On September 30th, Traill College hosted a multi-projection installation by filmmaker Dylan Cree. To Conference: Faux in Perpetuity and Of Pornology straddle comedy, documentary, and cultural theory in an effort to bring humor to scholarly research.
During a reception at The Trend, Cree also spoke to a receptive audience and answered questions about his filmmaking process and the contents of his works.
Following the Q&A, I asked Dylan about the event and gained some more clarity as to what his interventions are in the academic pursuit of knowledge.
We’ve promoted To Conference and Of Pornology as mostly critical works. I find them more funny than critical, although there is certainly much of the latter. Do you cross a line in these works, of both criticality and satire? Was the point to get audiences to laugh firstly? Is there a point where humor undermines or
overshadows the critique?
I think it’s arguable that a lot of critique is such that it takes itself seriously. There is that affect to it and at the same time it indicates there is something of potency happening. But with laughter, I think – as you’re full aware in having studied Bataille – there is this kind of dispersive feeling that comes, that breaks organization, breaks the very terms for being organized. At the same time, we have as it were, a repressive structure that tries to suppress what is effectively comical and, I think that your asking [this question] is very much in the center of that organization, of an attempt to make effective. That’s academia.
Undeniably though, you have a distaste of cultural theory, academia, and the type of scholarly investigations of late-20th century French philosophy. Yet you also work from within academia, in the Communication Studies PhD program at Concordia and your MFA from Simon Fraser. Could you say something precise about your relationship to academia, theory, graduate studies?
In a lot of respects that distrust is also academic; it’s a stance within academia, so it’s not outside of it. It’s of it. I think that that’s something to be grappled with, not outside the process, whatever that is. And I don’t know what is. I think we have extensions of extensions. This standard binary of the academic institution versus the street is highly questionable.
So with that in mind, I would frame my response here with that kind of revisiting of what it is that allows me to speak as I do, and to question as I do. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be more breaches, where they are, when they are… how it is that we’re able to somehow enter into this negotiation of string-pulling, what releases at a certain point, and builds pressure in others.
You said something in our Q&A about this, but could you say more about the decision to split the film, To Conference, into seven parts? What does this add to the spectator’s experience?
I think that it is disconcerting. We have so many things that prompt a questioning of reading things linearly, but at the same time I think that the spectator – a key word here – is, I hope, always disappointed. In a lot of respects, from one room to the next, although it [the film] is allegedly different [in its seven parts], it is an encounter that is emphasizing in the same way. I think that I am making game of the spectatorial, in terms of making it a spectacle. And I think that that is most solidly executed in this… how should we put it… this dispersive approach to viewing the material.
I’ll lastly ask you something about Of Pornology. The film seems to be hinting at an aporia in the field of porn studies, namely, can we make theoretically conclusive remarks about pornographic scenes and films. Can porn films be studied for their form, their perfomances, their beauty? Is there some direction for studying porn? A large question of course, but these were the themes I found in this work.
My thought is that: What is it that we take to be a study? That there is an object to study? And that applies to whatever. For porn or pornography, it’s incumbent upon the researcher, the academic, the scholar that engages with the study of porn to also be interrogating how it is they come to study porn – how porn comes to be a genre onto its own, not only in terms of cinema, but in terms of our general experience of media.
But beyond that, we also have questions of a motive, to construct this [porn studies] as a kind of study, to turn it into a subject and, while we’re turning it into a subject, perhaps we’re also attempting – and I think that many porn theorists are well aware of this – to neutralize it, to make it something that is a legitimized process. And I think porn is no different than a lot of other things that have been dealt with in that fashion.
So that to me in a preeminent question: What is it that permits that legitimization, the rendering that is a kind of subject-worthy notion, a form of objectivity… And that I think is something that extends beyond pornography obviously… especially in the line of poststructuralism, it demands that kind of questioning.
