Scott Fitzpatrick: Look Back in Toner

by Stephen Broomer

The tradition of cameraless filmmaking spans the history of experimental film; from the work of the Surrealists, to the field of visual music, to the mid-century abstractionists, to a contemporary vanguard of artists working in animation and chemical processes. The artists affiliated with this tradition used many tools in the course of marking, drawing, or in other ways affixing forms onto the film plane. From the direct exposure to light that creates the photogram, to controlled application of paint and emulsion scratches, the processes involved range from the aleatoric to the carefully deliberated.

As cameraless filmmaking covers so vast a history of disparate movements, it falls to the processes and tools to bear a heritage. That material heritage is the basis for experimentation among filmmakers in this tradition; a shared grammar through which artists individuate their voices. In time, by devoted exploration, the filmmaker sheds and tempers the signs of influence and arrives at such insight and mastery as to begin an individual body of work. Winnipeg artist Scott Fitzpatrick studied filmmaking and film theory at the University of Manitoba, but his work as an artist assumed its present trajectory in 2010 when he began to make work of a lo-fi, materially self-conscious aesthetic. In this work, he often implicated the base of his media (Super 8mm and 16mm film or, less frequently, analogue video) as a visible presence in his work; departing from the illusory properties of moving images and embracing instead their material boundaries.

Out of a sense of formal inclusivity common among the emerging generation of Winnipeg’s experimental filmmakers, Fitzpatrick has also used cameras to make more conventionally photographic films, such as his contributions to the Winnipeg’s annual “One Take Super 8” events. He is an artist who, with apparent ease, balances and integrates the distinct aesthetic sensibilities that drive his maturing work with a freewheeling, improvisatory, and formally inclusive attitude toward filmmaking.

While there is much to be said about Scott Fitzpatrick’s work across modes, it is in his cameraless films that he has developed his most challenging and individual gestures: Reflecting on the medium through serial repetition; simultaneous and conflicting representational acts; and the distorting, semi-controlled electronic tones that compose several of his soundtracks.

For generating this work, one of his central tools is the laser printer, which he uses to print images directly onto 16mm film and clear leader. Fitzpatrick is not the first artist to make use of printers and copy machines as filmmaking tools, nor are such strategies uncommon among his contemporaries. But of those who undertake these processes today, Fitzpatrick is rare in his attention to the demarcations of the frame; distorting and magnifying his printed sources to abstraction, and allowing streaks of toner and printed forms to transgress the bounds of the image. His printed forms, many graphic by design—some alien, some familiar—are often printed on angles, in shifting positions in fragments, or even on the underside of the filmstrip; the images made reversible and rhythmic by their fluctuating placement.

The laser printer films also recall the granularity of the halftone printing process that first brought photographs into the daily news, or the even measures of Ben-Day dots used with ironic distance by Pop artist Roy Lichenstein. With his commitment to colour experimentation, Fitzpatrick’s process might also be linked to the divisionism and pointillism of Neo- Impressionist painters; rough contemporaries to the dawns of photography and cinema; and to the invention of the halftone and Ben-Day dot processes. In Fitzpatrick’s films, all toner markings, whether manifesting symbols, letters, or representational images, are reduced to their essential graphic form, and as in the work of the Neo-Impressionists, these manifestations often cannot be taken as strictly representational or abstract.

In For Magicians, 2011, Fitzpatrick announced several of the aesthetic themes of his laser printer films. He performs cameraless techniques by laser-printing faces onto a faded Winnipeg cityscape. Here the dot composition of the printer’s image is particularly clear in contrast to pastel markers and the static, fading city. In an act of formal inclusivity, Fitzpatrick joins his cameraless techniques to a “found footage” base. Using toner, he imprints images of photographic origin onto a film of the city, and in so doing, pitches his work between abstraction and representation.

This is a gesture that Fitzpatrick would repeat with Kathy, 2012, made in a workshop led by found footage filmmaker Craig Baldwin. The use of found material is an overarching theme in Fitzpatrick’s work whether he is integrating discarded film, appropriating images or fonts cast in toner, or lifting ink from books and applying them to the film plane. In working with found footage, Fitzpatrick joins his films to another tradition in the underground that was also cameraless, but only in the sense that the artists did not themselves photograph their materials.

Wingdings Love Letter, 2011, disposes of the photographic base entirely and instead uses the stutter of printed forms—their orientation precisely inconstant—to introduce rhythms against a changing candy coloured base. This work also signals the beginning of Fitzpatrick’s work with fonts—in this case, Microsoft’s arcane dingbats font called Wingdings—a code without a key.

Fitzpatrick followed this with further experimentation with graphic fonts. The vistas in Places with Meaning, 2012, resulted from graphic fonts that evoke beaches, government buildings, stadiums, skylines, and houses; some with a welcoming path, others boarded up. The graphics repeat in sets, stuttering across the screen by slight variations in their placement along second-long strips of film. The soundtrack fluctuates in sympathy, the printed images generating the score.

While laser printing has served as a central technique in Fitzpatrick’s cameraless filmmaking, he has also done extensive work in ink lifts in a process reminiscent of emulsion transfers and printmaking techniques. In The Pieced Quilt and That Canadian Look, both 2012, Fitzpatrick began to appropriate material from industrial design books by lifting ink directly from the printed page, developing what he has described as “physical adaptations” of books. In using books as resources for images, Fitzpatrick uses the temporal envelope of film as another mode of containment for the graphic forms that populate books. The graphic content of books that interest him includes the granular structure of paper itself. His ink lift work is an act of disassembly; translating the physical rootforms of the books into a codeless stream of images.

While the majority of his work has been conceived for theatrical contexts, Scott Fitzpatrick has used these strategies to develop a series of installations and expanded cinema works that use film loops and multiple projectors. In Provenance, 2012, repeating circles enlarge and become squares, and out of their corners come dark, granular circles which again morph to squares – the loop endlessly repeating and alternating between left and right orientation.

Jellybeans, 2012, originally performed as part of the Winnipeg Film Group’s “Bands vs. Filmmakers” event, combines a wooly texture and flashing colours; visible splices and fast alternation overlapping the colours in a rapid pulse. Of these works, Bruce’s Borders, 2013, was designed for both single-channel and three projectors and expands on Fitzpatrick’s ink lift work. Here, Fitzpatrick adapts Victorian Frames, Borders and Cuts (Dover Publications, New York, 1882), an historical design book of decorative detailing. In his programme note, Fitzpatrick refers to these details as embellishment: A literal descriptor of the subject, but also one that underscores the ironic distance between decoration and execution.

Another work for three projectors, BCKGRNDS, PTTRNS, TXTRS + TNTS, 2013, is likewise an adaptation of an industrial design book – albeit more contemporary— Clarence P. Hornung’s Background Patterns, Textures and Tints (Dover Publications, New York, 1976). In execution, this work builds on the collisions of Jellybeans, only with the overlap performed not by rapid cutting, but by overlapping projections. It builds to a climax where op art patterns give a dialogue of shapes and colours; the ghost of some faded prototype of electric art.

The densities of Fitzpatrick’s expanded cinema works suggest new directions for stimulation in avant-garde film by immersing the viewer in harsh, durational and uncommon pleasures. Such directions continue in his new work. Among his most recent films is FAG, 2014, in which he prints the word “fag” in every font on his computer over the rapidly alternating colours of clipart rainbow pride flags; and Stories Houses Tell, 2014, in which rapid single frames of Winnipeg houses are married to a narrated text taken from an antique home and garden newspaper column.

He has also finished two films that take explicit inspiration from the work of other artists: Blue Movie, 2014, an attempt at conjuring the elusive Klein Blue of French Neo-Dada painter Yves Klein, a work more interested in its limitations than the possibility of its mission; and Escrituras, 2015, a response to the op art of Jesus Rafael Soto that in Fitzpatrick’s words “seeks to dazzle your eyes and damage your speakers.”

In the short order of a few years, Scott Fitzpatrick’s films have come to carry the curses, debts, and revitalizing joys of a mature body of work, further developing and refining its individual pleasures complete with all necessary abrasions.

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Stephen Broomer is a filmmaker, film historian and preservationist based in Toronto, Ontario.

This article was originally featured in BlackFlash Issue 32.2.