Shooting from the East: Filmmaking on the Canadian Atlantic 9780773598041

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Illustrations
INTRODUCTION: From Anti-modernism to Global Media
CHAPTER ONE: Art Film Desire and Difference
CHAPTER TWO: The Co-op Scene
CHAPTER THREE: Documentary in the Spirit of the Vernacular
CHAPTER FOUR: Border Crossing from Art to Industry and Back Again
CONCLUSION: Displacing the Landscape
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
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Citation preview

SHOOTING FROM THE EAST

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McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago

SHOOTING FROM THE EAST Filmmaking on the Canadian Atlantic D A R R E L L VA R G A

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015

isbn 978-0-7735-4628-8 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-4629-5 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-9804-1 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-9805-8 (epub) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Varga, Darrell, 1966–, author Shooting from the East : filmmaking on the Canadian Atlantic / Darrell Varga. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4628-8 (bound). – isbn 978-0-7735-4629-5 (paperback). – isbn 978-0-7735-9804-1 (epdf). – isbn 978-0-7735-9805-8 (epub) 1. Motion pictures – Atlantic Provinces – History and criticism. 2. Motion picture industry – Atlantic Provinces – History – 20th century. 3. Television programs – Atlantic Provinces – History and criticism. 4. Television broadcasting – Atlantic Provinces – History – 20th century. 5. Atlantic Provinces – In motion pictures. I. Title.

pn 1993.5.c3v37 2015

791.4309715

c2015-904460-x c 2015-904461-8

Set in 10.5/13.5 Sina Nova with Brandon Grotesque Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

Dedicated to the memory of a trio of important Peters who helped think into being this thing called Canadian film:

PETER HARCOURT (1931–2014) Friend and confidante, programmer, critic and writer, Scotch whisky aficionado

PETER MORRIS (1937–2011) My P hD supervisor at York University (2002), a gentle giant

PETER WINTONICK (1953–2013) Documentary filmmaker, advocate and activist, keeper of a million friends

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CONTENTS Illustrations | ix INTRODUCTION

From Anti-modernism to Global Media | 3 CHAPTER ONE

Art Film Desire and Difference | 17

CHAPTER THREE

Documentary in the Spirit of the Vernacular | 149 CHAPTER FOUR

Border Crossing from Art to Industry and Back Again | 227 CONCLUSION

Displacing the Landscape | 303 CHAPTER TWO

The Co-op Scene | 68

Acknowledgments | 325 Notes | 329 Bibliography | 349 Index | 363

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ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8

Production still, The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood. By permission. Andy Jones and Mike Jones | 25 The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood. By permission. Andy Jones and Mike Jones | 29 The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood. By permission. Andy Jones and Mike Jones | 30 Production still, The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood. By permission. Andy Jones and Mike Jones | 31 Life Classes. By permission. Picture Plant | 36 Production still, Life Classes. By permission. Picture Plant | 37 Stations. By permission. Chuck Clark | 41 Production still, Aerial View. By permission. Picture Plant | 48

1.9 1.10 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2 4.3

Production still, The Author of These Words: Harold Horwood. By permission. Picture Plant | 55 Gullage’s. By permission. Picture Plant | 58 Robert Frank. By permission. Chuck Clark | 78 Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative. By permission. Chuck Clark | 80 Linda Joy. By permission. Chuck Clark | 82 8 Frames per Second. By permission. Chuck Clark | 84 Nova Scotia film festival poster. Courtesy of Chuck Lapp | 87 Ricky Leacock. By permission. Chuck Clark | 89 The nfb fire in Halifax. By permission. Harold Rennie | 102 Abandoned nfb headquarters. By permission. Darrell Varga | 103 Art Makosinski and Jean Pierre Lefebvre. By permission. nbfc | 107 3part Harmony: Composition in rgb #1. By permission. Amanda Dawn Christie | 111 Tony Merzetti. By permission. New Brunswick Film Co-op | 116 Roadside Attraction. By permission. Jeremy Larter | 128 When Ponds Freeze Over. By permission. Mary Lewis | 136 Punch Up at a Wedding. By permission. Justin Simms | 144 Andy Jones in R-Rated. By permission. Jerry Rogers | 147 Scouts Are Cancelled. By permission. John Scott | 151 Production still, Little Black Schoolhouse. By permission. Maroon Films | 172 Bill McKiggan and Tom Burger. Courtesy of Chuck Lapp | 205 God’s Red Poet. By permission. Chuck Lapp | 216 Burning Rubber. Photograph by Sandra Kipis. By permission. Ariella Pahlke | 219 Pretend Not to See Me. By permission. Katherine Knight | 220 Down to the Dirt. By permission. Justin Simms | 238 Down to the Dirt. By permission. Justin Simms | 241 Jiggers. By permission. Adam Perry | 300

x | I L LU S T R AT I O N S

SHOOTING FROM THE EAST

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Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries – both actual and conceptual – disturb those ideological maneuvers through which “imagined communities” are given essentialist identities. Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture¹

INTR OD UCTION

From Anti-modernism to Global Media In 1943, Canadian literary critic E.K. Brown declared, with a certainty that can only come from the centre of the country: “The advent of regionalism may be welcomed with reservations as a stage through which it may be well for us to pass, as a discipline and a purgation [one which will delay] the coming of great books.”² Decades later, this sentiment persists in more subtle ways through the concept of national cinema, and in funding allocations, exhibition opportunities, and critical writing. It is my view that national cinema is most interesting at the margins. This book looks at the contemporary history of filmmaking in Atlantic Canada with an eye to understanding the tactics of representation at the edge of the nation-state. My project is

not to simply champion the work but to situate these films within the context of the industrial, regional, geographic, social, and political milieu. This introduction offers an overview of the concept of region, its historical basis in Canada, and an outline of a theory of space useful for understanding this material. It ends with a brief description of the analysis to follow, along with the rationale for my selections. Filmmakers make a lot of different kinds of films; I discuss a selection of titles that help us make sense of the ideas of region, place, space, and nation. Some of the films are reasonably well known, at least in Canadian film circles, while others are more obscure. One goal of this writing is to help us consider the conditions through which films are made and unmade as art and entertainment, and as flashpoints of popular consciousness. The way we come to understand regional culture, like the twin concepts of space and place, is in a dialectical process involving, on the one hand, creative labour and geography, and, on the other, the filters of political economy, technology, networks of transportation, and communication, as well as the whole confluence of forces through which location is given meaning. The canon of Canadian national cinema when it was conceived in the mid-1970s concentrated on films made in southern Ontario and Quebec, and tended toward the prescriptive social realist style influenced by the nfb -led documentary film tradition. Work that fell outside of this spatial and aesthetic model did not receive much attention. Until the 1970s, the primary Canadian history texts focused on the “Laurentian Thesis” of development in central Canada, with the outlying regions serving mostly as sources of cheap labour and raw materials.³ Historians Conrad and Hiller point out: “In 1949 … ‘Atlantic Canada’ was born. The term was convenient, but misleading: in fact, there was no effective regional identity, and the four provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador) often followed separate and at times conflicting agendas. Although cushioned now by a kinder, gentler federalism, optimistic about the future, and part of a prosperous country, the region had to accept that the centralization of political and economic power was irreversible.”4 Regionalism is grounded in geography, but it also requires other shared interests such as class, nationalism, and ethnicity. As Ernest Forbes describes it, this complexity has persisted at least since confederation: “Maritime regionalism was a state of mind, a matter of perception and belief.”5 It is determined by politics, but these can change. For instance, in 2001, the Canadian constitution was amended to officially change Newfoundland’s name to include the region of Labrador, thus asserting provincial domain

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over Innu territory (following a long history of dispute with Quebec over the provincial boundary, a clash fuelled by economic interests related to mineral reserves). Against the ideological suturing of the nation-state by the act of naming, the art community in St John’s is strongly shaped by a sense of independence from the rest of Canada. In turn, the small population and separateness of island culture distinguishes Prince Edward Island, while New Brunswick has linguistic, cultural, and economic ties with Quebec, though it is also separated from its neighbour by its Acadian heritage. In Nova Scotia, there is a monarchist influence brought by Loyalist settlers and perhaps because various colonial battles were fought here, and there is a sense of nationalist pride coming from the fact that it is the first colony within the British Empire to win responsible government. Yet issues of race, class, and internal regional differences divide the province. All of the Atlantic provinces have strong historic links with the northeastern United States, through trade, tourism, and the cross-border movement of workers. These provinces began as colonies that extended commerce and trade (including slaves) across the Atlantic, and internally, they have colonized the territory of the First Nations. In characterizing the region, one also must take into account different patterns of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration in the four provinces. As a result, this book cannot claim any singular identity for this thing called Atlantic Canada. It is, instead, a framework for discussing place, culture, and difference. The concept of place is not fixed and timeless; forces that are at once social, political, technological, industrial, and cultural influence meaning. The way we think about the relationship between space, place, and culture changes over time and is never fully contained by geopolitical borders. For this reason, we cannot assume that the political boundaries of the nation-state can unify culture, but it is true that political, social, economic, and geographic conditions intersect in a given region and do have considerable influence on cultural expression, just as national policies and funding mechanisms help regulate the production and distribution of what ends up on our movie screens. Culture is not a singular thing, and people identify themselves and their locale through a host of factors. W.H. New makes the useful distinction between borders and borderlines as a way of thinking through the ways that boundaries structure activity and foster assumptions about culture and belonging. “Borders seem to me to be metaphors more than fixed edges; signs of limits more than the limits themselves – but signs of what kind? Perhaps of reach, accessibility … power … territoriality.”6 The McLuhanesque optimism of this distinction must not cloud our awareness

Introduction | 5

of how specific border policies shape human activity. As Hornsby and Reid outline in their book on the history of economic and cultural intersections between New England and the Maritimes, the way place is brought into being through the organization of everyday life is often at odds with the prescriptive terms of the nation-state.7 Borders are sometimes created through consensus but can also be products of police and military action and are always a function of economic interests. For instance, some business interests in Atlantic Canada have inhaled enough post-modern smoke to propose, against all cartographic and geographic evidence, that the region, which they sometimes call Atlantica, is “now part of the Pacific Rim.”8 It is an idea doubled-over by empty rhetoric of Halifax as a “world-class” city.9 Along these same lines, Atlantica is a proposed regional business consortium consisting of the Canadian Atlantic provinces except for Labrador, and including Quebec south of the St Lawrence River along with Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and upstate New York. The purpose is to designate the region as a primary port of entry for Asian manufactured goods and for the export of Canadian energy. The concept, driven by free-market fundamentalism, seeks to dismantle national and provincial regulations for the sake of expanded port traffic. In other words, the concept of place as specific entity formed through the interrelation of culture and political economy is superseded by an instrumentalist use of space as mediation zone between locations of production and consumption. A detailed study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives describes the purpose of Atlantica as not to stimulate trade between specific industries within this region but rather to serve the traffic in goods: “The Atlantica project also represents a highly ideological view of the region’s future … business unimpeded by the international border, but also freed from the boundaries of environmental regulation, minimum wage legislation, social program spending, public ownership and unionization.”¹0 This is a concept of space that negates place and culture and reminds us that place and space are never simply given as natural; they are made and unmade through social and political processes. This scheme may include the building of a super highway for the shipment of goods into the US, literally paving over the local with the emissions of global capitalism. An alternate choice would be to foster a critical and democratic consensus about the region’s political economy and possible development initiatives that make sense internally and in relation to the rest of the world. Cultural production can contribute to this dialogue, helping create a critical understanding of the conditions

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giving shape to the region, especially if it can avoid genuflection to clichés of heritage and identity under cover of neoliberal economic machinations. Region is an administrative category, but one that is shaped by subjective experience. Henry Veltmeyer explains: “Objectively, a ‘region’ is located (defined, that is) in terms of a position shared by groups of individuals in a broader system of institutionalized practices or structures which, for the purpose of the ‘development project’ (to bring about economic progress and with it an improvement in associated socio-economic conditions and corresponding changes), most commonly defined in economic terms.” He goes on to say: “As with the notion of “community” there is also a necessary subjective dimension … it also denotes a sense of identification and sense of belonging – an attachment to symbols and to place.”¹¹ The industrial base of Canada is organized around resource extraction for export and, to a lesser extent more recently, branch-plant manufacturing. Cultural nationalists bemoan the lack of access Canadian films have to the country’s screens and the way Hollywood tracks box office by treating the US and Canada as one market. These screen conditions are an outcome of much larger cross-border political-economic entanglements. When we assume that popular taste is a commonsensical expression of the general will of the population, we neglect specific economic activity that shapes this logic. To understand this, we can look at the analogy of industrial production, as organized prior to the implementation of free trade, under a branch-plant model. Patricia Marchak explains: “By the end of the 1950s, Canada’s economy was contained to a larger degree than that of any other industrial country within another nation’s economy … Political sovereignty is limited where economic decisions are made outside the nation’s borders and in terms of essentially nonnational interests.”¹² This branch-plant economy did not emerge out of thin air, but from specific spatial and economic policies of industrialization created to accommodate the rise of manufacturing in Canada during the Second World War, where development was fully concentrated in central Canada at the expense of the regions. Forbes explains: The government’s policies regarding coal, steel, shipbuilding, ship repair and general manufacturing industries in the Maritimes formed a consistent pattern. For more than a year into the war C.D. Howe and his controllers [overseers of each industry] withheld government funds for the modernization and expansion of Maritime industries

Introduction | 7

while labour were drawn to Ontario and Quebec or into the armed forces. With the realization of impending commodity shortages and the growing strategic importance of the region, they finally turned to Maritime industries only to encounter manpower shortages and limited infrastructure. The failure to resolve these problems, especially in the matter of ship repairs, undermined the effectiveness of the Royal Canadian Navy at a crucial point in the war.¹³ The point is that the location of development is not arbitrary or inevitable but is the consequence of specific actions of business and the nation-state. The same is true for the culture industries. I am interested in the expressions of the local in the context of these extra-regional influences. This expression is especially challenging for film production, which has always been dominated by commercial concerns within and outside the region. Most people living in Atlantic Canada see very little of the region on the big screen except when it serves as backdrop for a Hollywood movie. tv provides a more accessible view, with the notable success of such shows as Republic of Doyle, Trailer Park Boys, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and others. The key challenge and contradiction of regional film and television production in Canada is the desire, on the one hand, to integrate with the global/American media market and, on the other hand, to express the local as unique, even if only for the sake of market differentiation. Toby Miller et al. have shown that Hollywood is no longer simply a geographic locale: “Hollywood’s ‘real’ location lies in its division of labour.”¹4 Under this model, Hollywood films can be made anywhere, and regions come to identify cultural production with this key economic force in mind. Canadian film financing through Telefilm and its counterparts in provincial film offices is driven by commercial viability with an increased emphasis on multi-platform marketing rather than support for the theatrical cinema experience. For these agencies, the central figure in the production enterprise is the producer.¹5 Throughout this book, I look to individual filmmakers as a starting point and for signs of resistance to the homogenization of media culture but keep in mind the complex economic conditions of production navigated by producers. They are, after all, also filmmakers in partnership with directors, but ones who have to navigate the priorities and policies of the funding agencies. The idea of place and space, of the specificity of the local and of the abstraction of the region, is expressed and given shape in the exercise of power. My starting point is the proposition that spaces and places are performed in a fluid relationship with time and history rather than simply given as an

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outcome of geography and nationhood. This idea of fluidity builds upon critical interventions in cultural geography in the work of Doreen Massey, David Harvey, and others. I also borrow the idea of the performative from Judith Butler’s description of gender, and apply this process to the concepts of space and place. As Butler says: “There is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.”¹6 Our understanding of space, like that of gender, depends on point of view, whether scientific or cultural, and is linked with a historically specific understanding of time. This way of understanding the social production of space is described by Massey in distinctly cinematic terms: “Such a way of conceptualizing the spatial, moreover, inherently implies the existence in the lived world of a simultaneous multiplicity of spaces: cross-cutting, intersecting, aligning with one another, or existing in relations of paradox or antagonism.”¹7 This conceptualization is at odds with deterministic assumptions of coherence within a nation-state’s official paradigm of culture. Space and cinema need to be thought of as fluid entities. In his seminal book on spatial theory, Henri Lefebvre says that the experience of a work of art provides us with the means of slipping free from the closed and circumscribed space of the nation-state: “To lead out of what is present, out of what is close, out of representations of space, into what is farther off, into nature, into symbols, into representational spaces.”¹8 Lefebvre uses the term “representational space” to describe a spatial practice that resists instrumentalization, and it is a concept that usefully links art with counterculture political movements. The idea of a critical link between cinema and space is by no means abstract. When one views a movie, a whole series of spatial relations are mobilized – the space of the movie theatre or other screen location, public streets, and transportation (or the redesign of the private home to accommodate big-screen viewing and theatrical sound, if not in the portability of hand-held media screens), as well as the intermediary spaces of distribution, broadcasting, the web, personal relations, and even eating habits. This spatial discourse also includes the obvious act of representing space by framing a field of vision through a lens, echoed by the glow of the projector bulb as the light hangs in the air, pointed toward the luminous screen. The framing of space comes into being through all kinds of tricky manoeuvres: camerawork, lighting, and special effects, but also the technical infrastructure, aesthetic impulses, labour relations, financial transactions, and government subsidies – all of which come to privilege certain spaces or encourage certain kinds of representation. Yet the way we see space and

Introduction | 9

image remains as intriguing and complicated as ever. While globalization is an expression of neoliberal economics, and global media seeks to transcend borders, the role of the state in creating incentives for production and providing a regulatory framework is more important than ever. Canadian feature films and documentaries rely on production funds available through television broadcasters, and the flow of these funds is regulated through the policies of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (crtc ). Large and well-capitalized production firms located in central Canada are better positioned to lobby for policies that enable production in accordance with the global Hollywood framework. Smaller firms in Atlantic Canada would benefit from a regulatory framework that favours diversity and local specificity. However, there is no guarantee that a regionally based producer would be predisposed to making films that reflect the specificity of place, though all films are influenced by spatial conditions even when these are not made explicit in the narrative. Contemporary commercial cinema is produced not only as the outcome of the global flow of capital but also the result of policies and regulations that are specific to the territory and nation-state. So movies are both of and not of a given locale. Regions market themselves to potential outside producers as unique or, just as often, as suitable stand-ins for other places. The early history of filmmaking in Atlantic Canada is consistent with the experience elsewhere in the country, namely one of underdevelopment save for the exploitation of landscape in a way consistent with an anti-modern framework. Peter Morris points out: “Countries which developed film industries already had well established vaudeville, music hall, and theatrical traditions. And film producers drew heavily on these traditions when movies began to tell stories … Most of the plays staged in Canada were ‘stock company’ productions on tour from Britain, France, or the United States. Canadians who wanted to develop their careers in acting, writing, or producing for the stage almost inevitably found it necessary to base themselves in the United States, Britain, or Europe. Thus, when the movies had developed to the point of needing a particular kind of trained personnel, Canada had none.”¹9 Today, when culture is discussed at the level of policy, it is inevitably attached to a program of economic development, as a ‘culture industry.’ As I explain in Chapter 4, the original concept of a culture industry, in the analysis of Adorno, Horkheimer, and other thinkers attached to the Frankfurt School, was conceived as a negative term, where art is collapsed into the routines of a leisure economy. So how do filmmakers express locality without lapsing into nostalgia or trivial provincialism? How is otherness

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expressed, and does locality still matter? Can it mean resistance to dominant hegemony, whether nationalism or global capitalism? As Marjorie Pryse explains in the case of regional literature: “regionalism represents in narrative a sense of place that reflects a gap between dominant ideological and aesthetic interests and the interests and stories of persons who reside in the locale. Regionalism becomes, in effect, writing out of that gap, and regionalist writers construct ‘place’ as cultural, economic, geographical, and political ‘position,’ or, to use a more theoretical word, ‘standpoint.’”²0 We must first of all understand that the “gap” is not simply the black hole of geography, but is produced through networks of power and uneven development. It all depends on where we place the centre, a problem we have had ever since we decided that the earth is round. Think of the camera going round and round, guided by a robotic device in the iconic La Région Centrale (Dir: Michael Snow, 1971), a film that troubles the idea of regional boundaries. The film was shot in northern Quebec and edited in part at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where Snow was teaching for a semester; it was first screened at the school.²¹ La Région has been taken up as centrally about landscape, something considered to be the defining ground of Canadian culture, an idea that begins with a handful of Toronto artists who romanticized the outdoors – the Group of Seven. The Group produced a mythic ideal for their art as rising from the soil rather than admitting the truth of border crossing and the influence of European art, especially Impressionism. Snow’s title problematizes this claim, as it invokes a tension between region and centre and the process of centralization, as if the narrative of the nation could somehow spin coherently around the camera’s fixed axis. This film is also about the abstraction of space; about indeterminacy, flux, and the play of light; and fundamentally about the relation between the image apparatus and the ground, all the while troubling the connection between the work of art and the hand of the artist. These questions inform contemporary media production at all levels, though only sometimes with a degree of self-consciousness. Stereotypes of the region work by fixing place in time and space. The persistence of an anti-modernist discourse of place originates in part, according to Ernest Forbes, from Turner’s frontier thesis in the US, which equated westward expansionism with progress. He explains the logic this way: “The Maritimes were of interest only as a foil against which to demonstrate the validity of the frontier approach; simple logic suggested that, if the frontier encouraged progressive, egalitarian and democratic attitudes, then that part of the country furthest removed from the frontier stage must

Introduction | 11

be conservative, socially stratified and unprogressive.”²² This narrative line of thinking is consistent with the theme of anti-modernism attached to Atlantic Canada throughout the twentieth century, and to be sure, there are plenty of cultural workers within the region who foster this stereotype. Ian McKay points out that imagery of a quaint rural folk living in a pre-modern rugged landscape is not simply a natural outcome of life in the region, however much aspects of this image correspond with some corners of lived reality. The anti-modern image was produced as part of the tourism economy that developed in response to deindustrialization, which started in the 1920s. This tourist-image of place signals difference and autonomy while also functioning within the fantasy of escape from modernity – tourists were attracted to the Maritime provinces as an antidote to the chaos of life in the industrial city but the pastoral ideal of the region is itself a product of the very same forces. As McKay describes it: “The emergence of the Folk was perfectly suited to the perspective of those who were seeking new ways of imagining their communities, yet who also had every reason to hope that these new ways would entail the restoration of a comforting conservative ideal.”²³ At the same time, the most significant historical event in the city of Halifax was the 1917 explosion, where a harbour collision of wartime munitions and fuel-laden ships levelled a huge tract of the city and killed over 2,000 people. One could argue that these deaths occurred by the very forces of technology, communications, and the colonization of space attributed to modernity. Within folk imagery, the relationship with space is naturalized, the political realm is excluded, and history is frozen. McKay points out that the kinds of folk culture promoted, for example, in the Maritime song collections of Helen Creighton, tend to exclude references to political radicalism and challenges to the status quo – not to mention alcohol and sexuality – that exist in folk culture. The popular image of the folk erases history for the sake of a romanticized backward-looking ideal. McKay describes it this way: “What earlier Nova Scotian intellectuals would certainly have regarded as insulting stereotypes questioning the rationality and progressiveness of their society have become part of the essence of a province as reimagined by twentieth-century Innocence Tourism and travel writing now aggressively promoting the image of superstitious Nova Scotians spinning ghostly tales by the sea.”²4 This book spins a different tale. In the chapters that follow, I draw together commercial movies with art cinema, tourism productions along with features and shorts, documentary and experimental work as well as television

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in order to move beyond regional stereotypes, parochialism, and prescriptive ideas of regional and/or national cinema. This effort at comprehensiveness cannot play the fool’s game of trying to include every production made in the region. Instead, I strive to cover key works, explain their relevance, and suggest patterns of meaning across diverse productions. The thing to avoid is a limiting of understanding by essentializing concepts of identity; rather, I want to shed light on the processes through which images of the place are made and the ways that concepts of identity are enabled in a conversation between culture, place, and citizenship. Where do we place regional filmmaking in Michael Dorland’s formulation of Canadian national cinema? “The singularity of the English Canadian ‘industry’ was its drive to seek institutionalization in the form of an Englishlanguage ‘economistic’ discourse of export-led development. Its exactly symmetrical French-language equivalent was to seek institutionalization of a ‘cultural’ discourse that differentiated Québecois from Canadian cinema within the economy of talk of the Canadian feature as the différance (in Derrida’s sense) of the same.”²5 Can we test this assumption in the case of the region? If filmmaking began in Atlantic Canada through art cinema practices where there was an assertion of real difference and distinction, now there is a thriving industry contributing tens of millions of dollars to the regional economy. But does region then become a means of managing difference in service of capital? In a study that applies Foucault’s panoptic model to region-centre relations, Carole Skan describes how the centre is made to define excellence and innovation through a common-sense logic of regional marginalization. “If the periphery claims a work which is outside the concerns and focus of the centre, then that work will be de-valued and marginalized as parochial. Those on the periphery tend to internalize the sense of failure and inadequacy imposed by the centre, based on the centre’s definitions and interests. The centre argues that coherent aesthetic judgments, professional competence, appropriate skills, efficient management and creative control can only occur in the centre and therefore must occur only in the centre.”²6 We have to look to the margins for another view. Quebec filmmaker Jean Pierre Lefebvre, who spent considerable time visiting and giving workshops at the various film co-ops across the country, got to know many filmmakers in Atlantic Canada. Of the film scene in its infancy, he says: “I could feel such a taste for learning and a passion for making films. What was so wonderful about the burst of creativity at the film co-ops is that it really expressed differences everywhere in Canada, and of course I loved to be a part of it because that is how I have survived.” He goes

Introduction | 13

on to make the point that “the basic mistake of the federal government is to try to make one culture out of Canadian values – the Trudeau line. Canada does not exist as one unit or culture, it cannot be. But Telefilm expects the people in Halifax or St John’s to make the same movies as in Toronto. Ultimately, they want us to make American movies.”²7 Speaking with Jean Pierre reminded me of the resilience of culture as a living thing that needs to be nurtured and struggled over. His influence has been widely felt, and this includes his great sense of internationalism: “I believe we have to mix. We are citizens of the world but what is interesting is to give the other citizens of the world what we have specifically, what characterizes us as us, not in flat standard international movies.” I want to know how films reflect something integral of place and how they offer to us the opportunity to discover possible worlds uncontained by the present system as structured by the machinations of global capital. For me, the most interesting productions are those where the creative workers exercise a degree of self-consciousness about history, regionality, and the creative process – but that does not mean these films must only gaze inward. Over the course of this book’s writing, I spent a lot of time talking with filmmakers in Atlantic Canada – by no means all of them, I am sorry to say, but with enough of them to gather a sense of the possible as it is lived in place. I like what Linda Ruth Williams says about using interviews as a key component of research: “Interviews generate material that is both true and false, skewed by memory or wish fulfillment, interpretive and richly interpretable. This is why they can provide such resonant, irreplaceable materials for film and television studies.”²8 Voice is something integral to place; it is the sound that keeps it real. My interest is in troubling the borders of national cinema, and I also want to tear down some of the walls between different filmmaking practices. Many filmmakers, especially in smaller centres, work across the lines of feature fiction films, television documentary, sponsored productions, and shorts. I discuss these various forms throughout the book, with the guiding concern being how the work at hand illuminates the concept of region. My bias leans toward art cinema, and it is here that I begin in chapter 1 – it is also in the mode of art cinema that regional filmmaking is born. Key art films such as The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (Dir: Michael Jones and Andy Jones, 1986) and Life Classes (Dir: William D. MacGillivray, 1987) are discussed as productions that have substantially contributed to the region’s cinema: first, by being remarkable cinematic accomplishments and, second, because they were made before an infrastructure for production was

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in place. I analyze the narrative and structure of these films in detail because they help illuminate a path for regional cinema that unfolds on its own terms. I also situate each work in the circumstances in which it was made and in the context of related films. The point is not to lament an art cinema ideal but to explore its possibilities as a starting point for understanding the filmmaking conditions that come later. As we shall see, for various reasons the path tread by these works of art cinema has not been followed, but a key thrust of this book is to uncover reminders of this potential – especially in the book’s conclusion. Chapter 2 is a historical overview of the filmmaking co-operatives as they emerge in the four Atlantic provinces. This is the soil from which formative art cinema emerges; it is also the training ground for new filmmakers and a key hub for the creative community in each province. I point out that, today, we take for granted easy access to media and equipment, but such was not the case in the 1970s. The history of the co-ops references the establishment of artist-run centres across Canada and the foundational role of the Canada Council. I endeavour to provide the context for the co-op scene as it emerges across the country as well as in relation to some of the models of communal production located elsewhere in the world. I discuss the early films that come out of each co-op, describe the milieu and working conditions, and relate this atmosphere to the broader social conditions in each province. These organizations continue to operate and thrive, but are not frozen in the time of their origins. Changes taking place at this grassroots level reveal important trends in the broader cultural scene in the region and across the country. Far too many films are made in each co-op to ever discuss in one book, but the energy and determination of this work is an inspiration. My focus is, in part, on the recovery of otherwise lost or marginalized work and to think about specific productions that offer a critical and theoretical intervention in the broader picture of regional culture and national cinema. The extended close readings of selected films are necessary to this project of recovery. Since some of the work is not readily accessible, these readings are a window to the work. With this analysis I may be putting forward a new canon, but with the hope that the exclusions are mitigated by a contribution to the question of film and regional culture and an invitation to other writers to take up these questions and fill in the gaps. More documentary is made in the region than any other kind of filmmaking, and it is a practice that is often very closely connected with grassroots conditions. In chapter 3, I have selected films representative of the diversity of filmmaking and have grouped these films in categories that help

Introduction | 15

illuminate regionalist concerns. These include, first of all, the environment; Acadian, Black, and First Nations films; work from Labrador; films about artists; and a selection of films that deal with representations of the body. In this chapter, I discuss the establishment of the National Film Board office in the region, the seminal Challenge for Change Fogo Island films, and the Board’s accomplishments and shortcomings. Chapter 4 addresses the development of filmmaking as culture industry, with attention to television and genre production. I also deal with contemporary films that are not simply genre products but that also echo the energy of the earlier era of art cinema. These productions mark the international rise of indie cinema in a confluence of auteurism and the market-driven industry. Analysis of the culture industry dovetails with my examination of the marketing of the region for tourism, and I consider the consequences of the nostalgic inflection of place when it is remade for global consumption. Any one of the subject areas I have outlined could be an entire book, but I believe it is important to understand the interrelatedness of these various modes of production. The book concludes with an analysis of films that speak to the energy and innovations of the first wave of regional filmmaking but that are also grounded in the context, limits, and possibilities of the present. Culture is vital precisely because it crosses borders, but also because it comes from some place, not just any space.

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Do you feel the winds of change blowing around your arse? Greg Malone as Vasily Bogdanovitch Shagoff in The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood

CHA PTER 1

Art Film Desire and Difference This book begins with a close analysis of the art films that form the backbone of narrative filmmaking in the Atlantic region. The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (Dir: Mike Jones and Andy Jones, 1986) and Life Classes (Dir: William D. MacGillivray, 1987) were made years before an infrastructure for larger-scale production existed in the region, and both are accomplishments that have made possible the development of that industry, even though they are decidedly non-commercial ventures. These are also important because they are auteur films that speak directly and with great imaginative complexity to the places out of which they emerge. I use the term ‘auteur’ with caution – not as a simplistic assumption of the film’s director as the singular creative force,

but as a way of describing the channelling of expression through a distinct point of view, one that involves marshalling the energies of the creative team toward a clear artistic goal. The lengthy discussion of Faustus Bidgood draws the analogy between the specific film and the struggle for independent cinema intersecting with the social production of place. My discussion of Life Classes situates the film within Bill MacGillivray’s larger body of work. His films are complex stories about the place of the individual at the intersection of story and landscape. By beginning with Faustus Bidgood, I am suggesting that community and landscape is constructed out of the interface of social satire, politics, and delirium. THE ADVENTURE OF FAUSTUS BIDGOOD AND CODCO

Faustus Bidgood is of singular importance in Canadian film history but sadly neglected in most scholarship. Ten years in the making, Faustus is the first Newfoundland-based feature film made entirely by Newfoundlanders. It emerges from the creative energy of Codco, the great theatre (and later television) group, as well as from the Newfoundland Independent Filmmaker’s Cooperative (nifco ), both formed in St John’s in the 1970s during a renaissance of cultural activity coincident with disillusionment over the promise of Confederation.¹ It is a wild ride, an inspiration and a cautionary tale about film in the region. The film represents both the talent of its creators and the collective energy of the Newfoundland arts community – Andy Jones authored the original script and is credited by his brother, Mike, with inspiring the film, while Andy has indicated to me that Mike is the real filmmaker. Many scenes are improvised by the performers, who also participated in a collective writing workshop during development of the project.² The legacy of Faustus Bidgood helps nurture contemporary filmmaking in Newfoundland, and in 2006, the film was adapted as a stage play.³ This film could be a template for national cinema but that the madness of its long production process and the labyrinthine plot threads, not to mention the film industry’s subsequent turn toward a market-driven model of production, makes it a national cinema that could never come into being. Important to national cinema studies in Canada in the 1970s and ’80s is a declaration of difference from Hollywood filmmaking, a perspective certainly expressed in this review written for the film’s release: “I knew Faustus was a good film by the audience’s reaction and it fulfilled expectation. I knew Faustus Bidgood was a truly great film when the American critic left halfway through … just as the film was starting to get really interesting.”4 What is important is not the

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way the film conforms to canonical conventions of Canadian cinema, but how it explodes these terms. The epic scale of the film’s production invites this extra-diegetic cultural discourse, but if the completed film seems disorienting, it is a greatly scaleddown version of the original eight-hour concept written by Andy Jones. “It had the whole history of the Bidgood family in it, a big revolution with the politicians all put in work camps, an organization called the Hate-Sorry Group who hated mainlanders but felt sorry about it, the Canadian army invading Newfoundland, the Beothucks still alive, watching us on tv .”5 The character Faustus Bidgood (Andy Jones) is a polyester-clad milquetoast functionary in the provincial Department of Education with a fantasy life that includes the murder of his tormenting office colleagues and his election as the president of the People’s Republic of Newfoundland. The film takes place, like Joyce’s great modernist novel Ulysses, in one day: June 21, Faustus’s birthday and, in his mind, the day of revolution. The ordinary day of Faustus, like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, is filtered through a tangle of plot threads, some existing entirely in the character’s mind. Where Joyce references and reworks Homer’s Odyssey, there are a litany of classic and contemporary references in Faustus Bidgood, making the film a bricolage of textual citations, cinematic tricks, broad humour, and clever wordplay, and invoking aspects of the culture, politics, and spatial dynamics of its location. The idea of political independence enacted in the film parallels the Faustian bargain and mad journey of independent filmmaking in this country, especially in a region that, at the time, had very few physical and financial resources for production. Osman Durrani explains that Goethe began writing Dr Faustus in 1775 and continued for twenty-six years, a bit longer than the still considerable period of this film’s production. The Faust story is born at around the time of the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and the European ‘discovery’ of America; Dr Faustus is a worldly traveller. While the film is created at a time of disenchantment with the Catholic Church in Newfoundland, Goethe was writing his classic of German Romanticism at a time of Catholicism’s waning influence with the rise of stern Protestantism.6 The film is made within the insular context of Newfoundland, with its own rich storytelling tradition, by artists who have travelled extensively outside of the province. Mike Jones had attended graduate school, lived for several years in Toronto and New York, and was exposed to the experimental films of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and the counter-culture environment of Toronto’s Rochdale College, an infamous alternative education housing

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co-operative infused with New Left anti-war politics and drug culture. Andy Jones, along with the members of Codco, had become a well-known force in theatre by the time of the film’s shooting, having travelled extensively throughout Canada and elsewhere, performing to large and often sold-out audiences.7 Along with popular musicians such as Ron Hynes, members of Codco were among the first generation of Newfoundland artists to perform work that reflected the distinct culture and voice of this place. The film’s intense locality is informed by broader social and political concerns (related to religion, the mass media, family, education, and national identity) that follow from the experiences of working and living in Newfoundland. At the same time that these artists were performing outside the province, Toronto-based theatre director and activist Stephen Busch moved to Newfoundland in 1973 to research a film script and later direct for the Mummers Troupe. This border crossing gives a glimpse of the cultural ferment of the time. Goethe’s Dr Faustus is, according to Durrani, “a profusion of contradictory images of a restless character and his heroic but often futile actions … [who] could only fulfill his aspirations (to know all there is to know, to travel the globe at will, and to fulfill his sexual desires) through a diabolical association which would … lead to an inevitable day of reckoning.”8 Likewise, the making of an independent feature film involves a whole host of deals with the devil, starting with the demands of funding agencies and including the dynamics of working with performers, securing locations and resources, through to narrative coherence and audience engagement. This film, however, is remarkably free of compromise, made with a cash budget of $100,000 by a close-knit group of artists, with contributions from a vast number of people in St John’s, and with volunteer labour (all cast and crew were given shares in the film commensurate with their contribution). Technical resources were provided by nifco and funds were eventually obtained from the Canada Council for the Arts. They began shooting the film in 1977 and continued over several years, accumulating forty hours of material, though this footage was not developed and printed until 1980. Additional scenes were filmed in 1982–83 and editing continued throughout the first half of the 1980s. It is a film built in the editing process, as there are many plot lines, not all of which were conceived as being intercut. Late in the process, the National Film Board (nfb) finally provided post-production support, including the salary for an assistant editor, as well as lab, sound mix, and blow-up to 35mm. The nfb had no input on the content and the filmmakers would have accepted none. They do, however, tell a funny story of being unable to gain

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a meeting with then head of English production Peter Katadotis and staking out the bathroom to await his appearance in order to convince him to look at the project.9 Mike Jones describes the non-industrial production process: All the film gear – camera, sound, and lighting gear – me and the soundman and whatever craft services had come up with that day would fit inside my green Volkswagen Beetle – the very same car that was in The Rowdyman [Mike worked as a camera assistant on that film]. And so we didn’t have the big production thing at all. The story I like to tell is wanting a shot after Uncle Henny Penny, the children’s show host dressed as a chicken, quits his job because he is under suspicion of being a murderer. He goes into the liquor store and buys a few bottles of rum because he’s just going to go drink his face off. We went to the liquor store with Uncle Henny Penny in costume and the Bolex. We walked in; the sun was coming through the window, beautifully lit, and got Uncle Henny Penny picking the bottles off the shelf and standing in line to pay. And there is a guy in line who points to him and says, “Look at that.” The people in line didn’t know we were shooting a movie. We had the scene and we were out of there before anybody knew we were shooting. Didn’t ask permission. Nowadays you’d have to get permission, block the street off, put the big hmi s beating in the window, reflectors and coffee and craft services and it would have taken all friggin’ day to shoot it, or at least a morning. It was a wild and crazy movie in that sense. It wasn’t done according to the rules. Andy Jones won the best actor award at the 1986 Atlantic Film Festival; however, the award was sponsored by actra (the performers’ union) and this low-budget film was not made under union contract, so considerable tensions arose. actra has subsequently developed a contractual mechanism to allow union members to work on low-budget productions, but this film would still have great difficulty getting made today. Although the resources for filmmaking are vastly improved in this country, it is overwhelmingly directed at commercially oriented productions, not films that self-consciously defy genre and narrative expectations. If there is a devil in the room with this film, it is the weight of Newfoundland culture – the intense storytelling tradition and myopic obsession with the question of identity. Durrani says the film is consistent with the long

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history of the re-telling of the Faust myth: “Like all Fausts, Bidgood finds his work restrictive and oppressive, yet is prone to moments of vision and genius. In some ways, he resembles the type of the idiot savant.”¹0 Faustus dreams himself as political leader with a devout following, but even in his fantasy this can only come about through random barroom cajoling, and he never travels further than St John’s, spending much on-screen time as taxi passenger or asleep – at one point Faustus the President even begins to dream himself as a minor civil servant functionary while the dream-screen film of his life unspools. Like Hamlet, Faustus dreams of revenge, madness, and self-glory. He also has fantasies of passionate encounters with the women in his workplace, but even within the dream, these relationships end badly either through stumbling incompetence or violent fantasy. We see a glint in his eye, a tortured expression, and then quick cut to an axe embedded in a co-worker’s head or a man choking on a telephone receiver. Faustus’s psychological instability and eventual downfall is the price to be paid for his late-in-the-day reckoning. His Mephistopheles is Fred Bonia-Coombs (Brian Downey), his boss and Director of Special Curriculum Development for the Department of Education. Coombs has a mad plan called Total Education and has enlisted Faustus to set it in motion (but Faustus is unable to move on his own volition). This is a key plot strand within the film, but in a way, the entire film is about the process of education at the same time that the film is educating us on the imaginative possibilities of a national cinema. The bizarre Total Education plan corresponds with Bonia-Coombs’s vision of a grid pattern hanging in the sky over the entire planet, one that only he has ever seen. Success or failure and survival or death depend on one’s position beneath the grid, meaning that mastery of the rules of the grid can offer “eternal life,” as he says with beads of sweat dripping from his brow. His moment of epiphany occurred during a stroll down Gower Street in St John’s. He saw a friend in the distance, called out, and when the man turned around, he was hit on the head by a plastic bag of frozen soup, hurled from an overhead window during a domestic dispute. The man was killed by soup, and Bonia-Coombs envisioned the grid pattern in the sky and the square in which his friend had landed. His rationality refuses to see the randomness through which human experience is ordered and is a kind of reverse of the structural inequity through which the economy functions. Geographically remote places such as Newfoundland are often assumed to be economically disadvantaged as a natural consequence, but a more critical view of geography shows the complex social and political forces through

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which a given space is created and used. Neil Smith summarizes the geography of uneven development as fundamental to capitalism: “The logic of uneven development derives specifically from the opposed tendencies, inherent in capital, toward the differentiation but simultaneous equalization of the levels and conditions of production. Capital is continually invested in the built environment in order to produce surplus value and expand the basis of capital itself. But equally, capital is continually withdrawn from the built environment so that it can move elsewhere and take advantage of higher profit rates.”¹¹ We are conditioned to see landscape as external to us, but the point is that while there is a reality of the ground under our feet, how we understand and interact with that space depends on who we are and how we are made by ideology and by our material conditions. We can see this contradiction expressed in Bonia-Coombs’s crazed idea of the grid imposed upon the irrationality and chaos of everyday life. I would also suggest that it is visible in the way Telefilm Canada vets screenplays for plot points to occur in accordance with predictable formulae or grid-logic of genre moviemaking.¹² As Faustus pleads like a cult disciple: “No Mr BoniaCoombs. There is no luck, there is only grid reality.” This contradiction is expressed in the film’s view of the Catholic Church and its role in education. The dominance of the church in the culture and economy of Newfoundland cannot be overstated. It is only following a 1997 referendum endorsing the elimination of religious-based school boards that a secular public school system was established. Most of the artists discussed here have had religious education integrated with everyday life. Mike Jones says that it is the turn away from organized religion that has fuelled the explosion of creativity: I think we owe the church gratitude for disillusioning us so severely. The comedy we see in Newfoundland largely exists because of that disillusionment. We were told a huge story, a big story, and it turned out not to be true, not to be credible at all. People were really seriously fucked-over mentally by the story of what a sin was and how easily you could go to hell for all eternity – and that’s a very, very long time – and it turned out not to be true. And that’s a good awakening. I think we owe a lot to the church for that, for being so stupid to push that down our throats, knowing that we were going to wake up eventually. So I believe there’s a connection – religion and comedy are related in that way.

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The seeds of disillusionment are sown in the film’s flashback to Catholic school. Following Faustus’s stroll along the harbour and through old St John’s (we see a streetscape of the late 1970s that no longer exists) with his imaginary guardian angel, Vasily Bogdanovitch Shagoff (Greg Malone), who is also his political and media advisor in the fantasy revolution scenes, they return to the classroom. Shagoff is Wagner in the Faust narrative, as Durrani says, “attempting to warn him against taking his visions too seriously.”¹³ But in the vision that follows, the warning is not against fantasy but against the mad claims to power in institutions of church and education. Approaching the stern Victorian building, they first see a teacher dangling a student by the ankles out of an upper-storey window while the boy repeats his lesson: “Napoleon Bonaparte was an emperor not a king!” Inside, students are being shoved by teachers, are lined up for a strapping, and watch as a teacher (Chris Brookes) bangs his head against the chalkboard nine loud times to count out the answer to a mathematics question. In a French-language class, the priest, played by Mike Jones, explodes in outrage when a student responds with the incorrect gender attached to a noun: “I went to school, I went to university on the mainland for five years so that I could come in here and listen to you tell me l -e ? The archiepiscopal corporation built this school brick by brick, they built that staircase out there so that you could come up here and into this classroom and tell me l -e !” Just as the school is built brick upon brick, so too is the student torn down when the teacher’s barely repressed rage boils over. The filmmakers affirm that this scene, while played as a dream, is largely a documentary of their own school experiences. In an interview at the time of the film’s original release, Andy Jones says: “There’s a lot in there about murdering children. I don’t think it’s there because I want to kill children but probably because, when I was a child, I was afraid I was going to be killed … I was so relieved to get out of school. I thought university was wonderful; no one was going to beat me. At school, everything I did was based on guilt and fear.”¹4 Faustus is “the one foretold” to greatness in the writings of Reverend Dempster Peebles, his great grandfather. We are shown mock-archival footage from what is explained as the first feature film made in Newfoundland, “years in the editing … only fragments remain,” self-consciously echoing the prolonged process of The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood. The Dempster Peebles scenes are excerpted within another film within the film, “The Faustus Bidgood Story,” (all conveyed within a television news segment within Faustus’s dream), and we see Faustus falling asleep during the premiere screening, dreaming himself back into the role of functionary in the department

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Figure 1.1 | Mike Jones, on the ground with Bolex camera, and Andy Jones, as Reverend Dempster Peebles gone “moonie,” in The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood.

of education. Andy Jones plays the Reverend Peebles as a crazed madman tearing pages out of the Bible with clenched fists following a sermon on the suffering to follow the collapse of the fishery (met by the congregation with open laughter): “Where is the God of love promised in the New Testament? Well, I’ll tell you, he’s standing right next to you, waiting for you to commit a sin so that hell on earth that you are suffering now can last for an eternity. You don’t deserve the name of Christians, you don’t deserve the name of snakes!” Fear is laden with seduction, and the firebrand preacher is also an entertainer, “charming the merchant ladies of St John’s with his ethnic dan-

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cing learned in Scotland as a boy.” Helen Peters explains the role of church in the film and in the larger society by drawing the link between this institution and the function of mass media. “Religious education takes some blame in the film for initiating and promoting mental instability in the individual; it has played a role in preventing the establishment of a healthy relationship between the sexes; and it has helped to condition people collectively into being passive spectators for the media, capable only of listening and watching while news events are predigested for them and explained to them.”¹5 Here, church is a theatrical stage and its history is told in the farcical tale of madman Peebles. Television news has a similar pedagogical function, teaching through the intoxicating mix of entertainment and anxiety, a secular alternative to Catholic education. In the film, the flagship show of the province’s educational broadcaster is Uncle Henny Penny. The main character (Bryan Hennessey), dressed as a chicken, chants foolishly until he too loses his mind in scenes filmed in the media studio of Newfoundland’s official post-secondary education institution, Memorial University. Henny Penny is first described, in a radio broadcast playing in the background, as “one of Newfoundland’s greatest educators,” but the character derives from an English folk tale about a chicken that believes the sky is falling when an acorn lands on its head. Unfortunately, Uncle’s reputation is shattered by the suspicion that he is a serial killer of children. We learn late in the film that the killer is the Minister of Education, Eddie Peddle (he kills with poison gum and leaves notes on the bodies of his victims signed by Uncle Henny Penny). In recurring shots of Peddle as a child, we see him pushing a baby pram along a dock until finally the baby tumbles into the ocean, echoing the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1926) and setting the stage for Peddle’s future role as murderer. Eddie Peddle is yet another devil influencing the life of Faustus, and he turns out to be just as crazy. His job qualifications are neatly satirized at the end of the film when we are told that he is a doctor: “The Minister of Education should have at least an honorary p hd .” If religious education is marked by violence, the secular model is equal parts foolish and brutal. The relation between Faustus’s individual narrative and the history of Newfoundland is the backbone of the film. Writing at the time of the film’s screening of a work-in-progress, art critic Robin Metcalfe suggests that the film’s energy comes from the province’s relation to centres of imperial power: “This panorama of a world gone mad recalls the apocalyptic vision of Brueghel, for Faustus Bidgood, with all its madcap silliness, is fueled by a dark

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moral outrage. Mike Jones has tackled squarely the problem facing serious Newfoundland artists: how to do tragic justice to the history of a people who were only forty years ago a nation … Five hundred years at the bottom of the Imperial dung heap having denied them the dignity required of the classical tragic hero, Newfoundland artists have responded with a distinctive brand of self-deprecating wit.”¹6 The carnivalesque structure of the film transforms the idea of tragedy into a palimpsest of the creative and social forces mobilizing the possibility of independent cinema – as act of madness and of possibility. The stereotypical way that Newfoundland has been viewed in the rest of Canada is turned on its head while drawing a line between the descent into madness of the main character and the political conditions of the province’s place within the nation-state. If Faustus is mad, at least this condition provides some reprieve from the anonymity and alienation of everyday life, and his psychological instability complements the madness of provincial politics. The story begins with a poem from Premier Jonathan Moon: I’m dead as a doornail Though very high strung I can make loud noises Though I have no lung I’m fun at parties Though I do not drink I have no brain And yet I can tink. He offers this strange verse as a clue to his location, for it is his regular practice to go into hiding as relief from the burden of leadership. The joke is based on province-wide radio broadcasts of the 1950s where solving a riddle was part of a contest sponsored by various local companies. Politics is a children’s game and Moon is an amalgam of the many eccentric politicians in the province. The cheering response to his discovery, inside the piano (“I have no brain / And yet I can tink”) at the annual Provincial Government Employees’ Benefit Concert for Crippled Children, is matched by the devotion of the masses for Faustus in his dream as leader, and both scenarios correspond to the delusions of grandeur on the part of Joey Smallwood during his final years as premier. During a meeting of Cabinet ministers, we see various politicians rehearsing roles for their contribution to the benefit con-

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cert as the absurdist theatricality of everyday life merges with politics and the mass media. Henri Lefebvre describes the poetry of everyday life as performance: “In everyday life or in the full glare of the theatre footlights, human beings always behave like mystifiers, who manage to ‘play a role’ precisely by exaggerating their own importance … [The actors] extend reality, and are equally real; acting explores what is possible; in the abstract, play-acting does not exclude sincerity; on the contrary, it implies it, while at the same time adding something extra – something real: the knowledge of a situation, an action, a result to be obtained.”¹7 While Lefebvre is redeeming the everyday as poetic, theatricality in the film is more a consequence of absurd social and political relations. Lefebvre’s ideas draw from a mix of Chaplin and the Situationists, and extend to Jacques Tati – and I would add Andy Jones on this trajectory. Lefebvre describes Chaplin’s comedy as rooted not just in physicality but also “in the relation of this body to something else: a social relation with the material world and the social world. Naïve, physically adept but spiritually innocent, Chaplin arrives in a complicated and sophisticated universe of people and things with fixed patterns of behaviour.”¹8 In an intellectual biography of Lefebvre by Rob Shields, the link to Chaplin and resistance to the instrumentalization of space is manifest: “One can see in the Charlie Chaplin films … a portrait of the reign of machine-like repetition, which threatened to crush independent human spirits. The central question for all radical thinkers was thus how to ‘leave’ the ‘everyday world’ in which people’s creativity, spirit and social life was suffocated by the trivial routines of the new production lines.”¹9 There is a strong affinity between the plight of the innocent clown Faustus and these precedents. Faustus the dreamer is the image in reverse of technocratic political and social rationality, just as Faustus Bidgood the film turns the conventions of national cinema on its head. The clowning theatricality of politics is met by the petty nature of its smalltown variant when we learn that Eddie Peddle approves the Bonia-Coombs plan for Total Education, not because it is brilliant or well-presented, and not because of a blackmail plot, but simply because: “Fred’s the premier’s cousin, b’y.” The dream narrative is intercut with the willful blindness of politics and media. In his dream role as president, Faustus must go back to sleep, enter a fantasy stage, in order to make his decision whether to stay in power or step down after one year, as promised in the revolutionary constitution. In the dream, the mass media pay close attention to Faustus as he falls asleep. In the world outside of his dream, the media attend to trivia and the spectacle

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Figure 1.2 | Bryan Hennessey as Uncle Henny Penny, dressed as a chicken and running through the TV studio for the “Find the Poet Premier” call-in show in The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood.

of politics rather than the material conditions of everyday life. The crowd in Faustus’s dream believes in the story they are told, that he is the one foretold. While children are being murdered, a game-show program is broadcast: “Find the Poet Premier Crisis Centre,” hosted by the Minister of Culture, Hon. Claude Squires. Citizens are invited to call in and guess where the premier is hiding. If they guess correctly, they win a prize determined by the spinning of a roulette wheel – could be a waffle iron! A mad Uncle Henny Penny running through the studio, in full chicken costume, interrupts the show. The program hosts are unruffled and rationalize the story of a premier periodically going missing as affirming the idea of Newfoundlanders as poets. When they are finally able to report on his resurfacing, no account is given of the fate of Faustus, crushed beneath the falling piano in which Moon is hiding, though they do note that if he survives this Moon landing, he should be awarded with whatever comes up on the prize wheel.

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Figure 1.3 | Faustus (Andy Jones) dreams himself as premier, standing on stage to announce his resignation, in The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood.

The falling piano is the last of many plot threads that come together on the stage of the benefit concert. Here, politics becomes theatre just as the return of the real premier crushes the imaginary premier, Faustus – imagination is killed on the theatre stage. Before then, we see Bonia-Coombs’s Plan b , his effort to get approval for Total Education by blackmailing Eddie Peddle. The blackmail involves revealing to the province’s population that this politician, who ran on the platform of being a true Newfoundlander and storyteller (in a recurring scene, he tells a joke involving a wheelbarrow, a mainlander, and a bag of tea, for which we are never given the punchline), once worked in Toronto as a flamenco dancer. Eddie Peddle’s dance inadequacies become grounds for blackmail over his political-identity credentials, but as it turns out, there is a litany of government scandals and crackpot schemes that

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Figure 1.4 | Andy Jones as Faustus confronted by Robert Joy as Eddie Peddle on stage at the Provincial Government Employees’ Benefit Concert for Crippled Children with Jim Rillie (location sound) and Mike Jones (cinematographer) in The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood.

could have been used for blackmail, echoing the many industrial development fiascos of the Smallwood era. Behind the scenes at the theatre, Faustus discovers live bullets in a prop gun and believes that Bonia-Coombs intends to kill Peddle over Total Education. When Faustus finally speaks truth to power with his announcement, “There is a murderer on the stage,” Peddle believes the reference is to him. As it turns out, a jealous boyfriend of the woman Peddle is having an affair with planted the bullets – she gives birth in the rafters above the stage. Faustus’s noble intentions are again misdirected; the baby is tossed over the rafters by Eddie Peddle (who is later praised in the media for delivering the birth) and caught by Bonia-Coombs, who declares the child “the first grid baby.” Finally, to escape this madness on stage and in the convoluted plot, Faustus is wheeled away on a stretcher – following a dispute over claims to the body

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between the ambulance attendants and the mental health strongmen. One ambulance is marked as “Physical” and the other “Mental,” but the boys from the mental have papers, giving them claim to the body. In a scene shot at the St John’s airport with full runway lights and a fire extinguisher blasting out of the back of the van to create a smoke effect, Faustus finally gets off this epic stage, back through the grid, and to outer space. We see his image alongside that of Buddha, Christ, and Captain Canada in cape and underwear. This final layer of information confounds all claims to verisimilitude and leaves us in a delirious dream state whence we came. This adventure does not go unpunished. Twenty years later, in Congratulations, a short film commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival to mark its 25th anniversary in 2000, Mike Jones introduces himself as “an ex-filmmaker of the cheap independent variety.”²0 The film is a measure of the place of the region with the substantial changes to the industrial structure of Canadian filmmaking. Now, films are made on a grand scale with all the apparatus of Hollywood – notably, helicopters like the one we see in Congratulations plucking the filmmakers from an isolated seaside house back into the media apparatus where they participate in the making of a congratulatory greeting-card film for the Toronto festival. Along the way, they dream of past cinematic adventures and we see excerpts from Faustus Bidgood. Now, the regional film artist is museum curiosity to be brought out of storage when the project of a national cinema has some currency. The undercurrent running through this film is the fact that Faustus Bidgood would never be funded within the contemporary apparatus of production, not least because the many layers of comedic self-reference in the plot remain irreducible to genre and narrative conventions. This fantasy of a popular cinema as measured by box office is the piano falling on the dreamer, the dream of a national cinema that can never come into being. Faustus is the one foretold. I began discussion of Faustus Bidgood as growing, in part, from the great creative force that was Codco, and conclude this section with this remarkable group. The original Codco members have dispersed, but the seeds of that show remain in the tv show This Hour Has 22 Minutes. In between was Wonderful Grand Band, a very popular regional music and variety tv show on cbc (1980–83) with Ron Hynes. Helen Peters describes the Toronto premiere of the first Codco theatre show, Cod on a Stick, in 1973: “The play was highly political, presenting Newfoundland culture to the mainland audience by turning the pain and embarrassment of being ‘foreigners in a strange land’ into side-splitting but pointed humour, a combination which left On-

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tario audiences not sure who was laughing at whom or why.”²¹ Prior to the 1970s, the majority of theatrical work in Newfoundland tended to be conventional British plays staged for the merchant class. Codco’s work offers, among many themes, a sharp satire of the idea of a folk culture tradition and the array of stereotypes directed at the Atlantic region: happy if simple and impoverished folk living in timeless tradition upon a landscape of mythic beauty. In The Sisters of the Silver Scalpel (originally made as part of a 1975 stage performance and completed by Mike Jones as a stand-alone film in 1980), the hosts of a mock television wildlife-safari show venture to the Newfoundland hinterland in pursuit of a rare breed of nuns who subsist on ‘holy eucreysts.’ The target of satire is both the peculiarities of language, social norms, gender and the mass media, political culture, and the dominance of the Catholic Church in Newfoundland life as well as the marginalization of the region in the political and media discourse originating elsewhere. Upon arrival in what they call “the socio-zoological wild country of Newfoundland,” the Silver Scalpel tv -adventurers set up camp by expelling the residents of a rural dwelling, a not too subtle reference to outport resettlement (a provincial government program beginning in the 1950s where remote communities were strongly encouraged to abandon their settlements and move to more centralized towns, ostensibly to provide better employment and social service resources). In the televisual logic of the characters, which parodically mimics the logic of both the Catholic Church and the provincial government, a wild nun is “helped” by being captured and tied to the hood of their car as they drive through St John’s. Throughout the film, the characters speak with earnestly contented mid-western accents: “This little nun seems to have turned a blind eye to science. I guess she couldn’t be expected to know, poor little thing, that what we were doing to her was for her own good. Would you just look at that, she just kept praying and praying the whole time.” The voice of reason, paternally easing us into situations for our “own good” is set against the absurd logic of colonial relations and the inequity of power. In a later Codco skit called “Pleasant Irish Priests in Conversation,” censored for broadcast by the cbc , Andy Jones’s priest, who describes himself as so “saturated with booze and masturbation” that he does not know what to call his own sexual orientation, says: “Pardon me for laughing, father, but I was just remembering your buttocks. In the shower room, many years ago. I saw them a number of times, and fine round buttocks they were, too.” This is one of many scenes criticizing the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church

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that troubled the cbc , and censorship eventually prompted Andy Jones to leave the show in 1990. In Tommy: A Family Portrait (Dir: Mary Sexton and Nigel Markham, 2001), a portrait of Codco member Tommy Sexton, who died of aids in 1993, we are give an entry to the performer and to this group’s ability to navigate between local cultural references and those of the media spectacle of the late twentieth century. For instance, we see a news clip from church spokesman Father Hickey, an outspoken critic of the blasphemy of Codco, whom we later learn is himself sent to jail for molesting children. The hypocrisy of everyday life is met by the transcendence of comic satire. Sexton himself was the first openly gay tv performer in Canada, and many of his roles directly challenge homophobia. His Codco lounge singer performs “I am a Homo, h -o -m -o ” as much anthem as declaration. A number of his characters are cross-dressers (among many, he did a great cold and sexually aggressive Barbara Walters, and televangelical-wife-felon Tammy Faye Bakker as even more over-the-top than the original), again displacing stereotypes of regional backwardness and making satire out of urban concerns with media and celebrity culture. The Codco tv show was produced in Halifax, but St John’s is the setting that we see during the opening credits. They returned to the province to shoot a number of scenes for the show, but there is a mix of belonging and an outsider perspective (because St John’s is a rather closed community) reflected in its themes. For instance, tensions expressed in the satire of tourism are mirrored in the question of belonging and authenticity. Tradition becomes subject for tourist spectacle while artists take up the subject of the local and turn the tourism economy on its head, in part through self-mockery. Two Codco sketches have particular resonance with this theme of tourism. “Ship Inn Man” is a mock music video shot by Mike Jones at the Ship Inn pub. This pub is an important meeting place for the city’s art community, and at one time, the Codco office was located above the bar. Here, drunkenness and violence are part of the landscape, as the song lyrics attest: Beautiful Ship Inn man, some days you never come to, As soon as you open your eyes you reach for your smokes and your booze. You wonder why nobody is ever insanely attracted to you. Up on your feet, b’y. Go brush your teeth and I’ll talk to you. The lyrics are sung in cheery upbeat style like a travelogue on the wonders of the natural environment.

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“Anne of Green Gut,” described in narration as the tale of another orphan from a not-so-precious island, is a sketch featuring a tedious non-stop talker who arrives in the less-than-pastoral community of the Gut, named after the raw effluent pouring into the harbour. Like many newly arrived and self-appointed experts, she goes on and on about the need for new economic development. By the end, Anne becomes a tattooed, chain-smoking tough coming down from a drug addiction. There is no myth of innocence in this counterpoint to Anne of Green Gables, even as Mary Walsh plays Anne in freckles and ponytail. In her description of Codco’s humour, Helen Peters cites Bakhtin’s idea of carnival, which draws upon the grotesque to undermine pretension: “To consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted.”²² Here, we are invited to see place and culture beyond prevailing politics and economy locked, until now, inside the narrow frame of official culture. LIFE CLASSES AND THE FILMS OF W I L L I A M D. M A C G I L L I V R AY

Life Classes (1987) is the story of Mary Cameron (Jacinta Cormier), a loner in Cape Breton working in her father’s drugstore and passing the time with a paint-by-numbers hobby. She becomes pregnant by Earl (Leon Dubinsky), the local bootlegger turned video pirate. Rather than face the antagonism of the small minds of the small town over her status as a single parent, Mary moves to Halifax. Her growth as a mother follows her development from hobbyist to full-fledged artist, and it is as mother and artist that she is able to construct an ideal of home – in the end returning to Cape Breton but refusing the tyranny of social conservatism. Mary is not formally enrolled in art school and not intending a professional career, but it is from this position at the margins that her art becomes fully realized. She works at a department store and is a friend of fellow-employee Gloria (Francis Knickle), an art student at nscad . When Gloria bemoans the utter boredom of her art history classes, Mary agrees to come along. The lesson she attends is on the serious subject of abstract expressionism, but it is delivered in a flat monotone by a speaker self-satisfied in the value of what he is presenting – modelled on Donald C. Mackay, president of the College during the time MacGillivray was a student (the lecturer is played by Jeremy Ackerman, one-time leader of

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Figure 1.5 | Mary and Marie (Jacinta Cormier and Jill Chatt) in Life Classes.

the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party). Although the lecture is dull, it provides one of the opportunities for Mary’s world to open up, in part through her opposition to abstraction. Mary is making a claim to space and culture in the face of its liquidation, and this is precisely where the film begins and concludes, with an extended slow-motion tracking shot through a shopping mall. Viewing this image today, we can see the mall as icon of the transformation to a service-sector economy that is just underway at the time of the film’s production. Prominent behind a stack of televisions on the mall floor is the sign “liquidation,” tipping the film’s hand to the themes of media, materialism, and the displacement of cultural specificity. The opening is explicitly self-referential with the actor Jacinta Cormier seen on television interviewed by a cbc news reporter on the nature of her character, Mary, at the Halifax opening

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Figure 1.6 | Director Bill MacGillivray (left) and cinematographer Lionel Simmons on location for Life Classes.

of the film Life Classes. Jacinta says that she does not fully know the character, but also speaks of the shared connection she carries with her fictional counterpart. As the camera moves toward the television monitors, it passes a fiddle player (played by Trudi Peterson, the lead in Vacant Lot discussed below) performing the music that becomes the theme song of the film. In the mall, the Celtic-inspired music functions as a kind of memory of local culture in an otherwise fully commercialized environment. Today, buskers would not even be permitted inside the enclosed commercial space. The fact of economic relations and social class is present from the title and forward throughout the film, but the economy becomes part of the condition of the characters rather than a system to be radically transformed. Mary’s introduction to art making is first as a worker, a drawing-class model, and later as a performer in a video art happening. Her own artwork, large-scale drawings

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of herself, her child, and especially of her lover, Earl, are cogent responses to the material conditions of her life. Life Classes was originally released in 1987, and while it received considerable international attention, for instance as the Canadian selection for the Berlin International Film Festival, it has otherwise fallen through the cracks – or should I say, the gaping holes – in Canadian film distribution. The since-bankrupt distributor, Cinephile, was also handling another then-prominent title, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (Dir: Patricia Rozema, 1987), and in the fragile economy of Canadian film at the time, it is the Ontario-made production on the subject of art that is celebrated. This is also a period of transition from the art house to the international film festival as venue for indie films (with pay-tv an important component of financing) and the rise of a school of filmmaking post-1970s art cinema that comes to be known as the Toronto New Wave. Mermaids emerges from within this Toronto milieu, and as much as it is an interesting film about art and identity, it does not challenge or draw attention to existing locations of power. In contrast, Life Classes presents the question of power as it plays out within the region (Cape Breton to Halifax) and in relation to other centres (Halifax to New York). The conditions of Mermaids’s canonization are in part a consequence of availability and distribution profile, but the film has also gained critical interest by corresponding with then-prevailing notions of Canadian national cinema and the important desire to champion the work of women filmmakers. It is also a Toronto film, and while its main character is marginalized, she circulates through the national centre. Life Classes reconfigures the relation between centre and margin, particularly through the subject of education – in this way it echoes this theme in Faustus Bidgood. These are very different films but are made by filmmakers well acquainted with each other and equally concerned with the way institutions have functioned to colonize consciousness, a subject dryly satirized in a Life Classes scene with a visiting art star at nscad . A German artist delivers, through translation, a high-minded and jargon-filled lecture on the value of her abstract sculptures to a group of students too intimidated to respond. Mary asks pointed questions about materials and work methods and is surprised to learn that the artist does not actually make the objects with her own hands. Peter Harcourt has pointed out to me that this artist works in a manner similar to that of a film director, and the style of the art is minimal and even austere, not unlike that of MacGillivray’s films.²³ We see her stoic posture on the video screen as her talk is read in translation, and what she does say in German, though not fully translated on screen, is in response to

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Mary’s questions: “I come all the way from Europe to answer shit like this! Do you think it will be better in Toronto?” The classroom is a place for interpretation, but for this artist, meaning and value are determined by strict claims to cultural worth. Later, the film invites us to see that when culture is performed, the consequences cannot always be contained within existing systems of knowledge and power. Mary arrives at the art college out of curiosity, to relieve Gloria’s boredom, and in order to earn additional money – the life lesson of Life Classes is of the relation between economy and culture. But what does one do with that relation? Or how does one mobilize or obstruct agency? Mary is hired by a visiting American artist to participate in a broadcast art happening. Participants stand naked inside a translucent enclosure and each performs an improvised song intended to evoke deep childhood memories. A musician accompanies the singer, and the artist mixes all the stories and musical lines together for broadcast. The incongruity of this contemporary video performance art being located in Nova Scotia is taken up in MacGillivray’s documentary about the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1988), made just after Life Classes, on the attraction of major American art stars to the college in the 1970s. In Boring Art, the relation between place, institution, and art making are situated in the broader global economy of cultural production where, for a brief time, this institution held a privileged position. The broadcast signal of the art happening is intercepted in Mary’s hometown on Cape Breton Island by Earl, on his satellite receiver. He then retransmits the show throughout the community. Her performance consists of a narrative about becoming a mother and having to move away just like her own mother did, following marital infidelity. The song expresses a claim to authenticity in the face of social constraints, namely the idea that her child, born out of wedlock, is illegitimate. But what is legitimacy? She sings, in both Gaelic and English, the lament: My child is my mother returning. Her mother, my daughter the same. She carried us all in her yearning, our sorrow, our joy, our pain. In the live moment of the video performance, broadcast from margin to cultural centre and incidentally to Cape Breton Island, Mary casts back to her Gaelic heritage and the memory of her own mother in order to tell a story

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about her daughter in a poetic rendering of the link between past and future in creating the present. This performative bridge between past and present mirrors that of the regional and the global. Mary’s performance draws from family history in order to see a way out of the present. This event causes her considerable embarrassment since she did not intend to perform nude in front of her home community, but it then allows her to return and make a home that is unconstrained by the prevailing vision of place. The film concludes with Mary clearing a view to the ocean around the home she inherits from her grandmother. The ocean is an image of mobility, fluidity, and the source of life. At the same time, the one-way terms of conventional broadcast media are remade. For a brief moment, community members are no longer passive recipients of a mass culture produced elsewhere and instead become active participants in the construction of meaning. Mary’s return allows her to continue the matriarchal line of family, and she is able to bring her own father into her new life as artist and mother. The film also gives us a brief educational excursus in the politics of space and place through an account of Africville, a historic African-Canadian community at the edge of Halifax on the harbour, bulldozed by the city in the name of modernization during the year of Canada’s centennial in 1967. Mary rents a room from Mrs Miller (Mary Izzard), a black woman who owns a boarding house. Both are outsiders in the city; they become friends, and Mrs Miller is also a kind of mother figure. She consoles Mary after an embarrassing incident at the department store, where she inadvertently offended a black female customer, a minor moment of conflict in the broader politics of race and place. They are walking along the shoreline, and Mrs Miller gestures to the shipyard and adjacent footings of what is the MacKay Bridge spanning the Halifax harbour, saying that she once lived there, in Africville. The City of Halifax neglected needed services to the area for water and sewage disposal, police and fire protection, and encroached upon the community in ways that demonstrate the regard it held for these citizens, notably by building a garbage dump on its edge and allowing highly polluting enterprises to locate on the site.²4 The eventual bulldozing of this community is an outcome of institutionalized racism, power, and elite notions of modernization and urban development. Mrs Miller describes how the devastation following Africville’s destruction led to her husband’s departure, and later we see cbc archival footage of homes being demolished, with a speaker describing how families were relocated using the city’s garbage trucks. The history of the place is more than in its destruction, but it is that devastation that structures

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Figure 1.7 | Mike Jones as Tom in Stations.

our contemporary understanding. I do not want to suggest, and nor does the film, that there is a simple equivalent in Mary’s decision to move to the city and the forced movement of residents out of Africville, but the characters share an affinity as outsiders subject to the power dynamics embedded in space and place. On one level, the film is about the concept of legitimacy in art, but the Africville reference details this concept of legitimacy in the broader scope of community and the material conditions of everyday life. It is this idea of community, made in the process of leaving home and then returning, that is the narrative frame for MacGillivray’s 1983 feature Stations. The film is a loosely structured narrative of a character named Tom Murphy (played by Mike Jones), former aspiring priest now working as a television journalist in Vancouver. He is disenchanted with his career and seeks greater meaning by undertaking a more personal documentary project consisting of interviews with the travellers he encounters on the transCanada train line from Vancouver back to the east coast. While Life Classes

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is feminist in outlook and character, Stations and MacGillivray’s earlier featurette, Aerial View, are stories of masculine identity. Stations is shot largely with a hand-held camera and available light during a regularly scheduled passenger train journey, and many of the encounters are improvised. It has an open-ended narrative structure, and the writing credits are shared with members of the cast and with cinematographer Lionel Simmons. This journey through the space of the countryside invites reflection on the socialeconomic forces structuring nation and region. The railway is a significant icon in the founding narrative of the nation-state, but in Atlantic Canada, it is often identified with a narrative of economic decline since it helped centralize manufacturing in central Canada at the expense of the region. The relentless motion of the train reminds us of the mechanical unspooling of film through camera and projector. By now, the train is also icon of an industrial era overshadowed by non-analog systems of exchange. In the film, Tom is a survivor of the old system, the church, and its clash with the modern. Neither system nurtures him. Like the wanderings of rootless characters in the work of art cinema filmmakers such as Wim Wenders and Michelangelo Antonioni, Tom’s search for self-identity is made in the context of modern anonymity and the breakdown of community and traditional institutions. What does it mean to travel backwards across Canada when the final leg of the trip, the return to Newfoundland, has to be completed by ferry and bus since the national-icon railway does not connect? The first departure of Stations comes after Tom has left the seminary and is saying goodbye to his father at a train station. Michael Jones Sr plays the father, and it is his home-movie footage of his son during Mike Jones’s actual time in the seminary that we see at the beginning. Jones Sr was a film distributor based in St John’s, and three of his children (Michael, Andy, and Cathy) grew up to be performers, in part inspired by the exposure to movies in the home, and traces of personal narrative guide the film. The first image we see is an extended step-printed shot of candidates for the priesthood walking solemnly through the grounds of the monastery with hands held in a prayer position and eyes down. The image can be taken as devotion and separation from material concerns, and perhaps that is the case of the original footage, but the use of this material here is informed by widespread disenchantment with the church in Newfoundland. We see a young Michael Jones stepping into his father’s car in front of the seminary; he is beaming with pride and youthful confidence. The visual treatment of the home-movie footage evokes nostalgia for an idea of home as something that has utterly dissolved into air, a sense reinforced by the Latin speech on the soundtrack, later switching to English as Tom reflects on his decision. 42 | S H O O T I N G F R O M T H E E A S T

Tom assures his father that he is making the right choice, but the father responds by saying that his own decision is also correct, to cease contact with his son. This sentiment is delivered with an understated matter-of-fact tone, but the rupture is felt across the time and space of the film through the theme of fractured community. Much later, near the end of his journey back home, Tom encounters the artist Robert Frank, iconoclastic father figure to the nascent film scene in the region, who indicates that there is a price to be paid for not following convention and expectation. He describes life in Canada as an adherence to convention: “Stay in line, show your boarding pass with the number on it.” The dialogue is improvised, and Frank is noticeably uneasy in front of the camera, toward which he glances when he says: “Stories are boring, and you are the man who makes stories.” His story as an artist is to break rules and resist expectations. Tom is not an aimless wanderer: his purpose is to record experience. But the longer he stays on the train, the less engaged he is with his profession. The journey turns nasty when he encounters a drunk (played with belligerent intensity by Barrie Dunn). The drunken ramble includes an apology to his father, tinted with the certainty that can only come with regret. With that confessional speech, the camera is turned onto Tom and the question of whether he has recorded any dead bodies. The film is made in the wake of Vietnam and civil rights era media coverage of violence, and Tom admits to one, referring to the suicide of his seminary friend, but I wonder if he is also speaking of the various parts of himself having died along the way? The image of landscape flicks past the open space as the characters stand between train cars and in the dynamic relationship between self and image, subject and camera, character and space. Following this intervention, the landscape images are increasingly dreamy as the train passes through stations along the way. Even though the spatial journey on the train is forward moving, for Tom, it is a free temporal experience. As is the case throughout MacGillivray’s films, there is no final resignation to the forces of fate. We make meaning and invent place through a shared storytelling experience that is the projection of light upon consciousness. The connections Tom makes with fellow travellers are more fully realized when the camera is not rolling. The film expresses a resistance to technocratic rationalization and seeks instead the communal energy of storytelling and song, not something to be found back in the sober images of the seminary. Signalling Tom’s return to St John’s, we see him finally happy as he sits in a crowded pub audience for a comedy act performed by Michael Jones’s brother Andy. The act consists of references to Canada and the perception of this place in the eyes of those who come from away. In particular, Jones Art Film Desire and Difference | 43

describes the fact that movies are now made here, and that Newfoundlanders now get to play the part of background characters in their own home. Like a scene near the conclusion of Aerial View, discussed below, a house party is held to mark Tom’s return to St John’s. In this joyful and energetic atmosphere,Tom is reunited with his father, while MacGillivray’s own father performs a solo song as part of the spontaneous and organic spirit of the event. The return home is a return to a more organic kind of representation. On Signal Hill, overlooking St John’s, we see Tom and his father pose for a photograph that then cuts to home-movie footage from the same perspective. Father and son are together, but the two must now re-establish the terms of their relationship. There is work to be done, pictures to be made, and stations to pass. MacGillivray’s hour-long Canada Council–funded drama Aerial View (cowritten with cinematographer Lionel Simmons, 1979), about an architect disenchanted with his profession and with modern materialistic culture, expresses ideas and thematic concerns that come to dominate this filmmaker’s remarkable body of work. These include a concern with landscape, art, and creativity; the place of the individual within community; and a lament for the erosion of local distinctiveness in homogenized modern society. MacGillivray’s films express a contradictory politics of radicalism and conservatism along the lines of what David Creelman observes as the central tension of Cape Breton–born writer Hugh MacLennan. The affinity can also be made with another Cape Breton writer, Alistair MacLeod, the subject of MacGillivray’s documentary Reading Alistair MacLeod (2005). These writers create characters that are in exile from home and caught between the desire to return and the need to become part of the diasporic flow of modern life. While MacGillivray is identified with the canon of Canadian cinema, this is often out of a need to include ‘the regions’ within the canon; in any case, he operates resolutely outside of the central-Canada nexus of production and reflects what Creelman describes as the dominant cultural condition of the region, that of the “competing tensions of nostalgia and hesitation” along with a restlessness that comes to replace an easy relation with the land and rural life.²5 These are films with neither explicit political themes nor characters locked into conventional roles of social protest. On the idea of social conservatism, Creelman says that it “reinforces the notion that the individual’s identity must not take precedence over, indeed could never be maintained or stabilized apart from, the broader community and wider social order.”²6 In MacGillivray’s films, this does not take the form of a reactionary and nos-

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talgic yearning for a past and tradition that may never have existed. In this way, they are unlike Nova Scotia writer Ernest Buckler’s novels where, as Creelman points out, the modern urban world is a “threatening power.”²7 The thrust of Creelman’s analysis is to discern the direction of realist literary representation in the context of a region that, prior to the 20th century, was a significant economic force, but is now characterized by deindustrialization, underemployment, and out-migration. The way that we come to know space is shaped by these social conditions: landscape is not simply an idealized location; it exists as a component of character. Janice Kulyk Keefer echoes the experience of loss and the erosion of tradition manifest in regional literature: “Under the relentless pressure of poverty, all the forms of love – of place, of wife or husband, of parent or child – become entrapment by regret, betrayal, or sheer necessity.”²8 MacGillivray’s Reading Alistair MacLeod consists of notable writers reading passages from MacLeod’s work influential to their own writing and understanding of the relation between place and language. Collectively, they express some sense of MacGillivray’s own ideas of landscape and culture, and unintentionally provide a kind of summary of the filmmaker’s concerns. Newfoundland writer Lisa Moore makes the point that it is impossible to be nostalgic when presented with prose images that depict suffering set amidst a harsh landscape. Nostalgia is a perspective on displacement and deindustrialization that is manufactured by an existing politics that reinforces economic and social relations, but it is by no means the only way of seeing space and place. Moore makes the point that this is the cumulative narrative of globalization, that the capital accumulated and traded upon in centres of power is made on the backs of regional resources and working-class labour. MacGillivray frames his work within the dominant cultural superstructure, one that I would say is born from the material conditions explored in MacLeod’s stories: “We are all in our society pretty much victims insofar as we are living and breathing within the dominant culture. Very few of us have the privilege of having a voice.”²9 The saliency of realism in both MacLeod’s and MacGillivray’s work echoes Raymond Williams’s insistence that realism is politically vital precisely because it is grounded in the materiality of experience (and in the development of class consciousness). As he states: “it is necessary to describe … an environment if we wish to understand a character, since character and environment are indissolubly linked.”³0 While straightforward, this perspective is by no means simplistic; instead, it becomes a way of expressing a subject’s relation to place and the flux of modernization. In Reading, Irish

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writer Colm Tóibín describes the vitality of MacLeod’s stories, working with what he calls “that old material … my four grandparents are buried in the same graveyard. I know what graves have space left in them. And all the family is there. I’m from there. But I live here.” This relation to place, one of simultaneous belonging and alienation, of how we can be attached to landscape while also disconnected from locale, gives light to memory, migration, and exile. The film is fundamentally about the craft of storytelling and the process of making meaning. MacGillivray’s films are about the difficulty of holding on to communal ideals related to place and landscape in the face of the many forces of one-dimensionality. Geoff Peterson (Kenneth Umland), the nonconformist architect of Aerial View, builds a home along the wooded and rocky Atlantic shoreline (in Herring Cove, outside of Halifax, before this area became populated by urban commuters), making strict use of local materials and a vernacular design. Since the home is isolated from community, this project becomes the fulcrum for the unravelling of his family. Alternatively, we can describe this setting as a bold attempt to reformulate home and community unconstrained by the compromises of modern commercial culture. Over the course of the film, we see the house under construction. While it remains unfinished, it does offer a tentative beginning to Geoff ’s ideals, and the process of construction may even echo the invention of tradition upon which community is sustained; or, it may be a rebuilding of something that never really existed. The building of the house marks the dissolution of Geoff ’s marriage to Mary (Claudia Hulme), though he is able to sustain a loving relationship with his young son, Sammy (played by the filmmaker’s own son, Jess MacGillivray, who also plays Tom’s son in Stations). Andrew Burke makes a similar point about the integration of vernacular architecture in the working-class bohemian milieu of north-end Halifax in Andrea Dorfman’s feature film Parsley Days (2000), discussed later in this book, a film influenced by MacGillivray’s oeuvre.³¹ Aerial View begins with the prototypical image of family: Geoff, Mary, and Sammy are viewing home movies projected onto the white surface of the kitchen refrigerator, with Sammy interrupting the flow of images for a glass of milk. The scene already suggests a yearning for a happiness that has since passed, for an ideal that perhaps can only ever exist as an image. The home movie is of the couple at a playful time early in their relationship and includes Geoff ’s architecture partner (Joel Sapp) and an old friend, Tom (Mike Jones). In this footage, we see Tom shooting a Super 8 camera with a carefree style, invoking a stylistic challenge to the film proper, and to the culture of

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filmmaking in the region. Tom is presented as an idealized figure without compromise (though that unravels at the end). Peter Harcourt points out that throughout MacGillivray’s films there is a concern with self-referential imagery, such as this home-movie sequence; the role of the media journalist in Stations; the subject of art, performance, and mass media broadcasting in Life Classes; and music as vehicle for self-expression in Vacant Lot. As Harcourt says, “It is as if MacGillivray wants to critique his own representational practice, his own use of cinema both to explore the self and to search for a present by recording the past.”³² This self-critique functions in multiple directions, both within the film as vessel for memory and outwardly toward the region’s nascent film community. Geoff ’s criticism of architectural practice – the homogenization of style and erosion of local distinctiveness – can also be directed at the film industry, including the National Film Board, which, by the time of Aerial View’s production, has an established office in Atlantic Canada but is viewed at the time by numerous filmmakers, including MacGillivray, as a colonizing power. This is how he described it to me: “What they were doing was informing and defining the kinds of films that were going to be made here. Rather than saying to us, ‘Here is the National Film Board, we can help you to make your films,’ they would say, ‘Here is the National Film Board, here are the films we want to make, and we may hire you to make them.’” It should be noted that the Atlantic nfb office did provide some assistance to the making of Aerial View, and that MacGillivray has subsequently worked on several projects with the Film Board and credits regional executive producer Rex Tasker with insightful editing guidance on Stations, an altogether un-nfb film. The point, however, is how the terms of the local are mapped at this formative stage of film culture. In fact, anger at the Montreal head office of the nfb helped fuel the production of Aerial View. In the late 1970s, MacGillivray, along with several other filmmakers from across Canada, participated in an nfb training program for documentary filmmakers who wanted to move into dramatic work. They were invited, at the conclusion of the two-month program, to pitch a project. MacGillivray presented Aerial View, which was dismissed out of hand and, when he declared his intentions to make the film with Canada Council funds, was told by a prominent nfb filmmaker: “Frankly, Bill, I hope you fall flat on your face.” MacGillivray goes on to explain: “Well, this was at the end of the training program, and if you are not doing what they want you to do, then fail. It’s not, let’s explore and see where it goes. If you are not doing the nfb model, you fail.” It is not surprising then that the main

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Figure 1.8 | A small crew and equipment set-up for Aerial View: Left to right: Bill MacGillivray, Lionel Simmons, Gordon Parsons, and Pat Kipping.

character of Aerial View, like Mary in Life Classes and Tom in Stations, is in a kind of exile. Aerial View sets up a dialectic between the omniscient view from above (at the beginning and end we see the landscape from an airplane) and the experience of place, home, and family lived on the ground. Geoff ’s rejection of his profession crystallizes as he ascends a concrete office tower (the soul-destroying brutalism of the Halifax Maritime Centre) to meet with a wealthy client for a home design project pitched by his business partner as a random combination of styles selected from a catalogue. This approach is entirely antithetical to Geoff ’s progressive but altogether rigid ideals where there is no place for hybridity or the accommodation of needs different from his own. The home he constructs is an alternative space, but for it to flourish, it depends on a degree of integration with the community. There is some suggestion of this in Geoff ’s relationship with Tom. At the film’s conclusion, however, Tom confesses to having capitulated to material needs by taking a job in the civil service. This dialogue is played out in a remarkable Antonioni-inspired fog-shrouded setting on the edge of the ocean and with a partially submerged, abandoned freighter looming in the background. The

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landscape is stark, beautiful, and open to possibility, but it is also cruel and lonely. From above, the landscape is beautiful and rendered harmless, but the from-above perspective also feels empty. It is on the ground where meaning is made. MacGillivray’s less-successful 1989 feature, Vacant Lot, also makes important use of airplane imagery. Trudi (Trudi Petersen) yearns to escape her stifling home by becoming a musician. She lives with her emotionally distant mother in a trailer park in Dartmouth, and the ferry ride across the harbour to urban Halifax is an important visual motif of the film, expressing mobility but also distance between place of residence and a more satisfying ideal of belonging. For hipster Haligonians, Dartmouth is the nether reaches, even though it is only a ten-minute trip across the harbour. Trudi becomes friends and, by the end, falls in love with David (Grant Fullerton), a much older musician who is very cynical of the allure of the rock-and-roll life. David is a surrogate father figure for Trudi, whose own father, a hopeless drunk, abandoned the family to pursue a musician’s career. In David, there is an element of Robert Frank’s guitar-making artist Elmore, in Candy Mountain (1987), who has retreated from the ruthlessness of art as commercial enterprise and is living, as David says, “at the end of the road” in Nova Scotia.³³ David draws Trudi into his habit of observing airplanes taking off and landing at the Halifax airport, a ritual substitute for the more productive time of his life spent travelling through airports while touring in a successful band. Vacant Lot begins and ends with an evocative long-lens shot of an airplane taking off, visualizing the yearning for elsewhere expressed by the characters, but also suggesting a vacancy in the present locale. This desire for travel, at once a coming-of-age motif and a means of confronting psychological demons, is taken up in MacGillivray’s Hard Drive (2014), made two decades after the release of the director’s previous fiction feature. The film is driven by an intense jazz soundtrack, youthful energy, and a theme of alienation fostered by our collective obsession with computer screens. While MacGillivray’s other dramatic films have a visceral connection with the region’s landscape, Hard Drive has a strong urban feel that, like the characters, is not tied to the specificity of place. Unlike the beautiful landscape of Cape Breton Island in Life Classes, the geography we see in Vacant Lot is cold and barren – yet in both cases, the way we see space is through the limits and possibilities of the characters. Trudi’s band sets out on a small-town tour but it ends after the first gig, with the band’s van breaking down and the group being forced to walk through the rock-strewn and bone-chilling cold. The band, called Vacant Lot, is led

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by a strong-willed punk-feminist who decries David’s technical talent, as she is more concerned with having ‘something to say’ in the music. The band performs well, but they are obviously just learning their craft. The landscape reflects other emotional vacancies: Trudi’s father is a country music player, and his absence from her life is felt when David describes how country music was once prominent here, mentioning Nova Scotia icons Hank Snow and Wilf Carter, but has become a relic of the past. In a touching scene near the end, he brings Trudi to the rundown farmhouse where he was raised by two uncles. There is a moment of hope with the sound of someone playing country music inside the house, but we soon learn that one uncle is long dead and the other does not recognize David. The film concludes with the characters departing during a snowstorm for Los Angeles, the promised land of popular culture. In discussing MacGillivray’s 1990 video-feature Understanding Bliss, I want to recall Faustus Bidgood and the broader milieu of the first generation of art cinema in the region. In Bliss, we see an excerpt from Faustus of the great Newfoundland educator Uncle Henny Penny and the narrative similarly takes up the twin themes of education and culture. Faustus has iconic importance here because MacGillivray’s film is about holding on to local culture in the face of external forces of homogenization, and by the early 1990s, there is a shift away from art cinema and toward a model of mainstream film production. Peter Breen (Bryan Hennessey) is a cultural studies professor teaching a class on language and storytelling through Memorial University’s Extension Services. He tells his class that the presence and voice of the storyteller is as important as the content itself. The class is located downtown, and we are not given a clean tourist-postcard image of St John’s; instead, the palette is muted and the context is economic decline (the film was made just a few years prior to the total collapse of the cod fishery). The Extension Services Department has also played a key role in community development and outreach programs to rural areas, with emphasis on preserving traditional folk culture, and it has had a hand in supporting filmmaking in the province. Peter screens his Uncle Henny Penny performance for the class, explaining that it is a scene from the most important film to originate in Newfoundland, also noting that the film remains largely unknown. It is a scene directly from Faustus Bidgood, but by casting it as “unknown,” Bliss is pointing to the marginalization of independent art cinema. Peter then stresses the importance of humiliating oneself as an essential part of the ritual of storytelling. This idea of humiliation is bound together with desire, culture, and a lived experience rooted in place.

