MH:
Has every experience already been photographed? Is that why
you use found footage?
AC: Every experience and emotion cannot possibly be
photographed, that's why I use found footage. The realms of
experience and emotion are infinite, yet so many of us choose
familiarity and stability over risk and the unknown. I'm fascinated
by how much silence and suffocation there is in each human
interaction.
We watch movies to feel something more than we allow ourselves
to feel in our everyday lives. Recorded images and sounds
double as mirrored echoes where we don't have to look or listen
to ourselves, we only have to be quiet and watch the screen.
I think this is an everlasting power of cinema. It permits
us to be who we want to be free from responsibility and action.
It releases us from guilt and shame. The more I pick through
old movies the more I find a history of this psychological
etiquette. My work aspires to understand why we live in a
poverty of emotion and how it can change.
MH: So you feel that becoming like the pictures which
surround us could make us more human? What a lovely idea.
But don't movies also render us helpless and infantile? It's
not my fault, it's not my problem-movie going equals actions
without consequences and what could be more dangerous than
that? Many sociologists, certainly censor boards and the governments
they represent, are quick to point to the negative impact
of movie going. Do you feel that its outpouring of feelings
outweighs these disadvantages?
AC: It's both these forces that attract me to using
found footage. The tears that stream down my face when I watch
A Birth Story coupled with the contention I feel for so many
aspects of parenting, is a familiar disjunct of our technological
times. Without the tears, despondency reigns, and I think
that if anyone is going to change something they believe is
wrong, they have to know how they feel about it first. We
live in a society that mistakes cohesiveness for political
action and sameness for power. Most movies (at their ideological
core) perpetuate this. But I think the emotion we take away
from movies overrides their plots. Perhaps that's why stories
don't change and people do.
MH: Some would argue that you are doing nothing creatively,
you're not adding anything new, only parasitically taking
what others have done and reshuffling them before signing
the results. How would you respond to these criticisms?
AC: I would argue that everything is made by reshuffling.
A building is built based on parts of other buildings. Medicine
is based on new combinations of chemicals. Nothing is without
multiple origins. Origins can be hidden or exposed and I'm
not interested in hiding what I edit. My creative tool is
editing and without footage my art is not visible.
MH: Can you describe your process of collecting pictures?
Do you have a source archive from which your pictures are
drawn, or are you continually on the hunt, looking out for
another, better shot?
AC: I have an archive of shots that I've been collecting
for the past five years. I'm also always on the hunt. I try
to stay ahead of a desperate hunt though, which always involves
a shot that is too specific. I've decided that these shots
don't exist, I only want them to. Instead, I have a system
of collecting things in groups; people walking down hallways,
climbing stairs, driving cars, sleeping, on the phone, taking
a bath, running away, opening and closing doors and windows.
Once I've grouped clips into thematic categories, I make sub
groups of emotional categories. I find sound harder to divide
this specifically so I organize it differently, such as: ambience
and texture, sound effects, ethical assertions, emotional
expressions, excuses, admittances, beliefs and anyone discussing
truth. With each idea I focus on there are always other categories
I created for the footage I find. Generally, though, I'm looking
for moments before and after an event. Whether it's anxiousness,
anticipation, denial, or relief, the emotions that frame actions
are points of relation, they might be mine or yours.
MH: Are there some shots that are so powerful, so moving,
that you want to make a movie simply so this moment can be
felt in the way you feel it?
AC: Yes. These are also the shots I can't put into
a category other than "favorites." They are moments that are
layered with complex and multiple emotions. I often use them
to structure a video. The first shot in Ready
to Cope of the boy picking leaves off the bush is an
example. He seems so sad and at the same time paralyzed by
his sadness. In the original movie, he had just killed his
brother when they were out hunting. His shock and grief is
buried by guilt which is what I believe national security
is based on. That's why I chose it to open Ready
to Cope.
