Experimental Film by Gemma Files
Gemma Files
When I slow-motion real-time review this fiction, my comments will be found in the thought stream below or by clicking on this post’s title above.
Gemma Files
When I slow-motion real-time review this fiction, my comments will be found in the thought stream below or by clicking on this post’s title above.
1.
“Because stories lie hidden inside other stories,…”
And reviews inside other reviews.
Slow motion, yet a fast-framed opening building naturally the facts from the vulnerably writerish woman character who wants to write this book, Googling the man so as to meet him and for him to tell her of the circumstances and possible witnesses of the mysterious vanishment of Mrs Whitcomb early in the 20th century on a train between Ontario and Toronto, and then, as real-time reader, I learn what this writer already knew more than she found out about Mrs Whitcomb, and I now know more than those who use Google about Mrs W’s possibly making-films etc. In her backstory and about the writer writing about her, but not as much as what’s already in the official Files, I guess.
Don’t expect this slow motion ‘review’ to tell the story about this story — this story about its writer written by herself (a Ms despite the wedding ring) about wanting to write the story of spooky sounding Mrs Whitcomb — but just to tell my own flickering reactions to both stories inside each other via the projector of my mind.
So far, I am captivated.
Edgar Cayce and all.
“in Quebec, it’s genuinely considered cool to want to see films that reflect your reality, because nothing else coming in from the world around you does. And in English-speaking Canada . . . it’s the exact opposite.”
I love it when I start a book that I had an instinct, before starting it, that I will love it and it then turns out, quite early on, that I love it EVEN more that I anticipated. This is one. The narrator’s name, let’s get that out now: Lois Cairns is already a character full-fledged in my mind, with the delineation of her chequered career in teaching and making films and the quite brilliant echolalia-jazz speech-ThomasTheTankEngine depiction of her son, a boy with many difficultly loveable facets that many parents have to grapple with as I once did many years ago when such facets didn’t even have a name.
“The problem with thinking you’re the centre of the world is always wondering why, if that’s so, do you palpably not control a single goddamn thing?”
Assuming I, as reader, probably don’t know what constitutes an experimental film, I am asked to suck the eggs of Dali and Bunuel, fascinatingly for some, if not me, because I call Experimental Avant Garde and vice versa (see the world’s first blank story mentioned HERE among the credentials of my own avant-gardening, as it were), but all this from Files serves to drag me screaming and dreaming with delight into concepts of dream within dream, waking dream, experimental film as the nearest one can get to someone else’s dream (or Dreamcatching?) and the linear gravity to which we all tend should we not fight against the non-linear as a paradoxical part of that very Avant Garde sensibility. This is beautifully tied in with the Mrs Whitcomb phenomenon being investigated by Lois non-linearly in real-time as well as backstory, it seems, and the whole gamut of the experimental film ethos and community in the area where she lives and works.
“I still have the text in question today, bookmarked between pages 112 and 113,” – leading to the extract about Lady Midday.
Cf: “Ah! There was something firmly held between pages 112 and 113 – probably a bookmarking…” – in the story ‘Only Connect’ from my book collection of collaborations with my father Gordon published in 1998 under the overall title ONLY CONNECT.
“One way or the other, I knew I’d read “Lady Midday” before. Had to have. Why else would I have kept the book? How else could I have connected the dots?”
Mythocentric Lois – riding the geeking geekiness of her son and husband – spots Lady Midday in a film Untitled 13, as a film within a film, like that story within a story, review within a film, and she interviews the director, but only connect Mrs Whitcomb, only connect Lady Midday text?
Full of conspiracies of found footage, a bit like walking the staircase by Duchamp? A piecemeal rite of passage by found Google?
Everything is impressionistic like her recurrent migraines.
If I tell you this story line by line, this review would be found text to match the found footage, reflecting my memories of having already read it when I haven’t. A waking dream.
Suffice to say it is amazingly involving. And, if this were not a slow motion review, I would have already finished reading it.
“Could you really call it “working,” though, if nobody was actually paying you to do it?”
I often ask that question, especially when I always buy the books I review as a normal reader. Even as an abnormal reader!
Meanwhile, I am becoming EVEN more entranced by this work, as we learn more about Lois and her mother and her special needs son and migraines and ‘drama queens’ from her skilfully adumbrated backstory. As well as the found coincidences and synchronicities (that are, I hope, the no-spoiler lifeblood of my still evolving preternatural reviewing style), such phenomena being concerned, here, with the found footage on Nitrate films in turn found in ‘hell holes’ in a random moment of becoming lost in a wood, part of her investigations and Burke’s Law interviews and found googling, activities she conducts as a well known figure in the Canadian experimental film community.
And film theories that seem now felicitously and fortuitously to hark back to my earlier reference to Duchamp and staircases? So, osmosis, too, as well as coincidence?
“Instead, they’re supposed to somehow pick up, via osmosis, that if they wander up a flight of stairs…”
“Oh, absolutely, but people do switch disciplines; sometimes they move out of their comfort zones, play around for a while, then stop and move back again,…”
The fathoming continues of the Whitcomb / Lady Midday syndrome as [W]robbed or, at best, enhanced (arguably) into a filmic theme and variations upon Danielewski’s bookic attics, passages and backrooms in the HOUSE of found Leaves.
Meanwhile, we learn to empathise with Lois’s guilt hang-ups at the interface between this almost self-indulgent career and her role as mother…as I read it.
“…a fire and two floods put paid to half their back-files, according to the woman who runs it.”
“Yeah, they do—and you know what? I actually want him to pick up how there’s more people in the world than just him, and sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to,…”
….which sort of echoes something I quoted earlier, as Lois’ backstory within a backstory takes on a new gestalt, including the circumstances of the pre- and post-natal of her son’s actual birth – a sort of aberrantly astrological epoch in parallel with the presumably dislocated chronology of dates regarding the theory of the Whitcomb / Midday connection, a dislocation that an old book publication tends to prove…despite with whatever ‘fiction filter’ she tries to layer it like a palimpsest. (Natal charts are usually set at Midday when the actual time of birth is not known.) Ironic that this dislocation in the chronology within Lois’s research (for which she is seeking finance) seems to be confirmed by a gift of that old book from her husband during a marital ‘date’ enabled by her Mum’s babysitting. The boy’s pet name for his Grandma is Nay-Nay. There is something inchoately organic going on here, I sense, where things are taking shape just as I try to make them take shape, and without such attempts at Dreamcatching they would diverge and dissipate? Astrology, for me, is concerned with synchronicities not cause-and-effect. My attempt at pinning down an astrological angle is an act of faith, an angle that is possibly not intended by the author at all. But it is an unstated thread I have sensed going on beneath the text. An experiment within an experiment.
“…suddenly inside my silhouette, some bad idea made manifest.”
….being a blink or click ratcheted into synchronisation by the angles of mirror or of natal chart, or a crystallising effect of the migraine, or the point where this text aspires towards a ghost story, a frisson of someone in a chair where someone should not be. That blink or click also paradoxically or ironically accompanies the point where Lois’s theories about Mrs W have been returned by the robber, as it were, become a potential gestalt, become her meal ticket antidote for her pride, her son and her work….
This novel has not only become my experiment but also its own, too, and the fact that it is ABOUT an experimental film does not prevent it becoming, almost autonomously, an even bigger experiment that uses a linear grammatical syntactical language that disguises what’s beneath its surface nitrate. As reader, you are induced to walk before the author, before the guard, not walking behind, as you prepare to enter the rest of the book…
7.
“….where Australian Aboriginal star charts described an ’emu in the sky’ between the Southern Cross and Scorpius, its half-lifted head formed by the Coalsack Nebula. . . .
And on very bad nights, the angels would come.”
Lois’s backstory of Planetarium visiting (a “pocket universe”) seems highly appropriate bearing in mind my earlier speculations, as well as reference to the Star of Bethlehem, the speed of light reaching us from the stars…
And this claustrophobically cosmic feel then fits in with the introduction of a new character, Safie Hewsen, her Armenian backstory, Lois’s student from the old days, beautifully honed as a believable woman coming off the page, a collaborator on the distaff project of Mrs W as an early Canadian filmmaker. Safie’s backstory includes the Armenian myths and a God that controls both good and evil….
And Safie’s “Interactive art installations” (serendipitously to match the story I reviewed about an hour or so ago HERE for the other book to which I earlier referred above) – one such installation being, for Lois, a virtual womb-like directionless abyss or something, I infer, sucking down upon her like the power of dark stars – to match her migraines?
Meanwhile the mechanics of the actual plot, that I try not to spoil, continue to compel.
“…the instant realization that somebody else just gets it; that you’re not alone in your dislocation.”
“Other people’s obsessions can be fascinating, but there’s also an element of pull. A current.”
…like a current, perhaps, from this section’s mention of “unfamiliar Australian stars” during a past example of Lois’s night terrors, obsessively adumbrated by her, as a phenomenon, for our benefit. Today, I infer L’s pain and insomnia as well as the onset of migraines, as she tussles with guilt stemming from her son’s “autism spectrum”, from her husband’s needs and her mother’s anxieties about L’s forthcoming collaborative Mrs. W-orientated research trip, collaborative with whom? Someone safe enough as Safie?
L’s latest adumbrated night terror is terror indeed in this context. As powerful as the parallel plot itself.
“I’d never quite bought into the idea that being someone’s parent or child automatically guaranteed their love or yours.”