COMMS. 652

CANADIAN DOCUMENTARY FILM FINAL ASSIGNMENT A REVIEW

BY REZA FAROKHFAL

Beyond the Forgetful Snow: Richard Hancox's "poetics of space" in the Moose Jaw

 

 

...For me, all of this is more than just a metaphor for aging and the loss of childhood, more than a symbol for the entropy of self and post-industrial society. Accordingly, i have taken steps to ensure that the film is more than just an empty lament, or a simplistic exercise in nostalgia. Rather, l want this project to result in a film which, while walking a fine line between pathos and sardonic humour, will point the way toward a strategy of psychological survival. That strategy will integrate the personal and the public, subjective and objective knowledge, individual memory and social history.

-Hancox on the Moose Jaw

 

The notion of the "past" and re-creating it trough reflecting on the "place(s)" have been two important motifs in Richard Hancox's recent films. It could be argued, what Hancox has achieved as a Canadian avant-garde filmmaker in his works is exposing a cinematic interaction between these two motifs, or these two personal "obsessions". In this paper, I attempt to examine this interaction, and what Hancox has elaborated as a "poetics of space" in his most recent film, the Moose Jaw (45 min. 1992). For this purpose, I try to read the Moose Jaw as a text, as a long cinematic poem, and I shall compare my "reading" with the other's "readings " in order to find out the structural components of the film, and the 'formal way(s), in which, these components have provided variant levels of the "meaning" that has been projected through a spatial trope, as the main device of the text and the discursive core of Hancox's poetics in filmmaking.

 

Unreal city

Hancox, is a Canadian documentary filmmaker. He, was born in Toronto in 1946, belongs to the "second generation" of experimental filmmakers that emerged in the 1970s (R. Bruce Elder, Al Razutis and Chris Gallagher, are the other figures of this generation). Hancox made his first film in 1968. In this respect, he also belongs to the generation of 60s, another example of a "lost" generation (in Gertrude Stein's words)',that had, and suffered from, his/her own great "hopes" and "ideals". Through his career as a filmmaker Hancox has explored various genre in documentary film, but one could say that the autobiographic and poetic works have been his main contribution to the Canadian documentary film history.

 

Hancox's first domain of interest was literature, specially poetry, but it was during his school years, at the University of Prince Edward, that he discovered the cinema trough the works of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhag, Marie Menken, maya Deren and the others. Hancox, at least for the first years of filmmaking, still had his literary obsessions, or in other words, he had tried to make an synthesis of these two different domains in order to promote, and coin a personal cinematic performance, "I adopted an aesthetic which held that words of any kind were an unimaginative crutch that violated the 'purity' of cinema, and I temporarily abandoned poetry in favour of the poetic," he points out. It was at this time that Hancox found the cinema and documentary film as a genre, as a "...signifying practice, a medium with its own resource- and resistance-through which the artist's relationship with his/her personal, and our collective, environments can be figured."2 (2. Mclarty, 11.)

 

Hancox spent early years of his life in various parts of Canada

(Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, Ontario...) It is not surprising that the "place(s)" plays a dominant role in his works. Apart from his personal experiences of the places and locations, he, as a Canadian, has lived in a country that has not had a long history, but a vast geography. Again, It is not surprising that, in his works, and significantly in the moose jaw, he tries to recreate a sense of "time" in, or through, a sense of "place". For him, as for most Canadian filmmakers, time is dominated by the place in geographic, or natural sense of the word. Even Moose Jaw, despite its constructed existent and as a modem entity, is destined to be an extension or a temporal transformation of the natural, geographical "place". It is a Don Quixote-like city (in Kroker's words) on the prairies, a city that "likes to boasts, there's a future in our past" while it is becoming eventually, "prairie again, as if nothing had ever happened" (in Hancox's words). In a tragic perspective, what has happened to it seems to be symbolic for the rest of the country.

On the one hand, the Moose Jaw, as a film, shows a common sensibility of the Canadian filmmakers, a sensibility which has been described by Kroker as a "prairie sensibility and as a part of the Canadian absurd, or Canadian impossible dream -i.e. a state of being living on the edge of constitutive contradictions. On the other hand, the film contains another important sensibility which is peculiar to the Hancox as a filmmaker: the poetic sensibility. This sensibility could be regarded as an outcome of Hancox's approach toward the medium. Although his interest has been shifted from literature to the cinema, as a filmmaker he has been always close to his early fascination: poetry. Through his recent works, one could see this closeness clearly in terms of a "synthesis" or in form of a "shifting back" to the poetry. This process, as Mclarty noted, significantly started with Zum Ditter. Hancox began to feel that the image for him, "was not ipso facto worth a thousand words - perhaps not even worth one word-which didn't necessarily take away from the image" and began to experiment how the words could be used for more than image-redundant signification."3 In fact, from Waterworks (1982) onwards, Hancox brought to light his poetics, a poetics that I could name it here as poetics of space. This poetic deeply rooted in a sense of place, as well as a sense of time. It is through this

3 Quoted in Mclarty's, 12.

 

 

poetics that Hancox presents his version of what Kroker pointed as the Canadian discourse.

Hancox's Moose Jaw, as an "experimental", "poetic" documentary film is already a Canadian classic. It has been identified as an " unconventional film", a "prophetic analysis and re-creation of the Canadian discourse" (Kroker), and also an irony "...appropriate to a context of Canadian deConfederation, and documents the acceptation of individual or collective death and ceaseless flux that is the way of all things" (Dorland). Hancox, describes it as a film so much about "himself" rather than about the city: Moose Jaw. He made this film in 1992, but in fact, it was an outcome of a long period of shootings, research and collecting audio-visual material that had been started since 1978. What finally ended many years of preparation for this film, according to a Hancox's note, A) was a Mulroney government decision on cutting the Canadian route through the southern prairies, which for a rail town like Moose Jaw was a disaster, and B) a "sudden personal insight". Hancox wrote:

... just prior to my final shoot out West I realized ... that no one could ever 'tell the story' of Moose Jaw, or possibly any place (hence the nursery rhyme at the beginning,'....seven crows a story never to be told'); that I had to break out of the vortex of research to tell any story at all-a story that might ultimately only be the story of myself and my obsession.

Yet, Hancox, in his film does not narrate or tell any story. What he actually has presented is a series of images such as train (station), landscapes, houses photographs, newspapers, streets, city monument (the moose), museum shops ... these images along with music and the sound effect have shaped a temporal " collage" which as a whole, conveys a thematic impact. Through this collage, we see the "past" and the " present" of a Canadian town, a rail town which was once( in the 1950s ) a Western frontier with the cavernous train station and thundering steam engines and now seems to be a ruined city. Hancox also tries to remember and reconstruct his childhood years which he has been spent in the Moose Jaw. In this respect, the film also could be seen as a cinematic account of a personal life.

The Moose Jaw, According to Kroker, is an "unconventional" film, it is "decentered"-i.e. with no "beginning" or "ending". These comments are to a certain extent correct, but only to a certain extent, and if we have agreed upon some conventional definitions, or better to say, upon some linear concepts such as "beginning", "ending" and also the "center or "middle" in a work of art. The film is unconventional not because one could not sufficiently examine its components or view it as a whole by the conventional measures. Rather, it is " unconventional " because as a documentary film, its structural elements, textual multiplicity, diverse perceptual layers and points of view goes beyond the conventional bounds of the narration and representation. Here, I intend to look at the Moose Jaw through its unconventional textuality.

 

A Methodological Digression

Before looking at the Moose Jaw through its unconventional textuality, or in other words, through its textual properties, some methodological implications of my approach to the film need to be brought up here. From a semiotic approach ( my approach in this paper), a documentary film is a dialect of the cinema language (Metz, 104). It is a dialect among the other dialects of the film language such as the feature, advertising or pornographic films. The Moose Jaw as far as its denoted moments is concerned, is a documentary, but it is also a poetic documentary film because of its connoted moments which have been presented in a significant way of framing the reality. In interpreting the Moose Jaw as a text, in reading it as a long poem, I consider its connoted moments, all those shared aspects of the film with the modern poetry. In the Moose Jaw, as in a modern poem, one could see the " logic of imagery" ( in Eliot's words), in terms of exposing "sights" and "sounds" of the world without any trying to explain them. The film does not try to tell the spectator what the exposed things mean, it only exposes the things. The significance here arises from the way in which all those things have been arranged and shaped in a visual texture! In other words, all disparate images of the film have been framed in a total poetic statement. The film as a whole is not but a montage, and thus, a poetic work by its very nature, a long cinepoem.

