By Nicole Armour

Brent Green’s seventies-set tinkerer-inventor documentary Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then employs hand-drawn and live action, stop-motion animation to tell the true-life love story of Kentucky residents Mary and hardware store clerk Leonard. They first meet when their cars crash, causing Leonard to fly through his windshield and land in the passenger seat of Mary’s car. Their connection defies physics from the start and continues in an unholy mist of magic and calamity. When Mary is diagnosed with cancer two years into their relationship, Leonard begins to build a house he envisions as a “healing machine.” Its mostly improvised construction, consisting of irregularly-tiered levels and a tower centrepiece that reaches perilously for the heavens, fills Leonard’s thoughts. In narration, we’re told each nail represents a problem that he strikes to make disappear. Still, they accumulate and, while shingling, they pour out of Leonard’s pockets, stream down the roof and accumulate in impossible numbers in the rain gutter. The house fails to save his wife. But after her death, he continues his project unabated for another fifteen years.

Green had the good fortune to visit the healing house before it was razed to the ground, after which he built a version on his property in rural Pennsylvania based on blueprints scrawled on cardboard that were found amongst Leonard’s effects. Green then surrounded it with several other buildings, fabricating a small town cum movie set, and also designed a handmade, working piano like the instrument Leonard used to play hymns. (Leonard’s fervent religiosity grew in direct proportion to Mary’s weakness and his own sense of loss.) Green directed and narrated the film, and wrote the script and musical score with collaborators. He also tours the film as a live performance during which he and other musicians, such as Fugazi’s Brendan Canty, play along in accompaniment. Through Green’s activities both on and off screen he conflates himself with Leonard, embodying a comparable fanaticism. When Leonard found that he lacked control of his life, he re-asserted that control by choosing a project and dedicating himself to its completion. Through live action stop motion animation, Green orchestrates his actors’ halting movements like a puppeteer.

 

The only heaviness in Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then is the weight of its emotions; its aesthetic connotes flights of fancy and pursuit of the fantastical. Silent film intertitles and hand-wrought rooms and furnishings comprised of found materials give the film a folkloric look, and the persistent glow of bare, incandescent bulbs (especially Mary’s electric halo) make these common items seem otherworldly. Green’s narration, insightful and stated with a passion evidenced by his often quavering tone, feels spontaneous and unscripted, not least in the many contradictions it evokes; e.g., Green decries Leonard’s religiosity while simultaneously depicting it with curiosity and respect. In fact, it’s these kind of contradictions that become one of the film’s greatest assets. “Some things, nearly all the best things in this world, aren’t made with hands,” says Green in his narration—this in a meticulously hand-wrought film about a man working with his hands to heal his heart. This inconsistency is the main site of the film’s compassion, as it gives evidence of Green’s deep understanding of Leonard’s plight. It’s not always worth adhering to rationality when love, faith and aspiration, however confused, could be your guides instead. By chronicling Leonard’s flawed enterprise, Green doesn’t save his life, but he does rescue his story. To some degree, this is basically the same thing.

Leonard’s tower, meant to help him resist earth’s pull, also measures his refusal to contend with reality. The gravity of the film’s title applies to physics but to life’s solemnity as well. Both meanings also plague Josh “Screech” Sandoval, the skateboarding subject of Tristan Patterson’s Dragonslayer. An impressionistic portrait of Sandoval and the mythic Southern Californian subculture that sustains him (a glimmering landscape of sunlight, pot, and girls), the film also punctures that culture’s typically romantic vision of heroic boys dropping out. Accumulated from footage shot gathered by Eric Koretz (using a Canon 5D still camera) and Sandoval himself, who operated a Flip Cam when apart from the crew, Dragonslayer follows Sandoval statewide and internationally as he moves between abandoned pools and official competitions, often sleeping in tents in friends’ backyards. Incurably peripatetic, Sandoval is hovering at a crossroads with a new, young girlfriend, a baby by a different woman, and a rather nebulous attitude towards his profession: he alludes to having had more financial security in the past, but let numerous sponsors slide due to depression.

 

Organized into eleven chapters edited to transition abruptly and accompanied by music from the Mexican Summer and Kemado Records labels, Dragonslayer both lends structure to Sandoval’s mostly aimless activities while underscoring how they can turn on a dime. The meditative result has a foreboding in common with Over the Edge (1979) and River’s Edge (1986), both touchstones for Patterson’s vision. Rather than attempting to elucidate Sandoval’s chronology, Dragonslayer prefers to offer an entirely present-oriented perspective on how Sandoval and his friends live from day to day. But by not placing the group in a specific time or place, the film takes on an inescapably retro feel: the skateboarders depicted here resemble their antecedents so closely that they and their culture seem not to have evolved. This isn’t meant to deny the benefits of lifestyles lived apart from the mainstream: Sandoval’s chosen course requires a kind of adaptation and resourcefulness typically avoided by the status quo. Yet Dragonslayer indicates that it’s possible to ascribe one’s life choices to political views when they more accurately align with stagnation. In a moment of rare insight, one of Sandoval’s friends, a former skateboarder turned tattoo artist, explains how some people show up at the skate park and then don’t even skate. The park has become somewhere to be for want of something better, a protective shell and set of parameters for how to act and what to value.

