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If there is magic on this planet,
it is contained in water.
Loran Eisley

INTRODUCTION

To understand water is to understand the cosmos, the marvels of nature, life itself. Fluid water stands for sensitivity and being moved in some way, but also for physical and spiritual strength, power, wisdom, purity and the promise of development and growth. Creative energy in itself, water also became a symbol for inspiration and creativity. It simply represents infinite possibilities. Thanks to its changing form, mood and colour water has a mysterious influence on the mind. It has the tendency to blur the line between dream and reality. It is not surprising then that water in all it shapes has inspired artists since ages and that it is a recurrent theme in experimental films. Especially in Canada, where water in all it shapes and forms is an important part of the beauty of the landscape, many film artists work with water images and sounds.

This film program presents an inspiring selection of Canadian experimental films that hold water. It is constructed as a voyage on the sea of time and into a whirlpool of creativity that overflows with sparkling ideas, moving watercoulours, changing waterlines and exiting sound waves. The following descriptions of the films are meant to serve as your flotation devices, to help you drift from one bubble of creativity to another, with both my thoughts and impressions of the work as buoys, alongside the lifelines of other water devotees. As one film after another swims into view, water will serve as a metaphor for remembering and forgetting, for pain and healing, for fear and security, for weakness and power, and through all these ups and downs, it always also operates as a sensual and creative force, one that moves and inspires, no matter whether one sinks or swims.

THE PROGRAM

Like swift water, an active mind never stagnates.
The underlying attraction of the movement of water and sand is
biological. If we look more deeply we can see it as
the basis of an abstract idea linking ourselves with the
limitless mechanics of the universe.
Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe

Action : Study (2008), Richard Kerr, digital video, 5 min, B&W.
Richard Kerr’s Action : Study is a poetic and painterly musing on bygone times when the filmmaker’s daughter was a toddler, wading as happy as a clam on a hot summer day in the shimmering waters of the Georgian Bay. The giddy images, the result of transferring high-contrast 16 mm film at a variable shutter speed and using hand-held motion, create a lovely interplay between the flicker of the water and the silhouetted girl. These two simple image components constantly shift from background to foreground and back, just as fuzzy memories tend to drift in and out of consciousness. Time present and time past collapse in this sustained nervous synapse, like holding one’s breath under water or holding on to the dream-state, not wanting to surface for air and return to reality.

The sound of water says what I think.
Chuang Tzu

When the mind hears (1995), April Hickox, 16 mm, 7 min, B&W.
When the mind hears continues the search for memories of innocence and youth, but with more disconnected observations. This film lets us experience the world as seen from inside an aquarium: claustrophobic. Children run or chase each other seemingly without purpose in a harsh black and white labyrinth of trees, leafs and simmering sounds. A large water surface serves as a sounding board but is unwilling to react to the all the erratic action on land, just as a little girl who explores the world on her own terms. Still images of a swan floating symbolically connect these three spheres (and the medium film with photography). Their stillness contrasts with the otherwise wobbly pattern of this film that was inspired by the difficulties of the filmmaker to communicate with her daughter who is deaf, as well as her own youth experiences growing up different. The stories of mother and daughter connect when the little girl silently stares back at the camera. There is a ripple on the water, a tiny sound wave that expresses their mutual understanding that this is a messy and noisy world and the film can end in silence.

Next to blood relationships,
come water relationships.
Stanley Crawford

Waving (1987), Ann Marie Fleming, 16 mm, 7 min, colour.
This film is the personal story of the relationship of the filmmaker with her grandmother, beautifully narrated with underwater footage that evokes a strong sense of loss and grief. The narrated story connects key moments in the granddaughter’s life when her grandmother acted as her lifeguard up to the moment that she died. This story of grief is metaphorically told with an underwater performance that constantly hovers between swimming and drowning.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.
Edward E. Cummings

Zyklon Portrait (1999), Elida Schogt, 16 mm, 13 min, colour.
This deeply moving film is also an elegy for the filmmaker’s grandparents, be it a story of a different nature. After years of silence the filmmaker has her mother recount memories of her parents and how they died in the Holocaust. This personal quest is effectively interwoven with a scientific discourse about zyklon, the poison used in the gas chambers (evoked with images of old-fashioned showers and pools and found footage from scientific films). Abstract blue water images connect different levels of remembering and forgetting, rising resistance against both. The peaceful images of family days on the beach and the calm voice of the mother gradually steer the film to a peaceful remembering and acceptance, and as this emotional swim through time progresses, a stronger connection between the three generations surfaces, like a lifeline for future generations.

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,
but there is also a third thing, that makes water
and nobody knows what that is.
D.H. Lawrence.

H2O:two parts Heart and one part Obsession.
Author Unknown

Surfacing (2005), Barbara Sternberg, 16 mm, 10 min 30 sec., coulour.
This film is a lifeline of a different kind: it reminds us of the necessity to pause our lives from time to time to take it all in. In the film this is expressed with layers of images of busy comings and going, all scratched so that viewing through the depths is an effort. But when we scratch the surface, glimpses of other states can surface. Therefore, to stay afloat in the ocean of daily impressions, every now and then, one needs to leap like a frog, glide on a bike, laugh like a drain, drown in a kiss or float in a pool. Or simply step into a canoe dressed in red and go tango on the lake.

A man of wisdom delights in water.
Confucius

Adrift (2005), Farheen HaQ, digital video, 4 min 15 sec., colour.
A similar struggle unfolds in this dance video. Red shoes, a red scarf and a red dress are the accessories of a woman who runs from one obstacle to another in a dreary world, only to finally succumb to the appeasing and purifying powers of a ritual bath.

You don't drown by falling in the water,
you drown by staying there.
Edwin Cole

Marshlands (2000), Penny McCann, digital video, 6 min, colour.
A similar search for relief structures this wade in an emotional marshland, blurring the line between a past prediction of the future and a future remembering of the past. The only “ocean” in this film is a Via Rail train rumbling through the marshlands of Sackville, New Brunswick, scattering peaceful images and ideas about a life without disaster the landscape is supposed to evoke. The video noise of the images becomes more and more a kind of video blues and we are told that the marsh is a place of unsettling dreams. When the train leaves the film, the danger seems to have passed and so have the blues. And yet, a final look at the now green marshland, supposedly meant as a sigh of relief, remains a bleak picture without any promise.

A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature.
It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder
measures the depth of his own nature.
Henry David Thoreau

Lake Ontario (in my head) (2006), Penny McCann, 16 mm, 5 min, colour.
The mood of this more abstract film remains dark and gloomy. Grainy super-8 images of lake Ontario and the industrial activity that stains its peaceful appearance are slowed down and reworked to evoke the meditative state one achieves when staring at a large body of water and its horizon. When slowly dark clouds gather, by association the dust and scratches of the super-8 images begin to look more and more like lightning in the sky during a storm. And when the light fades even more, the deep blue images hesitantly run ashore leaving us unsure: was this a moving painting or a painting moving or both?

Watercolor is a swim in the metaphysics of life,
a mirror of one's own character.
Let it be unpredictable and colorful.
Anonymous

Stroke (2009), Ellen Besen, digital video, 4 min 15, colour.
This animated video, which was entirely shot with a small digital photo camera, literally links painting to the theme of water and to lake Ontario. It is an homage to the painter Tom Hodgson, a member of the art collective Painters 11, a key group of artists working in the late 1950’s who created dynamic abstract art. The images chosen are all strokes of some kind – paddle strokes, paint brush strokes, a boat ride and suggestive sensual strokes – all directly inspired by Hodgson’s own life and passions: from his childhood on Toronto Island, to his careers as an Olympic rower and painter, his love of the bohemian high life and his particular painting style and technique. The dynamic editing and the animation techniques used give this video a strong drive and painterly qualities of its own. Ellen Besen paddles her own canoe.

The Waters are Nature's storehouse
in which she locks up her wonders.
Isaac Waltonn

The Importance of Doing Nothing (2010), Pierre Tremblay, 4 min 12, colour.
Also made with a small digital photo camera, this video links the themes of wetlands and water in all its shapes in the different seasons to the art and emotions of music. Selected quotes of ‘The Artist as Critic’ by Oscar Wilde are cut and pasted in a fast collage of nature images. The importance of doing nothing is evoked by brief pauses in the editing and illustrations of how nature itself takes a break every now and then, even if it constantly keeps changing and morphing into new shapes. This photographic painting in motion is a touching musical piece that reflects on nature, art and life in general.

I have left almost to the last the magic of water,
an element which owing to its changefulness of form
and mood and colour and to the vast range of its effects
is ever the principal source of landscape beauty,
and has like music a mysterious influence over the mind.
Sir George Sitwell

Poolsong (2000), Jonathan Inksetter, digital video, 6 min, colour.
Also a musical composition in image and sound, this video is made with images of a swimming pool in a Costa Rican jungle using water as a metaphor for memory. A pipe feeds the pool with water from a well, which through inventive editing (keeping images and sound in sync) becomes a rhythmic water song and water painting: it is an ode to the beauty of water, its purity and its meditative powers and to the joys of swimming.

