Nouveau and improved - The Montreal International Festival of Film, Video and and the New Technologies

The Montreal International Festival of Film, Video and the New Technologies tends to get lost in the shadow of the larger Montreal World Film Festival that each year takes place two months later. That is a shame because its selection of work provides an exceptional opportunity to glimpse the ways that makers are challenging media arts conventions. This year's festival, noted as "the oldest (and yet youngest) festival in Canada," was organized by Claude Chamberlain. Chamberlain's programming, true to the search for genuinely "nouveau" forms of video, film and new technologies, ran the gamut from conventional narrative films to experimental film and video, to emerging technologies like CD-ROM. The quality of the work in the festival's large program varied widely, of course, but such variety is testimony to the vitality of the field.

American independent film and video has always had a significant presence in the festival by virtue of both the number of entries in the program and the wide recognition that such work has subsequently enjoyed. Although the press release notes that "the festival provides a launching pad for the commercial release of Quebec, Canadian and foreign films at a time of year that is generally reserved for American blockbusters," there were still many films and tapes from just south of the border. In addition to big-name art house movies such as Crumb (1994, by Terry Zwigoff), much work was by relatively unknown Americans who stretched media definitions to provide a glimpse into contemporary media art concerns.

Several American videos, for instance, focused on the changing landscape of Eastern Europe. That the fall of the Communist bloc holds such interest for U.S. artists seems to stem from the gradual but partial westernization that the region has undergone as a result of capitalism. The former bloc is now stuck in an odd in-between state: it is neither as "exotic" nor as "foreign" as it once was, partially due to the McDonalds on every corner; yet the very awkwardness of that presence hints at a remaining "otherness" to which these videomakers seem to be attracted. Lyrical documentation of wandering through an Eastern Europe on the cusp of capitalism was the focus of both Jem Cohen's Buried In Light (1994), and Ken Kobland's Moscow X (1993). Cohen's video was shot mostly on super-8 and has a characteristically grainy, dreamy look, integrating excerpts from foreign language phrase books in an attempt to express the widespread alienation produced by this transition. Cohen traveled far and wide, from Dresden to Prague, and ruminates not only on the fate of communism but the continuing impact of World War II (there is a poignant sequence shot in Auschwitz). Despite the comic relief provided by the phrase book, the video is extremely melancholy, painting the East in drab, dark colors and showing everything in terms of decay.

Kobland's film has a similar feel to it, and indeed was shot during the same period as Cohen's (although Kobland confined his traveling to Moscow). There is much footage of demonstrations, and Kobland focuses on the apparition of faces-in-the-crowd. In this way Moscow X feels more intimate than Buried in Light, getting closer to the people of Eastern Europe. Both works are structured as diaries, though Cohen is less prone to grandiose philosophizing than Kobland, whose informal musings are closer to the diary form.

Breaking out of this angst over the spread of capitalism - a view of the East that frames it in specifically Western terms - was Mira Reym Binford's deeply moving video Diamonds in the Snow (1994). In the video, Binford returns to a small Polish town whose Jewish population was nearly decimated by the Nazis in order to document the people who helped to hide her. The video reveals, however, that the patriarch of the family who saved Binford was also cruel and abusive, and Binford's efforts to understand the ambiguity of her memories form the crux of the work. Diamonds in the Snow avoids using Eastern landscapes as tools for painting sleepy tales of sad tourism or wandering in favor of a straightforward exploration of historical memory, solidly rooted in socio-political reality.

Somewhere between imagism and historical documentation lies Uli Schuppel's Frozen Stories (1994). Schuppel combines super-8 footage of Communist labor camps with recent interviews of German men who were imprisoned in the same camp as his father. The video is intensely personal, drawing heavily on letters from Schuppel's father. Like Binford, Schuppel brings neglected aspects of recent history to light through a combination of personal childhood memories and testimony of the people who lived through the events, and does so with a dark visual sense that meshes well with the sometimes vaguely remembered stories.

Two Canadian films offered visions of the East, also positioned between imagism and documentation. Zigrail (1995), the debut feature from Quebecer Andre Turpin about a young man's voyage from Paris to Istanbul, has a wandering sensibility similar to Cohen or Kobland, emphasized by its black and white images and hand-held camera work. Some cliches of the twenty-something/slacker youth film are present, but Zigrail provides a portrait of Europe far grittier and bleaker than anything in Before Sunrise (1995, by Richard Linklater). Although this is not an uplifting film, it avoids the "tristesse" of Cohen or Kobland. It is far more conventional than these works, and Turpin still approaches the landscape with more clearheadedness than his American colleagues. David Rimmer's Under the Lizards (1994), documents jazz culture in cold war Poland, artfully evoking the raw, rebellious spirit of the music. The film draws on both archival footage and contemporary interviews with jazz performers who jammed in secret during the Communist era. Rimmer is able to skillfully interweave lyrical, montage-style sequences with straightforward, talking head-style sequences. The discussions range from the details of securing a gig under the hand of communism to the roles of women and Polish jazz culture. Rimmer shows that he has a good sense of the complexity of the quest for liberation.

Reflecting the current interest in new technologies, the Nouveau Festival has taken as one of its missions the exploration of computer-based modes of visual expression. For example, this year's festival included programs of computer animation drawn from the most recent Imagina conference, an annual meeting sponsored by France's Audio Visual Institute and the Monte Carlo International Television Festival. Imagina award winners were mostly amusing cartoons or quickie adventure stories (including several science fiction vignettes and a French adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). Like much high-end computer animation, works in these programs had a slick, commercial feel to them, no doubt in the hope that they would later sell and recoup their significant production costs. Ironically, more adventurous computer animation can frequently be seen on the MTV program, Liquid Television, which is backed by such considerable amounts of money that it can afford to take risks.

