From a distance

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This article was published 24/08/2020 (2255 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Shooting life from the voyeuristic vantage point of your own apartment building ordinarily invokes the Alfred Hitchcock 1954 classic Rear Window, in which Jimmy Stewart is trapped in his apartment with a broken leg, where his isolated perspective leads him to suspect a neighbour has committed murder.

Filmmaker Galen Johnson, 39, is well aware of the parallel as his short film Thursday launches today as part of the National Film Board’s cross-Canada online project The Curve, described as a living document of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shot from April 15 to May 15 of this year, Johnson’s contribution, one of 40 shorts, was mostly photographed from his Osborne Village apartment, across the Assiniboine River from the Gates neighbourhood.

“It was shot from my bedroom window, mostly,” Johnson says in a phone interview. Because he lives in the same building as his brother Evan, he would occasionally use that vantage point as well.

“He lives on the opposite side of my building,” he says. “So I have maybe 270 degrees of Winnipeg covered. From my apartment, I can see everything from the airport to the stadium down south at the University (of Manitoba) and everything in between.”

Johnson is best known for his collaborations with filmmaker Guy Maddin, often working in tandem with his brother, including The Green Fog (a kind of remake of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, compiled with footage of other films) and the 2018 short film Accidence, which coincidentally creates a narrative from a single vantage point from outside a high-rise apartment building.

On his own for Thursday, Johnson’s telephoto lens captures eerie tableaus of life in the city, rendered quieter and markedly less hectic in the COVID era. The pandemic presence is almost subliminal in the film.

“Since I would be shooting it from my bedroom, I knew that people were going to be very, very far away; it already had social distancing built in to it,” Johnson says. “I’m not really seeing any physical manifestations of COVID out my window because one of the physical manifestations of COVID is that most people are indoors.

“There’s maybe one guy with a mask, but otherwise it’s not like any era-defining tragedy,” he says. “You just can’t see it. It’s invisible.

“But I just thought the whole mood of it — just waiting for something to happen — was a bit uneasy and that spoke to the feeling of living through the COVID era.”

Since the 2017 film The Green Fog already connected Johnson to Hitchcock, the Rear Window connection struck him too.

“I guess we’re always accidentally remaking Hitchcock films,” he says. “I couldn’t help but identify with Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window because you’re seeing little fragments of a narrative but you’re not seeing the whole thing and you get paranoid — your whole brain starts to make inferences and leaps and stuff.

“I didn’t see any actual murders though,” he says.

What he did see from shooting up to eight hours at a time from his window was humanity writ small.

“When you’re shooting this wide, people are sort of tiny little stacks of pixels. You can’t see their eyes, you can’t see the expressions on their faces, so they just start to become metaphors,” he says. “They’re just kind of standing in for all of us.

“Because COVID is nature. It’s a natural disaster and seeing these tiny little people totally dwarfed by nature had a bit of ominousness to it in that context,” he says. “There’s a lot of ideas I was trying to cram into this thing which is just a lot of stillness and silence.”

Thursday launches today on nfb.ca with two other short films, In the Garden on the Farm by Kristin Catherwood and K’i Tah Amongst the Birch by filmmaker/activist Melaw Nakehk’o.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing