After viewing Gianfranco Foshchino’s short films, I felt like I had just picked up a stranger’s photo album and flipped through his private shots. Or maybe it was like being assigned to be on a top secret stakeout in which your intended targets were Chilean pallbearers, senior citizens and… stray dogs? I found myself scanning all around the frame from the sky bound birds to a random passerby to the roof of a shack. Resembling Gursky-esque “landscapes” (though Foschino is very quick to point out the conscious avoidance of any superfluous post-production in all of his work), the films draw a fine line between still photography and time-based media.

The work is remarkable in the sense that they bring up issues surrounding surveillance, duality and human fragility without a single pan, edit or word of dialogue. Regardless of focal points, the stillness of the frame in each film forces the viewer to analyze the scenes for purpose, dissecting the details for meaning.

Foschino is insistent that his practices are based on the idea that there is an inevitable uncertainty when one attempts to visually digest imagery, even through an objective lens such as a hidden camera. It is clear to him that a single shot can’t and/or shouldn’t be read in just one way. A short featuring seniors sporadically looking out a window could symbolize extreme isolation or frivolous joy. The depiction of the end of a funeral procession could imply great loss or a new beginning. The most “action-packed” piece is a single horizontal shot of a group of people waiting at a crowded bus stop. A girl sucks on a lollipop. A sun-kissed older man stares into the distance. A stray dog walks back and forth through the frame. His images are serene yet troubling. They are telling but mysterious. I recently sat down with Gianfranco to chat about his work and his upcoming Friday screening at Innis Town Hall.

Sunny Fong: Is this your first time in Toronto?

Gianfranco Foschino: Yes. It’s a unique place.

S: Have you been to the Power Plant yet?

G: Yes! I loved it. I really enjoyed Sharon Lockhart’s videos. It’s amazing that Toronto has an audience for this. In Chile, the scene is small.

S: After viewing some of the work, I find that you have this fascination with windows. It’s almost a motif. Nan Goldin was also obsessed with windows but she didn’t realize it until someone pointed it out.

G: A window is something metaphorical. It’s something where you can look out and see an alternative place. It’s also about duality: in front, what’s in it, what’s outside… For some of my subjects, the only link to the outside world is a window.

S: It’s like a frame within a frame. Particularly in the shot of the seniors.

G: Right. They get a link to daily life. To the exterior.

S: Do you think they are analyzing as much we are analyzing as viewers?

G: I think these seniors only see the outside as a reference to the exterior. They don’t look for specifics.

S: I also noticed that you chose to film vertically for certain shots.

G: My films are all about composition. The difference between what is up, what is down. Filming vertically can show a higher top or a higher frontier. There is a better visual relationship between earth and sky. A vertical shot can also create a better relationship with the viewer. Horizontal video is a convention. There is no reason for it. If you can do vertical photography, why not vertical films?

S: I never thought of it that way! You seem in love with your films in the way that you watch them.

G: [Smiles] I’m always discovering new things in my own work. The films are always changing.

S: Do you think there is beauty in your work?

G: I don’t know if “beautiful” is the right term.

S: Is there a significance to the absence of sound? I noticed you didn’t include cars whizzing by, the voices…

G: For me, true cinema is without sound. Cinema is imagery and movement. What’s spectacular about the moving image is the movement itself. You don’t need special effects to make something visually interesting. I think the work has a connection to photography and painting. For me, they’re in a similar place. The rhythm of sound is something different from the “rhythm” of images.

S: As an experimental media artist, is there a filmmaker that you enjoy on a personal level?

G: Michelangelo Antonioni. He makes great films.

S: Ha, I was trying to get you to confess to a Hollywood Director… The films also seem to talk about surveillance and memory. It’s amazing that none of your subjects are aware that they are being filmed. Particularly, the film that features people waiting for the bus. It almost seems like a staged tableau. Some of the faces are very animated. The one subject who starts breastfeeding is incredible.

G: Who knows where her mind is?

S: Her expression doesn’t change! It’s like she’s either lost in her thoughts or focused on being a mother.

G: It’s an exercise in capturing reality: to remind us to be conscious of the present. It’s hard to stay focused sometimes in life. It’s a second chance to see reality before it fades away. You can see the context without being in the context. I mostly choose to capture rural life. Places and subjects that are not typically involved with contemporary life. It’s the fragility of it all that I want to showcase. For example, that building behind those people has disappeared. That whole scene is now gone due to development. It will never happen again.

