Women, Nature and
Chemistry: Hand-Processed Films from The Independent
Imaging Workshop by Janine Marchessault
The representation of
nature has been a central and longstanding aesthetic preoccupation in Canadian
art and iconography. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in a series of films
that have emerged from Philip Hoffman’s Hand Processing Film workshop located
on a forty acre farm in
The creative context for these films is
no doubt shaped by the
Experimental films and critical concerns of Hoffman and his
late partner Marian McMahon. Since the late eighties, both Hoffman and
McMahon were interested in autobiography, film (as) memory and pedagogy.
Hoffman, weary of overseeing large classes and high end technologies at film
school, conceived of a different pedagogical model for teaching film
production. Instead of the urban, male dominated and technology
heavy atmosphere, The Independent Imaging Workshop would be
geared
towards women and would feature hand-processing
techniques in a low-tech nature setting.. The process encouraged filmmakers to
explore the environment through film, and to explore film through different
chemical processes. The result is a number of beautiful short films that are
highly personal, deeply phenomenological and often surreal. Dandelions (Dawn Wilkinson, 1995), Swell (Carolynne Hew, 1998), Froglight (Sarah Abbott, 1997), Fall and Scratch (Deirdre Logue,
1998), Across (Cara Morton, 1997) and
We are Going Home, (Jenn Reeves,
1998) are among
the most striking, recalling some of Joyce Wieland’s most
artisinal works and the psychic intensity of Maya Deren’s ‘trance’ films.
By artisinal I do not mean the
aesthetic effect of ‘home
made’ movies produced by the uneven coloration of hand
processing and tinting techniques. I am referring to the process of making films that is
embedded in the final effect; that is, the work of film. Joyce Wieland’s work
was often characterized as artisinal, a term that in the sixties and seventies
was the opposite of great art. Famously, she made films on her kitchen table,
bringing a history of women’s work to bear on her productions. In a video
document of The Independent Imaging Workshop, three women sit at a kitchen
table in a barn discussing the varying and unpredictable results of processing
recipes: the thickness of the emulsion, the strength of the solutions, the
degree of agitation, not to mention air temperature and humidity. Out of the
lab and into the kitchen (or barn), film production moves into the realm of the
artisan and the amateur which, as Roland Barthes once observed, is the realm of
love. This is the home of the experimental in its
originary meaning, of finding what is not being sought, of being open to living
processes and to chance.
Like Wieland, this new generation of
filmmakers is exploring the
relationship between bodies, the materiality of film stocks
and the
artifacts of the world around them. The simple images of
nature (daisies, fields, frogs, trees, rivers, clouds and so on) and rural
architectures (bridges, barns, roads, etc.) are exquisite in their different
cinematic manifestations. This is not
idealized or essentialist nature, rather the landscapes are grounded in an
experience of place. In Dawn Wilkinson’s Dandelions
for example, the filmmaker
speaks of her relation to her birthplace and to home,
“I am
Canadian.” As the only black child growing up in a rural town
in
Several of the films display quite
literally a desire to
inscribe personal identity and history onto or, in the
case of Carolynne Hew’s Swell, into
the landscape. In Swell, Hew, lying
on a pile of rocks, begins to place the stones over her body. The film is
structured by a movement from the city into the country, but the simple
opposition is undone by both the filmmaker’s body and film processes. The quick
montage of black and white city images (Chinatown, bodies moving on the street,
smoke, cars), accompanied on the soundtrack by a cement drill, is replaced by
feet on rocks, strips of film blowing in the wind
and beautifully tinted shots of yarrow blooms. There is no
attempt here
at a pristine nature, at representing a nature untouched by
culture. Rather, the film is about the artist’s love of nature, her sensual
desire to be in nature. Shots of her face over the city are replaced with
images of nature over her body; yarrow casts detailed shadows on her thigh, a
symphony of colors abound--orange, blue and fusia. Strands of film hang on a
line and Hew plays them with her scissors as one would a musical instrument.
