Interview with Rick Hancox on CBC Radio “Prime Time”

Geoff Pevere: Hi, I’m Geoff Pevere. It’s said that you can’t go home again and in certain cases that may be true. Rick Hancox sees it a little differently. He recently made a movie about his hometown, Moose Jaw, and he learned that you can go home again, it’s just that the home you remember might not exist anymore. That story on Prime Time tonight.

Coming up in a few minutes my guest will be Rick Hancox. Recently, Rick returned to his hometown and got some rather sobering lesson on what it’s like to re-visit the past. Rick Hancox’s film about his experience is called Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past, and it a very personal tale about going home. You know, there are a couple of different film categories that seem to have a perennially bad reputation with audiences and one of these is definitely experimental film. Many people seem to associate experimental movies with indulgence, incoherence, public funding headaches and six hour running times. Rick Hancox knows this attitude all too well, he makes unconventional films-some may call them experimental-but tries to make them a little more audience-friendly by rooting them in very personal subjects. His latest film is called Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past. In it he looks at a Canadian town, his own hometown in fact, as it grapples with a recession in a population that is growing steadily and irreversibly older. I met with Rick Hancox during the Toronto International Film Festival. Hi Rick.

Rick: Hi Geoff.

Geoff: Your films aren’t just sort of formal experiments. The are formal experiments but they also deal with very personal autobiographical materials. What first motivated you to make this kind of film?

Rick: I think it was sort of a personal quest of maybe some selfish reasons, I’m not sure. It was the attempt to preserve on celluloid my ever-vanishing past, my memories, images of my father who had a heart condition and I was afraid that every shot I took of him might be the last. He’s gone on to live another twenty-five or thirty years, however. That was the motivation behind my film Home for Christmas, a long documentary I finished in 1978. I also came across a very influential filmmaker when I was studying film at the University of Prince Edward Island. He came up for one year, George Semsel was his name. He talked about something called the “personal documentary” and his theory was that as a student or as any person learning film, you can’t really make effective fim until you are first able to make a personal documentary. You have to be able to look at yourself and understand how you interact with the images that you film. And once you do that he said students are capable of anything. I was affected by that in the beginning and I still live by that philosophy and try to teach it to my students.

Geoff: So it sound to me that this kind of personal exploration and personal documentary-which you call a quest-is something that’s interested you throughout your filmmaking.

Rick: It’s a quest, it’s an attempt to use the cinema as a tool of discovery, as a means for uncovering or trying to understand how the world works for me. It’s almost experimentation in the true sense of the term, almost as if the cinematic apparatus was a scientific process, a scientific tool to get at truth. I guess in a poetic way which for me is perhaps the most accurate and effective mode of uncovering philosophical truths. I’ve been influenced by Wallace Stevens’ poetry and he talked about the combination of both the reason and the imagination and for me some of it works that way.

Geoff: I wonder if your stylistic approach changed over the years?

Rick; Yes.

Geoff: It has.

Rick: Yes, it has gradually become… I’ve used language more. I was interested in literature and especially in poetry. This is what I was interested in before I got interested in filmmaking. I’ve found that I’ve come back to language in my poetry films, a series of three films that were made in the 1980s, I actually use words on the screen, stamped on the screen or read on the soundtrack. Poetry. Which of course up to that point was an experimental no-no. Experimental film was seen as a purist, visual medium and language was too literary. A lot of experimental filmmakers come out of a fine arts background. They’re painters as much as filmmakers. I came out of a literary and musical background and my new film Moose Jaw has a lot of language in it, a lot of narration; stuff read from a newspaper, things I picked up off radio, interviews, and even a couple of talking head interviews, which is, when we get back to this idea of accessibility, people can relate to that. But, of course, in the world of experimental film, you start to wonder if a talking head interview is really acceptable. But I don’t really care about these terms or even “documentary.” I just want to make film in the best way that I know how.

Geoff: So when you were doing this it sounds to me that it wasn’t following what certain people believe were the conventions of experimental film-that almost seems like a contradiction in terms there-but, how different was what you were doing from what people commonly thought was proper experimental filmmaking?

Rick: How different? Perhaps in what way was it different?

