Magnus Isacsson – Page 4 – Documentary Field Notes and Flashpoints

Hot Docs: ‘Position among the Stars’

I wasn’t at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto this year, because I’m in production. But my colleague Tobi Elliott, the writer and filmmaker who helps me with this blog was there, and picked this film to write about. Over to Tobi:

You won’t find a stronger documentary that so beautifully brings out Indonesia’s churning social and religious questions than Position among the Stars (Stand van de Sterren), which screened recently at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival. Earlier this year the film took home the Best Feature-length Documentary at IDFA and a World Cinema Special Jury Prize at the Sundance festival.

Directed and shot by Dutch filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich, it’s the concluding film in a trilogy following a poor family living through modern-day Indonesia’s tumultuous decade of change. (His first two films The Eye of the Day and Shape of the Moon won the Joris Ivens Award IDFA – 2004, and the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance – 2005.)

Position among the Stars continues Helmrich’s 12-year documentation of Rumidjah, an elderly Christian grandmother living in the world’s largest Muslim community, and her family. Rumidjah struggles to keep her non-observant Muslim sons on track, and to provide for her granddaughter’s uncertain future in an increasingly globalized economy. Through the microcosm of a single family, we see all the issues Indonesia is struggling to come to grips with today.

Helmrich’s cinematography style is astonishingly intimate. Using his unique “Single-shot Cinema” method – his excellent website where he describes his trademark style is here – and an array of relatively cheap consumer cameras, he brings the audience into startling moments of truth in the family’s life.

After a screening he answered some questions about his film:

Describe your filming technique and how you got such intimate scenes with this family.

I didn’t want to be just an observer, and standing, shooting scenes from the outside. I wanted to be a participant, among them. As I filmed, I was just being with them, together.

There is a drama going on always, and when you get to know people you can predict what will happen, and I just make sure that I get the right angle from the right place. I call it single-shot cinema. At a scene, I shoot in a single shot and only in the editing it gets cut.

I also used five different cameras, normally I have just consumer cameras, but they are all specialized in certain things. I use them like a painter would use a brush. So I can say that in this situation, “this camera would be best.”

In the scene of the boy running (ED NOTE: a long scene with multiple shots of a young boy running through Jakarta’s alleys after he’d stolen some clothes) I just ran after him, and he ran away… but I knew where he would go, I knew his labyrinth by then. So when I had a number of my shots and I thought “if I want to make my story round I should do something extra – I should do with the camera what he wanted to do himself.” The boy wanted to fly. So I took the little camera and put it on a bamboo stick and lifted it up to get a kind of a crane shot.

How much time did you spend with the family, and how did you meet them?

I was there about 14 months, almost every day, actually living their life for that time. This is the third part of a trilogy, the first I shot almost 12 years ago, so they know me quite a lot.

In 1990 was the first time I went to the village where my mother was born, and it was there I met them. Rumidjah’s husband was still alive, he was about twenty years older than her and he still could speak a little Dutch. Because of the old colonial tie. So it was a great bond between us and we became friends. It was just before the fall of Suharto (May 1998.)

And then I hired Bakti (Rumidjah’s son) as a driver and I was seeing what was happening with the family. And it was historical, this change in the country because the Suharto family was a dictator and he had to step down, and there were huge protests, and it was similar to what is happening now in Arab countries. And I saw that what was happening in their life was a microcosm of what was happening in greater Indonesia so I thought, I’d better focus on them.

Can you talk a bit about the themes you pulled out?

The main reason I decided to focus on religion, economy and politics is because it’s the three things that are very much changing and making this turmoil in Indonesia. If you look at every newspaper they are really the three main things. The economy is booming, but there is a also a kind of reaction from the religious part. And politics of course, you have to cope with these events.

Helmrich said he doesn’t plan to film a fourth installment, but if something were to happen in the family that was important with respect to Indonesia, then “I’m ready.”

