“strange and recursive and curious and enthralling” – Norman Wilner

“a cinematic spawn of Charlie Kaufman and Franz Kafka” – CBC News

“engrossing and enigmatic stories for the 21st century” – Jon Davies

You Are Here - feature film

All The Mistakes I’ve Made, part 2: how not to watch a movie - live performance

Sculpting Memory – a portrait of Atom Egoyan

All The Mistakes I’ve Made - live performance

Visible Vocals – performance/book

Short Videos 1999-2006 and Critical Writing

zero at zeroFunction dot com

The death of the horror movie is so habitually lamented that its future is often limited to meta-irony and nostalgia. The climax of The Blair Witch Project (1999), in which its doomed documentarians were isolated in the spaces defined by their cameras, had the air of something groundbreaking until physical reality was restored. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse is a terrifying aesthetic object constructed from the spatial parsing to which Blair Witch accidentally alluded. It kills the horror movie in order to resurrect it.

Whereas Kurosawa’s Cure (1998) featured a series of motiveless murders committed by unrelated people, Pulse concerns a suicide epidemic that begins with a core group of teenagers and soon goes global. Normally this phenomenon would be traceable to possession or a murderous demon (as in A Nightmare on Elm Street), but Pulse dispenses with such blame. Its ghosts are just as bored and passive as its living.

The central conceit of Pulse is that the afterlife, spatially finite, has reached capacity, a concept that informs Kurosawa’s visual approach. The baseline of Pulse’s existential creepiness is derived from the terror of spatial limitation—not literal claustrophobia, but the entrapment of individual perception. Kurosawa’s characteristic master shots are in full force, and there’s nary a wide-angle lens in view. He keeps his characters confined to discrete planes; foreground and background occupants never enter one another’s territory and ambient sounds often are used to isolate them even further. Two-dimensionality is also a narrative motif: ghostly Internet computer screens invade the movie and claim new tenants, while ennui-ridden characters retreat from reality by flattening permanently into walls, reminiscent of the young protagonist from Barren Illusion (1999), and his tendency to disappear accidentally (“I knew it. I’m not here at all.”)

In all this flat despair, there’s one exception: the warm relationship between Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato), a charmingly naive Internet novice, and Harue (Koyuki), the computer-science student who tries to help him exorcise the spectres from his screen. The nature of their interaction is conveyed through long pans in which they occupy the same plane, laterally entering and exiting their shared screen in a manner that echoes the movements of her computer lab’s phantasmal screen saver, roving dots that are drawn to each other only to die on contact. Pulse suggests that human connection is impossible, and that death effectively strips away the things that, in life, distract us from this fact. But the relationship between Harue and Kawashima provides a tenuous hope. They’re bound by the same laws as everyone else but find new ways to navigate within them.

The visual and narrative ties between this angst and the Internet, depicted as a vacuum sucking up the world’s souls, suggests Pulse can be interpreted as the work of a technophobe. But, according to Kurosawa, his idea for the movie existed before the Internet. As one character describes a triangle made of red tape that acts as a connected portal: “No matter how simple the device, once the system’s complete, it’ll function on its own.” Pulse itself is such a self-sufficient system, and any attempts to read it as a social critique are negated by its reversal of logic. It’s only by a series of coincidences that red rectangles and the World Wide Web become spiritual conduits; the Internet in Pulse is not the root of anything, but simply the best expression of human loneliness.

As in Cure and Charisma (1999), Pulse inverts mystery and exposition; the more we learn, the less sense the film’s universe makes, and the less likely effect will follow cause. Unseen forces move objects and the process by which Kurosawa’s netherworld absorbs victims—through walls, suicide, the Internet—is never the same. But the director denies our wish for the supernatural to be explained. Whether these inconsistencies and arbitrary strokes reveal either his intent or the film’s narrative deficiencies is irrelevant. All familiar clichés are freed from mystical and iconographic associations, and Pulse both recombines them into a troubling vision of eternal angst and tunnels down to a new ground zero where their potential is again wide open.

“The installation invites cats to consider their split status as autonomous residents and decorative fixtures of the contemporary human domicile.  Humans… are given a window onto the way cats see themselves and the way humans consume non-object-based art.”   Coonley may be an ironist, but he’s telling the truth.

We gaped through the glass at three cats, who acted oblivious to our gaze and to the “Jingle Cats”-inspired psychedelia looping on two monitors.  Not just the funniest installation this human has ever seen, it annihilated Disney anthropomorphism with the tragic impossibility of interspecies communication; never has feline inscrutability been used to such gloriously, profoundly idiotic effect.  Were the cats laughing inside, or did they resent their forced participation?  We will never know.  And they have secret better things to do.

