Radio
Interview with Michael Dorland about
English
transcript: April 9, 1993 “A L’Ecran” CBC FM 12
minutes
Translated
from the French transcript by Emma Hancox
“Happy
Gang” sound clip from
Laurendeau:
Does that remind you of something?
Marineau:
Yes, “Les Joyueux Troubadours!”
Laurendeau:
Well, actually “The Happy Gang” was not inspired by “Les Joyeux
Troubadours,” but the other way around: the CBC program began in 1937, four
years before the first airing of Couture, Baily and
Caron et al’s show… Alright, it’s time that you tell us, Jean-Claude Marineau, what film this sound clip is from.
Marineau:
Yes, from
Dorland:
Frye formulated certain observations on the role nature plays in the English
Canadian visual or textual representations. What struck him was that nature,
the countryside/natural landscape was something menacing.
Marineau:
Something not very sympathetic, accommodating, pleasant.
Dorland:
Not at all, and this can be easily understood when we think about our winters:
it’s as thought we’ll die if we stick our nose outside, right? And so he
reflected on this observation and how it is represented in painting, in poetry,
and from there he developed the idea that he called “the garrison mentality” …
sort of the reaction of a society or human community in the face of a menacing
countryside, which is to protect itself in the interior of a fortress, to
protect against the exterior menace. But also, notably, this has very important
influences on the development of the arts.
Marineau:
That’s it, and this is the sense of direction from whence comes a tentative
Canadian artistic nationalism.
Dorland:
Yes, good, in the sense that yes nationalism is still an ideological form of
this fortress-building, of this self-reflection, but also a form of a big fear
of individualization.
Marineau:
Hm!
Dorland:
Ok? And of.. of a lack of development, of… a lack of confidence in the
individual and individual capacities, notably the imagination, which is
something that creates something he calls “vegatatif,” a certain artistic
freedom, a certain… a lack of motivation that permits artistic creativity. And
so to return a little to documentary origins, not only Frye but many other
critics have noticed that English Canadian arts have this particular
documentary tendency in relation to representations of the countryside/natural
landscape; that results in a Canadian nationalist aesthetic ideology that
represents landscape, most of all characterized by that which is uninhabited.
Marineau:
Ah.
Dorland:
OK? So the landscape becomes a location for the projection of Canadian social
conflicts, something pretty interesting. So to continue, Canadian experimental
film is therefore an artistic movement, largely fortified within universities,
arts councils, in this parallel structure-who also, in passing doesn’t have
much of a relationship with a public who... which we can say about the case of
Canadian cinema in general, but even more so in the case of experimental
cinema, so it’s a…
Marineau:
Yes, it exists because of institutions that…
Dorland:
Because… the interiority of institutions, because of institutions there is a
little parallel world, with its own preoccupations, its tensions. I insist on
the idea that it’s a pretty small world, in which the participants are not well
known outside of its circles.
Marineau:
Universities and museums.
Dorland:
…restrained, that’s it, circles of critics and all that, which equally gives
much importance to the discourse of critics that surrounds these practices. And
I’m finally getting to…
Marineau:
To Rick Hancox.
Dorland: To
Rick. One of the things that is striking about Rick is a belief in the
integrity of the oeuvre. He is perhaps even a bit naïve about this subject, and
always believed that—it’s been twenty or so years since he’s been making
films—that the oeuvre possessed a certain integrity in itself.
So in terms
of critics, in terms of the discourse formed around experimental film
practices, Rick doesn’t really have a particular place. The monopoly of
textuality inside experimental film largely turned around personalities like
Bruce Elder, it’… a bit of the team tendency/group mentality if you like in
experimental film, that is to say that “goes back a bit to Michael Snow with La Region Centrale, which is a film
three and a half hours long… Bruce Elder, he started out modestly and now is at
the point where he makes films fourteen hours long and this is sort of the
tendency that has monopolized the discourse…
Marineau:
Critical attention.
Dorland:
Critical attention, the impact of the oeuvre, etc. So a movement, that counted
a lot on the oeuvre itself to speak for itself, was pretty marginalized within
this little world. So this begins to answer this question a bit.
Marineau:
Ok, a quick question. You too, Michael Dorland, are participating in the
critical discourse. You are already participating in the one around Rick Hancox
since next week you will be instigating a conversation on irony and landscape.
I would like to being the discussion back to him in particular and his last
film, Moose Jaw, which is also a good way of presenting other works by Hancox.
