Alison Murray’s work is infused with a poetic punk essence. She describes film as a mere setup for a dance sequence, and from train-hopping hobos to fairground workers traveling with the American Midway, a nomadic ballet takes centre stage in her work. Her latest film, the documentary Carny, sold out all three of its screenings at Hot Docs this year, so it’s little surprise she was recently deemed worthy of a retrospective at Toronto’s Royal theatre. The programme showcased a selection of Murray’s more than half-dozen short films, along with her first fiction feature, Mouth to Mouth (2005) and her two documentaries (Carny and 2003’s Train on the Brain), providing a rare look into Murray’s world of misfits, dreams and, most of all, dancing. 

What Murray calls her “choreographic style” in film is no surprise, considering her background. Born in Nova Scotia, she left for England at age 15, and lived in the U.K. for the next 18 years. While at the Royal College of Art in London, she studied dance, but took film courses at the same time. She decided to pursue cinema when she realized that film let you do it all – in film, you could dance. Four years ago, she returned to Canada, and these days finds herself moving between Toronto and Argentina, where her partner lives. She tells me she’s become obsessed with the tango and that maybe she’ll find a film within that topic.

The dance sequences Murray incorporates into her films are much different and subtler than those you would find in a musical. Murray’s aim is to understand why dancers do what they do and put it into context. In Mouth to Mouth, starring Ellen Page, the characters suddenly break into interactive dance numbers, which serve as evocative and emotional representations that push the narrative forward. In a film, the dancing is part of a story; it can express things that words can’t. It showcases bodies communicating something on a visceral level, allowing the audience to understand the meaning and emotion at the heart of the narrative.

Working with actors in the development of dance scenes allows Murray to push her story forward through possibilities in the choreography. In Mouth to Mouth, Page plays Sherry, a teenage girl who finds herself entangled with a questionable nomadic cult as she searches for her place in the world. Page had to work closely with Murray on the emotionally charged scenes, and Murray says that when shooting Mouth to Mouth, Page asked a lot of questions about each specific movement and what it meant. In fact, Murray says, she worked with actors during the writing process even before she had cast the film. She says that this added a spontaneous element to the script, and she’s been happy with comments suggesting the film has a documentary quality to it.

One of Murray’s strengths is her ability to jump back and forth between the innately spontaneous and organic documentary form and the much more controlled, choreographed nature of narrative film. For her, one seems to compliment the other. Fiction helps her to find the narrative in a documentary while improvisation with actors helps her to develop a fictional script. For Murray’s first documentary, Train on the Brain, she went on an adventure, hopping freight trains across North America. In the film, she introduces us to many characters she met on the journey – some running away from something, others just never wanting to stand still. Among them is a 16 year-old girl named Jackie who shares many traits with Page’s character in Mouth to Mouth. Murray wrote part of the script for the latter film during the production of Train on the Brain, leading to parallels.

These recurring themes and emotions in the lives of Murray’s characters, both real and imagined, draw a lot from Murray’s own story. She says both Train on the Brain and Mouth to Mouth were very personal films for her. For Carny, however, she took a different approach. She realized that, as the film's director, she needed to create boundaries, putting distance between herself, the story and the characters. She feels that the film benefited from her detachment and that this approach was one of the factors that allowed them to finish editing in only six to seven weeks.

Some have branded Murray as a representative of life on the margins. She says she feels comfortable in those worlds and acknowledges that there is a definite trend in her films. However, she suggested to me that this may not be something she will continue in her future works, explaining that when she got pregnant and was sick for a while, she started seeing things differently. She would watch gloomy art-house films and find herself less interested than before. During our conversation, she half-jokingly suggested that maybe she’ll end up making romantic comedies.

Based on her work so far, though, it’s not something I’d count on. Reminiscing about her first short, Kissy Suzuki Suck from 1992, Murray remembers wanting to use film as a way to respond to something: to culture, to the media, to things she liked and things she didn’t like. All of her films are bold, provocative, and charged with a strong, expressive voice. From the audacity of early titles like Pantyhead and Wank Stallions to the sympathetic and thoughtful portraits of Carny’s fairground veterans, Murray has never been one to play to the middle. It’s hard to imagine that changing, no matter how auspicious the “retrospective” label makes her sound.
             
