Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person’s dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.

  I’d already covered enough screenings at the Ursulines Studios to know the quickest way to get there, without springing for a taxi: catch the northbound bus up Sherbourne, then hop a streetcar west along Carlton until it turns into College and keep going. Best place to get off is at Augusta, just before Bathurst. From there it’s just a brisk walk north to Nassau, in the heart of Kensington Market, where the Ursulines occupies the whole top floor of a former industrial garage.

  Founded in 2004 by a coalition of multimedia and performance artists who were tired of never being able to find proper venues for their art, the Ursulines has since become a fixture of Toronto’s alternative cinema and a meeting place for both those who make and those who consume films from the fringes of the system. Though its overall budget receives generous bi-annual support from both provincial and federal grant-giving bodies, the costs of a typical week are paid through a combination of user fees, box office, and money made from the operation of an equally community-oriented bike shop sharing their location.

  Throughout the day, they fix bikes down at street level, or give maintenance lessons—teach people how to make their own, too. At night, they pull a gate across, lock it, then open the second storey for business: single-artist installations, festivals, “world premieres” seen by eighty poor bastards on fold-up chairs a pop. They even turn it into a mini-studio every summer and do a month of workshops on Super 8 film, mentored by guest artists from all around the world; for two hundred bucks you get a rig and a reel, they show you how to cut in-camera and develop, and then you get to force whoever’s dumb enough to show up to sit still for your masterpieces. I got a pretty good article out of the experience once, in my Lip days.

  Under current management, the Ursulines also produces a small quarterly magazine about the experimental scene (Some Do Harm) and runs the Stream Store, a web-based distribution company that releases films featured at and developed through the studio. You’d think they’d be a little artsy-fartsy for an area like the Market, not to mention apolitical; this is a place that’s been radical since the 1960s, seemingly composed of nothing but anarchist bookstores, vegan restaurants and thrift shops far as the eye can see. It’s also a neighbourhood that consistently attracts a high student and immigrant population, and is stridently anti-corporate despite some of its most vocal residents being surprisingly upper crust—self-exiled fugitives from Toronto’s media and financial elite.

  It was one of this latter group playing as headliner/programmer for that night’s dubious roster of entertainment—a man whose work would set me on my path to the Vinegar House and beyond.

  Wrob Barney was born Robert James Barney in 1962—he added an extra letter to his name in high school, hoping to distinguish himself from his three older siblings, Richard, Robin, and Reid. A former resident of the Lake of the North area, much like Mrs. Whitcomb, he was born in Chaste then raised in Overdeere. He first appeared on my radar after his 2006 debut at Inside/Out, the Toronto LGBT Film Festival, and joined the Ursulines Studio collective in 2010, replacing withdrawn member Max Holborn.

  (I’d heard of Holborn but had never really seen anything he’d done, and didn’t know him enough by sight to nod at him across the room. Alec Christian was a big fan, but I mainly categorized him through his association with Soraya Mousch, whom I’d interviewed back when the two of them ran the Wall of Love—another experimental film collective—and who later became a mentor for my former student Safie Hewsen. Actually, I don’t think anybody’d seen Holborn directly for about a year by the time of the Ursulines screening, including Mousch. First his wife had died, and then he and Mousch had some weird falling out over their last project, and then he just sort of dropped off the map. Mousch had at least switched disciplines, as she liked to say, and though she no longer did anything involving film, it wasn’t like she didn’t work. But for all people knew about Holborn, he might’ve gone into his house, locked the door, and never come back out.)

  Looking back, I can admit now that I was pretty—okay, highly—uncharitable to Wrob Barney, from my first review on. His affectations annoyed me, to say the least. And God knows, I have a not-unwarranted reputation for disliking people almost at random, sometimes for not much more than screw you, that’s why . . . But in my own defence, this was a pretty much universal opinion; Wrob rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, sometimes without even trying.

  The thing is, in Toronto, those who do experimental film basically fall into two categories: there are the zealots, people who’ve decided for philosophical reasons not to practise or cooperate with the commercial storytelling oligarchy—the Griersonites, I call them, after John Grierson, the dude who started the National Film Board of Canada. Same guy who once said “Fiction is a temptation for trivial people.” Them I have some respect for, because that’s a freakishly, perversely hard row they’ve chosen to hoe. I mean, make an even vaguely commercial movie in Canada—something that tells a story from beginning to end, fits a ninety-minute slot, conforms to broadcast regulations—and you can have yourself a nice little career in TV. But the stuff the Griersonites do? Doesn’t get you shit.

  On the other hand, some people do experimental film because it’s the smallest possible pond and they enjoy being a big fish, no matter where. And Wrob Barney fell squarely in that second camp.

  Wrob applied for grants even though he came from money—that was an open secret. After a boating accident killed his grandmother and step-grandfather, Barney’s father Russett somehow wound up the unexpected beneficiary of a large “charitable donation” from the eccentric Sidderstane family, which he soon invested in what would eventually become the Ramble Barn mini-empire, a successful chain of quality outdoor gear shops with outlets in Toronto, Ottawa, and Burlington. So young then-Robert did indeed grow up in plenty, and it was his elder siblings’ early commitment to maintaining the family business that freed him to pursue his artistic dreams. They were the heirs, ranked in descending order of importance; he was the spare, consistently supported but otherwise ignored, and acted accordingly.

