Interpreting prairie cinema
Gerald S. Horne
Published in Prairie Forum, The Journal of the Canadian Plains Research Center, Vol. 22, no. 2, Fall 1997.
Abstract
Motion picture production is attracting a great deal of media attention in Saskatchewan and other centres across Canada. The economic "boom" in production is due to the fact that government agencies are investing in the motion picture industry to an extent never before experienced. The boom is celebrated as an opportunity to express prairie culture and ideas in a form that will reach a larger audience. This paper will attempt to define the concept of "prairie culture" based on some ideas developed by scholars of prairie writing and visual arts, then will attempt to determine whether or to what extent cinema is able to carry on this tradition of cultural expression.
Introduction
Can a region's culture be summed up by reference to a few generative ideas, and can these ideas be expressed in the cinema produced in that region?
If one speaks of the literature or the painting produced in the prairie region, the answer given by some critics, writers, and artists is positive. Whether or not cinema conforms to the same generative ideas as art and literature must be explored by first examining the conditions which determine cinema as an expressive form. Some of these conditions include history, artistic tradition, the artistic community, and the marketplace.
This essay is not intended to be an exhaustive catalogue of films produced on the Prairies. Rather, it aims to answer the question posed above by citing a few examples in a roughly chronological fashion. As an organizing principle for this examination, we should first explore the factors which influence prairie cinema today.
The prairie environment
Prairie prose and poetry were first influenced by the journals of the early explorers and settlers of the region, who were struck by the isolation, by the harsh climate, and by the expansive look of the prairies.
For McCourt (1.), only by exploring the works of these early writers ". . . can we hope to come to something approaching a sympathetic understanding of our literature and of ourselves," p 162. For example, there are the writings of British soldier Sir William Francis Butler:
"There is no mountain range to come up across the skyline, no river to lay its glistening folds along the middle distance, no dark forest to give shade to foreground or to bring perspective, no speck of life, no trace of man, nothing but the wilderness. Reduced thus to its own nakedness, space stands forth with almost terrible grandeur. One is suddenly brought face to face with that enigma we try to comprehend by giving it the names of endless, interminable, measureless; that dark inanity which broods upon a waste of moorland at dusk, and in which fancy sees the spectral and the shadowy." (2.)
Critics have contemplated the origin of myths and ideas manifest in the literary works of a region. Some have felt that the look and feel of the land and climate have had a significant influence on the creative processes of several generations of writers.
"All discussion of the literature produced in the Canadian west must of necessity begin with the impact of the landscape upon the mind." (3.)
The environment and its influences on the drama of life provide a starting point for novelists working in the prairie region. For example, W. O. Mitchell begins Who Has Seen the Wind with the following:
"Here was the least common denominator of nature, the skeleton requirements simply, of land and sky -- Saskatchewan prairie. It lay wide around the town, stretching tan to the far line of the sky, shimmering under the June sun and waiting for the unfailing visitation of wind, gentle at first, barely stroking the long grasses and giving them life; later, a long hot gusting that would lift the black topsoil and pile it in barrow pits along the roads, or in deep banks against the fences." (4.)
Prairie visual artists have been moved to paint dramatic skies, and have meditated on the subtle palette of colours of a prairie landscape.
The first landscape paintings from the Canadian prairie region look a lot like European landscapes. By the 1950s prairie painting escaped the conventions of the traditional 19th century landscape art of Europe. Dorothy Knowles' impressionistic landscapes are an accessible median between the representational painting of the early landscape painters and the abstractions of William Perehudoff and Otto Rogers in Saskatoon, and Ken Lochhead, Art McKay,, and Ted Godwin in Regina. Each of these artist, including Knowles, was influenced in his or her way by modernism, which dominated the thinking of painters during the 1950s and 60s and was nurtured by visits to Regina and Emma Lake by New York critic Clement Greenburg; but each of these artists retained a strong connection with the colours, shapes and textures they observed on the prairies. (5.)
The next generation of prairie artists -- David Thauberger, Donna Kriekle, Franklin Heisler and Jerry Didur, for example -- looked beyond the prairies for stylistic inspiration, but much of their subject matter, both visual and narrative, celebrates the prairie. (6.)
Writers and artists alike have immersed themselves in the folk ways of the early European immigrants, and have produced new forms that introduce the boldness and irony of modern art to the forms and themes of traditional stories, arts and crafts. (7.) Aboriginal writers and artists such as Bob Boyer have sought inspiration from the traditional crafts and folklore of their people.
But what about cinema? Cinema is a pastiche drawn from various levels of culture, and many cinema images are strongly influenced by the stereotypes propagated by Hollywood and other commercial media centres. Some of the most authentic or aesthetically pure prairie cinema may consist of works which are a homage to the painting and writing of the region. Many short films celebrate the work of prairie artists and writers: these include biographies of Margaret Lawrence, Joe Fafard, Otto Rogers, and others.
