The Psychotechnology of Everyday Life

Mike Hoolboom Millennium Film Journal 1990

The relationship between bodies and desire is among the oldest subjects in the cinema, underpinning its movement from music hall curiosity to causal narrative assembly. With the invention of 16mm film stock, film took another kind of turn. Though primarily intended for military use, it allowed an avant-garde of a different sort to flourish, as well as a burgeoning interest in "home movies.” Decades of these home-made movies have passed and were they to be joined end to end, they could easily circumnavigate the globe a dozen times or more, providing in their orbit a hitherto secret and alternative history of the movies. As sprocket hole and emulsion give way to the scanning raster of the video monitor, long coils of iron oxide lend their electronic designs to the untutored expressions of home. That domestic retreat is filled with a panoptic doubling whose memorial gestures convert what was present into history. These long running insignias of the subjective have also found their place in the hands of artists whose domestic recollections shed new light on identity, memory, and naming. The homing instinct of the fringe has never been more acute than today when a new generation has emerged to shape a transgressively personal work, exposing a hitherto private experience to the unblinking stare of its shrinking public. This emphasis on personal expression has marked the project of filmmaker Steve Sanguedolce, whose work continues to forge new links between movies and home.

Sanguedolce learned his craft in Oakville's Sheridan College, primal scene of the Escarpment School, and immediately showed a propensity for short commercial work, producing films on boxing and an anti-drinking/driving commercial. Two years after college, his collision with fellow Escarpment School eye jock Carl Brown proved instrumental in developing new eyes for motion pictures. For two years they laboured on Full Moon Darkness (90 min b/w 1984), a gothic, feature-length documentary that examined mental illness. Episodically photographed, Full Moon's blend of interviews and expressionistic interludes focused on Toronto's self-help group "On Our Own,” a collective of ex-psychiatric patients. Working in long, ten-minute takes, Sanguedolce developed a performative camera style that privileged a radically emotive subjectivity. Blending a rigorous technical inclination with a free flowing meat dance of muscles, nerves, and camera, Sanguedolce's work in Full Moon underlines the dialectic that informs the bulk of his films. Implicated in the act of representation, Sanguedolce and his camera create a double subject, one in front of the camera, the other behind it. On the one hand lies a personal necessity and on the other, a historical consciousness; on the one hand, a Romantic imagination and on the other the passing forms of everyday life. The ordering of these forms is figured as a morality which seeks to relate a series of disparate figures whose interlocking frames circumscribe and contextualize one another, and whose mutual understandings, between one image and the next, or between sound and image, produce a work founded on an ethics of design. Working with the personal materials of his own life and the lives around him, Sanguedolce attempts to reconstitute the flow of the present into an understanding that is not so much a retrospective summary, but an open text whose constellations of images map out the workings of an ethical consciousness.

After finishing Full Moon Darkness in 1984, he began work on the autobiographical Woodbridge (32 min 1985). Named after the Toronto suburb in which his family resides, he returns home with a camera learned in the diction of abstract expressionism. Church picnics, lawn bowling, and street hockey games are all refocused under the filmmaker's unsettling gaze to produce a sensual derangement. Underscoring many of the neighbourhood's activities is the mythology of Roman Catholicism, pervasive in this predominantly Italian immigrant population. The litany of the church service is continued with the recitation of Hail Mary's as the filmmaker's mother rolls bread in a daily ritual, her living room furniture wrapped in a preserving plastic for tomorrow's guests. The slow motion stance of the lawn bowlers is caught in some eternal cycle of body and spirit, every gesture tuned to a divine understanding.

Woodbridge is a coming-of-age film, turning from the law of the Father to establish a poetics of self-expression which reconciles the rules of an old- world culture with their new-found setting. The dominant Catholic iconography is contrasted with the filmmaker's quest for release, identity and escape. But this quest for individuation is also a return home, a gesture of nostalgia refigured through the camera. It is the apparatus that attempts to straddle these two worlds, between a generation of Italian immigrants and their Canadian-bound progeny. It is striking to witness how often this paradigm is repeated in the Canadian fringe, its members subject to a displacement which is everywhere felt but never seen. As their parents arrive in “the new world,” they are born and raised in a Canadian setting which overlaps uneasily with past understandings. Haunted by images of a place they have never seen, they internalize the displacement of their immigrant parentage, never quite feeling “at home” in Canada, but knowing little of the geography which continues to sound through their parents. As a result, the present appears in a double vision, overlaid with a borrowed understanding, its constituents standing in a place between old world and new. This place “between” functions to destroy the simple transparency of a place and its representations even as they are drawn to make images in a documentary register, these filmmakers’ expectations are upset by the understanding that something is missing. This distance between an object and its representation has impelled much of the efforts of the Canadian fringe.