By the end of our discussion, Murray admits that maybe it was a good time for a retrospective and a chance to look back at it all. Venturing even further into “mature” territory, my last question to her was pulled from the Oprah playbook: I asked about her latest project – her role as a soon-to-be mom. Were her freight train jumping days over? She smiled and told me that, for now, they’re just on hold. 

By the banks of the Ganges, an eight-year-old Indian girl has her hair shorn off in mourning for a husband she never knew. In China, a young woman says farewell to her parents, as she leaves for a job serving tourists who’ve come to see her village sink. In Delhi, a man hustles his autorickshaw through the bustle of India’s urban streets. These are the images of contemporary Canadian cinema, which increasingly is the story of how people who came to be Canadians now look upon the rest of the world, at the places from which their histories drag like shimmering snail trails.

Min Sook Lee’s Tiger Spirit is a film in this tradition: a documentary about how the Toronto-based filmmaker’s life connects to her Korean heritage. By extension, it is both a film about Korea and a film about Canada, and especially about how Canada has come to be defined by its status as a nation of people from elsewhere – a composite country increasingly both enriched and burdened by the histories of those who have settled and started families here. 

Lee begins the film looking for a tiger. The Siberian (or Korean) tiger, a potent symbol of Korean culture, used to be populous in the forests of the Korean peninsula, but development and hunting have eradicated it from the area – at least according to most people. Lee introduces us to a man who believes the Korean tiger still exists, and has made it his life’s goal to prove it. Together, they prowl the forests near the DMZ, searching for a symbol powerful enough to ignite the spark of reunification between North and South Korea, which these days share a history, but not much else.

As the film progresses and the tiger search reveals itself (both thematically and cinematically) to be something of a dud, the director drifts towards another search for Korean identity, when she becomes interested in the reunion projects aiming to connect families from North and South who were separated when the country was divided after the Korean war. These reunions – some in person, some via video – are carefully controlled publicity gambits by the two nations’ governments. Thousands of Korean citizens register, but only a few hundred, chosen through a lottery system, are ever given the chance to discover the fates of the brothers, sisters and children they were cut off from over a half-century ago.

Lee follows several applicants, including one family given the rare chance for a face-to-face meeting with a lost relative. Brother and sister Yeong-shik Kim and Ju-ok Kim travel with their younger family members to Geumgangsan, the mountain resort that’s the only place in North Korea tourists from the South are allowed to visit, to meet their brother, Eun-Shik Kim. As foreign media, Lee is not allowed to record the meetings, but the film features footage shot by Hyeon-Jeon Kim, Eun-Shik’s nephew, providing a rare look at what happens when mindsets from the two drastically different societies have the chance to mingle.

We find out early in the film that family matters are much on Lee’s mind. “In my world, family was everything,” she says near the beginning, in voiceover atop fuzzy images of a young girl on a swing. Lee tells us that her own mother died when she was 12, and that she is one of the “fallen pieces” of a Korea she calls “broken.” Soon after, we find out she is pregnant with her own child. The film is thus an attempt to try to find some insight into the Korean family, such that it can be filtered down into Lee’s own transforming family life, and to discover whether a country that has been fragmented can, while it remains so, produce a unified concept of family in its people, both domestically and abroad.

These concerns are the same for many immigrants. The experience of immigration is often one of separation from homeland and from relatives; anyone who’s taken more than a few taxi rides in Toronto has surely encountered a driver who’s told them about their yearning for some relative they left behind in their native country.

One of the questions implicit in Tiger Spirit is how effective a tool the camera is for bridging the inevitable gaps that exist between lives lived in an adopted country, and those parts that remain inseparable from one’s country of origin – the sinews of culture, language and imagination that continue to pull at the self, no matter how far one stretches them, how deeply entrenched in a different country’s society one becomes. Lee only touches on the virtual, video-feed reunions that are part of the program to connect separated Korean relatives, but it’s telling that they are the film’s very first images, occurring immediately after the title screens outlining the separation of the two Koreas. We are presented with a pair of screens, side by side. On one, a man holds up a framed photograph. “This is father’s picture,” he says, and the man and woman on the other screen bow their heads in reverence, paying respect to a deceased relative through a conglomerate of pixels. Variations on the scene are repeated several times: the same two screens with different families sharing brief moments of connection, intercut with footage of a barbed wire fence whirring by, as if shot while traveling along a closed border. For awhile, the context in which the screens are showing the footage is left ambiguous, but soon it becomes clear: “In South Korea, the video reunions are broadcast live,” Lee says, as she cuts to a wider shot that shows a small audience sitting in a kind of waiting room, watching the screens. These reunions are public spectacles, shown as entertainment, presumably in an attempt to induce in the audience a sentimental sense that things are going well, wounds are being healed, barriers broken and truths shared.

