Documentary Field Notes and Flashpoints
A syndicated blog about filmmaking by one of Canada’s formost documentary media creators.
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June 2, 2009
Marching Grannies
All photos by Alan Auvaart (see below)
I just came back from filming the Raging Grannies in action at the protest against the CANSEC arms fair in Ottawa. It is the largest event of its kind in Canada, showcasing all the best new ways to inflict pain, cause death and create mayhem. It was held this year in Lansdowne Park inside the city limits. A protest action was organized by COAT - you can find all the information on Canada’s role in the arms trade on their web site. Arms bazaars were banned from Ottawa twenty years ago, but because of municipal fusions this measure has to be adopted again to be valid. Needless to say there is a citizen campaign underfoot to do just that.
On the roll Granny
The Raging Grannies from several cities and Mémés déchaînées from Montreal played a major role at this protest, setting up a Peace Garden and slowing traffic in and out of the exhibition, singing their songs and getting their message across. They sang, among other songs, WAR BUSINESS (you can guess to what tune…)
THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE WAR BUSINESS
THE BEST BUSINESS THEY KNOW!
NEVER MIND THE HOMELESS AND THE HUNGRY
NEVER MIND THE PEOPLE WITHOUT JOBS
WAR’S A STUPID WAY TO SPEND OUR MONEY
IT JUST AIN’T FUNNY! LET’S MAKE IT STOP!
And
Tune: Battle Hymn (Glory, Glory)
THE PROFITEERS ARE COMING HERE
AND THEY HAVE COME TO BUY
THE GADGETS THAT ARE ON DISPLAY
THAT BURN, EXPLODE AND FRY
AND ALL LAID OUT SO THEY CAN SEE
WHICH ONES THEY’D LIKE TO TRY
AT THE CANSEC TRADING SHOW.
For our shoot we had the help of some terrific Ottawa volunteers, including excellent photographer Alan Auvaart. It was his first encounter with the Grannies and he had this to say:’ The resilience of the Grannies to come out in such inclement weather to protest for what they believe in is truly amazing. I hope none of them catch colds!’ Here is his shot of the crew: myself, Martin Duckworth (on camera with assistant Kendall McQueen).
Part of the crew: Magnus Isacsson, Kendall McQueen, and Martin Duckworth
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Still from the film ‘Final Offer’ directed by Sturla Gunnarsson
I recently had the opportunity to co-direct a 25-minute video for the Canadian Auto Workers with my wife Jocelyne Clarke. This is one of the very few commissioned pieces I have worked on in my 30 years of doing audiovisual work, but the Auto Workers is one organization I am pleased to work with. Not only does that union have a strong commitment to social justice, but it knows how to use film and video for educational purposes. The leadership of the union has also over the years shown an extraordinary openness to documentary filmmakers, not being afraid of letting them film life as it really was. This is evident in Sturla Gunnarson’s excellent 1964 film Final Offer (NFB) which documented not just an important strike but the birth of the CAW as a Canadian Union, breaking off from the ‘international’ (US dominated) UAW. Another example is Barry Greenwald’s terrific film The Negotiator (Barna-Alper 1995) which followed CAW president ‘Buzz’ Hargrove through some very difficult negotiations. (Barna-Alper and Real to Reel productions have done many videos for the CAW.) And in Quebec, Louise Lemelin and Hélène Pichette made the excellent Troc Made in Quebec which documented the fight against the closing of the Kenworth plant in Ste-Thérèse for Radio-Canada. I had an opportunity to talk to former CAW president Bob White, the main character of Final Offer, about the union’s attitude towards documentaries. If everyone shared his opinions, we would have an easier time making films ! Video below the photo.
