Robert Fothergill, Interviewed
Interview conducted by Chelsea Keen with assistance from Tj Alston, Alex Jokinen, and Bing Wang on March 18th, 2015. The interview was conducted at the Ryerson University Graduate Film Preservation Lab and is reproduced here in full with minor changes made for flow and ease of readability. All changes have been approved by Robert Fothergill.
Take Two: We would like to know about the formation of the CFMDC and generally what the filmmaking practices were like at the time. How did you know the other founders and what was your relationship like with them? How did everything unravel in the way that it did?
Robert Fothergill: I think we came together quite casually. You’ve read my piece called A Founding Memoir? That talks about how, in the summer of 1966, a lot of people seemed to suddenly be making little movies…just running around town with handheld Bolexes making movies, and imagining that we were inventing a whole new thing… You ask why my film Oddballs was the film that started it all? Well it really wasn’t. Oddballs, you’ve seen it, was nothing much really, it’s just an amusing little joke movie - it’s not important…well, it’s cute in its way, and it shows you Toronto from nearly fifty years ago which is amazing…that’s nearly half way back to the origins of cinema. But some time in the winter of 1966-67, this guy John Hofsess, who made Redpath 25, and who really was pivotal in the setting up of the CFMDC…Hofsess was making movies at McMaster and had made this 10 minute film, Redpath 25. He made it in the summer of ’66. He’d been to New York with Patricia Murphy, who is the girl in the film…have you seen it? And they’d been to the New York Co-op, and seen some of the films in the collection, and they were quite turned on by this kind of experimental, so-called “underground” movies. Hofsess had made Redpath 25, and I must have met him through Patricia, whom I knew already from Mac…and some time in the winter, early 1967, he arranged a screening, in U of T somewhere, of films that several of us had been making, unaware of one another, and he did this in order to try and launch some sort of distribution outfit, modeled on the New York co-op. It was initially supposed to be both a production co-op and a distribution co-op. He’d already set up a thing called the McMaster Film Board, which was a production co-op of some kind…mainly as a vehicle to make his own movies. He’d got some backing from the student council - I think they put a few hundred dollars in – so that he could make his own stuff. And that screening at the U of T was when several film-makers started meeting each other - that’s probably where David Cronenberg turned up with his little film called Transfer. Have you seen that? It’s quite slight! …Two people have a sort of duel to the death on a hilltop and flap their ties at one another… or am I thinking of a different film? Maybe a film called The Duel? … so anyway, half a dozen people turned up with their short movies and showed them, and Hofsess’s film just blew everybody away because it was so much more exciting and vivid and colourful and loud, and it had that song “My Generation” on it…you know what I’m talking about? “My g-g-generation.” By The Who? And the rest of us had made these amateurish little things. Hofsess’s film has multiple superimpositions in camera and various visual effects that seemed rather dazzling at the time. He shot in some way whereby you could put 16mm film through an 8mm camera and then turn it upside down and shoot again and then you’d get four pictures on the screen and then he…I don’t know, it just looked exciting, and made the rest of the program seem rather tame.
Then, in about April 1967, we somehow got in contact with this guy Willem Poolman, a rather dubious Dutch lawyer who was setting up a company called Film Canada in order to try and distribute European films and gain the Canadian rights. He also wanted to get hold of some of the films from the New York co-op, to exploit their mildly sensational potential, but Jonas Mekas, who ran the Co-op, wouldn’t let those films be distributed commercially. So Poolman undertook to help set up some sort of fledgling co-op in Toronto, and Mekas would then give the prints to Poolman to distribute, on the understanding that they would come over to the Distribution Centre when we were sufficiently established to handle them…cause I mean, initially, we had nothing. We just had three or four people and a pair of rewinds… and then Poolman had the idea of creating this festival of underground film in the summer of 1967, of which I have the original poster …this is maybe unique… partly to promote these underground films and launch the idea. So for four days in June of 1967, there was an almost continuous screening of a whole bunch of films. How he had…how I got involved in this…I think we went to Poolman to try and get some money for Hofsess’s next film, cause Hofsess was getting in trouble with the McMaster Film Board ‘cause he was overspending the tiny budget he’d got. We’re talking a few hundred dollars here…fifteen hundred maybe. But they were getting fed up with him because he was…well, any organization he got involved in he would try and exploit for his own advantage. He was a good friend of mine. I liked him. But he was trouble. There was one point where he got a grant from the fledgling Telefilm Canada, I think, for several thousand dollars, and Patricia and I actually went to the Toronto representative of Telefilm Canada and said, “Don’t give this money to John all in one lump sum, because he will simply spend it on something. Give it to him a few hundred dollars at a time, and make sure he is spending it properly.” This seems mean of us, but it was trying to save him from getting into trouble. And he used to get into trouble quite regularly. He would rent cameras and pawn them and then get caught by the police and…I always used to think, when Hofsess would get involved in a lot of trouble, maybe he’s a genius, and I don’t want to go down in history as the person who refused him the few hundred dollars he needed, like Dostoyevsky or something.
