Experimental films from Québec and Canada

The three programmes we have gathered here are marked by a great heterogeneity. They do not aim to propose a prescriptive definition – despite the title – of what “experimental films from Québec and Canada” are supposed to be. At the very most, they allow us to glimpse the eclecticism that this term covers: three psychedelic films shot by a Québecer in Paris, wondrous film-journals or satirical pamphlets made by a Canadian (in love with Québec) living in New York, a fragment of an 8mm amateur film showing Fernand Léger’s arrival at the Québec City train station in May 1945, the first student film made in Montreal by an Acadian filmmaker whose exceptional body of work will flourish in part in the US, an experimental sci-fi B-movie with surrealist accents, a collective found-footage film-poem, an intimate queer film mixing film and video… These films are the work of established filmmakers (Bourque, Wieland) or those who have made one or very few experimental films (Lafleur, Desrosiers, Parent, Lafontaine). They share in common the fact that they have been rediscovered or restored, in many cases, recently, thanks to the work of the Cinémathèque québécoise (which preserves the films of Joyce Wieland and O’Leary as well as several other films in the cycle) and many have never been screened publicly outside of Canada. They are part of recent historiographical and archival initiatives to map, write and restore the history of Canadian and Québec experimental cinema (see Zryd & Broomer or Lafleur & Elwani) to which this cycle also hopes to contribute. Isolated exercises, independent and fiercely artisanal, all these solitary films are paradoxica ly the expression of a collectivity – an “unavowable community”, “people who are missing” – and of a multitude. They bring to light, for our greatest happiness, the secret beauty of a hidden world, as well as the buried possibilities of cinema, and that is something that we are very fortunate to be able to unearth and rediscover. 

André Habib

Looking back: Focus on Joyce Wieland

By the early 1960s, Joyce Wieland had surpassed her artistic origins as a painter, to explore a range of materials and media, including film. After she relocated from Toronto to New York, Water Sark and Peggy’s Blue Skylight were  shot in the artist’s studio/living space, using the space, objects, and light conditions at hand. We become witnesses to what New Materialists now call a flat ontology; the artist’s own naked body parts take their place amid an assemblage of objects, while ordinary household items are shown in states of liveliness and generative agency. Some of these strategies are evident in Rat Life and Diet in North America, but the result is very different because the table-top scenarios are provided with a narrative structure; thus the film becomes an anti-Vietnam War allegory, a story of rodent-protagonists who escape the USA’s militaristic regime, crossing the border to Canada. With this overt turn to narrative and politics, Wieland distanced herself from the Structuralist film paradigms of the time. The humour in this film is characteristic, though, of Wieland’s art and film practice as a whole. A & B in Ontario includes moments of slapstick-style comedy, as Wieland and fellow experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton lug their big cameras around and stalk each other – indoors, on the street, in a park, on the beach. The film is also a genuine homage to Wieland’s friendship and collaboration with Frampton, and indeed, the 1967 footage was only assembled into a finished film in 1984, after his death.

Johanne Sloane