A Quebecois’s colourful canvases

The Quebecois artist Alfred Pellan, the centennial of whose birth is this year, evolved through many styles and movements during his long career. The exhibition Alfred Pellan: the Prints, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), presents a comprehensive narrative of this evolution in an unfortunately cramped space. Prints of many of Pellan’s earlier paintings are displayed, accompanied by a wide variety of other media such as theatre set and costume designs, greeting cards, performance art concepts, and poetry illustrations. Pellan’s use of strong and bold colours unites every phase in his development, phases which are otherwise visually disparate to the point of seeming the work of a handful of different artists.

Pellan’s work is visually striking first for its colour, then its variety. His strong use of colour is largely derived from the fauvist aesthetic of André Derrain, though rather than abandon the technique Pellan stuck to it throughout his artistic development. The exhibition features prints of his earlier paintings, many of which employ the geometric shapes and compositions of the cubist style he worked in for many years. His use of bold colours in these prints, unlike the pale shades of much cubist art, makes his work unique rather than imitative. Bestiary and Delirium Concerto, two of the series featured in the exhibition, invoke the wild mythical creatures, and nude female forms so often found in surrealist art. In these works, however, he does not use the complex and hyper-realistic palette of many surrealists, but instead sticks to his strong and simple set of reds, oranges, yellows, greens, and blues.

The most interesting prints on display, however, are not those based on paintings or strict printmaking. The exhibition features a number of works which Pellan executed as research for other projects, most notably a series of greeting cards, a piece of performance art, and set and costume design for the theatre. A series entitled “Les pères Noël,” for example, is a playful set of Christmas cards which were ultimately rejected by the company Pellan created them for. His adherence to simple shapes and a restricted set of strong colours is very effective in this series, as in the “Polychromés” prints which served as research and planning for a performance art piece. The basic geometric lines of these works are complemented by their vivid and varied colours. Pellan’s set and costume designs for two production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, finally, testify to the practicality of the print medium. The clean outlines of his costumes, their sharply defined colours and shapes, give a striking sense of movement and physicality. The strict linearity of his set designs, meanwhile, provides a contrasting minimalist backdrop for his extravagant costumes. Printmaking, then, serves Pellan’s creativity as a multi-purpose medium for increasing his areas of artistic investigation.

Initially, however, Pellan was approached by a friend and printmaker mainly interested in making prints of his paintings. That enterprise began with both pragmatic and commercial goals in mind. Prints, being so easy to reproduce, allowed wider dissemination of his works, but also meant more publishing opportunities. The medium, evidently, quickly gained creative potential for Pellan, and many of his later works were executed exclusively in print. Since his death in 1988, Pellan’s prints have become very popular with collectors of modern and Canadian art. In 2005, his wife Madeleine Pellan donated all the prints from the artist’s private collection to the MMFA, totalling over seventy works.

The exhibition itself, as a curatorial endeavour, does not do justice to the complexity and variety of Pellan’s prints. The works are all packed into a small room in the MMFA’s Canadian Art section, on the second floor of the museum’s Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavillion. The dense displays, though they accentuate the continuity of his series, make the exhibition’s one room seem daunting and overwhelming. Using more gallery space would have made Pellan’s prints easier to appreciate at a more comfortable pace, particularly the most singular works that do not fit into a series or specific project. The small and isolated gallery also undermines the importance of this exhibition. The space is hard of access, hidden in a room next to the MMFA’s generally deserted Canadian art collection, which itself is housed in the museum’s less-frequented pavilion on the North side of Sherbrooke Street. Pellan’s works, for their intricacy and evolving aesthetic properties, require a larger and more accessible exhibition space.

Note: This article was published on 8 January 2007 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.

Shakespeare's love trade

The English Department’s Winter semester production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is visually spectacular and ideologically fascinating. Specifically, it brings two problematic themes from the original text to the fore: heteronormative sexual politics and the application of economics to human relationships. Meanwhile, the production’s treatment of anti-Semitism, though true to Shakespeare’s original and unapologetic for it, only testifies to the problematic politics of the play’s historical context.

The plot follows the trajectory of Bassanio as he borrows money from his friend and lover Antonio in order to go woo the rich and powerful Portia. Antonio, in turn, raises the money for his partner by taking out a loan from a Jewish financier, Shylock. When Antonio defaults on the loan, the terms of the contract stipulate that he must forfeit a pound of his flesh to Shylock. This sets the stage for a thrilling courtroom scene in which Portia saves the day in disguise, ensuring the happiness and fidelity of her recently-wed Bassanio, and the demise of Shylock.

Added to the fray are subplots that address the activities of the many secondary characters. These involve, amongst others, the conversion of Shylock’s daughter Jessica into a Christian fit for the love of Lorenzo, the attempted courtship of Portia by two self-absorbed suitors, and the movements of the main characters’ posses – because in those days, everybody who was anybody in Venice rolled with a crew.

One of the play’s two central threads relentlessly works to undo the romantic relationship between Bassanio and Antonio, and replace it with the heterosexual union of the former with Portia. Professor Myrna Wyatt-Selkirk’s production plays up the romantic investment between Antonio and Bassanio, and its dissolution. In doing so, Wyatt-Selkirk makes Antonio’s sacrifice painfully clear, and the final image of the play has him standing near the front of the stage as Bassanio and Portia run off to bed. This is not to say that Bassanio has no moral difficulty in displacing his affection from Antonio onto Portia. In fact, until midway through the last scene it is clear that Bassanio’s main romantic interest is still Antonio. Whether or not this replacement of homosexual love with heterosexual desire had any particular historical topicality in Shakespeare’s time, it provides a potent allegory for contemporary sexual politics.

The Merchant of Venice’s other main plot is the personal and financial breaking down of Shylock, which raises another issue in the play: the conflation of the personal and the financial. Shylock’s main offense, therefore, is that he makes this analogy literal when he proposes to clear Antonio’s debt in exchange for a pound of his flesh. By punishing Shylock, the other characters seek to deny the intermingling of the flesh with finance. However, the punishment visited on Shylock collapses these two categories all over again: not only does the court demand the confiscation of all his money, but also his conversion to Christianity and his expulsion from Venice.

With its huge set of characters and plots, The Merchant of Venice’s cast is inevitably uneven. That said, the four main characters are all portrayed with engaging zeal. Dan Wood Clegg, in the role of Shylock, rides the line between stubborn jerk and pitiful underdog magnificently. Mackenzie Tan, playing Bassanio, creates a sense of youthful exuberance and innocence that almost makes one forget his disloyalty to Antonio. In the role of powerful Portia, Katherine Folk-Sullivan lends the cleverly manipulative upper-class socialite redeeming humanity and depth. As the imperiled Antonio, Stephen Nagy elicits pity from start to finish, while his convincing chemistry with Tan’s Bassanio makes the end of their relationship palpably sad.

The secondary characters, meanwhile, are portrayed by actors who ride the gamut from inspiring to appalling. Two performances are particularly noteworthy. Portraying Shylock’s manservant Lancelot Gobbo, who leaves to work for Bassanio, Phil Li-Wei Chen creates a brilliant caricature that combines clown-like banter, schizophrenic soliloquizing, and animalistic and sometimes hyper-sexual movements that recall the mannerisms of Smeagol in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Meanwhile, Adam Goldhamer’s portrayal of Antonio’s posse-member Gratiano is well-suited and stylized to this production’s conflation of Renaissance and contemporary modes. His constant raucous energy saves several scenes from getting bogged down in the sad solemnity of some of the other actors.