Shooting in Montreal North

Joel, Shellby et Danny à Montréal-Nord. — Joel Shellby and Christopher.

For the last nine months – and with six months to go – I have been shooting a documentary in Montreal North. With my DOP Martin Duckworth and our assistant Franck Le Coroller, I have been immersed in the daily reality of a mutli-ethnic ‘underprivileged’ neighborhood.

Compared to downtown Montreal where we live ourselves, this is quite another world, although the differences are not always what you’d expect. The neighborhood has been the subject of much sensationalist press coverage focusing on violence and street gangs, and definitely doesn’t have a good reputation. The ‘Villanueva affair’ which saw a youth killed by police in a park three years ago called attention to the racial profiling and discriminatory attitudes of the police.

Since then, there has been a push for change in Montreal-North. But are things changing fast enough?

At the centre of most of the controversies are the young men of Montreal-North who are considered ‘at risk.’ And they are the subjects of our film. Produced by Jeannine Gagné at Amazone films with a license from Canal D and investment by SODEC and The Canadian Media Fund, it will follow three young men who are struggling to improve their situation despite tremendous difficulties.

Until now, our main challenge has been the ‘casting,’ the choice of our main characters. Each one of the young men we focus on will likely have a link to a community organization that is trying to make a difference in the neighbourhood. In a few weeks I’ll tell you more about them, and about a video training course we organized for one group of young people.

Martin Duckworth tourne à Mtl-N. — DOP Martin Duckworth.

MI et Big Joe à Montréal-Nord. — I put a microphone on 'Big Joe", Jonathan Duguay, youth worker at the Maison Culturelle et Communautaire de Montréal-Nord.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for help with this blog.

Tournage à Montréal-Nord

Depuis neuf mois – et pour encore six mois – je tourne un documentaire à Montréal-Nord avec le directeur photo Martin Duckworth et notre assistant Franck Le Coroller. Nous sommes plongés dans la réalité quotidienne d’un quartier multi-ethnique défavorisé – un autre monde par rapport au Centre-Ville de Montréal où nous habitons.

Le quartier a fait l’objet d’une couverture médiatique sensationnaliste centrée sur les gangs de rue et la violence et n’a donc pas bonne réputation. ‘L’affaire Villanueva’ qui a vu un policier abattre un jeune homme dans un parc il y a trois ans, a mis en lumière le ‘profilage racial’ et les attitudes discriminatoires de la police. Depuis cette crise, il y a beaucoup d’efforts de changement à Montréal-Nord. Mais les choses changent-elles assez vite?

Au cœur des controverses, il y a la réalité des jeunes hommes ‘à risque’ de Montréal-Nord et c’est là le sujet de notre film. Produit par Jeannine Gagné à Amazone Films avec une license de Canal D et la participation financière de la SODEC et du Fonds des Médias du Canada, il suivra trois jeunes qui font des efforts pour améliorer leur situation malgré le contexte difficile.

Jusqu’à maintenant, notre principal défi a été le ‘casting’: le choix des principaux personnages. Chacun des jeunes que nous choisirons est en lien avec un organisme communautaire qui tente d’aider la jeunesse, et surtout avec des individus clés de ces organismes, travailleurs de rue ou intervenants sociaux.

Dans quelques semaines, je vous présenterai nos principaux personnages. Je vous parlerai aussi d’une formation sur la production vidéo que nous avons donné à quelques jeunes du quartier.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for help with this blog.

Winds of Heaven

Emily Carrs painting Cathedral Grove — “Kispiox Village.” Painting by Emily Carr, 1929.

Montreal’s International Festival of Films on Art has a huge following. Most screening are full, great to see. The festival mostly programs films for the subject matter as opposed to the filmic qualities, but every year there are some really excellent films.

