David Rimmer: West Coast Workprint

David Rimmer, Self-Portrait, April 1979. 9 gelatin silver prints, 50.8 x 66 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, CMCP Collection. Photo: NGC.

DAVID RIMMER: WEST COAST WORKPRINT

by Stephen Broomer

Among David Rimmer’s films, West Coast Workprint has long been unavailable, acknowledged only intermittently, although he seems to have worked on it, or at least continued adding to it, across a greater span of time than any of his completed works. While it was screened in the 1970s under the title West Coast Workprint, it had also been screened untitled, and decades later, Rimmer remembered it in conversation as “the Storm Bay Film.” Rimmer and a group of friends had bought land together on the British Columbia coast, built houses there, raised children. Rimmer filmed their homesteading and their gatherings over the course of decades.¹ The film was colour and silent, made without the complicated printing techniques that he had been pursuing by that time. As a filmmaker whose work was never explicitly intimate nor diaristic, the project is a major contrast to his body of work.

Rimmer’s early work had been saturated with a West Coast lyricism in which landscape, animals, weather and human bodies passed into one another: Square Inch Field literalized this, in a litany of faces and symbols dissolving into one another. Migration begins from the flight of a bird through trees and over water, to beached carcasses and suggestions of a governing cosmos. Landscape is a time-lapse that observes the changes of a coastal view over the course of a day. His involvement with the Intermedia group, in particular his projection loops made for performances and environments, led Rimmer toward the more concentrated structural films for which he soon became known, assembled from fragments, sometimes of his own shooting, more often archival, and bearing shifts of duration, contrast, polarity and colour. 

By February 1972, the film had acquired the title West Coast Workprint. Roger Greenspun encountered it at Film Forum in New York and called it “a diary film about communal living in the Pacific Northwest,” conspicuously still a work in progress.² Kristina Nordstrom, writing in the Village Voice several weeks later, saw candid images of Rimmer’s wife and friends at home and in the woods, and thought the film suggested a movement away from the highly stylized patterning of the preceding work, toward something narrative yet freer.³ When Greenspun returned to Rimmer's films in October, the scale of this continuing film already stood apart from everything else he had made. Rimmer was working on “a rather long movie,” while his other films, none longer than twelve minutes, could be watched in a concentrated sitting.⁴

Real Italian Pizza, made from September 1970 into the following spring, is another diurnal portrait of a community, shot by Rimmer as he looked out the window of a New York apartment to film the façade of a pizza parlour. People gather around the storefront, disappear and return. There are fights, arrests, a dancer on the sidewalk, firemen stopping for food, snow being shovelled. Months are condensed to twelve minutes, though the small behaviour of the figures in the street bear a quality of narrative entertainment.⁵ West Coast Workprint seems to have begun at approximately the same time and from a related appetite for watching, except there was no functional limit upon the period being observed--it was a project conceived to be potentially lifelong.

In 1978 George Csaba Koller asked Rimmer about a project “sometimes referred to as West Coast Workprint.” Rimmer described the film as a portrait made over a long period and imagined continuing to shoot there for as long as he remained involved with those people, “which could be twenty or thirty years.” He speaks particularly of the children and of watching them grow up. By then, Rimmer's edit of the film had reached approximately two and a half hours.⁶

Much of Rimmer’s work had invited intense acts of concentration and elongation. In Surfacing on the Thames, he elongates a short strip of turn-of-the-century found film, opening them until the movement of a ship across the horizon is nearly suspended, buried under a weathered horizon that gives the entire movement the Impressionistic feel of a J.M.W. Turner canvas. With Watching for the Queen, Rimmer parcels out forty-eight frames of a crowd according to a calculated acceleration, such that the viewer is being stared at intensely by an elastic measure of attention. In Seashore, he locates within an early film strip of women at the water’s edge smaller loops, reversals, symmetries, dirt, damage. In these films, the isolated strip is magnified because Rimmer builds intensity through expectation, that change will come, hurtling toward the collapse of the machine itself. The community film enlarged by other means.

