Sound, Vision & Mechanical Memories:Amanda Dawn Christie @ SAW Gallery

by

source

Matt Rushton

 

Canadian Filmmaker Amanda Dawn Christie is a multi-faceted artist who blends visual and performance arts to both captivate viewers and challenge our relationship with independent Canadian cinema.

Dividing Road Maps by Time Zones, a ten-year retrospective of short works by Christie, screened at Ottawa’s SAW Gallery on October 7, 2009, as part of the Canadian Film Institute’s Café Ex series.

While outward looking, Christie’s collection of films remains personal, populated by images and sounds from the filmmaker’s life. In using old home movies and capturing such fleeting moments and objects as the messages from a telephone’s answering machine, Christie records time and documents travels that stretch across the Canadian landscape and across the Atlantic.

Ranging in length from a mere 40 seconds (Forever Hold Your Peace) to more than 8 minutes (Turning, Velocity = distance/time, Fallen Flags), these shorts portray a life in fragmented snippets, ultimately revealing a chosen little, yet leaving the spectator feeling witness to one’s innermost thoughts and secrets.

But the films screened for this event are perhaps most striking for their materiality. Christie is a technically acute filmmaker, and her work insists upon the plasticity of the medium. In the six-minute 3-part Harmony: Composition in RGB #1, for example, shot on black and white film and employing the antiquated colouring technique of using red, blue and yellow filters, she transforms a singular dancer into a trio of monochrome ghosts that float gracefully around a minimal set piece. Whether hand-scratching an optical sound track or playing one live on guitar, or preserving an old, mouldy film reel where the fungal spores, when projected, have the appearance of snowflakes, she continually brings the viewer’s attention to the craft. Not letting one get completely lost in the illusion, Christie’s frequent manipulations of film’s sound and vision remind us that it is shaped with human hands.

There is often a familiarity in her films, not in terms of style, but rather of setting, particularly for any Easterner who’s ventured westward in search of work, adventure, love or escape. New Brunswick forests blur past a car’s windshield; the narrow gray corridor of a VIA Rail train clanks with metallic noise. But Christie’s is a subtle Canadiana, perhaps even unintentionally so.

More so than any particular theme, it could be the iconic logo of the National Film Board, that appears to unite her works. That symbol of Canada’s public film agency, titled “Man Who Sees/l’homme qui voit” and best described as a human eye with legs, was a fixture of childhood for many kids raised on the CBC.

The logo would appear during and between children’s programming, in lieu of commercials, and it would introduce vignettes—short, often animated films about multiculturalism or black flies or dancing log drivers—that, whether or not they helped shape how young people might come to see their country, would nonetheless plant themselves firmly into a collective cultural
memory.

The logo’s frequent appearances in the credits of Christie’s shorts makes one imagine what effect Christie’s much more visceral, absurdist take on Canada might have had on the cultural fabric, had it been sandwiched between The Friendly Giant and Mr. Dressup.