Cinema Canada (Nov 1981)

During the winter months, Cinema Canada will pay special attention to the young filmmakers who have made an impact recently. Although the commercial feature boom has all but obscured the other work being done, a new generation of filmmakers is on its way, winning awards and making a mark. Halya Kuchmij took the Genie last year jor her short The Strongest Man in the World, Clay Borris took his Alligator .Shoes to Cannes, Sturla Gunnarsson received broad press attention last month for After the Axe which was recently shown on the CBC, and Ron by Jacqueline Levitin Mann is wowing the festival crowds with Imagine the Sound. The following is an interview with directors Sophie Bissonnette and Joyce Rock. Together with Martin Duckworth they won this year’s Prix de la Critique Québécoise for A Wives’ Tale. The prize is awarded each year by the Québécois critics for the film judged to be ‘the finest of the preceeding year. Their choice was at once a commentary on the commercial production scene, and a great honour for these two young women directing their first featurelength documentary. A Wives’ Tale (Une histoire de femmes), has been one of the most enthusiastically received films of the year in Quebec. Recording the participation of the wives of the 12,000 strikers in the historic eightand-a-half-month-long Inco strike in Sudbury, Ontario, directors Sophie Bissonnette, Martin Duckworth and Joyce Rock have brought to their story a warmth and intimacy that is rare in‘ political documentaries. As in the 1958 Inco strike, the strikers’ wives in 1978 formed a wives’ committee, but an independent committee this time instead of a wives’ auxiliary. The group included 250 out of a poten-. tial 7,000 women. Sixty were active. The strike was already in its fourth month when the three filmmakers first’ went to Sudbury. They stayed for the next four-and-a-half months. Joan Kuyek, a community organizer whom the women had chosen to chair their meetings introduced them to the committee.) Together they negotiated the terms of their presence — permission to attend and film meetings, permission to follow certain women on their daily activities in the service of the committee, and general roaming privileges in exchange for the wives’ power to decide, by a majority vote, to accept or reject the finished film. The women they followed closely, a representational group, became the “main characters” of the documentary. Each of the filmmakers had accommodations in the home of a striker’s family (often a main character’s) where. there was sufficient room to make a long-term arrangement tolerable. Their rapport with the women is evident in the spontaneous quality of the conversations in the film. Jacqueline Levitin is a film professor at Concordia University in Montreal. 30/Cinema Canada-November 1981 Sophie Bissonnette : We knew what kind of political film we didn’t want to make. We didn’t want to make a film_ where we would be talking in the place of the women who were there. We thought that in a lot of films that we had seen about strikes, at some point just as someone was getting into something, you felt that the filmmaker was scared of what that person had to say ; of where it would lead to. What was most important to me was the feminist films I had seen and the approach of letting women speak, and of a more intimate understanding and portrayal of human relationships. A lot of films about strikes, or about \working-people’s struggles, seek out people in leadership positions or people who are extremely articulate. They give a very glossy picture of what the strike is . about, as if they are afraid to show thata strike is more than that. You hardly ever get a more intimate portrayal of what people might get out of a strike other than what they've won in their negotiations. For example, for one of the striker’s wives it might be that she decided to learn how to drive — which, in a housewife’s life, can be an enormous step. But because we knew what we didn’t want to make, but weren't sure of what we were going to make, we constantly had to fight our own fears. We thought “maybe we should go and get the union’s point of view on this,” or “maybe we should find out what the husbands think.” We ourselves were afraid of what kind of film we would have, if it would be a valid film if we only had the women’s point of... Joyce Rock: ...If “the girls” only speak for themselves. — oe ee Sophie Bissonnette: You have to @ “When you see this film you see our signature...” Joyce Rock, Sophie Bissonnette constantly fight against those images that are in your head, that you see on the news, that are in every documentary and every political film you've seen. That you're supposed to be making a film about a strike and should film a picket-line and all those obvious things. So we had to put our foot down. We had — to be clear about what this film was going to be about. And also fight against our own fear of “Am I completely crazy to want to film this kind of situation ?” Because it was new territory. Can you imagine that in QuebecI can’t think ofa single film that talks about workingclass women ? They’re a majority of the population and they've never been on film! It’s very terrifying to make that first film because you don’t know how to show them. Because the only images you have are the soap operas in the afternoons and the ads you see. And the question keeps coming back “Maybe they don’t have anything to say. Maybe this is totally boring.” It’s a lot like what those women were going through during the strike. Suddenly during the strike they could afford to think things they thought were crazy alone in their houses. Maybe it was unthinkable alone in their houses to say “I should be able to go to the general meetings” but then three of them would get together and find out “you think you should go to general meetings also!” We tried to show in the historical part of the film that all the women in 1958 and before would have done all the things the 1978 women had done, but thanks to the feminist movement there was a feeling that these women could think these things and not be crazy, and we could make this film and not be crazy. Joyce Rock: The strongest influence on me making this film was the body of cinéma direct in terms of its attitude © and approach. And it’s interesting in terms of the acceptance of the film. It’s bizarre because the film was 75% in English originally and then translated, yet the film is immediately understood in Quebec. The press and the film critics here never asked questions about the style or what the film was about. They all got the point even when they didn’t necessarily agree with it. What I realized was that in Montreal our kind of film, or other documentaries or fictions, have a constant place in the culture pages, while in Toronto it is “What Hollywood starlet is in town ?” or “What is Canadian culture ?” or “What is Canadian film ?” In Toronto, when I would ask critics who came to the press screenings, “Are you going to do an article?” their response was “I couldn't possibly. This is such a terrible film.” And when I’d ask them why, they'd ask questions like “Is this shot in 35 or in 16 mm ?” and they wouldn’t understand why the camera was sometimes shakey. It seemed to me that most of them had no experience of cinéma vérité, and the few who did thought that the film must be cinéma vérité. I had to explain to them that the predominant use of cinéma vérité in the States was generally very manipulative, with an attitude of, “No matter what the cost, I've got to get this on film because this is real and this is life.” Sophie Bissonnette: Here political filmmakers, because there is a much greater political consciousness, are not afraid to talk about politics in everyday life, are not afraid of filming very banal situations and presenting that politically. In Ontario or in the films that I’ve seen from English Canada, I can’t think of a political film that is not dogmatic, that is not imposed from the top, that