Lola Magazine, Fall 2001

Is it perversely ungrateful to fault an audience for being too receptive?  Probably, so please forgive me…  In the warm glow of a packed Latvian House, July’s The Amateurist came alive in ways that had never occurred to me — and I was thankful but disappointed, since its tragic anxiety depends on its persistence at playing dead and embalmed.  And Nest Of Tens’ sense of humour was more apparent than ever before; unfortunately, its intoxicating sense of narrative envelope-pushing got lost in the laughs, subsumed by a post-Being John Malkovich acceptance of the non sequitur as a mere comedy bomb for cranial detonation.  But I was laughing too… why do I carp so?  Miranda, what have you done to my head?  Moooore, please… “She’s making a U” indeed… eye caught that.

Lola Magazine, Fall 2001

Is the purpose of an anniversary to lose oneself in nostalgia for the numbered years gone by, or to prepare a new vision for the unnumbered ones to come? Both, of course… but it’s easier to talk about the past than the future. The past can be counted and recorded and filed; the future is a little more slippery. So when LIFT celebrated its 20th Anniversary in 2001, screening a retrospective of its members’ two decades of filmmaking (”Celluloid: Past & Present”) was the natural thing to do. But how to look in the other direction—that is, how to compile a program of films that have not yet been made? The obvious answer (obvious in retrospect, at least) is to make those films. So LIFT gave cash and equipment to eight selected applicants and seven invited film & video artists, setting them loose to create short works that would be personal responses to the theme “Self & Celluloid: The Future.”

Coherence may be in the eye of the perceiver, but it seems to me that the two programs, Past & Present and Future, have a discernible through-line: the notion of history. Not history just in the sense of things dead and done, but in the sense of a living continuum in which the present is one link in a narrative chain. Explicitly or implicitly, stylistically or content-wise, the films featured in the Anniversary programs express themselves as moments in this continuum.

The Old…

It’s already old hat to dichotomize film and video in terms of tradition vs. progress, but habits die hard, and the “film=old, video=new” contrast is a useful shorthand — not to mention a historical fact. So we can apply it with care, remaining open to instances where a particular work turns it inside out and reveals its oversimplification.

Take, for example, the heavily scratched and flickering presence of the celluloid in Christopher Chong’s Minus. The filmmaker’s naked dancing body, tripled through multiple exposure, remains veiled by the film’s hand processed texture; the medium’s unmissable physicality, by association,  is as eroticized as the dancer’s. Such (literal) fetishization of film is a loud call for preservation its hands-on sexiness. Wrik Mead’s Cupid is a close companion of Minus; it too is a succinct shot of homo-/auto-eroticism, and it too revels in its own grainy nature. Cupid’s willing imprisonment by his own libido, viewed through a dirty (glory?) hole in the film frame, presents celluloid as the happily seedy side of town.

Both Minus and Cupid are from the Past & Present program, but have kin in the Future: Michele Stanley’s Fix offers its hand scratched and painted texture as one in a series of landscapes : natural, industrial, bodily, and filmic. Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s Light Magic goes even farther back historically, to the early 19th century’s photogram technique, in order to create a Brakhagian barrage of colour and shapes. These two irony-free films gain a point of view by simple virtue of their presence in The Future : the abstract isn’t ready to die yet, nor are the old-school techniques of abstraction.

… + The New

But is LIFT an exclusive club of filmic fuddy-duddies, lamenting the impending demise of their beloved medium? Apparently not; even in the Past & Present programme, video begins to rear its pixeled head. Granted, it’s just a single shot in Christopher McKay’s Fries With That, and its context in this sensitive stop-motion film carries quite the Egoyanesque denotation of loss. But Kristiina Szabo’s Dragonfly, though as optical-printing-centric as any film in the two programmes, is stylistically MTV through and through — music-video impressionism without the corporate co-opting.

Futureward: Instead of trying to surmount CGI’s synthetic quality, Mike Hoolboom’s Secret flaunts it, providing a too-smoothly rendered foetus as a nightmare vision of cultural and genetic homogenization. Secret’s 2.5 minutes would provide more than enough videophobia to go around… if only its images weren’t so seductive. Midi Onodera’s Slightseer, in its exhortation for the preservation of painful history, embraces video more fully insofar as it proves that film does not have a monopoly on memory. The “splitscreen didacticism” of Kika Thorne’s The Up + The Down contrasts political activism with angsty teen boredom, and from its camcorder documentation of both milieus, one can extrapolate the potential virtues and pitfalls of video’s ease. Certainly the medium allows for more, and more potent, activist imagemaking than film ever did; on the other hand, it also allows for more, and more aimless, documentation of one’s own aimlessness than ever before.

The Traditionalists

“You’ve seen this movie hundreds of times… Doesn’t matter who wrote it… It’s all the same play anyway.” So says David Roche in Jeremy Podeswa’s film adaptation of his monologue, David Roche Talks To You About Love. Roche is bitter about everything — that is, movies and romance — but in that Woody Allenishly endearing mode. Sure, he’s peeved at Hollywood’s romantic ideals and genre tropes… but, as with his boyfriends, he loves that which he hates. David Roche Talks To You About Love is itself bound up in tradition, belonging to that most unjustly maligned of genres, “theatrical cinema.” In bravely aligning itself with old-fashioned theatricality, it (more than most films) lives or dies on the strength of its audience’s willingness to participate. Its death on TV & VCR for a single spectator is nigh-absolute… but its potential for success with an open audience is well worth the risk.

