The Black Zero founder provides a guide to some of Canada’s great experimental films
On Black Zero’s website, founder Stephen Broomer includes a quotation from Jonas Mekas on Canada’s tradition of underground cinema, in which he praises it for having “a finer vibration, a finer density, a finer matter.” Black Zero is Broomer’s new home video label which specializes in deluxe presentations of some of Canada’s finest experimental films. We were thrilled to speak with Broomer for a comprehensive interview about Black Zero and his many other creative and scholarly projects. To accompany the interview, Broomer was kind enough to compile program notes for a selection of some of Canada’s greatest experimental works. Each film demonstrates those finer qualities that Mekas wrote about, each in their own unique manner.
Broomer says, “The following list of films reflects the vast, diverse range of expressions that comprise the Canadian underground film. My selection is, of course, subjective: these are some of the many films I value from this field. It shouldn’t be taken as a ranked list, but a series of enthusiastic cheers for filmmakers who offer a good introduction to this corner of Canadian cinema.”
The majority of Broomer’s selected films can be viewed directly on this page. In the case that there is no embedded video, click on the image below the film’s title to be linked to the film.
Broomer’s selection relies on work that artists and arts organizations have made publicly available. These links were working as of July 23, 2023
1857 (Fool’s Gold) (R. Bruce Elder, 1981)
"Independent Visions with Jim Shedden," episode 4. from Jim Shedden on Vimeo.
R. Bruce Elder is the foremost intellectual authority on Canadian avant-garde cinema. Elder has devoted a tremendous amount of effort to the cause of identifying and thematizing the country’s vanguard cinema through his work as a critic and with his book Image and Identity (1989). His own films are likewise formidable but often cede explicit argumentation in favor of a form that balances comedy and mechanism. His works place obscure challenges to the perception of the viewer in their reassembly of the whole of a discourse, the whole of an education. In 1857 (Fool’s Gold), Elder levels algorithmic process against the terrors of history and poetic witness: computer-assisted optical printing and pulses of color abstract commonplace images that suggest nautical journeys and the life of the shore, paired with a dense collision of texts. The narration is taken from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, while the on-screen text combines an algebraic proof with Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a text with which Elder’s filmmaking is often in dialogue. The soundtrack alone is a demonstration of the multimodal collisions that drive Elder’s filmmaking, and the overarching critique of history and individual and collective vision that course through The Book of All the Dead, Elder’s epic, 36-hour film cycle (1975-1994). In the above video, taken from the television program Independent Visions, 1857 (Fool’s Gold) plays along with an interview with Elder, conducted by Canadian documentary filmmaker Jim Shedden.
Elder’s filmmaking metamorphosed a great deal over the years, reflective of the searching, restless nature of his lifelong engagement with the electric current of poetic thought. One of my favorites of his later films, Crack, Brutal Grief, is a jeremiad on the corruption of vision provoked by the tragic suicide of a friend.
Free Fall (Arthur Lipsett, 1964)
In 1962, when Arthur Lipsett received an Academy Award nomination for his first film, Very Nice, Very Nice, that represented a level of individual success that his coworkers at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) had rarely experienced (with the exception of Norman McLaren). Two years later, when Lipsett was making his third film, Free Fall, the NFB was changing its priorities: the Unit system, which had facilitated Lipsett’s independence, was on its way out, supposedly in the interest of giving a greater number of staff members opportunities to make artistic films. What came in was a producer-focused system that was punishing and populist and to which an outsider like Lipsett would inevitably struggle to conform. Free Fall, in this sense, represents the end of an independence that Lipsett was nourished by in the early part of his career. It began as an intended collaboration with John Cage (much as Norman McLaren’s Pas de deux had started life as an intended collaboration with George Balanchine), but terms couldn’t be reached. The resulting film is, like all of Lipsett’s films, a work of stifled laughter in a shadow of fear and trembling, composed in part with citations to his remarkable blues-roots record collection, and as a showcase for his remarkable handling of the Bolex camera.
