Globe and Mail revels in Practical Dreamers

Every generation has its own cinematic landscape of the imagination.

Those large figures looming from the grand screen at the front of a movie theatre imprint on our minds all kinds of deceptions and delights. Over time, these accumulate, and a certain amount of our life view is nudged and streamlined according to what we have seen on those screens. (Not quite what happens when we watch movies on television screens at home, thank you, Marshall McLuhan.) What we Canadians saw until the 1960s and '70s was almost exclusively made in America, invariably constructed around a classical Hollywood narrative template. Good guys won, bad guys lost. White guys were good, bad guys were a different colour. Women who let men have their way rarely married and settled down and had kids with them.

We made few distinctions, despite having preferences. We watched everything: horror pictures, westerns, screwball comedy and drama.

Then, suddenly, another world opened up, at film societies, in little art houses or in language classes at universities: foreign films, with subtitles, unresolved situations, mysterious scrambled timelines, even no plots. Some moviegoers breathed a huge sigh of relief: Yes, there really was another portal through which to engage with the world.

The consequence of this fusion of indiscriminate viewing was an opulent mental treasure chest of visual imagery, all located elsewhere, not here. Filmmakers play with these optical references, and audiences make links, consciously or unconsciously.

In Canada, in feature film, there are relatively few references to our own culture, which we (correctly) insist is significantly different from the U.S. experience. Most Canadians are completely unfamiliar with the thousands of films, good, bad and indifferent, that have been made right here, by those who live among us.

Perhaps Canadian cinema can claim to be the least-seen movie product in the world. Too bad.

Everyone should read Mike Hoolboom's Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists and see the work of his more than two dozen moviemaking subjects. Hoolboom opens up a vast territory of investigation and playfulness about films that have the particularity to make us feel right at home. The task of seeing the films, like reading this book, takes a bit of work, but it's worth it. The prerequisite is an open mind. (We can do that: Not long ago, no one would dream of eating raw fish, and look at us now.)

Hoolboom's primer assists us in grasping the meaning of the work of some of the more obscure film artists working in our midst. His interview style is unmatchable: His introductory paragraphs are provocative and lucid. The writing reaches back in time and into Hoolboom's own excellent work and filmmaking experience. He infuses with fleet phrase an aura of significance to his subject. (Where is his interview with himself?) By conducting the interviews on paper (or by e-mail), he elicits the wit and insight and the very thought processes of his subjects. This work is in the tradition of Godard and Truffaut and other filmmakers who became devoted to an examination of the work of their peers.

Hoolboom: 'How do you see the ongoing disconnect between production and exhibition? Do you feel that most artists' work simply shows to other artists, and that this in-crowd insularity is creating a body of work whose means and messages lie further and further from any who don't already know the secret handshake, possess the decoder ring, speak the riddle?'

Montreal video artist Nelson Henricks responds: 'I think there are ways for people who have no education in art or experimental film to enter my work. I have employed narrative and tropes derived from popular culture to facilitate this. I don't think every artist needs to do this, but some of us do. This is a niche I am happy to inhabit because I adore pop culture. And art. I am a pop artist!'

Another, from Cree painter, performance/installation artist and film- and video-maker Kent Monkman: 'Judeo-Christian understanding places the centre of the universe in the Middle East -- that's where attention always seems to be focused in the mainstream media. But if you don't believe in that way of seeing the world, the centre of the universe lies elsewhere. ... My work is about presenting another perspective ... inserting lost (Aboriginal) narratives, the histories that have been obliterated and the absent mythologies.'

What one learns from Hoolboom's investigation is that these are more artists than filmmakers. They paint or sculpt the screen with their images, and references to painting and sculpture are woven throughout the analysis of the work. This film art ought to be seen in the appropriate venue: art gallery or dedicated screening facility.

Toronto-based filmmaker Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof: 'the general public has been fed the beautiful, clean image. They regard experimental cinema as beginners' cinema produced by those who can't make it in the commercial world. I doubt that ... lovers of filmmaking in [U.S. experimental filmmaker Stan] Brakhage's terms ever wanted their films to be placed next to commercially consumable blockbusters, far from it.'

Hoolboom, by expressing his love and empathy for the genre, through penetrating language and thoughtful interrogation, illuminates the work of these artists who dwell in peculiar obscurity, seen here and there by handfuls of admirers.

(An index would have been more than useful, an amazing game in which a reader examines the lacework of interconnection among not only the predecessors who inspired these artists but also the artists who cross-reference themselves by collaborating with each other.)

On the other hand, the much smaller Volume One of editor (and scholar) George Melnyk's The Young, the Restless, and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers, is a much chattier, more conventional approach to the written exchange between questioner and interviewee. The responses from the filmmakers are more whimsical, less intellectual. You can read these interviews like magazine pieces. They are primarily Canadian feature film directors, and the interviewers are respected academics familiar with their subjects: Anne Wheeler, Guy Maddin, Gary Burns, the late Jean-Claude Lauzon and more.

I found Melnyk's introduction particularly provocative in light of Hoolboom's unapologetic literary approach: 'an interview is very much of the moment ... an interview done the next day, by a different interviewer ... could result in something completely different.'

Only Mike Hoolboom could have conducted the interviews in Practical Dreamers, whereas the questions posed and responses provided in The Young, the Restless and the Dead reflect little of the interviewers, and just a smidgen about the subjects. Nonetheless, as Melnyk comments: 'I have launched this series of interviews with the hope that scholars and the public will have access to creators of cinema ... whenever required.'

Each of these books has a place in a film lover's library.

Gail Singer is a Canadian filmmaker and writer currently studying drawing and painting and other fine arts.