In our era especially, "art" is one of many cultural expressive forms. There is also advertising, TV programs, pop music (8.), as well as a variety of traditional arts and crafts maintained by churches, schools, and ethnic communities. Cultural expression can also be described as a representation of other levels of sociolinguistic interaction borne by informal conversation and political discourse at all levels. To attempt to define cinema in terms of "high" culture -- the culture identified by mainstream art criticism -- would be to ignore most of what cinema has to offer as a vehicle for "culture" in its widest, anthropological, sense.
So in cinema, all kinds of cultural content are considered fair game. This is because, in its broadest definition, "cinema" is a term for a representational process which involves technological practises. Some cinema is interesting because it seems to be an accurate representation of some form of reality, whether that be the "real world" as someone has perceived it, or of a popular cultural expressive form (music, dance, poetry, and visual crafts).
Cinema aesthetics: realism and expressionism
Cinema is an outgrowth from photography and there is an assumption that its technology can render an accurate representation of reality. Cinema and photography are rooted in some here and now, and by necessity are associated with the ambiguity and multifarious meanings of human existence. Cinema theorist André Bazin has said that ambiguity is the essence of reality. According to Bazin's view, the artist who tries to impose some kind of external structure to the image by manipulating what can be manipulated -- script, mise en scéne, and montage -- could be accused of going against that which cinema can do best -- the representation of what simply is. Another cinema theorist, Siegfried Kracauer, also celebrated the indeterminacy of realist cinema: ideally the film maker will let what is observed do the speaking, while avoiding the temptation to impose a structure. Kracauer said that plot is the natural enemy of realism. (9.)
Cinema can be either realistic or expressionistic, or a blend of the two (which points to the trend in art known as "post-modernism"). Expressive cinema is often the least accessible because it eschews the forms and stereotypes of popular cinema. Instead, it attempts to communicate by way of lesser known symbols, which may be part of the visual vocabulary of only a few cinema artists and their followers. Realist art, on the other hand, can be quite easy to understand because it reflects the familiar look and feel of reality.
At its best, cinema, like opera and theatre, is a number of arts and crafts working together to provide an emotionally moving experience for the audience. Excellent expressive cinema can be difficult to achieve because of the high cost of production and the necessity in most production practices to involve many people with possibly conflicting ideas about what is aesthetically important. Some of these collaborative elements may have little to do with aesthetics and more to do with a tight budget, a desire to exploit the largest commercial market, or a political agenda of some kind.
Often the best cinema is the result of a strong creative force, an auteur, who translates a particular idea into cinematic language. The names Bergman, Fellini, Hitchcock, Ford, and Scorsese are often connected with the French film critics' definition of "auteur". The auteur has an idea and a will to realize it, is skilled in the crafts of cinema, and has the support or the wherewithal to make the film as he wishes it made with little or no compromise. Auteurs are rare, but they do exist, even among regional film makers.
By recognizing some of cinema's strengths and shortcomings, we can begin to search for value among a wide variety of cinema and video images that have come from the prairies. We should re-state what it is that cinema does well:
First, as an emotionally moving point of view about reality, cinema is unequaled: cinema can transport us to another time and place. We learn about a worldview, and perhaps develop some understanding of why things are as they are. "Direct cinema", or "cinema verite", can be an excellent medium for phenomenological or ethnographic research. These ideas are also essential to an understanding of what has become known as "realist cinema". Realist cinema is a dramatized representation of reality. Most modern dramatic films could be called "realist", though most films warp their representation of reality to conform to the conventions of story-telling (plot and a strong protagonist), or attempt to entertain the audience through the use of spectacular visual effects or overblown dramatic conflicts. The best realist dramatic cinema manages to capture the real while employing just enough dramatic and cinematic conventions to maintain audience interest.
Second, film can be expressive, in the way that a piece of music is expressive. We bop along mentally, perhaps even fidgeting with excitement, as a series of images works on us at a primal level or stimulates our intellect with visual symbolism and poetry.
Part of the appeal of music videos, or any work of cinema which uses a great deal of contrived sound, is the action on the two senses simultaneously, thus creating many layers of meaning and the harmony or irony that develops between these levels of meaning. Early cinema theorists disliked sound films, claiming that the true art of cinema had its heyday during the silent era of cinema. This may be because dialogue and music in early sound films were often used as a crutch for weak visuals, or were used to transform cinema into another medium altogether: a kind of radio drama with pictures.
Expressive film might be able to evoke some ideas or emotions that are elemental to the prairie experience. Many expressionistic short films and videos, as well as realist dramas and documentaries reflecting prairie themes, have been generated by film students and film makers associated with film cooperatives in Regina and Winnipeg, and video cooperatives such as E Media in Calgary or Video Verité in Saskatoon.
As we begin to understand "prairie" film, we have to consider that much film and video is a means of delivering other forms of art, whether they be visual or literary. Some films are artistic in and of themselves due to the skill and artistry of the film makers, and can be considered either "realistic" or "expressive" in the terms outlined here.
Before we narrow the focus to exclude (somewhat arbitrarily) all but a few films, we should celebrate the fact that any films or videos with prairie themes have been made at all. Anyone who has taken the time to give birth to a script, then to knock on doors to raise the funds for a film or video, deserves great praise. Production is a long and difficult process, particularly in the Canadian prairie region where media has not been considered a key industry. Production is even more difficult if the subject is neither of great commercial interest nor of interest to those who grant funds from an agency concerned with the current definitions of "art".
Some prairie films and film makers
The first prairie film was also one of the first films made in Canada. James Freer, a Manitoba farmer, made a film of farm life in 1898. (10.) The film was sponsored by the CPR to promote, in England, the sale of land on the prairies. Though much talked about, no prints remain of this first prairie film, but one can speculate: being a promotional piece it is highly unlikely that it contained images of prairie blizzards or other elements which showed the harder aspects of life on the prairies during this period.
Until the 1960s film activity on the prairies was most notable for some film pioneers. For example, there were Bill Marsden, Ron Brown, and Nick Zubko of Edmonton. Two Regina film makers who had done some work for the National Film Board of Canada were Dick Bird, a Regina nature photographer, who also did some contract filming for Walt Disney nature productions, and Lawrence and Evelyn Cherry of Regina, who produced films about agriculture and rural life in the prairie region for both the NFB and for the Government of Saskatchewan. There are many others worthy of mention.
When television came to the prairies in the mid 1950s, prairie TV stations produced some documentaries as part of their mandate to reflect the region for their viewers -- usually in a style that showed early television stations' desire to do news reportage or promotion of local events and institutions. Some programs and sequences from the films of Marsden, Bird, and Cherry, as well as some early TV film documentaries, have been retained by provincial and national archives, and on viewing provide some insight into the social history of the region.
Other opportunities for the representation of prairie themes and stories were offered by the National Film Board of Canada. Notable early NFB films included Listen to the Prairies (1945), which features a choir singing over images of wheat fields blowing in the wind. In 1954, Roman Kroitor and Colin Low were sent west to make the short films Corral, about an Alberta cowboy rounding up and breaking wild horses and Paul Tomkowicz: Street Railway Switchman, which incorporated a voice over by a Toronto actor reading lines based on the elderly Tomkowicz's account of working on the Winnipeg street railway line during a cold prairie winter day. Though no more remarkable than an undergraduate film school student's thesis project, both films were hailed as artistic triumphs. They were innovative in terms of both theme and style, but their notoriety may have more to do with the extent to which the NFB promoted the films than with the quality of the films.
The Drylanders (1964) was one of the first feature film productions of the National Film Board of Canada. The only three feature films made by the NFB in the early 1960s included Nobody Waved Goodbye, about a rebellious suburban Toronto teenager, and The World of Leopold Z, a whimsical tale of a snowplow driver in Montreal. The Drylanders retells a classic story of a family of settlers, who arrive from Eastern Canada in the late 1800s to claim a piece of inexpensive land. The film examines two generations, ending with the patriarch's death in the 1930s. It includes such memorable prairie images as the family making their way west with an oxen cart, building a sod hut in which to live during their first winter, welcoming their first "bumper crop" of wheat, then watching as the land blows away and neighbors leave in the "dirty 1930s".
Started in 1939 as the federal government's film office, the National Film Board of Canada was put to work making documentaries about Canada's role in World War II. After the war the NFB set to the task of "interpreting Canada to Canadians and the world". In the 1970s, regional offices were set up in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and other Canadian cities. Saskatchewan did not have an NFB production office, which has meant that few NFB films were made in Saskatchewan. Various attempts were made to right this regional bias. In the late 1970s short vignettes were produced on prairie themes and stories. Most notable was The Shipbuilder, based on a true story about a Finnish immigrant who builds a ship on his prairie farm and drags it to the Saskatchewan river with the desire to sail to his homeland. A half-hour comedy drama by Regina writer Ken Mitchell, The Great Electrical Revolution, also came out of this era.
The prairies have also produced film makers working in the field of educational documentary. These include nature cameraman Robert Long of Saskatchewan, who is known for Aspen (1989), which was produced for the BBC and the PBS series Nature, and the Home Place series (1995) based on the writings of Saskatchewan ecologist Stan Rowe. Another nature cinematographer, Albert Karvonen of Alberta, produced Drummer in the Woods (1976), Lakeside Habitat (1979), High Country (1982), Country of the Muskox (1990), and Prairie Grasslands: Wind Country (1993).