Rather than work by collaging found images, as he had with Very Nice, Very Nice, and, to a lesser extent, his second film, 21-87, Lipsett pursued a collage la vie from everyday witness: he mixes peeling posters and antique photos with his own masterful observational camerawork. Lipsett took inspiration from Dylan Thomas’ poem “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” a troubling poem about that life energy that is maker and destroyer and that deals with the limitations of communicating the universal experience, in which we are “dumb to tell the lover’s tomb / how at [our] sheet goes the same crooked worm.” The resulting film is the Fall of Man — that fall that is the eternal plummet, universally experienced and evident all around us, in the energies of all life forms, in the green fuse, in the irony of the glassy-eyed grin of an illustrated barker in a boater hat.
(For the past several years, I have been writing a book, Secret Museums: The Films of Arthur Lipsett, which will be published next year. My restoration of Strange Codes, completed in partnership with the Cinematheque Quebecois, is available on disc from Black Zero.)
1933 (Joyce Wieland, 1967)
Does Joyce Wieland need an introduction? A major painter and mixed media artist whose quilts and site-specific works are as diverse in form as her painting (which toured abstract expressionism, sequential comic-strip imagery, and modernist figuration), all of it unified under the sign of a valentine heart, whether ablaze or wrapped in plastic! Joyce Wieland’s contributions to the development of the structural film movement include a number of minimalistic works that feature text printed directly atop the image, invoking games of signifier and signified. 1933 (1967) is one of these single-shot films: the image looks down through a window onto a busy street and the exterior of a restaurant. The number 1933 is superimposed over the image, the white text appearing for 15 seconds at a time, roughly once per minute. The filmed image alternates with sections of white. Wieland performs the soundtrack — a mouth organ sounding discordantly against chords hammered on a piano — which plays during the photographed image, but is replaced with the hum of an empty soundtrack during stretches of white. The sound is only this: dissonance or silence. The dissonance standing in for the bustling sounds of street life; the silence signaling the film’s material being, its natural silence. Wieland would describe 1933 as “a speeded up shot out of a window/repeated/evoking the feeling of 1933/walking/window/repeat.” This image is held against the blank frame and its silence, its depiction of street life coming under the influence of text that forces an assumption. Wieland’s use of this number then raises questions about the nature of film itself, all images being of the past, their distance from the present dependent upon context and language, variables that hold the power to subvert.
buffalo lifts (Christina Battle, 2004)
Christina Battle is a Canadian media artist who has been making films since the early 2000s. Her work has since expanded to include gallery installations, video, and digital works that often deal with ecological themes. Battle’s first films engaged with the politics and imagination of the West, with landscapes marked by industry, commerce, and trauma, and material strategies that are dense with action and bear a furious momentum. This approach is evident as early as oil wells (sturgeon road & 97th street) (2002), in which the cleaving motion of oil pump jacks — an iconic symbol of Alberta — mirrors the camera’s own intermittent mechanism. In the final minute, the pump is superimposed over itself with the frame line shifting, as if the damage being done to the earth is being done to the foundation of the frame itself. Such crossings of technique and theme continue in buffalo lifts (2004), as Battle applies an “emulsion lift” to found footage of a herd of galloping buffalo. The material went through a long translation — from video to black-and-white film, printed to color stock, and then manipulated by chemistry. The emulsion is loosened on the film strip, lifted, and rearranged before crumpling on the strip to dry. The effect of this is an abstract collage, a redistribution of subject such that the buffalo are overtaken by a substructure of color layers (a brilliant yellow emerges), and by the splintering texture of distressed emulsion. Within moments, the frame itself is violently shrunken so that its edges seem to veer inwards in the composition; the herd subject to an “accordion bellows” effect that elasticizes their silhouettes and frays the source frame such that it becomes an intensely activated mass within the fixed boundaries of the composition.
New York Eye and Ear Control (Michael Snow, 1964)
Michael Snow passed away in January of this year. His absence feels like a gaping hole punched in reality, like something straight out of the elastic world of the cartoon, or, for that matter, not unlike the iconic Walking Woman silhouette with which he will always be associated. A monumental figure in Canadian art and beyond, there’s little I can say about Michael Snow that would adequately speak to the man’s legacy, so instead I’ll offer this as a personal tribute. I can’t think of a time in my life when Michael Snow was not a significant force in my thinking about art. He was a tremendously generous, unpretentious person who was as funny in life as the wit his work bears. I am glad that I was able to pay explicit tribute to him, and to his broader work in the visual arts, in my video Variations on a Theme by Michael Snow and in my book Codes for North: Foundations of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film.
