Life without Frank - Cinematographer Frank Cole - Obituary

TAKE ONE, May, 2002 by Melanie Scott

The Sahara Desert occupies most of the northern continent of Africa. It's eight-and-a-half-million square kilometres in area, and stretches from Mauritania on the Atlantic coast, through Mali, Niger and Chad, and ends at the Red Sea in Sudan. It's arid, bleak and unforgiving. Outbreaks of civil war between various desert tribes spring up continuously along the entire route. The carcasses of the desert's victims -- camels, goats and scorpions - litter its vast expanse, having succumbed to the heat or the lack of water or the violence of its storms. What, then, would possess someone to traverse this hell on earth - alone?

In the case of the late Ottawa filmmaker Frank Cole, equally obsessive passions for love of life and fear of death were reasons enough. In 1989, following the death of his grandfather, Cole set out to cross the Sahara. He carried with him water bottles, preventive medication, his grandfather's ashes and a Bolex camera equipped with a timer. Over the course of a year-long journey, he recorded in meticulous detail the adventure that would earn him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. The journey would also earn him a unique position in the world of film. Life without Death, the 90-minute documentary that Cole created over the ensuing 10 years, is a haunting, brilliant and bittersweet homage to the pursuit of eternity.

Cole got his first taste of the desert as a young boy, when his father, a diplomat with the Canadian government, was posted to North Africa. His reaction to this encounter lasted throughout his life. Cole equated the barren landscape with a battleground on which one could fight - and beat - death. His first film, The Mountenays, a quirky documentary about modem-day hillbillies eking out a living in the woods, appears to have no connection to the place that would become the very foundation of his body of work. His second film, A Documentary, is a painstaking visual record of the death of his grandmother. It is in this work that one glimpses Cole's later obsessions. A third film, A Life, has some of the qualities that would serve to make Life without Death the brilliant work that it is. Cole went back to the desert and travelled parts of it by car with a companion; on his return, he took the various pieces of footage that had been recorded, intertwining it with footage shot in Ottawa. The film is without sound - no dialogue, no music - save for the noises of the desert itself, the pounding of a shoe on the sand, the wind and the stillness of the night. At the film's premiere at the National Archives in Ottawa, Cole participated in a Q&A after the screening. A man in the audience stood up and declared: "I believe I have seen a work of pure genius."

Cole then embarked on the first part of his next desert sojourn. With enviable focus, he removed himself from the fray of the every day. He spent his days in preparation for the gruelling trek from the Atlantic coast at Nema, Mauritania, to the coast of the Red Sea in Sudan. Consumed with the belief that death is a temporary cancer that can be treated, he built up his body and soul with, respectively, exercise, vitamins, a strict diet and solitude. As he states in the opening sequences of Life without Death, "I forced myself to become a recluse, to become a person so alone that I could never be crushed by loneliness."

I had met Cole in the days following his graduation from the film program at Algonquin College. Out of all the emerging filmmakers who were paving their way to the world of celluloid, Cole was, it seemed, the one - perhaps the only one - who grasped the medium fully. As his classmates went off to wait on tables and drive taxis, Cole began an exploration of his inner self that was so pure and so honest that others could only look on in awe. While developing as a filmmaker, he was also developing an interest in some of the things that would later see him labelled an eccentric: an obsessively low-fat diet; an existence devoid of "things" (his sparse apartment in a nondescript high rise in southeast Ottawa was empty, save for his barbells and the necessities of sleep and cooking); and, above all, cryogenics, that nebulous area from whence the stuff of science fiction is born. Many an argument would begin and end with the cryogenics thing. "But Frank, if everyone lives forever, where are they all going to live?" H is response: "There's lot's of space between here and Toronto."

He lived as he filmed as he lived; nothing was ever half way. When a swim in the Gatineau River just north of Ottawa is proposed, Cole counters with a suggestion that the swim should be across the river. During a shopping expedition, he implies that his companion doesn't need the one or two practical purchases she is proposing, but needs, in fact, a whole new wardrobe. Cole's companion of many years, Sonia Hersig, reflects that Cole would frown upon what she was eating at any given time, especially if it contained even a trace of fat. Fellow filmmaker and friend Dan Sokolowski sums him up thusly: "He was obsessed with life."