Epilogues
Relating cinema with the discipline of painting allows for an evolving investigation into historical parallels amongst a context of comparative yet opposing Romantic and Modernist sensibilities. A specifically selected representational motif and existential fetish is utilized to compose works that archive visual and narrative patterns.
After accumulating photographic stills of the closing images of the ends of films, repetitive tropes emerge. The subjective freeze frame portrait, the omnipotent aerial landscape, the symbolism of a presented object, the ambiguous out of focus blur, or the figure turned from the camera facing the sublime, all exemplify a common Romantic affect. Intending to transmute these subjects into unromantic forms, alternative agendas are introduced to a collection of film endings disconnected from their original narratives. The final frames are painted into frameworks of gestalt configuration after a recognized international mass cultural Romantic reverence is acknowledged, contemplated, and then for antithetical purposes, decidedly unseated by interpolating formalist consideration.
The 16:9 widescreen and 4:3 fullscreen film ratios are initial exploratory means to construct compositions of other resulting ratios. Shrinking, stretching, or fitting the painted imagery into chosen shapes, and referring to the physical thickness and other available properties of the canvas stretcher itself in relation to the dimensions of a hard edge grid composition, are continuous investigative approaches that rework the cinematic source material. The square is an employed Modernist archetype that resides in an abstract territory negated of the intentionally grandiose widescreen subjectivity found in aspect ratios like CinemaScope, Cinerama, or VistaVision. Since the silent film era, cinema has increasingly retreated from the square in favour of the expansive horizontal rectangle, maximized in mid-20th century examples such as the western, or the biblical epic. Within this series, returning to square dimensions and vertically stacking widescreen frames are formal strategies that counter the history of cinema’s widening scope.
Recent motivations towards producing paintings are indebted to an analysis of the quadrangle. Akin to the projection screen, the television, or the photograph, this polygon is a shape with four sides and four points. More complex than the rectangle or the square, quadrangles can be concave, convex, or self-intersecting, and their sides can vary in length and angle, offering an opportunistic multiplicity of form. Current pieces begin with one focal quadrangle filled with painted imagery which then initiates the composition around it, sometimes evolving into works that are themselves divided into quadrants each consisted of four sided forms.
A variety of filmmaking techniques and processes are utilized to aid decisions made in the construction of the paintings. The MacGuffin is a narrative device which is used to initiate a plot and is then often forgotten or eclipsed by other developments. Analogously, the painted film ending serves as a visual motif which has evolved beyond its initial impetus into a body of work of increased complexity, its significance descriptively expressed and yet also ineffably undisclosed. A camera maneuver named the Dutch Angle is traditionally used by filmmakers to visually alter or heighten dramatic moments. Painting frames on diagonals in relation to this cinematic strategy alternatively becomes a formal way to fill square shapes with rectangular frames. Another maneuver known as a Swish Pan, characterized by the quick camera rotation from one point to another that visually causes a blurred streaking of imagery, serves as an editing tool to interconnect scenes or frames of film. Freshly painted representational pictures swiped with a dry brush from edge to edge achieves a similar effect, sometimes strengthening and sometimes diminishing the recognizable realism of the source. A Texas Switch is a filmmaking technique which a director uses to deceive the audience’s belief that a principal actor has performed a scene actually executed by a stunt actor. Switching representational imagery within differing contexts is explored throughout this series, confusing the origin of the genre or author from sources both mainstream and esoteric. The Fade Out is a familiar way scenes or films are concluded, most commonly dissolving to blackness. Although some filmmakers have specific reasons for fading to white, or even red or blue or yellow, the use of black has influenced the way the paintings are executed, always by reversely applying pigment to a dark surface and then building up to the desired level of colour and light. Film Noir is a genre that generally, yet not definitively, characterizes black and white American dramas initially recognized in the 1940s, often depicting criminally and amorously motivated plots, and often presented in radically exaggerated contrasts of light and shadow. The unique monochromatic chiaroscuro aesthetic is of enormous influence upon this series of paintings, it is a visual source repetitively and progressively revisited. The Fourth Wall, a conceptual boundary between the performance and the spectator, is often broken when a director allows a character or a scenario to somehow engage directly with the viewer. A commonality to this theatrical device is achieved in select paintings as exposed gesso, canvas, or brush marks, reveal the reality of the materials over their illusionistic capabilities. The SmileBox curvature, affiliated with Cinerama, is produced by a recording and projection of simultaneous trinary images to exaggerate a sense of depth. Experimenting with flattening this three-dimensional source on to a two-dimensional painted surface supplies abstract form in place of a filmmaker’s intended verisimilitude. A film process known as the Pan and Scan, which cuts off imagery during the translation of a theatrical widescreen release to its standard format fullscreen video counterpart, is indirectly associated to this body of work. It is an example where subject can be secondary, even sacrificial, to the geometric concerns of a chosen image boundary. Postproduction is an enhancing procedure where filmmakers beautify the material upon completion of principal photography, and is a process that exists in opposition to the finished state of the paintings. The canvases are left unvarnished and unadorned, resisting an embellished presentation.