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Peter’s students hang on his words, even if, like all students, they are distracted by their own more immediate concerns. He exercises an easy paternal familiarity with the class, and his populist talk is set against the hierarchy of knowledge and the regulation of culture exercised by the university (keeping in mind that until the 1970s, Memorial University was dominated by British authorities and American researchers in the Department of Folklore).³4 Peter proclaims: “You don’t need a p hd to know a good story. You don’t need Canada or America coming down here telling you what’s worth holding onto, what’s worth saving. Remember who you are. Shoot the picture out of the tv ! Listen to your goddam nannies. Tell your own stories. Get to know who you are yourself for Jesus sakes. Forget the experts and the dilettantes who don’t really care. Besides, more often than not what’s important is not the story but the storyteller, the event of the story being told.” The speech is a manifesto for regional culture, the saliency of storytelling, and the integral relation between narrative and location. MacGillivray includes a video clip of traditional reciter John Joe English in Peter’s classroom, and what we experience is the distinct pattern of vernacular Newfoundland English. On an adjacent screen plays a clip from On Rooftops (Dir: Justin Hall, 1980), a black and white experimental film visualizing the unique rooftop structures of St John’s and affirming the link between the topography and the structure of place with language. In this way, past and present are integrated and the meaning of each is transformed. Another video clip used in the classroom is from Tom/Mike Jones in the border-crossing journey that is Stations. Taken together, the work of Mike Jones and Bill MacGillivray offers a dynamic unfolding of the relationship between home and away, art and culture, voice and place, the modern and the folk. In Understanding Bliss, Hennessey describes St John’s as a place you have to get to know by walking, and he echoes those very lines a decade later as a subject in Rosemary House’s documentary Rain, Drizzle and Fog (1998) about the defiant culture of the city. As House describes it, “This is still a hard rock land, a dirty old town at the back of beyond. And yet the St John’s townie is so proud, you’d swear we lived in Paris.” In addition to his career as an actor, Hennessey is also a writer of, not surprisingly, stories that take the city itself as character. These stories express the contradictory relationship between the city and the surrounding rural environs. His generation of artists are urban-based but are influenced by the revival of tradition and folk culture, in part out of a political awareness of the cruelty of outport resettlement. Yet, as townies, they grew up with a lingering prejudice toward rural life.³5 Hennessey’s story “Townie” concludes with a sense of accidental

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unity: “Bayman and townie alike, we all cling precariously to this inhospitable rock, one foot on solid ground, the other swinging free. Surrounding us on every side, the indifferent waves roll in relentlessly, year after year … An uneasy alliance of elements mixed together in the uneasy balance of life and death.”³6 The love of place hangs close with disgust. In another Hennessey story, the weight of isolation, underdevelopment, and the misery of climate growls warning: “The sun don’t shine when you need a light. This town looks maggoty, like a big rotting fish slowly decomposing beneath my feet. Now that the snow is melting, all the garbage that’s been thrown on the streets and sidewalks all winter emerging: bottle caps, rubber bands, bar wrappers, chip bags, soggy cigarette butts, broken glass, dog shit. The sidewalks are soft and squishy, stinking to high heaven.”³7 Hennessey also figures prominently in Rosemary House’s Bloomsbury Cabaret (2004), which emphasizes the affinity of St John’s with Dublin – two places outside centres of power but defined by a vital cultural life. House’s film is a celebration of James Joyce, the impenetrable modernist writer who also enjoyed a good pop song. In Bliss, Hennessey’s Peter Breen speaks with some bitterness toward the city that he could never leave and of his time on the mainland as a student. MacGillivray was born in Newfoundland but left to pursue an education. He is now based in Nova Scotia but speaks of St John’s as having a formative effect: “The map that is in my head is St John’s. And this culture [in Nova Scotia] is not that far removed. I go back to Newfoundland as often as I can. I have my family, all Newfoundlanders, so I don’t think I ever left. I left the island but I never left Newfoundland … Although the film that I am most known for was actually a Cape Breton story [Life Classes], and I’m not from Cape Breton. But it’s basically a Celtic culture. It’s a survivalist culture, an insular culture.” Bliss asks us to consider the relation between culture and education: the question of what is culture and who gets to play the role of teacher. The film itself takes an open approach to authorship, one that demystifies the idea of art and culture as removed from everyday life. Peter’s secret lover is Elizabeth Sutton (Catherine Grant), a literature professor who arrives from Toronto to give a talk on Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield is an icon of imported culture at odds with local vernacular. In describing the writer, Angela Smith says: “She was to seize and shake her respectable middle-class family in the course of her short life by the intensity of her passion for exploration, in personal experience and in her writing.”³8 Elizabeth is twice removed from experience, as reader of Mansfield and as outsider to St John’s. Peter and Elizabeth have carried out their clandestine affair during travels away from home and through calls and letters, but it has a different resonance at home. Peter desires real transformation 52 | S H O O T I N G F R O M T H E E A S T

and contemplates a more public declaration of his love for Elizabeth. She wants their passion but none of the necessary complications that come with love. Noreen Golfman points out the dilemma for Peter: “From imagining an idyllic retreat together to his roots, Peter gradually realizes the nexus of contradictions that disturb this romantic fantasy. Home is both the past and a present he no longer inhabits. With a foot in the worlds both of here and there, and of then and now, Peter is unsurprisingly shaky with a growing awareness of the complexity and burden of difference. As with home, difference changes all the time.”³9 Peter reminisces about his childhood home while on a visit to Signal Hill, but Elizabeth can only feel the bone-chilling cold on the windswept location overlooking St John’s. Elizabeth has been professionally humiliated by the lacklustre response to her Mansfield reading. Peter’s sister May explains that it is not that people are not interested, but that this high modernism is disconnected from contemporary material conditions and that there is suspicion of authority coming from elsewhere. The dialogue is another instance where regional distinctiveness is asserted against the dictates of cultural authority. As May explains: “We don’t want to be told to be interested.” It is through the vernacular rhythms that people retain some control over their lives. Peter and Elizabeth sneak a kiss on the street; May intrudes but feigns not to have noticed that her married brother is having an affair. They are walking down a narrow alley between buildings, in a kind of liminal space between public and private, between love and humiliation. Even a liaison in Elizabeth’s harbourside hotel is complicated by the presence of cleaning staff – the hotel room is a home-away-from-home that can never be home and St John’s is a city where it is difficult to keep secrets. This affair is not between young lovers, but between two people entangled in the complications of family and community, and it is not a simple matter to make time for passion and desire. We see Elizabeth’s reading through the videotape eye (May is recording so that Peter can later use it in his storytelling class). The image is flat and perfunctory, in stark contrast with the hand-held video camera used in Peter’s class during staging of a Mummers Play. The classroom as media studio and performance space is where the film really comes alive and where it locates culture. Mummering is a traditional folk practice in Newfoundland, but originating in Ireland and England with analogies worldwide. It existed in two forms, as ribald house visits during the Christmas season and as theatrical plays featuring aggressive action and infused with reference to magic, heroism, and fertility. It is a ritual of liminality, as Margaret Robertson describes, “when deviance was sanctioned, without jeopardizing normal social values or relationships, but when the social mores were also upheld.”40 Mummering Art Film Desire and Difference | 53

is a central icon of the revival of traditional Newfoundland culture, in part because it is associated with the outports and, as pagan ritual, is at odds with the authority of the church. The practice became a flashpoint for nativism where the everyday is transformed into tradition. Gerald Pocius explains: “What were in previous generations ordinary everyday practices that were not considered as exceptional embodiments of cultural identity become, during periods of nativism, objectified symbols of the very culture.”4¹ Key to this revival is the Mummers Troupe, a theatre company working in St John’s from about 1972 to 1982 and using this tradition as an entry for political theatre work. As Mummers Troupe founder Chris Brookes describes: “The essence of the Mummers Play lies in its proximity to the audience. It would never work on a stage. It thrives on being outrageous, on taking liberties, on toying with that elemental act of surrender within the actor-spectator relationship … The performance is a ritual desanctifying of the house, an exorcism of the spirits of stuffiness, of sameness and safety and decorum which have accumulated in the home like dust balls all year.”4² In 1861, mummering was made illegal if practised without a license granted by the government (though it most certainly continued), since disguised practitioners were a threat to the elite and merchant classes.4³ The counterculture impulse is central to the renaissance of tradition and the place of the Mummers Play in the film. Peter explains the lesson to be learned as a kind of willed humiliation: “to humble ourselves.” It is anarchic and cathartic, and quite unlike the search for internal deep meaning associated with modernism. Stylistically, while the camera is fluid throughout the film, using extended shots to follow characters through the streets and into buildings, it is especially free here, panning wildly between various characters. Curiously, the class performs the play for themselves rather than as a ritual of public interaction, so it becomes a forum for cultural identity rather than broader social commentary. Chris Brookes points out: “In 1972 [at the formation of the Mummers Troupe], there were less than two dozen Newfoundlanders still living who had actually seen the Mummers Play in performance [excluding the wider practice of Christmas home visit mummering].”44 Performance provides the foundation for a new communal formation. Elizabeth arrives to observe the class but is not allowed to be a passive spectator. She walks up the stairs to the classroom, and two costumed students charge up from behind, sweep her off her feet and charge into the scene. She is given a makeshift costume and compelled to participate as a character called Dame Dorothy. Her line is: “Although my temerity is small,

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Figure 1.9 | On location for the documentary The Author of These Words: Harold Horwood.

I am the biggest bully of them all,” and then Peter/Hennessey responds: “A man of mighty mighty strength,” followed by lines peppered with references to Canada and to Uncle Sam. The Mummers Play invites the students to play, and they do, with enthusiasm – and in so doing, also get to think about story as active process integrated with the conditions of place and history. When it is successful, the classroom and the process of education are transformed. A pedagogy of story and landscape is central to MacGillivray’s much earlier artist portrait, The Author of These Words: Harold Horwood (1982), but inflected by the author’s tragic worldview, as Horwood says: “tragedy is at the root of all life on earth … the angel of death bears the gift of life with the other hand.” Horwood was a novelist and non-fiction writer who was

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originally close to Smallwood around the years of Newfoundland’s entry into confederation but later became a strong critic of the premier, especially regarding the schemes of industrialization. Almost thirty years later, MacGillivray made another documentary about a Newfoundland artist, The Man of a Thousand Songs (2010), about songwriter and performer Ron Hynes. The film begins with the subject speaking directly to the camera, supposedly during a sound check, to answer the question of what is this film and who is Ron Hynes. The answer remains elusive because we can only ever have a partial view of the artist through his songs, and since the songwriter needs to be a kind of chameleon in order to keep telling stories. Hynes has been performing for over forty years (he had a recording contract at age sixteen), and in 1972 was the first Newfoundland artist to release an album of entirely original material. He has a huge catalogue of songs, hence the film’s title, and he is as well known in Newfoundland as Leonard Cohen is in the rest of Canada. This documentary encapsulates many of the art cinema concerns of this book – place, identity, meaning, and the need to make culture in a commercial marketplace. Ron’s nephew, actor and writer Joel Hynes (whose work is discussed later in this book), is a key interview subject of the film, providing an insider’s view of Ron’s struggle with addiction and his life as a performer. It is also a film about work and the challenges of making art that has meaning for other people, the paths not taken, the blood spilled. Later, we see grainy video footage of Ron in his heavy cocaine days – teeth gnashing and angry with the audience for not listening. On camera, Ron speaks about that Ron in the third person, but MacGillivray’s film is about one artist speaking from the heart to another about value and meaning in the face of self-destruction – and the need to carry on. MacGillivray identifies himself as a dramatic filmmaker first, but in the limited economy of Canadian film, he has made documentaries in order to keep working and thinking on screen. These films have always been on subjects that closely intersect with concerns found in the fiction films. He has also stepped into the land of series tv . MacGillivray returned to Newfoundland to shoot the cbc series Gullage’s (1996–98), but it was not made without a struggle, as he describes the casting process: The cbc , unbeknownst to us, already had a cast in mind for Gullage’s, but we had a casting call anyway, a series of auditions, and we had to prove to them that these people could act. In Newfoundland, everybody is an actor – everybody. It came to one decision. We knew

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whom we wanted to play the lead [Bryan Hennessey as Calvin Pope], and they had other ideas. They wanted a Toronto person. This is like one of those apocryphal stories, but it’s actually true. They said we’ll bring in somebody from Toronto and you can assign him a dialogue coach and he can learn the accent because this is the person we want. We said if you want that person, we’re shutting down because that’s stupid, that’s not the show we’re trying to make. They backed off and we got the person we wanted. But that’s how important it is. The sense of place is about language, just the timing of a line that comes out of two hundred years of talking. You can’t just fake that. Hennessey plays cab driver Calvin Pope, a man determined to hang on to his sense of place and identity in spite of the onslaught of consumer culture. Tom McSorley describes how Calvin is the everyman at the centre of chaos: “In a world where, as Pis Parsons [ruthless capitalist taxi stand owner] says, ‘tradition is dropping like flies,’ where coffee is replacing tea, and where notions of community are under siege, Calvin strides like Don Quixote into the strange existential battlefield that is modern Newfoundland … Calvin Pope, like many MacGillivray protagonists, seeks his own interpretation of modernity and control of his place within it.”45 The music performances in Gullage’s (busking on the street and on stage) help unify the characters in a way that is not strictly bound to narrative. Here, culture is something made out of local experience rather than imported commodity. For instance, at the taxi stand, one character casually plays spoons with others enthusiastically joining the rhythm and eventually several are dancing together. The spontaneous communal pleasure is only broken by the gnarly voice of company owner Pis Parsons: “What in the hell is going on in here? Goddam diddly-dum music. Get out into the friggin’ world and make yourselves a livin’. Ye goddam crowd of foolish Newfoundlanders.” In many episodes, characters cannot readily make a living, but financial well-being is offset by the need to maintain a way of life that is not entirely taken over by the market imperative of cultural homogenization. Calvin regularly campaigns against vinyl siding on homes in downtown St John’s and, in one episode, organizes a campaign against a new office complex with reference to the brutalist Atlantic Place development that has divided the harbour from the city. The subject of urban development as threat to local culture was previously taken up in Codco’s stage show Das Capital: Or, What Do You Want to See the

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Figure 1.10 | The family in the TV series Gullage’s.

Harbour For Anyway?, first performed in 1975 with the tourist image of happily impoverished Newfoundlanders as the target of satire: “You know, boy, we got all kinds of advantages, living in a little place like St John’s … What’ve we got here? Well, ya got poverty. All kinds of poor people. Little kids come up to ya, ask ya for a nickel, ya know. You’ll like that. All kinds of ramshackle old houses, no one would live in except the poor people, ya know. They’re out on the stoop all the time, boy, as friendly as could be.”46 Many scenes in Gullage’s also take place in front of the family house, and a group of street kids, credited as The Urchins, pop up in a random act of wealth redistribution – they steal liquor from Pis (who sells it out of the cab stand). Pis shouts back: “Don’t come around here no more. I knows who your father is. And I know who your real father is, too!” Pis schemes to make money but is defeated by his own foolishness. He tries to breed wolverines but neglects to acquire more than one. The discussion turns to the huge number of plant and animal species thought to be native but, in fact, have been introduced to Newfoundland. At that, the Greek chorus of the taxi stand, Bert and Russell (Philip Dinn and Brian Best), announce: “Let us not forget the delicate, yet unexpectedly carnivor-

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ous, pitcher plant. Our official flower.” The joke is on MacGillivray’s production company: Picture Plant. The province’s own description of this plant reminds us of the way regional indie production companies have a hardscrabble existence: “While other plants find nutrients to survive in the soil, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, the pitcher plant has adapted to an environment deficient in these vital nutrients by finding an alternate source. Its leaves and structure are expertly formed to survive, and regardless of its conditions, the pitcher plant remains intensely resilient, infinitely adaptable, and naturally and remarkably beautiful.”47 The gently worded description does not mention that the plant eats insects to survive. The theme of regional difference is a running gag in the series, as Bert and Russell say: “Canada is one of the wealthiest nations in the whole world. Wouldn’t hurt to go there, maybe, just take a look.” At the kitchen table sits Calvin’s mother, Angora (Janis Spence). She smokes and offers common-sense commentary, plucks feathers from a partridge bird, smokes some more, and slips rum into the tea as a cure for the common cold. In the background is “The Old Fella” (played by the director’s late father, William E. MacGillivray). Next door lives an old couple, the silent and hen-pecked husband played by iconic Newfoundland writer Ray Guy. Guy is associated with the romanticized nostalgia for a mythic past and described by literary scholar Patrick O’Flaherty as “the last of the real Newfoundlanders,” here reduced to numb silence and sneaking away from his wife’s gaze in order to receive bootleg liquor from a Gullage’s taxi.48 Guy also coined the term “Newfcult” to criticize the romantic idealization of place where culture becomes a branch of the service sector tourist economy. In the foreground of home life is the relationship between Calvin and Iris (Brenda Devine), who may or may not be married; they cannot recall the precise details of their 1960s-era romance. Iris lives in an adjacent house and has interests antithetical to Calvin’s Calvinistic ways (she sells cosmetics and drives a luxury Cadillac). Their daughter Dolly (Elizabeth Pickard) is a musician and taxi driver, and is a single parent seen protesting the lack of subsidized child care – Baby’s father (the child is simply named Baby) is unknown and irrelevant to the family. The final scene of the final Gullage’s episode has all the characters gathered together on a camping trip where they pose for a portrait of what has become a kind of extended family, though Iris has neglected to put film in the camera.49 Without film there is no permanent record; instead, we experience an idea of family as something that is performed, but not ever fixed in time.

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S E C R E T N AT I O N A N D T H E B O N E S O F H I S TO R Y

Despite the certainty with which historians speak of the “origins” of nation as a sign of the “modernity” of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality.50 Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration

Bhabha is concerned with the interstice between a fixed concept of nation and the performative flux through which the nation is constructed in everyday life. Secret Nation (Dir: Michael Jones, 1992) deals with the controversy surrounding Newfoundland’s 1949 entry to Canadian Confederation, and is especially concerned with the weight of this history on contemporary life.5¹ Frieda Vokey (Cathy Jones) is a doctoral student in history at McGill University, writing a dissertation on the “decline of the sovereign Newfoundland state,” but is disenchanted with her advisors and with the casual antiNewfoundland sentiment experienced in the city. She returns home to make a final research push but becomes embroiled in a British-led plot to cover up the conspiracy to fix the results of the referendum upon which Newfoundland entered Confederation. The 1948 referendum succeeded by a slim margin of 52 per cent, representing stark social and class divisions between Catholics and Protestants and between outporters and townies, and remains a controversial subject. Frieda is warned by history professor Dr Furey (Bryan Hennessey) that “Newfoundland is not the best place to study Newfoundland history. People here have a very proprietary view of the subject.” Furey explains that Confederation resonates with people in a vital way, but also implies that nationalism depends upon exclusion, on the fact of borders. Bhabha’s idea of the interstices of identity finds ground in border areas, in places of transition, where identity is in flux. This way of thinking has particular inflection in the case of an island nation at a remove from mainland Canada and where the physical borders are formed by the ruthless North Atlantic. The island was settled by the British for its cod fishery, as Judith Stamps describes: “Fish, dried and incorporated into a vortex of gold and other trade goods, became Newfoundland, the land found and identified to serve the ships that served the empire.”5² This understanding of nationhood, influenced by the staples thesis of Harold Innis, demonstrates how the object of trade is both economic and cultural currency, situating place in the flow of time. The film shows us that time and history do not unfold in a linear fashion; past coexists with the present, but these forces cannot be viewed directly, only in artifacts, in memory, in flashpoints of

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consciousness, and in the process of representation. One gets the sense that director Mike Jones has pored over every frame of Newfoundland archival footage, and that same material becomes a key research tool for Frieda. We see several scenes with Frieda amidst research documents, walking through a cavernous archive, and viewing film footage. We see plenty of codfish, and this is important for the way the film sets up the time before the ‘fall’ (Confederation). Historian David Frank troubles this use of the archive: “All of this material is decidedly positive – bustling streets, busy outports, happy faces, lots of fish. It may well be true that this is the surviving visual record of Newfoundland history, and if so it shapes Frieda’s perceptions of the idyllic condition of Newfoundland before Confederation. Although there are references in the dialogue to unemployment, poverty, tuberculosis and malnutrition, none of these are reinforced in the visual imagery of the film.”5³ History is performed through representation – power and privilege help determine what we know of the past. On the character of professional historians, the film gives us vile drunkards driven by ego. Frieda arrives at Memorial University’s history department to visit Dan Maddox (Ron Hynes), her friend and, it turns out, rival in pursuit of evidence for the Confederation story. Glancing into a seminar room, she sees Dan in a loud dispute with Furey, clutching his throat and angrily proclaiming his jurisdiction over an area of publishing. Dan has his own demons to bury: we see him wake up from a nightmare memory of his father’s suicide (father was a pro-Confederation delegate), and this is intercut with tv footage of hyper-nationalist Expo ’67 celebrations. These Expo images are often used in a nostalgic way in centralCanadian media images (and scholarship) of the 1960s, but in the regions they have a more malevolent resonance. Frieda seduces Dan so that she can prowl through his records, and their sex scene is accompanied by a soundtrack mix of Smallwood’s rationale for Confederation, including the fact of high infant mortality rates – but who could fuck to the sound of Joey? Later, the image of father bleeding to death is juxtaposed with that of Dan sifting through archive documents. History is written in blood. Staged scenes of the 1946–48 National Convention where nationhood was debated are layered with the genuine archive sound recordings of Joey Smallwood and his anti-Confederation opponent Peter Cashin. Among the film’s many links between the fictional and the historic is the casting of Richard Cashin, nephew of Peter and a prominent trade union activist, in the role of his famous uncle for the visual staging of the debates. As Noreen Golfman notes, the film “struggles openly with its own attempt to find legitimacy for the community evoked in Faustus. It is audacious enough to take

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on the question of identity and difference directly, shrewdly grounding it in a strong narrative about the lost origins of that very community.”54 Secret Nation takes seriously the mythology of Newfoundland as nation and the necessity of challenging the standard discourse of the nation-state. In the archival footage of the signing of the agreement to join Canada, the announcer, describing the footage, says, “You can hear the actual sound of the pen on the paper.” The marvel at the technique of modern representation displaces the historic act itself, which, for the filmmaker, is like writing a death certificate. What follows is a quick stock footage overview of provincial history, including the arrival of American culture through the presence of US military during the Second World War. Historian James Hiller describes St John’s on the day of Confederation: “The first of April 1949, the day on which Newfoundland passed from rule by a British-appointed Commission of Government to the status of a Canadian province, was typically cold and gloomy. It fitted with the mood of the predominantly anti-Confederate town of St John’s. Some houses flew black flags, others the Union Jack at half-mast, yet others the old, unofficial flag, the pink, white, and green. There were drawn blinds and black ties.”55 In drunken despair as she prepares to leave Montreal, Frieda has a nightmare of her mother (Mary Walsh) screaming: “What do you mean by coming back here. You think that’s why I gave up my whole goddam life, so you could come back here like some kind of whipped dog?” An alternate mother, Lorenza Goodyear, the secretary to Peter Cashin, drops a note in her pocket containing a cryptic message along with Newfoundland stamps and a coin. Lorenza becomes a guardian angel for Frieda, leading her through the fragments of history and also providing artifacts that assert the claim to nationhood. This return home is also an encounter with the father, the law of the father, the fatherland. Frieda’s father, Lester (Michael Wade), was part of the delegation sent to London to negotiate the status of Newfoundland and is fiercely anti-Confederation. His life is entirely engulfed by demons of the past; his booze-filled shame is due to the fact that he worked as a spy for Confederate forces. When confronted with evidence of this duplicity, he takes the Joey Smallwood line that it was necessary to save the people from utter despair and poverty, and then regains the upper hand, as fathers do, by declaring that he never actually cashed the cheques paid to him by the British. Smallwood is near death at the start of the film, and the actual premier’s opencasket wake is filmed. But what to do with Smallwood’s bones? Frieda gets an appointment at his hospital bedside to ask important questions about inten-

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tion, rhetoric, and the consequences of history. The feeble answer is vetted through his smarmy and pompous lawyer, Parkinson (Ken Campbell), who takes cover in cultural distinctiveness and the hush money of state welfare. The reference to Smallwood is met with the character of Valentine Aylward (Andy Jones), the current premier. Aylward is Faustus revisited, and just as unstable – as reporters rush him with questions about whether he is fit to hold power, he vomits, driven mad by the weight of history. Later, he is in his underwear outside the offices of the Evening Telegram newspaper, screaming madly for Lester, his confidential advisor – one bad father to another. Frieda’s brother Chris (Rick Mercer), a performance artist who briefly chased fame in New York and is now a taxi dispatcher in St John’s, is both a cultural and social worker, mediating disputes between customers and taxi drivers via the cab radio. Here, knowledge is made on the street and through social interaction. Chris is dressed as an archbishop for a costume party benefit concert, accompanying his sister, who dresses as father Lester. At this bacchanalian party held at the lspu Hall, former longshoremen’s hall and locus point for the St John’s arts community, the fool’s game of history is performed through the confluence of the real and the fictional – we see priests, Vikings, mummers, Smallwood facemasks, a clutch of Beothuks, several partiers dressed as former premier Brian Peckford (a strong advocate of economic nationalism in the 1980s), and among the party guests, the real Peckford. In these films, disguise is close on the heels of the real. British colonization is the bad seed of the party, and skulking through the shadows, we see two representatives from the British Public Records Office who watch over the locals. Only a filmmaker obsessed with the minutiae of history and aware of the vital power of systems of representation would cast librarians as armed thugs in a conspiracy to keep the records under wraps. What follows is a chase through the archive in pursuit of the ghosts of history where Frieda is able to elude colonial authority and finally complete her thesis titled “Secret Nation.” The film performs the fact of history, nation, and tradition as concepts that are made and remade, rather than as objects that are fixed forever in time. N O A P O LO G I E S A N D V I O L E T : A R T A N D I N D U S T R Y

This chapter concludes with two films that mark the transformation from locally specific art cinema to a filmmaking style attached to the conventions of international commercial cinema. No Apologies (Dir: Ken Pittman; Exec Prod: Bill MacGillivray, 1990) is a grim but impassioned story of a journalist

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who returns home to Newfoundland to see his dying father. Violet, made a decade later (Dir: Rosemary House, 2000), centres around Violet (played by Mary Walsh), who is approaching her fifty-fifth birthday and convinced that this will be her final year since everyone else in her family has died at that age. The style of Violet has a European sensibility similar to the films of Louis Malle, and avoids specific references to its Newfoundland location, though audiences who are familiar with the place would easily recognize it. At about the same time that the earlier No Apologies was in production, House made her first film, When Women Are Crazy (1991), an experimental short film about sex, death, and crazy women. Beautiful and fluid black-andwhite photography explores the domestic space of a backyard on a summer day, accompanied by a stream-of-consciousness narrative: “When women are crazy, they say, when women are crazy, they say aliens are spreading rumours that I was not born on earth. Aliens have stolen my birth certificate. Call Elvis, they’ll tell you.” The poetics of the film’s imagery flows against social stereotypes of madness. While it is a very different kind of film, there is a thematic concern that is later realized in Violet. All three films reflect important tensions and tendencies present in the place they are produced and are made with a strong commitment to the local, though only No Apologies names the place. No Apologies is made just prior to the collapse of the cod fishery, and its soundtrack is punctuated by reports of deindustrialization, the betrayals of politicians, and economic uncertainty. In its representation of social and economic conditions, it is hardly the most subtle or nuanced film. The father’s death is due to dangerous health conditions at the local mine, which is closing down. Anxiety about death and losing the family farm structures Violet, but through a combination of tragic and comic elements. No Apologies is at once about the consequences of an economic system that exploits region and worker without apology while being made in a style that gives weight to these issues without concern (or apology) for commercial genre conventions. Director Ken Pittman indicates that this approach was certainly not easy: “It was a wrestling match as a filmmaker trying to get it made from the start because almost every comment on the script was an attempt to de-localize it.” With a total budget of $1.3 million, it was among the last films financed by Telefilm in the late 1980s that had a distinct and self-conscious regional identity (excepting lower-budget productions). Rosemary House began her filmmaking career working for Ken Pittman and was unit publicist and casting coordinator on No Apologies. She has an impressive list of documentary credits in addition to Rain, Drizzle and Fog,

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discussed earlier. Her Salvation (2001) is an engaging portrait of Salvation Army front-line workers serving the needy, recalling the nfb classic The Days Before Christmas (1958) in that both films contrast material affluence with destitution. House’s Hospital City (2004) similarly portrays an institution through the characters who make it function, in this case the behindthe-scenes workers at the Health Sciences Centre in St John’s. Ken Pittman was president of the Newfoundland Producers Association at the time the provincial film development office was established in 1997. He was the Canadian co-producer on the international co-production Misery Harbour (Dir: Nils Gaup, 1999) and has since worked in television production. Pittman was closely involved with both the Newfoundland Independent Filmmaker’s Co-operative (nifco) and the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (afcoop) at the time of their formation, and No Apologies is a Nova Scotia and Newfoundland co-production. The pairing of distinct films for analysis opens both to analytical consideration not necessarily self-evident in each taken alone, and this approach helps reveal the way narrative elements illuminate the broader conditions of regional production. Violet was developed through an initiative of Telefilm and the National Screen Institute called Features First, a business-oriented program for filmmakers with some short drama and television experience and with a featurelength project deemed to have commercial potential. At the time, the program was an important initiative for filmmakers outside of the major centres, but it also demonstrates the shift toward a market imperative that has come to structure the industry. The difficulty of financing feature films outside of this framework cannot be overstated. It is with this in mind that we consider the themes of death as related not just to the characters’ anxieties but also to a shift in the cultural context for feature filmmaking. In No Apologies, there is rarely a scene of happiness that does not turn to bitterness and resentment. Outside the home is the father’s fishing boat: early in the film, we see a nostalgic home-movie image of the boat being painted; now it is being dismantled. Peter’s children convene at his bedside, and their mourning is met by the broader scale of decline. Bryan Hennessey plays Matthew, a struggling writer and alcoholic who has been given medical records surreptitiously acquired by his father as evidence of malfeasance by politicians and the mining company in the deaths of workers. He has an opportunity to bring to light the nasty reality underlying social conditions, but is unable to take action except in a crazed alcohol-fuelled plan to assassinate one of the politicians. In Violet, Hennessey is drunk and belligerent Uncle Ed, seething at Violet’s birthday party; to him, it is a “three-hour banjo solo in hell.” He

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is next in line to inherit the farm and scheming with his daughter Linda to do so, though he himself is barely alive. His contempt for family is a welcome relief in a film that takes an overall tone of middle-class tolerance of idiosyncrasy rather than offer a potentially more radical position founded in passionate eccentricity, with the latter being less about the individual and more about collective difference. A similar concern can be raised with respect to language, used in the film to signify European culture but negating the multiplicity of tongues spoken in Newfoundland, where the dialect from one outport to another is quite distinct. Perhaps the film, following the conventions of mainstream production and echoing its own characters, is yearning for an ideal of culture that comes from away. Violet is a film yearning for a broader audience, while No Apologies is trying to speak passionately to the political consequences of space abandoned by capital. No Apologies begins in Latin America, where Mark (Barrie Dunn) is working as a journalist. The radical resistance movement he is covering is in contrast with the complacency and out-migration found in Newfoundland. But this contrast can only work through an oversimplified view of resistance. The meaning and value of ‘identity’ is a contested term precisely because so many people have to leave the province for employment, and, as an island, it has a long sea-going tradition of movement and migration. Mark returns home to the father’s bedside but seethes with resentment over the surrounding economic and social conditions. We are shown a decidedly unromantic Newfoundland landscape, further emphasized by the winter setting, a consequence of a delay in funding that caused a summer-based script to be shot out in the cold. The father wants to see his brother Jack, who has long since departed the island for the prosperity of America. Jack cannot bring himself to return and instead sends his own son, Tim, in his stead. The rest of the family, and especially Mark, resent this American outsider who arrives with a hatful of pro-development ideas but little understanding of the specific circumstances of the place.56 In Violet, there is a dialectical relationship between the local and elsewhere, a place romantically conveyed through the idea of Italy, associated here with romance and youth. Violet travelled to Italy as a young woman and yearns to return. The film is punctuated with Italian love songs, and Violet’s son, Carlos (Andrew Younghusband), is a gay professor of Italian at McGill University, though he is on leave due to personal turmoil – a close companion is dying of aids . The farm manager, Rusty (Peter MacNeill), tries to learn a few Italian words to impress Violet. The film concludes with Violet’s fiftysixth birthday party, an affirmation of life met with plans for a trip to Italy.

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Among other liaisons between the various characters, Carlos is in love with Sebastian (Raoul Bhaneja), a farmhand who impresses with his language skills, demonstrated in the film’s concluding exchange, delivered in Italian: “Did you tell me this is the way to the villa of your crazy mother, Violetta?” Carlos responds in a way that displaces the madness of family and locality for the romance of Italy and otherness: “Well, you are correct, signore. We are a distinguished group of suicides, alcoholics, and homosexuals. You have indeed been lucky to find us at home.” No Apologies concludes with the beautiful but stark image of the father’s boat on fire, with Mark standing in front of it holding a gasoline container. The burning is a necessary break with the past, but no sense of renewal is offered within the film. Both films are primarily ensemble performances, and my analysis is informed not just by the diegetic relationship between the characters but also the recurring presence of these actors in many of the films discussed in this book. In this way, the idea of renewal and the continuity of place is expressed not simply in the on-screen lives of characters but in the transformations of a performer’s roles over time. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno proclaim, in their analysis of the onslaught of mass culture, “Not Italy is offered, but evidence that it exists,” whereby the old world becomes a signifier of tradition and authenticity in the face of loss and transformation.57 Important to the art films discussed in this chapter is the communal base of the region’s filmmaking co-operatives. These organizations began before the films just discussed, and thus formed the conditions and limits for those, and subsequent, productions. While most films made at the co-ops are short, the style, sensibility, and production culture has a lot to say about the art films that have emerged here. The next chapter explores the origins and history of the Atlantic filmmaking co-ops and their relationship with the broader film industry.

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Parents drop their babies, but the kids turn out okay. It gives them lots of character and they’ll need that one day. There’s a Flower in My Pedal, a film by Andrea Dorfman (2005)

CH A PTER 2

The Co-op Scene Short filmmaking is a vital part of production in the region, and the central spaces in support of this activity are the filmmaking co-ops: The Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (afcoop ) in Nova Scotia, the Newfoundland Independent Filmmaker’s Co-operative (nifco ), the New Brunswick Filmmakers’ Co-operative (nbfc ), and Island Media Arts Cooperative (imac ) in Prince Edward Island. This chapter is an overview of the history of these organizations and a selective description of the films from each locale. In order to tell this story, I shift between a description of early films and later productions. Through discussion of specific films, I provide a map of the cultural influences informing the thrust of these organizations. There remains

the question of what constitutes a co-op film, since these organizations facilitate and support productions and only in some instances play the role of producer. Some filmmakers rely heavily on the co-op and use the organization as an essential base for their production, while others are more selective in their interaction, a distinction that usually magnifies as productions become longer and more complex. For my purposes, films that are made within the broad spirit of a co-op’s mandate by filmmakers who have an evident association with the organization are fair game for analysis. Within this mix, I discuss details of policy, funding, and other conditions at play in each co-op and in each province. I want to emphasize the interconnection between specific films and the co-op as social institution from its origins to the present. Where this history shifts back and forth between historical and later productions, it is to emphasize the changes and interrelatedness of conditions at the co-ops. In this study, the films are both objects of analysis in themselves and tools for understanding the social, cultural, and economic context of production. The origin and organization of each co-op tells us something of the conditions for filmmaking and the character of the communities where they are located. afcoop and nifco were formed in the early 1970s, a time of counterculture optimism and real ferment in alternative media – an echo of the various political and social protest movements of the era. nbfc and imac, on the other hand, came into being at the dawn of the mean-spirited 1980s, a time of retrenchment in arts and culture funding and a rise in social conservativism and neoliberalism. Social and political context influenced how these organizations imagined their place in the arts community. Regions exist in dialectical relationship with other regions, with the nation-state, and with transnational flows of culture. The specific elements of the local are themselves formed in relation to extra-regional forces. Nowhere is this more evident than in commercially oriented film and video production, where, due to the scale of production, the high costs involved, and the global focus of distribution (whether for commercial industry sales or across the network of international film festivals), the relationship between the local and the global is manifest. The degree to which small-scale, co-op-based filmmakers are informed by these sets of relationships is an important question, since there exists a broad diversity of influences and approaches to making short films. Filmmakers and critics often speak of the centrality of landscape and place in narrative cinema as marker of local distinction, but this relationship is always mediated by social and economic context. The concept of place, like cultural texts, is produced rather than simply given. How do specific

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films articulate ‘place’ in a local-national-global nexus, and what is the place of the filmmaking co-op in this process? Since the 1970s, film production co-operatives throughout Canada have been central to the support of artist work that falls outside the parameters of mainstream cinema. These institutions provide a range of services under varying membership structures, but typically include production, exhibition, and sometimes distribution resources as well as forums for education and, most importantly, a base for community formation. The co-ops are a training ground for beginning filmmakers but can also be a central resource for more-established artists. The tension between these interests often shapes the activities of the co-op. These organizations have followed the trend toward professionalization within the artist-run centre, with the added complication of dealing with entry-level members.¹ Co-operatives play a crucial role in support of an indigenous film culture in regions that are economically and geographically isolated from the diversity of resources available in larger urban centres such as Toronto and Montreal.² Various models for filmmaking co-operatives existed in New York, London, and other major cities long before this initiative took hold in Canada. Organizations such as Anthology Film Archives became a major hub for the exhibition of experimental cinema in 1960s New York and were central to the canonization of the work of filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas under the flag of a formalist avant-garde. Elsewhere in New York in the late 1960s, a group of politically motivated filmmakers formed the Newsreel Collective to share resources and skills in the making of counterculture work as an alternative to mainstream news. The London Filmmakers’ Co-operative (in the uk ) was inspired by the efforts of Jonas Mekas but organized along more egalitarian lines and in support of both production and distribution. The intent here is not to provide a global history of the film co-op movement but rather to indicate the broader international context for these initiatives and to suggest an overlap of indie filmmaking activity with counterculture movements. The experimental filmmaking scene in New York provided the model for nascent film organizations in Canada – before returning to Toronto in 1973, artists Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland made films in New York in the 1960s and attended screenings organized by Jonas Mekas.³ The rise of various new-wave cinema movements, especially in Europe, provided another model for filmmaking that fostered an aesthetic that is specific to cinema rather than borrowed from literature and theatre. The Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (cfmdc ), founded in 1967, was the country’s first co-op, followed in the next year by the London [Ontario] Film

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Cooperative, formed in part for the distribution of the experimental films made by Jack Chambers. The existence of this group does, however, reflect a burgeoning art scene in that city, notably including Greg Curnoe, Chambers’s friend and the subject of his film r -34 (1967), one of the first experimental films to receive funding from the Canada Council.4 At the same time, there was a lively film society at McMaster University producing groundbreaking experimental films, especially those made by John Hofsess, as well as seeding the commercial entertainment career of Ivan Reitman and others. All of this happened before the establishment of Canada Council funding and institutional support. In the cfmdc ’s Rochdale College offices, the Toronto Filmmakers’ Co-op was formed in 1971.5 These groups were followed by l’Association coopérative de productions audio-visuelles (acpav ), incorporated in 1971. acpav was set up to support independent production outside of the institutional constraints of the National Film Board in Quebec. It was unique from the other co-ops that formed across Canada a few years later in that it was not a technical resource but a co-operative of producers (rather than directors and craftspeople) dedicated primarily to independent narrative film. It was formed by disaffected former nfb filmmakers that included, among others, Roger Frappier, André Forcier, Léa Pool, and Pierre Falardeau. THE CANADA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS AND THE F O R M AT I O N O F F I L M M A K I N G C O-O P E R AT I V E S

This mode of filmmaking would not have existed without financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, and many of the art films of the 1970s would not have been made without the co-ops. The expanded vision of support for film in the various regions of the country required extensive lobbying inside the Council as well as recognition of film as a legitimate art form and not simply a commercial product. The latter movement was occurring just as a Canadian feature film industry was being established – the Canadian Film Development Corporation (cfdc ) was set up in 1967, and the groundbreaking film Mon Oncle Antoine (Dir: Claude Jutra) was released in 1971 – and there existed substantial external lobbying to direct any new film funds toward the commercial sector. A strong nationalist feeling was dominant in the cultural sector and took the form of resistance to the homogenization that would, so the argument goes, accompany a more commercialized production sector. At a film producers’ symposium in Winnipeg in 1974, a manifesto was put forward: “We wish to state unequivocally that film is an expression and affirmation of the cultural reality of this country first,

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and a business second.” These words would now seem entirely out of place in contemporary Canadian narrative filmmaking circles. The filmmakers attending the Winnipeg event called for a strong national system of film support that rejects “foreign examples” (meaning American) and explicitly embraces regionalization, using Quebec as a model of success: “Quebec has already separated, at least as far as film is concerned.”6 A considerable amount of Canada Council energy was consumed by internal territorial debates over whether film should be supported as a distinct art practice or as a component of the then-emergent media arts. While, today, film is administered through the Media Arts Section, applications are adjudicated within a distinct stream (in 2015, categories have again been restructured). Had it been amalgamated earlier, it is unlikely that the same degree of support would have been directed toward filmmakers (because they constituted a small unproven group in competition with artists in already-established disciplines). It is also unlikely that the co-ops would exist in the same manner, more likely being merged with other media art organizations. These debates were fuelled by an ideological position that film is a dead medium, fully replaceable by video and new media practices. The argument has always been oversimplified and technologically deterministic. Today, most filmmakers understand the word film to encompass an approach to representation rather than the specific tools of reproduction. In the face of these internal and external pressures, Penni Jaques, then Canada Council’s film officer, needed to claim filmmakers as artists, and established a process where only individual directors could apply for funding (rather than producers and production companies, the model used by the cfdc and subsequent commercial agencies) and the director had to maintain complete editorial control over the project through to its completion. In order to support the development of auteur-directors, Council funds were allocated to establish filmmaking resources in the various regions of Canada. In contrast, the cfdc at the time decided that filmmaking should only be supported in three centres: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. While, today, we take for granted easy access to highly sophisticated media production tools, very little equipment existed in the Atlantic region except in the well-guarded depot of the cbc and in a few scattered institutional and private hands. This mandate to nurture independent filmmaking by providing resources to the co-ops was realized under the direction of Francoyse Picard, appointed head of the Canada Council’s film section in 1975. Picard believed in the idea of filmmaker as artist-auteur and is a great example of the influence a cultural administrator can have at a time when policies and

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ideas are being formed. Part of Picard’s role was the very defence of artist cinema. By requiring Council funds to flow to the auteur-director (rather than to the producer or production company, as in typical film financing), she was able to convince colleagues at Canada Council to recognize filmmakers as equivalent to artists working in other disciplines. The structure of the Canada Council at the time allowed her to use significant discretion in allocating funds to nurture the co-ops, particularly in providing travel funds so that filmmakers in different parts of the country could meet and see each other’s work. In my conversations with filmmakers active in those formative years, I was struck by how emphatically they expressed the importance of Picard’s role, in terms that one does not hear today in the more rigidly defined institutional relationships. Picard was a kind of auteur of national cinema, and my conversations with her have strongly influenced my understanding of the co-op movement. Her close contact with filmmakers across the country enabled a direct understanding of local needs against which national policies and infrastructure could be measured, which is not to say that she did not also have strong ideas that were at times at odds with local interests. In the early days, Picard would be consulted about administrative and policy matters on a regular basis. However, she recognized the need to step back from this hands-on approach, and in 1979, she facilitated a national meeting that led to formation of an umbrella organization called the Independent Film and Video Alliance, now known as the Independent Media Arts Alliance (imaa ).7 Today, it represents over eighty media organizations across Canada, including festivals and various media production centres in addition to the original film co-ops. When Picard started her job, there were just a handful of film organizations, but there already existed an established network of artist-run centres throughout the country, spaces for visual art exhibition and production as alternatives or ‘parallel galleries’ to the closed and hierarchical traditional art institutions. The first art centre funded by the Canada Council was A Space in Toronto, which received a $5,000 grant in 1972. By 1975, there were already operating grants of just over $500,000 awarded to thirty organizations across the country. The various video co-operatives came out of this parallel gallery network, but film organizations remained at the margins of the margins of the art world. The famed art group General Idea collectively formed Art Metropole, a key centre in this emerging network. Artist AA Bronson describes it this way: “It was natural to call upon our national attributes – the bureaucratic tendency and the protestant work ethic – and working together, and sometimes not together we laboured to structure, or rather to untangle

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from the messy post-60s spaghetti of our minds, artist-run galleries, artists’ video, and artist-run magazines. And that allowed us to allow ourselves to see ourselves as an art scene. And we did.”8 The Halifax-based Centre for Art Tapes was part of this scene, with crossover activity with media art faculty and students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (nscad ). The art world has always had a degree of resistance to the narrative inclinations of filmmakers, and the conceptual and technological approaches as well as the different contexts of exhibition have reinforced a divide between film and media art organizations. Just as important as providing technical resources was the need to establish a way of thinking about cinema that was distinct from the kind of work carried out at the nfb and cbc . The Canada Council paid to bring established filmmakers to the regions, a process that helped legitimize a way of thinking outside of the prevailing norms of commercial movies and the constrained approach of nfb documentaries. Quebec auteur Jean Pierre Lefebvre embodied this sensibility and brought an international perspective to his conversations with regional filmmakers. There is probably no other Quebec artist who has travelled as extensively in Canada outside of Quebec as Lefebvre. He has visited all the film co-ops across the country, including the four in Atlantic Canada. Lefebvre’s films are integral to the rise of indie cinema in Quebec, though today he is left out of the canon, and as much as the work is integral to the place, he has always maintained cross-border connections. In the 1980s, he made a feature documentary about the co-op scene in Canada called Au Rythme du mon coeur (To the Rhythm of My Heart, 1983). This very personal film also relates the death of his first wife, and collaborator, Marguerite Duparc. Lefebvre sat on numerous Canada Council funding juries vetting applications from the co-ops and from individual filmmakers. Regarding Lefebvre’s influence, early afcoop member and cinematographer Lionel Simmons says: “He was probably one of the most influential people in the whole co-op thing because he made so-called feature films but they were very low-budget. Small crews, he kept that up right to the end.” Filmmaker Bill MacGillivray says: “He was what many of us wanted our co-op to be. That is, he penned his own films, he knew who he was, and he spoke a language that was full and rich both visually and verbally. His films had gone beyond their own culture to the greater world, so he was an ideal model for us. And he was a very patient, kind, well-spoken, gentle person.” It is difficult to measure a contribution that, while essential, is not easily quantifiable. When probed further, MacGillivray simply says:

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I think it is just an attitude and a sense of play, that films could be what you want them to be. He encouraged people to experiment and look beyond the norm, the Hollywood norm that was all around us. If you see his films, you know that they are playful, but they are also very deep and moving and profound and are very tied to place. I think that he just exuded that, and when he spoke to people about their films, those are the frames of reference he used to talk about. He never talked to us about the budget or the marketplace. I don’t think that ever came up once. The one thing he always said about budgeting, which I always appreciated, was that if you are going to make a film that you know only a few people will appreciate, then you make it for a small budget. Buying basic film equipment was a huge achievement for the newly established co-ops; maintaining technical resources in an ever-changing sphere, while meeting the needs of diverse memberships, remains a major challenge. In my view, the basis of the film co-op movement is the intersection of the technological apparatus with the broader social context, and cinema is a social technology, meaning a set of institutional relationships shaped by a specific deployment of technology that fosters particular practices of production and reception. Some filmmaking co-operatives in Canada and elsewhere are purist in the use of the medium, and lately there has been resurgence in celluloid hand-processing; in other cases, it is a matter of preference. Today, for a project that originates on film, post-production is almost always carried out in the digital domain, and the final output may be film, video, or some other digital storage format. Film co-ops located in larger centres, such as the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (lift ), tend to concentrate more on experimental practices, in part because there are many other resources for narrative filmmakers in that city and this concentration fulfills the Canada Council mandate. lift emerged after the 1978 bankruptcy of the Toronto Filmmakers’ Co-op, a group that served, along with the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, as an organizational model for afcoop and nifco . Brenda Longfellow describes how lift mediated between the formalist avant-garde direction of the Toronto Filmmakers’ Co-op and a new generation of directors interested in narrative filmmaking, all of which came to a head at the 1989 International Experimental Film Congress held in Toronto. “Perhaps what was most notable about the congress manifesto [put forward by younger filmmakers opposing the agenda of the congress] was its public

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representation of a new generation of experimental film artists who defined their practice in relation to a range of social issues and new political identities and who, most significantly, embraced storytelling and the possibilities of a vitally deconstructed narrative, or ‘neo-narrative,’ as it was framed in the parlance of the time.”9 The legacy of formalist experimentation also raises the contentious question of what is an art cinema practice, a topic that remains a measure of the divide between media artists, the art world, and filmmakers.¹0 Circumstances in the regions have required the co-ops to serve a broader constituency, though not without factions and conflicting visions. There are fewer filmmakers outside of the larger centres who work in a more formalist practice of experimentation, in part because there is less of a tradition of film history education and because one impulse in the formation of regional co-ops is to express, in narrative and documentary terms, the specificity of place.¹¹ Films start, first of all, as ideas, and compelling work always transcends technological limitations, but the co-ops do begin with the basic need for production equipment. In all instances, equipment access is at rates much reduced from prevailing commercial costs, with the requirement that the gear only be used on productions that meet the mandate of the organization. There are also various conditions of membership and volunteer participation in exchange for access. Each organization also runs training programs; some are designed for professional development, but the first intent is to ensure that equipment is used properly (and not damaged) by beginning filmmakers. From a societal perspective, the equipment is purchased with public funds, and in caring for this gear, the co-ops serve as a public trust on behalf of the Canada Council. However, these organizations are not state agencies; they are encouraged to form partnerships with other entities in support of their activities, and they exist to nurture filmmaking that may be highly individualized or collective and countercultural. N O VA S C O T I A

By the 1970s, the spirit of the co-operative was already a familiar idea in Atlantic Canada. The first co-operative business in North America was a store formed in Stellerton, Nova Scotia, in 1861 to market locally made goods. The name of Moses Coady (1882–1959), a legendary Cape Breton priest and social reformer who was instrumental in the co-operative movement, remains in the popular consciousness and was the subject of the nfb documentary Moses Coady (Dir: Kent Martin, 1976). The Atlantic Filmmakers

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Cooperative (afcoop ) was founded on August 25, 1973 (but not officially incorporated until June 4, 1974), preceded by the Winnipeg Film Group by a few months and closely followed by nifco . It originated with filmmakers who gathered at the Seahorse Tavern on Argyle Street in Halifax for beer, agitation, and the imagining of a cinema future. The founding mission statement describes the co-op as: “an accessible member-run centre for the production of creative films in a collaborative, learning environment.” Some founding members had made Super 8 films and a few had worked on film crews outside the province, but at the time, there was barely any film activity in Nova Scotia. The nfb had just opened its regional office in 1973 but was not readily accessible to emerging indie filmmakers; underwater filmmaker Charles Doucette made Dive Nova Scotia and Wreckhunters as promotional films for the province; there were tourism and information films made by Margaret Perry at the Nova Scotia Film Bureau; the cbc had a number of local productions but was inaccessible to independent filmmakers; some activity was taking place at nscad , but only registered students could access what little equipment was available. It was not until the early 1980s that a limited amount of industrial production began to occur, with Citadel Films making television commercials for the Sobey’s grocery chain, producer Chris Zimmer starting his company imx for commercials and eventually dramatic films, and Salter Street Films began their feature productions. By the 1990s, the industry was booming with television production and animation, but that is far removed from the early days of the co-op when no industry existed and the industrial format had not been entrenched. In the early 1970s, filmmaker and photographer Robert Frank was teaching workshop classes at nscad along with Peter Kubelka – his methodology guided by the declaration that there are no rules.¹² His class was attended by early afcoop members who included, among others, nascent producer Ramona Macdonald; Lionel Simmons, who became a cinematographer but at the time was an actor; and, among others, filmmaker Chuck Clark. Another Chuck, founding co-op member and the organization’s first coordinator, Chuck Lapp, had moved to Toronto in the early 1970s in search of the great Canadian film industry. While hanging out at the Toronto Filmmakers’ Co-op, he learned of the Canada Council’s interest in funding a cross-country network of organizations for independent filmmakers. The Council recognized that it would be more cost-effective to fund film projects by creating a system for the sharing of resources rather than having to adjudicate production proposals that included expensive commercial equipment rental budgets. A meeting had been scheduled to bring together

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Figure 2.1 | Robert Frank teaching filmmaking at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, as viewed through a Movieola film-editing screen.

interested film people from across the country, and the Nova Scotia crew were determined to crash the party. As Lapp tells it: I called them up – I used the phone at the National Film Board [the nfb had a distribution office in Halifax before the production studio opened] since we had no money for long distance. Don Duchene, my buddy, was working there at the time in distribution, so I came in to use his Film Board phone. We called the woman [Penni Jaques] at the Canada Council, and she said, “yes, we are having a meeting,” and I said, “we want to come up and talk about this film co-op we want to form down here.” She says, “oh, we already have someone coming from Halifax.” It turned out to be an art college video artist. I said, “that’s fine but he doesn’t have anything to do with the film community here – we are into forming a film co-op, not doing video art.” She

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said, “we have no more room left.” I said, “we’ll sleep in our cars.” “Oh, you can’t sleep in your cars; we will find you a room.” So we were in. It turned out to be a retreat in Quebec; an estate had been donated to the Canada Council – complete with servants, gourmet chef, and the Madame who ran the place. The tension between gallery-exhibited video, now media art, and filmmaking continues to shape biases in art education, programming, funding, critical writing, and the silos of art world subcultures. The temper of this divide is not as volatile as it was in the 1970s, but the history of these formative years shapes contemporary attitudes and assumptions. Lapp also recalls arguments with the Madame about the need for formal dinner attire, and whether it was even proper to invite this shabby Nova Scotia crew to sit with the grown-ups at the dinner table. With Don Duchene and Stephen Wodoslawsky, Lapp rented a car on Duchene’s nfb expense account to drive to the meeting, made an impassioned presentation, and with subsequent paperwork, the co-op received $50,000, half for equipment and half for the organization. afcoop had twenty-five members at its first general meeting. From the Council’s operations funding, $13,000 was to pay a senior filmmaker to serve as mentor; he turned out to be a retired nfb staffer named Grant Crabtree. The co-op purchased Super 8 equipment, which could be borrowed by anyone who had a project. This now-marginalized film format was, at the time, a viable tool for indie filmmaking, including documentary, but also served a useful public outreach function (non-members could borrow the gear) – a populist impulse present at the co-op right from the start. Access to 16mm gear was restricted to skilled users. afcoop ’s first professional camera was an Arriflex purchased from Robert Frank, the camera he used to shoot his infamous documentary about the Rolling Stones, Cocksucker Blues (1972), the definitive anti-celebrity film of backstage blow jobs, heroin, and boredom. Frank was a strong influence in the early days, and his sensibility can be read in one critic’s description of his landmark book The Americans (1959): “In Frank’s transforming vision of America, a car is a casket, a trolley a prison, a flag a shroud. As for us, we stand in odd groups and stare at some impossibly sad event beyond the frame of Frank’s camera, while he captures us and the event itself is forgotten.”¹³ The Americans, made on the road across America, raises the questions of who belongs and who has power, themes that can also be seen in Cocksucker Blues, first by taking the Rolling Stones as the subject but then by being utterly unimpressed by the gloss of celebrity. Around the

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Figure 2.2 | Membership meeting of the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative.

time of this film’s release, Frank moved from New York to live part of the time in exile from the art world on Cape Breton Island – his connection with nscad helped make this possible. If his photography follows Thoreau’s idea of the quiet desperation of America, his films are grounded in the fact of inequity and a less than precious view of landscape, as indicated by this concise artist statement: “It’s beautiful to be alive, but life isn’t that beautiful.”¹4 In addition to operations funding from the Canada Council, afcoop secured cash earmarked for individual productions, and supplemented this with stock and lab services from the nfb . This money opened the door to a flurry of activity. Later in the 1970s, however, filmmakers were required to apply directly to the Council for production funds rather than have the co-op disperse the money, so that adjudication would be made within a national competition. As much as this was a co-operative, there was also a lot of competition for the production funds, as Lapp recalls: “Some people have a fond memory of being able to show their films to people in the co-op. I remember it being just brutal. People hated the footage or they loved the footage, and it was a knock-down battle every time.” The co-op was formed

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out of shared interests, but there was divergence in ideas about how those interests should manifest; as well, the members were very individualized in their work, with some favouring drama or nfb -style documentary, and others wanting to produce experimental films. Filmmaker Ken Pittman was on the founding board of directors of afcoop and has also been closely involved with the governance of nifco for many years. He compares the organizations in this way: Right from the beginning, afcoop had a membership that had assorted agendas or aspirations compared with nifco, which had much more of a consensus focus on the independent freelance film artist. In Halifax there were more diverse aspirations: freelance film artists but also people who had more corporate orientations. There was the range of social activist filmmakers right through to people making art gallery films, but there was more diversity and more individualism in the afcoop membership. At nifco, there was more of a consensus. They were almost all neighbours, so ideologically and in terms of film art and practice, they were pretty much all thinking and expressing in the same way. Some afcoop members at the time looked to nifco as the model of how a co-op could integrate new with more senior members, but there was never strong enough interest to go in this direction. From the beginning, some members wanted afcoop to be an educational resource and stepping stone for the industry, while others wanted the organization to be more directly involved in social activist documentary. There were three diverse influences at the time of the group’s founding: people who had been involved with the photography society at Dalhousie University who brought a strong documentary interest, those who had attended Robert Frank’s filmmaking course at nscad and were influenced by the grassroots spirit of indie film, and those influenced by a narrative art cinema ideal best represented by Bill MacGillivray. By the early 1980s, these differences intensified, with very tense meetings and, eventually, a split in the membership, with several filmmakers resigning from the co-op and determined to make their films separately. There is also the suggestion that afcoop ’s proximity to the regional nfb offices hindered the co-op’s development as a more distinct entity, but I would say that influences and intentions are more diffuse, not a product of a single institutional force. Two films completed in the mid1980s are significant landmarks in afcoop ’s history, expressing a difference

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Figure 2.3 | Linda Joy in her Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative office.

from the industry model of nfb documentary and reflecting an important thrust of the group in its first decade. They are: Linda Joy (Dir: Bill MacGillivray, 1985), a portrait of a woman as she describes her cancer diagnosis, and 8 Frames Per Second (Dir: Chuck Clark, 1986), an experimental documentary set in working-class north-end Halifax. These projects began years before their release dates and, thus, reflect the early years of the co-op. Linda Joy Busby, filmmaker and coordinator at afcoop (in 1982), was diagnosed with cancer and died in November 1984. She began making this film during a period of remission to share her experience of the disease. The entire visual track of the film is an image of Linda in medium close-up; her radiant smile and expressive eyes illuminate the bleak subject and spare style. Mike Jones shot the footage as she discusses the fact of cancer and surgery, describing the cold and controlled voice of the doctor – the voice of reason as antithesis to Linda’s gentle tone. This is a film about voice, authorship, and the

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question of power circulating around the body and its representation. After Linda’s death, her friend Bill MacGillivray finished the project. In this way, the film represents the communal ideal of grassroots filmmaking where authorship is shared and the material is intensely personal and significant to the people in its immediate locale. As we wait for Linda to clap hands together in order to provide a sync reference for picture and sound, MacGillivray introduces her. It is an image of felt time through waiting, one that evokes the trauma of diagnosis and questions of power and mortality. Linda then says: “I am talking with my heart,” knowing that her heart will stop before the film is finished. She describes the difficulty of confronting her doctor about methods of treatment (she was investigating alternative procedures and resisted the doctor’s recommendation of a mastectomy), of bargaining for time, and of having to tell her family. It is a narrative of the act of seeing, of revealing the self. Over black leader, MacGillivray describes a visit to the hospital during Linda’s final days and her remark: “I don’t want you to see me like this.” We have to wonder what it means to see, can we see another self at the moment of death?¹5 We only see the image of Linda and the black space in between images, and while the filmmaker had access to other imagery, this material remains unused. There is no interpretation or commentary, just the singularity of Linda. In a discussion of MacGillivray’s early films, Peter Harcourt points out that in Linda Joy, as in Aerial View, there is “a constant play between what is present and what is past – in fact, a destabilization of the present in relation to the past.”¹6 At the end, the filmmaker recognizes that it is she who has comforted him, not the other way around. The film was well received at the time of its completion, with proceeds earned from the film donated to the Linda Joy Busby Media Arts Foundation, now an important granting body for emerging film and media artists in Atlantic Canada. Past Joy award recipients have included Andrea Dorfman, Justin Simms, Helen Hill, and Neal Livingston, to name a few. 8 Frames Per Second wears the influence of Robert Frank in its improvisational style that resists the ‘rules’ of genre categorization. Made over a period of six years, beginning with audio interviews of the filmmaker’s neighbours in the working-class area of north-end Halifax, the film comes through a utilitarian documentary process and evolves into personal expression made against the one-way representation of the working class in the seminal pre– Challenge for Change nfb film The Things I Cannot Change (Dir: Tanya Ballantyne, 1967). 8 Frames is a portrait of the filmmaker’s neighbour Sophia, a cantankerous storyteller, but the film deconstructs the idea of the portrait

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Figure 2.4 | Sophie playing bingo in north-end Halifax in 8 Frames Per Second.

and is better described by the filmmaker as “an experimental home movie.” His longer description: “One morning this wasp middle-class guy from western New Brunswick wakes up in the lower-income section of north-end Halifax. Downstairs there’s a loud landscaping company assembling to do battle with the lawns in the more affluent south end. In the apartment across the hall, the older, working-class woman from Cape Breton sounds like she’s having an argument with the whole neighbourhood.” The opening image is of the audience at Wormwoods, the local art house and repertory cinema, underscored with the sound of a movie projector. Loud noises awaken the sleeping filmmaker and then a hilarious and startling image of next-door neighbour Sophia peeking into a window and shouting “Hello, Chuck” causes the filmmaker to fall off of his chair. Later, we see retakes of this shot, and this vocal track is also repeated over the end credits. The subject is clearly participating in the humour and is not simply powerless under the gaze of the camera. We catch glimpses of Chuck and Sophia discussing photographs he has taken of her, but these are not shown to the camera. At one point, he hands her a gag pair of glasses with funny nose.

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There is a mix of film stock, optical printing, and camera-speed alterations, with some of the picture out of sync due to speed changes – all drawing attention to the technical process between subject and filmmaker. This portrait is filtered through a collage of elements, reminding us to actively think about how the subject is observing the process of her own representation. In 2008, Clark worked through the Centre for Art Tapes to produce Max o u /w , an impressionistic documentary with a young man, Max, who has Down syndrome. If the subject faces challenges in everyday life, in the swimming pool he has mastery over movement and self-expression, captured with beautiful underwater camerawork. Shot from below, we see the reflections and distortions of the body as Max crashes into the surface, and occasionally glimpse the filmmaker’s body in snorkel gear struggling to keep pace. There is no attempt to explain the subject; instead, the film is a literal immersion in experience: movement, water, play, and pure joy. The first afcoop films obviously reflected the low-budget conditions of filmmakers just beginning the craft, and were made at a time when improvisation and a more spontaneous shooting style was widely accepted among indie filmmakers. An early film from the co-op took a straightforward approach to documentary. You Laugh Like A Duck (Dir: Leon Johnson, 1980), a co-production with the Winnipeg Film Group, deals with children and youth speaking frankly about their communities in Manitoba and Nova Scotia. Even earlier was Joe Sleep (Dir: Herald Pearse, 1976), a documentary about a then well-known folk artist. Sleep became an artist by chance late in his life during an extended stay at the Halifax infirmary in 1973. Until his death in 1978, he was an extremely prolific and charismatic figure known for colourful and child-like images made with passion and complete disregard for conventions of line and perspective, and using whatever materials were at hand. Before becoming an artist, among other jobs, Sleep worked on the sea, for the Bill Lynch Shows, and in a travelling carnival. Seeing Sleep boozing in the bleak downtown taverns, wandering the derelict streets, and on the former carnival grounds of McNabs Island in Halifax harbour provides a glimpse of an era in the region’s art and sense of place that has since been papered over by the gloss of tourism. Film Culture and Exhibition in a Sleepy Coastal Town

Halifax in the early 1970s was hardly a tourist mecca; it was a gritty town ruthlessly divided between the wealthy south and the working-class north end, a division of class and race. It was a place of rather limited cinema cul-

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ture. In 1974, one year after the nfb opened its Halifax office, the Capitol Theatre on Barrington Street, a grand movie palace that once had a novelty X-ray machine in the lobby, was closed to make way for the brutalist concrete tower of Maritime Centre. The Capitol opened in 1930 to much acclaim, as described in the press at the time: “Entering the theatre under the brightly illuminated marquise and sign we find ourselves at the entrance to a castle, with a stone wall coped with red tile surrounding us. This wall is pierced with ballustraded and grilled openings through which we catch glimpses of the surrounding countryside.”¹7 But the era of the movie palace was long gone by the ’70s. Other than mainstream Hollywood fare at the few local screens, local cinema fans and filmmakers could see occasional screenings of nfb documentaries, the sporadic art film presentations at nscad , and some classic films programmed by the Dalhousie Film Society. The conservative nature of the province was felt in its attitude toward the movies; famous art films such as A Clockwork Orange (Dir: Stanley Kubrick, 1971) and Last Tango in Paris (Dir: Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) were once banned, and the province’s censor board would freely take the scissors to banal Hollywood product. These days, urban Halifax has a reputation as a progressive art-friendly city, but this history of censorship reflects the deeper social context. The monopolistic exhibitors had been provided with legislated restrictions on competition with the Theatres and Amusements Act, which declared: “No such exhibitor shall exhibit any motion picture film in any city or town in which there is a licenced 35mm theatre, or in a municipal district within five miles of a licensed 35mm theatre in the same district.”¹8 Given these restrictions, setting up an art cinema in Halifax would be a particular challenge, but in 1976 afcoop coughed up $200 to sponsor the opening of Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Cinema, using the 16mm screening format as the loophole in the law. The name of the theatre came from Edwin Porter’s travelling vaudeville and theatre troupe and the first screening of the movies in Halifax in 1897. The Holland Brothers had tried to bring the movies to the city a year earlier, following their successful screening in Ottawa, but technical problems related to the electricity supply prevented the event from occurring.¹9 Wormwood’s was the labour of love of Gordon Parsons, eclectic cinephile and writer, who went on to work with Bill MacGillivray’s production company and, in 1991, became the executive director of the Atlantic Film Festival. At the time of his untimely death at age forty-three in 1993, Parsons was researching the history of filmmaking in the province, though many of his documents were lost in the 1991 fire that destroyed the original nfb Halifax Barrington Street headquarters.²0

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Figure 2.5 | Poster advertising the first film festival in Nova Scotia – modest beginnings in 1974.

Wormwood’s was first housed in nfb theatre space on Barrington Street, a building that was once home to the first permanent nickel movie theatre in Halifax. Among its many venues (including Carpenters Hall, now the Propeller Brewing Company on Gottingen Street), it later moved two doors down to the Khyber Building, a space that has also housed a gallery and

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artist resource centre. Wormwood’s closed in 1998, a few years after the death of Parsons. As I write this, there is still no permanent year-round alternative art cinema venue in the province, though there have been various efforts to start one. In a small city with weak subsidies available for the arts, it is a venture that can only be sustained by individual passion and dedication since there is no money to be made. Art cinemas in many cities have closed due to the decline in public movie culture, the appeal of home video screenings, and the rise of the film festival as alternative presentation venue. The importance of Wormwood’s cannot be overstated in its contribution to film activity in the city at a time when there was much greater disconnection with the cultural activity going on elsewhere in the country and in the world; at the same time, attendance was never very strong. However, it may be that the simple fact of such a venue where none previously existed contributed to a broadening of the scope of culture and the idea that it is not something that has to be imported from elsewhere. Several people involved with Wormwood’s went on to work as programmers for the Atlantic Film Festival. Long before that festival got off the ground, afcoop organized the first-ever festival of Nova Scotia films in 1974, consisting of short works of co-op members, a selection of Margaret Perry’s tourism films, and a display of Super 8 equipment – a far cry from the industry-dominated forum of the contemporary Atlantic Film Festival (aff ). The aff began, under a different guise, in 1981 in St John’s: nifco filmmaker Mike Riggio presented a modest event at the lspu Hall, paid for with revenue from a benefit screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Riggio’s idea was that the festival would travel throughout the region, and his intention was to program from an international perspective. However, when it moved to Halifax in the second year, and Riggio became unable to remain in control due to illness, it stayed there with the hope of attracting commercial sponsorship, and programming became more regionally focused. Since 1989, St John’s has hosted its International Women’s Film Festival, screening a high-profile mix of short films and more industryoriented fare that is well supported by the city’s arts community. In addition, beginning in 2001, the city has been home to the Nickel Independent Film Festival. Since 2007, afcoop has organized an alternative to the aff called the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival, drawing modest but engaged audiences to more challenging experimental, documentary, and media performance work. The other important exhibition sponsor in Halifax is the Centre for Art Tapes (cfat ), founded in 1979 and originally located at 1671 Argyle Street

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Figure 2.6 | American documentary filmmaker Ricky Leacock at AFCOOP to teach a master class (and drink some wine) with Doug Pope (left) and Gordon Parsons.

on the same floor as Wormwood’s, the animation company Doomsday Studios Limited, The Nova Scotia Photographers Co-op, and afcoop . cfat was formed from the ashes of an earlier initiative supported by the nfb and the Canada Council called Video Theatre, set up for community development and for artist access to video equipment. cfat ’s mandate was strictly programming, but it became a production centre after the Canada Council withdrew funding from Video Theatre and coerced the cfat board of directors to adopt that organization’s production mandate in exchange for financial assistance toward its accumulated deficit.²¹ This was a formative time in the community’s history; former director of cfat Bruce Campbell describes the energy of the Argyle House location: “With so much happening, it was electrifying as filmmaking and film screening, photo co-op shows, popular theatre, and artists’ performances all took place in the same space.”²² Filmmaker Neal Livingston puts a grittier spin on the environment: You came up this long staircase [built in] the 1880s, up a couple of flights of stairs, you’d walk around a corner, and on one end of the building was the film co-op area. Brian McNiven started the Centre

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for Art Tapes. Joe Sleep was there, an ancient alcoholic who was losing some of his body functions, and Gordon [Parsons] would help him out and take care of him. I remember numerous times walking up the stairs, and Joe Sleep would be collapsed and passed out. Gordon and I would help him up, so it was a very interesting complete scene … The art college [nscad ] moved downtown, the film co-op was downtown, and you’d wander to the Jury Room at the corner of Argyle and Prince, that was the bar. When Gerry Regan was premier in the mid-1970s, the politicians and the artists would be there. It was the closest bar to the legislature and the art college. It was pretty vibrant. While there is a divide between filmmakers and media artists, the close proximity generated some crossover, though avant-garde practices, performance, and installation art are a more explicit part of cfat ’s culture. Political activity on the part of the film co-op tended to take the form of lobbying for support of a film industry, though some filmmakers were also engaged in political documentary. Activist feminist production emerged in the late 1970s with Reel Life, a collective whose members included filmmakers Sylvia Hamilton and Pat Kipping. Reel Life members used reel-to-reel video to document political activities in the community. Gay protest also had a media connection, with the first demonstration, on 17 February 1977, held against the Halifax cbc for refusing to accept a public service radio announcement for a gay telephone counselling line.²³ We may take for granted a broadly progressive politics in the cultural community, but it was not until 1982 that a queer art exhibit would be staged in Halifax – Art by Gay Men, organized by curator Robin Metcalfe in space provided by cfat , though the event was not officially part of cfat ’s programming.²4 A decade later, cfat organized and for several years ran, the first Halifax Queer Film Festival – in 1992, it was called Halifax Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Video and Film Festival, and in 1993 and 1994, it was simply called Peggy’s Festival. In 2012, the out east Film Festival launched, programming queer cinema from the region, Canada, and the world. This mainstream presence is a long way from Metcalfe’s description of the response to Jim MacSwain’s 1982 video performance with seven-foot penis sculpture atop the Argyle Street building. Police arrived after complaints from occupants across the street – what was then the Halifax Chronicle-Herald office. It is disappointing that the response of a daily newspaper was to call the cops rather than cross the street and perform journalism, but such were the social norms of 1970s Halifax. “Donning various outfits, ranging from thrift-shop Fred

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Astaire to a dour fetishist, Jim danced around his bright-pink maypole until interrupted by officers of the Halifax police.”²5 The performance was videotaped for inclusion in the Art by Gay Men show. Throughout this period, MacSwain was a pillar of the media arts community, working as artist and administrator, programmer, and from 1983–96 was co-director (along with Tom Fitzgerald) of Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Atlantic, later called Atlantic Independent Media. Sadly, it has not survived, and while the co-ops undertake programming, they do not handle the day-to-day business of distribution and promotion of individual works. MacSwain’s first film, shot on Super 8, is the personal fiction-documentary Amherst (1974). It’s a rough-edged series of streetscapes – the post office, the train station, the park where an older man picked him up – testimony to growing up in a small Nova Scotia industrial town in decline, a town overridden with Baptist morality where escape is the necessary fuel for creative expression and coming out. At the time of his retirement from his job as programmer for cfat , MacSwain released The Fountain of Youth (2010), a wildly energetic cutout animation with characters called Dr Ramsbottom and Madame Spinoza, wheelchair-bound residents of a seniors’ home. The free-flowing and disjunctive film follows their combined fantasies as they search for the fountain of youth. The trip takes them to Florida, popular destination for Canadian grey-hairs, but the quest is interrupted by skateboarding youth on a sixteenth-century pirate ship, and by the nurse arriving to give them their nightly pills. MacSwain’s films are wildly playful, but the humour is underscored by a political consciousness critical of administered society. Animation

A great counter-narrative to the tourism industry’s nostalgic conceptualization of place is MacSwain’s short film Nova Scotia Tourist Industries (1998). The film is a smart parody of the tourism industry’s transformation of landscape, where the cliché of the rugged beauty of the coast covers over the historical reality of place. We hear the filmmaker’s voice accompanying pixilated images of writing and then crumpling paper as he becomes increasingly frustrated with the task of formulating a tourism campaign for the province. Out of these workaday disappointments comes the earnest proposal: “Are you looking for a place to commit suicide? Look no further than this lovely land. Drenched in the blood of genocide, war, deportation, hanging, slaughter … explosions … rape and drunkenness.” The logic of suicide is set within this glib overview of the history of the province that is, like all histories,

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stained in blood. And if the hinterland is not your thing, the film points out how the modern bridges spanning the Halifax harbour are a delightful place to launch a suicide. This counter-narrative to the culture industry turns on its head the regional film industry’s, like the tourism industry’s, need to claim distinctiveness along with familiarity in the attraction of capital. The narration proposes that Tourist Industries is eager to assist in suicide location scouting, an obvious reference to the desire on the part of the province to attract big-budget American film location scouting. Implied is a correspondence of cultural industries and the death of culture. Making the pitch for the new economy: “Nova Scotians, who are no strangers to suicide, delight in the financial addition it provides in these days of crisis in forestry, fishing, mining, and manufacturing.” Black-and-white photographs of the grey sea remind us of the fog cover and bleak weather so often visiting this place. We then see an animated dance of lobster-shaped souvenirs perform a traditional highland step. In one of the film’s final images, a map of the province is folded into the shape of a coffin, painted black, though the lines of the map continue to show through, as the box drifts over the beautiful Halifax Public Gardens. “Make Nova Scotia the final destination. Yes!” We hear the sound of a gunshot. MacSwain’s film refuses the mystification of heritage production but also avoids the turn away from the local for the sake of a universal humanist narrative. This tension continues in his 2005 animation Pitfall, about a depressed archeologist banished (because he has taken too many drugs) to Nova Scotia to do his digging. The setting is no garden paradise but an ‘outback’ visualized with campy horror. The character descends into a cavern, passing icons of Nova Scotia tourism, including a cruise ship jammed into the rock face, and lands in a computer dump, a not-too-subtle reference to the province’s treatment of the environment. Out of the ruins of this discarded technology, he is then reborn as a bagpiper. In the final image, we see a pasted smile on his weary face. The resonance of these films provides one answer to my question of how to engage with regional production without mystifying it: somehow having a greater purchase on authenticity. Author Lynn Coady takes on this question of tourism in her introduction to Victory Meat, an anthology of short fiction from the region, describing how the tourist gaze changes our understanding of place: “Gee, I always thought Great Uncle Bob’s place was a shitbox, but apparently it’s been ‘quaint’ all this time. My grandparent’s music – the stuff that used to grate on my teenage ears – is suddenly ‘haunting,’ just like the landscape that was, for so many years, simply the place where I lived.”²6

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Animation is the dominant form for experimental filmmaking in Halifax and, by and large, throughout the Atlantic region. In the case of afcoop , it may be proximity to a major art school that has offered traditional drawing as well as 16mm film animation in courses taught by Henry Orenstein long before it began scheduling courses in live-action filmmaking. Early afcoop member Ramona Macdonald produced a number of animation projects through her company Doomsday Studios, using an animation stand found in storage at Dalhousie University. This work included Lulu Keating’s first film Lulu’s Back in Town (1980). It consisted mostly of still-photograph self-portraits with a concluding live-action scene on a rooftop with Citadel Hill in the background and Lulu in various costumes, including one made from the Canadian flag. Her next film, The Jabberwalk (1981), is a brief freeform cell animation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” poem. At present, the animation tradition is thriving through the work of Lisa Morse, Siloën Daley, Helen Bredin, Heather Harkins, Becka Barker, and others. Lisa Morse’s wild and widely circulated 2002 film Pustulations uses a painting-on-glass technique to explore the skin and what is described as the “purulent, pustular world beneath it.” This artisanal animation work is dominated by women, many of them influenced by Helen Hill, an experimental filmmaker who used handmade and camera-less processes as well as more traditional animation, collage, and pixilation. Hill was originally from the southern United States, graduated from the film program at Harvard University, and moved to Halifax in the mid-1990s, teaching workshops at afcoop and playing an active role in the community. She authored Recipes for Disaster, a great resource for handmade filmmaking widely circulated on the Web, and a funny overview of handmade film techniques in mock training-film style called Madame Winger Makes A Film (2001). Sadly, she was murdered in 2007 at age thirtysix by a burglar in her home in New Orleans, where she was contributing to the renewal of the community following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. The outpouring of comments and Web postings²7 speak to the tremendous impact this young artist made on the community, both by her lively and colourful work and by her generosity of spirit as teacher, friend, and social activist. Among her many films is Bohemian Town (2004), a love letter to Halifax’s north end, made after she had returned to New Orleans, and set to calypso music with references to peace activism, love, and Food Not Bombs. Love, play, cotton candy, bicycles, makeshift carnivals, chickens, pigs, and happy accidents are recurring themes that all come together in her Tunnel of Love (1996). The lilt of Hill’s southern-accented voice is heard in many

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of the films, expanding the idea of region in ways that encompass the community of alternative artists spread across distant locations. Hill’s final film, The Florestine Collection, in production at the time of her death and based on her discovery of one hundred handmade dresses found in the trash during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, was completed by her husband, Paul Gailiunas, and released in 2011.²8 The Watchmaker (Dir: Christopher Ball, 2008) is inspired by Norman McLaren’s scratch animation technique; the film began with the filmmaker looking for the music to accommodate his visual schema, which he found with the Cape Breton band The Tom Fun Orchestra. This is not a typical music video commissioned to help market the band; instead it began as an original film idea. It is a high-energy, colourful, and multi-layered orchestration of live performance with drawn, painted, and scratched film images set to an upbeat groove that makes McLaren’s original style relevant for a contemporary audience. It is also a return to the materiality of the film medium itself, with the director constructing a customized animation stand to facilitate the work. He describes the process: “The interesting thing about drawing directly on film is that the simplest of lines takes on a wild vitality, because it is impossible to draw perfectly identical images from frame to frame. As a result, hard lines vibrate and colours pulse erratically.”²9 Modern digital effects usually strive to control all elements while the process of The Watchmaker welcomes the unexpected. What is Regional Cinema?

There are a variety of reasons for the focus on animation, including personal inclination, a lack of production resources – at least in the early days, a grassroots diy ethos that allows projects to be completed without large budgets, and the cumbersome structure of a traditional crew hierarchy. These are conditions of filmmaking in a location at a distance from major production centres. An important exception to the dominance of animation as the primary form for experimental film is Winnipeg expat and nscad film teacher Solomon Nagler, whose short Black Salt Water Elegy (2010) makes great use of texture, landscape, and the archive to evoke solitude and the intertwined dreams of place. Nagler’s feature Gravity and Grace (2012) is almost free of dialogue but suggests miscarriage, stowaways in the harbour, and the haunting emptiness of a cold-war-era fallout bunker. This challenging film focuses on the unsaid moments in between action and visualizes region in the ruins. Nagler’s formative film training was at the Winnipeg Film Group, and he remains a strong advocate for a film culture not beholden to commercial 94 | S H O O T I N G F R O M T H E E A S T

industry norms. In this way, he embodies a spirit of regionalism that fosters a global outlook as alternative to cultural homogenization and one that responds to but also transcends a specific geographic locale. In conversations with filmmakers over the course of writing this book, I kept asking for a definition of regional cinema. The answers ranged from bold assertions of distinctiveness to a rejection of that concept for the sake of a more universal humanist impulse. While one motivation for the founding of the co-ops was to provide support that didn’t otherwise exist at all, many of today’s filmmakers are based in the region but operate outside of the co-ops and the nfb , and make work that does not at all address regional specificity. An example is Halifax filmmaker Noah Pink, director of ZedCrew (2010), a 45-minute drama about Zambian rappers, who was invited to the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. The film reflects the machinations of globalization in that it is witness to the immersion of African youth in American hip hop while they slip between local dialects of Nyahja, Bemba, and English, and dream of making it to New York by stowing away in a container ship. Hamish Lambert captures the dynamic energy and specificity of the city of Halifax in a short documentary called Being Parkour (2010). Parkour is an urban-based ‘art of movement’ where participants jump, climb, and vault over the terrain in a highly expressive manner. It is no casual stroll of the tourist or flaneur. A counterpoint to the rigid ideal of regionalism is Lowlife (Dir: Seth Smith, 2012), an extremely low-budget, self-financed experimental feature. The characters inhabit grim surroundings and, in a nod to the intoxications of the north Atlantic, suck on the tentacles of a starfish to get high. The ecstasy of the narcotic is release from the banal boredom of everyday life, in a setting that recalls the gritty realism of early Jim Jarmusch and the surrealism of David Lynch, with the kitsch sensibility of 1960s Russ Meyer exploitation movies. The starfish image inverts the nostalgic tourist image of place, and the landscape consists of barren strip malls, parking lots, and rundown housing. It is the post-industrial landscape of zombie capitalism without much capital. Some filmmakers describe the regional distinction in terms of funding policies and access to resources so that the region comes to be defined more by structural limitations than aesthetic issues. The aesthetic cannot be divorced from the material conditions of production – there is always an intersection, and the more interesting films emerge as creative responses to economic and ideological marginalization. A provocative response to this question of the region came from Lulu Keating, who emphatically made the point that this idea of region is a national concept, one that is produced in the centre to The Co-op Scene | 95

describe work being undertaken in areas that have limited access to power and economic privilege; and so it is a way of affirming hegemony by marginalization. “It just smacks to me of a centralist outlook to talk about regionalism, because it defines regionalism as something outside of a centre that is defined by policy makers in the centre. For me, the cinema that’s come out of provinces that are more far-flung and disparate is much more exciting a cinema than anything produced in what they would define as their centre.” Keating’s point comes, first of all, in an impassioned engagement with cinema that expresses a distinct voice rather than one that mirrors the familiar. It also comes out of a tactical concern over policy machinations that see regional funding as short-term development that can be withdrawn. This condition is shaped by the narrow concept of national cinema as a singular thing, and the idea that regional cinema is simply one other ‘thing’ when, in fact, the country is nothing but a collection of regions held together in an economic marriage of convenience, with culture deployed as party favours to keep the guests happy. The interests of the nation-state must not be confused with the needs and desires of artists, whether located in the margins or close to the centre, and regional voices must be seen as a key part of national culture, not simply as a side dish. Keating’s Moody Brood (1999) mixes animation with live action to tell the personal story of her family and of growing up in the Nova Scotia town of Antigonish. The family arrived after having lived in various parts of the world and had a difficult time fitting in to this small Scots-dominated community. The animation makes use of found objects – photos, maps, and landscape images – along with more stylized backgrounds to create a sense of the detritus of everyday life. These objects are the forgotten icons through which memory is formed. The story of family is also the story of entry into culture. There is a great image of the tearing apart and rearranging of a family photo; the family is constructed through this act of storytelling. The home is described as a kind of theatrical stage, with the intense rivalries of a large family, the social influences of highland dancing, and the wearing of the tartan in an effort to fit in (never enough to please the locals). All of this is set against the theatrical rigidity of the Catholic Church. Lulu’s sister Trish says: “Catholicism … makes people live their lives shrouded in guilt. Dad was so religious, so Catholic, that I think his Catholicism estranged him from his children when they started to commit mortal sins.” The film deals with the weight of family that one carries into adulthood, and it asserts the matriarchal story within the narrative of home. The filmmaker asks at the conclusion: “Do our memories of the past have any resemblance to the

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things that really happened?” This film is her way of writing the drama of family and of love, themes later pursued in her experimental documentary Ladies in Waiting (2000), which features an eight-year-old girl talking about growing up. We also hear the voices of mature adult women who reflect on age, love, sex, and loneliness. The centre of the film is a beautiful dining scene with the young girl and all the women, including Keating, feasting while fragments of their voices play against this social landscape. By the 1980s, with the rise of social and economic conservatism, funding policies began to shift. One consequence was an implicit encouragement of the film co-ops to take on a role more directed toward being a broader cultural and educational resource than toward the support of artist-filmmakers. As the co-ops come into their own in the mid-1980s, the nfb , which provided crucial support through the loan of equipment, office space, and laboratory services, had come under increasing attack. In 1985 it was commonplace to assume the once-grand institution of Canadian film culture would close its doors – that is the opening premise of a Globe and Mail feature article of the time – succumbing to private sector pressures, particularly for its lucrative laboratory facilities but also for production financing. ³0 The nfb also faced regular criticism from within the independent film community for its staid house style (a criticism that certainly applies to many productions but also willfully ignores the development of regional documentary voices, the innovations of Challenge for Change, the political importance of Studio d , etc.). The same newspaper article cites Toronto filmmaker Bruce Elder and film reviewer Bart Testa calling for its dissolution, playing into the interests of the private-sector market. The problems with the nfb are well known in the regions, but this purist ideal for a national cinema distracts from the material conditions of production and the complex ways that works of culture come into being and function in society. A degree of malaise and a decline in activity at afcoop was met by a Canada Council threat to operational funding. Filmmaker John Scott, who was then on the board of directors, describes the mood: “In the mid-nineties, the meetings at afcoop seemed to be far less passionate about the issues. I remember Tom Fitzgerald saying there was a time when we would argue about this point for an hour and a half, and now no one says anything … When I was on the board, we never talked about movies. It was all about money.” The turn to a training mandate was a strategic effort to generate more filmmaking activity. One filmmaker who has managed to shift back and forth between short and feature filmmaking is Andrea Dorfman. Her work reflects the scrappy character of the city of Halifax and avoids cliché images associated with the

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region. As she says: “I’ve resisted shots of the ocean and villages because I really don’t connect with that. Those aren’t my stories. But the other part of it is, I think there are a lot more stories in Halifax, in Atlantic Canada, that are not connected to fishing and cod and ceilidh. That was my experience, but those are the unfortunate narratives that Telefilm gloms onto because they have this regional idea, which is not true. Halifax is an incredible city for creativity. It’s a really fascinating place, but I think the weather keeps people inside. I’m always thinking of ways to get people outside.” The line from Dorfman’s film poem There’s a Flower in My Pedal (2005) that opens this chapter conveys the energy and chaos of a diy film culture that manages to persist in the face of industry homogenization. She describes her film as a poetic narrative about bicycles, knitting, and love. Dorfman says: “I was thinking of the idea of how fear stops us from living and doing certain things. I have a mother who is very fearful and who, I feel, did not live up to her potential in some ways because she let fear get in the way. I am quite the opposite. Lots of things scare me, but I try to be conscious of it and move toward the things that scare me. That film was talking about being in that place where you are afraid. And how you inhabit it.” The film’s energy comes from quotidian moments of the everyday, where past and present coalesce. Dorfman’s earlier short films include Swerve (1998), a tightly made love triangle between three women, set in the back of a pickup truck. Nine (1997) draws on personal experience in the story of a year in the life of a nine-yearold girl diagnosed with separation anxiety. We see home-movie footage of a baby crawling on the ground and footage staged as a home movie of a young Andrea hiding her mother’s perfume in an attempt to prevent her parents from going out for the evening. It is a documentary of personal history and inner experience. We see kids clapping hands while a child’s voice describes a litany of common childhood fears – using the bathroom, large animals, being alone, school – together raising the question of what is normal and who is the self. The energy of these earlier films is echoed in Dorfman’s 2010 collaboration with Halifax poet Tanya Davis in a short called How To Be Alone. This beautiful film about loneliness became an on-line viral hit after Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert circulated the link on Twitter and it was passed along via Facebook; it reached over two million views on YouTube. No Canadian artist’s popular success can be had without contemptuous backlash from central Canadian gatekeepers. In this case, Globe and Mail writer Russell Smith misses the boat by calling the film anti-feminist and retrograde, assuming incorrectly that since the creators are women that the text is directed narrowly at women’s experience. It is an example of a re-

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viewer uncritically asserting his own biases rather than considering the work on its own terms.³¹ The phenomenon of the film’s success utterly disrupts the fixed idea of regional cinema as something closed and provincial, since the audience is everywhere, defined by shared interests rather than geography, and the film makes use of these new technological platforms with a text that also emphasizes a handmade sensibility: “Lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.” Dorfman and Davis have taken up the success of this collaboration with a feature film inspired by this short, Heartbeat (2013), a film that takes the city of Halifax as its primary subject. It is discussed in this book’s concluding chapter. A more conventional coming-of-age story is Baba’s House (Dir: Shandi Mitchell, 2001), a well-made, tv -style short drama about a nine-year-old girl coming to terms with the death of her mother. While shot in small-town Nova Scotia, it could be just about anywhere. This kind of filmmaking certainly has an audience, and it again raises the question of whether regional identity still matters. The humanist impulse is reinforced by the retrospective format of an adult woman named Kristina recalling a significant event in her childhood. She tells the story of having to stay with Baba, with whom she shares no common language, after her dad remarries and goes off to Graceland on a honeymoon. Later, the girl is shocked by the tv news of Elvis’s death. We then see that Baba has set up a candle-lit bedroom shrine for Elvis in a room that is otherwise crammed with Ukrainian Easter eggs and Catholic imagery, but all of this just adds to Kristina’s feeling of unbelonging. The film is well acted and beautifully photographed, especially during a fierce rainstorm where we see Baba working to cover garden plants to protect them from hail. Kristina struggles to help but falls in the mud in a kind of tragic ballet as she recalls the storm on the day her mother was buried. Unfortunately, the dramatic tension felt in the environment is weakened by a turn to spirituality in a scene where Kristina attempts to contact her dead mother with the help of a local First Nations girl named Ruby. How many white characters in North American films go on a spiritual quest with a Native Canadian or Native American who just happens to come along? The film follows a familiar coming-of-age trajectory of misunderstanding and disconnection felt by the child due to her inability to exercise agency over her environment, and out of a desperate desire to understand the impossible terms of life, age, and death. A useful comparison to Baba’s House is the coming-of-age film The Wait (Dir: Ann Verrall, 2006). The filmmaker graduated from nscad , where she was exposed to video art, and was then an active member of cfat – influences

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that are decidedly not of the industry model, even though this short film anticipates the director’s subsequent teen coming-of-age feature Nonsense Revolution (2008). The Wait is set in that liminal space between childhood and adult experience – the opening credits play over an assemblage of family photos, and we see a boy waking up to the sound of parents arguing. It is a film about escape from the disappointments of family as well as the yearning of young love. It is identifiable as set in north-end Halifax but is also universalistic in tone. The film came out of Verrall’s process of developing the story with youth collaborators through extensive discussion and improvisation, a model that she has since employed on other projects. The filmmaker describes the process as an intervention against the homogenization of media culture. The thing I like about working this way is that it starts to form a different kind of relationship with the audience. We are making a piece that actually is able to work within an educational system. In terms of building a Canadian audience, you have to start younger so that people, when they are growing up, have a different relationship to Canadian film. They are comparing it to American stuff, and that is what they are expecting. The kind of work that I am doing excites me because I feel that it is actually reaching an audience, and even if it doesn’t go very far, the way of working with it is having a big impact on this community of people. My short films have had more of an audience so far than the feature has. I think that it was great to make a feature film, to really be able to dive into a big long story, but I think that the connection with the audience isn’t there yet. I feel there should be some kind of alternate distribution process, maybe getting films shown not in mainstream theatres but in schools or some other way. This collaborative dialogue is a way of bringing a fresh approach to regional filmmaking, understanding that the work emerges not just in the hands of the filmmaker but also in the experience of the film viewer. Changing Approaches to Co-op Filmmaking

In celebration of afcoop ’s thirtieth anniversary, a series of short films were commissioned. Among these, Glenn Walton’s My History Project (2005) is an example of the grassroots spirit felt in the early days of the co-op as seen

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through a nostalgic lens. It is a poetic mapping of personal history from Holywood, down the road from Belfast, to Halifax and the other Hollywood, the one that maps our consciousness. It is a personal story of family origins intertwined with the landscape, architecture, military industrialism (through reminiscences of his father’s service in the air force), and concepts of culture, from the old land and the new. Reference is made to the Halifax explosion of 1917 and the sinking of the Titanic as markers of place – the young boy who voices the filmmaker’s story talks about drawing endless pictures of the Titanic and later working as an extra in the location filming of the Titanic movie (1997), an iconic product of global Hollywood milked by local film industry advocates as a showpiece of the location. The early days of the co-op are exemplified in the films of John Brett. He made three documentaries admired by afcoop filmmakers for the expression of regional identity – Voices From the Landscape (1975), Two Brothers (1976), and Island Memories (1978) – dealing with Acadian life in the Morris and Surette’s islands of Nova Scotia. Voices conveys the impressions of an old man and the loss of traditional Acadian culture in a village on the south shore of Nova Scotia after the homestead has been deserted. What remains are the environmental ruins and the patriarch’s memories. In retrospect, these sentiments could more broadly apply to maritime culture. Cinematographer Lionel Simmons made Masterpiece (1975), a futuristic existential film on the idea of human survival in the face of external coercive powers; Ramona Macdonald directed Regan’s Cove (1976), a short drama set in a fishing village; Ken Pittman made Gene (1977), a short drama on alienation and boredom; in Rude Questions (1980), Doug Pope portrays an antiquarian bookstore in rural Nova Scotia run by a character named Larry Loomer; in 1980, Cordell Wynne released Rubber Madness, an amusing film about tubing, singing, laughing, and boozing down the Gaspereau River. Also in 1980 came the short Billy Doucette’s Hornpipe (Dir: Claire Henry), where a light is attached to the end of a horn and appears to dance to the accompaniment of guitar and fiddle – an image that recalls the style of Norman McLaren’s animation. The early era of the co-op comes to a close with Gasoline Puddles, acclaimed writer Shandi Mitchell’s first film, shot in 1991, with the footage destroyed in the fire of that year at the nfb Halifax offices. Mitchell made Take Two (1992) with footage taken of the ruins. This fire marked a change in the relationship between the nfb and independent filmmakers: the new nfb offices relocated to a corporate office tower and no longer had space to support local screenings and other grassroots activities. I would also say that this shift was as much conceptual as physical.

