The Visual
Poetry of Rick Hancox by Bob Wilkie
Considered
one of
Last spring
(April 1987), in the box car of an overnight rain en route from
Landfall
itself was destined to become the subject and title of a later work, Landfall (1983) which, along with Waterworx (1982) and Beach Events (1984) belongs to a
category referred to by Hancox as his “poetry films.” In these poetry films, s
well s in Home for Christmas and several other earlier films, there is a strong
evidence of lace but not, as one might expect, a sense of belonging or of being
connected to that place. What seems to displace this liaison in these films is
a lament for something lost or forgotten-something that has to do with place, connection, belonging and
personal identity. The loss is the result of a historical amnesia which is,
according to Hancox, the product of “a society that emphasizes the present and
devalue the past.” This privileging of present over past is tied up with a
technological imperative and with the “assumption… that we are progressing
towards something better.”
Historically
in
As Rick and
I were finishing up our interview in that smoke-filled bar car, with several
other red-eyed, late-night travellers present, we reflected on much of what was
said and the enormous editing job ahead. We were somewhat surprised, perhaps
even pleased, with the fact that much of our conversation, as we clacked along
on that deliberately slow overnight train toward Toronto, focused on the
railway and the part if played in Rick’s life, particularly in his films. We
were both very tired and had all but exhausted our desire to speak the words
that had become so familiar to us in the course of our
conversations-experimental, autobiographical, personal, lament, loss, redemption,
presence, Snow, landscape, Wieland, nationalism, Kroker, postmodernism, Grant,
technology-to repeat but a few. Several of these words would disappear, along
with the passages they were embedded in, after the editing job was completed.
One of the exchanges that was cut because it seemed trivial and irrelevant,
occurred around the same time as our train rolled to a stop in the “middle of
nowhere.” It was made less out of curiosity that it was out of a sort of forced
indifference that one experiences at the end of a project no matter how
interesting it has been otherwise. It is worth repeating here only because it
is less than trivial, and in fact it seems to embody much of what Rick Hancox
concerns himself with in his filmmaking today.
Rick: Where
are we… near Cornwall… or is it Iroquois?
Bob: Who
knows?
Rick:
Iroquois… Iroquois… washed over by the St. Lawrence Seaway… Iroquois… do you
remember Iroquois?
Bob: No,
what about it?
Rick: There
were three Canadian towns… wiped out by the Seaway… that’s another Canadian
technology, the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Bob: Really
eh? Wiped out?
Rick: Yes,
Iroquois… gone for good!
Bob Wilkie:
You began artistically as a poet. What led you to making films or working with
as your medium?
Rick
Hancox: The kind of poetry I was interested in was quite visually specific:
that is, it was based on personal experiences, in which the surroundings
figured quite strongly. If you look at the titles of the poems you realize they
are street names and place names. I felt that I had sort of pushed that to the
limit and I wanted to take it to the next logical step, which was to physically
materialize some of this visual imagery—not only in words but also in
photographs—and I wanted to enhance it with music and any other sensual means
at my disposal. I began to realize that I was never going to be a particularly
good poet… or a musician. I though that this might be a way in which I could
put together everything that I knew and evolve it into a totally different
medium.
Bob: Was
there any one particular artist who was close to you at the time you began to
use film… perhaps another filmmaker or photographer?
Rick: No.
But my poetry and creative writing teachers at the University of Prince Edward
Island (UPEI) were particularly good: John Smith, Frank Ledwell, Adrian
Arsenault. I still keep in touch with these people almost twenty years later.
It was they who introduced me to poets like William Carlos Williams and of
course Wallace Stevens. There wasn’t any particular film or filmmaker, who influenced
me. I came to Montreal in the mid-60s, halfway through one of my less
successful university years, and wound up driving a cab, during which I had
plenty of time to read and think to myself. It was a real transitional year.
Anyway I picked up a copy of Sheldan Renan’s book Introduction to the American Underground Film. That was the first
film book I read and I just couldn’t believe how I hadn’t heard of or seen that
kind of cinema before.
Bob: What
was he talking about in that book? Which filmmakers wa he referring to and how
was he describing their work?
Rick: He
was talking about the American underground of the 1960s and the whole new
American filmmaking scene. Stan Brakhage. Maya Deren. Marie Menken. Willard
Maas. I actually spent some time with the last two in New York and showed one
of my films. That would have been a couple of years later when I was really
getting in to the filmmaking. I met crazy people like Jack Smith. I remember
reading about him, and then actually seeing one of his performances in N.Y.C.
Renan’s book doesn’t get into any serious critical analysis or theory. It’s
really just a description of the films… which was enough for me at the time. I
had never heard of those people before. To have the works so graphically
described seemed to open up a whole new world of possibilities. I was just
overjoyed to discover that there was such an art form around. I bought another
book around the same time-Four
Screenplays by Ingmar Bergman-and it seemed that the underground film was
so much more colourful and interesting. So I just happened to take that route…
and I think I was a bit of a rebel and the radical qualities of that stuff
really appealed to me… and it was the 1960s too… and that was a big influence…
just being set up for such a thing by the culture I was immersed in. I was
ready to receive it. I should rally mention the name of one person who did
influence me. It just so happened that he very next year, after having
developed an interest in this sort of film, a visiting professor came to teach
at UPEI for one years… and he happened to be teaching the only film course
that’s ever been given there. He also happened to be an underground filmmaker
who had a lot of connections in N.Y.C. George Semsel was his name. It was an
incredible course. He taught us film history, film production, film theory and
he showed us lots of underground films. You had these P.E.I. kids some of them
right off the farm, looking at guys like Kenneth Anger. It was great! Anyway,
after that course, George went back to the States but I kept in touch with him,
He was a big influence on me because he made what he called “personal”
documentaries. You can call them autobiographical as well, but he really
emphasized the personal in cinema. He still remains an influence. Ed
Emschweller was also a big influence. His moving camera style I still use. In
fact I met him in N.Y.C. and asked him how he did it. That was around 1969 or
1970 when I was going down to New York and eventually when I was in Graduate
School at NYU in the fall of 1971. I met a lot of those people I had read
about. I also went to screenings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and
there several filmmakers there who really impressed me. Will Hindle. That’s
just one name that comes to mind. I’m trying to think of these influences in
chronological sequence. At that time I wasn’t aware of any Canadian
experimental filmmakers. The first one was Snow. Yeah. Snow and Wieland. The
first time they received serious attention was around the end of the 1960s. At
first I didn’t like Snow’s films. At the first screening of Wavelength, I didn’t like it. But the
next time I saw it I was very impressed by it… I saw it again a few months
later and that really made the difference… I was suddenly on his wave length…
Bob: Did Joyce
Wieland influence your work?
