Valery’s Ankle
SELF-CRITIQUE OF ARTISTIC PROCESS
CIAM - Final Grant Report
Submitted by Brett Kashmere
MFA Studio Arts/Film Production
Concordia University
July 13, 2006
Valery’s Ankle is a 31-minute essay-film1 about the spectacle of hockey violence
and its representation in North American media. The film takes Bobby Clarke’s
breaking of rival Russian star Valery Kharlamov’s ankle during the 1972 CanadaSoviet Summit Series as its site of research and point of departure.
outwards
from
there,
I
staging,
from
transmission
through
the
filters
examine
of
to
the
Series’
circuitry,
historicization.
Canada’s
political
The
and
from
film
Working
development
views
cultural
this
histories,
to
event
the
particular circumstances of the Summit Series, and its semiotic function in the
mediascape and collective memory of Canadians.
stills,
appropriated
montage
techniques,
narration,
and
and
self-shot
digital
music,
image
Valery’s
regarding our cultural identity.
Using archival documents and
footage,
re-enactment,
processing,
on-screen
Ankle
attempts
to
re-photography,
text,
unearth
voice-over
contradictions
One of my primary goals is to redress the
function of hockey in Canadian culture.
Hockey has often been employed as a
symbol of national unity, an indicator of Canadian values, and an instrument of
foreign policy.
to
become
To question or renounce our common assumptions is a good way
conscious
accepted before.
of
what
might
have
been
automatically
Such is the case with hockey in Canada.
and
habitually
This sport is
increasingly unrepresentative of the nation, but the power of its imagery in
the national imagination is impossible to deny.
METHODOLOGY
I
initially
documentary.
conceived
Valery’s
Ankle
as
a
10-minute,
experimental
My plan was to construct the film using an Oxberry animation
camera, focusing solely on the Clarke-Kharlamov episode.
low-resolution
35mm
broadcast
footage
of
the
attack
into
frames, which were subsequently magnified up to 1000%.
to form the basis of my investigation.
First, I broke down
black
and
white
still
These “blow-ups” were
These frames would then be augmented by
A note on terminology: Technically this film is a media hybrid, combining Super 16,
16mm, and numerous video formats, which were then transferred to Mini-DV, digitised and
edited using Final Cut Pro HD. Archival text documents, newspaper clippings, and still
photographs were scanned and formatted in Adobe Photoshop then reframed and animated
using Adobe After Effects. The sound was edited in Final Cut and mixed using Pro Tools
software. Because I consider this work to exist within a cinema context, I use the term
“film” in referring to Valery’s Ankle, even though it’s final projection format is
digital video. I define “essay-film” as a personal investigation involving the passion
and intellect of the filmmaker.
1
flicker effects, and transformed through hand processing, contact printing, and
other hand-tooled techniques. Borrowing from the strategies of structural and
materialist filmmaking I hoped to match the physiological intensity of films
such as Tony Conrad’s Flicker (1965), Paul Sharit’s Ray Gun Virus (1966), and
Bruce Conner’s Report (1963-67).
But as I found out, you can’t impose a structure on your materials.
revelation of content.
Form is a
Over time, and in response to current events,2 Valery’s
Ankle slowly expanded from a short, visceral formal-structural analysis to a
more contemplative, medium-length digital essay, drawing upon the practices of
autobiography and first-person cinema.
Having grown up in a hockey-obsessed,
small-town prairie culture, my involvement with the sport is deeply entwined
with my social and psychological development.
This personal experience with
hockey acts as a rhetorical frame for the evidence that I present in the film.
Utilizing a self-reflexive, investigative voice, my intention was to fashion a
blatantly subjective argument from the viewpoint of a participant-observer,
that interrogates the trope of violence in ice hockey while also affirming the
symbolic and unifying potential of hockey as Canadian popular culture. The
politics of representation, particularly questions of who speaks about whom,
what, and why, are central to my filmmaking practice.
Archival research was conducted at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, and
the International Ice Hockey Hall of Fame and Museum in Kingston, Ontario.