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Figure 2.7 | Remains of the fire that destroyed the National Film Board headquarters on Barrington Street in Halifax, 1992.

There is considerable financial and social pressure to produce calling-card films – films made to demonstrate a filmmaker’s mastery of narrative cinema to assist entry into the commercial film industry (the model of the Canadian Film Centre and of some film schools). According to Lionel Simmons, an early member of afcoop and accomplished cinematographer (Life Classes), the pressure to be calling-card producers existed from the beginning, even if no one called it that at the time. Experimental processes and documentary tend to get marginalized as a consequence, though I do not want to overstate this since there is certainly no prescription against non-narrative practices. I will say that there is some disconnect between the general impression of activity and actual practice. An intriguing example of experimentation is Chris Spencer-Lowe’s Yggdrasll, The World Tree (2006), shot during European travels, with footage then optically manipulated, drawing on Norse mythology to meditate on the interconnections of space and being. On the other hand, there is a visceral celebration of the B-movie, for instance, in the slasher homage Treevenge (Dir: Jason Eisener, 2008). It is a well crafted if gruesome revenge tale of Christmas trees turning against the unwitting masses. Blood spills freely with children strangled, eyes gouged out by

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Figure 2.8 | Abandoned ruins of the NFB in Halifax, twenty years after the 1992 fire.

branches, and a throat slashed by the decorative star. Happy holidays. In North America, films like this appeal to a wide fan base through familiar references to the genre. The popularity of the genre in the region is also seen in the documentary Zombiemania (Dir: Donna Davies, 2008), on the evolution of the zombie from its roots in Haitian voodoo to popular culture. Eisener has parlayed the success of his short films into a $3 million feature Hobo With A Shotgun (2010), another revenge fantasy featuring genre star Rutger Hauer as a vagrant who performs an especially gore-filled idea of justice for the crimes he comes across. Film culture in Nova Scotia is driven by industry imperatives, and this has influenced what takes place at afcoop , though the organization remains open to a diversity of activity. Media activity is now much more dispersed, with an independent production co-operative having been formed in Cape Breton in 2008, film education centralized in the universities, and alternative screenings now hosted by various groups, often in partnership with afcoop. In 2009–10, afcoop established a new initiative to help offset the

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co-op’s emphasis on training: a residency program for already-established filmmakers. The first recipient of this award was filmmaker and cinematographer Tarek Abouamin, who completed his documentary Gawab (2010), about family, loss, and identity, in the form of a personal film-letter to his family in Egypt. The title is the phonetic translation of the Arabic word for ‘letter.’ Abouamin followed this film with the searing documentary 18 Days (2011), shot collectively with filmmakers and activists in Egypt during the Arab Spring. The calling-card structure of afcoop ’s Film5 training program has mostly generated straightforward narrative, but also some very good films. A standout case is Rhonda’s Party (Dir: Ashley Mackenzie, 2010), the story of a reclusive resident of a seniors’ residence who is planning a birthday party for a close friend. Rhonda has to deal with the fact that her friend has died on the eve of the party. Most short films dealing with themes of aging and death tend to become maudlin, but this is the exception, with the strong performances and spare photography making for a compelling experience. The gritty dwb (Driving While Black) (Dir: Reed Jones, 2009) is an exceptional, if brief, political film made under the Film5 program, dealing with strained race relations through a scenario of a black-occupied car pulled over by a white cop. The characters get away from police harassment only after telling the cops they happen to be on the way to cbc for a radio discussion dealing with police harassment issues. Saved by the public media institution! The soundtrack turns on its head the banal mythologization of folk innocence with an intense politicized rap, “Welcome to Nova Scotia,” articulating the fact of racism in the province. More gentle but no less pointed is Sylvia Hamilton’s short Keep on Keepin’ On (2005), sponsored as part of afcoop’s thirtieth anniversary. The title evokes the continuity of struggle while the images suggest home movies and the declaration of belonging. The narration speaks of being from this place and the frustration of being asked, “Where are you really from?” We see the filmmaker taking pictures within the frame, making place and history out of the abstraction of space. She says: “You see, we didn’t just get off the boat and we keep on keepin’ on, being Nova Scotians.” Other images include historical photos of Blacks in the province, including a classroom image of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, gesturing to this filmmaker’s substantial documentary The Little Black Schoolhouse (2007), in production at around the same time and discussed in the documentary chapter of this book. I conclude this section with two notable films that explore ideas of place and culture: the first, Charlie’s Prospect (Dir: Ariella Pahlke, 1997), is a tren-

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chant critique of the nostalgia and tourism industry; and the second, The Wake of Calum MacLeod (Dir: Marc Almon, 2006), skirts the edge of nostalgia for the loss of Gaelic in Cape Breton but also embraces the role of language, music, and storytelling in the making of place. Charlie’s Prospect was made at cfat and is an interesting crossover between the personal video associated with cfat and the narrative impulse of afcoop . It is the story of folk artist Charlie Norris, from the community of Lower Prospect, who builds a miniature model of his town and dock. We see very beautiful stylized shots of painting, with haptic close-ups of his hands at work. The film’s reverence for place is interrupted by the arrival of a man who, while his kids wait in the idling car, offers Charlie cash to buy the entire town model. Charlie later has a nightmare in which his town is converted into a Barbie dollhouse. We then see that he has refused the sale of culture and has defiantly built a model of the man’s car. The end credit makes a pointed statement against the anti-art, tourism-oriented policies of the provincial government: “This production was not sponsored by the Department of Tourism, nor by the corporate Coastal Real Estate Investor’s Group.” The credit reminds us of how the inflated cost of real estate along the province’s south shore has significantly transformed these communities. The Wake of Calum MacLeod is a successful industry-style calling-card film, but it is also entirely invested in local specificity. Shot in Cape Breton and performed in Gaelic with English subtitles (is there another North American film made in Gaelic?), it is the story of an aged storyteller who has lost his audience. In 2011, Marc Almon returned to shoot another Gaeliclanguage short in Cape Breton called The Fiddler’s Reel, a tale of love and intrigue set during the Depression and using a storytelling structure similar to The Wake. Almon describes the films as expressing a desire to hold on to culture and language. “The setting is important, as it takes place in the early 1930s, which was a pivotal time in Cape Breton when people where giving up on the language, not passing it on to their kids, seeing it as something backward. The second framing device is what took place in the late 1970s, with researchers going to communities to record stories and songs … And it dovetails with what is happening in the Gaelic community today, with young people starting to learn the language.”³² The Wake is pitched, in part, as a language-learning tool (and this triggered some of the film’s financing), but it is by no means a utilitarian object; rather, it is a moving journey into the power of storytelling and the oral tradition, echoing Bill MacGillivray’s Life Classes. The plot involves an old storyteller’s desire to have his now-adult children return in order to re-establish

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the culture of storytelling. It begins with the old man telling a wild story to his young children of having to confront the Baron of the Wind over a lost haystack, and then stealing one of the Baron’s prized horses in return. Gestures and sounds give the impression that the old man continues to do battle with the Baron, and that this spirit is present in the room. The daughter listens attentively while a son makes the accusation that the story is a fiction (as if that is such a terrible charge!), while another son interrupts to ask whether there will be food today. This is the only explicit political moment, making reference to the region’s economic and cultural decline, except that the making of this film is a political act against the homogenization of culture. The story turns out to be a dream or memory of the old man, who now must confront the Baron again over the loss of his audience – his children have grown up and moved away. During a fierce windstorm, the old man dies, but when his children return to attend his wake, he suddenly comes back to life: “Now trust me, coming back to life is terribly frightening for all involved.” The wake is transformed into a celebration of the need for story (and filmmaking) connected with place – a sensibility that informs the history of the co-op and that keeps it alive. These films reflect resilient tactics of afcoop to work in the industrial model of filmmaking and funding opportunities, but also to declare a space for expression that is outside of the homogeneity of the mainstream. NEW BRUNSWICK

Of the four Atlantic provinces, the film industries in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island are the least industrialized, and this has a corresponding effect on the co-op scene. New Brunswick competes with other jurisdictions for location film work, promoting the province as a stand-in for elsewhere rather than as a place to nurture local culture. Filmmaker and founding member of the New Brunswick Filmmakers’ Co-operative Art Makosinski characterized filmmaking in the province in a way that grimly captures the morality and cultural context of the place: “Here in New Brunswick making films can be like establishing a bordello. First no one really believes such things can exist here; second, no one wants to take part in it because its immoral; and third, it can never be as good as the ones that exist in Toronto.”³³ Makosinski made the first locally produced indie art film in Fredericton in 1967, called Next Day, a ‘day-in-the-life of a student’ short production. This early initiative was made in isolation from the grow-

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Figure 2.9 | New Brunswick Filmmakers’ Co-operative founding member Art Makosinski (left) with visiting filmmaker Jean Pierre Lefebvre.

ing underground film movements emerging elsewhere; the New Brunswick Filmmakers’ Co-operative (nbfc ) did not form until a decade later. New Brunswick’s population is spread over a number of smaller cities – Saint John, Moncton, and Fredericton are each under 75,000 – and distinct English and French communities mostly work in isolation. There is little institutional support for experimental filmmaking, perhaps because the arts culture is largely oriented to traditional art practices as nurtured by the fine arts department of Mount Allison University in Sackville. At the same time, in addition to nbfc, there are two other production co-operatives in the province. Cinémarévie Coop Ltée, dedicated to serving the French/Acadian community, is located in Edmunston, near the New Brunswick–Quebec border. It was founded in 1980 by documentary cinematographer and director Rodolphe Caron along with other filmmakers involved with the French office of the nfb located in Moncton. With the founding of this co-op, there was a struggle over control of Acadian production and a resistance

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on the part of the nfb to the Canada Council’s mandate to support truly independent organizations. Cinémarévie, incorporated as La Coopérative des Artisans du Cinéma en Marévie and originally organized for traditional 16mm production, is especially dedicated to regional production in northwestern New Brunswick.³4 Unfortunately, it does not have the level of activity and community profile of other co-ops in the region and has faced a loss of Canada Council funding. An early Acadian production that precedes the formation of Cinémarévie is Les Gossipeuses (Dir: Phil Comeau, nfb 1978), a drama shot in the Baie St Marie area. The film reflects the nfb ’s desire to deal with both regionalization and cultural change in a subject that makes comedy out of the presence of young hippies and a new freethinking priest in a small town. Among other films, Comeau later made the feature Le Secret de Jerome (1994) in Nova Scotia. Set in the 1860s, the film tells the story of an Acadian couple unable to have children who then take charge of a mysterious crippled and mute boy. Acadian filmmaking is often characterized by a unique approach combining documentary and drama, for instance, in the wacky Brecht-inspired Challenge for Change film La noce est pas finie (Dir: Léonard Forest, 1971), a community-scripted experimental feature made with residents of Gloucester County, New Brunswick, to dramatize social change while also commenting upon the act of dramatization.³5 At the other end of the province is the third co-op, Faucet Media Arts, an offshoot of the artist-run centre Struts Gallery in Sackville, supporting smallscale filmmaking within an audio and media arts environment. Struts was formally established in 1981, though it existed in an earlier form as a community art and education centre. Faucet was established following a series of performance and media art events and lectures hosted at Struts in the late 1990s and developed organically out of interests and practices present in the community. Filmmaker Amanda Dawn Christie describes the local aesthetic as having a strong base in animation and being influenced by the drawing program at Mount Allison: “The animation I see in Sackville is very similar to a lot of the tattoos I see – I’ve never seen such bizarre tattoos anywhere. Simple line drawings, no shading, no detail. The aesthetic is a lot of cursive handwriting, short declarative sentences followed by beautiful drawings.” A beautiful collage animation is Dawn of the Pixies (Dir: Tara Wells, 2004); just under two minutes in length, it evokes the fantastical world of George Méliès as well as changing seasons and layers of playful pixies. Of the work I have screened, there is a preponderance of music and a use of Super 8 and lowend video – reflecting the grassroots, diy nature of short productions that lack access to larger budgets and resources. Many productions are collage

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works and enigmatic narratives rather than linear stories. The work in Sackville follows to some extent on the influence of pioneering video artist, and Mount Allison faculty member from 1971 to 1973, Colin Campbell (1942– 2001). Many well-known media artists were Campbell’s students, including Acadian poet, filmmaker, professor, and former lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick Herménégilde Chiasson. See Campbell’s ironic portrait of the art star in rural New Brunswick in his 1972 tape Sackville I’m Yours. The rural environment is described more concretely by Valerie LeBlanc as an especially important influence in the development of time-based art in the province: “Most aspects of New Brunswick culture are influenced by the diversity of the landscape – rocky, sandy, coastal, inland, flat, and hilly – as well as the rural/urban blend of people with heterogeneous interests.”³6 An artist who crossed the fortified terrain between the artworld and filmmaking is Barbara Sternberg, who lived in Sackville in the early 1980s and was a founding member of Struts. Her optical printing–based experimental films, such as Transitions (1982), originated on 8mm film shot in Sackville but then reshot in Halifax on the afcoop optical printer to create the multiple layering of images. The film reflects the transition space between sleep and wakefulness through enigmatic looping imagery and motion. In the words of Vivian Darroch-Lozowski: “Sternberg’s films impress as a fluid mass. No images in them are without temporal and physical weight and this weight increases as they are viewed.”³7 This idea of weight reflects something of the materiality of the films. These are handmade works that are outside of the domain of industrial cinema production, and they reflect the spirit of filmmaking in the regions in the early days of the co-ops. Her intensely personal films make use of layers of images from everyday life in a way that transcends the ‘home movie’ while interrogating the concept of home, memory, and time. On her filmmaking, Sternberg says: “I don’t like to use images that are monumental or create a sense of awe in the viewer … I felt better keeping things smaller and rougher. My stuff works through an accumulation of the everyday, more through a glance than a look, less a controlling gaze than an observational one.”³8 Sternberg moved to Toronto in 1984, and her work has since been taken up within the canon of experimental film, but the early Maritime films were made outside of the peculiar institutional conditions of fringe film exhibition. An unfortunate condition of filmmaking in the Atlantic region is a diminished culture of reception for difficult non-narrative films. There is a tendency to view experimental practice as a learning stage on the road toward making conventional narrative, or as a laboratory for the development of

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techniques that can be incorporated into more mainstream media. Short films are often exhibited together, with a formally radical work sandwiched between a screwball comedy and an earnest coming-of-age story. The lack of curatorial rigour can provide a healthy alternative to the canonical and interpersonal politics dominating exhibition practices in larger centres, but the democratic impulse behind the organization of screenings can also diminish the development of a stronger critical and aesthetic dialogue. It is taken for granted in contemporary art that the work is subject to interpretation and that there is an active process of engagement required on the part of the viewer, but this perspective is less commonly directed at film. Amanda Dawn Christie has reported a number of experiences that illustrate this problem, including having short sound films screened silently; programmers screen dvd preview versions of films when 16mm prints were available; and a film projected inadvertently onto one corner of the screen and then witnessing, with a packed theatre audience, the projectionist move the projector during the show to properly centre and frame the image. These are the sublime experiences of the live event, but without a model of alternatives or a sense of the historical trajectory of an art practice, it is not surprising that mainstream conventions have taken hold as the common-sense ideology of production and exhibition. While Christie lives and works in New Brunswick, much of her work has been done through afcoop, and she could just as easily be inserted into that section of this book. She has a background in dance and still photography and entered into filmmaking out of these combined practices. She is also a skilled technician and is now working in film performances that involve multiple 16mm projectors that are modified to control the image in a variety of ways. This shift in film practice is toward an understanding of film as being physical and embodied, and that it involves a relationship between artist and audience. She also suggested to me, only half-jokingly, that taking control of the projectors is a reaction against the experience of inattentive projectionists. Her films often utilize optical printing, colour manipulation, and hand processing, and involve intimate gestures that relate to haptic sensation rather than linear plot. Laura Marks describes the haptic as a combined sensory experience: “In haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch.”³9 Christie wants her films to critique the structuring of experience through language. As she says: “Like an abstract painting, or a fabulous meal, a film can be a beautiful moment of being or revelation that brings us closer to our intimate senses and to the geography of our

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Figure 2.10 | 16mm film strip for 3part Harmony: Composition in RGB #1.

bodily presence in this world without leaning on the guise of an Aristotelian story arc.”40 Scratching onto film picture surfaces and soundtrack areas, painting onto film, optical manipulation, and experimentation with alternative chemical processing all refuse narrative cinema’s obligatory suspension of disbelief. These techniques act on the viewer in an emotional way that is outside of story conventions, eliciting not character empathy but embodied sensation. The works are connected with the tradition of experimental film but expand history into present-day practices. For instance, Christie’s black-and-white silent Turning (2004) is an oblique journey into the natural landscape, recalling the films of Maya Deren. In several films, water is a dominant image, a force of nurturing that is essential to life, a force that can drown us but is also connected with the materials inside the home. These ideas are manifest in more complex ways in Fallen Flags (2007), making use of multiple layered images of trains and of underwater, recalling Joyce Wieland’s Reason Over Passion/La Raison Avant La Passion (1967–69). In Christie’s film, the space of the train is not simply related to landscape but is transformed into light and texture, an interior that folds onto memory and sensation. As in Wieland’s work, feminist hand-made filmmaking references women’s space and labour, using techniques from sewing and other domestic chores. The beautiful 3part Harmony: Composition in rgb #1 (2006) makes use of ‘obsolete’ three-strip Technicolor process and the gestures of the female dancer body (the filmmaker herself ) in a play of unity and separation where the colours combine and separate, moving with and against the dancer’s body. While achieving something unique in film practice, the film evokes Norman McLaren’s Pas De Deux (1967) and Andy Warhol’s screen-print multiples. Ironically, the sense of unity in the cinematic experience appears greatest when the bodies separate into three distinct colours and three distinct movement patterns, perhaps because the powerful way that these bodies, the artist body in multiple, fills the cinema frame and thus transcends the originating basis of the work in performance and still photography. The New Brunswick Filmmaker’s Co-operative

Formed in 1979 and located in Fredericton, The New Brunswick Filmmaker’s Co-operative (nbfc) began with fourteen founding members and an initial fund of $11,000 (a year later the co-op began receiving some organizational funds from the Canada Council). It now strives to serve a province-wide membership of close to two hundred. To this end, the co-op maintains

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mobile equipment packages in the cities of Saint John and Moncton, and runs workshops in communities outside of Fredericton. It identifies itself explicitly as a training centre, with a formal association with the minor film program at the University of New Brunswick. It is currently located in the Charlotte Street Arts Centre in Fredericton, a shared space housing a variety of arts organizations and facilitating professional interaction across disciplines. Unusual among film co-ops, most members do not pay a fee to access equipment for work on independent non-commercial productions (through a deferral system that must be approved by the board of directors), but are encouraged to contribute volunteer time to the organization. At the time of this writing, it also provides small grants to seed member productions; offers a program called Scripts Out Loud to workshop screenplays with local actors; and runs the Short Film Venture Fund, a joint venture with New Brunwswick Film, the provincial film industry office for the production of calling-card-style short narrative films. The co-op also runs a weekly screening series in conjunction with the University of New Brunswick (there is otherwise no art cinema venue), and since 2000, the Silver Wave Film Festival (originally called the Tidal Wave Festival), primarily as a showcase for local work but it does feature visiting filmmakers and facilitates contacts and professional development. The co-op is the primary institution of film culture in the province and maintains activity across the domains of production, exhibition, and education, allowing it to reach out to diverse communities but also stretching resources and demands upon staff. It does a huge amount with a modest budget of just over $300,000 – not much to cover staff, rent, programming, and facilities costs.4¹ On top of these activities, the organization must purchase and upgrade equipment in a constantly changing digital sphere while also maintaining traditional 16mm production capabilities. It identifies itself as a filmmaking co-op with 16mm production gear as an integral component, even if most members work with digital video. The rationale for the organization extends beyond technology and involves fostering a sense of community and shared purpose in the development of filmmaking. At the same time, working on film remains expensive and the video-film divide was well entrenched at the time of the organization’s establishment. Leafing through the newsletters of the early years of the co-op, I was struck by the overwhelming enthusiasm for local production and for the co-op itself on the part of a handful of members, and especially Tony Merzetti, who has been actively involved with the organization since 1983 and the executive director since 1986. Most small- and medium-sized arts organizations have

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a lot of staff turnover, and the executive director position can come with considerable stress, making Merzetti’s long term on the job an admirable achievement. Newsletters covered the excitement around the screenings of completed films and about visiting filmmakers such as Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Lionel Simmons, Bill MacGillivray, Mike Jones, and Giles Walker in the early 1980s, and Mina Shum in 1997, the same year an advertisement for Fredericton’s first queer video festival appeared in an issue. But it is the small details that reveal the conditions of production at the time and the lack of substantial resources. A news item about a blown fuse in a camera power supply announces the co-op’s one 16mm sync sound camera being out of service. There is news of Canada Council cutbacks in funding to the co-op – the group faced a 10 per cent reduction in core funding in 1994, directly impacting the already limited salaries (for staff who earned considerably less than what they could in the private sector). In the early years of the co-op, there was a lack of production because few members had experience or training in filmmaking, the skills necessary to turn good ideas into the hard work of making a film. More than one filmmaker described to me what was then a prevailing attitude of discouragement in the community at large toward the establishment of the co-op, that filmmaking is something that happens elsewhere (an attitude that began to change with the start of the Silver Wave Film Festival). Early Films at the New Brunswick Co-op

A number of the early productions were workshop films lacking the focus of a dedicated artistic vision, but they did provide experience and helped to kick-start an atmosphere of activity. An exceptional production from the early years is Skateboard Peru (Dir: Art Makosinski, 1981), a dynamic wild ride on skateboard through streets and mountain roads. It captures the energy of indie film in a free-form visceral glance through the environment from rural mountains, through villages, and into a city, concluding with local kids trying out the skateboard. This short film was made at the same time that the filmmaker was in Peru with Jon Pedersen to make Ski Peru (1979), a documentary about a race to ski from the highest mountain in the country. A series of short historical vignettes were commissioned to mark the province’s 1984 bicentennial and produced for broadcast. This kind of work gave co-op members experience on a professional film set, helped establish technical skills, and provided a sense of accomplishment that enabled members to imagine larger projects. The shorts run from thirty seconds to one minute

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in length, featuring heritage topics. For instance, Boss Gibson (Dir: Ilkay Silk) is the story of a rich but benevolent nineteenth-century cotton mill owner in Fredericton who shared his good fortune by paying off the worker tabs at the company store. The format does not allow time to situate the story in the broader context of labour history, and it is up to the viewers to decide whether the province’s contemporary capitalists would make a similar gesture of sharing the wealth. Typical of the beautiful scenic illustration is The Fiddlehead (Dir: Art Makosinski), a time-lapse of a fiddlehead sprouting from the earth to the accompaniment of fiddle music. A major milestone in the development of the co-op was a half-hour dramatic production called the Spectre of Rexton (Dir: Kevin Holden, 1987). Shot and post-produced over a four-year period on 16mm film with assistance from the nfb , it was the largest production at the co-op up to that time. Highly ambitious, it involved period art direction and special effects. Spectre is well made and well acted, especially given the low budget and lack of experience among co-op members on productions of this scale. It was adapted from short stories by New Brunswick writer Stuart Truman on the exploits of rumrunners in the late 1920s near the town of Rexton. The film demonstrates a strong commitment to local culture – an emphasis that is by no means characteristic of all co-op productions – providing a rough macho image of the province while also conveying a humorous folk innocence. It is a ghost story where a drunkard murders a woman, and local yokels stage a ‘ghost’ appearance by rigging a spectre on a rope by the side of the road in order to frighten the rumrunners and steal their hooch. The joke of the film is the idea that the real spirits is the rum, but at the end a ‘real’ spectre appears to take revenge. Made two decades later and evincing a similar local pride is Anthony Flower: The Life and Art of a Country Painter (Dir: Jon Collicott, 2007). It is a documentary about a mysterious English gentleman who abandoned his wealth and moved to rural New Brunswick in 1817. Through interviews with curators and amateur historians, we are given speculation on the era and early life of the subject and a channel for regional commentary on the artworld. Since the subject is an unknown outsider artist, the locals are no more or less informed than are the art experts. One common form of filmmaking consistently found at this co-op, and also more generally in student productions, is the parody. The industrial filmmaking model is reflected in mimicry or mockumentary, signalling a correspondence with the mainstream while also being outside the system. Typical of this style and also referencing the climate of the region is Blowies (Dir: Brian Carty, 2004), a spoof of a new Olympic sport. We see men

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Figure 2.11 | Tony Merzetti editing film with a 16mm viewer and hand-cranked reels at the New Brunswick Filmmakers’ Co-operative.

in training and their adoring fans – the one joke is the sport itself: operating a snow blower. Another is Tony Merzetti’s The Man Who Skied Citadel Hill (1985), a well-done and widely exhibited five-minute parody of The Man Who Skied Everest (Dirs: Bruce Nyznik and Lawrence Schiller, 1975), the Academy Award–winning Crawley Films production of Japanese skier Yuichiro Miura, who skied 6,600 feet down Mount Everest in less than two and a half minutes. The Everest film is famous for capturing the extreme thrills and danger of the event, and the months of work in climbing the mountain, with eight deaths among the hundreds of Sherpas involved in the spectacle. In Merzetti’s film, we are given all the trappings of the manconquering-nature documentary with a serious tone to the narration and visuals of a stark snow-covered hill. That hill is revealed, through a quick zoom out when the skier falls over into the snow, to be Citadel Hill in downtown Halifax. An exception to the style of the co-op films is the queer-political We Two Boys Together Clinging (Dir: Glendon McKinney, 2006). The film uses the homophobic anti-gay marriage tirade given by conservative Member of Parliament Elsie Wayne (from 8 May 2003). The hate rant is narrated over a

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black screen. A reading of Walt Whitman follows, in which the idea of the personal as political is manifest as the camera slowly pans over the bodies of two men in each other’s arms. The poem ends as the flash of overexposure indicates that the film has run through the camera. A series of films dealing with issues of race, some of which received international festival exhibition, were made by Errol Williams who, sadly, passed away in 2007 just as I began the research for this book. Williams was born in Guyana and moved to Fredericton at age seventeen, where he attended the University of New Brunswick and then Queen’s University, graduating with a degree in education.4² He relocated to Bermuda but maintained his Canadian connections and moved back to the province in the 1980s, where he began his filmmaking career. In 1988, he completed a short dramatic film called Driftwood, in which he also performs. The film was the co-op’s first international festival success, and it tells a poignant story of an elderly Caribbean man who moves to Canada only to trade his freedom for loneliness and isolation. In 1994, Williams completed a short called Parable in Black and White, deploying a silent-movie-era style with piano accompaniment and title cards but in a contemporary setting. We see a blind woman giving away flowers in an image recalling Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) and a rich man who looks like Thomas Edison giving food to the white tramp but then refusing assistance to the Black man. What follows is a slapstick scenario expressive of a humanist impulse with the white tramp stealing food for his friend who then falls in love with the blind flower lady. The film was produced for the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission, and the references to Chaplin bring the social struggles and concerns of the depression-era into the present day of the region. A Darker Side (1991) is a longer drama of political awakening connecting activism in South Africa (during apartheid) to contemporary Canada, dramatizing the fact of assassinations carried out abroad by agents working for the South African government. Williams made several documentaries dealing with race and struggle, including Echoes in the Rink: The Willie O’Ree Story (1997), on the first black professional hockey player, originally from Fredericton, who played for the Boston Bruins in 1958. The film was in production starting in 1991 (with long delays due, in part, to the high cost of archival National Hockey League footage) and provided considerable training and professional development to co-op members Tony Merzetti (cinematographer) and Chris Campbell (sound and editing). Both crewmembers are credited as co-producers, a gesture that reflects the director’s egalitarian spirit and the character of the co-op. It is a straightforward story of perseverance told in conventional

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voice-over, detailing the ridiculous myths of hockey as a white man’s game, the camaraderie of life on the team, and some reference to racial tension, though this is downplayed in a story that otherwise emphasizes achievement. Williams’s last film is Walking on a Sea of Glass (2006), a 35mm feature documentary on Bermuda civil rights activist Kingsley Tweed – carpenter, preacher, and key figure in the desegregation of Bermuda following the boycott of public theatres in 1959. The film is an homage that follows Tweed’s return to the island after living abroad for forty years. It was made after the release of When Voices Rise (2002), an earlier feature documentary on the dismantling of segregation in Bermuda and a key moment in this struggle, the boycott of the country’s cinemas and the rule of “unmixed European descent.” The film is uneven in style but important in subject, conveying the energy and excitement of taking action, and concluding with a recognition of the struggle as the “people’s victory.” The reward of struggle follows the hard work of behind-the-scenes activism, a difficult concept to capture on film as it is without the grand spectacle of street protest. The film shows the beauty of Bermuda against the day-to-day obscenities of casual racism. In highcontrast chiaroscuro, we are given a description of the white oligarchy’s control of the island and how this control is tied to land ownership. The protests are described in animated detail by Kingsley Tweed, revealing an embarrassed white bourgeoisie not accustomed to being confronted. When Williams relocated to Bermuda, he maintained his connection with the co-op and arranged for Merzetti and Campbell to teach a workshop and work on a vignette called Hilda Tucker (nd), produced for the Bermuda government during its heritage month. A name that recurs on many credit scrolls is Cathie LeBlanc, who also works as the co-op’s membership coordinator. Her film Those Eyes (2000) is a poetic ode to her father, whose life was transformed by a sudden stroke. Michelle Lovegrove Thomson made an interesting non-narrative production called Me’s en Abyme (2005), using powerful abstract and tactile handprocessed black-and-white images of faces, hands, and surfaces in a collage combined with multiple female voices reflecting on creativity and feminism. This same filmmaker also made Love Letters (2004), a commentary on mass media icons and the constructedness of image and self. The voice-over constructs love letters to various celebrities, including Canadian actor Don McKellar; David Suzuki, “the sexiest environmentalist I have ever seen”; and rock icon Patti Smith. An outstanding experimental project is The Birth of Nicola (Dir: Chris Giles, 2009) suggesting the influences of Guy Maddin and Luis Buñuel; the strange plot involves a character named Scientia who

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dreams of creating a genetically modified potato that can replace the man she loves. The tone of these films is quite distinct from the more conventional approach of the co-op’s earlier films – Scientia has sex in the potato field and later gives birth to a mutant head that she eats because “nothing is wasted in science!” An ambitious film from that earlier era is the kitchen-sink feature drama Love Potion (Dir: Doug Sutherland, 1996), a romantic/screwball comedy with focus on the unconventional but gifted outsider – a scientist who retreats from the corporate world to brew an aphrodisiac, allowing the plot to follow the familiar ground of straight-male sexual fantasy. A very funny short called She Lost Her Marbles (Dir: Gia Milani, 2007), commissioned by the US Broad Humor Film Festival for comedies made by women, is an ‘instant film’ completed in only two weeks and a good example of a filmmaker looking for opportunities beyond the local scene and making work with materials readily at hand: marbles. The director trained in California at ucla and brings a strong sense of professionalism to films that are less invested in the specificity of local culture. The criteria of the festival commission stated that the plot must revolve around something unusual spilling out of a purse. In this case it is a little girl’s purse from which a unit of marbles break out after one renegade hatches an escape plan. The marbles are ‘voiced’ in a way that captures the broad contours of cinema stereotypes of gender and masculinity and where the ‘escape’ takes the form of a war movie. I conclude this section with The Official Guide to Watching a Saturday Night Hockey Game (For Intermediates) (Dir: Tak Koyama, 2007), a hilarious parody of prevailing ideals of culture and masculinity. It is a deliberately flat animated illustration of the proper procedure for this Canadian pastime, but where romantic idealizations of nationhood and the strictures of masculinity are utterly disabled. In deadpan training-film style, we are given advice such as: “It is a good idea to reserve a space where the tv is located, otherwise you have to stare at a blank wall.” The next step is the design of the tv room: “You may want to hang some hunting trophies such as a moose head, bear head, but not a human head, and definitely not a shower head.” Good advice for hockey fans and filmmakers alike. The success of the co-op is demonstrated by the abundance of work, far beyond what can be detailed here. In the face of national stereotypes, where New Brunswick is situated as impoverished backwater, the activity of the co-op demonstrates a healthy diversity of production and outlook. The challenge with all of these organizations is to maintain relevance at a time when technology is more affordable and accessible and where exhibition

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proliferates on digital platforms. These changes should not be overstated, since some pieces of specialized high-end production equipment remain costly and Web platforms cannot replace the energy of workshops and screenings where people gather together. It is through a solid sense of community that the co-op gains meaning beyond the nuts and bolts of its equipment inventory. P R I N C E E D WA R D I S L A N D

The Island Media Arts Cooperative (imac ) was incorporated in 1982, evolving out of the dormant Island Music Co-operative formed in 1978 to support live performance events. It has a small membership base isolated from the Atlantic region’s film industry, which means less technical development and fewer professional opportunities. There is little substantial support for the arts in the province, except for tourism-oriented activities. With the exception of media and performance artist Judith Scherer, who works on an international level, there is no media art scene comparable to the activity coming out of the Centre for Art Tapes in Halifax. Peter Richards, former imac coordinator and the publisher of Buzz, the Charlottetown entertainment paper, describes the local art scene in this way: “The stories or the subjects are very much of this place. And that might mean in the global view it’s isolated, insular, and maybe not all that groundbreaking. Painting is really strong here amongst the visual artists, and the music, of course. Coming from a Celtic, Scottish, Acadian background, that’s the kind of music that gets played. It’s not avant-garde; for the most part, the character of the art that is made reflects this place. Maybe it’s seen to be backward by people who live in, so called, more advanced art communities, but people here don’t think of it that way.” A contemporary short film reflecting a sense of wonder with nature and recalling the impressionistic style of early indie films is Crows and Branches (Dir: Mille Clarkes, 2009), an experiment with colour and multiple frames within the frame of haunting images of crows descending on the skyline of Charlottetown. There is a playful psychedelia in the work, but it is also a project made possible by the integration of digital media technologies. Given that many artists have moved to, or remained on, the island in order to fulfill a back-to-the-land ideal, it is not surprising that the work has an anti-modern flavor. On the other hand, starting in 1984 and running into the 1990s, imac was host to the annual Atlantic Film and Video Producers Conference, a very successful industry gathering that provided professional

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development opportunities to regional filmmakers. This forum has since been subsumed by industry events associated with the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax. More recently, imac has sponsored, with Telefilm funding, the Screenwriters’ Bootcamp, an annual week-long industry development master class for emerging screenwriters serving filmmakers throughout Atlantic Canada. The pei government drew upon Nova Scotia’s industry model of film development via tax credit subsidies to attract offshore production, but this did little for indie filmmakers; since it did not attract much business, it has been discontinued. The imac membership is somewhat divided between traditional filmmakers, who became involved at a time when the Canada Council insisted on the specificity of the film medium and who want to maintain production on film, and an influx of younger members, who embrace digital technologies and who no longer worry about the film-video distinction. This conflict came to a head in the 1990s when a staff member disposed of some 16mm prints, believing that video would entirely replace this medium. In the early days, following the model of the historical vignettes produced by the New Brunswick Filmmakers’ Co-operative, Dave Ward, one of imac ’s founders, approached various provincial government departments to do the same thing, and this provided some public profile for the organization as the vignettes were broadcast on local cbc . These productions focused on multiculturalism, with short films on the Canadian Lebanese Association of Prince Edward Island and the Indo Canadian Association of pei , featuring cultural imagery of food, music, and with an emphasis on education. Programs were also made on Dutch and Scottish groups. With these projects, film in the early days of the co-op was deployed for utilitarian purposes. Dave Ward’s own training came, in part, through workshops at the nowdefunct Toronto Filmmakers’ Co-op in the early 1970s, and this experience was brought back to the island. The group’s first film was not completed until 1984 due to a lack of editing resources – they originally borrowed a closet space from the provincial Department of Education and eventually obtained a flatbed Steenbeck editing table from the nfb . In the 1970s, the nfb had a minor presence on the island, primarily for film distribution in association with the provincial Department of Education, but they also had editing equipment. When the office closed, some equipment was transferred to the co-op. imac members collectively made a two-minute short called The Bangor Chainsaw Massacre (1986), about a man’s frustration with an inoperable chainsaw, which he then destroys with a sledgehammer. The film responds to the populist humour of a rural culture, which would be a familiar

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presence. It was shot on negative film stock with the intention of making a normal release print, but due to a mix-up in the lab, it was printed as a negative release print and this is how it remains. By and large, the activity at imac is narrative production, but one of the most engaging films from the co-op’s early years is the documentary Retrieval (Dir: Dave Ward, 1986). It follows artist Don Tryhurn as he makes a sculpture out of sandstone collected from the eastern part of the island. After being away from the island for five years, he returns to the carving, then leaves again to take care of his dying father. Tryhurn invited the filmmaker along to retrieve a sculpture he worked on and then abandoned a year before. Exposed to the elements, the sculpture changes in a way that is outside the artist’s control. Retrieved along with the object itself are the story of the artist and the filmmaker’s process of this film’s coming-into-being, done through a complex layering of emotionally resonant voices that far exceeds the informational expectations of documentary. The sandstone shoreline is constantly reshaped by erosion from wind and ocean, and this flux relates to the artist’s process. The film expresses an anti-modern, and certainly an anti-artworld, perspective that also manages to avoid folk sentimentality. There are numerous hand-held point-of-view shots along the shoreline carved by crashing ocean waves, evoking the question of place and creativity. These images are juxtaposed with close camera moves along the surface of the sculpture, mirroring the scraggly lines of the rock on the shoreline. The soundtrack is a wash of layered voices and complex instrumentation, including violin, harp, percussion, and vocal chanting along with the filmmaker’s own narration. After the artist leaves the province for the final time, the sculpture is abandoned in the back alley where he was last working on it. In the winter, the filmmaker returns to try to retrieve the piece, but it is frozen to the ground and cannot be moved without destroying it. By spring thaw, the sculpture is gone. After the film was completed, the filmmaker learned that the artist, who had terminal cancer, committed suicide. The subsequent story could be another film: the landlord removed the sculpture from the alley and stored it in the basement of a building that subsequently caught fire. Submerged in water during the firefighting, the now-filthy sculpture was once again abandoned. It has since been recovered again and is currently on display at the back of a Charlottetown coffee shop.4³ The nfb ’s support for the co-ops took different forms across the country, but all were given an allotment of film laboratory services, a significant cost for low-budget filmmakers, which has vanished with the closing of the nfb lab in 1996. In the 1980s, imac never had enough activity to use up its allot-

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ment. Much of the production at the time took the form of workshop films, enabling training and development but also maintaining strict control over access to equipment. The low level of activity led to a loss of Canada Council funding that has since been restored. Filmmaker Paul Ness described the co-op’s early days in this way: “I don’t think that, initially, a lot of people who were involved with the organization understood what the concept of a co-op was. Everybody tried to have their own projects and stay away from each other. That was what I saw there personally. Over the years it has improved a great deal.” Membership in the early days was by written application and had to be approved by the board of directors. This kind of control is not uncommon in a co-op, since it must ensure that resources are directed to fulfilling its original mandate. Ness goes on to explain that a certain amount of guardedness is necessary to ensure the maintenance of expensive film equipment that could not be readily replaced, but that in many ways it was “a pretty closed shop.” In the early 1990s, there were only eight full producer members with complete access to equipment, as well as a higher number of associate members who could participate in the organization but not touch the gear. The workshop film strategy differs from the way workshops are typically run in other film co-ops in that here they were oriented toward getting films completed, rather than being internal training exercises. A rarely seen film from the workshop program is Janet Says (Dir: Laurel Smyth, 1994), a first-person documentary on the experience of a battered woman. The film begins with the woman describing how she lived in fear and in hiding, on edge at any sound – a car horn or the telephone ringing. This description plays over a black screen, drawing us close to the voice and also to the experience of living in a void. It is a difficult film on a harrowing subject; the viewing experience depends on duration and reflection and is not the kind of film that tends to get played in festival or retrospective compilation reels. After the lengthy introduction, drawing us into the woman’s voice, the black screen cuts to an image of a knife jammed in a door frame. We are told that the knife helps keep the door secure. The camera zooms out slowly while the woman plays with her young child. The filmmaker speaks of friendship and having lost and then later regaining contact with Janet, and of trying to understand how this abused woman could keep a violently abusive man in her life. The film does not offer easy answers; instead it is about the profundity of friendship. The spare visual style is at odds with the complexity of this relationship. A stylistically different but equally important film from this era is the short animation The Bath (Dir: JoDee Samuelson, 1992). Samuelson was already

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an established artist when she was invited to participate in an intensive three-month imac -sponsored animation workshop taught by Eileen Brophy. She subsequently developed this rich and colourful portrait of an elderly woman soaking in the tub. Painted on glass in the under-the-camera style of celebrated nfb animator Caroline Leaf – the paint is kept from drying as the artist creates movement and transitions, resulting in a very fluid style, more along the lines of impressionistic transformation rather than a continuous realistic representation. The film celebrates the shape of the old woman’s body and the fantasy life of an elderly person as we see the tub drifting along a river and to the open sea. This pleasure is interrupted by a knock on the door: “Are you almost done in there?” The image of luxurious bathing is a counterpoint to the toil of women’s work. This accomplished first film is a landmark in the development of independent filmmaking on pei . Rick Hancox: On the Border between Documentary and Experimentation

Long before the establishment of imac , a filmmaker who has since become influential in the co-op scene across the country was just beginning his career on pei . Rick Hancox makes personal films on the border between documentary and experimentation, and they are films about borders, places, and ways of seeing. Before drifting toward the underground film scene in New York, he made an experimental response to Easy Rider (Dir: Dennis Hopper, 1969) called Tall Dark Stranger (1970), where this time the hippies survive. As Hancox describes it: “Stranger’s about a pei farmer who’s visited by a hippie dressed like Christ. The hippie turns him on to hashish, and the farmer has a vision of squealing pigs in positive and negative film, upside-down cows, and farm tractors.”44 American experimental filmmaker George Semsel taught an introductory film course at Prince of Wales College (now part of University of pei ) in 1968, and this was an important point of contact for Hancox (the course was also attended by Kent Martin, who would eventually become executive producer of the nfb ’s Atlantic studio). Hancox later became a teacher at Sheridan College in Ontario, mentoring filmmakers in what became known as the escarpment school, and then moved to Concordia University in Montreal. In 1978, Hancox released Home for Christmas, about a return to pei for the holidays, shooting in verité style with a Bolex camera to “show the relationships between various family members, between landscape and memory … [to] evoke certain rituals of Christmas and homecoming and trains in Canada.”45 The playful and impro-

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vised camerawork in Home for Christmas begins with a train journey, iconic vehicle for the colonization of Canada and for the history of the movies. We see plenty of beer drinking and music playing on the journey, while the grain and scratches of the film make it seem like it is from another era. There is a strong sense of going back in time, and that journey backwards is associated with the island. This idealized return is more critically deconstructed in Hancox’s later film Moosejaw: There’s A Future in Our Past (1992). What we get in Home is a tension between a desire to return to the family home and a sense of intergenerational distance and the gendered conditions of family – we see a father who is reticent to reveal emotions (even as he hams it up for the camera) and a mother whose youth was interrupted by the Second World War blitzkrieg bombing of London. The film exists in a liminal space between documentary and home movie, deploying and deconstructing the tactics of each. The dynamics of family is set in contrast with quiet, and mostly still, exterior shots of the snow-covered landscape, a calm that is itself interrupted by the father’s voice as he feeds the birds. Pat Aufderheide describes the scholarly interest in personal documentaries as a means of exploring ideas of memory and truth: “such films posit that there are important truths to be revealed and that they can be revealed in spite of – or even by calling attention to – the partiality of our understanding.”46 Inside the Hancox home, the ideal of the occasion is ironically turned on its head when Rick and his siblings playfully knock each other on the head with their Christmas gifts. The Contemporary Scene on PEI

The contemporary scene at imac was energized in the mid-2000s with the hiring of Millefiore (Mille) Clarkes as coordinator. She instituted programs to encourage production and to bring in new members, and started a regular series of screenings so that members could see and respond to each other’s work, something that is integral to the co-op scene but strangely lacking here. In describing the creative environment, Clarkes says: “In some ways it’s kind of like a blank canvas – and that’s kind of exciting – but the downside of that is there aren’t the same standards and the same criticism and level of peers that would encourage or challenge you. So it is easy to be self-satisfied and not really push it as far as it needs to go.” Unfortunately, for many filmmakers here and throughout the country, the mainstream – and its elusive promise of fame and fortune – dictates norms and assumptions of the form of cinema and attendant notions of quality. Screenings and dialogue go a

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long way to opening up narrow market-determined ideas of what is cinema, and what the medium can be in its local context. One cynical view that captures something of island inertia comes from animation artist JoDee Samuelson: “Here is my theory of pei, and this sort of sums up everything. pei is a sandbar. If you are playing ball on the sand and you throw your ball, the ball goes flat and barely rolls when it hits the sand. If you are from Newfoundland or Cape Breton, which are rocks, that ball hits and bounces. The energy here is something like that and a lot of people get sucked in, and it is a draining.” These remarks are followed by a heartfelt love of the place. A film that captures something of the character of the island is According to John Acorn (Dir: Jason Arsenault, 2005), about a salt-of-the-earth islander who lives without running water or electricity and wishes that the world would stand still. Acorn died midway through the making of the film, and the final film was pieced together from what had been shot. Acorn’s story is juxtaposed with images of children on a carnival ride consisting of antique cars, suggesting how the past functions as image and ideal but in very different ways across generations. There is a nascent class-consciousness in the Acorn story that is not felt in most contemporary productions. The short collage-style animation Men With Ties (Dir: Lesley McCubbin, JoDee Samuelson, and Hans Samuelson, 1999) begins with the arrival, by flying saucer, of the alien men with ties. The landscape is soon littered with coffee shops, followed by golf courses and condo developments, but then a pestilence knocks over their soy lattés. The people eventually cast off their ties and other junk in a utopian reconnection with the land. A short non-narrative film that makes powerful use of landscape is Accumulation and Disappearance (Dir: Judith Scherer, 2007), starting with a very flat horizon line and building shape and texture into the landscape through a series of time-lapse dissolves of winter images of the ocean shore. Mille Clarkes summarizes the working environment: “This is a really rich odd place. Sometimes you walk down the street and everywhere you look people seem mildly mad. They’re just engaged in some sort of strange little activity sitting or talking to their dog. There are so many characters – everyone is aware of those iconic characters in the community and the culture is so shared. So many individual perspectives on the same thing swirling around in the pool here – it’s ripe for the picking.” Profile pei (Dir: Adam Perry and Jeremy Larter, 2008–09) is heir to Rick Hancox’s freewheeling style and is a tongue-in-cheek reality-tv -style view of the inertia and conservatism of the island, told through the trials and tribulations of wanna-be screenwriter named Jeremy Larter. The project originated as a short film pro-

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duced as part of an artist challenge initiated by Mille Clarkes – a call made at the monthly imac screening series to make a short film that would play at the next month’s event. It was well received at the first public screening, and the filmmakers then sent viewing copies to friends across the country. The positive response encouraged them to make another episode and eventually a series for Web distribution. It is precisely the kind of work that is possible here – very low budget, but made by a group of friends doing it for fun and in a place where work can be done for little cost. For instance, they shot material at the Charlottetown airport without seeking permission, something that anywhere else would attract the full force of the security apparatus. As Jeremy Larter described to me: “Anywhere else there’d be guns pointed at you, and you’d be taken out by security after being thoroughly examined. People in pei are very gracious. They are scared to ask what you are doing there, that hesitant island way: I don’t want to bother you, you’re shooting, okay go ahead.” The debut segment of Profile pei begins with colour bars and then cheesy music and graphics to announce a cable-tv show featuring a profile of Jeremy Larter. Jeremy as Jeremy gives us a sardonic rundown of his early years by looking at school photographs, noting that his mother dressed him in the same sweater in grade four and in grade six. He then describes his accomplishments while eating an array of mcjunk food and describing his proximity to celebrity by noting that he worked on a film with Nova Scotia–born actor Ellen Page, before her breakout hit Juno (Dir: Jason Reitman, 2007). While Jeremy wants to be a screenwriter, his character is more of a celebrity stalker. We meet Jeremy’s brother, the alter ego to the wanna-be filmmaker in that the brother at least has a job (and, we are told, was breastfed). The sibling rivalry is seen in similarly fraught encounters with women; scenes with the “bowling support group for screenwriters” play as a kind of satire of the grassroots community of the co-op scene. Altogether, it is like bouncing a ball on the sandbar, but at the same time the ephemeral cable-tv style allows for reconciliation with a place that is outside the zone of contemporary art and culture. The same episode flashes forward to Jeremy feigning success in his life, saying that he has taken a video game design course at the local college – precisely what the province wants its creative people to do. This Web series is not beholden to existing institutions for production and distribution, yet it has attained modest international access (during its first season, the series received a thousand hits per week). Larter is an actor on Adam Perry’s follow-up Web series, Jiggers, discussed in Chapter 4. He also made a 35mm short called Roadside Attraction (2008),

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Figure 2.12 | Roadside Attraction, frame enlargement.

with wide-screen treatment of the glorious summertime big sky of the island, but also with the landscape compressed into the action. In a single moving shot, tracking backwards, an arguing couple get out of a car in the middle of the highway to have a relationship meltdown. We do not hear what they are saying, but a busybody power walker attempts to intervene. It is as if Sam Beckett riffing Buster Keaton arrived by chance on the set of Two-Lane Blacktop (Dir: Monte Hellman, 1971). The comedic energy of this film turns away from the tendency to treat landscape with nostalgic reverence – while the work comes from the fertile soil of pei , it is grounded as much by the late capitalist imagery of cars, blacktop, heroism, and heartbreak that is the movies. The humour, energy, and absurdity of this short film serves as a good summary for the co-op filmmaking on the island. NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR

Filmmaking in this province is overwhelmingly concentrated in the vibrant art community based in downtown St John’s. There is also a theatre and visual arts program at Grenfell Campus in Corner Brook with filmmaker and actor Sherry White as a prominent alumnus. Corner Brook is home to the province’s only sound stage. It is also important to note the OKâlaKatiget Society located in Nain, Labrador. OKâlaKatiget supports communication activities, including video and radio production, that contributes to the preservation of the Inuktitut language, strengthens understanding of social

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issues in Labrador, and preserves and promotes Inuit cultural identity in the region. Before getting into the co-op scene, a brief and selective sketch of earlier film activity in the province is in order. Among the many industrial development schemes of the Smallwood era was the establishment of Atlantic Films in 1951, a private company operated by two Latvian filmmakers who ended up in Hamburg following the Second World War. They were then invited by the provincial government (and given a start-up loan) to set up a studio in St John’s with the hope of attracting investment. Productions included well-photographed but didactic ‘progress report’ films conveying updates on industrial development schemes on behalf of the government, with an emphasis on the expansion of the economy beyond the fishery. During the 1950s, the company was quite ambitious in its output and distribution efforts throughout the province, though activity all but ceased by the end of the decade and the company morphed into a retail electronics operation. After the Second World War, Atlantic Films made a serious-minded but clumsy film about the threat of tuberculosis in Newfoundland and the need to be vigilant in diagnosis and treatment. This is parodied in an early nifco film called Under the Knife (Dir: Derek Norman and Nigel Markham, 1982), a slapstick comedy about a child who does not want to have his tonsils removed. The title card informs us of the serious treatment: “Not only did they haul them out with a zealous relish, they stomped on them to make them pop!” Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish the parody from the serious, as in one Atlantic Films production made for the tourism office called You Are Welcome. The premise is a talking sealskin suitcase, which reluctantly travels to Newfoundland, fearing that the place is a wasteland of bad weather. The suitcase gets a pleasant surprise with images of young women in bathing suits. Letters to the Evening Telegram protested the film’s plot, which also involves a man and woman meeting by chance at the Newfoundland Hotel and then enjoying the local nightlife together.47 In the late 1930s and again after the Second World War and into the 1970s, the government hired American professional hunter and outdoorsman Lee Wulff to make tourismoriented outdoor films. With Camera and Gun in Newfoundland (1952) features Wulff and his wife hunting with their weapons of choice. The concluding narration invites visitors across a gendered division of labour: “Through the hours, the days and the evenings, the arguments will continue as to whether a picture is a better trophy than the tender steaks and the spreading horns that go with a sportsman’s kill in the province of Newfoundland.” All of this activity was quite disconnected from the nascent ambitions of independent filmmakers.

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The Newfoundland Independent Filmmaker’s Co-operative

When visitors enter the King’s Road office of the Newfoundland Independent Filmmaker’s Co-operative (nifco ) in St John’s, they see a wall-mounted enlargement of the founding mandate and history of the organization. More than at any other co-op, nifco members are very aware of the group’s origins, and many founding members remain involved. In other provinces, a co-op is more typically viewed as a training ground from which one graduates into the professional industry, but at nifco it is the organization that has evolved to accommodate the changing needs of members. The founding spirit was that a success for one was a success for all. The organization’s constitution includes a description of its function as facility and technical resource as well as serving educational, exhibition, and information needs. It also says: “Provide a centre and an environment in which personal contact promotes exchange of ideas and learning through the experience of others.” This is a key statement of intent reflecting the communal sensibility of Newfoundland in the sharing of resources and the public culture of storytelling. The co-op has evolved from very modest resources in a space behind the projection screen of the nfb ’s distribution office, through a period described by one member as “the boy’s tree house,” to a state-of-the-art high-definition digital post-production facility in a trio of linked houses owned by nifco . Over this time, the organization has remained remarkably true to its original mandate. In February 1974, a group of filmmakers first met to discuss the need for a filmmakers’ organization. Among the attendees were Canada Council film officer Penni Jaques, who indicated there would be seed money available, and Sandra Gathercole of the Toronto Filmmakers’ Co-op, which would become a model for nifco ’s organization. In the fall of 1974, the filmmakers responded with alarm on learning that the Canada Council seed money of $17,500 had been awarded to Memorial University (mun ) for a filmmaker-in-residence. As a result of community objections, the Council reassessed the grant and requested a formal proposal from local filmmakers. In early 1975, they were awarded $7,000 toward organizing a film co-op. This was a great achievement, but it is worth noting that they were not trusted with the full original amount. In the minutes of a subsequent meeting, the independent mandate is reinforced: “It was agreed that when the filmmaker’s co-op is formed, its prime purpose will be to foster and encourage independent filmmaking by members, and not to establish an organizational structure to be used by individual filmmakers to engage in commercial activity.”48 Official co-op status

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was granted on 18 June 1975. A more cynical newspaper columnist writing at the time wondered whether the organizers had “confused Hollywood with Holyrood.”49 One of the founding members, Derek Norman, described to me an atmosphere of youthful anti-establishment activism combined with the renewed energy and pride that came with the renaissance of interest in Newfoundland stories, music, and culture that was in the air at the time. A lot of that activity was centred on the film unit of Memorial’s Extension Services (founded in 1959). Extension Services had a mandate for community development and, following the success of the nfb ’s Fogo Island Films, was using the medium as a tool for social development. The good relationship between Memorial and the founders of nifco no doubt made it easier to transfer the Canada Council seed money. Had the institution been more territorial, nifco ’s foundation may not have been as solid. mun Extension produced a tv series called Decks Awash on community and fishery issues, with Mike Jones working as cameraman on some episodes. A key figure from this period was Nelson Squires, not a founder of the co-op but the first television cameraman in the province who went on to work on the mun-nfb Fogo project and shared his expertise with the new group of filmmakers.50 The Decks Awash series set the stage for the longrunning Newfoundland cbc-tv series Land and Sea. Norman and other filmmakers gained valuable technical training by working on these projects, and the film unit donated or loaned equipment to nifco . At the time, there was also support from the local cbc affiliate, based on the personal relationships of a few filmmakers and the cbc staffers, especially the lab technicians who would process film for nifco (this was in the days of tv news shooting on 16mm reversal stock) in exchange for the occasional bottle of rum. nifco has a reputation for comedy and drama, drawing on the tremendous influence of Codco, but there was also a strong documentary tradition coming out of the activist spirit of the early days. A number of founding members of the co-op were already working on individual projects and some had involvement with mun Extension. Among his early efforts, Mike Jones, while teaching at Brother Rice High School in St John’s, was creating short films with the students under his charge. Back when he was living in Toronto and studying at oise (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), Jones spent time at the Toronto Filmmakers’ Co-op and watching avant-garde films at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, both of which were located in Rochdale College. In Toronto in 1971, he made Cathy at 16, a short impressionistic film shot in-camera with one roll of black-and-white stock, with his sister, Cathy Jones. The footage was screened but then lost until

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2003, when Mike discovered it by chance in his basement and re-released it. First films are often about the place one lives, which is the ground for all subsequent interesting work. The first completed official nifco film is a collectively made documentary workshop project called The St John’s Film (1976). Over images of the rough edges of the downtown, various residents are interviewed about the place where they live. The first speaker points out that the city was founded at about the same time that Thomas More wrote Utopia, the classic political book about an ideal island nation. The speaker goes on to explain that St John’s was quite the opposite of the utopian ideal, that it was a rough commercial port without civil administration. Rosemary House described to me how the cultural renaissance that burned through the province in the 1970s was fuelled by a rediscovery of previously abandoned folk culture. “When I grew up, Irish music, Newfoundland music, you wouldn’t be caught dead having anything to do with it. And then it very much came back into our lives [even though we] never grew up with it.” Writer Edward Riche has a more caustic view: “Most of the activity that goes around that’s called ‘cultural’ trades on clichés, ridiculous preoccupations with Newfoundland’s past. Newfoundland has some sort of disorder where it can’t imagine itself in terms of a future. There’s no modern Newfoundland in the consciousness. Everything is tied up with the fishery and the northeast coast. And all the mythology, all the myths and national symbols that have come out of that, they are a shackle and a chain around the national imagination, you know. For no good reason, I think. If Newfoundland culture is only tied up with its past, well fuck it, what’s the point of doing anything with it?” Stereotypes are maintained in part because of the lack of familiarity with Newfoundland culture in the rest of Canada, a condition that prompts cultural workers to assert an ideal of unique identity. A key finding of a comprehensive survey of Canadian attitudes toward Newfoundland and Labrador includes the following: “The first theme is that while Newfoundland and Labrador may be well-known to Canadians, it is not known-well. General perceptions of the province and its people suggest a continuing familiarity with outdated stereotypes and past realities.”5¹ Early NIFCO

The late Dave Pope, a nifco founding member and its first manager (and the brother of film producer and nifco member Paul Pope), made several compelling experimental films in the 1970s that are distinct from the theatre-influenced satirical comedy style dominant at the time.5² Offstage

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Line (1976) captures the rawness and anomie of youth culture with images of a young man desperate for work wandering the streets of St John’s and drinking alone in an alley. He is also seen banging on the door of The Nickel – the name of the first St John’s movie house to play talkies (the theatre first opened in 1907). The movie theatre doors remain locked to him, and he drifts to the docks and climbs on board a fishing vessel called the Cape Farewell, which then sails out of the harbour. Slipway (1978) begins with a young couple standing on a dock as a dory is pulled up. Intercut with images of the young man receiving medical treatment is his reminiscing of the dory that his grandfather once owned. He becomes attracted to the nurse caring for him, and the film cuts to a beautiful underwater scene of the two swimming together. Back in the hospital, he is devastated when she announces that she is taking a job in Toronto. The film evokes the director’s own personal health issues and the broader context of outmigration and social change, ending with the man slipping off the dock and into the cold Atlantic. Dave Pope played a significant role in organizing a strong governing structure for the co-op, which enabled it to thrive over the years. As set up under provincial co-operative legislation, nifco is open to all while remaining tightly controlled by a board of directors comprised of working filmmakers. Dolly Cake (Dir: Mike Jones, 1976) began as a documentary about Codco but evolved into an improvised drama because some members of the group objected to the presence of the camera during rehearsal. The filmmaker describes the chaos and turmoil of rehearsal and how amazing it was to him that such good work came out of that process.5³ This short film is a portrait of the creative energy of this group of artists and the era’s freewheeling improvisational approach to filmmaking, which together led into the creation of The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood. Someone had a friend with the last name Cake, and so was born the inspiration for the film Dolly Cake, a parody kitchen-sink drama about Dolly, who takes care of a group of ungrateful layabouts but who finally tries to assert her independence by running off. She returns, though, because one of the men cannot find the Cheez Whiz (!) and only Dolly can help. This story is intercut with an even stranger project, Borkin the Spineless Servant, originally shot as a screen test for the National Film Board and subtitled “A film for children.” Codco members were all reading Russian novels from which the characters are inspired. They gather at a tea party set in the woods where Borkin carries Greg Malone to the table, saying, “He came in the post.” After he is removed, Malone morphs into a vampire to seek revenge on the faux aristocracy. Dolly Cake was made in the editing process and was strongly influenced by Robert Frank, who

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had visited nifco (and, as it turns out, became the mun filmmaker-in-residence). Frank’s style of improvisation and his fluid combination of fiction and documentary filmmaking was a powerful influence. While we refer to this as a Mike Jones film, like many of the early productions, it has no director credit. At the time everyone understood themselves simply as filmmakers, irrespective of the specific role carried out on a given production. In the organization of nifco and the tenor of the early films is a demand that the artists control the means of production. What is The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood if not the first revolution carried out by artists? Most filmmakers acknowledge the formative role played by the nfb in assisting the film co-ops in the early days, though the Film Board tended to see the co-ops as a training ground rather than as a place for professional film artists. Mike Jones explains it this way: “The National Film Board was always very kind to us, but they were always the big brothers. They were training us. I know some of us resisted that kind of training; we thought that they had a house style, that all their films looked alike, and we didn’t want to make films that way. We didn’t particularly want to make that style of documentary, especially. And we resisted them. The Atlantic Film Co-op was so close to the Board that they did actually more or less go in the documentary direction. More than the dramatic direction.” Ken Pittman has a different view, noting that both afcoop and nifco were provided with substantial support, including office space at the beginning. On the idea of a strong cultural difference at nifco , Pittman says: “I think that’s an accurate description of what Newfoundland filmmakers would like to be the case. From time to time, any one film project or any one filmmaker’s work can reflect that, but it’s never a clear-cut case.” The nfb had a presence in Newfoundland since the 1940s by distributing 16mm prints to remote communities. With Confederation in 1949, the Board established an office to more actively disseminate films that would help introduce Canada to its new citizens. This activity proved to be quite popular; in 1956, the nfb had a total audience of 1.4 million for film screenings in the province.54 One regular visitor to outport communities in the pre-tv era was the travelling movie projectionist, bringing along nfb films as well as pop culture. Folklorist Michael Taft describes how the movies functioned as a collective event for a community: “The movie-man embodied the joy and mystery of the event, just as, in the eyes of the children, the itinerant minister embodied an unpleasant weekly ritual. The effect of hearing the minister’s boat was in complete contrast to that of hearing the movie man’s, for as one man said, recalling his childhood, ‘You had to go to church, but you didn’t want to go.’”55

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The Film Board turned to the co-ops not, strictly speaking, to foster the local but to integrate individual filmmakers into the national, or central Canadian, scene. Rex Tasker, former executive producer of the Atlantic studio, makes the distinction with the term home movies: “We always had the bigger picture in mind, and I don’t think any of the films we made you could say are just home movies. They did approach subjects with a bigger national push to them. Now, after a while, we supported the various film co-ops that happened. First, because it is a way for people to get their feet wet in film, and second, if they were good people, maybe they would come to work for the Board. We could say: go to the co-op, get your feet wet, bring us back something you shot – it could be very simple, but let us see if you’ve got the feel for film.” Filmmakers at nifco were determined to find their own voice in this medium but inevitably had to reconcile with the firmly established conventions of movie making and the expectations of funders. While Faustus Bidgood was made as an art project entirely driven by the imaginations of its creators, a subsequent feature film, Finding Mary March (Dir: Ken Pittman, 1988) was made with a budget of $1.3 million and in accordance with standard industry norms of scheduling, organization, and crew hierarchy. It is often described as nifco ’s first feature-length ‘workshop film,’ since many of the crewmembers had made their own films but now had to adjust to the more rigid industrial work process. It is a well-made drama that strives for universal marketability, though outside of pay-tv screenings it did not find much of an audience. A photographer (played by Quebec actor Andrée Pelletier) journeys into a remote area of the province in order to search for artifacts and ruins of the Beothuks. She hires a local man (Rick Boland) as her guide and becomes involved in a conflict over a mining company’s activities in the area. The guide’s deceased wife turns out to be a descendent of Mary March, the name given to Demasduit, one of the last of the Beothuk, captured in 1818. The film’s opening stages her capture and the murder of her husband, a scene that is later filmed in a similar manner in the documentary Stealing Mary: Last of the Red Indians (Dir: Tim Wolochatiuk, 2005). The documentary traces the story of capture, revealing as a lie the colonial claim of being on a peaceful mission, and using modern dna evidence and other investigative techniques to determine what happened in 1818. A vivid and compelling image in the documentary is the scene of washing Demasduit of her red ochre body paint, which is explained as the taking away of her spiritual connection, a theme that is explored in a different way in Pittman’s dramatic film. The photographer’s guide brings her to a wilderness museum site created as an employment project but since abandoned

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Figure 2.13 | When Ponds Freeze Over, frame enlargement.

when the money ran out. She later discovers human bones, the remains of the Beothuk, and the film then explores history and broader questions of voice, authenticity, and the function of photography in mediating the real. As Mary Dalton indicates, “the scene of violation, of the photographer’s flash illuminating the recesses of the burial cave, is rich in ironies about film as a medium and about the filmmaker exploiting material.”56 When Ponds Freeze Over (Dir: Mary Lewis, 1998) is an extraordinary short film marking the maturity and complexity of filmmaking at nifco . Drawing on family history and the filmmaker’s own experience of falling through thin ice while skating as a sixteen-year-old girl, it begins with a bedtime story told to a young daughter, with filmmaker Mary Lewis as mother. In the act of telling, she drifts back in time, with family memories cascading through her imagination as she struggles to escape the cold dark water. The mother’s experience becomes the daughter’s memory. These memory images take the form of dramatic scenes, family photos, and animation. The film suggests how we make history in lived experience and imagination, and we bring children into our community through stories and for them the en-

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chantment and fears found in fairy tales are as real as anything else. A lesser film would lapse into maudlin nostalgia, but in Ponds, past is integrated with the present in a powerful and generative way. As the filmmaker describes the work: “In my film When Ponds Freeze Over, there was a kind of burning pride about my family and this history that I had learned from my grandparents about who my people were. That drove the film in a kind of way. I think that might be there for a lot of people: yeah we’re poor, yeah we’re stuck way over here, our weather is really bad, but we’ve got something going on. I’m not sure what – character probably.” Mary’s father falls through the ice, and when her younger brother calls for help, Mary also crashes through. She is struggling to grab onto something to save her, but is immersed in a sea of memories and by the weight of water on the coldest day of the year. The evocative narration begins with: “These are the things I have forgotten,” and then: “I’ll talk to you about forgetting, for I am in a place where forgotten things go.” But of course they have not been forgotten, only transformed so that the fragments of self, family, the scrap heap of history, together with trauma, loss, and joy, become integral to identity. As Lewis says, “even in a magical sense. All that mountain of events that led to the uncapturable moment of the present where we are now. The film ultimately is about the tension between living in the present, and the struggle to retain and keep the wealth of the past available to us.” The memory fragments include material from the lives of parents and grandparents – memory is both inherited, imagined, and integrated in a tradition of storytelling. These memories become part of the body, floating to the surface in the moment of physical trauma. The specificity of place is met by a desire to travel; a distant train whistle is described as “a sound of possibilities.” We learn of the dream of John Lewis, not to go away to school in England but to go to sea like his grandfather: “The same name and the same dream.” The younger John eventually travels to Naples to visit the grave of his grandfather, in the shadow of Pompeii’s ruins, and to bring back a fragment of the tombstone. Andy Jones, as a senior artist-storyteller in the community, is cast as the Napoline grave keeper, leading the boy to this physical marker of time and body. Finally, in the water, Mary is surrounded by family. It is a wedding party, and Papa Lewis, played with crusty belligerence by film producer Paul Pope, extends his cane to pull her to the rescue. He then turns away from her, as if with contempt for any romanticization of this cold place. The daughter then rescues her father and the narration declares, “We’re here and we are not going anywhere.” These themes of the social and the personal, expressed in a combination of drama and animation, are echoed in Lewis’s

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later film, made for the nfb, The Sparky Book (2006), about a young girl who comes close to death following a heart transplant and her bond with her dog. From Kitchen Table to Media Centre

When Ponds Freeze Over was Mary Lewis’s second film and was made in collaboration with many members of the St John’s art community, particularly in their assisting with the time-consuming hand-painted sequences and animation. The physical and social space provided by nifco is essential to facilitating personal non-industry-driven work, as the space and community affirms the importance of creative practice. As the co-op has become a more high-end post-production facility, the space for this kind of kitchen-table, hand-made filmmaking has diminished, though in principle the work is still supported. In the mid-1990s, the film equipment at nifco was underutilized as the work migrated to digital technology with final post-production having to be completed outside of the province. Rather than hold on to an ideal of 16mm production, the board of directors decided to aggressively seek funding for digital post-production equipment in order to accommodate the evolving needs of the members and to do the more complex and expensive narrative productions. At the same time, some 16mm gear is still present, including an animation stand and black-and-white lab (last used in 2005), and there is no interest in disposing of this gear. Because there is no comparable facility on the island, the co-op services post-production needs of commercial productions, and the market rates charged for this work subsidizes emerging and low-budget films. As a matter of policy, small projects with modest budgets have the same access to a broadcast-quality facility as do bigger films, and a sliding rate exists to match the costs with the ability to pay. As Paul Pope describes it: “In 1975 the cbc described us as potsmoking hippies on welfare, and in 2005 we are major partners with cbc .” While the broadcaster was doing local production in the 1970s, today it has been significantly downsized with production activity outsourced to the private sector. The current nifco facility is 9,000 square feet, located in three internally connected but otherwise unassuming (and unmarked) downtown row houses. The first house was purchased outright in 1980, the second in 1990, and the third when it became available in 1999. There is no other co-op in the country with the stability and financial acumen to manage real estate and yet remain true to its grassroots origins. The co-op’s board and members also extended considerable lobbying effort toward the creation of the Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation, which

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finally opened in 1997 with an initial modest commitment of $1 million over five years. The expansion of nifco ’s facilities was funded in part with money available for alternative industrial development as a consequence of the collapse of the province’s cod fishery. At that time, the organization could have shifted toward becoming more of a film school and service outlet, but the awareness of the founding mandate and the continuity within the membership and board prevented this shift. The navigation of industry and art would not be possible in a larger city with competing private sector interests and less of a shared sense of purpose. It is not insignificant that the arts community in St John’s is concentrated in the compact downtown area and that there is a vibrant public culture of interaction in coffee shops and pubs, not to mention at raucous nifco gatherings. Jean Smith (nifco executive director at the time of this writing) was quite emphatic in describing the organization as a comprehensive resource, supporting filmmakers at all levels of ability and expertise, as well as contributing to the broader community, for instance, in supporting the needs of artists working in other disciplines. Smith bristled at the mention of nifco having transformed into simply a post-production facility, as she has witnessed a day-to-day integration of activity and exchange: “There’s a huge emphasis on networking, sharing of expertise, and mentoring in this town. And people work together on numerous committees and lobby together on initiatives with the government to support the industry here. And it’s not only an industry, it’s very creative.” Working filmmakers remain in control of the organization, so the direction is grounded in concrete needs, and there is a strong willingness to adapt to changing circumstances rather than deny access to projects that do not fit existing programs. Filmmaker Justin Simms explains how the co-op functions as a consequence of isolation: I think nifco is one of the rare examples where distance from the major centres is a benefit, because unlike most co-ops, nifco has to have a split personality. It has to be a co-op first and foremost, but it also has to provide what our actual film industry desperately needs, which is a professional finishing facility to do sound mixing, colour correction, and closed captioning. If that didn’t exist at nifco, it would exist nowhere else in this province. So we would all have to go to Halifax or Toronto to do that. Ultimately, there would be fewer films and that would take a toll on the aesthetic. So I think that nifco is incredibly vital in those two functions, and they do feed each other.

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In theory it is a revolving door, but you never revolve out. You are at nifco making your first short on one roll of film over a weekend, everybody working voluntarily. But you are also at nifco doing your sound mix on your $2 million feature and your colour correction. So it’s the same place and I think that also influences the aesthetic in terms of how the films feel and what they taste like.

nifco has a highly professional and now relatively well-paid staff. This is distinct from many other arts organizations that often deal with budget constraints on the backs of employees and that, in turn, are often staffed by members who have other interests. Remarkably, membership remains fixed at the original $5 per year rate, but with much more revenue generated through facilities rentals (with significant discounts for artist-driven productions). Non-members are eligible to use the facilities, with rates and access at the discretion of the board of directors. nifco members are responding to the changing context of contemporary work; by and large, short films are more structured and less improvised than in the 1970s, and the funding environment, as a consequence of a more conservative cultural climate, favours the production of calling-card films. In the broader industry, the Canadian Film Centre is a strong influence in this trend, with a mandate to integrate filmmakers in the commercial marketplace. Edward Riche was involved with the co-op since the early 1980s, and observed the national scene as it was taking shape: “Those co-ops across Canada were formed out of a deep necessity to say something. They were not commercial endeavours; they just came out of this urgency to speak in that form. So the films were very rudimentary but came from the most genuine impulse in artists. I think there’s purity in the early work that comes from those places, some sort of pent-up expression. A generation later with younger filmmakers, it’s a totally different matter. They say here’s a facility and opportunity that exists, and I’m going to use it for whatever reason.” In 1988, while a film student at Concordia University in Montreal, Riche made a mock documentary called Hey Elvis, affectionately seeing the celebrity as gaudy icon of American culture, as important as cars, money, and bubble gum. Completed at nifco , it features a cameo by Mike Jones as Dr Gordon Puss, director of Elvis Presley Laboratories Limited, researching the mortal remains and, with tongue firmly in cheek, providing commentary on the cultural obsession with star power. This fascination with pop culture iconography is later viewed through a feminist lens in Portrait of a 70 Foot Artist (Dir: Anita McGee, 2002), a documentary about media artist Andrea Cooper

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who makes large billboard images of herself wearing sexually provocative clothing that dwarf the weather-beaten streets of St John’s. The work recalls American photographer Cindy Sherman’s intense examination of social masks but here grounded in the harsh environment of this city on the north Atlantic. In another dystopian view of the environment, Anne Troake made a short performance film called Pretty Big Dig (2003), dance choreography with three large backhoe tractors moving in unison over the landscape. Place and Narrative

The narrative tradition at nifco grows out of the theatre influence and the storytelling practice of the place. As John Doyle explains: “There is a strong sense of entertaining an audience. I think that’s something that comes from Newfoundland culture, I mean you put three or four Newfoundlanders together in a room and right away someone is telling a story and people are one-upping the stories or laughing at them. Probably the biggest single status thing in the hierarchy of Newfoundland society is the ability to entertain, to tell a good story, or to be able to perform with an instrument or sing.” After Faustus Bidgood was completed, Andy Jones wrote the half-hour film monologue Albert (1987), filmed by Nigel Markham. Actor Charles Tomlinson, as Andy’s alter ego, plays a weakling accountant home for the weekend, talking to his pet budgie – contemplating running naked in the streets but living in fear of his “hard and cruel” boss, from (and for) whom he aches for the “sting of her criticism.” The film’s repressed sexual tension provides the veil for a story of a failed relationship and the claustrophobia of a character afraid to step outside his door. The closed environment and use of long takes emphasizes performance while also reflecting a place where fear and fantasy merge in the compulsion for storytelling. The Hall Trilogy (1992) is an early example of theatre and film crossover, a trio of half-hour dramas produced by Ken Pittman as a pilot for cbc and adapted from stage shows originally performed at the lsvu Hall. These are compelling small dramas with strong local performers. The first, Hanlon House (Dir: Derek Norman), features Bryan Hennessey as a fussy father and Greg Thomey as his young recalcitrant son home from Ontario. There is a strong sense of being contained by a closed world, as the father warns: “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.” But there is also the need to be part of a family, even when there is only the faintest of gestures of communication across generations. There is a similar sense of containment and possibility in Flux (Dir: Gerald Lunz), where the angst of personal relationships and anxieties

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about professional life play out as a young artist (Rick Mercer) struggles to complete an abstract sculpture in spite of rejection from “that crowd at the gallery.” The third film has the best title: Subway to Tickle Gut (Dir: Rosemary House). It is set on a Toronto subway, constructed for the film shoot, and involves a woman (played by Mary Lewis) anxious to get to the airport in order to return home to Newfoundland but frustrated by a stop on the line. Like many regional films, the idea of getting away rubs up against the fact of being stuck in place. As she paces anxiously, waiting for power to be restored, she talks with another passenger (Christine Taylor), who is obsessed with Newfoundland because it is the home of her mother, though she has never been there herself. While musician Ron Hynes leers at the women and plays his harmonica, we learn the troubled back story of this woman who has led a sheltered life but was brutally attacked on the subway and has since suffered a breakdown. She decides that the relief from her troubles would be a trip to Newfoundland. The response from the Lewis character dumps cold water on the romanticization of place: “There is no such thing as safe – you are finding that out, right? Newfoundland is a hard place; it is not easy. Your mother must have told you that, too. It’s beautiful, but there are days I’d risk swimming to get out of there. It’s okay if you belong there, but one spring and it would be straight to the mental for you.” When the train jostles forward and the lights flicker out, the woman falls over. When Hynes tries to help her up, she starts swinging her fists in a kind of revenge against her earlier attacker. The film gives us a glimpse of how everyone carries with them a story that is more complex than appearances may imply, and that everyone is damaged, but still carrying on. The subway set makes a reappearance in Anchor Zone (Dir: Andrée Pelletier, 1994), a B-movie sci-fi feature set in a dystopian future of corporate rule and toxic waste with Ron Hynes as malevolent ceo . The film, which otherwise benefits from its obscurity, does have some charming moments but is an example of concepts that may have had local energy but for being watered down in order to fit into the marketplace. It concludes with the corporate refugees on the ocean, escaping to the outports in a small boat – an image that is the reverse of the refugee arrival in the nfb ’s Welcome to Canada discussed in this book’s conclusion. To support filmmakers who have gone through an initial development and first-film process, nifco has established a program called Picture Start, with funding from Telefilm and set up similar to afcoop ’s Film 5 program. In this way, more experienced members remain connected to the co-op rather than graduating into the private sector. A strong product of this program is

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Spoiled (Dir: Sherry White, 2008). A young girl named Pearl lives with her father, played by writer Des Walsh, and tries to help him navigate the world of online dating. While he nurses her cuts and bruises and collects her tears in a jar, she types his e-mail correspondence: “I fantasize about meeting you …” They both have high hopes when a Latino woman named Clarissa arrives to visit during Christmas, but the father is unable to moderate his boorish manners. Pearl is both older than her years and trapped between childhood innocence and the cruelties of the adult world. The scheduled shoot was met by a most brutal snowstorm, a coincidence that visually reinforces the theme of isolation and yearning. Clothesline Patch (1999), made by Mary Lewis after her residency at the Canadian Film Centre, likewise deals in coming-of-age trauma. The plot revolves around a communal laundry line in the 1960s where it is difficult to keep secrets, and a young girl is traumatized by puberty and menstruation. The laundry line hung with pure white sheets is her favourite skipping spot, but when she begins her period, she is terrified of the evidence being the subject of community gossip. The girl begins to understand the changes in her body, and her mother also realizes what is going on when each separately overhear talk from the local gossip. The girl’s development can be seen as parallel to the evolution of the broader filmmaking community. A short that is the antithesis of the calling card is Punch Up at a Wedding (Dir Justin Simms, 2006), about a wedding toast that goes horribly wrong. Recalling the energy and counter-mainstream style of Codco and the early nifco films, it was shot in an afternoon on a budget of $400 and the donated labour of cast and crew. Staged in three acts and three camera set-ups where, inspired by Wong Kar-Wai, the actors move in and out of the picture and significant action occurs outside the frame. Simms is part of a generation of filmmakers inspired by the history of nifco but also film school–educated and much more aware of world cinema than his predecessors. He recognizes two interlocking influences: “We were talking about the two aesthetics: the independent Newfoundland spirit and the international spirit. I think it is always something we have to reconcile and will inform our aesthetic.” Cyril (Frank Barry), the best man at a wedding, is thrown out of the party after making a rude and embarrassing toast to the bride and groom. We never get to see the toast, though bits of it are overheard as videotape is played back. The film begins as he stumbles out the door, spits blood from his mouth and, still holding his drink, relieves himself against the side of the house. He then provides a long-winded drunken rationalization for his speech, and with it a glimpse into the despair and violence that informs masculinity – all men

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Figure 2.14 | Frank Barry (left) and Stephen Lush in Punch Up at a Wedding, frame enlargement.

know someone like Cyril. He tells his friend Gordon (Steven Lush): “They’re young, worse than that will happen to them, believe me you.” He then brags: “I’m known for my toasts, I’m an eloquent person. I appreciate the language.” It is a film about the pleasure of words and the central role of storytelling, and his subsequent remarks evolve into another story about a friend frozen on the side of a road. Storytelling is located on the precipice of danger. In its references to drinking and the cadence of local vernacular, the film is about the massive weight of culture on everyday life, how it intrudes upon, fascinates, provides fleeting moments of pleasure, but can also crush everything. Inside, the bride’s mother tells her daughter to grow up and act like a bride, which means having to accept the grim disappointments offered by men. In the third act, the groom and a pal are watching the toast scuffle in the view screen of a video camera (we never see the screen). He tells a story of what he was thinking when they put the ring on his finger – his thoughts were of his first sexual experience. The story is his loss of virginity with

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Jenny, the Dairy Queen girl, recalling the mix of perfume, ice cream, and deep-fryer smells, and the need to keep quiet since the parents are home and in the next room – cultural authority always looming over, in a town where everyone knows your business. The smell of sex and ice cream is followed by a nasty fragment of Cyril’s toast, playing over the end credits: “Love is not something you fall into. It is forged in the fires of adversity. And the most beautiful flowers sometimes ascend from the violent dunghill of righteous manure. And as you know, Julie, or as your mommy knows, and your daddy knows, and as I know, not all those flowers get to bloom.” No one kisses the cod in Heartless Disappearance into Labrador Seas (Dir: Justin Simms, 2008), a half-hour drama developed as a pilot for cbc by Justin Simms, Lois Brown, and Anna Petras. Knowing the broadcaster had little interest in a regionally based series, the filmmakers used the development money to complete the film since the project would likely not have moved forward through official channels. Heartless is the story of what happens when Lily (Liane Balaban), a girl from the suburbs of Mount Pearl, goes around the bay to fulfill what she believes is her birthright: to fall in love with a fisherman. She meets a boy named Stagger (Joel Hynes) at a party. “I saw myself as belonging to an imaginary society of archetypal Newfoundland women. Waiting for their husbands to come back from the sea, or the war, or the hunt, or Canadian Tire.” It is told in a deadpan that upsets the conventions of a fairy-tale romance: “I was Sleeping Beauty awoken from a deep sleep by some guy’s kiss. Then he just takes off. If he’s going to take off, why’d he kiss me in the first place? And now I can’t get back to sleep. Where’s the beauty in that?” It is not ‘once upon a time,’ but now and just outside the city in the wake of the decline of the fabled fishery. We see hyper-romantic images of the couple’s first meeting, and throughout, Lily is seen taking pictures with an array of cameras, among them a Brownie and a Kodak Instamatic once favoured by tourists, but no digital device. We are invited to think about the fabrication of culture. At the wedding, the bride and groom cake figurine is set upon a stack of raisin tea buns, icon of Newfoundland cooking. Lily describes her wedding day as one remembered for being the most hopeful, and we then see the reality of married life as hope in decline. Frank Barry appears as patriarchal apparition waiting for the bus who heartlessly tells Lily that she should accept the fact of an absent husband: “Fishing is his birthright …We men need action to live.” Stagger takes a job on a fishing vessel called Heartless while the new bride laments her situation. Rather than give her strength in solidarity, the archetypal Newfoundland women (including writer and narrator Lois Brown) appear as a

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Greek chorus to mock this hardship: “My dear maid, my husband left for sea in 1856 … gone for sixteen years and one day he comes back, traipsing over my clean kitchen floor … I didn’t even know he was gone.” While the film makes fun of the common-sense logic of gender relations, it also concludes with an ideal of love. Over a shot of Stagger finally returning, the narration says: “We began in a small way to forgive each other for what we are like.” A very funny short that satirizes ideas of gender and masculinity is the ‘cowboy musical’ Little Dickie (Dir: Anita McGee, 2002). Shot on a tourist farm in Nova Scotia, the film begins with a rugged cowboy riding into a wildwest town and entering a saloon to slam down whiskey. All the signifiers of hyperbolic masculinity are turned upside down when, to impress a beautiful woman, he begins the song of the film’s title. “I have a little dickie, and know how to use it well. Takes a damn good-looking chickie, just to make it swell.” The absurdity builds with the bartender joining in the chorus followed by a full-blown musical and square dance with dozens of performers. The woman sings, in response to the little dickie performance but also in answer to the film industry’s masculine conventions of technology, power, and genre: “You can keep your little dickie tucked away down below. Here’s one good-looking chickie gonna tell you where to go.” If co-ops such as nifco began out of utilitarian needs, they flourish as creative communities. While technological changes have pushed nifco to be equipped with broadcast-quality equipment, it remains truly supportive of ‘old school’ shooting on Super 8, 16mm, or 35mm film stock, suggesting an acceptance of diverse approaches and support for work that is outside of the mainstream. Roger Maunder’s first film, It Ain’t Funny (1998), a bleak story of a drunk lamenting what he has become, is shot on gritty black-and-white stock, recalling the co-op’s early productions, and, like many first films, draws on the stylistic energy of early slapstick. The character is a sad drunk who is also a down-on-his-luck birthday-party clown. Maunder later made the more polished Swallowed (2002), a melodramatic story of an old fisherman who years ago had lost his young pregnant wife to the sea. It begins with haunting underwater imagery along the rugged coast in the town of Bauline. Here, the local is never simply used as an embellishment of colour for the tourism industry; it is integrated to the narrative of place. That understanding is the energy of Mary Power: A Lifetime of Stories (Dir: Michelle Jackson, 2007), a beautifully photographed short documentary about storyteller Mary Power in the small outport community of Branch. She is a lively woman with a firm claim to the idea of place and home.

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Figure 2.15 | Andy Jones as the crazed teacher of the letter R in R-Rated, frame enlargement.

Filmmakers such as Jordan Canning are invested in Newfoundland but use festivals and the Web to get the films to a wider audience unconstrained by ideals of regionalism, and where there is less concern with a pure ideal of film form.57 Her accomplished first film, Pillowtalk (2005), involves a young couple in bed, unable to sleep and unable to have sex when a petty argument tears them apart. Off-screen sounds and the light coming in the window disturb them, but these are distractions from the tensions in their relationship. As the film concludes, the young woman uncovers the window allowing the light to enter as the image shifts from black-and-white to colour. Among her other films is Thanks a lot, Jerry (2007), a collaboration with performer Susan Kent, based on Kent’s character Jerry, a tracksuit-wearing, unemployed, drink-beer-in-the-graveyard, pee-in-the-alley boy-man, from her stage play Nan Loves Jerry. It is a great example of the grassroots energy of early nifco and the tradition of crossing over from theatre to film. Kent has since taken a lead role in the satirical tv series This Hour Has 22 Minutes. At nifco ,

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senior artists often continue to be involved in short film productions. Andy Jones collaborates in an obscure and crazed short directed by Jerry Rogers called R-Rated (2002). Made for a literacy campaign, Jones is a mad classroom teacher furiously enunciating the letter R, leaving his students terrified, bored, and amazed – responses that likewise resonate with the short indie film experience. It is a great lesson on speech, language, and manners, and is an antidote to the artworld pretensions of Michael Snow’s classroom film Back and Forth (1969), consisting of non-stop camera panning across a classroom. What moves in R-Rated is the free play of language, and we see Andy Jones almost like a shaman in intense ritual – and connecting across time within a long tradition of storytelling. The co-op scene is an important grassroots location for making culture. Equally important is the documentary film movement, which emerges from grassroots social and political activism, though is less determined by the dynamics of the co-operatives. The next chapter explores the image of region on screen as presented in documentaries. These are films that are invested in place, in the conditions of local culture and society, and they are films that, in their thematic concerns, connect in broad ways with many of the fiction films made in the region. Our understanding of place as it comes into being on screen is made in the interface of the real and its representation.

