Hamilton Babylon: A History of the McMaster Film Board 9781442669185

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HAMILTON BABYLON A History of the McMaster Film Board

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STEPHEN BROOMER

Hamilton Babylon A History of the McMaster Film Board

University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4778-7 (cloth)  Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. ______________________________________________________________

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Broomer, Stephen, author Hamilton babylon : a history of the McMaster Film Board / Stephen Broomer. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4778-7 (bound) 1. McMaster Film Board. 2. Motion pictures − Production and direction – Ontario – Hamilton − History. 3. Motion pictures − Ontario – Hamilton − History. 4. Motion pictures, Canadian − Ontario – Hamilton − History. 5. Experimental films – Ontario − Hamilton − History and criticism. 6. Motion picture producers and directors − Ontario. I. Title. PN1993.5.C3B7 2016 791.4309713’52 C2015-905895-3 ______________________________________________________________

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

    Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

In memory of Peter Morris, 1937–2011, whose support and encouragement made this study possible.

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Contents

Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction  3 1 A Dangerous Precedent  11 2 Assembling Pleasure  38 3 A New President  70 4 Participatory Democracy  88 5 Seize the Projectors  114 6 Sync Sound Arrives  129 7 The Film Board Presidents on Trial  152 8 The Appeal  170 9 Show Business  192 Appendix: McMaster Film Board Filmography  211 Notes  219 Bibliography  241 Index  251

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Illustrations

1.1 Redpath 25 premieres at McMaster. McMaster Silhouette  21 1.2 Redpath 25 (1966), John Hofsess  24 2.1 Peter Rowe is dismissed as Film Board president. McMaster Silhouette  45 2.2 An ironic award pokes fun at John Hofsess. McMaster Silhouette 48 2.3 Palace of Pleasure (1966–7), John Hofsess  60 2.4 Palace of Pleasure (1966–7), John Hofsess  64 3.1 Buffalo Airport Visions (1967), Peter Rowe  74 3.2 To Paint the Park (1968), David Martin  79 3.3 … and dionysus died (1968), Bob Allington  86 4.1 Orientation (1968), Ivan Reitman  92 4.2 Ivan Reitman leads a camera workshop in Wentworth House. Marmor 1969  97 4.3 Walk On (1969), Jim Bennett  99 4.4 Garbage (1969), Eugene Levy  102 4.5 End (1969), G.W. Curran  104 4.6 Freak Film (1969), Ivan Reitman  108 6.1 Day Off (1970), Dan Goldberg  135 6.2 Lawrence Martin and Eugene Levy operate a Bolex. Marmor 1969  138 6.3 Jack and Jill (1970), Eugene Levy  140 6.4 Reversal (1970), Dennis Matheson  143 6.5 Civilization (1970), G.W. Curran  146 8.1 A Flower and a Penny (1971), Andrew Rainbow  178 8.2 Poor Richard’s Almanac (1971), Paul Schumacher  180 8.3 Haugh (1971), Bryce Kanbara  184 8.4 Penelope (1971), Graham Petrie  187

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Acknowledgments

In the decades after its disbandment, the student film board of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, was a subject of lingering, half-remembered controversy. In the late 1990s, three decades after its founding, that vague memory persisted, even in nearby Toronto, where, as a high school student interested in art and film, I first heard a yarn about a group of Canadian comedians who, in their youth, had scandalized their university campus by making pornographic films. In September 2006, I began my research into the McMaster Film Board after discovering writings on the work of avant-garde filmmaker John Hofsess. I discovered a story far more interesting than that yarn, one that would address the relation between art, pornography, and commerce; censorship in a society hostile to modern art; and the unrest of a student population that was growing increasingly disenchanted with the inherent value of education. As a study of the recent past, this history was informed by the testimony of its participants. For their recollections and insights, I thank John Hofsess, Peter Rowe, Robin Hilborn, Dan Goldberg, Rob Fothergill, Peter Morris, Peter Calamai, Willem Poolman, John Mayer, Lawrence Martin, Graham Petrie, Bryce Kanbara, Bruce and Kathryn Elder, and others who have generously reflected on this time and these events. I have been fortunate to receive input on this project at various stages from the following people, as readers or in discussion: John McCullough, Seth Feldman, Emmalyne Laurin, Cameron Moneo, R. Bruce Elder, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Eva Kolcze, Jim Shedden, Michael Zryd, and Suzie S.F. Young. This book bears a dedication to the late Peter Morris, pre-eminent historian of early Canadian cinema, a defender of free expression (as evidenced by his trial testimony in this

xii Acknowledgments

book), but also a friend who encouraged my writing in the years before this study began. My family has also been a tremendous source of support through this process, and to them I owe, among other things, my interest in the arts and in cinema. For this I thank my parents, Cherie and Stuart Broomer, and my brother, Geoffrey Broomer. My research was aided by the efforts of many archivists and librarians who actively devoted time to help facilitate my research. Those who in various capacities made it possible for me to see the films considered in this study include: Kathryn Elder (York University Sound and Moving Image Library), Lynn Lafontaine (Library and Archives Canada), Greg Boa, Tina Harvey, and Scott Low (Gatineau Preservation Centre), and Carl ­Spadoni (McMaster University Archives). John Gledhill, Bill Byers, and Jon ­Hedley provided further technical assistance. Others helped in accessing research materials relating to the McMaster Film Board and its members: Ian M ­ acdonald (legal consultant, Library and Archives C ­ anada), Richie Allen and Gilles Durocher (Reference, Library and Archives Canada), Daniel Somers (Library and Archives Canada), Bryan Pang (archivist, Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre), Barb Taylor (Archives of Ontario), Daniel Salisbury and Ron Ward (Privacy and Information Department, Archives of Ontario), Leslie Field (University of British Columbia Archives), Michael Moir (York University Archives), and Sharon Wang (Reference Librarian, Osgoode Hall Law School). My efforts in archiving and preserving these films have received the generous attention of curators and professors who have arranged opportunities for me to screen and discuss the work. My thanks to Scott Birdwise (Canadian Film Institute), André Loiselle (Carleton University), Jim Leach (Brock University), and James Quandt and Andréa Picard (Cinematheque Ontario). The final stage of this manuscript was completed during my tenure as Scholar-in-Residence at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre at Ryerson University. I am grateful for the support of the centre, its staff, and director Irene Gammel. I extend my thanks to the staff of University of Toronto Press, and to the peer reviewers whose responses to this study made a significant contribution to the final text. The labour of readying this work for publication was lightened by the dedication, support, and good humour of Siobhan McMenemy of University of Toronto Press. The subject of this book, an obscure body of student cinema, might only have slipped deeper into obscurity if not for her patience and enthusiasm.

HAMILTON BABYLON A History of the McMaster Film Board

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Introduction

The McMaster Film Board began in 1966, the project of a small circle of friends who had been active in the campus arts festival, film screening society, and theatre troupe of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The Film Board was founded largely through the work of one man, John Hofsess, who upon encountering the avant-garde films circulating through New York’s Film-Makers’ Cooperative, planned to pioneer such filmmaking in Canada through McMaster’s campus arts community. Almost immediately, Hofsess and company ran afoul of the university administration, the student union, and the local police. The organization was repeatedly threatened with closure until it was shut down in 1968, after just two years of operation. A few months later, the Film Board resumed operations under new management, but with its revival, the nature of filmmaking at McMaster changed. Under the direction of music student Ivan Reitman, the McMaster Film Board found success and acceptance on campus by subscribing to and excelling at the aesthetics and business model of mainstream filmmaking. Within a few years, in the hands of Reitman’s less capable successors, these same aspirations to commercial filmmaking would yield mediocre results, leading to the final dissolution of the Film Board. In the short history of student filmmaking and of film production courses in colleges and universities, the student film either has been an expression of youthful rebellion, innovation, and imitation, or has been looked upon as a test, as mere rehearsal for long-form narrative filmmaking, a “calling card” to lure investors and to inspire critical interest in emerging filmmakers. In the latter instance, student filmmaking becomes a graduated system: the filmmaker demonstrates professionalism and a sure hand with form and storytelling conventions, and

4  Hamilton Babylon

is rewarded with greater opportunities.1 Passion and originality are devalued, dwarfed by systematic derivation, held to contrived standards of “correct” and “incorrect” film form. This expectation of the student film, which has become dominant in recent decades, is an affront to the traditional role of the university. It feeds the cynical notion that education is only valuable if bartered for a career – that knowledge for the sake of knowledge or, for that matter, creativity for its own sake, is worthless. The college years of filmmakers who pass through such programs are spent in the mastery of conventional technique and immersion in a dominant ideology that resists critical growth. But in the fluid culture of the 1960s, cinema was a transformative force on campuses. Elenore Lester, writing on the emerging student film culture for New York Times Magazine in 1967, commented that the “new age has produced a new crop of creative young people who see an almost magical potential in making films themselves … They see the camera as uniquely the instrument of their generation, still rich with unexplored possibilities.”2 Students who pursued film in this context often did so at their own expense and on their own terms, without course credit, without formal instruction, working from amateur passions and earnest beliefs. They were influenced by modernism, music, poetry, and politics. Before the spread of applied film, media, and communications technology programs, students could engage with filmmaking through film societies, often cradled in the relative security of liberal arts campuses. University film societies became a place for students to pursue film, as makers, as actors, or as audiences. In Canada, it was a significant development for students to be making films; the nation had no substantial recent record of independent filmmaking, as Canada’s media were dominated by the state.3 In America, however, there had been an explosion of independent film production: from the genre films of Roger Corman to the improvised dramas of John Cassavetes, Americans had models for pursuing filmmaking. In Canada, cinema and broadcasting were the business of the government, and they were run as an echo of the motherland, Britain. Early on, Britain had recognized the power of cinema and broadcast media and had bureaucratized them, controlling them through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) and forcing households to purchase annual television licences for home viewing.4 In Canada, the ­Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the country’s National Film Board (NFB) had made of central importance the documentary film, and had built their mission on the

Introduction 5 

use of film for cultural preservation and promotion, and for education. They had not fostered a feature film industry.5 In Canadian universities, a different concept for cinema was forming, as students absorbed multiple sources: avant-garde art and underground film; American commercial film; international art house cinema; the politics of the age; newly available, once-banned literature; still-banned literature; poetry; and music, in the forms of modern jazz, blues, rock and roll, early electronic music, and experimental art music. In the 1960s, for the first time in Canada, students could make and see films starring their classmates, friends, and family. Students made personal films that were not mere home movies but works that drew from this convergence of art forms. At McMaster University, such opportunities came rapidly during the 1960s. Each step forward for student artists was met with opposition and warning from the administration and from their peers. Out of this tense setting the McMaster Film Board emerged, a student-run extension of the campus film society. The Film Board was conceived as a platform for students to train each other in filmmaking, with an emphasis on art and personal expression. Michael Zryd, in his writing on the relationship between the avant-garde and the formation of film studies as a discipline, presents avant-garde and underground film as something that was not widely pursued on campuses. He argues that “college film students still resisted the most radical forms [of filmmaking].”6 And yet, the McMaster Film Board was, in its early years, a hub of underground filmmaking in Canada. A diverse screening series introduced students to work beyond Hollywood, beyond European art cinema and Canadian government filmmaking, with screenings of experimental work by Shirley Clarke, Jonas Mekas, Paul Sharits, Ben Van Meter, and Andy Warhol, among others. During the waning years of the 1960s, the Film Board would adopt the business model of mainstream filmmaking. This commercial filmmaking eclipsed the personal and underground films that had taken up residence at McMaster in the mid-1960s. One hope transformed into another in polluted, provincial Hamilton. Founded on lofty aspirations to free expression, the Film Board now turned instead to developing the skills required for an independent film industry. The Board’s founders had been visionary, but their successors were far more practical. In the end, however, none was spared from the clumsy and brutal hand of the law, when these disparate leaders – artist founder John Hofsess and his business-savvy successors Ivan Reitman and Dan Goldberg – collaborated on a film that would be condemned as obscene.

6  Hamilton Babylon

A number of artists, critics, filmmakers, and actors emerged from this community to become major contributors to Canadian independent film and television. The McMaster Film Board would be marginalized by its very celebrity in the myth making that surrounded the meteoric rise during the 1970s of a small circle of commercial filmmakers who had launched their careers through the Film Board – Ivan Reitman, Dan Goldberg, and Eugene Levy. Through their tremendous success in Hollywood films and in television, they became campus heroes years after the controversies and struggles of the McMaster Film Board had been forgotten. Forgotten also were the group’s origins in the defence of freedom and love, values that were already evaporating from the youth culture of the 1960s in the instant they were spoken and that had long faded by the mid-1970s. Some figures rose to prominence through the mainstream appeal of their own comic inventions (for Reitman and Goldberg, the frat comedy of Animal House; for Levy, his contributions to Second City Television, or SCTV), while others moved on to write film criticism or to make films with the National Film Board and independent companies in the Toronto film and television scene. For many of the McMaster Film Board filmmakers, cinema had been a pastime, not a calling, and so they simply walked away from it for other pursuits. On the McMaster campus, the Film Board was faring poorly by the mid-1970s, declining under the pressures of an indifferent student union, with a limited budget and uninspired, even destructive leadership. By then, its leaders were already mythologizing their predecessors, distorting the Film Board’s history in the hope of building a future for the moribund organization. But that plan was built on the lie, or at least the misunderstanding, that filmmaking had been a fun-filled and easy pursuit for earlier Film Board cohorts, in an era of greater optimism. The truth was that, from the perspective of the administration and student union, the McMaster Film Board had been a festering sore on campus life from its beginnings. Keeping the organization active had been a constant struggle: in those first years, student filmmakers would be persecuted by the police and threatened with lawsuits by their own student union. Their films would be seized, ransomed, or destroyed. Michael Zryd recognizes a “tension between student filmmaking’s simultaneous urge to experiment and conform to mainstream and industry values,”7 and indeed such urges coexisted in the McMaster Film Board of the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, however, all that remained at the Film Board was the impulse towards conformity and an increasing ignorance of both underground and mainstream film

Introduction 7 

values. John Hofsess and Ivan Reitman typified conflicting ideologies. Hofsess and his collaborators represented the intellectual, psychological, and spiritual freedom that was once a perceived goal of education and of art. They took up their cause in a time of causes, when other Canadian students of similar disposition were instigating or joining organizations like SUPA (the Student Union for Peace Action). In their time they were subject to attack from their peers at McMaster; from students who were also obedient sons and daughters, fastened in the values of an older order, perceiving any voice against authority as a voice against their own beloved parents, as a personal offence; and from a cynical contingent of student journalists who greeted their activities with annoyance, bemusement, and disbelief. John Hofsess further aggravated this unwelcoming crowd; because he acted as campus provocateur, his questionable decisions, personal embarrassments, and impulsive and difficult character were under public scrutiny by his peers at the student newspaper. By the time Ivan Reitman and his colleagues took control, any popular support that Hofsess might have enjoyed, however marginal, had passed. Those students who had been offended by earlier Film Board films, or who had dismissed them cynically, were ready to be entertained, and to do so was Reitman and company’s main objective. The films that Reitman made and commissioned demonstrated a mastery of audience indulgence. Unlike his predecessors, Reitman was making uncontroversial films for mass appeal. The McMaster Film Board would no longer cater to the niche interests of art students. It is the goal of this study to bring these films to light. For many decades, the McMaster films went unseen, languishing in sundry archives, attics, and basements. Some of the films that are discussed here cannot be located, including the McMaster Film Board’s only feature (and most notorious work), Columbus of Sex (1969), which was the subject of an obscenity trial.8 These films cannot be held to simple qualitative judgments of good and bad, successful and unsuccessful, for most exist as unhindered youthful expressions, at times selfless and brave, at other times selfish and riddled with personal and general anxieties. The films made at the McMaster Film Board responded to the realist impulse in cinema that had dominated Canadian media institutions by their documental missions. Realism had been given a privileged place in the campus’s film society, from its early emphasis on international postwar realist film movements, to its later engagement with the socially conscious realist dramas (for example, those of Larry Kent and David

8  Hamilton Babylon

Secter) that had formed the basis for a new Canadian independent cinema. Against this, the McMaster films often looked beyond simple realism, towards more complex film forms, to resist realist renderings of the savage and unkind environment of Hamilton, Ontario. Whether the McMaster films take the form of libidinous memos, transfixing explorations of light, or comic parables of individual triumph, the ambitions of their makers survive in them. The strongest of these films were those that resisted realism and in doing so attempted to effect change, if not in the world, then at least in the harsh provincial realm in which they were made. The first of these films was John Hofsess’s Palace of Pleasure (1967), a work that was intended to “render the unconscious conscious.”9 Through its motifs, psychedelic lighting, and discontinuous editing, Hofsess intended the viewer to see and experience the world in a whole new way. It was in this spirit that avant-garde filmmaker, poet, and community leader Jonas Mekas had spoken to the Philadelphia College of Art in June 1966, declaring that avant-garde film had shifted from the political to the personal, in an attempt to “clean ourselves out … [of] everything that is dragging us down – the whole bag of horrors and lies and egos.”10 Hofsess aspired, like Mekas and his peers in the American avant-garde, to create an art of light. For him, as for Mekas, that light was a healing, cleansing power that could do away with all of the hopelessness and neurosis that he felt in himself and perceived in his generation. When Hofsess began to make films in 1966, there was no model for a Canadian avant-garde film. Arthur Lipsett, with his sardonic found-footage collage films, had set an isolated precedent through the National Film Board’s animation division. Those who would become Canada’s predominant avant-garde filmmakers were not present in English Canada’s independent film community at the time, and their activities stretched well beyond filmmaking. Toronto artists Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland had moved to New York City, working in many mediums, including film. They would not make a permanent return to Toronto until the early 1970s; London, Ontario, painters Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe, who had begun to make films in the mid-1960s, did not distribute their films widely; their friend ­Keewatin Dewdney’s discontinuous films, such as Maltese Cross Movement (1967), were made while he was a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Michigan. In the mid-1960s, English Canada’s experimental and independent film community was composed of Hofsess and a small handful of others active in Toronto and Hamilton, among

Introduction 9 

them Rob Fothergill and Burton Rubenstein.11 Of those present in the filmmaking community, Hofsess had the strongest and most original vision for cinema, and his Palace of Pleasure would not only inspire filmmakers in Toronto and Hamilton, but would reach audiences in New York and Los Angeles. Significant American film critics such as Roger Ebert and Gene Youngblood championed Hofsess’s challenging film form and his therapeutic intentions, and he found favour with Mekas, who once called Palace of Pleasure a vital part of the new cinema (of which Mekas was the prime ambassador). In the years that followed, Palace of Pleasure slipped into obscurity, changing hands over time, and pieces of it were thought lost and unrecoverable. Only a few voices remained to defend it and its maker: in his biography of David Cronenberg, Peter Morris, preeminent historian of early Canadian cinema, recalled Hofsess’s key role in bringing avant-garde cinema to Canadian audiences; critic Wheeler Winston Dixon, who had seen Palace of Pleasure in New York City in the 1960s, expressed surprise at its absence from Canadian film history scholarship, remembering it as “accomplished and deeply felt”;12 filmmaker and author R. Bruce Elder, a contemporary of Hofsess’s at McMaster, has repeatedly stressed the importance of Hofsess’s work, once describing him as “the leading Canadian avant-garde filmmaker of the mid-1960s”13 and as a maker of films that were “really and truly entrancing.”14 Despite this praise, the film went unseen from its initial circulation in 1967 until 2008, when it was recovered and restored in the course of this research. Palace of Pleasure and Hofsess’s second and final film, Columbus of Sex, disappeared from Canadian and avantgarde film history, a result of a multi-tiered battle between fledgling art and entrenched authority, between art and commerce, at a time when the line between artistic and commercial filmmaking was still pliant enough to benefit filmgoers and makers in developing and spreading new expressions and styles. The disappearance of these films was not the only loss of the ­McMaster Film Board, which achieved so much in its first four years and received so little in turn. The Film Board fell into historical neglect. Much of its documentation was destroyed or lost, and none of its films remained in circulation. The rare tributes it received in print were riddled with misinformation. The McMaster filmmakers had created powerful, personal works. Some were seen widely and received distribution, launching their makers on major careers in commercial filmmaking. Others were seen only on the Hamilton campus. But not

10  Hamilton Babylon

all films exist to be seen widely, and many of the finest and bravest expressions to come from the Film Board were made for their campus audience. The act of making the films was consuming and satisfying in itself. No greater ambition was necessary. These films cut a quick path to obscurity, but are herein reclaimed as records of their time, and of the joys, pains, passions, and values of their little-known makers. Of the twenty-seven films completed through the McMaster Film Board between 1966 and 1974, twenty-two are known to have survived, most as unique film prints, some in lamentable condition, and many under the care of Library and Archives Canada, the country’s national archives, which inherited them from the Canadian Film Institute in 1975. Within this book, I have documented these works as exhaustively as possible. I hope that this study might lead to the recovery of those films that remain missing, and that it will encourage an informed assumption of the McMaster Film Board into history.

chapter one

A Dangerous Precedent

Hamilton, Ontario, is a steel-mill town on the western shore of Lake Ontario, located between the populous provincial capital Toronto and the picturesque Niagara Falls (and Buffalo) on the Queen Elizabeth Way. A port city culled from the ashes of the War of 1812 for its strategic importance, it was shaped through the nineteenth century by a series of steel companies and trade routes. Eventually local industry was split between two steel plants: steelworkers were employed at the unionized Stelco and the non-unionized Dofasco. In its heyday the steel industry rendered Hamilton the sulphurous nadir of Canadian cities, but the city’s nostalgic historic sites and national museums would speak of a nobler aspiration: the Art Gallery of Hamilton, incorporated in 1914; the Royal Botanical Gardens, built during the Great Depression as a make-work project; and Dundurn Castle, an 18,000-square-foot neoclassical mansion restored as a civic museum. But only McMaster University, relocated from nearby Toronto in 1930, could challenge the steel industry for attention. In 1959, the first university-based research nuclear reactor within the British Commonwealth was completed at McMaster. Its esteemed medical school was founded in 1966. The McMaster of the 1960s was a symbol of conservative English Canada’s power. Any challenge to school protocol could be perceived as a challenge to the fabric of Canadian conservative thought. On campus, intellectual life was geared towards traditional academic disciplines, rooted in the sciences and humanities. Prestigious faculty included philosopher George Grant, best known for the ethical conservatism of his 1965 book Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism and his writings on the perils of unbridled technology.

12  Hamilton Babylon

Students interested in artistic pursuits were largely responsible for their own creative growth. This was an era when communication arts, such as cinema and photography, guided and gave expression to the discord between new and traditional culture. Never before were the tools of these arts more accessible, and the McMaster community, through its Student Union, supported student cultural interests, within limits. Without significant faculty support and input, student art activities might have been prohibited. A shifting moral order was present in the artwork that McMaster students would create and exhibit. This work would soon bring creative students, the Student Union, the administration, and Hamilton’s citizenry into conflicts that rapidly spiralled into chaos, with authoritarian interventions, arrests, and censorship. Student filmmakers, alternately messiahs and pariahs for the campus paper, would have their works condemned, seized, censored, and ransomed by the university administration, their own Student Union, and the state. The McMaster Film Society Wentworth House opened in 1957 as McMaster’s first student centre, housing a student services department and a cafeteria. By the 1960s, it had become the hangout for the campus arts movement and its leaders. The Board of Publications was located there, and with it the The Silhouette, a weekly student newspaper. A number of student clubs and associations had offices in the building, and soon a social clique formed within the Wentworth House community: Hamilton-born mature student John Hofsess, Silhouette film critic Peter Rowe, arts festival organizers Patricia Murphy and Neil Cole, graduate student Rob Fothergill, and a cosmopolitan professor, Bernhard Banaschewski, who headed the Department of Mathematics. The campus’s first Film Society developed out of the Wentworth House Camera Club, founded by Toshio Nanba in 1962 as an outlet for student photographers.1 Within a week of Nanba’s announcement of the Camera Club, which stated that film screenings would be a part of club activities, another student, Doug Taylor, introduced the McMaster University Film Society, announcing an initial screening of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950).2 European art cinema would remain a dominant attraction for students when, in October 1963, new club president Patricia Murphy began the season with a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957),3 but Murphy’s leadership would soon take the Film Society in progressive and, to some, shocking new directions.

A Dangerous Precedent  13 

In the winter of 1964, the McMaster Film Society invited student filmmaker Larry Kent, from the University of British Columbia (UBC), to screen his sexually frank feature The Bitter Ash (1963). Semi-improvised in the style of American director John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959), the film is about the sexual crisis of a solipsistic typesetter who, feeling trapped by the prospect of marrying his pregnant girlfriend, initiates a casual affair with an unhappily married woman. Kent, a theatre student at UBC, would soon develop a successful independent filmmaking career, replete with taboo sexual themes, drug use, and profanity. The Bitter Ash was notorious before it reached Ontario: the British Columbia film censors had already banned it. A Toronto minister, H.A.M. Whyte, wrote letters of protest to McMaster University president H.G. Thode and Hamilton mayor Victor Copps, demanding that the film be denied a campus screening. Thode complied.4 Concern had already arisen among the Film Society’s executive about the film’s content. They resolved to have a private screening of the film for the club’s executive members to decide on its fitness for public exhibition. Some on the executive opposed this, denouncing the act of withholding the film from their fellow students as a form of censorship.5 The Reverend Whyte’s son Stephen, a McMaster student, told the campus paper that based on what he had heard of its content, Kent’s film could have nothing but a detrimental effect on the student body: “This could pervert them for the rest of their lives.”6 The Bitter Ash never received a public screening at McMaster. This was the first of the film-related controversies that embroiled the McMaster arts community through the 1960s. For the Film Society, it marked a move away from the programming of European art cinema, programming that for two years had been uncontested by the administration. They would instead move towards an emerging independent cinema of radical aesthetic and political values, a cinema that was raw and often inflammatory. The Bitter Ash controversy also raised awareness among students as to the business of filmmaking, via newfound exposure to the regulations, and hypocrisies, of censorship. Cinema was no longer merely something to be seen, but something that could be made.7 This was a revelation for young Canadians. The country’s cinema and television were then exclusive, government-sanctioned institutions, their caretakers being the National Film Board (NFB) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). National media production was entrenched in educational and documentary programming. Both the NFB and CBC owed ideological debts to Britain, where

14  Hamilton Babylon

cinema and broadcasting had been recognized as powerful weapons to be kept in the hands of the state.8 The apparent inaccessibility of filmmaking would discourage many young Canadians from choosing it as a vocation, but this changed with the birth of the new independent film.9 Amateur film formats were inexpensive. Small-gauge formats such as 8mm and 16mm were now realizing their potential as artists’ materials, as a form for different approaches to seeing, to storytelling, or to the materiality of film itself. In the hands of amateurs, artists, and students, cinema could resume a freedom of form, as it had at its outset, before the establishment of conventional narrative grammar and the formal mastery of Sergei Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith. The expressive possibility of personal filmmaking became clear on the McMaster campus in 1964. Members of the Wentworth House group, primarily Neil Cole and Patricia Murphy, were tasked with organizing the McMaster Arts Festival, an annual forum established in 1962 to showcase student art and to bring students into contact with professional artists of national and international stature.10 In November 1964, McMaster Arts Festival headliners included the Cannonball Adderley Sextet, novelist John Barth, literary critic Leslie Fiedler, poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and Québécois filmmaker Claude Jutra.11 Jutra had just been in a motorcycle accident, badly injuring his head, but he nevertheless appeared to present his autobiographical narrative feature À tout prendre.12 In it, Jutra had cast himself as Claude, a young filmmaker who is driven to suicide. Disillusioned by an affair with a model and further by realization of his homosexuality, Claude walks off a pier and drowns. Jutra, then in his mid-thirties, had worked with the National Film Board for over a decade. For this feature, he won his third Canadian Film Award.13 That Tuesday evening, 10 November, Jutra spoke at McMaster’s Convocation Hall. In the audience was student John Hofsess, who a decade later would reflect on the strong impression left by Jutra and À tout prendre: “[Jutra] was an unknown film maker, painfully shy and thoroughly drunk, trying hard to screw up enough courage to make a few inarticulate remarks to the assembled group of students, glad to find even 100 people to see his first feature À tout prendre … For most people present, À tout prendre was a pleasant surprise, a good film out of the Canadian nowhere. For me, it was more than that; it was a life-changing film that made me aware for the first time that there was, or could be, and someday would be, a Canadian film industry.”14 The poetic and personal film culture of the 1960s was a far cry from

A Dangerous Precedent  15 

the anthropological and educational subjects of past Canadian films. The National Film Board, from its origins in propaganda, had produced films of great technical innovation and patriotic messages and as such were not so ambiguous, critical, or introspective. They demonstrated the harmonious life of Canadians, the diversity of society, the vastness of the landscape. Above all, the NFB’s postwar cinema encouraged immigration in the hopes of further populating the land. Their films were educational and generalized to appeal to the masses. The new Canadian feature film cared little for these values. À tout prendre and The Bitter Ash, arising from distinct communities, one from central Canada, the other from the west coast, signalled the arrival of a Canadian cinema that was unafraid of expressing anxiety and dissatisfaction. Its ambitions were not bureaucratic and goal-oriented; rather, it was the work of artists and poets seeking to render accurate accounts of their culture and their time. They did so not in the formal grammar of the educational documentary, but in the form of the narrative feature film. And their films were of the same formal persuasions as the most radical narrative features of their time, those of the American Independent Cinema and the French New Wave. Another harbinger of a Canadian independent film culture arrived at McMaster a few months later. On 8 February 1965, Larry Kent’s second feature, Sweet Substitute, was allowed to screen for the McMaster Film Society with the stipulation, put forth by the Ontario Board of ­Censors, that it be shown to a restricted audience.15 Sweet Substitute, the second entry in what would become Kent’s informal “Vancouver trilogy” (along with The Bitter Ash and When Tomorrow Dies), follows the sexual frustrations of a pair of high school seniors who are keen to shed their virginity. Like The Bitter Ash, it was semi-improvised. Sweet Substitute not only demonstrated the continuing practice of an independent ­filmmaker, it also suggested the financial viability of independent Canadian film, going on to become profitable in the United States under the title Caressed. At the end of the screening, the Film Society executive asked viewers to respond to a questionnaire about their feelings on viewing Sweet Substitute. Bernhard Banaschewski, the Film Society’s faculty adviser, had designed the questionnaire to serve as a challenge to the provincial censors, who had objected to a public screening on the grounds that the film featured profane dialogue that would not be tolerated in a commercial film. The censors felt that an independent film should conform to the moral standards of mainstream cinema. Banaschewski believed

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that the results of his survey would demonstrate that others did not share the Board of Censors’s sensitivities. The results showed that the majority of the audience disagreed with the censors: “Did you find any of the following objectionable? (Language, yes: 16, no: 84. Scenes, yes: 16, no: 84. Subject matter, yes: 11, no: 89).”16 The values of the provincial censors, tasked with defending community morality, diverged sharply from those of the vast majority of students present. With his survey, Banaschewski was able to demonstrate a shifting moral order, his statistics contradicting the pronouncements of the censors. The discrepancy between the audience and the censors suggests, first, that the censors were no longer informed as to the directions of cinema and were unable to adjust their criteria and judgments to accommodate the demand for the new cinema. Second, it might then be said that if the provincial censors did represent a greater majority in society, a majority that would protest Sweet Substitute on the basis of its language and sexual content, then the campus audience was a separate demographic, one that might therefore have its own community standards. A Round Peg The Film Society’s passage from screening films to making films would largely result from one man’s efforts. John Hofsess had represented a thorn in the side of McMaster protocol virtually from his arrival. An insistent product of the working class, Hofsess first entered McMaster as a busboy when he was fifteen years old. He had enrolled as a special student in extension classes in 1958 at age twenty but dropped out before the term had started. By his account, Hofsess left Hamilton for Toronto, returning at twenty-three to care for his parents, who were in serious financial and physical distress. He became both breadwinner and live-in nurse for them. A voracious reader, Hofsess began to write essays in his spare time. He shared them with a supportive philosophy professor, John Mayer. Soon a promising opportunity arose for Hofsess to become a McMaster student again. Hofsess would later relate: “Dr. Mayer informed me that he had shown several of my articles to Dr. R.M. Wiles, Chairman of the English Department, and that it was possible for me to enter full-time study at McMaster … I learned that I had been accepted as a special student in a programme of 4th year English studies.”17 Hofsess received a letter from McMaster’s Dean A.W. Patrick consenting to his admission to a set of advanced courses beginning in

A Dangerous Precedent  17 

fall 1963. He worked at the Canadian National Railway by night and attended classes by day. Tirelessly contributing to campus art activities, writing for the campus paper, and working nights, Hofsess had difficulty functioning as a student. By June 1965, after failing or missing his second-year exams, Hofsess was barred from re-admission to the university. He remained involved with the Wentworth group, spending his days sitting in on classes and contributing to the campus newspaper, the Silhouette, and literary journal, the Muse. When the administration discovered that he was still attending classes and participating in extra-curricular activities, they took action, sending two employees of the bursar’s office to eject Hofsess forcibly from the campus. Hofsess’s private dilemma had become campus drama. A frustrated Hofsess would eventually write a letter detailing the history of his student life to be circulated through the McMaster administration and the English Department in February 1966. In it, he recounted his financial and personal difficulties and his desire, against adversity, to achieve an education. Hofsess claimed that Dean Patrick, upon first admitting him, had informed him that the unusual arrangements of his admission were to be kept confidential. If he did well, his position would be clarified; he would become a regular student and graduate upon meeting all requirements. For his second academic year, 1964–5, Patrick had designed a program of study that, when completed, would grant Hofsess prerequisite credits to the English and philosophy courses that he would be taking. As he began this course of study, Hofsess found himself with mounting bookstore debts and limited resources to cover them. He continued to work full-time at Canadian National Railway until 20 February 1965. “I left on that date,” he wrote, “not because my expenses were less, but because it was necessary – at all costs – to do so. I began selling my personal belongings: a taperecorder, a stereo phonograph, my typewriter. These were all that I had in terms of goods that were saleable.”18 Concerned that he would not be able to continue as planned, Hofsess approached English chair Wiles and was directed to Ivor Wynne, the dean of students. Hofsess told Wynne that he could not afford to borrow more funds on a short-term basis because he would not have the resources to repay it all before the following September. Acting on good reports from Wiles and English professor Norman Shrive, Wynne arranged some funding for Hofsess through other sources. But Hofsess was still having difficulty keeping up with his assignments, and his exams were pending. “There is no precedent in my life for the tension

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and paralysis I experienced at this crucial time. While I do hold myself responsible for those days and weeks in which I tried to study, fearfully tried to justify the hopes of all who had helped me, the diverse causes of the strain practically defies description. I felt physically exhausted; there was hardly a day that I retained food.”19 Hofsess wrote the first of his exams, History 2A6, and failed. He did not write the rest. Hofsess brought his case to Dean Patrick, who suggested that Hofsess might be allowed to write his exams at a later date. Patrick took the matter to the dean’s committee. They decided that Hofsess was unsuitable for re-admission to McMaster University. As a probationary student, he did not have the right to repeat the year. The dean’s committee did not consult Hofsess’s supporters in the English department, although according to Hofsess’s open letter, Patrick claimed that Hofsess had “lost support in the English department.”20 To make matters worse, the university turned Hofsess’s account over to a collection agency. The conflict between Hofsess and the administration came to a head the following term. He continued to attend classes despite his non-­ student status. On Tuesday, 1 February, the two men from the bursar’s office arrived at the McMaster Silhouette office. They inquired as to Hofsess’s whereabouts, but were misinformed. As Hofsess sat in professors Gordon Vichert and James Noxon’s Eighteenth-Century Philosophy in Literature seminar, the men stationed themselves elsewhere, outside of Arts 307. Their orders were to bar Hofsess from attendance and to order him from the campus. They failed in their task, but by the following day, their inquiries and intentions had become public knowledge throughout Wentworth House, and Hofsess began assembling his letter. Hofsess took his unique situation as the basis for a general polemic against the administration, citing hearsay to call out the university leaders for their misleading arrangements: “Who knows what the rights (if any) of a ‘special’ student are? I agreed to the secret arrangements and the arbitrary decisions made in private because I had no choice. As early as 1963, three weeks after I had been attending classes, Dr. Mayer informed me that at a private party Dean Patrick expressed views of ‘deep resentment’ that ‘Mayer had twisted his arm’ into setting a ‘dangerous precedent which he already regretted’ … I was quite hurt and puzzled to hear of this. I was told such views wouldn’t matter once I was brought before a faculty meeting; as late as December 1965, my case still had not been aired at a faculty meeting … In attempting to ascertain my status as a student, following what appeared to be my

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expulsion from McMaster University, I discovered that my academic record of 1963–64 was termed ‘non-negotiable’ with any other Canadian university. It was ‘meaningless.’”21 Hofsess’s curious student career, and its dramatic termination, would overlap and impinge on his role in McMaster’s student art community, the two creating a web of failure, recrimination, rejection, and earnest affirmation. Official disdain could not keep John Hofsess from taking leadership of the campus art movement. By the beginning of 1966, Hofsess, Silhouette film critic Peter Rowe, and science student Robin Hilborn were becoming interested in filmmaking.22 Together they established an informal student filmmaking club. The group’s first project was to document that year’s McMaster Winter Carnival with a 16mm camera. Filmed in January 1966, Coldfinger was described by Hofsess as “a satirical documentary about last year’s Winter Carnival, featuring in ‘cameo roles’ the sublimely beautiful Mary Simms, the entire BOP [Board of Publications] in a hilarious broomball battle with SEC [Student Executive Council] members, and dozens of other students revealingly shot in candid moments … It features everything from the McMaster Marlins losing another battle in the Dundas Arena; the Snow Queen contest; to the picturesque ice formations that accumulate over Webster’s Falls.”23 Coldfinger was twenty minutes long, in black and white.24 Although the film primarily documented an event, Hofsess’s description suggests a staged, playful construction that would distinguish it from home filmmaking. Peter Rowe recalls that other members of the art community were involved in its production, among them Patricia Murphy, and that the film bore the influence of Richard Lester’s mod, whimsical Beatles films A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965).25 The film would sit unedited for months, finally premiering on campus in late November on a double bill with the Mae West vehicle She Done Him Wrong (1933). Upon its premiere, Susan Woll reviewed it for the Silhouette: “No one idea or viewpoint dominates the camera’s vision, which makes the movie less acute than it might have been. However some funny scenes, both spontaneous and planned, evolve before the camera.”26 In the spring of 1966, not long after the bursar’s office had attempted to eject him from campus, Hofsess was informed that a committee of Student Executive Council and Board of Publications representatives had selected him to take on the editorship of the McMaster Muse, the campus literary journal, for which Hofsess had previously written short fiction. In what he termed “an attempt to improve its quality and reputation,” Hofsess brought to the Board of Publications a proposal

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for a new format: an 8” by 11” magazine, with glossy and soft-textured paper differentiating content, to be released as a quarterly.27 Hofsess enlisted McMaster students Jelte Kuipers as art editor, F. James Allan as photographer, and Alan Robertson as designer of the magazine’s logo and stationary. For contributors, he enlisted McMaster alumni no longer affiliated with the university: Neil Cole, then in Montreal; Allan Bell, then at the University of Buffalo; and Lloyd Abbey at the University of Western Ontario. For Hofsess, distinctions of present, past, and non-student status would not regulate his journal’s content. The journal was a creative forum, and he felt that authors should not be hindered by their registration status, much as he felt that his own unregistered attendance in seminars should have been allowed. After all, he was appointed as editor by the student body, and he himself was not a student. In short time, the Muse would become mired in controversy. Redpath 25 and the McMaster Film Board In his memoir of the founding of the Canadian Film-makers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), Rob Fothergill, then a graduate student at McMaster, remembers that John Hofsess and Art Festival programmer Patricia Murphy visited New York to see the avant-garde films issuing from the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative. The Cooperative had flourished under the direction of its founder, filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Fothergill, who in his capacity as director of the CFMDC would later act as distributor for many of these “underground” films, describes them as “a mixed bag of formal and technical experimentation, some of them highly crafted cinematic poems, others more-or-less random assemblages of found footage, some deadly serious, others wildly anarchic, some strikingly original, others trashy and ephemeral – but all in their various ways free, inventive, anti-conventional, and very hip.”28 The trip was inspiring for Hofsess and Murphy. Their first group film project, Coldfinger, had emulated the quirky pop cinema that was by then widely embraced as commercial counterculture, but Hofsess wanted to move in the more daring and difficult directions of the American underground. Peter Rowe had hitchhiked through America in the summer of 1966, along with David Martin, the president of the McMaster Dramatic Society. On returning to Hamilton in early fall, Rowe found that John Hofsess had taken steps towards legitimizing a student filmmaking cooperative and, further, had completed a second film. The new film

1.1  Redpath 25 premieres at McMaster in Arts 1A, 5 October 1966.

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was called Redpath 25, and it had cost roughly $200 to produce.29 It starred Patricia Murphy and Norman Walker. Its title was taken from Canada’s Redpath Sugar Company and the drug lysergic acid diethylamide 25, or LSD-25 (popularly known as acid). Trace amounts of LSD were commonly distributed on sugar cubes as a psychotropic treat. In the film, young lovers are covered in whipped cream in an environment of geometric sculptures, flowers, and tin foil walls, lit in red and orange. Coldfinger collaborator Robin Hilborn had bleached portions of the film’s emulsion away and then hand-painted each bleached frame, lending haunting abstract dimensions to Hofsess’s photography. Rowe recalls Hofsess’s ambition: “He had made Redpath 25, and he was getting Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol to write articles for the Muse Quarterly. It was a student journal, but he was asking Andy Warhol to write articles for it. He didn’t have any concept of limits. He thought that he was going to do this at McMaster and so he had to formalize this McMaster Film Board.”30 Hofsess needed a student front so that the Student Executive Council would approve the Board. In early fall 1966, Peter Rowe became the McMaster Film Board’s first president, and Robin Hilborn its first vice-president. An audience of more than seventy students and faculty filed into Arts 1A on 5 October 1966 for a screening of their new Film Board’s first production. The lights dimmed and the projector revved up. The familiar face of Patricia Murphy appeared on screen. She is seated in a psychedelic, alien space. A tiny red ball hangs from the ceiling; near it are yellow flowers. Metal rings of various sizes orbit the ball. Behind this sculpture is Murphy’s face, lit in red and yellow. The focus racks from her face to the objects in front of her. The screen is filled with colourful, reflective tin foil. Hofsess’s soft-focus cinematography transforms solid objects into porous shapes; he pans, surveying them patiently, and then repeats the pan, speeding past them in a blur. Lineless, porous subjects fill the screen, and the young woman’s fantasy begins. She stands before a wall of tin foil. When she approaches the foil, green and yellow lights pass over the metallic sheet. Obscure reflections show in it; red and orange light jets in sharp angles on its creased surface. Peeling the foil, Murphy reveals her fantasy lover (Norman Walker), sandy-haired, broad-shouldered, and expressionless. She wears a striped vinyl raincoat. He is naked. She cuts the tin foil with a serrated knife, slicing the foil in a downward direction, past Walker’s genitals, past his legs, for him to step out from it. A fountain spouts up

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a geyser, lit by a red light that flashes on and off, colouring the water. She places her hands on his neck and his chest, facing him, and pushes against his body, forcing herself down upon her knees. The lovers’ exchange is shown in fleeting images, their outfits and positions shifting. Murphy wears a black studded dress and lies in a bed of flowers. She feeds Walker flower petals, nourishing and nursing him. When she feeds him, she is feeding a manifestation of her imagination, feeding her imagination itself. An ellipsis occurs, and she is lying on her back, her naked torso concealed by whipped cream and cherries. The addition of the whipped cream and cherries did not merely protect the film from censorship, as one reviewer observed;31 it emphasized the film’s sensuality, a sensuality beyond the arousing vision, one that might transmit odour, taste, and touch. Redpath 25 parades, from its outset, a preoccupation with taste and touch, senses inherently idle in the perception of cinema. The search for sensual and psychological renewal would become a principal theme of Hofsess’s filmmaking. He aspired to create a synaesthetic film form, one that offered new sensual knowledge to the spectator and that would involuntarily excite other faculties through aural and visual stimulation. In Redpath 25, there is an underlying principle that the immersive sensations of cinema, like the immersion of fantasy itself, can move the whole sensual spectrum of the organism. In a final sequence, Walker smells Murphy’s shoulder and hair, embracing her, fulfilling her fantasy through an implied coital stimulation and release. She is alone again. She blows out a candle, and smoke rises from its spent wick. This fantasy is oneiric, a dream of erotic fulfilment realized only in the psyche. The film ends in a satisfied emptiness that holds hope for new pleasures, for renewal and repetition: Redpath 25 is a reverie in the absence of pleasure. Robin Hilborn’s abstract images are integrated with the scenes of the lovers, intensifying the film’s plastic qualities with swelling forms, changing colours, patterns, explosions of solid colour, etchings, lacerations, and chemical imprints that foreground the material base of the film, diminishing the film’s representational quality. Hilborn had taken Hofsess’s footage and applied techniques borrowed from the canon of experimental cameraless filmmaking. Emulsion was scratched away with razor blades and swabbed away with bleach. New pigments were painted in with nail polish and food colouring.32 These techniques were integrated with the scenes of the lovers, even intruding on those scenes as Hilborn destroyed and recreated the lovers’ bodies. Through Hilborn’s

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1.2   A kinetic sculpture is bathed in red light in Redpath 25 (1966).

techniques, the hallucinated lover, in profile, is etched away. The lover finally vanishes entirely, only to be reconstituted through the gradual return of emulsion, from a scintilla to a full portrait. For a soundtrack, Hofsess assembled a collage of rock music, featuring Sandy Bull’s “Memphis, Tennessee,” an extended jam on a theme by Chuck Berry, from Bull’s 1964 LP Inventions. Bull had overdubbed himself on guitar and other plectrum string instruments, accompanied by jazz drummer Billy Higgins. Bull’s loose rhythm and jangling, microtonal slidework augmented the immersive atmosphere of red light, geometric sculptures, and brightly lit flesh. The soundtrack also memorably included British rock group The Who’s “My Generation”; singer Roger Daltrey’s ironic stutter as he’s “t-t-talkin’ ’bout” his generation accompanies John Hofsess’s similarly stuttering, fragmentary

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fable of fleshy desires. The lovers caressing in their red realm are a tender contrast to the explosive, staccato sounds of their generation. In the Silhouette Review, the arts supplement to the campus paper, Susan Woll wrote of the broader North American context for Redpath 25, of John Hofsess’s leading by example in creating a sensual film of daring ambitions, one that did not adhere to the mainstream film form to which its first audience, and the majority of filmgoers, were accustomed. She pointed to New York City as a focal point for independent filmmaking, and as a clear source for Hofsess’s film. In her analysis, Woll distinguishes the two interacting forms, the narrative of the lovers and Robin Hilborn’s abstractions, as “open-eye” and “closed-eye” hallucinations.33 These terms had entered the discourse around psychedelic experience. The closed-eye hallucination is associated with the phenomenon of phosphenes, the experience of witnessing light without light stimulating the retina, an experience known since antiquity that can be seen in the elementary physiological experiment of applying pressure to shut eyes. The concept of open- and closed-eye hallucination offered an analogy by which to differentiate the abstract from the non-abstract; further, it afforded Hofsess a philosophic organizing principle that would allow him to shift between the two and to rationalize his film form as extending from the visual and visually comprehensible to the psychic and sensual. Hofsess’s interest in closed-eye vision may have been influenced by a statement that Jonas Mekas gave him in an interview for the Muse when Hofsess asked about the relationship between drugs and underground cinema: “the ‘psychedelic experience’ is one that can be experienced without any drugs. Stan Brakhage never takes any drugs but visually he has gone further than any of the filmmakers in capturing what we call ‘closed eye’ vision.”34 Brakhage, one of the leading figures of American avant-garde film, had spoken and written extensively of open- and closed-eye vision, particularly of closed-eye vision and its relation to painting on film. For Brakhage, painting on film was the closest approximation to his experience of closed-eye vision. Hofsess’s discussion of these concepts, and similar aspects of his later films, evoked universal experiences of sensual stimuli, such as orgasmic release. Like Brakhage, Hofsess denied the relation of such techniques to manufactured psychedelic drugs. In his writings, Hofsess would demonstrate considerable disdain for drug culture mentality, despite his exploitation of its code in adopting the title Redpath 25. Hofsess refers to his title as a trippy affectation, recalling Parker Tyler’s remarks in his Underground Film regarding the “insidious

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Drug Attitude” of psychedelic art; Tyler believed that the filmmaker who simulates drug-induced consciousness is evading the responsibilities of art. “The Underground filmmaker … has to overcome much infantile self-indulgence and fashionable camp hauteur.”35 Tyler might condemn Hofsess’s campy, indulgent, extra-textual explanations of his title, but Redpath 25 goes beyond its druggy title: the film is committed to the sublime experience of new sensual knowledge, and not merely the orgasmic, explosive groove of a lightshow made to accompany doctored sugar. Hofsess’s use of the concept of open- and closed-eye vision is literalized in an early close-up on Murphy’s eyes: her eyes are shown open, then closed, the act of opening and closing lost in a hard cut. In this way, the film posits that fantasy is something that we imagine ourselves into, something ordered and rational, like watching a play in which figures interact, like watching Murphy and her fantasy lover as comprehensible forms. But it also contends that fantasy is something inescapably within us, a state of impulsive musing that cannot be represented through detachment and rationality, but rather through the disruptive, spontaneous, chance elements of lived experience, conveyed here through Hilborn’s effects and Hofsess’s rapid, metaphoric, illusory juxtapositions. When he spoke of Redpath 25 publicly, and wrote on it in the Silhouette, Hofsess characterized the film as a “hallucinatory fantasia in color.”36 Although this double nature of fantasy – as representable and beyond representation – was undoubtedly a conscious element in his work, he would offer only this succinct summary. As a work of sensual art, it was tremendously arousing, transcending the visual stimulation of erotic realism. But it was the formal representation of these open- and closed-eye hallucinations, and the act of drawing attention to their simultaneity in the editing process, that were John Hofsess’s most significant achievements with Redpath 25. This complexity of representation and contrast of forms would soon evolve to greater effect as his filmmaking extended into new aesthetic territory. Redpath 25 was a revelation for its audience. It had some narrative values, as a series of photographed, representational scenes involving characters, but it was not the conventional narrative film to which students were accustomed. It had no dialogue, its events were revealed in strictly visual terms, and it engaged with aesthetics in a way that would have been unfamiliar to most members of its first audience. Campus filmgoers were not ignorant when it came to art cinema, but few in Arts 1A that night would have seen the films of Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren,

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or the works of the New York underground. Of those present that night, Hofsess and Patricia Murphy had the greatest first-hand exposure to such films through their experience in New York. Some students found the film reprehensible, not understanding it as anything more than drug culture self-indulgence; others praised it as a profound experience, a new standard for the campus art community, for its properties of free associative sequencing, its sensual gratification, and its contemplation of the mysteries of vision and of freedom itself. For those McMaster students who felt stifled by the traditional values imposed on the campus by its administration, Redpath 25 offered an alternative. Two days after the screening, two separate articles appeared in the Silhouette, one unsigned and the other by John Hofsess. The unsigned article featured a quotation from Film Board president Peter Rowe in which he claimed that the Calvin Company, industrial and educational film producers in Kansas, had refused to print Redpath 25. No reason was given, but Rowe implied that their refusal might be attributed to the film’s sexually provocative content, saying that Redpath 25 “was not the type of film they would want their children to see.”37 Hofsess would later explain the printer’s concerns about subliminal imagery: “printing firms have refused Redpath 25 because of several ‘subliminal’ sections, two or three frames each, which they termed obscene. The fact that when projected at 24 fps some sections are imperceptible consciously made no difference to them.”38 Hofsess’s article featured Peter Rowe’s explanation of the operations of the McMaster Film Board: “Students simply have to request our 8mm. equipment and outline a schedule for shooting. They will be given any assistance they need in handling lighting, or in the editing of their films. Then, when the films have been shown to the Board and all its members, it may be commissioned for a 16mm version, with release prints and soundtrack.” David Martin announced on behalf of the McMaster Dramatic Society that they welcomed an active student Film Board, and even offered it a practical direction, saying that it might now be possible “to preserve on film dramatic performances by McMaster students and thus … build a permanent library of [our] growth and that of the university.”39 Hofsess noted that the Film Board’s first co-production with the Dramatic Society would involve the filming of a one-act play, though it was still in debate as to whether this would be a student-penned play or one by a recognized playwright.40 Two other “MFB” works-in-progress were also announced in the 7 October article: an animated film by Jelte Kuipers, juxtaposing “savage caricatures with serene watercolour paintings,”

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and a “Chaplin-esque comedy in black and white” written by Russ Brown and B.A. Veldhuis, photographed by Rowe. Unlike Larry Kent and Claude Jutra, whose interests lay in costly feature-length realist filmmaking, the McMaster Film Board intended to disperse its funding among several individuals and to finance short films. As a consequence, the McMaster films did not share the social realism of other Canadian independent filmmakers. They followed the models for short filmmaking that were known to them: Jelte Kuipers’s project might suggest the work of the National Film Board’s animation division, as a self-aware comment on the artist’s process; Brown and Veldhuis’s project suggests the American silent comedy, an escapist and slapstick form; and Hofsess’s Redpath 25 followed the model of the American underground film, for which the contrivance of narrative realism was an obstacle to communicating greater truths of experience and vision. Alongside the Film Board’s announcement, a notice appeared that controversial New York rock-band The Fugs would be performing at the McMaster Arts Festival that November. Their song titles “Having a Wet Dream over You” and “Coca-Cola Douche” were listed for further provocation. The Fugs took their name from the vernacular spelling of “fuck” in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Beat poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg led the group. Sanders was the founder and editor of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Its credo was “I’ll print anything.” Fuck You was an important forum for major American poets of the era such as Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen. When the Peace Eye Bookstore, Sanders’s Greenwich Village storefront, was raided in the opening seconds of 1966 (at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve), the notoriety landed Sanders on the cover of Life magazine. In contrast to Sanders’s approach to magazine editing, Hofsess’s was moderate. He modelled his Muse on the Evergreen Review of the day. Nevertheless, his plans for a revamped and quarterly Muse were enmeshed in controversy. He had secured the rights to include a full-text first printing of Fred Watson’s one-act play Infanticide in the House of Fred Ginger. There were plans to print a collection of letters by James Joyce, edited by prominent Joyce critic and biographer Richard Ellmann, and interviews had been arranged with prominent literary critic Northrop Frye, erotica publisher Ralph Ginzburg, and philosophers Walter Kaufmann and Marshall McLuhan. Hofsess’s only issue as editor, published as Muse 66–67, featured the Watson play; interviews with the Fugs and Jonas Mekas by Patricia Murphy

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and John Hofsess respectively; and reviews of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. Hofsess had established a bold student publication, featuring original material that had been compiled to appeal to students of contemporary art and literature. It was assembled outside the confines of student life to probe and enrich the values of the McMaster community and beyond. Something about Hofsess’s conduct, however, displeased the Student Executive Council (SEC). They threatened to cut the Muse’s budget unless Hofsess was removed as Muse Quarterly editor. The Board of Publications complied. “The Hofsess Case” Redpath 25 had its American premiere on the following Monday, 10 October, at New York’s 41st Street Filmmakers Cinematheque. While Hofsess was enjoying the film’s New York debut, his status at McMaster had hardly improved. He faced renewed opposition, this time from members of the Student Executive Council and the Board of Publications. At their annual budget meeting on 12 October, the Student Executive Council moved that John Hofsess be banned from all student activities. The motion was passed by a vote of two for the motion and four abstentions. A distinct minority forced Hofsess from his position as Muse editor and from any official involvement with the Silhouette and the Film Board, but it was a minority supported by the indifference and silence of four members who did not wish to become involved. In that Friday’s edition of the Silhouette, an editorial argued that this ruling did not result, as the SEC claimed, from Hofsess’s unregistered status at the university, but was instead brought on by “a long series of problems with University officialdom … far too complex and sordid to outline.”41 The editorial contended that the methods employed by the SEC denied Hofsess the opportunity to defend his involvement with these student publications and clubs. Declaring that readers, too, might find themselves dismissed without explanation, the editorial concludes: “The SEC may have been right in banning John Hofsess, but the methods used were tragically wrong. Mr. Hofsess has been swept safely under the rug but a dangerous precedent has been set in the process.”42 As this was happening, the McMaster Arts Festival, scheduled for 12–20 November, was experiencing some last-minute cancellations. The theme of that year’s festival was “The Arts in the Age of Technology.”

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Announcements had prominently featured two groups as ambassadors of the New York underground: The Fugs, and Andy Warhol’s travelling happening called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. On 13 October, Patricia Conway, McMaster cultural affairs commissioner, and Russ Brown, head of the Arts Festival committee, travelled to New York for a Friday night performance by the Fugs in Greenwich Village. The Fugs’ invitation to perform at the Arts Festival was on the verge of being revoked. The Silhouette advertisement of their upcoming appearance had alarmed the administration and the Student Union. Conway and Brown had been sent to investigate the “obscene” nature of the Fugs’ work. Student Union president Lachlan MacLachlan stated, “The artistic value of the Fugs is certainly questionable and therefore their act is being looked into.”43 Brown and Conway were to report to MacLachlan, who would in turn report to Dean of Students Ivor Wynne, which would leave the future of the performance in the hands of the university administration, not the Student Union. By 19 October, a petition in support of John Hofsess was being circulated. The Board of Publications publicly challenged the Council’s decision: “While it accept[ed] the contention Hofsess can’t hold an executive position, it [couldn’t] agree he should be banned from all students’ union activities.”44 In a frustrated letter to the editor of the Silhouette, Hofsess detailed the conflict between authentic student culture and the culture imposed on students by the administration. The student leadership, wishing to appear wholesome, had maintained the dated cultural values of the administration: for the 1966 Winter Carnival, the Student Executive Council and Student Representative Assembly (referred to jointly as the SEC-SRA, the two governing bodies of the Student Union) had approved hiring the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra at a cost of $2,200.45 In that same spirit, the SEC-SRA conspired with the McMaster administration to cancel the Fugs performance and ignored their supporters. “The ban which is imposed on them out of fear and ignorance,” Hofsess wrote, “is an insult to the students as a whole.”46 Patricia Conway regretfully reported the cancellation in the Silhouette but remained vocal in her defence of the Fugs, expressing unspecific concern that the group would not be tolerated on campus. In the Fugs, Conway had recognized a profound liberation that she knew was out of reach for the puritanical, regressive student body. She vividly describes one Fugs song as occurring “in complete darkness with a throbbing blast of electronic sound. It is emptiness, hopelessness, loneliness. In the face of this, why quibble about words? We could ask them to tone down their performance – to

A Dangerous Precedent  31 

stick to political satire and poetry – to refrain from saying those nasty words. But that seems a little silly since [they’re] free to say what they feel – what a lot of people feel but can’t or won’t say.”47 Hofsess found considerable support in the student art community. Muse photographer F. James Allan wrote a letter to the editor of the Silhouette in defence of Hofsess (whom Allan never identifies by name), charging that this dismissal on the grounds of “non-student” status was reflective of a greater cultural and intellectual malaise on campus. Mathematics professor Bernhard Banaschewski also came to Hofsess’s defence, demanding that he be allowed to defend himself with a full explanation. Peter Rowe argued passionately for Hofsess in a letter to the editor, trying to deflect the suggestion that Hofsess’s story was emblematic of student struggles with authority. Some of those writing letters to the editor had dubbed it “The Hofsess Case,” rhetoric that could only exacerbate the dispute. Rowe countered the argument that Hofsess’s potential reinstatement could set a precedent for students’ rights. He believed that Hofsess’s dismissal had little to do with his registration status but was rather a result of the Council’s personal disdain for Hofsess. Rather than being a greater issue of student rights, the dismissal reflected only the Council’s ingratitude for Hofsess’s valiant service. Rowe began with a concession: “Regardless of Mr. Hofsess’s beliefs, feelings and actions which many, including myself, would consider strange, I feel he is the most active, alive and important person in the University community.” He continued, “It is my contention that not only were John Hofsess’s actions right, but that without him what I consider to be an important organization not only at McMaster but in the ‘Underground’ movie circuit as a whole, would not exist. John Hofsess created the Film Board, just as much as he created Muse Quarterly and this year’s Arts Festival. The good he achieved will always be considered by me at least to be worth far more than the questionable constitutional wrong he might have done. The McMaster Student Union managed to lose for itself its most valuable asset and the person who at the time of his secret dismissal worked hardest on their behalf and for their benefit.”48 The Toronto Film Community On 4 November 1966, in the days leading up to the McMaster Arts Festival, John Hofsess exhibited Redpath 25 in a short film program organized by fellow filmmaker Glen McCauley at the University of Toronto’s Victoria

32  Hamilton Babylon

College. Marilyn Beker reviewed the screening for the Varsity, the University of Toronto’s student newspaper: “Out of nowhere, suddenly a blond boy with a gentle voice introduced Redpath 25 and things started happening. It was a trip extraordinaire into the sexual fantasy of a girl who looked a little like Sylvia Tyson. Her imaginary lover, and I gasped when I saw him, looked like every Greek God should – chiseled features, blond hair, massive chest and quiet eyes. There were marvelous shots of flowers, naked flesh, tin foil, whipped cream and eyes and lips and hair. The movie is love magnified a thousand times with all the bad parts left out … I went away thinking that the blond quiet-voiced boy was rather beautiful. Seeing that film was like finding a guru.”49 The following week, in the Varsity, John Hofsess began a series of articles on the establishment of the McMaster Film Board, describing the need for both a production and distribution centre. He cited the Film Board’s distribution of independent films – Glen McCauley’s This and Sam Gupta and Rob Fothergill’s Oddballs – and announced four newly commissioned films: untitled animated and experimental films by Jelte Kuipers and Robin Hilborn respectively, Peter Rowe’s Film for Spike, Secombe and Sellers, and Hofsess’s own Black Zero. Black Zero was announced to follow Redpath 25 as the second part in a trilogy.50 Toronto’s independent film scene was thriving, and, as in Hamilton, it had sprung from the local student community. In 1965, David Secter, a University of Toronto student, had made Winter Kept Us Warm. In Secter’s film, a university senior develops a crush on a same-sex junior. The film left a strong mark on Toronto’s young filmmakers, among them future director David Cronenberg, for whom the experience of seeing friends act on film made the elusive possibility of a filmmaking career a foreseeable reality.51 Winter Kept Us Warm begins with the passage in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” from which it takes its title: “Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.”52 Secter’s tribute acknowledges Eliot as a major influence on his intimate, independent, and intensely personal narrative filmmaking. Eliot was the dominant intellectual authority of mid-twentieth-century English literature, and many filmmakers concerned with personal expression worked under the influence of his introspective, elegiac poetry and criticism. This influence was especially prominent within the English programs of universities, where David Secter, David Cronenberg, Larry Kent, John Hofsess, and others were taking courses while making films.

