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The camera as painter’s canvas, magic wand or kaleidoscope — experimental film gets a TIFF showcase

If Hollywood is a dream factory, Canadian cinema and its so-called “documentary tradition” is often seen as dryly didactic as it tackles reality — a trickle-down effect of the National Film Board of Canada and its government-backed mandate for non-fiction filmmaking.

In the 1930s, the NFB’s first commissioner, John Grierson, famously opined that “art was not a mirror, but a hammer,” effectively contextualizing the tactics of directors caught between faithfully reflecting the country and culture around them, and reconstructing it through the use of evolving cinematic technologies and techniques.

In the introduction to the critical anthology “Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada,” AGO curator and filmmaker Jim Shedden suggests a different point of view for a different Canadian cinematic tradition, one that overlaps with documentary and narrative while also transcending those categories.

“Experimental cinema,” he writes, “is a hands-on personal practice. Each film creates its own reality.”

“Moments of Perception” works as history, analysis and homage to those creators past and present who have tried to utilize tools beyond Grierson’s hammer and mirror: the camera as a painter’s canvas, a magic wand or a kaleidoscope.

“Work that we think of as experimental may never become mainstream,” Shedden said in an email exchange, “but it’s far more so than I would have ever thought before the rise of the web, and especially YouTube, Vimeo and social media … (it’s there) in things we now take for granted like Wikipedia and online sharing in general.”

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“There are many people who haven’t so much ignored experimental film as they don’t know that it exists,” added filmmaker Barbara Sternberg, one of the authors of “Moments of Perception” along with Shedden, Stephen Broomer and Michael Zryd. “They haven’t had an opportunity to see it.”

That will change for some on Feb. 24 when Shedden and Sternberg present a free program of films at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, selected to give a sense both of the book’s 70-year chronology, and the stylistic, geographic and ethnic diversity of its subjects.

A scene from "Very Nice, Very Nice" by Arthur Lipsett, which assembles anxious and/or apocalyptic still photographs overlaid by snatches of banal, seemingly unscripted dialogue.

The oldest and arguably most essential of these is Arthur Lipsett’s pioneering 1961 collage piece “Very Nice, Very Nice,” an assemblage of anxious and/or apocalyptic still photographs overlaid by snatches of banal, seemingly unscripted dialogue. (One of the film’s biggest fans was Stanley Kubrick, who copped the esthetic for the trailer to “Dr. Strangelove” after Lipsett declined to edit it himself.)

In an essay on Lipsett’s work that serves as one of the most crucial entries in “Moments of Perception,” critic Broomer cites the “sardonicism, gallows humour and suffering humanism” of a filmmaker whose refusal to conform to conventions while inventing new ones is emblematic of a restless ethos of experimentation: one that ultimately alienated him from the very institution his work helped to cover in glory.

A scene from "Water Sark" by Joyce Wieland, a self-portrait shot through carefully arranged mirrors and glassware on the filmmaker's kitchen table.

By the relatively esoteric standards at play here, Lipsett is one of the bigger names featured in “Moments of Perception,” alongside even more famous pioneers like Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland. Her gorgeous 1963 short “Water Sark” — a prismatic self-portrait shot through carefully arranged mirrors and glassware on the filmmaker’s kitchen table, also screening at the Lightbox — belongs to a canon that the authors variously acknowledge and challenge.

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Progressive ideals (and anxieties) run through Michael Zryd’s beautifully written section on the larger history of experimental film in Canada, which begins with the literary equivalent of a land acknowledgment. It suggests that engaging with Indigenous visions onscreen, whether through rediscoveries of past work or promotion of new pieces, is not only a necessity for expanding the canon but in sync with a practice “dedicated to opening up perception and critical understanding of the world.”

A scene from Jennifer Dysart's "Caribou in the Archive," which juxtaposes NFB archival footage of Northern Manitoba with home video of a caribou hunt.

Cree director Jennifer Dysart’s “Caribou in the Archive” sharply juxtaposes NFB archival footage of Northern Manitoba in the first half of the 20th century with home video of a caribou hunt to limn the differences in representation; the TIFF program also includes Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette’s mesmerizing abstract short “Black Rectangle,” which documents its own meticulous deconstruction as a strip of 16-mm celluloid.

The opportunity to see films like “Black Rectangle” in their original format should not be discounted: one key subplot in “Moments of Perception” is the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the experimental film community.

“The migration of festivals to streaming platforms actually increased audience numbers in some cases,” said Zryd, graduate program director of film and media studies at York University. “But as someone with privileged access to the pre-pandemic festival experience, the loss of image and sound quality in screenings and installations, and the basic human level of interaction that one gets with artists and the community at festivals, makes them diminished experiences.”

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Still, Zryd is hopeful that a cinematic subculture that’s always cultivated an audience on the margins will continue.

“(Our) resilience will be tested in the next few years as exhaustion among cultural workers, and the squeezing of urban cultural space and people by obscenely unequal income levels in Canada take their effect,” he said. “Artists always find a way, but ‘there be dragons’ in the uncharted waters ahead.”

Moments of Perception With Barbara Sternberg and Jim Shedden is at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St. W., Feb. 24 at 6:15 p.m. Admission is free. See www.tiff.net for information.

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