Of the films I saw this year I liked The Owl in Daylight by David Kleijwegt about Philip K. Dick for the way it used metaphorical images. (The sci-fi writer PKD’s stories have formed the basis for many fiction films, including Bladerunner, which came out just after he died, at an early age. Not to be confused with the Hollywood biopic with the same name starring Paul Giamatti as Dick!) And also my friend Jennifer Alleyn‘s excellent film about a German artist I really admire: Otto Dix. (Named Dix fois Dix, it’s made up of ten tableaus from different moments in Dix’s life.)

Another beautiful and insightful film at the festival was Winds of Heaven about Emily Carr, directed by Michael Ostroff, co-produced by Peter Raymont at White Pine Pictures and filmed by John Walker – who won the CSC award for best documentary cinematography for his work on the film. The most interesting thing about the film for me was the way it took a close look at Carr’s struggle to be recognized as an artist at a time when not many women were, and the ambivalent and not always ‘politically correct’ (especially with today’s standards) relationship with and views of the aboriginal peoples whose culture figured so prominently in her art.

Michael Ostroff explained to me how he constructed the story line:

Carr’s writings form the narrative basis of the film but I had to look at them from that of the perspective of an old sickly woman recalling her earlier times solely from memory. There were no notes or diaries that she relied on, at least so’s that anyone is aware of. So memory of events formed the basis of much of her writings which she began sometime after her first stroke in 1937. This is especially true of her stories about her travel among the First Nations peoples of NW BC. She declared herself to be a friend of the Indians but, as Marcia Crosby says in the film, her writings reflected not so much as friendship but a conceit, and a sense of the racism of her day.

Carr was not political – and we cannot judge her by the standards of our times. Her writings are problematic and to Marcia pose a real concern, because schools are still reading/teaching Carr’s stories.

However – the paintings show a great deal of respect. Carr went up the coast and brought back images of communities – active, working, living. This was at a time when the slogan “the only good indian is a dead indian” was often heard and approved of in white society. First nations people were seen by most whites as either barbaric savages or sad vestiges of the noble savage. Most of the the images created by whites portrayed one or the other of these two polarities (think about Curtis.) The solution presented by government was assimilation when it wasn’t outright extermination. Carr’s images however were respectful – and shocking to white society. (In addition to the fauve colours.)

Her diary entries of the 1930’s though suggest a more complex and troubled present. The sacrifices she had to make to remain true to herself as an artist were very hard.

The Harris quote I think should be on every artist’s wall. “… despair is part of every creative individual. It can’t be conquered. One rises out of it. I suppose we are only content when all our sails are up and full of the winds of heaven. I hope all your sails are up and full of the winds of heaven. There is only one way. Keep on.”

Much of the Carr industry is dedicated to the didactic exploration. WOH is not. Entertainment and visual flow were the guiding principles of my direction. And from that the film evolved. The logging sequences for example, became a metaphor for the first nations people. When first seen in the film’s prelude – there is barely enough room for the trees to fall. Each time we return to logging, the forest has been reduced until the very last exquisite camera pan of 25 seconds across the landscape of a 1925 clearcut. They are almost wiped out. Only a stick or two remains. So when we see – at the end – “Scorned as Timber” – a much loved Carr work – it can be a metaphor for Carr’s persistence and individuality, and it can be a metaphor for the First Nations people. “Yes – we’ve been beaten, but we are still here – reaching for the sky.” Striving. Living. I couldn’t feel comfortable ever writing – “they were almost exterminated/assimilated” – so I let the visuals say it.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for the help with this blog post.

Labour’s New Frontier

Young union organizers Maxime and Pascal from the film: 'Maxime, McDuff & McDo' (M.Isacsson)

Quebec has a higher percentage of union members (about 40%) than Canada as a whole (about 30%) or the United States (about 15%.) Perhaps this is why this province regularly sees pioneering efforts to extend unionization into new sectors. The most recent is the effort to sign up the workers at the Couche-Tard chain’s many convenience stores by the CSN, La confédération des syndicats nationaux.

The majority of employees in several locations have voted for the union. After threatening to close the stores where the workers voted for the union – in a video shown to the employees – management last week did just that, in one important store in Montreal. A choice location, at the corner of St. Denis and Beaubien, not one where the company can argue they were losing money. The union naturally accuses management of intimidation, and is maintaining the pressure.

This battle is reminiscent of one which touched Walmart in Quebec over the last couple of years, and saw that corporation close one major outlet in Jonquière.

This is all quite déjà vu for me, because I followed the attempts to unionize two McDonald’s franchises in Quebec for five years, from 1998 to 2003. I made two films, both produced by Virage and broadcast by Télé-Québec. The first one, Un Syndicat avec ça? (A Union with that?) saw a close-knit gang of experienced workers in Brossard bring in the union.

The second case was quite different. In Maxime, McDuff & McDo I followed two young men who signed up a majority of their very young co-workers in a downtown Montreal franchise on Peel street.

The result? The multinational closed down both restaurants, and there is still no unionized McDonald’s in Canada or the U.S.

The right to free association is a democratic right. How many stores is Couche-Tard willing to close before they accept the union?

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.

Godin Doc: A Reminder of Heady Times

I have said this before: I often find myself writing about Quebec matters in English, because I feel like telling non-francophones about what goes on here.

Traditionally, St. Lawrence Boulevard – a few blocks from my house – has been thought of as the dividing line between English and French Montreal, with the francophones living mainly in the East. Although a huge simplification, this notion still bears some truth.

And well East of that line there is a fantastic neighbourhood cinema called the Beaubien that attracts people from many other parts of town. It usually mixes in documentaries with its mainstay of independent – or at least creatively interesting – fiction.

Screening right now at the Beaubien is Godin, a very good documentary by Simon Beaulieu about Quebec poet and politician Gérald Godin. It takes us back to the heady days when the independence movement in Quebec was on the march, winning a provincial election in 1976 and losing a referendum with a very close margin in 1995. The film seems to have struck a chord. The day I was there, the theatre was full for a 1.30 pm screening!

Godin was an irreverent poet who loved the good life. He lived for thirty years with one of my favourite singers, the passionate Pauline Julien – I was honoured that she accepted to narrate the French version of one of my films, Uranium. In 1988 Dorothy Todd-Hénault made a very good NFB film about the couple: Quebec… un peu… beaucoup… passionnément….

Godin was a tremendously open-minded and inspired politician who once famously defeated then premier Robert Bourassa in the riding of Mercier where I live. Although he was a Quebec nationalist who fought for independence, Godin was intensely interested in the cultural and linguistic minorities, and actually got a lot of immigrants to vote for the Parti Québecois.

He liked to de-dramatize the linguistic conflicts here. I remember him giving a bilingual TV interview in a local grocery store, saying, “Potato–patate, tomato-tomate, orange-orange – Quel est le problème? What’s the problem?” But of course he did support the protection and promotion of the French language.

Godin became Quebec’s Minister of Immigration and Cultural Communities under René Levesque, at a time when Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister of Canada. As I left the screening, I heard a white-haired lady say: “Today’s politicians are sorry sight, compared to those days.”

The most touching part of the film deals with Godin’s illness – a brain tumour severely slowed him down and eventually killed him at age 56. We see him in archival footage still doing his best to represent his constituency during the last years, half his head shaven, and saying in essence, “When you’re seriously ill, you have to pack a lot in, because you know there isn’t much time left.”

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for help with this blog.

Disturbing realities: Annabel Soutar

I recently wrote about PorteParole theatre’s Montreal documentary theatre performance Sexy Béton (Sexy Concrete) created by artistic director Annabel Soutar. And I have seen other documentary plays she put on in the past – one of them was “Seeds,” about Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeizer’s fight against Monsanto and its genetically modified seeds. Just as interesting and thought-provoking.

This is the theatrical equivalent of creative non-fiction, a fascinating literary genre. And even among visual and installation artists and filmmakers there is a lot of talk about the relationship between documentary and fiction these days. I asked Annabel why she thinks this is so.

>> Annabel: I think that artists become obsessed with the boundary between fiction and reality when, in real life, we have lost touch with what is ‘really going on’. We have arrived at a point where we, unwittingly or not, accept a fictional narrative about the real world. Why? Partly because the truth is too hard to face. Why would I want to talk about my credit card debt when I could just go and enjoy another sushi dinner without really paying for it?

But also, people of my generation (who came of age in the 80s) have grown up on the idea that the news is not a description of reality, but a source of entertainment. Since the 80s we have been bombarded with mediated current-event stories: the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, the birth of ‘niche news’ (business news, weather news, celebrity news, etc…) and the evolution of instant and personalized news through the Internet.

Recently, it has dawned on us that we probably aren’t getting a true picture of reality from the news media. And most recently, with the Wikileaks cables, we have abruptly learned that we have been completely duped about a lot of things. Why have we trusted news media for so long? Why haven’t we noticed that what the media has been saying isn’t really going on in the world?

Well… partly because we’ve just been enjoying the stories so much. The news is entertaining. But also because we have accepted that our relationship with the world around us should be completely mediated. We are no longer going out into the world ourselves to learn and document reality because we are so busy consuming ‘stories’ about it.

You could say that the mediated world has replaced the real world for most of us. And in that mediated world, the search for truth is much less relevant than the ability to grab peoples’ attention and create another layer of buzz.

>> MI: I am just reading a little book called ‘The Storyteller’ which my daughter Anna gave me. It’s about the ‘documentary turn’ taken by many artists. It says: “Faced with a reality fraught with global conflict, artists are increasingly seeking to respond to and come to terms with the world around them… events are re-imagined and thereby re-experienced through the artist’s personal encounter or the character’s narration.”

In your work, you have anchored your stories very solidly in a documented reality. Why? Will that strategy allow a closer relationship to a certain truth? Will that perceived relationship to the truth allow for a greater impact on the audience?

>> Annabel: I definitely feel like I NEED to research and write these documentary plays. Firstly because I can’t trust the version of the real word that is being presented to me by the media so I need to go out and experience the world first hand. But second, because if I don’t go out and encounter the real world in a concrete way, that world becomes an abstraction that is so easily misperceived, dismissed and neglected.

My theatre creation process is a process of engagement – engagement with ‘the other’, engagement between myself and experiences that were hitherto completely foreign to me, and ultimately engagement with the other artists I collaborate with to come to terms with what is really happening in the world.

Much of what “is happening” out there is invisible in our day-to-day lives, and much of what people are thinking and doing is unspeakable. The theatre brings concrete form to what we can’t see in the real world and gives the audience the courage and inspiration to speak about the unspeakable, and to recognize the invisible forces that are influencing their lives.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.

“La clé 56” – Chapeau Alex !

Cle 56-michele — Michèle, une patiente de l’Hôpital. Photo Alexandre Hamel.

Depuis deux ans je regarde avec intérêt ce qui se fait en documentaire pour le web. Il y a parfois des choses intéressantes, mais on est aussi souvent déçu. Beaucoup de projets sont un peu didactiques et manquent d’émotion. Les gros projets sont souvent de qualité très inégale.

Mais un de mes anciens stagiaires, Alexandre Hamel, un jeune qui a du talent en tant que cinéaste (en plus d’être patineur artistique de classe mondiale!) a réalisé un petit bijou de documentaire web qui s’appelle “La Clé 56”, sur les patients de l’hôpital psychiatrique Louis-H. Lafontaine. Jetez un coup d’œil ici a la bande annonce et ici (épisode 1) avant de lire ma petite entrevue avec Alex.

