winnipeg's festival of film and video art thursday october 8 to sunday october 11, 2009

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Please join the Winnipeg Film Group for the release of our latest publication

PLACE , a 128 page book featuring 13 essays on 13 independent feature filmmakers from Winnipeg Wednesday October 21 2009

&(:HH6NH 5 – 7 PM &(;>ABB6@:GH &8>IN > 100 Arthur Street > Filmmakers and authors in attendance > For Sale: winnipegfilmgroup.com Festival Information...... 2

of Funders and Sponsors...... 3 table Schedule...... 4 contents Open Call Programs New Prairie Cinema...... 5 Avant Garde...... 6

Special Presentations All Fall Down, by Philip Hoffman...... 8

Video Alchemy: Tasman Richardson vs RKO (Paris) Live Video Performance...... 8

The One Take Super 8 Event Screening...... 8

Curated Programs Poetic Passages: A Philip Hoffman Retrospective...... 9 (special parallel presentation)

John Price: Second Childhood...... 10

A Fragile Transition: Past and Present in Chilean Canadian Cinema...... 12

Great Experiments Experimental Shorts... just for kids...... 14

Lectures, Panels and Workshops...... 15

Essays Poetic Passages: Thinking the Films of Philip Hoffman, by Scott Birdwise...... 16

John Price: Second Childhood, by Mike Hoolboom ...... 21

A Fragile Transition: Past and Present in Chilean Canadian Cinema, by Cecilia Araneda...... 27

Print Sources...... 29 Festival Information About WNDX More Established in 2006, WNDX places Information special attention on the most innovative and ground-breaking work by Canadian and Updates filmmakers and video artists, with a special focus on the work of Manitoba and prairie www.wndx.org artists. We celebrate the impetus to create in motion picture as a means of artistic expression and bring to the forefront works Credits Programmers and Curators: that may be overlooked by the mainstream. Cecilia Araneda, WNDX is a film festival that was created by Jaimz Asmundson, filmmakers, in support of filmmakers. Clive Holden and Solomon Nagler

Writers: Dates Cecilia Araneda, Scott Birdwise Thurs October 8 to Sun October 11, 2009 and Mike Hoolboom

One Take Super 8 Event: Tickets Alex Rogalski Festival Pass: $20 ($15 Students and Seniors) Festival Coordinator: Liz Barron Single Admission: $8 Festival Publicist: Leslie Stafford ($6 Students and Seniors) Website: Cecilia Araneda One Take Super 8 Event Screening: $5 all admission Digital Mastering: Jaimz Asmundson Great Experiment! Schedule subject to change Just For Kids Screening: Free To All © 2009 WNDX copyright for all essays Locations is retained by the writers Artspace - 100 Arthur Street (at Bannatyne) WNDX • Winnipeg Cinematheque, 304 – 100 Arthur Street main floor Winnipeg MB R3B 1H3, • PLATFORM, main floor Canada • Winnipeg Film Group’s www.wndx.org Studio, 3rd floor [email protected] The Gas Station Theatre - 445 River Avenue (at Osborne) 2 Funders and Sponsors

Operating Funder Project Funders

Canada Council Conseil des Arts for the Arts du Canada

Festival Sponsors

3 Schedule Festival Schedule thurs oct 8 fri oct 9 Special Parallel

Presentation 5 pm | Philip Hoffman Master Lecture on 5 pm | Panel Discussion: Diary Cinema – Cinematheque (pg15) Distributing Your Independent wed oct 7 – Cinematheque (pg 15)

7 pm | Philip Hoffman Retrospective I – 7 pm | New Prairie Cinema – Cinematheque 7 pm | John Price: Second Cinematheque (pg 9) (pg 5) Childhood – Cinematheque (pg 10)

9 pm | Philip Hoffman Retrospective II – 9 pm | Opening Reception – PLATFORM 9 pm | Canada Avant Garde – Cinematheque Cinematheque (pg 9) (pg 6)

sat oct 10 sun oct 11

5 pm | A Fragile Transition: Past and Present 12 noon | Video Vulture Workshop: the in Chilean Canadian Cinema – Cinematheque Jawa Editing Technique – Winnipeg Film (pg 12) Group Studio (pg 15)

7 pm | All Fall Down, by Philip Hoffman – 2 pm | Great Experiments Just for Kids – Cinematheque (pg 8) Cinematheque (pg 14)

9 pm | Video Alchemy: Tasman Richardson vs 7 pm | One Take Super 8 Event Screening – RKO (Paris) – Winnipeg Film Group Studio The Gas Station Theatre (pg 8) (pg 8)

11 pm | The Underground Party – Winnipeg Film Group Studio

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Open Call Program: New Prairie Cinema

Opening Night Screening Sitka Vacation Suit Thursday, October 8 (Olga Zikrata | Manitoba) (Paul Atkins + Ian Campbell @ 7 PM – Cinematheque – 5 mins, video, 2009 ) – 5 mins, video, * Manitoba Premiere 2009 Followed by a post-screening Sitka (“net” in Ukrainian) is composed * World Premiere opening reception of threads and ruptures into the folds of While on a European vacation, Bernie This program features innovative short memory, love and loss. Body, skin, touch, likes to be well equipped. His friend Chuck films and videos from creators working movement, man and woman, mother and acts as his guide. across the prairie region – Manitoba, son, memories are awash in a haptic Saskatchewan and . eroticism of film grain. all this way (robert.daniel.pytlyk | Loving the Bomb Intuition Saskatchewan) – 4 mins, video, 2008 (Alison Davis | Manitoba) * Manitoba Premiere (Sean Garrity | Manitoba) – 4 mins, video, 2008 – 5 mins, video, 2009 A human beings life essence, crystalized *Canadian Premiere to 5 minutes showing the cumulative * World Premiere Atomic positive propaganda and historical molecular residual patterning of the The prairies, when seen from the sky, accounts of nuclear explosions infiltrate the mental, physical and spiritual inner are etched with dark black lines, with daily existence of a family living in a town vibration from conception to death. intricate, canvas-like textures, like a supported by atomic bomb production. series of expressionist paintings, at turns reminiscent of Miro and Klee. Visages Revival (Lyle Pisio | Alberta) (Heidi Phillips Manitoba) – 8 mins, – 8 mins, 16 mm, 2008 Tourism video, 2009 * * Manitoba Premiere (aka A Hayseed in Hogtown) (Bryan Regional Premiere Ely discovers that his perception of reality Besant | Manitoba) – 3 mins, video, Words half-heard, momentary silences, depends on the face he chooses to wear. 2009* World Premiere sounds of technology and rhythmic Tourism Toronto is a Super 8 one take repetition create a hypnotic, entrancing Static experiment shot with the intention of soundscape to echo extensively hand (Tyler Funk | Manitoba) – 4 mins, generating audio from the film by capturing processed found film footage. Revival is video, 2009 geometric imagery shot frame by frame a spiritual search that gives us an inkling * World Premiere and lights utilizing a long exposure. of our ultimate destination. A tortured musician trying to cope with the need to create. Shatterglit Fair Trade (Robot Pasternak Manitoba) (Leslie Supnet | Manitoba) – 5 mins, video, 2009 My Life in Dreams – 4 mins, video, 2009 (Cam Woykin | Alberta / Manitoba) A human beings life essence, crystalized *World Premiere to 5 minutes showing the cumulative – 8 mins, video, 2008 A young woman experiences heavy My Life in Dreams follows a man’s trance- molecular residual patterning of the nostalgic trauma, as she purges herself mental, physical and spiritual inner like recollection of a recurring dream he from her past. Fair Trade is a story of has had since childhood. vibration from conception to death. one woman’s quest for a psychedelic transformation.

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Open Call Program: New Prairie Cinema

Going, going, gone... IKWÉ (Aubriand | Manitoba) – 3 mins, (Caroline Monnet | Manitoba) video, 2008 – 5 mins, video, 2009 A young girl’s dispute with her mother… * Regional Premiere and its unexpected poetic unraveling. She * WNDX Special Jury Prize waves to us, and as her turmoil disappears IKWÉ is an that weaves so does she. the narrative of one woman’s (IKWÉ) intimate thoughts with the teachings of her grandmother, the Moon, creating a surreal narrative experience that communicates the power of thoughts and personal reflection.

Open Call Program: Canada Avant Garde

Friday, Introduction à l’usure: R-10 lay claim to an island October (Pierre Luc Gouin | ) (Chris Kennedy | ) 9 @ 9 PM – 2 mins, 16 mm, 2009 – 12 mins, video, 2009 – Cinematheque This program features * World Premiere * Canadian Premiere innovative short films and Introduction à l’usure: R-10 is an essay Texts from the 1969 American Indian videos from creators working across on changes: changes through time, Occupation of Alcatraz and letters Canada, outside of the prairie region. manipulation and perception. Degradation from supporters propel an exploration is everywhere and it is constant; nothing of political yearning, emancipatory escapes it. In this introduction, Kodak architecture and failed utopias. What LoopLoop colour reversal 3383 film is treated with does it mean to claim land that has more (Patrick Bergeron | Quebec) Kodak R-10 bleach. Colours and shapes value as a symbol than as a potential – 5 mins, video, 2008 of the pre-exposed film are revealed home? And how does that symbol * Regional Premiere to create an ever-changing abstract function beyond the boundaries of its Using , sounds warping and landscape. geographic limits? time shifts this video runs forwards and backwards looking for forgotten details, mimicking the way memories are replayed Lacuna in the mind. LoopLoop is made from a (Shannon Harris | Quebec) sequence I captured in a train going to – 10 mins, video, 2008 Hanoi in Vietnam. * Western Canadian Premiere Lacuna: 1. an empty space or a missing part; a gap, an absence. 2. a discontinuity in an anatomical structure.

