The Transmutation of Visceral Desecration:
marginalized women, murder and the urban environment contextualized in film
By
Laura Rena Marie Del Pieve Gobbi
BFA Intermedia, Emily Carr University, Vancouver British Columbia, 1999

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTERS OF APPLIED ART
in
Media Arts

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2009

© Laura Rena Marie Del Pieve Gobbi, 2009

abstract

This thesis is made up of a 35mm film, reinsertion, and a praxis paper that
investigated my film processes and research, concerning the missing and murdered
women of Vancouver. The catalyst was my experience living in a city in shock
during the Pickton Trial. In 2007 Robert Pickton was charged with 26 counts of First
Degree Murder. He was tried and found guilty for six out of a possible 26 murders
that took place on his pig farm in Coquitlam. My goal was to create a film that
positions the responsibility of the murders on the City of Vancouver, its police, City
Hall and residents. My research focused on my personal experiences in the
community and feminist discourse. Through the creation of an experimental film
about the murders, I explored ideas such as authorship, experiential art and
absence as representation. Simultaneously, the film subliminally communicates the
trauma of the aforementioned women.

This thesis pursues several key questions:
Can a city be a sexual predator?
Who has the right to tell a story?
Can film emote without narrative?

It concludes that a society, by inaction, can condone atrocities, that the stories we
tell are inherently our own and that trauma can be communicated through subtle
movements, gestures or objects.
ii

table of contents

abstract ...................................................................................................................... ii
table of contents ....................................................................................................... iii
list of figures.............................................................................................................. iv
acknowledgements ....................................................................................................v
dedication.................................................................................................................. vi
inspiration................................................................................................................. vii
introduction ................................................................................................................1
telling a story..............................................................................................................3
origins of reinsertion...................................................................................................7
synesthesia ..............................................................................................................16
Downtown Eastside..................................................................................................18
horror film genre.......................................................................................................28
atypical film genre ....................................................................................................29
location as subject ...................................................................................................31
metaphor and absence ............................................................................................44
film as object: editing ...............................................................................................49
conclusion ................................................................................................................52
works cited...............................................................................................................54
works consulted .......................................................................................................58

iii

list of figures

Fig. 1 Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. insurrection. 1999. Vancouver. Film Still.................10
Fig. 2 Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. interception. 2001. Vancouver. Film Still. ...............10
Fig. 3 Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. degradation. 2003. Vancouver. Film Still. ...............10
Fig. 4 Vancouver City Hall. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. reinsertion. 2010. Digital
Photograph. Vancouver............................................................................................31
Fig. 5 Main and Hastings, Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. reinsertion. 2010. Film Still.
Vancouver. ...............................................................................................................37
Fig. 6 West Coast Reduction. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. reinsertion. 2010. Film Still.
Vancouver. ...............................................................................................................40
Fig. 7 Boot and Hubcap. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. reinsertion. 2010. Film Still.
Vancouver. ...............................................................................................................44
Fig. 8 Boot and hubcap. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. reinsertion. 2010. Film Still.
Vancouver. ...............................................................................................................45
Fig. 9 Editing Room With Negatives. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. Studio. 2010. Digital
Photograph. Vancouver............................................................................................49
Fig. 10 Film Reels and Hot-splicer at far Window. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. Studio.
2010. Digital Photograph. Vancouver.......................................................................51

iv

acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Ron Burnett, President of Emily Carr University for making
the MAA program possible and for his rigorous critique of both my ideas and my
practice. My thesis advisor, Kelly Phillips, was a huge catalyst to the size and
breadth of my library and research. Formulation of ideas through group critique was
passionately fostered by Fiona Bowie, Harry Killas, and Babak Golkar.
My colleagues in the graduate program at Emily Carr University were indispensable
through their challenges to my intention as opposed to their perceived meaning in
my images special thanks to Brenda Draney, Michele Alborg, Alex Hass, and Alex
Young Hwa Cho.
Throughout the process of the written thesis Karolle Wall has been full of wry advice
and was a great motivator.
My friends Nereid Lake, Morgan Stafford and Janet Sadel were helpful in
unearthing my interesting grammatical proclivities and experimental spelling at
various stages.
I would like to thank my friend, Nick Vaughan, for his support through the writing of
this thesis and also during shooting and editing as I processed the images and my
emotions.

Vancouver, Canada. December 2011

v

dedication

This thesis and my film reinsertion are dedicated
to the missing and murdered women from the
Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

vi

inspiration

An 'aesthetics of sensation’ describes the connections, the energies,
the molecular connections of consciousness and nervousness within
the mind/body/brains of those who experience the film as a material
encounter. In this perspective, texts or films it might be argued are
also bodies.

Barbara Kennedy (53)

Philosophy is motivated by dark sentiments: a “discontent,” a certain
anguish, an uneasiness about living, an obscure sense of guilt. By
contrast, the first figure of the transmutation elevates multiplicity and
becoming to their highest power and makes of them objects of an
affirmation. In the affirmation of the multiple lies the practical joy of the
diverse.

Gilles Deleuze (82)

vii

introduction

Yes, I intend to transmute a visceral desecration. This thought, the title of my praxis
paper, is the intent of my research and film, reinsertion. By visceral desecration, I
refer to an act of sexual violence that leads to the mental or physical destruction of
the victim. Specifically, I refer to the shocking deaths on the Pickton farm1. I intend
to transmute my thoughts and emotional responses concerning these deaths into
an experimental film and a social statement. Deleuze describes transmutation as “a
triumph of affirmation in the will to power” (82 emphasis his). I reference Deleuze
here because I believe that through the creation of art we can affirm the lives of the
missing and murdered by acknowledging and mourning their deaths. The Cultural
Memory Group, in their studies of memorials across Canada, state that survivors of
sexual or gender based violence and their allies, through the creation of memorials
can bring about healing in themselves and their communities. I align myself with
others witnessing and creating works about sexual violence.

The raw materials for this praxis are my personal memories and the experience that
I have living in a community where seventy-one women are missing or murdered
(MISSINGPEOPLE.NET). The stories I disclose to you here are an autobiographical
dialogue, and the points of departure that acted as a springboard to the creation of
my thesis film. I did not conduct empirical research into the murders, the trial, or the

1

The Pickton farm is a large farm in Coquitlam at 953 Dominion Avenue. Pickton’s brother Dave had a party
house nearby called “Piggy’s Palace” (Mudede).

1

dangers that women face working on the streets, before or after the Pickton trial.
My purpose was not to create a documentary. My purpose was to create a film
that memorializes and communicates the trauma of the victimized women and
explores the culpability of the City of Vancouver. I simultaneously did readings that
questioned my authority as a witness and artist.

My purpose was to capture photographic images representative of my trains of
thought concerning the missing women, and to create a narrative from my research
and memories. I considered both the origins of gathered facts and my emotions.
After shooting and processing of the film negatives I entered into a meditative state
as I retreated into a room for editing for two weeks to compile disparate images into
a film. Finally, I held my breath in the screening room as my vision unfurled. This
praxis paper is a description of the research and methodology necessary to the
production of reinsertion.

Some of my research is unconventional within an academic context; I present
autobiographical accounts and my response to living in a world where women
disappear. Within this paper short conversations from my past are presented in
script form. These scenes will not appear in the film. From my own internal
perspective, I contemplate the disappearances of approximately seventy-one
women from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver (MISSINGPEOPLE.NET). For the
past decade I have been aware of disappearances of women, and I felt that there
were murders connected to them.
2

telling a story

Central to my praxis and film is the question of who has the power or the right to tell
a story. I have only a tenuous grasp upon my chosen subjects: the missing and
murdered women from the Downtown Eastside, the victims of Robert Pickton. I
could embark upon a series of interviews with friends and family of the victims and
other missing women or I could make up fiction. I resolved to examine my past for
connections. This focus on my personal experiences as a woman in the Downtown
Eastside positions reinsertion an auto-ethnographic film. I am telling a story about
myself in order to tell a story about my community. I am not speaking from inside
the community of these women. I am not a friend, colleague or family. I am
speaking as a neighbour and fellow woman. I currently reside on the perimeter of
the Downtown Eastside and lived (for two years previously) within five blocks of
Hastings and Main2. Despite this, I am very much an outsider.

