Irony, Self
and Landscape in the Films of Richard Hancox by Michael Dorland
(National
Gallery talk April 14, 1993)
Now Rick,
whom, I just realized, I will have known for ten years this June-is intrigued
by some of the theories he’s heard me come up with from time to time regarding
his work, and has concluded I’ve got some possibly interesting things to say
about his filmmaking. Why is why I’m here tonight as the designated or official
critic, and my burden is to show you that this is not entirely a subjective
impression on his part.
So what I’d
like to do-rather than a detailed analysis of the film you’re about to see, and
about which the filmmaker himself is here to answer your questions-is to engage
in that form of critical activity the Russian formalists called “laying bare
the device”—that is to say, to show you some of the inner workings of the
image-machine whose various devices will shortly cause your nervous system to
reverberate in certain ways.
Broadly
speaking, Canadian experimental film, as critic Cameron Bailey has observed,
has been torn between pulling apart the basic elements of cinema-to mention
some of these: the frame, the zoom, the wipe, the pan and a range of other
camera movements—and the need to document something: particularly what one
could call, on the one hand, “ the landscape” and, on the other, the “self.”
The work of the so-called Escarpment School—initially, in addition to Hancox
himself, the experimental documentarians Richard Kerr, Lorne Marin and Philip
Hoffman who studied under Hancox at Sheridan College in he 1979s—has been
centrally preoccupied with this later side of the tension; namely the
intrication of the “need to document something,” with notions of
landscape and self. According to Mike Hoolboom, a more peripheral member of the
Escarpment School in his filmmaking, and a would-be analyst of Canadian
experimental film in his critical writings, what distinguishes the filmmakers
of the Escarpment has been their movement away from documentary proper to
experimental forms “enacting the drama of memory,” by the introduction of
language as the central mediation between landscape and self. The layering of
language over landscape, Hoolboom writes, makes possible a mediation between
landscape and a nostalgic consciousness, turning both—landscape and
consciousness—towards memories of returning and to memory itself.
These are
not particularly dramatic or even controversial assertions, but fully
consistent with claims made by other Canadian critics of what one of these
Gaile McGregor, like to call “the Canadian oeuvre”—namely, that the object of
Canadian literature, broadly understood, is what she terms a langscape,
as illuminated by a subjectivity George Woodcock once described as that of
“Odysseus ever returning.” In other words, and from the point of view of the
history of criticism, the unremarkable claim that the linguistification of the
landscape-the layering of language over the landscape-includes within itself
the subjectivity of experience. What is perhaps more remarkable is that we are
dealing here not with a literary or painterly phenomenon, but with a movement
in film: that is to say, a medium of image-making that privileges a notion of
latency, and it is some elements of this latency that I would attempt to bring
to your attention.
In Canadian
experimental film, generally, and in the work of the
First, to
look at the category of “landscape.” This is dualistic in the sense that it
splits into two objects: landscape and langscape. By the former, we can
understand a place, some “natural’ out there, but of this it is uncertain what
more can be said without falling into thorny epistemological problems of
representation: most notably, in the Canadian context, Northrop Frye’s famed
“where is here?,” but also such regressive questions as “is the idea of
‘landscape’ itself already not a re-presentation of some place?,” and so on.
Much less daunting, at first view, is the notion of langscape, since it is
inclusive of subjectivity, and therefore of the possibility at least of
inter-subjectivity. But the notion of langscape implies, as Paul de Man has
remarked, the priority of a relationship of the subject toward itself (de Man,
“Rhetoric of Temporality, 1965). Here, however, we are no longer primarily
dealing with the world outside but have passed entirely within the subject, and
the resulting radical idealism. In other words, we have leapt prematurely from
the category of landscape to that of the self, which will be our third
category.
Cinema, our
second category, reminds us, however, that the problems of re-presentation can
scarcely be avoided, but force us to ask as well: “re-presentations of what?”
Again, we are confronted with a duality: representations of the world out
there, which returns us to one part of our first duality (landscape), and
representations of language and subjectivity (langscape), which moves us to our
third category. As Bailey suggests, Canadian experimental film has been
precisely such a restless oscillation-between, as it were, a cinema of
‘nothingness,’ a cinema of deconstruction which privileges the apparatus, and a
cinema of ‘somethingness,’ expressive of an obsessive need to document some
thing. But what?
We come
then, to our third category, the self. Like the other two, this also is
dualistic, alternating between the self-as-ego in some not especially
interesting psychological sense, and the self-as-ideal, particularly in the
sense that would entail something we could call “the nationalistic self.” It is
this latter, non-psychological self that will concern me. The mode of
consciousness available to this self has been described as a nostalgic
consciousness, in the sense that it operates within a temporal framework that
can be characterized as “the longing for a past that never was from the
perspective of a present one cannot accept.” Put slightly differently, this is
to say that such a consciousness is centrally preoccupied with the
re-collection particularly of human time, with re-membering in the sense of
attempting to render whose that which has been torn asunder. Once more this
opens onto yet another duality: that of the psychological ego that suffers, as
per Freud, from reminiscences-that is to say, is afflicted by hysteria; and
that of the self-as-ideal which suffers from history-that is, conceives of
changes over time with difficulty, as profoundly painful, and so producing
either tragic or nostalgic effects in its attempt to re-member.
