Richard Kerr: Field Trips
Art & Trash, episode 13
Richard Kerr: Field Trips
Stephen Broomer, May 5, 2022
Richard Kerr came to filmmaking from a distinctively Canadian background, having pursued a career as a professional hockey player. Kerr became interested in making art, first through photography, which led him to filmmaking. After making a number of films that explored a poetic, observational style, Kerr began a series of long films that dealt with storytelling, journeying, and national myth. Inspired by the writings of Ernest Hemingway, and by compositional and reportage traditions of photography, Kerr took images of home, of landscapes, and, as a tourist, of the territories and politics of America; later, he would pursue self-consciously machined images and found footage.
The narration of this video is derived from Broomer’s writing on Kerr originally developed for the book, Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada, edited by Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, published by Goose Lane Editions in Fall 2021. The book is available to purchase here: https://gooselane.com/products/moments-of-perception
Richard Kerr's films are available for rent from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Canyon Cinema. For further information, please consult https://www.cfmdc.org/filmmaker/1170
SCRIPT:
Richard Kerr came to filmmaking from a distinctively Canadian background, having pursued a career as a professional hockey player. Kerr became interested in making art, first through photography, which led him to filmmaking. After making a number of films that explored a poetic, observational style, Kerr began a series of long films that dealt with storytelling, journeying, and national myth. Inspired by the writings of Ernest Hemingway, and by compositional and reportage traditions of photography, Kerr took images of home, of landscapes, and, as a tourist, of the territories and politics of America; later, he would pursue self-consciously machined images and found footage. His work in filmmaking has been complemented by his work in sculpture and craft, specifically his motion picture weaving project, totemic quilts fashioned from interwoven strips of commercial film, their frames forming tartan patterns on wall-mounted light boxes. These boxes, a unique integration of the methods of folk art with the serial constitution of the film strip, represent the bulk of Kerr’s activity in recent decades.
Kerr’s earliest films are works of cinéma vérité: Hawkesville to Wallenstein (1976), a portrait of Old Order Amish farmers in southern Ontario in winter, a patient, at times meditative look at their lifestyle, suspended in pastoral memory; Vesta Lunch (1978), an exercise in stationary, observational, sync-sound filmmaking, shot at night in an iconic Toronto greasy spoon; and the more personal Canal (1982), a portrait of the Welland Canal dedicated to his brother, a study of “a place of our youth.” His films moved in another direction with his first major work, On Land over Water (Six Stories) (1984), an omnibus of six episodes, among them a dramatized reading (paired with visually fragmented text) from Hemingway; non-narrative episodes that use improvisatory camerawork and optical manipulation; and spontaneous stories from figures encountered on the road. Much of this work remains anchored in observation, but it suggests the forms that will underscore Kerr’s subsequent films—fluent transit between colour and black and white photography, a mixture of environmental and human portraiture, interruptions of texts and symbols printed into the image, a porous sense of what storytelling can mean.
He followed this with two more long films, The Last Days of Contrition and Cruel Rhythm (1988 and 1991 respectively). Both are road trips through the final days of Reagan’s America. The Last Days of Contrition tours beaches, deserts, ballparks, and ruins, in a stark black and white, using motorized tripod heads to create breathless scans of an unstoried desert; radio broadcasts introduce a percussive march, jingoistic commentary on American democracy, a collage of looping speeches. The film ends with these forms coming together in a persistent spinning motion aimed at treetops as, in superimposition, military jets cross the sky, an omen of the end-times. Cruel Rhythm continues these gestures, with a more explicit emphasis on themes of militarism in American life. The soundtrack offers a survey distinct to the American social landscape: dramatized military drills; the national anthem; cheers at a baseball game; official statements from military personnel. Against this Kerr poses images that, at first, extend the observational qualities of The Last Days of Contrition, but once colour arrives, in the form of a long abstract sequence of animated, agitated palm leaves, Cruel Rhythm enters into a more violent, intensely abstract space. Elemental phenomena come and go, composed in the abstract: a backlit indoor waterfall, billowing flames. Kerr engages a rapid, mechanical movement that reduces palm leaves and landscapes to lines of light. From this emerges an America of fear and uncertainty, host to a blinding restlessness matched on the soundtrack by the sounds of war and the ponderous statement by a reporter that “something is happening outside.”
The final sequence of machined abstraction in Cruel Rhythm foreshadows a coming turn in Kerr’s work, a total embrace of the camera’s ability to abstract the photographic subject by force of motion. This work, influenced by Michael Snow’s explorations of camera motion, disavows the narrative aspects that had a played a persistent role in Kerr’s long films to date. It also signals a departure from the photojournalistic qualities that had defined much of his work, moving into a territory of difficult, experiential modernism. In three works—Machine in the Garden, Plein Air Etude, and Plein Air (all finished in 1991)—Kerr uses the camera, motorized tripod heads, and vehicle mounts to explore a new approach to environmental portraiture. Kerr is influenced by Michael Snow’s La region centrale - in which a landscape is subject to an exhaustive, coolly mechanical survey of camera movement - but the resulting works have a plainly romantic quality to them, inscribed with a machine but willed by a definitively human subjectivity.
