GREG CURNOE’S HOME MOVIES: RECORDING AN ORAL HISTORY COMMENTARY by Jesse Brossoit BA, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, 2013 A thesis presented to Ryerson University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the program of Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2016 © Jesse Brossoit 2016 Author’s Declaration for Electronic Submission of a Thesis I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I authorize Ryerson University to lend this thesis to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I further authorize Ryerson University to reproduce this thesis by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract Greg Curnoe’s Home Movies: Recording an Oral History Commentary Master of Arts, 2016 Jesse Brossoit Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management Ryerson University This paper documents an applied oral history project that focuses on the moving image works of Canadian artist Greg Curnoe (1936-1992). In order to document these works in a manner appropriate to their subject matter, a series of oral history interviews were arranged with a group of the artist's friends and family. Participants were asked a series of questions and were shown footage from a selection of Curnoe's films and videos, including two 16mm films—No Movie (1965) and Souwesto (1969)—and a three-part video series entitled The Laithwaite Farm (1974). While watching these works, the participants were asked to comment aloud and their resulting commentaries were recorded and transcribed for the E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Also included in this paper is a brief analysis of these oral history documents, as well as a history of Curnoe's work with moving image technologies. iii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my first reader, Dennis Reid, for his guidance, patience, and words of encouragement over the last few months. I would also like to thank Maia Sutnik for reading this paper and for providing comments and suggestions. During my time at the AGO, I was helped immensely by Special Collections Archivist, Amy Furness, and by my residency supervisor, Sophie Hackett. Thanks are also extended to the faculty of the FPPCM program at Ryerson University, who all provided feedback on this project at different times in its various stages of development, and to the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre for providing the digital transfer of Greg Curnoe's Souwesto. Lastly, I would like to thank the oral history narrators for agreeing to be involved in this project in the first place and also for being so generous with their time and memories. iv Table of Contents List of Appendices vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Literature Review 4 1.1 On Greg Curnoe 4 1.2 On Home Movies and Moving Image Preservation 6 1.3 On Oral History Theory and Practice 8 Chapter 2: The Greg Curnoe Fonds at the Art Gallery of Ontario 10 Chapter 3: Methodology 12 3.1 Oral History 12 3.2 Technology and Formatting 16 3.3 Transcription 18 3.4 Interpretation and Evaluation 20 Chapter 4: Summary and Discussion 22 Chapter 5: A Brief History of Greg Curnoe’s Films and Videos 30 Conclusion 39 Bibliography 40 Appendix A: List of Greg Curnoe’s Known Moving Image Works 43 Appendix B: Oral History Transcripts 45 v List of Appendices Appendix A: List of Greg Curnoe’s Known Moving Image Works Appendix B: Oral History Transcripts vi Introduction This paper documents an applied oral history project that focuses on the moving image works of Canadian artist Greg Curnoe (1936-1992).1 Beginning in the 1960s, Curnoe was among a group of artists working in London, Ontario that began to champion their everyday lives as the raw material for their art. This informal movement later became known as London Regionalism. Indeed, as one of the leading advocates of regionalism in Canadian art, Curnoe frequently found the inspiration for his artwork in his relationships with friends and family members, and within the community in and around his hometown of London, Ontario. More than his contemporaries, Curnoe chose to make no distinction between his life and his art. The documentation of his own life—of the time and place in which he lived and worked—was a lifelong project for Curnoe, who endlessly recorded his thoughts and day-to-day experiences in notes, journals, indexical lists, published and unpublished essays, audio diaries, and occasionally films and videos. Between 1965 and 1970, Curnoe began to produce a number of moving image works on 16mm film. These films are typical of Curnoe's interest in the day-to- day, often featuring footage of people, places, and events that Curnoe found personally significant. These films can also be seen as a specific example of Curnoe's interest in liberating the distinction between life and art as they borrow heavily from the conventions of home movies in terms of both subject matter and aesthetics. The film Connexions (1970) features images of London, Ontario with Curnoe providing his own oral history of these images in the form of a pre-recorded voiceover commentary. After 1970, Curnoe stopped making films but later started working with a variety of different video technologies to continue documenting his life. These videos often served as documentation of Curnoe's own life and artistic practice, although the 1 "Moving image" refers here to both motion picture film and a variety of video recording technologies. 1 work of other artists from Southwestern Ontario (a geographic community that Curnoe and others affectionately termed Souwesto) are also occasionally the main focus. Curnoe's body of audiovisual work was originally composed of four 16mm films and at least ten known video recordings. The E. P. Taylor Research Library and Archives at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is currently in possession of all known extant copies of Curnoe's videos, which amounts to eight video objects made between 1974 and 1990. This includes one master recording on ½" open reel tape, two remasters of now lost material on ¾" U-Matic cassettes, and four master VHS cassettes. Also included is one VHS remaster of the ½" open reel tape—possibly created by Curnoe as an access copy or to preserve the recording against technological obsolescence—for a total of seven unique video works and one duplicate. The other video recordings known to have been made by Curnoe cannot be located at this time and may be lost. The AGO also has 16mm prints of three of Curnoe's films in their collection. Today, Curnoe is predominantly remembered for his prolific work in a variety of mediums, including watercolour, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, installation, and collage, among others. His work with film and video, however, has been largely neglected and forgotten. These works are poorly documented and are significantly underrepresented in the literature: this is possibly due to the access challenges that researchers would have faced while working with these older film and video formats, or is perhaps a result of these works being overshadowed by Curnoe's better known work in other mediums. So how can the regionally- and personally- specific subject matter of these films and videos be documented in a way that facilitates and contributes to future Curnoe scholarship and an improved understanding of Curnoe's practice? This project was designed to address this question and to acknowledge and integrate the personal subject matter of these works into their description and documentation. I arranged a series of oral 2 history interviews with Curnoe's family, friends, and colleagues. These interviews were focused specifically on a selection of the material described above, including two films—No Movie (1965) and Souwesto (1969) and a series of three videos entitled The Laithwaite Farm (1974). The participants were also invited to watch this material and encouraged to comment aloud on what they were seeing, using Curnoe's own Connexions as a template for a descriptive oral history commentary. These interviews and the various spoken commentaries were recorded and transcribed to make information on these films and videos more accessible for researchers and the public. This process will be explained in greater detail later in this paper. Also included in this paper is a brief history of Curnoe's work with moving image technologies, which draws heavily from the aforementioned oral history interviews and commentaries. This brief history should be taken as a first step toward a fuller understanding of this aspect of Curnoe's artistic practice. 3 Chapter 1: Literature Review 1.1 On Greg Curnoe Greg Curnoe's use of moving image technologies is conspicuously absent from much of the existing literature. Many of the major texts that focus on Curnoe as an artist have been published in conjunction with exhibitions of his work but these exhibitions typically do not feature any of Curnoe's films or videos. One of the most significant of these publications is the AGO's Greg Curnoe: Life & Stuff. Published in 2001, this is the first book-length study of Curnoe's life and artistic practice. Included is an exhaustive chronology of Curnoe's life and work and an extensive bibliography prepared by art historian and curator Judith Rodger. One section of the bibliography entitled "Tape-recorded Interviews, Films, etc.