NXNE 2014

I have been going to free NXNE shows for about five years now and I went to my first ticketed event last year with Natalie Angilletta when we went to see FLAG, but this year was my first all-out, NXNE experience with a wristband, a bicycle and the incomparable Francine Dibacco as a shaman of sorts getting me into the right state of mind for four straight days of shows and drinking (the Canadian dream)! Since I have a compulsive need to get everything in writing, I considered a variety of ways that I could get this in words and decided that it would work best to just pick out the best shows as recommendations of sorts.

THURSDAY

Tobacco: Just kidding, but can I complain for a second before the good stuff? I have nothing against electronic music; some of my good friends are electronic musicians! However, 1) who the fuck puts an electronic musician between Weaves and tUnE-yArDs (that hurt to write), 2) who the fuck goes to a show to see a performer who is ENTIRELY obscured by a screen for the whole performance and 3) who the fuck schedules an electronic show in a sit-down venue? Isn't the whole point of electronic music to make people dance? Why did it take so long for all the dudebros to get up and start dancing? We didn't make it far into this one!

The Pizza Underground: This Velvet Underground "cover band" really should not have worked and many will argue that it doesn't, but there is definitely something to be said for a ridiculous band which takes itself seriously. Coming out with a pizza box and whatever other instruments they had and refusing to break character takes some work and their stupid puns just sweetened the deal. Walking a tightrope between brilliance and utter garbage, this band manages to stay on the right side.

Odonis Odonis: HOLY SHIT! This was a real surprise. At 1 AM, after going all over town and being extremely tired, we decided to go to the Garrison and have a drink. Luckily, that was when this band was about to go on. This is a great time for really heavy, but not mindless music (so much of that at this year's festival) and this band exemplifies that, with a guttural and yet melodic sound that you can't not headbang to.

FRIDAY

Swans/St. Vincent: There's not much else you can say about these two performers. It would be a better write-up if they were uninteresting, but Swans' earth-shattering attack (the floor was seriously vibrating), filling up YDS with what sounds like the battlecry of a murderous extraterrestrial race, followed by the amazing voice and brilliant stage antics of St. Vincent was destined to be great and that's what it was. On another note, Annie, we all love you, but no one walks out of a Tim Horton feeling guilty because they think you're stealing. That statement made no sense, but I'm sure we all forgive you!

Courtney Barnett: One of the highlights of the festival! Being at the Silver Dollar, I was within a metre of her, when she started performing. Listening to her music and seeing her videos convinced me this would be a stoic, peaceful performance. That idea was quashed the second she went into her first guitar solo, looking and sounding less like Bob Dylan and more like Jay Reatard! Since her catalogue is so small, consisting of twelve released tracks, it meant that she played every song, including a heavier-than-usual version of Avant Gardener which automatically made me realize that I was in love. I talked to her after the show, but forgot to propose, so that's something for next time.

SATURDAY

Weaves/HSY/Perfect Pussy: This was just a really unusual combo, which is why I really dug it. First, Weaves, who I saw on Thursday, played a thirty minute set with a strange sort-of psychedelic music followed by HSY's heavy (flashbacks to Odonis Odonis), jumbled sound followed by the total sensual assault of Perfect Pussy. This tiny room had been set up with two gigantic speakers on the sides of the stage which made the whole room shake and was in a constant state of knocking me over (this may not be true, but I was in an entirely different world by this point; I had a mental situation going on at the time and mixed with my penchant for self-destruction and heroic alcohol intake, I'm not certain how true some of these events were). I also saw the horrors of the all-ages moshpit; seeing a bunch of pre-pubescent kids moshing made me wonder if an adult could be charged with child endangerment for jumping in. One final note on Perfect Pussy: I really hated their recorded music, but, in a rare case, this is one band that only works live; recorded music can be altered, quieted, silenced. This is a band that needs to be heard at FULL VOLUME!

Tom Robinson: This may have been the best show of the whole festival! I ended up getting semi-lost on the way to this show at the Drake Hotel and arrived a few minutes late. I walked into a mostly empty room, maybe twenty people altogether, to see an aged man on the stage with a guitar in his hand and a microphone in front of him, singing Up Against the Wall (side note: Up Against the Wall and similar iterations of it is one of the most popular titles for really amazing songs). The rest of the hour at this show, which can truly be called an "intimate show", consisted of Robinson, a man who hasn't released an album in seventeen years and who hasn't toured regularly for twelve years, singing his greatest songs (an a cappella version of Martin, a brand-new, unreleased song about bankers and, of course, a singalong version of Glad to be Gay) and accompanying each one with a story (how Glad to be Gay points out the closeted gay men in the bar, how a scary-looking bartender complained about it being too catchy, how he was looking for a Canadian musician to do backing vocals and guitars at the show and he found one in the form of his assigned driver (whose name I wish I remembered)). Tom Robinson's wit, charm and generally pleasant personality made for a wonderful show that very few people saw!