Though its acting is uneven – but on balance good – and its politics are problematic, the play’s visual aesthetic is remarkable and completely unique. The luscious costumes, jarring make-up and hairstyles, striking lighting, and unusual set design make The Merchant of Venice a relentless feast for the eyes. Intriguing for its visual stimulation and its confrontational politics, this production is satisfying both for those whose brains are numbed by essays, and the others who want to whet their intellectual appetites in preparation for exams.

Note: This article was published on 5 April 2007 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.

New trial for an old case

Bamako – the opening film of the second annual Montreal Human Rights Film Festival – is fascinating and intriguing, but mostly for cinematic reasons that have little to do with human rights. Far more compelling than its political context and messages, the films manipulations of genre and systems of identification are complex and original.

Directed by Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, the film is set in a communal courtyard in the Malian capital Bamako. Amidst the locals’ daily activities, the courtyard has become the setting for a trial: spokespersons for the African civil society are taking the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to court. The trial dominates the films narrative, but we are also aware of other goings on in the courtyard from which subordinate plots slowly emerge. Nightclub singer Melé (Aïssa Maïga) and her stoic husband Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré), the closest this Bamako comes to having main characters, provide a family melodrama as the couple drift apart and the future of their daughter remains unclear. This plot, however, stays undeveloped and is constantly displaced by the global trial unfolding outside their door.

The trial in the courtyard is a clever device, allowing Sissako to juxtapose impoverished Malian village life with a discussion of the international power structures perpetuating African poverty. But for a film being shown at the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, a biting critique and indictment of the IMF and World Bank is, let’s face it, preaching to the converted. Well-articulated as Bamako is – complete with quotations from the father of postcolonial theory Aimé Césaire – the arguments it puts forward are nothing new in the denunciation of the neo-colonial practices of global financial institutions. That said, this film is completely fascinating for the ways in which it plays with cinematic conventions.

Bamako combines several different film genres in very jarring ways. The films form, a collision of different genres, becomes an analogy for the way globalization forces disparate cultures into dialogue in more or less exploitative ways. This piecing together of genres also testifies to the influence of the films multiple nodes of production – France, Mali, and the United States. The majority of the film, therefore, is a courtroom drama that overlaps with a humanitarian documentary on community life. Our glimpses of the domestic troubles between Melé and Chaka also provide a hint of the family melodrama genre. The most jarring use of genre in Bamako, however, is the intrusion of a xenophobic Western.

About halfway through the film, a family takes its TV into the empty courtyard at night to watch a film entitled Death in Timbuktu. What follows is five minutes of a hilarious movie-within-the-movie that stars Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon, Beloved). Death in Timbuktu shows a group of cowboys roll into the Malian city and shoot up every local who crosses their path for no reason. When the solitary Danny Glover character kills one of the cowboys their outlaw antics degenerate into dark comedy, and the group resorts to shooting wildly in the deserted streets.

This sequence brings in the Western genre – often associated with something between colonization and genocide – and uses it for parody. First, when the Danny Glover character kills one of the outlaws, he becomes something of a good guy, protecting the people of Timbuktu. Glover is also, it turns out, the executive producer of Bamako, so this sequence is a parody of the idea that just by financing a Malian film Glover is somehow saving the whole country from the IMF and World Bank. Making a movie – or watching one for that matter – does little or nothing to curb humanitarian injustice. There is the added irony that the Malian family watching Death in Timbuktu don’t root for the Malians in the film, or Glover’s character, but the murderous rampaging cowboys. Bamako points out the assumptions of Western viewers that Malian movie-goers necessarily identify with Malian characters onscreen. The broader project of this Western sequence is to underline the fact that identification in film is not restricted by gender or race.

While the film concludes with moving speeches on the evils of global finance and the resilience of the African people, these moments are pre-digested. Bamako articulates those arguments in a very convincing way, but brings little new to the table in terms of its political message. Particularly in the context of the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, Bamako is much more innovative in its treatment of film than its discussion of human rights.

Note: This article was published on 22 March 2007 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.

Writing a queer history from a basement in East Berlin

Queer politics face many challenges in contemporary Western society. With ongoing struggles to ensure legal and social equality, the right to self-representation, and freedom from institutionalized oppression, queer identity politics have become a hyper-visual subject in recent years. Within this field of debate, increasing attention has been given to the writing of a queer history as a crucial step towards establishing a communal identity. I Am My Own Wife, the moving must-see production currently at the Leanor and Alvin Segal Theatre, is a giant leap in the direction of forging a queer history.

I Am My Own Wife is a true story that stages the history of German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf as it was disentangled by playwright Doug Wright. In 1960 von Mahlsdorf opened the Gründerzeit Museum, in which she preserved a microcosm of the German Empire of the late 1800s – what she refers to as “the gay nineties.” Her old mansion – stacked high with chairs, tables, dressers, desks, miniatures, gramophones, and clocks – becoming an encyclopedic inventory of the material artifacts left over from a period in German history that was wiped out by the rise of Nazism.

However, the importance of von Mahlsdorf’s personal history for queer politics vastly outstrips the significance of her mansion-museum. Beyond her absorption in German history and her efforts to preserve it, her very existence is an artefact of queer history. This play’s broader project becomes that of documenting von Mahlsdorf’s survival through two ultra-repressive regimes, and how she single-handedly carved out space for a queer community in East Berlin.

As Wright remarks to his editor over the phone – his research process is included in the text of I Am My Own Wife – von Mahlsdorf “doesn’t run a museum, she is a museum.” She dedicated her life to preserving the queer history of East Berlin as successive Nazi and Communist regimes sought to erase it from the city’s landscape. Salvaging the whole interior of a gay cabaret the day before its scheduled bulldozing, von Mahlsdorf’s basement became the epicenter of East Berlin’s queer scene from the 1970s onwards, after it was forced underground by the repressive Stasi – the East German secret police. As she recounts to Wright the people who spent evenings in her basement – actress Marlene Dietrich and playwright Bertolt Brecht among them – the safe haven von Mahlsdorf fostered for queer Berliners takes on even greater significance. She was not just the proprietor of a seminal queer hang-out, but the keeper, patron, and historian of an entire queer community.

Portraying all of I Am My Own Wife’s three dozen roles, Brett Christopher gives an incredible performance. Using a broad range of accents, postures, speech patterns, and movements, Christopher moves seamlessly from one character to the next, causing no confusion in the captivated and receptive audience. The impressive lighting system helps differentiate between characters, creating varying moods and glows from one moment to the next. In fact, that Wright’s play should call for only one actor makes all kinds of sense. As a text concerned with solidifying a sense of queer identity, I Am My Own Wife demonstrates that categories of gender and sexuality are completely fluid, malleable, and ultimately based on convention and performance rather than hard fact.

The play is very aware of its significance to the writing of queer history. During its second half, I Am My Own Wife addresses the media attention von Mahlsdorf’s story has recently garnered in Germany and in queer communities worldwide. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, files kept by the Stasi were found suggesting that von Mahlsdorf had been a collaborator, naming several members of the queer community she had preserved, and receiving immunity and payoffs in return. By including these snippets, Wright makes clear what is at stake in the story of von Mahlsdorf. In a particularly vulnerable moment, Wright breaks down on the phone to his editor, admitting his personal stake in the truth and honesty of von Mahlsdorf’s story.

Rather than ignore this problematic aspect of von Mahlsdorf’s life, I Am My Own Wife draws our attention to the importance of honesty in the recording of history. She was not a wholly benevolent queer messiah, but had to bend to the oppressive rules of her time in order to stay alive and free. Whether or not this required that she collaborate with a repressive state police force will never be clear, and this uncertainty in her personal history is a testament to her humanity. Von Mahlsdorf’s answer to Wright’s questioning testifies to this need for honesty rather than embellishment; using her antique furniture collections as an analogy for her life story, von Mahlsdorf explains: “Nicks, cuts, scrapes…these things, they are proof of their history, and so, you must leave it.”

