Lindsay McIntyre: Indigenous Handmade Cinema

Lindsay McIntyre: Indigenous Handmade Cinema Kristin L. Dowell (bio) There is always the mark of me as a maker in my works. —Lindsay McIntyre1 Lindsay McIntyre is an award-winning analog experimental filmmaker of Inuit and Scottish heritage who has made over forty short films in the last twenty years. She has contributed a body of knowledge to the practice of silver gelatin emulsion for motion picture film. In this essay, I explore how her analog filmmaking practice indigenizes handmade cinema as she breaks settler colonial silences to recuperate her Inuit matrilineal family history through film. Making her own film stock is an act of creative sovereignty and a way to reclaim 16mm film from the apparatus of the film industry while exerting control over the means of production. This is an especially powerful and salient reclamation given the long history of misrepresentation and extractive practices of the dominant film industry with regard to Indigenous stories and knowledge. There is a rich materiality to her films as her high-contrast 16mm film stock shows textures and marks of her own hand while also bearing the traces of the environmental conditions under which the film footage was shot including on her traditional territory in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), Nunavut. I argue that McIntyre’s inventive celluloid-based [End Page 183] artistic practice reveals 16mm film to be a dynamic and vibrant medium that speaks to an Indigenous creative resurgence while reflecting Inuit principles around resourcefulness and innovation. McIntyre’s commitment to analog practices as a maker of emulsions has deepened the global movement of artist-driven, experimental, and handmade cinematic practice as well as Indigenous film practice. There are other Indigenous filmmakers who utilize 16mm film, such as Alexandra Lazarowich for Lake (2019), Rhayne Vermette for the feature film Ste. Anne (2021), and Alanis Obomsawin for her vast filmography, including the groundbreaking film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). That McIntyre was the cinematographer for Lake and was one of five cinematographers for Ste. Anne speaks to her prominence within the Indigenous film world, where she’s known for her exceptional skill with 16mm. Many other filmmakers rely on commercially made 16mm film and commercial labs for film processing (instead of hand-processing their own film as McIntyre often does). Their films have also been produced on a larger scale and with the support of the National Film Board of Canada or other national film funding agencies and institutions. McIntyre was first trained in painting and drawing, and she turned to filmmaking with a creative interest in pushing the material limits of film itself. In an interview she explains, “I came to film from drawing and scratching on the film to seeing what I could do to change its physical properties and push up against boundaries.”2 She is part of a wider artist movement of process cinema and handmade cinema. Film scholars Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault define process cinema as “a creative tradition in alternative filmmaking that is unscripted, improvisational, participatory, and based on the manipulation of the very materiality of film.”3 McIntyre’s interest in pushing the limits of the material possibilities of film align her within the community of non-commercial, experimental, and avant-garde filmmakers who have utilized 16mm film as their artistic materials. What differentiates McIntyre’s filmmaking practice is her engagement with these materials through her unique visual sensibilities, which are informed by her learned and embedded Inuit values, and narratives that privilege Inuit stories. While experimental filmmakers have long utilized 16mm film, there are far fewer filmmakers who make their own emulsions. This is a very time-consuming and labor-intensive process that McIntyre first became involved with as a response to Kodak’s abrupt discontinuance of her favorite film stock. The short documentary Handmade Film (Christina Ienna, 2017) is a compelling portrait of McIntyre’s process in which she notes that it often takes her three days to make an emulsion resulting in a medium-sized batch of about five hundred feet of film, with thirty or forty feet being used to test while the remaining footage contains about nine to thirteen minutes of actual film time available for a...

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