Images 2012: Monday

Reviews of screenings from Images Festival 2012, Toronto, Canada.

Toronto's festival of "experimental and independent moving image culture" has now been at the cutting edge for twenty-five years. Screenings continue at Jackman Hall until April 21.

A Place in the World [shorts programme]

Three short and one mid-length entries that all convey a sense of place. Portrait De La Place Ville Marie (Dir: Alexandre Larose, 2011, 3 min, 16mm, Canada) takes a building that's both a very specific landmark and a very general signifier of the architectural International Style and sends it into the sky, yawing and juddering like an Apollo rocket in flight. Third Law: N. Kedzie Blvd. (Dir: Mike Gibisser, 2011, 7 min, HDCAM, USA) is far more static, watching the seasons change through the windows of an empty apartment. Not as finely observed as Gibisser's Second Law (about which, more below) but the depopulated space and buzzing dread do lend the film a palpable sense of alienation and listless entropic creep. The Home and the World (Lucy Parker, 2011, 19 min, 16mm, UK) uses a not-dissimilar palette to create something much warmer and homey, a grainy series of vignettes tracking the routines and excursions of a group of residential students learning through art and encounters with nature. The pacing is as patient as the teachers who hover at the edges of the frame, and the film radiates a warm calmness. Bonus points for a cameo by some ducks in the garden.

But the main draw of the screening was East Hastings Pharmacy (Dir: Antoine Bourges, 2011, 46 min, HDCAM, Canada), a verité-style account of a methadone-dispensing pharmacy in Vancouver's downtown eastside. It is perhaps at this point that I should issue a *SPOILER WARNING* for anyone who wants to go into this film with a blank slate...

...although the very fact I'd consider doing so probably reveals that I'm coming at the movie from a specific set of assumptions. For although the movie presents as a fly-on-the-wall documentary, a title card at the end tells us that the pharmacist is, in fact, an actor and the clients are patients working through a process of guided improvisation. The attentive viewer might have been on the road to drawing that conclusion regardless (among other things, there were a couple reverse shots that seemed entirely unlikely from a documentary crew) but it's interesting to note that the very fact that Bourges chose to inform the audience at the end rather than the beginning shows an awareness of how the "realness" of what we see on screen shapes our perception of the material. I think it's mildly problematic inasmuch as saving it for a "reveal" at the end then becomes the last lens through which one sees the material — suddenly invoking a debate about cinematic quote-unquote authenticity (ugh).

All of which then detracts from the film itself, which is no less impactful for not being "real". By unobtrusively putting us face-to-face with the exchanges between the stoic pharmacist and her varied cohort of clients, we confront the whole range of these highly structured and encoded encounters, which can be read simultaneously as the pseudo-carceral power relationship between an observing authority figure and supplicant criminal/client but also as a portrait of the healer's infinite patience and the simple grace of human decency exposed in an unusually vulnerable and intimate relationship.

Bourges' aim in this film was to empower the real-life patients to become storytellers, and although watching them is undoubtedly in some measure voyeuristic, it's also a good chance to realize that methadone patients are probably funny and angry and self-damaging and thoughtful in the same ratios as everyone else. How this sort of exercise engages their agency is probably the most interesting debate to arise out of this, which is overall a rather enjoyable film — although I hope peoples' enjoyment of it doesn't get too caught up in debating aspects of verisimilitude.

Memorie di uno Smemorato [shorts programme]

Taking its title from the novel Memoirs of an Amnesiac, these shorts were all united around the idea of memory and self — and, in the possibility of forgetting, finding ways of overcoming the memories that can keep one bogged down. In between some shorter and less substantial works (Omokage (Remains) (Dir: Maki Satake, 2010, 6 min, Video, Japan), returning to significant personal locations to layer old photographs over current reality, was the best of these) three titles took the theme in interesting directions.

Insideout (Dir: Tonje Alice Madsen, 2010, 25 min, Video, Norway) takes a trip through the quiet corners of YouTube to weave together deeply personal images, laments and cris de cœur. Madsen has skilfully created an arc both temporal (beginning with sunrise and extended through a full day to the predawn darkness) and emotional — mostly of people at their darkest hours, looking not so much for comfort as a chance to transcend the burden of their pasts and be reborn, unfettered. Faceless confessions merge with other found imagery, feeling at times like the jumble of half-forgotten memories. A little bleak, even if it's structured to hint at the possibility of overcoming. (On a technical aside, I remain rather unsure whether films sourced from webcam-quality shaky youtube footage should be shown on the big screen, where they look terribly blocky and pixilated. This is one form of "new media" that should perhaps be presented in a more accommodating format.)

Second Law: S. Leh Street (Dir: Mike Gibisser, 2011, 14 min, 16mm, USA) had a similar feel to Gibisser's Third Law (screened in the previous programme) but felt more focused for having a subject (Gibisser's grandmother) to focus upon. Her home — a place heavily laden with memories and personal meanings — is now becoming a burden, and she is musing upon downsizing to something more manageable. The swimmy evening murk in many of the shots expresses the atmosphere the grandmother finds herself in, though we also get some welcome glances that she's still facing the world with some feisty pluck.

Agatha (Dir: Beatrice Gibson, 2012, 14 min, Video, UK) is also pregnant with memory and forgetting — possibly amongst other things. However, this one is so vibrant and delightful in its form that the content needs to be mulled over after the fact. Science-fiction in the cast, say, of Alphaville or Stalker, where suggestion is enough to convince that a world that looks rather like ours is indeed a distant planet. That disjunction between the banal visuals and uncanny events of the voiceover read as kitsch at the outset, but the movie's straight-facedness (and a boost from the Radiophonic Workshop-style soundtrack) slowly invest it with a sense of the uncanny. That opens a space to absorb a rather full plate of ideas bubbling underneath — of identity and forgetting as well as on gender identity and the very nature of communication. A fabulously inventive bit of work.