On December 12th we present a special 16mm screening of Potamkin by Toronto filmmaker Stephen Broomer.
Artist Synopsis:
In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related
to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world's most respected
film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would
simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and
the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This
film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which
he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness.
At the
Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet
miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating
unseen into their nothing, the unfired rounds of their rifles restored
to their menacing potential. Feet tread backward up the steps as the
steps themselves collapse in splintering emulsion. The carriage is set
upright.
Review from desistfilm: online film journal:
By Ivonne Sheen
Experimental cinema inquires about the spirit of cinema itself. Its
research spreads out through the experimentation with the medium and the
language. The common sense that cinema art has built of itself, losses
sustainability and it dilutes before its poetic force. Avant-garde
cinema form emerges as an anti-establishment reply to hegemony, in the
Film Industry field and in the social sphere. From the foundation of
surrealism, to the New York underground cinema, experimental filmmaking
context has always been a platform for new radical ideas which challenge
spectators and artists.
This way of creation with the
cinematographic image, relates to a personal creative process of an
author-artist who works with the film medium material. Nowadays,
experimental filmmaking has developed organically, with the sprout of an
immense diversity of filmmakers who mostly unfold their work as
individual legacies that dialogue in between them. They appeal the
kinesthetic experience of cinema from its poetic essence.
Among
young artists of experimental filmmaking, Stephen Broomer (1984) stands
out. He was born and grew up in Canada, where he was influenced by the
avant-garde cinema since early age. He studied Film, and he works as a
filmmaker and film preservationist. His concerned about film archive is
reflected in his work, in which is shown a thorough work with the
images, that also dialogues with its historical value.
Potamkin
is introduced as a biographical film of the deceased film critic, Harry
Alan Potamkin, who believed in the force of the film structure analogue
to the marxist dialectical ideology. Potamkin’s writings were conceived
as essays about cinema language evolution as a semantic structure, but
also about the poetry within it. The intense passion of Potamkin’s
beliefs about cinema and communism, are condensed in its poetry.
Broomer gets inspired by Potamkin’s passion to reinterpret fragments of
films that the russian critic valued as examples of the becoming of film
as an engaged art form. Along Potamkin (Canadá, 2017), we are faced to
the disintegration and superposition of distressed scenes of The
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1927), Jeanne of Arc (Theodor
Dreyer, 1928), and Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). In an interview,
Stephen Broomer tells that he worked with a found-footage, that he got
by reshooting VHS copies in 16 mm. This method let him focus in
particular scenes that he considered that evoke the suffering and
sacrifice of Potamkin’s life. But also, let him start with the format he
used to watch and re-watch those films when he was younger. A way of
working with found footage that begins in the personal memory that one
has of those images.
The quest of a spectral spirit that
destroyed spaces and dead people leave in this world, is a motive in
some of Broomer’s work. In films like Christ Church – Saint James
(Canadá, 2011), and Brébeuf (Canadá, 2012), the author reinterprets the
history of those places and approaches to pass through them with the
cinematic image. We can see superpositions, also used in Potamkin, that
evoke an inner life in those places, a interstice between the present
and the past, an intermediate space that is multiplied and fragmented.
Broomer goes further than the tacit cinema capacity of apprehending a
temporality in a new one. He interprets the past from the trace it has
left in the present. In Potamkin’s case, his trace can be reached in his
poetry and texts of film criticism. Nevertheless, Broomer -with
tremendous sensitivity- achieves to build a new audiovisual poem that
takes us closer to Potamkin’s spirit, from cinema. Also, lets us think
about a social engaged film culture, that sets the film critic as an
intermediary between the films and the public. A kind of film criticism
that reaches a dialogue with cinema itself, in a way that it is
transformed and affected by the ideas it evokes to other, at the same
time that the critic gets affected too, in an essential level.
The physical interpretation of Potamkin’s spirit is visualized by a
disintegrated, contrasted, and superimposed filmic material. The scenes
repeated along the film, are near-death climax scenes. Scenes of an
essential suffering caused by the unavoidable death. A metaphor of
Potamkin itself, from the mutable and organic vitality of the filmic
medium. Broomer amalgamates different scenes, with the superimposition
method, to give more intensity and condensation to the sentiment that
Potamkin embraced about those films. His spirit pass through them and
unified them. The film starts with one of his verses: “Sooner or later
all delicate things. Are butterflies with severed wings”. A poetic image
that portrays him and his world view, with a tragic destiny, such as
the characters resurrected by Broomer, but with the persistence of their
unavoidable death. All of them, including Potamkin, were victims of a
mechanism that oppresses all kind of social transformation and social
justice.
In Potamkin, a mass of spectators react and turn their
heads from side to side. They appear as a reminder of the past of those
images we are watching and of their purpose. Thinking of film as a
device of social change, set questions about the rol of the spectators,
the filmmakers and the film critics. Film is an art form that erased the
boundaries to its access, thats why its ideological potential made of
it a dangerous weapon of domination. Nevertheless, during the years of
Harry Potamkin’s life, cinema got involved with the revolutionary causes
lived in Russia before World War II. He took part of it with his
writings, that worked as intermediary between spectators and the movies,
based in his marxists beliefs. But the value of Potamkin’s legacy -even
though his life was short- lives in his poetic approach to cinema and
social change. He was a person who lived intensely, praising every
sentimentalism with the conviction of a better world. In that way,
Broomer achieve a portrait of the deceased critic, free of the sense of
an exclusively historical archive, to become into the new intermediary
-closer to a medium- between us and Harry Alan Potamkin’s spirit, in a
cinematic rite of invocation.
December 12th, 2017
Grand Illusion Cinema
7:00 pm
View trailer
