beats, jack kerouac - 1989 - Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey

Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey
Herménégilde Chiasson
1989
National Film Board of Canada
55 min.

The National Film Board is one of Canada's most important cultural institutions. Important, as far as I'm concerned, because the film board has produced numerous films of relevance to this blog. Several of those films, such as Acts of Defiance and l'Acadie l'Acadie !?! have already been profiled on this blog. Canada as a site of colonial domination and inter-colonial struggle has produced many of the kinds of socio-cultural fractures that countercultures grow from. Herménégilde Chiasson's film about Jack Kerouac's life and family history follows one of those lines of fracture from Quebec into Lowell Massachusetts, an industrial town where many French Canadian's immigrated to in the late 19th century, and it was also the birthplace of seminal Beat author Jack Kerouac, a descendant of those immigrants. The mother of this unabashedly American iconoclast were, in fact, Quebecois.

Chiasson's film is an investigation into the life of Kerouac and his roots in this immigrant Quebecois-American culture, and it is also a look at this community itself. The documentary is a typical mix of interviews with members of the Quebecois community in Lowell and read quotations or old television interview segments from the famous author. Visually, the film shows old photographs juxtaposed against contemporary footage of the city of Lowell during the winter, and this winter aesthetic immediately conjures up ideas of Canadian towns despite the fact that its an American city on display.

This film also goes over many of the known details of Kerouac's life, such as his football scholarship to Columbia, his becoming a writer, and Allen Ginsberg appears to discuss their first meeting. The documentary's main focus however is the connections between its implied subjects, Canadian and American, mother and child, alien and native. Some of the interview subjects talk about growing up in Lowell and developing from their families an intimate knowledge of Canadian/Quebecois politics and society. Many of the Kerouac quotations referred to in the film refer to his mother, and in the context of this film the implication is that to refer to his mother is to refer to Quebec as well.

civil rights movement - 2005 - The Long Walk to Freedom

The Long Walk to Freedom
Tom Weidlinger
2005
Moira Productions
30 min

This documentary shares its title with the much better known Nelson Mandela autobiography and film adaptation, so it's search-engine obscure thanks to this.The Long Walk to Freedom is a short documentary featuring civil rights activists speaking to students at George Washington High School in San Francisco California. The documentary is another addition to the long list of documentaries on the American civil rights movement, but it also demonstrates the ongoing commitment of civil rights activists to educate new generations about a struggle that in many ways continues still.

The documentary shows a racially diverse group of activists speaking to public school students about their experiences. It is broken down into segments organized by themes like music and non-violent resistance. I assume that the documentary's ideal audience are students, and the setting for viewing is a classroom. The division of the film's subject matter into short and easy to comprehend thematic segments is an ideal way of presenting this subject for classroom discussion.

partisan resistance - 2001 - Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans

Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans
Seth Kramer
Great Projects Film Company Inc
2001

Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans is a short television documentary from PBS highlighting the existence of Jewish armed resistance units in Germany during the Third Reich. There is a lot of media commemorating or dramatizing the WWII-era partisan fighters in France and other occupied countries but much less about armed resistance within Germany, let alone about Jewish resistance. Direct resistance adds another mode of Jewish response to the atrocities of the Third Reich, that of sabotage and armed direct action, in addition to the more widely historicized accounts of submission, hiding, passing for German, receiving protection from sympathetic Nazis such as Oskar Schindler, and emigration to democratic countries.

The documentary consists of a familiar pattern of showing interview subjects recalling anecdotes from their experiences interspersed with archival footage and photographs representing the referred era. This kind of subject matter provides an alternative kind military history which I am very interested in delving into further, and a quick survey has revealed that there's quite a bit of material about Jewish resistance, and this film is not the only to claim to be telling an 'untold story' in its title. Generally I ignore the military history sections of bookstores entirely but now that I am aware of the tradition of partisan fighters and oppressed populations taking up arms and developing strategies for engaging their enemies in warfare, I consider this a new topic to research within the field of counterculture studies.

