Cinema Canada (Feb 1978)

Puzzling Omissions Reading your reports in issue no. 42 about the festivals held in Toronto and Montreal, I could not help being puzzled by some omissions. First, did anyone know there was an international film festival held in Ottawa at the beginning of August? Second, in the humorous ‘“‘Docu-drama: The Garden Path” relating to the World Film Festival, you talk about Franco Brusati and Emile de Antonio being in Montreal the week before the festival. Why were they there? You could at least mention the fact that the week before the World Festival was held, another one took place at Place des Arts in Montreal: “The Quebec Critics’ First International Film Festival” from August 11 to 18. I know this festival was intended for a French-speaking audience, but how could you ignore such an event? Franco Brusati was there and received a standing ovation after the showing of Bread and Chocolate of which you talk, incidentally, in your article. Emile de Antonio was there with his latest film, Underground. As a film critic for the French radio of Radio-Canada in Toronto, I covered the two festivals in Montreal and the one in Toronto. The Quebec Critics’ festival was, in my opinion, the best in terms of overall quality: choice of films, quality of projection (respect of picture ratios, picture in focus) and organization (for instance, the daily public meeting with actors, directors and critics at the Place Desjardins). Once again, I know you deal with an English-speaking audience. Nevertheless, it would have been only fair to mention the existence of that festival. I hate to report the other festival held in Montreal at the famous Outremont repertory cinema in October. A festival which travelled to three other cities in Quebec: TroisRiviéres, Sherbrooke and Quebec City. Just imagine Bill Marshall showing international films in Toronto, London, Hamilton, Sudbury, St-Catherines... Okay. I am dreaming... Let’s go back to reality. I am not putting down Serge Losique’s festival or Bill Marshall’s. They were important and great events. But you chose to ignore the others because they were intended for a French-speaking audience. For information’s sake, for cinema’s sake, this is not nice. Serge Denko Toronto An attentive reader of Cinema Canada would know that all the above festivals were reported on in the Summer 1977 issue. Subscribe now! ae cinema Canada 6/ Cinema Canada Sa EY SS Erratum In the last issue of Cinema Canada, two i paragraphs were omitted by error from the review of Who Has Seen the Wind by Katherine Gilday. This error altered the internal logic of the review, and weakened it considerably, for which we apologize. Below, the absent paragraphs are printed, along with the paragraphs which lead in and lead out from that section. The original review was printed on p. 40 of issue 43. The most we had a right to expect was that a first-rate creative imagination would actually improve the book, sear away the comic and sentimental evasions, heal the split between Mitchell’s knowledge that a boy must grow into a man and his emotional commitment to childhood innocence, between his sense of nature as a beneficent mother and his knowledge that the natural processes wear an unremittingly alien face to the human mind. The least we had a right to expect was a competent transcription of Brian’s dilemma of growth, certainly on the most obvious, visually accessible level of the clearcut opposition between town and prairie forces. Instead, what we get is a series of random incidents in the life of an eight-year-old boy, unilluminated by any larger framework of significance. The book’s characters and plot ele ments appear in hopelessly fragment. ed versions of their original selves, the only apparent criterion for their inclusion being their ability to prime the pump of stock emotional responses. Thus, for example, St. Sammy, the hermit-mystic who plays a vital thematic role in the novel, functions in the film as little more than a cutecrazy comic local. The school principal’s philosophical conversations with the shoemaker are fraudulent without the anchoring context of Mitchell’s inquiry into the grounds of consciousness. A sub-plot that has Miss Thompson, the teacher, involved with Digby and another more “‘colonized”’ member of the town establishment is handled so pertunctorily that her final choice of Digby is motiveless to the point of indecency. Meanwhile, the upswellings of the over-ripe musical score labor to convince us of the heavy meanings the script never succeeds in delivering. Where Brian is coming from, and where he is going, are equally unclear. That’s partially because the most crucial stage of the boy’s life, the preschool period of his wild and sweet innocence that constitutes the bedrock of Mitchell’s elegy, is omitted. The Brian we get in this film is from the start already a socialized being, a cowed, tense, thoughtful child with no hint in his makeup of the unruly, anarchic joyful energies that supposedly once connected him to the world of the prairie. Along with this loss of one of the most fundamental aspects of the novel’s logic goes, too, a tremendous opportunity to try to convey cinematically the unifying, magical consciousness of the child from the inside, as Mitchell tries to do in prose. Removing the young child from the story is almost like removing the prairie itself. Except that for all the symbolic tension that director King and cinematographer Leiterman manage to create between the natural and human environments in the film, the prairie might as well have been omitted too. The intimacy and lush wilderness brings all distances near, familiarizes the alien — to such an extent that the prairie comes to seem a mere backyard extension of the town. What Mitchell’s material needed anyway to counterbalance some of its sweetness was the correcting chill of clean, hard visuals, like those in Why Shoot the Teacher (which by the way is a vastly superior film on every count), conveying the unassimilable rawness of the prairie wilderness. In the context of this script, which gathers together the weakest, most cloying elements of both the realistic and the romantic strains in the novel, Leiterman’s cinematography establishes an exterior setting that is highly oppressive in its confinement. Aside from a night sequence and a storm sequence that begin, at least, to approach, by the very nature of their content, the requisite sense of awe for the landscape, the prairie in this production wears a consistent pastoral golden glow that entirely subverts its meaning as the empire of the title’s unseen wind. Subscribe now ! cinema * Canada