Raphael Bendahan, Interviewed
Interview conducted by Bing Wang on April 22nd, 2015. The interview was conducted by phone and is reproduced here in full with minor changes made for flow and ease of readability. All changes have been approved by Raphael Bendahan.
Take Two: You are known as a filmmaker, photographer, and writer. How did you become interested in films? Does your photography work have any influences on your film work?
Bendahan: I started as a photographer well before I'd quit high school in the late sixties. Then I moved into Rochdale College because it seemed like an interesting place to be during those "Youth Culture" years when protests against "the Establishment" were the thing. It seemed like an exciting time to be away from home while still being close enough to visit.
In high school, I'd seen some great NFB films (you can see them now, free, on-line). Works by Arthur Lipsett, Very Nice, Nice Nice, and his "21-87", both remarkable short films that every film student should see. Amazing editing made from scraps of films he'd found in the NFB hallways with a kind of organized wild sound that speaks to you with a sardonic twist. In contrast, there were lyrical films like Pas de Deux by Norman McLaren that were strikingly beautiful, very moving, a kind of love song to youthful love, longing and the beauty of the body. McLaren had an aesthetic sense that seemed to go back to classical Greek sculpture. Those NFB films sparked my interest in film.
At Rochdale, I saw interesting experimental films by Ed Emshwiller, an engaged American experimental film artist. Emshwiller's films broke new ground for me because they combined humour, critique, satiric sketches, absurdist and surrealist leaps...all of which I enjoyed without knowing their history in art. That's when I got really interested in experimental films and thought of making some. I saw myself first as a social documentary photographer but I began to see that my concerns could also be expressed in film. Though I hadn't studied art formally I knew what I liked. I was looking to the great photographers in history and admiring their ability to move people simply with images.
My documentary photography certainly influenced both the content and style of my filmmaking. My experimental films were rooted in the power of photography and reflected the social issues I sensed all around me. Mostly, they were visual essays with few words that relied almost exclusively on the emotional impact of images in camera sequences. Then I'd mesh the sound into a unified whole. I saw the two approaches in my work as complimentary but different whether it was a documentary essay or an experimental film. Each fed the other formally and in terms of content.
After you studied English Literature and Bunuel’s Spanish Cinema at the University of Toronto, you attended Rochdale College. When did that happen? And what was your major at Rochdale College? CFMDC [Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre] was found in Rochdale College in 1967. How would you define the environment and cultural atmosphere in Rochdale at that time and the influences that emerged from the CFMDC?
You've got the facts backwards. First I quit grade 13 high school and went to Rochdale College in 1969-70. Six years later, I got in to the University of Toronto and took a couple of courses on Bunuel's films in the Spanish department (because of his transgressive cinema) and a course with Joe Medjuck, then editor of the film magazine Take One, called Conventions and Anti-conventions in the Cinema or something like that. Both courses fed my interest in film and the forms that alternative, independent films could take.
During my first year at Rochdale College, I met a lot of creative artists, writers, performers and freethinkers who were questioning the status quo. It was a kind of Lab for following your interests in poetry, philosophy, alternative forms of consciousness raising with drugs or meditation...it was a very open atmosphere of experimentation within a very inclusive community that mixed all sorts of people from various backgrounds into one collective hope for the future. It was exciting to be there before it became known as a "drug haven".
Rochdale College taught me that you could gather people together around an idea and "just do it"...well before the Nike ad. CFMDC and the Co-Op were already there when I got there and I hung around to see how I could be part of those groups. I had no formal film or art education per se and I read a lot about Eastern mysticism, the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsburg and screwed around trying to find out whom I was and what I wanted to do with my life other than photography and writing. That's when I helped start IMPRESSIONS magazine with other photographers. A quarterly journal of Canadian photography that I published and printed at Coach House Press behind Rochdale College. I also took one night course at Ryerson. There was about 60 of us in the lecture hall all squeezed in, looking down at an instructor showing us how to spool a roll of film into a Bolex. By chance, I met a Spanish speaking Jesuit priest from Argentina who also took the course and I interpreted for him. He had his own Bolex. It was because he lent me his Bolex that I was able to shoot both Black and White/Noir et Blanc (1971) and L'ennui (Les Reves d'un Somnambule) (1973). It was a time when things seemed to happen and you met people along the way and you went with it.
