The Value of the Parochial: Film and the Commonplace

(an excerpt from a larger article publication forthcoming)
by Janine Marchessault

I was still a young boy when I saw my first film. The impression it made upon me must have been intoxicating, for I there and then determined to commit my experience to writing…. I immediately put on a shred of paper, Film as the Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life, the title read. And I remember, as if it were today the marvels themselves. What thrilled me so deeply was an ordinary suburban street, filled with lights and shadows, which transfigured it. Several trees stood about, and there was in the foreground a puddle reflecting invisible house façades and a piece of the sky. Then a breeze moved the shadows, and the façades with sky below began to waver. The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle—this image has never left me. 

— Siegfried Kracauer (Ii, 1960)

We can see the development of strategies based on coincidence, accidents, indeterminacy, endlessness, and contingency in documentary and experimental filmmaking of the post war period expressly in this light. As a means to work through some of Kracauer’s insights around cinema and the “whole world”, let me turn to a specific work—the short ‘travel’ film Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion (1984) by Canadian filmmaker Philip Hoffman. The film was shot under the influence of Jack Kerouac and inspired by the Beat Generation. Kerouac went on the road in the fifties to wander and to have experiences, to create a scene across cities, New York, San Francisco and Mexico. ‘On the road’ refers specifically to a mode of writing that is quite literally writing while en route. It is after The Town and the City and through On the Road that Kerouac developed his art of ‘spontaneous prose’, an improvisational method of writing in time connected to the flow of life like jazz.  Famously he used a full roll of Teletype paper that matched the road and typed the novel almost continuously over three weeks. The roll enabled him to write without stopping, without interrupting the flow of words, essentially mirroring the experience of driving. Kerouac like Gertrude Stein before him, associates writing with a phenomenology of the mind, a writing that is “composed on the tongue rather than paper” (Ginsberg 74). Kerouac’s writing does not seek to transcend mediation so much as it does to document its actions so that writing becomes a record of the connection between inner and outer structures of perception, binding bodies to places through time. As much as it pushes the boundaries of presentness, writing like film, is always in the past. Although the fact of mediation between word and image is altogether different as Kracauer would stress.

Hoffman made Somewhere Between, after attending a conference devoted to the legacy of On the Road in Boulder, Colorado. Yet Hoffman’s film is not so much on the road (the highway) as it is on the street, featuring two cities (Boulder and Toronto) and towns somewhere between the cities of Guadalajara and León. The film cuts across various scenes in these places with lengthy (often twenty-eight seconds) unedited sequences of action and black leader as “measured pauses” (Kerouac’s silence or breath) between sequences. These juxtaposed moments play out a reflexive rhythm that foreground the randomness and stubborn indeterminacy of the images of everyday life, and of their placement in the film.  We are presented with situations that are delimited without being explicated. The film opens with a text on the screen: “Looking through the lens/ at passing events/I recall what once was /and consider what might be.” Two early sequences in the film give image to these words. The first is an image of what is now a cliché of globalization. The static camera poised on a street corner in the centre of a small town in Mexico, frames in long shot, a mule and buggy parked beneath a large red Coca-Cola sign, a tangle of telephone wires above low rise dilapidated buildings. The only movement in the frame is the cars, driving in and out of it, and a woman and child crossing the street. Yet movement and layers of interaction are implicit in the juxtaposition of the mule and the global corporation, which co-exist in this place. This image is preceded by another static shot of a church down the street, doubly framed between two pillars of a Catholic arch. Looking in, the camera reveals someone deep in prayer. After a motionless few seconds, a child interrupts the stillness of the sequence, enters the frame and begins a game of crawling up and down on chairs. The child’s sudden appearance is precisely that kind of “unexpected incident” that Kracauer delights in—“the stirring” of nature and people that the Lumiére films first captured. The kind of “spontaneous writing” that we often find in experimental ethnographies favors a self-reflexive methodology[1]. In this instance, focusing on the physicality of the scene to include the temporal structure imposed by the camera (i.e., the spring wound Bolex’s 28 second take) and the filmmaker. The acts of “looking through the lens” as Hoffman’s text tells us, calls upon a time-based aesthetic where past and future co-exist beyond the edges of the frame. Yet it is not only the film strip/ flow of life analogy that foregrounds this temporality. It is also the reoccurring themes of religion and children, of tradition and horizons that Hoffman finds across the different places in the film. Given that the film concerns the story of a Mexican boy run over by a truck somewhere in Mexico, these themes resonate throughout. The boy’s death is an event that the filmmaker refuses to film (or include in the film) but instead conveys through a poetic text on the screen that is intercut throughout the film. Filled with black holes overwritten with the poem that remembers the boy’s death, the film’s architectonics are structured by the words that never conflate the commonalities between the situations. The poem embeds the boy’s death in all of the images of the film so that it is not inconsequential to the corporate sign, the superstructure in the opening images but rather stands in a contiguous relationship to it as to all the images in the film. The melancholic saxophone that draws the line from Mexico to Colorado to Toronto, seems to synchronize momentarily with the musicians and children holding out cups to collect money in these different places but then separates and floats over them from an off screen space that leaves the frame open to a multiplicity of found stories:  children playing games on different streets in different cities, a crowd kneeling outside a church, the Feast of Fatima procession in a Portuguese neighborhood in Toronto, little girls dressed as angels and streets lined with telephone poles,  the beautiful patina of pealing walls aged by the weather, graffiti palimpsests in different languages, a paint brush sketching a likeness of Jesus from a painting of Jesus, a child crawling up and down on a large sculpture of a sea shell in an outdoor street mall, a pond surrounded by trees at dusk. The camera stages situations from a distance and in long shot; sometimes the movements of bodies are slowed. But it is the materiality of the built environment that is framed to equalize the human and the non-human (trees, benches, windows, sidewalks, statues, cars, signs) which are counter influencing and interpenetrating processes. We see here the manifestations global cultures, national and urban idioms and technologies that the film stages as commonplace.

In the study of localities, filmmaker and anthropologist David MacDougal points out that it is not singularities but interconnectivities and flows between particular cultures that lead to the cinema’s capacity for deeply phenomenological and pedagogical gestures. Somewhere Between gives us the interval or the interface between places where identities and experiences take up their meanings in Hoffman’s memories of a shared world. Yet it is also the characteristic of the “found story” that it remains open, fragmented, that it burn through myths and clichés. It must resist the “self-contained whole” that would betray its force by casting a tight structure with a beginning, middle and end around its anonymous core. The found story Kracauer explains arises out of and dissolves into the material environment, often in “embryonic” forms that reveal patterns of collectivity (Theory 246). The found story comes from the aesthetic of the street and we should add, holds infinite possibilities for the psychic investment in the whole even as it takes it apart. In the end, Hoffman may well have broken with Kracauer’s prescriptive visual aesthetics by staging reality with word, image and black leader in a way that actively petitions the dreamer to envision what was and what might be. What holds the spectator’s interest in Hoffman’s film is the gap, the place of imagining: the black smoke from the truck, the children weeping, the sky and the boy’s spirit as it “left through its blue”.

[1] Take for example the films of Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Jean Rouch, Agnes Varda or Chris Marker who use the camera as an intrinsic aspect of performance. We could also include some of the more self-reflexive documentaries by the Unit B directors at the NFB of Canada. Cf. Catherine Russell  Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (1999).

Read whole article here

Avant Ghosts of Mexico

by Jeremy Rigsby

Travelogues are films made by tourists. They are defined by their creators’ decision to remain on unfamiliar terms with unfamiliar surroundings. These are not documentaries, which presume or strive for some unmediated relation to their subjects. Unless they can demonstrate that they are provisional and selective, documentaries are prone to be mistaken for the truth. Unless they can demonstrate that they are art, travelogues are largely the product of hobbyists who can afford vacations. Travelogues may affirm their artfulness by appealing to an aesthetic derived from the lyrical avant-garde, or, more frequently, by adopting the discursive strategies of fiction films. Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion  takes the latter route, all the way to a Mexican crossroads of the Real and the Imaginary.

