斯蒂芬·布鲁默评《回家过圣诞》 (original) (raw)

In 1978, Canadian filmmaker Rick Hancox finished Home for Christmas, a record of a train, bus and ferry journey taken from his then-home of Toronto, Canada, to his family’s Landfall homestead in Prince Edward Island. The journey had occurred three years earlier, in 1975, and at an auspicious time for Hancox, in the last days of his twenties and the first days of his thirties, and his experience becomes an open parallel for those viewers who are separated from their families by a great divide, living their own lives in distant cities, and for whom this commonplace journey—humble and monotonous—takes on the epic dimensions of a pilgrimage. Home for Christmas portrays the traditional subjects of the amateur home movie—family portraiture, a holiday trip, Christmas rituals—captured through the professional technology of 16mm synchronous-sound production equipment and the aesthetic discipline of a creative filmmaker, and in doing so, it occupies a space between the amateur film—amateur meaning, pursued with pleasure and passion—and professional practice, albeit in a way that is decidedly non-industrial and non-commercial.

By the late 1970s, the field of personal filmmaking had become commonplace in the underground and marginally accepted as a viable artistic mode of cinema. Such filmmaking was undertaken by individuals and groups of individuals instead of large corporations, was focused on the maker’s personal, subjective experience, and was made and shown independent of traditional routes of financing and distribution. Rick Hancox, through the example of the work of his mentor George Semsel, had pursued such filmmaking following early encounters with experimental cinema, a field that had been personal from its origins but which had become more declaratively personal from the late 1950s onward. By the mid-1970s, Hancox had been making films for almost a decade, with his approach steadily invested in the autobiographical non-fiction film. Hancox’s predecessors were artists like Stan Brakhage, in whose work everyday experience was exalted and mythic, and Jonas Mekas, whose diaries chronicle his social experiences and the evolution of the American underground and that combine documental observation with the temporal abstraction of pixilation, such that these moments are always slipping away. Among Hancox’s contemporaries, there was Ed Pincus, whose autobiographical Diaries followed after the Victorian diaries of Samuel Pepys as creative accounts of ordinary experience, elevating the mundane details of everyday life into something extraordinary; and there was Anne Charlotte Robertson, whose Five Year Diary, beginning in the early 1980s, was likewise an intimate chronicle that emerged from a reconciliation of the paper diary, the home movie, and the underground movie. Like Pincus and Robertson, Hancox was extending a thread that had arrived with the widespread and empowering cinephilia of the 1960s, typified in Lenny Lipton’s textbook Independent Filmmaking. This movement towards first-hand personal storytelling was already being parodied in the late 1960s, in films such as David Holzman’s Diary and Coming Apart. It was easy for a culture weened on cinema-as-entertainment to dismiss personal filmmaking as naval-gazing—it was even easier than dismissing the home movie, for the personal film had a pretence to importance, it was made with the expectation that it would be watched and understood by strangers. At its very best the personal film could represent its maker’s being, their sensitivity towards the world, their inimitable subjectivity, their passions, their loves, their sorrows, their outrage.

In his own student films, Hancox had mixed documental witness with personal evocation and reflection, and had done so with a playful sense of professional discipline that increased through the course of his education. This amalgamation of personal practice, professional pedagogy and play culminates in Wild Sync, a film made in 1973, the year that he assumed his position as a professor of film at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario. Wild Sync has its own educational conceit, as a demonstration of Hancox’s approach to capturing wild sound. With this technique, Hancox offers that in cinema, the professional’s toolkit is porous and can be improvised: in this sense, to shoot ‘wild sync’ is to remove one more barrier-to-access that the professional film world had put in place to keep out the amateur. For a maker like Hancox, crossing such barriers reinforced the skill that an independent film culture demanded, the frugality of their means relative to commercial cinema, and the possibilities that it opened for those working at an intimate scale. This was a rejection of what Hancox has called the “ostentatious traditions” of the medium, the use of heavy equipment and large crews, traditions from which even independent filmmakers were not immune.

Hancox’s approach to personal cinema, as it manifests in Home for Christmas, was anticipated in House Movie, a film documenting the apparent end of a relationship, and continued with September 15, a film of his first wedding, shot by himself and a friend. By the time that he shot Home for Christmas, that marriage had ended and the film was out of distribution, but still it served as a template for what he set out to make, not only for featuring the same family home in P.E.I., but as a film made in the midst of celebration, a film that captures the joy of the occasion, its unpredictable and chaotic aspects. By seeking to convey such strong emotions and common rituals in his films, Hancox connects with universal experiences, but this does not overshadow the particularity of these encounters. Home for Christmas is a universal, humanist film, and yet it does not exist to offer easy lessons and its maker does not assert a predetermined framework for its interpretation: it is a film about this man, his family, his encounters on the road to and from home. The actions and sights of this film are particular to his trip—from locations seen out the window of the train, to the endearing mugging of Hancox’s father Bill, to the men sneaking drinks with their host at a Sunday-‘dry’ house party. By refraining from messaging, and simply presenting scenes with subtle, patient editorial constructions, Hancox invites us into an open, universal experience of an old-fashioned Canadian Christmas.