You can catch Gianfranco Foschino’s work at the Workers Entering the Factory program along with new films by Pooja Madhavan, Benj Gerdes, Jennifer Hayashida and Barbara Meter at Innis Town Hall on Friday, April 9 at 5:00 PM. Admission is pay-what-you-can.

As the first few minimalist frames of Erie grace the screen, it’s quite evident that tone will be an overarching catalyst for the rest of the film. The opening scene shows two men hanging a slick Volkswagen billboard advertisement aimed at African Americans, cooking up a flavour of equal parts irony and mobility.

A documentary in the least interventionist sense, Kevin Jerome Everson’s fourth feature arranges unedited, back-to-back, black-and-white snapshots of African American working class life, in areas surrounding Lake Erie.

Shortly following that opening scene is one that was selected to reflect the film in the Images 2010 catalogue. It depicts a young black girl, seated and staring listlessly at a burning candle. Her gaze never wanders, and any action is contained visually in her natural facial trembles, and audibly on the ambient soundtrack of passing cars and a barking dog.

For 10 long minutes, it’s just the stare and the candle. My initial reaction: curious tedium.

But while its extent without explanation irked me at first, I began to realize that the scene actually establishes a key idea early on in Erie, before the film’s offshoots flow out in loose relation: allowing time to pass.

That uninterrupted passage of time is implicit in the scenes that follow - of fencers, artists, and autoworkers past and present in conversation, among others - who Everson documents for about the length of one film roll, each.

What it seems to reflect for all Everson’s characters (a tie binding people unrelated by a central story) is the wait they must endure for circumstances - economic, political, and otherwise - to change, in light of recent financial and social collapse.

Despite the monotony of the candle chapter, Everson’s ability to capture evocative images should not be understated. One highlight is a scene in which the camera moves seamlessly between a singer and piano player, and a few b-boys, both performing in the same room using disparate styles, but related by circumstance.

Scenes like this develop the notion of rhythm - in conversation, work, recreation - that pervades the film. And paired with Everson’s strongly developed themes of focus and different types of movement, Erie reinterprets the documentary form as a steady visual mosaic.

Erie screens Thursday, April 8 at 9 p.m. at Innis Town Hall. Admission: Pay what you can.

Images Blog 6 - 2010 Andrew James Paterson

Sunday (Easter, no less) was the marathon cinematic grinder of the 23rd Images Festival. This was the day for three On-Screen programmes and, not unlike a durational performance-artist, I clocked in and clocked out.

The first afternoon programme - Eliminate or Minimize. Substitute - focused on an underlying theme linking much of this year’s festival programme. That theme is one of choreography in relation to social space, which means a lot of dancers and then a whole lot more. The works in this programme were linked by a refusal to adhere to dominant forms of producing choreography and images resulting from choreography, and the works ran the gamut from solo performance to crowd celebration.

The Source is Thirsty to Taste Itself, by Elaine Despins, was a haunting solo exercise in stillness in relation to a moving surface. Momma Dadda, by Kaitlin Till-Landry, was a simple exercise involving the artist’s body in relation to light sources. These are individual bodies in their not anti-social but rather private personal spaces, which are more than just comfort zones. Till-Landry’s title suggests a poke at Dada’s masculinist legacies, as well as eternal connections between infantilism and compulsive needs to perform or be on camera. Also notable in this programme was Emily Roysdon’s Story of History, in which a representation of that thing between the legs of biological men gets slowly but surely chipped away at.

The longest piece in the programme was Johanna Billing’s I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm, which is looped so that it plays through twice. Billings’ project links several days of work into a continuous performance (in Romania in 2008) for an unfixed audience, who could enter and leave at their will. Dutiful workers were motivated to fold up their chairs by an insistent drum rhythm provided by a live drummer, who used this rhythm to kick in a quasi-anthemic song. The drumming suggested imminent ecstasy, but that was not quite what resulted. What did result was a choreographed performance involving choreographers, audience members, performing musicians, and dancers outside of traditional performance spaces with their hierarchical relationships. This performance certainly achieved a seamless fluidity, which is no mean achievement. However, the song itself annoyed me the first time through and not to mention the second. It was harmonious and celebratory, which was probably the point. But it did seem like the sort of song that one of the probably well-meaning Western liberal entertainers gently but firmly chided in John Greyson’s film Covered would themselves cover. I found myself thinking about Benetton ads, when I probably should have been just letting go and going with the flow.

