A Life + A Documentary + The Mountenays

A Life
Canada 1986. Director: Frank Cole

A strangely powerful portrait of a man who lives by facing death, this visionary, obsessive work was the third film — and first feature — by Ottawa filmmaker Frank Cole. The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott called A Life “an immensely talented piece of minimalist cinema that revels in a semi-suicidal, erotic attention to death.” Andrienne Mancia of New York’s Museum of Modern Art said “it does some of the things that Scorsese does in The Last Temptation of Christ, but perhaps better.” The film is entirely without dialogue, and follows only the most oblique and elusive of narrative expositions. In its first part, filmed in a fastidiously spartan apartment, oddly framed, rigorously composed, and startlingly fetishistic images reveal a man (Cole himself) apparently seeking to seal himself up in a living tomb. The second part, filmed in the Sahara, finds the man trapped in an overwhelmingly expansive desert landscape, where images of terrifying loneliness compete with images of equally terrifying beauty. “A work of uncompromising, risk-taking and always breathtaking genius. . . One hesitates to bandy about such words as ‘masterpiece’ in describing anything, but A Life comes as close to it as anything this writer has seen in some time” (Greg Klymkiw, Cinema Canada). Colour, 16mm. 75 mins.

A Documentary
Canada 1979. Director: Frank Cole

Something of a formal and thematic template for his subsequent work, Frank Cole’s first short film “brings a terrifying mixture of intimacy and distance to bear on his aging grandparents” (Hoolboom/McSorley). B&W, 16mm. 8 mins.

The Mountenays
Canada 1981. Director: Frank Cole

Frank Cole’s second film “is a short black-and-white marvel of direct cinema. He visits the Mountenay family who live in a stretch of abandoned forest, next to an auto junkyard in the Ottawa valley” (Hoolboom/McSorley). B&W, 16mm. 22 mins.