Between Making and Telling: The Experimental Films of Lindsay McIntyre
The Experimental Films of Lindsay McIntyre
Vancouver-based Lindsay McIntyre is one of only a handful of artists working with handmade emulsion for her 16 mm celluloid analogue films. Together, these poetic, performative and exploratory works trace the contours of documentary, handcrafted and narrative techniques to explore the materiality of film. by Taqralik Partridge
This experimental filmmaker explores themes of form, place and identity through a distinct analogue practice involving handmade emulsions and various forms of chemical manipulations to 16 mm celluloid film, which she often feeds directly into projectors as part of live performances. The results are tender and revealing works that skirt the periphery of arthouse, documentary and narrative genres and present the complex shifting surfaces of the medium—capturing the unique materiality of film through its most fugitive element: light.
Sock-clad feet walk into the frame. This is the first glimpse of Sean Uquqtuq in Lindsay McIntyre’s sepia-toned experimental portrait all-around junior male (2012). Filmed on hand-processed film, the sevenminute short is a play on dark and light, interior and exterior, shifting between solid form and negative space. We hear the faint call of a loon, the click of dripping water, an electric bass and a steady chant of voices that brings to mind the appearance of the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
A young athlete from Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), NU, Uquqtuq appears as a solitary figure practicing the high kick both inside in a t-shirt and out in the snow, fully clothed and shadowed. The celluloid is purposefully imperfect: mottled, shot through with spots that could be single-celled creatures or lichen. As Uquqtuq raises his face to the aqijaq that he must hit with his toes, lines dance around him. If we trust only our eyes, we may believe that he is surrounded by countless small and strange-lighted creatures in constant movement.
McIntyre’s work asks for your time. If you’ve seen her films, even just the once, they stay with you, prodding and nudging you to think about them, to sit with them. all-around junior male, for example, takes a simple idea—one body repeating one task—and translates it into a contemplation of possibilities. The light touches only his eyes, the side of his face, his fingertips reaching to steady the ball of cloth. And then, in the snow, everything is light and only the lines of his features and the pattern on his jacket move through the air. Does the body move the ball, or does the ball pull the body into motion?
A maker, McIntyre’s hands and handiwork feature prominently in her films—both in their imagery and in their physical creation. Much of her work is experimental. Though she teaches Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University and does cinematography for other filmmakers, her own work is largely created with celluloid emulsions that she makes herself—a practice that is equal parts art and science, and one fully characterized by its materiality. Training first in drawing and painting at the University of Alberta, McIntyre went on to complete an MFA in Film Production from Concordia University and today is one of very few artists worldwide who work in handmade emulsions.
I first met McIntyre in the spring of 2018 at the Indigenous Film Conference in Kautokeino, Norway. She spoke gently, but had a strong presence and a markedly steady gaze.
Seven months later, in October, we made plans to Skype. She was doing the cinematography for Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette’s forthcoming feature St. Anne (2019–20). Although our call didn’t happen, I was able to view excerpts of her work online. Watching them was like looking at a fire through the grate of a wood stove: too much happening for the mind to process in the moment, but the memory of the flames is still there when you close your eyes.
When we caught up again this past January, McIntyre was laid up on the couch in her North Vancouver, BC, living room, having just broken her ankle in a roller derby fall. She hoped it would not interfere with a film she was scheduled to shoot in northern Alberta with prize-winning Cree director Alexandra Lazarowich the following month. McIntrye fixed me with the same steady gaze, only now and then looking off to one side when recalling some detail, as I asked her about the works she has made that speak to who she is.
Of course, I already knew. In our first brief conversation, McIntrye revealed she was marked by the experiences of the women in her family and that she had examined some of these experiences through film. Her family’s story is both singular in the sequence of its events and tragically common in the way that the effects of their unfolding have reached across several generations.
In the late 1930s, McIntyre’s Inuk great-grandmother Kumaa’naaq and two of her eight children were spirited away by dog team from Qamani’tuaq (then part of the Northwest Territories) to Edmonton, AB. The agent of this relocation was Ray Ward, a British-born RCMP constable, who wanted Kumaa’naaq (a noted beauty) for his wife. Whether by force or consent, Kumaa’naaq along with her youngest son and daughter were moved to an Alberta farm where they no longer had access to Inuit community, food and activities and no longer spoke Inuktitut. Left behind in Qamani’tuaq were Kumaa’naaq’s Inuk husband, Paakaarjuaq, and her six other children.
Broadly, McIntyre’s work is very much a story of women.
As a child, like the other women in her family, she simply knew Kumaa’naaq as “Mum.” Mum was a silent, strange figure on the couch. She and Ward had raised McIntyre’s mother from infancy, so it was understood that they were both McIntyre’s grandparents. In life Ward loomed large, and his will dictated their lives. But it is Kumaa’naaq’s story that has taken hold of the filmmaker. From McIntyre’s first memories, Kumaa’naaq hardly ever spoke, and, in the last three years of her life, she was completely silent.
In a series of five, short, experimental films titled Bloodline (2007–12), McIntyre has treated various aspects of this story with a lens that adds and reveals layers of meaning. The central work in the series, her silent life (2012), is the most directly descriptive of these films, as it lays out different aspects of the family history recounted by McIntrye, her mother, Edie, and her mother’s mother, Marguerite
She looks at it, from all angles, making no pronouncements; instead, she transmutes the various pieces of stories through film, again and again, just as the strands of beads run through her grandmother’s hands. —
(or Peggy). Marguerite, one of Kumaa’naaq’s two children brought south with her on the qamutiik (sled), was long estranged from the family, and the footage of her as an old woman is from the first day she and McIntyre met in person.
her silent life describes six acts of silence that defined Kumaa’naaq’s life and that have had lasting impacts on her descendants. From Kumaa’naaq’s abandonment of her mother tongue to her silent final years, McIntyre’s family has lived a story of loss that might otherwise be forgotten if not for her insistence on bringing it to light. “Through a learned mechanism rooted in shame, some of us still practice a kind of colonial amnesia—a deliberate ignorance, which ends, ultimately, in silence.” 1
her silent life opens with the breath of an accordion and close views of Marguerite’s hands running strands of beads over and over through her fingers. We are told that these hands are exactly the same as Edie’s hands, and McIntyre’s own hands.
The back and forth motion of the beads is mirrored by the back and forth telling by mother and grandmother. They have different views on Kumaa’naaq’s life, but they are both where they are because of that singular event that took the family away from Inuit Nunangat.
It is clear there are many ways of telling this story, and McIntyre treats the different perspectives with equal weight. The women tell for themselves what happy, difficult and sometimes tragic things they have lived, and how aware they are of what they have lost. Because it is not didactic, the experimental format of this film allows the viewer a closer experience of the stories; the focus on hands, old photographs and landscapes and the privileging of voices over faces is a kind of metered poetry.
The highest point of emotion in her silent life is in fact when McIntyre turns off the camera during part of the conversation with her grandmother. “This is where she tells me some things that, out of respect and shame, I cannot repeat, but will never forget.” This is enough. We do not need to hear more to know that here is heartbreak that runs very deep.
In her personal essay “Silence as Resistance,” McIntyre discusses the motivations of the various actors in and on the lives of the women in her family. In her silent life, her grandmother, Marguerite, characterized Inuit of old as a people that were accommodating to
a fault and reluctant to challenge authority. McIntyre’s own investigation confronts this idea with an understanding of Kumaa’naaq’s apparent passive silence as an act of self-assertion. Kumaa’naaq had lived through multiple life-changing events due to forces that were beyond her control, and the will to speak or not—in any language— was hers alone to exercise.
“While the journey I took in the making of this film was an attempt to understand my matrilineal history,” explains the artist, “I found that this history is buried under thick layers of patriarchal, colonial lies.” In order to contend with this discovery, McIntyre has taken a very Inuk approach to untangling the threads of this matrilineal history: she looks at it, from all angles, making no pronouncements; instead, she transmutes the various pieces of stories through film, again and again, just as the strands of beads run through her grandmother’s hands. In this way she deepens understanding—hers and ours—so as to know how best to respond.
When we are deprived of one kind of language, then we must resort to another. The shorter films in Bloodline lead up to and enrich our understandings of her silent life. where no one knew her name (2011) is an almost still-life portrait, its saturated colour and uncomplicated panning across the remains of a household, evidently once full of movement, are a striking contrast to the others in the series.
This is the southern home in which Kumaa’naaq and her children came to live.
what she would not leave behind (2007) is McIntyre’s recounting of a dreamlike story as she turns a hide-cleaning tool in her hands. where she stood in the first place (2012) was filmed during the artist’s almost year-long stay in Qamani’tuaq; it is a contemplation on the land Kumaa’naaq was taken from and the effects of human activity on the land.
though she never spoke, this is where her voice would have been (2008) is a performance work that combines emulsion footage with a soundtrack of old recordings the artist made on her toy tape recorder. We hear both Ward’s voice, repeatedly urging McIntyre to go ask her grandmother (Kumaa’naaq) to say something, and the sing-song and high-pitched squeals of McIntyre playing with the microphone. Visually, the work captures the movement of a collection of caribou teeth strung on a wire. Surely already prized as decorative objects during Kumaa’naaq’s lifetime, we may well infer that they are priceless to the artist. The sound and images of this work never appear in the same sequence, and, as with much of McIntyre’s other work, the pacing and use of repetition evoke a strong response. Intentionally unsettling and dreamlike, it is a work that invites a second look.
McIntyre is not finished with the telling of her family history. She plans to make a feature film based on Kumaa’naaq’s story. McIntyre’s background in experimental film brings her to focus as much on the processes of making and telling as on the end result. She goes over the grooves of a question with a skilled eye and hand, raising yet more questions for herself and her audience.
One of the great losses in McIntyre’s family is Inuktitut. This is a loss to which too many Inuit can relate. At a time when Inuit in the North are sounding the alarm about the decline of Inuktitut/Inuktut, McIntyre, like many Inuit living outside of Inuit Nunangat, is also trying to reclaim her language and culture. She tells me that she and some fellow Inuit are working to create an Inuktitut course in Vancouver, and she is eager to have more Inuit participate. She has a daughter; she wants her to know her language.
This is the backbone of McIntyre’s work: the reclaiming of her stories—all that is beautiful and painful, wished for and discarded. She takes it all in and lays it all out.
as a family, not speaking is what we do best. we are four generations of women estranged in various ways, but united in this choking on words we can’t speak.
in making this film i hope we can transform our pain into preventing its recurrence. NOTES
1 Lindsay McIntyre, “Silence as Resitence: When Silence is the Only Weapon You Have Left,” in Pioneer Lies and Propertied Lives, ed. Erin Morton (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).
2 Ibid.
3 Epilogue from her silent life, Lindsay McIntyre (Toronto, ON: Canadian Film Distribution Centre, 2011), 16 mm to HD.