SASKATCHEWAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA:
NEW VIEWS FROM EMERGING FILMMAKERS

Program notes by Brett Kashmere


Below Zero: New work From the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative was conceived as an opportunity to collect and screen new films by several emerging Saskatchewan filmmakers (many of whom are now scattered all across the country). The primary goal of this event is to recognize the recent endeavours of various young, committed, and largely under-appreciated filmmakers. Despite the fact that many of these filmmakers have had their work screened internationally, gathering numerous awards, recognition and respect in the process, they remain relatively unknown in many parts of Canada (including their own home province). It is this disparity that we wish to address: by instigating a forum for the exhibition and discussion of new Saskatchewan cinema in an interesting, distinct cultural environment we hope that others may be encouraged to build upon our efforts by organizing similar events in different venues.

This program also offers an opportunity to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, one of the oldest film production co-ops of its kind in Canada. Founded in 1977 by six members of the local filmmaking community, the Saskatchewan Filmpool's membership now totals over one hundred and fifty. All of the filmmakers included herein are active Filmpool members, while the majority of the films inBelow Zero have benefited from Filmpool production assistance. As a non-profit artist- run centre committed to supporting, encouraging, and assisting independent Saskatchewan film, the Filmpool provides an open, accessible environment where young filmmakers can develop their filmmaking skills following post-secondary training (all of the filmmakers included in this program are University of Regina graduates). Besides dispersing production funding, equipment access, facilities, resource materials and workshops to its members, the Filmpool also exhibits Canadian independent work, sponsors tours of Members' films across Canada, and brings other filmmakers to Saskatchewan for screenings and lectures.[1]

The films selected forBelow Zero have been loosely organized into two programs. The first program includes filmmakers that work within or at the edges of Canada's first person documentary tradition.[2] The Toronto-based film programmer and festival coordinator Karen Tisch has noted how "Canadian documentary filmmakers have increasingly turned to their family and friends as subjects, creating more intimate films."[3] The films in the first half of Below Zero bear this observation out, emphasizing the gaps and contradictions of personal experience over didactic exposition. The second program groups together works that feature more conceptually based approaches to their material. Less intimate, these films emphasize form and structure over personal storytelling. Despite these evident differences, the films in both programs share many similarities of purpose and approach. In both programs you'll find that narrative development repeatedly recedes to formal experimentation, poetic expression, or personal reflection. The recurring tendencies towards hand-held photography, hand-processing, and the use of contrapuntal sound, meanwhile, reveal stylistic overlaps between personal documentary and experimental modes of production.

Despite increasingly sketchy projection, not to mention ever-troublesome optical sound, 16mm remains the preferred production and exhibition format amongst Filmpool members. Many of these filmmakers continue to shoot and edit their work on 16mm even as the Filmpool moves to accommodate digital tools and approaches. The potential offered by optical printing, an identifiable trope of recent Filmpool productions, is another advantage of 16mm production. Besides being a tool for optical effects such as freeze framing, skip (speeded up) and stretch (slowed down) printing, superimpositions and other image manipulations, the optical printer allows filmmakers to reprint Super 8 and 8mm footage to 16mm stock, facilitating the recovery, reproduction, and reworking of fragile and/or forgotten images and home movies.

Like 16mm, Super 8 has again become an important option for younger generations of prairie filmmakers. The simplicity, accessibility and affordability of Super 8 equipment and projectors throughout Saskatchewan make Super 8 a vital production format. (There was a time when you could visit any flea market, garage sale or church bazaar between Moosomin and Lloydminster and find a decent Super 8 camera or projector for ten bucks Ð I hope this is still the case). Furthermore, the One Take Super 8 event, held annually in Regina, offers an innovative forum for the production and exhibition of Super 8 work. Organized by Alex Rogalski, the One Take event, now in its third year, aims to spur both novice and experienced filmmakers to utilize the potential of Super 8. Comprised each year of entirely new work shot specifically for the festival, the filmmakers aren't allowed to physically edit or even see their film before the night of the screening. The result is twenty fresh films made each year for less than forty dollars apiece.

