Remember the Vancouver of not so long ago? It was a place of promise and of possibility, a place where things were happening. Now it is an empty chromey shell of tiny condos and yuppie wankers.

We used to have a place called The Blinding Light, a small cinema cafe that went beyond art house straight into the fringe. It was the epicenter of experimental cinema, of a thriving super 8 movement, it was a venue for real film artists to congregate, to show their work, to try their experiments, to feed off each others creative energy.

That’s gone. Now we don’t even have what could be called an Art House cinema let alone a venue for local experimental film.

All we have now is industry schmoozathons where shallow hacks wank each other off, chattering and trading business cards, figuring out who can be used to advance their career, and then discarded as thoughtlessly as a popcorn bag thrown on the floor after National Treasure 2.

We used to have a horror film festival called Cinemuerte, which had rare and exotic prints of films you never heard of, of the surreal, the profound, the gross and the fun. It used to bring in people like Udo Kier and John Saxon, as well as other film makers and directors who may not be on the top of the marquees or first on a Hollywood producers list but who the real film lovers know have had a profound and lasting impact on cinema.

That gone. Now all we have is nothing. Although once, last year, Peter Greenaway was in town and gave a lecture at the cinemateque. He was funny and eloquent, he talked of the culture of cinema and of visual illiteracy, the place of ascetic in film and his continued disgust and disappointment with contemporary cinema. Following his talk the audience proceeds to ask of nothing other then his distribution deals.

This place, our city, our home, used to have verve, uniqueness and a community of artists and innovators working on strange and wonderful things. We used to have artists doing art instead of working shitty jobs to pay their bloated rents or fighting developers for the last few scraps of viable studio space. We used to have edge and vision rather then “artists” whose sole talent is to make paintings that match the furniture.

The Olympics are coming to Vancouver, the world is coming to Vancouver. We will be flooded by people who are worldly and experienced and cultured. They will come, and they will see the pristine venues, the posh restaurants, the bright and happy volunteers who are paid to take time off from their cushy jobs, the streets swept clean of the addicted and the mentally ill who have been pushed as far inland as possible. They will see the well designed merchandise and the impressive skyline of glass and steel set against the backdrop of forest and mountains. They will see all this but they will also see that Vancouver has no soul. Apparently such as this is not important enough for us even to be aware of, and thus was not budgeted for.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.