Living at the Movies

This is a piece that I wrote for Critical Superbeast that didn't make it onto the blog. I wanted it to see the light of day, so here it is-- some of my thoughts around old media, and the proliferation of VHS movie nights in Hamilton as of late. Read on and use the comment section if you have thoughts to share or add.

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I dreamt up, and have been recycling, this line lately: “Vinyl records have been gentrified.” Indie, punk and fringe music kept vinyl manufacturing going when it was in doldrums at the dawn of the 1990s. For the last few years, news outlets have been claiming that vinyl is BACK, IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT.  Now, the Beatles’ back catalogue and Adele records are being pressed on vinyl, causing a bottleneck in production out of what few record-pressing plants exist today. Small quantities equal lower priority and longer waits for small-scale releases to see the light of day. As a consumer, the landscape has changed too. Gone are the days of the dollar bin. 2016 is the year of the $40 reissue, not the $4 bargain.

What do such conditions mean for the weirdos whose life’s blood is to see oddball production, whether they created it or not, see the light of day? We don’t just exhume the media graveyard for fun; we do it out of neccessity. For many of us, the humble audio cassette has recently become a cultural lifebuoy.

Perhaps this same impulse has informed the proliferation of VHS film screening nights in Hamilton. At least three currently exist— one celebrates the trashy bowels of cinematic experience, mostly horror, while one is dedicated to punk rockers on celluloid. I went to one two nights ago, a private version which identified as a “secret film screening society of sorts” in an unassuming location on Rebecca Street. A motley group of seven, we sat in a room watching a curated pair of films selected with the theme “Trump’s America” in mind: The Stepford Wives (1974) and George A. Romero’s zombie prototype, The Crazies (1974). In The Stepford Wives, a feminist wife and mother tries to resist the local men’s association’s plot to turn all of the town’s women into baking, scrubbing, glossy-eyed, submissive cyborgs. In the lesser-known The Crazies, a biological warfare tool— a virus called Trixie— unleashes an epidemic of rage across swing state Pensylvannia as a small group of insurgents struggles to not succumb to one of two things: the sickness, or the trigger-happy army that is trying to keep citizens, whether stricken with madness or sane, in line. Sound familiar?

Why VHS? Tape hiss, packaging and charming tracking issues—aspects of VHS’ unique visual and aural vocabulary now only known through the twice-removed simulacra of Youtube— are all possibilities. It is tempting to question whether their slowness— the fact that we can’t surf, binge or replay a VHS with the ease of a Youtube video—adds to the formality and intensity of our reception of them. But I refuse to believe that it’s simply a matter of novelty, or an infatuation with the old or obsolete.

The late, great Jim Carroll’s first poetry collection was called Living at the Movies. I always imagined that Living at the Movies was Carroll’s metaphor for escapism. Some might suggest that the impulse to exhume and appropriate old technologies, and the media they contain, is a way to escape the dauntingly rapid change of contemporary technological change…either that, or it might be dismissed as knee-jerk nostalgia. In a world that often feels like a runaway train racing towards oblivion, it’s hard to deny the comfort I experience when I revisit the first media— cassettes, vinyl records and VHS tapes— I experienced as a child. But as with audio cassette tape being a safe haven in a gentrified media landscape,  perhaps old VHS tapes carrying weird and wonderful films from past decades might hint at another interpretation of what it might mean to live at the movies.

In the 1970s twilight of my cinematic dreamscape— the space of Rocky’s lonely night walks past flaming garbage cans or DiNiro’s night ride through Manhattan in his cologne and cigarette-stenched cab— the movies, like a bus station or a 24-hour diner, is a place where someone with nowhere else to go can spend the night and fade into the background, unnoticed. When we live with and embrace the media of the past, we carve out a space for our own imagination, presence, culture and difference. Through it, we live in a movie, or a eutopian space, that draws from the past to talk about the present. This eutopia is a place where misfit media can continue to be vessels for misfit stories-- perhaps a more political act than any humble secret film screening society in the name of good fun might guess.

(becoming) The Logic of Memory at Hamilton Artist's Inc.

Image: Corinne Duchesne, Sybil, 2013. Mixed media drawing on mylar.

I'm unbelievably excited about the following exhibition which opens at The Inc. next week, featuring the work of Corinne Duchesne, Peter Horvath and one of my textile art heros of all time, Anna Torma.  It was an honour and a privilege to be asked to write the catalogue essay for this show.  Don't miss this one, folks!

*****

[becoming] The Logic of Memory
Corinne Duchesne, Peter Horvath, Anna Torma

January 23 – March 1, 2014

Opening reception: Thursday, January 23, 7:00 – 9:30pm

Art Crawl: Friday, February 14, 7:00 – 11:00pm

To paraphrase Deleuze, we can only function in the present, but we are always in motion, always becoming. Our past makes up who we are, but by contemplating these moments of the past, we are no longer remembering, we are constructing something new, in turn effecting our future understanding of the present.