Other Past & Present films incorporate the idea of tradition more explicitly. Mike Hoolboom’s Letters From Home poetically renders the reconfiguration of individual and collective personality in the wake of AIDS, positing change not as a victimizing force but as a tool to be seized and wielded. “Remember that one day the AIDS crisis will be over, and when that day has come and gone, there will be people alive on this earth who hear that once, there was a terrible disease, and a brave group of people stood up and fought — and, in some cases, died — so that others might live and be free.” Defiantly hopeful, Letters From Home writes itself and its time as a living piece of future history.

Elida Schogt’s Zyklon Portrait has a similar agenda but with its eyes set on the past. Superficially belonging to the subgenre of “diaristic Holocaust film,” it explodes that tradition (to which we have by now, unfortunately, become inured) by mingling it with a variety of other genres and viewpoints: the “educational science film” genre forms Zyklon Portrait’s framework; its omniscient narrator suddenly takes on the identity of Rudolph Hoss; death by gas chamber is rendered subjectively by the film’s total breakdown and abstraction. The result is a hybrid film, which, by initially distancing us (who would have thought to scrutinize Nazism at the molecular level?), ultimately breaks through our desensitization.

But if you want an essay on film tradition and genre, you can skip reading the rest of this and just watch John Greyson’s Nunca. As unflaggingly punning and campy as you’d expect from the man who made UnCut, its semiotic analysis of pop lyrics, gender identity, and cinematic grammar culminates in a manifesto, which itself culminates in a big purposeful _______. Whether this is a pessimistic or hopeful Future vision depends on what you fill in the blank with.

Optimism is more clear-cut in some of the other Future films: Ali Kazimi with I Drop… and Tobi Lampard with My Beautiful Ugly Sweater present themselves, their ancestors, and their children as conduits for both filmmaking and familial tradition. Helen Lee’s Star gives us the child only, but through something as simple as a song implies that video is still in its infancy, and thus as full of potential — and maybe even innocence! — as its youthful performer.

The Exhibitionists

While David Roche Talks To You About Love is dependent on its screening atmosphere for success, some films in The Future take exhibition itself as their subject matter. Alexi Manis’s Luminous is a love letter to film projection, a document of the mini-movies that occur on the walls of the projection booth due to the booth glass’s reflection of the beam. Wrik Mead’s Hand Job looks and feels like a silent movie about a man watching silent movies — and bursts into a wash of gay porn, climaxing in a shot that suggests the uber-masturbatory nature of film-going.

And, returning to the film/video dichotomy topic for a moment: I must reveal my complicity in that mental framework. As one of the Future filmmakers, I created my piece The Other Shoe solely in dismayed response to my discovery that the commissioned works would be streamed on the internet. That may be fine for some people, I thought — without (much) prejudice — but not for those of us who still relish the surrender of darkened-theatre viewing. So I created the only loophole I could think of: I made a double projection of 16mm and video. The video portion was designed to be streamed on the internet, but the film portion (that is, the film I initially wanted to make) could only be seen by those who physically attended its screening. If that isn’t simplistic film fetishism, I don’t know what is.

Anti-Thesis

Unfortunately for me and my biases, The Other Shoe ended up being as much of an ode to hypertext and multitasking as it was to camera obscura contemplation. If I learned anything from making that film/video, it was the humbling joy to be derived from the knowledge that a work created with the most simple-minded of intentions can, in failing to fully make its point, become a more engagingly conflicted and complex piece of work than the obstinate brain from whence it sprung. The same, I hope, can be said of this essay.

Old hats and habits die hard. I offer these old/new video/film past/future left/right up/down split-screens as rectilinear prisms purposefully designed to be incapable of holding all instances and arguments. You could probably already see them cracking; The Other Shoe is by no means the only work cited here with too many facets to squish into a bisected box.

On which side of any of those halved rectangles, for example, do we place something like Primiti Too Taa (Ed Ackerman & Colin Morton)? Prehistoric vocal poetry means “the past”; is its typewritten animated counterpart then “the future”? Or is the typewriter too much “the past” now, relegated as it is to analog nostalgia? And what of Machine Machine Machine Machine (Sara MacLean), the most “narrative” film of The Future, unassumingly witty and without a shred of self-referential speculation? Or Self: [Portrait/Fulfillment] A Film by the Blob Thing (Brian Stockton), which through its collision of Bolex CinemaScope and Bergmanesque claymation seeks to obliterate tradition and meaning in a gale of self-deprecating laughter? Dichotomies and split-screens are meant to be exploded, if only so we have pieces to pick up, inspect, and recombine.

