164

A Film: Primiti Too Taa

by Colin Morton

IN '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 routeto 
Ottawa and wanted directions for driving to my house.

   Ed 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