Download the latest FilmCAN video podcast (#03) to see System D-128’s Muppet Show theme video remix, from the WLTV DVD Vol. 1!
For all intents and purposes, 2006 was yet another big year for the Internet. (Quel surprise!) Websites like MySpace and YouTube became as ubiquitous as Google and Yahoo. They also emerged as two of the most useful e-tools for sharing new music or video content.
Taking advantage of both resources, the groundbreaking White Label TV collective surfaced this year and unleashed a flurry of mind-blowing original video content. One would be severely mistaken, however, to consider WLTV as just another MySpace or YouTube phenomenon. Those two web-sharing/networking sites have merely been a means for this groundbreaking underground collective to share, promote and exhibit a new style of art form that might otherwise remain fiercely underground.
White Label TV is a collective of directors, producers (music and film), DJs and multimedia artists from Montreal and Philadelphia. They take the name ‘white label’ from the DJ world, where it denotes 12’ bootleg records covered in a plain white label, sometimes used to hide the title of the record from competing DJs. In their own words, the collective makes “bootleg videos for bootleg tracks.” This fall, they collected the best of their work and released their first DVD compilation, White Label TV DVD Vol. 1. The set includes videos for artists like Spank Rock, Ghislain Poirier, Amerie and DJ Johnny Blaze, plus a chopped and screwed remix of a live Spank Rock performance and the original Spank Rock Electronic Press Kit (one of the collective’s first projects). The package is also loaded with bonus content, like the unbelievable video remix of the Muppet Show theme by the legendary System D-128 (a WLTV co-producer), who is best known for creating live visuals for his roommate, the M.I.A. collaborator Diplo.
The style of the WLTV videos is not something that can be easily described. From clip to clip, it ranges from 3D animation to live action to mesmerizing collage – assembled with a hyperactive wit and insistence on pushing visual boundaries. Much of the secret to the videos lie in their editing or, in many cases, remixing, which is where WLTV has really cemented themselves as leaders in this evolving art form. While the concept of a music remix has been around for years and for some time has been quite prevalent in the mainstream, video remixing takes the form a step further. As seen in the Muppet Show remix, the visuals have a life and beat all their own, to the extent where you can practically dance to the video without any audio.
Old waves aren’t necessarily any less admirable than new ones, but when it comes to naming artistic movements, it’s typically fresh ripples in the pond that artists (or curators and programmers) look for. Made famous in the first 100 years of cinema by France’s le nouvelle vague movement in the 1960’s, the phrase “new wave” has since been applied to cinematic movements as early as the 1950s and as late as the Thai film new wave of the late 1990s. The term was also used as a marketing tool in the early 1980s by Sire records guru Seymour Stein, to define a group of bands (Talking Heads, Television, Elvis Costello, Blondie, etc.) – at first interchangeably with the term “punk rock” – supposedly sharing an anti-corporate ethos and a penchant for experimentation that Stein felt hearkened back to Godard, Truffaut, and co. Traditional uses of the term, then, suggest a conscious break with stale traditions and, typically, an underground reaction against the prevalent mainstream of an era. Which is not to suggest that new wave movements – and its architects – are never adopted into the mainstream, but rather that their initial intentions are to subvert dominant contemporary representations in favour of under-represented perspectives.
In the Canadian context there has always been a need to connect and qualify films from bygone eras; our canon is always under debate, within the country at least, and curatorial stretches are often made that reflect the problem of defining a national cinema in a country that produces so few (good) domestic feature films out of a particular region in any given year. The NFB tradition and realism always come to mind when thinking of Canuck film history, and in 2000, Cameron Bailey wrote an article defining the “kitchen party” new wave of Toronto filmmakers in the 80’s who have gone on to varying degrees of international and domestic prominence. But without sifting films and filmmakers from the pan of fool’s gold over time, and aside from the province-specific success of recent Quebecois cinema, most Canadian film movements are still too little noticed to warrant their own catchy title.
“Only Happy When It Rains: The Roots and Rise of the Vancouver New Wave” is writer and programmer Steve Gravestock’s (Associate Director of Canadian Programming and Special Projects for the Toronto International Film Festival) foray into wave analysis. The program includes 13 films, screened at Cinematheque Ontario from November 5 to December 9, 2006.