The afternoon’s second programme - Disembodied Bodies Pts. 1 & 11 - was bracketed by two short action-pieces (or arguably non-action pieces) by Jon Sasaki. Both is Sasaki’s pieces involved light. One has a match that never gets lit; one has a light that never goes out. Sasaki has been building a justifiably profile career as a gallery-artist. (Think Jacques Tati as a conceptualist - not so far fetched at all. Sasaki is a subtle prankster). A subject of discussion during the question and answer session following the first part of this programme concerned works shown in galleries and their translation to theatrical/cinematic screening formats. There actually are many time-based works that can play effectively in both gallery and theatrical situations; although attention must be paid to the nuts and bolts and possibilities of installation just as colour resolution and audio should be checked before any kind of projection. But I think the length of a work is a key factor in how or where the work best plays. Sasaki makes good miniatures, which play well with typical gallery attention spans. But… why not mix gallery artists working with performance and narrative elements with those whose careers have been rooted in the cinema? Why not indeed?

Whose Toes, by Vancouver wunderkind Barry Doupe, is a longer work which has also played in gallery formats. I have enjoyed many works by Doupe on previous occasions - notably his almost-feature “Ponytail“, in which language was a crucial component of his fantastic landscape. In Whose Toes, language is not at all present. A steadily rhythmic shifting static and surface noise locks Doupe’s virtuoso editing and image manipulation into an omnipresent rhythm. In Whose Toes, people truly float in a timeless ozone; the primary recognizable floating “characters” are J.F. Kennedy and Princess Diana. Yes, two famous political-celebrity deaths one of whom was definitely assassinated and one who allegedly might have been. They float in and out of motsam jetsam flotsam medicated goo - there are other characters Doupe has drawn who I stopped trying to recognize (El-Dodi Whatshisname? The drunken chauffeur? Freddie Mercury?). I abandoned Cartesian logic and found myself appreciating systemic netherworld logic. One minute I’m seeing fingers through the glory holes, and the next I’m seeing what is usually there - a cock. And is that or is that not shit dripping from the unadorned fingers? Excess floats in mysterious ways, and toes (feet, fingers, other bodily parts) do not seem to belong to their biological orders.

Part II of Disembodied Bodies was taken up by Emily Wardill’s feature Game Keepers Without Game. Doupe reduces his characters to their framed essences by means of his skilled draughtsmanship and image manipulation; and Wardill moves her live but still figurine characters against a blank screen (a gallery white wall?) in a manner not unlike that of minimalist animation. Her source material is a play by a 17th Spanish writer - “Life is a Dream“, which Wardill has adapted to contemporary London. The narrative is melodramatic, and Wardill has stripped melodrama down to its basic elements: the players, the props, and the soundtrack. Melodrama is a genre known for its excess - melodrama whether Sirk or Fassbinder or Todd Haynes uses excess to turn that excess back upon itself - Brecht meets camp. Melodrama literally translates as melody plus drama, but Wardill almost eliminates melody. Or, rather she finds it in the drumbeats which literally move her narrative. There are no swelling orchestral manoeuvres and no crocodile tears in this movie. Melodrama is also the progenitor of soap-operas, and both melodrama and soap-operas have often used prop close-ups to stand in for their owners or users. Game Keepers Without Game is a close cousin of Wardill’s installation Sea Oak, concurrently on “display” at YYZ. One tests the limits and limitations of the art or gallery film, one does the same with the theatrical screening. If Godard went through his seventies abandonment of film for video by virtue of the latter’s flatness, then where does that situate Emily Wardill, who in this film has utterly eliminated depth of field? Today, many films are conceived and executed with animation being in the back of the director’s and editor’s psyches. And Wardill has stripped the theatrical cinematic experience to its basic mechanisms, and they only appear when necessary. Now if only the sound in the current Workman auditorium had been cleaner - when dialogue is the main event happening then one should be able to hear that dialogue as clearly as possible.