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Driving along in that rattling old bus, I was picking up bits of all the dark stinking residue of this strange country, the roadkill, the tire marks on the highways, duff, burned out trees, dead mosquitoes, broken beer bottles, skunk scent and traplines. John Stiles, The Insolent Boy¹

CHA PTER 3

Documentary in the Spirit of the Vernacular Neal Livingston’s documentary about John Dunsworth, the actor well known as drunken trailer park supervisor Mr Lahey in The Trailer Park Boys tv series, follows him in the underdog role of candidate for the New Democratic Party in the 1988 provincial elections. In John Dunsworth: The Candidate (1989), the subject provides strong commentary on politics in Nova Scotia. He walks door to door listening as people express disinterest in the political process, and at one point, the actor performs the role of the cutthroat patronageseeking politician, turning to the camera and demanding votes in exchange for favour and out of fear of retribution. He describes the local scene in this

way: “We’ve always been part of an authoritarian society … People in this community think that something that is has virtue because it is, and they will vote for someone because that someone has been the premiere and he’s important. They will subscribe to a set of rules because it has been the set of rules, and so by virtue of its existence, it must be good.” Many of Livingston’s films are about grassroots social activism, seeking the resistance to dominant hegemony expressed by Dunsworth. In this chapter I am interested in the documentary expression of the local and the dialectical context of resistance and hegemony, though not exclusively in films that are explicitly political. Documentary has been a mainstay of production in the region (though this has been weakened by a decline in funding), and while the films often do not gain the profile of fiction features, they do reveal great details about the conditions of place. While this is a lengthy chapter, I cannot discuss all the work, choosing to focus on work that speaks specifically to regional conditions. The quotation that opens this chapter is from a work of fiction, but it telegraphs a documentary vibe about conditions of place. I use it as a reminder that documentary is always made from a particular perspective and is never simply a direct transmission of the real. The enigmatic title of a film about Annapolis Valley–born poet John Stiles, Scouts Are Cancelled (Dir: John D. Scott, 2007), comes from Stiles’s first book of poetry, with themes drawn from the rural area where he grew up. The poems are written in the cadence and tone of the regional vernacular, as suggested by some of his poem titles: “Givver Jimmie Givver,” “Little Buggers,” and “Fer the Pardy.” But Stiles no longer lives in the Valley – he currently resides in London, England. In the film, we first see him in Toronto, at the Insomniac Press launch party for his book, where he proclaims himself as being from “Tinbucket, Nova Scotia.” Toronto is where he worked at a litany of dead-end jobs and lived broke and at the margins. While working at a call centre, Stiles began to craft his rural voice, beginning some calls with what was to become an on-stage character: “How ya doon anight?” This voice evolved into the performance poems that led to his first book contract and, surprisingly, to great success as a telemarketer. There is a decidedly analog quality to the film, coincident with Stiles’s vernacular speech, emerging as in between rural and urban, region and centre.² The performance of a vernacular voice is made at a distance from the ‘real,’ geographically speaking, and in this way the film raises interesting questions about representation, the idea of home, of voice, and of memory – all of which inform documentary practice.

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Figure 3.1 | Scouts Are Cancelled, frame enlargement.

Filmmaker John Scott explains in his Scouts narration that he is fascinated with the writer’s “vagabond spirit” and resistance to the conformist world. Contemporary footage is intercut with segments titled “Memorybank Movie” (a title also used for the flashback passages in Margaret Laurence’s 1974 prairie novel The Diviners), consisting of footage of filmmaker and subject ‘on the road’ in their younger days, with explicit references to Jack Kerouac to signify a free spiritedness. The filmmaker then reveals himself as outside that ideal of freedom – we see photographs of his family with a young child in front of his house and a minivan. When we hear the filmmaker’s voice, it is made distant through a degraded recording, suggestive of the disconnect between representation and material reality. This degraded audio is evocative of the material conditions under which the film’s subject lives, but also of the form of the film, emerging as it does from a low-budget diy sensibility. The filmmaker explains the formal challenges of inserting his own voice in a film that is about voice: “Once it sounded clean and professional, the lines I read sounded forced, self-important, and authoritative. When the voice is compromised a little it does feel more distant, more playful.” On the road

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with Stiles in the present is a kind of portrait of the artist as outsider in conformist times. They are travelling through rural Nova Scotia on a book tour. From behind the wheel, we see the artist working and re-working the precise rhythm of a line of poetry, but the car breaks down on the way to their first stop in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. We later see Stiles at a table in the mall outside of a bookstore, but no one is stopping to buy and old geezers glide past in motorized wheelchairs. At a public library reading, only two chairs are occupied. I should emphasize that the poems themselves are really compelling and highly entertaining, and in other scenes, there is a more receptive audience, but the cumulative effect is to raise questions about the complex relationship between artist, audience, and subject. Films are as interesting for what they do not show as for what is on screen. Here we see Stiles perform the voice and characters of the Annapolis Valley, but a trip home reveals a sense of disconnect. We do not meet any of the local characters described in his poems, and we do not see images of labour in the apple orchards, even though this is important economically to the region and is prominent in the poems. The result is a kind of mythologization – place is performed rather than lived materially. The filmmaker has indicated to me that some of the characters important to Stiles simply were unwilling to be on camera – and this points to the practical contingencies of filmmaking. However, by signalling these absences, the film indicates a broader disconnect between the idea of home, material reality, memory, and the performative act of writing through which these elements are transformed. The way that the filmmaker looks at his subject is similar to the ways that we look to the movies – both for reflection of our experiences in the material world and for fulfillment of a desire unmet in the world. This contradiction is where contemporary documentary is located. Fiction also occupies this place, and while it is important to understand the distinction between these forms of representation with respect to the real, the blurred boundaries of a given territory offer a productive space for thinking. With this in mind, it is worth thinking about Stiles’s fiction novel The Insolent Boy (2001) for its encounter with place. Cited at the beginning of this chapter, it is a punk update of Anne of Green Gables set, in part, in rural Nova Scotia, where the character Selwyn Davis is adopted by a minister and his wife. He has a miserable childhood filled with mean-spirited and smallminded locals. In a brief teenage romance, Selwyn becomes a father, but the girl’s mother drags her and the child away – the son becomes fatherless and the mean-spiritedness of the community continues. Selwyn escapes to join a rock band, moves to Vancouver (an anti-romantic road trip and as far away

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from home as he can get), tours Europe, and eventually returns home. Stiles himself travelled with the Alberta rock band The Smalls in the late 1980s and produced the raw documentary The Smalls … er Whatever (2000). In the book, the return home is devoid of any pretense of nostalgia for tradition since place is what you make it, but it is also made under conditions one cannot control. The idea of returning home is bound together with the need to move away. Growing up, Selwyn seeks out music and is keen to play an instrument, but he does not possess a guitar, only a flugelhorn on which he can play neither popular nor traditional Irish folk music; when pressed, he does manage “Farewell to Nova Scotia.” An anti-nostalgic view of place is at odds with the way the Annapolis Valley has been constructed in tourism campaigns as Edenic garden, particularly around the Evangeline story. Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, a poem published in 1847 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, is a highly romanticized tragic love story of a young Acadian girl named Evangeline who becomes separated from her love during the time of the British expulsion of Acadians, beginning in 1755. Acadians had remained neutral in the British–French conflicts but had refused to sign an oath of allegiance to England and, unlike the British, were on good terms with the Mi’kmaq. At the same time, the British coveted the fertile Annapolis Valley lands for settlers from New England, prompting the brutal expulsion. The story is retold in numerous texts, including Acadian Spirit: The Legacy of Philippe d’Entremont, an episode in the history series A Scattering of Seeds (Dir: Peter d’Entremont, 1998). Longfellow, in contrast, had never set foot in the region and his description of the landscape does not match the local geography. I should mention that what has become known as Canada’s first feature film, Evangeline (Dir: Edward P. Sullivan, 1913), is an adaptation of Longfellow’s poem that was shot in Nova Scotia. Made largely with American actors, the film has been lost, its last known whereabouts being on a ship sailing out of Halifax harbour after the local screening.³ The Longfellow poem popularized a mythic ideal of a pure and untouched natural space attached to a saccharine romance. The trajectory of Evangeline is taken up in the nfb Acadian documentary Evangeline’s Quest (Dir: Ginette Pellerin, 1996), journeying from Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, to Louisiana. The story is posited as a creation myth accompanying Acadian nationalism, and this sense of place is set against the deluge of commercial uses of Evangeline – we see a long montage of Evangeline signage, including life insurance, kidney centre, and funeral home. Pierre Véronneau points out that “the Deportation constitutes a founding event in the historiography of the Acadians

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and determines their struggle for identity as well as their definition as a distinct people.”4 Véronneau calls films such as Le Grand Jack (Jack Kerouac’s Road – A Franco-American Odyssey) (Dir: Herménégilde Chiasson, 1987) exemplary of the theme of travel and border crossing in Acadian culture. The road trip personal documentary On the Road With Mary (Dir: Monique LeBlanc, 2005) has the filmmaker travelling through the paranoid landscape of post-9/11 United States accompanied by a dashboard-mounted Virgin Mary to examine questions of faith in the face of generalized misery and fear. The introspective narration takes the form of on-screen text, beginning with: “Dear Mary, my grandmother used to pray to you everyday … I never could.” In turn, the filmmaker seeks out exceptional people who work to assist those in need. The journey follows upon LeBlanc’s previous Le Lien Acadian (The Acadian Connection) (1995), which traces the LeBlanc family name throughout North America. In both cases, the idea of the local is integrated with the spatial dynamics of contemporary North America where identity is not neatly contained within political boundaries. LeBlanc’s text offers invocations about how we choose to see the world and evokes the long European tradition of looking at America and the myth of the American Dream, from Alexis De Tocqueville to Jean Baudrillard. She demonstrates how Christianity in America is used as a cover for greed and exploitation, but she also gives us amazing stories of resistance. The European art cinema style of On the Road With Mary recalls Léa Pool’s 1990 documentary Hotel Chronicles, a journey through open spaces and from one hotel room to another in search of the ideals of America. The reference demonstrates the affinity between at least some Acadian-New Brunswick filmmakers and their Quebec counterparts, distinguishing this group from other filmmakers in Atlantic Canada. A key figure in the renaissance of Acadian art in the later decades of the twentieth century, poet Gérald Leblanc was strongly committed to Acadian identity but also integrated into the broader North American counterculture.5 Leblanc’s work engages with location while reacting against nostalgia, as Herménégilde Chiasson, an Acadian poet, filmmaker, professor at Université de Moncton, and former New Brunswick lieutenant-governor says: “[He] linked Acadia to America and brought modernity into our writing, after it was so brutally taken hostage by folklore.”6 Rodrigue Jean’s film Living on the Edge: The Poetic Works of Gérald Leblanc (2006) begins with the dynamic energy of the poet reading from his 1988 book L’Extréme Frontière (this is the original French title of the film and better expresses the energy of the subject) and explaining his urgency in creating poetry that reflects Acadian

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experience, which does not make claims for high-brow culture but instead maps the gritty reality of place. In this way, the work corresponds with Jean’s fiction films discussed later in this book. Leblanc says: “It was important to me to map my space, where I lived, loved, got depressed, drank.” He asks, in a poem that connects viscerally to the beat tradition, what it means to come from “nowhere,” from Moncton: “A linguistic burn. / Moncton is an American prayer, a coyote howl in the fin-de-siècle desert. / Moncton’s more a word than a place or vice versa in the night of troubling things.” He answers the question by inventing a poetry that gives name to place, linking location with desire. Chiasson is interviewed in the film speaking of the power not only of his writing but also of books on Leblanc: “I always saw Gérald with books, at home – surrounded by books. That was unusual for Acadia. I grew up in a home without books. My parents were basically illiterate.” Leblanc later points out the importance of naming place in the poems as a way of bringing it into existence: “reality bricks, around which the rest is poetic mortar.” The film is structured through evocative readings of Leblanc’s poetry by younger artists, a representational strategy also used in MacGillivray’s Reading Alistair MacLeod – in both cases the work of art is understood as a living process to be felt, not simply described, and in this way the words resonate through the community. Some of the poems are performed to music on stage, as was Leblanc’s practice (he wrote lyrics for the Acadian rock band 1755, the name referencing the expulsion); others are read on the snowcovered landscape with the concrete of the city of Moncton behind. At times it is emotionally painful, with one poet expressing anger at the difficulty of the prose and repeatedly stopping, but then continuing in the face of the emotional resonance of the work. These poets help to name Acadie into existence so that it is no longer just a diasporic imaginary zone. In these faces, we witness the formation of community, and in their passion, Leblanc’s words become a shared language written in material reality. As one speaker describes: “his poems are like incantations. Their spirit is trancelike.” This is a film from one gay artist to another, but it is not concerned with a narrative of coming-out, or the relation of the gay poet to a conservative rural location. Instead, the film demonstrates how the poet creates a space of sexuality and sensuality evoking the beat tradition but grounded in Acadie, where the words are a kind of music integrated with the body. By the time of the making of the film, Leblanc is undergoing chemotherapy and is not much interested in providing detailed rationalizations for the work. From off-camera we hear the gentle voice of the filmmaker probing themes

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of sensuality and the connection with Burroughs and other beat writers, but also saying “Gérald, we can stop at any time. You don’t have to do this.” This is an important moment reflecting the relationship of the filmmaker to the subject and a refusal of what are often the more exploitive tactics of a journalistic approach. Although Leblanc is dying, the film is by no means a lament; instead, the subject remains alive in the voice of other poets and artists, not the least in filmmaker Rodrigue Jean. THE ENVIRONMENT

Contemporary documentary filmmaking in the region emerges in the wake of anti-modernist nfb imagery that largely points to economic decline.7 One small film serves as an example: Don’t Knock the Ox (Dir: Tony Ianzelo, 1970), made from the Montreal nfb office on location at the Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, annual fair and ox-pull competition. While the director was a long-time cinematographer for such innovative nfb filmmakers as Colin Low, George Stoney, and Bonnie Klein, and the transformative program Challenge for Change was already well underway on Fogo Island in Newfoundland and elsewhere, this film is made as if the progressive movements in documentary throughout the 1960s had not taken place. Like many films of this kind, it approaches the subject as nostalgic and curious anachronism entirely disconnected from the larger world. The film reflects the structural contradiction of the nfb , which can at once support groundbreaking initiatives while tilling the same soil of banal exposition. These are the conditions under which progressive staff filmmakers toiled and where change emerged through the efforts of a handful of determined filmmakers irrespective of management directives. The tone of the film is lighthearted but the cumulative effect is to convey the sense that these small rural communities are rooted in the past and defined by traditional agriculture practices. There is no discourse on the complex ways that the geography is made by human interaction and how spatial relations are remade through transformative social and industrial action. Two decades later, many nfb documentaries exercise an earnest paternalism toward small communities. A Passage from Burnt Islands (Dir: Alan Handel, 1992) provides a “heartwarming” story, to use the language of the film’s publicity, of literacy crusader Ray Brown, an elementary school principal in Burnt Islands, Newfoundland. The didactic style of narration, voiced by Gordon Pinsent, posits Newfoundland as anthropological specimen. The film opens with folk music and idyllic coastal imagery, and the fact of

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geographic and cultural isolation is emphasized. This emphasis on isolation effaces the interconnection between local economic trauma and spatial patterns of underdevelopment. Like many documentaries of this style, the focus on the individual mitigates broader analysis. Where the film succeeds is in the emotional poignancy of the struggles for literacy, especially in a scene depicting parents and children writing letters to each other in order to develop literary skills, a scene that also reveals deep familial and communal concerns. In spite of the broader theme of isolation, it is evident that the only hope for the town’s children, under the existing economic regime, is to move away. In this way, the meaning of space is formed through patterns of migration. The nfb has supported a range of useful historical documentaries in the region. Among these films is the low-budget labour-history documentary They Didn’t Starve Us Out: Industrial Cape Breton in the 1920s (Dir: Patricia Kipping, 1991). The film opens with familiar big-city (Toronto) images of the Roaring Twenties and then points out that the fuel for central Canada came from dangerous toil in Cape Breton coal mines. Labour and union struggles are detailed, including the deployment of the Canadian army against the miners – who are treated as foreign enemies. More typical are films that portray the folk culture of the region, such as A Sigh and A Wish: Helen Creighton’s Maritimes (Dir: Donna Davies, 2001), on Creighton’s work collecting folk stories and songs. The Sacred Sundance (Dir: Brian Francis, 2008), shot in New Brunswick, details the transmission of traditional culture from one First Nation to another. In the Sundance Ceremony, participants pierce the flesh of their chests as an offering to the creator and dance for four days without food or water. Since it is forbidden to photograph the ceremony, the film has to convey the experience through the testimony of the participants. An important political documentary co-produced by the nfb is Buried At Sea (Dir: John Wesley Chisholm, 2006), on the environmental legacy of the dumping of munitions and war chemicals off the shores of Nova Scotia, including in waters near the city of Halifax. This film links the local story and an international crisis. A film that is playful, rooted in place, and decidedly not an nfb production is Neal Livingston’s 1999 short Suêtes, on the 150-kilometre-perhour ‘sud est’ winds that hit the western shores of Cape Breton Island (the Acadian region) and on how people cope with this intensity. We see siding ripped from buildings and, among the stories, hear a woman tell of crawling home from the local pub, not because of drunkenness but as the only way to escape the force of the wind. We see quotidian struggles to open or close

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doors against the force, the futility of trying to walk against the wind, and a funny shot of local artist Michel Williatte-Battet hanging laundry outside and attempting to read the newspaper amidst the fierce windstorm. Livingston’s earlier documentary Budworks (1978) is more directly engaged with environmental activism. Dealing with the 1976 grassroots citizens’ movement in Cape Breton to organize against proposed aerial insecticide spraying of the forest, it remains highly relevant to contemporary debates. Budworks was made on a very modest budget with a diy approach shot on out-of-date film stock obtained from the cbc after the network had abandoned film for video technology. The film precedes Livingston’s related 1984 nfb film Herbicide Trials. Budworks features young activist Elizabeth May who, in 2006, became leader of the Green Party of Canada. She articulates the challenge of activism in the face of significant threats of job losses in the forestry sector. Then Nova Scotia premier Gerald Regan (who actively supported industrialization and offshore oil development) takes credit for the pro-environment decision against aerial spraying, based on scientific evidence, but May points out that it was significant public protest that made a difference. The film is structured through a comparison with neighbouring New Brunswick, where aerial spraying activity has been taking place since 1952 in service of the demands of forestry companies, notably the Irving family. Where New Brunswick is beholden to these corporate interests, the film expresses a spirit of counter-culture resistance in Cape Breton (where the filmmaker has since made his home and is involved in a range of environmental activities, including sustainable woodlot management and small-scale hydro- and windpower development). Inspired by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962), Budworks situates the New Brunswick aerial spraying in the context of 1950s faith in chemical engineering, but then reveals the utter carelessness and futility of its application. Abandoned chemical barrels are found close to waterways and at the edge of the runway used in aerial-spraying activity. We are given first-hand accounts of illegal spraying operations over school grounds and waterways, contrary to federal law but unenforced in a province beholden to vested corporate interests. Livingston makes clear the importance of point-of-view documentary rather than claims of balance as in conventional television journalism: “For the political documentaries I’ve made here, bias is inherent in the film. The filmmaker is representing the view of the community and the public and helping advance the issue. This is social documentary at its truest.”8

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Livingston’s The Battle At Our Shores (2001), about citizen activism against inshore and coastal oil and gas exploration in Nova Scotia, shows the lack of public consultation and of comprehensive environmental assessment in the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board Resources Accord Implementation Act. Elizabeth May characterizes the Act as designed for a Sovietstyle system while both government and industry spokespeople articulate the party line. The filmmaker clearly stands with the community; we do not see him argue with his opponents. Instead, the pro-resource development advocates simply provide their perspective in conventionally photographed interviews with the counterpoint provided by environmentalists. It is a strategy that does tend to follow broadcast conventions (the film is funded by Visiontv and cbc Atlantic). On the other hand, the emphasis on the interview is an expressive counterpoint inviting reflection set against the simplistic montage style of conventional tv . Livingston says: “as television came to look like experimental film from the 1960s, a lot of quick cutting … to make something look different, it almost has to be slower, and I think the public is always interested in seeing stuff that looks different. The public is totally bored with everything having to fit into the same framework, look the same and sound the same for television. I think that’s why people are fleeing the box.” A more modest documentary from Livingston demonstrates this perspective: Rudy Hasse (2007) is a biography of “Canada’s greatest unknown environmentalist,” who would likely be much more well known had he been based in central Canada rather than in Nova Scotia. Hasse and the film evince joyfulness in environmentalism not typically found in more mainstream media on the subject. For instance, not only do we get accounts of the subject’s activism but we also see his visceral love for nature in playful scenes, including the image of this man in his eighties enjoying wild downhill sled rides. Elizabeth May is featured prominently, and the film uses excerpts of May from Budworks, Battle At Our Shores, and Herbicide Trials, making Rudy Hasse also a retrospective of Livingston’s own cinematic community activism. A scene in Battle At Our Shores neatly expresses the twin themes of community and communication informing this work when scientist Christopher Clarke, director of bioacoustics research at Cornell University, describes the effect of seismic exploration on whales. These animals use sound to communicate across great distances and to map their environment – a process central to the whale’s consciousness and understanding of itself in space. The massive and ongoing seismic blasts used in oil and gas exploration drastically interfere with the whale sounds. The effect is that the whales are much less able to

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communicate across great distances and, we can only speculate, have a corresponding diminished sense of consciousness and means of survival. From this, we come to understand communication and consciousness as integral to survival, and we can then consider how theories of behaviour privilege the human ability to communicate across space, since the whales achieved this ability long before humans began scratching on rocks. Forbidden Forest (Dir: Kevin Matthews, 2004), made in co-production with nfb and cbc, deals with the mismanagement of New Brunswick forests. It begins in Helsinki, Finland, at a shareholders’ meeting of international forestry conglomerate upm . The pastoral image of the region is deromanticized, and the film reveals this geography as subject to the intervention of global capitalism. Forest activists Jean-Guy Comeau (woodlot owner and retired woodworker) and Francis Wishart (artist, winemaker, and environmentalist) come together to advocate for change, declaring repeatedly that the forest, while licensed for harvest to several forestry conglomerates, is crown land belonging to the citizens of New Brunswick. The point is that these citizens deserve a return on their investment in the form of long-term environmental and economic sustainability, something that is arguably equivalent to corporate shareholders’ investment return. Comeau and Wishart get a meeting with senior upm executives in Finland, and while the meeting may be motivated by corporate image-making rather than an interest in changing business practices, the discussion does reveal substantial differences in European and Canadian forestry policies. We learn that in Finland, forest clear-cuts do not exceed three hectares in size, while this same company is able to clear-cut ninety hectares in New Brunswick. We then see New Brunswick politicians and forest industry executives mouthing empty rhetoric about concern for the environment and local communities. While Comeau lobbies for specific changes in forestry management practices related to small woodlot owners and community forestry initiatives, Wishart is lobbying the provincial government to accept a significant amount of his property into a permanent land preserve. He explains that he “has to fight the government in order to be responsible. You would think it would be the other way around, that it would be the government pressing us to be responsible but actually it is the other way around, which is hard to believe today.” At the shareholders’ meeting, Wishart makes the point that forestry companies need to be cognizant of the parallel case of tobacco companies compelled to make retroactive compensation for health damages caused by their products. The shareholders dine to the gentle sounds of a string quartet and we see heavy machinery continuing to operate in the for-

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ests. Wishart later makes the related comment that many people are now so alienated from nature that the forest is actually a frightening rather than nurturing place. The ideal of beauty and respect for nature is set in contrast with visualization of massive devastation in the clear-cut areas, and we see Comeau being given the runaround by provincial forestry management bureaucrats and then being escorted, along with the camera crew, out of the building by security. The film is structured through this contrast of imagery: lush images of the forest vs. clear-cut devastation; engaged dialogue with Comeau and Wishart vs. corporate and government empty rhetoric. This rhetoric is matched by the emptying out of the space of the forest. The ruins of clear-cut activity are seen close to waterways (affecting water levels, fish stocks, and downstream drinking water quality); in the huge trenches carved by the tracks of heavy machinery; in significant amounts of abandoned wood (the machinery is designed to only handle large pieces); and in bright-red tree tags that read “no harvest” fluttering beside tree stumps. There is no sign of wildlife, and we are told that in comparison with the degree of devastation, the economic output is minimal. Likewise, the industrial process has led to widespread unemployment of woodworkers and even the wages of heavy machinery operators are in decline. In turn, the film details a model of community forest management that would be both environmentally and economically sustainable, but this is dismissed out of hand by corporate and government interests. Jim Irving, of the powerful J.D. Irving, Limited, while claiming great concern for New Brunswick communities, condescendingly states that modern forestry is too complex to be in the hands of local residents. It is worth making the point echoed in Budworks that the Irving corporation has a monopoly over print media in the province, severely limiting opportunities for debate on these issues. The near-oligarchy of New Brunswick – today, in the form of elected representatives serving the needs of corporate interests – has historical precedence. Margaret Conrad and James Hiller describe the formation of the province in 1784, “when the British government was persuaded, after intensive lobbying by élite Loyalists from the St John River, to create the new colony of New Brunswick. These men hoped that the colony, which they expected to dominate, would become the ‘envy of the American states,’ a model of order and hierarchy in contrast to the democratic anarchy that would surely engulf their neighbours to the south.”9 Forbidden Forest was extensively screened throughout rural communities in New Brunswick and had a sold-out launch in Fredericton featuring David Suzuki (the film was coproduced with Suzuki’s cbc show The Nature of Things). The response of

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the Irving-controlled media, according to Kevin Matthews, was to ignore the film. “And at this time Suzuki was named one of Canada’s top ten most popular Canadians. He is in town and you would think he would deserve mention in the paper.” The filmmaker declares himself a follower of Grierson’s ideal of documentary as catalyst for social change, but that change can only manifest if members of the community are provided information and opportunity. Matthews goes on to describe the present conditions of media and society in the province as an extension of the terms of its formation: “Rich loyalists convince the king to partition Nova Scotia and create this little enclave for themselves, and the motto of the province to this day is ‘Hope Restored.’ What they hoped to restore was a peasant system of agriculture with a land-ruling gentry. It never changed and in many ways that mentality has never lifted. It’s the overall aura of the place.” This tone influences the kinds of films made in the province. Consistent with this tendency is the low-key approach to filmmaking of Léonard Forest, appointed as the first head of the Acadian regional film office in 1974. As described by Jeanne Deslandes, “Acadian committed-cinema has a tone and an ideology quite different from its Quebec counterpart. In Quebec, French dissident cinema is assertive, while it is soft and sanguine in New Brunswick. This difference in tone reflects the differences in culture.”¹0 Deslandes makes this case with respect to Un soleil pas comme ailleurs, directed by Forest in 1972, a film that Pierre Véronneau describes as “testif[ying] to the cultural and political awakening of the Acadians of northeastern New Brunswick.”¹¹ The film depicts union protests and demonstrations where citizens refused to allow politicians to speak. Deslandes describes the film’s approach as being unlike Challenge for Change: “Forest adopts a tone that aims at calming the angry insurgents. Seeing their frustration over not receiving their overdue employment payments, Forest takes the opportunity to build upon a sense of community, one with a more conciliatory tone.”¹² Deslandes makes the point that this approach is quite distinct from that of Michael Brault and Pierre Perrault in their radical documentary about language rights, L’Acadie, L’Acadie (1971). A later nfb Acadian film on a political subject is Robichaud (Dir: Herménégilde Chiasson, 1990), about the first Acadian premier of New Brunswick and dealing with issues of economic inequality, French-English divisions, and a confrontation with vested industrial interests – the K.C. Irving company. The film draws a parallel with the election of Kennedy in the US as marker of social change. Chiasson uses footage of Martin Luther King to place Robichaud’s reforms within a broader civil rights movement.

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Perhaps being retrospective was one reason it was possible to make this political film. By the time of its production, Robichaud was an old man, ensconced in the Senate and seen watching current political debates on television. While Robichaud engages with Acadian history, an earlier nfb film called Kouchibouguac (Dir: collective headed by Guy Borremans, 1978), about the displacement of Acadians during the establishment of a national park, avoids the specificity of cultural identity for the sake of a more generalized story of the mistreatment of French people by English speakers. Historian Ronald Rudin described the history of civil resistance around the opening of the park and that early treatments for the film were much more expressive of Acadian identity and aligned the event with Third World conflicts with imperial powers. However, Quebec filmmakers vetting production proposals at the nfb ’s French unit were, according to Rudin, actively hostile to the funding of Acadian filmmakers.¹³ At about the same time, the nfb in co-production with the cbc was making a fawning biography of K.C. Irving: I Like to See the Wheels Turn (Dir: Gilles Walker, 1981). Contra scenes of worker protest, this film opens with Irving workers striding, with military efficiency, alongside a long row of company oil trucks. In the wake of the grassroots social movement documentaries and the innovations of Challenge for Change, the Atlantic nfb office made a film that glorified this industrial leader. In a review of the film, historian Colin Howell asks why this industrialist is viewed as a saviour of the province rather than a parasite. He suggests that “popular support for the likes of K.C. Irving represents not so much an affirmation of the virtue of corporate capitalism as it does New Brunswick’s longing for a more equitable share of Canada’s industrial wealth.”¹4 The original treatment for the film suggests a more critical and even humorous approach to the subject, but these nfb documents also indicate compromises thought necessary in order to gain access to Irving. New Brunswick–born director Gilles Walker strove for a balance between admiration and criticism, with the film suffering from the detached politeness of this approach. The director attempted, for four years, to secure K.C. Irving’s participation in the film, and when this was finally granted, the presence of Irving overwhelmed the production. Walker’s perspective is made clear in a media interview following the film’s release: “For them to be involved in the project was a staggering leap. I felt an enormous responsibility not to abuse them. I promised a fair hearing.”¹5 In his original film treatment, Walker acknowledges that “a much harder edged film” would result if access to Irving were not granted. In fact, the film went well over its original $215,000 budget to a final cost of $304,500

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due, according to internal nfb correspondence, to the unpredictability of the Irvings and anxieties during the production that co-operation and access might cease so the filmmakers shot more material early in the production in case that happened. These budget figures would be in keeping with a documentary made today, making them rather extraordinary for 1981. It is useful to note that the nfb granted the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative, at its formation, production services valued at $10,000 per year, a huge amount for small-budget filmmakers but not much in comparison to the production budget of the Irving picture postcard. The tone of the documentary may have been influenced by the Irving family’s long-standing reputation for aggressive litigiousness. The otherwise secretive Irvings were, in turn, motivated to garner an improved public profile as the Irving shipyards were, at the time of the film’s production, bidding on a lucrative naval contract. During this period, the regional nfb office was making sponsored films for the Canadian military. As the film title suggests, the focus was on the achievements of this modest man from a backwoods town in the building of his corporate empire. It is, however, possible to read the film against the grain. Following the opening parade of workers, we see Irving looking down on the province from an airplane and the narration notes: “Today, when K.C. Irving looks down from his plane, chances are he owns whatever he sees.” We can understand this in more complex ways by thinking about the monopolization of the forestry industry and attendant problems for workers and communities. The narration does refer to New Brunswick as “the biggest company town in the world” and tells us that Irving lives in the tax haven of Bermuda. A later scene at a corporate sales convention led by an evangelical speaker imported from Detroit can similarly be read in chilling terms of social control. Dissent against Irving power in the province is expressed but then elided by the statement: “If the Irvings can work their will so freely in New Brunswick, it is because the people want them to succeed.” If the filmmakers photographed Irving with a God’s eye view of New Brunswick, it is because the film’s original treatment already believed in Irving as deity: “Whether the K.C. (genus Irving) is actually seen or not is not really at issue since ‘He,’ as he is usually referred to, has ceased to be a man at all. He has in fact become a way of life in New Brunswick.” If there is a critical impulse behind this statement, the finished film has curtailed its potential, and the nfb ’s marketing plan to push the film to business groups after its initial public screenings and broadcast reaffirms this function. While the nfb has travelled far on a reputation of social issue documentary, this film forsakes social engagement for a reverential portrait of the capitalist establishment. 164 | S H O O T I N G F R O M T H E E A S T

Throughout, criticism is answered by presenting the corporate point of view and emphasizing the hard work of Irving and his sons in navigating a complex environment. Even the fact of tax evasion is explained away in a narration that purports to speak for the average citizen of the province. Over carefree beach imagery, we are told: “Any zealous tax official will point to the tremendous losses this may cause the Canadian nation. An equally zealous New Brunswicker might point out that the tax-free Irving dollars have most often returned to the home province in the form of more industries and more jobs.” Note how the interests of the state are diminished by the stereotype of the zealous tax collector while the corporate interests are ideologically aligned with the average citizens of the province. Throughout, the corporate interests are mitigated by return to the portrait of Irving the individual and the family connections operating the company. Critics are diminished as being outsiders, not business-minded, or worse: academics. The fact of the company’s lack of public community gifts at the time of the film’s production is held up as a sign of modesty rather than more critical ways that this can be read. Overall, we are given a whitewash of labour struggles at Irving companies in favour of an emphasis on the individual against larger forces, and an ethos of Presbyterian-inspired hard work mitigates issues of power even where they are presented in the film. The image of the patriarch single-handedly trimming small trees for the replanting of Irving’s forests implies both integral concern for the environment (belied by clear-cut practices) and, again, individualizes the narrative of corporate control over space. Neither Robichaud nor Wheels Turn are explicitly environmentalist films, but they do demonstrate that the environment is not simply an empty space of nature, but a space made through the intervention of politics and the economy. Then nfb Atlantic Studio executive producer Rex Tasker agreed, in retrospect, that Wheels Turn could have been a much tougher film but that conflicts with director Gilles Walker prevented a harder edge. At that time, when the Film Board produced material critical of capitalism, it tended to be in an historical subject. For instance, Chandler’s Mill (Dir: Joan Henson, 1990) is an historical drama set in 1889 depicting the plight of workers, child labour, and union organizing in the New Brunswick wool industry. While there is an earnestness to the production, it does depict the mill as a brutal workplace, though sanitized in its staging – it feels like it is performed at a historic site (which it is – at Kings Landing Historical Settlement, Fredericton), without providing an opportunity to critically reflect on the performative aspect. Nonetheless, the narrative emphasizes the fact that for wealth to be shared, there must be collective action on the part of workers since capitalDocumentary in the Spirit of the Vernacular | 165

ists will not give freeely.¹6 Class inequity is similarly expressed in The Marco Polo: Queen of the Seas (Dir: Roger Hart, 1995), the story of a legendary ship made in Saint John that, in 1852, circumnavigated the globe in less than six months. The film invests nationalist pride in the ship as symbol of Canada and a ‘new age of travel’ and depicts a contemporary businessman’s quest to build a replica of the ship to celebrate it as technological and capitalist achievement. It is unclear whether the film is self-conscious of the absurdity of this quest, since the ship is, after all, an icon of how history is written in blood. The film does, however, manage to emphasize class conflict and managerial brutality, as it is the ruthlessness of the ship’s captain that made the circumnavigation possible. Nature as contested space is the subject of My Ancestors Were Rogues and Murderers (Dir: Anne Troake, 2005), a film about the Newfoundland seal harvest and the anti-sealing campaign mobilized by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (ifaw ). The film is a response to the image of Newfoundland sealers as one-dimensional stereotypes in the mass media and as barbarians in animal rights campaigns organized by the ifaw . Concern over the image of Newfoundland in the eyes of outsiders followed a much earlier film, the nfb ’s The Baymen (Dir: Rex Tasker, 1965). Shot in Bauline, it endorses the idea of a distinct Newfoundland identity with a romantic image of work on the sea and the shared intergenerational experience of place. Of note is the graphic imagery of a successful seal hunt, with the catch displayed on the docks. The point of the film is that while this harvest is bloody, it is also necessary for the community, but an outcry ensued over this image of brutality. In response, the provincial legislature adjourned so that all members could see the film, with then premier Joey Smallwood subsequently giving his approval.¹7 Noreen Golfman discusses My Ancestors in light of how the seal has become signifier of the transformation of the concept of the natural. She notes how the seal operates precisely along Barthes concept of myth formation: “Furry, relatively small, and endowed with large, brown, watery eyes, the seal, especially the white-furred baby version, quickly became both an icon of vulnerability and a symbol of what humanity is capable of destroying in acts of greed and depravity.”¹8 Concepts of nature and landscape, however naturalized in everyday discourse, are constructed in specific social contexts. The rise of concern over the seals is coincident with industrial fishing practices that have devastated the oceans and the small fishing communities that rely on the ocean for a livelihood. Tourism materials invite us to see these small communities as a pre-modern pastoral paradise, but this is

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at odds with the material conditions of an economy shaped by an industrialized fishery. Troake’s film directs our sympathy to the sealers by providing an insider account of the subject through a portrait of her extended family in the community of Twillingate. The film begins and frequently returns to ninety-year-old Jesse Troake Drover, the filmmaker’s grandmother, a wise elder commenting on community and the small details of everyday life, and also of her experience of clubbing a seal as a young girl. We then hear the filmmaker’s voice-over accompanying landscape imagery: “The place I was born owes its existence to the seal hunt,” then giving us geographic coordinates as “halfway between Paris and Winnipeg.” In this way, an insider perspective and an image of isolated home and community is privileged over detached analysis, and we are invited to align our sympathy with the subject. The goal of the film is to show the sealers’ human side in order to reverse the ifaw -promoted stereotypes, though in a way it makes use of similar strategies in directing our gaze. The film is dealing with processes of mediation through which we come to know place and history. The artifice of mediation is explicit in the ‘casting’ of Brigitte Bardot as saviour of the seals in the ensuing media spectacle. In turn, the complex social roles of members of the community of Twillingate are illuminated – no longer demonized nor cast as background players in a power struggle carried out elsewhere. A much earlier film made in Newfoundland romanticizes the seal hunt, revealing how meaning depends on the context of time and place. Victoria King’s documentary White Thunder (2002) tells the story of Varick Frissell – a wealthy New York filmmaker-adventurer and protege of Robert Flaherty – who died in 1931 in an explosion on the sealing ship ss Viking. Frissell was shooting footage for an epic film on the sealers, eventually released as The Viking. While The Viking is a generic romantic hero story, playing Newfoundland as exotic other in the Hollywood imagination, it does have incredible footage of sealers standing on ice that is rolling over fierce ocean swells. The film is notable for its technical achievement in employing an elaborate production apparatus on location, use of real sealers in complex and dangerous work conditions, and including innovative use of location sound recording. According to Peter Morris: “He was loved and admired by the people of Newfoundland; and this love was reflected in the way they mourned his death. Though American, he was far more to the Newfoundlanders than a visitor. He had shared their lives [having worked for the Grenfell Mission in Labrador]. He knew their problems by experiencing them. He was not an outsider filming them but someone who cared enough to discover what the seal hunt was really like – and only then to film it.”¹9

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This affection for Frissell continues with King’s documentary on the filmmaker’s biography and achievements; the film also includes archival imagery of work on board a sealing ship and on the streets of St John’s in the 1920s. Another film that takes on this subject but without foregrounding the heroic, as in White Thunder, or the personal, as in My Ancestors, is Pelts: The Politics of the Fur Trade (Dir: Nigel Markham, 1989). Pelts offers an evenhanded didactic outline of pro- and anti-fur industry perspectives, but then spends considerable screen time detailing the integration of fur trapping with Aboriginal traditional life – a life that cannot be led in total isolation since furs are now sold in order to buy essential goods, irrespective of fashion and vanity. In fact, Pelts makes the point that fur buyers are bypassing seal pelts for other products as a consequence of market pressures created by animal rights activists. The film points out how the status of fur has changed over time and depends on context. It is this very fact that makes family and community so important to Troake’s film. Central to My Ancestors is the story of the filmmaker’s cousin, the late Garry Troake, seen in home-movie footage and photographs, and in recorded media commentary he made in an effort to put forward the sealers’ perspective in these animal rights debates. His voice undermines the selfrighteousness of celebrity anti-sealing commentators. Troake died at sea while trying to retrieve fishing gear in rough waters – following the return of a limited cod fishery after the 1992 moratorium. Federal regulations at the time (in 2000) required fishers to remove gear from the water on Saturday and return it on Monday or face penalties. This tragic death is put forward as an instance of detached bureaucracy creating fatal conditions for citizenry where the former never have to experience the ensuing hardship. Following details of Garry Troake’s death, the film breaks from the immediate political concerns to relate how British ships crossing the Atlantic for cod would use soil for ballast with the earth then dumped in nearby Hart’s Cove. Images of berry picking and, especially, of gardening in rich organic soil accompany the portrait of the film’s subjects, and this anecdote of British soil affirms heritage (if colonial in origin) that is written on the ground. In contrast, the ifaw and celebrity activists are presented at a significant remove from ground and community. Before his death, Troake wanted to form an alliance with the animal rights activists in order to have a scientifically monitored and quota-regulated seal harvest. What the film details is how profitable the anti-sealing campaign is, reaping $100 million in annual donations – meaning that in spite of its stated purpose, the last thing they want is an end to sealing. What the filmmaker asserts is that the urban-based environmental

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movement and the ideal of nature as separate from humans erases the experience of Canadians in rural communities who are on the front lines of environmental issues. The filmmaker describes her approach: “I think that personal stories can be profoundly political, and I think that humans respond to humans more readily … than to cold information. There is a lot of politics in My Ancestors Were Rogues and Murderers even though it’s conveyed through personal stories of berry picking and that kind of thing.” R A C E A N D A P E D A G O G Y O F S PA C E

Sylvia Hamilton’s Little Black Schoolhouse (2007) deals with segregated schools in Canada, featuring one in Guysborough County, Nova Scotia, that did not close until 1983. The film takes the geographic conditions of black communities as a key aspect of the story. As in her first film, Black Mother, Black Daughter (1989), a history of black women in Nova Scotia with a focus on the communal values shared from mother to daughter, and Speak It! From the Heart of Black Nova Scotia (1992), about black high school students navigating the casual and institutional racism of school, we are provided with a pedagogy of space where physical territory is linked with the process of education.²0 In her book Raising Africville: A Geography of Racism, Jennifer Nelson describes the use of space in the ideological construction of race: “The dispossession of spaces deemed marginal bolsters the development of ‘respectable’ white space.”²¹ Shingai Nyajeka, a youth featured in Speak It! standing on Halifax’s Citadel Hill (constructed in part by Jamaican Maroons), the once military centre of the colony, says: “There’s been a black community in Nova Scotia for over three hundred years, but you wouldn’t know it by the history books. You won’t find our faces on the postcards. You won’t find our statues in the parks … My attitude is, you don’t have to be from Scotland to have a history.” Hamilton makes films that exercise a claim to space by confronting the absences of history, and these films engage with community in efforts to recognize and celebrate the black presence in Nova Scotia. This intervention in the school system and in the politics of space is taken up in a later nfb Reel Diversity program film called Brother 2 Brother (Dir: Russell Wyse, 2004). The program came out of a New Initiatives plan that Sylvia Hamilton spearheaded when she worked at the Film Board in the early 1990s. Reel Diversity was set up to support emerging filmmakers of colour located in the regions of Canada. This important program extends from the work of Studio d but is limited to the production of an image of

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race, not necessarily a dialogue about racism and difference. Zoë Druick points to a fundamental shortcoming: “[It] restricts the filmmakers’ projects to those dealing with race and identity, and thus it restricts filmmakers of visible minorities to the fact of their visibility as a marker of difference, without examining the causes of racism or issues of transnational migration, or the way in which racial difference and multicultural discourse function for dominant groups of white Canadians.”²² This comment is not a criticism of the individual filmmakers involved with this initiative; rather, it is examining the limits of the institutional context. Only with a shift in perspective developed through a critical mass of diversity within cultural institutions can these limits be overturned. In Brother, the filmmaker tells his own story of a troubled past and becoming involved in a retreat for black youth. The idea of community is set against the anonymous terrain of suburban development and the structural racism affecting the identity and opportunities for youth. In Black Schoolhouse, geography becomes a character in that we see the location of the schools as a consequence of segregation – black settlements are located on the province’s more marginal lands. While school segregation is a product of law, segregation in the larger community was not legislated simply because it was built into the economic system – black villages would be in close proximity to a white town, separate but close enough for labour exploitation. This spatial relation legitimizes the location of white colonial power while the antiquated infrastructure of rural areas assists in limiting the aspirations of youth to move beyond this spatial regime. The school buildings and roughhewn surrounding terrain becomes an important visual structuring device, as Hamilton describes: In Little Black Schoolhouse, it was really important to be in a number of locations where people had lived for hundreds of years and actually see those spaces, because those spaces were the ones that created the situation we are in. The reason we have these small communities sprinkled throughout Nova Scotia is not by happenstance, or by accident at all. They were established because of the way the land was granted from the earliest period of colonization and settlement in Nova Scotia. For me, embedded in the soil, embedded in the rock and lakes of all of these places are these stories of African people. So the physicality of the rock is really important because that’s where people were landed and they made what they could out of nothing.

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Past and present are integrated through interviews with young black students expressing future aspirations, juxtaposed with testimony from older people recalling how their own goals were diminished. Individual stories of strength and perseverance are set against a social context of systemic discrimination. What the film does is inscribe black presence in the pages of Canadian history and help articulate the integration of past in the formation of the present. Black Schoolhouse does not describe ancient history; the experience of segregation remains a burning experience, and racism is a structural fact of life in Nova Scotia – this is not to diminish the real gains made through progressive struggle, but to say that the struggle continues. Racial dynamics are a condition of schools in the province. We see this in Waging Peace (Dir: Teresa MacInnes, 2001), about what was then a highly volatile environment at Caledonia Junior High School, an east Dartmouth school. The film deals with efforts to overcome these problems by a black woman, Edy Guy-François, hired as the school’s fifth principal in four years. It concludes with a sense that problems have been resolved but also that a need remains to continue the struggle and to integrate concerns within the school into those of the surrounding community. These are stories that help fill in the spaces at the margins of power by showing an insider’s view of a complex community and avoiding the simplification of news headlines. Memory and popular culture are shaped by absences as much as by the official record – it is that lingering sense of doubt that one has in reflecting upon the socalled common-sense story of history. This doubt echoes with the ghosts of stories not yet told, in the sense of what Walter Benjamin described as the retroactive force calling into question the given state of things: “As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.”²³ While Speak It! and Black Mother are nfb productions, according to Hamilton, Black Schoolhouse was not granted funds from the Atlantic nfb office on the claim that the film was unlikely to have been supported by the Film Board’s Montreal head office. It is difficult to imagine the nfb not supporting a comparable film about black experience in the school systems of Montreal or Toronto. The situation draws attention to the distinct spatial dynamics of central and Atlantic Canada, a tension reflected in I Made a Vow (Dir: Juanita Peters, 2003), another nfb production made through the auspices of the Reel Diversity program. Vow is the story of Robbie and Sharon, a black couple from the community of North Preston, Nova Scotia, as they struggle to organize their wedding, a huge and complicated event. While the

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Figure 3.2 | Cinematographer Kent Nason, CSC, and director Sylvia Hamilton shooting Little Black Schoolhouse.

film primarily focuses on the gender conflicts and personality clashes of this event (she wants an elaborate affair in keeping with the tradition of this community, while he wants it to be much more modest), there are several moments where spatial dynamics are foregrounded. The film makes the point of the distinctiveness of North Preston and that it is not like Toronto, and there is a very brief outline of the community’s settlement by blacks located on marginal and poorly serviced land outside of Halifax. Sharon describes moving to Toronto to seek better employment opportunities and education for her daughter, due to the limited employment opportunities for blacks in Nova Scotia. When her daughter becomes ill with cancer, she returns to North Preston, and subsequently develops a relationship with Robbie. While not dwelling on the fact of racism, the film emphasizes the importance of

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community in the lives of these individuals – as opposed to the broader society, which limits opportunities based on race. A salient example of the long history of racism in Nova Scotia is the arrest of Viola Desmond for daring to sit in the white section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow in 1946. According to the legal case study of this incident by Constance Backhouse, there was no American-style law requiring racialized seating. Instead, racial separation was the policy of white theatre-owner Henry McNeil who had a longstanding reputation in the town as a showman, often featuring “boozy has-beans [sic] of the classic theatre emoting lines of black face roles with Shakespearean declamations.”²4 The Crown prosecuted Desmond for the pithy crime of not paying the appropriate amusement tax. She had requested a front-row ticket but was given one for the balcony, and when she proceeded to sit down front with this lower-priced ticket, she effectively denied the coffers of the province the entirety of one cent in tax revenue.²5 Desmond was physically injured by the rough handling of the police officer who was called by the theatre owner/manager to remove her, and the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia upheld her conviction – nine years before Rosa Parks helped spark the American civil rights movement by refusing to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This case demonstrates the absolute pettiness of racism, and how racism emerges in a social context initiated by individual action and reinforced by social institutions. The way we understand cinema and cinema history cannot be separated from this context. Experience cannot be entirely reduced to racism, but racism is a fact of settlement patterns in the construction of place and region. The names of slaves having arrived on the Atlantic shore at Tracadie, Nova Scotia, as listed in The Book of Negroes, are recited at the conclusion of Loyalties (Dir: Leslie Ann Patten, 1999).²6 This well-crafted film connects past and present through the encounter of two Halifax women (Dr Ruth Whitehead and Carmelita Robertson) whose meeting prompts a journey to the American south and across time, race, and nation. Whitehead’s ancestors were slave owners while Robertson is a descendent of slaves. The film provides an interesting contrast to what it means to go south, encountering both white pride and black resentment; however, it avoids the simplification of a story with two ‘sides’ and, rather, examines the present as formed in the open wound of history. Robertson makes the point that slavery is viewed as something from the past, disconnected from the present – but who do we see working in low-wage service-sector jobs at the plantation museum? Whitehead is joined

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by her elderly parents at a meeting of descendants of slaves, some of whom their own ancestors would have owned. In a resonant image, Robertson sits on an old tree at a black graveyard – the rich natural growth of the surrounding landscape comes from the bones of slaves buried underneath. The traditional centre of black community in Atlantic Canada is the Baptist Church, not just to attend to matters of faith but as a gathering place for education, communal support, and expressive culture. Music is very important in the church, not to mention in the theatricality of call-andresponse preaching. Seeking Salvation (Dir: Phillip Daniels, 2004) emphasizes the central role of the church as ‘home’ in spite of whatever other problems people face in the larger community and in the wake of the history of black slavery in Canada (abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834). Salvation tells the story of Olivier Le Jeune, the first black resident recorded as being purchased as a slave in Canada (though other slaves certainly preceded him) who, in 1632, protested the pretense of spiritual equality amidst the fact of social inequality – all the Catholic orders held slaves. This story is an example of the value and necessity of documentary realism to narrate the absences of mainstream media. This need to “tell it like it is,” according to Kobena Mercer, and drawing on Gramsci’s idea of counterhegemony in his (Mercer’s) analysis of black British cinema of the 1980s, is: “understood as the prevailing mode in which a counterdiscourse has been constructed by black filmmakers against the dominant versions of reality produced by the race-relations master narrative. From a context-oriented point of view, the ‘reality effect’ brought into operation by the filmic values of immediacy, transparency, authority and authenticity (which are aesthetic principles central to the realist paradigm) is a crucial element in the process by which the commonsense authority of dominant media discourse is disrupted by black counterdiscourse.”²7 Documentary filmmaking in the region has not moved much beyond this necessary invocation of realism and toward what Mercer describes as an “accentuation of the expressive over the referential” using the expressive example of black British work such as Sankofa and Black Audio Film Collective.²8 Formal experimentation is limited by the preferences of individual filmmakers as well as the dependency of documentary production on investment from conservative-minded broadcasters. In any case, we should not assume that radical form takes the place of an active political position, though the two can certainly function together. The realist form provides emotionally powerful insight. For instance, at the conclusion of Seeking Salvation, the eyes of writer George Elliott Clarke fill with tears as he describes

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the church as “our strength.” At the same time, he acknowledges the church’s conservatism being at odds with his own radical political instincts.²9 Clarke has described the destruction of Africville and its Seaview African United Baptist Church as at once the collapse of community and a new beginning of political activism comparable to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: “The cessation of legal segregation, the semi-mitigation of poverty and illiteracy, the adoption of human rights legislation, and the striking of publicly-funded, secular and nationalist, black advocacy groups, such as the Black United Front of Nova Scotia (established in 1969), expanded the beleaguered Africadian bourgeoisie and increased the ranks of its professional artists.”³0 Sylvia Hamilton is among Clarke’s list of important artists and intellectuals. She grew up outside of Halifax in the community of Beechville, founded by black refugees after the War of 1812, where she attended a segregated school. Among her films, she directed the Ontario production Hymn to Freedom: Nova Scotia Against the Tides (1994), a compelling television documentary on black immigration to the province, featuring radical activist Burnley “Rocky” Jones who, at age fifty, graduated from Dalhousie law school. The film relays how black institutions provided spiritual, social, and political support to the family and also gives us stories of family life and mischievous children, serving to normalize the family rather than posit black history as all about suffering. Racism does, however, pervade experience in subtle ways that are just as oppressive as if ‘white only’ signs were on display. On growing up in Truro, Nova Scotia, Rocky Jones says: “I knew that if I stayed, that town would destroy me.” The style of the film continues the legacy of oral history to tell stories otherwise marginalized. We see images of Halifax harbour, important because slave ships travelled into this harbour and because we need to understand the social conditions of this place and identity as integrated with global patterns of trade and immigration. Paul Gilroy, who also uses the ship as liminal space says: “Cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.”³¹ In this way, positions of power and points of origin can be reconceptualized while race cannot be limited to a fixed idea of belonging to the nation-state. The idea of regional culture, expression, and influence must not be beholden to political boundaries. There exist important cross-border relations throughout the Atlantic region and, as Gilroy observes, across oceans and national borders that impact cultural work and everyday life. The nation-state is a container, but cultural activity is one means of re-making this frame; a critical re-framing allows us to see

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the nation-state in ways that counter the racist-inflected discourse of national identity. Kass Banning points out that Jones was under close surveillance by the rcmp at the very time he was a featured participant in a film sponsored by another state agency, the nfb . In Encounter at Kwacha House-Halifax (Dir: Rex Tasker, 1967), an early Challenge for Change production, Jones leads a talk about housing, unemployment, and racism at an interracial youth club located on Gottingen Street in north-end Halifax, touching on the potential of both non-violent and more militant activism.³² He relates his own story of the long search to find rental housing for himself and his family against obstructionist landlords. Having been active in the US civil rights movement, Jones brings these activist politics to Halifax. Banning describes the claustrophobic style of the film, a series of tightly framed close-ups within a confined space, as eliding the rich extra-textual relationships informing the subject and the era. “Encounter’s frozen slice of time–like properties do not foster disclosure of the rich outer-national relationships that were forged by participants such as Jones, relationships that the state was simultaneously attempting to suppress.”³³ The film did have an immediate impact in facilitating some job creation for black youth, following a screening for the mayor of Halifax set up by the filmmakers.³4 Encounter concludes in a way that affirms the state’s ideological erasure of racism through a tolerant multiculturalism, with a young man declaring: “I won’t remain a nigger. I will remain a Negro.” While the discussion no doubt continued after this poignant on-screen moment, and continues in other forms into the present, by ending the film here, the state agency transforms a declaration of struggle into an affirmation of integration. On one hand, this can be read as the permissible limit of radical discourse; on the other, it may have been seen at the time as an alternative radicality. Banning describes this conclusion as a measure of the “temporal dissonance” between Halifax youth and the US civil rights movement; nonetheless, Jones’s “call and response” pedagogical strategy does suggest cross-border influences and movements.³5 Following Gilroy, we are invited to see race both as a social construction and as a form of power with effect on bodies and spaces. The films discussed in this section are about laying claim to identity in relation to place. “I say I am from Africville,” words spoken in an on-the-street interview at the beginning of Remember Africville (Dir: Shelagh Mackenzie, 1991), assert the legitimacy of place against the forces of modernization – in the late 1960s, the City of Halifax, in the name of integration and urban renewal, began moving residents from this black community on the harbour

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north of the city’s downtown via bulldozer. The oral testimony “I say I am from Africville” makes the abstraction of space a living place, and so it is worth saying again. The testimony of these citizens draws attention to the way the past remains a living presence in the now. George Elliott Clarke describes the community: “Numbering some 400 families by the time of its demolition in the 1960s, Africville had its own church, school, community store and post office. (Once upon a time you could mail a letter to ‘Africville, Nova Scotia’!) Villagers (and I insist that it was a village, not a ‘slum’) worked as labourers, as domestics, as factory workers (Africville was hemmed in by factories and, beginning in the 1950s, by the city dump). They paid taxes to the City of Halifax but received no city services in return, mainly because city officials never accepted the existence of Africville.”³6 Remember Africville was made twenty years after the demolition with footage shot at a conference held at Mount Saint Vincent University in 1989 where members of the community gathered to speak. The point is not to create nostalgia but to integrate this history with present-day politics. While city officials viewed Africville as a slum and an embarrassment, the expression of community asserts the beauty of place. As one former resident makes clear, what the city could not accept was the increasingly valuable waterfront real estate being in the hands of black residents. With calm bombast, former mayor John Edward Lloyd paternalistically explains from a position of comfortable authority: “Sometimes, some people need to be shown that certain things are not in their best interests.” Jennifer Nelson asserts that official claims to good intentions covers over systemic racism, which may not be attributed to any specific individual but is, nonetheless, integrated in the social and political structure of the city, which is why the question of ‘why’ remains unanswered in the film: “To answer this honestly would mean to state racism, to relinquish the ‘good intent’ foundation. No one in a position of authority has done this, which is why the answers are so rarely satisfying.”³7 For decades, the Africville story remained an open wound in Halifax. Finally, in the winter of 2010, Halifax City Council ratified a settlement with terms that included a public apology along with land and money to build a replica of the Africville church. Because the deal does not include compensation paid to individuals, it remains controversial. Prior to the settlement, the story had been taken up in Africville: Can’t Stop Now (Dir: Juanita Peters, 2009), a straightforward recap of this story, illuminating the resonance of place on the broader black community. We see this expression of place and identity in the celebratory tone of the annual reunion, and in ongoing

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activities to seek restitution. We see how the more modern structures of public housing, the bland area near downtown Halifax called Uniake Square where some Africville families ended up, do not facilitate the same kind of communal interaction that characterized Africville – in fact, it demonstrates how low-income urban areas are designed to warehouse the poor under a regulatory-administrative regime. The film focuses primarily on members of the Carvery family, children of the last family to leave Africville, and the different approaches to activism. At the time of this writing, Irvine Carvery is the chair of the Halifax Regional School Board and the voice of moderation and negotiation within the existing system. His brother Eddie Carvery has been waging direct-action protests on the Africville site since the 1970s and, despite failing health, is seen in the film determined to remain in his encampment in spite of political and police pressures to move. By his presence, he embodies the refusal of the status quo and the refusal of middle-class propriety. In the film, Nelson Carvery, cousin to the brothers, is a kind of mediating figure between their approaches to protest. The iconic space of protest bringing these factions together is the Baptist Church, which was, in the city’s most cowardly act, bulldozed at night. Shelagh Mackenzie, director of Remember Africville, is also the executive producer of Sylvia Hamilton’s first film, Black Mother, Black Daughter, the first Atlantic nfb film entirely made with an all-female crew. The crew visits the site of Africville to acknowledge the loss of this heritage but their presence allows the spirit of place to continue to live in oral culture. This film about the important interdependence of family, church, and community is about creating ‘home’ in the context of systemic racism, making the point that early settlers, if they were white loyalists, became citizens of influence, while black loyalists, all slaves, were given very little upon arrival. In turn, there is little evidence of black culture in local museums. Racism is learned in systemic exclusions and in everyday practices. For instance, Hamilton’s mother describes playing with children from a variety of backgrounds, but growing up meant facing the discrimination of the adult world. As in other films discussed here, music is used both as passionate expression and as testimony and counterdiscourse to the official narrative of history. This theme is extended in Hamilton’s film Portia White: Think On Me (2000), about “Canada’s singing sensation,” the Nova Scotia–born classical singer. Following Portia White’s successful debut, the Nova Scotia government set up a fund to assist her career. The film leaves it to us to ponder the irony of this in the context of the racism of the era. Hamilton was subsequently a recipient of the Portia White Prize (in 2002), a major cash award recognizing

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artists in the province who have had a significant impact. The film demonstrates how music allowed White to cross boundaries within an otherwise segregated city, and how her international popularity (she signed with Columbia Records in New York) extends the subject of border crossing through geographic and artistic spaces. History keeps moving on a slow train. There is a strong affinity between Black Mother, Black Daughter and Mi’kmaq Family Migmaoei Otjiosog (1994), made by Hamilton’s friend Catherine Martin. In both films, women are presented as keepers of language and tradition. In Mi’kmaq Family, the filmmaker is the subject of her film, seen at the beginning drumming and then in childbirth at a hospital; later, the film navigates between personal portrait and the broader study of First Nations culture and society. The film’s account of the experience of displacement in the policies of assimilation and in the terrors of the residential school system is a necessary step in the larger work of cultural retrieval. We are shown a communal gathering to mark St Anne’s Day, an important event for the Mi’kmaq and one that integrates Christianity with traditional practices. It is celebrated on Cape Breton Island at a location that was once used for pre-European-contact gatherings. Here, the children are raised by the entire community rather than within the frame of the nuclear family, and the warmth and communal connections that we are invited to witness take place against the post-contact legacy of alcoholism and violence. Subjects in the film refer to these conditions, but the film avoids a victim thesis and, instead, affirms community in the present. This narrative of the present integrated with history is also the form of The Spirit of Annie Mae (2002), Martin’s film on Mi’kmaq activist Annie Mae Pictou Aquash and the unresolved story of her 1975 murder in desolate South Dakota at the age of thirty. The film is an tribute to the subject, beginning with Annie Mae’s exposure to First Nations traditions in her early years in Nova Scotia, her move to Boston as a young woman to begin a family and integrate into mainstream society, and her eventual awakening into radical politics with high-level involvement in the American Indian Movement (aim ), including participation in the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota (the historic site of the 1890 massacre of Chief Big Foot and three hundred people). The Black Hills of South Dakota have never been surrendered and, according to the 1868 Sioux treaty, it remains Native territory, but for the bombastic carving of four white faces into the mountainside. The film begins with a female police officer looking through the scope of a high-powered rifle and this narration: “I’d like to look in the eyes of the people who murdered my mother.” This image of Annie Mae’s daughter is

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complex and reflects the resonance of aim activism in the present. The fact that she is a police officer demonstrates some progressive transformation of opportunities for First Nations people, save that the murder remains unsolved and First Nations history remains marginalized in the popular consciousness. When Annie Mae’s body was discovered in 1976, the evidence of murder was initially covered up and she was buried without identification. This history is corrected not by chance or benevolence but by sustained activism, a spirit continuing with this film. Spirit emphasizes the matriarchal force of this struggle, telling the story through the experiences of Annie Mae’s now-adult daughters as well as her family and other Native women activists, including Buffy Sainte-Marie and, especially, activist and journalist Minnie Two Shoes. The role of women in these struggles is an extension of their traditional role in a warrior society. In this instance and throughout the film, history is not simply of the past and separate from the present but made integral to our understanding. We are given a description of reserves as concentration camps, shown frank and straightforward problems of drugs and alcohol, and taken back to the genocidal policies of Governor Cornwallis and the bounty placed on the scalps of Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia in 1749. We are invited to read the territorial struggles in South Dakota where vast mineral resources are located, as being in continuity with this earlier British imperialist land grab. The final words of the film echo the opening and make clear the importance of this retrieval of history: “She is never just another dead Indian to us. She is our mother.” The film’s recuperation of this memory is one important way that continues the struggle, a struggle that crosses borders of political territory and history. This is the story of a Canadian woman involved in an American political conflict, but it is also the story of women’s vital role in the broader political and historical events, raising the question: Whose territory and whose borders? The trans-Atlantic identity process argued by Paul Gilroy is taken up in another production of the nfb ’s Reel Diversity program, Race is a Four-Letter Word (Dir: Sobaz Benjamin, 2006). The fact of nationalism is not dismissed here, but is something that needs to be understood as the context for hybrid identity formation and as a site that provides the potential to resist essentialist notions of authenticity connected with territory.³8 Though autonomous territory characterizes the nation-state, modern identity needs to be understood as free of these spatial constraints in expressions of hybridity. This position also allows us to see the concept of ‘black Canadian’ not in a singular or essentializing way but in a way that incorporates a multiplicity of backgrounds and perspectives. We have to measure the notions of

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border crossing and hybridity against the fact that new mobilities under late-capitalist conditions of globalization and technological change remain regulated by prescriptions of citizenship, race, and class. These films express a dialectic of belonging and difference that is formed in the collision of location, race, and experience, demonstrating the importance of the nation as location for struggle, something that post-national theorization tends to negate.³9 Four-Letter Word opens with a quote from James Baldwin to locate the film firmly in the black intellectual tradition, and throughout, it expresses the idea of hybridity in echo of Henry Louis Gates Jr’s idea of African-American literature as “double voiced.” Gates extends Bakhtin’s idea to the process of vernacular as both a response to tradition and a redirection of meaning.40 The purpose of a double voice is to disrupt relations of power embedded in language. Along similar lines, race is tattooed on the body and Benjamin’s film deals with how skin colour signifies a trajectory of material and discursive power relations. This collision of location, race, and identity emerges through struggle against the naturalized assumptions of identity and national belonging. Four-Letter Word concludes with imagery of the Atlantic as it spills into Halifax harbour and of the filmmaker jogging along the boardwalk – enacting a physical ‘race’ in a film dealing with issues of race, identity, and the body. The film opens with Benjamin’s community radio show (ckdu in Halifax) dealing with the subject of identity. Extended close-up shots provide details of the technical apparatus, including the vu metres on the mixing board, the telephone system, the microphone – Canadian culture is something that is mediated by systems of language and communication. The film asks why race is so significant in identity formation, and what role the subject plays in the formation of his own consciousness. The filmmaker’s own identity and body becomes the vessel for an exploration of these questions, including what we do not see when all we see is the colour of human skin. As the filmmaker puts it: “Blackness is an identity that has emerged out of reactionary circumstances.” Like Catherine Martin in Mi’kmaq Family, here the filmmaker is also subject of the documentary – his skin is the surface for the narrative of race and identity, and this is literally addressed in several scenes, including his admission to using skin-whitening products as a teenager, his participation in nude modelling for an art class and for photographer George Steeves, and his frank statement that not a single day passes without his confronting the fact of blackness in dealings outside of the home. The effect of being subject and investigator is, first of all, to affirm that identity is not simply an abstraction; its construction has real consequences

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on lived experience. It is a representational strategy common in contemporary documentary filmmaking to distinguish this practice from the objective tone of conventional journalism, and from the expository mode of earlier forms of documentary. It is also a practice that helps direct audience sympathy. This engagement is manifest in several instances where Benjamin becomes emotionally overwhelmed by the weight of his subject. He is looking for self-worth in a cultural context where notions of the good and the beautiful are overwhelmingly associated with whiteness. Richard Dyer explains how whiteness directs the dominant social trajectory of the West, with respect both to social power and in narrative: “Whites must reproduce themselves, yet they must also control and transcend their bodies. Only by (impossibly) doing both can they be white. Thus are produced some of the great narrative dilemmas of whiteness, notably romance, adultery, rape, and pornography.”4¹ Benjamin investigates the signification of the black body in the provocative photographs by George Steeves in which Benjamin models with his friend, Tim Dunn, a white man raised in a black family and then brutalized by the experience of being removed from that family and returned to his alcoholic biological parents at age twelve. Modelling together is described as a way of shedding skin. The dynamic of the photo shoot is driven by the question of what it means for a black man to take off his clothes, and is the meaning different than for a white man. This performative photography is juxtaposed with the other important subject of the film, visual and performance artist Camille Turner. Turner performs as Miss Canadiana, a beauty-pageant role where she posits herself as an ambassador for the country in order to confront assumptions of Canadian identity, using this iconic image of culture and the body as a means of action in the world. The body is not just the abstract form for an art school drawing class. These contemporary works are interventions in the epic narrative of the European foundation of Canada, where people of colour are cast in a marginal role. Cecil Foster summarizes the problem: Lost in this idealistic reconstruction since the 1960s is any examination or analysis of the true foundations of Canada: of a country born from and shaped by the imagination of an aristocratic elite group of Europeans that showed little pretense or stomach for democracy or democratic institutions; that this was a county founded on racism and notions of ethnographic white homelands; that Canadian institutions and agencies have been shaped out of racist, functionalist norms and precepts; and that in terms of moral and ethical relations,

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early Canadian behaviour – in the way it treated specific groups of people – failed to meet even the accepted standards of the day that were considered to be Judeo-Christian.4² Foster goes on to substantiate this position with data on racism and the perception of racism felt by black Canadians, and concrete data on discriminatory wage levels, all of which is at odds with the polite sentiment of multiculturalism. It is in this context that we need to see contemporary media projects such as the Heritage Minutes, an ongoing series of short films for broadcast in television commercial slots that seek to popularize Canadian history. In particular, the episode on Maurice Ruddick, a black survivor of the 1958 Springhill, Nova Scotia, mining disaster, illuminates the ideological limits to this use of the medium.4³ It is obviously important that popular history programs such as Heritage Minutes address the diversity of the country, and indeed, the very first Minute is on the Underground Railroad. With the Underground Railroad and the Ruddick story, there have been a total of three Minutes on black history – the third being about Jackie Robinson as a member of the Montreal Royals, the farm team for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Each of these episodes situates black experience as integrally American and posits a tolerant Canada in relation to the United States. While these are important stories, the US reference point recalls for viewers the media imagery of civil rights struggles and serves to mitigate the more contested histories of race relations within Canada. The actor playing Ruddick provides a compelling first-person account of the story, the subject’s suffering as well as his heroism, but emphasizing the communal bond among all the miners, in turn negating the race-inflected labour history of mining in the region. It is a story of survival laden with spirituality – that favourite Canadian theme – where the miners, trapped underground for nine days following an explosion, had to drink their own urine and then are rewarded, upon rescue, with a trip to a luxury resort in Georgia (a tribute offered by the state governor). Segregation laws prevented Ruddick from accompanying his co-workers, so the group collectively refused the trip. The trip south is a bizarre reward for survival, but somehow fitting for workers in a staple-export economy. The film turns on the opportunity for the black worker to sing the praises of his white colleagues, and however heartfelt this is, it elides conditions of race relations in Canada, and particularly in the Maritimes. Katarzyna Rukszto points out that the emphasis on a dramatic and celebratory narrative form has the contradictory outcome of at once providing insight into marginalized aspects of history.

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As she explains: “The Minutes induce Canadians to participate in an act of commemoration akin to attending traditional sites of collective memory, such as museums … The focus on ‘the dramatic’ makes sense if the goal is to strengthen citizens’ attachment to their nation.”44 These narratives help to cover up the more egregious aspects of Canadian history insofar as they contribute to a myth of tolerance. This ideological-spatial practice is confronted by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin in what Randolph Lewis calls a “cinema of sovereignty.” Lewis situates Obomsawin’s work in the vanguard of politicized First Nations art and contributing substantially to the transformation of Native stereotypes in the popular consciousness. The idea of sovereignty is highly charged, for it declares the issues represented in the work not as localized and separate from the legitimacy of the nation-state but instead as directly confronting the terms and territory of that nation-state. Lewis describes this kind of cinema as explicitly articulating the perspective of a sovereign people, irrespective of whether that status is legally conferred. What we are provided with is an insider view that is unbeholden to assumptions of balance and perspective in the mass media. He goes on to explain: “Rejecting the encroachment of external media nationalisms, her cinematic vision reflects an indigenous sovereign gaze, a practice of looking that comes out of Native experience and shapes the nature of the film itself. The gaze is sovereign, I argue, when it is rooted in the particular ways of knowing and being that inform distinct nationhoods.”45 This approach is evident throughout the work of this remarkable filmmaker and is particularly resonant in two films she made on Mi’kmaq territory in New Brunswick. Is the Crown at War with Us? (2002) and the follow-up film, Our Nationhood (2003), on the Mi’kmaq of Listuguj and based primarily in what is now Quebec, follow the struggle for autonomy represented in her 1981 film Incident at Restigouche. Mi’kmaq territory transcends these more recent political boundaries. Traditional chief Gary Metallic makes the point in Nationhood that the Quebec government’s refusal to respect Native territorial claims is motivated by how this would impact on Quebec’s desire for sovereignty. In these films, past and present are interlaced to demonstrate continuity of culture and of struggle. Contemporary space is made through the confluence of politics, the economy, and police actions that, in these films, take brutal form. The perspective of members of the community is asserted in both films through the use of raw home-video footage, providing a first-hand activist account of struggles against the state apparatus. We see this in Our Nationhood beginning with Mi’kmaq exercising claims to traditional forestlands and in Crown at War dealing with rcmp and Department of Fisheries police actions against 184 | S H O O T I N G F R O M T H E E A S T

Native fishing rights. Canada’s economy, in spite of rhetoric related to advanced technology and culture industries, is overwhelmingly dependent on staple resources, and control over resources and territory is closely connected with the maintenance of the hegemony of the nation-state. That these are National Film Board productions is one of the more interesting contradictions of modern liberal democracy, where one state agency financially supports work critical not only of the actions of other agencies but also of the legitimacy of the nation-state itself.46 One function of this situation is as a kind of release valve and means of demonstrating multiculturalist tolerance. The point of the work, however, is not to be merely tolerated like so many bad children but to be respectfully engaged with as sovereign equals and, irrespective of the motive of the institution in sponsoring this work, it has a prominent impact in libraries and classrooms and on television.47 These films document the strict limits to the ideal of tolerance on the part of the state in dealing with Native rights, and the brutality in response to Native exercise of sovereignty. In Crown at War, members of the Mi’kmaq community of Burnt Church on Miramichi Bay in New Brunswick are accessing fishing rights fully sanctioned by the Supreme Court following the 1999 Marshall decision, a legal affirmation of treaty fishing rights. What we see in the film are highly aggressive actions on the part of federal agencies to deny these legal rights, compounded by antagonism toward the Natives from the neighbouring white community. If there is a single image that makes this case of state brutality, it is in home-video footage of a Department of Fisheries and Oceans vessel ramming into a Native fishing boat, its occupants jumping overboard to save themselves from serious injury. We then see rcmp and Coast Guard vessels steering close to the men in the water, and repeatedly attacking the Native boats. Equipment is subsequently destroyed. While this image demonstrates the militarization of political disputes (disputes which are entirely unwarranted given the Supreme Court decision), Obomsawin’s broader approach is to challenge the terms of political discourse through which First Nations people are marginalized. It is by now a truism to point out that minority peoples are relatively voiceless within mainstream news coverage, due to utter absence, presentation in narrow and stereotypical ways (as victim or criminal), or the typical media approach of explaining and thus reaching conclusions under the reporter’s pretense of objectivity.48 Obomsawin highlights the necessary subjectivity of experience through the use of her own voice as narrator, and allows her First Nations subjects to speak at length on camera. What we get is not a condensed sound bite but a pattern of speech reflecting at length the subject’s place in the world. In this way, her films are in continuity with Aboriginal Documentary in the Spirit of the Vernacular | 185

storytelling traditions, which function simultaneously as narrative, lesson, and history text. Zuzana Pick points out that Obomsawin’s films are located within an active site of struggle, and the subjects are not positioned as passive victims kept at a remove from the author, but instead “testify” in a way that “challenges pre-established categories of discourse and representation.”49 An unfortunate reality of contemporary life in Atlantic Canada is the fact that conflict over the exercise of court-sanctioned treaty rights is not uncommon – and the violence is a product of government policy enacted by police, by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and by some elements of the white community. This story is detailed in Treaty Tribulations (Dir: April Maloney, 2005), a low-budget short film made with strong commitment to the community. It is the story of the Indian Brook fishing dispute with the federal and Nova Scotia governments where members of the community have been prevented from carrying out a communal fishery even though these rights are clearly granted in the treaty of 1752 and affirmed by the Marshall decision. Until that 1999 decision, Natives were viewed by the courts (explicitly in a 1929 decision) as savages and thus unable to properly enter into a treaty agreement. The aggressive actions we see in the film of police violence on the open water in obstructing the Native fishery raise the important question of who is the savage. Treaty Tribulations begins with a beautiful shot of a small boat gliding through the fog at sunrise. As a didactic voice-over explains the juridical context, we see a canoe loaded with lobster traps being paddled through the water while a large Coast Guard vessel looms in the distance. What is at stake is the right of the Native community to 800 seasonal traps compared with over 300,000 granted to the commercial fishery. These images reveal the power relations involved and legitimize the comparison made in the film to the case of the US Supreme Court decision on desegregation of education. In that case (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954), the police and military were deployed to protect the rights affirmed by the court, unlike this case in Canada where the police are used in a political manner to obstruct courtaffirmed rights. A key spokesperson in the film is the filmmaker’s father, Mi’kmaq Chief Reginald Maloney, Indian Brook First Nation, who provides a solid analysis of the historical and legal details of the case as well as a heartfelt statement on the value of the Treaty as a declaration of rights agreed upon between sovereign nations. The Treaty is not something freely given by a benevolent Canadian state, nor is it merely an economic contract. The political interest of the nation-state through the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is to replace communal fishing rights with individual licences.

