Kyle Whitehead (l) and Truck director Renato Vitic at a free screening in Tomkins Park.

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Urbanity
Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers
Tuesday, September 15 - Saturday, September 19

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A trailer housing an experimental filmmaker may soon be visiting your community as part of Urbanity on Film. The idea of a mobile film laboratory producing several short films focusing on themes of urbanity is the result of a project with the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers (CSIF), Calgary’s Truck Gallery and artist-in-residence and filmmaker Kyle Whitehead. The Truck’s CAMPER (Contemporary Art Mobile Public Exhibition Rig) will become the mobile laboratory, while the resulting works will be showcased as outdoor film screenings, for free, at various locations.

The goal of the project is to place the CAMPER in all four quadrants of Calgary, reaching as many diverse communities as possible and reaching out to a crowd that normally wouldn’t have the opportunity to interact with contemporary art.

The short films are meant to be spliced together and shown as a successive series of images, according to Whitehead. “The idea is to make one film for each week of the residency, as the CAMPER will be parked in a different location each week. Each film will represent one space the CAMPER has inhabited for the duration of the residency. A working title I am using for the films, as a single entity, is Four Vignettes, as the idea is that they will be tiny peeks into a moment, space or interaction specific to the location.”

A major part of the project is also the use of Super 8 film. Whitehead often includes a hand-processed technique because it helps him form a more tactile and intimate relationship with film as his medium.

During the processing of a Super 8 film, the cartridge can be cracked open with something as simple as a butter knife and then sloshed around in a container, such as an ice cream bucket, with the right chemicals. “Even if you damage the film in the process, it really only adds to the beauty of Super 8, which is all about the grain, scratches and light flashes... It’s really the medium that most easily captures the look of film,” says CSIF programming co-ordinator Melanie Wilmink.

After searching for a place to develop his film only to find processors were unwilling to experiment and perform what is considered “improper development,” Whitehead decided to process his own.

“I found one lab in California that would cross-process film for a completely outrageous price, which seemed to defeat the purpose of using Super 8 film, as one of its strengths is its relatively low cost compared to other film formats, making it a perfect choice for experimentation,” says Whitehead.

“By processing my own film I open up a wide range of visual possibilities unavailable to the filmmaker who relies on a lab to process their images. I am able to physically manipulate the film, literally, with my own two hands and I have absolute control, at least as much as is possible with many of these processes, over every aspect of making a film — from shooting the images right through to editing and making the final master to video or to optical print for exhibition.”

Whitehead will also give a series of workshops on small film, hand processing and a failed film critique as part of the residency.

For more information on the screenings and workshops go to csif.org or truck.ca.