Geoff: Yes.

Rick: The films used photographic realism, the film involves a lot of landscape, they’re not abstract visually, they’re very hard-edged, they’re sharp, they’re in focus, there isn’t a lot of quick cutting and tumbling of images and flashing light. I made a few films like that in the 1960s but I found it very unsatisfying. I’m not interesting in trying to create self-referential, modernist fantasy worlds. I’m interested in trying to understand the present, the world we live in and my obsession with the past in some of my films is an attempt to understand the present, an attempt to understand how we’re always living with te past. Rather than go back and re-enact the past-I detest re-enactments-I’d rather just root it in the present and somehow deal with the remnants of the past as it’s felt in the present, particularly in landscapes.

Geoff: Yes. Well, I’d like to talk a little about Moose Jaw. What is the relationship in that film between your personal history and the history of the city of Moose Jaw?

Rick: I became fascinated with making a film about Moose Jaw after having a trip out west in 1978. We’d left Moose Jaw in the late 1950s when I was a kid. So, almost twenty years later, I happened to have a camera with me and I was traveling out west and I just started collecting images of my home town and little did I know what a massive project this was going to become. Twelve years of shooting on and off. It began as an interest again, in what’s out there, in the landscape of Moose Jaw, which I find is quite interesting because we have a place where it has a relatively short history. Saskatchewan only became a province in 1905 and yet there are all these museums out there. There are contradictory images like the CFB Moose Jaw Air Force Base jus south of the town with a buffalo pound and a wild animal park built right next to it. In my film, there’s in fact a scene with buffalo wandering in this pound with jets passing in the background. However, I wasn’t able to really get around to organizing the film because it had no script, of course, but it developed as I observed the gradual devolution of Moose Jaw, with the closing of the train station, the main department store-Eaton’s-the main hotel, and finally the death of VIA rail itself in the Southern Prairies in 1989 which finally ended my shooting. It’ wasn’t until I saw the relevance of all of this to my own conscience as a filmmaker, of my own implication in a museumization process of Moose Jaw, for example. Because the Moose Jaw motto is “There’s a Future in Our Past,” is in effect my model in the making of the film, and in fact, in one of the scenes near the end of the film I appear in the museum holding my Bolex camera as if I’m a wax figure, while the camera trucks by me. I’m standing in front of a model-T Ford and a wagon in the background holding antiquated 16mm technology. I just don’t think we can separate the personal from any kind of experience, particularly in documentary filmmaking.

Geoff: So tell me, what has happened to Moose Jaw that’s brought about the decline?

Rick: I think it’s a lot of factors: it was built on a technology, the railroad, like a lot of Canadian towns, which has of course been replaced by air travel. The economy of Saskatchewan has been so dependent upon one crop: wheat. It depends on the winds and the weather, they have just gone through nine years of drought on the Prairies, and farmers getting no prices at all for their wheat or for any of their crops. And now there’s too much rain, so I think Saskatchewan has a negative flow of population. The other thing is, particularly with Moose Jaw, is that Regina was built too close. It’s only an hour away, and Regina became the capital: I think Moose Jaw was originally intended as the capital but through some kind of CPR land deal and the governor of Saskatchewan, Regina was deemed to be the capital. So it’s received a lot of governmental largesse and it’s prospered while Moose Jaw has suffered in comparison. There has always been a rivalry between Moose Jaw and Regina. Reginians will probably say that they are suffering economically as well, but nothing like Moose Jaw which now has the largest population over 65 in all of Canada. Partly because the youth have left, but it’s also become a mecca in Saskatchewan for retiring people and in fact, the old Eaton’s store which is boarded up in my film, and there’s rumours of it becoming an old folk’s home in the film, a nice little old folk’s home right on Main Street.

Geoff: Also an interesting symbol for a city seemingly put out to pasture.

Rick: Yes.

