It’s a strange & lovely experience to see an old film in a movie theater.  It’s strange because I’m doing what someone over fifty years ago was doing as well but reacting to it with very different ways of thinking about relationships, experiences, etc.   It’s lovely for that exact same reason.  I like the romance of old Hollywood films, especially within my perception of the perfect atmosphere of film-viewing – the lights are dark, only about 2 dozen people in a theater that can hold 200 and a hush fills the space instead of murmurs and crinkly wrappers.  (Even though I do my share of whispered talking).  I’m the first to admit that I overly romanticize certain aspects of cinema but I get a little thrill out of watching older films in theaters because for a few moments I get to pretend I’m watching it at the same time it was released and a few minutes after the film is over, the spell is broken and I start to overlap the ideas from then with the present.

Gay’s comments about how anything’s better than a job are more idealistic now rather than a statement of fact, a sentiment that, at the time of filming, was transitioning from truth to ideal, with John Huston and Arthur Miller deconstructing the Western.  The difference being that people now try to move from having a regular job towards doing something that isn’t viewed as a “job”, whereas Gay was trying to hold onto something that was fading out.

Some of the parallels and observations are quite obvious.  Isabelle Steers – horses.  Gay, Roslyn, Perce and Guido are all misfits and Gay refers to the Mustangs as misfit horses.  Roslyn’s outburst in the desert, jerking and bucking like the tied up horses.  The men all (except maybe Perce but I can’t recall for sure) all impart their own notions of what Roslyn is without ever asking her.  She makes men feel happy, she exudes life, she’s living while the others aren’t.  There are a few moments here and there where she starts to explain/assert herself but for the most part she’s treated much in the same way the actress that plays her has been treated – a desired symbol of sex that has always been possessed and directed rather than listened to.  The only one that seems to actually do that, listen to Roslyn, is Perce, possibly the result of both he and Roslyn living their lives as throwaways.  Neither one of them has any real family, Isabelle is just about the closest thing Roslyn has to family and Perce never had anyone cry for him before (after the rodeo).

Eli Wallach’s Guido is fascinating.  He comes across as boyish and shy at first but the more you listen to him talk, especially about his life and Roslyn, the times when he seems the most lost in this thoughts and speaking without considering what he’s saying and to whom, those are when he appears the scariest.  He speaks about his wife’s death with a coldness that doesn’t seem to ring true for a man who seemingly had the most loving wife in the world but died because he had a flat tire.  Then, when Roslyn breaks down in the desert, after she calls him out for trying to get her to leave Gay for him, he tells Gay that women are malicious and will always try to drive them (men)/him down and that he (Guido) should know.  This is actually the point where I started thinking of a little history of Guido – that either he killed his wife himself or that an accident really did happen and he just chose to not get help to her because he knew what would happen.  Anything can happen in the country – in the West – where you’re often left to fend for yourself and with the devices you have on hand.

It’s apparent that Roslyn is being reduced from human being to animal by those around her.  In a way, she does it to herself by not speaking up and not taking control.  Except that she does, it’s just that no one listens.  When she’s putting on a show, that’s when she’s adored but when she tries to defend the defenseless are the times when she is, literally, pushed aside.  So then what?  The ending is bothersome, to me.  Gay changes, he allows the horses to go free, it just seems that he wanted to be the one to decide that it happen rather than let Roslyn, a woman, anyone else, make him let go – either of the Mustangs or the old ways of the West.  He was willing, he admits throughout the film that he’s a changing man who was doing things for a woman that he never did before.  But like anyone with a healthy amount of pride and stubbornness to them, he only agreed to let go on his own terms.

There are several other elements of this film that are fascinating and at times prophetic.  The way the men talk about Roslyn/Marilyn.  The despair in her voice when she tells Perce that she isn’t sure where she belongs after her asks if she belongs to Gay.  The way the we, the camera, everyone objectifies her.  The fact that it was the last film Clark Gable ever made and the last full film of Monroe’s.  The Hollywood myth is built and fortified with this film.  It is one of the most complexly simple movies.  It tells you what it is and what it’s about throughout, you just have to watch and listen.

