Video Confidential: Voice-over Musings in the work of Tom Sherman and Robert Morin.

This is a case study of works by the Canadians Robert Morin and Tom Sherman.

Video has long acted as both travelling companion and confidante in the work of Canadian artists. The travelling derives from the experiences of recent arrivals or the family myths of arrival inherited by the children of migrants. Everyone who isn’t a member of the First Nations has come from somewhere else. The sometimes-perilous journeys that brought migrants to Canada generate stories and most Canadian film and video artists are consummate storytellers – raconteurs and fabulators of subtlety, elegance or, as in the case of Morin, of uncompromising directness. In these stories immigrant Canadian identity emerges as a hyphenated sense of self, straddling two or more cultures: French-Canadian, Anglo-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, Portuguese-Canadian, Franco-German-Canadian etc.
Canadian identity is always in the process of becoming and that unfolding subjectivity finds its most direct expression in the voice-over musings of film and video artists.

UK/Canadian Film and Video Exchange is a long-term project which began in 1998, when Lisa Steele at the University of Toronto, Maggie Warwick of the Canadian High Commission and Cate Elwes set out to investigate the relationship between UK and Canadian moving image practices and draw out similarities and differences between a ‘mother country’ and the ‘New World’.

The work began by surveying culminating in public screenings of film and video programmes from both countries showing simultaneously in Canada and the UK. By the time the 2003/4 Exchange took place at the South London Gallery, I was developing a thesis in which the hyphenated Canadian identity: French-Canadian, Anglo-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian etc. found expression in the widespread use of narrative and voice-over. This theme was developed in Telling it Like it is, published in the 2002/04 project catalogue. Within the current Exchange, (ANALOGUE: Tate Modern and touring the UK, USA, Canada and Poland) I have related this persistence of voice over in Canadian video to the experience of scale and ‘emptiness’ in Canadian landscape, one that Professor Steele has contrasted with the historically marked landscape of the UK, which is foundational in the development of national identity. I found UK work to be less concerned with myths of origins and national identity and more focussed on the medium as material with expressive potential.

I discussed these themes in a case study of works by the Canadians Robert Morin and Tom Sherman, which I published as Video Confidential in Vertigo Vol. 2, No. 9, 2005.

The consideration of the role of landscape in the formation of national identity as considered across the UK and Canada has led to the development of an ongoing research project ‘Landscape and the Moving Image’, whose major outcome will be a book of the same name published by Wallflower Press in 2009.