Charity and NFB’s Civic Discontent

Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, *Charity* (still), 2021. 360 video, 36 minutes. Courtesy of the artists, the National Film Board of Canada, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto.

There’s an unimpeachably delightful stretch of Guy Maddin’s 2007 film My Winnipeg catalogued on YouTube in clips with names like The Great Cold Winter of 1926 or The Story of the Frozen Horse Heads or, simply, The Dead Horse Scene. In The Dead Horse Scene, Maddin’s noir-ish voiceover details the circumstances — a brutally cold winter, an unexpected fire in the stables of Whittier Park, a shortsighted rushing of racehorses into the nearby Red River where they spend their final minutes thrashing and fighting as the water slowly condenses into slush and then to ice — that lead to the horrifying spectacle of horse heads poking above the frozen river like crocuses in the springtime. Through grainy black-and-white pseudo-historical footage, we watch as the denizens of Winnipeg return to their normal hibernal pursuits. Lovers stroll among the horse heads and the stentorian-voiced Maddin tells us of the subsequent baby boom.

In press surrounding the film, the Canadian director describes it not as a documentary but as a docu-fantasia. It’s a descriptor that, even for Maddin, is essentially meaningless. Quote: “That’s just a label I threw on because I wanted to avoid arguments over whether it’s a documentary or not.” He doesn’t specify whether the particulars of The Dead Horse Scene are true (at first blush, seems unlikely) but tells a kindred story from a friend’s childhood in a 2008 interview with Vulture: A cow falls into a pond and drowns, and as fall turns to winter, two legs remain frozen above the ice to create the perfect set of goal posts for that winter’s pond shinny, “Canadian prairie boy’s winter!”

Another dead cow (or, rather, a stainless steel effigy thereof) stands upright on four twenty-five- foot flagpole-like stilts in Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko’s 2021 interactive online documentary, Charity. The title is both the name of the sculpture at the centre of the film and a play on its origins as a public artwork. A wealthy donor commissioned Charity (the sculpture) for the suburban Markham planned community of Cathedraltown in 2017, and it takes its name from a prize-winning Holstein owned by the mining mogul who funded construction of the cathedral of Cathedraltown. The aspiration was something like a gleaming bovine equivalent of Chicago’s great metallic bean. Instead, in Charity (the film) we see a photograph of Charity (the sculpture) surrounded by about four dozen people each giving an emphatic thumbs down. This is a convenient image to explain the civic discontent at the heart of Anoushapour, Anoushahpour, and Ferko’s 36-minute work. If you are hoping for a sound bite, it comes from the mouth of a councillor at a Markham City Council meeting: “So, why is it that we don’t do public consultation for pieces of public art?”

Beyond the thumbs-down photograph, beyond a detour into Maddin-esque black-and-white footage of the cathedral for which Cathedraltown is named, Charity’s visuals come mostly in the form of 360-degree videos and a navigable real estate listing. The interactivity these mechanics provide is sparse and selectively instituted. The project’s success in forensic storytelling is debatable. Active engagement with the interactive elements is not necessary because the events surrounding the surprisingly controversial sculpture play out through audio recordings of relevant city council meetings.

Why hate this great stainless steel cow? Councillors cite a resident of Cathedraltown describing Charity’s nightly transformation into a bovine boogie man, a shadowy figure lurking outside his children’s second floor bedrooms. They discuss how the wreath of water jet-cut steel maple leaves around Charity’s neck would become throwing stars during a windstorm. There is an impossibly silly photo of two hands: one holding one of Charity’s fallen maple leaves and another holding a knife. The threat of more metal leaf abscission would ultimately lead to the statue’s removal. Success for the citizens of Cathedraltown!

But Charity (the film) is not about these citizens. The lone human figure in the work is a real estate agent, portrayed by an actor, who we see walking through the staged house at the edge of the park where Charity (the sculpture) was installed. The obdurate public responsible for the outcry at the centre of this project appears only through records of comments read aloud in council meetings and the thumbs-down photograph. At its heart, Charity tells the story of public reaction to public art, but it expands into a greater inquisition into the mechanics of the governmental bureaucracies to which public art is subject. The question of whether the public is correct in their negative assessment of the metal cow is overshadowed by the ways in which their criticisms are reformatted through ideas of public and private property, the aesthetics of real estate, and the spoors of municipal bureaucracies.

Charity was co-produced by the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Toronto, which showed a variation of the work in its triennial survey Greater Toronto Art 2021 (GTA21). The NFB was originally established in 1939 as a governmental advisory board. It moved into production in the early 1940s and took on a new mandate — “to interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations” — with the National Film Act of 1950. MOCA Toronto tasked Anoushahpour, Anoushahpour, and Ferko with representing the Greater Toronto Area while the NFB asked them to interpret Canada to Canadians.

