There was something appealing to me about seeing the student films - mainly because I am always curious as to what is sprouting in the minds of the future generations.

9pm Screening at Joseph Workman theatre. Gotta love Toronto; waiting in the line-up for the screening amongst residents of CAMH - one of which was shouting “when you die you will rise” and another walking briskly through the lobby saying “Shalom” to everyone he approached. It is Passover after all..

The event was packed with eager young filmmakers and their support teams of friends and family, faculty from York and this really sweet guy from a company called V-Tape who got up to speak and was so nervous and cute about it. I felt the love in the room - I realized what a huge undertaking it is for Images to run this festival. We are so lucky to have people in our cities/communities who CARE about art (huge kudos to the Images folk..) and actually DO things to support them.

The films were a mish-mash of thought, image, music, style, and ‘potential’ genre. 11 short films, all just a few minutes in length, the festival chose a wide variety for this showcase. Films that stood out to me - I loved “They Will Never Catch Us”by Frank Aschberg & Gabriel Watson of Sweden - and not just because it was a series’ of shots of men having their pants pulled down in slow-motion (the most full-frontal maleness I have ever seen on screen, mind you) but because it was brilliantly shot and everything about it worked. The music was perfect. Fascinating also, to see a slowed-down set of reactions to this prank. Balls were literally flying… hilarious.

“Annual Report” and “Those Crazy Insides” showed some incredible and unique animation. Annual Report was thought-provoking without being at all in-your-face about it. And Those Crazy Insides was well, too hard to describe without knowing what type of animation I was watching.

There was the punchy and fun “It Only Hurts When I Cry” by Daniel Macintyre (I think this kid is gonna do some neat stuff). Also, “Morning Will Come” which blew my mind with its poetry-in-motion, I couldn’t believe that it was a student film.

In seeing these films I realized how much film has changed since my younger days (ha ha - I’m only 31, but you know how fast technology is moving) and how technology is influencing the younger generations. This shift allows for so much experimentation and mixed media. This is obviously a huge bonus in short film when you have only a few minutes to tell your story.

All in all, nice work O Future Generation. I wonder who won the award…

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Images Blog 2009 - #5

In this year of 2009, the Images’ Festival’s spotlighted artist was Acadian-Quebecois filmmaker Louise Bourque (now based in Boston). Bourque was an astute choice for this edition of the Images Festival, with its focus on print and what artists do with or to prints. Bourque’s programme testified to the potential wonders of manipulating original prints - painting on them, re-filming them, re-sizing them (even digitalizing them).

Although she delights in deliriously layered abstractionism, there are recurring image-motifs throughout Bourque’s body of work. Specifically, houses feature prominently - not interiors but primarily exteriors. The filmmaker is outside and not necessarily wishing to go back inside. Bourque is not particularly interested in these houses’ architectures - she is interested in them as monuments and/or memories. They are here one frame and gone the next, or they are not quite completely buried underneath paint and print-treatments and collages of other source images. The catalogue essay - Impossible Trips Back Home (by Michael Sickinski) - posits in some detail the filmmaker’s parallel attraction and rejection of conventional concepts of “home”. An audience member asked Bourque about “Rosebud”, but that’s just too literal. While Bourque does play with memory and therefore emotion in a manner that many abstractionist filmmakers stringently avoid, her division of exteriors and interiors parallels a public/private axiom.

The Images’ Spotlight programme of Bourque’s films spanned from 1991 to right now in 2009. The earliest work (Just Words, 1991) utilized sound and image from Samuel Beckett’s solo play Not I - a mouth highlighted at the expense of a face (let alone the rest of the body) intones language-text. The mouth is established and then Bourque introduces stock of a young woman in what appears to be a small-town context - she is slowly moving away from houses and perhaps small businesses. After this film, language disappears from the programme - with one significant exception.

Imprint (1997) set a tone for the evening’s programme and for the artist’s body of work. At the top of the film, a little girl is running toward a porch on the right side of the frame, and there is a coterie of her contemporaries (classmates? playmates?) on the left. Bourque loops this passage and then subjects the stock to multiple treatments - whiting it out, printing its negative, alternating positive/negative and more. The original home movie aesthetic begs questions as to whose point-of-view - the father’s? The camera circles around the house and doesn’t go in. Imprint plays with an insistent rhythm, provided by its sounds as well as its editing. Initially I thought it was a convenient creaking of the film’s apparatus that Bourque had cannily decided to deploy - in a time-honoured tradition. But it is the sound of a record player, its needle continuing to make its revolutions after the music has ceased to play. And about three quarters into the film, this hypnotic scratching is usurped by the great Enrico Caruso singing “A Dream”. And what a dream it is! Bourque has by now added painting to her collage or mise-en-scene - one thinks of Stan Brakhage but “scratchier and more weather-beaten” (according to Sickinski’s essay, and I heartily concur.).

Imprint was succeeded by shorter works : Self-Portrait Post Mortem - 2002) Jours en Fleurs -2003 , Fissures -1999 , The Bleeding Heart -2005, Going Back Home -2000, and a little prayer (H-E-L-P) -2009. All were exquisitely multi-layered and silent, with the exception of The Bleeding Heart. In this film, a recurring bad dream was prominent. With Bourque’s films, it is as if language is something to be overcome or even banished. Language was dominant in the house and now she is outside of the house, but she persists in returning to that site. Going Back Home was a brief and repeated action - the subject returns and returns.

I am pleased that Images 2009’s Canadian Spotlight artist is a woman not all that well known who is working against many grains, including those of many of her abstractionist experimental contemporaries. Bourque’s screening was like watching paint chase its own tail and become more and more circular and delirious. Her palette is so different from cool collected conceptualism - it is wildly expressionist and all the more powerful because of it.

As several bloggers and critics have already noted, the opening weekend of this year’s festival emphasized Live events: performances, talks and interactive screenings by several compelling artists that proved to be popular, “must-see” events for many festival goers with lineups out the door at many venues despite the dreary weather. While Live events have always played a major role in Images programming, this year they felt more concentrated in their scheduling and physical location. The opening gala event, “Notes on Composing,” which paired film and video artists with music composers, spoke nicely to Sung Hwan Kim’s inventive concert/campfire story/screening in a near-blackout environment; while Ben Coonley’s highly entertaining, ill-fated PowerPoint presentation paralleled the end of Kim’s performance (which the artist had to announce by breaking the fourth wall and telling the audience, “That’s it” at the first presentation) by underscoring the way viewer expectations can be frustrated by the practicalities of improvised performances.

But while I loved taking in the diversity of live programming over the weekend and bumping into friends and acquaintances in many damp lineups, I have to admit I’m now looking forward to settling in inside to take in this week’s curated On Screen programs, starting with Chris Kennedy’s “Super 8 Late” program this Thursday.

Steve Polta, 1997A (Arrival), 1997, still

Featuring seven film pieces done through the anachronistic medium of Super 8, most of which are silent and unaccompanied by a soundtrack or score, the program emphasizes the medium’s inherent intimacy as a small scale film format most commonly used to capture home movies or early experimental student works in artists’ own homes and backyards. Many of the pieces depict banal, everyday environments and scenes, such as the movement of dust through a room or the passage of movers on a staircase. The contemplative and almost reverential mood that unites the work operates as a study of the ways Super 8 represents light, shadow and movement in completely unique ways.

Curator Chris Kennedy will be sharing his insights on the program on the blog in the coming days and four artists from the program–-François Boué, Takehiro Nakamura, Philippe Cote & Jason Halprin–will be in attendance for the screening. “Super 8 Late” screens (characteristically) late at 11 pm at the Theatre Centre this Thursday, April 9th.

Tara Mateik, PYT (Pretty Young Thing), 2004, still

I also got the chance to see a sneak preview, low res version of curator Brett Kashmere’s “Saturn Returns” program at the Images mediatheque at the Gladstone Hotel yesterday and am now dying to see the real thing. The Saturn Return, for which the program is named, is an astrological event that happens every 27 to 30 years in a person’s life: the time it takes for Saturn to “return” from a full rotation around the sun. For Brett and his generation (myself included), the next few years marks the first time Saturn returns in our lives, which according to astrology (which as a wacky, half-Icelandic I follow pretty faithfully) heralds a time of reflection on the past and moving forward into a new phase of life that will be markedly different from our previous formative years.

The pieces Brett has chosen bring tongue-in-cheek humour, pop culture appropriation, but also a good dose of sincerity and earnestness (perhaps heralded by recent developments in American culture like the election of Barack Obama and the Oscars’ proclamation that “the musical is back” (which I am afraid means postmodernism is over officially)?) to bear on these examinations of generational coming-of-age and the program is a perfect mix of genres, mediums and references. Not-to-be-missed in my opinion are Winnipeg-based artist Leslie Supnet’s animation of rockers before an AC/DC concert (which can be viewed in its entirety here: http://www.sundaestories.com/animation.html) and Tara Mateik’s incredibly disturbing lip-synching performance of Michael Jackson’s song “PYT” fully costumed as Peter Pan (also online here: http://www.taramateik.com/index.php/projects/details/pyt).

