Some Words on the North by Stan Brakhage

Since Tom Thomson and the so-called Canadian 7 painters, of the nineteen-teens and –twenties fame, faced nature as something other than “a garden” and slashed sharp edged hard colour onto canvases in such a way as to make even Turner’s nineteenth-century storms seem romanticized (which they, of course, were) in comparison, and the entirety of impressionism seem a picnic (which it mostly was), the North has been the direction for The so-called World to turn in order to see what Humans, and all their hubris, are up against… as always Poet Charles Olson, in conversation with me, put it well, once: “Nature?… she’ll kill you, given the chance!” The eyes of painting-lovers, alas, are a dulled as those of the average Nature worshipper: thus the Canadian 7 are little known; and even the name Tom Thomson evokes little response outside Canada, though he is surely the Van Gogh of that culture: his forest and mountain scapes are more terrifying to the discriminating viewer than Van Gogh’s sirocco-ravaged fields or cypresses because Tom Thomson was not painting internal turmoil bur rather the same fact of recognition-albeit a recognition most would rather forget than, as Thomson does, celebrate!… recognition that a Beckettian “end game” is implicit once one sees, rather than seizes (or frames) natural surroundings. The Nordic peoples know and celebrate this envisionment. It was a 1913 Scandinavian show of modern painting in Buffalo, which acted as prime catalyst to shape the Canadian 7 into modes we most know: that tradition reverberates today as an aesthetic uneasiness with the rural bulwark humans have erected to front the vast spaces of wilderness Canada still mostly is. The nature-loving (but certainly not worshipping) Canadian 7 more or less demonstrated the impossibility of “taking to the woods.” Some, like Lawren Harris (who often painted above timberline), pushed North enough to come to painterly icons of the frozen mind. It only remained for Michael Snow, painter turned filmmaker, to push this “shock of recognition” into motion, as in his celebrated La Region Centrale. Meanwhile, back in the suburbs, jack chambers, another Canadian painter (inspired by his “death sentence” from cancer) turned to epic filmmaking, became seismograph of the rural reverberations of this “end game” knowledge-to wit: the limits of being human-in his film Hart of London. The Canadian who most carries this working imperative today is filmmaker Bruce Eldr in his prospective thirty-hour film The Book of All the Dead.

With the help of Marilyn Jull, I recently organized a showing of Canadian independent films from the 1980s, utilizing Michael Snow’s Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphine and Tape Recorder (especially the piecing Falling Starts) as pre-and-post-lude program music. Michael Snow has been involved in “playing freely improvised music with certain groups in Toronto (mostly the Artist’s Jazz Band)” for several years now. Falling Starts is solo improvisation which begins with shards of high-pitched speeded-up piano notes which occur as clusters interspersed with silence. The piece progresses through “normal” speed recording to, finally, such slowed sounds that the trills over reverberations dominate all hearing… the “falling” of the “starts” of each note played: the nature of sound itself determines the aesthetic of this work-the nature of this urban instrument sounding.

Rick Hancox’s Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories), in its moving tour past structure, through landscape, dominated by hard blue sky, all woven with the Wallce Stevens poem, seems often also all-of-a-weave with the late paintings of Jack Chambers. Both celebrate a rural landscape as hard-edged and flat-coloured as the mindscapes of elder Lawren Harris.

Seeing in the Rain by Chris Gallagher jump-cuts, back/forth, the progress of a Vancouver bus seen through its front window windshield-wiper’s left/right tick-tock ironically obliterating clock-time and city street’s continuum. Waterworx pictured no people. In Gallagher’s film, human beings are oddly even more ephemeral, altered as their continuities by the editing.

Barbara Sternberg’s Transitions focusing on autobiographical first-person-singularity in eidetic-beseeming superimpositions is (by the author’s admission) “between here and now, being and not being.”

Richard Kerr’s His Romantic Movement traces a search for a missing person through Florida keys seen as hard-colour-candy cut-out metaphors of the desperate mind.

David Rimmer, famous from the sixties for his structural works, traveled all the way to Spain for his (again) essentially people-less travelogue through the mind (all photographed humans speeded up, their acts flattened to quick cut-out postures of antic movement) in Along the Road to Altamira.

But Bruce Elder’s 1857 (Fool’s Gold) (part of his long epic work) states the mental dilemma of human in natural “scape” (picture and person) on four visual levels: (1) photographed scenes which are increasingly multiple printed to cause the photographic deterioration of detail, (2) written texts (mostly from The Cantos of Ezra Pound those passages primarily evocative of light, presented in the film as white-light letters over ironically juxtaposed variably flaring imagery), (3) mathematical symbols, and (4) math numerals-both of which assert purely mental picturing and the orders of abstract thought: this accompanied by a reading from Daniel DeFoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. The effect of this, as the author puts it, “Complex amalgam of disparate elements” (in transformations increasingly only conceivable as moving visual thinking), Is that the presentation of Person confronted by Nature is as that of waterbug skimming the surface of any given pool vis a vis the depth of complexity of that pool… or one might almost say-the memory of the patterns made by said bug upon that surface.

The Aesthetic of the North, as represented by these films and their traditional underpinning in Canadian painting and music (especially if one considers Glenn Gould’s radio series The North, wherein human conversation exists more surely as Fugue than anything else) suggests a new humility of being human: Personae (the Masks of Human) have given way to pictured and edited senses of ephermerality of person, persons, personal(L) in the “teeth” of a depicted belief in natural forces solidly alien. Bruce Elder (across the full thirty hour length of his film work) seeks to heal the schism this aesthetic implies.

Originally published in: American Book Review, May-June 1988