MH: You spent a good while cutting Ready
to Cope (7 minutes 2006), why so long? Were you looking
for a new relation to your pictures, trying to get them to
"make sense" in a different way?
AC: Beginning in August 2005, I scheduled one day each
week to edit Ready to Cope and
Supposed To. However, I've found it impossible in my
work life as an editor to predict the length of a project.
The work that I was doing for money often bleeds into time
for my own videos. Juggling this aside, I also encountered
many other challenges with these pieces. My first intention
was to concentrate on our cultural obsession with uniformity
and homogeneity. Once I felt I had collected enough images
and sounds and began a paper edit, I discovered that the underlying
fear of these themes were far more interesting and pervasive
especially with recent political debate regarding safety and
security in Canada. It's clear to me that my own desire for
order is very much grounded in a fear of chaos. Chaos breeds
strictness and strictness privileges sameness. The same cycle
exists in the hundreds of horror movies I went through; something
disrupts or invades a clean house, a good relationship, a
sweet family, a good intention. A desire for goodness is destined
for disturbance. This then became my focus. How do we define
goodness? How do we protect ourselves from impending doom?
These difficult questions took a long time to build a narrative
around, especially since many of their qualities are repressed
and nuanced.
MH: Is it necessary to arrive at new forms and new
relationships in your own life before being able to apply
them in your movies?
AC: Yes. For the past seven years my work has been
based on the questions: What do I believe? And what am I afraid
of that makes me believe that? The answers to both questions
always have something to do with the ideas I trust and the
relationships I have.
Lately I've experienced a rawness that is very new to me.
I easily lose a sense of myself. I'm overwhelmed by anxiety
and hesitation. I guess I feel like I'm fighting a lot of
skepticism. I trust less people than I used to. I remember
feeling something important going on inside me and sharing
it with several people, looking for different perspectives
and reactions. Now I barely want to talk about important personal
things, as though they will change if they get out, as though
I'll lose something. The examples I can think of are small
and wouldn't make much sense to anyone else.
The person that is closest to me right now is Tema, and she
hates the word integrity. She understands it as a grandiose
idea about Truth and Properness, something no one can live
up to even though everyone tries. It's an archetypal vision
of "rightness." A choice you make one day may seem like its
full of integrity and another choice may negate that integrity.
This contradiction is how we are human. The idea of integrity
is a static unflinching notion but to be human is not. She
says that the only beings that have integrity are animals.
Her distaste exposes the conflict in ways that aren't possible
on my own. We argue about it all the time; I feel the conflict
is primarily within oneself, a grappling with an inner knowledge
of right and wrong. She tries to determine what is most compassionate
outside of her personal desires. She spends a lot of time
with animals.
When I was first being politicized in my early twenties, feminism
and anti-oppression politics taught me to be an ally, to speak
from my experience and to hear other people's opinions as
their experience and to understand my privilege. It was my
responsibility to identify my own prejudices and actions which
perpetuate oppression. Dialogue and discussion are necessary
to learn how to listen non-defensively and communicate respectfully
if an anti-oppression practice is going to be successful.
I realize now how deeply skeptical I am and how far apart
experiences are from how they get told; how "owning" an experience
invites comparisonism and often competition, and how often
self reflection deepens oblivion. In moments I think I'm being
straightforward, people seem confused. I've always thought
of myself as overly sensitive but often get told I'm not sensitive
enough. In the darkest part of this reality, tragedies are
compared and compassion is measured accordingly. It feels
as though theory and practice are colliding with one another,
cancelling each other out. An insidious system of erasure
resides at the base of the ideas I trust most. I see it in
the world, in myself and in others.
I remember a few days after the second levy broke in New Orleans
I was at a bar with friends. People were discussing connections
they had to people effected by the tragedy. One person talked
about a woman she knows who was getting ready to leave New
Orleans to go to school in San Francisco. She made it to San
Francisco having lost all her possessions. She only had the
clothes she was wearing and the items in the bag she was carrying.
