Reviews of screenings — and more! — 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 Letter to the Living [shorts programme]
This selection of shorter works was united around themes of deaths and other endings, making it a less than cheery slog. And, interestingly, with the exception of the first couple films, the other obvious running theme was the un-citified outdoorsy-ness in the works. That could just be a coincidence, but it could also show a bit of urban bias on display, as you probably don't have to dig deep at, say, a big-city film festival to find a vein of thinking in the rural=desolate=death tradition.
Still, S.T.T.L. (Dir: Elisabeth Smolarz, 2011, 4 min, Video, USA) encapsulated the programme's morbidity, with a patron at a laundromat facing the camera while giving a chronicle of a banal death foretold, detailing the course of a typical cancer patient with dispassionate detail. Placing death on the same everyday level as getting the laundry done might serve as an attempt to make us face up to the inevitability of it all, but surely I ain't ready yet.
The Well of Representation (Dir: Evan Meaney, 2012, 7 min, Video, USA) was, after that, an effective mood-lightener. Choosing to emulate a Super NES-era RPG is bound to impart a certain levity to the proceedings — regardless of how heavy the narrative is, to see it unfold as speech balloons from blocky 16-bit avatars is amusing. Below that, however, this was also a re-framing of Gloria!, a 1979 film by noted avant-garde film-maker Hollis Frampton. That film's death-narrative was mirrored by the technological seizures of the videogame environment, with kludgy bursts of digital garble and occasional error messages flashing onto the screen. I can't say I absorbed all of the nuances of Meaney's paean to Hollis (though I did afterward find the film online here) but I certainly enjoyed this.
I found Algonquin (Dir: Travis Shilling, 2011, 4 min, Video, Canada) to be more interesting after the fact when Shilling talked about the work in the Q+A. A combination of a static-but-tense visual shot with the recitation of a hunter's reincarnation story was a stand-in for an image that Shilling couldn't capture in a painting. That retrospectively made the film's vibrating tableau resonate a bit more strongly with me.
Three shorter psychogeographical works seemed to go together within the programme. To Mark the Shape (Dir: JB Mabe, 2011, 3 min, 16mm, USA) gave a murky glimpse into a few moments unfolding in a farmyard, while Under The Shadow of Marcus Mountain (Dir: Robert Schaller, 2011, 6 min, 16mm, USA) transcended murk and headed into an impressionistic journey though a forest that felt seared in my mind's eye afterwards. Employing "manual processing, custom-made emulsions and chemicals and shoots with pinhole cameras and other handmade devices," this felt more like subconscious dream-flashes than cinema, almost as if someone's decaying, fragmentary — and possibly terrified — memories were being projected directly onto the screen. where she stood in the first place (Dir: Lindsay McIntyre, 2010, 10 min, Video, Canada) also went on a journey of fragmented images, exploring Baker Lake, once home to the film-maker's grandmother, and now the site of a search for lingering traces of her presence. Initially appearing harsh and abandoned, the landscape comes to life at the end as the community's children rambunctiously tear through the frame, chasing after the midnight sun.
The most intriguing of the programme's selections, Hoof, Tooth & Claw (Dir: Chu-Li Shewring, Adam Gutch, 2011, 17 min, Video, UK) could have been presented in a straightforward narrative package, but instead let its central drama unfold in its own slow way, just the same as 86-year-old Betty French goes about her days. Trying to keep up with the demands of running a farm, French certainly isn't alone, surrounded by a flock of elderly animals who seem to be fighting aching joints as much as she does. The sense of self that arises from having a place in the world is more than enough for most of us to want to cling to them as tightly as possible, but as we get the sense that it's getting harder for French to keep up, the film doesn't sensationalize or arrange things into a tidy package.
Señora con Flores (Woman with Flowers) (Dir: Chick Strand, 1995, 15 min, 16mm, USA) takes a similarly abstract approach as well — in fact, this newly-restored work reflects Strand's efforts to apply non-narrative methods to documentary film. Shot mostly with vivid, colourful closeups, the film is a sympathetic portrait of a Mexican flower vendor, struggling to make ends meet in the face of an abusive husband. In opposition to her demanding daily routine and seemingly limited opportunities, the vendor is given dignity simply by being given a voice, her words flowing as narration as we watch her at work. A powerful portrait.
Live Images - The Third Man by Erik Bünger [performance]
A fabulous night "off-screen" at the festival's pop-up venue, tucked into an austere basement on Spadina that was the former home to a modelling agency. With the smell of grilled cheese sandwiches wafting through the air, this programme combined a pair of monologues which both came across like idea-heavy one man shows.1
I have seen Steve Kado opine on some pretty diverse topics, ranging from arguing for Céline Dion's works as an extension of Nègres blancs d'Amérique-style Québec nationalism to advocating for amateurism over professionalism in the surgical field. And that's not even including musical sets that turned into audience-baiting non-performances. The once-and-again Torontonian seems to have mellowed a bit, though, even as his presentation upped the intellectual density.