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Resistance to this plan is the source of conflict – and another example of what Harold Innis describes as a bias of communication whereby the economic relation is but a symptom of a divergent relation to land and ideas of community extending across time. ON LABRADOR

Home to Inuit and Innu as well as settlers of European descent, the territory of Labrador has changed hands between British, French, Newfoundland, and Canadian control numerous times. Only since 2001 has it more prominently been recognized as part of Newfoundland by the name change of that province to Newfoundland and Labrador. Given the province’s history of isolation from the rest of Canada, Labrador is at a conceptual double-remove. Here I discuss a small handful of films made in Labrador and acknowledge that the wealth of production in the region invites further analysis.50 Hunters and Bombers (Dir: Nigel Markham and Hugh Brody, 1990) is a powerful nfb documentary about the Innu struggles against low-level military training flights, part of Canadian army commitments to nato, that take place over traditional hunting territory. The film demonstrates Harold Innis’s key distinction between oral and print culture, where the former requires continuity through time and the latter displaces collective memory in facilitating expansionist imperialism. Innis makes clear that the differences between oral and print culture are such that there remains an irreconcilable gap between cultures, and this tends to be accompanied by a growth in nationalism.5¹ Judith Stamps describes Innis’s staple thesis as a description of the fundamental relation between time and production.5² For Innis, the limit to understanding is an outcome of the monopolization of knowledge via printbased communication, and in the film we see the real effects of this limit in the militarized control over territory and severe limits on traditional Native rights to the land. Innis’s idea of a ‘bias’ in communication is demonstrated in the opening on-screen text where we see an English translation of spoken Innu followed by a shot of the landscape. With this translation written on the land comes a transformation of speech and the meaning of this place. For the Canadian military, the location of the base is in empty space, while for the Innu, space is infused with meaning irrespective of the concept of ownership. The military position is that the low-level flights occur over the land rather than upon it; they also explain that there is a substantial financial investment in the base infrastructure – this economic condition legitimizes

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activity as a return on investment. Economic factors are arbitrary and not integrally related to territory, though here they come to define this space. The idea of flying over rather than occupying the land is belied by the fact that the low-level fighter jets create damaging noise pollution – we are shown the remains of industrial waste on the ground and fenced-off areas of the territory. That none of the “investment” money flows to the original inhabitants of the land is obvious. Extensive shots of the military apparatus are intercut with a flight commander’s warning of caution, lest their “pink bodies” touch the ground in the event of a crash. We then see the Aboriginal organic relationship with the land in a scene of women singing and laughing while cooking, including the traditional method of baking bread by burying the dough beneath the earth and building a fire over top. The vast military infrastructure is defined by its control over sophisticated communications technology, a media structure written onto the land. In one important scene we see a group of Native people cross the fenced enclosure to briefly occupy aircraft runways and interrupt the flights – putting their bodies in the path of the conquest of space. In a related scene, an Innu woman attempts to convey their story to the media, but there is the problem of a poor radio transmission signal and the need for translation. Hunters and Bombers is structured through the contrast of Innu traditional life with western civilization, and the corresponding discord between oral and print culture, managing to avoid a simplistic dichotomy of the old – tradition – and the new – modern technology and geopolitical state activity. Such an absolutist assumption would situate indigenous culture in the past and as incompatible with modern life. The Innu in the film are not advocating a complete break with technology, but a use of technology more compatible with everyday life lived in accordance with the rhythms of place. This spatial-acoustic experience is obliterated by the military presence, introduced by the deafening sound of jet aircraft and shots of the massive technological apparatus of the military base. In contrast, we hear the sound of traditional drumming, a rhythmic experience of the body and of the earth – and this heartbeat persists even when overpowered by the roar of the military. Close-ups of the military activities are contrasted with wide landscape shots situating the Innu within the land. The film ends with a tentative sense of hopefulness visually conveyed with an image of a peaceful winter camp and the practice of storytelling – a hope belied by events following the film’s release, namely the expansion of military use of this territory along with increased mining activities sanctioned by the Canadian government in spite of the expressed wishes of the Innu.5³ Nonetheless, the sense of hope

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is demonstrated in the continuity of storytelling practices through which knowledge and tradition is conveyed from one generation to the next. History is a long story, one that is dependent upon the process of narrative and the context of reception. These elements may be marginalized at the present conjuncture, but that which is repressed can emerge later in another form. The opening of Place of the Boss: Utshimassits (Dir: John Walker, 1996, with cinematography by Hunters and Bombers director Nigel Markham) shows a visceral contrast between then and now. Elders testify to the camera about life before contact with whites, describing a close connection between lived reality and shamanistic spirit life, punctuated with dramatic shots of stampeding caribou. The film establishes a narrative of decline and struggle for renewal. With the disappearance of caribou, the inland nomadic Mushuau Innu began trading with white settlers. This practice gradually increased over the course of the twentieth century, and in 1967, they settled permanently in Davis Inlet, urged by promises from priests and government. The film’s title, Utshimassits, refers to the Innu’s understanding that their new home is not their own, and the fact that resettlement has led to dependency and serious problems of alcohol and drug addiction stemming from a litany of broken promises. We are shown slum housing and told in voice-over that promises such as indoor plumbing were only provided to the home of the priest and the schoolteacher, while no jobs were available to fill the void from the loss of traditional livelihood on the land. The film was made after numerous incidents of gas sniffing and suicides were reported in the mainstream media, including news of the tragic death of six children left alone and caught in a house fire in 1992. This event becomes the catalyst for members of the community to transform conditions, begin a process of addiction recovery, and advocate for relocation back to traditional lands. The film begins within the community rather than with the outside media headlines and, thus, avoids reproducing the power relationship of investigator and subject. The story is told through testimony of Innu and sparse narration spoken by acclaimed First Nations artist, filmmaker, and storyteller Shirley Cheechoo. In this way, the film strives to avoid as much as possible the gaze of sympathetic outsider enmeshed in the systems of power it seeks to criticize. We see that conditions in Davis Inlet are related to the broader historical context, and the Innu first-person testimony locates the filmmaker as witness rather than voice of authority. The narrative focuses on the efforts of the band council and Chief Katie Rich to initiate reform. The landscape we see here is a cluttered council office with stacks of file folders, busy photocopy machines, and staff on the telephone. In this way, the aura

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of landscape gives way to the administrated reality of everyday life. Late in the film, we see disturbing images of teenagers sniffing gasoline. Unlike typical handling in mainstream media – in a sensationalistic manner through a condescending point of view – here, it follows logically from the narrative of assimilation and is conveyed from within – a young woman explains how she tries to resist this addiction but that the behaviour is a consequence of limited options and the disconnection from tradition. As in Hunters and Bombers, near the conclusion of Utshimassits, we are given a tentative return to the land, with a group of teenagers taken to an inland camp to experience traditional practices, but the film offers no promises, only tentative hope. Documentary functions as witness and contributes to education and renewal that must first of all come from within the community. In 2002–03, Innu in Davis Inlet began moving back to a newly built community at Sango Bay (known locally as Natuashish) in mainland Labrador, following the embarrassment and pressure put upon the provincial and federal governments to respond to the long-standing calls for assistance. As Ausra Burns details in a study on the relocation, while this move is welcome and necessary, many root causes remain, stemming from a colonial government administration. Burns explains: “Complex barriers to increasing or regaining quality of life in these communities run along political, cultural, policy and economic lines and have important physical and environmental dimensions as well. In the case of the Mushuau Innu, for example, the federal government’s imposed governance system requiring election of a single chief and council does not reflect the traditional Innu family-based hierarchy. The new political processes erode solidarity as the community struggles for fair treatment.”54 These conditions echo what we have seen in Hunters and Bombers, where the political-spatial conflict reflects the irreconcilable differences in Innis’s space and time bias of communication. The move from Davis Inlet to Natuashish was the largest relocation of Aboriginal people undertaken in Canada and, for once, was made with the full consultation of the people. The move is not without it problems, including the persistence of colonial attitudes reflected in governance issues, planning, and housing design, which, as Burns reports, would fit better in the generic Canadian suburb than in meeting the real needs of the Innu. That being said, it is far removed from the assimilationist project of the original move of the Mushuau to Davis Inlet. In 2001, Nigel Markham returned to Labrador to make Forever in Our Hearts: Memories of the Hebron Relocation, about the effects of community relocation of the Innu from a remote northern area of Labrador to the more accessible and established town of Nain

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and other settlements. This move occurred in 1959, ostensibly to better provide education and health facilities as well as employment opportunities. This happened during the era of outport resettlement throughout Newfoundland, but it has a particular colonial thrust in the case of the Innu. The name Hebron today is better known for the vast offshore oil reserves and is in this way connected with the global economy, but at the time the community subsisted largely on hunting and fishing. The move was a catastrophe: promised housing was not provided for most of the citizens; people were separated into a variety of settlements; there were few work opportunities; and the people faced hardship, discrimination, and ostracism. It is characteristic of the white colonial imagination in the north to see the landscape as a vast, undifferentiated expanse (and to see distinct Aboriginal groups as the same), not recognizing the territorial distinctions of traditional hunting grounds and spiritual elements. The catastrophe of resettlement is an extension of the colonial assimilationist strategies of Christianity. It was the Morovian Church, backed by the Newfoundland government, that announced without warning withdrawal of all services provided to – and depended upon by – the community, including education, health, and broad social needs. It was dependency on and respect for the church that enabled this move since, as we are told in the film, the elders would not speak against the announcement – it was strategically conveyed in the church building rather than in the adjacent meeting hall. The move was so abrupt that people who had been out on the land returned to an empty village and relocated family. The film gives us this information in stark narration over strikingly beautiful images of landscape and the abandoned building of this once active community. The effect of this representational strategy is to convey the complex beauty of this environment – which functions against extra-diegetic popular notions of the Labrador landscape as barren – and to witness the injustice of these events. The film is made on the occasion of the original community members returning temporarily to Hebron. The camera respectfully observes the faces of these people as they gather inside the church – demonstrating the power of the documentary camera to intimately convey emotion, a feeling structurally reinforced by the juxtaposition of these tearful elderly faces with archival images of them in their youth. The film helps facilitate a healing process through recording and communicating the experience of loss. In a demonstration of the film’s honesty, there is a scene where a woman returns to the now-decayed house where she was born, but it is not simply staged with the pretense of first-person discovery. Instead, as the woman walks

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through the house and lifts a section of fallen ceiling to reveal a few tattered books and a child’s toy, she describes having returned to this home to try to recover a few possessions: “I lifted this, and these are what I found.” This is a minor moment, but the past tense of the delivery situates the filmmaker in relation to the subject and reinforces the pastness of this space as home. The strategy distinguishes thoughtful cinematic documentary practice from the typical conventions of television (which would more typically block the action for the camera but then stage it as if unfolding for the first time) and is consistent with the complex process of the reunion. We are shown the ruins of former homes, collapsing into the earth, a physical marker of the failed promises and as metaphor for the alcoholism and family violence that ensued. Later we see an abundance of meat, hunted locally for the reunion, giving the lie to the rationale for the move. Control over resources is central to the politics of space, and it is for this reason that imagery of traditional food practices is so central to documentaries dealing with Aboriginal territories. The critical approach to relocation and the way Forever in Our Hearts gives itself over to the Innu experience is in contrast with the National Film Board’s earlier treatment of relocation in the 1970 film Introduction to Labrador. While it is true that the considerable passage of time between these two films would foster a change in perspective, it is important to note that Introduction is a Challenge for Change production (co-produced with Memorial University Extension Services) and produced by leading progressive filmmaker George Stoney (with Harvey Best and Joe Harvey credited as filmmaker and editor). While Challenge for Change is associated with an innovative approach to the representation of marginalized groups with the subject participating significantly in authorship, Introduction is much more conventional. It provides an overview of the problems facing remote communities conveyed with conventional narration, voiced by Stanley Jackson, the standard reassuring voice of the post-war nfb . Introduction is at least more critical than some previous nfb films, such as the short Outports on the Move (1962), a gloss on the exercise of moving a family house by floating the building to its new location. That film shows the move as a happy and regret-free event, an achievement of modernization. The locals are equated with nature and we are told: “No need to fret … there will be plenty of fish for everyone.” This clip is used ironically in Barbara Doran’s later Hard Rock and Water (2005), made after the time of plenty. With Introduction, the pretense of journalistic balance distances us from the subject. To be fair, this overview would be complemented with addi-

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tional first-hand accounts recorded by Memorial University Extension Services, excerpts of which are included here. The film strives to acknowledge the difficulties faced in resettlement but has, as its central blindspot, a conviction in the progressive benefits of modern development strategies. The Memorial-affiliated community worker, Tony Williamson (also credited as “Field Research and Direction”), is the film’s main protagonist, and while he is visually represented as having a good rapport with the locals, he functions in the broader context of spatial practice and dominant ideology to legitimize the government’s interest in relocation. Watching this film today, one senses a critical impulse, for instance, by the acknowledgement of the social segregation experienced by those who have been relocated, but this sentiment is constrained by the filmmaker’s distance from the subject, inevitable pressures to create a coherent narrative from the material at hand, and an implicit alignment with the institutional interests of the sponsoring agencies. For example, over images of boat building, the narration pointedly notes the government subsidies made available for this enterprise, but that business subsidies are hardly unusual in the region. Likewise, the nomadic practice of shifting between summer and winter homes is described in relation to the disruption in formal education for children rather than as part of a more organic and communal pedagogic practice. On this point, I do not want to romanticize a difficult life or disregard the real concerns parents would have for their children’s education and integration into modern life, but do want to suggest another way of understanding the material. In all likelihood the filmmakers were simply following shared progressive ideas of the time, but outport relocation in Newfoundland had been going on for over a decade by the time of this production and controversy was well known. The final film in this section on Labrador is the modest but engaging James Andersen: Over 50 Years of Taking Pictures (Dir: Rhonda Buckley, 2006). Andersen (1919–2011) was a resident of Makkovik, Labrador, and over the course of his adult life, he created an immense archive of photographs (including over 2,000 slides) and films documenting his community. He matter-of-factly says he wants “to make history” and goes on to describe photography and history as “something money can’t buy.” This film is an overview of Andersen’s work, emphasizing the archival importance and implicitly demonstrating the integral relationship between image and community as well as a profound commitment to artmaking over a span of a life. The work is not simple folk art, as Buckley explains: “The photos selected are more than just snapshots. There’s a grounded intelligence in his composition and use of colour that suggest a clear intention to capture facial expressions

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that are natural and true to the moment.”55 The production was followed by a major exhibit of Andersen’s work in St John’s at The Rooms Gallery (in 2008), with images accompanied by Buckley’s extensive audio recordings of Andersen. The images in the film are not so much explained as integrated into an organic community consisting of Innu and white settlers; of pictures of work, leisure (games, sports, a brass band), and everyday life over the seasons; and including remarkable footage of a fifty-foot-long beached whale. Anderson was also a businessman with a number of local concerns, including a boarding house, and his filmmaking would have bolstered these activities though Buckley’s film does not explore the subject’s business relationship to the community.56 In Buckley’s film, he describes setting up film screenings to provide local entertainment, bringing 16mm prints of popular films into the community (an activity that ends with the arrival of television). He mentions Hopalong Cassidy, the 1930s–40s B-movie serial, as being particularly popular. As a film, James Andersen demonstrates the integrity of the local (personal and communal) as well as its integration with the global, as suggested metaphorically by one of the concluding images shot by Andersen, of an airplane manoeuvring in the sky over the Labrador landscape. INSPIRED BY CHALLENGE FOR CHANGE: R E G I O N A L I Z AT I O N O F T H E N F B

Many of the documentaries in this chapter are produced in whole or in part through the nfb , so a sketch of the Film Board’s arrival in the region is necessary. The Atlantic Canada office of the National Film Board opened in Halifax on 1 April 1973 with a paltry annual budget of $300,000, increasing to $1 million by the end of the decade. The founding mandate of the nfb is nationalist, with regionalization coming decades after. John Grierson, the nfb ’s first commissioner, saw this as something of a problem in his day, and this sentiment has stayed with the Film Board over the years. Zoë Druick reports that Grierson’s 1938 report on film activity commissioned by the Canadian government was written to emphasize a national film agency as a means of “breaking down Canadian sectionalism.”57 Films shot in the regions either reproduced broad stereotype assumptions or were made in a way that downplayed differences and the specificity of place, since Grierson wanted films to represent the nation as a unified whole. For instance, The Case of Charlie Gordon (Dir: Stuart Legg, 1939), the first nfb film: the production began under the auspices of the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau and was shot in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, but is described in

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the nfb catalogue as, “The case history of a young man in a Canadian community who might be any young man anywhere.” The film is about the problem of youth unemployment, obviously conceived before the slaughter of the Second World War became the driving force of the economy, and it presents the problem in a way that affirms the guiding role of the nation-state. However, since the state was not interested at the time in establishing comprehensive social programs, the film needed to emphasize the role of local business owners in accepting youth in apprenticeship positions. A variety of trades are mentioned, including – incongruously – dentistry! Charlie is set up as an auto mechanic, and we see the state-employed trades instructor work into the night to help him understand various mechanical concepts. The focus is on resolving everyday problems in a way that reproduces a common-sense assumption of benevolent authority. According to Peter Morris, this small film “aroused considerable controversy on its release” – probably, I suspect, because it dared to enter a working-class community and reveal discord.58 Malek Khouri generously describes Charlie Gordon as “subtly stress[ing] the consequences of business’s inability to see beyond its immediate and narrow interests, and urges it to adopt a more socially responsible attitude … [as] an alternative to forcing surplus unemployed workers to compete with each other over a shrinking job pool.”59 In this way, the film cautiously hints at the important social programs to come later. Similarly, Druick points out that in a film shot after the war in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, When All the People Play (Dir: Evelyn Cherry, 1948), the role of the state is to provide proper training in recreation and physical fitness in order to foster good citizens.60 This invocation of the modern is at odds with the specificity of place, as the film’s narrator baldly asks: “How can children be happy in a town built on traditions?” But what is fascinating about the film is the emphasis on collective agency at the local level: “working together for the world they wanted.” It is not surprising that in the oppressive cold-war, red-baiting climate, Cherry was forced out of the nfb . She was also trying to unionize nfb staff, so would have been out of favour for that reason as well. Regionalism at the Film Board begins cautiously in 1965 with modest branch offices established in Halifax, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver.6¹ It is always amusing, from an east coast perspective, to see Toronto referred to as a region. These offices were not production centres, only liaison posts for ideas that could be brought to the national headquarters in Montreal. In 1968, budget cutbacks forced the closure of all but the Vancouver office. Vancouver became a model for the eventual establishment of regional studios in

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the 1970s. By that time, the nfb had regional offices for distribution, though there was no easy relationship between the production and distribution sides of the Film Board. There were also political forces directing regionalization, and by 1976, the nfb ’s board of governors officially adopted this plan.6² Rex Tasker joined the nfb in 1960 as an editor and was appointed executive producer of the Atlantic Regional Production Unit in 1973. He was previously involved in a community cable-tv training initiative in Thunder Bay, Ontario, as part of Challenge for Change in 1970. Tasker told me that in the early 1970s the nfb was under siege from government and needed to justify itself as a national agency. This fed his own advocacy for regionalism as a way of better reflecting the diversity of the country. Ronald Dick claims that the transfer of headquarters from Ottawa to Montreal in 1956 was the first step toward regionalization, though this claim can only be made from a centralist perspective. “The main motivation for the move seems to have been to get away from the negative influences of bureaucratic structures in Ottawa, whose civil servants did not always share the enthusiasms or see eye-to-eye with Grierson’s heirs. And, also, to expose the creative staff of the Film Board to a cultural life more stimulating than that of the (then) rather provincial Canadian capital.”6³ The move certainly fostered greater autonomous French production, but English filmmakers, isolated in the suburban Montreal plant on the Trans-Canada Highway, did not all connect with the city’s vibrant cultural sphere. D.B. Jones cautions that regionalization simply follows the broader political forces in the country rather than offer a radical reconfiguration of power: “Filmmakers in Challenge for Change shared authority with their subjects … Regionalization involves sharing authority at a higher level: with directors and producers from the competing private industry, traditionally at odds with Film Board methods and goals … Regionalization is a similar [to the establishment of the French Unit in 1964] acknowledgement of new political realities, in this case a growing disaffection of Anglophone provincial groupings from centralized Canada.”64 Vancouver regional director Peter Jones made significant efforts to work with the local community and to lobby for autonomy in production decisions. However, for many years, decisions remained the domain of the Montreal office, which would vet filmmakers’ projects at every stage of production, from initial proposal through to script, assembly, and the final print. The problem was in the physical distance between the regional offices and headquarters, which created delays and additional expenses since the regional producer and filmmakers would have to present and defend their work to the committee. In the era of analog film production, this meant travelling

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with stacks of heavy film cans containing edit assemblies and multiple magnetic sound reels – a very cumbersome task. More important, the central committee would not be familiar with regional concerns; or worse, view a regional idea as less substantial than one developed in the centre. While the peer-review process is admirable, the fact is that the filmmakers on the committee were competing for the same pool of money. Ronald Dick indicates that antagonism toward regional filmmakers, whether because their work was viewed as parochial or because of professional jealousy, put the regions at a disadvantage. In the case of Vancouver, “[Peter Jones] found that professionals, jealous of their status, were not always disposed to be tolerant to anyone less skilled who seemed to be invading ‘their’ territory, and hence were sometimes given to demanding excessively high standards of those with fewer resources and experience than themselves.”65 Many filmmakers I have spoken with in Atlantic Canada affirm this perspective, and also describe a tension between the need for nfb resources and a resistance to the house-style of nfb filmmaking. Chuck Lapp puts it bluntly in describing the arrival of the nfb in Halifax: The Film Board was a colonial influence. They were sent down here to teach the locals how to make films. So a few people got work on the films or managed to get skills from the Film Board by going to their workshops, but rarely did anybody actually get production funding from them. afcoop members had some respect for the Film Board’s history but felt they were the old school. We wanted to make independent documentaries, independent cinema, and that was different than what had happened in the region before. The Film Board did films about the region, which were for the most part stereotypical and did not have the kind of independent sensibility we felt we wanted to make in the Atlantic region. At the level of style, Mike Jones agrees: “Our feeling … is that the nfb deteriorated to the point where the films coming out are basically products of the institution. The institutional ‘touch’ shows up in all the films. By the time an idea emerges from the nfb as a film, the film feels like every other film coming out of there.”66 Many filmmakers have since developed a good working relationship with the Film Board, and it is important to acknowledge that the institution is only going to support work that fits within its own mandate. One initiative of the nfb that was influential both as filmmaking practice and in fostering interest in the establishment of regional offices

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was the Challenge for Change program. Established in 1967, Challenge for Change was a program for the integration of film with movements for social change and was grassroots in approach, with an explicit emphasis on the regions. Filmmakers would not simply record a subject but would work with subject and community in a process of shared authorship, though many productions working under this rubric did not fully embrace this radical and communal approach. Among the most important Challenge for Change projects are the twentyseven films made on Fogo Island as part of the nfb ’s Newfoundland Project. Known collectively as the “Fogo Films,” they were made in collaboration with Memorial University Extension Services, which itself played an important role in developing filmmakers in the province. In these films, feedback from community members was integral to the process; footage was always screened and participants had the right to excise material deemed unsuitable. Jerry White makes the case that these are not simply political interventions but are consistent with the best work of Studio B, the Film Board’s documentary unit. White goes as far as saying that the Fogo Films have an affinity with innovations in the avant-garde.67 These films were made by Montreal-based filmmakers working in the regions, and many of the films were not intended for general distribution, but for Colin Low, director of the Fogo project, this was an opportunity to return the nfb to its Griersonian roots: “I think the roots of the documentary movement must be rediscovered in the regions – on a smaller scale so that the quieter voices of the country can be given a channel of expression.”68 At the end of the Fogo project, Colin Low became assistant director of production and advocated for decentralization of the Film Board. It needs to be said that the Fogo Films were also supported by the nation-state’s interest in integrating the outport with the centre – whether through modernization strategies or, in the case of Newfoundland, outport relocation. This motivation is at odds with grassroots production; instead, it is about managing social change. That being said, the actual films express more of the contradictions in the centre-margin relationship and also articulate the resilience of place, particularly in the integration of modernization strategies in areas of education. Druick describes the emphasis on the talking-head close-up as an “(anti)aesthetic” established as the dominant approach in these films.69 While that approach does become dominant, White makes the case that the series as a whole is highly innovative formally. I would like to add that the critical dismissal of facial closeups and interviews as not very interesting formally is too easy a position common within film studies, and is shaped by the dominance of dramatic

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narrative as the main object of study. As a consequence, critics disregard the intense complexity of the human face in relation to the cinematic apparatus. A key example where the close-up is a powerful and active device is in the Fogo Film Billy Crane Moves Away (1967). Billy, an inshore fisherman since the age of nine, has quit because of the lack of a “square deal” from government and due to reduced fish stocks. The government has put policy and subsidy support toward large dragger boats that harvest too many fish. The entire seventeen-minute film is a hand-held shot moving between tight close-up and a few shots of Billy’s children assisting with the gear. The image helps make clear that the subject is very aware of his place in the power relations at hand and, I would say, in the relationship engendered between him and the camera. While he understands his place as ‘the little guy,’ he is by no means naive or innocent. Against the typical complaints that his regional accent is too difficult for a more general audience or that the film has little to say to viewers outside of the community (Grierson’s stern take on this70), this is a narrative of power relations shared across a broad spectrum of experience. As for Billy’s dialect, I suggest that if we take our responsibility as viewers seriously and listen closely, then we are much rewarded. The tonal quality of voice and rhythms of speech are important to the place and to the film; in fact, speech patterns are a primary way of locating regional identity. The visual treatment of the subject helps us understand his particular perspective as well as the impact this has on his family and the local community. The style, with extreme close-ups and fast zoom-ins to the face are also consistent with the camerawork on many indie narrative films of the era: hardly an “anti-aesthetic.” What I have described in this section and elsewhere in this book are some of the possibilities, accomplishments, and limits of the Atlantic office of the nfb. Now I turn to an independent production truly inspired by the radical ideals of Challenge for Change but utterly dismissed by the nfb . Fish or Cut Bait, produced by the Fish or Cut Bait Collective (Tom Burger and Bill McKiggan, later joined by Chuck Lapp) in 1980–81 and then re-edited for broadcast on Visiontv in 1993, is a historical documentary tracing the fishworker labour movement from the early 1900s to the present, with a focus on fishing in the Atlantic shores. We see archival and contemporary footage of work, picket lines, and activism. As in the radical approach of the Fogo Films, authorship is shared with the fishing community, where versions of the film-in-progress were screened and feedback was incorporated into the final work. George Stoney was a supporter, but the withdrawal of nfb support is suggestive of the post–Challenge for Change professional

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transformation of the Film Board, which included a retreat from the idea of films linked with radical politics. The case of this film makes for a good story of indie filmmaking as well as a revealing tale about the complexity of institutional power and authority where production decisions remain with the centralized Montreal office and where influences on decision making extend beyond the film into the overlap of political and industrial concerns. Large fishing corporations have encroached upon inshore fishing grounds, seeing them as a public commons; Fish or Cut Bait refuses the inevitability in this practice of global capital and the corresponding eradication of local culture. That this change is ‘not inevitable’ is the expressed commitment of the film. The conflict with the nfb over the telling of this story was also fuelled by personality and political differences. Fish or Cut Bait was a leftist political collective committed to using media for progressive social change. A memorial to Tom Burger, who died at the age of sixty of a heart attack on 9 September 2004, makes this clear: “Tom was part of a wave of culture workers in Canada who opposed the weight of imported Americanized culture and who saw the necessity for a Canadian culture that is based on our people. The great novelty and power of his work is that it is characterized by social realism and humanity, a sense of urgency, and an aesthetics that placed the life and concerns of working people, especially fishermen and First Nations, at the centre of his artistic and professional output.”7¹ This partisan urgency is present in an earlier film, Work and Wages (1978), produced on a shoestring budget on two-inch video equipment borrowed from Video Theatre, a Halifax organization set up by the National Film Board to support Challenge for Change–inspired work.7² The film is a raw portrait of low-wage Halifax in the 1970s, with images of soup kitchens, homelessness, rundown buildings, and broken windows in the north end – not the postcard image of the folk. In a great example of how an independent perspective is marginalized, an official with Manpower Canada blows off the filmmaker’s unannounced entrance to the office, saying that they are accustomed to advance notice when a broadcast crew arrives. In other words, discourse needs to be regulated through official channels. The narrative is told through the experiences of working people, and we see efforts to unionize the unemployed and footage of an rcmp raid on the office of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, which had defied a court ruling against the right to strike. A union leader explains that since the Trudeau government is unable to deal with problems of the economy, efforts are directed against unions instead. We see a stiff-suited cop looking through photographs at the union office in a tactic of cold war–style intimidation.

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A later film, No Harbour for War (1991), integrates a broad social and historical perspective on the militarization of Halifax harbour made in the wake of the buildup to Canada’s involvement in the First Gulf War and the subsequent command-structure integration of the Canadian military with that of the United States. Under Bill c -55, the Public Safety Act, 2002, the harbour has been declared a “military security zone,” replacing democratic rule with martial law and criminalizing dissent, in echo of Trudeau’s War Measures Act of 1970. This Act applies not only to the specific property of the Canadian Forces base but also to all vessels entering the harbour under the domain of the Visiting Forces Act. The Halifax base is a major port of call for US navy vessels, including nuclear-powered submarines, and both the cia and the fbi have operations in Halifax. The standard line from military talking heads is that they will neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons on American vessels. The integrity of the film is in its historical materialist analysis. The Atlantic office of the nfb marginalized left-activist perspectives and directly contributed to the militarization of consciousness by producing internal military and training films and sponsoring a recruitment film, Young Man’s Challenge (Skerrett Communications, 1981), aimed at high school students. No Harbour for War details the foundation of the city of Halifax as a military port and the subsequent integration of military with local business. In the 1980s, women in Halifax were encouraged to participate in the “dial a sailor” program for the entertainment of visiting troops, making explicit the link between gender control (if not outright prostitution) with imperialism. The film links this fact with the rise in military spending in the province at the same time as cutbacks are made to education, worker rights, and health and safety issues, and amidst rising threats to democracy in a global context. The filmmakers are engaged in anti-war activities and we see the camera within a protest march. This contemporary perspective is then integrated with a historical view, showing period-costumed soldiers on Citadel Hill carrying out the daily ritual firing of a canon – an event that shakes the windows of my downtown office and serves as a public reminder of militarization under the guise of culture and tourism. The film refuses the prevailing nostalgic view of history, pointing out that Cornwallis, the first governor of Nova Scotia established a bounty on the Mi’kmaq. The film tells us that war has been a lucrative business for Halifax merchants, while everyday life for the rest of the population is marked by the continual shipping out of troops to fight in British colonial wars, and the existence of slavery. The devastation of the 1917 Halifax explosion (caused by the collision of gunpowder-laden

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vessels), a catastrophe only exceeded at the time by Hiroshima, is understood in the film as a direct consequence of militarization and the larger trajectory of imperialism. The present war protests are situated in this context and the fact that, as one activist states in the film, when there are preparations for war, war surely follows. The films discussed above set the radical context for Fish or Cut Bait. While technically crude in places, the film expresses the strong political commitment of activists and a solid grounding in the history of labour conflicts, in particular, the fight for unionization through the radical Canadian Seamen’s Union in 1939 at Lockport, Nova Scotia, and how this struggle extends into the present. On this strike, see the related Fish or Cut Bait film The Finest Kind: The Lockport Lockout, 1939 (1989). We are more familiar with the Seamen’s Union through the Donald Brittain docudrama Canada’s Sweetheart (1985), about the union-busting gangster Hal Banks. But in that nfb film, collective radicalism is elided for a morality tale.7³ In Finest Kind and Fish or Cut Bait, the local fishermen are highly engaging and passionate storytellers who explain the power relations from the standpoint of having put their lives on the line in conflict with the state. A number of activists were locked up in wartime internment camps – Seamen’s Union activist Charles Murray was interred for sixteen months. At the same time, National Sea Products Ltd, is formed, becoming the dominant fishing corporation and, in turn, causing a number of smaller companies to go out of business; it was later provided with government subsidies. This is a story about control of the resource and of the commons resting in the hands of powerful corporations rather than in the labouring hands of local communities. In Fish or Cut Bait, the fishermen provide clear analysis of the unsustainability of the mass production approach of dragger vessels.74 Accounts of struggle and incarceration characterize this history and connections are made to similar events throughout the region, but the response on the part of Peter Katadotis, then head of English-Canadian production at the Film Board, was to tell the filmmakers: “Your film has no heart and soul … all I see in this production is the state versus the community.”75 The nfb had initially invested a small amount of money and services into the production but reacted against the political tone of the film as it ran counter to the programming philosophy articulated by then–Atlantic Studio executive producer Rex Tasker who, on 18 August 1977, circulated what came to be known as the “no bitch” memo. He emphasizes the need for local relevance combined with “universal values” and then declares: “We are not in the business of making socially acceptable bitch films.” Tasker outlines three main areas of production: “history films” where the region is located in a larger whole; “Down to 202 | S H O O T I N G F R O M T H E E A S T

Earth films” dealing with everyday concerns, with the curious examples of “mulch, wood, seaweed, music, aquaculture” (but not work); and “Unique Films” with vague reference to the importance of an art cinema tradition.76 In his request to Peter Katadotis for funds, Tom Burger described an atmosphere of suppression at the Halifax nfb office, which was coincident with the fact that it was supplementing its budget with contract work for the Canadian military – making internal training, nuclear and chemical weapons handling, and recruitment films at the same time that Studio d made the groundbreaking anti-nuclear war film If You Love This Planet (Dir: Terre Nash, 1982). According to Burger, Katadotis expressed disbelief at the memo and agreed that the “dnd -nfb relationship is pornographic.”77 In spite of this sympathy, Katadotis travelled to Halifax in November 1980 at the request of Tasker to announce that the nfb would not continue to support Fish or Cut Bait. Keep in mind that this was a very low-budget production with requests for several thousand dollars in funds as well as services – in other words, a marginal amount by typical nfb budgets and not that much more than what it would cost for a senior executive to travel from Montreal to Halifax. The film refuses an aesthetic professionalism; instead there is a mix of styles, from exposition to verité, and includes many interviews with workers. The filmmakers immersed themselves in collective action, and we see scenes from within crowds of people, including at a mass demonstration in 1980 when Newfoundland fishers shut down at the height of the fishing season in solidarity with locked-out plant workers. Police are filmed using tear gas against protesting fishers and their families during a 1979 Acadian rally of Maritime Fishermen’s Union in northern New Brunswick. Together, there is a picture of class struggle over time against the state and its police, courts, and corporate clients, affirming a committed social-activist perspective in the best tradition of Challenge for Change. I wonder how this struggle could ever be described as without heart? The story of class struggle makes the institution uncomfortable and in the common-sense logic of the state, fishermen are not workers but are independent business operators. While films are not supported for a variety of reasons, including technical quality, aesthetics, and distribution opportunities, there is a history of nfb skittishness around political issues, especially when these issues are presented as immediate and structural rather than retrospective and individualistic. Of course, there are exceptions, such as the films of Alanis Obomsawin and of L’Acadie L’Acadie, about Acadian student protests in Moncton (made out of the Montreal nfb office), but in the case of class struggle, one can point to the long refusal to release Denys Arcand’s On Est au Coton (1969) and the Film Board’s obstructionist distribution of If You Love This Planet. Documentary in the Spirit of the Vernacular | 203

At the time of the Fish or Cut Bait conflict, the nfb Montreal office also stopped respected filmmaker Martin Duckworth’s film then in production, which was highly critical of the Trudeau government’s policy of wage and price controls – policies that limited working-class wages. In the case of Planet, distribution officers pressed for the excising of material uncomfortable to American politicians of 1982, notably the inclusion of a clip from a Hollywood propaganda film called Jap Zero, a 1943 US propaganda film featuring former-actor/then-president Ronald Reagan as a trigger-happy commie-killer. The cbc refused to air this Academy Award–winning film with the same excuse given for the refusal to broadcast Fish or Cut Bait, that it did not meet “journalistic policy guidelines” requiring objective balance.78 The idea of balance suggests that equal weight should be given to forces opposing progressive social change, but this limits real debate by emphasizing simplistic oppositions. Good films are grounded in the context of their making and are driven by a point of view. The film did eventually broadcast on Visiontv , which at the time strongly supported grassroots independent documentary through the commitment of then–director of programming Peter Flemington (this policy evaporates a decade later after Flemington’s retirement). Flemington’s policy at the time was to achieve a degree of objectivity over time rather than in a simplistic way within each film. In a letter to the filmmakers, he makes the explicit point of the necessity for “guerilla tactics” in making work that is critical of the state apparatus.79 Fish or Cut Bait began as a 16mm production, and there were few resources for the cumbersome editing process after the nfb cut off support, necessitating a tactic in the true spirit of independent filmmaking. Burger and McKiggan found some pretense to enter the nfb office during the day and then propped open a bathroom window. They would return after midnight when staff were gone, enter the office through the window – hauling in boxes of film and supplies – work all night, and then exit with all their supplies early in the morning before staff returned. Bill McKiggan describes: “We went in there about ten days, and the film was starting to take shape – I think it was around Easter. Then we stayed in there longer, which was our undoing. We were in there eating some peanut butter sandwiches past our usual deadline on the weekend. It was around nine or ten a.m. – we were pushing it. That’s when Shelagh Mackenzie [regional producer and former wife of Rex Tasker] came in and said, ‘What are you guys doing in here?’ I said, ‘We are eating sandwiches.’ Then they discovered what we had done and that was it. The window got locked permanently.” Tom Burger recalls a slightly different version in his diary: “While cutting the last frames of Fish

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Figure 3.3 | Bill McKiggan (left) and Tom Burger agitating for political change at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

or Cut Bait after forty straight hours of continuous editing in the nfb over the Thanksgiving weekend, Barry Cowling arrived on orders. ‘Get out, get out. This place is not for anybody just off the street.’” As the industry professionalized, the nfb moved into a bland corporate office tower, creating a greater physical barrier to the grassroots. Today, we take for granted easy access to media production tools, but that was not the case in the earlier era of 16mm film production when the tools were in the hands of a state institution. Burger and McKiggan were also denied access to resources at afcoop over hotly debated claims that they had been negligent with equipment. Fish or Cut Bait, though not as technically accomplished, is as important as Harlan County usa (1976), Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning documentary about the brutality of work and labour struggles in the coal mines of Kentucky. Harlan County was a struggle to produce. The proximity of the filmmakers to the striking miners put them in very real danger of violence – we see that the company goons are openly armed and several union activists are murdered during the ordeal, but the film has since been selected for preservation by the National Film Registry of the US Library of Congress for its cultural and historical significance. Fish or Cut Bait, on the

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other hand, while known to radical activists in the region and deposited in a few library collections, is otherwise marginalized in the history of documentary film in Canada. The group was supported, to a limited degree, by the then-open teaching environment of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, with McKiggan and Burger giving occasional class presentations and generally rabble-rousing amongst the students. They would also protest visitors to the college deemed insufficiently radical, and so an uneasy tension existed between the filmmakers and some members of faculty. What was missing, and what would have nurtured a more complex political film culture, is a collective such as New York’s Newsreel, arising post-1968 and quickly developing satellite groups across the United States and important Third World connections. There was never a critical mass for this kind of work in Halifax, as the ensuing commercial turn of the film industry attests. While there was a culture of protest across various fronts in the 1980s, the many factions could not coalesce around media production (No Harbour for War is the notable exception). A later film reflecting something of this spirit of protest is Regarding Cohen (Dir: Leslie Ann Patten, 2005), about Lee Cohen, outspoken Halifax lawyer and activist on behalf of those seeking political asylum in Canada. The film situates the struggles of asylum seekers within the global context marked by the 2004 visit of US president George W. Bush to Halifax, which signified the integration of Canada into American imperialist ambitions. Bush visited Halifax to promote Canadian involvement in the foolish but lucrative Ballistic Missile Defense Plan as well as to affirm the continued militarization of the harbour. Cohen’s face is grim, as if resigned to the necessity of street protest in the face of the intransigence of political power, but we hear him articulating the moral responsibility we have to disobey unjust laws – as measured by the simple but not simplistic rule that laws degrading human beings are unjust. Near the film’s conclusion, we revisit these same protest images but the meaning is fundamentally transformed by what we have seen. We now understand that the film’s subject has come to the protest for affirmation, to know that there are others, many others, who believe in alternatives to the present system of inequity, war, and misery.80 AFTER THE FISHERY

The radical politics of Fish or Cut Bait is at odds with the image of decline dominant in nfb films of the region. As Colin Howell and Peter Twohig describe: “The folkish construction of the Maritimes – reminiscent in many

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ways of the discovery of Appalachia in the United States – remained an enduring theme in the documentary rendering of this region’s history before 1990. In general, the films of the nfb glorified the region’s pre-confederation past, and especially the ‘golden age’ of sail.”8¹ The authors go on to cite Empty Harbours Empty Dreams (Dir: Barry Cowling, 1976) as an example of a film that romanticizes the pre-confederation era of the region. The tone of the narration is the familiar Canadian lament for what once was, and this takes the place of an engagement with political conditions of the present. Economic alienation is visually reinforced with depictions of empty landscapes and concluding images of Yonge Street in Toronto, imagery familiar to the then-popular Canadian narrative of east coast migration to central Canada: Goin’ Down the Road (Dir: Don Shebib, 1970). The shots of crowds, traffic, and porn shops convey a sense of alienation that are, presumably, at odds with the ideals of home. This narrative needs to be understood in an ideological context where a particular notion of progress associated with technology and centralization is accepted as inevitable: “the notion of ‘empty harbours’ not only reinforced the idea of a region whose glory years were behind it, but served those wishing to develop the east coast fishery as a technologically modernized offshore industry at the expense of the small-boat or inshore fishermen at a crucial time in the struggle against over-fishing.”8² The project of technological modernization is glorified in the nfb ’s Trawler Fishermen (Dir: Martin Defalco, 1966), which presents work on a modern (corporatecontrolled) vessel as more appealing than traditional small-boat practices, and even features a scene of a fisherman getting married. Fish or Cut Bait belies this promise of technological progress with details of the dangerous work conditions and poor pay for the crewmembers on these modern vessels. It probably did not impress the nfb that Fish or Cut Bait explicitly names the nfb as producing misleading documentaries trumpeting the death of the inshore fishery and the promised new golden age of wage labour. On the soundtrack for final credits of Fish or Cut Bait, a fisherman relates this local struggle to his Scottish heritage and the struggles of his ancestors who endured the highland clearances – an event marking the dawn of capitalism and, with it, a particular relation to space formulated in political-economic terms. The anecdote blasts into relief the cliché image of Scottish folk culture in Nova Scotia by grounding this heritage in class struggle rather than apolitical heritage. A later nfb film, Taking Stock (Dir: Nigel Markham, 1994), about the collapse of the cod fishery, details how political inclination to support large

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industry overtakes facts related to conservation. This film makes use of a trio of related images to convey the interrelation of politics, environment, and community. First, a shot of a large trawler lunging over huge ocean swells – this is the image of modern progress, a floating factory relentlessly at work on the sea. Second, footage from 2 July 1992 of then–federal fisheries minister John Crosbie announcing to the media, behind locked doors in a St John’s hotel, a then two-year moratorium on Atlantic cod fishing, immediately placing 35,000 Newfoundlanders out of work. In the hallway outside the locked room, furious fishermen demand to speak with the minister and unsuccessfully attempt to break through the barricade. In subsequent remarks broadcast in the media (but not in this film), Crosbie answers an angry fisherman by saying, “I didn’t take the fish from the goddam water,” an individualist elision of the political and industrial forces at play. The third important image is a static shot of boats tied to the docks of small communities. These three images together constitute the interrelation of industrial progress, politics, and the impact on everyday life. Other films dealing with struggles of fisher communities include Chuck Lapp’s Fishing on the Brink (1997) and Clearing the Waters (2002), where we see fishing communities systematically dismantled as a consequence of government policy and fish-stock depletion. A film with a focus on the impact of these changes on women is An Untidy Package: Women and the Newfoundland Cod Moratorium (Dir: Debbie McGee, 1997), pointing out that while this story is often posited as a masculine struggle, many fishers and plant workers are women. Here, personal stories are integrated with analysis and a frank outline of how women consistently face a struggle, far beyond what men in comparable positions face, in gaining compensation for lost wages through various programs to assist fishers. Repeatedly emphasized is the stark impact upon families and communities of decisions made by people at a great physical and economic distance from this locale. These films could finally be made through the nfb for a variety of reasons not applicable to the Fish or Cut Bait Collective, including: the films are made retrospectively after the damage of corporate consolidation is done; they avoid an explicit radical history connection between capitalist action and the decline in the fishery; and they are made by filmmakers with greater leverage from within the nfb – plus there had been a change in decision-making personnel at the Film Board. Stylistically, these films are not in the idiom of Challenge for Change, but are highly competent, if conventional. Along these lines, Voyage of the 7 Girls (Dir: John Brett, 2001) is an engaging film representative of nfb projects. It is a year in the life of a deep-sea longliner, with focus on the

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rhythms of work with its dangers, sacrifices. and rewards. In this case, the image of fishing is not hard-luck enterprise but a successful and complex business integrated into global markets. The film both captures something of the reality of contemporary work on the sea and avoids the politics and industrial policies directing the fishery for the sake of a narrative of free enterprise, but this is an improvement over the romantic ideal of the rugged pre-modern fisherman. By the same filmmaker, One Man’s Paradise (1997) presents an image of life on the ocean through the eyes of an idiosyncratic character named Lewellyn James Henneberry – fisherman, yodeller, and collector of the jaws of sharks and other oddities in his fantastical folk museum called The Liars Club, located in Sambro, Nova Scotia. We are introduced to the subject through the voice of the filmmaker as we see inside the cramped museum: “I remember the whole thing did seem crazy, and it smelled bad. Like fish and mothballs mixed together.” The filmmaker assumes an ironic and affectionate tone proclaiming difference related to place and character through an individualist narrative detached from a political context. At one point we see Henneberry dressed in a bizarre mask and body suit made out of mussels, his fingers clicking the shells. While the materials are comical – taxidermy fish covered with glitter dust and fierce-looking shark jaws – Henneberry turns out to be in charge of a multi-million dollar fishing operation run with his four sons. He is the capitalist raconteur rolled into folk armour, and he is in on the joke, not simply the oddball subject of the camera’s gaze. While we are told that he is in charge of a financially successful business, the visual treatment of the subject is down-home folksy charm. The point of the film is to playfully account for the unique way of life in this corner of the north Atlantic, and while there are references to the decline in fish stocks, the idea is to stress continuity in time and culture in the face of the dangers and challenges of fishing. There are references to death at sea, but we do not get the class-inflected workplace analysis of Fish or Cut Bait; instead we get incredibly beautiful underwater shots combined with a sense of good-humoured perseverance in the work. C A P I TA L I S M E X P L O D E S : W E S T R AY

An nfb film that is more explicitly class-conscious and demonstrates the potential of this institution in realizing point-of-view documentaries of social criticism is Westray (2001), directed by Montreal-based nfb staff director Paul Cowan. The film deals with the death of twenty-six miners in the

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9 May 1992 underground explosion of the Westray Mine in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. This incident is an extension of the long history of death underground. Journalist John DeMont estimates that during the harvesting of 500 million tons of coal in Nova Scotia, excluding deaths due to cancer and other work-related diseases, approximately 2,500 men have died – more than the number of Nova Scotians killed in the First World War.8³ In Westray, ideas of time and place are revealed through social-economic and class relations. The film begins with a dramatic countdown voiced by the main participants in the film: three surviving miners and three widows of miners killed in the incident. The participants count down from twenty to convey the desperation that would have been felt at the time: twenty seconds is thought to be the amount of time from the initial spark to the fatal explosion. The narration tells us: “In twenty seconds a running man’s heart beats fifty-five times. He takes twenty-five gulps of air … on broken ground he might cover a hundred yards.” The political point of the film is that they were doomed from the start, long before the accident. The film unfolds in time through a process of grief and recovery that is itself temporally framed with the stated promise of fifteen years of steady work in a region marked by high unemployment and out-migration. This temporal bias of narrative recovery is set against a visualization of the spatial dynamics vested in the political economy of the mine. Following the pre-credit countdown, exaggerated dramatic scenes convey class relations through an image of a black limousine cruising through the community on the way to the political ceremony for the opening of the mine on 11 September 1991, a brief eight months prior to the explosion. That is an iconic date, and the film retrospectively reminds us of other kinds of disasters in other places.84 With imagery of the trappings of power, we can ask: When do ordinary workers get to ride in limousines except at weddings and funerals? The narration provides quick details of the political connections behind the opening of the mine and subsequent efforts to keep it open in the face of mounting safety concerns. An important function of documentary is to direct our gaze outside of the terms of official discourse. While shifts in capital regulate the rhythm of the everyday, the fairy-tale references in the Westray narration belie the myth of progress: “Baa baa black sheep, have you any coal? Yes sir, yes sir, trainloads full.” And later: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray for coal and jobs to keep.” The film cuts ahead to four years after the disaster and the public inquiry, with then–provincial premier Donald Cameron rejecting the assumption of responsibility. The relationship between politicians and media is suggested in his smile to assembled reporters as

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he leaves the inquiry, and the quick dash he makes to a waiting car: “Don be nimble, Don be quick. Don, hoping the Westray fall-out won’t stick.” The ritual cat-and-mouse game of media in pursuit of politicians takes the place of more concrete journalistic or political challenges to the system of inequity that bequeathed this tragedy.85 Media coverage at the time of the incident was to frame it through an explicit concern for business and to posit the explosion as a natural disaster rather than as a consequence of specific human actions.86 Westray upends this prevailing ‘common sense’ by telling the story through the voice of workers. The film integrates the workers in stylized scenes that are not simple dramatizations but instead evoke an experiential sensibility in between fiction and actuality. Understanding the Westray disaster, and for that matter developing a historical consciousness, is not done through an accumulation of information but through an experiential and performative engagement. Truth is made in the process of representation where lived experience is manifest. The imagery relies on bold Brechtian stereotypes – the corporate limousine and the cigar in the mouth of the ceo announcing the opening of the mine. While these images function as caricature, they do emphasize the film’s working-class perspective and rejection of simplistic claims of journalistic balance. And if the images are stereotypical, they are reinforced by the actions of the company itself. At the time of the disaster, Clifford Frame, founder and ceo of Curragh Resources Inc., owner of the Westray Mine, refused to address the media, and one of the few images of Frame available at the time had him with a fat cigar clenched in his teeth as he tossed a suitcase into an expensive car and was driven out of town. This image is used in the film in a sequence dealing with the judicial inquiry into the explosion and Frame’s refusal to testify. We also see Frame in a television broadcast reading a eulogy for the dead miners alongside sombre-faced then–prime minister Brian Mulroney. Here, the relation between capital and labour is veiled, as Marx would say, by the distraction of the religious service. The use of narration revitalizes this practice typically associated with the didactic problem-solution form of Griersonian documentary. The smoky baritone of filmmaker Mike Jones along with cbc broadcaster Katie Malloch voice the narration. The voices were recorded separately (each read the entire script) and then cut together to convey an energy and conversational tone not available to a solo narrator. This process exemplifies the filmmaker’s creative treatment of actuality. The masculine culture of work underground is formed in relation to Malloch’s tone of urgency and concern. Traditional gender divisions characterize the community, and we see images of laundry

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hanging on the line in contrast with the thick dirt of work underground. The voices convey something of the intangible atmosphere of this coal-mining community where Westray was the first mine in a generation to be hiring: “Bring out the coal, boys.” A related film, made five years later, likewise views the aftermath of industrial decline in Cape Breton. Cottonland (Dir: Nance Ackerman, 2006, made in collaboration with recovering addict Eddie Buchanan) is a powerfully rendered story of addiction to OxyContin (the poor man’s heroin, hence the film’s title) as the human cost of deindustrialization. The film makes explicit the relationship between economic dependency and drug addiction; moreover, OxyContin is widely available in working-class communities because of its prescription use as a painkiller. This film is important for its integration of the local with the broader context of addiction and deindustrialization. There is a high degree of self-awareness on the part of the addicts, and the film avoids a narrow prescriptive view of the region. It should also be noted that this form of addiction is by no means exclusive to the Maritimes. In fact, the rich agricultural and manufacturing area of southern Ontario’s Oxford County is broadly known as ‘OxyCounty,’ with OxyContin more readily available than crack cocaine.87 ARTISTS ON FILM

During the funeral service for the miners killed in the Westray explosion, we see an excerpt of the choral group Men of the Deeps, working and retired Cape Breton coal miners whose performances express the folklore and culture of work associated with the region. John Walker’s Men of the Deeps (2003) shows us the choir and the striking physical beauty of Cape Breton, the landscape these men hold dear but which they do not see, since most of them have spent all their working days underground. Without nostalgia or false sentiment, the men express heartfelt anxieties about the loss of livelihood along with the rich culture and storytelling tradition associated with this work. The opening titles tell us that coal has been mined here for over 270 years, yet at the time of filming only one mine remains (the Prince Colliery in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia) – the filmmakers had to move quickly to gain access as it too has now been closed. As the camera crew descends on “the trip” – the open rail cars used by the miners to descend into the mine five miles beneath the ocean – titles indicate that in the 1920s, over 12,000 men worked the mine, and that at the time of production, workers number

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130.88 The choral performances are remarkable, as if resonating through the vast underground caverns of the mind, and, indeed, they resonate in the long oral tradition of mining, where song narrates, makes visceral, and legitimizes working-class experience. Over images of underground work, the air thick and the work back-breaking, we hear: “Dust in the air and all through the mines. / It’s concrete on your lungs and you’re old before your time.” The music does not just originate in the mines but runs like a vein through the culture of Cape Breton. This performing group has met with widespread acclaim throughout Canada and has performed internationally. What is important about the film is how it avoids folk sentimentality and instead integrates song with an understanding of culture, one characterized by struggle, with reference to labour strikes, including the brutal military backlash against strikers in 1923. It is not, however, a brooding portrait of despair; there is a resilient energy, driven by storytelling and the passion on the faces of the men as they sing. They relate the close camaraderie underground, the humour, and the confessional nature of working in the dark far away from everyday society. This is a culture shaped by masculine physicality and danger, but the film also tells the story of women’s experience above ground, culminating in anxiety and displacement following the closure of the mine. It seems so strange, there is no sound, Now there are no men underground. […] Tired and weary, their shifts done, Never having seen the sun. Will it become a sacred ground? Foreign tourists gazing round Asking if men once worked here, Way beneath this pithead gear.89 John Walker returns to this landscape to film The Fairy Faith (2000), a documentary about imagination as revealed through persistence of a belief in fairies in the moors of England, the Scottish Highlands, and in Cape Breton. In this film, the idea that fairies remain among us depends upon how one sees landscape, with the barrier to sight and insight being the technocratic apparatus structuring space and behaviour. What is important

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to the idea of fairies is that how we live in place and engage with each other depends on how we see ourselves in that place – do we tread the surface or do our steps resonate with depth? The fact of departure, of out-migration, is a defining characteristic of life in the region and is one of the conditions unifying an otherwise diverse collection of provinces. In the performing-arts documentary Christopher House: Ahead of the Curve (Dir: Rosemary House, 2007), the Newfoundland filmmaker portrays the experience of her brother, an acclaimed modern dance choreographer, who describes the need to escape what was in the 1970s a “very homophobic environment.” We see the subject immersed in the fast pace of Toronto, and gorgeous shots of the dancer’s body are set against the landscape of his travels and of his home. Geography is a state of mind as well as physical locale, and as much as this artist must leave home to become himself, the space of home travels with him. Another film might have pursued the subject of coming out in St John’s in the 1970s; this one chooses to focus on creative practice in the present. There is a seductive calm to Christopher House’s voice, but for me this too is a kind of armour, speaking of the beauty of the Newfoundland landscape, but appreciating it in the present, perhaps to deflect from the homophobic past. These comments are in contrast with his childhood sense of place, what he describes as the “wait for the slow arrival of what is happening in the rest of the world.” This is an artist who has internalized a sense of place in order to see out into the world, but there is another film beneath the surface, that of the tension of belonging and having to leave. The hidden narrative is glimpsed in his description of gender roles. Over images of rehearsal, House puts his finger on it: “There is a physical suit of armour that men are forced to wear. There’s a kind of anti-sensual physicality, so that men don’t want to own their own bodies, and consequently it’s much more difficult for them to have any connection to their feelings. So that when feelings do kind of break outside of the envelope, it can explode into violence.” It is in the physicality and beauty of the body that the subject speaks. While the artist works intuitively, this process does not simply come out of thin air; it is grounded in the space of creative collaboration, a world of ideas, personal history, and the experiences of moving in the world. The film is a document of the coming-into-being of a collaborative process, setting into motion the space of the stage and a way of seeing the body in the interstice of culture and place. Home is made in the process of work and creativity. Chuck Lapp has made a trio of films on Nova Scotia artists and writers: Inner Mountains, Inner Valleys: The Life and Writing of Ernest Buckler (1993), God’s Red Poet:

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The Life of Kenneth Leslie (2008), and Tom Forrestall: Painting the Mystery (2011). Buckler is a reverential portrait of this reclusive writer with narrative scenes drawn from his most famous novel, The Mountain and the Valley (with the actor R.H. Thompson as the character David). The landscape of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, where the writer was born and spent most of his life, is illustrative of the fictional settings and also engages the contradictory idea of place central to the film; that is, landscape as beauty but also as location for the back-breaking toil of farm labour. Landscape is shelter from the dislocations of the modern world, but it is also exile and isolation. Though we may read these texts now as having a highly romanticized ideal of place, that sense emerges as relief from the overwhelming transformations taking place in society at the time, with respect to industrialization and modernization. Painting the Mystery gives us the artist in a lush local landscape while situating the work in its international influences. Lapp also digs beneath the surface to explore the creative process and Forrestall’s epilepsy as a dominant factor in his life. God’s Red Poet is more directly about politics and the tensions of the modern world told through the story of Kenneth Leslie, an acclaimed Nova Scotia–born poet involved in anti-fascist and anti-Semitic struggles in the US. As Lapp says of Leslie: “He did not see any difference between poetry and politics. Poetry was a way to express what he wanted to say about love or the Spanish Civil War.”90 The film begins with now-familiar images of Nazi parades, Mussolini, and the declaration of fascist triumph but locates this tyranny in America, introducing Leslie as a writer committed to agitation and change against the racist and pro-fascist political and media demagoguery: “There is the poet’s work, to disenthrall the world from all these Hitlers, great and small. The poet’s mark: contempt for power and place. His wage: disfavour, and his crown: disgrace.” The documentary fulfills the important need to represent the marginalized stories of the region, but it really stands out in its integration of the regional subject in the broader currents of world politics. Not only does the film fill a gap in the history of Nova Scotia but it also provides a story relevant to the present with respect to the role of the artist in the era of mass warfare and economic disaster. In a dramatized scene, a frustrated Leslie, tired of the right-wing rants of then-populist radio mouth Rev Charles Coughlin (Canadian-born, American-based preacher-apologist for fascism and anti-Semitism with a massive radio audience in the 1930s), he declares the need for a new magazine to counter “the right-wing dribble” and as prescient front against what he predicted as the expansion of the Spanish Civil

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Figure 3.4 | Kenneth Leslie at the NBC radio studios around 1941, from God’s Red Poet.

War into the Second World War. Leslie was a preacher and his magazine, The Protestant Digest, became an important platform for direct attacks on the conditions giving rise to war and fascism, and an important counter to the fascist sympathies of the Catholic Church. This film serves as a manifesto for the role of documentary in retrieving history for the purpose of activating resistance. The surveillance of Leslie by the fbi (dutifully attended to by the rcmp once Leslie moved back to Nova Scotia in 1949 to live in obscurity) is echoed in present-day surveillance tactics, limits to free expression through media consolidation, reduction of supports for independent journalism and documentary, and politically motivated cowardliness of the cbc , notably in its fawning coverage of Canadian involvement in the Afghanistan War, accelerating at the time of this film’s release. The words of poetry are not mere decorative language but are the seeds of social transformation, and Leslie’s poem’s can be read in light of more recent imperial adventures. It is the job of the artist to disrupt conventions of thinking and practice, and that is the legacy of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, dis-

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cussed earlier. Frank moved to Nova Scotia in the early 1970s, influencing the filmmakers involved with the formation of afcoop and nifco . After Frank (Dir: Walter Forsyth, 2005) traces the lingering presence of Frank in this creative community but was made long after the formative heyday of the co-op. In a way, it is a film about the global flow of culture, the movement of this iconoclastic artist from the New York scene and collaboration with the Beat writers to Cape Breton Island. In After Frank, we see the filmmaker chasing after the notoriously reclusive Frank: waiting outside his home by the ocean; flying to London to try (unsuccessfully) to meet him at the opening of an exhibit; and finally, arriving at the door of his New York loft, where the artist remains off-camera and politely declines to participate. While every indie filmmaker wants to make a film with the impact of Frank’s seminal Pull My Daisy (with Alfred Leslie and Jack Kerouac, 1959), the implication of Forsyth’s film is the necessity of the ‘after,’ of the making of new work rather than lapsing into nostalgia for the innovations of acclaimed artists. The documentary revolves around the identity of the subject but his elusiveness turns into an experience of waiting and watching. The filmmaker plays the good son of the fictional father (we see him tending to the overgrown weeds in front of Frank’s oceanside house), and in this narrative conceit, the film manages to incorporate Robert Frank’s concise artist statement: “The truth is somewhere between the documentary and the fictional.” The Robert Frank we are not shown in the film is someone who has broken the rules of artistic convention and forsaken cult status so that others may likewise be unbeholden to the dominant rules of the game. The presence of Frank in Cape Breton is a useful counterpoint to the prevailing image of folk art marketed as part of the nostalgic idealization of the region. Folk Art Found Me (Dir: Alex Busby, 1993) is a humorous portrait of outsider artists in Nova Scotia who explain with passion and directness what is ‘real’ folk art. The film takes these artists seriously, rather than view them simply as oddballs, while also enjoying the visceral experience and shock value of the work and asserting its legitimacy. The film avoids economic analysis, other than to express a degree of wonder at the workings of the art market (similarly, the artists seem both proud and dumbfounded by the international appeal of their work). Outsider status is affirmed in scenes of the artists arriving in the big (!) city of Halifax and negotiating traffic on the city’s west end roundabout and in images of Japanese tourists arriving by the busload to visit their studios. In this way, the film is consistent with a rural folk ethos familiar in nfb documentaries.9¹ In Folk Art, the politicized moment comes near the end with artist Bradford Naugler speaking of his political painting

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about the First Gulf War called Running in the World. The filmmaker cuts to several shots of bombs hitting their targets and the resonance of war and empire are brought forward with great urgency, though diminished by subsequent playful shots emphasizing the humour of folk art. The sequence recalls Ian McKay’s point about the elimination of political and bawdy stories from the folk collections of Helen Creighton.9² A more contemporary form of folk art is presented in Burning Rubber (Dir: Ariella Pahlke, 2009), a film about the strange rural practice of leaving markings on the highway by spinning car tires. Rubber patches are found on highways everywhere, but it is a game taken up with particular fervour in south shore Nova Scotia. The film documents competitions and the glee of participants who leave their mark in spite of the cost in damages to their vehicles. It brings together the art world and muscle-car hobbyists in a spectacular and smoke-filled performance where the car fans burn a ton of rubber, even causing the concrete to catch fire, while Swiss artist Lori Hersberger, whose work includes burned rubber tread, takes photographs. Art groupies gawk at the pavement, looking for art in the moment of destruction – Dada meets Goin’ Down the Road – in a kind of end-of-times circus of free expression. Class dynamics are attached to creative expression, and the film refuses to value one perspective over another. In a playful scene, we see Pahlke given a lesson in how to burn rubber, but she fails to perform to the testosterone standards of her subjects. It is not her interest to judge this activity, even if it begins as a kind of ethnographic and gendered investigation (one participant explicitly refers to burning rubber as an orgasm). What Pahlke is doing instead is looking at marginalized practices through which community is formed. These rural areas have been systematically depopulated through policies of underdevelopment and technological change; from this perspective, burning rubber is a kind of anti-landscape abstraction of place. The practice is taken up as exhibition sport in Japan and in the Middle East, a phenomenon toward which the east coast locals respond with puzzlement. At the same time, it is embraced by other artists, including Torontonian Steven Laurie, who makes hyper-masculine machines, including a burning-rubber device that looks like a horror film version of a garden-tilling machine, in order to examine what he describes as the “function of uselessness.” Halifax artist and musician Lukas Pearse, who composed the soundtrack for the film, turns to these road tracings as a kind of recorded event that can be transposed into music, with tread marks as musical notation. He scores these markings as Pneu Musique, a residue of art in the ruins of culture.

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Figure 3.5 | Burning rubber in the documentary Burning Rubber.

The final film in this section is Pretend Not to See Me (2009) by Torontobased photographer Katherine Knight. It is a portrait of performance artist Colette Urban, who had relocated from central Canada to the western shore of Newfoundland.9³ The film is a beautiful rendering of the creative process grounded in place, with the artist restaging many works from her extensive performance art portfolio on her property in a way that renders the work new in relation to landscape. In this restaging for the camera, there is an intimacy between performer and filmmaker that is distinct from a live-audience event. It is a means of bringing the art into the present moment of her life in this place through a productive tension with the means of representation. In the most powerful instances, the camera is hand-held and up close to the costumes and objects rather than providing an objective view. We do not see the full depth of all the performances; instead, we are offered glimpses into

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Figure 3.6 | Performance artist Collette Urban in Pretend Not to See Me.

a body of work that is self-consciously engaged with the fact of the body in domestic space and amidst the wake of capitalist culture. As Jayne Wark says of this ironic displacement: “Urban’s costumes and props are often made from what the Surrealists called objets trouvailles: the cast-offs and detritus of a technological, capitalist society that nonetheless carry the possibility of ‘convulsing’ the viewer through their psychic, symbolic, and social associations. Urban’s performances often use such objects to invoke the gendered spaces and experiences of domesticity and childhood where identity takes shape, which she then unsettles and makes strange.”94 All of this connects with ideas of belonging, of home, and of the tactics of gender in relation to place. In a performance called “Recalling Belvedere,” the artist wears a model of her house on her head and speaks through the open windows, and we see footage of the previous staging of this piece where she rides on the back of an elephant. The house is mobile, recalling patterns of migration and outport resettlement (where houses were literally floated on the ocean), yet the female form is contained within. The elephant is the rock-like beast that is extremely intelligent, its rough-textured skin analogous to the Newfoundland landscape. We later see the cutting of tree branches for a performance prop, with the artist using Joey Smallwood’s ceremonial scissors, and with this juxtaposition arises the complex history of nationalist identity, modernization, resettlement, and creative practice.

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T H E B O DY

In his book Representing Reality, Bill Nichols makes the point that in order to understand documentary, which most often functions within mainstream conventions, we must move beyond the left avant-garde critique of mainstream cinema’s tactics of visual pleasure. This critique has helped us understand the representation of women, demonstrating how a particular form of sexism is integrated into the technological apparatus. But, asks Nichols, how do we come to terms with subjectivity when it is not an imaginary construct but is materially connected with the historical world?95 In distinguishing the body in documentary from its fiction-film counterparts, Nichols says: “With documentary film we tender belief that the referent has the same status as that of our own bodies. Its mortality is as much at stake as our own. Death is not a simulation but an irreversible act. At stake is representing the indignities and hazards flesh is heir to with sufficient magnitude to escape the security of comfortable responses of charity or sympathy to martyrs and victims.”96 Rather than allow for the comfort of distance, we are invited into the frame through the filmmaker’s subjective experience of the body at a moment of crisis. My Left Breast (Dir: Gerry Rogers, 2000) is a highly intimate and harrowing story of the filmmaker’s breast cancer. We experience the details of Gerry’s pain but also the love and care provided by her partner, Peggy Norman, who also (with no previous filmmaking experience) becomes the camera operator for this personal story; the act of representation is shaped by the intimacy of their relationship. What we see of the body at home is at odds with the technologies of treatment. While the filmmaker is very warm and generous toward the doctors and nurses attending to her chemo and radiotherapy treatments, she remains ambivalent toward the medical establishment. In the years since her cancer recovery, she has become an outspoken advocate for patients, particularly with the revelation in 2008 of serious problems in testing procedures and the handling of breast cancer results in Newfoundland and Labrador.97 This is not a film about treatment; instead, it is about the filmmaker’s personal experience and is made in the face of the prospect of dying, but also invoking narrative as a way of taking control of her circumstances. What she teaches us, through her bravery and vulnerability, is the close connection between self and community expressed in the radicalized potential of love. The direct address and ‘home-movie’ quality of the video takes the form of a diary created over the course of diagnosis, radical mastectomy, and treatment, with seventy-two hours of material accumulated (and subsequently

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edited by Terre Nash, who publicly presented her Academy Award, won for If You Love This Planet (nfb , 1982), to Rogers at the 2000 St John’s International Women’s Film Festival). The vast amount of footage was shot with the idea that it would serve as background research for a subsequent film. Instead, the personal diary became the public text. As Michael Renov points out, drawing from Foucault, the confessional in documentary has a ritual function in which the act of expression does not simply convey information – it also transforms and has a restorative function on the confessor.98 The confession is an intrinsic part of this filmmaker’s experience, as she explains: “I grew up in a culture of prayer. I was a nun at one point, and although I am no longer Catholic, I absolutely adored the confessional. You grow up with the sense of an anthropomorphized deity who is there to hear you.”99 This oral process combines with the naked presence of the body as affirmation of life and finds strength in the expression of vulnerability. What is striking about the film, and Gerry’s character, is the central role of humour. This is not simply laughing in the face of adversity, but a laughter that affirms the self, not triumphalist but empathetic; in other words, the humour draws us in to character and provides a meeting place for shared experience. For instance, during a family dinner scene, we see Gerry consoling her shocked mother over the use of marijuana as a painkiller. When Gerry begins chemo, she regrets her hair loss but expresses it by brushing her hair out onto the family dog, a wry gesture of revenge for having endured the years of shedding, while also honestly revealing the effect of cancer and treatment on the body. Later, during a radio network established by the hospital in order to link cancer patients in an electronic support group inclusive of the far-flung communities in the province, we see a now-bald Gerry become emotionally overwhelmed with the announcement of a fellow patient’s death. It is a quiet scene, filmed simply with a single extended shot, conveying the subject’s relation to her community and the stark reality of cancer. In Film Studies, we expand upon the irreconcilable gap between representation and reality, and even the impossibility of approaching reality through the media frame and at risk of sounding naive, I want to suggest that a scene such as this approaches the real by opening up the subject’s vulnerability in a way that is immediate and unadorned. This moment is followed by a poignant scene with Gerry holding her newborn nephew and making the joke that each are bald. She holds the child close and turns in a slow, almost meditative circle. Later, as Gerry laments the weight gain she has experienced as a side effect of her medication, she lays on the ice

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along the ocean shore remarkably close to a fat seal. The image expresses the absurdity of human life and also signals the iconography of the province, with Peggy wryly commenting from behind the camera: “Some people see a beautiful wild animal and others see a coat.” In response to hair loss and as a performative gesture of communal healing, Gerry organizes a wig-making party with an impressive accumulation of donations – whole families send packages of hair, locks of hair saved over generations; a man gives the long hair cut off when he entered the seminary; a woman gives her long braid cut off before beginning her own chemo treatment. At this point, the film breaks from the confessional form into a kind of performance, as Gerry declares: “The wig is a testament of life.” This is not a film about mourning, though it is about the experience of crisis and grief, and like the follow-up film, Pleasant Street (2004), made with fellow cancer patients and neighbours in St John’s, it is as much about life and love. Pleasant Street engages a therapeutic process as the filmmaker and members of the community attend to her neighbours. This disease is everywhere, but the effects are held privately, and these films provide a public forum of expression, demonstrating the vitality of documentary as a point of entry for that which is hidden. We are introduced to Leida Finlayson, thirty-one years old and diagnosed with untreatable melanoma, and Ken Hickey, in his early forties and diagnosed with an extremely rare form of pancreatic cancer. As he says, “there are only eighteen reported cases. You’d have a better chance of winning the Lotto than getting this.” We witness the effects of disease on the body, but also the spirit of self and a need, on the part of Ken and Leida, to share something of themselves through the camera. In a moment of comic absurdity, we see Ken’s partner, Rolanda, rushing to the FedEx drop-off depot with a package that must be shipped immediately, a sperm sample that is to be frozen and stored in a preservation facility. She remarks on the curious timing of airline schedules, traffic congestion, and ejaculation that must be met in order to preserve the promise of life in the event of Ken’s death. By the end of the film, we are relieved to learn that Ken’s cancer is in remission but, sadly, Leida’s condition worsens over the course of the film, and she dies in 2003. We mourn for Leida, but we are privileged to have had the opportunity to get to know her in the limited performative way that film allows. Norm (Dir: Kent Nason and Teresa MacInnes, 2008) is a documentary about Norm Llewellyn, an elderly Nova Scotia man with Down syndrome and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Norm cannot talk but he communi-

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cates in amazing ways, and this has a powerful impact on the people around him, including the filmmakers. We see that he is both old man and child, bursting into crying fits and in need of everyday care. But his gaze penetrates directly into the camera, confronting us with gesture and voice. Through this portrait, the film illuminates the place of difference. Documentary is able to explore the margins of society in a way that transcends superficial media reporting and social stereotypes, but it is also the kind of filmmaking that is increasingly difficult to get made even within the state-supported Canadian system. That system is influenced by entertainment conventions and is less interested in non-glamorous subjects; what attracts funding, especially from broadcasters looking at a cross-border market, are what filmmaker Teresa MacInnes describes as high-gloss “coffee-table” style programs. What suffers is the kind of filmmaking that requires an organic relationship with the subject built over a long period of time. Norm was shot over five years, and it is through that extended process that the depth of the subject emerges. When Norm was born, he was deemed a “Mongolian idiot,” in the medical language of the day, and institutionalization was the expected outcome. He was put into foster care at the age of fourteen, and this had a devastating effect on his sister, who later reunited with him to provide care as an adult. His birth parents participate in the film and give us a sense of the social context of the day – the shame and complete absence of support mechanisms. Family does not simply exist, it is made (or destroyed) by the social context, and the film details its retrieval. Here, Norm is not a marginal case study of disability; he is made central: he is a teacher providing lessons on how to love. This is also the lesson of Four Feet Up (Dir: Nance Ackerman, 2009), a film about the persistence of grinding poverty in the rich country of Canada, with a focus on an exceptional eight-year-old boy named Isaiah Jackson and his family in Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. The film begins with Isaiah waking up on 24 November 2009, twenty years after the Canadian government’s empty promise to end child poverty by the year 2000, and concludes with him going to bed a year later. This subject is continued on the Web in Ackerman’s The Anniversary Project, which extended the documentary into an interactive realm on a national scale and was designed to draw attention to poverty and advocate for social change.¹00 Four Feet Up fits within this theme of the body by the fact that poverty has a direct effect on a child’s physical, intellectual, and emotional development. The film does not take poverty as an abstract social condition; rather, it is grounded in a specific location – the incredibly fertile Valley – as well as in attitudes of judgment

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directed at the poor. Place is not taken for granted as pastoral splendour; the film asks why hunger should exist at all in a locale that harvests much of the region’s fruit and vegetables. This view is not the outside gaze of the well-meaning filmmaker; instead, the subject guides it. We see Isaiah drawing a picture of the pastoral ravine behind his home, but it is not all flowers and trees. The drawing also highlights the garbage, old tires, and sludge that are part of this landscape. Isaiah is a young child experiencing the ups and downs of everyday life, but a child who is incredibly mature and sensitive to his surroundings and to the struggles of his family. The shooting style brings us inside the subject in a way that is unlike more conventional televisionoriented documentary. During many of the interviews with the film’s subjects, we see them in extreme close-up, forcing an almost uncomfortable presence that refuses the treatment of poverty as abstraction held at a distance from the viewers. The filmmaker, who had an accomplished earlier career as a photographer, turns her still camera over to Isaiah to explore his world. The photographic aesthetic is integrated with an activist ethos. This chapter concludes on Prince Edward Island. Stalking Love (2005) is the first film by Millefiore Clarke, a low-budget video road movie exploring the idea of love – love is, among other things, of the body. Stalking Love complements Scouts Are Cancelled, with which I began this chapter. Both are made with a raw indie film spirit, but in this case, the local is mitigated by an ideal of the universal in a journey across Canada, through the US, and into Mexico, and includes rich and poor characters, young and old, prostitutes, street people, and priests. All the characters are asked to respond to the impossible question of, “What is love?” Some offer a romantic ideal and others cynicism, but all are connected by the filmmaker’s open regard for her subjects. The playful style, though rough in places with frequent zooms and freeze frames common to first-time video users, is as much an exploration of technique as it is of the subject. The style also connects with the landscape-oriented tradition of Canadian experimental filmmaking, notably for instance in the work of pei -born and Ottawa-based filmmaker Rick Hancox, but Clarke was not aware of this tradition at the time of the film’s production. It begins with poetic images of travel, the road at night, close shots – an eye, a bird in flight, piano keys, fire – with the sound of the wind around the microphone and the filmmaker’s voice and then a montage of voices we later return to as the film unfolds. The point is not to document the subject of love in an instrumental way but, instead, to evoke the fluidity, importance, and difficulty of the concept. The images of landscape punctuating

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the film are not to provide a stable sense of place but are linked with the idea of journey and process. In contrast, The Islanders (Dir: Brian Pollard, 1974), released a year after the nfb arrived in the region, casts a nostalgic gaze upon the island with a focus on pride of place and a romantic view of agrarian life structured by a masculine mythology: “The whole society moved to the rhythm of hard work.” In this framework, the question of love is not even possible. More interesting is In Love and Anger: Milton Acorn – Poet (Dir: Kent Martin, 1984), where the beautiful landscape of the island is offset by the proud scowl of the poet: “I was born into an ambush of preachers, propagandists, drafters … And while I learned to despise them all, my dreams were a rubbish of destruction.” Acorn was known as the “people’s poet” for his radical working-class perspective and sharp criticism of elite privilege. The poet is not searching for an idealized past; instead, he is redeeming the potential radicalism in a more fully formed regional identity. We see him walking the paper route he had as a child, and this mapping of pei gives us the region not as tourism postcard but as a space defined by economic relations that are the determinant forces of culture. He might agree with the conclusion of Stalking Love: love, like place and for that matter documentary film, is fragile and fragmented by the contours of sadness and joy. The next chapter deals with films made with one foot in the art scene and the other foot in the commercial sphere. It is a way of understanding the idea and ideal of place and desire raised in the documentary films as these impulses intersect with entertainment. Analysis of these films helps us to consider the conditions of regional filmmaking, what regionality means to the question of national cinema, and what avenues allow for some resistance to the commercial machine.

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If cinema is one of the media through which we imagine place, it must also be acknowledged that place is one of the templates with which we imagine cinema. Cinema, in other words, has commonly been analyzed as a medium of expression specific to a geographically situated culture. And within cinema’s taxonomy, privilege has been granted to national cultures. Mike Gasher, Hollywood North¹

CHA PTER 4

Border Crossing from Art to Industry and Back Again This chapter is interested in filmmaking that comes out of the art cinema tradition but is made in the context of what is now a well-established culture industry. Here, I examine the formation of that industry through analysis of select feature films but also in relation to policy formation with the case study of the establishment of the Nova Scotia provincial film office. These shifts are understood in relation to Frankfurt school theorizations of the culture industry and by looking at the use of media in development of the tourism sector.

NOT GOIN’ DOWN THE ROAD

The iconic Canadian film from the early days of the country’s feature film industry is Goin’ Down the Road (Dir: Don Shebib, 1970), about Pete and Joey, two boys in adult bodies who travel from Cape Breton to Toronto in search of work and happiness. The film has been critically embraced as reflecting something of the truth of the Canadian experience with its focus on outsider characters travelling from ‘the regions’ to the centre. The reception of the film is consistent with Gasher’s observation of the relationship between geography and national cinema, but, as Gasher notes, plenty of films do not fit this template. Much has been made of the film’s documentary-like style – using hand-held 16mm camerawork and working mostly under available light – and how this style reflects the history of filmmaking in this country and something of the observational quality of the Canadian consciousness. In his landmark essay on the National Film Board’s Studio b , Peter Harcourt called the Canadian documentary style “innocent” and conveying “a quality of suspended judgment, of something left open at the end, of something undecided.”² Christine Ramsey takes up this idea of innocence: “As Pete and Joey attempt to move from the margins to the centre, cultures clash and male egos take a beating. Thus, our national concern, if not obsession, with the problems of successfully creating an imagined community is negotiated in and through this text as a site of regional, class, cultural, and gender conflict.”³ Ramsey makes an important point about the gap between the stereotyped on-screen characters and the unequal power relationships that define Canada in social and economic terms. However, in my view, the gross stereotypes of the film, both of regional character and working-class experience, negate whatever it may have to say. Chris Byford has pointed out the absurdity of many of Goin’ Down the Road’s scenes, such as Pete’s desire to secure a job at an advertising firm. “If we feel empathy for Pete during his interview at the firm, it is largely a result of the absurdity of the situation and not because it reveals a truism of marginality.”4 Byford goes on to point out how the parody of the film in the tv show sctv (broadcast 1976–1984 and originating with Second City, the Toronto improvisational comedy troupe), where John Candy and Joe Flaherty go west for “some of those doctorin’ and lawyerin’ jobs” is more accurate in its demonstration of “an already ridiculous idea through mimicry.”5 The point is that a film such as this, while claiming to articulate the experience of working-class marginality in ‘the regions’ displaces the complexity of social conditions through dehistoricization and simplification. Migration

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for work is central to life in Atlantic Canada, but that does not mean that workers are, as a consequence, locked into a suspended adolescence disconnected from a network of social relations. In 2011, Shebib released a sequel called Down the Road Again. The film has Pete return to Sydney, Nova Scotia, with Joey’s ashes, though it is actually shot in Vancouver and Toronto. The sequel trades on nostalgic fondness for the original but now has even less to say about the concept of region. Shebib’s sequel is made within what is now a fully developed media industry, conditions that certainly did not exist at the time of the original, but something is lost in this maturation. While no studio infrastructure existed in Canada in the early 1970s, there was a studio mogul in Budge Crawley. Crawley was a charismatic and prolific private-sector producer who was very influential to the careers of many Canadian filmmakers but mostly excluded from the critical history of filmmaking in this country.6 Crawley Films in its forty-year operation, closing in 1989, made around 5,000 films, including documentary, feature, government, and corporate industrial films and received Canada’s first feature-length documentary Oscar in 1976.7 I mention this absence from general film history because Budge Crawley put up $50,000, out of a total budget of $350,000, to become executive producer of an interesting but less canonized film shot in Atlantic Canada: The Rowdyman (Dir: Peter Carter, 1972). Following the success of this film, Crawley was able to re-release Newfoundland Scene (1952), his portrait of the province as it joins Confederation, with Gordon Pinsent hired as narrator. The film strives to represent many aspects of life in the province, but the main distinction of the re-released version is the omission of sequences that, in the original, provided vivid detail of whale hunting. As Barbara Wade Rose says: “The powerful, blood-tinged whaling shots, brilliantly filmed by Budge at the cost of the sight in his right eye, had become unpalatable to animal rights activists and were sliced to the cutting-room floor.”8 The film was commissioned by Imperial Oil Ltd to help integrate Newfoundland into the narrative of the nation, but the cross-border conditions are just as interesting: “Hollywood director Irwin Allen purchased Budge’s seafaring footage and used it, unchanged, in his film The Sea Around Us, which went on to be nominated for several international awards and won an Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1953 … The storm sequence in [David] Lean’s 1970 film Ryan’s Daughter was patterned after the one Budge clambered around a whaling ship to film for his 39-minute portrait of life in Newfoundland.”9 These references are important in consideration of regional filmmaking as integrated into a broader sphere of production and reception.

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Actor Gordon Pinsent wrote the screenplay for The Rowdyman and performed the iconic lead role of the charming and rebellious Will Cole who, according to the film’s promotional material, is a man whose philosophy is “seduce it if it moves, drink it if it pours.” Set in Corner Brook and St John’s, the film wants to be true to place, but also to convey this reality in a mainstream-styled movie. As Peter Morris summarizes: “Peter Carter’s cryptoHollywood style seems often at odds with Pinsent’s ideas, which emphasize (as so many other Canadian films of the period) the relationship between the environment and the outsider hero who has painfully to learn, if not accept, the significance of social integration.”¹0 The character’s distinct accent discouraged American distributors of the film, though it was popular in Canada at the time of release.¹¹ Morris’s comments implicitly struggle with the question of who is the author. What is overlooked is the interactive and performative process of authorship in the making of feature films, and the financial and market imperatives on the work. Pinsent himself describes, in his autobiography, the writing of this role as a way of reconnecting with the side of himself that would have been, had he not moved away from his place of birth, the pulp and paper mill town of Grand Falls.¹² Pinsent’s story is also told in the bio film Still Rowdy after All These Years (Dir: Barbara Doran, 2011). Another approach is to see The Rowdyman and Will Cole as markers of resistance to the regime of order and the complacency of work, leisure, and family in contemporary society. Will charms everyone, and while his sexuality is characterized by a fear of real intimacy, his refusal to deny the pleasures of the body is refreshingly at odds with the puritan strain of AngloCanadian culture. An early scene in the film of a playful pillow fight in a brothel would not have been out of place in French New Wave films from the era. Will is told several times in the film that it is time to ‘grow up,’ and at one point is even seen with a slingshot in hand. The film implicitly asks whether the society as given is one worth growing into. On the one hand, the film can be seen as perpetuating the Goin’ Down the Road stereotype of drunken irresponsibility – and when Will is late for his best friend Andrew’s wedding due to his all-night boozing (he gets into a fight in a bakery and we see him wandering the streets in a blanket dusting of white flour), it is hard to feel sympathetic. On the other hand, unlike the pathetic model of survival and alienation in Goin’ Down the Road, here we are shown adulthood to be a disappointment and the workplace – anchor of social responsibility – to be grim and violent. Andrew dies in an industrial accident soon after marriage. Will blames himself for the accident, and while it is true that his irrespons-

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ibility on the job created conditions of danger, it is also true that in a dangerous workplace like a paper mill, fatal accidents are all too common. Andrew is presented as the alternative model of masculinity for Will to follow; the film suggests that the triad of marriage-work-family under this system of social organization is already a form of death. At one time, the Corner Brook Bowater paper mill was the largest in the world, and the profits earned at this plant helped finance the company’s international expansion. In 2008, then-premier Danny Williams expropriated company assets after another mill was closed, arguing that these assets belong to the citizens and were not being developed in a way that would benefit the province. The federal government paid the company through an almost-immediate North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) settlement.¹³ Bowater long had the Smallwood government’s support, notably in the harsh red-baiting opposition to a labour strike by members of the International Woodworkers of America in 1958–59. In staging the Mummers Troupe show Company Town in 1974, just two years after the release of The Rowdyman, in the mining community of Buchans, Chris Brookes describes the context: “The company cars drove around without provincial license plates. They didn’t need them because the company, not the province, was the law in Buchans.”¹4 This social-economic reality is at odds with the picturesque ideal of the region promoted by the province. The opening of Rowdyman, with its languid shots of Corner Brook, suggests a rigid social framework where characters fulfill a script already written. Will’s role as town troublemaker is emphasized in his conflict with the local cop. When the comic chase scene is played out, it appears that the two are re-enacting recurring and well-rehearsed roles. Near the end, Will’s descent is marked by his grief at the news of the death of the old cop, and of the fragmenting of roles within the social narrative. The opening scene sets up a generational and establishment versus outsider conflict that is familiar in contemporaneous cinema of the time. To escape this environment, Will travels frequently to St John’s to visit Stan, his mentor and surrogate father (played by American character actor and social activist Will Geer). On the train trip to town, we see Will seduce a young woman, but later, on the city streets, he is helping elderly ladies cross through busy traffic. His kindredspirit Stan is idolized as a rum-running, hard-living hellraiser who refused to settle down, but is near the end of his life and regrets not pursuing his true love. After a scene of boisterous play, Stan dies while Will pushes him in his wheelchair. Stan leaves Will his collection of treasured love letters. One response is to agree that it is time for Will to grow up, but at the margins of

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the film remains a refusal to accept the limits of propriety and social convention, given the fleeting brevity of life. The concluding image of the film affirms that refusal. In a desperate and delirious effort to win back Ruth, his own lost love, Will races to her house and, breathless from the run, attempts to assault her soon-to-be husband. The scene ends in desperation, but Ruth’s warm laughter as she drives away affirms at least the spark of desire for an alternative to existing social relations. The film’s final image is Will walking away, after having talked his way out of police charges, and his back to the camera, kicking up his heels. There are limits to the reading of this film as resistant to prevailing ideology since it does not provide a viable alternative except in the character’s individual non-conformity. Malek Khouri identifies this limit in Pinsent’s later film John and the Missus (1987), where individual free will becomes the currency of resistance, but so long as it remains at the level of the individual, collective change is impossible. As Khouri explains, free will functions “as an ideological reaffirmation of capitalist hegemony within a Canadian (and specifically Atlantic Canadian) historical and economic political context.”¹5 John and the Missus deals specifically with broad social issues – the Newfoundland government–mandated abandonment of outport communities and resettlement of the citizenry in what were called “growth centres” (with the stated requirement to develop or perish) – but there is a direct line between the character Will Cole and Pinsent’s hardrock miner John Munn. The point is not to say that Pinsent is uninformed of working-class and outport community concerns but that the structure of narrative cinema tends to displace the political in favour of the individual. A similar displacement occurs, as Peter Urquhart argues, in the transformation of the film Margaret’s Museum (Dir: Mort Ransen, 1995) from its original literary and stage form, The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum.¹6 All acts of representation, including critical responses such as this book, are influenced by the social conditions and prevailing ideology out of which they emerge. Individual actions, beliefs, and predispositions are not simply a product of the self but are conditioned by political economy, history, and uneven patterns of economic and social development. F U L L B L A S T , Y E L LO W K N I F E , A N D D O W N T O T H E D I R T

It is important not to lose sight of the fact that good films are made with heart, commitment, and in spite of the administered apparatus of film financing. Here I turn to several films made a generation later that share the energy

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and spark of The Rowdyman. The Quebec-New Brunswick co-production Full Blast (Dir: Rodrigue Jean, 1999) is a queer update of the romantic outsider character yearning to escape from the isolated mill town. The promotional material for Full Blast draws an affinity with Trainspotting (Dir: Danny Boyle, 1996), the Scottish indie film about working-class heroin addicts. Rodrigue Jean has indicated that he “hoped to make a bridge to the gritty films made in Montreal in the ’70s by Denys Arcand, Francis Mankiewicz and André Forcier.”¹7 There was, however, an extremely negative response on the part of funding agency managers: “people from the funding bodies [would be] shouting at me as if I’d raped their daughter or something.”¹8 This resistance to a film that eventually found a receptive theatrical audience, at least in Montreal, demonstrates the pressure, on the part of public financing agencies, to promote filmmaking that is more easily recognizable as popular genre product and thus less distinct and less specifically of its place and time. In Full Blast, sexuality is more fluid than the gatekeepers would like, beer is mixed with pot and other drugs, and the soundtrack is dystopian grunge. Shot on location in various Acadian communities, including Bathurst, New Brunswick, this fiction film captures the desire to get away from the remote rural community and the despairing impossibility of escape for the working-class characters. They are locked in place by economic policies that concentrate wealth in some areas while marginalizing others to zones of resource extraction. The location is never specifically named, but the Acadian speech patterns are as familiar as the landscape and the smoke-engulfed skies to anyone who has at least passed through northern New Brunswick. The smokestack pollution and the constant smoking of all the characters make us feel the suffocating smell of a paper mill. In a comic scene of desperation for easy money and a nod to another icon of the region’s economy, Piston and Steph break into a fish-processing warehouse and steal handfuls of frozen fish, but they are stoned and the fish are slippery. Later, Steph finds Piston surrounded by rotting fish; he was unable or uninterested in making any sales. The image connects the film with several contemporary Quebec art films: the powerful image of a block of frozen trout decomposing in a motel bathroom sink in Le Confessional (Dir: Robert Lepage, 1995) and the fish on the chopping block as narrator in Maelström (Dir: Denis Villeneuve, 2000). The opening of Full Blast is a slow-motion shot across the hard-pebbled surface of the ocean shore. The abstraction of the blurred surface is juxtaposed with a shot of three speeding all-terrain vehicles erratically bumping into each other, one with a young child precariously balanced in between the

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driver (her father, Piston) and the handlebars (in a region where even the use of helmets and minimum age requirements for atv use is hotly debated). Even the beauty of the ocean provides no relief as it comes to signal the way the characters are confined to this rough terrain rather than offered possibilities of transformation. This is the social and environmental frame for characters travelling at top speed, full blast, with no place to go. We see images of the lumber mill that recall The Rowdyman, but now the lead character can no longer remain detached from the system; instead, the violence of the industrial economy and workplace is turned inward. This point is suggested in the scene of bad parenting described above and is demonstrated in a ritual of homosocial violence at the end of the workday. Piston and his close friend, Steph, are leaving the shower room, and several other men block their way and force Piston to burn his friend’s arm with a cigarette. Soon, work at the mill is shut down due to a labour strike, but the violence of work is now fully internalized. Where a steady job at the mill is a kind of defeat in the world of The Rowdyman, in Full Blast even the promise of regular employment is already long past; the characters are surplus labour in a political economy of uneven development. It is helpful to know that Jean was a dancer and choreographer before becoming a filmmaker. The way we see characters interact in this and his follow-up feature, Yellowknife (2002), is informed by this sensibility. Here, dance is not a concept abstracted from everyday life but is found in the ensemble approach to characters and resistance to language as a dominant structuring force. What is spoken is less important than the manner in which characters move through space. Language functions more as gesture than verbal communication, and shifts between English and French. Movement is for the sake of having to move and action is of the body: drinking, smoking, pissing, fucking. Consider the kinds of spaces deployed in these films: smoke-filled bars, motels, run-down American cars, fast food diners, parking lots, phone booths, laundry rooms, and the grey cloud-covered, road. In Yellowknife, home is a recreational vehicle. Sex is as likely to occur in a public washroom as in a bedroom, and may as well be masturbation. The film opens with an urge to move. Max arrives at a hospital to rescue Linda, who may or may not be his sister but who is, at times, his girlfriend, or at least his sex partner. This opening environment is an institution associated with illness, disease, and injury. We do not see any medical personnel, and so it is difficult to refer to this environment as characterized by care. Max and Linda get nowhere: they are headed toward the mythic north of the film’s title, but this remains unrealized except as fantasy for the reinvention of the self. One

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does not get the sense that they are really interested in self-transformation; they simply have an urge to move and keep moving. Nature provides no relief from the constraints of society. It is simply a source of resources for the lumber mill or a barrier between other destinations. After getting out of the hospital, Linda seeks solace standing by the sea, but the sound of chainsaws intrudes on the soundtrack. No image of nature in these films passes unframed by the social. In Jean’s films the characters are playing roles, or functioning as surfaces, in a way that mirrors this dystopian idea of nature. In Full Blast, Piston and Steph get their rock band together as a way to pass the time during the strike at the mill, but also as a way of arresting the responsibilities of adulthood. Band-member Charles returns to the community driving a bright-red Porsche, icon of his wealth and an echo of the return of Sweet William, the gay son who fled the homophobia of small-town Nova Scotia in Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden (1997), discussed later in this chapter. He is a would-be prodigal son, except there is no home for him to return to. He is staying alone at the family cottage (we are told that his family prefers that he stay away), which he burns to the ground at the film’s conclusion. At the cottage, he provides Steph with clean clothes, and moments later they are naked and fucking next to the blazing fireplace. On the one hand, there is little suggestion of intimacy between the act of kindness and the performance of sex. On the other hand, an immersion in corporal experience and desire fuels action, and these actions are refreshingly free of social conventions governing relationships. The cottage arson is not simply a self-destructive, violent response to Charles’s unrequited love for Steph but also a way of opposing prevailing class and sexual politics, as Tom Waugh says: “His final act before leaving is to set the place on fire, a gesture of rejecting both his heritage as boss’s son in this exploitive economic arena and his sexual marginality in this town that is too small.”¹9 The fire returns the built structure to nature, and the scene mirrors an amazing set-up by the ocean where a disconsolate Piston, inside another cottage, is firing a rifle. His ex-partner and mother of his child approaches, and we wonder if someone will be killed. What we have left is the relentlessness of the sea, but it is impossible to see this landscape except through the frame of human action. Full Blast concludes with Charles dropping Steph off on the deserted street in front of the looming mill. The way we see family in Yellowknife is through the strained relationship between Max and Linda. As they drive away from the hospital, they stop to pick up two hitchhikers – twins, or look-alike lovers, who are itinerant exotic

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dancers. Throughout, ‘family’ is formed through random encounters, and relationships are ambiguous but may offer relief from the dysfunctional constraints of the nuclear family. Later, Max and Linda encounter Marlene and Johnny, whose home is the recreational vehicle. She is a fading lounge singer (played with gritty world-weariness by pop singer Patsy Gallant), and with her boyfriend and manager, the two could be surrogate parents, except that they are alternately despairing and despicable. At one point, Marlene clothes Linda in one of her old dresses, a moment suggestive of the bond between a mother and daughter, but whatever generative pleasure is fleeting. First, Linda is so emotionally fragile and alienated that she is unable to accept the gesture of kindness. Later, Johnny backs her into a corner, urges her to lift up the hem of the dress and masturbates. Linda is both frightened and complicit, and she repeats this game of autoeroticism with Johnny in a secluded forest, where a police officer with eyes for Linda shoots him dead. Again, there is no innocence in nature or in play. The shooting echoes an earlier scene where Max runs over a deer while driving on the highway, and the cop shot it, too, in the head. At the film’s conclusion, in a shot that mirrors the opening in the hospital, with the camera following close behind, Max is led away by police, having been charged with Johnny’s murder. The location is a stark, whitewashed series of apartment buildings suggestive of the communist-era eastern block (shot in a low-rent area of Winnipeg’s francophone community of St Boniface). Linda, a look of bleak resignation on her face, leaves with the cop. Rodrigue Jean’s third feature in this trilogy is Lost Song (2008). Set in the Laurentians, Lost Song is inspired by the Greek tragedy Medea but set in the modern age of global capitalism, asking how tragedy can come to be in this world of affluence. A mother spends the summer at a cottage with her husband, their new and as-yet-unnamed baby, and her intrusive motherin-law. The film is remarkable for the degree of tension elicited between the characters through what is not said and where every action, however simple, has huge psychological and material repercussions. Jean moved the film and his production company to Quebec after being refused financing and support for the project at the script stage by the Halifax office of Telefilm Canada. The film took five years to produce, in part, because it was developed through prolonged conversations with the cast members, many of whom are not professional actors. While this casting poses a challenge for filmmaking, it also provides a degree of freedom not easily achieved with professional actors who are more self-conscious of the presence of the camera. When asked about his rehearsal process, the director admitted that

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there is no formula that can be applied to all actors, but that most often more time is required with trained actors “because you have to undo the tricks they do for television.”²0 The barriers to completing the film are a consequence of the conservative instrumentalization of culture as industry. As Jean declares bluntly: “The whole industry has been hijacked by producers in Montreal and Toronto, so it is a client-based financing system in the country now. And it is even worse for people coming from Halifax or outside the big centres.”²¹ His point is that the Hollywood model, so fondly followed by the funding agencies, is a dead end because it is impossible to achieve real box-office success in this country, due to the geographic expanse and small population base. Full Blast is set in one of the oldest industrial areas of the country but where working-class residents live, in the words of the director, “almost in a state of apartheid.”²² Yellowknife focuses on the brother and sister on the road, heading north to escape the circumstances of region. Lost Song concludes the trilogy with a focus on the beneficiaries of global capitalism. With the birth of the child in Lost Song, all the comforts of bourgeois affirmation disintegrate, and while the fate of the child remains ambiguous at the conclusion, it is clear that any potential for harmony between mother and child in the beautiful Laurentians is shattered by the intrusions of what passes for civilization. These three films together express the specificity of an Acadian–New Brunswick experience of being in the world in a way that Jean describes as “beyond language.”²³ Lost Song is also a film that, without pandering to the reductionist direction of the media marketplace, remains more broadly universal in setting while expressing a strong sense of grounding in community. Down to the Dirt (2008) is the first feature film by St John’s filmmaker Justin Simms and is funded by Telefilm’s Low Budget Independent Feature Film Assistance Program, along with provincial and pay-television investment. This financing is important to note since it is less beholden to the box-office imperative driving Telefilm’s more generous Feature Film Fund envelope.²4 The stated mandate of this low-budget envelope is to support “culturally relevant director-driven low budget feature films.” In spite of the token funding available, this is important because it avoids some of the formulaic script-vetting of other funding envelopes. The program is “directordriven” while the broader film industry has followed the business model of producer-driven operations. In the case of television funding, producers may apply to the Canada Media Fund (administered by Telefilm) as well as for a separate broadcast licence (financed by a fee collected from broadcasters and then distributed in designated funding envelopes). Telefilm’s Feature

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Figure 4.1 | Joel Thomas Hynes as Keith Kavanagh in the gutter at the beginning of Down to the Dirt.

