Landfall
was shot in Prince Edward Island, near the family home on the
Northumberland Strait. The original footage, shot in 1974, was
a kind of interactive, camera “dance” with the environment.
Poetry became important when the footage was later superimposed
onto its own mirror-image, to help direct the viewer away from
the luring yet limited world of image-identification. “I
Thought There Were Limits,” by Quebec poet D.G. Jones, w
as used to encourage the viewer to reject Newtonian notions of
space and time, and to conceptualize the film’s interplay
between absence, desire, and presence. Eventually, the limitation
of text as spoken signifier is exposed through dynamic visual
techniques reminiscent of concrete poetry. (RH)
“Although
completed in 1983, Landfall was actually shot in 1974
at the Hancox family home in Prince Edward Island. Influenced
by Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale Hancox became a “Human
tripod” that anchored the camera. This original footage
was a “kind of interactive, camera dance” with the
environment. Poetry was superimposed on the sweeping arcs of landscape
drawing the viewer away from the temptation to identify and order
the images. It is, Hancox suggests a structure that is similar
to Waterworx but that the second half of the film is both visually
and textually reflected repeat of the first.” (“Recent
Canadian Experimental Films” by Cathy Jonasson, Canada House
Catalogue, 1991)
“Landfall
is a seminal film in the development of Canadian experimental
film of the past decade. It is an elegant work that illustrates
the debt the Canadian avant-garde still owes to structural film,
but it also points the way to a rearticulation of a structural
film aesthetic in a more humanist context. The film is concerned
not merely with exploring questions of art and perception, but
with all boundaries of human endeavour. Landfall is a
reflexive exploration of how one’s understanding of the
physical world is insufficient if the idea of human perceptibility
is divorced from our emotions.” (Mario Falsetto, Experimental
Film Congress Catalogue)
“Landfall
offers a contrasting visual metaphor for the structure of our
conscious and unconscious realities. While the camera swings and
sweeps around an ocean cove in P.E.I., the interjection of frozen
frames reveals a shadow of Hancox holding a Bolex camera above
his head. A voice-over of D.G. Jones’ poem, I Thought There
Were Limits, accompanies this dizzy profusion of images, describing
a falling away from the “Newtonian laws of emotion.”
In the second half of the film, the images are not only repeated,
but their mirror reflection superimposed. The words, which now
appear as text upon the screen, know no gravity as well. A sonorous
repetition of synthesized notes sound warning of their arrival.
They float diagonally across the screen. They move up and down,
up-0side down, swinging around. The visual effect of this sequence
becomes a physical impression of disembodiment. In contrast to
Waterworx, we are not detached from the images, but almost part
of them. But despite this sensation that we are experiencing time
and space from a different vantage point of perception, the poem
tell us that these are “dreams, hallucinations, which reveal
the sound and fury of machines working on nothing” …
our meeting of the unconscious process brings us to the paradoxical
impasse of nothingness, of a void. Conclude, the poem suggests,
that “desire is but an ache, an absence… It creates
a dream of limits and it grows in gravity as that takes shape.”
‘Sense’ in Hancox’s poetical exploration, becomes
non-sense. We can only know through repetition, in an enigmatic
flash, the presence of the unconscious through absence.”
Dot Tuer, Vanguard
“…the
greatest film, to me, was Landfall, wherein I felt you
achieved a hard-won acceptance of the Universe, like we say-i.e.
there was no sentimentality from grounds chosen to begin the film
thru to your full exposition (clear clean visual architecture-in-evolution)
of it-Bravo!” (Stan Brakhage)
“..typography
and graphics become significant considerations, not to mention
the timing and method of making the words appear and disappear.
Comparable elements...when the poem is spoken on the soundtrack...
Landfall offers an excellent reading of the poem, which
is, in turn, well integrated with the film’s visuals.”
William Wees, Words and Moving Images
Available
from:
Canadian
Filmmakers' Distribution Centre
37 Hanna Ave. #220
Toronto, Ontario Canada M6K 1W8
telephone: 416-588-0725, e-mail: bookings@cfmdc.org
web: www.cfmdc.org
Canyon
Cinema
145 Ninth Street, Suite 260, San Francisco, CA 94103
phone/fax: 415-626-2255 email: films@canyoncinema.com
web: www.canyoncinema.com
(printable
version of description)
Reviews,
Articles, Text & Notes:
Rick
Hancox’s Landfall: A Canadian Poetry Film by Melanie
Nash (Experimental Film 532, Submitted
to Chris Gallagher April 5, 1994)
Landfall
onscreen text from “I Thought
There Were Limits” a poem by D.G. Jones, published in Phrases
from Orpheus (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 26
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