these words

My success is due to PCVS

2011-09-21T01:09:00.004-04:00

Below is a letter I recently sent to the trustees of the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board regarding the possible closure of my former high school, PCVS:

Dear Trustees,

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of attending Peterborough's ReFrame International Film Festival, a festival which grows bigger and better every year. The festival brings some of the most entertaining and thoughtful movies that have been made recently to the city, pairing them with groups in the community who have concerns related to the stories on screen. It also brings filmmakers from around the world, to present their films to local audiences who would otherwise have to travel long distances to see them. This festival is one-of-a-kind, and brings incalculable benefits to the citizens of Peterborough and its surrounding area, including unique opportunities for discussion and community engagement. We should be very proud to have such a festival in our city.

PCVS is also one-of-a-kind, and I should know. I believe that my own success is in no small way a result of my time there. Since attending PCVS from 1997-2002, and graduating from its unique Integrated Arts Program, I have been blessed with the opportunity to study film at York University with some of Canada's most talented filmmakers. After achieving my BFA, I worked on several important documentary films, like Weather Report (directed by Brenda Longfellow), Invisible City (directed by Oscar nominee Hubert Davis), Prosecutor (directed by Barry Stevens), Jackpot (directed by Alan Black), and The Guantanamo Trap (directed by Thomas Wallner), to name just a few. Several of these have won or been nominated for awards at major Canadian festivals. This September, my most recent work, editing a dramatic feature film, was selected to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film, a mother-daughter story entitled i am a good person/i am a bad person, has been widely praised by both critics and audiences, with all 3 public screenings at the festival sold out.

In the years since attending PCVS, I have also written and directed my own films, which have played at different venues around the world, and I've been invited to speak or present films and teach workshops at home and internationally (including at the ReFrame Festival). In 2010 I was invited to be a Visiting Fellow at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, to work with a leading political philosopher on a series of films about the question of what it means to be a human being. Without exaggeration, I can say that my experiences at PCVS – academic and otherwise – were what prepared me for such a career. My early exposure to the arts in a vibrant downtown setting (with talented students from across the Peterborough region) gave me the confidence to try things that I would never have tried otherwise, and sensitized me to the needs and perspectives of others, essential for telling stories on film.

In my time at PCVS, I wrote the first draft of the constitution for the then-brand-new student art collective, which ten years later is apparently still going strong, and which I have been told has "changed the landscape of the school" with creative art, activism, and fundraising projects. Similarly, PCVS has changed the landscape of our city and region for the better over the years. I believe that this is a result of its location, its historic architecture, and its unique traditions and character as an institution. These things have the power not just to change Peterborough, but to change the world.

In grade 12, I traveled to The Hague, Netherlands, with the Model United Nations class, to propose and debate solutions to the some of the world's gravest problems, including water, health, genocide and global warming. We were one of only two public schools in the world that sent a delegation to the conference (THIMUN), the largest conference of its kind. Several years later, I returned to The Netherlands to present Prosecutor, a film about the International Criminal Court and its chief prosecutor, who has the responsibility of prosecuting war crimes and crimes against humanity, to an audience of thousands at the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam. The connections to my high school experiences are obvious. Such experiences could hardly have been possible without the perseverance and dedication of the staff and students at PCVS, who fundraised, lobbied and spent long hours studying the nuances of global issues and international relations. And neither could they have been possible without the outward-looking nature of the school's culture itself. I strongly believe the kind of history and outlook that enables such programs as the Integrated Arts Program and Model United Nations class to exist and thrive could not easily be replaced or reproduced in another setting. Indeed, I believe PCVS itself is a model for other schools around the world. It is the fragile product of an intangible, but real, atmosphere of cooperation, adventure and respect, which others could do well to study and learn from.

