You Take Care Now

Not everyone can be an experimental filmmaker. Regardless of what some may think, it requires a good deal more than simply installing a static camera on a building for 8 hours or constructing erratic collages from poorly defined, vacillating images that will turn the most open-minded cinephiles into epileptics. One needs, in fact, to have something to say. Such was the case with Warhol in Empire State and with the works of Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom. It is also the case with Vancouverite Ann Marie Fleming and her striking film You Take Care Now. From the moment of its release in 1989, the barely 12-minute short made by a budding filmmaker in her early 20s elided its initial label as a banal student film, creating a shock wave that can still be felt today.

A film of impressions, visually poetic and seemingly chaotic with its combinations of real and re-enacted scenes cut with animated sequences, documentary tracking shots, found footage, and retouched images, You Take Care Now presents as an amalgam of dreams and memory. Edited to resemble cascades of thoughts, the film creates both emotional and intellectual connections between elements that at first blush appear unrelated, but which create dialogue and play off one another. In voiceover, with a tone bordering on innocuous, yet still eminently personal and delicately feminist, Fleming uses humour and empathy to tell the story of two profoundly intimate events that marked her life: a rape and an accident. You won’t walk away from this film unscathed.

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer