Nightmares of dreams - trajectories towards a City.

"Nightmares of dreams - trajectories towards a City."
Essay by: Rhayne Vermette 
 

I’ve chosen to take you onto a spectral journey towards the fantasy of a city. MY city! A vision, reflected in a curated allegory! A DREAM!

Let’s go!

The map towards our destination is crystalline in state - lines and markings, reflected, and refracted, diverting us through our trajectory over and over and over and over and over again. You may at times ask yourself - hey haven’t we been here before? We may, yes, but look how this formation has changed. This I will tell you.

This idea of a fragmented projection of our path is exactly that which animates our city. (OUR city!) Taking this route, a universal concept (city!) becomes a multifarious megapolis. A place animated through sound and image, always revealing itself as a mirage locked in our sight - like a quivering horizon point, just out of our reach, off in the distance, and beyond the frame by way of -
                              a narrative
                                         a genealogy
                                                       a character
                                                                    a history
                                                                             a dream
                                                                                     AND
                                                                                                                          a memory.

It’s just there - far off ahead. Do you see it?

We’ll be travelling across a vibrant cartogram of 4 films. Four separate topologies delineating each their own trail across a wide panorama of moving image and cinematic ephemera to enlighten the understanding of a city. Hidden beneath the floorboards of the dream which houses a city, we will encounter the apparition of a place and inevitably reveal the latent nightmares enraptured within.

Maybe we’ll never even reach our destination, but let’s remember that, the real fun always lies in the voyage.


Was dreaming in color a thing when you first intervened within the idea of a dream?

What is it to think of a geographic other, you wonder?

Is it something wrought in some nostalgia you saved?


[When you hear a beep turn the page.] 
 

This journey begins with a look back, a glance in the rearview to the place you’ve been. I am talking about that place in which you first housed the creation of the image of a city.  To illuminate the encasement of such a memory, we turn to some ember offered by  Midi Onodera's Home Was Never Like This (1983).

The film first defines its own proscenium as a silhouette of our darkened path, momentarily revealed to us in a flash of light…

Each person enters alone, in this work.

The utter stillness of our surroundings is amplified by the silent hum of the film. Onodera begins by offering a blank slate unto which to construct our ideal. A carefully fragmented impression is then layered, reassembled rhythmically through step printing. In Onodera’s space, images transition like molten matter, shifting into one another like waves of silver flashing in and out over the surface of a spectral tide. Maybe we aren’t in a memory, but the dream itself.

How do you relinquish matter from its physical shape?

Swimming across interiors and exteriors of images, we experience luscious textures and enlivened shadows.  We get lost for a while...

. . .

Our dream is overtaken by an interference of someone else’s story, disclosed to us in monotone speech, stepping itself through abrupt beeps and sound effects. Our eyes however, still adrift.. yet we listen… and as we listen, a reverie unfolds.

A city of luxury!  /A modern extravagance!  / …

We’re still listening …

As the pages of her narrative turn, Onodera presents to us the idea of city as a fantasm, and we, alone within our interior, are left to contemplate the dream, the desire, the objective, one singular wish.  Inevitably the narrative thread succumbs to the allure of city, and the images - did you see? They just shifted in response. Opening themselves up to us, ever so slightly through altered movements giving the impression of actually penetrating the photographic expanse. Briefly, caught up in this moment, that which we witness and that which we experience - they touch. Ever so slightly. Onodera's tale of disruption and fiasco now measured against a growing eroticism of space. It as as though, the further our narrative moves away, the more the interior exposes itself.

[Did you turn the page?]

[Good.]
 

Walking past the home, through a path we then begin to follow a more picturesque route.  towards our city taken through Darryl Nepinak’s thrilling and heartwarming short film The Last of the Nepinaks (2005). Our dramatic introduction to this landscape is provoked through an ominous soundtrack and a rhythm of cuts which draw out the scenery…

It’s a blue winter’s day merging on a precipice of land. I think we are teetering somewhere between the bush and open fields. And if you look closely you will see there are various paths to take - some by foot, some icy, some snow covered. And, at just the right moment, our director introduces us to his nephew - our guide. Nepinak’s camera immediately shares it’s gaze with his nephew - a delightful  interaction he lends to use viewers, placing us there, in some way.