Since graduating from PCVS, I have remained in touch with my fellow graduates, some of whom have staggeringly successful careers in the arts and other areas. People like Serena Ryder, the Juno-winning singer-songwriter; Jared Raab, an acclaimed young filmmaker; Dan Fortin, who has toured across Canada with his jazz group; and many, many others. All of us still keep in close contact, trade gossip and ideas, and collaborate on each other's projects on a regular basis. And we frequently come home to share what we have learned with the local community.

I strongly believe that my own career, and those of my friends, would not have been possible without the unique culture that existed at PCVS, along with the support and encouragement of the teachers and administration at that school. The lasting, irreplaceable bonds that are created between students and teachers there, and the rich history that informs those bonds, are directly responsible for the success of its graduates.

In my opinion, without PCVS, our community would lose one of its most precious and important resources, as well as one of its most effective ways to make an impact on the world. One that, crucially, could never be replaced.

We should do everything in our power to preserve it.

Sincerely,

Chris Wiseman

Filmmaker & PCVS graduate

The Enchanted Wanderer

2010-09-11T04:58:00.009-04:00

…

“Well, and what adventures did you have while living with Khan Agashimola?”

“I suffered worse and worse trials and tribulations.”

“But you didn’t perish?”

“No, I didn’t perish.”

“Won’t you tell us what further trials you had to undergo with Khan Agashimola?”

“Gladly, gentlemen.”

(from The Enchanted Wanderer, by Nikolai Leskov, p.110)

The presence of possibility

2010-08-23T00:24:00.029-04:00

"No Heaven" by John Scott

In his famous collection of poems Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), the French poet Charles Baudelaire describes, with his characteristic candor, a brief encounter with a stranger in whose presence he senses a profound, yet profoundly fleeting, possibility of romantic involvement:

The traffic roared around me, deafening!

Tall, slender, in mourning - noble grief -

a woman passed, and with a jewelled hand

gathered up her black embroidered hem;

stately yet lithe, as if a statue walked . . .

And trembling like a fool, I drank from eyes

as ashen as the clouds before a gale

the grace that beckons and the joy that kills.

We might anticipate where this is going, especially those of us who appreciate a good film noir. However, in this case, the high-flown, maybe deadly, romance, has hardly even a chance to be imagined in the "deafening" city.

And so Baudelaire writes, in terms at once epic and tragic:

Lightning . . . then darkness! Lovely fugitive

whose glance has brought me back to life! But where

is life - not this side of eternity?

Elsewhere! Too far, too late, or never at all!

Of me you know nothing, I nothing of you - you

whom I might have loved and who knew that too!

(Charles Baudelaire, "In Passing" from Les Fleurs Du Mal)

Baudelaire describes his experience of possibility stillborn in some of the most magnificent prose poetry – poetry that was ahead of its time in 1857. But what stands out to me is just how ordinary such a "passing" seems, in spite of its incredible melodrama.

What I mean is that this kind of thing happens thousands of times a day in a modern city (perhaps more in certain cities), though rarely is it expressed so wonderfully, even by those with the talent to do so.*

But what does this admittedly sonorous complaint tell us that we don't know already? Is it more or less just a morbid version of the voyeuristic "missed connections" on craigslist?

In fact, one could easily point out that today, in addition to the roaring traffic, we have uncountable MP3 players, phones and iThings, or "I" things, that make Baudelaire's quest for the "non-I", the other – which quest he celebrates in his essay "The Painter of Modern Life" – that much more challenging.

Ironically, of course, what these devices promise is that we will always be "connected." So connected that you can instantly transmit a missed connection to the entire world, or break up with a significant other through SMS, "in passing".

Without being fatalistic about it (and no poet is so fatalistic as Baudelaire), shouldn't we acknowledge that in spite of our great modern technological achievements, there are better and worse ways to be "connected" – better and worse places to search for the presence of possibility, for example, in the possibilities of presence (not telepresence)?

Perhaps that's something we can tell with the help of poetry.

* As Gustave Flaubert said, "What I find so difficult… to write the mediocre beautifully."

A Parable

2010-04-05T02:53:00.007-04:00

By Luke Surl:

An Unbroken Agony

2010-02-01T09:51:00.022-05:00

Among the countless photos that have catalogued Haiti’s suffering after the recent earthquake, this one in particular stands out. It was taken by Julie Glassberg for the New York Times, and is featured at nocaptionneeded.com. The photo is of a man, probably in his mid to late thirties, sitting on a carpeted floor and supported by an office wall and a rack of brochures, eyes closed; a second individual (partly outside the frame) kneeling beside him, holding a paper cup to the man’s lips; and a third person in heels (also partly cut off) standing beside them.

From No Caption Needed:

On the surface, this doesn’t seem to have much to do with Haiti. Nothing is collapsed or broken, and there is no blood, no open wounds or stumps instead of hands or feet, no burning bodies. The photo itself is banal: crowded, cropped, with the only identifiable person slumped in some kind of torpor, all in some vaguely institutional hallway–the image is too familiar in one sense and yet still not adequately informative.

However, a caption was, in fact, found alongside this photo, writes Robert Hariman at NCN, “tucked away in a slide show on the New York region [page of the New York Times website].” It reads: “Alex Alexis collapsed when he learned that his wife and three children had died in the earthquake in Haiti.”

Presumably part of the worldwide Hatian diaspora (although we don't know for sure), and living and working in New York to support his family, Alexis had literally fallen under the weight of the news from home.

Now it is a different photograph… the catastrophe is being measured not only in the damage done at the original scene but also by the long strands of anxiety, pain, and desolation defining the losses felt by loved ones around the globe… It reminds me that this is not only a world where many rush to aid those in need, but also a world where vast disparities in wealth are taken for granted.

Such a picture is indeed “too familiar”: before the earthquake in Haiti, many children in that country were eating mud-cakes to ease their hunger pains, and now, after the earthquake, their suffering is only expected to get worse. After decades of insupportable debt, political violence, occupation and repression by foreign military forces – and now, a devastating earthquake – how can anyone respond to this reality? A reality which one writer has termed “an unbroken agony” for the people of Haiti – and not collapse under its weight, like this man did upon hearing of the deaths of his loved ones.

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2 or 3 things I know about romanticism

2009-12-02T20:57:00.065-05:00

If things come into focus again, it will only be through the rebirth of conscience. Everything follows from this… I must listen. I must look around more than ever. The world – my kin, my twin.

- Jean-Luc Godard, Two or Three Things I Know About Her

In an essay on Romanticism for the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, Nikolas Kompridis writes about the kind of thinking that Heidegger has in mind when he uses the word Andenken:

It is a type of learning that by its very nature cannot, and therefore does not, aim at mastery. It belongs to those transformative processes through which we change our language and our life, our whole sensibility, and that change reposes upon a change in our relationships to one another and to the objects of our knowledge. Indeed, it is just the kind of learning on which art and literature are based, the kind that they facilitate and demand. Andenken, the thinking that responds and recalls, abandons itself to the receptive reflection out of which art and literature arise, and into which they invite us. It is the kind of thinking that brings romanticism into being, bringing into being the kind of writing that responds and recalls – romantic writing.

By "romantic writing", Kompridis means much more than written language alone. He is channeling a view of what it means to live a particular kind of life in modern times – what it means, in other words, to live such a life romantically. To live this way of life according to the "demands" of romanticism, means living it as if it were "an apprenticeship to the truth that around this circle another can be drawn" (Emerson). What does this mean? Well, for one thing, this way of life would take more than just writing, even of a romantic sort – it would mean, among other things, allowing oneself to be enjoined to demands arising outside of the self, letting oneself be affected by and respond to those demands, being responsible to them. It would therefore involve being responsive to that which calls us, receptively open to what Heidegger terms the call of conscience, a call that comes from "outside and beyond me."

Kompridis writes:

[S]ince the "call of conscience" is a call uttered by a voice in expectation of a response, it refers by its very nature to [a]… structure of "call" and "response." "Calling is a mode of language (Rede), and as Heidegger makes clear… "language articulates intelligibility"… Since calling is a mode of language, and since language always involves a speaker and a hearer, it constitutes a relation between speaker and hearer structured by normative expectations… likely to require articulation in words not already at our disposal. These words have to be "found," or they have to "find" us. When we find them, or they find us, we cannot go on as before.

- Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, p.60

For Kompridis, the form of thinking which "responds and recalls" is also that kind of thinking that allows us to reopen the relationships we have with things, with the world, and other people, through a dialogical relationship that places (new) expectations and demands on a "speaker and hearer." Just what those expectations or demands might be, cannot be known in advance. That is what makes this kind of "writing" distinctively romantic, and in turn what makes it a part of – if not the defining possibility of – works of art. However, this sort of possibility is not at our disposal, not something we can predict or control, even though we are nonetheless responsible to it. Thus, after an encounter with a work of art that places some new demand on my experience of it, I "cannot go on as before" – I must change my life, drawing another circle around my experience, and my words, and my world too.

Not in Utopia…

Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world

Of all of us, – the place where, in the end,

We find our happiness, or not at all!

- William Wordsworth, "The Prelude, Book X"

Cinema's consciousness of time #1 (Sans Soleil)

2009-11-30T13:59:00.012-05:00

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.

- Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

In Chris Marker's essay film Sans Soleil (1982), a narrator reads letters she has received from a man, who writes, "I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo." About her friend, she says, "He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time."

Later on, after telling us about a couple who performed a ritual for their cat to "repair the web of time where it had been broken" ("No, she wasn't dead, only run away"), the narrator says:

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

We are eventually taken to a bar in Namidabashi, Japan, where the friend has paid for a round of sake, and then to Africa where we're told of the Sahel:

[I]t's a land that drought seeps into like water into a leaking boat… This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten, with one exception – you win – Japan. My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts; they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.

Then we are shown images from a carnival in impoverished Guinea-Bissau, where animals are "resurrected" in the form of elaborate and colourful masks, and incorporated into a festival with music, dancing and song. Presumably these are meant to be "things that quicken the heart", the "criterion" that is employed by the filmmaker when deciding what to film. "I bow to the economic miracle," writes the friend, "but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations."

Back in Japan, another festival is happening, at night, illuminated by streetlights and the glow of neon signs. This celebration has its own distinctive costumes, music and movement. For a moment, the camera fixes on a close-up of a woman's face, painted ghostly white and wearing a traditional Amigasa straw hat. The sounds of the parade fade away except for a single, reverberating flute, and the woman passes us. For the space of that moment, time stands still, and we are transported backwards into history.

Mission statement (North by Northwest)

2009-11-25T04:35:00.021-05:00

In one way [a film] may be taken as escape (in which case you must keep on escaping); in another way it may be taken as refreshment and recreation (in which case you are free to stop and think).

- Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness

Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time, is that we are still not thinking.

- Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?

In Pursuits of Happiness, Stanley Cavell remarks on classic film star Cary Grant's apparently "photogenetic tendency to thoughtfulness, some inner concentration of intellectual energy" that gives him "the air... of mental preoccupation, of a continuous thoughtfulness that makes him spiritually inaccessible to those around him. This quality of the sage," writes Cavell, "gives to his privacy, his aliveness to himself, a certainty and a depth." This quality often captured Grant at his best, for example in His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story, perhaps two of the best film comedies ever. So it isn't very surprising that Alfred Hitchcock, who made four films with Grant, suggested that he should play Hamlet, or that Grant (according to biographer Geoffrey Wansell), perhaps concerned about what picture it might give audiences, "politely declined."

