Local filmmaker’s lo-fi feature packs a punch

It feels right that this low-budget, lo-fi experimental feature should be showing as part of We’re Still Here, a slate of programming that marks 50 resilient and resourceful years of the Winnipeg Film Group.

First off, Think at Night is idiosyncratically and intensely Winnipeggy, from rooftop views of our downtown skyline to shots of our green, scrubby riverbanks to scenes set in our oddly iconic parkades.

Secondly, the opening and closing credits of cast and crew are a roll call of WFG people over the decades. And finally, this 2024 film connects past and present in a poignant and unexpected way, as local filmmaker Greg Hanec explores the elastic nature of time.

Think at Night takes place over the course of one night, but Hanec, who’s also an artist, composer and musician, has been working on it since filming started over 30 years ago.

Often enigmatic, even abstract, the film gradually loops in a loose kind of narrative, which then narrows into a wonderfully obsessive central paradox. Al (played by Hanec) is a one-time artist now questioning the need to make art. “What does it matter?” he asks in the face of his friends’ edgy, obscure, under attended shows and performance and installations.

But of course, Hanec-the-character’s position is belied by Hanec-the-filmmaker’s position: For half of his life, the 64-year-old artist has remained persistently, even perversely committed to this project, which encompasses a few nighttime hours onscreen but has taken 32 years of off-and-on work to reach its final form.

The film opens with a view of what could be one of our town’s shimmering, slow-moving rivers. Or maybe the fuzzed-out static on the screen of an old TV.

Or it could embody our protagonist’s state of mind. Al finds himself restless and unable to sleep after a phone-call hangup. He heads out on an idiosyncratic odyssey around the city, going to a bar, dropping in at the sad end of a house party — in a series of happenstance meetings with writers, filmmakers and artists. He attends a multimedia happening, lensed by a constantly circling camera, that mixes up projection, performance and a spoken-word manifesto, in a sequence that feels slightly satirical (but mostly affectionate).

He visits a friend (Tom Kohut) working the night shift at a medical lab, who reads aloud from a poem he’s been crafting, which seems partly about the need to write even in the face of indifference. We sense Al’s boredom — words begin to tumble over each other on doubled tracks — but the poem keeps following him as he continues on his nocturnal journey.

There’s a certain amount of low-key comedy coming out of the often conflicting imperatives of work, money and creativity. Al has a funny encounter with a filmmaker pal (Mike Maryniuk), who’s working on a meta-meta experimental short and who has owed Al $25 for many years. There are references to the offbeat day (and night) gigs Al’s friends take so they can pursue their art and still pay the water bill.

In a more serious way, the film’s almost hidden hinge point is a project with art student Dana (Alerry Lavitt) that paid out big but went wrong — dangerously wrong.

Hanec’s experimental style, especially in the early scenes, sometimes feels deliberately alienated, even alienating. The soundscape is a deep, dark kind of noise music that often edges into the ambient environmental hum of buzzing lights and car traffic. There are awkward angles and disorienting cutting.

But there are also passages of dreamy, hypnotic beauty.

Near the end, Hanec starts to favour a scruffy kind of naturalism, and he ends with a scene that somehow dissolves all the tensions of art and life, creativity and practicality into one beautiful, suspended moment. Al and Dana have been staring into the river in the clear, clean light of early morning when they’re joined by their friend Stuart (David Stubel), who recites the poem we heard in that earlier scene.

The words are now resonant, full of feeling and meaning. Through this one long night and through Hanec’s long-gestating process, they speak to us across the years.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca