Hello and welcome back to Art & Trash! It’s been a year since I last released an episode of the series, and I’ve emerged from that time of reflection with the conclusion that an episode a week is indeed too frequent. So for this season, I’ll be making a new episode available every other Thursday, beginning today with Richard Kerr: Field Trips. More on that below.
To launch the new series, I threw together this trailer. Spot the films! Despite what the Kingsmen may say, all of these films are cool (and some are also trash), from the participatory puzzles of B.D. Benedikt’s Beyond the Seventh Door (imagine Sesame Street, its lessons more fatal) to the alien limbo of Standish Lawder’s Necrology (as they said at the drive-ins, “after I saw Necrology, I couldn’t get on an escalator for a week!”). This time around I’ll be talking about film labour, futurism, grim inheritances, the decline of classical allegory, and Canadian pastoral fantasies.
Along the way there may also be slightly more personal digressions in episodes, because I made a decision this year to no longer disavow my own presence / experiences / history in how I talk about movies. More on that below, as well.
RICHARD KERR: FIELD TRIPS
This week’s episode is sourced from my latest book, Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada, co-authored with Michael Zryd and edited by Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg. The book can be purchased here.
The focus of this episode is on Richard Kerr, one of Canada’s greatest living filmmakers, whose work integrates technological adventure, phenomenal curiosity, and a sense of instinct that seems preternaturally aligned with the history of vision in art.
Richard Kerr’s films have meant a great deal to me as subjects for teaching film and video production because of the degree to which they provoke students to think about how they’ll use their materials, and because at the forefront of his work is a devotion to visual experience that supersedes theme and content. Even at his most documental and minimalistic, Richard Kerr makes films to be felt immediately in the synapses, a quality that may seem obvious in his most abstract films (like Plein Air, 1991, or House Arrest, 2013), but which is a trait that emerges as early as his first film, Hawkesville to Wallenstein (1977), where slow-motion shots of horse-drawn carriages are both symbolic elegies (of what for most North Americans is a bygone way of life) and durational passages that structure other, more plainly observational passages.
Kerr’s films have been the subject of critical commentary that places them in relation to technology, collage, the Canadian landscape and masculinity. Bart Testa has been the leading commentator on Kerr’s films, and offered one remark about them that seems a comprehensive statement of their virtues: that they are unconfused and compact (Testa, 1994, 11). His earliest films bear the poetic documentary style that Colin Low had mastered at the National Film Board of Canada—Canal (1981), in particular, reflects this approach, subtle but deliberate shows of technique emerging from slow, meditative passages, scanning coastlines marked by the wastage of industry. This side of Kerr’s work remains even as his films become more open in their forms, with his long-form films of the mid- to late-80s: On Land Over Water (Six Stories) (1984), The Last Days of Contrition (1988), and Cruel Rhythm (1991). It is that openness of form—and Kerr’s commitment to aesthetics that feature curious pleasures, like aggressive, kinetic camera movement and dial-tuning soundscapes—that persists in his later work, especially the films and videos that he has made in the twenty-first century.
With Richard Kerr: Field Trips, I’ve attempted to make a fairly total survey of Kerr’s films. Some items have fallen by the wayside: there are more works to be explored, and time and ease of form have kept me from giving more attention to the light box collages, tapestries of industrial waste that strike me as a touchstone in the folk art of upcycling. As collages, they are less the collision of “foreign realities” as Max Ernst would have it, and more an act of material self-consciousness for the film strip; the illusion of movement collapses and the strip is revealed for what it is: pattern and colour.
THE STAIRWELL: MEMORIES AND MIRAGES OF FILM NOIR
As we resume Art & Trash, I wanted to also share this piece, recently published in issue 9.1 of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies. My first stab at a memoir. For those of you who followed my Detours series last fall, this was my first piece on film noir which, from the timing of its publication, might serve as a conclusion to that first series. The creator’s statement is reproduced below.
With The Stairwell, I am exploring themes of personal and collective memory and representations of amnesia in film noir. The occasion for this stems from a childhood memory of watching Edward Dmytryk’s cold war-era neo-noir Mirage (1965) on a late night movie show. My recollection of this film is inaccurate, flawed by the lens of a child’s imagination. As a result The Stairwell becomes an interrogation of remembering and forgetting, in relation to the themes and characters of the classic period of film noir (1941-1958). In making this essay, my allegiance is first to the imagination, second to the facts of the objects at hand. As a work of personal inventory, the process of making this piece reminded me of Gaston Bachelard’s remark that, 'like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us'.1 This essay demonstrates the synergy that develops between the fractured, partial memories of subjective ‘moviegoing’ and the consensus themes of an era, a movement, a style.
The account I offer of my own childhood imaginings marks the divergence within me of what D.W. Winnicott described as the true and the false self that are distinguished in play.2 My false self, that is, the self that fits into society, can accept the truth of the object as something that is separate from my imagination and my creative extensions and confusions of it; but my true self is the child who rearranged these fragments to become a mirror of still-forming knowledge about the nature of the world. The false self is the part of every moviegoer than can understand the circumstances of production, that David Stillwell is a character played by Gregory Peck, and the nest of recognitions that come with an understanding of the conventions of storytelling. The moviegoer’s true self is that subjectivity that reimagines the parameters of story, and for whom the stakes of the characters and the atmosphere of cinematic diegesis carry palpable risk.
The Stairwell is spread over six sequences. In the first sequence, I offer my memory of Mirage, the context in which I saw it, and the facts of my misremembering. Context and fallible recollection can transform narrative and refigure theme so as to prioritize fear; this anticipates the idea that films seen by a still-forming identity can be reshaped into a vivid oneiric experience. The visual approach in this section establishes the way that Mirage looked, and offers contrary ways of seeing it, by making it denser, by using superimposition, photographic negative, and other plastic techniques to aggravate the nightmarish qualities of the film as remembered.
The second sequence presents a second-hand anecdote, that of a woman who is taken to see Kiss of Death as a child, and is asked by her father to recount its story thoroughly. This sequence interrogates the nature of memory, its interweaving of complex characterizations with the punctuation of sudden violence. This argument runs parallel to Roland Barthes’s claim of the rarity of punctum in the photograph, that trait that lingers in the memory. By ending with a repetition of the best-remembered sequence from the film—of Tommy Udo throwing Mrs. Rizzo down the stairs in her wheelchair—I am reinforcing the themes of restatement as a memory aid, while also signalling the relation between trauma and visual storytelling.
The third sequence declares an affiliation with the avant-garde, returning to the idea of context, this time, the context of the American experimental psychodramas that were roughly contemporaneous with the classic period of film noir. Drawing from Kenneth Anger’s description of the oneiric potential of his films, Anger’s Fireworks, Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and Mirage are combined in dynamic, layered montage, a parallel of my muddled childhood memories of late night movie shows.
The fourth sequence argues that the definitional search that has guided scholarship on film noir often disregards the ambiguities of the style. Later developments, like the casual endurance of noir style in contemporary culture, stand in contrast to the ossifying frame of film history. The abstraction and speculation of these sentiments are met with more concrete imagery of visual citations - the faces of the noir amnesiacs - which give way to more abstract layering, combined with imagery that is suggested by the narrator, including the anachronistic appearance of the Invisible Man. This anticipates a full transformation of the work, from interwoven imagery to punctuative, clarified images in the fifth section, to support its exploration of amnesiac characters in noir, emphasizing John Ballantyne of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) as a mirror to Mirage protagonist David Stillwell (with the Dalí dream sequence remixed into a dense mass). In the sixth and final sequence, I return to this theme of the nocturne and the fleeting remembrance, giving it plastic form in a series of truncated images, punctuated by black, reasserting the role of ‘late night movie shows’ and laying out plainly the content of my misremembering and the nature of this self-interrogation as a means of ‘seeing in the dark’.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 104.
D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: BasicBooks, 1971).
That’s it for now. We’ll be back in two weeks with The Wrestler’s Cruel Study: Theatre and Honour in Pushed Too Far, on Jack Rooney’s great hoosier fable, a battle between good (a karate teacher) and evil (a professional wrestler) in a sleepy Indiana town.