Let us close, or open, with Jeff Sterne’s Technical Drunk, the third split-screen of The Future (fourth, if you count Slightseer’s binocularism). Like The Other Shoe, it situates film on the left and video on the right… but no judgement is on display, merely acceleration. Film loops and alcohol in a grungy toilet stall. The beer is drunk, the bottle smashed. The film threatens to break. Video pulses with cyclical fire. The shots get shorter. Destruction or elation. On either side. The future of the moving image is either so dire that there’s nothing to do but get hammered, or so promising that we should all get celebratorily sloshed. Get drunk. Pick up the pieces. Repeat.

Daniel Cockburn
October 2001

Please imagine as you read these words that they are not written, that you are not reading them, but rather that you are hearing them as the voiceover of a video whose imagery is cobbled from easily-obtained and un-artificed snatches of reality. Whether the speaker has recorded these images himself or grabbed them from the whirl of extant moving pictures is irrelevant – and if his voice doesn’t say so outright, it certainly implies it. This voice has a cadence so haltingly soothing, and deploys its vocabularic arsenal with such a deceptive sense of ease, that it persuades you that listening is enough. Yes, keep your eyes open, but only because it doesn’t matter what you see; all objects belong to the same world, and here they are.

Every artwork has its ideal medium, and not all of them choose the proper one. This world is full of films that should have been essays, essays that should have been pop songs, pop songs that should have been paintings. Steve Reinke’s videos implicitly apologize for not being prose, for living on videotape only to fill an art-production quota in advancement of their maker’s chosen career. Each of them is unassailable, protected by self-deprecating admission of its own technical modesty and ulterior motives. Thus do I hate Steve Reinke: as I hate a lover who persuades me, with superhuman eloquence, to overlook her shortcomings again and again — who makes of these very shortcomings a virtue, an extended pleasure-based apology.

But how effortless it must be! I can hardly wait to turn on the camera and emit some vacuum-sealed cleverness which would better reside on the printed page but which I choose to render VO because video’s where it’s at. I hate Steve Reinke like I hate George Lucas — not because I dislike Star Wars but because of all the pale imitators it spawned (21st-century Lucas included). It’s more complex, however, in Reinke’s case, because I can feel him making me one of those same pale imitators, fooling me time and time again into thinking Yes, It Is Just That Easy.

Please imagine, as you watch Afternoon (March 22, 1999), that you are viewing it as I did. You are alone at home, watching Reinke videos on a TV at 3 PM, feeling the days shorten outside your window, immobilized by a petty depression and bounded by the feeling that immediate productive activity is both imperative and impossible. The video mirrors this state, physically and mentally, in a way which you persuade yourself to believe to be spiritually strengthening. It allows you to almost stave off the thought that soon you’ll have to eject the tape and be once more faced with the physical world and the prospect of doing something with it. Afternoon, like much of Reinke’s work, is a diagnosis of cinema as a terminal case, a tired glut of exhausted possibility that doesn’t yet know it’s dead. I fear that this afternoon will end very soon; I fear more that it will last forever.

Like all of us, Reinke is waiting for the rebirth of art, but he’s decided to roll camera while he waits. As I watch and wait with him, I can’t help but feel that the histories of cinema and of video art are being summarized for me — I have no need to educate myself further because it all led to this point anyway. So I hate Steve Reinke like I hate Cole’s Notes, people who try to convince me that it’s okay to use Cole’s Notes, and myself for using Cole’s Notes.

But of course all of my professed hatred is so much surface decoy based on purposeful fallacy, like Reinke’s apologetic tone. He pretends to be a chronic disappointment, but his pretense delivers satisfaction. He sermonizes on the impossibility of innovation, but his homilies refuse to practise what they preach. Reinke’s videos may ride on the charm of their apparent slapdash nature, but they embody the tension between a vocalized romp through the infinite playground of thought and a visible tether to things exactly as they are. This tension could go by another name, which is “yearning”, and I believe it to be intrinsic to good and essential art.

This little essay yearns to be a little video, but it doesn’t know what images to use; it yearns to express its yearning as well as Reinke keeps doing (second-generation yearning at best). I yearn (let’s come clean, now) to be Steve, and if I do hate him for anything, it’s a dismissible, untoothed cousin of hate, better classified as amicable envy. We all yearn to be a million people and places at once, a million other than this one right here. Reinke’s videos echo and intensify this yearning even as they tighten the noose of specificity around our collective neck — and so they perform a curious marriage between ethereality and fact. The consummation of this marriage dances unceasingly away into the imaginary future, but Reinke is content (or at least contentedly discontent) to keep looking for it, as are we to keep watching him look.