In Rhythms of the Heart (43 min 1990), Sanguedolce's affinity for expressionistic documentaries turns to the depiction of a ruined marriage. Part documentary, part fiction, this home movie musical is staged in eight movements with prelude and coda. Begun with a softly ebbing light shining from the pastel mists of Niagara Falls, the film moves in quiet concert with its surround, leaking colour into the slowly rising condensation. Framing this Edenic enclosure are twin texts, recorded vérité style, of an aggressive male opera director whose first word is also the film's beginning: "No!" In the year-long process of gathering images and sounds for what the filmmaker imagined at first to be a film about music, he recorded dress rehearsals for Puccini's La Bohéme, directed by Giuseppe Machina. Scrapping the image, Sanguedolce kept only Machina's voice, using it in ironic counterpoint to images of a more personal order. Part carnival barker, ham actor, and outraged artist, Machina continually decries the timing of his cast and crew, the look of their costumes, the delivery of dialogue, their emotions in performance. Displaced from its original context, these comments are re-directed towards the actions in Rhythms, often casting Machina’s authorial tones over the diary images of Mary and Stephen. In this way their diary work and private life seem subjected to an unseen control, a voice that speaks through a technology of representation which makes available to us their most intimate exchanges.

After Sanguedolce's refigured image of the fall, Machina sounds again, shaming the proceedings and demanding that everything begin from the beginning. The filmmaker now returns to nature, replacing the waterfall's mist by a billowing white smoke, evidence of a ruined forest below. Choosing to show only the effects of the fire, Sanguedolce drapes its destructive imagery with a deadly and seductive shroud that replays and refigures the film's opening. Moving from images of the sublime to their rethinking in fire's light, Sanguedolce opens a surface common to each for reinterpretation, de-mist-ifying the sublime by pointing to its shared origins in disaster.

After another disgusted intercession from Giuseppe Machina, Sanguedolce offers the film's third beginning. Racing over rock, his camera pitching earthwards and skywards, Sanguedolce returns to the earth's surface as if to another planet, wandering without bearings or direction. Spliced into his footfalls are glimpses of a couple at home. As the walk terminates in a rush of sun flares and reflecting pools, these intimations of domestic life expand in a frenzied super-8 collage depicting pre-post marriage nuptials. From their marriage, honeymoon doubts, and institutionalized intimacies to Mary’s last pained leaving scene, Rhythms takes up the trajectory of a marriage's dissolution. This blend of fact and fiction is photographed largely in super-8, utilizing its lightweight portability, automatic metering, and low light capabilities to full advantage. Invariably held in hand at close quarters, the super-8 camera is used to squeeze off short bursts of picture, rhythmic phrases that keep the married couple of the film in a continual state of readjustment and realignment. All of the super-8 work is photographed by its protagonists — the filmmaker (who plays himself) and "Mary,” acted with an abandoned verve by Alex Morrison. They photograph one another with a groin's eye view of sleeping, crying, fucking, dancing, and talking, exposing their most intimate relations to the quick turn of the hand-held camera.

