Experimenting with Catharsis

Film Preservationist Mark Toscano Talks David Rimmer and Experimental Filmmaking

Fringe ArtsMatteo Ciambella — Published April 6, 2015

Canadian filmmaker David Rimmer has produced an impressive body of work in a career that spans more than 40 years. With films like Canadian Pacific (1974), he has established himself as one of the most influential and respected artists in his field. In anticipation of the series of screenings entitled David Rimmer: A Retrospective taking place at the Cinémathèque Québécoise on April 10 and April 11, The Link spoke with Mark Toscano from the Academy Film Archive, a film preservationist who worked on the restoration of Rimmer’s films.

Could you tell us something about the techniques and themes Rimmer explored in his films?

I think that one of the fundamental underlying interests in much of David Rimmer’s work is the idea of vision. And by vision, I mean not just seeing, but connecting, knowing, having a certain awareness, and making certain leaps of understanding through extended and careful observation. As a result, a lot of David’s work deals with the close scrutiny of both the content of his images as well as the qualities of the image itself.

To grossly generalize, David’s early work is often characterized by a very manual, almost sculptural interaction with the film medium and its qualities, whether by the kaleidoscopic montage of his earliest films, or the re-photography and repetition of some of his most widely seen films. At the centre of this is always a heightened awareness of looking and seeking, something which manifests in perhaps even more transcendent ways when David turns his own camera on a real world subject, as in Real Italian Pizza or the incredible Al Neil / A Portrait. As David’s work moves into the ‘80s and ‘90s, I feel like all the lessons he taught himself in his earlier filmmaking start to synthesize, as he explores the external world with a very sensitive sense of montage, time, space, and texture.

Has the panorama of experimental filmmaking changed in North America since the 1960’s? If so, in what ways has it changed?

This is a tough question. Like with any medium, there are cycles. So the efflorescence of experimental filmmaking in the 1960s and ‘70s transformed quite a bit going into the ‘80s, but it certainly never went away. I feel like a lot of people think films practically stopped being made in the ‘80s, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Of course there were a lot of technological, aesthetic, social, political, and other kinds of shifts in the filmmaking and exhibiting being done, but it hardly went away. However I do feel that perhaps now, though there’s probably not a radically larger amount of people making experimental work than before, there is a lot more global awareness about it, in large part due to the internet and electronic communication, and I think this has fomented a more pronounced and wide-ranging sense of community than could have been possible before, even with the organizations and publications that did a lot to create community over the past several decades.

What is the relationship of the Academy with underground and experimental filmmakers like Rimmer?

I can really only speak from the point of view of the archive here, and particularly my own experiences and processes. Although I’m greatly simplifying things, it could be said that the Academy Film Archive sees its role as that of caretaker for work that has contributed to the art and science of motion pictures. This very crucially includes the work of independent artists. The collections of approximately 100 different experimental filmmakers are currently on deposit at the Academy […] The approach has always been to not focus on a “greatest hits” of artists or their films, so the collections of significant but perhaps lesser-known (or even practically unknown) filmmakers are strongly represented as well.

With David Rimmer, I’ve worked on quite a few of his films, which means we now have brand new internegatives, soundtrack masters, and prints for each of those films. All the prints showing in the three Montreal programs are either restored, or at the very least newly struck from existing negatives.

In your introduction to the retrospective you mention that, while working on the preservation of Rimmer’s films, you felt as if they were handmade objects, almost like a sculpture, in which the manual interaction with the material is very palpable. Do you think this could happen with digital filmmaking? Or is there something about film that the digital medium cannot offer?

I was at a symposium at the Getty a few years ago, and one participant talked about his enthusiasm for the way that, for example, smartphones reintroduced a level of hands-on interactivity that had been previously lacking in digital, and he saw that as similar to pre-cinematic optical toys. I totally disagreed, because I feel like the technology itself—which for the vast majority of people (including me) is completely, impenetrably abstract, unlike optical toys—is an obstacle to true hands-on interaction and comprehension.

In other words, if we don’t really know how what our hand is doing relates to what our eye sees or mind thinks, then it’s an abstracted connection. I don’t mean it’s a meaningless one. But I do feel that the actual connection itself, that bridge between the apparatus and our mind, is an abstracted, less intrinsically meaningful one, because we don’t actually understand it.

If you scratch a piece of film, you can fully understand exactly the causality at work there. If you make a mark on a tablet and see it onscreen in a paint program, you can’t, because there’s a highly abstract series of translations going on that comparatively very few people can apprehend. You know that a particular movement on a tablet makes a particular mark on the screen, and can even master that process beautifully, but I think it’s incorrect to think of this as a kind of hands-on interaction or full comprehension of the act.
However, the abstracted nature of that relationship can create its own very rich meaning which would be impossible in film, and furthermore, that nuanced connection or lack of connection ultimately needn’t be important for everyone.

Digital offers many creative opportunities that film doesn’t, and vice versa. But this is really because they are utterly different mediums from each other.