Walking with Johanne Chagnon: Review of Promenade en forêt

Johanne Chagnon has, for over thirty years, been working as an artist in various fields. These include, film, writing, photography, art installations and performance art. She is also involved in what she calls, “artivisme,” which can be translated in English as ‘artivism.’ As she says in her bio, “I have always been motivated by a desire to intervene in the face of our inegalitarian world, inspired by a desire for social justice” (my translation). This desire has most recently driven Chagnon to devote more of her time to experimental video. Promenade en forêt (Walk in the Forest) is a recent and prime example of her experimental work.

As with any experimental work, it is not easy to describe or classify. Promenade en forêt, though, is of a piece with her other videos, with titles such as Caring for your Carcass or Still Life under Suspicious Circumstances and The Knives. All of these are permeated by a sense of dread and perhaps even horror.

Promenade en forêt is dominated by three colours: black, white and red. Chagnon herself poses as a white haired figure in a black forest. She resembles, if anything a sorceress or witch, or perhaps even a ghost, with her back turned to the camera. When she finally does turn towards the audience, she has no face. The textures and sounds express a profound fear. But the character is not afraid because she is lost in the forest. Rather, she seems to be struggling with the objects she finds, and in particular with a tree. In fact, she seems to be struggling with nothing less than the tenuous link between life and death. That link is characterized by the red strings we see throughout the film. These appear perhaps to be puppet strings, begging the question of who might be controlling them. At other times, these red lines appear as blood-red branches with a striking similarity to veins and arteries. They bring the lifeblood. There are, hanging from the trees, other scalps of long white hair and we wonder if these were previous wandered who did not survive.

There is also a clear element of gore here, that we find in Chagnon’s other videos as well. There is a dead fox hanging from a tree. And the protagonist here seems at times to be struggling with a bloody tree, which at times seems to be composed partly of raw meat. There are tufts of hair stuck to the tree as well. Near the end of the film, another colour appears: that of a fruit. The fruit will, perhaps, be a means of escape from this land of death and into life.

With a title like, Walk in the Forest, we would expect a peaceful and charming idyll. But what we have here borders on a horror film. The forest is, after all, an inherently unknown and potentially dangerous place. You never know what you’ll find in the woods. In this light, Promenade en forêt is like a parable for life. Behind the trappings of modern life, we are still animals in a fundamentally hostile environment struggling for our lives. There is a constant threat of death from unknown sources and we’re never quite sure who’s pulling the strings.

Chagnon’s interest in death and decay is a constant theme in her work. She in fact published a book composed entirely of pictures of dead birds that she found on the beach near her home (available on her website). But Chagnon is able to confront death and decay in a way that might be shocking, but somehow is not morbid. There is, underlying the blood, gore and frightening sounds, something thought-provoking and even peaceful in this film. It is, after all, in some sense a portrait of nature at work. Nature is slow, deliberate and alternates between life and death. Paying attention to this process, which again, runs constantly behind the veil of technology and comfort that characterizes most of our lives, is an essential component of living a reflective life. As an experimental film, Promenade en forêt works just as well as any painting that seeks to pull together the themes of life, death and the unknown.

By: Darida Rose