The sounds of nature--crickets, bees, water--are strongly grounded in the sound
of her own body, breathing and finally
a heartbeat. There are no words in this film but everything
is mediated
through language and through the density of the
filmmaker’s perception and imagination. The film is laid to rest on a beautiful
rock as she scratches the emulsion with scissors, the relation between film and
nature is dialectical. Nature here is both imagined (hand processed) and
experienced. It is impossible to separate the two.
Deirdre Logue’s two short and
deceptively simple films, Fall
(1998)
and Scratch (1998) also convey the
filmmaker’s physical insertion into nature only this time the experience is not
sensual release, rather it is a sadomasochistic and painful journey. In Fall, Logue falls (faints?) over and over again from
different angles and in different natural locations to become one, in a
humorous and bruised way, with the land. In Scratch
she is more explicit about the nature of her images as we read “My path is
deliberately difficult”. Facing the camera,
she puts thistles down her underpants, and pulls them out
again. The sounds of breaking glass as well as the crackle of film splices are
almost the only sounds heard in this mostly silent film. Intercut are found
footage images from an instructional film, we see a bed being automatically
made and unmade, glass breaking and plates smashed. This film is sharp and
painful. Logue, beautifully butch in her appearance, is anything but ‘natural’;
it is clear that the nature she is self-inflicting is the nature of sex. Her
body is treated like a piece of emulsion--processed, manipulated, scratched,
cut to fit. What is left ambiguous is whether the source of self-inflicted pain
results from going against a socially prescribed nature or embracing a socially
deviant one.
Sarah Abbott’s Froglight (1997) is even more ambiguous than
either Swell
or Scratch in terms of the nature of
nature. The film opens with the artist’s voice over black leader, “I am walking
down the road with my camera but I can’t see ,anything.”
A tree comes into focus as she tells us “but I know I am walking
,straight towards something, we always are.” For Abbott there is ,something that exceeds the image, that exceeds her
thinking about nature. She experiences a moment standing in a field, a moment
that cannot be reduced to an image ,or words; ,she
“experiences something that is not taught”, she does not want to ,doubt this
experience because “life would be
smaller.” Abbott touches the earth, we hear the sound of her footsteps,
we see a road, we hear frogs, and later we come upon a frog at night. In the
narration which is accompanied by the sound of frogs, Abbott attempts to put
into words the idea of an experience that is beyond language, the idea that the
world is much more than film, than the artist’s own imaginings. Like the
soundtrack, the film’s black and white images are sparse. A
magnifying glass over grass makes the grass less clear and
is the
film’s central phenomenological drive: surfaces reveal
nothing of what lies beneath. Towards the end of the film, a long held shot of
wild flowers blowing in the wind is accompanied by Abbott’s voice-over: “a
woman gave me a sunflower before I came to make this film, and someone asked if
it was my husband as I held it in my arm.” The ambiguity of this statement
foregrounds the randomness of signs (flower, husband) and language. Froglight affirms a nature that is
mysterious and unknowable, a world of spiritual depth and creative possibility.
What first struck me about so many of
the films coming out of
the workshop is the tension between the female self/body and
nature; each film is in some way an exploration of the filmmaker’s relation to
the land as place by cartwheeling,
walking or falling on it, and in the last two films that I want to comment on,
swimming and dreaming through it. Women’s bodies in Jenn Reeves We are Going Home and Cara Morton’s Across are not
only placed in nature but in time. Temporality exists on two planes in all of
the hand-processed films I have been discussing, not only in terms of the
images of a nature that is always changing but also, in terms of film stocks
and chemicals that continue to work on the film through time. Where workprints
serve to protect the original negative from the processes of post-production,
the films produced at the workshop use reversal stock and thus include the
physical traces of processing and editing, an intense tactility that will
comprise the final print of the film. This is what gives these films their
temporal materiality and sensuality. In We
are Going Home and
Across this temporality is
narrativized and it is perhaps fitting that both films experiment more
extensively with advanced film techniques such as time-lapse cinematography,
solarization, single-frame pixelation, split toning and tinting, superimpositions,
optical printing and so on. Here is where these two filmmakers would part
company with Wieland whose cinematic sensibility is, in the first instance,
shaped by a non-narrative tradition. Both films are steeped in a narrativity
that can be more easily situated in relation to the psychodramas of another
founding mother of the avant-garde, Maya Deren.