Like most spectacles, the Korean video reunions are carefully engineered. They are a construct of the governments on both sides of the 38th parallel, who are using the camera as a means to contain an experience that, by virtue of the emotions at stake, should be terribly messy – even the most routine family reunions are not usually ideal fodder for publicity campaigns trumpeting the harmony of the family unit, and the Korea situation is obviously charged with unprecedented political, ideological and cultural tension. Recall that Lee is not allowed to film the face-to-face meeting between the Kim family and their Northern relative. Clearly, the situation is too volatile, too prone to produce results that would leak outside of the accepted contextual frame of the reunions, and so the engineers adopt the opposite approach to that used in their video moments: the spectacle is closed to the eye of the professional global media, sequestered away in a remote mountain retreat and played as an abstract proof of unity on the mend, the images and words better veiled in mystique than accidentally revealed to the world to be deviating from the script. 

Although her aims are far different, Lee uses her camera in much the same way as the governments do theirs. She, too, is trying to contain something amorphous, which she is having a great deal of trouble wrapping her head around: her connection to Korea, and her idea of family. Her search for the tiger represents one framing device for her search – one that proves insufficient, and which she therefore abandons midway through the film in favour of the reunions, which allows her a better scheme within which to puzzle out her own questions. In pursuing these moments of connection and healing with her inquisitive camera, and situating them within her own context of the emigrant’s relationship to her country of birth and ancestry, Lee provides a counterbalance to the governmental video reunions, capturing them in a larger frame than the one in which they themselves are contained, thereby making them function as pieces of a larger socio-cultural puzzle, rather than as answers in and of themselves.

 

*           *            *          

If film is the most constructed of media, an assembly of moving images designed to tell a particular story – one that could, with the replacement or shuffling of just a few shots, become unrecognizable – the idea we have of heritage is not far removed. The stories we tell ourselves about our lineage are rarely complete; they are made of pieces, inherited stereotypes and legends, pictures, dreams and relics. The question that often gets asked in the context of the immigration debate is, can Canada’s heritage contain a multitude of other heritages – can our history encompass the history of other countries, the places from which our always growing immigrant population comes? Is there a place for Indian history, Nigerian tragedy, Chinese ambition and Korean division within the frame of our cultural heritage? With the country’s immigration backlog swelling to nearly one million applicants this year, controversial new amendments to Canada’s Immigration Act now before Parliament and a debate about “reasonable accommodation” raging in Quebec, the question is more urgent than ever.

Cinema is only one small part of a country’s arts, let alone its whole culture, but the answer that Canada’s national cinema provides to the above questions is, simply, yes.
Canada continues to provide a vital outlet for filmmakers to reflect on the countries of their ancestry, and in doing so, it is gradually developing a cinema of limitless cultural depth. Witness Deepa Mehta, who, in filming her “Elements” trilogy, faced repeated opposition and persecution from Indian authorities that were unhappy with her critiques of some of the country’s more conservative taboos. Mehta has often made India and Indian culture her subject matter, but it would be both regrettable and incorrect to argue that, for that reason, she is not a Canadian filmmaker. Her films about India are made possible by her Canadian experience. The same can be said of Atom Egoyan and his films about Armenia, Yung Chang’s Up The Yangtze, Richie Mehta’s Amal, and Lee’s Tiger Spirit.

The critic Theodor W. Adorno is often cited as disparaging the American variety of capitalist pop art, and encouraging immigrants to resist assimilation into the “Culture Industry.” These views – arguably both, in and of themselves, sensible – have been broadly absorbed as signs of Adorno’s anti-Americanism. But as Detlev Claussen points out in  “Intellectual Transfer: Theodor W. Adorno’s American Experience,” Adorno was making these judgments from America, where he lived after fleeing Nazi Germany, and his ideas were being fed by his existence in his new home. “Paradoxical as it may sound,” Claussen writes, “it was in the United States that he became a European… [Adorno]’s Minima Moralia reads like a an inverted tourist guide, in which the European begins to understand himself through exile.” Exile is a very specific circumstance in which to find oneself in a new country, but the point can be applied to any situation in which distance from a native or ancestral country is a factor in generating ideas for art; a removed perspective allows for new insights to develop, and new modes of exploration and analysis to be explored, and the result can be beneficial to both the culture being represented and that from which the representation comes. Indeed, in Minima Moralia, Adorno himself suggests such an exchange has the ability to serve in the development of a kind of new utopia. Adorno is no fan of the “melting pot” – “the thought of landing in it conjures martyrdom, not democracy,” he writes. Instead, he imagines a society in which difference is visible and recognized, but not cause for alarm:

An emancipated society however would be no unitary state, but the realization of the generality in the reconciliation of differences. A politics which took this seriously should therefore not propagate even the idea of the abstract equality of human beings. They should rather point to the bad equality of today, the identity of film interests with weapons interests, and think of the better condition as the one in which one could be different without fear. (1)

This is not equivalent to the trite call to “celebrate” differences often given by those touting Canada’s multiculturalism as a tourist draw. But it does provide an answer to the question of how to conceive of Canada’s cultural heritage, offering the vision of heritage as an ongoing project, in which – in cinematic terms – intellectual and artistic transfer give new insights about cultures on both sides of the camera, and the goal is the eradication of fear of deviance from a constructed sociocultural norm (or, again in cinematic terms, from what Peter Watkins calls the “monoform” of Hollywood moviemaking). One has to imagine that this same goal is a dream of millions of Koreans on both sides of the 38th parallel, who can now, as Tiger Sprit shows, no longer realistically deny their differences, but who crave the unification of the country with mutual acceptance as the ideal.

Whether such a thing is currently possible in Korea, where the twentieth century’s storied faceoff between Communism and Capitalism still rages (at least in the minds of the North’s leaders), is debatable. Unfortunately, it is impossible to see North Korean cinema in South Korea, and vice versa. As to whether it is possible in Canada, the answer can be given with more confidence. Canada’s multiculturalism has become a kind of flag for us to wave in the face of the world, a convenient brand with which to market us polite folks up here in the snow. Yet it would behoove those who make immigration policy, or fret that immigration reports in Quebec will bring the end of Christmas, to remember that in a mosaic you can still see the individual pieces, and that tests to our tolerance are not to be seen as hassles, but rather as occasions for us to look honestly at how we receive the people and cultures that come from other nations to live here. As a reminder of these things, I might recommend a day at the Film Reference Library, where they can catch up with Lee, Chang and plenty of other Canadian filmmakers who have engaged in searches for their ancestral cultures, and who have in doing so expanded, enriched and broadened the scope of Canadian cinema.

The type of cinema I am discussing here is still young; contrast the number of films by Canadian directors that look at issues and stories from their ancestral countries with the number of Canadian novels that do the same, and you will notice a large discrepancy. This only confirms that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of fascinating films yet to come – stories of South (and perhaps even North) Korea, China, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Vietnam, the Ukraine, the Congo, the world, Canadian stories that work towards a cinema and a society in which one can be different without fear – a culture of cultures, a place where we can explore the paths all people take to arrive where they are, and perhaps to look at where all of us are going.

All of which is to say, someone give that taxi driver a camera.

13 June 2008 – Krakow

What can we make of Polish cinema today? All the venerated masters can be discounted: Roman Pola?ski has packed up long ago and now lives in France, Krzysztof Kie?lowski is no longer with us (may He rest in peace), and Andrzej Wajda has been reduced to making history textbook chapters on film (see his recent Oscar-nominated Katy?). And after almost twenty years since the fall of communism in this country, what stories are there to tell?

Well, it seems Krakow is a good place to start looking. The home of two well-respected annual film festivals – one featuring animation in the fall and the more general Krakow Film Festival in June – the city presents itself as the cultural capital of Poland, a labyrinth of central European charm that offsets both cosmopolitan Warsaw, the muscle of the national film industry, and industrial Lodz, home to the revered Film School.