On this journey we are intimately close to the outdoors, and other times lagging behind and far off. Nepinak forms a collaged course of land for us to move through, always circling the action. Constantly in motion, we can draw out the surrounding environment which then amplifies the formidable adventure and sublime performance of our leader...  Meanwhile, our guide, treading arduously through snow across vast expanses of land, well, he remains spirited and keeps our spirits in check too.

The epic of Nepinak’s film score and title draw upon a diffusion of an industrious extraction of story. Subverting for his own candor, he reframes the treatment of these cinematic idioms though an underbelly of humor and most likely, I would think, love. Shifting our entry point within the city through an accurate directorial line through to a scenic view of the downtown core of his home (Winnipeg), Nepinak presents to us a far more densely and complex, layered world - an explosion of effects, just off in the distance. Can you see it?

Our next diversion is down the city’s backlane. Are you scared?

Maybe you should be.
 

Because, its through these watery channels we will experience the fragments of a ruined city in Ana Vaz’s Sacris Pulso (2008).  Before we begin our trek, we are implored, again, to the first moment of a memory.


Can you remember it?

Is it the same as in the beginning?

How does re-remembering change the landscape of this place we are trying to reach?


We are carefully moving us forward through by way of a breaking of a landscape, and Vaz’ film, in reaction, errupts in pockets of image sources. The city is presented to us as an alluring, iridescent, vision. It’s really so beautifully treated - I see a phosphorescent hologram presented as a whole… We’re getting closer, I think.

Now.

We must first enter this city, by leaving it. And as we slowly drift away from our island, Vaz lets us fall…

deep
deep
deeply into the tunnel of a recollection.

We first encounter the city as a future vestige. It’s a representation of itself, exhibited behind a polished glass frame of the past. We move slowly here, displaced in a dense formaldehyde stream through a place.

It is as though…

It is as though, the more we try to see the place - the more our director enrobes her debris with glittering fabrics, laced through dream and memory. The city and our own conscience of it - they’re both left murky through sentiments of fear and desire. Our travels melt into lucidity as Vaz leaves us wandering a vast expanse. As though dropped into the chasm of a hallucination, shifting through enneumerable pairs of eyes, left to consider the constructions manifesting before us.

And then we awaken.

 

At the beginning again yet this time to the catalytic moment of an utterance, a desire, “a dream of doing something better”. Lulu Keating’s City Survival (1983) is a slightly kinder approach into the city. Our director guide here is Keating herself, animated behind her protagonist Mary Francis. Keating is careful in our treatment. Sensing our nervousness to leave, yet again, she reminds us before we depart - “you can always come home”. (Maybe we have been here before.) Keating oversees that we are transported safely to the city. She then gives us a home to live in, and she even introduces us to individuals who can help us. Yet this place we desire so much, it still remains far from our grasp.

The world she surrounds us with remains isolative and through her main character, we are consistently framed in such a way, to intensify our loneliness. The city of our world is one which overarches upon us, alien in form and overwhelming. Shifts in tone, composition, and soundtrack stress the estrangement because here, in this city, we find a complex modern instrument posited at times as the experience of a science fiction.

Through exploring the systems of a place, Keating turns a projection, and shifts the symbiosis between her character and place. She turns the table and effects a place whom assumes upon a person. Within the narrative a cascade of the city unto her character - it’s always streaming just beyond window to the world which surrounds Mary-Francis. And if you listen closely, you can just hear the nostalgia and preservation of latent memories creak within the walls.

Go ahead, put your ear up against the wall, just like one would a shell…

Yet beyond these confines, residents, they do enliven the city. It’s through them the city and our relationship to it - these are vitalized. A collection of interactions intervening between two separate geographies emphasize the intimidation, fear, and dread through playful, dry humorous ways - awkward interventions, the multiplicity of them passed off as subtle occurrences.

Keating’s city is one built of exclusivity and performs as a means to isolate. Despite the ominous tone, a lens vigorously fixed onto the a world shifted through character creaks near a shard of light far off ahead, creaking in from underneath a city shroud.

And so, we are left here again, perhaps to continue to conjure a our dream ? 
 

We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.


We would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.