by Gemma Files
“You’re always acting like you know something I don’t!” one kid complained, to which I replied: “That’s because I do. I’m the teacher.”
The older ones were always more difficult. I taught people—guys, mostly—who were twice my age, who’d already had a long-term job or even owned a business only to see it fail from underneath them, forcing them into a midlife career change they weren’t ready for; they tended to have odd ideas about exactly what making movies entailed, especially on a practical level. I remember once giving my normal lecture on the difference between Hollywood and Canada, pointing out that in Hollywood a movie budgeted at less than six million dollars was considered “below the line of visibility,” unable even to budget for self-promotion, and how this explained why so many English-speaking Canadian movies came and went without a trace—their average budget was five million and under (more like two point five to three, at the time). One fifty-plus dude at the back immediately raised his hand and said: “Wait, three million dollars isn’t enough to make a movie?”
“Not usually, no. Not in Hollywood terms.”
“Well, what do they usually cost?”
“Twenty million and up.”
“Twenty million! That can’t be right. What do they spend it all on?!”
The best students I ever had were either immigrants who came from cultures where teachers were automatically accorded respect (though even then, because the Fac never vetted applicants properly, I often found myself dealing with more than a few per term who desperately needed an ESL course or two, or the occasional autodidact with a true artistic drive—people who would have been writing, shooting, and editing visual narratives no matter where they ended up. The real deal, in other words. The kind of obsessives even the Fac couldn’t discourage.
It was this last category that Safie Hewsen fell into, embodying it so beautifully that even after she was long gone, I continued to refer to it in my head as “the Safie slot.”
Seven Angels But No Devil was partly documentary, built around interview footage Safie had shot with her great-grandfather before he died, which she augmented with some truly gorgeous and (yes) experimental animation achieved through a process of still photography, rotoscoped digital footage, and video step printing—sort of Chris Marker meets Richard Linklater meets Wong Kar-wai. It was incredibly ambitious, especially considering that much of it, even the clips she came in with, had been recorded on a Fisher-Price PXL-2000 she picked up when she was fourteen, a toy camera released the year after she was born that records video and audio onto a standard audio cassette tape. A flop on the market, this odd piece of stillborn technology was pulled from the shelves because of the low resolution, inherently slow-motion black-and-white images it creates—the same grainy, dreamlike visual shorthand which later led to its revival as a popular format for hipster video artists like Sadie Benning and Michael Almereyda. Now considered highly endangered cult items, PixelVision cameras routinely fetch up to $600 on eBay, which tells you a little about Safie’s family background, above and beyond the whole diasporic Armenian Yezidi thing . . . she’s a very nice girl, but much like Wrob, she didn’t exactly grow up hurting for cash.
Safie’s great-grandfather, Aslan Husseniglian, was born and raised in the Kurdish village of Sipan in the Aragats District of Armenia’s Aragatsotn Province. Back in the 1900s—the man lived to be over a hundred—he fell in love with a girl named Gayane Hovsepian and chose to marry her, even though she was Christian and he knew it’d make him an outcast; it was a big deal, because he was Yezidi, and the Yezidi used to think everybody else in Armenia—the world, really—was mistaken at best, and wilfully evil at worst. Then again, a lot of Armenian Christians still think the Yezidi straight-up worship the Devil, so I guess it sort of went both ways.
Without community support they were forced to immigrate, avoiding the genocide of 1915 to 1918. Eventually settling in the Don Valley Village, Aslan and Gayane let their name be “Canadianized” to Hewsen and had seven children, one of whom would be Safie’s grandfather Petrak, who called himself Peter. Aslan started off working construction, then built up a home improvement business that mostly catered to Armenians, and was a great success. By the 1960s, the same time Safie’s father was born, Peter cashed out his share of the company and started up a suburban real estate development venture, moving out to Mississauga, where it cost surprisingly little to buy into, build, and occupy a two-block “neighbourhood” inside a gated community that’s still known as Hewsen Estates. That they also happened to be right next to a newly developed GO Transit line made the area popular with upwardly mobile immigrant families from all ethnic backgrounds throughout the 1980s.
Peter’s son, however, had come far enough from his assimilationist origins not to feel as though he was shooting himself in the foot socially by calling himself Barsegh instead of Blake, nor did he have any qualms about marrying a non-Yezidi girl—Safie’s mother, Domenica, an Italian-Canadian. In 1986, Safie was born. “Perfect suburban childhood, ridiculously well off, all that,” she told me, during an early chat between classes. “We spoke English at school, Kurdish and Armenian at home, and I guess we were pretty insular, but it wasn’t like I could tell.”
“Did you always want to make films?”
She nodded. “Ever since I got my first video camera. I used to play like I was a reporter for CITY TV, trying to interview everybody I came across. Dédé Aslan was pretty much the only one who’d put up with it.”
“And were you raised Yezidi?”
“Not really, no. Mom’s Catholic, Dad’s . . . nothing, I guess. Now that Dédé’s dead, I think Granddad and Grandma probably drop in at the Anglican church down the road every once in a while, but I don’t exactly ask.”