At the risk of getting swept away by the seemingly unstoppable deluge of competing festivals on the continent, KFF focuses primarily on domestic releases, shorts, animation and documentaries. If you sense an analogy to Canadian cinema, you’re not alone. At the opening of this year’s 48th edition of the festival, the Dragon of Dragons Award (a sort of Guest of Honour or Director Laureate prize) was presented to Allan King, the Canadian maestro of the cinéma-vérité – or "actuality drama," as he prefers – by Wajda himself. This came with an almost full retrospective of his documentaries, as well as a Masterclass lecture, although it must be said King rejects the word "Masterclass", and instead provided attendees with a resourceful Q&A session, essentially a master class on what he learned from Robert Flaherty and John Grierson, what is "real" in his films (almost all of it, but more on that later) and his future projects.

King's retrospective showed some of the best work of the festival, kicking off with the short film Field Day (1963), featuring an army troop being methodically desensitized by their superiors in training for war, and continuing with his canonical Warrendale (1967), about a home for troubled kids in Toronto. His unabashed exploration of social issues continued with Skidrow (1956), containing provoking interviews with the downtrodden of King's hometown of Vancouver and produced by the CBC; Where Will They Go? (1959), a unexpectedly relevant film featuring Eastern European refugee peasants following the chaotic aftermath of World War II; and Rickshaw (1960), about the hard lives of rickshaw drivers in Calcutta, and made fully, as King states, "in the tradition of Flaherty". (Interesting side note: King says he directly consulted Indian auteur Satayjit Ray about the production of Rickshaw during filming. Ray gave him support, but advised him that filming on the streets of Calcutta was absolutely out of the question. King did it anyway. There would undoubtedly be something ill-suited about a documentary on rickshaws shot from the window of a building.)

A lot of King's older work plays out well in an age where documentaries are more relevant, and prevalent, than ever. His films shown at KFF often portrayed a kindred relationship to the young and misunderstood, such as the affecting youth in Warrendale, or the rebellious southern Ontarian teens who have quit school in Come on Children (1973), a sort of pre-MTV "Real World" where King put a gender-equal number of young hipsters in a house together, then brought in their parents for some needed confrontation. The teenagers complain about not being heard, and their parents lament their lack of motivation. Curiously enough, King informed us post-screening that the kids in the film who just wanted to "focus on their music" eventually evolved into the rock and roll institution known as Rush.

Before fast-forwarding to King's later films on the last days of life, Dying at Grace (2003) and Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005), the festival showed his self-proclaimed war triptych, featuring Field Day, Where Will They Go? and the made-for-TV propaganda piece Six War Years (1975), what King calls a multimedia film before there were any multimedia films. The result not an innovative piece of filmmaking so much as a series of poorly-acted dramatizations on Canadians' recollections of the Second World War. How it sneaked into the retrospective is anyone's guess, and it offers a striking contrast to the dramatic "actuality" of his best work.

As for the competition at KFF, the festival evenly split it into three parts: one for feature-length docs, another for the international short film competition, and the last for the popular national prize. There were three Canadian entries this year, the short Lightchasers from first-time filmmaker and Toronto-based theatre director Rafal Sokolowski, and the two animated favourites Isabelle au bois dormant (Sleeping Betty) by Claude Cloutier and the Oscar-nominated Madame Tutli-Putli from Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, both strong contenders from the National Film Board. There seems to be a lot of interest in Canadian animation and the NFB here in Krakow – last fall the 14th Etiuda&Anima (Krakow's animation fest) showed two well-received programs, one a best-of-the-NFB and the other a Norman McLaren tribute.

What was interesting about the closing of the festival was not the documentary top prize (awarded to Sergei Loznitsa's stunning Revue, based on ’50s and ’60s Soviet propaganda newsreels) but the International Competition, almost cleaned up entirely by Poland's own. Three filmmakers from the new generation of Polish talent each took home a Silver Dragon – Wiola Sowa for her animated short Refrains, which has been making the rounds throughout Europe; Marcin Koszalka for his documentary short Till It Hurts; and Agnieszka Smoczynska for Aria Diva, the best narrative short – all intimate portraits of family, particularly women, and the unspoken relationships between the sexes. These films are strong proof that New Polish cinema is on the rise and, like Canada's industry, is rooted in forms alternative to the feature film.