SPEAKING at the University of Toronto’s Innis Town Hall this summer, Canadian media artist Mike Hoolboom articulated the ethos behind his newest film Waves, an aesthetically restless mix of 16mm found-footage documentary, experimental cinema, and essay film. Waves, the filmmaker said, asks whether “it is possible to make a group picture out of individual portraits, especially when they are haunted by thoughts and ideas that come from the others.” Hoolboom’s formally adventurous “group picture” is part of a burgeoning tradition of recent Canadian avant-garde documentaries that expand the boundaries of documentary, fiction, and experimental cinema to take in a broad array of voices. The contemporary Canadian avant-garde documentary marries the voice-centred aesthetics of the essay film with an experimental tapestry of perspectives, grounded in the textual production of the film, yielding a kind of polyphonic portrait, to modify Hoolboom’s phrase.
It’s fitting that Hoolboom sees as a collective picture born out of individual depictions, given it takes inspiration from fiction, avant-garde, and political documentary filmmaking. As Hoolboom writes on his website, he conceived the filmThose subjects are identified by the voice of a woman who, sounding like the frame narrator from Geoffrey Chaucer’s as well as Chris Marker’s travelogue writer from , claims to have met them on her way to a protest. Their respective professions are indicated in titles on the screen; they include a dancer, a biologist, a musician, and, in a magical realist episode, Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, who we see riding a bicycle through the streets of downtown Toronto with wings on her back. Though the women speak in a confessional register, their words are not strictly evidentiary. They are filtered through the interlocutor of the filmmaker, who in his notes to the film likens himself to a ventriloquist, “offering internal monologues collaged out of gender philosophers, novels, and newspapers.” The women’s semi-fictionalized discussions about their work, their politics, their relationship to the climate crisis, and their thoughts on feminism become a chorus guiding us through Hoolboom’s phantasmagoric visions of Toronto. Their monologues serve as a floating textual accompaniment to the filmmaker’s sometimes-tactile, often-dreamy images—of veiled women ambling through the forest at reduced frame rates, of obscured figures marching through Toronto streets, and of more traditionally realist documentary footage of the 2011 Occupy Toronto protests.