  To his credit, he had good taste; however, he couldn’t generate anything. He did “collage art,” sampling, like the Beastie Boys’ album Paul’s Boutique, where every song is basically nothing but samples on top of samples. Still, there’s a reason they got sued for making that album, and there’s a reason that suit gave rise to regulations which now stipulate samples can’t be more than a certain length. Because when you build a house out of bits and pieces of other people’s houses, you can’t claim to be surprised when the whole fucking thing falls down.

  I remember he used to compare himself to Max Ernst when he was first starting out. Back in his Dada days, Ernst made entire books out of cutting images from magazines and recombining them. Difference was, Ernst could actually paint, and after a certain point in his career he gave up on the whole Semaine de Bonté routine entirely, whereas I never saw anything in Wrob’s films that I’d call original. The best parts were always stolen from somebody else.

  His offering that night was called Untitled 13, thirteenth in a series of similarly title-less films. It was roughly ten minutes long, and at first contained nothing but the various “artistic” flourishes I’d learned to associate with product released under his name: intercutting CBC documentary footage videotaped off TV screens with loops of hardcore gay porn; using stop-motion photography to puppet around a series of naked dudes wearing papier-mâché masks made from vintage Blue Boy magazines in blown-out 16mm—tricks that aimed to shock, only to stumble over into cute or trite. Or both.

  Right in the middle, however, things changed.

  It started with the framing, which suddenly shifted, moving inwards. Took me a minute or so to figure out that
what he’d done was poach an idea first developed in 1971 for Józef Robakowski’s “camera-free” film, Test I: punch physical holes along a length of opaque 35mm film, then project it using an exceptionally bright lamp, allowing the strong light behind the film to “attack” the viewer and generate afterimages mimicking the flicker of film frames—like cigarette burns in reverse, all-white versions of those hovering black dots that often appear on the film-strips of older movies, just before a splice.

  So Wrob was using essentially the same technique, but also intermittently widening the holes until they “ate” almost the whole frame, then using blurring and light-flare to mask the transition to a different film altogether. These secondary edits were initially brief—a couple of seconds each, just enough to suggest an image without allowing for interpretation—but became steadily longer, wider, until I was finally able to figure out the mechanics: he’d burned a physical hole through a piece of black cardboard, mimicking the Test I sprockets, then fitted it over his camera’s lens and filmed a second set of images, presenting them as though they were appearing in the “window” of the hole itself.

  Even as I connected the dots on Wrob’s methodology, I was also watching this new footage emerge, politely at first but a bit restively, squinting to get some sort of purchase on what I was seeing, then with growing interest. By the last flicker, less a fade than a smash cut to black, I was riveted.

  Now the thing is, I could fill this whole chapter with film-critic jargon if I wanted to, all cues and references and shorthand. But I learned the hard way how most people—even ones who actually work in the industry—just don’t care about that sort of accuracy. I remember one class, early in my teaching career, where a student to whom I’d just returned a script covered in scribbled comments raised his hand and asked: “Miz Cairns, you said here that the character development was ‘cursory.’ What’s that mean, exactly?”

  “It means you didn’t have enough of it. Did a half-assed job, basically.”

  “Then why didn’t you just write ‘half-assed’?”

  “Because there’s a word for it. And that word is ‘cursory.’”

  Rather than drowning you in cinematographic esoterica, therefore, I’ll give you my most immediate impressions from that first viewing—the actual notes I scribbled down while still squinting up at the screen, done on a Staples notepad I rummaged out of my pocket.

  very bright black + white, looks more like grey/silver

  bits come away? like its moulting

  scratches pops dropped frames

  this is old/1920s? silent film

  older?

  I remember what looked like sheaves of grain waving back and forth, or the shadows of very tall grass, sharp under a pitiless sun that must surely have been an effect, since battery-powered electrical lamps were not available during the period in which Mrs. Whitcomb made her films but a painted backdrop could be made to look flatly three-dimensional, as if going away into the distance the theatrical suggestion of a field, with people onstage in front of it, wearing archaic, fairy tale peasant-type clothes—smocks and leggings, jerkins, hoods that hid their faces, mediaeval, like a Dance of Death.

  And then there was a woman, stepping out from behind them, either around the backdrop’s edge or through a cunningly hidden slit cut into it. She was brighter than everything else yet far harder to see in any true detail, covered as she was in a whitish veil that draped from her head to her feet and dazzled, sewn perhaps with glassine sequins, or tiny shards of mirror. She leaned down to whisper in one figure’s ear, dwarfing him—was he played by a child? A child with a false beard, recoiling from her with his hands up?

  Cued, her own hand came out from behind her back, and I could see she held a sword, angling it to reflect till it had almost turned white: curved and sharp like a sabre, like the blade of a scythe. So bright it hurt the eyes.

  At which point, the screen went black.