Rick: No,
not directly. Joyce’s films didn’t me as much as her nationalism and her
independence… her sort of brash nationalistic independence was inspiring. But I
liked some of her films. I really don’t know the extent to which they might
have influenced me but I liked some of them. Solidarity is one of my favourites.
But then I
started to be influenced by some of my contemporaries, like David Rimmer. And
then I started to become influenced by my own students-Mike Hoolboom, Holly
Dale, Janis Cole, Lorne Marin, Richard Kerr, Philip Hoffman and others.
Bob: Have
you ever worked with a group or collective besides your students at Sheridan?
Rick: Yeah,
I did. The Toronto Filmmaker’s Co-op in the early 1970s. I was very much a part
of it. I was on the early executive of the TFC. There were plenty of good
people there and we show each other our work-in-progress, and in that way we
influenced each other.
Bob: So
they were like critiques… that sort of thing?
Rick: Oh
yeah! Thee were people like Raphael Bendahan, who’s in Montreal now. He was on
the executive then, along with Michael Snow. Keith Lock and Jim Anderson were
active members of the TFC and I was very influenced by their work. There were
several glorious years, when the offices of the TFC, Cinema Canada and the
Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre were all sharing the same building on
Jarvis Street. You could go from one room to the other… you know… one minute
you’d be with Canada’s largest distributor of independent films, screening
whatever was being sent in, or over at Cinema Canada where I might write an
article about the Canadian Student Film Festival or about something else I was
doing at the time.
Bob: What
were your first concerns as a filmmaker? What were you trying to say in the
early films like Next to Me, Wild Sync and House Movie? They are three very different films of course. Are
they exemplary films or do they represent all the work you had during that
period. You made reference to other films, made earlier…
Rick: Well
yeah… the other night Michael Dorland said that I had made seven films, but I
have actually made sixteen films. Around the time I made Next to Me I also made a couple of others… Rooftops, and I, A Dog,
which is a film about a Prince Edward Islander who’s sort of just arrived in
N.Y.C….and he spends a lot of his time just dodging doggy dung. Next To Me is made up of shots I took in
N.Y.C. while I was going to NYU. It was actually an NYU project. It was
inspired by my personal relationship to N.Y.C. After that I went to Ohio
University where I finished Next To Me
and then I did House Movie the next
year.. and again it was about what was going on in my life at the time. The
year after that, 1973, I finished Wild
Sync, so they were really all autobiographical… except that I’m not in Next To Me. It actually took a while
before I realized that, in fact, it was a personal film… I couldn’t edit it
properly until I realized that.
Bob: But in
Wild Sync there seems to be some
concern with formal issues or an attempt to address the technology… you know,
the out-of-sync clapping, the discussion of the sound and syncing up process,
etc… and that was of course right around the time when structural filmmaking
was in its heyday.
Rick: I
don’t think I was aware of structuralism when I was doing this film… the film
is a satire in a sense. It’s a satire on those who were infatuated with the
technology. I wanted to liberate myself from the technology. A lot of people
were running around in graduate school thinking that the ultimate film was a
lip-synch film… or using a lip-synch camera for the simplest exercise of 100
feet. So once I finally got access to the lip-synch equipment, I rejected all
that stuff and just sent the whole thing up. So I think it was more an analysis
or a critique of the apparatus than a structuralist or formalist film.
Hancox on
Experimental Film Theory
Bob: OK,
let’s talk about ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’ or ‘alternative’ filmmaking in
general. How do you consider yourself in terms of these definitions?
Rick: Well,
I have to resort to radical techniques in my films, I’m sure there are people
who use more radical techniques than mine. There are some people like Michael
snow who are uncomfortable with the term “experimental film” because it implies
a kind of lack of knowledge on the part of the filmmaker. In other words, if
there is an experiment, then they will not be sure of the results. There is a
sense of incompletion, Snow doesn’t like the term but he lives with it because
it seems to be the most common and convenient term to describe it.
Bob: You
spoke the other night about the issues you dealt with as being so complex that
you had to…
Rick: The
issues of time and memory and landscape that interest me are so full of
contradiction and so intertwined… rich with different layers… that to represent
them in a few minutes you must resort to the techniques that are best suited.
Those techniques don’t exist in the dominant cinema. The lexicon of film
technique is woefully inadequate to deal with such themes in a few short
minutes. It’s like writing poetry and being forced to do nothing but iambic
pentameter. You have to invent your own way of doing it… your own language that
is specific to whatever you happen to be dealing with. And if you look at my
files they are not all the same… at least on a formalistic, superficial level.
Unlike the structuralist films, the point is not to make some sort of ironic
statement about the apparatus itself. Like some of Sharits’s films or George
Landow’s films which deal with the material stuff. That’s not interesting to
me.
Bob: Even
though there’s a certain political dimension, albeit minimal, to the
structuralist or minimalist art project, whereby the focusing on the materials
and processes reveals or functions deconstructively and thereby debunks some of
the myths around representation.
Rick: It’s
basically Brechtian in concept. But it is one thing while communicating your
content, to also make the viewer aware of how they are being manipulated, and
it is quite another to have nothing to communicate except the form itself,
where the form itself replaces the content, and all that is communicated is
plastic material… it’s pretty empty really. Who cares about the cinematic
apparatus in and of itself?
Bob: Your
films deal with formal issues to some extent and they point to philosophical
and existential concerns, but do you feel the political has some relation to
your films?
