Mediapolis Live: Joseph Clement at Film, Media, and Toronto’s Built Environment

This is a part recording of the March 2018 event "Film, Media, and Toronto’s Built Environment" presented at the University of Toronto during that year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference and organized by Mediapolis‘ own Stanley Corkin. In this episode, you hear the most utopian presentation of the night, from the second panellist, filmmaker and landscape architect Joseph Clement. Clement directed the 2016 documentary Integral Man, about Integral House and its original owner, James Stewart. Clement’s approach to the evening was to share a collection of his own personal photographs, a quietly stunning series of views taken amid his daily life in the city that showed it under the influence of plays of light, shadows and reflections. Several offered visions of the city’s pervasive concrete – a legacy particularly of development from the 1950s through 1970s – touched by fleeting ephemeral transformations. ¹ A sidewalk encased in construction scaffolding is marvellously changed by shadows created by its zigzag fencing. A watery reflection from opposite windows creates a patch of seeming transparency on the imposing and impenetrable limestone fin walls of the city’s courthouse. And in perhaps the most utopian of the collection, a photo taken of Toronto from beyond one of its harbour islands gives the impression that the city’s waterfront boasts a thick greenbelt and a natural sand beach. Clement’s poetic documentation of these imaginary realities amid the city’s built form inspired both a dreaminess about other possibilities and new appreciation for the latent merits of what already exists. (summary by Kate Lawrie Van de Ven)

This episode is from the archives of Mediapolis Live, precursor podcast to Mediapolis Now.