True stories well told
The independent films and videos of Ardele Lister
Archived article from Feb 18, 2000
By Phyllis Gottlieb
Page 2 of 3
The film uses home movies from Lister's childhood along with her ruminations on her life as a Canadian. It interweaves clips from Hollywood features that mention Canada with shorts and documentaries produced in Canada. It includes interviews with Canadians, who are often ambivalent about their country, and with expatriates, such as Robert MacNeil, who eloquently articulate the nation's strengths. And it looks at recent challenges to national identity, including the Mohawk demonstrations and the failure to ratify a Canadian constitution.
The result is a kind of "fractured narrative," a technique Lister has been developing for some 25 years for work she emphatically labels "unpopular culture."
Reel Feelings
Lister's road to producing complex, multilayered, highly visual meditations on identity began in the 1970s, when she was a graduate student in art history at the University of British Columbia specializing in the Renaissance. Having written movie reviews for a local paper, she was contacted by the magazine artscanada to cover the International Festival of Women's Films, which opened in New York in 1973 and then traveled to various cities, including Vancouver. In three days Lister saw 54 films made by women. With the festival over, Lister and several other women started looking for ways to keep the energy and excitement alive. Within a week they had formed the production collective ReelFeelings.
In 1975, Lister directed her first one-minute film, "Headache." With its wry humor and feminist point of view, the film was a strong statement of women's needs -- perhaps too strong, since the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which had committed to showing the film as part of its programming for the International Year of the Woman, never aired it.
Lister's next piece with the other members of ReelFeelings was a spoof on the happily-ever-after romantic version of love and marriage. Called "So Where's My Prince Already?" the film was selected for the second International Festival of Women's Films, and when Lister went to New York for the premiere, she decided to stay in the city.
There she started The Independent, an influential journal put out by the Association of Independent Video and Film Makers, participated in numerous workshops and began experimenting with digital technology.
"Around this time I started to see video as a separate, quite wonderful medium with its own properties. The early '80s saw the very beginning of digital technology. The frame was finally being broken. You could have a multiplicity of frames within a frame, which meant you could deal with space differently. You could have video from one source in the foreground and other imagery in the background, and you could manipulate frames. I could isolate a video sequence and slow it down, speed it up, freeze it and make it repeat itself a thousand times, and then I could program a path within the screen so it could travel through the space of the frame."
Hell and beyond
Lister got to explore those properties more fully in her 1985 film, "Hell." Inspired by Dante's "Inferno," the video was one of the first artworks created for a digital medium. In her interpretation, hell is a computerized storage facility for souls, each of which is kept on disk and tortured with digital effects.
"Punishment in Dante's universe was about endless repetition, having to live the moment of your capitulation to sin over and over again," Lister observes. "I wondered, 'Could I use this technology to illustrate that concept while conveying a sense of power and meaning?' And I could. It was fabulous."
"Hell" was originally conceived as part of a trilogy. Repentance or "Pentimento," an installation piece, is nearly ready for exhibition, while "Heaven" is still on the horizon.
Meanwhile, Lister has embarked on a new project, "Dreaming Backwards," an interactive, computer-based multimedia exploration of the possible identities assumed by three individuals as they search for a place to call home. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, she spent last May at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, beginning what she suspects will be years of work.
continued...
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