In making reinsertion I am very much aware that I am neither friend nor family of any
of the victims. I speak from my personal experiences living in the Downtown
Eastside and my personal experiences as a survivor of sexual violence. My
personal experiences are essential to the creative process and ethical bias of this
project. I know how it feels to be propositioned by a john, to be followed home by a
john in a car, and to fear for my safety. I am an outsider who has experiences that

2

Hastings and Main is the epicentre of the Downtown Eastside, psychologically if not geographically.

3

connect and with a story to tell. Women’s stories have traditionally been ignored;
bell hook’s phrase, “the right speech of womanhood” implies speech that is able to
be ignored, suitable for the societal position of women (Talking Back 6). If that is so,
then my desire in this work is to speak wrongly. Rather than appropriate another’s
utterance, I desire to speak for myself, to stand among the numbers of women who
have experienced sexual violence to say: “Silenced No More!”

Traditionally, women artists have created work from biblical stories, history, and
commissioned works of portraiture. Within the confines of these subjects Artemisia
Gentileschi, in 1620, made striking work to depict powerful heroines from the Old
Testament (Heller 30). Although Gentileschi did not make autobiographical work
about her experiences of rape, by her art instructor in 1612, this series of paintings
depict women with an unusual ferocity, “vulnerability and strength” (Heller 30).
Some artists such as Nancy Spero used the Holocaust to tell stories specific to
women (Bohm-Duchen in Feinstein 65). I feel I can only explore women’s issues
from my own experience.

In the film, reinsertion, I combine the potential of auto-ethnographic research
methodologies with artistic practice, to address the marginalization of women living
within Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The imbrication of myself, as artist, and the
missing women, as subject, is essential to my material practice (Ronai 4). I am not
telling anyone’s specific story in this film; I indicate this through the absence of
characters, or subjects, in my film. The viewer will not develop any relationship to
4

people who occupy the screen for between two and eight frames as characters in
the film. The only shot in which a viewer might identify a character is in a six frame
zoom, a self portrait, through which I address my own presence and the
autobiographical nature of film. The camera does not act as an authority—revealing
characters or stories to the viewer. Rather, the camera captures moments that we
might experience in common with the unseen, implied subjects of the film. I film
specific sites that figure into the story: specific corners where women were last
seen working, locations where women’s remains were disposed of, a store where
Pickton sold his pork. I do not photograph the farm in Coquitlam where women
died, because I am staying within the boundaries of Vancouver and my personal
related experience.

Rather than approach my subjects didactically, or from an aesthetic perspective, I
attempt to create an empathic, immersive relationship with them. This
autobiographical experiential approach aligns my work with “third wave” feminists
(Heywood 2). I position myself within “third wave” feminists who reject the attack of
Naomi Wolf in her early work and Katie Roiphe when they coined, “victim feminism”
and “rape crisis feminism” respectively (Heywood 59). Wolf and Roiphe were
speaking from within the ranks of well-educated privileged women. There is a need,
within feminism, for the voice of women who are not privileged and who have felt
the effects of sexual or domestic violence. The Cultural Memory Group suggest that

5

public feminist gatherings such as “Take Back the Night”3 and memorial
installations for the École Polytechnique Massacre4 and other public monuments
memorializing “women murdered by men” are a way to promote change.

While my film is dedicated to the missing and murdered women of Vancouver it is
not meant to act as a memorial. My intent is to show that by living in proximity to
these women, I developed feelings of kinship towards them. The change that I
might wish to promote is to inspire women to feel more solidarity towards
marginalized and dispossessed women. I am making this film about a serial killing
of women from my neighborhood, however; essentially, it is my own story being
told. It is this intimacy with the inner workings of my own mind, that of the
filmmaker, which became the crux of my thesis. James Peterson describes the
‘poetic avant-garde’ in film to be intimate in two ways: first, it is personally
controlled, and second, it is about the private concerns of the filmmaker (Peterson
29). I worked with the structure of the film to communicate danger, fear, and terror.
During the making of the film, I visited and photographed specific locations where
Picton’s victims were last seen. Two locations happen to be within blocks of my
home in 1996. My experiences and my response to living in the Downtown
Eastside, an environment where such disappearances became commonplace, is
what the film will reveal.

3

“Take back the Night” is a peaceful protest against Sexual Violence, a march of women and their allies often
with speakers or a candlelight vigil. It has taken place in cities internationally since the late 1970’s.
4

On December 6, 1989 Marc Lepine opened fire at the École Polytechnique in Montréal. Fourteen women died
as a result. He began the shooting spree by “separating the men in one classroom from the women. He told the
women, ‘I am fighting feminism. ’”(Sourour 7).

6

origins of reinsertion

Abstraction has been my preferred methodology for the past ten years. Remaining
central to my work is my attention to the visceral response to various types of
sexual violence. In the past, I used my own and my friends stories as a survivors of
sexual violence as source material. I used the story line and emotive content of
these stories in combination with materials derived from myths that have a similar
storyline. My past work Includes: the video, Mythogeny (1997), and three 35mm
films: insurrection (1999), interception (2002) and degradation (2003). These films
are primarily abstract. I utilized materials symbolically and created films that pulse
with bold colour and high contrast. In interception I hand painted four hundred feet
of film stock in order to create an colourful montage that interpreted my
experiences of being raped. I used a very precise story line that moves from a
happy day through to a painful rape, a blackout, and a fearful running escape to
shelter. In interception, I was asked by a friend to create a film that spoke about
her experiences of incest. I connected her story to the fall of Eve, rewriting the story
in the garden as the first incestuous act. With Satan as the first incestuous uncle
and Adam and Eve, through their enforced innocence, confusing his erect penis for
a snake. This story does not appear in the film. I made the film out of thousands of
slices of fruit, metaphoric for the garden. When you see the film it is as if you are
seeing the fruit used as a negative. I used various methods to vary the impact of the
images on the viewer and tell the story subliminally. In degradation I connect a myth
to an experience that I had when there was a moth infestation in the fruit on the
7

negatives from interception. My description of degredation reads,

The film maker finds herself transformed into Pandora as she opens a
reel of film and a cloud of insects surround her. A single moth,
delicately, invisibly, embedded in the substance of the film symbolizes
original sin. The shame and repercussions of incest are represented
by, the excrement, cocoons, and dead bodies, of moths and their
larva. We see how the insidious spread of disease and evil erupt
through the mythological and historical defloration of women.
Thousands of moths were killed during the making of this film. Their
bodies filled the frames and sprocket holes. Thousands of girls are
raped daily, their lives and bodies treated as refuse. (Del Pieve Gobbi)

The frame-rate and juxtaposition of image will communicate to the audience via
their autonomic nervous systems (Gehman 170). Through visual and auditory
channels, I seek to involve, and even provoke, the viewer’s emotional and physical
experiences by using rapid, even extreme frame rates as I am photographing the
city. I seek to trigger certain physical responses in the viewer: their respiration may
increase, they may feel warmer or become restless, they may even leave the
theater. Avant-garde filmmakers attribute such responses to the ‘flicker effect’
(Small 74). My use of the ‘flicker effect’ and re-photographed frames, I attribute to
the influence of structural film, such as that of Conrad and Warhol (Sitney 348).
Specific instances, when I re-photograph two Vancouver police stations and city
hall in my work manipulating duration are inspired by Rimmer, Snow, and Warhol.