Note: This article was published on 19 March 2007 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.

Noel's angels

In Fallen Angels, the current production at the Leanor and Alvin Segal theatre, three strong women control and manipulate three weak men. Though this power structure is present in the text, written in 1925 by gay British playwright Noël Coward, the casting decisions highlight the subversive powers of the female characters. Director Diana Leblanc’s production does justice to the script’s commanding women, but it does not explore the homosexual undertones available in Coward’s text.

Divided into three acts, the play follows a week-end in the lives of best friends Julia (Goldie Semple) and Jane (Brigitte Robinson). Their husbands Fred (Noel Burton) and Willy (Tim Hine), also best friends, are out of London on a golfing trip for much of the play. This leaves Julia and Jane to fret over the impending visit of Maurice (Paul-Antoine Taillefer), a young Frenchman with whom they both had romantic episodes before marrying. The nerve-wracked and drunken hysterics of Julia and Jane are tempered throughout by the hilariously undermining maid Saunders (Clare Coulter).

The second act is the strongest, book-ended between a first act that is mostly set-up and a disappointing and hung-over climax. In the second act we only see the three women, whose exchanges are energetic and snappy. As Julia and Jane become more and more drunk throughout the second act, their schemes and accusations become proportionately more preposterous. This is when Fallen Angels is at its best. We imagine that this is how Coward, the heir to a tradition of excess and exuberance in British theatre that began with Oscar Wilde, would have wanted to see his play performed. These moments of hilarity, however, are too heavily relied upon to provide the bulk of the play’s energy.

The looming return of the husbands and supposedly climactic appearance of Maurice fail to maintain the standard set in the second act. This may be due to deliberately uneven casting choices. The weaker actors are upstaged by the actresses, just as the naïve husbands are manipulated by their wives. The ending, as a result, is disappointing because we are never convinced that the husbands could have outsmarted their wives. Leblanc’s production, furthermore, fails to acknowledge more complex homosocial bonds between Fred and Willy, or Julia and Jane. A more daring staging could draw attention to activities other than golf that the men might partake in during a week-end out of town, and away from their disenchanting marriages. Similarly, more could be made of the relationship between Julia and Jane. The pair has been best friends since before either married, yet in this production their only shared experiences seem to be lacklustre marriages and distant romances with Maurice.

Uneven acting and too-conventional direction aside, Fallen Angels is fun and beautiful. The consistent scene-stealing of the maid Saunders is delightful and refreshing. Between the dramatic antics of Julia and Jane, and the stuffy ignorance of Fred and Willy, Coulter’s Saunders is quietly and cleverly subversive. Despite her working-class position she is more intelligent, cultured, and worldly than the upper-class employers she answers to. The ease with which she gets her way and points out the foolishness of her economic superiors is hilarious and endearing.

Other highpoints of the play are its luscious set and costumes. The entire play takes place in Julia and Fred’s London flat, and is located sometime between the year Coward wrote it, 1925, and the beginning of the Second World War. Period furniture and decorative details such as a collection of vases, bright colours, elegant mouldings, and Expressionist paintings create an atmosphere of abundant luxury. Set and Costume designer Michael Gianfrancesco provides the characters with costumes to match. Fred and Willy appear in subdued grays and browns which are nonetheless chic. Julia is appropriately dressed in a series of stylish and tasteful green numbers, until her hangover forces her into a more sober brown dress. Jane, meanwhile, spends the play in a series of increasingly loud pink dresses which compliment her personality and energy.

Though in many ways a conservative production, Fallen Angels is beautiful, and at its most entertaining when Julia, Jane, and Saunders have free run of the stage. While the more implicit subplots of the relationships between Fred and Willy, or Julia and Jane, are not fleshed out, the latter two in particular are given life by spirited performances from Semple, Robinson, and Coulter. Despite the neglected subtexts, Coward’s plays are primarily about beautiful people having a marvellously entertaining time. Leblanc’s production, in this respect, is successful for about two thirds of its runtime.

Note: This article was published on 2 November 2006 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.

The art of television commercials

The idea of paying money to sit in a movie theatre and watch commercials may seem odd. Most people would probably pay not to have to watch commercials before their feature presentation. However, we do often accuse commercials of being ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ so isn’t it possible that some might be so good as to merit appreciation in and of themselves? That’s the assumption behind the Cannes Advertisement Festival, an annual celebration of the best television commercials from around the world.

The Cannes Lions, the awards given to advertisers for outstanding television commercials, are distributed in the framework of the International Advertising Festival, which takes place for one week every June in Cannes. The festival is in its 53^rd year, and has been showing the best ads of each year to audiences world-wide since 1990.

The advertisements presented are for every variety of products and from every region of the world. Multi-national corporations like Nike, Sony, Volkswagen or Levis’ are rewarded consistently every year. Meanwhile, a rotating cast of smaller companies always appears, selling everything from poultry to plasma televisions.

Consumer goods are also not the only thing being pushed in these excellent advertisements. Touching segments come courtesy of UNESCO, funds for children with cancer and AIDS research groups. The Truth, an organization seeking to hold tobacco companies responsible for their customers’ illnesses with hard-hitting documentary-style commercials, is often rewarded as well. The government of Thailand, on the other hand, chose humour as a way of reaching its audience in a series of commercials demanding a greater effort towards energy conservation.

Indeed, throughout the screening, comedy is the most popular advertising technique. A number of companies harnessed the inherent humour of showing people in animal suits in order to push their products. The brand of candy Skittles, featured multiple times this year, were able to give their familiar tagline “taste the rainbow” new meaning by framing it in mundane, everyday situations and letting absurdity do the rest. The most abrasively comic series was produced to sell an energy drink. Surveying a serene scene in the countryside, viewers were lulled into relaxation until a vampire-like creature leapt to the front of the image, causing one to feel just as awake as if one had consumed the caffeinated drink.

However, comedies being the genre of choice, funny commercials tended to melt into one another, as advertisements generally do. Many of the most memorable segments ended up being those which were strikingly different. A Levis’ commercial adapting a scene from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in the streets of present-day Los Angeles, will not be soon forgotten. Similarly, a series of very strange, uncomfortable and disturbing commercials for Olympus digital cameras shocked their way into viewer’s memories.

However, advertisements which demonstrated immense creativity provided the greatest support for considering television commercials an artistic medium, and were the best of this year’s winners. A wonderfully animated segment from France to raise AIDS awareness testified not only to technical expertise, but also vivid imagination and terrific artistic talent. A similarly colourful advertisement for Honda diesel engines was given this year’s top prize. Finally, a series of commercials for Adidas footwear proved exceptionally clever and creative, but also undeniably beautiful; a personal favourite.

However sceptical one might be at the prospect of watching several dozen television commercials in a row, the experience is extremely enjoyable, year after year without fail. It is also enlightening, as one becomes aware that all those things typically avoided while watching TV might actually be better than the program one is struggling to watch. In fact, the dense doses of comedy, touching drama, or arresting beauty one experiences in these commercials are more satisfying and enjoyable than most TV shows or feature films.

For a society that suffers from many symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder, the condensed format of the television commercial might be the most fitting medium for artistic expression.

Note: This article was published on 19 January 2006 in the McGill Daily, and a version of it can be found on that paper's website here.

Everything old is Neo again

Using images from the past, Neo Rauch creates complex environments representing visions of the present and future, which can be seen in the newly-opened exhibition of his work at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC).

The exhibition brings together eight monumental canvases which all date from the last four years. They feature disquieting compositions drawing on many sources of inspiration and employing a very unusual array of colours and shapes. “His references are numerous and varied,” explains Réal Lussier, the curator of the exhibition, “from Symbolism and Socialist Realism, to East German traditional illustrations, or even his childhood taste for comic books.” From this cacophony of influences emerges a striking style which recalls Surrealism and Pop Art amongst others, and whose possible interpretations are endless.