The person telling the story explained that she came from
a fucked up home, "Her mother collects Barbie Dolls," she
said. I got angry with her and asked why that meant her home
was necessarily fucked up. The conversation died prematurely
(as most conflicts do) but I still think about it. What bothers
me most is that a sad situation cannot simply be sad, it needs
to be punctuated by morality in the form of what I believe
was understood in this case as feminism. Whether or not this
woman's mother's Barbie collection was a source of abuse,
neurosis, a hobby or art, it cannot define wrongness by itself.
Nothing can. Like an anti-oppression framework, feminism is
deeply committed to ideas about not generalizing feelings,
thoughts or behaviors, and is therefore devoted to reconstructing
and redefining power. Yet, I'm not sure most feminists or
anti-oppression activists are personally committed to the
same things. We want to tell a good story, to make people
laugh, to be loved. We want things to set us apart and make
us feel special. The woman telling the story wanted to hold
an audience. For many reasons there's shame in these desires,
causing us to hide and to value opinions over feelings. I
know I've said many things just like the woman who told this
story. Perhaps the reason it stayed with me is because it
reminded me of ways I don't like myself.
MH: Ready to Cope begins
with a voice-over which asks, "In the history of Canada has
there been a crisis this deep, this merciless?" Where did
you find this quotation and what drew you to it?
AC: I found this piece of audio in a documentary about
farmer's rights in Canada from the early 80's. It was one
of the first things I knew I needed to use. The woman speaking
is passionate and honest. I was especially drawn to the idea
of a "merciless" crisis providing a shell for the cyclic relationship
between self protection, denial and national security issues.
I'm interested in how drawn we are to wanting and needing
mercy, when we so often can't give ourselves a break.
I also knew that I wanted to establish the ideas in Ready
to Cope within a frame. When something is named a crisis,
there is often more tolerance for emotion, hysteria, speed
(or immediacy) and even a kind of abstractness that is not
acceptable in a "professional" environment. Ready
to Cope contains all of these elements so announcing
a crisis set an appropriate stage.
MH: Your movie is framed by people taking the next
step, in high heels and sneakers, inside and out. The effort
of going on, of getting up over a paralyzing sense of malaise
and anxiety, is everywhere palpable. Much of this dread is
centered in homes where doors are ominously approached and
hallways are the circulation system of unseen fears. Why have
you placed the middle (class) home at the epicenter of these
fears?
AC: "The middle home" is an interesting way to look
at it. For me, the home is where most of our unconscious fears
are rooted and where we act through and against them. In a
lot of my work it functions as a figurative source for the
themes I address. As a child, it was in my own home where
I first learnt to manipulate, to dwell in insecurities, and
mostly to feel the depths of hopelessness and despair. I grew
up feeling affected by everything; stuffed animals that had
a bad look in their eyes, wallpaper patterns that moved at
night, babysitters I hated the smell of, and fantasies of
running away so I could be a different person. I would put
on a dress that I hated, pack a bag and walk out the front
door. I remember thinking that if I wore an ugly dress people
would treat me differently and I could begin a new life. Nothing
felt right though nothing was ever all that wrong.
But "the middle home" is a place that is similarly represented
by most movies. Unlike my own obscure memories of growing
up, the collective home functions as a receptor for collective
fears that we can attach to our personal experiences. A creepy
shadow in the hallway reminds me of the shifting cloud patterns
on the wallpaper in my childhood room. Only now I have an
enemy. This same shadow reminds you of an early fear of yours,
and in an instant we have a shared enemy.
When I was developing ideas about safety and security for
Ready to Cope I knew I had to
disassemble why movies can scare us so profoundly. The connections
to our early understandings of fear for which many of us have
no explanations, illuminates why the same gestures and similar
narratives can scare us infinitely. Movies provide us with
pictures that we've been waiting to put content into and explanations
we crave. Conscious or not, the fear we feel when watching
movies must be a continuation of where it all began, but often
stripped of its original uniqueness and sometimes capable
of providing false and easy answers.
