By Miles Baker
Like most things, I learned about Screen & Racket on Facebook. But, unlike most events on Facebook, I was actually interested in this one. The show is billed as a showcase for four original short films with live performances of accompanying musical scores. It will premiere brand new works from emerging filmmakers Pouyan Jafarizadeh (previous works screened at the Images Festival, TIFF Student Showcase, and Calgary Independent Film Festival), Doug Nayler, Brodie Spaull, and Lesley Chan (previous works screened at Pleasure Dome, the Images Festival, Alucine Toronto Latin Media Festival, as well being featured as a Canadian Spotlight at the 2008 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival) with dancer Laura Kappel. Each filmmaker worked in close collaboration with a group of musicians, respectively: Alex Unger, The Weather Station, Destroy All Humans, and EXERCISERS. I sat down with Doug Nayler (who longtime MONDOreaders will know as our former film editor and as an awesome writer) via the Facebook chat to talk about the show.
MONDO: So, to kick things off, tell me about what we’ll be seeing on Friday.
Doug Nayler: Well, we’ll be seeing four original short film collaborations, projected onto a screen with the scores performed live. Each film was produced by a different team consisting of filmmakers and musicians, and everything is completely new and original for this event.
MONDO: How did these collaborations start?
DN: Well, we started with the idea of the event and then began recruiting whoever was interested. Generally the filmmakers involved sought out musicians it would be interesting to collaborate with. But the biggest hurdle was finding folks who wanted to try doing film and music in a way outside the standard relationships
MONDO: Today most original music for film is composed after editing to fit best. So I assume that wasn’t the process here.
DN: Well, I actually don’t really know enough about how everyone went about it to really give a generalization. I think we’re all coming at it a bit differently.
I can speak to the one I directed, where to mix things up, the Weather Station and I agreed that they’d have total free reign to do whatever they want and not think about trying to consider my expectations. I’m not even going to hear one note of it until the day of the show.
MONDO: Are you worried about that at all?
DN: I don’t know. Maybe I should be, but I kind of feel like that way it’s just as much their’s as it is mine. Whatever they come up with can validly stand on its own without being subject to the question of my approval, you know?
MONDO: Makes sense to me. Did your approach in making the film change knowing you’d be giving up this control?
DN: Yeah, I had it in mind from the outset. I even tried to get everyone else on board with trying the same experiment, but you know, everyone else has their own processes.
MONDO: Can you think of a specific way your film-making changed?
DN: I don’t know if it did or not. I’ve usually made films with very limited music in the past, sort of playing with the textures of the environment and location sound, so I guess I just sort of tried to build that in a way that would be engaging for a band to play off of. I guess I thought of it sort of more like a game almost, trying to think of what would be interesting for them to work with without it being specific or prescriptive.
MONDO: Do you mind giving some hints about what your film is about?
DN: Well, mine is something in the way of a throwback to ’60s vérité documentary that I made up here in rural Ontario, and the Weather Station are generally an alt-country and folk act with a bit of a taste for the morbid.
But they’re all completely different both film- and music-wise. We wanted to keep it a really odd-ball mix.
MONDO: Do you anything about some of the other films being screened?
DN: Well, I know Lesley Chan’s is being projected on 16mm and it’s a collaborative piece she made with a dancer. Pouyan Jafarizadeh’s prominently features hand-processing and archival footage, and Brodie’s is just going to be completely out of left field, I think.
MONDO: It strikes me that this is — in some ways — a lot like how films were screened in the early days of film screenings: projected with a live musician providing the soundtrack. Was that part of the inspiration to create the show?
DN: Well, yes and no. Something that you’ll see people do a lot more often, there’s a group up here in Owen Sound called the Silent Film Ensemble who do it very well, but there are lots of musicians out there today who really like composing and performing their own soundtracks for existing silent films and there are some really exciting results. So that was one thing that cued the idea of why don’t we do this with brand new films made with this process in mind?
MONDO: Cool. Is there anything else you’d like to tell the people at home?
DN: Um, I don’t know. I hope they’re willing to check it out. In some ways we wanted to do an event like this because it’s not the sort of thing that you can rent or Bit Torrent and watch on your laptop monitor and have it be the same. We’re not sponsored or funded in any way, we’ve just put this together out of our own resources, and it’s because we want to have the sort of event that feels like it was worth it to drag yourself down to the venue for.
Screen & Racket will take place August 21, at the TRANZAC (292 Brunswick Ave). Check out the Facebook event.
