ART & TRASH: A PRIMER

Art & Trash is a series of video essays exploring cinema’s underbelly: the avant-garde, the amateur, the ‘golden turkeys’, the ‘off-beat’, the ‘incredibly strange’. It’s also a network of interrelated projects that reflect on many different facets of moviegoing that trip the boundaries of high culture and low culture.

My name is Stephen Broomer, and at Art & Trash I wear many hats, as the host and creator, but also as writer and editor. These essays are personal to me, and they come together to bridge all of the different areas of cinema that have drawn me in over the past three decades. I offer these essays as a challenge to film culture, which has a tendency to impose labels on films and filmmakers, to classify them as good or bad—correct and incorrect form, good or bad stories and storytellers—such definitions are meaningless and distract from the experiential power of movies. Usually these questions of what’s good and what’s bad have little to do with a film’s values or ideas, and more to do with the success of cinematic illusionism — its plausibility — allowing scenes to play out with an infused — contrived — human interest and semblance of truth, what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “the suspension of disbelief.”

Cinema evolved to support the suspension of disbelief, through invisible editing and immersive, melodramatic acting; these facets, among others, allowed audiences to accept the scenarios playing out before them from a flexible vantage point, identifying with the actors, the lens, the scenery itself, embracing the authenticity of a rubber world. I contest the romantic realism of cinema by exploring those films that have been consigned to the rubbish bins of film history, often for their bizarre formal implausibility, treating them with the same seriousness I offer to experimental and avant-garde films, films that have also found only marginal audiences having long been dismissed by mainstream culture for their codification, for their inaccessibility, for their provocations. Our project isn’t about choosing between vitamins and poison. It’s about investigating and celebrating creativity. If we come to the movies in search of meaningful experiences, that search demands an open mind.

I am searching for meaningful experiences, and I’m doing so while exploring questions of taste, of culture and value. A great deal of what society accepts as valuable culture is simply what fits the codes and systems we’ve decided best suit the majority. Melodrama and technological mastery form clichés, and clichés please us because they don’t ask very much of us. A blockbuster movie will never truly challenge us. It won’t bear the form of an unsolvable riddle; even when it appears to be complex, we can trust that it will give us all the steps we need to find its solution.

My perception of movies was shaped in part by the ways in which I discovered them: through late-night broadcasts hosted by Maynard G. Krebsian beatniks, or borrowed from the audiovisual department in the basement of my local library, or in video stores, franchises and mom ’n pop shops. For a few short years, there was a video store in my neighbourhood called Art & Trash: it was there that I first saw films like Los Olvidados. I remember the aisles from the low angle of a ten-year-old, navigating teetering stacks of videocassettes, it seemed disorganized and its disorganization felt promising. Those stacks and overflowing shelves were built for haphazard browsing, which seemed like a natural metaphor for how I had found movies all along: what was on, what was around, what I’d encounter in the old underground magazines and movie books in the basement of my family home, what could come to me, dial-flipping after midnight. Every cassette represented experiences, what at that age felt like whole-body trance experiences, and in this they seemed closer to dreams than the tinsel fabrications of mass culture and the fanfare of awards shows.

So is this series pitting Art against Trash? Never! This is about Art & Trash, paired together, operating in tandem towards new visions, new sensations, and best of all, the abandonment of the worst and most pompous myth of cinema, that there are “correct” and “incorrect” ways of making movies.

Stephen Broomer is a filmmaker and film preservationist. He is the author of Hamilton Babylon: A History of the McMaster Film Board (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Codes for North: Foundations of the Canadian avant-garde film (CFMDC, 2017), co-author of Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada (with Michael Zryd, Goose Lane Editions, 2021), and co-editor of Imprints: The Films of Louise Bourque (with Clint Enns, Canadian Film Institute, 2021) and Exovede in the Darkroom: The Films of Rhayne Vermette (with Irene Bindi, ARP Books, 2023). Broomer has been a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of California Santa Cruz and the Prelinger Library, studying the aesthetics of home movies, and was a recipient of the International Council for Canadian Studies postdoctoral fellowship. He has held teaching appointments at University of Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan University, University of Calgary, and Glendon College (York University).

In 2023, Broomer launched the multimedia publishing house Black Zero, specializing in highly contextualized home video releases of Canadian underground movies.