Cinema Canada (Aug 1978)

at his father who has spent thirty of his fifty years in the mines, “I look at you, dad, and I have to say it, you’re finished.” The young miner then turns to his wife and asks, “What am I going to be like at 40?” Elsewhere, a young miner, about to be married, talks of the difficulty of maintaining relations with his future wife when he spends most of his day doing back-breaking work in the mines. He decides to quit the mines in favor of a normal life. In one of the last scenes, an old miner sitting around a camp-fire lists the diseases that plague him as a result of mining; cellicose, arthritis, bronchitis and alcoholism. He switches to listing with pride the trinkets the company has awarded him for not having accidents: a copper ashtray, a knife and a belt that reads “4,000 shifts.’’ He concludes, “It mades me sad... I would have liked to have had a life like the others.” These scenes are bracketed by union rallies, speeches denouncing the injustices and the visit to Chile. The film concludes with the song-chant, “It’s only the beginning, continue the struggle,” over a montage of the miner’s marriage, Québec and Chilean miners trading songs and jigs and a union congress in the Forum. It is an exhaustive work with a solid direction to follow, a balance well kept and as a result, a textural integrity from beginning to end. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Les Gars Du Tabac. It is an atmospheric grab-bag of undeveloped themes; intolerance due to racism, transient versus sedentary life styles and conflicting work ethics. To the accompaniment of some blues by the group Offenbach, the camera tracks — in languid long shots — youths hitch-hiking, looking for work, loitering in Delhi’s town park. There are snippets of work on the fields, youths being beaten up at night, a choir in the park, authorities shrugging responsibility. But the total does not add up to much. Bulbulian himself calls it a film “in passing’. It was originally set to be part of a larger work called Le Temps Des Fétes which was to contrast the St-Jean festivities with the daily lives of people caught up in another kind of reality; a waitress in the Laurentians, the wives of United Aircraft strikers and the youths in Ontario tobacco fields. But, once the material had been shot, it did not hold its own; the approach was deemed too artificial. As a consequence, Les Gars Du Tabac was released, perhaps in desperation. It is unfortunate that it had to be so, for the film holds the seed of a documentary that would have brought home a situation one usually associates with migrant workers in the U.S., a racism which has, in the past, led to lynchings in Ontario. But the film is but an embryo brought to term too quickly. What perhaps motivates Bulbulian to put his craft at the disposal of the underdog is the awareness that, now more than ever, he and his colleagues are in danger of extinction, that the kind of documentary that, up to now, he has made is faced with insurmountable difficulties, especially economic restrictions. “T refuse to make sponsored films. They are not what they used to be; companies are more and more conscious of the nature of the mass media. When Flaherty made Louisiana Story for Carnegie, he was able to make a film and not propaganda. Now, that kind of thing is impossible... People have distorted Malraux’s Cinema, it is an art but it is also an industry by over emphasizing the word ‘industry’. It’s through the economy that they have us by the balls. 24/Cinema Canada fi io La P’tite Bourgogne’s social hierarchy: Mayor Drapeau at the top, peasants at the bottom and the artists in the middle “The present crisis in Québec cinema exists solely on the level of an economic system that is being imposed on Canada; everywhere, creativity is being strangled at the base. In our society, filmmakers, along with poets, are those who have the least access to the public and who are the least heard. “There’s a whole generation of filmmakers right behind us to whom we throw nickels and dimes to fight over so they can finish a little film. These artisans are filmmakers in the real sense of the word. The politicians talk about conserving our heritage and go ape over an 18th century wrought-iron plaque while there are a hundred filmmakers who aren’t allowed to work. That, they don’t care about.” Without becoming a knight in shining armor, one is assured that Bulbulian and others like him, will continue to fight for what he believes, not only for himself, but for his subjects as well. “There are alternatives to the government’s opinion and public opinion has been deformed by polls and statistics. The system has developed a way of transmitting messages and I have developed, in cooperation with my subjects, a way of transmitting messages which are often in contradiction with those of the government... There was a big stink raised in Parliament over the $150,000 that was spent on La Richesse Des Autres, that public funds were spent to publicize problems in the mining industry. Well, during that time, Noranda Co. made six or seven commercials at $50,000 each... I think that, in a democratic society where freedom of speech supposedly exists, it is only just and normal that, if Noranda can spend $300,000 to publicize its opinions, miners are entitled to $150,000 from the government to give their own diverging opinion. In that context, it is essential that the miner’s opinion be as well organized as possible. It is not enough to shove a microphone in front of somebody just because it is his opinion; he has a right to as many fades and dissolves as Noranda.” O