From a semiotic approach, the Moose Jaw is a string of signs. In reading it as a long poem, the "shots" are to be read as the signs, as the words in verbal language. The "sequence", therefore, is the sentences, the real unit, a coherent syntagma within which, the shots react (semantically) to each other. Yet it should be noted that the cinema is not a language system, or what is suggested by the theoreticians of the silent film as "Cine langue", " Visual Esperanto", or the "Hieroglyphics" of the twentieth century.' Cinema is a language as far as it transforms "what might have been a mere visual transfer of reality into discourse."(Metz, 115). In the film language, the image (shot) of a house signifies "here is a house", it is an actualized unit, a unit of discourse, while in the verbal language, the word of house only signifies "house". In the verbal language words are not made by the speaker, they are pre-existed entities, but in the film language shots are created by filmmaker. The shots are infinite, present an undefined amount of information, but the words are limited in number, could convey a defined range of meaning and so forth.

4 See R. Richardson, Literature and Film, chapters 7 and 8. 5 Vachel Lindsay, cited by Richardson, P 91.

The film language however, like verbal language, is structurally based on the mechanism of similarities and differences ( in Sussurien terms). It is based on this mechanism that film language obtains its meaning. Furthermore, in this language, combination of two shots [ or more] is not the sum of those shots, it is something of a higher semantic level. The cinematic image conveys its meaning in two levels : A) by reproducing the object(s) of the real world on the screen; and, B)by re-exposing the object(s) in a visual texture through the montage, interplay of depth level, lighting etc. A secondary sign units arises in the latter level with the symbolic, metaphorical and metonymical significance, and thus the visual object transforms into the discourse (Lotman, 31).

 

A heap of broken images

(1 have taken this words from T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land, also "forgetful snow" and "unreal city" as the title and one of the sub-titles of this essay are taken from The Waste Land)

The Moose Jaw has been built on a series of cinematic moments. What I suggest as the "moment" is a visual/semantic unit which is made of one single image(shot) or more. These moments are woven together through the film and function as the statements in verbal language. The images in their succession, recurrence, synchronization, and contrariety provide the significance of each moment, and the moments in a chain provide the total significance of the film as an ultimate meaning (discourse). Here I attempt to distinguish the moments of the first part (opening episode)of the film.

 

This part (about 5 minutes) is important because it shows the whole structure of the film-i.e. its main visual elements and the way in which these elements has been framed in terms of formal devices. Not need to mention that some of the images in this part and through the whole film are mixed with the verbal sound, music and sound effect. In the opening part of the film we have:

 

1)Black Screen

sound: car crash

2) Train (rail road )

Shadow of a man with camera on the rails...

sound: One crow sorrow... ( a child sings the verse)

3)Sign

a highway sign to Moose Jaw, a car        passes sound: ambience

4) Title

5) House

dead crows on floor sound: ambience 6) Title

sound: Happy Gang theme(vocal) 7) Title

sound: Happy Gang continued 8) Photo(s)

still fading snapshots: mother and child(hancox)/hand holding a photo sound: happy theme continued

9) Title

10) Photo

hand holding a photo

sound: happy theme continued 11) House

a pink bungalow

sound: happy theme continued, ambience, C B C music show

12) Photo(s)

kids (Hancox)/ mother and child another version/kids and shadows...

sound: happy theme continued, ambience

13) Man on Horseback sound: ambience

14 Moose

Hancox looking at the moose, he (camera ) sees the monument in

details, orange balls of the moose

sound: verbal (touristic information about the city monument: the

moose)

15) Man

a man in red sweater

sound: man speaks with camera about the moose

16) Street

sound: verbal (information about the town),ambience

17) Train

empty tunnel under train station

sound: verbal (information about the station)

18) Train

station (outside view)

sound: verbal (information about the station), ambience

19) Black Screen

20) Photo

boy (Hancox) in dark coat

sound: silence, a nostalgic theme begins....

