Avant-garde filmmaker takes on Hollywood in a new show

By Max Harrold

From left, Mike Rollo, a former MFA student and now the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema’s production co-ordinator, filmmaker Richard Kerr, and Brett Kashmere, an MFA student and curator of an exhibition at the Cinématèque québécoise.
Photo by Andrew Dobrowolskyj

Scott McRae
Experimental filmmaker Richard Kerr is turning Hollywood on its head this fall in an upcoming exhibition filled with found footage.

Kerr has turned toward meta-cinema, an art form which embraces both film’s ephemeral images and the physical products of the industry, the filmstrips.

Industrie/Industry is an installation of Kerr’s work that will be displayed at the Cinémathèque québécoise starting in November. It uses as its principal material approximately 40 trailers from major Hollywood films released between 1998 and 2000.

From these trailers Kerr and his team, Brett Kashmere and Mike Rolo, have created an exhibition that uses the footage in several ways: a slide show of “stilled cinema,” a series of “motion picture weavings,” and a film they call Collage d’Hollywood. Indeed, collage has become the central aesthetic for the show.

The slides in the “stilled cinema” segment consist of two consecutive trailer frames which have been boiled until the emulsion softens, physically manipulated, retouched with dye, then inserted into a slide holder.

Some retain many of their original features and still look like film frames; others have been distorted to look like abstract art.
In his “motion picture weavings,” Kerr stitches together filmstrips of Hollywood trailers and mounts the crosshatched product on lightboxes. From afar, they look like geometric abstractions; viewed up close, the tiny images reveal a critical analysis of this film commodity. In case anyone missed the point, Kerr and his team have named one of the lightboxes “Hollywood Turns Light into Money.”

The film Collage d’Hollywood, which will be shown at the exhibition as a remixed digital projection, juxtaposes three tracks of different collages of trailers onto one screen. This frenzy of familiar, overlapping images moves through Hollywood genre, from science fiction to thriller, and offers in its sensory overload a poignant critique of both the commercial film world’s vacuity and its limited visual grammar.

Working with trailers has proved an artistic goldmine for Kerr. “It’s like working with diamond dust,” he said. “It’s very rich material.”
It also suits his personality. Kerr is an energetic, restless man who is constantly on the move.

Unlike many of his meta-cinematic contemporaries who have experimented with slowing films down, Kerr has been interested in the acceleration of film. Film trailers, already a highly accelerated form of cinema, were a natural choice, he explained.

They may be fast, but his work demands extended contemplation, Kerr said. “I’m happy that this will be in a gallery setting.
“You don’t make things like this to see once. Like poetry and jazz, they demand repeated viewings.”

The project took about three years, or 10,000 hours of studio labour, all performed in the studios of the School of Cinema.
Kerr and his team will take Industrie/Industry on the road after its Cinémathèque debut; several venues are in discussion.
Industrie/Industry will be displayed in the Salle Norman-McLaren at the Cinémathèque québécoise from Nov. 4 to Jan. 23, 2005, Wednesday to Friday noon to 9 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays, 4 to 9 p.m. The Cinémathèque is located at 335, Maisonneuve E. (Metro: Berri-UQAM). Info: (514) 842-9763. Admission to the exhibition is free.

You don’t make things like this to see once. Like poetry and jazz, they demand repeated viewings.”
Kerr and his team hope to take Industrie/Industry on the road after its Cinémathèque debut, although no other venues have yet been confirmed.

Industrie/Industry will be displayed in the Salle Norman-McLaren at the Cinémathèque québécoise from Nov. 4 to Jan. 23, 2005, Wednesday to Friday noon to 9 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays, 4 to 9 p.m. The Cinémathèque is located at 335, Maisonneuve E. (Metro: Berri-UQAM). Info: (514) 842-9763. Admission to the exhibition is free.