So while the exhibition seems small upon first entering the gallery which it occupies, the complexity and richness of Rauch’s paintings make this a very compelling introduction to an artist little known in North America. Indeed, this is his first solo exhibition in Canada and was conceived of as an initiation. Meanwhile, a large scale retrospective of Rauch’s works will be opening soon in his native Germany. The MAC’s own stated agenda limits the scope of exhibitions on international artists in favour of promoting local talent. As Lussier explains, “the museum reserves the largest temporary spaces and retrospective exhibitions for artists from Québec or Canada.”

The brevity of the Rauch exhibition, rather than being a weakness, is one of its strengths. Because his canvases are so dense, saturated with meaning and interpretive potential, the eight paintings on display are just the right dose. Were an exhibition to feature any more than fifteen of Rauch’s works side by side the viewer would become immersed in symbols and suggestions to the point of drowning in their currents. This exhibition anticipates the attention span of the contemporary audience to which the paintings are so poignantly addressed.

The works themselves are extremely post-modern, crafting an absurd but accurate vision of the present and future using Rauch’s own palette of influences from the past. His canvases enact the collision of dissimilar spaces. For example a work entitled Gold includes a city diner, a river and a rural church side by side; or another painting by the name of Höhe (Altitude) brings together a mountain ridge, a supermarket and a piece of Modern architecture. This trend in Rauch’s work can be taken, on one reading, to suggest the decomposition of the physical world in favour of the virtual world of wireless telecommunications which we are experiencing.

As already mentioned, the themes and issues addressed in Rauch’s paintings are innumerable. However, several larger motifs reappear in more than one of the canvases presented at the MAC. For instance, the male anxiety caused by the increasing political and economic independence of women is evoked in at least three of the eight works. In the lower right-hand section of the painting entitled Lösung (Solution) for example, a man can be seen grovelling, possibly dying, at a woman’s feet while a large and phallic drill rests impotently against the wall beside them. However, images of misogyny and patriarchal domination can also be found in some of the same paintings. Thus in another section of the same painting Solution, the viewer is able to peer through the curtains of a suburban home to see the same man and woman in a struggle, the man with a sword hanging from his belt. This apparent contradiction, of which there are as many as one wants to find in Rauch’s work, is not an oversight on the artist’s part. Rather, it is an accurate representation of the conflicts and inconsistencies which are present in every aspect of our lives including, in this case, gender politics.

All this to say that in spite of the density of Rauch’s work it is not difficult to appreciate or enjoy. The endless levels of meaning embedded in his paintings make this exhibition a great introduction to a fascinating artist.

Note: This article was published on 25 September 2006 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.

Manufacturing China: new views of new landscapes

The film Manufactured Landscapes follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynksy around China as he visits and captures what he calls, the sceneries “we disrupt in the pursuit of progress.” The images are as strikingly beautiful as they are deeply unnerving, and though the locales are strewn all over the rapidly industrializing nation, they are brought together through the theme of connections. This thread in turn emphasizes our own connection to these phenomena.

The film’s montage focuses on manufactured goods, connecting the products’ sites of creation and destruction. The film begins, therefore, with a hypnotizing five minute-long tracking shot through an assembly plant for household electrical goods. The last work station we see is the final step in the production of electronic irons. Director Jennifer Baichwal then transplants us to a metal scrap yard where people gather recyclable metals. Our first image of this metallic moonscape is the bottom of an electronic iron. Baichwal immediately places Western viewers in the film because we are the connection linking the Chinese manufactories and landfills. Between the symbolic births and deaths of these household goods, both located in China, they are shipped to Europe and North America to be bought, used, and thrown away.

The following segment of the film, similarly, follows Burtynsky to a shoot in an eWaste dump. As he states that “fifty percent of the world’s computers end up in China,” we see a dense landscape of microchips, motherboards, mice, and monitors. Minimum-wage workers sort through the trashed computer parts to get metals and components that can be sold or re-used. Meanwhile we learn that many of the products and materials used in computer parts are harmful or even poisonous in such large quantities. Burtynsky, however, makes a conscious point of not politicizing his images so that we are left to draw our own conclusions, implicitly reminded at every step of our connection to this process.

After seeing the toxic eWaste fields, therefore, we are quickly whisked back to a manufactory where we witness a dexterous young employee assemble a breaker switch in about twenty seconds, one of 400 she assembles in a work day. How many of her breaker switches will end up in another eWaste field we can only guess. Before they end up in the trash however, Baichwal and Burtynsky take us to shipbuilding yards and shipping docks, the means by which the breaker switches will be connected to the Western consumer. As Burtynsky puts it, while we watch the futuristic container cranes and shipbuilding landscapes glimmering with activity, “this is the reason globalization has been able to take the proportions it has.”

The following segment, however, proves that even the mammoth shipping vessels are subject to the pattern of creation, consumption, and destruction. The next connection in Manufactured Landscapes takes Burtynsky to a ship-breaking beach in Bangladesh. A spellbinding landscape of tidal flats spotted with decaying freighter corpses is the first of several in the film which are truly biblical in scale and grandeur.

Burtynsky is from Saint Catherine, Ont., and first began photographing post-industrial landscapes when he stumbled on an abandoned mining town after getting lost driving in rural Pennsylvania. Manufactured Landscapes was originally the title of an exhibition of photographs taken all over the world, not just in China, which traveled to Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2004. Burtynksy explains that the film focuses on his photo shoots in China since they epitomize the speed and scale of the landscapes which are being created by industrialization and globalization.

The film is as sumptuous visually as it is shocking politically and environmentally, and director of photography Peter Mettler, makes great use of the contrast between his moving images and Burtynsky’s still photographs. On several occasions Mettler presents us with what appears at first to be one of Burtynsky’s haunting stills. But when one small element in the image begins to flutter in the wind, we realize how completely static the bleak landscape is. Baichwal is also very clever in the way she presents Burtynsky’s still photographs. By beginning focused on a small detail and slowly zooming out to reveal the vast magnitude of the photographed landscapes, she emphasizes the material density and human isolation of Burtynsky’s images. Finally, composer Dan Driscoll provides an eccentric but very fitting soundtrack which echoes the human alterations to a natural state which feature throughout the film.

Manufactured Landscape’s final segment connects the cities being submerged by the Three-Gorges Dam project to the incessant and destructive build-up of modern Shanghai. This provides a final connection to us Western viewers, as Shanghai’s endless skyline becomes a bigger and more rapidly-changing version of New York or London. How many more of these dramatic and disturbing landscapes will be created all over the globe if the entire Chinese population one day consumes at the same rate as a New Yorker or Londoner does today? As Burtynsky concludes, this puts us in “an uncomfortable spot where we don’t want to give up what we have, but we realize that what we’re doing causes problems that run deep. This creates a situation that needs a whole new way of thinking.” Manufactured Landscapes is a must-see, as much for its beauty as for the eloquent way it articulates our uncomfortable connection to these landscapes.

Note: This article was published on 27 November 2006 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.

Super 8

Montreal’s parade of film festivals never seems to end. The year-round calendar includes events based around a theme (Image+Nation), a broad criterion of newness (Festival du Nouveau Cinéma) a specific place of origin (Vues d’Afrique), any place of origin (World Film Festival), a use of genre conventions (Fantasia Film Festival), or a specific genre (Rencontres internationales du documentaire). In its fourth year now, the Montreal Super 8 Film Festival confines its content to a specific film medium, namely Super 8 film stock.