Geoff: You talked about the museumization process of Moose Jaw and your own implication in that in making a film about Moose Jaw. What about the museumizing of your own personal history? Have you ever concerned yourself with that process too? Is that what you’re doing also?\

Rick: That’s exactly what I’m doing. The film is a museum of stills. Moose Jaw is an interesting example because unlike a lot of areas that we remember from our childhood, it hasn’t grown so large that we don’t even recognize it anymore. It still looks the same and yet there is something that is missing. Buildings are there but they’re closed, boarded up. Here and there you’ll see a parking lot where I remember the YMCA used to be, where I went as a kid. Now, I can walk the streets of Moose Jaw and I don’t know a single soul and I feel like I’m a ghost walking around the streets and I can’t be seen. I can see the city but it can’t see me now. But it depends on the film; I can’t say yet what the psychological effect of having made this film, or having finished this film is going to be for another five or ten years. I can reflect upon the films I’ve made in the past, they seem to become more valuable personally, over time.

Geoff: How do they become more valuable personally? I’ve seen a lot of work and it is very personal. Is it ever difficult dealing with material that is that close?

Rick: I know it is for some filmmakers. Some of them have confessed to me that when they make personal films and show them to an audience, they feel like they’re standing naked on a stage. Some pace around in the hallway while their films are being shown. I like to be there with the audience because my project is to try to the use the cinema apparatus-which of course, includes the audience-to try to understand experience and understand reality, and understand my place in it. To search for something. I think that in my particular case it is quite elusive because we lived in Saskatchewan, Ontario and Prince Edward Island, I don’t feel like I have roots in any particular place. I feel both at home anywhere and not at home anywhere. The way Moose Jaw ends, with me on a train, is because sometimes I feel like my true home is looking out a train window as it travels across the country. Or a car window, just to be in perpetual motion. I think that this search for some kind of anchor is how that affects me in these films. I find it’ quite remarkable that audiences can relate to my personal experience, even though I may be a different gender or race then people in the audience. I think we all have a personal experience of being Canadian. Younger people who were children during the era of Expo 1967 will have a nationalist, subconscious memory about that that affects them. I bought right into the mygh of the Canadian Pacific Railroad and heading out to the Rockies and that whole of what a colleague of mine calls technological nationalism in which this technology builds the country and is then used to continue the rhetoric of nationalism through the CBC, and so on. I bought into this and I don’t like the fact that I’ve been manipulated by this but I can’t do anything about it. So my film is a way to try to come to terms with that, understand that and both try to share the experience with other people and communicate to them where I’m coming from. And also to try to use it as a test bed to get feedback from them. I see filmmaking as a very interactive process.

Geoff: With Moose Jaw you are recording basically a process of deterioration, something that is dying. Is it too simple to say that a film or movie can effectively keep certain memories alive? Is that what they do or do they keep the deterioration process alive?

Rick: Well that’s a difficult question because the film is both a part of the whole simulacra of experience and it too becomes something that is real itself. Real and tangible. There’s a lot of music from the 1940s and 1950s in my film for this purpose becuae it still exists, it’s still a real object from the past that’s carried forward into the present. Through this we can make connections with the past which is so enigmatic that we can never really understand it. The past is a foreign country-which is an expression from the film The Go-Between-which I think is true.

Geoff: You’re dealing with things like personal history, the country we live in, our impressions of the country we live in and how those things change as we get older, how we look back on different things. Everybody experiences this stuff. How accessible do people generally find your films?

Rick: They find them very accessible once they’re sitting in the theatre watching them. I find that the most unsophisticated viewer who has never seen an experimental film before have absolutely not trouble at all. It’s as if there are things that they recognize. ~I think we all share personal experience, and we share intimate experience. When there are actors there, everyone knows that deep down it’s not really happening, these aren’t real people, this script didn’t really happen to these people and I think we can relate on a much larger level, ironically, by being more particular and more personal. I think we can become more universal and I’m sure I’m not the only one whose said that. I just wish that some of the guards of culture in our society would give a chance to some of the filmmakers who are doing this type of work. Whether they be film buyers for tv networks or librarians, I don’t think they give the public enough of a chance. I think they’re capable of much more than they are given credit for.

Geoff: I’ve been speaking with filmmaker Rick Hancox. He’s made a number of films and his new film is called Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past. I hope everyone at least gets an opportunity to see it. Rick, thank you very much.

Rick: Thank you very much, Geoff.