Snow’s first film proper, New York Eye and Ear Control begins with a text by the poet Paul Haines. Snow’s writings describe the role of this text as an indicator of the flatness of the screen: “Start with Words. Words flat on screen which is Flat. Words don’t have much visual space unless you’re asked to see that.” The text, therefore, not by its content but by its presence, announces the role of the screen as a flat plane. The viewer is confronted by this, but indirectly, without context and without instruction to connect this idea with the rest of the film. The film invariably casts the flat form of the Walking Woman into three-dimensional space, spaces occupied by the dramatic, shifting surfaces of nature (sand, rock, forest), and the flat planes of civilization (street signs, buildings). There is little editorial mediation in what follows, as one roll leads to another, with light-struck ends bridging the sequences. The aperture changes on the same compositions, indicating that each camera roll contains several exposures of the same shots.
These strategies distress the conventional, realist expectations of cinema, as the camera rolls play against the artifice of film editing and bear the marks of their materiality. With a free jazz score from one of the best bands ever assembled (featuring Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, Gary Peacock, and Sunny Murray), New York Eye and Ear Control is profoundly difficult. It alludes to Snow’s sources and his prior work, placing it in a context where parallels (between his Walking Woman activity and free jazz) were not comprehensible or immediate, and in disorienting sequence, as the relation between one episode and another is forged by physical editing alone and not by logical, causal transition. Snow could build perceptual puzzles in film and extend to cinema the most difficult ends of his art. The work develops around puns, disjointed sequence and self-referentiality. The film is perceptually distressing, dense, fortified against ready interpretation, and yet, it remains as vibrant and witty as his work in other media.
Essai à la mille (Jean-Claude Labrecque, 1970)
Quebecois filmmaker Jean-Claude Labrecque began his career at the National Film Board of Canada, training in cinematography. By the time that he departed from the Film Board to begin his own independent film company in the late 1960s, Labrecque had gained considerable esteem in Canadian film culture for his mastery of the expanding tool kit of the cinematographer in an era of rapid technological innovation. He had used a 1000mm telephoto lens, acquired from NASA, for the opening shot of his 1965 documentary 60 Cycles, a film about a long-distance bike race in Quebec. In 1970, Labrecque would use the lens again to make a short film, Essai a la mille, or, Test to the Thousand, that deliberates upon the various ways in which this extreme telephoto distortion could impact perception, the aberrations of vision and abstractions of form that it could provoke, and the hallucinatory process of charting and collapsing great distances.
I published an analysis of this film last year as part of my series Art & Trash. The video essay deals with the film as an end-of-days fantasy seen through the magnificent distance of extreme telephotography. As I conclude there, “Labrecque’s film is an apocalypse that is also a catalog of the earth, turning away from a world of machine and mechanism with traces of the presence of human and animal life. Telephotography keeps these elements at a distance, but it does something else to them as well: it allows all those traits emphasized by distortion — heat waves, air particulates — to appear as if they are permeating and flowing through the distant figures. The child runs in place; the light itself speeds through them to reach us. If Test to the Thousand has a core poetic allegory, it is this: a solar permeation that rends space and scatters and immolates its subjects, an obliteration of depth.”
Facing the Waves (Eva Kolcze, 2016)
Eva Kolcze’s films have pursued two strands: a tour of architecture and environmental perception, and a confrontation with the material roots of image itself — interests that are reconciled through themes of geology and history (a history that is often informed by a compassionate, postcolonial humanism). In works like 775 King St. West (2010), All That is Solid (2014), and Dust Cycles (2017), Kolcze interacts with vastly different forms of landscape, from the density of the city, to the authoritarian spareness of the campus, to the dramatic sublime of the cliffside. Her engagement with motion picture materiality (using destructive photochemical processes and etching directly on the film strip) combines with the geological themes underlying many of her films, but more often the impact of her work lies in the sense of witness that arises from looking outward: at vistas spoiled and unspoiled, as works of moral philosophy. Setting aside the ecological passion of her films, Kolcze’s work might also be seen as bearing an earnest fascination with the perceptual wonders of vision. In Facing the Waves, commissioned by Toronto’s small-gauge film festival the8fest in 2016, Kolcze captures a city-symphony of stray observations, often lingering on the ways in which the glass and stone is permeated by sunlight, marking it as another of the artist’s trademark investigations of the material constitution of the world.
