Seriously Moving Images

The complete archival film, with added musical score.

THREE THERE is an experimental amateur travelogue/memoir, filmed on Galiano Island, BC, over the 1940 Labour Day weekend by Vancouver film buffs Oscar Burritt, Dorothy Fowler, and Margaret Roberts. The three were avid members of the Vancouver Branch of the National Film Society of Canada. (The film society regularly screened foreign and classic cinema on Sunday afternoons at the Stanley Theatre on Vancouver’s Granville Street.)

Although on first glance little more than a well-photographed holiday keepsake (with the requisite posing, repetition, and waving to the camera), Three There is actually a little Modernist essay in using film to create a sense of place and mood. The stillness of forest and fog, the motion of waves, and the passing of boats and steamships mark the languid rhythm of “island time.” The three friends amble down country roads and forest trails, take photos, hang out at the ocean’s edge, and chill in their rented cottage, “Skunk Manor.” Dorothy is featured in a series of striking vignettes, dancing and performing dramatic Martha Graham-like gestures in a suspended mirror. In one bravura unedited shot, 72 seconds long, the camera pans steadily to the right—from the outside wall of Skunk Manor, through the foliage to a nearby wharf, and out into the sea-shrouding fog (with a glimpse of Mayne Island across Active Pass)—before finally returning to land, with a shrub popping into the foreground. (This shot begins at 7:00 in the video file.)

The film’s second half includes a sequence entitled “night,” shot entirely inside “Skunk Manor.” Given the film stock and lenses available, and the absence of proper film lighting, the whole sequence is hugely underexposed. I’ve tried to bump up the light levels without totally washing out the image. (The effort is only intermittently successful.) The “last day” sequence follows. It features more rambling along the beach and on the forest path to nowhere in particular. There are more extravagant gestures and tomfoolery on view.

The film’s conclusion depicts the trio’s departure from Galiano to return to Vancouver. The long last sequence shows the elegantly-dressed Dorothy aboard a Canadian Pacific coastal steamship as it sails away from the island through Active Pass. Dorothy’s lovely hat, and its lively feather (dancing in the slipstream) deserve credit as her co-stars. Finally the film returns to the rocky shores of Galiano, with Dorothy walking alone beside the ocean waves.

Especially evident throughout Three There is the affection and humour shared by the trio. As elsewhere in Dorothy and Oscar’s work, there are also strange similarities to Maya Deren’s visual style—although Deren would not make her seminal first film, Meshes of the Afternoon, until 1943, some three years later.

Dorothy and Margaret’s experimental film “and–“ can also be viewed on the blog here. The original edited silent 16mm picture reels for both Three Three and “and–“ are preserved in the Douglas Wilson collection at Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa.

The soundtrack for this presentation comprises six musical pieces by Maarten Schellekens of evocativesoundtrack.com.

For (much!) more about the makers of this film, see my essay Evangelists: The Other Cinema of Dorothy and Oscar Burritt, elsewhere on this blog.