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By fall 1966, Secter had directed a second feature, The Offering. The $60,000 film received a limited theatrical release and won a Canadian Film Award, but its success was in part hindered by local unionized film and television workers who, having not been hired to work on the film, used their affiliation with the projectionists’ union to Secter’s disadvantage. Any production deemed undesirable by the craft workers could be blacklisted, effectively keeping it out of Toronto theatres.53 This tactic led to a very limited Toronto engagement for The Offering. Nonetheless, it was sold to Columbia Pictures and gained Secter audiences with American agents.54 Like Larry Kent’s American sale of his Sweet Substitute, Secter’s short domestic career demonstrates, through his success with Columbia Pictures, that there was an audience beyond university campuses for independent dramatic Canadian filmmaking, and that successful filmmaking could emerge from anywhere, including campuses. To their peers, Kent and Secter proved that serious artistic and dramatic filmmaking did not have to be imported, nor did it have to be a government product. John Hofsess’s efforts to create a distribution centre for independent film were made all the more important because of the local industry’s suppression of Secter. His Varsity articles announced an independent distribution system – modelled on the New York Film-Makers’ ­Cooperative – that would allow filmmakers to have their work seen without the consent of existing industrial film distribution platforms. In a way it also followed the model that John Grierson had outlined early in his tenure at the National Film Board, what he called the “nontheatrical revolution,” which disregarded the institutional mechanisms of theatrical cinema to instead bring films to “educational classes in schools and universities” and elsewhere.55 Just as David Secter had encountered difficulty and negative attention for his naive approach to the business of filmmaking, so too would Hofsess; and just as Larry Kent’s work had been met with censorship and accusations of obscenity, Hofsess’s films would also encounter resistance from censors and the law. As the McMaster Film Board began to produce films in the late fall of 1966, more independent feature films were going into production in Toronto, such as Julius Kohanyi’s Bittersweet and Iain Ewing’s Picaro.56 Like Kent, Jutra, and Secter, Kohanyi and Ewing were working within feature-length narrative form with a bent towards social realism. Independent filmmaking was slowly developing in southern Ontario, but the McMaster Film Board was unique in their resistance to realism,

34  Hamilton Babylon

their commitment to the short form, and their persistent attempts (primarily on Hofsess’s part) to organize the growing independent filmmaking community. In his next Varsity article, Hofsess voiced practical concerns about the Film Board’s limited budget, including two traditional problems young filmmakers faced: obtaining equipment and film stock, “which in most instances have a prohibitive price,” and having their film distributed, “in order to receive criticism, recognition and revenues for future work.” For him, contemporary practices demonstrated “a system best mastered by those with more talent for wheeling-and-dealing than for actually making good films.” In organizing collectively to address these problems, amateur filmmakers were “creating the conditions in which creativity can thrive.”57 Hofsess often insisted that he was pursuing utopian ends, a claim that must be looked upon with some reservation. His battles were waged around what was beneficial to him, and with masterful rhetoric, he would project these benefits upon his peers while concealing his own stake. In this case, Hofsess was seeking to improve creative conditions for the greater good, for his own good, and ostensibly for the good of those who would follow him. The creative act, in his experience, was met first with material obstacles, and then with fulfilling the expectations of distributors. Commercial distributors would not, generally speaking, have any interest in the short subjects that had been made or proposed at the McMaster Film Board, or for that matter the films screened at the Victoria College program (those of Rob Fothergill, Sam Gupta, and Glen McCauley), because there was a very limited theatrical market for short subjects, let alone short subjects that often defied classification. In order to gain distribution, and consequently critical attention and revenues, a filmmaker would need to either meet the expectations of the distributor – that is, to make a feature-length film of commercial promise – or self-distribute. A week after the Victoria College screening, the London Film Society at the University of Western Ontario screened Redpath 25 alongside animator John Straiton’s Portrait of Lydia (1964) and Secter’s Winter Kept Us Warm. In the Western Gazette, the student newspaper of the University of Western Ontario, Tony Phillips praised Hofsess’s film as “an eleven-minute bath of hypersensation” and “a superb example of what independent film makers should be doing … A kaleidoscope of colours, accompanied by a cacophony of sound impinge[s] on the viewer’s receptors, teasing his perpetual defenses, and forcing his association areas into all sorts of novel interfaculty collaborations which

A Dangerous Precedent  35 

are necessary for the comprehension of this fantasy.”58 Phillips wrote that Redpath 25 would “soon be joined by two other segments to form a 75-minute trilogy.” The article announced that the McMaster Film Board was interested in hearing from filmmakers and invited any interested filmmakers to write to Hofsess care of the McMaster Film Board. The ambitions of the Film Board were already beginning to stretch well beyond Hamilton and the McMaster campus. McMaster Arts Festival 1966 Even without the Fugs, the 1966 McMaster Arts Festival was an important opportunity for the campus community to experience a program of radical art, most of it on film. That year’s film screening was a mix of east and west coast American underground film: Bridges-GoRound (Shirley Clarke, 1958); Relativity (Ed Emshwiller, 1966); Cosmic Ray (Bruce Conner, 1962); Up Tight, L.A. Is Burning … Shit (Ben Van Meter, 1965–6); Ray Gun Virus (Paul Sharits, 1966); and Jonas Mekas’s feature drama The Brig (1964), a filmed performance of Kenneth H. Brown’s off-Broadway play of the same name.59 While in the past the festival organizers had programmed one or two features and invited filmmakers and critics, such as Québécois filmmaker Claude Jutra and Canadian Film Institute curator Peter Morris, as guest speakers, the program of underground short films was an intentional departure from past programs.60 It was in keeping with Patricia Murphy’s encouragement of student creativity, as when she brought Larry Kent to McMaster as an example of a peer filmmaker. Kent was working outside of the exclusionary, dominant production models of Hollywood and European art cinema. Interested students not only saw his work, but also witnessed the trials that he endured in reaching an audience. The New York shorts had been inexpensive to make, at least in relation to what the student body might otherwise see. This underground cinema was not only a fiscally sound and accessible mode of filmmaking, but a critical cinema of wit and power, of diverse viewpoints and idioms, a cinema that deftly shifted between realism, surrealism, the poetic, the visionary. It had a heightened relevance to the students of 1966, amid spectres of protest, racial and economic disparity, and social and sexual revolution. John Hofsess’s Redpath 25 was again screened, but now McMaster students could view it alongside works from the New York film community that had inspired it.

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In addition to the film programming, the Arts Festival featured a performance of Fred Watson’s Infanticide in the House of Fred Ginger, as well as musical performances by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and the electronic music pioneer Udo Kasemets. Visiting lecturers included philosopher Walter Kaufmann, jazz critic Leonard Feather, American poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, and Canadian poets Earle Birney and James Reaney.61 The festival opened with Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), which featured the deadpan-nihilist rock band The Velvet Underground with Nico. As an intermedia event, EPI had no equivalent in North American art.62 It was a living record of Warhol’s career to date, combining his pop art sensibilities with performances by members of his Factory community. EPI would pair the Velvet Underground’s live, hypnotic jams with Warhol’s films. Sometimes the same film would be cast simultaneously across multiple walls. Supplementing this were other Warhol discoveries (Gerard Malanga, Ingrid Superstar, and Mary Woronov) and an environment that featured, in various combinations, moving spotlights equipped with coloured gels; variable-speed strobe lights; pistol lights; mirror balls; and loudspeakers from which different contemporary pop records would simultaneously sound.63 Various light sources would not only project films, slides, and pure colour, but would cast the shadows of the dancers, band, and audience on the walls and ceilings. It was Plato’s cave for the pop art world. Previewing the show in the Silhouette, Peter Rowe had written an extensive, argumentative feature on Warhol and pop art, concluding: “The show that has blown the mind of New York for the last four months (so to speak) will be blowing the mind of Hamilton in the Physical Education Building. Come stoned if possible, but definitely come. It may be the most different happening of the year. It may even be the only one.”64 Rowe was responsible for collecting members of Warhol’s entourage from the Buffalo airport. There he met singer and model Nico and her young son; the others had flown into Toronto. Nico, with her multiple passports, drug arrests, missing work visas, and unproven connection to the child in tow, could not convince Canadian immigration authorities at the Peace Bridge to allow her entry. A second attempt at entry, at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, was also fruitless. Finally, Rowe succeeded in smuggling Nico in at the Lewiston-Queenston bridge, in the middle of the night.65 That Saturday, McMaster hosted Warhol’s immersive happening. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable resonated with Marshall McLuhan’s

A Dangerous Precedent  37 

message of collective involvement in the “new electronic environment [which] compels commitment and participation, and fulfills man’s psychic and social needs at profound levels.”66 Warhol’s show was an inclusive experience, one that McLuhan might characterize as tribal and familial. The Hamilton Spectator’s Stewart Brown condescended to EPI – “It’s nice to see how the other half lives sometimes”67 – echoing criticism that the work had received from confounded American critics who had dismissed EPI as a pageant of decadence. Brown, reflecting the conservative taste of his readership, included indignantly smug jabs at Warhol’s androgynous “longhair” performers and sanctimonious bewilderment at the sonic minimalism of the Velvet Underground’s John Cale. The majority of McMaster students, who in keeping with their past resentments towards modern art on campus, responded to the show with bewilderment and disdain. However, an interested minority of creative students was paying close attention. When the show was over, Rowe drove members of the Warhol caravan back across the border. Months after their appearance at the Arts Festival, their happening would continue to cause waves in Hamilton, and the experience proved life changing for John Hofsess. He could now imagine his next film, an earnest, perhaps naively sentimental communication, in that same mode of image neutrality and community participation that he had seen in Warhol’s happening, but to a very different end. It was in this mode that Hofsess would seek brotherhood, acceptance, and liberation.

chapter two

Assembling Pleasure

A few weeks after the Arts Festival, a screening tour was announced for Redpath 25: “In the last two weeks, the print was seen twice at Victoria College in Toronto, and twice at the Massey College residence at the University of Toronto. Within the next two months it will be seen in Montreal, York University, Queen’s University, New York, and Amsterdam.”1 The film had found an audience on Canadian campuses and was gaining traction on the international underground film circuit. Its screenings in New York and Amsterdam enhanced its standing as the work of serious and committed filmmakers, as opposed to a homegrown curiosity for Canadian students. The Film Board officially announced its next project: “A new film entitled Black Zero is about to be shot. The film, which attempts to dissect the psyches of the two characters involved, has been written.” Peter Rowe and John Hofsess would collaborate on Black Zero, and it would be shot in Montreal. McMaster student Michaele-Sue Goldblatt and Dramatic Society president David Martin would play the two characters. The article justified the selection of this film over others that students had proposed to the Film Board: “One of the reasons for the choice of this script over the few others submitted is that a fairly large sum was offered by an outside source to help finance the film.” The outside funding source was unidentified. “The MFB will have complete possession of the film, however. This contribution may allow the MFB to make another major film within the year with the funds given to the club by the Cultural Affairs Commission.”2 John Hofsess’s collaborations with Robin Hilborn, Peter Rowe, and Patricia Murphy suggest that his interest in filmmaking was communal as well as artistic. The McMaster Film Board offered a social experience, albeit an exclusive one, and its membership was made up of outsiders.

Assembling Pleasure  39 

Other students and administrators found the Wentworth House group’s presence on campus, and specifically Hofsess’s presence, disruptive and uncomfortable. They had built a community for themselves through Wentworth House, as cultural journalists for the Silhouette and Silhouette Review and as members of organizations like the McMaster Dramatic Society and the Film Board. Hofsess’s films were collective efforts, and in this sense the McMaster group functioned as an artist collective, its resources centralized around Hofsess’s vision but its creative tasks dispersed among a group of like-minded students. This was evident in Coldfinger and Redpath 25, in which creative duties had been divided among several people. With Coldfinger, there was no assigned “director,” and consequently the film had no singular governing viewpoint. With Redpath 25, much of the closed-eye vision sequences were the handwork of Robin Hilborn, but the logic of the film was Hofsess’s. The collaborative process would continue with Black Zero, with Rowe and Hofsess sharing camera duties and improvising sequences with their actors. Hofsess’s artistic vision, heavily influenced by the postFreudian psychoanalytic writings of Wilhelm Reich and Norman O. Brown, would begin to emerge as something uniquely his own. In at least one announcement of its production, Black Zero was referred to as Rowe’s project, with Hofsess credited as director. Hofsess and Rowe downplayed Hofsess’s leadership of the McMaster Film Board, presumably to avoid conflict that might test the tolerance of the Student Union and endanger the Film Board’s funding. Rowe had already publicly declared his suspicion that the Student Union harboured a personal dislike for Hofsess. Flaunting Hofsess’s role in the Board could have led to a seizure of its equipment and films and even its termination. Together, Coldfinger and Redpath 25 had cost $620, an expense that was easily justified by the latter’s considerable success.3 Black Zero, however, would end in debts and disputes. Hofsess and Rowe began production in December 1966. Matters of budget and convenience moved the film’s location from Montreal to Oakville, where the cast and crew occupied a house over two consecutive weekends. Originally a barn, the house was now both “a rambling studio and near mansion for the artist David Newman and his wife.”4 The house had been located for the Film Board by Hamilton Spectator writer Jennifer Amor, who joined the crew on the shoot and subsequently wrote an article on the production. To join lead actors David Martin and Michaele-Sue Goldblatt, Hofsess and Rowe cast McMaster students David Hollings and Don Gouthro. Contrary to its announcement, the film did not have

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a script. Rowe recalls the shoot: “We filmed all night long, dreaming it up as we went along. Nothing was planned really, and whenever we didn’t know what to do, people would sit there and smoke cigarettes.”5 The McMaster students who appeared in the film refused to take part in a sexually explicit bedroom scene. In their place appeared a woman from York University and two men from the University of Toronto, one of whom was the young Toronto filmmaker David Cronenberg.6 At the time, Rowe chronicled the shoot in the Silhouette: “The frigid atmosphere (except for a huge fireplace, the house is unheated), the dark, high-ceilinged rooms and the animosities and dislikes between various members of the cast were perhaps all too suitable for a film displaying as many post-Freudian, post-fall out neuroses as Black Zero does.”7 For the final session of shooting, the crew began at 6 p.m. and ended at 2 the following afternoon. Many boxes of film were packed up and shipped to Toronto for processing. In his 6 January Silhouette Review column, Rowe announced the formation of a new national co-op, the Film-makers Cooperative of Canada, the realization of Hofsess’s vision for national independent film distribution. It was “both an offshoot and an amalgamation of the McMaster Film Board, with everything on a much larger and all encompassing scale than before.”8 The aim was to create a northern echo of New York’s Film-Makers’ Cooperative or San Francisco’s Canyon Cinema. It was anticipated that by early January 1967, the co-op would be distributing thirteen films, four by the McMaster Film Board, including Redpath 25. This rebranding of the McMaster Film Board’s distribution arm would distance Hofsess and Rowe from their student origins and their alma mater. Without the McMaster name, now under the guise of the Film-makers Cooperative of Canada, they could present themselves as professional film distributors. Hamilton: Sex Capital of Canada By the mid-1960s, the Toronto Police Service had mobilized a Morality Squad to enforce charges of obscenity. On 21 May 1965, Toronto gallerist Dorothy Cameron, owner of a commercial gallery at 840 Yonge Street, had mounted an adults-only exhibition. Eros ’65 was a show of contemporary erotic painting featuring the work of twenty-two artists, among them Dennis Burton, Graham Coughtry, and Robert Markle. That evening, officers of the Morality Squad entered the gallery. They confiscated seven of Markle’s drawings, arrested owner Dorothy Cameron, and

Assembling Pleasure  41 

charged her with “exposing to view an obscene matter, to wit, obscene pictures.”9 Five expert witnesses spoke in Cameron’s defence, but their testimony fell on deaf ears. In the Ontario Court of Appeal, Justice Aylesworth even ruled the testimony as inadmissible, declaring the opinions of art experts to be irrelevant to the greater community. The opinions of the arresting officers – and their lurid descriptions of Markle’s canvases – were given greater credence. After this event, it was not a safe time for erotic art in Toronto. When the camera negatives for Black Zero were sent for processing to Film House, a lab in Toronto started by cameraman Bob Crone, the filmmakers soon found themselves facing threats from the police. Processing that would normally take a day took a week due to the instructions of the filmmakers, as there was one eight-minute sequence in the film that was to be printed in negative colour, a process that Film House told Rowe they had never done before.10 At some point during this week, Film House employees, offended by the footage, contacted the Toronto Morality Squad, who viewed but did not seize the film on 5 January 1967. Sergeant John Wilson told the press that charges might be laid against the filmmakers on the grounds that it was obscene, and stated that while the individuals in bed were not undressed, their actions might be construed as obscene. Rowe responded that it would be impossible for Toronto police to lay such charges. He told the Globe and Mail: “The film in question is only part of a working print and may be edited before the final film is submitted to the Ontario Board of Censors.”11 The Hamilton Spectator also picked up the story. By 10 January, Film House returned the Black Zero elements to the McMaster Film Board, and Dean of Students Ivor Wynne agreed to allow the film to be shown on campus on the condition that the Ontario Board of Censors approve it. Peter Rowe remembers that John Hofsess “was never one to shy away from controversy. [The potential seizure of Black Zero] would in his mind be the greatest thing that could happen. He could be a martyr, which he likes, and he’d be an artist who is maligned.” The Establishment was coming down on Hofsess, and it was good for publicity. That publicity arrived in the form of a television crew from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s current affairs program Sunday. “[Producers Larry Zolf and Stephen Patrick] came down to Hamilton. They were with a CBC crew, and they were out doing streeters,” Rowe recalls. “It was right after the Gerda Munsinger affair, and so now [Zolf and Patrick are] coming to Hamilton and talking to students and saying ‘Now that

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Hamilton has replaced Ottawa as the sex capital of Canada, what do you think?’ This caused an even bigger stink among the students and the faculty.”12 Munsinger, an East German prostitute and supposed Soviet spy, had infiltrated the inner circle of Canadian government in the late 1950s by prostituting herself to cabinet members under the John Diefenbaker administration. She was quietly deported in 1961, but the story became a front-page scandal in 1966, when Minister of Justice Lucien Cardin mentioned it during a Parliamentary debate.13 The event brought sexual taboos to the public’s attention. Within a few years, amendments to criminal law concerning homosexuality would lead Cardin’s successor (and future prime minister) Pierre Trudeau to famously declare that there was “no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” Though Trudeau was referring to the decriminalization of homosexuality, he was making this pronouncement in a House that had so recently been rocked by revelations of a prostitution scandal. The nation’s bedroom, in the eyes of Parliament, was a primal scene. By the mid-1960s, the national news had become increasingly salacious in its coverage of scandals and played its hand with the Munsinger affair. Sex was prone to capture the public’s imagination, to stoke the flames of both traditional and progressive opinion, and so with the Dorothy Cameron Gallery seizure and the Munsinger affair fading out of the spotlight by the beginning of 1967, news outlets were only too happy to give the McMaster “blue movie” the status of a local lead story. In the 11 January edition of the Globe and Mail, humorist George Bain wrote a satirical letter signed “Clem Watkins, Jr.” It described a collection of Saskatchewan yokels gathered in a barbershop to trade tedious limericks about the McMaster situation. One read: “Said the film-man, ‘How gay, having three, Two-to-one is quite best, you’d agree?’ Said the girl, ‘This here lark Would play hell with an ark, But by George, it’s just dandy by me.’”14

That evening John Hofsess was arrested at his home in Hamilton. He was charged with theft over $50. The Toronto police had issued orders to have Hofsess picked up for allegedly pawning a rented movie camera. Peter Rowe contends that it was projection equipment that was in debate.

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Sunday reporter Stephen Patrick (ironically the son of Hofsess’s old nemesis, Dean A.W. Patrick) provided Hofsess’s bail the next day. That Friday’s edition of the Silhouette featured two cover stories about Hofsess, evident criminal mastermind of Hamilton student filmmaking. The Silhouette reported: “Mr. Hofsess directed [Black Zero] despite having been banned from student activities by the MSU because he was not a student,” spitefully adding, “Mr. Hofsess moved to Toronto after the ban in October but did not find employment.”15 At the time Peter Rowe publicly denied that the rented equipment had anything to do with the filming of Black Zero. He now recalls, “John was going to use the projectors for additional filming. He then took them to a pawnshop and pawned them. Now he had this charge against him, and there was the issue of the film. He was sending bills for this lab work and other things to the Student Council, expecting them to pay bills for the McMaster Film Board.”16 On top of his criminal charge, Hofsess’s non-student status would again become an issue for the Student Union. On 13 January the Student Executive Council convened for a sixhour meeting to discuss the McMaster Film Board. In this meeting, it was revealed that the McMaster Film Board had been billed in excess of $1,000, more than three times its annual budget of $300, and that over half of these bills had been signed by or addressed to John Hofsess.17 Rowe was held responsible, and the Student Council claimed Black Zero as their property, prohibiting any public screenings until they had been compensated by the film’s sale. The Council would also have to approve any fund-raising projects that the filmmakers would mount. As the new owners of Black Zero, Council’s first action was to withhold approval from the CBC to broadcast excerpts from the film for Zolf and Patrick’s Sunday segment. Without those scenes, Sunday producer Daryl Duke had to drop the interview with Rowe and Hofsess, as well as Zolf and Patrick’s streeters, from that week’s show.18 On campus, the revelations about the MFB’s debts stirred resentment from other student clubs. In the Silhouette, an anonymous commentator, enraged by the thought that the Film Board’s actions might mean stricter Union intervention with other student clubs, asked, “Who would be too upset if the SEC took drastic action and even went so far as to disband the MFB? After all the MFB brought it all on itself.”19 Student Union treasurer Mort Mitchnik suggested that if the Film Board’s debts were not straightened out, the Union would consider disbanding it.20 Student Union president Lachlan MacLachlan observed, “This only helps to increase the intrigue connected with the

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film, first in its administrative production, and now in its moral and artistic implication.”21 Accusations of obscenity lodged against the unseen and incomplete Black Zero invited further attacks on the Film Board and Redpath 25 from the McMaster student body. In the Silhouette’s arts supplement, Terry Campbell, whom Hofsess had succeeded as Muse editor, condemned the Film Board, charging its executive with inexperience and pretension. He called them “[a] bunch of neanderthal, misguided people who want to identify with something” and went on to charge that Hofsess’s films were artless amalgams of psychedelic and sexual imagery, calling Redpath 25 “an inadequate substitute for an acid trip.”22 Elsewhere, outraged students were working from ignorant assumptions about the films, having proudly seen neither. One, Mary Lou Smitheram, complained in her Silhouette column the following week that the Film Board was damaging the upstanding image of McMaster. Her column exemplified the ignorance and hysteria of those more compliant and dutiful factions of the student body. It was a campaign against modern art and contemporary life: “[McMaster] will appear to be the home of dirty movies, pot-smoking, acid-dropping, bearded protestors, and general student immorality.” Smitheram accused the Film Board of misrepresenting themselves as the spokespeople for the McMaster student community. F. James Allan had done so when he declared Hofsess’s earlier conflicts with the administration as emblematic of the struggle for student rights. But the filmmakers in question and their vocal supporters, a distinct minority of perhaps a few dozen, could not have been under any delusion that they represented other McMaster students. In the pages of the Silhouette, as in the meeting places of the Student Union and the administration alike, they were beset with critics. With the massive expansion of university admissions in the 1960s, a genuine outsider like John Hofsess could finally achieve an education. But students like him could find only marginal fellowship at McMaster, which was dedicated to hard sciences, research, and medicine, and where humanities disciplines and fine arts activities were of rapidly decreasing importance to the administration. That same lack of mass fellowship could be extended to Hofsess’s hip collaborators David Martin, Patricia Murphy, and Peter Rowe, for even as the stars of Wentworth House’s student art clique, their interests and their conduct sharply diverged from the majority. For Mary Lou Smitheram, a campus that had much to pride itself on – she cites its medical school, its nuclear reactor, philosopher George Grant and his rousing Lament for a Nation – was finding its accomplishments

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undermined by the immorality of the youth movement as a whole, embodied in the pornographic sensationalism of Black Zero. She closed her tirade with what was perhaps the most surreal image of this whole fiasco: “In a few weeks, if all goes well, our Baptist forefathers will stop spinning in their graves.”23 Dismissals and Caricatures On 20 January 1967, a Silhouette editorial cartoon caricatured Peter Rowe with his hands tied behind his back, his head on a chopping block. He is on a movie set, surrounded by lights and cables. A personified Student Executive Council, from a director’s chair labelled SEC, shouts “CUT!” to a masked executioner. The cartoon commemorated Rowe’s

2.1  Peter Rowe’s dismissal is caricatured in the Silhouette, 20 January 1967.

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forced dismissal as president of the Film Board for having given nonstudent Hofsess signing authority and for failing to inform his executive of many of his actions. In the same edition, Hofsess responded to Terry Campbell’s hostile review: “Redpath is a film that celebrates youth and human sensuality: that is its subject and film board members are not notably lacking in experience.”24 The Film Board was not disbanded. Instead, Robin Hilborn succeeded Peter Rowe to become its second president. The Student Executive Council now accused Hofsess of withholding some of the Black Zero footage. Treasurer Mort Mitchnick proposed that the Council consider suing Hofsess for the missing footage. The possibility that Hofsess retained some footage undermined their efforts to ransom the film. Former McMaster graduate student Rob Fothergill approached the Council with a bid of $750 for the film, suggesting shared ownership between the Student Union and Cinematics, the production and distribution company that Fothergill represented. The Film Board approved of this arrangement, but the Union rejected it, with Mitchnick claiming that Fothergill had not shown up to their meeting with all of Hofsess’s withheld footage and stating that the Union did not want to retain any ownership of Black Zero.25 Fothergill, then a member of the Department of English at York University, had screened portions of the film for a York class the previous Tuesday evening without the Student Council’s permission. Hofsess explained his position on the events of 1966–7 in a letter to the editor of the Silhouette. He argued that the whole matter was a smokescreen, that the Student Executive Council and Silhouette were vilifying him to indulge their conservative biases against the student movement and modern art. He introduced himself as John Hofsess, “a name to be uttered with all the reverence one has for bubonic plague, and to whom all God’s children are my enemies and prey … My role in this fictitious drama is akin to the ‘mad scientist’ in Help! or the negro in Birth of a Nation.”26 The SEC had closed all possible avenues suggested by the Film Board to repay its debts, such as Fothergill’s offer of partial purchase. They had also turned down Sunday’s offer of payment to televise excerpts from the unfinished film. As a result of the Union’s stubbornness, the debt was no longer the fault of the Film Board. The vengeful intentions of the SEC were obvious. The Council had similarly caused their own misfortune by banning Hofsess from student ­activities – the Arts Festival suffered, the Muse folded, all at a cost that might have been repaid had the student government supported

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Hofsess’s plans. The Film Board had been portrayed as a group of irresponsible hooligans, interested only in furthering their own notoriety; however, their films stood to profit the student community in direct remuneration. Proceeds from the Film Board might bankroll more community activities, unlike the Silhouette or the McMaster radio station that were, by their nature as free services, unprofitable, surviving on the subsistence of Student Union funding and advertising. Hofsess argued that the Council was “no longer loyal to the McMaster student community and refuses to permit beneficial projects to survive intact, due to its preoccupation with power struggles and issues of pride.”27 The Silhouette responded to these charges of complicity and cronyism by giving Hofsess an award. A Rick Pottruff illustration for the Silhouette’s Dubious Achievement Awards, 1966–7, caricatures John Hofsess as an award statue with a tower of zany spectacles extending up through his body. In the commentary, the Silhouette editors wrote: “To John Hofsess goes the Cecil B. DeMille award, for breaking most of the Ten Commandments and for his unparalleled talent for turning out B-pics on a Spectacle budget.” They closed with another dig at Hofsess’s desperation and poverty: “Congratulations, Mr. Hofsess. We know the pawn ticket from this trophy will be a proud addition to your collection.” In an adjoining item, the editors acknowledged the McMaster Film Board as “best newsmaker of the year” for their headline “scandals” with a caption quoting one of George Bain’s folksy Black Zero limericks. The Silhouette also gave Council treasurer Mort Mitchnik an award, taking one more swipe at Hofsess and company: “We know you have a job to do, Mort, but putting a price on art! Really!”28 In February 1967, Redpath 25 screened with a collection of National Film Board and American underground films at Perception ’67, a festival of radical, psychedelic art and thought orchestrated by the University of Toronto’s Literary and Athletic Society.29 Festival director Allan Kamin told reporters that the festival’s purpose was to “make people aware of the subculture of psychedelics and make them realize their values.”30 The festival ran from 10 to 12 February. The Fugs performed at the event, as did the Stu Broomer Kinetic Ensemble and Allen Ginsberg. A psychedelic fashion show featured New York avant-garde designer Joan “Tiger’ Morse. Toronto artist Michael Hayden, who had been a principal creative force in the organization of the festival, designed “Mind Excursion Rooms,’ a series of rooms dressed to simulate the experience of an LSD trip. One of the festival’s intended guests of honour, the LSD guru Timothy Leary, was denied entrance to the country,

2.2 The Silhouette (24 February 1967) gave John Hofsess an ironic award for his role in the 1967 Film Board scandal.

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sparking controversy. A sober counter-event was even staged by the Progressive Conservative Party. Redpath 25 screened in a program with Dance Chromatic (Ed Emshwiller, 1959), Free Fall (Arthur Lipsett, 1964), A Trip down Memory Lane (Lipsett, 1965), Marching the Colours (Guy Glover, 1952), Science Friction (Stan VanDerBeek, 1959), On the Edge (Curtis Harrington, 1949), and Prison (Andy Warhol, 1965).31 Peter Rowe filmed the festival, and that footage would form part of the first film that he would make without John Hofsess. Cinematherapy: A School of One In the April 1967 edition of Take One, a new Canadian film magazine, John Hofsess published “Towards a New Voluptuary,” a manifesto asserting film’s potential as a therapeutic art form. What followed was a declaration of Hofsess’s beliefs, offered in his intensely ornamental, Victorian language and further complicated by its arcane pre-Victorian title. The “voluptuary” is one who lives for sensuality, but also for decadence and luxury; it is a term used judgmentally by Sir Walter Scott (who wrote of “a low voluptuary, seeking pleasure without sentiment”)32 and Thomas de Quincey (applied to himself, in his Confessions of an Opium Eater). In Hofsess’s time, the voluptuary had shed its meaning of decadent hedonist and had simply become “voluptuous,” a descriptor for pin-up models such as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. While Hofsess’s title was intended to signal a new celebration of sensuality, it simultaneously implied a return to hedonistic indulgence in luxury. Hofsess’s manifesto begins with the claim that his filmmaking aims to render the unconscious conscious. The filmmaker may have encountered this adaptation of Freudian thought to art through Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death. For Brown, “art represents an irruption from the unconscious into the conscious.”33 Art must assert itself against that reality principle of deferred gratification; it must assert itself against reason and lead its makers and spectators to a primal dominion of pleasure. Through Hofsess’s manifesto, the sources that informed Black Zero are fully disclosed as emissaries of compassionate, emancipatory post-Freudian psychoanalysis: Norman O. Brown, Carl Jung, R.D. Laing, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich. Of special significance are Brown and Reich, the former for his deeply poetic advocacy of feminine knowledge, the latter for his theories of mind-body psychic health and the roots of neurosis in sexual dysfunction. These ideas would influence Hofsess’s aesthetics, which took on the visible energies

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of Reich’s radical orgone theories (orgonomy) and Brown’s articulation of feminine sensuality. The manifesto is complicated by the works that Hofsess selected for comparison to his own, and by his identification of the contemporary conditions of the neurotic organism. He declared that the shock of Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) or Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) would “only strengthen existing defense mechanisms,” creating “so much anxiety in the audience, that to alleviate the anxiety, they must forcefully reject the film.”34 Rather than choose sexually neutral or heterosexual objects of American experimental film as opponents to his therapeutic film form, Hofsess identifies two flamboyantly gay films as causes of anxiety, and positions his work in relation to theirs on a basis of rhetorical form. What is most confounding about this parallel is that it presumes that Hofsess’s therapeutic films and those of Anger and Smith are working from the same intentions and towards the same end: to Hofsess, these works were united with his in the struggle to uproot “middle-class sensibilities.” This allows Hofsess to reduce this question of anxiety to one of rhetoric and persuasion. Hofsess’s alternative would “present visual metaphors, which, like the symbolic disguises in dreams, are inoffensive even to the most censorious of minds, and yet contain a depth charge, suggestive of repressed impulses.” The therapeutic film presents what he terms inevitable facets of the human condition: manic depression, brutal wars, stifled loves, and sexual, racial, and economic inequity. Against these, it asks, “Is it possible to organize the human psyche in other ways at once more creative and constructive?” Or rather, is it possible to rebuild the mind without the repressive systems of society? In therapeutic films, the emblematic public trials of the era, such as the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, would mingle with private trials of misery and suicide. Hofsess called his new film form cinematherapy, a concept that would bring about a therapeutic experience through film by demystifying the taboo of eroticism. Frustrating, incomplete, distant events and relationships, some sexual, some not, confront the spectator and induce a trance state using visual and dramatic techniques drawn from the surrealists, the American underground cinema, pop art, Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, and Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. It was to be a film form that celebrated tactile sensuality, in effect undermining “the repressive mechanisms of puritanism and sensual negation.” As his discussion of therapeutic cinema continues, Hofsess identifies the universal symptoms of the young neurotic: “Today’s youth … are not

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rebels but dropouts, and the telling difference between them is that the dropout is not prey to any ideology. His demands on the outer world are minimal because his hopes for change are not high; he is less frustrated than his predecessor because he has no great expectations to become frustrated about; you don’t become alienated once you realize that Man is Dead. He is even beyond suicide because suicide is only a live option … providing you believe in a self worth killing. The dropout simply hangs loose and lets life happen.”35 Unlike the youth that he describes, Hofsess had professed an intense need for acceptance and a disciplined sense of self-expectation. The dropout may not be prey to ideology, but Hofsess’s own writing is awash with ideologies, from George Grant–inspired statements on the oppressive technological society that appear in his frustrated correspondence with McMaster’s top brass, to this manifesto, a synthesis of post-Freudian thought applied to cinema. Here he acts as a maker of ideology, an ambassador of a new psychotherapeutic art that aims to free its spectator from the bondage of sexual oppression and the tyranny of modern life. In keeping with Hofsess’s anxious relationship with authority, and his desire to have the authority of his own considerable intellect recognized, he positions himself in this document as a doctor addressing a generation of afflicted neurotics and not as a fellow patient. The cinematherapy manifesto suggested another possibility for a Canadian cinema separate from the theatrical, narrative-driven films produced elsewhere in the country’s independent film communities. What Hofsess described, and indeed, what he made, had little in common with the films of Larry Kent and David Secter. He describes the alienation achieved through his editing process: “I deal exclusively with images. The films are not actors’ vehicles, and a lot of time is spent cutting up and flattening out a performance, reducing it to its imagistic state … I am striving for films which are not simply observed by an audience, aesthetically distanced from what they are seeing, but films which happen directly to the audience with a minimum of extraneous factors. Thus you don’t identify with the actors, or ‘follow the plot’; the films are a mental event.”36 His processes discarded pretences of narrative involvement and traditional expectations of formal revelation and thematic development. The viewer’s alienation from the actor as narrative agent had played a part in Redpath 25. Critics described the fantasy of Redpath 25 in narrative terms, but the acting of Murphy and Walker had been intentionally stifled by the film form, their bodies subject to rapid, elliptical editing, their faces drained of performed

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expression via this reductive editing process. Rather than perform dramatically, Patricia Murphy and Norman Walker simply appeared as vessels, unencumbered by the falseness of acting. In liberating himself from conventional film language, Hofsess could make a film as an intensely sensual experience: it would provoke the audience with its hypnotic, rhythmic, cyclical progression. Though Hofsess does not explicitly refer to it in his manifesto, he would make these “therapeutic” films in a dual-projection format, casting two images side by side. This would include a return to Redpath 25, which would be re-edited for two screens, the original film appearing on the left with a new righthand screen featuring images from the Vietnam War. In Black Zero, kaleidoscopic light patterns interrupt the performers, as do static images appropriated from magazine advertisements, album covers, and book jackets. On the soundtrack, a collage of poetry readings and music overlap, complementing layers of visual stimuli. Hofsess’s film offered something formally novel. But beyond the appeal of novelty, his therapeutic form combined a striking collection of images, sparse narrative, and extratextual rhetoric into an account of alienation, despair, and desire. The film’s bodily, sensual excitations were, regardless of Hofsess’s avowed rationale, offered to his viewership in a loving spirit of freedom and goodwill: “The role of film as ‘cinematherapy’ is designed to assist people in rediscovering their freedom. The freedom they have come to deny themselves, and consequently others; freedoms of love and trust and tenderness. I hold that every living person is essentially mysterious: an increase in communication only deepens one’s awareness and respect for the mystery of others. You can’t sum them up and pin them down or label them.” In Life against Death, Brown described man as a disease, but Hofsess offers that “man is a process, and the truth is in flux.”37 Hofsess was the architect of this therapeutic school of filmmaking, but it was to be a school of one. Film Canada and Cinecity On 6 April 1967, the Globe and Mail reported that the theft charges against John Hofsess had been dropped. The charge was “withdrawn at the request of Crown counsel Eugene Ewaschuk before Magistrate R.C. Taylor” upon full restitution. The Globe report held to the sensationalistic aspects of the story, concluding, “The camera was used by Hofsess to film Black Zero, which included a four-minute scene of a girl in bed with two men.”38 Two days later, the Globe’s Joan Fox reported that Cinecity, a

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new movie house at Yonge and Charles Streets in Toronto, would open that month, with the intention of screening “underground and amateurs’ films as well as a general program of foreign films.”39 Six Charles Street East was built in 1905 as Postal Station F and E–R, but in the six decades following its creation it had gone on to house a Department of Agriculture branch office, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police substation, and a bank. In the early spring of 1967, its latest transformation was complete: Cinecity, a 285-seat auditorium, was established there by the Cineshow Corporation and art film distributor Film Canada as “a Centre for the Cinematic Arts,” with a specialization in underground film and the exhibition of mixed-media art and happenings. Lawyer Willem Poolman, president and founder of Film Canada, was credited as Cinecity’s “prime artistic mover.”40 The theatre featured a sculptural installation by David Knox, an associate of Michael Hayden (architect of Perception ’67’s “Mind Excursion Rooms”). Knox’s installation was described as “boxes, 4 by 6 feet … designed for window recesses, filled with variable light which bursts into moving color – computerized to an elaborate program, with risk of color repetition slight.”41 Cinecity was distinguished in Take One for its “psychedelic decor, mini-clad usherettes, and hippy program notes, with a policy of first run international features alternating with twice-weekly screenings of Underground movies.”42 Willem Poolman, meanwhile, entered into co-production on John Hofsess’s Black Zero, and in doing so paid its debts, effectively freeing the film from its captors at the McMaster Student Council.43 Poolman was primarily interested in European art films, opening Cinecity with a screening of Alain Resnais’s La guerre est finie (1966). According to Rob Fothergill, Poolman intended to bring American underground cinema to Canada to “cash in on the notoriety of things like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising.”44 Acting as financier to Toronto’s burgeoning independent film community, Poolman could gain the trust of Jonas Mekas, who had apprehensions about dealing with commercial distributors like Film Canada. By financing Hofsess’s notorious film, Poolman was guaranteed both public attention and underground credibility. He provided Hofsess with the funds to finish Black Zero, which was to be shown in June at Cinecity’s Cinethon, a weekend-long festival from Thursday to the early hours of Monday morning consisting of short and feature-length underground films. Black Zero had already cost about $1,500 and was expected to be finished at a cost of $2,000.45 Soon after Poolman entered into co-production on

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the film, John Hofsess moved into the Film Canada offices and began running up more debts. In May, the founding meeting of the Canadian Film-makers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) took place in Rob Fothergill’s Lowther Avenue apartment. With the arrival of this organization, the largely inactive FilmMakers Cooperative of Canada became redundant and quietly dissolved. The CFMDC was a new and final realization of Hofsess and Rowe’s distribution ambitions, although Hofsess and Rowe were no longer directly involved. In attendance were Fothergill, David Cronenberg, and Toronto film community members Jim Plaxton and Lorne Lipowitz (Lipowitz would later achieve commercial success as Lorne Michaels, producer of NBC’s Saturday Night Live).46 Film Canada assisted the new Distribution Centre in establishing an office at 719 Yonge, near Cinecity. Their first office manager was Redpath 25 star Patricia Murphy. The organization began with fourteen titles, and its first catalogues were created surreptitiously, using copy machines at York University’s Atkinson College.47 The first catalogue appeared that May. It featured the following description of John Hofsess’s films, now assembled as The Palace of Pleasure: When complete, Palace of Pleasure will be a feature-length trilogy in dual projection, communicating, in John Hofsess’ phrase, “a therapy of the senses.” The trilogy is introduced by Redpath 25, an exotic, richly coloured complex of erotic fantasy, lavish and intensely vivid. In Black Zero the experiment with mood and impression is extended still further. Temporal sequence is abolished as the images on the two screens move between pure abstraction and the fragmentation of real and mental events. On the soundtrack the poetry of Leonard Cohen is interposed with the music of the Gass Company.48

The announcement mentioned only the working title of a concluding part, Mauvember, a portmanteau of “mauve” and “November,” that was to be shot in fall 1967. Films from McMaster Film Board members Peter Rowe (Encantada) and David Martin (Hang-up) were announced as forthcoming, as was Rob Fothergill’s own Solipse, a thirty-minute film influenced by Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity. When the Distribution Centre’s next catalogue was printed in September 1967, distributed films had increased to over fifty, some of them feature-length. This second catalogue offered, in addition to the dual projection Palace of Pleasure, the single-screen version of Redpath 25.

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When Peter Morris, director of the Canadian Film Institute, saw John Hofsess’s Palace of Pleasure, he was taken aback by its artistic maturity and sensual power. Writing in Take One, he declared it “one of the most extraordinary and moving films I have seen in a long time,” and “a decadent film in the sense that Buñuel’s Un chien andalou and l’âge d’or are decadent, and whose catharsis runs throughout from first frame to last. The film completely envelops the viewer in a total emotional experience: an exultation of the free inner world of man.”49 Cinethon Rob Fothergill was recruited by Willem Poolman to assist in the organization of the Cinethon, the multi-day marathon that would serve as a goodwill summit between the Canadian and American undergrounds. Fothergill would curate and coordinate the festival with Lorne Lipowitz. The Cinethon took place from Thursday, 15 June, to Monday morning, 19 June, running continuously through the nights. This marathon was unlike any other in Ontario or in Canada, where theatre and festival film screenings ignored the underground. Programs of underground films at universities would run a tenable hour or two. At the Cinethon, programs would repeat and the same films would be shown in different configurations; despite that, there was still a sizeable body of work on display. The festival presented a broad sampling of the North American underground, going well beyond New York, although the Film-Makers’ Cooperative had been the primary source of many of the Cinethon’s prints and New York was home to many of the featured filmmakers. There was a wealth of Californian filmmaking, much of it centred in San Francisco: Larry Jordan, Ben Van Meter, Jerry Abrams, Gunvor and Robert Nelson, Kenneth Anger. Vancouver’s Sam Perry, then recently deceased, represented Canada’s west coast.50 Toronto artists Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, then based in New York, screened films; Stan Brakhage’s monumental and ever-expanding corpus was represented with his Prelude to Dog Star Man.51 The Cinethon was an amalgam of different, often contradictory and incompatible works, some deeply invested in modern art and poetic traditions, others bearing the conventions of narrative cinema, and still others defying such categorization. On display were the decadent Luciferian fantasies of Anger; the nihilistic emptiness of Warhol; the suffering humanism of Brakhage; the darkly comic social criticism of Robert Nelson; the cameraless

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filmmaking of Storm de Hirsch; and the found-film collages of Bruce Conner. George and Mike Kuchar received a special gala presentation for Sins of the Fleshapoids on Friday night, paired with Joyce Wieland’s commissioned mixed media show, which would repeat on the Sunday night, closing the festival. A screening of Wieland’s film Bill’s Hat formed the core of her happening. The film is a series of portraits of friends and public figures who enact a ritual of wearing Wieland’s old raccoon fur hat. Among others, the film features comedians Dick Gregory and Soupy Sales, acid advocate Timothy Leary, New York filmmaker Shirley Clarke, and Canadian painters Jack Bush and A.Y. Jackson. In the strobe-lit room, the film projection, its musical accompaniment, and a slideshow that showed even more people wearing the hat, were combined. Planted audience members held small handheld projectors, casting images onto the backs of others. Accompanying the film was the Stu Broomer Kinetic Ensemble, with Wieland’s husband, Michael Snow, on trumpet. During the performance, Wieland’s friend Dawn Cree lay silently on top of the piano with the raccoon fur hat pressed to her stomach. Some months later, in the fall, when Wieland presented the performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario, she described it as a declaration of unity, in brotherhood and love, under the “friendly furry crown – of commonness.”52 Saturday’s Breakfast Special, a six-hour program beginning at 4:30 a.m., mixed geographically and formally diverse filmmakers. Local works, such as John Hofsess’s Palace of Pleasure, David Cronenberg’s From the Drain and Transfer, and Burton Rubenstein’s The Hyacinth Child and A Bedroom Story, were inserted amid works by such east and west coast American underground filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, Bruce Conner, Ed Emshwiller, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Nelson, Andy Warhol, and others. Rubenstein’s film, keeping in step with the Cinethon’s “wild party” atmosphere, was run upside down and backward.53 Palace of Pleasure screened early in the program, between Warhol’s Vinyl and Robert Nelson’s Oh Dem Watermelons. It also screened in a shorter program, following Vinyl and Canadian films by Rubenstein, Gerald Robinson, and John Straiton. The sheer volume of American films dwarfed the Canadian films, but the American films also demonstrated maturation, precision of form and of statement, a greater diversity of styles, all a consequence of the Americans’ invention and mastery of the third-wave avant-garde film. This body of work formed a context for the young Canadian underground, for it presented the local filmmakers with many possibilities for future directions.

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Many works screened at the Cinethon would not have been altogether new to a Toronto audience. Programs at the universities had introduced students to many of these works, and films that were featured at the 1966 McMaster Arts Festival and at Perception ’67 appeared again at the Cinethon. What was radically new about the Cinethon was the sheer concentration of films. It was a unique event in North America, revealing a full picture of the avant-garde film movement. It brought artists together in a unified stance, despite the disparities between artists and works, and attempted to present avant-garde film, not as isolated, regionally dispersed pockets of activity, but as a whole. To this end, the organizers staged a panel that Saturday night, titled “How Deep Is the Underground?” Canadian author and editor Barry Callaghan moderated the conference, and panelists included Kenneth Anger, Ed Emshwiller, Stan Fox, Andrew Meyer, Shirley Clarke, Robert Nelson, and others. After the panel, the artists, audience, and organizers walked to The Blue Fox, just north of the theatre, for wine, beer, pretzels, and dancing.54 By the time of the Cinethon, John Hofsess had run costs for Palace of Pleasure up to $4,000. At the Film Canada offices, he was seen as a liability. Poolman wanted to keep Palace of Pleasure out of Cinethon press screenings as punishment for Hofsess’s expenses. Fothergill and Lipowitz screened it for the press anyway, to the benefit of all concerned when Clyde Gilmour’s coverage of the Cinethon graced the front page of the Toronto Telegram’s entertainment section on 16 June. With a headline proclaiming “The Underground Is Here,” an iconic photograph of Patricia Murphy, credited as Patricia Snow, accompanies the review, which focuses on Palace of Pleasure. Gilmour had found Hofsess’s heterosexual content a tremendous relief after being wound up by the overt homosexuality (and minimalism) of Vinyl. According to Gilmour, “all the gratifications of vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell are exemplified in these twin-screen cataracts of sights and sounds … Plotless, almost mindless, Palace conjures up a unique sensual reverie. It haunts the mind after the screen has darkened.”55 Palace of Pleasure Palace of Pleasure took its title from William Painter’s sixteenth-century anthology of erotic tales through which Painter had introduced his Elizabethan audience to the stories of Boccaccio and Bandello. By these stories, Painter writes in his preface, “the sad shall be discharged of

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heaviness, the angry and choleric purged, the pleasant maintained in mirth, the whole furnished with disport, and the sick appaised of grief.”56 Painter presented his work as having restorative properties by sheer erotic force. His will to sensual renewal made Painter an ideal source for Hofsess, whose manifesto for a therapeutic film form echoed these ambitions. Painter’s statement also foretold the twentieth-­century post-Freudian psychoanalysts with whom Hofsess was taken, specifically, Norman O. Brown and Wilhelm Reich, whose work celebrated eroticism and psychological liberation. Brown’s work had advocated the feminine experience of pleasure, where tactile pleasure supplants visual pleasure. Reich believed that neurosis stemmed from dammedup energies in the sexually unsatisfied organism, that psychological health could be achieved through orgasmic release. Brown and Painter afforded Hofsess a thematic and philosophical basis for his film’s structure. Reich’s work, which was at times concerned with the visual manifestation of a universal life energy, influenced Hofsess’s aesthetics. The film was an attempt to express structural and visual analogues for complex psychological states. Parker Tyler once said of Warhol’s films that they don’t mind not being watched.57 Hofsess’s films, through vivid colours and hypnotic soundtracks, demanded and thrived on attention, but like Warhol’s films, they ruptured the focus of that attention. The first movement of the film is Redpath 25, recomposed for two screens. The original Redpath plays on the left screen. The second screen features black-and-white footage from the war in Vietnam. Scenes of atrocities in villages, of funerals, and of slaughtered, burned, or mutilated children play back at the pace of a newsreel. A static image of the fantasy lover (Norman Walker) in profile, facing right, towards the dividing line between the two screens, is laid on top of this footage. His face has a blue-green colour. It combines with the war footage into a blue-grey-green colour scheme, in sharp contrast with the predominantly red images of the original Redpath to the left. This McLuhanist “hot left” and “cool right” contrast continues throughout the episode, as the immobile male face superimposed onto the news footage alternately cools, suspends, and intensifies the lust of Redpath 25. The original Redpath 25 was made with fundamental equipment: a camera and a splicer. It did not employ optical printing or any in-camera double-exposure effects. Its optical effects, achieved through scratching and painting, were artisanal, and not a product of advanced film printing technology. Because of its simple technological roots, Redpath unfolds in consistently legible and linear terms: its flattened acting and

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evocations of the open- and closed-eye realms of vision operate within a visual system that is subject to hard transitions. To the right, the warzone images are revealed in the same way, through zooming lenses, on hard cuts, but the image has been saddled with a dense, static overlay, a constant double exposure that flattens any sense of depth. The split canvas forces viewers either to gaze with greater intensity at one image or to dissipate focus to both at once. Such manifestations of McLuhan media theory and colour psychology would persist throughout Palace of Pleasure: a circulation of dominant and submissive, of focused and nebulous. As the first movement ends, Norman Walker’s face appears on the left screen, in a perfect mirror image of the right overlay. Walker’s face on the left deteriorates, the emulsion etched away in a décollage gesture. On the right, his profile remains, static and unaltered. Redpath 25 has served as a prelude to the more substantial Black Zero, which begins the film’s second movement. Poet Leonard Cohen’s voice interrupts The Who’s “My Generation” as he reads the poem “What I’m Doing Here,” from his Flowers for Hitler.58 As he reads, a scene of ritual sacrifice unfolds on the left screen. Photographed in black and white, a group of men sit solemnly at a table, the camera moving around their graven faces. A low whir of feedback builds under Cohen’s voice. Michaele-Sue Goldblatt is shown reading from a Bible. Her fingers find I Corinthians 7:9, the apostle Paul’s endorsement of marriage: “better to marry than to burn.” Cohen seems to give the “Palace” of Hofsess’s title a second meaning as he reads, “Like mirrors in a movie-palace lobby / consulted only on the way out / … I wait / for each one of you to confess.” The palace of pleasure is cinema itself. Viewers attend a palace of pleasures, an exultation of the senses, intended to heighten their awareness of one another in the unity of this experience, to emerge from it as from a confessional or therapy. Here, cinema is the abyss that stares back at us. Like the abyss, cinema can also be a palace of stymied and deprived pleasures, the audience’s silent bodies in a darkened theatre attentive to the action on screen rather than to one another. As Cohen’s reading ends, Goldblatt’s hand is gripped by another’s. On the right screen, a cheeky ad featuring a woman in a bridal gown appears, captioned “Should a bride-to-be work as a Hertz girl before marriage?” Crimson flames begin to lick the screen, superimposed over the actors’ ritual. The soundtrack is filled with the Gass Company’s modal, spacey, Velvet Underground–inspired feedback-heavy score.59 The earlier contrast of the cooled-out Vietnam footage is echoed and inverted; this time the monochrome of the underlying ritual footage

2.3 Images of Patricia Murphy and Norman Walker from Redpath 25 become diptychs in Palace of Pleasure (1966–7).

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is set ablaze. The right screen features black-and-white images of a woman window shopping in front of a store. In bright red, Goldblatt’s face is slapped in slow motion. The first full-colour image from this movement appears on screen right: it is of Goldblatt’s face, tears running from her eyes, while on the left screen, a hand slides along the table to join with another, as if preparing for a séance. On the left, the ritual has turned to human sacrifice. One of the men spins a knife in his hand. With flames imposed on the image, he holds the knife to David Martin’s wrist, slashing it. The earlier appearance of the Corinthians scripture has made this strange, violent ritual a marriage ceremony. On the left, kaleidoscopic images intrude, echoing the closed-eye hallucinations of Redpath 25. Hofsess held a kaleidoscope to the lens itself and rephotographed projections of Redpath 25 and Black Zero, turning the kaleidoscope to bend the refracted light gently as it passed through the lens. In the variegated patterns, faces and limbs, flowers and flames emerge and merge. Dark grids beneath these symmetrical forms brightly flash a pulse. Echoing geometric forms calmly spin and circulate through both screens. On the right screen, representational images begin to appear: a rose is shown in full bloom, perfectly saturated with green stalk and red petals. The young lovers, Goldblatt and Martin, walk along a garden path. This tender scene – as they walk, she clings to his neck and he wraps an arm around her – repeats in green, yellow, and pink-purple tones, intercut with red rose petals. The rose is scorched to black and grey, until it finally bursts into flame and turns to ash. This movement ends with an image of Goldblatt, her eyes darting, filmed in time lapse. Kaleidoscopic patterns are projected over her face; they revolve rapidly. These geometric patterns soon dominate both screens, and Goldblatt’s face disappears from view. At their most suggestive, these symmetrical forms evoke flower petals, cathedral domes, and the microscopic photography of Petri dishes containing cellular growth. Each kaleidoscopic blossom contains a pistil of hands morphing into faces and then into combinations of flame and cream and solid colour. For the third movement, naturalistic images resume. On the right, the camera pans over a body in a bed, its hands gripping the rails of a brass headboard. The body belongs to David Cronenberg. A face appears in extreme close-up, with plastic leaves covering its eyes. The film’s most notorious sequence begins. Kaleidoscopic images on both screens are now accompanied by Cohen’s voice. He reads “You Have the Lovers,” a sermon on the sensual realm created between lovers, who reciprocate

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caresses with their whole bodies, whose whole flesh takes and gives pleasure. The right screen returns to the bedroom: it is bathed in pink light, with two lovers, a man and woman, their faces obscured, groping and spinning, their limbs tangled. Cohen reads, “When he puts his mouth against her shoulder, she is uncertain whether her shoulder has given or received the kiss.” The act of love dissolves the distance between the lovers, between lover and loved, between action and the thing acted upon, between cause and effect. All gestures become reciprocal. Cohen describes this reciprocity that the image reveals. Her fingers drag across his back in the pink light of the bedroom. A wide-angle lens distorts the lovers’ bodies as the camera passes over them. An elbow juts up towards the lens and becomes a vast expanse of pink neon flesh, recalling for an instant Willard Maas’s Geography of the Body (1943), in which bodies are transformed into landscapes by a combination of narration and photographic distortion. A third figure approaches from behind the camera. It is Cronenberg. He joins the lovers, pulling a sheet back and taking his place at the edge of the bed, with a space between him and them. He looks away from them, even covering his face, as if embarrassed by his own presence. As Cohen’s poem concludes, the second-person voyeur (“you”) of his poem finds their worries soothed by mouth and hand, by touch. The Mothers of Invention’s “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” sounds for a brief instant before giving way to the violent rhythm guitar of the Velvet Underground’s “European Son.” The kaleidoscopic left screen builds in colour saturation and rapid sequencing, and the camera zooms into its heaving yellow and orange hexagrams. The lovers’ hands explore each other’s faces and backs. The image changes to pale geometric patterns. When the scene returns, Cronenberg is lying on his stomach, his mouth buried in his pillow. The kaleidoscopic patterns reach the apex of their rhythm and colour intensity, as green, purple, black, and white hexagrams flicker turbulently. The woman’s arm reaches down to caress Cronenberg’s hip. Cronenberg reaches down and clasps her hand, but he stares away from the lovers. At last, he turns to kiss her. But he is not a third lover. He is Cohen’s spectral “you.” He is drawn into their caresses, but he remains separate, a ghostly observer. He is the union, the manifestation of the unconscious, and the projection of the viewer and of Hofsess on this intimate scene. He is both a despairing third wheel and a wraith. He is kissed, he is caressed, but he is not there. In turn, they are the dreamed lovers to Cronenberg’s second-person narrator, to you. These lovers whose mouths and hands

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kiss away the dreamer’s worries are likewise wraiths, a chimera. An image of David Martin’s wrist cutting repeats; it is now in green and white, with green tint on black emulsion. The fourth movement features kaleidoscopic patterns on the right screen, and double-exposed negative images on the left. In doubleexposed negative, Goldblatt and Martin perform domestic scenes: she applies makeup, they smoke, they laugh, they cry, they sit at a table. But these actions are tangled in superimpositions, a whir of panning motion sustained beneath them. Eventually, this whir is echoed on the right screen, as the kaleidoscopic images yield to a motif of yellow-lit horizontal lines, like brushstrokes. This effect is created through a fast panning movement, buckling forms into traces, as the panning of the camera is too fast for the film to register decipherable forms. In the fifth movement, the McLuhan hot and cool values are reversed: the right image is now red-tinged, featuring naturalistic images of Goldblatt and Martin, close-ups on their faces, their hands, their clothing, in a setting of vibrant red-brown tables, red tinting, faces flushed red with discomfort. The left image remains in photographic negative, tinted green and white, and now purple as well. On the soundtrack Leonard Cohen reads his poem “Two Went to Sleep.” The left and right screens are asynchronously showing the same scenes. Goldblatt and Martin are shown in domestic scenes: she applies makeup, they smoke, they drink tea, they cry, they sit at a table, they caress. These are the same scenes that have been running in cycles on the left screen, tangled; but now, cast on the right, these images are shown in the raw, unenhanced by effects of chemistry or printing. Cohen reads: “Love could not bind them, fear could not either. / They went unconnected, they never knew where. / Always returning to wait out the day.” Goldblatt and Martin embody Cohen’s disconnected couple, and at the same time Goldblatt and Martin are literally doubled by the two screens, becoming four, recalling Sigmund Freud’s statement that “every sexual act [is] a process involving four individuals.”60 Each one is given a double to echo or contrast emotion and action. Cohen’s voice ends. The Gass Company score resumes. The film moves into its sixth and final movement. On the right, Goldblatt’s fingers slip between Martin’s lips in a yellow light. On the left, the anonymous lovers from the bedroom scene spin into each other, pink spotlights finding them in the darkness of their room. On the right, domestic scenes of Goldblatt and Martin continue to circulate. They laugh together. A newspaper headline interrupts – “Do you have what it takes to join the underground?” – reminding

2.4  Kaleidoscopic forms are paired with leaf-covered eyes in Palace of Pleasure (1966–7).

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us of the exclusive order of the new youth culture, and forcing us to reflect on the notion of belonging, on this ironic challenge to assimilate, and to speculate on where this disaffected, hurt, and brooding young couple, with their domestic distresses, might belong. Martin runs his fingers over Goldblatt’s face. He rubs her neck and shoulders and she lays her head in his lap. The Gass Company score gives way to the Velvet Underground, playing “I’m Waiting for the Man.” On the right Goldblatt’s fingers run over Martin’s shoulders through his white wool sweater. On the left, the lovers in the bedroom kiss. The right screen has Goldblatt and Martin’s tender consolations. On the left, the lovers in the bedroom, now three, become savagely lustful, stripping, at last in the throes of ecstasy while abstract light patterns are projected onto their bodies. The yellow whir of fast panning begins again on the right screen. Newspaper advertisements interrupt the copulation on the left. One of the men runs his mouth over the woman’s breasts. On the right, Goldblatt is seen in a multi-coloured negative image. This phantom leans against a wall; she sits, paces, and cradles something indecipherable. She is filmed in pixilation to condense time and give the illusion of rapid movement. On the left, the lovers’ caresses become more explicit, as the right-screen image of Goldblatt builds momentum. She seems to stand very still as these chemical processes transform her, her flesh taking on a blue and green cast, an aura of yellow and red light forming around her body. When this image ends, kaleidoscopes reappear. The music fades to a heavy loop of feedback resonance, and Cronenberg’s face appears, again staring away from the side of the bed that the lovers had occupied. The right screen cuts to black. The left screen remains, held on this final, frozen image: Michaele-Sue Goldblatt is seated in front of a blue projection of rough and cracked textures. Her face is a bright red smear, smudged featureless in the hot and cool palette, with blue textures and a saturation of red overtaking her. Here, as in Gene Youngblood’s description of freeze-frame technique, “the image suddenly is relegated to the motionless past, leaving in its place a pervading aura of melancholy.”61 Colour is of primary significance in Palace of Pleasure, but Hofsess does not ascribe rigid colour allocations between the two halves of his oblong composition. The binaries of pale and flushed, of drained and saturated, are evened out with an array of moderate colour values, purple and pink combining with beige and brown. The kaleidoscopic images that move back and forth from left to right are defined primarily by the dark space that separates each hexagram fragment of

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rephotographed projection. The hexagrams shift perpetually between colour extremities. The pallid or lustrous hues on the left or right screen are conscious and controlled, but each lasts only for a short measure and then collapses, reverts, and circulates, the left and right exchanging, alternating hues, so that the eye is directed to one frame or the other – whether towards one, or away from the other. Throughout Black Zero, book jackets appear: Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death; Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil; C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces; Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology; Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory; and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. Record covers join these tomes: Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana; Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 2; and Glenn Gould’s The Art of the Fugue. Hofsess’s sources are laid bare. His therapeutic mission is made explicit by these titles and advertisements, which force viewers to build an understanding of what they are seeing from the sources with which they are confronted, and to construct further associations through the exclamation of titles. But it also contests therapeutic cinema’s trance character, its resistance to words. Hofsess had imagined therapeutic cinema as a kind of new primitivism, a reversion to the savagery of the non-verbal, of the sensually immersive. Such experiences had been cheapened by what Hofsess would later call the “world of words,”62 and yet, his films were composed of the promissory notes of his grim library. Among Palace of Pleasure’s diverse aesthetics was one that challenged the others: a citation aesthetic. Roland Barthes wrote that “any text is a new tissue of past citations.”63 For Hofsess, these citations were to be made explicit. This aesthetic appears in Hofsess’s filmmaking almost simultaneously with the emergence of intertextuality through Julia Kristeva’s writings on Mikhail Bakhtin, published in French in 1966. The collision of stream of consciousness and allusion was commonplace in the American avant-garde film, but the explicit tethering of one work to many others by the inclusion of book covers, magazines ads, and records was not. The collage score was another part of this aesthetic, and was in fact challenged by Hofsess’s inclusion of the jackets of his curiously opposite record collection: a soundtrack that bled between the Mothers, the Velvets, the Who, and the Gass Company was being met on screen by album covers of German composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, Gustav Mahler, and Carl Orff. These citations pit the inclusive, tribal character of the primitive beat and the amplified throb of those bands against the refined formalism of these earlier art musics. The images of

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advertising – commercial collages planted amid representations of tenderness, lust, and anguish – advance the idea that the superficial world of advertising, the “world of words,” is incapable of representing emotional extremities of hope and despair. During Black Zero’s post-production controversies it was condemned as a dirty movie, and its makers were called pornographers. Such short-sighted puritanical branding was not consistent with the film. Of the supposed orgy scene, consider Cronenberg’s phantom. The “dirty movie” suspends its viewer’s disbelief; the spectator fantasizes participation in idealized sexual unions. Palace of Pleasure is the opposite: it confronts the emotional pains of sex. Cronenberg lies longingly in bed, emotionally distant from the lovers next to him. The film’s erotic urge is abstract and visual, found in intensities of colour, the tensions of dual images, and in negative images that subvert the elementary intelligibility of naturalistic representation. And even the film’s representational symbolic order is set in metaphor, for the “you” that is Cronenberg is not really there. The form does not document. It does not offer the viewer the simple and immediate erotic charge of spying on a genital fusion, an orgasmic merge. It invites the spectator into a trance, one with too much loneliness and suffering, and by contrast too much elation and freedom, to be congruent with pornography. Palace of Pleasure challenges; “smut” simplifies. In his manifesto, John Hofsess had explained his film form in a way that obscured its true nature, giving his art practice, which pointedly aspired to the non-verbal, a dense critical explanation. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable had hedonistically enveloped its participant-­ spectators in dualisms and media designed to overwhelm them with sonic and sensual pressure. Such was the effect of the multimedia, coexisting images and musics, recorded and live, all in the presence of a community of creators united with their spectators. Its tribalism was this non-verbal ideal. By contrast, Palace of Pleasure was dolorous and lyrical in its narrative scenes, in the selection and arrangement of sources, and in its resistance to the representational visual order of its actors’ “dramatic” scenes. And yet it conveyed an experience that defied explanation. For all of the language that encircled its construction and rationale, and the critical explanation that legitimated Hofsess’s ambition to make a sophisticated contribution to psychoanalytical art, at its most sublime, Palace of Pleasure was a summoning of primal and wordless desires.

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The End of the 1960s Owing to the transient nature of student experience, some contributors to the McMaster Film Board would leave filmmaking behind after the 1966–7 year. There is no evidence that proposed projects from Robin Hilborn and Jelte Kuipers were completed or publicly exhibited, if indeed their productions ever began. By the time that the Cinethon took place in the spring of 1967, the first wave of filmmakers at McMaster had moved away from the Board, and the management shifted from Robin Hilborn to Dramatic Society president and Black Zero star David Martin. Thanks to the success of John Hofsess and Peter Rowe in attracting an audience to their own work and in launching a national distribution organization for Canadian independent films, the Film Board founders no longer needed their campus audience to support their work. At the Cinethon, John Hofsess and Patricia Murphy met the managers of Chicago’s Aardvark Cinema and accepted an invitation to move to Chicago to work on a new film, Resurrection of the Body, its title taken from a climactic section of Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death. Peter Rowe remained in Toronto, continuing with his own filmmaking through the McMaster Film Board, but also joining the staff of Allan King Associates, the documentary film production outfit responsible for the landmark cinema-vérité film Warrendale (1967). With Patricia Murphy’s departure to Chicago, Rob Fothergill and Iain Ewing managed the Distribution Centre, with Clara Mayer as office manager. By 1968, it had moved to room 204 of Bloor Street’s Rochdale College, the University of Toronto’s urban peace movement commune. The departure of the Film Board’s founders was a graduation, a sign of their maturation, extending their interests beyond the borders of the campus. John Hofsess and Patricia Murphy were moving into a larger community with greater consequences, beyond the parochialism of McMaster University. Popular culture and art had collided in the Velvet Undergound, and that blend was spreading to the mainstream: that summer, the Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. What started as a radical impulse soon became prey to commercial manipulation. The image of youth culture was forming, and once formed it would become a marketplace. Much as Hofsess and Murphy had graduated into a larger community, so too had the distribution ambitions of the Canadian underground film. The Canadian Film-makers Distribution Centre had become one of a handful of institutions equipped to

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distribute and support underground film in North America. Through the work of Rob Fothergill, Clara Meyer, and Patricia Murphy, filmmakers from Hamilton, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver found their work was assuming a role in an international community, alongside major works of the American avant-garde. In a treatment for his film The Neon Palace (A Fifties Trip, A Sixties Trip), Peter Rowe eulogized the era: It seems as if the ’60s, as a distinctive phenomenon, ended in about mid1967. There were no longer new alternatives, as revolution, both cultural and political, became everyone’s property. From a state of mind to a colour spread in Look magazine. In 1965 people individually sensed that there was something going on and you don’t know what it is, Mr. Jones. By 1968, it was policy. And now, even Mr. Jones has wised and hippened up, and now who cares? Since 1967 we have seen either the slowing down, the stagnation, or even the death of most of the things that once seemed so exciting and distinctive about the ’60s.64

chapter three

A New President

David Martin assumed the presidency of the McMaster Film Board on Wednesday, 22 February 1967, taking over leadership from interim president Robin Hilborn. After the Black Zero scandal, the Silhouette’s petty insults to the Film Board became more aggressive. This tension escalated under the Martin regime. Palace of Pleasure’s success had been ignored on campus, the Silhouette announcing: “The Cecil B. DeMilles on campus have produced an underground film. In fact it is so far underground, out-of-focus, and undeveloped that nobody has yet seen it.”1 Student journalists carried on lampooning McMaster’s art scene. The Film Board’s avant-garde orientation clashed with the student paper’s assumptions about what a film should be. By the time the 1967–8 school year commenced, David Martin and his executive had taken steps to affirm the Film Board’s accountability to the Student Union. Martin had successfully run the Dramatic Society, and he used that experience to formalize and legitimate the Film Board. When John Hofsess, Peter Rowe, and Robin Hilborn founded the Film Board, they did not follow Student Union club protocols closely and never had a clearly identified, task-oriented executive, only a president and vice-president. This lack of structure may have contributed to Student Union hostility. For all of Hofsess’s exhortations of free expression, he and Rowe had been managing the Film Board in an exclusive, secretive fashion. No doubt they were well aware that they could not make a film like Palace of Pleasure in transparent, democratic conditions at McMaster. Under Martin’s leadership, the Film Board appointed an executive consisting of student leaders and other members of the campus arts community. Student Union president Lachlan MacLachlan was elected as business manager but resigned

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immediately; as a graduating student, he was not eligible for the office. Arts major Bob Allington assumed the position instead. Other members of the executive were Rene de Vos, vice-president; Tami Paikin, secretary; Ruben Benmergui, distribution manager; and Martin’s Black Zero co-star Don Gouthro as publicity director.2 It was presumed that with this shared management would come openness and accountability, and that this reorganization would help the Film Board pay off its past debts and foster new practices to sustain it for the future. Peter Rowe continued his association with the Film Board, completing the film that had been announced in the Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre’s first catalogue as Encantada, now renamed Buffalo Airport Visions. As productions moved forward in the summer, Martin took on a substantial colour narrative film project, and business manager Bob Allington began to make an experimental film that would integrate animation; photographed dance performance; nightmarish, discontinuous sequences of city lights, highways, and sculptures; and dramatic scenes. The majority of the Film Board executive were not active as filmmakers, and so production continued much as it had under Rowe and Hilborn, with a small concentration of projects by a group of friends. The Film Board had been a student club, but in the spring it became a regular organization under the Student Union constitution. As a regular organization, the Board was not allowed to have an independent bank account. The new executive assumed the Board’s existing bank account, which miraculously had some money remaining in it, a total of $364.50. The executive, uncertain of the funding they would be receiving that year and of the potential costs they might incur, decided not to disclose the account to the student government. The incoming Student Council knew nothing of the extent of the Film Board’s remaining funds. Not wanting to turn that money over to the Student Union, or to have it counted against their annual operating budget, the executive chose to purchase film with it. They purchased thirty-two rolls of film from Kodak Canada, returning the difference of $28.74 to the student union. The rolls joined ten rolls of film that had been left over from the production of Black Zero. As they moved ahead with production, David Martin took possession of twenty-nine colour rolls; Peter Rowe took one roll to make a short colour sequence for his black and white Buffalo Airport Visions, though the colour sequence would not appear in his final version of his film; Bob Allington took six rolls of black and white film.3

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When the student organizations made their annual announcements to attract freshman involvement that fall, the Film Board described itself as an informal training program. It claimed to “offer students a wide variety of experience in all phases of production, from writing of scripts and acting, to the technical aspects of photography, lighting and sound reproduction,”4 essentially repeating the same goals that Peter Rowe had offered at the time of its founding. The Film Board’s goals never indicated a perspective on art or content, but gave the appearance of encouraging proposed films on an individual basis, without an agenda. Buffalo Airport Visions Rowe’s first film to be completed as sole director, the black and white Buffalo Airport Visions, took its title from the filmmaker’s experience ferrying the Velvet Underground and company to the Buffalo airport following the 1966 Arts Festival. With this film, Rowe revealed his own auteur ambitions: it is a critical investigation of the values of his generation and their relation to values of nation and past. The film defies classification: it is a documentary (in the sense that it documents), and an experimental narrative, with a complex collage structure, with some formal debts to the National Film Board experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. Unlike Hofsess’s films, it is a comedy, albeit one of tremendous formal sophistication. Rowe was unafraid of looking critically at his own generation, and he did so with uncommon acumen. With Palace of Pleasure, Hofsess was critical of his generation: at times it seemed that his concept of therapeutic cinema was designed primarily to counter the superficial openness of the free-love generation. He had lodged his protest through Palace of Pleasure and its post-Freudian motives. ­Hofsess looked to sensual and intellectual liberties that he felt were being abandoned by his peers and in his culture. Rowe looked instead to what was being championed in the culture, and the resulting film was no more optimistic. At times the film mirrors the style of films made by the National Film Board for Expo 67 in Montreal, employing music and visual motifs to contrast and complement one another, and yet this style is in service of a very different perspective, one influenced by the writings of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. An early review describes Rowe’s film as “a penetrating cross-section of the life around him.”5 Buffalo Airport Visions begins with a narrative frame: a young woman (Maryke McEwan) is shown applying eyeliner and lipstick. She takes a drag on a cigarette while listening to a preacher sound through the

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crackle of a radio. When she reappears later, she is crying. By the end of the film, McEwan has cut her wrists in a bathtub with a razor. An airstrip at night, with active planes, is glimpsed under the opening credits, which rise from the bottom of the screen in huge bubble letters to comic effect. The body of the film is populated with cinémavérité segments of life in Toronto in the 1960s. Men unload trucks at the city’s St Lawrence Market; they are accompanied by a recording of an interview with the American folklorist and writer J. Frank Dobie, conducted by folklorists Austin and Alta Fife.6 Dobie speaks of the poet absorbing the rhythm of the land, what seems an articulation of Rowe’s own process in echoing the rhythms of his surroundings. Street scenes burst with activity. Wilson Pickett sings “Everybody Needs Somebody” as pedestrians are double-exposed, their transparent bodies passing through one another. Rowe’s footage of a demonstration in Toronto’s Queen’s Park in spring 1967 provides a fascinating glimpse into the city’s youth culture. Hippies stand around with flowers in their hair and in their hats. The soundtrack presents fragmentary recordings of news coverage, which fade in and out while a band sets up on the park’s stage. As the bands begin to play, the soundtrack is overtaken with John Lennon singing “All You Need Is Love,” comically interrupted with the sound of Crest toothpaste advertisements, as if to remind that love is not quite all you need. The crowd is smoking marijuana. Some wear camouflage face paint. In succession we see a man with a cat on his shoulder, then a man with a dog on his shoulder, and finally a man with a monkey on his shoulder. An elderly priest in a clerical collar peaceably makes his way through the crowd, a flower protruding from his Bible. A man with missing digits plays a balalaika on the grass, while others blow soap bubbles. The Fugs’ song “Kill for Peace” starts up on the soundtrack, and we see negative images of a man with berries on his face, and then a series of collages of images from magazines that show grotesque caricatures of strained, confused, tortured faces. In footage from the Perception ’67 festival, the Fugs are shown setting up in a darkened University of Toronto theatre. Elsewhere in Toronto, Rowe finds desperate, impoverished people sifting through trash. A recording of Allen Ginsberg, a guest of Perception ’67, reading his most famous verse from “Howl” on the fate of the best minds of his generation, sounds for a moment and soon fades out. Rowe films mating calls scrawled in graffiti on subway walls and building facades and doorways: “For a good time, call …” When Ginsberg’s

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3.1  David Cronenberg rides his motorcycle in Buffalo Airport Visions (1967).

reading resumes, he is reciting his “America”: “My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.” Ginsberg’s determination gives way to the saccharine cheer of provincial optimism circa 1967: “A Place to Stand, A Place to Grow,” an Ontario anthem written for a promotional movie of the same name that played at Montreal’s Expo 67. a choir sings “A Place to Stand, A Place to Grow, Ontari-ari-ari-o” as Toronto denizens jeer and confront Rowe’s voyeuristic camera as it peers into the city’s streets, shop windows, and service entrances. Rowe shows the hardship surrounding the city’s Scott Mission, a shelter at College Street and Spadina Avenue. As the song’s triumphant chorus plays, David Cronenberg, riding a motorcycle, is intercut with an apparently legless man in a wheelchair rolling along a downtown street.

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A film sync countdown interrupts the film, and Rowe is suddenly on a set with Cronenberg. A confused cast is asking for direction. Cronenberg gives instructions, and someone asks if they can play a record. Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” begins, and Cronenberg tells a dancing woman to take off her dress and step on an actor’s head. As a final comic punctuation for the manic, disorganized scene, one of the actresses says, “Why don’tcha write a script?” This gives way to more wandering, now at night. Rowe’s camera surveys downtown traffic, the Satan’s Choice motorcycle club at a gas station, greasy spoons, and arcades. He finds celebrated Toronto transient Alex the Holy huddled in a neon-lit doorway.7 In the dark interior of a strip club, a stripper’s performance faintly registers. The sound shifts from the embittered Rolling Stones song “Under My Thumb” to Roy Orbison’s lighthearted “Pretty Woman” just as the camera captures the stripper mid-gyration. Intruding on this mix is the narrative frame: McEwan runs down a fire escape at night, bright lights bouncing off her raincoat. The preacher’s sermon returns on the soundtrack, his voice recalling the deep groan of William S. Burroughs. In the penultimate sequence, McEwan is seen lifeless in her bath. Close-ups linger on her slashed wrists. Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight” plays. As it reaches its own climax of ad-libbed vocalizations, we see her, alive again, reflected in a mirror that is being shattered with a hammer; this action repeats four times, composed slightly differently each time. Glass shatters on the floor, and the bloody razor, curiously a stillsheathed safety razor, slips into the bath. In the film’s final scene, it is morning, and a young black boy runs through a field, climbs down a stony cliff, and skips across rocks in a stream. He runs his hands through the water, splashing it. There’s an asynchronous sound of sirens, and the boy picks up a rock and playfully throws it into the water. He climbs back up the steep embankment. Rowe’s depiction of Toronto street life in Buffalo Airport Visions recalls an earlier Toronto film: Don Shebib’s Revival (1965), which depicted urban life in Toronto, capturing public scenes of domestic violence, hippie youth, and the homeless. It begins with a scene of a prayer group at the northeast corner of Spadina and Queen Streets on an early Sunday morning, sitting in folding chairs on the sidewalk in front of the Horseshoe Tavern. It ends with a scene of a teen preacher being taunted in a park by a prostitute. Shebib’s Revival was structured as a traditional documentary, with voice-over narration explaining the bookend scenes of street preaching, and a middle section devoted solely to observation.

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Shebib’s camera probed Yonge Street, filming the violence, poverty, recreation, and cultural richness of the city’s street life. These street scenes were echoed in Buffalo Airport Visions. Peter Rowe had reviewed Revival positively in his Silhouette column, and it was a likely source for his own work.8 But Buffalo Airport Visions only has a superficial resemblance to Revival. Unlike Shebib’s film, Rowe worked in a hybrid form: the Queen’s Park demonstration, Cronenberg’s film set, and scenes of Toronto’s poor are no more realistic nor less dramatic than the suicide narrative that frames them. This is a record of the great achievements of the era: the sense of community and of communal protest, the excitement of unity and free love, the beauty of innocence. In Buffalo Airport Visions the optimism of the era confronts its persisting degradation. The subjects of Rowe’s satirical construction are the young, the old, the Establishment, the opportunists, and the artists: all victims and all aggressors. This is communicated with an anomalous lack of symbolic order, most pronounced in the final shift from suicide to a child at play. The sound design is a key to this: it is awash with transistor radio noise bridging fragments of sermon, music, and poetry, as if the entire film is an act of dial changing. Where Revival is ostensibly a realist document, Buffalo Airport Visions is at odds with its own reality, questioning whether a self-aware movie can represent unmediated reality. It offers such doubts through the scenes at Cronenberg’s movie set and the intrusion of countdown leader. The heterodox editing also suggests this tension, as it is a contrast to filmic realism, which, like other forms of narrative filmmaking, constructs meaning for us. Filmic realism is offered to us only briefly: in the framing device, at the protest, at the movie set, and in the scenes of McEwan running at night. The rest of the film resists realism in its creation of ambiguous meanings in editing. When the film screened at McMaster, student Wayne Fraser offered an impassioned defence, claiming that Rowe’s film had placed the everyday in direct contrast with the spiritual. This theme is well documented: McEwan’s makeup ritual is paired with a radio sermon, the elderly priest at Queen’s Park moves stoically through the crowd with a flower in his Bible. Fraser wrote, “People seek other means of satisfying their needs [for] love and meaning,”9 referring to LSD, love-ins, the throng of city life. This analysis, however generous, is short-sighted in aligning Rowe too closely with a spiritual message or, for that matter, a constructive exploration: the film’s most arresting characteristics are those contrasts that provoke anger or chortles.

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To Paint the Park Shortly after taking on the Film Board leadership, David Martin began production on To Paint the Park. The film features music by the Gass Company, by then renamed the Butter Band. McMaster students Chris Golding and Patricia Conway were cast in the film. Conway plays a seductive pixie, leading Golding’s sex-starved art student on a vivid odyssey of enticement and rejection during an afternoon visit to a park. The film is divided in two parts. The first movement is a conventional drama of students spending an afternoon on a date, playing and flirting. At the film’s midpoint, the inoffensive, carefree tone is violently derailed when Golding’s caresses are no longer reciprocated. His advances become aggressive, and he stops himself on the verge of rape. The film then becomes a fantasy of freely sequenced images, some the product of Golding’s imagination, others analogous to the couple’s tormented situation, and others flashbacks to the happiness of their day together. To Paint the Park begins in an art class. A woman poses nude; there is a brief animated sequence of her naked body in mid-step. Chris Golding’s is one of several faces luridly examining her pink flesh, which appears against a deep blue background. Golding eyes the nude with desire and desperation. His mouth is agape, his stare penetrating. The camera zooms in on his eyes. The nude is shown in several poses, each pose seeming more wanton. Golding rubs his face, gasping in ecstasy. Other faces laugh, or show more timid signs of arousal. The model writhes on the blue tarp; her movements change in rapid elliptical edits. An alarm interrupts the class. The clock on the wall reads five o’clock. When Golding looks back to the tarp, the model is gone. The music cuts off; the photography shifts into black and white, the monochrome and silence signalling a return to clothed, frigid order. The class packs up for the day. On the building steps, Golding meets Conway. The black-and-white photography turns to a sepia tone, and the music resumes. She encourages him to follow her. Colour returns as they walk along a bridge. She is wearing sunglasses and a dress with purple and orange squares. They skip through a meadow, frolicking and flirting. When at last they reach the park (Toronto’s Edwards Gardens), they are shown in montage: they lie near a pond; she pulls flowers from her pocket and throws them at him; she rides down a slide and solitarily swings on a swing set; they stalk each other near a gazebo, then he chases her around it;

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she climbs a tree. He attempts to follow her up the tree but fails. The colour changes radically in quick succession, from black and white, to sepia, to strong pink and orange hues cast over colour sequences, modifying the rendering of colours, from pale to richly saturated yellows, oranges, purples, and greens. Golding stands by a pond. Conway sneaks up behind and surprises him. When he turns, he is shocked to find her wearing a grotesque clear-plastic mask, the details of her face visibly lurking beneath the mask’s androgynous features. The scene dissolves to one in which she lies in the grass motionless, his hand moving along her clothed body, pausing above her breast. Back at the pond, he is wearing the plastic mask. He takes it off and they admire it. The majority of their activities are commonplace and unexceptional, recalling the filler photography on the Black Zero set: they smoke together; they walk through the wood; they hold hands. Lying on the grass, he reaches to touch her lips. She is motionless. He leans down. His mouth hovers just above hers. He kisses her. She takes off her sunglasses and touches his face. She kisses his nose. He kisses her lips. His hand grips her dress and begins to pull it down. She struggles. She pushes him away. His rape-seduction is unsuccessful. He looks tormented. The fantasy sequence begins. The sky is in red monochrome. The focus goes soft. Conway is shown in a quick succession of outfits. She becomes the artist’s model, and then the artist’s model appears, dressed as her. A rapid assemblage of images follows: patterns of dresses; she in the corner of an empty white room, as one might find in an asylum; a series of still images as Golding approaches an apprehensive Conway. She moves away from him. His hand is extended to her as she slinks along the wall of the room. Her fear turns to mockery as she runs around the room, laughing at him. Pain builds in his face; he buries his face in his hands. A procession of motorcyclists is shown in a purple monochrome cast; they are members of Hamilton’s Blackhawk Motorcycle Club. A go-go dancer’s silhouette is projected against a bed sheet. Conway, in a black full-body outfit, runs along the shore of a lake. On a suburban street, Golding rides a bicycle, his wobbling in stark contrast to the sure machines of the Motorcycle Club. The camera tracks along Conway, again in her yellow sunglasses and dress of purple and orange, as she runs through tall grass in the park. The go-go dancer’s silhouette is lit in green and blue and other pale colours. She dances against superimpositions of dress patterns. The couple’s earlier

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3.2   Patricia Conway is layered against a statue in To Paint the Park (1967).

tree climbing is repeated, but now on a steel bridge. Golding desperately scratches at the bed sheet that conceals the go-go dancer. Conway stands at the top of the industrial bridge, with Golding at the foot of it. He climbs the bridge’s ladder. Now, she stands on a sandy mound. He unsuccessfully attempts to climb it, looking up at her silhouette, backlit by the sun. Other superimpositions appear, showing the peaceful moments of their earlier day together. He stumbles in the sand as he climbs up to her. We see her slide down a swing. The Blackhawk Motorcycle Club jumps a hill. Golding is at his lowest, wallowing in a sand dune. His fractured masculinity is contrasted with the ruggedness of the motorcyclists. Golding, once again in the park, encounters Conway, with porcelain skin, a pink and green polka dot dress, and yellow sunglasses. He reaches out to touch her and caresses her hair. He unbuttons her dress,

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only to reveal another dress; then another. He tears at them, undoes their lace straps, pulls them over her head, unzips them, but each outfit is cast aside to reveal a new outfit beneath. In a cleverly constructed, uninterrupted shot, Golding finally reaches her original purple and orange square print dress. The camera zooms in on her body as he undoes her buttons and opens her dress, but it is empty. The camera zooms out to find that Golding is alone. All that remains of Conway is the dress in his hands. In a series of still images, he looks into the dress, as if he’ll find her there. He stands in a clearing, her dresses scattered on the grass around him. He takes her sunglasses from the ground and puts them on himself. The camera freezes on a still of him wearing her sunglasses, the camera reflected in the lenses, and the credits begin to roll. To Paint the Park bore the influence of Redpath 25. It had the same approach to narrative: although it involves characters, its events resist realism. They defy easy classification as realist drama or surreal dream. Its second movement has formal ties to Redpath’s non-linear sequencing and evocative use of colour. The most certain difference between this film and its predecessors is its embrace of the conventions of narrative storytelling, which was natural for David Martin with his extensive background in theatre. Its melodramatic acting, on Golding’s part, evokes the performance of the young man (Pierre Batcheff) in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist film Un chien andalou (1929). When seized by desire, he approaches Simone Mareuil to rape her, dragging by a harness a piano, a rotting donkey, the Ten Commandments, and two priests. Like Batcheff’s, Golding’s is an exaggerated physical performance of sadness and rage; he appears simultaneously leering, tormented, menacing, and comically pathetic. Hofsess and Rowe had made films in which sparse narrative values did not mask the experiential nature of their films. By contrast, Martin’s film has a definite narrative course. To Paint the Park is also thematically distinct from its predecessors. Redpath’s subject of female fantasy is replaced here with the destructive male urge. Golding’s horny student, desperate to the point of violence, replaces Murphy’s lyrical dreamer. The feminine aesthetic that was primary to Hofsess’s filmmaking is absent, but the lavish, decadent colour scheme of Martin’s film is an extension of Hofsess’s approach. Instead of the tactile pleasures of Redpath 25 and Black Zero, To Paint the Park presents the fantasy of a frustrated male. Masculine vision is established early with Golding’s ecstatic, frenzied stares at the artist’s model, as he admires

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the untouchable body, his desire saturating the room with colour. At times, Conway is so perfectly objectified as to be a mannequin. When Golding takes and wears her glasses, he assumes her vision, her final gift or curse to him. It might, however, be presumed to be an entirely different vision. Is this his salvation? Does a willingness to take on her sight satiate his frustrated desires? Does he wear the glasses merely as a souvenir? Or does the failed rapist remain, abandoned in a field of her clothes? Redpath 25 and To Paint the Park come from the same ideological position: they advocate for an epistemological shift towards a feminine aesthetic and haptic, sensual pleasures. In To Paint the Park, pleasure is dammed up. The only explicitly erotic exchange between Golding and Conway is complicated with rejection. There is no celebration of the erotic experience, only the affliction of lust without satisfaction. To Paint the Park premiered at McMaster’s fall 1967 Film Festival. It was a small affair, but it brought together more Film Board productions than any previous exhibition. Redpath 25 and Buffalo Airport Visions joined Martin’s film, along with Toronto films Soul Freeze (Bob Cowan, 1967) and On Nothing Days (Clarke Mackey, 1967). The festival also featured The Most (1963), a documentary on Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner. Greg Munce and Ian MacKenzie covered the festival for the Silhouette, offering kind reminiscence of Hofsess’s startling Redpath 25, and drawing parallels between it and Martin’s new effort, asserting that both were examples of personal and sensual filmmaking. “Mr. Martin makes excellent use of rich colour, both natural and contrived, along with imaginative camera angle, to produce a film which has moved beyond technical excellence to an artistic achievement.”10 A week earlier, Jim Bennett of the Silhouette Review offered a capsule review of Martin’s film, comparing it to Winter Kept Us Warm in its professional execution, and even calling it “one of the best films ever made in Canada.”11 Munce and Mackenzie evidently misunderstood Rowe’s film, dismissing it as a “disjointed collection of home movies without purpose,” but praised Redpath 25 and To Paint the Park unreservedly. They were, by no coincidence, the two films that were intelligible as narratives. Buffalo Airport Visions, like Palace of Pleasure, placed greater demands on its audience. Munce and MacKenzie understood it only as a record of events. A year later, when Rowe’s film was again screened for a McMaster audience, a student critic dismissed it as no longer topical, as if showing youth culture of 1967 had caused the whole film to expire by 1968. Understood as a mere record, the film could only be topical, but its construction was more complex than that. With it, Rowe

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comments on the impossibility of making records of an era, and does so with a richly comic bent. In this way it became the most mature act of resistance against the realist film project that had yet emerged from McMaster, for it was critical of realism in a documentary form, where recorded events are casually accepted as factual. His resistance was not in visual composition, as was much of Hofsess’s and Martin’s, but in editing. In 1968 and beyond, after the subjects were no longer topical, this achievement was still rare and relevant. David Martin in Disgrace On the evening of Wednesday, 11 October, at a meeting of the Student Executive Council and Student Representative Assembly (SEC-SRA), Film Board business manager Bob Allington took the floor and apologetically voiced his concerns about the Film Board’s leadership: “I like David. I like David a lot. I respect the fact that he is a doer. He gets things done. He has a great deal of creative ability. It is just the way that he has done things that irks me.”12 He revealed that the Board had exceeded its budget in making Rowe’s and Martin’s films in the summer of 1967. Allington also exposed Martin’s considerable car rental expenses, incurred in the course of making To Paint the Park and billed to the Film Board, and revealed the details of the covert film purchase, which he admitted was a wilful attempt to deceive the Student Union. He had not been able to depose David Martin from within the Film Board Executive and claimed that it was his conscience that compelled him to report to the Student Union. “The Film Board seems to have done it again,” reported the Silhouette, reminding their readership of the organization’s past failures.13 The paper’s trademark distortion and speculation on Allington’s motives led Allington to respond with a pedantic 2,400-word letter to the editor in which he accused the Silhouette of libelling him, and analysed the reporter’s composition and word choice at length. David Martin responded that Allington’s action was unnecessary: he had already reported the bills to the Student Executive Council and had agreed to cease Film Board production until the debt was repaid. In Allington’s version of events, he, Martin, and members of the SEC had met earlier in the evening, prior to the assembly, to consolidate the Film Board’s accounts before the budget sessions. Only some of these bills had been revealed by Martin at this meeting.14 It had also come out in that evening’s general meeting that the Film Board’s debts

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over Black Zero had not been paid; the funds owed to the Student Union had not been claimed from Film Canada as expected. David Martin told the Silhouette, “The whole purpose in my presidency was to make films, so that the revenue gained from their distribution would help the Film Board to pay off last year’s debts.”15 That presidency was now over. Martin resigned, citing Allington’s public accusations as his reason for leaving his post. Allington felt that his statements of respect for his friend had been clear at the meeting, and that his subsequent gripe with Martin had been built on honest statements of fact: “It must have been obvious to anyone that I came to the meeting with a feeling of extreme regret. David was my friend. I did not want to offend him. The film board was an organization I had a great deal of faith in. I did not want to put that organization in jeoprody [sic].”16 At the end of his letter, Allington repeated his allegations that the Silhouette was engaging in speculation and skewing facts to suit their sensationalistic style. In response, the editor challenged that the “last few sentences of this letter sound strange coming from a member of an organization which is being investigated for mismanagement.”17 Student Union treasurer Ray Guy had been gaining notice in the Silhouette for his dedication to the responsibilities of his post. He undertook a public investigation of the Film Board through the remainder of the fall and reported his findings at the beginning of the winter term. He had concluded that the Film Board had been acting unconstitutionally, and that their expenses exceeded their budget by $2,038.13.18 He called on Martin, Allington, and their fellow Film Board executive members Ruben Benmergui and Tami Paikin to reply to these allegations of financial mismanagement. Benmergui and Paikin pleaded ignorance of Martin’s actions or, at least, of their unconstitutionality. Benmergui said that he had been “taken in.”19 The main point of contention for Ray Guy was that Martin had not obtained purchase orders for expenses incurred by the Film Board. He had been running up debts that the Union could not track, making it impossible for the Union to intervene in this accumulation of debt. Guy recommended that financial retribution be sought from Martin for the cost of car rentals; a clause would be included in the Film Board constitution that individual filmmakers would not be able to authorize accounts; the 1967–8 budget would be frozen, except for publicity and distribution budgets for films already made; and the four members of the Film Board executive would be barred from taking executive positions in any Student Union organization.20

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The Student Representative Assembly (SRA) concurred with Ray Guy about freezing the budget line. However, they ruled that the overbudget expenses incurred by the McMaster Film Board should be paid by the Student Union, and not by David Martin; the motion against the Film Board executive members was modified to apply only to David Martin, who, being in his final year, was accepting of this. Guy observed that the SRA was “dealing with personalities when it should have been dealing with illegal spending.”21 Furious that the Assembly would ignore the personal culpability of the Film Board executive, Guy wrote an open letter in the Silhouette calling for support from the student body to hold David Martin personally accountable for the costs incurred through the Film Board’s actions.22 Ray Guy managed to convince the Student Union to reconsider and withdraw the motion. The Assembly decided that revenues accruing from To Paint the Park would be used to reimburse Martin, who would take on personal responsibility of bills exceeding his 1967–8 Film Board budget. This made Martin responsible for bills for film, equipment, post-production services, and car rentals. It would later be discovered that Martin had also spent $284.37 on poster design and printing without obtaining a purchase order. When the Student Union refused to pay, the poster company took them to court. The Union was unprepared to deal with a lawsuit, and in their naivety they expected their constitution and by-laws to be recognized by the court. Ray Guy was the Union’s sole witness, testifying that Martin had no authority to arrange such purchases. The Union lost the case and was saddled with court costs in addition to the cost of the posters.23 Aside from the demands for compensation, all that Allington’s revelations had amounted to was the striking of the production budget. By the time the details came forward, Rowe and Martin had already completed and screened their films. Allington’s film … and dionysus died would eventually be completed too, but for now, it was in limbo. It would not screen on campus. … and dionysus died Dionysus is the Greek god of grape harvest, of wine, ecstasy, and epiphany, an androgynous deity central to the ancient cult of the Dionysian Mysteries. The Dionysian Mysteries had obvious modern-day significance for students of the 1960s: their ritual was purported to cast off the prohibitions of society through intoxication, to liberate individuals

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from social constraint by inviting them into a realm of primal, ecstatic possibility. Such Mysteries were evident in the euphoria of Redpath 25 and Palace of Pleasure, which held that spiritual, social, and sexual revolution remained possible. Like Osiris, Egyptian god of the blessed dead, Dionysus died and was resurrected. Dionysus is thought by some to be a Greek import of the Osiris myth; in Roman mythology, Dionysus became Bacchus. Variations of this resurrection myth would continue in the Christian tradition through the New Testament resurrections of Lazarus and Christ. Gods of different ancient faiths merged through their shared traits; in this case, the gods were twice born.24 Whether Allington was drawing from this pan-cultural narrative of death and resurrection, or these sacred rites of intoxication and sensual renewal, the death of his title has an air of finality about it. The film is an aggressively heterodox collection of images, shifting between cameraless techniques and naturalistic photography. The film features passages of white leader with black paint running along either side of the frame, weaving a topographic valley of light. Frantic painted dots interrupt this stream of light, as do paint strokes, some representational, some abstract, the latter recalling Robin Hilborn’s closed-eye hallucinations from Redpath 25. Allington’s painted images take advantage of his monochrome film stock by inverting values of black and white so that one does not consistently overwhelm the other, light and paint giving line and shape to his blotted forms. Bristle smears combine with spheres, squares, rectangles, eventually representing hands, flowers, and directional arrows. Its photographic sequences commence with a woman’s face and naked shoulders, her hair wrapped in a bow. A dancer in black leotard stretches her arms; a blonde woman skips through a riverbed in a forest; a silhouette smokes in profile; a figure ascends a staircase. The dancer’s movements are manipulated in stop-motion, interrupted with street signs/marquees (stop signs, hotel accommodation signs, declarations of discounts) and accompanied by the Beatles’ instrumental “Flying.” The dancer is reduced to ornament as she stutters forward, moved by the camera apparatus. The painted passage of light with which the film begins finds a parallel in her form, in the space between her thighs, mimicking that earlier animation of paint and light. By a lake, a young woman decorates a man asleep on a bench with oversized plastic flowers. When he awakes, irritated, he angrily casts one of the flowers to the ground. In the film’s climax, the rotating dancer is replaced with a modernist sculpture of the Virgin and Child on a lazy Susan. The sculpture is

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3.3   A woman places large artificial flowers on a sleeping man in … and dionysus died (1968).

then replaced with a plastic skull. The dancer wakes up with a start, screaming. The animations return: a stopwatch, a street sign, and a ­crucifix. Early in the film, a voice reads Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Fir-Tree,” as images of a forest are shown. Images of printed pages from the Book of Genesis follow. Andersen’s lesson of the value of living in the moment might be a retort to the revival myths evoked in Allington’s title. The lack of symbolic order in Peter Rowe’s Buffalo Airport Visions was a conscious aesthetic decision that gave his film depth and complexity. Allington takes that heterodox form to another level of resistance, now disorganized resistance, without wit to lift it. Here symbolic incompatibility and vagueness of idea close the work off from interpretation. The film’s symbolic content supports divergent readings. The film endorses and rejects its sources simultaneously, at

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once grieving for and celebrating this titular death. Allington’s conjuring of Dionysus has no discernible significance. It is buried in the constitution of his film. Allington’s gambit had produced a film that revealed his interests in form and discontinuous structure. However, the creation of art would soon become more unfashionable than ever at McMaster. Ironically, it was Allington’s allegations, and the subsequent fallout, that would create this climate. With a freeze on Film Board activities, the occasion for student filmmaking on campus seemed to have ended, but only for a time. The coming months would see a cooling of the Student Union’s opposition to organized campus filmmaking and a dramatic reinvention of the McMaster Film Board.

chapter four

Participatory Democracy

Whatever the limitations imposed on the McMaster Film Board in the aftermath of Allington’s revelations, one remaining member of the executive would entirely transform it. Ivan Reitman, born in Czechoslovakia in 1946, had immigrated to Canada with his parents in 1950. He grew up in Toronto, and moved to Hamilton to study music at McMaster in the mid-1960s. There he became involved with the Student Union’s music and theatre clubs. Reitman had been vice-­president of the Film Board in winter 1967 when Robin Hilborn had briefly assumed the position of president following Peter Rowe’s dismissal.1 Reitman had gained considerable attention for his direction of Proscenium, McMaster’s annual musical show, directing a production of the 1956 Broadway musical adaptation of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip. Having accomplished that, he devoted himself to remodelling the Film Board. Like John Hofsess and Peter Rowe, Reitman was interested in making films, but his interests were strongly geared towards narrative entertainment. While Rowe, Martin, and Allington were making their Film Board films in the summer of 1967, Reitman was making Guitar Thing, a short animated collage of city life set to music, at the National Film Board’s summer institute in Montreal. In February 1968, only a few months after David Martin’s resignation and in the immediate wake of Ray Guy’s report, Reitman wrote an article asserting the importance of a student film board. He supported Bob Allington’s proposition to make the Film Board into a transparent organization that could operate within the confines of the Student Union administration, and he argued that it would make a practical contribution to student life, echoing the sentiments of past Film Board presidents. By the time Reitman spoke up, the Film Board

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had informally disbanded. The organization’s financial mismanagement and fractious public debates had taken their toll on the Student Union. A fed-up Council had no interest in reviving and supporting an organization that had repeatedly resisted the conventions of student government, such as instituting a constitution and electing an active executive.2 In further articles for the Silhouette, Reitman made specific recommendations for changing the Film Board’s operating procedure. He agreed that radical changes would have to be made not only to the constitution, executive design and budget, but also “in program,”3 indicating that the formal experimentation of past films had been as much a problem as the cliquey makeup of the Board’s leadership and its resistance to democratic regulation. Reitman offered a factually accurate history of the McMaster Film Board. Although a bit severe in dealing with the faults of John Hofsess, he acknowledged Hofsess’s creativity, a rare admission in a newspaper that had vilified, mocked, and dismissed Hofsess; but he also declared Hofsess “notoriously lacking in organizational skill.”4 What Hofsess had lacked was not coordination skills but finesse and business sense. He had, after all, conceived and instituted both the Film Board and an early incarnation of the Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre, and had demonstrated considerable coordination skill in his editorial leadership at the campus literary journal Muse. Reitman’s history restated some of the controversy resulting from the Film Board’s “disorganization”: Larry Zolf’s street interviews about McMaster becoming the sex capital of Canada, the Toronto Morality Squad’s seizure of Black Zero, and Martin’s fiscal irresponsibility. Reitman cited all of these events as embarrassments to the Student Union and the university. What is more, he charged, for the first time publicly, that a clique had run the organization. In two years of existence, the presidents had all been close friends. They gave the illusion of having “script-reading committees,” but those had been committees of one (Peter Rowe), and few films had been commissioned. By Reitman’s account, throughout the Film Board’s history, Hofsess, Rowe, and Martin had made decisions in dictatorial fashion. Like Allington, Reitman expressed disbelief at the management practices of his peers, who had repeatedly taken their Film Board into “a very familiar position” of heavy debt and embarrassment while hoarding all resources within an exclusive social circle. The filmmakers would never have been allowed creative freedom if they had been made answerable to the Student Union. To some in the student body, the value of their work outweighed the constitutional wrong of their secrecy. The Union,

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however, was unsympathetic towards the aesthetics of the underground and, more fundamentally, the overt sexuality of past Film Board productions. Reitman pointed out that distribution contracts for Buffalo Airport Visions, To Paint the Park, and Palace of Pleasure had not benefited the Student Union, that the Film Board to this point had been a drain on funding, returning only embarrassment and notoriety. Reitman’s account of the Film Board’s history provoked a curious rejoinder. B.A. Veldhuis, who had been a writer on Peter Rowe’s unproduced Goon Show tribute, Film for Spike, Secombe, and Sellers, offered a two-part response, “A Full & True Account of the Celebrated McMaster Film Board.” Veldhuis wrote a fantasy retelling of the trials of the Film Board, a “Magick Bag of Bones” taking the place of the Film Board’s budget line, and Black Zero and To Paint the Park described as magical weapons. His story features Hofsess, Rowe, and Martin (“the Filmers”) battling an enemy (the Student Union), and concludes with Reitman, “Magick Bag” in hand, forging the new Film Board as a self-destructive weapon: a sword without a hilt.5 For whatever good Reitman intended, there were some at McMaster who viewed his approach as conformist, coming as it did after a prolonged and bitter war between the student body’s artists and politicians. What Reitman wanted was a Film Board that would have a democratic system to facilitate greater student involvement, as well as a business model that could justify the costly production of films for a sceptical, financially strapped Student Union. In many ways, this profit-oriented business model was at odds with the Student Union’s tenet of enriching student culture; unprofitable activities, such as the making of art, were not seen as having an inherent worth. This business model suggested rather cynically that the only activities worth pursuing in a university are those that reap financial rewards. John Hofsess had always emphasized the potential financial benefits to the Union as an advantage, but one that was subordinate to the artistic ambitions of the student filmmakers. In this new model, generating financial return was the primary goal. For the Film Board’s toughest critics on Student Council, Reitman’s proposal was sensible and worth supporting. Orientation The Union agreed to give Ivan Reitman a small interim budget with which he could test his belief that the Film Board could be reformed. He organized a new seven-member executive. By June 1968, Reitman

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had sufficiently demonstrated his management abilities that the Union bankrolled a pilot film, one that if successful would inaugurate the new Film Board. For Reitman, this film was an opportunity to prove to the Student Council that the Film Board was indeed necessary. He proposed a film that would already have a built-in audience at McMaster: a comedy about the trials of freshman life that could be screened as part of the school’s annual frosh activities. It was a tremendously ambitious project; as a thirty-minute colour narrative film, it was the longest and most expensive film to be funded willingly by the Student Union. It also marked the first collaboration between Reitman and his Film Board vice-president Dan Goldberg. In the summer, Reitman and Goldberg wrote the script for Orientation. Goldberg would play the lead freshman with geeky charm. The film was a satire of campus life: the freshman arrives at campus and immediately encounters an exclusive, impenetrable social order. His alienation from this, and his general disorientation in his new environment, is presented in scenes at the registrar’s office, the gym, the cafeteria, a lecture hall, and his dorm room. He is subject to irritating hazing by his roommate (Paul Starkman) and a horde of frat boys. The spheres of the university bureaucracy and the student body are screwball, madcap. When Goldberg tries to become involved in student activities at the campus student centre, he is comically inundated with club literature. In a timid act of rebellion, he discards the club leaflets on the steps of Gilmour Hall but is immediately scolded for doing so. In the gym, he is berated for his milquetoast physique by a muscular jock. In the cafeteria, he is fed dog food. When Goldberg finally does adjust to campus life, he does so by two means: first, he becomes involved with the Film Board and begins to take candid movies of his classmates (an echo of Coldfinger). Second, he courts and beds a beautiful co-ed (Lyn Logan). He finally gains social acceptance when his roommate is impressed by his sexual conquest. Campus arts activities are farcically exaggerated. The filmmakers included a parody of the production of Redpath 25, lampooning the Film Board’s own history. Patricia Murphy and Norman Walker, who had played the lovers with cool detachment, are here replaced with giggling, overeager Margi Laver and Bob Bracewell.6 When Laver giggles, a Hofsess-like filmmaker, looking strangely like Andy Warhol, warns her “this is not a laughing part.” When the filmmaker speaks, the voice on the soundtrack is Ivan Reitman’s. He invites Goldberg’s freshman to join them with the words, “I can use you!” The freshman joins a leering

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4.1 The freshman (Dan Goldberg) stares to the camera while being lectured on fitness in Orientation (1968).

film crew, as the director barks at his props department to smear more whipped cream on the actress’s body. The McMaster Dramatic Society is similarly teased: a director shouts at an actor, “You, be an elf, that’s how you get places in acting.” One actor repeats, over and over, “I’m a tree, I’m a tree,” a parody of the Stanislavski method. Other parts of the filmmaking process were made under less controlled circumstances. The freshman attends a dance featuring the Village S.T.O.P. (Sounds Typical Of People), a local five-piece psychedelic rock band. The sequence is evocative of the atmosphere that Reitman himself would have experienced in his own freshman and sophomore years when the Arts Festival had hosted the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Lyn Logan, the beautiful co-ed, appears throughout the film. She is unapproachably hip, surrounded by suitors and friends. Reitman’s satire does not stop at student social order. Education is also subject to playful ridicule: Bernhard Banaschewski of the Mathematics Department, advocate of Hofsess and the Film Board and former

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Film Society adviser, appears as an English lecturer, giving a cryptic lecture on the heroism of the apple in Milton’s Paradise Lost. The students are disengaged; some are sleeping, some are making out. No one seems interested in Paradise Lost. Goldberg takes lustful glimpses of Logan as Banaschewski speaks of Adam and Eve, and the necessity of woman to man. As the hour ends and his audience stands to leave, Banaschewski dryly reminds them that they’ll meet the following week. Invoking the Vera Lynn song that closes Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1962), he says, “We will meet again, won’t we, class?” Goldberg finally breaks the ice with Logan by filming her. On the sidewalk outside of the student centre, he jumps in front of her, holds up an 8mm film camera, and she spontaneously strikes a pose. They spend the rest of the day by a riverbed, filming each other. At the end of the day, they go back to his dorm room, where they have sex off camera. His roommate witnesses Logan leaving the room and, thoroughly impressed with Goldberg’s success, recognizes him as a fellow “college man.” Hofsess’s films had presented women as “possessing the clue to mental and emotional health,” as a cure for the repressive system of masculine posturing. By sharp contrast, Reitman had gone towards mainstream representations of sexual relations, presenting woman as conquest, reinforcing what Hofsess had regarded as the sexual repression of the masculine mystique.7 Ivan Reitman employed a number of camera techniques in making Orientation, exploring stop-motion, elliptical editing, and superimpositions. His technique was primarily demonstrative of technique itself: its purpose was to show that formally novel filmmaking could be combined with dramatic narrative to make campus entertainment. Unlike Redpath 25, in which Robin Hilborn’s cameraless techniques foreground the film’s celluloid materiality, Reitman’s use of the apparatus’s capacity for trick photography was to distinguish the Film Board from the Dramatic Society: he augmented his narrative with distinctively cinematic techniques. The film took considerable labour on Reitman’s part: he not only directed and co-wrote the film, but wrote the film’s memorably cheerful pop score. Before Orientation premiered, he proudly told the student press that the film had taken all three months of summer, working seven days a week, at ten hours a day, to complete. A New School Year Orientation premiered as planned during frosh week. Reitman described the film to the Silhouette: “Although basically humorous, the film

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underlines the loneliness and fear experienced by most freshmen in their first week.”8 Despite aiming at the demographic of new students, Reitman stressed that the film “could be appreciated and enjoyed by all students,” a broad appeal that his predecessors, with their polarizing art films, had never aspired to. The film premiered on the evening of Monday, 18 September 1968, in Arts II, room 120, at 8:30. Buffalo Airport Visions warmed up the crowd.9 Filmmaking at McMaster had always been in conflict with the administration and had an overt political resonance; now, Reitman was telling his peers that his film was “not meant to be a profound or propagandizing film, but one which is mildly critical of some facets of university life.”10 The film was a slaughter of all sacred cows on campus. Reitman and Goldberg satirized the art community, the faculty, the Film Board’s own roots, and the vanity of campus athletes. It was a nod to a freshman audience’s similar experience of alienation, inviting them to share in the hero’s bored annoyance at things artistic and academic, and his sheer disbelief at the insanity of the university. Ellen Wolter, writing in the Silhouette Review, fixed on the familiarity of the performers: “We catch Donna Vaitonis sketching, a couple in the back of the hall necking, Geoff Pittman fanatically writing notes, Jean Angi reading a book.”11 Reitman’s film was, in this sense, a celebratory record of his community, simultaneously fulfilling its stated purpose of lampooning the university (and with it, his community) in sympathy with beleaguered freshmen. When Redpath 25 screened on campus, the reviews dwelled on the familiarity of the actors; however, those actors were not performing caricatures of themselves or their peers, as Reitman’s cast did. Orientation succeeded in attracting positive attention for the Film Board. Students began to express interest in campus filmmaking. A core group formed that would sustain the Board in the coming years, with Eugene Levy, G.W. Curran, and Lawrence Martin (brother of David) joining Goldberg and Reitman. The access and education platforms that Reitman planned were expected to build a substantial membership base that could rival those of Proscenium and the Dramatic Society. With Orientation completed at a cost of $1,600, Reitman’s handling of finances showed a significant improvement on his predecessor’s: To Paint the Park had cost nearly twice that much. With Orientation’s warm reception, Reitman could count on future Student Union support. In the first week of the 1968–9 school year, the Silhouette carried a full-page advertisement for the McMaster Film Board, prominently

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announcing Ivan Reitman’s presidency and asking: “Want to watch FILMS? Want to make FILMS? Want to get involved in FILMS?” Images from Orientation speckled the poster, and the accompanying text offered details about the mission of the Film Board. The new Film Board offered a three-part program: Film Production, Film Showing, and, as an extension of both, a film festival of Canadian student-made films, along with a conference on Canadian independent filmmaking. The Film Production program advertised the success of Board alumni and the success in Canada and the United States that the McMaster Film Board had achieved for the quality of the films it produced. Alumni were working in film professionally. David Martin had joined Peter Rowe at Allan King Associates, where he would act as an assistant camera operator on the cinéma-vérité documentary A Married Couple (1971); he would also act as the assistant camera operator on two major American vérité documentaries: Frederick Wiseman’s Law and Order (1969) and Hospital (1970). John Hofsess and Patricia Murphy remained with the underground film community, albeit in Chicago. The McMaster Film Board had much to be proud of in their past, even if their new foundation had been built on a purge of that past, through Reitman’s savvy historicizing. The new Film Board advertised their great ambitions: in the winter they planned a full-length feature, a mammoth task that needed volunteers from the student body to fill the roles of actors, crew, and publicists. The Film Board welcomed the inexperienced, so long as they were passionate and responsible. In running a screening series, the Film Board was returning to its roots in the Film Society. Feature films were booked for alternate Thursday screenings during the school year: Persona (1966); Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966); Citizen Kane (1941); Masculin féminin (1966); and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). The screenings needed volunteer ticket sellers, projectionists, and, again, publicists. Admission would be by subscription, another move to foster community, continuity, and involvement. The campaign succeeded tremendously, netting substantial returns when blocks of season tickets sold out almost immediately.12 The proposed festival of Canadian student films and its adjoining conference were cancelled, lost in the mad rush of the year’s activities. On the Wednesday following Orientation’s premiere, in Arts II 120 at 7:30, a program of past films of the McMaster Film Board was shown.13 With the school year beginning, the Board announced the specifics of its support to filmmakers: students could submit a script to

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Ivan Reitman in the Film Board office, still in Wentworth House, and if accepted, they would receive a grant of roughly $500 and use of Film Board equipment.14 McMaster Film Board Shorts The frosh week screening had stirred enough interest in the Film Board that more than twenty scripts came in. Within a year of Bob Allington’s budgetary revelations, the Film Board was not only back on its feet; it was a popular success. The newly democratized Board had created enormous interest, and the executive was vetting entries with a set of prerequisites: chosen films would be original, have technical merit, suit the format (black and white 16mm film), and – following in Reitman’s audience-conscious timing of Orientation – demonstrate “audience appeal.”15 After the accepted projects were publicly announced, the Film Board called a general meeting for Wednesday, 6 November, at 7:30 in the Men’s Lounge of Wentworth House, which included a workshop in the use of film equipment for the selected filmmakers. Crews worked on the proposed films through the remainder of fall and the early months of the winter term. Some of the projects changed significantly during this time. Of the seven film scripts that had been accepted, six were produced. Only Jack Hill’s animated film, The Beginning, described as “a progression of increasingly complex geometric figures moving towards Man’s first appearance,”16 was not completed. Ivan Reitman’s The Fishbowl was renamed Freak Film. Eugene Levy’s film, which had originally taken its title from Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row, premiered as Garbage. Gary Curran’s It’s Over became End. Fraser McAninch’s Freeway Impressions was shortened to Freeway.17 The six black-and-white films premiered on campus on 13 March 1969. The program was well received on campus and was even reviewed in the nationally circulated Globe and Mail. The Globe’s Melinda McCracken described the program as “full of hackneyed undergraduate wit, first love affairs, pokes at the academic system, student pranks – all those predictable student things.” Among the everyday subjects of the films, McCracken noticed an absence of political content. She wrote, “If there are any student activists or revolutionaries at McMaster, they aren’t connected with the Film Board or reflected in the campus movies.”18

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4.2 Ivan Reitman leads a camera workshop at McMaster, 1968.