Interviewing Bob White, President of the Canadian Auto Workers
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An image from Helene Klodawsky’s documentary ‘Malls R Us’
Last week I had a chance to see Malls R Us, an excellent new documentary by an excellent Montreal filmmaker, Helene Klodawsky. Helene has made some terrific films, my favourite being No More Tears Sister, a story from Sri Lanka which beautifully illustrates the notion that ‘the personal is political.’ Not in a didactic or sloganeering kind of way, but just by telling a personal story set in the context of civil war and exile. One of the most interesting things about that film is the way colour has been manipulated through chemical treatment of the actual film stock.
Here’s a trailer for Malls R Us.
Malls R Us (produced by Ina Fichman of Instinct Films and Luc Martin-Glousset of Point du Jour) is about shopping malls, and the film gets inside the malls, from North America to Dubai, India and Japan, in every conceivable way. Rather than standing on the outside looking in – or spitting at them for that matter – the film takes us inside the mall not just physically but mentally, inside the heads of the people who conceive, design and build malls as well as the people who use them. One way Helene does that is by interviewing an impressive cast of key characters (kudos for convincing them), the other is by capturing some revealing conversations in the mall context. The film is also very thoughtful, about the deeper meaning of the prevalence of malls. Are they the cathedrals of modern times or – as author Ray Bradbury suggests in the film – today’s version of the town square? Or are they monuments to an era dominated by consumerism to the detriment of higher values? In her narration Helene takes care not to hit us over the head with any ready-made conclusions, which actually makes the film scarier, in a deeper and more subtle way. I asked Helene to talk about her creative process and editorial choices.
Helene Klodawsky
In 2006, while editing Family Motel (an alternative fiction film on a Somali refugee family’s journey into homelessness), I read the initial research on a new project being developed by Instinct Films. Writer Harold Crooks and researcher Terri Foxman were working closely with producer Ina Fichman on her idea about the global spread of shopping malls. I soon signed onto the project as director. Right from the start, there were many challenges as the film had been developed and sold as an international coproduction with many themes, contrasts, characters and locations. I needed to find a way to tell the 70-year-old story of these huge temples to consumerism, describe why malls hold such appeal for the billions of people who visit them, as well as provide a critique of their worldwide proliferation. Added to this was the complexity of getting into to malls to shoot. Think of gaining access to a prison; most of the time it was that difficult, and hence we were extremely limited in what and when we could shoot.
Early on I decided to focus on characters that were intensely involved in the world of malls – whether out of passion or despair – rather than intellectuals or social critics who observed malls only from a distance. I felt it was important that my intended audience (those who both adore and despise shopping centres) listen directly to those people who are fully committed to bringing malls to every corner of the globe. I knew I would have only a few days in each location and hence decided to construct a highly stylized post-modern collage made up of mini portraits of each character alongside malls that represented an issue or struggle. Wherever we shot I was surprised by what we found. For example, who would have thought that Science Fiction guru Ray Bradbury would be a proponent of malls, or that young men travel the US mourning the loss of once thriving, but now dead, malls? I am most proud of capturing the little known anti-mall protests in India – as in most of the world, mall developments seems to be a done deal, quietly accepted by most of the population. Audiences tell me how much they appreciate the complex reading that Malls R Us provides – waking us up to ways in which culture and the environment are being shaped by the everyday places that dot our cities and suburbs.
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An image from Lech Kowalski’s ‘Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?’
Last week I saw the most creatively radical documentary I have ever seen, East of Paradise (2004) by Lech Kowalski. It breaks every convention of story development. The first half of the film is made up of an interview with Kowalski’s mother, about the horrors she experienced as a young girl at the end of the Second World War, in Russian-occupied Poland. Then he cuts to a medley of his own films of junkies on the New York underground scene, filmed over the last couple of decades. And what’s the link? The extreme. That becomes clear in the film, towards the end. Kowalski was here in Montreal for a retrospective of his films at the Cinémathèque Québecoise and had a chance to elaborate. To Kowalski life is real when you’re at the extreme limits of what can be tolerated, and that is what throws light on the rest of our existence. He explained how the horrors his mother had experienced set a sort of standard against which, it seemed, all his own experiences had to be measured. This led him to search out, in his own life and work, some extremely harsh realities. So in a sense, the totally unorthodox structure of his film was totally logical. At the discussion after the film the son of a holocaust victim talked about how he totally identified with this psychological dilemma, and brought up the question of a ’survival gene.’ Kowalski totally agreed, he had received that also from his parents. After all they had been through to survive, he would not have the right to waste his own life, to become one of those junkies you see dying of overdose or AIDS in his own films.