Anyway, so I think somehow we were put in touch with Willem Poolman who might agree to finance the completion of Hofsess’s new film and Poolman recruited me and a guy called Lorne Lipowitz, a stand up comedian with a partner called Hart Pomerantz. “Hart and Lorne.” And we were, together, to somehow manage this festival, the Cinethon. Lorne Lipowitz later changed his name to Lorne Michaels and became hugely famous, but at the time he was still Lorne Lipowitz. He was just graduating from U of T and his parents had given him a Mustang for his 21st birthday…a graduation present, I guess… and we would drive around in this open top Mustang in 1967 playing Wilson Pickett, you know, on the car radio. It was terrific. And for some reason, we were more or less entrusted with organizing the Cinethon. Lorne was supposed to manage the finances and I was in charge of programming. I was sent to New York at Willem’s expense…flown to New York I suppose, I can’t remember…and stayed at the Chelsea Hotel because that was the cool thing to do ‘cause that’s where Warhol made Chelsea Girls… and spent about three days in the New York Co-op offices looking at a whole bunch of movies. A lot of people came in because they thought, you know, this is a big chance…somebody in Canada is fool enough to want to show our movies and pay for it – and even pay for us to come to Toronto for the weekend. And I said yes to a whole lot of films. Yes, we’ll take them to Toronto, and then they must have gone through some process of being imported, cause there were a lot of regulations and customs hassles and import duties. It was a hassle getting the movies back and forth across the border. And Hofsess by this time had moved into Willem Poolman’s offices - Film Canada which was on Charles street, right at Yonge….if you can think of Yonge and Charles…on the northeast corner of Yonge and Charles there is an old building which I think has a McDonald’s in it nowadays… it was a post office originally, and in the front of the building it still says ‘Postal Station F’, and that was the building that Poolman converted into a cinema called Cinecity, where he wanted to screen his own films. So he was into both distribution and exhibition. He wasn’t really a very good businessman, and didn’t really know what he was doing, and the building wasn’t really good for a cinema - it had really low ceilings, which meant you couldn’t rake the seats very well, which in turn meant the sight lines were very bad. Anyway, that’s where the Cinethon took place…and the actual distribution offices were across the road, on the southeast corner of Yonge and Charles. And Hofsess had more or less moved in - like, literally sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag or something - and was continuing to edit his film which was called Black Zero. It was supposed to be the middle section of a trilogy to be called Palace of Pleasure.
Was Cronenberg involved in Palace of Pleasure?
Cronenberg was not involved in Palace of Pleasure, no. He had made another short film called From The Drain…have you seen that? A guy in a weird hat sits in a bathtub, and a green wire thing comes out of the drain hole and strangles him. That was early Cronenberg. Cronenberg really broke through a year or two later with a film called Stereo, about telepathy...
Stereo?
Stereo. Which is brilliant, actually. Have you seen it? It was a 35mm, black and white feature film, about 75 minutes long, which cost him maybe 20,000 dollars. It was about a commune of telepaths, a weirdly futuristic kind of experiment, and they’d all had their vocal chords destroyed, so they couldn’t speak to each other. They could only communicate telepathically. Therefore, it was a silent movie. Or at least, the soundtrack was all voiceover, cause it was their thoughts as they communicated, and it was all shot out on the new campus at Scarborough College, which was very futuristic-looking, and it’s a very smart movie.