Rick: They
use form. They exploit form. They don’t use it as an end. I don’t go around
broadcasting the fact that I’m a political filmmaker and that you had better
listen! I am influenced by the things that go on around me and I want to share
these things and to come to terms with them. I am certainly aware that my films
fit into a political fabric, and that I am a political being. I’m aware of what
influences me as an individual and I respond to that. I don’t pretend to
represent anyone else. I mean let’s go back to this thing about what interests
people… I think about how some of my students feel that by reducing the
characters to stereotypes-ie. The average student—they will appeal to a greater
audience. You can say the same thing about the scenery or the background. If
they make the interiors like the inside of any office building, for example, it
will be most accessible to most people. You know someone comes along and says,
I can’t relate to this fishing village in Newfoundland, therefore I’m not
interested in the film, but if you show me an office building in St. John’s,
then I can relate to it. But what interests people is other people-real
people!—with their particular distorted memories, their particular childhoods,
the places they came from. I think we communicate on that level, as one
individual to another. Other people influence me and I want to communicate with
them, but I can only do it as myself-as an individual who has had these
particular experiences. I don’t pretend that it is anything else. Now I think
that my work is getting more political. If you look at the Moose Jaw film for
instance, I started that project quite awhile ago but the political dimension
wasn’t a comprehensible factor until Arthur Kroker (author, Technology-The Canadian Mind) rode on to
the scene, or I rode on to his scene. In the last two years, since I moved to
Montreal, I have met several other people as well who are certainly influencing
me on that level… and it’s all going back into the Moose Jaw film.
Bob: How
are your films autobiographical?
Rick: The
early films are direct autobiography, in which I am in the films. They are
diaristic. The more recent ones are much more indirectly autobiographical.
What’s in them now, perhaps, is an arm or a shadow.
Bob: Except
for the fact that they are about places which are very familiar to you. Landfall and Beach Events being made close to your parents’ home in P.E.I. and Waterworx being made at the bottom of
the street where you father grew up.
Rick: It
goes back to what I was writing poetry about-things that were a part of my
experience. In any case, the personal is inevitable in art.
Bob: There
seems to be a pivotal film in your oeuvre that acts as a point of departure
stylistically and perhaps even as a catalyst for your later autobiographical,
personal or philosophical concerns. The film I am referring to is Reunion in Dunnville. The reason I bring
this film up is because I was both surprised and pleased to see it within your
works. It surprised me as an experimental film, because of its documentary
nature and it pleased me because it relates to some of the things you deal with
in your later films and to some extent even some of the things you explore in House Movie were there. There is a sense
of absence or loss or lament that we see in both the main theme of the film,
which is the rekindling of old bonds by the WWII fliers, and then there is the
depiction of the old buildings, decaying and empty, which also suggests a
lament or a loss for that which has gone on before, the past. Do you think of
it as an experimental film?
Rick I
think it’s experimental documentary. It was a burning issue with me. I
approached the veterans and said that I really wanted to make this film. I
thought when I made it that it was a pretty straight documentary but upon
screening it at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, which handles a
lot of independent, but conventional looking documentary films, they thought it
was off the wall—that nobody would understand it. You know the camera was
jiggling around, funny shots of thousands of turkeys and strange music thrown
in here and there. They dismissed it. In a way I was shocked at first-a bit
hurt. It was my only attempt at doing something conventional, something that
could be sold perhaps. They were saying, basically, go away kid, this is a
personal film. But soon afterwards I saw those comments as flattering and
realized that it really was a personal film. And I think I would say it is my
favourite of all my films. It’s the one I secretly love the most. It means an
awful lot to me because of the memories around the shootings and the subsequent
screenings for the veterans and the people who were involved with it. It acts
as a catalyst, if you like, that triggers a lot of pleasant and significant
memories for me. It means something to those people in a personal way, beyond
entertainment… and that’s very gratifying for me.
Bob: Could
you focus a little more on this sense of absence or loss or lament in your
films? It seems evident in the poetry films but it is there in House Movie and Reunion in Dunnville as well.
Rick: And
in the ones I’m working on now as well. It’s such an important issue for me, I
just don’t know where to begin. I think I distrust the present considerably. I
feel very strongly about this because I disagree with that philosophy,
especially from the ‘60s, and I’m thinking about |Alan Watt’s book This Is It, that says, this is all we
have, the present moment. Forget everything else that went on before! Or that’s
coming up! Get rid of all the anxiety! Don’t think of the future! Live for the
present! I distrust this completely. We live in a society that emphasizes the
present and devalues the past. Our vision is contrary to what life really is,
because in reality, our experience of the present is a predication of the past.
This is more than just a theory with me, this is the way I live. I find it
disturbing how things pass in to oblivion so quickly.
Bob: What
do you mean?
Rick:
Relegated to the precincts of the past. If one speaks of the past at all, it
must be represented as nostalgia. The past is okay as long as it is accompanied
by cute silent movie music. It is rarely said that what we did in the past, may
have been, on occasion better than what happens today. We have this assumption
in the West that we are progressing towards something better. It overlooks the
positive achievements of the past.
My parents
seem to have the opposite opinion. We never sit around in my family and talk
about the old days or anecdotes about family experiences. My parents want to be
regarded as with it, contemporary people. Any mention of the past seems to
imply that you are living in the past. But I think it is the opposite, of
course. I think that no ignoring these vital memories, whether they are good or
bad, is less pathological, more healthy, than trying to obliterate it all. The
films are an attempt to revitalize the past. In fact I once looked up our
family motto in the General Armoury and discovered the Hancox motto was “redeem
time!’ I looked it up in the process of making my Moose Jaw film. Redeem time…
I think that’s what I’m doing in my films. You can compare it to the film
theory of Siegfried Kracauer-his notion of film as the redemption of physical
reality. In our society, says Kracauer, we have become disassociated from
reality. And he thought that the reason film worked so well in redeeming that
reality was because it so realistic-looking, more than any other art form. Of
course he didn’t seem to grasp how much film itself is part of the simulacra. I
don’t think that film redeems physical reality but I do believe it redeems time.
It allows us to realize that all time does not evaporate-that it still exists
at the very least on these projected images…
Bob: Even
though it isn’t real time… it’s a represented time… or if you like, a
simulation of time… an appropriation of time…
Rick: Well
our memory isn’t real time either and our memories become increasingly filled
with edited moving images. The style and pulse of a culture is recoded in its
products and the films of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s are a very good analog of
those times. That is at least as important as the redemption of physical
reality, which is in any case impossible. One can redeem time though. I think
it is a manifestation of the ontological, the forming of the image in cinema,
the latent image, which is so different than the instantaneous image in video
for example. Film is unavoidably committed to the past because the image cannot
be seen as soon as it is recorded. It is no accident that it takes the
ontological form it does. Humans invented it. It’s very similar to the way the
computer apparatus functions. It is a good analog of the human memory system.