“He was your one link to the faith, then.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” She paused. “Everybody in the family’s one link to it, and there just aren’t a lot of other Armenian Yezidi in Toronto, period. So he wasn’t totally one of a kind, but he was definitely something special.”
Most non-Yezidi tend to interpret the figure of Malak Tâwus—the “Peacock Angel” who was, according to myth, the leader of the angelic task force assigned by God to create the world and look after humankind—as analogous to the Judeo-Christian Devil, or the Islamic Shaytān. Seven Angels But No Devil was written as a direct refutation of this idea, and begins with a close-up of Aslan quoting the truism that “today all Yezidis are Kurds, but there was a time when most Kurds were Yezidis, and Yezidis are still considered the living memory and conscience of the Kurds.” As the film continues, various sequences “interpret” the imagery of Aslan’s religion literally, yet with a haunting sort of sketchiness—Malak Tâwus, and the other six angels to which he gave birth, are translated as different species of birds: the dropped Cosmic Egg of Xwedê (“The One who created Himself”, or Yezidic Universal Spirit) as an artificial pearl cooked until it starts to crack; and the five cardinal elements of Fire, Sun, Earth, Water, and Air are all represented by their most immediate domestic and natural examples: a lit match, a window-kindled reflection, flowerpot dirt, melting snow, trash devils blown across an intersection. When finally completed, Seven Angels turned out to be a painstaking, intensely personal work that took Safie on a film festival circuit tour, winning her awards from coast to coast. The film was solitary and a bit oblique, but I enjoyed it a lot.
“I get tired of people calling my relatives witches,” Safie tells the camera, near the end of the film. “Yezidi were massacred and denounced under the Ottoman caliphates for hundreds of years, and continue to be treated as pariahs even today. But the truth is, they practise equal rights, ecology, and consider honesty, pacifism, and tolerance of other religions the highest moral principles. Yezidi don’t even believe in a personification of Evil, because to them, both Good and Evil coexist under God’s control. So we should always be held responsible for our own actions—not God, and definitely not the Devil�
��because we were all created with the ability to think and decide for ourselves, whatever the consequences.”
Since then, I’d kept in touch-but-not-really, tracking Safie’s sad lack of professional progress mainly through Facebook posts, plus the occasional IM exchange. Those latter would have been the quickest way to reach her again, but an old-fashioned face-to-face sell session was what I really wanted—ideally, one where I didn’t have to try to explain things in IM or Facebook message boxes.
A lucky coincidence brought me my chance. I Googled Safie’s name to see what else she might be attached to locally, and was pleased to find her listed as one of the contributing artists in the upcoming Nuit Blanche art festival: a free event that takes place every October in Toronto, featuring dozens of interactive art installations all over the city on display from sundown to sunup. Safie was providing technical support for a “sound collage installation” by Soraya Mousch, Max Holborn’s old partner—another former filmmaker who’d supposedly sworn off the medium entirely in the wake of . . . whatever the hell had happened to Holborn, and (one assumes) to her.
Safie’s alliance with her made sense in hindsight—she’d done a biographical essay on Mousch for my Canadian Film History class, I now recalled, actually looking her up in the phone book and calling her directly rather than relying on Wikipedia like most of the other quote-unquote “kids” in her class. It’s yet another way people fail to realize Canada isn’t like Hollywood: Canadian industry types tend to be far more accessible, providing you’re polite. Then again, given the size of the community overall, it probably did help that they were both Armenian. Mousch invited Safie over to her place, showed her the old-school flatbed rig in her living room she used to do reel-to-reel editing on, and became a bit of a mentor to her—if I recall correctly, she actually gave said rig to Safie as a present after whatever happened with Max Holborn, not that I think Safie ever used it. They kept in touch, Safie consulting with her on a variety of professional issues. When Mousch phoned her up with the outline for her Nuit Blanche piece, Safie jumped on board. As she later told me: “It’s not like I had anything better to do.”
“That’s a rousing endorsement.”
“Yeah, well: she was paying, at least.”
Previous to that, Safie had just wrapped final edit on a film called Drink Me, an artsy softcore that wanted to crossbreed Hammer Horror with Alice in Wonderland. “Thirty hours of boobs, blood, and blurred-out privates compressed down to seventy-six minutes, and I’m not even getting official credit for work done,” she complained; their Internet Movie Database page still had her listed as “3rd Camera Assistant,” even though she’d apparently been the de facto editor ever since the real editor “went literally crazy” in post-production—stopped coming in, changed all his contact info, dropped off the map. But they’d kicked her a few thousand extra under the table, if nothing else, and she’d plugged the money straight back into making Mousch’s aural “vision” as fully realized as possible.
Since I already knew I’d be up, and it was close enough I could walk there from our condo, I got to the area indicated on Nuit Blanche’s official map—an office building lobby just off Yonge Street, about ten steps down from Yonge and Adelaide—at roughly 2:45 A.M., when attendance was just starting to taper off; we were entering the “dead hours” between three and five, the event’s last spasms before sunrise. I’d emailed ahead to tell Safie I was coming. Opening the door, I found myself immediately confronted with a twisty grey structure made from sound-retardant materials, a tunnel whorling inwards like something caught halfway between either the world’s most massive ammonite fossil or a human ear blown up large enough to crawl through. ENTER HERE, a sign instructed. After a moment’s hesitation, I bent my head and did so.
