Trains of Winnipeg | 14 Films
18,000 Dead in Gordon Head
The title of this film comes from the oft-quoted statistic that the average sixteen-year-old has witnessed 18,000 murders, on TV and at the movies. Gordon Head is the Canadian suburb where the film takes place. The original footage for '18,000 Dead in Gordon Head' was shot in Super 8 film. However, before it could be edited the footage was lost, and it wasn't until twenty years later that a crude VHS video dub was found. This wrecked, out-of-sync and damaged footage, with its strobing, water colour-like hues, was evocative of the filmmakers marred and murky memories of the original event. It inspired the writing of a narrative poem, and finally formed the basis of this completed 35mm film. In 1982, as remarkable as the girls sudden death was, the young filmmaker also found it devastatingly normal. Hed, "already seen it, thousands of times." The state of shock that it engendered, was simply more of the same, a state of mind very familiar. As was the ensuing series of violent events that he went on to witness until... a small, positive action broke the spell. '18,000 Dead in Gordon Head' is partly a treatise on the omnipresence of violence in contemporary culture, even (or some would say especially) in the banal context of a Canadian suburb. Composed as a poem, the final work is a hybrid of several film stocks and video formats, processed to create a kinetic, lyrical collage of textures, loops, rhythms and visual rhymes, and in the end finally completing the works cycle back to its originally intended film format. Music by Jason Tait.
'Trains of Winnipeg' uses multiple film gauges and digital formats in a collage of colliding and looping vantage points on this brief, ever-moving, moment in history. Music by Emily Goodden.
Hitler! (Revisited) is a digital + hands-on filmic 're-mix' of the earlier film, a new work made from materials ten years older. With the assistance of filmmaker Sol Nagler, a print of the earlier film was literally deconstructed, separated back into individual shots which were then put through a variety of physical stresses and tortures. While this was done, Sol asked questions about the filmmaker's family, and they discussed filmmaking, Sol's family history including the Warsaw Ghetto, Hitler, and the war. The text was written, and the new images digitally re-mixed with a soundtrack from sound artist Steve Bates, in response to this physical and verbal process. This is the final film in a trilogy about the film-makers relationship with his schizophrenic sibling.
Music by Christine Fellows.
This hilltop view was many things to us while growing up: a place to peer out at the dark with a date, tongue-tied a place to see the first flash of a long expected nuclear strike - a place to almost hear the bombs dropping on far-off Pacific villages and up in the sky, Fs dancing. Music by Christine Fellows. Bombs dropped by U.S. Air Force, Vietnam.
The original poem was commissioned by CBC Radio in 2002 on the theme, Love in Winnipeg it began at 3 am in mid-February at 30 below, on a drive home in an empty, wind-swept, snowbound town. Music by Christine Fellows.
The 8mm footage, including the film-makers first steps, was filmed by his namesake, Clive Brown, a friend of the family and a west coast fisherman. Nanaimo, British Columbia, is where Clive's family first attempted to set up a home in Canada after arriving from Dublin. They moved, for work reasons, to Victoria two years later. As a result, Nanaimo took on a useful mythical status for the Holden family, becoming the place before complication and sadness. Music by Christine Fellows.
Figures (modeling compound, gouache) by Shary Boyle. Music by Christine Fellows.
This one’s about one-way interfaces, and their role in class and power dynamics. It’s common in our culture for artists to live in low rent neighbourhoods and therefore to witness the daily misery of the poor. But this witnessing is generally done from an outsider’s perspective. A majority of artists, at least in Western countries, are either from the middle classes or have effectively become middle class through education – but despite this, they often have very low incomes. This complex of watching, hearing, and often recording, can be seen as a mild kind of violence. Music by Christine Fellows.
Artist's Note: I drove Greyhound bus for many years – it was an exceptionally good seasonal artist’s job, that I still miss. When speaking with Les, I’m reminded in particular of the summer of 1987 when I drove a route from northern British Columbia to the Yukon Territories. Over the years I’ve come to admire people who do their jobs well, and, like Les, seem to fit what they’re doing like a well-tailored suit of clothes. Les is also a part-time painter, his specialty an ongoing series of kinetic cow paintings (available through the Winnipeg Art Gallery). Music by Jason Tait.
The question of where to live has recently reached a fever pitch for many people in the richer Western industrialized nations. People are moving with greater and greater frequency, as if desperate to find the perfect ‘resting place’. At the end of the road is a gilded question mark. Is this what we worked so hard for? Music by Jason Tait.
The Super 8 and video footage was collected in an upscale Vancouver neighbourhood over the period of one year, the act of looking through a lens causing the artist to realize what wasn't there to be seen that even though there weren't any physical walls to keep out the poor and the less beautiful, somehow they were missing from the footage he collected. The familiar middle class images are seen through a moving screen of near black & white textures, in the hope that the conscious effort required to see them increases perception. Music by Jason Tait.
Footage shot from the windows of planes high above the Rocky Mountains, on trips between Winnipeg and the west coast. Broad metal wings equalling the heights of material invention, the dreamlike hush of air travel, human endeavour through blue ether. Music by Jason Tait.
Music by Jason Tait.
|