Because all
of these categories are, as I’ve been suggesting, inherently unstable, but
furthermore because we are dealing with a medium of moving images, a particular
kind of movement necessarily results. If, from a theoretical perspective, it
might suffice simply to say that Canadian experimental film is the combinatoire
of its own categorical instabilities, the films of Rick Hancox, I suggest, shed
a particular understanding on the nature of the resulting movement. Rick’s films,
and Moose Jaw especially, move in a particular manner that is ironic.
Of itself,
to say that Rick’s films are ironic is not an earth-shattering assertion.
Canada’s leading ironologist, Professor Linda Hutcheon, has suggested, in one
her many writings, although she cautions again suggestion that irony is any
kind of master narrative that will unlock the secrets of Canadian mythologies,
that “irony is one mode of self-defining discourse used by English-Canadians”
(As Canadian As Possible…, pp. 10-11) In this light, it is less the fact that
Rick’s films are ironic, but how they are ironic that matters.
For
Hutcheon, the Canadian artistic voice-a strange form of utterance in a strange
land-is “often a doubled one, that of the forked tongue of irony” (ACAP, 9).
Irony, let us say, is l, like my three categories, also dualistic; in its
simplest sense, it says one thing and means another. It also, as Hutcheon
notes, postulates the existence of a detached observer who can see the
discrepancy. She goes on to point out that irony is “a mode of speech (in any
medium) which allows speakers to address, and at the same time, slyly confront
an ‘official’ discourse” (9). To put in terms of my categories, irony, then is
the form of speech of the nationalistic self, whose nostalgic mode of
consciousness, we’ll recall, suffers from history.
If we look
beyond Linda Hutcheon to additional, more complex definitions of irony, Paul de
Man, for example, observes that “It is a historical fact that irony becomes
increasingly conscious of itself in the course of demonstrating the
impossibility of being historical. In speaking or irony we are dealing not with
the history of an error but with a problem that exists within the self.”
DeMan goes
on, via a discussion of Baudelaire, to point out that, in irony, the crucial
relationships are not between person and person, are not intersubjective, but
between person and the world out there, between self and what we earlier called
landscape. Irony is the splitting that designates the activity of a
consciousness by which a person differentiates him/herself from the nonhuman
world, split by language into an empirical self-in-the-world and a self that
becomes like a linguistic sign in its attempt at differentiation and
self-definition. If we add the medium of cinema to the equation, however, these
two selves become indistinguishable: we see representations of Rick on the
streets of Moose Jaw but, at the same time, Rick’s is the consciousness that
has shot and edited what we see: ‘himself.’ If we further add to this
particular place, we get the opening credit sequence: “Rick Hancox’s Moose Jaw
and Moose Jaw’s Rick Hancox.” Landsape, medium and self have been apparently
reconciled-but in an ironic way and, I would suggest, possible only in irony.
Irony, or
what Baudelare termed the “comique absolu,” entails a notion of the Fall—from
its silly sense of pratfall, to a more complex theological sense, to the
psychological sense of a descent into madness-as the end of all consciousness.
“…the ironist invents a form of himself that is ‘mad’ but that does know its
own madness; he then proceeds to reflect on his madness thus objectified.” (de
Man, 216). In his madness, what the ironist discovers, however, is the critical
theoretical figure of parabasis the self-conscious narrator who discovers “the
ironic necessity of not being the dupe of his own irony and… that there is no
way back form his fictional self to his actual self” (219). In the film,
however there is a way back and it’s the trans-Canadian train-which,
ironically, no longer exists, at least not for Moose Jaw, the actual place.
Just as
there is no way out of irony, there is no happy ending here-other than the
maturity of the work itself, and its most deserved showing here in one of our
few remaining national cultural institutions. Hancox’s Moose Jaw is, in this sense, irony appropriate to a context of Canadian deConfederation, and
documents the acceptance of the individual or collective fall that is the way
of all things. There can be no sustaining myths: not cinema, not history, not
nation, not even memory—‘no thing,” but perhaps the ironic dimensions of our
own forgetfulness.
As such Moose Jaw is at once a statement of the
filmmaker’s own maturation as an artist at midlife; a regionalist dirge on the
fatality of economic dependency; an archeological excavation of our
ever-vanishing historical past-and the ironic deconstruction of all of the
above. Moose Jaw, Canada’s epitaph, becomes that stated by the poet Ronald
Bates in his “The Fall of Seasons:”
They stand
together in dusty photo albums
The last
repository of dreams
But nobody
bothers to look at them
Nobody
bothers at all
Rick Hancox
is a filmmaker who has bothered. And Moose
Jaw, a film whose making has obsessed him for fourteen years, becomes a
monument to an exemplary body of work: the passing of time ironically captured
in light on the most fleeting, but hereby perhaps most memorable, of media.
Bibliography
Linda
Hutcheon, As Canadian As Possible Under the Circumstances
ECW Press
and York University, 1990
Paul DeMan,
Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd
edition, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.