The title of The Machine in the Garden comes from Leo Marx, whose study of the same name drew from the motif in American literature of a pastoral reality disrupted by industrial technology. Kerr’s film does not linger on the fraying of a tranquil range, but nor does it see only as a machine sees. The road opens up for it, a car-mounted camera passing through space. Car and camera become the carriage of vision, mediating and disrupting the scene.
The Plein Air films - kinetic sketch work - offer a bridge between Kerr’s environmental themes and the post-impressionists, suggesting that the spirit of the landscape is felt more in the energy of receiving it - an energy that can only be expressed in the abstract - than it can be in the clean witness of bounded, conventional composition. As with Cruel Rhythm, Kerr turns to the elemental - in fluid, violent, kinetic cinematography of water and earth, the plein air of the title - an allusion to the painter’s tradition of working in nature - become the literal air that’s broken by the movement of the camera.
Kerr’s impulse towards narrative and storytelling was not altogether abandoned: rather, it led him to make The Willing Voyeur (1996), a feature in the style of the new narrative, combining storytelling and dramatic structures with progressive, subversive, experimental forms. The willing voyeur deals in discontinuities: body bags, photo albums, overlapping voices giving stray, tangential observations. It is a film about the voyeur - both on screen and in the audience - and their violent desires: why do we seek out violence? how do we document violence? What about it thrills or repels us? Where do thrill and repulsion overlap? Why do we study and remember it? Kerr withdrew The Willing Voyeur from distribution after a debut at the Locarno Film Festival. It marks Kerr’s only effort in relatively mainstream filmmaking, but it also serves as a central rift in his work, distinguishing what had come before—disciplined formalism that paired explorative treatments of landscape with an obscure approach to narrative—with what would follow—a continuing embrace of the machine’s wildest and most kinetic possibilities.
After The Willing Voyeur, Kerr completed his first work in video, …never confuse movement with action … (the self-fictionalization of Patrick Hemingway) (1998), a post-modern biographical documentary about a grandson of Ernest Hemingway. Kerr explores themes of inheritance, addiction, and the author’s exploration of the veil between fact and fiction. A subsequent lawsuit led Kerr to produce an alternative version, human tragedy on a grand scale (1999), a remix that placed greater emphasis on the community of homeless addicts in East Hastings, Vancouver, that had also featured prominently in the original. Kerr’s approach to working with video is present here as well: at times he uses a slow shutter to create staggered movements, and often retains roughly truncated sound. Throughout both films, Kerr employs running horizontal scrolls, drawn from emails, a ticker abundant with information, a maximalist force feeding of counter-narratives, sometimes deepening context, sometimes providing atmosphere, sometimes simply providing the eye with another place to look.
He followed this with a pair of poetic documentaries focused on landscape and the transient nature of perception: pictures of sound (2000), in which interrupting, often grating sound is paired with elliptical edits of two landscapes, a mountain range and a waterbody; and i was a strong man until i left home (2000), the most diaristic of his films since Cruel Rhythm, which also uses ellipses as a running strategy along with fades that indicate passing time, and much of which is composed in abstract images that use soft focus and extreme closeup, in tandem with the forward-moving elliptical cuts that draw the viewer through a series of hotel rooms, cityscapes, airports, airplanes. Kerr describes this approach as digital sketching, and he continued it in a universe of broken parts (2007) and action : study (2008).
All of Kerr’s work prior to the turn of the millennium had focused on personal vision of one order or another, whether that personal vision was observational or abstracting, internal or external. In the early 2000s, however, he began to work with 35mm commercial movie trailers, refashioning them into lightbox-mounted collages but also working with them to create new films. This marked the start of his work in installation, culminating in Industry, a show held at the Cinémathèque québécoise in 2003 that included works from his motion picture weaving project and his found footage films. In Collage d’Hollywood (2003) and Hollywood décollage (2004) he uses chemistry, paint, and superimposition to chip away at the existing imagery and to fill in the gaps that he has dug out in a décollage mode; in De Mouvement (2009), a black and white collage of graphic transitions suggests an undercurrent of menacing psychology in scenes from commercial films of the early talkie and wartime era; and in morning … came a day early (2015), scientific films of the 1960s are revisited to ruminate on the riddle of the ruin, the nature of time and destruction. The acme of his work in this mode, however, is T/ Demi-Monde (2004), a five-hour double-projector work of 35mm film strips, digitally scanned and slowly dissolving into each other. The composition is of a rectangular strip of two consecutive frames. Kerr has distorted, decomposed, or otherwise distressed the emulsion of each frame to create abstract and occasionally non-objective imagery. For the most part, the root image remains, but in some instances Kerr has created new symmetries within the image, or has reticulated the image so that it breaks down into strands of fraying viscera, revealing underlying patterns of emulsion.
