Episode 4 - Falling from the Sky: Accident as Testimonial Documentary

• Martin Duckworth and Pat Crawley’s Accident (1973) had been conceived as a straightforward project that involved filming a stunt within a small aircraft, but the film was transformed by a tragic turn—the plane crashed, claiming the life of the pilot and leaving Crawley, who had been on board filming, with life-altering injuries. Duckworth, filming from the ground, captured the crash and, during Crawley’s long recovery, collaborated with him to reframe the project around that moment. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses Accident as a film on the challenges of resilience.

Episode 5 - A Place to Stand: Authorship and Activism in You Are On Indian Land

• In 1969, Mohawk residents of Akwesasne organized a blockade at the Cornwall Island border crossing, in protest of Canada’s enforcement of customs duties and to assert their cross-border rights rooted in the Jay Treaty of 1794. You Are on Indian Land, made within the National Film Board’s Challenge for Change program by the Indian Film Crew, embeds the camera in the midst of the action, refusing the posture of documentary objectivity. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer traces how director Mike Kanentakeron Mitchell and his collaborators turned state-sponsored documentary tools to activist ends, exposing the gap between being represented on film and being recognized by the state.

Episode 6 - Man of the Year: Debt and Redemption in Skip Tracer

• In Zale Dalen’s 1977 feature Skip Tracer, John Collins works the underside of Vancouver’s boom years as a debt collector, repo man, and enforcer for a predatory lender, moving through a city where bureaucratic violence and masculine performance are inseparable. Haunted by doubles, shaken by assault, and confronted with the human wreckage of his profession, Collins drifts toward a thin, anti-heroic form of redemption. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer offers that Skip Tracer is a study of moral exhaustion and compromised grace, a film that turns the debt collector into a post-modern detective whose final refusal measures the limits of conscience under capital.

Episode 7 - Furnaces of Freedom: Ecstasy and Assimilation in Naked Flame

• Set in the fictional Alberta mining town of Little Creek, Naked Flame (aka Deadline for Murder, 1964) transplants the sensational logic of the American exploitation picture into a distinctly Canadian landscape, where conflict between orthodox Doukhobors, radical Freedomites, and Anglo outsiders is staged under the sublime shadow of the Banff mountains. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer examines how the film turns ethnoreligious difference, nude protest, and coercive assimilation into dramatic spectacle, balancing themes of tolerance against a patronizing gaze. Tracing the film’s movement from prairie gothic to courtroom melodrama, Broomer argues that in The Naked Flame, Canadian marginality is reshaped through the borrowed forms of settler modernity.

Episode 8 - The Don Juan of the Lawn: Obsession and Estrangement in Amanita Pestilens

• In 1963, René Bonnière’s Amanita Pestilens told the farcical story of Henri Martin, a Montreal bookkeeper known as the “Don Juan of the Lawn.” Produced by Crawley Films and shot simultaneously in English and French, the film turns Martin’s immaculate Mount Royal lawn into an emblem of status, order, and assimilation. When luminous pink-orange mushrooms invade the lawn, his middle-class fantasy begins to collapse into debt, paranoia, and violence. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer examines how Amanita Pestilens transforms a comic fungal nuisance into a satire of consumer conformity, bilingual ambition, and the fragile public face of Canadian suburban life.

If you enjoy this piece and want to support what I do at Art & Trash, consider making a pledge at our Patreon! This series is made possible through the generous support of viewers like you.

I have also started to offer lecture series for subscribers at Patreon. Sign up now for the first eight episodes of An Introduction to Slow Cinema!

If you enjoy this and would like a primer on what I do here at Art & Trash, consider watching some of our playlists, new to our YouTube Channel!

Thank you for your time. If you enjoy the content that I produce, consider pledging or signing up for a free membership at the Art & Trash patreon.

The first episode, on Rob Fothergill’s Countdown Canada, was launched here on this substack last July. Since then, the series has been executive produced by the filmmaker and writer Kier-La Janisse through her publishing outfit Spectacular Optical. You can watch these episodes exclusively through the Spectacular Optical site (links below).

Episode 2 - The Tragedy of The Viking

• In 1931, Americans George Melford and Lewis Varick Frissell collaborated to make The Viking, a film that would document the lives of Newfoundland seal hunters. The resulting film celebrates regional identity through myth and melodrama. It is a paradoxical work that strives for realism and anthropological authority and yet conversely serves as a heroic fantasy. Seeking to enhance the film with additional footage of the exotic landscape, co-director Frissell would die alongside 25 crew members in a tragic explosion. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer considers The Viking as a work of melodrama with a regional, documental focus, and as a sublime meta-spectacle that, in its final form, exploits the tragedy of its production.

Episode 3 - War at Home: Mainstreet Soldier as Anti-Epic

• Bleary-eyed Ray Le Clair performs a haze of drunken regrets, mutterings about the man he used to be, rambling about lost love and abiding rage. As Mainstreet Soldier begins, he offers a litany of false starts, pivoting around the question, “why should I change?” Le Clair’s self-pitying and self-fictionalizing character – a traumatized battlefield ghost – tests the documentary’s insistence on truth. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer situates Leonard Yakir’s celebrated short film in the context of CanLit’s disillusioned anti-heroes, and the tensions of performance in cinema verité.

If you enjoy this piece and want to support what I do at Art & Trash, consider making a pledge at our Patreon! This series is made possible through the generous support of viewers like you.

Last month, Michael O’Keefe of Mystic and Severe interviewed me about the series, and we got into a very good discussion about Canadian identity and sovereignty in these trying times. Take a look!

And for more of an orientation to what I’m doing with this series, here is another interview!

A NORTHERN LIGHT PRIMER

How did you come to study Canadian cinema?

It may surprise and infuriate any nationalists in my audience to learn that I had a longstanding hostility toward mainstream Canadian cinema! As a person whose interests in radical and vanguard art became entrenched through having access to weird video stores and good libraries as a child, I would look at the Canadian films I encountered on television with embarrassment and disdain. I believe this was commonplace feeling among my generation of Canadian cinephiles, whether one liked things that were imaginative, conventionally ‘good’ or commercial: what was celebrated in Canadian film through the course of the 1980s and 90s was often dry and self-conscious and sanctimonious, and the journeyman work of Canadian television often bled into the mediocrity of Canadian arthouse, made-for-TV and indie genre fare. I remember arriving at York University in the early 2000s with a sense that what I cared about in cinema was the new waves of the ‘60s, the political, the experimental, the formally imaginative and accomplished, all of which seemed to happen outside of Canada. But my sense of what those things were and what was possible here would be consistently challenged throughout my twenties as I developed a real dedication to this national cinema, learning as I did by age 21 that the most interesting Canadian films I was reading about were inaccessible or lost.

My respect for Canadian cinema didn’t begin by falling in love with one commanding film, but instead came from a recognition of how marginal it was, how knee-jerk prejudicial many, including myself, had been toward it for its rough edges, and that it was sort of eternally fragile, that there was nothing really safe and secure and canonical about Canadian cinema, even the propagandistic stuff that was funded by the government. This means that, while I’ve developed a real enthusiasm for the material, it did begin, admittedly, from more of a desire to explore and share a culture to discover strengths than to celebrate a specific, self-evident strength. My original sin of skepticism has also been maintained, and I think a great deal of what’s been made in Canada, like a great deal of what’s been made in cinema internationally, is derivative and mediocre.

But my convictions about Canadian cinema were really broadened by engaging with writings by John Hofsess, Rob Fothergill, Bart Testa, Seth Feldman, R. Bruce Elder, and Peter Harcourt. I see my work as a product of a centennial way-of-thinking about nationhood and Canadian sovereignty.

How do you choose material? What makes a film suitable for Northern Light, and are there kinds of films that you deliberately avoid?

I set out with the goal of creating a series that was wholly distinct from Art & Trash and Detours, both in terms of the objects studied and the approach. Because Canadian cinema has a long history of critical commentary and theory that’s been largely neglected in recent decades and many of the objects at hand have never been written about in any substantial way (beyond capsule dailies and festival reviews), I knew I would be in rich territory, and that unlike Art & Trash, which almost completely eschews film criticism in favour of moral philosophy and literary allusions and western history, and Detours, which always employs a single token scholarly source for the sake of generating conflict and debate, I wanted to make sure that the films I looked at were deeply connected to critical thought around nationhood and the evolving styles of documentary and fiction filmmaking. I didn’t want to cover experimental film - though I may yet - because Canadian experimental film is already a focus of what I do at Art & Trash and Black Zero. Instead I wanted to focus on Canada’s contributions to cinema vérité and the docudrama, alongside its commercial aspirations with camp, drama and genre films.

The majority of the films studied are from the 1970s because that was the era in which Canada’s cinema was most directly engaged in questions of nationhood, and it was also a rich era for formal experimentation and storytelling. But because of that, I’ve made conscious efforts to deal with other eras - for example, our second episode, The Tragedy of The Viking, looks at an early example of Canadian feature filmmaking. Future episodes will deal with offbeat contributions from the 1980s and 90s as well as contemporary films. But for this first season, it was also very important for me to make sure there was regional representation that expanded beyond Ontario. I have an Ontario bias because I was born here, but I know how incredible and diverse the country’s cinema is coast-to-coast. So I’m looking to build a relatively cohesive picture of nationhood.

How do you balance advocacy with honest critique?

I think that for many years, critics who were engaged in advocating for Canadian cinema had to hold their noses at some of the things they wrote flattering copy about. When I encounter that it makes my skin crawl. I’m much more interested in the pronounced convictions that arose during the era of the ‘Cinema We Need’ debate, provoked by Elder’s criticisms of the emergence of a ‘new narrative’ Canadian cinema that aped the forms of the avant-garde as window-dressing on mediocre (or even just plain absent) fiction storytelling. While I would disagree with some elements of the assault on the new narrative, I respect the honesty of it in a climate where a ridiculous number of critics, programmers, and other institutional figures were inclined to respond to legitimate criticism with a hushed “shut up, the funders might be listening.” And so I guess what I try to do is strike a balance of advocacy and honest enthusiasm rather than critique: I only write about films that give me a reason to write about them, and most of the time that comes from a desire to plumb the depths of a film’s themes or to connect it in some way to our present moment, but sometimes it also comes from sheer outrage. I think there is honest, and even harsh critique, in some of the pieces that I’ve done for Art & Trash: on Take Me Naked, Johnny Minotaur, The Timekeepers of Eternity... If I encounter something that provokes in me a firm response, I follow it. Even when I deal with the greatest films I’ve ever seen, I’m not moved to express sheer wonder and awe - I want to get into the heart of it and how they function and what limitations they reveal in us. The critical function of this process is what makes these videos essays.

What’s the most common misconception viewers bring to Canadian cinema?

My own misconception, which I imagine is fairly common, was that there was only one kind of Canadian cinema and that it wasn’t for me. I thought Nobody Waved Goodbye and Goin’ Down the Road were sort of mediocre renditions of something being done better in the New Hollywood cinema. I’ve come to feel differently about them, but only a little. Yet the deeper one dives into Canadian cinema, one encounters incredible diversity of forms and subjects. Think about it in relation to Canada geographically: it has these vast territories with little dots on the map hundreds of miles apart that represent city centres, and each major city centre and the miles in-between have distinct regional cultures, and in some cases they have their own film heritages, even competing heritages within the same milieu. So what one finds is that Canadian cinema, like any national cinema, doesn’t just evolve through time but through regional isolation and exchange and internecine conflicts, often against the shifting priorities of funding bodies. What this means is that, while the Canadian artistic drama of the 1970s that was heavily funded and advanced by the Canadian Film Development Corporation has been dominant, even it has a remarkable diversity to it, and films made through that stimulus in British Columbia are very different from those made in Ontario and Quebec and the Prairies and the Atlantic provinces.

If someone watches only one episode to understand your thesis for Northern Light, where should they start?

Even though I talk about Northern Light as a series, you can dip into it anywhere - but what you find will differ vastly in part because not every episode is about big questions of Canadian sovereignty and identity. That’s because many of the films made in Canada are chamber pieces, intimate affairs that focus on small gestures and marginal figures. In this sense my thesis - that the value of Canadian cinema is in its diversity - is pervasive anywhere you dip in. But there are theses at play here, and one of them is that Canada is perpetually on the cusp of vanishing. It disappears behind the stencil of Hollywood; it disappears in the modest tragedies of its cinema; and sometimes it ignores itself as a survival mechanism, in the eye of the terrifying sublime imposed on its protagonists by the vast distances of the land itself, that can make even the most archetypal hero into a coward or a bully or a clown.

The episode that deals most extensively with the greater theme of sovereignty is the first one, The Invasion Will Be Televised, which links imperialist threats to Canadian nationhood to the philosophies of our own George Grant and Marshall McLuhan. As good a starting place as any - and that’s why I started there.

How do you feel about the resurgence of interest in Canadian cinema? Why is it happening now?

I think the same could be asked of any surging interest in national cinemas the world over: audiences have grown, people are hungry for things they’ve never seen before, and tools like Twitter and Letterboxd have done a lot to shape that new audience. At the same time, I also think this has to do with technology and what people are lacking: even a mediocre old movie, shot in 16mm or 35mm or even super 8, now scanned in high-resolution, is going to win audiences over more readily than digital-born contemporary movies. The specific resurgence of interest in Canadian cinema we could locate in the very recent work of home video labels like Canadian International Pictures (or my own little outing, Black Zero), but I think it has more to do with the work that’s been being done for years at the website Canuxploitation and the fostering of audiences for Canadian cult cinema through outsider publications like that, or for that matter, the emphasis that programmers and writers like Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe have placed on Canadian work, or the perennial self-promotion of the National Film Board of Canada, whose force-feeding of my generation has resulted in some serious nostalgia for the Log Driver’s Waltz. We just happen to have hit this moment where Canadian cinema is starting to find audiences that recognize it as having an intrinsic value, after many years of struggling to be taken seriously.

If you enjoy this and would like a primer on what I do here at Art & Trash, consider watching some of our playlists, new to our YouTube Channel!

Thank you for your time. If you enjoy the content that I produce, consider pledging or signing up for a free membership at the Art & Trash patreon.

I wrote this piece for Split Tooth Media, the Portland-based independent online culture magazine edited by brothers Craig and Brett Wright. I began to write for STM two years ago with a couple of pieces for their annual ‘October Horror’ marathon, where they publish 31 days of new articles on horror culture. The pieces I wrote for them that fall later became the basis for episodes of Art & Trash, on The Timekeepers of Eternity, Mindwarp, and Suffer Little Children. This marathon structure puts a tremendous amount of thoughtful writing into the world all at once. Take a look at what they’re doing: it’s often illuminating. And for this piece, sure enough, it will eventually be an episode of some future series of Art & Trash.

In the Dark caught my attention thanks to the advocacy it enjoyed from an old friend, my former (video store) and current (university department) co-worker Adam Nayman. While I’m no stranger to SOV (shot-on-video) amateur filmmaking, I’ve mostly paid attention to the classic (1980s) era of Betacam and VHS lo-fi micro-odysseys. In the Dark uses video differently, to capture the increasingly video-dependent youth-ish culture of the millennium, for which the RCA cords that would join a PlayStation to a CRT are like an umbilical cord from the brain to the electrical signal itself, sapping nutrients in reverse. I’m not sure the film is so critical as I am, but the final image, of the blank stare of star Kim Garrett, speaks volumes about a brain-rot mass hypnosis that has loomed larger and larger in the quarter-century since the film was made...

The film can be seen here.

If you enjoy this piece and want to support what I do at Art & Trash, consider making a pledge at our Patreon!

In the Dark: Temptation and the Willing Victim

In the 1990s, horror culture, once concentrated in literature and cinema, was migrating toward more interactive platforms, first through the survival horror genre of video games and through the call-and-response proto-meme culture of the early Internet. The visceral invitation of horror had always been interactive, trading on the goosebumps of its audience, provoking a giddy compulsion to persist, page by page, scene by scene. Readers and viewers were now players, participants who could assume control of an avatar and lead them through the foggy streets of a ghost town. The player was compelled to abide by the rules of a game, both the urgent, stated rules of the quest at hand—find your missing daughter, solve the mystery, escape—and the implied rules of the rail-bound sandbox. The polygonal construction of these environments was a marker of visual sophistication, a departure from the flat renderings that had defined the first decade of home gaming, a subtle evolution toward an increasingly uncanny simulation. Still distinct from reality, these 3D renderings were also an order of magnitude separating the player from the game world. Rather than passive entertainment, the survival horror game acted on the psychology of the user, reflecting a search for the feeling of being imperilled by proxy, for a sensation of authentic dread. Users who had grown accustomed to the formula shocks of the horror story could once again cower and flinch at what might be waiting behind the next corner or in the next room. These players were testing the limits of their newfound control.

Jane plays games obsessively. By day, she’s a librarian in a college-town suburb of Chicago, and by night, she’s glued to her PlayStation, scouring the streets of Silent Hill. A gen-X cliché, she lives a monotonous, lonely routine of self-assured cool detachment: her own life is rail-bound, and in it she asserts her agency insofar as her rare social interactions allow her, with wit and apprehension. Is she convinced of her control because the games that she plays give her that illusion of control? Through the course of her story, she will go from player to chess-piece, and her sense of autonomy and choice will be exposed as the illusions that they are, prey to other appetites, debts and desires.