The fictive convention relied upon by Somewhere Between establishes an artificial contiguity between the film’s two discrete components: intertitles alternating with images (of Mexico, mostly). This convention is associative editing, a neat version of the so-called Kuleshov effect, whereby details noted in the intertitles are presumed to refer to the images they immediately follow or anticipate by the simple virtue of proximity. The dead youth is nowhere seen or implied in any of the footage. The titles state that Hoffman “put the camera down.” But the cop car that sped by his corpse must be the very one just seen passing the Coke billboard. Likewise the beggar girl who was conceded a peso is identified as the beggar girl who then appears. And the girl with the big eyes awaiting her dead brother? There she is, her imputed lingering iterated by symbolic association with a concrete snail. Much of the film’s remaining footage is neutral and irrelevant to the text, but marshaled to support a funereal aura through melancholy slow motion or sepulchral, greenish-black tints.

That the film’s apparent coherence of text and image is a construction of cinematic artifice should be obvious, but the film condescends to underline the point. The soundtrack, a plaintive sax solo, twice jars incongruously with footage of musicians playing visibly different tunes, prompting suspicion of any facile congruence between events and their remains in the picture world. And in a sequence quite exceeding the credulity that associative editing might sustain, a funeral procession plods down conspicuously non-Mexican (i.e. Toronto’s) streets, a near-parodic intrusion that must be rationalized as a metaphorical digression on the universality of death, or some such thing. All these contrivances and retractions cumulate in a film whose reliability as documentation is severely undermined by its imperative to simulate fiction. Somewhere Between thus exploits a special tension inherent to the travelogue as a genre. Conventions that would affirm the continuity of narrative films, or the veracity of documentaries, are here destabilized, indeterminate, somewhere between… where, exactly?

Clearly not the poles of a debate concerning the film’s ethics, which it suffered when it was first exhibited in 1984. Its supporters regarded the omission of the child’s death as a noble refusal of spectacular and exploitative documentary practices. Its detractors, conventional ‘journalistic’ documentarians, considered the film irredeemably deprived of the potential impact conferred by such a powerful image.

Both these arguments assume the film’s images support the text, signifying only the conclusive absence it describes. But the latter position does implicitly contain a more incisive interpretation: footage of the accident or its aftermath would confirm that it actually happened. This shopworn raison d’etre of the journalistic documentary finds application here; an appeal to evidence validates the skepticism this film seems designed to provoke. Its issues aren’t ethical but ontological. Did the dead youth exist, or did Hoffman invent him? Given the film’s lack of positive evidence, coupled with its protracted insistence that it be acknowledged as a synthetic construction, the question remains. There are two plausible answers. In the first instance, Hoffman sifts through a large amount of Mexican vacation footage to find a few shots that, by chance, contain imagery similar to details he recalled of the accident and to the text he wrote to describe it. Or he returned from Mexico with a relatively small amount of attractive but disparate, mismatched footage which he united into coherent form by fabricating the accident as a kind of plot device.

Occam’s razor might suggest the second option, but that’s not the rub. As film critic Rita Gonzàlez writes “…international filmmakers have been drawn to the notion of Mexico as a transgressive or mythic space, an eidolon that they have done their part to perpetuate.” [1] As the avant-garde film canon attests, south-of-the border has been a popular destination for filmmaking tourists, the special condition of their alienation in Mexico circumscribed by this imperative to solicit visionary experience. The roster of sojourners include Bruce Baillie, Bruce Conner, Richard Myers and Chick Strand, who made most of her career around Guadalajara and once confidently decared “Mexico is surrealism.” The Mexican travelogue is almost always their projected phantasmata. The ‘reality’ of the death in Somewhere Between is akin to the ‘reality’ of, say, the quintessentially Mexican peyote hallucinations in Larry Jordan’s Triptych In Four Parts: that is, as real as permitted by illusory circumstances. The virtue of Somewhere Between is to be conscious of its complicity in this tradition of cultural mystification. It inspires and permits doubt. It doubts the authenticity of the particular experience it describes, the authenticity of Mexico as an experience of the ‘mythic,’ perhaps ultimately even the authenticity of experience in general. Typical of the traveler’s tale is a tendency to embellish. Rarely is it so evocative, or so obliging, of the tendency to disbelieve its teller.