At the first level of signifying (denotation), these images reproduce the various objects containing some initiative information about the town and a certain kid among the other kids by a resemblance which is disclosed through the recurrence of the photo(s). At this level one could not find any relation between some of the images. For instance, what is the relation between the dead crows and a still image of the hand holding a snapshot as two denoted moments? Yet, a metaphoric, symbolical and metonymic significance arises itself by reoccurrence of the "photo/moment° during and at the end of this part. Through this reoccurrence a relation between the images, at the second level of signifying (connotation) begins to be revealed. The reoccurrence of the snapshots provides a cyclic and rhythmical pattern for the first part of the film.

According to the occurrences and duration of the snapshots (photos) in moments of 8,10,12 and 20 in the opening episode, a cyclic pattern could be distinguished in this part of the film as below:

1)>...5)>6)>7)>8)Photo(s)>9)>10)Photo(s)>11)>12)Photo(s)>13)>... ...>...15)> 16)>...18)>19)>20)Photo...

In the following moments of the film a deeper relation between the images both in denotation and connotation has been developed. The first two moments after the opening part, especially the beautiful moment of the train ( view out train window with raindrops, mixed with a nostalgic musical theme) function as passage which through it, Hancox prepares us for the later development. Furthermore, in the chain of the images, reoccurrence of another important moment (the images of the train and its properties) exposes another cyclic pattern through the whole film. This moment (train) in fact, functions in the film as a "refrain" in a long poem. The cyclic pattern of the film as a whole is the following:

1) Black >                               >

...>         2) Train [ rail road, shadow of Hancox with camera

on the rails ...]> >                            116) Train [ Hancox asleep at train...] >....

 

...>             117)>118) Black

 

In addition to the "train" and the "snapshots", there are some other moments or images that tends to repeat themselves or their variations in the film, for example the "house". Each time they reappear, their signifying magnitudes seems to be expanded, opened and multiplied. They signify something more and different than, and from, what they had signify in their previous position. The reoccurrence of the " train", significantly at the beginning, end, and through the above mentioned cyclic pattern as a "refrain", as well as the other reoccurrence of the images, show that Moose Jaw as a text could not be read and viewed by the linear measures.

 

These moments, through their "happening" and "re-happening" in a visual "paradigmatic" chain, bring forth their discursive interrelationship. While each moment has its own signifying zone, it reinforces, determines, or confronts the other zone by the way in which it has been synchronized, simultaneously juxtaposed, or simply distorted by the other moment. No need to mention that when the images are synchronized they reveal their tragic zone of signifying, and when they are not and specially their juxtaposition has been on the contrast, contradiction, and distortion, they reveal their ironic(satiric)zone. The moment 14 (the gigantic moose, monument of the city) followed by a moment through which a man with a wom out red sweater tells us that the moose had not been enough water proof and consequently its reconstructing has cost thousands dollars for the taxpayers. Or, the image of the dead crows is followed by the Happy Gang Theme in the next moment (title).

 

The whole structure of the film have been made through elaboration of interrelation between these cinematic moments: these heap of the broken images... But each moment could be also regarded as a single or multiple formal device(s). In this respect, moose Jaw, offers various metaphoric and symbolic ways of signification in form of its images. In this regard, the film seems to be, In Kroker’s words, a sampler machine, " a site of fantasized identities, floating, snatches of disconnected conversation fragments of music flotsam as if to provide a veneer of coherency over the reality of an imploded city... empty restaurant, abandoned hotel... a whole city which has actually been eaten by its parking lots and museum. "'Among these distorted images the "train" has an intensified metaphoric zone. While it could be viewed through its universal symbolic signification as a vehicle for connection and communication, and, here in Moose Jaw, not only connection in the place but also in time (between the past and the present), it also could be seen as a metaphor of what Maurice Charlands, theorized as Canadian technological nationalism.80r, could not we viewed the gigantic moose (with

fluorescent red balls) as the biblical "speaking calf", a metaphor of the capitalist economic miracle?..