Tout le monde qui travaille en documentaire sait que c’est extrêmement difficile d’avoir accès et de pouvoir filmer à l’intérieur d’un hôpital psychiatrique. Comment tu as réussi ce bon coup?

En mai 2009, je n’avais pas de travail. Un de mes amis a attiré mon attention sur une offre d’emploi de l’Hôpital psychiatrique Louis-H.Lafontaine. L’annonce était dans le journal “Voir“. L’employeur cherchait un cinéaste pour un projet à réaliser dans l’hôpital, dans le cadre d’une campagne de sensibilisation sur Internet.

J’ai appliqué, puis j’ai passé une entrevue où les candidats devaient présenter un projet qui aiderait à déstigmatiser la maladie mentale. N’importe quel type de projet pouvait être présenté. Je suis passionné par le documentaire et je me spécialise dans le contenu web. J’ai donc présenté le projet d’une série de courtes capsules vidéos qui suivrait la vie de patients de l’hôpital.

Finalement, je n’ai donc rien “réussi”. J’ai tout simplement obtenu l’emploi!

La direction et le département des communications de l’hôpital rassemble des gens très progressistes, très “in”. C’est eux qui ont fait les premiers pas pour faire accepter une première: la présence d’une caméra dans l’hôpital. Ils se sont rendus compte que les petits vidéos genre “corpo”, et les autres stratégies de communication instutionelle habituelles n’atteindraient pas le public, seraient un coup d’épée dans l’eau et ne réussiraient pas à venir à bout des immenses tabous liés à la maladie mentale. Ils ont donc joué le tout pour le tout et ont fini par obtenir toutes les autorisations nécessaires.

C’est là qu’ils m’ont donné la Clé 56, le passe-partout de l’hôpital…

Malgré les lettres d’autorisation, mon badge, ma clé, les gardiens de sécurité ont mis quelques semaines à s’habituer à ma présence et à ne pas réagir.

Il ne restait plus qu’à convaincre les individus (travailleurs et patients) de se prêter au jeu. C’est là que la vraie difficulté commençait…

Alexandre avec deux de ses principaux personnages.

La vraie difficulté a été de trouver les perles rares qui accepteraient de participer au projet de documentaire.

Au niveau des patients, ça a été facile. Les gens atteints de maladies mentales souffrent autant de leur maladie que du fait qu’ils ont une mauvais image de “fuckés mentaux”. De nombreuses personnes atteintes sont donc venus à moi volontairement et avec enthousiasme. Ils voulaient participer, faire leur “coming out” et jouer un rôle dans cette campagne de sensibilisation.

J’ai été supris de l’intelligence et de la vivacité des gens qui sont devenus mes sujets. En passant, la maladie mentale n’atteint aucunement l’intelligence des gens. On se trompe souvent avec la déficience intelectuelle, qui est quelque chose de bien différent.

Ça a été beaucoup plus difficile de trouver des sujets au niveau du personnel de l’hôpital. Une caméra dans leurs pattes, ça les dérangeait dans leurs habitudes. Plusieurs n’aiment pas les caméras. Et ils avaient moins à gagner dans ce projet que les personnes atteintes qui seront premières à bénéficier d’un changement des mentalités.

J’ai donc fini par trouver mes perles rares: quelques médecins, infirmières et préposés qui, malgré leur timidité, ont accepter de participer par pure générosité. Ces gens là sont extrêmement occupés… On connaît tous le débordement du sytsème de santé. Quand même, ces précieux partenaires du projet prenaient le temps nécessaire pour tout m’expliquer: les traitements, leur point de vue, plus à propos des maladies, etc. Sans eux, ça n’aurait pas fonctionné. Ils l’ont fait pour aider cette campagne de déstigmatisation.

