Personal Artist’s Statement by Rick Hancox about Moose Jaw (There’s a Future In Our Past)

This project has been developing since 1978, when I first shot some footage during a trip across Canada. I hadn't seen Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan-the place where, from 1948 to 1959, I spent my childhood-for almost twenty years. I began shooting spontaneously without a script (as in many of my films), and had a feeling I was onto something much deeper than the obvious nostalgic content. While I couldn't articulate it at the time, I knew it would obsess me until it was 'solved'—no matter how long it took. At the same time, even though I was also finishing six other films between 1978 and 1985, I kept shooting footage of Moose Jaw and accumulating research—not just on details of the history of the area, but also on the nature of autobiography, time, memory, and landscape. The footage amounts to a rather unique record of a decade of change, both in Moose Jaw and my evolving relationship to it, as well as the broad­er context of Canadian culture and political economy.

What finally ended the shooting was the Mulroney government's decision to cut 'The Canadian' route through the southern prairies- which, for a rail town like Moose Jaw, was the final blow in a string of bad luck dating back several decades. The mythology of this train route in the building of Canada had already figured prominently in the film. Its death made me finally see how what is happening to Moose Jaw is, in fact, symbolic for the rest of the country.

Another thing ended the many years of research and collecting of audio-visual material (including scores of photographs and tapes of conversations, interviews, material from radio and television, readings of old newspapers, etc.). Just prior to my final shoot out West I realized, during an excruciating moment of sudden personal insight, 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. In other words, perhaps it wasn't a 'documentary,' but another of my

Autobiographical films that have come to be considered 'experimental.' In fact, the film moves from a narrational mode into something increasingly poetic—skewered on a subjective tangent.'

Once I broke through this critical window and gained some distance, the film matured rapidly. I'm glad now I didn't attempt completion of the film a moment earlier. "In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn't matter, and ten years are
nothing." (Rainer Maria Rilke).

As its name might suggest, Moose Jaw is not now, and never was, any ordinary town. At once a frontier boomtown, chief red light district of the prairies, hide-out for Chicago gangsters, and important rail head, Moose Jaw has declined. A place where now one of the main industries is actually geriatrics, the city has gone from an exciting, would­-be metropolis, originally intended as the provincial capital, to a town whose economic motto, in an attempt to draw in tourists from the Trans-Canada bypass is', "Moose Jaw—There's a Future in Our Past," Festooned with museum culture, such as the provincial Museum of Transportation, a pristine shrine to the technology on which Moose Jaw was founded , became dependent, then floundered when the C.P.R. moved its western headquarters to Winnipeg (taking other industries with it), Moose Jaw just couldn't compete with the government favouritism in nearby Regina, which has thrived by comparison. If one were to view post­modern culture as the detritus of late capitalist economy, then Moose Jaw would be a major Canadian site, a site which has also become a fascinating study lin the downside of what could be called 'technological nationalism'.

While many of Moose Jaw's post-modern, cultural accidents are absurd, like the giant moose ('Mac' the Moose) in the middle of the prairie beside the Western Development Museum, or the Wild Animal Park built out by the Air Force base, nevertheless Moose Jaw is the town where I grew up, and I can't help but take some of this seriously. Like anyone's home town, Moose Jaw had a significant effect on who I am today—a person at times haunted by romantic memories of Moose Jaw's cavernous train station with its thundering steam engines, the impressive air shows at the base south of town, the western rodeos we used to attend, and the great, pioneering spirit and sense of community, famous for its role in the formation of the C.C.F. party there. And all of it intensified by a 1950's, post-war optimism in which looking to the past for your future was the last thing on anyone's mind.

Our leaving Moose Jaw (for Prince Edward Island) in 1959 happened to coincide really with the end of my childhood, the beginning of the sixties—the 'jet age', and the start of Moose Jaw's long decline. The population has decreased, Main Street is crippled with boarded-up establishments, with the latest be­ing the main hotel and convention center (where a portion of the film was shot), Eaton's—the largest department store (soon to become an old folks home), and finally, the biggest landmark of all, the train station itself. Buildings destroyed by fire are not rebuilt, and other structures, some historically significant, are unflinchingly razed for parking lots. In fact I have this vision in which the whole city becomes a vast parking lot. Weeds slowly begin to take over, and eventually it becomes prairie again, as if nothing had ever happened. All that remains is the impenetrable, pyramid­-shaped Development Museum with its once-restored 'treasures', now rusting again, and a small herd of fly-ridden plains buffalo, penned-up, as they are today, besides what's left of the air base south of town.