Film Fund earmarks funds for production companies with an existing track record of box-office success, further marginalizing films with challenging subject material since the business model encourages producers to follow existing conventions. These conditions of financing help frame the possibilities and limits of the narrative. Down to the Dirt is a film about language and place, but is also about a yearning to escape the local and, in spite of some shortcomings related to budget limitations, represents an exciting maturation and energy in regional filmmaking. At the time of its release, Down to the Dirt was favourably compared in popular media reports with The Rowdyman, a comparison the director accepts and appreciates. Both films tell the story of the coming-of-age of a character whose identity is strongly grounded in the local environment but who is also defiantly an outsider. Both films reflect the time and circumstances of production, and shed light on differences in the region since Rowdyman’s 1972 screen debut and Dirt’s release in 2008. Dirt is adapted

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from the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by St John’s writer Joel Thomas Hynes, who also plays the film’s lead character, Keith Kavanagh, and who had earlier played the role in a stage adaptation of part of the book called The Devil You Don’t Know (Resource Centre for the Arts mainstage, St John’s, 2003). A key change in the screen adaptation is the age of the character. While he is in his late teens in the novel, he is a man of thirty in the film. The self-destructiveness resonates quite differently with age: there is more contempt than pity among his family and neighbours, and the possibility for transformation is increasingly desperate as one is further along the one-way street of mortality. When we first see this character on screen, he is drunk, bloodied, and passed out in a pool of water. Kavanagh is a poet yearning for the truth of experience like the inebriated wanderers of Kerouac’s On the Road, but he is also a self-destructive asshole and petty criminal who eventually finds pain and redemption in love, friendship, and the act of writing. Kavanagh yearns to escape from The Cove, an outport he describes as needing “some serious redesigning before it could be raised to the level of humble origins.” There is no pastoral yearning for the simple pleasures of the seaside. Instead, we see the character as product of a bleak and mean-spirited place of dead-end desperation or quiet resignation. In contrast, howevermuch Gordon Pinsent’s Rowdyman resisted the tyranny of mind-numbing industrial labour, at least employment was an option to react against. That earlier film also emerges on a wave of interest in folk culture marked by the popularity of such musical groups as Newfoundland’s Figgy Duff, performing traditional Celtic music to popular acclaim.²5 While there remains a fondness for this kind of cultural activity, contemporary filmmaking in Newfoundland is urban and influenced by more international approaches to storytelling. Hynes as Kavanagh defiantly refuses polite conformity, and in this way the character is a living manifesto for independent culture, rejecting anti-modern folk sentiment and the generic qualities of commercial media. The film can be seen as a bridge between the counterculture spirit of the 1970s and the birth of independent filmmaking through the regional coops, as well as the need to resist present-day cultural hegemony. When we find Kavanagh in the grime of the post-binge despair of the film’s opening, we are invited to experience the grit and physicality of place not as distant spectacle or quaint surrounding but as condition of character. Most of the film’s camerawork is hand-held, engaging a more subjective, internalized, and immediate response to the surroundings. The narration: “Listen. You’ve got to be very particular about how you looks when they find you,” states a self-destructiveness that is integral to character. From this

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opening image of the living dead, the film cuts back to Kavanagh’s birth in order to introduce the father (Robert Joy) as ineffectual drunk – suggesting a continuity of self-destructiveness and setting up later confrontations with authority figures. The father also provides a way out by giving his son a notebook in which he begins to write – the blank pages become the place where the son invents his life. This tattered book is a vehicle for self-transformation as it is carried through the film’s locations – from outport to St John’s, then to Halifax and back again. There is so much baggage between father and son that they cannot speak to each other, but they are connected by the words Keith inscribes in the book. One of the things I admire about this film is the conviction with which it engages with place while at the same time avoiding a myopic nostalgia, discovering instead the universal in the particulars. We see this both in the naming of place and in the use of language, the gritty vernacular of working-class Newfoundland. Early in the film, when he is detained by the police over a charge of arson and handcuffed to a bunk as punishment for his rudely accurate poem describing the protruding waistline of the constabulary, Kavanagh cannot help but desperately grasp for a pencil with which to write. Just as he destroys himself through substance abuse and violence, he performs himself through language. Kavanagh makes his break from The Cove with his new lover Natasha (Mylène Savoie), and while they have a volatile relationship, it is through this experience of love that he can begin to find his creative voice. His answer to Natasha’s question of why he writes begins off-handedly, but then reveals an existential dimension. “I just sit down sometimes, got a book, got a pencil, just kinda feel a little less contained.” Though the characters pack their bags full with self-destructiveness on the move to downtown St John’s, it is here that they are made whole, not just as functions of the closed world that is The Cove. The characteristics of urban life – anonymity, density, proximity – are declared as pleasures, but it cannot last. It needs to be said that these are romanticized ideals: St John’s is not a big city. Following an aborted pregnancy, Natasha moves to Halifax to pursue a theatre career and is later followed by an increasingly desperate and crazed Kavanagh. Their final magic mushroom–fuelled binge has the boy-man dressed in one of Natasha’s dresses, and while it is a playful moment, the ill-fitting outfit demonstrates the impossibility of this character stepping out of the straitjacket of masculinity. In the final blow to the possibility of domestic bliss, the morning-after hangover is met by the sad discovery that their pet cat has ingested poison and must be put down. A remorseful Kavanagh staggers through an over-

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Figure 4.2 | A wounded Joel Thomas Hynes as Keith Kavanagh with Mylène Savoie as Natasha near the conclusion of Down to the Dirt.

grown area behind their house, still wearing the now-tattered dress, to drown the creature. His relationship with other men in the film likewise charts a path between possible versions of masculinity. Andy (Phil Churchill) is dull but well intentioned – a straight-and-narrow childhood friend who tolerates and forgives his friend’s excesses. Francey (Jody Richardson), on the other hand, is the violent alternative who mockingly bonds with Kavanagh by declaring that they are both “cockroaches.” Kavanagh is too much the undeclared romantic to accept this position at the bottom of the food chain even if that is where social and economic class places them. His eventual break from the downward spiral occurs when he follows Natasha to Halifax where, in an over-the-top drunken performance, he wears his identity as Newfoundlander on his sleeve. In a park bench encounter with a prostitute (played by filmmaker and actor Sherry White, who also co-wrote the screenplay), Kavanagh’s alcoholdrenched body is unable to perform sexually, but he does impress in the role of Newfoundlander. His distinct speech prompts an invitation to her place

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and the explosive encounter with her pimp, Renny (Hugh Dillon). At the same time, Natasha is on a date with a well-dressed and over-pretentious theatre friend, whose performance of mannered and shallow privilege plays as stereotype of what Kavanagh (and perhaps writer Joel Hynes) would view as the inauthentic mainlander. His own over-the-top posturing is the voice of a boy trying too hard to be a man; a macho play-acting that gets in the way of the film’s quest to reveal the truth of his character. When he is caught in the petty act of stealing a few bottles of Renny’s contraband liquor, it is Dillon, the star actor from away, who takes the role of menacing and violent outsider. Dillon/Renny is an alternate-father teaching what it means to be a grown-up crazed maniac while also teaching the regional actor what it really means to perform. Renny chains the boy-man to a pipe and beats him viciously while informing him, in no uncertain terms: “Bulgarians invented the fucking bagpipes. Not the Irish, not the Scottish, and not the motherfucking Newfoundlanders.” So much for the tourist image. What follows is a return to the sight that began the film: Kavanagh battered and unconscious in a puddle of muddy water – now outside of Natasha’s home. What is he looking for but some truth in the dirt and grime of the self so that he can return home. Down to the Dirt is not a perfect film, but it is made with a distinct voice and is unafraid of expressing identity in terms of language and place. These qualities make it distinct from the increasingly generic media products produced in this country. INDUSTRY

In Canada, like everywhere, there exists a division between the idea of cinema as art or as industry, but these terms have always been fluid. After all, the art cinema of the 1960s was commercially viable. It was, however, also driven by a newly constituted ideal of cinema as a distinct art form and something deserving of public financial support. Today, under the dominant frame of neo-liberalism, this kind of support is more often understood as a business subsidy fuelled in Canada by assumptions of market share and the supposed failure of Canadian film. In this context, regional production is no guarantee of difference. Just because a production is local by no means guarantees it being more politically progressive than the product of a multinational, vertically integrated media conglomerate, for it is the latter that is the business model for the former. The idea of regionalism is as likely to be mobilized for reactionary or simply nostalgic ends, though it does contain at least the potential for the expression of difference. For various reasons

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related to structural conditions of the market and changing demographics as well as the particular talents of the filmmakers, the various New Wave cinemas emerging in the 1960s gained substantial audience share. They were also the product of European cross-border financing and marketing, and not untouched by commercial imperatives.²6 But what is art cinema and how does it function in the contemporary context? Stephen Crofts points out how this form has evolved, in part through the rise of a Hollywood version of art cinema: “This has contributed to a blurring of boundaries between specialist and entertainment market sectors in its own market and abroad, and has weakened the assertions of independence made by other art cinemas … A principal upshot has been a blurring of national cinema differences”²7 It is in this conceptual ambiguity (or hybridity) that Canadian cinema exists. It is instructive to compare Down to the Dirt with a Nova Scotia feature released in the same year, Growing Op (Dir: Michael Melski, 2008). It is a coming-of-age comedy about a teenage boy named Quinn (Steven Yaffe) growing up with pot-growing parents, and the film does a good job at capturing the language of its teenage characters. The film’s press made much of the coup of landing an American star, Rosanna Arquette, in the role of Quinn’s mother. Canadians are always pleased by American approval and, to be sure, Arquette has a strong and unconventional screen persona, but her presence has as much to do with the market conventions of b -movies; it is this imperative that drives the casting. As Fred Wasser points out in an insightful study of the political economy of the movie industry, “The earnings that the distributor can put together determine the overall allocation of production resources. It is only as secondary players that the writers, directors, set designers, et al., can make their operational decisions in terms of actual filmmaking.”²8 In the wider American-dominated media marketplace, even a second-tier actor represents a defined revenue stream irrespective of the actual on-screen performance. Growing Op pokes fun at the madness of strict anti-drug laws (a subject that is much more readily identifiable as American) and references the pleasures of good dope, while depicting the parents as narrow-minded and judgmental. The film champions Quinn’s desire to fit in with normal (non-pothead) teenage suburban life. While the suburbs are utterly generic and provide the cover for the parent’s grow op, it is an image that at once precludes regional specificity while recalling the generically familiar from such contemporary American films as American Beauty (Dir: Sam Mendes, 1999) and Garden State (Dir: Zach Braff, 2004) but missing the critical pathos of this kind of setting found in To Die For (Dir: Gus Van Sant, 1995) and The

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Ice Storm (Dir: Ang Lee, 1997). In other words, the film imports the cliché of suburbia that, to be sure, is a big part of Canadian life, but absolves it of a specificity that would make the story resonate beyond the blandly familiar. Much of the plot centres on Quinn’s desire to attend a regular high school, rather than continue to be home-schooled, even as it plays on the familiar joke of the mediocrity and conformism of mainstream education. An instructive if passing image encapsulates the way Growing Op obscures its spatial identity for what is probably market concern: when Quinn uncovers a stash of drug money hidden by his parents, it is American cash that we see on-screen even though this image matters little to the impact of the scene and to the flow of the narrative. In contrast, in the many scenes of Kavanagh boozing in Dirt, we repeatedly see him slam a mittful of Canadian bills on the table. Likewise, in a description of the making of the film during a Telefilm-sponsored industry session at the 2007 Silver Wave Film Festival in New Brunswick, the producers took pains to explain the effort of securing fake pot plants, eventually employing the artisanal labour of women from an old-folks home in planting the fake pot. Notwithstanding legal issues and, according to the producers speaking at this forum, the refusal of some crewmembers to work on the set even with hemp as the stand-in weed, the anecdote is certainly a measure of the industry’s drift away from a counterculture impulse. The film’s best scene is where the straight-laced neighbours, who turn out to be police on surveillance, unwittingly become stoned and giddy; it is unfortunate that the filmmakers did not inhale more often themselves as it could only have helped the film become more interesting.²9 The shortcomings of the film are preceded by a much worse Telefilmfunded Nova Scotia film called A Bug and a Bag of Weed (Dir: David Gonella, 2006), again with a faux-transgressive pot plot rolled in sit-com paper. The film deals with a trio of boy-men who work in computer sales and who try to get rich and break free of corporate drudgery by selling the dope they find in an old Volkswagen Bug. The characters yearn to restore their glory days of high school by getting their rock band together so they can return to adolescence. The Bug and Bag boys get stoned and run amok in the nightclub area of Argyle Street in Halifax, which includes a ridiculous fantasy liaison with a couple of strippers. There are no strip clubs in this area of the city, but it is interesting that locale is named rather than hidden, though that hardly redeems the ridiculous plot. A more amusing representation of place is the low-budget Nova Scotia feature Touch and Go (Dir: Scott Simpson, 2002),about a young man who is unable to grow up and whose summer job is as guide for a down-and-out Halifax tour company. The film does a

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good job at gently satirizing the tourism industry, the saccharine marketing of Scottish heritage, and the local attachment to the story of the Titanic. We see a sign in front of a dinner theatre announcing: “Titanic, a chorus line to remember” – complete with bagpiper accompaniment. Michael Melski, who wrote the screenplay for Touch and Go, made the much stronger follow-up feature, Charlie Zone (2011), a film that is more integrally connected to place. Charlie is a boxer who is unable to compete professionally because of misconduct and who earns cash in staged bare-knuckle street fights that are then posted on a fictional website called Halifights. He becomes involved in a plot to rescue a young woman from the street, and with this crime-thriller, we are shown a bleak and brutal underside of Halifax – a city of hard drugs and violent crime. The characters battle their personal demons, but the film strives to show an unadorned city quite unlike the over-produced image of quaint charm associated with the region. It is important that Halifax is named specifically here, though the issues of criminal exploitation and addiction are certainly not exclusive to the place. We see a location populated by outsiders directing violence against each other but who are also produced by the conditions of place. This gritty portrait of the city is unlike the director’s previous film, and while there are occasional questions of believability in the action – for instance, in the almost superhuman ability of the main character to withstand his attackers – it is a wellmade thriller that engages with genre without sacrificing local specificity. The regional film industry expanded from its small-scale art film roots thanks to the concerted efforts of a handful of local producers in lobbying for the establishment of a funding and infrastructure support system.³0 Federal and provincial supports for the film industry through tax credits, rather than through an increase in direct subsidies based on an arts council model of adjudication, is one concrete way that industrial policy influences cultural activity. This mechanism follows strategies for economic development deployed to support other industries. Since it is a refundable tax credit rather than a simple deduction from taxes owed, it is a form of subsidy, though far more complex than a direct grant. The credit works by calculating allowable expenses (such as the cost of employing residents of a given province) and issuing a rebate based on whatever percentage of these expenses is mandated by provincial and/or federal legislation.³¹ Producers are required to demonstrate that the money has been spent within the jurisdiction before a rebate is issued, and this system is especially complex for productions crossing provincial borders. This system is a key method through which regions compete with each other to attract business. Film business is highly

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mobile and without this support it is unlikely that a large-scale industry would remain in the region. The tax credits provide a rebate of labour costs and other eligible expenses and are aimed at supporting local production and attracting offshore producers employing large numbers of people, with attendant accounting requirement complexities in managing the fund. In 2015 the Nova Scotia provincial government drastically cut the tax credit, creating a great deal of outrage and uncertainty on the future viability of the industry and concern over the loss of substantial economic spin-off benefits throughout this province. The result of situating a Telefilm office in Halifax and the opening of provincial film agencies throughout the region is a thriving if seasonal industry employing thousands of people and contributing millions to the local economies. Matters of art film taste aside, Atlantic Canadians, like movie audiences everywhere, have a desire to consume mass-market movie products, but we should not then be surprised that what we have by way of local production is more inflected by conditions outlined by Toby Miller in the book Global Hollywood than by the specificity of regional culture. My point is that the region could have an industry as well as a more mature cultural sphere if investment policies were designed to lead rather than follow the homogenization of existing styles of production. However, this would require acknowledging the impossibility of competing within the global Hollywood marketplace, which, within the flow of contemporary transnational capitalism, no longer requires the nation-state. Nonetheless, it does make use of whatever state subsidies are available, and this is the key aspect of Miller’s Global Hollywood analysis – that regions compete against each other through the marketing of tax credits, subsidies, and other financial advantages. We know from studies of the cultural industries in Canada that culture is not simply an open site of individual expression but is something that is managed in the interests of the nation-state, as Michael Dorland demonstrates in his Foucault-inspired analysis of policy as function of governmentality: “In terms of language within which the Canadian feature was institutionalized as an object of policy, the economic status of the film industry established the feature film as a symbolic, ‘economic’ entity within a discourse of power.”³² In order for film to lead rather than follow within the cultural sphere, a more progressive funding sphere has to be created, as it will not be simply given by the capitalist production apparatus, in contrast to other international cinemas emergent as an alternative to the dominant Hollywood system.³³

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Miller points to regionalism, in spite of its shortcomings, as “a key potential bulwark” against the use of national cinema as training ground for global Hollywood.³4 The Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation (nsfdc ) (later called Filmns and then Film & Creative Industries Nova Scotia until it closed in 2015) was created in 1990, but is the product of producer lobbying efforts beginning in 1984, when a task force consisting of filmmakers, bureaucrats, and a political appointee was formed to study the industry.³5 The nfb also influenced the process through lobbying. The task force was the first time the provincial government commissioned a formal body to report on an aspect of culture, though the nsfdc was set up under the jurisdiction of what was then the Department of Economic Development. Today we take such consultation mechanisms for granted but culture was far outside the day-to-day operation of the province at the time. According to Harold Rennie, a civil servant involved with this file and who went on to study the case history as part of his graduate studies, the support for the arts began in Nova Scotia in the late 1940s through Department of Education Adult Ed activities in support of music and art festivals, local theatre groups, and choirs as well as handicrafts and painters. The Fine Arts and Handcraft Service was formally established in the 1960s, and a decade later it was transferred to the Cultural Affairs Division of the Department of Recreation. The emphasis here is on very traditional practices that have a community development component disconnected from professional art.³6 Given the ghettoization of art as community leisure activity rather than serious profession, there was a strong culture of cynicism on the part of artists. While cultural funding finally increased over the 1970s and consolidated with the creation of a Department of Culture, Recreation and Fitness in 1981, there was a fluctuation in support due to petty small-town politics and a high turnover of culture ministers (on average a new appointee every sixteen months – one minister was convicted of “uttering false documents” and removed from office; another Cabinet minister used his influence to get an unqualified friend a job at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia).³7 The task force focused on economic benefits rather than cultural arguments, a perspective that remains dominant. Provincial politicians were finally attracted to film for economic and job-creation benefits and set up nsfdc as a marketoriented agency, not as a granting council. They were also seduced by the glamour associated with the business. In the fall of 1989, long before his gun could be pried from his cold dead hands, one-time National Rifle Association of America head Charlton Heston was in Halifax on location for

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a film called The Little Kidnappers (Dir: Don Shebib). He also made a promotional video extolling the province as a great film location and attended a photo-op with then-premier John Buchanan, who announced the creation of a film agency. Heston’s opportunism is longstanding: as far back as 1960, he blamed fellow film workers for inspiring runaway productions as a consequence of wage demands.³8 While much of tourism and economic development in the province has relied on traditional industries and an antimodernist cultural identity, Rennie indicates that provincial support for a film industry was hindered by The Bay Boy syndrome, referring to the 1984 nostalgia film (Dir: Daniel Petrie) shot in Nova Scotia that grossly perpetuates backwater stereotypes and presents the province as a place to leave. It took six years for the province to open the agency with a modest investment of $7 million in 1992. The industry has since grown significantly, with total production activity exceeding $150 million by 2009, though it remains highly subject to market volatility. Nova Scotia also got on the continent-wide bandwagon of building soundstages in hopes of attracting big-budget Hollywood productions. In addition to facilities in Halifax, the province took this as an opportunity for rural employment and economic development – with a failed investment in a Cape Breton studio (at a cost of $4.7 million) and a similar failure on the south-shore town of Yarmouth.³9 Support for the arts took a major step backward in 2002 with the dismantling of the Nova Scotia Arts Council (the province was the last in the country to get an arts council in 1996). The mandate shifted to the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage and arm’s length oversight was replaced with a politicized funding mechanism. In the pathetic words of then–tourism minister Rodney MacDonald, the arts council would be replaced with a new agency with “responsibility for the broader objectives of government.”40 The closure occurred without warning or consultation with the arts community; instead, in the style of corporate firings, government officials and security guards suddenly arrived (on 27 March 2002) at the council office and served notice of immediate dismissal to the executive director Tim Leary. If irony provides a bitter compensation, the province does operate a casino across the road from the art college. THOM FITZGERALD: IN THE GARDEN OF INDIE CINEMA

Throughout his impressive body of films, Thom Fitzgerald has been able to navigate between a real sense of place and the need to produce for the broader market. His first feature, Movie of the Week (1990), was produced

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with Andrew Ellis when both were students at nscad University. It deals with a character, played by Fitzgerald, who becomes so overwhelmed with the world he sees on television that he is unable to distinguish between the real and the virtual – themes circulating in art cinema of the time, notably the early features of Atom Egoyan. Fitzgerald and Ellis comment explicitly on the relationship between viewer and screen, injecting a vital queer politics into regional filmmaking through a discourse on the apparatus of representation. In Movie of the Week, the real world intrudes into the character’s media-psychic space, in part through television commercials, baldly declaring the market imperative of the landscape. The commercials interrupt the main character’s therapy counselling sessions where the distance between subject and object is eventually broken down along with cinema conventions of heterosexual desire. Mass media becomes reality, and it does so by constantly interrupting the real; Ellis explains the use of television re-creations in the film: “It constantly shifts perspective and intent with commercials, public service messages, plugs for upcoming shows. It’s always barging in, interrupting, disrupting and massaging. That’s what we tried to capture.”4¹ Fitzgerald’s second feature was the widely acclaimed The Hanging Garden (1997), emerging at a high point of Canadian indie filmmaking following a decade of substantial interest in this national cinema. Initial financing for the film came from outside of Canada, with script support from the gay and lesbian programming department of Britain’s Channel 4.4² Released in the same year as Egoyan’s Sweet Hereafter and Quebec commercial hit Les Boys (Dir: Louis Saïa), Hanging Garden opened the Perspective Canada series of the Toronto International Film Festival and went on to wide distribution and received many awards. The film uses humour, language, and music specific to the region while also enabling broad audience appeal.4³ Hanging Garden is the story of Sweet William (Chris Leavins), an affluent young Torontonian who returns to his Nova Scotia family home after a long absence to attend the wedding of his sister. She is getting married to Fletcher (Joel Keller) with whom a teenage Sweet William was caught having sex in the garden. Many of the characters are named after flowers, referencing the garden as space of earthly delights, pastoral idealism, and biblical paternalism. In the opening scene, we see Sweet William being taught the names of the flowers by his garden-obsessed alcoholic father who then viciously beats the boy for making an incorrect identification – his name and identity is at the hands of a violent patriarchy. Sweet William’s return to the garden is also a return to the location where he may or may not have committed suicide. The film’s magic realist style

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allows for the simultaneous presence and absence of Sweet William – we see him as an overweight gay teenager abused by his father and eventually hanging himself, and we see him as the prodigal son returned. In fact, we sometimes see three actors, a young, teenage, and adult Sweet William interacting on-screen at the same time, even as the film otherwise maintains a realist style. This is especially poignant in a moment where the adult speaks to the dead teen version of himself in a way that culminates the anxiety of coming-of-age and coming out. Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotic describe the complex representation of bodies and difference integrated in the film’s narrative: “The Hanging Garden exploits its interconnecting narratives through a presentation of bodies that refuse to convey merely one physical manifestation or another. For example, just before cutting down his teenaged body, hanging in the garden, the older Sweet William experiences a violent and disturbing asthma attack. This attack, in the film, conjoins his double bodily reality by reminding viewers that Sweet William’s strangulation continues … The unique narrative structure offers this film a potent way to articulate how extreme identity categories refuse/fail to statically contain complicated characters.”44 The return home reveals the hypocrisy of the institutions of marriage and family while also allowing the character to bury the dead demons of his past. In a flashback to one of his teenage experiences, we see that Sweet William’s mother paid a local prostitute to have sex with him as a way of setting him straight. During Sweet William’s return home he meets the tomboy Violet, a young girl who turns out to be the product of this financial exchange. Here, the film combines the nightmares of heterosexual and homosexual teen-life: unexpected pregnancy along with obligatory straight sex. The film concludes with Sweet William and Violet leaving in order to inhabit a space that is free from the constraints of the traditional home. While it is true, as Malek Khouri argues, that this conclusion coincides with the broader shift in gay and lesbian politics – lobbying for gay marriage, rather than engaging in a more radical politics of social transformation – it is also a declarative move away from the weight of tradition hanging over the region. In 1999, Fitzgerald releases Beefcake, a campy hybrid documentarycomedy about muscle and fitness magazines of the 1950s. At a time of entrenched homophobia and a queer culture that is deep in the closet, these magazines provided a popular forum for men to gaze upon the bodies of men. Actor and director Daniel MacIvor provides a sly rendering of Bob Mizer, the founder of a magazine called Physique Pictorial that provided hot images of men but also exploited them for commercial gain. Fitzgerald’s

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2003 feature The Event is set in New York City and was in production at the time of the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. We see the twin towers in the cityscape and later they are gone – the context is a heightened American nationalism visible in the flag-draped streets seen in the exterior shots as the various characters come to terms with their roles in the assisted suicide of a young man (played by Canadian stalwart Don McKellar) dying of aids . The film draws a link between the social disaster of the terrorist act and the personal disaster of death and disease with the body as ground zero. The idea of difference and the body formed in the nexus of global and local relations is important in Fitzgerald’s less well-known Wild Dogs (2002). The film is shot on digital video in Bucharest – after Fitzgerald worked as director-for-hire on a US cable-tv horror film called Blood Moon (a.k.a. Wolf Girl, 2001, and released at film festivals as Welcome to the Freakshow) – and recalls the genre bending of early David Cronenberg. Wild Dogs is the story of Geordie, a Halifax-based pornographer played by Fitzgerald, who is sent to photograph teenage Lolita girls for a website. The digital medium of the film echoes the proliferation of exploitation images in the digital age and is appropriate for the film’s improvisational approach and use of street people as actors. It should also be said that Wild Dogs is quite cinematic, with beautifully lit interiors and gritty on-the-street shots. What Geordie finds in Bucharest are people discarded in the ruins of post-Communist underdevelopment. We also see the naiveté of the western visitor who proposes himself as rescuer to the downtrodden. On the streets of Bucharest and amidst the ruins of communism there are stray dogs everywhere. We see dogs in every exterior shot of the film and barking is the dominant sound. Wild Dogs was released two years prior to Romania’s membership in nato, and at the time, the country suffered high unemployment, poverty, and homelessness. The roaming packs of tens of thousands of stray dogs are a consequence of a 1980s Ceauşescu-era urban redevelopment project that destroyed a large area of the city, forcing residents to release their dogs because they could not take them to their new apartments. Now the Communist dictator is gone, capitalism has not fulfilled its promise, and the dogs defecate in the streets, attack people, and feed off the ruins. The idea of the dogs has to be understood within the frame of eastern European culture and what they mean in relation to citizens having lived through dictatorship. With that in mind, it is interesting to note that the term for these dogs in Romania is literally translated as “community dogs.” The film begins with the story of Bogdan, a dogcatcher who is unable to bring himself to carry out his job, and we come to see the animals as

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wild innocents at the bottom of the heap. Through Fitzgerald’s character Geordie, we are invited to see the role of the West in the social construction of eastern Europe. On the flight to Bucharest, he assists a diplomat in medical distress, who then inquires whether Geordie is a missionary or aid worker. That Geordie is instead a pornographer is amusing, but the film emphasizes the real pornography of vast social inequity aided by the apparatus of diplomacy and politics. The diplomat who befriends him turns out to be despicable and creepy. The question of body image in Hanging Garden is much more fully developed in this film and integrated not simply into the middle-class discourse of identity politics but into the material politics of survival. The small talk during one of Geordie’s photo shoots has a woman describing the fact that everyone was employed during the communist era but that the era was also bathed in blood. In between this discourse, he has to gently prompt her into various porn poses, but this is not good enough for the image market and he is told in no uncertain terms by his boss that younger girls are required. Meanwhile, Bogdan is catching dogs, but instead of bringing them to the pound, he begins to care for them in an abandoned but once-opulent bathhouse. Geordie provides food and new clothes for a crippled beggar, but the pimps who run the house where the boy lives take these away. No individual actions by well-intentioned outsiders can make a difference. In 2005, Fitzgerald released 3 Needles, an international co-production with the star power of a recognizable cast, exploring the subject of aids . In the press kit for the film, the director says: “I wanted the movie to flow like a book of short stories rather than a novel. We all know that a virus mutates with exposure to other life forms and in these stories I wanted to explore how people mutate as a result of their exposure to a virus.”45 Set in South Africa, China, and Canada, there is a concerted humanist effort to draw together stories across cultures and borders. The film begins in Africa with a lush tracking shot and the vibrant sound of singing. We see a group of young boys preparing for a tribal ritual initiation into manhood through a group circumcision. An elder uses a long knife to perform the act, and we see that the blood from each participant commingles on the blade. Where the ritual is rooted in traditional communal bonding, for a contemporary cinema audience, blood signifies anxieties of the other; thus, the transition into manhood depicted on-screen is, extra-diegetically, into the broad terrain of anxiety over blood and bodies, health, sexuality, and identity. In China, a desperately poor farmer submits his daughter to donate blood for pay so that he can improve his farm, but by the time the crops are ready for harvest,

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wife and daughter are dead – the dirty needles of the blood harvest having spread the virus. The China segment begins with violence and rape, pitting the cruel dictatorship against the individual. A pregnant woman named Jin Ping (Lucy Liu), travelling through the lush rice fields of an isolated countryside, is stopped by a military patrol. She claims she is carrying rapeseed (now identified by the less-offensive name of canola), but when the soldiers fire into the wooden crate and blood spills out, we see that it is an illegal shipment of human blood packets. In wide shot, we then see the soldiers maniacally destroying the shipment while the woman is brutally raped. In the image of blood splashing up from their boots, we see the blood of all the victims of war. Through this image the film is asking questions of spirituality and moral value amidst the cynicism of the modern age. The third segment of 3 Needles introduces us to Clara (Chloe Sevigny), a young woman preparing to take her vows as a nun. She is in cosmopolitan Montreal – her cell phone rings as she prays at the altar, and she ducks into a confessional booth to take the call. At lunch, her mother admonishes her for wearing the veil as they eat in an upscale restaurant. The nun is later seen carving into her body with a needle, in reference to the suffering of Christ but also to the systems of contagion of modern life. Elsewhere in Montreal, Denys, a young porn star (Shawn Ashmore), siphons blood from the body of his ailing and incapacitated father so that he can pass the medical screening requirements of the modern sex workplace. Denys did not realize that the old man had died (he would draw blood when the father was asleep), and his fraud is discovered when the blood does not coagulate during testing; his opportunity for work comes to an end. Earlier, Denys shares a beer with his father as they watch one of his porn films. It is a moment that captures the generational dilemma of all filmmakers having to explain what they do to parents and also echoes the patronizing advice dispensed by industry gatekeepers. The father emphatically says: “There’s the kind of film you should be doing. It’s got plot, character – it’s funny. Characters you can relate on. Not just these wham-bam action themes with no story.” The porn tape is called Plumber Lovers. In an earlier scene, we see Denys working as an actual plumber – or it could have been the making of this film: the ambiguity draws attention to Denys’s identity as working class, a fact that resonates throughout the film. It also illustrates the zero-sum fantasy of the movie industry, with the two men in their bathrobes watching the video fantasy on a crappy tv while the father says, “You got the best job in the world.” It is the patriarchal fantasy of the son’s sexual prowess; the fact that he has aids is presented here as a workplace injury.

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The three main spaces of the film can be understood as workplaces inflected (and infected) by the dynamics of class. At the funeral for Denys’s father, two aged war veterans slowly fold the Canadian flag draped over the coffin, the honour bestowed upon veterans, but the scene is punctuated by the horrid hacking cough of one of the vets. It is interesting that we prominently see the national flag in a film made for the export market, since national signifiers tend to be downplayed in international co-productions, but it can also be read ironically in that Canada came into autonomous nationhood on the backs of working-class soldiers participating in a war of empire. For the Chinese farmer, it is material conditions that lead him to renting the body of his young daughter for blood. A conservative viewing could read the ensuing disaster as a consequence of his greed and ambition, but the film invites us to see this scenario in the context where poverty is produced through systemic underdevelopment. The story returns to Africa and the arrival of Clara with two other nuns to a remote mission. We see the thin white bodies of the nuns cloaked in white garments against the stunning landscape and amidst the African victims of aids . The religious trappings obscure the scene as another kind of workplace. It becomes Clara’s mission to forgo the spiritual restriction of the job in order to advocate for material improvements on behalf of the villagers. We see this in small moments – helping a family collect bottles from the local dump, facilitating the sale of handwoven baskets in the marketplace, and, most importantly, arranging for the extension of pharmaceutical benefits available to the plantation workforce for treatment of hiv to the broader community. Like all arrangements under capitalism, it is a deal with the devil, made possible by agreeing to have sex with the manager of the local plantation. The scenario allows Clara to become a martyr, but martyrdom also becomes the tactic for working-class survival back in Montreal. In order to obtain the funds for expensive aids treatment, Denys’s mother takes out an insurance policy, and then deliberately infects herself with the blood from her sleeping son. She then makes use of the vampire brokers of the insurance industry who buy out policies of the living dead, speculating on expected lifespan, in order to receive the cash immediately. The film concludes with a brutal rape attack on the nuns, shot obliquely and with no clear identification of the perpetrators. The result is a view of African men as monstrous other, but the film suggests a violence and cruelty systemic to the capitalist organization of labour. Following the rape, we see the nuns climb into a Jeep to leave the mission. In a beautiful long shot, we see the vehicle stop. Clara gets out, removes her habit, and walks back up the road, turning away from

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the ideals of the religious order and toward the possibilities, challenges, and dangers of the secular material world. Fitzgerald’s Cloudburst (2011) is a cross-border road movie that begins in Maine with an elderly lesbian couple travelling to Canada intent on getting married. The director casts Olympia Dukakis as Stella, a foul-mouthed powerhouse. As Fitzgerald says, “Sometimes I’d look through the camera and think I was directing Lorne Greene.”46 Her blind and grandmotherly partner Dot (Brenda Fricker) is injured in a fall and placed in a care facility by her granddaughter (who is also willfully blind to the fact that Grandma is a lesbian). In a slapstick scene, Stella breaks Dot out of the home and they hit the road. It is interesting how the film negotiates regional identity since the characters are identified as American, and while the film is shot in Nova Scotia, the opening third is set in Maine. In this way, the film is saleable in the American media marketplace (it is financed by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, based in Los Angeles) while exploiting the sign value of Canada as offering a more progressive space for homosexuals. The couple has been together for many years and only considers marriage as a means of ensuring that they can stay together in old age – it is a fact that in both countries, same-sex couples are often separated in care facilities and may be denied access and legal rights secured by marriage. The film is ultimately about reconstituting the institution of family in a way that fits the needs and desires of individuals. FA M I LY T R O U B L E S

The use of rural Nova Scotia as film location often signifies a conservative view of family, so it is useful to look at mainstream-oriented films that engage with place in a way that disrupts stereotyped conventions. Along these lines, Whole New Thing (Dir: Amnon Buchbinder, 2005) is about Emerson (Aaron Webber) a precocious thirteen-year-old, home-schooled Nova Scotian who has just been enrolled in the local high school. As he begins to become aware of his sexual desires, he develops a crush on his teacher, Don Grant (played by co-writer Daniel MacIvor), a closeted gay man who remains stuck in adolescence. The film begins with Emerson emerging from a sauna, where he sits with his sweating and naked parents, to cross over a frozen and snow-covered lake, introducing a relationship between counterculture family and the open landscape. We then see him complete the writing of an illustrated thousand-page fairy tale followed by having to change the sheets on his bed, and explain to his overly supportive mother that he had

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a wet dream. The film neatly combines coming-of-age with an expression of difference, desire, and place. The location is set up as a backwater and as opportunity for alternative culture, and this notion plays against the dreary interior of the school classroom and its rigid social hierarchy. While the film is rather on-the-nose in its social themes, its strength is in the characters and the conviction of the performances, all the more remarkable given the very tight fifteen-day shooting schedule. This budget restriction also required a minimal shooting style with many long takes and the actors having to play out in time. Whole New Thing is especially strong in presenting Emerson as an already interesting and complex character, not one who has to be made in the process of coming into adulthood. He is vulnerable like the adults around him, though he is also a good-liberal fantasy of the intelligent and open-minded youth with a fluid sexual identity. The film echoes the earnest but predictable eco-activist theme of A Stone’s Throw (Dir: Camelia Frieberg, 2006; she was the producer of Whole New Thing), set in and around the south shore Nova Scotia town of Mahone Bay and revealing the region’s natural splendour as well as its environmental problems related to industrial development. The father in Whole New Thing, Rog, as played by Robert Joy, is most convincing not because he is a figure of idealized open-mindedness but because he performs the weakness and desperation of an adult who finds himself in a place where his beliefs no longer easily fit. There is a parallel with Daniel MacIvor’s two other written and directed feature films shot in Nova Scotia, Past Perfect (2002) and Wilby Wonderful (2004). In the latter, there are numerous references to the social conservative tenor of the region, though treated lightly and transcended by the strength and resilience of the characters. This idea resonates with the visual treatment of the opening of Marion Bridge (Dir: Wiebke Von Carolsfeld, 2002; written by MacIvor), where we see a bleak industrial landscape punctuated by strip malls. It is Cape Breton, but a decidedly anti-romantic image of the place; namely, a portrait of deindustrialization and the lowwage conditions of the service sector economy, where the main character’s daughter works in a tourist shop. These films draw upon the conditions of place but strive for a universalism in characterization, though with a tendency to exploit the comic stereotype of quirky folk provincialism, often with dark humour. We see this in the Newfoundland feature Young Triffie’s Been Made Away With (Dir: Mary Walsh, 2006), set in a pre-confederation outport and making use of broad stereotypes of oddball characters. It is a fast-paced and wellmade murder mystery that begins with a police investigation of sheep muta-

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tions evidently leading to a pedophiliac priest and murder. The humour comes from the outrageous characters cast as bizarre products of their location. In a similar vein, the Nova Scotia feature Just Buried (Dir: Chaz Thorne, 2008) is the story of a nose-bleeding oddball character named Ollie who inherits a funeral home and comes of age by enacting a ludicrous plan to boost the funeral business through a series of murders. The tv -sitcomstyle dark humour is continued in the director’s Whirligig (2010). The title refers to folk-art sculptures that turn in the wind, a quaint metaphor for characters who are spinning in place. The plot revolves around Nick, a depressed twenty-five-year-old who has moved back into his parents’ country home with a non-stop talking mom and silent dad who would drive anyone crazy. The infantilized boy meets a Mrs Robinson character in the woman next door, but the relationship is doomed. The concluding regional angst is scored with “Farewell to Nova Scotia,” a very popular folk song and the unofficial anthem of the province. A more mature regional cinema can evoke the conditions of place in a way that is less pat and on-the-nose. This work is usually found at the gritty margins. Of Andrea Dorfman’s first feature, Parsley Days (2000), Andrew Burke describes a commitment to the vernacular and the spatial character of northend Halifax fitting with “an indie aesthetic that thrives on location shooting and the particularity of place [and that] mobilizes a repertoire of actors and non-actors as performers, forg[ing] connections between cinema and other artistic practices.”47 This low-budget feature was shot in a mere eleven days and manages to capture the quotidian rhythms of urban Halifax. The main characters, Kate (Megan Dunlop) and Ollie (Mike LeBlanc), are very much part of their immediate community – she teaches outreach workshops on bicycle maintenance and he is a public health worker known as “the king of contraception.” The bicycle is a great image of embodied mobility, yet it breaks down – parts keep disappearing from Kate’s ride. Kate and Ollie’s relationship is idealized by everyone around them, except that the condom fails and Kate does not want to have the baby. The relationships between the characters can be seen as a metaphor of the film’s idea of community – something that has to be made through human interaction and is marked by the fact of imperfection rather than being fixed and stable in time and place. Journalist Katherine Monk has also described the film as uniquely Canadian in the way it posits abortion as a non-politically controversial choice in the hands of the female, something that would not be the case in any American film that aspires to a popular audience.48 The title of the film comes from Kate’s efforts to induce a naturopathic abortion by ingesting, and even

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bathing in, vast quantities of parsley. We see Kate reaching deeper into the bag of greens whenever friends and family praise how good Ollie is as a mate and how compatible they are as partners. The naturopathic effort fails and Kate confesses to Ollie – in a nod to Canadiana, they sit in a canoe, but it is landlocked in the backyard. Rather than allow the confession to restore the heterosexual romance, Kate has a medical abortion at the end of the film. Dorfman’s follow-up feature was a small-budget, digital-video character study called Love That Boy (2003), which focused on characters who are between childhood and full-blown adulthood and was set in the more generic west-end Halifax suburbs and at the south-end University of King’s College. Phoebe (Nadia Litz) is an extreme perfectionist who has created a to-do list that combines upper-middle-class notions of cultural literacy with a regime of physical fitness: forage for wild mushrooms, view all the French New Wave films, become an expert kayaker, write a memoir, witness a birth, take opera lessons, expand vocabulary, etc. Even “inner peace” is a line that gets checked off after we see her hold an awkward yoga pose. Phoebe’s list also includes “find a boyfriend,” and the relationship is but another item on a list of yuppie over-achievement. The plan is turned on its head when Phoebe falls for Frazer (Adrien Dixon), the boy next door, who just happens to be fourteen years old. Following where Parsley Days left off, Love That Boy begins with a break up, but one that plays on the ways in which dominant culture choreographs romantic relationships. A young woman appears to be rehearsing a break-up speech with Phoebe’s coaching, but then we see that the boy is sitting in front of them with mouth agape. A relationship for Phoebe is not an expression of desire but a marker of educated achievement. These are the conditions that set up the unlikely union with Frazier, whom we first see as the boy mowing the lawn. The film wants to resist the manicured conventions of middle-class life but also stays on the sweet side by avoiding a sexual relationship between the two, though it does conclude with a passionate kiss on the suburban street. But if this second feature is less successful than the first, it is because it is not as well integrated, photographically, with the architecture and community of the place in which it is made. Parsley Days has a diy sensibility with the director handling the film’s 16mm cinematography. TO U R I S M

Screen images often trade in nostalgia and heritage rather than a critical and aesthetic engagement with the present. A key question is the degree to

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which regional filmmaking transforms a heritage-derived space into lived place. Film and television production in Canada and elsewhere is driven much more by cultural and investment policies that link the hardware of a film industry with the software of location promotion. What is then privileged is film as a vehicle for employment, as a means of economic redevelopment in areas where traditional resource and manufacturing industries are in decline, and its capacity to promote place for the benefit of other sectors of the economy, notably tourism. In Canada, culture provides a kind of cover for economic and politically driven policy, and film activity at the level of policy and funding has always been closely linked with the interests of the nation-state. Part of the policy of the government of Canada and the nfb as it is developed in the 1950s is explicitly to discourage the making of feature films. One rather regrettable mechanism was called the Canadian Co-operation Project, an agreement initiated by the influential Motion Picture Association of America and in place from 1948 to 1958. Rather than imposing quota restrictions on Hollywood film exhibition or encouraging indigenous production, Canada accepted Hollywood’s proposal to shoot a few films in Canada and to insert references to Canada in scripts, ostensibly to support tourism, which it did not do in any measurable way.49 For instance, in a Jimmy Stewart western made in 1952 called Bend in the River (Dir: Anthony Mann), a bird chirps and we are told, more than once, that it is a red-winged oriole, from Canada. A full-time Hollywood consultant advised studios on how to insert these clever references. Closer to the region, a Gregory Peck vehicle called The World in His Arms (Dir: Raoul Walsh, 1952) has a character identified as a Nova Scotian, and some of the film’s second unit photography was carried out near Lunenburg on the province’s south shore. In this epic adventure set in 1850, Peck is a sea captain who dares to trap seals off the coast of then Russian-controlled Alaska. Along the way, he falls in love with a Russian countess who speaks perfect English. The gross stereotypes of the Russians are an obvious symptom of cold-war anxieties typical of Hollywood at the time. The film also provides a litany of other stereotypes, notably Peck’s sidekick, an Eskimo named Ogeechuck who uses his head to literally break a door open (to rescue Peck’s crew) and then has to grin through recurring references to his bad body odour. Peck’s first mate is introduced as being from Nova Scotia, and this character, named Deacon, is a scripture-quoting and hard-drinking caricature of a gentleman. During a party scene, he calls for a “real Nova Scotia reel” and a group of black musicians play lively if non-descript jazz. For studio products such as this, it is enough to simply reference otherness; accuracy is not a concern.

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The studio-shot scenes of Peck at the wheel of his ship during a powerful storm are especially amusing for the way he holds on to the wheel with one hand, as if driving a car with power steering. Peck is a seal hunter, but of the good Hollywood kind where not a drop of blood is spilled on the ice. Instead, we see him and his crew herding seals like cowboys herding cattle. We are cautioned that the seals would be in jeopardy if not for the conservationist hand of the good American, that the evil Russians would surely wipe out the population if given a chance.50 The town of Lunenburg proudly lists this and other films on its website, demonstrating its active support for the local film industry.5¹ These references to filmmaking serve to enhance the tourism industry rather than the other way around. Perhaps this is the finally realized intended effect of the Canadian Co-operation Project? Hollywood studios would occasionally consider filmmaking in the region, for instance, Prince Edward Island was scouted for Johnny Belinda (Dir: Jean Negulesco, 1948), but the island’s Board of Trade “did not take kindly to strangers.”5² The original stage play on which the film is based is set in pei , but it is rewritten as Cape Breton for the film and subsequently shot in northern California. Johnny Belinda was remade as Belinda by cbc in 1977, based on the musical by Mavor Moore produced in Charlottetown in 1968. Narrative film production in the region, through the hierarchical organization of a large number of people, the securing of capital, and the interface of celluloid and digital image technologies, problematizes the persistent cultural image of anti-modern isolationism, even as the narratives often trade on this theme. Working alongside the region’s nascent film industry is a production apparatus dedicated to marketing the various provinces in competition with a global travel industry. Like regional film production, it must promote local distinctiveness as well as familiarity. In both cases, there is the promise of uniqueness drawing upon a romantic and modernist notion of discovery that is predicated on an opposition between the modern and the primitive. Tourism has been active in the region throughout the twentieth century, but is especially important with the contemporary decline of a traditional resource economy. With this decline comes a depopulating of rural and outport communities and a transformation of these spaces into objects of the tourist gaze. Dean MacCannell describes what he calls “ethnic tourism” in this way: “Modern mass tourism is based on two seemingly contradictory tendencies: the international homogenization of the culture of the tourists and the artificial preservation of local ethnic groups and attractions so that they can be consumed as tourist experiences … What one witnesses, in vil-

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lages that are transformed for tourists, is a reification of the simple social virtues, or the ideal of ‘village life,’ into ‘something to see.’”5³ This transformation of space is not exclusive to the region; rather, it is symptomatic of how space is never neutral but, instead, is a function of social and economic forces. Canadian spatial relations are determined in part by the close integration of the country’s economy with the United States. As Patricia Marchak explains: “By the end of the 1950s, Canada’s economy was contained to a larger degree than that of any other industrial country within another nation’s economy … Political sovereignty is limited where economic decisions are made outside the nation’s borders and in terms of essentially non-national interests.”54 In this respect, tourism imagery is interesting for the expression of locality and nationalism at the same time that it is produced under conditions where there are real constraints upon autonomous nationalist and economic action, all the while marketing an image that is consumable in an international tourist economy. Contemporary tourism promotional films emphasize a quaint antimodern pictorialism, but in the years following the Second World War, they were just as likely to promote on-screen images of masculinized industrial progress. For instance, in Road to Keltic (Dir: Margaret Perry, 1956), we see the blasting and bulldozing of rock in the building of the Canso Causeway, the land-link between mainland Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island. The narrator intones, with breathless certainty and accompanied by heavy orchestration: “In 1951, the dream came to life! The blasts that shattered the peaceful quiet of the countryside marked the beginning of one of the world’s deepest causeways. The stony face of Cape Porcupine crumbled. Loads of rock and fill splashed into the strait.” Footage of the completed causeway shows a mass of people walking across, led by marching band and bagpipers during the opening ceremony. The images reflect the era’s optimism associated with industrial development, the automotive age, and the conquering of nature. This transformation of nature by technology was idealized as a great moment in nation building, with the first blast of dynamite broadcast on national cbc Radio.55 What was constructed was a means of marketing a folk tradition while also facilitating the flight of labour away from Cape Breton. It is curious to include images of labour in a tourist film, but then tourist recreation does always depend on the exploitation of labour. The contemporary tourism slogan for Nova Scotia, “Canada’s Ocean Playground,” often accompanies images of fishing boats that are, first of all, workplaces.56 In another early Nova Scotia tourism film made by Margaret Perry, the geographic shape of the province is celebrated because, according to the film,

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“It looks like a lobster.” In Lobsters Unlimited (1959), we see a lobster literally placed on top of the provincial map – it is a kind of unintended parody of the giant insect and blob movies popular in mainstream cinema at the time. The film reconciles this contradiction by explaining how, with the building of the Causeway and related highway improvements, the region can better serve American tourists. It explains that the highway is the gateway to the quaint folk culture to be found at the end of the road.57 The National Film Board participated in this pedagogical exercise by producing a nowlost film called The Wandering Piper, about a world champion bagpiper who arrives on Cape Breton to teach men and boys how to play the pipes, culminating with a filmed parade across the newly built causeway.58 Tourism iconography has substantially contributed to the idealized naturalization of Scottish heritage in Nova Scotia, but as Marjorie Harper and Michael Vance indicate, the specific representation of Scottishness is by no means neutral: “by the late nineteenth century [the Scots] were increasingly ignored as irrelevant, pre-industrial bystanders in celebrations of Nova Scotia’s material progression to cosmopolitan status …Yet, paradoxically, by the 1930s, Nova Scotia Premier Angus L. MacDonald had begun promoting his province’s “tartan” heritage – a process that continues to this day.”59 As much as Scottish immigration to the region has been significant, the production of the tartan transformed that history into a marketable good disconnected from larger social and historical processes. While the myth of national culture sutured the country together from east to west, the economic infrastructure of the highway system with which the Causeway was integrated served the needs of north-south mobility, just as the establishment of the region as a natural playground for tourists was reinforced by a circumscription of land use by local residents. It was not until the post–Second World War era that Scottish-themed tourism in Cape Breton became dominant, and, in fact, during the first wave of Nova Scotia tourism at the dawn of the twentieth century, the focus was the Evangeline myth and the verdant Annapolis Valley. As Ian McKay points out: “neither tourists nor local residents considered Scots, isolated fishing villages, or rocky coastlines particularly interesting or beautiful … and, like Anne of Green Gables, Evangeline, always portrayed as a sweet and vulnerable girl, appealed to sexist notions of ‘woman’s place.’”60 In the early twentieth century, the Maritime provinces were connected with the northeast United States by extensive cross-border traffic of goods and people, and a shared popular image as untouched paradise. Stephen Hornsby and John Reid describe it this way: “Travel writers portrayed Maine and the Maritimes as an undifferentiated paradise for sportsmen, and the

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states and provinces responded to the influx of wealthy tourists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by aggressively restricting the hunting and fishing activities of existing populations.”6¹ This north-south tourism link was nothing new; ferry traffic to Prince Edward Island was also, first of all, in support of American tourist travel. Similarly, the building of the Queen Elizabeth Way in Ontario in the 1930s was about forging a northsouth economic link and, to quote an Ontario politician at the time, it expresses “a desire to promote Canada as a civilized, cultured nation.”6² A road! Back on pei , the provincial government prohibited the use of automobiles in the province in 1908, out of fear that modernization would undermine the attractiveness of the place to tourists.6³ Place is conceptualized as garden, reinforced by the popularity of Lucy Maude Montgomery books where, as Ian McKay points out, Anne of Green Gables is the virginal icon of regional innocence.64 The image of the modern intersects with the production of antimodernism; for instance, one of Nova Scotia filmmaker Margaret Perry’s most popular films, Glooscap Country (1961), a carefully made telling of the Mi’kmaq creation story through beautiful wildlife and landscape shots, was criticized by government bureaucrats for omitting evidence of civilization, asking, as Adrian Willsher describes: “Where are the roads?”65 Where we see references to First Nations people in these tourism films, it is typically through a pre-modern frame, situating aboriginals as separate from presentday society, as Willsher indicates: “The Mi’kmaq become history, become a people who have no present living culture at mid-century and are often remembered only in monuments, or exist in the present only for the continued exploitation of their interesting appearance.”66 In a way, the emphasis on the natural provides some relief from the tendency to exploitation, but still with the omission of Mi’kmaq in contemporary life. It is an omission mirrored in the opaque references to Perry’s private life in the nfb documentary Margaret Perry: Filmmaker (Dir: Les Krizsan, 1987), a film overview of her work, beginning at the nfb as protegé to John Grierson during the Second World War. After the war, she became the main staff filmmaker for the Nova Scotia Film Bureau, producing over fifty films until her retirement in 1970. In the film, there are coy references to sharing her cottage with “friend” Barbara, who is also featured in Perry’s home-movie clips. In this way the film hints at, but does not reveal or ‘out,’ another story of identity at the margins. The documentary is, in this way, symptomatic of the socially conservative environment out of which it emerges. Rare Birds, directed by Sturla Gunnersson (2001) from Ed Riche’s script, is an interesting conventional feature film integrating themes of regional-

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ity and tourism, though the film’s commercial success was hampered by the reverse-tourism event of 9/11, coincidentally the day of the film’s scheduled launch at the Toronto International Film Festival. Rare Birds stars William Hurt as Dave, a down-on-his-luck restaurateur drinking his way through his wine cellar as his out-of-the-way restaurant, The Auk, has no customers and his marriage is disintegrating. The great auk was a flightless bird familiar to the north Atlantic coastline and extinct since 1844, one of the many species threatened by the expansion of new immigrants in the colonies. This bird’s demise is often cited as a sad consequence of the ruthlessness of modernity, as this encyclopedia description suggests: “Utterly defenseless, great auks were killed by rapacious hunters for food and bait, particularly during the early 1800s. Enormous numbers were captured, the birds often being driven up a plank and slaughtered on their way into the hold of a vessel.”67 One can read this reference as metaphor for the culture industry and the relentless homogenization of regional distinctiveness, or simply as Dave’s ironic view of his own dream of operating an upscale restaurant on a rock at the edge of the Atlantic. Missing from the film is the character detail present in Ed Riche’s novel, on which the film is based, that Dave had worked for the government in fisheries management but quit in disgust for the cynical policies leading up to the collapse of the cod fishery. On one level, the film follows familiar genre patterns of the crisis of the middle-aged male whose life is redeemed when he meets an attractive woman – in Dave’s case, Alice (Molly Parker). A series of comic events transform the prospects of The Auk. Like many feature films shot in the region but made for the wider media marketplace, regional specificity is provided through picture-postcard imagery of the beautiful and rugged coastal landscape. This ideal is demystified by Dave’s idiosyncratic neighbour Phonse (Andy Jones), embodying a strong sense of locality while defying stereotypes of marginality. Phonse has great mechanical facility, and in exchange for his labour, Dave provides him with fine food and wine. The character is driven by a fierce independence, great pragmatic skills, and a refusal to be intimidated by agents of authority. In this way, there is something of the province’s idiom in the character. While, on one level, Phonse is the oddball handyman with a strong survivalist streak, he is no stereotyped local yokel. He shares with Dave an appreciation for fine food and wine, and among his many schemes, he demonstrates his familiarity with a research library in undertaking a plan to save the failing restaurant. His research identifies a rare species of duck, and by spreading the rumour of its appearance along

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the coast adjacent to The Auk, he attracts a great number of tourist birdwatchers who become Dave’s customers. Dave, the sophisticated restaurateur who has spent time away in larger metropolitan centres, would be unable to undertake this transformation, or tourism marketing strategy, on his own. He also falls in love with Alice, Phonse’s visiting sister-in-law, who assists at the now-busy restaurant. Dave is tormented by guilt over the deceit – and fears getting caught – and over the accidental death of a birder who got too close to the dangerous shoreline. Phonse is too pragmatic to feel guilty: “Everybody takes their chances, Dave. It was undoubtedly the woman’s time. If she hadn’t fallen off a cliff, she would have been struck by lightning or choked on a bone, perhaps in your restaurant. That would be a pickle, wouldn’t it?” When the appeal of the duck begins to wane, Phonse has a photograph published of his convincing decoy – turning the tourism collectible on its head by making it real. When Dave protests that they will be discovered, Phonse explains away these worries, noting that since everyone wants the bird to exist, but its evident extinction makes this unlikely, what they are doing satisfies a widely held desire. Two other interrelated schemes speak to the link between tourism and global trade in the construction of place. Phonse is paranoid about surveillance and continually gazes at the landscape for clues of unwelcome intruders. He is especially concerned about corporate espionage on the part of the Winnebago company, since he has designed and built a prototype rsv or recreational submarine vehicle. He reveals this to Dave at the same time that he relates the salvaging along the shoreline of a brick of cocaine, another icon of global trade and colonization. He wants Dave’s assistance in marketing the cocaine, but his main interest is the rsv as a means of capturing a share of the recreational tourism market.68 In his explanation, he reveals himself as someone who has not fully internalized the modern distinction between work and leisure, between nature and society: “People are gone mental on the nature. Geezers hiding in blinds all day to get a snap at some bird that they are not even going to eat.” Phonse is under surveillance, but not by the feared Winnebago company. Nor are the rcmp concerned with these present schemes; rather, they are investigating an earlier collaboration with a Bulgarian refugee in the invention of a strange light-emitting paper. For the film, what is important is not so much the object itself as the effect of one marvelous scheme upon another, all intersecting with global flows. This understanding of place is in contrast with the romantic idealization of Newfoundland in a much earlier tourism-themed television film, A Whale

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for the Killing (Dir: Richard Heffron, 1981), shot in the province by an American production company and based on the novel by Farley Mowat (1972). It is loosely based on Mowat’s controversial description of Newfoundland, following his observation of the abusive treatment of a whale trapped in an outport harbour. The story is told through the perspective of a American tourist, stranded in an outport due to damage to his sailboat after having been caught in a fierce storm, but also seeking a way of life free from the trappings of modern consumer culture. The whale is anthropomorphized by the parallel identity with the outsider tourist and integrated into a coldwar American narrative through the lingering offshore presence of a Russian whaling ship. In his commentary on the film, James Overton describes how Mowat’s criticism of the killing of a whale reflects a neo-colonial idealization of what the author wants the region to be. “What happened in Burgeo is, for Mowat, symptomatic of what is happening everywhere in the urbanindustrial world. Modern life has alienated humans from nature external to them and from their own inner nature; the destruction of the environment is the outcome of this alienation. The whale is the classic ‘other’ which we cannot understand and, therefore, destroy. Even efforts to save the whale are supported only if this can be shown to be profitable. Smallwood and those who do show some regard for the animal are not committed to saving it for its own sake, but because it may have some publicity value and attract tourists.”69 Overton’s critique is consistent with McKay’s analysis of folk culture in Nova Scotia as depoliticizing culture, thus marginalizing the more radical narratives present in folklore. The film transports this myth into a conventional American narrative of individual struggle against nature, with the condescending variation of the ‘good’ American identifying with the whale while the local people are characterized as wild and bloodthirsty. There is considerable opposition to Mowat’s depiction of Newfoundlanders in his book, but it needs to be pointed out that this writer’s move to the province was an important component of the cultural renaissance, and he was actively encouraged to take an interest in Newfoundland by Premier Smallwood. The decline of traditional resource industries and the 1992 moratorium on the cod fishery has encouraged the province to develop tourism, and it has done so in a manner that largely perpetuates stereotypes of anti-modernism and isolation. For instance, a print and Internet campaign in 2006 included images of a rural home by the ocean with colourful laundry hanging out to dry accompanied by the caption: “Where is this place exactly … it is about as far away from Disneyland as you can get.” In another print campaign featuring both the laundry image as well as beautiful landscape shots,

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the text emphasizes the province’s proximity to Toronto with the slogan: “On a clear day, you still can’t see it from the cn Tower [the iconographic Toronto tourist landmark] but trust us, it’s a lot closer than you think.” The ease of contemporary airline travel helps elide the vast political, economic, and social distance between region and centre. This gap also shapes filmmaking in the region. Happy-go-lucky folk charm is at odds with the many narratives of exile and misery characterizing a whole host of films made in the region. Economic exploitation and despair is the driving force of films such as The Shipping News (Dir: Lasse Hallström, 2001), Misery Harbour (Dir: Nils Gaup, 1999), Margaret’s Museum (Dir: Mort Ransen, 1995), and Random Passage (Dir: John N. Smith, 2001). The fact that these titles are all international co-productions suggests the dominance of this particular way of conceptualizing the region as marketable screen destination – the untamed ruggedness of place provides a conceptual break from the demands of modern urban life. Probably the most well known, due to the star power of Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, and Judi Dench, is The Shipping News. Producers of American films that are shot in Canada make this location choice for economic reasons – the industry has been substantially built on the historic inequity in currency exchange – the lower Canadian dollar against US money – and discounted labour. These locations are typically disguised to pass as someplace else, someplace generically American. In this case, however, Newfoundland is presented as a lead character in the film, and there is even a passing reference to Winnipeg. The story revolves around a man and his daughter moving to their ancestral home of Newfoundland after an emotionally devastating trauma – the death of the man’s wife following her long infidelity and maternal neglect. The wife (Blanchett), visually associated with urban life, is presented as so utterly nasty that she even sells her daughter to an illegal adoption agency – a receipt is found when her body and that of her lover are recovered from a car wreck (shot beneath the MacKay Bridge in Halifax). The new love interest (Moore) in Newfoundland is essentialized as an idealized good woman attached to the pre-modern land. Blanchett’s character is highly sexualized and this is made negative, while Moore at first rejects overtures by Spacey’s character. Newfoundland is shown as the barren yet faux-mystical ground for transforming the emotional wreckage of the characters’ lives. In a defence of the original E. Annie Proulx novel (1993), Tracy Whalen turns to Susan Sontag to suggest that the author’s purple prose is a form of camp, calling the bad writing “strangely redemptive” and allowing for a resistance to the persistence

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of stereotypes of place.70 This turn to post-modern irony may be a reaction against the persistent essentialization of place and authorship in Canadian criticism. If a camp perspective is appropriate for the novel, there is no evidence that it is a self-conscious strategy on the part of the author, and in any case, the way the story has been taken up in both the province’s tourism campaigns and in the film is entirely through an essentialist lens. In the behind-the-scenes ‘making of ’ promotional video packaged with the North American dvd release of the film, much is made of the fact that the primary shooting location, the town of New Bonaventure, is a full three hours from the airport. Talk about roughing it in the bush! This pre-modern idealization of place became a part of the publicity strategy of the film. In a story published under the pretense of entertainment news reporting, one crewmember is quoted: “To me, Newfoundland seemed like a time before I was born. I thought it was something not possible for me to find and then there it was, a piece of the past.”7¹ While the naming of place is perhaps preferable to the more typical erasure of identification in Hollywood location production, the subsequent treatment of Newfoundland is as utterly remote, barren, and seemingly trapped in time, though punctuated with ghosts and simple-butwise folk. The Kevin Spacey character, Quoyle, is haunted by the news that his ancestors were vicious pirates who were eventually driven away. Near the end of the film, the locals become brutally violent during a drunken party and destroy a boat in order to prevent a “friend” from leaving. This scene and the reference to a violent past are in continuity with the simplistic stereotypes of A Whale for the Killing in its depiction of the locals as utterly barbaric. While violence is certainly a component of history and a structuring force of the contemporary society, presenting it as inherent to place for the sake of a Hollywood fantasy of redemption negates the complex ways that broader social forces and conditions form individual actions. A key Canadian example of this approach is the highly popular Newfoundland television series Random Passage, a show that certainly does make an effort to situate social violence in the context of historical conditions. This series, based on a pair of novels by Bernice Morgan (Random Passage, 1992, and Waiting for Time, 1994), is the Newfoundland origin story set in the 1800s, depicting immigrants arriving to the unforgiving environment of the barren rock, escaping misery in the old world only to find more suffering. The settlers are at the mercy of a system of economic exploitation structuring the fishery, where workers are kept powerless and impoverished by the controlling interests of the merchants in St John’s. Random Passage foregrounds material struggle, and the main female character has a power-

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ful sexual identity. When the show’s producer, Barbara Doran, began looking for a co-production partner, the common response on the part of other Canadian producers was: “who wants to make a film about this bitch.”7² The show points out that poverty and hardship are not just a consequence of the environment but are produced by the inequity of power relations.7³ It is shot in an outport location, but this rough edge of the world is held at a distance: we see the stark but beautiful landscape without having to feel the relentless chill of the North Atlantic winds. This location of misery has since become a tourist destination as the land and sets have been transferred from the production company to the local community of Trinity Bight. The marketing of nostalgia reflects a desire for a mythic origin story through which the past is deployed to deflect political engagement with the present.74 The provincial government explicitly identifies film and television in relation to tourism, and keeps track of tourism inquiries that are made with reference to film and tv shows.75 As they state on the province’s tourism website: “Tour the filming locations of The Shipping News and Random Passage. You can rest on the top of a cliff and look out over the ocean as did Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, and Dame Judi Dench while rehearsing their lines.” In this way, your tourist gaze of the region can be supplanted by the eyes of a movie star, which can never be your own. A more contemporary visitor to Newfoundland – actually an old character in a modern setting: John the Baptist arriving in his namesake city of St John’s at the millennium – gives us a very different view of tourism and place in a feature film called Extraordinary Visitor (Dir: John Doyle, 1998). In a way, this is the ultimate tourism film, where John the Baptist is looking for hope in order to redeem the earth’s population – his bad-tempered God the Father wants to pull the plug on the human experiment. He has come to a place characterized by brutal capitalist relations surrounding the fishery and a contemporary population fully absorbed by material pleasures. The question is how to find hope in a place founded, as Random Passage tells us, on hopelessness. John the Baptist as visitor-tourist is an innocent outsider entering a crude and rude environment. When he first walks along the streets of St John’s, a group dressed as Roman guards accost him and brandish a torch in his face. They are pilgrims driven to St John’s by the disaster tourism of millennial madness. Their behaviour evokes the rough carnivalesque of mummers, and John recalls the Romans of his earlier experience on earth, saying, “they are real bastards.” Later, during a tv talk show staged at the local mall, the locals plead for relief from imminent doom, saying that they are not greedy people. To this, John, now as talk show sage, pointedly

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asks: “What about your fishery?” The mall event is emceed by Marietta (Mary Walsh); and then she, her husband Rick (Andy Jones), and their daughter Alison (Jordan Canning) become John’s unwitting hosts. The family is set up as a microcosm of the millennial dilemma, with its own dissolution looming. While Marietta is a career-obsessed media worker stuck in the mall, Rick runs a junk shop, tinkers with electronics (shades of Jones’s character in Rare Birds), and is primarily obsessed with the destruction of global capitalism. John becomes the means for carrying out Rick’s and Marietta’s contrasting goals, and the avoidance of patriarchal-legislated apocalypse is an unintended consequence. John is unable to find a sign of hope in his wanderings through St John’s and on the ever-present tv . Instead, he offers the faint hope of love within this fractured family, and that becomes the tenuous means by which the planet is spared. We are allowed this vision of hope even though Rick and Marietta are obviously incompatible and have long since lost whatever spark of desire brought them together. One could say that the family unit is the embodiment of disaster rather than its relief, but at least the extraordinary tourist returns home with happy memories of Newfoundland. This feature film is an expanded re-make of a short film of the same title written collectively by John Doyle, Mike Jones, Andy Jones, and Mary Walsh in 1982. While the feature was made for $1.9 million, modest by commercial standards but typical of Telefilm-financed Canadian films at the time, the earlier short is fiercely independent, largely improvised by the cast, and shot on surplus cbc film stock with nifco equipment and a small Newfoundland Arts Council grant. This difference is worth noting both in consideration of how a cinematic text evolves and for how different production circumstances result in distinct representations of place. The feature begins in the Vatican, and while the film offers criticism of the Church, starting here privileges this institution while the original film is more antagonistic. The short begins with Andy Jones as the Pope opening the Letter of Fatima, where the reference to Newfoundland must be deciphered in relation to the idea of eternity. The Letter in the film refers to the Catholic ‘Secret of Fatima,’ an apocryphal prophecy. Here, it reads: “Terra Nova exito subito de Confederatione” – Newfoundland must leave Confederation at once. In the feature, the Pope learns about Newfoundland by viewing a cliché-filled tourism video and through the counselling of his devil-worshipping advisor. In the short film, the reading of the Letter of Fatima is interrupted by mention of a lack of “discretion” on the part of the Christian Brothers in their relationships with young boys. This time the

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message is not millennial survival but Newfoundland nationalism. In the St John’s of the first Extraordinary Visitor, we see Rick (also played by Andy Jones) and Marietta (Mary Walsh) gazing, tourist-like, at icebergs in the St John’s harbour as John (this time played by John Doyle) becomes a kind of tourist spectacle, arriving downtown in the back of a pickup truck and gazing up at the Basilica. They entertain the visitor with a meal at the tourist hotspot of McDonald’s, and Rick provides bitter commentary on the history of disenchantment that has befallen Newfoundland, while Marietta mocks the desperation of cultural identity: “A bunch of people trying to cling onto a rock that gives nothing.” Following an afternoon of drinking, the Letter of Fatima is lost, as is the nationalist project, and John writes his report to the Vatican while sitting in front of the tv eating junk food. Interrupted by Marietta’s temptations, he sends the Pope a chocolate biscuit in lieu of report. While the feature film criticizes the institution of the Church, it does resolve with a return to the possibility of faith, while the short casts the Baptist character as fool, like a travelling businessman having a quick fling in his St John’s hotel room. In both films, the idea of faith is linked to the decline of organic society, replaced by marital bickering and corporate commerce. While the millennium-anxiety story is now dated, the self-destruction of capitalism never goes stale (I write this at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century with markets crashing). The first Rick wants to save Newfoundland from the betrayal and disappointment of Confederation, while the second millennial Rick wants to disrupt global capitalism. By this time, the island is no longer isolated and insular in its concerns, and rather than proclaim nationalist sentiment from the rooftops, Rick now uses his ingenuity with radio technology to intervene in cell phone transmissions in order to spread false rumours that negatively influence stock market trading. The point here is that capitalism and consumerism have become a new faith. Many of the artists working in Newfoundland in the 1970s are strongly influenced by the decline of influence of the Catholic Church, and Doyle himself studied to be a priest. Doyle described to me a childhood of deeply held Catholic views, where church doctrine is not simply an idea but is knowledge itself. These films express disenchantment as he says: “I think there is a kind of need for spirituality, but if that part of you is contaminated, it’s like pouring gasoline into a water bottle – you can’t use it for water anymore. That part of me has been contaminated, but I think I have some longing that I wish that it wasn’t … it’s easy for me to believe that there is something to believe in, it’s just I can’t believe in it.” In the feature, Rick’s effort to communicate capitalist critique finds him dangling in front of a microwave broadcast transmission

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tower, risking the toasting of his brain. Only an intervention from John can save him and re-unite the family. It is as if this return to faith is in exchange for the free love of the first film, since no sex can go unpunished in the Catholic household. Rick’s intervention becomes part of the media spectacle of the millennium, broadcast on cnn as another quirky travel story from the remote region where even the real prophet becomes a false idol, or marketable object, in the mall. This pattern of cinematic exile and misery shifts to a more critical reflection on the relationship between place and culture is the Nova Scotia– Scotland co-production Margaret’s Museum.76 The opening of the film is about literally putting on display the ravages of industrial capitalism. As the credits roll, an elderly couple is driving along the coastal landscape looking for a rest stop and expressing irritation at what they have seen: “If I have to look at one more helmet with a lamp on it, I’ll throw up.” They arrive as the first visitors to the newly opened museum of the film’s title. The woman rushes inside to use the bathroom but then exits screaming. Not until the film’s climax, a brutal mine accident resulting in the death of several members of Margaret’s family, do we learn the content of the museum and source of distress for the tourist. After the death of her husband and younger brother, Margaret has created a museum consisting of preserved body parts, including her brother’s penis (the most important thing to a sixteen-yearold); her grandfather’s lungs – he died at the time of the accident because Margaret, his caregiver, was distracted by the mine explosion (the exhibition of the blackened and shrivelled lungs are to demonstrate the debilitating effect of a life in the mines); her husband Neil’s lungs (to show what a good pair should look like, and because his lungs are connected to his bagpipes and thus his Gaelic heritage), tongue (because she liked to hear him talk), and fingers (because they danced when he played the pipes). The reification of culture through museumization is undermined by the performative signification of the body. The story is about the labouring bodies of Irish and Scottish immigrants having arrived at the shores of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia only to spend their working lives underground. Following the opening scream scene, the film flashes back three years earlier when Margaret first met her soon-to-be-husband Neil. He is drunk and enters a Chinese restaurant where Margaret is dining. She describes him as a giant in terms akin to tourism legends like Paul Bunyan but with sexual overtones: “The first time I ever saw the bugger, he was a bit drunk. And I thought to myself, if I were to meet him on the road, naked, with his feet apart, I could walk under without a hair touching him.” Neil begins his court-

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ship of Margaret by performing on the bagpipes. The sound overwhelms the cramped space of the restaurant, and the owners rush him outside. This location is notable for signifying the presence of Chinese labour in Canada that has, until recently, been marginalized in standard texts on Canadian history. While the bagpipes remain the iconic image of Celtic heritage in the tourism marketing of the region, the use in this context opens up our understanding of the relationship between culture, immigration, and place without the gloss of nostalgia. This transition is expressed in the narrative by the way that Neil builds the marital home for Margaret – a bricolage of discarded materials from the company, even including indoor plumbing. Neil’s structure is an alternative to Margaret’s family home positioned next to a sinkhole into which the neighbouring house collapsed. The home is, for a brief time, a place of marital happiness, but that joy is lost when Neil has to take a job in the mine. The building then becomes location for the museum where the blood of history is finally written on the remains of the body. In contrast, the modestly successful coming-of-age film New Waterford Girl (Dir: Allan Moyle, 1999), also shot on Cape Breton Island, tends to reify place in the story about a young woman named Moonie Pottie who yearns for an ideal of culture. Culture is attached to large cities such as Rome, Paris, and especially New York, to anywhere but Cape Breton Island. The film raises the question of what and where is culture, and by the end has the character waxing nostalgic at the bliss of small-town life even as she finally departs. One answer is offered in the film’s opening image, that of laundry hanging to dry on an outdoor line. It is precisely the same image used in the advertising campaign for Newfoundland and Labrador tourism discussed earlier. In both cases, the image plays with the idea of a pre-modern regional disconnection from the centre of culture, and both evoke this disconnection as a virtue. Moonie is coming of age as teenage outsider in the rough-worn mining town of New Waterford. It is visualized as a place no one would come to visit: derelict cars, rundown houses, scrappy characters. As one local indignantly proclaims: “Try living here when it’s hailing … with ice pellets spiking your eyes!” Moonie’s plan of escape is to get accepted into a New York art school, but when her parents refuse this goal, she performs an elaborate charade of sexual promiscuity in order to convince her parents that she is pregnant and must be sent away. In this way, the film draws upon the stereotype of smalltown sexual backwardness and then positions the artist-character as having greater purchase on the concept of place and authenticity. The film inverts the teen coming-of-age genre’s typical privileging of male sexuality – here,

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much of the comedy comes at the expense of the town boys, but restores gender and genre conventions by Moonie maintaining her virginity. Sexuality is performative rather than embodied pleasure. Moonie eventually comes to see the beauty of the place from which she yearns to escape. This transformation is punctuated by 1970s rock music signifying the film’s Canadian identity while deploying that identity as part of a marketable kitsch along with 8-track tapes, plaid, gas-guzzling cars and beer-swilling boys, hockey, street fighting, white bread, and whisky. Moonie’s fast friend Lou, who is from New York but staying in New Waterford for the summer (because her family needs to keep a low profile and this place is utterly off the beaten track), marks her outsider status by playing soul music at a party. While the scene is played for laughs, it shows the location to be backward and disconnected from popular culture.77 In one idealized scene by the seaside, Moonie longs for New York but Lou tells her, in a kind of reversal of the Canadian Co-operation Project, that the Hudson River is filled with little more than piss and Coca-Cola. As John Urry and Dean MacCannell have discussed, tourism depends upon the predictable control over the expectation of difference through the tactical organization of the gaze.78 The seaside scene triggers Moonie’s affectionate turn toward her rundown home, seeing its difference not as lack but as somehow more authentic than the Coca-Colanourished city. C U LT U R A L I N D U S T R I E S

The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms.79 Theodor Adorno

In his description of the Canadian cultural industries, Michael Dorland points out that while the Canadian state has a long history of involvement with culture, it takes a specific form in that it is designed to fit with national industrial policies, including the prevailing North American politicaleconomy of media. The industry is not entirely the same since the time of Dorland’s study. Most notable is the rise of compelling made-for-television drama generated by cable broadcasters such as hbo and new platforms such as Netflix, but this shift has been slow to appear in Canada. Feature films in Canada are usually financed with broadcast investment, and the television format comes to influence content. tv is defined by the privatization of the viewing experience so that the film itself becomes an accessory to the home

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appliance. All of this occurs even as there remains a persistence of public rhetoric in defence of the idea of Canadian culture. As Dorland describes it, we have an unevenly split industry: one side is “tanned in California” – that is to say, the terms of production style and content are bound up with the Hollywood model – and the other, more impoverished, side is “hardened by Canadian winters,” determined to represent everyday life in this country.80 Bad weather functions as a sign of inadequacy and displeasure and also as a kind of severe Protestant test of moral fortitude. The idea of Canada as a land locked in ice and snow was already entrenched in the cinematic imagination at the dawn of cinema, with the snow-bound landscape as backdrop for American adventure stories such as Nell Shipman’s Back to God’s Country (1919). In Whole New Thing, discussed previously, the teacher Don Grant’s car is seen in several shots with heavy frost on the windows, the external ice cube of his repressed self. The concept of cultural industries – as distinct from the original idea of mass culture as something rising up from the masses – originates with Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. It is a way of describing the entertainment business as an extension of the regimentation of work and everyday life, something that is at odds with the critical and emancipatory potential of art. Industry managers have now uncritically adapted the concept as a logical description of a mass market–oriented business. For instance, the Telefilm corporate plan, entitled From Cinemas to Cell Phones, advocates a business model of production that moves away from the idea of film as a theatrical experience and toward film as a marketable commodity on multiple digital platforms alongside ring tones and video games. The plan declares that the producers – not the writers and directors – are the project leaders, and that the agency itself has “progressed far beyond its funding agency roots.” In other words, an industry model for the organization of capital and distribution of product replaces one where the creative filmmaker was nominally at the centre. By referring to a “funding agency” in the past tense, Telefilm positions itself as distinct from artworld agencies such as the Canada Council and implicitly making a distinction from the public service agenda of the National Film Board. This document makes the rational case for increased market share of Canadian media, but it is premised on the idea of mass marketability rather than artistic achievement. Here, the agency explicitly turns its back on the practice of film art by embracing new interactive media as a substantial improvement on the cinema experience: “A game is a fundamentally more engaging experience than traditional media. Books tell you something; movies show you something. Games give a player

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some of the responsibility that the director used to take.”8¹ In my view, this is an infantalization of experience that ignores the complex intellectual and emotional interaction to be had with cinema and literature. All the while, Telefilm continues to express support for feature films through its specific funding envelopes, but increasingly within the rhetoric of market popularity and integration with multiple delivery platforms. What then remains of the specificity of the medium and of the integral relationship between form and content, never mind the possibility of culture as something distinct from industry? The answer, for the industry, is to follow on the coattails of global Hollywood; thus, policy is reinforced at the expense of nurturing of the locally specific and unique. Film studies has often turned for intellectual legitimacy to Walter Benjamin’s classic 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” which argues the importance of the medium in reflecting the rise of new technologies of reproduction. The artist is no longer mystified with the fetish of authenticity attached to the singular original. Benjamin says: “The social significance of film, even – and especially – in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive cathartic side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage.”8² He writes of the potential of cinema, not its standard commercial form, and is particularly influenced by Soviet montage, Chaplin, and his friend Brecht. Benjamin did not bother with the less interesting question of whether film is an art; instead, he wanted to know how film could change the idea of art. For Benjamin, social and political transformations were attached to changes in the act of perception, and in this way, film art becomes political. What is less discussed within film studies is the place of this seminal article as part of an intellectual conversation with his formidable friend Theodor Adorno. Adorno edited Benjamin’s original text prior to publication in order to excise certain political passages and to downplay what may be read as an idealization of cinema.8³ Adorno was no friend of Brecht, and while he grants to Benjamin the usefulness of the decay of traditional authority attached to the work of art, he does not agree that the shock effect of montage is enough to enable social transformation, howevermuch it may contain the potential. To read Benjamin and Adorno together is to see the potential of technological reproduction but to also face the wall of commodification denying that potential. In his “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression in Listening,” Adorno, writing in response to the Benjamin essay, criticizes the standardization of entertainment that sterilizes difference, where there is only the illusion of free will but no place for individual experience. In

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this schema, the reified individual becomes symptom of the industrial apparatus, while the real demands of aesthetic judgment are eliminated. What he is describing is the systematization of consumption as an extension of the regimentation of time and body. Adorno’s criticism of popular music certainly extends to film and could even serve as description of the impoverished use of music in the movies: “The delight in the moment and the gay façade becomes an excuse for absolving the listener from the thought of the whole, whose claim is comprised in proper listening. The listener is converted, along his line of least resistance, into the acquiescent purchaser. No longer do the partial moments serve as a critique of that whole; instead, they suspend the critique which the successful aesthetic totality exerts against the flawed one of society.”84 It is within this critical frame that I want to situate the cultural industry as it operates in Atlantic Canada. I have suggested that there is a headlong turn in the direction of commercial marketability in the administration of feature film funding, but I also wish to indicate how the seeds of this turn emerged much earlier, since the feature film industry has always been a form of industrial development distinct from the public service orientation of the nfb and cbc. Industrialization takes hold with the tax shelter era of 1974 to 1982 and the Capital Cost Allowance designed to stimulate economic development through a 100 per cent tax write-off for investment in designated industries, including film production. This policy went a long way to enable the development of a service economy through crew training and building of production facilities, labs, audio mixing houses, and equipment rental firms. It also had substantial spinoff stimulus effects in the economy through such related services as hotels, catering, and location rentals. This program opened up the industry as one designed to service offshore production, and many of the tax-sheltered films featured American B-rate celebrities in generic stories – though certainly from an exhibition perspective, these media products could be said to be as much a part of Canadian national cinema as anything else, since Canadians happily consumed them. The horror-slasher movie My Bloody Valentine (Dir: George Mihalka, 1981) was shot in the town of Sydney Mines in the historic working-class coal mining area of Cape Breton Island. The town is recognizable to those familiar with the region, but on-screen, it dare not speak its name – it is renamed Valentine Bluffs. Other than the landscape, the primary identifying marker of place is the ridiculous abundance of Moosehead beer in several scenes. What may be a bizarre novelty item for American viewers is, from an industry development perspective, a business lesson for Canadian filmmakers on

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the tactic of product placement. Canadian audiences may applaud the signifier of locality and even see the presence of the brand-name prop as indication of the maturity of the film industry (this would be the same audience that in the mid-1990s appropriated the Molson Canadian beer advertisement “I Am Canadian” as a popular substitute anthem). However, it is worth noting that the long-neck Moosehead bottles seen on-screen – distinct from the then-familiar Canadian stubbies – were, in fact, designed to resemble American beer bottles for exports to the US. This detail is trivial, except that it is a measure of the practical realities of low-budget productions and of the minutiae through which signifiers of place are transformed for market considerations. In a book on Canadian horror films, Caelum Vatnsdal declares that Valentine “stands without rival as the most Canadian horror movie ever made.” He then explains that this is achieved by the massive amounts of beer consumed on-screen, the provincial tone of the actors, and the mining town location giving as “realistic a portrait of Maritime economic depression as Goin’ Down the Road.”85 My point is neither to champion nor to dismiss the tax shelter–era films but to describe one example that intersects with the early development of the regional film industry.86 The slapstick, hard-drinking miners evince American stereotypes of the rural underclass in such tv shows as the then-popular Dukes of Hazzard (1979–85), a serial about fast-driving moonshiners in the Deep South. In fact, the female lead in Valentine, Lori Hallier, later played a role in an episode of Dukes. Valentine opens with a brutal murder in an abandoned mine shaft – the industrial workplace is seen as site of horror with the worker as the monster (the killer is dressed in mining gear with his face obscured by a gas mask, augmented by muffled breathing on the soundtrack). Of course, this workplace is more dangerous due to compromised safety conditions (see the documentary Westray discussed in chapter 3, but the genre fantasy displaces these material conditions onto the phantasmagoria of the workermonster. These kinds of exploitation films sometimes manage to allow a modicum of social criticism within the narrative. In this case, the monsterkiller is seeking revenge against mine managers who neglected safety concerns so that they could get to the town’s Valentine dance, resulting in the death of several workers. Twenty years later, the town dares to hold another dance on that fatal day and, of course, the worker-monster returns. The issue of mine safety is a minor pretense for a film intent on demonizing the working class by presenting workers as either foolish or monstrous and, in either case, in need of containment. This film was shot in Canada for the US market in order to reduce labour costs and avoid union jurisdiction. As it turns out,

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the exploitive work conditions on this exploitation movie were as dangerous as that implied in the fictional narrative. The producers tried to recruit lowwage crew positions by seeking the assistance of the then-fledgling Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative, but had to convince members that the film was suitable for the film co-op milieu. According to Chuck Lapp, who worked as a technician on the film, the original title was The Secret and the producers “wouldn’t release the script, except to say that it was about young people growing up in a mining town.” The film has a cult following among genre fans and on-line fan comments refer to the realistic setting, but most viewers would have only ever seen an underground mine in the movies. The realism of the location included an incident of methane buildup underground that could have been fatal to the crew. The air pressure from an offshore hurricane drew methane into the mine up to the level where the crew was shooting with open-faced quartz lights (equipment that had been originally banned by the mine supervisors because it could ignite an explosion). There was a delay while the line producer had discussions with the mining inspectors who were assigned to the production. According to Lapp: “I walked beside one of the mining inspectors as we went to the elevator and asked him what the problem was. He said there were some ‘methane flares.’ After we got to the surface, I stayed around the entrance and watched him go back down to check the levels. He came back about ten minutes later and looked ashen-faced as he emerged. I said, ‘It must be pretty bad down there, eh?’ He replied, ‘You are not going back down there anytime soon!’ and he walked away. A couple of days later, the methane levels were deemed safe, and we returned to the mine to resume shooting.” In another case of dangerous on-set conditions, one of the lead actors could not drive a motor vehicle but was required in one scene to tear into the mine parking lot. He lost control of the car and ran into one of the extras, who ended up in the hospital. According to Lapp, the accident was recorded on film and could be seen in the rushes the next day. The extra spent considerable time in the hospital, and the producers paid him to avoid a lawsuit. Only after this incident were stunt drivers employed on set.87 Near the end of the scheduled shoot, many local crewmembers would not renew their contracts due to the low pay and arduous working conditions, and the film was finished with a skeleton crew.88 It took the death of a crewmember on another Nova Scotia film before proper safety considerations began to be implemented. During production of Mary Silliman’s War (Dir: Stephen Surjik, 1994), set in New England during the American War of Independence, a production assistant was tasked with

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disguising a power pole. The unfortunate worker, thirty-one-year-old Paul Cochrane, used an aluminum ladder; when it touched the power line, he was electrocuted.89 The subsequent police investigation deemed this an accident; because he was not under the supervision of a more experienced technician, his employer could not be held at fault. The case is a sad example of the cost to the worker of his enthusiasm to please the production company and advance in the business. What gets lost amidst such enthusiasm is the fact that filmmaking is not simply driven by a creative impulse; it is an oftendangerous work environment. The freelance nature of the enterprise and the tremendous pressure on budgets and schedules can invite compromises with serious consequences. After this accident, the Nova Scotia Department of Labour introduced regulations adapted from the more-established film industries in Ontario and British Columbia that helped mitigate the recklessness of a new industry. In Valentine, the on-screen fantasy shows the industrial workplace as spectre of horror, and notably a place where women are either helpless victims and/or punished by men who fear their sexuality, while the real workplace of the exploitation film is similarly fraught. If a film like this comes to the region as a means of economic and industrial development – that is, to provide a business model on the tactics of capitalist exploitation – the narrative serves a related function. To put it bluntly, there is a correspondence between on-screen cheese and off-screen business sleaze. The appeal of exploitation movies may be in reaction to the saccharine sentimentality of those earnest Canadian films that wear their location on their sleeve –heritage productions like Anne of Green Gables – which provide an image of place entirely detached from the complex social conditions out of which place is formed. The high production values of this kind of official Canadian content shot in glossy 35mm are at odds with the real conditions of economic underdevelopment but serve the function of contributing to a fantasy of national unity. A more low-budget example – produced for cbc with location shooting in Nova Scotia and made a few years after Bloody Valentine – is The King of Friday Nights (Dir: John Gray, 1985), based on the director’s successful stage musical Rock’n’ Roll. Here, the specific locale is named: the eastern shore community of Mushaboom is identified as a down-and-out Maritime town. Part of the appeal of nostalgia production is an avoidance of political context, so this paean to small-town rock and roll exists as if the social movements associated with the music never existed: civil rights, black cultural influences, the rise of youth culture are all absent. Instead, the film begins with an assertion of lowbrow pride: “Culture, that’s something you find in your fridge every couple of months.” The narrative is

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rather thin; the story of a rock band that starts out without much chance of success but then rises to the top (we see an unlikely image of stacks of money having been earned after touring small towns in Nova Scotia). The one redeeming critical element is the stylized use of graphic backgrounds, with many musical numbers staged with performers chroma-keyed over painted imagery, much of which evokes the stereotyped iconography of the good life and suburbia in 1950s and early 1960s Americana.90 The chroma-key aesthetic exploits the qualities of video, and in this respect, there is a comparison with the Trailer Park Boys franchise. In tpb , video evokes realitytv and more generally the preponderance of surveillance technologies in everyday life. It is not surprising that director and writer Mike Clattenburg began his career not in film school but in community-access tv .9¹ P R I S O N H O U S E O F C U LT U R E : T R A I L E R PA R K B OY S A N D ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

Trailer Park Boys (Dir: Mike Clattenburg, tv series, 2001–08) deals with family and belonging in Nova Scotia at the margins of culture and the economy. In tpb , Ricky’s dad, Ray, is played by the show’s co-producer Barrie Dunn, who also had a regular role in Gullage’s as Szabo Vaseline, a sleazy Bulgarian businessman with fractured English. His recurring line in that show, whenever he shakes hands, is, “I am always being pleasured.” Ricky (Robb Wells) has a similarly strained grasp of the language, though without the excuse of translation: “I’m not a pessimist. I’m an optometrist.” Ricky’s neo-literacy and the show’s huge use of profanity contribute to the image of regional backwardness and the positing of criminality as logical response to economic underdevelopment. Language use functions to ironically undermine prevailing terms of power linked with discourse, but at the same time, it reproduces mass media stereotypes of white trash and working-class dysfunction. The problem with such stereotypes is that they tend to legitimize, and even justify, prevailing class relations. Consider for instance the role of the working-class male in such iconic American tv shows as All in the Family, The Simpsons, and The Honeymooners – all are buffoons who undertake, in most episodes, some sort of scheme to get rich but, by the conclusion, are reconciled to their social-economic position, usually through the affirmation of family. In fact, the deconstruction of family is one of the interesting counter-discursive aspects of tpb . Each episode usually includes a get-rich-quick scheme that is inevitably doomed to fail but that, by the conclusion, affirms the bond between the

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boys and, implicitly, with the place in which they live. In season six, Ricky’s dad, Ray, ends up living at the local dump, leaving jugs full of piss around the park – an idea taken from the practice of some long-distance truckers to dispose of urine while driving (Ray used to be a trucker, and this is described as the way of the road – just-in-time delivery!). To put this scenario in a broader social context, Mike Davis describes, in Planet of Slums, that two billion people living in squalor, many without access to basic washroom facilities, where the use of a “flying toilet” is common. Davis describes many cases where a handful of toilets are available to service thousands of people, or cases where the price of using the toilet is unaffordable: “As a result, slum residents rely on ‘flying toilets’ or ‘scud missiles,’ as they are called: They put the waste in a polythene bag and throw it on to the nearest roof or pathway.” In a scheme close to echoing in real life the entrepreneurial fantasies of the tpb, Davis goes on to cite a form of aggressive begging in Nairobi, where street kids brandish bottles of excrement into the windows of stopped cars, demanding cash.9² These street kids are perfect students of market capitalism, turning shit into commodity. All of this is far removed from the comedy of tpb , but even if the broader social-political references are unintended, our laughter is an uneasy acknowledgement of the massive inequity on the planet. Next to the dump, Bubbles (Mike Smith) comes up with a kind of tourist scheme, setting up a theme park called The Kittyland Love Centre. The Love Centre is outfitted with rummage-sale objects converted into carnival rides for cats, with Bubbles gleefully asking: “Tell me what you think of the rat wheel.” Meanwhile, Julian (John Paul Tremblay) has set up a prosperous business making potato vodka inside prison, possible since he is high school pals with a couple of the guards. His plan is to invest his cash in real estate, the ideal enterprise of bourgeois capitalists and the mortgage-tanked middle-class. At the trailer park, his business gets a boost with the high-definition broadcast on the local cable channel of a show promoting small business. The advanced image technology finds its ground zero in the pathos of underdevelopment where name-calling and infighting take over. Notwithstanding the use of profanity, one significant marker of the show’s local specificity is vernacular language. The trailer park boys are frequently in and out of jail and, in fact, there is little distinction between the two states. For the boys, prison is not unlike everyday life outside, and the relative restriction on mobility is met with an abundance of dope and liquor (so why go anywhere?). In fact, getting out of jail is often met with disappointment. Most seasons of the show end with Ricky and Julian going back to jail, re-