The film’s best skateboarding footage occurs over the opening and closing credits and was shot on Sandoval’s Flip Cam. In the first instance, he cleans out a backyard pool himself and rides its contours smoothly, without spilling, until an elderly neighbour chases him away. This effortlessness tends to leave him during competitions, where he stumbles often; he’s more capable amidst comfort and familiarity, sensations heightened by the way the Flip Cam footage resembles home movies. The sequence constitutes the problem inherent in being an expert: how to achieve and maintain flight without letting the vertigo of responsibility send you crashing. The magnetic appeal of skateboarding is most effectively conveyed at the film’s end, when Sandoval takes a decisive step away from it: working at a strangely fancy bowling alley, the most resolutely earthbound of sports, he wanders through its nightclub lighting in a uniform while carrying trays of drinks. It seems impossible that this grind could ever compare to the speed and hard-won balance skateboarding affords, but this strangely comforting conclusion suggests bigger challenges that Sandoval is now willing to face head-on, albeit bolstered by bong hits: to find stability without forsaking pleasure and to accept actuality without forgetting the self.

Ferran Adrià’s molecular-gastronomy (or modernist cuisine) mecca El Bulli proves a surprisingly relevant arena for the investigation of pragmatism’s role in creativity in Gereon Wetzel’s studious El Bulli—Cooking in Progress, which follows the famous chef and his team over the course of a year in the restaurant’s life. Located in an idyllic Catalan setting overlooking Spain’s Cala Montjoi Bay, El Bulli offers an expensive, avant-garde tasting menu to guests with reservations; walk-ins are not welcome! The restaurant operates from July to December, then closes for six months while the head chefs move to a Barcelona-based laboratory to devise next season’s dishes. The warmth of El Bulli’s interior and environs gives way to a sterile workroom stocked with instruments worthy of a research lab.

 

Wetzel eschews context in favour of scrutinizing the chefs’ experimental process. With heads bent, they submit selected ingredients—tangerines, mushrooms, rabbit brains—to a battery of techniques in order to determine which of them produces the most pure and sensually satisfying results. Everything is liberally tasted, annotated through copious written notes and captured in digital photographs. The chefs, as well as Adrià, evaluate one another’s work and despite the hush and discipline, there’s a pronounced camaraderie and a sense of eager, excited discovery. It’s Adrià’s expectation that his food should engage the emotions as well as the senses, and provoke Proustian recall of the wonder of foods tasted for the first time. He sees food as a portal to poetry and joy, and employs science as the terrestrial link to this ephemerality—science not in the contemporary sense of reason and clinical detachment, but reminiscent of the Renaissance when art, religion, and scientific investigation were interconnected, and each one a site of alchemical discovery. Adrià stands at the head of this guild, distilling food to its essence so that ingredients are magically age-old and reborn all at once.

By introducing this element of surprise to his dishes, Adrià alters what’s familiar to make it more exciting and full of promise. In her essay film A Simple Rhythm, Toronto-based filmmaker Tess Girard suggests that everyday occurrences, when looked at closely, carry exhilarating proof of our holistic connection to our environment and one another. Girard conducts interviews with musician Charles Spearin (Broken Social Scene, Do Make Say Think), psychologist Caroline Palmer, theoretical mathematician Steven Strogatz, nurse practitioner Menaka Ponnambalam, and Roger Nelson, director of the Global Consciousness Project, to elucidate how things in the universe tend to synchronize. Their commentary is united with lyrical footage of common beats like raindrops striking pavement, reflected lights pulsing on electrical wires, and streetcar lines making manifest the invisible currents that propel them. Beginning with our heartbeat, Girard insists that the innate rhythm propelling our lives reverberates with the world around us. She goes on to cite circadian rhythms and tones of speech as indicators of a cosmic dance in which we lead and are led by a conforming life force.

 

With A Simple Rhythm, Girard takes on the ambitious challenge of making elusive energies perceptible and beautiful. She shares this drive with the preceding filmmakers and subjects, all of whom give physical shape to their individual complexity. Therefore, it’s debatable that we’re governed by a synchronous rhythm when our uniqueness is so varying and apparent. Perhaps the desire to locate a collective pulse is born of the human inclination for pattern-making. The drive to discern similarities is what makes us capable of empathy. In Girard’s film, mathematician Steven Strogatz stands alone in advocating for a balance between chaos and synchrony. He claims that adhering to one extreme or the other would be too rigid; we can look to nature as an exemplary system because it functions according to both probability and chance. A plant will to go to seed, but the wind may blow one seed into an entirely new location. This variability can beg all of our strength, but it also offers the possibility of amazement. A robin features prominently in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book The Secret Garden in which children Mary, Colin and Dickon heal themselves with faith, intimacy, and connection to nature. When spring comes to the English moor, eggs fill the bird’s nest and are greeted with appropriate awe. As vessels of life, they’re at once wholly methodical and eminently wonderful, and the children duly recognize their “…immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty.” Mary in Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then makes a living collecting and selling eggs from bird houses scattered through the woods, each white ovoid a clear relation to its neighbour yet each one entirely different—an everyday example of the immense variety possible within familiar forms.

Nicole Armour