  “Typically uninterested in any film except his own, Wrob Barney gives pride of place to Untitled 13,” my Deep Down Undertown article begins, “a waking dream of troubling things, done flammably, in light and poison.” Then again, though, I really wasn’t one to talk: there were ten other movies on that program, and I barely remembered any of them—Alec Christian got on my case about that, later on. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the way Barney’s piece made me feel, itchy in a good way, like the grit before the pearl. I needed to know where that came from.

  I got home around one in the morning. Clark had probably been asleep since eight-thirty or nine, and Simon had dozed off in bed with the lights still on, a roleplaying game module balanced haphazardly on his chest. I could hear the two of them sawing counterpoint from either end of the apartment, a wracking, swollen-tonsils duet that wasn’t doing much for my burgeoning migraine. The older I get, the more I find that any sort of barometric pressure shift goes straight to my sinus cavities, ruthlessly crossbreeding what sometimes feels like a near-constant case of PMS with the general side-effects of crap vision versus watching movies all day (and night) to create organic lens-flares. I knew I’d need a potentially dangerous amount of Melatonin, muscle-relaxants, and recreational web surfing before I could safely count on being able to dodge a full-blown bout of insomnia.

  So I started the usual late-night round of chores—load of laundry, load of dishes—and set my laptop up on the “dining room” table, an unwieldy glass-topped ironwork monstrosity Simon’s parents had bought us in anticipation of parties we’d never throw and meals we’d never make, not once it became clear that sitting still for social situations was something Clark seemed unlikely to ever do for more than ten minutes at a time. I transcribed my notes, moved stuff around, dashed off two thousand words’ worth of description and analysis, then signed onto our WiFi, readying the article to post.

  Throughout the process, I kept on thinking about the film, replaying it in snatches till it overlaid the mundane details of my life. It was seriously driving me nuts, because the masks, the costumes, the hint of a story . . . it all reminded me of something, and I just couldn’t remember what. Not a movie, I knew that much; I thought maybe a photo, or a picture, so I hit PUBLISH, then pulled out my reference books and started going through them: stuff on fairy tales, stuff on mythology, on the occult, woodcuts, engravings, chiaroscuro, collage—Ernst, Magritte, Khnopff, Bosch, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo. Movie stills. Comic books. Surrealists and Decadents of all descriptions.

  Slowly but surely, as my perception narrowed, the presentiment of pain I’d been wrestling with became pain itself, dim but distinct: my eye sockets lit up, muscles on the back of my skull humping and crawling. I got sick, sleepy. Eventually, I had to force myself to sit down and stay quiet for a while, lids lowered, taking deep, slow breaths. Press my thumbs against my nasal bridge and watch the patterns form, hypnagogically recursive—red spiralling away into black, thicker and thicker, making it impossible to tell which was which.

  Olfactory hallucinations came next, tinnitus garnished. To my left, I smelled hay and smoke and mould, a whole burning barn of fragrances; to my right was wet earth, cold green shoots, frozen decay. A forest, deep and dark, after the late autumn rains.

  Quiet, then. A long, grey pause, empty of almost everything.

  When I opened my eyes once more it was almost four in the morning, but the pain was gone. Better yet, I finally knew what I was looking for.

  I still have the text in question today, bookmarked between pages 112 and 113, where the section titled “Dreams & Nightmares” begins—a battered trade paperback with fraying laminate corners, the cover a murky reproduction of Emily Carr’s 1931 painting Among the Firs, called Finding Your Voice: Creative Writing Prompts and Projects, Grades Three to Eight (edited by Luanne Kellerman, copyright 1979 from Seedling Press, Toronto). It’s a compilation of fifth-grade English class prompts that struck enough of my fancy to make me “forget” to bring it back at the end of the yea
r, all based on poems and essays, myths and fairy tales; mostly Canadian Content, too, because that must’ve been the most affordable option. It usually is.

  Nothing to show what I wanted it for, at least not on the outside. But we all know the spine of a book tends to crack where you’ve read it most, even if it was so long ago it now seems unfamiliar, from the inside-out.

  So when I opened it, this is what I found.

  LADY MIDDAY

  A Fairy tale of the Wends

  Collected and Translated by Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb

  First printed in The Snake-Queen’s Daughter: Wendish Legends & Folklore

  Once, a young boy was ploughing a field to ready it for planting, during the noon hour. How hot it was, and how he wished he could be elsewhere! His whole hatband was soaked with sweat. But his father was dead and his mother took in sewing to pay their way, and there was no one else to help him with his labours.

  Soon enough, when the sun was at its still point above him, there came by Lady Midday, so tall and fine with her long white hair and her blazing eyes, and a terrible great pair of scissors in one hand, with blades so sharp and polished they threw back the sun’s rays like lightning.

  “It is a hard day for ploughing,” she said to the boy, “and you without even a cup of water. Do you not wish for rest and comfort?”

  But the boy’s mother had warned him of Lady Midday. So he kept his eyes to his task, bowing low in deference at the same time, and replied: “No, milady, for this field must be ploughed and planted, so that my mother and I may have crops to sustain us this winter. I need nothing, though I thank you for your kindness.”