Changing Seasons: The Canadian Pastoral in Keith Lock’s Everything Everywhere Again Alive

Art & Trash, episode 23
Changing Seasons: The Canadian Pastoral in Keith Lock's Everything Everywhere Again Alive
Stephen Broomer, December 8, 2022

In 1972, a small commune formed at Buck Lake, an isolated patch of wilderness. Founded by two skilled tradesmen who had met on a construction job, those who came to Buck Lake participated in the development of a homestead, whether that meant digging a well or building a barn or sharing in the daily rituals of cooking and cleaning. When Lock came to Buck Lake, he brought his camera, documenting the community over the course of 1973 and 1974, returning to Toronto intermittently to get his film developed. In the time that he documented them, the Buck Lake residents were involved in farming practices from the birthing of calfs to the slaughter of pigs, sharing their days between an idyllic, meditative splendour, the hard labour of farming, the necessary rituals of rural living, and the building of infrastructure. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer discusses the Back-to-the-Land movement that foregrounded the Buck Lake experiment, and engages in a formal analysis of Lock's film, which serves as a template of many of the themes that had a profound influence on the Canadian experimental film movement through the years that followed it.

This video essay is a variation on one that appears as a bonus feature on the Black Zero release of Everything Everywhere Again Alive, which was published through blackzero.ca on January 15, 2023.

SCRIPT:

In the 1960s amid a growing generational divide, young people began to leave urban centres and establish small communes in the wilderness. A staple of the youth movement, agrarian communes were places for reflection, for developing alternative forms of knowledge, for living with nature, for living a more fundamental life unclouded by the anxieties of convention and persecution that many experienced in North America’s cities and suburbs. For many, such exile was an ultimate form of dropping out from mainstream western capitalist society. The desire to go back to the land became an informal movement, guided by a mix of examples, from paperback agrarian fantasies, to the experiential and harmonious lifestyle of the Zen Buddhist, to the practical, purposeful work of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue. As much as it was an act of returning to the past, going back-to-the-land was also a search for a new land. This was an era of growing ecological crisis, with the natural world dwindling under the total geographical knowledge of NASA’s Blue Marble photograph: the whole world could be photographed, and once photographed, every last wilderness was ready to be occupied and degraded. As inspired as it was by positive examples, the back-to-the-land movement was likewise propelled by negative examples of what life in western society was coming to mean, from the failure of urban renewal projects, to increasing agitation over the war in Viet Nam, to the despair of the campus novel. While the desire to go back-to-the-land was motivated by the interesting times in which it happened, the movement of the 1960s was a new wave on an old fashion, taking after the transcendentalist communards and free spirits of the nineteenth century, like Henry David Thoreau whose embrace of the natural world was twinned to his repudiation of civil government, or others who had imagined the new world as a bountiful Edenic garden—from Walt Whitman to those utopian communities that mixed collective farming with fringe faith.

Canada had long been prey to similar fantasies among its settlers, realized vividly in Susanna Moodie’s memoir Roughing it in the Bush, on settler life in Upper Canada in the 1830s. Moodie offers a portrait of Canada as a place of caution and hardship, inhospitable but worthy of the settler’s endurance. Hers was the prejudicial fantasy of a land in need of taming; this theme resonates when motion picture cameras arrive in anticipation of the twentieth-century. It is in this spirit that, in 1898, James Freer makes the first Canadian film, Ten Years in Manitoba, a record of farm life on the prairie. Moodie’s and Freer’s projects were both about sending invitation back to the Old World, an Old World that was invariably one of white Europeans. In Moodie’s case, the invitation was come if you dare, in Freer’s case, come and thrive. Farley Mowat, the Canadian adventure novelist, saw the contested territory of the Canadian landscape as both a compelling setting and a cause, and his books feature westerners whose forced immersion in the wild provokes lessons in survival and humility. By the 1960s, the popular conception of the Canadian landscape as an exotic frontier began to drift with a growing social awareness of the suffering of the land’s first peoples; that frontier became a place of tragic resonances, of frightening colonial promises and debts.

In 1972, a small commune formed at Buck Lake, an isolated patch of wilderness in Southern Ontario. Founded by two skilled tradesmen who had met on a construction job, those who came to Buck Lake participated in the development of a homestead, whether that meant digging a well or building a barn or sharing in the daily rituals of cooking and cleaning. The communards lived together in an A-frame cottage. Co-founder Tom Brouillette, who built the A-frame on his family’s land, began to bring up his partner, Anna Gronau. Gronau was an artist in nearby Toronto, where she had been living in a communal house with other artists and filmmakers. Some of her housemates would follow, many artists among them, forming a circle of friends whose stays at Buck Lake soon went from weekend visits to long bouts of full-time on-site living.