For me of course, 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, I 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. These various dialectics will be woven together in the film—particularly with the aid of a highly innovative soundtrack—in order to examine their interdependence.

In the midst of preparing for my final shoot out West, I began to realize the film wasn't so much about Moose Jaw as about myself. It's really an inner landscape. "There's a future in our past" has in fact become my motto, and Moose Jaw's museumization, which part of the film will spend mocking, will in the end be revealed as simply a mirror of museumizing processes at work in my own memory. After all, my motivations in making the film itself are perhaps not that different from the museum, even though I would like to think otherwise. And, just like a museum, far from preserving the past, original experience just becomes more attenuated with each substitution, each re-presentation, each repetition. "The work flames, and the model dies" (GENET). This psychological development will be under my conscious control in the film, and will reveal itself through careful editing of sound with the picture. Ultimately, there will be a realization in the end that this alienation with one's own memory, this remoteness and irretrievability of the past—ironically pushed to further recesses with each attempt to conjure it—isn't so much Moose Jaw's problem as mine. If I can't relate to what Moose Jaw has become, that's my problem. Life still goes on there like everywhere else, as the film will show.

Having said all this, I don't intend to shrink from a certain political critique in which Moose Jaw is nevertheless cast as a victim of the rhetoric of technological nationalism, and a victim, in certain cases, of its own folly. For example, the gang known as the 'Moose Boosters' (responsible for Mac the Moose) for decades dominated Moose Jaw politics with crazy financial band-aid schemes to stimulate the economy, the latest of which was to turn River Street (the former red.-light district of .the Prairies) into a giant casino, and make Moose Jaw "the Las Vegas of the North". Finally the population voted them out of office, after they endorsed an expensive renovation to the Council chambers (including computerized balloting, which still doesn't work), and also voted themselves raises in the midst of the worst drought seen on the prairies since the 30's.

This information will be revealed in an interview with councilor Brian Swanson, part of a new generation at City Hall, who frankly admit Moose Jaw's economic plight, and the necessity to concentrate instead on looking after its increasingly aging population. My discovery of him in the film will mark the turning of my satire inward, from the sardonic to pathos, as I begin to realize the total irrelevance to Moose Jaw of someone whose experience of the place stopped in 1959 at age thirteen. This feeling culminates in the parade scene, which cuts from street-level to over-the-shoulder shots of me watching from behind a closed and dirty old hotel window. When I disappear from the frame the camera commences a kind of search, only to wind up at the Western Development Museum again, this time tracking by what looks like. a wax figure of me, Bolex in hand, arrested in the midst of filming one of the displays, a display myself.

The film ends with me desperately trying to film some final shots of the interior of the closed and darkened railway station, as I leave in the middle of the night, headed back East on 'The Canadian' (one of the last of them, as it turned out). The scene outside my window gradually becomes a blurred view of rushing scenery, first going east, then west, then east again—shot at various times of year. Finally I am shown asleep, head thrust back against the window, as the Canadian landscape flashes by in a kind of perpetual motion, gradually burning out as the film roll comes to a flaring end in the camera, suggesting perhaps my true home is a moving train—even as Brian Mulroney's electronically-distorted voice promises how he is "Saving VIA", as the cuts are seemingly announced through the train's broken PA system. 2

This multiplicity of texts, perceptual layers, points-of­-view, etc., will be advanced through a combination of documentary and experimental techniques employed in several previous films of mine, including (besides those already mentioned)* I, a Dog, Next to Me, Wild Sync, House Movie, Home for Christmas, and Reunion in Dunnville. In the case of the soundtrack, there will be both a poetic/diaristic narration in the first person, and one in the third person, which, in addition to providing general information (tourist brochures, newspaper accounts, facts about the dinosaurs, etc.), will refer to me, the cameraman-protagonist, almost as an intruder. For example, in the scene where I am working in the archives of the Moose Jaw public library, and later, when I am filming the exterior of the closed Eaton's store, 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.

