Take One (Jul 15, 1979)

quality product. Besides paying for a top-heavy administration and a demoralized publicity and distribution staff, the Film Board is stuck with dozens of filmmakers who collect between $20,000 and $30,000 a year to do virtually nothing. James de B. Domville, the Commissioner of the Film Board and Bob Verrall, head of the Union, stoutly argue that the amount of deadwood on the Film Board staff is no greater than that tolerated by any other business. Maybe that’s true, but it’s an axiom among employees as well as outsiders that there are at least four or five staff filmmakers who have been paid salaries for years who are never given budgets for films because they are incompetent. And there are 12 or 15 more whose work is only passable, and certainly not commensurate with their salaries. Don Brittain says, “At least 50% of the people at the National Film Board should not have a job there. This is what I resent the Film Board for not understanding... by keeping these people on their staff who are not competent they are depriving the country of artists. The recent budget cuts really only affected the freelancers, who were the people doing the bulk of the good work.” Joe Koenig, now President of International Cinemedia in Toronto, is another ex-Film Board staffer who quit in 1969. He thinks people on staff dry up because they don’t have to deliver. “It’s like a womb. When people on staff are full term, they have to get out, or they'll die.” Domestically, the Film Board is indispensible to Canadian education. Kirwan Cox says, “If it weren’t for the National Film Board, our educational system would be totally American. Completely.” Yet in the past few years Film Board distribution hasn't been able to meet domestic educational demand, because there isn’t enough money for prints. (You can find the movie of your dreams in the Film Board catalogue, but just try to get a copy.) The free library system is mostly to blame; with mounting running costs, the whole idea of free service is breaking down. It's a lethal drain on the rest of distribution. Internationally, the Film Board's reputation is still unsurpassed, and its greatest sales are not to Canadian television, but to the American Public Broadcasting System. Canadians can go for years without seeing a Film Board movie on television, unless a CBC ball game gets rained out, but there are some cities in the States that show Film Board material once a week at prime time. Fred Wiseman, one of the most famous documentary filmmakers in America says, “I’m laying it on, but I really believe it. The Film Board is an example to filmmakers all over the world. The documentary films of the NFB made me aware Brittain: “There was nobody there, It was empty, deserted. | had to quit.” of the possibilities of the medium... And it is what it was. Its reputation is intact. Now it's an ideal to look up to; a cutback of its services and creative output would be a disaster. It would represent to other governments that there’s no point in getting into this kind of service.” David Denby, film critic for New York Magazine, has his own reasons for admiring the National Film Board. “People increasingly think of documentary as what they see on ‘Sixty Minutes’ or ‘The Fifth Estate’. There it’s been sidetracked by television into notions of balance, journalistic objectivity and so on. But to me, real documentary is like the stuff Mike Rubbo and Don Brittain do—it’s an art form, a personal interpretation. And if documentary film dies at the National Film Board of Canada, it dies everywhere.” The international prestige the Film Board has won for Canada can hardly be overstated. In the last five years, six Oscar nominations and three Oscars, for animation and documentary; three Palmes d’Or from Cannes over the years, as well as countless Silver Dragons, Gold and Silver medals, five Robert Flaherty awards, an almost embarrassing stream of little statuettes, embossed certificates, and the like. The past four year period has seen the completion of hundreds of beautiful and useful films. The Board has always been a world leader in areas that later become fashionable. It currently has two antinuclear-power films, how-to films on solar and wind power, movies on saving whales, hawks, whooping cranes, swamps and oceans, films on the working poor, on old people and crippled children, on forgotten skills and arts, as well as films made just to be funny or beautiful. Many of the recent efforts languish for months in the labs because of insufficient money to make prints; many more never satisfy demand because only a few copies are made. Yet this work remains Canada’s one area of unsurpassed cultural excellence. As David Denby puts it, “America is known culturally for music and movies—Canada is known for documentary film.” But Canadians are allergic to their successes, as well as blind to them. Peter Herendorff, general manager of the CBC says, “All our nation’s spanning institutions are in trouble and have been for years. Real trouble. A railroad, a road system, the National Film Board, Air Canada and the CBC. They're an odd combination of transportation and communication networks, but they're emotional and cultural links. And they're the only ones we've got.” Only public opinion carries any real clout with politicians, and there was very little media coverage of the Film Board's miserable fortieth birthday, outside Montreal. One found little beyond a snide, ill-documented article in Maclean's; other Canadian weeklies didn’t seem to consider it newsworthy. Canada cannot afford to lose one of its three or four spanning institutions, yet the nation is alarmingly complacent about the Board's fate. Right now, the Montreal head office is partially deserted, as it was in 1969. As time goes on, people employed in production tend not to come in because they know there’s no money for projects. Cyril Synes, NDP cultural critic laments, “You can only squeeze a creative institution so much. There's no vibrancy, creativity, energy left. Filmmakers are susceptible to moral discouragement. They're unemployed. They go away. The repercussions of these cutbacks are going to be felt many years down the road.” Don Brittain believes no one will actually close down the National Film Board of Canada. “All of a sudden, somebody’s going to realize it’s no longer there, and wonder where it went. And that’s the thing that frightens me.” Holly Dressel is a Montreal freelance writer and broadcaster. TAKE ONE 39