 

  1. In ‘The MexperimentalCinema,” catalogue essay published by the Guggenheim Museum, 1999.

 

Letter from Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway
28 St Peter’s Grove
London W6

January 24th 1984

Monique Belanger
Arts Awards Service
Canada Council, Ottawa

Dear Ms Belanger,

I met Phil Hoffman at the 1984 Grierson Seminar. His films were a breath of fresh air amidst so much conventional material. His films blithely side-stepped the orthodoxies so taken for granted by those who believe documentary cinema is an educational rostrum, is about questions of balance, is essentially a dissertation on something described as ‘truth.’ Meeting him in the context of his films backed up my impressions of his aims and abilities. His work is an encouragement to those who want to use autobiography as subject matter, personal vision as a trademark, and show how small resources can be a positive virtue.

It was Phil’s suggestion in London several months later that he would like to be some sort of witness to the feature production of the film Zed and Two Noughts in Rotterdam in the Spring of this year—which I am certainly agreeable to—though I will not hide the fact that I believe, as a filmmaker with a personal vision, he is well past the apprenticeship stage. What he needs now is opportunities, encouragement and experience. Since his method is to work with a camera as a constant companion, I would wish he could be encouraged to make a modest film whilst he is in Rotterdam and London, certainly to be encouraged to shoot some two or three thousand feet of 16mm. The desirability of his presenting a script before hand, as far as I can see, is not necessary, considering his work method. In fact, I think it ought to be a condition of his association with the Zed and Two Noughts project that he shoot on his own on any subject whatsoever.

Most of the relevant detail of the production of Zed and Two Noughts Phil has already mentioned. It is perhaps not so strange a co-production, as seen from a British point of view, but nonetheless will present a nicely complex mixture of finance, production, cast and crew that aptly mirrors the complexity of the film’s structure and content—the ambivalent diversity of species and purpose—of beasts and men—both sides of the cages in a zoo. Phil has volunteered not just to stand by and observe but to offer practical help which will always be useful on such a modestly budgeted, ambitious film.

If he (and you) believe that he (and you) can profit by his experience with the production, then I am certainly happy to invite him. If there is anything else you would like to know, I am sure I can help, though I would be obliged, as I am sure you would understand, to keep bureaucracy to a minimum. The production of a feature film is very time-consuming and demanding.

Here’s hoping that you can agree to Phil’s participation.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Greenaway

The Road Ended at the Beach

16mm, 30 minutes, color
by Philip Hoffman

Road / Poole article

 
The film is a series of “telling” incidents in which events, which fall short of expectations, are confronted by more “vibrant” memories of the past. The subject, the filmmaker/diarist, whose consciousness encompasses this flow or passage of time, uses failure to make his strongest points about the convergence and intermingling of anticipation and event, experience and memory. On the road, he and his friends spend time with an old buddy who makes his own music at home but has to play in a military band to earn a living, forcing them to come to terms with their own diminished expectations on the trip they are undertaking as compared to trips in the past. The story of a wood carver who lives with his family in rural Nova Scotia seems idyllic until we find that he must also work in a fish cannery to survive. The film itself is an account of failure. Spurred on by the mythology of Jack Kerouac and his life on the road, the travellers visit Robert Frank in order to learn first-hand about the Beats. Frank matter of factly dismisses their quest by noting that Kerouac is dead and the Beat era is over. In a partial response to this shattering of the myth, the film­maker goes back over the ground of the journey once again, only this time he includes the frustrations, the dead-ends and the low spots. The smooth, linearly developing narrative that we earlier understood to be the product of the filmmakers consciousness is now questioned and replaced by a series of stops and starts, memories and reveries. The final sequence of the film marks a reevaluation and change most emphatically. The sequence shows a beach in Newfoundland on a bright clear day; children and dogs crossing in front of the camera. Yet each time some­one disappears off-frame the filmmaker jump-cuts to a new action. On the beach where the road ends discontinuity becomes a virtue, a form of concentration that validates exceptional experience, just as recollection and anticipation validate certain memories and fantasies.

– David Poole 1984

Philip Hoffman: A Life In Films

by Ilppo Pohjola

“You look like Christ coming up that hill.”

These were the first words Robert Frank said to Phillip Hoffman when he was visiting the photographer in Newfoundland six years ago.

“We were driving with a ’67 Dodge… And I only knew where he was staying from his photographs but I wasn’t sure of its exact location. We drove around and asked the way there, and they didn’t know. Finally we picked up a hitchhiker, who appears in Frank’s film Pull My Daisy, and he told me how to get there.

We stopped at the bottom of the hill and I started to walk across it. And walking up the hill I noticed there was a man sitting and looking out to the sea. I was too far to say hello and at this point I wasn’t sure of myself. What am I doing here? What was the point of all this?

And then he said something that didn’t put me at ease.”

Philip Hoffman is an experimental filmmaker for whom the making of a film, the process itself, is as important as the finished film. It is his way of keeping a diary.

” My films are a combination of everyone I meet, what I learn, e.g. from other filmmakers. It all channels through me. I’m in a way just a medium, but I might change it on the way, making it work.” He collects personal day-to-day experiences in the form of films, videotapes, audio recordings and written diaries. “When I film I write about what I film, and when I get the footage back, I write about that.” Then he examines and reworks his notes, diaries, audio, videotapes and films, analyzing and editing them to create a more meaningful understanding of past experiences and events.

“I think you should not be self-conscious when you are working with a camera, you should be in the rhythm of life. Only the editing process is analyzing.”

Gradually his films develop and certain patterns emerge. Only while editing does the final structure of the film unfold, without a script written before shooting. His film The Road Ended at the Beach (1983) is an example of this kind of theory in practice. It developed during seven years, begun when Hoffman was a student at Sheridan College and was shot during his travels in North America. Finalizing the film was also one reason to meet Robert Frank.

“I had seen his photographs and films, but what did I know about him as a human being?”

Mabou was a good place to stop.

“I wanted to meet him face to face, and ask him about his own pictures and the Beat poets.  Because there has only been a few people besides Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac whose work has moved me in that way.  There is something I could connect to my own world.”

The Road Ended at the Beach starts with waiting for the trip. Hoffman’s old friends and traveling companions Jim and Richard are preparing for driving and painting their van.

“There is a preoccupation in the film that it is going to be as good as Kerouac’s trip.”

The purpose of this last trip is to reunite old friendships and experiences again the feeling of the earlier journeys. They meet an old Asian man, who has traveled the world for ten years.  They meet an old cyclist, who has traveled around the world since 1953 and who is now going around for the seventh time.  They drive and meet old friends, and try to experience again Jack Kerouac’s and Neil Cassidy’s sizzling Mexican nights.

“But when I got the footage back, the joy and excitement of traveling wasn’t there… There are two points to be made. One is that Kerouac’s trip was written as myth. And secondly, I did not go out to create a myth with my camera. I tried to record something that is there… And the myth wasn’t there.”

The film turns into a discussion of the filmmaker’s own mind and personal growth and also the realization of myths and the need to break them.

“Kerouac’s work was not only a bohemian lifestyle. That is something the media has grabbed on. The heart of it is when he was describing simple things… ‘Sympathy for humanism’ is how he described his work. And that is something I think Beat is. Sadness of life and joy of life both happening at the same time.”

” I see myself less as an observer. The camera is something else for me… like someone playing jazz music… it puts me into rhythm with the rest of the world. It is my tool into the world.”

And life can be experienced better outside home or the place which is called home.

“I have discovered something about traveling. It’s a perfect container, an environment for the recording of life.”

Most of Hoffman’s eight films are results of traveling. His newest one, passing through/torn formations (1987) started when he visited his relatives in Europe during the summer of 1984. Hoffman’s father is German while his Polish mother was born in Czechoslovakia. He was born in Kitchener, Ontario and lives now in Toronto. The film describes his mother’s background, but is at the same time an investigation of how history can be recreated and formed differently with different kinds of media. Hoffman tried also to reunite the family by his work, their lives divided on different sides of the Atlantic.