Adapted liberally from a novel by Richard Laymon, In the Dark (2000) subverts the supernatural and vampiric themes of its source material to pursue a more grounded, realistic horror tale. In place of the supernatural, filmmaker Clifton Holmes draws on imminent cultural anxieties, of survival horror gaming, of financial coercion, of breaking taboos. These anxieties are made flesh through Jane, whose sense of control will be steadily eroded until she becomes nothing more than a puppet. The story begins as she receives the first of several letters from an anonymous ‘Master of Games,’ instructing her to find a book. What start as harmless riddles, with steadily doubling cash rewards, soon turn more ambiguous and menacing, commands that place Jane in increasingly hazardous situations. To her only confidante, local college teacher Brace, she insists that she is continuing with these games only because of the doubling rewards; this is a misdirection that this will be a story of the petty temptations of capitalism, the petty compulsions of greed. It could be, if Jane were not gifted with other flaws that suggest something just as universal, but deeper, darker, and less materialistic. She is driven by the thrill itself, by not knowing the next demand, and she’s conversely reassured by her self-image as a pragmatic, intelligent person in control of herself. These letters are a rupture from her humdrum life, and even when they drive her to violence, even when the Master of Games becomes sexually abusive, she takes it in stride, objectifying herself, a puppet for pay, a doll like the avatar of her video game. She has been seen, selected, addressed, by an unseen force that wants to play with her. Even her own desires, whether they involve gaining wealth, being objectified and used, or endangered, become irrelevant: she is simply deployed to her nightly tasks. What the Master of Games wants from Jane is both mysterious and un-mysterious, in that he explicitly demands obedience. That he wants anything from her is what compels her. Temptation itself manufactures her desires.

As much as Jane’s story is about the limits of perceived control, it is also an allegory for the limits of choice. She isn’t ignorant of the dangers posed by these escalating demands: after a few initial puzzles, the games that she plays are less riddles than dares, and by the second act, she challenges her stalker by turning herself over to him, drugging herself unconscious and inviting him to exploit her, which only escalates his taunts and his demands. Jane’s motivations follow that of the gambler’s fallacy, the need to complete a sequence as if her compulsion to continue were an act of prudent planning. She deceives herself into continuing, initially out of curiosity. Through the course of this, her motivation changes: she becomes more insistent, more desperate, and more self-abnegating. Her mother tells her that she had a happy childhood, and despite her concerns about Jane, concedes respectfully to her daughter’s pragmatic approach to life and to getting paid. This exchange becomes a pivotal turn in the film’s second act, as the violence wrought to Jane becomes more perilous, more sexual, more sadistic. Her attempts to surveil the Master of Games as he enters and exits her apartment at will result only in static signals. Throughout, Jane is expanding her own limits. The transformation she undergoes, from passive disaffected gamer to a puppet of real violence, reaches a critical turn in an extended sequence in which her Master’s letter leads her to a grotesque torture chamber disguised as an ordinary suburban home. There, three women are being held captive, an orgy of mutilation and slavery. She frees them and executes their assailants, but she’s simply playing a role that has been mapped out for her: even the captors are pawns, giddily watching a videotape of a strange magic show, set to the eerie sounds of Harry Nilsson’s Daddy’s Song. This joyous up-tempo lament of parental abandonment is a clue to the underlying psychology of the Master of Games and his wards, when Nilsson sings that “he just couldn’t understand that his father was not a man and it all was just a game.”

As surrogate sister to these rapists, Jane sees that their new father is more devil than man. Does he engineer these scenarios simply because he can, or is he motivated by something loftier? The Master of Games is the B.F. Skinner of the ‘survival horror’ era, a remote experimenter whose intermittent reinforcement, in payouts of cash, acknowledgement and relief, give Jane an illusion of partnership and control. Her small compliant acts escalate to larger, uglier and more imperilling acts, and while for her this preserves a self-image of autonomy, her compliance, her willingness, her inability to decline deepens. The transgressions inflicted by Jane and upon her, no matter how inhumane, can’t be cruel, because they’re the rules of a game that she’s consented to. When the outcomes contradict her, and her curiosity results in violence, she doubles down, until that violence turns to untenable carnage. After her massacre of her fellow puppets, she admits a desire to escape this game, even as she shows up at Brace’s apartment with her PlayStation, ready to play all night.

In the Dark unfolds in a suburban Illinois that has been rendered through a consumer camcorder’s slightly-wide lens, a view that leaves horizons dimmed and vacant, and that limits perspective and depth. The lens also frequently blooms with shifts of exposure, as the slow aperture of a surveillance camera might in the process of correcting itself. That slightly wide field of view governs the film’s compositions. The to-the-minute time-punching that announces each shift of scene, through hard VTR titling stamped onto the image, achieves two things at once: it drills the quotidian boredom of Jane’s routine into the image while mounting a procedural claim to the story’s authenticity. Such time-punching is a common amateur video reflex, and its presence on this tape becomes a claim to truth. The tape’s own signal—noise, field interlacing, and minor ghosting—reads as intentional mise-en-scène. In the Dark is a work about coercion that is itself coercive, in leading its viewer on this gauntlet of DV realism, a realism that is most pierced by the creative decision to render it all in black and white, which was an unnatural, elective mode for amateur video at the millennium. By the year 2000, consumer video took its natural form in full colour. As a black and white video, In the Dark declares its maker’s interference and construction. Holmes also, if only incidentally, casts his tale of grey morality in a sickly pale light. Only twice is the image rendered in colour: first with the opening image of a blood-red moon, an omen of what is to follow; second, when Jane attempts self-surveillance, rendered in a dim sepia-leaning composition. She is seen slowly regaining consciousness in bed as she’s approached by a menacing leather-clad figure, the image fluctuating in tight crops into details on the lo-fi image. In these two scenes, colour is used to vastly different ends: first, it captures a portentous natural event, and second, it imposes a kind of logical realism on this stylized world, with Jane’s own use of a camcorder rendered in the typical amateur fashion. Her self-surveilling trauma attains a disturbing, heightened realism framed against the stylized distance of Holmes’s use of black and white. For the bulk of In the Dark, Illinois is shaped by lens choice and desaturation to capture both more and less of what’s happening, somewhere between surveillance and subjective vision, even as its time signature insists that this has all happened, with enough distance to measure the days in retrospect, from the terminal point of an endless tomorrow.

Early in her journey, Jane has a drink with Brace in a restaurant called “Yesterdays.” By the end of the story, she is plotting out her the Master’s games on a bulletin board labelled “tomorrow.” Between the yesterday of the story and the tomorrow of its epilogue, a great distance elapses. By the climax, these games having entered a state of maximum escalation, and Jane seems to be doomed. An edit interrupts to shift the scene to a year later. There, an unseen figure, revealed to be Jane, plants letters on behalf of her Master, the camera adopting her own subjective, lurking perspective before revealing Jane, her humanity compromised, her face concealed by a grotesque plastic mask. She has surrendered her false sense of control and embraced a new isolation, ruled by habituated appetites and comforts in a hollow rendition of middle-class comfort. Off hours, her life remains a lonely one, sitting in a bar by herself, coming home to a mostly-empty apartment, where a change of clothes reveals that her entire body is tattooed with the word ‘obey’. Her liminal high-rise apartment has an enviable view of Lake Michigan, a triumphant amenity, but she prefers the dim glow of her television on which she continues to play Silent Hill. She has become, like the on-screen avatar she controls, no more than an instrument, a willing pawn for a Master of Games.

Within a year of the release of In the Dark, interactive horror storytelling had taken a new and reductive turn. Holmes’s film was a product of both a gaming renaissance and an early Internet age, one that was developing a new breed of player, in the scrolling and trolling of usenet message boards for thrills and chills. Even if it does not cite the cultural transformations of the millennium, In the Dark exists parallel to the ‘Mondo Internet’, with ready access to things like crime scene photographs, forbidden and illegal images and videos, outlets for those whose fetishes crossed ultimate boundaries, things that would soon recede deeper under the crust of the Internet to a semi-mythical ‘dark web’. By the millennium, those who had felt inhabited by the dread tone of the survival horror game might get a similar thrill from creepypasta, semi-literate micro-stories spread through the internet like chain letters, a product of fan culture that in no more than a few hundred words could impel the imagination to construct more elaborate tales, a form as hallucinatory as it was defiantly stupid, an early signpost of a coming brain rot, but one that took advantage of essential and universal fears, of what might be waiting in the dark. The Master of Games is, like Bloody Mary and the Slender Man, folkloric, a cautionary figure who reminds us that games persist because we play, whether out of habit, out of choice, or out of need.

If you enjoy this and would like a primer on what I do here at Art & Trash, consider watching some of our playlists, new to our YouTube Channel!

Thank you for your time. If you enjoy the content that I produce, consider pledging or signing up for a free membership at the Art & Trash patreon.

Last week, Black Zero launched three new discs - of films by Christine Lucy Latimer, Richard Kerr, and Larry Kardish. You can order them here. However, with our focus on Canadian cinema, Black Zero couldn’t pass Canada Day without observing it…

Please find below a new Black Zero publication - a free, online release.

In 1970, Rob Fothergill released Canada’s own War of the Worlds—Countdown Canada, a TV news simulation dramatizing the day in which Canada becomes part of the United States. The broadcast included prominent public figures commenting on the last gasp of Canadian sovereignty, some debating the merits of such an assimilation, others engaging in a plea for an independent Canada. It was set in the future (1979), but was aired only five years after the publication of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, a philosopher’s defence of Canada in an era of its diminishing sovereignty, and only three years after Canada's centennial wrestled a confident and complex nationalism back into the public consciousness. Countdown Canada was bought by the CBC and aired nationwide in September of that year, prophesying what a future of apathy and inaction could bring to the nation.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER: Robert Fothergill is a playwright and professor emeritus of theatre at York University. In addition to his plays, he is the author of Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (1974). He was the founding director of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and made five films between 1966 and 1975: Oddballs, Solipse, Love Seen, Countdown Canada and Campaign.

Countdown Canada is presented here in a 2K scan from Fothergill's personal print, which was gifted to me upon his retirement from York University.

In addition to the main feature (above), here is an introduction that Rob and I gave when we presented the film as part of the Ad Hoc screening series at Innis College. Thanks to Eva Kolcze, who shot this video.

And finally, here is a new video essay on the film. In addition to being part of this release, The Invasion Will Be Televised is the first episode of a new ‘spin-off’ of Art & Trash, Northern Light, on Canadian cinema. I had planned to release it throughout the summer but I’ve been presented with an opportunity to produce it in partnership with a new platform arriving this fall. So, future episodes will be available starting in September or October.

THE INVASION WILL BE TELEVISED: COUNTDOWN CANADA AS ANTICIPATORY DOCUDRAMA

In September 1970, the CBC broadcast a special presentation, in the style of a news-magazine program, that dramatized a peaceful annexation of Canada by the United States. The final hours of Canada’s independence play out on television, with the country’s leading cultural commentators debating these interesting times, interspersed with scenes depicting dissent and rioting by a hostage Canadian populace and the pageantry of surrender. Countdown Canada was a speculative docudrama rooted in an existential threat that had felt very real to Canadians in the years leading up to the country’s centennial—an event intended to consolidate a shared Canadian identity. The broadcast arrived at a moment of national reflection. Quebec’s Quiet Revolution had transformed Canadian politics, revealing fractures to federal unity, while separatist unrest and the rise of the FLQ revealed the fragility of the Canadian state. Pierre Trudeau’s early federalism promised a pan-Canadian vision that emphasized bilingualism and civil rights, but which struggled to define cultural sovereignty. There were also external pressure of American cultural dominance: by 1970, American ownership of Canadian magazines, newspapers, and television outlets was widely perceived as a threat to national autonomy. This concern had been growing since the O’Leary Commission’s 1961 report on foreign media ownership, and was amplified by Dave Godfrey’s 1968 essay collection The New Romans, which argued that Canada's absorption into the American empire was not a question of if, but when. Countdown Canada staged a creeping annexation—by invoking media, market forces, and ideology. A declining sense of national identity was making the country vulnerable to cultural and military domination from its southern neighbour. It risked becoming just another theatre of the Cold War. Countdown Canada anticipates challenges to Canada’s sovereignty, reminding the viewer that the cost of democratic self-determination is to foster a strong, distinctive national identity. If Canada cannot adequately and plainly define what makes it Canadian—and what beliefs lie at the heart of its identity—how can it hope to deflect a cultural invasion by America, with its declarations of individualism, its freedom rhetoric, its colonial fantasy of manifest destiny?

Countdown Canada was written and co-directed by literary historian and filmmaker Rob Fothergill, whose wide-ranging and divergent interests—from underground filmmaking, to the archetypes of an emerging Canadian cinema, to the study of English diaries—would later give way to his calling as a playwright. Countdown Canada anticipates Fothergill’s work in theatre, which was also marked by the speculative docudrama, pitching narratives that engage with the figure of Leon Trotsky and the ideas of Alan Dershowitz. With Countdown Canada, Fothergill was crafting a subtle variation on the Mercury Theatre’s infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, developing a program with enough veracity to deceive the casual viewer into a state of alarm, as through its use of real commentators playing themselves, and its invocation of the documental witness of news media. As George Grant observed in Lament for a Nation, the idea of Canadian sovereignty had become a philosophical impossibility in the age of liberal internationalism and American dominance. Countdown Canada is, in this sense, not merely a speculative satire but a televised funeral for an idea already eroded by history. It dramatizes Grant’s despair as performance: the spectacle of a nation negotiating the terms of its own disappearance—not through violence, but through consensus, distraction, and media assimilation.

For Grant, Canada’s postwar economic and cultural policies had “led to the impossibility of an alternative to the American republic being built on the north half of this continent.” His was not simply a lament for lost political autonomy—it was a philosophical diagnosis. The liberal commitment to progress, individualism, and free-market integration rendered any form of meaningful national difference unsustainable. Canada had surrendered in a failure of will, imagination, and metaphysical grounding. In Countdown Canada, sovereignty collapses as a fait accompli, confirmed and narrated by television anchors, experts, and commentators. No formal conquest takes place; instead, it is a media event that ratifies annexation as if it were natural, even banal. This televisual rendering mirrors Grant’s philosophical claim: that Canadian sovereignty would be lost not by an external invasion, but by acquiescing to the values and systems of liberal modernity. In this sense, Countdown Canada performs the very kind of "inevitability" that Grant feared—a sovereignty so eroded by ideological alignment with American liberalism that its disappearance would be accepted without resistance, as entertainment. Television chooses the nation’s fate. What Grant saw as a long erosion of identity, Countdown Canada compresses into a single broadcast evening, visualizing the disappearance of the nation as a process of linguistic, cultural, and institutional surrender. That it is styled like a typical CBC current affairs program makes its critique all the more potent: the tools of national communication have become the mechanisms of national dissolution.

Marshall McLuhan’s dictum—that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence”—form, and not just content, shapes our perception. “The medium is the message.” For McLuhan, the content of a communication is always subordinate to the way it is delivered: “It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” Countdown Canada does not merely tell the story of Canada’s annexation; it performs it using the authoritative codes and aesthetics of CBC news broadcasting. It mimics the tone, visual grammar, and social trust of Canadian public broadcasting. The illusion is seamless: real media figures—commentators, journalists, and public intellectuals—appear as themselves, offering supposedly live analysis of a speculative political event. The broadcast form creates a temporal and cognitive environment in which the fiction becomes real, or at least plausible. The viewer is not watching a documentary about annexation; they are watching annexation unfold in real time—as only television could rationalize and mediate it.
The medium is the message: form is fate. By adopting the codes of the news broadcast—a forum associated with truth-telling, public consensus, and national address—Countdown Canada renders the dissolution of Canadian sovereignty in an uncanny cadence. The structure trains the viewer to internalize the logic of collapse. Annexation becomes a matter of news formatting: the visuals, the presenter’s poise, the cutting between panel and field footage, all reinforce a sense of public normalcy even as the subject matter is a dire national extinction.

What Countdown Canada demonstrates is that television has the capacity to transcend reporting, to actively supplant political reality. For McLuhan, television becomes an environment that absorbs and reconditions the viewer’s sense of what is real and what is constructed. The distinction between a speculative fiction and a state broadcast collapses. The implications are immense: the broadcast does not just simulate a possible future—it primes the viewer to experience it. As such, Countdown Canada is not merely an exercise in speculative fiction, but a critique of televisual power. Its medium is its most potent message: the idea that Canada could vanish through the quiet, persuasive authority of its own broadcasting voice.