Daniel Cockburn
December 2002

Each time we see a man walk on the wire, a part of us is up there with him… the experience of the high wire is direct, unmediated, simple, and it requires no explanation whatsoever.  The art is the thing itself, a life in its most naked delineation.  And if there is beauty in this, it is because of the beauty we feel inside ourselves.
- Paul Auster, On The High Wire

But, you see, in exchange for me showing you these things, you have to bear a certain burden.
- Joe Gibbons, Confessions of a Sociopath

It’s cool not to fit in (that is, once you’ve passed Grade 11). If the movies have taught us anything, it’s the joy to be had in proclaiming your individuality—or at least in watching someone else do so. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda rode their Harleys across three decades to find us sitting in darkened theatres, watching men with names like Lester Burnham and Tyler Durden bust out of their workaday cubicles (though whether rebellion is defined by one’s own desires, or simply as the opposite of the norm, remains uncertain).

The spectrum of ways to rebel ranges from the beautiful to the pathetic, the role model to the bad example, the empowering to the futile. This collection of works is a cross-section of that spectrum: six performative hypotheses in which the test subjects place themselves, or are placed, outside such common constraints as architecture, decorum, the film frame, conscience, and gravity.

Sheet Sculpture is a record of what happens when two people (Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell) bring outside-the-box thinking to the act of making a bed. Simple in concept, sublime in execution, it serves as an instructional video for artistic creation with the most modest and domestic of means. Going, by Colleen Collins and Claire Greenshaw, occupies a similar space; two synchronized figures perform ritualistic, stylized movements in and out of an unpopulated public pool. Their actions and the clever camera placement open discreet cracks in the definitions of public performance, privacy, and recreation.  Whether clandestine, rebellious, or simply lonely, it’s a quietly moving duet.

As engaging as these performances are, one could ask whether the performers are having more fun than the audience.  Danny Scavuzzo’s Pure Intention acknowledges this question and then happily throws it to the wind. A sharp-dressed man dances the light impossible while an academic lecture on the artistic process is in constant danger of being buried by a raucous drumbeat. It’s not that the issue of artistic worth isn’t worthy; it just doesn’t make so much difference when you’re dancing in midair.

Getting Stronger Every Day is the flipside of all this misfit bliss.  A monologue that hovers between childlike naiveté and sinister deviance, it paints a picture of an affection-starved man in arrested emotional development. Lost in a world of movie reminiscences and meaningless geometry, this character would likely view Sheet Sculpture not as playful performance but as abstract horror. Whether his perpetual immaturity has also made him psychotically dangerous is unknowable, thanks to the parallel-narrative structure that Miranda July is making more her own with each passing video.

Shawn P. Morrissey tells a similar story, but with the narrative excised. His Automatic Meat Probe scissors a couple of angry antagonists from a 1970s stunt film, leaving their machismo to howl in the celluloid void as they beat the shit out of each other and into infinity. As giddy an exercise as it may be, there’s something sad about these two guys, going through the motions without realizing that their movie has left them to fend for themselves.

Joe Gibbons, on the other hand, is fully aware that he’s fending for himself, and he’s determined to do it even if it kills him. With Confessions of a Sociopath, he laces a life of self-documentation and self-destruction into a compact half-hour. Gibbons the doctor looks at Gibbons the patient, trying to divine the cause of his alcoholism, heroin dependency, and joblessness (unless you count shoplifting art books as a job).

The subject’s justifications for his behaviour ring true and hollow at the same time: he’s striving toward the creation of a great work, he doesn’t trust his conscience to be anything more than classical conditioning, he doesn’t want to be a mere cog in society’s machine.  Certainly Confessions’ antisocial tendencies can be traced back to the alienation of labour, but any Marxism here is equal parts Karl and Groucho; Gibbons wouldn’t belong to any Fight Club that would have him for a member. Confessions draws the outlines not of a society that offers its citizens pale imitations of satisfaction, but of an individual who will put himself through anything in order to avoid having to call himself a citizen.

But the video’s true pathology is the fact that, pretend though it may to the contrary, it knows it was made with an audience in mind. The dropout has become the video artist, and it’s his treatment of himself simultaneously as real and fictional that makes this video something much more than a compelling piece of auto-snuff. If our desire for rebellious characters is to be fulfilled, here is an inventory of what it costs the people we ask to play the role.

Confessions of a Sociopath is a high-wire walk, but more conflicted than the kind of which Paul Auster writes. It’s a first-person POV along a concrete precipice, and we know Joe’s doing it for our benefit—why else would he have brought a camera for his jog along the edge? And why else would you have paid money to see it? The “burden” to which he refers is our burden of responsibility in this dynamic, a symbiosis born in the fires of deepest boredom. He needs us, and we need him.

Daniel Cockburn
2002

thanks to Tom Taylor and the Pleasure Domers, Shane Smith, Jan Peacock, Leslie Peters, and the Cinematexans.  Program layout by Dave Tebby.