LeGrice has explored the effect of structural film on the viewer and states,
8

Editing of live-action sequences in the avant-garde film has
increasingly tended towards extremely rapid rates of change. One
possible reason for this is an implicit search for a film that can function
essentially on the psychophysical rather than the psycho-interpretive
level. Action on the autonomic system seeks to create a nervous
response that is largely pre-conscious. The psychological reactions
sought being a direct consequence of physiological function. (LeGrice
106)

These structural elements began with flicker films but have since been used in other
types of experimental film and even in mainstream cinema. Stan Brakhage
pioneered autobiographical content and further attempted to document thoughts
and emotions. Brakhage and other “avant-garde filmmakers developed abstract
(non-representational) forms to represent the everyday. They pursued abstract
cinematic forms that metaphorically represent states of mind and emotional states”
(Lane 13). In 1998 I encountered a Stan Brakhage film, Delicacies of Molten Horror
Synapse, which inspired me to explore the possibilities of abstraction as a possible
narrative device. The title of the film prompted me to wonder; I attempted to distil a
dramatic narrative from the visual experience. The questions evoked by this film are
ongoing in my practice. I was inspired by Brakhage to apply my own experiences
as a victim of sexual violence to communicate, using colour and the flicker effect,
the catharsis of horror to the viewer.

9

Fig. 1 Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. insurrection. 1999. Vancouver. Film Still.

Fig. 2 Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. interception. 2001. Vancouver. Film Still.

Fig. 3 Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. degradation. 2003. Vancouver. Film Still.
I am combining the provocation of physiological responses from the toolkit of the
experimental filmmaker with the use of literal images of the Vancouver landscape.
This synthesis is how I diverge from my past body of work. My past work was so
veiled behind theories of abstract and experimental film that unless I am present
to comment, the story remains purely liminal. My past films have concerned
themselves with the psyche and experiences of one woman, whereas reinsertion
10

concerns itself with a group of women and their community. Rather than using
abstraction exclusively, my new work is a combination of representational and
abstract images. This approach is stylistically aligning my work with that of women
animators. Women who have depicted sexual violence in animation have also
chosen to digress into abstraction during sensitive scenes in their films. Michèle
Cournoyer’s, The Hat / Le Chapeau, is described by the NFB thus:
A young woman works as an exotic dancer in a bar. The customers'
hats remind her of a man she knew as a child, who also wore a hat.
The man entered her bedroom, turned back the sheets and laid his
hand on her body. She cannot forget how he defiled her (NFB).

The Hat / Le Chapeau is further described as a “visceral experience” in which. “The
filmmaker, with naked honesty, invites the audience to share in the pain of a woman
(NFB).” Cournoyer depicts this story through a pen and ink rendition in which
images morph in quick succession: his fedora becomes the dress of a small girl, the
buttocks of an adult woman, and the balls of the man become a small girl, the girl’s
torso becomes an immense penis.

The morphing of objects to tell a story of a sexual assault on a young girl is also
used across the world in Korea. In Daddy and I, a mother leaves a small girl at
home alone; her father comes home and after watching a beauty pageant and some
soft porn he turns upon his daughter. She tries to escape running and leaps into the
fish tank becoming a guppy or gold fish. The father follows, morphing into a shark

11

and then a penis. Five Korean college students co-directed Daddy and I using
extremely evocative images. The official synopsis reads, “A sexually abused child
transports herself into a fantastic place within her mind to escape her terrible ordeal
(Daddy and I Web).” This sensitive portrayal of sexual violence cuts through our
learned experience of film as spectacle. With the use of suggestive images, the
authors of these two films portray the rape of children without graphic or voyeuristic
sexual images of children and engage the viewer through emotions.

Viewers who engage on an emotional level increase their empathy for victims of
sexual violence. An increase in empathy reduces the likelihood of engaging in
sexual assault (Foubert 2006). According to Rachel Hall, “the performative
recurrence of horror in public representations of sexual violence naturalizes rape in
a manner that denies men’s ability to stop raping women” (2004). The exploration of
rape narratives in animation heightens the emotive aspects, rather than the
voyeuristic, thereby increasing empathy in the relationship of the viewer to the
victim, rather than to the representation of the violent act.

reinsertion is about prostitution and murder in Vancouver, but you will not see any
prostitutes. Likewise, you probably won’t see any plot development. It is very likely
that the images in the film will be disturbing to you, not in their content but in their
speed, their intensity, and their incongruous colours and juxtaposition. The visceral
effect of the film on the autonomic nervous system of the viewer will communicate
directly as a synesthetic experience, whereby, “sensation and kinetics affect the
12

body, of the viewer, and the observer, as much as the mind and the emotions”
(Kennedy 59).

I use frame rate and duration to evoke abstraction and employ metaphor by
implying the characters in the film through their absence in the landscape. The
making of the film began as I rode buses through the City of Vancouver in 2007 on
my way to school.

The high-profile Pickton Trial was wrapping up as I was beginning the Master of
Applied Arts program at Emily Carr University. Each day on my ride through the
Downtown Eastside of Vancouver the daily papers, which I found abandoned on my
bus, displayed images from the trial: the victims and their families, but mostly
Robert Pickton himself, the perpetrator of these shocking crimes. Confronted with
these images each day, my psyche recoiled. I began capturing the city on film, from
Commercial Drive through the downtown core to the Granville Bridge, as a
meditation on the missing women.

I used my 35mm cameras from within the buses where I found the daily papers
displaying the trial images. This photographic journey was then transformed into
cinematography as I envisioned the creation of a 35mm thematic short, all shot on
old half-frame 35mm still cameras, and mostly hand-processed. I shot specific
locations and built a sequence with my editing while trying to deny the viewer the
familiar film trope of location. The edits in the film have a rhythmic rather than
13

narrative structure. My notions of editing in reinsertion are similar to those that Raul
Ruiz describes as poetic.

…nor, is poetry found in so-called beautiful things: rivers, landscapes,
mountains and sunsets. Rather, we find it in the haphazard
intersecting of sequences, in the instances of narrative incoherence
and in crossing sight lines. (Ruiz 22).

In my editing process, I cut from shot to shot Cambie Street—the ocean—a busy
sidewalk—city hall—Save On Meats— city hall—a busy sidewalk —the ocean—
Cambie Street—the ocean. I based my decisions on colour, texture and patterns of
repetition. Repeated segments in film reference the past with each repetition
serving to add mystery while also increasing our desire to possess the image
(Mulvey Death 160,161). The fragmented quality of the editing heightens what
Mulvey refers to as “the uncanny of the inorganic” (Death 172). By freezing the
frame the illusion of life created by the twenty-four frames per second required for
persistence of vision is broken down. This is used often in live action film as the
character in the film dies we see the moment of death as stillness, often as a held
frame. Mulvey states that the freeze frame thereby infers that the “still frame’s
association with death fuses into the death of the story” (Death 70). The repeated
still frames in reinsertion infer a relationship between City Hall, the police stations
and the death of the women.

The creation of an avant-garde film, a memento mori, as my personal elegiac
14

response to the disappearances of women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside,
presents a difficult challenge. These women are not survivors of sexual violence
from whom I can gain permission or information. These issues of appropriation and
authorship are shared by many artists creating art about marginalized, homeless
and disenfranchised people (Felshin 255). I created film in remembrance of women I
did not know. Susan Sontag writes that remembering is ethical (115). Furthermore,
Sontag asserts that we do not have the right to claim amnesia concerning the pain
of others (114).

