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.
The Nine Muses / Dir: John Akomfrah (2011, 94 min, HDCAM, UK)
You are alone when you arrive. In a cold place of forbidding beauty, you are colourful and stand out against the bleak landscape.
John Akomfrah's film presents us with a series of vivid tableaux — figures in bright parkas, their backs to the camera, looking over a series of desolate (yet beautiful) Alaskan landscapes. Their presence invokes a feeling of dislocated timelessness.
That alternates with a collage of stock footage presenting the immigrant experience to England in the 50's and 60's, and as the film progresses, we come to understand Akomfrah's metaphorical intent — each of those immigrants arrived feeling cold and alone, prominently colourful in a bleak place.
Uniting the two visual streams is the audio, drawn from readings of "great works" of the Western canon, with the notion of the epic heroic quest — Telemachus sailing to find his father; Dante descending into the Inferno — as our map to the immigrants' odysseys, framed through a delineation of the classic nine muses.
A lyric and metaphor-rich film then — a journey to be experienced rather than a narrative expression. As such, the viewer needs to be willing to sink into it and drift along. It's largely rewarding on that level and immersive enough to justify its running time. There were a couple points where I felt like the film could have been tightened up but on the whole Akomfrah, who has been making films since the 80's, is confidently in control of his diverse elements, weaving together the historical and mythical in order to have them illuminate each other.
The screening was enriched with a very perceptive Q + A session hosted by Cameron Bailey. It was a treat to hear Akomfrah talk about his methods and goals, showing a keen perception into his own work. A very good opening for the festival.
Images 25th Anniversary 1988 Screening Part 1 [shorts programme]
As part of their twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations, Images is looking back to the first iteration of the festival, asking some of the people who put that together to re-present some selections from 1988. This programme brought together three of those entries.
Last Days of Contrition (Dir: Richard Kerr. 1987, 35 min, 16mm, Canada) loomed over this group, not just in having the longest running time, but also in its bold, nearly harsh, presentation. It was introduced by Cameron Bailey who situated the film as a part of an ongoing dialogue at the time about gender representations in the stylistic approach of non-narrative film — and this work is most definitely "male" in its aggressive signifiers. Hitting with the force of an air-raid siren, Last Days redeploys footage from a road trip across America as an investigation into Regan-era imperialism. Swirling desert shots imply the vertigo of dislocated confusion as they are layered over other vistas. Meanwhile, found sounds create a harsh sonic terrain. In the end, the travelogue becomes unravelled into a blur of warnoise and fragmentary images. Deliberately pummeling, it was a bit hard to take at times, but I could see how this would have left an impact in Bailey's mind a quarter-century later.
On the other hand Sirensong (Dir: Jan Peacock. 1987, 8 min, Video, Canada) was soft-edged and suggestive, drifting from the banal (footage of washing dishes bookends the piece) into the associative drift of memory. This also contains elements of a travelogue — and even some similar desert terrain — but it evokes less a sense of place than a feeling of memory. The passage of time has also provided an extra layer of nostalgia to this work, as the warm fuzziness of videotape now joyfully shouts "1988!" at the viewer. Nicely done at a technical level, with some very smart transitions informing its sense of drift — this is recommended viewing to anyone making a music video on VHS (and I've seen no few examples of this in the past year or so) in order to evoke just this sort of memoryhaze.
With its old-school cut-and-paste technique, Orientation Express (Dir: Frances Leeming, 1988, 15 min, 16mm, Canada) felt less bound to its exact moment of production. Employing a cut-out animation technique reminiscent of Monty Python-era Terry Gilliam, this was a giddy joyride that compressed its running time into an express train trip across the terrain of pop culture. Cheeky feminist fun that appropriates ads and other images of "the good life" (suburban style) and gives them a twist to hint at what lurks underneath. Wonderful stuff.
These selections from 1988 were really worth seeing. In that regard, do take note that there is a second programme of curated selections from that first festival running on Thursday night (April 19) at 9 p.m. And, even more intriguingly, the festival has put the bulk of the material that was shown at the first Images Festival online: you can stream them on the "iFpod" at the Images website.
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