Program:

Sheet Sculpture
Kika Thorne & Adrian Blackwell
9 minutes, video, 1997

Pure Intention (excerpt)
Danny Scavuzzo
6 minutes, video, 1997

Going
Colleen Collins & Claire Greenshaw
7 minutes, video, 2001

Automatic Meat Probe
Shawn P. Morrissey
5 minutes, 16mm, 2001

Getting Stronger Every Day
Miranda July
7 minutes, video, 2001

Confessions of a Sociopath
Joe Gibbons
35 minutes, video, 2001

Sebastian: Look, he’s winding up the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.
(Shakespeare, The Tempest)

One can partially numb the sadness of past experience by transforming it into anecdote; a more complete (and perhaps more desperate) tactic is to make the anecdote into a joke.

Jokes collapse history; they tell a story in some amorphous, always-happening present tense. “Two bags of vomit are walking down the street…” Read that either way: contemptuous metaphor for worthless scum, or benign setup for a scatological punchline. Robert Lee’s watch shows at least two different time zones, and he reads it both ways at once; bitter urban nostalgia hand in hand with juvenile wordplay (and it is worth mentioning that the common response to a pun is not laughter but a groan).

Gonzalo: When every grief is entertain’d that’s offer’d,
Comes to the entertainer–
Sebastian: A dollar.
Gonzalo: Dolour comes to him, indeed: you have spoken truer than you purposed.

Money changes ownerless hands, motorized stairs ascend and descend, automatic doors open and shut, and unborn babies’ hearts beat; we can see from our vantage point that everything is progressing as it should.

This vantage point, however, is of uncertain location. La Capitale de la Douleur is the product of some new kind of security camera: one which remembers not only the lost moments of anonymous urbanites (thanks to ultrasound technology, surveillance can begin in the womb), but abandoned shots from the image-culture detritus which swirls round the city’s collective head. This camera’s memory takes the form of random montage: an endless series of POV fragments denied either beginning or closure; a city of dreams and griefs, offered for entertainment, looking at itself.

Look here: this might be a Hollywood tracking shot, its expensive resolution degraded beyond context or history, or it might be the view from a stolen camcorder pointed out the window of a battered pickup truck. The images’ dollar value is rendered invisible; the uber-camera wants (you) to believe that all pictures share the same proportional degrees of anecdote and truth, as if the ennui of a lone room’s inhabitant were as natural and predetermined as the flow of capital which built the four walls encasing him.

Antonio: Fie, what a spendthrift is he of his tongue!

Subtitles are generally trusted as a bridge of the gap between languages, but I don’t trust Robert Lee. The onscreen English and the spoken French are alienated from one another, two separate monologues in two separate spaces, like a pun’s double entendre snapped in half.

Believe if you like that no man, image, or word is an island (enchanted or otherwise), but you’ll probably be alone in thinking so. This city imagines itself an audiovisual archipelago, each discrete entity shaped and isolated by the flow of something as elemental as water.

Gonzalo: Here is everything advantageous to life.
Antonio: True; save means to live.
Sebastian: Of that there’s none, or little.

Nothing funny is going on here… and where is here? All the images of La Capitale de la Douleur bleed colourlessly into one another, enlarged pixels quivering at the edge of instability. They have as tenuous and untraceable a relationship to their original source material as a joke has to its sad inspiration, as subtitled words have to their spoken counterparts in the eyes and ears of the monolingual. This could be any place where condominiums go up to “hide the ugly neighbour children;” where people, taking time out from saving means to live, dance surreptitiously on a street corner and think themselves unseen; the capital city of the nation of dolour.

I confess: I have come relatively late in life to the art world. As such, my criteria for art slouch happily in the shadows of paradigms ingrained in me by a quarter-century of movies-and-TV consumption—and I feel no urgent need to divest myself of this bias. I still proudly contend that any “intervention” which doesn’t make its method/purpose clear to its intervened-upon spectators, or at least provide them with something of or for use, is so much masturbation fodder for the artist and his/her peers. And I still proclaim that Tom Green is (occasionally and, I suspect, accidentally) a paragon of successful intervention-performance video-documentation tactic for the early 21st century (justification of this claim available upon request). In my world, entertainment value is not antithetical to artistic merit, but rather intrinsic to it. “It’s funny because it’s true”: an equation which ideally works just as well in reverse.

So whither Green? And wherefore Art? Enter Kwan: a hop, skip, and a jump away.

It’s a sunny day, but the man in the navy one-piece (with indiscernible name tag) is wearing a toque, and a few flakes of snow are drifting downward. We are in Canada, homeland of the over-polite stereotype. He is laying down cardboard stencils and spray painting the concrete of a pedestrian crossing (Toronto’s College & Huron), with the confidence of a cityworks technician… but there is an odd urgency to his technique, and we note that, bereft of any pylons to deflect traffic flow, he restricts his work to the times when the light is green. He sometimes waves cars past assuredly, but just as often scurries from their path. He almost gets creamed by a moving monolith, which bears the Toronto Hydro logo, (I thought municipal workers were supposed to watch out for one another). So of course something non-kosher is going on here, if you didn’t know already… and our eyes rub their hands together in anticipation of the payoff, as we see a pattern of rectilinears and semicircles take shape between the twin parallel lines that say, in the language of urban convention, “you may safely walk here.”

