Ten Films To Check Out at DOXA Documentary Film Festival

19th Century history paintings such as Theodore Gericault's Raft of the Medusa (1830) were like the documentary films of their day.

It is true that documentary films today are much like history paintings were in the nineteenth century-- a form of visual culture that creates conversations about contemporary real-world events across wide audiences both locally and globally. Whereas in the past large scale painted representations such as Gericault's Raft of the Medusa (1819) or Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) could elicit outrage and even spark revolt, the modern medium of documentary film acts as today's visual catalyst for raising public awareness about current social, political, and economic tensions. 

The DOXA Documentary Film Festival is one of the most anticipated film festivals each year in Vancouver and Western Canada, and this year's offerings are especially rich with films that span themes of art, activism, new media, architecture, and yes even a self-reflexive look at the documentary genre. Below are my Top 10 picks in the gallery slider (in order of screening dates). You can click on each film listing thumbnail to be linked directly to DOXA for more information, ticketing, and other details. Many of the filmmakers will be present for screenings, and several forums have been scheduled to discuss the films both before and after the screenings.

I also invite you to check out the ON-LINE FILM PROGRAM to browse and plan your own visit to the festival. For those of you outside Vancouver, the program offers a glimpse of several documentaries that will also no doubt start making the rounds of other documentary festivals in major international cities. Enjoy and share!

Some Intersecting Thoughts on Food, Art, and Transgression....

It seems all that anybody wants to talk about these days, at least with any level of passion and enthusiasm, is food. Whether it be discussion of individual food preferences (or exclusions), talk of the newest restaurant, superfood, food fad, food television show, food personality/chef, food truck, or food item sourced locally (almost always organic, small batch, grown within 100 miles, and made by small independent business selling out of their backyard), it seems that being a foodie is all but going mainstream in a big big way. Notably too, where discussion of art, theatre, and literature used to dominate the cultural pages and content of most major newspapers and media sources, talk and discussion of food is on the rise and displacing much of the discourse reserved for the traditional arts.

In many ways, this is not surprising. Foodie culture, after all is tied to a countercultural impetus, and shares many things in common with the form of avant-gardism we normally associate with the art world.  Notions of connoisseurship, subculture, underground community, slumming it to find off-the-radar experiences, engaging in transgressive acts, seeking the experiential, and fighting the institutions and metanarratives shaping conversations and defining the norm, are but a cross-section of those shared similarities. 

But whereas the art world and art history have all but institutionalized counterculturalism and the avant-garde as part of the dominant story about art-- a condition that makes it much more difficult for artists, critics, and historians to launch a critique about the art world-- the world of food, its consumption, production, distribution, and history, is still shaped by large global forces that have yet to reconcile and fully embrace the diversity of food types and practices seen around the world. Enter here the food avant-garde, those foodies on the leading edge of disrupting and bringing into question the norms of eating, making food choices, and exposing those institutions and institutional practices shaping common perceptions about food.   

Chef and food globetrotter Anthony Bourdain is an excellent example of a now mainstream food culture figure who unites many of these themes in his books and television shows. Last year, CNN began producing his latest project Parts Unknown-- a TV series that documents Bourdain's travels to remote, war-torn, unexpected, and more off-the-radar places to report on the local food culture. Most of what Bourdain seeks out is understood to be on the fringes of the expected and norm of North American food tastes (he spends a lot of time in back alley food stalls and locals' homes), but at the same time he also visits the most exclusive dining establishments in the world (such as Noma in Denmark) to satisfy the gourmands tuning into his show. In this way, he is very much a flanuer, looking for the "high" and "low" food experiences that he brings into a kind of unexpected relief. Take for example his recent show on Las Vegas (see YouTube clip) where he spent half the episode in the best restaurants on the strip, and the other half in dive bars in the desert. 

Dana Goodyear's Anything That Moves (2013) delves into the foodie subculture at its most extreme and "avant-garde."  

This idea of a "food avant-garde" is the topic of Dana Goodyear's informative and entertaining book Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture (2013) . It is a book I have had on my wish list for months after first hearing her discuss the project on a NYT blog thinking about how much the trangressive aspect of foodie-ism is linked to wider global unease about the politics and social implications of food choices we make and are being made for us. In one of my favourite passages in the book, she lays out the heart of her argument: "The deeper into the foodie world I ate, the more aware I became of its reactionary tilt. Though the public has embraced it as a mainstream hobby, foodie-sim is a counterculture. Its shared values are a love of the special, sub rosa, small batch, and handmade and loathing of homogeneity, mass production, and uniformity" (146). Goodyear's account is compelling in that she understands and exposes many of the contradictions of foodie-ism as it engages in acts of transgression at both the margins and centre of food cultures around the world.  