Through my photo essay, Facade, on female impersonators, I met Joe Fletcher, the dancer in Black and White (1971), who was also an impersonator. My approach to all this was just do it. I learn mostly by doing things like my own films and photographs and also slowly by meeting other photographers and filmmakers as I went along.
Were you ever a part of CFMDC, or the Toronto Filmmakers Co-op in the early days [during the late 60s to early 70s]?
Most of us were members of both but I was wary of organizations in general. I'd dropped out of high school and I remember serving on one of their boards but I can't remember which. It's a blur of meetings and motions passed, etc. etc. I just wanted to make things and not have to sit in a room to vote for things to happen like most restless young men.
The Co-op's aim was to provide equipment for people who wanted to make films, though it didn't quite work out that way at first. The guy who handled all the equipment was very finicky about who got it. He was the guardian of that precious equipment but nobody ever took it out it seemed. It was funny and frustrating at the same time. I never did use Co-op equipment from what I remember. Thanks to my Jesuit priest friend, it was his Bolex that helped me make my first two experimental films. On the other hand, one great thing the Co-op did was to organize monthly film screenings in Rochdale and it's there that I saw some films that inspired me.
Also, the magazine Cinema Canada was down the hall from CFMDC in Rochdale. They would write about young Canadian films and filmmakers with reviews of Co-Op screenings. That boosted our confidence and I'm sure that's how I met other filmmakers from the Co-Op screenings and Cinema Canada. Slowly they [CFMDC and Toronto Filmmakers Co-op] became bigger and moved to Jarvis street and that's when I got more involved on their Board where I met Rick Hancox and Keith Lock and Jim Anderson. We were also involved later with the Funnel, a kind of artist collective and working co-op that began in the late 80's.
Is Rochdale College 1970 your first film? Would you explain how you came to do Rochdale College 1970, and is it a commissioned film?
Black and White/Noir et Blanc (1971) is my first film. Rochdale College 1970 came after and it is a record of that year's activities, not when it was finished. It was not a commissioned film. I'd lived in Rochdale for a year before, so I knew Rochdale. I knew what was going on and the people who were interesting there, so I kind of introduced the idea and followed it through to capture the spirit of idealism at Rochdale. I sent a proposal to get the NFB to produce it but they rejected it so I gathered people together and we did it ourselves.
Lance Carlson, a cameraman who I befriended really helped produce the film. I had another friend, Robert Sherman, who also helped. The three of us found all the money we could but it's thanks to Lance that it got done. Lance had his own Arriflex camera and offered to shoot it for free and I had my friend's Bolex. Lance was working with a small film production company and knew a female film editor who helped finish the film in their offices. We made the film from some old black and white film ends that the production company gave us.
None of us got paid for doing it. We shot it on our own over a long weekend. We hoped that someone might like it enough to buy it and show it on TV to counteract all the bad press that Rochdale was getting, though that never happened. By then CFMDC was up and running, so a copy went in their collection and the Toronto Public Library bought a copy for theirs. The National Archives of Canada have the original negatives, which they've stored since then.
Rochdale College (1970) was my first sync/sound documentary film while doing the sound on a Nagra [recorder]. Having lived in Rochdale, I felt it needed to be done, and the NFB refusal only helped to fuel my determination to do it. So, there you have it.
Would you explain how you came to do Black & White? What were you trying to say with this film? Were you speaking to any other films at the time?
Bendahan: That's an interesting question. It's not one we ask ourselves when we're working on something. Who knows how we're influenced by other people's films or what we've seen that's moved us enough so that something sneaks into our own work? At the time, I didn't believe I'd seen anything that resembled what I was doing. But in retrospect, I'm sure Norman McLaren's famous NFB film Pas de Deux influenced my choices. Pas de Deux showed a white couple of ballet dancers dancing in a black room with optically re-printing sequences to accentuate their movements and a classical music score. Stunningly beautiful and it won lots of awards internationally. I'd loved the film and wrote about it in our high-school film club newsletter.
In Black and White/Noir et Blanc, you have a naked black male dancer in a white room with white noise as the soundtrack. It seems almost obvious now that I was "speaking to" McLaren's film though I had no idea then. It's more than a funny coincidence too that McLaren's film slowed down the dancers by optically re-printing sections whereas in Black and White variable speeds in the Bolex accelerated Joe's movements. Is it coincidence? Maybe. I don't know. But it does suggest an influence no matter how obtuse. Does that make my film a critique of Pas de Deux? A Spoof? A response to it? Though the similarities are there, back then I had no idea how McLaren's classic film may have inspired my transgressive revision in Black and White/Noir et Blanc.
What I can tell you is how it was made, not what it means. Having met Joe Fletcher from my work on Facade, he accepted my idea of making a film with him. When he came to my studio, we talked about improvising an idea. Since I didn't want the film fixed in a particular time, I asked him to dance naked rather than wear his street clothes. That was one of the ideas I had. So, we began with me using the Bolex while he danced. Every shot the Bolex spring unwound, I'd have to stop and rewind it to take the next shot. That's how we improvised this dance between him (the camera) and me.
As the film progressed, he would move approach and retreat from the camera. My fascination and my ambivalence as to what we were doing can easily be felt, as one sees the film. I was intrigued by the taboo of a naked black man dancing in a very sensual and sexual way in an empty white room...something risky and challenging, and that's a good sign that something new is being born. It felt weird and scary but we continued. At the time, if there was a simple message it was that the world we live in is White, and most of the people who aren't white don't feel particularly welcomed. That sense of marginality was something we'd both felt. I'd come from a different culture and background into a Canadian context just as Joe had.
Here's the clincher. When I got the film back, I realized I'd ruined some of the shoot because I'd placed the lenses on the Bolex lens ring improperly. It was a parallax Bolex not an SLR so I'd made mistakes and parts of the film showed flecks of light on a black background. It shocked and disillusioned me since I viewed the footage as a failure. But with every mistake there is something to be learned. It dawned on me that the white reflections in the black sections of the film were in fact the white reflections off Joe's black body as he'd been dancing. They were of him, but a refracted version of him. So, it occurred to me that this too was part of his portrait and I'd include it in the film. It was a representation that was both abstract and apt. So the mistake became a new way of seeing Joe as light, as energy and a presence.
To extend my simplistic metaphor, I used white noise as the actual soundtrack for the film. That kind of conceptual leap came from seeing other similar ploys in artist's films. In my mind it cinched the idea elegantly. The feeze frame ending of the film evolved from the shooting itself. At one point, Joe approaches the camera with a fixed, confrontational stare as if mocking the whole process. That's where I felt the film had to end in a freeze frame. His gaze back at me, the voyeur watching him, gave the film an immediacy I couldn't ignore. By questioning my privileged gaze as the filmmaker, Joe had reclaimed a sense of his own agency that I'd denied him up until then. I could not have verbalized these things at the time but I felt what his stare meant. Simultaneously, his fixed gaze connected us in a way that I hadn't expected. It was surprising and strangely exhilarating. It bonded us in a real exchange by breaking the myth of the detached observer objectively viewing things from afar. It showed his frustration too at being objectified.
Historically, the film was shot in the aftermath of a horrific period in the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. that had been waged against the southern Blacks on black and white TVs; the beatings in SELMA, the water hosing of demonstrators in Birmingham and the killing of Martin Luther King Jr had happened. I felt an affinity with that movement both as a documentary photographer and as part of a Canadian minority whose own identity seemed invisible and dismissed. Though I was still too young to understand the complexity of their struggle, making Black and White/Noir et Blanc (1971) came from a sense of solidarity with those indigenous, visible minorities as they struggled for recognition, respect and their rights.
That's how the film got made but I can only tell you what it meant to me. It taught me a lot about the inherent challenges of filmmaking. When it was shown at a Co-op screening in Rochdale College, the audience fell silent, as if I'd lobbed a grenade in their midst. No one seemed to know what I'd meant by it though it seemed perfectly obvious to me. I'd begun to identify with those displaced histories, with the marginal minorities in society who'd been deprived of their rights. The film was a visual manifesto of my solidarity. And I felt like a fish out of water as a young immigrant filmmaker in Toronto.
Yes, well I'm not Canadian, but I'm living in Canada right now, I know that feeling.
I came to Canada in 1957 from a Morocco torn by the throes of an independence movement that threatened French and Jewish citizens with bombings in cafes and kidnappings. Canadian society had no idea how privileged it was compared to that kind of chaos. Most of the Toronto filmmakers I knew were nice white Anglo Saxons and I didn't really understand what they were doing. I mean they made nice films but they didn't move me in any way. I was looking for Canadian films that could reflect on larger issues. And I couldn't have made a funny little Canadian English film if I'd tried.
So it’s a film about Identity?
Yeah, most of my films I think deal with identity and displacement. Whether it's in Canada or in Quebec, they theme of identity, diasporic memory and the scars of hidden histories are always present.
How would you describe or define your style or visual aesthetic in your early films, such as Rochdale College 1970, Black & White, and Final News Report (1973)? And how significant were these early films in your filmmaking career?
My experimental films were raw, instinctive, direct, conceptually experimental, reflexive, socially critical and using the combined senses of one's emotions and intuitions. In contrast, Rochdale College 1970, is not innovative in any real way because I wanted to present a Youth Culture still trying to define itself at a time when most people ignored its claims. Those early films came easy to me. When you're young, everything is either black or white [laughs].
Did any Canadian filmmakers have influences on your early film works, or were there any Canadian filmmakers you were particularly interested in during the late 60s early 70s?
I liked Morley Markson's politically engaged films and the early short films of Martin Lavut, both Toronto filmmakers. They seemed original, interesting, and engaging. They challenged me. I'd keep an eye out for their screenings. I liked Don Owen's Nobody Waved Good-bye (1964), an early Canadian independent feature. Since I spoke and understood French, some French Canadian experimental films by Quebecois Jean-Pierre Lefebvre intrigued me. The French NFB had produced them. And, of course, the early Norman McLaren and Arthur Lipsett films. Those two filmmakers spoke to me directly and they influenced how I was to work later on with respect and admiration for them.
But on the whole, I always felt that Canadian cinema was too conventional. Later on, other than a handful of American experimental filmmakers like Yvonne Rainer and Kenneth Anger, I was drawn to European filmmakers like Antonioni, Goddard, and Russian experimental films after the revolution, Pasolini, Bertolucci and Bergman. It was impossible to see their films early on.
In the meantime, I liked Snow's films and their focus on the limits of the medium, films about how film trips up perception playing with the language of film. They were interesting on a conceptual level but they left me cold, except for Wavelength which I loved. Generally, coming to film from documentary photography, I didn't choose to make art films per se. My idea was to use film to question viewer's beliefs and expectations, to open up a space about things that mattered without providing easy answers. Very utilitarian, very pragmatic though the results often veered from that objective.
How would you evaluate Toronto or Ontario independent films during the late 60s to early 70s? Were there any characteristics you feel were distinctly “Toronto”? And how would you evaluate the roles of CFMDC and Toronto Filmmaker Co-op in developing Toronto independent filmmaking during that time period?
Most of the early experimental films made in Toronto and Ontario had a sense of humour about them, a kind of whimsy that I found entertaining. Clever though not particularly challenging. They wanted to please their viewers in ways I didn't. The need to please anyone in particular seemed irrelevant to me. As a young filmmaker, most of the films I saw seemed to be missing the point of a lot of peoples' experiences. In that respect, I felt alienated from the filmmaking scene going on, though I couldn't express why at the time. I joined the organizations but I was always wary while supporting the work of filmmakers I knew.
The one thing the Co-op did exceptionally well was to help filmmakers gather together into a community at their regular monthly CO-OP screenings. That's important for any creative movement. They would entice filmmakers to come and talk about their work. We felt less isolated and screenings were well attended, the only alternative to what we saw in movie theatres. The same thing was true of Cinema Canada who wrote reviews of those early film screenings. That encouraged us too because there was an interest. As for equipment, it was there to stare at but few got to use it.
Could you talk about what was the relationship between CFMDC and Toronto Filmmaker Co-op during that time period?
There were a lot of the same people in both. It was just the idea, the feeling that something was happening and each of us had to do something to make things progress. We were starting to put things in place that we needed and all of us had some input.
Was it a competitive relationship between those two organizations or more a friendly relationship?
I think co-operation existed but with a bit of competition, because each group had to be different in its own way and they were competing for members and funding too. There were certain personalities that were competitive. I remember some heated discussions. Generally, it was a healthy kind of competition between the filmmakers.
How are you preserving your films now? Are they preserved by you or preserved by an institution?
Most of my original negatives are kept in archives either at the Cinémathèque Québécoise or the National Archives in Ottawa. I'm considering digitizing works in various formats for the future when 16mm film will either disappear or will not be screened anymore. I'm doing research in this area now and any suggestions would help. I'm glad there's a new program at Ryerson that looks at these issues seriously and trains people to preserve earlier works. It's an important part of our cultural history.