It felt like I was taking a step down with my current topic and writing on something that anyone could write about.  It’s vaguely interesting, nothing more.  I still feel that way.  There’s even a part of me that wishes I could change back but then I wonder if that would do me any good.  It wouldn’t, because the problem isn’t the topic – it’s the writing, the writer.

I know what it is I want, regardless of what people think of me.  But, I do wonder if I can ever be that.

This kind of cognitive decline could have probably been depicted with a made up character since most of the film is a blend of fact and fictionalized memory.  But, The Iron Lady takes the story of a real and once powerful woman, whose persona and actions still arouse volatile feelings of resentment and pride, and tries to take you inside her mind.  How she may have perceived herself, her actions and the people around her.  Streep is startling as Margaret Thatcher, not just because of how similar she appeared to look but I became convinced that the twitches and arched eyebrows and mannerisms were all drawn from the real Margaret Thatcher and I’m not even old enough to remember anything about her.

To suffer from dementia is cruel enough on its own, you could even argue to see it happen to someone is worse.  Lloyd turns it into a point of fascination with an interpretation of how Thatcher thinks and interprets her own world around her – while still at a point of knowing what she is suffering from.  A particular point to notice that frequently occurs is when Streep’s Thatcher interacts with her late-husband Denis, played by an energetic in a slightly off-his-rocker way Jim Broadbent, and the real people around her such as her daughter and various minders.  Her attempts at hiding her conversations with Denis are poignant because you can tell that she is still aware enough of her condition to know she needs to hide it.  There is a bit of a shadow-personality element to Broadbent’s portrayal of Denis, at least that’s how I felt, because he’s not actually portraying Denis as he was in real life.  Rather, Denis, in the film, is a shard from Thatcher’s mind – a combination of memory and Self because the her conversations with him are essentially with herself, the Id, Ego and Super-Ego take on a whole new meaning when portrayed through the film’s interpretation of Thatcher.

The element that I find the most fascinating about this film is that this is one of those films that tries to play out how Margaret Thatcher thinks or may have thought, not provide you with a detailed account of her life year-by-year.  The politics are there, they shaped her and she shaped a nation – for better or for worse. How do you show what goes on in someone else’s mind?  You make your best guess because no person, government, corporation of film will ever succeed in fully deciphering that last bastion of the mind – because when you take away all the trappings of a person that is all they are left with.

The individual experience isn’t quite as individual as you may think, what’s unique is how we give it expression (I think that may also be the reason we have so many sequels) and you can’t standardize forms of expression.

Cinematic expressions of feelings, in this case of melancholy, empathy and pain, are difficult to communicate broadly enough so everyone understands or feels what the film is trying to convey.  This is even further complicated when viewers bring in their own evaluative opinions of whether a film was good or bad.  This kind of quality assessment seems symptomatic of even larger concerns within cinema – the preference of art house films over mainstream.  What then qualifies as art house cinema?  Some think it’s only French films, or all European films, this is in contrast to mainstream – does mainstream only mean Hollywood, or all American films?  Or is mainstream cinema defined as big budget films?  If someone tends to watch films with lower budgets, is it because they don’t think mainstream films are good?  This evaluation of cinema seems counterproductive when engaging with the object we are viewing because our role as spectator is already being predetermined by all the other films we have seen and have also placed value judgements on.

I think this is getting far too esoteric now.  We objectify the image because in some way it is an experience that we believe we can encapsulate or hold onto, when in fact the object cannot be retained.  We put a lot of things on pedestals because we want to value them.  They mean something to us that someone else cannot fathom, not entirely.  Whether The Way did that successfully or not isn’t something I’m going to judge but I do feel it’s interesting that so much weight is given to a box, or stones, or idols that aren’t real – they exist(ed) only within the cinematic – but we evaluate them nonetheless.

