(Introduction to Steve Sanguedolce’s Blinding at Innis College, Toronto. January 21, 2012)
When you’ve only experienced someone in close-up, how can you talk about them in a wide shot? What does the private language of friendship sound like in a crowd? Too late, too little or too much? Eulogy or show business?
I didn’t meet Steve Sanguedolce at Sheridan College, though we both cast a shadow across those hallways, he was a year or two ahead of my cohort that included a schoolyard boy no one got along with - except for Steve of course - and it was through this unwanted misfit that we met. I think Steve has a feeling for the ones that don’t belong, the awkward outsider, as if he were the one (and not his parents) who had made the trek from the sheep grazing farmlands of Sicily so that he could raise cute loveable animals in an Eglinton Avenue apartment that would be slaughtered one after another. What’s for dinner ma? Mario the pig’s for dinner, and nobody leaves the table until it’s all down the hatch.
I met him shortly after his kind of, sort of, almost, conversion experience. He was always hopped up on the tech side of things, he had the kind of hands that could pick up a dirt-filled, left behind machine and bring it back to life. Let me mess with that. But after a pair of slick, nearly commercial shorts in a program that used to emphasize what Apple would have branded I-cinema, he made a dramatic turn, and started using his camera the way an artist might lift a pencil to find the way shadow falls across a face. But there was a cost to crossing over, of leaving the old and nearly innocent dreams behind. They don’t tell you about the cost, the terrible toll it takes, sometimes, in becoming an artist. It can be a wound that never heals, like a bird that comes to visit you every day to eat your liver, and slowly, and this is the other thing they don’t tell you, slowly you learn to look it in the eye and say thank you.
The wound, the conversion, the opening. Perhaps it’s true what they say, that the wound is the path.
In 1983 he made a feature length almost collaboration about mental illness, shot in a brooding high contrast black and white that punctuated psychiatric survivor interviews with extended lyric interludes. He had started making documentaries, because the people around him, the stories around us, were stranger and more beautiful than anything fiction could ever conjure. Here’s the crude sketch, a life’s work as sound bite: there were three experimentalist home movies made in the 1980s and early 90s, followed by another three films made in the last decade that each started by reworking the Catholic confessional as a place of testimony. In place of a priest, a microphone. Take, eat, this is my movie.
To go back and colour in some of the lines. In 1985 he returned to his roots to make Woodbridge where his expressionist camera stylings took aim at the containers of church and family. We made a film called Mexico together and then I moved into his apartment where we were more or less living together anyways because it took so long to cut. Rhythms of the Heart (1990) was made while taking his camera out for a walk, now to Niagara Falls, or towards a lonely sax player, or a couple making food. He found his centre late in its making, in a brief flare of a romance that was recast for the camera. In the cinema, you only live, you only love, twice. Sweetblood (1993) reworks the idea of the family photo album, it’s made almost entirely out of still photographs and printed poetic overtitles. Away was his first venture into fiction, set in the off-stage rooms of Apocalypse Now. Smack and Dead Time, his two long films from the past decade, are hand coloured docs fuelled by interviews with people suffering from addiction.
Unlike the digital bingers of today, the ones cramming for deadlines, or chugging out six or seven little digital droppings at a time, Steve works on his movies day after day. It’s an art that takes time, hard to imagine now, when we seem to have run out of time.
He is someone dedicated, in his language, in his speaking practice, to a restless flow and excited circulation, forever pushing the word accelerator until the censor overloads and the sentences arrive as surprise and invention. The movies are by contrast a slow motion slog. They are slowness, a necessary time machine perhaps, a place before and after language, a frame where hundreds of hours are spent in contemplation and material reworking. How long does it take to look at what can’t be looked at, to tell the story that can’t be told?
My friend Tomas saw the movie we’re going to see tonight in Jihlava, the east European capital of documentary movies. He wrote me, “Such a fragile inside view into the deep, hot heart of a life and nobody is interested? I still have some visuals from his film in my head, probably forever. And these personal stories, the sound and colours and everything together creates a great semantic gesture, as the structuralists say. And the author himself, so strange that completely extrovert person can create so introverted and imaginative movie. Yes, I would never thought he can make this film, but it makes it more interesting.”
But why don’t we let him speak for himself? Friend, collaborator, teacher, student, father, artist, banjo player, hockey goalie, sweet blooded porkpie hat machine, talking book Steve Sanguedolce.
Steve Sanguedolce: Documentary Paintbrush
Three decades later he’s still at work in the man cave, lowering himself into every frame, getting lost in what he dare not even name as hope, and then finding the thread that will lead him to the movie that is already busy making itself. Every four or five years he releases another personal documentary, all shot with the same 16mm on-the-shoulder camera that were standard issue for news cameras news crews in the 60s, (modified from cine verité dad Pennebaker’s home-made adjustments). His work offers up survival testaments that speak of addiction, family and mental illness, often digging deep into the roots of impossible feelings and threshold experiences in order to ground them again in the experience of a singular body of light.
Blinding 72 min. 16mm/HDCAM SR, hand coloured, 5.1 surround, 2011
Blinding is the latest Sanguedolce opus, an epic turn into the act of seeing itself. He began by interviewing three unusuals: a blind man, a dyke cop, and a military pilot. Each account strips away layers of assumption and cliché – the shadow we cast on experiences before they occur – as layers of complication and contradiction swirl around these figments of a self. The peacekeeper who finds himself in the middle of a war. The lesbian who has to reach across sometimes homophobic superiors in order to find her way. The blind man who will never see his wife. In place of the usual illustrative accompaniments, the artist has dug into his own back catalog, and dished up an anthology of moments from his seeing, along with that of friends and familiars. All these have been hand-processed and coloured, granting the surface a seething, flickering material life, all set in a shimmering psychedelic haze. As usual, it is up to the viewer to piece together the trio’s insights and calamities, as the associative collage dreams by, filled with lovers past and future.