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flecting the conditions of seasonal labour under conditions of underdevelopment as much as the rise of the prison complex. In explaining his efforts to provide a degree of care for his daughter, Ricky declares that it is possible to balance the competing claims on his time: “I’m fuckin’ hung over, burned out, but that’s what being a good dad is all about.” In my favourite episode, the Christmas special called “Dear Santa: Go Fuck Yourself,” Ricky confuses the existence of Christ with that of Santa Claus, but then, after trying to sell dope outside of church on Christmas Eve, he goes inside and brushes past the priest to deliver his own sermon on family and togetherness. The show provides a remarkable degree of openness to non-traditional family groupings, with homosexuality taken for granted rather than being a subject of debate or moral policing. Trailer park supervisor Jim Lahey (John Dunsworth) is in an open relationship with his lover Randy (Patrick Roach) and, in season six, is in a three-way relationship that includes his ex-wife Sarah (Shelley Thompson). However, it is difficult to know whether the show puts forward sexual permissiveness as a progressive ideal or whether these images are used to present an image of decline. Like many popular entertainment shows, a wide audience is encouraged because both perspectives are plausible, while humour undermines the idea that such a show could have anything to say about social issues. John McCullough suggests that the humanist impulse in Gullage’s and tpb “disguises itself as regional survivalism in underdevelopment. In these [shows] about human struggles, it is not the Canadian region that disappears. In fact, it is the region, underdeveloped as it is, that perpetuates the principle that human survival alone is a sign of progress.” In this way, according to McCullough, tpb actually deflects criticism of the particular form of late capitalism and its impact on everyday life through a “bold normalizing of underdevelopment.”9³ Where Gullage’s provides an image of family and community that, while fractured, offers a position to voice criticism and posit difference, tpb tends, for all its surface counterculturalism, to emphasize the maintenance of family in a way that tends to blunt the show’s critical impulse. The role of music in the show is to reference existing forms that come from elsewhere, for instance, with the character of J-Roc, a white rapper and pornographer. In contrast, music in Gullage’s is generated by the show’s main characters. Both shows depict a hardscrabble for cash as part of everyday life, but where Gullage’s refuses the compromises to community that would be attached to whatever economic advantages may accompany the market logic of cultural homogenization, it also depicts the difficulties and compromises that come from being short of cash at the end

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of the month or in line at the grocery store. The critical importance of tpb is in presenting a world already displaced from the legitimate market, one that offers nothing but a choice between criminality and poverty, or both. The boys have several theatrical feature films directed by Mike Clattenburg, including Trailer Park Boys: The Movie (2006) and Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day (2009), and both are an extension of the long tradition of comedy where the joke is in the antics of backwater bumpkins dimwittedly trying, but failing, to get ahead. These films were preceded by a short video made in 1998 called One Last Shot, followed in 1999 by a feature called The Trailer Park Boys, with Ricky and Julian working as pet assassins. tpb has been wildly popular with its hometown audience, appealing as both a local success story and an underdog achievement. Tourists visiting Halifax purchase the show’s bling and take pictures of familiar locations. There was some polite opposition to the appearance of the boys as hosts of the 2006 East Coast Music Awards broadcast on cbc , with concern that dope-smoking losers are the wrong image for the region, but all of this functioned as publicity, especially against the fact of uptight critics missing the joke. The 2006 tpb Movie was executive produced by Ivan Reitman, who reached the high point of Canadian filmmaking that is genre success in Hollywood as director of teen comedy hits such as Meatballs (1979) and Ghostbusters (1984). The film follows a narrative pattern similar to the tv series: the boys get out of jail, they have plans to get rich, these plans are thwarted, and they end up back where they started. In making the transition to the big screen, Reitman tailored the 2006 tpb Movie’s appeal to an American audience by emphasizing nudity (the character Lucy is made to work in a strip club), stressing the idea of ‘family values’ in the relationships, and by downplaying profanity and the specificity of locale. It is also structured to introduce audiences to the characters, while the second feature film functions as an extension of the tv series, with the characters already established. tpb Movie is shot on 16mm film for blow-up to theatrical 35mm and uses a combination of hand-held and locked-down shots in order to conform to a conventional movie style, unlike the entirely hand-held, pseudo-amateur video format of the tv show and the second feature. The Americanization formula appealed to Canadian audiences, providing gross revenue of $1.3 million in the film’s opening weekend, but was a disaster in the US at less than $3,000.94 The plot of tpb in its various manifestations always involves either an attempt to enter the straight business world, which always fails, or a spectacular if ridiculous heist to gain retirement funds. In tpb Movie, the plan is to steal an enormous container of coins displayed in a movie theatre

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lobby as part of a contest, an upgrade of their everyday work of knocking over parking meters for small change. tpb nicely manages a combination of the absurd and the petty while also reflecting the lunkheaded greed running through our society, where crime is the flipside of capitalist enterprise. The second feature, Countdown to Liquor Day, begins where the final episode of the series ends, and it continues the reality-tv premise in a movie that may be what the filmmakers had wanted to make before the first one was diluted by considerations of genre and marketplace. While Hollywood promotes a specialty product line of white trash chic, the premise of the tv show and film is that these characters are the real thing. In publicity materials, guest appearances in public, and the dvd ‘making-of ’ video, the performers always remain in character. In Liquor Day, they admonish the camera crew to stay out of the way so as not to interfere with whatever petty crime is being carried out. Interaction with the camera crew is not a selfreferential moment deconstructing the process of representation; it is instead a parotic affinity with conventions of television. The direct address to the camera is also a very economical way of conveying plot information. tpb is transgressive primarily in the use of language. Ricky (Robb Wells) notoriously mangles the simplest of expressions, trailer park supervisor Jim Lahey (John Dunsworth) seethes with rage as he predicts a looming “shitstorm,” and all the characters regularly punctuate speech with profanity. In this way, the show undermines conventions of propriety and privilege. Access to property (another marker of privilege) is a recurring theme, with the threat of expulsion from the trailer park a frequent plot point on the tv show. In Liquor Day, the hope for an increase in real estate values drives Lahey’s scheme to gentrify the trailer park. The boys demonstrate their inability to get ahead by infantile behaviour, but tpb also suggests how the conventional law-abiding world is dysfunctional, with crime as a legitimate alternative to a broken system. When the boys are getting out of jail, Julian displays the requisite subservience in a parole board hearing, claiming his intention to go straight and set up an auto body repair business (his first job is to steal a prison van and repaint it). Ricky makes no pretense to social propriety, telling his parole hearing that, while he could lie and claim to go straight, the reality is otherwise – and in any case, prison overcrowding requires that he be let out. Ricky’s speech reflects the contemporary neo-conservatism that disavows the pretense of social reform for a more explicit social Darwinism. The concluding spectacular crime of Liquor Day is a bank heist where the boys impersonate armoured guards scheduled to pick up the week’s bank deposits. It works,

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to a point, because no one within the system questions authority, even if uniforms are patched together with hockey tape. The plan is interrupted when a drunk Lahey proclaims his love for his sidekick Randy and threatens suicide from the rooftop of the bank if his love remains unrequited. He is rescued from the precipice, but by then, the real security guards arrive, followed by a B-movie-style shootout and car chase. Of course, the boys land back in jail, but they expect to be released early on account of the improprieties of a drunk arresting officer; the film crew gets the blame for disrupting the plans; and Lahey ends up with the stolen money. At the end of the film, we see his sun-scorched body staggering across a tropical beach and him lamenting, “what’s liquor without love.” In 2011, Clattenburg shifted from the trailer park shtick to make a feature called Afghan Luke about a Canadian journalist tracking the story of a Canadian sniper in the Afghanistan War. The film draws upon a stoner subplot but also follows the brutality of war past the veil of innocence attached to Canadian troops as told through a journalist’s perspective. In 2013, Clattenburg and co-producers Barrie Dunn and Mike Volpe sold the ownership of the tpb franchise to cast members Robb Wells, Mike Smith, and John Paul Tremblay. tpb’s narrative landscape is the ruins of uneven development marked by the familiarity of commodity culture, as David Harvey describes it: “Disruptive spatiality triumphs over the coherence of perspective and narrative in postmodern fiction, in exactly the same way that imported beers coexist with local brews, local employment collapses under the weight of foreign competition, and all the divergent spaces of the world are assembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television screen.”95 On the surface, the show is at odds with an earlier regional icon, Anne of Green Gables, but both trade on the image of the rural. While Anne lives on a potato farm, the boys reconstitute deindustrialized urban space by harvesting marijuana. The boys are certainly more profane than sweet Anne, but tpb has been critically championed as really being about love and family. Both of these narratives provide a response to prevailing social and economic conditions, brute labour of pre-industrial development and poverty of post-industrial underdevelopment.96 The Anne brand has now extended beyond the cultural sphere and fully into the realm of economic development since the story and character are no longer governed by copyright (related to authorship) but are now a trademark controlled jointly by the Province of Prince Edward Island and the heirs of the original story author, Lucy Maude Montgomery. Proving that authorship is a contested term detached from the ideal of art, Anne of Green Gables tv -series producer Kevin Sullivan was engaged in a legal dis-

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pute with Montgomery’s heirs when, in the 1980s, he sought to capitalize on the Japanese fascination with the Anne image by applying for a trademark without the family’s consent.97 The Anne series was shot in Ontario, and the sequel, Emily of New Moon (1998–2000), only moved production to pei when the province directly paid the producers $1.9 million in 1996 as compensation for tax credit subsidies available in Ontario.98 This case exemplifies what is, arguably, a race to the bottom in the use of public funds in interprovincial competition for production. In Ho! Kanada (1995), a lighthearted documentary directed by Barbara Doran and Peter Wintonick, the filmmakers follow a group of Japanese tourists travelling across Canada and play at making a faux-tourist film featuring a tourist whose business is making souvenir travel videos. They make the point of disabling national icons while also admiring the appeal of Canada to the Japanese. They also travel to Japan to visit “Canada World,” bigger than Disneyland but not as crowded. The Anne of Green Gables display, next to a former strip mine, is shown as a kind of fantasy place for the projection of an ideal of freedom attached to pastoral romanticism. In her conversations with the Japanese, filmmaker Doran qualifies her own identity as a Newfoundlander rather than a Canadian, but then dresses as Anne to explain the purpose of the film on a cbc news clip. While all of this is played tonguein-cheek, there is an interesting relation between the indie film perspective, the state apparatus (media and tourist infrastructure), and interest in the country in the eyes of the Japanese tourists through which we come to see the appeal of tourism and national myths. Anne of Green Gables was produced by Toronto-based producer Kevin Sullivan as a mini-series in 1985, a sequel in 1987, the previously mentioned Emily of New Moon series, another spin-off series Road to Avonlea (1989– 96), yet another Anne series in 1998, a half-hour educational program called Anne: The Animated Series (1999–2000) co-produced with US-based pbs , and a feature animation called Anne: Journey to Green Gables (1985) designed as a prequel to the live-action storyline. The orphan farm girl is a story of riches from a media industry perspective. The popularity of the original novels and all this tv product has contributed to the success of Anne-themed built environments to attract tourists to pei with a romantic pastoral image that effaces the specificity of social and economic conditions of place. Tourist shops on the island are happy to separate visitors from their money in exchange for all manner of Anne merchandise. Patsy Kotsopoulos points out that the big business of Anne tourism on Prince Edward Island is matched on-screen by a “deregionalization, creating a regionless romance appropriate

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for a geographically dispersed viewership.”99 The Anne story, orphan farm labourer in exile, is one that has great meaning for the descendants of the many child workers dispatched to Canada early in the twentieth century and who experienced utter misery and exploitation. Excluded from Anne’s static myth of innocence is a complex history of industry, ethnic rivalry, and labour struggle. Lorraine York suggests that the literary tourism produced by Montgomery’s fame destabilizes fixed notions of culture: “Literary tourism, viewed from the perspective of small-production culture, is an open challenge to the very notion of high culture because by definition, it involves the mass consumption of an author and works that are thought best if fully accessible only by the few.”¹00 The tourism development on the island maintains the author’s literary reputation while also preserving an ideal of the island landscape as if forever unchanging.¹0¹ INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT

In this analysis of Canadian cinema, there is an ongoing tension between notions of culture and industrial development, meaning entertainment filmmaking. With regard to the latter, in the Atlantic region, the dominant company has been Salter Street Films. It was formed in 1979 by director Paul Donovan and his brother, producer Michael Donovan, to make genre films for the export market, beginning with tax shelter financing for their first feature: South Pacific 1942 (1981), a B-grade black comedy about a Canadian submarine crew fighting the Japanese during the Second World War. In 1985 they made Def-Con 4, a cult-exploitation movie set in a post-nuclear war future of cannibals and survivalists. One on-line review described the wry Canadian content: “If there’s anything worse than being hunted down like an animal, it’s being hunted down like an animal by a kilt-wearing Maury Chaykin.”¹0² The early films by Salter Street were refused cfdc /Telefilm financing because they were deemed lacking in sufficient Canadian content. That response began to change as the company became more successful and as state financing became more readily available for genre entertainment. In 1992, they returned to the submarine with Buried on Sunday (Dir: Paul Donovan), a comedy set in a fictional Atlantic fishing community devastated by the cod fishery moratorium. The town declares independence after coming into possession of a Russian submarine and aiming its nuclear missiles at Mount Rushmore and at Canada’s Wonderland, an amusement park outside of Toronto. Many of the cast are members of Codco, and the film attempts to profit from the group’s satirical anti-establishment humour, but

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it falls short by relying on gross stereotypes – the Russians are unethical, crazy, and drunk on vodka while the locals are redneck bumpkins. Tommy Sexton, in his last screen role before his death due to aids , plays a mad Russian missile programmer who spontaneously combusts because his body is so completely soaked in vodka. Maury Chaykin, now without kilt, plays the prime minister’s spokesman, describing himself as: “a lawyer, a liar, for the prime minister,” and we see him bedding down beside the town mayor’s pet pig – the film reminds us that it will not trade in the subtle nuances of art cinema. The film expresses concerns of regional underdevelopment and economic disenfranchisement but, unfortunately, delivers these ideas in cliché dialogue and through stereotyped roles, diminishing whatever critical impact it may have had. The resistance to the idea of film as serious culture is again expressed in the 1994 Salter Street production Paint Cans (Dir: Paul Donovan), a weak satire of the bureaucratic apparatus of Canadian film financing laden with gratuitous homophobia. The production is a great expression of the hypocrisy of Canadian capitalism in that it is funded largely with public money through the National Film Board and the cbc . Many filmmakers in this country have a critical relationship to the public system, but the cliché presentation sacrifices insight for cheap laughs. Set in Toronto and Cannes, Paint Cans is about a thin-lipped government agency film bureaucrat named Wick Burns (Chas Lowther) who has utter contempt for art and is entirely self-absorbed by his own power. This subject is taken up by the company’s much more satirical and critically interesting tv series Made in Canada (1998–2002), featuring actor and comedian Rick Mercer. From disdain for film culture, Salter Street goes on to produce the publicly financed heritage series Emily of New Moon and, among many other projects, the cbc mini-series Shattered City (Dir: Bruce Pittman, 2003), telling the story of the 1917 Halifax explosion – made with a high budget but garnering weak critical response and marked by historical inaccuracies. Around the same time, the company partnered in a German co-production of the extremely lucrative science fiction series Lexx (1997–2002), which sold widely in international markets and gained a large following on-line. The most high profile Salter Street production is Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002). The trajectory of Salter Street is a measure of structural changes in the regional and Canadian film industry. In 2001, the company was acquired by the then-largest producer in Canada, Alliance Atlantis Communications (aa ), with the promise that production operations would continue. aa, itself the product of an earlier merger of competing entities, was at the

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time aggressively expanding its cable television holdings and among the Salter Street assets was ifc (Independent Film Channel). The promise of production and exhibition convergence (and of an ongoing commitment to regional production) disappeared with aa ’s concentration on exhibition rather than the financially risky feature film business, leading to the closure of Salter Street in 2003. In order to grease the wheels of regulatory approval by the crtc and to quiet concerns over media monopolization, aa had to make a contribution to the local film community. After considerable negotiation, this took the form of a charitable donation of real estate: the former Salter Street headquarters became the home of the nscad University film program, where I wrote this book. aa was subsequently bought by CanWest Global Communications Corp. with financing from Wall Street heavyweight Goldman Sachs – raising questions about foreign ownership of Canadian media, not to mention the entanglement of Canadian media with the periodic catastrophes of the stock market. CanWest assets have since been sold to Alberta-based Shaw Cable, a company known in the industry for vocal opposition to Canadian content requirements. The closure of Salter Street must be understood not simply as the demise of a significant player in regional production but also as a logical extension of industrial-cultural policy. What emerged from Salter Street was Halifax Film, founded by Michael Donovan with other partners, which has since been merged with Decode Entertainment to form the publicly traded, Toronto-based dhx Media Ltd, a company primarily interested in television production especially for children and youth markets, with a large portfolio of serial animation. It has since also bought the Halifax company imx Communications for its library of feature films, including regionally specific titles such as New Waterford Girl, Margaret’s Museum, Love That Boy, Divine Ryans (Dir: Stephen Reynolds, 1999), and Wild Dogs as well as high-profile service productions that include The River King (Dir: Nick Willing, 2005) and Love and Death on Long Island (Dir: Richard Kwietniowski, 1997), and a number of less successful regional productions such as Cadillac Girls (Dir: Nicholas Kendall, 1993) and Dragonwheel (Dir: Tricia Fish, 2001). These corporate mergers are consistent with consolidation patterns in the global media industry as the larger regional firms organize in accordance with the needs of Hollywood service contracts. Some of the business of Halifax Film is clearly identified as Canadian content, notably the long-running news satire show This Hour Has 22 Minutes made out of the ashes of Codco, which was produced for tv by Salter Street. 22 Minutes is interesting for the ways that it negotiates a regional perspective within a national broad-

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cast framework, for instance, through frequent parodies of Newfoundland premier Danny Williams (retired from office in 2010) and in-jokes referring to regional stereotypes, especially where these intersect with federal government policies. Most of the other shows produced by this company are not regionally specific but, instead, are produced for the export tv market; they include such titles as The Mighty Jungle, a live-action puppet show, and the animation series Poko. The notable theatrical exception is Shake Hands with the Devil (Dir: Roger Spottiswoode, 2007), based on the memoir written by Roméo Dallaire, Canadian lieutenant-general and leader of the un military forces during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The film comes out of the Canadian tradition of social realism and social purpose, powerfully conveying the brutality of events and the duplicity of politicians who obstructed Dallaire’s attempts to prevent the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi by extremist Hutu militants. It is made with the involvement of Dallaire who remains committed to ensuring that this history is not forgotten.¹0³ The film is also indicative of the kinds of feature films that receive Canadian financing – the Canadian subject is located in an international context; star Roy Dupuis is a Quebec actor with a profile outside of Canada (from his role in the tv series La Femme Nikita, 1997–2001); the Ottawa-born director has a long track record of Hollywood experience, including work as an editor for Sam Peckinpah in the early 1970s; and the narrative is punctuated by action and suspense marketable in a transnational context. None of this is to say that the producers had an easy time selling a complex film about a serious historical subject, with a style and context quite distinct from its more typically exploitive Hollywood twin, Hotel Rwanda (Dir: Terry George, 2004). What makes these issues interesting is the way they emerge in the intersection of cultural policies and industrial development investment strategies. They are at once set up to support indigenous production but also to attract foreign location shooting, what is colloquially termed ‘guest production’ in the pr language of Film & Creative Industries Nova Scotia. This work has a contradictory function for Canadian film workers, as Elmer and Gasher point out: “Location production gives Canadian filmmakers, wherever they work, access to a Hollywood industry that many Canadians regard as less ‘foreign’ than their own domestic industry, and an industry many have blamed for deterring and retarding the development of a viable indigenous cinema.”¹04 The phenomenon of location production is known as ‘runaways’ within Hollywood film labour circles and is a system whereby various film regions around the world compete for productions. Regional film development offices offer skilled labour at rates that undermine union

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wages within Hollywood in a kind of race-to-the-bottom indicative of industrial organization under conditions of globalization. Susan Christopherson points out that this form of inter-jurisdictional competition is a symptom of larger state forces: “The real political action takes place within national regimes through regulatory changes and judicial decisions. These institutional frameworks set the rules for competition policy and the scale and scope of labor’s bargaining rights, and they determine the definition and extent of the privileges and obligations associated with private property.”¹05 Most runaway productions shot in Canada land in the major centres of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. However, there is spillover into the regions due, again, to inter-regional competition, as well as availability of facilities (which can be limited in the busy centres) and, sometimes, the specific quality of the location. The numbers are significant: “The Monitor Company (1999) estimates that the total dollar loss to the United States as a result of economic runaways was $2.28 billion in 1998. The presumed Canadian share of this total is $1.85 billion. By contrast, the Canadian Film and Television Production Association estimates that total revenues from foreign film shooting in Canada in the 1999–2000 season was just $1 billion.”¹06 This kind of industrial work is highly vulnerable to external conditions, for instance, the fluctuation of the Canadian dollar and xenophobic anxieties over border-crossing, but are also stimulated by capital fears of labour unrest, such as the threat of job action by the Screen Actors Guild. While there exists a tension between cultural and industrial forces within the film community and most commercial filmmakers retain the veneer of culture as a legitimizing force, some in the region are more direct. The former first commissioner of New Brunswick Film and now Moncton-based producer Sam Grana states his position bluntly in describing his relation to government funding: “I urge them to stop looking at film as a cultural thing, as a handout … The film and television industry is a business. Sam Grana is a businessperson. I’m not a cultural freak looking for a grant from the government.”¹07 As Pierre Véronneau notes, while serving as provincial film commissioner, Grana allocated the vast majority of funds to anglophone productions, alienating the Acadian community.¹08 The kinds of productions that are typically attracted to the regions are neither profile blockbusters nor the high cultural-value art films. The exceptions are Titanic (Dir: James Cameron, 1997), partially shot in Halifax as well as in Mexico, and The Shipping News, shot in Newfoundland and strongly invested in the specificity of the landscape. More typical is the mundane television movie, the kind of production that is highly mobile precisely

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because it is not driven by the spatial dynamics of the location. After all, recognizable exteriors such as the New York City skyline can be shot by a second unit crew or purchased from a stock footage library and digitally integrated into the production. Issues related to financing and the availability of production infrastructure are far more important. Part of the skill set of a professional film crew is to disguise the shooting location for whatever the production requires, and the narratives of most television movies are not strongly invested in the dynamics of place except as colourful background. Halifax serves as double for Boston in the various Jesse Stone cbs television movies starring Tom Selleck. The producers are able to manage the costs on tightly budgeted shows such as this, and the local media convey the nascent thrills of celebrity spotting. THE LOCAL AND THE POPUL AR

Box office is the primary marker of success in the film industry, so it is no surprise that regional producers, encouraged by funding policies, strive to create productions that fit the marketplace. As David Pike describes it, Canadian film studies remains uncomfortable with the idea of the popular, noting that the specificity of Canadian cinema is bound up with the paradox of combining the terms “Canadian” and “popular film.” “Success in Canadian film is generally defined as failure to be popular, while popular success tends to make the ‘Canadianness’ of a film invisible to the canon of Canadian national cinema.”¹09 While regional industrial development strategies turn to media activity as replacement for the loss of traditional industries, this activity needs to be understood as being in continuity with the history of branch-plant production whereby regionally based capitalists fill a managerial function while the broader terms of work and product output are determined elsewhere. From a critical-cultural perspective, we can also understand these kinds of media products as having the function of, at best, distraction, and, more forcefully, social control since these texts inhibit opportunities to reflect critically about our collective place in the world. This is the Frankfurt School perspective on mass culture, where non-working time is regimented in a continuing spiral of consumption. I want to conclude this chapter with discussion of a series of films from the region that function at the border between genre marketability and local specificity. Of the many filmmakers from outside the region who have used Atlantic Canada as location, one of the most interesting is Toronto-based Clement Virgo, director of One Heart Broken into Song (1999) produced by Nova

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Scotia–based filmmaker Bill MacGillivray and partner Terry Greenlaw. This made-for-television movie is the first fiction feature film shot in the region that is directed by a black filmmaker, and it all but vanished after its initial broadcast. It was written by acclaimed novelist and poet George Elliott Clarke, based on his poetry collection Whylah Falls, a blues-inspired sensual epic written in “response to the call of popular angst in radio and folklore … to restore the verbal magic of African United Baptist Association sermons. Shouts, hollers, coos, cries, screams – the jazz of life.”¹¹0 Virgo later returned to Nova Scotia for the theatrical feature Poor Boy’s Game (2007), a drama set amidst the racial tensions of urban Halifax but with American star Danny Glover. Both films are interesting as compelling dramas that are characteristic of market-oriented indie filmmaking and as films that are well integrated with the dynamics of place. Central to One Heart is the idea that culture is something performed, not simply fixed in time and place. One Heart is unique among Canadian tv movies with a historical theme, in that it presents its subject in a lush poetic form. It depicts racism in Nova Scotia through a love story, which begins in the gypsum mining area near the town of Three Mile Plains (one of many historic black communities in the province), fictionalized as Whylah Falls, and then proceeds to Africville, which is characterized as a place of promise and opportunity. The filmmakers chose to make these locations beautiful and evocative even while acknowledging the ugly systemic racism and economic marginalization through which these places are socially produced. This is important because it gets past the identification of the black community as being associated with strife and suffering. The film represents hardship but also offers an alternative imaginary discourse fuelled by poetry. It begins with the image of a pen on paper, composing a lyric narrative of what is to come and a taking ownership of language in its physicality and erotic energy. That opening image of creative writing is followed by an outdoor baptism scene, an important form of public testimony within the black Baptist community, and sets up a mythic good versus evil narrative that also resists a simplistic Christian moralism. Later, in Africville, we see not the white community’s view of the place as irredeemable ghetto but a vibrant place characterized by social connection and art – one scene depicts Duke Ellington playing piano at a house party, a detail that is historically true: Ellington was married to a woman whose family was from Africville, and he visited on numerous occasions. Later, Portia White performs as part of a church service. Together these scenes celebrate artistic energy and posit creativity as a means of resistance.

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Virgo’s Poor Boy’s Game, while cinematically engaging and beautiful, is more direct in its discourse on the interrelation of race, class, and the politics of place.¹¹¹ Poor Boy’s Game understands racial and class inequity as a structuring force of society irrespective of individual action. It tells the story of Donnie (Rosif Sutherland), a violent white boxer who gets out of jail after serving time for the vicious beating of a black man, Charlie Carvery (K.C. Collins), who is left with permanent brain damage. To enact Old Testament vengeance, a star boxer named Ozzie Paris (Flex Alexander) challenges Donnie to a fight. The film depicts a homosocial and homophobic world where the violence of social conditions intersects with the world of boxing (a sport that demands brutality along with grace and that is tightly controlled by capitalist interests) and a community’s desire for revenge. Where One Heart transforms place into lyrical epic, this Ontario-originated film (coproduced with Nova Scotian Chaz Thorne, who is also the co-screenwriter) makes specific references to Halifax. This is all the more refreshing in a film that is produced for the export market and with an American star, Danny Glover, as George Carvery, the father of the injured man. Carvery is a name of considerable importance as it is a reference to Aaron Carvery, the last Africville resident to leave the community before the City of Halifax destroyed it. George Carvery is the one good figure in a narrative populated with bad fathers, men who perpetuate the system of violence they have internalized (this is also how we see the father in One Heart), but even George is driven by the impulse of revenge. When Donnie gets out of jail, George takes a handgun and confronts him, but is ultimately unable to act on this impulse. Instead, George decides to become Donnie’s boxing coach – not because he does not want revenge, but because he wants to restore an ideal of honour to the community and to boxing by ensuring a fair fight, and to prevent sheer vengeance being carried out in his son’s name. George is also restoring the idea of honour within an otherwise debased masculinity. All the other father figures in the film are irredeemably despicable and made that way by the social context. Donnie’s own father is absent, his older brother and father-surrogate is abusive to his wife and enforces the racist gatekeeping policies against black customers at the club where he works as a bouncer. Joe, the club owner, expressly declares tribalist racism and, after the riot that takes place outside of his club doors, orders revenge with an arson attack on the black church. Joe aligns with Ozzie to set up the revenge fight, both seeking individual gain from the culture of violence. It is important to note that the club scenes are shot in Halifax at (but not

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explicitly identified as) what was then The Palace Nightclub, a space with a business model based on cut-rate booze served to a young and predominantly white clientele as well as a history of racially inflected confrontations. The club entrance, where the riot occurs, is actually shot in the nearby loading dock area of the Halifax Trade and Convention Centre, probably because it provides more space, but it also conveys a more gritty urban sensibility. Virgo describes the setting for the film in terms that pull no punches: “Halifax is very similar to an American city. It has the oldest black population, and there’s a history of divide between the communities. I just felt like certain spaces didn’t belong to me. It’s a feeling, a vibe in clubs or in restaurants. Just: ‘You don’t really belong in this space.’”¹¹² In these overlapping spaces of the boxing ring, the neighbourhood of north-end Halifax, and the nightclub, the terms for social engagement are determined by tribalism and capitalism. Here, the poor boy is a pawn in a game he cannot really control. Individual resistance, while important, cannot change the system as a whole since the city remains racially divided. As in Virgo’s first feature, Rude (1995), the idea of art is connected to power, violence, and the body. Donnie in Poor Boy’s Game is nominally an artist, and this characterizes him as outside the terms of society and linking him, in keeping with mainstream narrative stereotypes, with sexual difference. We see him making sketches and learn that he is a tattoo artist, but for Donnie, art takes a pretty crude form as indicated by his description of his best work. A fellow inmate wanted a snake tattoo on his face with the head of the snake aimed at the mouth. Donnie instead tattooed a penis on the man’s face as a crude expression of the homophobic terms of power written on the body. Meanwhile, in several scenes, we see George reading to his invalid son from Dickens’s Great Expectations, a popular novel of coming-of-age, signalling with this character an affinity with cultural expression associated with the modernist ideals of progress. The relation between modernist innovation and popular culture remains a defining characteristic of independent filmmaking, which, while no longer adhering to art cinema terms established within the various New Wave movements, needs to evoke the popular while distinguishing itself from the more predictable conventions of genre production. What has arisen in the wake of art cinema is what Jeffrey Sconce has called the “smart film.”¹¹³ These films accommodate the demographic shift toward a youth audience by forgoing cinematic ambiguity and alienation for the sake of irony, disaffection, and a critique of consumer culture. Art cinema references within contemporary filmmaking can then become a kind of coffee-table signifier

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of meaning without depth. Narrative films, by and large, are driven by realism and tend to disconnect character and story from the specificity of place. This structure undermines the fact that place matters, even if place is also something that is produced by a whole host of external social, political, and economic conditions. An alternative can be found in absurd comedy, and while this can take a cliché form in films that exploit the idea of regional quirkiness, the wild comedy Roller Town (Dir: Andrew Bush, 2011) has taken a different path. It is created by the Halifax-based comedy group Picnicface, which also made a television show in the vein of Kids in the Hall (cbc series, 1988–94) and has a popular Web presence with many short video skits. The film is a slapstick parody of the late-1970s trend of roller skating movies, as well as of the disco era. The plot spins around a young man named Leo (Mark Little) yearning to get into the upscale roller/dance academy, but he does not have the necessary upper-class credentials. He is the star of the local rink, like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (Dir: John Badham, 1977), with his skater fans literally frothing at the mouth. When gangsters scheme to convert the rink into a video arcade (with the town mayor on the take and wanting to eliminate the “scourge” of disco), Leo saves the day – we see the kids become zombie coin feeders of the video screens until Leo pulls the plug. The downscale waterfront of Dartmouth is transformed into a fantastical skating zone, quite unlike the more typical treatment of place in regional cinema. Even better is the scene of Leo and his girlfriend having high-speed roller-sex at night as they skate downhill toward the harbour. Near the end, even the god of disco appears. External conditions have an impact on the narrative even when filmmakers do not strive to incorporate explicit references, as in the low-budget New Brunswick coming-of-age themed Unspoken (Dir: Tony Larder, 1997), the Nova Scotia queer-positive Nonsense Revolution (Dir: Ann Verrall, and produced by Thom Fitzgerald, 2008), and the self-financed Summerhood (Dir: Jacob Medjuck and Tony Dean Smith, 2008). The latter echoes the great Canadian tax shelter success story Meatballs and is set at a summer camp where the campers despise each other. Unspoken tells three teen stories set in a fictionalized small town (shot in Bathurst) and linked together by a latenight radio dj whom teens call for advice. The film is set in the transition space between teenage years and adulthood, dealing with the anxieties of teenage life coupled with the diminishment of hope for social change characteristic of the 1980s. It is made in the wake of interest in ultra-low-budget filmmaking in the 1990s, inspired by such titles as El Mariachi (Dir: Robert

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Rodriguez, 1992) and Clerks (Dir: Kevin Smith,1994). Unspoken director Tony Larder attended the Vancouver Film School along with Kevin Smith. Larder is interested in making film with an eye to industry conventions but working outside of the mainstream apparatus of production. The director was living in Charlottetown while developing the project and visited the Island Media Arts Cooperative to inquire about production costs. There he met one of the founders of the co-op, Dave Ward, who pitched himself as the film’s cinematographer. The characters express a sense of isolation, for instance we see a teenage girl slowly becoming the lonely alcoholic that her mother already is. The vast beauty of the place counters the psychological turmoil experienced by the characters. This relation to landscape is also an interesting factor in Nonsense Revolution, a teen movie where friends are growing up under the cloud of grief over the death of Kaz, the group’s charismatic queer leader. Kaz is killed in a car accident caused by his drunken friends when they speed away from a police bust of a rave. A year after the accident, the incident is still not discussed, but Kaz reappears to his friend Tes as an angel (and still a horny teenager with a permanent erection). He becomes visible to others at the moment of orgasm. Another character, Curtis, desperately wants to lose his virginity, but his sexual fantasies come under the gaze of his dead ancestors. While this premise is absurd, the film deals with the need to reconcile the past in the lives of the present, and it does so through a fluid integration of sexuality, identity, and place. While locale is not named specifically, the film makes beautiful use of the autumn landscape, including the expansive south shore Crystal Crescent Beach (echoing the use of water imagery in director Ann Verrall’s earlier art video work). New Brunswick’s film industry remains underdeveloped in comparison with its Nova Scotia and Quebec neighbours, but it is worth noting the cinematic sensibility and regional distinctiveness of writer David Adams Richards. His autobiographical novel, River of the Brokenhearted (2003), deals with a family’s emotional and financial wealth as it changes with the prosperity of the movie theatres it owns, in the process offering a picture of the early days of the movies in the province. Richards authored the screenplay for the now-lost indie feature Tuesday, Wednesday (Dir: Jon Pedersen, 1987), about a man who returns from prison after having killed a boy while drunk driving and who seeks to reconcile with the boy’s mother. Richards’s Miramichi books have been adapted as films – For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (Dir: Norma Bailey, 1996), Nights below Station Street (Dir: Norma Bailey, 1997) and The Bay of Love and Sorrows (Dir: Tim Southam, 2002) – but none

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of these were shot in the province. The New Brunswick films Black Swan (Dir: Wendy Ord, 2001, not to be confused with the 2011 Hollywood film of that name), Lakefront (Dir: Doug Sutherland, 2004), and Black Eyed Dog (Dir: Pierre Gang; Exec prod: Sam Grana, 2006) each deal with characters who are shaped by and trapped in place, in a landscape that is at once seductive and frightening. Black Swan is located along the shores of the Bay of Fundy, a location famous for spectacular tides (the highest in the world) that provide a lush postcard background for the narrative. The tides also present an aura of danger as the mother of the main character, Helen, was swept out to sea. Helen is torn between her connection to the community and wanting to escape the limits of the small town and the memory of the earlier loss of her mother. The sublime landscape functions as metaphor for the character’s dilemma while also serving a more commercial function for the tourism economy. Lakefront, a gritty kitchen-sink drama shot in the Edmunston area of northern New Brunswick, is about an alcoholic widower who becomes involved with the wife of a reclusive small-town businessman, a man who turns out to be a murderer. The narrative makes use of the claustrophobia of the small town, with its secrets, obligations, and sense of entrapment, set against the rugged beauty of the place. Both Lakefront and Black Eyed Dog are New Brunswick–Quebec co-productions, demonstrating the link between these two provinces and suggesting a degree of separation from the rest of Atlantic Canada. While Quebec has tended to be celebrated as the location for Canadian art cinema, it also has a high level of indigenous commercial production and these films connect with that aspect of the industry. Black Eyed Dog is shot in French for the Quebec and non-theatrical ancillary market as well as pay-tv , and its director has a successful track record in the commercial filmmaking sector. It is another film with a main character yearning to escape the small-town environment, one marked by a series of shocking crimes occurring along the great Miramichi River, but that environment restricts her ability to imagine a way out. A mean dog that attacked her years before is chained near the door of her home, viciously reminding her of the danger in this place. She had dreamed of being a singer like Joni Mitchell but success in the cultural industry is seen as something that happens elsewhere and is far out of reach. She works as a waitress, nobody has heard her sing for years, her mother is mentally ill, and her father is absent. The despair within the family is extended throughout the community: the film is set in 1989, when serial murderer Allan Legere escaped from a New Brunswick prison and committed multiple rapes and murders in Miramichi

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Figure 4.3 | Step-dancing and rap music in Jiggers with Lennie MacPherson (left) and Graham Putnam.

during the seven months he was on the run. The idea that the town itself is holding its residents hostage is expressly stated in the dialogue (and this was the sentiment in the community during the Legere period), but by the conclusion the main character chooses not to leave. The final film discussed in this section is a hybrid Web and cinema project from Prince Edward Island called Jiggers (Dir: Adam Perry, 2009). pei has the least-developed film industry within the region, with almost no funding, studio, or equipment infrastructure. This film was made with little industry support but belongs in this section as a smart commentary on the culture industry coming to terms with the region outside the zone of commodity production. Large-scale productions undertaken in pei always involve non-local production personnel, and during the period of the low Canadian dollar relative to US currency, there was some activity, mainly in advertising, that exploited the unique landscape. Long-time locations manager Paul

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Ness sums up the provincial scene: “When I moved back here, the first six jobs I did were for Japanese companies, and they all had red-haired girls with pigtails … One of the hard sells here is to convince government funders that there are other stories that probably would draw even more attention to pei . I mean, you sit in a room and listen to some politicians say what a great writer Lucy Maude was – well, you bite your tongue if you want to get any support later on.” Local production, with the exception of promotional material for the tourism industry, is mainly in the form of short films and a limited amount of documentary. Jiggers is a grassroots, do-it-yourself media project that integrates these conditions of marginalization. The use of the Web as alternative sphere recalls the excitement around small-press publishing in the 1970s, though without the same political context. Jiggers originated as a narrative Web series made by the same team that produced Profile pei (discussed in chapter 2) and bypassed existing models of production and distribution.¹¹4 It is the story of an asthmatic outsider named John Paul (Lennie MacPherson) who dreams of becoming a professional step dancer, in spite of the overprotective worries of his deaf sister and surrogate mother (Jill McRae), who raised him with funds from the community. As a boy, he was locked in the attic for two days, found his father’s abandoned step-dancing shoes, and banged away to get free, driving his mother to leave and shaming the community into lending support. John Paul (JP) teams up with Stanley (Graham Putnam), a rapper who hatches a plan for the two to perform together. They follow the advice of seductive and sleazy Slender Tips Doucette (Jeremy Larter) – a local corn-dog version of infamous Elvis manager Colonel Tom Parker – who promises fame and fortune. Step-dancing, an iconic activity of island culture, is dangerous for JP due to his severe asthma, but also because it evokes the past. The narrative back-story is conveyed in an opening scene of JP undergoing a psychological examination that also serves as a kind of audition. It begins with him clipping on a microphone and then making sound effects into it. JP’s stepdancing feet are weighed down by the island sand, where dancing is a required expression of tradition, but when he dances “too much” at the legion hall talent show, he collapses, gasping for breath. Later, a trip to Halifax to appear on a morning television show is likewise met with over-the-top anxieties about big-city crime. JP dances with an inner determination marked by an embarrassed shame, like that of a schoolboy uncomfortable playing with infant toys but not sure how to move to the next level of development. As it turns out, anxieties about crime in the ‘big’ small city of Halifax turn

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out to be true: Stanley is fatally shot in a random act of violence. Like many Canadian films, the main characters, Stanley and JP, are boys in the bodies of men whose presence is shaped by absent fathers. Their story is framed by the colonial red brick and faded paint of Charlottetown clapboard houses, conveying a sense that the adult world has moved on and the boy-men are left to sort out how to transform game-playing into cultural survival. While the premise is absurd and some of the performances are over-the-top (JP is so deadpan as to be in the realm of willed unconsciousness), Jiggers is carefully photographed and tightly edited. The show speaks to and beyond the local scene and against the grain of culture as nostalgic commodity. I use Jiggers in this chapter as exemplifying production that is outside of the constraints of the industry model of filmmaking, yet is made with a high level of craft skill in its production and in the script and performance. In this way, it posits an alternative to the global Hollywood style of filmmaking that drives funding agency decisions – though I assume that these filmmakers would happily try their hand at that model if given the opportunity. The industry model is built around the feature film, a format that evolved to suit the interests of exhibitors. The culture industry in the region has followed already-existing conventions, but buried under these market-driven policies and generic conventions is the potential for the meaningful expression of place. It is with the possibilities and limits of representing place and the offering of a worldview not simply beholden to the local that I conclude this book in the next chapter.

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The displacements of which I speak lead often, if not always, to a disjunction in the psyche which can be, and often is, for poets and writers, a source of intense creativity: displacement leads to marginality; marginality allows one a certain distance from, and lucidity of vision about, the mainstream society, which allows the poet to explode the myths and lies by which such a society fuels itself. It is often also a source of tension, invaluable and essential to the creation of any work of art. M. Nourbese Phillip, A Genealogy of Resistance¹

CONCLUSION

Displacing the Landscape Film history is a moving target: my goal with this book is not to cast the Atlantic region’s filmmaking in stone but to engage with its processes and accomplishments and to understand its output in relation to conditions of place. The region is not a homogenous entity; the differences between each of the four provinces are as important as the common ground. Following M. Nourbese Phillip’s poetic theorization of the place of the poet to displace the foundational mythologization (and ideological constraints) of society, I have pointed to works that reveal the edges of place and social meaning. The landscape is productively displaced by work in the field of culture, clearing paths and removing entrenched obstacles. This has meant examining how

the region is contained in a non-dialectical sense of permanence but also consider where ‘region’ is allowed to remain fluid. While a finished film is a fixed object, the processes of its coming-into-being (economic, social, aesthetic, spatial, technological, etc.) are in motion, and this is also the case for the processes of reception across time, geography, context, and screen platform. Non-dialectical fixedness is usually expressed in anti-modern nostalgic terms, while mobility can be found in more challenging approaches to formal and narrative expression. However, formal experimentation need not be the exclusive gateway to difference; it is also expressed in narratives that transform fixed concepts of place. I discuss such narratives throughout this chapter. Rather than use this book’s conclusion to offer a final word on regional cinema, or summarize the issues raised throughout, I wish to further develop the question of the remains of art cinema as a reminder of difference within contemporary industrial media. This book began with analysis of The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood and Life Classes, in the context of feature filmmaking at the height of the region’s cultural ferment and extending from the vibrant creative communities of the filmmaking co-operatives in each province. A generation later, the idea of region is no longer as certain. ‘Region’ has always existed in the mind as well as in specific geographic locales, and the locale manifests in specific economic and cultural policies, such as development subsidies or trade infrastructure. As I have discussed with respect to the formation of the filmmaking co-operatives, institutional conditions giving rise to regional film activity did not exist until the 1970s, and it took more than another decade for industrial development policies to begin to encourage an infrastructure for professional filmmaking – first in Nova Scotia and later in other Atlantic provinces. This activity does not simply emerge out of a creative impulse but, rather, through specific conditions attached to specific places. These development policies are not driven by artistic interests but by wealth and employment and must compete with other sectors of the economy. In the case of Prince Edward Island at the time of this writing, the incentives that supported small-scale film and television production have been replaced by a gaming industry, effectively terminating television production in that province, since provincial equity investment is a key component in financing. There are few specific conditions that link the provinces of the Atlantic region in a way that would foster collective action; however, within the cultural sector there are provisions for interprovincial co-production. For the most part, the provinces undertake economic activity that serves interests within their borders or compete with each other to attract investment even

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as globalization has functioned elsewhere to encourage regional integration. In the case of New Brunswick, the province has undertaken to attract call centre business through economic and policy incentives that apply to the local but compete with other provinces and regions in a context where capital is defined by its mobility. Within the Canadian nation-state, the idea of region has functioned in two contradictory ways that are at once material and ideological: it is a means of bringing local concerns onto the national agenda; however, ‘region’ has historically signified a parochial backwardness that must be superseded within a more homogenous national framework. We see this most starkly in the Smallwood project of bringing Newfoundland into Confederation, but we also see it in cultural criticism, ideals of national culture, and concepts of taste.² The Atlantic region functions under terms of the east–west relations within the national polity, but historically, the eastern Canadian provinces have had important north–south economic and social links with the northeastern United States. The problem with considering this borderland as an alternative space for cultural production is twofold: the economic attachment of filmmaking policies to citizenship and the historical dominance of the American film industry and consequent marginalization of less wellcapitalized entities. Economic underdevelopment in eastern Canada has stimulated outmigration – do the intertwined ideas of space, region, and identity expand to include the uranium mines of Saskatchewan and the oilfields of Alberta? The expansion of the western resource economy facilitates a shift in the locations of power and influence on the national political stage along with a coincident decline in the exercise of culture that was motivated by specifically local conditions. Filmmakers that I have spoken with over the course of the writing of this book consistently point to non-local influences and ambitions even as they acknowledge the resilience of the local on what they do. The period from 1970s grassroots cultural energy toward a contemporary de-localization maps onto the end of Keynesian economics and generally shared concepts of public space to the present conjuncture of neo-liberalism, globalization, and the privatization of experience. Culture is produced under regulatory conditions of power, but is never simply a function of power – though it is true to say that economic frames have shifted the terrain of actually existing cultural expression. In international terms, it is the modern city that provides new opportunities for exchange and growth. Throughout the Atlantic region, population decline and economic underdevelopment due to a reliance on traditional resource extraction have left urban centres with weak infrastructure. These spaces do not provide the free

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play of mobility that is the cosmopolitan expression of urban life. Here, spatial conditions limit discourse and opportunities for change. In the case of cultural production, new media technologies are often considered vehicles for growth because they are less dependent on existing centralized infrastructure associated with analog media. However, the actual use of media is not simply a function of existing technology; it functions via social deployment in the form of cultural and economic policy. Two forces are at play here: the fluidity of the concept of region and the external conditions that help structure the representations of place. Not the least of these conditions is the apparatus for financing. In its 2012–13 business plan, Telefilm Canada has further redefined its approach. First, a micro-budget program supports strong regional films such as Down to the Dirt, discussed in the previous chapter. This stream provides more autonomy to filmmakers than allowed within the higher-budget envelopes. The other major revision is to increase the marketability requirements for the larger feature film fund. This is done by favouring already-successful companies in the ranking of project proposals. This restructuring coincides with a decline in the autonomy of regional Telefilm offices, something that has similarly occurred with the nfb . The problem for many regional producers is that they have neither the economies of scale nor the track record to qualify. These changes push indie cinema made at the edge of the country further into the margins. This redirection has already occurred in documentary financing. In 2003–04, the Canadian Television Fund (now Canada Media Fund), which invests in both drama and documentary for television, eliminated regional production incentives. This change did not happen by chance; rather, it followed a lobbying campaign undertaken by Ontario-based producers and broadcasters. Under an industrial development model, cultural production is a zero-sum game of regional competition – a kind of low-rent globalization rather than encouragement of diversity as mandated by Canadian Heritage, the federal department responsible for the cmf . The consequence is direct: from 2003 to 2009, when this change was implemented, cmf funding in Atlantic Canada decreased by $48 million, and there has been an estimated overall loss of $158 million in production activity because cmf funding would have triggered other investments. At the same time, production in Ontario increased substantially.³ The question of regional cinema is never driven just by the good feelings of cultural diversity but is made and unmade by policy and economic conditions. Remarkably, in 2014 the cmf revised the rules related to eligibility for English regional production incentives (previously established to support production across Canada) so

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that with the exception of Quebec, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon (all of which have separate incentives), the concept of region is now defined within the terms of this fund as any part of Canada more than 150 kilometres by shortest reasonable roadway from Toronto.4 In the context of this drift in regional cinema, I am interested in examining films that express something of the anarchic and counter-technocratic force of Faustus Bidgood. Filmmakers in Newfoundland remain invested in the ideal of the province’s cultural distinctiveness but are no longer attached to nostalgia for a past that may never have existed and have to work within the challenges of production financing. The nostalgia I refer to is characteristic of the first wave of Newfoundland’s cultural renaissance, beginning, first in literature, in the late 1960s with such writers as Harold Horwood and Ray Guy.5 We have to understand this cultural work in a way that acknowledges the limits of cultural nationalism, so that the distinctiveness and vitality of regional cinema is not weighed down by parochialism. Jerry Bannister describes the scene in this way: “Like its counterparts in other post-colonial societies, Newfoundland nationalism has inherited a troubled historical legacy. It carries with it the noble rhetoric of liberation but also the parochial seeds of tribalism and the danger of racism.”6 The nationalist impulse of the 1970s and into the 1980s contributed to the creation of remarkable work, along with the establishment of nifco as the cornerstone of the filmmaking scene. One important contemporary direction of regional filmmaking is inter-provincial and international co-production, a consequence of the diminishment of nationally available funds and a marker of the success of production companies able to form business relationships with producers based elsewhere in Canada and in the world. Telefilm Canada policies encourage this business strategy, one that privileges more established companies under the rubric of Global Hollywood. One example, Love and Savagery (Dir: John N. Smith, 2009), shot primarily on location in County Clare, Ireland, can be understood as an echo of Newfoundland’s cultural renaissance made within this contemporary border-crossing context. That renaissance explored the richness of outport culture and its Irish roots. Love and Savagery screenwriter, Des Walsh, is closely associated with the Harold Horwood and Ray Guy trajectory of traditionalist narrative, and this film is based on his poetry collection of the same title. Love and Savagery manages to avoid the generic placelessness often characteristic of international co-productions. It is set in the heady days of late 1960s, but rather than journey to the province’s outports, the main character travels outward. An amateur geologist and poet named Michael McCarthy

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(Allan Hawco) goes to the west coast Irish village of Ballyvaughan in order to explore the geological wonder of The Burren, a hauntingly beautiful limestone plateau marked with extensive Celtic ruins. The landscape mirrors the Newfoundland coastline, and the film references the province’s Irish lineage, though the drama hinges on the intractable differences between the old and the new world. Michael hates that he is referred to as an American tourist. His sense of belonging is manifest by falling in love with a local woman, Cathleen (Sarah Greene). Cathleen strongly desires Michael, but is also determined to fulfill a promise made upon the death of her mother years earlier that she would go into the nunnery. The film sets up a relation between a sense of spirituality felt in the dramatic experience of landscape and the tradition-bound rigour of faith. Screenwriter Walsh explains: “One of the things I found interesting in developing the story was relying on my experience of being raised Catholic and remembering those moments as a child and the wonderment of mythology. I needed to relive that to truly understand the character of Cathleen, why she stays on the path she walks, and how the character of Michael, even though he has turned his back on what he sees as the paganism of Christianity, still has to understand Cathleen’s choices.”7 Michael has rejected the church and makes a passionate claim for the spiritual force of poetry and the dramatic texture of the rocky Burren. As an artist, he is a figure at the vanguard of cultural change. In the logic of the film, this identity also casts him outside of the social dynamic of the community, as he is told by the elder nun who is coaching Cathleen as she prepares for the convent: “Poets don’t risk their own lives. They simply risk the lives of those around them.” Twice, hostile villagers beat Michael, and the film situates this conflict in parallel with Cathleen’s dilemma in choosing between secular love and Christian faith, a dilemma mapped onto the shifts in Newfoundland society. The first physical attack on Michael occurs while he is sketching ruins on the landscape – three men attack him and, in a reverse baptism, hold his head underwater. Later, at the wake of an old man who had befriended Michael, the man’s sons beat him. These actions are not simply an expression of individual conflict but stand in for Michael’s rejection of the church. To provoke the men, he shouts: “Fuck you, fuck god and fuck Ballyvaughan.” Here, the sensitive poet resorts to more typical male belligerence in a failed effort to win the heart of the girl. While Cathleen remains tied to the Church, she is also typed as the good girl who represents an alternative progressive force unselfishly dedicated to her community. But it is the 1960s and okay to acknowledge desire. Though Cathleen rejects a long-term relationship with Michael, she does initiate a

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one-time passionate sexual encounter with him. As if torn from the screen of classical Hollywood, the film exploits the visual force of the landscape and the intensity of the ocean waves as metaphor for the desire felt between the characters. To better understand the cinematic navigation of cultural change, we need to go back to the acclaimed 1992 tv movie The Boys of St Vincent, a previous collaboration between writer Des Walsh and director John N. Smith. It deals with the brutal 1970s scandal of sexual and physical abuse carried out by Catholic priests at the Mount Cashel Orphanage, and the attempt to cover up the truth through a conspiracy of church and community elites. The film is an important marker of disenchantment with the Church, though it owes a debt to the groundbreaking criticism in Codco, particularly Andy Jones’s Father Dinn character, a hypocrite and sexual predator. Boys follows the social purpose impulse of Canadian production originating with Grierson and characteristic of tv production in the 1980s, situating a journalistic imperative within a fictional form. The cbc broadcast of Boys occurred when the court trials of several priests were in progress (for similar crimes committed in Ontario) and had an impact on public sentiment toward the institution. The orphanage run by the Christian Brothers of Ireland in Canada has since been closed and the crime scene demolished. Jeannette Sloniowski explains the significance of this film within the tradition of docudrama for avoiding focus on a single hero and villain. She describes it this way: “We are shown boys literally owned by the church, brutalized not only physically, but intellectually through the fear and guilt instilled in them in both church and classroom. Lessons are taught by hypocritical and tedious rote, and the boys are harshly disciplined for seemingly minor infractions. The children in the film repeat memorized religious dogma several times – dogma which is all the more hypocritical given the treatment they receive at the hands of the priests. Boys is nothing if not a thorough critique of middle-class, patriarchal capitalism in its most brutalizing form.”8 At the level of style, the film uses many close-ups to signal the inner turmoil of the characters and the theft of their innocence, the brutal removal of these boys from a sense of stability grounded in place. This treatment of space is unlike typical tv movie conventions of landscape that tend toward picture-postcard idealization. To put the idea of border-crossing and island culture in context, it is helpful to look back to another nfb feature also directed by John N. Smith. Welcome to Canada (1989) is a documentary-style drama based on the true story of the unexpected arrival of a boatload of Sri Lankan refugees in outport Newfoundland (the community of Brigus South). The tag line situates the

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film with the familiar storyline involving a collision of people from opposite worlds: “The Tamils think they’ve landed in Montreal, and their hosts think Ceylon is the name of a tea.” Wyndham Wise summarizes the thrust of the narrative: “While avoiding both the politics of Canadian immigration policy and the racist backlash in the issue of illegal immigrants, the film nevertheless touches upon the questionable integrity of Canada’s multicultural dream.”9 It begins with the image of stormy weather and a small fishing boat towing a rescue raft from which the refugees emerge – one deceased body is hauled onto shore in a fishing net. The image dramatically captures the terrible struggles faced by refugees while also reproducing the image of the region as defined by bad weather, fishing, and isolation. The film itself is a product of the nfb ’s late-1980s effort to reinvent itself for the feature film market while continuing its documentary tradition. The story is told with documentary elements, including footage of militia in Sri Lanka, though this functions more as image of Third World upheaval as the specific political-military tensions are only vaguely explained. The complexity of international politics is met with the confusions of cultural translation, and the film functions as much to explain Newfoundland outport life to the visitors and thus to the audience. The fate of the refugees is unanswered. The film concludes with a church service followed by the refugees being transported to an awaiting Coast Guard ship. Two films by Nova Scotia director Rohan Fernando take up this mix of documentary and drama related to border-crossing, migration, and disaster. Fernando’s 2007 documentary, Blood and Water, deals with the devastating 2004 tsunami on the coast of Sri Lanka. The director follows his uncle, Anton Ambrose, who had relocated to Los Angeles in the 1970s and become a successful gynecologist. He lost both his wife and daughter in the tsunami. They were all in the country at the time of the storm – daughter Orlantha ran a charity that provided free violin lessons to poor children. Ambrose describes in vivid detail the events of the tidal wave impact, of surviving himself but of losing his family in the space of a few minutes. He walks along the shoreline and pauses at an article of clothing, wondering if it could have belonged to his wife. A year after the storm, he returns to Sri Lanka to organize a charity concert in memory of Orlantha, but also to try to reconcile his grief and his relationship to his birth country. The country is characterized by a schism between rich and poor, and the film hints at the problematic role of charity that cannot deal with structured inequality. Ambrose visits the poor neighbourhood where he grew up, but is visibly uncomfortable with this association to his identity. The film explores identity and loss while

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avoiding an imposed western perspective; instead, it opens up the complexity of these issues without posing easy answers. The charity concert, which ends up losing money, is well attended by the country’s elite, who are able to make polite applause, give food handouts, and live in rich isolation from the masses in the wake of the country’s civil war. All of this functions within the overlap of feudal tradition and global capital. This overlap manifests in the bizarre appearance of Ann Claire, a Los Angeles friend of Ambrose, arriving to participate in the concert. She is an exiled Iranian princess (a distant niece of the Shah of Iran) who is also an aspiring honky-tonk country singer. Her interest is clearly her own media profile, while her persona speaks to the massive gap between local needs and the all-consuming machine of popular culture. The character reminds us that truth is always stranger than fiction. Fernando followed Blood and Water with the fiction feature Snow (2010), with the turn to drama intending to circumvent the ethical problem of representing intimacy in documentary. Snow follows a survivor and new immigrant to Canada after having lost her family in the tsunami. It depicts the subjective experience of displacement and difference using mostly nonprofessional actors, with a tone that avoids the heightened sentiment and narrative resolution of mainstream movies. In this respect, Snow recalls the earlier movement of social realist narrative familiar to Canadian cinema prior to the Global Hollywood turn. Of particular importance is the image of the ocean, a space that is at once of the region but that also evokes distance, displacement, and journey. The tsunami itself is not sensationalized; instead, we have the image of floodwaters slowly creeping into the family home. Later, we see the main character in silhouette sitting by the ocean where the rocky shore and calm waters are at once a relief and a trap. The Canadian landscape consists of anonymous streets, cold institutions, and the home of her relatives where she encounters rigid traditional expectations (her uncle attempts to arrange a marriage with a suitable Sri Lankan associate) against the promise of openness in Canadian society. Snow and Blood and Water deal with disappearance in the context of spatial-geographic conditions but also in the global flow of capital and migration. The Disappeared (Dir: Shandi Mitchell, 2012) uses the North Atlantic as location for a story of six fishermen lost at sea, adrift in two dories. On the one hand, the film connects with the region’s fishing tradition, but it avoids the sentimentalizing of place by allowing each character to express his inner life and complexity – they are bound together but alone. The timeframe is unclear – perhaps mid-twentieth century, since there are hints at conflicts over religion with one character pious and another atheist. The distinctiveness

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of voice situates the narrative within the region while providing for a universal humanist appeal in an environment of muted colour and an indistinct separation of sky and sea. With its stylistic and narrative approach, the film is a mature realization of regional cinema that is at once of this place, accessible across borders, but avoiding the placelessness of Global Hollywood. The physical struggle of survival is mapped onto an inner journey. The film concludes with only a faint sense of a hope with no guarantees except for the barely sustained determination to move. On the one hand, this narrative recalls the ‘survival’ theme of Canadian literature appropriated in film interpretation in the 1970s, but there is something more happening here. First, the best regional films are not beholden to literary narrative models, nor are they beholden to ideals of national culture. This is indie cinema that has affinities internationally, outside of the domain of Global Hollywood. A similar ending is in play with Blackbird (Dir: Jason Buxton, 2013), about a teenage Goth boy imprisoned for threatening a Columbine-style school shooting – except that he did not do so. He only imagined the crime in the form of a story as a way of working through his anger at being the outsider in the bully zone that is high school. One of the alleged targets is the high school princess, but over the course of the film she bonds with him. At the conclusion, he is in jail a second time, charged with perjury. He had taken a guilty plea to escape the violent conditions of jail, but when back in court a second time, he changes his story. In other words, he is imprisoned for telling the truth against the machinations of a system that wants to produce him as villain. The girl visits him in jail, and there is a sense that they can have a relationship, in spite of social and familial obstacles, but that it will not be easy. As the film fades to black, we know that he is still in prison. The film gives us no easy answers, and the characters live in a monotonous relay between tedium, social conformity, and violence. In a scene that would not make sense in the US, the father is also charged because his hunting rifles were not securely stored, and these were the potential massacre weapons. Against the nostalgic ideal of rural Nova Scotia, here we see a stark landscape of dead-end jobs (the boy joins his father maintaining the ice at the local hockey rink) and brutal conformism – the bullying in the high school cafeteria is mirrored in the prison lunchroom with the minor difference of the violence simmering underneath in the former and being on the surface in the latter. This is not a simple cautionary tale of wayward teens; instead, it deals with the contemporary landscape of surveillance and socially internalized fears of difference where teenagers are criminalized for expressions of individual identity.

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This theme of alienation takes a more redemptive form in Heartbeat (Dir: Andrea Dorfman, 2014). The film is a feature narrative collaboration with performance poet Tanya Davis and is a visually engaging, if gentle, portrait of Halifax. As with Dorfman’s 2010 short-film collaboration with Davis (discussed in chapter 3), the live-action sequences are punctuated with fluid animation conveying emotional resonance but also allowing this feeling to flow through the viewing experience rather than being connected to a specific realist-narrative element. The use of animation also emphasizes the place of art in individual expression and social connection, but it is an imaginative space not grounded by the framework of everyday life. Davis plays the lead role of Justine, a woman who yearns for fulfillment but is living in her inherited grandmother’s house and even wearing her underwear. In a way, the film is about role-playing and taking risks in order to find fulfillment. For Justine, it is in accepting the loss of a relationship but also leaving her bland but safe job and performing music (we learn early in the film that the one previous time she set foot on a stage, she collapsed). She is able to reject the tedious assumption that she should desire a child, and we see her as befuddled outsider when visiting a friend and surrounded entirely by conversation related to babies. The film’s conclusion is a Halloween party where costumed house guests are contributing to Justine’s financial needs, the roof of her grandmother’s house is leaking and in need of expensive repairs, and she performs a song that is a confident eulogy for her past relationship. She is able to embrace being alone through the network of community relationships enabled by her focus on art. The film uses the city of Halifax as a character by emphasizing recognizable places and idiosyncrasies, striving to connect the local with universal themes of art and identity through low-key performances by local artists. Relative Happiness (Dir: Deanne Foley, 2014) undertakes a cross-border approach to casting, even engaging a Los Angeles–based agent to cast Australian actor Melissa Bergland in the lead. The film is based on the book by Cape Breton writer Lesley Crewe and is a Nova Scotia and Newfoundland coproduction, shot in Halifax and in the Hubbards area of south-shore Nova Scotia. The province is occasionally named, but could pass for a great many semi-rural seaside locations. The film is a sharply written and quick-paced romantic comedy with Bergland as Lexie, a ‘plus-sized’ woman who does not fit the model of femininity portrayed by her skinny and blonde mother and two sisters. Early in the film, we see her struggling to fit into the bridesmaid’s dress for her sister’s wedding while her mother queries the likelihood that she has a date for the occasion. The pattern, or stereotype, of comedy at the

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expense of the supposedly lonely and overweight woman is very familiar in mainstream film and television. Here, it is altogether ridiculous since Bergland is gorgeous, and in her role as Lexie, she carries the film; her character is witty and a great cook, and has a quite sensible loathing for yoga. Lexie runs a bed-and-breakfast guesthouse, somehow earning a living with barely any visitors and with a roof in need of repair – leaky roofs have become a recurring theme! Her dream ‘date’ Adrian (Johnathan Sousa) arrives as a guest, and she begins to court him through fantastic meals. The sexual tension is present but unfulfilled, with Lexie self-deprecating and Adrian aloof and boorish. He accompanies Lexie to a pre-wedding family gathering and, to her dismay, is not readily accepted. He is an outsider, a professional photographer, and traveller – someone who does not fit the familial ideal of a mate as being connected to the local community. Adrian ends up falling in love with the soon-to-be-married sister, disrupting the wedding, and breaking Lexie’s heart in what becomes a coming-of-age moment for the character, experiencing the betrayals of adulthood (she also learns that her father had been having an affair but her mother insists on maintaining the image of family unity). Lexie hooks up with Joss (Aaron Poole), the local handyman and part-time fisherman hired to fix her roof. We know by the tension between the two, and by the conventions of romantic comedy, that they will end up together even though he is ill-mannered and sloppy, deriding Lexie’s interest in books and fine food. In this way, the film also restores conventional assumptions within the region: suspicion of outsiders, of art, and of work that is not connected with physical labour, along with the valorization of hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth characters identified as having an integral relationship with the locale. In Cast No Shadow (Dir: Christian Sparkes, 2014), it is the fierce rolling sea off the coast of Newfoundland that signals the dramatic energy of place. But this is not a film tainted by nostalgic sentiment or a romantic view of landscape; instead, the physical location is a trap, and escape into the imagination offers no relief from the fear and violence that is everywhere. The director is a graduate of the film program at nscad, and the film was largely financed by the Telefilm Canada micro-budget program wherein nscad is invited to nominate a film for potential funding. nscad film professor Sam Fisher was script consultant, and Scott McClellan, the cinematographer, is also a graduate of the program. This is an example of regional cross-border support for independent cinema, since the film is otherwise identified, through language and landscape, with Newfoundland (and that province also provided financing). Joel Thomas Hynes wrote the final screenplay, and

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if his character in Down to the Dirt has at least the possibility of redemption, the role he plays in this film as petty criminal and bad father is one of utter malevolence. Hynes’s son, thirteen-year-old Percy Hynes White, is cast as the boy at the centre of the story – Jude is motherless and living with his violent father, an outcast in the community, and is himself prone to violence. He is haunted by images of monsters in the forest and fears an evil troll living in a cave near the ocean. The film opens with the question: “Who says fairy tales are not real?” and we come to understand that they do exist, but that they are inside our heads and are a product of landscape and social conditions as much as imagination. Everyone in the film is haunted, that is to say, damaged by demons of fate, bad decisions, and circumstances, and the choices we make are formed by what we think we see. Jude is terrified by the troll he believes inhabits the cave, but the surrounding ocean offers its own relentless terror, matched only by that of the father. The boy desperately wants to appease his demons, and believes that he can do so through an offering of gold – we see him hiding in the basement painting gold the bones, bottle caps, and stray objects he finds in the forest. Here, he can also read books, something the father sneers at with disgust. There is a coming-of-age moment as Jude must get away from his father, but it is left to the audience to imagine an alternative path, since easy solutions are no more provided on screen than they are in the landscape, at once a place of beauty and a terrifying trap. Contemporary filmmaking exists in a space between the hegemonic and the radically regional and has the potential to reimagine spatial relations. Making Love in St Pierre (Dir: John Vatcher, 2003) is a very low-budget film that deals with the devastating closure of the Newfoundland cod fishery, but posits this issue in the transnational flow of capital. Making Love presents place not as function of timeless tradition but as an environment that has been emptied out due to economic mismanagement of primary industries. Shot on digital video, the rough edges of the film provide a kind of Brechtian reminder of the material conditions of the everyday. Of particular note is the film’s use of outport Newfoundland vernacular as a marker of cultural distinctiveness and signifying the film as outside of the economic terms of global media. The film’s producer and screenwriter, Ken Pittman, has described to me the ways that broadcasters diminish the local out of a fear that such specificity weakens marketability: “First of all just to accommodate the Toronto person in presenting something creative originating out of this culture, there is a whole process of accommodation. You don’t even get started without already changing your mind about something, because you know

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if you don’t change it, you are going to have to end up explaining it every day to the broadcaster, let alone to the viewing audience. I think a rural Saskatchewan filmmaker would feel that too.” Pittman goes on to explain how this process of homogenization starts with language: “They’ll say we want a little bit more Newfie-ness in it, which means what? It means make sure the accent is there, but not too much because we don’t want to do subtitles. If you do it too much then they will require subtitles.” The visual treatment of landscape in Love and Savagery is breathtaking while the use of video in Making Love destabilizes the cinematic spectacle to provide a sense of social breakdown. Both films exploit the powerful imagery of the rough North Atlantic, but where Savagery provides an intense visual pleasure of the sea as backdrop to the desires of the characters, Making Love gives us the sea as raw noise. It begins with the 2 July 1992 television news footage of then federal fisheries minister John Crosbie (appointed lieutenant-governor of Newfoundland in 2008) announcing the moratorium on cod fishing, and the aggressive reaction of the fishermen outside the locked hotel ballroom doors where the announcement was made. We see how these conditions wreak havoc on the lives of the characters. The lead actor is Savagery’s Allan Hawco who, in Making Love, plays Sebastian, a fisherman in bitter despair at the loss of his livelihood. He is not a poet; in fact, his character’s inarticulateness further reflects his sense of displacement. Economic opportunities help determine social relationships, and this condition is the starting point for the film. As relief from everyday despair, Sebastian is encouraged by his girlfriend, Jenny, to accompany her on a vacation, an idea that reverses the tourist image of the region as destination away from the stress of modern life. Now, there is no way out. A winter storm has grounded outbound flights, but after a fit of anger, they end up travelling by boat to St Pierre, the French territory off the southern shore of Newfoundland. With the challenge of crossing the ocean, they are crossing national boundaries, as signified by the stern police warning to Sebastian that all vessels must register their arrival. In this moment and in later references to the history of the islands, the local story is integrated with a history of border-crossing. The act of smuggling also needs to be understood as an important part of the history of trade, binding the various territories of the Atlantic region, an activity validated by Adam Smith as “free trade.” While Smith’s concept has been co-opted by neo-liberal forces wanting to subjugate geography to the regime of modern contemporary capitalism, it needs to be understood more broadly as coextensive with an opposition to the constraints of nation-state borders.¹0

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On the streets of St Pierre, the couple gaze at the wonders of the tourism economy, the array of fine foods on display in shop windows, the gentrified architecture, and fashionable clothing. Bill Marshall notes how St Pierre in this film is set up as feminine, in that it is aligned with consumption, against the raw production “back home.”¹¹ During their visit, they become friendly with another couple through whom Sebastian learns of the history of liquor smuggling during Prohibition and how this transformed the life of the fishermen. There is a parallel between this history and the larger social and economic forces that have transformed the livelihood of Newfoundland fishermen. The other obvious parallel is the contemporary drug trade as part of an underground economy that is illegal yet fully integrated with global forces. This is the route that another out-of-work fisherman, Morgan (Barry Newhook), has chosen, but he is typed not as a fellow worker but as a predatory thug. In an earlier barroom scene, we see him aggressively declare: “Would you give it up about the fucking fishery. It’s over! Gone, b’y. Dead, b’y. I’m not going down with it. I’m going to survive, b’y.” During the ocean journey to St Pierre, Sebastian spots Morgan’s boat but no one is on board. He pulls alongside and ‘borrows’ several containers of gasoline, one of which is hiding bricks of hashish. As they explore St Pierre, two thugs, who have mistaken Sebastian for Morgan, follow in the shadows and want to complete the drug deal. In this way, the film follows humanist narrative conventions that focus on the individual relationship seasoned with criminal intrigue rather than more fully taking up the themes of border-crossing and an alternative economy. But on the other hand, the film does dramatize the emotional damage felt by people at the margins of the region caught up in social and economic circumstances they cannot control. Throughout this book, I have expressed the concept of nostalgia in negative terms, not because I believe that we should turn our back on a collective past and ruthlessly ride into the glare of modern sunshine, but because nostalgic imagery is detached from artistic and critical goals. I am interested in how characters are embedded in the material conditions of place, conditions that echo the past not necessarily through direct references in dialogue or plot but in a way that makes manifest the constellation of the past within the present. We see this in Bingo Robbers (Dir: Lois Brown and Barry Newhook, 2000), a low-budget comedy about two eccentric characters, played by the writer-director team, who spend most of their time cruising St John’s in a beat-up American gas guzzler. They are plotting a way to get out of town by pulling off a robbery, but this is impossible to do in a place where everyone knows your name. The film, shot on digital video before this was

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more widely popular and accepted by film festival gatekeepers (it is the first Newfoundland feature shot on dv ), is a direct descendent of the spirit and intense locality of The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood. The film takes advantage of the possibilities of the digital technology, notably in various montage sequences and use of motion effects. While these techniques are possible in film, they are much more immediately at hand in a non-linear digital editing environment and thus become more integral to the story. This presence is reflected in the opening soundtrack that begins with traditional folk music and then morphs into a hard-driving electric sound. The St John’s of Bingo Robbers is not simply a colourful backdrop but a real character, dark and brooding. The exterior night-driving shots are cast with a brown hue, an imagery that is both of this place but also characteristic of many urban locations faced with bad weather and economic underdevelopment – dreary enough to be Winnipeg! What is fascinating is the degree to which the film is locally specific while mostly avoiding the obviously recognizable. Many of the interiors are dressed in bold colours as if hit by a bingo dauber. Bingo Robbers was structured under a profit-sharing agreement with the crew (really a way to get people to work for low wages because the budget is tiny), similar to the arrangement for Faustus, and the film is a product not simply of the imaginations of the writer-directors but also of the close-knit art community in the city. Faustus creators Mike and Andy Jones are part of Bingo Robbers. Andy was a script consultant as the project was workshopped at rca Theatre, and he plays a minor role as “The Old Bastard,” a pharmacy clerk who recognizes the pair when they attempt a robbery. Mike is the author of a sly journal written over the course of the production.¹² These relatively minor roles belie the more significant influence these two have had on this project and on the film community. Mike and Andy are a kind of palimpsest of all the mad storytelling, politics, and economic underdevelopment infusing the place. What I have described is an organic creative community that is both an extension of the broader cultural ferment and a reflection of the claustrophobia of a closed place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. In the introduction to her short story collection Open (2002), Lisa Moore thanks the members of the St John’s art scene who supported the development of the book by saying that they “read these stories with love in one fist and a hatchet in the other,” a line that more than any other describes this place and that is captured by the film. As Lois Brown said to me: “There’s an undercurrent of secrecy in this community, in the St John’s as I know it anyway. And yet the secrecy is just a really strange secrecy because it’s

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more that everyone is pretending that your secret is a secret, but they already know what your secret is … You know that phrase ‘quiet desperation’? I think of St John’s as loud, screaming, pulling-your-hair-out desperation.” The Mike Jones journal provides an anecdote that captures the dystopian magic of the place. Shooting on location at a private home, a neighbour spontaneously offers her basement as makeshift canteen for the crew’s lunch and then warns that nearby residents are real bingo robbers while yet other neighbours are anxious about the area being depicted in a bad light. Mike puts it this way: “A woman we have never met has given us her house for the night, a man proud of his neighbourhood is protecting it, and alleged real bingo robbers have a sense of humour [because they outed themselves to the filmmakers by declaring that they should be the real stars].” The film opens with the first of a series of failed robbery attempts. Vallis (Barry Newhook) tries to sledgehammer his way into a warehouse, something he is clearly incapable of doing – the guns they carry are obviously plastic, but they prefer to describe them as icon or metaphor – while Nancy (Lois Brown) is at a nearby pay phone pleading with her ex-husband, Jack, to look after their daughter, whom he hasn’t seen for weeks. The tenor of screwball comedy is met with a feeling of desperation; Nancy wants to force some responsibility out of Jack, and she would even pay, after all she still loves him. The mutual affection between Vallis and Nancy is seasoned with a contempt fuelled by the dead-end circumstances and comic absurdity of their lives. When they decide to relieve the tension and boredom by having sex, Vallis’s aunt Gerilynn interrupts them: “Vallis, your mother is fifty yards away. Go home and do this sort of thing.” His reply: “This my home. I live in a car. Get away from my window, you Peeping Tom!” No privacy and no way out. Later, when stopped by the police, anxieties about being arrested are displaced when the cop who pulls them over – Nancy’s uncle – proceeds to hand them tickets to the constabulary’s annual charity ball (recalling the Crippled Children’s Benefit Concert at the climax of Faustus). At the conclusion, they do try to steal the loot from the annual twenty-four-hour bingo extravaganza, but this is no easy feat – it tramples on the sacred bingo-hall ground of a now-secular society. In response to Nancy’s plan, Vallis speaks the absurd taboo: “Is nothing holy to you? Not even our years as innocent children gaily running through the bingo tables. It is my place of sanctuary. Does your greed know no bounds?” The family comes together in the bingo hall where we meet the extreme beehive-haired aunts and evangelical Uncle Edwin, played by actor and

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writer Bryan Hennessey. Hennessey is an important presence in a number of films discussed in this book, and I would go so far as to say that in his role in Bingo Robbers he is a kind of Rosetta stone of Newfoundland filmmaking. He is Uncle Henny Penny, “Newfoundland’s greatest educator” wearing a chicken suit in Faustus; he plays the role of Calvin, ever-lamenting the decline of culture in the face of modern St John’s in Gullage’s; and now, he is Uncle Edwin – spouting Biblical pieties while munching candy and playing bingo. He also tells Vallis that he should “get on her and get her pregnant”; then, red in the face as if he is about to spontaneously combust, he bounces Nancy on his knee. The intersection of past and present in the formation of character and community is the theme of the kitchen-sink gritty feature Grown Up Movie Star (Dir: Adriana Maggs, 2009). The film draws together familiar themes of regional isolation and family dysfunction with sexual awakening on the part of a teenage girl and her closeted homosexual father. He is a former nhl hockey star named Ray (Shawn Doyle) who has returned to small-town Newfoundland after facing a drug conviction in the US. Ray’s wife has left him for dreams of movie stardom, but her roles are low-rent pornography. Daughter Ruby (Tatiana Maslany) witnesses her father having sex with her school gym teacher, and the exploration of her own sexuality is a way to confront her father with his sexual hypocrisy and to call attention to herself. Ray’s best friend, Stuart (Johnny Harris), is confined to a wheelchair due to a hunting accident, but the film implies a repressed sexual attraction between the two men. The homosocial bond is intensified as Stuart begins to take erotic photographs of Ruby, culminating in an aborted sex scene. The film captures the vulnerability, confusion, and raw energy of teen sexuality, depicting Ruby’s desire to become a mature sexual being while not sure what that means. Stuart assures her that the camera loves her, and for a while, it seems as if the photographs only exist in her head. These head images confirm her own desire and echo her mother’s porn-inflected dreams of stardom. But Stuart’s sleazy line is really an expression of his own desperation and willingness to take advantage of her vulnerability, all of which explodes in violence when Ray sees the pictures. All the sex in this movie is bad because it functions as a substitute for human connection not possible until the conclusion, when Ray comes out of the closet. Before then, we see Andy Jones in a crazed role as Ray’s father, a paranoid madman providing parenting advice that includes brutal corporal punishment and padlocking Ruby in her room. In a fury of fundamentalist desperation, he pulls off his belt to thrash Ruby, chasing her with his pants

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twisting around his ankles and with all the repressed rage and paranoia of the community’s destructive homophobia. The bad father begets the dysfunctional family and the progeny of boys who are unable or unwilling to become men – no wonder the women want to get out of town. In the world of the film, power and achievement come from elsewhere – a movie or hockey career. We see this in Ruby’s puppy love for the “American” boy in her high school. The moment recalls Vancouver filmmaker Sandy Wilson’s My American Cousin (1985), where infatuation is based on the idea that all Americans live lives of celebrity, fame, and excitement. In Movie Star, this idea is parodied and expressed in a way that enables Ruby’s coming of age. Crackie (Dir: Sherry White, 2009) has the least glamorous loss-of-virginity scene of any movie in recent memory. When Mitsy (Meghan Greeley) agrees to adopt the crackie dog Sparky, who would otherwise be abandoned or put down, the dog’s owner Duffy (Joel Hynes), the local fry cook and creep, expects sex because nothing, especially not intimacy and companionship, comes without a price. The Duffy character demystifies the idealized image of the male poet provocateur embodied by Hynes with his autobiographical role in Down to the Dirt. A key distinction between Crackie and Down to the Dirt is gender and the corresponding discourse of power. This condition within the narrative matches that of the film industry itself. There are many women in the region’s film industry, often in producer roles, supporting the creation of masculine narratives. Mitsy is desperate for an object of love, but the dog offers absolutely no affection in return. Crackie is the colloquial name for a mongrel, probably derived from crossbreeding Newfoundland and Black Lab dogs. The relationship with a dog as replacement for an otherwise dysfunctional family is also at the centre of Dog Girl (Dir: Heather Young, 2009), a gritty and accomplished short film made in Nova Scotia that likewise conveys a hard-edged working-class sensibility. Crackie is shot on the west side of Newfoundland in Conception Bay South to avoid the grand vista of the St John’s harbour and other familiar iconography. The Globe and Mail situates location with manners: “set in a bleak Newfoundland that might as well be Siberia, so remote it is from polite, middle-class Canada.”¹³ White was interested in the characters first and did not set out to tell a story that was immediately identifiable as being from the region, and yet it is precisely the integrity of character that so profoundly resonates with the location. As she says: “I wasn’t trying to say anything about the place, not how quirky we are, or unique, or anything. I also chose to keep the water and harbour aspect out of the film, largely because that wasn’t my reality as a child. I grew up on the bog and in the woods

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near rivers. Harbours and rocky cliffs feel colder to me than I wanted. I also wanted to keep the ‘vista’ at a distance for metaphorical reasons.” The film was shot in an area that regularly experiences dense fog cover, and that fog visited the filmmakers on the day they were scheduled to shoot the opening sequence of Mitsy with her grandmother Bride (Mary Walsh) scrounging at the town dump. The shoot proceeded without the planned scenery, and the resulting fog-shrouded image gave a greater sense of characters caught in place but with the strength of Bride’s defiance and will to survive. White admits that there is immense pressure to make a film that is broadly marketable, and this has an impact on the representation of place. The filmmaker’s insistence that speaking to the specificity of locale is not her intention may also be a reaction against the determined cultural nationalism of the previous generation of filmmakers in the province. Mary Walsh may be the most recognizable screen and stage performer associated with Newfoundland. Her role as Bride is particularly brave in that the character is utterly non-glamorous and refuses the ‘quirkiness’ associated with the region and that often passes for glib portrayal of the working class. We get a real sense of Bride’s identity and relationship to the community through her language, appearance, and mannerisms. The film captures the language and routines of working-class characters in a way that is distinct within Canadian film – this is not the typical central-Canadian obsession with mediated culture and urban anomie, nor is it cosmopolitan Montreal. In responding to favourable critical comments comparing Crackie to the class-consciousness of British filmmaker Ken Loach, White says: “He does working-class films, and that authenticity is what I really aspire to. I feel like we’re a middle-class industry, because most of us that are in it are middle class.”¹4 In Crackie, economic conditions determine the limited opportunities available to the characters as well as their inability to imagine an alternate reality for themselves. Like Grown Up Movie Star, the pace of Crackie reflects the liminality of teenage years, where ambition is not fully understood and where one remains at the mercy of the adult world. Much of the action takes place in long takes, and there is a strong sense that the characters live in space, rather than in locations that function as colourful backdrop. This sense of style, while low key, is important to note since it helps distinguish the film from more conventional tv fare as well as from the majestic environment of an epic film like Love and Savagery. Mitsy is enrolled at the local beauty college. Her future opportunities are shaped by the limited options at hand and by gendered assumptions of female labour, but even that is threatened by her inability to pay her tu-

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ition. As in Movie Star, the mother is absent. In this case, she has gone to Alberta, like thousands of working-class Canadians migrating west in search of better work. Bride, the surrogate mother, cannot provide a modicum of comfort for Mitsy, and her dialogue is fuelled with resentment. In an earlier feature film written by Sherry White, in which she also performs as a lead actor, The Breadmaker (Dir: Anita McGee, 2003), the working-class context for the characters is central, but it is one from which the main the character escapes through art, recalling Life Classes. Her character fuels a fantasy life through writing, which is also her relief from mundane work at an industrial bakery. By the conclusion, the successful launch of a book and literary career enables her to leave the job – eliding the fact that most published writers, like most filmmakers in the region, still have to earn a living. This romantic ideal of fulfillment through cultural production is not an option in the landscape of Crackie, yet the dignity of the characters resonates with their capacity to inhabit space rather than be bound in place. Mitsy and Bride have a poignant, if tentative, reconciliation by the end. Mitsy’s mother has come and gone; the dog is dead (shot by Bride); Mitsy is pregnant, the father is long gone (just as well), and she is not sure if she is keeping the baby. But Mitsy has managed to get through beauty college and is able, for once, to see the landscape. Through her eyes, we can finally appreciate the rugged beauty in a view that now looks out into the distance, though framed by Bride’s final words: “So, they say it’s a shit hole …” What does it mean to deliver these sardonic words with quiet tenderness? It is a tentative reaching out to Mitsy through irony but also with a defiant sense of connection to place. I take it as a coda for this book, as resistance to regional and class marginalization created within discourses of power. No single conclusion to the concept of region and cinema is explored here. Instead, I wish to affirm the vitality of the question of the relationship between space, place, and representation. The meaning of regional cinema depends on perspective and, as I said in the introduction, on where we put the centre. Within the culture industry, it has an economic function in competition with other regions around the world for the business of media production. The ancillary relationship is the impact this business has on the tourism sector and, more broadly, on the cultural branding of a city or province, especially important in a region dealing with deindustrialization and economic underdevelopment. From the perspective of national cinema, a region may be the margin that affirms the conventions of the centre or it may be a problem to the ideal of a coherent cultural narrative. From this perspective, the discourse of power is literally written on the space of the nation. My

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argument is that the energy and excitement of national cinema is kept alive in regional spaces through resistance to the homogenization of representation. At first glance, regionalism may be confused with a parochial provincialism, but this has not been the perspective of this book. The best films have been enriched by influences from across borders, oceans, and nations. The study of the region is a way to know the entirety through the particular. It has been my intention that this thinking contributes to a collective understanding of what is cinema in the specific spaces and places of the nation.

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We are filmmakers and we will make films, grants or not. Our strength is in our films. Gordon Parsons, 1979¹

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Gordon Parsons worked as a coordinator in the early days of the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative. In 1976, he founded Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Theatre, a repertory movie house named after the first cinema presentations offered in Nova Scotia, a travelling film and vaudeville company sponsored by Thomas Edison in 1887. The previous year, another film exhibition, organized by the Holland Brothers (the Ottawa entrepreneurs who opened the first kinetoscope parlour in New York City in 1894), travelled to Halifax but failed to screen movies due to incompatibilities between electrical systems and projector motors.² These are details not usually present in a book’s acknowledgments, but I include this anecdote to illustrate how the discord between industrial infrastructure and cultural practices marks the history of film and television in Atlantic Canada. Under Parsons’s hand, the more

contemporary Wormwood’s contributed significantly to the development of cinema culture in Halifax. At the time of his death in 1993, he was also working on a history of filmmaking in the province.³ I hope the present volume does some justice to this legacy. In the quote above, he is asserting a collective dedication to the art of cinema through grassroots activity and necessity. I wish to acknowledge the importance of this dedication on behalf of filmmakers, educators, and viewers. Regarding the “Peters” to whom this book is dedicated, Morris had a hand in my grad school. I remember his mischievous grin when I was anxious about being admitted to the p hd program after completing my mfa (he could only pretend to keep a secret). His best advice to grad students: “You are the expert, tell us what you know.” Simple words that kept me in the game at a crucial time and against the steady tide of self-doubt. I first met Harcourt as he was retiring from Carleton University when we both attended a conference in Nipissing, Ontario, on the North and film. Me, still a grad student at the start of my teaching career and waist-deep in theory. This Peter, bruised by internecine battles over the small plot of Canadian film and the rise of a menu of theoretical fashions that ran against his ideals as pragmatic advocate and humanist. Over the years, our conversations ranged widely and touched deeply on matters of the heart. Our dear mutual friend, Francoyse Picard, hosted a dinner, which began in slapstick followed by food, wine, spirits, and talk of regions, life, cinema – Peter’s body failing but with a mind alive and wanting conversation. Wintonick was a friend to film, filmmakers, and activists around the world. In 2010, I invited Peter to be the head raconteur at a seminar on documentary filmmaking. At his suggestion, we called the event Docula, out of a desire to push out the vampires of funding bureaucracy and programming cowardliness. After a day of talk, screening, and agitation, a group of committed doc-flaneurs held candles and walked through the blowing snow in merry vigil to the front of the long-abandoned nfb building on Barrington Street in downtown Halifax to hold an exorcism for the spirit of documentary, Peter in the role of jovial high priest. A vial of what was rumoured to be the blood of John Grierson was splattered against the boarded-up facade, drawing cheers from the committed and looks from curious bystanders waiting for the bus. We agreed that humour was the first weapon to deploy against the mean spirits of empire. Peter’s playful gaze reflected back the magic of the movies and the possibilities for media in the arc of social struggle. This book, like the films from the region, would be less interesting without the presence of the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative in Halifax, Island

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Media Arts Cooperative in Charlottetown, New Brunswick Filmmakers’ Co-operative in Fredericton, and especially the Newfoundland Independent Filmmakers Co-operative in St John’s. The staff, volunteers, and board members who keep these places open are the unsung heroes of this country’s filmmaking. I was able to devote considerable time to this project because of the resources available to me as Canada Research Chair in Contemporary Film and Media Studies at nscad University. The funding for positions such as mine is welcome but does not replace the ongoing need for support to Canadian universities. Research for the section on the filmmaking co-ops was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Jonathan Crago, my editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, is at the top of his game: patient and supportive, but also able to bring a smart critical eye to these words, especially in the final moments of crisis. I also sincerely thank managing editor Ryan Van Huijstee and the entire staff of the Press, and am grateful for the fine work of copy editor Eleanor Gasparik. External reviewers laboured with my sometimes-indelicate prose and gave a fresh perspective. I am forever grateful for the detailed attention brought to this project: a round of drinks on me! With a moment of sobriety, I also accept all responsibility for missteps and misdeeds on these pages. This book follows my anthology Rain/Drizzle/Fog: Film and Television in Atlantic Canada (University of Calgary Press, 2008). I extend thanks to the contributors to that volume for engaging in a dialogue on the twin ideas of region and cinema. Harold Rennie generously gave me his unpublished research on the nfb and on formation of the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation. I accessed copies of many films through the informal library of the Atlantic Film Festival. I thank archivists at Library and Archives Canada: Nick Nguyan, Joanne Stober, and the best archive of all, the creaking shelves and teetering stacks of papers belonging to my old friend Dave Barber, packrat extraordinaire and tireless champion of Canadian films at the Winnipeg Film Group’s Cinematheque. Mark Turner’s enthusiasm for Newfoundland and Labrador helped me think about this material in new ways as I was reaching the end. Conversations with Rhonda Buckley in the early days were fun and necessary. My work on the re-release on dvd of the films Life Classes and The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood has been a highlight of my engagement with Atlantic Canadian cinema. These are important films, and for me, it is just as important to get to know the filmmakers: Mike Jones and Andy Jones in Newfoundland and Bill MacGillivray in Nova Scotia. The beer is good, too.

