Every generation has its own cinematic landscape of the imagination.
Those large figures looming from the grand screen at the front of a movie theatre imprint on our minds all kinds of deceptions and delights. Over time, these accumulate, and a certain amount of our life view is nudged and streamlined according to what we have seen on those screens. (Not quite what happens when we watch movies on television screens at home, thank you, Marshall McLuhan.) What we Canadians saw until the 1960s and '70s was almost exclusively made in America, invariably constructed around a classical Hollywood narrative template. Good guys won, bad guys lost. White guys were good, bad guys were a different colour. Women who let men have their way rarely married and settled down and had kids with them.
Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists
, by Mike Hoolboom, Coach House, 319 pages, $29.95The Young, the Restless, and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers
, edited by George Melnyk, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 134 pages, $18.95
We made few distinctions, despite having preferences. We watched everything: horror pictures, westerns, screwball comedy and drama.
Then, suddenly, another world opened up, at film societies, in little art houses or in language classes at universities: foreign films, with subtitles, unresolved situations, mysterious scrambled timelines, even no plots. Some moviegoers breathed a huge sigh of relief: Yes, there really was another portal through which to engage with the world.
The consequence of this fusion of indiscriminate viewing was an opulent mental treasure chest of visual imagery, all located elsewhere, not here. Filmmakers play with these optical references, and audiences make links, consciously or unconsciously.
In Canada, in feature film, there are relatively few references to our own culture, which we (correctly) insist is significantly different from the U.S. experience. Most Canadians are completely unfamiliar with the thousands of films, good, bad and indifferent, that have been made right here, by those who live among us.
Perhaps Canadian cinema can claim to be the least-seen movie product in the world. Too bad.
Everyone should read Mike Hoolboom's Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists and see the work of his more than two dozen moviemaking subjects. Hoolboom opens up a vast territory of investigation and playfulness about films that have the particularity to make us feel right at home. The task of seeing the films, like reading this book, takes a bit of work, but it's worth it. The prerequisite is an open mind. (We can do that: Not long ago, no one would dream of eating raw fish, and look at us now.)
What one learns from Hoolboom's investigation is that these are more artists than filmmakers
Hoolboom's primer assists us in grasping the meaning of the work of some of the more obscure film artists working in our midst. His interview style is unmatchable: His introductory paragraphs are provocative and lucid. The writing reaches back in time and into Hoolboom's own excellent work and filmmaking experience. He infuses with fleet phrase an aura of significance to his subject. (Where is his interview with himself?) By conducting the interviews on paper (or by e-mail), he elicits the wit and insight and the very thought processes of his subjects. This work is in the tradition of Godard and Truffaut and other filmmakers who became devoted to an examination of the work of their peers.
Hoolboom: "How do you see the ongoing disconnect between production and exhibition? Do you feel that most artists' work simply shows to other artists, and that this in-crowd insularity is creating a body of work whose means and messages lie further and further from any who don't already know the secret handshake, possess the decoder ring, speak the riddle?"