Kerr returned to his experiments in using the camera in tandem with other forms of machines with house arrest (2012), in which he mounted a digital camera on the end of a power drill, giving an illusion that the camera can see 360 degrees. The image curves with the speed of the rotating drillbit. The wide angle of the camera lens bends the shapes it encounters—skyscrapers, paint cans, a garden—along that curve. At first this act of abstraction forces the eye to recognize these objects; as it continues, the root environment becomes less discernible, as the drill speeds up and the resulting images metamorphose into mandalas. The power drill is again used in wholly holy (2017), not as a mount, but to make images by drilling directly into the film plane: Kerr drilled a hole into a roll of undeveloped film and let it soak up moonlight. Once processed and scanned, the drill’s holes are pitch black, with frayed, brown-gold edges, in contrast to the blue and dark purple tone of the intact film strip. Kerr digitally manipulated the results, slowing and staggering the rhythm in which this circle moves across the frame. The black puncture becomes a metaphoric opposite for the moon itself; the image is both a product of moonlight and a symbol of its absence.
Field Trip, finished in 2021, is a culmination of Kerr’s studies in the boundaries of material. The piece is made from a personal archive of visual research gathered between 1980 and 1995, of photographs taken throughout the United States while he was making films, among them, The Last Days of Contrition and Cruel Rhythm. Kerr has crumpled and distressed the photographs, creating creases in the surface that become animated as he passes a light over them. Kerr’s photographs bear an illusion of depth; but that depth is annihilated by the folds and creases, the highlights and shadows, created by his handling of base materials—paper and light. Field Trip is an affirmation of Kerr’s total project, a meeting of found materials—found, if only in one’s own past; materiality—where the arcs and valleys of crumpled paper trump the printed grain of the snapshot; and social landscape—traces of American life, acts of witness after Robert Frank, from rustbelt vistas to mundane gatherings to suggestions of jingoism and violence. The photograph is revealed as a construct; the construct is further strained by staggering, unnatural colour. Kerr has described this process as a reimagining: in a fog of dissolves, he breaks down the image into component parts, of texture, content, colour, speaking to the distance of time.
CREATOR’S STATEMENT
The focus of this episode is on Richard Kerr, one of Canada’s greatest living filmmakers, whose work integrates technological adventure, phenomenal curiosity, and a sense of instinct that seems preternaturally aligned with the history of vision in art. Kerr’s films have meant a great deal to me as subjects for teaching film and video production because of the degree to which they provoke students to think about how they’ll use their materials, and because at the forefront of his work is a devotion to visual experience that supersedes theme and content. Even at his most documental and minimalistic, Richard Kerr makes films to be felt immediately in the synapses, a quality that may seem obvious in his most abstract films (like Plein Air, 1991, or House Arrest, 2013), but which is a trait that emerges as early as his first film, Hawkesville to Wallenstein (1977), where slow-motion shots of horse-drawn carriages are both symbolic elegies (of what for most North Americans is a bygone way of life) and durational passages that structure other, more plainly observational passages.
Kerr’s films have been the subject of critical commentary that places them in relation to technology, collage, the Canadian landscape and masculinity. Bart Testa has been the leading commentator on Kerr’s films, and offered one remark about them that seems a comprehensive statement of their virtues: that they are unconfused and compact (Testa, 1994, 11). His earliest films bear the poetic documentary style that Colin Low had mastered at the National Film Board of Canada—Canal (1981), in particular, reflects this approach, subtle but deliberate shows of technique emerging from slow, meditative passages, scanning coastlines marked by the wastage of industry. This side of Kerr’s work remains even as his films become more open in their forms, with his long-form films of the mid- to late-80s: On Land Over Water (Six Stories) (1984), The Last Days of Contrition (1988), and Cruel Rhythm (1991). It is that openness of form—and Kerr’s commitment to aesthetics that feature curious pleasures, like aggressive, kinetic camera movement and dial-tuning soundscapes—that persists in his later work, especially the films and videos that he has made in the twenty-first century.
With Richard Kerr: Field Trips, I’ve attempted to make a fairly total survey of Kerr’s films. Some items have fallen by the wayside: there are more works to be explored, and time and ease of form have kept me from giving more attention to the light box collages, tapestries of industrial waste that strike me as a touchstone in the folk art of upcycling. As collages, they are less the collision of “foreign realities” as Max Ernst would have it, and more an act of material self-consciousness for the film strip; the illusion of movement collapses and the strip is revealed for what it is: pattern and colour.