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PRELUDE

Offered the soft pillow of Quebec movie artists along with instant cash, how could I refuse? Mathieu and Claire hoped only for some words for their already fine magazine. Every time I made a suggestion, they said yes. Any time I wrote them mails that were too long, they replied with something even longer, more thoughtful, more caring, and smarter. What else to do but follow their gift horse? Here are three artists based in Quebec who are lighting the way in experimental cinema for me right now.

:: Mobilize (Caroline Monnet, 2015) [ONF]

CAROLINE MONNET

Let’s imagine the old Greeks, no wait, the old Algonquins, told the story like this: There are just two kinds of artists. The first begins with a map, an imprint in place of eyes, a stencil in place of hands. The whole of their work is a body, from the first throwaway doodle when they were just four years old, scribbled hastily before recess on a lunch bag, to their shining masterpiece five decades later, a monumental sculpture which is as large as the city they live in. Everything they make looks like everything else they’ve ever made. In place of deviation, there is coherence, depth and integrity. In fact, the dictionary has their name engraved beside the definition of these cherished values. Their work is not merely rigorous, they are rigour itself.

How I longed to become this artist. The one who photographed every person in the world as if they were the same person. Instead, I was condemned to become the second kind of artist.

The second artist is a nomad. They might produce a play, write a poem or dabble in forbidden subjects. If they are a movie maker, we can expect that they will never produce what we expect. How relieving it was for me to find the work of Caroline Monnet. This self-taught wonder has logged time in Winnipeg and Montreal, creating work that began as handmade identity structures, black-and-white lyrics that lent style to her documentary leanings. She is Algonquin and French-Canadian, asymmetrical facts that loom large in her making. Her driven work ethic created new opportunities, but somehow the artist manages to navigate crews and collaborators while maintaining the necessary edge of her seeing, the urgent and devastating recall of Native history, the balm of beauty, and the troubling of any easy tags.

In 2015, the wondrous National Film Board producer Anita Lee kickstarted a project she called Souvenir, inviting four Indigenous artists to remix footage from the Board’s archives. The chosen few included Jeff Barnaby, Michelle Latimer, Kent Monkman and Caroline Monnet. While movie commissions are invariably well intentioned, it can be difficult to puncture the grey seal of someone else’s heat, the urgency of strangers. The polished turds that too often result are toasted with champagne and quickly forgotten. As usual, Monnet is the exception to the rule.

In Mobilize (3 minutes, 2015), having never made a “found footage” movie before, or shown much interest in archives, she conjures a breathtaking rush of a trip that takes us from Canada’s northern reaches to cities in the south. Every shot is a wonder, as the artist reframes the archive with an aboriginal lens, allowing snowshoers, paddlers, strollers and iron walkers to cross the new screen of the eye.

Somehow she closes the distance between her life and these iconic pictures, some drawn from classics like Don Owen’s High Steel (1965), that shows the Mohawk of Kahnawake creating the iconic skyline of New York City, launching death-defying towers into the stratosphere. Perhaps it’s only my projection, but I can feel these images energizing the artist. I see them racing, flowing through her fingers, as she returns us to forgotten moments of Indigenous enterprise, showing us how they created new worlds to live in.

But even while there is an exhilarating thrill ride of pictures, each scene feels intimate at the same time, as if every moment was both touched and touching, and out of that mutual embrace the artist conjures a deep feeling of family. Even the faraway pics here feel close, part of a new and extended family compact, a home movie. Canoes are a way to float houses out into the water, forests become the beginnings of a snowbound village of new dwellings. Even the largest of city buildings are created by hand, one bolt at a time. The filmmaker re-mothers these images, births them once again, lifting them out of their former homes, in order to resettle them into this utopian horizon, where another world is not only a possibility, but a demonstrated fact. You see, these pictures seem to insist, because they are documentary evidence after all, we’ve been here all along!

:: Desert Islands (2019) [Ralitsa Doncheva]

RALITSA DONCHEVA

What is wrong with artists’ movies? My friend Aden, a tirelessly patient viewer and programmer in the field, feels we are at a kind of nadir, a low point in artists’ moviemaking. Festival after festival roll out their proud seasonal models of the fringe, with their tantalizing descriptions and glittering thumbnails, but even a cursory glance confirms that the promises are empty, that these formalist gestures lack any semblance of form, that the urge to repeat has taken over what used to be a playground for the imagination. Let me offer a simple, one word answer: the problem is film. By which I mean emulsion, the oil product stamped with holes, horse gelatin strained through mutant chemistries. Now that too many pictures are being made (though not where they are really needed), making films-on-film is one way to upscale your artist brand. And in this touchless meta digital moment, here is a way to dig back into analog roots, or that’s how the alibi reads, though most often people are still taking their rolls to a lab, relying on predatory multinational companies for their film stock, and waiting for their price gouging digital transfers.

And besides, films-on-film throw a plumb line back to historical generations of the avant-garde, to mom and dad in other words, in the hopes that their hand-wound efforts might lend the present some sheen of authenticity. As someone who made films for twenty years, I am sickened by the nostalgia fests, by the endless repetitions of moves and movies that bored me when I saw them in the 1980s. Unfortunately, the small field of fringe movies has been squatted, occupied, taken over by high-minded programmer nerd formalists whose idea of excellence equals international brand quality heritage. And unfortunately, younger artists, and artists who are not so young, watch these showcases of the also-ran, these triumphs of déjà vu, and imagine that this work defines the field. Make no mistake, in neoliberalism, bureaucrats are tops while artists are bottoms. The managerial class of the fringe is not content to simply show movies, they are bent on defining a field. Never mind that these movies would put a coked-up guard dog to sleep, these movies are IMPORTANT. They define what is happening right now and forever. The genre gravity is hard to resist, at least, judging by the efforts of those I see around me, everyone hoping to be counted amongst the chosen few.

I meet Ralitsa in a small after-screening party dedicated to drinking the last home-brewed beer in Montreal. There is something in her face that hasn’t decided yet, her open-hearted smile allows her to absorb unexpected encounters as an expected luxury.

I ask her what she’s working on, and she talks about a short movie she seems in no hurry to finish, as if the material itself needed to rest, to gather some experience, before it could be summoned into some final shape. Mostly when I meet young people (and everyone I meet now seems impossibly young), they feel haunted by time. Old age begins at 23, when they have already missed the most important opportunities, the doors have been closing on them for years already, they have come too late. A year passes when the artist sends along a link to her movie Desert Islands (11 minutes, 2019), and then it all falls into place for me. Ralitsa is a filmmaker, she works on film. I prepare myself for the worst, but am surprised by the opening scene, a nearly blank screen offering a horizon of night, broken only by a string of streetlamps criss-crossing the frame, met by the artist’s walk, as the sounds of her feet on gravel take us down the long and broken road of a woman and the man who will forever accompany her. The one she calls “father.”

If you want to preserve something beautiful, make it hard to reach.

In every frame, there is darkness, something obscured or in the way, shadow objects too close to be identified. The digital image longs for clarity and sharpness, the brilliance of the high-res phone image allows its viewer a nearly infinite zoom into the microparticles of the image. No matter how close you get, the image is always crisp and clear. Legible. The utopia of the digital image is to banish secrets, and the interiority that secrets make possible. Frederic Jameson described the digital image as a pair of sunglasses, the world bends across its surface — in fact, it is all surface. You can always tell a book by its cover. But here, each frame offers only the possibility of seeing, and it insists that this possibility cannot be separated from what cannot be seen. The visible and the invisible are part of a dance, an alternating current that marks the long road of this short movie.

The artist’s sensitivity to light, and to the very end of her life, even though she is much closer to its beginning, draws her inevitably to sunset. She finds a clothesline, a mysterious island, a lonely village, water rippling. I don’t think fringe films are allowed to be made without at least one scene of water. But wait, the first figure appears, it’s an ordinary man in a baseball cap, squatting by the water’s edge, filling the pouch of a slingshot with a mysterious mixture before flinging it into the waiting lake.

We are in the car with her father. His body has left him, all that remains is a hand on a steering wheel. On the radio, Freddie Mercury sings I Want to Break Free. One glimpse of the road is enough to confirm that this is the same road, the one they will never leave, both condemned to follow the same path, despite the fact that they can only speak to each other in riddles and worn-out commandments. The filmmaker shows us a nursing foal (perhaps animals would make better parents for us?) as her father reaches for an old philosopher’s question.

What do you see in the darkness?

In the day’s last light, she tries to find his face, still in the car, still balancing a long-ago demitasse of espresso with one hand, the other loosely resting on the wheel. How much easier it is to talk, or not to talk, when we can’t see each other. This double-blind, this road without end, is also the road of family. I can feel the filmmaker recoil from the mirror of her father, even as she recognizes herself in his silences, his well-worn shield of self-assurances, his random pronouncements. A friend recently described a fleeting affair with a man who could be close but never intimate. He needed the closeness, was driven by it, but couldn’t risk the leap that vulnerability required. His wound turned him into a banter machine, an escape artist. The artist’s father appears as another member of this tribe, not so well versed in the grammar of avoidance and distraction perhaps, though his armour of self-reliance has become too effective at covering the holes in his body, the longing and loneliness, the fear most of all that is tucked away behind the dark glasses. “What do you see in the darkness?” he asks, before answering his own question. “Nothing.”

The artist is left to find herself, every image is a shadow self, a dreamed double. She is back in the room where she grew up, her mother lounging just beyond in her underpants while her father turns the kitchen into fish soup. They are back in Bulgaria, touching the roots, the foundation, the place where the first words of family were summoned. Ralitsa dances for the camera, then shows us a plant nearly drowned, as bird shadows pass overhead. This image reminds me that when you wait long enough, a single image can show you everything. Her father is there, and mother, and of course herself, in fact, all the selves she’ll ever become lie in this murky stretch of water. The secret to making films is not shooting, not pulling the trigger, it’s about learning to wait, and how that happens in our timeless time remains a mystery to me. But I’m glad to have the evidence of this movie to know that it’s still possible. That somewhere people are meeting their dreaded selves, their extinguished roles, and dancing right out of those rooms, not yet defeated.

:: Crossing Paths (Kanockatonanok, Nicolas Jimy Awashish, 2019) [Wapikoni Mobile]

NICOLAS JIMY AWASHISH

Why is export culture the preserve of cities? Why is it that scenes, micro-communities, undergrounds, refusenik gatherings rely on the great capitals, and their accumulation of wealth and people? Or let’s put it another way: what if it wasn’t? What if the most important work came from the de-centered outposts, the geographical margins? Perhaps we might look there for a fresh start, for new lives busy inventing new frames because they have to.

Nicolas Jimy Awashish was born 26 years ago, at the end of a 150-kilometre logging road in the Mauricie region of Quebec. He’s part of the Atikamekw First Nation of Opitciwan who have laid suits against both Canada and Quebec for their own lands after four decades of negotiation. Nadir André, an Innu lawyer remarks, “It’s a semi-remote community, semi-nomad community, and they still use the land, they still have elders, their language, their way of life so they have what it takes to actually go and prove their title.”

Every cultural event and co-op meeting hereabouts opens with a land acknowledgment. As a settler, I understand “land” to mean every water current, every face on every hillside, every conversation ever held here, even between lichen and tree roots. I can’t help but wonder what the word might mean for a young guy living that far off the range, on a perch that has somehow resisted the state theft that marks the beginnings of so many nations, and where the tap water needs to be run before drinking to clear some of the lead in it.

Crossing Paths (Kanockatonanok, 5:20 minutes, 2019) features an opening that recalls Desert Islands, with its nighttime walk prelude, and its sunset collage first act. But unlike Islands, this movie is shot one frame at a time, as a collection of still photos. Even in a movie as short as this one, that’s a lot of decisive moments. The artist outlines a perimeter that is both geographical and emotional, trying to pick up a lost thread, a lost love, only to be sent back into the night. He’d be lonely except for all the wonder that’s unfolding around him, and so he does the work of gathering attention, which feels like the first task of any artist. What is worth paying attention to? And then: how do I put these attentions together to make a scene, a movement, how to give it a form that can be shared?

The movie’s English title, Crossing Paths, denotes an intersection, a crossroads, an X. It’s the signature of someone who doesn’t know their name. In a flat and understated voice, unlocking his sentences one short phrase at a time in everyday poetry, the artist searches for a name. The name of his lover, the name of his land, the name that he might one day again answer to. Perhaps without knowing the land, it’s not possible to have a name.

Mike Cartmell: “What the people whose languages are scattered, whose lips are turned… in the Hebrew it says ‘He turned their lips, so that they all spoke a different language and they were scattered across the earth to go and make a name for themselves.’ The tower of Babel.”

The artist is a night nomad, his company is the starlit forest, the emptied street, and in a dizzying visual crescendo that closes the work, a startling sequence of northern lights. When he lays down his intentions at the movie’s opening, to go around the world in order to find his name, and then circles his neighbourhood, his territory, his people, it appears that these familiar scenes embrace every face and understanding. The movie feels charged with purpose, as if it made a difference whether it was made or not. I remember a long-ago screening performance, filled with home-made tricks and projector reinventions. Later that weekend a mutual friend asked her favourite tree, genuinely puzzled: did anything change the artist because they made that? Why did they need to do it?

Perhaps for some — for most — it’s not a question of need. But here, the urgency is palpable, it drives the movie forward, offering a tremendous compression of experience, of seeing and feeling, into a few frames, which peel and shudder across the screen with staggering beauty. It is a seeing that is frozen into instants: click click click. Each moment is a stand. An encounter. And whatever else is being met here, it is also a question of the name, the quest that makes it possible to have a name, even when a province, an entire country, has been built on the premise of erasing that name.

Twice the artist refers to the second person. He makes an address to you. He closes the prelude by saying: “I have something to show you.” And then later: “I met you a long time ago and we loved each other for a while. But now you’ve stopped answering me… We hurt each other and I hated my own name.”

These second-person monologues are the place where love and naming are joined, and this is what gives his movie such a propulsive gravity. This broken heart requires testimony. And more than this. I can hear in his double address that he is also turning me, turning the viewer, into his lover. “I have something to show you.” He lets me ride the wave of his urgency, even as he requires unnamed observers to hold him up. He can’t make this night walk alone after all, he manages to take another step only by relying on the kindness of strangers. Can I get a witness? His vulnerability leaves me breathless. What else to say but thanks?

*

Mike Hoolboom began making movies in 1980. Making as practice, a daily application. Ongoing remixology. Since 2000 there has been a steady drip of found footage bio docs. The animating question of community: how can I help you? Interviews with media artists for 3 decades. Monographs and books, written, edited, co-edited. Local ecologies. Volunteerism. Opening the door.

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