Festival Round-up (POV Magazine)

Festival Round-up by Daniel Cockburn (April 2004)

Tranz Tech 2003 Toronto International Media Art Biennial
October 9-12, 2003
www.tranztech.ca

Media City 10
February 10-14, 2004
www.houseoftoast.ca

Images Festival 2004
April 15-24, 2004
www.imagesfestival.com

I remember Michelle McLean showing a one-reel 8mm film of a bunch of stuff on a picnic table with the wind blowing. She said, “I really like the way the light is in that.” I thought: How can you take this seriously? How could you have an entire industry devoted to this, to continually talk about the way “the light” is? There seemed to be an awful lot of posing in that direction. To be honest, I think there still is.
— Mike Cartmell (experimental filmmaker), Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada (Mike Hoolboom, Gutter Press, 1997)

When I first encountered the above quote, I felt that elating vindication one feels at finding one’s suspicion of the canon expressed frankly by a member of that very canon. And yet I find enough counterexamples in my journeys from screening to screening, from film to video and back again, to make me question my loyalty to this suspicion. Let that internal conflict of mine, then, be the subtext or character arc of this chronologically fractured travelogue of three recent experimental media exhibitions: Tranz Tech 2003 Toronto International Media Art Biennial (hereafter TT/03); Media City 10th Annual International Festival of Experimental Film & Video Art (MC10); and the Images Festival 2004 (IF/04).
The multi-projection polyphony of Guy Sherwin’s 16mm series The Train Films (1970s-present, MC10), with its steadfast observance of arriving trains and passing telegraph poles, should by all rights have been of the light-for-light’s-sake ilk which Cartmell and I so fear. Thankfully, Sherwin’s exactitude makes it an exercise in viewer multitasking and pattern-finding, hypnotic rather than solipsistic. The video works of Images Festival spotlight artist Leslie Peters achieve a similar effect. Catherine Osborne of the National Post writes that Peters’ “idiosyncratic videos are like streams of raw footage that appear to be entirely free of any post-production tinkering,” which may be an accurate description of how they feel but diminishes the extent of the audiovisual manipulation which Peters applies to her landscape studies. Best case in point: divine (TT/03, MC10, IF/04), a natural vista made unearthly via digital image-layering. The melancholic lingering and eventual departure of the scene’s two avian inhabitants is all the more affecting for its seeming simplicity.
On the other hand we have Glint (Eve Heller, MC10) and Pistrino (Nicky Hamlyn, MC10). Each 16mm film is gorgeous in its own way, but they play more like experimentalists’ demo reels—for underwater cinematography and time-lapse, respectively—than fully realized expressive gesture (Glint is admittedly a work-in-progress). Strangely, Hamlyn’s other film Penumbra (MC10) was the strongest of the lightbenders, maybe because its cockroach’s-eye exploration of bathroom tiles was so resolutely fixated on a single soft-focus vertical line that it left no room for the mind to wish for anything else to intrude.
But where, I wondered, are the masterpieces such as I’ve seen in previous years, the fusions of form, image, and sound that grab me by the brain? Gerhard Holthuis’s Marsa Abu Galawa (MC10) was almost transcendent in its gleeful and, I trust, purposeful idiocy, Holthuis’s trigger-happy editing finger turning lush underwater footage into a stroboscopic bellydancing discotheque (watch out for that turtle!). But the real deal was to be found in Hierophanie (Mikio Okado, TT/04): an abandoned building is illuminated one window at a time by a single lantern-bearing figure, time gradually compressed and spread on top of itself until the edifice is lit with composite fire. Rebirth or apocalypse, take your pick; either way it’s a slow-burn jawdropper.
Quicker incinerations were provided by video (upst)art collective FAMEFAME in their curated programme Attack of the Clones (TT/03): fifteen video remixes of the cloning-themed Schwarzenegger abomination The 6th Day. While the overall chaff-to-wheat ratio was a little high, there were standouts: Jeremy Bailey deflated the original film’s “philosophy;” Jowita Kepa was virtually the only remixer to forgo Arnold in favour of a female protagonist, around whom was constructed a creepy tale of unsolicited reincarnation; and Tasman Richardson set off a rhythmic picture-in-picture explosion that blurred the line between montage and musicianship. Elsewhere, Richard Kerr proved that neither youth nor video has a monopoly on intensity; collage d’hollywood (IF/04) compiled 35mm movie trailers into ten minutes of pure acceleration. Like Hierophanie, its sense of structure and progression (from point a to point A!!!) resulted in an actual journey, as opposed to a mere assault.
Other dispatches from the found-footage camp: Aleesa Cohene’s All Right (IF/04) combines diverse footage into a polemic on Canada’s closed-door immigration policy. Its informational content is slight, but Cohene’s goal seems to be emotive response, which she manages through evocative editing and deft deployment of music. Kent Lambert’s Security Anthem (MC10, IF/04) weaves a more ironicized agitpop music video from appropriated threads, American everymen and -women asserting the origin of potatoes and the sharpness of knives to a domestic-dread beat. The most seamless blend of aesthetic approach and political content on recent display was Julia Meltzer & David Thorne’s It’s Not My Memory of It: Three Recollected Documents (IF/04), a three-part inquiry into the nature of secrecy via the videonic disclosure of classified material. The video effects are appropriate and absorbing, and the tight structural control burns the point all the more deeply into the viewer’s brain (video activists take note).
Are experimentalists still patching together the corpse of narrative, or have they left it to rot? Thankfully, the former is the case. For instance, Rachel Reupke’s Infrastructure (MC10), four long wide shots of epic transportation systems presided over by the even more epic Alps. No familiar study in grandeur, this, but a subtle fantasia, a world which I’m inclined to think doesn’t exist except in Reupke’s hard drive. Its seamless believability gives the viewer pause; its snippets of staged human “drama,” dwarfed by the big picture, give the video resonance.
Conundrum (Cane CapoVolto, TT/03) puts narrative through a blender and spews forth what might be a sci-fi tale of the reincarnation of mad scientist Ron Random, or perhaps an educational video on logical impossibilia, or possibly a video chain letter designed to spread the epidemic of insanity. Non sequiturs become the building blocks of semantics, and second-person narration is a cognitive assault weapon (“SOMEDAY YOU WILL BE NOTHING TOO”). So absolute a destruction of reason is rare: Conundrum is simultaneously hilarious, terrifying, and somehow humane, like God disproving himself in a final act of mercy.
Let Winnipegger Daniel Barrow have the last word. His “live cartoon” The Face of Everything (IF/04), a 40-minute melodrama of innocence lost, tabloid celebrity misdeeds, and involuntary plastic surgery, was performed via an overhead projector and a series of hand-drawn transparencies. The inventiveness with which he put these tools to use fed the magic-lantern crowd well enough, but the real magic was Barrow’s literate monologue, to which these figures and grounds danced. Comforting to see that even the lightbending nerds can avow the value of such unfashionables as poetry, prose, and emotional investment; affirming to see that obsession with a medium and personal expression are not mutually exclusive; exhilarating to see that new recombinations of old media, form, and content (in a word, experimentation!) are still there and ripe for the picking.