"In public," writes Wanssell, "Cary Grant still liked to preserve the image that he had so carefully constructed on screen. He certainly did not care to reveal his private insecurities to the cinema audience, and this made him particularly cautious about accepting any role that might hint he was not what he appeared to be." Indeed, Grant was once quoted as saying, "If I give the impression of being a man without a care in the world it is because people with problems always try to give that impression. We are all the opposite of what we appear to be." The man who every woman wanted to be with, and every man wanted to be like, was fatefully "stuck" to his onscreen appearance. Yet when he was asked what it was like in fact "to be Cary Grant," he answered, "How should I know?"

Similar themes of performance, of not being what others take you to be, and being "stuck" with a strange identity, are riddled throughout Hitchcock's North by Northwest, the last film Hitchcock made with Cary Grant. It is perhaps significant that this film, according to Stanley Cavell, was adapted partly from Hamlet, while re-imagined as a murder mystery taking place all over the United States during the Cold War, and with a decidedly different trajectory than the play. Whether Grant ever learned the truth about his part, or whether he had in fact been "played" into taking on the secret role of Hamlet, isn't known. In any case, Grant's "to be" in North by Northwest was clear: "Hitchcock wanted to make his new film the ultimate exploration of the character that he and Cary Grant had perfected: the man to whom terrible things happen but who nevertheless never seems to lose control." (Wansell, Cary Grant: Dark Angel)

Cavell puts it this way: "although in the course of the film he grows big," meaning that he gains the self-control of an adult, "he remains a boy." In other words, he acquires what Baudelaire calls the genius of "childhood recovered at will." Of course, to put it this way is to more or less reverse the problem of being and becoming, or so-called "self-actualization" – allowing oneself to grow as a person, without letting one's identity become fixed or "petrified" (to use Stanley Cavell's terminology), leaving it open (although not too open), like a question, and especially a question a child would ask. Yet isn't this also how we think of art, when we say that it is "open to interpretation", and isn't that how a work of art (or a film) "grows" over time, lending itself to richer and deeper interpretations?

Emerson writes of the "thousand-eyed present" that interprets the past (he could have been talking about a film audience interpreting a film), and Cavell, using another description of Emerson's, said that Cary Grant "is fit to stand the gaze of millions" – even if he was reluctant to open up about his own personal problems. "The Man from Dream City" is the name of a classic essay about Grant, which suggests that film is intimately connected to our dreams – perhaps it is a way of dreaming in public, or a public way of dreaming. The question then, is how one man's problems relate to the dreams (or projections) of millions – and whether film, being an example of one or the other or both, can give us a new way of thinking about the relationship between them.

Cavell's term for philosophy is an "education for grown-ups", and in a recent provocatively-titled essay called "Cinema as a democratic emblem", Alain Badiou writes that, "After the philosophy of cinema must come – is already coming – philosophy as cinema, which," he says, "consequently has the opportunity of being a mass philosophy." If those descriptions are accurate, then what would a cinematic "mass education for grown-ups" be like? Let us first allow that what democracy offers us is the possibility of an education – call it a "self-education" – for human society. And if philosophy and cinema (or the two of them together) can help, what we will have is a democratic society prepared to grow (say in terms of virtue and experience), while preserving the possibility of a collective "childhood recovered at will."

The recovery of a collective childhood is an idea that Nikolas Kompridis links to oral storytelling, specifically to Walter Benjamin's idea of oral storytelling, Furthermore, it is something I think would take all the resources of philosophy and film together – in friendship and society – and it is what the thoughts I publish here will be about. If what I write happens to stimulate reflection and conversation about film and philosophy for others, and especially about the kinds of dreams we can dream in a brave new "public" such as the blogosphere, then these words will have been truly accomplished.

So read on! As somebody very special to me once said, "It's not a waste of time" – to read; to write; to stop and think.

Anything worse than what I do, without knowing what, or why, I have never been able to conceive, and that doesn't surprise me, for I have never tried.

– Samuel Beckett, Molloy