Josephine Massarella: One Woman Walking
Art & Trash, episode 1
Josephine Massarella: One Woman Walking
Stephen Broomer, February 11, 2021
Josephine Massarella’s career as a filmmaker is marked by a long break. She began to make films in the early 1980s while a student at the University of British Columbia. She would finish five short films over the course of a decade, before taking a hiatus of almost two decades. Massarella returned to filmmaking in 2013. She would complete three more films that narrowed and articulated the major themes of her work, prior to her death in 2018. In this survey of Massarella's films, Stephen Broomer identifies ecological and feminist themes present in a recurring motif of women walking in solitude, symbolic vessels for the filmmaker herself, necessary guardians of nature, womanhood, and history.
The narration of this video is derived from Broomer’s writing on Massarella originally developed for the book, Moments of Perception: Canadian Experimental Film, edited by Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, forthcoming from Goose Lane Editions, Fall 2021.
Josephine Massarella's films are available for rent from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Canyon Cinema. For further information, please consult:
- cfmdc.org/filmmaker/1218
- canyoncinema.com/catalog/filmmaker/?i=209
Following her passing in June 2018, the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, with support from the Josephine Massarella Memorial Fund, established the Josephine Massarella Artist Award, an award conceived to assist female-identifying film artists, aged 50 years and older, living in Toronto or Hamilton, to return to filmmaking after a long absence. For more information, see lift.ca/programming-home/josephine-massarella-artist-award-2019/
Night Stream (1996)
SCRIPT:
Josephine Massarella’s career as a filmmaker is marked by a long break. She began to make films in the early 1980s while studying at the University of British Columbia. At that time, the faculty was focused on the conventions of Hollywood cinema, but Massarella was drawn to the more radical work that she encountered at the Pacific Cinematheque and Western Front. These experiences inspired Massarella to explore alternative forms. She would finish five short films over the course of a decade, before taking a seventeen-year hiatus in Hamilton, Ontario. Massarella returned to filmmaking in 2013. Prior to her death in 2018, she would complete three more films that narrowed and articulated the major themes of her work.
Massarella took a minimalistic approach for her first film, One Woman Waiting. It begins on a long take of wind coursing through sand dunes; its gaze is hypnotic and patient, as if fixed on a mirage. Actions play out entirely in this one uninterrupted shot. Over the course of eight minutes, a woman enters, paces and sits; another woman enters on the distant horizon. They come face to face. They embrace and part. This exchange suggests that the first woman, the waiting woman of the title, is one of many links in a long relay, an eternal chain of women in waiting. The notion of a sheltering, supportive sisterhood continues in her work, but it is only after her debut that Massarella begins to assemble the formal approach that would distinguish her work: spoken text that is full of intimacy and longing; contrasts of industry and the natural world; and a violent, rhythmic pursuit of the dynamic heart of nature.
No. 5 Reversal explores themes of alienation and life in wartime through scenes of female intimacy, factories and waterfalls, homes and ruins riddled by space and silence. On its soundtrack, radio dial-flipping, dramatic accounts of wartime, and Ruth Brown belting out “Teardrops From My Eyes,” combine to suggest the world of Massarella’s parents a decade before her birth. This portrayal of a historical past is challenged by a return to the present, with the appearance of Massarella herself, as a young woman, her Bolex camera to her eye, filming her own reflection. The entire film is in black and white, shot with the “number five reversal” stock that gives the film its title. This suggests a more complex relationship between past and present, that we are able to see in ourselves the pattern of the past. In the case of Massarella’s self-portrait, she casts herself in the tones of the past, fitting herself into this continuum.