6 Open Call Program: Canada Avant Garde

Snap Shot Up the Chronicle Reconstructions Kim Kielhofner | Quebec) Rabbit Hole (Steven Woloshen | Ontario) – 4 mins, video, 2008 (Asa Mori | BC) – 5 – 3 mins, video, 2008 * Regional Premiere mins, video, 2008 * Manitoba Premiere “I watched a movie one afternoon * Regional Premiere I believe that filmmakers in the future and this is the story of that movie.” A surreal Super 8 dream will have to establish an archaeological A fictional story combined with my sequence unravels as a six- approach to their subject matter. Instead personal archives of photos. Together the nippled creature finds herself trapped in a of photographing images, we may have to story and images walk the line between capsule with a dead rabbit and a bloody dig them from the ground and paste them fiction and autobiography, hero and villain, hole. With trusty rabbit ears, she taps her together – film will look like today’s Dead humor and melancholy. way through bizarre TV scenes: Japanese Sea Scrolls. men on carousels, people in monster Kinestasis suites with balloons, and disturbing 1 to 8 (John Kneller | Ontario) garbage bags in bathtubs. (Amy Schwartz | Quebec) – 13 mins, 16 mm, 2009 – 5 mins, 16 mm, 2009 * World Premiere Resonance Mark * Regional Premiere Kinestasis consists entirely of advertising (Brian Kent Gotro | BC) A series of 30-second sequences, all based still images. They are collaged and – 4 mins, video, 2008 on the original frames of a super 8 mm film heavily image processed using a custom * Regional Premiere and re-worked on the optical printer using built 16 mm animation art table, showing Resonance Mark references the most difference rhythms and methods. A play on multiplicities from opposing sides of the serious of dramatic movie scores, then light and colour. capitalist coin. begins to visually deconstruct the imagery on screen before pushing it into total Block B audio-visual obliteration. (Chris Chong Chan Fui | Ontario/ Malaysia) – 20 mins, 35 mm, 2008 The Garden of * Regional Premiere Earthly Delights A building becomes a living painting. (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof | Ontario) The concrete homes and contradicting – 8 mins, 16 mm, 2008 (silent) soundscapes frame the lives of an * Manitoba Premiere expatriate Indian community in Malaysia. A visual duet consisting of a 16mm film and a 16mm photogram self-portrait collage. It is inspired by the earthly pleasures and wonders as revealed in the vibrant marvels of Stan Brakhage’s cinema, and in the central panel of the 1504 triptych by Hieronymus Bosch titled The Garden of Earthly Delights.

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Special Presentations

Saturday, October 10 @ 7 PM Saturday, October 10 @ 9 PM Sunday, October 11 @ 7 PM – Cinematheque – Winnipeg Film Group Studio – The Gas Station Theatre

All Fall Down Video Alchemy: Tasman The One Take Super 8 (Philip Hoffman) Richardson vs RKO (Paris) Event Screening – 94 mins, HDCAM, 2009 Now in its fourth year, the Winnipeg edition * Regional Canadian Premiere live video performance We’re casting a net, catching a broad sample of the One Take Super 8 Event is always All Fall Down is an experimental of disposable sounds and images and then an audience favourite. This year we will documentary that takes as its starting picking through them, reducing them to feature over three dozen minty new short point a nineteenth-century farmhouse in recurring themes, distilling the essence of works by Manitoba filmmakers from Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the what we catch and stripping away the fat and Winnipeg, Lac du Bonnet and The Pas! questions ‘what has been here before?’ the filler. We’re taking lead and making gold. The film weaves together a complex We’re using trash and mediocrity to create temporal structure that juxtaposes intense, immediate, sensational, spectacle. the lives of two figures, one historical Basically, it’s video alchemy. It’s clear that (Nahneebahweequa: a nineteenth-century our video cultures are so homogeneous Aboriginal woman and land rights activist) that very little national distinction remains. and the other contemporary (an ex-pat What does remain is unifying symbolism drifter and father of the filmmaker’s and universal experience. This performance stepdaughter) across two hundred years. will feature the two artists going head-to- The film is structured through Hoffman’s head using found media from their culture extraordinary landscapes of Southern to communicate in a non-language based Ontario, which make the temporal fabric video performance. shimmer, bringing us meditation on childhood, property, colonialism, ecology, and love.

* World Premiere: Berlin International Film Festival, 2009

*North American Premiere: Toronto International Film Festival, 2009

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Curated Program: Poetic Passages: A Philip Hoffman Retrospective

Curated by 7 PM – Philip Hoffman Cecilia Araneda Retrospective I – Cinematheque Introduced by Philip Hoffman Kitchener-Berlin (Philip Hoffman) - 1990, Wednesday , October 9 34 mins, 16 mm @ 7 PM and 9 PM – Cinematheque Kitchener-Berlin is a naming of recall, a Death, life, love, memory and loss together movement into the city’s Germanic traditions, comprise the essential stuff that forms and its rituals of memory, bereavement, 9 PM | Philip Hoffman the oeuvre of Canadian experimental and technology. It is Hoffman’s most frankly Retrospective II documentary filmmaker Philip Hoffman. “poetic” film, employing image phrases – Cinematheque Indeed, in an interview with Barbara across a wordless field of interlocking Sternberg, Hoffman acknowledges that fragments, gathering the sum of a diary ?O, Zoo! travel in overlapping movements that “not all filmmakers deal with death so (The Making of a Fiction Film) directly, or so often” as he has within his quietly course through a rectangle of body of work. And yet, this is just the start, introspection. - Mike Hoolboom (Philip Hoffman) - 1986, because there is no single way to merely 23 mins, 16 mm ‘watch’ a Hoffman film; when you enter passing through / torn In ?O, Zoo! Hoffman grapples with the darkened space of the cinema, you the Griersonian legacy of Canadian formations documentary cinema. Largely shot around become a participant within Hoffman’s (Philip Hoffman) - 1988, memories and you come to know Hoffman the production of Peter Greenaway’s A Zed 43 mins, 16 mm as a person perhaps better than you know and Two Noughts, the film constructs a passing through/torn formations yourself. - Cecilia Araneda labyrinthean fiction out of “documentary” accomplishes a multi-faceted experience materials, and places the story of a death for the viewer. It is a poetic document of Read the essay, Poetic Passages: at its unseen centre. - Images Festival family, for instance - but Philip Hoffman’s Thinking the Film of Philip Hoffman, by editing throughout is true thought process, Scott Birdwise, on page 16. What these ashes wanted tracks visual theme as the mind tracks shape, (Philip Hoffman) - 2001, makes melody of noise and words as the mind recalls sound. - Stan Brakhage 55 mins, 16 mm ‘If you had to make up your own ritual for death, what would it be? Would it be private or shared?’ asked his partner, Marian. Hoffman’s answer is this beautiful document. - San Francisco International Film Festival

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Curated Program: John Price: Second Childhood

Friday, October 9 @ 7 Naissance Gun/Play PM – Cinematheque (John Price) – 2008, 16 mm, (John Price) – 2006, 35 mm, 9:00 A selection of recent 6:00 minute version After shooting a strange episode that works selected and New life... rolls from before occurred spontaneously on a secluded introduced by John Price. and after. beach, I realized that there were two other rolls shot Read the essay, John Price: Party #4 years earlier that might Second Childhood, by Mike (John Price) – 2006, 35 mm, 2:45 work as a triptych. A Hoolboom, on page 21. subconscious reaction A special one for my first son.... his last as to the escalating gun a lone ranger (only child). Shot on double Remembrance Day Parade perforation black and white 16mm, the film violence in the city. (John Price) – 2005, 16 mm, 2:45 ran through the camera twice and doubled A somber parade shot on a laboratory the consumption of ice cream and cake. Camp #2 printing stock not intended to be used in (John Price) – 2007, 35 a camera. The roll was processed by hand Making Pictures mm, 7:37 in a very active developer. (John Price) – 2005, 35 mm, 13:00 A Thanksgiving weekend with the family at In May 2005, I was hired to work as a a duck hunting camp on the Ottawa River. Fire #3 camera technician on a (John Price) – 2003, 16 mm, 2:45 about a Canadian fine art photographer A hand-processed created who ‘makes pictures’ of massive industrial The Boy Who Died on a bitterly cold winter evening. In a projects. In that 3 week period our small (John Price) – 2007, 35 mm, 7:35 windowless bathroom with a single candle crew traveled constantly from one alien Impressions of Beauval, Saskatchewan and a roll of very outdated color print landscape to another to observe the during a day off while shooting a stock, it became - through the alchemy of photographer at work. There was something documentary film for Gail Maurice about light, silver, and color chemistry - a hazy, intense and odd about the exercise that I the dreams of aboriginal youth at different abstract hymn to the warmth of the sun. could not fully articulate in the moment. latitudes in Canada. The images were Something about the contrast between shot after hearing that one the subjects Eve the ‘work’ of the photographer and that we had followed for a week had been (John Price) – 2006, of the millions making appearances in a devastating skidoo accident. She 16 mm, 7:00 in his photographs. Though I was managed to survive despite the hours of thoroughly preoccupied with A regular under my exposure to the arctic winter night before the job that had brought me to Vancouver window for she was rescued. Her friend who was these unbelievable places, I did 6 months shown here at driving did not. manage to record tiny fragments her most tragic… a child of the trip with my own super-8 soliciting herself while camera. under the influence of crack. It is an excerpt from an earlier film “After Eden” completed in 2000.

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View of the Falls from Intermittent Movement The Sounding the Canadian Side (John Price) – 2005 – 2009, Lines are Obsolete (John Price) – 2006, 35 mm, 7:00 35 mm, 7:00 (John Price) – 2009, 16 mm, 10:00 In 1896, William Heise photographed the Disparate moments.... some shot on 16, some An irradiated time capsule of home movies first 35mm motion picture images of Canada on 35, some hand cranked, some not, some and human rituals... dark global forecasts at Niagara Falls. The 4 perforation camera spherical, some anamorphic, some black & refracting through the light of my sons system he used was designed and built by white, some color, some grainy, some not, eyes... a hand processed science fiction Thomas Edison and William K. Dickson. some solarized, some not, all processed documentary... The stock was manufactured by George by hand. The film was commissioned by Eastman to Edisons’ specifications. This Niagara Custom Labs for their “Short & film was photographed using the same Wide” 35 mm omnibus project. essential technology and is dedicated to the visionary ideas of those pioneers.

11 Curated Program: A Fragile Transition: Past And Present In Chilean Canadian Cinema

Curated by No Bikini In The Kingdom Cecilia Araneda (Claudia Morgado Escanilla) – 2007, of Shadows 35 mm, 9 mins, drama (Francisca Duran) – 2006, 16 mm, A young girl pretending to be a boy discovers Saturday, October 10 @ 5 PM 6 mins, experimental the freedom that comes with no bikini. Cinematheque In the Kingdom of Shadows documents There is one constant, and that it is there a paragraph being typeset on an early and we are here. But in as much as a new Bitten twentieth-century Ludlow Linecaster. The generation of Chilean Canadian filmmakers (Claudia Morgado Escanilla) – 2002, text is taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review have in common with each other, there 35 mm, 15 mins, drama of the Lumiere Brothers’ film Arrival of the are also significant differences. The A mysterious man meets a mother and Train at La Ciotat (1895). As the words melt trajectories of three filmmakers – Francisca daughter with some delectable secrets of into a pool of lead, the alchemical magic Duran (Toronto), Eduardo Menz (Montreal/ their own. of printing is linked to that of cinema. The ) and Claudia Morgado Escanilla work was commissioned by LIFT (Liaison (Vancouver) – reveal strong tendencies Angustia of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) for towards alternative forms of filmmaking, their 25th anniversary program, “Film is (Claudia Morgado Escanilla) – 1996, Dead! Long Live Film!” but have manifest themselves in different 16 mm, 5 min, experimental directions and paths. - Cecilia Araneda A long and lingering look at a woman seducing herself with caresses of poetry Time for Airports Read the essay, A Fragile Transition: Past and music. (Eduardo Menz) – 2009, video and Present in Chilean Canadian Cinema (5.1 surround), 16 mins, experimental by Cecilia Araneda, on page 27. There is time that drags itself out, a Mechanism / Organism chronology that hesitates, a present (Eduardo Menz) – 2005, video, moment that persists, hours that never 7 mins, experimental end, feelings of confinement, moments The methods of recording human movement of vacancy and unconsciousness, days have evolved; have humans evolved without a date, brief instants of an with it? With razor-sharp choreography ‘individual destiny’, a bombardment of and a pulse-pounding soundtrack this announcements in foreign languages, a work question’s photographer Eadweard synchronization of perpetual movement, Muybridge’s techniques for recording all occurring in a space of circulation that organic movement mechanically. Dance holds no history, yet a thousand stories in a represents organic movement, while the single moment. camera symbolizes mechanical movement; at different points within the work, the two movements become confused and merge as the dance becomes mechanical and the camera organic.

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Cuentos de mi niñez Las Mujeres de Pinochet (Francisca Duran) – 1991, 16 mm, (Eduardo Menz) – 2005, video, 9 mins, experimental 12 mins, experimental In this experimental autobiographical film, In this experimental short, the viewer is Duran remembers and recounts difficult invited to role-play through the repeated childhood memories of the 1973 coup in employment and alteration of the text, sound , when her family was forced into and image until his or her expectations exile. have been truthfully realized. This video examines class structure, the meaning of Retrato Oficial (2009) beauty and forgotten history through two (Francisca Duran) – 2009, very different but significant women during video, 4 mins, experimental Pinochet’s brutal regime of the late 1980’s. Retrato Oficial animates the desimulation and reconstruction of the great liberator Una Frágil Transición of Chile, nineteenth century revolutionary (Eduardo Menz) – 2009, video, and republican Bernardo O’Higgins, and 6 mins, experimental the historical reach of the late twentieth Unsettling found images are brought century dictator Augusto Pinochet. Based together to form a brief history lesson into in part on a conceit borrowed from Raul Chile’s past of the late 80’s and early 90’s, Ruiz’s essay “Images of Images” and a time that parallels the filmmaker’s own orginal footage shot by Patricio Guzmán childhood. As a child of the Chilean coup, on September 11, 1973, this short video is the filmmaker brings forth the notion of an exploration of the mediates image and looking in from outside. Through memory, the mnemonic possibilities of video and through history, through images – it seems still image technologies. – lies our humanity, our connection to our world and to each other. This work attempts Retrato Oficial (2003) to take part in this idea by expressing a (Francisca Duran) – 2003, political yet personal viewpoint into a small fraction of a country’s history and how 16 mm 1 min, experimental thousands watched from a safe outside. After declared unfit to stand trial in England, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet stands up out of his wheelchair and greets supports in Chile

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Curated Program: Great Experiments

Manitoba Experimental Praying Mantis Upskirt Bubble Canopy Shorts... Just for Kids (Allison Bile + Jenny Bisch) (Michael Stecky) – 2 mins, video, 2007 – 4 mins, video, 2002 Curated by Cecilia Araneda A swarm of mischievous Insects run amok An atmospheric video shot entirely with a in Saskatchewan. web cam using kitchen utensils, toys and and Solomon Nagler other household objects. Moving Sunday, October 11 @ 2 PM (Leslie Supnet) – 1 min, video, 2007 Super Feminist – Cinematheque – FREE ADMISSION We all leave things behind when we move. (Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan) 45 minute program suitable for kids 8+ – 3 mins, video, 2008 Quirky, fun and loveable – the recipe A Miracle A reworking of the Wonder Woman opening of many independent short films being (Daniel Barrow) – 3 mins, sequence from 1970s television, a new produced by Manitoba filmmakers right superhero kicks butt! here at home. Ranging from innovative video, 2003 A boy uses the light of the moon to make to fun performance work, this Winnipeg to Saskatoon collection of ultra short works will bring shadow puppets on his bedroom walls. (Brenna George) out the child in everybody! The Last of the Nepinaks – 2 mins, video, 2009 Cattle Call (Darryl Nepinak) – A sketched road trip video. (Mike Maryniuk and Matthew Rankin) 5 mins, video, 2001 – 4 mins, video, 2008 A young boy’s journey to the unkown. Automoto A high-speed animation documenting the (Neil and Cathy McInnes) art of livestock auctioneering. Primiti Too Taa – 5 mins, video, 2007 (Ed Ackerman and Colin Morton) An animated re-imagining of the –3 mins, video, 1988 filmmaking process takes place inside the Spider Pig ornately mechanized cinematic workshop Simply, an animated film made on (Scott Stephens) - 4 mins, video, 2007 of a wooden skeleton. Spider pig, spider pig, does whatever a a typewritter. spider pig does…

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Lectures, Panels and Workshops

Thursday, Oct 8 at 5 PM Sunday, Oct 11 @ 12 Noon to 4 PM Friday, Oct 9 to Sunday, Oct 11 – Cinematheque – Winnipeg Film Group Studio – Advance registration through the Winnipeg Film Group Philip Hoffman Master Lecture Video Vulture Workshop: 35 mm DIY Film Experiment on Diary Cinema the Jawa Editing Technique This master level workshop led by In this core lecture within his Independent The sound track is the image track when John Price is open to alumni of the Imaging Retreat, Philip Hoffman analyses music concrete meets scratch video in Winnipeg Film Groups S8 or 16 mm Film the construction of ‘truth’ within diaristic this cut and paste editing lesson for video Experiment workshop series, or people practices, and documentary in general, culture vultures. Why reinvent cinema with comparable hands-on photography breaking down montage constructions when we can pull clips from history experience. This workshop includes that create insinuated realities in viewers’ like words from a dictionary? What is hands-on instruction on a 35 mm non synch minds. This lecture is a co-presentation of subliminal micro composition? How can camera, along with a hand-processing WNDX and the Winnipeg Film Group. you build complex, layered, musical component. This workshop is a co- compositions using nothing but source presentation of WNDX and the Winnipeg video clips? What’s this JAWA stuff about Film Group. Maximum six participants. and where did it come from? Join Tasman Friday, Oct 9 @ 5 PM Richardson, the founder of the JAWA – Cinematheque technique (1996) and fellow guest artist RKO (Paris, France) for an explanation of Panel Discussion on what, why, and how. Bring your laptops, any timeline based video editor, and some Distributing Your Independent sample clips to follow along. Attendees Short Film will be provided with a pdf of notes, a For new and emerging filmmakers, history of JAWA, sample clips, and one navigating the festivals and presentation example video from each visiting artist. systems often seem like an impossible pursuit. This panel discussion and open dialogue with distributors and programmers - including Alex Rogalski, a programmer with the Toronto International Film Festival and Pablo de Ocampo (Images Festival) - will focus on how programmers assess and evaluate work, and key deciding factors that will impact their decisions.

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Essay: Poetic Passages: Thinking the Films of Philip Hoffman by Scott Birdwise

“looking through the lens experience of itself - the subject’s body as terms of media, I would place much of at passing events, well as its subjectivity, its “I.” According what is called Reality TV in this neurotic I recall what once was to Agamben, “Post festum temporality category.) Agamben takes epilepsy as his is that of the melancholic, who always second example of intra festum, where and consider what might be” experiences his own ‘I’ in the form of an the subject loses consciousness at the ‘I was,’ of an irrevocably accomplished moment of self-presence, the result of a Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan past with respect to which one can only kind of “ecstatic excess over presence” and Encarnacion (1984) be in debt” (125). The melancholic is (127). The subject’s experience of presence directed toward the past, ever seeking to either leads to a physical transformation reclaim the lost moment of an event only or death, both cases where the subject is Too Early, Too Late to feel that (s)he is “after the celebration,” altered irrevocably, where, especially in It seems so often the case with always already late, and, therefore, guilty. death, the subject ceases to exist as such. experimental film in Canada and elsewhere On the other hand, ante festum temporality The epileptic of intra festum would then not that one hears or reads about a film or “corresponds to the experience of the be a middle point between the melancholic filmmaker before one can experience any schizophrenic…For the schizophrenic, and the schizophrenic but rather a zone of the work - if one is tenacious or lucky the ‘I’ is never a certain possession; of indistinction between the two, an enough to come across the work at all, it is always something to be attained, undecidable oscillation between past that is. Indeed, in the Information Age, it and the schizophrenic therefore always and future, before and after. Indeed, for is far easier to come across commentary lives time in the form of anticipation” Agamben, “man seems necessarily to dwell on an experimental filmmaker than it is (126). The schizophrenic of ante festum in a disjunction with respect to himself and to see the work, especially in a public only ever looks ahead, experiencing the his own dies festus [‘day of celebration’]” screening. One, it seems, is always either present in relation to a projected future (128). Ultimately, the “I” is the space of too late or too early: if you read about the “celebration,” where (s)he becomes disjunction as such. I am tempted to offer, film first, you have of course arrived after in essence all of her/his potentialities, then, that the film screening itself is such the fact, for textual commentary is only without remainder. For this reason, the a disjunction, its own “ecstatic excess” ever secondary, at (at least) one remove, schizophrenic constantly risks arriving flickering between multiple temporalities, delayed, somehow inauthentic. Ideally, too soon, thus missing the moment. The light and dark, the image and nothingness. one sees the film first, with fresh eyes and schizophrenic is poised just before the To repeat, this is how I arrive(d) at the films an unbiased perspective, without the taint event, the melancholic, just after. of Philip Hoffman. of someone else’s interpretation; to see the film after a text is to somehow spoil the Does Agamben’s second category, First Person Cinema authentic experience. Paradoxically, one intra festum, reconcile these two poles For me, Hoffman’s films are a beautiful has arrived both too early (interpretation of human temporality and describe example of the strangest of coincidences too soon) and too late (always after the the event of “living in the moment,” and of the absolute workings of inexorable screening, after the event, etc.). Too early, however fugitive and fleeting it may be? fate. In their having given cinematic shape too late: this is how I arrive(d) at the films Agamben says no, for intra festum takes to the temporal condition of humanity, of Philip Hoffman. two shapes: one is a kind of obsessive Hoffman’s films are testimonies to a neurosis, where “the obsessive type continued engagement with discontinuity, The ambivalent nature of my arrival at seeks through repetition to document to a coherent and sustained exploration Hoffman’s films finds an illuminating his own presence at a celebration that of life before and after the “celebration.” parallel in what philosopher Giorgio constantly eludes him” (127). In her/his At risk of overshadowing the specificity of Agamben identifies as the three modalities efforts to assert and record her/his self- each of his works, I think that if we refer of human temporality: post festum, intra presence in the moment, the neurotic in to Hoffman’s oeuvre as a kind of “first festum, and ante festum. Agamben fact splits the moment and fractures its person cinema,” we can do so in the focuses his discussion on the subject’s unity through the force of repetition. (In 16 (implicit) terms of Agamben’s discussion of the melancholic and the schizophrenic, in their mutual implication: Hoffman Indeed, our (colonial) past weighs heavily the obsessive neurotic and the epileptic. shows us how experimental film is also on the past/future as an “I was” (I was Subjectivity, the “I,” caught in the a document of people, places and time; British, Indian, German, Czech, Chinese, intermedial, ever-changing flux of time, is of bodies and voices and breath and etc…), and the landscape, far from offering the disjunctive marker of time itself. The gesture; of how film can affect the very itself as the (American) frontier, responds “I” is the contingent and mutable, yet stuff of the world in a direct way and is not with a kind of echo of the question - an necessary, spectral presence of the body merely a question of aesthetics. He shows effect, perhaps, of its vast nature. Again, and the voice differentially related in and us how documentary is an intervention in Hoffman’s films navigate these questions to a community of speakers and listeners. and transformation of the world, as much by traversing the paradoxical space of That is, the performative utterance of the an exploration of the (im)possible as an intra festum, epileptically traversing the “I” is always struggling to catch up to the archive of the known. It is as if Hoffman’s space between the past and the future in body (just as criticism struggles with its films somehow remember back to when their use of the “I.” Allow me to furnish all object, the film); the “I” shifts from body to documentary and experimental practice of this with a couple of examples from two body, offering and exchanging its power. were one, before their solidification and of Hoffman’s diary films from the 1980s. objectification into distinct categories and Hoffman’s films stage (embody) the discursive systems. Against the positivist The Celebration and I encounter (relation) between the “too epistemologies and certainties of state Hoffman sets seemingly innocuous images early” and the “too late,” which often documentary, Hoffman’s experimental from a trip to Mexico and elsewhere turns on the function of memory. Indeed, documentaries are nonteleological and against a poetic text telling of the death if humanity’s temporal existence is the noninstrumental, open to the wellspring of a young Mexican boy in Somewhere ongoing to and fro of past and future, of difference that animates the world. Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion Hoffman addresses this by making Concomitant with this openness, however, (1984), a travelogue involving 28-second memory’s workings explicit in the very is the avowal of a profound unease takes with a Bolex camera. The image construction and reception of his films, and disturbance, a perpetual threat of and text are intimate with one another: which meditate on the conditions of cinema disconnection that leads to a sort of they do not didactically affirm the same as such. Again, Agamben is valuable in unreality, a corrosion of all foundation. point in unison but maintain their relative setting the terms of the issue. In one of his This is a risk in Hoffman’s films. autonomy - together, intimate, by virtue articles on cinema, he states: of their difference and disjunction. We This risk is something that never really never see an image of the dead boy and, seems to trouble Canada’s neighbour to in this way, it acts as a kind of absent Memory is, so to speak, the organ the South, at least in so far as its mythology centre to the film. The event of the of reality’s modalization; it is that is concerned. In Agamben’s sense, the US death is suspended, apprehended as which can transform the real into is schizophrenic, for in its emphasis on the something past that cannot be grasped, the possible and the possible individual and manifest destiny it looks yet continually suggesting the possibility into the real. If you think about it, ahead to the celebration when all things of future meaning in every potential that’s also the definition of cinema. coincide, when one is oneself and no one association each viewer constructs. Doesn’t cinema always do just that, else, in the moment. In The Road Ended at Indeed, the space of intra festum in transform the real into the possible the Beach (1983), for example, Hoffman Somewhere is between, and, it seems and the possible into the real?… meets beat generation filmmaker Robert to me, the strongest authorial imprint Cinema takes place in this zone of Frank in , only to find that he Hoffman makes in the film is his editorial indifference. (316) has arrived too late, that the moment (so choice to exclude the image of death. heralded in the writings of Kerouac and Hoffman’s “I,” then, is an absent centre Ginsberg) has passed. The mythology manifest in the suspension of the image. Often critics writing about Hoffman of the beats runs up against what I am In one of his most well-known films, stress how his films blur the boundaries reluctant to call a “Canadian experience,” passing through/torn formations (1988), between experimental and documentary which seems to partake of a melancholic Hoffman attempts to take stock of film, and it is to Hoffman’s credit that his temporality, where one is never fully memories from his mother’s side of the 17 work explores both but abandons neither. oneself as they perpetually ask where family, crossing back and forth between Rather, the two categories are exposed they are and why and how they got (t)here.

Essay: Poetic Passages: Thinking the Films of Philip Hoffman by Scott Birdwise

Czechoslavakia and Canada. Histories of and home movies testify to the presence of In this way, Technilogic Ordering is a kind birth and death, mental illness and war life and thoughts of prosperity; there, a city, of metacommentary on war and images, overlap in the peripatetic trajectory of the Berlin, Germany, is crumbling beneath the or, the war of/in images: the film questions film, with Hoffman adopting a multitude bombs of WWII; then, later, the population the sovereignty of readymade images that of perspectives from which he perceives of Berlin uncannily echo the inhabitants of presume not only to document or remember the fragments of family history. The “I” Kitchener at a mass. The two cities fates but, indeed, preemptively “think” for narrating the film is a singular-plural “I,” a are linked by logics of expansion and the viewer. In a sense, Hoffman’s filmic shared signifier of subjectivity. The centre technologies of vision, cinema not the least remediations expose and make audible the of the film, so to speak, is Hoffman’s among them. In Kitchener-Berlin Hoffman univocal silence at the centre of television’s description of his mentally disturbed uncle mobilizes the cinema to filter through the cacophonous “celebration” of war. Wally’s corner mirror, which, mirroring debris of the past: the separating and sorting itself, is said to show “the real you.” We powers of the cinema – its temporal as well Live(d) Cinema are told the mirror was constructed for the as spatial frame, its filters and depths of Thus far I have devoted attention to purposes of restoring Wally’s sense of self, field, its impositions and superimpositions some of Philip Hoffman’s early, explicitly which he believes was fractured in his – are used to suggestively conjoin the ruins autobiographical films and his work from youth. The central metaphor of the corner of place to the poetics of the trace. the early 1990s involving elements of war, mirror, then, embodies the experience of technics and representation. I would intra festum, at once situated between a Made in collaboration with filmmakers like here to consider a few of his later past traumatic event and a projection into Heather Cook and Steve Buston, works in light of a kind of poetics of film a future sense of wholeness (doubled, Technilogic Ordering (1994) explicitly takes and filmmaking, a lived cinema, where it of course, in the superimposition of past up problems related to the (re)presentation becomes increasingly apparent that for and present in the images and narrative of of war in a climate of audio-visual hysteria. Hoffman cinema is not merely something the film). passing through/torn formations The film is a construct of short sequences one does – to show or document life, say is a sustained attempt to possess one’s of snippets taken from the audio-visual – but in fact is something one does to live; own ungraspable nature, to articulate the simulacrum of television during the first that cinema is a kind of life; that cinema is epileptic experience of the “celebration.” Gulf War. These pieces are manipulated by inextricably bound-up with living, everyday. the home or consumer version of special Chimera (1996), for instance, is a form of War and Cinema effects, compliments of the VCR, into ever- travelogue, a documentation of places Hoffman brought an end to his changing patterns of grid-works, combining as disparate and diverse as Helsinki, “autobiographical film cycle” with images and sounds of rocket fire and Sydney, Leningrad, Egypt, London, and Kitchener-Berlin (1990), a dense, smart bombs with the utter banalities of Uluru, shot between the years of 1989 and multilayered meditation on his father’s side CNN commentary and television aerobics. 1992. The shooting technique of the film, of the family. It is a warp of interwoven (Incidentally, it is around this same time, however, opens the doors of perception trajectories; of the tissues that connect 1992 to be more exact, that Hoffman began to a far different logic of representation the personal and the political, exposed his Opening Series, an ongoing collection than what is customarily known to the via the cinematic linkage of the securities of film fragments structured according travelogue. The film employs the use of a and familiarities of Canadian domesticity to various processes of free-association super-8 camera with a single-frame zoom; with the destruction of a seemingly distant and interaction.) In this politically charged Hoffman radically slows down the film in war. The idea of home conjured by the work of reappropriation, Hoffman pushes editing and thus the viewer perceives the sum experience of Kitchener-Berlin is the fetishism of consumer images of war – images of the world in startling intensities profoundly, poetically dispersed: home aerobics and advertisements included – to bordering on abstraction, streaks of light is nowhere; home is now here. Here, a hyperbolic extremes, in the process giving and motion charging the frame with energy town, Kitchener (previously named Berlin), some sensitivity to the derangement of the somewhere between absolute movement Ontario, is in the process of being built and senses that is/was the representation – and stasis. There is something ontological that is, the extension – of war on television. 18 later being lived in: archival photographs about Chimera: it is about a way of being in the world, as Hoffman said in an interview, – a window flickering in the dark, a chorus image. At one point toward the end of the “Gathering speed.” Chimera is a document of answering machine messages, Hoffman film, we witness an image of Hoffman and of seeing, of seeing seeing; it is about life speaking to Marion and speaking to us - his camera; he is pointing it at what must manifested in the means of cinema; the but this stuttering is equally marked by an be a mirror. Suddenly, the image comes qualities of light and movement registering honest embrace of loss; fetishism of the apart and we realize we have been looking subjectivity in a medium. As Christopher past this is not. Rather, Hoffman excavates at Hoffman in the reflective surface of Rohde puts it in his article “Experiments numerous images and moments for the interior of an elevator. We have been in Disorientation,” “Chimera functions not something of what Barthes might consider watching both Hoffman and his reflection: only as a poetic evocation of Hoffman’s their “punctum” – a wounding detail outside a man and a door. We awaken to the fact own travel experience, but also as a historical or symbolic determination – and that we are with an image and that it took primer for the experience of travel itself… in the process shares with the world the the image to show us itself. The image It shows us not where to go, but how to be paradoxical, communal nature of death. opened: a gate. moved” (43). In life, one never loses something at the “appropriate” time – this is precisely why A closing line from ever present going past Jumping ahead in time to one of Hoffman’s things are lost. Death is the paradigm of the offers this: most affecting films, What these ashes order of losing and with What these ashes wanted (2001), we find the filmmaker wanted Hoffman explores the breakdown A garden includes water. coming to terms with the death of his of order that is the (dis)order of death – It also includes thirst. longtime partner, Marion McMahon. The the very condition of life - with the (dis) film is moved by the presence of death in order of film – one of the conditions of his The garden conjured here suggests many life and - through Hoffman’s public ritual of life. Hoffman is the bereaved husband and things, among them the archetype of the mourning – life in death. What these ashes filmmaker, at one and the same time, and his “original” dwelling of humanity in Eden, in wanted opens with the following lines plight to survive his living beyond Marion is a zone of indistinction between the natural from poet Mark Doty, and they capture a problem of filmmaking, of film-inhabiting, wild and the order of civilization; another is something of the profound link between with and through what Agamben calls the that the film image itself is a kind of garden, Hoffman’s lifeworld, the terrible event of “irreparable past.” included in its bounty the visual and aural death, and the art of filmmaking: material of the world. But the garden-image Poetry also includes its own loss, its own blindness – a thirst. Loss, blindness, thirst: these are What these ashes wanted, ever present going past (2007), the final some of the necessary conditions of life I felt sure, was not containment film I want to mention, speaks to many of and the cinema. The cinema – in particular but participation. the concerns I have already laid out with a form explicitly concerned with memory Not an enclosure of memory, respect to Hoffman’s cinema: the fleeting work such as documentary – not only but the world. nature of human temporality; the bonds between memory, history and cinema; the responds to loss and thirst, using its power zone of indistinction between documentary against (inevitable) ruin and decay, but is in and experimental film; the logic of war fact also a part of the process of loss and What these ashes wanted is less Hoffman’s and the image; and the intimacy of death thirst. The sensitive filmmaker opens her/ epitaph for his deceased partner – clear with life. Here, I want to briefly note how his film to this loss, to the always already and well-defined, formal in its presentation, this film haiku of sorts, composed with text passing. Recognizing this, Hoffman’s ever a sort of mastery - than a kind of working- by longtime Hoffman collaborator Gerry present going past responds to humanity’s through of intimacy in its many forms, Shikatani and only about seven minutes poetic need, however aporetic, to be in including: the intimacy of life and death, a long, beautifully takes up the question of the trembling space of intra festum, in man and a woman, a husband and a wife, how the image – verbal and visual - is a presence and absence, to sense loss and a grandson and a grandfather; the intimacy kind of “gate” through which one passes the passage of time, to claim an “I.” These of text and image, of sound and image, of to reconnect with sense impressions and, are the poetics of (a) life in film. pieces of film, of light and dark, of sense vice versa, with how sense impressions and nonsense, of the one and the many, and can be evoked in order to prompt/allow/ so on. The film stutters with Hoffman’s grief invite the viewer to “think” or engage the 19

Essay: Poetic Passages: Thinking the Films of Philip Hoffman by Scott Birdwise

A Passage Works Cited In this piece I have considered Philip Hoffman’s films in three superimposed, Agamben, Giorgio. yet ostensibly distinct, levels: one, my own Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Brooklyn, experience of his films within the context New York: Zone Books, 1999. of access, exhibition and reception (a situated, historical perspective); two, in “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben (an Films.” Trans. Brian Holmes. Ed. Tom McDonough. ontological perspective on the human Guy Debord and the Situationist International: condition); and, three, in terms of his films’ Texts and Documents (October Books). form and content (analytical, critical). For Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002. me, the consideration of one illuminates 313-319. the other, especially in regard to gaining a Hoolboom, Mike. sense of humanity’s (temporal) condition. “Duets: Hoffman in the 90s, An Interview.” Ed. Indeed, whether the result of convention Karyn Sandlos and Mike Hoolboom. Landscape or ideology, if we wander through our with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and lives in arrogant bliss or in misery without the Films of Philip Hoffman. Toronto, Ontario: history or connection, Hoffman’s films help Images Festival of and Video us to clear away our assumptions and & Insomniac Press, 2001. 211-221. readymade conclusions. In his attention Rohde, Christopher. to the disjunctive connection between “Experiments in Disorientation: Chimera.” Ed. historical and personal memory, between Tom McSorley. Rivers of Time: The Films of the subjectivity of the “I” and the body, Philip Hoffman. Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Film Hoffman’s practice subtracts ossified Institute, 2008. 39-43. certainties and adds to our collective spectrum of experience, reinventing our relation(s) to the past and the future. In Agamben’s sense, Hoffman’s cinema is *A shorter version of this essay appeared as “Tales of Hoffman (Expected Time of Arrival)” neither a repetition of nor an absolute in Rivers of Time: The Films of Philip Hoffman, difference from the world; it is, rather, an edited by Tom McSorley, and is available from the act of thought intimate with the world. Canadian Film Institute (http://www.cfi-icf.ca). Hoffman’s films invite multiple points of entry for they are passages that offer Scott Birdwise is a Programmer at the themselves without predetermined Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa, Ontario. He destination. If I arrive at Hoffman’s films in is currently completing a Master of Arts at the paradoxical state of too early, too late, Carleton University. His dissertation, a study of the videographic practice of Montreal artist so be it: it fits. I arrived. I arrive. I will have Dongian Cumming, is titled Life Support: The arrived. Now, where and how will his films Documentary Means Without End of Donigan take me? Cumming.

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Essay: John Price: Second Childhood by Mike Hoolboom