Keith Lock and Jim Anderson came to Buck Lake at a time when they had been deeply involved in filmmaking collaborations. Lock had lived with Gronau in the communal house in Toronto, and he and Anderson had attended York University for filmmaking. But the men had been friends longer than that: they began making films together in high school. By the time that they first visited Buck Lake, Lock and Anderson had already made several films, among them Arnold, a short dramatic character study, and Base Tranquility, an animated film depicting the moon-landing. In 1972, they finished a mid-length dramatic film, Work Bike & Eat. The film follows a character through a series of vignettes; some sequences are dramatic, but many bear the fly-on-the-wall naturalism of cinéma vérité. When Lock came to Buck Lake, he brought his camera, documenting the community over the course of 1973 and 1974, returning to Toronto intermittently to get his film developed. In the time that he documented them, the Buck Lake residents were involved in farming practices from the birthing of calfs to the slaughter of pigs, sharing their days between an idyllic, meditative splendour, the hard labour of farming, the necessary rituals of rural living, and the building of infrastructure. People came and went. The mix of work, play and rest provoked a confrontation with the landscape, at once a celebration of the diurnal rhythms of the earth and a reflection on the moral contract between human beings and the land. When Lock finished the film, he gave it a title that reflected the transitions of the seasons, the concept of totality, and the inevitable renewal of spring: Everything Everywhere Again Alive.

In their early films, Lock and Anderson had shown a skill for spontaneous observation. Lock’s filmmaking at Buck Lake comes in part from diaristic ambitions: in a sense, he’s making home movies, but they are the expertly crafted home movies of an experienced and creative cinematographer. Lock is also making a ‘home movie’ that will come to bear self-conscious markings of the medium, and the final film mixes Lock’s documentation of life on the lake with forms more elusive in their meaning, for example, hieroglyphics that chart the phases of the moon and fragments of speech that have been sewn into a sound collage. The result is something like a ritual, as if, by collapsing this year into little more than an hour, Lock is summoning the renewal of spring. Everything Everywhere Again Alive is at once a social critique, demonstrating a way of life that many urbanites seeing it would recognize as being more vital than their own; an intimate celebration, of these people whose lives were so entwined over the years in which it was made; a work of environmental conviction, an Edenic vision in a world of shrinking wilderness; and a spiritual work, in the filmmaker’s harmonization with the land, felt in the film’s elemental disruptions, of blazing fires seen in close up, the splashing of lake water and condensation on pots and windows, the tilling of the earth, the air in the trees and in the mist rising from the lake.

Although it condenses many seasons on Buck Lake, Everything Everywhere Again Alive, like Work Bike & Eat, bears a vignette structure. Episodes pass steadily, memorable either for the events they depict or for the formal disruptions that they bear. These episodes chart the evolution of the property and of the community, but they are also often marked by formal interventions that depart sharply from the documental presentation of reality. From early in the film, solid colours appear intermittently, their rhythm becoming a kind of pulse, their presence marking each shot as a discreet moment, the void inviting the subconscious to produce afterimages. These interruptions are non-objective, visual rests that space out events but that also seem to bridge periods of waiting around in the wilderness, in the process becoming an allegory for that faint, meditative blankness. Elsewhere, Lock uses freeze-frames to linger on images, another departure from documentation, holding on punch holes and other signs of mediation. Chalk drawings of plants are intercut with scenes of the residents gardening; these images suggest a self-consciousness on the filmmaker’s part, a contrast of the vitality of the living organism with his filmed record of it; the illustrations become one more degree removed from the image. Lock’s approach reinforces these growing distances, from the empirical experience of tending to these plants to the act of recording them, further still to the act of illustrating them. In the same spirit of self-conscious mediation, Lock employs on-screen text throughout. The texts vary from odes-to-the-seasons, for example, the opening declaration of the arrival of spring, to step-by-step-instructions, as when the residents and their mentor go dowsing for a well.