Lech Kowalski (Photo Jocelyne Clarke)
Kowalski believes that we are in a ‘post-documentary era’ where reality is too complex to be dealt with in an ordinary film, especially since film production and distribution are largely controlled by vested interests who are set against free creativity and analysis. He has created a web site called Camera War TV to create a new kind of documentary experience. I think this is a great concept, even though I found some of the films on the site less than impressive.
A fascinating encounter. And during the coming month we will have the time to see more of Kowalski’s films. D.O.A.: A Right of Passage (1980), Born to Lose: The Last Rock and Roll Movie (1999), Gringo: The Story of a Junkie (1987), Rock Soup (1991) and two films on Eastern Europe: The Boot Factory (2000) and On Hitler’s Highway (2002).
There is an excellent interview with Kowalski [in French] on the Cinémathèque’s web site.
P.S. I am sure you saw the British clip on YouTube about Susan Boyle, the ‘unattractive’ woman singer whose performance brings down the house in a resounding victory over prejudice (represented by the attitudes of a talent-show jury). A wonderful little film with important issues, suspense, a terrific main character, excellent character development, a surprising turn-around, an uplifting outcome, reminiscent of classical stories like the ugly duckling and Cinderella. What more can you ask of a doc?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
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Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in shapes of your own choosing…If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Aldous Huxley, Introduction to the reprint of Brave New World, 1945
Two terrifying novels haunted the 20th Century and continue to trouble us today: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Huxley’s Brave New World. Every day, newspapers invoke their nightmarish visions, whether driven by Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ repression or Huxley’s consumer seduction and conditioning.
Several generations of readers have used these two novels as beacons, throwing light on contemporary realities. Young people still read them today, and use them to make sense of what’s going on in the world. Orwell and Huxley could never have imagined some of the amazing technological advances of the last few decade. But they understood the fundamental tendencies at work in modern society, and that’s why they are still read today.
Orwell foresaw surveillance, repression, constant war and torture. Huxley imagined rampant commercialism, deception, conditioning and genetic manipulation. Today, unfortunately, many of the daily realities we and people around the world experience combine the ‘Orwellian’ with the ‘Huxleyan.’ Our willing participation in the invasion of our own privacy through our use of Facebook and other social sites on the web is just one recent example.
There is a time-honoured tradition of debate about which one of the two authors, Orwell or Huxley, was more prescient. In the end, authors like Margaret Atwood have concluded that the main issue isn’t ‘who was right,’ but in what ways both authors were right – and what we can learn from using their insights. This is also our view.
For several years now, Varda Burstyn and myself have been working on a film about these issues. However, the subject seemed too large and sprawling to really make a good film, and the most enthusiasm for this project comes from young people who are most interested in participatory, interactive web-based experiences. The project has now found a home on the NFB’s web site Citizenshift. Check it out, comment, contribute!
http://citizen.nfb.ca/brave-new-1984
If they came back to life, Orwell and Huxley would feel vindicated for many of the dystopian trends they foresaw. At the same time, they might well be surprised – and delighted - to see the amount of resistance to these trends, all over the world. Huxley called for caution, for vigilance and for a greater awareness of the potential totalitarian power of scientific and technological innovation. Orwell called for a mobilization of the common people against power and privilege sustained by repression and elite omnipotence. These concerns are echoed in many civil society movements today.
That is why we think this project has a great deal of potential to capture the imagination of video makers and web users.
