Life Without Death
Chris Robinson
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Life Without Death: The Cinema of Frank Cole, edited by Mike Hoolboom and Tom McSorley (Canadian Film Institute)
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Canadian Film Institute launches retrospective of Ottawa filmmaker, Frank Cole
I first encountered Ottawa filmmaker Frank Cole during a screening of his film A Life around 1991. He handed me a pamphlet that was from an organization that was anti-death. I remember laughing loudly. It was a good Monty Pythonesque gag. Cole, though, wasn't laughing. He was dead serious.As I later learned, death was Cole's shadow, stalking every aspect of his life and films. His tragic death (he was murdered while crossing the Sahara Desert alone) came as no surprise to people who knew him. He had become obsessed with mortality, with living on the edge of life.
In memory of Cole's uniqueness as a person and filmmaker, the Canadian Film Institute is launching a book about Cole's life, alongside a retrospective of his brief but memorable films, featuring contributions by an assortment of friends, family, critics and Cole himself. The book, co-edited by Tom McSorley and Mike Hoolboom, also contains a DVD of The Man Who Crossed the Sahara, a documentary on Cole by onetime Ottawa filmmaker Korbett Matthews.
XPress Cole made just four films, yet so many people seem drawn to his work. What is so special and unique about Cole's films?
Tom McSorley Their formal rigour and the artful blend of documentary, fiction and diaristic modes of filmmaking. They have a strange combination of the deeply personal and aesthetically detached, forces of chaos and order barely contained in his remarkable frames.
XP For people who might be seeing his films for the first time
during the CFI retrospective, what should they expect?McSorley Intensity. Frank's work is confrontational. It is lean and muscular. It deals with the theme of mortality obsessively, but not without some humour. Frank's work, intense as it is, is also filled with compassion for our human predicament.
XP Where do you think Cole's death obsession came from?
McSorley That remains a mystery. The death of his beloved grandparents, who looked after him for a time when he was young, seemed to have some catalytic effect on his consciousness about death. This is not uncommon, I suppose - the fear of and obsession with our mortality and the frustration of knowing we cannot do anything about it. But I'm still stumped.
A Life, A Legend, A Filmmaker Book Launch and Film Screening
@ Library & Archives Canada
(395 Wellington)
Oct 3, 6 p.m., free
www.cfi-icf.ca