To summarize the documentary briefly, the stories these former fighters tell reveal the fact that significant damage was done to the Reich by Jewish partisan fighters. They describe escaping from the ghettos to live in the woods, acquiring guns from a farmer, executing German soldiers and informers, and sabotaging the infrastructure of Hitler's Germany. It is stated during the documentary that there was an estimated 20 to 30,000 such partisans who fought in Germany, a large fighting force that must have made a significant contribution towards weakening Nazi control in Germany. The documentary's primary purpose is to oppose myths that there was no real Jewish opposition to Nazi oppression.

culture jamming - 2009 - The Yes Men Fix The World

The Yes Men Fix the World
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno
Arte France
2009
87 minutes

The Yes Men are a pair of culture jamming pranksters whose interventions into media have revealed injustices in the basic structures of contemporary neoliberalist globalization. Their modus operandi has been to mimic the conventional forms by which information is packaged and delivered to contemporary audiences, deliver a message that is absurd, either in the traditional sense or in a modern sense where an inconvenient truth is acknowledged, and then capture the reactions of the audience. The most profound example of this later sense of the absurd which I mentioned, as expressed in the work of The Yes Men, can be seen in this interview wherein one of the Yes Men claim that Dow Chemical will make reparations for Union Carbide's 1984 Bophal (India) disaster, when the company's Bophal plant leaked toxic gasses which almost immediately caused over 15,000 deaths, now that Dow has purchased the guilty company. The result was Dow's stock dropped instantly, revealing the sense of justice encoded into markets, and The Yes Men were instantly acused of giving the people of Bophal false hope.

The film begins with the song 'Get Happy', which I otherwise know from David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks.

This documentary, The Yes Men Fix The World (an irritating title for a film that doesn't actually show them offering solutions) shows The Yes Men going behind the scenes of their own work and following up on its results. They used media to pretend as though officials were acknowledging the errors made in Bophal India, and also in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and bringing equitable compensation to those affected populations. They visited these locations to speak with people and to ask them if they were filled with false hope, the generic critique of Yes Men interventions by media pundits. Naturally the people of of those locations have very good reason to be angry at the cruelty of governments, corporations, and markets, on a continuing basis and weren't especially put off by the actions of the culture jammers.

The film's revelation that the duo were so often accused of providing false hope is fascinating. Clearly the Yes Men are playing with media to create an image of what justice should look like when filtered through the conventions of contemporary media channels. Of course, when The Yes Men are revealed as tricksters, and media personalities are not including questions about the withholding of justice by the actual offenders in part of their response to the Yes Men's intervention, then they are choosing to protect the image of institutions responsible for disaster.

The Yes Men are media pranksters, and fundamentally this is a documentary about media, chains of communication and representation, the manipulation of symbols, and the public relations industry. TV's are viewed in strange locations, creating juxtapositions of imagery, the sleek PR television image against what is often a post-industrial setting, for our own consumption via our own screen. I'm not pointing that out to note any irony, but I do believe that the production of a documentary like this serves the purpose of giving the Yes Men a forum for responding to their own imagery and the responses it garnered in turn, since they're used to making images with other people's machinery.

Hunter S Thompson - 2008 - Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Alex Gibney

Jigsaw Productions

2008

Gonzo is a predictable look at the life of Hunter S. Thompson, the libidinal and anarchistic journalist best known for the hallucinatory travelog, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If anyone already knows anything about Thompson’s work (and really, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, in itself, a summary of pretty much everything he was about) then this documentary brings nothing new to the field. If, for some reason, one decided to skip the ubiquitously available Fear and Loathing... in film or print and decided to watch this documentary instead, then its a decent introduction to the first few years of Thompson’s literary/journalism career, with plenty of interviews with his friends and family in addition to quotations from his works, and images of his literary subjects.  

What interests me about Gonzo is how it operates as another contribution to the maintenance of 1960s America as *the* centre of all countercultural activity. In Gonzo, Thompson’s early life is glossed over and, with some brief references to F. Scott Fitzgerald, so are any mention of literary influences.  His early novels, Prince Jellyfish (never published) and The Rum Diary (finally published in 1998) and the years of literary failure were not mentioned.  Instead, the film moves right into his Hells Angels period and then dwells on the mid-late 1960s and early 1970s for almost the entire film. Once the discussion finally moves on from the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign (which Thomson covered for Rolling Stone magazine) there is a quick discussion of his contributions to the ‘76 Carter campaign and then nothing is said about anything after that until people start lamenting his 2005 suicide. His post-’72 career, 33 years of living and writing, is hardly discussed. It does not seem like its Hunter S Thompson’s biography being produced here but rather HST is used as another means of recreating the 1960s as an especially turbulent and fascinating time.  

