Cinema Canada (Apr-May 1974)

Encounter Canada — York University’s film symposium — by Warren Clements When York University’s Vanier College decided to turn its traditionally literature-oriented Encounter Canada symposium over to a celebration of Canadian film, it figured it had found a sure-fire hit. Three nights of films, rare and recent, film-makers, French and Englishspeaking, and displays of old Associated Screen movie posters. Who could resist such a deal, all for free? Well, the York students could; the average nightly attendance was 75. “Looking at it the morning after, I find I broke my ass, put on a good show, and nobody showed up,” complained student organizer Vince Dorval. “Even volunteers were hard to find. Seventy per cent worked for an hourly tate.” The first night, Tuesday Feb. 26, was particularly embarrassing. Students Michie Mitchell and Chris Syed had scoured the Canadian Film Institute vaults in Ottawa to find the rare 1919 Back to God’s Country, and invited pianist Horace Lapp to accompany the silent films on tap. But when Lapp, regular pianist for the silents at the Ontario Science Centre, arrived in the Vanier lounge, he found the organizers outnumbering the guests. Recruits were quietly dispatched to press-gang a larger crowd. Back to God’s Country, adapted from a Good Housekeeping serial, offered a romantic triangle between an author, a trapper’s daughter and a “‘lawless trading vessel master”. Lapp’s piano pyrotechnics trailed the action from despair to romance, with themes varying from ‘Stout Hearted Men” to “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”’. The hero of the film was Wapi the Killer Dog, whose role consisted primarily of straining at his leash. The heroine, played by Nell Shipman (her husband Ernest was ‘Canada’s first movie mogul’), spent the film cuddling bears, porcupines and the _ itinerant author. The trading vessel master lusted after her until the last reel, when Wapi chewed up his dog sled at Nell’s command. (“‘Sic ’em,” read the gentle title. “Wipe ’em out.”) As the audience recovered from the excitement, Lapp mentioned that he had played briefly with the silents in 1925, but had become orchestra conductor in production shows at the old Uptown and Imperial theatres in Toronto. “We used to put on a half-hour musical show three times a day between films, with a 24-girl chorus and a 35man orchestra. These days I find myself playing organ at Maple Leaf Gardens for the hockey games.” 12 Cinema Canada He managed four years ago to record music for 37 Laurel and Hardy films under a CBC commission, and is still amazed that they’ve been distributed as far away as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. “TI thought silent films were dead, but my gosh, they’re all coming back.” After the break, Lapp accompanied two 1930s Canadian cameos made in the thousands by Associated Screen: Back in ’23 (about famous _ nonCanadians like Valentino and BadenPowell who deigned to visit Canada) and Rhapsody in Two Languages, an unintentionally amusing guide through Montreal. “TI say, mate,” asks a man on a street corner, ‘“‘Have you the time?” “Oui, monsieur, c’est une heure moins le quart.” Jacques Leduc York professor Stan Fox, on a subsequent discussion panel with Gerald Pratley and Richard Leiterman, commented that one slick montage in Rhapsody, in which a girl pulls on a stocking and puts milk out for the cat while alarm clocks ring, was re-staged almost shot for shot in the Lullaby of Broadway sequence of Golddiggers of 1935. ‘Warner Brothers had a contract with Associated Screen to distribute in the States whichever cameos they liked,’’ revealed Fox. ‘So what does this tell us? It tells us Busby Berkeley was copying Canadian films.” Wednesday night showcased Don Shebib’s Between Friends and Gilles Carle’s Death of a Lumberjack in York’s Curtis lecture hall. In the intermission, G. Chalmers Adams, producer of Between Friends, reported that Shebib’s film, previously called “Good Times Gone By’, ‘Get Back”, “Surf's Up” (for two days) and ‘“‘Winter Sun’’, might be in for yet another title change, and a new publicity campaign. “The public may have been given the impression that Between Friends was an artier film than most,” he said. “The ads gave short shrift to the more commercial aspects in the film, like nostalgia, a sense of longing and special kind of relationship between pairs of characters.” In the States, in fact, it may be played up as a surfing film, (despite the BINWO WIT fact that aside from the surfing background of the two main characters, there is only a Beach Boys’ song and five minutes of stock surfing footage to build the campaign on.) Thursday evening offered Quebec filmmaker Gilles Groulx’s Les Raquetteurs (1958, with Michel Brault), an energetic documentary following a snowshoers’ convention from the opening martial parade to the choosing of the festival queen; and Entre Tu et Vous (1969), a political essay showing, in Groulx’s words, that ‘“‘man tends to impose upon women what the leaders of this society impose upon our society.” “It is only half of what it should have been,” said Groulx. “I spent two months selecting shots of political speeches from the CBC, which I wanted to put parallel to material I shot myself. ‘But the CBC told me it would take them a year to have each shot approved by a Radio-Canada lawyer. I call that very technical censorship. It was a new style to me; I always thought censorship was done with scissors.” Entre Tu et Vous, shown without subtitles, was often tediously didactic (and confusing; a girl at a sewing machine says, “I’d rather be mute than blind”), but made the point that “neutrality = illusion’. “After years at the film board,” said Groulx, “you learn not to be specific, but you are led to a dead end if you keep practicing symbolism. Your film can’t be seen outside without explanation.” Jacques Leduc (On est loin du soleil) and Bill Fruet were also on the discussion panel with Gilles Groulx. Later that night, the audience was subjected to Murray Markowitz’s August and July, a chronicle of two girls in‘ love, romping and talking in the woods. “TI mean, do you understand what it means to be me?” “NO.” “Well it’s awful.” Next came Flick (Dr. Frankenstein on Campus), a slick, ridiculous feature with Robin Ward as exchange student Victor Frankenstein and Austin Willis as the principal of the University of Toronto. Vic invents a box to control the human brain which will “make the H-bomb seem like a child’s firecracker.” Protest marchers carry signs like “stamp out physical fitness” (no kidding), and Vic pumps an electrode into a dog with his air gun. ‘‘Oh,” moaned a girl in the audience. “I’m not watching any more of this.” Encounter Canada will return next year; whether or not it will be devoted to film depends on whether Vanier’s student council, which footed the $2,000 tab, remembers the entertainment factor or the poor attendance figurese