Bob: Aren’t
you splitting philosophical and technological hairs when you say that film is a
more precise or truthful representation or redeemer to the past than video is?
Even though video can be played back instantly and film must go through a
developing and fixing process, don’t the two redeem time, your sense of time,
which in any case is just a representation of certain events?
Rick: Well
that’s looking at them as if the maker had no influence on the product. When
one makes a video one knows one is working with an instantaneous medium, which
is partly why one uses video. I have young students who want to get into film
classes as opposed to television courses because they simply feel more
comfortable with the apparatus of film. And they know… they understand clearly
the differences between them. I wish that writers and critics, during their
taining, could get their hands on the technology-even in a token way-then they would
understand the differences between them. Even when films make it on to
television one can easily distinguish between a film-originated and a
video-originated product. I think it’s more than a superficial quality. It
comes through in the very content and meaning of the work because the
practitioners were influenced by the medium they were working with. One is
simply not a replacement for the other.
Bob: Over
the past year or so you have begun to concern yourself more closely with the
theoretical and philosophical implications of your films. Why now? What was the
motivation?
Rick: It
didn’t just start in the last year or so. It really began in the late ‘70s. It
has just intensified over the years, especially since I moved to Montreal a few
years ago. It started because I felt atht my films had reached a dead-end in
terms of the directly autobiographical cinema. It became unsatisfactory for me.
So language seemed to me a way of better engaging the left hemisphere of the
brain. I went back to poetry which I had abandoned when I got into film, when I
became sort of a visual purist. I began reading Wallace Stevens again and his
essay The Necessary Angel, where he discusses the balance one must strike
between reason and the imagination. For him only poetry could do this, so for
him poetry was the ultimate philosophy.
Bob: You
mentioned Arthur Kroker a couple of times; how has he and his reading of
technology and of Canadian thinkers such as George Grant, Marshall McLuhan and
Harold Innis influenced you?
Rick:
Kroker made me more conscious of what I was doing… what I had already stumbled
onto several years before in the Moose Jaw footage. He also could reale to it.
We both come from small towns outside the dominant centres of Toronto and
Montreal. As far as his discussion of Canadian writers… well… it’s Grant who I
can relate to the most. I had read parts of his Time as History before I met Arthur. I don’t know what to say about
Grant except to mention that the passage from Technology and Empire when he says we must listen “for the
intimations of deprival” because “Any intimations of authentic deprival are
precious, because they are the ways through which intimations of good,
unthinkable in public terms, may yet appear to us. The affirmation stands, how
can we think of deprivation unless the good which we lack is somehow
remembered? To reverse the platitude, we are never more sure that air is good
for animals than when we are gasping for breath.
I began to
think about the underlying philosophical and theoretical dimensions of my films
more seriously when I began to see my thoughts mirrored in some of these
thinkers like Grant and Kroker himself. Kroker is one of the few scholars who
really respects artists as equally capable of articulating meaning. So many artists
get left in the critical dustbin as writers distance themselves from the art
object further with each successive discourse. This has happened so much in
film theory, with theorists attempting to make films-0and they are pedantic
nightmares. It’s as I had tried to start to write theory. Let’s work together
instead of trying to stamp the other party out!
The
Landscape Sensibility
Bob: What
does the ‘landscape’ mean to you and what do you see it as signifying in the
Canadian context?
Rick: I
became interested in landscape on a conscious analytical level when, after
having programmed a series of recent Canadian experimental films for the Film
Studies Association Conference at Laval University in the spring of ’86, Tom
Waugh of Concordia University asked me to speak to his class on the subject of
‘landscape’ sensibility in Canadian experimental film. He pointed out that this
was the theme around which I seemed to be selecting many of the films. So,
given this invitation, I had several months with the idea and I realized that I
couldn’t really begin to deal with landscape in Canadian experimental film
until I dealt with landscape in general in Canadian art and literature. And
then I read a review by Michael Dorland last fall on the Festival of Festivals
where he referred to Gaile MacGregor’s book The
Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Landscape. It was
incredible how well I could realte to much of what she was saying. She makes a
clear distinction between the Canadian and American approaches to the land as
evidenced in the art and literature of these two countries. Now I’m not going
to summarize her whole thesis, but I began thinking of my work and the work of
some of my colleagues and contemporaries in these terms. I also took a look at
Bruce Elder’s thesis of the photographic image in Canadian experimental cinema
again. It struck me that this (landscape) was a very dominant theme in our
national experimental film.
Bob: What
about this connection between the landscape and the photographic image?
Rick: When
I first read Elder’s thesis I thought, superficially, he meant that we simply
use the photograph in Canadian films. The typical example is City of Gold by Colin Low. In fact, I
believe what Elder meant was that we make reference to the nature of the
photographic image in the way we deal with landscape. Now he doesn’t deal
directly with the landscape so much in his own thesis, but he does mention it
as a kind of threatening force. He also notes two ways of perceiving. The first
being the perception of nature being out there… the external or everything
external to us. The second of course, is the internal perception, the mental
perception. There is such a division between those two when faced, let’s say,
with the northern frontier, with its harsh and foreboding climate, that any
vehicle that could draw those two together would be a very important medium.
And that’s exactly what the photograph does, because it is at once both a
product of the mind and a product of reality. It’s where the mental and the
physical coincide, where you have something that’s physically present in the
photographic print and yet it’s also absent in that it is also just a
representation. So this absence must be compensated for in the mind… in the
imagination. And the photograph, for Elder, becomes a way of mediating Canadian
nature. And he believes that our experimental films make the most profound use
of the ontological nature of the photograph.
Bob: Do you
mean this coincidence of presence and absence…?
