Frank Cole
The Sahara Desert occupies most of the northern continent
of Africa.
It's eight-and-a-half-million square kilometres in area,
and stretches
from Mauritania on the Atlantic coast, through Mali, Niger
and Chad,
and ends at the Red Sea in Sudan. It's arid, bleak and
unforgiving.
Outbreaks of civil war between various desert tribes spring
up
continuously along the entire route. The carcasses of the
desert's
victims -- camels, goats and scorpions - litter its vast
expanse,
having succumbed to the heat or the lack of water or the
violence of
its storms. What, then, would possess someone to traverse
this hell on
earth - alone?
In the case of the late Ottawa filmmaker Frank Cole,
equally obsessive
passions for love of life and fear of death were reasons
enough. In
1989, following the death of his grandfather, Cole set out
to cross the
Sahara. He carried with him water bottles, preventive
medication, his
grandfather's ashes and a Bolex camera equipped with a
timer. Over the
course of a year-long journey, he recorded in meticulous
detail the
adventure that would earn him a place in the Guinness Book
of World
Records. The journey would also earn him a unique position
in the world
of film. Life without Death, the 90-minute documentary that
Cole
created over the ensuing 10 years, is a haunting, brilliant
and
bittersweet homage to the pursuit of eternity.
Cole got his first taste of the desert as a young boy,
when his
father, a diplomat with the Canadian government, was posted
to North
Africa. His reaction to this encounter lasted throughout
his life. Cole
equated the barren landscape with a battleground on which
one could
fight - and beat - death. His first film, The Mountenays, a
quirky
documentary about modem-day hillbillies eking out a living
in the
woods, appears to have no connection to the place that
would become the
very foundation of his body of work. His second film, A
Documentary, is
a painstaking visual record of the death of his
grandmother. It is in
this work that one glimpses Cole's later obsessions. A
third film, A
Life, has some of the qualities that would serve to make
Life without
Death the brilliant work that it is. Cole went back to the
desert and
travelled parts of it by car with a companion; on his
return, he took
the various pieces of footage that had been recorded,
intertwining it
with footage shot in Ottawa. The film is without sound - no
dialogue,
no music - save for the noises of the desert itself, the
pounding of a
shoe on the sand, the wind and the stillness of the night.
At the
film's premiere at the National Archives in Ottawa, Cole
participated
in a Q&A after the screening. A man in the audience stood
up and
declared: "I believe I have seen a work of pure genius."
Cole then embarked on the first part of his next desert
sojourn. With
enviable focus, he removed himself from the fray of the
every day. He
spent his days in preparation for the gruelling trek from
the Atlantic
coast at Nema, Mauritania, to the coast of the Red Sea in
Sudan.
Consumed with the belief that death is a temporary cancer
that can be
treated, he built up his body and soul with, respectively,
exercise,
vitamins, a strict diet and solitude. As he states in the
opening
sequences of Life without Death, "I forced myself to become
a recluse,
to become a person so alone that I could never be crushed
by
loneliness."
I had met Cole in the days following his graduation from
the film
program at Algonquin College. Out of all the emerging
filmmakers who
were paving their way to the world of celluloid, Cole was,
it seemed,
the one - perhaps the only one - who grasped the medium
fully. As his
classmates went off to wait on tables and drive taxis, Cole
began an
exploration of his inner self that was so pure and so
honest that
others could only look on in awe. While developing as a
filmmaker, he
was also developing an interest in some of the things that
would later
see him labelled an eccentric: an obsessively low-fat diet;
an
existence devoid of "things" (his sparse apartment in a
nondescript
high rise in southeast Ottawa was empty, save for his
barbells and the
necessities of sleep and cooking); and, above all,
cryogenics, that
nebulous area from whence the stuff of science fiction is
born. Many an
argument would begin and end with the cryogenics thing.
"But Frank, if
everyone lives forever, where are they all going to live?"
H is
response: "There's lot's of space between here and
Toronto."
He lived as he filmed as he lived; nothing was ever half
way. When a
swim in the Gatineau River just north of Ottawa is
proposed, Cole
counters with a suggestion that the swim should be across
the river.
During a shopping expedition, he implies that his companion
doesn't
need the one or two practical purchases she is proposing,
but needs, in
fact, a whole new wardrobe. Cole's companion of many years,
Sonia
Hersig, reflects that Cole would frown upon what she was
eating at any
given time, especially if it contained even a trace of fat.
Fellow
filmmaker and friend Dan Sokolowski sums him up thusly: "He
was
obsessed with life."
The first trip to the desert with his family, and the
second with a
companion to record the footage that would become A Life,
had merely
whet his appetite. He knew that, in order to understand the
death of
his grandfather on his own very individual terms - and,
hence, the
meaning of death itself - he would need to embark on a
journey fraught
with danger and fear. He explained to Sokolowski: "The
desert is the
place I feel most alive." His terror of death was his fuel
for life.
On November 29, 1989, he set off from Nema with the first
of eight
camels that would accompany him through the following year.
