Seriously Moving Images

In late 1930s Vancouver, Dorothy Fowler and Margaret Roberts were avid members of the Vancouver Branch of the National Film Society of Canada. Sometime in 1940-41, Dorothy and Margaret collaborated to produce the unique collage film “and–”. It’s the earliest known attempt at experimental filmmaking in Vancouver, and possibly the earliest in Canada.

Dorothy Fowler was close friends with film society manager Oscar C. Burritt, who was a keen amateur cinematographer. “and–” utilizes some material culled from Oscar’s late-1930s footage. (For instance, the “producers” credit runs over a shot from his unfinished midget-car-racing film Bats Out of Hell [1940].) This “found footage”—including negative film stock, inverted (reversed) images, and wild camera movements—was combined with Fowler and Roberts’ newly hand-painted and scratched film stock. In one clever section (starting at 3:03), actual holes punched in the frames have been filled with other images.

The whole thing is refreshingly chaotic. From the ominous opening shot of a large metal cylinder rolling toward a fragile glass figurine, the film hurtles headlong through segments of increasingly frenetic rhythmic montage to its abrupt conclusion at a stop sign. Vancouver landmarks appear upside-down, and both Oscar Burritt and Margaret Roberts put in cameo appearances. (Oscar appears twice, at 2:37 and 4:42; Margaret gets face time at 1:41.)

The technique of painting and scratching directly onto film would later become widely identified with Norman McLaren of the National Film Board of Canada. However, Dorothy and Margaret were almost certainly inspired by the earlier work of Len Lye, whose pioneering short A Colour Box (1935) had been screened by the Vancouver film society. It’s worth noting, though, that Lye and McLaren were both painting on 35-millimetre film stock, while “and-“ was hand-painted on 16-millimetre film–where each frame is about half the size of a postage stamp. It would have been extremely painstaking work.

Very few people now living have ever seen “and-“. Preserved today in silent form, the film was originally presented with an ephemeral soundtrack of jazz music from phonograph records: Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” and Bud Freeman’s “China Boy” and “The Eel”, mixed “live” on dual turntables.

I’ve tried to assemble a suitably jazzy score using tracks from the Free Music Archive. (Does it work? I don’t know. At least the vibes and bass lines contribute some rhythm and movement to the film.) This Province item from 28 January 1942 (p. 12) mentions an actual screening of the film.

The original 16mm edited picture roll for “and-“ (OR a duplicate negative copied from the original?) is preserved in the Douglas S. Wilson collection at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.

By the way: Dorothy Fowler and Oscar Burritt were married on January 10, 1942. In the 1940s and 1950s, they became key figures in the Canadian film society movement. You can read more about their lives and films in this online article on the Amateur Cinema website: “Evangelists: The Other Cinema of Dorothy and Oscar Burritt.”

FURTHER VIEWING/READING: Dorothy, Oscar, and Margaret also collaborated on Three There: Galiano Island 1940, a experimental travelogue/memoir that they filmed on the Gulf Island on the Labour Day weekend of 1940. It can be viewed via this page.