Primary
materials
such
as
Summit
Series
budgets,
scouting
notes,
letters,
memos, and press clippings, uncovered at Archives Canada were used extensively
in the film.
In Kingston I also met with the hockey historians Mark Potter, Ed
Grenda and J.W. Fitsell.
me.
Besides
unsupervised
providing
access
to
Fitsell generously shared his personal archives with
ginger
his
ale,
office,
copies
he
even
of
books
allowed
and
me
to
journals,
take
and
original
documents back to Montreal for photocopying!
Formally, Valery’s Ankle borrows from the personal documentary, essay-film, and
experimental ethnographic genres. Methods of ethnography were employed in the
filming
of
the
Verdun
Dragons,
a
minor
pro
hockey
team
in
Quebec.
My
cinematographer and I documented the final two weeks of the Dragon’s 2005
season, up to and including the playoffs.
Although the Dragons play in a
league (the North American Hockey League) that claims to be among the most
violent in the world, we found almost no evidence of this in the games we
Notably, Todd Bertuzzi’s pre-meditated attack on Steve Moore during a game between the
Vancouver Canucks and Colorado Avalanche on March 8, 2004, which occurred early in the
film’s production stages. This incident profoundly altered the course of my thinking.
Not only was it a clear indication that hockey violence is an ongoing contemporary
problem with deep historical roots, it also flooded the television airwaves with related
attacks, which I diligently recorded.
2
followed.
What we discovered were good hockey players at the fringe of their
careers, but who continue to play hockey because they love the game rather than
for
financial
compensation.
Ironically,
these
men
provide
a
non-violent
counterpoint in the film, demonstrating the fluid, effortless grace that anyone
who has ever strapped on skates knows.
Combining traditional research methods and techniques from ethnography with
documentary modes of narration, materialist aesthetics and strategies of the
avant-garde,
and
a
self-searching
authorial
presence,
I’ve
attempted
to
inscribe processes of analysis and interpretation within the text of the film.
It was important to avoid a simple repetition of spectacle, which Bill Nichols
describes as “an aborted or foreclosed form of identification where emotional
engagement does not even extend as far as concern but instead remains arrested
at the level of sensation.”3
me.
Hockey violence is an issue that deeply concerns
Therefore, images of the violence are treated as troubled and troubling
texts,
which
gain
magnitude
and
meaning
through
excess
accumulation
and
enumeration.
CONCEPTUAL IDEAS
To “slash” means to violently cut or attack somebody with the sharp, sweeping
strokes of a stick or weapon.
transgression
of
the
rules.
In hockey vernacular, “slashing” is a penalty, a
As
a
piece
of
syntax,
a
slash
separates
by
bringing to things together, as in a hybrid: an essay/film, a digital/film
interface.
A slash can also be a negation, a hard diagonal line, a severe
criticism, a long deep cut.
When editing I prefer to use (insist on) straight
cuts rather than fades, dissolves, sweeps, etc., which can also be considered
“slashes.”
Film cuts both separate and unite.
These various interpretations
and implications of slash/ing are key to a conceptual understanding of Valery’s
Ankle.
I’m interested in the sensorial and cognitive spaces of the cut, as well as
perceptual oscillations between feeling and thinking.
to pass by unseen (and therefore unthought).
is a misnomer.
blades,
digital
Usually, cuts are meant
In fact, in digital media a cut
Performed without the messiness of splicing tape and razor
cutting
is
clean,
virtual;
it
leaves
no
trace,
or
waste.
Digital technology erases the interval from film editing because images are no
longer separated by a space between frames, a small black bar.
is a continuous unbroken line, a stream of information.
Digitized video
Fades and dissolves,
Bill Nichols, “Representing the Body: Questions of Meaning and Magnitute,” in
Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 1991), p. 234. My emphases.
3
once expensive, specialized optical effects, are now desktop functions; they’re
part of the data flow, too.
Throughout Valery’s Ankle I devised strategies to pronounce the cut, to make
its appearance thought and felt.