“In the case of the Vancouver (or Pacific) New Wave, you're looking at a group of filmmakers who clearly share a certain sardonic, downbeat view, a sense of being shoved to the side; there's also an overwhelming amount of fractured identities, minimal selves,” Gravestock notes. As Canadian as that sounds, it also seems to speak to a particularly British Columbian or West coast mentality. Vancouver, Canada’s freshest and most gorgeous city – at least scenically, if not as a metropolis – remains a terra incognita or pseudo new frontier to many Canadians – a space to make a new start, maybe enjoy a wheat grass shake and smoke some killer chronic. Yet unlike other major Canadian cities Toronto, Montreal, or even Calgary, Vancouver seems like a place destined to grow in national significance, albeit perhaps still under the radar of those other industrial champions over the next decade. As Gravestock suggests, “it's a port town, which inevitably means transients, plus it's at the end of the continent, which carries its own mythic baggage – a sense of restlessness, of being halted arbitrarily.”
Using the qualifiers ‘roots’ and ‘rise’ suggests a new wave in its infancy, which is often when such designations begin taking shape. Accordingly, Gravestock screened three B.C. films acknowledged as classics of the canon - The Bitter Ash (1963, Larry Kent – who’s new film The Hamster Cage may still be in theatres when you read this); The Grey Fox (1982, Phillip Borsos), and My American Cousin (1985, Sandy Wilson). Thanks to professor Blaine Allen (Queen’s University), who introduced the GF screening at the Cinematheque and is currently writing a book on Borsos, I had the opportunity to see TheGrey Fox at least three times in my university days, often on rare film prints. There are a few reasons GF often ends up on all time Canadian top-ten lists, not least of which is the performance by Richard Farnsworth as Bill Miner, a bank robber at the end of his rope and on the run from the authorities and the rapidly modernizing world. Kent’s The Bitter Ash, on the other hand, is a film as raw as they come, made in the seminal years of France’s cinematic movement, but without as much intellectual engagement. A workingman’s new wave film, The Bitter Ash isn’t so much a story as a loose pastiche of characters rebelling against any authority placed on them, including the worst authority of them all: money. A B.C. cousin of Ontario classic Nobody Waved Goodbye (1964, Don Owen), Kent’s film maintains a vibrancy of class clash even today, and features some great sweeping statements on social cliques – “this group’s crap and that group’s shit” – and lifestyle choices, but fails to come together in the way one may forgive of a first feature (for Kent and, in many ways, B.C.). Unfortunately, though I’ve definitely caught pieces of it back in university and on TV, I didn’t get a chance to see Sandy Wilson’s MyAmerican Cousin, like TheGrey Fox a tale of an American invading a seemingly unmarked Canada, told through the eyes of a young female Canadian coming of age within her community and country.
Sprinkled in between – both chronologically and psychologically – are perhaps the truest “out there” films on B.C. livin’: The Wolfpen Principle (1974, Jack Darcus) and Skip Tracer (1977, Zale Dalen). I missed Darcus’ surreal tale of a theatre manager who, his life in shambles, develops a fascination with wolves at the local zoo, where he befriends a native who plans to set the animals free. WP not only sounds like it shares a counter culture ethos also found in the uproarious Skip Tracer, it was also Dalen’s start in the business – he worked on WP in the sound department. Skip Tracer, re-named Deadly Business in the US, is the story of first-rate debt collector John Collins (David Peterson) looking to maintain his string of ‘man of the year’ titles. When he’s approached by struggling junior collector Brent Solverman (John Lazarus) looking to train under him, Collins is typically unenthused and dismissive. As the days go by and Collins’ title and life is in jeopardy, he begins to lose his cool composure and the comedy of earlier moments turns to a sad drama on his status as an uncompromising dealer of grief. In the end, as the aptly named Solverman excitedly begins to fill his quota, Collins has no choice but to walk away from what he clearly once considered his calling. Peterson and Lazarus, along with a handful of minor characters, supply extremely solid work throughout, turning the power centre of scenes around from start to finish, and the film benefits from Dalen’s affection for cheeky synthesizer accompaniment, a visual knack for kinetic action sequences and a strange sense of dread lurking behind each debt. A Kafka-esque corporate denunciation told with the heart of an action director (Dalen went on to direct – though not write – action and horror TV and films), Skip Tracer is clearly a sadly neglected gem of the Canadian canon that more programmers should collect on.