Countdown Canada shares DNA with other subversive pseudo-journalistic films that blend documentary form with fictional narrative to intervene politically in public discourse. Its most direct precursor is Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1965), a BBC-commissioned docudrama that simulates a nuclear attack on Britain and its aftermath. Framed in the style of a news report, The War Game combines interviews, statistics, and voiceover with harrowing fictionalized footage of civil collapse. Watkins employs this pseudo-journalistic authority as a truncheon against the public complacency and governmental silence around the realities of nuclear war. The film was deemed too politically incendiary to be broadcast, and was pulled by the BBC—a testament to the threat posed by its subversion of broadcast form. Watkins later made Punishment Park (1971). Structured as a vérité-style documentary of an emergency tribunal where political dissidents are judged and sentenced to death-by-exile in the titular “punishment park,” the film adopts the aesthetic conventions of news reportage and direct cinema. Its fictional elements are filmed in improvisational, hand-held style; its camera crew is rendered a participant-observer. In this form, Punishment Park reveals the fraying lines between judicial procedure and state violence: it speculates on what can—and implicitly does—occur in the ideological structure of American authoritarianism. Like Watkins, Fothergill weaponizes the visual grammar of public broadcasting against itself, turning state-sanctioned form into a site of resistance. These works use pseudo-realism to dramatize the slow erosion of civil liberties, national autonomy, or democratic discourse—not in the future, but now, and in plain sight.

These works provide important coordinates for understanding Countdown Canada. Like them, it uses the visual language of television journalism to simulate political reality. The credibility of television gives the resulting program a heightened urgency. This strategy finds one of its most unsettling expressions in the BBC’s Ghostwatch (1992), a hoax broadcast about paranormal activity in a North London home. Framed as a live investigation and hosted by respected broadcaster Michael Parkinson, Ghostwatch drew on every convention of factual television: call-ins from viewers, roving camera crews, real television personalities playing themselves. The horror of Ghostwatch arises from a subtle modulation of register—the slight lag in audio during remote connections, the low-quality video feeds, the restrained tone of Parkinson’s commentary—all of which are signifiers of authenticity in the visual language of live TV. Ghostwatch, like Countdown Canada, collapses fiction into journalistic form, staging a media event that behaves like a live broadcast. Both programs exploit television’s claim to truth, using that authority and the grammar of the medium to make the speculations of their fantasies into something vivid and real to the viewer.

This formal strategy allows Countdown Canada to do what a traditional drama could not: to generate a plausible sense of political collapse by speaking in the language of institutions—officials, journalists, studio panels, field reporters. As in The War Game, Punishment Park, and Ghostwatch, the fusion of documentary aesthetics and speculative narrative mobilizes audience affect while disguising the scaffolding of fiction. It is a simulation—a projection of political anxieties into the apparatus designed to relay the real.

Today, Countdown Canada can be understood as a precursor to contemporary debates about media simulation, post-truth politics, and the theatricality of sovereignty. Its modest production and brief runtime belie its conceptual daring: that a nation’s identity might be lost not through conquest, but through cultural absorption, passivity, and forgetfulness—made visible, fittingly, on a national broadcast.

Countdown Canada presents a nation televised out of existence. In this, it is not merely a speculative docudrama but an early recognition of sovereignty as a media phenomenon. It stages the absorption of Canada into the United States with talking heads in place of tanks, with consensus in place of conflict. In doing so, it anticipates the slow, procedural erosion of Canadian independence—an erosion whose signs remain visible in the “51st state” crisis of 2025.

The suggestion that Canada could be annexed without armed conflict, simply by failing to articulate its own identity, is no longer hypothetical. In trade policy, foreign ownership, and cultural production, Canada has increasingly ceded ground. Countdown Canada suggests that, should the nation lose its sovereignty overnight, its citizens might fail to notice. The film’s uncanny mode—faux-broadcast, half-familiar, domestically voiced—is precisely the medium through which such an annexation would become palatable: it would be performed, debated, and rationalized.

Contemporary viewers may see Countdown Canada as a broadcast from a parallel Canada—one that is only a few policy decisions, a few trade deals, a few cultural amnesties removed from our own. From this parallel reality, it offers this warning: identity, once surrendered, cannot be reclaimed. The identity of a nation must be a lived experience. If a nation fails to own its identity, someone else may own it for them.

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Our home video label Black Zero has released three new blu-ray discs of essential Canadian experimental films, as of this morning — Christine Lucy Latimer: Fragile Systems, Richard Kerr: Crisis Collision Resolve, and Larry Kardish’s underground feature Slow Run (1968). As always, these discs feature new video essays in the same voice and style as the Art & Trash series. Each disc is available for $35 CAD, and is packed dense with contextualizing bonus features. We produce these discs in an edition of 1000, so get them while you can!

The films and videos of Christine Lucy Latimer defy their containers: they reveal the fragile systems underlying media, press the boundaries of image-making machines, and embrace the faults and frailties of vision. Almost all of Latimer’s work is silent, but nothing is truly silent: Latimer’s images recall the hums, tweets and mechanical moans of the technology with which she made them. Her work began long after most of the formats she employs had become obsolete. Refusing the universal nostalgia of the antique camera and the antique image, Latimer’s works are undeniably present-facing and playfully disobedient, ethereal, and abstract. Supremely self-conscious yet mystical, they are seances that draw out the ghosts in the machine.

This disc collects 17 of Latimer's projects, spanning 2002 to 2021.

• Mosaic (2002)

• Ghostmeat (2003)

• The Bridge View (2003)

• Over {Past:Future} Sight (2006-07)

• (Just Beyond the Screen) The Universe - As We Know It - is Ending (2008)

• Focus (2009)

• Fruit Flies (2010)

• The Pool (2011)

• The Magik Iffektor (2011)

• Nationtime (2013)

• Lines Postfixal (2013)

• Jane's Birthday (2013)

• Physics and Metaphysics in Modern Photography (2014)

• C2013 (2014)

• Still Feeling Blue about Colour Separation (2015)

• House Pieces (2017)

• Tender (2021)

SPECIAL FEATURES

• Digital masters approved by artist Christine Lucy Latimer

• Dreaming in Abstraction, a new interview with Christine Lucy Latimer

• 14 additional project-specific interviews, throughout the disc

• Fragile Systems, a video essay by Stephen Broomer

• Select audio commentaries with the artist and her family

• Liner notes by artist and curator Meganelizabeth Diamond

Through the course of the 1980s, Canadian artist-filmmaker Richard Kerr had gradually moved towards an ‘accelerated cinema,’ an imagistic cinema of movement, montage and aggressive sound design. Kerr’s work in this ‘accelerated cinema’ became increasingly total at the same time that he became invested in the model of the ‘teacher-practitioner,’ collaborating directly with his students and working with simple, accessible tools.

This collection gathers thirteen of Kerr’s films made between 1991 and 2017, chronicling an important phase in his creative evolution. Crisis Collision Resolve serves as a portrait of an artist pushing the limits of the moving image, while pitching a dynamic dialogue between pedagogy, collective action, and personal vision.

• plein air etude (1991)

• plein air (1991)

• the machine in the garden (1991)

• i was a strong man until i left home (2000)

• pictures of sound (2000)

• collage d'hollywood (2003)

• hollywood décollage (2003)

• a universe of broken parts (2007)

• action : study (2009)

• de mouvement (2009)

• house arrest (2012)

• morning ... came a day early (2014)

• wholly holy (2017)

SPECIAL FEATURES

• Newly restored digital masters approved by director Richard Kerr

• Machines of Cinema, a new interview with Richard Kerr

• The Dissolving Carousel, a video essay on Kerr's demi-monde by Canadian filmmaker Stephen Broomer

• Liner notes by film scholar Bart Testa

Slow Run is a raw, lyrical portrait of New York City as seen through the eyes of a young Canadian exile. The filmmaker, Larry Kardish, at 23 years old, had made his first and only film as a candid love letter to the city, a litany of fascinations and complaints. Kardish blends dreamlike street photography, intimate portraiture, and a rhapsodic monologue performed by the filmmaker's fictional surrogate, a young Canadian ex-pat (Saul Rubinek in his first film role). The narration accounts the lives and relationships of a group of young Bohemians, and unfolds in parallel to the imagery rather than in dialogue with it, creating a tension between voice and vision, presence and distance.

When Slow Run was released, Jonas Mekas asked, "is Larry Kardish a lyrical realist?" It is a film of such contraditions: romantic and disenchanted, spontaneous and composed. Slow Run captures a fleeting moment in time—New York in its grand beauty, as seen by an alien.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• A new digital restoration approved by filmmaker Larry Kardish

• From Sandy Hill to Ottawa, a new interview with Larry Kardish

• Blind Alleys: Slow Run and the Tropic of Manhattan, a video essay by Stephen Broomer

• Liner notes by poet and filmmaker David Spittle

• English subtitles

On Canada Day, July 1, we will be doing a free online release of Rob Fothergill’s Countdown Canada (1970), a speculative docudrama about Canadian sovereignty in decline. In addition to a new 2K scan of the filmmaker’s personal 16mm print (in admittedly rough shape), we will be releasing a video introduction by the filmmaker (recorded in 2017) and a new video essay. That video essay, “The Invasion Will Be Televised,” is also a preview of a new monthly video essay series, Northern Light, which will be coming this fall as part of a new partnership. More information coming on that soon.

In order to support what we do here at Art & Trash, and at Black Zero, consider pledging support to our Patreon!

Join today!

Till next time!

Stephen Broomer // Art & Trash

Black Zero, the home video label that I started in 2023, returns next week with a fresh wave of releases! There will be three discs coming this time, two of which are comprehensive collections of essential Canadian experimental filmmakers, the third of which is an underappreciated gem, an experimental feature film from the late 1960s.

Timed to coincide with that, I’ve launched a new series, In the Field, through Black Zero and Art & Trash, which will regularly feature tours of co-ops and artist studios, interviews with artists, and spotlights on historical locations important to the study of Canadian underground cinema.

The first episode is out now and you can watch it below — Freedom to the Filmmaker: Madi Piller and Pix Film.

Last night I received the devastating news that P. Adams Sitney passed away. Sitney was a founding force in the experimental film world, first as a critic and programmer and later as the author of a series of remarkable books (Visionary Film, Modernist Montage, Eyes Upside Down, The Cinema of Poetry). He will be remembered in many ways, with love and affection by those of us who touched into his orbit, with envious hostility from ‘rival scholars’, and with bewilderment by any artists who still think that critics set out to build canons. Me, I’d rather build cannons! I regard Sitney with tremendous admiration: for me there is no other critic who wrote with such clarity and certainty about the American avant-garde cinema.

You can see a young P. Adams Sitney in Storm De Hirsch’s The Tattooed Man—and you can even watch a video essay about it right here, at Art & Trash …

My newsletters and updates were slowed down a little through the spring, but Art & Trash will soon return with a new sub-series. More info coming soon… And in the meantime, here is a new audio commentary, on Christopher Maclaine’s Scotch Hop.

Christopher Maclaine was a beat poet, he was the publisher of the short-lived but essential little magazine Contour, and is best remembered as a maker of a small handful of brilliant films. With Scotch Hop, Maclaine films a highland heritage festival in Petaluma, California, where traditional Scottish recreation is on full display, with highland dancers, bagpipers, and drum troops as his subjects. Maclaine strains these events through his own sensibilities, using canted angles and disruptive cutting to cast abstract and discontinuous rhythms—the result isn’t a mockery of what’s on display, it’s a work of love and of connection with something greater than the close borders of self, it is an ecstatic dance.

The film has a tripartite structure: the first and second sequences have similar momentum. In the first sequence, pipers and drummers are documented, with a straightforward style that gives way to increasingly rapid cutting and tight close-up compositions, that seem to build a parallel rhythm to the oscillating drones of the bagpipes; the second sequence features dancers, filmed from a low angle at the edge of a performing stage, interspersing shots in slow and undercranked motion that turns the subject’s rhythm over to Maclaine’s own lyrical operations. In the third sequence, these contrasts - of abstract and broad compositions, and of slow, fast, and normal motion, come together as band processions, competitive games and cultural dances assume Maclaine’s attention, with caber tosses and speed walkers becoming a directional arrow for the film itself, moving rightward towards a conclusion. All of this kinetic activity, and in particular the dances, is slowed into something more graceful by Maclaine’s camera, a grace that is inevitably, if not sentimental, at least tender in its depiction.

Scotch Hop was Maclaine’s final film. The next few years were very harsh for him, as has been reported in various accounts, most vividly by the poet David Melzer—Maclaine’s methadrine and amphetamine addictions were the cause of his deterioration, and he ended up in jail, which broke him in a kind of final way, and though he held on for another 12 years, by the end of the 1960s he was prematurely aged, he was incapable of independent survival, and in the end, he became vegetative at age 46. Maclaine’s own tragic end has cast a pall over his films, especially his darkly absurd masterpiece The End, a film too easily misunderstood as purely miserable although it, like Scotch Hop, dances in its own way, and to its own rhythms…but what we see here in Scotch Hop is a bare and innate liveliness that occupied Maclaine’s core—pleasure and plasticity and the dancing camera, joining in rituals that are themselves ecstatic and celebratory. This film has been a game of pleasant disruptions, like the interruption of daisies woven into the fingers of an idle hand that breaks up the final title credit.

It is a late gesture in the films of Christopher Maclaine, to see a world external to that personal mythology that guided his major works, major works that are also more in service to narrative—I’m thinking of The End and The Man Who Invented Gold, little fables that made him into the Homer of hipsterdom. But in Scotch Hop and the film that preceded it, Beat, Maclaine is chronicling phenomena external to his tales, something more spontaneous and social, filtering it all through his own witness: in Beat, his witness is a casual one of romantic haze, in Scotch Hop, an intensely formal one. In the face of this ecstasy, I’m reminded of a poem that Maclaine wrote ten years earlier, a poem that broadcasts the mordant perspective he had on a world gone and going wrong, the whole of the present moment as an echo where little glimpses of vitality spent and spending could still bleed through into a perceptible present.

“as though everything were alive,
I see everything is dying, the clock
says half past eight, in the corridor
but I have been cut off in a room
and the time in the corridor does not reach me
here.

I see everything is dying
on this day of the returning robins,
sparrows: the flowers, heads without bodies,
so young in the tender breath of April—all is life
today as if the awkward movement of death were
halted,
but I know the sun will bow the heads of lilies
tomorrow
as though everything were not dying
but only flowers, birds, and me.”

In order to support what we do here at Art & Trash, and at Black Zero, consider pledging support to our Patreon!

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Till next time!

Stephen Broomer // Art & Trash

Further to our newsletter: the Art & Trash patreon is hosting Canadian experimental filmmaker David Rimmer’s great and rare documentary Language of the Brush, on painter Jack Wise, streaming until noon tomorrow. It’s free to sign up!

David Rimmer passed away a short time ago. To celebrate his life and his impact on me, I recorded this audio commentary about David’s film Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper. Enjoy!

This film was a breakthrough work for Rimmer, whose involvement in filmmaking evolved through the late-1960s from family-of-man phenomenological psychedelia, a quality in Rimmer’s first films that recedes to something more austere and minimalistic, realized in a series of films in 1970, chief among them, Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper. Rimmer’s first films were maximalist in part because of what had influenced him: through the years, Rimmer claimed to have been inspired to make films by a talk that Stan Brakhage gave where Brakhage talked about rediscovering freedom, that you could spit on the lens of a camera and transform vision, that you could think about this medium in totally new ways and break from convention; and in addition to that inspiration, it seems to me beyond doubt that Rimmer was also inspired by the Pacific coast landscape, inevitably maximalist in all the phenomena that the tides took in, and the surrounding culture, with his home of Vancouver a diverse hub, an east and west intersection where one could have a kind of Omnist faith riddled with symbolism from an all-encompassing, borderless spiritual history. Those values aren’t dispensed with when he moves towards minimalism, for we find that this new minimalist turn in his work is not clinical or cold, but full of the curiosity and passion and hunger of an expanding consciousness: Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper witnesses a gradual transformation from an ordinary western record, documentary b-roll gleaned from the trash, to a psychic impression that suggests something distant and mystical, otherworldly. In other works from this same period, Rimmer begins to use repetition and symmetry to re-mystify action: a busy river channel, a dance, falling trees, a crowd of spectators, a day of recreation on the seashore, all become subject to intense, ecstatic meditations. Even as Rimmer became a formidable presence in the developing community of structural filmmaking, he remained a proponent of that west coast Buddhist-Omnist cinema that is a cinema of mystery and romance. The cool patience of minimalism and the warm, tripping passions of Beatnik-cum-hippie glory converge in his formalization of elastic time. That elastic time can be seen here in the restless repetition-and-variation of a single shot, but in other films he will prolong shots, effecting an extreme and probing slow-motion.

The germ of Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper is this scrap of documentary footage, a medium-wide shot of an assembly line worker, a woman, drawing and shaking out a big sheet of cellophane. The cellophane seems to fly towards the viewer, cast up vertically, such that, as the image evolves, it will come to feel like we are being smothered by it, or drowning in it. This loop is near-perfect because it is hard to tell where the cut is in casual observation, harder to tell as the loop begins to overlap and change its textures and tonalities and colour: so it’s hard to see the beginning and end, and is this a tribute to Rimmer’s skill in closing the loop, or to the mechanization of the human body on an assembly line? I say this because it’s easy enough to commend the loop as an inscription of the mechanical movements of modern labour, where bodies become the cogs and gears of a machine. Rimmer found the shot in a scrap pile. It came from a National Film Board of Canada documentary. Rimmer had been involved with Intermedia, which was a foundational Vancouver arts association that served as a platform for artists working across media and in new multimedia forms. Film materials from both the NFB and the CBC would make their way to Intermedia, and artists would draw from those materials to make new work, and that’s how he found this clip, and with it in hand, he began to print the film in all kinds of ways: to make negative and positive versions of it, to print it to colour stock with colour filters, printing it in high contrast—we see all of these approaches bleeding in and out in the final version. At Intermedia happenings, Rimmer would include these loops as projector performances, often in tandem with poetry readings and free jazz and dance performances, as was the nature of such happenings. When he went about cutting it all together as a film, Rimmer was after a specific effect; he would later tell Alex MacKenzie, “the idea was to take this image and just disintegrate it over time. Do as many things that I could to it to see where it would lead.” Rimmer found that the meaning of the image changed: over time, showing the film to audiences, he found his sense of the composition met a welcome challenge from those who saw it as a work of symbolic transformation. For some it was a feminist work—here is woman trapped in monotonous labour, sewing cellophane like the Fates spinning thread—for others it was an Orientalist work, with the worker’s form changing from that of a western labourer into a Hindu God, the icon of a dancing Shiva, in whose grace we witness the panchakritya—creation, preservation, destruction, concealment and salvation.

That verticality that I mentioned earlier is a part of this mysterious invitation, this symbolic transit to another plane, in that the vertical action of shaking out the cellophane gives a sensation of being drowned, as if waves are overtaking both the assembly line worker and the composition itself, and therefore, us. This effect is furthered by Don Druick’s score, of percussive tones that skitter and rumble and reverberate as if occurring across some vast distance, with overlapping rhythms that, like the image, suggest mechanization, at times mirroring the rapid function of the projector’s intermittent mechanism, a rapid function that becomes an essential part of the image when the shot begins to flicker, multiple versions of the loop converging, printing in alternating and superimposing positive and negative frames, further stylizing the features of the worker. Through all of this transformation, it must be said, Rimmer disintegrates the image as best he can, but he does not destroy it, he can’t destroy the image. Image is resilient. We glimpse the core resilience of this shot when Rimmer strips the composition down to its essential construction—the shape of a face with eye and mouth and nose holes in photo-negative high contrast, a form that is later coloured wildly, and takes on the crackling textures of magnified grain. The face, more than the action, remains: Rimmer’s operations drench the form in ambiguity, making a neutral countenance into the penetrating stare of a face without eyes. In the mystery of this figure, and of this face, we could glimpse almost anything.

And further to the announcement the other day about the impending release of my new book, Secret Museums: The Films of Arthur Lipsett, here is a trailer for the book! It’s available for pre-order now from Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Till next time!

Stephen Broomer // Art & Trash

While the series is on hiatus, this newsletter will highlight episodes from the past with full scripts, as well as new developments related to our sister projects - Ad Hoc, an ongoing series of experimental film screenings that I am involved in programming at the University of Toronto, and Black Zero, a home video label dedicated to Canadian experimental film.

Join today!

Secret Museums: The Films of Arthur Lipsett

I have a new book coming out next month, the first book-length critical study of the great collage filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. My engagement with Lipsett goes back many years but his films became a big part of my life in 2017 when I restored his final film, Strange Codes, with the support of the Cinematheque Quebecois. That film has since been issued on a limited edition Blu-ray disc through Black Zero, where you can buy it today. Though the film is short, the disc includes a 90-minute shot-by-shot breakdown of the film.

The book can be pre-ordered from its publisher, Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Below is the description and some marvellous blurbs.

When Arthur Lipsett’s first film was nominated for an Academy Award in 1962, the event marked the arrival of an influential turn in cinema. The film’s dark humour and dancing rhythms had captured the spirit of his times. When Lipsett committed suicide in 1986, the humour and joy of his work was eclipsed by that sardonic darkness. It all came to feel like an omen.

Secret Museums is a study in the life and work of Canadian collage filmmaker Arthur Lipsett, whose struggles with mental illness have overshadowed his vital and innovative work. Author Stephen Broomer explores the spiritual themes and formal challenges posed by Lipsett’s films and the artist’s absurdist, comic, beatnik sensibility. As a critical biography, Secret Museums follows the trajectory of Lipsett’s life through his years as a filmmaker (1960-1975) and after, with new interpretations and analysis of his eight completed films.

In Secret Museums, Lipsett’s films are recognized as riotous comedies that reflect the artist’s resilience. It serves as a new interpretation of Lipsett and his films, positioning him as both a visionary force and a holy fool, illuminating fresh pathways through his work that reflect his understandings of his sources and his world.

No one researches and writes on experimental film as ardently and thoroughly as Stephen Broomer. And the immortal found-footage visionary Arthur Lipsett gets the wall-to-wall, deep-pile, ultra-sensory Broomer treatment here in what will stand forever as the definitive study of the artist whose influences can be found everywhere in cinema today. Read this book! Love this book!

- Guy Maddin

A clear-eyed and patient examination of Lipsett’s enigmatic films.  Stephen Broomer sensitively traces Lipsett’s trajectory from his art school days to his development as a filmmaker at the NFB, and eventually through the vicissitudes of an artist’s life and processes. Full of deeply felt descriptions of the films, Broomer unearths Lipsett’s collections of flowcharts, images, and diagrams he called his “secret museum”—a disjointed cultural scrapbook at turns comically absurd and overwhelmingly dark. Broomer’s book reminds us of Lipsett’s extraordinary mind and capacity for humour, despite the sad circumstances of his descent into schizophrenia which has long cast a pall upon his life’s work. 

- Jeanne Liotta

I will be presenting the book, and accompanying programs of films, at Cinematheque Quebecois (Montreal) and Innis College (Toronto) in September.

Spring is here, so it’s time to revisit one of our first Art & Trash miniatures - on Bruce Baillie’s All My Life.

Baillie shot the film in Caspar, California, where he was staying with the poet Paul Tulley, a few hours north along the Pacific Coast from Baillie’s home base of San Francisco. It’s a film about a characteristic of sunlight that was particular to this place, this moment, this day. It’s a work of phenomenal wonder. Baillie had often employed a telephoto lens, whether to obscure details as he does in Quick Billy, or to limit focal depth as he does in Valentin. In All My Life the telephoto lens distorts spatial relations, it flattens the weeds and bushes and roses and the fence against that horizon. It depicts a sky like a riddle, impossibly deep yet absolutely flat, at once full and empty. In flattening this phenomena, it also magnifies their potential—they become graphic, translated from the real into art, translated by art into eternity. Baillie, having only one roll of film, rehearsed the motion of panning, timing the film so that the tilt would come right at the end of the roll. That one roll of film was also expired—so one might also see in All My Life a tribute to the surprising resilience of colour film! In an era of improvising filmmakers, emulating the patterns of consciousness—an approach that one can find in some of Baillie’s other films—Baillie did something unusual in this care, this planning and construction. What results is an open metaphor for the life force itself and all that entails—maturation, romantic love, and surprise. These are symbols but they are also energy patterns, the red of the flowers, the blue of the sky, the boundaries of the fence line, the path of the camera and the final heavenward tilt of the tripod head. Baillie is condensing concept, action, symbolism, and metaphor into a predetermined length, 100 feet of film running continuously. It becomes an essential act of beat buddhism: zen meditation in a rose garden.

FINAL DESTINATIONS: The Case of Night Train to Terror

Out of all of the dark fables to emerge from gothic literature, one with an uncommonly long reach and abiding influence is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the tale of a body fashioned from other bodies, animated as a blank slate. The creature is haunted not necessarily by the memory of its parts but by the gradual knowledge of its own unlikely existence, not as a man but as a creature in the image of man. It wrestles with its identity as a made monster, a mere thing, with no hope of changing its character.

Such questions of objecthood and purpose weigh heavily on Night Train to Terror, a film assembled in 1985 by director-producer Jay Schlossberg-Cohen. Night Train to Terror tells three stories, each presented as the case of an individual who has been morally compromised because of their involvement with something evil: there is the case of an asylum for cruel experimentation, the case of a circle of death-obsessed thrill seekers, and the case of spiritual conflict between a satanic sect, an atheist, and the atheist’s god-fearing wife. These stories are framed by a wraparound segment in which God and Lucifer debate the final destination of the souls involved in these cases; they engage in a philosophical conversation about free will and sin and their roles, and Lucifer’s past as a fallen angel. After each segment, they negotiate the salvation or damnation of the subjects at hand. Night Train to Terror is an anthology horror film, a genre with strong precedents such as Dead of Night, Tales from the Crypt, and The Torture Garden; it differs from these films in one significant way, that the cases which God and Lucifer debate are, in fact, entire feature-length films that have been cut down and summarized. In this sense, it is something of a remix. Schlossberg-Cohen’s contribution is the frame that ties these three tales together.

Each of Night Train to Terror’s individual segments originated as an exploitation film, and they bear premises and twists that would be at home in the pages of EC horror comics. The first segment, The Case of Harry Billings, was left unfinished in its original form, produced with the title Scream Your Head Off, and later re-edited and released as Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. In it, a man is held in an insane asylum where he and other inmates are being tortured by black market organ harvesters. The title protagonist, Harry Billings, is hypnotized into seducing women for the harvesters. He does so as a smooth operator, meeting women in churches and bars before drugging them and bringing them to the asylum. He finally wakes from his hypnotism, setting in motion a fatal confrontation with his keepers.

The second segment, The Case of Greta Connors, was finished and released under the titles The Death Wish Club, The Dark Side of Love, Carnival of Fools, and Gretta; in it a pair of young lovers, Gretta and Glenn, become involved with a death cult, a group of elites whose boredom and decadence has led them to seek out gruesome deaths, for which they elect a victim from their own ranks using chance games of Russian roulette. One involves a rare, dangerous mosquito, another involves electrocution. The young lovers themselves are a curious pair: Gretta is a musician who has been coerced into appearing in pornography; Glenn becomes obsessed with her after seeing her on film at a frat party. Their courtship is limited to a few knowing glances in a cardboard vision of a nightclub. As they become more involved with the death cult, Gretta’s own behaviour becomes more grotesque, more gleeful at the site of death. Finally, the couple are forced against their will to participate in a final game of chance, and it ends, anticlimactically, with the death of a minor character.

The third and most substantial segment, The Case of Claire Hanson, was released in full under the titles Cataclysm, The Nightmare Never Ends, and Satan’s Supper. This case follows a satanic conspiracy involving a crusty detective, a Jewish mystic named Papini, an immortal Nazi officer now patronizing California discos and opera houses, an outspoken atheist philosopher and the atheist’s wife, the title character, Claire Hanson. Claire Hanson is haunted by menacing visions, and for much of the segment, she serves as a witness to the omens of what is ultimately revealed to be an apocalyptic satanic scheme; her role is relatively minor until it is revealed that she has been chosen by god to put an end to all of this evil, and she is instructed to do so by containing the immortal Nazi’s heart in a box fashioned from a piece of the true cross. This proves to be a final, grotesque deception, as doing so simply makes her into the devil’s accomplice.

The content of these segments is made more bizarre by the appearance, in segments two and three, of clay animation. And of all the incidental comic relief of the film, perhaps the strangest is the appearance in the first and third segment of character actor Richard Moll, best known for his role as childlike bailiff Bull on Night Court, who appears in the first as a hulking monosyllabic brute, and in the third as erudite, proto-Dawkinsian public intellectual Dr. Hanson. These accidental ‘dual roles’ give such stark contrast as to provide the film with a bizarre comic backbone. But more than these superficial resemblances, the films share common traits in a more fundamental aspect of their production. All three, in their original form, were written by Philip Yordan, a writer best remembered for acting as a front for other writers when the red scare had left them blacklisted. And two of the films, The Death Wish Club and Scream Your Head Off, were directed by John Carr. Carr and Yordan’s influence gives the stories their thematic coherence, a tragic trilogy of moral compromise; Yordan’s lingering authorship is also what distinguishes these stories, abandoning genre tropes to embrace esoteric influences and cruel ironies.

The segments are distinct in their links to subgenres of exploitation cinema - The Case of Harry Billings is essentially a variation on the women-in-prison genre; The Case of Claire Hanson, for all of its advanced mystic-philosophical religious horror, fits into the Nazisploitation genre. Both are at home in the exploitation cinemas of the 1970s; in this only the case of Gretta Connors is something of an outlier, a complicated mystery film, complicated in that its mystery has little to do with the Death Cult’s pursuits but with mysteries of the heart. In a sense, what God and Lucifer examine through their train voyage are such mysteries and tricks, of the mind, of the heart, of the body. These themes overlap, but they’re present in recurrent the role of hypnosis and lobotomy in the first; the unknowable, fickle motives of Gretta in the second; and the pliability of the body in the third, the body eternal, but also, the body that metamorphoses and the body that transcends space and time.

The wraparound segment primarily serves as a frame for exposition. The train they ride, which is journeying through the cosmos, is occupied by a group of musicians and dancers who seem to be producing a music video, unaware that they are riding to the afterlife. The only person they interact with is an aged conductor/porter, a ferryman on this cosmic styx. The song they dance to is, in itself, a limbo hex: a recurring lyric seems to mirror the suspension in which these dancers exist: “everybody’s got something to do, everybody but you.” Indeed, the question of having something - or nothing - to do is evident in the film’s crude remix. As narrative is shorn away, leaving behind rapidly advancing sequences, entire secondary storylines are condensed to ellipses. Meanwhile, atmosphere is retained, ironically, through prolonged sequences, in anticipation of shocks and thrills. This is most apparent in The Case of Gretta Connors, where narrative drifts continuously forward but slows to a standstill in scenes of the death cult’s ‘games’, and in The Case of Claire Hansen, when the film is at its most mystically contemplative.

At the end of Frankenstein, the creature drifts away on an ice raft, lost in darkness and distance, never to be seen again. Night Train to Terror offers three such creatures, cut up and refashioned, resurrected to stand judgment.

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While the series is on hiatus, this newsletter will highlight episodes from the past with full scripts, as well as new developments related to our sister projects - Ad Hoc, an ongoing series of experimental film screenings that I am involved in programming at the University of Toronto, and Black Zero, a home video label dedicated to Canadian experimental film.

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AD HOC 70 - The Dynamic Arts: Documentaries by Jim Davis

This programme was presented as part of Ad Hoc, a free public screening series based at the Cinema Studies Institute at Innis College. Think of it as a kind of live episode. The films are wonderful and are viewable here for the first time publicly in new high-resolution scans (except the last one which is sourced from archive.org).

The American filmmaker Jim Davis is best known for his dynamic, abstract filmmaking, which built on aesthetics he developed first in his hanging sculptures, mobiles of coloured plastic that channeled and shaped light. Davis’s interests in modern aesthetics would lead him to hail the promise that cinema could become “the only dynamic art,” yet the dynamic possibilities across the arts had long informed his approach, from his early years as a painter to his mature work working directly with light. In addition to his abstract films, Davis made a modest body of documentaries focused on the life and work of artists he admired, the cubist painter John Marin and the Prairie School architect Frank Lloyd Wright, both of them artists whose sense of dynamics resonated with Davis’s own creative ambitions. Davis’s films on Marin and Wright are presented in this program, beginning with the portrait, John Marin; following this is Pertaining to Marin, a shorter portrait made from the earlier film’s outtakes. Closing the program are the paired architectural studies Taliesin East and Taliesin West, on Frank Lloyd Wright’s home studios, the first in Springfield Wisconsin, the second in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Program:
John Marin (1950, 16mm, 23m, colour, sound)
Pertaining to Marin (1953, 16mm, 10m, colour, sound)
Taliesin East (1950, 16mm, 10m, colour, sound)
Taliesin West (1950, 16mm as digital file, 10m, colour, sound)

Film prints provided by the Black Zero Media Collection. Taliesin West is sourced from the Prelinger Archives.

In light of the massive storms that have pilloried Toronto this past week, here’s the first Art & Trash miniature commentary - a seasonal one.

Much has been said about Jerome Hill’s life, not least of which by himself in his great autobiographical feature Film Portrait. When he made Merry Christmas, Hill was in the midst of a transition in his creative life: after decades of producing documentaries, he devoted himself to experimental filmmaking. In particular, Hill came to see film as a form into which he could pour his many talents across the arts, drawing from his interests in music composition and painting to make work that was defiantly personal. As a child, Hill had seen films by George Méliès that had involved hand-painting directly on film, and it left such an impression on him that when he turned to experimental film, it was out of a conviction that this was what he was to do, to enhance photographic images with, on the one hand, tints—and every image in Merry Christmas is tinted—and through the blotting of objects in paint onto the film strip. The objects often assume multi-dimensional form despite being flat. Painted in miniature, they are simple, lacking fine detail, often purely geometric. Hill was painting directly on the film’s negative, so in the course of printing the films, the colours would be inverted to their opposites: warm colours would become cool colours, and the effect of this negative inversion of colour is also eerie and unnatural. Hill was able to get print tests from the lab on sections of the film, and to adjust what he was doing, to decorate and elaborate his miniatures, to achieve specific effects. Thus, an experiment refined becomes a method, but still Hill felt that happy accidents could occur, that the painted figures took on a life of their own beyond his control. Of his animated films, Merry Christmas is one of the most ambitious, as these ghostly figures—Mary, Joseph, and their donkey—trudge down 44th Street, posed to assume complex blocking, their scale fluctuating as they’re sent on their way. The bustle of Manhattan has its own chill, bodies moving rapidly in under cranked motion, like Keystone Cops but scattering with futility, seizing up in freeze frames on the faces of individuals.