15

synesthesia

Synesthesia is the effective translation of one sensory input into a sensory
experience of a different category. Wassily Kandinsky describes it in the following
way: “Keen lemon-yellow hurts the eye in time as a prolonged and shrill trumpetnote the ear, and the gazer turns away to seek relief in blue or green” (25). Some
people look at a colour and hear a sound. Or inversely, some people see colours
when they hear sounds. Others experience a synesthetic effect when looking at
numbers or text; they see colours simultaneously. I contextualize the effects of
synesthesia as the ability of films to arouse emotions in the viewer.

Experimental films depicting narratives of sexual violence are designed to engage
the viewer on a visceral level. Frame rate and colour shifts in the footage translate
into affect, creating an experiential moment. The film invites the viewer to enter into
and share experience.

I am making a film about a series of violent sexual attacks that ended in death and
dismemberment. I am trying to do this without creating a film that is a voyeuristic
spectacle. This film has transference of emotions as its main component. I attempt
this transference by using ideas based in synesthesia to create an unusual
experience for the viewer.

My intention in this film is that the viewer might experience synesthesia while
16

looking at images of the City of Vancouver, and become aware of their own body,
perhaps experience physical sensations, taste or sounds, from something outside
their present experience. Ideally, this synesthesia will penetrate into the psyche,
transporting the viewer into a different mind-state. In his discussion of a new
aesthetic theory, Deleuze describes how contemporary films penetrate into the
body of the viewer to communicate through intensity, texture, light, speed, and
sound (Kennedy 5). This is explicitly how I intend to communicate to my viewer.

17

Downtown Eastside

The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver begins at the perimeter of Gastown and
extends eastward to within a block from my door and within an inch of my heart.

Each day as I leave my building I walk past women ‘working’ the four corners of my
street. As I walk by I greet them with a simple ‘hello’ or ‘have a nice day.’ Some
days, I compliment them on an outfit or haircut. I view these women as people in
my neighborhood who work in a very difficult profession. Some of the women are
transient; I see them once or twice and then they are gone. Other women I see on a
regular basis for a while, and then not at all. Sometimes I worry about them, and
sometimes I simply hope they have moved on to a better life.

The women I encounter at the perimeter of the Downtown Eastside, are
comparatively healthy and do not overtly seem to have lost the battle with drugs or
childhood demons. In one of several brief conversations I had with one woman, we
talked about the new cut and colour of her hair, and then she shared with me part
of her strategy for moving off the street: she was attending life-skills classes at
Gastown Vocational5 and she said they had paid for her haircut. She disappeared
shortly thereafter and I didn’t see her for almost a year.

5

“Gastown Vocational Services (GVS) provides a range of vocational and educational services to both youth
and adults who have a mental health disability.” February 21 2009. <http://www.gvsonline.ca.>

18

I ran into her again recently on a different corner than usual, just a block farther
west. The women had relocated due to the construction of a new storage facility in
the neighborhood. I’ll take you there…

1.

EXT. STREET. NIGHT

1

RENA
Oh! Hi, I haven’t seen you for a
while.
WOMAN
Yeah, I was trying to stay away. I
was doing good.
RENA
And how are you now? Are you okay?
WOMAN
(shaking her head)
Can I have a hug?
Rena steps off her bicycle and complies with the woman’s
request. Rena’s eyes close tightly and she takes a deep
breath.
WOMAN (CONT’D)
Thanks

Take care.
about you.

RENA
I’ve been

thinking

Rena gets back on her bicycle and rides away. She cycles for a
few blocks and then turns and backtracks. The woman is no
longer alone and gives Rena a closed, dismissive look. So Rena
turns again and rides away.

My relationship with the woman whose conversation I scripted above was fleeting:
19

no more than a year and a half of periodic encounters. It took six months of
nodding hello before we even spoke to each other. This was our last encounter. It
was about a year ago. I choose to see her absence as a positive sign.

Prostitution, mental health issues, poverty, broken homes, addictions and in many
cases an aboriginal heritage, compounds the situation that kept the missing women
on the margins of society. My sensitivity to these issues stems from growing up in
Prince George, the southernmost point on the “Highway of Tears”, a stretch of
Highway 16 North, through Smithers where many young women disappeared and
some have been found dead. In an article published on Friday, October 12, 2007
CTV reported that:

The RCMP on Thursday doubled the list of women who have gone
missing on a notorious British Columbia road known as the ‘Highway
of Tears.’ Until now police believed nine young women died or went
missing along Highway 16, a road that stretches from Prince Rupert to
Prince George. But police now believe the number is actually 18. (CTV
News Staff)

At the time of this report the murders had already been happening for a long time.
In fact the first victim, Gloria Moody, was killed in Williams Lake in 1969 (CTV News
Staff).

A male friend of mine went on a grand adventure, camping and hitchhiking across
Canada from Toronto to Vancouver that summer. I had always dreamed of such an
20

adventure but was painfully aware of the danger due to my gender. My friends and I
growing up in Prince George were aware of the dangers of the road. My awareness
of the disappearances of women from both Highway 16 and from the Downtown
Eastside was the starting point of an awareness of my own feminist inclinations. bell
hooks describes issues that I have encountered within feminism.

Much feminist theory emerges from privileged women who live at the
center, whose perspectives on reality rarely include knowledge and
awareness of the lives of women and men who live on the margin. As
a consequence, feminist theory lacks wholeness, lacks the broad
analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences
(hooks, Feminist Theory xvii).

hooks describes black women as a group having “a social status lower than any
other group” (Feminist Theory). In Canada, aboriginal women have our lowest social
status. In British Columbia this lack of social status contributed to the invisibility of
women missing from the “Highway of Tears” and the Downtown Eastside.

After Robert Pickton was charged with the murder of Sherry Irving,
Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of British Columbia Indian
Chiefs, said that the disproportionate number of aboriginal women
among the victims reflects a dismissive and discriminatory attitude on
the part of police agencies who didn’t look as hard for these
marginalized women as they would have if 63 women had
disappeared from the British Properties over time. (Anderson 181)

21

Women missing from the Downtown Eastside were marginalized because of their
position as sex trade workers, substance addiction, and mental health issues; racial
discrimination compounds the issue. Referring back to the missing women on the
“Highway of Tears”, for instance, it was not until the disappearance of Nicole Hoar,
a white tree planter, that the public and media took any notice of the
disappearances in general.

The term “Highway of Tears” was born out of fear, frustration and
sorrow over the mostly Aboriginal women who have gone missing or
have been found murdered along the stretch of highway between
Prince George and Prince Rupert. With Nicole Hoar’s disappearance
on June 21, 2002, the term “Highway of Tears” became more widely
known, and the general public became aware that Hoar’s
disappearance was not an isolated incident. (Stutz)

Issues of race and social status are in the forefront of society’s disregard for many
of the missing women in British Columbia.

The initial desire to write and illustrate the plight of these women came to me in
1997. I was living in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighborhood, one block from the
corner of Hastings and Heatley. This was my first experience of living in the
Downtown Eastside. I really enjoyed my street and the neighborhood south into
Strathcona; we had frequent potlucks and afternoon teas. The area teemed with
artists and bohemians; the yuppie encroachment into the neighborhood and its
gentrification had barely begun.
22

One day, everything changed: I injured my hands at school and could no longer ride
my bicycle. This meant that to get to college, instead of cycling south through my
happy neighborhood, I had to walk a block north and catch the bus on Hastings
Street. I tried to time my arrival at the bus stop at a nearby corner so that I would
arrive just before the bus. I wanted to avoid, as much as possible, facing the johns
trolling the neighborhood. The johns were impossible to avoid on my way home.
The bus stop was over a half a block away from my street. On two days out of
three, as I walked away from the bus stop a car would follow me. Some weeks I
was followed every day. Sometimes the driver would pull over only to pull away
again when he realized that I was not a sex trade worker. However, sometimes the
vehicle would follow me around the corner and the driver would lean over and
speak to me through the passenger window. If I turned my head, spoke or gestured
they would simply pull closer.

