Answer Print: Spring 2015

ANSWER PRINT SPRING 2015

FINALE

CSIF Board of Directors: President: Leah Nicholson | Vice President: Ben Rowe| Treasurer: Wayne Bradford | Secretary: Scott Westby Directors: Tina Alford, Donna Serafinus, Michelle Wong, Taylor Ross, Matt Watterworth

STAFF Operations Director Bobbie Todd operations@csif.org Programming Director Nicola Waugh programming@csif.org Communications Director Nicola Waugh communications@csif.org Production Director Yvonne Abusow production@csif.org Production Coordinator: Dan Crittenden production@csif.org Designed and Compiled by Dave Reynolds + Nicola Waugh Editor: Guillaume Carlier Cover Photo: Larry’s Recent Behaviour (1963) Dir. Joyce Wieland Advertising Inquiries: communications@csif.org The Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers (CSIF) is a non-profit, member-driven media arts cooperative that encourages the production and exhibition of independent film.

Suite 103-223 12 Avenue SW Calgary, AB Canada T2R 0G9 Phone: 403.205.4747 Hours: Tues-Sat, 10am – 5pm Web: csif.org

IN THIS ISSUE QUARTERLY MANIFESTO 4 MEMBERS MISSIVES 6 TRUE PATRIOT LOVE 10 LOCATION SPOTLIGHT 12 CUFF FILM REVIEW 13 ON THE SLATE 15

CSIF is grateful for the involvement of its members, the network of artist-run cooperatives throughout Canada and for the financial assistance of its funders: The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, The Canada Council for the Arts, Calgary Arts Development, and from its donors, members and individuals.

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QUARTERLY MANIFESTO In 1983, the first edition of the “CSIF Film & Video Journal” was launched by Leila Sujir and Marcella Bienvenue. The seven-page newsprint publication heralds a “Call for a Derangement of Cinematic Senses” and begins with a 1959 quote by Jonas Mekas: Every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official cinema is a healthy sign. We need less perfect but more free films. If only our younger filmmakers – I have no hopes for the older generation – would really break loose, completely loose, out of themselves, wildly anarchically!

There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.

Closing with a “visual statement on censorship” by local artist Don Mabie (Chuck Stake) (opposite page), the premiere issue is a call to action for Calgary filmmakers, urging non-complacency and creative freedom at any cost. The Calgary Society of Independent filmmakers has held true to our mandate throughout the decades, encouraging filmmaking as art reflecting and challenging our changing cultural landscape through production, exhibition and distribution of film. In 1991, The Film & Video Journal became Answer Print, and has since continued to be a critical voice for local, national and international independent film.

Today, we are thrilled to announce that we hope to continue the legacy of Answer Print by joining forces with EMMEDIA Gallery and Production Society, and their 4

publication, Handheld, to launch a new online publication called Luma. Luma will be a quarterly online journal that will include critical essays, news, reviews, event previews, interviews, reflections, and photo/video essays about culturally relevant productions, events and ideas. Luma will aim to expand critical dialogue about media art and film from a western Canadian perspective on an international platform.

This shift to an online platform will make for more cost effective distribution, freeing up important funds to pay writing fees, and will also reach a more global audience. Our sister centre, EMMEDIA, will bring vital perspective on media arts, allowing for a stronger, united voice for moving image culture in Calgary and beyond.

This finale issue of Answer Print is also an exciting introduction to Luma. Stay tuned for another thirty years of derangement of the official cinematic senses!

Nicola Waugh Programming Director, CSIF

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MEMBER’S MISSIVES Neon Baptism: My Cinecoup Experience

by Nick Haywood

Let’s get one thing straight. Getting yourself involved in the Cinecoup Feature Film Accelerator is not for the faint of heart. It’ll make you question all of your life choices, renounce your respective faiths and force you

to ask yourself why the hell you decided to join this filmmaking racket all together.

Having said that, if you are as relentlessly ambitious and paradoxically self-hating as I am in this thankless crusade that is film, you are most certainly not faint-hearted and should continue reading.

Cinecoup is a nationwide competition where filmmakers produce weekly promotional videos to rapidly produce and grow a fan base for their film projects. Much like a reality show -­minus the sexy hookups -­filmmakers are eliminated throughout the competition, before the last five projects standing are given the opportunity to pitch their films to a panel of producers and industry experts at the Banff World Media Festival. The top dog out of these five is awarded up to $1 million dollars in production financing, and a guaranteed nationwide distribution deal through a partnership with Cineplex. Pretty nifty, am I right?