Inside, the passage beyond curled back and forth across itself, a mini-maze. I was forced to bend in increasingly creative ways to gain access. I soon began to wish I hadn’t brought my backpack, especially when the ceiling shrank even further. Eventually I slipped it off and pushed it in front of me through the narrow canal, soldiering grimly on. Behind me, the entrance first muffled, then effectively cut off all trace of ambient noise—distant traffic, weather, the hum and clank of machinery, the chatter of passing crowds—and scrubbed my mind’s palate clean, opening me up for the equally subtle intrusion of Mousch’s sound-mix, which seeped up through speakers set in the floors, meeting more layers of noise sifting down from the roof, now on my right hand and on my left, now making me shy from whatever lay ahead, now driving me forward with an awful sense of mounting pursuit.
It wasn’t music, exactly. Just tones and drones and spatters of muffled dialogue; conversations filtered through the walls, noise and effects overlaid to create some sort of ever-moving internal landscape of almost-glimpsed sequences. And when the passage finally widened, giving way to a room beyond, things didn’t much improve: the blackness was total, womb-like, with no hint of which direction to turn. I stumbled with hands out, feeling my way, constantly afraid I was going to encounter something else that would grip me and pull me into . . . what, I don’t even know. Another dimension, some dreadful night-time abyss. The silent, dust-piled bottom of some long-dried ocean full of skeleton fish and glowing, floating jellies, blind seekers with mouths open wide, waiting to bite down and swallow.
Like the Orphic Mysteries, conducted in Grecian caverns, my brain told me, while I shuffled blindly about. Like that cave in the jungle, the one they’ve identified as the working model for Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld. Quite fascinating, really; you’ll be okay, I’m almost sure. . . .
And then—at the edge of my total lack of vision, a waft of scent, borne on some invisible breath. It broke over me all at once, weirdly familiar: green shoots, turned earth, burnt hay. A hint of perfume—something musty and antique—impressed upon old clothing like sweat. Was that tuberose, perhaps? Lily of the Valley?
Don’t move, a voice seemed to say, right against my ear, warming the lobe. Keep your eyes shut, stay still. Don’t look. The risk is great; avoid it. Do not—look—
Spurred, I reeled back, arms flailing; touched the wall on one side and spun toward it, gripped hard, almost fell. Reached out in the darkness, only to feel another hand meet hers.
“Ms. Cairns?” a familiar voice asked.
“What’s with your eyes, Ms. Cairns?”
My hand went reflexively up to touch my glasses. “Oh, shit—is it that obvious?”
“Well, in here, yeah.” Safie and I had adjourned to a nearby Starbucks, which like many local shops was staying open all night to take advantage of the Nuit Blanche crowds; compared to the darkness of Safie’s display, it had seemed dazzlingly, tear-making bright.
“Crap. I thought they were looking better.”
“Um, well. Depends on how they looked before, I guess.” A beat. “So how’d they look?”
“. . . Worse.”
She shot me a look, like: You don’t change, man, do you? Which was valid, I guess; I’ve always been prickly, and teaching brought that out in me extra hard, especially when people got really stupid. I remember this one guy in my general film history class who literally didn’t seem to understand the distinction between star and director, who thought Cast Away was a film by Tom Hanks rather than a film with Tom Hanks, thus making Robert Zemeckis and his crew just, what—friends of Hanks’s who got on-screen credit for standing around admiringly while he simply dreamed the whole movie into existence, or spun it out of his ass like a spider? And yeah, if you’re wondering, I did say that last part out loud, in front of all the other students—Safie included. I can still see her trying not to laugh, and failing miserably.
“I can see fine,” I reassured her. “Not that that was much help, back there . . . you had anybody freak out, yet? Nobody’s been an asshole and dared their claustrophobic significant other to try it?”
“Not so far. We did put a warning sign up at the front, you know,
‘People with Phobic Responses to Darkness or Enclosed Spaces Strongly Cautioned Against Entry’—I guess you didn’t notice that. But just to be safe, we’ve got night-vision cameras in a couple of places, and there are sections designed to lift straight out if we see anybody about to lose their shit.” Safie sipped her cappuccino. “Once you get past the opening flat, most of the structure’s just wooden frames with sound-baffling foam layered three or four sheets deep on chicken-wire backing. The foam’s the most expensive part, weirdly, just ’cause we needed so freaking much of it. We rented the speakers and the board, and Soraya and I did the sound mix ourselves on her home system.” She brushed her hair back from her brow then asked, with slightly too casual a tone of voice: “So how’d you like it?”
“Honestly? It scared the crap out of me.”
“I seem to recall that’s a compliment.”
I grinned. “Yup. I mean, I’m not even phobic about this stuff, mostly, and I was still seriously creeped out. How’d you do the scents thing, by the way? Atomizers, set up to pump stuff in at key places?”
“No, we didn’t include an olfactory component. What did you smell?”