Sometimes this manifested in quick cutting,
as I do with many of the still image and hockey fight sequences.
In certain
places I’ve tried to make the cuts resemble shuttles in time, or peel-backs, so
that after every image you perceive another image like the one that came
before, to give an indication of the depth and repetition of hockey violence.
Other abbreviated cuts are meant to work subliminally, to create a sense of
subconscious or repressed memory.
the
soundtrack,
either
through
Many of these strategies are underscored on
the
vertical montage of sound and image.
voice-over
narration,
or
through
the
Music is used as accent and pointer.
A quick flashback: My first experience editing video was on a linear, ¾” tapeto-tape
system.
Two
playback
decks
were
patched
through
an
Amiga
Video
Toaster, then a video synchronizer (which could also be used for transitions
and effects, like the kind in televised sporting events), and into a recording
deck.
All cutting and effects were performed on the fly and would often result
in glitches, caused by time-based errors in the video signal (i.e. loss of
sync).
A glitch is a form of low frequency interference, appearing as a
horizontal bar moving vertically through the picture.
it’s on your tape is nearly impossible.
A glitch is a technical mistake, a
source of embarrassment in the bygone analogue era.
bought new tapes and started over.
Removing a glitch once
Perfectionists with money
The rest of us disguised the glitches as
best we could, grimacing when they appeared onscreen for all to see.
A
glitch
is
a
visual
“artefact”
that
can’t
be
erased,
only
forgotten.
Incidents of hockey violence are like video glitches in the collective Canadian
memory / archive.
both.
Go back to the original tapes and you’ll find plenty of
But we don’t want to be reminded.
Better to grimace and forget.
Obsolete technologies are a safe house for unwanted memories.
In Valery’s Ankle I use the slash (the cut, the incision) and the glitch as
metaphors for nearly imperceptible visible evidence, such as Clarke’s slashing
of Kharlamov.
At regular speed, 30 video frames per second, it’s almost
impossible to discern Clarke’s stick as it strikes Kharlamov’s ankle.
Only by
slowing
can
the
image
down,
splitting
the
actually witness the act of violence.
Blink, you miss it.
second,
freezing
Contact occurs at
the
frame,
1/30th
we
of a second.
Like a visible frame line or a video glitch, ignoring the
almost unseen is easy.
Blink, it’s gone, but not erased.
Celebrating the end
result–a narrow victory in an eight game hockey exhibition–while repressing the
political forces and brutal actions that enabled the result has caused, in my
view, a hairline fracture of our national identity.
That is, an almost unseen
breakage, a subtle psychological splitting, an elision.
ANALYTICAL PROCEDURES
Jean-Luc
Godard
fondly
observes
that,
“Movies
are
a
world
of
fragments.”4
Through a gleaning and sifting of fragments (sound bytes, bone chips, newspaper
headlines, publicity stills, hockey attack clips, revenue totals) I began to
conceive a form for the film.
These were culled from a wide array of sources:
“official” archives (i.e. Library and Archives Canada, the International Hockey
Hall
of
Fame,
NHL
Archives)
and
“amateur”
archives
(i.e.
homemade
fight
compilations purchased at reasonable prices on eBay); North American narrative
cinema, as well as the National Film Board’s catalogue and other non-fiction
films; and live television. These were then integrated with my own documentary
footage and audio of the Verdun Dragons hockey team; filmed re-enactments; and
re-photographed and digitally processed images.
The footage, still images, clippings and audio that I collected where then
subjected to a procedure of authorial analysis. Televisual techniques such as
instant replay, freeze frame and slow motion became my analytical toolbox.
Projecting and re-photographing video footage of the attack onto 16mm (which
was cross-processed, giving it a yellow and red look, and posterized)5 allowed
for
greater
investigation
of
each
split-second
gesture.
Single-frame
re-
photography also allowed me to both elongate and compress the event’s secondslong real time.