Throughout the film, Lock employs a variety of devices that call attention to the contrast between the square and the circle. These shapes have not only oppositional forms but oppositional meanings: the square is inevitably defined by corners that box in the subject, while the circle is a continuous, unbroken line. Lock’s preoccupation with corners and circles becomes evident in the film, for example in this sequence, in which the corners of the frame are numbered in a clockwise direction, suggestion both the linearity of the frame and the circularity of the clock face. In other passages, square brackets are superimposed over the image, drawing attention to Lock’s framing in such a way that resembles the framing guides common to the interior of a camera eyepiece. The circle is present throughout, in a recurring dot that appears in the centre of the frame, another means of imposing a circle over these affairs. The circle can represent both zero and eternity, like Ouroboros, an infinite circulation of destruction and rebirth. The questions of form that are raised by this circle’s presence are most strongly felt in a sequence late in the film’s first reel: as the circle flashes intermittently to an X, Lock films a blue sky with strongly defined clouds, but the film appears to be skipping, as if skipping in the gate of a projector. In this moment, the film is caught between its two physical states: the square frame that is projected and the circular film reel that runs on the projector. In the next shot, the tree-lined horizon of Buck Lake is fully rotated 90-degrees and then another 90-degrees, turning the image fully upside-down—or is it right-side up? Lock is playing with the symmetry of the image, casting uncertainty as to which tree line is real and which is the reflection. This, again, resonates with Lock’s theme of the distance between true empirical experience and the inscription of it. This horizon is another participatory opening, an opportunity for the viewer to explore their own subjectivity, the tree line becoming like a Rorschach Test inkblot. Soon after, an icon of transition in nature, the caterpillar, is shown suspended in mid-air, crawling on an invisible thread. The orientation of the caterpillar mirrors this strange illusion, of the horizontal landscape transformed into a symmetrical pillar. It is a subtle declaration that Everything Everywhere Again Alive is a film about circulation, repetition, and transformation.

Northrop Frye proposed that the Canadian psyche was marked with a garrison mentality, formed from the forts that were once the centres of settler life, surrounded on all sides by the terrifying otherness of the frontier. And in these forts, communities were held together by a shared vision of the society they wished to build there, shared values, shared laws, shared boundaries that could stand in for the boundless fears vibrating on the dark horizons of the wilderness. For Frye this was the origin of the dominant themes of Canadian literature, a posture of looking outward with fear and caution into the sublime of a vast, threatening landscape. The communards at Buck Lake experienced the wilderness in a markedly different way: even against the hardships of nature, their path radiated optimism, openness, a receptive, utopian sensibility. Like the first settlers, they are the other in this landscape, outsiders in a community where their unconventional lifestyle is occasionally met with suspicion. In one of the film’s final sequences, Lock is alone on the lake when he receives a strange guest, a man who has just gotten out of prison and who has shown up because the locals pointed him in their direction, a man who, for his criminal history alone, lives further out on the margins of society than the hippies and art students of Buck Lake. Lock spends some weeks alone in the A-frame with this man, whose rambling thoughts become a syntactically-fragmented poem. The poem, read by Lock one word at a time, accompanies a final portrait of the traveller before he departs.

At Buck Lake, the challenges of frontier life, as they had been perceived by Susannah Moodie and James Freer, become the mad threat of chance: the residents navigate wounds and challenging terrain, but the greater threat is the suddenness of change, as when a tragedy strikes their neighbours, an elderly couple whose house burns down. Lock’s habit of taking portraits has persisted throughout the film—a subject will pose for his camera and hold their pose, as they would for a still camera—it is a gesture of holding time that makes Lock’s portraiture distinctively totemic. In these moments, Lock relinquishes the overt dynamism of his camerawork and embraces the possibility of the camera to produce mementos. This portrait of the neighbours, in the wake of their tragedy, demonstrates the way that this technique strips away the pain of their context and transforms them into icons, the farm couple, like Grant Wood’s American Gothic; through this image they become resilient and iconic. In the midst of the film’s exceptional moments of communion, Lock’s portraits seem to erect barriers, distances between him and his subjects that speak to the film’s broader commentary, on time, ecology, tenderness, labour, meditation. It is in this distance that the film fully departs from the home movie, the diary, the quotidian, and becomes symbolic and eternal. The climax, after the prisoner has left, lingers on scenes of this last spring, scenes without human subjects, and the editing is rapturous, an exaltation of the spirit of the landscape: a sunless tree-line turns to a reflection of the bright sun in the water, a final reconciliation of sky and earth. This Eden remains a dense and overgrown landscape, for it was never their role to tame it. In one final self-conscious gesture, Keith Lock reminds that this is not a wilderness but a record of it, as the final frames flash an instruction: “REWIND FILM.” Even this last instruction holds parallels to the Back-to-the-Land movement, a command to rewind civilization back to an earlier time, towards something more authentic, or less corrupted, than the contemporary world.