The many works are numbered or lettered rather than titled with the identity of the source material to which the imagery is appropriated. Offering a deconstruction of the content and form of one piece, however, exposes the degree of referential consideration involved in the establishment of individualized themes. Epilogues #37 contains painted imagery cropped from film stills belonging to the endings of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), and Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void (2009). Within these recent films, each of the three filmmakers either make reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and/or share a professional association to its special effects supervisor, Douglas Trumbull. Kubrick’s film was presented in the Cinerama format, which is the form to which this painting makes further reference; the three images are divided equally and fitted within a curved shape connecting the corners of a square canvas that, in contrast, challenges the magnificence of their rectangular scopes. The narrowest middle point of the curvature in relation to the length/width of the square equals the contemporary 16:9 ratio. The 45 inch dimension of the square is derived from the available measurement of the angles of the mitres and gussets involved with the carpentry of the stretcher.
Due to advantageous subject and composition, or connections to other films, the final scenes of certain sources have been painted more than once. Taste of Cherry (1997) directed by Abbas Kiarostami concludes with a metaphysical unmasking of the film’s illusionary constructive elements. The viewer witnesses the suicide of the main protagonist at the moment when the film stock changes, the film crew is exposed, and the lead actor is shown out of character in an appended scene that serves as an afterward, or afterlife, to the already concluded picture. Martin Scorsese resolves The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) with an abstract sequence of camera effects after the title role finally expires. At the moment of dying, the character’s departure disallows the film to continue representationally, specifically linking the circumstance of the subject with nonfigurative resources of the involved medium. Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) ends abruptly when the film reel appears to stop within the projector, resulting in the burning of its final frame before the audience. This directorial decision promotes a relation between the stopping of the narrative, and the factual revelation that it is being told and stopped by mechanical means. F for Fake (1975), a film from Orson Welles about trickery, deceit, magic, and art, concludes in an appropriate manner. Following the closing credits is a final shot where a hand, perhaps belonging to Welles himself, flips a consequential switch from an on to an off position, and the picture vanishes. Zabriskie Point (1970) reaches an explosive climax as Michelangelo Antonioni delivers the repetitive slow motion destruction of a cliffside mansion along with all its consumerist contents. The denouement that follows is that of an onlooking figure witnessing the event who then drives off into a setting desert sun. Hal Hartley’s end to Henry Fool (1997) depicts the film’s title antagonist running with suitcase in hand toward a destination left unknown to the viewer. Considering the slowly crafted momentum leading up to this final scenario, the ending poetically and courageously creates two possible resolutions to the script. Similarly, Ironweed (1987) directed by Hector Babenco, which ends upon the last shot of a spacious room filling with morning light, can be interpreted in two manners. This final image can either be a regretful flashback to what a destitute character is remembering from earlier in the film, or the empyrean to which he plans to return. Bruno Dumont shocks audiences with his suddenly violent climax to Twentynine Palms (2003). At a final moment, the protagonist murders his co-protagonist with such revolting surprise that one needs to review the entire preceding narrative with an alternate sensibility. Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), which confusingly evokes alarm and humour after the title character apparently shoots himself off camera and the film then ends with a chicken dancing to the music of Sonny Terry’s “Old Lost John” (1940), Andrei Tarkovsky’s conclusion to Stalker (1979), that upon first viewing ultimately culminates to a meticulously and symbolically composed yet suddenly and seemingly unrelated scene depicting a character’s telekinetic abilities, and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), comprised of an ending which includes an affecting montage of historical images relating to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich viscerally edited into a reverse timeline, are further examples of disquieting conclusions that challenge by exploiting the ambiguously bizarre. Directed by Herbert Ross and written by Woody Allen, Play it Again, Sam (1972), which influenced Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay for Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993), begins with Allen’s character in a theatre viewing the ending of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942). Ross then fittingly reprises a version of Curtiz’s concluding enactment played out at the finale. Stardust Memories (1980) directed by Woody Allen, is a second example where Allen places his characters in a theatre watching another film – this time, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), or The Bicycle Thief as it is often referred to in the United States. De Sica’s film, its ending in particular, is also featured in a scene where it is projected and viewed in a theatre in the Robert Altman film, The Player (1992). A third and fourth example where Allen involves characters watching another film can be found in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Celebrity (1998). The final shot of the former captures the close portrait of the lead actress watching a fictionalized film within the film, while the final shot of the latter shows an image from a fictionalized film within the film relaying the word “help” spelled out in smoke upon the sky as it is watched and interpreted by the lead actor. Observing endings from the film noir genre exposes the attention filmmakers pay to the geometry of interiors. The staircase sets from the final scenes of both Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) directed by Michael Curtiz, and The Maltese Falcon (1941) directed by John Huston, are lasting images because of the carefully composed cinematography, allowing the shot to close the film rather than the narrative. Some of John Huston’s later films finish as the final image slowly blurs out of recognizable focus, providing a neutral space for the credits to roll. Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975) exemplify this trait. Within film noir there also exists a nihilistic characteristic to which endings often occur succinctly following an energetically fatal climax. Examples such as White Heat (1949) directed by Raoul Walsh, and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) directed by Robert Aldrich, both quickly conclude with surreally apocalyptic explosions after frenetic scenes of rising tension, while Jules Dassin’s French noir Rififi (1955) reaches its resolution at the end of an impressively edited race of a car through countryside and city which finally halts with the demise of its driver. Often considered a colour noir, the ending of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) returns to the top of a mission bell tower with the ascending suspense finally coming to a close when the film abruptly concludes with an unexpected plot turn that sends a character over the edge to her death. An extended afterward was filmed but was chosen by Hitchcock not to be used. Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), a neo-noir private investigator story containing a pertinent subplot involving infidelity, specifically references Eric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” (1962-1972) as characters from Penn’s film exit a screening of My Night at Maud’s (1969). Both films end with scenes upon opposite coasts of the Atlantic Ocean. Gallipoli (1981) matter-of-factly ends in freeze frame with director Peter Weir’s image of the lead actor shot dead in mid-stride upon a World War I battlefield. This sudden and yet poignant conclusion is reminiscent of the ending of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and its remake by Delbert Mann (1979) when a young soldier is killed in a moment of melancholic surprise. Francis Ford Coppola superimposes an image of a stone idol from the final frame of Apocalypse Now (1979) upon a segment of the film’s opening sequence, allowing a cyclical narrative interpretation. Additionally, the soundtrack heard at the beginning of the film features “The End” (1967) by The Doors. Although there are a myriad of examples where films are bookended by similarities between their opening and closing segments, Carlos Reygadas is one filmmaker who performs this device with both abject and sublime intentions. Battle in Heaven (2005) begins and ends with an act of uncensored and supposedly unsimulated oral sex, possibly inferring that the entire middle narrative takes place in the mind of one of the two characters, while Silent Light (2007) accomplishes a masterfully captured opening sunrise and closing sunset, encapsulating the small yet large story of spirituality set within a Mennonite community. Andrey Zvyagintsev captures a comparably long sunrise in the opening of Elena (2011). The very last frame of