Many interesting educational documentaries and docudramas have been created by small production companies working in the prairies with funding from provincial government and provincial educational television authorities. These films have often achieved wider exposure on educational television at home and abroad, and have thus taken prairie ideas to a wider audience. They have also offered film makers an opportunity to gain the skills and confidence to take on more ambitious projects of the dramatic genre.
A few short dramatic films have also emerged since the 1970s. For example, Tom Radford of Alberta produced Life after Hockey, about a child's dream of playing hockey like Maurice "Rocket" Richard. Metis producer Gil Cardinal, also of Alberta, has produced a number of documentaries with the National Film Board, and has directed episodes of the CBC television series North of 60.
Manitoba's film industry was nurtured during the 1970s by the National Film Board Prairie Studio and by the Winnipeg Film Group, a cooperative which helped independents to gain access to equipment and production facilities. Out of this rich soil came: Allan Kroeker, who made God is Not a Fish Inspector (1980), The Catch (1981) and The Pedlar (1982); Guy Madden, with Archangel (1990); John Paizs, who made Crime Wave (1985); Aaron Kim Johnston, with The Last Winter (1989); and many others who have continued working in the media of animation, short documentary and experimental film and video.
In Saskatchewan the cooperatives Filmpool and Video Verité have helped many film makers to practice their arts and crafts, though feature film production is only beginning to emerge from the provincial scene. Some Saskatchewan film makers who have produced short dramas in the past 15 years include Stephen Surjik (Razor in the Wind), Will Dixon (Heartline, The Garden, Guitar Man), Gerald Saul (Wheat Soup), Gord McLennan (Silence Amid Sound), Brian Stockton (The Final Gift, The 24 Store, The Weight of the World) and Mark Wihak (The Land of Cain, The Ballad of Don Quinn).
The 1970s was a period of expansion of the Canadian motion picture industry. New money was available in the form of loans and tax incentives through the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC), later Telefilm Canada. The result of this was the production of a number of feature films on prairie themes. These included Alien Thunder (1973), directed by Claude Fournier, in which Donald Sutherland plays a mountie chasing a Cree Indian accused of murdering a sergeant. A town was built for the movie near Duck Lake, Saskatchewan. The film was later named Dan Candy's War, and, like most Canadian films, suffered very limited theatrical distribution because of the monopoly of the multinational distribution companies.
The big distributors, who control most of the theatre screens in North America, need to make each of their screens pay a maximum, so they are compelled to distribute only big budget films with "star" performers and multi-million dollar promotion budgets. There are over a hundred feature-length independent films made in North America each year, but only a handful are purchased by big distributors for theatrical release. Most Canadian feature films have missed the big screen and ended up in limited distribution on video, or broadcast on television. Attempts by Canadian producers to gain distribution have met with demands by the multinationals to adopt a more "international" style of film making, which means, in their definition, making films that look like mainstream Hollywood productions. Television and feature film executives believe that the largest audience wants a simple, dramatic story with a strong protagonist, visual spectacle and well-known "star" performers. Locale and local culture are used only as interesting or quaint backdrops for the dramatic action that dominates the screen.
In Paperback Hero (1973), directed by Peter Pearson, Keir Dullea (star of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) plays a womanizing hockey player leading a fantasy life as a town gunslinger. Filmed in Delisle, near Saskatoon, the title comes from a song by Canadian balladeer Gordon Lightfoot. Who Has Seen the Wind (1977), directed by Torontonian Allan King, was based on W. O. Mitchell's coming-of-age novel. Filmed in Arcola, Saskatchewan, the film provided crew and cast jobs for about 20 young Saskatchewan film craftspeople. After the production wrapped, six of them formed Filmpool, the Saskatchewan film cooperative, with Canada Council funding. The Saskatchewan government provided some equity financing for the feature in return for the apprenticeship positions on the production.
The Hounds of Notre Dame (1981), produced and directed by Fil Fraser, is a tale based on the early years of Pere Athol Murray at Notre Dame College in Wilcox, Saskatchewan. Funded in part by alumni of the college, the film warmly remembers Pere's rough language, anti-CCF sentiments, and whisky drinking, as well as his strong resolve to make patriots of a motley collection of farm boys and small town hoods during the depression years. The title comes from the name of a winning hockey team which Pere Murray founded. Why Shoot the Teacher (1978) was based on the Max Braitwaite novel by the same name. Bud Cort plays a school teacher who begins his first job in a one-room prairie schoolhouse; Samantha Eggar plays a farmer's wife who has an affair with the young teacher.
Though these films disappeared quickly from theatrical and video distribution, The Hounds of Notre Dame, Who Has Seen The Wind and Don't Shoot the Teacher, have found a home on late, late TV movie shows across North America and have thus taken prairie culture far and wide. A friend reported to me having watched Who Has Seen The Wind on late night TV in Miami.