These days there are very few places that ask you to work with 30 year old technology but that’s exactly what SAW Video did.   As part of their 30^thanniversary, they commissioned artists to create short videos using only analog technology and four videos were chosen: Utah 1978 by Montrealers Emily Pelstring and Jessica Mensch, Evolution de l’avenir by Kerry Campbell, Music Video #3 by Tyler Reekie, both from Ottawa and Gay Men and Jamaicans by Toronto native Roy Mitchell.  This commission was ultimately a challenge to not use any of the latest computer technology, editing suites or digital media.  All the artists could use was technology that was at the forefront of the media industry when SAW Video was inaugurated in 1981.  The results are surprisingly varied, humourous and thought-provoking, as examinations of visual media art’s technological past.

Old technology isn’t defunct, it’s merely a point of understanding how far we’ve come.  With an influx of computer and digital technology incorporated into our world at an increasing rate, analog seems defunct in comparison.  ¾ inch tape and eight-track have been replaced with the digitization of sound and image that can be stored and edited with far more ease and artistic flexibility.

The overall challenge of working with analog was unanimous amongst the artists, it was cumbersome to work with physically and in post-production.  “You definitely have less control,” says Kerry Campbell, an Ottawa-area artist and also known as VJ Daisy.  “your work has to be linear and that can really affect the final product. Originally I had started out with a traditional narrative … but that changed when it came to editing the final piece because this [analog technology] isn’t as compliant as digital.”

Reekie echoes Campbell when asked if he faced any challenges working with analog technology.  “What was challenging?  The equipment!  It’s just really heavy and portability became an issue.  Even when using the equipment, I had to trick it sometimes in order to get it working the right way … but HD is also too clean sometimes.  The medium tends to disappear… when you see a painting you want to see the brushstrokes and see that texture.”

“My work is DIY so I don’t mind the glitchiness of things as long as I can work around them,” Says Roy, when asked about the difference between working with analog versus digital technology.  “what excited me was the idea of using the technology that would have been around then when the speech was made…but in hindsight!  NO WAY!…  And when I started to edit I realized I’d have to learn something that really would not help me in later years…like learning to use a typewriter to write a novel…conceptually great idea…practically, not so much.”

But filming and editing in the medium of analog technology aren’t the only elements that the Jog & Shuttle project highlighted.  Across the board, memory was presented and confronted in various ways.  Whether it was Kerry’s abstract interpretation of the evolution of technology, Tyler’s video as a memory generator that questioned how the medium would remember itself, Roy’s intertwining of personal and collective memory or Emily and Jessica’s re-presentation of a childhood and imagined memory.

Says Pelstring of hers and Mensch’s Utah 1978, “We wanted to create a visual representation of a specific time.  The idea of obsolescence was conceptually and aesthetically important, especially when you’re working with this [analog] equipment.  The ‘Christmas Leg’ sketch was a way of asking how could we recreate this memory?”  Like Kerry, Pelstring and Mensch felt they had less control working in this medium but that it was also hugely educational in terms of learning what their limitations were.

The thing about looking back on 30 years of visual art media is that you develop an appreciation for both ends of the current technological spectrum.  The images strung together by magnetic tape or celluloid are representative of the different ways in which we try to re-present or evoke a particular time.  Digital media hasn’t reduced those images to 0’s and 1’s but it has changed the immediacy with which we can work with those images.  Though the Jog & Shuttle videos were created with no digital or computer technology, when you view them it becomes apparent that in order to appreciate what we work with now, we have to acknowledge just how much technology has changed how we remember, interpret and re-present those memories.

You rarely see people do what they love and even rarer still is it when people do what they love and exceed expectations.  Our own familiarity that we create with those people, often stars or celebrities,  breeds the intimacy we feel between ourselves and that other person.  Our ownership of that intimacy feeds the familiarity and when we see that familiarity on screen we engage in that nod, the inevitable bop that comes from understanding.  Just go with me on this trip for a little while.  What it is we’re understanding is our own connection to something about what we’re seeing or hearing in relation to the screen.  It’s that connection that we can’t quantify but is expressed by the nod, how do you explain understanding and interpretation when it’s so personal and individual?  What we understand is internalized and internalization can’t be reproduced by external means except through our body’s involuntary movements.