The remaining contemporary films in the program (excepting two I missed, John Pozer’s 1991 film The Grocer’s Wife and Carl Bessai’s 2005 Severed), could be divided into two distinct groups of styles, though all contained overlapping themes. Lola, the second in a trilogy of films on single name outsiders by prolific B.C. filmmaker Bessai (his new film Unnatural and Accidental may be in theatres as you read this) is an artless portrayal of a woman escaping her marriage and life’s banal expectations on a mental journey from a boring, space-less place to an open, empty nowhere. Constantly fighting with hubby Mike (Colm Feore – you’ve never seen him this shackled by bad dialogue) over inane responsibility errors (like forgetting to pick up the correct size shoes for him), Lola makes good on a threat to leave for good when she heads out for the night and saves Sandra (Joanna Going), a prostitute, from a near car accident. Rewarded with a drink, she’s soon back at Sandra’s place, reminiscing in her new freedom; but when Sandra’s pimp shows up and the girls make an escape into a nearby alley both are beaten and left for dead. When Lola wakes and realizes her new friend is in fact dead (a moment reminiscent but not quite worthy of Antonioni’s The Passenger), she steals Sandra’s identity and heads off to meet her blind mother and family in the interior of B.C. Lola spends the rest of the film in a dazed, supernatural, nostalgic haze, encountering people on the road, whom she engages in ultimately irrelevant banter. Much of the film is stalled by these awkward conversations, which typically include frank confessions that – it’s tough to tell – either have a deep impact on Lola or wash over her head. In the end, Bessai leaves his heroine off the hook via a clumsy art film cliché, silent and brooding in the hills.
Lola does follow in the interior landscape footsteps of the much more effective and startling Kissed (1996, Lynne Stopkewich), the taboo busting tale of a woman who sleeps with dead bodies at her day job as a mortician. Both Molly Parker and Peter Outerbridge lend the plot a naïve, morbid believability, as Kissed consistently straddles a fine line between reality and the afterlife. The story, though, seems to take place all through the clouded gaze of Sandra, oblivious of physical space – and, significantly, a nameable place. Sarah MacLauchlin music aside, Stopkewich makes some great choices to unravel her Cronenberg-esque plot, notably a strong sense of restrained temporal development. Perhaps the well-written narration and the story’s previous life as a story by Barbara Gowdy leant the film this eerie interior landscape, an atmosphere that suits the story, though – of all these films – recognizes its surroundings the least.
The other category or style of films in this collection is epitomized by the low-budget resourcefulness of Kent’s The Bitter Ash, as seen through the eyes of filmmakers Blain Thurier (Low Self-Esteem Girl, 2000), Bruce Sweeney (Dirty, 1998), Scott Smith (Rollercoaster, 1999). Low Self-Esteem Girl is as messy as Kent’s effort, from a plot perspective, but instead of exploring the dynamics between the lower and upper classes it shifts the argument to the moral crutches of religion vs. debauchery. A keyboardist in the Canadian band The New Pornographers, Thurier (Male Fantasy, 2004) employs friends and musical colleagues (Carl “A.C.” Newman, Jason Zumpano, and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar) to not so much tell a story as place a variety of characters in situations where they face moral quandaries based on recent commitments. Whether it’s the newly reformed Lois (Corinna Hammond), seeking redemption from the type of one night stands with the likes of dope dealer Gregg (Ted Dave) that open the film, or the Christian Rob (Rob McBeth), who pastor Carl and his conservative wife Cindy (Cindy Wolfe) are increasingly convinced hides a demon inside, the film is a constant play between forces pulling characters in multiple directions, while the moral ground they’re standing on seems to be falling into oblivion any time they stop to look down.
The arc of LSEG reflects the mobility of Kent’s film, a similar sense of movement found in Dirty, Sweeney’s sophomore film (Live Bait, 1995; Last Wedding, 2001). Employing a bike courier mentality, both Thurier and Sweeney follow their plot and characters around the city as they – always awkwardly - attempt to embrace all that free-flowing West coast sex. In Dirty, part low budget dark comedy and part stunted male interior sociopath diary, Sweeney – who was boom operator on Kissed – explores men who simply cannot communicate with anyone in their world short of shouting, impromptu breakdowns, or pathetic romantic assaults. The women in the film, while stronger than the men, are still hung up on past debts they can’t escape, though they do choose to at least face them by the end of the film. Sweeney and the actors find unique ways to bring out the characters’ past, and the plot finds unexpected and simultaneously funny and empathetic crossovers between characters. Of all the films in this series, Dirty contains a fair chunk of exteriors of B.C. city exteriors, placing it firmly within a space, if not, again, a defined place.
In Scott Smith’s Rollercoaster, essentially a single location premise – a closed amusement park – location is once again back inside the mind, and this time it’s framed in the issue of teenagers grappling with the displacement of youth. Featuring a much more assured, traditionally cinematic eye to go along with its increased production value, and a script (written by Smith) that pushes all the right buttons, Rollercoaster follows a group of teens who steal their youth home boss’ car and head to the park, where they plan to drink, ride, and – in the case of lover leads Darrin (Kett Turton) and Chloe (Crystal Buble) – commit suicide. Along for the ride are their gang of best friends, the in your face Stick (Brendan Fletcher), funny guy Sanj (Sean Amsing), and Darrin’s forever doodling little brother Ben (David Lovgren). Smith consistently fashions fascinating twists that reveal character secrets to one another at key intervals, and what may have been a simple waiting game in the hands of a lesser filmmaker is filled with tension throughout – and capped with an appropriately stark ending. Like Sweeney, Smith brings the characters’ past back to haunt them, but of all the directors in this series save Borsos, Smith has the best eye for visuals, using a mix of handheld realism and epic framings of the characters amongst the monstrous toy park (often, pieces of the rides sit motionless in the foreground of frames).
Where BC films and filmmakers go from here – within the province, country, and world – is fairly difficult to guess. Aside from Kent, almost all of the filmmakers included in this series have made 2-3 films at most. As Gravestock notes, “money always helps” to keep things moving at regular rate, but he also hopefully suggests that “the Vancouver scene is different because they're still very supportive of one another, almost across the board. And some of the people who've made films think there's an even more talented group coming up behind them.” That list would likely include Nathanial Geary (On the Corner, 2003) and Keith Behrman (Flower and Garnet, 2002) who produced slick, decent-budget films with uniquely moving characters. Smith’s sophomore effort Falling Angels (2004), an adaptation of a Barbara Gowdy novel set in Toronto suburbs, was as solid a multiple character study as Rollercoaster, again with a great eye for detail, and probably the most intriguing and entertaining film made by a West Coast director in a while.
Gravestock’s title for the series, “Only Happy When It Rains,” is a bit mis-leading, unless rain is taken as a metaphor for an isolating catalyst that allows characters to retreat inside the mind’s eye and deal with(in) their own world. Vancouver and B.C., aside from Lola’s road trip or the constant movement in Low Self Esteem Girl or Dirty, is hard to distinguish, especially in contemporary cinema. Even Kent used more shots of the city – even if he didn’t address it directly – than his current disciples. But Vancouver is a strange beast in and of itself, not to mention within a country struggling with a national identity. It may be the place the characters in these films come from, live in, or go to, but on a literal level to date, the cinematic reflection is “all kind of miasmic, an atmosphere, a kind of gap in the presentation of the city,” as Gravestock suggests. “Personally, I think that the presence of all that awesome, natural beauty so close by (visible basically every time you step out of your home) inevitably creates a kind of insecurity. You're kind of dwarfed by it, spiritually, physically, etc. Add the service sector aspects and the fact that Vancouver suffers from being colonized twice over (once by Britain and once by Eastern Canada), and you couldn't help but think of the city, at some point, as indistinct, as a non-place.”
It will be interesting to see how B.C. and Canadian filmmakers deal with the issue of location – concepts of place, home, and the exterior – in this new century. Geary and Berhman both set their dramas within particularly B.C. milieus (downtown Vancouver and the small town lifestyle of Cache Creek, respectively) while Aubrey Nealon’s overly witty A Simple Curve (2005) explores life in the Kootenays, treating the area’s jaw-dropping scenery as a character as much as the actors. Gravestock sees this as an important evolution. “What's really intriguing and exciting about the newer films is how they're feeding off or responding to motifs and themes in the earlier work,” he says. “It's an advance more than a genuine rupture, and that's a real development in English Canadian cinema.” So maybe the key to Gravestock’s collection is in the designation “Rise and Roots.” Indeed, a renewed dedication to building on the efforts of a legitimate cinematic canon or movement – as much as harshly breaking from it – would do wonders for many new Canadian filmmakers; perhaps following this path will even lead to waves that actually reach the shores of a domestic and international audience.Complaints about desensitization backfire when the merchants of violence take them as a cue to up the ante. Witness the recent wave of horror films that are no longer satisfied with mere slasher-style killings, preferring instead to mine revulsion through depictions of torture that act as foreplay to death. Video games are following a similar path, combining ever more naturalistic graphics with rampant bloodlust to create games that, were they real, would bring charges of war crimes and genocide to all who play them.