Ces professionnels que j’ai filmé, que ce soit des médecins, des infirmières ou des préposés, ce sont l’élite de ce petit monde des soins psychiatriques. Ceux qui sont là pour aider les personnes atteintes, même si c’est au-delà de leur définition de tâche. Ça a été une belle expérience de voir ces gens à l’œuvre. Dans la petite série de 6 fois 4 minutes, on ne les voit pas assez, j’aurais voulu en montrer plus.

Et tu travailles sur une suite ?

Mon nouveau projet me permet d’explorer une réalité que j’avais aperçue brièvement à travers “Clé 56”, mais sans avoir le temps de la découvrir vraiment. 1500 patients de l’hôpital vivent dans des ressources externes, des maisons anonymes réparties un peu partout dans l’est de Montréal. Ça explique pourquoi l’hôpital qui acceuillait des milliers de patients n’a plus qu’environ 500 lits.

Cette fois, on m’a prêté une chambre dans une de ces résidences. J’ai passé énormément de temps à vivre avec et filmer des gens atteints de maladies mentales et tentant de se réintégrer doucement à la vie “normale”. La réadaptation continue durant des années après le congé de l’hôpital. C’est ça la désinstitutionalisation.

Je fais encore une série web qui sortira en mai 2011. Cette série mettra en vedette quelques résidents qui ont réalisé eux-mêmes des vidéos exprimant leur vision de la maladie mentale. Des petits bijoux…

Après, je sortirai une série télé qui passera à TV5. Je ne sais pas encore quand exactement mais ce sera 8 épisodes de 25 minutes. Ce format me permet d’aller beaucoup plus loin dans l’intimité et la réalité de mes sujets.

Et après, une deuxième petite série de capsules web sur des anecdotes du tournage.

Bref, un gros projet….

Et je suis en écriture pour d’autres choses, après. Suite à un voyage au Labrador et à Terre-Neuve, je m’intéresse présentemment au dépeuplement en région et à la pêche.

Alors, oui, ce sera bel et bien la fin de mon travail dans l’univers de la psychiatrie. La prochaine fois que j’irai à Louis-H.Lafontaine, ce sera probablement pour moi-même! ;o)

Merci à Tobi Elliot pour l’aide avec le blogue.

NFB film playlists

My young colleague Tobi Elliott who helps me with this blog has this to say:

I recently spent a morning browsing the NFB’s excellent resource of film playlists. The playlists have been a feature of the new www.nfb.ca website since it launched in January 2009. Invited guests and their own staff have grouped together films around themes ranging from the powerful to the whimsical, the obvious to the obscure.

I have one conclusion…. You can get lost in there! The only way I can justify spending hours watching ten of these films at a time, is by rationalizing that it’s the duty of every young filmmaker to see the work of filmmakers that have gone before them.

Thanks to the playlists, it becomes a delightful chore. They are a useful tool for whittling down the wonderful selection of films available on the website. They also provide insight into the making-of certain films and in some cases, the historical context that otherwise would be lost to someone of my generation.

The NFB’s Guest Playlists include film groupings by the following people, some of whom are in-house producers and filmmakers:

Douglas Roche: The Strength of Peace (Magnus’ film Uranium, Terry Nash’s If You Love This Planet, and Martin Duckworth’s Return to Dresden are included in this list)
Tre Armstrong: Dance, Music and Passion
Donald McWilliams: Norman McLaren: Hands-on Animation
Colin Low: Recollections from a Distinguished Career
Alanis Obomsawin: a Retrospective
Gil Cardinal: The Aboriginal Voice
Katerina Cizek: Manifesto for interventionist Media
Thomas Waugh, Ezra Winton and Michael Baker: Challenge for Change
Adam Symansky: Donald Brittain

The guest authors of their collections take one of two approaches in their selections: either they focus on a theme or a particular filmmaker. Cizek’s playlist brings together 11 films on “the philosophy and practice of ‘Art as a Hammer’.” Her picks range from 1944’s short Democracy at Work to 2008’s RiP! A Remix Manifesto.