During the same period, Keith Lock was filming a commune at the other end of the country, in Ontario. Everything Everywhere Again Alive (1975) was made at Buck Lake, where a group drawn from Toronto’s art community had taken up an experiment in collective living. Lock’s feature gathers the work of daily life with graphic signs, numbers, diagrams and electronic sound, continually interrupting the apparent immediacy of the diary image.⁷ Buck Lake and Storm Bay offered two distinct records of the Back-to-the-Land movement, a period when young people had decided to reject society and move to the edges, with the wisdom of countercultural almanacs like Whole Earth Catalogue, and the wind-up Bolex camera in their rucksacks. Lock eventually brought that experience into the closed form of an experimental diary film, one that was shaped by glyphs, text, and signs of the material constitution of the film strip itself. 

While the Storm Bay film would never be presented in a final, public form, the site of Storm Bay enters Rimmer's completed films in other ways. Narrows Inlet was photographed there from a boat, the shoreline slowly appearing as morning fog gives up the pilings and forest.⁸ In Local Knowledge, the site becomes more expansive, a home ground joined to images arriving from far beyond it, out of the ether of found televisual materials. The title names what a mariner knows about dangerous waters that cannot be found on the chart, and Colin Browne has called Storm Bay the film’s spiritual and geographical centre.⁹ Weather, water, boats, trees, horizons and the movements of a camera shifting with the tide recur through Rimmer’s work, an act of collaboration between man and nature.

By 2012 the title West Coast Workprint had been abandoned. In an interview with Sarah Butterfield contained in Rimmer’s proposal for a late self-portrait, Butterfield asks about “the Storm Bay Film,” which she describes as something he had been making since the sixties. Rimmer remembers buying the land with friends roughly fifty years before. They were hippies, “breaking rules, building anything,” following the Back-to-the-Land impulse. They had grown old there.¹⁰ Rimmer describes the film as a home movie from the days when the community began and added to over the years. He had built several houses at Storm Bay, the last a glass tree house with little separation between inside and outside, from which he filmed. Every few years the community gathered in summer and watched the film on the communal dock. “I’m in it, everyone’s in it.”¹¹ The children spent their own childhoods there, and by 2012, some of the residents had passed away. Rimmer writes of friends, lovers, “mad projects,” laughter, children, storms and handmade houses. The footage interested him because it had seized an “immensely long stretch of time.”¹² In this it serves as both a reflection and counterbalance to the condensed time of his optically-printed films.

Rimmer claimed in 2012 that the home movie was made casually for the people at Storm Bay and “has never been seen by anyone else.”¹³ Yet, in the form titled West Coast Workprint, it had been publicly shown and reviewed in New York forty years earlier.¹⁴ An early assembly circulated and subsequently disappeared back into a much larger body of material. The two-and-a-half-hour version mentioned in 1978 may already have borne little resemblance to the workprint that Greenspun saw in 1972. Or Rimmer had simply forgotten a few screenings from the beginning of a project that stretched across most of his adult life, and that became increasingly private. The film on the dock and the film at Film Forum may have shared images, but they were not the same object.

Rimmer hoped to use the Storm Bay footage again. His 2012 proposal, When the Mind Reaches Out to Touch the Thing it Sees, imagined a self-portrait assembled from new material, earlier films, found images, photographs, hand-painted film and other traces of his own work.¹⁵ He proposed something around fifty minutes long, though almost immediately resisted the idea that it could be planned in sections. His usual method was to collect fragments and start somewhere in the middle, moving outward, “thickening the mix.”¹⁶ He had begun to regard all his earlier films as found footage, even those like West Coast Workprint, that he had shot: images made by another, younger version of himself.¹⁷ The Storm Bay footage was to run through the new work as a central spine.¹⁸

The proposed self-portrait was never made. What became of the much older film is harder to say. West Coast Workprint is absent from the 1992 Art Gallery of Ontario survey of Rimmer’s films, despite the considerable attention given there to the work of the same period.¹⁹ It is likewise absent from later filmographies of his completed work.²⁰ Yet the Storm Bay material was plainly still with Rimmer as late as 2012.

Some films are made for nobody, and some are made for private audiences. Rimmer, a filmmaker whose work often seemed to weave social history in clinically mechanical ways, was building such a film, for his friends and neighbors, now unlikely to reach audiences beyond the Storm Bay dock.

Notes