Reviews
May 8th, 2009
It’s safe to say that the Alberta Oil Sands have achieved a singular level of regard in the national imagination. Images of them proliferate the media. Usually beautifully detailed and taken from great heights, they conjure up anxieties running deep in our culture – of thirst and demolition and bewildered entitlement. They are the largest and perhaps most important industrial energy project in the world. And I wonder, after seeing the provocative and powerful documentary H2Oil, if the Oil Sands aren’t simply an icon for our times, but if they are perhaps some great metonymy for them as well. Cruising across their unreal expanse at the beginning of the film, we acquire the sense that what’s visible of the Sands can only ever stand for something larger. The Oil Sands are a flash-point for volatile inter-provincial debate, a bulging knot in the North American petroleum market, the fuel for our cities, and an environmental wager of global proportions.
The best thing about H2Oil is perhaps also its admirable weakness – it refuses to define the Oil Sands from any singular vantage. There are many important stories to tell about the Oil Sands, and H2Oil tells of a lot of them. It explores the political economy of oil, taking us into an Oil Sands Buyer Convention in Edmonton. It assesses the ecological devastation caused by the Oil Sands projects, showing us interviews with renowned ecologists David Schindler and Kevin Timoney. Through the stunning animation work of James Braithwaite, it visualises the costly and unusual method by which bituminous oil is separated from the deposits contained deep underground. Throughout, the film maintains a sense of the rich interdependancies that exist between these narratives.
Interestingly, the central storyline in H2Oil is perhaps also the hardest one to picture: the story about tiny strains of arsenic and mercury that started traveling through the waters of the Athabasca. About 200km downstream of the Oil Sands, the residents of Fort Chipewyan began witnessing declining fish populations, and weird ailments in their small game. This, it turns out, is nothing new: we learn from candid interviews with local residents that Oil Sands- related contaminants have been impacting their local ecologies for decades. But as the energy projects have picked up in the last 7 years, so too have basic forms of sustenance become more and more dangerous to consume. Forms of cancer than should only happen to one in one hundred thousand people have begun to hit – and kill – the residents of Fort Chipewyan at truly alarming rates.
May 8th, 2009
In 1999, Josh Harris began working on QUIET, an underground bunker city eventually inhabited by 100 willing participants who lived, played, crapped, and screwed on camera for a month. Was this an art project? A social experiment? Was it merely pathological gratification for Harris, a multimillionaire who clearly took pleasure in controlling his subjects?
When Ondi Timoner began filming the six floors of hedonism, which included a cereal bar and a shooting range, it was not with the finished product, We Live in Public, in mind. While the QUIET exploits are, on their own, fascinating to watch, what drove Timoner to make a film about Harris, and what ties the narrative together, is the way in which Harris was able to conceive of an internet landscape that, while obvious to us now, did not yet exist in the late 90s. In QUIET, where everyone can watch everyone, and screens are an essential way of interacting with those around you, Harris created what he imagined to be “a perfect anaology of what the internet will be like,” or, as Timoner puts it, “a physical manifestation for the way we share our lives now.”
Harris is not the most likable of the dotcom nerds, but he is probably one the most innovative. After moving to New York in 1984, Harris started Jupiter Communications, built platforms for Prodigy, and in 1993 founded pseudo.com, a pioneering internet TV station. What made Pseudo special was the way that the shows’ audiences could participate in real time with the hosts through a chat box. Harris saw this kind of television as the inevitable future: the audience could be easily controlled, and marketing could be tailored to very specific audiences. “I’m going to sell you your life back to you,” he promises, rather ominously. Last time I logged onto Facebook, the sidebar informed me that there were free Uggs available…but only for twenty-three year olds. Luckily, I’m twenty three! After QUIET was broken up by the police (who’d been informed that it was a Y2K doomsday cult, but found more than a few fire infractions), Harris started weliveinpublic.com, a website that streamed footage taken from dozens of cameras mounted all over the apartment he shared with his girlfriend. From there his story only gets weirder.