Simon Amstell: Yeah, I guess Saturday was generally a good day. I skipped out on seeing The Last of England to see this show, so Amstell has better be funny! And he delivered, in the form of most self-serving, narcissistic, Alan Partridge-esque version of Simon Amstell imaginable. He basically told large segments of his life story, riffing on the Nelson Mandela situation, his love life, his relationship with his father and his strange god complex. He also occasionally stopped to admonish certain audience members, including one woman who was texting in the front row ("you can see why that would be a problem for me with you sitting in the front row, right? I know it's good when you get a text, because you think 'oh, I'm popular', but when you get a lot of texts, that's the number of people who don't want to talk to you!") and another woman, this time more jokingly, who dared to speak to him ("I'm very important, you know, right?" "Right." "Don't talk to me!") He also frequently commented on his own jokes: which ones work, which ones don't, which ones don't translate well, Overall, I spent about an hour laughing. I also later realized that this was the first comedy show I had ever been to!

METZ: I had no time to reminisce about Simon Amstell. I had to get my ass to Lee's Palace before midnight. I ended up getting to a long line, not knowing for certain if I would get in or not. I wanted to end this festival with a bang, which would consist of almost total self-destruction at worst and my imminent death at best! Luckily, I got in, got a beer, drank it up and stepped into the middle of pit area in front of the stage. These three guys came out (I have to admit, I didn't expect Metz to look like that) and the patented Metz sound began! And the floor came to life. This show kind of showed me the difference between two types of brilliant show: Courtney Barnett and Tom Robinson kind of exemplify one version ("I heard this song and this song and it was great") and Metz exemplifies the second ("there was music involved...I think"). While the Metz sound blared, I got stepped on, slammed into the stage, punched in the face, gut and crotch and headbutted in the jaw; it was one of the greatest experiences I have ever had! This show was total brutality and I wouldn't have it any other way. Funny moment: at one point, after getting slammed into stage, I turned around and in my daze, screamed something, which probably didn't make a sound anyways. This resulted in one woman running up to me and punching me in the stomach. My adrenaline and endorphin levels were so high that I felt nothing and just gave her a sick grin, to which she responded with a smile and a thumbs up, before disappearing back under a heap of bodies. This is the sort of thing that only happens in a pit! I left that show wet with sweat, some of it mine, after getting hugged by pretty much everyone that I bumped into, picked up off the floor or otherwise contacted. Not to get into morality here, but the moshpit is the most incredible form of therapy and the least damaging form of violence imaginable.

There it is. My overlong retelling of about eighty hours of my life, hours which consisted of very little sleep, too much alcohol, a mental semi-breakdown and a quest for total self-destruction. I enjoyed the hell out of it and would totally do it again, but...maybe not until next year!

The Utter Failure of Self (Less) Portrait

I was genuinely excited to see Self (Less) Portrait. Despite all the negative reviews and criticisms the film was subjected to, I was interested by the idea of public confessions; I always have been, even working with the concept myself. That's why it was so disappointing to see this film. The film attempts to create a world of total honesty, confessions made by a segment of society, without any semblance of fear or shame. People, situated against a white background, admit their pains, pleasures, joys and sorrows, while a camera films. This would have probably been a brilliant film in anyone else's hands; in this case, its failure falls entirely on the director.

To begin with, the film had no structure or focus. The purpose of confessing is to create pathos, to cause the audience to feel empathy for the object of their gaze. This audience was robbed of that possibility because the editing of the pieces was so randomized, there were no segments. This lack of segmentation, important in such a film, became an annoyance at best and entirely offensive at worst. When a confession of a suicide attempt is followed by a study of one's tattoos or three stories of physical and sexual abuse are followed by a man's confession that he loves his friends and partying, there is something entirely wrong with the director's choices.

That is not, however, the film's only ethical dilemma. The filmmaker uses this structure to place himself in a position of power over his subjects: while the subjects are exposed and vulnerable, the filmmaker is comfortably absent and anonymous, when only his voice is occasionally present. There is nothing in the film to suggest that the confessions need to be made to a figure of power, meaning that this was a conscious choice (even if a figure of power was to be the one hearing confessions, who is more powerful than a camera?) made by the director. In such a situation, where two equal humans come face to face, the power must be equally-divided between the two. Anonymity must exist for both or the director must also be exposed (these are two rules that I truly believe in and have followed in the past).

Finally, the film, with its white backgrounds, attempts to create a sense of nakedness; these confessions are not elaborate Catholic confessions, but rather friendly exchanges of ideas (already proven false). However, even in the aesthetic sense, the director manages to undermine his own idea by adding excessive visual and aural effects, in an attempt to create a mood, along the way destroying any hint of authenticity that may have remained in his film by that point.

I guess the reason that I am so mad is that getting people to be honest is extremely difficult. I made a series of video studies of people several years ago, people who were my friends, and, on several occasions, I was convinced they were not being honest. They gave me safe answers, despite my promise of their anonymity. To this day, no one but me has seen those videos. So, when a filmmaker manages to get entirely honest individuals who are entirely willing to share and still manages to destroy the project, I just cannot sit back and watch. I lasted thirty minutes, but I had to leave when rapes were followed by friendship. I missed an hour of the film, but I sincerely doubt I missed anything worthwhile.

The Seeing Image

It has been said that if you stare into the abyss, sometimes, it stares back. A recent viewing of Godfrey Reggio's most recent film, Visitors, makes me wonder if the same can be said about the cinema. Large segments of the film are devoted to images of human (and one gorilla) faces looking directly into the camera. It could be said that this method has been around as long as cinema has, with the utilization of the cinematic close-up, but even the close-up was never meant to look back; the close-up was an examination, not a judgment. This method was occasionally utilized in certain popular cinemas as a way to turn a conversation into something more personal, Iran's popular cinema being a notable, egregious offender. However, at some point of which I am, sadly, unaware, the image of the eyes looking back at the viewer became a notable experimentation in cinema; I have only begun noticing it recently.

In the Cannes-funded film Chacun son Cinema, Abbas Kiarostami created a short film which later developed into Shirin, a play as experienced through the faces of the viewers. The faces here, those of the women of Iran's cinema (and Juliette Binoche), are not meant to be seen; instead, they are meant to be read. The viewer does not see a story, but rather he or she experiences the story along with these viewers/performers. The audience becomes a part of the performance. Several years later, a single shot in Michael Haneke's Amour similarly caught my attention. The leading couple enter a theatre, along with many others, to see a performance. Again, the performance is mentioned to be a concert, but remains invisible (but not silent) to the viewer. We are, once again, left to look at the audience, a large audience, a faceless mass of individuals, as they look directly at us. Of course, there is still a pretense of something being viewed, something in the distance behind us, but the confrontation of viewer and viewed was a jarring experience.

Fast forward to Reggio. The pretense of a specific event being viewed has been lifted. The faces on the screen are no longer looking at a show. They are looking directly through the camera. First, they are individuals. As individuals, they have no agency. They may be looking at us, but we are greater in number; they continue to be the spectacle. That is, however, until a crowd of them gathers. Their crowd outnumbers our crowd! As two dozen or so individuals look out at us (there is no indication of what they may be looking at), they react; they cheer, groan, laugh and cry. As I look around the theatre, I see no difference between those on the screen and those in the seats. Well, just one: Those in the seats do not react; our agency has just reversed. We have become the spectacle.

Visitors was filmed in black and white, which I worried would be a distraction. However, that furthers the illusion. The audience viewing the film, in the darkness, is also black and white. So are the seats, the walls and everything in the distance. The only thing keeping me sane are the three exit signs around me, glowing red, reminding me that I can leave this madness anytime I desire. As the film reaches its end, Reggio once again twists the viewer's perception of the world. Singular faces once again occupy the screen (he has well proven how terrifying it is to be viewed by a larger group that one's own). However, a slow zoom out reveals a large audience in front of the screen, viewing it along with those in the theatre. The viewer begins to question just who is viewing who. The question of power and agency is raised to the forefront but never answered, as the screen disintegrates the film audience, deciding, for some reason, to spare the physical viewer.

Is this a possibility however? Can film stare back? The unimaginative answer is no, because the apparatuses of film (the camera, the projector, the screen) are all one-way objects. That is at least what the powers that be will say. The truth is that the image does not stare back, because the very idea of it still terrifies the viewer. Technology has developed methods for the image to stare back, but fear stops it from being put to good use. I have twice been in screenings which have used Skype to connect the audience to the creator, but the connection is never complete, because, at least in my experience with the two instances, the image, that of the creator displayed on the giant screen, has never been allowed to look out at the audience (except for the occasional fleeting glance). The image can hear the audience, but not see them, giving the audience, the greater number, the power. We still live in a world where power structures are strictly defined and enforced and the thought of giving agency to a singular image continues to terrify people. Take this as a call to revolution: the image can no longer remain blind!

My Current Director Obsession: Ali Hatami

This director is by no means someone that I am only “currently” obsessed with; this is a filmmaker of whom I have been aware almost all my life. I remember the day that he died, at the age of 52, of cancer. I was still young, but I knew that he was a big deal in the world of Iranian cinema. It took me a while to finally watch my first one of his films, which was one of his last films, 1991’s Madar (Mother). This director’s name was Ali Hatami, he was Iran’s greatest storyteller and his legacy has been forgotten. There are several reasons for this: his films were unquestionably Persian, thus his works would not translate for foreign audiences. This also means that his films are more or less lost for viewing, with one of the few ways to see his work being on youtube, where the videos look awful and discoloured, often lacking subtitles, again alienating viewers. Even then, there are not enough of his films on there. I have personally seen a total of three of his films myself (with a fourth recently found), so his work is scarce. The truth is that Ali Hatami’s name needs to be up there with the names of Kiarostami, Farrokhzad and Mehrjui as one of the early auteurs of Iranian cinema.

In pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, influences came from far and wide. The French New Wave was a clear influence for many filmmakers, something that is clearly visible in the earlier works of Kiarostami, when he would channel the works of Truffaut in his films about children. Others were influenced by communist cinema (Kamran Shirdel and Santiago Alvarez were working at roughly the same time, so it is difficult to tell who influenced who), the avant-garde and even sexploitation cinema. It is difficult to tell who exactly influenced Hatami, though. Hatami served two purposes for Iranian cinema: he was a storyteller and a historian. In this sense, he served the function of Roberto Rossellini for a culture which has a long history. His first film, 1970’s Hassan Kachal (Hassan the Bald), the first Persian musical, has even taken on a mythical status itself, becoming a fairy tale of sorts, an object that every child in Iran grows up knowing. Hassan is tricked by his mother into leaving the house, where he meets a girl and falls in love. Just thinking of this film, which launched Parviz Sayyad’s career (essentially, Iran’s Jerry Lewis), is making me sing some of the songs, despite the fact that I haven’t seen the film in well over a decade; it’s as if the film is ingrained within me somehow. I acknowledge that I mentioned that Madar was my first Hatami, but that’s only because I never really thought of Hassan Kachal as a Hatami film; this film is from a time before I knew what a filmmaker was!

Soon after, after making a small number of films which have become lost to time, or at least to me, Hatami became a historiographer, making films about national heroes and similar figures, including Sattar Khan, a film about the eponymous revolutionary hero, Hajji Washington, about Iran’s first ambassador to the United States, and Kamalolmolk, about the famed Persian painter. This shift also happened to fall in the middle of the early parts of the Islamic revolution that plagued Iran in the late-70s, so his works often faced censorship, just like any other work and he had artistic freedom taken from him. His pre-revolution films were aided by the fact that the actors could be natural, but after the revolution, archaic rules threatened to make his films more stilted. Madar proved that this worry was unwarranted. Telling the tale of a woman’s last days, as her children gather to say goodbye (one of her children being a developmentally disabled man portrayed by Akbar Abdi). Despite the fact that the siblings are dressed oddly modestly around each other and there’s little-to-no male-female contact in the film, the emotional honesty that Hatami infuses into his work hides all of that. If a comparison has to be made, I would say that this is Hatami’s Tokyo Story; he is quite Ozu-esque in style in the later parts of his career. In the end, the mother dies. It falls on her daughter to explain to her developmentally challenged brother what has occurred. Instead of making a big spectacle of it, the scene sees the two sitting together, the daughter heartbroken, crying, as she slowly repeats to her brother “madar mord” (“mother died”), which her brother understands by responding “madar mord chon ke jan nadarad” (“mother died because she has no life”). The film boils death down to a very basic understanding of lacking life, minimalistic in its own beautiful way.

Madar was immediately followed by Del-Shodegan (The Love-Stricken), a film about the first Persian musicians who went to France to record music on a record; the pioneers of recorded Persian music, as it were. This film combined the poetry of Madar with the historical obsession of his earlier films, resulting in a Homeric epic with an incredible score. When the deal falls through, these musicians end up trapped in France with no way to get back home. This film may well be the one that most resonated with me, because it took a historic event and used it to explain the situation of a displaced individual, a Persian who suddenly winds up in a western world, a stranger in a strange land. This is the experience of an immigrant. I have experienced it and so have many others. Clearly, these musicians made it back; after all, they are historical figures, but the historical element is not of as much interest, as the people who are forced to leave behind their homes and lives with little prior warning. Hatami was clearly a wise individual.

He made one more film after this, a film with very little information on it. It was apparently edited from Hezardastan, his epic, historical television series which is often named his best work (and which I have been unable to find). Unfortunately, he died before he had a chance to create more of these masterpieces. IMDb has sixteen credits for him as a director. That is not my issue. My issue is that this master of the art form is almost entirely ignored. The majority of books that I have read on Iranian cinema do not even mention his name once. Certainly, he is a national figure, but that should be enough, shouldn’t it? I asked Hamid Naficy earlier this year where he believes Hatami’s place is in Iran’s cinema. He responded, and others agreed, that he has an important place in this history, but that his films belong in the country. Why? I say his films need to break out of the country and be seen by everyone, so he can be recognized as the auteur that he is.