Of course, Gonzo, like almost all documentaries about the 1960s includes a standard montage of 1960s imagery. Vietnam napalm victims, US soldiers in various states of mind, anti-war and civil rights marchers, Nixon, hippies dancing, Timothy Leary doing something, John Lennon doing something. Maybe Gonzo merely has a variation on the images I’ve listed above, but some sequence containing most or all of what I just mentioned almost always appears at some moment where the narrator is talking about how the 1960s were “a different time” or some other cliched phrase used to refer to the era.

An endnote: this documentary isn’t that great (it works on a commemorative level), but its director, Alex Gibney, and his production company, Jigsaw Productions, have created many worthwhile documentaries such as Taxi to the Dark Side, Who Killed the Electric Car?, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Other films in Gibney’s filmography such as, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, and Magic Trip (about Ken Kesey and the trips he took on his bus Further) will be mandatory viewing for my ContraTexts project.

Palestinian nationalism - film - 2004 - Discordia

Discordia
Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal
National Film Board of Canada
2004
68 minutes

Discordia is a documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada that records the strife at Concordia University over the issue of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The events depicted in the film begin with a 2002 visit to the campus by (then) former and also future Israeli Prime Minister Bejnamin Netanyahu at which protests gave way to rioting. This event was followed by an attenuated struggle for student space between members of the progressive Student Union and members of the Concordia chapter of Hillel (an international organization for Jewish university students).

Directed by Ben Addleman and Samir Mallal, Discordia captures the events of this struggle as they unfold. At the centre of the struggle was a challenge to the right for Hillel to use campus as recruiting grounds for the Israeli Defense Force. The students of Hillel saw their recruitment efforts necessary to protect Israel, a Jewish island in an ocean of Arab hostility, while Arab students took the actions of Hillel as a provocation against them, and as a means of evoking the actual violence suffered by Palestinians at the hands of the people who actually do the fighting for that organization. The film thus captures numerous interviews with the students involved as well as moments of direct conflict between the groups, as well as moments of friendship and solidarity among the members of either side. Finally, the documentary also captures reactions by a number of students who are not interested in the strife these issues have caused and are simply frustrated by it having temporarily taken over campus life.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this kind of subject matter is the question of where bigotry and politically conscious activism overlap. Consistently, the argument is made against pro-Palestinian activists that their work is basically anti-semitic. There’s no question that in the broader spectrum of pro-Palestinian expressions a strong anti-semitism can be found that pushes the immediate socio-political realities of the central issues to the side (often to indulge in age-old conspiracy theories of Jewish manipulations). In this particular documentary, the weight of dealing with the present issues as bigotry falls mostly upon the shoulders of Hillel members, both in accusations they make of their adversaries, and in their attitude towards the other. The pro-Palestine Concordia Student Union is headed by Aaron Mate, a young Jewish activist who currently works as a producer for Democracy Now!, a daily social justice radio program carried by the Pacifica Radio network, and Samir Elatrash, a Canadian-Palestinian student with family in the occupied territories. Hillel is primarily represented by Noah Sarna, a leader of the Concordia chapter and a sincere and passionate fighter for Israel. There are some instances of unadulterated Anti-Semitism expressed, but more common are the Islamophobic statements of the Hillel students. Furthermore, Aaron Mate is characterized as a self-hating Jew during the documentary and also off screen by his opponents. This charge against Mate suggests that in some circles Jewishness demands unlimited support for Israel and all of its policies.

This film was released after the release of another documentary about the Netanyahu riots called Confrontation at Concordia, directed by Martin Himel. I haven’t seen Himel’s film (I’ve now added it to my watchlist) but according to wikipedia it heavily emphasizes the anti-Israel sentiments expressed and the anti-free speech dimension of the riots which ultimately succeeded in preventing Netanyahu from speaking. In interviews, Himel also was someone who regarded Discordia as flawed for its heavy presence of Aaron Mate, the “self-hating jew” who sided with Palestinians. During a talk given by Himel about the two documentaries, he said,  “In my Concordia, we did interview the Arab student leader Samir Elatrash, as well as the Jewish student leader Patrick Amar. But Discordia, besides interviewing Elatrash, interviewed a self-hating Jew who agreed with the Arabs. There was no interview with Amar or any other self-respecting Jewish spokesperson.” This kind of statement indicates a point of view where race and ethnicity determines political disposition. Discordia challenges that notion however, showing that Anti-Israel doesn’t have to mean Anti-Semetic, and in fact, opposition to oppression of Palestinians doesn’t have to mean death-to-Israel. The struggle over this issue is far more nuanced in its actual manifestations than a simple clash of ethnic hatreds.

Discordia is essentially a film about the subaltern struggle for Palestinian sovereignty from Israel, and an example of how this conflict carried out by diasporic communities far from the centre of the fight. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has its epicentre in Jerusalem’s West bank and the Gaza Strip - the ‘Occupied Territories’ - but it has its peripheral battlegrounds on university campuses and public spaces and events such as, for example, the Toronto Pride Parade, where the presence of the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is an annual source of controversy. At these peripheral sites of conflict, ideologies, flows of influence, rhetorics, symbols, and attitudes are the means of attack and the ground upon which the battle is waged, and they are relevant to the overall conflict.

vagabondia - film - 2000 - Dark Days

Dark Days
Marc Singer
Picture Farm
2000
94 minutes

Dark Days is a black and white documentary that covers the same subject matter as Jennifer Toth’s The Mole People and Margaret Morton’s The Tunnel, the subterranean tunnel dwellers of New York City. The film is the sole documentary by filmmaker Marc Singer, and has won a number of ‘best documentary’ awards in the year of its release.

Singer’s documentary is essentially a film version of the above mentioned books. The Mole People is a flawed work of journalism, The Tunnel is primarily a book of black and white photos, and Dark Days is a step further than the two, providing a deep investigation into the lives of the people who live under the NYC streets that validates aspects of Toth’s scrutinized text (although not the most outlandish aspects, such as stories of an underground citadel beneath grand central station), and with its black-and-white aesthetic, provides the dimension of time to Morton’s photographic work.  All this is set to a musical score composed by DJ Shadow.

What’s notable about Singer’s film is the sense of society, in tension with a sense of individual isolation, in that, while it shows the men living in solitude under conditions of 24-hour darkness, the film also displays a number of friendships between these people. The film also partially displays an economy of scavenging and the sale of found objects, an essentially social activity.
The film is also important for showing the resourcefulness of the tunnel-dwellers and their ability to find novel ways to fulfill the necessities of life.

mohawk warriors - film - 1992 - Acts of Defiance

Acts of Defiance
Alec G. MacLeod
National Film Board of Canada
1992
104 Minutes

Acts of Defiance is just one of a small number of NFB documentaries that recorded the events of the 1990 Oka Crisis that took place in the Western Quebec communities of Oka and Kanetesake. The crisis erupted when the municipal government of the Oka permitted the expansion of a golf course and luxury housing development on land long used by the Mohawk people of Kanetesake for things like the burial of their dead. The Mohawk Warrior society mounted a campaign of armed resistance against this expansion which ultimately failed although the crises led to a renewal of First Nations activism in Canada and the rise of warrior societies in many First Nations communities.

Defiance, directed by Alec MacLeod, opens with the scene of an illegal bingo game at a Kanetesake community hall during which it is announced that the first prize (a lawnmower) was donated by the Warriors, demonstrating how the Warrior Society was already woven into community life in the area.  MacLeod’s film includes voices from all of the involved communities in his treatment of this crisis however it is the voices of the Mohawks and their Warriors that are represented most sympathetically by the director. Members of the Warriors (essentially those Mohawks who defended the disputed lands from construction crews and law enforcement) were the primary source of verbal information pertaining to the events and were shown admired and celebrated by their community.  Conversely, the police and military (Canadian Forces were called into Oka) appear absurd at best and heavy handed at worst, while politicians (such as the mayor of Oka, Jean Oulette) appear mean spirited, corrupt, and arrogant.  This privileging of the Mohawk voices challenges the representation of the events appearing in much of the press coverage of the crisis at the time, most of which consisted of statements issued by law enforcement, military, and governmental personnel who had an interest in resolving the dispute to the favour of land developers.  