Precedents But unlike most home movies, John doesn’t I am a breathing, blood pumping, editing The Canadian fringe has had a long deliver a sentimental shorthand, or perform machine, collecting moments across the engagement with the home movie, from the act of covering up. Instead, his camera picture plane, putting them together as I Mike Snow’s Wavelength (a 45 minute is not afraid to encounter, to challenge, to choose, according to my own design. Even zoom across his home), to Joyce Wieland’s witness both the wonder and terror of his when the frame is still (which is rare), the Watersark a film famously made on her children. There is certainly awe in his first viewer grants it movement because of its kitchen table, to the post-colonial narratives glimpse of his newly born daughter with scale. Part of the mystery of his work is the of Richard Fung (My Mother’s Place, On the good light running across her belly, way John makes small things large. the Way to My Father’s Village). John and the placenta which is soon brought Price has stepped into this tradition of the into the garden. But his daughter’s face Politics untraditional, collecting and transforming is covered over in spots and hives, she is Common wisdom states that families and the sights and scenes around him, not a “traditionally beautiful” baby. Later art don’t mix. Who has the time to pursue recuperating the stuff of everyday life as on, interactions between the children do the idle dreams of art any longer? Yet John his material– the birth of his two children, not appear entirely harmonious. Instead, has stepped into this traditional dichotomy the incessant passage of the trans-national there is an interplay of close/distance, between work and life (and while his partner railway just steps outside his front door, of attraction and fear. When Charlie, Lea is everywhere present, he is very much and rituals of masculinity (hunting, fishing). John’s son, is shown a barnful of dead a primary caregiver, days and weeks are chickens hanging to dry, he is repulsed and spent with his kids, his priorities are clear). fascinated. Charlie becomes the locus of a But at the same time as he is living, as Home Movies generational conflict as his grandparents Most home movies are staged moving his children are running and swimming try to draw him closer to the world of these and learning how to talk, the camera picture albums. Getaways, birthdays animal deaths, while his mother intercedes and Christmas cheer events all stage the is turning, and the emulsion is shaking. to protect him. The filmmaker does not Everything is moving, and somehow, family. It is striking how generic most home weigh in on one side or the other, he lets movies appear, even as they aspire to magically, everything is moving together. the viewer decide; it is more than enough The old dichotomies have been left behind, show the intimate, the personal. How often to present these primal encounters. they return, in reel after reel, to the same at least for now, and in their place there themes, the same looks, the same gestures is an adventure of discovery. He is open (more presents opened, more squinting into Scale to receiving what is around him, and he the camera). This tendency was parodied One of the exciting things about John’s is busy using his many years of technical in Steve Reinke’s Excuse of the Real, the project is that he is intent on taking skills to make this possible without letting first of his The 100 Videos, in which he moments which are so very small — like it stop anything. He finds a way to express proposed making a documentary which his son Charlie eating a slice of chocolate his own fears and hopes and longings would require the use of home movies. “I cake on his birthday at the family’s lunch through his camera work, his daily living, would need some home movies, flickering table — and then blowing it up very large. and his chemical reinterpretations which super-8. I would use these as visuals. If my His shifts in scale elevate these acts and condense a hundred looks into a single roll subject didn’t have any, another’s could be make them into something very different. I of film. He doesn’t feel the important things used. Everyone’s home movies are basically have sat, thrilling, while the leaves of the in the world are happening “over there” the same and it would simply be a matter of theatre frame open wide to admit John’s or somewhere else, they are happening matching hair colour and body type.” scope film View from the Falls. The clarity where he is. How else but to understand and size ensure that I am able to move my this small-large cinema as a political eye across the vast picture, and create a gesture. living montage.

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Essay: John Price: Second Childhood by Mike Hoolboom

The Artist Says waiting for me to step into their well worn the one forever busy attaching itself to “I don’t make movies from scripts... there shoes? And then the art arrives, ready or nearly everything around him (that street are no actors... I shoot movie film like a not, the burn leaves an impression hot light is my street light, that bus driver traveller would shoot stills... as a diary or enough to be shared, to be seen by perfect belongs to me). Once he could let go of memory of experiences... travels... birthdays... strangers, a light visible for kilometers, the those stories, once he had run up enough christenings... break-ups... weddings... brightest star in the firmament. miles, his mind would clear, and then he parades... holidays... good-byes... using old would be ready to begin shooting. In other 16mm film and processing it myself is cheaper Second Childhood words, to notice what was right there in than going digital... the emulsion’s texture John Price became a child again in front of him the whole time. somehow communicates on an emotional the playground of film’s chemistry. He level and the process fascinates me... editing learned the difference between colour Clearing is like organizing a scrapbook... it is a process toners which worked into the shadows “So writing involves some dashing of reflection... who you were when the (the unspoken, the forbidden), and the back and forth between that darkening images were recorded and who you have tinters which headed for the light areas landscape where facticity is strewn and a become and how you have changed... how of a picture (the things which are too windowless room cleared of everything I everything changes... an intensive process much looked at, the clichés which must do not know. It is the clearing that takes of observation, meditation and reflection... I be made new again). He was one of those time. It is the clearing that is a mystery.” think it’s an attempt to communicate a sense handy men who knew how to fix things — (Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost) of the richness of humanity... the theatre of plumbing errors, wiring judgments, small the absurd... the fragility of past and present... structures — he could look at a thing and First Steps besides, friendship and loving is the only way know how it was made by the feelings John’s early movies found him running I know how to make sense of this place.” inside his fingers. His hands knew the some of his found fragments through (August 2001) secret of how things that look solid and wide-eyed, and occasionally wide-angled, forever can come apart just like that. And alchemical reworkings. There was a train how to put it all back together again. And The Story wreck in Saskatchewan (Wreck 4 minutes how temporary that is too. This is the way we learned to tell the 1997), a flag waving rally in Montreal story of tradition and the individual talent. (Nation 5 minutes 1997), a raging fire near The artist burns with something raw and In-tuition the Coulee Dam (Sunset 2:45 minutes unspoken and necessary in their youth, He’s a handyman. A handsome, curly- 1997), a hallucinogenic roller coaster ride and somehow it doesn’t manage to come haired, soft-speaking man’s man happy in Vancouver (PNE 2:45 minutes silent out of their mouth. It is before or after to let his pictures do the talking. Even 1996). These are moments of looking, language, or mathematics, or signs of at the beginning of the beginning, back sometimes just single rolls, each subject any kind. It doesn’t live out there, instead in school, where every step should be to a single, delirious chemical refashioning it is attached to the body, and to the outlined in chalk like a corpse and then that underlines the original moment of body’s media extensions, its necessary followed right up by the autopsy squad encounter. prostheses. So the young artist learns their — the scriptwriters and crew members craft — whether scratching on pewter, justifying the catastrophe of pre- Michael or mushing clay in their hands. The first production planning — he didn’t want any Everything John made was fine, or at efforts offer a screened glimpse of that part of that murder scene. Instead, like so least OK, or at least yes, that will do, a quiet burn inside that pushes the artist, many men before him, he liked the feeling pass, a workmanlike effort. Until he made hour after hour, to return to the studio, to of leaving, he lived to feel the road rushing nine + 20 (10 minutes 2001), the touching the material, to the thing inside that wants past him going fast nowhere in particular. film about his friend Michael Dolan, a to find its dreamed double outside. It’s only He found that when he was lost, when he dancer who talks casually to John about a story and yet. How many stories have I had run enough miles past his brain, he his hopes as they stroll together up the lived before now, and how many are left, could finally swamp the storyteller inside, 22 mountain in Montreal. In the end, facing a future whose only certainty is that they beach where the light will be perfect. And does all the work, OK fine, no problem, won’t be seeing much of each other any not simply this one day, but every day after no worries, the struggle of making can more, Dolan breaks into a dance, very day. This is how artists are made, from the go on pretty much as before. But if they casually, as casually as picking up a pen inside out, via a practice that is daily, every start having children, and actually pay or a spoon or a word because it’s the only step after step, and John was busy taking attention to them, I mean, noticing that thing that can save your life. The only way these steps, no doubt about that. Running these small humanoids are separate from you have left to say good-bye. the film through his fingers, his basement the artist, perhaps even taking a hand in chemistry, his chance encounters. This is their raising, even throwing themselves Practice how the story goes: the artist is dedicated, into the new life that surrounds them, then But this exceptional movie was the and resolute, and usually it is not enough. that’s it, sorry, you might as well hand in exception, mostly John was laying There are modest successes OK, but the your smock and beret and paint brush, down tracks. The artist steps up to magic, the shine, still manages to elude. because it’s over. No real artist could the microphone and says, “Testing, Or it lights up a small corner of his house, survive that. testing…” They are steps along the way, it might extend to his neighbourhood part of a necessary passage. And then the perhaps, where the other seekers, the That’s how the story goes. But with John catastrophic thing happened that is not other like-minded devotees, might come to it didn’t work that way. He and Lea found supposed to happen to an artist, a real witness. And then that passes away too. each other, and two years later they had artist, the ones staring back at us from the Charlie, and after Charlie came Estelle. And magazine racks. Or at least, this is how the After the initial burn, most artists give in, it’s true, it has to be said, the magic didn’t story goes. After the initial burn, the artist give way, give up. There’s no more, there’s happen right away. He was so stunned and pours their wordless heart into makings nothing left to say, real life decisions about excited and astonished about Charlie that of every kind, and then the burn is spent. how to make a living need to be made. As he couldn’t stop shooting him, and then These efforts may be noticed or unnoticed, the artist gets older, the walk becomes a rewinding the camera and shooting more they may bring gallery dealers and buyers little steeper. It’s harder to stay up all night of him, until he had made ten thousand and fame or nothing at all. Sorry for being when the joints hurt, when the results dreams (6 minutes 35mm 2004), a footnote in the wrong place at the wrong time. aren’t coming quickly enough, when of a home movie, and then there was The Sorry for not fitting into the prevailing you’ve already been there through the Almanac (52 minutes 35mm 2005), shot wind of ideas. (Most of us fit the economy night after night. The happy and inspired with a small, hand-cranked 35mm motion of present ideas very well, but we don’t fit moments don’t look quite as fine whenever picture camera, offering observational urgently. We are footnotes, another thing you show them to anyone else, in the vignettes which didn’t quite become more in a world already too full of them.) presentation instant those monuments to than the sum of its handsome parts. cinema shrink back down into something Visibility, or the knack of being noticed, that looks plain and ordinary. And then Making Pictures strikes artists like lightning. Randomly, here you start to wonder: am I just an ordinary But after that he found himself at the crux and there, once in a while. Luck has so person, living an ordinary life? An ordinary and crossroads, all of a sudden he was much to do with it. And drive. Please don’t artist, making ordinary art? making the movies he was supposed to let them tell you any different. Talent? Sure, make all along. It’s true, the initial burn it’s always fine if you have talent, but talent Kid Stuff was gone, drawn out in a raft of emulsion is a luxury few can afford, and is actually Let’s go back to the story, the way it experiments and happenstance. But pretty far down the list of what is required to always goes. The home truth. The gospel. now there was a renewed purpose to his be an artist. Drive, for instance, is a hundred The artist does the best they can, and shooting. For me it begins with Making times more important than talent. The urge sometimes that’s good enough, and Pictures (13 minutes, 35mm b/w 2005). to get up at three in the morning and start sometimes it’s not. And then they get cutting your movie. The need, the absolute older, and make the unthinkable decision “I shot some super-8 in China that I blew uncategorical necessity to motor for three to find a life partner. The old story goes up to 35mm and hand-processed which days across the country, nearly sleepless, that if they get married to someone who looks almost like things are happening in a in order to make it to a certain deserted 23

