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WINNIPEG'S FESTIVAL OF FILM AND VIDEO ART |
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WINNIPEG'S FESTIVAL OF FILM AND VIDEO ART |
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JOHN PRICE: SECOND CHILDHOOD A selection of recent works selected and introduced by John Price Friday, October 9 @ 7 PM | Cinematheque – main floor, 100 Arthur Street |
Download the full essay: |
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Precedents The Canadian fringe has had a long engagement with the home movie, from Mike Snow’s Wavelength (a 45 minute zoom across his home), to Joyce Wieland’s Watersark (a film made (famously!) on her kitchen table, to the post-colonial narratives of Richard Fung (My Mother’s Place, On the Way to My Father’s Village). John Price has stepped into this tradition of the untraditional, collecting and transforming the sights and scenes around him, taking as his “material” the stuff of everyday life — the birth of his two children, the incessant passage of the trans-national railway just steps outside his front door, and rituals of masculinity (hunting, fishing)... Second Childhood John Price became a child again in the playground of film’s chemistry. He learned the difference between colour toners which worked into the shadows (the unspoken, the forbidden), and the tinters which headed for the light areas of a picture (the things which are too much looked at, the clichés which must be made new again). He was one of those handy men who knew how to fix things — plumbing errors, wiring judgments, small structures — he could look at a thing and know how it was made by the feelings inside his fingers. His hands knew the secret of how things that look solid and forever can come apart just like that. And how to put it all back together again. And how temporary that is too... The Present He doesn’t have to drive across the country anymore to stop the storyteller any longer, his kids look after that for him. He was never a planner, a conceptualist, he was never married to the big idea. What he has found, in his playtime and child rearing, is a relief from thinking, and an admission that experience needn’t be curtailed by the Frontal Lobe Surveillance Society day and night. What makes John so special as a person, and as an artist, is that he is really here. Right here in front of you, right there on phone, right here behind his camera. He’s not wishing he was somewhere else, or complaining about how it is, instead, he has learned the most difficult art of all, which is to embrace and accept what is actually going on. When I speak with John, which is not nearly often enough these days, I feel him pulling me here alongside him. Come here. Come now. He urges me in the softest way possible. In this, as in all the important matters in his life, he takes the lead from his children, who are his first and best teacher. Let them take us out of the prison house of adulthood. Watching John run alongside his kids I understand at last: we only live twice. - Excerpted from the essay “John Price: Second Childhood” by Mike Hoolboom ________________________________________________________________________ |
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remembrance day parade – 2005, 16 mm, 2:45 A somber parade shot on a laboratory printing stock not intended to be used in a camera. The roll was processed by hand in a very active developer.
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fire #3 – 2003. 16 mm, 2:45 A hand-processed silent film created on a bitterly cold winter evening. In a windowless bathroom with a single candle and a roll of very outdated color print stock, it became - through the alchemy of light, silver, and color chemistry - a hazy, abstract hymn to the warmth of the sun.
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eve – 2006. 16 mm, 7:00 A regular under my Vancouver window for 6 months shown here at her most tragic… a child soliciting herself while under the influence of crack. It is an excerpt from an earlier film “After Eden” completed in 2000.
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naissance – 2008, 16 mm, 6:00 minute version New life... rolls from before and after.
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party #4 – 2006, 35 mm, 2:45 A special one for my first son.... his last as a lone ranger (only child). Shot on double perforation black and white 16mm, the film ran through the camera twice and doubled the consumption of ice cream and cake.
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Making Pictures – 2005, 35 mm, 13:00 In May 2005, I was hired to work as a camera technician on a documentary film about a Canadian fine art photographer who ‘makes pictures’ of massive industrial projects. In that 3 week period our small crew traveled constantly from one alien landscape to another to observe the photographer at work. There was something intense and odd about the exercise that I could not fully articulate in the moment. Something about the contrast between the ‘work’ of the photographer and that of the millions making appearances in his photographs. Though I was thoroughly preoccupied with the job that had brought me to these unbelievable places, I did manage to record tiny fragments of the trip with my own super-8 camera.
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gun/play – 2006, 35 mm, 9:00 After shooting a strange episode that occurred spontaneously on a secluded beach, I realized that there were two other rolls shot years earlier that might work as a triptych. A subconscious reaction to the escalating gun violence in the city.
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Camp #2 – 2007, 35 mm, 7:37 A Thanksgiving weekend with the family at a duck hunting camp on the Ottawa River.
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the boy who died – 2007, 35 mm, 7:35 Impressions of Beauval, Saskatchewan during a day off while shooting a documentary film for Gail Maurice about the dreams of aboriginal youth at different latitudes in Canada. The images were shot after hearing that one the subjects we had followed for a week had been in a devastating skidoo accident. She managed to survive despite the hours of exposure to the arctic winter night before she was rescued. Her friend who was driving did not. |
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View of the Falls from the Canadian Side – 2006, 35 mm, 7:00 A film commissioned by The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto for it's Film is Dead - Long Live Film omnibus project. In 1896, William Heise photographed the first 35mm motion picture images of Canada at Niagara Falls. The 4 perforation camera system he used was designed and built by Thomas Edison and William K. Dickson. The stock was manufactured by George Eastman to Edisons’ specifications. This film was photographed using the same essential technology and is dedicated to the visionary ideas of those pioneers.
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intermittent movement – 2005 – 2009, 35 mm, 7:00 Disparate moments.... some shot on 16, some on 35, some hand cranked, some not, some spherical, some anamorphic, some black & white, some color, some grainy, some not, some solarized, some not, all processed by hand. The film was commissioned by Niagara Custom Labs for their "Short & Wide" 35 mm omnibus project. |
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the sounding lines are obsolete – 2009, 16 mm, 10:00 An irradiated time capsule of home movies and human rituals... dark global forecasts refracting through the light of my sons eyes... a hand processed science fiction documentary... |
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JOHN PRICE BOOKINGS |
John Price |
