"Dead Time" – Steve Sanguedolce’s Avant Garde Embodied Documentary
Kali Paakspuu
“I started making films when I was thirteen. My family is Italian and at that age I was still a practicing Catholic. We went through what is called confirmation. For young teenagers, it’s kind of a rite to manhood for Italians, so my uncle and aunt bought us this super 8 camera. I’m a twin. Two boys. We got a super 8 camera, a screen and a super 8 projecter. This is the precursor to digital video and high 8 cameras. I remember my uncle saying something like, “When you look through this camera, point it at your subject, move it very, very slowly. I consider myself as a recovering Catholic. It’s kind of rebellious. When I was recovering from all that, I figured that I would change speeds and move the camera a little more quickly (Sanguedolce, 2007).”
In “Dead Time” (2005) Sanguedolce transposes his diary form to tell the stories of two sister survivors of a urban youth drug culture Holocaust. The film embodies their real live voices in conversation with an “other” – in effect their confessions - in dramatic re-enactments and a documentary grounded horror of marginalization by addiction. The lived narratives of character informants include “husbands” Mark and Reg (husbands only in the film’s construction), also in confession, whose narratives of pain or relief underscore jail cell experiences, crimes committed and other moments of making it or losing it all. As stated in the film’s opening credits - “interpretations by the actors” – an improvisational form to this film’s documentary is asserted from the beginning. Dead time, appropriated as the film’s title, refers to the time a person spends in jail when they don’t get bail and can be drawn out by days to years. A psychic interface of body inside and out through an abject coupling of drug euphoria and autotopographical meditation is marked. Carnivalesque, in Jackson Pollock splashes of hand coloured frames, Sanguedolce’s Toronto neighbourhoods call to question normativity through the voices of the disenfranchised and marginalized.
After “Smack” (2000), a film which like “Dead Time” was shot and processed in his basement, diarist Steve Sanguedolce, yields to the bizarre pressure and demand to open his studio for “confessionals”. “In “Dead Time” the four subjects were people I knew and they basically came into my studio and just told me their life stories. In some cases they asked me to do it. They figured a recovering Catholic, a kind of confession in the studio of all their sins. In some cases, I just asked them…people I knew. I never asked them questions. I just asked them to tell me about this. Tell me about that. In some cases I didn’t have to say a single word, just nod for three hours while they divulged their deepest darkest secrets.
I feel this strange responsibility to shape what they say in a way that does justice to the story. That doesn’t glorify them and doesn’t vilify them. It’s really easy to do two things to characters. It’s really easy to portray a really bad person and it’s really easy to portray a really good person. Those kinds of dichotomies I don’t think exist in our worlds. All saints have dark sides….or the people with villainesque attributes have good qualities, as well (Sanguedolce, 2007).”
In “Smack” three brothers, Antonio, Sybil and Zed explore the forbidden from religion to heroin overdose. This film inspired a new cycle of storytellers to Sanguedolce’s live mike and tape recorder with unbearably painful stories of dysfunction, addiction and criminality. Sanguedolce relieves their pain and sorrow by transforming their stories and emotions into a release and a cinematic flow – a therapy, if you will - that raises the everyday routines into a critical language beyond the film’s construction. Twenty years after Sheridan College’s immersion in the experimental effects of optical printing, Sanguedolce records these journeys into a liminal poetics of hand coloured dramatic encounters. The conversion experience counters a status quo effect of fixed, static identity and death – and the dehumanizing effects of addiction. The inescapable cycle of sameness in these narratives - their quasi-essentialism - are the pathways in a world interpellated with unspeakable traumas that fit like puzzle pieces in a Sanguedolce diary treatment of life on the “other” side. Here a living daylight hell of limited options is palpably felt in a human form where beauty and disgust attract and repel in the interstices of liminality.
