Cinema Canada (Feb 1976)

(SRE TEA DP ARN ADSI ALLTEL NL ESTELLE LE LAID LTE TE TREE IE EE LA ET drips of maple syrup and tends to give one a glucose overdose in the area of the heart. The film is a kind of backfired, shoestring American Graffiti meets Earthquake. There is hardly an area from scripting to direction, from acting to editing which does not deserve derisive comment. It is awkward to a fault and one can only warm to it as a mother to a less than gifted child. A local Winnipeg critic commented that he found it the funniest film of the year. He quickly added that all pains should be taken to contain the film in the province as it was a total embarrassment to Manitobans. The Melting Pot is a strange mixture of fact and fiction. Authentic police garb which looks amazingly out of place mingles with modern day blue jeans complete with logos. Vintage period cars park in front of 70s superstructures, etc. The film constantly annoys the viewer with illogical responses set in factual situations. This culminates when the people doing the sand-bagging defy the army’s orders to evacuate the area. The troops then raise their guns, and one of the townspeople breaks into a rendition of the Lord’s Prayer, followed by several more versions in various languages. However, the ludicrousness of the film does not stop here. It is a sex film without sex, a 50s music film with non-50s type songs, and an action picture without thrills. When the flood finally hits, it has all the force of a man breaking down a door and lasts the equivalent period of time. There are no floating cars or houses or really anything visual to suggest the catastrophe. It all resembles a mud-slinging event more than anything else. The Melting Pot leaks. Len Klady REVIEWS OF SHORT FILMS Boyce Richardson's Job’s Garden d. Boyce Richardson. ph. Guy Borremans, Gilbert Heérodier. ed. Jacques Leroux. tech. consult. Michel Brault. narr. Bernard Assiniwi. songs. Samson Nahacappo, Job Bearskin, Isiah Awashish. p. JeanPierre Fournier. p.c. Fournier/Richardson, 1974. col. Colour, 16mm. running time. 52 minutes. dist. Canadian Film Makers’ Distribution Centre. Job Bearskin, the Job in Job’s Garden, has hunted all his life along the La Grande River 600 miles north of Montreal. Job’s Garden, a Fournier/ Richardson production directed by Boyce Richardson, records Bearskin’s reaction to the flooding of his people’s hunting grounds by the James Bay hydroelectric project. A highlight of the film is a visit to LG-2, a hydroelectric job site by the La Grande River. “It is just like ripping something apart,’ Bearskin says when he sees the work camp. “It does not look good. It looks like people have been fighting. Everything is shattered. I’ve seen it before, in the mating season for the bear. They fight and when they do that they usually tear up a lot of land. That is how it looks here.”’ “T used to ask them what they were doing,” Bearskin says of his first contacts with white men in the bush. “But they never told me anything. They always told me only: ‘We are working.’ That was their answer. I guess this is what they meant.” “I know they are only beginning their work. There is much more land to be destroyed.” Despite the effects of a leg injury, Bearskin is seen in Job’s Garden to stand, sit and walk with a remarkable sense of bodily ease. His body maintains a beautiful and subtle balance in the field of gravity in his movements and gestures. His neck is relaxed, his spine is straight, and his rib cage is flexible. When Bearskin sits, he bends his body from the hip joint instead of from the waist, revealing at the same time the quick spring-like action of the spine which F.M. Alexander, originator of the Alexander Technique, has labelled the “‘anti-gravity reflex’’, of which the free functioning is rarely seen in adults in advanced industrial society. In terms of body language, what does our own society teach us to do with our bodies, in contrast to a society such as Job Bearskin’s? It teaches us to slouch. That’s what the FILM REVIEWS body learns, sitting for hours, days, weeks, months and years at school desks, in preparation for more advanced slouching later on. Job’s Garden is in a way an epilogue, albeit in another medium, to T.C. McLuhan’s book Touch the Earth, when Indians’ themselves speak, eloquently and directly, of the way of life which for centuries enabled them to live in harmony and equilibrium with the material resources which modern industrial society is now, with purposeful efficiency, destroying. Viewers interested in Job’s Garden as a “film for film’s sake” are, however, likely to be disappointed. The film takes too long to make its point, the colour correction and exposure are often dismal, and the hand-held shots are consistently unsteady. In addition, the constant use of the zoom lens is thoroughly disconcerting. Despite this, the fact that the film was made, period, in my view overrides its technical shortcomings. Jaan Pill Warren Zucker’s Novitiate d. Warren Zucker. ph. Lance Carlson, Jerry Fijalkowski. ed. Eric Young. exec. p. Tony Bond. p. Tim Hurson. p. manager. René Egger. p.c. Caprice Films (Toronto), 1973. col. Colour. running time. 25 minutes. dist. Canadian Film Makers’ Distribution Centre. There is an aphorism I enjoy, based on a line from William Blake, to the effect that “We become what we behold.” The ambience in Toronto, for example, is one which tends, as a friend puts it, “to line us up and make us go a certain way.” Toronto is a city where one beholds surfaces and appearances set aside from nature. Its ambience emphasizes gloss and rectilinearity. It is interesting to consider, in this context, how the ambience of a city is reflected in the films made within it. For example Warren Zucker’s Novitiate, shown on CBC in March, 1974, is, most quintessentially, a Toronto product. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” explains Harry Lavery, the young novitiate in the film, who has turned from a suc ’ february 1976 / 47