Rick: You
see, it’s not so much that I was influenced directly by this stuff in the
making of films like Waterworx and Landfall, which were already good
examples of this presence and absence, it’s just that it was encouraging to
read writers like Elder and MacGregor referring to others who were doing the
same thing. I gave me a sense of belonging within a cultural context-that I am
working within a milieu where I am, in fact, not isolated-and isolation is so
easily felt when working in experimental film because there is little recognition.
That’s how I got started on the landscape and it has reached a point now where
I am teaching a course at UPEI called “Art, Technology and the Landscape.” The
technology part of that comes fro Kroker’s influence after he introduced me to
such writers as William Leiss, George Grant and others. This is what sparked
the new interest in landscape. After all we’re not talking about the Group of
Seven vision here. What’s interesting now sixty or seventy years after the
Group of Seven is that the effects of technology are becoming more apparent. So
we are looking at new kind of landscape… a post-industrial landscape. It’s sort
of what’s left over after the initial optimism of the Futurists who idolized
technology among other things. So let’s take a look at that technological
idealism after it has aged sixty or seventy years and after all we have been
through under its increasing domination. For instance in the Group of Seven
days you had nature on the one hand which was largely untamed and awesome, and on
the other hand you had the promise of technology which was somehow comforting
and reassuring, but I think now, seventy years later, we have a very different
outlook on technology.
Bob: With
reference to the Group of Seven’s empty, foreboding landscapes and the absence
of technology I would like you to reflect and comment on Snow’s La Region Centrale where thee is also an
absolute absence of technology, accepting the fact that the film is made with
highly advanced technological equipment, but only in comparison with the sort
of technology that the Group of Seven used to represent the landscape. In other
words, it’s not the means of representation here, but what is being
represented. Snow’s landscape is even starker than the Group of Seven’s…
nothing but a few lichens, a lake and some rock and dirt.
Rick: I
think a more interesting comparison would be between the Group of Seven’s
landscapes and the Canadian landscapes of the American artist Milton Avery. My
interpretation of them was that Avery was always looking down on these little
fishing villages on the Gaspé. Now that is partly because I think he was in awe
and perhaps even afraid of the sea, so he stood a considerable distance from
it. But also the high angle in filmmaking is always considered to be the
dominating one… that renders the subject submissive. So one could say that here
is an American artist coming up and literally looking down at the locals from
his perch on high where he is safe and where he has an omniscient view… and he
is quite comfortable with it. Now compare that to Snow’s film and you could
almost say that he could have sent out a scouting party onto into the
landscape… his $20,000 tripod ran by itself. I mean Gaile MacGregor in The Wacousta Syndrome talks about our
view from the “fort” and our position of safety from behind the palisades… and
at best if our artists go forth we do so along our rail lines and our roads. In
Snow’s case he ‘sent out’ his ‘robot’ to do it for him. Now in my film Landfall
I do something that looks similar except that I do it myself with the camera
away from my eye, attached to my hand, swirling around in slow motion. You see
shadows of myself on the beach and I actually freeze those frames to emphasize
the fact that there is a human being there shooting this stuff. Now I think
this is a vastly different way of looking at the landscape than the Group of
Seven—both in La Region Centrale and
in my own Landfall. So we're looking
at different representations here-different eras looking at the landscape,
different nationalities, different technologies. It’s complicated. But I do
know that there is a vast difference between the American approach to
landscape, which deals with a western frontier, and the Canadian approach,
which deals with a northern frontier, and our dependency on technology to
conquer it… not so much to conquer it… because that’s an American approach…
Bob: To
integrate the landscape maybe…?
Rick: To
mediate it.
Bob:
Mediation implies a sort of contractual state, an agreement. Is that what you
mean, an agreement between the artist and the landscape?
Rick: It’s
like Elder says, how can consciousness know nature if they are so different, if
there is such a duality. As he says the early settlers brought this dualistic
philosophy in that there are mental things and physical things, and they are so
separate that they cannot know each other. How can consciousness know nature? A
medium like photography can allow that to happen because, in it, consciousness
and nature are together. It is both the product of nature—as Bazin says a
photograph is “a veritable impression of light… a phenomenon of nature”-but
also it is a product of the mind, because it is a subjective view. And cinema
is an even more profound aspect of that because it takes it one step further… it
takes this notion of photographic presence and absence further because it is
now projected on the screen as an illusion. That is what I mean by mediation,
not so much an agreement but a vehicle through which one thing… one element…
can know the other. Now I don’t know if nature knows consciousness that way,
but we can certainly know nature… we can deal with it… we can discover our own
relation to it; and then we can turn around and present that relationship to
others. It is a vital way for us to “survive” just as the technology of rail
transportation was a way for the nation to survive. According to Maurice
Charland in his essay, “Technological Nationalism” it is the way we continue to
survive, as a nation, through the rhetoric the technology itself generates. We
are a nation founded on technology and we depend on it to survive as a state.
And I keep thinking here on another figure who deals with the railroad—Charland
opens up his article with a quote from one of Gordon Lightfoot’s songs. The
quote is, “There was a time in this fair land/When the railroad did not run.”
But there is another one that keeps coming to mind from his Railroad Trilogy, and it goes, “Long
before the white man and long before the wheel/When the cold dark forest was
too silent to be real.”
It wasn’t
real until we represented it. We couldn’t represent it until the technology or
the technique to represent it came along. That is the technique of the Group of
Seven, the technology of the railroad that allowed us to get there, and more
recently the technology of the National film Board, which is technology that
Maurice doesn’t mention, but it’s there and it happened in all the church
basements across Canada. It’s more than just any technology… it’s not just an
accident that it’s photographic technology that is the most profound, because
its very nature can somehow deal with the contradictions that are so much a
part of our sense of being a nation.
Experimental
film and Canadian identity
Bob: How do
you deal with the fact that as a serious filmmaker who has won international
awards and recognition for his work, you have had very little or no critical
attention in Canada?
Rick: Well,
maybe part of it is my own fault. I really haven’t pushed or promoted my work.
It’s impossible to make a living at it so I don’t go around putting together
glossy brochures or firing off resumes everywhere, trying to hit people over
the head with it. I’m not involved in the kind of publicity campaign that the
Funnel was once involved in, for example. The Funnel realized that if you were
going to succeed with experimental film in Canada, you would have to promote it
aggressively. The danger with trumping up a lot of publicity and rhetoric, of
course, is that you have to follow through, sooner or later, with good work. I
didn’t really have the time for that sort of campaign and I preferred to
actually make the films. If you make good films, eventually they will generate
the interest. I would rather have it that way; otherwise I wouldn’t have an
accurate barometer of how I was being received.