In Ready to Cope I wanted to
bring the obscurity of early experiences of fear back into
a collective dread and anxiety. What if the creepy shadow
is my own? What if I forgot to lock the door and the wind
blew it open? I focused on the home in order to ask questions
like these and to bring focus to our only true collective
enemy: ourselves.
MH: The home shrinks and bursts open until a body falls
from the sky, lies on the grass, runs into woods. When images
of home return they are seized with a new pressure and violence,
they build until they break in a shatter storm of broken windows
and dishes. You close the movie with a trio of shots: a woman
puts it all away in her cupboards, a girl bends down, a sneaker
leaves the room. It is a powerful ending, especially because
the movie stops here. Why these three shots, why are you filled
with so much hope?
AC: At the end of Ready to Cope
a woman is searching through all her cupboards. Looking for
something but unable to find it. In the next shot a girl creeps
down, and peers under a stall, knowing that something or someone
is there. And yes, a man's sneakers leave (or enter) a room,
and the movie ends. I never thought of this ending as hopeful
but I suppose it is. I edited the video to reflect the idea
that the fear we feel is a fear of ourselves. So I structured
the last thirty seconds (three shots) of the video as a reprise
of my thesis. The reprise begins with a frantic search (shot
#1); a feeling of having lost or misplaced something can feel
like you've lost a part of yourself. Then, from within (shot#2),
you gather some courage and look one last time. Maybe it's
the last place it could possibly be, maybe you hear a strange
noise and know it's there. In the final shot, action is required,
you must choose to enter or exit. I know that my translation
of these images might not be communicated to the audience
the same way I've explained it here. But like all my work
I hope it's experienced in flux; as we experience things emotionally.
Maybe this is why you feel like I'm hopeful. I think hope
is only possible when you know things will change and that
you can participate in the change.
MH: The pictures your movies are drawn from are from
other people's movies, from a "public record," so I'm wondering
what your relation to your audience is. Once upon a time you
were "equal," both spectators in a theatre, or video store
patrons. But now you have taken portions of this shared understanding,
this visible inheritance, and turned it to your own ends.
Are you attempting to activate a new kind of spectatorship?
Who are your movies for (only the usual suspects: those who
attend art video fests for instance)?
AC: I'm of two minds. On one hand, my relationship
to my audience is strange. There is so little dialogue about
video art (about so many things) and my work speaks to this.
So I'm often confused by my audience. Who they are, who I
want them to be, what they think, what I hope they think.
This confused silence of mine and theirs feeds new ideas for
new projects so it's sometimes hard to imagine anything different,
any "new kind of spectatorship."
On the other hand, I have a lot of fantasies about who my
movies are for and where they could show. I feel like they
are trailers for our problems. I think about what it would
take to offer art as a public service. I imagine an advertisement:
Feeling anxious? So are we. Watch this movie... If you feel
worse, that's good. If you feel better, that's good.
My divided perspective is probably why I make work in isolation,
but most days I work as an editor with various community groups
and other artists to produce videos they want to make. I haven't
found a balance and I'm not sure if there is one.
SUPPOSED TO
MH: Supposed To (7 minutes
2006) has a feeling of barely controlled rage which is smoothed
over by its sweet pop electronica and your assured montage.
But I'm wondering if you could talk about the origin of this
visceral anger-the movie feels like it wants to reach out
of the monitor and choke me. Like your other work, this movie
is made up of pictures made by others, why is it important
to refract your feelings through others? Are you using found
footage the way others would deploy actors and scripts?
AC: When I first started thinking about and using found
footage I was also reading a lot about psychoanalytic theories
of projection. The idea that we attribute to others our undesirable
thoughts and emotions became key for many personal and political
questions. Found footage is the cultural source of an ingrained
defense mechanism.
Undesirable characteristics are not only being displaced onto
other people but also onto animals, inanimate objects and
social constructs. We create scapegoats in order to feel better.