“slow
motion
is
representation.”6
parts.
approach,
To
The structural filmmaker and theorist Peter Gidal writes,
a
technical
invention,
inseparable
from
analytic
work
on
“Analysis” means to break something down to its component
Clarke’s
isolating
breaking
and
structure, a social nerve
of
magnifying
cell.7
Kharlamov’s
each
frame
ankle
as
if
I
applied
it
were
a
a
forensic
molecular
Frame-by-frame I deciphered and re-presented
this action, teasing out new potential or hidden meanings; questioning how it
functioned in the past (as absence), and how it should be understood in the
present; rendering the images textual and allegorical.
A broken ankle, the
magnified mirror image of a nation’s unspoken psychological crisis.
Quoted in Louis Giamatti, “Godard’s Masculine-Feminine: The Cinematic Essay,” in Godard
and Others: Essays In Cinematic Form (London: Tantivy Press, 1975), p. 19.
5
Posterization is a video effect that highlights the graphic qualities of electronic
media. Posterization allows for the mapping of an image’s tonal range onto a smaller
number of levels, thus abstracting the image by subtracting tonal detail. I am also
playing on the image’s “graphic” duality.
6
Peter Gidal, “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist film,” in Structural Film
Anthology. Ed. Peter Gidal. (London: BFI, 1978), p. 11. My emphasis
7
Many of these images don’t appear in the final film but were important to my process.
This idea was partially inspired by the film Letter to Jane (Jean-Luc Godard and JeanPierre Gorin, 1972), in which Godard and Gorin scrutinize the Jane Fonda / “Hanoi Jane”
newspaper photo to a point of cruel absurdity.
4
SHOT BLOCKS
Because
I
work
from
a
huge
inventory
of
“found”
imagery,
I
sequences out of pre-cut elements, which I call “shot blocks.”
this for practical reasons.
often
build
In part, I do
To follow a traditional post-production workflow,
which includes screening rushes, then logging and capturing selected takes,
would be logistically impossible.
But there’s another, more pertinent purpose
for assembling with prefabricated components.
As the filmmaker Ken Jacobs
points out, “A lot of film is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing in its
un- or semi-conscious form.”8 The compilation actuality has long been a staple
of avant-garde activity, exemplified by such films as Works and Days (Hollis
Frampton, 1969), Perfect Film (Ken Jacobs, 1986), Perfect Video (Jacqueline
Goss and Brian Goldberg, 1986).
that
“their
[a]rtlessness
Writing on these, William C. Wees observes
exposes
them
to
more
critical–and
more
amusing–
readings than their original makers intended or their original audiences were
likely to produce.”9
The cribbed footage that I use in Valery’s Ankle is a
palimpsest upon and into which I extend my montage.
of
footage,
rather
than
building
Cutting into longer chains
brick-by-brick,
allows
for
more
subtle
insertions and interventions.
Valery’s Ankle
is a dense, synthetic film.
Each sequence is intended to
overload viewers with interrelated images, data and ideas.
for this.
Hockey is a fast, transitional game.
There is a reason
In order to best represent its
speed and flow (also the cause of its violent collisions), I tried to build a
montage that moves quickly and transparently between sections and time periods.
Like swift, skating strides, short bursts of still images and primary documents
build momentum, imbuing the film with hockey-like rhythms.
Peter Gzowski’s
description of hockey’s fluidity sums up my editing strategy in Valery’s Ankle:
“There is an awesome, rushing beauty to this game.
Even from this perspective,
patterns emerge, fade, shift, change, fade and form again.
A rhythm sets in,
as the play flows back and forth, eases off, gets broken and picks up.
immeasurable instant, a gap
appears…”10
For an
These gaps provide opportunities to ask
questions. I say in the film that an image can cover up as much as it reveals.
Too often, we trust what we see without really thinking about how it was
produced
and
what
it
signifies.
As
with
the
ubiquitous
image
of
Paul
Henderson’s goal, its mass reproduction informs and obscures at the same time.
Ken Jacobs, Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue 7 (1989): 272.
William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Film (New York:
Anthology Film Archives, 1993), pp. 7-8.
10
Peter Gzowski, The Game of Our Lives (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982), p. 155.
8
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