We swim because we are too sexy
for a sport that requires clothes.
Author Unknown

The Bather (2000), Cameron Esler and David Bateman, digital video, 5 min, colour.
Ending on a cheerful note, this ode to water as a lover and to all lovers of water is a video poem about sensuality, the gaze and private emotions in public pools. Nailing some of the issues we all deal with as swimmers, David Bateman (the writer of and performer of the piece) takes them a step further and freely reflects on his experiences and desires as a gay man. The video combines staged performances in and out of swimming pools with a substantial underwater act that is totally endearing. Despite all the water in this film, the humor is very dry, be it slippery at times.

Water is the principle, or the element, of things.
All things are water.
Placita philosophorum, about A.D. 46

CONCLUSION

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book,
a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger,
but which told its mind to me without reserve,
delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly
as if it uttered them with a voice.
And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside,
for it had a new story to tell every day.
Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain)

When doing the research for this series I came across a new form of art related to water that might point to where the future will lead us. A Japanese scientist called Emoto Masaru has been conducting experiments with water droplets, basically exposing them to different types of emotions with either images or sounds, before they were frozen. He experimented with music and words, as well as with photos and found that the water reacted differently to these impulses by making either beautiful or ugly crystals when frozen. This points to a future where possibly more and more images will emerge produced by water itself expressing its own emotions. This film program was still limited to the more habitual use of water by artists to give expression to their personal anguish and desires, and this by using images of larger volumes of water than singular water molecules. But as can be experienced by watching this program with its various uses of water in all it shapes and forms and by studying the emotional effect this has on the viewer, one can only imagine how powerful future can will be if water and artists truly work together to express not just the psyche of human beings but also the needs and emotions of water itself. In these times when it is more and more obvious that we still haven ’t learned to properly care for the water on our globe and refuse to understand that without water there is simply no life, that future looks rather bleak and I suspect that future aquatic art will be accordingly dark and gloomy. For now, I hope that by presenting the various imaginative uses of water by moving image artists, and the imaginative links they make between water, life and art, that I made a splash. We are all in deep water, and I truly hope for a sea change soon. I know that in the context of massive and continuous water pollution and climate change this film program is only a drop in the ocean, but it is a glorious drop.

SHORT ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Richard Kerr
Richard Kerr is a visual artist-media maker known for his expansive body of work, which has explored a multiplicity of genres and media since the early 1970s. He has created over 30 films and videos that have been screened and collected around the world and range from documentaries to purely abstract video sketches. In the mid nineties Richard Kerr expanded his practice to encompass meta-cinema installation work and most notably his conceptualization of the Motion Picture Weaving Light Box. He has also written on the notion of the Digital Sketch and Visual Processes (Electronic Small Press Publishing, 2009). Kerr is professor in film at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal and teaches occasionally at the Escuela International de Cine y TV in Cuba.

April Hickox
April Hickox is a lens-based artist, teacher and independent curator who lives on Toronto Island. She is a founding member of Gallery 44 Center for Contemporary Photography, and a founding member of Tenth Muse Photography Studio, and Artscape – a Toronto based organization for the development of creative spaces for artists. She has been actively producing art work for over 35 years which includes photography, film, video and installation. Her work is based in narratives about life’s passages as we move from one experience to the next creating personal history and memory. She is currently associate professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.

Ann Marie Fleming
Ann Marie Fleming is an award-winning Canadian independent filmmaker, writer and artist, born in Okinawa, of Chinese and Australian parentage. Her film work incorporates various techniques: animation, documentary, experimental, dramatic, and primarily deals with themes of family, history and memory, in a continuing media critique. Besides her continuous active career as an independent artist and critic, she is currently working on an adaptation of a illustrated memoir by Bernice Eisenstein, "I Was A Child of Holocaust Survivors", with the Toronto and Montreal offices of the NFB, is working on a dramatic script of the life and loves of her great grandfather, "Shanghai Follies", and "Window Horses" a feature-length animated father-daughter story that involves poetry and immigrants (what else?) and takes place in Shiraz, Iran. Anne Marie Fleming is also doing a segment for the CBC's "Definitely Not the Opera's" website, interpreting a segment of the life and times of Sook-Yin Lee.

Elida Schoght
Elida Schogt is a film and installation artist who uses conceptual premises, formally experimental techniques and poetic visual language to create work that explores the themes of memory and history. She uses scientific or historical inquiry as a tool for seeking truth and, ultimately relies on metaphor to distill complex human processes into clear and coherent forms. Her deeply personal trilogy of short documentaries on Holocaust memory, Zyklon Portrait (1999), The Walnut Tree (2000) and Silent Song (2001) have been screened around the globe, garnering numerous awards - most notably The Grand Prize at the Bilbao International Festival of Documentary & Short Film and Special Mention for Best Independent Canadian Film at Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival. Schoght has an MA in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research in New York and teaches at the Ontario College for Art and Design in Toronto.

Barbara Sternberg
Toronto filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid-seventies. Her work has been screened widely across Canada as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Workshop in New York, and the Ontario Cinematheque, Toronto. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. Sternberg has been active in a number of fronts in Toronto, teaching at York University, working for Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre, serving on Toronto and Ontario Arts Council juries and committees, helping to organize the International Experimental Film Congress (May 1989), and was a founding member of Pleasure Dome, artists' film and video exhibition group. While living in the Maritimes, Sternberg co-founded Struts, an artist-run centre in Sackville, New Brunswick. She also wrote a handbook on Media Literacy for high school teachers with Ellen Besen (see further). Although her main practice is film, Sternberg has worked in other media including performance and installation.

Farheen HaQ
Farheen HaQ was born and raised in the Niagara Region in Southern Ontario and now calls Victoria, British Columbia home. Farheen works with video, performance and photo exploring cultural inscriptions of the body, gender, ritual and gesture. Her art investigates the body as a site of struggle and performance as a way to activate space, exposing the many layers of codes women’s bodies are wrapped up in. She creates videos where she choreographs her own rituals and imagines new spaces of congregation. HaQ has a Masters of Fine Art from York University. She has exhibited internationally, including New York, Los Angeles, Toronto and Vancouver.

Penny McCann
McCann’s career as a media artist spans twenty years and encompasses both dramatic and experimental films and videos. Her work is an ongoing investigation into hybrid forms of expression, mixing film and video imagery to create shifts in subjectivity, memory, and perspective. Her films and videos have been exhibited at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. As a long-time activist/worker in the Canadian media and visual arts community, she served as president of the Independent Film and Video Alliance from 1996-1999. Since 2004, she is the Director of SAW Video, a media arts centre located in Ottawa, Ontario. In 2007, she was awarded the Victor Tolgesy Award for achievement in the arts.

Ellen Besen
A former faculty member of Sheridan College’s School of Animation (1987-2002), Ellen Besen has been working in animation for over 35 years. Highlights of her career include directing award-winning films for the NFB and broadcast work for CBC Radio. Her films have been shown at international festivals and at such institutions as MOMA, and her film analysis workshops are featured at such festivals as the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF). A specialist in animation storytelling, Besen has written popular series for Animation World Network (AWN) and has served as creative director of The Kalamazoo Animation Festival International. Recent projects include her new film, Stroke, created as a contribution to the animated-art project, XI in Motion (2009), and Animation Unleashed, a book of applied theory for animation filmmaking (2008).

Pierre Tremblay
Pierre Tremblay is a Canadian-born multimedia artist who worked more than twelve years in France doing commercial work for Baynard Presse as an art director. Several of his CD-ROMs won awards and his artistic work can be found in the collections of the Musée Carnavalet, Bibliotèque Nationale and the Musée Rodin. Since his return to Canada, Tremblay continued exploring new combinations of new media technologies with photography and his video and installation work has been exhibited internationally. He has taught at the Parsons School of Design in Paris and is currently Associate Professor at the School of Image Arts of Ryerson University in Toronto.

Jonathan Inksetter
Jonathan Inksetter works in video, sound, installation, performance and literature. His video work was screened at festivals in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Brussels, Belgium and San Francisco. Inksetter’s body of work was praised for expanding and subverting the predominant clichés that have defined and limited the scope of music videos as a genre. He worked as an interdisciplinary artist on over twenty-five dance and new performance projects in Montreal, England, and Belgium. He remains active as installation and projection artist, composer, scenographer, performer, choreographer and videographer as he currently works and lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

Cameron Esler and David Bateman
Cameron Esler is an independent filmmaker, writer and theatre artist. His films (many cine-poems) have been screened at various festivals around the world and his theatre work has been seen throughout Canada. Cameron had his own play Bouncing Ball produced while his poems were published in a number of Canadian journals. He also works as director of photography and editor on television shows and documentaries. David Bateman (writer of The Bather) specialized in creative writing at the University of Calgary. He currently works as a poet and performance artist in Toronto. His most recent performances, A Brief History of White Virgins or The Night Freddy Kissed Me, and What’s It Like? were presented in Vancouver, Peterborough, Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto during the winter of 2009. Bateman teaches drama, literature, and creative writing at a variety of Canadian post-secondary institutions.