If Rhythms's opening and closing scenes wander in a natural surround, the rest is lensed in a gaggle of enclosures: sparsely lit studio settings, counter tops, or framed bathrooms. This claustrophobic intimacy is matched with a kinetic intensity and gestural camera style whose freewheeling expressions push against the confines of their interiors. The couple searches throughout the film to find the living room that will permit them to live without the dissolution of sexual passion or the dictates of the law. Over and over, the images of Rhythms are regrouped around a linguistic centre, reissued as evidence that the spontaneous is also a function of language. At the same time, the uncontrolled furies of everyday life are summoned in an assault against the dictates of the word, whose rule is echoed in an enclosed and enframing design. Over and over, Rhythms hurls its protagonists against these linguistic signs of enclosure, breaking through them only to find them reconstituted under different names and places. This polarity between an ecstatic join and a rational, linguistic separation is demonstrated in the film's architecture and framing. While Rhythms begins with an image of the “fall” or fallen nature, it closes with a rooftop dance lit by the city lights beyond. This progression, from country to city, or from a solitary trek to a reconciliation with another, provides the film's essential trajectory. But this passage is hardly a linear one; rather, it consists of a continual series of transgressions (of space, of confinement, of each other) which are remade and redressed in succeeding parts of the film.

Rhythms of the Heart provides a cornucopia of musical pastimes: from ambient harmonica to wailing sax, from an aleatory piano jam to the dirge-like hum of overloaded refrigerator circuits. Spliced into the mix are the home movie pyrotechnics of Stephen and Mary, an interface that opens and closes in the passing thunder of their surround. Drawn through a succession of enclosures, their final escape is from each other, their words an unanswered monologue of separation, their bodies joined in the passing shutter of the home movie camera. This divide of sound and image splinters its subject, casting shattered reflections from one to the other. Taking up the means of representation for themselves, they are finally able to come together only as an image, an image whose mediated distance reinforces their own sense of estrangement from one another.

Mexico (35 min 1992) is a collaborative effort made with this writer, an episodic road movie which unfolds like a series of postcards. As the unseen protagonist ventures through war museums, dinosaur ruins, jungle factories, the Judo champions of Monterrey, and an explosive amateur bullfight in Mexico City, he is impelled by a wry voice-over which insistently converts his place of escape into his past. "You drive through the suburbs of Vera Cruz. You pass the telephone exchange, the waterworks, and the white picket fences that surround the houses in the district, but there are no people anywhere. You drive from habit, not looking at anything in particular before realizing you are back in Toronto, that your driving always takes you to the same place, that everything is familiar here, that it's impossible to leave. Behind the wheel you are like King Midas, everything you touch turns into Toronto."

To entitle his next work the filmmaker turned to his own name (and the name of his father) translating it into the language of the new world: “Sanguedolce” in English means “sweet blood.” This resodding of the old world marks the passage from father to son in a diary film of immigrants. Driven by a montage of fragmented voice-overs that draft an elegiac weave of remonstrance, memory, and sentiment, Sweetblood's pictures are drawn from a family's history of self-representation — the endless heap of family photographs, rapidly reshuffled now between the filmmaker's lens. Mounting a series of six “periods” of snapshots on foam core boards, then photographing them in single frame abandon, Sanguedolce presents a synoptic personal history begun with family weddings, and proceeding through grade school class photos, high school hipsters, a hockey montage, booze and drugs, a near fatal car accident, travels abroad, lovers and friends, the beginnings of his filmmaking career, and finally a last, difficult attempt to reconcile himself with his family. Superimposed over his photographic frenzy are texts presented one line at a time; culled from the maker's dream diaries, they serve as reminders that family history is strained through language.

Away (60 min 1996) turns again to the subject of the Sanguedolce family, this time in the guise of fiction. Asked to crew on the set of Apocalypse Now by fellow paesano Francis Ford Coppola, Steve uses the interminable shooting breaks to search for his twin brother Sam. A carefully crafted mosaic of dramatic interludes, home movies, philosophic asides, and Apocalypse Now excerpts, Away turns around its absent centre with a desperate ferocity, seeking familial communion in the midst of a ravaging simulation. That each brother should appear as the answer to the next speaks of a blood marriage, of a destiny made flesh, as their genetic compact seeks its haunted prophecy in the veil of the other, and a return home.

After the successes of direct cinema moviemakers like Leacock and Pennebaker, it was hoped the widescale dissemination of home media equipment, specifically the introduction of super-8, would establish a grass roots imaging network that would loosen Hollywood's fatal grip. The advent of cheap, portable home video recording will draft the next chapter in the ongoing struggle between private and public spheres. Sanguedolce's work stands as an intermediary in this effort to broadcast the intimate and unforeseen, the unheralded shape of the everyday.