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Annie Roy and Pierre Allard of ATSA with one component of their installation at the Havana Biennial
Annie Roy et Pierre Allard de ATSA avec une partie de leur installation à la Biennale de La Havane
[Français plus bas]
With my close collaborator Simon Bujold, I am just back from Cuba, where we were filming the artists Annie Roy and Pierre Allard of ATSA as they participated in the 10th Havana Biennial. The theme of the event is Integration and Resistance in a Global World. Annie and Pierre made an installation called Cannonballs and Bubblegum, a way of speaking about the repressive and destructive aspects of consumer culture - a kind of warning to people who live in a context of shortages but whose society might well experience huge changes in the decades to come. This was one of the last shoots for our film Creative Emergency (working title) produced by Amazone Film, already in editing and likely to be released before the end of the year.
Avec mon complice Simon Bujold, je suis tout juste de retour de Cuba, ou nous avons filmé Annie Roy et Pierre Allard de ATSA participant à la 10e Biennale de La Havane. Le thème de l’exposition est Intérgration et Résistance à l’époque de la mondialisation. Pierre et Annie sont venus faire une installation qui s’appelle Boules de canon et gum-balloune, façon de parler des dimensions répressives et destructrices de la société de consommation, sorte d’avertissement pour un pays qui vit la pénurie mais qui risque de vivre des changements importants au cours des prochaines décennies. C’était un de nos derniers tournages pour notre film Urgence Création (titre de travai) produit par Amazone Film - nous sommes déjà en montage, le film devrait sortit avant la fin de l’année.
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I am screening a ton of rushes, not much time for writing. But I thought I’d pass on a couple of interesting links.
An image from the documentary ‘The Age of Stupid’
First, about the ‘crowd-funded’ documentary The Age of Stupid, by British documentarian Director Franny Armstrong and Producer Lizzie Gillett. Film completed, their aim over the coming months is to “turn 250 million viewers into activists, all focused on the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, December 2009
where the successor to the Kyoto Treaty must be finalized.”
I am familiar with Armstrong’s previous work, because she was one of the co-directors of McLibel, about the young activists in the U.K. who sued McDonald’s. During the same period, I made two films about attempts to unionize McDonald’s in Quebec (see my web site) and of course Morgan Spurlock made Super Size Me.
Making-of film (50 minutes) [here]
Article [here]
(Thanks to Mark Hamilton and the Doc list serve.)
A frame from ‘Slumdog Millionaire’
And now for some fiction, both acclaimed and controversial. Slumdog Millionaire is without any question the most successful film of the year, taking home numerous Oscars, including best film, Golden Globe award in the same category. It’s such a household word by now, I won’t describe it. Personally I liked it a lot, for its clever structure and great camerawork and editing. But I have close friends who are documentary filmmakers from Bombay, and they were not so thrilled. The sent me the following articles:
Mitu Sengupta: “Slumdog Millionaire: a Hollow Message of Social Justice” [here]
Jeremy Seabrook: “Betraying India’s poor” [here]
Aarundhati Roy: “Caught on Film: India ‘not shining’” [here]
(Thanks to Ali Kazimi and Anand Patwardhan.)
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Barack Obama, Michaëlle Jean, and Jean-Daniel Lafond
‘Cinéaste frustré, philosophe comblé.‘ (’Frustrated filmmaker, fulfilled philosopher.’)
Following up on my blog from last week, here’s part two of my interview with Jean-Daniel Lafond. How has he adapted to his newest role as “His Excellency” and a very active partner to Canada’s Governor General, Michaëlle Jean?
[Video interview clip further down.]
Of his current circumstances, Jean-Daniel says, “The challenge is to remain oneself and to defend the values one has always defended. There is a space for that.” His position is of a volunteer with an official status. He jokes that Canadians are getting “two for the price of one” and professes total solidarity with Michaëlle.
