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The Making of the Making of a Film: Primiti Too Taa

Watching Life Classes, I was one of those who thought the story was too corny: after twenty years of painting by numbers the young woman’s first student charcoal sketches become a one-woman show. Life isn’t like that, I said to myself; Art isn’t.

But life is more like that than I can sometimes believe. It happened to me. My first sketch of a film, conceived from start to finish in twenty-four hours, and realized in six weeks by animator Ed Ackerman, has been shown in festivals on four continents. Awards have come from across North America: Rimouski, New York City, Ann Arbor, San Francisco. When Ed and I brought Primiti Too Taa to the Rivoli on Queen Street in Toronto in 1988, the film already had a cult following: people who liked to play it forward, then backward, same speed, sound on, then forward again. Why only once?

A morning phone call from Ed Ackerman in October 1986 began the making of Primiti Too Taa. (We had never met, but had corresponded about making an animated film on a typewriter after Ed had heard some of First Draft’s poetry on CBC's Morningside.) Ed was ready to do a test film, he told me on the long-distance line. He was in Toronto en route to Ottawa and wanted directions for driving to my house.

He was there in time for supper, and while it steamed he showed me on VHS some of the tests he had done so far. He also had a scrapbook crammed with typewriter drawings — grain elevators, meadowlark on the fence post, railway tracks to the horizon, all meticulously ‘coloured in’ and textured with lines of type.

He had never heard of concrete poetry, and it was with the shock of recognition that he leafed through the anthologies I showed him, along with my own chapbooks and postcards. Over a few hours of like discoveries, we settled on Primiti Too Taa as the film we were about to make.

I thought it a natural choice. It is a scherzo movement from the long sound poem Ursonnate, sonata in primitive sounds, by German artist Kurt Schwitters, which I had been including in readings from my series of poems called The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems.

Primiti Too Taa is a highly charged bit of linguistic energy. Making a film of it was a tribute to Schwitters for the centennial of his birth in 1987, as Ackerman’s animation was a homage to Norman MacLaren, made a few months before MacLaren died.

In the hour of decision, though, we chose to make a film of that particular poem because it met certain real-world needs of independent filmmaking. First, Primiti Too Taa was the right length. The beautiful miniatures I had been performing with my collaborators in First Draft (Andrew McClure and Susan McMaster) each took under a minute to unfold; others of my pieces were five or six minutes in length and would likely demand elaborate animation. But the company in Toronto that developed film for Ed charged for a minimum of one hundred feet. That’s about two and a half minutes of film. Coincidentally, my improvisation based on the Ursonate lasted a little over two minutes.

What’s more, the sound poem was conceptually easy to ‘type.’ It demanded no shading of grain elevators with x’s and o’s. A single letter can become a character in this drama. When I say FFF, a file of F’s snakes across the screen. A few choruses of rakete rinzekete rakete rinzekete rakete rinzekete fill the screen with off-kilter letters until BEEEEEEE spirals out from the centre, obscuring the rinzekete’s and BO! scatters all the letters at once, clearing the field for the next verse of the poem. There is rudeness and growling in Primiti Too Taa, but in greater measure there is laughter and dancing.

Ed Ackerman’s first film, Sarah’s Dream, a Plasticine-animated story of Ukrainian immigration to Manitoba, has a sound-track recorded live, in real time, by a sound-effects crew of seven. At a presentation in the lecture theatre of the National Gallery, Ed showed two films side-by-side: Sarah’s Dream, the animation, and the voice and sound-effects crew recording the Sarah’s Dream soundtrack while watching the silent film on screen.

Primiti Too Taa was made in the opposite way. The sound-track was recorded first, the typewriter drawing laboriously synchronized to it later. The day after Ed drove to Ottawa to meet me, I was in Studio A of my friendly neighbourhood broadcaster, CKCU-FM at Carleton, recording the soundtrack for the film that was still barely a notion in our two heads. Then, with the soundtrack in the can ($18), Ed and I sat down to ‘do the storyboard’ — to outline the action of the film.

There must be some kind of story, after all. Not that anything needs to happen, but there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. I have always tried to use my visual imagination to the max in poetry, and never with as much freedom as in this collaboration, where Ed volunteered to do all the tedious typing. Together, we plotted the film verse by verse, word by ‘word,’ letter by letter.

Six weeks later we would meet in Toronto to line up the soundtrack with the finished film and catch any flaws. But Primiti Too Taa was effectively created during the hour or two after taping the soundtrack and before Ed climbed into his car, borrowing money for the oil and gas, to drive home to Teeswater, Ontario, where he typed the film. By the first week in December, Primiti Too Taa would be showing at the San Francisco Poetry Film Festival under a poster that said, You’ve seen the book, now read the movie!

Each foot of 16mm film has forty frames; a hundred feet has 4000 frames; 4000 sheets of paper for Ed to align and realign (how many times?) to make the giant flip-book that is a two and a half minute film. Ed Ackerman, who dreams in 70 mm, went on to remake the film in 35mm — the version that was shortlisted for a Gemini award — and finally built his own IMAX camera in order to see Primiti Too Taa full-scale.

Although I can call myself an award-winning filmmaker, I still know very little of the mystery that changes a concept, even a notion, into a big-screen daydream. But I’m sure this is not the way it’s done in Hollywood.

- Colin Morton