Essay: John Price: Second Childhood by Mike Hoolboom

blizzard... gigantic grain that documents The people in them are small and crushed big swelling sections all heaving together, Edward Burtynsky shooting with his and part of some larger (globalized) project it’s just as good to dedicate oneself to this grainless 4x5 camera... and Peter Mettler of power (electricity for the new century). small moment. In John’s work, this impulse shooting super-16mm off a tripod. Despite often takes the shape of a single roll – shot the fact that there is no sound, I sense Behind the photographer Peter Mettler between madcap beer adventures at his that the film will end up as a critique of works his own camera charms for kid’s birthday parties, or up at a friend’s the documenting process. My camera Jennifer’s documentary. And between cottage, or at the side of a road. They are managed to see both things going on at the these poles of representation, between moments caught in passing, and then same time: people working with cameras image and tragedy, daily life and work, is run through his chemistry maneuvers. and people working with concrete and the super-8 camera of John Price, flinging But he always wanted more, even at the steel. It makes the observers seem his body into other bodies, meeting their beginning. He had rolls of silver happiness completely out of place in the landscape look, walking their streets, searching for filling the drawers, but weren’t they all (which they are). I created shots on the a place to begin the work of greeting. really part of the same film that he had optical printer, fading in from white into These are pictures made between other been making all his life? Couldn’t they a still frame of Ed, or a peasant, or a pictures, between frames, in the off time, be coaxed together to produce a larger landscape, and then it comes to life for the margins, when the real work has been statement, a more sustained reflection? Oh a bit, and then usually ends on a freeze done. He rushes into these off-camera God, how he tried. He got into the habit of frame of a child, or a couple of children, or spaces with deliberation and an empty spending long months in the editing room, a group of children... and then it fades to mindfulness, guided by voices, because sweating the relations between instant of white. It was an amazing process that way, to work of looking has not yet ended. shooting which had been gathered on the no video transfer, just the super-8 that I Back home, he looks at these raw camera fly, trying to push and pull them into some processed as a negative in the projector rolls through another camera, finding a kind of larger shape, trying to find some and a bit of guesswork. Not a lot of editing structure for these live moments through subterranean current that ran underneath was required, more like sequencing.” a camera’s camera, an optical printer, all that looking. Running the pictures over where he makes a blow-up (“live”), and over. After Eden (30 minutes 2000) was Could it be his best movie? Not that there freezing frames and sending them into both a summary work and a portrait of his has to be a best here in the fringe we white oblivions before allowing the next Vancouver life, with one eye fixed on a rear have done away with tops and bottoms, encounter to appear in all its daily opacity view mirror that kept changing focus. And except when it gives us pleasure (when and wonder. His looking is an invitation then there was his travelogue Passages we want to try that on too). In order to and a refusal. Can you follow? Yes, (24 minutes 2003) that probably cost him a pay for the habits of his living (a roof for absolutely. Can you see what I see? No, couple of summers, huddled together with instance, his old car fetish) he works as it is too singular, too wrapped up in the his pictures in dark rooms, trying to develop a camera assistant on mostly sub-optimal life of John’s body, and the strangeness a conversation between a few rolls he shot movies, large budget spectaculars of the bodies which he meets, which he while wandering through the remains of requiring dozens to produce the place meets without meeting. But nonetheless, empires abroad. where an image could be, if there was between these blank punctuations there one. But occasionally there are gigs of are moments which open the heart. More These retrospective stitchings were never another kind, like Jennifer Baichwell’s than we dared hope for. quite as perfect as each individual stand. documentary on Canadian photographer He was making beautiful pictures, but Edward Burtynsky. Shot largely in China, The Devil in the Details they weren’t flowing together. It’s as if he at the site of ruinous dam projects which Perhaps he is most at home as a had beautiful words which didn’t want to have tragically displaced hundreds of miniaturist. Never mind the symphony, collect into sentences. Now what? thousands across the country, Baichwell the orchestra, I’ll just sit here at the piano follows Burtynsky as he maps out his bench and lay it down one note at a time. coolly framed, large format panoramas. I don’t need the curtains, the baton, the 24 Rescue some of the earlier work strived for. Even his to Edison’s specifications. This film was His children came to the rescue. All of throwaway moments are golden, like Party photographed using essentially the same a sudden there was no more time to be 4 (2:45 minutes, 35mm, 2006) which shows technology and is dedicated to the visionary spent on the editing machine, rolling the Charlie’s second birthday party, smeared in ideas of those pioneers.” (John Price) same images over picture heads in every chocolate cake and ice cream, all shot in possible configuration. Instead, there the kitchen with a doubly exposed wind-up The opening gesture is in colour, in a wide were diapers to be emptied and urgent camera which takes these tiny joyfuls and screen extravagance that turns watchers wordless needs that needed deciphering blows them up outrageously. Or gun/play (9 into watched. The tourists have gathered over a hundred sleepless nights. If he minutes 35 mm, 2006), a three-parter which round the world to gape, and owing to was going to keep making movies, he finds him running around with a young boy John’s chemical magics they appear was going to have to find the in-between and his trusty weapon, and then alongside reconfigured, touched, and transformed. moments, in other words, like so many his own father in a grainy bird watch, and They have come with their large bellies artists before him, John’s process had to finally looking on as a boy makes disturbing and small digital cameras to try to keep change. This crisis was also (like every and enigmatic gestures at a beach. Or a distance, to try to keep the miracle crisis) his opportunity, the way out of his Naissance (10 minutes 35mm 2007) which from happening. But what is astonishing own blind spots. What he was supposed to narrates (in silence) the birth of Estelle, about the Falls, viewed and reviewed on do was build a wall and stay on the other the afterbirth luminescent in John’s hands postcards and T-shirts and Marilyn Monroe side, or get angry, or simply drop the whole as he buries it in the backyard garden, movies, is that the encounter itself strips all situation like a thousand thousand other Lea’s nipple glowing like some lighthouse of that away. Some old wonder continues, neglectful fathers, never mind artists. But beacon for this new life. and by running the footage through his instead he opened both arms and swan chemical soaked hands, John adds a dived into fatherhood, reveling in every He followed up with his reigning devastating light that comes up out of the moment, feeling his feelings and theirs, masterpiece (so far), View of the Falls watery cascade. content to let the movies take a second from the Canadian Side (7 minutes, 35mm, place, knowing that some bit of his footing, 2006). Shot with a small, hand-cranked, When the tourists are released, after a his core, was bound up in that making, that 35mm camera, Price visits a tourist’s single camera roll, the Falls appear in black he needed to make a little window of time playground and returns with the mystery and white in single rolls arriving out of a soft for it so he would feel alright. But that was intact. Instead of using his camera as a focused haze, and then dissolving back into ok, he had a new subject now, the miracle shield, to protect himself from seeing, it (which permits the processing marks, in of his boy. He had never thought he could here he strips away the layers of culture watery baths of a different kind, to be seen love anyone as much, for as long, or accept and artifice and returns us, in a sublime more clearly.) How to see what has been so much, and then his girl Estelle came, chemical reworking, to a primal scene seen too often, how to make visible what and it all happened again. of witness. Those vast supernal bodies of becomes invisible not via repression, but light: they’re us! He shoots both the tourists through overexposure? The steady pulse and Niagara Falls, and lets us wonder at of these pictures, turning in and out of the Children not art vampires both parties, marvelous and mysterious. focal plane, allows the Falls to become He was supposed to become a sleep- visible, exactly because they are so fragile deprived, baby-talking, ass wiper who “A film commissioned by LIFT (Liaison of and momentary; this small window of focus would cry while reading Christmas cards. Independent Filmmakers of Toronto–a film is already slipping away even as it appears. But I think it’s only after the birth of his kids production co-op) for its Film is Dead-Long I accompanied John on one of these that John has really come into his own as Live Film omnibus project. In 1896, William excursions, and it was a mid-afternoon a filmmaker. He continues to be drawn to Heise photographed the first 35mm motion delight to see him set up his small wooden moments of a landscape, or a child’s face, picture images of Canada at Niagara box of a camera, entirely blind (there is no or an afternoon spent in the company Falls. The 4 perforation camera system he way to see “through” the camera”, rather, of his friend’s children. But these brief used was designed and built by Thomas it is pointed towards the subject in wide- observational bits are now made with a Edison and William K. Dickson. The stock angled hope), steadily cranking profound assurance, even an easiness, that was manufactured by George Eastman 25

Essay: John Price: Second Childhood by Mike Hoolboom

the film through the device after looking The Present and looking again. I think he exposed two He doesn’t have to drive across the country rolls that day, a couple of minutes at most, anymore to stop the storyteller any longer, which were taken home and processed in his kids look after that for him. He was his basement. That was the beginning of his never a planner, a conceptualist, he was camera visitations, the movie took shape never married to the big idea. What he has as a result of the evidence, the encounter, found, in his playtime and child rearing, and the act of seeing with his own eyes. Editing an admission that experience needn’t be meant cutting these rolls together, end to curtailed by the Frontal Lobe Surveillance end, in between playing with his son Charlie Society day and night. and his daughter Estelle. The wonder of their appearance arrives in the basement What makes John so special as a person, chemistry because he is busy all day letting and as an artist, is that he is really here. them teach him how to see, how to turn the Right here in front of you, right there on neighbourhood into small wonders just like phone, right here behind his camera. He’s this. A crack in the concrete. A patch of not wishing he was somewhere else, or grass folded back, leaving the impression complaining about how it is, instead, he has of a head. The cataract of water. In the learned the most difficult art of all, which final roll of the film the spectators leave, is to embrace and accept what is actually rendered in high contrast black and white, going on. When I speak with John, which their bodies glowing with the charge of all is not nearly often enough these days, I feel they’ve seen. Then it’s time to go home and him pulling me here alongside him. Come live those miracles. here. Come now. He urges me in the softest way possible. In this, as in all the important matters in his life, he takes the lead from his children, who are his first and best teacher. Let them take us out of the prison house of adulthood. Watching John run alongside his kids I understand at last: we only live twice.

Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He feels lucky that the fabulous John Price is his friend.

26

Essay: A Fragile Transition: Past and Present in Chilean Canadian Cinema by Cecilia Araneda

There is one constant, and that is that it coming to Canada in the early 1980’s, when differences for granted, with the result that is there and we are here. But in as much she was in her twenties. In as much as she they come to be perceived as the natural or as a new generation of Chilean Canadian is clearly Canadian, she has also clearly the norm...” (363). Indeed, this is clearly the filmmakers have in common with each other, retained her identity as an unhyphenated case with her most recent work, No Bikini, there are also significant differences. Chilean at the same time, reflected in the very where the ‘freeing’ effect of being released Chilean practice of utilizing both of her family from the bikini top is not only literal, but The trajectories of three filmmakers – names. The fringe within which Morgado also figurative as well, and presented in Francisca Duran (Toronto), Eduardo Menz Escanilla works, in terms of the alternative a way that is completely devoid of any (Montreal/Edmonton) and Claudia Morgado nature of her work, is not the impact of a complications of self-doubt or negative Escanilla (Vancouver) – reveal strong complicated geo-political history on an ramifications from society. At the same tendencies towards alternative forms of expanded sense of self within the world, time, however, Morgado Escanilla’s work filmmaking, but have manifest themselves but rather rooted in challenging established is not devoid of references to the Canadian in different directions and paths. Born in notions of female sexual identity. immigrant experience. In the article “The big different decades, in different countries and picture: Looking at immigrant filmmakers”, subjected differently to what is the single Indeed, Morgado Escanilla is most published online at canadianimmigrant. defining moment in modern Chilean history known for the strong LGBT thread that ca, writer Margaret Jetelina notes that the which defines and polarizes still runs through her work, including being immigrant experience is always a part of to this day, 36 years after the fact – the recognized with a Teddy award at the Morgado Escanilla’s work. “My immigrant Chilean coup d’etat of September 11, 1973 prestigious Berlin International Film Festival self is there because the music is Latin or and the aftermath that followed – as well in 1996 for her short docu-drama Unbound one of the characters is a little darker than as living in culturally-distinct different (1996), where sixteen women of different the rest. It’s always there,” Jetelina quotes Canadian cities, these three filmmakers cultural and religious backgrounds free the filmmaker. leave no doubt that they are working within themselves from society’s expectations and the fringe (in Hoolboomian sense of the stereotypes as represented by the bra. Her Unlike Morgado Escanilla, Duran and Menz word), as neither wholly Anglophone (or most recent work, No Bikini (2007) – a work broach topics that are more common among Francophone) and revealing a sense of equally as well received as Unbound – is a second generation immigrant Canadian separation from the mainstream, but yet short drama that traverses a similar terrain, experience of living with a split cultural without a sense of disenfranchisement as the young protagonist decides to take identity – one which was experienced from it. swimming lessons free of her impractical within the home while growing up and the bikini top. other beyond the door to the outside. In Though Duran and Morgado Escanilla have this context, Chile (the mother country) is close ‘surface’ similarities – both females In the chapter “Beyond the Homeland: more a mythology than an actual place. close in age and both born in Chile – it is Latino-Canadian Film and the work of Menz explains, “I do think that culture partly actually Duran and Menz who demonstrate Marilú Mallet and Claudia Morgado,” of the defines and artist’s practice... I have always similar trajectories in terms a habitual back anthology Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, questioned my own identity because of and forth weaving between grappling with scholar Elena Feder notes that in Morgado the conflict between my birthplace and my the impact the coup had on their personal Escanilla’s films is an “absence of culture and I have tried to examine that issue identities and pure technical experiments discourses of belonging... Issues pertaining with some of the videos that I have made.” In in moving image, for Duran in film and to the representation of ethnic, national, a very parallel explanation, Duran notes “All Menz in video. or subnational identities are depicted as of my work deals with Chile (or my particular simply one element among many within experience as a Chilean and as a Canadian) During the 15 years that followed the coup, a wider cultural field...”(362-363). Feder even when it is not overtly mentioned in the Duran and Menz lived mostly Canada observes that Morgado Escanilla’s mode of work. These ‘cultural’ connections are a - indeed, Menz was born here – while working “is to take not only homosexuality part of me, difficult to tease out.” Morgado Escanilla lived mainly in Chile, but also national, ethnic, and linguistic 27

Essay: A Fragile Transition: Past and Present in Chilean Canadian Cinema by Cecilia Araneda

But, at the same time as Duran and Menz For Duran, her work is an exploration of WORKS CITED engage in socially aware works that often “the intersection points of memory, history address square-on the contradictions of and technology within a poetic framework Feder, Elena. public interpretations of recent Chilean that reveals that material presence of “Beyond the Homeland: Latino-Canadian Film political history, their methods of working in the film (or digital) medium.” Indeed, the and the Work of Marilú Mallet and Claudia Morgado.” Ed. Jacqueline Levitin, Judith experimental forms spoke out from a centre materiality of the medium with which she is Plessis and Valerie Raoul. Women Filmmakers: that moves beyond – or, perhaps, which working is always a foreground presence Refocusing. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2003. is a natural extension of – addressing the in her work, as much in her ‘non Chilean’ 347-369. Chilean roots of their personal identity: in work (In the Kingdom of Shadows (2006), Duran’s case, a search for remnants of that which documents a paragraph being Jetelina, Margaret. which has been lost, and in Menz’s case a typeset on an early twentieth-century “The big picture: looking at immigrant mode of assembly that forces viewers to Ludlow Linecaster; Mr. Edison’s Ear (2003), filmmakers,” Margaret Jetelina, Brian actively participate in the construction of an exploration of the nature of sound and J. D’Souza and Sarshar Hosseinnia. canadianimmigrant.ca. reality they are perceiving. how we learned to capture and reproduce it over time), as in her ‘Chilean’ work, most Menz notably repeats a pattern of ‘inviting’ especially through her in-progress, multi- Cecilia Araneda is a filmmaker and curator who viewers into creating meaning within year Retrato Oficial series. was born in Chile and came to Canada as a his work, first leading them into an initial child with her family, immediately following the conclusion through juxtaposed sound and And yet, as both cycle into other themes Chilean coup d’etat. image, and then guiding them from that within their body of work, Menz and Duran’s point to a greater awareness of meaning. most personally affecting work is directed This mechanism of construction is squarely specifically to audiences who comprehend evident with Fracas (2007), which juxtaposes first-hand the cultural markers they are children’s school portraits with the voices of playing with - Chilean who have children participating in a spelling bee to an spent most, if not all, of their lives in Canada: ominous conclusion, and repeats itself as the transformative meaning of flying and the underlying framework to varying levels flight, the human degradation of the Chilean in other works, also very strongly in Las coup as an image system that serves as Mujeres de Pinochet (2005). the symbol of the root of separation, the mythology of martyred Chilean President and a fluid shift between Spanish and English without translation into the other.

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Print Sources by Director Name

Atkins, Paul (and Campbell, Ian) – [email protected] Aubriand (O’Brien, Carole) – [email protected] Bergeron, Patrick – [email protected] Besant, Bryan – [email protected] Campbell, Ian (and Atkins, Paul) – [email protected] Chong, Chan Fui (Chris) – [email protected] Davis, Alison – [email protected] Duran, Francisca – [email protected] Funk, Tyler – [email protected] Garrity, Sean – [email protected] Gotro, Brian Kent – [email protected] Gouin, Pierre Luc – [email protected] Great Experiments Just for kids program – [email protected] Harris, Shannon – [email protected] Hoffman, Philip – www.philiphoffman.ca Kennedy, Chris – [email protected] Kielhofner, Kim – [email protected] Kneller, John – [email protected] Menz, Eduardo– [email protected] Monnet, Caroline – [email protected] Morgado Escanilla, Claudia – [email protected] Mori, Asa – [email protected] Pasternak, Robot – [email protected] Phillips, Heidi – [email protected] Pisio, Lyle – [email protected] Price, John – www.filmdiary.org Pruska-Oldenhof, Izabella – [email protected] Richardson, Tasman – www.tasmanrichardson.com RKO (Paris) – www.vidioatak.org robert.daniel.pytlyk – [email protected] Schwartz, Amy – [email protected] Supnet, Leslie – [email protected] Woloshen, Steven - [email protected] Woykin, Cam – [email protected] Zikrata, Olga – [email protected]

29 thurs oct 8 Philip Hoffman Master Lecture on Diary Cinema 5 pm | Platform New Prairie Cinema 7 pm | | Opening Reception @ 9 pm on distributing your independent short film fri octPanel 9 Discussion 5 pm | John Price: Second Childhood 7 pm | Canada Avant Garde 9 pm |

sat octA Fragile 10 Transition: Past and Present in Chilean Canadian Cinema 5 pm | All Fall Down, by Philip Hoffman 7 pm | Video Alchemy: Tasman Richardson vs RKO (Paris) 9 pm | Live Video Showdown @ WFG Studio

sun oct 11 Video Vulture Workshop: the Jawa Editing Technique @ WFG Studio 12 pm | | Great Experiments Just for Kids screening (FREE!) 2 pm The One Take Super 8 Event @ The Gas StationScreenings Theatre + 7 pm | Events are at Cinematheque WNDX Pass: $20 (100 Arthur), ($15 students/seniors) unless specified. Single Tickets: $8 www.wndx.org ($6 students/seniors) Super 8 Event: $5 all admissions

WNDX Passes include all screenings + events and are available for advance purchase at the new Artspace Kiosk. Single Tickets are available at the door.