This is my in-point. This is the breach through which I try to expand my
consciousness and understand the plight of the abducted and murdered women. It
is because of such experiences that I feel kindred to women who choose to exploit
their own bodies and undertake such a precarious, dangerous and uncertain
existence. I have felt first-hand the unrelenting pressure that johns place upon
women. They want us to succumb to their desires, and they push for it. From my
experiences of feeling hunted, and my elusive relationships and conversations with
marginalized women,

23

2.
EXT. STREET. MORNING
Rena is walking quickly South on Heatley Street. A vehicle
pulls towards her as the driver rolls down his window.

2

RENA
(Waving her arms)
Go away!
The vehicle pulls closer and the driver leans out the window
JOHN
(Slowly and clearly)
Do you speak English?

RENA
(Slowly and crisply)
Yes I speak English. Do you
understand English? I said go
away. I am not a prostitute; I
am walking in my neighborhood. I
am not standing on a corner on
Hastings Street. I can see your
license plate number. Now, go
away! Fuck off!

Through my past experiences and clear memories of such interactions I conceive of
the characterization of emotions and fears in the streets of Vancouver. I exude this
malaise through the construction of film.

The idea of conveying the emotions of women dealing with the aftermath of sexual
violence through film is not a new one. In England, at the Leeds Animation Co-op, a
feminist co-operative founded in 1976 by Gillian Lacie produced Give Us a Smile, a
collage-based animated film which expresses the reactions of women to the
24

violence, both physical and ideological, with which they are confronted every day
(Pilling 35). Another film that dealt with issues of sexual violence from a first-person
perspective is Karen Watson’s Daddy’s Little Bit of Dresden China illustrating the
subject of incestuous child abuse (Pilling 96). The father figure in Watson’s film has
only one facial feature that he uses to see and eat. Seeming to allude to the
devouring nature of the male gaze. These films utilize the personal experiences of
the filmmakers, much as I am doing with this auto-ethnographic piece. By making
film derived from our own experiences, women filmmakers have direct ownership of
our stories, thereby avoiding issues of appropriation.

Here is another example of an incident from my life that directed the muse of my
filmmaking.

3.
INT: A HOUSE ON 600 BLOCK PENDER STREET
There is a knock on the door. Rena gets up and answers the
door.

3

MAN
You’ve got to help me!
RENA
What’s up?
MAN
(breathing heavily with wild eyes)
My girlfriend is freaking out. I
just broke up with her and I
don’t know what to do.
25

MAN enters the room and paces in near the door.
She’s
a
prostitute,
I
kept
asking her to quit working and I
couldn’t take it anymore. I so I
broke up with her today.
She says she wants to go home
but I know she will work on the
way. She’s fucked up! I can’t
let her go out there!
4.

INT: EVENING:

4

Two women and the same man enter the room. The girlfriend is
lying across the bed. Her makeup is smeared and she is crying.
MAN
I brought a couple
over. Can we talk?

of

friends

RENA
Hey, are you okay? N is worried
about you.
GIRL
(Sniffling)
Why do you want to break up with
me? Why can’t things work out?
... Leave me alone.
RENA
N is worried about you going
home tonight when you are so
upset. Do you want to come over
and have a glass of wine? We can
talk about it.

This ended up being very successful and the woman spent the night at our house
and was in a calmer state when she headed for home the next day.

26

This experience led to my first time-based piece about the issues of childhood
trauma and repeating cycles of behavior that re-enact that trauma. In that video,
Mythogeny, I play four characters, one dressed in white symbolizing the innocent
child who is the original personality and the primal victim, and three other identical
characters in purple who play the child’s older selves who are trying to destroy the
innocent part of themselves in order to be able to deal with their reality without the
pain of the loss of innocence or without the painful reminder of a lost life free from
pain. It is the contrast between the past life and the present, the knowledge that
there could be a different life without the initial violation, makes their lives
unbearable. In the video the three older selves hunt down and kill the person of
their innocent child self.

The need to numb out the memories of past sexual trauma through re-enactment
can cause victims of childhood sexual violence to seek out similar circumstances
(Phillips 251). My conjecture was that the woman who sheltered at my house
wanted to go out during a moment of emotional duress and ‘work the streets’ in
order to re-engage with her earlier experiences of trauma in a bid to numb herself
out from her current emotional pain. This experience more than any other, caused a
breakthrough in my attitude towards prostitution; a paradigm shift in my thoughts
and generated empathy towards prostitutes as fellow sexual assault survivors.

27

horror film genre

Generally, in films depicting sexual violence and murder, the viewer is transported
into an uncomfortable scary place. reinsertion tries to do the same. Unlike typical
films in horror or suspense genres, this film will not provide characters, plot, or an
abundance of gore to produce the effect of danger, fear, death and the uncanny to
an audience.

If this was mainstream cinema, there would be characters in the film; a concerned
population, a police chief, the mayor, countless extras as the streetwalkers of
Vancouver, bit parts for actors playing Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea
Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin, and Marnie Frey,6 a lively
collection of police officers, and forensic specialists, police station support staff, the
family and friends of the victims, and the “star” of the film, Robert Pickton. Special
consideration would be taken in hiring actors to play the judge, court lawyers, and
key jurors. Importantly, we would have scenes depicting the Pickton family home in
his childhood.

If this were a traditional horror film no expense would be spared.

This is not the type of film that I am making.

6

These are six of the women Pickton killed; the six for whose murders he was found guilty.

28

atypical film genre

I am one woman with a motley collection of camera equipment and a deep-seated
distaste for voyeuristic spectacle. Through my eye and the cameras’ I subvert the
“determining male gaze” of the voyeur by referencing to the women of Vancouver
through their surroundings and filming the city rather than the women (Mulvey
Visual 19). I extricate the eroticism of the ‘streetwalker’ by removing them as
object(s) of the male gaze. The absence of the women turns the focus back to the
viewer. I refuse to re-enforce the sexual stereotype of the protagonist, in this case
marginalized sex trade workers (Rainier 42). I engage the City of Vancouver through
my very active cinematic eye reversing the role of the gaze through my
active/female lens7. I assign the city the role of the passive male through the static
shots of city hall, the police stations and the docks, which remain primarily
masculine domains. Rather than filming sex trade workers I positioned myself on
corners where specific murdered women were last seen and filmed the traces of
cars going by and recorded the sounds of the traffic. By shooting from my imagined
point of view of the women I hope to assist the viewer to experience rather than
objectify.

Despite the lack of a multi-million dollar budget, I make this film at great expense. I
make this film despite my stress and abhorrence to the Pickton Trial and the

7

Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema assigns the cinematic gaze as active/female and
passive/female. (19)

29

anxieties encountered: despair, depression and revulsion. My method requires
distilling the pathos and fear that I feel into my shots and editing. I provoke a
response, not through depiction of women in pathetic and degrading situations, but
directly through the rapid flickering of images that evoke tension, chaos and
visceral discomfort in the viewer. Rather than allowing the audience a comfortable
distance from which to objectify the experience, my film immerses them directly in a
disruptive, chaotic, and frightening environment of filmic sense and sound. My hope
is that the response of the viewer mirrors the emotions of the unseen subjects of
the film.

30

location as subject

Depicting a city as a sexual predator and having images of a city stand in for
characters is a challenge. Especially since I am photographing a city familiar to
many. I use images of the City of Vancouver metaphorically to represent the fear
and energy of a woman threatened by a violent sexual act, or by her own death,
and also metaphorically to represent the inaction of the city in preventing the death
of the women. I use images of city hall in various ways as a character.

Fig. 4 Vancouver City Hall. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. reinsertion. 2010.
Digital Photograph. Vancouver.
Near the end of the film, I inter-cut two different shots of the city. One shot is of the
Vancouver city hall and was shot and processed in such a way to add a contrasted
inverse image the way animators simulate the appearance of lightning. This shot
was is inter-cut with a total of nine seconds of images taken every few steps while
31

walking along the sidewalk on Hastings Street from Heatly Street to Abbott Street.
This strip is a hang out for the marginalized and was/is a common area for
prostitution and drug trade. The editing of the fast and jarring movement through
the night-time Vancouver landscape juxtaposed with the ominous shot of city hall is
intended to infer pursuit.

I use a more traditional associative approach in some footage. For instance, I rephotographed a slide of city hall 1020 times to create a static moment (Fig.4).
Within film language, the static frame most often represents mortality, the passing
of time and death (Mulvey, Death 67). I use this metaphor to also reference the lack
of civic action concerning the missing women. It was not until charges had been
pressed against Pickton that the city began to respond to the very real needs of sex
trade workers. My assertion, that city officials turned a blind eye to the needs of sex
trade workers, is backed up by Robert Matas, a reporter for the Globe and Mail, he
states:

For years, Vancouver turned a blind eye to the mysterious
disappearance of dozens of prostitutes from the city's Downtown
Eastside. But just before the start of a sensational trial alleging that
Robert Pickton murdered the women, the city has apparently found its
heart.

City hall has given preliminary approval to a location for Canada's first
24-hour drop-in centre for sex-trade workers. Police have renewed
their commitment to a $100,000 reward related to the missing-women
32

case. And a rundown hotel has been converted into housing for
women who are victims of violence.

For years, family and friends of missing women have been petitioning,
marching and shouting for more thorough police investigations and
more support for the vulnerable women who sell sex from street
corners. But little was done to help families search for the missing or
to aid those working in the industry.

Robert Pickton's first-degree murder trial in the deaths of six women
from the Downtown Eastside, now scheduled to begin on Jan. 22, is
expected to draw attention to Vancouver's hesitant response to the
plight of street prostitutes. (Matas)

The plight of women in the Downtown Eastside is visible to me on a daily basis. I
see women in desperate postures as I walk, ride or take transit each day. I also see
men in dire straits, however the plight of the women affects me more. The dangers
they face and the knowledge that so many have died drove me to make this film.
Mine is not a fun, ‘feel good’ movie. It is a film about my emotions and reactions to
a series of murders too close to home. It is a movie about how I felt being
confronted on a daily basis with the face of the serial killer in the news every time I
rode the bus from December 12, 2006 to December 11, 2007, the day the jury came
to a verdict (CBC).

When you see reinsertion in a theater it will bear no resemblance to the stories that I
have written here. I wrote these stories to illustrate my methods and lay bare my
33

internal thought processes of constructing reinsertion. I filmed various aspects of
the city based solely on my gut responses and instincts. I travelled through
Vancouver photographing sometimes two frames per block and sometimes eight or
even twenty frames per block; this methodology slows down and speeds up the
city. I operated cameras on foot, on public transit, and on a bicycle. I changed film
stock in a random fashion that seemed very significant at the time of shooting.

reinsertion explores the problem of the content through the material of the film and
yet abandons the content for the material. The form is the content. This is what I
mean when I call reinsertion an abstract film. I create images and distil emotions
from them through montage rather than from story, actors and dialogue. This is a
challenging undertaking because I possessed a story, characters, even a location.
This type of film is referred to as avant-garde, structural or experimental. I had to
decide what it was that I would abandon in the process. It turned out that the one
thing that I was unable to abandon was the material of my film. I was working
without any 35mm equipment other than five half-frame 35mm still cameras, two
eight foot long light tables and a tape splicer. Later, I rented a hot splicer for the
neg-cut.8

I was asked by one professor to abandon film for digital production due to the lack
of production facilities and the cost of film. I explained that I could not! My desire to

8

After editing decisions are locked in film negatives go to a specialized lab where they are cut and hot spliced.
I did this myself, with a rented hot splicer.

34

work in film embodies my belated desire to protect the missing women. The
poignant subject of the film is referenced by a reverent visitation to specific
locations, frame by frame shooting, labour-intensive hand processing and is
reinforced by my relationship with the celluloid. My relationship to the celluloid of
the film is fundamental and protective. The physical processes of film references
directly my rage and pain at the plight of the missing women.

The physical relationship of female avant-garde filmmakers with the celluloid of their
process has precedent, especially in the work of Carolee Schneemann, who would
leave her film out in the studio for extensive periods up to three years (Butler 70).
Her films combined photographic images with hand dyed and distressed sections
and clearly showed the hand of the maker (Butler 70; Peterson 69). Butler describes
a film in which Schneemann filmed herself and her partner during intimate sexual
acts but from extreme close up and unusual angles.

The result is doubly autobiographical: intensely intimate, in its closeup
portrayal of bodies and sexual acts, and densely textured, marked by
its artisan, domestic production, with a non-linear organization that
mimics a participant perception or memory of events rather than
objectifying those events. (Butler 70)

In the past I have worked alone. I did not disclose the story behind my films to
people around me until I was finished, and sometimes not even then, or perhaps
only to a small percentage of my audience. When screening in a women’s festival
35

event, such as Vancouver’s “Sistahood Celebration”, I would give a very clear
artist’s talk about the motivation and construction of my film, while screening in an
international animation or film festival there would not be the same opportunity or
even the appropriate moment for such a talk.

My life is my research, the raw material of my creative process.

I am shooting literal images and I am using those images as the raw material to
create a mood, a journey and a synesthetic experience.

The journey that I undertake in my praxis is to extrapolate the emotions of the
missing and murdered women. Now, I am going to be very clear here: I am not
trying to incite in the viewer any feeling of being abducted or murdered. I am trying,
however, to communicate the stress that one might feel being in a precarious or
even dangerous position. I am trying to depict the City of Vancouver itself as a
hostile, dangerous predator of marginalized women. By the City of Vancouver I
mean its government, police force, social service organizations and general public. I
propose that the City of Vancouver is implicated by its failure to respond to the
ongoing crisis of the disappearances of women.

reinsertion is not the only film to use images of a city as self-reflective commentary.
Anne Marie Fleming in You Take Care Now combines images of prizefighters with
images of a city to accompany “her account of being raped by a taxi driver in
36

Southern Italy and hit by a car in downtown Vancouver” (Wees 18). This is another
example of a filmmaker using images of a city to stand in for the emotional
experience of sexual violence. The City of Vancouver figures in both Fleming’s work
and mine. I’ll explore part of that city now.

There is currently in Vancouver a large population of marginalized people requiring
assistance for basic needs. A disproportionate number of these people reside in the
Downtown Eastside. The area is full of SRO Hotels and Social Service Agencies
that provide basic food, medical care, education and legal services to residents.

Fig. 5 Main and Hastings, Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. reinsertion. 2010. Film
Still. Vancouver.
So how did one neighborhood become a receptacle for the nation's ills? British
Columbia Social Service organizations outside Vancouver, lacking resources, tell
clients to move to Vancouver where, “services that can help you are available.”

37

One such service organization, the Motivation Power and Achievement Society9, is
a member based Vancouver organization for Persons with Mental Heath Disabilities,
needs to move its Community Resource Center at Fourth Avenue and Fir Street to a
new proposed location a few blocks away. They have been at the present location
for twenty years. The MPA is dedicated to having places of refuge outside of the
Downtown Eastside so their clients can progress. The Kitsilano community has
been lobbying to prevent them from establishing new quarters. This lobbying
translates as animosity and rejection felt by the members of the organization on a
personal level.10

For these people with mental illnesses and similar marginalized populations cast as
perpetual victims, ostracized and terminally unhealthy, the city plays the role of a
predator. Organizations often require people to be in unsafe neighbourhoods in
order to receive services. For persons living in fear and deprivation so
overwhelming that they struggle for a safe place to sleep and even to excrete, the
spatial reality of the city takes on the role of an adversary. For marginalized and
homeless people, their bodies, lives, and possessions are in constant danger. For
women, this is greatly magnified.