The opening credits in “Dead Time” (2005) tell us: “The events you will hear are true and are told by the people who lived them.” The filmmaker, not a proponent of the reality television genre, offers a counter position – a narrative trajectory that emerges from authentic survivor stories of identity, memory and naming. Fluctuating electronic tones and strobes of kaleidoscopic colour pulse over scratched film surfaces
- green, yellow and red intercut with sepia toned black and white in trancelike back seat car rides. “Dead Time” erupts into delusional fantasy propelled by the atonal music score which beckons like a call and answer to the visuals and the voices. At times the stark juxtaposition of the unspoken and the throbbing emotion flow beauteously into a careening merry-go-round ride only to rupture into the memory horror of incest in a broad daylight neighbourhood.
“Dead Time” is heavily based on spoken words, but the filmmaker will not allow these words nor the rhythmic and pulsating score to dominate. The scopic lens frames, composes and candidly articulates incest, murder, rape, theft, incarceration and death – their living memory felt more palpably in the shadows and in breaking rhythms and breaths of each speaker. Sanguedolce describes his stylistic aesthetic: “The images aren’t literal, they’re quite abstracted, but they speak of what’s inside. If I take your portrait, it’s probably as much a portrait of me as it is of you. It’s an interpretation. I could make an abstract representation of your face in which no one would recognize a human form. I think that’s what the landscape work is doing: it’s taking the outside and moving it through the veins (Hoolboom, 2001, 123)”.
In a Canadian tradition of reenactment and interview based documentary that includes the National Film Board productions, Michel Brault’s ‘Les Ordres” (1974) and Janis Lundman and Adrienne Mitchell’s “Talk 16” (1991), Sanguedolce’s reinvention of the form goes a step further. Over a four year stretch Sanguedolce collected stories that found a resonance with each other and fitted together like a puzzle. Whereas his predecessors used the interviews for research into a dramatic shape, he takes their authentic voices with the intonations and pauses directly into the dramatic and musical core of the experience. The confessions cut like conversations between the characters whose own journeys cross and cross reference.
Mark (black ocean)
And the waves are black and they’re huge and I’m swimming through the ocean. And I’m trapped out there and there’s nothing out there. And every once in a while there’s a life buoy just when I’m drowning. I grab that life buoy and it saves my life for another year, another two years. And I did that all my life. I wasn’t afraid to grab on and clean up my act. And if I didn’t do that, I’d be dead five times over. It wasn’t all at once. It was a war of attrition and drugs are a very powerful adversary.
Wendy (things got ugly)
That’s when things kind of got ugly. They got worse before they got better with him. I used to think I was gonna die. It’s really strange, I used to do, you know do a really big hit and I’d sit there with tears coming down my eyes. I wasn’t a happy junkie, that’s for sure.
Mark (self-destructive)
It seemed like I had lost any respect for the world in which I lived in, because I had no fear. I had no sense of, of being careful. I had no limits. I had no, no voice in the back of my head saying “Don’t do that you might not wake up. Don’t do that you might die.”
Wendy (tomorrow)
And he used to always say, “Jesus Christ, I’m gonna stop this shit. All the time there was always tomorrow. Tomorrow that you were gonna stop. But tomorrow never came.
(Sanguedolce, 2005)
Sanguedolce’s reconstructivist aesthetic tracks similar relations of power and powerlessness in a lively intertextuality that makes Wendy and Mark actually sound like a married couple. The performers are framed together in various scenes domestic and on the move and are made a married couple in the film - though unmarried to each other in their real lives. The dialogue text makes a powerful reference to the O. J. Simpson trial and to its public media negotiation of sexism. In giving voice to these individuals he creates powerful stories that are more potent by the fact that they are not acted or written. Like Errol Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line” (1988) the film’s open text becomes a public stage where viewers take a position and then revisit their earlier preconceptions on who is more credible in the accounts of domestic violence. Like a noir thriller, with few exceptions, traumatic circumstances act on the characters until they take a step towards recovery or rehabilitation. The confessions are each a step towards a personal agency that we vicariously experience with the subjects.
“Besides the fact the people gave me their stories…. I felt (like) this incredible conflict how to present them. He says he didn’t hit his wife. He said he didn’t have a gun. Wendy says that her husband did hit her and that he did have a gun. To resolve that scene I should say some fiction thing. This last sentence is unclear. Everyone tells their own story but Mark and Wendy the couple who were married off at the top, they have never met in life. So when Wendy is talking, she is talking about her first husband who was like her a teenage alcoholic, junkie, pregnant and married with a kid and divorced by the time they were twenty-five. Mark who never met Wendy, Mark, who I went to high school with was a young man, an alcoholic, an opiate junkie, not needles just pills. Got married as a teenager and had a kid and was divorced by the time he was twenty-five. Even though they haven’t met I haven’t changed one thing in their story. In my film they could easily be a married couple. I found throughout my years of collecting interviews that if I took any eight people there were weird striking similarities. We’ve all fallen. We’ve all picked ourselves up. Some maybe more than others. So Wendy and Mark as much as they never met are the perfect couple. They both talk about their ex-husband and ex-wives in the same way. In fact, they could be each other’s ex-partner. The problem came when Reg does say he never struck his wife at the time and he never had a gun. The judge even let him walk. He got thrown out of jail. Wendy does say she does strike him. It’s a tough dilemma. Whose story to follow and who to give credence to. So I kind of let it be. Let the audience decide whether he is guilty or not. You know the judge acquits him. I think he threw it out of court which is better. O.J. got acquitted. So the idea was when people entrust me with their stories I’m going to try and tell something that has some meaning and might have some resonance to other people and isn’t going to present them as a two dimensional evil or good archetype. You’re God. You’re the devil (Sanguedolce, 2007).”
This postmodern nonfiction film thus figures into a long critical tradition of civic dialogue and critique of democracy, but remains an open text and blurs taken-for-granted dichotomies. The human qualities of the characters, their honesty and single minded purpose, make viewers re-assess and re-negotiate their understandings and beliefs about the drug subculture and also the devastating effects of depression. Sanguedolce, who also edited this feature and created the sound design, aligns each candid moment to bring about a re-interpretation of the film’s earlier performances, and in effect, our pre-conceptions of reality.
“After having made “Smack”, the Mark character from “Dead Time”, that I went to high school with, came up to me after the screening. We were talking. He said, “I’ve got some stories I’d like to tell you.” On tape ? On a microphone? Yah, I’d like, too.” I like to tell you a story. I had no idea what was coming. I didn’t know that he was sexually abused as a teenager. I went to high school with the guy. He was best friends with my twin brother so we were really close. I didn’t know he was drinking a twenty sixer of scotch every day. I didn’t know he had a bottle of wine for every day of school. It was the seventies….He wanted to tell me this story. He felt this great trust. In that somehow I could turn it into something good (Sanguedolce, 2007).”
Sanguedolce’ s early obsession with home movies led him to be the documentarian of the family. At Sheridan College he was immersed in a personal documentary ethos through the “Escarpment School” which included Jeffrey Paull, Phil Hoffman, Carl Brown, Mike Hoolboom, Gary Popovich and Rick Hancox. He became a voyeur with a camera and a participant in the action in “Rhythms of the Heart” (1990) which features a break up with his girlfriend. He describes the process as “First we shot ourselves working together, then we started shooting everything – drinking, fucking, sleeping, crying, laughing – everything that lovers do….We both held the camera, both equally vulnerable” (Hoolboom, 2001, 123). Like the collaboration of Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak in their artist video, “In the Dark” (1983), a performance questioning the conventional morality of sex as private, hidden away and censored, Sanguedolce chronicles relationships in a search for personal and social morality, blending autobiography with the paradoxical and the ironic. His later collaboration with Mike Hoolboom produced Mexico (35 min. 1992) which started out being a film about love and ended up being about how a traveler as narrator is unable to see anything but where he’s come from. Home is packed into the suitcase with the underwear and shaver.
His recent innovations with form are antagonistic to mainstream direct cinema, as in Michael Moore’s leftist documentaries that address the public from worldwide cinema screens and television broadcasts and which dogmatize a style of activism. In Sanguedolce’s cinematic flow we lose sight of the film’s construction in a conversion experience that counters a status quo of fixed, static identity and death. The inescapable cycle of sameness that he discovers in these narratives is not quite essentialist as each character’s pathway is interpellated with unspeakable traumas differently.
Julie (every day a different person/integrity)
Every day you wake up and you are a different person. And the only thing that keeps you a singular person is your integrity. Your commitment to doing what you said you were going to do the day before. And other than that there is no continuity. There is no singular you.
(Sanguedolce, 2005)
Drug abuse and criminality interpellate them in limited roles and as viewers we get caught up in their efforts to dislodge themselves them from a living hell where they are disempowered.
Mark (crawling back to clinic)
Finally after avoiding the clinic for two weeks I crawled back in there. I was crying. I said, Doctor I have tried to kick this habit for 15 years. Almost as soon as it started I tried to stop it and I’ve never been successful. And then he uttered those famous words, he said, Well maybe a course of methadone would be beneficial in your case Mark. And I just looked up at him and I said, Yes. I didn’t have to think about it. This guy said to me once at a meeting, he said, You know what happens when an addict dies? Everybody feels really bad about it for a little while and then he says, You become just another person that didn’t quite cut it. And that always stuck with me. It made me angry. I wanted to live. I wanna live and I wanna live for at least the next 24 hours and then I’ll think about killing myself. And that kept me alive.
(Sanguedolce, 2005)
The characters in “Dead Time” flush their words with pleasures and pain. As Julia Kristeva has stated: “Naming the latter, hence differentiating them amounts to introducing language, which just as it distinguishes pleasure from pain….founds the separation inside/outside. (Kristeva, ) In “Dead Time” the representation of the body becomes a material abjection and a phantasmagoric colour embodiment of physical and psychic distress. The power of this abjection is in its ambiguity; what it repels is also what attracts very strongly. “Dead Time” in its technological gaze exudes the horribly fascinating places of choices made and not made.
Julie (American Beauty)
It’s like that movie American Beauty where he described a dead bird and how beautiful it was. Sometimes you can take the most heart wrenching, dismal situation and perceive it as part of a process of evolution, of resurrection through death or despair or leaving something behind. Like a woman who’s involved in a violent domestic situation who goes through it and comes out and declares, This is not what I want. We can just sit there and think, Holy Fuck, look what she’s been through. Or you can see that the person’s becoming self aware and declaring oneself.
(Sanguedolce, 2005)
The apparatus of addiction with its regulatory system and interstitial sites of psychic and performative embodiment become in “Dead Time” a public cinematic stage as a first step to envision other possibilities. As a bold and unforgiving critique of the marginalization of persons with addiction, Sanguedolce makes us question the basic conditions and needs of human life and entitlement. In giving authentic voice to his subjects he has thus produced a powerful underground antidote and critical intervention to the horror of the Holocaust that consumes our youth today.
Steve: “What I would really like to do is to make a film that would cure hang-overs. A useful film. A film you would want to put in your toolbox. A film you could eat if you had to. I’m interested in the notion of a medicine, of a kind of cinema that could be used to heal ailments (Hoolboom, 2001, 126).”
Bibliography
Chedgzoy, Kate, “Frida Kahlo’s “Grotesque Bodies”, in Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, “Feminisms”, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hoolboom, Mike, “Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada”, Toronto, Coach House Books, 2001.
Kristeva, Julia, “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection”, tr. Leon S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 61.
Sanguedolce, Steve, “Artist’s Talk”, York University, October 24, 2007.
Sanguedolce, Steve, “Dead Time”, 2005.