Then, in about April 1967, we somehow got in contact with this guy Willem Poolman, a rather dubious Dutch lawyer who was setting up a company called Film Canada in order to try and distribute European films and gain the Canadian rights. He also wanted to get hold of some of the films from the New York co-op, to exploit their mildly sensational potential, but Jonas Mekas, who ran the Co-op, wouldn’t let those films be distributed commercially. So Poolman undertook to help set up some sort of fledgling co-op in Toronto, and Mekas would then give the prints to Poolman to distribute, on the understanding that they would come over to the Distribution Centre when we were sufficiently established to handle them…cause I mean, initially, we had nothing. We just had three or four people and a pair of rewinds… and then Poolman had the idea of creating this festival of underground film in the summer of 1967, of which I have the original poster …this is maybe unique… partly to promote these underground films and launch the idea. So for four days in June of 1967, there was an almost continuous screening of a whole bunch of films. How he had…how I got involved in this…I think we went to Poolman to try and get some money for Hofsess’s next film, cause Hofsess was getting in trouble with the McMaster Film Board ‘cause he was overspending the tiny budget he’d got. We’re talking a few hundred dollars here…fifteen hundred maybe. But they were getting fed up with him because he was…well, any organization he got involved in he would try and exploit for his own advantage. He was a good friend of mine. I liked him. But he was trouble. There was one point where he got a grant from the fledgling Telefilm Canada, I think, for several thousand dollars, and Patricia and I actually went to the Toronto representative of Telefilm Canada and said, “Don’t give this money to John all in one lump sum, because he will simply spend it on something. Give it to him a few hundred dollars at a time, and make sure he is spending it properly.” This seems mean of us, but it was trying to save him from getting into trouble. And he used to get into trouble quite regularly. He would rent cameras and pawn them and then get caught by the police and…I always used to think, when Hofsess would get involved in a lot of trouble, maybe he’s a genius, and I don’t want to go down in history as the person who refused him the few hundred dollars he needed, like Dostoyevsky or something.
Anyway, so I think somehow we were put in touch with Willem Poolman who might agree to finance the completion of Hofsess’s new film and Poolman recruited me and a guy called Lorne Lipowitz, a stand up comedian with a partner called Hart Pomerantz. “Hart and Lorne.” And we were, together, to somehow manage this festival, the Cinethon. Lorne Lipowitz later changed his name to Lorne Michaels and became hugely famous, but at the time he was still Lorne Lipowitz. He was just graduating from U of T and his parents had given him a Mustang for his 21st birthday…a graduation present, I guess… and we would drive around in this open top Mustang in 1967 playing Wilson Pickett, you know, on the car radio. It was terrific. And for some reason, we were more or less entrusted with organizing the Cinethon. Lorne was supposed to manage the finances and I was in charge of programming. I was sent to New York at Willem’s expense…flown to New York I suppose, I can’t remember…and stayed at the Chelsea Hotel because that was the cool thing to do ‘cause that’s where Warhol made Chelsea Girls… and spent about three days in the New York Co-op offices looking at a whole bunch of movies. A lot of people came in because they thought, you know, this is a big chance…somebody in Canada is fool enough to want to show our movies and pay for it – and even pay for us to come to Toronto for the weekend. And I said yes to a whole lot of films. Yes, we’ll take them to Toronto, and then they must have gone through some process of being imported, cause there were a lot of regulations and customs hassles and import duties. It was a hassle getting the movies back and forth across the border. And Hofsess by this time had moved into Willem Poolman’s offices - Film Canada which was on Charles street, right at Yonge….if you can think of Yonge and Charles…on the northeast corner of Yonge and Charles there is an old building which I think has a McDonald’s in it nowadays… it was a post office originally, and in the front of the building it still says ‘Postal Station F’, and that was the building that Poolman converted into a cinema called Cinecity, where he wanted to screen his own films. So he was into both distribution and exhibition. He wasn’t really a very good businessman, and didn’t really know what he was doing, and the building wasn’t really good for a cinema - it had really low ceilings, which meant you couldn’t rake the seats very well, which in turn meant the sight lines were very bad. Anyway, that’s where the Cinethon took place…and the actual distribution offices were across the road, on the southeast corner of Yonge and Charles. And Hofsess had more or less moved in - like, literally sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag or something - and was continuing to edit his film which was called Black Zero. It was supposed to be the middle section of a trilogy to be called Palace of Pleasure.
Was Cronenberg involved in Palace of Pleasure?
Cronenberg was not involved in Palace of Pleasure, no. He had made another short film called From The Drain…have you seen that? A guy in a weird hat sits in a bathtub, and a green wire thing comes out of the drain hole and strangles him. That was early Cronenberg. Cronenberg really broke through a year or two later with a film called Stereo, about telepathy...
Stereo?
Stereo. Which is brilliant, actually. Have you seen it? It was a 35mm, black and white feature film, about 75 minutes long, which cost him maybe 20,000 dollars. It was about a commune of telepaths, a weirdly futuristic kind of experiment, and they’d all had their vocal chords destroyed, so they couldn’t speak to each other. They could only communicate telepathically. Therefore, it was a silent movie. Or at least, the soundtrack was all voiceover, cause it was their thoughts as they communicated, and it was all shot out on the new campus at Scarborough College, which was very futuristic-looking, and it’s a very smart movie.
