Diversity or Dumb Realism.

SPECULATIONS ON CANADIAN FILM AND ON SEA IN THE BLOOD BY RICHARD FUNG

Unquestionably, the challenge of contemporary civilization is the challenge of diversity. Every day, pollutants endemic to industrial development diminish the bio-diversity of the world. The corporate rush towards convergence diminishes local initiatives. In North America, the major automotive manufacturers or the major television companies devise products that all look very much the same. Innovation, market research insists, might trouble sales.

Innovation might also trouble politics. Innovation suggests alternatives and alternatives remind citizens, now called consumers, that political options might also be possible. In the United States, however, because the Green Party couldn't command a sufficient percentage to acquire official party status, Ralph Nader couldn't debate with the Big Two in the recent presidential election. In Canada, although minority voices are more in evidence, both the major political parties, the Liberals and the Alliance, wish to retune the country to be more in harmony with the values of self-interest of the United States. In their own move towards convergence, they wish to diminish diversity.

In the field of culture, more specifically within cinema, this movement towards convergence represses originality. Stylistic conformity is both cause and effect of other social changes within the circulation of film. The substitution of film festivals for the art house circuit works against a sustained knowledge of the potentiality of cinema. During the mammoth festivals at Montreal or Toronto, during ten days that shake the world, viewers have a choice of over 300 films. During the 346 days that follow, within the economically marginalized repertory cinemas, viewers have a choice of perhapsten films not from the main stream.

These shifts in both production and circulation during the last thirty years recently led Susan Sontag to lament the death of cinephilia. Sontag recalled the days when cinema was a crucial part of everyday life: Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.

In those days, film style was informed by philosophy. A tracking shot possessed an ethical dimension. The content of movies transcended their subject-matter.

As art critic John Berger has insisted, content is not the same as subject-matter: "Content is what the artist discovers in his subject." Content is created through the process of discovery--a process that becomes the film's style. Style does not embellish a film's meaning: it enacts the meaning.

In the early 1960s, there was an exciting diversity within film. The jump-cuts and zip-pans of Godard's A bout de souffle (1959) enacted the breathless pace of the film's protagonist; while in Quebec, in ways even more astringent than Godard's, Jean Pierre Lefebvre achieved a different style for every film he made, a different "aesthetic" for every "ethic," as he would explain. In L'amour blesse(1975), the extremely minimal style subtends the limitations of the woman's life; while in Avoir 16 ans(1979), the rigorous enclosures of its slow zooms and pans reinforce the boy's confinement within the school system.

These were wonderful times, with the cinema informed by innovation. But current filmmakers either reject the formal achievements of the past or, increasingly, are ignorant of them. When in the early 1980s Peter Weir abandoned his Australian career to work in Hollywood, he confessed in Film Comment that an individual style is incompatible with an international reputation. Culture complicates commerce. Commerce constricts culture.

Watching the Canadian films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, I was nudged into considering the state of cinema in this country. While there were some stylistic bravura achievements - Denis Arcand's Stardom, Robert Lepage's Possible Worlds, Denis Villeneuve's Maelstrom -- there were other films that really faltered owing to their inability to imagine a style adequate for their subject-matter, an aesthetic adequate for their ethic. Instead, as if nurtured by too much television, they adopted a style that I shall call Dumb Realism - a style that, while supposedly neutral, is actually a style that has nothing to say.

In his rough and grainy Curtis's Charm(1995), John L'Ecuyer explored the street world of drugs with a passion greater than many other films of that ilk. The coloured elegance of Saint Jude, however, undermines the authenticity of the same kind of world. As wonderful and lively as she was in New Waterford Girl, Liane Balaban doesn't for a minute look as if she has lived on the streets. She is thoroughly deodorized. She becomes part of the decor of the film -- a decor designed to please because predesigned for television.

More unsettling is the failure of both Lynne Stopkewitch's Suspicious River and Colleen Murphy's Desire to find a style adequate for their concerns. Although both films confront evil, both lack shadow. Lacking shadow, they lack nuance; and without nuance they become either implausible or (at least in part) offensive.

Probing an important theme and boasting splendid performances by Molly Parker as Leila Murray and Callum Keith Rennie as Gary Jensen, Suspicious River attempts to meld different periods of time, presenting coterminous lives. Instead of employing the flashback structure of Laura Kasischke's novel, Stopkewitch has invented a young girl as observer of the story - a young girl we gradually realize has been Leila or will become Leila. But lacking any reference to Leila's mother, the film dilutes the determinism through which Leila accepts her fate as a female body passively accepting both physical and sexual abuse. The Dumb Realism of the style fails to convey the potential complexity of the film's temporal and psychological ideas.