Walk On Jim Bennett, a graduate student who, as a critic for the Silhouette Review, had praised Martin’s Film Board in the early fall of 1967, received a budget and equipment access to make a film. His film, Walk On, was proposed as “a subtly humorous analysis of pick-ups … [using] a series of fresh variations of the classical ‘boy-meets-girl’ theme in his crosssections of North American meeting and mating customs.”19 Bennett developed Walk On with fellow student Hugh Caughey (also his lead actor and co-editor). As the film begins, Caughey is in a car with a young woman. As he seductively draws her towards him, the car horn sounds, interrupting and causing confusion. It doesn’t stop, and he furiously steps out and checks under the hood. When at last it stops, the credits play. When the narrative resumes, the setting has changed. Caughey wanders around a school dance, asking young women to dance, without success. The room is dark. Music plays as

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he wades through the crowd, ceiling lights striking his white sweater. The rest of the crowd seems to fade into the darkness of the scene, passing through the negative space between Caughey and the camera. He sits with a young woman, ignoring her protests, and watches as her ­partner leads her away to the dance floor. When a nearby couple (the male is Dan Goldberg – dressed much as he was in Orientation) also gets up to dance, Caughey is left sitting alone. The camera zooms towards Caughey as the asynchronous soundtrack cuts off. In the daytime, Caughey drives through residential Hamilton in a van. He slows at a bus stop, trying to pick up a waiting woman. He leans out with a leering expression and (with mimed dialogue) offers her a ride. She refuses at first, but he persists. When at last she agrees, she calls off-screen to her two small children to join them. The three passengers pile into the backseat, and Caughey is still leaning out of the van’s window in surprise and disappointment when they shut the door behind them, his confident grin fading to a pout. Indoors, on campus, at night, a young woman puts a cigarette in her mouth and sifts the contents of her purse for a match. Caughey approaches and offers her a light. She looks at him as she drags the flame to her cigarette, and blows smoke out with a smile. A man approaches and takes her hand, leading her away. She mouths goodbye to Caughey and he looks forlorn. In the film’s final courtship, Caughey enters a butcher’s shop. He eyes another customer, a young woman, then he eyes the deli meats, and she smiles at him. She picks out a salami. He holds the door for her as they leave together. The two lie in bed, eating and playing chess on a chessboard-patterned blanket. She takes his queen. As he leans to kiss her, she bounces the queen off his back. As the piece falls to the floor, in a rapid edit, she vanishes, and he falls face first into the blanket. He looks up and realizes he is no longer in the bed, but on a windy beach under an overcast sky. A young woman in a bathing suit stands over him. She takes his hand to help him stand up, and the two embrace. He is back in the room, alone, and the film ends. Like Orientation, Walk On is a comedy, and so, as Reitman had, Jim Bennett was able to make a narrative film without the trappings of realism. Comedy was largely absent from the Canadian independent narrative features that had emerged in the 1960s, focused as many of them were on the trials of the working class. The McMaster filmmakers were not dealing with problems of class, identity, and other politics, but with timeless trials – social adaptation, the search for love – that naturally lent themselves to a fantastic or surreal framework. In this way films

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4.3  Hugh Caughey embraces his fantasy lover in Walk On (1969).

such as Orientation and Walk On were, in continuity with earlier works of the Film Board and with the explicit fantasy of Redpath 25 and To Paint the Park, united in their resistance to realism. Walk On is filled with silences. The score by David Morrow, of the Gass Company / Butter band, drifts in occasionally, as do some diegetic sounds (the car horn, doors shutting), but most of the film occurs in a vacuum of silence. This makes it a challenge to appreciate Caughey’s pathetic courting as comedy. Morrow’s score is primarily made up of a guitar filtered through a wah-wah pedal, mixed with other instruments. Even when this music sounds, it conveys space and absence. The silences reflect the incompletion of the protagonist’s quest: unlike the joyous, fulfilling mating narrative of Orientation, the dysfunctional world of Walk On doesn’t offer Caughey any catharsis or triumph, or even the self-satisfaction of being a sane person in an insane world. He

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does not conform because he cannot conform, finding only the obstacles of other people’s relationships. He desires romance and sex, but when he reaches his most intimate encounter, the woman literally vanishes.20 The subsequent fantasy represents his elusive desires, to grasp at love in the vast emptiness of a stormy beach. Unlike Goldberg’s freshman, who seduces a beautiful woman and in doing so achieves the approval of his peers, Caughey is left in longing, apparently without the welcome distractions of school and friendships. The humour of Walk On, as promised by its early description, is subtle, much of it achieved in Caughey’s mischievous expressions. The comedy of his failing mating rituals is very dark, from the first scene, when his sounding car horn interrupts his courting, to the surprise of the bus stop pickup, to the vanishing woman on the checkered blanket, and the arbitrary fantasy at the end. Garbage Garbage had been initiated as a collaborative project between Eugene Levy, Bill Crandall, Lawrence Martin, and Marshall Elliott. According to the Silhouette announcement of the film, the makers would “draw on their personal experience in the field of garbage collection” and present “an objective view of a typical day in the life of a garbage man.”21 The resultant film has little objectivity: it is a richly metaphoric film about the frustrations of student workload. Like Walk On, it veers from Orientation’s (eventual) affirmation of the rituals of student life, and like Orientation, it turns a satirical eye on the madness of education. At a landfill, polyethylene bags and cardboard boxes litter the ground in mounds. In the distance, the skyline rises from a forest. Gulls congregate over the trash. The camera pans past the mounds, from one clearing to another. A mournful, unaccompanied saxophone sounds. The scene shifts to students studying at a table, two male, one female. One of the students (Leon Jervis) is bored, struggling with the book in front of him. Setting it down, he lights a cigarette and offers one to the other male student. The landfill and the dormitory are intercut, the landfill becoming a metaphor for Jervis’s own head. Jervis now stands in the dump, amid the circling gulls and detritus. He closes the book and tosses it in a heap of debris. Back in the dormitory, he is visibly frustrated, taking a drag on his cigarette and rolling his eyes in frustration. Seven students sit at desks in a field on the McMaster campus. Drifts of snow buttress their makeshift classroom. A lecturer (Walt Harvey),

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dressed in an academic gown, orates from a podium. All seem oblivious to the curious setting. Like Walk On, there is no synchronous sound, nor is there an asynchronous “lecture” to fill the space. Harvey moves his mouth, but no words sound. The soundtrack fills with Thelonious Monk’s “Well You Needn’t,” as the students furiously write. They look up in unison, hands to chins, miming deep thought. This is intercut with a truck unloading piles of polyethylene bags at the landfill. We see Harvey’s face, mid-oration, and then the truck, pulling away from the mass it is unloading. The students turn back to their papers and write. Garbagemen pass tin garbage cans to one another, emptying them into a truck. Jervis stands in the snowy field with the lecturer. Their conversation sounds: Jervis admits that he’s lost and doesn’t understand the relationship between the readings and the lecture. “Now, you gave us a book in class the other day, this one here. How does that relate to your lectures?” Harvey responds that Jervis thinks too much. “You should do a little more reading.” Harvey begins to pile up texts for Jervis to read, among them an ironic fictitious volume, The Aesthetics of Bureaucracy, commenting, “I read this one twice and I think everyone should.” In the midst of their conversation, they are transported to the landfill. Harvey now hands Jervis bags of garbage, his advice uninterrupted, continuing, “Take it and memorize it. This one’s going to be on the exam.” Back in the dormitory, studying, a despairing Jervis places his face in his hands, intercut with polyethylene bags tumbling from a mound. A terrified Jervis runs through a snowy field, Harvey in pursuit; Jervis looks back at the hollering professor and stumbles. A rapid intercutting of preceding images from the film begins: the faces of the actors, the garbage bags, the tin garbage cans passed from one collector to another, the landfill. The mournful music starts up again and bulldozers begin to plow pathways through the garbage. In the film’s climactic image, Leon Jervis stands amid the polyethylene bags with his book in his hands as a bulldozer passes by in the background, clearing away garbage from the seemingly endless landfill. In static images, we see him again running in a snowy field, a terrified expression on his face. This time, no one is pursuing him. Levy’s film is a comedy, albeit a dark comedy; there is a comic element to Harvey’s grandstanding performance of learned appearance, a comic element that emerges as he seamlessly shifts from heaping books to heaping bags of garbage on his student. The authority figure deflects criticism, or even curiosity, by inundating his struggling pupil

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4.4  Leon Jervis studies on a landfill in Garbage (1969).

with such a volume of readings, and no guidance, that he might as well be handing the pupil garbage. Jervis’s initial question is spoken on the soundtrack (by director Levy) in feeble defeat. His consequent bullying by Harvey makes the film a strong statement about the frustrations of university life. End Like Walk On and Garbage, G.W. Curran’s End deals with the frustrations of youth, but unlike Bennett and Levy’s films, it does so through things remembered, and not things imagined. In Walk On, Caughey desperately searches for love, only to be surprised, rebuked, and abandoned. In Garbage, Jervis wrestles with and finally buckles under the

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expectations, hypocrisies, and madness of education and pedagogy. End is a lyrical, sorrowful film about the collapse of a relationship, a rapid montage of scenes from a broken engagement, remembered at a dance by a forsaken fiancée. A couple walks through a grassy field. Nearby trees are stripped of leaves and the sky is overcast. He (Siegfried Arndt) points to something, and she (Sheila Turple) follows his finger with her eyes. They look to the sky, and then to each other. He runs a hand through her hair. This prelude gives way to a series of framed flashbacks. Defying temporal and spatial conventions of narrative storytelling, the film shows the relationship in fleeting moments. Out of sequence, we see what will become the climactic image: his hand, extended and open, reaching out to her clenched fist, a refused gesture of reconciliation. At a dance, Turple, now in a formal dress, remembers a bottle falling and smashing. This alerts her to her present surroundings. Arndt coolly leans against a bookcase, surrounded by dancing couples. The two are wallflowers on opposite walls. A close-up shows his welcoming expression. She begins to move towards him. Scenes from their relationship are recalled. She picks a flower from a vase and admires it nostalgically. She and Arndt are again in the field. He seems to slip a ring onto her finger, and their faces fill with joy. At the dance, she slips the ring from her finger, sadly admiring it. In her memories, she and Arndt are seen dancing together. The camera pulls away from them to reveal an empty room. Turple passes students seated at the dance; one man has a hand up a woman’s dress, which shocks Turple into rushing past them. A man stops and spins around to ask her to dance. She refuses. More memorial scenes intrude on the dance: Arndt and Turple argue in a parking lot. At the party, she passes a young woman (Jean Ho) and is startled into remembering her: from across a crowded street in daylight, Turple sees Arndt and Ho smoking and laughing together intimately. Their eyes meet: Turple looks shocked; Arndt is surprised; he smiles at her. At the party, she is crying and smearing her makeup. She remembers their hands clasped in the field. He looks at her, his mouth agape. She continues to walk through the party, towards him, then past him to a nearby corner. She buries her face in her right hand, leaning against the wall on her clenched left fist. His hand extends, open-palmed, to reach out for her. Her hand remains in a fist. The story of End is told largely through implication. Turple’s digressions are accepted, by use of montage, as memory rather than fantasy.

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4.5 She (Sheila Turple) spurns his (Siegfried Arndt) reconciliatory gesture in End (1969).

The montage form, present here and in Levy’s Garbage, resists the conventions of theatrical realism that guided Reitman’s Orientation, much in the same way that the psychedelic montage of David Martin’s To Paint the Park subverts expectations of conventional form established in the early sequences of that work. The final image alludes to the impossibility of reconciliation for the splintered couple. The film’s intricate structure clearly delineates past and present: the dance is lit as an interior at evening, Turple passes through against a black background, and the bodies that come in and out of her view fade into the setting; her memories are set primarily in daylight, featuring only one or two actors. The exception to this structure, which complicates it, is the early insertion of the climactic image, of Turple’s inability to reciprocate Arndt’s reconciliatory reach in the aftermath of his infidelity. In narrative terms,

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the placement of this image implies that the whole event of the narrative is something remembered, that Turple’s reminiscence is a reverie within a reverie. But the early appearance of this image serves a greater purpose: it announces the impact that this infidelity has had on the couple, undermining the conventional structure that brings the viewer from a beginning to an end, and evoking the bookends of T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker”: “In my beginning is my end,” and “In my end is my beginning.”22 While David Secter would quote the first line of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in the title of his Winter Kept Us Warm, the poet’s pervasive influence could also be felt in the work of the McMaster Film Board. These filmmakers too had been prey to the dominance of high modernist despair in the English departments of the 1960s. End bears the influence of Eliot’s poetry. Even its central narrative action, of Sheila Turple passing through the dance recollecting her former love, conjures Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.”23 The final moments of Jim Bennett’s Walk On also suggest the influence of Eliot: Hugh Caughey’s sophomore picaro, on the beach, has heard the mermaids singing, each to each, but does not think that they will sing to him. He even wears Prufrock’s white flannel trousers. In End, Turple is dizzy with “a hundred visions and revisions”24 as her impressions carry us through the grim arc of her love for Arndt. McCracken’s Globe review called this the “first love affair” of the Film Board program, and it is tragic: Turple passes through the dance, and Walk On’s Caughey embraces the young woman on the beach, with mouths miming, in silence or to music, “till human voices wake [them], and [they] drown.”25 Freak Film When it was titled The Fishbowl, Ivan Reitman described his film as “ridiculing the monotony of contemporary life.”26 By the time it premiered, under the title Freak Film, it had become specific to student life and film culture at McMaster, and its ridicule was pointed deliberately at campus film critics. It was a clear statement of Reitman’s view of the kinds of films that his peers and predecessors had made. It was not informed by poetry and did not aim to effect change. It held such values in grinning contempt, with an almost Dadaist opposition to rationality. It sported an anti-interpretive bias and non-sequitur construction that was comic, in the tradition of Richard Lester’s Beatles films, unlike the

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frustrated teenage libido narratives of the rest of the Film Board premieres. Reitman’s predecessors had resisted the realist conventions of film form; so too did Reitman here, in earnest. Reitman made a film that was in continuity with those of his predecessors. Freak Film was formally anarchic, loosely aligned with his predecessor’s aesthetic values as an improvisatory and discontinuous work of “nonsense,” in contrast to Orientation’s stiff adherence to convention and its stated aim of good business practice. The Globe’s Melinda McCracken described Freak Film as having “the forces of good and evil playing cards against each other and [ending] in a self-conscious free-for-all,”27 although assignments of good and evil are difficult to place among the film’s abnormal characters. A surviving program note tells us to recognize them as the Marquis de Sade, Attila the Hun, Adolf Schikelgruber, Jack the Ripper, Tom Terrific, Svenson the Janitor, The Shadow, Prince Valiant, Crazy Ralph (alias Wild Bill Schwartz), and The Credible Hulk. Freak Film begins in darkness, host to a subversive framing device: the shuffling, shushing, impatient sounds of a movie theatre play under the black screen, the film teasing the viewers with its own self-consciousness. At Freak Film’s end, voices perform a pompous discussion of the film, as a work of high art and a reflection on the state of the world. In between, a strange scene plays out. A pointed finger and tripped switch interrupt the blackness, cuing up the film. Eugene Levy swings open the door to the Silhouette office. A cigarette dangles from his mouth. He is photographed from a low angle, staring down at the camera, mugging for the audience. In a reverse shot, we see his perspective of Dan Goldberg sweeping the room, Goldberg again dressed as he was in Orientation and Walk On, now a caricature. In a series of shots, we see the other students in the room: one picks his nose; another holds a sceptre; another wears a fencing coat and points a chair by its legs as if it were a sword; and Silhouette writer Bill Crandall wears an ornate metal bowl on his head. Levy, in the doorway, is joined by three more students: a man in a bowler hat draped in a leopard print sheet; a robed figure with crossed arms and a toothbrush moustache; and a leather-jacketed thug, brandishing a pair of scissors. They stare menacingly into the camera, towards Goldberg and the rest of their office-dwelling opposition. The film cuts to a lecture hall of students, their faces obscured by uniform white paper masks: one looks to the camera and applauds, peers around, sees that he is the only one applauding, and stops. Only editing has tethered Levy and his footmen, and their opposition of Silhouette office dwellers, to this

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audience of masked students. Levy and Crandall’s gangs threaten and mock each other, stumbling towards the camera, which stands in for the gangs’ viewpoints. In this sequence of point-of-view and reverse shots, they are never seen occupying the same space. It is a subversion of the conventional film form of joining and matching action. A voice-over interrupts: “And now a word from our sponsors.” No word follows, and it immediately returns to the scene. The voiceover continues, “Meanwhile back at the … uh, where were we…?” The two gangs are now playing a card game, positioned at opposite ends of a long table. Each side is still photographed separately. The leaders, Levy and Crandall, exchange pleased glances with their cohorts when they see their hands. The voice-over again interrupts, “And now a cultural message.” Some of the characters are shown walking around in manic patterns in the rain. The film returns to the card game, which unfolds with triumphant music cues. Dan Goldberg seems to stretch his arm an impossible distance under the table to pick more cards from the deck. On the opposing team, the scissor-wielding thug drags himself to the deck to collect a card. Levy’s gang lay down their collective hand. They appear to have won, and rejoice. They climb across the table towards the camera, towards, it is presumed, their opposition. The gangs have yet to be shown within the same frame. Animated letters announce: “Strike!” The two gangs, now standing, advance on each other. In alternating shots, they seem to occupy the same small space. Both sides head towards the camera, giving the illusion that they are moving towards each other. Their skirmish is a performance of codes of “freakdom,” mugging, wild-eyed, drooling, and snarling, as each group trips over itself. Their movement speeds up. Levy’s cigarette is lit by one of his flunkies. Goldberg lifts a table as if to throw it. The camera zooms into the faces of individual warriors as the music swells, and the film cuts to a scene of McMaster’s dean and his staff congregating on a stage at an official ceremony. When the camera returns, the battle plays out, as the two gangs have at last entered the same frame. Their scuffle is sped up and intercut with other images, including W. Eugene Smith’s iconic photograph, “A Walk to Paradise Garden.” In it, Smith’s young children follow a dirt path, framed by leaves, exiting the shadow of a tree towards a sunlit spot. It is most famous as the climactic image of The Family of Man, the 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition curated by Edward Steichen. With Freak Film, Reitman presents a more recent addition to that family of man: the madcap prankster frat boy. In the film’s final moment, both gangs

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4.6 The mad commander (Eugene Levy) stops for a smoke in the midst of battle in Freak Film (1969).

collapse at the feet of a modernist sculpture, and the mugging faces of the actors play under closing credits. Reitman rebels against interpretation, as Susan Sontag had when she called interpretation “the revenge of the intellect upon art.”28 His film was made in such a way that it couldn’t be disassembled or analysed as a coherent whole. As the credits roll, the sound of the screening room resumes. A medley of voices confers about the status of this film. A voice asks, “Do you think that the forces of good and evil represented in this film are a true document of what is happening in the world today?” The voices squabble in aimless discussion, among them actor Levy and director Reitman, who quip about the film’s artistry: “I think that possibly this film could be one of the most significant films that was made in the last 30 or 40 years.” The voices list adjectives to

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describe the film – “remarkable,” “flowing.” They satirize pompous film critics. The film ends with an argument, one voice saying that Freak Film has “shades of Fellini,” a second disagreeing, “I think maybe Godard, shades of Godard.” A final voice disagrees: “I thought it was a little like true-fought [Truffaut].” Were it not for the sarcasm of this bookend the film would be marked only by joy. Freak Film involved an incredible number of performers, with nine on-screen roles. The set (the Silhouette office) would be familiar to a good number of spectators. The campus audience would be pleased to see their friends and classmates in a movie. The film’s content became secondary to that function, and it was not conceived to travel beyond campus. As with Orientation, Ivan Reitman was alternately winding up his peers and preaching to a choir, with the film’s final anti-­interpretive conversation. This parody might as well have been directed specifically at John Hofsess, Peter Rowe, and Patricia Murphy, who had worked so hard only a few years earlier to provide a critical forum on campus for European art cinema and Canadian independent cinema, activities that had met with strong faculty approval. One of Hofsess’s primary concerns, when he wrote in the Varsity about creating forums for ­Canadian filmmakers to get their work seen, was that without distribution structure, filmmakers would not be able to get valuable critical feedback. With Freak Film, Reitman rejected the supposed value of critical feedback, or at least the critical insight of his peers. Unlike Garbage, which had a strange sense of personal responsibility in its critique of the madness of education, Freak Film’s opposition to scrutiny made it a pointed attack on art and critical thought. Unlike Orientation, with its careful farcical manipulation of realism; unlike Walk On and End for their earnest longing; for that matter, unlike Palace of Pleasure and the rest, poetic dimensions and sources were largely irrelevant. Freak Film was clever rather than earnest, and even though it was ambivalent about meaning, the film was not without purpose. It was a rallying call for campus filmmaking to be simple, personally satisfying, fun to make, and fun to watch. It was the second and final film that Ivan Reitman would direct with the Film Board, and it was an expression of his cleverness, his comic sense, and his energy. It was also in many ways the clearest expression of his vision for the Film Board, and how that differed from the artistic aspirations of his predecessors. The remainder of the program featured experimental films that are no longer extant. Fraser McAninch, a major in anthropology and Spanish,

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had played one of the leering crew in Orientation’s parody of the production of Redpath 25. He had also appeared among Levy’s sidekicks in Freak Film. Now trying his hand as a filmmaker, he made the experimental Freeway. It was proposed as a “montage of highway shots [that] creates in [its] audience an intensely impersonal phenomenon.”29 The Globe’s Melinda McCracken described it as “excellent: long shots of the empty unhuman [sic] highways, intercut with color shots of car hoods, with voices cooing over them in admiration.”30 Tom Laing and David Rosenfield had collaborated on The Chair: Studies. In the end, Laing was credited as director and Rosenfield as writer, with a supporting crew of three. McCracken described its content: “A chair is photographed in various settings while a voice reads poetry.”31 Regardless of their diverse subjects and sentiments, all of the extant films had successfully accomplished the basic, dominant conventions of filmmaking. They were evenly exposed, shot with stable cameras or with carefully directed camera movement, well synchronized with music and non-sync voices, and there was intention to their editing. The Film Board was once again gaining national attention: later in the summer, the CBC presented a seven-episode series called New Film Makers, devoted to presenting new Canadian independent short films.32 In the second episode of the series, host Lyal Brown interviewed Jim Bennett and broadcast Bennett’s Walk On and Levy’s Garbage. Brown asked Bennett practical questions, about costs, about his working process. Bennett described the Film Board as separate from the university. He said that there were no advisers as such, but that filmmakers whose projects were selected for production were given film stock. The Film Board proceeded from an ethos of learning from experience. Bennett promoted the Film Board while being courteous and self-deprecating. When Brown asked if he would do another film, Bennett replied, “I don’t know for sure. A lot of people at the Film Board are making films as good or better.”33 Ivan Reitman’s Projections “There is no academic institution in this country where a student can freely make the film he desires,” Ivan Reitman told Eugene Levy for a Silhouette report on Reitman’s success. In his short time as Film Board president, Reitman had become a campus hero. While Hofsess had waged an uphill battle to introduce avant-garde cinema to the campus, Reitman was having far greater success through the popular conventions of

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­ arrative cinema. He knew and understood the campus audience in a n way that John Hofsess, for all of his optimism, did not. When Reitman screened Orientation for the Canadian Film Festival in Montreal, Peter Myers, the general director of Twentieth CenturyFox, enthusiastically agreed to distribute it as a short subject in Famous Players theatres throughout Canada, netting the Film Board approximately $5,000.34 In order to secure this deal, the Film Board would have to come up with the money to blow up the film from 16mm to 35mm. In January 1969, Reitman screened Orientation to CBC executives in Toronto. It was met with great enthusiasm, and they planned to air the film in the summer, compensating the Board with $1,500 per screening, nearly matching the film’s initial budget. There would have to be some editing done, Reitman admitted. His parody of Redpath 25 was too much of an in-joke for a national audience.35 In March, when the shorts program premiered, he told the Globe’s Melinda McCracken that the film had been shown to the McMaster administration for funding, unsuccessfully. “They sat through it completely stone-faced. McMaster can’t be connected with the film because it’s too dirty. It can’t condone it officially.”36 Reitman took the film to Willem Poolman, and Film Canada acquired the exclusive distribution rights to both Orientation and Bob Allington’s … and dionysus died. The contract with Film Canada stipulated that the Film Board would receive 50 per cent of the profits from every showing that the two films received, and that Film Canada would cover the costs of publicity, designing and printing brochures and artwork for all McMaster films that it handled, including Peter Rowe’s and David Martin’s films, already in distribution with Film Canada.37 The contract stipulated that Film Canada and the McMaster Film Board would also share the cost of 35mm blow-ups. Reitman told Levy that “Communication Arts courses are usually bogged down in pseudo-philosophical discussions of the aesthetics of film whereas we want the students to learn about films by making them.”38 The values of Orientation and Freak Film had little in common with the values of education; in sharp contrast to the films that had built the Film Board, Reitman’s films did not engage intellectually with their themes. His surprising pedagogical ambition for the Film Board was a shift away from the existing model of film studies within the university. Until then, technical training was available at colleges, for example, Hamilton’s Mohawk College and Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. At McMaster and other Ontario universities, courses in film

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studies dealt exclusively with the analysis of film history and with films as texts of symbol and theme. In contrast, Reitman’s program would provide students with an understanding of filmmaking through the process of creation, of handling raw materials and assembling finished films. Reitman envisioned a new purpose for the Film Board, turning it into a loosely structured training institution for film technology, situated within McMaster University and providing a three-year selfdirected program where students would start in 8mm, familiarizing themselves with proper film handling and basic camera technique. In their second year, students would move on to 16mm production, making short movies. By their third year they would gain experience with a sync-sound camera, the Film Board’s newest technological acquisition.39 Previously restricted to operating in the early symbolic language of Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin, Reitman’s Film Board could now engage the conventions of the talkie. Before stepping down from the presidency, Reitman had arranged the sync-sound camera’s purchase as his last act in office.40 Until then, McMaster Film Board productions had used Bolex 16mm cameras, which had an audible spring-wound mechanism. Sound recorded on location would include the whirs and clicks of the apparatus. This is why, with every film produced at the Film Board since it was founded in 1966, sound had been constructed in post-production, with music or with asynchronous speech and sound effects. The collage soundtracks of Hofsess’s and Rowe’s films had lent themselves to this mode of operation, but conventional narrative filmmaking with dialogue needed synchronous sound, and with it a semblance of technical mastery comparable to mainstream entertainment. Reitman believed that this was integral to the continued development of the Film Board, prophesying that within ten years the Board would have its own sound studios. When the camera acquisition was announced, the Board invited proposals for films that would take advantage of their new technology, to be shot in the summer of 1969, for campus premieres that fall. They invited scripts from all undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty members. The camera was purchased before the first round of silent shorts had even been screened, such was the promise with which Orientation was met. The executive make-up for the Film Board was now codified, and the positions established by Reitman when he first approached the Student Union had become more specific. Putting out a call for members, the Board asked for specific applications for president, vice-president

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production, vice-president showings, distribution manager, secretary, and publicity manager.41 Interest in Orientation had created opportunities for Reitman well beyond the confines of McMaster. He told Eugene Levy that he had already received offers of employment in the film industry. “Now at least I have something to do after I graduate.”42 Film Board alumni could be counted among the first Canadian independent filmmakers who were beginning to receive federal funding to produce work. In the summer of 1969, it was announced that Dan Goldberg, John Hofsess, and Peter Rowe would receive grants from the Canadian Film Development Corporation,43 an agency founded in 1967 with a $10 million grant from the government of Canada to support the burgeoning feature film industry.44 With this new resource available to them, the McMaster alumni would take on substantial new projects: Rowe would make an experimental documentary about generational difference (The Neon Palace, then titled A Fifties Trip, a Sixties Trip); Hofsess would begin work on an ill-fated documentary, Man in Pieces; and Goldberg would use his grant to make the Film Board’s first sync-sound narrative, ushering in this new technological possibility for Film Board members wishing to pursue commercial filmmaking. Reitman had done an exceptional job of publicizing the Film Board. There was a significant number of new works to show for his year of reorganization, and there had been substantial and positive public attention. Not only was the Student Union satisfied, but the student community now had a greater engagement in the production of films than ever before. Under Reitman’s leadership, each Film Board commission involved more students, in cast and crew, than any film developed under John Hofsess, Peter Rowe, or David Martin. There were reasons for the student body to celebrate this: not only was the Board more accessible for interested students, the work produced was more accessible for a general audience. Those who had no interest in the sensual liberation of Hofsess’s films, the complex comic collage of Rowe’s Buffalo Airport Visions, or the surreal melodrama of Martin’s To Paint the Park could be treated to short, simple, primarily narrative entertainments. They might even appear in the films. When Silhouette reviewer Ellen Wolter watched Orientation during frosh week, she marvelled at the familiarity of it, noting each face that she recognized. It was as if the Film Board had reverted to its first film, the collaborative Coldfinger: back to the narcissism of home movies, of “being seen,” of the immediate satisfaction of using cinema as a mirror, in contrast to Palace of Pleasure’s conceptualization of cinema as a mysterious portal.

chapter five

Seize the Projectors

Chicago’s Aardvark Cinema had its origins in Jeff Begun’s underground magazine The Aardvark, also out of Chicago and founded in 1962. Begun, a former Playboy staff member, had made a pair of films with Howard Cohen in 1966 and 1967 that had been distributed by the Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre. He was the co-owner, with partners Stephen Touchlin and Paul Gonsky, of a series of repertory cinemas in Chicago: the 3 Penny Cinema in Lincoln Park; the Festival Cinema on Sheffield Avenue; the Rialto, a former burlesque house on South State Street; the Bijou on Wells, specializing in gay pornography; and the Aardvark Cinematheque at 1608 North Wells Street, which showcased underground films. To support his interest in avant-garde cinema, Begun had branched into pornography, at a time when the fearful, ignorant, and moralistic mainstream of American society would see little distinction between modern art and smut, either by deeming them equally pointless, or by declaring that art was beginning to resemble pornography. This same moralistic mainstream had put Los Angeles film exhibitor Mike Getz on trial only a few years earlier for peddling obscenity in the form of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964).1 When it hired John Hofsess and Patricia Murphy, Aardvark also purchased the North American distribution rights for Palace of Pleasure from Film Canada. John Hofsess programmed and managed the Aardvark Cinematheque in Old Town. Patricia Murphy handled the company’s underground film distribution business. Aardvark was closely linked to the Second City theatre. Both were located in the same Piper’s Alley vicinity. Hofsess and Murphy met members of the Chicago comedy and acting community, including Second City performer David Steinberg. According to Hofsess, they spoke of making films together,

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but none materialized. Palace of Pleasure would be exhibited twice at the Aardvark Cinema, first in August as part of a program of Canadian avant-garde films, all of which had been featured at the Cinethon.2 Aardvark distributed the films of Chicagoan Ronald Nameth. Nameth and Hofsess got to know each other and had some common ground: Nameth had made a film of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, filmed during a week of Chicago performances in June 1966. Wheeler Winston Dixon describes Nameth’s film as recording “the Edenic spirit of the ‘60s,”3 reflecting the tribal inclusiveness that had been so essential to that happening. Nameth’s film would premiere at the Aardvark Cinema on 2 November 1967, on a double bill with Palace of Pleasure.4 Some Chicago cinephiles were taking notice of John Hofsess’s work. In February, Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert wrote of Hofsess when reviewing the American release of Larry Kent’s Sweet Substitute (now retitled Caressed): “Talented newcomers like John Hofsess (now working in Chicago) have quietly outflanked the Warhol crowd with underground classics like Palace of Pleasure.”5 Aardvark financed Hofsess’s new film, Resurrection of the Body, forty-five minutes of which were shot in Chicago. Ronald Nameth was his director of photography, and the film starred Patricia Murphy and Howard Sturges. Evoking images of those dying and revived gods Osiris and Christ, the film took its title from the concluding chapter of Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death in which Brown envisions continuity and hope for the future if man might embrace Eros. Aesthetically, the film was strongly influenced by Joris-Karl Huysman’s À rebours (in translation, Against Nature), which was frequently cited by Hofsess as a source for his post-Palace filmmaking. Resurrection of the Body, like the previously announced Mauvember, was never completed.6 Hofsess also worked on a conclusion for Palace of Pleasure in Chicago. Of the new segments, which no longer exist, Hofsess remembers, “One was a bridal scene. I remember white petals falling through the air.”7 Hofsess’s time in Chicago may have been socially and professionally rewarding, but his artwork did not progress. Nothing that he developed at that time was completed or exhibited, and none has survived. Hofsess left Chicago before Patricia Murphy, about a month before the Democratic National Convention rioting, in the summer of 1968. According to that fall’s Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre catalogues, he was back in Hamilton working on the script for Resurrection of the Body, which had by this time become “the final part of the Palace of Pleasure trilogy.”8 Hofsess had not been able to function in Chicago as he had in Hamilton and Toronto. He began work,

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but none of it was finished or shown publicly. The Democratic National Convention would set to rest the lingering ideals of the 1960s, as simmering disparities erupted in brutal violence. A few months after Hofsess returned to Canada, a shift in avantgarde cinema would be evident at a juried Canadian art show. In late fall 1968, Hofsess was featured in the Canadian Artists ’68 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The gallery’s National Art Exhibition Committee organized the exhibition, under the leadership of contemporary art curator Dennis Young. The avant-garde film was shifting away from both personal and explicitly political work, and towards a highly structured form of dense, difficult experience and meaning, typified among Canadian artists in the work of visual artists Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Keewatin Dewdney, and Jack Chambers. At Canadian Artists ’68, film was being given status as an art form, as filmmakers were featured alongside artists working with more traditional art materials. Jonas Mekas judged the film competition. Michael Snow won in the non-narrative category for his Wavelength, with a second prize going to Keewatin Dewdney for his Maltese Cross Movement.9 Non-narrative runners-up included Palace of Pleasure, Joyce Wieland’s Rat Life and Diet in North America, Les Levine’s White Noise, and Gary Lee-Nova’s Steel Mushrooms.10 Palace of Pleasure received little attention in such a diverse competition. Manny Farber, in his Artscanada coverage of the exhibition, admitted to skipping Hofsess’s film, dismissing it as “a dual projector job.”11 What had seemed fresh and novel in 1967 was dated just a year later. The winners, Wavelength and Maltese Cross Movement, represented uncharted territory for film, Wavelength for, among other qualities, the durational and perceptual demands that it placed on a viewer, and Maltese Cross Movement for its aggressive discontinuity. By comparison, Palace of Pleasure was not offering such a sea change. By then, Hofsess’s film had been seen in various forms for over a year. It invited comparison to the multiple-projector films and performances of Andy Warhol, which overshadowed Palace of Pleasure and led it to appear, at least by description, as a derivative work. Mekas nevertheless included Palace of Pleasure when he brought a program of these films to the Museum of Modern Art’s Cineprobe series in New York City on 4 and 18 February 1969, with Jack Chambers and Joyce Wieland in attendance. In his program notes, Mekas said the Canadian films contained “a finer vibration, a finer density, a finer matter,”12 and described Palace of Pleasure as one of the first works of this New Canadian Cinema. A revolution was happening in the avant-garde that

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would surpass the ready pleasures of Hofsess’s Palace, giving it less currency in a broader debate. In her review of the McMaster Film Board’s shorts program a month later, Melinda McCracken said that Palace of Pleasure was “not seen very often, having been bogged down in the coggery of film distribution machinery,”13 though it had screened internationally, receiving theatrical runs in Chicago and Los Angeles, and festival screenings in Europe. If the film was suffering in distribution, this was more likely due to Hofsess’s waning enthusiasm for his incomplete trilogy, and his preoccupation with other projects. Multiple titles had been given to the awaited conclusion of Palace of Pleasure, and with no film forthcoming, Hofsess’s intentions were becoming confusing. In Take One, Hofsess announced that he had “just released two new films – Epiphanies and Resurrection of the Body, the long-awaited coda to Palace of Pleasure,”14 but this coda and Epiphanies are not known to have screened, and cannot be located. Two years later, he offered this explanation of why Palace of Pleasure would never be completed: I lost the intensity of conviction necessary, in what the film was saying or implying, to make it an authentic work; film catalogues were already overstocked with false, facile entertainments, the least I could do was suppress (or not extend) a dishonest vision. It was the function of Palace of Pleasure to give the viewer an overloaded sensual experience, disorienting, disquieting, that defied translation into a “verbal equivalent” – a reminder of the primacy of unstructured sensation. As such it was conceived as a “therapeutic” experience – I was weary and suspicious of the world of words, the falsification of experience through language; but far from being serviceable as an example of “phenomenological” cinema, it merely reinforced a trend of mindless illiteracy in the arts … After seeing the response to Palace on several occasions (wow … groovy … whatta headfilm) I realized it was failing every one of its objectives. I had written … “the film is designed to encourage people to explore their senses, help render the Unconscious conscious: a form of cinematherapy,” but the film was too timid and compromised to be effective in that respect.15

The film’s intended audience of sensitive, open-minded thinkers seemed to Hofsess only a marginal part of his actual audience, and the film itself did not achieve its promise of non-verbal sensual immersion. But this is also, perhaps, the admission of an artist frustrated at declining interest in his work, stagnating production and post-production,

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and the financial complications of having multiple investors. He simply moved on. On his return to Hamilton in summer 1968, John Hofsess had connected with the new Film Board management. He continued to write a column in Take One and began to contribute reviews to the magazine. In the new work of the Film Board, he saw potential for commercial distribution that was not evident in the avant-garde emphasis of the Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre. A film like Orientation was a landmark achievement towards what Hofsess wanted to see Canadian film become: an industry, one that included both high and low culture, with coexisting art and commercial filmmaking, with a style and quality range that would foster a legitimate market. Here was a possibility for commercial Canadian cinema, and even though it conflicted in many ways with the process and values of his own filmmaking, Hofsess was excited about it. Penetanguishene and the Epiphanies At the end of 1968, an article ran in Globe and Mail Magazine that detailed harrowing psychedelic treatments being conducted in the maximumsecurity division of the Penetanguishene Ontario Hospital, or “Penetang,” a medical facility for the criminally insane, an isolated Bedlam in Oak Ridges Moraine, a wilderness north of Toronto. Michael Valpy’s article, “Naked in the Box,” gave a dramatic account of Dr Elliot Barker’s experimental psychiatric practice. Barker had developed a deprivation technique to aid in the treatment of psychotics: patients were stripped and placed in a green-lit 8 × 10 room, called a “capsule,” for days or weeks on end. The patients were forced to take scopolamine and LSD. Valpy’s article accounts his own forty-eight-hour experience in the “capsule,” naked, with six patients, all in their twenties. He described the residents of this green world for his readership: “Seven naked young men: two who have killed, two who have almost killed, one who has stolen a lot, one who thinks a lot about killing himself, one whom the law says is free just now to walk the streets.”16 Valpy’s fellow prisoners were institutionalized because of the threat they posed, but in this setting, under these chemical influences, they became profoundly vulnerable to one another and to their jailers. Barker’s deprivation experiments might be considered akin to Hofsess’s vision for therapeutic cinema, undermining the “repressive mechanisms” of society by stripping these prisoners down to their most animal state: naked, sweating, and hallucinating

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on the floor of a green-lit, claustrophobic room. These prisoners might even be the non-verbal voluptuaries of Hofsess’s philosophy, though whatever “freedom” they achieved or had inflicted upon them would be an illusion. In the winter of 1969, Hofsess had corresponded with Michael Valpy and written to Elliot Barker. He was interested in making his next film at Penetanguishene. He optimistically told Rob Fothergill, “I would be meeting with an entirely different group of people, and the budget costs would be extremely low.” Even in the context of a mental hospital, he made the filmmaking process sound like a social occasion. He planned a ninety-minute black-and-white feature and hoped to raise funds by issuing a twenty-minute segment of his unfinished Chicago production Resurrection of the Body, simply described in that month’s Distribution Centre catalogue as an “exploration of the senses,” loosely based on Huysmans’s Against Nature. He admitted to Fothergill, “Needless to say, 600 lap-dissolves of four nudes adds nothing to my stature or aspirations as a film-maker, but it would sell, better than Redpath I expect.”17 In the same letter, he mentions another proposed project, which he scripted with former Muse contributor Allan Bell, an adaptation of Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. In the Distribution Centre’s 1969 catalogue, Hofsess’s biography noted that he was working “on a feature-length documentary at Penetang Psychiatric Clinic, dealing with ‘intense communication therapy’ among patients, and preparing a screenplay based on Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, to be filmed in England in 1970.”18 Although there are no recorded screenings of it, the Resurrection of the Body fundraiser print was listed as complete and available, renting for $25, as were the Epiphanies, his seventeen-minute series of “four brief vignettes recording the strategic ‘moments in time’ where human relationships either fuse or disintegrate.”19 The catalogue featured the following synopses: “Epiphany One – The Telephone as an Instrument of Love; a social worker at a suicide Prevention Centre discovers that her voice is being used for sexual purposes by an unknown caller. Epiphany Two – Cain and Abel; two youths discover that physical violence is the only socially acceptable means of making contact. Epiphany Three – Making Do; a young girl’s first love has inexplicably ended; she tries to transmute the pain into poetry. Epiphany Four – Civilization and its Discontents; advertisements for love in ‘underground’ newspapers.”20 What became of the Epiphanies is unknown. They were presumably completed, as the Distribution Centre was distributing them at a cost,

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but there is no evidence of screenings or prints. The surviving descriptions reinforce Hofsess’s growing interest in conventional storytelling (relative to Redpath 25 and Black Zero). Palace of Pleasure demanded that the viewer surrender to visual stimuli, provoking a physical and mental response to its rapid, discontinuous imaging. By comparison, the description of this series suggests conventional narrative wherein the relationships of characters, their roles and motivations, were offered clearly, adhering to narrative conventions. In the days before production was to begin at Penetanguishene, Hofsess was informed that a governing board had withdrawn permission to film on site. No names were attached to the decision, and his attempts to get more information were ignored. A number of factors may have influenced the refusal. Hofsess had recently donated a large collection of books to the prison library: these included canonical texts of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Hume, but also controversial works from authors such as Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, and the Marquis de Sade. This may have alarmed the Penetang staff.21 He also suspected that there might have been some talk of his controversial McMaster productions, which had made national news during the Toronto Morality Squad’s examination and threatened seizure of Black Zero.22 His attempt at adapting The Secret Garden would not proceed either. Instead, Hofsess chose as his next project an adaptation of a very different work of Victorian literature. My Secret Life My Secret Life, the autobiography of the pseudonymous Walter, notorious for its erotic content, was first printed in a private edition of eleven volumes in 1888. Famous owners included mystic Aleister Crowley, silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, and film director Josef von Sternberg. Attempts at commercial publication in the coming decades were always met with suppression, but at last, in 1966, Grove Press legally released a partial edition. It was a series of frank, graphic sexual encounters, recollections of love affairs and rapes, of taboo explorations of sodomy, sadism, homosexuality, prostitution, bestiality, and scatology. There is a whole body of scholarship investigating the book’s authorship. Ian Gibson put forth a convincing account with his 2001 study The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee. Gibson purports that Ashbee, a rare-books collector preoccupied with sexuality, wrote the volumes either from experience or from the anecdotes of friends,

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making it, in a sense, a work of “oral history.” Gibson’s book built on the work of Gershon Legman, who first offered this link in an introduction he wrote for the 1962 reprints of Ashbee’s indexes of erotic writings. Legman’s essay was expanded and reprinted in the 1966 Grove Press edition. Steven Marcus (The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, 1966) and Drs Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen (Walter the English Casanova, a London Polybooks edition of My Secret Life, 1967) offered studies at the time of the Grove Press edition arguing against the suggestion of Ashbee’s authorship. Both the Kronhausens and Marcus pointed to the anonymous author’s indifference to pornography, in contrast to Ashbee’s enthusiasm for collecting it. Marcus’s study offered a fascinating theory about the world of Victorian pornography: it was a “pornotopia,” a world of plenty, a libidinous Eden, where “all men in it are always and infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both. Everyone is always ready for anything, and everyone is infinitely generous with his substance.”23 This was a world in many ways compatible with Hofsess’s own ideal, formed by way of Wilhelm Reich’s conception of Eros as all; it was a paradise of healthy, stable, indulgent organisms. Hofsess’s recent projects had collapsed, but he was still well regarded as a filmmaker of promise and had become a part of the North American underground film network with the support of Jonas Mekas and Jeff Begun. His recent misfortunes had left him struggling to make something, ideally a greater extension of those noble therapeutic ambitions that had informed Palace of Pleasure. He wanted to make a film that would not be received with trippy enthusiasm, like his past work, but which could still use techniques and concepts that would provoke an ecstatic response. At McMaster, Ivan Reitman had his own frustrations to deal with. Now exiting his presidency, having rescued the Film Board, he wanted to move from shorts into features. When he first assumed the presidency, he had made known his desire to develop longer projects with the Board, such as a thirty-minute documentary and a feature film.24 They had even issued a call for volunteers to work on a feature film that summer. The shorts produced in the 1968–9 school year were impressive, but with such diverse interests, what could the Film Board members collaborate on? How could a feature film project proceed without complaints of bias, complaints of repeating past mistakes of corruption and exclusivity, were Film Board president-saviour Reitman to take the

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director’s chair? Enough time had passed that John Hofsess was no longer persona non grata at McMaster. Rather than be admonished, he might instead be praised for his ability to generate publicity, good or bad. Even if the present Film Board could not admire his Palace of Pleasure for its philosophical basis, they could without question admire and celebrate the reviews it had received, and the reach of its screening history. Ivan Reitman and Dan Goldberg, whose collaboration had saved the Film Board, could work with Hofsess. The three met to discuss the possibility of feature-length collaboration. Hofsess’s previous films drew from sources in such a way that they may be thought of as adaptations. Even before he had announced Resurrection of the Body as a loose adaptation of Huysmans’s Against Nature, he had said as much to critic Clyde Gilmour about the proposed third segment of Palace of Pleasure. G.W. Curran’s End and Jim Bennett’s Walk On literalized passages from the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Hofsess’s earlier film had done the same: his notorious bedroom scene was an adaptation of Leonard Cohen’s “You Have the Lovers.” Hofsess had taken his titles from William Painter and Norman O. Brown. The philosophical foundations of Palace of Pleasure had come from elsewhere as well: a tangled complex of ideals had been applied to film form, equally addressing presumptions of drama, facts of materiality, and hopes for aesthetic immersion. With the crew support of the McMaster Film Board, but with independent funding, Hofsess would direct his adaptation of My Secret Life. Dan Goldberg and Ivan Reitman would put up a budget of $3,000, and each of the three would own a third of the film. Hofsess told Reitman that he wanted to make “a film of beautiful ideas, a film that will bring out the best in people.”25 This adaptation would take its title from an epithet applied to sexologist Alfred Kinsey by prominent civil liberties lawyer Morris Ernst, who wrote that Kinsey had “done for sex what Columbus did for geography.”26 The film would be called The Columbus of Sex, or Columbus of Sex. The Columbus of Sex: Production, Exhibition, Seizure Columbus of Sex was filmed in the summer of 1969. From late May to July, Hofsess, Goldberg, and Reitman mobilized a crew around Hamilton and southern Ontario. Their cast was a mix of McMaster students and local actors. Much of the cast was composed of Dramatic Society members, including Leon Jervis, who had previously appeared in Eugene

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Levy’s Garbage. Jervis played the lead as the body of Walter, the anonymous Victorian narrator, enacting the conquests of Walter’s youth. Rob Fothergill read Walter’s voice on the soundtrack. Like Palace of Pleasure, the film was shot for two screens. Actors congregated in the home of Professor Gordon Vichert. Hofsess photographed their mimed sexual encounters with a 35mm still camera. Once the images were printed to motion picture film, the actor’s naked bodies would be transformed by 600 two-second lap dissolves, the same technique and measure that had been used for Resurrection of the Body. Lawrence Martin remembers getting involved in the project as an actor, and then opting out on hearing of what would become known as the beach scene.27 Filmed on the night of 21 July 1969, the occasion of the moon landing, naked men and women took to a beach in nearby Burlington. They lit bonfires and gave a choreographed performance for the camera. Men and women, men and men, and women and women touched their genitals together while dancing and then lying down, paired off and positioned into horizontal piles. Hofsess did not want to follow the verbal precedent of Walter’s book, wanting to continue in therapeutic cinema’s non-verbal approach, crafting an impression of the spirit of the book, rather than a literalization of its narrative content. The film would not be a product of Walter’s voice, but would use Walter’s voice as a challenge to the reigning repressive moral order. Hofsess was incorporating distancing techniques, such as a lengthy and intentionally non-erotic sequence of a couple undressing. These techniques would serve to demystify sex, to separate the sex act and its overtures from the guilt and stigma of the act. As he had with Palace of Pleasure, Hofsess was characterizing this film as an attempt to free its audience from inhibitions and anxieties. Once Columbus of Sex was completed, it screened for members of the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa. Curator Peter Morris was impressed. Morris had presented John Hofsess’s Palace of Pleasure at the National Film Theatre in London, England, and his praise for the film had included a comparison to Luis Buñuel’s L’âge d’or (1930).28 After the screening, Morris confirmed his support for Hofsess’s extraordinary, epic extension of the formal radicalism of his previous work. The filmmakers planned to take the film to the Ontario Board of Censors before summer’s end, to gain special permission to tour it to campuses. Their intention was to build a following for the film by screening it for audiences of university students and faculty, in a tactic that recalled Reitman’s own market-savvy debut screening of Orientation. The film had been made

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primarily by students, had a cast of students, and was essentially the product of an important student organization, crewed by the McMaster Film Board and paid for by its leaders. Students would make up a considerable part of the market for a film of sensual liberation, so why not take the film directly to university audiences? For a sneak preview, the filmmakers brought Columbus of Sex home to McMaster. Reitman told the Spectator some days after the screening that “the idea of showing it to the Mac community was to gauge their reaction to the film.”29 In their elation from a year of success, Reitman and Goldberg had not expected that Columbus of Sex, or for that matter any product of McMaster’s now-beloved Film Board, would be received with hostility on campus. The film was very much a part of McMaster. Most of Columbus’s cast of thirty-seven were either current or recent students. Many of the graduated students involved were still active members of the Dramatic Society.30 The Board of Student Broadcasting had recorded the film’s sound in its Wentworth House studios. The campus had served as the film’s office space and post-production studio, even providing some of its locations. McMaster already had in recent memory allowed the exhibition and staging of controversial performances. Lieutenant Albert Welsh of the Hamilton vice squad had negotiated an arrangement with the Dramatic Society whereby performances of Michael McClure’s The Beard were approved on the condition that only students be admitted. For shows like The Beard and Columbus of Sex, the organizers did not expect members of Hamilton’s general public to be in attendance. It could be safely assumed that they would not desire to attend. Much of the cultural production that McMaster students engaged in was geared towards students’ sensibilities, and not the parochial interests of Hamilton at large. Those few members of the general public who might go out of their way to attend student art shows were unlikely to be surprised or offended by the content. If they were, it would be because of their disconnection from and total ignorance of modern art and its role in student life. Even then, those members of the public who might be permissive of progressive art could choose instead to attend a performance of Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice at the city’s Dundurn Castle. In that play, an act of cunnilingus is simulated on stage. No members of Hamilton’s general public in attendance at Tiny Alice had contacted the police with complaints. Permission to show Columbus of Sex was secured from McMaster’s Buildings and Grounds Committee. The Film Board sponsored the

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screening, with 10 per cent of its earnings being paid to the Student Union. The screening was only advertised on campus in and around the main cafeteria. Members of the general public were not invited and the screening was not promoted to them. In order to know about the screening, one had to be a member of the McMaster community. Signs on campus advertised the cost of admission: “Students with Identification: $1.00, Others: $1.50.” The filmmakers had presumed that with these signs, strategically placed on campus, “others” had referred to faculty members, former students, spouses and relatives of those who made up the McMaster community.31 On the evening of 8 August 1969, Goldberg, Hofsess, and Reitman first publicly exhibited Columbus of Sex. It was a few months short of the third anniversary of Redpath 25’s premiere and the founding of the Film Board. The film would screen twice that evening. An audience of about 300 students and faculty filled Arts 1, Room 104. In attendance was Rein Ende. He was an alumnus and had been an active member of the McMaster community in his time: he had been a writer and photographer for the Silhouette in the early 1960s. His nickname in the paper’s production notes had affectionately referred to him as Rein ‘the Living’ Ende. Since his graduation, he had become a French teacher at Hamilton’s W.H. Ballard Elementary School. The press would later note that Ende had once been an employee of the Hamilton police, though the nature of that employment was not fully disclosed. Gary Kellam, another public school teacher, accompanied Ende to the screening. Kellam would later write to the Hamilton Spectator of what he saw: “Two projectors threw simultaneous black-and-white and color pictures on a screen to the accompanying taped soundtrack of some male reading selections from My Secret Life, the memoirs of an individual known as Walter, the English Casanova. The images on the screen went through most of the erotic gyrations possible to the human body and a fairly active imagination, and through the permutations and combinations of male-female, male-male, female-female, and mixed group love-making.” He explained his presence: “I went out of curiosity concerning the state of the art of filmmaking as practised at the university, and I had heard a little about this particular film and this particular film-maker.”32 The only thing that Kellam could have heard about John Hofsess in the summer of 1969, from local sources such as the Spectator and Silhouette, was that he was a maker of candidly sexual and controversial experimental films, which had as recently as 1967 been subject

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to Toronto Morality Squad scrutiny, achieving notoriety in national newspapers. Rein Ende gave his own account to the Silhouette. “Both of us watched the first showing and were quite impressed by certain sequences that showed definite artistic talent. I am sure that Mr. Kellam would agree with me that the effect of the film was spoiled by some poorly directed scenes, the lack of definite continuity, and the rather careless synchronization of the two images with each other and with the soundtrack. Without the few excellent sequences, it would have been easy to dismiss the entire production as modern producers [sic]. Because the well-done scenes were present, I feel it a shame that their talent was not shown throughout the entire film.”33 The majority of the audience received the film with tremendous enthusiasm. As the filmmakers prepared to screen the film a second time, Ende and Kellam went to the police and spoke with Lieutenant Tom O’Connell. The second screening began with a slightly smaller audience of about 250 people. O’Connell and other members of the Hamilton vice squad arrived at McMaster at 10:20 and watched an estimated twenty minutes of the film before ordering that it be turned off. The audience hissed and booed at them as they seized the reels, the soundtrack, and, in a puzzling act of authoritarian technological ignorance, the projectors. The officers found Ivan Reitman in the projection booth. Dan Goldberg was found in the lobby selling tickets. The officers placed the producers and John Hofsess under arrest. Student Marsha Hewitt later related the event to Canadian historian Bill Freeman: “We were watching the film when suddenly these big burly guys rushed in, turned on the lights, ordered the film to stop and told us that we were all to leave immediately. It was the police, if you can imagine, and they were saying that the film was pornographic.”34 Hofsess told Take One editor Joe Medjuck that when the police arrived, it was not merely in the spirit of doing their duty. “They said that the film was worse than a stag film.”35 The audience was kicked out, and when offered their money back, refused to take it. Reitman was surprised by the intrusion of the vice squad. Years later, he would tell Medjuck, “We were very naïve. We really didn’t think we’d get into any trouble. We’d seen films at universities that we thought were a lot rougher and we intended originally only to put the film on the university circuit.”36 Gary Kellam would later claim that his dissatisfaction was not with the film’s content, but with the filmmakers’ use of public facilities. But even this defence was inevitably based in his bewilderment over the

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film’s content. “If that movie had been shown through strictly private facilities, then I could have had no complaint; it would have been a case of take it or leave it. But when it is shown using facilities that I have helped pay for, then it suddenly becomes very much my business to pass a personal judgment, and to act upon that judgment in the most effective way I know.”37 Ende wrote, “As a conscientious citizen, and as a former employee of the Hamilton Police Department, I felt obliged and was able to advise Mr. Kellam of expedient procedures to make his dissatisfaction heard and felt. Two members of the vice squad were summoned and they felt that there was sufficient evidence of an irregularity to justify action. The film was shown publicly and had not been passed, let alone screened, by the Ontario Board of Film Censors, that body that attempts to protect young impressionable minds from excessive violence in their movies.”38 Kellam incorrectly charged that Hofsess had made the film with a government grant. He felt that his tax money should not go towards these people or the facilities that they used for the advancement of their “politically, philosophically, and psychologically naïve” activities.39 Kellam’s own naivety, or wilful ignorance, found him justifying his censorious actions by offering lies and assumptions as facts. After the seizure, Reitman publicly refuted accusations that grant money had been used for the production, telling the Spectator that he and Dan Goldberg had privately financed the film. Hofsess responded to Kellam’s bizarre and unfounded accusation of misused public facilities, arguing his complaint had set in motion an arrest and trial that was far more expensive to the taxpayers than a few hours of facility use at McMaster. Kellam continued, “What right in a free country does any individual have to make me pay for the exposition of standards and values that I consider inimical to mine? The showing of that movie was such a case. When this happens, I have the right to protest and to act in my own defence. I did, taking the only legal course of action that guaranteed that something would be done.”40 Kellam took his case to the one body that he and Ende knew would see the film as they saw it: the ­Hamilton vice squad, the most moralistic faction within a reactionary police force. They knew that the officers would concur that Columbus of Sex was indecent. For Kellam and Ende, the police were simply a vehicle for enforcing their own moral code, a code that, evident in their alternately regretful and embittered letters, was muddled and inconsistent. The police would claim that they received between fifteen and

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twenty complaints about the film, but aside from Ende and Kellam, none came forward to repeat any accusations.41 Ende denied his role in the seizure in his letter to the Silhouette but would later admit his part in court. Kellam, on the other hand, proudly admitted his complaint in the Hamilton Spectator, but would not be called as a witness. At the police station, Goldberg, Hofsess, and Reitman endured further humiliation. In Hofsess’s account, the arresting officer had told the three that their film was “fit only for fucking perverts” and “imbecile masturbators,” and went on to describe the film to others on duty as they fingerprinted and photographed the filmmakers. “There’s this scene where a woman seduces a priest and sucks his rosary.” Another asked, “Sucks his what?” Laughter ensued. Another officer spoke to the filmmakers: “Did you know that I saw a girl leaving the auditorium with her boyfriend …” He pointed to Goldberg and continued, “And I believe they were of your … faith, you know what I mean? And that girl was in tears.” This caught the attention of yet another officer, who menacingly announced, “If any boy took my daughter to see such filth, he’d end up in the hospital.”42 If Hofsess took artistic licence in his account of the Hamilton police’s dialogue, his telling was in keeping with the tone of remarks on the case made by officers to the press. The filmmakers were released without bail. The arrest and seizure coincided with a labour dispute at Stelco. With officers assigned to the Stelco strike picket lines, there was no hurry on the part of the police to settle the accusations. A sergeant from the vice squad told reporters, “We’re going to be just too busy to look at dirty pictures this week.”43 Within a few days of the sergeant’s remark, Lieutenant Albert Welsh announced that the film was being held under section 432 of the Criminal Code, which enabled some types of evidence to be held for three months without anyone being charged. Despite the implication that the police might hoard the “dirty pictures” through the fall, they would arrange a screening that coming Monday, 18 August. Contrary to the sergeant’s remark, the police had not been too busy: some even brought their wives to the screening.

chapter six

Sync Sound Arrives

On 20 August, Hamilton police again arrested Goldberg, Hofsess, and Reitman. They were formally charged with making and exhibiting an obscene movie. The three were eventually freed on $500 bail after being held in the Hamilton jail for two days. Their cases were adjourned to 13 October, but they would not put in a plea until the end of November. The inevitable trial would be a show, putting on display Hofsess’s eagerness to fight for his beliefs, Goldberg and Reitman’s need to defend their professionalism, and the ludicrous behaviour of the police during and after the seizure of the film. It would be staged for the city’s provincial working- and middle-class community, who until that time had managed to ignore or dismiss the most shocking social changes of the 1960s. To them, any local act of youth in revolt could be dismissed as mere hooliganism. It was simply an extension of the city’s Victoria Day rioting, which lasted for several years from 1961 to 1964. In those instances, a mob of youths – characterized in some accounts as children with firecrackers, ranging from several dozen to a thousand strong – had struck out at the city with “banger” firecrackers, stuffed glass jars with explosives, and engaged in other forms of public disturbance.1 Columbus of Sex, entrenched in ideology and the work of a serious and accomplished artist, was to the local community no different than these violent but slight acts of rebellion. It was simply the work of misguided troublemakers. The defendants’ legal aid attorney, John Bowlby, demanded that the courts produce an explanation as to where precisely Columbus of Sex departed from art and became obscene.2 The question of Columbus’s obscenity was already settled in the minds of the police, the prosecution, and those steelworkers, housewives, and clergy who would act as

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witnesses against the film. For those witnesses, the film was a blasphemy against God and civic order. Similar charges of obscenity had come before the United States Supreme Court, which during this era had dealt extensively with censorship and challenges to freedom of speech. At the ruling of Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), Justice Potter Stewart famously said, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [of hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”3 Stewart’s comment responded to an obscenity conviction laid against Louis Malle’s film Les amants (1958), which had been screened publicly by the appellant, theatre manager Nico Jacobellis.4 Stewart was in fact defending the film’s content as being protected by freedom of speech; he was stating his belief that Malle’s film was not pornographic. His remark was popularized, and within a few years had become perverted. A close relative of a cliché remark made famous by American humorist Frank Gelett Burgess, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like,” Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” is a simultaneously meaningless and incontestable aphorism. The expression avoids the task of identifying what is and is not protected speech, and could condemn or exonerate any accused work on the basis of subjective observation. Stewart’s ruling, for whatever good it did Les amants and Jacobellis, was an admission that pornography was indefinable, which gives courts licence to prosecute obscenity without any accountability, on an entirely subjective basis. Free speech and obscenity laws, as dictated by the United States Supreme Court, would remain in shambles until the ruling of Miller v. California (1973), when the Supreme Court established a content analysis test for determining obscenity (the Miller Test).5 Following Stewart’s ruling, prosecutions would continue through the 1960s and early 1970s, condemning art as pornography, in a system corrupted by a lack of reason, on charges laid by dishonest or ignorant prosecutors and vice squads. It was against the Canadian justice system’s corresponding mad authorities that John Bowlby laid his demand for a definition. Although Canada subscribed to a distinctively British justice system, it was in neighbouring America that obscenity trials were gaining the most attention and spreading influence in their rulings. In commanding the court to clarify the law, the defendants and counsel had taken a stand against the prosecution’s perception of law and the good. Their only other option would be to throw themselves on the mercy of the

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court with the ready and reasonable excuse of murky and unclear laws. It would be months of waiting before their case could be heard, but Bowlby’s challenge to the court had been brave and defiant. The McMaster Elections Like Peter Rowe and David Martin, his predecessors at the Film Board, Ivan Reitman found employment in the film industry, working at Robert Lawrence Film Productions in Toronto, a company that co-produced dramatic and informational programming for the CBC. He was also still pursuing his own projects. He had finally managed to enlarge his 16mm Orientation to 35mm for theatrical distribution, and Twentieth Century-Fox put it into theatres as a short feature accompanying ­Canadian screenings of John and Mary (1969), a drama starring Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow. Orientation would also at last be broadcast on the CBC on 3 October. John Hofsess spent the weeks between the bail hearing and trial preparing for his day in court. The offending content was attributed to Hofsess as director; the offending ideas had been his, and now his therapeutic cinema was being put on trial by a repressive Establishment. His work, unlike that of other Film Board members, had already caused a public stir when the Toronto Morality Squad investigated Palace of Pleasure. With his involvement in American underground film culture, through his associations with Jeff Begun, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol, and with his expert knowledge of censored literature, Hofsess had a unique understanding of both the history of obscenity and the curious role that cinema was playing on an international stage. Cinema was a union of popular art and social change. It was a critical art, a tool of revolution, inevitably controversial with moral authorities. Of the three defendants, only Dan Goldberg remained connected to the McMaster Film Board. He assumed the presidency, and the Board continued with business as usual. The executive was distancing the Film Board from Columbus of Sex: in a celebratory article published just one month after the raid, commemorating the Film Board’s achievements through the 1968–9 school year, no mention is made of Columbus of Sex. The anonymous author congratulated the Film Board for its growth in four short years, from a home movie about the Winter Carnival of 1965– 6, to a production house and training program with 8mm, 16mm, and synchronous-sound production streams. Its diverse screening series was also announced for the new year: the Film Society/Film Board of

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the last half-decade had a wide range of programming interests, and all interests were now satisfied, in a season that featured everything from Hollywood filmmaking like How the West Was Won (1962) and Love Me Tender (1956), to the European art cinema of Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ingmar Bergman, to an underground program that featured Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1963) and John Hofsess’s Palace of Pleasure.6 In the October student elections, Film Board executive members Goldberg, Eugene Levy, and Dennis Matheson ran for positions on the Student Executive Council under the slogan, “Let the MFB run the SEC.”7 The positions of regular organizations commissioner, athletic affairs commissioner, and social commissioner were newly vacant. The once-vilified Film Board had been so strongly rebuilt by ­Reitman’s acumen that memory of their disgraces had faded. Even with the Columbus scandal casting a pall over it, its executive still had the clout to attempt a coup of the student administration, their goal to assume positions once held by the Film Board’s first persecutors, the McMaster Student Council. Their local profile was raised even higher when, on the Saturday before the elections, Dan ­Goldberg and Eugene Levy were featured on local Hamilton television station CHCH’s This Saturday.8 The show followed Goldberg and Levy through the process of making their new sync-sound Film Board films. On Thursday, 23 October, just forty-five minutes before the polls closed, Goldberg, Levy, and Matheson withdrew from the election.9 In an odd concession, Dennis Matheson claimed that the Film Board’s election campaign was staged to force other candidates to run campaigns; however, unofficial counts showed a 2:1 victory for the elected. The Film Board had planned to premiere its new sound films on 6 November, but following the election, the screening would be delayed until January 1970. The Film Board had already announced a fall screening, with Eugene Levy boasting that the “caliber of the four films is much greater than any other films this organization has produced.”10 As Goldberg’s oncoming trial gained momentum and consumed his attention, vice-presidents Levy and Matheson became the Film Board’s spokesmen. On 26 November, Goldberg, Hofsess, and Reitman pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.11 The presiding judge remanded the case to December, at which time the court would hold a private screening of the film. By this time, Rein Ende had misgivings over his involvement and wrote a letter publicly denying his involvement in

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the seizure of Columbus of Sex, crediting Kellam (“now in attendance at Sir George Williams University”) with reporting the film to the police. Even in denial, Ende was sanctimonious. “I did not deserve the experimental cinema,” Ende told the Silhouette, “and to apologize for the lack of technical talent and expertise of the credit [sic], I have never used the term ‘obscene’ with reference to the film in question.”12 The accused returned to court on Monday, 8 December, with the false expectation that the case would begin on that date. They faced further delays. No significant movement would occur until the late winter of 1970. The machinations of the justice system were slow, with delays stretching the pre-trial period over months. The four new films premiered on campus on 9 January 1970. They had been made in the spring and summer of 1969, some on the new sync-sound equipment. Dennis Matheson told the Silhouette that even more films were already in production, that they hoped that the Film Board would “have a full length feature film started by the end of summer,” and that “on top of making a full length film we also want the university to start a credit course in film making.”13 These were variations on Ivan Reitman’s ambitions to expand the Film Board and incorporate it into the university curriculum. Matheson suggested that students were displeased over the lack of curricular filmmaking. As his predecessors had done, Matheson was forecasting the rise of film production as an academic discipline in Canada. His statement also further distanced the Film Board from the scandalous Columbus of Sex, which, with its considerable use of McMaster students and its creative management and direction by former presidents, had essentially been the Film Board’s first feature. But for those students interested in training for narrative filmmaking, these new sound films could be regarded as the Board’s greatest official achievement, even though only two of the four films had been shot with the new sync-sound camera. Columbus of Sex, as a piece of expanded cinema, with tapes asynchronously accompanying its dual screens, did not have such technological conventions of dominant feature filmmaking. It had not aspired to this end any more than had Palace of Pleasure, with its disembodied Leonard Cohen readings, kaleidoscopic photography, and invocation of open-eye and closed-eye visions. Billing the new films as the Board’s first synchronous sound films was a publicity move made to emphasize the progress of the organization, to preserve the industrious and industry-oriented optimism that had intoxicated Ivan Reitman’s Film Board.