Hancox noted that his film is not "...just a metaphor for aging and the loss of childhood". This point is also emphasized by Kroker that Moose Jaw "is not a film about hystericized male kitsch (the old and boring search for boyhood dreams)". Both Hancox and Kroker are correct enough, but one could not overlook the repeating moments of the childhood through the whole film as a remembrance. And why we should ignore the significance of such images in favour of the other discursive moments in the film? It is at the heart of this remembrance, as though it is at the very heat of the lightness, that the "protagonist" in this long cinepoem hears a voice calling him by his name. All the rest are the echoes of that voice. They are no more "voice", they are sounds, parodic sounds, that repeat and repeat themselves, especially with an intensifying rhythm in the last episode of the film, without their original meaning. This remembrance is significant, because it is located at the core of Hancox's poetic performance. It is his "Concrete Universal "in this work. All the rest are "a heap of broken images.” It is by this remembrance that the photographic moments reveal their metonymic significance or their interrelation with the other moments such as symbolic image of the dead crows or the nursery rhyme in the first moments of the film.

The last occurrence of the "train" in the final episode of Moose Jaw, significantly contains the main theme of the film. It is in this contemplative moment that Hancox feels his "true home, perhaps, is a moving train..." s (9 Hancox,4.) This sense of place, or "belonging" or better to say a "longing for belonging" is all that Moose Jaw, in its total and final form as a "metonymy" tries to convey. In this regard, if Moose Jaw as a city, as a rigid historic fact, is doomed to be vanished, the train, metaphorically, offers another sense of place, a movable place, freed from boredom of the time, a place that surrounds and comforts.

 

Somewhere Beyond the Forgetful Snow

In the Moose Jaw, signs (images) have been clustered in the visual moments and thus, the film could be seen as a cinematic still-life - a process of abstracting that let the film attains a formal textuality which defined by McLarty as objecthood of the work of art.10 (10 McLarty,15.) Even, sounds, verbal pieces are abstracted. They do not narrate, or merely fill the gaps between the visual images. They are distorted, faded and unfinished utterances. they are " things" as much as the places and landscapes are "things" and are used to emphasize the "thingness" of the other images in the cluster. It is through the thingness (objecthood) of the work that, the whole moments of the film have been elaborated as a formal device which Michael Dorland named it "irony" but I intend to distinguished it as a spatial trope, a metonymy-i.e. exposing the place as an object in itself, and for itself, but meaning the time that is associated to it. This device is the structural core of Hancox's poetics. The place, in this poetics, stands for a desired time which has passed away and cannot be present again. However, what is being conveyed by this metonymy, is not a "naive nostalgia"(as McLarty pointed out in relation with the "memory" in Waterworx) for pre-technological age, but a remembrance of what is lost in the age of progress.

On the other hand, by making Moose Jaw as a cluster of images, as a cinematic still life, Hancox applied in his work what is called collage (pastiche), a technique which seems to be a characteristic of the post modern art. By applying this technique, he has framed the images free from a unitary referential context, and through this, he has re-framed them in a multiple signified perspective that has resulted in fragmentation of the "subject" in the work. This fragmentation, could be seen as a shifting of point of view in the film. The moment of "closed Eaton's store" for instance, as Hancox, described it in a note, shows that how this shifting has been performed and the way in which this shifting provided a multiple perspectivity for what has been signified:

...when I am filming ...there will be sudden cuts to

radically different points of view-Moose Jaw's point of view-as if the city were keeping tabs on this

trespasser, and perhaps plotting his demise.

The sound at these points will shift suddenly from natural sounds to a kind of onerous, thumping electronic sound which will gradually force its way in here and there, distorting the other sounds and music in the film.