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I am happy that colleagues in the Film Studies Association of Canada have entertained versions of this project through numerous conference presentations. Some of these ideas took an early form in invited talks at York University, the University of Manitoba, the University of Alberta, Dalhousie University, and the University of Calgary. Brief sketches for the documentary chapter were published in Cineaction (issues 69 and 73/74), with thanks to Scott Forsyth. Ideas dealing with tourism and film began as an invited talk for the conference Journeys of Expression vii , organized by the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at Leeds University and held at the University of Iceland in 2008. Thanks to Philip Long for the invitation. Over the course of writing this book, I had the pleasure of speaking with filmmakers from throughout the region. The bibliography lists everyone I have interviewed; new voices coming on the scene can and will change the angle. Quotations from interviews have been minimally edited to maintain the flow of the text. I remain responsible for the interpretation of these comments and guilty of, among other things, the limits of interpretation. I recall a great lunch with Jean Pierre Lefebvre where we talked about cheese, wine, and the filmmaking co-op scene. His generosity of spirit and incredible patience helped guide my sense of the importance of culture in its local specificity. What a great quote from Jean Pierre: “The most precious thing we can give to anyone is time.” Colleagues in the dark art of film studies in Halifax play well together. Especially helpful to this project are: Jerry White at Dalhousie, Jen Vanderburgh at Saint Mary’s University, and Bruce Barber, a rumoured accomplice of Frères Lumière and complicit in serious art crimes. It helps that diehard Winnipeger Sol Nagler is teaching a certain regard for the cinema at nscad . While we are no longer together as a couple, I thank Anne-Marie Smith for her support of my work and that we continue to work together as parents. We moved to Halifax with young kids, and Ben and Sara have since grown like weeds, and have become marvelous people. Most of all, Shana McGuire is my best friend and my love; where I see dark, she helps me get at the light shining through the cracks. Shine on.

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NOTES INTRODUCTION

1 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 149. 2 E.K. Brown (1943), cited in Riegel and Wyile, Sense of Place, xi. 3 This attitude is best expressed in the offhand remark by notable Canadian historian Frank Underhill, describing Atlantic Canada in a book on the history of Confederation published in 1964 by no less a national entity than the cbc : “As for the Maritime provinces, nothing, of course, ever happens down there.” I use this crazy remark as the title of the introduction to Varga, Rain/Drizzle/Fog. 4 Conrad and Hiller, Atlantic Canada, 187. 5 Forbes, Aspects of Maritime Regionalism, 21. 6 New, Borderlands, 4.

7 Hornsby and Reid, New England and the Maritime Provinces, 113. 8 Statement made by Brian Lee Crowley, president of the neo-conservative Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, in a speech seeking support for Atlantica, cited in Von Kintzel, “Atlantic Canada,” f 1. 9 For an overview of how this term has been used in the political and social economy of Halifax, see: Tim Bousquet, “Two Decades of World-Class Delusion,” The Coast. 10 Sinclair and Jacobs, Atlantica: Myths and Reality, 11. The report provides detailed economic and political analysis of the faulty logic driving this initiative. 11 Veltmeyer, “Rethinking Underdevelopment,” 14–15. 12 Marchak, “Nationalism and Regionalism in Canada,” 18. 13 Forbes, Challenging the Regional Stereotype, 173. 14 Miller, Global Hollywood, 3. 15 See the 2007 Telefilm Canada corporate plan, From Cinemas to Cell Phones, 3. For a declaration of auteurism, see: the introduction to Melnyk, Great Canadian Film Directors. For a cogent analysis, see: Peter Urquhart, “Film Policy/Film History: From the Canadian Film Development Corporation to Telefilm Canada,” in Loiselle and McSorley, Self Portraits, 43. 16 Butler, Gender Trouble, 25. 17 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 3. 18 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 231. 19 Morris, Embattled Shadows, 28. 20 Marjorie Pryse, “Writing Out of the Gap: Regionalism, Resistance, and Relational Reading,” in Riegel and Wyile, Sense of Place, 24. 21 Garry Neill Kennedy, “nscad and the Sixties,” in Barber, Conceptual Art, 26. 22 Forbes, Regional Stereotype, 51. 23 McKay, Quest of the Folk, 36. 24 Ibid., 120. 25 Dorland, State/s, 124. 26 Carole Sklan, “Peripheral Visions: Regionalism, Nationalism, Internationalism,” in Moran, Film Policy, 237. 27 Unless otherwise noted, all interviews cited in this book have been conducted with the author and are listed in the interview section of the bibliography. 28 Williams, “Speaking of Soft Core,” 134. CHAPTER 1

1 Sandra Gwyn coins the term “cultural renaissance,” Saturday Night, 45. 2 The Faustus Bidgood Writers [as per the film’s end credits] Workshop is credited as: Rick Boland, Mack Furlong, Susan Hoddinott, Andy Jones, Michael Jones, Robert Joy, Greg Malone, Neil Murray, and Mary Walsh. 3 Stage adaptation directed by Mark Turner, University of Toronto Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama, March 2006.

330 | N O T E S T O P A G E S 6–18

4 5 6 7

8 9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

Wintonick, “The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (review),” 22. Jones, “First Person Plural,” 18. Durrani, Faust, 3. Andy Jones joined Codco in 1974. The original group consisted of: Cathy Jones, Greg Malone, Dyan Olsen, Tommy Sexton, Mary Walsh, and Mary White. They came together to create their first show, Cod on a Stick, in Toronto in 1973 with $300 of seed money from Theatre Passe Muraille. For an overview of the group, see Peters, Plays of Codco. The Codco papers are deposited with the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University. See the online finding aid: www.library.mun.ca/qeii/cns/archives/Codco.php. Durrani, 3. The story is found on the commentary track of the 2008 dvd re-release of the film. This author is the producer of that project. For more information contact: www.nifco.org or see: www.andyjonesproductions.com. Durrani, 332. Smith, Uneven Development, xv. The genre format fits the goal of funding ‘box office’ films; unfortunately, no one knows what that is and there are no resources to create a star system, a necessary component of box office popularity. Robert McKee is well known in the industry as a popularizer of the format, and his scriptwriting workshops, offered all over the world, are well attended by Telefilm readers and applicants when presented in Canada. Durrani, 333. Sullivan, “The Advent of Faustus Bidgood,” 19. Peters, “The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood: Deconstructing Faust.” Metcalfe, “Faustus Bidgood and the National Tragedy.” Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 136. Ibid., 10. Shields, Lefebvre, 14. Congratulations is included on the Faustus Bidgood dvd . I write at length about this film in Varga, Rain/Drizzle/Fog, 235–41. Peters, Plays of Codco, xii. The 1974 performance of Cod on a Stick at Memorial University in St John’s was filmed by Mike Jones. A copy is deposited in The Papers of Codco, Memorial University Archives 13.12.008 and 13.12.009. Silver Scalpel was originally staged as part of a theatre show called Would You Like to Smell My … Pocket Crumbs. See the introduction of the Peters collection for an overview of the history of this amazing performance group. Peters, Plays of Codco, xxix. Personal correspondence between Harcourt and the author. For an important study of the systems of power and racism that produced and then obliterated Africville, see Nelson, Razing Africville. Creelman, Setting in the East, 50. Ibid., 52.

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27 Ibid., 92. 28 Kulyk Keefer, Under Eastern Eyes, 182. 29 MacGillivray on the commentary track of Life Classes dvd available from: www.pictureplant.com. 30 Raymond Williams, “Realism, Naturalism, and Their Alternatives,” in Burnett, Explorations, 121. 31 Andrew Burke, “Site Specific: Visualizing the Vernacular in Andrea Dorfman’s Parsley Days,” in Varga, 219–33. 32 Harcourt, “Planting Pictures,” 41. 33 I discuss Candy Mountain at length in Varga, 247–50. 34 According to Malcolm Macleod in A Bridge Built Halfway, the actual history of Memorial involves extensive outreach, distance education, and vocational training. The idea of the university deployed in the film makes use of a populist concept of academic elitism. 35 Anita Best expresses this in Rain, Drizzle and Fog. 36 Hennessey, “Townie,” in City of Dreams, 23. 37 Ibid., “Love Notes,” 39. 38 Angela Smith, The Literary Encyclopedia, online: www.litencyc.com/php/ speople.php?rec=true&UID=2924. (Accessed 19 March 2015) 39 Noreen Golfman, “Imagining Region: A Survey of Newfoundland Film,” in Beard and White, North of Everything, 54. 40 Robertson, Newfoundland Mummers, 133. 41 Pocius, “The Mummers Song,” 59. 42 Brookes, Public Nuisance, 52. 43 Byrne, “Mummering in Conception Bay,” Newfoundland Quarterly, 5. 44 Brookes, 46. 45 McSorley, “MacGillivray Goes tv ,” 40. 46 Greg Malone as Mr Budgell in Das Capital, in Peters, Plays of Codco, 160. 47 Province of Newfoundland and Labrador tourism website www.newfoundlandlabrador.com/WildlifeAndNature/PitcherPlant.aspx is no longer available, but a brief description of the plant is at: www.gov.nl.ca/ aboutnl/emblem/floral.html. (Accessed 19 March 2015) 48 Flaherty cited in Bannister, Royal Commission, 129. 49 The fractured family structure is echoed in another short-lived Newfoundland comedy series called Dooley Gardens (Prod: Mary Sexton, 1998). The show was set in a hockey rink where, in the opening episode, the owner commits suicide by hanging (or was involved in a sexual practice that involved asphyxiation) while cross-dressed and wearing figure skates. 50 Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 1. 51 Former Codco star Greg Malone takes up the story in Don’t Tell the Newfoundlanders and in the documentary Danny (Prod/Dir: Bill MacGillivray and Justin Simms, 2014) on former Newfoundland premier Danny Williams.

332 | N O T E S T O P A G E S 45–60

52 Stamps, Unthinking Modernity, 58. 53 Frank, “One Hundred Years After,” 129. This article is an even-handed weighing of evidence on the question of referendum conspiracy. For additional discussion, see Fitzgerald, “Newfoundland Politics and Confederation Revisited.” 54 Noreen Golfman, “Imagining Region,” in Beard and White, 50. 55 James Hiller, “Newfoundland Confronts Canada: 1867–1949,” in Forbes and Muise, The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation, 350. 56 America is a malevolent colonial force, a theme then dominant in Canadian literature, for instance, in Margaret Atwood’s 1972 novel Surfacing. 57 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 148. CHAPTER 2

1 Clive Robertson notes that these organizations reveal the twin impulses of opposition and cooptation: “The history of the artist-run movement demonstrates how possible it has been to create new organizational models for production, display, and dissemination … [But] there is some unease that the processes of professionalization embraced in turn have reformed artist-run organizations, erasing certain functional and ethical distinctions … follow[ing] conventional models of … arts administration lobbying” (5). 2 For a limited history of the co-op movement, see Mike Zryd, “Report on Canadian Experimental Film Institutions: 1980–2000,” in Beard and White, North of Everything, 392–401. 3 Rabinovitz, Resistance, 150–83. 4 Kashmere, “Jack Chambers.” 5 For a rich history of the early days of filmmaking in Toronto, see Wyndham Wyse, “Up from the Underground: Filmmaking in Toronto from Winter Kept Us Warm to Shivers,” in Pevere, Toronto on Film, 87–107. 6 Ibrányi-Kiss, “Winnipeg Symposium,” 14. 7 The Alliance was officially formed in 1980 at the Yorkton Film Festival. 8 Bronson, Sea to Shining Sea, 164. 9 Brenda Longfellow, “Surfing the Toronto New Wave: Policy, Paradigm Shifts and Post-Nationalism,” in Pevere, 114. On the history of the Toronto Filmmakers’ Co-op, see: Patrick Lee, “Personal History.” 10 For discussion that situates the International Experimental Film Congress in a broader context of the avant-garde, see: Kashmere, “Where Are We Now?” 11 There was an early avant-garde film/video presence in Halifax through, among others, nscad faculty David Askevold. 12 The classes were organized by Kasper Koenig, the first head of the nscad Press, which itself grew out of the vibrant lithography workshop and the practice of bringing important contemporary artists to the college. Kennedy, Last Art College, xxi.

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13 Papageorge, “Walker Evans and Robert Frank,” 8. 14 The artist cited in Morris, Perry, and MacNeil, Photography, 61. 15 On this question of death in documentary, see Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space.” 16 Harcourt, “Planting Pictures,” 41. 17 From Halifax Mail (31 October 1930): cited in Oostveen, “From the Vaults.” 18 Cited in Dubinsky, “Nova Scotia beyond Censorship,” 35. 19 Musser, Emergence, 129. 20 A version of this research survives as the document Eastern Eye, on the website of the Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management: http://novascotia.ca/ archives/virtual/easterneye/default.asp. (Accessed on 18 March 2015) 21 Tracy Y. Zhang, “On the Fringe of the ‘Canadian State’: Grassroots Film and Video Movements in Halifax, 1960s–1980s,” in Varga, Rain/Drizzle/Fog, 188. 22 Bruce Campbell, “In the Beginning,” in MacSwain, Intersections, 11. 23 Metcalfe, Queer Looking, 43. 24 Metcalfe, “Art by Gay Men,” in MacSwain, Intersections, 45. 25 Ibid., 46. MacSwain also details this story and puts it in the context of queer media production in Halifax in his essay (with useful filmography): “The Oxide Mandate: Queer Media in Halifax,” in Metcalfe, Queer Looking, 96–110. 26 Coady, Victory Meat, 2. 27 http://helenhill.org. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 28 Hill’s work is identified in Daniel Eagan, “Five Women Animators Who Shook Up the Industry,” Smithsonium.com (13 June 2012), online: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/five-women-animators-whoshook-up-the-industry-120442836/?no-ist=. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 29 Christopher Ball, “A Handmade Tale,” Workprint (afcoop newsletter, summer 2008): 9. 30 Salem Alaton, “The nfb ’s Last Stand,” Globe and Mail, 16 February 1985, n 1. 31 Russell Smith, “YouTube Video about Being Alone Is Antifeminist, Retrograde,” Globe and Mail (11 August 2010), online: www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/ youtube-video-about-being-alone-is-anti-feminist-retrograde/ article1376682/. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 32 Marc Almon interviewed by Andrea Nemitz, “Fiddler’s Reel: Finding Gaelic Cast Was Easy Part,” Chronicle-Herald (23 September 2011), online: www.chonicleherald.ca. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 33 Cited in Mike Riggio, “Atlantic Voices,” Cinema Canada (May 1982): 12, with a note that the quote was originally made in the same magazine in October 1975. 34 I regret that this organization receives only a brief mention here and call for scholars better versed in Acadian culture and cinema to take up this history. The starting point is the archival description prepared by Dave Landry (2007) deposited at the Centre of Documentation and Studies, University of Moncton, Edmunston Campus. Also important is the work produced through the

334 | N O T E S T O P A G E S 79–108

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

French studio of the National Film Board of Canada, located in Moncton, New Brunswick. Jean Deslandes, “Léonard Forest and Acadia,” in Waugh, Baker and Winton, Challenge, 251–8. Valerie LeBlanc, “This Is the Time, This Is the Place: Time-Based Art in New Brunswick,” in New Brunswick Media Ticks (Sackville, nb : Struts Gallery, 1998), 4. Darroch-Lozowski, “Body and Time.” Hoolboom, “Sternberg” (interview), Inside, 48. Marks, Skin, 162. Christie, “Engaging the Ephemera.” This was the figure around 2008 when this research was conducted. Biographical details from obituary feature article, Globe and Mail (Atlantic Edition), 12 October 2007, r 5. As of 2009, it is at Beanz Espresso Bar, 38 University Ave., Charlottetown. Rick Hancox, “There’s a Future” (interview), in Hoolboom, Inside the Pleasure Dome, 184. Ibid., 187. Aufderheide, Documentary, 105. Newfoundland Independent Filmmaker’s Co-operative, Film, 40. Minutes of the Filmmaker’s meeting, 31 March 1975, nifco archives. Cited by then–nifco president John Doyle in his program notes for the twentieth anniversary celebrations. For an extensive obituary, see J.M. Sullivan, “Newfoundland’s First Filmmaker,” Globe and Mail, Atlantic Edition (12 February 2004): r 7. Pollara public opinion survey commissioned for Bannister, Politics, 473. Dave Pope died in 1988. Mike Jones describes the origins of Dolly Cake in audio commentary included on the 2008 dvd of The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood. Newfoundland Independent Filmmaker’s Co-operative, 25. Taft, “Itinerant Movie-Man,” 114. Dalton, “Shadow Indians,” 142. See a selection of her films at: www.getsetfilms.com. (Accessed 20 March 2015) CHAPTER 3

1 Stiles, Insolent Boy, 77. 2 Scouts has screened at numerous festivals and won the Rex Tasker award for best documentary at the 2007 Atlantic Film Festival. For info on the film see: http://magpiemd.tripod.com; follow the link to John Stiles’s blog. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 3 See Constantinides for a discussion of the problem of ascribing national cinema origins to this absent film.

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4 Pierre Véronneau, “Journey through Acadian Cinema,” in Varga, Rain/Drizzle/ Fog, 43. 5 Leblanc (1945–2005) began publishing his books of poetry in the early 1980s. 6 Cited in a biographical sketch of Leblanc published on the Library and Archives Canada website: www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/literaryarchives/ 027011-200.152-e.html. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 7 Colin Howell and Peter L. Twohig, “A Region on Film: Metropolitanism, Place, and Meaning in nfb Films,” in Varga, 1–22. 8 For more information on Livingston’s films, see his website: www.blackriver.ns.ca/films.html. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 9 Conrad and Hiller, Atlantic Canada, 102. 10 Jeanne Deslandes, “Léonard Forest and Acadia,” in Waugh, Baker, and Winton, Challenge for Change, 256. 11 Véronneau, 24. 12 Deslandes, 255. 13 Rudin, “Making Kouchibouguac.” 14 Howell, “Film and History,” 143. 15 Mike Boone, “Film Gives Insight into Irving, The Man,” Montreal Gazette (2 October 1981). 16 David Frank indicates historical inaccuracies, “One Hundred Years After,” 112–36. 17 Nancy E. Robb, “Power of Production,” Halifax (April 1981): 61. 18 Noreen Golfman, “Documenting the Seal Fishery: A Short History of Newfoundland Film,” in Varga, 69. 19 Morris, Embattled Shadows, 204. 20 This section on Sylvia Hamilton is based in part on previously published material: Shana McGuire and Darrell Varga, “Eradicating Erasure: The Documentary Films of Sylvia Hamilton,” in Austin-Smith and Melnyk, Gendered Screen, 185–201. 21 Nelson, Razing Africville, 22. 22 Druick, Projecting Canada, 175. 23 Benjamin, Illuminations, 255. 24 Backhouse, Colour-Coded, 228. The relationship of this case to the cinema history of this book is also manifest in the coincident fact that Viola Desmond operated a prominent beauty salon and had as one of her clients the famed singer Portia White, subject of Sylvia Hamilton’s film Portia White: Think On Me. 25 Ibid., 230. 26 Selections from The Book of Negroes are available online: www.blackloyalist. info. (Accessed 20 March 2015) This historical document was made by British naval officers to list black loyalists allowed into Canada after the American Revolutionary War. It is used as a point of reference for the novel The Book of

336 | N O T E S T O P A G E S 154–73

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

Negroes by Laurence Hill (2007). Hill co-wrote with Clemont Virgo a screenplay for a tv mini-series adaptation of the book. The series, directed by Virgo (2015), is an international co-production partly shot in Nova Scotia. Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 83. Ibid., 53. For a fascinating entry to the history of activism and culture in Halifax, see the September 2000 interview with George Elliott Clarke, with references to Rocky Jones and Sylvia Hamilton: www.canlit.ca/interviews.php?interview=9. (Accessed 20 March 2015) George Elliott Clarke, “The Birth and Rebirth of Africadian Literature,” in Hochbruck and Taylor, Down East, 66. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 15. Kass Banning, “‘Nation Time’ at Kwacha House: The Transitional Modalities of Encounter at Kwacha House-Halifax,” in Waugh, Baker, and Winton, 190–200. Ibid., 199. Jim Lotz, “Film in Atlantic Canada,” Arts Atlantic 24 (Winter 1986): 42. Banning, 194. Clarke, “Honouring African-Canadian Geography,” 37. Nelson, 129. In his important book, Odysseys Home, Clarke argues against Gilroy: “His very formulation, ‘The Black Atlantic,’ resurrects a Pan-Africanism that almost dare not speak its name” (81). The issues of race, identity, memory, and geography are taken up by Rinaldo Walcott in his analysis of the excellent short fiction film Making Change (1995), directed by Toronto artist Colina Philips and set in rural Nova Scotia. Black Like Who?, 141–9. Gates, Signifying Monkey, 50. Dyer, White, 30. Cecil Foster, “Black History and Culture in Canada: A Celebration of Essence or Presence,” in Sherbert, Gérin, and Petty, Canadian Cultural Poesis, 347. These episodes have been regularly broadcast on television and can be found online: www.histori.ca. (Accessed 20 March 2015) To their credit, they also include a large selection of Heritage Minute parodies, many from the cbc tv show The Rick Mercer Report. Katarzyna Rukszto, “History as Edutainment: Heritage Minutes and the Uses of Educational Television,” in Druick and Kotsopoulos, Programming Reality, 177. Lewis, Alanis Obomsawin, 182. See my “History and Storytelling: The Documentary Context of Canadian Cinema,” in Keller and Walz, Screening Canadians, 59–65. Lewis details the resistance of the cbc to the broadcast of Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) and the eventual impact of that broadcast, Alanis Obomsawin, 109.

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48 The dominant stereotype of First Nations Peoples in Canada has been either noble or barbaric savage. For an overview of this history, see Francis, Imaginary Indian. 49 Zuzana Pick, “Storytelling and Resistance: The Documentary Practice of Alanis Obomsawin,” in Armatage, Baning, Longfellow, and Marchessault, Gendering the Nation, 78. 50 Start with the film and video collection of the Labrador Institute, an extension of Memorial University. See: www.mun.ca/labradorinstitute/home/. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 51 Innis, Staples, 342. 52 Stamps, Unthinking Modernity, 59. 53 For a brief summary, see: http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/SEEJ/voisey/innu.html. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 54 Ausra Burns, “Moving and Moving Forward.” 55 Heidi Wicks, “Fifty Years of Makkovik, through Uncle Jim’s Eye,” The Telegram (St John’s) (14 May 2008), online: http://www.thetelegram.com/Community/ 2008-05-14/article-1448887/Fifty-years-of-Makkovik-through-Uncle-Jims-eye/1. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 56 From personal conversations with Mark Turner related to unpublished research on film in Labrador. 57 Grierson cited in Druick, 41. 58 Morris, Film Companion, 59. 59 Khouri, Filming Politics, 107. 60 Druick, 60. 61 Jones, Movies and Memoranda, 177. 62 Ronald Dick, “Regionalization of a Federal Cultural Institution: The Experience of the National Film Board of Canada 1965–1979,” in Walz, Flashback, 121. See also: Evans, National Interest, 152, 202, 222, and passim. 63 Dick, 121. 64 Jones, 177. 65 Dick, 115. 66 Mike Jones, cited in Movies and Memoranda, 195. 67 Jerry White, “Guys with Brylcreem Discussing Fish Processing: Form, Community, and Politics in the nfb ’s Newfoundland Project,” in Varga, 103. On the limits of democratic agency in this process, see: Marchessault, “Reflections,” 135. 68 Low cited in Dick, 124. 69 Druick, 146. 70 White, 112. 71 Marxist-Leninist Daily, online edition, no. 141 (16 September 2004): www.cpcml.ca/Tmld2004/D34141.htm. (No longer available online; contact [email protected] for older archives.)

338 | N O T E S T O P A G E S 185–200

72 Video Theatre folded in the early 1980s and its mandate for supporting community-based video production was taken over by the Centre for Art Tapes, as discussed elsewhere in this book and in Tracy Zhang, “On the Fringe of the Canadian State: Grassroots Film and Video Movements in Halifax, 1960s–1980s,” in Varga, 187–8. 73 For detailed analysis of the film, see Joe Kispal-Kovacs, “Inscriptions of Class and Nationalism in Canadian ‘Realist’ Cinema,” in Varga and Khouri, Working on Screen, 235–45. 74 For a compelling book version of this story, written from a working-class perspective, see Cameron, Education of Everett Richardson. 75 Production diary notes by Tom Burger in author’s personal collection. Statements confirmed by Bill McKiggan and Chuck Lapp. 76 Memo, 18 August 1977, from Rex Tasker to nfb Production, cc’d to Colin Low and others; copy in the author’s personal collection. 77 Tom Burger diary notes. 78 On the struggle to make and distribute Planet, see Vanstone, D is for Daring: 138–40. The cbc refusal to air Fish or Cut Bait is given in a letter from Saleem Ahmed, director of television, cbht (cbc Halifax), 29 November 1989, to the producers; in the author’s personal collection. The letter also says these issues have been frequently covered by the cbc and also cites technical quality issues. 79 Letter, 7 April 1992; in author’s personal collection. 80 My comments on this film were originally published in “Reading, Regarding, Waiting: Three New Documentaries from Nova Scotia,” Cineaction (Spring 2006): 60–3. 81 Howell and Twohig in Varga, 9. 82 Ibid., 10. 83 The history of corporate arrogance, greed, and political malfeance in the coal industry of Nova Scotia is told in DeMont, Coal Black Heart. 84 The first 9/11 disaster was the US orchestrated coup against the government of Salvadore Allende in Chile in 1973, with the torture and murder of tens of thousands of citizens. I say this to provide some context for the iconography of 9/11. 85 See Richards on the integration of politics and media in Nova Scotia through analysis of media coverage and corporate communications response to the tragedy. 86 O’Connell and Mills, “Making Sense of Bad News,” Canadian Journal of Communication 28 (2003): 323–39. 87 Joe Friesen and Lisa Priest, “The Seedy Side of Small-Town Ontario,” Globe and Mail (23 May 2009), a 8. 88 Production details from the Canadian Society of Cinematographers newsletter, May 2004, online: http://www.csc.ca/publications/2004/200405/ IssueWeb200405.pdf. (Accessed 20 March 2015)

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89 From the song “Coal Not Dole,” available on Coal Fire in Winter (Atlantica 1996). 90 Cited in: Tim Arsenault, “First Unsung Hero is Nova Scotia Poet,” Chronicle Herald (29 June 2008), online: www.thechronicleherald.ca. (Accessed 30 June 2008) 91 For instance, in Ballad of South Mountain and The Church and the Hearth (both Dir: Hubert Schuurman, 1987), engaging and earnest films on the hidden pockets of rural poverty in Nova Scotia. 92 McKay, Quest of the Folk, 114. 93 For further information on the film, see: www.sitemedia.ca. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 94 Wark, Radical Gestures, 160. 95 Nichols, Representing Reality, 177. 96 Ibid., 237. 97 The 2008 Cameron Inquiry revealed systemic problems with testing procedures, leading to the misdiagnosis of patients. Of the 386 patients who had to be retested, 108 had died. For a brief summary, see: “Eastern Health Botched Release of Latest Cancer Details,” online: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ newfoundland-labrador/eastern-health-botched-release-of-latest-cancerdetails-patients-1.780874. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 98 Renov, Subject of Documentary, 193. 99 Cited in Cynthia Amsden, “My Left Breast – Review,” Take One (May 2001), online: http://takeone.athabascau.ca/index.php/takeone/article/view/867. (Accessed 20 March 2015) 100 At the time of publication, the website was no longer available. For related information, see the filmmaker’s site: www.nanceackerman.com/. (Accessed 20 March 2015) CHAPTER FOUR

1 Gasher, Hollywood North, 6. 2 Peter Harcourt, “The Innocent Eye: An Aspect of the Work of the National Film Board of Canada,” in Feldman and Nelson, Canadian Film Reader, 72. 3 Ramsey, “Canadian Narrative,” 39. 4 Byford, “Highway 61,” 12. 5 Ibid. The sctv parody is called “Garth and Gord and Fiona and Alice,” Episode 106, broadcast 5 November 1982, collected on dvd sctv Volume 4. 6 The primary critique of the construction of national cinema in this country remains Morris, “In Our Own Eyes,” 27–44. 7 For a journalistic overview of the company’s history, see: Rose, Budge. 8 Ibid., 153. 9 Ibid., 75.

340 | N O T E S T O P A G E S 213–29

10 Morris, Film Companion, 259. 11 At least one American reviewer disagreed: “The Rowdyman is nearly worthless. None of the characters is interesting: none of the acting is particularly distinguished. Generally an actor cannot be blamed for the lines that he must deliver, but Gordon Pinsent, in the lead role of Will Cole the Rowdyman, forfeited that excuse. He wrote the script.” Dwight Cramer, “O’ Canada, Oh No,” The Harvard Crimson (25 September 1971), online: www.thecrimson.com/article/1972/9/25/ ocanada-oh-no-pbibt-is-a/. (Accessed 31 March 2015) 12 Pinsent, By the Way, 201. Pinsent wrote the script from his home in Los Angeles, and while he wanted to shoot in Canada, he details the tempting offer to sell the screenplay to a Hollywood lawyer, which would inevitably mean an all-American cast and location. 13 For a summary of the issues, see: Frances Russell, “Abitibi-Bowater case pushes nafta’s ‘investor rights’ over Crown land ownership,” 18 October 2010, originally published in The Winnipeg Free Press and reposted online: http://rabble.ca/ news/2010/10/abitibibowater-case-pushes-naftas-investors-rights-over-crownland-ownership. (Accessed 31 March 2015) 14 Brookes, Public Nuisance, 113. 15 Malek Khouri, “A Parochial Newfoundland: Gordon Pinsent’s Film Tale About Tradition, Progress, and Resistance,” in Varga, Rain/Drizzle/Fog, 86. 16 Peter Urquhart, “Whose Museum Is It, Anyway? Discourses of Resistance in the Adaptation of The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum into Margaret’s Museum,” in Varga and Khouri, Working on Screen, 148–57. 17 Jason Anderson, “A Blast of French Air: Rodrigue Jean Exposes Acadia’s Harsh and Sexy Side,” Eye Weekly (6 April 2000). 18 Ibid. 19 Waugh, Romance of Transgression, 117. 20 Rodrigue Jean, artist talk at nscad University, 31 March 2008. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 For guidelines on policy and the various funding envelopes, see: www.telefilm. gc.ca. (Accessed 31 March 2015) For an overview of Canadian film policy, see: studies by Manjunath Pendakur, Ted Magder, and Michael Dorland. For an insider account on the institutionalization of the Canadian Film Development Corporation, which became Telefilm Canada in 1984, see: Michael Spencer. 25 See the nfb portrait: A Figgy Duff Christmas (Dir: William Gough, 1978). 26 For a rethinking of European art cinema, see: Betz, Beyond the Subtitle. 27 Stephen Crofts, “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s,” in Williams, Film and Nationalism, 29. 28 Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video, 15.

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29 The director has indicated that the film is partly drawn from his own experience growing up. Andrea Nemetz, “High Time for Melski,” Chronicle Herald (12 September 2008), online: www.thechronicleherald.ca. 30 The 2008–09 annual report of Film Nova Scotia reports over $100 million in annual production spending and 2,000 employed in Nova Scotia. 31 An overview of tax credits available throughout Canada, see: www.pwc.com/ ca/en/entertainment-media/film-video-tax-incentives-canada.jhtml. (Accessed 8 April 2015) 32 Dorland, Close to the State/s, 94. 33 Michael Dorland, “Policy Rhetorics of an Imaginary Cinema,” in Moran, Film Policy, 118. 34 Miller, Global Hollywood, 348. 35 The task force members included filmmakers William Skerrett, Michael Donovan, and Bill MacGillivray along with three senior civil servants from the Department of Culture, Recreation and Fitness and the Department of Transportation, and a bureaucrat in the Department of Development for the City of Halifax. The chair was the only female appointee, Dartmouth businesswoman Elizabeth Hanson (appointed in 1990 to the board of nsfdc under her married named Liz Tierney), who had no experience in film. 36 Rennie, “Important Origins.” 37 Terris, “Public Policy,” cited in Rennie. 38 Miller, 133. 39 Jäckel, 29. 40 Cited in Schwartz, “Principle in Exile,” 23. 41 Andrew Ellis, cited in Ron Foley MacDonald, “Representation Under Siege,” Fuse (June–July 1990): 30. 42 Glenn Walton, “Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden,” Take One (Fall 1997): 36. 43 Malek Khouri has argued that the film is a turn away from the transformative possibilities of a more radical gay cinema, a sensibility we do see in Movie of the Week, but that is missing in the middle-class stylization and affluence of Hanging Garden’s main character. “Other-ing the Worker in Canadian ‘Gay Cinema’: Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden,” in Varga and Khouri, 134–47. 44 Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotic, “Hanging in Plain Sight: The Problem of the Body in Thom Fitzgerald’s Films,” in Melnyk, Great Canadian Film Directors, 340. 45 Available on the film’s website: www.3-needles.com. (Accessed 31 March 2015) 46 Cited in “Film in Search of a Family,” Chronicle-Herald (17 September 2011). 47 Andrew Burke, “Site Specific: Visualizing the Vernacular in Andrea Dorfman’s Parsley Days,” in Varga, 227. 48 Monk, Weird Sex, 133.

342 | N O T E S T O P A G E S 244–57

49 For a brief summary, see Morris, Film Companion, 53. 50 An outline of production details, including Gregory Peck’s contract terms (which he modelled on Jimmy Stewart’s arrangements with the studios) and reference to shooting in Nova Scotia can be found in Gerard Molyneaux, Gregory Peck: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, ct : Greenwood, 1995), 115. 51 See: http://explorelunenburg.ca and follow the link Visitor Information. (Accessed 31 March 2015) 52 Lapp, “pei : Centennial Retrospective,” 25. At a retrospective for filmmaking in this province in 1975, the organizers screened Johnny Belinda since, at the time, no other feature had been shot there – including, as it turns out, this one. 53 MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds, 176. 54 Marchak, “Nationalism and Regionalism in Canada,” 18. 55 Hogg, When Canada Joined Cape Breton, 9. 56 My article on Margaret Perry’s films was written for the Nova Scotia provincial archives. It can be found online and is illustrated with links to a selection of films: http://novascotia.ca/archives/virtual/nsfilm/perry.asp?Language= English. (Accessed 1 April 2015) 57 Willsher, “Where Are the Roads?,” 97. 58 Hogg, 42. The Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management holds various tourism films featuring the Causeway, as well as nfb outtakes from films of the construction as well as travelogue scenes, but, unfortunately, no Wandering Piper. 59 Harper and Vance, Myth, 29. For a different view extolling the place of Scots in the development of Canada, see: McGoogan. 60 McKay, “Five Ages,” 8. 61 Hornsby and Reid, New England and the Maritime Provinces, 13. 62 Thomas Baker McQuesten, Ontario minister of highways and public works during the 1930s, cited in Coutu, “Vehicles of Nationalism,” 181. 63 Colin Howell, “The 1900s: Industry, Urbanization, and Reform,” 155–91, in Forbes and Muise, Atlantic Provinces in Confederation, 179. The idea throughout the region was to promote a “friendly remoteness from the confusions of the world.” Margaret Conrad, “The 1950s: The Decade of Development,” 382–420, in Forbes and Muise, 394. At the time of this writing in 2012, one of the slogans on the Newfoundland and Labrador tourism website is: “Where is this place exactly … it’s about as far from Disneyland as you can possibly get.” Current tourism campaigns Online: http://newfoundlandandlabradortourism.com. (Accessed 31 March 2015) 64 McKay, Quest of the Folk, 262. 65 Willsher, 112. 66 Ibid., 47. 67 Encyclopedia Britannica, online: www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/ 242880/great-auk. (Accessed 31 March 2015)

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68 As it turns out, there is a market for privately owned submarines, and even James Cameron owns one. See: “Submarines: Not Just for the Navy,” Wired (20 September 2001). 69 Overton, World of Difference, 67. 70 Whalen, “‘Camping’ with Annie Proulx,” 53. 71 Kelly Toughill, “When Hollywood Came to Town,” Toronto Star (19 December 2001): a 7. 72 Producer Barbara Doran, audio commentary, Random Passage dvd , 2001. 73 Wyile makes a similar point on Bernice Morgan’s book, in Anne of Tim Hortons, 200. 74 On the memory industry, see: Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” in Appadurai, Globalization, 57–77. 75 See provincial government news release: www.releases.gov.nl.ca/releases/ 2002/tcr/0208n03.htm. (Accessed 31 March 2015) 76 For an analysis of the film that considers the representation of labour and gender, see: Peter Urquhart, “Whose Museum Is It, Anyway? Discourses of Resistance in the Adaptation of The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum into Margaret’s Museum,” in Varga and Khouri, 148–57. 77 For a longer discussion of this film in relation to others from the region that make use of the artist character, see: Varga, 251–4. 78 Urry, Tourist Gaze. 79 Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in Adorno, The Culture Industry, 86. 80 Dorland, Cultural Industries in Canada, 173. 81 Telefilm Canada, Cinemas to Cell Phones (corporate plan 2006–07 to 2010–11). Citations as follows: “funding agency,” p4; producer as project leader, p5; “game is fundamentally more engaging,” p14. 82 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 3, 104. 83 For an overview of the history of the text’s original publication, see: Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 3, 425–9. 84 Adorno, 29. 85 Vatnsdal, They Came from Within, 148. 86 On the blindspots of national cinema criticism dismissive of the tax shelter films, see Urquhart, “You Should Know Something – Anything – About this Movie,” 2003. 87 The story is told in a less provocative version in Rockoff, Going to Pieces, 106. 88 Wages for many crewmembers were in the area of $50/day for days that ran upwards of 16 to 20 hours in a mine coated with limestone dust. 89 Rob Gorham, “Negligence Unlikely in Death of Worker,” Chronicle-Herald (26 September 1992): a 3. 90 The film was well received at the time. Joyce Nelson starts her review with “The production is so universally fine that it’s hard to know where to begin … [The

344 | N O T E S T O P A G E S 265–81

91 92 93 94

95 96

97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

film] blasts past colonial cultural hangups and elitist taboos to revel in and fuse the two most poplar art forms of a generation: tv and rock ’n’ roll.” “The King of Friday Night (review),” Cinema Canada (September 1989): 35. Robert Hough, “Boys in the ’Hood,” The Walrus (November 2009): 71. Davis, Planet of Slums, 139. Davis cites Katy Salmon, “Nairobi’s ‘Flying Toilets’: Tip of an Iceberg,” Terra Viva (Johannesburg), 26 August 2002. McCullough, “Imperialism, Regionalism, Humanism,” in Varga, 158. Box-office numbers are from James Adams, “Americans Don’t Get Bubbles at All,” Globe and Mail (8 March 2008): r 2; emphasis on nudity and family values: “Making it Big and Dirty,” Eye Weekly (Toronto, 5 October 2006); on the music awards: John Doyle, “The Trailer Park Boys Are Us,” Globe and Mail (23 February 2006): r 3; on the film’s lacklustre transition from the small screen, see: Rick Groen, “Trailer Park Troubles,” Globe and Mail (6 October 2006): r 1; for a more fawning local review that also addresses the film’s clean-up for an American audience, see: Carston Knox, “Is Hollywood Ready for Mike Clattenburg,” The Coast (Halifax) (12 October 2006): 12–19. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 302. McCullough makes the point that the humanism of the show, through the way the characters validate home and family amidst the stress of modern life, depoliticizes commentary on the effects of uneven development and global capitalism. “Imperialism, Regionalism, Humanism,” in Varga, 156. York, Literary Celebrity, 97 Jäckel, 31. Patsy Aspasia Kotsopoulos, “L.M. Montgomery on Television: The Romance and Industry of the Adaptation Process,” in Sherbert, Gérin, and Petty, Canadian Cultural Poesis, 272. York, 92. Janice Kulyk Keefer makes the case for Montgomery as a serious writer precisely by the use of pastoral imagery. Under Eastern Eyes, 198. “Canuxploitation: A Guide to Canadian b -Film,” online: www.canuxploitation. com/review/defcon.html. (Accessed 31 March 2015) Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil. Elmer and Gasher, Contracting Out, 6. Susan Christopherson, “Divide and Conquer: Regional Competition in a Concentrated Media Industry,” in Elmer and Gasher, 24. Scott, On Hollywood, 53. Cited in Charles Mandel, “Stuck on New Brunswick,” Globe and Mail (5 December 2006): r 2. Pierre Véronneau, “Journey,” in Varga, 46. David L. Pike, “Across the Great Divide: Canadian Popular Cinema in the 21st Century,” Bright Lights Film Journal 56, online: www.brightlightsfilm.com/56/ canada.htm. (Accessed 31 March 2015)

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110 Clarke, Whylah Falls, xxiii. 111 For a discussion of the possibilities and limits of Virgo’s first feature, Rude, see: John McCullough, “Rude and the Representation of Class,” in Varga and Khouri, 246–67. 112 Online: www.cbc.ca/arts/tiff/features/tiffclementvirgo.html. (Accessed 31 March 2015) 113 Sconce, “Irony,” 349–69. 114 Jiggers is archived online: www.peifilmandmedia.com/profile?user=Adam%20 Perry. (Accessed 26 March 2015) C O N C LU S I O N

1 Phillip, Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays, 58. 2 I began with this idea in chapter 1 with the comment from literary critic E.K. Brown. We see it taken up by the ways that ideas of national cinema in the 1970s functioned to police ideas of taste. 3 Data provided in an internal report prepared by the Atlantic Chapter of the Documentary Organization of Canada, in the author’s personal collection. 4 www.cmf-fmc.ca/documents/files/programs/2014-15/guidelines/2014-15_eng_ reg_prd_bonus_guidelines.pdf. (Accessed 1 April 2015) 5 Bannister, “Politics of Cultural Memory,” 129. For a satirical commentary on the Smallwood era of development, see: Guy, Smallwood Years. 6 Bannister, 151. 7 “Love and Savagery: An Interview with Des Walsh and John N. Smith,” National Post (12 November 2009), online: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/ afterword/archive/2009/11/12/love-and-savagery-an-interview-with-des-walshand-john-k-smith.aspx#ixzz0Xh4taQRd. (Accessed 1 April 2010) 8 Sloniowski, “Violations.” For a discussion of the political limits of docudrama, see Joe Kispal-Kovacs, “Inscriptions of Class and Nationalism in Canadian ‘Realist’ Cinema: Final Offer and Canada’s Sweetheart,” in Varga and Khouri, 235–45. 9 Wise, Take One, 219. 10 Joshua Smith describes the region not as a territory framed by political borders but as characterized by the act of border-crossing: “The first component of understanding borderlands thinking refers not to a place, or a process, but to an attitude that rejected the arbitrary authority of the state. The most obvious manifestation of this disregard for governmental interference in the economy was smuggling. The more government forces attempted to halt unregulated trade the more apparent it became to locals that the state was an unwelcome and alien force.” “Humbert’s Paradox: The Global Context of Smuggling in the Bay of Fundy,” in Hornsby and Reid, New England, 117. Reference to Adam Smith, 112.

346 | N O T E S T O P A G E S 294–316

11 Marshall, French Atlantic, 122. 12 The journal was posted on the film website but is no longer available. Copy in the author’s personal collection. This document provides a great idiosyncratic insight on the author and this community as well as occasional information on the film, especially the important csi data: casual sex index. 13 John Doyle, “tiff Sheet,” Globe and Mail (15 September 2009). 14 Carston Knox, “Canada First! Crackie,” Playback (31 August 2009), online: http://playbackonline.ca/2009/08/31/crackie-20090831/. (Accessed 1 April 2015) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1 Statement made on behalf of filmmakers in the Atlantic region at a meeting organized by the Canada Council, 29 November 1979, Monte Ste Marie, Quebec. My thanks to Gene Walz (my first film professor at the University of Manitoba) for drawing my attention to this document. 2 Musser, Emergence of Cinema, 129. 3 An outline of this work can be found on the website of the Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management: http://novascotia.ca/archives/virtual/easterneye/ default.asp. (Accessed 18 March 2015)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY FILMMAKER INTERVIEWS

Unless otherwise noted, statements from filmmakers were recorded during interviews and/or expressed in correspondence with the author. Almon, Marc. 24 March 2010, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Brown, Lois. 17 October 2007, St John’s, Newfoundland. Clark, Chuck. 11 April 2010, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Clarkes, Millefiore. 10 April 2008, Charlottetown, pei . Christie, Amanda Dawn. 3 October 2009, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Dorfman, Andrea. 15 May 2007, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Doyle, John. 20 October 2007, St John’s, Newfoundland. Hamilton, Sylvia. 28 March 2008, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

House, Rosemary. 17 October 2007, St John’s, Newfoundland. Jones, Michael. 15 October 2007, St John’s, Newfoundland. Keating, Lulu. 2 April 2008, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lapp, T. Charles (Chuck). 31 July 2008, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Larder, Tony. 19 June 2009, Ottawa, Ontario. Larter, Jeremy. 1 May 2009, Charlottetown, pei . Lefebvre, Jean Pierre. 1 June 2010, Montreal, Quebec. Lewis, Mary. 6 May 2008, St John’s, Newfoundland. Livingston, Neal. 17 September 2008, Halifax, Nova Scotia. MacGillivray, William (Bill). 19 November 2007, Halifax, Nova Scotia. McKiggan, Bill. 5 November 2008, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Matthews, Kevin. 8 November 2007, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Merzetti, Tony. 10 November 2007, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Ness, Paul. 12 April 2008, Charlottetown, pei . Norman, Derek. 18 October 2007, St John’s, Newfoundland. Pedersen, Jon, and Freda Pedersen. 11 November 2007, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Picard, Françoyse. 27 May 2009, Ottawa, Ontario. Pittman, Ken. 6 May 2008, St John’s, Newfoundland. Pope, Paul. 16 October 2007, St John’s, Newfoundland. Richards, Peter. 11 April 2008, Charlottetown, pei . Riche, Ed. 8 May 2008, St John’s, Newfoundland. Rogers, Gerry. 18 October 2007, St John’s, Newfoundland. Samuelson, JoDee. 12 April 2008, Charlottetown, pei . Scott, John. 28 July 2008, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Simmons, Lionel. 23 October 2007, Toronto, Ontario. Simms, Justin. 19 October 2007, St John’s, Newfoundland. Smith, Jean. 16 October 2007, St John’s, Newfoundland. Sutherland, Doug. 10 November 2007, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Tasker, Rex. 7 May 2009, Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia. Troake, Anne. 19 October 2007, St John’s, Newfoundland. Verrall, Ann. 6 May 2010, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Ward, David. 11 April 2008, Charlottetown, pei . White, Sherry. 9 October 2009, e-mail correspondence.

TEXTS

Citations for relatively minor items, such as brief film reviews, are in the endnotes. Acland, Charles, and William J. Buxton, eds. Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999.

350 | B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited by J.M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1972. Allen, John, with Julie Charlesworth, Nick Henry, Doreen Massey, Akkab Cochrane, Gill Court, and Phil Sarre. Rethinking the Region: Spaces of Neo-Liberalism. New York: Routledge, 1998. Apparadui, Arjun, ed. Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. – Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Armatage, Kay, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine Marchessault, eds. Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Atlantic Filmmakers Co-operative. 30 Takes: Celebrating 30 Years at the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative. Halifax: afcoop , 2004. Aufderheide, Pat. Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Austin-Smith, Brenda, and George Melnyk, eds. The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010. Backhouse, Constance. Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900– 1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Bannister, Jerry. “Making History: Cultural Memory in Twentieth-Century Newfoundland.” Newfoundland Studies 18:2 (2002): 175–94. – The Politics of Cultural Memory: Themes in the History of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, 1972–2003. Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada. Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003. Barber, Bruce, ed. Conceptual Art: The nscad Connection 1967–1973. Halifax: Anna Leonowens Gallery/nscad University, 2001. Barry, Frank. Wreckhouse. St John’s: Killick, 2003. Beard, William, and Jerry White, eds. North of Everything: English Canadian Cinema Since 1980. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002. Beaty, Bart, and Rebecca Sullivan. Canadian Television Today. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. – Selected Writings Vol. 3, 1935–1938. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2002. Berland, Jody. North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2009. – “Space at the Margins.” Topia 1 (Spring 1997): 55–82. Betz, Mark. Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

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INDEX 3 Needles, 252–5 3part Harmony, 111, 112 8 Frames Per Second, 82–4 16mm (film stock), 79, 86, 93, 108, 110, 111–16, 121, 131, 134, 138, 146, 194, 204, 205, 228, 258, 284 18 Days, 104 35mm (film stock), 20, 86, 118, 127, 146, 280, 284 A Darker Side, 117 A Sigh and a Wish: Helen Creighton’s Maritimes, 157 Abouamin, Tarek, 104

Acadian; Acadie; Acadian expulsion, 5, 16, 101, 107–9, 120, 153–7, 162, 163, 203, 233, 237, 334n34 L’Acadie, L’Acadie, 162, 203 According to John Acorn, 126 Accumulation and Disappearance, 126 Ackerman, Nance, 212, 224 Adorno, Theodor, 10, 67, 274–7 Adventure of Faustus Bidgood, The; Faustus Bidgood, 14, 17–32, 38,

50, 133–5, 141, 304, 307, 318, 327, 330n2 Aerial View, 42, 44, 46–8, 83 Afghan Luke, 286 Africville, 40, 41, 175–8, 294, 295, 331n24 Africville: Can’t Stop Now, 177 After Frank, 217 aids, 34, 66, 251–4, 289 Albert, 141 Alliance Atlantis Communications; aa , 289, 290 Almon, Mark, 105

American Beauty, 243 American Indian Movement; aim , 179 Amherst, 91 Anchor Zone, 142 Anne of Green Gables; Anne, 152, 262, 263, 280, 281, 286–8 Anne of Green Gut, 35 Anniversary Project, The, 224 Anthology Film Archives, 70 Anthony Flower: The Life and Art of a Country Painter, 115 anti-modernism, 3, 10–12, 120, 122, 156, 239, 260, 304 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 42 Aquash, Annie Mae Pictou, 179 Arcand, Denys, 203, 233 Arquette, Rosanna, 243 Arriflex (motion picture camera), 79 Arsenault, Jason, 126 Art By Gay Men, 90 Art Metropole, 73 l’Association coopérative de productions audiovisuelles; acpav , 71 Atlantic Film and Video Producers Conference, 120 Atlantic Film Festival; aff, 88 Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative; afcoop , 65, 68, 69, 74, 75, 77– 110, 142, 197, 205, 217 Au Rythme du mon Coeur (To the Rhythm of my Heart), 74 Author of These Words: Harold Horwood, The, 55 Baba’s House, 99 364 | I N D E X

Back and Forth, 148 Back to God’s Country, 275 Bailey, Norma, 298 Bakhtin, [Mikhail], 35, 181 Baldwin, James, 181 Ball, Christopher, 94 Ballantyne, Tania, 83 Bangor Chainsaw Massacre, The, 121 Banks, Hal, 202 Baptist Church; Baptist, 91, 175, 178, 294 Bardot, Brigitte, 167 Barker, Becka, 93 Barthes, [Roland], 166 Bath, The, 123–4 Battle At Our Shores, The, 159 Baudrillard, Jean, 154 Bay Boy, The, 248 Bay of Love and Sorrows, The, 298 Baymen, The, 166 Beckett, Sam, 128 Beefcake, 250 Being Parkhour, 95 Bend in the River, 259 Benjamin, Sobaz, 180 Benjamin, Walter, 171, 276 Bergland, Melissa, 313 Berlin International Film Festival, 38 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 86 Billy Crane Moves Away, 199 Billy Doucette’s Hornpipe, 101 Bingo Robbers, 318–20 Birth of Nicola, The, 118 Black Audio Film Collective, 174 Black Eyed Dog, 299, 300 Black Mother, Black Daughter, 169, 171, 178, 179 Black Salt Water Elegy, 94 Black Swan, 299 Blackbird, 312 Blanchett, Cate, 267

Blood and Water, 310, 311 Blood Moon/Welcome to the Freakshow/Wolf Girl, 251 Bloomsbury Cabaret, 52 Blowies, 115 Bohemian Town, 93 Bolex (16mm springwound camera), 21, 25, 124 Book of Negroes, 336–7n26 Boss Gibson, 115 Bowater Pulp and Paper Mill, 231 Bowling for Columbine, 290 Boyle, Danny, 233 Boys, Les, 249 Boys of St Vincent, The, 309 Braff, Zach, 243 Brakhage, Stan, 70 Brault, Michel, 162 Breadmaker, The, 323 Bredin, Helen, 93 Brett, John, 101, 208 Brittain, Donald, 202 Brody, Hugh, 187 Bronson, AA, 73 Brookes, Chris, 24, 54, 231 Brother 2 Brother, 169 Brown, Lois, 145, 317–19 Buchanan, Edie, 212 Buchanan, John, 248 Buchbinder, Amnon, 255 Buckler, Ernest, 45, 214 Buckley, Rhonda, 193, 194, 327 Budworks, 158–61 Bug and a Bag of Weed, A, 244 Buñuel, Luis, 118 Burger, Tom, 199, 200, 203–6 Buried at Sea, 157 Buried on Sunday, 288 Burning Rubber, 218, 219 Busby, Alex, 217 Bush, Andrew, 297 Butler, Judith, 9

Buxton, Jason, 312 Cadillac Girls, 290 Campbell, Bruce, 89 Campbell, Chris, 117, 118 Campbell, Colin, 109 Canada Council for the Arts, The, 15, 20, 44, 47, 71–80, 89, 97, 108, 112, 114, 121, 123, 130, 131, 275 Canada Media Fund; cmf , 306 Canada’s Sweetheart, 202 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, cbc , 32–4, 36, 40, 56, 72, 74, 77, 90, 104, 121, 131, 138, 141, 145, 158–63, 204, 211, 216, 260, 261, 270, 277, 280, 284, 287, 289, 309, 329n3, 337n43, 339n78 Canadian Co-operation Project, 259 Canadian Film Centre, 102, 140, 143 Canadian Film Development Corporation, cfdc, 71, 72, 288 Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, cfmdc, 70, 71 Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, 194 Canadian Radio Television Commission; crtc , 10, 290 Canadian Seamen’s Union, 202 Canadian Television Fund, 306 Canadian Union of Postal Workers, 200 Candy Mountain, 49, 332n33 Cannes Film Festival, 95, 289 Canning, Jordan, 147, 270

CanWest Global Communications Corp., 290 Cape Breton, 35, 38, 39, 44, 49, 52, 76, 80, 84, 94, 103, 105, 126, 157, 158, 179, 212, 213, 217, 228, 248, 256, 260–2, 272, 273, 277, 313 capitalism, 6, 11, 23, 95, 160, 163, 165, 207, 209, 236, 237, 246, 251, 254, 271, 272, 283, 289, 296, 309, 316 Carolsfeld, Wiebke Von, 256 Caron, Rodolphe, 107 Carroll, Lewis, 93 Carter, Peter, 229, 230 Carter, Wilf, 50 Carty, Brian, 115 Carvery, Irvine, 178 Case of Charlie Gordon, The, 194, 195 Cashin, Peter, 61, 62 Cast No Shadow, 314, 315 casual sex index, 347n12 Catholic Church; Catholic School; Catholicism, 9, 19, 23, 24, 33, 60, 96, 99, 141, 174, 216, 222, 270, 271, 308, 309 Cathy at 16, 131 Celtic, 37, 52, 120, 239, 273, 308 Centre for Art Tapes; cfat , 88–91, 99, 105 Challenge for Change, 83, 97, 108, 156, 162, 163, 176, 192, 194, 196, 198, 199, 200, 203, 208 Chambers, Jack, 71 Chandler’s Mill, 165 Channel 4 (uk ), 249 Chaplin, Charles, 28, 117, 276 Charlie Zone, 245 Charlie’s Prospect, 104, 105

Charlottetown (pei ), 120, 122, 127, 260, 298, 302, 327, 335n43 Cheechoo, Shirley, 189 Cherry, Evelyn, 195 Chiasson, Herménégilde, 109, 154, 162 Christian Brothers; Christian Brothers of Ireland, 270, 309 Christie, Amanda Dawn, 108, 110–12 Christopher House: Ahead of the Curve, 214 Cinémarévie Coop Ltée, 107 Clark, Chuck, 77, 82, 85 Clarke, George Elliott, 174, 177, 294, 337n29 Clarkes, Millefiore (Mille), 120, 125–7, 225 class (social-economic), 4–6, 45, 46, 60, 66, 82–6, 126, 166, 178, 181, 195, 203–18, 226, 228, 232–7, 240, 241, 252–8, 277–82, 295, 297, 321–3 Clattenburg, Mike, 281, 286 Clearing the Waters, 208 Clerks, 298 Clockwork Orange, 86 Clothesline Patch, 143 Cloudburst, 255 Coady, Lynn, 92 Coady, Moses, 76 Cocksucker Blues, 79 Codco, 18, 20, 32–5, 57, 131, 133, 143, 288, 290, 309, 331n7, 331n21 Cohen, Leonard, 56 Collicot, Jon, 115 Comeau, Jean-Guy, 160, 161 Comeau, Phil, 108 Concordia University, 124, 140 Confessional, Le, 233 Conrad, Margaret, 4, 161

INDEX

| 365

Corner Brook (nl ), 128, 230, 231 Cottonland, 212 Coughlin, Rev Charles, 215 Countdown to Liquor Day, 284, 285 Cowan, Paul, 209 Cowling, Barry, 205, 207 Crabtree, Grant, 79 Crackie, 321–3 Crawley, F.R. “Budge”; Crawley Films, 116, 229 Creelman, David, 44, 45 Creighton, Helen, 12, 157, 218 Cronenberg, David, 251 Crosbie, John, 208, 316 Crows and Branches, 120 Curnoe, Greg, 71 Daley, Siloën, 93 Dalhousie University; Dalhousie Film Society, 81, 86, 93, 175, 328 Dallaire, Roméo, 291 Daniels, Phillip, 174 Danny, 332n51 Darroch-Lozowski, Vivian, 109 Das Capital: Or, What Do You Want to See the Harbour For Anyway?, 57, 58 Davies, Donna, 103, 157 Dawn of the Pixies, 108 Days Before Christmas, 65 Decks Awash, 131 Defalco, Martin, 207 Def-Con 4, 288 deindustrialization, 12, 45, 64, 212, 256, 323 Dench, Judi, 267, 269 Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 184, 186 Deren, Maya, 112 Deslandes, Jeanne, 162 Desmond, Viola, 173

366 | I N D E X

digital, 75, 94, 113, 120, 121, 130, 138, 251, 258, 260, 275, 293, 315, 317, 318 Disappeared, The, 311–12 Dog Girl, 321 Dolly Cake, 133 Donovan, Michael, 288 Donovan, Paul, 288–90 Don’t Knock the Ox, 156 Dooley Gardens, 332n49 Doran, Barbara, 192, 230, 269, 287 Dorfman, Andrea, 46, 68, 83, 97–9, 257, 258, 313 Dorland, Michael, 13, 246, 274 Down the Road Again, 229 Down to the Dirt, 232, 237–44 Doyle, John, 141, 269–71 Dragonwheel, 290 Driftwood, 117 Druick, Zoë, 170, 194 Duckworth, Martin, 204 Dukes of Hazzard, 278 Dunsworth, John, 149, 150, 263, 285 Duparc, Marguerite, 74 Durrani, Osman, 19–21, 24 dwb (Driving While Black), 104 East Coast Music Awards, 284 Easy Rider, 124 Echoes in the Rink: The Willie O’Ree Story, 117 Edison, Thomas, 117, 325 Edmunston, 107, 299, 334n34 Egoyan, Atom, 249 Eisener, Jason, 102, 103 El Mariachi, 297 Elder, Bruce, 97 Emily of New Moon, 289 Empty Harbours Empty Dreams, 207

Encounter at Kwacha House-Halifax, 176 English, John Joe, 51 d’Entremont, Peter, 153 escarpment school, 124 Evangeline, 153 Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, 153 Evangeline’s Quest, 153 Event, The, 251 Experimental Film Congress, 75 Extraordinary Visitor, 269–72 Fairy Faith, The, 213, 214 Falardeau, Pierre, 71 Fallen Flags, 112 Faucet Media Arts, 108 Fernando, Rohan, 310, 311 Fiddlehead, The, 115 Fiddler’s Reel, The, 105 Film & Creative Industries Nova Scotia, 247 Finding Mary March, 135 Finest Kind: The Lockport Lockout, 1939, The, 202 First Nations, 16, 99, 179, 180, 185, 186, 189, 200, 263 Fish, Tricia, 290 Fish or Cut Bait, 199, 202–9, 339n78 Fish or Cut Bait Collective, 199, 200 Fishing on the Brink, 208 Fitzgerald, Tom, 91, 97, 235, 248–55, 297 Flaherty, Robert, 167 Flemington, Peter, 204 Florestine Collection, The, 94 Flux, 141 Fogo Island; Fogo Films; Fogo Project, 16, 131, 198, 199 Foley, Deanne, 313

folk; folk art; folk artist; folk culture; folk imagery; folk music; folk practice; folk sentiment; folk tale; folklore; folklorist, 12, 26, 33, 50–3, 85, 104, 105, 115, 122, 132, 134, 153, 154–7, 193, 200, 206–9, 212, 213, 217, 218, 239, 256, 257, 261, 262, 266, 267, 294, 318 Folk Art Found Me, 217, 218 For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down, 298 Forbes, Ernest, 4, 7, 11 Forbidden Forest, 160–2 Forcier, André, 71, 233 Forest, Léonard, 108, 162 forestry, 92, 158, 160, 161, 164 Forever in Our Hearts: Memories of the Hebron Relocation, 190–2 Forsyth, Walter, 217 Fountain of Youth, The, 91 Four Feet Up, 224, 225 Francis, Brian, 157 Frank, David, 61 Frank, Robert, 43,49, 77–81, 83, 133, 134, 216, 217 Frankfurt School of Critical Theory; Frankfurt School, 227, 275, 293 Frappier, Roger, 71 Fredericton, 106, 107, 112, 113, 115, 117, 161, 165, 327 Frieberg, Camelia, 256 Frissell, Varick, 167, 168 Full Blast, 232–7 Gailiunas, Paul, 94 Gang, Pierre, 299 Garden State, 243 Gasoline Puddles, 101

Gates Jr, Henry Louis, 181 Gathercole, Sandra, 130 Gawab, 104 Geer, Will, 231 Gene, 101 General Idea, 73 geopolitical, 5, 188 George, Terry, 291 Ghostbusters, 284 Giles, Chris, 118 Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, The, 232 global; global capitalism; globalization, 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 39, 40, 45, 69, 70, 95, 120, 160, 175, 181, 191, 194, 200, 201, 206, 209, 217, 236, 237, 251, 260, 265, 270, 271, 290, 292, 305, 306, 311, 315, 317 global Hollywood, 101, 246, 276, 302, 307, 311, 312 Glooscap Country, 263 God’s Red Poet: The Life of Kenneth Leslie, 214–16 Goin’ Down the Road, 207, 218, 228, 230, 278 Goldman Sachs, 290 Gonella, David, 244 Gossipeuses, Les, 108 Gramsci, [Antonio], 174 Grana, Sam, 292, 299 Grand Jack, Le (Jack Kerouac’s Road – A Franco– American Odyssey), 154 Gravity and Grace, 94 Green Party of Canada, 158 Greenlaw, Terry, 294 Grenfell Mission, 167 Grierson, John; Griersonian; blood of, 194, 196, 199, 211, 263, 309, 326 Group of Seven, 11 Growing Op, 243, 244 Grown Up Movie Star, 320

Gullage’s, 56–9, 281, 283, 320 Gunnersson, Sturla, 263 Halifax (ns ), 6, 12, 14, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 46, 48, 49, 74, 77, 78, 81–8, 90–3, 95, 97–103, 109, 116, 120, 121, 139, 153, 157, 169, 172, 173, 175–8, 181, 194, 195, 197, 200–3, 206, 217, 236, 237, 240, 244–8, 251, 257, 258, 267, 284, 289– 97, 301, 313, 325, 326, 328, 333n11, 337n29, 342n35 Halifax Film, 290 Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival; hiff , 88 Hall, Justin, 51 Hall Trilogy, The, 141 Hamilton, Sylvia, 90, 104, 169–72, 175, 178, 179, 337n29 Hancox, Rick, 124–6, 225 Handel, Alan, 156 hand-processing, 75, 110 Hanging Garden, The, 235, 249–52 Hanlon House, 141 Harcourt, Peter, 38, 47, 83, 228, 326 Hard Drive, 49 Hard Rock and Water, 192 Harkins, Heather, 93 Harlan County usa, 205 Hart, Roger, 166 Harvey, David, 9, 286 Heartbeat, 99, 313 Heartless Disappearance into Labrador Seas, 145, 146 Heffron, Richard, 266 Hennessey, Bryan, 26, 29, 50–2, 55, 57, 60, 65, 141, 320

INDEX

| 367

Henry, Claire, 101 Henson, Joan, 165 Herbicide Trials, 158, 159 Heritage Minutes, 183, 337n43 Heston, Charlton, 247, 248 Hey Elvis, 140 Hill, Helen, 83, 93, 94 Hiller, James, 4, 62, 161 Ho! Kanada, 287 Hobo With A Shotgun, 103 Hofsess, John, 71 Holden, Kevin, 115 Holland Brothers, 86, 325 Home for Christmas, 124 homophobic, 116, 214, 295, 296 homosocial, 234, 295, 320 Horkheimer, Max, 10, 67 Horwood, Harold, 55, 307 Hospital City, 65 Hotel Chronicles, 154 Hotel Rwanda, 291 House, Rosemary, 51, 52, 64, 65, 132, 142, 214, 332n35 How To Be Alone, 98 Hunters and Bombers, 187–90 Hymn to Freedom: Nova Scotia Against the Tides, 175 Hynes Joel Thomas, 145, 238, 239, 241, 242, 314, 315, 321 Hynes, Ron, 20, 32, 56, 61, 142 Hynes White, Percy, 315 I Like to See the Wheels Turn, 163–5 I Made a Vow, 171, 172 I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art; Boring Art, 39 Ianzelo, Tony, 156 Ice Storm, The, 244

368 | I N D E X

If You Love This Planet, 203, 222 In Love and Anger, 226 Incident at Retigouche, 184 Independent Media Arts Alliance; imaa , 73 industrialization, 5, 7, 12, 56, 215, 277, Inner Valleys: The Life and Writing of Ernest Buckler, 214, 215 Innis, Harold, 60, 187, 190 Innu, 5, 187–94 International Fund for Animal Welfare; ifaw, 166–8 International Woodworkers of America, 231 Introduction to Labrador, 192, 193 Inuit, 129, 187 irony, 178, 248, 268, 296, 323 Irving corporation; Irving family; J.D. Irving; K.C. Irving; Jim Irving, 158, 161–5 Is the Crown at War with Us?; Crown at War, 184–6 Island Media Arts Cooperative; imac, 68, 69, 120–8 Island Memories, 101 Islanders, The, 226 It Ain’t Funny, 146 I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, 38 Jabberwalk, The, 93 Jackson, Michelle, 146 James Anderson: Over 50 Years of Taking Pictures, 193–4 Janet Says, 123 Jap Zero, 204 Jaques, Penni, 72, 78, 130 Jarmusch, Jim, 95

Jean, Rodrigue, 154, 156, 233, 236 Jesse Stone, 293 Jiggers, 127, 300–2 Joe Sleep, 85, 90 John and the Missus, 232 John Dunsworth: The Candidate, 149 John the Baptist, 269, 271 Johnny Belinda, 260, 343n52 Johnson, Leon, 85 Jones, Andy, 14, 17, 18–20, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31, 34, 63, 137, 141, 147, 148, 264, 270, 271, 309, 318, 320, 327, 330n2 Jones, Burnley (Rocky), 175, 176 Jones, Cathy, 42, 60, 131 Jones, Michael, 14, 17, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 31–4, 41–3, 46, 51, 60, 61, 82, 114, 131, 133, 134, 140, 211, 270, 318, 319, 327, 330n2, 335n53 Jones, Reed, 104 Just Buried, 257 Kar-Wai, Wong, 143 Katadotis, Peter, 21, 202, 203 Keating, Lulu, 93, 95, 96 Keaton, Buster, 128 Keep on Keepin’ On, 104 Kendall, Nicholas, 290 Kent, Susan, 147 Kerouac, Jack, 151, 154, 217, 239 Kids in the Hall, 297 King, Victoria, 167 King of Friday Nights, The, 280, 281 Kipping, Pat, 48, 90, 157 Klein, Bonnie, 156 Knight, Katherine, 219, 220 Kopple, Barbara, 205

Kouchibouguac, 163 Koyama, Tak, 119 Krizsan, Les, 263 Kubrick, Stanley, 86 Kulyk Keefer, Janice, 45 Labrador, 6, 16, 128, 129, 187–94, 338n50 Ladies in Waiting, 97 Lakefront, 299 Lambert, Hamish, 95 Land and Sea, 131 Lapp, Charles (Chuck), 77–80, 197, 199, 208, 214, 279 Larder, Tony, 297, 298 Larter, Jeremy, 126, 127, 301 Last Tango in Paris, 86 Laurence, Margaret, 151 Leaf, Caroline, 124 Leblanc, Cathie, 118 Leblanc, Gérald, 154, 156 LeBlanc, Monique, 154 Lee, Ang, 244 Lefebvre, Henri, 9, 28 Lefebvre, Jean Pierre, 13, 74, 107, 114, 328 Legere, Allan, 299, 300 Legg, Stuart, 194 Lepage, Robert, 233 Leslie, Alfred, 217 Leslie, Kenneth, 215, 216 Lewis, Mary, 136–8, 142, 143 Lewis, Randolph, 184 Lexx, 289 Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto; lift, 75 Lien Acadian, Le (The Acadian Connection), 154 Life Classes, 14, 17, 18, 35–41, 47–9, 52, 102, 105, 304, 323, 327, 332n29 Linda Joy, 82, 83

Little Black Schoolhouse, 104, 169–72 Little Dickie, 146 Little Kidnappers, The, 248 Liu, Lucy, 253 Living on the Edge: The Poetic Works of Gérald Leblanc, 154, 155 Livingston, Neal, 83, 89, 149, 150, 157–9, 336n8 Loach, Ken, 322 Lobsters Unlimited, 262 London Film Cooperative, 70 Lost Song, 236, 237 Love and Savagery, 307–9 Love Letters, 118 Love Potion, 119 Love That Boy, 258 Low, Colin, 156, 198 Lowlife, 95 Loyalties, 173 lspu hall, 63, 88 Lulu’s Back in Town, 93 Lunz, Gerald, 141 Lynch, David, 95 MacCullough, John, 283 Macdonald, Ramona, 77, 93, 101 MacDonald, Rodney, 248 McGee, Anita, 140, 146, 323 MacGillivray, William D. (Bill), 14, 17, 35–59, 63, 74, 81, 83, 86, 105, 114, 155, 294, 327, 331n29, 342n35 McKay, Ian, 12, 218, 262, 263, 266 McKellar, Don, 118, 251 MacInnes, Teresa, 171 MacIvor, Daniel, 250, 255, 256 Mackenzie, Ashley, 104 Mackenzie, Shelagh, 176, 178, 204 McKiggan, Bill, 199, 204–6

MacKinney, Glendon, 116 MacLaren, Norman, 94, 101, 112 MacLennan, Hugh, 44 MacLeod, Alistair, 44, 45, 155 McMaster University, 71 McSorley, Tom, 57 MacSwain, Jim, 90–2 Madame Winger Makes a Film, 93 Maddin, Guy, 118 Made in Canada, 289 Maelström, 233 Maggs, Adriana, 320 Making Love in St Pierre, 315–18 Makosinski, Art, 106, 107, 114, 115 Malle, Louis, 64 Malloch, Katie, 211 Maloney, April, 186 Maloney, Chief Reginald, 186 Man of a Thousand Songs, The, 56 Man Who Skied Citadel Hill, The, 116 Man Who Skied Everest, The, 116 Mankiewicz, Francis, 233 Marco Polo, Queen of the Seas, The, 166 Margaret Perry: Filmmaker, 263 Margaret’s Museum, 232, 267, 272, 273, 290 Marion Bridge, 256 maritime; maritimes, 6–8, 11, 12, 101, 109, 183, 206, 212, 262, 278, 280, 329n3 Maritime Fisherman’s Union, 203 Markham, Nigel, 34, 129, 141, 168, 187, 189, 190, 207 Marks, Laura, 110

INDEX

| 369

Martin, Catherine, 179, 181 Martin, Kent, 76, 124, 226 Marx, Karl, 211 Mary Power: A Lifetime of Stories, 146 Mary Silliman’s War, 279, 280 Massey, Doreen, 9 Masterpiece, 101 Matthews, Kevin, 160, 162 Maunder, Roger, 146 Max o u/w, 85 Meatballs, 284 Medjuck, Jacob, 297 Mekas, Jonas, 70 Méliès, George, 108 Melski, Michael, 243, 246, Memorial University; mun; Memorial University Extension Services; Extension Services, 26, 50, 51, 61, 130, 193, 198, 332n34 Men of the Deeps, 212, 213 Men With Ties, 126 Mendes, Sam, 243 Mercer, Kobena, 174 Mercer, Rick, 63, 142, 289, 337n43 Merzetti, Tony, 113, 114, 116–18 Me’s en Abyme, 118 Metallic, Gary, 184 Metcalfe, Robin, 26, 90 Meyer, Russ, 95 Mihalka, George, 277 Mi’kmaq, 153, 179–86, 201, 263 Mi’kmaq Family Migmaoei Otjiosog, 179 Milani, Gina, 119 Miller, Toby, 8, 246 Misery Harbour, 65, 267 Mitchell, Shandi, 99, 101, 311 modern; modernist; modernity; modernization, 7, 12, 19, 40, 42, 44–6, 51–4, 57, 60, 62, 92, 370 | I N D E X

94, 132, 135, 154, 161, 175–80, 185, 188, 192, , 193, 195, 198, 207, 208, 214, 215, 220, 236, 253, 263–9, 296, 305, 316, 320 Moncton, 107, 113, 155, 203, 292, 335n34 Monk, Katherine, 257 Montgomery, Lucy Maude, 263, 286 Montreal, 47, 62, 70, 72, 124, 140, 156, 171, 183, 195, 196, 198, 200, 203, 204, 209, 233, 237, 253, 254, 292, 310, 322 Moody Brood, 96 Moore, Julianne, 267, 269 Moore, Lisa, 45, 318 Moore, Mavor, 260 Moore, Michael, 289 Moosejaw: There’s a Future in our Past, 125 Morgan, Bernice, 268 Morse, Lisa, 93 Mount Allison University, 107–9 Mount Cashel Orphanage, 309 Mount Saint Vincent University, 177 Movie of the Week, 249 Mowat, Farley, 266 Moyle, Allan, 273 Mulroney, Brian, 211 mummers; mummer’s play; Mummers Troupe; mummering, 53–5, 63, 231, 269 Murray, Charles, 202 My American Cousin, 321 My Ancestors Were Rogues and Murderers, 166–9 My Bloody Valentine, 277–9 My History Project, 100 My Left Breast, 221–3 Nagler, Solomon, 94, 328

Nash, Terre, 203, 222 Nason, Kent, 172, 223 National Film Board of Canada; nfb , 4, 20, 47, 65, 71, 74, 76, 77, 78–83, 86–9, 95, 97, 101–3, 107, 108, 115, 121–4, 130–4, 138, 142, 153, 156–71, 176, 178, 180, 180, 192, 194–209, 217, 222, 226, 247, 259, 263, 277, 306, 309, 310, 326, 327 nationalism, 4 11, 60, 63, 153, 180, 251, 261, 271, 307, 322 Nature of Things, The, 161 Ness, Paul 123 New Brunswick, 4, 5, 68, 84, 106–21, 154, 157–65, 184, 185, 203, 233, 237, 244, 292, 297–9, 305, 327 New Brunswick Filmmakers’ Co-operative; nbfc, 68, 69, 07, 112–20 New Waterford Girl, 273, 274, 290 New York, 38, 63, 70, 80, 95, 124, 167, 179, 206, 217, 251, 273, 274, 293, 325 Newfoundland, 4, 18–33, 42–5, 50–68, 126, 129–47, 156, 166, 167, 187, 191, 193, 203, 208, 214, 219, 221, 229, 232, 239–42, 256, 265–73, 291, 292, 307–22 Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation, 138 Newfoundland Independent Filmmaker’s Co-operative; nifco , 18, 20, 65, 68, 69, 75, 77, 81, 88, 129–48, 217, 270, 307, 327 Newfoundland Scene, 229

Next Day, 106 Nichols, Bill, 221 Nickel Independent Film Festival, 88 Nights below Station Street, 298 Nine, 98 No Apologies, 63–7 No Harbour for War, 201, 206 noce est pas finie, La, 108 Nonsense Revolution, 297 Norm, 223, 224 Norman, Derek, 129, 131, 141 North American Free Trade Agreement; nafta, 231 Nova Scotia, 4, 5, 11, 12, 36, 39, 45, 49–52, 65, 68, 74, 76–9, 85–92, 96, 99, 101, 103, 104, 108, 121, 127, 146, 149–59, 162, 169–83, 186, 194, 196, 201–18, 223, 224, 227, 229, 235, 243–9, 255–63, 266, 272, 279– 81, 291–8, 304, 310–13, 321, 325 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; nscad , 35, 38, 74, 77, 80, 81, 86, 90, 94, 99, 249, 290, 314, 327, 328 Nova Scotia Film Bureau, 77, 263 Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation (nsfdc ), 247 Nova Scotia Photographers Co-op, 89 Nova Scotia Tourist Industries, 91, 92 Obomsawin, Alanis, 184–6, 203 Official Guide to Watching a Saturday Night

Hockey Game ( for Intermediates), The, 119 Offstage Line, 132–3 OkâlaKatiget Society, 128 On est au Coton, 203 On Rooftops, 51 On the Road With Mary, 154 One Heart Broken into Song, 293 One Last Shot, 284 One Man’s Paradise, 209 Ord, Wendy, 299 Our Nationhood, 184 outport; outport resettlement, outporters, 33, 51, 54, 60, 61, 66, 134, 142, 146, 191–3, 198, 220, 232, 239, 240, 256, 266, 269, 307, 309, 310, 315 Outports on the Move, 192 Overton, James, 266 Page, Ellen, 127 Pahlke, Ariella, 104, 218 Paint Cans, 289 Parable in Black and White, 117 Parsley Days, 46, 257, 258 Parsons, Gordon, 48, 86–90, 325 Pas De Deux, 112 Passage from Burnt Islands, 156 Past Perfect, 256 Patten, Leslie Ann, 173, 206 Pearse, Harold, 85 Pearse, Lukas, 218 Peckford, Brian, 63 Peckinpah, Sam, 291 Pedersen, Jon, 298 Pellerin, Ginette, 153 Pelletier, Andrée, 142 Pelts: The Politics of the Fur Trade, 168 Perrault, Pierre, 162 Perry, Adam, 126, 127, 300

Perry, Margaret, 77, 88, 261, 263 Peters, Helen, 26, 32, 35 Peters, Juanita, 171, 177 Picard, Francoyse, 72, 73, 326 Pillowtalk, 147 Pinsent, Gordon, 156, 229, 230, 232, 239, 341n11 Pitfall, 92 Pittman, Ken, 63–5, 81, 101, 134, 135, 141, 315, 316 Place of the Boss: Utshimassits, 189, 190 Pleasant Street, 223 Pollard, Brian, 226 Pool, Léa, 71, 154 Poole, Aaron, 314 Poor Boy’s Game, 294–6 Pope, David, 132, 133, 335n52 Pope, Doug, 89, 101 Pope, Paul, 132, 137, 138 Portia White, 178, 294 Portia White: Think on Me, 178, 336n24 Portrait of a 70 Foot Artist, 140 post-modern, 6, 268, 286 poverty, 45, 58, 61, 62, 175, 224, 225, 251, 254, 269, 284, 286, 340n91 Pretend Not to See Me, 219, 220 Pretty Big Dig, 141 Prince Edward Island; pei, 4, 5, 68, 106, 120, 121, 124–8, 225, 226, 260, 263, 286, 287, 300, 301, 304 Profile pei, 126, 127, 301 Protestant; Protestantism, 19, 60, 73, 216, 275 Pull My Daisy, 217 Punch Up at a Wedding, 143–5 Pustulations, 93

INDEX

| 371

Quebec, 4–8, 11, 13, 71,72, 74, 79, 107, 135, 154, 162, 163, 175, 184, 233, 236, 249, 291, 298, 299, 307 queer, 90, 114, 116, 233, 249, 250, 297, 298 queer film festival, 90

r-34, 71 race; racism, 5, 40, 85, 104, 117, 118, 169–87, 294, 295, 307 Race is a Four-Letter Word, 180–2 Rain, Drizzle and Fog, 51, 64, 332n35 Random Passage, 267–9 Ransen, Mort, 232, 267 Rare Birds, 263–5 Reading Alistair MacLeod; Reading, 44–5, 155 Reagan, Ronald, 204 Reason Over Passion/ La Raison Avant La Passion, 112 Recipes for Disaster, 93 Regan, Gerald, 90, 158 Regan’s Cove, 101 Regarding Cohen, 206 Region Centrale, La, 11 Reitman, Ivan, 71, 284 Relative Happiness, 313, 314 Remember Africville, 176 Rennie, Harold, 247, 248, 327 Renov, Michael, 222 Republic of Doyle, 8 Retrieval, 122 Rhonda’s Party, 104 Richards, David Adams, 298 Richards, Peter, 120 Riche, Edward, 132, 140, 263, 264 Riggio, Mike, 88 Road to Keltic, 261, 262

372 | I N D E X

Roadside Attraction, 127, 128 Robichaud, 162, 163, 165 Rochdale College, 19, 71, 131 Rocky Horror Picture Show, 88 Rodriguez, Robert, 298 Rogers, Jerry, 148, 221, 222 Roller Town, 297 Rowdyman, The, 21, 230–4, 238, 239, 341n11 Rozema, Patricia, 38 R-Rated, 147–8 Rubber Madness, 101 Ruddick, Maurice, 183 Rude, 296 Rude Questions, 101 Rudy Hasse, 159 rural, 12, 33, 44, 50, 51, 101, 109, 114, 115, 121, 150, 152, 155, 156, 161, 169, 170, 217, 218, 233, 248, 255, 260, 266, 278, 286, 312, 313, 316 Sackville I’m Yours, 109 Sacred Sundance, 157 Saïa, Louis, 249 Saint John (nb ), 107, 113, 166 St John’s (nl ), 5, 14, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25, 32–4, 42–4, 51–4, 57, 58, 62, 63, 65, 88, 128–33, 138, 139, 141, 168, 194, 208, 214, 222, 223, 230, 231, 237, 239, 240, 268, 269–71, 317–21, 327 St John’s Film, The, 132 St John’s International Women’s Film Festival, 88 Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 180 Salter Street Films, 77, 288–90 Salvation, 65 Samuelson, JoDee, 126

Sankofa, 174 Saturday Night Fever, 297 Savoie, Mylène, 240, 241 Scattering of Seeds, A, 153 Scherer, Judith, 120, 126 Sconce, Jeffrey, 296 Scott, John, 97, 150, 151 Scouts Are Cancelled, 150, 151, 225, 335n2 Seaview African United Baptist Church, 175 Secret de Jerome, Le, 108 Secret Nation, 60–3 Seeking Salvation, 174 Selleck, Tom, 293 Semsel, George, 124 Sevigny, Chloe, 253 sex; sexual; sexuality, 12, 20, 33, 34, 61, 64, 90, 97, 119, 141, 145, 147, 155, 230, 233–5, 241, 249– 58, 267, 269, 272–4, 280, 283, 296–8, 309, 314, 319, 320, 321 Sexton, Mary, 34, 332n49 Sexton, Tommy, 34, 289, 331n7 Shake Hands with the Devil, 291 Shattered City, 289 Shaw Cable, 290 She Lost Her Marbles, 119 Shebib, Don, 207, 228, 229, 248 Sheridan College (Ontario), 124 Shipman, Nell, 275 Shipping News, The, 267, 269, 292 Simmons, Lionel, 37, 42, 44, 48, 74, 77, 101, 102, 114 Simms, Justin, 83, 139, 143, 145, 237 Simpson, Scott, 244 Sisters of the Silver Scalpel, 33, 331n21 Skateboard Peru, 114

Skerrett Communications, 201, 342n35 Ski Peru, 114 slaves; slavery, 5, 173–5, 178, 201 Slipway, 133 Smallwood, Joey, 27, 31, 56, 61–3, 129, 166, 220, 231, 266, 305 Smith, Jean, 139 Smith, John N., 307, 309 Smith, Kevin, 298 Smith, Neil, 23 Smith, Patti, 118 Smith, Seth, 95 Smyth, Laurel, 123 Snow, 311 Snow, Hank, 50 Snow, Michael, 11, 70, 148 soleil pas comme ailleurs, Un, 162 Sousa, Jonathan, 314 South Pacific, 288 Southam, Tim, 298 Spacey, Kevin, 267–9 Sparks, Christian, 314 Sparky Book, The, 138 Speak It! From the Heart of Black Nova Scotia, 169, 171 Spectre of Rexton, 115 Spencer-Lowe, Chris, 102 Spirit of Annie Mae, The, 179, 180 Spoiled, 143 Spottiswoode, Roger, 291 Stalking Love, 225 Stations, 41–4, 46–8, 51 Stealing Mary: The Last of the Red Indians, 135 Steenbeck (film editing table), 121 Steeves, George, 181, 182 stereotype(s); stereotyped, 11–13, 33, 34, 64, 119, 132, 165–7, 184, 194, 211, 224, 228, 230, 242, 248, 255–9, 264, 266,

268, 273, 278, 281, 289, 291, 296, 313, 338n48 Sternberg, Barbara, 109 Stiles, John, 149–53 Still Rowdy after All These Years, 230 Stone’s Throw, A, 256 Stoney, George, 156, 192, 199 Struts Gallery, 108 suburban, 170, 196, 243, 258 Subway to Tickle Gut, 142 Suêtes, 157 Summerhood, 297 Super 8, 46, 77, 79, 88, 91, 108, 146 Surjik, Stephen, 279 Sutherland, Doug, 119 Suzuki, David, 161 Swallowed, 146 Sweet Hereafter, 249 Swerve, 98 Take Two, 101 Taking Stock, 207 Tall Dark Stranger, 124 Tasker, Rex, 47, 135, 165, 166, 176, 196, 202–4, 335n2, 339n76 Tati, Jacques, 28 tax credit, 121, 245, 246, 287 tax shelter, 277, 278, 288, 297 Telefilm Canada; Telefilm, 8, 14, 23, 64, 65, 98, 121, 142, 236, 237, 244, 246, 270, 275, 276, 288, 306, 314 Thanks a lot, Jerry, 147 Theatre Passe Muraille, 331n7 There’s a Flower in My Pedal, 68, 98 They Didn’t Starve Us Out: Industrial Cape Breton in the 1920s, 157

Things I Cannot Change, The, 83 This Hour Has 22 Minutes, 8, 32, 147, 290 Thomey, Greg, 141 Thomson, Michelle Lovegrove, 118 Thorne, Chaz, 257, 295 Those Eyes, 118 Titanic, 101, 245, 292 To Die For, 243 Tocqueville, Alexis De, 154 Tóibín, Colm, 46 Tom Forrestall: Painting the Mystery, 215 Tom Fun Orchestra, 94 Tommy: A Family Portrait, 34 Toronto, 8, 14, 19, 20, 30, 32, 38, 39, 52, 57, 70, 71–3, 75, 77, 97, 106, 109, 121, 130, 131, 133, 139, 142, 150, 157, 171, 172, 195, 207, 214, 218, 219, 228, 229, 237, 249, 264, 267, 287–93, 307, 315, 331n7, 333n5, 337n39 Toronto Filmmakers’ Co-op, 71, 75, 77, 121, 130, 131 Toronto International Film Festival; tiff , 32, 249, 264 Touch and Go, 244 tourism, 5, 12, 16, 34, 77, 85, 88, 91, 92, 105, 120, 129, 146, 153, 166, 201, 226, 227, 245, 248, 258–74, 287–301, 317, 323, 328 Trailer Park Boys; tpb , 8, 149, 281–6 Trainspotting, 233 Transitions, 109 transnational, 69, 170, 246, 291, 315 Trawler Fishermen, 207

INDEX

| 373

Treaty Tribulations, 186 Treevenge, 102 Troake, Anne, 141, 166–8 Tuesday, Wednesday, 298 Tunnel of Love, 93 Turner, Camille, 182 Turning, 112 Tweed, Kinglsey, 118 Two Brothers, 101 Two Shoes, Minnie, 180 Two-Lane Blacktop, 128 Under the Knife, 129 underdevelopment (economic), 10, 52, 157, 218, 254, 280–3, 289, 305, 318, 323 Understanding Bliss, 50–5 United States; 5, 10, 93, 154, 183, 201, 206, 207, 261, 262, 292, 305 Université de Moncton, 154 Unspoken, 297 Untidy Package: Women and the Newfoundland Cod Moratorium, An, 208 urban; urban development; urban life; urban-based; urbanization, 5, 34, 40, 45, 46, 49, 51, 57, 70, 86, 95, 109, 150, 168, 176, 178, 239, 240, 251, 257, 266, 267, 286, 294, 296, 305, 306, 318, 322 Urban, Collette, 219, 220 Vacant Lot, 37, 47, 49, 50 Van Sant, Gus, 243 Vancouver, 41, 72, 152, 195–7, 229, 292, 298, 321 Vatcher, John, 315

374 | I N D E X

Verrall, Ann, 99, 100, 297, 298 Viking, The, 167 Villeneuve, Denis, 233 Violet, 63–7 Virgo, Clemont, 293–6, 337n26 Visiontv , 159, 199, 204 Voices From the Landscape, 101 Voyage of the 7 Girls, 208, 20–9 Waging Peace, 171 Wait, The, 99 Wake of Calum MacLeod, The, 105, 106 Walker, Gilles, 114, 163 Walker, John, 189, 212, 213 Walking on a Sea of Glass, 118 Walsh, Des, 143, 307–9 Walsh, Mary, 35, 62, 64, 256, 270, 271, 322, 330n2, 331n7 Walton, Glen, 100 Ward, Dave, 121, 122 Warhol, Andy, 112 Watchmaker, The, 94 Waugh, Thomas, 235 We Two Boys Together Clinging, 116 Welcome to Canada, 309 Wells, Tara, 108 Wenders, Wim, 42 Westray, 209–12, 278 Whale for the Killing, A, 265, 266, 268 When All the People Play, 195 When Ponds Freeze Over, 136, 137 When Voices Rise, 118 When Women Are Crazy, 64

Whirligig, 257 White, Jerry, 198, 328 White, Sherry, 128, 321–3 White Thunder, 167 Whole New Thing, 255, 256 Whylah Falls, 294 Wieland, Joyce, 70, 112 Wilby Wonderful, 256 Wild Dogs, 251, 251 Williams, Danny, 231, 291, 332n51 Williams, Errol, 117, 118 Wilson, Sandy, 321 Winnipeg, 71, 72, 77, 85, 94, 167, 195, 236, 267, 318, 327, 328 Wintonick, Peter, 287, 326 Wishart, Francis, 160, 161 With Camera and Gun in Newfoundland, 129 Wolochatiuk, Tim, 135 Wonderful Grand Band, 32 Work and Wages, 200 World in His Arms, The, 259 Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Cinema, 86–8 Wounded Knee, 179 Wulff, Lee, 129 Wynne, Cordell, 101 Wyse, Russell, 169 X-ray, 86 Yellowknife, 232, 234–7 Yggdrasill, The World Tree, 102 You Laugh Like A Duck, 85 Young, Heather, 321 Young Man’s Challenge, 201 Young Triffie’s Been Made Away With, 256, 257 ZedCrew, 95 Zombiemania, 103