the film is then shot from the same position, yet with a difference of light and context. The unassertive final scene of Cache (2005) directed by Michael Haneke, not noticed by many viewers, can be observed through the scrolling end credits of the film. Within this conclusive scenario is a scripted, acted, and yet unheard dialogue between two pivotal characters amongst a crowd of people, hiding an answer to the intentionally unanswerable premise set up by the director. Another of Haneke’s films, Funny Games (1997 and 2007) ends with a portrait in freeze frame which shares a strange correspondence to the way Francois Truffaut ends The 400 Blows (1959). David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) concludes with a character reciting the word “silencio”, common to the final moment of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963). The epic gangster film Once Upon a Time in America (1984) directed by Sergio Leone, famously concludes with an extremely close portrait returning an opium induced gaze, remarkably similar to the aftermath offered by Robert Altman in his preceding western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), considered Postmodern westerns that undermine the very genre to which they belong, both end with a centrally composed character slowly retreating from the camera before a long fade out. Of interest, Reichardt transgressively chooses the fullscreen aspect ratio, practically unheard of amongst westerns of the past fifty years except for a few examples such as Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014), Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970), and then perhaps some of the more obscure Spaghetti westerns of Italy or the Osterns and Red westerns of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, while Jarmusch acknowledges certain conventions of the western genre, and then amid them repetitively and episodically re-contextualizes the namesake and poetry of William Blake to ironically transcendent effect. Michael Cimino’s infamously lavish Heaven’s Gate (1980) which ends upon a scene of quietly enigmatic sadness, is a western that has received unfortunate dismissal over deserved appreciation. In spite of initial negative reception, Cimino, who holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting (1963), has cinematically accomplished a unique relationship of light, colour, composition, atmosphere, and scope, amongst recognizable historical reference to painters including French, Russian, and American realists, perhaps never to be matched again. Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925 and 1942) exists in two versions with two different endings; the initial 1925 release concludes with a comically directed scene where the lead actors kiss, while the 1942 reissue resolves more ambiguously as the same two characters simply ascend a staircase together. Whether one resolution is more successful than the other is debatable, yet what is most interesting is how this serves as a precursor to why a filmmaker might be lured back to previous work in order to somehow modernize their first vision. Canadian films Normal (2007) directed by Carl Bessai, Away From Her (2006) directed by Sarah Polley, Possible Worlds (2000) directed by Robert Lepage, Hard Core Logo (1996) directed by Bruce McDonald, Kissed (1996) directed by Lynne Stopkewich, Whale Music (1994) directed by Richard J. Lewis, Leolo (1992) directed by Jean-Claude Lauzon, Careful (1992) directed by Guy Maddin, Black Robe (1991) directed by Bruce Beresford, My American Cousin (1985) directed by Sandy Wilson, The Grey Fox (1982) directed by Phillip Borsos, In Praise of Older Women (1978) directed by George Kaczender, Lies My Father Told Me (1975) directed by Jan Kadar, and Goin’ Down the Road (1970) directed by Donald Shebib, appear several times throughout this body of work. They, along with others, exemplify an array of interestingly Romantic conclusions that provide fodder for alternative explorations.
The paintings form an archive. Each frame, executed with brevity, is as faithful to the selected photographic film still as needed in order to suggest a comparable likeness. The brush marks are generally unassuming, paint application is thin without an assisting external vehicle, palette is minimal, and the finish is matte. A black gesso ground mirrors the recurring conclusive trope of the fade to black cinematic ending.
A Critical Claim / Imperfect Pictures
Referencing early photographic images from western Canadian museum archives, this selection of paintings executes two motivational concerns. One, the work subverts the Romantic representation of the historic Canadian pioneer in favour of a critical view upon the documentation of colonialist subjects; two, the work utilizes imperfect characteristics of archival photography and their relationships with languages of painting.
