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Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (David Rimmer, 1970)
🕑 Added 2022-04-13 21:20:43 +0000 UTC
This is a bit of classic as far as Canadian structural film goes, although it isn't shown all that much these days. (A few years ago, TIFF Wavelengths premiered a restoration print, although I don't recall its general reception.) I'd previously only seen Variations in a highly degraded video transfer, so this lovely copy sort of makes me feel as if I'm seeing Rimmer's film for the very first time.
If you look back at P. Adams Sitney's chapter on structural film in Visionary Cinema, you'll find that he boils down the unofficial movement into four basic strategies: fixed camera position, flicker, loop printing, and rephotography from the screen. By that rather rigid recipe, Variations is indubitably a structural film. It's a continuous loop of about a second from what appears to be an industrial documentary. A woman is working in a factory, pulling out a sheet of cellophane to cover some unseen object, and the end of the sheet flies up at the end, subsuming the frame.
Against an increasingly glitchy electronic score, Rimmer subjects the image to superimpositions, high- and low-contrast reprinting, negative reversal, and eventually a series of primary colors overlaid on the clip. The first few minutes of the film strongly resemble J.J. Murphy's Print Generation, although that film was made two years later. Where Rimmer treated the degradation of the film image as one gesture among many, Murphy made the loss of clarity his film's entire raison d'etre. Similarly, the colored passages at the end look like certain Hollis Frampton works, such as Artificial Light and Palindrome (both 1969).
How one feels about Rimmer's film, I think, will depend on what one hopes to see in structural films in general. Unlike work by Murphy, Frampton, Snow, or Gehr, Variations does not isolate a specific filmic element and follow it to some logical conclusion. As Rimmer's title perhaps suggests, Variations feels more improvisational. There is no obvious logic for how or why one "variation" follows another. This jazz-like looseness may strike the viewer as a welcome corrective to traditional structuralism's dogged single-mindedness. But it may also suggest why the film has been bobbing in and out of the canon. At times it can feel like a part of the 1970s hippie-technology subgenre, including filmmakers like Scott Bartlett, David Larcher, and Stan Van Der Beek. It's an attitude that clashes with structuralism's rage for order, and for me these opposing tendencies tend to strand Variations in a sort of aesthetic no-mans-land.
