Explaining the concept of the Authorial Movie, part one

  The Authorial Movie, an anthology 

Le film d’auteur, une anthologie...

Statement:

I’m a Canadian writer/artist/filmmaker/musician living in South Korea/ Je suis un artiste, écrivain, musicien, et cinéaste canadien qui vie en Corée de Sud. Au-dessous est une sélection de mes vidéos.

Below is a selection of my work, including an online video-anthology. I do all this work myself, and some of it is original enough that it represents a new art form: that of authorial moviemaking, in which a belletristic text is transformed into a movie in which one person makes — authors — all aspects of the movie.

Here is an example at YouTube of an authorial videostory, Last Question of the Evening : https://youtu.be/MPivPuRAyYA

I’ve followed with interest - and a certain degree of eye-rolling - the current fashion for putting readings of one’s work online. The eye rolling isn’t because I think it’s a bad idea; I’ve been doing new media literary work for over seven years now, and have been repeatedly told by Canadian acquisition editors and agents that my work “isn’t the sort of thing we do”, “too ambitious “, “would bankrupt us”, etc. 

The situation with the coronavirus has changed that ... for better or worse. The epidemic is itself terrifying, and all I can say to Canadians not sure of what will happen next: brace yourselves, it’ll get worse before it gets better. The strategy of social distancing is a good one.

Below are links to several pieces of mine, from videopoems to readings. The top reading is from a long social novel about contemporary Canada entititled Plastic Millennium. It begins in the year 1999, and follows the life of Jerry Gunnarsen, a failed journalist now selling computer peripherals on the eve of Y2K.

The other readings are from two historical works. The first is a historical novel entitled The Business Army about an attempt to organize a coup d’état against Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. The novel is based on fact, and is available online at the lit magazine Eclectica. The second entitled Rabies Beach, and is a novel about Juno Beach and the Canadian soldiers who fought there (I actually have a feature-length, high quality video clip fb this reading if the topic interests you.)

I’ve made over 3,000 videos (around half of them are publicly available). It’s a major body of work. And the reading from Plastic Millennium is based on a novel manuscript that’s over 240,000 words. That’s over a 1,000 pages printed out. It and Rabies Beach remain unpublished, and I continue to look for a home for them, along with other projects.

(To be continued)