Sanguedolce’s Dead Time – Immunity System as Embodied Documentary

by Kalli Paakspuu

 Dec. 30, 2008

“What I would really like to do is to make a film that would cure hang-overs….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

                                                            Steve Sanguedolce (quoted in Hoolboom, 126).

            Dead Time makes a hard hitting anti-drug message from the heart of Toronto with a radical conception of human connection at its core.  Steve Sanguedolce’s Dead Time conjoins avant garde film practice in a Canadian artisan tradition to a penetrating lense on urban drug subculture.  Acquaintances, hairdressers, addicts-in-recovery sought out cinema priest Sanguedolce with candid, no holds barred confessions.  Articulate confessions recorded in a makeshift booth in Sanguedolce’s studio are edited and reorganized into compelling dialogues and back stories for actor reenactments performed to a kaleidescope of scratched, hand-processed tinted film and atonal music.  Sanguedolce collapses the “us” and “them” using an immunity perspective which regulates itself (Jerne 1985) and a “semiotic excess” (Fiske 1989) of naming in a critique of the dehumanization of addiction.     

            The titular, Dead Time, refers to the jail time custody before trial - anywhere from days to years.  Jail life and “making it” or “losing it” become transitional zones in a filmic hypertext where trans-human bodies merge.  Marriage partners become interchangeable cyborgian monsters that break down private and public space with mirrored responses (Haraway, p. 218).  The poetic revelations of eight year heroin addict Wendy (Anna Myszkowski) and her sister and model Julie (Amber Patterson), who discovered Bennies, amphetamines, speed and fat prevention, collide with confessions by Mark (Tim Bolen) and Reg (Chris Welsh), whose malevolent laugh transports him into violence.  The dissolve of body inside and outside enacted in sun drenched residential neighbourhoods, hospital beds, jail cells and dark basement corners has an immunity effect where the body is not clearly organic against an exterior not-self (Haraway).  The stark juxtaposition of unspoken and throbbing emotion, drug euphoria and autotopographical meditation question standards of normativity    

            After Smack (2000) which, like Dead Time, was filmed and processed in Sanguedolce’s basement, the director gave in to the bizarre demand to open his studio for “confessionals”:. As Sanguedolce recalls:

            In Dead Time the four subjects were people I knew and they basically came into my studio and just told me their life stories…. I never asked them questions.  I just asked them to tell me about this…. In some cases I didn’t have to say a single word, just nod for three hours divulging their deepest darkest secrets.                                                                                                                                                               (Sanguedolce)

The inescapable sameness in these narratives and their interchangeabilty are pathways of unspeakable traumas that fit together like a puzzle.  Here the “other” side is a sun baked hell of limited options where beauty and disgust coexist, attract and repel like a bad drug.

            In a Canadian documentary tradition of reenactment that includes National Film Board productions such as Les Ordres (Brault, 1974) and Talk 16 (Lundman and Mitchell, 1991), Sanguedolce’s Dead Time takes documentary beyond research for a drama: he incorporates the original confessional voices, their intonations, stutters and pauses into the dramatic and musical core of a cinematic experience.  Monologues collected over four years are transformed into conversations between characters unknown to each other; yet their journeys cross and cross-reference one another.

            The film’s head credits state: “The events you will hear are true and told by the people who lived them” and “interpretively presented as the characters Mark, Wendy, Julie and Reg.”  After a series of staccato guitar plucks the first monologue is spoken over shimmering black and white images of water  - hand processed to a cobalt blue which alternates with a copper red.

            Mark

            ….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….I wasn’t          afraid to grab on and clean up my act…. It was a war of attrition and drugs are a very powerful adversary.

Portrait stills introduce Mark and Wendy and are followed by a sequence where the couple staggers on the curbside, hailing a ride.  In the back seat of the sedan the couple nod off in a drugged slump and Wendy’s monotone voice relates the back story.       

            Wendy

            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

                                                                                                            (Dead Time)

          Wendy and Mark become a “married couple” framed in mise-en-scenes of domesticity or on the move.  Powerful stories become more expansive and potent by the fact they are neither acted (as in the voice over), nor written.  In the film’s story universe intertextuality acknowledges the presence of other marriage partners and life traumas through comparisons and differences that negotiate other meanings.     [JvE2]

            Sanguedolce found that throughout years of collecting interviews any eight people would have weird and striking similarities: “Everyone tells their own story but Mark and Wendy the couple who were married off at the top, they have never met in life.” (Sanguedolce).  Dead Time is heavily voice-based, but the filmmaker does not allow the words or the rhythmic pulsating score to dominate the film.  A scopic lens frames, composes and candidly witnesses incest, murder, rape, theft, incarceration and death reiterated in the breaking rhythms of breaths between words.   Referring to a stylistic evolved through earlier films, Sanguedolce describes his symbolism: “The images aren’t literal, they’re quite abstracted, but they speak of what’s inside[…], I think that’s what the landscape work is doing: it’s taking the outside and moving it through the veins (qtd. in Hoolboom 123). 