When I feel frustrated about something in my life I'll often
hate the way a piece of furniture looks. I'll move it around
the room hoping to like it better at a different angle, in
a different spot. Editing of all sorts has become the manifestation
of many of my feelings (anger included). Any time I dig for
the root cause of a feeling, possibilities and combinations
multiply. Nothing feels like it exists without its past and
future relationships. The origins of my anger exist equally
in my past and in movies I haven't seen yet.
MH: Because you work with status quo pictures are you
concerned that the many people who are never represented in
movies (the working poor, immigrants, the elderly…) are similarly
missing from your work? Does your work mimic the exclusions
of mainstream media?
AC: The images I choose are steeped in representational
stereotypes. And the presentation of the work (as you've indicated)
is exclusive and limited (video festivals and galleries).
These realities weigh on me and at the same time push me to
keep working.
I'm always interested in what type of person is cast to play
different emotions. There are so many hidden rules. When a
horror movie deals with an "unknown phenomenon," the main
character is usually a white woman with straight brown hair.
If her hair is curly, then perhaps she's called the evil to
her, and if she isn't white, well then she is the phenomenon
itself. The racist, classist, sexist realities of these movies
have been analyzed by many people and it's my hope to continue
the discussion using the pictures themselves.
MH: A young girl looks into a mirror, but when we see
the answering shot it is a man's face that looks back at her.
Throughout this movie you disperse subjectivity between genders
and across different age groups. You ask us to unify these
experiences, these bodies. I understood the climactic scene
where a man crashes through a window as emblematic of this
broken subjectivity. As a viewer my identification is asked
to shuttle between the two poles of broken and whole.
Supposed To is carefully structured,
filled with rhyming gestures (a hand wipes the windshield
of a car, other hands grip a steering wheel, a third shot
shows yet another car on the road, though the montage makes
it feel as if it's all the same car). Can you talk about the
overall structure of Supposed To
with its prelude of first steps, its attempted escape, the
window crash, the telephone call and the return home.
AC: Like all my videos, Supposed
To is structured through intuition. I'll write scripts
prior to editing; or elaborate paper edits to structure the
argument I want to make, but it always changes during editing.
Each shot has its own rhythm and each edit its own meter,
so no matter what I want to say conceptually, I'm led primarily
by mood. The montage produces a sequence of emotions; the
struggle is for the emotions to say what I mean.
Supposed To begins with a scene
of a boy helping an old man take off his boots. The old man
pushes the boy's bum with his foot to help him get the boot
off. The scene is simultaneously sweet and creepy and acts
as a prelude for an investigation about obligation and guilt.
Following this is a series of feet taking steps through a
field, up stairs, in hallways, outside a door. It is a collective
arrival by people who, at least in my mind, have come to hear:
"There's a whole machine that works because everyone does
what they are supposed to. I found out I was supposed to be
something I didn't like." From here the movie begins unraveling
the complexity of work; a suitcase falls, a woman scrambles
through her wallet and sees that her ID is gone, another woman
falls into a pool, a man in a uniform collapses, shots of
losing oneself are interwoven with people at work. A man sits
at a table eating bananas in milk as another voice talks about
working nine to five and how that "snuffs out eccentricities"
and results in passive aggression. A woman vacuums. A girl
looks into a mirror and sees someone else. This continues
from person to person, each facing themselves in order to
see another. People are shocked, confused and frustrated.
This catalyzes a change and escape. A woman puts on her housecoat
and another woman looks out the window. A young woman frantically
gets into a van, people are packing, and a series of cars
driving occurs. A boy sitting in a vehicle turns his head
and says "Know what I did?" A shot of scattered clothes and
broken glass follows. A woman is on the phone, she covers
the receiver and says: "He broke a window." The escape has
prompted a confession about something that hasn't happened,
or at least doesn't seem wrong. The confession itself has
caused a crime. A series of people fall through windows, and
glass is scattered on various floors. A boy is running away.