One of the best prairie films of the era was made south of the border with private and US public funding: Northern Lights (1979) is John Hanson and Rob Nilsson's recollection of the struggles of farmers in pre-WWI North Dakota, with the protagonist attempting to organize the populist Nonpartisan League, an organization founded by farmers to fight for a better system of quotas and pricing for farm products. This is a period drama, with the present day storyteller appearing in documentary segments before and within the dramatic sequences. The film expresses the feel of the prairie landscape, as well as the prairie community culture of the early 1900s. A similar film could have been made about Saskatchewan pioneers and the early years of the CCF or one of the other social/political movements which grew out of the inequities of the prairie grain economy.
In the 1980s and 1990s, film development corporations were started in Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan to use provincial government funds to supplement federal government funding through Telefilm Canada. These funds have resulted in a number of half-hour and one-hour television dramas and documentaries. In addition, a few theatrical feature films have appeared.
Two women directors whose careers began in the 80s were Norma Bailey of Winnipeg and Anne Wheeler of Edmonton. Norma Bailey's Daughters of the Country (1987), a four part made-for-television drama series, shows the lives of four Metis women over a period of two hundred years. Anne Wheeler directed Loyalties (1986), Bye Bye Blues (1989), a story of Wheeler's mother, who, left alone by her husband during World War II, becomes a singer in a dance band touring the prairies, Angel Square (1990), a children's story set in 1945, and The Diviners (1992), based on Margaret Lawrence's novel set in small town Manitoba. Loyalties is the story of a Metis woman and an Englishwoman who settles with her doctor husband in the northern Alberta community of Lac La Biche. The Metis woman goes to work as a housekeeper for the the aloof Englishwoman, and a friendship develops between the two as they discover they face similar problems with domestic abuse. The doctor husband, who has had to relocate several times when it was discovered that he had sexual relations with young girls, is eventually dealt with by the wife and her Metis friend, whose daughter is the latest of the doctor's victims.
In Saskatchewan, only one theatrical feature film has emerged from the local film community, Wheat Soup. This is a low budget feature about a farmer who has lost his land and wanders the prairie. Set in the post-apocalyptic future, and produced by Filmpool, this 16mm black and white film captures the stark beauty of the prairie landscape. Several film makers had their beginnings with Filmpool. One of them, Brian Stockton, is one of the new creative voices in prairie film making. Having attended Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Centre (where he produced The Weight of the World (1995)), he may yet have an opportunity to produce a feature film with wider release. Meanwhile, Stockton, like many prairie film makers, fights to acquire funding to do even low budget short films.
SaskFilm and other Canadian film agencies use most of their budgets helping to finance $1 million to $4 million American TV style movies-of-the-week destined for the pay television market. These films employ some Saskatchewan actors or craftspeople and use Saskatchewan locations. Unfortunately the locations are seldom identified within these films, but appear as generic mid-western US cities. This is done to appease the average American viewers, who would be unfamiliar with locations with names such as Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. The film agencies justify their investment by insisting on a Saskatchewan-based co-producer. They claim that medium-budget American-style TV dramas provide training for the Saskatchewan producer and local actors and craftspeople. They also claim that their investment will have a good chance of payback and that the money spent in the province by the film production amounts to spinoffs equivalent to a sum larger than their initial investment.
Indigenous film makers are unable to gain significant funding for their projects because these are not deemed financially viable. SaskFilm, like Telefilm Canada and other provincial film development agencies, seldom funds a project unless a large percentage of its budget has been secured from a major broadcaster or distributor. The regional story by an indigenous writer is less likely to gain the cooperation of an American co-producer or broadcaster. The more colloquial film project is not considered unless it can be proven to have wider appeal in the marketplace.
In spite of these odds, one of the strongest feature films to emerge from the prairies in recent years was a made-for-television drama, which succeeds where many have failed because of a well-written script: Paris or Somewhere (1993), directed by Brad Turner, produced by Credo Productions of Manitoba and Reel Eye Media (Gord McLennan and company) of Saskatchewan, is carefully construed and visually interesting. Unfortunately, the acting is uneven: Callum Keith Rennie and Molly Parker are sometimes captivating, but often over-the-top with their characterizations of Christie Mahon, a young drifter, and Peg Kennedy, a girl trying to manage an isolated prairie store owned by her lazy father (played by Francis Damberger). Swift Current, Saskatchewan writer Lee Gowan based the script on the Irish play Playboy of the Western World by John M. Synge. Synge's play is about a man who wins immediate respect when he tells people that he murdered his abusive father. Gowan's script succeeds in bringing Synge's mythic characters into the modern prairie landscape, although the use of television newscasts as the private monologue of the lead character's ego comes off as campy. Where Synge employed the cadence of Irish brogue, Gowan tries to utilize prairie vernacular, which is colourful, but lacks the old country charm that makes the Oedipal myth dramatically convincing.