The film begins with the sound of Hancox’s sister Amanda speaking to their mother on the phone, updating her on their travel plans; as this plays on the soundtrack, Amanda is shown, asynchronous, looking out the window of a train. While much of what will follow involves married sound and image, this use of non-sync sound promises that what will follow is, at least in part, a result of editorial arrangement and construction. On this journey, Hancox is accompanied by Amanda and her husband Scot, who are introduced along with the rest of his cast in opening credits that assert the professional standard of a curtain call. The asynchronous opening shot, the professional sheen of the credits, and in sequences that follow, the richness of the film’s audio recording and the detail of its 16mm cinematography, are all aspects that distinguish Hancox’s film from the more casual tradition of home moviemaking. Even before they have departed Toronto’s Union Station, these markers of style declare what for many viewers might seem a strange filtering of the everyday subject through an uncommon level of technique. Through the editorial structures that Hancox imposes on his materials, the film bears out the professional style of the cinema vérité documentary, with digressive edits that bridge shots and overhanging audio that gives an illusion of continuity. While that style had been largely subsumed by documentary cinema in pursuit of explicit social meanings, here it is used to effect something like a stream of consciousness, in the bar car, in the midst of conversations, the camera jostled and passed around among travellers. That Hancox’s family share in camera and sound duties speaks to his role as a conductor: he is not a witness, but an agent of experience who enters into scenarios in which he cannot control all of the variables. This allows him to capture unguarded, unvarnished ‘truth’, in this case, a truth beyond elaboration, a recognition that these were the faces, sights and sounds of this journey. These makers are not mere witnesses, they’re also invasive: as they go around and ask strangers about their Christmas plans, it is easy to place the film in relation to Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer, the foundational cinema-vérité film about filmmaking that likewise exploits the convention of the man-in-the-street television interview to provoke reflections on universal experiences, and on the role of conversation itself. In Home for Christmas, rather than serve self-reflexive goals, their curiosity simply makes our traveller-hosts friendly and familiar to us.

Home for Christmas finds a natural counterpoint in The Days Before Christmas, made twenty years earlier by the National Film Board’s Unit B as a critical document of the commercial Christmas experience in Montreal. A work of extraordinarily technical achievement, The Days Before Christmas is, like many films produced by the NFB, unambiguous in its social messaging. Hancox, by comparison, refuses prescriptive social comment: instead, he makes a truly social film, a film that unfolds naturally and with subtle intervention, and which, like the social encounters of everyday life, does not provide us with a guide for its comprehension. The viewer is placed in the midst of family discussions, which allows for a greater sense of identification with the family, an ear-witness to private discussions about the past. Hancox’s use of asynchronous sound in his discussion with his mother Mary allows the filmmaker to situate the work in a social history that is, again, an act of invitation, intercutting their discussion with family photographs that show the family—him, his sister Amanda, his brother Mike, and parents Mary and Bill—through the years. This is further intercut with scenes of a family dinner being prepared, a dinner that will serve as the film’s climax. This interweaving of past and present continues as the dinner is served and discussion becomes, inevitably, nostalgic, and this intercutting gives an added weight to subsequent scenes of the family parting, first with brother Mike and sister-in-law Picky, whose daughter Rachel, the only child in the film, most vividly represents the continuity of these Christmas rituals.

As much as it is a social film, Home for Christmas is also engaged in a more solitary, anti-social contemplation, that of the landscape seen through the window of the train. In the film’s first act, the travellers are largely bound to the bar car, but Hancox frequently digresses, turning his attention to the murky snowdrifts of urban Ontario and Quebec towns. The next day, as they prepare for their final trek to Charlottetown, his attention is drawn to the passing views of stations and strip malls in the small towns and cities of the Atlantic Provinces. Later, when he makes the return journey, unaccompanied, his solitude emphasizes this act of reflection. It suggests something different from Amanda’s early declaration of the train journey as a big party. Melancholy creeps in, in his deflated expressions, as he makes a very different kind of journey, a return to the responsibilities of work, the end of a vacation, and a departure from family, reinstating that great gulf of distance that separates them. His return journey is spent looking out the window, as the landscapes of his formative years recede and he prepares to file back into the throng of civilization. Between these framing journeys, Hancox’s visit to the family home is spent largely in small, tight rooms—the family rec room, his father’s office, another family’s home that they visit—but the character of the family home is enhanced by quieter scenes in which Hancox busies himself with filming the porch, the surrounding woods, the adjoining farmland. In its emphasis on a pastoral landscape—a landscape that is pastoral even as it springs up on the edge of the railroad tracks—Home for Christmas is joined to a tradition in Canadian experimental filmmaking of both looking through windows and regarding the world at a distance, and situating one’s vision in a landscape. In the years prior to Home for Christmas, these themes were being practiced by Hancox’s predecessors, such as Joyce Wieland with Reason Over Passion and David Rimmer with his Canadian Pacific films. Where those films were about the wonder of the vista in relation to industry and imperialism, in Home for Christmas, the landscape is a more stable and particular one, a trajectory to and from home.

As focused as Home for Christmas is on this family visit, it is also plainly a vehicle for Hancox himself, whose informal interviews, discussions, wry observations, and even his singing of the film’s autobiographic title song on its soundtrack, make him a likeable avatar for our own exploration of the traditional Canadian Christmas experience. His willingness to open his life to the scrutiny of an audience might remind the viewer of their own place in the world. And even if that viewer doesn’t celebrate Christmas, or doesn’t have a happy family, there is something merciful in the social spirit of Hancox’s filmmaking style that seems an invitation, not to the manger of Christendom, but to the warmth and shelter of a more universal communion, humanist, welcoming, a space at the hearth, come all ye, faithful and faithless, joyful and triumphant, and come let us adore ourselves and each other.