Simply
remaining alive against the odds the desert presented would
have been
enough for anyone. Filming the trek brought the journey to
a completely
different level. And the final creation, the film that has
been
screened and discussed and analyzed in the two years since
it was
finally released, raised the bar on what can be
accomplished by one
determined, gifted man.
The film's haunting imagery - a camel's head against a
night sky
flashing with lightning; the arrival of the police in the
darkness
(they have been tracking Cole, determined to force him to
stop the
madness); the relentless, blistering sun, all intertwined
with images
of Cole's dying grandfather - is the culmination of the
creation of a
splendid painting made with moving pictures. Tom McSorley,
director of
the Canadian Film Institute (CFI) and a contributing editor
to Take
One, believes Cole "was like a landscape painter." When the
film was
screened on TVOntario's The View from Here, host Ian Brown
described it
as a "truly rare thing, a documentary that grabs you by the
throat and
doesn't let go, even when it ends many months and thousands
of miles
later."
Over the course of the passage, Cole learns a lot about
himself, and
we learn along with him, voyeurs to his agony, his cracked
skin, the
sickness induced by contaminated water, and, above all, his
thirst. At
one point Cole realizes, "If water was all there was in my
life, it
would be enough." At times, the biggest fear that haunts
him - dying in
his sleep at the hands of bandits - is so consuming that he
spends the
night completely alert, a knife planted beside his sleeping
bag. "The
longer I'm in the Sahara," says Cole, "the greater the odds
of dying
here." Were his nightly terror to become reality, he would
not be aware
of his own passing. "The death I fear more than any other
is death in
my sleep...to not be awake to face it...confront it...to
fight back."
Francis Miquet, a friend and fellow filmmaker who worked
closely with
Cole on Life without Death, believes that the fear factor
was a
critical characteristic of Cole the filmmaker and Cole the
man." He
liked to flirt with danger, and he wanted to get cl ose to
death in the
hope that by doing so he might overcome his fear of it. He
did not
expect he would die in the course of his most recent
trans-Saharan
crossing, but he understood the risks and was prepared to
die for
something he believed in," he says. Cole's determination
and passion
become abundantly clear as the film rolls. One of the first
statements
that Cole makes in the narration reflects his absolute
belief in being
able to beat the odds: "I strived to make myself a person
the Sahara
could not kill...a person whose outcome was life, not
death." Miquet,
who did much of the editing on the film, also scored the
music (Cole,
we had both noticed, didn't own a record, let alone a
machine on which
to play it). The music was structured and edited to reflect
the various
emotional states Cole experienced in the course of his
journey. The
narration, completed during the editing process, is
revealing and witty
and very, very Cole. His voice is monotone and, apparently,
without
emotion. But the images of Cole (he appears in at least 95
per cent of
the footage) are so riveting that it is impossible to look
away from
the screen. Although Cole forced himself to become
something of an
urban hermit in order to undertake his journey, he is
completely at
ease in front of the camera. Being in focus, in front of an
audience,
provided him with fuel, as did fear. Miquet reflects that
"he loved to
see himself on screen."
His life and his work were so intertwined that the line
between the
two could have easily disappeared. Those with whom he
shared his life -
and there weren't many - are unanimous in their agreement
that Cole was
his work. "You can't talk about Frank," says Sokolowski,
"without
talking about his film." McSorley believes that "Frank
found a metaphor
for his interior self." And Miquet says that, "His art was
his
blueprint for life. His film was the way he communicated
with the
world."
A decade after his return from the Sahara, Life without
Death started
making the rounds. Cole, ever enigmatic, left his
masterpiece in the
hands of others and didn't stick around to witness the
public reaction
to this extremely personal visual diary. He was back in the
desert,
launching another voyage. Why, after pouring himself into
his life's
work, did he choose to abandon its public birth? Miquet
says "He
couldn't live with the expectation of people asking him
'What next?' He
wanted to stop. He thought he'd said everything he had to
say."
Nevertheless, he took his camera with him when he returned
to the
Sahara.
In November of 2000, the CFI ran a retrospective of
Cole's work.
Unbeknownst to McSorley, and most of the others who
attended the
screenings, Cole had become the victim of the land that
possessed him,
body and soul. He had been bludgeoned to death by bandits
in Mali
sometime during the month of October. It took four months
to confirm
that the body that was found was, in fact, Cole's.
Some pop psychologists believe that our deepest desire is
to achieve
what we fear most. in Cole's case, this would be an apt
analysis.
McSorley speculates that "maybe he was out there searching
for death."
But the land that he loved - the barren dunes, the
carcass-littered
scrub, the heartless plateau that seems never ending - was
his saviour
and his enemy; his passion and his nemesis; his life and
his death.
Had Frank Cole survived, none can predict what would have
come next.
Those who admire his work all state that Life without Death
was the
epitome of filmmaking, and it would have been difficult, if
not
impossible, to improve upon. None can imagine him making
conventional
films. It is, in the end, a matter of personal speculation.
And there
is only one constant, one point that need not be debated.
He would have
returned to the endless desert, again and again, in search
of the
elusive - eternity.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Canadian Independent Film & Television
Publishing Association