Issue 3: Spring 2009
JOHN PORTER AT CORK FILM FESTIVAL
Cork Film Festival, October, 2008
Over the course of the two screenings and one workshop Canadian filmmaker and performer John Porter presented in Cork last year, he more than once stated his liking for limitations. First and foremost, the limitations of working with Super8. An undisputed master of this format's technology, he insists on projecting the originals of the roughly three hundred Super8 films that he has made over a forty year career. Copies look inferior. If the films are damaged during projection, he simply remakes them for future performances.
This singular combination of purist perfectionism and easygoing acceptance is telling and not at all contradictory. It reflects an acceptance of Super8 that parallels an acceptance of the everyday life that Porter chronicles and explores with his camera. And more than an acceptance, a fascination, one that it never seems to occur to the artist that the viewer might not share. This is the root of his cinema's great strength- happy with its limits, it never doubts itself.
Judging by the two Cork programmes, which feature works from the ‘70s up to date, his films consist of what are essentially home movies on the one hand and, on the other, experiments with his medium. The same pure, unintellectualised fascination with the progress of a luckless knifegrinder moving from door to door in search of business in the silent, one-take Blade Sharpener (1998) animates the desire to find out the effects of spinning a camera on a fishing line over a deep stairwell in the dizzying ‘camera dance' Down on Me (1981). Let's see what happens!
This approach is further accentuated by Porter's performative presence, a crucial factor in experiencing his work. In addition to the witty, playful performances in which he moves the projector or interacts physically with the image, he speaks between and often throughout many of the films. At times his commentary is like that of someone talking you through their photo album, at other times a colleague divulging technical inspirations.
Yet the most oddly affecting film of all was, unusually, made with synch sound and, at 20 minutes, uncommonly long. Toy Catalog 3 (1996) is extremely minimalistic, consisting entirely of fixed close ups of a table top on which Porter's hands arrange plastic toys from his immense collection of cereal box freebie toys. In voiceover, he catalogues this display, evaluating and stating the origins of each item. Even if superficially atypical, Toy Catalog 3 perhaps best represents the sensibility at work in all these films. An unselfconscious, good-natured desire to share ones interests given an edge by the unusual intensity of focus on these interests.
-Maximilian Le Cain
Visit John Porter's extensive website: www.super8porter.ca
Cork Film Festival: www.corkfilmfest.org