Director/Camera/Editor: Mike McKinlay
Conceived and produced by: Kier-La Janisse
Canada/USA, 2019 Created for ByNWR.com
THE RITA is the noise project of Vancouver sound artist Sam McKinlay. A pioneer of harsh wall noise (HNW) who began in the late 1990s with Italian horror-influenced releases like Crusty Etruscans and Possessed Nun Sleaze (both 1998). After a brief hiatus to finish a fine arts degree, he returned with a vengeance with 2004’s Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence, which would kick off a highly prolific period that has taken him (and his audience) in a number of surprising directions.
McKinlay’s cinematic obsessions – which become quite literally the foundation for his sound pieces – have followed a fascinating trajectory from giallo and krimi films to sharks and Italian frogmen, to his greatest love: the classical ballet. This 30-minute film – directed, edited and shot by McKinlay’s brother, Mike McKinlay, himself an award-winning documentarian and cinematographer – traces Sam’s early days as a punk skateboarder through his academic development as a conceptual artist into a highly esteemed noise practitioner whose work bridges the gap between the gallery world and the sleaze of exploitation film imagery. It documents the physical processes of his work and the distillation of visuals into sound, most notably addressing the appeal of abstraction – from the cheap effects of old monster movie makeup to the ‘masks’ created by the heavy cosmetic makeup of 1920s flapper culture and actresses like Pamela Stanford in Jess Franco’s Lorna the Exorcist.
You can see the film exclusively at Nicolas Winding Refn’s website ByNWR.com HERE >>