More weird sex and snowshoes
Independent Canadian short films all over the map
REVIEW
THE INDEPENDENT SHORT FILM IN CANADA 1967-2002
September 27 and 28
CSIF (Currie Barracks)
When considering where Canadian cinema fits into the North American picture, I’m reminded of a university film class discussion about the differences between the films we produce here and those pumped out by our neighbours to the south. Using Don McKellar’s quietly apocalyptic Last Night and the U.S. equivalents Armageddon and Deep Impact for examples, the fearless professor hypothesized that Canadian filmmakers are far more interested in individuals, whereas American films concentrate on vastly larger groups of people.
Whatever your theories – population dispersion, Northern moodiness, incessant navel-gazing thanks to budgetary restraints – Canadian film often fits into this mould of individual exploration. Offering up further proof is The Independent Short Film in Canada 1967-2002, the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre’s compendium of Canadian shorts. Of the four programs compiled by Louise Liliefeldt and the CFMDC (only two of which are screening in Calgary), the focus has remained primarily individual and the results are often striking and quite pointedly Canadian.
Program 1: Short Stories & Fractured Fables opens with Wendy Tilby’s charming animation Tables of Content, in which a solitary diner simply observes the actions of those at the tables around him.
The late Jack Chambers’ 1965 piece Mosaic intercuts shots of a young woman frolicking in a field of flowers, a young child nursing and festering corpses in a rapid-cut style reminiscent of Stan Brakhage’s similarly minded shorts.
For Mothers of Me, Alexandra Grimanis sorted through hours of family archival footage and audio tape interviews to reconstruct a portrait of her matriarchal lineage, long afflicted with the early onset of insanity.
Both Once by Ellen Flanders and Reville by Franchine Leger focus on two sets of outsiders – Flanders interviews several Jewish offspring on their quest to re-learn the near-lost language of Yiddish, while Leger composes an animated tribute to the Acadians deported from Nova Scotia in Canada’s earliest days.
Neither Me, Mom and Mona (which features filmmaker Mina Shum discussing her Chinese upbringing in Vancouver with her sister and mother for what feels like an eternal 20 minutes) nor Cathryn Robertson’s portrayal of the traditional native harvesting of wild rice Minomen Harvest will win any arguments in the "Canadian films are boring" debate, but at least there’s Michael Snow’s 1956 A To Z left in the wings to bat cleanup. Summed up simply in Snow’s synopsis as "two chairs fuck," A To Z’s cut-and-paste animation more than fills the "quirky quotient" Canadian cinema is often saddled with.
Program 2: The Lighted Field is saddled with weaker material, but its moments of quality are worth waiting for. The proceedings open with David Rimmer’s poignant Canadian Pacific, composed of identical shots from his trainyard window taken over the seasons in 1974, and local animator Richard Reeves’s Linear Dreams, scratchy paint splatterings accompanied by a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, one must also sit through Louise Lebeau’s yawn-inducing gaze at the women of Mexico in Desert Veils, Carl Brown’s hand-tinted colour splashes in Sheep (too bad Reeves was programmed first), and Dawn Wilkinson’s self-important and hollow exploration of place and belonging (or something like that) in Dandelions.
Thankfully both Nocturne, Michael Crochetiere’s 1996 tribute to Montreal at night, and Joyce Wieland’s 1967 collage Handtinting liven things up again. Created from long exposures of rushing traffic and twinkling city lights, Nocturne is pretty as a painting, while Handtinting cuts together an ultra-hip ’60s dance party from discarded strips of film discovered by the filmmaker.
It’s always easy to quibble with a program of shorts (the occasional stinkers always seem to be the longest ones and a person can only take so much of someone else’s interior monologue), but The Independent Short Film in Canada is a useful primer on the histories and themes of untethered filmmaking here at home. |