The film shows the decision to develop land long used by Mohawks as a contemporary form of colonial dispossession of First Nations sovereignty. A striking fact stated early in the film is that more Mohawk land had been taken legally for development since 1950 than in the entire previous era of Mohawk-European contact. The disputed land was originally used by Mohawks for grazing their animals, then European settlers began playing golf there (thus scaring Mohawk animals) and eventually a legal apparatus organized to privilege white interests could only recognize the space as a golf course. The film, through its many Native voices, expresses a more recent history of Mohawk anger at Canadian politics and society: their exclusion from the Meech Lake negotiations, and the shooting of a man named David Cross during a dispute with police. Such events, in addition to the continual encroachment of First Nations land, led to the development of an intense resentment towards a dominant society that appeared to only show them disrespect and demand obedience.
Much of Acts of Defiance is about the inability (or refusal) of outsiders to understand Mohawk resentment and opposition to them. The Mohawk Warriors fought in infrequent gun battles with police and military during the summer of 1990, but MacLeod’s film also shows unarmed Kanehtesake villagers standing up to armed personnel (who are also empowered by governmental authority) as well.  Furthermore, it is clear from watching the film that the heavy handed actions of police (who are shown seizing cases of soft drinks during searches of all vehicles entering or leaving the Mohawk community) steeled the resolve of the entire Mohawk population against government forces. While the Quebec police produced the local First Nations community in its entirety as adversary, the military largely seemed present for the purpose of producing a particular representation of the events that advance a long-standing Euro/Native colonial discourse.  

Famous photo of Canadian Forces private Paul Cloutier in staring contest with Mohawk Warrior Brad  Larocque.  Here is Vancouver punk band DOA's appropriation of of the image for the cover of their 1993 album, Loggerheads.

Brief end notes: The film ends with a celebration of the Warriors society members who spent time in jail.  The celebrated members, both men and women, were named in the film and the list included the sculptor Joe David who was later paralyzed in a violent dispute with reserve police.  The film also borrows heavily from CBC’s coverage of the events, much of which can be found on the CBC digital archives.  Finally, Warren Kinsella’s Web of Hate, a history of organized racist activity in Canada includes accounts of pogroms, anti-Mohawk rallies, by the good people of Oka.

black metal - film - 2008 - Until The Light Takes Us

Until the Light Takes Us
Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell
2008
93 minutes

The 2010 documentary film Lemmy, focusing on the life and times of Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmeister, was an extended study in perpetual adolescence and obsessive fandom that characterizes all levels of the culture of rock music.  Reknown rockers like Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters and Nirvana) and.... uhm... some Metallica guys... hang on Lemmy’s every word, just happy to bask in his aura, while their hero regales them with his own boring fan-stories of having met Little Richard and whoever else.  Lemmy was largely composed of talking head interviews with rock stars who profess their undying love, interspersed with scenes of the object of everyone’s affection showing off his toy collection and his hi-scores at some bar-top video-game.  Right after watching Lemmy, I watched Until the Light Takes Us, a documentary film about the Norwegian black metal scene that formed in Oslo during the late-1980s and early 1990s that turned out to be quite a palette-cleanser to the two-hour rock-star geek convention I had just finished watching.

Since the punk documentary American Hardcore came out, based on a Feral House book title of the same name, I have heard that a documentary version of the Feral House book Lords of Chaos was also in production. Until the Light Takes Us is unaffiliated with Lords of Chaos, it is a documentary directed by Aaron Aites, former songwriter and member of the indie rock band, Iran, and Audrey Ewell, a filmmaker who is currently working on a documentary about the %99/Occupy movement (according to her twitter page).  The documentary looks into the events that made the Norweigian black metal scene so notable (the burning of medieval churches, the intense personalities, the gloomy record store, the suicides and murders) but also into the legacy of these matters.  

Aites and Ewell’s documentary profiles the history of the black metal scene as something that formed from an intense opposition to everything in waking life.  The musicians hated mainstream society, Christianity, and in the case of Dead (the original lead singer of the original black metal band, Mayhem), life itself.  Tabloid newspapers and books like Lords of Chaos have covered the events that made this scene world famous, Dead’s suicide captured on camera, to be used as an album cover, the group’s relentless destruction of medieval Christian churces as a symbolic gesture towards reclaiming a pagan spiritual heritage, and Varg Vikernes murder of Mayhem lead guitarist Euronymous, are all discussed at length in this documentary.  Fenriz of Darkthrone and Vikirnes (formerly of Emperor, presently of Burzurm) are the two main interview subjects although a number of other individuals are interviewed as well in order to investigate the attitudes and actions of the “Inner Circle” (the name these individuals gave to their little social scene).  Vikirnes discussion of the murder is especially interesting, as he switches between two voices, one of an individual killing another in self-defense, and the second voice is of a killer for whom scenes of extreme violence are no big deal.