Dorland:
But before embarking a bit on Moose Jaw
I would like to say one more thing about Rick and that’s…
Marineau:
Yes.
Dorland:
Rick is someone who was very important for me, as a critic, helping me to
understand a little the rather complicated dynamics on the inside of this
little universe, but also because of
his place, that is to say he is a filmmaker who, in comparison to someone like
Bruce Elder or someone like Michael Snow, his work doesn’t fall into a genre of
tragic desperation. He regardless has certain… Rick for example is very
preoccupied by memory and the problematic of the memory in the interior of, as
I was talking about earlier, this menacing landscape. He is very preoccupied
by, well, temporality; and the separation of time and Moose Jaw is a…
Marineau:
Is a film about this.
Dorland: An
archaeology about this basically.
Marineau:
Yes.
Dorland:
But he does it in a way that’s not… that’s not through a grand lament. He does
it, as I would say, more in an ironic way that postulates a point of view for
the spectator or observer that can follow the game in the inside of an official
discourse that is, to return to what we mentioned earlier, Canadian
nationalism.
So to talk
about Moose Jaw, Moose Jaw is a town
that at the beginning of the century when… well because of the eternal iron
path was a Canadian Pacific “tete de rail” and up until the 20s or 30s, when
Canada, Western Canada operated on an economy based on what, Moose Jaw was sort
of the model town of this economy and was also the town where Rick Hancox grew
up and their family left in the 50s when the locusts came. His father was a
newspaper editor and they left Saskatchewan for Prince Edward Island where he
did part of his studies later.
So in 1978
he returned to Moose Jaw by chance in the context of a trip to Vancoauver, and
he hadn’t seen it since the 50s. And s…. because of this trip he began what
would become a twelve year-long obsession. What struck him was that the town
hadn’t changed except that there were visible signs of degradation, buildings
he had remembered, this or that site, there was nothing left but a parking lot,
there were little holes, a little like holes in one’s memory.
He began to film, the work he does in experimental cinema, as opposed to
feature/fiction film, is not scripted. So he gets footage, collects images,
plays with them, it develops a bit like a “mystery stew.” So he started a…
let’s say the collection of images around Moose Jaw and this process lasts
twelve years, during which he collects all sorts of textual documentation,
images, etc. And he begins a sort of archaeological excavation of this site, or
this town, where it came from, what was its history, what was there before, he
returns to dance with the dinosaurs… then he comes back to the present and
everything to try and understand something of his relationship to this place.
Marineau:
It’s also a self-portrait of the filmmaker in search of these images, these
places that existed in a certain way.
Dorland:
Yes.
Marineau:
His portrait is fairly present.
Dorland:
Absolutely and again this is something fundamental and not only in Rick’s work…
he has made sixteen films to date. Always very focused on personal experience,
some autobiography to try to situate himself…
Marineau:
Inscribing himself in the memory of time too.
Dorland: In
the memory of time, to situate himself in respect to a place was something
important. This has happened over time with the maturation of the auteur-it has
been twenty years as I mentioned, that he has been working in this area. It’s…
a certain distance in relation to himself and his own perceptions because there
s another aspect of Moose Jaw’s irony, and that is that he doesn’t
take himself too seriously.
Marineau:
Not too seriously. Voila.
Dorland:
And there is… and the film turns back a little against, well a little and even
a lot against the author who says who is this person and ultimately what does
he know about this town, the people who inhabit it, etc. He plays with this as
well.
Marineau:
So this distance between the author and the subject if we like is depicted in
an explicit way when we see him, Hancox himself on the screen. Not only is he
filming the town and its empty places and empty urban landscapes, but he is
filming himself as well in search of these very images. So the ironic distance
takes form this way as well.
Dorland:
That’s right, that’s right.
Marineau:
This is particularly interesting. And so Michael Dorland, I don’t know how much
more there is to add to the panorama of Rick Hancox, of his work and of Canadian
experimental cinema. We have devoted a few minutes to the subject. I think we
will leave it at that. One final word perhaps on the interest of experimental
cinema today in Canada.
Dorland: We
are always in a bit of a funny situation, especially on the air, on national
radio to say, well here is someone who merits, whose work merits the trouble of
seeing it, well it’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s true.
Marineau:
It can be said anyway.
Dorland:
True.
Marineau:
OK, so next Wednesday and Thursday at the Canadian Museum of Fine Arts in
Ottawa. Thank you Michael Dorland.