Monday, April 23, 2007

Going way back

So although this is long overdue, I have to tell you about the incredible range of short film work being produced through Canada’s media co-ops, because sadly so few were there to see the B.C, Atlantic, Manitoba and Ontario segments of the Stem Cell Film Festival.

Scott Amos’ Memory Lapse is an intriguing glimpse into his own practice of voyeuristic collecting of found footage, re-imagining other people’s memories into a collage of lost meaning, searching for a glimpse of someone else’s dirty little secret. The delicate, yet almost arbitrary drawings in the film, right over top of someone else’s memories seem to elude to the irretrievable aspect of trying to record and hold onto any experience. You can see more of Amos’ films, music videos (Meatdraw “I Don’t Want to be Your Ghost” and look out for Hank and Lily’s “Angel of the West Wing”) and subscribe to found-footage podcast at http://www.oilyfilms.com .

In A Girl Named Kai, Kai Ling Xue transformed the all to often clichéd tale of coming out into a highly visceral experience, sending chills down my spine with the raw physicality in the rich colours of the film, the intensity of the music, and her own physical actions especially in the scenes where Kai is almost violently shaving her head in the middle of a street festival in (I believe) Taiwan. Similarly as we watch Kai’s body skin being marked with a tattoo she is able to invoke and bring attention to the corporeality of her own body, the body of the viewer and the materiality of the film itself. The tactility of experience and loss are intertwined with strength and resolve to tell her story and continue creating films. The embodiment and sharing, releasing and withholding, the necessity to express that, which is self repressed, the need to make public that which remains private within a family.

Saskatchewan’s Graeme Patterson (shown in the vibrant Manitoba section of the film screening) created an amazing stop motion animation simply titled Monkey and Deer. Growing out of his childhood experiments with miniature worlds and creatures, Patterson’s technical mastery of set and puppet building retains a humble sense of wonder that brings the enchanted Monkey and Deer characters to life and tugs at our desire to retain even a glimmer of the innocence, beauty and wildness that lingers in the world. Just as essential to the delicately animated animals, the elaborate buildings based upon Patterson’s recent fascination with the real life prairie ghost town of Woodrow, where three generations of his own forefathers lived (you can see the buildings on their own too at the website http://www.graemepatterson.com/ ). Could such an honest sense, of the romance and nostalgia of the rural peripheries come from anywhere but the Canadian prairies? This really is a masterpiece in Canadiana, delightful, whimsical, sad, awe inspiring, you really have to see it to understand.

There were a number of choreographed dance pieces that utilized the specific nature of the film to elaborate beyond the dance itself either through framing (Hiding in Plain Site), focus as a means of transforming the dance into a type of drawing (Tunnel Vision) but Amanda Dawn Christie’s Three Part Harmony was particularly entrancing. In the film she both danced in and directed, Christie layered three very closely structured dance passages over top of one another in RGB colour seperation. At times her bodies would coalesce, always flickering almost a ghost dance, various selves dividing, returning, repeating. Three Part Harmony was almost hypnotizing and quite poignant in addressing the idea of a consistently fluctuating self.

Other films like Guy Maddin’s Sissy Boy Slap Party and Victoria Prince’s Winged Victory overflowed with giddy exuberance, extravagance and chaos abounding. Maddin’s refinement of audio choreography (sissy slaps and voodoo trance drums) reverberates with hysterics while Prince’s silent film references jumbled with circus freaks, film burning and drawing are just as tumultuous.

How I had never before heard of Istvan Kantor (Revolutionary Song), I have no idea, or maybe I had heard of the artist who was banned from the National Gallery because he painted a giant X on the wall in his own blood, and was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Art a couple of years ago, either way his piece was a high strung film to end the screening with, and I believe it was at this point that I started getting spasms in my eye muscles. I am quite amazed by the intensity and the incredible range of work he produces, entangled with multiple identities, the development of Neoism?!, blood paintings, music, videos and performances with robots. Definitely another website worth checking out http://www.istvankantor.com, definitely another huge leap seeing this kind of work in Edmonton.

I will be back with more on aDemond, Placetime and dot.calm as well as metro cinema and just more in general.
later
Andrea

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