John Langan reviews Experimental
Film, very favourably, in this month's Locus Magazine:
There's a cache of lost films at the
centre of Experimental Film, the fine, compelling novel by
Gemma Files. The movies were made in the early years of the 20th
century by a woman who herself went missing during what should have
been a routine train journey to Toronto. Shot on highly unstable
silver nitrate stock, the short films are variations on the same
subject: a mysterious, veiled woman, her dress ornamented with beads
or mirrors that make her flash and shimmer. She moves through a
stylized farm landscape, bending to speak to a child labourer, when
it becomes apparent that she is holding a sword in one hand.
Lois Cairns, the
narrator-protagonist of the novel, first becomes aware of Iris
Dunlopp Whitcomb's work at a screening of new independent Canadian
films she is covering for a film publication. One of the filmmakers
includes an excerpt from one of the lost movies in his Untitled
13. The result affects Lois profoundly, viscerally, leading her
to interview Wrob Barney about the footage he's sampled. That
conversation sets Lois on the path of investigating Iris Whitcomb's
life and art. A film historian as well as critic, Lois immediately
understands the earthshaking implications of the lost movies for the
history of women in film, especially women who produced and directed
their own work. She contacts a former student of hers, Safie Hewsen,
now a budding filmmaker, and enlists her in documenting the search
for Iris Whitcomb's films.
It isn't very long, however, before
a series of escalatingly strange and unnerving events connected to
her inquiry cause Lois to realize that there might be more to the
missing movies than she anticipated. Her research reveals that the
subject of Iris Whitcomb's films is a minor deity from Wendish
mythology, Lady Midday, who interrogates farm labourers to learn if
they are performing their work well and whole-heartedly. Gradually,
Lois understands that what she at first took for dramatizations of a
somewhat esoteric folk tale are in fact recreating encounters with an
actual supernatural entity. What's more, Lady Midday has become
entangled with Iris Whitcomb's work—especially the last piece she
shot—to the extent that it can provide her a means of return in
force to a world whose steady forgetting of her has reduced the deity
to a fraction of her former strength.
The story of the forbidden text is,
of course, a mainstay of horror fiction, from Lovecraft's
Necronomicon to Barron's Black Guide. The number
of works that have made movies their sinister texts is more select,
but includes Ramsey Campbell's Ancient Images and
Marissa Pessl's Night Film, as well as “each thing I
show you is a piece of my death,” the story Files co-wrote with her
husband, Stephen Barringer, and which served as something of a dry
run for Experimental Film. Where this novel succeeds is in its
understanding of film, from the process by which it is made to those
by which it is disseminated and discussed; from its history to its
culture. Lois Cairns is steeped in movies, and she incorporates her
understanding into her narrative, pausing to deliver relevant
information when necessary. Lois is a self-conscious narrator, always
aware of how she's framing the story she's recounting, and including
the reader in her strategizing. The result is an experimental novel
about her quest for a set of films whose experimental qualities
extend far beyond her expectations.
All of this would be impressive
enough, but Files gives the story additional weight through her
description of Lois's experience as the mother of an autistic child.
From the early pages of the novel, Files shows the challenges Lois
confronts in her son, Clark, whose autism causes him to speak mostly
in quotations from popular media, and cannot communicate with Lois
and Simon, her husband and Clark's father. Lois is unsparing about
the trials of raising her son, but she leavens her bluntness with
enough wit and warmth to bring her love for her son to complicated
life. Clark's occasional distance from Lois, her remove from her idea
of a stereotypical mother, expand the novel's concern with the lost,
with what is missing, and give it an added poignancy.
At the same time, the novel's
evocation of Toronto and the community of its filmmakers and critics
results in a vivid sense of place. Details about the city's geography
combine with details about the men and women who populate its film
culture to create a setting that is an integral part of the
narrative. Experimental Film
could not happen in any other place and be the same novel: this is
very much a Canadian book, concerned with the history and current
state of Canadian filmmaking.
The recent republication of Gemma
Files's first two collections of short fiction, Kissing Carrion
and The Worm in Every Heart, was a reminder of how long and
how well she has been writing. The last several years have seen a
welcome uptick in her output, from the cosmic horror horse opera of
the Hexslinger series to the story cycle that comprises We Will
All Go Down Together, not to mention her stories in any number of
anthologies. Experimental Film represents the next significant
contribution to what is emerging as one of the most interesting and
exciting bodies of work currently being produced in the horror field.
Every film, Lois Cairns writes, is an experiment. The same might be
said of every novel. This one succeeds, wildly.
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