Times Square becomes Bethlehem to this restaging of the founding story of Christmas: there’s no room at the inn, and no stable or manger to be seen, yet the nativity’s coming, maybe just down the block on 5th Avenue. A foundational tableaux of struggle and suffering, Mary and Joseph give of themselves, but are met by the ungenerous, impatient throng of modern life, and they travel on, anonymous, down the street.

SECOND DEATHS: Metaphors for Tolerance in Mindwarp

The biologist John Calhoun was fascinated by the social hierarchies of the rodent kingdom, and when he began to build habitats for his specimens in the late 1940s, it was inevitable that his observations, particular as they were to rats and mice, would resonate with the operations of others societies, animal or human, in measuring how populations grow, how they regulate themselves, and how they collapse. In 1968, Calhoun built a mouse utopia, which would witness a rapid development, overpopulation, and a horrific decimation arising from violent behaviours, willful isolation, the decline of mating, what was essentially a decline of fellowship, a concept which, once imposed on critters, closes the distance between man and mouse. Calhoun had concluded that his studies were a metaphor for the human race, facing its own rapidly expanding population and the decay of its burdened cities, recognizing a “behavioural sink” of aberrant actions that came in response to density and overcrowding. Those who passively withdrew from this circus he called “beautiful ones,” shunning social interaction, grooming themselves, a model of self-preservation that is itself an image of doom.

Calhoun had observed a cataclysm: he designed a world and watched it end. In dystopian science-fiction, the cause of an apocalypse is mere decoration around the creation of a new world, a post-apocalypse; such worlds serve as allegories in response to the same queries that Calhoun and his peers had about the dangerous transformations of society, through overcrowding, through energy crises, through ideological conflict. What made these wastelands? The circumstances and causes are often less important than the dramas that play out within them. Those dramas are, like all fables and quests, handed down: even in the act of handing down a story to an imagined future, speculative stories become identified with our long-held firmament of myth. Loners, refugees, men without names, tour vast deserts and the molted shells of cities in search of fellowship long after fellowship has vanished. They survive in the behavioural sink, toilet basins of rapists and scavengers, and like H.G. Wells’s fantastical future, this primeval regression has its counterpoint, its beautiful ones preserved, Eloi to the Morlocks.

In Mindwarp, the beautiful ones occupy a biosphere habitat that, like Calhoun’s, has been made for them: they recline in machines that help them dream lucid fantasies, sheltered from the unknown of a destroyed external world with uncanny illusions of greenery projected on their windows. Tranquility breeds rebellion: when Judy rebels, she is cast out of paradise and into the ‘death zone’. Is she named for Judy Garland? The System Operator who casts her out will become something of an Oz figure. She is saved from slavers by a scavenger, Stover, who educates her in the origins of the radioactive world she’s fallen into. It does not suffer from overpopulation anymore, if it ever did, a second ice age has taken care of that: this is a withering planet living out what Calhoun would have called a ‘second death,’ the bodily death that follows the spiritual death of social breakdown. Everyone in this scenario has a role to play: Judy is a dreamer, one of the beautiful ones; Stover is an outworlder, a non-mutated human living in the death zone; the slavers are known as crawlers, cannibalistic mutants who worship a mysterious prophet. Judy and Stover will be held prisoner in an underground cavern by the crawlers, tortured physically and mentally, their anguish compounded by grotesque twists, for example, the revelation that their prophet is Judy’s own father, who intends to imprison her for the purpose of mating with her. Judy will escape the death zone only through the miraculous intervention of the System Operator, who, in a final twist, is revealed to be a more benevolent manifestation of her father. The System Operator has created this whole experience as a simulation, a dream, to test her worth so that she can take his place. Stover and the outworlders, the crawlers and the seer, were all imaginary, fictions conducted for her edification. The slate is wiped clean in an admission from one beautiful one to another: he has no idea if any part of this fantasy was accurate to the world outside, because he’s never been there.

Mindwarp is an allegory, but unlike Calhoun’s project, its purpose is not to speculate on the underlying cause of some future cataclysm: it is a film about our world, in the present, a society riddled with the censorious voices of aspiring inquisitors. Its cause is to defend the place of storytelling in a climate of censorship and scapegoating. Produced by the horror culture magazine Fangoria, Mindwarp argues that the fictional rendering of violence is harmless, that it be regarded without intervention and judgment, that it be facilitated. To recognize an illusion for what it is, is to preserve the self. This argument remains relevant, but had a special relevance in the 1980s and 90s, when horror culture was still a controversial corner of mass culture, when censors were eager to draw connecting lines between real and imaginary violence, when a new wave of video games were igniting debates about the naivety and dangerous fantasies of youth. Video culture writ large must have appeared to its critics to be just that, a rejection of life itself: turn on, tune in, drop dead. Moral crusaders saw a bankruptcy akin to that ‘behavioural sink,’ insular, anti-social behaviours that would be ready scapegoats for real-world evils, like the case of Jamie Bulger, whose killers, it was suggested by the judge in their case, had been perverted by exposure to video nasties; or for that matter, the tenuous links news media made between the Columbine shooters and their choice of entertainment, as if Quake had trained them to wage war on their classmates. By contrast, the most articulate of advocates found more than pleasure in these objects, and richer defences than the perilous excuse of free speech: they found catharsis, empowerment, acceptance and celebration of the outsider, a means to turn the imagination into a shelter from a cruel, bullying world.

As advocacy for free imaginations—for the freedom of the dreamer—Mindwarp places a challenge to the viewer. The visceral impact of its violence is an embodied experience, nauseating and grotesque, and further unsettling in its invocation of taboos, of rape and incest. Having been produced by a magazine that specialized in special effects culture, Mindwarp is distinguished for the quality of its illusions, its wet, graphic brutality, an authentic rendering that allows it to feel dangerous and unpredictable, an experience unlocked by the most effective nightmares, that plausibility that can cause the dreamer to wake in a sweat. With its final twist this verisimilitude is rationalized: the System Operator admits the terrifying realism of the mental image, and stays his judgment. As an exercise in form, Mindwarp provokes primal fear, even as it declares its illusions to be the feedback of the dreaming mind: what allows the film to feel provocative and dangerous is not any similarity to the dream, but its heritage in the montage tradition. Like the great Russian project, Mindwarp uses montage as a network of image-responses, plastic counterpoints, and provocative abstractions. The film’s most harrowing sequences frighten because they assume a baroque intercutting between dreamer, outworlder, and the crawler dungeon. The image balances this nexus of sympathies when, as the seer of the crawlers is introduced, young outworlder Claude is chosen to be made an example of, in a ritual execution. She is enucleated by the seer, who then pushes her down a sluice into a meat grinder; her blood comes out the other end, to be consumed by the crawlers and their prisoners. The scene lasts less than two minutes, but in that time, a dizzying sequence of sixty images are interspersed that achieve a number of things: they map out the stages of this ritual killing and the tools involved; they further establish the cavernous world and lore of the crawlers; and they tour the horrified reactions of the prisoners. The sequence deceives the viewer by teasing a happier outcome with a simple gesture. Stover, disguised as a crawler, has made his way into the ritual room: of the sixty shots, two of them are on Stover, dollying in on him, as if to suggest a heroic intervention. But that intervention doesn’t come: Stover is not a hero, he’s just a witness, and that sinking feeling that comes with the dolly is, in retrospect, a formal metaphor for the sinking heart, the lump in the throat, the bristling goosebumps that come with shock. The execution establishes one other thing: it anticipates the climax, in which Judy, having defied the seer, is to be executed in the same way. A struggle ensues, during which Judy falls down a sluice lined with sawblades, and it is as if we feel the blades catching on our own hands. The earlier sequence had an unpredictable and shocking outcome, and that lingering challenge to the viewer’s expectations makes this final confrontation feel dangerous and unpredictable, even as it conforms to the familiar, if temporary, triumph of the hero’s quest.

In the prolonged subterranean episode that forms the bulk of Mindwarp, the film is a confrontation with the abject, but its excess serves a cleansing purpose. The crawlers are grotesque and the film seeks to reinforce this perception of them, nauseating mutants whose cannibalism is condemned by the film through the guiding avatars of Judy and Stover; but it also advocates for the right of the dreamer to conceive of cannibalism, sexual enslavement, incest, with that forgiving excuse that taboo desires, and with them, patterns of story, are imprinted on the subconscious. The System Operator stays his judgment: in fantasies of violence, nothing happened to forgive. In the denouement, Stover becomes possessed by parasitic slugs that the crawlers have put into his body, and he pursues Judy through the wastes before vomiting, in her face, a mix of internal organs, slugs and blood: his ordeal with the slugs is another of the film’s simple allegories, for the myth that violence is a media-transmitted disease. Stover is eroded from the inside-out, as some censorious mind would image the souls of children weened on violent entertainment, rotted like a brain on video nasties, rotted like a couch-potato generation playing Doom in a school computer lab. It is thus by design that in the end, he is only a fantasy, a manifestation of heroic masculinity turned into a rampaging, toxic creature. The deceitfulness of dreams becomes the deceitfulness of storytelling itself, and dreams, like stories, are easily forgiven, because like the System Operator, we have never truly been there.

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THE BIRTH OF NEW WISDOM: Christmas on Earth, an Impossible Reconstruction

Barbara Rubin, at 18 years old, made Christmas on Earth as a challenge to the frigid, oppressive society in which she had come of age. A ward of Jonas Mekas and a major force in her own right in the New York underground, Rubin had direct experience confronting oppressors, defending a rebellious, transgressive strain of the New American Cinema typified by Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Smith’s film had provoked censors in New York, where it was made, and as far afield as Belgium, where Rubin, Mekas and P. Adams Sitney defiantly screened it against the wishes of the Knokke-Le-Zoute festival in 1963, in an emblematic confrontation with conservative hypocrisy, a confrontation with the festival’s jurors and those like them, who would meet frank sexuality with cowardice and puritanical censorship and accusations of obscenity. Christmas on Earth, made in the midst of such confrontations, is Rubin’s response to Flaming Creatures, and an extension of its challenge. It is an act of expanded cinema, a projector performance, in which two half-hour reels, played simultaneously, invite us to witness painted bodies in a variety of couplings.

Christmas on Earth is composed of two reels, packaged with instructions to the projectionist: “The film on the first projector fills the screen, while the image on the second projector is approximately one half smaller and fills the middle of the screen, superimposing on the first image.” The projectionist has the option to add colour by screening the film through colour filters, “moved or alternated by hand during the screening." The films are meant to start simultaneously, with one running a little shorter than the other. For a soundtrack, Rubin directs the projectionist to hook a radio up to a PA system, “with a nice cross-section of psychic tumult like an AM rock station, turned on and played loud.” The projectionist was to choose which of the two reels to project at half scale. The decision could be made by chance, with a significant impact on the perception of the film, as the contents of the reels themselves differ greatly, although all scenes are captured from the same event: one reel is preoccupied with close-up presentations of genitalia, often overlapping through superimpositions; the other reel emphasizes faces and the full bodies of its participants, posed alone and together.

Dancer Barbara Gladstone appears throughout, a blackface minstrel in full-body greasepaint, white strokes defining her face like the graphic forms found in African sculpture. From minstrel show to orgy, the figures are fragmented and the fragments reduced to details, curves, curling pubic hairs and creased skin. Gladstone’s counterpart is a male figure in white face-paint, formal clothes and top hat, a minstrel inverted in chalk. Like the film stock, the figures are simply black and white, but Gladstone’s gyrations and the contrast of her garish lips and the dazzling white of her eyes provoke the racist spectacle of minstrelsy. On one reel, gasping orifices are superimposed until they form a pulsating, abstract light; the spread lips of a vagina, a fist stroking a penis, and the swelling, probing tongue of Gladstone’s minstrel combine in shimmering, overlapping forms, the total sex organ, an amalgam of mouth, vagina, penis, anus. The film’s original title was Cocks and Cunts, as if to dare the vice squad to press charges; but that title is also a deceptively direct description of the film’s content. Christmas on Earth is a film of genital worship, casting phallus and orifice plainly on screen. For Rubin’s players, sex is kinetic and violent and joyous; and its joyousness is on display in the final scene, as the figures are united in a tableaux on both screens, waving to the camera. Jonas Mekas declared it a film of “terrible beauty,” the terror of the bare facts of being human, of the human form as a machine of bone and muscle. It is also a film that acknowledges the body as object, unelaborated by the beautifying lens of western art. It ends in that freedom, lovers and symbols waving, echoing, on one reel larger than life, on the other, homunculi. Barbara Rubin took the title from Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. That awaited Christmas on earth, for Rimbaud, is a new age of new feelings, of liberation from tyrants and demons, an end to superstition, where new wisdom brings new mysteries.

Christmas on Earth was conceived to be ‘of its time’, regardless of how regressive and quaintly repulsive blackface minstrelsy already was in 1963. The parameters Rubin set for the film have presented the keepers of her legacy with a challenge, and attempts to preserve it in the video era have been marked by academic patchwork. The AM radio tuning of 1963 cannot be duplicated, and even if it were, it would only date and in dating decay the events on screen. That radio tuning can instead be simulated, substituted, but with sound and image disconnected, the stage is set for anachronism. It is machined anachronism. Invaded by the psychic tumult and top 40 of 1966, 1978, 1991, 2025, the gulf between sound and vision deepens. Does this anachronism trap the image in 1963, or is the erotic force of the film renewed, each new alignment another trip to a bountiful, infinite well, all of these flexing muscles and organs wetted anew, re-oiled, by a change of sonic guard? By transferring the film to video, the predetermined, locked-in relation between the screens subverts Rubin’s intention, to have two beams of light rub up against each other; fixed in place, they become a single image, less an interpenetration than a newborn composition.

Not all experiences exist to be held onto; some fade away, for the shame of them, like the blackface minstrel show, or for that matter, vice squad raids on art galleries. Are such persecutions ever gone for good, dimly remembered only as a portrait of a time when man was wolf to man? Other experiences, from long nights spent in erotic splendour, to briefer acts of clarity, like the caress or the orgasm, simply fade away in the growing distance between remembered pleasure and the present moment. Christmas on Earth is a challenge to an ossifying, tyrannical system, and it makes this declaration of new wisdom, sung from the total sex organ: vitality is energy that we spend. Vitality once spent can be renewed, but it cannot be recovered.

This little film—intimate of vision, modest of scale—collapses three years in its brief six minutes. Like many of the films that Marie Menken made between the mid-1950s and mid-60s, it is a film propelled by personal fascinations that broaden in execution: she shot Lights over three consecutive Christmas seasons, drawn to the ebullience of the colourful lights and decorations that would overtake New York during the holidays, a visualization of cheer and joy taken in the city’s loneliest, quietest hours. To this end, her subjects are a mix of big store displays—of public Christmas trees lit up in shopping hubs—and the landscape of the city itself, its density, its epic scale shining through the night. The true subject of the film is, ultimately, light itself, both within and transcending a framework of representational imagery, light as the cotton of vision. Menken described her process: “Made during the brief Christmas-lit season, usually between the hours of midnight and 1:00 A.M., when vehicle and foot traffic was light, over a period of three years. Based on store decorations, window displays, fountains, public promenades, Park Avenue lights, building and church facades. I had to keep my camera under my coat to warm it up, as the temperature was close to zero much of the time.”

In that cool, tranquil darkness, even the tangle of branches become a flat, black negative space that disrupts the extraordinary illumination of green, red, yellow, purple, white. Menken’s shooting style takes advantage of the pinpoints of string lights, which through her violent, ambulatory movements streak through the image. Her movements, which serve to abstract the subject, at times beyond recognition, invite parallels to action-painting, the style of gestural abstraction typified in the work of Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. Time observed this link between Menken and the abstract expressionists in 1967, when its critic wrote of Lights that “she slashes at her subject with a camera as an action painter slashes at his canvas.” This gestural abstraction is not the only form of agitation that Menken plays with in Lights: as the film goes on, she often engages in other techniques that frame and subvert representation, taking fleeting shots taken at low frame-rates that speed the subject, rotating the camera itself to capture a subject so that it circulates through all sides and corners of the composition.

