Home, sweet home

Sharon and Claire at the Salt Flats

Lady Ute promo, as the cinematic Soviets might have cut it together

This is a nice State, actually!  That's Sarah, of course, atop the football stadium:

From the archive: the first day of school

Monday, Aug. 24, 1998: Drew (seven years of age) to school.  She had her knapsack on forty minutes early.  First days are always exciting, for everybody.  

Hyndland Primary, where Caitlin started out (Glasgow)

Wednesday, August 25, 1999: It’s the first day of school.  The girls are up early (even Drew).  Sarah (six years of age) has her knapsack on forty-five minutes before time.  I get to take the girls down.  Caitlin (10) is cheerful and excited, with friends greeting her enthusiastically.  Drew is self-conscious, maybe happy, and she goes in on her very own.  Sarah’s doorway is littered with trembling children.  She marches right in, her teacher greets her by name, and she waves goodbye.  I feel pleased and proud and then, as I go down the hallway, just a bit sentimental!

Monday, August 21, 2000: Everyone starts school.  Caitlin (eleven years old) disappears into the middle school throngs.  In comparison, Brookside Elementary feels awfully small and quiet and friendly.   

 

Caitlin comes back from her first day in school with some new perspectives.  Some kid declared that if you wear any clothes this year that you had last year, then you’re a baby and a geek.  C. reports this as if read from Hansard and written in stone.  She bemoans her class placement, because the other class has the most popular girls in school (how do you establish things like that?), and so she feels like she is already shut out of the inner circles.  She’s so vulnerable to this first point, as evidence also by the full roaring Utah accent that she’s acquired.  As for popularity, may we be preserved therefrom.

Wednesday, August 22, 2001: The first day of school.  The kids are up and excited very early.  Drew (ten years old) is even singing songs.   

The kids come home.  Caitlin anticipates a pretty fun year.  A twelve year old’s perceptions are very unequivocal.  What she likes, she likes awfully.  What she doesn’t…

Cf. that song they sing together

Wednesday, August 25, 2004: Four kids, four new schools!  I take the boys, and it’s exciting.  I’m back from work by mid-afternoon, eagerly awaiting their reports.  First comes Sarah (11), so small, and smiling.  “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.”  She’s gratified.  The middle school is full of her friends.  Drew (13) is philosophical.  “All my teachers are retards!”  Matt (6) just had a play day.  

Wednesday, August 23, 2006: Caitlin nearly had Mr. Hylton for chemistry today.  He has her come quietly back to her office.  “Caitlin, it’s a B-day today.” 

Track four, of course...

Since she’s in grade twelve, Caitlin says that she intends to go to every athletic event, all year through.  Of course, says Sharon.  I say it too, but really—I don’t understand these people!

Thursday, August 21, 2008: Matt (10) has some homework.  I send him off to do it, or at least to think about it.  A few minutes later I hear a crash and a tinkle.  I go to his room and find him on the brink of tears, standing in front of that mirror on their closet door, which is now all star’d and shattered.  “What happened, Matt?”  “Well, I was doing my homework, and I picked up my light sabre and stabbed myself.”  All things considered, I don’t see anything to get mad about here.  

The Man in the White Suit, Ealing, 1951

Brothers

Matt

Spencer

A few last photos: the kids

It's time, maybe, to move on to next and new things.  Before that, though, as summer ends, let's post just a few more images from our happy English interlude.

Ham House:

Oxford:

Kew:

Eltham:

In town:

The Royal Albert Hall:

By the Barbican:

Kent:

Women's road race, going out and coming back:

Things we love: Tate Britain

Eltham Palace

We're back in North America, alas/hooray.  But you've gotta see this old place... (photos by Spencer)

There's quite a story behind this next one...

...you can find it here:  https://vimeo.com/46198278


Echoes of Henry James, 1898...

Look it up:

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/eltham-palace-and-gardens/

True North: some more favourite NFB films

The Land:

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.   

Nahanni, 1962

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

Major painter!  The textbooks emphasize their various figures and movements, and they apparently miss a thing or two.  Regions, and ethnicities, and representational paintings (with a touch of very sophisticated naiveté) telling the simple, nuanced, archetypal tales of the people who make the world go round.  The animation camera absolutely vivifies these already dynamic images.  Just like City of Gold, leaving you wondering why they don’t make more movies like this.  Why don’t we?

La Merle, 1958 

Varley, 1953

What a first shot!  A lot of this is devoted to goodish, pretty plummy art critical narration.  Nothing wrong with it, but nothing very lasting either.  Much more impressive is how they add ethno-dramatic or neo-realistic method to the educational stuff. Varley himself is an actor in his own film, which gives him business and marks and motivation and everything.  He looks great, with his scarred and haunted and humourous face.  And the fact that the contrivance takes place in his own space, surrounded by the implements of his own labour and artistry, contributes to something special.  The stock they were using is also wonderful, full of vivid, non-technicolor tones that really favour both paintings and settings.  





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!

Cinematic Enlightenment: Unit B (Tom Daly, Colin Low, Wolf Koenig, et. al.):

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.
 

Circle of the Sun, 1961

City of Gold, 1957 

In the Labyrinth, 1979

Lonely Boy, 1961 

Universe, 1960

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Here's our favourite athlete, at the start of a new season:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjiNgrSXGuY