Lindsay McIntyre: Indigenous Handmade Cinema

Abstract

Lindsay McIntyre is an awardwinning analog experimental filmmaker of Inuit and Scottish heritage who has made over forty short films in the last twenty years. She has contributed a body of knowledge to the practice of silver gelatin emulsion for motion picture film. In this essay, I explore how her analog filmmaking practice indigenizes handmade cinema as she breaks settler colonial silences to recuperate her Inuit matrilineal family history through film. Making her own film stock is an act of creative sovereignty and a way to reclaim 16mm film from the apparatus of the film industry while exerting control over the means of production. This is an especially powerful and salient reclamation given the long history of misrepresentation and extractive practices of the dominant film industry with regard to Indigenous stories and knowledge. There is a rich materiality to her films as her highcontrast 16mm film stock shows textures and marks of her own hand while also bearing the traces of the environmental conditions under which the film footage was shot including on her traditional territory in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), Nunavut. I argue that McIntyre’s inventive celluloidbased