We all want to be doing what we love, that is a fundamental desire everyone has and I feel it’s safe to say that, the word ‘everyone’, literally.  We all know how difficult it is to even get to that point, let alone be successful at it.  It’s that understanding that drives the nod when we hear the song or the person speak the words that got them where they are.

It’s the old-world aura that Cunningham exudes that makes the film so charming and appealing.  At times you could almost imagine yourself walking down the streets of New York’s fashion district or SoHo, running into supermodels, artists or fashion designers who simply existed without the pretention of sweeping grandly into rooms.  Instead, those who created art shared spaces, lives and ideas freely and experimentally.  When people laughed and snorted during Eddita’s dance to the Carnival of Animals, that was a little dismaying.  The beauty of that dance was overlooked because she didn’t have the ‘look’ of a ballerina but that was one of the points of Bill’s photography, was it not?  It’s not who is in the clothes but how you wear the clothes. In order to get past the surface look, you have to learn how to see  the lines, the draping, the way the clothes move from one body to the next.

It’s this same kind of sensibility that I saw in Blank City the other night.  A documentary about the No Wave film movement that erupted in New York in the 1970s.  I say erupted because when you listen and watch the progenitors of the movement, such as Amos Poe, Lydia Lunch or Beth.B., they do an amazing job of bringing you into their world, albeit temporarily, to see how they scratched and scrabbled their way towards making films that said something about what they were experiencing.  Which is what, exactly?  How do you explain a movement that is gone and past?  Watching the clips from the films of that movement only brings us so close to understanding No Wave Cinema.  Maybe it’s the kind of filmmaking that can only be understood in terms of temporality – breaking down and building up rules all at the same time in an effort to create something new and different.  The rules of punk, so to speak.  Sometimes it doesn’t help to talk about cinema in the academic language.  The apparatus, the language, photogenie and the photoplay exist on a different plane.  Because when it comes down to creating films, you create with what you’ve got to work with.  And if that’s stolen film stock in someone’s roach-infested squatters’ apartment on Houston street then you do what you gotta do because you just can’t bring yourself to do anything else.  It’s not so much about the film as much as it is about what drives it and that’s not something that can be quantified in a single documentary about a movement.  It’s that kind of drive, desire that pulls us into this sensibility.  There’s insight in looking back that a film like Blank City provides, but to be part of that kind of movement requires a very specific time and place that cannot be planned.

I’d love to meet Lydia Lunch or Beth B., circa 1978 or now, any day.  I think they would blow my mind.

For the second time in as many months, I walked away from Bill wanting to be what he considers an elegant lady –  who doesn’t try too hard to get noticed, someone who just is.

“In the very first class that I TA’d for last year, Film 1000, one of the first things the Professor asked of his students was that, while watching all the films we were going to screen throughout the year, to keep the question “Is this art?” in the back of their minds.  And while this may seem like a simple enough task, not everyone believes films made earlier than 2005, in black and white and not by Michael Bay or Quentin Tarantino can be art in the same way people consider a painting by Van Gogh or Picasso to be art.

In order to see films as art in such a way, you first have to be open to the idea of changing how you actually watch films – to go beyond just watching films you like because you like them but to ask yourself why do you like them?  Is it the genre, story, or the use of different techniques like close-ups and lighting are used to create different tones or moods of a film.

The way in which we view and process films also affects how we may understand a film to be art.  We may go to the movies as a group with friends, talking about what was amazing or boring about them and sometimes we’ll see a movie based on the recommendation of someone else’s opinion.  But ultimately we are the ones sitting silently (hopefully) looking up at the screen and re-interpreting those images into something that only we can comprehend.

