Cinema Travelogue

Image: Courtesy of TIFF

In 2021, Rhayme Vermette’s debut feature Ste. Anne, a film about a woman’s (played by Vermette herself) return to her hometown in Manitoba, surprisingly won the Best Canadian Film Award at TIFF. I would call that a surprise, not because of its quality (which, let’s be honest, doesn’t usually have a solid correlation with awards), but because of how much its style deviates from the conventional ways of the much-accoladed, socially relevant Canadian cinema. Although Vermette herself does not want to call her films experimental, there is no denying her interest in playing with both the textures of images and their linkages. Indeed, films like Ste. Anne and Levers should not simply be coined with a generalized term like “experimental”, as that would segregate the films from “traditional” narrative, instead of considering the film in their own relationship to it.

Compared to Ste. Anne, Vermette is working within a fairly contained conceptual framework this time. Despite there being no traditional narrative link for any of the events presented, one can more simply interpret every image as part of an elliptical chain reaction of events following the disappearance of the sun, leaving Winnipeg in complete darkness – the existential dread and claustrophobia infused by the emphasis of negative spaces and dense shadows that constantly shroud the characters’ actions. As a pure play of textures, this is fairly effective. Most notably, the portentous smoke that appears during the statue ceremony, the long-winding shot of a pan across multiple households watching the news of the rest of the world getting sunlight back, which leads to a really disorienting sequence of crossfades.

The film is in association with the cinematic practices of Bresson, his lineages, rather than a vaguely defined experiment. Mainly, it’s the way Vermette seems to deemphasize the importance of the role that a human carries in each scene and sequence. When a character leaves the frame, the film holds onto the negative space they leave behind for an extra few seconds; even when they are onscreen, the blocking would often cover their faces with shadows and show more obscure physical features such as their shoulders and hands; shadows carry equal weight within the frame as the humans.

Similar cases with the use of associative montage. Evidently with that scene where people were rushing around in the police station (I can’t really tell), but also to a larger extent that when a character goes out into the storm to go somewhere else, the film shows them leaving their home and entering another place, but the in-between shots are instead landscape shots and close-ups of snow landing on tree branches that carries more thematic connections than logical ones, or you can say the that contain human provides meaning to these seemingly random insert shots like an extended Kuleshov effect. All of which is to limit our perception towards quotidian activities that we’re taking for granted of and can no longer be due to the overarching supernatural disruption.

“Film where expression is obtained by relations of images and sounds, and not by mimicry done with gestures and intonations of voice”

Robert Bresson, Note On the Cinematograph

Perhaps the whole deal is wrapped in the film within this type of grand ancient ritual that was filmed sometime in the middle. People subsumed within the grainy analog film photographing fuzzy TV, telephones, and VHS tapes, all chaptered by tarot cards that grant the film the feeling of being trapped by time, analogous to the long night without hopes for the day.