The producers found an isolated coulee in the Qu'Appelle Valley system northeast of Regina as the setting for the farming community that embraces the young protagonist, then rejects him when his father turns out not to be dead, but merely injured, and comes looking for him. The producers are to be admired for attempting to bring a better quality of drama and poetry to the pablum format of made-for-TV movies. To be a successful stand-alone feature, however, the film would have to be re-edited to avoid looking like a TV program, with its use of fadeouts for commercial breaks, which are preceded by "stingers" -- plot points designed to bring the audience back after the commercial.
Thanks to its writer, Paris or Somewhere succeeds in celebrating the people and the discourse of prairie Canada. One interesting point is the contrast between Canadian and American prairie people, with the comic misconceptions each has of the other. The young protagonist hitchhikes to Saskatchewan from Montana, and when he tells the man who gives him a ride about his plan to try Canada, the driver says: "Kid, you wouldn't be heading up to the deep freeze. Of course, there's no murders in Canada. That's the only reason people live there. They only speak French." When he drops the kid off he says "There it is, the Big Empty."
In the end the young drifter decides to stay in Canada, if not for the independence he feels when he escapes his domineering father, then for his love for Peg, the young girl who first gives him refuge. Paris or Somewhere received funding support from SaskFilm, Film Manitoba and Telefilm Canada. This funding was contingent upon broadcast licenses, which provided a portion of the budget. If the film is able to recoup its investment through international sales, it will prove that an indigenous story, set in the Canadian prairie region, is of interest to broadcasters outside of Canada.
A critical perspective
We have sought a definition of the prairie aesthetic based on some ideas about art and literature, then attempted to identify these ideas in the cinema of the region, but in order to gain an understanding of the character and structure of the cinema of the prairies, i.e. what "is" rather than what "ought to be", given the aesthetic roots of prairie stories and images, we must ask questions about the practises of film production and distribution.
Gilles Hébert (11.) has pointed out that most of the films which have emerged from the prairies were produced by outsiders, so may well reflect the views of the colonizers rather than the colonized. This statement presupposes that prairie people are colonized, and to a certain extent history shows that this may be a cultural as well as an economic fact. For many years the fate of prairie farmers hung on the whims of Wall Street and Bay Street bankers, and of multinational grain companies. Similarly, prairie culture has received little exposure in national and international media, except in the form of stereotypes.
International film audiences turned their attention to the prairies when the silent film Back to God's Country (1919) appeared. The film starred Nell Shipman, and was produced by her husband Ernest Shipman ("ten percent Ernie" of Calgary). In it Nell "lolls about in erotic play with Brownie the bear, nuzzling his snout and tweaking his ears, as skunks, squirrels, raccoons and baby foxes cavort about her." (12.) Shipman's film, like most of the Hollywood films made or set in the Canadian prairies -- Call of the Wild (1914), Calgary Stampede (1925), and North West Mounted Police (1939) to name a few -- differed slightly from the classic American western in their portrayal of a myth of a people in conflict or in harmony with nature. Hollywood films set in the prairie region use the landscape as a background for conflict between lawmen and villains or between ranchers and farmers. Though Hollywood westerns seem to have a perennial appeal, films featuring Canada's western myths have seldom found support in Hollywood production boardrooms.
Where Hollywood left off as mythmaker and colonizer, the National Film Board of Canada took over. The Film Board, though a proudly Canadian institution, nonetheless looked out on the regions of Canada from a lofty perch in Ottawa (later Montreal). Film crews were dispatched to record and interpret regional stories, then return to home base for post-production. An example of this is Paper Wheat (1976), a documentary about a troupe of prairie actors who toured a play about the social conditions that gave rise to the wheat pools. Though suggested by NFB Winnipeg producers, it was eventually filmed by Albert Kish and a crew from NFB Montreal.
An aggressive distribution system has always been part of the Film Board's corporate structure -- presumably to show a presence in every community in the country. During the years before television, projectionists were regularly sent to prairie communities and other rural areas of Canada to show NFB documentaries. NFB founder John Grierson's mandate to Òinterpret Canada to CanadiansÓ is an interpretation mediated by a style and a perspective honed in the NFB central office.
"The prairies were also subjected to this paternalistic (production) and colonizing (exhibition) system where the activity was that of outsiders dealing with (presumably) ÒprairieÓ issues or themes for local, national, and international consumption. This system meant genuine as opposed to authentic filmmaking prescribed for unwitting prairie audiences, in their best interests." (13.)