Dead: Mayhem's suicidal frontman.

Varg Vikernes smiling in court. 

This documentary has been criticized for being a work of uncritical fandom.  After watching Lemmy, a more highly regarded documentary, I know that it can get a lot worse than Until the Light Takes Us if you can’t stand relentless adulation on film.  Personally, I don’t see how this documentary can be read as such.  This film about a small music oriented subculture features a musical score that is largely of experimental and melodic electronic music by artists such as Boards of Canada rather than the sounds by the bands that make up this movie's focus.  The black metal content of the score is mostly of Burzum’s atmospheric keyboard pieces or of pieces by contemporary doom metal operators like Sunn O))).  Black metal music is played in short referential bursts that play a semiotic role in the film’s structure.  Otherwise this scene appears on film as, in present, through isolated interview subjects, most notably Fenriz of the band Darkthrone, who appears as a loner, and through Varg Vikirnes, a prison inmate.  These subjects look back upon a small music scene that never appeared vital, but instead was always isolated.

The legacy of this scene is also covered, as, for example, the Norweigan artist Bjarne Melgaard is made an interview subject, and his visual work, assemblage paintings with black metal themes, and some kind of black metal performance piece, is featured prominently, (Fenriz seems to hate it).

 Additionally, the store run by Euronymous, Helvete, where metal records and evil music was sold, and a centre for the black metal scene, is shown where it currently stands as a bright boutique of some sort.  These aspects of the film suggest that while the legacy of this tiny scene has greatly expanded beyond its origins in an Oslo shop basement, its original scene and the authentically dark pathos that made it so noteworthy is long gone.  



PS, the film is viewable in its entirety on Vimeo here.

flq, quebec nationalism - film - 1973 - Action: The October Crisis of 1970

Action: The October Crisis of 1970
Robin Spry
1973
National Film Board of Canada
87 minutes

For centuries, Quebec was essentially under the control of the Catholic Church and English Canada (first British colonial rule, and then the primarily English federal Government of Canada).  Beginning in the early-1950s, the social climate changed in the province, and the Quiet Revolution began to undermine the power held by the French political bosses that were friendly to English buisiness interests and to the church.  The events that set this cultural revolution in motion included the emergence of the surrealist-inflected avant-garde art movement Les Automatistes and the publication of their radical manifesto Refus Global, and the "Richard Riot" that errupted at a Montreal Canadiens hockey game on March 17, 1955 (see footage of the riot on the Canadiens Website).  The slow revolution put in motion by such events built over the next two decades, leading to increasing unionization among Quebec laborers, the election of socialistic politicians, and by the late 1960s, to the formation of an intensely radical organization fighting for Quebec nationalism called the Front Du Liberation du Quebec (FLQ).

Robin Spry’s (a late NFB filmmaker whose early work focused on Canadian social issues) documentary film, Action: The October Crisis of 1970, focuses on the political discourse that revolved around the most intense period of FLQ activity.  During that month, the FLQ took two men, British Trade Commissioner James Cross, and Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte, and held them for ransome for the purpose of advancing their cause of Quebec liberation from English Canada.  These events provoked a response from the Federal government, then led by Pierre Trudeau, that has been controversial ever since, namely the evocation of the War Measures Act.  This clampdown on civil liberties legitimated by the Act has been represented in Spry’s documentary (and elsewhere) by Trudeau’s “just watch me” speech where the Prime Minister spoke casually to CBC journalist Tim Ralfe about the need to reduce freedom for the sake of public safety.  The scenario is explicitly ironic as Trudeau appears unprotected on an Ottawa street, calling for an increase in military presence in Quebec for the purpose of restricting individual mobility.

The FLQ were revolutionaries in a similar vein to the Red Army Faction of West Germany, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army.  They were less accomplished, perhaps, than those two organizations, however their commitment to both politically radical rhetoric (primarily through the FLQ’s intellectual leader, Pierre Vallieres) and revolutionary violence, was similar.  In Spry’s film, the FLQ never appear outside of media clips, and their “voice” is mostly heard through a CBC broadcaster reading an FLQ statement as part of their ransom demands.

Otherwise, FLQ members appear mostly as still shots when the narration refers to them, a number of Quebec/Canadian political figures appear as interview subjects, while the FLQ members are the mostly absent referent around which those politicians orient their thoughts.

acadian nationalism - film - 1971 - Acadia Acadia?!?