And then the evening’s programme - Included in the Present Classification - focused on order and its antonym, and on “same” surveying and classifying “other“. Benjamin Tong’s not so oxymoronic title - Genuine Fake - pretty well set the tone. Disruptions, by Juan Ortiz-Aguy, effectively maintained a split-frame structure to depict an intruder in an unidentified public library disordering the collection. The intruder can only intrude to a slight degree indeed since the collection is not only alphabetically-sequenced buts also colout coded. These are two ordering systems which are rather difficult to argue with, unless one does come out and declare radical subjectivity. John Forget revels in the contents of his “music boxes” and his central texts in Flares for the Melodic Forest. Many a queer life has been anchored by the classifications and revelations of Richard Dyer. “Included in the Present Classification” also focuses on those in power positions labelling and classifying those who are either clearly or apparently “other”. Jenny Perlin’s Leads draws from FBI files on a woman (with a Russian name) who seems actually quite ordinary but perhaps a lead will lead to a lead and so on and on. Perhaps repetition ultimately lead to breakdown? In Non-Aryan, by Abraham Ravett, a prominent seemingly liberal university had a system of restricting the number of non-Aryans to be hired. And then Madness in Four Acts, by Thirza Jean Cuthand, skews confrontational scenes from a Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft movie underneath roll texts by anti-psychiatric theorists and activists. Texts in this film, by R.D. Laing among others, argue on behalf of madness as a zone that one might be capable of passing through and subsequently coming out both stronger and more imaginative than before. Order and disorder are indeed symbiotic, and those who can play with disorder arguably understand order better than those who act but don’t think. This was a good concentrated programme.

Images Blog 5 - 2010 Andrew James Paterson

Canadian Artist Spotlight Ross McLaren

Ross McLaren is a very good choice for a spotlighted Canadian artist since (a) he was the maker of a significant body of cinematic works that stand tests of time very effectively indeed and (b) he was a prime catalyst in experimental film history, not only with respect to his own work but to, dare I say, multiple communities. McLaren could justifiably be accused of stirring up a lot of shit and then entering it into play.

If one were to time-tunnel back to the 1970s in Toronto, one could have an archaeological and archival field day with the histories of one particular building - 15 Duncan Street. This was once an office for the Ontario Liberal Party, but that is just a footnote. 15 Duncan hosted the Centre for Experimental Arts and Communications (CEAC), which was a force of beyond nature in its whirlwind international performance and media-arts programming and its political provocativeness. (for further reading, check out Eldon Garnet’s informative essay in the 2010 Images catalogue and then Dot Tuer’s The CEAC was Banned in Canada - Dot Tuer, Mining the Media Archive, YYZ Books, 2005).

CEAC also embraced punk rock, and in 1977 the more punk venues the better. In the basement of 15 Duncan, The Canadian power-pop-punk band The Diodes came in and organized The Crash and Burn, which was short-lived and furious. I myself remember punk/art crossover - not only the frenetic bands but also punk fashion shows and then cold beer in a metal bathtub. (for further reading, check out Liz Worth, Treat Me Like Dirt - An Oral History of Toronto Punk, Bongo Beat Books, 2009)

McLaren had begun organizing film screenings in the 15 Duncan basement in 1976. Many of the filmmakers involved were working with low-gauge stocks - Regular and Super 8 in particular. McLaren co-founded the Toronto Super-8 Festival, and he himself used the stock. McLaren had discreetly initiated The Funnel, a proto-artist-controlled organization for the making and exhibiting of film. The Funnel began in 1977, it used the former Crash and Burn space until CEAC had to shut down in 1978, and then McLaren moved the organization to a warehouse at 507 King Street East - very east indeed from most of the downtown artist-run galleries and video cooperatives. The Funnel talked and made serious film, and someone should write a book about all of this. (further reading, check out John Porter’s Super-8 Porter website)

McLaren himself has been a playful and even confrontational filmmaker, and the Images spotlight focuses on his work between 1976 and 1984, before his relocation to New York City where he continued to work and teach. Weather Building (1976) is raw and performative. Shot on Super-8 with in-camera editing, McLaren references but dances around Warhol’s Empire State. Weather Building is notable for its viscerality and its rhythms - the omnipresent footsteps are on the verge of serious crashing. The filmmaker’s body dances with his camera - somewhere between the pogo and the freefall. Weather Building, with its DIY kineticism, anticipates the punks who McLaren came to share space with and who supplied a subject for his subsequent film Crash and Burn.

McLaren indeed shares the structuralists’ concentration on the film medium’s materials. In Wednesday January 17, 1979 (Art’s birthday, according to Robert Filiou) , the filmmaker is cleaning the shelves and their stock at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre when he decides that the leader of the films is more interesting than the images being led to. So then, McLaren splices the strands of leader into a filmic entity, adding dates with that convenience of punk postering - Letraset. The film 9 x 12 (1981) was produces as an microfiche insert for an edition of Impulse magazine. McLaren has assembled nine rows of 16mm. film with 12 frames per row, producing a still image of the Funnel gallery space. When projected, one can see that space deconstructed though time - one day it was this and the next day it was that.

In addition to his amusing essay on rear-screen projection and romantic narratives Sex Without Glasses (1983), McLaren screened a predominately abstract (with serious scratching) film tied to a rollercoaster radio interview with visiting luminance Jack Smith (he of “Flaming Creatures” notoriety). Smith is explaining why he is doing a performance and not a film during his residency at the Funnel - it is because censorship has indeed become a hot button issue since the provincial censor board has been demanding prior submission for classification of all films of all gauges to be screened in the province. The Funnel had already been hit hard by this ridiculous request, with serious legal and financial consequences. By this time, video artists and distributors and art galleries had joined the anti-censorship battle. Smith himself is alternately angry and bored with the subject, and McLaren’s “translations” of his responses to the interview almost comically follow the visiting artist’s oscillations. Now there is clarity, and now static.

The final hour of McLaren’s screening was reserved for his 1978 film Summer Camp. At sixty minutes, Summer Camp is indeed a feature, of the durational variety. This film is indeed a Duchampian exercise in importing found material into an originally-unintended venue or location. McLaren found more than several reels of young “actors” auditioning for a CBC youth culture programme called “Time of Your Life“. The auditions are, of course, repetitive. Each candidate is interviewed by a classically prim CBC employee, then asked to deliver a specific memorized speech about the grotesque cook at summer camp, and then required to perform an improvisation with a CBC actor. The CBC actor portrays the brother who is dying of cancer - he has been told by the doctors that he has three weeks remaining. So how to the candidates react to this news? Well, some already know but are still in denial. And some try to reassure the brother that the doctors can’t possibly know what the hell they’re talking about. There are interesting collisions here between different definitions of “acting”. There are clashes between annoyingly sunny dispositions and grim hospital realities. There are moments when “acting” indeed breaks down.

But…Duchamp inserted a readymade (of course a urinal) into an environment (an art gallery) in which high culture was certainly not supposed to mix with bodily fluids but in which many of the objects on the wall and the floor could be derogatively referred to as “shit”. McLaren is inserting a readymade (a CBC audition tape) into an environment in which narrative tends to be frowned on, actors are considered to be generally unnecessary, and television itself is an inhabitant of another planet. (And video is suspected by some to be a poor cousin of television) If McLaren had mounted Summer Camp as a gallery installation, then people would look at it, get the point, and move on; or else move around the installation while checking in on the “narrative’ at their own speed. Perhaps they might form their own coteries of comic observers - perhaps the installation might become proto-“relational” or whatever. In a cinematic or theatrical screening situation, a tension develops between quick over-familiarity with the structure and the tacit agreement to commit oneself to the strictures of duration. Summer Camp problematizes art/cinematic/ television boundaries by its very everydayness - its blandness and relative monotony. The scene with the dying brother could possibly be shot as flaming melodrama, but this is just an audition tape and visuals are not a priority. Structural exercises make their points quickly and then must complete their own executions - those are the rules of their games.

And so Summer Camp indeed played as a feature that itself had started late. Audiences were more than trickling in for the evening’s finale - a karaoke screening of McLaren’s 1977 film Crash and Burn. Yes, the old punks were beginning to fill the room. And a found-footage CBC audition tape was beginning to resemble a present-day reality-TV show in which none of the contestants were particularly suitable star material.

So, there we go. And again, congratulations to the Images Festival for an astute choice of featured Canadian artist. I made a quick decision that staying for the karaoke might be hard on my implanted tinnitus, and I walked home. It was prematurely summer, and not at all camp.