Richard Fung | Ontario College of Art and Design | Thursday December 1, 2005 | Download PDF

I don’t like documentaries about artists. I find the mediating lens puts me at a distance from the artwork, and explication by the artist doesn’t enlighten me.

There are exceptions, of course. In Mereta Mita’s Hotere (2001), the great Maori modernist is barely glimpsed in this feature length consideration of his life; I thought perhaps he had died. Similarly, in Tom by Mike Hoolboom (2002), the figure of New York filmmaker Tom Chomont only occasionally emerges from behind a waterfall of moving images, borrowed, found and stolen. Rivers and Tides (2001), by Thomas Riedelsheimer, takes a different tack: it doesn’t impede but rather amplifies our vision. It sneaks us into the secret rituals of Andy Goldsworthy who creates solitary spectacles in the wilderness: a rock pool filled with dandelions, a dome woven from driftwood which collapses in the rising tide. These portraits work foremost as films. They excel as creations of sound and image rather than as vehicles for information about their artist-subjects. They are exceptions to the genre.

I didn’t plan to make a documentary about an artist. A few years ago, I received a research-creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to study the relationship between nationalism and homophobia in Canada and Trinidad and Tobago. In the1980s, Trinidad and Tobago outlawed lesbian sex, and Canada began accepting gay and lesbian refugee cases. I was interested in how both countries defined their national spaces by criminalizing or accepting queer sexualities. These gestures reflected official discourses about national character, upstanding and God-fearing in the case of Trinidad and Tobago, compassionate and tolerant in the case of Canada. As a gay man who has lived in both countries I was aware of the extent to which these narratives were ideological constructions, and I proposed to consider these questions through a series of short videos. I completed the introduction to the series, Islands, in 2002. However, as I proceeded with my research I found myself increasingly feeling the burden to represent, to produce yet another instalment in the seemingly inexhaustible series of documentaries with the subtitle, “gays and lesbians in…..” Apart from my boredom with that project, British-based filmmaker Inge Blackman had recently released Paradise Lost (2003), which is billed as a personal journey into carnival, Catholicism and homosexuality in Trinidad. Although I as yet have not seen this film, I felt relief that perhaps the job of representing Trinidadian queers had been done.