Tending
Towards The Horizontal
I
was asked recently to be on a panel of filmmakers discussing "Canadian
Vision." My first reaction was to decline. I thought, 'What do I know of
this? I am no authority.' And 'What is there to say, is there such a thing as Canadian
Vision?' and further,'Who cares?'
Then I thought that, after all, I am Canadian so I must know something
about the topic and that perhaps right now, in the wake of Free Trade, Oka, Meech Lake, and The Gulf
War, it might be important to identify and openly discuss matters of
vision—Canadian vision. ( All this use of the term
"Canadian" should not conjure up a flag-waving, totemic,
let's-fight-to-the-death-for Nationalism. In
And
so I started to think about films, works with themes of Family, Quest, Identity
with heroes who are everyday people who face death, who survive, who carry on
and I looked to myself as a Canadian and a filmmaker and tested out with myself
what characteristics of my film practice, style, aesthetics or ethics I could
attribute to being Canadian. The question, though, was vision not identity, so
I tried to understand the vision underlying choices, themes, formal
devices—like manyness and interrelatedness. I construct films from
very many images with meaning or a sense of the film coming in an accumulation
, different images retain their multiple meanings or valences and are related
through juxtaposition, through rhythms of editing, an accumulation of glances.
There is a tension between relatedness or merging and aloneness. I take more of
an observational position with my camera, a glance, rather than a studied look.
I observe what is around me, the everyday, not the
monumental or exotic nor is the filmic treatment highly composed or stylized
-not the perfected image but the roughness of the human, and the mystery that
is in the everyday. My films seek more to describe than contrive. I try for an honesty—no glorified images, no pat endings, no answers
or easy outs.
At
about this point in my deliberations, the thought came to me that had I been
asked to speak on a panel on Feminist or Women’s vision instead of Canadian, I would
say almost the same things! Is Canadian 'female'? AND, for that matter, isn't
experimental film 'female' also. Certainly, when placed in relation to the
I
had undertaken to research the topic for the panel and so was reading an
analysis of Canadian literature by Gaile McGregor,
"The Wacousta Syndrome." I was struck by
how thoroughly the description of Canadian vision and the methods of its
enunciation in Canadian literature she identified fit my own and other filmmakers works and practices and supported my
identification of this work as in some ways 'female'. She speaks of the hero's
struggle "not to do, but to be"; that the novels advocate
"domestic virtues: tolerance, reticence, decency, a clean house". She
notes the gender reversal so that the landscape is rendered as male and home the
central symbol. She notes the depiction of the artist as unheroic,
self-effacing and the practice of writers' collecting material from real life,
writing as collagists and identifies their fiction in relation to a documentary
stance and as navigating a "ridge between control and accommodation."
She speaks of the books' "elliptical form of expression...less susceptible
to contrivance and artifact" and she appreciates the unwillingness to give
a satisfyingly unified presentation or conclusion. She states that the books
are structured such that we are given "...the juxtaposition of unmeliorated modal alternatives rather than pretending to
reconcile them. The result is a complex aesthetic object which is
simultaneously despairing and affirmative." She speaks of the Northern
frontier as one of "limits of endurance" and the importance of the
horizon motif comparing vertical( male, American) and horizontal (female,
Canadian) perspectives: the former, characterized by a romantic hero,
self-absorption, ego-centric; the latter wherein "context is crucial...
seeking images of wholeness rather than aloneness..." She sums up the
Canadian world relation as "being towards". When I read this chapter,
it confirmed for me (confirmed especially here since I have a film entitled "Tending
Towards the Horizontal"!) what I already always knew, that I am Canadian
and Female and that perhaps the extent to which I feel at home in Canada and
with Experimental film is the extent to which they intersect in an ethic or
world view.
Barbara
Sternberg - written for "The Visual Aspect: Recent Canadian Experimental
Films" catalogue, 1991, edited by Rose Lowder