Continuing on from Part 2...

I dig on higher education. I was a booky kid growing up and there's little denying that after the anarchic apathy of high school, it was nice to find myself in a place where (in theory anyway) a more dedicated approach to learning and thought was to be found at any space in which I chose to apply myself. The number of things that I learned at York University that, literally, changed the person that I am, cannot be counted. Many of my most overwhelming learning experiences took place in electives that I took outside the film department (Archetypal Themes in Literature, Queer Desire, Modes of Fantasy, and an anthropology course or two sit at the top of that list), but there's no denying that I truly did gain a fuck of a lot by going to film school. I take a dim view of the process in my rhetoric and in these entries, but the sheer quantity of understanding that was dumped into my head in classes like my second year film theory class (taught by a man who could give Kubrick himself a run for his money in sheer impenetrability), my fourth year cinematography class (a.k.a. Fisting with Antonin), pretty much any or all of my film history or film theory classes, and not to mention my plain old production workshops, made me the filmmaker / film critic / film fan that I am today.

Now here's my problem with that.

Let me give you an example: before I went to film school, I didn't know about the axis of action. (The axis of action, by the bye, is the invisible line between two subjects on screen. Man A is looking at Man B. Man A must therefore be looking to the right of frame, and Man B must be looking to the left of frame, or Man A and Man B will not appear to be looking at one another in successive shots.) My lack of knowledge of this fundamental principal of camera blocking and editing is underlined in the "heaven" sequence of Stanley's Life, wherein Stanley and Edith have a lengthy dialogue sequence at Six Inch Lake. Stanley is standing on the west side of Six Inch Lake, and Edith is standing on the right. Having never shot so large a chunk of dialogue before, I quickly got tired of endless medium shots of the two characters staring at each other, shot from the same position (this was long before I started doing master takes of scenes, incidentally), so I just started throwing the camera all over the place. To their left, to their right, above them, around them, underneath them.

The result is a sequence of film where unless you've spent most of your life sitting beside Six Inch Lake, and can therefore consistently orientate yourself through the nearby geography in each shot, it really does look like Stanley and Edith are arguing with everybody and nobody, all at once. Eyelines are fucked, continuity of action is fucked, the entire temporal sense of the place is fucked.

I don't care.

There's nothing wrong with the scene above. It's still a scene, it still achieves everything the scene needs to achieve, and it's fun and exuberant and excited in all the ways those old Infinitely Brown movies always were. They were thrilling to make. Fuck, they were thrilling to conceive. Sometimes I'd just sit around giggling at the mindflying brilliance of scenes I hadn't even shot yet.

Film school made me hate that scene. Hate it. Be unable to watch it, in other words, without hearing any of six film professors (and more than a few of my film school comrades) shrieking at me about the perceived importance of the axis of action, and thereby raising a viper's nest of sadness and insecurity in me.

This is a slight example, but I think it's good at getting at the root of the thing. There's nothing actually wrong with the axis of action rule, and there's certainly a shitload to be gained by a formal education in an artistic medium in which you are trying to express yourself. But just as the Hollywood film industry (as documented weekly on Mamo) must never stray too far from the paradoxical reality that film is both a business (necessitating deals, agents, lawyers, action figure tie-ins, and a generally commodity-based approach to the entire production process) and an art form (requiring temperamental creative individuals, Brangelinas, development hells, and sweet little fuck of a chance of a newbie ever making it anywhere unless he does something truly different), so too we must remember that film (as with all art) can certainly improve through instruction, but must also lie servant to the innate creative curiousities and impulses that lie within the (hopefully) talented individual undertaking the art form. Or like they used to say about the frog, you can cut on that green son'bitch, but you'll kill him to find out why he wriggles.

Film school killed my frog.

Went down like this:

I was so cocky in first year, I was essentially a walking glans. I was so cocky, Meredith and I (now very close friends) were essentially arch-nemeses. I was so cocky, I took pretty much every single assignment handed to me in Film Production 1010 as an opportunity to completely throw away every single rule book they tried to force me under, and come out with a film that obeyed the letter of the law by doing so much more than you could ever have expected it to do, thereby showing them how much I was capable of beyond their limited professorial imaginations. Teddy bears walked and Death Stars exploded. And the creative spirit was very much with me. Embroiled in a thick soup of heroic literature, Eisensteinian theory, and natural adolescent male competitiveness, I was so into my shit that year, that when I came up with what became my final project (Light & Magic), I walked straight into a girls' washroom and spent several minutes trying to figure out a) where they'd put all the fucking urinals and b) why there were so many women in here staring at me.

My production teacher that year was a noob. An utter noob, really, a guy who had been given the gig based on the strength of his documentaries about various Caribbean islands. Couldn't have given less of a fuck about any of us, that's certain. Notably, he was the guy who saddled my very first film school project (shot on actual film, no less!) with the descriptive: "disturbing." Which it really, really was. But fuck him anyway. Still, the year ended well; Light & Magic was rather nicely received, especially given that it came from the guy who made the "disturbing" flick with all the fish eyes in it. Some mentioned Light & Magic and E.T. in the same breath, which I laughed about frequently and much. And the collective gasp at the year-end screening when Tederick sat up and walked off my bed... well, that's about as good as it ever got at York U.

This meant that when I arrived for second year, I was loaded for bear (no pun intended). I had a detailed game plan of what I wanted to do and who I wanted to do it with. And then things got... complex. There were two teachers for the production stream that year, dividing the second-year students among four classes. One of the teachers had been at the school for a while; the other (mine) was new. And the latter decided he was going to change things up in terms of how he approached teaching the class. He favoured a more "workshop" approach, with small, themed assignments designed to teach specific skills within certain "genres" of camera blocking. He liked to spend classes watching laserdisks with audio commentary or dissecting key sequences from good and bad films, shot by shot. He was sort of the godfather of the One Minute Film & Video Festival, too, in that he gave us two assignments in the fall that had to be exactly one minute long, no more, no less.

These kinetic exercises jived brilliantly with my attitudes, because they really were opportunities to be both formal and anarchic at the same time. The fall term in my second year passed pretty well, with the slight, sad exception that the teacher in question wasn't too big on my flicks. Some of them went over well with the class and some didn't; each of them pushed their concept in a way that I like, and all of them gave birth to better things in later years (André fighting eggs in Repression became André fighting centipedes in Night of the Centipedes; anti-time experiments in Clockwork got packaged into my inaugural 1MFVF flick, Sensitivity; and the crazy bastard shit of Parallax pretty much redefined how I shot everything after it).

When the other half of the students found out what was going on in my classroom, they went nuts. They were stuck doing "thesis"-style larger projects that had to be proposed, documented, and executed... and worse, not everyone in their class got a chance to direct. Here we were farting around doing whatever the fuck we wanted, using the same production and editing space as the other side, and the result was predictible: it started a gigantic, multi-month turf war over the curriculum design at York University. I was in the middle of that briefly, mostly because I chaired a student/teacher information session and thereby caught the eye of the head of the department, who later consulted with me as an unofficial student representative in higher-level meetings. It was fun, and it was interesting, and it underlined how much poor York really was in a state of utter transition - because what value did this formalist approach to teaching film craft have in an age where every student had a camcorder? Who shoots on 16mm and edits on a Steenbeck anymore, anyway?

I finished my second year at York with The Positively True Adventures of a Teenaged Girl in Love, in which I exorcised the last of my teenaged ya-yas through a collaboration with my sister, and made a mockumentary that wore its angsty, love-struck heart unabashedly on its sleeve... but was pretty much unilaterally lost on its audience. Or at least, it was lost on my teacher, who dismissed it with a diffident "it's not my thing." (The best thing to come out of the production was when an old stalker of mine, seeing me return to North Toronto C.I. armed with video cameras, reportedly thought I was there to make a documentary about her.) (The second best thing was the song, a riff on My So-Called Life quotes, written by my brother.) By the end of year, I was pretty vulnerable to criticism of my work and of my style. We'd just gone through a CUPE strike delaying the end of term by weeks, the curriculum thing had dragged on for a lot longer than anybody had planned, and I was thoroughly exhausted. I didn't attend the end-of-year screening at all that year. I was Yorked out.

In my third year, the production stream was divided again, with everyone now having the opportunities to take classes in both film production and video production. (And if there were ever a greater emblem of just how obsolete and backwards-facing the York curriculum now was, a divided approach to film and video production in 1998 must surely be it.) The year was significant for two reasons. First, it held the actual moment where I realized, for the first time in my life, that something that I was very good at - going to school - was about to be over. Second, it was where I started to meet significant resistance to my work from the production department. By this point (in theory), the directors were supposed to have been thinned from the herd, with everyone else falling into the other roles (writing, editing, photography, sound, production). The directors were expected to bear the York torch, create powerful and award-winning Canadian short films, and show the world how good the school was.

As was made explicit to me the following year, most of the production committee did not want me in that group of directors. I don't think I can describe in writing what exactly the "style" of movie that the production committee wanted to support was, but I can assure you that my shit did not meet that style. This is okay. This is life. I am grateful for the opportunities (FUCK, Glamazons) I had in third year. All of my other proposals to direct projects were rejected throughout the year, but my proposal for the end-of-year open project in film production was picked up in what was, as I recall, the single most surprising moment of my time at school. I'd submitted Night of the Centipedes after a flurry of all-night writing, with a belief that there was no sweet way in fuck it would ever get chosen for production. When the list of directors for the open project was posted and my name was on it alongside Dave's and Joel's and everyone else I respected in the year, it was like breathing in rarified air. I was sharing list-space with people whose work I admired, and whose projects looked shit-hot.

Let's face it, Night of the Centipedes was pretty much my entire York experience. I made one of my closest friends on that shoot, I made a movie that (and this is genuinely unique, by the way) achieved every single thing required of it in the script, and felt artistically significant, albeit in a limited way. And there was a lot of fun around it, too. There was a postering war in the halls of York where I put up full-page "ads" for the film's progress that ignited a bunch of graffiti comments which, themselves, only kicked off more postering. There was the nefarious incident of the garbage bag full of Jell-o that developed a rivulet of mould the size of a snake. There was my really, really, really stunningly hot girlfriend crawling around on André wearing only a white men's dress shirt. There was me, running an actual show, with actual crew, camera, equipment, schedules, deadlines... albeit my usual, minimalist approach to such things. (NOTC came in at half the budget of the next-most-expensive film from that year.) And at an end-of-year screening where few projects were actually finished, and one actually prompted my very favourite on-the-spot emcee quip of all time ("Sometimes a director's vision is so powerful, you can actually hear his voice while watching his film"), Night of the Centipedes went over like gangbusters. I learned pretty much everything I'll ever need to know about mounting a set piece by the way the audience reacted to the cereal gag that night. It was... nice. I walked out to the car after the screening thinking I'd pretty much set myself back on the course I thought I'd be on through my entire film school career.

Because, of course, it was only third year. The real proving ground was yet to come, and here I was, positioned to lead into it with a strong prototype of exactly the kind of cinema I wanted to practice in my thesis project. Or so I thought.

To Be Continued...