Bob: Now
that there is an increased interest in your films, wouldn’t you like to take
the opportunity to get out and push them more?
Rick: No. I
still need the time to make them. That stuff takes too much time away from my
production.
Bob: So the
emphasis is on production.
Rick:
Absolutely. I have about… maybe one or two shows a month, both here in Montreal
and in different parts of Canada, and in the States sometimes. But I have never
contacted anybody and asked for a show. They’ve always heard of me and that’s
flattering, I would like to keep it that way. I don’t want to get caught up in
the promotion. It’s hard enough to figure out how to make the films and that’s
my greatest joy, just making them. And of course, getting them seen by
somebody! But they don’t have to be seen by thousands of people. And to get
some… not a lot… but some critical
feedback, because I put it right back into my work. I need it to keep going.
Bob: And
you feel that you can sustain yourself on the response you receive during the
presentations of the work, where you are present, for instance in film classes
and screenings in alternative spaces here in Montreal and other parts of the
country?
Rick: Yeah…
well I love that. It’s really enjoyable.
Bob: Perhaps
this lack of recognition is simply due to the fact that experimental film is
seen as marginal and Canada is preoccupied with building an indigenous
feature-film industry, through which the resulting ‘popular culture’ will
establish, somehow, our Canadian identity? Do you think that contributes to not
being recognized? Is there only room for a few experimental filmmakers to
become recognized in Canada and perhaps internationally?
Rick: That
may be part of it. I think that’s a good reading of the situation. The dominant
culture.. the dominant cinema has the greatest effect on the greatest number of
people and that’s why in our Department of Communication Studies here at
Concordia, more often than not, we are studying popular culture, and the
communication of popular culture, because it has the most serious impact…
Perhaps that’s as it should be. I mean if you’re writing for a newspaper or
magazine, you’ve got a readership and you’ve got to write about what they’re
interested in. But what is more interesting is not so much the difference
between writing about commercial cinema and experimental film, as the
difference between the writing about Canadian experimental film and that of
every other Canadian art form. There is a big discrepancy there and there shouldn’t
be. There is much more writing about painting, sculpture and music than there
is about film. That’s perhaps because it is a relatively new medium. Also,
unlike painting, it doesn’t excite a lot of financial interests. Experimental
films can’t be sold for thousands of dollars. People can look at a painting in
a museum or a gallery, but where are you going to look at an experimental film?
Even video art has trouble and people have VCRs. But set up a 16mm film
projector in your home Even in art galleries the screenings only last one
night. Now you see it, now you don’t! Everything is packed up and let’s get on
with the next thing. Whereas other art exhibitions are hanging on the walls for
weeks or months.
Bob:
Funding for experimental film in Canada has been scarce and what little has
been forthcoming has been perceived as being guided by a mild form of nepotism
in the case of the National Film Board and the Canada Council. Do you agree
with that characterization? And how do you fund your films?
Rick: Are
you talking about the Canada Council now…?
Bob: Well
yes, I just read an article by Mathew Fraser in the Globe and Mail that accuses
the Canada Council of funding the more well-known and established artists while
the struggling unknown artists find it very difficult to get money from the
Arts Councils.
Rick: My
view is that the Canada Council is doing a very good job with what meager funds
it has. The problem is the way we are awarded. On jury after jury you have many
worthy people asking for money and the Council has only a fraction of what they
are asking for. So what do you do, chop the number of people who get the money
in half or give them half of what they are asking for? The Ontario Arts Council
has a separate jury for experimental film and have funded a lot of people. They
have been very good. I received one grant from them and one from the Canada
Council. But the main problem is that compared to the amount of money goddamn
Telefilm Canada has, the Canada Council’s funds are minimal. I mean, what are
we quibbling about? Let’s not quibble about individual artists who deserve the
money… let’s get a bigger piece of the pie! I think the figure for the cost of
building one mile of the 401 highway exceeded the entire budget of the Ontario
Arts Council.
Bob: Yes,
so again, with Telefilm Canada, we go back to this obsession with developing an
indigenous feature film industry which would apparently, on some perverse
manner, offer us our Canadian identity. It has an enormous budget and it funds
mostly American productions being made here in order to take advantage of the
tax breaks, the lower value of the dollar, and Telefilm Canada. So in fact this
idea of an indigenous culture is being undermined by fugitive American film
capital.
Rick: There
isn’t a realization here yet, like in Australia and Britain, that in order to
have a successful cinema, commercially, we should proceed with exactly the
opposite strategy; that is we should make films about ourselves, about our
locales… about what we know best. A lot of the commercial films that I can
think of went out of their way to hide the fact that they were filmed in
Canada. But I do think that the Canadian identity has been carved out in the independent film scene
since the 1960s. Our experimental film, our documentary film, even our short
fiction. And what happens to all these films? There is nowhere to show them.
But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be looked at and taken seriously. Because
right in our backyards, right under our noses we might have the cinema that we
need! I’m teaching a course in independent Canadian cinema next year as a
matter of fact, that will deal with many of these issues.
Bob: And
what about you? How do you fund your films?
Rick: First
of all my films are very short so they don’t cost very much. I’ve made longer
films and the films I’m working on now are longer so I’m going to have to get
some grants in order to finish them. But the recent series of films, the poetry
films, didn’t cost very much. I do most of the work myself. I didn’t have any
high shooting ratios. I didn’t have to rent any equipment because Sheridan
College was a willing participant. The institutions where I have taught have
been very kind in lending me cameras and editing facilities. And I have had
students volunteer to work on my films because they enjoy it. Some of my own
money goes into them of course.
Bob: So
apart from the two grants that you mentioned earlier, you haven’t received any
government funding?
Rick: And
haven’t asked for it either. Part of that is because I haven’t known how to ask
for it. And that’s because of the flaw in the system. When you work the way
that I do, which is sometimes called the empirical style of filmmaking, you
really don’t know how something is going to turn out. You don’t have a neat
little script all preconceived that you can hand a jury. I don’t have anything.