A man lies face down on the shore.
The final scene begins with the phone ringing. A woman picks
it up and hears a man's voice saying: "Time has come to put
aside childish things..." Three more women are listening on
the phone and one says "OK" in response. The man continues
"Face up to who you are…" Three more woman listen. The man
says "...suspicions of destiny...", "...surely you must be
feeling it..." A woman answers, "Yes, I am." The voice continues,
"We all have them..." and a boy on the phone answers, "Oh,
OK." The man concludes: "...a deep, wordless knowledge." A
woman looking in shock hangs up the phone followed by a series
of hang-ups and a boy saying, "Did I do anything wrong?" Shots
of a few people located outside houses appear and a woman
says, "I thought it was all over." A woman enters a room and
takes off her stockings, another woman drops her keys and
the final woman drops her coat, returns to a bed, sits down,
hesitates to pick up the phone and instead sits in silence
and bows her head.
I hope the end explains itself. For me, the scene is very
dramatic and enters a new territory. Something I will develop
more in new projects.
ALL RIGHT
MH: All Right is a very
unusual hybrid film: part found footage collage, part immigration
polemic. Can you talk about you became involved with issues
of displacement, borders and Canadian immigration? Why did
you mix these concerns with found footage, how does the ‘other'
footage figure/function in the movie?
AC: The ideas in All Right
are based on experiences I had doing various types of activist
work around new immigration policies and detainee issues after
9/11. I learned about a Toronto Immigrant Holding Centre which
is a converted motel near the airport where refugees and immigrants
were being held for long periods of time in poor conditions,
behind razor wire, without information about why they are
there. This detention centre was called the Celebrity Inn
and is now called the Heritage Inn. It is a large place where
people (mostly women and children) are brought directly from
planes. Reena, my ex-girlfriend, worked with a group that
made visits to the centre, played cards with some of the people
and worked to get them the aid and information they needed.
All Right grew out of the reality
that refugees and immigrants can be arrested or detained without
criminal charges and held indefinitely once they arrive in
Canada until they are granted citizenship.
Once I started researching immigration issues in government
sponsored footage I realized that we have been talking about
the same issues in Canada for years. Many of the documentaries
I searched through were made in the early 80's and still felt
relevant in 2004. I believe that there is an unstated kind
of racism in Canada.
When I was in high school there were a lot of Asian immigrants
from Hong Kong in my classes. They had been sent to Vancouver
without their parents, many had houses and cars, that's where
the parties were. My mother said the reason the women didn't
come with their children is because they were afraid that
their husbands wouldn't be faithful. She had no Asian friends,
there was no way for her to know anything about the lives
of these people, but this story made her feel more comfortable
with them being "everywhere." Many referred to the new immigrants
as the "Asian invasion." People said it freely without any
shame, without any reference to their own immigrant history.
When I was growing up, racism was never called racism, it
was simply entitlement and maybe very complex fear. When I
started thinking about the characteristics of this shameless
racism, many images came to mind. I began looking for movie
moments where people are confused, unable to see anything
around them. There's a shot in All Right
showing a guy from his thighs down, he's on a gravel road
and kicks a rock. It's so defeatist, it feels like a powerless,
childish gesture. There's a woman wearing a dress searching
through a grassy field. The drama of her action foreshadows
the fact that she's not going to find whatever she's looking
for. A woman turns a corner and runs down a hallway; without
seeing who is chasing her or what she's running from she can
only be running from herself.
The movie opens with a boy bending down to kiss something,
a creepy woman's voice says, "Feel it, it makes you strong."
Her voice provides an emotional anthem for the piece, an emotional
calling for the nationalism which the movie takes up later.
A woman turns to a man in a car and asks him if he feels it
and he responds, "I feel things as they come, come on." This
concludes the anthem. He opens a door, another man walks through
a door into a bedroom suspicious of something being under
the covers. He tears off the covers and nothing is there.
What stops people from feeling things as they come are suspicions.