May 6th, 2009
The Great Lakes have about 17 000 km of shorelines, and Toronto is lucky enough to …
May 6th, 2009
Watching Those Who Remain, a doc about the Mexican families who lose loved ones to American immigration, I kept thinking about a Mike Davis book called Magical Urbanism. It’s a study of the recent ‘Latinization‘ of US cities. Not only are Latino immigrants are invigorating such places as never before, Davis argues, but they are finally piercing the glass ceiling of political disenfranchisement that’s plagued America’s ethnic immigrant communities. “Jose is now the most popular name for baby boys in both California and Texas,†Davis enthuses, “and Southern Californians are more likely to greet each other with ‘Que tal?’ than ‘Hey Dude!’â€
Magical Urbanism is a fundamentally optimistic book (which, if you know Davis’ other work, isn’t saying much) and Those Who Remain is not. Its subjects aren’t broken exactly, but they are hardened, and in many cases quite sad. The reasons their loved ones have emigrated is universally simple: money, opportunity, jobs. Every year, millions of Mexicans “cross over.†Some never return. Some come back, only to leave again. The resignation which accompanies these painfully cyclical lifestyles is hard to fathom. We meet one father, Adriano, as he plans his US departure to fall after the Baptism of his third child. Birthing, his wife tell us, is the only reason he’ll stick around for more than a month. Another father only exists on the end of a telephone, and we watch painfully as his baby daughter’s wander away from the receiver distractedly.
May 6th, 2009
Like a strange peering glance through a keyhole into a world of rooms rented by the week in New York City of the eighties, Diary of a Times Square Thief uses the occasion of a newly discovered scrapbook to unearth a host of burnt out and jubilant New Yorkers and resurrect their memories.
The film opens with a matter of fact account of filmmaker Klaas Bense’s EBay acquisition of the diary, a chronicle of a young poet’s efforts to establish himself in the City. The curling pages of the notebook he buys for seventy-five dollars are covered in a ball-point blue scrawl and interspersed with Polaroid snapshots of faces, some odd, some old, some beaten into new and bloody shapes. The last few pages are missing, apparently cut from the book with a knife.
Captivated by the voice in the pages, Bense travels to New York to excavate any traces that remain of the young writer, John, whose character is slowly teased out from the mouths of former guests and employees of the Times Square hotel where he worked. Some of the people Bense interviews remember John well, and some don’t, even though photos of their much-younger faces appear in the pages of his diary. We meet Mr. Cohan, psychic to the stars, and Mr. Joe Franklin, who sits all day at a tiny desk surrounded by a chaotic archive of papers, and we hear about the mobster who runs his organization of thieves (John among them) from a wheelchair in the men’s room of Penn Station. We chat with Ducky DooLittle, former Times Square sex worker, now a Harvard sex-ed lecturer, Sammy, once an urban accident-chasing reporter, now a photographer in war-torn countries, and Chet, the philosopher bartender who graduated from Columbia in the same class as Barack Obama, and drew his first welfare check the day Obama declared his presidential candidacy. In the past world that these characters shared, and which emerges from the memories and life-lessons they feel moved to reveal, murderers can be your best friends and lovers, and bizarre umbrella headgear can shield the shy face of the most skillful artist. Nothing is at it seems—especially not yourself.
Artfully keeping its secrets and doling out its surprises like a judicious chocolatier or fascinating parlour act, the film keeps viewers wondering until its final moments whether John might be the fabrication of everyone’s faulty memories of a heady New York, or if he disappeared in an excess of the little blue pills, or if he vanished as completely as if he had landed in an unmarked body bag by simply finding a new life somewhere else. With eight people a night being shot in the City at the time, people jumping frequently from the upper floors of the hotel, and HIV beginning to threaten the community, survival, friendship, personality, and memory, each begin to seem precious, fleeting, and rare.
May 4th, 2009
The street-length rush line awaiting my arrival outside the Royal testified to the amount of buzz Hubert Davis’ “Invisible City†has been getting (making it quite possibly the hottest Doc in the festival after Baichwal’s “Act of God”). A title-riff on Ralph Ellison’s portrait of alienation, “Invisible Man,†Davis’ piece follows two high-school kids– Kendell and Mikey – as they grow up in Toronto’s Regent Park. This housing project, the oldest of its kind in Canada, is in the process of a huge redevelopment that holds a very uncertain future for the community. These parallels – between the unrelenting evolution of urban form and community – are powerfully explored throughout the film.