In Menken’s earlier film, night writing, a sketch of no more than 15 seconds, she demonstrates a technique that is on display throughout Lights, a technique that, I’ll follow Menken in calling it night writing, a phrase one imagines she embraced for the similarity between these light patterns and the joined lines of cursive. Why does she call it night writing and not light writing? Her term suggests a nocturnal state, like writing from a dream state, somewhere beyond conscious action. It also makes clear her dependence on another aspect of night, darkness, an all-encompassing literal darkness against which to play with light. Her film Eye Music in Red Major, which she explicitly links to experiences of eye fatigue, is another example of night writing in her work, for in it she creates abstract patterns out of coloured light through violent movement of the camera itself; unlike Lights, Eye Music in Red Major is even more pronouncedly separated from representation. Like Lights, it is dependent upon an extreme contrast between the coloured lights that animate the work and the flat, black environment that serves as its base or background. This phenomenon in Menken’s work is ultimately about exploiting contrast in order to alienate the resulting inscription from the object photographed, and to isolate these streaks of light from a broader environment. Rebecca Sheehan has written about Lights as one of several of Menken’s films—she offers night writing and Moonplay as additional examples—films in which the depth of field, that is, the relationship between background and foreground, is “entirely collapsed” as a result of a combination of the contrast of light against darkness and the camera’s movement. I would contend that depth of field isn’t annihilated, for Menken uses selective focus throughout Lights to allow her subjects to fluctuate in and out of focus, and there is a perceivable depth to the image, albeit a depth that is under distress. But Sheehan’s observation gets at a greater truth at the heart of Menken’s operations, that for her these lights are manifesting out of a profound absence of light.

To that end, Lights is a Christmas nocturne: it is akin to those carols and fables that promise charity, peace and the milk of human kindness flowing anonymous under cover of darkness, kindling in the hearth of this one prophetic night. It is also, simply, action, construction, and the promise of continuity that comes with ritual.

PROPHETS AND PROPAGANDA, or, If Faces Tire You, What Will Movies Do?

In Slavko Vorakpich’s conception of a dynamic cinema, what he called, true cinema, the close-up was an essential unit that revealed the medium’s inherent dynamism. The close-up transcends the linear purpose of narrative by drawing the viewer deeper into the stream of image: this distinguishes cinema from the exposition of literature and theatre. Going beyond mere description, the close-up summons those details to the viewer, in what becomes a confrontation, a shift in scale that transforms the scientific potential of cinema—to measure with precision—into the poetic potential of cinema—to abstract the subject by fracturing it in time. While Vorkapich applied his theories to the digressive-thematic montage, these beliefs were, above all, the pedagogical principles of a seasoned educator: from the vantage point of 1959, when he committed these words to paper, the future of cinema lay in its ability to repudiate the influence and pretence of exposition, of expository storytelling, in favour of an unfolding, through time and composition, elements that are naturally invoked by the intrusion of the close-up. The close-up had arrived through the utility of storytelling—when D.W. Griffith reveals the wrench in The Lonedale Operator, this is a departure from the theatrical proscenium, but it is also nothing more than a new direction for exposition. In Vorkapich’s poetics, there was no need that the close-up remain a tool of story; more than this, it could disrupt the uncanny of the photoplay to serve a greater truth. Vorkapich’s devotion to the close-up as an act-of-truth is anticipated in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Vorkapich conceived of a montage in which details and their contexts might be intercut, or at least, where any intercutting with the close-up would enhance its meaning and vice versa. Dreyer, on the other hand, had achieved something of proven distinction from the literary and theatrical bias of cinema, for by making a tribute of uncommon devotion to an infamous act of suffering, composed almost entirely in close-ups on the face of the martyred, he offered evidence of what cinema could give the viewer that no play nor novel nor historian’s account ever could. The result is hypnotic: a study of the human face in trance, in judicious contemplation, in the interesting times of inquisitions, hysteria, and spiritual chasms.

When Nashville filmmaker Ron Ormond began to collaborate with the evangelical Baptist preacher Estus Pirkle on a series of Christian scare films, such thinking around film form was already in use, albeit rarely, largely through Vorkapich’s influence on an evolving style of fiction filmmaking in America. Ormond’s films were not poetically strategic; their style was, like that of the roughies and drive-in fare of exploitation cinema, born of utility. Nevertheless, Ormond’s collaborations with Pirkle became the focal point for his filmmaking following a near-death experience that purportedly led to Ormond’s own Road-to-Damascus rebirth. Ormond found himself making a new kind of film, one that’s intention was not only to convert, but that functioned through direct address, in other words, an illustrated sermon that would linger on the face of the preacher and on the faces of his congregants, often in close-up, lending a claustrophobic charge to the proceedings, the viewer held hostage in extremity. The face of Falconetti gave cinema its burning saint, the uncompromising beauty of spiritual conviction; the face of Estus Pirkle gives cinema something else, an inquisitor on the pulpit, demanding submission to a healing lord of love.

The first of the Ormond and Pirkle collaborations, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do, is a dramatic interpretation of Pirkle’s central prophecy: that Communism will overtake America and transform it by force into a godless, oppressive society. In extreme caricature, Pirkle's Communists travel around mocking the faithful, separating families, brainwashing and even decapitating children. Ormond and Pirkle would follow this with The Burning Hell and The Believer’s Heaven, companion pieces that offer the preacher's visions of heaven and hell, Pirkle’s biblical literalism forming a jeremiad against permissive modern society. In all three films, Pirkle’s sermons are illustrated with anachronistic costume drama. Even as the preacher rejects metaphorical interpretations of such stories as parables, in the staging of them they become allegories for the faults of humankind that endure into the twentieth century. If Footmen Tire You gained a cult audience as a curio with an unintentionally comic bent, with its frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Communist ideology and its brutal conception of fascism; the others endured in much the same way, as their amateur drama, hysterical fantasy, and manipulative rhetoric resonated beyond the revivalist ministry, in the Church of Camp, from which the preacher’s red-baiting, fear mongering narration and the filmmaker’s exploitation roots could inspire mocking laughter.

Throughout the films, Pirkle hosts these stories from the pulpit, rather, multiple pulpits at a series of revivalist ministries where he is filmed delivering his stock sermon. His face often occupies the frame as he delivers his sermon in direct address: it is just as commonly held in dialogue with reaction shots on the faces of the congregation, whose expressions range from boredom, shock, rapt attention, the tear-filled eyes of those experiencing something profound. The intercutting of preacher and listener becomes hypnotic, adding to the hallucinatory power of the form even as Ormond mixes the presentational modes of the films, between the theatrics of the preacher, the amateur drama of his costumed characters, and more symbolic illustrations to resonate with Pirkle’s sermon. This hallucinatory power belongs both to the sermon and to the film; film and sermon become one. Into Pirkle’s sermons, characters are dropped who are experiencing crises of faith: Judy, whose promiscuity is revealed to be at odds with her upbringing, and Tim, a Jesus Freak whose friend has just died in a motorcycle crash. In listening to Pirkle, each finds salvation: their stories make Pirkle’s sermonizing urgent, and so they are testimonials to the sermon’s power. This mixing of presentational modes, between illustration, concurrent drama, and direct address, culminates in a montage that is designed to terrify the viewer, in which they are trapped in the narrow passage between the intent stares of the congregants and the face of Estus Pirkle. By the third film, the dramatic catalyst of the wayward soul has been dropped, replaced by a variety show format featuring guest singers.

The close-ups on Pirkle’s face are appeals to his own authority and to the emotions: Ormond offers Pirkle’s face as stern, paternal, and wise, and his piping, crisp, hypo-nasal voice and folksy Georgia accent enhance the hypnotic character of the film and sermon. Dreyer and Vorkapich were firm in their intentions to use the close-up: it distanced cinema from theatre, and the ways in which they used this unit, in a greater stream of images, allowed for new ways of seeing. Ormond uses close-ups on Pirkle to much the same end—affecting an emotional intensity that can only be realized through film—but doing so is a matter of utility, a means to an end, allowing Pirkle’s message to reach far more souls than he ever could through Sunday sermons. And yet, the close-up serves more than just sending Pirkle on tour: it makes his convictions and his stories, as hysterical and alarmist as they are, compelling and urgent. What begins in invitation ends in terror. In the course of an hour, these close-ups become the essential aesthetic of brainwashing, aided by the repetition of Pirkle’s message, which inevitably circles back to the need for salvation. Medium and messenger become one. Estus Pirkle becomes George Orwell’s Big Brother, the ever-present face of authority; like Orwell, Pirkle’s dire vision of the future is of a boot stamping on a face forever. That face is the face of Christ.

In 2025, Art & Trash will be undergoing some major changes. Our fourth series will be coming in the spring/summer, with twelve new episodes. Until then, there will still be a monthly audio commentary, exclusive to patrons. Sign up today!

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John Parker’s Dementia is an unconventional, low-budget, independent film, made without synchronous sound by amateurs, a cruel adventure of symbols colliding in a web of nocturnal fantasy, classical allegory, chiaroscuro, and a menacing atmosphere. It exists at the midpoint between the film noir and the psychodrama, and the motives of its makers are caught somewhere between aspirations to join the film industry and the restless desire to expel from themselves some kind of evil that had crept up on them in their dreams. It is a haunted film, one that, through oppressive symbolism and illogical bridges, forms a portrait of damnation, here on skid row where devils are almost as terrifying as angels.

In this video essay, I address Parker's film in relation to collaboration, the trance film, and the representation of dream-life in cinema through the ages.

When Gilbert Bowen and Roy Collins, old friends on a trip to Mexico, stop to help a stranded motorist, the hitch-hiker’s frightening appearance is a warning sign of the difference between the travellers and the hitch-hiker, of the impassable distance between them. Soon enough this hitch-hiker, Emmett Myers, has them at gunpoint, directing them to drive him into Mexico so he can escape from the law. He has killed many people, all of them, it's implied, like Bowen and Collins, good samaritans who made the mistake of offering him a ride. The Hitch-Hiker was made by Ida Lupino, then better known as an actress, though she had already directed four other films, a series of social-issue-oriented docudramas, films that balanced compassionate humanism with lurid curiosity. They were message films about polio, rape and bigamy. The Hitch-Hiker emerges naturally from this trajectory: like the earlier films, its story is torn-from-the-headlines.

In this video essay, I locate Lupino's film along two trajectories: a mythical, symbolic journey into the male psyche, and the issue-driven docudrama. The Hitch-Hiker is a film that places its protagonists in a situation that draws out their ordinary, everyday humanity to combat a devilish stranger.

In “Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir,” Raymond Durgnat argues that film noir is not a genre but a style that exists at the centre of overlapping themes. This approach makes other genres susceptible to a noir influence: the gothic mystery, the horror movie, the romantic drama, all of these genres are present in the classic period of noir, a continuum they share with the gritty urban thrillers and detective stories that foreground the style. The world-weary voice of noir could modulate through these genres. The severity of noir, the deathly serious threats and warnings of hardboiled dialogue, the spectres of death and taboo desires that run through the style are vulnerable to parody. The adaptability of that hardboiled tone made it capable of absorbing, or being lampooned by, the light, fast-talkin’ escapism of the screwball comedy, a style that preceded it in the Hollywood dream factory.

In this video essay, I address the 1947 Bernard Vorhaus noir-comedy Bury Me Dead in relation to the overlapping tropes of the screwball comedy and the film noir, a comparison that underscores the parallels and divergences of the genres.

In the harsh and glorious sunlight of southern California, consider the romance and terror of the shadow in film noir: shadows, plural, cloak a scene in mystery, but true menace lies in the faintest of movements, the animation of a lone shadow, breaking the atmosphere with a hint of voyeurism or violence, an agitated movement on the periphery of strained vision. In film noir, the night has a thousand eyes, but the night is not a syndicate: each probing stare that emerges out of that blackness is individual, creatures of torment and desire. Like many noir films, Jennifer is about the failure of social connection; it is also a romantic mystery, told through characters—sirens, spinsters, and satyrs—trapped in a web of miscommunication. This mystery is signalled at the start, with the movement of a lone shadow stalking the threshold of an empty gothic Californian estate. To this solitary shadow the film will inevitably return.

In this video essay, I discuss Joel Newton's 1953 film Jennifer, a bridge between the Gothic melodrama and the Old Dark House film. Broomer addresses the film's themes of madness and loneliness, as well as its portrayal of male predation.

In the wake of the massive success of The Big Sleep - first as a novel, then as a film - Raymond Chandler became the dean of American hardboiled fiction. In 1947, Robert Montgomery set about adapting another of Chandler’s Marlowe novels, The Lady in the Lake, and in doing so pursued a form that seemed, hypothetically, to suit the presentational mode of Chandler’s writing. As the Marlowe novels were written in the first-person, in a serpent’s tongue of cutting insight, Montgomery would use a subjective camera, such that the audience, like the reader, became a passenger in Marlowe’s consciousness.

In this video essay, I consider the the subjective camera in Lady in the Lake in relation to naturalism and stylization, and the position of the audience (or passenger). The eyes of Philip Marlowe are imperfect vehicles for truth, for the world of Chandler’s novels is one of machined distrust and deception, straining the limits of the observable and the verifiable, a romantic vision that does not merely enter the eyes, but is projected back from them, casting shadows and doubt. There, even the pictures lie.

At the Art & Trash Patreon, I held a poll for next year’s series of Detours. The winners were On Dangerous Ground, The Well, The Window, The Prowler and Violated! Watch for those next November.

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October has been a dense month of content, all of it public. Here is my Halloween content, five spooky videos covering the history of exploitation and horror cinema, from 1933 to 2021. I normally write a little something about each, but this is a ‘video newsletter’ so I’m gonna just shut up ‘n play my guitar…

In October, I also released several titles from our back-catalogue of previously-exclusive and preview content. This includes Plastic Masks, on Cecelia Condit’s incredible feminist video-operetta Possibly in Michigan, and Sympathy for the Devil, on the extraordinarily unpleasant black comedy Murderlust. For good measure, our only piece of non-Halloween-adjacent content, an audio commentary on Wallace Berman’s legendary experimental film Aleph.

In November, Art & Trash will serve as a platform for new episodes of Detours, my series on film noir. Five episodes will be released on Fridays throughout November (though I’ll be cutting it close with this Friday’s, which is still not done). Here is the schedule…

Nov. 1 — Dementia: Myth and Nocturne
Nov. 8 — The Difference: Fate and the Gun in The Hitch-Hiker
Nov. 15 — The Smirking Revenant: Bury Me Dead as Screwball Comedy
Nov. 22 — Trouble with People: The Mystery of Jennifer
Nov. 29 — Pools of Darkness: Lady in the Lake and the Eyes of Philip Marlowe

When Art & Trash returns in December, before going on a longer hiatus, I will be posting four pieces of holiday-themed content. Keep your eyes peeled for that! I will be taking most of 2025 to focus on Black Zero, the home video label that I founded to support Canadian experimental film.

Consider joining our Patreon with a free account, and spread the word about any episodes of Art & Trash that you enjoy. All support for this project is welcomed and greatly appreciated!

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When I last wrote you, I had just posted Wizards, on The Wizard of Speed and Time. August was a busy month, with five Fridays to fill: the month’s offerings continued with audio commentaries on Andrew Lugg’s classic Canadian experimental film Black Forest Trading Post and Fred Mogubgub’s seldom-remembered but essential Lipsett-esque time capsule The Pop Show. Patrons received previews of a commentary on Jim Reardon’s anarchic tribute to New Hollywood, Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown, and an episode on the American experimental filmmaker David Brooks, both of which will be released publicly in a few months.

In this audio commentary, I look at Black Forest Trading Post, a Canadian experimental collage film made by Andrew Lugg and Stuart Klein, in which the filmmakers make sandwiches out of a consistent foreground and shifting, increasingly ludicrous backgrounds. The foreground is the titular Black Forest Trading Post, a souvenir shop in Ulysses, Pennsylvania; the backgrounds seem to gather a natural affiliation with the place names that the narrator barks out, but even this comes under distress as the parade continues, with branches that become mighty trunks in a distortion of scale; the constructed nature of the image is also made clear when night imagery appears behind the souvenir shop, which is plainly shot in daylight. Here, the postcard landmark itself travels the world.

In the mid-1960s, animator Fred Mogubgub moved freely between the spheres of mainstream advertising and underground culture. As the mainstream adopted (or interred...!) the style and aesthetics of counterculture in pursuit of consumer attraction, artists found themselves occupying an ironic posture, caught between contempt and joy in the face of mass culture. Mogubgub's The Pop Show is a record of the zeitgeist of 1966 - with gallows humour and slogans pitched somewhere between sugar and death. In this audio commentary, I take on Mogubgub's influences, from Lipsett to Warhol, and address the ultimate theme of The Pop Show - that the fuel in the tank of civilization has run out, and that fuel was Love.

In 1986, as a student at CalArts, Jim Reardon and his friends made this fast n' brutal satire. More a satire of New American Cinema and commercial culture than of the Peanuts gang, Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown bridges the precocious fantasy of Schultz's sensitive wisening children with the violent style and vision of Sam Peckinpah and company. In this audio commentary, I discuss the nature of the film's satire, its crude pencil-sketch style, and its correlation to the world of underground comix. You can watch it here!

The American underground filmmaker David Brooks came of age in the 1960s. Brooks was preoccupied with myth; he considered Albert Lamorisse’s short film White Mane (1953) and Barrie’s play Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904) to be the essential myths, and his various attempts at making feature films were wrapped up in the making of such myths. The Peter Pan fable is at once central and peripheral to Brooks’s filmmaking: it casts a pall over the whole of his work through the tragedy of Brooks’s own premature death. And yet, in his work, the Peter Pan fable also makes occasional and potent intrusions, evident in his preoccupations with exotic and faraway lands. Brooks’s stable vantage point—the island of Manhattan, often seen in his films in panning shots of rooftops—was also Neverland to Brooks’s childhood home of New England.

In this video essay (watch it here), I discuss Brooks's modest body of work in relation to the fable of eternal youth and his community, the New American Cinema, from his vantage point of Manhattan in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, August also marked the public release of a couple of old previews from the vaults: my commentary on the burlesque film Le cochon danseur, and a video essay on The Last Slumber Party in the context of surrealism.

In this audio commentary, I look at the 1907 burlesque comedy Le cochon danseur, or, The Dancing Pig. The Dancing Pig has haunted many dreams in recent years thanks to the spread of it through the Internet, where it's presented as a 'creepy' old movie, like the stuff of a diminutive 'creepypasta' ("but then, who was phone?").  The truth of the film is more fascinating than one can dream up, and the world that it belonged to didn't see the realistic anthropomorphism as creepy, but the stuff of fantasy and fairytale (and social critique). The Dancing Pig might more accurately be related to its contemporary, The Wind in the Willows, in which an anthropomorphic cast reflects human frailties...

Made in suburban New Orleans in 1984, Stephen Tyler's The Last Slumber Party is an exceptional slasher: its characters occupy an oneiric space where dreams and other digressions challenge the asserted reality of plot, a messy extemporization of campfire storytelling. It is a surreal slasher, bowing to the intuition of dreams, the concealed truths of the subconscious, indicative of the collaborative dreamlife of adolescent friendships and of the strange fear that creeps in when dreams reveal themselves.

In this video essay, I argue that Tyler's film develops, from its clichéd premise, into an imaginative film about dreams and omens.

September featured two new video essays - one dealing with Fredric Hobbs’s bizarre eco-horror film The Godmonster of Indian Flats, the other a patron-preview on Storm De Hirsch’s The Tattooed Man - and two new audio commentaries, on Gary Beydler’s Hand Held Day and Gunvor Nelson’s Take Off.

In 1969, Storm De Hirsch received a grant from the American Film Institute to make a film adaptation of her poem, “The Tattooed Man.” In this video essay (watch it here!), I place De Hirsch's film in the context of her poetry and of the underground community around her. The Tattooed Man is a mythopoeic film, a portrait of genetic memory and trauma, a visionary quest.

For more on Storm De Hirsch, don't forget to check out my 'miniature' audio commentary on her film Third Eye Butterfly!

The West was always weird. The Godmonster of Indian Flats weaves two narratives that gradually collide: one is the story of the Godmonster, a grotesque mutated sheep that escapes a scientist’s laboratory and terrorizes the town. The other is the story of Virginia City, Nevada, the palace intrigue of the town, whose citizens live somewhere between a tourist’s ideal of the Wild West, a townscape of ruined brick and rotting wood buildings, and a technologized present of video surveillance. It is a genre movie, and yet it is an imaginative variation on the genre movie that has so much to say about America that it extends far beyond the metaphor of the monster. The ecological terror of the Godmonster creature is absorbed into a broader constellation, of gothic paranoia, industrial espionage, and the aging nostalgia of an entrenched American idyll.

In this audio commentary, I look at Beydler's Hand Held Day, his first film, made in Arizona in 1974, as a structural film that bridges conceptualism and performance with the persistent 'stuff' of image (light/focus/composition).

Take Off is one of the great absurdist feminist comedies of experimental film, a literal disassembly of the beauty myth as embodied in the exotic dancer. In this audio commentary, I discuss Take Off in relation to filmmaker Gunvor Nelson's other works, her own reservations about the film, and its resonance with the trick films of Georges Méliès.

In addition, my audio commentary on Freude’s Stand Up and Be Counted is now available publicly.

The utopianism of the 1960s was itself a diverse collision of lifestyles and perspectives. With this audio commentary, I explore this rare collaboration between then-married filmmakers Scott Bartlett and Freude, a film of simple beauty and complex execution that plays like an advertisement for a better future. Stand Up and Be Counted joins Bartlett's optical printing mastery with Freude's declarative humanism, in a gesture that reminds that the growing Family of Man includes everyone and every way of loving.

Coming in October - our next episode will be Return to Me, on the Hilton Twins, conjoined sisters who starred in the 1952 exploitation film Chained for Life, a veiled dramatization of their life. Also coming this month: spooky audio commentaries on Len Lye’s The Peanut Vendor and Ed Emshwiller’s Thanatopsis, as well as new episodes on Suffer Little Children and The Timekeepers of Eternity!

Consider joining our Patreon with a free account, and spread the word about any episodes of Art & Trash that you enjoy. All support for this project is welcomed and greatly appreciated!

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This newsletter has shifted to a bi-monthly format. My next one will be issued at the end of November as an October/November re-cap. For weekly updates, sign up for our Patreon. Thank you!

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August kicks off with Wizards: Labour, Magic and The Wizard of Speed and Time. It’s the most personal episode of Art & Trash yet, in which I use the animator Mike Jittlov’s cult classic feature The Wizard of Speed and Time as a launching point for talking about the creative imagination, my involvement at the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, and my collaborator and friend Karl Reinsalu.

A willed enchantment between the apparatus and the subject becomes a matter of personal conviction in the work of American animator Mike Jittlov, a talented outsider to the Hollywood dream factory. His story is told in a rebellious meta-fable autobiographical feature film, The Wizard of Speed and Time, in which Jittlov dramatizes the experiences of an independent filmmaker who enters into a one-sided, devilish contract with a broadcaster. For Jittlov, labour and recreation are continuous, the work of the artist and the pleasure and pastimes of the artist are inextricably bound together. Mike Jittlov sees the world as open to wonder: his illusionism can set it in motion.

In this video essay, I address The Wizard of Speed and Time in relation to the legacy of pixilation animation, and discuss Jittlov's greater themes of labour and illusion.

What follows is a digest of public content that was released in June and July!

Standish Lawder (1936-2014) was an essential contributor to the American structural film movement, with his mordant comedies such as Necrology and Runaway. In this audio commentary, Stephen Broomer situates Lawder's Roadfilm along the trajectory of Cubist artists with whom he identified (as author of The Cubist Cinema, Lawder was a major advocate for the reconcilation of Cubist multiplanar vision and the movies), and deal, in brief, with its playful treatment of axis, with its vertically and horizontally flipped images superimposed to create grand symmetries.

The Sun Quartet confronts the climate of corruption and violence that dominates contemporary Mexican leadership and militarism. Across its four parts, the series exemplifies the poetic operations of the collective, who reconcile elements ranging from sound collage, superimposed cinematography, poetic texts both read and cast on screen, and documentation of protests. These elements assemble as a counter to official claims to truth regarding traumas as recent as the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural normal school that happened in Iguala, Mexico, and as distant as the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, a formative event in contemporary Mexican revolutionary consciousness. The Sun Quartet also summons resonances of older, unspeakable traumas, more distant still, rifts that recede deep into the past of Mexico, its genocides and massacres, the predation done in its name, its significance as a theatre to colonial ambitions. The Sun Quartet mixes phenomenological fascination with the terrifying climate of contemporary Mexican governance and the historical foundations of that terror.

In this video essay, I discuss the metaphysical suggestions of Colectivo los ingrávidos' aesthetic approach to contemporary Mexico, an inferno of government abuse and multi-generational civilian terror.

Owen Land, born George Landow, was one of the primary figures of the structural filmmaking movement. In his work one could find an uncommon comic sensibility that was broad in scope, a tour of language and spirituality and the apparatus itself. In A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour, he pursues a singular form of alternating streams of image and sound, a form that is maximalist in extremity, in its desire to condense two strings of unrelated image and sound into the length of one. Land trusts the sieve of our perception to sort these strings out.

In this audio commentary, I address the circumstances that led Land to make this film, the relation between this experiment and the perceptual restoration effect, and its relation to other 'flicker' films.

Mindwarp was produced by Fangoria Magazine in a turbulent era, when horror culture was still a controversial corner of mass culture, a scapegoat for censors and for the law to explain aberrant, violent behaviours. The film uses the setting of a post-apocalyptic world to speculate on the nature of dreams and taboo fantasies, and ultimately, to forgive the taboo imagination as a necessary fact of a healthy, creative society, a bandage for the traumas of reality. In this video essay, I situate Mindwarp in relation to post-apocalyptic cinema and John Calhoun's conception of the behavioural sink, as well as the climate of censorship that surrounds the dark corners of mass culture.

Takashi Ito is one of Japan’s most significant experimental filmmakers; his distinctive style betrays almost clinical fascinations with technology, time, and space. For Ito, the camera is a spatial tool above all, a device for capturing, mapping out and disrupting ordinary, commonplace environments, environments that, through his reconstruction of them, become deeply unfamiliar.

In this audio commentary, I discuss Thunder in relation to the metaphor of its title, Ito's techniques of time-lapse and long-exposure photography, and the atmosphere of dread advanced in his maturing work of the mid-1980s.

The films and videos of Christine Lucy Latimer defy their containers: they reveal the fragile systems underlying media; they press the boundaries of image-making machines; they embrace the faults and frailties of vision. Almost all of Latimer’s work is silent, but nothing is truly silent: Latimer draws out images that recall the hums, tweets, and mechanical moans of the technology with which she made them. Latimer’s work began long after most of the formats she pursues had become obsolescent. Refusing the universal nostalgia of the antique camera and the antique image, her works are undeniably present-facing and playfully disobedient, ethereal, abstract. Supremely self-conscious and yet mystical, they are seances that draw out the ghosts in the machine.

In this video essay, I chart Latimer’s aesthetic development from 2002 to the present, from films and videos that bear an overt eroticism (the scrambled kickboxing of Mosaic, the glow of a stripping woman filtered through a toy camera in Ghostmeat) to explorations of the patina of resilient media (the damaged digital photos of House Pieces, the foldable hologram imprints of Tender).

Coming this month - our next episode will be Neverlands, on David Brooks, the American underground filmmaker of the 1960s who died young and left behind a couple of remarkable films. We will also be posting the following audio commentaries!

I’ve been producing a tremendous amount of content this year - something new every week! For access to all of it as it comes, consider joining our Patreon with a free account, and spread the word about any episodes of Art & Trash that you enjoy. All support for this project is welcomed and greatly appreciated!

Join today!

This newsletter has shifted to a bi-monthly format. My next one will be issued at the end of September as an August/September re-cap. For weekly updates, sign up for our Patreon. Thank you!

Join today!

I have recently had to take stock of what inspired me to undertake this project. I came to the development of documental/informational/critical content from a different direction than some: I simply noticed a dearth of the kinds of content I once valued and that shaped my adolescent knowledge of the world. A witch’s brew of late-night regional movie shows, specifically Off Beat Cinema and Saturday Night at the Movies, newsmagazine series, specifically Rick Green’s brilliant Prisoners of Gravity, and hosted documentary series like those of Sister Wendy Beckett, Desmond Morris, and John Berger, and of course, bizarre variations on hosted series, like Gary Owens and Eric Boardman’s eccentric Dinosaurs programs. As this series evolves, I would like it to become a mirror of all of these influences, somehow - in the meantime, thanks for letting me be your guide to art & trash!

This month at Art & Trash, episode 32 - The Eyes of Hell: Depth and Despair in The Mask. No, it’s not about the Chuck Russell film - it’s about a great Canadian commercial 3-D film, by Julian Roffman.

In the stereoscopic 3-D movie, the imagined things on the screen might escape the canvas and become real, to terrorize and haunt and touch us; it’s a grand exaggeration of the early dreams of cinema, that the phantasms might gain their own agency, like souls stolen through an anthropologist’s camera, or that, conversely, the projections could be stepped into, an immersive simulation of the halls of reality. Julian Roffman's The Mask is such a film: it suggests folie à deux, the collective unconscious, the transmission of a nightmare from one person to another. It rationalizes its 3-D gimmickry with corresponding themes, vividly realizing the slumber of the psychoanalyst’s couch, synthesizing visions as mysterious as those conceived under hypnosis.

With this video essay, I address The Mask in the context of 3-D, unpack the manifestation of its themes in an analysis of the film's three hallucinatory sequences, and consider its themes as a collision of modern and ancient belief.

Try watching it with yer red n’ blues!

May’s second piece of public content is this audio commentary on the Lockheed Corporation’s ephemeral classic Case Study: LSD!

A woman drops acid and has a spiritual confrontation with a hot dog on Market Street. In this audio commentary, I discuss the Lockheed Corporation's early contribution to the war on drugs, Case Study: LSD, one of four 'case studies' made by the company that offer illustrations of the terrifying addictive properties of narcotics and hallucinogens. Where Lockheed's other case studies were self-serious, harrowing fables about the ruination of youth in the throes of heroin, amphetamines and barbiturates, Case Study: LSD is an intentionally goofy variations, perhaps made with the hopes that the embarrassment and stupidity of psychedelic experience would shame young people into sobriety.

When you last heard from me, I sent our 30th episode, on Fischli & Weiss’s The Way Things Go. In cinema, things go differently! The second piece of public content last month was an audio commentary on David Rimmer’s Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper.

David Rimmer (1942-2023) was a major contributor to the Canadian experimental film movement of the 1970s and 80s. In this audio commentary, I look at his landmark film, Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, the germ of which is a scrap of documentary footage, a medium-wide shot of an assembly line worker, a woman, drawing and shaking out a big sheet of cellophane. The cellophane seems to fly towards the viewer, cast up vertically, such that, as the image evolves, it will come to feel like we are being smothered by it, or drowning in it. For some it was a feminist work—here is woman trapped in monotonous labour, sewing cellophane like the Fates spinning thread—for others it was an Orientalist work, with the worker’s form changing from that of a western labourer into a Hindu God, the icon of a dancing Shiva, in whose grace we witness the panchkritya—creation, preservation, destruction, concealment and salvation...

April’s patron-exclusive audio commentary was on the low-budget 80s thriller MurderLust. This episode, available to subscribers, explores the film as a black comedy, a satirical dimension of it seldom noted amidst all of its ugliness.

Appearances can be deceitful, and beneath such a deception there may be no depth at all, no substantive or satisfying explanation. Steve Belmont, a security guard and Sunday school teacher, moonlights as the 'Mojave Murderer', killing sex workers and dumping their bodies in the desert. Belmont is a comical grotesque, interesting only for the lack of explanation for his crimes. He is unfixed, chameleonic, charming to some, to others, a surly misanthrope, a predator. He is a man who idolizes nothing and nobody, but who pursues authority with calculating desire.

In this video essay, I situate anti-hero Steve Belmont in the public perception of violence and authority, while also addressing the film itself as the blackest of black comedies, a gruesome satire of the hypocrisy and naivety of Christian America.

April’s subscriber-exclusive audio commentary dealt with the great beatnik publisher Wallace Berman’s film Aleph.

Wallace Berman was a major figure in Los Angeles’s Beat and Neo-Dada countercultural of the 1950s. He began to make this film in the late 1950s and worked on it until his death, in a car accident, in 1976. The film became a kind of notebook of ideas and a scrapbook of its era, one that reconciled home moviemaking with the collage forms of the assemblage and material interventions, with Berman etching words in letraset and painting on the film. An unfinished work, Aleph is also a work of life force, conceived under the sign of Kabbalistic thought and fascination. In this it is a densely codified film, a collage that transmits spiritual energy, transmissions that are perhaps not meant to be decoded, or that, at the very least, could never be translated into some universal tongue, transmissions that bear the hidden meanings of the word of God. Like any codified art, it is broken into the tongue of Berman’s aesthetic and moral vision, which is one of both purpose and coincidence, punctuative images and the dust of dailyness. In this audio commentary, I introduce the relation between Aleph and its Kabbalistic traits.

May’s patron-exclusive preview episode deals with Cecelia Condit’s Possibly in Michigan! A classic piece of video art-cum-viral video.

Possibly in Michigan is a work of American video art that brings Surreal fantasy into dialogue with feminist critique. In it dwells an absurd synthesis of Melpomene and Thalia, a grotesque grin creasing tear-stained cheeks, topped with a nest of snakes like the head of Medusa. Its story is a fable, told in operetta and masquerade. Masked players populate this elsewhere, somewhere in America, somewhere we met before, possibly in Michigan, or in the suburbs of Cleveland, where it was shot. They are symbolic, lurking, stalking figures, but they know how to party. Sometimes they wear animal masks, which is appropriate because they are the frog princes and big bad wolves of fairy tales, but they are also just humans in masks—humans who are frailer and crueler, more tragic and less innocent than other creatures of the earth. Sharon and Janice meet in a mall, where they are stalked by Arthur. Don’t worry about Arthur, though: he’ll never guess after whom he’s walkin’...

In this episode, I take on Cecelia Condit's video in relation to epic theatre, the fairy tale and the urban legend, and veristic surrealism, inquiring to the limits of video's documental nature, and the motives of Condit's plastic disruptions.

Coming this Friday and next, two more audio commentaries! A patron-exclusive commentary on Storm De Hirsch’s Third Eye Butterfly and the public commentary on Standish Lawder’s Roadfilm.

A dense newsletter, I know! I’ve been producing a tremendous amount of content this year - something new every week! For access to all of it as it comes, consider joining our Patreon with a free account, and spread the word about any episodes of Art & Trash that you enjoy. All support for this project is welcomed and greatly appreciated!

Join today!