There are numerous film critics who claim that the whole process  of watching a film happens internally and our judgments and opinions of the films we watch are ultimately shaped by our own personal and individual experiences – we can see the image of a fall tree, but the person next to us may interpret that as a metaphor for life, or the person next to them may recall a memory from their childhood.  Or the person next to them may have fallen asleep.  When we go to a museum and see the art it houses, something similar happens.  We become drawn to certain pieces and gloss over others.  I have a preference for post-impressionist works of art versus….say…the Voice of Fire painting at the National Art Gallery.

Leo Tolstoy wrote, in an 1897 essay titled “What is art?” that “art is a means of communication, and is an important means of expression of any experience, or of any aspect of the human condition.”

To group: So I would ask you guys now, how would you define art?  What are some of the things that you consider to be art?

(Van Gogh slide) There are several ways of viewing art, as conventional paintings that we are used to such as portraits or abstract paintings.  (Marcel Duchamp – Urinal)  There are everyday objects that the artist turns into a commentary on some aspect of life. (Serrano) And there are seemingly innocuous sketches whose meanings lie in the materials that made them, more so than the image itself.

Not all films are going to grab your interest or lend themselves to be what you consider “art”.   One person’s consideration of art will very likely be different from someone elses’.  One person’s Weekend at Bernie’s is another’s Citizen Kane.  But in order to have a greater understanding of the human experience and condition throughout history, it may be helpful look at what a film, a sculpture, a painting or an installation of modern art is asking you to consider rather than evaluate it .”

I’m Indian, my parents are from India. I always feel like I have to offer that distinction that though I’m Indian, it is my parents that are from there, as if that makes them *real* Indians and I’m just masquerading as one.

The idea of transnationalism, or of being a part of different cultures was something discussed at length last year in one of my classes.  I mentioned that my experiences growing up were shaped by a variety of cultures and traditions, most of them unrelated to that of my parents or “my own” culture.  My professor asked, “Isn’t that a wonderful thing?” and I paused for a very long time before I answered, rather unconvincingly to some of my classmates, “Sure.”  I only said that because I was giving a presentation and did not want to go into a personal discussion of my experiences living in-between cultures during my formative years.

The thing is, it was and wasn’t wonderful.  It was great to have been exposed to such diverse cultures, many of which were interrelated in some ways and in others, vastly different.  Taiwan, Philippines and Tokyo are all countries that share similarities whether in terms of their politics, society or even their customs – yet when you experience them as an outsider and as an outsider with ties to another Asian country, those nuances or similarities and dissimilarities become apparent in relation to your own culture and how you relate to your own culture.

Where do the borders then get drawn?  And by borders, I don’t mean those physical ones that are guarded with arms and duty-free stores where you can buy comically large bottles of Jack Daniels or Amaretto.  I mean those psychological borders that one envisions or imposes upon themselves.  At what point does one say, definitively, that they are Canadian, American, Taiwanese, Japanese or even Philippino?  How does one make the distinction between being born part of one culture but then being raised within several others?

When my professor asked me “Isn’t it wonderful?” at having been raised within such diversity, I said that it was and wasn’t wonderful.  It was wonderful because of that diversity but not so wonderful because I haven’t been able to fully flesh out my own identity – specifically in determining where I belong, because I don’t feel like I actually belong anywhere.  Now whether that’s a good or a bad thing is kind of besides the point.  But the idea of feeling like you belong to a culture, or that it belongs to you is important.  How does one actually belong to anything?  I have a birth certificate that states I was born in Toronto, Canada and so therefore I am, by birth rights, a Canadian citizen.  I have documentation of this fact, I have several pieces of government issued cards that back this up as proof of my Canadian citizenship.  But my most vivid childhood memories occurred outside of my country of origin and even further still, outside the country of the culture of my parents, that I am a part of simply by having been born to two people that themselves were born in India.

