Vernacular Video: 3 Reviews
The following entries offer brief commentary on four local YouTube videos uploaded between 2007 and 2010. What can we learn by studying this vast public archive of PEI-based video work?
Snow in Prince Edward Island
Michael Poczynek, digital video, 00:06:51, 2007 December 30, Summerside, PEI
Michael Poczynek’s “Snow in Prince Edward Island'' begins on a snow-covered clay road dulled by woolly, viridescent daylight. Windshield wipers rise and fall ahead of the camera bouncing on the dash, recording the rig’s energetic vibrations as it rolls through the grey drifts. He stops, panning across obscured fields, then cuts abruptly back to the road as Summerside approaches, a song on the radio. Wet-looking cars with lit headlights pass by rows of red brick storefronts. Heading uptown, buildings scatter and give way to towering beacons beckoning through the wintery murk: Irving, Wendy’s, KFC, Petro-Can. The recording ends just shy of the 7-minute mark, as the rig rolls on toward the edge of town.
In studying their spatial power relations, Godfrey Baldacchino describes small islands as “epitomes of commodified represented space.” (1) Unlike mainlands without clear topographical borders, entire islands may be neatly objectified into coherent tourism brands (2). Representations that deviate from commodified “islandness”(3) may create more complex and critical notions of place, a truth that resonates in the contrast between local amateur video and the official tourism media hosted on YouTube. In relation to that ad material, amateur video is anomalous for its focus on reality and lived experience, rather than the fantastic, the bucolic or the “idyllic non-place of the past,” as Lucy Lippard has put it (4). To this point, by publishing recordings of PEI without allure or solicitation, amateur creators resist being interpolated by the island’s authorised narratives and their aesthetics of escapism.
“When you get a new camera you will record just about anything,” Michael Poczynek muses, somewhat self-deprecatingly, in his YouTube video caption. Poczynek is an Island realtor and YouTuber quick to take to the platform following its 2005 launch. “Snow in Prince Edward Island” is among his earliest uploads and remains one of the most popular videos on his active channel, having amassed over 22,000 views since 2007. Unlike his later uploads, which focus on questions and concerns posed by out-of-province property buyers, “Snow” is unique in its diaristic style and intention. In his quest to test out a new camera, Poczynek depicts the island just as it is: experienced in bad weather made harsher by uncleared roads; often ubiquitously North American, blue-collar and suburban; and, above all, passing through the frame on the opposite side of the windshield. The dreary antithesis of the sunny vacation marketing crystallises as one form of commodification gives way to another and the island transforms from tourist destination to regional franchise stronghold: pervasive, common, inescapable.
Potato Digging in Prince Edward Island, Canada
rockhardlyable, digital video, 00:00:14, 1 October 2010, Chelton, PEI
As a category, folk art is as vague and precarious as they come, yet nevertheless succeeds in evoking very specific feelings, images and cultural references. It is commonly defined as expressive production reflective of the cultural life of a community, created by community members who learn local art forms through demonstration, conversation and practice. Though it encompasses a diverse range of activities, traditions and crafted objects, folk aesthetics in our region possess many shared qualities, a few of which can be described in these terms: practical, pleasing, and prolific.
“Potato Digging in Prince Edward Island, Canada” is an early upload from active YouTuber rockhardlyable. The brief video portrays a potato truck exiting the field, soundtracked by his a cappella performance of the chorus of Stompin’ Tom Connors’ “Bud the Spud”:
Well it’s Bud the Spud, from the bright red mud
Rollin’ down the highway smilin’
The spuds are big on the back of that rig
‘Cuz they’re from Prince Edward Island
rockhardlyable’s “Potato Digging” implements each of the three aforementioned aesthetic qualities of local folk arts. The annalistic function of his recording demonstrates his concern for practical application. He pleases by recording local subjects, events and phenomena while appealing to his audience through references to regionally beloved pop culture. He is a prolific creator, generating videos in great quantities without the assurance of compensation, recognition or even viewership.
In arguing for home movies to be included in public archival collections, Judi Hetrick encourages folklorists to study and preserve folk culture in the form of amateur videos that document activities important to a community while following the community’s aesthetic standards (5). “Potato Digging'' is exemplary, not only as a folk document in its own right, but also as a meta-commentary on folk discourse. By boiling down these archetypal qualities into a fourteen-second thesis encapsulating the local folk aesthetic in its rawest form, rockhardlyable holds a mirror up to his audience as dual producers and consumers of folk culture.
Fire At Morley Annear Trucking Limited
Jeff Docherty, digital video, 00:05:12, 7 February 2010, Brudenell, PEI / A Drive Up Main Street Montague, PEI, Jeff Docherty, digital video, 00:02:26, 9 February 2010, Montague, PEI
On the afternoon of Sunday, February 7th, 2010, the offices of Morley Annear Trucking were destroyed by fire. Working simultaneously in the modes of a guerrilla documentarian and an experimental filmmaker, Jeff Docherty records the rows of firefighters looking on as waves of smoke rise from the transportation headquarters. He pans across the formidable sky, then captures closeups of the action before zooming out to focus once more on the sublime magnitude of smoke and debris. His dynamic camera movements imbue the scene with the texture and turbulence of a Turner canvas.
Two days after publishing “Fire At Morley Annear Trucking Limited,” Docherty uploaded a new video to his channel, depicting a calm and seemingly ordinary day. “A Drive Up Main Street Montague, PEI” begins on the south side of the Montague bridge; as Docherty continues north on Main Street he occasionally angles his camera to provide unobstructed views of significant landmarks (Sobeys, Superstore). As he nears the edge of town, he slows and turns into a conspicuously empty lot: none other than the former site of Morley Annear Trucking. Its scorched wreckage can be glimpsed beyond a barrier of yellow stanchions before the camera Is curtly shut off.
Creative hobbies, like amateur videography, present an opportunity for individuals to gain agency as community practitioners (6). By participating in the co-production of local knowledge through creative engagement in shared spaces such as YouTube (7), Docherty blurs the boundary between amateur and expert, consumer and producer (8). The expressive power of the citizen journalist is to represent local events through a uniquely grassroots lens. Why does Docherty conclude his peaceful drive through town at the site of the devastating fire witnessed in his previous video? Perhaps the creative liberty Docherty wields in this short series of documentary recordings is evidenced by his subtle insinuation that destruction and disaster patiently conspire just beyond the demure facade of small-town normalcy.
(1) Godfrey Baldacchino, “The Lure of the Island: A Spatial Analysis of Power Relations,” Journal of Marine and Island Cultures 1 no. 2 (2012): 57.
(2) Baldacchino, “The Lure of the Island,” 57.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Lucy R Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 85.
(5) Judi Hetrick, “Amateur Video Must Not be Overlooked,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 6, no. 1 (2006): 79.
(6) Fiona Hackney, Hannah Maughan, and Sarah Desmarais, “The Power of Quiet: Re-making Affective Amateur and Professional Textiles Agencies,” Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice 4, no. 1 (2016): 35.
(7) Hackney, Maughan, and Desmarais, “The Power of Quiet,” 57.
(8) Ibid., 38.
