Comic books, ’60s dance moves and marijuana
The films of Ron Mann are released on DVD
It has become a career milestone for a filmmaker to have their catalogue released on DVD. Besides making the work available to ravenous collectors, it attaches a sense of permanence and prestige to an oeuvre, even if that oeuvre happens to be devoted to celebrating the poems of John Giorno, the illustrations of Jack Kirby or the dance known as the Mashed Potato.
Documentary-maker Ron Mann is one of a very select few Canadian filmmakers to get the red-carpet DVD treatment with the recent release of three titles on Home Vision/ Morningstar: Poetry in Motion (1982), Comic Book Confidential (1988) and Twist (1992). A special edition of his marijuana history, Grass (1998), also came out shortly after the unofficial holiday of April 20 – the number 4/20 has a mystical significance to potheads and Mann knows his market.
Yet he’s no newcomer to DVD. Through his involvement with Bob Stein’s pioneering CD-ROM company, Voyager, and its movie offshoot, Criterion Collection, Mann was in attendance for the birth of the digital format. In the mid-'80s, he helped package Criterion’s seminal laserdisc editions of Citizen Kane and King Kong. In the early ’90s, he authored four CD-ROMs for Voyager, including two adapted from Poetry in Motion, which Mann cites as "the first movie to be digitized."
"The legacy of the CD-ROM is the DVD today," Mann says over the phone from his Toronto office. "Voyager was the avant-garde of interactive media, and everything that is now standard in DVD – the letterboxing of films, the supplementary material – comes from Voyager."
Everyone who missed out on those early versions of Poetry in Motion and Comic Book Confidential can now savour the goodies. The movies themselves are still pretty good, too. Each exhibits Mann’s flair for synthesizing a wild array of archival material and includes new interviews, performance sequences and arresting graphics. Indeed, Comic Book Confidential, Twist and Grass have lost little of their potency as hopped-up history lessons, and Poetry in Motion remains a stunning merger of verse and visuals. Fans of the latter will be particularly excited about the additional hour of performances.
"We shot 75 artists for the film and a lot of them couldn’t fit into the 90-minute format," says Mann. "For the CD-ROM and now the DVD, I was allowed to put in an hour’s worth of those performances, including Spalding Gray and a lot of people who never quite made it in."
Twist, his history of ’60s dance fads, is now augmented with never-used footage of a 1989 concert featuring many of the performers who popularized the twist.
"That was a $100,000 shoot that went up in smoke," Mann explains. "The realization for me at the time was that the movie wasn’t really about the performers, it was about the dance. That’s why that concert never wound up in the movie, not even as a title sequence. It was too much about today. I really wanted to stop that movie in 1964 with the Beatles."
Though these titles are smartly packaged, Mann was leery of loading up the discs with bonus material of dubious worth.
"When I was making CD-ROMs, we used to call it ‘shovelware’ because people would shove things in without any thought behind it. And when they asked me what supplementary materials I wanted on the discs, I actually said nothing. I said, ‘Who cares if they get a trailer or an interview with the director – I don’t care what the director has to say. I want to see the work.’ But that’s because I’m just a contrarian.
"I always think that with DVD, there is so much one can do that isn’t being done – people just do what everybody else does and that’s the problem. With my discs, there’s enough of what one will expect of a DVD release and that makes it a little bit more than shovelware. But we haven’t seen the potential of the medium really used, especially as a storytelling medium."
Besides, the kind of permanence that Mann cares about doesn’t come from DVD reissues but from the archives of his work at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Cinémathéque Québécoise. There, the hundreds of hours of interviews and vintage source material that Mann used to construct his films are available to all. Mann continues to see himself as a cultural historian as well as a filmmaker.
"When I started making these films," he says, "it was really about making sure that before a lot of these artists disappeared, there was some record of their work. And this wasn’t a matter of looking just at the traditional art forms, but at what you might call outsider art – the ephemeral culture, basically. These are pop histories. Usually pop is supposed to go away, but these don’t."
The subject matter of his forthcoming projects is typically idiosyncratic. His film about Woody Harrelson’s Simple Organic Living Tour – during which the actor and Grass narrator took to the road to promote earth-friendly lifestyle choices – should be ready by early 2003, while work continues on an animated documentary about hot-rod pioneer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and a history of American film criticism produced by Mann and directed by Gerald Peary. He also continues his work in Canadian film preservation and has been talking to Atom Egoyan and Mongrel Media’s Hussein Awarshi about opening a new digital cinema in Toronto. But for the most part, Mann is amazed that he is still able to indulge his interests for a living.
"That’s something I always think: ‘I’m here another day? Great,'" he says. "But I’m not a role model at all and I’m not that ambitious because I’m not part of the film industry. My interest is in giving recognition to visionary artists and telling hidden histories. That’s what I wanna do and that’s why I can’t stop thinking about making these movies."
MANN ON DISC
Besides the four current titles, there are plans to reissue more of Ron Mann’s films on DVD, including his history of Toronto’s Rochdale College, Dream Tower (1994), and his outstanding free-jazz documentary Imagine the Sound (1981).
"The dream for me," says Mann, "is to put out Imagine the Sound with a new digital audio mix. It was recorded at a 24-track studio by Phil Sheridan, so I would be able to remix it digitally and in stereo and provide some of the additional performances that Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor did that aren’t in the movie."
As for the new discs, here’s what you can expect.
·Poetry in Motion: In this anthology of poets including Allen Ginsberg, Jayne Cortez, Michael Ondaatje and Jim Carroll performing their work, the extra hour of material features verbal pyrotechnics as dazzling as anything that made the cut.
· Comic Book Confidential: Mann’s history of American comics (both the underground and mainstream varieties) comes with an introduction by filmmaker and illustrator Kevin Smith and a massive archive of stories by the artists featured in the film. I only wish I had a bigger TV so I could read ’em.
· Twist: Besides the unused concert footage, this fun tribute to frugging comes with an appropriately cheesy dance seminar that gives you all the steps you need.
· Grass: This fascinating, but still too brief, tale of America’s war on pot includes a deleted intro sequence, a gallery of High Times covers, a 5.1 Dolby Digital mix and a reference guide to marijuana laws in the U.S., which is an invaluable tool for anyone planning on getting busted in Arkansas. |