A final factor that needs to be touched upon when considering the current state of independent Saskatchewan cinema is the still-influential presence of former University of Regina, and current Concordia University film professor, Richard Kerr. After leaving behind his Ontario- based "Escarpment School" colleagues (including Rick Hancox, Philip Hoffman, Michael Hoolboom and Gary Popovich) in 1986,[4] Kerr arrived at the University of Regina and distinctively altered the landscape of Saskatchewan filmmaking. The filmmakers in this program are, essentially, the last generation of filmmakers taught by Kerr in Regina. Now in Montreal, Kerr's imprint is still noticeable in many of the films being produced at the Saskatchewan Co- op. More specifically, Kerr's tendency towards hybrid design, determined by his dual interests in documentary/visual essay and more formally experimental work, is mirrored in the films being screened here. As University of Toronto film professor, critic and scholar Bart Testa writes, "Much of [Kerr's] filmmaking can be seen as a series of confrontations between documentary and narrative and between both these modes and avant-garde film practices."[5] The representational imagery of the films in below zero, composed with an assortment of both experimental and documentary tactics (occasionally in the same work), reveal Kerr's continued influence on this current wave of Saskatchewan filmmakers.

As the University of Regina's Film and Video Production program (now titled Media Production and Studies) reorganizes to incorporate new media, the future of 16mm (and Super 8) filmmaking within the university curriculum appears unclear.[6] The films collected together in below zero, however, supply evidence of a strong alternative to the philosophical and technological shifts that are presently taking place inside the academy. The continued investment in amateur film equipment and strategies (such as in-camera editing and hand- processing) by Filmpool practitioners indicates that the rhetoric surrounding digital cinema hasn't completely effaced the impulse towards emulsion-based, artisanal filmmaking in Saskatchewan.

NOTES

[1] Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, "20 Years of United Independents 1977-1997: Anniversary Tour," (Regina: Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, 1997), n.p.

[2] For more on Canadian first person cinema, see Landscape with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman, eds. Karyn Sandlos and Mike Hoolboom (Toronto: Insomniac Press and Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, 2001).

[3] Karen Tisch, "The Artist Stripped Bare: Cinematic Self Portraits," online, www.nfb.ca

[4] For more on the Escarpment School see Mike Cartmell, "Landscape with Shipwreck," Landscape with Shipwreck, eds. Sandlos and Hoolboom, p. 227. For more on its principle members, see Mike Hoolboom, Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada (Toronto: Gutter Press, 1997).

[5] Bart Testa, Richard Kerr: Overlapping Entries (Regina: MacKenzie Art Gallery, 1994), p. 8.

[6] At the same time I should acknowledge the recent hand-processing activities of current University of Regina film professor Gerald Saul. Besides teaching hand-processing techniques, Saul is also currently at work on Toxic, "a series of six films, which utilize hand- processed images to explore disease, decay, death and rebirth." See Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, "25th Anniversary Celebration Program" (Regina, Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, 2002), p. 12.

PROGRAM ONE
Transfixed (Jason Britski, 2001, 16mm, 2 min)
Go Buy A Kite (Katherine Skelton, 2001, Super 8, 3 min)
sIgh (Dianne Ouellette, 2001, 16mm, 9 min)
Reflections (Gayle Metz, 2001, 16mm, 3 min)
Strange News from Another Star (Jason Nielsen, 2001, 16mm, 9 min)
Family Outing (Mark Bradley, 2001, 16mm, 6 min)

PROGRAM TWO
scream of this conversation (robert.daniel.pytlyk, 2001, Super 8, 3 min)
up with nothing (Brett Kashmere, 2002, 16mm, 5 min)
Babelangue (Troy Rhoades, 2000, 16mm, 6 min)
Japan: Kesei Line Single Take (Ian Toews, 2001, 16mm, 5 min)
block[s] (Shane Eason, 2001-02, 16mm, 15 min)