Not only through the shifting of point of view, Moose Jaw, shows this fragmentation by redefining the conventional concept of the subject and its position in the work of art. Therefore, no wonder if in some of the moments we find that Hancox, himself, has become the real subject of his film. The presence of the "subject" in the work, and thus, a redefined relationship between the "subject" and "object", interrogates the conventional concept of the "representation". McLarty in his essay argues that, "Hancox never denies the potential for representation and meaning."" and tries to show that the representational capability is central to Hancox's both autobiographical and poetry/landscape films. But, as far as Moose Jaw is concerned, it seems that, in its best cinematic moments, and as a whole, the film clearly and successfully tends to deny and reject essentialist ways of representation or, at least, casts doubt on it. It does not mean that the film as a pure formalist work tends to deny any meaning for its images. Rather, it means that Moose Jaw brings forth its meaning(s) trough exposing its meaningful structure in parts by suggesting its various referential contexts in its textuality and as a whole, as a metonymy by revealing all its textual properties(its broken, distorted images) not as the representation of the reality, but as the fragments of the reality itself, in their own pure simulacrum".

Moose Jaw, as a metonymy, links "personal" with what is "historically" lost, absent. In this regard, it is an attempt for remembering and ironically, at the same time, an attempt for forgetting (Dorland). It has transformed a "private" obsession into a "public" project, and in doing so, it has disclosed at -first the past which is Canada's future. It has also revealed "the silent universe of the Canadian absurd, that gap between impossibility and survival, between the quixotic and stoical. Moose Jaw significantly as a metonymy, embodied what I have suggested in this essay as "poetics of the space". In this regard, it is a "longing", a "desire for" what has been lost in time (the past), but through reconstructing a "belonging" to the place (in the present). It is a trying for finding an answer to this question: who am l, but through another question; where am I? Here, the filmmaker through a poetics of space, localized what is "universal", or better to say, he tries to locate in the place what has been dislocated in the time; his own self, his identity.

Afterthought (in conclusion)

Moose Jaw is the town where I grew up, and I cant help but take some of this seriously. Like anyone's home town, Moose Jaw had a significant effect on who I am today...-Hancox, on Moose Jaw (a note)

 

The notion of the "past" and re-creating it through exposing the "place" have been two significant motifs in Hancox films. In this paper I tried to identify these motifs and their general and particular implications in Moose Jaw. Through a formal analysis of the film as a "text" I examined its structure in parts, as series of images and as a whole as a Metonymy. Significantly, this metonymy in the film has been motivated by two structural forces: a longing for self location through a reflection on history(time) and a Canadian prairie sensibility (place). It grows where exactly these two forces, as two parallel lines, meet each other: in a vanishing point, in Moose Jaw. I tried to show that how Hancox later founded his "poetics of space" on this spatial trope in terms of transferring the visual objects into the discourse, and in doing so, he has projected his longing(s) for a sense of belonging in order to redefine, reconstruct his own identity. In sum, and as an afterthought, I should say that, Moose jaw, remind me of Arthur miller who once said that, since the ancient epics, the main theme of all performing works of art has been man's longing and searching for a "home" of his/her own. For Hancox, "home" seems to be where memories are. Or, on the contrary, home is where one could get rid of memories... It seems that this dichotomy, the tragic and ironic sense of the place/time (Hancox's obsession) is what his poetics is built on. No doubt that he could not get rid of it, in other Moose Jaws, in the future...

REFERENCES

 

Dorland, Michael. "Archaeologist of the Canadian Unmodern", Catalogue of film retrospective, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1990.

Kroker, Arthur. " The Moose Jaw Postmodern", Catalogue of film retrospective, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1990.

Lotman, Jurij. Semiotics of Cinema. (trans. by Mark E. Suino), Michigan University Press, 1979.

McLarty, Lianne. "Imaging the Past and Place: Memory and Landscape in the Films of Richard Hancox, "Catalogue of film retrospective, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1990. Metz, Christian. "Some points in the Semiotics of the Cinema" in Film Theory and Criticism, (Gerald Mast and Marshal Cohen ed.) London, Oxford University Press, 1974.

 

Richardson, Robert Literature and Film. Bloomington/London, Indiana University Press,1969.

Rosenthal, Alan (ed.). New Challenges for Documentary. Lose Angeles, University of California Press, 1988.

Hancox, Richard : personal notes and documents on the Moose Jaw

 

GENERAL SOURCES

Barthes, Roland. Element of Semiology. New York, Hill & Wang,1967.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, Indiana University press, 1975.