60 Cycles, 1965
Great film! Godard graphics at the beginning, followed by a practical anthology of photographic techniques. Two minute first shot, long lens, with the whole array approaching, arriving, passing. A two minute lateral track, a study in planes, and in the constant ebb and flow of cycling. I notice for the first time how soccer-like this sport is. Victory is very much of interest, but with an undertaking this vast, it’s only and paradoxically through attending to the miniscule that you get it. Cycling is a matter of little surges and strategies, repeated infinitely.
In addition to sports insight, there’s lots here about technology and culture, and how they used to do things. No helmets! Bike seats are consistently too low. This is a lot like Helicopter Canada, but localized. Plenty of the picturesque, except that the portraits are too specific or indelible to be merely that. There’s that Green Onion-like music again. It’s derivative, but it quite works, actually. There’s an amazing series of shots at the end, long lens'd again, with the bikers streaking laterally through the static compositions like Norman McLaren abstractions. Resolves into the last of several mishaps that we’ve seen. Sensation and spectacle, but their poignant and even empathetic treatment of these mean no exploitation. Splitting the difference between chronicle and lyric, representation and abstraction. You get the sense of the event, and the poetry of it. Pure motion and velocity, with personalities registering glancingly but indelibly (the smiling boy who cries at the end).
The Back-Breaking Leaf, 1959
Canada the Land , 1971
Made
for the Canada Pavilion at the Osaka World Fair and so,
predictably/presumably, the spectacle is the thing. Very spectacular,
too. Was this informed by Kroiter’s burgeoning IMAX work? If so, it
really does big well. There are lots of whoosh shots, but they’re
nicely contrasted against and balanced by smaller things, not only
people and creatures nestled within the monumental, but also match
cuts, actual and optical camera movement, lenses, and the play of light
on surfaces. There’s something vaguely environmental going on here,
but mostly it’s a photographical film, and a very good one.
Let’s just pause to say that the old trapper’s solitary journey is not quite exactly solitary, since that cameraman is obviously with him the whole time. This is more complicated than the camera game conundrum. And clearly when it gets you this kind of stunningly elemental stuff it’s a price worth paying. Still, cameras are weird. More importantly, my gosh! The Board’s anti-industrial approach to photography is starting to look more than just a healthy alternative to Hollywood. It’s looking like the difference between truth and apostasy. Technician/artists, in perfect balance. And what a subject! Awesome landscapes, and this puny, plucky old guy in its midst. It’s like Jack London, but moreso. This water actually splashes you. The old prospector is made real and individual by the human particularities characteristic for which the best theatrical strive, and which actual people have in unconscious abundance. Virginia Falls!! And the portage around it is Sisyphus and more. Futility, nobility, mystery. And I live in a place that thinks universal health care is communistic. Or cares whether it is or not.
Patinoire, 1963
Poetical anthropology, meaning it’s profoundly typical, and so pretty and evocative in its typicality. I love the bad ice, and the holes in the boards, the balance between groups and the individuals therein, or the individuals that are outside. Boys and girls are tenderly portrayed here, quite different from one another, quite complete in themselves. It’s a city symphony, isn’t it? Day starts, heightens, ends. The conclusion is so subtle as to pass us by, and its developmentally, morally, charitably enormous. Did I get it right? The little girl on skates is tired and discouraged. She cries and the nice ladies help her off. Some of those nice ladies continue skating, hand in hand. Then, in the winter’s brief golden hour—golden five minutes?—the little girl is back out, bravely wobbling and falling and getting back up. She finally succeeds when a slightly bigger girl, who wobbles slightly less, finally picks her up and shows her how.
The Railroaders, 1958
This
seems a modest, workmanlike production. Beneath that dutiful spirit
it evokes the whole history of the Griersonian documentary, as well as
entirely fulfilling its purpose and potential. Here is intense
detailing, an artistic portrayal of an essential, often overlooked or
undervalued public service. In this it resembles Drifters. The
part in which the new guy learns his duties is like a drolly slowed
down, snowy equivalent to a similarly good-humoured sequence in Night Mail.
The sequence in which the baby’s birth is communicated through the
town of Glacier’s party line is as shimmering and lovely as the absent
friends section in Jennings’ A Diary for Timothy. (And that is
about the most shimmering and lovely sequence in film history!) In its
recording of graceful professionalism and humanity in the throes of an
impossible climate, this is like Nanook of the North. Similarly, on the subject of subsistence, or sufficiency, or even thriving amidst would be impossibility, it’s like City of Gold.
All
of these echoes are here, and some of them may even have been do to an
awareness of precedent and heritage. Or, alternatively, this could be
heterogenesis. The truth will out, wherever the camera and the
community and the Holy Spirit reside.
