| If ever you get the feeling that someone’s got their eye on you after the lights go down in the cinema, it’s possible that you’re under the watchful gaze of Patrick McLaughlin.
A cinematographer best known for his work behind the camera for Calgary director Gary Burns’s feature films The Suburbanators and Waydowntown, McLaughlin is fascinated by the way people watch movies and how they interpret them. He’s made a series of short films that explore what happens when people gather to watch light flicker across a screen in the dark, and he’ll show them at a screening called Viewmanship.
McLaughlin says his interest in watching people in theatres was first sparked by his profession.
"I would always find myself turning around and looking at people watching movies to see how the light plays across their faces, (so) if I ever came across a situation where I had to recreate that, I would know what it looked like. And that really takes you out of the film when you do that and gets you into looking at people looking at movies."
What McLaughlin has found is that each viewer brings something unique to every film they see – while initially that may sound trite or banal, McLaughlin’s fascination has led him to the point that he believes each person watching a movie has a kind of communion with the work under observation.
"My theory is that people provide their own content…. everybody has their own filters and everybody has their own life experiences that they bring into the film….
"That can even happen with the individual. You can watch a movie at one point in time and like it, and you watch it later on and have a different experience."
To support his theory, McLaughlin cites two different screenings of Stanley Kubrick’s psychological thriller The Shining that he attended about three weeks apart a few years ago.
"And the two different audiences in those screenings – one at a downtown art cinema and one a suburban mall at a midnight screening where you get nothing but teenagers – the reactions were completely different.
"Downtown, people just laughed at it – they almost saw it as a comedy. Whereas the teenagers had a different reaction to it…. They were scared! This was a frightening film to them. They were along for the ride and just enjoyed the film for the sheer horror of it."
While nothing in McLaughlin’s short films on display in Viewmanship is particularly horrific, it’s this audience subjectivity that he hopes to highlight with the evening’s program. For example, several of the films don’t have a specific narrative, but even though I knew that before I watched them, there was a tremendous compulsion to impose narrative upon them.
"People grow up with TV; people grow up with film – they’re so conditioned to look for story that even though there may not be a story, they’re going to find one," says McLaughlin.
One of the films that questions this conditioning is K2H40: Variations on an Architectural Construct, which presents a slow series of dissolves between one shot of a house and another. We slowly realize that it’s not a single dwelling that we’re seeing, but rather a number of different houses that all have nearly the same façade – with minor changes in paint, shingles and shrubbery. Clearly, this is a Calgary suburb – and, indeed, McLaughlin found the houses in Monterey Park.
"They’re similar enough that when you dissolve between two separate houses, it looks like a morphing effect," says McLaughlin. "From house to house and between neighbourhoods, they are identical. They build these houses on these crescents and within these gated communities – all these houses match the specifications that the designer wanted, but there’s no indication who it is living inside of them."
This impulse to look past the façade is taken up further in films like Ikegami M245, which simulates security camera footage, and Relinquishing Power to the Delicate Bond of Understanding, Part 4, a film shot in the style of the TV show COPS, with actors speaking a made-up language called "Boguslavic." As the film plays, another actor will provide "translation" live onstage in the cinema.
"He’ll be doing a play-by-play, telling the audience what’s happening," says McLaughlin, noting that all will not be quite as it seems. "It’s an experiment – we’ve never performed this before and we’re not quite sure what the results will be, but, in essence, he is acting as the filter of understanding that we all have in our brains….
"So while this video is onscreen, your attention is divided by this person onstage telling you what you should be thinking."
And how does McLaughlin think his audience will react?
"That’s the whole experiment of the evening – I really don’t know if people will enjoy that, or they won’t want to hear about that, or they’ll appreciate it and laugh, or they’ll be bored, or they’ll walk out, or they’ll talk during it. I think it’ll run the gamut.
"It’ll be interesting for me to see it and that’s why I want to do it." |