The NFB takes up space in my brain for two reasons. The first is its logo: a blocky figure of a man, much like the sign at a crosswalk or on a washroom door. He reaches his arms above his head, elbows bent like the outline of an eye. Get it? His head is the pupil. The second reason is its vast store of Canadian documentary shorts, which come in two wildly divergent varietals: mawkish Canadiana and goofy beyond belief.

A useful example of this second type is Cavan Young’s 2004 NFB short Citizen Z, a tongue-in- cheek documentary about the eviction of a puppet theater from the Zamboni rink house of Toronto’s Dufferin Grove Park. Citizen Z opens with the tone of a Dateline episode (pulsing synth over footage of children on slides included), and its laughingly lachrymose dialogue exempts the City of Toronto from any genuine criticism over its antagonism toward community-run programming. “These Zambonis require solitude. It kind of hit my heart, you know?” muses David Anderson of Toronto’s Clay and Paper Theatre. “Because I thought, ‘Yeah, that makes some sense.’ I mean, here’s this Zamboni. They’re in the garage with these puppets hanging over, whispering about the Zamboni and I’m sure they’re plotting all kinds of evil things that only puppets can. If the puppets were doing that, then I could see that the Zamboni might really be upset.” The film replaces the conflict between the municipal government and the Dufferin Grove community with the conflict between the great beast of a Zamboni and a cadre of puppets. It is deliberately silly, taking the (oft-derided) word “whimsy” as an operational form to express discontent.

Another: Fadel Saleh’s 1999 film The Black Squirrel. The title is an allusion to the legend that Ottawa’s rats transmogrified into squirrels to find acceptance in the city. The film opens with the monologue of one such newly minted squirrel: “If you’ve ever been to Ottawa, then you know me. Remember? I strode up and down the lawns of Parliament Hill, supporting all the demonstrators: strikers, battered women, angry refugees. I soliloquized before the eternal flame of Confederation. Back then, I used to recite the litany of human misery.” A 57-minute “documentary,” The Black Squirrel is ostensibly about the work of Franco-Ontarian author Daniel Poliquin and features re-enactments of Poliquin’s stories with the author in the starring role. In one scene, he flirts with four women as Jude, the antihero of his 1990 novel Visions de Jude. In another scene, Poliquin and a child actor playing a character based on his son Gabriel enter one of a sea of hot air balloons. Other aeronauts include, notably, a Mountie on horseback, the balloon’s basket hanging down beneath the horse like an udder.

Anoushahpour, Anoushahpour, and Ferko, *Charity*, 2022, installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

If I use scare quotes around “documentary” when describing Saleh’s The Black Squirrel, it is for the same reason Maddin chose the term docu-fantasia. I, too, do not want to have an argument over whether it’s a documentary or not. Perhaps I do not think it is even a necessary question. The Black Squirrel, much like My Winnipeg and Citizen Z and even Charity, is less a documentary and more a civic jeremiad hidden behind layers of artifice. The municipal character of Ottawa, our strange federal capital, is central both to Poliquin’s stories and The Black Squirrel. But while its depiction in both is rooted in realism — the film features a geographer praising Poliquin’s descriptions of the city for their verisimilitude — there is an understanding that this is a documentary constructed through fiction. We are meant to see these re-enactments of Poliquin’s stories as true not because they capture the world as it appears but because they capture with some accuracy social images of the city. In the film’s final scene, Poliquin (ostensibly as himself) and his son Gabriel (this time, the real Gabriel) are seated in a café waiting for an old friend of the elder. The friend, now middle aged, enters the café, and the three discuss the cause of their estrangement: differing views on Quebec separatism. It is a strange scene in a documentary that traffics in fiction, a rare moment in which the contrived meeting — awkward, uncomfortable, thorny — is true because it is reality. It is also the scene that feels the most untrue. To return briefly to My Winnipeg, Maddin winkingly offers that “virtually everything in the film is real. It’s either real, or it’s a wish, an opinion, or a legend. There are no outright lies in the film.” Charity’s definition of real requires fewer ors: everything in the absurd story of a hated public sculpture of a cow is true. It is a documentary without scare quotes. It is a docu-fantasia without the fantasia. It is serious, and in its seriousness, feels just a little less so.

The impact of both Sadal’s and Young’s films are just about knee-high to a grasshopper. I don’t mean to be dismissive when I say that, but I don’t believe either had a major cultural impact in their respective decades. Nor, I should say, do I believe that impact is necessarily something a work needs to strive for. Faced with the NFB’s project “to interpret Canada to Canadians,” both manage simultaneously to take up the task and reject it: Citizen Z, with the puerile seriousness with which it investigates the civic discord at its center, and The Black Squirrel, in its relentless jumping between fiction and reality. Anoushahpour, Anoushahpour, and Ferko’s Charity similarly embraces specific municipal grievances. However, it separates itself from the organizational project of the NFB not by amplifying the inherent silliness of the conflict or playfully underlining its own subjectivities, but by removing the community central to the conflict altogether. In their place, we are offered Charity, the abominable silver cow.

Mad Cow

Alt-Arts

G.B. Jones