The recording of Canadian colonial history is the subject, specifically late 19th and early 20th century portraits of posing prospectors, settlers, and armed explorers. The subversive aspect to the work is partially indebted to the discovery that some museums digitally alter their historical photographic imagery. Witnessing a select image on different museum archive websites with contrasting degrees of visual deterioration unearthed an intentional present-day revision. Where one archive exposed the natural cracks, dirt, mould, and age-induced degradation, another would provide the image unobscured and clean. Responding from a Postcolonial stance, observing and then painting mimicked photographic imperfection upon figurative under-paintings derived from a variety of idealized sources is a manner to metaphorically accentuate the suggestion of historical imperfection. These reinstated surface marks act as palimpsests of critique upon chosen subjects, the intent being one of iconoclasm, to challenge the heroic, the celebratory, and the Romantic.
Examples of early photography such as the daguerreotype, the tintype, and the pinhole image, have qualities that parallel certain attributes of painting. The distortion of image, the subtraction of detail, the fading of colour, the mutation of border, and the ephemeral reality of a limited capturing of time and place, are co-inhabitants of both photography and painting. The artifact/artwork simply does not last natural, temporal erosion; its lifespan may endure far longer than the subjects or contents that it documents, but in time, it will degrade and then finally decompose. Existential observations aside, historical colour tinting has a prime comparable relationship to the staining qualities of post-painterly abstraction, employing undetectable brushwork as a means to execute minimal yet unconventional pigment addition. Focus and blur are common photographic traits exploited in the work to reverse the figure/ground relationships of the image’s subject with its tactile surface imperfections. Observed cracks, scratches, missing pieces, and encapsulating fades that blend inward from the perimeters of the frame and over the subject, painted with sharpness and attentiveness, then jump to the foreground, allocating the blurred figure to the background. The semantic irony of reversing figure and ground is perhaps nothing original, but alongside an association between photography and painting, it provides worthy potential within the contexts of figuration, realism, and archival visual history. Furthermore, the paintings execute the differences between gloss and matte, and depth and flatness. The result is an engagement with not only the figure/ground relationship, but with an amalgamation-like, and not always aesthetically pleasing, alliance between representation and non-representation.
The installations, comprised of pieces edited from a larger body of paintings, were completed both during and following a studio residency at The Banff Centre in 2006.
While studying at Emily Carr Institute, this work first took shape as early as 2004. Correlating the cliches of the eager historic gold panner with the naive undergraduate art student became a way to combine pathos and prowess. Within these initial paintings, the utilization of the image of the pitiable prospector who risked their livelihood upon the hope of striking a worthy claim, performs an allegory for the manner in which a student similarly takes a life-changing chance upon a specific area of study, sometimes relocating across vast distances in search of uncertain success like the adventurer of the past. Establishing an accomplished realist method for depicting the chosen photographs and their medium specific failings into representational paintings, initiated the trajectory for further work that progressively embraced a more scathing rather than nostalgic agenda.
At some point in 2007, the representational source material informing and motivating the paintings progressed from photography to cinema. Like the deteriorated marks upon historical photographic images, similar observations can be gleaned from individually selected frames of film. While much effort is controversially being undertaken to restore the quality of aging films, studying their damaged properties offer methods and subjects for painting. Slowing down or pausing frames of older un-repaired film on video/dvd reveal often illuminating levels of visual disruption by varieties of detritus and celluloid decay, intriguing as both mark making devices, and for how these marks sometimes intersect or relate to the images surrounding and beneath. The argumentative aspect to the restorations can be attributed to the notion that, although intentions are admirable for extending the life of films for future generations, restorers are in some cases altering the original works of art without permission from, or collaboration with, their deceased creators. The once incomparable works are replaced by possibly overly produced and unduly modified reincarnations, often leaving the originals destined for compilation packages found in discount stores at bargain prices. Memento mori allusions, and this requiem for the mortality of cinematic lifespan, possibly contribute to the body of work to follow, a voluminous series of paintings that record the final frames from the ends of films.