In the films of Deren, nature and the
search for self are always
an erotic and deeply psychological enterprise. Dreams allow
passage to a human nature and a mysterious self that cannot be accessed through
conscious states. Her films have been characterized as ‘trance’ films for the
way they foster this movement into the deepest recesses of the self, a movement
that is less about social transgression as it was for the Surrealists, than
about the journey through desire. We Are
Going Home is a gorgeous surrealistic film that has all of the
characteristics of the trance film and more. It is structured around a dream
sequence that has no real beginning or end. The first image we see is of
a vending machine dispensing ‘Live Bait’ in the form of a
film
canister.. A woman opens the canister to find fish roe
(eggs). The equation of fish roe and film, no doubt a nod to the Surrealists,
opens up those ontological quandaries around mediation and truth that Froglight refers us to. It is this
promise of direct contact along with the return “Home” in the film’s title, that gives some sign that the highly processed
landscapes belong to the unconscious.
The film is structured around a network
of desire between three
women. One woman dives into a lake and ends up feet first in the
sand. Another woman happens by and sucks her toes erotically at which point
everything turns upside-down and backwards. Characters move through natural
spaces (the beach, fields, water) disconnected from the physical landscapes and
from each other. Superimposed figures over the ground move like ghosts,
affecting and affected by nothing. Storm clouds, trees in the wind, a thistle, cows are all processed and pixilated to look supernatural.
Toe sucking complete, the second woman lies down under an
apple tree and falls asleep, the wind gently blows her shirt
open. A
third
woman, a dream figure, emerges from a barn; skipping through fields she happens
upon the sleeping figure and cannot resist the exposed breast, she bends over
and sucks the nipple. The film ends with a sunset and romantic accordion music
that is eerily off key.
We
Are Going Home is an erotic film whose sensuality derives
both from the sublime image processing and from the
disunity between all the elements in the film: the landscapes, the colors, the
people. The sounds of birds cackling, water and wind that make up the
soundtrack further intensify the film’s discordance. It is precisely this
disunity that charges the sexual encounters which are themselves premised on an
objectification. Home remains a mysterious place that exceeds logic and
rationality; it is a puzzle whose pieces are connected in a seemingly linear
manner but which will always remain mysterious.
In contrast, the psychic space in
Morton’s Across
is shaped
through unity rather than disunity, the film is about
crossing a bridge. The central tension in this lovely film, which accomplishes
so much in a little over two minutes, is built upon a desire to connect with an
image from the filmmaker’s past. The metaphoric journey forward to see the past
is conveyed through a hand-held camera travelling at a great speed across a
dirt road, through fields, along fences and through woods. Different color
stocks combine with high contrast black and white
images of the bridge while on the soundtrack we hear a
river. As we
travel
with the filmmaker through these landscapes, we encounter a high angle
solarized image of a woman sleeping in a field, a negative image of a woman
swimming in the river below the bridge, a static shot of Morton staring into
the camera, and home-movie images of Morton as a young girl running toward the
camera. An intensity and anticipation is created in the movement and in the
juxtaposition of the different
elements. These are quietly resolved at the end of the
film: the young girl smiles into the camera to mirror the close-up of Morton’s
inquisitive gaze, the swimmer completes her stroke, stands up, brushes the
water from her eyes and seems to take a deep breath.
The workshop films that I have written
about reveal a renewal of
avant-garde concerns and experimental techniques--they are
unabashedly beautiful and filled with a frenetic immediacy. To some degree
their aesthetic approach grows directly out of the workshop structure: location
shooting and hand-processing. Participants (which now include equal numbers of
men) are invited to shoot surrounding locations and to collect images randomly
rather than to preconceive them through scripting. The aim of the workshop is
not to leave with a finished
product but rather to experiment with shooting
immediate surroundings
using a bolex and with hand-processing techniques. Many of the
films produced at the workshop are never completed as final works but stand as
film experiments—the equivalent of a sketchbook. This is the workshop’s most
important contribution to keeping film culture alive in