In <em>American Desi</em>, Krishna/Kris, all but disregards his parents culture – his parents culture because he doesn’t feel like it is his own.  In fact he wants no part of it and attempts to convince himself that he is an American and nothing more.  It isn’t until he spends time with others connected to his Indian heritage, a Sikh, a Muslim and of course an Indian love interest that he begins to feel a connection.  Krishna’s two worlds begin to merge and his psychological borders begin to break down as he begins to accept others from his own culture and finally himself, moving from being called the Americanized version of his name, Kris, to accepting his full name – Krishna.  And if you want to get really deep and philosophical with it, you could say that he goes through a transcendence.  He moves from being Kris, cutting off part of his heritage by cutting off part of his name until he finally sees himself differently and is able to accept and share his name with that of a deity, his mind transcends and ultimately accepts that he is also Krishna.  If only it were that simple for all of us.  Sometimes one’s sense of belonging, or not belonging, is the result of others’ expectations.  You’re supposed to follow the ‘norms’ of the society you live in, or there are the expectations of the culture you were born into and then you may also have to incorporate what you learned from exposure to other cultures on top of that.

This type of cultural hybridity has been on the rise for some time and yet it seems like a lot of people simply agree that it exists but never really question its existence.  We see it in films, we see it in other people but do we see it within ourselves?  If cinema is a reflection of society or culture, whose society and culture are being reflected?

There are several films that cross the national and global borders.  Look at any James Bond film and the amount of different countries that Bond travels can sometimes be counted on two hands.  Not to mention that Bond has been played by a Scot, an Aussie and several British actors.  Jason Bourne has travelled between France, Thailand and Russia.  Hanna journeys across several European and Middle-Eastern countries.  However one never truly gets a sense that any of these nomadic characters feel like they belong.  Bond marries twice, there are two women in his life that he truly loved and didn’t have comical and innuendo-laden names like Pussy Galore or Honey Ryder.  Both of his marriages occur and end well outside the British borders but end as the result of his association with his job, one that relies on a loyalty to his country.  Jason Bourne doesn’t know where he belongs because his memory is impaired and as a result must keep moving, he knows several languages but he was so well trained that he’s not completely sure at times which is his own.  Hanna was deliberately denied all information about her past, where she came from and whom she can associate with, so instead she floats between countries and cultures with the ease of belonging by virtue of the fact that she doesn’t, in fact, belong.  Like Bourne and Bond before her, Hanna crosses borders with ease because she has learned and been trained to remove all psychological barriers and borders, thereby disassociating herself with one country/culture/society and know about others so that she may move with ease and go unnoticed as a complete outsider.

This is unlike the literary character of Candide, who travels to various exotic locations and appears to trample over customs and traditions.  The reader is entertained by the many, satirical, follies that Candide finds himself in.  While there appear to be many blunders and though the border crossing that occurs in Voltaire’s story are not the main crux of the story, I can’t help but wonder if this story was in some way a precursor to the notion that adventure and finding like-minded people can only occur once you remove yourself from where you are to accept the larger world around you, <strong>as it exists</strong> rather than something parceled and divvied up by their differences.

But going back to my own experiences and the question my professor posited about how wonderful it is to have grown up being exposed to diverse cultures, I would have to say that the reality is far more complicated and well it should be.  I’m not a secret agent or trained assassin and I certainly am not traveling to El Dorado with a valet named Cacambo.  However my own sense of belonging is probably not too dissimilar from these fictional characters – and isn’t that the point of art, to find a connection between the audience and the art?  I feel a disconnect between myself and the culture I was born into and cannot ignore, it’s right there on my skin and in my features.  And I do believe, to a certain degree, that some of my culture is inherited or passed along through my DNA.  Then there are the cultures that I have been immersed within.  They shaped me in several ways as well, primarily in being witness to their contrasts and similarities.  But do I belong to any of those?  In some ways, yes, but in other ways I’m just an outsider wanting to belong by virtue of having been there and shared some spaces and experiences.  I don’t think it’s wonderful to be confused about where one belongs in the world, too much of this, too little of that, not enough of something else.  But in a way, it’s kind of wonderful to not belong either – I don’t fit any one mould or stereotype and that’s just fun to play with.