Black Forest Trading Post (Andrew Lugg and Stuart Klein, 1976)
Andrew Lugg was one of the leading contributors to Canadian underground cinema throughout the 1970s before he stepped away from filmmaking to focus on scholarly pursuits (he is professor emeritus in the philosophy department at University of Ottawa). Many of his contributions were collaborations, for example, his films of performance artists Tom Sherman (Trace) and John Orentlicher (Plow, Skid, Drag; Gemini Fire Extension). Alongside these performance films, Lugg pursued a series of “postcard” films focused on vernacular photography and the challenge that such mass-produced imagery places to the realist foundation of the photographic project. These films would take postcard imagery and interfere with it, piercing its illusion by cinematographic means. In Black Forest Trading Post, made with Stuart Klein, the approach is that of collage, making sandwiches out of a consistent foreground and shifting, increasingly ludicrous backgrounds. The foreground is the titular Black Forest Trading Post, a souvenir shop in Ulysses, Pennsylvania; the backgrounds seem to gather a natural affiliation with the place names that the narrator barks out, but even this comes under distress as the parade continues. The postcard landmark itself travels the world, a winking subversion of the whole idea of being-there and of the pilgrimages that postcards, or for that matter, other souvenirs, are meant to indicate. This is given added humor for the relatively inconsequential subject in the foreground: this is a postcard from a souvenir shop, of the souvenir shop itself. This choice of foreground turns the anonymous landmark into an absurd franchise, made all the more absurd by its seemingly elastic attachment to reality.
R. Bruce Elder has argued that, by introducing movement into the traditional stillness of the vernacular, mass market photograph image, Lugg is exposing “the lack of veracity” in Image itself, that he is exposing the doubts that should be laid at the feet of the photographer or cinematographer for the degree to which images are always constructed. This lack of veracity becomes increasingly obvious with scale distortions and surreal juxtapositions, for instance, when the foreground is placed against the Hoover Dam, a giant mountain goat, and finally, an illustration of an airplane in flight; likewise, it is a challenge to the contextualizing narrator who assigns each manifestation of the souvenir shop a location, straining the natural trust we lend to authoritative context. Lugg’s conceptual project is less a mockery of the disposable economy of the souvenir, than a defiance of the realist project writ large.
Light Study (Josephine Massarella, 2013)
Josephine Massarella’s filmmaking career is marked by a long break. She began to make films in the early 1980s while studying at the University of British Columbia. While the faculty was focused on the conventions of Hollywood cinema, Massarella was more interested in the formally and thematically radical work she encountered at the Pacific Cinematheque and Western Front. She was inspired by these experiences to explore alternative forms. After graduating, she completed a number of films ranging from structural experiments to psychodramas before taking a 17-year hiatus in Hamilton, Ontario. Returning to film in the five years prior to her death in 2018, Massarella completed three more films that narrowed and articulated the major concerns of her work.
Her second wind began with Light Study (2013), in which a woman walks through a dense wilderness, images of her alternating with shots of flowers, butterflies, waterfalls. Massarella’s fascination with pixilation, developed towards the end of her earlier period of filmmaking, persists, giving Light Study a vibrating energy. Midway through the film, the image shifts from brilliant color to high-contrast black and white; the electronic score likewise shifts from calm sustain to quick and violent bleats as the pixilation becomes more fragmented, rapidly intercutting the movements of seabirds, the rush of a waterfall, and the stamens and pistils of flowers. In spite of her love of nature, it is never sentimentalized; and as time passed, her response to its sheer dynamic force, in her pixilated photography, intensified.
Going Back Home (Louise Bourque, 2000)
Louise Bourque has been making films since the 1980s. From her Acadian background to her adopted home of Boston, Bourque has absorbed many cultural influences into her work, which often deals with materiality foremost and the potential for the image to collapse into abstraction. At the same time, many of her films, especially those from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, have been persistently haunted by home movie imagery. Going Back Home (2000) uses images of home in traces of catastrophe. In a sequence of eight shots we see a derailed train car, a sunken house, a dog on a roof, a raging inferno in a window, and the controlled collapse of buildings, all in a golden hue. With the comic aplomb of a jangling toy piano on its soundtrack, Going Back Home offers a series of homes to which no one can return. The film repeats for a second look.
Clint Enns and I published an edited collection about Louise’s films with the Canadian Film Institute. It has an amazing group of contributors and offers the most thorough assessment of Louise’s films to date.
Primiti Too Taa (Ed Ackerman and Colin Morton, 1988)
Primiti Too Taa is a classic piece of Canadian alternative animation. It came from Winnipeg, home to one of the country’s most exciting film scenes; one of defiant, renegade sensibilities. Ed Ackerman made the film in collaboration with the writer Colin Morton, a poet who has had a long engagement with the Dadaist tradition of sound poetry. Morton provides the reading to which Ackerman’s stop-motion animation corresponds. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Ackerman’s typewritten letters correspond to Morton’s read text in a seamless way, an illustration of cinema’s oiled machine working properly, a perfect synchronization of the frame and the wave. Inspired by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate (Sonata in Primitive Sounds),” Morton’s text is structured as one would compose a sonata, in four movements, and is perhaps best explained as a score — a poem that rejects the stylistic conventions of poetry, a poem as a force of nature.
Schwitters and his contemporaries broke from the semantic units of text, embracing instead rhythm and sonic character, repetition and variation, a vanguard repudiation of the communicative strictures of speech. Ackerman’s typing breaks decidedly from the traditional geometries of the typed page in a dance of nonsense syllables that swirl like vocalized sounds in a mouth. Primiti Too Taa finds visual correlatives of sonic emanations. Against the logic and bias of communication, its letters stray and fracture and overlap, gliding into and out of the frame and shifting scale. The minimal composition plane (restricted to the frame itself) makes the punctuation of these phrases into a violent recession of image/“word”: it is against the continuity of the printed page, the stanza, the typewriter scroll. Nevertheless, the nature of this collaboration begs an important question: do the semantic prisons of text and sound endure in Primiti Too Taa? Ackerman and Morton’s partnership becomes mutually illustrative, the voice an externalization of our own reading, the typed letters a correspondent “sign” of the voice, and illustration is, inevitably, explanatory.
Lion (Daniel McIntyre, 2011-2014)
Daniel McIntyre has been making hybrid works since 2008. He often combines the aesthetics of traditional motion picture media (showing its skin in hand-processed, decayed, destroyed imagery) with the style of the digital era (evident in the ways in which he works with text, color enhancement, and the synthesized, constructed scores of his collaborator Mark Savoia). His series Lion (2011-2014) revisits the Chernobyl disaster and uses it as an occasion to explore themes of memory and autobiography. Across seven parts, Lion persistently returns to this material theme: the effect of radiation as both a literal force acting on the body (for better and worse) and the land (simply for worse), and as a metaphor for all of the permeation (of gifts and wounds) that the soul learns to gather in a lifetime. In McIntyre’s poetics, atomic fallout becomes a pervasive specter overshadowing the rituals and order of twinned pairs: young and old, masculine and feminine, dream and wake, destruction and creation.
Second Sun (Leslie Supnet, 2014)
Leslie Supnet is a filmmaker whose work has tended to emphasize animation techniques such as cardboard collage, discontinuous stop-motion, and illustration. But to leave it at that would be selling her short: Supnet also incorporates a range of other image-making practices, including found footage and found sound and her own original footage. Second Sun (2014) is a good example of one the areas of Supnet’s work that I find most compelling: her discontinuous animation, a term I use conscious that it’s a misnomer, because what Supnet is pursuing is really, as in the films of Robert Breer, a search for new continuities. I perceive Second Sun as a direct continuation of her 2009 super 8 film sun moon stars rain, which purports to be a visual elegy “mourning the death of Mother Nature’s children,” a film that combines occult symbolism with the visceral energy-force of imagery that continuously peels away from one omen to the next, a tour of ancient pasts. Second Sun draws from similar imagery — pyramids, spheres, geometries that serve as containers of a kind of universal matter. Again, the image peels off, as a consistent, stable form (the sphere that becomes sun, moon, earth) pierces intermittently the wondrous distractions of prismatic images, refractions of light, visions that draw us away from the definite material (paper) base of Supnet’s illustrations.
The Garden of Earthly Delights (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, 2008)
In the films of Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, ecstatic formal inquiry combines with memorial and autobiographical themes. Her work encompasses several aesthetic strands: reconciling the minutiae of close-up photography, the aggressive rhythmic punctuations of discreet, densely laid frames, and a summoning of phantasmal shadows cast from one film strip to another or found in the strange and vivid colors that she synthesizes by digital means. Her films create seamless worlds — assemblages that take as their heart phenomena of the natural world. In her editing, the skin and flesh of human and plant become pliable canvas, interwoven in a complex collage.
Pruska-Oldenhof’s work with the body as subject reaches its apex in The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which erotic nudes — filmed with a slow shutter so that the bodies seem to cast vibrant trails of light — combine with rapid images of insects, snails, flora and fauna, fish, and waves reflecting light. The Garden of Earthly Delights is a culmination of the fascinations of her body films (Vibrant Marvels, her carnal longings, Scintillating Flesh). Pruska-Oldenhof explores the parallels she had established between the body and film and the body as a fount of light energy. But the body becomes especially miraculous here — not merely for its parallels to forms found elsewhere in nature, but for its implication in all of those forms as bodily movement and erotic union do not merely resemble the external world but draw from a common life force.
Bricolage (David Rimmer, 1984)
David Rimmer passed away in January of this year. A subtle and meticulous craftsman of observational and illusionistic work, Rimmer began to make films in the mid-1960s. He studied economics and mathematics at the University of British Columbia. He graduated in 1963, a watershed year for Vancouver’s experimental arts scene, when the Vancouver Poetry Conference introduced the Black Mountain poets to a generation of Vancouver students. A few years later, artists from various disciplines formed Intermedia, a space and collective devoted to interdisciplinary and media art happenings, where influences including Fluxus, the poet Charles Olson, and Marshall McLuhan paired well with the Buddhist and pantheistic mysticism of the scene. Within this context, Rimmer had seen Stan Brakhage present Dog Star Man at UBC. He spoke about the freedoms of vision afforded by cinema and on cinema as a poetic form. Inspired, Rimmer decided to pursue filmmaking.
Rimmer has described Bricolage (1984) as a deliberate parody of Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970). In the earlier film, Rimmer loops a piece of found footage, of a factory worker throwing a sheet of cellophane, so that various color and contrast variations transform the figure into something mystical and phantasmal. Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper established Rimmer as an artist and has remained the most dominant, frequently screened and taught work in his filmography. He made Bricolage exclusively from found materials: the film begins with looping footage of a woman on an antique television saying “hello.” This is followed by a scene of another woman removing her wooden leg as a party trick.
The third and most substantial section of Bricolage comes from a film about juvenile delinquency. A mob of teens has gathered outside of a house, and their leader smashes a window with a hammer. A young man emerges from the house and strikes the leader in the face. As this scene is set to seamlessly loop, the sound drifts until the smash of the window and the punch to the face have traded sounds. In an act of complex symmetry, Rimmer has calculated with precision the distance of the two sounds and set them on a course of comic exchange. Throughout, a woman’s face appears, overlaid with images of a collapsing stone wall. Rimmer uses the optical printer to flatten the sequence into a contrast of shifting colors. Bricolage thus becomes a revisitation of Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, but by setting up the sequence to follow these strange scenes of female objectification and macho confrontation, Rimmer shifts away from self-reflexivity of the instrument and toward the ambiguous social meanings of his work.
Lines Postfixal (Christine Lucy Latimer, 2013)
The films and videos of Christine Lucy Latimer defy their containers: they reveal the fragile systems underlying media; they press the boundaries of image-making machines; they embrace the faults and frailties of vision. Almost all of Latimer’s work is silent, but nothing is truly silent. Latimer draws out images that recall the hums, tweets, and mechanical moans of the technology with which she made them. She began to issue work in the early 2000s, long after most of the formats she pursues had become obsolescent. The bulk of her work exists as media hybrids, combining a variety of image-making processes (16mm film, toy camera video, camcorders, and phone cameras). Some end up as 16mm film reels, some end up as VHS tapes. Refusing the universal nostalgia of the antique camera and the antique image, her media hybrids are undeniably present-facing and playfully disobedient, ethereal, and abstract. Supremely self-conscious and yet mystical, they are seances that draw out the ghosts in these machines.
Latimer’s work bears an active awareness of work that has come before her. In 2013, Latimer made a tribute to Norman McLaren, whose precise animation of Lines Vertical (1960) and Lines Horizontal (1962) are comically subverted into a tartan grid in Lines Postfixal (2013). Latimer not only superimposes McLaren’s films, in a celebration of their meticulous interplay, but batters them through generation loss by way of Betamax and VHS decks until McLaren’s mannered lines fray, assuming the more familiar and intimate grit of home video.
House Arrest (Richard Kerr, 2013)
Richard Kerr came to filmmaking from a distinctively Canadian background, having pursued a career as a professional hockey player. Kerr became interested in making art, first through photography, which led him to filmmaking. After making a number of films that explored a poetic, observational style, Kerr began a series of long films that dealt with storytelling, journeying, and national myth. Inspired by the writings of Ernest Hemingway, and by compositional and reportage traditions of photography, Kerr took images of home, of landscapes, and, as a tourist, of the territories and politics of America. Later, he would pursue self-consciously machined images and found footage. His work in filmmaking has been complemented by his work in sculpture and craft, specifically his motion picture weaving project — totemic quilts fashioned from interwoven strips of commercial film, their frames forming tartan patterns on wall-mounted light boxes. These boxes, a unique integration of the methods of folk art with the serial constitution of the film strip, represent the bulk of Kerr’s activity in recent decades.
With House Arrest (2012), Kerr mounted a digital camera on the end of a power drill, giving an illusion that the camera can see 360 degrees. The image curves so as to cast some shape of the originating instrument, the rotating drill bit, and the wide angle of the camera lens bends the shapes it encounters — skyscrapers, paint cans, a garden — along that curve. At first this act of abstraction forces the eye to recognize these objects; as it continues, the root environment becomes less discernible, as the drill speeds up and the resulting images metamorphose into mandalas.
Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (Daïchi Saïto, 2009)
Daïchi Saïto has been a driving force in Montreal’s experimental film community since the 2000s as a founder of the Double Negative Collective. Saïto came to filmmaking from a long history of engagement in the humanities. Born in Japan, he studied philosophy in America and Hindi and Sanskrit in India before his arrival in Montreal, where he took up filmmaking.
Since his earliest films, Saïto has been concerned with the abstraction of figure and environment. He achieves this abstraction by way of fragmenting the composition, creating tight closeups; by coursing currents of saturated color through the image; and by editing or printing in staccato rhythms, with black used in rhythmic structuring as a visual rest. And it is this abstraction that guides the co-penetration of form and subject in his work, which has simultaneously explored sensual engagement alongside the materiality of the film image.
In Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (2009), the imagery is of trees and leaves and grass. The trunks of the trees become vertical mattes in the frame and the fading in-and-out of images give these trunks an illusion of transparency as rich tapestries of leaves pulse through. Early in the film, colors are cast over the verdant woods. As the film continues, the trunks assume more of the frame, and an increasing density of their black silhouettes drowns out the most dramatic colors. What remains is a spring green. As the colors again turn to unnatural casts, of purple and gold, the imagery smears vertically as if the leaves are being tugged skyward. Once this gesture crescendos, the image begins to flicker more rapidly with each frame revealing a new violent variation on the scene. The film reaches its most unnatural color scheme as the trunks themselves turn a fiery red. Beneath this, Malcolm Goldstein’s violin sounds a repeating, grinding phrase, which elaborates through slackening and then regaining momentum like breath. Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis represents the arrival of a style of film printing that Saïto would employ over coming projects — the textures and unnatural coloration achieved by his optical printing.
Electrocution of the Word (Morley Markson, 1968)
Morley Markson was one of the major contributors to Canadian underground cinema in the 1960s. From an interdisciplinary background anchored in industrial design and photography, Markson began to make experimental and psychedelic films that coincided with Marshall McLuhan’s advocacy for the emergence of a new electric tribe. One sees an early sign of Markson’s interests in the new media habitat of the 1960s with Electrocution of the Word, made in 1968 as a proto-music video featuring the band 3’s a Crowd. At the time, 3’s a Crowd was the house band on a TV variety show called One More Time, and featured Bruce Cockburn, who would later become successful as a solo act. The song was co-written by Cockburn and the poet Penelope Schafer, who would also star in Markson’s first feature, The Tragic Diary of Zero the Fool (1970). Electrocution of the Word was commissioned to be showcased at Ottawa’s Central Canadian Exhibition in 1968, in the Youth Pavilion. Markson was brought into this thanks to the massive success of his Kaleidoscope Theatre at Montreal’s Expo ’67. Markson conceived of the film as one that would “mourn the passing of the book and celebrate the victory of the proliferation of the screen.” In this it was explicitly indebted to McLuhan.