Then the song begins and the title comes up. We work to make
things seem all right, but they never are because we're not
present to how we really feel. These fears are also felt on
a nation wide level.
I took footage from a Canadian documentary called Who Gets
In? and officer training movies from Immigration Canada. In
one sequence we watch an interaction between an immigration
officer and a woman who is applying to immigrate through the
lens of emotional manipulation. They have this exchange.
"Because you want to upgrade? Because you want to study computers?
Well I'll tell you honestly, very honestly, I don't believe
you." "Sir but…" "That's what I think. The new employment
that you want to find in Canada I don't know what you're going
to find in Canada. I'm meaning that I'm not sure that you
know what you're going to find in Canada. Because you know
nothing about Canada. I would not invest anything if I were
you. You will not be going to Canada."
What he uses to make a decision about her application is based
on a judgment on what she knows or doesn't know about a country
she's never been to. It's manipulative criteria. They're not
having a conversation, he's telling her what he believes,
and what she thinks. Based on his judgment of her he's decided
that she's not eligible. When a real dialogue doesn't take
place interaction is reduced to superficial impressions and
racisms. Scenes like this helped explain to me why no one
knows and even fewer care that a motel has been turned into
a covert detention centre.
MH: There is a striking shot where a blonde woman comforts
a large naked man. Can you talk about the origin of this scene
and why you included it in your movie?
AC: This shot comes from one of my favorite movies,
it's called Brainwash. It's about a woman (the blonde) who
takes over a company using psychological tactics that break
people down to their rawest emotional selves. The naked fat
man is Buddy, who she asks to strip in front of a group of
men and talks him through his childhood sexual abuse as the
explanation for his weight. I keep thinking I'll use the whole
scene, but tend to grab tiny bits from it for various projects.
She manipulates the employees of the company under the guise
of compassion and moral integrity. The shot that I use in
All Right occurs at the end of
the scene. Buddy exposes himself, physically and emotionally
as she encourages him to cry. He does and she hugs him. What
stands out for me is the complication behind compassion and
care. At the time, this scene felt a lot like what gets called
"standard procedure" by the Canadian Immigration Department
when it is really the excuse for arbitrary treatments.
MH: Your new movies have just premiered at the Impakt
Festival in the Netherlands. How was it?
AC: Supposed To was a
part of a program called "Survival of the Fittest," which
carried this description: "The rat race of modern life makes
ever greater demands on its participants. For the moment,
there is no room for compassion with the less talented. What
does stress do to people, how far can you go in your ambitions,
and what will the future of our industrial society look like?"
The Central Museum's auditorium is a black glass box that
makes day feel like night. When you're inside the building
you can see the outside darkened through the tinted glass,
but when you're outside you can't see in. Supposed
To screened second in the program. Following the first
voice of an old man saying "Help me out with these boots would
ya?" there was a loud noise. I thought something screwed up
with a speaker, but when I looked over I saw a guy on the
outside of the building with a hose spraying the side windows.
The projectionist went over and banged his fist on the glass.
The man didn't hear the banging and continued washing the
window until the projectionist went outside to tell him to
stop. The entire interaction was visible from inside the theatre
and functioned as a replacement scene for the first three
minutes of the video.
When the screening was over, I took a train back to Amsterdam
and thought about what had happened. In many ways, it was
a perfect live scene for the movie. I've often wondered how
I might want to integrate live components into my work. Maybe
this is a beginning. Two men were trying to do their jobs
and one conflicted with the other. Both men were angry and
the audience was watching. I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed
for the window washer who was not only told to stop doing
his job but was being watched by everyone inside without knowing.
I was embarrassed for the projectionist who tried to tell
the window washer to stop and in doing so became just as much
a spectacle as the disruptive window washing. And I was really
embarrassed for myself, as though I had planned the whole
thing.
This interview is a part of a collection of interviews
that Mike
Hoolboom is doing for a second volume of Fringe Film
in Canada.
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