Experimental Film

ME: Best thing you’ve done so far. Better than Untitled 1 through 12, by a long shot.

WROB: Yeah, yeah . . . don’t oversell it, okay? I know you think I’m a parasite, a tapeworm dug deep in the bowels of CanCon, or whatever—

ME: What? No, I don’t think that.

WROB: Suuuurrre you don’t. But fine, let’s lay that by—I still know what you’re really here to ask about. You want to know about the inserts, right?

ME: They were . . . very powerful. Almost looked like you did them on silver nitrate.

WROB: Uh huh.

ME: But that’s not really possible, right? I mean—

WROB: What makes you think I couldn’t get my hands on some unexposed silver nitrate film, Lois? I’m rich, after all. Could even pay somebody to make some, if I really wanted to. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have that same kinda flaky quality, like it’s starting to come off a bit. Like it’s step-printed on a fire hazard. (Pause) No, you’re right, of course. The clips come from something I sampled, before the NFA bounced my sorry ass.

ME: What was it?

WROB: Long story. Longish. Definitely calls for another drink.

By the end of his NFA tenure, Wrob told me, he’d been working “very closely” with Jan Mattheuis, head of the Ontario Film Recovery Project. Mattheuis had started as an academic, teaching Film Studies out of Brock University, where he’d written a couple of surveys of early Canadian film that brought him to the attention of Piers Handling, Director and CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival. Handling brought Mattheuis in to curate a couple of programmes and the rest is history—he became attached to the NFA, where he developed the OFRP from the ground up, with the help of a network of volunteers and fundraisers. Their mandate was reclamation, categorization, and digitization of found footage dating anywhere from the late 1800s to the early 1920s. Wrob claimed to have bought his way in at the bottom through a hefty donation, then set his cap for Mattheuis, even though he was “not really my type, per se—waaay too old,” dazzling him with his double knowledge of digitization technology and potential recovery sites, especially in Lake of the North region.

WROB: Jan was particularly interested in locating any lost or hidden caches of silver nitrate footage, because given its chemical composition alone, there just doesn’t tend to be much of it left. So he really perked up when I told him about the studio in Sulfa. You might remember this one too, or maybe you don’t—the Japery? Opened up in 1918?

ME: Sure. One of the bandwagon-jumpers, after Canadian National Features of Toronto started supplying shorts and second-reel features for the Allen Brothers theatre chain.

WROB: That’s right. An intense but sadly fleeting period of success in the industry. Jay and Jule Allen went straight from owning a store-front nickelodeon into an exclusive Canadian distribution license for all those glamorous, proto-Hollywood Goldwyn and Famous Players-Lasky films, and their success then gave birth to a whole bunch of envious imitators leaping up like mushrooms across Ontario, Quebec, the West . . . till they ran afoul of Adolph Zukor, that is, the Famous Players magnate.

ME: I know the history, Wrob.

WROB: ’Course you do—the part that’s public record, anyhow. Zukor refused to renegotiate the distribution deal unless the Allens took him on as a partner, but they refused, naturally enough, and that tolled the bell on their entire business model. The Trenton studio was gone by 1920, and it took them four years to recoup even a fraction of their losses by selling out to the Ontario government. All its progeny soon followed likewise . . . except the Japery, which met a very different fate.

ME: Uh huh. Which was?

WROB: It burned to the ground. And the fire that gutted it? Began in its own little warehouse of completed movies, which just so happened to be located—un-strategically, in hindsight—in the facility where its silver nitrate reels were processed.

ME: Jesus, place must’ve gone off like a bomb. Anybody die?

WROB: Oh, it happened at night, well after hours. By that time, they’d mainly switched over from making their own films to copying other people’s, cobbling work-prints and sending them down along the store-front and church basement circuit, all up and down Lake of the North. Actually, there was a rumour maybe the Allens might’ve paid to have them torched, in order to limit competition—or Zukor, even, you want to get all conspiracy theory. But frankly? I think both sides of that struggle had bigger fish to fry.

ME: And Mattheuis thought he could find, what? Some leftovers?

WROB: No, we both knew how unlikely that was, given the way that shit burns. What he thought—well, what I suggested to him—was that if Japery was still delivering prints right up until the end, then maybe there’d be some point to checking the stops along what used to be their old supply route.

ME: Which turned out to be a profitable idea, I take it.

WROB: We ran across four different caches following that protocol, all silver nitrate—maybe four and a half if you count some stuff Jan bought from the Quarry Argent Folk Museum, donated from various private collections: one under a hockey rink in Chaste, when they knocked down what used to be Gersholme’s nickelodeon; one in somebody’s attic, out by Your Ear; one in God’s Lips, inside a meeting-house wall; and one . . . well, Jan should probably tell you about that one himself. It’s a funny story.

ME: So, the clips for Untitled 13—you stole them from Mattheuis’s stash?

WROB: Please, Lois: sampled. You know my methods. During catalog

uing, before restoration. I basically filmed it off a monitor with my Super 16, put a mosquito-netting drape over it and moved it back and forth while I did it, deformed the subtextual. Sick effect, right?

ME: And what’d Mattheuis think of that?

WROB: Not much, which is why I’m not working there anymore. Truth to tell, we were probably gonna break up soon anyways; he’s not a lot of fun after hours, or during hours, either. But it was worth it. I mean—you saw. (Pause) Look, from my point of view, I feel as though Canadian film belongs to everybody. And it repulses me that most Canadians don’t feel the same way, which is one of the reasons I got involved with the Archive in the first place, with Jan. And the reason I feel this way is that when I was a kid, back in Overdeere, I saw this bunch of dickheads stack maybe seventeen separate silver nitrate prints in a pit and set the whole thing on fire, let it burn till it was gone. They found ’em in an old church on the outskirts of town, where I guess they used to show films sometimes—the canisters were rusted shut, so they had to beat ’em with tire irons and shit just to pry them open, and when they did they found that half of ’em had turned to goo . . . God, that smelled awful, like pickled dead bodies or something. But the other half, they were fine. You could see it even from the sidelines, the safety perimeters they were keeping all us looky-loos back behind. One guy held up a reel so the light shone through it, and if you squinted you could almost see little tiny silver pictures on each frame, moving just a bit, like they were vibrating—that’s how it seemed to me, anyway. And I wanted to know why they’d just destroy something like that, something so old, so . . . beautiful, so important. Why they’d have to throw it away like garbage, burn it like a wasp’s nest. But the local fire chief told my dad it was too dangerous to even try and store, that it was a wonder it hadn’t gone up already: “This stuff spontaneously combusts! It gives off poisonous gases when it burns!” And my dad . . . he said he was right, stop your bitchin’, it’s nothing special anyhow. Think about it, Lois, ’cause I know you get what I’m saying: this was history, our history, and nobody cared enough to try to preserve any of it.

Was it a put-on, an act? I couldn’t tell, even close up; Wrob was like that, I guess. He had genuine tears in his eyes, though God knows, that might’ve been the beer. Or the music.