MOMENTS OF PERCEPTION: EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN CANADA 2021
Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada. Stephen Broomer and Michael Zryd. Edited by Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg. Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions. 2021. 346 pages.
Review by Bart Testa (from Canadian Journal of Film Studies)
MOMENTS OF PERCEPTION has already seen warm press reviews in the Toronto Star, the Winnipeg Free Press and the current Cinemascope. right after its launch, which involved several smart events. Likely this reception comes with the recognition that Moments of Perception addresses, in an accessible way, a need for an accessible survey of Canadian experimental films that reaches the present. The book offers obvious utility for the classroom. No one teaching a course on this cinema would fail to find it an indispensable source for syllabus-building. The authors, York film professor Michael Zryd, and three filmmaker-programmer-critics, have each spent decades working in experimental film circles. Barbara Sternberg and Jim Shedden are veteran organizers of conferences (including the International Experimental Film Congress in 1989), innumerable film series and, in Sternberg’s case, of film coops. Shedden has probably edited some key Canadian publications on experimental cinema, notable among them Presence/Absence: The Films of Michael Snow 1956-1991 (1995). Stephen Broomer has published an invaluable interpretive study on Jack Chambers, Joyce Weiland and Michael Snow, Codes of the North (2017), and, in Hamilton Babylon (2016), Broomer devised a detailed history of the McMaster Film Board, a 1960s avant-garde start-up led by John Hofsess. Readers of Moments of Perception can feel confident that they are in the capable hands of well-informed writers.
Before this, there was no book offering this kind of coverage. Most deal with one filmmaker, like Catherine Russell’s David Rimmer-Films and Tapes, 1967-1993 (1995), or a thematic selection, like Process Cinema: Handmade Films in the Digital Age (2019). Bruce Elder’s Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (1989) had some features of a survey, but it finally focuses on Chambers and Snow.
In contrast, Moments of Perception offers some thirty short essays (all but one by Broomer), and about ninety capsule pieces by Sternberg and Shedden.
Running at almost 150 pages, Zryd’s contribution is the longest. Zryd has long been scouting for this account of the institutions, some large and some miniscule, which have sustained independent film and video production and venues to exhibit the work. His is a complex story and Zryd takes it to be a history of practices and particulars rather than defining “monuments” or movements. Zryd begins with the first (of several) apologies that Canadian experimental cinema has not been as open to questions of race and gender, of indigeneity and ethnicity as it should, while trying briefly to measure how, and how much, that has changed recently.
Zryd then moves into the thankless task of defining “experimental” and “avant-garde” cinema and proposes characteristic traits of this cinema, like “openness,” “opposition” and “subversion.” He means these terms to dignify and unify what is really a heterogeneous cinema, really a generous dodge around any question of art or aesthetics. Whatever political claim he seems to make with such terms cannot help fogging over once Zryd gets to the main thing his essay first achieves: an account of the inaugural institutions and policies that gave rise to Norman McLaren and Arthur Lipsett at the NFB; the creation of financial supports (CFDC, CCA), and events like Expo 67, which gave Canadian media experiments their first big platform, and, that same year, Cinethon, which brought together local filmmakers, notably Wieland, and the New York Underground for a movie marathon just off Yonge Street, an event that sparked the inspiration that became the Canadian Film Distribution Centre. Zyrd does not neglect other less famous events leading up to all that, like Maya Deren’s visits in 1950 and 1951, the McMaster Film Board’s little adventure, and the brief florescence of Vancouver’s Intermedia, which stirred up that city and gave a bored grad student, David Rimmer, his initiation in the avant-garde film and video.
The second and third phases of his essay put a strong accent on the institutions that sprang up coast-to-coast, like the Winnipeg Film Group, V-Tape, and, later, LIFT, The Film Farm, and the Pleasure Dome, and snapshots of the people who built them, seeing their story as essential to the history Zryd is writing. And without saying it in so many words, he makes it clear that Canada has been very gifted in its individual and collective institution builders, witness his right accent on the importance of artist-run-centers (ARCs). Zryd does a good job distinguishing exhibition fora and critical outlets (which tend to be short-lived) and production centres (which persist through crises and near collapses).
