Screening: Julia Feyrer, MUDFLATS LIVING

The program for the exhibition Mad Horizon continues with a screening with Julia Feyrer and the film Mudflats Living (1972) by Robert Fresco and Kris Paterson. The film follows a group of outsiders, artists, frontierswomen and hippies who were building an alternative community called Maplewood Mudflats northwest of Vancouver in the 1960s.

“Mudflats are coastal wetlands that form when mud is deposited by tides or rivers. They are transient spaces, non-places or place of otherness.”

The mudflats were a legal grey area when it came to housing, but officially the people from Maplewood Mudflats were squatting by living there. The area was cleared in 1971 after the introduction of an urban renewal program by the District of North Vancouver, officially to enforce public health. Produced by the National Film Board Canada, Mudflats Living features the artist Willie Wilson who lived in the community for many years. In the film, he shows a part of his enormous collection of scrap culled from the demolition of Edwardian and Victorian houses in the state of Victoria. By the time of the clearance, Wilson made use of his collection as a constructor and set designer working for Robert Altman’s second film to be made in Vancouver, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), one of the many revisionist Westerns made in the early 1970s, a frontier parable in which late 1960s ideals play out against the long arm of speculative interests. It was filmed on the North Shore in the mountains just above the Mudflats.

Mudflats Living, director: Robert Fresco and Kris Paterson, 16mm, 1972, 29 min.

Mudflats Living will be shown together with two films by Julia Feyrer, and songs by Leonard Cohen featuring in Robert Altman’s film McCabe & Mrs. Miller.