The warm side of Kodachrome
In 8mm Redux, home movies provide snapshot of ordinary lives from another time
Jeremy Borsos draws inspiration from the deepest well of all – nostalgia. He acquires old home movies on ebay and uses them both as raw material for fictional narratives and to evoke a past that is familiar to anyone who has seen those jerky, fuzzy, but dripping-with-colour family films of the late 1940s, when people reacted to the camera by waving at it.
Home movies were animated snapshots, Borsos said in an interview – movies made by people familiar with snapshots. They stand still as if for a photo, but because it’s a movie, they have to do something. They wave.
Borsos’s show 8 mm Redux covers one wall of the SBC Gallery with 27 film projections.
Each film, measured in seconds, starts with people lining up for a group photo or gathering around a birthday cake – or, sometimes, walking into the scene unaware of the camera.
The projections end with everybody waving, or in one set with the subjects covering their faces.
Borsos says viewers are bearing witness to a few seconds of ordinary lives that capital-h History doesn’t record.
Peter White, the curator, writes in the catalogue that home movies recorded the behaviours and concerns of the burgeoning postwar middle class, and how that world was “formed by its intersection with accessible, everyday technology” like the home movie camera.
And Kodachrome film – the ultimate in colour and saturation, Borsos said. The most popular film for home movies colours an entire era with its emphasis on the warm side of the spectrum – yellow and red.
Borsos has also created fictional narratives from collages of home movies.
“A lot of production is done with found footage, but Jeremy’s is unique,” White said. “The material is not used for docudrama, but to create a narrative that reflects those times.”
In Mon Vrai Man Ray, a woman from a 1948 film narrates (in voice-over) a story about Man Ray leaving pre-war Europe for America and embarking on a road trip that ends in Montreal. Four different men fill the role of Man Ray, and Borsos attributes the fact that viewers don’t mention this and other obvious discrepancies to the power of narrative.
But I wasn’t so convinced. To me, the power of the imagery trumps the power of Borsos’s narratives. Who are these people, I always wanted to know of every family I saw in their bright backyard or grainy living room.
Fifteen galleries in the Belgo building, including SBC, are participating in Nuit Blanche on Saturday. The Visual Voice Gallery is recreating owner Bettina Forget’s apartment, with a TV playing One Random Year.
Using one minute of film from every day of a year, Forget made a home movie that’s more than six hours long.
“Does my life have an over-arching narrative, one that (will) become apparent when I watch the movie?” she asks.
Jeremy Borsos’s 8mm
Redux continues until March 31 at the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, 372 Ste. Catherine St. W., Suite 507. Visit sbcgallery. ca. Bettina Forget’s One Random Year is shown until March 24 at the Visual Voice Gallery, 372 Ste. Catherine St. W., Suite 421. For more details, visit
visualvoicegallery.com. For more details about Nuit Blanche participants in the Belgo Building, 372 Ste. Catherine St. W., visit www.thebelgoreport.com. For a complete listing of Saturday’s Nuit Blanche activities, visit montreal enlumiere.com. The Canadian Centre for Architecture is also open late – until 2 a.m. – for Nuit Blanche. It has family fun in the afternoon, and an evening program of music, light shows and creative activities. It also offers threehour explorations by bus of the city’s architecture; start times range from 1:30 to 8 p.m. (An English tour begins at 4:30.)
The CCA’S exhibitions will be open, including a new one that relates a contemporary Portuguese architect to the Machu Picchu site in Peru and to an “indigenista” who photographed the 15th-century Inca complex in 1927.
Martín Chambi was a photographer in Lima and a leader of a movement in the 1920s and ’30s to rediscover – and re-appropriate – the culture and artifacts of indigenous Andean people. Some of his photographs of “the lost city of the Incas” that sparked interest around the world are included in Alturas de Machu Picchu: Martín Chambi – Álvaro Siza at Work.
Fabrizio Gallanti, the curator, said Siza studied Machu Picchu and incorporated its use of stone as a building block – not just as cladding – into his architectural practice.
Siza, whose 1995 sketches of Machu Picchu are in the show, was also interested in how architecture works as a “blanket on the ground” in occupying a terrain with minimal impact, said CCA director Mirko Zardini. In his social housing projects in Portugal, Siza followed the Incan practice of building walkways and walls into the contours of the landscape.
On Thursday, the CCA presents the film Martín Chambi and the Heirs of the Incas. The film looks at the contemporary relevance of Chambi as a leader in the artistic and social movements that swept South America in the 1930s. Admission is free.
Alturas de Machu Picchu: Martín Chambi – Álvaro
Siza at Work continues until April 22 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1920 Baile St. For more i nformation, visit cca.qc.ca.