Artists:
Begone, Dull Care, 1947
Canadian Landscape, 1941
We’ve already established how the Lumiere films really didn’t need modernizing after all. The advances are all fine, but the Lumiere method is not so much primitive as primordial. Eternal too. Could the same idea apply to the educational or instructional film? Elaborations are welcome, but more as expansion than improvement. Look at this stodgy old thing. Hyper-narrated, and you think of the people there filming the people that are pretending not to be filmed. Irrelevant. The narration is quite good—real good art school fundamentals, painting principles to orient the layman and remind the practitioner. Plus, why fiddle with the subject? Handsome old painter, canoeing all over the place. Rural Quebec. The Canadian Shield! Mythological landscape of my schooldays. The 16mm stock captures it all beautifully, and then the film is patient with the actual process. The result is that we feel quite connected to the landscape, and to the paintings, and to Jackson’s mediation between nature and culture. Terrific painter, paintings. Why change anything?
Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak, 1963
Kurelek, 1967
La Merle, 1958
Films by my hero, Donald Brittain:
Fields of Sacrifice, 1964
Bethune, 1964
This isn’t all that groundbreaking or anything. It’s just so good. These classic Board documentaries remind us that innovative artistry is really exciting and important, but that professionalism and craftsmanship are probably, ultimately of higher value. Bethune is a great character, not only for his own estimable self, but for the way that he represents, contradicts, illuminates his time. He’s also a great Board subject, being a complex, emblematic, unusually influential Canadian. He contains contradictions, being both brilliant and self-effacing, posh and common, sensual and ethical, intractable and charitable. He’s an internationalist, a social democrat—well, make that a communist—a peacekeeper. They’re propagandizing just a little, quite responsibly and edifyingly. These also just happen to be the values of the organization, and we’d like to say, of the nation too.
Mind
you, as with those Stuart Legg films from the War, proper
journalistic values have to be in place before any propaganda is
allowed. Kemeny’s formidable research and editing, Brittain’s
magisterial narration—here he comes!—make for a tremendously rich
assemblage, a terrific compilation film. As with Brittain’s Volcano…,
they use their interviewees, their photos, their stock footage with
just that much extra grace and imagination. You can reinvent the
wheel, or just drive everyone else into the dust with the already
existing technology. And in the end this is because the subject is a
good one. He came up with the idea of socialized medicine! He
invented the blood bank. He prefigured Canadian peacekeeping by
putting his skills and his fragile health in the service of his
convictions. Number one fan.
Memorandum, 1965
Volcano: an inquiry into the life and death of Malcolm Lowry, 1976
Here is mastery of the documentarian’s, and the documentary biographer’s art. It’s expository, so the narration leads. (Brittain!) But it leads in a way that always gives precedence to the subject, as well the interviewees’ perspectives thereon. That means that modesty, or maturity, prevails; he’s devoting all of his considerable resources to the service of the story. All that is pretty conventional. What sets this apart is that the mastery of what is usually called B-roll, which here is so much more than just illustrative. The picture’s relation to the expository soundtrack is actually a lot like film music, or the complete range of its possibilities. Here it’s parallel, there it’s perpendicular, and it ends up exploring just about every point in between. In fact there are a number of visual cues that are quite brain-busting, having something of the quality of Virgil’s epic similes. We’re seeing something unlike, but elaborated with an intelligence and thoroughness that reaches toward the poetically encyclopedic: when it comes down to it, nothing is unlike.
One
of the reasons this happens, or that this works, is the photographic
quality of the location shooting. Mexico is especially vivid. Another
has everything to do with the source. Burton’s Lowry readings are
superbly integrated, and something of their allusiveness informs the
entire film. Then, finally, it’s the subject. Here is a portrait of
monumental entropy and degradation. It’s a terrible prospect, though
it’s not in itself degrading. They’ve got sin and self-loathing and
despair about right, but it’s all leavened by a clear account of a
writer’s process, and by this writer’s uniquely infernal/
transcendental genius. What a terrible life. What a book!
The Children of Fogo Island, 1967
Here are some home movies, by the greatest photographer/filmmakers in the world. Perfect compositions and juxtapositions, in the service of beautiful children at plainest and sweetest play. This is chock full of typical activities that register—this is after all the soon to be defunct Fogo Island—as exotically delightful. We’re tempted to idealize and condescend. Look how charmingly the poor people recreate! Except that they do play charmingly, and with all their hearts. It looks like Brueghel’s Children’s Games painting, except that instead of that mass of activity, they isolate and articulate and infuse it all with the eternity of a child’s afternoon. In a post-Flaherty way, though, the film may actually contain two contradictions. Aran has landlords, and these kids are imperiled by adult things that lie beyond the frame and beyond their understanding. Note for instance that subtle, shattering sequence of the graveyard and the boarded up house. But as Mr. Agee observed, the children also abide. And at the end, the Newfies even catch a fish. Very cheeky: they’ll trade in clichés, because they’ve already utterly obliterated them.
In the Labyrinth, 1979
Universe, 1960
