Peter Gibson is a modest guy in Montreal who didn’t think of himself as an artist when he started spray-painting stencils on the street; he just had inchoate notions about public space and was fueled by a post-9/11 desire to enter what seemed like a new era of discussion — about, seemingly, everything, but never mind; now seemed like the time to get serious. So he took his cardboard stencils out at night, laid them down on the road and spray-painted mischievous additions to Montreal’s roads: turning cross-walks into gigantic shoe-prints or adding zippers to them, even a mysterious “On” button with no obvious function. Non sequiturs were his mode of choice, explicit verbal statements pretty much not on the table. Then he got arrested and was forced to think, seriously, about whether or not he was an artist or just a guy with a weird compulsion.
At any rate, that’s how Alan Kohl’s zippy documentary Roadsworth: Crossing The Line approaches Gibson; it’s one of the most modest artist profiles I’ve seen, and precisely modesty makes it exciting. Gibson doesn’t have a manifesto; he’s against cars, but he’s not sure what he has to add to that conversation. He allows that maybe his work is “raising questions,” but qualifies with “I guess.” He doesn’t think of his stencils as significant: “This is closer to cartoons than it is to high art,” he offers. (Cue the sputtering of 1,000 outraged comix nerds.) He’s not going to tackle heady theoretical questions, because he doesn’t feel intellectually qualified: “I’ve never read Heidegger or, uh, Kant.” This makes Gibson the perfect artist for that genre of SXSW movies we can’t label anymore: bright and funny, but self-consciously hedging around what he’s doing. (As it happens, it sold out its first screening in the underattended, underpromoted SXGlobal section — shunted off to the 70-seat-capacity Hideout — and got an additional screening. So a hit of sorts. SXSW should do much more to promote this slate, which had uniformly stronger selections than any of the other ones I hit up.)
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Via Filmmaker comes word that director Bruce McDonald is asking the online masses to recut his latest film, The Tracey Fragments. He’s posted all of the film’s raw footage, including the score by Broken Social Scene, on the film’s website, and is inviting anyone who wishes to download the materials and cut them into music videos, trailers, or full re-edits of the film. Canadian residents can then submit their videos through the same website, and a winner selected by McDonald will receive a Final Cut Pro pirze package, and will have their cut included on the film’s DVD.
The Tracey Fragments is on my short list of films that I’m dying to see right now, and I keep missing my chance. It stars Ellen Page as a 15 year-old girl in search of her lost little brother, and the story is presented in an almost-constant, ever-changing split screen. I missed Tracey at the Toronto Film Festival but have heard nothing but good things from people who saw it there and in Berlin. I was hoping to catch it in Denver, but it turns out I won’t be arriving in town until after it screens. It’s opening in Canada this week, but as far as I know it still doesn’t have US distribution. I’m hoping Ellen Page’s impending uber-hotness will provide a domestic distributor the impetus to pick it up. In the meantime, I’m downloading the footage just to get a peak.