His films are subjective recordings of his own life, while weighing in against myths and conventions.

?Oh,Zoo! (1986) is a puzzle-like study of reality and truth, how they can be created in cinema and treated by cinematic means.  The framework for the film is the documentation of the making of Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts. This connected again to Hoffman’s own observations on life and his experiments, which contribute to the underlying questioning of documentary evidence. What is documentation, what is narrative storytelling and what is the difference between them? It is up to the audience to decide.

“I like people to participate in these films. I leave them open for interpretation, because I don’t like to feel authority and make big statements, and secondly, I don’t have the answers.”

By doing his films he questions conventional ways of filmmaking.  “I think conventions are made, that people try to mimic what has already been done. Conventions are sad and old… I am interested in every person that has their own way of looking at the world. By doing it your own way, you are unique… but not as a reaction to conventional films. It just comes out of living and being and doing what you want to do. I can’t worry about anything else.”

Robert Frank appears in The Road Ended at the Beach just in a couple of scenes, doing his own thing, nailing and looking over the sea. As an everyday person.

“I don’t know, if I would go there again, but it was part of playing out your youth. I guess I was looking for someone to give answers, but of course, you have to do it alone. I think this resolves in the film, too. And this film is not like On the Road. It describes my trip, my personal end of the road and moving to something else. The road ends at the beach. Then you have to do something else.”

On The Pond (script)

S  = Sisters
D = Dad
M = Mom
P = Phil
B = Cousin Brad
C = coach
A = announcer
Ba = Babji


S: Oh my… isn’t that beautiful.

S:…and you know who’s got the life preserver on…

M: Philip of course… and Marcie looks like a little girl.

P: What do I look like?

M…you look like an Eskimo, yes.

B: Are we going to do it tomorrow?

P: Yup.

S: …oohhh…

B: Hey, that’s me.

S: Bradly and Philip.

M: ..and the old Princess.

P: Yup.

M: Oh, is that ever precious. That was in our back yard, in the old house.

P: Yup.

S:…aaahh, Colleen.

S:…aahhh, look at the lake.

D: Colleen, that’s a good one of you.

S (Colleen):I don’t think I look so bad and you know Phil, we used to go fishing all of the time.

P: All the time.

M: You loved it.

S: Look at my feet, how I always stood. My favorite shorts.

P: I tell ya, that’s a good looking one there.

S: …that’s  beautiful… you look beautiful… Mom, you’re a hot chick boy…

S: I Wish I knew you better then.

M: We went out walking, it was Thanksgiving.

D: ..and you were feeling lousy.

M: Yeah.

D: ..we’re trying to cheer you up, but Phil’s looking at you

S: ..aaahhh…

P: ..ooohh..

S: Look at my glasses.

S:(softly) …oh really…

S: …I must say, I didn’t look as bad as you did…

D: …Colleen..

S: She knows?

S: …it’s so long ago…

D: There you can see where the cottage was.

S: Oh my God.

S: …and the ice was just as thick as could

D: We could skate it on the whole lake.

P: Bobby Orr.

 

D: You have the right stance there.

S: Oh, I want to go back.

(sounds of a hockey game)

S: I wish we had those scarves.

M: Where are those scarves?

S: I like them.

Ba: I’ve got some like that.

S: See the cottage is the same, oh no…

(hockey game sounds, laughter as boy falls, people laughing at the next photo)

C:…30 seconds and keep goin’, goin’, goin’, while we’re on the outside thirty seconds. I think we can wear them down. Everybody’s got to want it… everybody’s got to bust there backsides to get it.  Same starters…

(sounds of team psyching themselves up, sounds of projector, hockey crowd, dog)

A: It’s off the goalpost!

(crowd cheers, panting as boy does pushups)

M: Is that our old Princess?

M: Look how fat she was.

S: Yes she was.

S: Oh my…

M:I think about her often though.

(piano, sound of dog and boy playing hockey)