Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In 1988, Mike Hoolbloom began promoting the collection of experimental
films held by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre in Toronto. He
did so partly by founding The Independent Eye. After a nine-year
gestation period, the magazine gave birth to this collection of 16
interviews with a representative sampling of Canada’s fringe-film
cineastes. Hoolbloom’s purpose, he says, is “not to draft the
outlines of the fringe and its global manifestation, nor to provide an
overarching and theoretical penumbra beneath which this work may be
accounted and classified.” Instead, it is to provide a forum for 16
voices to praise, in their individual ways, noncommercial, nonnarrative
filmmaking across Canada.

Each interview opens with a concise statement about the interviewee and
closes with a filmography. In between, Hoolboom’s subjects discuss
such topics as the artistic and technical processes involved in creating
avant-garde films and the difficulties, financial and otherwise, of
bringing them to fruition.

Many among the five generations of artists interviewed will be known to
those already familiar with the fringe in Canada. The interviewees
include Michael Snow, Carl Brown, Patricia Gruben, Barbara Sternberg, Al
Razutis, Penelope Buitenhuis, Fumiko Kiyooka, Peter Lipskis, Wrik Mead,
Annette Mangaard, Steve Sanguedolce, Gary Popovich, Philip Hoffman,
Garine Torossian, Richard Kerr, and Mike Cartmell. For readers with no
or minimal knowledge of the movement, this book is an excellent starting
point.