Ostriches, outsiders

By Irene Bindi

Walker Publishing Filed to Moving Image

Leslie Supnet, The Peak Experience, 2018. Image courtesy Winnipeg Film Group.

I should not be writing sad songs
While a child plays on the street
Not watching the sky
Stops to listen as the bird sings
While waiting for the bombs to fall

—excerpt from “I am a child,” Duncan Mercredi

The words above are a poem fragment from legendary Winnipeg Cree and Métis poet Duncan Mercredi, who through his words has inspired generations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous poets and has contributed to exposing a counternarrative to previously accepted benign mythology of the province of Manitoba, and the nation of Canada. A city of 850,000 people, Winnipeg is at the center of a continent, at a confluence of large rivers and a large rail juncture, crisscrossed by the path of one of the world’s largest bird migratory routes. It’s located a full ­­­­613 kilometres (almost a 7.5-hour drive) and an international boundary away from the nearest major city, Minneapolis, and is, depending on vantage, blissfully or suffocatingly isolated. Among other Indigenous nations, Winnipeg is at the heart of Red River Métis homeland, a site of historical, ongoing, and intensified struggle against the Canadian state for national sovereignty, with many Indigenous communities suffering the worst effects of a racist state policy, including enormously high levels of immiseration and incarceration due to unending state violence. The city of Winnipeg has historically been drawn and redrawn on lines of racial segregation.

It has also been a site of strong labor and socialist movements, including the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, which inspired workers the world over, and powerful Indigenous resistance movements, from the Métis Red River Resistance and beyond, as detailed in recent books including the expansive history of Métis nationhood The North-West is Our Mother by revolutionary leader Louis Riel’s great grand-niece’s Jean Teillet, Owen Toews’s Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg; Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner’s Rooster Town; and Indigenous Resistance & Development in Winnipeg, edited by Kathy Mallett and Shauna MacKinnon.

From this position of continental centrality, stark social and political division, and continuous confluence, Winnipeg has also been a self-appointed, though often fragmented, artistic island. It’s a place exemplary of the fact that, whether through choice or circumstance, art from what’s thought of in the artistic mainstream as the peripheries eschews the cultural center, and to some extent the profit-driven worlds of film and art that market in trends, scale, and notoriety. Also through choice or circumstance, alternative practices here embrace a regionalism that acknowledges distinct material and spiritual surrounds. Of course, not all such practices do so with the pet discourses of the “art world” held deliberately aloft or in contempt. I’d even suggest that many Winnipeg artists operate with absolute disregard for the one circle of hell held for art within the hegemonic drift of capital, and, whether by choice or through circumstance, we do so resolutely.

For almost a year the words of the Italian politician Giuseppe Conte, observing with incredulity the inaction of his peers last fall to the genocide of Palestinians, have been ringing in my ears: “You cannot hide your head in sand that’s soaked in blood.” Such a flatly factual accusation casts a dark and broadly applicable lens, and I’ve admittedly lost some interest in situating artistic traditions of experiment amid tracking the fires of war, genocide, and environmental collapse. I also understand the scope of art’s influence as ubiquitous, though not always apparent, and that art can be both assistive to the forces of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism, and part of the struggle against them.

When I view artworks now, I’m thinking less about the location from within an artistic tradition a film may have emerged, or where it might fit into a set of artistic practices. What interests me today is how an artwork impacts our sense of reality; how it emerges from and in turn has capacity to influence its social and political context. This doesn’t mean that the only work I hold to have political value is overtly political, nor that an inventive and formally challenging film cannot be rupturing to the logic of ruling power, nor for that matter, that a metaphysical film might not also have the potential to offer such a rupture. But those potential charges lie in more than the artwork itself.

The message that we are more than individuals is one of the many treasures that I found in the program of Winnipeg films that artist-filmmaker Rhayne Vermette has put together for the Walker Art Center: Our Winnipeg, Ourselves. This plurality is in its title. Formally so diverse, these films share some geography, divergence from a multitude of standards, and, importantly to me, have nothing to do with profit; in that sense, they are cultural emissions that can refuse, in ways and degrees, the logic of a dominant culture. Each film in this program, in some way, has the capacity to proffer a challenge to the accepted.

Within it are a range of films that confront existing conditions. Counter-hegemonic works aren’t always those that present a formal or textual challenge. The conversation between what one could call a genre experimental film, and a film experiment that pulls you out of rote practice of viewership, is full of exciting potential in itself. And these brief films by Winnipeg (and formerly Winnipeg) filmmakers are in vibrant conversation, their carefully considered chronology igniting a variety of associations, challenges, ideas, rejections, and celebrations.

Many of the filmmakers in this program have worked on each other’s films over the past few decades, and many continue to collaborate in intimate film communities that have evolved over this same period, from those predominantly centered on the Winnipeg Film Group and Video Pool, to a more diffuse set of groupings and relationships connected to the broader community.

Through their metaphysical and investigatory nature, Vermette’s own films are sometimes fully rupturing of, and at other times place points of pressure upon, many locations of mainstream cultural ubiquity. Sometimes this occurs directly with humour, sometimes through the force of demonstrating narratives that diverge wildly from those the narrative or experimental film conversant might recognize. Vermette’s films, with the films of Our Winnipeg, Ourselves as a whole, are, by being themselves, connected within a reality that has little to do with the concerns of mainstream artistic production. Each film in the program emerges as one point in a constellation of wonders, vastly different, yet viewed together, as close as siblings. My brief discussion of them appears below, in the program’s order.

In a fitting start to a program that holds the communal as a central tension, Domus (2017) is unique for the way that its process of spiritual, temporal, and spatial layering provides an entry from one artist’s creative universe into their perception of another’s. I’ve experienced no film analogue to Domus; neither mimicry nor reference, it is an act of exploration. So even as the film could be said to be “about” iconoclastic artist-architect Carlo Mollino, we don’t receive a transposed Mollino aesthetic or an explication of his practice. We do receive a transposition of Vermette’s experience of Mollino as articulated through her own distinct practice. The word “influence” feels too flat an application for a work that is nothing if not spiritual; if there’s an expression that comes closer to what Domus enacts, it might be possession.

Black Rectangle (2014) is likewise possessed. Like a perfect song, it alters time; the basic black frame scales up into euphoric but controlled tiers of audiovisual intensity, and the film redraws the line between abstract and nonobjective cinema with transcendent simplicity.

Like most of Vermette’s films, Tricks Are for Kiddo (2012) feels distinctly propelled by sound, in this case the sound of the optical printer pushing film through its mechanism as the medium’s textures become both the visual and aural subject.

Ed Ackerman’s Two Taa Too (1992)is a reanimation of his 1986 sound and concrete poetry film Primiti Too Taa. Ackerman describes that film as “larva in memory of Kurt Schwitters (artist poet 1887–1948), under the influence of Norman McLaren.” Two Taa Two literalizes “film within film” by implanting fragments of the original into three registered film gauges: super 8, 16, and 35mm. Taking Schwitters’s “sonata” reference as the instigation, it becomes an explicit medium mash-up where, in the final iteration, various film gauges pose and chase one another around the frame via sounds hummed, hissed, and blurted in the filmmaker’s vocalizations from the original, subverting its concrete poetic ground and playfully introducing a new layer of questioning that the film prods throughout its frenetic two minutes. Two Taa Too has pressing questions: nnz kkr muu? pggiv muu?

I’m not sure what the originating sound is in Mike Maryniuk’s vibrantly colored one-minute melange of step-printed temporary tattoos, Tattoo Step (2008), but in combination with quick and energetic animation, it gives the impression of a pitched-down version of the film’s image track run across a 16mm projector’s optical head.

In another one-minute film, Omid Moterassed’s Desk Study (2024), bright blue scratches from hand processing take the fore and relegate the film’s long shot of a sparse room with an ornate mirror propped on the floor, to the ground. Half-way through the placid shot, the mirror vanishes, re-emerging within a beat, floating in darkened space. The title could be a reference to Vermette’s Desk Study No.1, a 13-second collage of a cutting matte littered with meticulously cut film frames, pulled along in quasi-comedic gesture by a light melody on clavicembalo. The lightness of the fickle mirror might reflect the comedic lilt of the earlier film’s music.

In another reach across divided space, Divya Mehra’s Allow Suffering to Speak (I’m too sad to tell you) (2016), the artist faces the camera, reading with emotion from a text below frame. The film is silent and, unless lip-reading, the viewer cannot register the content of the artist’s words, heightening attention to emotions as they register on her face. The protective gaze of an evil-eye necklace passes below the frameline as Mehra’s gaze shifts between camera and text, an oscillating protection from across the divide.

Ekene Emeka Maduka’s Spirits of Abstruse Lizards (2023) uses lushly saturated Sirkian drama with a Pinocchio character on one end of a conversation between reunited paramours; the fibbing “Pino” has called up his well-to-do lover from a hospital bed. The filmic space ruptures as the fibber then tells a story against a blank red screen with yellow subtitles and voice, in part an Igbo fable about lizards suffering painful secrets both in isolation, and together as part of a silent society. In a flash of return the bourgeois lover, still listening at a distance, is seen to collapse at the story’s close.