Each of the artists in this exhibition explore the concept of memory. Their diverse perspectives weave together and encourage visitors to consider notions of memory, nostalgia, time and loss. Corinne Duchesne’s layered mixed media drawings on mylar philosophically consider loss as a locative site of memory, using grief as an anchor to merge anthropomorphic forms with objects. Peter Horvath’s 2-channel video installation, Memoir, compares and juxtaposes the biographical similarities between his mother Eva and friend Denise, who both emigrated to Canada from Hungary, albeit decades apart. The installation is structured to reflect upon the nature of memory, manipulating the space between truth and fiction, past and present. Anna Torma’s technically rich textile installations reflect on the nostalgia of home, her immigrant heritage, the natural environment and maps the human body recalling the synapses of the brain.

Combined, through the use of these personal assemblages, the works in this exhibition reflect on the location and constructed nature of memory and it’s ability to influence and shape our understanding of ourselves in the present.

A catalogue essay by Tara Bursey will accompany the exhibition.

Hamilton Artists Inc.
155 James Street North, Hamilton
http://theinc.ca/

"Other Research Activity"

Right now, I'm in the middle of my final thesis project at school.  Things are starting to shape up, but I have to admit, I am such an f'ing procrastinator when it comes to research.  I am a bad (slow) reader, and have trouble retaining things I read-- I even admitted this in my thesis proposal in so many words.  One of my favourite things to do to procrastinate/weasel my way out of reading is watch movies/video under the guise of research.  Here is a short run-down of the films/video works I've been immersing myself in lately while working towards my major project.

7 UP/21 UP, (1963/1977).  Dir: Michael Apted.  Grenada Television, UK.

     “Give me a boy at seven, and I will give you the man” is the Jesuit motto at the heart of the Up Series, the renowned documentary series that examines the lives of twelve individuals over several decades as an interrogation of the British class system.  Originally focusing on twelve seven year olds, these individuals were subsequently interviewed every seven years in an attempt to determine if it was possible for them to break out of the class divisions they were born into.  What started as an examination of social stratification in England eventually became a compelling portrait of not just twelve individuals, but of post-war cultural and society in Britain.  

     Of particular interest to me is the ethics of representation at play in 21 UP, the series’ third instalment.  In the segment devoted to Tony, an aspiring cab driver from East London, the director 
accompanies him driving through some of London’s more crime-ridden neighbourhoods.  Apted later admitted to filming such scenes intentionally because he predicted Tony would become a criminal and end up imprisoned before the next installment of the series.  Apted later acknowledged in interviews the ethical problems with making these sorts of assumptions about his subjects.

sum of the parts: what can be named (2010).  Deanna Bowen.  V-Tape, Toronto, Canada

     sum of the parts: what can be named is an oral history of Bowen’s family performed on video.  Bowen traces her family history back several generations, from the earliest history she could find of enslaved relatives in Georgia to the family’s subsequent migration to western Canada in the early 20th century.  For Bowen, the oral history serves as a record of family members who could not speak on their own behalf as well as reclamation of a history that is largely unrecorded.

     The formal strategies employed by Bowen in sum of the parts evoke ideas of “disrememberment” and what it means to exist versus to not exist.  Bowen’s physical presence and strong narrative voice contrast with the absence of family members, whose only trace of existence is embodied by their faint signatures reproduced against the video’s black backdrop.  Importantly, the centrality of Bowen within the video anchors the history in the present, and gives the video a strong emotional resonance.

Goin' Down the Road (1970).  Dir:  Donald Shebib.  Evdon Films, Toronto.

     Goin' Down the Road is a 1970 Canadian film directed by Donald Shebib and released in 1970. It chronicles the lives of two men from the Maritimes who move to Toronto in order to find a better life. It starred Doug McGrath, Paul Bradley, Jayne Eastwood and Cayle Chernin. Despite a lack of production expense, it is generally regarded as one of the best and most influential Canadian films of all time and has received considerable critical acclaim for its true-to-life performances. In 2002, readers of Playback voted it the 5th greatest Canadian film of all-time.

     The film reflected an important social phenomenon in post-war Canada as the economy of the eastern provinces stagnated and many young men sought opportunities in the fast growing economy of Ontario. Although the men in the film come from Nova Scotia, the "Newfie" as an unsophisticated manual labourer was a common stereotype starting in the early 1950s as many Atlantic Canadians moved to the cities looking for work, only to find widespread unemployment and jobs that may have seemed to have attractive salaries, but made living in large cities marginal at best. Many of Toronto's early housing developments (particularly Regent Park) were built to handle the influx of internal immigrants before they were eventually replaced by external immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia starting in the 1960s. (Wikipedia)

Delirum (1993).  Mindy Faber.

     Mindy Faber’s Delirium (1993) is a video portrait of the artist’s mother’s history of mental illness.  Like autoethnography, Faber’s video uses a portrait of her mother and their relationship as a greater exploration of a social/cultural phenomenon-- a history of women and madness and the link between domesticity and depression.