Drylanders is an example of this system. Directors, crew and lead actors were from eastern Canada, and a few locals were hired for bit parts while local authorities were commandeered to provide services such as special effects. The Swift Current Fire Department, for example, provided a rain shower on cue. The resulting story could well be construed as a local tale in the NFB's realist "docudrama" sense, but for the most part it serves to keep alive the myth of the prairie pioneer settler for both local and national audiences.
In the late 1970s the NFB opened a regional production centre in Winnipeg, and although it has been a struggle for its producers, Mike Scott and Jerry Kreptekevich, managed to maintain some autonomy from the Montreal head office, and helped to stimulate local production and provide an infrastructure for a small film industry in Winnipeg. Another regional office was later opened in Edmonton, while film makers in Saskatchewan have had to compete unsuccessfully with Winnipeg film makers for scarce funding.
Conclusion
This essay is a search for a definition of prairie cinema. A pure prairie cinema may be an ideal, but the ideal is clear -- it must begin with an accurate representation of the feeling one gets contemplating the prairie. It must capture the essence of prairie people, their idiom, their inflection, and their down-to-earth ethic. Prairie songwriter Connie Kaldor captured some of it in her song:
"Spring on the prairie comes like a surprise; one minute there's snow on the ground, the next the sun's in your eyes." (14.)
The prairie ideal has been captured by certain prairie image makers, particularly painters. Some, like Dorothy Knowles, have done sensitive representations of the landscape, others, like Otto Rogers or William Perehudof, have achieved a level of truth about the prairie through abstraction.
In film, as in drama and in literature, it is not sufficient to merely reflect images of the landscape. There must also be a successful attempt to show how environment, economics and other social factors are manifest in the words and actions of the characters who people the story.
"True regional literature is above all distinctive in that it illustrates the effect of particular, rather than general, physical, economic and racial features upon the lives of ordinary men and women. It should and usually does do many other things besides, but if it does not illustrate the influence of a limited and particular environment it is not true regional literature." (15.)
Whatever the medium, there is a core that is common and reflects a clear idea of prairie. It is an idea which is not overcome by ideologies such as modernity, nor by conformity to cinematic conventions. To make the drama function properly conventions (plot, protagonist, genre) may have to be present, but they are there to provide a structure for an audience who hunger for a familiar yarn, not to overwhelm the thing being portrayed or represented.
In dramatic feature film, pure "prairie" has not yet been achieved, though certain experimental shorts and documentaries have attempted it. There have been glimpses, but seldom in a drama production. Nilsson might have achieved it in Northern Lights (1979). A film by the Cohn Brothers of Minneapolis, Fargo (1995), managed to capture the ennui of a prairie winter, and its actors and director captured something of the prairie idiom in their characterizations, but again, genre may have dominated this film. A murder story, complete with the bloodbath scenes now an inevitable part of the post-modern dramatic films from mainstream Hollywood, may be considered out of place among prairie scenes and characterizations. Or perhaps not. A film by Atlantis Productions of Toronto, called The Painted Door (1984), based on the short story by prairie writer Sinclair Ross, leaves one with the uncomfortable lump-in-the-throat one gets when one confronts the reality of a violent death. In the case of the latter story, it is the death of a man driven to suicide by freezing in a prairie blizzard and the feelings of guilt it raises in his adulterous wife.
Could violence be part of the prairie imagination? Prairie people have heard their share of grisly murder tales. The Thatcher murder trial may be indelibly etched into the prairie memory -- particularly after the national CBC broadcast of the TV mini-series Love and Hate, based on real events and Maggie SigginsÕ book A Canadian Tragedy, about the former Saskatchewan Cabinet member who was convicted of murdering his ex wife.
In the context of post-modern story-telling the murder or violent death story may fit very comfortably with the traditional idea that the prairie is cold and unforgiving, but it may work best in a story about death by nature rather than death at the hand of another human being. Everyone who has grown up on the prairie has heard about someone driven mad by loneliness, or by cabin fever brought on by isolation during a long prairie winter. This too may be part of the idea of prairie: there may well be a dark side to the prairie imagination. An early film by Filmpool called Razor in the Wind (1978) explored this theme.
So, whether the image be one of warmth and hope -- the hope of a new beginning suggested by a Connie Kaldor song -- or an image from the depth and darkness of a prairie winter, there is a solid idea of prairie to be found. People who have lived here for any length of time know the idea. It can be seen in the images of prairie painters, or in the words of prairie writers. Whether this idea of prairie can be achieved in film or video remains to be seen. Perhaps prairie film makers together will create a body of work that will achieve a perfect idea of prairie. Perhaps the demands of filmic genres, driven by the marketplace and the always-serious lack of funds for dramatic film production, will curtail such an endeavour.
To understand what perhaps ought to be strived for by prairie cinema, it is useful to examine what a famous prairie poet and literary critic has said about the possibilities for a true prairie literature. Eli Mandel chewed on the idea in a 1973 publication of the Canadian Plains Research Centre. He begins by paying tribute to Kreisel and McCourt (16.), who wrote about regional Canadian literature.
