COMMS. 652
CANADIAN DOCUMENTARY FILM FINAL ASSIGNMENT A REVIEW
BY REZA FAROKHFAL
Beyond the Forgetful Snow: Richard Hancox's "poetics of
space" in the
...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
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
Unreal city
Hancox, is a Canadian documentary filmmaker. He,
was born in
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.