Clip.
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Conn:
With MEAN, right away I thought of shooting film off a TV screen, and the tragicomic nature of hockey fights.
The film was a commission from the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto to celebrate their 25th anniversary, the theme was: Film Is Dead! Long Live Film! LIFT's anniversary project was partly inspired by a famous two word sentence written by video artist Tom Sherman in Canadian Art Magazine: Fuck film.
The pun of my film's title comes from our willingness to fight for absurd causes, and the life and death earnestness we bring to defining our own identities, the layered levels of meaning we attach to nation, religion, sports teams, and even to art genres.
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I made the left frame by filming brutal hockey fight footage off the TV set. The result isn't film or video, it's a third, new medium: grain + noise.
The fights were originally from low-grade VHS tapes that I bought from underground sources thru the internet. There's a whole subculture of fans who argue about their favourite clips. There are two kinds of fights: the more common is between worker-fighters, which can be very violent but are often ritualistic and routine; the other kind, by far the favourite kind on the web, is where 100% domination is the desired result, demanding the complete humiliation and psychological disintegration of the loser. These are the special fights that are talked about and re-played for years.
In MEAN I was trying to dissolve and reconstitute this corrosive culture into a kind of uglybeauty by focusing mostly on movement and colour. This was a utopian effort in both senses of the word. I mean it was born out of hope for something much better, and I knew I'd fail. But I was hoping for a useful failure as an important part of the process of making this film. I wanted to highlight some of the edge where meaning dominates and then gives way.
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For the frame on the right I filmed tree leaves beside Toronto's Don Valley Parkway. I was using Kodak's brand new Super 8 negative film stock. It had just been released to replace the Super 8 Kodachrome I'd used for 25 years and I was trying to keep an open mind. But while shooting I was mainly thinking about the sky as negative space and of the leaves shifting in the wind and my own movements covering and uncovering the sun.
I didn't notice they were diseased maple leaves until months after I'd finished the film.
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Q: Is the hockey fight footage in MEAN connected to a particular team, town, or part of the country?
Conn:
No, it's from my childhood, from a kind of utopia/dystopia I grew up in, from the Canada in my memory and imagination. Many Canadians don't realize how amazing hockey fights are to people in the rest of the world, especially in contrast to our otherwise, relatively subdued, nature.
I have an outsider's view on this because my parents were immigrants and I've never played the sport. But it was part of my childhood, the boys in the schoolyard with black eyes from the game the night before, who seemed so at ease with physical violence (unsurprisingly now, it turned out one of my close friends was being punched by his father, who was a hockey fan).
So, I was thinking about the idea of Canada more than the physical place I walk around in each day. This is where we actually live most of the time, in 'meaning', and we're willing to 'drop the gloves' if anyone attacks this, the Big Idea we call home.
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MEAN is a diptych made from VHS found footage and original Super 8 film, resulting in two film frames set into one HD frame, and exhibited in 35mm film or on Blu-ray Disc.
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Photobooklet .pdf, colour diptych image series, 8.6 MB