With a bare incandescent bulb on a table in front of him, Kado was accompanied by an audio track that pinged every few seconds with an advance-the-filmstrip type noise. And at each ping, he'd grab a different coloured transparency to hold behind the lamp, enveloping both himself and the distorted shadow-Kado looming behind him in varying hues. There was also a subtle audio collage behind his voice, running water and passing planes occasionally audible and rising as he rushed into his points with increased vigour.
Titled "Turning Away Part of the Light: The Future of Cinema", perhaps the most structurally subversive element of Kado's presentation was the fact that he spent the bulk of its running time defining his ground before only belatedly making his modest proposal. Essentially — I think — this was a call for technical liberation beyond the 24-frames-per-second tyranny that has given cinema the "illusion of motion". Just as some folks lament that over a lifetime you will have spent decades sleeping, Kado was obsessed with the "dark movie", the fractional blank moments between the frames, and called for a transcendence beyond the elemental light/dark yin-ying dualities and toward a richer series of gradations.
As he plowed ahead with his proposal, the light bulb in front of him slowly grew dimmer and dimmer, leaving the the room in darkness by the time he concluded. And while it was an amusing and erudite discussion, the rush of ideas left me similarly de-illuminated by the end. But if this was meant as a call for more shades of grey, I can get on board with that.
The other day, I woke up with the echo of a song in my head. I sort of hummed it to myself in the shower as the melody suddenly unfolded itself, and by the time I was getting dressed, I was singing the refrain and a few lyrical fragments. And then I thought back to try and figure out how I knew this song. After some musing on it, I realized I had never actually heard it as a recording — it was one of the songs I sang in kindergarten. How did this thing lay dormant in my mind for over thirty years? Where had it been all along, and how did it survive?2
Erik Bünger has spent some time thinking about stuff like this. As a child, he was entranced by the theme music to The Third Man, as played by his father on the family's piano — a fascination deepened by the image of Harry Lime's looming, disembodied shadow on the music book's cover. The haunting pervasiveness of this music was the jumping-off point for Bünger's slideshow/monologue.
It's hardly a new idea to suggest that melodies and lyrics are amongst the most powerful memes. But Bünger ran with the idea, presenting — with deadpan humour — the notion of songs as malicious viruses. Or, in the case of one of many film clips that illustrated his lecture, a zombie parasite. Is the instinct to sing along (or to tap one's feet to the rhythm) a bright gift of our humanity or a trap? Are we being manipulated into structures of submission to assist in the replication of music-ideas? Are songs just an ancient (and powerful) mind-control technology?
With the driving insinuations of associational logic worthy of the most seductive conspiracy theorists, Bünger suggested a series of possibly-outrageous unities that seemed to make absolute sense in the flow of his arguments. And hence, it seemed as reasonable to see Kylie Minogue channelling Babylonian epistemological theories as it was to see the echoes of the Pied Piper of Hamelin in Fritz Lang's M.
Successful both as entertainment and intellectual provocation, Bünger's Third Man was so laden with ideas, just to sit back and unpack them after the fact feels like a graduate seminar. And then, when it all just gets to be too much, something clicks in the back of your head, and you're distracted, trying once again to figure out just what it is that you're humming.
1 The figurative gooey cheese between the monological slices of bread would come on this night from Jodie Mack's The Future is Bright, a handcrafted 16mm short which paired an old-timey song with a bright tissue paper-y montage that would have been cheerfully at home as an abstract background in a cheaply-produced Saturday Morning cartoon from the 60's.
2 In case you're curious, that song was "Hill and Gully Ride", which, as it turns out, is an old Jamaican folk song:
Looking this up, I should note, has turned a minor footnote into what should be a lavish essay all on its own. Besides acknowledging the awesomeness of Lord Composer's chosen name, this song fits quite perfectly into The Third Man train of thought, as it appears to be a rather successful musical meme. "Hill and Gully Ride" crops up again and again with regularity through mento, reggae, dancehall and beyond. I'm pretty partial to this version:
This is a song that I remember the teacher playing on the piano, students gathered around to sing. How did this particular song make it to a songbook in rural Manitoba? I would love to spend more time digging around to see how this tune has reverberated through space and time. Some of its lyrics got cribbed for "The Banana Boat Song" (dayyyyy-o!!), so maybe that helped. (And as a footnote-to-the-footnote, did you know that Alan Arkin — yeah, that Alan Arkin — kinda-wrote "The Banana Boat Song"? At least in the way that white American folk singers "wrote" the traditionals they recorded?) Was this just from a standard-issue songbook, or did I have a particularly cool teacher? And how was it that the small, rural kindergarten I went to had its own piano? Is/was that a common thing?
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