Acadia Acadia?!?
Michel Brault & Pierre Perrault
National Film Board of Canada
1971
75 Minutes

This is the first film that I've watched from the National Film Board of Canada website which has recently made hundreds of its documentaries and animations available for streaming or download.  I intend to gradually go through the NFB website's content and write about any films that I deem appropriate for this blog.  As I'm moving through the NFB content alphabetically, Acadia Acadia?!? is the first such film, although there's a couple more in the A’s about the Oka standoff and the October Crisis of 1970 Quebec.

Acadia Acadia?!? is a black and white documentary that captures the short life of the Ralliement de la Jeunesse Acadienne, the student movement that called for the recognition of Acadian identity by the English political establishment in New Brunswick.  This documentary was mostly shot at the University of Moncton, the first and only French language university in New Brunswich.  The film's directors, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault, have worked in collaboration on a number of projects for the NFB and many of them focused on aspects of Francophone culture in Canada.  With this film, Brault and Perrault focus on a small student activist movement centered on the campus of a small university in a small Canadian city, but their film opens up a discussion about the status of French Canadians outside of Quebec during the 1960s.

Acadia was once a French Colony that once existed east of New France (modern Quebec) where New Brunswick, mainland Nova Scotia, and eastern Quebec currently is.  The Acadians were expelled from the region in the mid-18th century, settling in places like Louisiana following the French defeat to the English in their Colonial war for Canada.  Many of the Acadians returned to eastern Canada, following their expulsion, and they established French speaking communities throughout their former colony.  At the time of the events Brault and Perrault captured in their film, the city of Moncton was over 30% Francophone.  This %30 was hardly represented in the political and educational institutions of New Brunswick however, and therefore this student movement emerged to fight for language rights by, in part, asserting their Acadian heritage.

The film captured many of the significant events of this movement.  The successful call for a student strike at the Univertity of Moncton opened the documentary, which then segued into scenes of a large march for French language rights at Moncton city hall.  The scenes of the students speaking with city hall council were quintessential of the 1960s zeitgeist, as they featured a condescending group of aging white (and in this context, Anglophone) blowhards, proud of their ignorance, talking down to a group of educated and angry young outsiders.  The activists call for French to be recognized at city hall was rejected, showing how English, as the only recognized language of the political establishment of a city that's over a third Francophone, was a means of providing a barrier to access political power and services in that city.  The activists did not take their rejection well and they left a pig's head on the lawn of the mayor's home.

Brault and Perrault mix scenes of activist action with talking head interviews with the Young Acadians, wherin the student agitators express their opinions on the English power structure of the province, the meaning of Acadia, the state of the University of Moncton, their views on direct action activism and violence, and their wish to express themselves without giving up their identity.  The activists are clearly armed with recent sociological and postcolonial theories that contribute to many of the views they express in these interviews.  There are also some scenes shot at an Acadian village where the activists discuss language and cultural politics with some of the villagers - this scene is the converse of a scene where the activists sat at the meeting of a loyalist organization, where during the recital of the oath to the Queen and when the members of this organization sang 'God Save the Queen', the students held up the clenched fist of activist solidarity.  

The activists occupied the University of Moncton's science building for nine days in the winter of 1969.  The students were raising questions about why their school received zero funding from the provincial government while the University of New Brunswick was heavily subsidized (thus making tuition lower for students, and enabling the institution to provide nicer facilities and better services.)  The occupation ended with students submitting to police requests to move, despite earlier calls for passive non-violent resistance to the authorities, which pretty well caused the movement to dissipate.  Shortly thereafter students returned to classes, and thirty students were expelled, including Michel Blanchard, one of the activist leaders who speaks throughout the documentary.  Furthermore, the university closed its sociology department, the chief source of the social theories the activists operated on.

The English film is 75 minutes long, an abridged translation of the original French version that runs closer to two hours in length.  One feature of the translation is that there is only one female translator voice, which is fine, it works, but I never noticed how other such films make the choice to translate the words of male speakers into a male voice.  Overall, this film is probably one of the few sources of information on this particular movement, as a subaltern, Acadian, nationalism in Canada has mostly been a subject with regards to the First Nations or Quebec contexts.

Beginning in 2009, Michel Blanchard was permitted back onto the University of Moncton campus for the first time since 1970. 

PS:  Here is the link to watch the English version of the film on the National Film Board website.