Experimental film: Grierson's orphan - John

TAKE ONE,  Summer, 1996  by Tom McSorley

It is paradoxical and strangely typical that Canada's internationally renowned avant garde cinema can trace its origins to, of all places, the Canadian government. As with most things cinematic in Canada, even experimental film began at the NFB. It was unwittingly nurtured by the very man whose approach to filmmaking would later fuel the experimentalists' rebellion--John Grierson. When Grierson hired Norman McLaren, he had no idea that this quiet animator would help to inspire a movement which radically opposes the empirical principles of the documentary. Working with the cinematic medium in entirely new ways, playfully and profoundly foregrounding the artifices of his own image-making, McLaren detonated the very perceptual frameworks of the institution which employed him and, in the process, opened up the possibilities of Canadian cinematic expression. That pursuit of possibilities remains the chief characteristic of this other essential Canadian filmmaking tradition--the experimental film.

Rooted in early European avant grade movements and influenced by the American avant garde cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, experimental filmmaking in Canada began to emerge fully in the 1960s. Although some experimental work continued to be produced inside the NFB by McLaren, Arthur Lipsett and others, the most significant avant garde filmmaking took place beyond the Board. Concentrated primarily, but not exclusively in Toronto and Vancouver, experimental filmmaking flourished within the independent film scenes, on university campuses, and in the burgeoning visual arts community.

In the 1960's Canadian experimental film rose to international prominence and critical acclaim in ground-breaking works of Michael Snow (Wavelength), Joyce Wieland (Rat Life and Diet in North America) and Jack Chambers (Hart of London).

The tradition gathered formal and philosophical momentum in the 1970s and 1980s with Bruce Elder, David Rimmer, Ellie Epp, Al Razutis, Chris Gallagher, Vincent Grenier, Peter Mettler, Barbara Sternberg and others. In addition to the continuing work of these directors, Sheridan College in Oakville gave rise to the "Niagara Escarpment" school. Rick Hancox, Richard Kerr, Philip Hoffman, Mike Hoolboom, Gary Popovich and Steve Sanguedolce produced highly personal, autobiographical work while maintaining the structuralist, experimental tradition. Into the 1990s, experimental filmmaking, always restless and incorporating new image-making media into its open-ended forms, continues to offer startling, influential work. Just as the documentary tradition once dominated the structures of fiction in Canadian cinema, now the formal and philosophical investigations, once the exclusive preserve of the experimental film, are increasingly evident in recent Canadian narrative feature filmmaking.

In under four decades, the elusive, protean experimental film tradition has yielded a vast, complex and vital body of work essential to our understanding of Canadian cinema. Then and now, experimental film contests the assumptions of narrative cinema, the empirical claims of the documentary, and the validity of its own complex processes of image-making. The experimental accusation, boldly and often breathtakingly rendered, contends that audiences must challenge their very ways of seeing. Evolving in a creative dialectic with the documentary (in spite of Grierson or because of him), the rich and vibrant Canadian experimental film tradition continues both to construct and detonate images in order to investigate what is present and, perhaps, illuminate what is absent.