And of course there are people, always people, crossing as they should between those two lines, the white marks on the street which stave off automotive danger. The pedestrians give passing glances to the nondenominational spray painter, and to the camera, but don’t seem to worry about it. He’s not hurting them. And eventually his work takes recognizable shape, the classic outline of a hopscotch playing field coming together under the walkers’ feet, grade-school nostalgia in the middle of street. Importantly: this is also funny.

There is the occasional interrogation, most notably the cyclist who herself is wearing cityworks-style garb: reflective-orange jacket with a bright “X”, a talisman marking the spot which by virtue of its marking is safe from collisionist danger. The cameraperson briefly explains this venture to her, and she responds amiably: “Oh, so it’s art… Well, I just didn’t know if it was a protest, or advertising, or…”

Indeed. Her shirt similarly begs the question of allegiance; the uniform of a cyclist (power to the people!), it could just as easily be the uniform of a crossing guard to be followed (surround yourself in her municipal force field of safety!). To what organization does the spray painter’s navy jumpsuit denote allegiance? To what bylaws are his actions in adherence? That is to say: what, or who, is this displaced-and-re-placed hopscotch for?

But you could probably see the answer coming. And here it is: for the second half of the video, we watch pedestrians cross the street and gamely attempt to hop the squares. It’s as simple, and simply satisfying, as that. Personalities manifest themselves through hopping style: some people throw themselves into it with happy abandon (you’re only as young as you think); some give up after three hops and stagger across the remainder of the play zone; some keep their hands in their pockets and jump the sectors with deadpan cool. The practitioners of this last style seem reticent to devote themselves fully to the hopping, as if worried that someone’s watching – which, of course, someone is. This is for our benefit as much as the pedestrians’. The playing field is for their physical use, which in turn is for our ocular use – images to be consumed under the rubric of “entertainment” or of “art”? Thankfully, both.

(Let’s not forget that the whole system is for Kwan’s use as well; end credits signify this video to be an entry in an artist’s body of work, an addition to the topography of his performative/interventionist map. But this, of course, in entertainment and art, from Tom Green to Spencer Tunick, is surely fair play.)

Underneath this street action’s modest explosion of convention, its invitational insertion of freeplay into a circumscribed area of prescripted activity (”WALK” or “DON’T WALK”), is a problematic tug at the mind’s sleeve: is Kwan truly offering the public a little dose of liberation, or is their agreeable hopscotching merely another conditioned response to lines on the ground? Bouncing your way across the street may indeed be a rebellion of sorts, but only because it’s out of context. The whole point of the game, remember, is to stay inside the lines. And this is what makes the piece something more interesting, and less easy to swallow, than an enjoyable piece of vicarious insurrection. The public is offered empowerment and entrapment at the same time, an equation, which adds a most tasty bit of bitterness to the mix.

“Don’t Toe The Line, Or Toe Your Own Line” at first glance seems a title followed by a subtitle (along the lines of “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus”), but perhaps it’s a binary choice being offered (along the lines of “have your cake, or eat it too”). If so, its curiously twisty phrasing presents us with two options, thusly: (1) Ignore the path, or (2) Follow your own path. It’s the “or” that mucks things up, asserting that the two options are mutually exclusive. Which is to say: if you ignore the set path, you can’t follow your own. Which is too invertedly and troublingly say: to follow your own path is to automatically follow “the” path. The identity of the owner of the “the” has, at the time of this writing, yet to be determined.

Maybe I’m tired of learning. More likely, though, I’m tired of being Taught, of being assailed by monologuists who assume their opinions to be so self-evidently correct as to need no argumentation, only assertion. So this programme was initially conceived as a riposte, a counterweight to the mass of sermons-to-the-converted which gain repute by donning the moniker “experimental film” or “video art.” But I feel it’s grown into something else whose inner workings I am just beginning to discover as I write these words… and I find this wholly appropriate, as it’s in tune with what drew me to each of these movies in the first place. Each is an incarnation of a single idea which could only find expression in this particular form, adhering to no rules other than those which grow out of itself (and to those rules remaining impeccably true), and eschewing especially the Message which is so often quick passage to notoriety and at least as often anathema to lasting artfulness.

Which is not to imply that these works don’t have something to say (only that their meaning is not reducible to a sentence, or a tract, or, for that matter, anything verbal). For instance: Lured strips Hitchcockian filmic fetishization of its narrative, leaving us to contemplate the connection between the seduction of cinematic grammar and the representation of the female body. This sounds like a dry cinematic essay—but the obsessive structure and groovy soundtrack make the academic waters muddier and sexier than most artists-with-agendas would allow.

