Many SFU students are strong, caring people who support each other’s success, so I wasn’t surprised to find plenty of folk from the School for Contemporary Arts on hand to celebrate the screening of Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora’s documentary short E&N at the DOXA Film Festival.
E&N is a slow, haunting rumination on the invisible history beneath the E&N rail line that runs along southeastern Vancouver Island.
Not many people know of “the great land grab” of the 1870s, where this railway comes from, when the British Columbia and federal governments granted a railway belt of two million acres of land to the E&N Railway Company in exchange for the construction and operation of the rail line. About one third of that land belonged to the Hul’qumi’num. Much of the power of Johnson and Ermacora’s film comes from their experiments in rhythmic sound, the rain, the rail and the ferry, which, as Johnson said, “connect landscape without context and images that don’t necessarily connect visually. We wanted to put people in the moment.” The duo decided to submit to DOXA after Ermacora, who volunteers with the Cinemathéque, received a suggestion from an industry friend that they should show their films to the public.
E&N opened for DOXA’s premiere of Canadian filmmaker Cliff Caines’ first feature, A Rock and a Hard Place. Like Johnson and Ermacora, Caines displays a deep fascination with rhythm and sound. An eerie industrial-organic soundscape runs through his voyage 7,000 feet down into the Goldcorp mine at Red Lake Ontario, one of the richest gold mines in the world. Almost imperceptibly, it forces an intuition of the vast pressure sitting upon the rock at such depth, and the fragility of the people there.
In long takes of the machinery and people working in the mine, Caines traces the path of gold, from the rock pulled out of the wall to the production of gold brick, and exposes the audience to an otherworldly experience that few people get to see. Off-camera, miners and townspeople relate stories of disasters, deaths, strikes, the people and town, and uncertainties about their future. Caines, speaking of what it was like to film in the mine, said, “They cracked jokes with me about man being the softest thing down there.”
Both E&N and A Rock and a Hard Place use slow, observing shots of repetitive movement, and of stillness, to open up thoughtful, meditative relationships with their subjects. Their imagery breathes. Simple and soothing, and at times tinged with the cold unease that is a part of Canada’s hard country, both films are refreshingly different from the conventional documentary narrative built around dramatic conflict.
Each film has its own distinct tone and subject matter, but when placed side by side, a dialogue over the aesthetic qualities of sound and imagery in film emerged between the two. I think these new, experimental Canadian filmmakers are on to something, and I look forward to seeing more of their work — Johnson and Ermacora’s especially. Not only because they represent SFU, but because the world they present is so fascinating.
