Persistence of Vision: The Wonderful World of John Paizs

John is Canadian cinema's forgotten child. Although his early films virtually established postmodern style of Winnipeg Film Group, (1) and his first feature, Crime Wave (1985), was named Best Film Made in Manitoba, (2) and his films remain little more than marginal notes in history of Canadian cinema. For example, when Toronto-based Take One magazine asked critics and scholars to name ten best Canadian films of all time, only four of ninety-six published responses included Paizs's work. (3) is absent from both of special issues of Post Script dedicated to Canadian Cinema, as well as from past Canadian cinema-themed issues of cineAction. (4) His works are not discussed in Christopher Gittings's Canadian National Cinema. (5) And in Pierre Veronneau's study of English-Canadian cinema, A la recherche d'une identite, (whose name is misspelled as Paisz) is mentioned only in passing and is omitted entirely from Bio-filmographies section. (6) Of few critics who have recognized as one of Canada's greatest untapped resources, nearly all have focused on postmodern qualities of his films. Geoff Pevere, who has written what is unquestionably most insightful commentary on Paizs's oeuvre, sees these films as illustrations of logical extension of what Robert Fothergill has termed the younger brother syndrome, (7) a cinematic disorder that afflicts protagonists of Canadian feature films--an inferiority complex caused by intimidating, pervasive, and ultimately emasculating presence of that great, perfect, and powerful sibling to south... (8) In his Prairie Postmodern: An introduction to mind & films of John Paizs, Pevere maps out how Paizs's manipulation of pop culture iconography becomes a critique of America's cultural colonialism of Canada: Paizs is both a regurgitator and an ironic commentator on phenomenon of subconscious infiltration by an alien ideology that has functionally made cultural schizophrenics of a generation of TV-toasted Anglo-Canadians who shovel their snowy driveways while yearning for blue beam of boxed oblivion. (12) In Paizs's appropriation of signs and styles from American pop culture, Pevere finds definitive depiction of growing up Canadian in 1960s and 70s. (9) What distinguishes Paizs's work from similar projects is that while so-called films tell stories of another era using methods and styles of time period in which they are made, Paizs's films appropriate outmoded conventions of 1960s film and television to tell stories that are timeless. result is a verita ble semiological catalogue-in-action of sign-systems of '60s pop media. The striking intelligence and singularity of films is thus in revelatory way they reveal these sign-systems as sign-systems....Paizs effectively demonstrates--in practice--the Barthesian dictum that forms of cultural mythology only become apparent and artificial once enough time has elapsed to allow them to fall Out of practical usage and be replaced by others. (12) Paizs's films have power to fascinate viewers who, like filmmaker, grew up in TV age and found themselves simultaneously seduced and abandoned by televisual dream screen. His intriguing character studies exhibit a constantly fluctuating love/hate relationship with idealized images that have organised both director's fantasy life and those of his like-minded viewers. These films mix equal parts cool irony and warm nostalgia to illustrate in unmistakable terms kind of dual subjectivity that is a defining feature of camp response. Although camp has long been viewed as a sensibility that is inextricably linked to a gay sensibility, (10) Paizs's work illustrates that camp as a resistant artistic practice can be appropriated and used by other, similarly oppressed groups. The relevance of camp for Canadian artists rests in fact that, as is case with gay men, Canadians are marginalized, and often depicted as an other in dominant American cultural iconography. …

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