This newsletter is shifting to a bi-monthly format. My next one will be issued at the end of July as a June/July re-cap. Thank you!

Join today!

This week at Art & Trash, a milestone for me, my 30th episode - Old Time Continuity: Illusion, Futility and The Way Things Go, on Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s classic conceptual art film The Way Things Go.

In 1987, the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss released The Way Things Go, a thirty-minute 16mm film that portrays the continuity of a single chain reaction. Across a series of long takes, maintaining the illusion of a single take, a chain of simple, at times absurdly comic physical reactions occur in a chemical-industrial game of dominos. In this video essay, I explore the idea of continuity in cinema, as it appears in Fischli and Weiss's film, but also, as it evolved from early cinema through to its refinement in the poetics of the Soviet montage theorists, and its interaction with the work of filmmakers as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Breer and Michael Snow. At the same time, I undertake an exploration of another precedent for Fischli and Weiss's films, the marvellous imaginary machines of cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

When you last heard from me, I sent an episode about Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone. The rest of March featured a number of audio commentaries, starting with this one, on Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment.

Kenneth Anger made Puce Moment as a sketch for a longer film. When that project was abandoned, the reel sat abandoned for two decades unfinished. Finishing it in 1970, Anger added contemporary music, enhancing the puzzling nature of the film's relation to time. In this audio commentary, I explore this and other anachronisms surrounding the film, and link its symbolism to the tabloid and esoteric dimensions of Anger's broader projects.

In a month with five Fridays, I threw in an extra public audio commentary - on David Lynch’s The Alphabet.

In this audio commentary, I look at David Lynch's first live-action film, The Alphabet, made during his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Like his other films of the 1960s, it represents a link between his early studies in painting and his mature career as a filmmaker: working in collage and mixed media, Lynch creates a menacing, surreal film about the terrors of learning. The director's then-wife Peggy Lynch plays the pale wraith, a 'girl' as a baby doll, whose journey through the alphabet ends with a violent haemorrhage. The Alphabet is a naive psychodrama that combines the formative menace of childhood with the haunted, weary dreamlife of adults.

March’s Patreon-exclusive episode is epic and controversial. Passions in the Labyrinth: The Decline of Classical Allusion in Johnny Minotaur, is one of my longest video essays at 32 minutes. In the 1960s, the American poet Charles Henri Ford spent his summers in Crete. There he began to make a film that would be a film-within-a-film, a fiction film posed as a production diary, Johnny Minotaur (1971). It was inspired by the ancient myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, but Ford’s story would also involve definitively modern creatures, Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster.

In this video essay, I situate Ford's controversial, erotic film in relation to his sources and themes, the opacity of its plotting and execution, and the longer symbolic heritage of the Minotaur and its labyrinth at the Palace of Knossos, a dangerous animal masculinity. Johnny Minotaur is a film about classical allegory; it is a film about the use of classical allegory; and finally, it is a film about the uselessness of classical allegory in a changing world.

This episode is co-presented by Split Tooth Media, who hosted the text on their website. You can read it here! It is not only a patron-preview, but a permanent patron-exclusive, so I hope you’ll consider joining to watch it. As the song goes, “I’m charging two bucks to get into my house.” That’s a much smaller commitment than it was in the Kingsmen’s time. I’d go so far as to say that it has now gone from being trash to being cool.

Finally, I made a patron-exclusive audio commentary on Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray!

Cosmic Ray, Conner’s second film following the groundbreaking collage of A Movie, uses the erotic power of Ray Charles's "What'd I Say" to develop a constellation of sex and death in the long aftermath of the atomic blast. In this audio commentary, I address the film's construction, its ecstatic figuration, and the particular collision of eros and thanatos within it. Cast far from sorrow, Cosmic Ray exploits the undulating, horny rhythms of soul and matches them to the dire well of modern warfare.

In addition to the normal Art & Trash content, some of you may also know that I am a programmer at Toronto’s experimental film exhibition series AD HOC, which staged eight screenings this winter thanks to the sponsorship of the Cinema Studies Institute and Innis College at the University of Toronto. In the month of March, I programmed four shows. Three of these introductions were recorded and illustrated: Films by Ed Emshwiller (with an introduction by myself and filmmaker R. Bruce Elder), The Body in Film (featuring works by Keewatin Dewdney, Carolee Schneemann, James Broughton, and Hilary Harris), and Chumlum/Early Abstractions. I post them here as a kind of Art & Trash roadshow. Nice to see you!

COMING ATTRACTIONS

It was a busy month! Consider signing up for the Art & Trash Patreon to get regular notes about content. Coming in April: audio commentaries on David Rimmer’s Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper and Wallace Berman’s Aleph, and another video essay, Sympathy for the Devil: Walking a Mile with MurderLust, on Donald M. Jones’s gruesome character study.

I suppose I am the PBS of underground movies: these are hard times and I know that not everyone can afford to lend financial support as well as attention. Consider joining our Patreon with a free account, and spread the word about any episodes of Art & Trash that you enjoy. All support for this project is welcomed and greatly appreciated!

Join today!

Through the course of the 1970s, Richard Elfman led the avant-garde surrealist street theatre troupe and band The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. In 1978, Elfman would make Forbidden Zone, a feature-length musical fantasy that sought to translate the band’s stage show into a movie. The result is an absurdist, vulgar, ‘pataphysical cabaret. Forbidden Zone begins in minstrelsy; its world is one of hallucination and perversity and transgression. In this video essay, I focus on the film's absurdism as an act of fantastical reflection on our rude world.

This episode is adapted from a text that I wrote for Bright Lights Film Journal last year, which can be read here.

After my episode on Coming Apart, I spent the remainder of February dealing with a really diverse range of films. My public audio commentary was on Yvonne Andersen and the Yellow Ball Workshop’s The Amazing Colossal Man …

In this audio commentary, I look at the first film of the Yellow Ball Workshop, a workshop of child animators led by the visionary educator Yvonne Andersen. The film is considered for its glimpse into the unrestrained imagination of children. Working in papier-mâché stop motion, they tell the story of a towering monster invading an amusement park and its defeat by the military (and the subsequent destruction of the planet earth!). Andersen’s work in harnessing the imaginative powers of the children in this collective isn’t a matter of luck, as her pedagogical books evince: she has an astonishing generosity of spirit, and her sense of the dignity and agency and maturity of children, which led first with respect, is the conducting force of these wonderful films.

February’s patron-exclusive video essay is on Stephen Tyler’s The Last Slumber Party, a bizarre slasher made in the regional boom of independent commercial cinema that came with the home video market. The film is not what you might expect, by any means - a Caligari-esque nightmare of unreliable perspectives colliding in a strange climax, an omen told by an idiot…

Its characters occupy an oneiric space where dreams and other digressions challenge the asserted reality of plot, a messy extemporization of campfire storytelling. It is a surreal slasher, bowing to the intuition of dreams, the concealed truths of the subconscious, indicative of the collaborative dreamlife of adolescent friendships and of the strange fear that creeps in when dreams reveal themselves.

In this video essay, I argue that Tyler's film develops, from its clichéd premise, into an imaginative film about dreams and omens.

I'm interested in the question of how it achieves this, and I have come to the conclusion that there are only two possible responses, and they're just different sides of the same answer: the uncharitable take is, 'accidentally', and the charitable take is, 'through amateur passion'. When I first saw it (on February 3, 2012), I was struck with a feeling immediately afterward that I had dreamed it. A rare experience...

Watch the episode here. Great news came since I put this episode out: the American Genre Film Archive will be putting Tyler’s film out on blu-ray!

Finally, for the patron-exclusive audio commentary last month, I wrote on an incredibly rare object, seldom seen, Freude and Scott Bartlett’s Stand Up and Be Counted.

The utopianism of the 1960s was itself a diverse collision of lifestyles and perspectives. Naturism (nudism) gained a new relevance to a generation of flower children fleeing cities, building communes, going back to the land. With this audio commentary, I explore this rare collaboration between then-married filmmakers Scott Bartlett and Freude, a film of simple beauty and complex execution that plays like an advertisement for a better future. Stand Up and Be Counted joins Bartlett's optical printing mastery with Freude's declarative humanism, in a gesture that reminds that the growing Family of Man includes everyone and every way of loving.

The film itself has long been out of common circulation, an artifact of a vanishing order (when did humanism become so embarrassing, and what's so funny about peace, love and understanding?)   I'm currently working on a long-form piece about Freude's films (working title: Her Life in Art) that will, I hope, return them to a place of prominence in experimental film discourse. You can expect that later this year!

Other Art-&-Trash-related news: in the past day, the new issue of Sight and Sound released with a wonderful profile on Black Zero, the home video label that I publish focused on Canadian avant-garde film. If you get the chance, read it! It has a special emphasis on my releases of films by Josephine Massarella and R. Bruce Elder, two of Art & Trash’s favourite filmmakers.

Next week, the first of two public audio commentaries for March will launch, on Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949/1970), one of the greatest and most decadent underground films of all time. Our next audio commentary will also be public, coming March 22: on David Lynch’s student film The Alphabet (1968).

Coming later this month to Art & Trash patrons: a patron-exclusive video essay (!) on Charles Henri Ford’s legendary, erotic, controversial feature Johnny Minotaur (1971), and a patron-exclusive audio commentary on the great Bruce Conner’s classic collage film Cosmic Ray (1962). It’s a packed month! Five weeks of Fridays!

I first encountered Coming Apart around age 20 when I was doing initial research on my first book, Hamilton Babylon, which featured a criminal obscenity case in which it was used as evidence of the validity of artistic expressions that invoke the obscene (in this case, the frequency of the word ‘fuck’ and the appearance of male and female genitals). I have no doubt that many people see it now easily and just as easily forget about it; for me, watching it was challenging and forgetting about it impossible. A part of this, I suspect - as I make clear in this video essay - is that the underlying story itself isn’t altogether clear, that it keeps us largely in the dark about motives, or when it offers expository information, it seems half-mumbled and buried in a tide of other details, flooding in from a single vantage point, the candid camera.

Revisiting Coming Apart now, almost twenty years later, I found these qualities important to foreground, because the film is less about voyeurism than it is about a kind of proto-Auster-ish myth of a man fragile as glass throwing himself into a tempest. Glass is the central metaphor of this film - an aspect I don’t get into deeply, but glass is what is concealing and presenting everything, from the mirrored sculpture that conceals the camera, to the window that reveals an entire alienated world that lies beyond a protagonist who masquerades under the name ‘Glassman’. Glass can reflect, reveal and conceal respectively. And of course, it can shatter, and all three of these glasses will shatter by the end of it, in-screen, on-screen, and, apparently, off-screen, respectively…

Last month, I began to post weekly content. This will continue all through 2024, and will have a greater frequency than just weekly content: in addition to the weekly alternation of video essays and audio commentaries, I’m working on a new sub-series of on-camera pieces involving educational components, skill-sharing and consumer reporting - primarily The Art & Trash Library, which will look at essential texts, books, and multimedia publications, and Introducing, which will offer more general overviews of filmmakers, movements, bodies of work.

I touch on this briefly here, in this new (and three years overdue) introduction to the series.

I am kicking around some ideas for how these series are going to start - which I anticipate will happen in April. They will be free public content, and I’ll include them in these monthly mail-outs.

My public audio commentary last month was on Bruce Baillie’s All My Life. If you’ve got three minutes to spare, here it is! In offering these audio commentaries, my goal is simply to give a brief but substantial critical comment alongside some useful context/trivia that might enhance interpretations of the films on display and the artists who made them. In this piece, I address Baillie’s use of telephotography, his planning, and the way in which the resulting film represents his particular thread of ‘beat Buddhism’.

January’s patron-only preview video essay was Fragile Systems: The Media Hybrids of Christine Lucy Latimer. Christine Lucy Latimer received a retrospective screening last year at Ad Hoc, the screening series I co-program at Innis College alongside Bart Testa and Jim Shedden, and that screening served as an occasion for me to write a catalogue text that became the basis for this video essay. To see the monthly preview episodes, you can join my Patreon - these bonus episodes are available at the base level of $2. Every bit of support goes a long way in supporting this series. Previews give patrons a six-month early access window. This episode is available now for patrons, and will become available free to the public on July 19.

The films and videos of Christine Lucy Latimer defy their containers: they reveal the fragile systems underlying media; they press the boundaries of image-making machines; they embrace the faults and frailties of vision. Almost all of Latimer’s work is silent, but nothing is truly silent: Latimer draws out images that recall the hums, tweets, and mechanical moans of the technology with which she made them.

Latimer’s work began long after most of the formats she pursues had become obsolescent. Refusing the universal nostalgia of the antique camera and the antique image, her works are undeniably present-facing and playfully disobedient, ethereal, abstract. Supremely self-conscious and yet mystical, they are seances that draw out the ghosts in the machine. 

In this video essay, I chart Latimer’s aesthetic development from 2002 to the present, from films and videos that bear an overt eroticism (the scrambled kickboxing of Mosaic, the glow of a stripping woman filtered through a toy camera in Ghostmeat) to explorations of the patina of resilient media (the damaged digital photos of House Pieces, the foldable hologram imprints of Tender).

This was a busy month at Art & Trash - a sign of the coming months. My patron-exclusive audio commentary for the month is on Le cochon danseur, or, The Dancing Pig (1907), an older oddity than I usually delve into, but a fascinating case with a rich and important historical context that I’ve never seen anyone situate it in, the anthropomorphic fantasies of the era in which, as I say in the commentary, “anthropomorphic characters have endearing, comically exaggerated human frailties … like Mr. Toad and his eroticized engines or Henny Penny and her apocalyptic prophecy of a crumbling heaven.”

This is a patron-exclusive audio commentary, so there are no plans to make it public. Each month I’m doing a patron-exclusive audio commentary, which is available through patreon and included at membership tiers of $5 or more.

See The Dancing Pig without commentary below!

Next week, my public audio commentary for February will launch: it is on the Yellow Ball Workshop’s The Amazing Colossal Man (1964), an absurd science-fiction/fantasy film made by children under the supervision of visionary educator Yvonne Andersen.

Coming later this month to Art & Trash patrons: Discreet Charms: The Last Slumber Party and the Order of Dreams, and an audio commentary on Freude and Scott Bartlett’s Stand Up and Be Counted (1969).

Subscribe now

This week on Art & Trash, we're looking at William Grefé's classic animal exploitation film Mako, The Jaws of Death (1976). Made in the wake of Jaws (1975), the film is a riff on Spielberg's hit but drifts in the more sympathetic direction of other animal exploitation fantasies of the era, in particular, Willard (1971) and Grefé's own Stanley (1972), films in which  outcast protagonists developed profound bonds with animals. The protagonist of Mako, Sonny Stein (Richard Jaeckel), is a vigilante avenger dedicated to protecting the lives of sharks. Through the course of Mako, Stein is provoked to a rampage by the cruelty and corruption of human society...

In addressing Mako, I've tried to focus on a few themes that stand out - in particular, its relation to a broader impulse towards animal welfare and environmental protection, and the parallels between fictional anti-heroes like Sonny Stein, Willard Stiles, Tim Ockapee, and real crusaders for animal welfare, like ill-fated grizzly bear activist Timothy Treadwell, primatologist Dian Fossey, and folksinger-cum-dolphin rescue advocate Fred Neil. The episode focuses on this set of parallels in its epilogue, which deals primarily with Neil, a heroic figure who traded his career in for days under the Florida sun with the Dolphin Rescue Center, making the world a better place, everything he had done and pawned. Lordie me...

Thanks for watching! If you are so inclined, please consider liking and subscribing to my YouTube channel, and if you are interested in sponsoring this series, I hope you’ll consider getting a membership at my Patreon page.

Happy New Year!

After a year of planning and writing, Art & Trash returns this Friday with a new episode, on William Grefé’s Mako, the Jaws of Death. Florida Man: An Ecology of Despair is about Grefé’s film but, more broadly, deals with the cause of environmental and ecological preservation and the protection of animals and the comparative ‘worth’ of human and animal life, themes that are at the heart of Mako.

The third series of Art & Trash will run from January to October, with two episodes a month and two audio commentaries a month. Half of the content will be available to the public, and half will be reserved either as previews or exclusives for the patrons at our new Patreon. But don’t worry: I will continue to send out Substack newsletters on the first and second Fridays of every month, and there will continue to be a lot of public content.

If you do choose to support us through Patreon, thank you! Every bit of support goes a long way in making this a sustainable practice. Members will also receive information on sister projects like Black Zero, the home video label that I launched last year, and AD HOC, the screening collective I work with here in Toronto.

This trailer showcases content from the next few months: I’m planning episodes on a mix of cult cinema (The Psychotronic Man, The Last Slumber Party, The Mask, Murderlust) and avant-garde cinema (Coming Apart, The Way Things Go, filmmakers like Christine Lucy Latimer and Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, and, yes, our long-gestating piece on Johnny Minotaur).

In November, content will switch to our film noir series, Detours, for which a full series is planned. December is reserved for holiday specials! So there is an immense amount of content coming to Art & Trash this year!

Thank you for watching and supporting this venture over the past few years and I look forward to spending the rest of this year serving you and serving the cause of underground cinema!

Till next time,

Stephen