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Day Off Dan Goldberg used his Canadian Film Development Corporation grant to complete Day Off, a film about two male high school students who spend a day skipping class, intruding on the adult world. They celebrate their freedom, wandering through a series of comic episodes. Tranquility Base, led by Hamilton’s Ian Thomas, performed the film’s original score. The leads were two local high school students, evidently playing themselves. Like Orientation, Day Off was in colour. The film begins with a series of zooming shots, each joined through fades, through which the camera finds and invades a suburban house. Within the house, Tom (Tom Hutchinson), the teenaged protagonist, wakes to an alarm, stretches, and opens his curtains. He sits at his desk and writes a letter excusing him from class for a doctor’s appointment. He signs his mother’s name. The text of the letter fills the frame. When it is lowered, Tom’s face is revealed, grinning mischievously. The letter is now in the hands of his teacher, Mrs Krumhottz. The schoolmarm suspiciously eyes a nervous Tom and excuses him. He and a second boy (Francois Shalom) enter the outer hall from opposite classrooms at the same moment, walking together casually, exchanging a glance and shaking hands. They have succeeded in their ruse. Tom and Francois exit the school (Hamilton’s Westdale High), and as they sit on their bicycles, we hear the asynchronous sound of motorcycles revving. They turn down crowded streets and pass a Dickie Dee ice cream cart. The ice cream man sells two cones to a customer, resting them on his cart while he breaks the customer’s change, and turns to find that the boys have stolen the treats. In the next scene, after they are almost knocked off their bikes by a driver, the boys follow him to a parking lot and, in revenge, steal his rear right hubcap. He catches sight of them and begins pursuit. They take off on their bikes, escaping and later throwing his hubcap in a garbage can. These scenes of the boys’ high jinks are offered in a spirit of gentle fun. A subsequent montage shows the boys at play on a running track and at a construction site, intercut with images of a nearby television crew observing them. The television crew’s presence, along with the fact that the boys are seemingly playing themselves, imposes the documental self-awareness of the filmmaker. Goldberg knows that he is making a film of something that appears naturalistic, and with the television crew standing by, the audience becomes aware of this as well. It complicates this simple narrative of boys playing hookey, and yet makes that narrative and that friendship

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6.1 Tom Hutchinson dances on a steamroller driven by Francois Shalom in Day Off (1970).

appear more authentic. The authenticity of their play is an element that this constructed narrative has absorbed from the boys’ reality. Resuming their investigation of the adult world, the boys enter a clothing store and are approached by a salesman (Eugene Levy), in green suit and neckerchief. He dresses Tom in a series of suits, talking about the adjustments the suits would require. As he begins to pack the clothes for them, with his back to them, they walk out. From here, they go to a diner. As they sit eating burgers and fries, an elderly woman enters the restaurant and sits behind them. Tom holds his burger and eats it lustfully, echoing a similar scene in Tom Jones (1963), as if to provoke this spinsterish woman to disgust. He grabs a big handful of fries and messily shoves them into his mouth. The woman flees. As their day

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ends, Tom pulls his bicycle into his garage. He picks up his schoolbooks from a corner of the garage. The boys laugh and part. Tom goes to the door of his home and waves goodbye to his friend. The film was met with praise from its campus audience. As an extension of the filmmaking styles introduced at the Film Board by Goldberg and Reitman the previous year, Day Off charmed its audience with its rebellious youths and their spontaneous intrusions on the uptight adult world. Like Orientation, it had played to that campus audience’s experience, showing a friendship between two boys of an age not far from their own, paying tribute to a youthful arrogance with which its viewers could easily empathize. Though it was fixed in the apparent reality of Tom Hutchinson and Francois Shalom, and of Hamilton circa the spring of 1969, it was also broadly wistful about youth, pitting its puckish leads against a silly, contemptible adult world. Silhouette reviewer John Barker praised Hutchinson and Shalom’s naturalistic performances, as well as the film’s “slick camera work” and “commercial quality.”14 He described the film’s theme as “life’s a ball if you cheat a little,” explaining their pranks as being “all in good fun, and you can’t help feeling that the people who get cheated probably deserved it anyway.” Barker made special note of Eugene Levy’s “rapid-fire sales patter.” Of all of the films screened that night, Barker claimed that this one did not feel like a “student” film. In other words, he regarded this as the polished commercial product that the Film Board should aspire towards. In fact, Barker’s only criticism was directed towards anything that interrupted his expectations of the film’s adherence to convention and realism, objecting to a Laugh-In–style screwball joke ad-libbed by Levy, objecting to slow-motion photography during the montage, essentially objecting to anything unpredictable. To maintain commercial polish, such films could not be unpredictable. This review demonstrates what student expectations of the Film Board had become by 1970. Goldberg had offered a few unusual, highly effective elements to challenge the realism of the film – the extended montage, the camera crew, some surreal dialogue – and this challenge was necessary in a film that cast, too close to reality, the two boys as themselves. Because these elements were unexpected, Barker’s otherwise flattering review treated them as signs of failure. Jack and Jill Eugene Levy had been a strong presence on campus even before Ivan Reitman’s overhaul of the Film Board. He had been a columnist for

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the Silhouette, where he had spoken out in defence of Palace of Pleasure during the Student Union’s ransom of the film. When the Film Board opened up to the rest of the student body under Reitman’s direction, Levy had collaborated with his friends on Garbage and had acted in Reitman’s Freak Film. Like the cast members of the earlier Film Board films, Levy was involved in campus theatre activities. Garbage had shown Levy’s emphasis on symbolism, narrative subversion, and montage, and his new film, Jack and Jill, continued in the same vein. Of all of the films that screened that January, Levy’s had made the most of the Film Board’s new sync-sound camera. It featured synchronous dialogue throughout, but unlike Reitman’s Orientation and Goldberg’s Day Off, it did not aspire towards commercial film form. Its narrative – a story of unrequited love told by an unreliable narrator, described by John Barker as a vision of “what it’s like inside a straitjacket”15 – showed the influence of European art cinema (Ingmar Bergman, Roman Polanski) that had been the bedrock of the campus Film Society. This influence was apparent not only in its dramatically lit black and white photography, but in the complexity of the film’s plotting and its Ionesco-inspired dialogue. While Goldberg’s and ­Reitman’s films had aspired towards Hollywood filmmaking, Jack and Jill was challenging and literary in its construction, to such a degree that it left its viewers baffled. That night’s program notes described the film as “the story of an emotionally disturbed boy, completely submerged in a story he has written about a surrealistic environment.“16 In the opening scene, Jack (Valdi Inkens) attempts suicide. He wakes with a pouting, worried expression, rises from his couch, and descends a staircase into his darkened living room. The staircase rails are projected against the wall by a harsh light. His hand reaches for a blade that rests on a piano. He admires the blade in the light and holds it pointing inward, preparing to stab himself. At a sound of crashing and a man’s shout, the scene shifts from the darkness of the living room to a bright bathroom. The shower is running, and Jack, outside of it, paws at the curtain. On the other side, Jill (Patricia Conway, of To Paint the Park) asks who it is. He responds that he’s a vacuum cleaner salesman and she growls at him. He enters the shower and exclaims, “Goodness gracious, madam! You’re naked!” This surreal playfulness continues into the next scene, as they sit at a table eating. Both are distant and silent. She tries to provoke a response from him by talking about their meal, but he ignores her.

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6.2 Eugene Levy and Lawrence Martin operate a Bolex camera, 1969.

They perform the routine of a mature couple, but they drink chocolate milk, and in place of a newspaper, he scrutinizes a comic book. John Barker’s Silhouette review of the film paralleled their marriage to that of Blondie comic strip couple Blondie Boopadoop and Dagwood Bumstead. Conway and Inkens behave younger than they look in roles older than they are. She wraps her arms around his neck and says that she loves him. He wipes his mouth, not responding to her. She takes his glasses and kisses his head, and asks him to tell her that he loves her. He surrenders resentfully, repeatedly saying that he loves her, in a dry, loveless tone. In a later scene, Jack phones Jill to say that he has finished a painting. When Jill arrives, Jack leads her out onto his balcony to show her the canvas. The audience does not see his painting, but she looks shocked. She calls it obscene, and they debate how to look at it, she speaking figuratively of the content, he

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speaking literally of the orientation of the canvas, rotating it as they debate. In scenes such as these, the film’s tone veers from cheerless to lively. In the next sequence, they run along train tracks, their movement sped up by an undercranked camera. They play paddy cake on a cliff. The rural setting suggests a remote and isolated life. It becomes the playground of these overgrown children. During their game of paddy cake, Bruce (John Selby) approaches and asks to play. The three play Ring-around-the-Rosie. At the end, Jack falls down, while Bruce embraces Jill. The two seem to laugh at fallen Jack and then drag him to his feet. Now all three run together and play hide and seek in tall grass. When the three return to Jack’s home, their conversation takes the form of unheard, misheard, and misunderstood questions. Eventually, Jack asks Bruce what he thinks of Jill. Bruce answers that she’s very attractive, and Jack tells him that she’s very good in bed. Jack asks Bruce if he’d like to take Jill to bed. Bruce refuses, and Jack asks Bruce if he’d like to take him, Jack, to bed. In the daytime, Jack walks along a rural road in front of his home. A man with a stocking on his head accosts him at gunpoint, forcing him into a car. They drive into the country. The kidnapper takes off his stocking, revealing himself as Bruce. He taunts Jack. They arrive at Bruce’s cabin, and he admits that he is going to kill Jack. Bruce asks Jack about Jill, who she is, calling her a tramp. Jack does not respond. Bruce aims his gun. Out of sight, a sound of crashing distracts Bruce, and when he turns to look, Jack slaps the gun out of his hand and runs outside to a nearby beach. Bruce picks up the gun and follows. The two scuffle in the sand. The gun is again knocked from Bruce’s hand. He raises a chair to strike Jack, who picks up the gun and fires. In the distance, Jack sees Jill in a white robe, standing in the branches of a tree. In a series of elliptical cuts, she comes nearer. She walks towards him, a ghostly vision in a billowing white dress. She reaches him and their faces are rapidly intercut. This ends this episode, which in keeping with the emphasis on fantasy in past Film Board productions, is soon revealed to have only been Jack’s fantasy. Jack is typing in a small bedroom. A crowd stands over him, led by Bruce and Jill, who now refer to Jack as Freddy. When Freddy asks them why they have come, Bruce tells him that the door was unlocked, and they thought they would come in and see what he had been doing in his solitude. He protests their presence, insisting that he is busy,

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6.3  An apparition (Patricia Conway) stands in a tree in Jack and Jill (1970).

and the crowd teases him. They offer to help him with his writing. He refuses their help, and again they tease him. Bruce snatches his manuscript and reads the title, “Jack and Jill,” revealing Freddy’s laborious writing as nothing more than a familiar rhyme. The crowd bursts out laughing. Bruce begins to lead them in a chorus of the titular nursery rhyme, taunting the writer. Scenes from the film are rapidly intercut with their chant. Finally, Freddy howls in pain, shouting “Stop!” On Freddy’s pained utterance, the film abruptly cuts to black. Some of Dan Goldberg’s creative choices for Day Off were interpreted by Silhouette critic John Barker as jarring detours in an otherwise commercial film. Levy’s Jack and Jill, by contrast, offers something far more unorthodox with its resistance to structure and its surreal exchanges. It is a story-within-a-story, told by an unreliable narrator. These were not unfamiliar devices to serious filmgoers but were not the stuff of

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mainstream Hollywood cinema; nor were they in keeping with realist art cinema. Barker called Levy’s film overambitious and melodramatic, “muddied by symbolistic trappings and corny attempts at supersophistication.”17 His criticism of Levy was at least partly anchored in Levy’s ambition to tell a complex story. After the encouraging reception of Orientation, students had come to expect accessible mainstream entertainment from the Film Board, and the disorienting complexity of Jack and Jill was incompatible with this desired accessibility. In his review, Barker said that ambiguous films were “a result of either the director’s confusion or careless execution,” and took offence at what he believed to be the contemporary popularity of ambiguous films. Barker further went on to attack Levy for using antiquated techniques, claiming that his use of an undercranked camera to create the illusion of sped-up movement had been lifted from Keystone Kops features, and disparaged its credits for showing the actors’ faces when their names appeared, a curtain call which he dismissed as a convention of “old Hollywood.” What Eugene Levy demonstrates masterfully is episodic editing and storytelling, in both his story construction and the visual cuts between day and night, interior and exterior, the edits punctuated with unanswered questions or otherwise puzzling dialogue and images (Jack’s loveless repetition of tender words to Jill, Jack’s questioning of Bruce’s sexuality, Jill’s spectral presence at the site of Bruce’s shooting). This construction, which to Barker was incomprehensible, annihilates expectations of continuity early on, through the sudden truncation of scenes. By beginning with Jack’s despair, his interrupted suicide, Jack and Jill introduces a discontinuous structure, mirrored in the surreality of Jack’s story. Barker chose to identify this structure as a flashback from a suicide, suggesting that the final event – Jack/Freddy’s suicide – comes first, but the film remains ambiguous as to whether it is Jack or Freddy who commits this suicide. It also suggests that this scene may not be out of temporal sequence at all. It may be the repeated ritual of a despairing writer or his eccentric self-modelled character. Jack’s shifting spells of whimsy and anguish offer an entirely convincing portrait of loneliness and frailty, unmatched, even avoided, in Levy’s peers’ films. Reversal Dennis Matheson, who was taking on considerable administrative duties at the Film Board, chose to make his first film, Reversal, without the use of synchronous sound. Most of its comedy and dramatic exposition

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was performed without dialogue, and what little speech it had was dubbed in asynchronously. This brought it closer in execution to the previous winter’s shorts, some of which had featured asynchronous dialogue (Garbage, Freak Film). Reversal had a simple premise: to show an alternate reality in which a hooligan-led counterculture becomes the dominant social ideology, and dictates the law, forcing traditional behaviour to the fringes of society. This reversal is made explicit in the film’s opening scenes: youths inject heroin and take drags from pipes in an alley, while a church congregation secretly gathers in a basement. At the end of their mass, the congregation stands to leave, exiting discreetly through the cellar door, into a yard. There they are accosted by shirtless youths with “COP” painted on their chests. Some “cops” beat the congregation members with truncheons while others take their pictures. On a crowded street in downtown Hamilton, a student (Dave Sherry) passes by a crowd of injecting, smoking hippies. He looks at them and shakes his head disapprovingly. They leer at him, and he breaks into a run. With this social reversal established, the narrative begins: Sherry turns into an alley and slows his pace as he approaches someone, staking out an illicit exchange. The dealer produces a brown bag from his jacket. Sherry takes it and hides it in his own jacket. They are approached by one of the shirtless cops, who shoos them away with a touch of his truncheon. Sherry walks down a suburban street, approaches his home, enters, and rests his brown-bagged contraband on the table. He takes off his jacket, sits down, unwraps it and grins. It is a bottle of alcohol. He reads Time magazine, its cover graced by an editorial cartoon of Richard Nixon with a surfboard in hand. This ordinary life, conducted in secret, is in sharp contrast to the public intoxication of his peers. Two young men burst in, lifting their shirts to reveal the word “COP” scrawled across their bellies. They smell Sherry’s bottle, identifying it as liquor, and sit on his couch. One surveys the books on Sherry’s table, angrily flipping through them. He picks up the issue of Time, pointing to the cover. He wags a finger at Sherry. The other holds up a copy of Perry Como Sings Just for You, mocking Sherry. This continues with disapproving gestures towards Sherry’s collection of Shakespeare, Reader’s Digest, and Maclean’s. At last, the cops arrest Sherry and drag him out of the house. As the film ends, a radio announcer is heard explaining Sherry’s charges: “Last night police made another alcohol raid. One alcohol addict was arrested and almost twenty ounces of the liquid was

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6.4 Two undercover cops expose themselves in Reversal (1970).

seized.” In parody of the contemporary exaggeration of drug values, the announcer continues, “Police valued the alcohol at about $220.” The announcer is seen in the station with his crew, spinning records and taking drags on a cigarette. Sherry arrives at a tribunal of hippie youths seated on the floor, who throw scraps of paper at Sherry as he is brought before the bench. He is found guilty of non-conformity and is given a sentence of pills and injections, and no haircuts. John Barker criticized the film’s punchline. In this distorted world, those found guilty of being square are sentenced to a regimen of drugs and untidiness. Barker noted that there was no equivalent to this sentence in the reality of drug convictions. Reversal attacks dominant culture’s demands for conformity. What is difficult to ascertain – and where the argument of Matheson’s satire collapses – is whether the Establishment is being attacked for its harsh attitudes towards drug

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culture and changing values, or the youth culture is being attacked for its demands of conformity among youth. Sherry is, after all, a studentage actor, and so the latter becomes a likely meaning. However, in student films, youths commonly play older characters. This reactionary attitude towards the social construction of 1960s counterculture was also present, in a more subtle and sophisticated form, in John Hofsess’s films. His commitment to hallucinatory visions was not an endorsement of drug culture (even as Redpath 25 took on the language of drug culture for the sake of marketing). Hofsess had objected to the countercultural conformity among members of his own generation and had explained the decadence and psychedelic vision of his work as being tied to sensual rather than manufactured stimulants. Matheson’s film, if interpreted on these lines, is a reactionary treatment of the conformity and hypocrisy of the youth movement. Such an attitude was consistent with the films that Reitman and Goldberg had made, in which all acts of conformity and collectivity are ridiculous, and what matters most is the triumph of the individual, or individuals, facing the adversity of a mad world (as was true of Orientation and Day Off). But the film had been interpreted by Barker as a satire of the Establishment, of their brutal and irrational response to those things that do not fit into the mainstream. The behaviour of the arresting officers, who seem to enjoy reading and listening to Sherry’s books and music, if only to ridicule him, and who show deviant joy at their recognition of his black-market alcohol, recalls a night that past summer when the local police force brought their friends and wives to a screening of Columbus of Sex, a supposedly blue movie that they had confiscated, from which they derived perverse, hypocritical, deeply corrupt pleasure. Civilization G.W. Curran had made the tragic-gestured End during the earlier round of Film Board shorts in 1969. That film had adopted a complex structure to subvert a simple narrative, not unlike Jack and Jill. Curran’s new film, Civilization, made in collaboration with student producer Shawn Selway, was completely unlike the narratives of his peers. Of the four films that premiered in January 1970, Curran’s was the most formally experimental, taking on a heterodox form in its ambitious mission to summarize Western civilization through the ages. To this end, Curran used images of colonization, of Western art and culture, and built visual associations between technological mastery and death.

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John Barker described it as a “miniaturized, visualized Gibbon’s.”18 Rather than deliver historical fact, the film started from Curran’s fascination with architectural and sculptural form, developing visual arguments on the decline of civilization, the division and erosion of the mind, signalling return to an illiterate, tribal identity. In an announcement of the film the previous fall, it had been curiously described as a “trilogy,” although it has no such divisions within it.19 Perhaps, taking after Palace of Pleasure before it, Civilization was intended as the first part of a longer work. The film begins with civilization’s intrusion on the forested southern Ontario landscape: train tracks, hydro corridors, and highways break through forests and meadows. Urban and rural landscapes are contrasted: crowded streets and pastoral fields, skyscrapers and trees. The film’s first image is both a remnant of the unspoiled wilderness and a sign of human intrusion, as the camera pans from a cave, obscured by a bush, to a road full of traffic. From here, still images interrupt, showing horse-drawn carriages, the harnessing of natural power, and other signs of Western civilization’s past. An illustration of the Parthenon is paired with the ruins of an anonymous modern building. There are dramatic scenes with human subjects. An old man in a red beret paints. A young girl carries a doll. That doll is then shown tied to a tree. A hand hammers a bolt into the doll’s chest and it spits blood. Through a dissolve, the doll’s face becomes the moon. Soon after, in a darkened, fire-lit space, a beleaguered man in a suit is encircled and tormented by nude dancers. This sequence recalls Columbus of Sex, for choreographer Rod Stewart, and likely the same group of dancers, had been involved in Columbus’s notorious beach scene. This sequence in Civilization is lit and composed identically to that scene, save for its brevity and lack of genital contact among the performers. The symbolism in Curran’s film is both heavy-handed and obtuse. These juxtapositions and the titling of the work attempt to impose a profundity on the actions of the painter, the doll, the nude dancers, and yet that meaning is incomprehensible, and offered in slow reveals and lingering camerawork. What makes this film remarkable is its tremendous difference from the films it screened alongside: in its aggressive defiance of meaning, it echoed the early avant-garde films of the Film Board, such as Buffalo Airport Visions and … and dionysus died. Those films were also designed to resist interpretation, an aim that had become increasingly uncommon in the Film Board since its revival and which was last seen in Ivan Reitman’s Freak Film.

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6.5  An anatomical model sports cosmic illustrations and clockwork gear guts in Civilization (1970).

Curran integrates many images of paintings throughout Civilization. As the film begins, Spanish conquistadors and scenes of colonization are shown during a prolonged overture. Photographs of philosophers’ busts, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884 are shown. Advertisements and images from contemporary world events – for example, that summer’s moon landing – are integrated throughout. During an extended sequence of still photographs, images of children are paired with Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony no. 9 in E Minor (popularly known as “The New World Symphony”). The film also includes sculptural subjects: an elaborate setting with multi-coloured Coke bottles appears, a glass house of cards made from the waste of mass production. It falls in slow motion, repeatedly, until flames of unknown origin surround it.

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Civilization featured the most startling image of the post-Martin Film Board: an anatomical model with machine gears in its sides, and cosmic designs decorating its body. One hand is red, and the other a bundle of exposed muscle, bones, and nerves. The right side of its chest is speckled in black stars against yellow, the left side gears and clockwork. The right side of its face is red with two yellow lines beneath the eye, and the body spins (recalling Bob Allington’s use of a lazy Susan in … and dionysus died) to reveal that the left side of the dummy’s face is a fleshless skull. This dummy represents the end of civilization, the height of its achievement a division of man between mechanism and cosmos, between science and faith. The great mysteries and discoveries are a part of him as real as his flesh, his nerves, his bones. In the years since To Paint the Park, the Film Board had emphasized emotionally symbolic imagery, such as the empty beach in Walk On or the landfill in Garbage. Even as a resistance to realism took hold of the McMaster Film Board as a dominant, unifying trait, the majority of the films placed such themes in the midst of narratives, and those stories were often informed by symbol and metaphor. This dissected man strongly recalled the spirit of the 1960s Film Board, which, rather than draw from the contemporary realist film style, had been strongly influenced by surrealism. The dissected man vanishes, replaced by flames against a black background. In a final sequence, in daylight, a pair of forest-dwelling sprites, both male, both in togas, stalk through a forest. They throw yellow confetti towards the sky. It falls and becomes tangled in their hair. The camera pans up from them, revealing a vast expanse of forest, a new pastoral. A final cut returns to the cosmic dummy. The First Trial Months after the arrest and seizure, the makers of Columbus of Sex were assembling their defence. This meant establishing precedents, indicative of the moral standards of the present day. This was an age of Dionysian art, and a new, flexible moral order was taking shape. The Dionysian theme was being made explicit in nearby Toronto, where the city’s Studio Lab Theatre had imported the controversial participatory theatre production Dionysus in ’69 from New York City.20 It was in the same Toronto theatre community that Theatre Passe Muraille had staged Rochelle Owens’s Futz in winter 1969 at the Central Library theatre. In Owens’s play, a farmer falls in love with and has sex with his pet pig, sparking outrage and persecution from intolerant neighbours in his little hamlet.

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The Theatre Passe Muraille found its performances regularly attended by Morality Squad officers, and at the end of each performance, the police would issue summonses to all present. Obscenity charges were laid against the producers, actors, director, and stage crew. This led to four subsequent convictions, which were later overturned. The climate surrounding controversial art could be authoritarian or permissive, applied with no apparent consistency. In January 1970, John Hofsess wrote to Rob Fothergill with a list of examples he was preparing for lawyer John Bowlby’s use in the upcoming trial. They were “examples of films shown in Ontario with censor approval that employ verbal or visual precedents for the judge to consider.” Hofsess had done a painstaking content analysis of word usage in films and recordings that had been legally released in Canada. He noted the frequency of the word “fuck” (twenty-seven times) in Allan King’s Warrendale. The RCA Victor LP of Hair included the words “shit,” “motherfucker,” and “cock,” among other profanities. Lindsay Anderson’s If ... had both male and female genital nudity. Joseph Strick’s adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, with language equal in its graphic sexual content to Columbus of Sex, was passed by the Ontario Board of Censors and had public engagements in Hamilton theatres. Hofsess’s intention was to give the judge “a factual, ‘crash-course’ in modern culture.” He presumed that by confronting the authorities with what else had been allowed to go on, his own work would be forgiven as standard fare of the era. This would prove to be naive. Hofsess would insist that the showing of Columbus of Sex had not violated Hamilton’s community standards, based on precedents that had been set in film, theatre, literature, and music. He planned to get author and editor Barry Callaghan, who had moderated a symposium at the 1967 Cinethon, to explain the artistic merit and sociological importance of Columbus’s source material. Bowlby had told Hofsess to “begin with the assumption that Judge Morrison at present regards this as an open-and-shut case, very simple to decide; and that we must complicate the case for him in every way possible, through diligent research, and extensive testimony.”21 Hofsess would defend the film by offering up past instances of community permissiveness as evidence of community standards. Hofsess would have to begin defending his film by explaining its objectives as clearly as he could. But its objectives, like those of Palace of Pleasure, were steeped in psychotherapeutic mysticism that did not allow for easy reception, especially for those already appalled by the

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film’s sexual imagery and language. Hofsess planned to describe the film as “a hybrid; part surrealistic art, part comedy, part sex-­educational documentary – serious to the point of dullness in pursuing only one objective, and it pursues it relentlessly – the film is designed to relieve irrational anxieties and guilt-feelings about sexual behaviour; it uses words and images, over and over, until they are ‘disintoxicated’ or ‘de-sensationalized’ and an exorcism of shame is achieved.”22 The healing ambitions of Palace of Pleasure survived in Columbus of Sex, with some obvious changes. Hofsess’s concept of camera acting had been first gleaned from modernist avant-garde theatre and from the collision between actors and film technique (editing, photographic composition). Columbus of Sex had directly confronted cinematic forms, such as the sex education documentary, shifting away from his earlier emphasis on subversive theatricality. The therapeutic film no longer immersed its viewers in a realm of visual and aural sensuality, but rather forced them to confront their own sense of propriety when accosted, in a comic context, with bawdy language and imagery. Palace sought to awaken its audience to sensual possibility; Columbus aimed to numb their inhibitions. These are not incompatible objectives, both of them ostensibly aimed at freedom from neurosis, but they are not the same. The Columbus approach to cinematherapy was a major departure from Hofsess’s original vision of therapeutic cinema, when he rejected Flaming Creatures and Fireworks for their confrontational homosexual content. Columbus remained unlike those films in its aesthetic commitment to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol and its conceptual commitment to the post-Freudians’ notions of psychological wellness, and yet it was confrontational. Accusations of obscenity were once again making Hofsess a martyr for his work, as he had been when persecuted by the Toronto Morality Squad and the McMaster Student Union in 1967. His certainty that he was making art in the interest of a greater good made him overtly combative. To him, Columbus of Sex was, despite its humble origins, a major challenge to the repressive forces at play in society. Society’s psychological malaise and corrupt authorities had martyred and throttled radical therapist Wilhelm Reich before him. Hofsess described the bravery of his work: “Clumsy Columbus on its shoestring budget reaches out to touch a nerve; it places itself on the firing line. It says, in effect, either society or this individual will have to back down, which will it be?”23 A week later, Hofsess gave Bowlby a statement concerning the creative aims of The Columbus of Sex. There he gave a further definition of

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the film’s mission: “The primary objective of the film is to provide an audience with an exorcism from irrational anxieties and feelings of guilt about various aspects of sexual behaviour. Words and images, either referring to repressed wishes, dreams or behaviour, or triggering their release indirectly, are repeated over and over until they are drained of all sensationalistic meaning.”24 Provocation or stimulation would repeat until meaningless. The accusations of obscenity were not incidental; they may well have been anticipated. Hofsess’s film existed to confront the notion of obscenity, a stigma already attached to his source material. His task as filmmaker was to find a formal language for the material that would subvert it to meet his aims of emancipation. “The film’s function is to neutralize the last vestiges of sexual prejudices and fears, and to cleanse, or purge, its audience of their private burdens of irrationality. These aims – and the techniques required to realize these aims – are probably incompatible with the aims of entertainment.”25 As a demonstration of his technique, Hofsess cited examples from the film: “The first reel, on side two … consists simply of two people who remove their clothes, and take 30 minutes to do it; here, without any of the lascivious drama of burlesque, the act of disrobing is prolonged so that even the element of suspense is removed from it … the act of disrobing is ‘de-mystified,’ with every action of the two dancers minutely examined. The film while it examines various sexual phenomena is constantly disengaging the sexual responses of its audience; it doesn’t want them to feel what they have frequently felt many times before, more or less unthinkingly; it wants to gradually render sexual phenomena into objective ideas.”26 The film was neither an embrace nor an assault on sexual phenomena, but an attempt to degrade the lure, the power, and consequently, the psychological danger of taboo. On 9 March, seven months after their arrest, the defendants stood before Judge Robert Morrison with the expectation that they would at last be tried and receive a verdict. Hofsess had arranged for prominent figures in art and culture to act as defence witnesses for a three-day trial. The prosecution’s witnesses were Hamiltonians, none of them associated with McMaster, few of them present at the campus screening. Judge Morrison announced at the outset of the trial that he would allow a limit of five witnesses for each side, with the stipulation that they demonstrate expertise in art and censorship. With an ungainly echo of Potter Stewart’s famous ruling, he told the court, “I am not even very particular about how expert they are because I don’t know

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how you qualify as an expert in pornography.”27 As John Bowlby had anticipated, Judge Morrison had already decided the case. Thanks to Bowlby, that day’s proceedings were changed from a trial to a preliminary hearing, and Morrison committed the defendants for a trial in high court. Bowlby argued that expert testimony should be the deciding factor in a trial of this kind, and that the case was important enough to merit the extra time. “The police of this city have chosen to invade the intellectual community of this city,” he said. “They have imposed a censorship of the morality department on the university community. If the university cannot experiment in matters of dramatics and literature, what have we come to?”28 Among the defence’s preliminary hearing witnesses was Hofsess’s former English professor, Norman Shrive, who was also the director of the Attorney General of Ontario’s Committee on Obscene Literature (1963–70). Shrive told the court that Columbus of Sex represented a serious attempt to show that “society’s attitude toward sex could benefit from a clearing of the air.”29 Toronto Telegram film critic Clyde Gilmour, who had written so passionately about Palace of Pleasure in his Cinethon coverage, testified that John Hofsess was known as an “unquestionably sincere film-maker,”30 deflecting suppositions that cinematherapy was merely a concoction for the benefit of the court. Gilmour also spoke well of Ivan Reitman’s Orientation, pointing to both the artistic accomplishments and professional ambitions of the filmmakers and their organization. Professors Gordon Vichert and Graham Petrie of McMaster both testified that they did not believe the film was obscene. Petrie claimed that there was more undue exploitation of sex in television commercials, and Vichert, whose home had served as one of the film’s sets, said he considered violence or sexual violence to be the only obscenity. Assistant Crown Attorney John Lambier called no witnesses. Judge Morrison said, “I know there are 10 to 12 minutes of nudity in I Am Curious (Yellow), but there are only two or three minutes that there isn’t nudity in this movie.”31 Following the hearing, Hofsess, Reitman, and Goldberg had to reapply for bail and legal aid. Legal aid estimated the costs of the trial to exceed $10,000, an ironic turn for complainant Kellam and his concern for the taxpayer. “The Crown really overdoes itself in registering shock, in pretending that there is something in Columbus which is to be feared, which must be suppressed, which needs to be punished,” Hofsess told Fothergill. “I would find it tolerable to be put on trial by authentic puritans, and sexual saints, but to be put on trial by hypocrites is galling.”32

chapter seven

The Film Board Presidents on Trial

In early May 1970, John Hofsess was paid $150 by Ivan Reitman to write new material for Columbus of Sex. The film for which they were about to be put on trial was still in the process of being made. With their new trial date approaching, communication between Hofsess and his producers was breaking down. Goldberg and Reitman, unlike Hofsess, did not see themselves as benefiting from being put on trial. As businessmen and filmmakers of commercial aspiration, they felt that the public shame of being branded pornographers was a threat to their livelihoods. As an artist, that false brand could aid Hofsess in achieving attention for his philosophy and might even reward him with more opportunities to pursue filmmaking. For Goldberg and Reitman, notoriety was a liability. For Hofsess, whose therapeutic ambition was so dependent on finding an audience, being notorious was far preferable to being ignored. Hofsess told Columbus of Sex narrator Rob Fothergill of his dissatisfaction over the manner in which the production was being resolved. “Ivan wishes to record a new (short) section I’ve prepared for the film, and I hope to see you then. He’ll personally be shooting the new section involving Leon [Jervis], which means that over a third of the film has been shot without my presence on the set. When Ivan recently asked me what credit I’d like to have, I replied, ‘What’s left? What’s up for grabs?’”1 Behind the scenes, what had begun as an auteur project was becoming less a product of Hofsess’s therapeutic vision and more a product of committee thinking. Reitman and Goldberg were proceeding with filming without Hofsess, to protect the film’s lingering distribution possibilities. Their formal sensibilities, evident in Orientation and Day Off, were so unlike Hofsess’s that the film was unlikely

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to remain a challenging work of art. Before it had even gone on trial, the producers were beginning to transform it into a saleable piece of entertainment. This was not public knowledge, but had it been, it would have cast doubt on their innocence. By making a difficult film accessible and entertaining, they were transforming a work of art into pornography. Hofsess felt excluded, as if he were no longer going to court to defend his own work and ideas, a feeling no doubt shared by his producers, who had been put on trial for ideas that they did not believe in. ­Hofsess wrote, “More and more I’m beginning to feel like a guest witness defending somebody’s film but hardly mine, as the trial draws nearer the charade becomes more transparent. Perhaps all ‘official’ truths are corrupt, and our private truths too complex to relate in court.”2 Despite his misgivings, Hofsess had been actively seeking more celebrity witnesses. Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler was willing, but without having a clear idea of how many witnesses they would be allowed, it was impossible to ask legal aid to cover the cost of flying Richler to Hamilton from Montreal. Hofsess also approached film critic Andrew Sarris, whose writing in the Village Voice had advanced auteur theory in North America, and essayist Susan Sontag, whose thoughts on the intersection of high and low art could offer a context for ­Hofsess’s complex adaptation techniques. Fieldwork for the Prosecution On 1 May 1970, Hofsess gave John Bowlby a new set of references and witness preparation notes. He closed his cover letter to Bowlby, “The only right which Columbus of Sex asks of society is that of existing without harassment in the arena of free ideas, to be accepted or rejected on an individual basis by those who wish to view it.”3 Hofsess broke down his examples into categories of offending material, such as individual word usage (for “fuck,” “cock,” “cunt”), type of nudity (male frontal, female frontal), and full-body views of nude intercourse. The list referred only to versions of these films that had been passed by the Ontario Board of Censors for exhibition. The list featured a wide range of works. There were documentaries (Allan King’s Warrendale, 1967, and Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock, 1970) and experimental films (Joseph Strick’s Ulysses, 1967, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, 1968), but the majority of the films listed were contemporary international art house films or new American narratives, such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Zabriskie Point (1970),

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Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967), Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band (1970), and ­Robert Altman’s MASH (1970). These films had received considerable international attention and major theatrical releases, and whatever their controversies, whatever their altercations with regional censor boards, they were not at the fringes of society, and because of their strongly positive critical receptions, they could not be easily dismissed as pornography. In his witness preparation notes, Hofsess also refutes the accusation that “oral copulation” occurs in the film. His explanation to Bowlby recalls an earlier description he gave to Fothergill of the techniques used in his incomplete Resurrection of the Body: “There is a section of 600 2-second lap-dissolves in which, in two brief instances, the positions of the male and female couple present a close proximity of face and genital features.” To demonstrate that the act had been permissible in other films, he cites mimed oral sex in Alain Resnais’s La guerre est finie (1966) and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), and an explicit description in Strick’s Ulysses. Hofsess defends the “priest scene,” in which a woman fellates a priest’s rosary, by calling attention to precedents in Edward Albee’s play Tiny Alice, Somerset Maugham’s story “Rain,” and Peter Glenville’s film Becket (1964). In the midst of these examples of explicit precedents, he reminded his witnesses of the importance of the film’s therapeutic intent, and the specificity of that intent to a youth audience. This was a claim that strongly differentiated Columbus of Sex from these precedents. “In calling itself ‘a form of therapy,’ Columbus of Sex doesn’t claim to convert conservatives to liberals, or frigid temperaments into voluptuaries – simply that it serves to reduce general guilt and anxieties concerning sexual impulses and behaviour among the age bracket and social class which university students represent. The purpose is not a negligible one, and serving that purpose is the film’s primary right to existence.”4 Whether he was sincere in his optimism over the potential outcome of the trial, or simply having his day in court, Hofsess was pouring his energies into the gathering of expert testimony and precedents. Soon, he found himself in a financial crisis. He was unemployed, subsisting on welfare, and unable to use his Canadian Film Development Corporation grant for living expenses. He had traded his third share of the film to Joe Medjuck, his editor at Take One, for $400.5 Even before he went on trial, Hofsess had already sold what little financial interest he had in the fate of Columbus of Sex.

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The Trial Begins The trial began on 19 May 1970. It was presided over by Judge ­Theodore McCombs. The prosecutor, John Lambier, called his first witness, Rein Ende, the original complainant, or at least the enabler of absent complainant Gary Kellam. Ende testified that he and Kellam notified the police after the first screening. Under cross-examination, Ende admitted to Bowlby that he had sent a letter of denial to the Silhouette. The letter, which was read in court, included Ende’s statements about the film’s impressive sequences, and his attempt at shifting the blame for the raid from himself to Kellam.6 Kellam was not called as a witness. Ende’s reliability as a witness had been damaged on cross-­examination. He had admitted to having apologized in print to the McMaster student body for the situation. For whatever eyewitness testimony Ende could supply about the film’s obscenity, Bowlby had shown that Ende had already contradicted the grounds for his testimony, that he did not have the courage of his convictions, that indeed his convictions, he had claimed, were not his own at all, but Kellam’s. Ende and ­Kellam’s initial complaint, by their accounts, had focused on the expense to taxpayers for exhibiting such a film at McMaster. Hofsess estimated that the salaries of the court officials cost the taxpayer $970 a day.7 The trial would last for seven days. The prosecution’s next witness was Lieutenant Leonard Carrington of the Hamilton vice squad. Carrington placed Dan Goldberg in the auditorium’s foyer selling tickets and Ivan Reitman in the projection booth. He told the court that he watched twenty minutes of Columbus of Sex before seizing it and the projectors. “I saw numerous persons in the nude, all in different positions … females dancing belly-to-belly, males the same way, males on top of males, females on top of females, and males with females.”8 A scene between two sailors and a young woman in which only a few articles of clothing were removed was characterized by Carrington as a vicious rape. Onlookers in the scene were peeping Toms and voyeurs. The rosary-sucking sequence was described by the lieutenant as an encounter “between a priest and a sick woman which ends in their having intercourse.”9 Hofsess attested that, the priest being fully clothed and on his knees, the woman supine, sex was impossible. The officer claimed to have witnessed acts of “oral copulation” in the film, though none was present, save for those created through an illusory marriage of mouth and genital in the film’s lap dissolves. A thirty-second shot of four male dancers lying on four others,

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in Hofsess’s words no more erotic than a wrestling match, was to the lieutenant an act of homosexual perversion.10 There were chuckles in the courtroom when the lieutenant said he had since seen the movie four times.11 After the prosecution had presented their case, Bowlby put forth a motion for a non-suit against John Hofsess. In accord, McCombs dismissed all charges against Hofsess.12 The reasons for this motion, which must have come in consultation with Hofsess, remain mysterious. Regardless of Hofsess’s discouragement in the days before the trial, of the three defendants, he had the most to prove. The film, in its seized form, did not represent Goldberg’s or Reitman’s other work. The trial had represented a great opportunity for Hofsess to gain publicity for his ideas, and yet McCombs’s ruling read that no evidence had been presented by the prosecution in the pre-trial period to show that the John Hofsess listed as director on the screen was the same John Hofsess standing before him in court. He was excused on a technicality. He had felt that his collaborators were excluding him from finishing his own film, and now his afflictions, of finance or fear, were writing him out of his own trial. The day ended with an afternoon screening of Columbus of Sex in the darkened Hamilton courtroom. In attendance was Hamilton Spectator reporter Kathleen Keating, who described the strange comedy of seeing this film in an authoritarian atmosphere: “Some scenes drew laughter from the otherwise strained audience, made a little uneasy by the sight of a robed judge seated high on his bench overlooking the proceedings.”13 The Defence The next morning, John Bowlby began his defence. He called witnesses to testify to the film’s artistic merit and to comment on the charges of obscenity: cultural commentator and television host Pierre Berton; film critic Joan Fox; Canadian Film Institute curator Peter Morris, who had praised Palace of Pleasure and encouraged Columbus of Sex; Art ­Gallery of Ontario contemporary art curator Dennis Young; the United Church chaplain at McMaster, Reverend Carl Nelson Moore; and York University’s Reverend W.E. Mann, who had conducted studies of university campus sexual activity and was the author of Canadian Trends in Premarital Behaviour (1957), a study of campus attitudes towards sex. Returning to repeat their testimony from the preliminary hearing were

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Norman Shrive and Gordon Vichert. It was owing to John Hofsess that such a luminous public figure as Pierre Berton had been called as witness, although Hofsess’s attempts to gain other celebrity witnesses had failed. Hofsess had conceived a media circus of a defence, but with legal aid offering limited subsidy, and with the case shifting from writer/director Hofsess to producers Goldberg and Reitman, John Bowlby focused his examination on figures who knew the filmmakers and had special understandings of or involvement in the case, all of whom could comment on the case with authority. Bowlby also had to deal with the imposition of the court that he only call witnesses whose expertise in art, obscenity, and cinema could be established. Pierre Berton was the first to be called to the stand. He testified that he found the film very interesting and of higher quality and better taste than he had expected. Lambier asked him, “Can a film have a considerable degree of artistic merit and still be obscene?” Berton responded, “A film of artistic merit can’t unduly exploit sex because the undue exploitation of sex is unartistic.”14 Of all of the witnesses the defence would call, Berton was the only major public figure. As the host of a popular syndicated talk show, he might be accepted as an authority on the public interest. As such, he established Bowlby’s combative stance that the changing social mores of the 1960s should be reflected in the relationship between art and law. For his part, Berton told the court that “contemporary standards are changing quickly and the public is going along with it.”15 Joan Fox, film critic for the Globe and Mail, praised the film’s narration for its delicacy. She argued that explicit details of sex were not obscene in the context of the film. “You couldn’t take it to Yonge Street and make a million showing it to the public. It is not crass and vulgar enough. It’s esthetic and experimental.”16 In her testimony, Fox reinforced that the film was not the kind of work that could draw the profits that exploitative filmmakers would desire. On its deliberate failure as pornography, she said, “it’s not something you can go to for kicks unless you’re really hung up.”17 Fox said that she had seen many experimental films, and that there “wasn’t anything out of the way” in Columbus of Sex. Before it was seized, Peter Morris had seen Columbus of Sex at the Canadian Film Institute. The makers had screened it for him and his staff privately, and the version that the Institute staff had seen was identical to the version that was seized. He testified that the film was not in any way obscene, that it was “an important social document,”18 a chronicle of past and present attitudes towards sex and taboo. Reverend Mann

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could support the claim of it as a social document: his studies in sexual activity on campuses showed that the student attitude towards sexuality was unique in its bohemianism and sense of freedom. Columbus of Sex, with its intent to detoxify taboos, was not only a frank recording of campus attitudes towards sexuality, but also a sincere attempt at healing the neurotically inhibited. Dennis Young defended these therapeutic qualities, drawing from Hofsess’s statements about cinematherapy and praising the film’s frankness and candour. Norman Shrive repeated his testimony from the preliminary trial, stating that it was his opinion as a member of the Ontario Attorney General’s Panel on Obscene Literature that Columbus was not obscene. Vichert and campus chaplain Moore agreed, arguing that the university must be a forum for the free exchange of ideas, that if enforced on campus, obscenity laws could only harm and discourage the student community. Bowlby’s case had been laid out with precise strategy to convince the court of a series of arguments, defending the film through critical evaluation and the film’s unique social significance. The prosecution’s own eyewitnesses, in giving false testimony, helped to shift the guilt from the film and its makers to the police and complainants. The defence witnesses had also given Bowlby’s case a hefty conceptual weighting that might work against it. By presenting a work of art that was difficult and alien, and then defending it in intellectual terms, the defence risked obscuring the humanity of the accused, and the effect that a guilty verdict might have on Goldberg’s and Reitman’s ambitions. On 21 May, the third morning of the trial, in an appeal to the court’s mercy, at the close of the defence, Ivan Reitman was called to the stand. Reitman was not at all the pornographer that the court might have imagined him to be. He was professional, courteous, and articulate, and spoke for almost two hours, telling the court that he was surprised and confused when the vice squad detectives seized the film. He described his career to date, from his successes at McMaster to the present, which now included the national distribution of Orientation with John and Mary. He told the court that he was due to act as an assistant producer on a film that the Canadian Film Development Corporation and the Hollywood film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were making, managing a budget of $700,000. Reitman presented himself as being naive to the accusation of obscenity, citing Hofsess’s humanist values and the film’s intended audience. Reitman, Goldberg, and Hofsess had felt that they were being conscientious in screening the film for

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the Canadian Film Institute and for a university audience. The seizure of the film, and the accusation of obscenity, had left Reitman dumbfounded. Further, the accusation gave the work an undeserved notoriety. A sincere artist had made Columbus of Sex, with the support of two successful and professional film producers. It was never intended as pornography. All three of the filmmakers – Reitman on the stand, Goldberg seated by his counsel, and Hofsess a free man in the gallery – were earnestly committed to filmmaking. All three could imagine their careers continuing beyond this scandal, and none as pornographers. The Prosecution’s Reply As the Crown began its reply, prosecutor John Lambier began to call members of the public who had attended the Hamilton police screenings to give their observations. He told the court that these witnesses were not experts, but members of the community who had seen the film and wanted to voice their opinions. Bowlby objected that Lambier was calling witnesses whom he had been barred from calling. Bowlby had to restrict his defence because he had only been allowed to call witnesses who could be established as experts in the fields of art and cinema. Lambier had been expected to obey the same criteria. Judge McCombs instructed Lambier to proceed, pacifying Bowlby with the unusual allowance that he might call witnesses “in reply to the reply.”19 Like a burgeoning, bawdy eighteenth-century novelist – a fledgling Fielding or a Smollett – Lambier had scoured the Hamilton landscape for non-experts with names like Priest and Cockman. Ronald Priest, a thirty-six-year-old father of four, and chairman of Liberal Studies at Hamilton’s Mohawk College, was the first rebuttal witness called by Lambier. Priest testified for three hours, and in addition to calling the film obscene, he called it overdone, grotesque, and depraved. He testified, “The film is explicitly about sex. The title is The Columbus of Sex and I don’t know what could be more explicit than that. And furthermore, it deals with just that subject. My understanding of the law is that therefore this film is obscene.”20 To him, Columbus of Sex was “a vicious attack on sexual mores that makes a mockery of the subject itself and violates human sensitivities.”21 Pressed for evidence of his findings, Priest began to perversely misremember the content of scenes. “The film contains homosexual acts which go against the whole biological purpose of man’s existence, and the purpose of sex,”

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Priest said. “The association of alcohol and sex in the film also made it obscene. People drink and then start acting in an uninhibited and obscene manner.”22 Hofsess would later challenge Priest’s account, saying that there were only three scenes involving alcohol: a woman spills a glass of champagne, a woman sips wine at an outdoor picnic, and Leon Jervis pours himself a glass of cognac. This suggests that any imbibing of alcohol on film would be offensive to Priest. For his objection to the film as blasphemy, Priest specified the encounter between the clergyman and the woman, calling it “a very specific mockery of religion.”23 On cross-examination, Bowlby asked Priest if he had seen a number of recent films that contained nudity and profanity. He had seen none of them. “I make a specific point of avoiding things that are not in keeping with my interests and tastes, so I have not made a point of keeping up with those things.” He also admitted that he was not qualified to judge the film’s artistic merit. He told the court that the film had been “badly handled technically,” and then, that its technical qualities were the “one area where the film has merit.”24 He specifically commented on the split-screen technique and the lack of dialogue, but it was unclear whether he regarded this execution as a success or failure. As with Rein Ende, cross-examination had exposed Priest as an unreliable witness and, what is more, a witness testifying against a work that he would never have encountered if not for the trial. He admitted that, though he would often see National Film Board films in connection with courses that he taught, he saw only six commercial films a year. On 22 May, Lambier called Gerald Walsh to the stand. Walsh was a forty-nine-year-old divisional foreman at Stelco, a Roman Catholic holding a BSc from McGill University. Like Priest, he and his wife had been invited to a police screening of Columbus of Sex after it was seized. The couple could not believe what they were seeing and hearing. Walsh declared the narration “revolting and enough in itself to condemn the film.” On cross-examination, Bowlby asked Walsh if he could agree with the defence witnesses that the film had artistic merit. “I not only disagree,” said Walsh, “I violently disagree.”25 Next, Lambier called Dofasco foreman Wilfred O’Brien, age fiftythree, another lay witness for the prosecution who had seen the film under the same circumstances. O’Brien characterized Rob Fothergill’s voice as “very obscene.” Describing Fothergill’s elocution, he said: “Every word he said wasn’t just a word, it was just as explicit as the act itself.” He went on, “I am quite accustomed to hearing certain

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four-letter words that are used in the film’s narration, but in the film they aren’t used as a steelworker uses them.”26 O’Brien admitted that the profane language of the narration was a part of his own social life, and yet it became objectionable in the context of the film. Hofsess had intended the abundance and frequency of the profanity in Columbus of Sex to detoxify these words. They had the opposite effect on O’Brien, who saw them as a perversion of his acceptable workplace patois. Like other Crown witnesses, O’Brien wanted to see his moral sensibilities enforced as law, community be damned: “This permissive society is becoming a little more permissive than I want to see it. There has to be a stop to it somewhere.”27 Susan Hammond, a twenty-seven-year-old housewife, described the film for the court: “I saw money being exchanged between males and females in the film, and when I see people selling their bodies, it is in my opinion obscene.” According to Hammond’s logic, any film depicting prostitution would have been obscene – films as mainstream as Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce (1963) would be objectionable. ­Hammond called the language used on the soundtrack “gutter talk that has no place in a public showing.” More revealing were Hammond’s remarks about the film’s form: “The film made no sense, there’s no relation between the so-called story on the soundtrack and the pictures, and that too indicates it is obscene. A serious artist would have had a plot.”28 At the McMaster Film Board of the day, unconventional form was simply dismissed as incompetence. But in the Hamilton court, as with the 1966 Massachusetts obscenity trial of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, unconventional form was being labelled obscene. In that trial, provocateur Norman Mailer had defended Burroughs’s novel as a piece of automatic writing, offering a lesson in twentieth-century literature to a court that had already labelled passages “grossly offensive” for both their language and their difficult form.29 When discussion of the dual screens entered the court, the prosecution of Columbus of Sex became focused on the film’s form instead of its content. It became the prosecution of a discontinuous environment, like the Massachusetts prosecution of Naked Lunch before it, in which the stigma of obscenity was found in the author’s cut-up technique as much as the book’s transgressive content. By simultaneously casting two unrelated images, the prosecution could interpret the filmmakers as being against moral order. Matters of faith surfaced again in the testimony of William Cockman, of the Hamilton District Visitors’ Bureau, who told the court that “no

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work can have artistic merit if it attacks the church as this film did.” Lambier’s strategy had been to focus on the legal definition of obscenity, that is, “the undue exploitation of sex.” This definition was vague, as were the prosecution witnesses’ reasons for objection, most of which revealed hypocrisies, anxieties, and bigotry. Cockman, in his official position at the city’s tourism bureau, as a promoter of local culture, seemed unaware of cultural work that his own bureau had advertised that featured similarly objectionable content, such as the Hamilton theatre production of Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice. Other witnesses had made claims that the title or the form of the film represented an undue exploitation of sex, arguing that anything peripherally related to the representation of sex was obscene, a position that could include the health education films that Hofsess was satirizing. The Crown’s rebuttal witnesses had included employees from both of Hamilton’s steel refineries, but not a single member of the university community had been called. Ironically, though he aimed to cast the university as a small part of a broader community, Lambier had, in neglecting to involve members of the university community, emphasized the disparity between the campus and the rest of Hamilton. Bowlby demonstrated through his cross-examinations that these community members would likely never have heard of the film if not for the synthetic notoriety that the vice squad had given it. While Lambier had characterized the film as a vicious offence to the townspeople, this was a false premise. It had simply not been made for them. Closing Arguments The trial resumed on Tuesday, 26 May. At the end of the evidence, Judge McCombs dismissed the charge of distributing an obscene film for lack of evidence. After all, Goldberg and Reitman had been arrested prior to seeking distribution for the film. Four other charges relating to the production of an obscene film remained. The next day, the trial would end. John Bowlby gave his submissions for the defence. He argued that the issue of obscenity does not belong in the court because it forces the onus of evidence onto the defence. It forces the defence to plead its case to an unsympathetic court. Against this, Bowlby presented the principle of reasonable doubt: “In obscene literature cases, the book is filed and then all eyes turn to the accused as if to say ‘Now you prove that isn’t obscene.’ All the accused have to do is raise a reasonable doubt.”30 To prove reasonable doubt, he had called authorities in art and culture

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that could testify to the merits of the film, to the corruptness of obscenity law, and, perhaps most importantly, to the sincerity of John Hofsess. It was hoped that his idea of a therapeutic film form could elevate the film, in the judge’s eyes, from an act of obscenity to a work of art. In the United States, in the final decade of radical post-Freudian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s life, the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had persecuted Reich for his orgone accumulators, devices used to treat sexual dysfunction and, supposedly, to cure tumours. The discourse around the charges focused on Reich’s radical concept of orgonomy, which like therapeutic cinema was a theory for treating neurosis that dealt with sexual energies. In matters of the targeted persecution of radical thinkers, sincerity and goodwill would become irrelevant. John Bowlby argued that the film should be allowed to rise or fall in distribution, at the mercy of critics and audiences, unobstructed by the court. “If art is not art society discards it not because of judicial decree, but because that which has no merit has never endured.”31 The area of the Criminal Code that was being tested in this case gave the police and courts the right to interfere with the freedom of literary expression and artistic development. For this reason, the case would stand as a precedent for Canadian art in Canadian law, establishing how this justice system, divided, like the rest of Canadian culture, between British and American customs, could establish its own practices in dealing with charges of obscenity for the present and future. In Bowlby’s view, such arbitrary prosecutions as this could discourage artistic experimentation. He argued that a new art form – such as film, such as Hofsess’s dualscreen multimedia treatment of film – tends to confuse and therefore frighten viewers. Crown witnesses, in their testimony, had repeatedly held up the dual-screen film form as an offensive or obscene gesture. “They’re saying ‘this is an art form that is new that I don’t understand, so I will draw away from it.’”32 Bowlby closed by stating that no evidence had been presented by the Crown to show that the film was made for any part of the community other than the university, a community from which the prosecutor had not found one willing witness. For the prosecution’s closing statements, John Lambier argued that his witnesses – steelworkers, a schoolteacher, a housewife, a bureaucrat – were better equipped “as moderate individuals” to judge morality. “A person such as Pierre Berton may be an expert in his field, but not in the principles of right and wrong in human behaviour.”33 In Lambier’s words, his witnesses understood sex to be more than the physical acts they had

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seen on screen. In other words, his witnesses were more knowledgeable about intimacy than the filmmakers or defence witnesses, suggesting that the accused and their supporters were perverted radicals with no experience in love. In the film, sex appeared to Crown witnesses as a purely physical thing unconnected with the love or affection that they, as “moderate individuals,” claimed to appreciate most about sex. To them, Columbus of Sex was a graphic depiction of voyeurism, homosexuality, all possible positions of sexual intercourse, and oral copulation, none of which represented, to Lambier and his witnesses, a moral treatment of sexuality. These “moderate individuals” of Hamilton wanted moderate films and moderate art. As for the soundtrack, it was “unnecessarily rude and vulgar.” Lambier asserted that “the same result could have been effected with less coarse and profane language.”34 With this final statement, Lambier revealed his ignorance of John Hofsess’s confrontational form, which had already been explained as being dependent on the repetition of offending words. Without this, what effect did Lambier imagine it was trying to achieve? With the Crown’s closing statements as the final word, the trial ended. The defendants would wait almost two weeks for the verdict. The Verdict The verdict was presented on 9 June. Ivan Reitman’s father, who had never seen Columbus of Sex, drove from Toronto to the courthouse. He arrived too late to be admitted and had to wait until after a recess to enter. Dan Goldberg’s parents were also in attendance. John Hofsess was in the gallery, as he had been throughout the trial, a silent and unrecognized third defendant in a trial from which he had been excused, sitting witness to a defence largely of his own orchestration. Despite John Bowlby’s sound argument, and his thorough refutation of the Crown’s witnesses, the court found Goldberg and Reitman guilty. Judge McCombs ruled that the men had possessed, made, printed, and published an obscene picture with undue exploitation of sex in contravention of the Criminal Code. “I am not a prude,” began McCombs, in a statement that revealed an undeniable prudishness. “I know the three words spoken repeatedly throughout the evidence. I do not have any sense of false modesty, however, I do not choose to speak the offensive terms but shall designate them: ‘F’ dash, dash, dash; ‘C’ dash, dash, dash; and ‘P’ dash, dash, dash, dash.”35 In the end, it was Rob Fothergill’s narration – and, by proxy, Walter’s original text, legally available in

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printed form – that had left the strongest impression on McCombs. His ruling dealt primarily with the film’s profane language, the abundance of it and the performance of it, as evidence of the film’s obscenity. The Crown had failed to call any witnesses from McMaster, and the defence witnesses from campus had all lauded the film and objected to the police and the court’s intrusion on campus. McCombs nevertheless presumed, without any evidentiary logic, that many on campus would object to the film: “I am reasonably certain that there are a great many in the McMaster group who would not subscribe to standards set out in Columbus of Sex.”36 McCombs had decided that the community members that the Crown had called had provided an adequate crosssection of society from which to determine campus attitudes. But those witnesses all had shared beliefs in direct conflict with the McMaster representatives who had spoken at the trial, and they had repeatedly failed under Bowlby’s questioning to articulate their opinions about the film’s obscenity. According to McCombs, the defence failed to establish that the film served the public good, that “if there is any artistic merit in the technique used in the film, it is completely overshadowed by the obscene content of the film.”37 The film was no longer being judged solely in terms of its obscenity – its supposed assault on community morals – but was being penalized for not proving to the court the effectiveness of its abstract therapeutic aesthetic. When McCombs had finished his ruling, Bowlby asked to privately consult with him regarding penalty. He emphasized that the court should not limit his clients from engaging in film work. They had already demonstrated their aptitude for this career during the trial. “They have seriously adopted this as their chosen profession,” Bowlby said, reminding the judge of Reitman’s key role in an international co-production between the Canadian Film Development Corporation and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The court recessed briefly, and when it resumed, McCombs said counsel would speak to sentence later in the day. The defendants waited in the holding cells of the courthouse. Dan Goldberg remembers that prosecutor John Lambier, realizing the severity with which the court had come down on them, demanded that Goldberg and Reitman be separated from the other prisoners, taken to a private room, and given some food.38 After the trial, Lambier admitted to waiting reporters, “Everyone feels sorry for the accused to some extent,” recalling Reitman’s testimony of his surprise that police would seize Columbus of Sex in the first place. Soon after, the producers were ushered back to the courtroom.