“Invisible City†reminds me a lot of “Killer of Sheep,†Charles Burnett’s masterpiece portrait of Watts, Los Angeles, in the 1970s. Both explore black communities in urban centres with a special ability to capture their vividness – a sun-dappled tree-shadow across a cracked courtyard – within a city that has half-forgotten they exist. The cinematography throughout “Invisible Cities†is beautiful; Davis is especially deft at capturing the expressiveness of his subjects – the avoiding glances, dismissive smirks and wide grins – as they deal with quiet frustrations and unexpected challenges. Mikey is shy and cerebral; he wants to take an advanced math class but also deals crack and skips curfew. Kendell is handsome and athletic; a natural with little kids who gets in trouble for fighting and skipping basketball practice. Both are supported by single mothers who seem always exhausted and yet are completely dedicated. “I love him bad,†Mikey’s mom says. These interactions seem to become more and more compelling as the story grows.
Fortunately there is also Ainsworth, a former pro-athlete who has returned to the neighborhood as a school teacher. Ainsworth understands his role as surrogate father to these kids – one extends far beyond the class room. He lectures them in the parking lot, invites them over for family dinner, jokes with them in the hallway. Three years of high-school life unfold against the rhythm of Regent’s wrecking ball deconstruction – a backdrop which mimics the helplessness of change that each boy is confronted with. Mikey dreams of getting out of Regent, of seeing of the world, but the pull of neighbourhood is strong. “It’s all right here,†he says, pointing toward the playground where he grew up. “All my memories are right here.â€
May 2nd, 2009
Editor: Hot Docs is on and Spacing will be reviewing documentary films during the festival that are urban or city related.
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April 21st, 2009
It’s a curious experience to read a book where you agree with most of the ideas, but cringe at the way they are expressed.
American urban planner Mark Hinshaw’s True Urbanism: Living at and Near the Center documents an important recent phenomenon — the revitalization of city centers and the areas immediately around these centers across North America, including the rapid increase in the number of residents living in these areas. It’s a phenomenon we have seen happening in Toronto over the last fifteen years. But one of the interesting purposes of Hinshaw’s book is to show that it’s not just happening in large, older east-coast and mid-western cities, but also in newer cities on the west coast, and in smaller towns. Hinshaw calls this phenomenon “true urbanism” to contrast it with the “new urbanism” movement.
This phenomenon is a positive one in many ways — environmentally, economically, culturally. It shows a renewed appreciation and understanding of the value of urban, rather than suburban, living. But, like any phenomenon, there are also potential problems that need to be looked at when talking about it. Hinshaw is keen to spread the gospel of urbanism, and writes in an easy and accessible style for a broad audience. Unfortunately, Hinshaw’s tone is so boosterish, he tends to gloss over any problems, which actually makes his arguments less convincing than they should be.
December 9th, 2008
In an article in The Walrus earlier this year, Mark Kingwell referred to fellow urban thinker/public intellectual/University of Toronto professor/sometime Globe and Mail columnist Richard Florida as a “huckster”. Kingwell later republished his article in the uTOpia-for-boomers collection Toronto: A City Becoming, which the editors mischievously placed immediately after Florida’s own contribution, presumably to highlight the sense of rivalry between them.
One can kind of see what Kingwell means. Florida has that brash, too-perfectly-groomed, relentlessly upbeat feel, the simple message to sell in easy soundbites, the gravitation towards the powerful and influential, that are characteristic of salesmen. But poke that huckster facade and you find a lot more substance underneath — the soundbites are distillations of a lot of real research that has been thought about a great deal. Like a good salesman, Florida knows how to pitch to the right level for different audiences, but also, like the best salesmen, he has a genuine product to sell. One might not agree with what he’s saying, but he should not just be dismissed superficially.
It would be equally easy to dismiss Kingwell’s jibe as protecting his turf. Florida is the loud American who has suddenly stepped into all of the spaces where Kingwell plays — urbanism, go-to public thinker, the university, the media. It doesn’t help that Florida’s recent move to Toronto has echoes of Jane Jacobs — a renowned urban thinker abandoning the United States to move to Toronto as a city that embodies the ideals he writes about.
But underneath the apparent turf war lies a genuine clash of intellectual styles — one that makes their disagreement perhaps inevitable, but that can also produce a rich debate of ideas for Toronto.
November 27th, 2008
Spacing’s Shawn Micallef is the Blogger-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Art Matters blog for the grand re-opening of the new AGO. He will be cross-posting some of the entries here on Spacing Toronto. …