Similarly themed, Old Movie culminates in a visceral thunderstorm of Hollywood actresses trapped in weepy, submissive roles. Work backward from this, however, and you find an homage to the aesthetic of American film’s Golden Age, edited with a deftness worthy of an Oscar(TM) “Those were the days” tribute. The two parts combined are an invitational admission of unrepentantly guilty cinema-love at least as complex as the sum of its parts.

The feminist-Hollywood-critique trio is rounded out by Perversion, a series of abortive outtakes from a dark-side-of-suburbia drama. We see a dysfunctional family (complete with nubile schoolgirl), and wait for something unsavoury to happen. As it persistently doesn’t, we realize what we’ve come to expect from this genre, and how films like American Beauty and Happiness give us what we want more than we may care to admit.

But it is all too commonly remiss of fringe filmmakers to put Hollywood under the accusatory microscope without turning the lens on themselves. For this, we have Vegetative States. A purposefully futile attempt to quantify the worth of video art, it sets up a daisy chain of gazes involving a household plant, a polygraph technician, the audience, and some abstract animations (courtesy of Steve Reinke). This all would be crushingly glib if it weren’t both a beautiful aesthetic object and a surprisingly generous excursion into the comedy of stasis.

Untitled (Viewer Therapy) casts Vegetative States’ self-reflexive impulse in a mould of a more troublingly vague shape. Bernie Roddy’s self-help lecture omits (as psychobabble often does) any specific mention of What He’s Talking About, and so we are left with the void of his monologue, the void of our own oscillatingly fascinated/bored response, and the void between the two. Untitled gives us the time and space to inspect whichever of these we find most interesting…. and Dr. Roddy’s bipolar dresscode casts a pall of squeamish humour over the proceedings (while adding two more voids—the white-collar and the phallic—to the aforementioned trio).

The double performance of Colleen Collins and Claire Greenshaw gives a similar breathing room to the audience. The lo-fi compositions and cutting of Going fragment an empty recreation centre, setting the stage for a display of amphibious synchronized swimming long after the audience has gone home. The lack of spectators seems to imply a lack of purpose, but as Going goes on, we start to notice a soft, wordless dialogue between the two young women, a tender stab at communication in a space normally reserved for loud splashing competition.

Tenderness is the watchword for many of these movies, but none so much as Sincerely, Joe P. Bear and Snow Storm, Mum In Labour. The former gives us a glimpse into a furry heart broken by a doomed interspecies love affair, and reminds us that unrequited puppy love is no less painful for its immaturity. Snow Storm shares this childlike love-letter approach: a single take in which random words become poetry, written privately on the body’s digits, poor lighting transcended by post-production luminance and spatial restraint transcended by pop radio.

Every work here is characterized by a rare modesty (of means and/or of ego), but it would be wrong to equate this with a lack of ambition. To wit: Contrafacta. The horror of an incomprehensible world ruled by an unfathomable God is expressed through sublime cutout animation; medieval art moves to a creepy and funny soundtrack, inadvertently inventing a new genre: spiritual slapstick. Or take Jason Harrington’s Origin, which seeks in its seven minutes nothing less than to decode the universe by combining elements as disparate as function-graphs, photocopiers, Tarkovsky, animation, and Philip Glass. The difference between Origin and something like [PI] is the difference between Darren Aaronofsky’s puffed-up importance and Harrington’s deeply personal approach. Is it naive to try to graph the universe and fit love into the equation? Probably, but it’s a naiveté Aaronofsky would never risk, and Origin is the more convincing for it.

Let’s start ending with a quote from L. O. B. 2. (a portrait of babyhood pre-verbality, set in the gap between bilingual opposites, between writing and speaking? Perhaps… but this is all extrapolation.) The filmmaker says, off-camera: “I don’t think it’ll amuse anyone but me”. And the fact that she made the movie anyway proves that she doesn’t care. L. O. B. 2 and its companions in this programme are all hermits, content to live in isolation but suddenly and surprisingly hospitable should you happen to stumble upon one of their hidden homes. And here, in the abdication of “making a name for oneself,” of “changing the world,” of acclaim and success and other such bugaboos to which the fringe is no less immune than the mainstream—here, I think, is the substance of the counterweight I was seeking at the beginning of this writing.

Pauline Kael, in riposte to Siegfried Kracauer’s 400-page prescription for what constitutes Cinema, cited the single, solitary rule: “Astonish us!”These works follow this rule, especially if you allow them to redefine astonishment as something other than widened eyes caught in the headlights of self-conscious brilliance, as something to be experienced in the presence of minimalism, quietude, simplicity, and play. Am I a hopeless romantic? No, I’m a hopeful one. Unique though these movies may be, I believe there are others out there, which discover and produce their own selves by doggedly, naively following the same directive. May there continue to be; may we keep watching for them.

May 2003