Ann Cvetkovich explores the concept of political depression in her 2012 memoirist collection of critical essays Depression: A Public Feeling. Forged out of political turmoil—be it the effects of a fascist electorate, natural devastations, predatory police state, continual war-mongering, epidemic threat, an unrelenting housing crisis, or the abusive domestic realm—this physiological and social ailment engages a tension "between the everyday business" and “the urgency of disaster.” Cinematically, political depression results in tense imagery, at times static, at times freewheeling; tremulous and unknowable, political depression launches a flagrant way of seeing, a layered and laboring visuality—"a split focus".

In Split Focus, a spotlight programme featuring works from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre’s (CFMDC) collection, the filmic avant-garde mirrors the embodied and felt textures of this public feeling. Think, the tedium of daily commutes, where a seated factory worker in a crowded bus flits in and out of interrupted slumber, cataloging her eye contact with numerous passersby. Intriguing my responses to experimental imagery is a populace in transit, surrounded by streetlights, competing with incandescent bulbs and garish storefronts, and beheld by a back window seat. Passengers superimposing and imprinting spectrally against sliding traffic onto the windows of a packed bus, illuminate, for me, P. Adams Sitney’s tenets of structural cinema—fixed framing of the camera; a flickering effect; a looping effect; and off-screen re-photography. In simpler terms, this mode of film necessitates that cinematic form take precedence over narrative concerns, which are rarely pressing, if at all existent. Aiding my reflections on structural cinema in Split Focus thus are vivid and visceral fragments of public space—rapt with stranger intimacy and loaded with absent presence.

Formed in 1967, the CFMDC’s leading distribution of independent, avant-garde films as an artist-run non-profit, prioritizing artist rights and remuneration, anchors much of this reflection on landscape, labour, and tedium. For instance, Michael Snow’s visual treatise WVLNT: Wavelength for Those Who Don’t Have the Time (2003), where translucent reflections are filtered through doorways and light fixtures, stages tension between mobile and stagnant elements in one still frame, across a compressed passage of time. Capturing in patterned, close-up imagery, the boots and heels of rallying women workers, digging into dewy grass, as they strike against Dare Foods, Ltd. in the 1970s in Kitchener, Ontario, is Joyce Wieland’s chorusing and sonorous Solidarity (1973). In Martha Davis’ storied Performance Trilogy, a transit passenger or street-side passerby activates into starry performer (UR Lucky, 1983); an escalator shape shifts into raised curtain (Snow Search, 1985); and the street corner assumes a theatrical stage (Making a Scene, 1984). When sparse and unpeopled, these same concrete city sidewalks question kinship with natural landscape and the not-so-distant vast Ontarian country, narrativized in the vein of memoir, in Dawn Wilkinson’s impressionist and picturesque Dandelions (1995). Similarly diaristic and monochromatic, the frigid outdoors are weighed by visions of abandoned geography and domestic memorabilia, in Phillip Hoffman’s familial and photographic confessional On the Pond (1978).

Over the course of this programme, the rippling, blue, black, and gray of balmy twilight, is figuratively chronologized by a nervously lethargic dawn. While some works feel informed by the “inertia and despair” innate to Cvetovich’s conception of public feeling, others reveal how these symptoms guide “new ways of thinking about agency,” turning into hopeful “sites of publicity and community formation.” Migratory, routine, waged, Split Focus then ascertains specific access into a formally rigorous and landscape-entranced collection, reframing historic works as compellingly emotive texts that veer between alluring and tedious; often uniquely urbanist, innately diasporic, at times plaintive, if not curiously—generatively, mutably, publicly—depressive.

Aaditya Aggarwal
Programs & Collections Coordinator, CFMDC

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