I just start shooting. And when all you have is a bunch of footage, the only
thing you can apply for is a completion grant. That means you submit work in
progress and everybody knows that’s like committing suicide. It doesn’t look at
all like what it’s going to look like in the end. I just don’t know where I’m
going with my films until they are finished and sometimes after they are
finished. When I get a chance to show them to people and get some feedback,
that’s when I begin to fully understand what I have created.
Recent
works and postmodernism
Bob: Home For Christmas like Reunion in Dunnville—although they
themselves are very different from each other-is very different than your later
films, the poetry films. These later films are the ones that you are most known
for and they are the ones that you show exclusively now, with a few exceptions,
yet there is an autobiographical dimension in Home For Christmas as there is in the poetry films. But it is much
more evident, more demonstrative in Home
For Christmas… it is a sort of serious and at the same time lighthearted
autobiographical-experimental-documentary film. And you begin to explore, in
that film, some of the issues that you bring to fruition in the poetry films…
like absence and lament… you know… you were living in Toronto… you were going
back to the Maritimes to see your absent family… your departure on the train or
bus at the end of the film is, of course, a lamentable event. There were visual
references as well, to your later works, although they may have been unintended
at the time… like the sign with the place name Landfall on it… and the obvious
references to landscape in the outdoor shots and the pan shots of the landscape
and seascape paintings on the walls of your parents’ house. Another interesting
point I would like to bring up here is that the shooting and production of your
films often stretches over very long periods of time and some films like Beach Events, which was shot in 1974
before Home For Christmas and not
finished until 1984, don’t get finished until ten years after they’re begun. Beach Events was finished six years
after Home For Christmas, which
itself was shot in 1975 and not finished until 1978. So there seems to be
plenty of overlap and coincidence that is somehow not evident in the films. I
mean Home For Christmas and Beach Events are two immensely different
films. And why don’t you show Home For
Christmas anymore; why are you emphasizing the later works so much?
Rick: With Home For Christmas I had the idea of a
final product in mind when I shot it. But with Beach Events and Landfall
well they were just physical… intuitive responses to the landscape. They were
nothing but a bunch of pretty shots in the beginning. It took me a long time
before I could pull them into something other than that-into finished works.
But the similarities between them is the attention to detail. What I’m trying
to do, perhaps in all my films, through the notion of photographic detail-which
is why I tend more towards the photographic arts, because, of course, they
render detail more profoundly than any other medium-but what I’m trying to do
through this attention to detail is to share the experience more closely with the
viewer. A good example is that shot of the graffiti on the bus seat in Home For Christmas. Through these
details I feel I can share the experience more directly with the viewer and I
think that is, perhaps a common characteristic with all of the films. What
happened with the poetry films is that after I had gone through the process of
making Home For Christmas, I had
pushed that kind of sensual, detailed, direct autobiographical cinema as far as
I could take it… and I wanted to go beyond that! So the footage for Beach Events and Landfall was still sitting around throughout the shooting of Home For Christmas and afterwards as
well… but then I shot Waterworx and
in order to finish that film, which was also just a bunch of pretty pictures, I
started playing around with a few things and that’s when I rediscovered the
importance of language and poetry. This is what I was really doing before I got
into film and it was what really catapulted me into working with film as a way
to extend my poetry interests. Now here was poetry, back again, serving to
extend and improve upon my visual productions. I had actually rediscovered
Wallace Stevens who was a major influence on me when I was doing poetry… and
again, Stevens’ idea of the balance between reason and imagination was
something I tried to achieve in Waterworx, with the lush imagery being the
imagination and the overlaid poetry appealing to the reason. In fact I even
used a Stevens poem in that film. Once I had finished that, I began to apply a
similar process to the footage of Landfall and Beach Events which I had shot
years before. I found a D.G. Jones poem and used it in Landfall and, not
finding anything suitable for Beach Events,, I finally wrote something myself.
So the works I’m doing now, the Moose Jaw fim and another one called Arden, are
all going to utilize language. In these three poetry films I use a voiceover or
captions superimposed on the image. In all three language fulfills a graphic
function as well as representing reason, in the Stevens’ sense. In Waterworx,
for instance, the words on the screen are superimposed over the imagery and are
literally interfering with the background, which the viewer is seeing for the
second time around. Some people ask me why I did that because they got the
sense of the film when they saw the images the first time… so they ask why did
I lay those words over the screen and ruin their chance to those images again?
My response is that is exactly what memory does. It’s the same thing. It gets
in the way. We always have to recall something through the paraphernalia of
experience.
Bob: When
you refer to graphics Landfall comes
to mind immediately. Here you have very strong film graphics with the
superimposition and double exposures, and at the same time you have
superimposed the poetry over this already complicated imagery… and it appears
to me to be your most playful, if not outrageous use of language with phrases
appearing on different parts of the screen… coming in from one side and
disappearing through a vanishing point perspective… even phrases entering from
the bottom of the screen, upside down, and exiting at the top. What did you
have in mind when you were doing these things?
Rick: Well
the imagery was spinning around and perhaps I thought the words should too. But
it also has to do with the meaning of the poem There are No Limits. I thought there were limits, but in fact there
were not only no limits to the emotions Doug Jones was feeling when he wrote
the poem, but there are also no limits to the way that language can be used and
represented in a film. Why not have it upside down? In fact, when you’re
talking about gravity in the same poem, it becomes an open invitation to play
around with the vertical orientation of the words. It’s reminiscent of concrete
poetry. I just think if one is going to use language in that way—if you’re
going to use words on the screen—you are naturally forced to consider things
like where they are going to appear, their movement, their disappearance, and
just as important, I think, the font or typescript you are going to use. Maybe
it’s also the heritage of Snow and the playfulness in his work.
Bob: The
phenomenon of post modernism has been a preoccupation with many modern-day
thinkers. Some of them see postmodernism as encompassing, not just the
conditions and productions of art, but all forms of social interaction-both
real and abstract-communications, medicine, fashion, sports, economics, labour,
etc. indeed, as Arthur Kroker, after Baudrillard, has said, we have entered
into an age of “hypermodernity” or “ultramodernism” where technology seems to
be a dominating force in everyday life. First of all, do you respond to this
line of thinking and secondly, what significance does this technological
permeation of our lives have for you… or… how do you deal with it in your work?