A more academic take on the subject appears in the work done by Josee Johnston and Shyon Baumann's Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape (2010). Right from the book's preface, the authors tackle the contradictions of the "high" and "low" approach to foodie-ism as a story about democratic versus classed access to food: "This important new cultural analysis tells two stories about food. The first depicts good food as democratic. Foodies frequent ‘hole in the wall’ ethnic eateries, appreciate the pie found in working-class truck stops, and reject the snobbery of fancy French restaurants with formal table service. The second story describes how food operates as a source of status and distinction for economic and cultural elites, indirectly maintaining and reproducing social inequality. While the first storyline insists that anybody can be a foodie, the second  asks foodies to look in the mirror and think about their relative social and economic privilege" (xv). This dichotomy almost perfectly mirrors most of the art theory of the past several decades that isolates the problems and contradictions of maintaining a viable form of avant-gardism-- one that not only continues to disrupt expectations around art, but also creates social and political change-- as an issue related to democratic access versus exclusionary practices. 

Josee Johnston and Shyon Baumann's Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape (2010) is a sociological study that navigates the many contradictions and theories of foodie-ism as a form of counterculture. 

These connections are fascinating and are likely at the root of so much of the interest and passion around food that I see around me. In the world of art, food has historically served as a potent theme and is also seeing a resurgence (see the recent work of  artist Mark Menjivar as but one example) and I must note here as an aside that some of the most interesting food and beverage trends I have seen are often spotted first at art openings (!). Still, the stereotypes of hipster vegans, gluten-free celebrities, and paleo-yoga and other assorted foodie devotees aside, more than ever before, food is linked to a politics of choice and a form of self-expression and self-determination. 

Throwback Thursday: John Cage's 4'33" (1952) Immortalized

In 1952, American experimental composer and artist John Cage composed a score in three movements that instructed musicians not to play their instruments for a duration of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece was to consist of whatever ambient sounds occurred in the time frame designated for the score, and the radical gesture resulted in moving attention and focus away from the musicians, the "artists" performing the piece, to the world of the audience. Over sixty years later, 4'33" is still regarded as one of the watershed acts or episodes in the history of twentieth century art-- a work that creates a space for people to consider the notion of "silence" and the active and unfolding present moment as unique and open to chance. In a 1991 interview (see YouTube clip above), Cage reflects on "silence" as a far reaching concept that encompasses most of the ambient and everyday sounds around any one of us-- sounds, that when paid attention to, create the possibility for a powerful kind of lived and spatially experienced art. Over the years, many famous performances of 4'33" have punctuated how quickly the concept of space and time can be transformed through the process of active listening. 

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently featuring an exhibition about John Cage's famous composition titled "There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage's 4'33." As part of the show, people are being encouraged to visit the MoMA website and upload their own soundscapes as a way to share the experience of personal silence. After visiting this site a number of times in the past week, I must admit here is something oddly hypnotic and peaceful about listening to these shared "silences" from around the world. It also reminds us how little time is actually spent focusing and truly listening in the way Cage encouraged. 

For more information about Cage's composition, I recommend Kyle Gann's book No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage's 4'33" and Dieter Daniel's and Inke Arns' Sounds Like Silence, John Cage 4'33": Silence Today.

MoMA's "Share Your Silence" project allows people around the world to use their mobile device to upload soundscapes around them for inclusion on this crowd sourced map. 

Vancouverism: Architecture For An Urban Future

Living in the "city of glass" -- a term popularized by writer and visual artist Douglas Coupland in his book of personal essays about Vancouver-- it is often difficult to get critical distance from the powerful aesthetic force of the city's architecture and urban planning. It is a place of contradictions characterized by both its verticality and its density, a city boasting of its multiculturalism, but also remaining incredibly isolationist in terms of its urban development (we aren't called the "no-fun city" for nothing). Even so in recent years, and especially since the Winter Olympics in 2010, Vancouverism has emerged as a model of urban planning globally, being adopted by many other city councils and architectural planners around the world. 

An artistic rendering of Vancouver's Granville Street corridor into the city in 2018. Vancouver House (the spiral tower to the left) and its commercial development component under and around the bridge will eventually dominate the city skyline on the south end of Vancouver.

A recent exhibition, GESAMTKUNSTWERK, showcasing and exploring the Vancouverism phenomena opened a few weeks ago in the city. You may have heard about it via its clever ad campaign or figured out that it is also a strategically crafted promotion of one of the city's most anticipated building projects -- Danish starchitect Bjarke Ingels' 497 foot Vancouver House residential tower and commercial development plan, slated for completion in 2018.   

Visiting the exhibition online even ahead of my visit at its Howe Street pop-up style venue, I was struck by the attention paid to the diversity of audiences this project would likely attract, from the professional/academic crowd who would naturally be interested in the uniqueness of the art and design of the space, to the local population, many of whom would be learning about this project and Vancouverism for the first time, and then finally to the potential homeowners, many of whom will likely be drawn from an international pool of buyers. The resource materials, carefully crafted catalogue, and salon series (curated and organized by local architecture historian and critic Trevor Boddy) present a bold move on the part of the developers (Westbank) to present this project not just as a commercial venture, but also as a threshold cultural and social/political moment in Vancouverism and the future of the city's development. And while there are certainly critics of the plan, it is important to note that they have been invited to dialogue via the exhibition to extend the conversation about this project and its impact on the downtown core. See the gallery of images I captured from my visit below:

Gentrification remains one of the key characteristics of full-blown Vancouverism. This condemned house sits directly beside the  GESAMTKUNSTWERK exhibition venue, the same place where Vancouver House will be built.

Indeed, the conversation and history around condo living, urban density, and skyrocketing housing costs in the world's major cities is but one important subtext to this entire exhibition that is hinted at but not directly dealt with. Having recently purchased a condo in the very neighbourhood that Vancouver House and its development will be a part of and impacted by, I honestly disclose that I approach this topic as both a concerned citizen, but also an invested homeowner uneasy about the future livability of the city I love. It is true that however seductive this exhibition, with its promise of an artistically rendered, sustainable, and community oriented design, the reality remains that the area slated for development is part of a long history of gentrification in the city dating back to Expo 86. 

For these unspoken dynamics of Vancouverism , I refer you to the award-winning multimedia project Highrise created by documentary filmmaker Katerina Cizek and the National Film Board of Canada. Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC's Q recently interviewed Cizek about her stunning series of interactive documentaries, resources, pictures, and blog that trace every facet of the architectural form. It is certainly worth a listen and view to consider how aspects of Vancouverism increasingly dominate our global skylines and imaginations of an urban future.

An Emmy-winning, multi-year, many-media, collaborative documentary experiment by director Katerina Cizek at the National Film Board of Canada, that explores vertical living around the world.

Throwback Thursday: The Art and Times of Claire Fisher

There is about a week and a half in every semester between the last of the midterm grading, group evaluations, and final class preparations, and the beginning of the wind down to the final exam period. I like to think of this as the calm before the storm, but also as a great time to indulge some extra-curricular TV and movie viewing. This year, I found myself nostalgically binge-watching the entire five seasons (63 episodes in total) of Six Feet Under, arguably one of the best drama series to ever air on TV. Set between 2001-2005, the show follows the lives of the Fishers-- a family that runs a funeral home out of their Los Angeles house-- and traces their lives against the backdrop of loss, love, and the banality of everyday life. When I originally began watching the show, I was struggling through the end of my MA thesis and unsure of what direction my studies and life would take. The lives of the FIshers mirrored that insecurity and my own misgivings about the kind of post 9/11 world I was living in. I think people have short memories when it comes to the spectre of terror and the "homeland security" rhetoric that permeated the media and served as a shadowy backdrop to so many of my friend's art and research projects.

Watching Claire Fisher navigate the difficulties of art school this time around was very different. I was able to really appreciate both sides of the student-teacher dynamic that took shape in those witty classroom scenes at the fictitious LAC Arts College (first with the ever bitter and scorned art world star turned art instructor Olivier, and then with the bipolar artist instructor Billy, who Claire ends up dating). I can see now Olivier and Billy's vulnerability and fear about losing themselves and their creativity in their new roles as teachers. Back then, I just wanted the job and had little patience for any of their complaints. I also have some distance from identifying with Claire's worries about her future and succumbing to some soul-sucking job. I have learned that it will all work out OK, even if it isn't exactly as you dreamed (it might be better). 

I was especially struck this time however by how powerful Claire's art and process really were. The notion of a fragmented self reconstituted into a mask that one wears as an outer shield has even more resonance in today's digitally mediated social world. We have to remember that Claire did not have Facebook or Twitter back then (they weren't quite invented) and she shot her photographs with a 35mm camera and developed all her images in a darkroom. I always wondered what artist had actually been hired to make Claire's art when I watched the series back in the day, and I ended up running across this great article in Salon that reveals the true identity of the artist who made the infamous photo-collage portraits that catapulted Claire into the big leagues with her first professional exhibition while still a BFA undergrad. His name is David Meanix and a quick Google search finds a recent Huffington Post article about his evolving interest in photosculpture. I have included his pieces in the photo-slider above, along with other projects "Claire" completed during her art school days. 

If you have not seen this series, I highly recommend it. It is worth mentioning that the show was created and produced by Alan Ball, the screenwriter of American Beauty, a classic satire of the suburban middle class of North America. Without giving any spoilers, I will say that the final episode of this show (one of the most memorable in TV history) will leave you floored and possibly gutted (people still talk about it to this day!). But it is worth every last minute of investment, especially if you are living through, or have survived, the trials of art school.