Difficulty in the Origins of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film

CODES OF THE NORTH: DIFFICULTY IN THE ORIGINS OF THE CANADIAN AVANT-GARDE FILM by Stephen Broomer Master of Arts, York University, Toronto, Canada, 2008 Bachelor of Fine Arts, York University, Toronto, Canada, 2006 A dissertation presented to Ryerson University and York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Joint Program in Communication and Culture Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2015 © Stephen Broomer, 2015 Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this dissertation. This is a true copy of the dissertation, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I authorize Ryerson University to lend this dissertation to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I further authorize Ryerson University to reproduce this dissertation by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I understand that my dissertation may be made electronically available to the public. ii Codes of the North: Difficulty in the Origins of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film Stephen Broomer Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Culture, 2015 Ryerson University and York University Abstract This dissertation chronicles the formation of a Canadian avant-garde cinema and its relation to the tradition of art of purposeful difficulty. It is informed by the writings of George Steiner, who advanced a typology of difficult forms in poetry. The major works of Jack Chambers (The Hart of London), Michael Snow (La Region Centrale), and Joyce Wieland (Reason Over Passion) illustrate the ways in which a poetic vanguard in cinema is anchored in an aesthetic of difficulty. Such aesthetics enclose the various forms of avant-garde cinema, from the lyrical to the structural film, and signal work of an enduring radicalism. Simultaneously, this dissertation charts the origins of these artists, the circumstances that formed their aesthetic themes, and their maturation. In doing so, it attends to their individual origins and sources, and consequently, the individuation of their artistic activity. This research fills gaps in the literature of Canadian cinema by explicitly linking the origins of a Canadian avant-garde cinema to the forms of purposeful difficulty in modernism. Additionally, it offers new commentary on the idea of difficulty in art, and specifically, the resonances of difficult modern art in vanguard cinema. This study champions progressive poetic form in avant-garde cinema, identifying aesthetic strategies that have analogues in other art forms such as music, painting, and poetry. iii Acknowledgements The works discussed in this manuscript have been a part of my life since childhood. I dedicate this study to my parents, Cherie and Stuart Broomer, who first introduced me to the paintings and films of Jack Chambers, Michael Snow, and Joyce Wieland. I have now lived with these works for longer than I can remember. My thanks to them, and to my brother Geoffrey, for their love and support. Few have dedicated themselves to writing the history of the Canadian avant-garde film, and none more passionately than R. Bruce Elder. No significant text has appeared on this subject since Elder’s Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (1989), a volume that covered the much vaster territory of Canadian philosophy and vision, and within that, the avant-garde. This study gathers a view of this field that is guided by the role of difficult aesthetics in the origins of the Canadian avant-garde film (that is, in three foundational bodies of work from the 1960s to the early 1970s). None of this would be possible without the insight of R. Bruce Elder, who has spent his career to date advancing the cause of a poetic cinema. With this writing, I assume the same cause, one that has become essential to my own identity, both as a historian and as an artist. Some of the richest pleasures of this work came in many animated conversations on the topic of difficult aesthetics and the Canadian avant-garde film. For this I thank Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Jim Shedden, Clint Enns, Christine Lucy Latimer, Mark Loeser, Michael Zryd, Don Snyder, and Seth Feldman. Kathryn Elder, Sebastian di Trolio, and Brett Kashmere were a tremendous help in gathering research materials. iv Eva Kolcze, formerly of the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre (CFMDC), helped to facilitate my access to films and other research materials. Eva was also a great asset in navigating the status of these works, in finding the locations and condition of prints, and our many ongoing discussions, not only in matters of archiving and distribution, but as two emerging Canadian artists wrestling with this legacy, have helped me better understand the place of these works in the world. I completed this dissertation while serving as the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre (MLCRC) at Ryerson University, from 2012 to 2014. This research was also supported by a number of doctoral awards. These include the Ted Rogers Doctoral Fellowship (2008–2011), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2010), and the Liss Jeffrey Award for New Media Studies (2011). I owe a great debt to Cameron Moneo, who has spent countless hours working through these films and many others with me. Our common vision through the years has done much to shape my understanding of cinema, and whatever merit this work has to scholarship is his as well as mine. Likewise, Emmalyne Laurin has spent many hours working through and discussing these films with me, and her insights did much to illuminate my own thinking on this important body of work. Such bonds have been a respite from the tensions of this task, and have proven as necessary to my work as is the art itself. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 The Invention of Difficulty Chapter One 40 Homecomings: The Origins of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film Chapter Two 149 Careful Symmetries: Jack Chambers’ Hart of London (1970) Chapter Three 177 Glowing Hearts: Joyce Wieland’s La Raison avant la passion / Reason Over Passion (1969) Chapter Four 206 The Untethered Eye: Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale / The Central Region (1971) Post-Script 234 Endnotes 239 Bibliography 282 vi Codes of the North: Difficulty in the Origins of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film Introduction: The Invention of Difficulty The Canadian avant-garde film emerged through the work of three artists. Each bore separate stylistic and thematic debts, and each shaped those styles and themes to their distinct visions. Jack Chambers pursued painting and later filmmaking from his hometown of London, Ontario. He had returned to London after seven years in Spain, where he gathered his voice through the Spanish legacy of figurative painting and the mysteries of the Castilian landscape. Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, married artists, born in Toronto, had met in the mid–1950s while working together at the animation firm Graphic Associates. In 1962, they left Toronto to live and work in New York City, and there experienced the aftermath of abstract expressionism, a vacuum of colliding modern and postmodern movements, before their ultimate return to Toronto in 1971. This study will consider the aesthetic debts of these filmmakers, the metamorphosis of those influences into their individual styles, their major works, and the ways in which their art is fortified against ready comprehension, presenting perceptual challenges, resisting interpretation, and bearing complex meanings. Such difficult modern aesthetics manifested in the Canadian avant-garde film and became central to its character. These bodies of work became unified around an aesthetic of purposeful difficulty, even as the strategies, intentions, and perceptual character of the works remained distinct. Later, in the hands of artists who followed, a narrow set of themes and subjects would supplant the subtler unity of difficulty that had been sown through the major works, identified herein 1 as Joyce Wieland’s Reason Over Passion (1969), Jack Chambers’ The Hart of London (1970), and Michael Snow’s La région centrale (1971). In this introduction, I will outline four separate but interconnected areas that come to bear on this movement and that illuminate the critical construction of this dissertation. I will give a brief history of the ways in which an aesthetic of purposeful difficulty emerged simultaneously with the rise of modernism; I will present the discourse surrounding difficult aesthetics, will outline a pre-existing typology for difficulty in modern poetry, and in doing so will suggest ways in which it might be extended to art and aesthetics in general; I will address the consumption of difficult art, in relation to the common charge of elitism; and finally, I will give a cursory history of avant-garde cinema and its relation to poetry, to demonstrate the roots of its critical terminology in the study of modern aesthetics in general, but also, its specific implication in poetic tradition. Additionally, I am including a brief literature review specific to the subject, which situates this study within a small discourse of competing histories of Canadian artists’ cinema that has developed since 1989. The Invention of Difficulty Difficult aesthetics cannot be said to have a fixed point of origin, an hour of invention, much less to have entered the world as a symptom of the modern era. A long-advancing impulse toward difficult forms in art conspired with the epistemological transformations of the post-Victorian era to bring us into the modern, to create a difficult modern art, an art that is a contest of complex pleasures. Difficulty evolved in tandem with modernism, 2 a radical break from the past that simultaneously bound itself to that past. To map the evolution of difficult art is to map the precursors of modernism.

Load more