       The characters’ actions invite viewers to reassess and renegotiate their own understandings about drug culture.  As with Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988) a film’s open text becomes a public stage on violence where viewers take a position and then revisit their earlier perceptions. Sanguedolce, who was also the sound designer and co-editor (with Jeffrey Paull) for Dead Time, aligns a critical civic dialogue where dichotomies blur and the audience must re-interpret.

            An obsession with home movies led Sanguedolce to be the family documentarian.  Twenty years ago at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, he immersed into the personal documentary ethos and optical printing of the “Escarpment School” that included Jeffrey Paull, Phil Hoffman, Carl Brown, Mike Hoolboom, Gary Popovich and Ric Hancox  “Rhythms of the Heart” (1990) followed the break up with his girlfriend and was described by Sanguedolce in an interview by Mike Hoolboom: “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” (qtd. in Hoolboom 123).  Like Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak in their artist video, “In the Dark” (1983), the filmed performance questions the conventional morality of sex as an act that is private, and that should be hidden away and censored.  Blending autobiography with the paradoxical, a later collaboration with Mike Hoolboom produced “Mexico” (Sanguedolce and Hoolboom, 1992) which started out as a film about love, but ended up addressing a traveller’s inability to see anything but where he’s from because home is packed in the suitcase with the underwear and shaver. 

            Characters become post-human bodies where social and ethical boundaries are monitored.  Mark’s doctor sends him to the psychiatrist for treatment for substance abuse and the psychiatrist tells him that his real problem is depression.  Later, his marriage failed, he phones his dad from a foreign country after bouts of drinking and drugging.  Dad’s words “Come home!” are synched to the spoken words and are a moment when silent film illusorily becomes talkie.  Over scenes of Mark pacing in the cuckoo nest hospital Julie’s voice describes a parallel desperation:  “Every day you wake up and you are a different person…the only thing that keeps you a singular person is your integrity.” (Dead Time).  The character narratives overlap and converge as human palimpsests and their disengagements function as immunity perspectives accepting “others”, or outright rejecting them.

            In Dead Time the characters flush their words with pleasures and pain introducing language that founds a separation between inside/outside (Kristeva 61). The body is represented as a material abjection of psychic distress, wherein what repels also attracts very strongly.  The technological gaze of Dead Time exudes horribly fascinating places of choices made and foregone: the camera’s views, the trans-human marriages and the atonal ubiquities are washed by a phantasmagoria of the painter’s palette where character self-affirmations become sites of euphoria.            

            Julie

            ….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.                                                                                                                          (Dead Time)

          Sanguedolce’s Dead Time makes us question the basic conditions and needs of human entitlement.  Like a call and answer in surround-sound electronica - pulsating green, yellow and red  - Dead Time intensifies the horror of addiction.  As a mesmerizing underground antidote, it is made more powerful through its immunity discourse as critical intervention.  Sanguedolce obliges us to identify as citizens of that other place of punitive or sentimental fantasy; if only to recognize that the Cyborgian monster is a dissolution of its separation from ourselves.   

Bibliography

Dead Time.  Writ., dir, and prod. Steve Sanguedolce. DVD. Sweetblood Productions,

2005.

Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

Golub, 1987;

Jerne, 1985

Haraway, Donna. “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in

Immune System Discourse.”  Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Ed. Janet

Price and Margrit Shildrick.  New York: Taylor and Francis 1999. 204.

Hoolboom, Mike.  Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada. Toronto: Coach

House Books, 2001.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak in their artist video, “In the Dark” (1983)

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

 Mike Hoolboom produced “Mexico” (Sanguedolce and Hoolboom, 1992)

“Rhythms of the Heart” (1990) 

Sanguedolce, Steve. Artist’s Talk at York University. 24 October, 2007. 

Sontag, Susan, “”Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”: New York: Doubleday, 1988

Smack 2000

Terauds, John. “The best kind of filmed downer.” Toronto Star 5 March, 2005: G9.

Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988)

Les Ordres (Brault, 1974)

Talk 16 (Lundman and Mitchell, 1991)