Various independent films and videos drew upon or discussed new technologies, frequently with disappointing results. Lynn Hershmann, for instance, screened her video Twists in the Cord (1994), an experimental documentary about the telephone. The strength of the piece is in the way Hershmann moves between narrative and documentary, making this a self-reflexive, formally inventive meditation. Although it provides some interesting historical information, the video primarily addresses up-to-the-minute technology, which is a problematic course of action and a concern with much work about emerging media. The technology evolves so quickly, that it is difficult to produce work of lasting value while maintaining the qualities and concerns specific to the technology itself. Videos like Hershmann's that emphasize the "newness" of such things as video-telephones are soon likely to appear as irrelevant, quaint relics. in fairness, Twists in the Cord, made for French TV, does work well for the sort of up-to-the-minute discourse that broadcast enables, and indeed, serves as a solid model for an alternative practice of science documentary - it is like Nova crossed with Godard.

A somewhat more sustainable treatment of these issues was Bill Seaman's video Passage Sets/One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue (1995). Seaman sets contrasting images of hyper-modern urban Japan and ancient iconography to a voice-over and text discussing technological and organic concerns. Seaman's images are painterly and his musings philosophical and enigmatic. His tape addresses broad aspects of inter-relationships between the individual, society and technology - relationships that are likely to remain relevant regardless of the specific incarnation of the technologies that fascinate us. These are two very different models of videomaking: Hershmann works in a postmodern, hybrid style, whereas Seaman adapts a more traditional (from an experimental film perspective), non-narrative mode.

Work was presented by the big names of world cinema, including Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Peter Greenaway, Wim Wenders, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Raul Ruiz and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. The quality of their work varied widely. On the one hand, Wenders's Lisbon Story (1995), which concerns a man trying to make a film in Lisbon with a 1925-model camera, is enjoyable but lacks the seriousness or depth of his earlier works. Ouedraogo's Afrique Mon Afrique (1994), is an AIDS-prevention melodrama set in the contrasting locales of a small African village and the nearby city for which the hero leaves his family in search of fame and fortune. It is as visually striking as all of Ouedraogo's work, but has a very peculiar narrative featuring elements such as a rags-to-rock star story of personal redemption, and a prostitute who engages in unsafe sex and dies of AIDS within weeks. Godard and Greenaway, on the other hand, returned to more avant-garde aesthetics, with enormously successful results. Godard's JLG/JLG (1994), is his meditation on art, growing old, and the way his memories relate to the future. Godard's eye has never been sharper, with the film evoking his small home on the French/Swiss border, seamlessly meshing landscape with interiors. Greenaway's latest work is a video called Stairs I Geneva (1994). Its premise is to document a massive art project that took place at 100 sites throughout Geneva, Switzerland, but its primary success is as a portrait of the city. This is the Greenaway of The Falls (1980), or A Walk Through H (1978), a nonlinear, encyclopedic work rendered with great attention to visuals. Ruiz's film Fado Majeur et Mineur (1994), is a typically dense, surreal labyrinth of a film, unapologetically enigmatic and visually lavish.

Marker's new video Prime Time in the Camps (1993), which discusses making media about Bosnia, is an intimate and rigorous work. It features interviews with a group of refugees who produce news about the Bosnian war, and depicts much more graphic footage of the war-torn nation than is presented by maim stream media. Marker and his subjects muse about objectivity and responsibility, musings that are constantly undermined by Marker's unflinching views of war-torn towns and camps seen through barbed wire. Lefebvre, long a key figure of Quebec's independent cinema, has also begun working with video, and screened his new work, La Passion de I'Innocence (1995). It follows a day in the life of a young actress waiting for a callback on an audition while also experiencing great personal traumas. The video is a triumph of observational, impressionistic camera work; Lefebvre shoots in broad tableaus and uses long takes, rendering small details of everyday life with great care.

CD-ROMs by well known figures such as Ron Mann and Laurie Anderson were also presented at the festival. Demonstrations of virtual reality experiments also took place, sponsored by Microsoft's project, Softimage. In addition, the festival had its own home-page on the World Wide Web, and several computers were set up in a theater care, allowing attendees to "surf the net" at their leisure. During 1994, the first year that the festival included such multimedia work, a writer for the Quebecois film journal, 24 Images, wondered whether film critics really possessed the necessary tools to properly critique such work. By way of answering such concerns, the festival held panel discussions that included filmmakers such as Peter Wintonick, co-director (with Mark Ackbar) of Manufacturing Consent (1992), and computer specialists. Topics included the possibilities of internet cinema, various "new media" forms with the promise of new ways of expression, and ongoing efforts to establish a Francophonic presence on the Anglo-dominated internet. The festival's overall project in relation to new technology was to give a small glimpse of such work and to insist on acknowledging its presence (the number of works created specifically in a non-film or video medium was a comparatively small part of the program). Regrettably, unrealistic promotion crept in from time to time: "Viewers have the chance to experience the cinema and television of tomorrow" is how the catalog touted what would better be described as the computer graphics simulations of today.

The Nouveau Festival bills itself as "the festival for the second century of Cinema," and the breadth of its programming makes this assertion ring true. Its declared objective is to find new forms of expression through moving images, and while this is rather vague, it does provide an opportunity to view an extremely wide range of work. To Chamberlain's credit, the festival avoided the "film only" chauvinism that prevails at bigger festivals such as those in Toronto or Montreal, while still screening some of the best films unveiled at these events. In addition, his insistence on mixing these films with more aesthetically adventurous films, videos and multimedia, gives the festival's program a democratic emphasis. In considering the world of big-city festivals, a wider range of independently-minded media art is hard to find.

JERRY WHITE is on the program staff of the Neighborhood Film/Video Project and the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema.

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