Fanfare
2018Single-channel HD video, 8:45
Commissioned by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, employing footage from the Jacques Madvo Collection. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
︎ Please email for screener preview.
Fanfare examines the links between national identity, celebration, and state power by working with images of ceremonies and sites filmed by Jacques Madvo in the 1970s. Madvo's films document a moment when traditional military celebrations began to appear against the backdrop of modernizing Canadian cities. The incongruity between modern cityscapes and military marches reveals the coexistence of two vastly different expressions of statecraft. The residue of this unresolved juxtaposition continues to this day, and is taken up in new footage which builds upon the themes identified in Madvo's images.
This rhythm has always been set amid, and beset by, the general antagonism, the cacophony of beats, lines, falsettos, and growls, of hips, feet, hands, of bells, chimes, and chants, an undercommon track. But this is a settler rhythm, this one-two of capitalist production, a rhythm of citizen and subject, of dividuation and individuation, of genocide and law. This rhythm sounds out by expropriating any other movement of the beat and asserts nothing else can be heard, nothing else need be felt.
—Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Al-Khwariddim, or Savoir Faire is Everywhere in Really Useful Knowledge, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (2015).