The heads of disembodied stick figures float from one end of
the screen to the next. Childlike drawings of planes and explosions
ricochet across a swirling dark sky of scribbles and ghosts. The looped
sounds of robotic screaming and rapid-machine-gun firing set the
mood.
Quebecois filmmaker Pierre Hébert and electronic composer Bob
Ostertag sit in a corner, controlling the action. Their tools of choice
in orchestrating this nightmare: video game controllers, foot pedals, a
computer mouse and a dry-erase marker.
“Doing what I do is really totally crazy if you compare it to the
normal way of doing animation,” says Hébert, interrupted from
feeding the birds at his home in Quebec. Over the phone, he discusses
Special Forces, the third part of Hébert and Ostertag’s
ongoing Living Cinema project. It premiered in Beirut in 2007 as part
of the Irtijal Festival and comes to Halifax Friday night, thanks to the Centre for Art Tapes, who are presenting the evening.
Living Cinema explores the relationship between artists and
technology. Hébert and Ostertag fear today’s musicians and
animators are becoming mouse-clickers only, enslaved to the
technologies they depend on. But Ostertag has developed innovative
software, making more interactive, spontaneous performances
possible.
During performances, Hébert works frenziedly, drawing images
onto glass with a marker, while modifying images frame by frame. A
small camera records the images, then transposes them over the rolling
film. Meanwhile, Ostertag manipulates samples taken from bizarre
sources like crunching Cheetos, wind-up toys and video games.
This is not the first time Hébert has been at the cutting
edge of cinema. In the ’80s, he pioneered scratching directly onto
rolling film. Though his technology has become more sophisticated over
the years, Hébert has stuck with his simplistic, childlike
style.
“His fluid movement into the digital realm of using new technologies
and digital media in such a handmade, organic way was just so
impressive to me,” says NSCAD professor and filmmaker Solomon Nagler.
After seeing Hebert and Ostertag collaborate in Montreal, Nagler worked
to bring the duo to town for the Halifax Independent Film Festival.
The performances benefit from Hébert and Ostertag’s artistic
chemistry, which has been strong since the two friends started working
together in 1989.
“We’re like kids in a sandbox,” says Hébert, referring to
their playful, exploratory interactions with sound and images.
No two performances are ever the same, providing the artists with
the flexibility to react to events as they unfold. Both are political:
Hébert’s a self-described “news addict,” while Ostertag lived in
El Salvador, supporting the guerilla movement.
The idea for Special Forces was conceived in a five-minute
phone conversation between the two, moments after the 2006 Israeli
invasion of Lebanon began. That summer, images of dead Lebanese
children were broadcast from one screen to the next. The bombardment
was a response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah
militia, which claimed the lives of around 1,000 Lebanese, most of who
were civilians. “It seemed like some kind of a threshold was being
crossed, even in the very unstable and difficult situation of the
Middle East,” says Hébert, referring to the 34 days of
violence.
That summer, Hébert and Ostertag had been working on a
project about video games, doomed for the trash. The two decided to
change course immediately, by using sounds from the games in
combination with footage of war-torn Lebanon and Hébert’s
playful, spontaneous drawings. It sounds unlikely, disrespectful to the
dead even, but it’s a combination that works.
The video-game soundtrack makes the senseless nature of the killing
apparent, highlighting the “contrast between the imaginary world of war
and actual real war where people are dying,” explains Hébert.
Though the subject matter is generally heavy (other performances have
dealt with the Iraq War and September 11), the work conveys the
artists’ spontaneous gut reactions to events, rather than dogmatism or
political agendas.
“I like when people get to connect with the playful aspect of it,”
says Hébert, “but at the same time grasp the serious concerns.”
Living Cinema, Friday, April 3 at the North Street
Church, 5657 North, 8pm, $8 students/$10. Artist talk with
Hébert and Ostertag, Friday at 1pm, NSCAD Film School.
This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2009.