The band appears in the film performing rituals and, by the end, miming electrocution. Sandy Crawley, the guitarist, holds a burning book, an overt declaration of Markson’s theme, and, by the filmmaker’s admission, a corny image that signifies the end of the printed word. Markson explains his purpose in making the film in these terms: “Soon everyone would have their own little screen, just like in the movies of old, but now their own, little, glass-covered bit of immediacy, universality and fame, their own electric-world connection. It started with stage, then cinema, then went home to home movies, then television, and now the screen which is everywhere, even in your pocket, connecting everyone… everyone framed in importance, blown-up or reduced as you wish, improved or distorted. The words (of the old book) became secondary… the thrill of any old page transported onto glass became primary.” For Markson, the film “extols the death of literary content and its usurpation by the environment… the omnipresent screen with the omnipresent friends everywhere close, surrounding you.” Markson’s film is a poem of what is lost and what is gained in the new visual order, and we see the desire for what is absent, an electric family that worships joyously at the altar of the comic book, the rock concert, the backlit lobby listing.
Seeing in the Rain (Chris Gallagher, 1981)
The films of Chris Gallagher explore the persistence of time’s passing, the inflexible boundaries of the frame, and the anticipation and reverberations of everyday moments and main events. In the mid-1970s, from his home in Vancouver, Gallagher began to make films that followed in the mode of structural cinema, using the camera as a tool for visual construction and planning his films around rules of operation. For the first decade of his filmmaking, Gallagher surveyed a number of styles of filmmaking, making him a cosmic, semi-improvisatory outlier. He then moved on to feature-length films dealing with themes of duration, grief, and collective experience, before a later period of digital work that revived his minimalistic, structural path.
Seeing in the Rain (1981) continues the filmmaker’s inquiry into time and the frame established in his earlier films. A camera is aimed out the front window of a bus traveling through a rainstorm on Granville Street in Vancouver. The windshield wiper demarcates the frame. The bus moves forward along its route, stopping for passengers. At the left end of the wiper’s swing, it acts as a trigger that rearranges the bus’s position on this route, lurching it backward and forward, the otherwise linear path subject to gaps, fissures, and retreats in time. Figures and vehicles are glimpsed through a veil of rain and become focal points on a journey of accelerating discontinuity. The comic stagger of the ride is emphasized by the late chance appearance of an ad on the back of another bus that asks, “What’s stopping you?” This unexpected question, posed by an obstruction, resonates with the overarching temporal obstructions that have caused this linear path to become erratic. Here, time begins as metronomic and evenly measured as the clicks of the wiper sound at the left and right limits of the frame.The clicks are mixed with street noise, atmosphere, and the voices of riders. Sound, like vision, is marked by structured conceits, but both embrace chance occurrence. Gallagher maintains an illusion of measured time and of the scientific distance of predetermined structure, but against this, a time signature emerges. Metronomic time is misdirection; a foundational system of time that the film endorses, but that it gradually passes beyond. Seeing in the Rain accepts that click as an underlying rhythm, but poses a freer system against it. The stagger becomes unpredictable. The fissures expand and contract. The image skips across time and space, but always forward — toward that horizon, around the elusive present.
Special mention: My own explorations of Canadian experimental film have been informed by listening to those who have come before me. Jim Shedden, a friend and frequent collaborator, led the way with Independent Visions, a series made for Rogers 10 community television. He has made several episodes available on Vimeo. These programs are invaluable, for Shedden’s introductions lay a framework for how to interpret and receive the films, and he has in most cases balanced this with original or archival interviews with the artists.
Episode 5: The Experimental Tradition: Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow, David Rimmer, Chris Gallagher
Episode 4: Essayistic filmmaking: Veronika Soul and R. Bruce Elder
Episode 3: Storytelling: Richard Kerr and Amy Bodman
Episode 2: Independent Animation: Gerard Betts, Jonathan Amitay, John Straiton, Ed Ackerman, Iris Paabo, Keewatin Dewdney
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