For those of us who don’t know, Super 8 is a type of motion picture film developed by Kodak in the 1960s and recently discontinued. Because of its small format, and nostalgia-inducing aesthetic qualities, those in the know greedily track down what little supply of the stuff is still to be had. The short availability of the medium helps explain some of the festival’s rules, such as not letting contestants cut or edit any film so as to avoid wasted stock. With this year’s theme, “Secret Love,” firmly in mind, each of the 28 filmmakers was given one Super 8 reel, totalling about three minutes and twenty seconds.

For a few hours on Wednesday night, a near-hush fell over La Sala Rossa as the gathered audience of filmmakers, friends and fans watched the results. Many of the shorts made clever use of accompanying soundtracks, winning the audience over with wit and humour. Several films flopped face first. Certain participants made good use of conventions from historical periods of film like German Expressionism, or the French New Wave. Still others invoked the pixilation style of animation made popular by Norman McLaren. An air of playful creativity and experimentation was present throughout the screenings.

The event also oozed a community atmosphere, as pauses between reels gave attendees time to laud or lambaste the last film, go talk to its director elsewhere in the crowd, or get another drink. Organizer Gilles Castilloux, scrambling around the projection table in the middle of the room, was also being approached and congratulated throughout the evening. Indeed, Castilloux spent most of the night, as he put it, “running around with my hair on fire making sure everything goes well.” This brings us to the event’s principal shortcoming.

Montreal Super 8, due in part to its obscure and esoteric nature, lacks the organizational smoothness of larger film festivals. While this can be both strength and weakness, allowing for more interaction and audience participation, it slowed the event down dramatically. The awkward transitions between films became tedious after two thirds of the 28 films had been shown. As a result, only a fraction of the attendees stayed to hear the announcement of the evening’s winners.

The festival’s jury, consisting of three local filmmakers, awarded prizes at evenings end based on technical know-how, use of sound, creativity, and overall quality. Jose Garcia-Lozano was the event’s big winner and, suspiciously, also the projector operator for the evening. His Untitled, a clever vignette about love lost and planting new seeds, took home the Best Sound and Best Film awards. The slickest film of the night but also very funny, Mario Morin’s L’Univers de Catherine, took home the Technical Merit award. Owing something to the dry humour of Wes Anderson films, Morin’s short was a guided visit to a young girl’s favourite things in her house and room. Minor awards aside, the real competition was for the audience choice prize. This went to Aimee VanDrimmelen for Hip Skip, an ode to the delightful activity of skipping down the street. The hilarious short finds a skipper, made outcast by unsympathetic joggers, recruiting other hip people with whom to skip.

Despite the evening’s misfires and occasional tedium, when the Super 8 Film Festival is good it’s a laugh riot. So if you skipped the event this year, make sure you skip on up to Sala Rossa next November for a fun night of films and friends.

Note: This article was originally published on 27 November 2006 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.

Poorly sewn seeds reap law suits

What differentiates this true story’s protagonist from any other? As we are told early on, “he didn’t cave.” In Seeds, a documentary play being performed at the Monument-National Theatre, a farmer from Saskatchewan takes on a multi-national corporate farming giant.

The play is based upon a story that has been unfolding in the Canadian media and court system for roughly six years. As it has progressed, the case has produced a hero for grassroots activists the world over.

The action begins in Bruno, SK where Percy Schmeiser, a husband and canola farmer on the verge of retirement, was first taken to court by GMO giant Monsanto. The accusation he faced was that he had illegally acquired and used a gene which the company had patented. Schmeiser would lose this case, but as is made evident in Seeds, the battle had only begun.

Indeed, the main focus of the play is not on the lawsuit itself, but rather on its aftermath and implications. As playwright and artistic director Annabel Soutar explained, “this play is really about the dirt behind the case.” Unfortunately, in such a high-stakes situation, dirt was pretty hard to dig up.

Thus, the Schmeiser v. Monsanto case became in Soutar’s words “an exercise in investigative journalism.” She went to Saskatchewan, and collected original court documents, statements from friends and acquaintances of Schmeiser’s, and local news coverage of the case. The result is an inspiring, if rather slow, documentary play.

Most of the inspirational value though, comes from the actual story and not so much from its portrayal on stage. However, if the production seems more like a compilation of newscasts than anything else, it may be because the case received so little attention from the real media. Seeds therefore is primarily an effort to provoke thought and awareness, rather than to entertain.

Certainly Schmeiser’s story could have been spun into a riveting narrative “based on a true story.” Instead, the play consists entirely of primary documents spoken by six actors, each actor playing multiple roles. The first act therefore consists almost entirely of courtroom transcripts from the 1998 lawsuit, which Soutar explained she “had to edit down from 1300 pages to the 20 meatiest.” The second act is a post-modern collage of court documents, interviews, letters, telephone conversations, newspaper articles and editorials, and public speeches.

As Schmeiser has become one of the most vocal spokespersons of the anti-GMO movement, he has been traveling around the world speaking out on modern farming practices, corporate bullying and scare-tactics. Excerpts from speeches given in Texas and India testify to his near-superstar status in the agricultural and environmental communities. But in all the madness that the case has swept up, it is clear that the truth has been completely lost from sight.

Schmeiser’s appeal reached the Supreme Court of Canada, where the original decision was upheld, though it was decided that he did not owe Monsanto the vast sums of money he’d been ordered to pay originally. But for all this time in court nobody is any closer to knowing how the patented gene ended up in Shmeiser’s field. At the other end of the spectrum, we do not leave the theatre with any definite opinion as to whether or not a company should be allowed to patent a life form. One does leave with the clear and uncomfortable knowledge that we exist, as is articulated in a courtroom transcript, within “a system which seeks to commodify everything.”

And so the bitter question remains... "who owns life?"

Note: This article was originally published on 14 November 2005 in the McGill Daily and can also be found on that paper's website here.

Life after the radio star

Good music videos rock. No matter your musical preferences or taste in films and TV shows, a bumpin’ music video can transcend all personal prejudices and make you want to jump up and dance. Unfortunately, MTV and Muchmusic seem to have forgotten the magic of music videos in favour of boring programming consisting mostly of so-called reality TV. So where can disowned members of the MTV Generation such as ourselves go to get our fix of music videos? Why, to the museum of course.

Until October first, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) is screening a selection of 26 music videos from the present all the way back to the medium’s origins with Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975. The series, entitled simply Music Video, can be seen in the cavernous Beverly Webster Ralph hall, which is in the building’s basement and free of entry during the MAC’s opening hours. Much better than confining the videos to their traditional flickering boxes, the projection takes up an entire wall in the room, and the powerful speakers behind the screen give the music the power it deserves.

The videos selected for the projection show the evolution and progression of the music video form, all the while illustrating the recurring tools and tropes used by filmmakers. Though the videos are, for the most part, not very technically innovative, the daring creativity and originality which the short and generally loud format allows is intoxicating.

The first video in the series, for the aforementioned Queen song, consists chiefly of concert footage. Most of the videos from the 1980s, however, try to explore the possibilities of the budding medium. Several of the videos from this decade are pieced together in a jarring montage and make repeated use of abandoned urban spaces and found items, for instance those directed by Zbigniew Rybczynski for Art of Noise and Belfegore. These allusions to abandoned places and objects reflect the short-term promotional ends for which the music video format was first conceived.

However as the decade evolves more polished and innovative music videos appear. Some make imaginative use of animation such as Steve Barron’s video for a-ha’s Take On Me, or Stephen R. Johnson’s video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, which invokes the pixilation technique invented by National Film Board legend Norman McLaren. Other directors begin to infuse their videos with narratives as a way of keeping the distracted viewers attention. Good examples of this come in Zbigniew Rybczynski’s video for John Lennon’s Imagine, or the Steve Barron animated adventure mentioned earlier.

As the projection passes into the 1990s a decidedly cleaner aesthetic emerges, one anticipated in the series by the 1984 Jean Baptiste Mondino video for Don Henley’s Boys of Summer. Videos like the one directed by Stéphane Sednaoui for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1991 hit Give it Away show a much greater attention to detail in their direction, editing and artistic design. All the featured videos from the ‘90s employ surreal (Jonathan Glazer’s video for Street Spirit by Radiohead) or futuristic (Chris’ Cunningham’s video for All is Full of Love by Björk) visual styles, or both as is the case in the Mark Romanek-directed video for Madonna’s Bedtime Story. The careful craftsmanship and sombre sleekness of these videos contrasts sharply to their cheap, gritty and trashy predecessors from the 80s. This testifies to the legitimacy music videos have gained as promotional tools, but also as vehicles for artistic exploration and expression.

A tendency to abandon dark imagery and start having fun again is clear in the post-millennial films, such as Spike Jonze’s famous video for Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice starring only Christopher Walken. Many videos since the year 2000 also return to themes and concepts first elaborated in the 80s. Thus, the circular narrative of Mark Romanek’s video for John Lennon’s Imagine is cleverly readapted in the Michel Gondry-directed Come to my World by Kylie Minogue. The creative use of animation in the Peter Gabriel and a-ha videos mentioned earlier re-emerges in another Michel Gondry video, this one for the White Stripes’ Fell in Love with a Girl, as well as in Joshua Deu’s video for the Arcade Fire’s Laika and the Louis-Philippe Eno-directed Montréal -40 °C by Malajube.

At a time when music videos are a dime a dozen, and finding a decent one tends to require hours of online searching only to be confined to disappointingly inadequate computer screens and speakers, this projection is invaluable. Do yourself a favour: go to your local museum basement and rediscover that latent love for music videos in the perfect setting.

Note: This article was originally published on 11 September 2006 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.

Defecting to Define America Anew

The notion of breaking from tradition, taking the road less travelled, venturing from the beaten path, has been at work since the beginnings of American Literature. From the misadventures of Rip Van Winkle in the mysterious Catskills, to the dizzying cross-continental romps of Dean Moriarty, defection looms large in the American literary tradition. Three texts from the last sixty years, Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and David O. Russell’s Three Kings, recreate an American frontier so that their characters may defect into uncharted territory. By setting their narratives in the deep and mystical South, the vast expanse of Cold War America, and the unfamiliar deserts of Iraq, these texts give their characters an opportunity to defect from dominant society, in each instance sculpting a unique American identity.

In Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms defection occurs both physically and psychologically. Joel Knox’s voyage to a mystical rural Alabama signifies a journey into the American subconscious; to where cripples, invalids, and deviants have been banished. Characters such as Randolph, Miss Amy, Missouri, Idabel and Miss Wisteria populate the fringe of American society and the depths of its unconscious. By sending Joel, the closest-to-normal of the novel’s odd characters, to the frontier of American social conventions, Capote is defining a new American identity. He gives voices to other characters that embody perceived social ills such as child sexuality and adolescence (Joel, Idabel, Miss Wisteria), homosexuality (Randolph), civil rights and racism (Zoo), emasculation and castration anxiety (Mr. Sansom), to mention a few. In so doing Capote sends his readers with Joel to the psychological frontier of America, and from this defection seeks to create a more unified and accepting collective consciousness.

Therefore, Joel becomes the readers’ guide to their own unconscious, as he advances both physically and psychologically through rural Alabama. Even as his journey towards Noon City progresses, Joel becomes incapable of suppressing his subconscious. He “hadn’t had a proper hour’s rest since leaving New Orleans, for when he closed his eyes, as now, certain sickening memories slid through his mind” (Capote 8). As Ihab H. Hassan writes of Other Voices, “the image of adolescence throws a new light on that perennial conflict between the self and the world to which Freud assigned a decisive role in any culture” (Hassan 313). As he ventures from the comfort and familiarity of New Orleans to the challenging lifestyle of Skully’s Landing, Joel comes to belong in this community of misfits. The archetypal masculine Southerner Sam Radclif finds Joel “too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned; each of his features was shaped with a sensitive accuracy, and a girlish tendency” (Capote 4). By defecting to the backwaters of Alabama, Joel Knox embraces the unconscious at the dawn of an era of thorough repression in modern American history.

In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a similar psychological motivation drives the protagonists to travel all over America incessantly. Much like in Other Voices, Kerouac seeks to acknowledge the need for personal development between childhood and adulthood, the period of adolescence. Therefore, defection for Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty and their cohorts serves multiple purposes, all of which are ultimately formative. Firstly, their perpetual travels are a way of avoiding responsibility, prolonging the comforts of youth by fleeing adulthood on the open road. Secondly, Sal and Dean’s departure from settled life is a way of defecting from the American identities which their parents have come to exemplify. Thirdly therefore, defection is also a metaphysical search for their own identity; their journeys become tools of experience rather than travels with an explicit destination. As one critic writes, “[t]he book moves from hierarchy to openness, from the limitation of possibilities to their expansion” (Dardess 201). Sal betrays awareness of this when asked by another man of the road, a carnival owner, “‘[y]ou boys going to get somewhere, or just going?’ We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question” (Kerouac 20). The roads of America become Sal and Dean’s open frontier, and a unique and uniquely American identity becomes the object of their defection.

In his film Three Kings, David O. Russell makes similar use of open territory as a way of giving his characters physical space for defection. Though their defection has very material goals at the outset, its result is an experience much like that Sal and Dean seek in On the Road; that is emotional growth and a new sense of identity. Set against the backdrop of the Persian Gulf War, Three Kings chronicles the efforts of Major Archie Gates, Sergeant First Class Troy Barlow, and Staff Sergeant Chief Elgin to recover for their own personal gain gold stolen by Iraqis from Kuwait. The fringes between war and civil society become their frontier, the desert space between American barracks and Iraqi settlements. Their quest is typical of American capitalism, echoing the westward expansion of the Gold Rush. However, while they begin by seeking financial wealth with no regard for the impact on others, their journey becomes a socially conscious mission when its focus shifts to the rescuing of Iraqi civilians. Through this tale of American soldiers’ defection in the Persian Gulf, David O. Russell posits a new American identity of social consciousness and humanitarian benevolence, rather than military peacekeeping abroad and irresponsible capitalism at home.

By setting their narratives in unsettled spaces, these texts allow their characters to seek out a new identity free of historical and geographical constraints. Many critics, most notably Richard Slotkin, have identified the frontier myth with conservative social politics and militaristic foreign policies. Capote, Kerouac, and Russell repossess the American myth of the frontier, incorporating it into a progressive, socially inclusive political project. Rural Alabama, miles of American highway, and the deserts of Iraq provide Capote, Kerouac, and Russell’s characters with the physical and emotional freedom to defect. In their respective frontiers these narratives carve out a new American identity. Capote brings his readers to the geographical and psychological fringes of America in an effort to create a more accepting national consciousness. Kerouac sends Sal and Dean out on the road in search of their own sense of American adolescence, and thereafter adulthood, free from the constraints of their parents’ mistakes. Finally, Russell goes to the Iraqi desert to forge a more socially conscious and responsible American political identity. All three texts acknowledge that change is needed, but also that the right conditions must exist before that change can take place.

Note: Written for English 325: Modern American Fiction course taught by Dr. Jason Polley at McGill University in the Winter 2006.

Works Cited

Capote, Truman. Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York: Modern Library, 1948.

Dardess, George. “The Delicate Dynamics of Friendship: A Reconsideration of Kerouac’s On The Road”. American Literature 46.2 (1974): 200-206.