One of the themes that Zryd pauses to elaborate is the Cain and Abel tale of film and video that ends with a collapse of “medium specificity.” The issue arises with “video art,” which quickly enjoyed gallery and museum patronage never accorded to experimental cinema. The media difference seemed then became a critical sore point. video art gave rise to a parallel ethos of artist-stars, sponsorship and institutions (like Trinity Square Video and V-Tape), as well as gallery space. Yet, when “video” became “digital” and more an “interface” than a medium, and a tool that filmmakers could, and did, use and still be seen turning out films for exhibition. And now video artists could now project work at scale and bypass the TV monitor. Well, then, the marriage of digital and celluloid shoved the Cain and Abel fight into the dustbin of media history: the pragmatic difference between the film and video has collapsed, though not by critics and theorists. Meanwhile, once large-sized moving image installations became viable, gallery professionals got enthusiastic after decades of neglecting the moving picture arts.
Though he mentions the material near-collapse of 16mm, Zryd plumps for media separatism nonetheless, and reflecting the community’s consensus, throws his weight to experimental films watched intently in the dark, over installations hung on white walls of a museum to be glanced at by walkabout patrons. And Zyrd argues there is still reason to defend film’s rental-distribution model offering low-cost access to any classroom, screening group or community center with access to a projector.
The third part of Zryd’s essay consists of a fast-paced panorama, short histories of organizations across Canada that keep filmmakers going and their work shown. It is both the most edifying and intriguing part of the essay. And here is where Zryd’s attention to obscure corners or forgotten byways pays off. Who would know that tiny Regina is an important island of experimentation, or that Vancouver is where artists and universities have colluded as effectively as they do in Montreal in fostering an independent cinema? Zryd handles these and many short stops thoughtfully and accurately, even if his inclusiveness causes some cramming of names and acronyms (twenty-eight of these fill the page actually prefacing Zryd’s text).
In sum, as he explains, “most histories have concentrated on artists and their films.” But there really are no Canadian “histories” like the one he offers in rich outline and certainly none with a coherent program. The closest Zryd comes to a thesis is repeatedly to term his object of study an “ecosystem” sometimes an “infrastructure,”
metaphors that open the read to see how artists and cultural workers founded places, made them live, built walls and floors, installed mechanisms and allowed the films to flourish.
But there is no room in such Zryd’s survey for assessments of the artists’ achievements or the styles and themes they develop. This is where Broomer’s contribution to Moments of Perception proves a crucial counterweight. With great compression and precision, these short pieces assay his bushel of filmmakers with an uncanny eye for what they do technically and stylistically, what they express thematically. Whether he is dealing with an historic artist like Chambers, Granier or Snow, or relative newcomers like Daichi Saito, Garine Torossian and Kelly Egan; whether the sprawling outputs of Bruce Elder, Mike Hoolboom and John Porter, or the tight canons of influential works of Lipsett, Ellie Epp and Hancox, Broomer covers their careers and films with equally level aim, and writes about them with striking insight, lucidity and independence, that is, without footnotes or interview crutches. He is generous in describing their works, expressing a democracy of critical judgement parallel to Zryd’s democracy of institutions. Broomer seems to have seen and remembered all the films exactly. If Zryd’s essay is a compressed masterstroke of institutional historiography, Broomer’s is a masterwork of practical film criticism, exactly what Canadian experimental films require and need a lot more of.
The last section, written by Shedden and Sternberg, does not have the same density as Broomer, but these flip card capsules – at four a page -- is a lot of fun and displays a generosity all its own. Many of the filmmakers are either underrecognized (e.g., Clint Enns, Eva Kolcze, Kika Thorne, Zachary Finkelstein) or obscured by time (e.g., Bob Cowen, Betty Ferguson, Andrew Lugg, Peter Lipskis). Having them brought together in this kind of registry is another sign of the book’s inclusiveness.
What a book like this cannot do, and the editors have not pretended to do, is to stake out a position or offer an assessment of the significance or accomplishment of Canadian experimental cinema. That it is considerable and durable and ongoing…these are things a reader takes in trust just by opening the book and starting to read. The energy and integrity of the Canadian avant-garde is on the page, though manifest in a radically bigger way at a film screening, whether in Winnipeg, Toronto or Halifax.
Bart Testa
University of Toronto
