Cinema Canada (Jun 1983)

NN. TIESSEN The Traveller (left) and the Land-owner in How Much Land Does a Man Need? (1978) own lives leads them to delineate and quantify their experiences compulsively, blindly, often in search of their own childhood, in search of freedom ; at least of life relieved of uncontrollable complexity. Fusi's and Shizter’s inevitable failure to make whole their fragmented experience Is foreshadowed in the earlier film, How Much Land Does a Man Need ?, dramaticallya much simpler film, of course, than God Is Not a Fish Inspector and Capital. In that film the only possible end to successful — if desperate — encasement of experience is literal death. Here in particular we see that life itself is shunned in favour of an elusive form designed to grip life according to a man-made pattern. In Capital, even Billy Boy, the young protégé of the self-disenfranchising older man, refuses himselfa pair of skates he has coveted for over a year and clings to the capital that, presumably, will never broaden or enrich his experience. Billy Boy's, too, is what can finally be regarded as anihilistic vision similar to that of his elder, or elders. Billy Boy's tricking his father is actually doubly ironic, as he uses the methods and materials of his father's game of deception/betrayal to introduce a game of his own. While the father might be able to accept a son who out-cons the con artist in the game of car radios and gulled buyers (just as Fusi Berg man can accept fish inspectors, or even a daughter, who might catch him at the superficial game of fishing illegally), Shizter loses his place as the indulgent pal/father who delights in overseeing or coaching his boy with savoured words suchas, “Billy's got some business for you.” Billy Boy causes Shizterto lose his place with his rhetoric, his language, his drawing delicate distinctions between “living money” and “capital”. shizter loses his place as the macho/ boy's-best-friend who revels in rolling wisdom from his tongue in repeating often, “if you don't look after your own capital no one else will,” or, “be patient, get everything ready, then wait to get what you want.” Shizter does manage, however, a final attempt at reconciliation to his new, deflated role in his uneasy but outwardly exuberant closing cliché, “that's my boy.” : In one sense, Capital and God Is Not a Fish Inspector are as much parables as the more explicitly didactic How Much Land Does a Man Need ?. The men's accumulations of fish, or land, or capital — all these products of their compulsion to contro! and sustain their visions of themselves are slipped from them as easily as if they were children or simpletons, being robbed of a pocket possession by a sleight-ofhand thief. The devastating impact on Kroeker's protagonists of normally unre 18 markable incidents is not out of keeping with the physical world his characters occupy, and the treatment of that world on the screen by Kroeker, who is himself a cinematographer. A deserted piece of land sharply cut off from the rest of Civilization by water provides the particularly surrealistic setting in How Much Land Does a Man Need ?A lonely shack (in The Tudor King), or prairie towns insulated — except. forradios, or tape-recorder cassettes with a preacher's course from “Mobile, Alabama” —from outside influences and loosely encircled by farms or homesteads starkly braced against the prairie sky: all these pared-down elements of setting, reduced to the blunt outlines of the parable form, define or confirm the nature of experience in Kroekers world, a world sometimes of actual silhouettes separate from modulating, nuanced, fluid environment. The sound-over of wind atthe end of Capital or of the waves at the opening of God Is Nota Fish Inspector only reinforces the elemental, even primitive, quality of the environment of Kroeker’s work. The tautly visualized world which Kroekers characters occupy is a region of absolutes, of extremes, of hard, defiant, repetitive acts. Typical in this world are the terse, forceful, cutting statements of “The Lord's will be done,” “God will punish you,” “you have no right,” “a man who learns to wait always gets what he wants.” It is a world of irreversible dictums and policies: “Thou shalt not lend thy money for interest nor sell thy food for profit :” and “I don't take two-party cheques. Never have.” Such proverbial sayings are, here, not illuminations, of course; they are weapons, giving the bare world a claustrophobic atmosphere in which characters spend a great deal of time secretly watching each other, or being watched by invisible witnesses. In so rigid and neurotic an environment aman rises or falls, wins or loses by virtue of a mere gesture that elsewhere might easily be absorbed as inconsequential in a broad stream of complexly interrelated activities. Critical discussion of literature of the Canadian west has long ago acknowledged the prairie as a state of mind, to use Henry Kreisel's phrase. The definitive actions of ©