Symansky’s collection brings together eight Donald Brittain films, each written up with a personal recollection of Symansky’s about the “making of” of the film. The writing alone is an invaluable resource for younger filmmakers like myself.

In the NFB’s Expert Playlists, their resident collections expert, Albert Ohayon, put together six useful playlists:

10 Great Films from the last decade you may not have seen
The 1960s: An Explosion of Creativity
The 1950s: Television and the Move to Montreal
Canada’s Diverse Cultures
Bill Mason: Beyond the wild, beyond the paddle

And finally, the Thematic Playlists comprise almost sixty collections of films and clips, intriguing because there’s such a huge variety. Where else can you access groupings ranging from ‘Winter Sports Movies” to “Canada’s got Treasures!”?

Treasures indeed.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for this post.

Talkies in Toronto

A few weeks ago, I was invited to present a film at an event called Talkies in Toronto. It was one event in a series of screenings and discussions, organized by York University humanities professor Mark Cauchi and his co-conspirator filmmaker Azed Majeed.

I thought about the choice of film for a while. In the end I suggested to Mark and Azed that I show either the controversial documentary Capturing the Friedmans, which would have allowed us to discuss many tricky issues of access and consent, or one of my own films. They decided to go for one of mine, because it would be their first documentary and the Toronto premiere of Art in Action.

Now, if you read this blog often, you’ve already heard enough about Art in Action (see previous post). So let’s talk about Talkies. The very congenial but intellectually intense event takes place in what would be a loft if it wasn’t a basement, in Toronto’s East End.

Mark explains it this way:

“The films are selected primarily by the speakers. We give them free reign to pick what they want. We figure that they’ll know best what film they can discuss in an interesting manner. This has resulted in wide variety of films being selected, from Antonioni and Godard to the 80s thriller Angel Heart to a recent film like Doubt.”

“When we conceived the series, one of the ideas was not to confine it strictly to “film studies.” So we’ve been selecting people who have expertise in certain fields or practices, who also like to work with and think about film, and who are engaging speakers. We don’t want a classroom. This means we’ve had speakers take philosophical, political, psychoanalytic, sociological, and anthropological approaches. Most have been academics, but that’s not by design as much as by circumstance. We want to get more film makers and other artists and non-academic writers to participate.”

Talkies in Toronto organizers Mark Cauchi and Azed Majeed.

Can you give an example or two of interesting discussions?

“Nikolas Kompridis (Professor at the Center for Citizenship & Public Policy, University of Western Sydney) gave a presentation on Antonioni’s classic, Blow-Up. He suggested that the film was challenging the modernist ethos of mastery and control (exemplified in taking pictures, technology, and swingin’ 60s consumption) by presenting its main character and its viewers with an enigma that no amount of control (exemplified in blowing up a picture) could resolve. The main character and viewer learns that instead of always attempting to control actively one’s environment, sometimes one must simply be receptive to what is beyond oneself.”

“Kristine Klement (a graduate student in Social & Political Thought at York University) and Paola Bohorquez (Instructor of English, York University) gave a co-presentation on the recent film Doubt. They highlighted the fact that there is no evidence of crime in the film, and yet characters and viewers are compelled to regard the main character of the film as guilty. Leaving aside the question of whether or not he is guilty, they used psychoanalytic theory to explore the psychological processes that lead to such discrepancies.”

“Both discussions opened up the films in interesting and unexpected ways and generated a lot of discussion and response by our viewers.”

What’s coming up?

“The next Talkies will be on Saturday February 26.

We will be screening Bruno Dumont’s 1997 debut film, The Life of Jesus. Despite the title, this film does not depict the life of Jesus, a la Pasolini’s Gospel According to Saint Matthew or Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The film will be in French, with English subtitles.

John Caruana (Professor of Philosophy, Ryerson University) will be discussing the film. As usual, the event takes place in the basement at 245 Carlaw Ave, suite 004 (just north of Queen East), and starts at 7 pm.”

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.