If those who live within the city, those who are responsible for the organization and
safety of the city, are aware that predation is occurring on the level of a serial killer

9

Originally known as The Mental Patients Association

10

I have been a member of MPA since 1998 and I served on MPA’s Board of Directors from 2002 until 2007.
Their crisis in acquiring permission and funding for their new location is still ongoing.

38

and they do not act, does the city not then become an accomplice to the serial
killer? John Glionna in an article about Lincoln Clarkes states.

John Lowman a criminologist at Vancouver's Simon Frasier University,
says that the city simply looked the other way. ‘The long-term policies
flushed all the crime and addiction into the Downtown Eastside,’ he
says. ‘The idea was to contain and corral social problems in one area
and bury our heads’.

I communicate fear, displacement, unease, angst, bewilderment and trauma
through my images. I set up camera shots to transport the viewer through a toxic
landscape. I use various, often expired, film stock as filters to shift the colour,
temperature of the light and the mood of the footage. The film is an exploration of
how I feel and I position those feelings in the material of the film. The rapid and
changing frame rate and disturbing, unreal colours of the film combine with the
specific images to communicate my emotional reality.

The experiences of my life as a young woman living in the Downtown Eastside, an
unarguably hazardous neighborhood, are the primary sources of the structure of
this film. I have felt terrified and exposed when predatory johns followed me home. I
have been sexually assaulted. I have succumbed to the pressure to have sex with
someone due to my past experience as a victim and my fear of physical injury. I fill
my mind with the real, remembered terror of these events and translate them to
film. I don’t have to go far from home for inspiration.
39

My apartment building, the ARC, is at the intersection of Powell Street and
Commercial Drive, situated inside the industrial area on the fringe of the Downtown
Eastside.11 I shot a time-lapse sequence through a back window of my building;
orange loading cranes overlook the harbour; the steam from the factory,

Fig. 6 West Coast Reduction. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. reinsertion. 2010.
Film Still. Vancouver.
West Coast Reduction throws the seagulls into a spiralling relief (Fig. 6), Living as I
do across the railroad tracks from the factory, I am subliminally aware via olfactory
input that something is not right within. Charles Mudede, a west coast writer,
filmmaker and cultural critic had this to say about the situation:

The unusable remains of the pigs Robert slaughtered and served to
his friends and neighbours--pig entrails, brains, bones, nerve tissue,
and gore--were taken by truck to a rendering plant near the DES
11

The ARC is an artist live work studio building at Commercial Drive and Powell Street.

40

called West Coast Reduction Ltd. Many are certain that the partial
remains of the murdered sex workers were also trucked to West Coast
Reduction Ltd.

Located on 105 North Commercial Drive, West Coast Reduction's
facility is impressive. It's a complex of huge cylindrical cookers,
storage tanks, office buildings, industrial stacks, and railroad tracks.
Underground pipelines connect it with one of the biggest ports on the
Pacific Rim; huge orange cranes loom just behind it, and the
surrounding air is relatively clean, although once in a while the smell of
something awful wafts from an unidentifiable source. The plant turns
animal bones, guts, fish, blood, pig entrails, used restaurant grease,
and, now many believe, the remains of sex workers into a number of
consumer products, like lipstick base, soaps, shampoos, and
perfumes. These commodities that improve human appearance are
shipped all over the world.

Six blocks up from the rendering plant, the most fashionable part of
Vancouver begins. Commercial Drive is lined with restaurants that
serve Cuban finger foods, theaters that screen Bollywood films and
stores that sell Italian shoes. Here hipsters visit a wild variety of trendy
cafes, tapas bars, spas, heath-food groceries, and cosmetic shops. All
of these urban pleasures are walking distance from the rendering
plant, the place where Robert Pickton brought the intestines of his
slaughtered hogs for more than 20 years, according to West Coast
Reduction's records. After emptying his truck, he is believed to have
picked up sex workers, sometimes within a block of the plant.
(Mudede)

The strip within a block of West Coast Reductions, where Pickton is believed to
41

have picked up sex trade workers is the same area in the preceding anecdotes
about my neighborhood. My building sits between the corner where the women
work and the West Coast Reduction across the train tracks. This is where I have
interactions and brief conversations with the women a block from my door. When
people ask me about my Downtown Eastside neighborhood I joke that, “the
frequent job offers on the way home make one feel positive about the economy”. I
joke as a hint that I feel the pressure of the sex trade daily, in the threat and danger
that emanates from the vehicles that follow me home. People laugh; I successfully
made light of the matter. In this manner, one keeps a bold face on life.

One day, while walking home, I ran into a female police officer three blocks from my
building. I stopped to comment that had I known that they give the women police
officers Harleys I would have thought about applying to the force. I turned the
conversation to that of the prostitution in the neighborhood. The police officer
replied, “The scary thing is how normal the johns are, your average guy.”

Is it “your average guy” that we are afraid of? The Pickton Trial took place with no
real surprises. Robert Pickton has been found guilty on all counts. The remaining
charges against him are not going to trial. Family and friends of other victims will
not have the justice that a trial provides. Stated as reasons why the remaining
counts will not go to trial are the cost, and the fact that Pickton will not live to meet
parole as it now stands. Would all charges be going to trial if the victims were wellheeled Vancouverites? Has the marginalized life situation of these women followed
42

them to interfere with justice? Was Robert Pickton working alone or was he, among
the guilty, simply the one who most accurately matched our idea of a serial killer? I
do not address these questions in reinsertion and they remain unanswered.

43

metaphor and absence

In my films, I typically use subtle metaphors and abstraction to explore intense and
horrific incidences. I believe that this maintains a position of safety for a viewer who
has had similar experiences. reinsertion has been a considerable leap from my
previous films, structurally, with this addition of literal photographic representations
of persons and places.

Fig. 7 Boot and Hubcap. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. reinsertion. 2010. Film
Still. Vancouver.
The women, who are the subject of the film, are conspicuously missing. This was
obviously a conscious gesture. Their absence is an implicit metaphor referencing
three concepts. The first is that they are absent. These women are either missing or
dead, ergo; they are not here. The second is that when these women were present
on the streets of Vancouver. They were all but invisible. Considering everyone on
44

the streets, these marginalized women receive the least assistance. The third is that
due to their position on the margins, nothing was initially done when they were
reported missing. The missing and murdered women are alluded to in the film’s first
images (Fig. 7). An empty boot and an overturned hubcap, signifying a woman
risking her life in the sex trade and her customer; it hardly feels like a metaphor.

Fig. 8 Boot and hubcap. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. reinsertion. 2010. Film
Still. Vancouver.
The shot of the boot and hubcap appears again near the end of the film. However,
the shot is jittery and the shoe has tipped over (Fig. 8). The palpable absence of the
owner of the boot changes in the closing; shot the tipped over boot over has an
aura of pathos and finality. My use of an empty boot to signify the absence of
persons who have come to a tragic end, mirrors the use of shoes and other
wearable artifacts in the work of artists concerning the Holocaust (Feinstein
123,125). Another artist who used shoes to represent absence of presence is Doris

45

Salcedos who uses the once worn shoes of “dead and disappeared” persons from
among the politically oppressed in Columbia (Gibbons 58). Salcedos and I both
made art about a population for whom death and disappearance are considered
normative by “First World Society”, due to the aboriginal status of the missing (64).