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The sentence was relatively light. Bowlby had correctly anticipated that neither defendant would have to go to prison. McCombs gave the men a suspended sentence, one year of probation, and a fine of $300 or two months in prison. They chose to pay the fine. Goldberg and ­Reitman were to see a probation officer once each month for the first six months of probation and then alternate months for the remainder of the year. McCombs said, “I see no reason why I should not give these two young men an opportunity to redeem themselves, and a suspended sentence,” allowing them to make, print, and publish films during their probation, with the vague stipulation that such films not be obscene. McCombs ordered that Columbus of Sex be seized and forfeited to the Crown. Bowlby asked that nothing be done with the film until the appeal term had lapsed. Goldberg and Reitman had already planned ­Reitman’s feature directorial debut, Foxy Lady, a $250,000 film financed by the Canadian Film Development Corporation and the Montreal commercial film company Cinepix.39 They hired John Hofsess as their publicist. Aftermath In the days after the verdict, Hofsess wrote a letter to the editor of the Toronto Daily Star, describing his plans for the future and how the verdict could impact on those plans. He spoke of his new film project, Man in Pieces, for which he had received a Canadian Film Development Corporation grant. It would be “a study in depth of penal institutions in Canada, based upon 18 months of research into the subject.”40 As a study of prisoners and the law, it combined his research into Penetanguishene with his recent personal experience as a criminal defendant. As with his earlier films, he did not characterize this project as having any ambitions towards entertainment; like Palace of Pleasure and Columbus of Sex, he hoped it would be a challenging and revelatory experience, dependent on an audience’s intellectual engagement. “I would like to see each of my films add a portion of carefully studied truth to the existing knowledge of audiences, yet I find the principles I would most genuinely avow as a film-maker either in fictional films or documentaries have met with forcible suppression.”41 He would base the film on actual case histories. He had no doubt studied many of them in the course of his preparations for his own trial. As the film was factbased, he wrote, “It is unthinkable that I should tell imprisoned persons to ‘clean up their act,’ as it were, never to use profanities, never to tell

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the raw, sometimes startling, truth about their thoughts, feelings and behaviour.” In his own case, he was convinced that the testimony of the Crown witnesses and the judge’s prudish ruling demonstrated a reigning hypocrisy in the justice system. This hypocrisy masqueraded as concerned morality, and attempts to make objective laws from subjective and personal matters, such as sex and its representation, was futile. “The most pronounced effect of this judgement is that it raises doubt in my mind as to whether filmmakers of serious purpose can tell the truth in their works … I can only feel a restraint and intimidation that I know in my heart to be unhealthy and untrue.”42 Hofsess responded with bitter resolve to brave the threat of future censorship. Dan Goldberg and Ivan Reitman’s New Cinema of Canada was attempting to sell Columbus of Sex to distributors. Goldberg and Reitman were beginning their probation, and John Hofsess was developing a book on the trial, using the case as a launching point to discuss censorship of art and literature in Canada. In June 1970, Hofsess began writing letters to potential contributors – among them Canadian Minister of Justice John Turner, who was approached to provide a foreword, and Saturday Night magazine editor Robert Fulford. Hofsess described the book in a letter to Richard D. Hayes, executive assistant to the Office of the Minister of Justice, as “an anthology of original articles by artists, critics, and social commentators dealing with the issues of ‘obscenity’ and art-censorship.”43 The book would be called The Night They Raided McMaster, a reference to The Night They Raided Minsky’s, Rowland Barber’s 1960 novel about the invention of striptease in 1920s New York (which had also been the subject of William Friedkin’s 1968 musical film of the same name). Hofsess told the minister’s aide of the book’s proposed structure: “This book will include edited transcripts of the preliminary hearing and trial concerning ‘Columbus of Sex,’ and be supplemented by both reviews of the film, and scholarly articles on the nature and effects of ‘obscene materials.’”44 Mordecai Richler agreed to contribute an article about his 1968 novel Cocksure, which had won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction, but which had been refused distribution by retailers in Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. The humorist Richard J. Needham would contribute his review of the film and his observations of the trial. Robert Fulford told John Hofsess that he would be delighted to contribute, but also suggested that Hofsess write an article on it for Saturday Night, “a lively, provocative, anecdotal article on your adventures as a maker of an illegal film.”45

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In July, John Hofsess announced his projected book. In the Toronto Daily Star’s books column, the announcement read that he was seeking contributors, and that it was to be published by McClelland and Stewart. In August, his Saturday Night article was published. The headline “The Witchcraft of Obscenity: Trial and Conviction of a Canadian Movie” graced the cover, along with a semi-nude photograph of Patricia Murphy. The article featured Hofsess’s account of the trial, restating the defence’s position on the merits of Columbus of Sex as a serious work of art, as well as quoting from the court transcript the Crown witnesses’ bizarre and perverse interpretations of relatively innocent imagery. This article was a major achievement for Hofsess. A serious national journal was featuring his writing, and as a cover story no less. Some Saturday Night readers wrote in with their support, but more wrote to express their displeasure at finding such an explicit image on the cover of the August issue. Many responded with the same outrage as Lambier’s Crown witnesses, admonishing the editors with clumsy, puritanical frustration. One reader wrote, “Would you please be kind enough to cancel my gift subscription to Saturday Night. I am ashamed to have such a paper coming to my apartment! Is it just to cater to the unclean appetite of some teenagers, or can you think you are raising the standards by illustrating … an act that God gave for the holy procreation of children born in wedlock?”46 Another responded to Hofsess’s charge that the police were forsaking worthwhile law enforcement in favour of persecuting so-called obscenity: “[The police] care because we care. As law enforcement officers, we tell them to care.”47 By the time the issue hit newsstands, Hofsess was already starting a series of film reviews for Maclean’s. He took over the film review column from Larry Zolf, who as a producer of the CBC’s Sunday had been an early supporter of Hofsess during the Palace of Pleasure debacle with the Toronto Morality Squad. Hofsess was not neglecting his filmmaking interests: he was collaborating with producers Jim McPherson and Jim Hanley on an ETV (Educational Television, later renamed TV Ontario) program about Ontario filmmakers, titled Ontario Arts: Film Here and Now. Don Shebib, Ivan Reitman, Peter Rowe, and Morley Markson had been approached. Those chosen would direct the same four-minute scripted scene. With David Cronenberg unavailable for a fifth spot, Hofsess offered it to Rob Fothergill, against the producer’s choice of Timothy Bond. Less than a decade earlier, Ontario had barely any active independent filmmakers, much less a sense of an independent film community. The ETV program demonstrated the prodigious

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output and sense of community in the ranks of Canada’s independent filmmakers. All of the selected filmmakers had either completed a feature film or were in the process of completing one, and some had received significant recognition. Shebib had made Goin’ Down the Road (1970), the height of English-Canadian realist dramas; Morley Markson had made The Tragic Diary of Zero the Fool (1970); David Cronenberg had completed his first and second features, Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970); and McMaster Film Board alumni Peter Rowe and Ivan Reitman were preparing their first features, The Neon Palace and Foxy Lady, respectively. By the time the project was actually completed the following March, this line-up would change to Reitman, Rowe, Bond, and Fothergill. This was one of several projects that Hofsess would collaborate on with Jim Hanley in 1971, including an interview with Hollywood filmmaker Andrew McLaglen, photographed by Richard Leiterman, and an episode of ETV’s Issues and Episodes in Canadian History, titled “Order and Violence.” Throughout all of this, John Hofsess remained committed to publishing his book. In January 1971, Hofsess submitted a draft of his book, 140 pages with 60 pages of trial transcript, to McClelland and Stewart.48 The book was not published. The manuscript has long since been lost, and with it many details of the Columbus of Sex trial. The trial transcript is no longer known to exist, having been purged from the Wentworth County court system to save space.

chapter eight

The Appeal

As anticipated, John Bowlby filed an appeal on behalf of Goldberg and Reitman. The Ontario Court of Appeal handed down its judgment in the case on 18 January 1971, with judges MacKay, McGillivray, and Brooke presiding. Bowlby and John O’Driscoll acted as defence counsel. Bowlby argued that during the trial, Judge Theodore McCombs had not given proper weight to evidence that supported the defence’s position that the film had been intended for a campus audience. That was the audience by whose standards the film should be judged, and not the community at large. John Hofsess, in his preparatory notes for the trial, had given Bowlby not only examples of campus standards, but also those of the greater Hamilton art community, demonstrating that modern art was not merely a perverse hobby of university faculty and students. Nevertheless, Bowlby’s tactic for the trial – to insist that the campus did have its own separate moral standards – persisted through the appeal. After all, the producers had been found guilty based on the testimony of citizens who had no involvement with the city’s art community, and precedents that Hofsess had found off campus would be equally offensive to them. In his notice of appeal, Bowlby reminded the court that the film was not made to be shown indiscriminately to all segments of the community. The presiding justices refused to recognize that separate moral standards might coexist within a city. McGillivray, in his remarks upon turning down the appeal, condemned the film’s obscenity in the same language that the Crown witnesses had during the trial. He described the offending object as two films running side by side, accompanied by a tape recording. “No story appears in either film nor was either film related to the other except in this, that each portrayed a series of

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sex acts or simulated sex acts.”1 Echoing Theodore McCombs’s ruling, McGillivray refused to “dwell at length upon the various scenes in the film nor upon the readings which accompanied them.”2 Instead, he summarized the film’s content systematically: “It is enough to say that nude males and females were shown in various positions of intercourse; a beach orgy was presented in which six naked couples, male and female, participated and in which males were seen upon males, females upon females, and male and female upon each other; there were scenes in which the faces of the actors were in contact with the genitals of the others; there was what appeared to be oral copulation although stated by some witnesses to be but oral stimulation short of copulation; there was a rape scene.”3 McGillivray defended McCombs’s decision. The trial judge had been faced with contrasting testimony: while cultural critics and university professors had found the material acceptable under the Criminal Code, Hamilton community members had found it obscene under the same code. McGillivray’s judgment ignored the fact that the defence witnesses had consistently disputed the definition of obscenity offered by the court. To those witnesses, it was not a matter of finding this film acceptable within the law; they found the law itself unacceptable. In this way, the trial had not simply been about the fate of the debated object and its makers. It also questioned the law, so as to set precedents for future obscenity legislation in Canada. On appeal, this greater context of the constitutionality of obscenity laws was ignored. What is more, McGillivray did not acknowledge that the Crown had been held to different evidentiary standards than the defence, as prosecutor John Lambier had been allowed to call community members after it was ruled that he call only proven experts. Lambier took advantage of the rhetoric in court – the statement of pretrial judge Robert Morrison of his disbelief that anyone could demonstrate expertise in pornography – to ignore this stipulation, to place the burden of evidence on the accused. Like McCombs, McGillivray could not comprehend the offending material. In his remarks about the separate screens, and in earlier trial remarks from Crown witnesses to the same effect, one sees the linear structure of the court, their search for a clear narrative, imposing judgment on the difficult, non-linear structure of Columbus of Sex and, by extension, modern art. McGillivray held up Gordon Vichert’s testimony as typifying the “view sought to be advanced”: Vichert had said, “If we want universities to perform the function of creating critical, thoughtful people, who are able to make judgments and decisions for

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themselves – it seems to me a basis of a democratic society – then the universities must remain free to experiment in areas which don’t necessarily have the general universal approval of society.”4 McGillivray responded that the university might see fit to approve student reading lists without restriction and with wide latitude, and advocate for the viewing of all types of film productions. However, the university itself and its students … must in their actions obey the law and the question here to be answered is not ‘What does the University approve?’ but rather ‘Has Parliament by its legislation made it illegal to act in the manner charged against the appellants?’ As an example, certain films produced in Denmark while acceptable to the people of that country might, if held by one in this country for the purpose of distribution here, cause the holder to be found guilty of infringing provisions of the Criminal Code. To that extent the nature of the individual community bears a relation to the legality or otherwise of the act.5

For McGillivray, the campus was something foreign, invading the city. It was the university’s duty to conform to the city’s standards. Unlike his example, which presumably refers to Vilgot Sjöman’s Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967), Columbus of Sex had never been distributed. Save for its first McMaster screening and subsequent screenings by the police and court, Hofsess’s film had not been exhibited. The Hamilton police and court had taken it upon themselves to ban the film without the involvement of provincial censors. McGillivray ignored the legality of other explicit films that had been distributed in Canada. McGillivray cited R. v. Prairie Schooner News Ltd. and Powers (1970). The accused had faced similar obscenity charges. In that case, contemporary community standards were brought up. The presiding judge applied Criminal Code section 149, which dealt with gross indecency, to demonstrate that the presence of a photographer in any act of sexual union made the act public, thereby condemning the resulting photographs as an act of gross indecency. This section had been cited to justify “the express limits which Parliament felt obliged to impose with respect to the amended law,”6 demonstrating a recent judicial precedent on community standards. That the camera transformed the sex act from action into representation made no difference to the court. The camera’s presence had made the act itself a public show. McGillivray believed that the presiding judge’s remarks applied to the Columbus of Sex case with “even greater cogency.”7 He had no patience for the philosophic

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beliefs of the filmmaker, or for aesthetic values. He turned again to the content of the film, through his systematic list of obscenities contained therein. “I need refer to but one instance in the film – the scene where six couples participated, or gave a lifelike appearance of participating, in various sex acts which, under the circumstances in which performed, clearly infringed the provisions of section 149 of the Criminal Code.” It was the notorious beach scene. “So long as that section remains in the Code it must at the very least shed light on what one is to accept as a contemporary community standard. No exception is to be made for those in the university community even if it be viewed as having standards differing from those of the Canadian community about it.”8 But one of the primary differences between the intellectual life of the university and that of the nation was the willingness of the academy to allow for aesthetic philosophy and artistic representation. McGillivray saw no distinctions between the representation and the act, dismissing the appeal. Goldberg and Reitman’s conviction was upheld. The film’s fate appeared to have been sealed by the court. Back at Mac The years 1970–1 were the first in a series of uneventful ones for the McMaster Film Board. Goldberg and Reitman’s trial had been absent from the student press, but so had the Film Board, which had received a mix of keen praise and disapproving yawns from the Silhouette critics at the prior winter’s screening. Despite having presented their most substantial narrative films since Orientation, the Film Board was in decline. New films had been commissioned and had been due to screen at the end of the 1969–70 winter term, only a month after the syncsound films’ debuts. These new films would not premiere on campus until the end of the 1970–1 winter term. The high expectations set by Ivan Reitman’s presidency caused subsequent Film Board premieres to be met with disappointment. The incoming executive, under the leadership of new president Paul Schumacher, faced renewed opposition from the Student Union. Without active production programs through the 1970–1 year, the Film Board reverted to the activities of a screening society. Screenings had been the foundation of campus film activities in the days of ­Patricia Murphy’s Film Society, and this had continued at the Film Board, though it was never their primary focus. Dan Goldberg and Ivan ­Reitman, under the guise of their distribution partnership New Cinema

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of Canada, premiered Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (1968) as part of the Film Board’s 1970–1 screening series. They had acquired the North ­American rights for Godard’s film in early 1970 while Goldberg was still Film Board president.9 The film was a sound investment for a campus tour: as both a documentary on the Rolling Stones and an avant-garde political film involving Black Nationalism and Marxism, it appealed to a broad spectrum of student filmgoers. After this screening, Goldberg and Reitman would no longer be directly involved in Film Board activities. Their professional careers were taking off. However, New Cinema of Canada agreed to act as the distributor for any new Film Board productions.10 In early fall 1970, the Film Board announced an ambitious screening program called Pot Pourri [sic]. It was claimed that Pot Pourri would trace “the development and history of Underground movies.”11 Contrary to this claim, American commercial films and European art house fare dominated, although the series also promised a program of underground films by Ed Emshwiller, the Kuchar brothers, and others. Someone at the Film Board was still passionate about underground films, but the term “underground” was now being abused in their programming to describe a whole season that included The Birth of a Nation (1915), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and The Green Berets (1968). The Film Board even negotiated with the university to offer free parking for ticketholders as an incentive. In an attempt to continue the production programs, member Vern Ferster started a program in home moviemaking, offering 8mm workshops, demonstrating a commitment to amateur filmmaking that countered Pot Pourri’s screenings of expensive commercial films.12 Two weeks after Pot Pourri was announced, it was cancelled.13 A new Student Representative Assembly drastically cut budgets for all campus clubs and organizations geared towards creative activities. This SRA had, in one commentator’s words, “taken upon itself the task of eliminating artistic endeavour from campus. It has, with frightening lack of insight, seriously curtailed the constructive plans of many of the most worthwhile organizations in order to finance massive rock concerts and its exorbitant office expenses.”14 Profit had once been a justification for the Film Board, but never its sole ambition. Even when Ivan Reitman revived the Film Board with plans for a self-sustaining business model, the films were not produced solely for the sake of making money. In order to survive the cuts, profit and entertainment would have to become the Film Board’s sole interests. As a result, a new crop

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of students with conservative political ambitions would run the new Film Board, and run it into the ground, in coming years. The week after Pot Pourri was cancelled, Colin Ward, publicity director for the Board, gave a comment on the state of production programs. He was sure to note that the Board would not be making another “obscene” movie. “[We aren’t] planning another Columbus of Sex,” Ward told the Silhouette.15 The Board would accept scripts until 21 November, with no criteria except for suitability for public exhibition, a vague stipulation towards self-censorship that had never before appeared in the Film Board’s calls for scripts but which in light of the trial had been deemed necessary. This would signal their most ambitious short-film production program yet: five black-and-white and five colour films were planned, with use of colour dictated by the strength of the script and the director’s experience.16 By the time of the public announcement, eight scripts had already been received, suggesting that the Film Board was still an exclusive clique, inaccessible to those students who were not already within its new inner circle. Despite the failure of Pot Pourri, and the looming threat of the new SRA, the Board resolved to continue its growth with new programs and equipment purchases. For Vern Ferster’s 8mm program, the Board bought a new camera and film stock to produce a one-hour program of “home movies” for public exhibition. In early December, the Film Board resumed a modest screening series. Among them, as promised, was a program of underground films. It featured Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), Willard Maas’s Geography of the Body (1943), and works by Robert Nelson, the Kuchar brothers, and Ed Emshwiller.17 These would be the last experimental films that the Film Board would ever screen. Other campus groups would soon get involved in booking film screenings as fund-raisers, compounding the danger already facing the Film Board through budget cuts. Even the few Film Board members who claimed to be interested in underground filmmaking would be pushed to abandon this, instead booking popular mainstream films with guaranteed returns. As with Pot Pourri, the Film Board’s ambitious production program evaporated; the scripts submitted went unproduced. In February of 1971, the Board held its long overdue screening of the final crop of films that had been commissioned during the 1969–70 school year: Vern Ferster’s The Locals, Andrew Rainbow’s A Flower and a Penny, Paul Schumacher’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, Bryce Kanbara’s Haugh, and Graham Petrie’s Penelope.18 Pat Kehoe reviewed the program in the Silhouette, saying “the quality of the show was down

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from previous years,”19 citing Freak Film, Garbage, and Day Off as examples of the Film Board’s “efficient” past filmmaking. Vern Ferster’s The Locals, no longer extant, had been proposed under the title Impressions of Chedoke and was described as a fifteen-minute colour film that attempted “to combine more artistic visual observations on skiing with an appropriate pop music soundtrack.”20 Ferster was unique among the McMaster filmmakers for his interest in sport filmmaking, a genre typified in Bruce Brown’s iconic surfing documentary The Endless Summer (1966). Based on an 8mm film of skiing Ferster had made in 1969, his Film Board production follows two McMaster students through the hills of Chedoke, a hilly region along the Niagara Escarpment in Hamilton. Pat Kehoe wrote that its “background music, technical competence and appealing settings make for acceptable entertainment.”21 A Flower and a Penny According to Andrew Rainbow, his six-minute short showed “what money means to different people.”22 It presents both the mad whirl of city life and tranquil, pastoral settings, contrasting society and nature, materialism and innocence. It begins in a field with a long-haired boy (Nicholas Chapman) picking a rose. He skips through a field, bends to pick a penny from the dirt, and admires it. The photography switches between colour and a sepia monochrome, the former in rural scenes featuring the lush rose, the latter casting the copper shade of a penny over images of the city. Rainbow experiments with camera speeds: the child runs through a ravine in slow and fast motion. Cast in copper monochrome, with his penny in hand, the child enters a general store to buy candy. In stop-motion photography, the counter of the store is rapidly covered with coins and dollar bills. The scene changes to an urban bank, where a young male customer (David F. Clarke) finishes his transaction and exits. At a subway terminal, a coin is dropped into a turnstile. A train pulls into the station. A series of magazine articles rapidly pile up. Above ground, in sepia-tinted daylight, chains of marquees advertise theatre and film shows above a bustling crowd. A masked man plays the violin. Clarke, accompanied by his girlfriend (Sheila Waite), drops a coin into the violinist’s begging cup. Clarke and Waite stroll down a residential street. Waite sees a rose lying on the ground, and as she picks it up, colour returns to the film. They playfully descend into a ravine. The screen is split in a careful

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double exposure – Clarke occupies the left side, Waite the right, and they seem to move towards one another, with the shadowy obstacle of the parted frame between them. The child stares at the camera with his rose clenched in his teeth. He dips this rose into a stream, which is banked by snow in the otherwise autumnal ravine. The camera pans along the stream to reveal the couple standing nearby, with their rose. Suddenly, they are in a train yard, balancing on Canadian National Railway tracks. In another elliptical edit, Clarke stands in a stationary train car. He passes the rose to Waite, who stands opposite him in a neighbouring train car. Magazine advertisements rapidly appear in stop motion, and the film again turns to a sepia tone. The camera speeds in stop motion through the city at night, passing by storefronts, marquees, and the crowd. Coins dance in stop-motion animation. A card game plays out. Coins stack up, and the violinist is again shown. The final image is of a bearded man in a trench coat. He walks down the street with a dog at his side. In the final shot, he looks into the camera and laughs. Pat Kehoe described the film’s atmospheric usage of the rose and the penny: in the colour sequences featuring the rose “the scenery is attractive and the mood is a peaceful contentment.” In contrast, “money represents banks, flashing neon lights and a more hectic time. The impressions are not sustained and the idea is underdeveloped but what does appear on the screen is thematically appropriate.”23 Kehoe claims that the mission of the film, taken as the strict juxtaposition of country (flower) and city (penny), is unsuccessful, although the evening’s program offered a much more ambiguous and playful take on its two symbols, with the simple claim that “any association with two different views of life is purely intentional,” and jesting, “any other possible association is also intentional.”24 The film’s colour photography captures some of the most romantic images of any Film Board film. Images of the lovers at play recall the most tender moments between David Martin and Michaele-Sue Goldblatt in Palace of Pleasure, or between Chris Golding and Patricia Conway in the early scenes of To Paint the Park. After 1967, Film Board productions consistently presented relationships between men and women either cynically, as in the conquest of Orientation, or mournfully, as in End, Walk On, and Jack and Jill. It can at least be said of A Flower and a Penny that it celebrates love. Its luminous colour photography of these three subjects conveys the sentimental affection of a home movie. However, Rainbow’s film experiments with form and

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8.1 Young lovers (David F. Clarke and Sheila Waite) balance on tracks at a Canadian National Railway train yard in A Flower and a Penny (1971).

colour in an unreal way: variable camera speed, stop motion, and double exposure demonstrate a curiosity about technique, a willingness to experiment and to move beyond naturalism. In his alternating use of colour and monochrome, Rainbow offers a formal echo of his titular subjects – the flower and coin – giving conscious aesthetic assembly to the film and distancing it from the contrived narrative trappings of his contemporaries at McMaster. Poor Richard’s Almanac Paul Schumacher had assumed the Film Board presidency in the fall of 1970. His film Poor Richard’s Almanac was a nineteen-minute sync-sound narrative, announced in the Silhouette as “a surrealistic fairy tale – a collage

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of all that’s good in America today: race conflict, right wing paranoia and the military.”25 Of all of the McMaster films, it was the only one to take on the subject of American politics. Richard Nixon is the titular Richard. Schumacher’s choice of target is obvious and derivative: the jingoism of America in the Vietnam era. Schumacher’s film was more surrealist fantasy than Ivan Reitman’s satires had been. Orientation and Freak Film, which had targeted campus subjects, were at least witty. Schumacher produced one of the longest films in the history of the Film Board, replete with outtakes, mugging, and accidental breaking of the fourth wall. It suffered most from its tone of superiority, an odd quality for a film that dabbles in racism and rape as casual entertainment. The story was a variation on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with a statesman journeying through America in pursuit of a path home to Washington. When it premiered, the program note asked, “Why be subtle when you can be blatant?”26 The hero (Richard Schultz) is first seen as an overgrown schoolboy in suburban Hamilton, kicking a globe as if it were a soccer ball. He kicks it down a well, reaches to retrieve it, and falls in. On regaining his footing, Schultz, now in a jacket and tie, stands in a vacant, snowy field. He is now a Washington statesman. He approaches a nearby jeep. In it, an army colonel speaks in limericks. The actors giggle and look to the camera as they deliver their lines. Schultz asks for directions home to DC, and is directed to “the wizard.” Schultz continues his journey. A series of vignettes follow: Schultz encounters a scientist who claims to have invented a “laser beam toilet,” which in practice causes the scientist to evaporate. Next, Schultz comes across a hunter, who almost shoots him while aiming at a cardboard cutout of a lion. As they discuss gun control, the hunter speaks of his “constipational privilege” to bear arms. He too directs Schultz to the wizard. Schultz discovers a young blonde woman hitchhiking in this wilderness. The camera lingers on her body. On the soundtrack, a woman sings “Plaisir d’amour” (the song made famous by Elvis Presley as “Can’t Help Falling in Love”), as a car approaches containing three menacing frat boys. The girl flees. The men give chase, stopping (for comic effect) to put money in a parking meter, inexplicable in the wilderness. They capture the hitchhiker and drag her back to their car. They giggle, she struggles, and Schultz looks on. A gang rape is implied as her clothes fly out the window of the car. In a close-up on the parking meter, it switches over from “time expired” to “violation,” another

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8.2 The statesman (Richard Schultz) looks for the spirit of the times in Poor Richard’s Almanac (1971).

grim joke. A cop approaches, swinging a billy club. He ignores the rape, but reads the parking meter and writes the men a ticket. Schultz crosses his arms and shakes his head indignantly. The victim’s clenched fist, hanging out the car window, loosens to drop a flower. Schumacher intentionally contrasts the softness of the music with this grotesque narrative of institutional indifference to vicious crime; however, that crime is presented in a spirit of comic relief. The rape, performed by tongue-wagging frat boys, is a comic exaggeration. The general confusion of the film’s purported mission (to satirize jingoism) spreads to the film’s symbolic episodes. Until this point in the film, Schumacher’s wit takes aim at the military, technology, and consumerism. But his attack

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on law and order seems, in treating rape as comedy, to also be an attack on women. Schultz, as a symbol of powerless Washington, offers no more condemnation than a judgmental sneer. Lame satire barely conceals the film’s nihilism. A poor black man, alternately beggar and thief, confronts Schultz and demands a quarter. The man turns violent when Schultz asks, sarcastically, “Are you sure you can still buy a watermelon for a quarter?” The symbolic black thief, an alarming stereotype, threatens to eat Schultz. They fight, and in the struggle Schultz is knocked unconscious. He awakens to a funeral march. Its young mourners boo and jeer him. He is told that it is a funeral for the 1960s. The mourners talk about the pointlessness of their peace protests. As the sun sets, the casket is burned and a wild party begins. This effigy echoes the sentiment of Peter Rowe’s critique of sixties optimism, when he eulogized the sixties as having ended mid-decade, its culture co-opted by the mainstream. Schumacher’s hackneyed parody of this crisis is yet another act of co-option: the mourners are stereotypes – disappointed flower children whose own admission of hopelessness, and subsequent effigy, sends them into a state of wildness. Schultz journeys onward. In daylight, he greets a man playing pinball on the shore to the sound of The Who’s “Pinball Wizard.” This wizard, a sputtering Hispanic with bottlecaps on his shirt, strikes Schultz with a tire chain. Schultz awakens in bed. A mother’s voice comforts him, but it comes from a skeleton that sits at his bedside. “It can’t happen here,” the skeleton repeats again and again, suggesting that American jingoism is invading Canada. An upside-down American flag rises on a flagpole with snowy Hamilton extending beyond it. In this final act, Canada becomes a distorted mirror image of America. Despite its aesthetic shortcomings and hackneyed parody, Poor Richard’s Almanac was met with praise. Pat Kehoe found it to be “the most entertaining piece and most substantial work” of the screening and was impressed with its length, narrative coherence, and simplicity: “A few laughs are part of the fare … some political and social comment is intended but that is best individually interpreted.”27 Schumacher’s popular target – the American political system and social milieu – ensured the film’s appeal to the lowest common denominator. The film’s obvious flaws did not prevent Kehoe from giving it a glowing review. After Ivan Reitman’s reformation of the Film Board, no subsequent president would ever be criticized in the campus press, regardless of the content of his film. It was true for Paul Schumacher, as it had been for Goldberg

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and Reitman. Goldberg and Reitman’s proficient and entertaining comedies received justified praise, but Schumacher’s film, with its obvious failings, exposed the student press’s sycophancy. Haugh At the time of its originally scheduled premiere, Bryce Kanbara’s Haugh was described by the filmmaker as “an experiment in texture and movement [incorporating] animation in the form of sketches.”28 Past Film Board productions had merged cut-out animation with live action photography (Orientation, … and dionysus died) but none since To Paint the Park, which began with a fleeting animation of a drawn nude, had integrated hand-drawn animation. Haugh was novel in its use of animation, but in other ways it followed in the wake of prior experimental films made at the Board, holding strong aesthetic and thematic similarities to Allington’s … and dionysus died. A young woman (Eleanor Watson), in profile, is intercut with animation of a devil (with horns and tail) playing piano; clear leader; and a sync-sound countdown, which is upside down and backward, counting up. After the credits, a man (Ned Kozowyk) is shown in a series of dissolves. Kozowyk’s mouth forms words, but no voice sounds. He is filmed in a mirror, on which has been written a poem adapted from R.K. Gordon’s anthology Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1926). A woman (Helen Walasek) is seated in a chair on an elevated platform above Kozowyk. She bounces balls down at him. The text on the mirror reads, “… this middle-earth is not all beauteous, / Glorious, as it was in the beginning. / Truly, we are reft of joys, with anguish filled. / Surrounded with eternal night …” Animated stains appear to seep through an otherwise white screen. Now standing alongside each other, Kozowyk and Walasek draw a flower and a cat respectively on a chalkboard. Eleanor Watson reappears elsewhere, drawing a crude frontal illustration of a house in ink on paper. She adds a tree, then a smudge in the window that rapidly streams down, past the borders of the house, past the paper, to a clear white screen. There the streak takes on the form of ink slowly submerging in water. This ink spreads in the water, and the image is inverted to negative, with white ink flowing through black. Kozowyk, on his back, filmed from above, takes on poses that echo the shape of the ink – fetal, splayed, supine, freezing in still frame, dissolving into a new position, all the while intercut with the coiling ink, which now echoes through

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dissolves and multiple exposures. Walasek, too, is stretching her body into various positions. Still photographs of posed models are shown, individually and paired against a black background. The models are given an illusion of staccato movement as their sequential poses appear. Watson sits for a portrait. She appears delighted and surprised by a spotlight that appears next to her head, and in it the animation of a figure outstretched, its arms becoming loose and elastic, eventually bending into a floral pattern. After a brief pairing of Watson’s face with this animation, the animation overtakes the frame. When Watson is shown again, she is on the right side of a split screen, paired with animation of a sketched face, perhaps hers, in profile. Both faces contort through a series of expressions. Kozowyk and Walasek stand with their heads bowed and arms extended, holding crucifixion poses. This is intercut with animation of a crucified woman, her body writhing, viewed from a low angle. More figure studies follow this sequence. Kozowyk and Walasek run to each other in a vacant white space, a snowy exterior, overexposed so that the only visible element is the pair colliding, dancing, playing. Intercut with this is a scene of Eleanor Watson passing through a room with a piece of paper. A voice sounds, asking the actress (“Eleanor”) to tear the paper into pieces and throw it in the air. She follows this instruction slowly. When ready, she throws the torn bits up in the air, the shot repeating again and again, recalling the repeated smashing of Maryke McEwan’s mirrored reflection at the climax of Peter Rowe’s Buffalo Airport Visions. A voice sounds: “Hey Bryce, you’ve got all that crap in the picture, can you move it out?” The torn paper falls back down on Watson. In the white field, Kozowyk and Walasek frolic and dance. The actors’ faces are joined in a triptych through multiple exposures, separated by black spaces. In the final sequence, a plastic skeleton goes through a series of poses – fetal, splayed, supine – with Kozowyk, the two ultimately falling into a lovers’ embrace. Haugh follows the Film Board’s symbolically heterodox films, which had begun with Peter Rowe’s Buffalo Airport Visions and carried on in Bob Allington’s … and dionysus died and G.W. Curran’s Civilization. Kanbara’s film is not simply a jumble of disjointed images: most or all of the sequences of actors performing acts of creation (drawing, acting in tableau, posing for cameras – in one brief instant, Kozowyk aims a still camera at the cinematographer) and play (Kozowyk and Walasek’s dancing, Watson’s mugging) are merged with imagery of

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8.3 Ned Kozowyk and a skeleton pose in fetal positions in Haugh (1971).

the life-death cycle (as in Allington’s film: the skeleton, the crucifixion, the fetal pose). Recalling Allington’s use of Hans Christian Andersen, Kanbara’s adaptation of Anglo-Saxon poetry has no clear correspondence to the images and sequences. It comes, like Allington’s quotation, at the film’s outset, and so the anguish and ugliness that it conjures is the challenge that these bodies meet. The players are living, dying, creating, and being created, caught in cycles, caught in tableaux, raging against the bankruptcy and ghastliness of the world that this passage describes. The soundtrack – which includes early electronic compositions taken from recordings of György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, and Morton Subotnick – suits the alien spaces of the film: darkened rooms, mirrors reflecting blank walls, the snowstorm that Kozowyk and

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Walasek play in. Non-resonating, pitch-bending tones sound in accord with the immeasurable acoustic spaces of Haugh: the white space, the mirrored room, the watery abyss into which the ink sinks. Kanbara made the most formally daring of the films that premiered that winter, employing sporadic, unpredictable editing, superimposition techniques, tableaux, and self-conscious elements to annihilate narrative expectations and challenge photographic realism. Pat Kehoe reviewed the film negatively, calling it self-indulgent, dismissing Kanbara’s exploration of technique as merely demonstrative, and concluding that the film was “sure-fire boredom.” Kehoe wrote: “To the viewer the film offers no structure, no direction and no theme. During one particularly obscure sequence, a youth was lying on the floor and going through a number of positions. One resembled the fetal position and I take it this scene was pregnant with meaning. But unless you’ve logically developed a structure which this scene can relate back to, it is meaningless.” Stewart Brown echoed Kehoe’s charge of self-indulgence, adding that Haugh was also pretentious, though he gives no examples of how it is pretentious.29 Kanbara’s would be the last film of its kind made at McMaster. The dominant model of campus filmmaking would soon change again, becoming even further entrenched in commercial enterprise. Penelope Graham Petrie had been a defence witness at the trial of Columbus of Sex. A professor in McMaster’s Department of English, Petrie had been teaching film studies on campus for several years and had recently published a book on François Truffaut. He was the first – and only – faculty member to make a film with the Film Board. His contribution to the program, Penelope, was a scripted drama of non-linear construction. Eugene Levy acted as one of the film’s cinematographers, and it had a large crew by the modest standards of Film Board productions. The title invokes Penelope of Homer’s Odyssey, who perpetually weaves a burial shroud for her lost husband Odysseus, unravelling it each night to prolong her labours and to deceive her suitors. The film’s credits are integrated with a series of photo collages by David Moore. In them, fashion photographs of women have been dissected and reassembled in combination, creating monstrous hybrids. As Penelope begins, a woman (Maryke Barnes) gets off a bus in downtown Hamilton. She carries a large suitcase and is soon approached

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by a man (Jay Cowan). He carries her suitcase for her. After a block, Barnes’s voice-over begins. She describes meeting with a man she has not seen in three years. She speaks of phoneys and stares vacantly into space. Cowan breaks her reverie, inviting her back to his place for a drink. She is offended and loudly berates him. She takes her suitcase back and leaves. Next, she catches the eye of a young man (Simon Johnston). He follows her for a block. When she sees that he is following her, he takes a detour, feigning interest in a store window. His pursuit continues through twisting streets and overpasses, following her path. She eyes him warily. He slows as she pauses and then enters a bookstore (The Bookcellar). He follows her in. There Barnes confronts Johnston and asks him to leave her alone. He responds to her accusations with charges of his own, dismissing her warning as solipsistic rambling. He defends his presence in the bookstore, saying that he came into the store to look at books, “not to speak to lobotomized females.” He starts stacking books up in her hands, flirting, causing her to laugh. In the next scene, Barnes and Johnston enter an empty lecture hall. Above the lectern, slides are projected showing her path through the city and his pursuit. Now calm, Barnes defends her earlier reaction to him by talking about the ulterior motives of people she encounters. Her musings are ingenuous: “Why can’t people just smile at one another?” Johnston begins his own rant, about conceited people who talk continuously, who talk to themselves with no mind to others, unable to communicate. Their complaints continue, but the two do not hear each other. He complains about posturing intellectuals. She wants people to talk to each other. He wants people to stop talking at each other. Johnston takes the lectern and begins a lecture that will become a sermon. In praise of corporate thinking, the talk becomes increasingly incoherent. “It doesn’t matter what I say,” he says. “What really matters is that I’m getting paid for every second that I stand here saying it.” The lecture hall setting gives way to the street, repeating earlier scenes, images of Cowan’s proposition, of Johnston’s pursuit, in both moving and still images. Barnes and Johnston continue their separate speeches, deaf to each other. She speaks of her past in fragments, talking about a moribund relationship. As she stands to leave the lecture hall, ­Johnston pursues her up its steps with the same invitation that Cowan had offered. In the reflection of a shop window, a man, perhaps Johnston, stands at distant courthouse steps. Barnes watches his reflection in the window. As he descends the steps, she turns away.

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8.4  Maryke Barnes turns away from the reflection of a mysterious figure in Penelope (1971).

Again, Johnston watches her as she passes through the streets. The two are seated at a table in a park. Barnes retells the premise of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Circular Ruins,” in which a man painstakingly, over the course of years, dreams a world for his son to live in. Again, still images mix with live action: Johnston and Barnes are in the lecture hall; he pursues her through the streets; she is in a laboratory, passing glass cages full of hamsters. The film ends with her quoting the final lines of the Borges story, proudly speaking it from memory: “And with relief, with humiliation, with terror, he realized that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.” The Borges story, a grand fantasy of insularity, becomes a simple analogy for presumptions made from appearances and the ways in which man invents man.

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Petrie’s was the most intellectual and difficult film to be screened that winter. Despite its talky script and hammy acting, it bore the most advanced narrative form of the season’s films, with its dense montage and clever collision of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. It also dealt with simple themes in a subtle way through its woven monologue. Kehoe ignored the film’s conspicuous themes. He wrote that it “bases its attraction on familiar settings, i.e. South-West and South-Central Hamilton, and Robinson Theatre.” This recalls Ellen Wolter’s review of Orientation, which had emphasized the familiarity of the settings and cast. This superficial fascination was all that Kehoe found redeeming about Petrie’s film: “It’s the kind of movie that you want to have meaning but I can’t say it had much for me. Blame the less than perfect audio portion or a personal lack of the kinds of experience dealt with in the film, but I find it quite forgettable.”30 The debt that Petrie owed to European art house cinema (his primary area of research interest) was not lost on all viewers: in the Hamilton Spectator, Stewart Brown recognized the film’s “obvious bow to European filmmakers,” seeing a parallel to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) in Petrie’s use of still photographs.31 Neither reviewer dealt with the film’s themes; Kehoe had been outrightly dismissive of the “kinds of experience” occurring within the narrative, which are common experiences and feelings: experiences of courtship, pedagogy, and miscommunication, marked by feelings of embarrassment, rage, suspicion, and alienation. Petrie’s work benefited from his background in film studies, but it also benefited from the worldliness of his sources; much like Hofsess, he came to film with a fully formed engagement with art and literature, and so his film did not derive from the same naive and emotional experience as other Film Board works. Penelope, as a mature work, was out of place in a program with the innocent enthusiasm of The Locals, the callow humour of Poor Richard’s Almanac, the simple juxtaposition of A Flower and a Penny, and the gestural, unstructured assembly of Haugh. The Sale of My Secret Life In March 1971, John Hofsess finished his manuscript on the trial. After McClelland and Stewart turned it down, he took it to Peter Martin Associates, a relatively new Canadian publishing house founded in 1965. While Hofsess had been working on his manuscript, Dan Goldberg and Ivan Reitman successfully sold Columbus of Sex to Los Angeles producer and distributor Jack Harris of Jack Harris Enterprises. While the court’s

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copy had been destroyed, the film’s negatives were now subject to a worse fate. Jack Harris, who produced such classic B-movies as The Blob (1958) and 4D Man (1959), had been active in the soft-core pornography market. Harris would later tell Globe and Mail journalist Betty Lee that he thought the concept of Columbus of Sex was good but the execution was dreadful. He was referring to the film’s public domain source material. Harris bought the film on the basis of its notoriety and initiated a new version of the film, eliminating the dual projection design and shooting new footage to give it a linear structure. This new footage included a framing device, with the body of Older Walter, the narrator, played by Harris’s frequent collaborator, editor Jack Woods. Woods never moved his mouth, but instead was shown in reflection, with Rob Fothergill’s narration as his internal monologue. Leon Jervis retained his role as Young Walter. This was not the first time that Jack Harris had purchased a student film and significantly restructured it; he had done the same with ­Pasadena City College student Dennis Muren’s Equinox (1967), releasing an altered version of it, now directed by Jack Woods, in 1970. But where Muren’s film had been conceived as a B-movie, a quality that did not change with reshoots and re-editing, Hofsess’s film was being transformed by Jack Harris Enterprises from art into pornography. Columbus of Sex would now be titled My Secret Life, reverting to its source’s title in order to capitalize on the scandalous text’s international reputation. My Secret Life opened in New York City on 19 April 1971 at Loews State 2 and Loews Orpheum. Harris’s film had received an X classification from the Motion Picture Association of America. Posters sported the tagline, “Every word, every situation unchanged as the Erotic Best Seller comes to the screen.”32 The day after it opened, Vincent Canby wrote that it lacked the “social, psychological and historical importance” of its source material.33 Two weeks later, Canby again wrote of the film, this time citing Harris’s re-editing of Columbus as a dubious feat of engineering. Canby placed the film with unremarkable “schlock” films such as Stewardess (1969) and The Beast in the Cellar (1970).34 By the end of April, Hofsess had given a revised manuscript on the trial to Peter Martin Associates for consideration. Hofsess wrote to Fothergill, “I have no assurance it will be published, but I hope very much it will be – in its re-written form it could help establish the foundation of my future career.”35 Hofsess, perturbed by the sale of the film, had written to Jack Harris asking that his credit as writer,

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now meaningless, be removed from the film. Harris declined, reported Hofsess to Rob Fothergill. “He says he might have considered having me finish the film, had he known I directed films and had an interest in Columbus(!)”36 Once Hofsess sold his share of the film, it had undergone considerable change, and without a controlling interest, he had no say in its fate. By the time the film was released, Hofsess’s role was obscure. It had become a film without a director, Goldberg and Reitman’s product, with Hofsess as a peripheral collaborator. On 1 May 1971, the Globe and Mail ran an article by Betty Lee in which she interviewed those involved in this situation. Reitman told Lee, “I think there’s no doubt that even though they intended quite the opposite, the police and the courts in Hamilton made Columbus of Sex a highly exploitable property.”37 Jack Harris told Lee by telephone that the film had made $42,000 in its first week at Loews, “not exactly Gone With the Wind figures, but it’s really not so bad.” Harris claimed that the film contained only 20 per cent of the original McMaster footage. Reitman contested that the film was 65 per cent McMaster, 35 per cent Harris. Fothergill, who had been paid to do a raunchier version of his reading, said that his reading on the soundtrack was half-new, half-old. Lee suggested that the new film had “some added U.S. footage, a jazzed-up narration, a new musical score and a different title,” and questioned what reception a newly imported revision would receive in Canada. Bowlby told her that there would have to be a new trial. Lieutenant Tom O’Connell, the arresting officer at the Columbus premiere, told her: “We won’t even wait for a complaint. If this film is found to be basically the same as Columbus, we’ll look up the people who show it. And there won’t be any $300 fines. We’ll charge them under the Companies Act and the fines will run into the thousands.”38 Hofsess told Lee, “the real question is whether the whole exercise in the courts added anything to our knowledge of what is obscene or not in this country. If you read the transcript you can see Wentworth County Judge Theodore McCombs failed to clarify what was so exceptionally different about Columbus than dozens of other films available in the commercial cinemas at that time.” All of Hofsess’s research into precedents had little effect in court. The entire trial had done little more than demonstrate the inconsistent exercise of obscenity laws. Hofsess continued: “In my book I say: If a judge believes a nude human body is obscene, let him say so. If he believes that certain, common vernacular expressions are obscene, let him say that. Let him say clearly that no artist will be permitted to depict

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human sexual behavior honestly. And let the police seize every book or film that violates those standards.”39 In a letter to Rob Fothergill, Hofsess informed him that New Cinema of Canada had seized his manuscript from the office of Peter Martin Associates for study. Had Goldberg and Reitman intended to suppress the book through a lawsuit, or to request changes, it hardly mattered at this point. In Hofsess’s judgment, the sale to Harris partly justified the accusations made by the Hamilton courts. Directorial credit for Columbus of Sex, and association with what it had become, was a shameful honour. That credit went instead to Leland R. Thomas, an American freelancer who became involved in some capacity only after the sale to Harris. After the Betty Lee article, there is no further mention of ­Hofsess’s book in any private correspondence, and in a letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail, he publicly apologized to those who had spoken in his defence at trial and confirmed that a defence was no longer possible. Hofsess wrote, “Mr. Reitman has made it clear … that an undue exploitation of sex was indeed his objective and accomplished aim before the trial began.”40 On a promotional tour for his film Foxy Lady (1971), Reitman told the Toronto Star’s Urjo Kareda: “I’m not bitter about Columbus of Sex. Sure, I hate having a criminal record, but let’s face it: I couldn’t have gotten this new film, Foxy Lady, off the ground without the notoriety of the last one. It got all the money people interested. Variety had carried an item that Columbus of Sex was one of the hottest commercial properties in Canada, and after that, I got all sorts of offers from ­American distributors.”41 That anonymous Variety item had been planted by ­Hofsess. He used his anonymity to criticize the film, in such a way as to legitimate his voice, and then went on to flatter the film and its therapeutic mission. He had written that the film “represents a departure for sexploitation fare with a tone and attitude that falls between sex education documentary and sophisticated comedy, and although it tends to grow indulgent about the ‘wholesomeness’ of all sexual behaviour, it has probably earned itself the right to the subtitle, ‘a therapeutic film experience.’”42

chapter nine

Show Business

The celebrity and controversy that Goldberg, Hofsess, and Reitman had generated beyond the parochial confines of the campus left a strange legacy at the McMaster Film Board. New Film Board officers would manage it as a provincial student club, imagining themselves significant by association with the achievements of their predecessors. The Film Board’s decline was as rapid as its rise, with a series of executives hindered by a wary student government, shrinking budgets, and, above all, the burden of their own self-importance. Production slowed to a standstill. Past presidents’ ambitions to create a technological training ground were realized as the Board moved into informational and promotional film and television, but pettiness, territoriality, and egotism would wreck much of the good work that past executives had done. As the Film Board founders gained momentum in an independent Canadian film industry that they had helped create, their victories overshadowed their successors’ work, what little there was. Screening series now acted as fund-raisers and reflected the biases of the Board: respect for experimental and independent film was non-existent, and mainstream programming reflected the new paradigm of the organization – show business. Hollywood clichés seemed to inspire the new Film Board leaders, from dubious backroom accounting to the prospect of seeing their names in lights. After the 1970–1 screening, the Film Board achieved little, despite announcing a new screening series, commissioning more films than ever before, and shifting towards relatively inexpensive small-gauge filmmaking. The changing guard at the SEC-SRA had diminished arts funding. Plans for future productions were made discreetly; no word was issued to the Silhouette as to when to expect more student films, if ever.

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In the mid-1960s, both classical notions of art and presumptions of professional film form had been used against the student filmmakers and their radical aesthetic sensibilities. By the mid-1970s, no respect for creativity remained. The Film Board became a distorted reflection of its former self: sycophancy to the administration and pandering to the mainstream interests of the student body distanced the organization further from artistic ventures. Campus filmmaking was now based on strictly promotional and industrial initiatives. No longer would students write and direct stories or experiment with technology; instead, they would rent out their skills. Dan Goldberg and Ivan Reitman had become successful commercial filmmakers by creating entertainment, knowing their audience, and mastering commercial film form. This lesson was lost on students who desired to emulate only Goldberg and Reitman’s business acumen, blind to the high quality of their work. Goldberg and Reitman had made filmmaking appear effortless, a mainstream Hollywood ideal. On 19 March 1971, the Film Board elected Harley Steubing president. Steubing had been an active contributor to the Silhouette Review in 1970–1. As early as fall 1970, he was airing his opinions on past Film Boards. Mentioning Columbus of Sex in a movie review, he made the baffling claim that it “was billed by the producers as a sex show to end all sex shows. The courts thought different, and banned it.”1 Only a few months after Goldberg and Reitman’s guilty verdict, even before the sale to Jack Harris had been made public, Steubing was misremembering the motives of the producers, branding them pornographers for the sake of rhetoric. Outgoing president Paul Schumacher had not been a strong presence during his year in office. He did not make public statements to the student press, nor did his Poor Richard’s Almanac make any lasting impression on the campus community. By comparison, Steubing was a garrulous personality with a predilection for self-promotion. The Film Board’s screening series, now known as Campus Cinema, was under fire. Other clubs were beginning to book films and hold public screenings. In 1970–1, controversy had ensued when David Haslam, a third-year fine art student, screened several films under the purported auspices of the McMaster Newman Club, a Catholic students’ association. However, the Newman Club was unaware of Haslam’s activities. The previous year, the Newman executive had authorized film screenings as a fund-raising activity, and Haslam had taken this as a blanket endorsement. When Haslam’s deceit came to

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light, he offered the Newman Club 15 per cent of the profits, then 40 per cent. They refused, initiating an inquiry with the Student Union and the Film Board. Haslam finally offered to donate a quarter of his profits to the Film Board, and a quarter to the Newman Club. When his plan to keep half of the profits was met with disgust, Haslam stated his disbelief that the clubs would expect any student to do unpaid fund-­raising.2 The Union took legal action, but this did not deter Haslam from continuing this practice in 1971–2, arranging fund-raising screenings for the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The Film Board tried to prevent these infringements on their business, but negotiations with the GSU soon broke down. This signalled the advent of competing screening societies on campus, which in turn hindered the Film Board’s main fund-raising source for film productions.3 In order to survive, the Board lowered Campus Cinema admissions, but the damage was done. The Board would now program new commercial films exclusively, booking only proven box office hits to reach the lowest common denominator. As part of the Winter Carnival, the Film Board screened a program that would have been its end in 1967: Sexorama was an all-night show of “sex movies,” comic exploitation films like Candy (1968), adapted from Terry Southern’s parody of Candide, and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), Russ Meyer’s flamboyant sequel to Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. The accused deviants of the first Film Board were preoccupied with utopian sensual filmmaking; by contrast, Steubing’s Film Board was programming sensationalist parodies of pornography. In doing so, the Board became a pandering parody of its former self. When Ivan Reitman’s Foxy Lady was released, student Heather Blum interviewed him for the Silhouette Review. Reitman said that he and Dan Goldberg were finishing a feature-length horror-comedy, Cannibal Girls (1973). Questioned about the Film Board, he returned to matters of pedagogy and access, as he had discussed them three years earlier in conversation with Eugene Levy. But this time, Reitman was more openly derisive in his attitude towards classroom learning, recommending that students “get into a situation which will provide [them] with the necessary facilities even if [they] have to sign up for film courses – whether you attend the lectures or not.”4 This cynicism towards education would serve Reitman well in later years, when he became the architect of the Hollywood frat comedy. Other Film Board alumni were also active: Peter Rowe had released his film The Neon Palace (1970) and was moving on to new projects; John Hofsess was

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gaining momentum for his critical writings in Maclean’s; and Eugene Levy was directing an original musical, Benjy, for McMaster’s musical revue Proscenium, at the request of Proscenium president Martin Short. Levy was also starring in Reitman’s Cannibal Girls. McMaster Television Harley Steubing’s intentions as president would become apparent in February 1972, when the Silhouette Review unveiled his plan to shift Film Board technology from 16mm film to videotape and television production. The Board was finally taking on one of Hofsess’s first objectives, recording a play to be aired on local television as a two-hour special. The play, written by Robert Bexton, was titled Opus: One. It was about “a man who rejects all those around him that he loved and who loved him; in the next instance he rejects God, and in the final consequence rejects himself.”5 Steubing was to direct the production in March but had not given himself adequate time to prepare. Opus: One was cancelled. He would instead direct a television special at the campus pub, the Downstairs John, under the title Supersession of Rock and Jazz. The show would air on Hamilton’s Channel 8 and would feature local bands Wednesday, Tightass, and Ascension. Steubing was using the Film Board to launch his own initiative: McMaster Television, or MTV.6 MTV was founded with the expectation that in time it would become an autonomous organization, separate from the Film Board. The Board would provide workers for the new initiative, while McMaster’s Audio-Visual Services Department would train student volunteers in video recording, editing, and transmission systems. Community television productions were helping the Film Board gain headlines at the Silhouette, but no new films were being produced. Nothing had been publicly commissioned in almost two years. When the 1972–3 year began, Steubing retained the presidency. Reports claimed that a dozen super 8mm films had been commissioned the previous year. None was ever shown publicly, although some were listed in promotional leaflets as being available to rent: Amchitka – The Protest and Monday, both by Steubing; Suicide of Charlie Mason by Steven Rand; and Unfamiliar to Us by Charles Barnes and David Raithby. The Film Board had grown even closer to the university administration and now offered film services to departments and to individual professors, at a price. Their production program planned for three feature films. None would be made. They announced collaboration with the administration

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on Mac, an informational film about McMaster. For the first time since Dan Goldberg’s presidency, the Film Board had a functioning executive, but their operating budget had been slashed to a mere $1,600, plus a $500 MTV budget.7 In bankrolling Mac, the administration had enabled the Film Board to continue its film production program, albeit with a single project. In addition to acting as Film Board president, Harley Steubing joined the Student Executive Council, where he attempted to build a cult of personality for himself. The dimly remembered controversies of the Film Board still made it an attractive subject for student journalists. In December 1972, the Silhouette ran a four-page spread about the Film Board in which Steubing revealed that the Board had indeed been making projects. Western Boy had been quietly conceived in 1971 by the Film Board executive and was supported by a federal Opportunities For Youth grant. Production had collapsed due to a clash of personalities; Steubing did not elaborate, but claimed to have rescued the film by changing it from a narrative into a documentary. Still, he admitted, it was not a good film. He spoke of his own super 8mm film Monday but was dismissive of it, calling it unprofessional: “It [didn’t] express anything but self-reflection; and you can’t sell self-reflection.”8 Steubing understood something of the differences between mainstream and nonmainstream film, and recognized student films as beginnings, but still felt that commercial exposure and profit should be the ultimate aspirations of all filmmakers. In his words, “Student films are not to be compared to theatre movies. A student film expresses something entirely different. It’s like your first poem, or short story, or invention; it may not match the pros, so to speak, but it is still something unique.”9 According to the article, the Film Board could still occasionally act as a forum for students to share input on one another’s projects. Firstyear student Mike Nestler had shown his first film – Niagara … Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Falls – to his peers in the Film Board for technical advice.10 Among its current projects was a film of local comedy rock band Jason, which featured Steve and Morag Smith, who would later become the successful comic duo Smith & Smith. More televised concerts were planned. The new informational film, Mac, would be shot in colour 16mm, commissioned by the same university administrators who had been unable to offer public support to Ivan Reitman’s Orientation with its salacious plotting. This emphasis on promotional and informational filmmaking was inextricable from Steubing’s plan for McMaster Television. In January, the Film Board

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produced a television special, This Is Young, featuring the local “rock orchestra” Young.11 This Is Young would go on to win an award for “Best Entertainment Program on Cable Television in Canada” from the Canadian Cable Television Association. The Film Board used what little capital they had to invest in their own video production equipment, but no new film productions were commissioned. Mac Steubing finished Mac in March 1973. In a show of comical arrogance, he described Mac as an improvement on Orientation. Orientation had been concerned with “being funny,” whereas Mac was concerned with “show”; Orientation had “theme, plot, and character,” whereas Mac had these qualities and “a cast of thousands, most of them girls.” Mac was also more “professional” and “academic.”12 Steubing also characterized Orientation as having poor lighting and sound mixing. But these charges were all the more true of Mac, which had inconsistent exposure, jarring music editing, and visible splices. Steubing’s promotion skills far outweighed his skill at filmmaking, and his remarks passed unchallenged. The rest of the student body had not, after all, seen Orientation. Like Reitman, Steubing worked with a large crew: his cinematographer was Dennis Matheson, director of Reversal and production assistant on Orientation, and current Film Board member George Carlos served as associate producer. Steubing directed, produced, and co-wrote with Ian Finlay. While Reitman had written an original music score for Orientation, Mac featured the music of Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, and Joan Baez, among others. Unlike early Film Board productions, the music had been licensed, probably at significant expense. As an informational film, Mac had no discernible entertainment value. It had a simple premise: a student, James (Michael Bertrand), arrives at McMaster and is introduced to campus facilities and student life by two “hip” seniors, canvas-wearing longhair Oscar (Christopher Kelk) and clean-cut sophisticate Paul (Arthur Pewty, likely a pseudonym taken from Monty Python’s Flying Circus). There is no thematic journey for James: he arrives on campus and learns about his surroundings. There is no challenge for him to meet, no conflict, no story. Steubing claimed that his film emphasized the options that university presented incoming students in terms of fields and careers, stating “five years ago, no one seemed to worry too much about a job after university.”13 This was not true of previous Film Board members: after his initial success at the Film

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Board, Reitman told Levy that he now had something to do after graduation; he had made his own opportunities and his education would not aid or influence his career path; Levy’s Garbage had dealt with the frustrating disconnection between education and achievement; the entire Film Board had been founded by John Hofsess not as a hobby but as a serious step towards a career, at a time of great financial struggle, when he was saddled with debts and beset by failed expectations. The Film Board had been founded to create and distribute hopeful art of sensual rebellion, but it also existed for a more practical purpose. The first filmmakers were not just creating art and entertainment; they were attempting to create their own futures. In Steubing’s view, Orientation had taken academic performance for granted by not dwelling on classroom experience and areas of research on campus; he wrote of Orientation’s resentment towards “bureaucracy and boring professors,” a bureaucracy in which Steubing, as a member of the SEC, now had a role. Mac protagonist James is introduced to the nuclear reactor, the medical school, and the gym. Nothing is viewed critically. The film is a mere document of the university as its management wished it to be perceived. Reitman’s attitude towards administration had been one of healthy rebellion, but no rebellion was acceptable with the administration acting as financiers. Steubing also claimed that Mac was an act of preserving a vanishing sense of community, filming every student he could, as opposed to Orientation, which in his opinion had taken the sense of community for granted. Again, this was not true of Orientation. In its day, Orientation had been understood perfectly in terms of community: Ellen Wolter’s review had marvelled at the familiarity of its cast, and Reitman had filled his film with in-jokes that only the McMaster community would understand. But Reitman had also appointed roles to his large cast, some performing self-parody, others sending up campus clubs; no one appeared simply for the sake of inclusion. Mac is filled with portrait shots of students that serve no function within the film beyond documentation. Late in the film, there is a candid “girl-watching” montage. Female co-eds are shown walking, sitting, bending. With such sequences, Mac was at least as exploitative as Orientation. The final scenes feature James graduating to the sound of “Pomp and Circumstance,” and then attending an alumni association picnic. At thirty minutes, Mac was one of the longest films in the history of the Film Board. It was also the most expensive. Its claim of having bested Orientation was premature. As a film with nothing to offer students, it would never be reviewed in the student press.

