The Independent
Imaging Retreat by Chris Gehman
curated by Chris Gehman • Hanover Civic
Centre,
The Independent Imaging Retreat, now
in its tenth year, was founded by Canadian filmmakers Philip Hoffman and Marian McMahon to
encourage a direct, hands-on approach to filmmaking that is far removed from
the costly, hierarchical and inaccessible industrial model, with its
intensive division of labour into many specialized craft areas. Each summer it brings
to
The retreat is part of a
little-recognized international movement towards what might be called an artisanal mode of filmmaking - one in which the
artist works directly on every stage of a film, from shooting and editing to
the processing and printing of the film stock itself. In the past, even the
most solitary of avant-garde filmmakers have usually turned the processing,
printing, and negative cutting of their films over to professional film
laboratories whose primary products are commercial films, advertisements,
television programs, etc. A new generation of filmmakers has emerged, willing
to forego the predictability and standardization of industrial processes in
favour of direct control of their materials, motivated by a combination of necessity and curiosity.
Economically, the existence of
adventurous independent films has been dependent upon the existence of a larger
commercial
industry that creates a demand for products and services, and therefore keeps
prices relatively low. As the
commercial film industry, particularly its low-budget ranks,
have shifted production away from 16mm film to digital media, the availability of
16mm film stocks and services such as processing and printing has declined, and
will certainly continue
to decline further.
There are several possible responses
available to filmmakers who have been dependent upon this economy: follow the shifts in the
larger industry and switch to video and digital media; transfer production to
35mm, with its higher attendant costs; or take control of those stages of the
filmmaking process which are disappearing at the business level. (Of
course, many artists will practice some combination of these basic strategies.)
The Independent Imaging Retreat has played a crucial part in
It would be a mistake, however, to
look at the movement towards artisanal filmmaking as solely an economic response to
outside factors. As is so often the case in art, internal aesthetic ideas and
pressures produced effects that precede their putative economic causes:
The movement was burgeoning well before the practical effects of the shifts in the commercial
industry had begun to make themselves felt by independent filmmakers. The
examples of individual filmmakers have been crucial in motivating new
generations to take matters into their own hands: Internationally renowned artists
such as Len Lye and Stan Brakhage offered inspiration in their lifelong
commitments to individual, artisanal film practices. And in Canada, across a period
from the mid-60s through the present, filmmakers such as Joyce Wieland,
Al Razutis, Carl Brown, Gary Popovich, Barbara Sternberg, Philip Hoffman and
Steven Woloshen have experimented in different ways with unconventional approaches
to the film surface and image through processing, colour toning,
optical printing, scratching and painting, etc.
What these filmmakers tend to share
is a desire to complicate the reception of the image: In contrast to the
ordinary commercial practice of creating seamless, transparent representations - illusions - through which
stories are told, many independent filmmakers are committed to a more complex
kind of image-making in which the projected image may be both
representation and object simultaneously, or may reject representation
altogether (as is the case in many of Stan Brakhage's and Len Lye's films). The
filmmaker builds images, ideas, stories, atmospheres, while at the same time keeping
the method of construction of the film, and the images which make it up,
present in the viewer's consciousness. In this context, the nicks, scratches and
inconsistencies in development which result when a roll of film is processed
"spaghetti-style" in a plastic bucket are not seen as a problem - as they certainly
would in making a commercial
movie! - but
become part of the film's style and method.
Artists mining
this cinematic vein tend also to embrace a process-oriented mode of production,
in which the film's form and subject are discovered in the course of the making,
rather than following a preconceived script or plan - an art of
discovery, then, not only of management and execution. This is what allows
these artists to dispense with the predictability of laboratory results,
knowing that footage they hoped would be particularly good might not turn out
as expected
in the processing. It is a practice which embraces genuine experimentation and
the discovery of a personal
method of production.
Over the
past ten years, more than 125 artists have attended the Independent Imaging
Retreat. Its effect has been to share techniques and skills, but more importantly
to encourage an approach to filmmaking which is as far removed as can be
imagined from the conventional cinema whose products are so relentlessly
promoted. A poetic, individual, exploratory filmmaking in
which the artist is involved at every stage of the process. Perhaps for
this reason, the Retreat has proved hospitable to people whose view of the
world is poorly represented in the commercial media: women (there have been
several weeks offered to women only), gay and lesbian people, people of colour and people from regions outside the
recognized "cultural centres" of
Chris Gehman is an
independent filmmaker, film and video programmer and critic. He is currently
the Artistic Director of the Images Festival in
PHIL'S FILM FARM
John Porter, Canada • 16mm b&w 10 min. 2002 Canada's
most prolific filmmaker, John Porter has made more than 300 short films, mostly
in Super-8. He has also been documenting
MINUS
Chris
Chong, Canada • 16mm b&w 3 min. 1999 Minus
is a hand-processed, unedited stream of movements. After subtracting most
of what took place before the camera, what is left is
remnants of light and rhythm, traces of a body in motion. This was Chong's
first 16mm film, and demonstrates the kinds of rich results that can be
obtained from simple, highly restricted means and techniques.
HARDWOOD PROCESS
David
Gatten,
16mm colour silent 14 min. 1997
"A
history of scarred surfaces, an inquiry, and an imagining: For the marks we see
and the marks we make, for the languages we can read and for those we are
trying to learn. Reproduced by hand on an old contact printer
resulting in individual, unique release prints." (David Gatten)
DANDELIONS
Dawn
Wilkinson,
SWELL
Carolynne
Hew,
16mm
b&w/colour 5 min. 1998
Carolynne
Hew's Swell extends the techniques
used at the Retreat by reworking her film footage in the digital realm. The
result is a layered, oceanic embodiment of physical energy and desire.
THE SHAPE OF THE GAZE
Mala Cybelle Carpenter,
Chicago-based
filmmaker Ma'ia Carpenter acknowledges the pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara
Hammer as a great inspiration. The Shape
of the Gaze is a sort of manifesto of radical queer filmmaking in which
Carpenter implicates the viewer in the exchange of looks between the filmmaker
and her "butch" subjects, disrupting the usual filmmakersubject-viewer
triad through interventions in colour and film surface.
PASSING THROUGH
Since
participating in the Retreat in 1998, Sandlos has been one of its main
organizers most years, and has also co-edited a book, Landscape With Shipwreck, about the films
of Philip Hoffman. Passing Through develops
a more explicit narrative line than most of these films, creating a lovely
journal of a short stay in a small,
GLINT
Eve Heller, USA • 16mm b&w silent 5 min. 2003 Shot in
the Saugeen River using a special underwater housing, Glint is a film-poem of the utmost subtlety and finesse, in which
images emerge from black only to vanish again...
Related programming: Be sure to see Deirdre Logue's
installation Enlightened Nonsense: 10
Short Performance Films About Repetition and
Repetition, a film series shot over the course of several years at the
Independent Imaging Retreat. This work is installed at the
Hours:
Tuesday-Friday, 12-5; Saturday-Sunday, 1-4