Perhaps even more serious are the stylistic limitations of Colleen Murphy's Desire. As I have suggested elsewhere, her earlier feature, Shoemaker (1996), was a film simple on the surface but imbued with a feeling of the absurd -- a feeling that gave the film a surrealist dimension. Although Desire sets out to explore moral transgressions within the field of love, the Dumb Realism of the style is so lacking in nuance that spectators laugh at its most sensitive moments.

Within the festival as a whole, no doubt there was diversity within films from far away places like Iran or Taiwan; but within the Canadian offerings, the most accomplished stylistic achievements occurred within the "Preludes" and, as every year, within the shorts.

The initiative of Piers Handling, the Director of the Festival, the Preludes were designed to celebrate not only the silver anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival but also the role that Canadian film has played in festival offerings. Working with digital video for 35mm blow-up and with a budget of less than $40,000 each (plus many donated services), the Preludes consist of ten 5-minute films from ten Canadian filmmakers. The results are symptomatic of the directors' preoccupations and are frequently extraordinary.

For Congratulations, Mike Jones works with his two better-known siblings, Andy and Cathy, to devise a seif-parodic story in which the three of these by-now forgotten performers are whisked away by helicopter from their little outport settlement in Newfoundland to become part of a celebration for the Toronto film festival. In See You In Toronto, in a continuous take, Jean Pierre Lefebvre presents Marcel Sabourin as Samuel de Champlain. Walking along the ramparts of Quebec city, he rails against the key historical moments when the Quebecois were colonized by the English -- moments that include the founding of the National Film Board and the establishment of the Toronto International Film Festival! For 24 FPS, Jeremy Podeswa pays a tribute to his father and to what the cinema has meant to him in times of stress, creating a space for hope and dreams. And in Legs Apart, as if mocking her addiction these days to directing television series, Anne Wheeler devises an ER-type drama in which the expectant mother gives birth to a spool of film.

Don McKellar and Atom Egoyan both deal with crowds. In A Word from the Management, McKellar talks about the irate patrons that used to bully him when, during his days as theatre coordinator, he had to hold back the mobs from claiming unavailable seats. In The Line, with a beautiful simplicity, Egoyan devises a lateral tracking shot that, accompanied by murmurs and mumblings, takes us through the twenty-five years of the festival, displaying all the different program booklets along the way. And for The Heart of the World, Guy Maddin packs into five minutes the material for yet another feature length adulation of the antiquities of silent cinema. This short extravaganza met with such acclaim that Maddin has considered cutting all his features down to a five-minute format -- not a bad idea!

Although most of these films would repay extended analysis, there are three I should like to talk about in greater detail: Prelude, by Michael Snow; This Might Be Good, by Patricia Rozema; and Camera, by David Cronenberg.

First of all, Handling is to be congratulated for inviting Michael Snow to be part of this tribute, taking his experimental place alongside Canada's narrative filmmakers. As often in his work, Snow had a bit of fun. Recognizing the essence of narrative filmmaking, Snow has made a film about sex and violence. But with a difference.

Shot with synchronous sound in a continuous take, the camera pans right over a group of Asian film buffs, wolfing down a pizza while getting ready to rush off to see a film. In a way reminiscent of David Rimmer's slipping-synch gag in Bricolage (1984), Snow runs his sound-track backwards. Although a crash is heard at the beginning of the film (the violence!), we see the cause of it at the end; and after declaring that every film should have sex and violence, a young woman exclaims: "So here's the sex part." Only later (or is it earlier?) do we see her tear off her sweater to reveal her breasts. When it was screened at the New York Film Festival, Amy Taubin described Prelude as "a conceptual, perceptual brainteaser in which time folds in on itself and sound chases image, or maybe the reverse, as if caught in a revolving door, ad infinitum." A slight film for Michael Snow, Prelude nevertheless introduces a teasing playfulness into the assumed illusionist authority of narrative cinema.

Patricia Rozema's This Might Be Good has an eerie quality difficult to explain. Initially presenting the artificiality, the rehearsed spontaneity of festival events as we see Sarah Polley, with simulated gratitude, getting ready to introduce her latest role, the film slips into a space of the magical anticipation of a sensuous romance as one by one the spectators become part of another kind of spectacle, moving from the auditorium into the projection booth, as if to be closer to the magic of projecting film. With textured black-&-white cinematography by Andre Pienaar and powerful virtually silent performances by Polley and Don McKellar, This Might Be Good is a haunting presentation of the deceptions and yet the wonder of cinematic art.