The use of shoes to represent the missing and murdered has been co-opted by
groups world wide and here in British Columbia as a potent symbol. “Shoe
Memorials”12 occur at the Comox Valley Art Gallery and on the steps the Vancouver
Art Gallery.

Through their marked absence in reinsertion, I am commenting that these women
were invisible and that this invisibility contributed to their deaths. The absence of
the women from the film, serves to highlight their marginalized position in our
society. Mollineaux references another marginalized population, the Black
diasphoric subject in Cadboro Bay through their absence by in her photographs
(Fatona 230). Mollineaux uses absence to prevent the objectification of the gaze.
“Mollineaux's insistence on visually leaving the Black body out of the frame closes
the shutter on any attempt to objectify the Black body through a domineering and
objectifying gaze” (Fatona 230). Similarly by denying the viewer the presence of
women as subject of my film I reject the objectifying gaze.

Similarly, Yvonne Rainier in The Man Who Envied Women restricts her audience

46

from having any visual relationship with the female protagonist of the film by

removing her presence from the visual (Rainer 42). The missing presence of
Downtown Eastside women in my film references feminist film theories about the
subversion of the male gaze (Mulvey Visual 19). Both Mulvey’s writing and film
practice have worked to find new means of representing women’s feelings and
experience (Mulvey Visual ix).

My insistence on pursuing the portrayal of sexual violence through suggestive
rather than graphic representation remains consistent with my past work. In
insurrection I used hand painted negatives on film depicting violent sexual assault
through the closed eyes of the victim (fig. 1). My next film, interception, is an
abstract narrative film made of dried fruit (fig. 2). Inspired by Eve's expulsion from
the Garden of Eden, interception explores the loss of innocence. It is a graphic
representation of the place within my mind that I escaped to while being raped. For
my film degradation I wrote the following synopsis. It translates the metaphors I was
assigning in an extremely abstract film.

The filmmaker finds herself transformed into Pandora as she opens a
reel of film and a cloud of insects surround her. A single moth
delicately, invisibly, embedded in the substance of the film symbolizes
original sin. The excrement, cocoons and dead bodies of moths and
their larva represent the disbursement and repercussions of incest.
12

Women’s organizations gather and display shoes with information about individual women. Shoe memorials

47

We see how the insidious spread of disease and evil erupt through the
mythological and historical defloration of women. Thousands of moths
were killed during the making of this film. Their bodies filled the frames

and sprocket holes. Thousands of girls are raped daily, their lives and
bodies treated as refuse.

The use of representation of ‘place’ into my work, along with the public nature of
the crime I am exploring, cause reinsertion to read as political rather than personal.
This does not mean that the film is without metaphor or not abstract or not
personal. My use of literal images of a recognizable place add another dimension,
the political, to what is visually and structurally an abstract experimental film.

in other countries memorialize the Holocaust, other war dead, victims of child abuse, and Iraqi orphans

48

film as object: editing

The physical challenge of shooting and processing 450 feet of film in 54 and 32
inch (two and three second) pieces is rigorous. The challenge of editing a film from
these black and white and colour negative strips without being able to see it move
until I am finished was a great risk, compounded by the permanence of the splice. I
hung all my negatives in a window with the northern sky as a light source. I rented a
hot splicer at the last possible moment, when my editing decisions were coming
together.

Fig. 9 Editing Room With Negatives. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena. Studio. 2010.
Digital Photograph. Vancouver.
I began editing in the center of the film with the pan across ‘Save on Meats’ and
created a roughly symmetrical pattern. The movement in the film (after the first six
seconds) is in reverse and in the still frames the images are flipped left to right. In
49

filmic language this emphasizes the effect of film as referencing the past and
memory. In terms of the past these reversals represent the delay in beginning an
investigation into the missing women. Family of victims had pointed a finger at the
Pickton farm back in 1997 when attempted murder charges against him were
dropped (Kamb). The lack of action on behalf of the missing women is shown
through still shots of Vancouver city hall and police stations. Metaphorically
showing them as stagnant and belonging to another century. My thoughts during
the editing process were very much on the women; these women are viewed as
disposable people. I used a personal metaphor of images of the ocean to represent
different woman. During one editorial decision making session, I sat looking at
photos of the women on the computer screen and cried. The effect of having
twenty months of filming, research and writing converge in two weeks of editing
was intense. According to Joan Gibbons, the time-exhaustive process of making
“renders the process as symbolic as the objects” in the work of Doris Salcedos
(Gibbons 63). I felt this ritual of process also when filming on corners where women
had disappeared. When editing I was surrounded with the visual content of my
negatives and engaging physically with the mechanism of my process; neg cutting
and hot splicing; the ritual of construction.

During the process of setting up the editing room, I built a small table that was
centered in the large picture windows. I covered the windows with plastic film and
wax paper to render them translucent. I laid two eight feet long light boxes on the
table. I brought in fruit, candles, and flowers, potted tulips and hyacinth, and placed
50

them on the table with the light boxes. Five days later, while documenting the room
and my process, it suddenly became clear to me that I had built an altar while
setting up the room. This formalizes the editing process into a semblance of a
sacred space with the small table with hot splicer playing the role of sacristy and
the act of splicing a strange sacrament. My relationship to the object of the film, the
absence of the women and my unspoken grief and rage when I consider these

Fig. 10 Film Reels and Hot-splicer at far Window. Del Pieve Gobbi, Rena.
Studio. 2010. Digital Photograph. Vancouver.
deaths, played out as a solitary ritual. As I arranged and cut the negatives, I
performed a ritualistic act, a personal ritual of mourning.

51

conclusion

A new consideration of the concept of the aesthetic aims to bring
materialism back into the equation and to offer experimental thinking
about the nature of ‘body’ and ‘subjectivity’ (Kennedy 20).

Upon beginning this journey, I wanted to tell a story that explored the idea of the
city of Vancouver as sexual predator, culpable for the deaths and disappearances
of women from the Downtown Eastside. I questioned whether it was appropriate for
me to tell this story. I also wondered if it was possible to communicate my political
message and the emotive dissonance of the subject with an experimental film. I
feel that I have tested and answered these goals and have had affirmative audience
responses.

My progress in the pursuit of this thesis and the accompanying film project has
broadened my reach. I recognize my desire to have my work disseminated, and
implemented changes in my filmmaking practice to increase its ability to
communicate. I also recognized my desire to focus within specific feminist agendas
such as appropriation, representation, and authorship. The changes that I made in
my artistic practice caused me to rethink the manner in which abstraction
functioned in my past work. It was necessary in reinsertion, to utilize more direct
visual communication and real world photographic images. This type of filmmaking
is more concrete, yet it retains the mutable poetic quality of my previous films.

52

My praxis and body of work exist as alternative narrative structures that will
ultimately be empowering for women. During the making of reinsertion I explored
ideas concerning authorship, marginalized populations, and voyeurism, issues that
are vital for women filmmakers to consider (Felshin 11, 255). I clearly see my
filmmaking practice consisting of an academic, feminist, and filmic ideology. The
main occurrence that has transpired through the creation of reinsertion is my
increased awareness of my desire to communicate feminist issues surrounding
sexual violence and the difficulty in doing so. The relationship between my material
practice and my subject has always been a close one. By shooting on 35mm still
cameras and hand processing the film two and three seconds at a time my
relationship to each shot, even each frame is accentuated. The time span of
shooting and processing the film is extended so that the most I shot and processed
in one day was eleven rolls of film, thirty-three seconds of footage. Each location,
each shot was carefully intentional. I remained faithful to my medium, and my
message by continuing to work in film, in the midst of another digital revolution with
HD equipment being readily accessible. I remain primarily a filmmaker, transmuting
my world into light.

53

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