In his official capacity, Jean-Daniel has made culture his bailiwick, and suggests perhaps it is sorely in need of being defended in this country. It is critical to demonstrate the importance of culture, not just complain about lack of support, he says. He has created Point des arts/Art Matters, a forum and network for reflection and debate about artistic matters from all disciplines, bringing together practitioners, theorists and arts administrators of all political stripes. He has initiated the internet site Citizen Voices/Écoute des citoyens in an attempt to make the office of the Governor General more relevant and accessible, particularly to Canadian youth.
About making films, Jean-Daniel says he finds himself constantly in unexpected and extraordinary circumstances, for example in private conversation with heads of state, and in a most privileged position to observe the world, governance, diplomacy, the very highest echelons of power. He finds it simultaneously stimulating and frustrating. Given the opportunity, he would be making films all the time, but contents himself with gathering as much information - and some video material - as possible, building blocks or sources of inspiration for future projects.
Thanks to Jocelyne Clarke and Jorge Bustos-Estefan for help with this blog.
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Jean-Daniel Lafond
The other day, as U.S. President Obama touched down in Ottawa, I asked my students at l’INIS, the Quebec Film school, a question. ‘Which documentary filmmaker will be meeting with Obama today?’ Puzzled looks, no answers. They asked for a lead. ‘OK, I said, he is also a French citizen.’ ‘Oh, of course,’ said Nathalie who used to work at the NFB. ‘I know who it is, but he’s not there because he’s a filmmaker.’
I recently had a chance to meet with and interview Jean-Daniel Lafond, the husband of Governor General Michaëlle Jean, during a visit to Montreal and on the occasion of a retrospective of his works, curated by Tom McSorley at the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa and running until March 8th. The vast conceptual range of the 15 films he has directed since 1986 defy obvious notions of a continuous oeuvre.
I asked Jean-Daniel two questions, which, given his habitual eloquence, spun into a 30-minute answer, weaving in and through a wide range of topics and philosophical musings about his life’s work. Given how much there is to report from our discussion, I’ll share the first answer with you this week and the second next week.
[Video interview clip further down.]
Marie Tifo playing the role of Marie de l’Incarnation, in the film ‘Folle de Dieu’ (’The Madwoman of God’)
First question: What impulses and/or issues tie together what initially appears to be a very disparate range of works?
Jean-Daniel begins enigmatically by saying “Nous faisons ce que nous faisons en suivant le chemin qui nous échappe…” by which he means that the documentary impulse for him is always a movement toward the unknown, and stems from a desire to understand. He cites Spinoza at the start of his 2006 film, The Fugitive, “Not laughter, not tears, understanding”, an adage which he says is perhaps most fundamental to his work.
Jean-Daniel says that this retrospective, along with a “perspectives” tribute at La Rochelle documentary festival last year, have enabled him to articulate more clearly the connecting threads. He sees his most recent film, Folle de Dieu (The Madwoman of God), about the ideas and writings of an 18th mystic - Marie de l’Incarnation - who came to Nouvelle France to found a country, as utterly coherent with his first film, Les Traces du rêve (Dream Tracks), a portrait of seminal documentarist Pierre Perrault and of his films in relation to the creation of a country. Both interrogate the act of writing/filmmaking in the context of ideas of place, Otherness, dreams and utopias.
What he calls his fight for “the humanization of humanity” precedes his trajectory as a filmmaker. His first career was as a philosopher, a political thinker and defender of culture against the “absolute evil” of ignorance. He was transformed both by his exile and by his encounter with cinema, which he says is humbling, because it always begins from a place of ignorance. “As a philosopher, I always transmitted what I knew. As a filmmaker, I transmit my experience of the unknown, of the unpredictable, what is beyond me.”
Lafond’s films defy categories and cannot easily be summarized, as they offer an almost seamless extension of his philosophical journey, exploring and confronting the major ideas of the past half-century - exile, négritude, religion, the Other, barbarism.
