The cinema possesses a power that extends even to those who do not look upon it. Like the giant screens onto which its images are projected, film towers above us, a monumental force whose rhythms shape our lives, tracing patterns in our brains that impel us to move and think and feel in specific ways. In the light emanating from certain movies, this power feels worthy of obedience—at least to me, for the pleasures that I have experienced at its feet, in its glare, are unique in this world. Not every film provokes an electric sensation. Not every film crawls up the spine in that ineffable, special way. But submitting to the cinema’s energies can occasionally engender an inimitable and wordless thrill so potent that when it enters my body it feels just reward for all the hours lost and minutes spilled in its honour. Still, nothing can captivate so effectively in only the agreeable sense, this form of “entertainment” included, and years of immersion in the medium I love, years of studying media theory and mainstream cinematic conventions, have brought me face to face with film’s more adverse implications.
To me, it is clear that conventional narrative progression has a repressive function. Traditionally plotted texts consist, in their most basic form, of a beginning, a middle, and an end, plus a desiring protagonist that moves (us) through these story stages towards a final goal. The middle of a work may appear free from design or restriction, a chaotic space of slidings, errors, and postponement. But even the innermost portions of this vast, allegedly wild zone are subject to prohibitionary forces: certain occurrences, details, and concepts are suppressed in favour of others in order to provoke excitement, or to support a (momentarily concealed but ever-present) textual coherence; repetitions package the body of a work into a series of digestible slices. And no matter how meandering the heart of a story is, no matter how many detours are accommodated therein, in paradigmatic storytelling, the middle can only ever innocuously threaten deviance or opaqueness, for it is customarily reincorporated into meaning by the text’s end. The hero inevitably maneuvers past the murky central space of a work to a conclusion that imprisons all that came before it in the service of some ultimate knowledge. He arrives at an ending intended to distill the text’s supposedly haphazard intermediary events into a succinct, clear message, to squeeze the work into the boundaries of clarity. Of course, the finale of a work can never fully organize the excess of its centre, but to adhere to narrative orthodoxy, a conclusion must try; an exemplary ending refers us back to the middle only to wrench meaning from therein.
Habitually reproducing this specific way of structuring life energies in our cultural artifacts has two main troubling side effects: 1) occurrences such as heterosexual coupling, marriage, childbirth, and funerals – which have been plucked almost arbitrarily from the maelstrom of human experience to operate as common substance-imparting endings in stories – begin to resemble logical endpoints. And though the tenor or glow of fullness that they gain through this process is artificial, they are nonetheless re-assimilated into reality as “natural” sources of significance. 2) Conventional narrative always presumes that the reader is like the protagonist in at least this one way: that she is similarly propelled through the text by a wish to reach an illuminating conclusion. In other words, mainstream texts disconcertingly assume that the desire for a neatly composed ontology, for a patterning regulated by some larger meaning, sits at the base of human experience, a desire to which we can all relate. By incessantly arranging our stories according to this rationale, texts become their own self-perpetuating evidence for the idea that the desire for higher purpose is universal, and, as a result, occlude other potential guiding desires from claims to legitimacy.
Classical Hollywood Cinema and its tidy descendants do not question this dynamic, but rather contribute to it. Devices that privilege story such as continuity editing, in combination with film’s ability to re-present the human figure and its environment convincingly, further normalize this configuration and its contents as natural; image’s addition to the mix only increases the hold of canonic plotting and its attendant ideology over us. But what is lost in this contract? Why do we restrict ourselves, limit our experience in this way? What would happen if we, say, unlocked ourselves to desire itself as positive, rather than a means to a (deceptively) reassuring end? What potential lusts are buried in the middle, paved over by or beyond the edge of the story, the celluloid altogether? Is the closing off of desire to particular “productive,” conclusive pleasures inescapable, or can we dislodge and radicalize desire from this order?
I want to be part of an artistic tradition that unblocks desire, unfurling it to its full, varied, strange potential. I want to open up holes for alternative pleasures in film, ever widening those holes until the absences and excesses often removed from plots for their (nebulously decided) “lack of necessity” become blissful in and of themselves. I want to employ cinematic devices in an unruly fashion, make films and film-inspired objects that deconstruct themselves as they progress rather than spin themselves towards an irresponsibly exclusionary idea of what constitutes wholeness. But in order to do this, to what degree must I destroy the grand, imposing, mesmerizing and awe-inspiring storytelling medium I adore despite its tyranny? I may want to annihilate movies’ pervasive neat presentation, but I am equally impelled to celebrate film, to build a monument in its name, to make others feel what I feel when I lose myself in its hazy, soft glow, to express the cinema’s beauty to those immune to its alchemic charms, to put my finger on this glorious substance that I see flowing through our world.
My art practice is born of these at times seemingly contradictory, at times oddly harmonious compulsions, caught between them. In my work, I attempt to distill cinema’s particular magic, then communicate it through non-traditional means. I use any tool at my disposal to achieve the same emotional effects of conventional cinema, use any channel open to me to recreate that mysterious, characteristic visceral reaction, except reproducing the formula that induced that strange condition in me in the first place. I might imagine how film’s affect would manifest itself physically or visually or sonically, how it might exist in the world if it were an object and not a state of being, and then build that object. I zoom in on different components of films (backgrounds, movements within the frame, actions, colours, sounds, grain, texture, storytelling/filmic techniques, narrative fragments) and see how isolating these particles of a medium, stretching them out, reconfiguring them, or redeploying them outside of their primary context (in a sculpture, say, rather than a blockbuster) weirds or does not weird their source, captures or does not capture the essence of their origin. I experiment with processing techniques in a disorderly manner. I string together sound/images in a fashion that lightly, teasingly alludes to narrative, comes close to touching it, but then pushes it away before fully inhabiting its structures. I construct machines, videos, installations to synthetically prove bizarre, unscientific hypotheses about what gives cinema its vigor...I move through these oblique, sideways investigatory procedures in the hopes of encapsulating the distinct mood and pleasures of a tautly-crafted movie, of evoking those inarticulable tingly sensations, while avoiding conventional film’s flagrant pitfalls. I labour to re-inscribe classical film, to reimagine the function or placement of cinematic devices in such a way that allows them to take off and take on new valences.