Ten years after her debut, Massarella made Green Dream. Green Dream signalled a newly dynamic formalism in her work, and declared her fascination with the natural world. This formalism would largely be effected through the Bolex camera’s pixellation feature, that is, its function of taking single-frame images. Green Dream begins with scenes drawn from nature: a rapidly shifting field, slow-motion images of waterfalls; this soon gives way to an interspersing of scenes from highways, an infant’s face, seals frolicking on rocks. Excerpts from a poem by Toni Sammons appear on-screen intermittently, and Massarella’s film illustrates Sammons’ lyrics on the natural world, sorcery, and the beauty of use. After several minutes, a dominant technique emerges. Pixilation, divided by black frames, gives a stuttering rhythm to the roads and to a figure on a beach. This rapid stream of interlocking single-frames soon turns to contrasts of fire and ice, of the infant’s face and the roots of a tree; later, of plants; of portraits of women; of fish and factories; of ancient statues and the arrival of night. Green Dream signals the beginning of a more aggressive formalism in Massarella’s films, concerned as it is with the manipulative capabilities of the Bolex camera. Like One Woman Waiting and No. 5 Reversal, there is an atmosphere of autobiography to it: much of her footage is spontaneous and diaristic, making use of the presence of friends and family.
By contrast to this defiantly formal work, Massarella continued to make durational psychodramas in the vein of One Woman Waiting. Interference is a mostly silent character study of a woman typing and waiting for the day’s mail in her apartment. Night Stream is a psychodrama in the style of Maya Deren, in which a woman has a series of surreal encounters while exploring a seaside landscape. It was after Night Stream that Massarella took her hiatus from filmmaking.
In the early 2010s, Massarella began to make films again. This second wind began with Light Study, in which a woman walks through a dense wilderness, images of her alternating with shots of flowers, butterflies, waterfalls. Massarella’s pixilation gives Light Study a vibrating energy; midway through the film, it shifts from brilliant colour to high-contrast black and white; the electronic score likewise shifts from calm sustain to quick and violent bleats as Massarella’s pixilation becomes more fragmented, rapidly intercutting the movements of seabirds, the rush of a waterfall, and the stamens and pistils of flowers. That so much of the composition and imagery resembles both Green Dream and No. 5 Reversal speaks to Massarella’s fascination with the natural world. In spite of her love of nature, it is never sentimentalized; and as time has passed, her response to its sheer dynamic force has intensified.
In No End, a young woman follows a forest path and discovers a book on the ground. The sequence that follows integrates on-screen text, a poem of grief and loss written by Massarella, which seems to weave its way through slow takes surveying waterfalls, rivers, fossils. While it is notably distinct from the dynamic forms of Light Study, No End shares common ground with Green Dream and the durational, dramatic work that Massarella had developed in the 1990s. It is, above all, a meditation on our relationship with the natural world and the ability of nature to reflect our private trials. The young woman serves as a witness to the world and as an heir to this book and its poetry. She is another link in that eternal chain of women that Massarella introduced in her first film. As she follows a path out of Eden, the book is returned to the dirt to wait.
Massarella’s final film, 165708 takes its title from the serial number of her Bolex camera. It shares in many of the gestures in her earlier work: a woman walks in profile on a beach, flora and fauna are rapidly surveyed, all in a shimmering black and white. Single frames alternate; digital tinting introduces colour, casting blue and red into images of waterlilies and bees on sunflowers. But for all of its formal trappings, thematic imagery remains at the forefront in 165708, as this gesture that has repeated throughout Massarella’s work—of a woman passing through a landscape—has, by its persistent recurrence, become less performative, has become the autobiographical core of the work. These women are symbolic vessels for Massarella herself. They are also the necessary guardians of nature, womanhood, and history.
The long interruption to Massarella’s work reflects the themes she had explored in her early films: a continuum of departing and returning. A woman searches for definition through communion with other women, a filmmaker implicates herself in a monochrome past, a mother contemplates the mysteries of perception in the natural world. As solitary as Massarella’s films are, we might also see in them games of call-and-response, sounding out to family, past, and the land itself.
Massarella never again appeared on camera after No. 5 Reversal, but it is difficult to not to see, in her enigmatic portraits of these women walking, anything but that image of her, filming her own reflection with her Bolex camera.
One Woman Waiting (1984)
Green Dream (1994)
FURTHER READING:
Mike Hoolboom, “Memories of Josie,” mikehoolboom.com, June 16, 2018.
Josephine Massarella, “Josephine Massarella: a diary. April 5, 2017,” UZAK 30/31, Summer 2018.
Green Dream (1994)