EXITING THE VAMPIRE’S CASTLE

     Before his tragic passing writer Mark Fisher wrote ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’ in 2013 in which he refers to the concept of the vampire castle as “a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these [social] movements” (https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/).

     Many filmmakers in Canada are making works dealing with themes of diaspora. However, the linguistic structures the majority of these films abide by are embedded in a formal construction that dates back to 1915, to D.W. Griffith’s ‘Birth of A Nation’, a work condemned for its racist ideology yet applauded for its formal innovation. This lauded but representationally troubled composition of narrative would become the basis of all mainstream Western fiction films today. The question then arises: when we make diasporic films, when we are expressing our marginalized ideology and positionality, should we not explore new forms and aesthetics? Shouldn’t our cinema not keep representing a cinematographic syntax that’s rooted in a racist ideology? Abel Gance, who worked at the same time as Griffith but had his own distinct formal structures, shared sentiments on how cinema was still in its embryonic state. A century later we continue to structure and make the same films based on this embryo, this ‘Parallel Montage’ form, as it was labeled, which doesn’t allow you to express a complex of ideology or ideas, but only moralize to the audience, presenting them with a battle between a binary, whether good and evil, right or wrong, even oppositions in need of reconciliation or compromise. And all of these stories are so structurally predictable, oriented very laterally to a climax and then a conclusion. There’s so much rigidity to this, again enclosed within constant binaries. Canada lacks a national identity in cinema, it is a land built by colonizers that even today serves the upper-class - we must implore our young new filmmakers who come from all over the world to experiment and develop their own formal structures in the telling of their stories. Implore them to take influence from the cinema of the world, and build something collectively, something against the binary we know the world is not defined by, all the while so much of our art persists in re-presenting this constitution, over and over and over. Alternative perspective is a must.

     This is a call for action! Our institutions will only reaffirm these rigid binaries, our institutions will not challenge such, and the established artists working within these institutions will continue to make works reinforcing the same binaries, due to the comfort and stability provided by generating safe, accessible, redundant works of fiction. I call upon the new emerging filmmakers in Canada to go against this grain and let us collectively build a cinematic identity that contains all our angst and worries about the future. Let us produce works that challenge Canada’s colonial history and confront it - not just recognize it. Let us work together to build a Canadian New Wave.

Written by: Aman Singh Samra 

Edited: Zachary Goldkind