Light
Passages to New Perspectives by Gary Popovich
Since the
early beginnings of cinema, since the
Lumiére brothers first projected their films in a
Although a
set of codes soon institutionalized the way general audiences saw films (the
Hollywood model being a prime example of those loosely collected codes of the
dominant cinema-character, story and the portrayal of so-called real events
using seamless editing techniques), filmmakers from all over the world
continued to experiment alongside and in opposition to the dominant cinema.
Whether it be the world of Eisenstein, Antonioni, Cocteau, or Godard (often
situated more closely to the dominant forms) or the work of less known artists
such as Hans Richter, Man Ray, Maya Deren, Or Stan Brakhage, the history of
cinema is rich in examples of artists who have chosen to re-think, to explore,
to experiment with the possibilities of the medium in order to broaden our
range of experience.
By using
film, painters such as Hans Richter were able to add greater dimensions of
movement, rhythm and spatial depth to their work. Maya Deren’s work in the
psychodrama as well as her incorporation of poetry, dance and ritual in her
films, and her contribution through her writing helped create the New American
Cinema of experimental film artists. Stan Brakhage, one of the most personal
and most prolific of the American experimental filmmakers, working in almost
every way imaginable including scratching the film, painting it, and even
taping moths and leaves to it, has for 35 years uncompromisingly explored those
areas of film that the dominant cinema has left untouched. Brakhage asks us to
“imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by
compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything
but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of
perception…”
During the
mid 1960s several new filmmakers began to take up a different set of concerns
with their work. The term “Structuralism” as given to a loosely collected group
of filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits and others
whose films dealt with the shape or structuring principles of film. In Snow’s Wavelength, for example, the camera,
positioned in a room, records a zoom from the widest field to the smallest
field asking the spectator to reflect upon the changing presence of what is
represented (the room, the objects, and the four events that take place) in
terms of time and space. The film acts to trigger thoughts on the mind itself
as it experiences the film; or perhaps, as Annette Michelson has noted, it acts
as a metaphor for the activity of consciousness.
Up to 1967
Snow was best known for his visual work in painting, sculpture and
photography-especially in his serial reworkings of the Walking Woman. Wavelength (1967) helped put Snow at the
forefront of experimental film, winning him Grand Prize at the Knokke-le-Zoute
festival in
Snow has
often pointed to his interest in representational images (as opposed to abstract
and non-representational images) in terms of illusion/fact, and how the
representational image both “represents” and “is” something in itself.
Filmmaker and writer Bruce Elder has often argued that representation and the
relationship between presence and absence evoked by the representational image,
has been a strong concern of many Canadian experimental filmmakers. In Rick
Hancox’s work this presence/absence is often the focus for the filmmaker’s
attempts to make sense of personal experience by first recording the images
that haunt his consciousness then to piece them together, or re-member them. In
his most recent work Hancox has applied his lyrical camera work and his
interest in poetry to evoke a wandering nexus of variations on how time and memory
might be represented with an interplay of images and poetic text.
During the
past seventeen years Hancox has made more than fifteen films many of which have
won awards, including the Grand Prize in the 1983 San Francisco Poetry Film
Festival for Waterworx. In addition
to his participation in numerous independent and experimental film activities
and organizations, he has taught at several colleges and universities, most
notably at Sheridan College in the Media Arts Department for over ten years,
and more recently at Concordia University.
If we
consider that Canadian experimental film is about twenty years old and that
most of the practitioners are still active in filmmaking, then a program title
such as “New Perspectives in Canadian Cinema” might seem a misnomer. However
Michael Snow, Rick Hancox, Joyce Wieland, David Rimmer, and numerous others who
have been working for some times, as well as those who are just recently coming
to prominence, are still relatively unknown to larger audiences even though their
films have won screenings, enormous respect, critical attention and awards all
over the world. Therefore, for many viewers these films tonight will provide a
new perspective on what Canadian cinema is and has been.
But now
that you’ve settled into these notes,
with some thoughts on experimental film, waiting for the lights to dim, you may
hope to find a few more words here which illuminate these “new” films,
illuminate what you’ll see on the screen. You may wonder what “this” light
reading, this hors d’oeuvre, can present to you over and above the repast that
follows; in fact after the films you may remark how the filmmakers
themselves—Mr. Hancox and Mr. Snow—“wrote on/with their films” and how this
writing here on this page casts no frame in which you can see, hear, or read
these films. If the perspective is to be “new,” then this writing should stay
as far away as possible from interfering with the mind’s passage into the
relations presented on the screen.
But before
the camera obscura (the darkened room) in which we’ll sit, facing the
representations of a camera in a well-lit room, a window onto a room with
windows, a wavelength of sound, light and consciousness as it confronts the
time it takes for the camera to evoke the presence of absence and the absence
of presence when space is re-membered…
“I wanted
to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic
ideas. I was thinking of planning for a time monument in which the beauty and
sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a
definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of ‘illusion’ and
‘fact,’ all about seeing. The space starts at the camera (spectator’s) eye, is
in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind).
What’s
interesting is not codifying but experiencing and understanding the nature of
passages from one state to another. Socially or politically, I hope my stuff is
exemplary for what it is, as a whole, not for what it depicts-it instigates or
provokes meanings rather than packages them.” (Michael Snow)
…or waiting
for words to make a mark. Images of words, words of images; words making
images, provoking meanings in context, in rhythm with the spaces… races, the
persistence of vision over what it no longer sees… what the work evoked by what
it could (not) show.
Or the
camera marking a way where memory now makes its way. Over red sand on beaches
where water washes the footsteps away, where film re-marks the way. Past
buildings and shadows and a blue sky. Past memory which makes this new memory
an epigram on the death of a memory…
And it
flows over us without meanings,
As if none
of us had ever been here before,
And are not
now; in this shallow spectacle
This
invisible activity, this sense.
(Wallace
Stevens, from Rick Hancox’s Waterworx)
as I move
through the cave, to the red beach, to where
I will find
some older footprints, perhaps my own
from
another decade to be left for another time
Shadow
follow
following
shadow…
No
wondering where
the footprint
are
now
(Rick
Hancox, Beach Events text)
“I am
interested… in deliberately working with parallelism-not only in terms of
context—but in matching the apparent present tense of he cinematic with writing
“event” poetry in the present participle. I want to challenge this notion of
dominant present in film.. so that the film’s own past and future are brought
to bear on the present spectacle in view. This is so in Snow’s film, So Is This, and so is this.” (Rick
Hancox)
Our
readings tonight in the cinema make these our tales. We re-member the
experience by experiencing the form, by experiencing and understanding the
nature of our passages from one state to another. The lights dim before the
lights go on. The films begin to speak for themselves. The camera that wanders
through the sad afternoon colours of a relationship’s end becomes our camera
obscura, our theatre, our mind, our home movie.
Originally
published by Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre for a screening entitled
“New Perspectives in Canadian Cinema” at St. Lawrence Centre (as part of Centre
Stage Forum, a community public affairs forum), 27 Front Street East, Toronto,
Canada. Screenings were held Friday, April 3 for Rick Hancox and Sunday, April
5 for Michael Snow.