Rick: The
term postmodernism and the continuing quest to define it don’t really have a
lot of influence on me. As far as I can understand it really means all things
to all people. It’s whatever you want it to be. The thing I like about the way
Kroker uses the term is that he uses it to pick out certain artists, periods or
works of art from modern history which represent postmodernity… even if it is
somebody like de Chirico, the Italian surrealist painter, or the American painter
Edward Hopper, who were both, for Kroker, probably more postmodern than many
who followed them. I think that’s a more sensible way of dealing with
postmodernism. It seems to be art for which the optimism of modernity has worn
off. It is what’s left after the optimism for technology-which was so prevalent
during the early part of the century-has aged and turned into apprehension and
mistrust. The best thing about the term postmodern is that, unlike modernism,
it is not a close-ended term; it is not reductive. Because it can mean all
things to all people, it is actually something that can be quite useful.
Ironically, modernism, which had veneer of being so free, so open, so new, had,
in fact, very narrow limits. Postmodernism has encouraged and reawakened a
whole new interest in art in the attempts to go beyond the limits of modernism,
which seemed to have a sort of complicity with technology. We still have a lot
of modernists left over. They are neo-futurists. They are the people who talk
about the micro-chip and how everything going to be reduced into digital memory
somehow. Film and video, for example, will all merge into one sort of “heaven”
of digitalized information that we can supposedly control at will. The term
that’s used so often in compute graphics is the “virtual” camera. I spent some
time at Sheridan College studying computer graphics, interactive media and
other new technologies, because that was one of the big thrusts of that
institution whose motto was “One step ahead.” We all got swept up in the
computer revolution of the early ‘80s, but no one ever questioned this new
technology. There was this feeling that-in fact it was more than just a
feeling, it was a policy—if you didn’t jump on this new technology bandwagon
you would be left behind in the dust. Either you would be a “techno-peasant” or
someone who was in “control.” That is an example of how new technology doesn’t
provide us with the opportunity for a more democratic society. While giving the
impression of freedom, liberty and choice, it’s actually more restricting,
oppressive and in fact limits those choices. The only choice that it offers is
consumer choice. And it’s like I said before, film is shrinking in its
commercial marketability, but it is becoming more significant as an art form.
It has become, like Arthur Kroker pointed out, a residual art form, like
painting after the advent of photography. It is in a privileged position to
comment on the advancement of technology. It can step outside of it now,
mechanical technologies are important precisely because they are
residual—because they are on the fringe. I think that experimental film is
facing its biggest challenge in the face of the new electronic technology.
Bog: So you
see postmodernism as a liberating force with its tendency to lift things from
various historical periods, collapsing them into this sort of “hyper”
pluralism, to use a Krokerism…?
Rick: Well
I think it is. But it depends on what side of the postmodern fence you are on.
If you are a scholar, a critic, or an artist it means you are no longer
shackled to the narrow terms which define what can or cannot be art. But if you
are a member of the postmodern consumer society and do not have the privilege
of knowing how to make us of artistic expression, and do not have the tools at
your command or don’t have the education, then postmodern-a term for which you
probably have no use if indeed you have even heard of it-would apply simply to
a condition of advanced capitalism, which isn’t actually a lot of fun for
people who are really sucked into it…
Bob: You’re
now working on a project about Moose Jaw, a place where you spent a great deal
of time as a child, and more recently a place you have been returning to quite
frequently. How far along is that project?
Rick: Moose Jaw. I’m very excited about this
project. I have been working on it for several years now. I’ve done a lot of
shooting… I’ve done a lot of research too. I spent a lot f time there growing
up in the ‘50s. Most of the footage has been shot within the last few years.
But the thing about Moose Jaw is that it is not just any childhood town. First
of all I grew up there in the post-war optimism of the ‘50s when Moose Jaw was
still a part of the western frontier. The West was a place where people didn’t
think very much about the past, mainly because there was so much hope for
economic development and opportunity. The West was really opening up and Moose
Jaw was still a frontier town. Unfortunately, Regina was built too close to
Moose Jaw and it eventually became the capital. So towards the end of the ‘50s
you have Moose Jaw losing out to Regina in terms of population. The population
of Moose Jaw has not grown since the end of the ‘50s. Then the railway began
its decline as a passenger carrier, losing out to the airlines and eventually
the Moose Jaw operation was moved to Winnipeg. Several other industries closed
down after that. So the technologies that had given Moose Jaw its drive pulled
out. The beginning of its decline happened to coincide with my departure. I
left Moose Jaw at the end of the ‘50s at the age of thirteen. When I go back
there to shoot film not it is very sad. In a town where nobody ever thought of
the past, the motto now-for a downtown revitalization project is “Moose Jaw.
There’s a future in our past.” This to me is a very sad testament. It shows
that the frontier has really ended when you have reached this wall and you are
forced to look back and start exploiting the past through various museums in a
sort of feeble attempt to attract the tourist dollar. Museums are everywhere.
The only hope for economic development seems to lie in “freezing” all the old
technologies by restoring them to a pristine condition-that they never had
anyway—and then charging tourists to look at it. What really hurts is that this
is where my childhood took place. So I go back to this place and it is like
being in a weird dream. I only know one person there now—an artist. As a matter
of fact, everyone else I knew has left.
Sop I am
going to try and make a film which turns around a dialectic of personal memory
and feeling and with the universal, public record of history in newspapers,
town documents and brochures, etc. I will read many of these over the images.
But mixed in with all of this… lost in all of this.. somewhere is me.. and the
memories of place that once seemed really quite exciting. It’s a genuine
feeling of loss to go and see one’s own past in a museum. It’s very hard for me
to talk about it, except whereas to say a lot of films move around in space and
maintain one time, Moose Jaw will be
the opposite. I will be examining the various strata of time in one location
and then blending different times together in a sort of temporal collage. It’s
just a way of thinking of the structure of the film, I suppose. So the sound
from one era will be with the picture from another one. Sort of mining through
the depths of the various strata of time with my own history thrown in there as
another elements of the… dialectic if you like. It’s a sort of personal quest.
Originally
published in Cinema Canada July/August 1988 cover story