Finally, David Cronenberg's Camera was a surprise to everyone, perhaps through the universally favorable reception even to Cronenberg himself. Free from the artificiality of special effects, the film draws upon notions of cinematography central to the works of Jean Epstein and Jean Cocteau. The paradox of cinema is that, because actions are always over by the time we see them, it is actually filming death.

Less informed by this theoretical tradition than by a personal dream, Cronenberg establishes death at the centre of his film. "When you record the moment," the aging Les Carison, explains, "you record the death of the moment," as the camera moves into a Big Close-Up on Carison's frightened eyes. Even the fully professional 35mm camera on a dolly that the children found in the street is old, as Carlson complains. He is trapped in the process of being part of the past.

Camera is the most humane film that Cronenberg has ever made. It is also perhaps his most thoughtful. In a way that parallels the paradox within Rozema's film, by the end of Camera, once the make-up is finished, the lights are set and the children ready to shoot their film, Carlson becomes less confessional and more professional. The fear leaves his face as he assumes the role of the actor he is and has always been. This time with enacted courage, he begins the take for real -- that is, for the camera.

Traditionally, short films are the testing ground for stylistic innovation. Learning their craft, young filmmakers try out new ideas. Often these innovations are later abandoned for the sake of commercial acceptance; but sometimes, as in the early films of Truffaut and Godard but also of Rozema and Egoyan, they set the tone for their future work.

Within the Toronto International Film Festival, the programs of Canadian shorts not only allow spectators to see the latest work by experimental filmmakers such as Bruce Elder, Barbara Sternberg, and a host of others, but also allow emerging filmmakers to present their work.

Since the cultural cutbacks brought about by Mike Harris's neo-conservative government in Ontario, however, a new kind of short subject has emerged. These shorts are part of the "Calling Card" program of the Ontario Film Development Corporation, once a vibrant organization, now the training ground par excellence for Dumb Realism. Although some of the short subjects produced at the Canadian Film Centre over the years have revealed stylistic innovation -- John Greyson's The Making of Monsters (1991), Clement Virgo's Save My Lost Nigga' Soul(1993), or Colleen Murphy's The Feeler(1998) -- the films produced under the Calling Card program are (I believe without exception) stylistically banal.

Even Susan Shipton failed to escape these commercial assumptions. Although as editor, Shipton has worked for Patricia Rozema, David Wellington, Robert Lepage and, most consistently, for Atom Egoyan, her 12-minute Hindsight is an undistinguished exercise of little cinematic promise. And yet within the circus that is the Toronto festival, as part of the same program as a number of these Calling Card films, there was Sea in the Blood, the latest work by video artist Richard Fung. Sea in the Blood is a film that merits attention. I am prepared to argue that it was the most inventive, the most intimate, and the most accomplished film in the entire festival -- even if it is, in fact, a digital video.

Over the years, Toronto has become a privileged centre for alternative film practice. Many of the filmmakers have studied at Algonquin College. Under the twin influence of Rick Hancox and Jeffrey Paull, they have evolved a way of working with film that is polyphonic in organization and personal in appeal.

Home movies are never far away. The diary form is dominant. Rick Hancox, Mike Hoolboom, Phil Hoffman, Barbara Steinberg and a good many others have worked in this mode. It has, in essence, become a Canadian genre -- one far more available to us than the Western or Disaster Movie. It represents a lyrical condensation of the Canadian quest film of the 1970s such as Goin' Down the Road(1970) or Le vieux pays ou Rimbaud est mort(1977).

An artist of Chinese origin who grew up in Trinidad, Richard Fung has made videos largely for the gay and New Canadian community. He has also made family videos. The Way to My Father's Village(1988), My Mother's Place(1990) and now Sea in the Blood(2000) constitute a trilogy. While all his work displays an admirable sensitivity, Sea in the Blood is extraordinary. A video about illness and suffering, it is also about love. A video about death, it is full of joy. It achieves this richness by utilizing his chosen medium in a way that allows him to convey several impressions at the same time.

Like many experimental film- and video-makers, Fung employs a variety of cinematic devices. Video footage, still photographs, home movies, and an educational slide show make up the image track of the work. This in turn is modified by discursive subtitles that intermittently creep left across the screen, by line animations stylistically reminiscent of children's drawings, by type-written and computer-generated texts, and by translation subtitles lest his mother's Caribbean accent prove unintelligible to North American ears.

The sound track consists largely of Richard's account of his extended holiday abroad in the 1970s with his life-long partner, Tim McCaskell -- an account which modulates into the competitive account of the illness of his sister, Nan, who has struggled all her life with the ravages of thalassaemia. These twin narratives are amplified by the voices of his mother, of Tim, of another sister, Arlene, and by a magical sound-scape devised by Phil Strong and Laurel MacDonald -- sometimes as gentle as wind-chimes, sometimes through a sequence of plucked triplets more vigorously animated with the kicking energies of life.