6 The crew of Baby Face (2015)

Well they sure don’t make it easy. Apart from being spoiled by weeks of preparation for the debut 60 second trailer you must produce to qualify for the whole song and dance, every subsequent “mission” henceforth is announced and must be completed within a compact seven day window.

Being someone who has not dabbled in genre filmmaking in the past, I crafted a story that combines what I hold reverence for, as well as my own creative sensibilities. Mix in a superhero story, idiosyncratic characters and absurdist humor, and you have a pretty good inclination where I want to go with Baby Face.

Simple enough, if you were competing to produce the next Sundance indie about a blind, alcoholic saxophone player fighting to get his kids back. This is not the case with Cinecoup. They are seeking out high-concept, marketable features that can generate a mass audience. The goal is to empower the general viewer to help get the movies they want on the big screen made. The trick is figuring out what they want out of a vast sea of over 100 projects to choose from, many of which, can fall into the same genre. I for one, am not the only sap who has a predilection for the films of John Carpenter or grindhouse films of the 1980’s, but the fun is in setting ourselves apart from the pack. Lucky for us, Team Baby Face is the only film being pitched out of our great city. That’s a pretty attractive distinction if you ask me.

Now head on over to Cinecoup.com, and get yourselves educated. Peruse through all the amazing projects showcased on the website and if you like what you see, please sign up to support the filmmakers by rating their missions; commenting on them and using the votes you accumulate by doing so to help keep your favorites in the game, one of which I sincerely hope is Baby Face.

What is Baby Face you asked? Oh, you didn’t?

Since I am the one writing this, I’ll fill you in anyway, with a handy synopsis: Imagine if John Carpenter directed Batman.

This is that film.

The Y2K bug is real. On January 1st, 2000, an EMP wipes out 90% of the planet’s power sources. To combat this calamity, The United Nations opts to converge the remaining pockets of power into one landmass, known as “The City.” The City becomes a beacon of hope and desperation for everyone flocking to its bright lights. It’s not long before vicious psychos rule the streets and compete for supremacy as the police force shrinks and disbands, leaving the righteous to fend for themselves.

When The City’s at risk youths and orphans begin to vanish, a mysterious masked man seeks justice. They call him: Baby Face.

Last but not least, if any of you fellow masochists are brave enough to join in on the fun next season, don’t hesitate to call. I really need someone to talk to about all this.

Cinecoup is a fundraising initiative studio by Cineplex Odeon. After promotion, marketing, and voting, the final budget payout is $1 Million. Last year’s Wolf Cop (2014) has now signed on for a sequel and merchandising.

OUR STORIES, OUR PEOPLE, OUR LOCATIONS, OUR PERSPECTIVES, OUR CULTURE, THIS IS OUR ALBERTA.

Proudly supporting the more than 3,000 talented individuals in our screen-based industry who tell Alberta’s stories to the world.

To learn more about this important industry, please visit albertafilm.ca.

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Sailboat (1967) by Joyce Wieland

TRUE PATRIOT LOVE Johanne Sloan on Joyce Wieland

By Nicola Waugh Joyce Wieland scholar and Concordia Professor Johanne Sloan was in attendance at the Glenbow Museum on April 20th to speak about Wieland’s career, technique, and legacy.

Nicola Waugh, Programming Director at CSIF spoke with her about Wieland’s life and impact.

NW: What first got you interested in Joyce Wieland’s work? How long have you been studying her?

JS: I became captivated by Joyce Wieland’s work about 15 years ago when I was doing research on how contemporary artists were reinventing landscape art for the late 20th century. While it’s true that the Land Art/ Earth Art movement of the 1960s was influential, Wieland opened up a genuinely new way of representing and engaging with natural environments. Beginning in the late 60s, her artwork and films featured landscape imagery that was permeated by ecological concerns, political visions, and utopian narratives, and in that sense we could say she was ahead of her time. Only gradually did I realize what a complex and inventive artist/filmmaker Wieland was -- socially committed, always experimenting with form and materiality, and inevitably doing so with humour and wit.

NW: How does Wieland fit into the historical landscape of Canadian film and visual art?

JS: Having grown up in Toronto, Wieland began her art career as a painter in the 1950s, but she was part of that dynamic 1960s generation (in Canada and elsewhere), that moved beyond painting, rejecting “mediumspecificity” in order to experiment with all manner of media and materials. In some ways she can be compared to Canadian artists such as Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe, and Michael Snow (her spouse), all of whom came into their own in the 1960s. For example, Wieland and Curnoe both made assemblages out of found objects, and embraced a Pop-Art vocabulary. And then, like Chambers and Snow, Wieland would develop a strong profile as an experimental filmmaker, showing her work in Canada, the U.S., and internationally.

What is remarkable about Wieland, Chambers, and Snow is that each artist, in their own distinctive fashion, sustained side-by-side film and visual-art practices that complemented and nourished each other. This was certainly true in Wieland’s case: she made film-like paintings and cloth assemblages, and brought her material preoccupations to her film projects. In one respect Joyce Wieland clearly stood out in Canada’s artistic and cultural milieu at that time: not many women artists or filmmakers were able to achieve her level of success and recognition.

NW: Wieland spent a good part of her career working in New York. How do you think this shaped her cultural identity before and after her return to Canada in 1971?

JS: Wieland moved to New York City in 1963 and spent the rest of the decade there, and throughout this period she was extremely prolific. She was clearly inspired by her contact with movements such as Pop Art and Conceptual Art, and it was in New York

that she joined an emergent community of experimental and “underground” filmmakers.

While she had learnt filmmaking skills working for a commercial firm in Toronto some years prior, and had occasionally played around with a camera, it was in New York that she started to make short films, sometimes collaborating with other filmmaker-friends such as the Kuchar brothers, Shirley Clarke, and Hollis Frampton. At the same time, though, she was becoming increasingly critical of American values and foreign policy (the war in Vietnam in particular), making explicitly anti-war artworks and statements. She was still living in New York when she forged links with left-wing writers and activists in Canada, and she began to make work that featured an imagined, utopian, socialist Canadian nation.

This alternative Canadian-ness was the basis of her solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in 1971, entitled True Patriot Love.

NW: Many of Wieland’s films give an intimate sense of femininity and domesticity. She uses women’s crafts like embroidery, and punches holes in the film with sewing needles. Many scenes take place in her home and studio, giving a comforting nod to quotidian life (most notably Larry’s Recent Behavior (1963) and Water Sark (1965)). On the other hand, much of her work also turns outwards, taking a highly political tone. Films like Rat Life And Diet in North America (1968) and Solidarity (1973), in particular, give overt critiques of capitalism. What are your thoughts on these apparent ‘inward/outward’ or ‘personal/ public’ dichotomies in her films?

is not immune from ideology and power relations. It seems to me that Wieland moved with great intelligence and sensitivity between private and public realms, whether working with fabric or celluloid film. The most political films contain moments of intimacy and private life, while domestic settings become the site of political strife.

NW: Do you have a personal favorite work by Wieland, film or otherwise?

It’s difficult for me to choose! But Rat Life and Diet in North America remains a favorite, partly because of its cute animal heroes, and also because it was made in 1968, a crucial year for countercultural politics around the world. The U.S.-Canadian border figures prominently in the film, and the rodent-heroes are like the young Americans who were then resisting the draft, refusing to become soldiers, and relocating to Canada. There are political slogans and intertitles, colourfully composed scenes, and great comic timing… Wieland thus showed that it was possible to make art that was both formally inventive and politically savvy.

the space of creative possibility

LOFT

It’s true that this personal/public aspect of Wieland’s work is striking. When Wieland’s True Patriot Love exhibition was on at the National Gallery of Canada in 1971, it included many sewn, quilted, and embroidered work -- which one clueless reviewer mocked, referring to the artist as “Joyce the housewife” and saying that such domestic furnishings didn’t belong in a museum. But in fact feminists of the 1960s were insisting that “the personal is political,” because what happens in the context of the home, the family, and in romantic relationships

WHERE WRITERS AND ARTISTS CAN WORK, WRITE, TEACH AND COLLABORATE TOGETHER. THE SPACE IS AFFORDABLE.

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LOCATION SPOTLIGHT Bow River Ranch

By Guillaume Carlier

The Bow River Ranch is and has been a blessing to independent filmmakers in Calgary for almost three decades. Located just outside of Calgary, on the Calaway Park exit from Highway 1, being there feels like you’ve just landed in some long-forgotten miner’s town from last century’s hangover.

This is coming from my last shoot, where spaghetti sauce was flung around buildings, blanks fired, and scheduling conflicts jumped around, and lastly a crew member’s car died. During all this mayhem, the folks at Bow River were totally accommodating and understanding of this industry’s crazy

demands. I can’t thank the staff at the Bow Valley Ranch enough for their patience.

They boast a luxurious saloon, decrepit old homes, an abandoned feel for a mining town, and incredible vistas as far as the eye can see, with the Rockies standing tall on a clear day.

But more importantly, they are independent friendly! They’ve worked with Jackie Chan and SAIT’s graduating class. They’ll do music videos and Fargo. And beyond that, they genuinely want to help independent film makers in town. And that is a real gift considering the rising rates and limited funds in this market.

Check them out and get creative. There’s a lot that can be done on their property besides the old humdrum Western. Say hi to Maxine if you get a chance!

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CUFF FILM REVIEW Felt (2014) Dir. Jason Banker

by Yasmine Ekoka

After having watched Felt, I first left the theater with a mixture of sadness, confusion and annoyance. The film’s subject matter already sets a high standard. However, after some reflection, I saw the film in a new light.

Forgoing first impressions, the film was suspenseful, romantic, and had surprising comedic moments as you watched the protagonist Amy’s (Amy Everson) actions steadily increase in oddity, especially with her naked “male” and “female” costumes (pictured in promo).

These costumes were best used by Amy as an outlet for her inner thoughts and feelings about men and women’s relationships. She

often projects her true feelings and thoughts through the “male” costume and her sexuality in her “female” costume. Considering the film’s subject, Amy’s interactions with her friends and other men show that despite the weight of her rape, she hasn’t allowed it to define her. The director (Jason Banker) doesn’t let us forget the impact by emphasizing on the physical touches given to Amy, both wanted and unwanted. I immediately recoiled in my seat every time Amy was touched. Those little touches and reactions helped to remind us about the boundaries that are regularly breached and often go unnoticed in intimate relationships and that can build up to more deadly actions. The film also shows Amy’s growth in strength in the face of her traumatic event as she picks a fight with her friend’s boyfriend in her defense, takes part in a photo shoot while dressed in her “female” costume

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and gives her thoughts on a friend’s abusive relationship while inhabiting her “male” character.

Despite all this spontaneous fun however, the film still carries out its underlying tone of suspense which comes to a head with the reappearance of Kenny’s character (Kentucker Audley), the boy Amy and her friend met at a bar. Though their relationship is likely designed to not sit well with me, this train of thought helped me realize the problems that arise from the victimizing that is too often encouraged in the media. To that end, the movie uses Amy and Kenny’s happy beginnings to show how victims of trauma are still people, it shows that they are not defined by their past, they are able to move on and are capable of forming meaningful relationships at their own pace.

The climax of the movie peaked in the forest scene where we see Amy in her element as she dresses Kenny up in her bra and panties and puts on her own “male” costume. It’s a powerful and bizarre ending, and without giving anything away, Amy’s final act could be seen by many to be unjustified because of the predictability of Kenny’s acts and persona. But I personally see it as act of

rightful and symbolical vengeance, especially when considering that Amy was in her ”male” character and Kenny was dressed as a “female”. The shocking and violent finale was done to show the ironic, grotesque effect the devastation of what it feels like for a woman assaulted and stolen of her livelihood. This can be seen as one of the movie’s themes as the silence of assaulted women speaks volumes to the perpetuation of their assailant’s crimes.

Overall, Felt’s impact is a dark reminder of the dangers of victimizing women, the constricting roles that men and women still inhabit and the struggles that stifle and erase women. Most of all though, it’s biggest strength is in the portrayal of a woman who represents too often those unheard in the media and her struggles to express her rightful frustrations by an oppressive and unjust world, especially when the world forces her hand.

Felt was screened at the 2015 Calgary Underground Film Festival. This is the second film by Jason Banker who first caught attention with his hellish drug trip film Toad Road.

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Felt (2014) Dir. Jason Banker

ON THE SLATE PROGRAMMING On Location: Members Screening & Directors Talk May 21 7:00pm at the Globe Cinema (617 8 Ave SW)

Join CSIF to celebrate the best of our members’ latest work, and hear from the directors in a discussion about process, technique, storytelling, and the independent film scene in Calgary. Secret Cinema 2015 May 19 - 9:30pm | June 16 - 10:00pm | July 21 - 9:30pm | Aug 18 - 9:00pm

An outdoor screening series curated by members in the CommunityWise Courtyard (behind 223 12 Ave SW) Friday Afternoon Socials Every Friday 4pm onwards

Join CSIF staff and members for Friday afternoon drinks at our office- a great opportunity for networking and sharing ideas and information about filmmaking. BYOB or a few dollars to contribute.

Upcoming Workshops Shooting with the Scarlet with Aaron Bernakevitch

May 2 Members: $100 Non Members: $145 Editing Film & Video with Final Cut Pro with Tavin Dack

May 9 & 10 Members: $170 Non Members: $220 Cinematography with Philip Letourneau

May 14 Members $65 Non Members: $105 Developing Your Web Series

May 21, 28, June 4 Members $170 Non Members: $215

Call for Submissions CSIF is looking for engaging stories by new and experienced writers for our new publication, Luma. We welcome critical essays, film reviews, personal reflections and visual works. Please contact Nicola Waugh, Communications Director communications@csif.org to get involved.

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