Hassan. Ihab, H.. “The Idea of Adolescence in American Fiction”. American Quarterly 10.3 (1958): 312-324.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. London: Penguin, 1957.

Three Kings. Dir. David O. Russell. Perf. George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze, Nora Dunn. Village Roadshow Pictures, 1999.

“He turned around:” Keeping the Line and Crossing Borders in Duel and Jaws

Two of Steven Spielberg’s early films, Duel (1971) and Jaws (1975), have been accused of upholding apolitical, if not conservative, ideological structures. Writers Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, building on the interpretations of Frederic Jameson and Jane Caputi, account for three readings that see Jaws as a vehicle for conservative ideologies (Frentz and Rushing 16). Lester D. Friedman enumerates some sixteen different critical readings of Jaws (Friedman 163-164), summarizing that like in both these films, “[t]raditional communal values emerge triumphant in Spielberg’s horror movies” (ibid. 179). Addressing the director’s broader oeuvre, Friedman explains that “Spielberg is preoccupied with how men ought to act in their culturally assigned positions and how they often fail to perform these roles adequately. This theme characterizes the director’s career: it is evident in early films like Duel and Jaws” (ibid. 129-130). However, these films feature stripped bare chase narratives that call attention to their unswerving structures. The forward-moving linearity of these narratives and their protagonists is analogous to the American ethos of individual freedom, staying in one’s lane, adhering to the status quo. By defying linearity and boundaries, the monsters of these films demand that the protagonists also disrupt their straight lives. These movements and deviations are foregrounded by both these films’ cinematic minimalism, a term I will define below. Diverging from linear trajectories, crossing borders and boundaries signifies transgression and subversion of the patriarchal middle-class American status quo in Duel and Jaws.

Cinematic minimalism, to begin, is both a narrative and an aesthetic code of filmmaking. Narrative in cinematic minimalism consists of creating a story that involves only the most rudimentary of plot elements. In Duel, David Mann (Dennis Weaver) is the only character we know, and therefore the only person our sympathies might be aligned with. In fact, the character’s last name conveys the full extent of his appeal as a hero: the fact that he is a Man(n) makes him our protagonist by default. The monster, meanwhile, is menacing and unknown, only vaguely human and more often referred to as “the truck,” its psyche incomprehensible and its movements unpredictable. In both these films the monster is evil materialized in the form most befitting the setting. By pitting a representative of our lifestyle – however unsympathetic – against an irrational evil, Spielberg aligns the audience with the former, manipulating our emotions with attack after attack by the latter. Using the narrative devices and characters of cinematic minimalism, Spielberg creates plots that consist of successive exercises in suspense.

With story elements broken down to their most basic expressions, cinematic minimalism allows directors to perform elaborate technical feats. However, these exercises in technological mastery and manipulation are foregrounded by a minimalist mis-en-scene and visual code. The aesthetics of cinematic minimalism are barren and sleek, making masterful camera angles and movements, editing patterns and musical scores self-evident. In the pared down visual landscapes of Duel and Jaws, Spielberg is free to display his filmmaking skills, creativity and inventiveness. A brilliant and conspicuous camera movement near the beginning of Duel provides an example. The shot begins with a close-up on David driving his car through the driver-side window, then moves forward, showing the entire length of the truck, ending with a menacing view of its front grill while its engine roars. With only three elements to keep track of – car, truck and road – Spielberg lets us focus on his striking movement from one to the next, presumably shot from a car driving alongside the action. The use of sound effects is also striking in this scene, the smooth engine noise of David’s car being drowned out by the loud roar of the truck. In Jaws, similarly sparse story elements foreground both technical achievement and musical manipulation. When Alex Kinter is killed, the basic story elements of shark and innocent white American child are givens. Rather, the underwater shot from the shark’s point of view calls the audience’s attention to the technical means involved in having a highly mobile underwater camera. The shot also makes self-evident use of John Williams’s musical score, one that has remained in the American collective conscience ever since. In cinematic minimalism, then, story elements are transparent so that technical expertise can be foregrounded.

That said, cinematic minimalism does not employ the same strategy many critics have attributed to Blockbuster cinema. The latter emphasizes grandiose action scenes with complexly choreographed sequences and many characters and movements to keep track of. Films that qualify for cinematic minimalism place less emphasis on filling the screen with spectacular effects. Instead, the sparse landscape makes cinematic manipulations more apparent, giving the audience a greater sense of the technical means being deployed. One critic, for instance, giving a detailed account of the scene leading up to Alex Kinter’s death in Jaws, points out to what extent cinematic devices such as colour-coding, camera angles, editing rhythms, ambient sound and music create a complex set of reactions in the viewer (Friedman 169-173). Because the elements on-screen are so simple, cinematic minimalism makes us aware of the camera itself, and the other cinematic manipulations taking place outside the diegesis. Other films that provide examples of cinematic minimalism are Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and many Alfred Hitchcock mysteries, most notably Rope (1948). Already, then, with pared down landscapes and settings that call forth cinematic devices, these films call attention to their own means in a manner that is unusual for Hollywood films.

With their very simple visual codes, Duel and Jaws often make use of virtually abstract compositions that feature sharp lines and monochrome colour planes. In Duel, the line in question is most often the road, which is surrounded by green and golden fields, rocky hills or small country homes and businesses. As the film begins on the road, with Spielberg’s camera mounted to the front of David’s car, the road stands for continuity, safety and assurance. As David leaves the city and heads into the agricultural and desert areas traversed by “Highway 14 just north of Los Angeles” (ibid. 128), the road becomes the only constant evidence of modern civilization, tracing a line through the wilderness of scorching hot California country-side. Staying on the road, keeping straight and in line becomes increasingly hard and important for David. The truck, on the other hand, is all the more terrifying for its ability to leave the road, turn around and change directions.

The truck, furthermore, is not subject to the same isolation that David experiences outside his suburban middle-class comfort zone. In a moment that brings Duel into dialogue with texts like the Transformers movie and series – in which machines like trucks, trains and planes are given human attributes – the road runs parallel to another set of lines, train tracks. As David speeds ahead, trying to evade the truck and in the same moment overtaking the train, the truck honks three times, to which the train responds with the same three honks. Clearly, the large freight vehicles that facilitate commerce across the expansive North American continent are in league against David. In fact, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that with this exchange of honks the train and truck are plotting the railroad-crossing scene later, when the truck almost pushes David into the passing train. Again, this scene presents the crossing of lines as dangerous and transgressive, but, interestingly, necessary for David’s survival. The line of the road in Duel, staying on it and moving forward over it, mediates between the order it represents and the surrounding chaos of unsettled countryside.

Lines perform a similarly mediatory function in Jaws, though taking different forms in the film’s two halves. The abstract composition changes between the first and second parts of the film: the small-town horror narrative and the chase plot (Lemkin 9). In the former, the golden Amity island beach forms a line, with the town to one side and the blue ocean on the other. This strip of beach is the primary setting for the film’s first half, “it is between this archetypal uncontrollable wilderness and the archetypal American landscape that Spielberg spins his tale” (ibid. 6). By setting the first half of Jaws on the Amity beaches, “Spielberg thrusts his characters in a liminal zone and exposes them to danger” (ibid. 6). Again, to leave this line and go into the ocean becomes a transgressive activity, one harshly punished by the irrational evil represented by the shark. The beach, then, is a borderline between an idealized American status quo and the immense and threatening ocean. In a telling scene, Chief Brody and his forces attempt to extend this border by creating a line of boats with armed men some hundred feet offshore. However, this manipulation and extension of the shoreline fails miserably. While the line of boats attempts to mediate between the actual shoreline and the ocean, the shark crosses it and two other borders, entering “the pond” through an inlet and going under a bridge. This undermines Brody’s project, pointing out how fluid and uncontrollable the ocean is. Incapable of civilizing even those hundred feet of the ocean closest to the beach, Brody has no choice but leave Amity and meet the shark on its own turf.

Once Jaws becomes a chase narrative, the line is no longer Amity’s beach, but the wake of white water left by the movements of Quint’s boat, the Orca. This line traces the movements of the boat, and stands in contrast to the trajectories of the super-mobile shark. Because the boat is set on a constantly moving ocean with no markers of distance or space, it never appears to turn, instead only going forwards or backwards. The shark, on the other hand, turns around, dives and comes back up, criss-crosses the boat’s path and even seems to swim backwards in a couple of moments, a movement real sharks cannot actually perform. The fluidity of the shark’s movements stands in contrast to the rigid forward and backward capacities of the Orca. The multiplicity of movements demonstrated by the shark ultimately overcomes the boat, which only breaks free of the forward/backward dichotomy of linear movements as it sinks below the ocean’s surface. By abandoning forward-movement and staging a final face-off with the shark, the protagonists disregard the status quo of linear progress. In doing so, the three men abandon the line they had drawn through the untamed ocean with the movement of their boat, adopting strategies more akin to the shark’s subversive movements.

In both Duel and Jaws, the monsters are transgressive for the ways they undermine borders and lines between civilized and uncivilized areas. The truck in Duel defies the linear movements of David, turning around and coming back, crossing the road and leaving it any number of times. David, meanwhile, can only conceive of moving forward, stopping only occasionally and each time with a great deal of difficulty. In fact, whenever he tries to stop, he crashes his car or loses control of it. The truck, however, displays a great deal of agility in manipulating and negotiating the road, most notably when it destroys the roadside snake shack and telephone booth by carving a series of circles both on an off the road. David slowly begins to use the truck’s tactics, stopping on several occasions in hopes of evading his foe. For instance, he pulls over and hides below the road and takes a nap after the truck passes him, assuming that it will keep moving forward. However, once he takes back to the road he quickly catches up to the truck, which has pulled over and waited for him. David eventually learns from the truck, and in the climactic confrontation not only leaves the road completely, but turns around for the first time. It is only after he has turned around, something the truck does several times throughout Duel, that David is able to vanquish his enemy. Thus, by appropriating the transgressive behaviour of the truck, David escapes the normative forward movement that constitutes the American status quo, and emerges victorious.

The importance of turning around, then, draws attention to the Spielbergian motif of looking back. In an insightful article, Johanna Schneller points out that those important characters in Spielberg’s films are always the ones who look back rather than forward: “Spielberg knows that turning backwards sets a person apart from a crowd: Your perspective is immediately different; on film, you instantly become an Individual” (R2). Furthermore, she posits that this lends reflections, rear-view mirrors and car rear windows particular thematic weight as framing devices. “With your eyes in a rear-view mirror, you are pulling into the future but looking into the past. It’s nostalgia made physical. And no one is better at capturing a particularly American form of nostalgia than Spielberg” (ibid. R2). This notion of Spielberg’s cinema as fundamentally nostalgic for a long-gone American society compliments Jonathan Lemkin’s analysis of Amity, the fictional town of Jaws. For him, “Spielberg distils elements from a variety of American landscapes into one ideal, mythic landscape. In the process lies the power of the film to evoke a place that everyone in the audience recognizes as ‘America’” (4). Lemkin concludes that Amity “is also a creation of nostalgia, a pure American community which is nothing less than mythic” (4). Similarly, the car and paved highway of Duel correspond to another expression of the American myth, symbolically evoking the settling of the West, and ideals of individual freedom and class mobility. Both these films, while presenting a mythic space of archetypal American-ness, demand that their protagonists stop moving forward but rather become more fluid in their movements, and ultimately turn around to face their anxieties.

The protagonists of Duel and Jaws, then, overcome their habit of looking back while moving forward, and adopt their foe’s ability to turn around completely, but also to divert their course. After exclamations of “He turned around,” or “He’s coming back around,” the heroes take on these very same characteristics. To some extent, this may simply be due to how compelling Spielberg’s monsters are when compared with his heroes. As one critic observes regarding Jaws, “though the ominous shark has a great deal of life, the film’s central characters are thinly sketched” (Auster 116). However, this also testifies to the tremendous appeal of these monsters for being able to transgress the conventions and bindings of archetypal modern American life. When David defeats the truck at the end of Duel, he does so by leaving the road, turning around and destroying his car in order to ensure his freedom and survival. The film’s final image is of David looking out over a pristine wilderness, free from the constraints of social convention and decorum that his car symbolized. This is a utopian ending, one that does not posit a return to David’s dissatisfying life as an office employee and alienated father and husband. He has adopted the truck’s ability to take the road less-traveled, cross boundaries and move in a non-linear mode.

Similarly, the ending of Jaws does not enact a return to land and the family, but ends instead with Hooper and Brody clearly on the “wilderness” side of the line traced by the beach. Friedman says of Jaws that “[a]s is often the case in Spielberg’s films, the seemingly ordinary man who appears awkwardly out of place in the environment he is forced to inhabit defeats the threat to society” (165). He, like most critics writing on the film, goes on to posit that in neutralizing the threat, Brody and Hooper uphold the status quo exemplified by the town of Amity. However, much like the ending of Duel, the protagonists do not reintegrate the community within the diegesis. Instead, they remain outside society and have taken on certain of the behavioural traits of the threats they’ve just neutralized.

The protagonists of Duel and Jaws, by learning from their enemies, offer a progressive rather than regressive social model. The boundary-crossing shark and truck, though defeated, live on to some extent in the men who destroyed them. This internalizing of certain elements of the monsters aligns these two films with what Robin Wood has termed the progressive horror movie model in his book chapter “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 1970s”. According to Wood, when the monsters and the heroes share certain recognizable traits, the film admits to a certain “spirit of negativity” (93), dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs and desire for positive change. The heroes of these two Spielberg films adopt the monsters’ abilities to cross boundaries, pursue multiple directions of action, ultimately allowing them to confront the anxieties that chase them. In doing so, Duel and Jaws admit the shortcomings of 1970s American culture, and offer solutions to overcoming those difficulties. Both films foreground those means by adhering to cinematic minimalism, which creates an uncomplicated narrative and visual code whose abstract compositions call attention to movements across lines and borders.

Note: Written for English 480: American Cinema of the 1970s – the Two New Hollywoods course taught by Prof. Derek Nystrom at McGill University in the Winter of 2007.

Works Cited

Auster, Albert and Leaonard Quart. American Film and Society since 1945. 3rd ed. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002.

Caputi, Jane E. “Jaws as Patriarchal Myth.” Journal of Popular Film 6 (1978): 305-326.

Duel. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Dennis Weaver (David Mann). Universal TV, 1971.

Frentz, Thomas S. and Janice Hocker Rushing. “Integrating Ideology and Archetype in Rhetorical Criticism, Part II: A Case Study of Jaws.” In The Films of Steven Spielberg. Ed. Charles L. P. Silet. Oxford, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002, 15-43.

Friedman, Lester D. Citizen Spielberg. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2006.

Jameson, Frederic. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Jaws. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Roy Scheider (Martin Brody), Robert Shaw (Quint), Richard Dreyfuss (Matt Hooper), Lorraine Gary (Ellen Brody), Murray Hamilton (Mayor Larry Vaughn). Universal, 1975.

Lemkin, Jonathan. “Archetypal Landscapes and Jaws.” In The Films of Steven Spielberg. Ed. Charles L. P. Silet. Oxford, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002, 3-13.

Schneller, Johanna. “Smoke and rear-view mirrors: Spielberg looks back at an always better past.” Globe and Mail 8 July 2005: R1-R2.

Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 1970s.” In Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 70-94.