The work begins with shots of underwater swimming, of Richard and Tim, diving through one another's legs. The image is full of the intimacy of play except that the "sea" in which we see them is the colour of blood. Thalassaemia literally means Sea in the Blood. His older brother had died of it before Richard was born; and Nan, who is six years his elder, had always been infected by it, always living with the imminence of death.

After the opening underwater sequence, Richard introduces himself as a young man in 1977, at the time when he first met Tim and they began their extended honeymoon around Europe and Asia. A supplementary title crawls along the bottom of the screen offering additional information: "We met at a gay Marxist study group." After another title from Joni Mitchell's "Carey," we witness a slide-show on the nature of thalassaemia.

As a child, Richard lived in the shadow of Nan. They did everything together. "She led all my childhood adventures," he explains. As we view home footage of them as children, Richard appears such a klutz as a kid, perpetually grinning at the camera and failing to build a durable structure in the snow.

While we see Nan sitting at a table eating mangoes, Richard explains: "Nan's eventual death was a fact I was born into, like mangoes in July or Carnival before Lent." When he explains that as a young boy he imagined angels would appear and carry her off to Heaven, a line drawing of Nan as an angel floats upwards on the screen.

The achievement of this video resides not only in the delicate simplicity of its execution but in the range of emotion that this simplicity contains. While Nan's death is talked about, we see images of her and Richard playing in the sand. Because her birthday falls on the same day as Trinidad achieved independence, the fireworks in the sky become a tribute to Nan.

Richard recounts the moments in his youth when Nan read to him Han Suyin's A Many-Splendoured Thing, along with, more furtively because his father despised communism, the Red Book by Mao Tse-tung. And as Richard recounts Nan's recognition that, owing to her disease, she could never lead a normal life, never have a boyfriend, a title creeps across the screen like a whispered confession: "I couldn't tell her I wanted a boyfriend."

There are no photographs of Nan when she was in hospital; and when Richard realizes that Nan is dying, he stops taking pictures. These absences are discretionary, like an averted glance. And as Nan approaches death Richard shares with us the fact that Tim has tested HIV positive. Thus the "blood" that we see them swimming in becomes the infected blood not only of Nan but of Tim as well.

Twenty-three years ago, Richard had resisted returning home to see Nan again before she died. Since her death had always been near at hand, he felt his mother was simply trying to cut short his extended trip with Tim. Although the mother expresses anger, for Richard there are no self-accusations. A title informs us that it took twenty years for him to ask his mother about Nan's death. He has lived with the loss, as he may have to face the loss, after twenty-five years, of his partner Tim.

The video ends with scenes of them diving again in that sea of blood, Greg Woodbury's underwater photography capturing them manoeuvring their way between one another's legs. Then they surface, with broad smiles, into the sunlight -- first Tim and then Richard.

Sea in the Blood is a work full of the pain of suffering but is equally full of the joy of being alive.

Without diversity, civilization will rigidify itself to death -- certainly to the death of the spirit. As commercial films become increasingly expensive, true diversity becomes impossible. There are two many risks. We are offered products to consume, not to care for. "Cinephilia has no role in the era of hyperindustrial films," as Susan Sontag has declared:

For cinephilia cannot help, by the very range and eclecticism of its passions, from sponsoring the idea of the film as, first of all, a poetic object; and cannot help from inciting those outside the movie industry, like painters and writers, to want to make films. It is precisely this notion that has been defeated.

Banished from commercial theatres, the idea of film as a poetic object lives on in the work of the experimental tradition. This work represents alternative experiences that embody diversity. Like the remnants of alternative political parties that still argue for the humane values of social democracy, these works speak directly and intimately to individual spectators. They exist to be cherished, not consumed. They move us but also inspire us; and for young filmmakers, they offer the hope that it is still possible with restricted means, especially through the accessible technology of video, to make eloquent statements about life within film.

Down with commercial cinema! Long live the experimental tradition! The works of this tradition are the Monarch butterflies of cultural ecology. They must be nourished and preserved.

REFERENCES

John Berger, Permanent Red. (London: Methuen, 1960)

Peter Harcourt, "Breaking Human Hearts: an introduction to the films of Colleen Murphy." POV 33, Winter '97/'98

Susan Sontag, "The Decay of Cinema." New York Times Magazine, February 25, 1996

Amy Taubin. "Original Sins and Future Shock. The Village Voice, September 27-October 3, 2000