For me, the epiphany I experienced regarding experimentalism came while watching Derek Jarman’s film Blue, which I had to attempt to review for a Lip retrospective. Made when he was already blind and dying from AIDS-related complications, it consists of almost two hours of a bright blue screen unrelieved by images of any sort, accompanied with a layered and fascinating soundtrack. Watching people’s faces as th
ey reacted to the film—or struggled not to react to it—was a revelation in itself.
Now, there’s little more useless and baffling, conceptually, than a blind filmmaker—I don’t think anyone would argue with me on that point, Jarman himself included. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure Jarman knew that while people were watching his film, he could still conduct things inside their brains—that during the entire experience, they’d be desperately trying to conjure a “movie” where none existed, just to keep themselves sane. I remember the first time I showed one of my classes Soraya Mousch’s installation As Heaven Is Wide. And then I asked if anybody had any questions, to which this guy in the middle row put up his hand and said: Uh, yes, miss—like, what the eff was that?
Well, folks, I replied, that was the third stream of Canadian film, neither Telefilm nor Québécois; it’s the one you can make almost completely by yourself, no help required, government or otherwise—though the government’ll probably give you grant money for it, if you ask. Because experimental film is as far away from exploitative Hollywood genre narrative film as humanly possible. The point of showing experimental films, for me, was to demonstrate that if they were only willing to step outside the established system, it was perfectly possible for any filmmaker to get away with not actually having a “point.” That they could, in fact, defy the Hollywood rules that stated they even had to have one in the first place. Because in experimentalism, the film itself was the point, the question and the answer, all in one.
In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person’s dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.
I’d already covered enough screenings at the Ursulines Studios to know the quickest way to get there, without springing for a taxi: catch the northbound bus up Sherbourne, then hop a streetcar west along Carlton until it turns into College and keep going. Best place to get off is at Augusta, just before Bathurst. From there it’s just a brisk walk north to Nassau, in the heart of Kensington Market, where the Ursulines occupies the whole top floor of a former industrial garage.
Founded in 2004 by a coalition of multimedia and performance artists who were tired of never being able to find proper venues for their art, the Ursulines has since become a fixture of Toronto’s alternative cinema and a meeting place for both those who make and those who consume films from the fringes of the system. Though its overall budget receives generous bi-annual support from both provincial and federal grant-giving bodies, the costs of a typical week are paid through a combination of user fees, box office, and money made from the operation of an equally community-oriented bike shop sharing their location.
Throughout the day, they fix bikes down at street level, or give maintenance lessons—teach people how to make their own, too. At night, they pull a gate across, lock it, then open the second storey for business: single-artist installations, festivals, “world premieres” seen by eighty poor bastards on fold-up chairs a pop. They even turn it into a mini-studio every summer and do a month of workshops on Super 8 film, mentored by guest artists from all around the world; for two hundred bucks you get a rig and a reel, they show you how to cut in-camera and develop, and then you get to force whoever’s dumb enough to show up to sit still for your masterpieces. I got a pretty good article out of the experience once, in my Lip days.
Under current management, the Ursulines also produces a small quarterly magazine about the experimental scene (Some Do Harm) and runs the Stream Store, a web-based distribution company that releases films featured at and developed through the studio. You’d think they’d be a little artsy-fartsy for an area like the Market, not to mention apolitical; this is a place that’s been radical since the 1960s, seemingly composed of nothing but anarchist bookstores, vegan restaurants and thrift shops far as the eye can see. It’s also a neighbourhood that consistently attracts a high student and immigrant population, and is stridently anti-corporate despite some of its most vocal residents being surprisingly upper crust—self-exiled fugitives from Toronto’s media and financial elite.
It was one of this latter group playing as headliner/programmer for that night’s dubious roster of entertainment—a man whose work would set me on my path to the Vinegar House and beyond.
Wrob Barney was born Robert James Barney in 1962—he added an extra letter to his name in high school, hoping to distinguish himself from his three older siblings, Richard, Robin, and Reid. A former resident of the Lake of the North area, much like Mrs. Whitcomb, he was born in Chaste then raised in Overdeere. He first appeared on my radar after his 2006 debut at Inside/Out, the Toronto LGBT Film Festival, and joined the Ursulines Studio collective in 2010, replacing withdrawn member Max Holborn.
(I’d heard of Holborn but had never really seen anything he’d done, and didn’t know him enough by sight to nod at him across the room. Alec Christian was a big fan, but I mainly categorized him through his association with Soraya Mousch, whom I’d interviewed back when the two of them ran the Wall of Love—another experimental film collective—and who later became a mentor for my former student Safie Hewsen. Actually, I don’t think anybody’d seen Holborn directly for about a year by the time of the Ursulines screening, including Mousch. First his wife had died, and then he and Mousch had some weird falling out over their last project, and then he just sort of dropped off the map. Mousch had at least switched disciplines, as she liked to say, and though she no longer did anything involving film, it wasn’t like she didn’t work. But for all people knew about Holborn, he might’ve gone into his house, locked the door, and never come back out.)
Looking back, I can admit now that I was pretty—okay, highly—uncharitable to Wrob Barney, from my first review on. His affectations annoyed me, to say the least. And God knows, I have a not-unwarranted reputation for disliking people almost at random, sometimes for not much more than screw you, that’s why . . . But in my own defence, this was a pretty much universal opinion; Wrob rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, sometimes without even trying.
The thing is, in Toronto, those who do experimental film basically fall into two categories: there are the zealots, people who’ve decided for philosophical reasons not to practise or cooperate with the commercial storytelling oligarchy—the Griersonites, I call them, after John Grierson, the dude who started the National Film Board of Canada. Same guy who once said “Fiction is a temptation for trivial people.” Them I have some respect for, because that’s a freakishly, perversely hard row they’ve chosen to hoe. I mean, make an even vaguely commercial movie in Canada—something that tells a story from beginning to end, fits a ninety-minute slot, conforms to broadcast regulations—and you can have yourself a nice little career in TV. But the stuff the Griersonites do? Doesn’t get you shit.
On the other hand, some people do experimental film because it’s the smallest possible pond and they enjoy being a big fish, no matter where. And Wrob Barney fell squarely in that second camp.
Wrob applied for grants even though he came from money—that was an open secret. After a boating accident killed his grandmother and step-grandfather, Barney’s father Russett somehow wound up the unexpected beneficiary of a large “charitable donation” from the eccentric Sidderstane family, which he soon invested in what would eventually become the Ramble Barn mini-empire, a successful chain of quality outdoor gear shops with outlets in Toronto, Ottawa, and Burlington. So young then-Robert did indeed grow up in plenty, and it was his elder siblings’ early commitment to maintaining the family business that freed him to pursue his artistic dreams. They were the heirs, ranked in descending order of importance; he was the spare, consistently supported but otherwise ignored, and acted accordingly.
To his credit, he had good taste; however, he couldn’t generate anything. He did “collage art,” sampling, like the Beastie Boys’ album Paul’s Boutique, where every song is basically nothing but samples on top of samples. Still, there’s a reason they got sued for making that album, and there’s a reason that suit gave rise to regulations which now stipulate samples can’t be more than a certain length. Because when you build a house out of bits and pieces of other people’s houses, you can’t claim to be surprised when the whole fucking thing falls down.
I remember he used to compare himself to Max Ernst when he was first starting out. Back in his Dada days, Ernst made entire books out of cutting images from magazines and recombining them. Difference was, Ernst could actually paint, and after a certain point in his career he gave up on the whole Semaine de Bonté routine entirely, whereas I never saw anything in Wrob’s films that I’d call original. The best parts were always stolen from somebody else.
His offering that night was called Untitled 13, thirteenth in a series of similarly title-less films. It was roughly ten minutes long, and at first contained nothing but the various “artistic” flourishes I’d learned to associate with product released under his name: intercutting CBC documentary footage videotaped off TV screens with loops of hardcore gay porn; using stop-motion photography to puppet around a series of naked dudes wearing papier-mâché masks made from vintage Blue Boy magazines in blown-out 16mm—tricks that aimed to shock, only to stumble over into cute or trite. Or both.
Right in the middle, however, things changed.
It started with the framing, which suddenly shifted, moving inwards. Took me a minute or so to figure out that
what he’d done was poach an idea first developed in 1971 for Józef Robakowski’s “camera-free” film, Test I: punch physical holes along a length of opaque 35mm film, then project it using an exceptionally bright lamp, allowing the strong light behind the film to “attack” the viewer and generate afterimages mimicking the flicker of film frames—like cigarette burns in reverse, all-white versions of those hovering black dots that often appear on the film-strips of older movies, just before a splice.
So Wrob was using essentially the same technique, but also intermittently widening the holes until they “ate” almost the whole frame, then using blurring and light-flare to mask the transition to a different film altogether. These secondary edits were initially brief—a couple of seconds each, just enough to suggest an image without allowing for interpretation—but became steadily longer, wider, until I was finally able to figure out the mechanics: he’d burned a physical hole through a piece of black cardboard, mimicking the Test I sprockets, then fitted it over his camera’s lens and filmed a second set of images, presenting them as though they were appearing in the “window” of the hole itself.
Even as I connected the dots on Wrob’s methodology, I was also watching this new footage emerge, politely at first but a bit restively, squinting to get some sort of purchase on what I was seeing, then with growing interest. By the last flicker, less a fade than a smash cut to black, I was riveted.
Now the thing is, I could fill this whole chapter with film-critic jargon if I wanted to, all cues and references and shorthand. But I learned the hard way how most people—even ones who actually work in the industry—just don’t care about that sort of accuracy. I remember one class, early in my teaching career, where a student to whom I’d just returned a script covered in scribbled comments raised his hand and asked: “Miz Cairns, you said here that the character development was ‘cursory.’ What’s that mean, exactly?”
“It means you didn’t have enough of it. Did a half-assed job, basically.”
“Then why didn’t you just write ‘half-assed’?”
“Because there’s a word for it. And that word is ‘cursory.’”
Rather than drowning you in cinematographic esoterica, therefore, I’ll give you my most immediate impressions from that first viewing—the actual notes I scribbled down while still squinting up at the screen, done on a Staples notepad I rummaged out of my pocket.
very bright black + white, looks more like grey/silver