Cinema Canada (Aug 1978)

making a revolution?” Cut back to Chile where Allende, in a speech to miners, answers, “Our revolution is one of collective socialism, to regain our dignity.” Chilean miners go on to explain how they were drawn into servitude by the American owners of their mines, how they tried to be like ““Yankees”’, and then, finally, talk disparagingly of American attitudes, “For Americans, life is money.” Cut back once again to Québec where a miner’s wife explains, “If I didn’t have $1,000, I couldn’t live... my biggest hobby is shopping.” In La Revanche, the dialectic is drawn between the unsuccessful efforts of forestry workers to set up cooperatives in the ’70s with the memories of a man who successfully set up co-ops in the ’30s and 40s. Dramatic old footage of workers chopping wood and taking charge of their own sawmills is played against contemporary undertakings; here again, the founder of the early co-ops exudes a spiritual strength lacking in the ’70s as he quotes from Savard’s “Menaud MaitreDraveur’”, “We must have the courage to regain what we have lost.” Fortunately, his didactic and rational concerns do not submerge Bulbulian’s humanism, for a great deal of his films’ strength relies on intuitive rather than rational decisions. One example of this is Bulbulian’s use of a highly effective and dramatic technique, the “guided tour’. in La P’tite Bourgogne, an evicted resident walks along a boarded-up row of houses while giving us a run-down of who was living where, for how long, what their reactions were to the evictions, and Attracting his audicnce by putting a human face on the issues. A Chilean miner in La Richesse Des Autres where they finally moved to. The man colors his tour with anecdotes about the people he mentions, delivering a kind of eulogy to the neighbourhood he grew up in. In La Richesse Des Autres, a similar tour is given by a mining unionist as he takes a helicopter ride over mines in Northern Québec, describing the conflicts, the closures, the abandoned towns and the mines that never opened. Aside from the dry facts, the audience is given to consider the quality of the speaker’s voice, his intonations and colloquialisms, and insights into the issue at hand: incidental details which are nevertheless responsible for the films’ human richness. But it also leaves the films open to accusations of a lack of rigor vis-a-vis their themes. Bulbulian himself would be the last one to describe his approach as objective: La P’tite Bourgogne was to be a “filmchoc” on the inherent injustice of massive evictions, but, as the filming progressed and as the producer, Robert Forget, tended towards a more objective and global film, packed with facts and opinions from both sides, Bulbulian became increasingly inclined towards what he describes as “an advanced subjectivity: a bias and a technique at the disposal of the citizens.” This bias is evident from, the very first shots; a surrealistic travel of a deserted Habitat °67 is followed by a travel along the streets of Little Burgundy into the backyard of a tenement where a large family sits in a swing-chair. The film goes beyond the obvious contrast as the family engages the filmmaker in some small talk which ends with the grandmother’s rendition of an old song; the song echoes as the travel through Little Burgundy resumes. It is by putting a human face on the issues that Bulbulian hooks his audience. And it is when Bulbulian achieves a balance between the ideological and the personal that his films are most successful. The best example of this is La Richesse Des Autres, whose location shooting was directed by Michel Gauthier. Aside from being a textbook illustration of the evolution of a political issue from personal problem to shared concern to political platform, it is an imposing fiasco of mining and of a miner’s life, encompassing occupational diseases, family tensions, deterioration of physical and mental health, strikes, lockouts, and the creation of ghost towns. The two concerns, far from engaging in a useless diatribe, complement each other as the film switches back and forth from the private statement of a problem to its discussion in a political forum. “Some people wanted to see a better defined political line,” says Bulbulian. “But I found that it was more important to represent the miner’s state of mind than to turn him into a Marxist.” The film begins with an expressionistic sequence in a mine where young miners walk in the dark tunnels, the beams from their flashlights reflecting off the wet walls and from pools of water, to the accompaniment of the stark, lonely sound of slowly dripping water. The sound carries over to a travel inside the changing rooms where helmets and waterproof gear hang in blueish light. Then back into the mines, to what Orwell described in 1937 as “...my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are there — heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air and above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there...” From there, the film moves back up to the kitchens, taverns and picket lines, wherever miners congregate. There, we find scenes of great emotional impact; a young miner looks August 1978/23