". . . three features will distinguish regional writing: one is accuracy in description; a second is poetic power in evoking the atmosphere of a particular environment; and the third is a kind of psychological insight into the influence of a particular environment on the lives of those who inhabit it." (16.)
If this, by extension, is the definition of prairie cinema, then it may already have been achieved by some films from the prairies -- films which have reflected prairie images and the prairie idiom. Representation is not enough, however, there must be more. Mandel goes on to say:
". . . if it is meaningful to talk about images of prairie man, one should be able to find in, say, prairie literature a certain coherence or unity or identity, but the attempt to find this in some kind of realism or accuracy fails, because accuracy of fact and of tone is essentially superficial, if not indeed a contradiction in terms. In brief, if there is a distinctive regional prairie literature, it would have to be, in Fiedler's terms, mythic; and (as by now you will suspect), I am prepared to argue that we do find, in our best writers, precisely such a mythicized world." (17.)
Mandel explains myth in the context of prairie literature by reference to themes which Kreisel identified.
". . . the extraordinary sense of confinement by vast and seemingly unlimited space; the anxieties sharpened by this confinement; the definition of self by violation or conquest of land, a conquest which, he says, involves much more violence than we have been yet able to admit, even in our literature; the price paid by the conqueror; the sense of being possessed by the land; the austere puritanism bred in that harsh world; and the melodramatic eruptions of passion because of such restraint; the theme of the imprisoned spirit." (18.)
If Mandel is correct, then, it is the mythical which should be the goal of prairie literature and not just the real. In film, realism is possible in documentary or cinema verite, and drama which imitates reality may reach a level of truth that moves an audience. This occurs during particular scenes in Fargo and in Paris or Somewhere. It may even be found at a higher level of abstraction in some films by prairie experimental film makers.
The best cinema, however, and the best literature or visual art for that matter, is the work which restates a truth residing deeper than mere representational truth -- it is a truth that can only be explained by reference to myth. A work of art that successfully achieves mythical truth warrants the highest form of praise. Such a work may not yet have emerged from the prairie experience, but there is potential, given the funding support of provincial film agencies and prairie based broadcasters and the growing confidence of prairie film makers.
1. E. A. McCourt, "Prairie Literature and its Critics," A Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains, edited by Richard Allen, Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina, 1973.
2. Captain William Butler, The Wild North Land, London, 1873, pp. 30-31. quoted it McCourt, p 153.
3. Henry Kreisel, "The Prairie: A State of Mind," Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Vol. VI, Series 4 (June, 1968), p. 173, quoted in Mandel, p. 203.
4. W. O. Mitchell, Who Has Seen The Wind, Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1947.
5. Norman Zepp and Michael Parke-Taylor, introduction to "The Second Generation: Fourteen Saskatchewan Painters," Regina, Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina, 1985, pp. 8-13.
6. For example, the Chicago Art Brut style adopted by Jerry Didor, or the California Funk style adopted by ceramicist Franklin Heisler and others.
7. One of the best known is William Kurelek, whose dreamlike, sometimes surreal works were influenced by the colours and Christian iconography of pre-revolutionary Russian and Ukrainian painting, and by the colours and patterns of traditional Ukrainian folk arts.
8. Pop is not just music but a complex of interrelated subcultures from urban centres in the case of rap and soul, or from traditional and folk ways in the case of country and western music.
9. J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories, London, Oxford University Press, 1976.
10. Peter Morris, "Canadian Cinema, the First Six Decades" in Self Portrait, Essays on Canada and Quebec Cinema, ed. Pierre Véronneau, Pierre and Seth Feldman, Ottawa, Canadian Film Institute, 1980, pp. 1-10.
11. Gilles Hebert, Growing Up on the Prairies, unpublished manuscript, 1993
12. Kay Armatage, "Dog and Woman, Together At Last" in Cineaction 24/25, 1991, pp. 38-4, quoted in Hebert, p. 2.
13. H*bert, p. 6
14. Edward A. McCourt, "The Canadian West in Fiction," Toronto, 1940, p. 55, quoted in Mandel, p. 203.
15. The Canadian West In Fiction, Toronto, 1949.
16. Eli Mandel "Images of Prairie Man," in A Region of the Mind, ed. Richard Allen, Regina, Canadian Plains Studies 1, Canadian Plains Research Center, 1973, p. 203.
17. Ibid, p. 204. Mandel refers to Leslie Fiedler, The Return of The Vanishing American, New York, 1968, p. 16.
18. Ibid, p. 207. Also see Henry Kreisel, "The Prairie: A State of Mind," Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Vol. VI, Series 4 (June, 1968), passim.
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