Brett Kashmere has also agreed to be an Images blog interviewee and will be answering questions about his program in the next few days. “Saturn Returns” debuts alongside the launch of INCITE!, a new journal devoted to experimental media and radical aesthetics, this Friday, April 10th at 9 pm in MOCCA’s Project Space gallery.

Images Festival 2009 - Blog #4

Ben Coonley’s Power Point lecture (or demolition) Talking Points and Talking Ponies
(Remapping the Apparatus: Cinematographic Specificity and Hybrid Media) began with two pretty serious looking films - one his own student project Titanic and the other one by heavy-duty seventies structuralist J.J. Murphy. The Titanic film utilized audio sections of the James Cameron/Celine Dion epic as bedrock for the filmmaker’s leader-striping and flickering and other serious abstractions. The Murphy film inserted a giant unsinking ice-cube (perhaps the Titanic?) in front of a camera and then used a wide spectrum of filters to get strobic. Both films are strong on deep blue and an almost crimson red. The student film was impressive, and the mentor’s a landmark.

But then it became Power Point time. Power Point is an omnipresent feature of digital technologies. The cutely provocative imp named Ben Coonley announced his intention to re-contextualize the film-theorizing of Jean-Louis Baudry (not merely a structuralist but a materialist and apparatnik) to not just media-art work but also to the less respectable wings of digi-culture - pedagogical materials such as educational and training films, as well as You Tube “masterpieces”. Coonley set up his own pedagogical expectations and then allowed the malfunctioning functions of Power Point to sabotage those expectations. The ghosts of the machine became animated (and animations) and not only came to life but indeed run amok. It was as if the cat not only spared the mouse, but subsequently let the mouse become a raging anarchist.

Structuralism, and indeed other formalist premises, does bear resemblance to infantilism. Repeating absurdist actions or premises beyond a point of saturation while adhering to a maddeningly obvious logic, constructing sand castles prone to collapse and destruction, and so on and so on - well, these are tropes of both the rigorous and the ridiculous. Coonley deployed the intrinsic mechanical stupidity of the digi-video apparatus to present mind numbing literal puns (open sores rather than open source), and he displayed a willingness to let the animals take over the zoo. Not just the cat, but also the pony. He never quite lost a sharp observational edge, which came to the fore in his final video which pondered and lambasted the metaphysical hubris of the artist Christo (he of the unnecessary second vowel).

I did find myself thinking that, underneath Coonley’s childish willingness to let the chips fall where they may, there was a critique of the very possibility of apparatus formalism being applicable to video as opposed to film. The mechanics or the apparatus of the digital world are not those of the film strip and a projector - they are of electronic circuits that frequently do go short or postal and create their own logistics that have nought to do with their humans’ intentions. Conley’s videos did not miss, for example, any singular possible kitsch transition that so many high-tech media-producers consider to be essential to the material (and not just eighties music-video nostalgists). If a portal option suddenly blocked the road, then damn the original destination and hallelujah for the portal.

But the impish artist’s wit was often acutely acerbic. The most “educational” of the videos was the one in which an ingénue (Coonley himself) suggested to his boss that a certain product would be profitable but also environmentally toxic. The boss of course wants the profit. Then the ingénue suggests a product that would be profitable and also environmentally healthy, and the boss emphasized the essentiality of profit while not caring about the environmental benefits. The video-spot asks whether, in both cases, the boss is deliberately intending to harm or help the environment. The answer? Harm registers more clearly than help, whether active or passive. But…who would not want to have their cake and eat it too? Ben Coonley knows that the humans say one thing and then let the machines do another. That’s why he prefers to let the pony do the talking.

A connective trope of this 22nd Images Festival is that of print - the festival’s ghost masterwork is The Print Generation by none other than J.J. Murphy. When modernist film strategies such as print degeneration and death of the author enter into post-video digital technologies, questions such as what exactly constitutes a print are raised, and then forgotten. Coonley’s show and tell has me eagerly anticipating the upcoming Live Images Fifth presentation - Hanne Mugaas and Cory Arcangel’s Art Since 1950 (According to the Internet). Walter Benjamin did indeed take notice of the erosion of Aura in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Walter was indeed prescient.