In I for NDN (2011), Darryl Nepinak and Clint Enns use found material to parody a racist caricature in a children’s lesson that dehumanizes Indigenous people, equating “apple,” “elephant,” and “Indian” in a sing-song vowel exercise. Nepinak appears in a box, below identical boxes each featuring an illustration of an apple and an elephant. He bops along to the lesson until the term “Indian” is uttered, then pauses in confused perturbation.

The program closes with four films that form a spiritual quartet, ultimately cycling back to the metaphysical space of its start. Rachel Beaulieu’s film poem, Children of the Stars (2023) embraces personal narration with directness: “Our ancestors teach us to lead the good life.” A dream-like movement from shimmering fireworks and the interior of tipis with views to the skies above shifts into images of a large powwow on a dazzlingly bright day and children playing. The film closes with the gentle sound of a child’s voice calling their mother.

A pensive reflection on infinitude, Charlene Moore’s NIPI (2023) is composed of closely framed footage from a family fishing trip. The healing force of water, through shimmering light and sound, are a backdrop to ancestral stories and contemporary reflections on the universe in poetic voiceover.

Heidi Phillips’s Isolating Landscapes (2007) continues on water with a sailboat tilted across the screen and a tortured drawing of a heart. “DURING THAT TIME YOU FELT VERY DISTANT” and other pained titles appear over footage heavily blurred into abstraction. Emitting uncertainty and precarity, the film’s final title “AND THEN I SAID THE RIGHT THING AT THE RIGHT TIME” seems a heartbreaking plaint to the tenuousness of connection.

Leslie Supnet’s The Peak Experience (2018) layers a new age self-help track to undertake a tonal transformation using a thread of three simultaneous screens. It moves slowly from the quasi-parodic to the ethereal. The film’s metered tone and combination of found, shot, and sparkling animated imagery are ambiently rhythmic, gradually propelling the viewer through a hypnotic temporal distortion.

Carefully chain-linked, each film in Our Winnipeg, Ourselves is connected to the next in sequence, and to the rest in array. From intimate material observances, to satirical digs at the racist ruling order, to explosive temporal and spatial investigations, they cohere like punctures of light under dark cover.

When it feels that the most crucial work of culture is the work of undoing, the term “artist” feels both narrow and inadequately broad; but every artistic gesture that is antithetical to central destructive forces masked by soft power, whether through poetry or pointed reference, feels valuable, just as every gesture that pretends those forces don’t exist feels conspiratorial with our common enemy, and therefore self-defeating to the urgent struggle for basic survival.

Extra-institutional relationships that grow between art communities, and between these and other politically driven communities within the city of Winnipeg continue to inspire me, and I’m grateful for the kind of regionalism that Winnipeg artists embrace.

In the broad art world of the West, recognition of disruption is often mistaken as praxis, granting permission to relax into the rightness of a political affiliation, into the rightness of the recognition of a specific injustice, and ultimately leaving all as it stands. From within such strict limitation, credulity of art institutions, acceptance of their consumptive frameworks, and ignorance of their role in cultural hegemony, the mere acknowledgment of a political reality or a blatant injustice becomes an act of goodness and rectitude that ultimately belies action.

Film and other art as commonly consumed is no more separate from a warmongering class society than anything else, and the “world” of art—its curators, institutions, and academic frameworks—not only frequently fails to manifest an obstruction to that society, they also often concretize its continuance. Of course art is not inherently isolated, nor inherently to blame for this. The taming of art through closed and enclosing structures, contexts developed over generations and bolstered by a culture of uncritical limitation as supported through state, media, and education, and as driven by corporate and state power, certainly is.

So what could material challenge to hegemonic power actually look like in the space of cinema? The small ruptures that art can afford are certainly part of rising counter-hegemonic waves, and artists, including film artists, are part of laying the ground, but our recognition of existing power, and our counter-offerings, are one small part of creating something vast enough to present a direct challenge. You cannot stick your head in sand that’s soaked in blood, wherever that sand may be, and there is nothing more limiting to our participation in the tasks of resistance and struggle for change than the ability to think of ourselves as ourselves; more than one.▪︎

Experience Our Winnipeg, Ourselves, curated by Rhayne Vermette Friday November 22 at 7pm. Learn more and get tickets here.