Next week, the second question: How has Jean-Daniel adapted to his newest role as “His Excellency” and a very active partner to Canada’s Governor General, Michaëlle Jean?
Thanks to Jocelyne Clarke and Jorge Bustos-Estefan for help with this blog.
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Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez
Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, has won his most recent referendum, modifying the constitution so that elected officials - notably including himself - can be reelected for several terms. Is this good or bad ? Only the future will tell, but at least he submitted the change to a popular vote, in stark contrast to the may military coups in Latin America, supported by - if not orchestrated by - some of the countries who like to suggest Chavez is a dictator-in-the making.
I recently organized a screening of a film I really like, ¿¡Revolución!?, directed by Charles Gervais. It is a doc about Chavez’s ‘Bolivarian’ revolution in Venezuela. In terms of the meaning of that revolution the film is generally positive but not at all uncritical, and Chavez’s enemies are given lots of space. That gives the film a healthy tension and it certainly avoids the pitfalls of propaganda. And it has many other qualities. There is one important strand of the film made up of animated images of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, with a gravelly voice-over which seems to represent the knowledge of a veteran revolutionary formulating some general principles for social and political upheavals - you could imagine him to be a Che Guevara speaking from the grave, but his thoughts also remind one of Machiavelli, formulating some general principles about his subject based on years of experience. There are ten of these principles in as many segments, and they signpost ten chapters in the film. The actuality material is very well edited - by Étienne Gagnon - and was treated for contrast and texture in a way more reminiscent of edgy fiction films than of documentaries. I asked Charles how he developed this treatment.
How did you come upon the Don Quixote idea? Was it hard to make it work in the film?
Charles Gervais: In 2005, when I first got the idea of making this documentary, Chavez was distributing 1 million copies of Don Quixote books to the people of Venezuela. Chavez said that it was necessary to nourish the minds, to be inspired by someone who searched “to rectify the wrongs and to rearrange the world”. I found it unusual for a political leader, fascinating. At that time, I knew little about Chavez, and it brought me wanting to know more. During my research, what I found is that Chavez is in fact a real Quixotic figure: a dreamer that wants to do good to the people, but becomes so overwhelmed in his quest that he doesn’t always see the reality clearly anymore. How did I suggest this in the film? Don Quixote is everywhere in the film. At the very beginning, Chavez refers to him when he talks about passion, and drawings of Quixote’s adventures are used to present the theory of a modern revolution; and at the end, the storyline of Chavez and Don Quixote clearly mix together. It’s even a quote of Quixote himself that closes the film, warning Chavez to be careful not to lose himself in passion forgetting his true cause. (”Let not thine own passion blind thee in another man’s cause.” / Miguel de Cervantes)
Your film has a very interesting structure, and also an interesting texture. How did you develop those?
Charles Gervais: We wanted to create a structure that would give the film a possibility to stay interesting and insightful, whatever happens with Hugo Chavez. That led us to invent a step-by-step guide for a modern revolution that would succeed in bringing about radical change without resorting to violence and repression. (I worked on this with a specialist in Theory of the Revolution from the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.) So if Chavez got mad with power and ended up as a true dictator, our film could help understand why. And if he continued to work on his «socialist revolution of the 21st century» on a democratic way, we could even pretend that we might have helped him! (I’ll let you decide which path he is on today!)
Talking about the texture, we wanted to follow a certain aesthetic about slums, poverty and «end of the world» kind of places that was brought by some great movies like City of God or Traffic. The dominant color all over the film, amber, reminds me of an old newspaper that was forgotten for a long time under the hard sun - how the people living in Venezuela’s slums possibly felt like. So technically, we took the almost too perfect HD images (shot with a Sony CineAlta F900) and alter the signal with a kind of «bleach bypass». The resulting images, with deep black and deep white, but cold, was then colored with this amber texture.
Thanks to Jorge Bustos-Estefan for help with this blog.
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