LARISSA FAN: SKETCHES FROM THE GARDEN
by Stephen Broomer
Larissa Fan has compared her filmmaking to sketching or writing, something that could become part of everyday life. She was speaking in the context of the Independent Imaging Retreat, also known as the Film Farm, a site in Mount Forest, Ontario, where Philip Hoffman and Marian McMahon began to lead an annual worshop in 16mm filmmaking in 1994, and which Fan attended before making her 2003 film In the Garden. Fan was already working within Toronto’s experimental film community, at Pleasure Dome and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, but the Film Farm gave her immediate experience of production at an intimate scale. The notion of a 'handmade' film made filmmaking itself seem more readily available to her, “not necessarily an onerous task.” As she related to Janis Cole two years later, In the Garden “came directly from the farm experience.”¹ Fan shot the film in her garden, processed it in her basement and dried it on the lawn, with the whole of production taking place in the immediate surroundings of her home. Plants fill the small frame; leaves shake against one another; flowers come briefly into view; light shifts across them. The film lasts only a minute and a half, yet extends this life, fragile and temporary, in the fixed image.
Sketching describes an approach that is completed by its spontaneity and responsiveness. In the Garden remains concerned with changes of light, movement and framing. Nearly half a century earlier, Marie Menken worked with similar materials in Glimpse of the Garden (1957), filming the stamens and pistils of flowers, the curves and gradation of leaves, droplets of water and glints of sunlight with both meticulously composed close-ups and the more impulsive, ambulatory movements of a handheld Bolex. Gardens recur in Menken’s work alongside streets, parties, buildings, electric light and rain. In her Notebook (1962–63), brief passages appear under headings “Moonplay,” “Nightwriting,” “The Egg” and “Raindrops.” P. Adams Sitney describes what happens in the last of these: Menken waits for a drop to fall from a leaf, then has someone tap the branch.² Jonas Mekas later described her as one of the first filmmakers to improvise with the camera and to edit in-camera.³ Her decisions could be made while shooting, and the subject offered an occasion for creative action.
Fan made Coming + Going (2005) on a single roll of Regular 8, producing both the quadrant divisions of the screen and the edits in-camera. Across those four quadrants, trains, windmills and other movements cross. Near the end, the film reverses: arrivals become departures and the title changes sides. One half of a Regular 8 film strip is exposed, the spool is turned over and reloaded, and the other half is exposed; after processing, the film is typically slit lengthwise and the two halves joined end to end. That process already contains a change of direction. Fan refuses the slit, yet mirrors it in her post-production, using the strip's changes-of-direction to structure the divided image, so that trains can travel in different directions within the four parts of the frame and one movement can start as another continues, like a round. Images that would ordinarily be successive are seen together as “interrelated snapshots of bustling urban life.”⁴ And while the familiar form of the snapshot separates one moment from the next, here, four can coincide. One part of the frame can show a train departing while another contains movement in a different direction, making Coming + Going into an origin point of centrifugal divergence.
The French experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder also composes directly in the camera, though by a much more exacting method. Her Bouquets are built through tightly organized patterns of exposure, sometimes by passing the film repeatedly through the camera and placing images at predetermined positions among frames already exposed.⁵ Fan’s procedure is less systematic and depends more directly upon the mechanics of Regular 8. The roll establishes a finite length, and its exposure requires two passes through the camera. Fan then plays the completed film forward and, in full, in reverse, allowing its images to be seen, at one station or the next, in both forward and reverse motion. She uses these conditions in organizing direction, succession and return.
Fan has described Idyll (2009) as “a brief summer idyll, awash in colour and light, a memory of childhood joy is brief, and its summer appears through brief images: the filmmaker's own feet planted in sand underwater, her brother and nephew at play on the shoreline, boats, and hand-painted passages of luminous blues, reds, oranges, greens. On the soundtrack, the child's laughter makes its joyousness clear: this is the pleasure of generational continuity. In a prolonged sequence, the child is held upside-down with a gleeful expression, practicing the automatic gymnastic contortions that come most readily early in life. An idyll is a small form as well as a pastoral one, conventionally complete within a scene or interval. Where the sketch responds to an immediate observation, the idyll gathers its materials into a pastoral scene. It can gather a place, a few figures and a particular interval into a deliberately bounded form. This brings Fan closer to Margaret Tait, for whom the poem provided a way of making cinema from similarly limited materials without requiring them to support a larger concept. Tait called many of her works film poems, and her final film, Garden Pieces (1998), consists of three such observations: “Round the Garden,” “Garden Fliers” and “Grove.” “The kind of cinema I care about,” she wrote, “is at the level of poetry.”⁷ Her word piece establishes its own dimensions, a completeness independent of scale.
For The tide goes in, the tide goes out (2011), Fan filmed moon jellyfish, Aurelia aurita. Made on commission for the thirtieth anniversary of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, the film was, in her words, an “ode to the secret world” of the animal. She described her interest in the material and chemical properties of film, “with the fragility of the film mirroring that of the jellyfish.”⁸ The processing is visible throughout, in shifts of shifts, chemical marks, and the signs of agitation created through hand-processing. Blacks cloud and whites flare, and through it all the jellyfish are nearly transparent, their edges changing as they contract, turn and pass through areas of differing densities. Fan’s reference to fragility extends beyond the physical delicacy of the animal and the film stock. These translucent bodies are photographed through water in their balletic movement, inscribed in emulsion and through it transformed until the skin of the film and the membrane of the jellyfish are intertwined.
The film was shown on the closing night of the 2012 Images Festival before a programme of Jean Painlevé’s marine films, with Yo La Tengo performing The Sounds of Science live.⁹ Painlevé had filmed sea urchins, seahorses, octopuses and other marine animals at a time when scientific and avant-garde cinema shared techniques and audiences. Painlevé changed the conditions under which an animal was seen, but in Fan’s film, some of this uncertainty comes from the photographic material itself.
Fan's subjects can be named quickly: plants, trains and windmills, a summer, jellyfish. Her formal approach ties her to a rich history of identification between women experimental filmmakers and the intimate scales at which they were operating, as notebooks (a work anchored in observations), bouquets (a work of deliberate composition), and pieces (a work that is complete regardless of length). Fan's sketch adds another, a form responsive enough to become part of everyday life.
Notes
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Janis Cole, “The Harvest of Philip Hoffman,” Point of View, no. 58 (Summer 2005).
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P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 160–61.
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Jonas Mekas, quoted in Martina Kudláček, Notes on Marie Menken (2006).
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Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival Programme Guide (2005), 30.
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On Rose Lowder’s Bouquets 1–10 (1994–95), see the programme discussions of her method, in which images are composed in camera through the placement and interweaving of exposures on the film strip.
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Larissa Fan, filmography, description of Idyll (2009).
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Margaret Tait, “The kind of cinema I care about is at the level of poetry—in fact—it has been in a way my life’s work making film poems,” reproduced by Margaret Tait 100. https://mt100.luxscotland.org.uk/
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Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, programme note for Larissa Fan, the tide goes in, the tide goes out (2011).
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Images Festival 2012 Catalogue, 73.
Stephen Broomer is a filmmaker, writer and film historian based in Toronto, and the founder of Black Zero, a counter-archive and publishing house devoted to Canadian experimental cinema. His books include Hamilton Babylon: A History of the McMaster Film Board, Codes for North: Foundations of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film, and Secret Museums: The Films of Arthur Lipsett. Like Larissa Fan, he attended Philip Hoffman’s Film Farm, and, like Fan, his films are distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.