Interview with Robert Enright
Lindsay McIntyre’s films are familial and cultural meta-narratives; at the same time that they tell the story of her Inuk great-grandmother’s life, they also tell the story of their own making. Much of their power comes from their material presence. McIntyre makes her own emulsion, so that her films look as if they have come to us from another time. The scratching and degradation are utterly seductive; the mind wants to understand what the eye is seeing, and what we are seeing can be everything from an ulu, the Inuk cutting tool, to caribou teeth strung on a wire and held in the beautifully lived-in hands of a matrilineal family member. She can run her camera lens over the weighty surface of a massive steel vessel caught in the Arctic ice, or in her backyard garden where she records her daughter’s flickering, lyric presence. McIntyre has an instinctive sense of visual rhythm, and her films move at radically different speeds, sometimes so slow that were it not for the faint movement of grass in the foreground of a landscape, you would think you were looking at still images. At other times her footage flashes by so quickly that your recognition has to play a game of catch-up with your perception.
