“Something to Fall Through”: Grid Forms in The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (1986)

Abstract

Abstract: This article revisits Mike and Andy Jones’ 1986 feature film The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood, a landmark Newfoundland film that has appeared in too few accounts of Canadian cinema besides Darrell Varga’s groundbreaking treatise on Atlantic Canadian regional cinema, to analyze its pervasive use of grid forms, themes, and metaphors. It discusses the grid’s significance in the film beyond grid-reality, a theory that Faustus’s boss, Fred-Bonia Coombes, develops after seeing an expansive grid suspended in the sky when a friend gets fatally struck by a falling bag of frozen soup. In dialogue with writings on the grid as a form by thinkers such as Eugenie Brinkema and Rosalind Krauss, it examines the film’s graphic grids and metaphors—windows, chain-link fences, ceiling tiles, crosses, modernist architecture, television monitors, and a grape seed catcher—as crucial meeting points for structure and contingency. In doing so, this article not only makes an argument for the film’s historical or political importance for a culturally modernizing province or the Newfoundland Renaissance but also offers an in-depth reading of the film that argues for its historiographic and theoretical importance as a film that formally engages with questions of structure and contingency and cinema’s role therein.