Bendahan: I started as a photographer well before I'd quit high school in the late sixties. Then I moved into Rochdale College because it seemed like an interesting place to be during those "Youth Culture" years when protests against "the Establishment" were the thing. It seemed like an exciting time to be away from home while still being close enough to visit.
In high school, I'd seen some great NFB films (you can see them now, free, on-line). Works by Arthur Lipsett, Very Nice, Nice Nice, and his "21-87", both remarkable short films that every film student should see. Amazing editing made from scraps of films he'd found in the NFB hallways with a kind of organized wild sound that speaks to you with a sardonic twist. In contrast, there were lyrical films like Pas de Deux by Norman McLaren that were strikingly beautiful, very moving, a kind of love song to youthful love, longing and the beauty of the body. McLaren had an aesthetic sense that seemed to go back to classical Greek sculpture. Those NFB films sparked my interest in film.
At Rochdale, I saw interesting experimental films by Ed Emshwiller, an engaged American experimental film artist. Emshwiller's films broke new ground for me because they combined humour, critique, satiric sketches, absurdist and surrealist leaps...all of which I enjoyed without knowing their history in art. That's when I got really interested in experimental films and thought of making some. I saw myself first as a social documentary photographer but I began to see that my concerns could also be expressed in film. Though I hadn't studied art formally I knew what I liked. I was looking to the great photographers in history and admiring their ability to move people simply with images.
My documentary photography certainly influenced both the content and style of my filmmaking. My experimental films were rooted in the power of photography and reflected the social issues I sensed all around me. Mostly, they were visual essays with few words that relied almost exclusively on the emotional impact of images in camera sequences. Then I'd mesh the sound into a unified whole. I saw the two approaches in my work as complimentary but different whether it was a documentary essay or an experimental film. Each fed the other formally and in terms of content.
After you studied English Literature and Bunuel’s Spanish Cinema at the University of Toronto, you attended Rochdale College. When did that happen? And what was your major at Rochdale College? CFMDC [Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre] was found in Rochdale College in 1967. How would you define the environment and cultural atmosphere in Rochdale at that time and the influences that emerged from the CFMDC?
You've got the facts backwards. First I quit grade 13 high school and went to Rochdale College in 1969-70. Six years later, I got in to the University of Toronto and took a couple of courses on Bunuel's films in the Spanish department (because of his transgressive cinema) and a course with Joe Medjuck, then editor of the film magazine Take One, called Conventions and Anti-conventions in the Cinema or something like that. Both courses fed my interest in film and the forms that alternative, independent films could take.
During my first year at Rochdale College, I met a lot of creative artists, writers, performers and freethinkers who were questioning the status quo. It was a kind of Lab for following your interests in poetry, philosophy, alternative forms of consciousness raising with drugs or meditation...it was a very open atmosphere of experimentation within a very inclusive community that mixed all sorts of people from various backgrounds into one collective hope for the future. It was exciting to be there before it became known as a "drug haven".
Rochdale College taught me that you could gather people together around an idea and "just do it"...well before the Nike ad. CFMDC and the Co-Op were already there when I got there and I hung around to see how I could be part of those groups. I had no formal film or art education per se and I read a lot about Eastern mysticism, the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsburg and screwed around trying to find out whom I was and what I wanted to do with my life other than photography and writing. That's when I helped start IMPRESSIONS magazine with other photographers. A quarterly journal of Canadian photography that I published and printed at Coach House Press behind Rochdale College. I also took one night course at Ryerson. There was about 60 of us in the lecture hall all squeezed in, looking down at an instructor showing us how to spool a roll of film into a Bolex. By chance, I met a Spanish speaking Jesuit priest from Argentina who also took the course and I interpreted for him. He had his own Bolex. It was because he lent me his Bolex that I was able to shoot both Black and White/Noir et Blanc (1971) and L'ennui (Les Reves d'un Somnambule) (1973). It was a time when things seemed to happen and you met people along the way and you went with it.
Through my photo essay, Facade, on female impersonators, I met Joe Fletcher, the dancer in Black and White (1971), who was also an impersonator. My approach to all this was just do it. I learn mostly by doing things like my own films and photographs and also slowly by meeting other photographers and filmmakers as I went along.
Were you ever a part of CFMDC, or the Toronto Filmmakers Co-op in the early days [during the late 60s to early 70s]?
Most of us were members of both but I was wary of organizations in general. I'd dropped out of high school and I remember serving on one of their boards but I can't remember which. It's a blur of meetings and motions passed, etc. etc. I just wanted to make things and not have to sit in a room to vote for things to happen like most restless young men.
The Co-op's aim was to provide equipment for people who wanted to make films, though it didn't quite work out that way at first. The guy who handled all the equipment was very finicky about who got it. He was the guardian of that precious equipment but nobody ever took it out it seemed. It was funny and frustrating at the same time. I never did use Co-op equipment from what I remember. Thanks to my Jesuit priest friend, it was his Bolex that helped me make my first two experimental films. On the other hand, one great thing the Co-op did was to organize monthly film screenings in Rochdale and it's there that I saw some films that inspired me.
Also, the magazine Cinema Canada was down the hall from CFMDC in Rochdale. They would write about young Canadian films and filmmakers with reviews of Co-Op screenings. That boosted our confidence and I'm sure that's how I met other filmmakers from the Co-Op screenings and Cinema Canada. Slowly they [CFMDC and Toronto Filmmakers Co-op] became bigger and moved to Jarvis street and that's when I got more involved on their Board where I met Rick Hancox and Keith Lock and Jim Anderson. We were also involved later with the Funnel, a kind of artist collective and working co-op that began in the late 80's.
Is Rochdale College 1970 your first film? Would you explain how you came to do Rochdale College 1970, and is it a commissioned film?
Black and White/Noir et Blanc (1971) is my first film. Rochdale College 1970 came after and it is a record of that year's activities, not when it was finished. It was not a commissioned film. I'd lived in Rochdale for a year before, so I knew Rochdale. I knew what was going on and the people who were interesting there, so I kind of introduced the idea and followed it through to capture the spirit of idealism at Rochdale. I sent a proposal to get the NFB to produce it but they rejected it so I gathered people together and we did it ourselves.
Lance Carlson, a cameraman who I befriended really helped produce the film. I had another friend, Robert Sherman, who also helped. The three of us found all the money we could but it's thanks to Lance that it got done. Lance had his own Arriflex camera and offered to shoot it for free and I had my friend's Bolex. Lance was working with a small film production company and knew a female film editor who helped finish the film in their offices. We made the film from some old black and white film ends that the production company gave us.
None of us got paid for doing it. We shot it on our own over a long weekend. We hoped that someone might like it enough to buy it and show it on TV to counteract all the bad press that Rochdale was getting, though that never happened. By then CFMDC was up and running, so a copy went in their collection and the Toronto Public Library bought a copy for theirs. The National Archives of Canada have the original negatives, which they've stored since then.
Rochdale College (1970) was my first sync/sound documentary film while doing the sound on a Nagra [recorder]. Having lived in Rochdale, I felt it needed to be done, and the NFB refusal only helped to fuel my determination to do it. So, there you have it.
Would you explain how you came to do Black & White? What were you trying to say with this film? Were you speaking to any other films at the time?
Bendahan: That's an interesting question. It's not one we ask ourselves when we're working on something. Who knows how we're influenced by other people's films or what we've seen that's moved us enough so that something sneaks into our own work? At the time, I didn't believe I'd seen anything that resembled what I was doing. But in retrospect, I'm sure Norman McLaren's famous NFB film Pas de Deux influenced my choices. Pas de Deux showed a white couple of ballet dancers dancing in a black room with optically re-printing sequences to accentuate their movements and a classical music score. Stunningly beautiful and it won lots of awards internationally. I'd loved the film and wrote about it in our high-school film club newsletter.
In Black and White/Noir et Blanc, you have a naked black male dancer in a white room with white noise as the soundtrack. It seems almost obvious now that I was "speaking to" McLaren's film though I had no idea then. It's more than a funny coincidence too that McLaren's film slowed down the dancers by optically re-printing sections whereas in Black and White variable speeds in the Bolex accelerated Joe's movements. Is it coincidence? Maybe. I don't know. But it does suggest an influence no matter how obtuse. Does that make my film a critique of Pas de Deux? A Spoof? A response to it? Though the similarities are there, back then I had no idea how McLaren's classic film may have inspired my transgressive revision in Black and White/Noir et Blanc.
What I can tell you is how it was made, not what it means. Having met Joe Fletcher from my work on Facade, he accepted my idea of making a film with him. When he came to my studio, we talked about improvising an idea. Since I didn't want the film fixed in a particular time, I asked him to dance naked rather than wear his street clothes. That was one of the ideas I had. So, we began with me using the Bolex while he danced. Every shot the Bolex spring unwound, I'd have to stop and rewind it to take the next shot. That's how we improvised this dance between him (the camera) and me.
As the film progressed, he would move approach and retreat from the camera. My fascination and my ambivalence as to what we were doing can easily be felt, as one sees the film. I was intrigued by the taboo of a naked black man dancing in a very sensual and sexual way in an empty white room...something risky and challenging, and that's a good sign that something new is being born. It felt weird and scary but we continued. At the time, if there was a simple message it was that the world we live in is White, and most of the people who aren't white don't feel particularly welcomed. That sense of marginality was something we'd both felt. I'd come from a different culture and background into a Canadian context just as Joe had.
Here's the clincher. When I got the film back, I realized I'd ruined some of the shoot because I'd placed the lenses on the Bolex lens ring improperly. It was a parallax Bolex not an SLR so I'd made mistakes and parts of the film showed flecks of light on a black background. It shocked and disillusioned me since I viewed the footage as a failure. But with every mistake there is something to be learned. It dawned on me that the white reflections in the black sections of the film were in fact the white reflections off Joe's black body as he'd been dancing. They were of him, but a refracted version of him. So, it occurred to me that this too was part of his portrait and I'd include it in the film. It was a representation that was both abstract and apt. So the mistake became a new way of seeing Joe as light, as energy and a presence.
To extend my simplistic metaphor, I used white noise as the actual soundtrack for the film. That kind of conceptual leap came from seeing other similar ploys in artist's films. In my mind it cinched the idea elegantly. The feeze frame ending of the film evolved from the shooting itself. At one point, Joe approaches the camera with a fixed, confrontational stare as if mocking the whole process. That's where I felt the film had to end in a freeze frame. His gaze back at me, the voyeur watching him, gave the film an immediacy I couldn't ignore. By questioning my privileged gaze as the filmmaker, Joe had reclaimed a sense of his own agency that I'd denied him up until then. I could not have verbalized these things at the time but I felt what his stare meant. Simultaneously, his fixed gaze connected us in a way that I hadn't expected. It was surprising and strangely exhilarating. It bonded us in a real exchange by breaking the myth of the detached observer objectively viewing things from afar. It showed his frustration too at being objectified.
Historically, the film was shot in the aftermath of a horrific period in the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. that had been waged against the southern Blacks on black and white TVs; the beatings in SELMA, the water hosing of demonstrators in Birmingham and the killing of Martin Luther King Jr had happened. I felt an affinity with that movement both as a documentary photographer and as part of a Canadian minority whose own identity seemed invisible and dismissed. Though I was still too young to understand the complexity of their struggle, making Black and White/Noir et Blanc (1971) came from a sense of solidarity with those indigenous, visible minorities as they struggled for recognition, respect and their rights.
That's how the film got made but I can only tell you what it meant to me. It taught me a lot about the inherent challenges of filmmaking. When it was shown at a Co-op screening in Rochdale College, the audience fell silent, as if I'd lobbed a grenade in their midst. No one seemed to know what I'd meant by it though it seemed perfectly obvious to me. I'd begun to identify with those displaced histories, with the marginal minorities in society who'd been deprived of their rights. The film was a visual manifesto of my solidarity. And I felt like a fish out of water as a young immigrant filmmaker in Toronto.
Yes, well I'm not Canadian, but I'm living in Canada right now, I know that feeling.
I came to Canada in 1957 from a Morocco torn by the throes of an independence movement that threatened French and Jewish citizens with bombings in cafes and kidnappings. Canadian society had no idea how privileged it was compared to that kind of chaos. Most of the Toronto filmmakers I knew were nice white Anglo Saxons and I didn't really understand what they were doing. I mean they made nice films but they didn't move me in any way. I was looking for Canadian films that could reflect on larger issues. And I couldn't have made a funny little Canadian English film if I'd tried.
So it’s a film about Identity?
Yeah, most of my films I think deal with identity and displacement. Whether it's in Canada or in Quebec, they theme of identity, diasporic memory and the scars of hidden histories are always present.
How would you describe or define your style or visual aesthetic in your early films, such as Rochdale College 1970, Black & White, and Final News Report (1973)? And how significant were these early films in your filmmaking career?
My experimental films were raw, instinctive, direct, conceptually experimental, reflexive, socially critical and using the combined senses of one's emotions and intuitions. In contrast, Rochdale College 1970, is not innovative in any real way because I wanted to present a Youth Culture still trying to define itself at a time when most people ignored its claims. Those early films came easy to me. When you're young, everything is either black or white [laughs].
Did any Canadian filmmakers have influences on your early film works, or were there any Canadian filmmakers you were particularly interested in during the late 60s early 70s?
I liked Morley Markson's politically engaged films and the early short films of Martin Lavut, both Toronto filmmakers. They seemed original, interesting, and engaging. They challenged me. I'd keep an eye out for their screenings. I liked Don Owen's Nobody Waved Good-bye (1964), an early Canadian independent feature. Since I spoke and understood French, some French Canadian experimental films by Quebecois Jean-Pierre Lefebvre intrigued me. The French NFB had produced them. And, of course, the early Norman McLaren and Arthur Lipsett films. Those two filmmakers spoke to me directly and they influenced how I was to work later on with respect and admiration for them.
But on the whole, I always felt that Canadian cinema was too conventional. Later on, other than a handful of American experimental filmmakers like Yvonne Rainer and Kenneth Anger, I was drawn to European filmmakers like Antonioni, Goddard, and Russian experimental films after the revolution, Pasolini, Bertolucci and Bergman. It was impossible to see their films early on.
In the meantime, I liked Snow's films and their focus on the limits of the medium, films about how film trips up perception playing with the language of film. They were interesting on a conceptual level but they left me cold, except for Wavelength which I loved. Generally, coming to film from documentary photography, I didn't choose to make art films per se. My idea was to use film to question viewer's beliefs and expectations, to open up a space about things that mattered without providing easy answers. Very utilitarian, very pragmatic though the results often veered from that objective.
How would you evaluate Toronto or Ontario independent films during the late 60s to early 70s? Were there any characteristics you feel were distinctly “Toronto”? And how would you evaluate the roles of CFMDC and Toronto Filmmaker Co-op in developing Toronto independent filmmaking during that time period?
Most of the early experimental films made in Toronto and Ontario had a sense of humour about them, a kind of whimsy that I found entertaining. Clever though not particularly challenging. They wanted to please their viewers in ways I didn't. The need to please anyone in particular seemed irrelevant to me. As a young filmmaker, most of the films I saw seemed to be missing the point of a lot of peoples' experiences. In that respect, I felt alienated from the filmmaking scene going on, though I couldn't express why at the time. I joined the organizations but I was always wary while supporting the work of filmmakers I knew.
The one thing the Co-op did exceptionally well was to help filmmakers gather together into a community at their regular monthly CO-OP screenings. That's important for any creative movement. They would entice filmmakers to come and talk about their work. We felt less isolated and screenings were well attended, the only alternative to what we saw in movie theatres. The same thing was true of Cinema Canada who wrote reviews of those early film screenings. That encouraged us too because there was an interest. As for equipment, it was there to stare at but few got to use it.
Could you talk about what was the relationship between CFMDC and Toronto Filmmaker Co-op during that time period?
There were a lot of the same people in both. It was just the idea, the feeling that something was happening and each of us had to do something to make things progress. We were starting to put things in place that we needed and all of us had some input.
Was it a competitive relationship between those two organizations or more a friendly relationship?
I think co-operation existed but with a bit of competition, because each group had to be different in its own way and they were competing for members and funding too. There were certain personalities that were competitive. I remember some heated discussions. Generally, it was a healthy kind of competition between the filmmakers.
How are you preserving your films now? Are they preserved by you or preserved by an institution?
Most of my original negatives are kept in archives either at the Cinémathèque Québécoise or the National Archives in Ottawa. I'm considering digitizing works in various formats for the future when 16mm film will either disappear or will not be screened anymore. I'm doing research in this area now and any suggestions would help. I'm glad there's a new program at Ryerson that looks at these issues seriously and trains people to preserve earlier works. It's an important part of our cultural history.