The problem, if we have agreed to refer to it as such, is in the inherent voyeurism of screen violence. In films, we simply watch; in video games, we are engaged in the activity of killing, but the detachment is, if anything, heightened: the correlation between pressing button X and prompting the decapitation of a game character is felt only in purely mechanical terms, a kind of machinelike cause-effect that has still yet to find a better defense than that it improves motor skills.
The concept for PainStation is not revolutionary. The idea of incorporating physical sensation into screen-based entertainment is at least as old as the sit-in arcade game or the Nintendo Power Glove. In France and Japan, you can already watch movies that are augmented with olfactory elements, odours released during the film that are meant to heighten the reality or sensuality of the viewing experience. What makes the PainStation remarkable is that it is intended to hurt. Analyzed in the context of the desensitization debate, it can be confidently called a sensitizing device: a machine that aims to make the viewer aware of pain, rather than distancing them from it. Yet it is still supposed to be fun, begging the question: where does masochism fit into discussions of desensitization?
The machine itself, which was on display at this year’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, is simple. Designed by German media artists Volker Marawe and Tilman Reiff, members of //////////fur//// – a collective that produces “art entertainment interfaces” – it is basically Pong, the seminal video game in which players try to score points by shooting a ball past their opponent’s paddle. Except here, there is more at stake. A missed ball brings up icons (a flame, an axe) on screen that correspond to punishments meted out to the player’s left hand, which must be kept pressed down on a metal plate throughout the game. If the ball strikes the icons, the punishments are administered: searing heat, electric shock or a thrashing rubber whip will flare up from the plate, increasing in intensity every time an icon is hit. The loser is the player who takes his hand away first.
There is a lot going on in a game of PainStation. Ego, endurance, curiosity – all of these drive the player who steps up to the hulking silver box and readies himself for a bout of mild, enjoyable torture. But the primary factor in the game is undoubtedly tension. The punishments themselves are mostly effective as threats: they hurt more in the player’s imagination than they do for real. It is not the reaction that is severe, but the preaction – the anticipation of pain, of living through what we know to be inevitable. It is the same sensation evoked by many horror films as they build towards the moment when blade slices through skin or saw hits bone. If we recall Wes Craven’s statement that horror films are like “boot camp for the psyche,” it becomes possible to view manifestations of violence as preparatory; tension flexes empathy like a muscle, thereby readying it to deal with the horrors of modern, media-driven military society, to increase revulsion at the sight of any acts of violence. Even though the acts, once finalized (the eye gouged, the toe lopped off) provide a contradictory catharsis, the emotions have still been aroused, and empathy channeled.
The same transfer occurs during a game of PainStation. Superficially, the game is selfish – it is focused on each individual player, and much more about avoiding pain to oneself than inflicting it on an opponent. (The tension ensures this.) And yet the player you face is a mirror of your own reactions, a living and immediate demonstration of what might well happen to you in a moment. There are no special levels or passwords; each player faces the same dangers in every round. The playing field is equal. Thus does the game become a direct engine for empathy, forcing you to not only look directly at the pain you are inflicting, but also to exist psychologically as both players at once: inflicting pain, but simultaneously aware of exactly how that pain feels. Picture two people laid face to foot, foot to face, gnawing agonizingly at each other’s ankles, and you may get an idea of how the PainStation encourages a shared empathy that conventional films and video games can only point at.
Discussing PainStation, Tilman Reiff speaks of the virtualization of society and entertainment, and of PainStation as a step toward bringing the physical back into the picture. “You work over the Internet, watch movies, play games, order goods online,” he says. “This is disconnecting people from their bodies and thus their physical experience.” Yet he also readily admits that the machine is intended mainly as a source of fun, which beings us back to our original question: why is causing pain necessary to the process of resensitizing people? Can we not conjure sufficient empathy without flagellating ourselves? Is there no path to return to the physical through pleasure, instead? Must we be so ascetic, so focused on hurt?
The answer may be found in Buddhist philosophy. Perhaps the most famous quotation in that tradition’s history is the assertion that all life is suffering. In our media saturated culture, where consumption and distraction are the two primary goals of the status quo, we may come to believe that the opposite is true: all life is amusement. The PainStation redresses the balance between fun and suffering, highlighting the connectedness of the two states. On its most profound level, it asserts that Buddhist claim, denying the possibility of play without sacrifice. As such, it ultimately subverts the desensitization debate by positing that it is not enough to care, to cry out in shock and awe when we witness an act of violence. Only when we understand that pain is inseparable from life, and that it is present in joy as much as in despair, will we be able to truly see what violence means, and to stake our lives on taming it in reality, rather than wasting our breath condemning it in fiction.
