TABLE OF COnTEnTS - Images Festival

Canadian Artist Spotlight: Ross McLaren
Friday April 2
9 PM
Workman Arts, St. Anne’s Parish Hall (651 Dufferin Street at Dundas)
Admission: $10 general/$8 students, seniors, members
On SCREEn
I knew Ross as a filmmaker, collaborator and the founder of
the Funnel, the most important locale for experimental film in
Canada. It wasn’t just the man’s charm, but his films — awkward,
jarring, disjunctive, and, of course, ironic — which grabbed my
attention. It was the late 1970s. It was punk. No one followed,
everyone did what they weren’t expected to do. No reverence for
commercial film, no desire for distribution. You made films because
they needed to be made. Why not try it this way; let’s see what it
looks like. A failure in film was a celebrated success.
And there was Ross, a Sudbury boy in Toronto, recently graduated
from the Ontario College of Art. McLaren began his career cofounding
the Toronto Super 8 Film Festival, the first in Canada.
His film Weather Building (1976) is emblematic of this period.
Super 8, edited in camera, science fiction meets visual abstraction.
It is a dissolving, collapsing, repeating visual. It is the antithesis
of Warhol’s ponderous Empire State and a sly homage to Michael
Snow’s incessant panning camera. With its off-screen sounds,
footsteps, wind blowing, there is an uncomfortable energy in
Weather Building, and simultaneously something very cerebral in
its abstracted imagery. The film is an enunciation of the time.
It is 1976. McLaren is actively organizing screenings of films in
the basement of the Centre for Experimental Arts and Communication
(CEAC), a non-institutional, revolutionary art space operating at
the edge of the edge. CEAC’s mastermind and director, Amerigo
Marras, gay, young, was an architecturally trained anti-advocate
for the status quo. He had grown up in radical Italian politics so,
in the fresh cultural territory of Toronto art production, he was
willing to open his cultural space to whatever was tough, Marxist,
advocated world change, and had no time for history and its lies.
Here, one was confronted. Here, in the art basement, McLaren
created his seminal Crash ’N’ Burn (1977), named after the
short-lived downstairs punk club. With a wind-up 16mm Bolex, he
films in silence a visual rendering of the rancorous. Jerky, rough,
in grainy black-and-white, lead singer after lead singer takes off
his shirt, gyrates, shakes his ass in the face of an audience who
scream and jump up and down, up and down, their bodies, the
camera. In the film, the audio is not synced to the visual, but this
is seamless disjunction. The once-stars of early punk, the Dead
Weather Building
1976, 16mm, 10.5 min
Summer Camp
1978, 16mm, 60 min
Wednesday, January 17, 1979
1979, 16mm, 4.5 min
9 X 12
1979-81, 16mm, 1 min
Sex Without Glasses
1983, 16mm, 12.5 min
Dance of the Sacred Foundation
Application
2003, video, 15 min
Boys, Teenage Head, and the Diodes pass as McLaren zooms
in and pans. It is a documentary, yet not. Scratches on the film
reverberate with the snarling performers who want nothing more
than to announce destruction, feign their own deaths, and draw
knives across naked emaciated stomachs. The celluloid explodes
in raucous frenzy: discordant, awkward, and pertinent. These are
not folk singers, these are suffering punks who scream out to us:
“I’m in a coma/Pull the plug on me/ I’m in a coma/please listen
to me/I’ve got the right to live, I’ve got the right to die.” Isn’t this
what it’s about? Kill me, it’s so fuckin’ boring.
While downstairs at CEAC the punks had screamed, five floors
above Amerigo and crew organized an event for every day of the
week and published Strike magazine. When Strike printed a grainy
black-and-white-and-red cover photograph of Aldo Moro’s bloody
body in May 1978, what occurred was a political firestorm in
Conservative Ontario. Within days, all funding was withdrawn and
the RCMP were at the doors. It was over in an instant. The art
community went into a coma of fear; with hardly a word of protest
in defense, CEAC collapsed. McLaren propels out of CEAC’s
womb, tears off, landing at a small warehouse at the eastern end
of Toronto where he finds a new home for the Funnel, an artistcontrolled
location for the making and the showing of film.
Images
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