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Campus Cinema In March 1973, George Carlos, associate producer of Mac, became Film Board president. He cancelled the Director’s Series at Campus Cinema, which had specialized in art house fare. His new emphasis was on films that had already performed well at the box office. The coming year had a Student Union budget that “all but excluded filmmaking,”14 which meant that the Film Board was no longer beholden to the Union in financing their filmmaking activities. The Board would receive capital for Campus Cinema operations, which would act as an ongoing fundraising effort for the group’s filmmaking. Admission would be raised by twenty-five cents. Filmmaking plans for the coming year included a documentary exposé about student government politics at ­McMaster. This project would not be made. Harley Steubing, now Student Union vice-president, attempted to bring the notorious pornographic film Deep Throat (1972) to campus on behalf of the Film Board, but was eventually warned by lawyers that doing so would not be advisable, and plans were cancelled. Student president Derek Warner said bawdily, “If the police can’t stomach the thought of swallowing it, then we can’t show it.”15 By 1973, McMaster Television (MTV) had become a s­ emi-autonomous organization, no longer mentioned in the same breath with the Film Board.16 Steubing continued to run it. MTV planned a new concert film, Maple Jam. Rob Martin, a former MTV member, wrote in to the Silhouette to complain about Steubing’s use of non-students in the production. The former president had denied Film Board members an opportunity to work, neglecting to share the limelight. Steubing did not deny that local Hamilton station CHCH-TV had provided crew but insisted that the crew had brought to the project a necessary professionalism that could not be achieved with amateurs.17 His preference for skilled tradesmen was distancing the Film Board ever more from Reitman’s vision of campus filmmaking as a social activity. In February 1974, the Film Board took out an $18,000 loan from the Student Union to purchase a Steenbeck console for the purpose of editing 16mm films.18 Their plans for recouping the cost of the machine included renting it out to interested groups for $30 a day. However, due to the educational tax credit code under which it was purchased, unexpected restrictions were placed on its use that would later come to light. Even with such major expenses looming, Board members were becoming greedy and unrealistic. In Charles Merivale’s

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Feedback column, George Carlos insisted that the presidency of the Film Board become a paid position in the future, due to the responsibilities that the position demanded and the restrictions that it placed upon a student.19 At the Student Representative Assembly meeting in early March, ­ raham Carlos attacked a former Film Board filmmaker and supporter, G Petrie, who had founded a branch of the Ontario Film Theatre in ­Hamilton. It screened, as per Petrie’s taste, a selection of art house films, the kind of filmmaking that the Film Board was no longer interested in programming. Carlos alleged that the Ontario Film Theatre’s presence on campus was without approval of the university, that it had affixed posters on campus illegally, and that it was concerned with “making undue profits from the students and then taking the money from campus.”20 The SRA agreed. The following week, Petrie rebutted these allegations: he had approached Carlos to collaborate on a series that would introduce more variety to campus film showings. Carlos was only interested in showing profitable films, but he said he would have no objection to Petrie carrying out this plan on his own. Petrie reached out to Hamiltonians to found a Hamilton branch of the Toronto-based Ontario Film Theatre, an organization that had been founded in 1969 by the prominent film critic Gerald Pratley. The McMaster Medical Centre’s auditorium provided an ideal venue, but there had been no intention of directly competing with the Film Board. They had chosen a screening night that had not conflicted with the Film Board’s screening nights. The films chosen were not in conflict with the Film Board’s programming: Petrie had chosen foreign films, classic films, and Canadian films. The pettiness of the Film Board executive continued. Upon learning of Ontario Film Theatre’s presence, the incoming 1974–5 president, Don Ryder, went to the dean and asked that the Film Theatre be banned from campus. This was presumably a pre-emptive attack on an organization that the Film Board had perceived to be malicious. Ryder did not contact Petrie. When the dean told Ryder that he had no jurisdiction to dictate what the Medical Centre screened, the Film Board organized to tear down Ontario Film Theatre posters on campus or cover them with posters for Film Board screenings. Petrie wrote to the Silhouette demanding a public apology. He never received one. The only response was a public letter from George Carlos, calling art house films “money losers,” explaining that Campus Cinema’s business was to turn a profit to support their activities. Although Petrie had outlined how his

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screening series differed, Carlos continued to see the situation in terms of “splitting the pie too many ways.”21 The Last Year Don Ryder spent the summer of 1974 making a film, Escape. Its events took place in the mind of a prisoner who dreams of being reunited with his son in a field of flowers. Ryder broadcast the film through Hamilton’s Cable 8 television station and claimed that “various academic departments (i.e., Sociology and Political Science) [had] already requested usage of this film for its students.”22 Ryder’s new initiatives included a monthly half-hour program on Cable 8, produced by McMaster students to showcase Film Board work. Campus Cinema continued to emphasize recent, popular films in its screening series. In the student press, past Film Board members were revered for their success, all of them students from the 1960s: John Hofsess was finishing his first book, a collection of essays on Canadian filmmakers; Ivan Reitman was directing for theatre and television; and Fraser McAninch had by this time become an independent filmmaker in Toronto. Lack of continuity was now a primary concern. Don Ryder told the Silhouette: “Each year a group of students learn the complexities of film-making and then leave without ever passing [them] on.”23 He aimed to correct this deficiency, which had dogged the Board since the end of Dan ­Goldberg’s presidency. The Film Board was now experiencing fallout over the purchase of its Steenbeck flatbed editing console. It had cost more than twice the Film Board’s annual budget. They intended to repay the loan by renting the machine to non-students, but due to tax code regulations, it was to be used only by students. To justify the purchase, a member of the Film Board estimated that more than $10,000 had been spent on facility rentals to edit Film Board films between 1966 and 1974. By the end of his first term as president, Don Ryder was under a lot of pressure. Campus Cinema had to increase its admission cost again in order to make up for SEC cuts. The screening series had grown to four nights a week, making McMaster the only campus in Ontario operating with such frequency. The budget cuts had ended 8mm, 16mm, and video workshops. The Film Board’s request for $7,135 had been met with $4,660, with the additional stipulation that $2,000 be returned to the Student Union to begin paying off the Steenbeck flatbed editing console that the Film Board had purchased.24 With Harley Steubing as Union

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president, the Film Board budget had been slashed by two-thirds. The Film Board was again losing face with the student body.25 While the Steenbeck purchase had been a step towards realizing Reitman’s dream of an independent campus film facility, it had come at such an expense and at a time of so little enthusiasm for filmmaking on campus that it signalled the end of the Film Board. Campus filmmaking became Graham Petrie’s project. He transformed his film studies course into a film workshop, where students could develop practical skills in filmmaking while learning history and theory. His film workshop course even took on the name of the McMaster Film Board. Don Ryder and Petrie would establish an agreement that would allow students in film courses to submit films as coursework in place of essays.26 One of these films survives: How to Make It, a screwball comedy in the tradition of Orientation, in which a student is asked by a dean who resembles Groucho Marx to infiltrate and monitor the student community. The work that Petrie was doing was a harbinger for the formalization of film production programs in universities, and his linkage of film production with the historical and theoretical study of film was visionary in scope and would be mirrored in the relationship between history, theory, and practice on campuses throughout Canada through the 1970s and 1980s. Between the Ontario Film Theatre and his film workshop course, Petrie had seized the reins of the McMaster Film Board, but little could be done to salvage it. While the students in his workshop remained committed to the idea of filmmaking, the rest of the student body was uninterested in taking on the responsibility of a union-funded campus Film Board. Campus life had changed dramatically in the decade since the Film Board’s formation, and no students with the convictions and passionate intensity of John Hofsess, Patricia Murphy, or Peter Rowe would turn up. After its assumption into the curriculum, the McMaster Film Board quietly disbanded after 1975. It persevered only as a historical concept. In that year, undergrad Eric Kohanik, who had covered recent Film Board news with great dedication, restarted the cycle of mythologizing past presidents, writing in the Silhouette on the accomplishments of Film Board alumni. By then, John Hofsess was a successful critic still writing for Maclean’s, at the forefront of defining a growing nationalist film movement. He had at last become a point of pride in the Silhouette through Kohanik’s praise of the keen wit and vision of Hofsess’s book Inner Views. Kohanik overlooked both Hofsess’s past trials and his role

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in founding the organization, describing him simply as a “past member of the McMaster Film Board.”27 For those new to campus, the founder of the Film Board was Ivan Reitman, who in moving the organization away from experimental film and towards the commercial mainstream had enchanted his classmates with the lure of Hollywood. Years later, the spell remained in both the naive enthusiasm of Kohanik and the cynical s­ elf-indulgence of Steubing. As a legend and icon, Reitman expanded, blotting out Palace of Pleasure and Columbus of Sex from campus memory. The founding vision of the Film Board had been unpopular in its time; by the mid-1970s, utopian principles of sensual engagement with the world and belief in the transformative power of art were simply antique – relics among the failed hopes of the 1960s. If any members of the Silhouette staff had an inkling of the skeletons in the Film Board’s closet, its history of constitutional battles with the union, and its moral battles with the administration and the public, they had little interest in dredging them up. The facts of the Film Board’s early struggles became further corrupted by later accounts, and the Board became no more than a footnote in the careers of Dan Goldberg, Eugene Levy, and Ivan Reitman, all of whom would achieve mainstream success in film and television within a few years. Several attempts would come in subsequent years to restore the Film Board as an active campus club; even Dan Goldberg’s brother Harris attempted to revive the Board when he entered McMaster in the late 1970s. None of these attempts succeeded. The Alumni and Their Legacy Ivan Reitman would go on to become one of the most successful comedy filmmakers of his generation. As Reitman’s celebrity gained momentum, the history of the Film Board was recalled erroneously in his biographical write-ups. The facts of the Film Board’s membership became skewed: decades after its founding, it had mistakenly absorbed into its history other celebrities who attended McMaster in the 1960s and 1970s, including Proscenium president Martin Short and Silhouette editor Dave Thomas, both of whom would join Eugene Levy and his Cannibal Girls co-star Andrea Martin as members of the popular Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV through the 1970s and 1980s.28 The Film Board came to be known, through decades of news articles and oral history, as the genesis of Canadian mainstream film and television: as early as 1979,

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Goldberg and Reitman were being referred to as the “founders” of the McMaster Film Board in the monthly Canadian Forum, a more widely circulated proclamation of the same inaccuracies that had plagued Silhouette articles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. John Hofsess would remain at the fringes of the public eye, but he was largely written out of Canadian film history, save for his critical reputation, which endured thanks to a series of mid-1970s polemical essays about the budding Canadian cinema. Hofsess had seen firsthand the early birth of a Canadian independent cinema, had even been in the fray, and as a respected critic, he would speak authoritatively on its evolution, often tying his aesthetic and thematic concerns to the practical concerns of filmmaking. His Palace of Pleasure would disappear from accounts of avant-garde filmmaking in Canada until its restoration in 2008, and subsequent screenings at the Canadian Film Institute and Cinematheque Ontario. Historical assessments of the Canadian avant-garde emphasized works more enduring in their influence, such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), Joyce Wieland’s Reason over Passion (1969), and Jack Chambers’s The Hart of London (1970). Hofsess’s planned projects, such as his documentary Man in Pieces and a loosely autobiographical narrative feature, Tenderness, were not completed. Until 1976, he made repeated attempts to secure government funding for his filmmaking activities through the Canadian Film Development Corporation but received little assistance despite gaining the support of major Canadian public figures such as Margaret Atwood and Pierre Berton. In that year, he would experience a public rift with the film community, announcing his retirement from filmmaking in the pages of Cinema Canada at the same time as he offered an aggressive critique of Canada’s independent film financing structure. For a few years, he continued to write film criticism and lifestyle features, for a variety of publications, and filled his time with other pursuits: human rights activism, gay rights activism, and playwriting. Hofsess moved to British Columbia, where, in the early 1990s, he received considerable attention as founder of the Right to Die Society of Canada and for his role in the case of Sue Rodriguez, a Vancouver housewife with ALS whose struggle for assisted suicide made her a national figure of both sympathy and controversy. He came to this cause through his experiences of his late mother’s suffering and the apparent suicide of his Alzheimer’s-afflicted friend Claude Jutra in 1986. Right to Die activism not only gave Hofsess a mission, it gave him opportunities to be creative: he wrote speeches, made informational videos, edited

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a magazine on the subject, Last Rights, and participated in the invention of assisted-suicide equipment. As he became less active between 2000 and 2004, the Society would be transferred to the care of his peers. John Hofsess’s experimental filmmaking activities can be summarized in those first four years, in Hamilton, Chicago, and Toronto, but his creativity and leadership had a crucial and lasting effect on the shape of the Canadian film community.29 Peter Rowe continued his work in the Toronto film and television industry from the 1970s onward, directing films for theatrical, home video, and television distribution, as well as episodes of television series. Adventure and exploration became the major themes in his work, evident in projects such as the television series Tales of the Klondike and African Skies, and the TV movie Treasure Island (2001). In 2006, Rowe co-created and directed the award-winning documentary television series Angry Planet, a tour of dramatic climates and phenomena from around the world. The series has been broadcast internationally. In keeping with the chronicling impulse of his Buffalo Airport Visions and Neon Palace, Rowe also made a documentary about the development of the Canadian film industry, Popcorn with Maple Syrup (2004). Early Film Board members remained active in art and politics. After working as an assistant cameraman for Frederick Wiseman and Allan King (the respective American and Canada masters of cinéma vérité), David Martin took a position teaching drama at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. In January 1972, he was tragically killed in a car accident. Robin Hilborn pursued several careers through the 1970s, as a magazine editor, a copywriter, a disk jockey, and a federal information officer. In the 1990s he began an award-winning career in adoption activism. Robert Allington became a journalist and later, as a politician, assumed the presidency and provincial policy chair duties of the Democratic Reform party of British Columbia. Dan Goldberg and Ivan Reitman continued to work in the Canadian film industry for several years before achieving greater success in the United States. Reitman produced a series of films for Cinépix, a Montreal production company that had become known for making skin flicks informally dubbed “Maple Syrup Porn.”30 With Cinépix founder John Dunning, Reitman produced David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977). In 1978, Reitman produced John Landis’s Animal House, an iconic frat comedy that in many ways continued the themes of Orientation – of rebellion and conformity at university – and helped to establish the subgenre of frat comedy that Reitman would master through subsequent directorial

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efforts, such as Meatballs (1979), about high jinks among campers at a summer camp, and Stripes (1980), about high jinks among military recruits in basic training. Thereafter, having successfully infiltrated the American commercial film industry, Reitman achieved fame as a director and producer of hit films that defined the Hollywood filmmaking of the era: Ghostbusters (1984), Legal Eagles (1986), Twins (1988), and Kindergarten Cop (1990). Dan Goldberg, who produced Meatballs and Stripes, also produced major studio productions such as Space Jam (1996) and The Hangover (2009). He wrote the animated cult film Heavy Metal (1981), which featured the voices of members of Second City Television. He would direct again with Feds (1988), his first film as director since Day Off (1969). The producing partnership that Goldberg, Reitman, and Joe Medjuck formed, first at New Cinema of Canada, would last for decades, continuing into the twenty-first century with the Montecito Picture Company. Through the Montecito Picture Company, they would produce frat comedies such as Road Trip (2000), Old School (2003), and EuroTrip (2004). Eugene Levy achieved fame first as a cast member and writer of Second City Television (SCTV), then as both leading man and comic foil in major American comedies. As a director, he worked on television movies and series, and also directed the theatrical feature Once Upon a Crime … (1992), an all-star remake of the Italian comedy Crimen (1960). As a writer, in sharp contrast to his sober, earnest Film Board films, Levy wrote exclusively comic material after SCTV, collaborating on a series of semi-improvised theatrical mockumentary features with Saturday Night Live alumnus Christopher Guest: Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), A Mighty Wind (2003), and For Your Consideration (2006). Other Film Board members continued in cinema and the arts. Fraser McAninch, director of Freeway, went on to work in a variety of creative and technical capacities with the CBC and NFB in the 1970s and 1980s. He directed a theatrical feature, Freeloadin’ (1983), and later worked as the director of production for the University of Toronto’s McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. Bryce Kanbara, director of Haugh, remained in Hamilton as a professional artist, active in the city’s artistrun centres through the 1970s. In 2002, he opened the you me gallery on James Street in Hamilton. Some members developed significant careers in other fields. Lawrence Martin, brother of David, performer and crew member on several Film Board productions, became a journalist for the Globe and Mail, later

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writing Iron Man, an immense two-volume biography of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, as well as books on mid-1990s opposition leader Lucien Bouchard and Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Andrew Rainbow, director of A Flower and a Penny, became a professor of biology at McMaster. Graham Petrie remained on faculty at McMaster until his retirement and published volumes on Andrei Tarkovsky, Hungarian cinema, and European immigrant filmmakers in classical Hollywood. In spite of the interference of the administration and the police, and the eventual self-destruction of the McMaster Film Board, the Board lived on in several ways. John Hofsess’s project of founding a distribution centre for independent and artists’ cinema endured: the Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) had its roots in Hofsess and Rowe’s Film-Makers Cooperative of Canada, and it has remained active into the twenty-first century. In the 1960s, the CFMDC distributed underground film. As definitions changed and the umbrella term “underground” splintered into the independent and the avant-garde, the Centre honed its specialization in experimental film. The Canadian avant-garde film emerged in the 1960s, first in the experimental collage films of Arthur Lipsett at the National Film Board, the growing filmmaking practices of visual artists Jack Chambers, Michael Snow, and Joyce Wieland, as well as the discontinuous films of London, Ontario, mathematician Keewatin Dewdney. Like these artists, the McMaster Film Board, as it existed in its first two years, was a major contributor to the development of the Canadian avant-garde film. Palace of Pleasure was a focal point at screenings that introduced avant-garde film to provincial campuses that, like McMaster, had grown accustomed to comparatively accessible European art house fare at their local screening societies. Hofsess was part of a community of major North American filmmakers, including Ben van Meter, Ed Emshwiller, and Andy Warhol, whose films found their way into campus screening series and, like Palace, were a revelation for Canadian students. Hofsess’s film was not the origin point for the Canadian avant-garde film, but it was an important step forward in its history. Not only did Palace reach an audience, it helped to create an audience, and it inspired some in those audiences to take up the cause of experimental film. Likewise, the continuity of Ivan Reitman’s project cannot be undervalued. What Reitman organized at the Film Board was a watershed moment in the development of Canadian independent narrative film. Reitman had realized Hofsess’s dream of making Canadian films that appealed to audiences: student films that could be broadcast on the

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CBC and that could introduce theatrical features (as Orientation had with John and Mary). Canadian culture, in terms of nationhood and national myth, would have little currency to those who sought to make mainstream films, for the precedents of commercial cinema were culturally American. Hofsess once wrote of forging “the conditions in which creativity can thrive.”31 In the 1960s, cinema represented not merely “show business” but a myriad of possibilities. When the technology for filmmaking became accessible to a greater range of makers, as it did in the 1960s, the field of cinema opened again, as wide as it had been at the dawn of the medium, before promise gave way under the weight of new conventions – the cipher of editing and laws of composition. Everything was once again possible: existing grammars of cinema could be broken and reconstructed in new and innovative ways, or altogether new forms could be writ in the absence of montage editing and compositional rules. The codified vision that Eisenstein had so fixed in his films and writings could give way to new codes and codeless marvels: the poetic, the cameraless, the structural, and more. When Elenore Lester wrote in 1967 of the magical potential that young people had found in making films, she was observing this same diversity. The camera was a unique instrument of its time, as she wrote, “still rich with unexplored possibilities.”32 By the time of Reitman’s revival of the Film Board in 1968, unexplored possibilities of the mind and body, of psychic and sensual healing, were passé. The unexplored possibility that mattered most to undergrads was the prospect of making a living doing what was stylish and representative of the new: filmmaking. Older modes of cinema haunted this time: as students mastered longestablished narrative film form, the optimism and vitality of the present moment that had been discovered through experimental art receded further from them. By the time the first narrative filmmakers left McMaster at the end of the 1960s, newcomers were practising studio system arrogance, damning the collaborative spirit of community filmmaking with a greater emphasis on title appointments, assigned roles, and contrived scripts and commissions. Harley Steubing and company’s names would be in lights, but what did their names matter? Their films offered perspective on nothing but their own self-importance. Having sincere beliefs, aesthetic, moral, or political, was not compatible with the narrowing vision of commercial cinema that had infected the Film Board. What Steubing and company neglected was the magical potential of filmmaking; this is what drew their predecessors along a shared

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historical trajectory, and what had unified their work against the thendominant aesthetic of realism. The Film Board founders had used cinema as a tool for ideas that they brought from modern art and philosophy, and their first successors, Goldberg and Reitman, used cinema in its dominant technological tradition and for a purpose long established by Hollywood: to entertain. Both the founders and first successors realized transformative dimensions of filmmaking and embraced fantasy and the subversion, be it comic or poetic, of reality. They used cameras to strengthen their community, to record their youth, to create careers and opportunities for themselves and others – to create their own future. John Hofsess wanted to be a healer through a new medium, and Ivan Reitman an entrepreneur of a new industry. Peter Rowe documented his generation with a sharp wit. David Martin used techniques of the new avant-garde cinema to make a film in the style of the surrealists. Jim Bennett, G.W. Curran, and Eugene Levy made poetic films about the social and scholastic trials of students, while Dan Goldberg made a sweet record of the spontaneity of youth. For all of their differences and ideological conflicts, the early Board members were united in the pursuit of new possibilities, of one order or another, united in a resistance to realism. The founders took these opportunities to create work of formal originality and utopian idealism, while their successors mastered old conventions in new modes. The hypocrisy of the law could not fetter them; nor could the dishonesty and selfimportance of the final Film Board leaders tarnish the accomplishments of their best work. The creators of the McMaster Film Board built and rebuilt, founded and reinvented fellowships, the revivals a testament to the hope, arrogance, immortality, and tenacity of youth.

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Appendix: McMaster Film Board Filmography

Films are listed in order of premiere. This appendix contains the following criteria for each title, where available: Title Year of production, colour/b&w, production format Length in minutes, number of reels (feet) Cast and crew information (as it appears on the film) Print source The McMaster Film Board, 1966–1975

Coldfinger 1966, b&w, 8mm Estimated length: 20 minutes Cast: Dennis Murphy, Jelte Kuipers Crew: camera, Robin Hilborn, John Hofsess, Peter Rowe Print source: unavailable Redpath 25 1966, colour, 8mm 8 minutes, 40 seconds. 1 reel (estimated 310 ft) Cast: Patricia Murphy, Norman Walker Crew: director/photography, John Hofsess; special effects, Robin Hilborn Print source: unavailable. Redpath 25 was used in the construction of the first part of the Palace of Pleasure trilogy, and a re-edited version of it can be found in Palace of Pleasure. Analysis in this text is based on this version, Library and Archives Canada (ref. 3878).

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Palace of Pleasure 1966/1967, colour and b&w, 16mm 38 minutes, 2 reels (for synchronized, simultaneous projection; left-hand side 1,260 ft; right-hand side 1,150 ft; optical sound on left-hand side) Cast: Patricia Murphy, Norman Walker, Michaele-Sue Goldblatt, David Martin, David Hollings, Don Gouthrou Crew: director, John Hofsess; special effects, Robin Hilborn; photography, John Hofsess and Peter Rowe; original music, the Gass Company Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 3878). The print stored at the Gatineau Preservation Centre has no synchronization markings. Synchronization was achieved during digital recovery with the input of director John Hofsess and distributor Rob Fothergill. Buffalo Airport Visions 1967, b&w, 16mm 19 minutes, 10 seconds. 1 reel (690 ft) Cast: Maryke McEwen, Carla Vandervell, Stephen Bright, Jon Rowe, Jerry Trochimowski, Lynda Ackroyd, David Cronenberg Crew: director/photography/editing/story, Peter Rowe; sound, Fred Sengmuller Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 8801). To Paint the Park 1968, colour, 16mm 23 minutes, 33 seconds. 1 reel (847 ft) Cast: Patricia Conway, Chris Golding, Gillian Boyd, Danny Cousins, and the Blackhawk Motorcycle Club Crew: director, David Martin; music, The Butterband Print source: McMaster University, William Ready Archives, catalogue #702/710 … and dionysius died 1968, b&w, 16mm 7 minutes, 51 seconds. 1 reel (283 ft) Director, Robert Allington. No other cast and crew credits are available. Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 6507) Orientation 1968, colour, 16mm camera negative, 35mm master 25 minutes, 22 seconds. 1 reel (35mm, 2,284 ft) Cast: Dan Goldberg, Lyn Logan, Paul Starkman, Bernhardt Banaschewski, Harry Neiger, Margi Laver, Ray Barker, and the

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Village S.T.O.P. Crew: director/producer/photography/editing/music, Ivan Reitman; writer, Dan Goldberg; costumes, Lyn Logan; titles, Helen Au; sound effects, Fraser McAninch; negative cutting, Jordan Hill, Nadine Litwin, Fraser McAninch; second-unit director, Dan Goldberg; sound re-recording, Victor Adomaitis; production assistants, Jordan Hill, Eugene Levy, Fraser McAninch, Dennis Matheson, Brian Prince Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 159989) Walk On 1969, b&w, 16mm 5 minutes, 40 seconds. 1 reel (204 ft) Cast: Hugh Caughey, Judy Lepp, Lynda Spence, Sylvia Diebel, Linda Jarrett Crew: director, Jim Bennett; photography, Jim Cox, Bill Crandall, Eugene Levy; editing, Jim Bennett and Hugh Caughey; music, David Morrow Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 211310). Garbage 1969, b&w, 16mm 5 minutes, 10 seconds. 1 reel (186 ft) Cast: Leon Jervis, Walt Harvey Crew: director/writer, Eugene Levy; photography, Bill Crandall, Marshall Elliot, Lawrence Martin; sound, Dave McDougall, Don Dickinson, Dennis Matheson; titles, Sheila Prince, Nina Collago Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 6503) End 1969, b&w, 16mm 5 minutes, 25 seconds. 1 reel (196 ft) Cast: Sheila Turple, Siegfried Arndt, Jean Ho Crew: director, G.W. Curran; producer, Richard Gregory; assisted by Diane Cloutier, Bob Fenton, Keith Treacher; cinematography, Ray Greaves; music, Ian Thurston; sound recording, Dave McDougall Source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 6495) Freak Film 1969, b&w, 16mm 7 minutes, 32 seconds. 1 reel (271 ft) Cast: Eugene Levy, Hugh Caughey, Bill Crandall, Dan Goldberg, Dennis Matheson, W. Elliot, Lawrence Martin, Fraser McAninch, R. Shekter Crew: director, Ivan Reitman; sound, Don Dickinson Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 6501)

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Chairs/The Chair: Studies 1969, b&w, 16mm 4 minutes, 26 seconds. 1 reel (160 ft) Crew: director/photography/sound/editing, Tom Laing; scenario/ sound, David Rosenfield; photography, Ray Gamble, Ken McGregor; sound, Don Dickinson Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 295158) Freeway 1969, b&w, 16mm Estimated duration: 5 minutes Crew: director, Fraser McAnich; assisted by Sigfried McAnich, Jordan Hill, and Dave McCombs; sound recording by Don Dickinson Print source: unavailable, presumed lost Columbus of Sex 1969, colour, 16mm Estimated length: 97 minutes. 4 reels (for synchronized, simultaneous projection) Cast: Leon Jervis, Robert Fothergill, Karin Thompson, Mary Jane Card, Joan Vinell, Katharine Slobodin, Jennie Slobodin, Laurie Martin, Lyn Logan, Patricia Murphy, Shirley Jervis, Paul Londerville, Lynne Teski, Valdi Inkens, Nelli Duma, Therese Shalon, Ray Barker Crew: director/writer/editor, John Hofsess; producers, Dan Goldberg, Ivan Reitman; choreography, Rod Stewart; director of photography, Ivan Reitman, Eugene Levy, John Hofsess Note: Crew and cast notes are partial. Print source: unavailable, presumed lost Day Off 1969, colour, 16mm 16 minutes, 51 seconds. 1 reel (606 ft) Cast: Tom Hutchinson, Francois Shalom, Vi Pedlar, Eugene Levy, John Miller, Don Dickinson, Dennis Matheson Crew: director/writer/producer/cinematographer/editor, Dan Goldberg; camera assistant, Dennis Matheson; production assistants, Cheryl Clancy, Don Dickinson; music, Ian Thomas and Tranquility Base; negative cutting, Gwen Hilson Print source: Private collection of Dan Goldberg Jack and Jill 1970, b&w, 16mm 23 minutes, 11 seconds. 1 reel (829 ft)

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Cast: Valdi Inkins, Patricia Conway, John Selby. Ellen Wolter, Bonnie Nielson, Peter Taylor, Bob Sands Crew: director/producer/cinematographer, Eugene Levy; sound, Don Dickinson; music, Billy Kim Leyton; editing, Eugene Levy and Richard Morden; titles, Cheryl Clancy Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 6498) Reversal 1970, b&w, 16mm 7 minutes, 18 seconds. 1 reel (263 ft) Cast: Dave Sherry, Michelle Beeler, H. Bolster, Bruce Gibb, Robin Jackson, Don Dickinson, B. Bolster, John Jarrett, David Mailing, Anne Moore, W. Slims, A. Mieyer, B. Singer, Mike Thewalt, W. Visee, Drew Povill Crew: director, Dennis Matheson; music, Bruce Gibb, R. Knappett, J. Aleksa Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 6502) Civilization 1970, colour, 16mm 12 minutes, 46 seconds. 1 reel (460 ft) Crew: director, G.W. Curran; producer, Shawn Selway; assisted by Al Cipryk, Jim Cox, Dave Gordon, Willie Grant, Ray Greaves, Bob Gregory, Richard Gregory, Rod Stewart Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 6504) A Flower and a Penny 1971, colour and b&w, 16mm 5 minutes, 18 seconds. 1 reel (185 ft) Cast: Nicholas Chapman, Sheila Waite, David F. Clarke Crew: director/writer, Andrew Rainbow; assisted by Anna Omeluck and Neil Nevitte; sound recording, John Jarrett; music, Howard Woodhouse, John Dvorak, Mac Swakhammer, Robbie Van Wyck, Tony Wilkinson Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 6497) Poor Richard’s Almanac 1971, b&w, 16mm 18 minutes, 43 seconds. 1 reel (674 ft) Cast: Richard Schultz, Garry Cowan, Garry Garbutt, Maurice Noviks, Desmond Pouyat, Guntis Loja Crew: director/producer/music, Paul Schumacher; sound, DC. Haggo; music, Julie Robinson, Ken Puley; titles, Lynda Moore, Clarence Gauen Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 6499)

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Haugh 1971, b&w, 16mm 16 minutes, 5 seconds. 1 reel (579 ft) Cast: Helen Walasek, Ned Kozowyk, Eleanor Watson Crew: supervision, Bryce Kanbara; technical, Holman Hunt, Jim Chambers Print source: Private collection of Bryce Kanbara Penelope 1971, b&w, 16mm 16 minutes. 1 reel (576 ft) Cast: Maryke Barnes, Simon Johnston, Jay Cowan Crew: director/scenario/editing, Graham Petrie; photography, Jim Cox, Eugene Levy; sound, Peter Alves, Stuart Beal; music, Peter Alves, Nathan Argyle; slide photography, John Soyka; collages, David Moore; continuity, Shirley Jervis, Arlene Ferguso; assistant technician, Don McWilliams Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 8802) The Locals 1971, colour, 16mm 10 minutes. 1 reel (360 ft) Cast: Dave Leggat, Doug Hamilton, Ian Hamilton, Jack Gillie Crew: director/producer, Vernon Ferster, Thomas Nelson; assistant director, Jack Gillie, Nicholas Rebalski; sound, John Jarrett, Dennis Matheson; music, Bob George, Ian Thurston, Bob McLaren, Bruce Gibb Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 206973) Mac 1973, colour, 16mm 31 minutes, 15 seconds. 1 reel (1,125 ft) Cast: Michael Bertrand, Christopher Kelk, Arthur Pewty Crew: director, Harley Steubing; producer, Jim Skarratt; associate producer, George Carlos; written by Harley Steubing and Ian Finlay; photography, Dennis Matheson, Robin Jackson; lighting, Michael Drainie, George Carlos; sound, Ian Finlay, Jim Skarratt; titles, The Silhouette Print source: McMaster University, William Ready Archives, catalogue #701/703/705/712 Jason 1973, colour, 16mm 14 minutes, 15 seconds. 1 reel (513 ft)

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No cast and crew information. Promotional film featuring the rock band Jason, led by Steve and Morag Smith Print source: Library and Archives Canada (ref. 6496) Escape 1974, colour, 16mm 14 minutes, 14 seconds. 1 reel (512 ft) Cast: Ed Duarte, Alistair Inman, George Hounslow Crew: director/producer/editor, Don Ryder; story, Ed Duarte; screenplay, Ed Duarte, Don Ryder, Jeffrey Marrin; cinematography, Jeffrey Marrin; technical adviser, Salvatore Greco; technical crew, Uwe Kaufman, Maureen Cussion, Christine Pikulik, Suzanne Bunting, Jim Aquila; sound editor, Peter Burgess Print source: McMaster University, William Ready Archives, catalogue #711 The Point 1975, colour, 16mm 21 minutes, 45 seconds. 1 reel (783 ft) Cast: Valerie Bourne, Mike Eddenden, Eric Kohanik, Steve Mitchell, Jamie Oestreicher, Vic Plichota, Don Ryder, Gary Watts Crew: Produced and directed by the McMaster Film Board Workshop. Submitted to Professor Graham Petrie by the members of Film 3R6 associated with the production of this motion picture. Print source: McMaster University, William Ready Archives, catalogue #708. Listed as “How to Make It” by David Campbell.

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Notes

Introduction 1 This is true of other student films of the era that have remained in circulation due to the later mainstream success of their makers, such as those developed at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television: George Lucas’s Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB (1967), Robert Zemeckis’s A Field of Honor (1973), and John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s Dark Star (1970, expanded into a theatrical feature in 1974). 2 Elenore Lester, “Shaking the World with an 8-mm. Camera,” New York Times Magazine, 26 November 1967, 45. 3 This is not to say that there was no record of independent filmmaking in Canada. Canada’s first filmmaker, James Freer of Manitoba (1855–1933), was an independent filmmaker as well as a farmer and former newspaper reporter whose “actuality” films of life on the Prairies caught the attention of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, which toured his film Ten Years in Manitoba (1898) in the United Kingdom in an effort to encourage immigration to Canada. Prior to the establishment of the National Film Board (NFB) in 1938, filmmakers such as Ernest Shipman had produced significant films by entrepreneurial means. After the NFB was established, few Canadian filmmakers attempted to make commercial work in Canada. Of those who did, Sidney J. Furie and Julian Roffman had some success. Furie’s early feature films, such as A Cool Sound from Hell and A Dangerous Age (both made in Toronto in 1959), eventually led to his career as a maker of mainstream American commercial films, such as the Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and the Iron Eagle series of Air Force–themed action films. Roffman’s career as an independent filmmaker was relatively short but memorable: after a career with the National Film Board, he turned

220  Notes to pages 4–9 to commercial genre filmmaking with The Bloody Brood (1959) and The Mask (1961), the latter being the first Canadian film in 3-D. He went on to become a successful producer, on his own and in partnership with critic Nat Taylor. He would later produce genre films such as Harvey Hart’s The Pyx (1973) and Ross Hagen’s The Glove (1979). 4 During the 1930s, Britain’s own government filmmaking complex included the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, which bloomed under the direction of John Grierson. Grierson later founded Canada’s National Film Board, where, as the first Commissioner of the Board, he recruited GPO filmmakers such as Stuart Legg and Norman McLaren. 5 John Grierson made his perspective on the fate of feature film production in Canada clear in his “Film Policy for Canada,” released as an issue of Canadian Affairs in 1944. In his film policy, Grierson describes the myriad of financial consequences in getting involved in the production of narrative features, including the difficulties of finding an audience and of making expensive productions self-sustaining. He pointed to the necessity of expensive collaborations with Hollywood, which would compromise Canadian control of Canadian cinema. Instead, Grierson favoured a film culture that would emphasize anthropological and educational subjects, taking films out of movie theatres and into trade union halls, Rotary clubs, Chambers of Commerce, and so forth. This he termed the “non-theatrical revolution.” 6 Michael Zryd, “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 196. 7 Ibid., 197. 8 As later chapters will elaborate, Columbus of Sex was not in the strictest sense a McMaster Film Board film. It was the result of a collaboration between current and former McMaster Film Board leaders. Its cast included McMaster students, it was largely crewed by McMaster students, and it received its premiere at McMaster. It was financed privately, but it likely used McMaster Film Board facilities and equipment. 9 John Hofsess, “Towards a New Voluptuary,” Take One, April 1967, 8. 10 Jonas Mekas, “Where Are We – the Underground?” in The New American Cinema, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1967), 18. 11 Rob Fothergill, who would become the founding director of Canada’s experimental film distribution centre, made several short experimental films that have been unseen since the 1960s. Burton Rubenstein’s work, The Hyacinth Child and A Bedroom Story (both 1966), were widely seen in their day, but their present location is unknown.

Notes to pages 9–14  221  12 Wheeler Winston Dixon, review of One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema, by George Melnyk, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 42, no. 1 (2007): 104. 13 R. Bruce Elder, A Body of Vision: Representations of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997), 151. 14 Michael Dorland, “Bruce Elder, Lamentations, and Beyond,” Cinema Canada, November 1985, 25. 1.  A Dangerous Precedent 1 “New Club Displays Films, Photographs,” Silhouette, 28 September 1962, 8. 2 “Parisian Orpheus Thursday’s Film,” Silhouette, 5 October 1962, 8. 3 “Film Society Opens Season, Group Hopes to Break Even,” Silhouette, 11 October 1963, 7. 4 “‘Bitter Ash’ Shut Out,” Silhouette, 24 January 1964, 1. 5 “May Keep ‘Ash’ Private,” Silhouette, 10 January 1964, 3. 6 “‘Bitter Ash’ Shut Out,” 1. 7 This sensibility was taking root elsewhere in Canada at this time. In Toronto, students were making films at University of Toronto’s Victoria College. In Vancouver, theatre student Larry Kent was beginning to make feature-length realist dramas, and a small media art community was mobilizing through the performance and production space Intermedia. By 1969, independent filmmaking had travelled even further: Rick Hancox was running the University of Prince Edward Island’s film society with an emphasis on underground film and practical filmmaking. 8 For a more extensive discussion of the history of the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, see Gary Evans, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), and E. Austin Weir, The Struggle for National Broadcasting (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965). 9 This is not to say that artists’ cinema did not exist in Canada, but it was either dependent on National Film Board distribution or was not widely accessible until after the advent of the Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre in 1967. 10 The McMaster Arts Festival had equivalents elsewhere in Canada: for instance, the University of British Columbia held a Festival of Contemporary Art from 1961 to 1971, founded by B.C. Binning and Julie Binkert through the UBC Department of Fine Arts. 11 “Contemporary, Good Festival Program,” Silhouette, 30 October 1964, 2. 12 “Film-Maker Recovers; To Speak at Festival,” Silhouette, 6 November 1964, 1.

222  Notes to pages 14–23 13 The Canadian Film Awards were Canada’s national cinema honours, awarded annually between 1949 and 1978 for achievements in filmmaking. The National Film Board dominated the ceremonies until the 1970s, when independent films began to receive recognition. The awards ceased in 1978, but returned in 1980, under the direction of the newly founded Academy of Canadian Film and Television, as the Genie Awards. 14 John Hofsess, Inner Views: Ten Canadian Film-Makers (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975), 41. 15 Tom Coleman, “Kent Comes to Campus, Offers Sweet Substitute,” Silhouette, 5 February 1965, 1. 16 Bernhard Banaschewski, “Sweet Substitute Well-Received,” Silhouette, 19 February 1965, 5. 17 John Hofsess, letter to the Office of the President of McMaster University, 6 February 1966, 1. 18 Ibid., 4. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 6. 21 Ibid., 8. 22 In Eugene Levy’s later account he adds Peter Calamai, a student journalist, to this list. Eugene Levy, “Calamity after Calamity?” Silhouette, 7 February 1969, 7. In a letter to the author, Calamai stated that he has no recollection of having been involved in this film. 23 John Hofsess, “Film Board Holds Showing,” Silhouette Review, 7 October 1966, 5. 24 In addition to the cast listing offered in this announcement, the film featured Jelte Kuipers, Dennis Murphy, David and Gordon Morrow, Virginia Edwards, and Betty Bleth. 25 Peter Rowe, interview with author, April 2007. 26 Susan Woll, review of She Done Him Wrong, Silhouette Review, 9 December 1966, 6. 27 John Hofsess, “Hofsess Hits Back at SEC for Dismissal from Muse,” Silhouette, 21 October 1966, 8. 28 Robert Fothergill, “The Distribution Centre: A Founding Memoir,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 82. In a draft dated 29 August 1992, Fothergill adds that the films were “extremely inexpensive.” 29 This is presumed to be an estimate of the total cost including processing, printing, and production/post-production materials. 30 Peter Rowe, interview with author, April 2007. 31 Susan Woll offers an extensive argument about the inhibition of freedom within the film, claiming that the actors’ genitals are concealed only

Notes to pages 23–30  223  because of the threat of censorship; although censorship would later plague Hofsess, I propose that Redpath 25 is an ecstatic celebration of flesh and libido, unhindered by threat of censorship or by self-censorship, in a way that Hofsess’s subsequent films, and all subsequent films of the McMaster Film Board, are not. 32 John Hofsess and Patricia Murphy would have seen films of this kind at the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative; filmmakers who worked with film’s material properties and who were distributed by the cooperative included Stan Brakhage, Storm de Hirsch, and Carolee Schneemann. 33 Susan Woll, “I Found It at the Movies,” Silhouette Review, 14 October 1966, 4. 34 John Hofsess, “Jonas Mekas: An MQ Interview,” Muse Quarterly 1966–67, 7. 35 Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 131. 36 John Hofsess, “Revolution in Canadian films,” part 1, Varsity, 11 November 1966, 8. 37 “‘Redpath 25’ Really Packs Them In,” Silhouette, 7 October 1966, 2. 38 John Hofsess, “Towards a New Voluptuary,” Take One, April 1967, 9. 39 John Hofsess, “Film Board Holds Showings,” Silhouette Review, 7 October 1966, 5. 40 Hofsess’s interest in strengthening bonds between the McMaster Film Board and the Dramatic Society may not simply have been for the sake of unifying campus groups and strengthening the standing of his Film Board: he was aware of successful work by New York avant-garde filmmakers Shirley Clarke and Jonas Mekas in documenting off-Broadway plays: Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1962) and Kenneth H. Brown’s The Brig (1963), respectively. David Martin, like Hofsess, had interests in avant-garde art. Under Martin’s direction, the Dramatic Society would go on to stage a controversial production of beat poet Michael McClure’s play The Beard (1965), which caused a significant stir in the campus arts community and, like the Larry Kent films, would have made many McMaster students witnesses to art censorship. 41 The use of the phrase “a dangerous precedent,” earlier attributed to Dean Patrick in a letter by Hofsess, implies that Hofsess himself wrote this editorial. 42 “The Hofsess Case: A Bad Precedent,” Silhouette, 14 October 1966, 4. 43 “Conway, Brown Head for New York,” Silhouette, 14 October 1966, 1. 44 “Publication Board Fights Editor Ban,” Ubyssey, 20 October 1966, 11. 45 By 1966, the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra had outlived its namesake by nine years. 46 John Hofsess, “Hofsess Hits Back at SEC for Dismissal from Muse,” Silhouette, 21 October 1966, 8.

224  Notes to pages 31–6 47 Patricia Conway, “Administration Politics Cut Fugs from Festival, Says Conway,” Silhouette, 21 October, 1966, 1. 48 Peter Rowe, “Film Board Head Backs Hofsess,” Silhouette, 21 October 1966, 4. 49 Marilyn Beker, “Surprises at Film Showing,” Varsity, 11 November 1966, 8. 50 Hofsess, “Revolution in Canadian Films,” part 1, 8. 51 Chris Rodley, ed., Cronenberg on Cronenberg (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1992), 10. 52 T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland,” in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1971), 37. 53 Peter Rowe, “MFB: The Leader in a New Era of Canadian Film-Making?” Silhouette Review, 6 January 1967, 4. 54 Subsequently, Secter left Canada with expectations of a Hollywood career, but his sudden rise to prominence in the small Canadian independent film community was followed by a decade of silence. He did not complete another film until 1976, when he made a pornographic parody of the popular Shampoo, titled Blowdry, under the pseudonym Laser Scepter. That same year he also made Getting Together, which, like Winter Kept Us Warm, was a gay-themed coming-of-age drama. This short burst of filmmaking was followed by another long silence. 55 John Grierson, “A Film Policy for Canada,” Canadian Affairs 1, no. 11 (June 1944): 11. 56 Antony Ferry, “All of a Sudden, It’s Hollywood on the Humber,” Toronto Daily Star, 19 November 1966, 1. 57 John Hofsess, “Revolution in Canadian films,” part 2, Varsity, 18 November 1966, 8. 58 Tony Phillips, “Phillips on Film,” Gazette, 18 November, 1966, 18. 59 Peter Rowe, “26 Films in Too Short a Time,” Silhouette Review, 18 November 1966, 3. 60 “And Underground Films to Round Out the Show,” Silhouette, 11 November 1966, 8. 61 “SRA OKs Fugs for Arts Festival,” Silhouette, 7 October 1966, 3. 62 This is not to say that the Exploding Plastic Inevitable represented a sea change in North American art, merely a natural evolution in the history of intermedia and interart happenings. For a fuller discussion of artistic happenings, see Michael Kirby, ed., Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1965). 63 Branden W. Joseph, “‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” in Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 239–40.

Notes to pages 36–44  225  64 Peter Rowe, “Background to a Happening,” Silhouette, 4 November 1966, 5. 65 A more extensive and colourful account of this experience is given in Peter Rowe’s memoir Adventures in Filmmaking (Toronto: Pinewood, 2013). 66 Marshall McLuhan, “Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan – A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,” Playboy, March 1969, 70. 67 Stewart Brown, “Man, Like He Saw, But What?” Hamilton Spectator, 14 November 1966, 8. 2.  Assembling Pleasure 1 “MFB on the Move,” Silhouette, 2 December 1966, 8. 2 Ibid. 3 “‘Redpath 25’ Really Packs Them In,” Silhouette, 7 October 1966, 2. 4 Peter Rowe, “MFB: The Leader in New Era of Canadian Film-Making?” Silhouette Review, 6 January 1967, 5. 5 Peter Rowe, interview with author, April 2007. 6 Peter Morris, David Cronenberg: A Delicate Balance (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994), 36. 7 Rowe, “MFB: The Leader in New Era of Canadian Film-Making?” 4. 8 Ibid. 9 Iris Nowell, P11, Painters Eleven: The Wild Ones of Canadian Art (Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 2011), 273. 10 Rowe, “MFB: The Leader in New Era of Canadian Film-Making?” 4. 11 “Woman, Men in Bed: Charges Considered over McMaster Movie,” Globe and Mail, 10 January 1967, 10. 12 Peter Rowe, interview with author, April 2007. 13 Peter C. Newman, The Distemper of Our Times (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 404–6. 14 George Bain, “Uh-One, Uh-Two, Uh-Three,” Globe and Mail, 11 January 1967, 7. 15 “Hofsess Charged with Theft over $50,” Silhouette, 13 January 1967, 1. 16 Peter Rowe, interview with author, April 2007. 17 “Rowe Fired as Film Boss; Black Zero Banned,” Silhouette, 20 January 1967, 1. 18 “‘Sunday’ Cuts MFB Interview,” Silhouette, 20 January 1967, 1. 19 “Film Board,” Silhouette, 13 January 1967, 4. 20 Bill Crandall, “Sex Film to Be Aired on ‘Sunday,’” Silhouette, 13 January 1967, 1. 21 “Film Seizure Probe at Mac,” Hamilton Spectator, 7 January 1967, 7. 22 Terry Campbell, “BARF: It’s SEX but Is It Art?” Silhouette Review, 13 January 1967, 2.

226  Notes to pages 45–54 23 Mary Lou Smitheram, “Comment: The Film Board,” Silhouette, 20 January 1967, 5. 24 John Hofsess, “Film Director Raps BARF,” Silhouette, 20 January 1967, 4. 25 “SEC Rejects Bid for Film,” Silhouette, 27 January 1967, 1. 26 John Hofsess, “Hofsess Explains Muse, MFB, Arts Festival Shenanigans,” Silhouette, 3 February 1967, 6. 27 Ibid. 28 “Dubious Achievement Awards 66–67,” Silhouette, 24 February 1967, 7. 29 For a greater discussion and contextualization of the event and its place in the history of the University of Toronto, consult Charles Levi’s “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and the University College Lit: The University of Toronto Festivals, 1965–69,” Historical Studies in Education 18, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 163–90. Levi’s article is meticulous and offers a history of Canadian postsecondary education in the mid-1960s that provides context for this volume. 30 Peter Rowe, “U of T Psychedelic Festival Will Feature Fugs, Leary, Ginsberg,” Silhouette, 13 January 1967, 1. 31 Dave Lush, “Film Showings Disorganized,” Silhouette Review, 17 February 1967, 4. 32 Sir Walter Scott, Quentin Durward (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1845), 5. 33 Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 62. 34 John Hofsess, “Towards a New Voluptuary,” Take One, April 1967, 8. 35 Ibid., 10. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 “Theft Charge against Student Is Withdrawn,” Globe and Mail, 6 April 1967, 5. 39 Joan Fox, “Why Don’t Toronto Culture Lovers Wear Their Minks to the Movies?” Globe and Mail, 8 April 1967, 25. 40 Arthur Zeldin, “Toronto’s Swingingest Theatre,” Toronto Daily Star, 1 April 1967, 28. 41 Kay Kritzwiser, “At the Galleries,” Globe and Mail, 6 May 1967, 32. 42 Alan Collins, “Toronto Letter,” Take One, June 1967, 37. 43 It would later be revealed that Poolman did not pay the film’s debts at all or possibly that the Student Union forgot to collect the funds. 44 Robert Fothergill, “The Distribution Centre: A Founding Memoir,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 82. 45 Collins, “Toronto Letter,” 37. 46 This is Fothergill’s recollection. Cronenberg believes that in place of Plaxton and Lipowitz were Iain Ewing and Ivan Reitman, both friends

Notes to pages 54–69  227  and collaborators of Cronenberg’s. This and the specificity of location in Fothergill’s account suggest that Fothergill’s account is more reliable. 47 Fothergill, “The Distribution Centre: A Founding Memoir,” 83. 48 Subway: The Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre Catalogue and Newsletter, May 1967, 5. 49 Peter Morris, “Kineo,” Take One, August 1967, 30. Morris would later present the film at the National Film Theatre in London, England, in May 1968. 50 Sam Perry had been an instrumental force in the formation of Vancouver’s Intermedia, where he would often project films over performances by the free-jazz pianist Al Neil. After his death, his work was withdrawn from circulation, and its present location is unknown. The film that screened at Cinethon was simply titled Sam’s Last Film. 51 Brakhage’s epic The Art of Vision (also utilizing footage from his Dog Star Man) would screen at Cinecity the following weekend. 52 Jane Lind, Joyce Wieland: Artist on Fire (Toronto: Lorimer, 2001), 166. 53 Fothergill, “The Distribution Centre: A Founding Memoir,” 84. 54 Cinecity Cinethon program, 15 June 1967, 3. 55 Clyde Gilmour, “The Underground Is Here,” Toronto Telegram, 16 June 1967, 43. 56 This translation is taken from Tucker Brooke and Matthias A. Shaaber, The Renaissance: 1550–1600 (London: Routledge, 1967), 413. 57 Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 222. 58 Hofsess uses, without consent, recordings that Leonard Cohen made for the CBC, released on the double LP Canadian Poets 1 (1966). 59 The Gass Company, a local Hamilton band, was started at McMaster by Dennis Murphy, brother of Patricia Murphy. Dennis Murphy had been involved at the periphery of the McMaster Film Board from its outset, appearing in Coldfinger. Murphy would leave Canada in the late 1960s to become a publicity director and later record producer in Los Angeles. He joined Canada’s National Film Board as a producer in 1990. 60 Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, 1 August 1899, from The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. J.M. Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 61 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970), 105. 62 John Hofsess, “The Mind’s Eye,” Take One, March–April 1969 (publication date December 1969), 25. 63 Roland Barthes, “Theory of the Text,” in Robert Young, Untying the Text: A PostStructuralist Reader (Boston and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 39. 64 Peter Rowe, undated treatment for The Neon Palace (A Fifties Trip, A Sixties Trip), 17.

228  Notes to pages 70–85 3.  A New President 1 “Other Clubs Offer Variety,” Silhouette, 15 September 1967, 9. 2 “‘Film Canada’ Buys Black Zero for $1500,” Silhouette, 24 February 1967, 1. 3 This is based on the account that was published, and left unchallenged, by Bob Allington. Robert Allington, letter to the editor, Silhouette, 20 October 1967, 8. 4 “Other Clubs Offer Variety,” Silhouette, 15 September 1967, 9. 5 Jim Bennett, “McMaster Film Board,” Silhouette Review, 29 September 1967, 2. 6 This interview, dated 1959, was transcribed by the Fifes and published as “Tempo of the Range” in Western Folklore 26, no. 3 (July 1967): 177–81. 7 Alex the Holy, a Toronto street person, was a local Toronto celebrity in the mid- to late 1960s. The Toronto publisher Coach House Press would issue postcards of him. He was best known for emitting loud snorts and physically shaking the facades of buildings to make sure that they were secure. 8 Peter Rowe, “MFB: A Leader in a New Era of Canadian Film-Making?” Silhouette Review, 6 January 1967, 5. 9 Wayne Fraser, letter to the editor, Silhouette, 20 October 1967, 8. 10 Greg Munce and Ian Mackenzie, “McMaster Film Festival,” Silhouette Review, 6 October 1967, 2. 11 Bennett, “McMaster Film Board,” 2. 12 Robert Allington, letter to the editor, Silhouette, 20 October 1967, 8. 13 “Allington Rocks Film Board with New Disclosures,” Silhouette, 13 October 1967, 1. 14 Allington, letter to the editor, 8. 15 “Allington Rocks Film Board with New Disclosures,” 1. 16 Allington, letter to the editor, 8. 17 Ibid. 18 Ray Guy, “An Open Letter …,” Silhouette, 19 January 1968, 1. 19 Shirley Miller, “SRA Muddles through Film Board,” Silhouette, 12 January 1968, 3. 20 Ibid. 21 Shirley Miller, “MSU Won’t Pay MFB bills,” Silhouette, 2 February 1968, 3. 22 Guy, “An Open Letter …,” 1. 23 “Martin Is Not Responsible,” Silhouette, 8 November 1968, 1. 24 For an exhaustive discussion of this merging of gods, see Sir James George Frazer, “Dying and Reviving Gods, Dionysus,” in The New Golden Bough, with commentary by Theodor H. Gaster (New York: Criterion

Notes to pages 85–96  229  Books, 1959), 416–23. Frazer holds that Osiris and Dionysus developed independently, their similarities “sufficiently explained by the similarity of the ideas and customs on which they were founded.” 4.  Participatory Democracy 1 “‘Film Canada’ Makes Bid for Black Zero,” Silhouette, 17 February 1967, 1. 2 David Martin’s attempt to take such measures was a mere formality, as evinced by his executive’s claim of ignorance to his misappropriation. 3 Ivan Reitman, “Reitman Proposes Film Board Rebirth,” Silhouette, 2 February 1968, 4. 4 Ivan Reitman, “Sex, Money Scandals Rocked MFB,” Silhouette, 9 February 1968, 5. 5 B.A. Veldhuis, “A Full and True Account of the McMaster Film Board, Part II, Having Now Become an Amplification of Mr. Reitman’s Article,” Silhouette Review, 16 February 1968, 5. 6 Ellen Wolter, “MFB: Boob or Bust?” Collage, 18 October 1968, 2. Note that for this year, the Silhouette Review was temporarily titled Collage. 7 John Hofsess, “Towards a New Voluptuary,” Take One, April 1967, 9. 8 “Film Board Debut,” Silhouette, 27 September 1968, 3. 9 Wolter, “MFB: Boob or Bust?” 2. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Eugene Levy, “Calamity after Calamity: But Its Going Places, Baby,” Silhouette, 7 February 1969, 7. 13 McMaster Film Board advertisement, Silhouette, 30 August 1968, 9. 14 “Film Board Debut,” Silhouette, 27 September 1968, 3. 15 Sheila Turple, “Twenty Two Submitted, Seven Film Scripts Accepted,” Silhouette, 1 November 1968. 3. 16 Ibid. A later article, “Film Board Surges On,” credits the proposed film to Dan Goldberg rather than Jack Hill. 17 Of these six films, two are unavailable for consultation. The Chair: Studies is held by the National Library of Canada, who have assessed its condition to be too poor to consult, and there is no possibility of transferring the film to any format other than cost-prohibitive 35mm film. The fate of Freeway is unknown; filmmaker Fraser McAninch does not know its whereabouts, and no copy was retained by any organization or archive at McMaster or at the national level. 18 Melinda McCracken, “Campus Cameras Roll on Sex, Garbage, Card Game,” Globe and Mail, 31 March 1969, 14.

230  Notes to pages 97–113 19 Turple, “Twenty Two Submitted, Seven Film Scripts Accepted,” 3. 20 This is reminiscent of Redpath 25, but with its gender roles reversed: there, Patricia Murphy had dreamt Norman Walker, and when her fantasy is over, it ends by her terms. Here, Caughey’s fantasy ends in sudden disappointment, with the girl vanishing. Nothing in Walk On ends on Caughey’s terms. 21 Ibid. 22 T.S. Eliot, “East Coker,” from Four Quartets, in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1971), 123. 23 T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist, 1917), 10. 24 Ibid., 11. 25 Ibid., 16. 26 Turple, “Twenty Two Submitted, Seven Film Scripts Accepted,” 3. 27 McCracken, “Campus Cameras Roll on Sex, Garbage, Card Game,” 14. 28 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 7. 29 Turple, “Twenty Two Submitted, Seven Film Scripts Accepted,” 3. 30 McCracken, “Campus Cameras Roll on Sex, Garbage, Card Game,” 14. 31 Ibid. 32 “CHCH-TV will Feature M.F.B.,” Silhouette, 26 September 1969, 3. 33 CBC, “New Film Makers,” 30 April 1969. 34 “‘Orientation’ Distributed,” Silhouette, 8 November 1968, 1. 35 “MFB Gets TV Contract,” Silhouette, 24 January 1969, 1. 36 McCracken, “Campus Cameras Roll on Sex, Garbage, Card Game,” 14. 37 Eugene Levy, “Film Canada Grabs ‘Orientation,’” Silhouette, 31 January 1969, 1. 38 Ibid. 39 This exchange is paraphrased from Eugene Levy’s “Calamity after Calamity: But Its Going Places, Baby,” Silhouette, 7 February 1969, 7. 40 “Film Board Surges On,” Silhouette, 21 February 1969, 1. 41 Ibid. 42 Levy, “Film Canada Grabs ‘Orientation,’” 1. 43 “Feature Film-Makers Get $125,000 Grants,” Toronto Daily Star, 4 July 1969, 25. 44 For a full account of the evolution of the Canadian Film Development Corporation, consult Michael Dorland, So Close to the State/s: The Emergence of Canadian Feature Film Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).

Notes to pages 114–21  231  5.  Seize the Projectors 1 The charges against Mike Getz are discussed in Janet Staiger, “Finding Community in the Early 1960s Underground Cinema,” in Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, ed. Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 38–74. 2 “Calendar of Community Events,” Chicago Defender, 26 August 1967, 2. 3 Wheeler Winston Dixon, Visions of Paradise (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 122. 4 “Calendar of Community Events,” Chicago Defender, 2 November 1967, 15. 5 Roger Ebert, review of Caressed, Chicago Sun-Times, 13 February 1968. 6 John Hofsess, letter to Stephen Broomer, 11 February 2008. 7 John Hofsess, letter to Stephen Broomer, 7 April 2008. 8 Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre catalogue, October 1968, 1. 9 Wendy Michener, “The Unconventional Pays for Film-Makers,” Globe and Mail, 28 November 1968, 12. 10 Canadian Artists ’68 (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1968). 11 Manny Farber, “Films at Canadian Artists ’68, Art Gallery of Ontario,” Artscanada, February 1969, 29. 12 Museum of Modern Art, press release, 31 January 1969, 3. 13 Melinda McCracken, “Campus Cameras Roll on Sex, Garbage, Card Game,” Globe and Mail, 31 March 1969, 14. 14 “Contributor’s Notes,” John Hofsess listing, Take One, NovemberDecember 1968, 5. 15 John Hofsess, “The Mind’s Eye,” Take One, March-April 1969 (publication date December 1969), 25. 16 Michael Valpy, “Naked in the Box,” Globe and Mail Magazine, 7 December 1968, 8. 17 John Hofsess, letter to Robert Fothergill, February 1969. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 The Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre catalogue, undated, unpaginated, circa 1969. 21 John Hofsess, letter to Stephen Broomer, March 2008. 22 Hofsess shared these suspicions with Robert Fothergill in a letter dated 20 April 1969. 23 Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic, 1964), 273. 24 The Film Board planned both a documentary and a feature during its fall 1968 revival. The organization would never produce a documentary, aside from the hybrid Buffalo Airport Visions.

232  Notes to pages 122–30 25 John Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” Saturday Night, August 1970, 16. 26 Morris Leopold Ernst and David Loth, American Sexual Behavior and the Kinsey Report (New York: Greystone Press, 1948). 27 Lawrence Martin, letter to the author, 7 November 2009. 28 Peter Morris, “Kineo,” Take One, August 1967, 30. 29 “Mac Film Seized by Vice Squad,” Hamilton Spectator, 9 August 1969, 7. 30 The attitude toward non-student participation in extra-curricular activities had changed in the three years since Hofsess’s dismissal by the Student Union. The Dramatic Society had in its membership several non-students. The McMaster Film Board, when soliciting projects for sync-sound production for the 1969–70 school year, had opened the competition to graduate students and faculty members, who were not members of the Student Union. 31 John Hofsess, letter to John Bowlby, 1 May 1970, 3. 32 Gary Kellam, “Sex Movie Not to His Liking,” Hamilton Spectator, 14 August 1969, 6. 33 Rein Ende, “Ende Denies Squealing,” Silhouette, 5 December 1969, 4. 34 Bill Freeman, Hamilton: A People’s History (Toronto: Lorimer, 2001), 175. 35 John Hofsess, “The Mind’s Eye,” March-April 1969 (publication date December 1969), 26. 36 Joe Medjuck, “The Makers of ‘Cannibal Girls,’” Take One, March-April 1972, 23. 37 Kellam, “Sex Movie Not to His Liking,” 6. 38 Ende, “Ende Denies Squealing,” 4. 39 Kellam, “Sex Movie Not to His Liking,” 6. 40 Ibid. 41 Malcolm Dean, Censored! Only in Canada (Toronto: Virgo Press, 1981), 196. 42 This account of the arrest is paraphrased from John Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” Saturday Night, August 1970, 13. 43 “Police Too Busy to View Sex Film Shown at Mac,” Hamilton Spectator, 11 August 1969, 7. 6.  Sync Sound Arrives, 1970 1 This is discussed extensively in Bryan D. Palmer’s Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 190–2. 2 “McMaster Film Group Gets Bail,” Toronto Daily Star, 21 August 1969, 3. 3 Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964).

Notes to pages 130–48  233  4 Jacobellis suffered greatly for his role in the trial, as the charge led to his being further targeted by morality authorities. His house was searched on numerous occasions by police hoping to find obscene materials; on one occasion, they discovered a record titled The People, Yes, a recording of Carl Sandburg poetry that, by merit of its title, led the police to presume that Jacobellis was a Communist. Jacobellis received threatening, anti-Semitic letters, and when it emerged in the press that he was not Jewish, but rather Roman Catholic, local church officials pressured federal authorities to have him deported. This account draws from the one given by Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 132. 5 Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973). 6 “Success in Four Short Years,” Silhouette Review, 6 September 1969, 20. 7 “Film Board Plans Coup of SEC,” Silhouette, 17 October 1969, 3. 8 “CHCH-TV Will Feature M.F.B.” Silhouette, 26 September 1969, 3. 9 “Film Board Candidates Withdraw,” Silhouette, 31 October 1969, 3. 10 Harry DeMille, “Four New Film Board Attractions Ready for Premieres, November 6,” Silhouette, 24 October 1969, 3. 11 “Film Board Pleas Not Guilty,” Silhouette, 28 November 1969, 1. 12 Rein Ende, “Ende Denies Squealing,” Silhouette, 5 December 1969, 4. 13 “It’s Premier Night at Mac, Four New Films Screened,” Silhouette, 9 January 1970, 1. 14 John Barker, “Tremendous Coup – Film Board Scores Success,” Silhouette, 16 January 1970, 11. 15 Ibid. 16 McMaster Film Board Program Notes, 9 January 1970, qtd in Barker, “Tremendous Coup – Film Board Scores Success,” 11. It should be noted that although Levy’s description portrays Jack as a “boy,” he is played by college-age Valdi Inkens, and his characterization is that of an adult. 17 Barker, “Tremendous Coup – Film Board Scores Success,” 11. 18 Ibid. 19 DeMille, “Four New Film Board Attractions Ready For Premieres, November 6,” 3. 20 The theatrical production, conceived by Richard Schechner and The Performance Group as a work of Environmental Theatre, was an adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae. A performance film was made of it in 1970, directed by Brian De Palma. Like Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and John Hofsess’s Palace of Pleasure and Columbus of Sex, De Palma’s Dionysus in ’69 utilized two screens. 21 John Hofsess, letter to Robert Fothergill, 12 January 1970, 2.

234  Notes to pages 149–57 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 John Hofsess, letter to John Bowlby, 19 January 1970. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 John Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” Saturday Night, August 1970, 14. 28 Kathleen Keating, “Mac’s Columbus of Sex Trial Will Be First of Its Kind,” Hamilton Spectator, 16 May 1970, 53. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 John Hofsess, letter to Robert Fothergill, 24 April 1970. 7.  The Film Board Presidents on Trial 1 John Hofsess, letter to Robert Fothergill, 10 May 1970, 2. 2 Ibid. 3 John Hofsess, letter to John Bowlby, 1 May 1970, 1. 4 Ibid., 5. 5 John Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” Saturday Night, August 1970, 16. 6 “Sex Film to Roll in Court,” Hamilton Spectator, 19 May 1970, 7. 7 Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” 14. 8 Manny Escott, “Canadian Sex Film Viewed by Judge,” Toronto Daily Star, 20 May 1970, 44. 9 Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” 14. 10 Hofsess’s choice of words for describing the sequence, and for the lieutenant’s disgust at it, are telling, and possibly disingenuous. Among his precedents, Hofsess included Ken Russell’s adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, a film that prominently features a wrestling match with a strong gay subtext. 11 Escott, “Canadian Sex Film Viewed by Judge,” 44. 12 Kathleen Keating, “What the Court Saw,” Hamilton Spectator, 20 May 1970, 7. 13 Ibid. 14 Manny Escott, “Sex Exploitation Unartistic Pierre Berton Tells Court,” Toronto Daily Star, 21 May 1970, 28. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 “Police Puzzle Reitman,” Hamilton Spectator, 21 May 1970, 7.

Notes to pages 159–67  235  19 “Non-Expert Witnesses Spark Sex Trial Row,” Hamilton Spectator, 23 May 1970, 7. 20 Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” 15. 21 “Sex Movie Labelled Offensive, Obscene by Crown Witness,” Hamilton Spectator, 22 May 1970, 7. 22 Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” 15. 23 Ibid. 24 “Sex Movie Labelled Offensive, Obscene by Crown Witness,” 7. 25 Ibid. 26 Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” 15. 27 “Non-Expert Witnesses Spark Sex Trial Row,” 7. 28 Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” 15. 29 Ann Douglas, “‘Punching a Hole in the Big Lie’: The Achievement of William S. Burroughs,” in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholtz and Ira Silverberg (New York: Grove Press, 1998), xxv. 30 “Columbus Awaits Judgment,” Hamilton Spectator, 28 May 1970, 7. 31 Ibid. 32 “Artistic Merit beyond Judicial Decree, Suggests Defence,” Hamilton Spectator, 27 May 1970, 7. 33 “Columbus Awaits Judgment,” 7. 34 Ibid. 35 Hofsess, “The Witchcraft of Obscenity,” 15. 36 Ibid. 37 “Producers to Appeal Sex Film Verdict,” Hamilton Spectator, 10 June 1970, 7. 38 Stephen Broomer, interview with Dan Goldberg, 9 March 2011. 39 Goldberg and Reitman had hoped to have a controlling interest in the film through New Cinema of Canada. Although it was a non-theatrical distributor, with its aims to capture the campus market, it was the company name that they used to produce Columbus of Sex (according to D.J. Turner, Canadian Feature Film Index, 1913–1985 [Ottawa: Public Archives Canada, 1987]). From subsequent documentation it does not appear that they secured this investment, as the film proceeded through Cinépix with distribution by MGM. 40 John Hofsess, letter to the editor, Toronto Daily Star, July 4, 1970, 11. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 John Hofsess, letter to Richard D. Hayes, 11 June 1970, 2. 44 Ibid.

236  Notes to pages 167–76 45 Robert Fulford, letter to John Hofsess, 17 June 1970. 46 Joyce M. Ritchie, letter to the editor, Saturday Night, November 1970, 4. 47 Judith Dodington, letter to the editor, Saturday Night, November 1970, 4. 48 John Hofsess, letter to Robert Fothergill, 7 January 1971, 1. 8.  The Appeal 1 R. v. Goldberg and Reitman, Ontario Court of Appeal decision, 18 January 1971, [1971] 3 O.R. 323, 4 C.C.C. (2d) 187. 2. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 3. 5 Ibid. 6 R. v. Prairie Schooner News Ltd. and Powers, 1 C.C.C. (2d) 251, 75 W.W.R. 585 (1970). 7 R. v. Goldberg and Reitman, 18 January 1971, 4. 8 Ibid. 9 “Film Board Secures Canadian Premiere,” Silhouette, 6 February 1970, 1. 10 Stewart Brown, “Movie Night at McMaster University,” Hamilton Spectator, 3 February 1971, R5. 11 “MFB ‘POT POURRI,’” Silhouette, 9 October 1970, 2. 12 “Free Parking Bonus for MFB Patrons at New Film Series,” Silhouette, 2 October 1970, 1. 13 Sylvia Diebel, “It’s a Date,” Silhouette, 23 October 1970, 10. 14 Jim Evans, “Glands but No Heart,” Silhouette, 6 November 1970, 5. 15 “No Skin Flicks – Active Winter for MFB,” Silhouette, 6 November 1970, 2. 16 By this logic, colour filmmaking was a mark of graduation; this is in keeping with the Film Board’s history, from Ivan Reitman’s leadership onward, of championing the values of mainstream filmmaking. 17 Sylvia Diebel, “It’s a Date,” Silhouette, 4 December 1970, 12. 18 Of these films, Vern Ferster’s The Locals was not available for consultation. As with Tom Laing’s The Chair: Studies, Ferster’s film had severely deteriorated. 19 Pat Kehoe, “Mac Films – Original Failures,” Silhouette, 12 February 1971, 9. 20 “Another Film Board Premier,” Silhouette, 29 February 1970, 3. 21 Kehoe, “Mac Films – Original Failures,” 9.

Notes to pages 176–96  237  22 “McMaster Film Board Premieres,” leaflet, 1 February 1970, 1. 23 Kehoe, “Mac Films – Original Failures,” 9. 24 “McMaster Film Board Premieres,” 1. 25 “Another Film Board Premier,” 3. 26 “McMaster Film Board Premieres,” 2. 27 Kehoe, “Mac Films – Original Failures,” 9. 28 “Another Film Board Premier,” 3. 29 Stewart Brown, “Movie Night at McMaster University,” Hamilton Spectator, 3 February 1971, R5. 30 Kehoe, “Mac Films – Original Failures,” 9. 31 Brown, “Movie Night at McMaster University,” R5. 32 Advertisement, New York Times, 18 April 1971, D11. 33 Vincent Canby, “Vapid Erotica,” New York Times, 20 April 1971, 51. 34 Vincent Canby, “Sure, Hollywood Is Collapsing, but …” New York Times, 2 May 1971, D1. 35 John Hofsess, letter to Robert Fothergill, 29 April 1971. 36 John Hofsess, letter to Robert Fothergill, 4 May 1971. 37 Betty Lee, “Columbus of Sex: An Obscene Movie Reappears in a Slicker Package,” Globe and Mail, 1 May 1971, 27. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 John Hofsess, letter to the editor, Globe and Mail, 10 May 1971, 6. 41 Urjo Kareda, “Toronto Film-Making Is All Agony and Frustration,” Toronto Daily Star, 5 September 1970, 89. 42 Review of Columbus of Sex, Variety, 13 May 1970. 9.  Show Business 1 Harley Steubing, “Futz: A Man and His Pig – A ‘Love’ Story,” Silhouette Review, 13 November 1970, 2. 2 “MFB Film Profits Divided – Hassles Still Prevalent,” Silhouette, 11 December 1970, 1. 3 “MSU Undercuts Grad Union Film Showings,” Silhouette, 29 October 1971, 1. 4 Heather Blum, “Foxy Lady: Entertaining but Lacks Depth,” Silhouette Review, 12 November 1971, 1. 5 “Mac Filmboard,” Silhouette Review, 4 February 1972, 10. 6 “Film Board Presents Rock Show,” Silhouette, 17 March 1972, 1. 7 “After Last Year’s Problems, Mac Film Board Running Again,” Silhouette, 6 October 1972, 9.

238  Notes to pages 196–205 8 “A Four Page Mini-Feature Looking at the Past, Present and Future of McMaster Film Board,” Silhouette, 1 December 1972, 7. 9 Ibid. 10 Mary Frances Miedema, “Here’s Where They’ve Been … and Where They’ll Be Focusing …” Silhouette, 1 December 1972, 8. 11 “Here Comes MTV,” Silhouette, 12 January 1973, 7. 12 “Mac Film,” Silhouette Review, 30 March 1973, 20. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Robert Howard, “Lawyers’ Advice Stops ‘Deep Throat’ Screening,” Silhouette, 5 October 1973, 3. 16 “McMaster Television Increases Facilities in Few Years’ Operation,” Silhouette, 12 October 1973, 10. 17 Christine Pikulik, “Steubing Defends MTV’s Non-Use of Students,” Silhouette, 16 November 1973, 1. 18 Donna Leonard, “Mac Film Board Loaned $18,000 to Buy Machine,” Silhouette, 8 February 1974, 2. 19 Charles Merivale, “Feedback,” Silhouette, 15 February 1974, 2. 20 Graham Petrie, “Ontario Film Theatre Answers Charges,” Silhouette, 22 March 1974, 2. 21 George Carlos, “MFB Past President George Carlos Replies,” Silhouette, 29 March 1974, 8. 22 Christine Pikulik, “Mac Film Board Off to Great Year with Brand New Editing Machine,” Silhouette, 20 September 1974, 3. 23 Ibid. 24 Eric Kohanik, “Film Workshops in Trouble,” Silhouette, 11 October 1974, 13. 25 Ed Duarte, “Film Board Defends Editing Machine,” Silhouette, 6 December 1974, 5. 26 Pikuluk, “Mac Film Board Off to Great Year with Brand New Editing Machine,” 3. 27 Eric Kohanik, “Hofsess: From Mac Film Board to Expert on Canadian Films,” Silhouette, 31 January 1975, 8. 28 The four had first worked together in the celebrated Toronto production of the musical Godspell (1972). Andrea Martin, Martin Short, and Dave Thomas also worked together on The David Steinberg Show (1976), featuring Chicago’s Second City Theatre alumnus David Steinberg. 29 Hofsess was an influence on the films of R. Bruce Elder, a peer of his from McMaster who, upon taking up filmmaking in the 1970s, went on to become the most prolific Canadian avant-garde filmmaker of the 1980s.

Notes to pages 205–8  239  30 George Melnyk, Great Canadian Film Directors (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007), 83. 31 John Hofsess, “Revolution in Canadian films,” pt 2, Varsity, 18 November 1966, 8. 32 Elenore Lester, “Shaking the World with an 8-mm. Camera,” New York Times Magazine, 26 November 1967, 45.

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244 Bibliography –  “Jonas Mekas: An MQ Interview.” Muse Quarterly 1966–1967 (1966): 6–7. –  “Film Board Holds Showing.” Silhouette Review, 7 October 1966, 5. –  “Hofsess Hits Back at SEC for Dismissal from Muse.” Silhouette, 21 October 1966, 8. –  “Revolution in Canadian Films,” part 1. Varsity, 11 November 1966, 8. –  “Revolution in Canadian Films,” part 2. Varsity, 18 November 1966, 8. – “Film director raps BARF.” Silhouette, 20 January 1967, 4. –  “Hofsess Explains Muse, MFB, Arts Festival Shenanigans.” Silhouette, 3 February 1967, 6. –  “Towards a New Voluptuary.” Take One, April 1967, 8–10. –  Letter to Robert Fothergill, February 1969. –  “The Mind’s Eye.” Take One, March–April 1969 (publication date December 1969), 25–7. –  Letter to Robert Fothergill, 20 April 1969. –  Letter to Robert Fothergill, 12 January 1970. –  Letter to John Bowlby, 19 January 1970. –  Letter to Robert Fothergill, 24 April 1970. –  Letter to Robert Fothergill, 10 May 1970. –  Letter to John Bowlby, 1 May 1970. –  Letter to Richard D. Hayes, 11 June 1970. –  Letter to the editor. Toronto Daily Star, 4 July 1970, 11. –  “The Witchcraft of Obscenity.” Saturday Night, August 1970, 11–16. –  Letter to Robert Fothergill, 7 January 1971. –  Letter to Robert Fothergill, 29 April 1971. –  Letter to Robert Fothergill, 4 May 1971. –  Letter to the editor. Globe and Mail, 10 May 1971, 6. –  Inner Views: Ten Canadian Filmmakers. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975. Howard, Robert. “Lawyers’ Advice Stops ‘Deep Throat’ Screening.” Silhouette, 5 October 1973, 3. Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964). Joseph, Branden W. “‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” In Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. 239–68. Kareda, Urjo. “Toronto Film-making Is All Agony and Frustration.” Toronto Daily Star, 5 September 1970, 89. Keating, Kathleen. “Mac’s Columbus of Sex Trail Will Be First of Its Kind.” Hamilton Spectator, 16 May 1970, 53. –  “What the Court Saw.” Hamilton Spectator, 20 May 1970, 7. Kehoe, Pat. “Mac Films – Original Failures.” Silhouette, 12 February 1971, 9.

Bibliography 245  Kellam, Gary. “Sex Movie Not to His Liking.” Hamilton Spectator, 14 August 1969, 6. Kirby, Michael. Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology. New York: E. Dutton, 1965. Kohanik, Eric. “Film Workshops in Trouble.” Silhouette, 11 October 1974, 13. –  “Hofsess: From Mac Film Board to Expert on Canadian Films.” Silhouette, 31 January 1975, 8. Kritzwiser, Kay. “At the Galleries.” Globe and Mail, 6 May 1967, 32. Lee, Betty. “Columbus of Sex: An Obscene Movie Reappears in a Slicker Package.” Globe and Mail, 1 May 1971, 27. Leonard, Donna. “Mac Film Board Loaned $18,000 to Buy Machine.” Silhouette, 8 February 1974, 2. Lester, Elenore. “Shaking the World with an 8-mm. Camera.” New York Times Magazine, 26 November 1967. Levi, Charles. “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and the University College Lit: The University of Toronto Festivals, 1965–69.” Historical Studies in Education 18, no. 2 (2006): 163–90. Levy, Eugene. “Film Canada Grabs ‘Orientation.’” Silhouette, 31 January 1969, 1. –  “Calamity after Calamity: But It’s Going Places, Baby.” Silhouette, 7 February 1969, 7. Lewis, Jon. Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Lind, Jane. Joyce Wieland: Artist on Fire. Toronto: Lorimer, 2001. Lush, Dave. “Film Showings Disorganized.” Silhouette Review, 17 February 1967, 4. Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Basic Books, 1966. Masson, J.M. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. McCracken, Melinda. “Campus Cameras Roll On Sex, Garbage, Card Game.” Globe and Mail, 31 March 1969, 14. McLuhan, Marshall. “Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan – A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.” Playboy, March 1969, 26–7, 45, 55–6, 61, 63. McMaster Film Board. “McMaster Film Board.” Leaflet, 1 February 1970. Medjuck, Joe. “The Makers of ‘Cannibal Girls.’” Take One, March-April 1972, 23–9. Mekas, Jonas. “Where Are We – the Underground?” In The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock. New York: E. Dutton, 1967. 17–22. Melnyk, George. Great Canadian Film Directors. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007.

246 Bibliography Merivale, Charles. “Feedback.” Silhouette, 15 February 1974, 2. Michener, Wendy. “The Unconventional Pays for Film-Makers.” Globe and Mail, 28 November 1968, 12. Miedema, Mary Frances. “Here’s Where They’ve Been … and Where They’ll Be Focusing.” Silhouette, 1 December 1972, 8. Miller, Shirley. “SRA Muddles through Film Board.” Silhouette, 12 January 1968, 3. –  “MSU Won’t Pay MFB bills.” Silhouette, 2 February 1968, 3. Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973). Morris, Peter. “Kineo,” Take One, August 1967, 30. –  David Cronenberg: A Delicate Balance. Toronto: ECW Press, 1994. Munce, Greg, and Ian Mackenzie. “McMaster Film Festival.” Silhouette Review, 6 October 1967, 2. Museum of Modern Art. Press release. “New Canadian Cinema Offered by Museum as Part of Its Cineprobe Series.” 14 January 1969. Newman, Peter C. The Distemper of Our Times. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968. Nowell, Iris. P11, Painters Eleven: The Wild Ones in Canadian Art. Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 2011. Palmer, Bryan D. Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Petrie, Graham. “Ontario Film Theatre Answers Charges.” Silhouette, 22 March 1974, 2. Phillips, Tony. “Phillips on Film.” Gazette, 18 November 1966, 18. Pikulik, Christine. “Steubing Defends MTV’s Non-use of Students.” Silhouette, 12 October 1973, 10. –  “Mac Film Board Off to Great Year with Brand New Editing Machine.” Silhouette, 20 September 1974, 3. R. v. Goldberg and Reitman, Ontario Court of Appeal decision, 18 January 1971, [1971] 3 O.R. 323, 4 C.C.C. (2d) 187. R. v. Prairie Schooner News Ltd. and Powers, 1 C.C.C. (2d) 251, 75 W.W.R. 585 (1970). Reitman, Ivan. “Reitman proposes Film Board Rebirth.” Silhouette, 2 February 1968, 4. –  “Sex, Money Scandals Rocked MFB.” Silhouette, 9 February 1968, 5. Rodley, Chris. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1992. Rowe, Peter. “Film Board Head Backs Hofsess.” Silhouette, 21 October 1966, 4. –  “Background to a Happening.” Silhouette, 4 November 1966, 5. –  “26 Films in Too Short a Time.’ Silhouette Review, 18 November 1966, 3. –  “MFB: The Leader in a New Era of Canadian Film-making?” Silhouette Review, 6 January 1967, 4.

Bibliography 247  –  “U of T Psychedelic Festival Will Feature Fugs, Leary, Ginsberg.” Silhouette, 13 January 1967, 1. –  The Neon Palace (A Fifties Trip, A Sixties Trip), undated treatment, circa 1969. –  Adventures in Filmmaking. Toronto: Pinewood, 2013. Scott, Sir Walter. Quentin Durward. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1845. Silhouette. “New Club Displays Films, Photographs.” 28 September 1962, 8. –  “Parisian Orpheus Thursday’s Film.” 5 October 1962, 8. –  “Film Society Opens Season, Group Hopes to Break Even.” 11 October 1963, 7. –  “May Keep ‘Ash’ Private.” 10 January 1964, 3. –  “‘Bitter Ash’ Shut Out.” 24 January 1964, 1. –  “Contemporary, Good Festival Program.” 30 October 1964, 2. –  “Film-Maker Recovers; To Speak at Festival,” 6 November 1964, 1. –  “‘Redpath 25’ Really Packs Them In.” 7 October 1966, 2. –  “SRA OKs Fugs for Arts Festival.” 7 October 1966, 3. –  “Conway, Brown Head for New York.” 14 October 1966, 1. –  “The Hofsess Case: A Bad Precedent.” 14 October 1966, 4. –  “And Underground Films to Round Out the Show.” 11 November 1966, 8. –  “MFB on the Move.” 2 December 1966, 8. –  “Hofsess Charged with Theft over $50.” 13 January 1967, 1. –  “Film Board.” 13 January 1967, 4. –  “Rowe Fired as Film Boss; Black Zero Banned.” 20 January 1967, 1. –  “‘Sunday’ Cuts MFB Interview.” 20 January 1967, 1. –  “SEC Rejects Bid for Film.” 27 January 1967, 1. –  “‘Film Canada’ Makes Bid for Black Zero.” 17 February 1967, 1. –  “Dubious Achievement Awards 66–67.” 24 February 1967, 7. –  “‘Film Canada’ Buys Black Zero for $1500.” 24 February 1967, 1. –  “Other Clubs Offer Variety.” 15 September 1967, 9. –  “Film Board Debut.” 27 September 1968, 3. –  “Allington Rocks Film Board with New Disclosures.” 13 October 1967, 1. –  “Martin Is Not Responsible.” 8 November 1968, 1. –  “‘Orientation’ Distributed.” 8 November 1968, 1. –  “MFB Gets TV Contract.” 24 January 1969, 1. –  “Film Board Surges On.” 21 February 1969, 1. –  “CHCH-TV Will Feature M.F.B.” 26 September 1969, 3. –  “Film Board Plans Coup of SEC.” 17 October 1969, 3. –  “Film Board Candidates Withdraw.” 31 October 1969, 3. –  “Film Board Pleas Not Guilty.” 28 November 1969, 1. –  “It’s Premier Night at Mac, Four New Films Screened.” 9 January 1970, 1. –  “Film Board Secures Canadian Premiere.” 6 February 1970, 1. –  “Another Film Board Premier.” 29 February 1970, 3.

248 Bibliography –  “Free Parking Bonus for MFB Patrons at New Film Series.” 2 October 1970, 1. –  “MFB ‘POT POURRI.’” 9 October 1970, 2. –  “It’s a Date.” 23 October 1970, 10. –  “No Skin Flicks – Active Winter for MFB.” 6 November 1970, 2. –  “MFB Film Profits Divided – Hassles Still Prevalent.” 11 December 1970, 1. –  “MSU Undercuts Grad Union Film Showings.” 29 October 1971, 1. –  “Film Board Presents Rock Show.” 17 March 1972, 1. –  “After Last Year’s Problems, Mac Film Board Running Again.” 6 October 1972, 9. –  “A Four-Page Mini-feature Looking at the Past, Present and Future of McMaster Film Board.” 1 December 1972, 7. –  “Here Comes MTV.” 12 January 1973, 7. –  “McMaster Television Increases Facilities in Few Years’ Operation.’ 12 October 1973, 10. Silhouette Review. “Success in Four Short Years.” 6 September 1969, 20. –  “Mac Filmboard.” 4 February 1972, 10. –  “Mac Film.” 30 March 1973, 20. Smitherman, Mary Lou. “Comment: the Film Board.” Silhouette, 20 January 1967, 5. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Staiger, Janet. “Finding Community in the Early 1960s Underground Cinema.” In Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, ed. Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 38–74. Steubing, Harley. “Futz: A Man and His Pig – A “Love” Story.” Silhouette Review, 13 November 1970, 2. Toronto Daily Star. “Feature Film-Makers Get $125,000 Grants.” 4 July 1969, 25. –  “McMaster Film Group Gets Bail.” 21 August 1969, 3. Turple, Sheila. “Twenty Two Submitted, Seven Film Scripts Accepted.” Silhouette, 1 November 1968, 3. Tyler, Parker. Underground Film: A Critical History. New York: Grove Press, 1969. Ubyssey. “Publication Board Fights Editor Ban.” 20 October 1966, 11. Valpy, Michael. “Naked in the Box.” Globe and Mail Magazine, 7 December 1968. Variety. Review of Columbus of Sex. 13 May 1970. Veldhuis, B.A. “A Full and True Account of the McMaster Film Board, Part II, Having Now Become an Amplification of Mr. Reitman’s Article.” Silhouette Review, 16 February, 1968, 5. Weir, E. Austin. The Struggle for National Broadcasting in Canada. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965. Woll, Susan. “I Found It at the Movies.” Silhouette Review, 14 October 1966, 4.

Bibliography 249  – Review of She Done Him Wrong. Silhouette Review, 9 December 1966, 6. Wolter, Ellen. “MFB: Boob or Bust?” Collage, 18 November 1968, 2. Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: E. Dutton, 1970. Zeldin, Arthur. “Toronto’s Swingingest Theatre.” Toronto Daily Star, 1 April 1967, 28. Zryd, Michael. “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America.” In Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 182–216.

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Index

4D Man, 189 Aardvark Cinema, 68, 114–15 Abbey, Lloyd, 20 Abrams, Jerry, 55 African Skies, 205 Against Nature, 115, 119, 122 Age d’or, L’, 55, 123 Albee, Edward, 29, 124, 154, 162 Alex the Holy, 75, 226n7 Alice in Wonderland, 179 Allan, F. James, 20, 31, 44 Allan King Associates, 68, 95 Allington, Robert, 71, 82–9, 96, 111, 147, 182–4, 205 Altman, Robert, 154 Amants, Les, 130 Amchitka – The Protest, 195 Amor, Jennifer, 39 … and dionysus died, 84–7, 111, 145, 147, 182–4 Andersen, Hans Christian, 86, 184 Anderson, Lindsay, 148 Anger, Kenneth, 50, 53, 55–7, 114, 175 Angi, Jean, 94 Angry Planet, 205 Animal House, 6, 205 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 153, 188

Arndt, Siegfried, 103–5 Artaud, Antonin, 50 Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, 36 Art Gallery of Hamilton, 11 Art Gallery of Ontario, 56, 116, 156 artscanada, 116 Art of Vision, The, 225n51 Ashbee, Henry Spencer, 120–1 À tout prendre, 14–15 Atwood, Margaret, 204 Aylesworth, John Bell, 41 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 66 Baez, Joan, 197 Bain, George, 42, 47 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 66 Banaschewski, Bernhard, 12, 15–16, 31, 92–3 Baraka, Amiri, 14 Barber, Rowland, 167 Bard College, 205 Barker, Elliot, 118–19 Barker, John, 136–45 Barnes, Charles, 195 Barnes, Maryke, 185–7 Barth, John, 14 Barthes, Roland, 66

252 Index Baum, L. Frank, 179 Beard, The, 124, 221n40 Beast in the Cellar, The, 189 Beatles, 19, 68, 85, 105 Becket, 154 Bedroom Story, A, 56, 218n11 Beginning, The, 96 Begun, Jeff, 114, 121, 131 Beker, Marilyn, 32 Bell, Allan, 20, 119 Bell, Daniel, 66 Benjy, 195 Benmergui, Ruben, 71, 83 Bennett, Jim, 81, 97–100, 105, 110, 122, 209 Bergman, Ingmar, 12, 132, 137 Berry, Chuck, 24 Berton, Pierre, 156–7, 163, 204 Bertrand, Michael, 197 Best in Show, 206 Bexton, Robert, 195 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 66 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, 194 Bill’s Hat, 56 Birney, Earle, 36 Birth of a Nation, The, 46, 174 Bitter Ash, The, 13, 15 Bittersweet, 33 Blackhawk Motorcycle Club, 78–9 Black Zero, 32, 38–41, 43–54, 59, 61, 66–8, 70–1, 78, 80, 83, 89–90, 120 Blob, The, 189 Blondie (comic strip), 138 Blow Job, 132 Blow-Up, 153, 188 Blum, Heather, 194 Bond, Timothy, 168–9 Borges, Jorge Luis, 187 Bouchard, Lucien, 207

Bowlby, John, 130–1, 148–9, 151, 153–66, 170, 190 Boys in the Band, The, 154 Bracewell, Bob, 91 Brecht, Bertolt, 50 Brakhage, Stan, 25–6, 55, 221n32, 225n51 Bridges-Go-Round, 35 Brig, The, 35, 221n40 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), 4 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 4 Broch, Hermann, 66 Brown, Bruce, 176 Brown, Kenneth H., 35, 221n40 Brown, Lyal, 110 Brown, Norman O., 39, 49–50, 52, 58, 66, 68, 115, 122 Brown, Russ, 28, 30 Brown, Stewart, 37, 185, 188 Bull, Sandy, 24 Buñuel, Luis, 55, 80, 123 Burgess, Frank Gelett, 130 Burnett, Francis Hodgson, 119 Burroughs, William S., 75, 161 Burton, Dennis, 40 Bush, Jack, 56 Butter Band, 77, 99 Calamai, Peter, 220n22 Cale, John, 37 Callaghan, Barry, 57, 148 Cameron, Dorothy, 40–2 Campbell, Terry, 44, 46 Campus Cinema, 193–4, 199–201 Canadian Artists ’68, 116 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 4, 13, 41–3, 110–11, 131, 168, 206–8

Index 253  Canadian Film Development Corporation, 113, 134, 154, 158, 165–6, 204 Canadian Film Festival, 111 Canadian Film Institute, 10, 35, 55, 123, 156–7, 159, 204 Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre, 20, 54, 68–9, 71, 89, 114–15, 118, 207 Canadian Forum, 204 Canby, Vincent, 189 Candy, 194 Cannibal Girls, 194–5, 203 Cannonball Adderly Sextet, 14 Canyon Cinema, 40 Cardin, Lucien, 42 Carlos, George, 197, 199–201 Carpenter, John, 217n1 Carrington, Leonard, 155 Carroll, Lewis, 179 Cassavetes, John, 4, 13 Caughey, Hugh, 97–100, 102, 105 Chair: Studies, The, 110, 227n17 Chambers, Jack, 8, 116, 204, 207 Chaplin, Charles, 112 Chapman, Nicholas, 176–8 CHCH-TV, 132, 199 Chelsea Girls, 53, 231n20 Chicago Sun-Times, 115 Chrétien, Jean, 207 Cinecity, 52–4 Cinema Canada, 204 Cinematheque Ontario, 204 Cinematics, 46 Cinépix, 166, 205 Cineprobe, 116 Cineshow Corporation, 53 Cinethon, 53, 55–7, 68, 115, 148, 151, 225n50 Citizen Kane, 95

Civilization, 144–7, 183 Clarke, David F., 176–8 Clarke, Shirley, 5, 35, 56–7, 221n40 Coach House Press, 226n7 Cockman, William, 161–2 Cocksure, 167 Cocteau, Jean, 12 Cohen, Howard, 114 Cohen, Leonard, 54, 59, 61–3, 122, 133 Coldfinger, 19–20, 22, 39, 91, 113, 225n59 Cole, Neil, 12, 14, 20 Columbia Pictures, 33 Columbus of Sex, 7, 9, 122–33, 144–5, 147–73, 175, 185, 188–91, 193, 203, 218n8, 231n20 Confessions of an Opium Eater, 49 Connection, The, 221n40 Conner, Bruce, 35, 56 Conway, Patricia, 30, 77–81, 137–40, 177 Cool Sound from Hell, A, 217n3 Copps, Victor, 13 Corman, Roger, 4 Cosmic Ray, 35 Coughtry, Graham, 40 Cowan, Bob, 81 Cowan, Jay, 186 Crandall, Bill, 100, 106–7 Cree, Dawn, 56 Crimes of the Future, 169 Crone, Bob, 41 Cronenberg, David, 9, 32, 40, 54, 56, 61–2, 65, 67, 74–6, 168–9, 205, 224n46 Crowley, Aleister, 120 Curnoe, Greg, 8 Curran, G.W., 94, 96, 102, 122, 144–7, 183, 209

254 Index Dalí, Salvador, 80 Daltrey, Roger, 24 Dance Chromatic, 49 Dangerous Age, A, 217n3 Dark Star, 217n1 David Steinberg Show, The, 236n28 Day Off, 134–7, 140, 144, 152, 176, 206 de Hirsch, Storm, 56, 221n32 De Palma, Brian, 231n20 de Quincey, Thomas, 49 de Vos, Rene, 71 Death of Virgil, The (Broch), 66 Deep Throat, 199 Deren, Maya, 26 Dewdney, Keewatin, 8, 116, 207 Diefenbaker, John, 42 Dionysus, 84–5 Dixon, Wheeler Winston, 9, 115 Dobie, J. Frank, 73 Dofasco, 11, 160 Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 93 Duke, Daryl, 43 Dunning, John, 205 Dvořák, Antonín, 146 Dylan, Bob, 29, 96 Ebert, Roger, 9, 115 Eisenstein, Sergei, 14, 28 Elder, R. Bruce, 9, 236n29 Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB, 217n1 Eliot, T.S., 32, 105, 122 Elliott, Marshall, 100 Ellman, Richard, 28 Emshwiller, Ed, 35, 49, 54, 56–7, 174–5, 207 Encantada, 54, 71 End, 96, 102–5, 109, 122, 144, 177 Ende, Rein, 125–8, 132–3, 155, 160

End of Ideology, The (Bell), 66 Endless Summer, The, 176 Epiphanies, 117–20 Equinox, 189 Ernst, Morris, 122 Eros ’65, 40–1 Eros and Civilization (Marcuse), 66 Escape, 201 EuroTrip, 206 Evergreen Review, 28 Ewaschuk, Eugene, 52 Ewing, Iain Mackenzie, 33, 68 Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 30, 36–7, 67, 92, 115 Expo 67, 72, 74 Family of Man, The, 107 Famous Players, 111 Farber, Manny, 116 Farrow, Mia, 131 Feather, Leonard, 36 Feds, 206 Fellini, Federico, 109, 132 Ferster, Vern, 174–6 Fiedler, Leslie, 14 Field of Honor, A, 217n1 Fife, Austin and Alta, 73 Film Canada, 52–7, 83, 111, 114 Film House, 41 Film-Makers’ Cooperative (New York), 3, 20, 40, 55 Film-Makers Cooperative of Canada, 40, 207 Film for Spike, Secombe and Sellers, 32, 90 Finlay, Ian, 197 Fireworks, 50, 149, 175 Flaming Creatures, 50, 149 Flower and a Penny, A, 175–8, 188, 207

Index 255  Flowers for Hitler (Cohen), 59 For Your Consideration, 206 Fothergill, Rob, 9, 12, 20, 32, 34, 46, 53–5, 57, 68–9, 119, 123, 148, 151–2, 154, 160, 164, 168–9, 189–91, 218n11 Fox, Joan, 52–3, 156–7 Fox, Stan, 57 Foxy Lady, 166, 169, 191, 194 Fraser, Wayne, 76 Freak Film, 96, 105–11, 137, 142, 145, 176, 179 Free Fall, 49 Freeloadin’, 206 Freeman, Bill, 126 Freer, James, 217n3 Freeway, 96, 110, 206 Freud, Sigmund, 63, 66 Friedkin, William, 154, 167 From the Drain, 56 Frye, Northrop, 28 Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, 28 Fugs, The, 28, 30, 35, 47, 73 Fulford, Robert, 167 Furie, Sidney J., 217n3 Futz, 147 Garbage, 96, 100–2, 104, 109–10, 123, 137, 142, 147, 176, 198 Gass Company, The, 54, 59, 63–6, 77, 99, 225n59 Gelber, Jack, 221n40 General Post Office Film Unit (Britain), 218n4 Geography of the Body, 62, 175 Getting Together, 222n54 Getz, Mike, 114 Ghostbusters, 206 Gibson, Ian, 120–1 Gilmour, Clyde, 57, 122, 151

Ginsberg, Allen, 28, 47, 73–4 Ginzburg, Ralph, 28 Glenville, Peter, 154 Globe and Mail, 41–2, 52, 96, 157, 189–91, 206, Globe and Mail Magazine, 118 Glove, The, 218n3 Glover, Guy, 49 Godard, Jean-Luc, 109, 132, 153, 174 Godspell, 236n28 Goin’ Down the Road, 169 Goldberg, Dan, 5–6, 91–4, 98, 100, 106–7, 113, 122, 124–9, 131–2, 134, 136–7, 140, 144, 151–2, 155–9, 162, 164–7, 170, 173–4, 181–2, 188, 190–4, 196, 201, 203–6, 209 Goldberg, Harris, 203 Goldblatt, Michaele-Sue, 38–9, 59, 61, 63, 65, 177 Golding, Chris, 77–81, 177 Gone with the Wind, 190 Gordon, R.K., 182 Gould, Glenn, 66 Gouthro, Don, 39, 71 Grant, George, 11, 44, 51 Green Berets, 174 Gregory, Dick, 56 Griffith, D.W., 14 Grove Press, 120–1 La guerre est finie, 53, 154 Guest, Christopher, 206 Gupta, Sam, 32, 34 Guy, Ray, 83–4, 88 Hagen, Ross, 218n3 Hair, 148 Hamilton Spectator, 37, 39, 41, 124–5, 127–8, 156, 188 Hammond, Susan, 161 Hancox, Rick, 219n7

256 Index Hangover, The, 206 Hang-up, 54 Hanley, Jim, 168–9 Hard Day’s Night, A, 19 Harper, Stephen, 207 Harrington, Curtis, 49 Harris, Jack, 188–91, 193 Hart, Harvey, 218n3 Hart of London, The, 204 Harvey, Walt, 100–2 Haslam, David, 193–4 Haugh, 175, 182–5, 188, 206 Hayden, Michael, 47, 53 Hayes, Richard D., 167 Heavy Metal, 206 Hefner, Hugh, 81 Help! 19, 46 Hewitt, Marsha, 126 Hill, Jack, 96 Hilborn, Robin, 19, 22–3, 25–6, 32, 38–9, 46, 68, 70–1, 85, 88, 93, 205 Higgins, Billy, 24 Ho, Jean, 103 Hoffman, Dustin, 131 Hofsess, John, 3, 5, 7–9, 12, 14, 16–35, 37–44, 46–62, 65–8, 70, 72, 80–2, 88–93, 95, 109–23, 125–9, 131–2, 144, 148–64, 166–70, 172, 188–92, 194–5, 198, 201–2, 204–5, 207–9 Holiday, Billie, 217n3 Hollings, David, 39 Hospital, 95 How to Make It, 202 How the West Was Won, 132 Hutchinson, Tom, 134–6 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 119, 122 Hyacinth Child, The, 56, 218n11 I Am Curious (Yellow), 151, 154, 172 If …, 148

Infanticide in the House of Fred Ginger, 28, 36 Inkens, Valdi, 137–8 Inner Views, 202 Intermedia, 219n7, 225n50 Irma la Douce, 161 Iron Eagle, 217n3 Iron Maiden, 197 Issues and Episodes in Canadian History, 169 Jack and Jill, 136–41, 144, 177 Jackson, A.Y., 56 Jacobellis, Nico, 130, 231n4 Jason, 196 Jervis, Leon, 100–2, 122–3, 152, 160, 189 Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, 30 John and Mary, 131, 158, 208 Johnston, Simon, 186 Jordan, Larry, 55 Joyce, James, 28, 148 Jung, Carl, 49 Jutra, Claude, 14, 28, 33, 35, 204 Kamin, Allan, 47 Kanbara, Bryce, 175, 182–5, 206 Kareda, Urjo, 191 Kasemets, Udo, 36 Kaufmann, Walter, 28, 36 Keating, Kathleen, 156 Keaton, Buster, 112 Kehoe, Pat, 175–7, 181, 185, 188 Kelk, Christopher, 197 Kellam, Gary, 125–8, 133, 151, 155, Kent, Larry, 7–8, 13, 15, 28, 32–3, 35, 51, 115, 219n7 Keystone Kops, 141 Kindergarten Cop, 206 King, Allan, 148, 153, 205 Kinsey, Alfred, 122

Index 257  Knox, David, 53 Kohanik, Eric, 202–3 Kohanyi, Julius, 33 Kozowyk, Ned, 182–4 Kristeva, Julia, 66 Kronhausen, Phyllis and Eberhard, 121 Kubrick, Stanley, 93 Kuchar, George and Mike, 56, 174–5 Kuipers, Jelte, 20, 27–8, 32, 68 Kupferberg, Tuli, 28 Lady Sings the Blues, 217n3 Laing, Tom, 110 Laing, R.D., 49 Lambier, John, 151, 155, 157, 159–60, 162–5, 168, 171 Lament for a Nation (Grant), 11, 44 Landis, John, 205 Last Rights, 205 Laver, Margi, 91 Law and Order, 95 Leary, Timothy, 47, 56 Lee, Betty, 189–91 Lee-Nova, Gary, 116 Legal Eagles, 206 Legg, Stuart, 218n4 Legman, Gershon, 121 Leiterman, Richard, 169 Lennon, John, 73 Lester, Elenore, 4, 208 Lester, Richard, 19, 105 Levine, Les, 116 Levy, Eugene, 6, 94, 96, 100–2, 104, 106–8, 110–11, 113, 122–3, 132, 135–41, 185, 194–5, 198, 203, 206, 209 Lewis, C.S., 66 Life against Death (Brown), 49, 52, 66, 68, 115 Ligeti, György, 184

Li’l Abner, 88 Lipowitz, Lorne, 54–5, 57, 224n46 Lipsett, Arthur, 8, 49, 72, 207 Lloyd, Harold, 120 Locals, The, 175–6, 188 Logan, Lyn, 91–3 Love Me Tender, 132 LSD, 22, 47, 76, 118 Lucas, George, 217n1 Maas, Willard, 62, 175 Mac, 196–9 MacKenzie, Ian, 81 Mackey, Clarke, 81 MacLachlan, Lachlan, 30, 43, 70 Maclean’s, 142, 168, 195, 202 Mahler, Gustav, 66 Mailer, Norman, 28, 161 Malanga, Gerard, 36 Malle, Louis, 130 Maltese Cross Movement, 8, 116 Man in Pieces, 113, 166, 204 Mann, W.E., 156 Mansfield, Jayne, 49 Maple Jam, 199 Marching the Colours, 49 Marcus, Steven, 121 Marcuse, Herbert, 49, 66 Markle, Robert, 40–1 Markopoulos, Gregory, 56 Markson, Morley, 168–9 Married Couple, A, 95 Martin, Andrea, 203, 236n28 Martin, David, 20, 27, 38–9, 44, 54, 61, 63, 65, 68, 70–1, 77–84, 88–90, 94–5, 97, 104, 111, 113, 131, 177, 205, 209 Martin, Lawrence, 94, 100, 123, 138, 206 Martin, Rob, 199

258 Index Masculin féminin, 95 MASH, 154 Mask, The, 218n3 Matheson, Dennis, 132–3, 141–4, 197 Maugham, Somerset, 154 Mauvember, 54, 115 Mayer, Clara, 68 Mayer, John, 16 McAninch, Fraser, 96, 109, 201, 206 McCauley, Glen, 31–2, 34 McClelland and Stewart, 168–9, 188 McClure, Michael, 28, 124 McCombs, Theodore, 155–6, 159, 162, 164–6, 170–1, 190 McCracken, Melinda, 96, 105–6, 110–11, 117 McEwan, Maryke, 72–6, 183 McGill University, 160 McGillivray, George, 170–3 McLaglen, Andrew, 169 McLaren, Norman, 218n4 McLuhan, Marshall, 28, 36–7, 149 McMaster Arts Festival, 14, 28–31, 35–7, 219n10 McMaster Board of Publications, 12, 19, 29–30 McMaster Dramatic Society, 20, 27, 38–9, 68, 70, 92–4, 122, 124, 221n40 McMaster Film Board, 3, 5–7, 9–10, 20, 22, 27–9, 33–5, 38–41, 43–7, 54, 68, 70–2, 77, 81–4, 87–97, 105–6, 109–13, 117–18, 121–2, 124–5, 131–3, 136–7, 141, 144–5, 147, 161, 173–6, 178–9, 181–2, 185, 188, 192–209 McMaster Film Festival, 81 McMaster Film Society, 12–16, 95, 137, 173 McMaster Graduate Student Union, 194 McMaster Marlins, 19

McMaster Newman Club, 193–4 McMaster Student Union, 3, 6, 12, 30–1, 39, 43–4, 46–7, 70–1, 82–4, 87–91, 94, 112–13, 125, 137, 149, 173, 194, 199, 201–3; Student Executive Council, 19, 22, 29–30, 43, 45–6, 82, 132, 196; Student Representative Assembly, 30, 82, 84, 174–5, 192, 200 McMaster Television (MTV), 195–6, 199 McMaster Winter Carnival, 19, 30, 131, 194 McPherson, Jim, 168 Meatballs, 206 Medjuck, Joe, 126, 154, 206 Mekas, Jonas, 5, 8–9, 20, 22, 25, 28, 35, 53, 116, 121, 131 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 158, 165 Meyer, Andrew, 57 Midnight Cowboy, 154 Mighty Wind, A, 206 Miller Test, 130 Mitchnik, Mort, 43, 47 Mohawk College, 111, 159 Monday, 195–6 Monk, Thelonious, 101 Monroe, Marilyn, 49 Montecito Picture Company, 206 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 197 Moore, Carl Nelson, 156 Moore, David, 185 Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, 95 Morris, Peter, 9, 35, 55, 123, 156–7 Morrison, Robert, 148, 150–1, 171 Morrow, David, 99 Morse, Joan ‘Tiger,’ 47 Most, The, 81 Mothers of Invention, 62

Index 259  Motion Picture Association of America, 189 Munce, Greg, 81 Munsinger, Gerda, 41–2 Muren, Dennis, 189 Murphy, Dennis, 225n59 Murphy, Patricia, 12, 14, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26–8, 35, 38, 44, 51–2, 54, 57, 68–9, 91, 95, 109, 114–15, 168, 173, 202, Muse, 17, 19–20, 22, 25, 28–9, 31, 44, 46, 89, 119 Museum of Modern Art, 107, 116 My Secret Life (Walter), 120–2, 125, 188–9 Myers, Peter, 111 Nabokov, Vladimir, 66 Naked and the Dead, The, 28 Naked Lunch, 161 Nameth, Ronald, 115 Nanba, Toshio, 12 National Film Board, 4–6, 8, 13–15, 28, 33, 47, 72, 88, 160, 207, 217n3, 218n4 National Film Theatre (London), 123 Needham, Richard J., 167 Neil, Al, 225n50 Nelson, Gunvor, 55 Nelson, Robert, 55–7, 175 Neon Palace (A Fifties Trip, A Sixties Trip), The, 69, 113, 169, 194, 205 Nestler, Mike, 196 New Cinema of Canada, 167, 174, 191, 206 Newman, David, 39 New York Times Magazine, 4 Niagara … Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Falls, 196 Nico, 36

Night They Raided Minsky’s, The, 167 Nixon, Richard, 142, 179 Noxon, James, 18 O’Bannon, Dan, 217n1 O’Brien, Wilfred, 161–1 O’Connell, Tom, 126, 190 Oddballs, 32 Offering, The, 33 Oh Dem Watermelons, 56 Old School, 206 On Nothing Days, 81 On the Edge, 49 Once Upon a Crime …, 206 Ontario Arts: Here and Now, 168 Ontario Board of Censors, 15–16, 41, 123, 148, 153 Ontario Court of Appeal, 41, 170 Ontario Film Theatre, 200–2 Opus: One, 195 Orbison, Roy, 75 Orff, Carl, 66 Orientation, 90–6, 98–100, 104, 106, 109–13, 118, 123, 131, 134, 136–7, 141, 144, 151–2, 158, 173, 177, 179, 182, 188, 196–8, 202, 205, 208 Orphée, 12 Owens, Rochelle, 147 Paikin, Tami, 71, 83 Painter, William, 57–8, 122 Palace of Pleasure, 8–9, 54–67, 70, 72, 81, 85, 90, 109, 113–17, 120–3, 131–3, 137, 145, 148–9, 151, 156, 166, 168, 177, 203–4, 207 Paradise Lost, 93 Patrick, A.W., 16–18, 43 Patrick, Stephen, 41, 43 Peace Eye Bookstore, 28 Penelope, 175, 185–8

260 Index Penetanguishene Ontario Hospital, 118–20, 166 Perception ’67, 47, 53, 57, 73 Perry, Sam, 55, 225n50 Persona, 95 Peter Martin Associates, 188–9, 191 Petrie, Graham, 151, 175, 185–8, 200, 202, 207 Philadelphia College of Art, 8 Phillips, Tony, 34–5 Picaro, 33 Pickett, Wilson, 73 Pink Floyd, 197 Pittman, Geoff, 94 Plaxton, Jim, 54, 224n46 Playboy, 81, 114 Polanski, Roman, 137 Poolman, Willem, 53, 55, 57, 111, 224n43 Poor Richard’s Almanac, 175, 178–82, 188, 193 Popcorn with Maple Syrup, 205 Portrait of Lydia, 34 Pot Pourri, 174–5 Pottruff, Rick, 47 Pratley, Gerald, 200 Prelude to Dog Star Man, 55 Presley, Elvis, 179 Priest, Ronald, 159–60 Prison, 49 Procol Harum, 75 Proscenium, 88, 94, 195, 203 Pyx, The, 218n3 Rabid, 205 Rain, 154 Rainbow, Andrew, 175–8, 207 Raithby, David, 195 Rand, Steven, 195 Ransom, John Crowe, 36

Rat Life and Diet in North America, 116 Ray Gun Virus, 35 Reaney, James, 36 Reason over Passion, 204 Redpath 25, 20–9, 31–2, 34–5, 38–40, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51–2, 54, 58–61, 80–1, 85, 91, 93–4, 99, 110–11, 119–20, 125, 144 Reich, Wilhelm, 39, 49–50, 58, 121, 149, 163 Reitman, Ivan, 3, 5–7, 88–98, 104–13, 121–9, 131–3, 136–7, 144–5, 151–2, 155–9, 162, 164–70, 173–4, 179, 181–2, 188, 190–9, 201–9 Relativity, 35, 54 Resnais, Alain, 53, 154 Resurrection of the Body, 68, 115, 117, 119, 123, 154 Reversal, 141–4, 197 Revival, 75–6 Richler, Mordecai, 153, 167 Right to Die Society of Canada, 204–5 Road Trip, 206 Robert Lawrence Film Productions, 131 Robertson, Alan, 20 Robinson, Gerald, 56 Rochdale College, 68 Rodriguez, Sue, 204 Roffman, Julian, 217n3 Rolling Stones, 75, 174 Rosenfield, David, 110 Rowe, Peter, 12, 19–20, 22–3, 27–8, 31–2, 36–46, 49, 54, 68–76, 80–2, 84, 86, 88–90, 95, 109, 111–13, 131, 168–9, 181, 183, 194, 202, 205, 207, 209 Royal Botanical Gardens, 11 Rubenstein, Burton, 9, 56, 218n11 Russell, Ken, 154

Index 261  Ryder, Don, 200–2 Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, 111 Sales, Soupy, 56 Sam’s Last Film, 225n50 Sandburg, Carl, 231n4 Sanders, Ed, 28 Sarris, Andrew, 153 Satan’s Choice, 75 Saturday Night, 167–8 Saturday Night Live, 54, 206 Science Friction, 49 Scorpio Rising, 53, 114 Scott, Sir Walter, 49 Schechner, Richard, 231n20 Schlesinger, John, 154 Schneemann, Carolee, 221n32 Schultz, Richard, 179–81 Schumacher, Paul, 173, 175, 178–82, 193 Second City Television (SCTV), 6, 203, 206 Second City Theatre, 114 Secret Garden, The, 119–20 Secter, David, 7–8, 32–4, 51, 105, 222n54 Selby, John, 139 Selway, Shawn, 144 Seventh Seal, The, 12 Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 68 Shadows, 13 Shalom, Francois, 134–6 Sharits, Paul, 5, 35 Shebib, Don, 75–6, 168–9 She Done Him Wrong, 19 Sherry, Dave, 142–4 Shipman, Ernest, 217n3 Short, Martin, 195, 203, 236n28 Shrive, Norman, 17, 151, 157–8

Silhouette, The, 12, 17–19, 26–7, 29–31, 36, 39–40, 43–9, 76, 81–4, 89, 93–4, 100, 106, 109–10, 113, 125–6, 128, 133, 136–8, 140, 155, 173, 175, 178, 192, 195–6, 199–204 Silhouette Review, The, 25, 39–40, 81, 94, 97, 193–5 Simms, Mary, 19 Sins of the Fleshapoids, 56 Sjöman, Vilgot, 154, 172 Smith, Jack, 50 Smith, W. Eugene, 107 Smith & Smith, 196 Smitheram, Mary Lou, 44–5 Snow, Michael, 8, 55–6, 116, 204 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 174 Solipse, 54 Sontag, Susan, 108, 153 Soul Freeze, 81 Southern, Terry, 194 Space Jam, 206 Speak, Memory, 66 Starkman, Paul, 91 Steel Mushrooms, 116 Steichen, Edward, 107 Steinberg, David, 114, 236n28 Stelco, 11, 128, 160 Stereo, 169 Steubing, Harley, 193–9, 201–3, 208 Stewardess, 189 Stewart, Potter, 130, 150 Stewart, Rod, 145 Straiton, John, 34, 56 Strick, Joseph, 148, 153–4 Stripes, 206 Stu Broomer Kinetic Ensemble, 47, 56 Student Union for Peace Action, 7 Studio Lab Theatre, 147 Sturges, Howard, 115 Subotnick, Morton, 184

262 Index Suicide of Charlie Mason, 195 Sunday, 41–3, 46, 168 Supersession of Rock and Jazz, 195 Superstar, Ingrid, 36 Sweet Substitute, 15–16, 33, 115 Sympathy for the Devil, 153, 174 Take One, 49, 53, 55, 117–18, 126, 154 Tales of the Klondike, 205 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 207 Taylor, Doug, 12 Taylor, Nat, 218n3 Taylor, R.C., 52 Tenderness, 204 Ten Years in Manitoba, 217n3 Theatre Passe Muraille, 147–8 This, 32 This Is Young, 197 This Saturday, 132 Thode, H.G., 13 Thomas, Dave, 203, 236n28 Thomas, Ian, 134 Thomas, Leland R., 191 Thompson, Hunter S., 72 Till We Have Faces, 66 Tiny Alice, 124, 154, 162 Tom Jones, 135 To Paint the Park, 77–82, 84, 90, 94, 99, 104, 113, 137, 147, 177, 182 Toronto Morality Squad, 40–1, 89, 120, 126, 131, 148–9, 168 Toronto Star, 166, 168, 191 Toronto Telegram, 57, 151 Tragic Diary of Zero the Fool, 169 Tranquility Base, 134 Transfer, 56 Trip down Memory Lane, A, 49 Trudeau, Pierre, 42 Truffaut, François, 109, 185 Turner, John, 167

Turple, Sheila, 103–5 TV Ontario, 168 Twentieth Century-Fox, 111, 131 Twins, 206 Tyler, Parker, 25–6, 58 Ulysses, 148, 153–4 Un chien andalou, 55, 80 Underground Film (Tyler), 25–6 Unfamiliar to Us, 195 United States Supreme Court, 130 University of British Columbia, 13 University of Buffalo, 20 University of Michigan, 8 University of Western Ontario, 20, 34 Up Tight, L.A. Is Burning … Shit, 35 Vaitonis, Donna, 94 Valpy, Michael, 118–19 VanDerBeek, Stan, 49 Van Meter, Ben, 5, 35, 55, 207 Varsity, The, 32–4, 109 Veldhuis, B.A., 28, 90 Velvet Underground, 36–7, 59, 62, 65–6, 72 Vichert, Gordon, 18, 123, 151, 157–8, 171 Victoria College (University of Toronto), 34, 38 Vietnam War, 50, 52, 58–9, 179 Village S.T.O.P. (Sounds Typical of People), 92 Village Voice, 153 Vinyl, 56–7 von Sternberg, Josef, 120 Wadleigh, Michael, 153 Waite, Sheila, 176–8 Waiting for Guffman, 206 Walasek, Helen, 182–5

Index 263  Walker, Norman, 22–3, 51–2, 58–60, 91 Walk On, 97–102, 105–6, 109–10, 122, 147, 177 Walsh, Gerald, 160 Ward, Colin, 175 Warhol, Andy, 5, 22, 30, 36–7, 49, 53, 55–6, 58, 91, 115–16, 131–2, 149, 207 Warner, Derek, 199 Warrendale, 68, 148, 153 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 32, 105 Watson, Eleanor, 182–183 Watson, Fred, 28, 36 Wavelength, 116, 204 Welsh, Albert, 124, 128 Wentworth House, 12, 14, 18, 39, 44, 96, 124 Wentworth House Camera Club, 12 West, Mae, 19 Western Boy, 196 Western Gazette, 34 Whalen, Philip, 28 When Tomorrow Dies, 15 White Noise, 116 Who, The, 24, 59, 66, 181 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 29, 95 Whyte, H.A.M., 13 Whyte, Stephen, 13 Wieland, Joyce, 8, 55–6, 116, 204, 207

Wilder, Billy, 161 Wiles, R.M., 16–17 Wilson, John, 41 Winter Kept Us Warm, 32, 34, 81, 105, 222n54 Wiseman, Frederick, 95, 205 Wolfe, Tom, 72 Woll, Susan, 19, 25, 220n31 Wolter, Ellen, 94, 113, 188, 198 Women in Love, 154, 232n10 Wonder, Stevie, 75 Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum), 179 Woods, Jack, 189 Woodstock, 153 Woronov, Mary, 36 Wynne, Ivor, 17, 30, 41 Xenakis, Iannis, 184 York University, 38, 40, 46, 54, 156, you me gallery, 206 Young, Dennis, 116, 156, 158 Youngblood, Gene, 9, 65 Zabriskie Point, 153 Zemeckis, Robert, 217n1 Zolf, Larry, 41–3, 89, 168 Zryd, Michael, 5–6