Slaughtered animals and dysfunctional childhoods

Steve Sanguedolce’s experimental film delves in semi-documentary memoirs

By Angela Baldassarre

We’re both in disbelief. Me in hearing that for filmmaker Steve Sanguedolce butchering your own animals in the basement of your North York home was a normal occurrence when he was a child. Him for hearing that this scribe, of his same generation and also a member of the Italian-Canadian Toronto community, had not only never experienced such a thing, but has never heard of it either.

 “I think it was very typical of a lot of Italian Canadians’ experiences,” says Sanguedolce. “There were animals in the house and we foolishly as children thought they were pets. Y’see, we had a cousin who was a butcher so he’d come over and slaughter the sheep, rabbits, geese and goats we had in our basement. I know a lot of people who had a lot of animals who slaughtered them regularly. My parents are Sicilian and so they lived on a farm. They had their own animals, they slaughtered their own meat, they had their own milk and made their own cheese. So this was a way of life they exported into Toronto. It has since changed. I don’t know how many others continue to slaughter their own animals in their own homes. But I saw a lot of it as a kid. I think it must have affected me in some way because I had a much different relationship to animals than I had then.”

I guess ordinary pets like cats and dogs were out of the question for the Sanguedolce household.

“Definitely,” laughs the 40-year-old Steve. “What’s really scary is hearing about one kid in school, Italian as well, and he’d talk about having all these cats that would get really fat after a year, like baby pigs. Then they’d miraculously disappear. The luxury of pets is something that doesn’t exist in a more peasant, southern culture. I have two little dogs, and my parents don’t want me to bring them to their house.”

Slaughtering animals is an important element in Sanguedolce’s latest experimental effort, Smack, the story of three brothers who take different paths in life. “The first character in the film, Antonio, almost seems distinct from the other two,” explains Steve. “He’s a little straighter, has more of a religious conscience, and he tries to get out of it as it’s starting. And a lot of that has to do with the traumatic experiences as a child when he saw so many things that he loved being killed and kind of learned to equate the two in some way.”

Antonio, in fact, is the semi-autobiographical creation of Steve’s twin brother, Sam Sanguedolce, who provides the narrative to the character.

 “We were taught that slaughter was part of life,” he says. “We didn’t have a concept of pets as kids and those stories that Antonio says, those are our stories from my childhood. It’s as if anything that you’ve become close to and learned to love is killed, and that’s a kind of common, acceptable place to be. When love is held adjacent to death then you can almost understand in some way why somebody might move into a more dramatic or drastic existence, doing drugs and being rebellious and destructive. Those are the only things that I think are really important to children in terms of bonding, closeness, innocence. And when it’s taken away at that level you can see how that can be construed in that destructive way.”

Smack is an unconventional movie detailing the lives of Antonio, Sybil (Paul Dileo) and Zed (Robbie Magee) from ages five to adulthood as they deal with religious transformations, drug addiction and crime. Filmed in a documentary style using Super-8 footage, Smack is actually more fiction than fact.

“It’s a little bit of both,” says Steve. “Those are real people telling their own stories for the most part. What I’ve done is recorded a lot people telling stories, five or six of us, transcribed them all onto paper and then made those 150 pages of stories into one linear story where I changed the names, turned the five or six characters into three characters who now are brothers. So it started as a documentary. It’s taking original stories and turning them into a fictional context and making them into one story.”

Yet elements of the Steve’s background, and his personal knowledge of the Toronto’s 70s-80s drug culture are in plain view.

“ I don’t really delve into that as much as I’ve done with my other work,” he insists. “That last character is a surviving junkie and he’s telling his own stories. So the drug culture is very important here because it’s something I knew, and I thought the dramatic appeal would add something compelling to the story. In those days, in the 70s, the drug culture was much more liberal than it is today. So I tried to put that into the perspective. The near-death-defying experience is not exclusive to drug users, and a large part of the story addresses the recklessness of youth, of male youth and some of the underlying factors that might help push somebody in that direction.”

After attending Sheridan College, Sanguedolce (which means sweetblood) has dedicated himself to making films using a diary methodology about the darkest and most intimate moments of the person’s self. Full Moon Darkness (1983) is a portrayal of ex-psychiatric patients; Woodbridge (1985) attempted to deconstruct Italian mores; Rhythms of the Heart (1990) explored his own issues about romance; Mexico (1992) unraveled the world traveler; Sweetblood (1993) revisited his family photos; and Away (1996) focused on his search for his long-lost twin.

If you’ve never seen a Sanguedolce film, don’t expect a conventional moviegoing experience. Avant-garde and experimental, his movies are a challenge even for seasoned film lovers. And Smack, although more accessible than his previous films because of its narrative, is a compendium of hand-processed and hand-toned colourized images.

“My sense of incorporating images is much more metaphorical and poetic,” he explains. “When you deal with memory, and most of the film is told in past tense, it becomes coloured in a figurative sense. It’s all very specific but unusual. Memory has become something truly unique, it’s almost separate from the actual event. I’m more interested in trying to tell stories visually where the images don’t necessarily become slaves to the sound. I think that when somebody is speaking about almost dying or being let down, that we’re talking about trust and fear and connection, and some of those images deal with a more metaphoric level going either inside or beyond the words. The colouring makes it real specific to a person’s recollection, it’s more dreamlike and goes beyond what images normally do in dramatic films.”

But Sanguedolce’s artistry doesn’t limit itself to the screen. For years he’s been the leader of Sweetblood and the Hounds, a psycho-horror rock band, which plays around Toronto quite often.

“Not anymore,” he admits. “ I just decided to not play the club circuit anymore. It’s too hard and greasy and there’s not a lot of rewards. What the bars want is cover music, and original music doesn’t fit in there. I feel like I want to try something else. It’s the opposite of what cinema is. Cinema is more cerebral. I think I’ll leave music behind for now.”

Just don’t stop making those movies.

Smack screens at Artword, 75 Portland St., March 7 at 7:30pm. For information call 588-0725.