Notes

1. See Maurice Charland, "Technological Nationalism," Canadian Journal of

Political and Social Theory 10 (1-2, 1986): 196-220.

2. As a kid, I was often a passenger on this very train, as each summer my mDthr took us to see relatives in Ontario. The PA system worked then. * Waterworx (/Clear Day & No Memories), Beach Events Addendum

Waterworx (1982) and Beach Events (1985)relate to Moose Jaw in several important ways. Shooting had already begun on Moose Jaw in 1978, and while I continued to accumulate footage throughout the 80's, I was working through my concerns with time, memory and landscape in these and other short 'poetry films'. I was using poetry in the service of my images to explore ways of balancing reason and the imagination—ways in which the viewer's intellectual and sensual faculties might be engaged simultaneously. Waterworx relates to Moose Jaw partly because of the unpeopled landscapes and seemingly abandoned buildings. This was done deliberately as a metaphor for my own sense of loss and because I wanted to invoke—especially through the soundtrack—an atmosphere suggestive of the accumulation of people and events known particularly to the collective memory of the landscape itself.

Beach Events, while not dealing with the 'memories' of architectural landscapes, represented a chance for me to work out the kind of parallel points of view characteristic of Moose Jaw. Specifically, Beach Events utilizes a first-person point of view in the spoken narration and subjective camera movement, while at the same time an objective or 'omniscient' point of view is represented in the sub­titled information and static camera shots. In Moose Jaw this is pushed further, with a multiplicity of points of view, as represented partly by twenty different voices heard reading items from the Moose Jaw Times Herald, and other sources. In addition to my, subjective viewpoint behind the camera (many of these are hand-held shots with the sound of a Bolex added), and in addition to the relatively objective point of view of the traditional documentary camera work, there is also a sense of 'surveillance' from the point of view of Moose Jaw watching me film it. Yet another point of view, the official 'Moose Booster' view, is represented on the soundtrack, with the traditional, authoritative, male documentary voice reading straight from tourist and industrial brochures. This narrator, an American deliberately chosen because of his strong mid-western accent, has his credibility broken down—and with it, the old Moose Jaw I remember—part way through the film, by the inclusion of flubbed lines, directions from me, etc. (I imagine him to represent an American company the Moose Jaw Chamber of Commerce has hired to do a promotional film, whose accent is such that he can't even pronounce Saskatchewan.

This multiplicity of points of view is consistent with the complex thematic and (necessarily) formalistic layers to be found in this film, which includes the careful structuring of the film's one-hour length into variations of recurring themes and motifs—as, for example, the frequent use of windows, glass cases, mirrors, etc. as a means of dividing up the visual space into points (or planes) of view; or, as in another example, the idea of crashes, explosions, and generally, imminent disaster.

This style goes beyond my earlier films in its use of certain documentary techniques (interviews, voice over, etc.), in order to give the autobiographical elements of the film a sense of scale in relation to the social and political order. This attempt to contextualize the personal without letting go of the poetic nature of my earlier films necessitated manipulations of point of view like those discussed. It resulted in a complex style that grew naturally in response to Moose Jaw's (and Canada's) changes over a twelve­year period, a period which saw an increase in the construction of museums in Saskatchewan, and elsewhere. (The voice of an official conducting a tour of Ottawa's new Museum of Civilization is heard on the soundtrack, as if he's talking about the pictures we're seeing out the train window, or in Moose Jaw itself.) These devices were also discovered by me while creating the soundtrack (a two-year proposition practically in itself), as a result of pushing myself creatively until I broke through to a deeper understanding, and also came to terms with certain aspects of my own memory.

The layering and juxtaposition of image and sound in Moose Jaw is also meant to suggest the film is open to interpretation, and the viewer is invited to participate actively in negotiating the film's meaning.