A collection of genuine gems found among the detritus of my country's cinema. Good luck locating copies of most of these, but if you have the wherewithal, here's a handy guide to Canada's best.-Travis Mackenzie Hoover10. La Vraie nature de Bernadette (The True Nature of Bernadette) (1972, Gilles Carle)
Gilles Carle's satirical tragedy involves a free-thinking woman named Bernadette (the implacable Micheline Lanctôt) who flees the city to set up shop in a rural village; all manner of misunderstandings ensue, including the idea of her as a miracle-curing Madonna. Unpretentious yet acid, La Vraie nature de Bernadette goes down easy without spoon-feeding you to get there.9. Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002, Peter Mettler)
Training his camera on all things transcendent (from revival meetings to demolition sites to the lights on top of the Luxor pyramid), Peter Mettler shows the profound mystery involved on both the spiritual and the material planes, as well as the plain weirdness involved in being human.8. Montreal Main (1974, Frank Vitale)
This semi-autobiographical work of photographer Frank Vitale places Vitale in an undefined relationship with a 12-year-old boy--and, subsequently, the censure of his circle (to say nothing of the boy's parents). Mournful but somehow not hopeless, the film's melancholy will stay with you for days.7. A Married Couple (1969, Allan King)
Before reality-TV followed people around with cameras 24/7, there was Allan King's cinema-vérité masterpiece about Billy and Antoinette Edwards. A wrenching film about two people who talk past each other, with a rewarding moment of clarity close to the end.6. Goin' Down the Road (1970, Donald Shebib)
A man went looking for Canada, and couldn't find it anywhere; the Anglo-hoser Citizen Kane: a movie that's satisfying no matter how many times you watch it.5. Les Dernières fiançailles (1973, Jean Pierre Lefebvre)
A brilliantly structural take on the last two days in the disappointing lives of an elderly couple, this is the only film I've been able to track down by the great Jean Pierre Lefebvre, but it seems like it was the one to catch. The camera tracks beautifully as the details come spilling out.4. Pour la suite du monde (1963, Michel Brault, Marcel Carrière, Pierre Perrault)
Another one of the great documentaries: three filmmakers revive the practice of whale fishing in rural Ile-aux-Courdes and in the process make a statement on the vanishing traditions of Quebec.3. Dead Ringers (1988, David Cronenberg)
And God said, "Let there be Cronenberg." And when He saw what He had done, He disappeared in a puff of smoke as the master went about his bodily business in the most profoundly disturbing manner possible. This is Cronenberg's crowning achievement, about two Jeremy Irons who discover that their attempts at bodily control will come to naught.2. Yes Sir! Madame... (1994, Robert Morin)
Technically this is a video, but whatever it is, it's a masterpiece. Robert Morin's bilingual exploration of what it means to live on the knife-edge of two languages and two cultures while living on the margins of society. Blunt, ballsy, and conceptually astounding, this years-in-the-making mini-epic will make your jaw drop.1. Les Bons débarras (Good Riddance) (1980, Francis Mankiewicz)
There has never been a more appalling girl than Michelle, the 13-year-old who demands her mother's undivided attention in the most devious ways. She's the apocalyptic heroine of Francis Mankiewicz's quietly devastating classic: the most powerful film ever produced in Canada, and on the short list of best movies of the '80s. The climax must be seen to be believed.See also:
In the perhaps vain hope that anyone still cares, more of my nationalist cinematic sentiments:MONTREAL MAIN (Frank Vitale, 1974) ***1/2Frank Vitale is an American photographer who sojourned in Montreal, hung out with most of the participants of this movie, and for his troubles turned in one of the best films to come out of this country. Vitale essentially plays himself, a sort-of gay photographer who strikes up a friendship (maybe more) with a twelve-year-old boy and winds up censured both by the boy's parents and the gay/bohemian circles in which he runs. It's remarkably sensitive, highly evocative of the 70's milieu, and never once breaks the spell with a misplaced line or a stilted performance. Made all the more remarkable by being largely improvised, and for including the co-writing/acting talents of Allan Moyle, who would wind up making teenpic slop like Pump Up the Volume. THREE CARD MONTE (Les Rose, 1977) **1/2The loser-on-the-move archetype of Goin' Down the Road finds its supreme expression in this film about a gambler/drifter and the runaway kid whom he befriends. The film tries way, way too hard to sell its grubby milieu, and thus flaunts the gambling argot, barroom-brawling and bare breasts to the point that it's sometimes clearly artificial. It's somewhat tax shelter-y, and might easily have been much less if more craven sensibilities were at work- but the script seems to have been written out of desire rather than necessity and that counts for a lot. When it sticks with the hidden desperation of its lead, who makes fortunes only to blow them, and who eludes the encroaching suckers only until they catch him- it lucks into a character who's sympathetically pathetic when the chips are down. Not a great movie, but sometimes surprisingly resonant. RUNNING TIME (Mort Ransen, 1974) *1/2 They actually made musicals in the panic-stricken NFB of the seventies; this one is sort of a Brechtian Harold and Maude with animated superimpositions, which sounds like a swell idea right up until you see the movie. Jackie Burroughs plays an elderly lady who's run off with a longhaired teen David Balser; seems they're both victims of "the system," and are pursued by her son and his father with some vague and out-of-date hippified sentiments. To be sure, it is its own entity, and you're not likely to mistake it for any other movie, but the abuse of chroma-key, bad lyrics and Ryan Larkin's animation never once jells into something credible, believable, or watchable. It's remarkable as a freak (and for costing a million dollars when the NFB probably couldn't spare it) but not as an intellectual or artistic statement. However, it's far more interesting than the other NFB musical that year... A STAR IS LOST! (John Howe, 1974) 1/2*...which shows that making a joyous, fun-filled item in that genre might be beyond the kids at the Film Board. I'm told that this item- in which superstar Gloria Glide (Tiiu Leek) is threatened by her stalker on her new musical superproduction at a big studio (shot around the NFB, and looking it) and goes into hiding- was designed to teach English as a second language; all I know is that in any language the film is forced, unfunny, and without home or purpose. Jack Creley has some moments as a flustered, possibly-gay director, but the rest is a total wash. DON'T LET THE ANGELS FALL (George Kaczender, 1969)***This unassuming drama from the nascent feature mandate of the NFB took me by surprise: though it's marked by the same suburban anomie that marked the earlier Nobody Waved Goodbye, it somehow seems more merciful and sensitive. The film begins with a sheepish ad man being interviewed for a TV documentary, and then recounts the trickledown of his pointless existence, which includes sleeping around on his wife and transfers to his college-age son, who talks big revolutionary talk but can't deliver the goods (naturally, the school-skipping 13-year-old seems the most genuine). Certain sixties with-it-isms date the piece, but enough of it shines through to make it worth more than a second glance. Written by Canlit icon Timothy Findley; also the first Canadian film to be invited to Cannes.
In an attempt to raise the profile of Canadian film just one iota more, I hereby begin regular reporting on the films I've been screening at the Film Reference Library and from various alterna-video sources. Feel free to chime in if there's a title you'd like me to hunt down.
ONE MAN (Robin Spry, 1977) ** 1/2
The first fully-fictional film from docu-hybrid director Spry (Prologue), this makes a shaggy dialectic of NFB social conscience and tax-shelter era sensationalism. Len Cariou is a TV newsman who runs around chasing gun-toting gangsters; he stumbles onto a story when a nurse reveals the slow poisoning of her children's hospital by the polluting factory across the street. This naturally occasions some chasing, some manly soul-searching and a variety of threats and payoffs from the company at fault. One can see the documentary background in the unbroken takes and uncontrolled mise-en-scene, as well as the awkwardness with Hollywood tropes; still, it gets points for trying, plus there's Jayne Eastwood on hand as the long-suffering wife.
WHY ROCK THE BOAT? (John Howe, 1974) ***
This is straight-up, non-radical filmmaking all the way, but it's surprisingly polished and seems to know wherof it speaks. Stuard Gillard is the virginal greenhorn who gets a nonunion job at "the worst newspaper in Canada"; he then must navigate the meanspirited publisher, the macho reporting staff, and his crush on Tiiu Leek, a communist who writes for a rival paper. Based on a novel by Montreal Gazette veteran William Weintraub, it has a firm footing in its postwar milieu and seals the deal with its well-drawn (and somewhat coarse) characters.
WHY SHOOT THE TEACHER (Silvio Narizzano, 1977) ***
Another straight-shooting memoir movie (this time from Max Braithewaite), Teacher features Bud Cort as the naive schoolteacher who gets sent to rural Saskatchewan during the depression; not only do they refuse to pay him in anything other than food and IOUs, but the kids prove, shall we say, rather alienated from their lesson plans. Well-shot by Narizzano, and with a nice sense of see-sawing sympathy from Cort for the townspeople he at once hates and feels for. With a nice turn by Samantha Eggar as a war bride going stir-crazy.
SKIP TRACER (Zale Dalen, 1977)***
This could very easily have collapsed into imitative camp, but Dalen has a sense of his own vision rather than Hollywood's. David Petersen knocks it out of the park as a debt collector who's having a crisis of conscience; he's been the agency's biggest earner for several years running, but he's sick of the racket and the constant plaintive cries of the people he victimizes. Things go downhill when he tries to teach a younger charge the secrets of the business and turns him into a heartless prick. Wobbly in spots, and that apprentice sure has big hair, but the film has real charge thanks to Petersen and a genuinely acid sense of capitalism and its discontents.
Next: past masters discussed.
A couple of disturbing notes from the CanCon wilderness.
1. Decided to go back to my stomping grounds at the Film Reference Library and watch myself more Canadian movies. Specifically, Canadian films made from the mid-sixties to about 1980, when the groundwork was still being laid and things were up for grabs. There were Quebecois films to see, and hybrid documentary-fiction hoo-has: specifically, things beyond the big names in the CanFlick canon. Unfortunately, a little digging unearthed two unpleasant surprises:
a) most of the Quebec movies were crusty VHS tapes...that were unsubtitled. Nobody in English Canada had cared about them to begin with, and the intervening years had made them more obscure- and nobody was filling the gap with DVD releases with plentiful extras. So a whole avenue of Canadian film (and by all accounts, the superior avenue) was cut off due to apathy.
This left me with the Anglo features. Of which I made the second unpleasant discovery:
b) Aside from the big names, there are about eleven titles from that period in the library. Not an exaggeration. And this is the premier place in Toronto, if not Canada, to do film research. So an entire, crucial period of Canadian filmmaking is more or less lost to human eyes.
But that's not as bad as what happened next.
2. Discovered the minor Canuck thriller The Pyx at my local alternative video store. I was disappointed, however, to find that the print they had secured was disastrously bad: sometimes even broken frames could be seen, and the fading of the image was disconcertin. I was annoyed for a minute, but then decided that that was the luck of the draw.
But then later I wondered: was it? Films as mediocre (or worse) than The Pyx had gotten the royal treatment from major studios- but it was The Pyx that got the bum's rush. And I realized: there is nobody owning a Canadian film library (or more likely, individual sources dribbed and drabbed from here and there) who had the resources to fix up the negative and strike a minty-fresh print. I made a second realization: this is what happens if you're a Canadian film. You get forgotten no matter how good, or good enough, you might be.
Faithful readers of the site know of my annoyance with standard Canuck film practice. But the way to fix what you don't like is to understand it. You have to watch and study; to see what tendency comes from where and how we wound up in this mess. At present, it is next to impossible for someone to get a complete impression of our country's cinema- it sits mouldering in a vault, a little more deteriorated every day, on its way to at best neglect and at worst total disintigration. And if we lose touch with what is about to disintigrate, we lose the ability to understand it and change its course.
We will continue on our one-way ticket to irrelevance if we burn the Library of Alexandria. And I don't see a way to stop it. If anybody has ideas on how to stave off disaster, I'm all ears.
Coming soon to a website near you is a review of a wretched Canadian item called Fetching Cody. It's totally undistinguished in the annals of CanCon: lazily name-checked "social issue" (street kids), thoroughly flubbed archetypal resonance (fairy tales), ill-advised attempts at humour (wait for the gay kid who blows his head off), all adding up to one more patient dead on arrival. The amazing thing is not that it came out bad, but that it came out at all.
There was no real reason the movie had to happen. Any half-intelligent person who read the script would know that its head was planted firmly up its ass, and if director David Ray had a highlights reel it would almost certainly have shown him to be tentative and imprecise. Yet the movie got made- and there are scores of movies just like it, from people with the same unformed ideas and the same clumsy execution. One doesn't just get the idea that the system is broken, but that by and large Canadians do not know how to make movies.
The simple truth is that Canadians are unconsciously suspicious of carefully-crafted aesthetics. We're big on annexing those great "social issues," but we're too timid to take the next step and provide a visual/sensual/structural representation of those issues: the mere mention of an important subject is sufficient for a Canuck filmmaker to break out the Dom Perignon and congratulate him/herself for his/her heroism. Doing anything beyond that would somehow seem frivolous: instead of deepening the argument with fine-tuned, well-observed details and an emotional core to give it urgency, we see it all as window-dressing to be discarded.
I have nothing against dealing with big subjects, but then you better not dishonour them. The Dardenne Brothers are a case in point: nobody would accuse them of being frivolous, but their films are extremely careful in how they use the camera and how they sketch the damaged world they depict. You could write papers on the sociological detail, the Christian resonances in The Son and L'enfant, and the strategic use of long traveling shots. The Brothers know their craft, and they use it to give their stories complexity and resonance. But in Canada, all you have to do is show up and they'll pour on the grant money.
The extent of the damage can be measured by the recent, disastrous Stursberg regime at Telefilm. You'll recall that Richard Stursberg was hired to build audiences by greenlighting pop movies- but look at the sorry films that resulted and you'll know that our fear of frivolity had an unusual blowback. We had taught ourselves that the feeling of pop was useless that we taught our filmmakers that a pop film was something that was inherently crappy. That was the unspoken definition, and the results were the crappy films we demanded they be. Say what you like about Michael Bay, but he knows how to shoot and cut to make you feel something. But in Canada, feeling itself is suspect- seriousness rules. And not even seriousness: the name-checking of seriousness, which is perhaps the most deadly frivolity of all.
The rule of mediocrity makes it impossible to establish any kind of organic film culture. On the one hand, there is the fact that most Canadian films die on the table, making it hard to follow truncated careers; on the other is the vast indifference of the Canadian public, which makes attempts to critique the problem all but invisible. The dialogue between filmmakers and critics isn't there- not just because we live in anti-intellectual times, but because everyone is atomized and nobody communicates with anyone else. So directors exist in an intellectual vacuum: nobody pushes them, and the fact that the rest of cinematic Christendom is doing the same lazy things only encourages them- on those rare occasions that they're paying attention.
So I find myself exasperated once again with a situation that keeps getting worse. Canadian filmmakers continue to protect themselves from aesthetic complexity, and there's nobody around to tell them different. Any suggestions on how we could change this?
A collection of genuine gems found among the detritus of my country's cinema. Good luck locating copies of most of these, but if you have the wherewithal, here's a handy guide to Canada's best.-Travis Mackenzie Hoover