Okay, at the same time as the Cinethon and everything was happening, we were setting up the Distribution Centre at a meeting which, as I’ve said in the memoir, took place in the little flat I was living in on Lowther Avenue, and there were yes, the four of us: myself, Cronenberg, Lorne Michaels, and a guy called Jim Plaxton who was actually working for Willem Poolman at the time. He wasn’t really much involved in making film, I don’t think. He went on to become a theatrical lighting designer. Lorne was going to make a film, a kind of sitcom, about parking meter attendants. There was gonna be a kind of good guy/bad guy, good cop/bad cop thing, one guy who was totally hopeless and would be writing a ticket as the driver was driving away, and the other guy who would walk down the street and snap his fingers, and all the meters would go to Expired…that’s all I remember about it. That’s what Lorne was talking about making at the time. There was a fifth guy called Iain Ewing, who had been involved as something like an Assistant Director on David Sector’s Winter Kept Us Warm, which was something of a foundational movie a couple of years earlier. Then Iain wanted to make a feature of his own, to be called Picaro, but it ended up only being about 30 minutes long, because the story just wasn’t substantial enough to be a feature. Quite a nice little movie actually. It’s a sort of boy/girl relationship…you know, girl picks up boy hitchhiking. They go back to a family cottage on the lake in the fall and spend a night together, and it’s quite lovely…autumn trees glistening in the wind. Well, Iain and I somehow became the Distribution Centre, just the two of us, and the idea was that it would be a very collaborative, democratic, participatory thing, and all the filmmakers would deposit their films, and have a vote on policy, and we would somehow rotate the actual management of the thing. But nobody actually really wanted to do that. They just wanted somewhere to deposit their films and hopefully get some exposure. They didn’t care about meetings or any of the organizational stuff. And Iain’s girlfriend at the time, Clara Mayer, who later went to California and committed suicide…she was a lovely, lovely, person…she was the office manager for a while. No, actually Patricia Murphy, the girl in Redpath 25, was the first office manager, which basically meant she was the person who sat in a room, rather like this, with a shelf of a couple of dozen movies, and rewinds and reels and boxes, and we would take the movies down to the customs offices, which were next to Union Station, and we would do all the paperwork and everything - cause you wanted the shipment all sorted to Detroit or Chicago…or we’d send them to University film societies…they used to have things called ‘film societies’ in those days, where film enthusiasts would form kind of clubs which would meet, you know, once a week on a Sunday night or something, and rent 16mm prints of European or Classic films. It was the only way you could see them. And we would occasionally unload a program of our films on them - a bunch of about an hour and a half of movies, on a reel this size…and they would show it.
Hofsess was quite central to all this activity, and it was certainly his Redpath 25 which had set the ball rolling in a way. But he was deliberately kept at arm’s length from the day-to-day operations of the CFMDC, as we were setting it up, because we feared, quite frankly, that he would be tempted to “borrow” what little money we had for his own purposes.
You stated in an article from Take One “In many ways, the development of the CFMDC over the past 30 years mirrors the growth of experimental filmmaking in Canada.” Please explain.
I can’t really talk with any authority about that, because I wasn’t involved with the Distribution Centre much after about 1975. The last film I made was fairly straight, that is to say, not experimental at all - it was a 30-minute documentary called Campaign, about the campaign for election to the provincial Parliament of our local NDP candidate. We were actively canvassing for the candidate, Barbara Beardsley, so they treated us as insiders, and allowed us to film at their strategy meetings and so on, and we’d walk about the streets canvassing with the candidate and that kind of thing, so it wasn’t in any way an experimental, so-called underground film at all. I continued to be on the board of the Distribution Centre for a while, but I ceased to be an active film-maker. Around 1969, we had set up a nationwide union of co-ops from Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, and maybe Winnipeg. And we started getting grant money from the Ontario Arts Council, even the Canada Council…probably not Telefilm Canada, cause they were promoting the feature film industry and we were not headed in that direction. Some people did grow out of the very early underground movement and became feature filmmakers, people like Cronenberg and Ivan Reitman and Clarke Mackey. You know Clarke Mackey? Do you know his film called The Only Thing You Know? It’s a lovely little feature film - Iain Ewing is in it, doing a wonderfully crazy little cameo role…and it won the Canadian Film Awards top prize for a feature in 1971, I think, when the Canadian Film Awards only had about four entries. It took place over two evenings, and Clarke, who was only about 21 at the time, took the top prize. It was this very innocent, but very winning and quite charming, 16mm feature film. Clarke went on to become the Chair of the Film Department at Queens, where he still teaches.
What about the filmmaking style at the time and how was Toronto filmmaking influenced by New York? How were Toronto filmmakers influenced by the Warhol factory and what were the characteristics of it? What was happening at the time in terms of playing with film form and how did your film Oddballs fit in with what was going on?
Oddballs doesn’t really fit in. As I’ve said, it was a little home movie, really. Sami Gupta – Sehdev Kumar, as he is nowadays - and I were grad students in Massey College in 1965-6, and in the quadrangle at Massey they used to play croquet in a very English, Oxbridgy sort of way, and we had the idea of making a little joke film about a game of croquet which gets out of the quadrangle and goes all over the city of Toronto. That’s all it was. We started out to make it on 8mm, but discovered we could have access to a 16mm camera, which is to say we actually borrowed one from Ryerson, a klunky old thing called a Kodak Cine-Special. The camera only took 100 foot rolls…of black and white Kodak film…and we edited on a Moviescope, on rewinds just like these. And we then discovered that other people were making their own little movies, just like we were. But we had no artistic aspirations when we started out.
Hofsess was the one who was influenced by New York. Very much so. He was quite ambivalent in some ways about what he wanted to do. On the one hand he was kind of entrepreneurial and rather devious, and on the other he was quite idealistic…I think he wanted to create Cinematic Art with a serious purpose. If there was anything that could be called New York style of filmmaking it was perhaps a sort of psychedelic, free form, improvised, wave the camera around, pull the focus to the point where car headlights all become blobs on the screen. Use rock music, overlap two or three soundtracks on top of each other. Hofsess’s Black Zero had recordings of Leonard Cohen reading his own poems, with rock music laid on top of it, footage re-photographed through a kaleidoscope, throw everything you can on to the screen, sexy if you could manage it, which didn’t mean very much…a bit of nudity and vaguely erotic looking. That kind of thing.
The film of mine which is more influenced by the New York style, if such a thing existed, is called Solipse. It’s distinctly and obviously influenced by a film called Relativity, by Ed Emshwiller, whose name appears on the Cinethon poster. Solipse is about a man who gets obsessed with the idea that everything he does is being replicated millions of times over by everybody else in the world. He kind of becomes haunted by it and eventually focuses on the idea of his uniqueness being in his own fingerprints, which he then tries to erase. The title is taken from the word solipsism, which is the philosophical idea that you’re the only person who exists. I don’t think Emshwiller actually came to Toronto, but his film did. Some of the films in the Cinethon were really striking and original; others were really feeble.
Which ones?
The feeble ones? There was a film called something like Flimper Pimple. The very name is contemptible. It made Oddballs look quite sophisticated. It was just a silly student movie. There was a film called Allen for Allen, by a New York woman named Barbara Rubin. Basically, Barbara Rubin followed Allen Ginsberg around for a few days with a camera and filmed him, but it was all kind of shooting from the hip. You know, hand-held Bolex kind of thing and she edited the footage together, or maybe didn’t edit it at all, just took the film out of the camera and processed it. It was nothing. I think we actually refused to show it in the Cinethon. And I think maybe she was here and complained that we had no right to make curatorial decisions. But, I mean we were trying to put together programs that audiences would stay through to the end of. The film was so slight…but maybe we were wrong to make any kind of judgments about things…who were we, after all, to decide? So that was one aspect of the New York influence.
But of course there were other things too. The Warhol films were marked by a kind of rigorous minimalism, Sleep, and Empire State, for example. It’s impossible to locate a single, recognizable New York “style” I think. It was more of an approach to the process of making films. Individual, personal, quite anarchic, rule-breaking, provocative. Some of it was fairly political too, of course, because we were getting into the period of the Vietnam War and protests against that war. There was that split in the sixties always between the impulse towards political, even revolutionary, commitment, and the dropout sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll kind of thing. And they didn’t really merge very much. There is a film by Robin Spry called Prologue…it may have even been made within the National Film Board…which follows two people, one of whom goes to the Chicago convention in 1968, the Democratic convention where the big riots took place, and the other character joins a commune and you know, it’s the sort of drop out, free love, grow your own food, have children in common kind of thing, and that theme of the 1960’s was quite…it was a theme that people were living through you know, what life choices do we make? And movies became part of that self exploration.
Drug trip movies too…there’s a film I refer to in my memoir called The Hyacinth Child’s Bedtime Story, by Burton Rubenstein, which was the one that got shown upside and backwards at the Cinethon, and there was nothing we could do about it because we had loaded about two and a half hours of film onto a huge reel, and it was the middle of the night. And Burton’s movie was in the middle of this reel. You couldn’t take it off, take it out, turn it around and show it properly, so it just went on running. And everyone by that time was so stoned they hardly noticed. I mean, it had the Beatles song “Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream”…do you know that? But it was playing backwards, of course, on the soundtrack, and rock songs often sound quite good played backwards. Burton was in the foyer of the theatre screaming at us, “You’ve got to stop it!” and we said, “There’s nothing we can do Burton, just cool it.”
But it was a kind of druggy, psychedelic, trippy kind of thing…if you’ve ever been inside an old barn, with very strong sunlight coming through the boards of the barn, if you pan the camera back and forth across it, you’ll get these weird flashes of light, there are all kinds of ways of getting psychedelic effects on film. There was quite a lot of that in Hyacinth Child’s Bedtime Story, whose subtitle was “The horses are more important than the pig” So anyway, that’s something about the style. And some people got more serious and political, I suppose. The most substantial film I ever made was more of a TV program called Countdown Canada. We made it in the TV studios at York University in 1970, as a reaction to the trial of the Chicago Seven, and it dramatizes, like a TV News special, the day that Canada becomes part of the United States. We did it very realistically…so realistically that when the CBC actually bought it and showed it nationwide on September 1970, they flashed a subtitle from time to time saying, “simulated.” Nobody but a complete idiot would have thought it was really happening, but it had real people in it, Barbara Frum - the big atrium at the CBC is named after her and she was the host of the radio program As It Happens - so there were real people in a real studio arguing about the end of Canada as a sovereign nation. At the climax the President of the United States comes to Ottawa and makes a speech welcoming Canadians into the greater United States of America. It was meant to generate opposition to the possibility of Canada somehow losing its separate identity.
Ivan Reitman, to take a famous example, simply wanted to make successful commercial films. His first film was a thing called Orientation, a twenty-minute student comedy about a young man’s first weeks at McMaster University. It dates from the time when a bunch of guys who went on to be very big in American comedy, like Eugene Levy, were at Mac… it was a little sitcom, and he had the fantastic luck to show it at a screening in Montreal, in October 1968, where one of the major distributors, trying to show that he wanted to help fledgling filmmakers, picked it up. He had it enlarged to 35mm, made a number of 35mm prints, and distributed it commercially as the theatrical short, ahead of a Dustin Hoffman movie, John and Mary. So suddenly Ivan’s movie was being shown in theatres in front of a rather successful movie.
Then he and Hofsess made this thing called the Columbus of Sex - do you know about that? It was supposed to be projected onto two screens. This was Hofsess’s thing, to run twin projectors, side by side, at the same time. (Like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, I think) He had made Palace of Pleasure, also on twin screens, drawing on the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, the disciple of Freud who believed in psychic liberation through orgasm and stuff. With Columbus of Sex Hofsess wanted to make a film which was going to be sexually liberating, while Ivan wanted to make a commercial piece of soft core pornography, and together they made this terrible thing called Columbus of Sex, which is basically a lot of unrelated nude scenes, not much more than that, nothing much happens. There’s a bunch of naked people who lie on top of each other on a beach at night in front of a big bonfire…it’s so bad, really. But the soundtrack consists of readings from a book called My Secret Life, which is the sexual autobiography of an anonymous 19th century sexual fanatic. He spent his life…he claimed to have had sex with about 1200 women and a few men along the way…and he describes, in graphic and quite humorous detail, all these sexual encounters, and the soundtrack is me reading bits of it, for which Ivan Reitman paid me the grand sum of a hundred dollars. The film was first shown at McMaster. It was seized by the police and became the basis of quite an important legal challenge. They got various notable cultural types, like Pierre Burton, and movie critics and academics to come to the court, essentially to defend it as art. Hofsess felt that this was rather like the trial of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, the D.H.Lawrence novel, in England in the early 1960’s. Ivan just wanted to get off the embarrassment of being fined or jailed or something. I think they were found guilty and maybe fined some token amount. But Ivan took all the print materials of the film, and I helped him get on the train at Union station to take it to Los Angeles, to sell to a man called Jack Harris, who blew it up to 35mm, shot some extra footage and released the film as a sort of soft core porn flick called My Secret Life - with my soundtrack, which Ivan paid me another 100 dollars to re-record, still on it. It opened in New York, in Times Square, in a twin cinema, side by side with Love Story. Pity anyone who walked into the wrong one by mistake!
Where was everybody going? What was the movement all about? I guess what I’m saying is that some people, the purists, wanted to pursue film as a minority art-form, a quite esoteric mode of expression and communication, that stands in relation to commercial cinema the way that poetry stands to popular fiction. Others wanted to make their way into the wider realm of commercial cinema. Ivan Reitman wanted to make feature movies and went on to make things like Foxy Lady and Cannibal Girls, which were fairly simple-minded, but then he went to Los Angeles with Joe Medjuck and Danny Goldberg, and is now fantastically successful and still, I believe, a very nice man. Been married to the same woman for about 40 years, and used to have dinner parties with intellectuals like Carl Sagan. I had lunch with him in Los Angeles, quite a few years ago now, and he was still so nice and friendly. Cronenberg, as we’ve said, went on to make Stereo and then a thing called Crimes of the Future, and thence into making the serious and idiosyncratic feature movies that have made him world famous. Clark Mackey made The Only Thing You Know but never really took off as a feature filmmaker. David Sector burned his boats. He made Winter Kept Us Warm in about 1964, a feature film in 16mm about students at the U of T, and got some attention in the media. He then tried to make a film in 35mm – The Apprentice was it called? - and declared that he was not going to use union labour on the film. So the unions blacklisted the film, which meant projectionists wouldn’t show it in theatres, so that finished him off. I don’t think he did anything much after that. Big breakthrough in 1969 was Don Shebib’s Goin' Down The Road. Do you know the book by Geoff Pevere? Published about two or three years ago now about the making of Goin' Down The Road, it’s a very useful account of Toronto filmmaking in the late sixties.
What about Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow? Where do they fit into all of this?
They go back a bit earlier because they were out of the Ontario College of Art, now called OCAD. There was a painter called Jack Chambers who was an artist in London, Ontario, and Greg Curnoe…they were serious visual artists. Painters, sculptors, makers of installation pieces. They were getting towards a kind of conceptual art, where it’s not so much the intrinsic interest of the thing you look at, as the idea behind it. And they started making films. And Joyce and Michael Snow were married at the time…later Michael married Peggy Gale…and they had a sort of jazz band called something like the Nihilist Spasm Band which, as I remember, was almost totally free form, just a bunch of people who played musical instruments at the same time, and that was about all it amounted to. They would have these things called Happenings, where they would project film loops on a screen, and the band would play, and people would recite or perform…but they were kind of outside this New York-influenced, psychedelic film-making. It all came together in a way with the Cinethon in 1967. So the names of Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland are on the poster, and Joyce created a mixed-media Happening in the Cinecity theatre as part of the Cinethon.
In 1968 (I guess it was) Michael made a film called Wavelength. I happened to be at the first screening of Wavelength. It was at the same event in Montreal where Ivan’s Orientation was shown and picked up by a distributor. The two films could hardly be more different! Wavelength was a continuous, very, very slow zoom, from a fixed camera position, lasting about forty five minutes. And as the zoom inexorably progresses, you gradually begin to realize that’s it going to end up looking at a picture on the opposite wall of the room. And the picture is a black and white photograph of little waves breaking on a beach. The soundtrack is just a very slowly rising sine wave, becoming inaudibly high, and ending in five minutes of silence, as the camera looks at the photograph. So it’s the most rigorous, nearly abstract film you can imagine. At the end of the screening, the lights went up and somebody stood up at the back of the theatre and said, “Can anyone give me one reason why I should sit through this piece of total nonsensical crap…?” and someone else stood up and said, “If you can’t see why this is the greatest movie made since Un Chien Andalou then I’m sorry for you…” It looked for a minute as if a fight might break out, but then somebody turned the lights down and showed the next movie instead. Which is a pity really, as it have been a memorable moment in Canadian film-making. Michael went on to make a film called La Region Centrale, and built himself some huge kind of robotic structure with a camera that would go through all kinds of strange convolutions and 360 degree turns, set up on a hilltop somewhere in the wilderness. He also joined the Board of the CFMDC, as did Avrom Isaacs, the gallery owner who promoted a lot of avant-garde art. And then there’s Bruce Elder, who seems to take purity and intellectual rigour to a whole new level. So there’s that stream of things and that probably became the most interesting part of the filmmaking co-op scene in Toronto.
Do you think the formal, experimental filmmaking was more authentically Toronto whereas any other psychedelic films were influenced by New York? Is there a distinction there?
You might say that. Although I’m sure there were other people making formalist - to use a rather rough and ready term - films in other places…people like Stan Brakhage of course. And there was a guy in Chicago, Gregory Marcopoulos…
You made Oddballs with Sami Gupta. What did he do? How did you meet him?
We were just fellow students at Massey College. He taught for a very long time at Waterloo in what was called the Department of Man/Environment Studies…but we just thought it would be fun to make a movie together. I tend to regard the movie as 80% mine, 20% his. Well, it was more my idea, and I think I edited it pretty much single-handedly. And we took turns on the camera. He’s in the film at one point, so I must have been holding the camera. Neither of us had handled a movie camera before. I learned what little I ever knew about editing simply by doing it. It’s more my film than his, but as I say, it’s a very unassuming little thing. I don’t make any claims for it.
It’s interesting because some of the articles I have read have said “Oddballs is playing with film form and it’s a result of the limitations of technology…” and all this meaning is ascribed to it…
There are articles about Oddballs? If it’s about limitation of technology, it’s only by virtue of the fact that our technology was rather limited! We were using an ancient camera, a wind up camera. You had to crank the thing up like clockwork. You’d crank up the spring and then it would run for two and a half minutes, which is the length of a one hundred foot roll. And the soundtrack! Here’s the problem with the soundtrack. We screened the movie while a little jazz trio played along to it, occasionally punctuating moments in the film with drum-beats. The trouble was, the tape recorder was not synchronized to the movie projector. We didn’t even think of that. Which meant, as we discovered later, that the film’s soundtrack was getting further and further out of sync with the picture. And the only way we could correct for that was to splice in a few seconds of silence, to bring them into sync again. The limitations of technology were just that. We didn’t know we were doing. It was very crude. We weren’t “playing with film form” or anything like that. And it’s not some kind of artful parody of the French Nouvelle Vague or anything. Several times in the film we see a rather menacing guy running around pushing a wheelbarrow, but it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just a visual gag. Robertson Davies makes an appearance in the film, the tall bearded gentleman who hands the cup to the winner. The famous Canadian novelist. He was Master of Massey College at the time. So you will understand that when we saw Hofess’s Redpath 25, at that screening in January or February 1967, it opened our eyes to more ambitious possibilities.
Was it the first time you had seen anything like that before?
It was the first time most of us had. I mentioned a film called This by someone called Glen McCauley, who was virtually never seen again. And it too, like Oddballs, was a black and white, and jokey, pseudo Western, filmed in High Park. Young Clark Mackey was only about sixteen and made a film called On Nothing Days, which was a very simple film about a teenager who lurks around downtown. Don Shebib had made a very neat little film called Revival – he went to UCLA Film School and made a couple of films as his graduation projects. They were pretty good. I think he also made films at the NFB. You have to remember that, although we talk as though we were inventing cinema, in Toronto at the time, you had the CBC. And most, nearly all, television programs were either live-to-air in the studio, cause videotape wasn’t invented yet, or they were made on film. So a huge amount of film was being made for television by professional filmmakers. People like Paul Almond who made Isabel and Journey… Norman Jewison was a CBC film director…You gotta remember that while we were running around with our little wind-up Bolexes, making our little nothing films, CBC was a highly professional organization, producing masses of material for national distribution: documentary, news, features, drama, all on film. There was a place called Film House down on Front Street, right next door to what is now the Hockey Hall of Fame, and it was one of the big processing houses and they were terrific. They would let us, with our little tiny rolls of black and white nothing, into the editing suites in the middle of the night. Free. Just as kind of encouragement. So anyway, there’s tons of film being made by professional people who’d been making it for decades…You’ve also got the National Film Board and some of the earliest Canadian features in the sixties…including Shebib’s Goin' Down The Road….were NFB documentaries that “got away” as it were. Like Don Owen with Nobody Waved Goodbye. They were given a budget, a very strict budget, to make some sort of documentary about a runaway teenager in Toronto… and they kind of took the money and ran with it and made a feature and brought it back to the NFB who said “You shouldn’t have done that, we told you not to, but it’s quite good, let’s see what you can do with it…” So that was another way films were getting made. And then Down Owen went on to make a film called the Ernie Game …a funded feature. And Peter Pearson made Best Damn Fiddler… The NFB was toying with the idea of getting into feature filmmaking. It wasn’t clear whether its mandate permitted it.
So do you think Don Owen, Claude Jutra, Gilles Carle, Gilles Groulx, Larry Kent, and David Sector were making bolder steps in filmmaking because they were involved with the NFB?
Partly, but the thing is, they were trying to make serious feature films…I mean, Claude Jutra’s first feature is a thing called A Tout Prendre, 1963 I think…but it’s up there with the Nouvelle Vague things. Godard, Truffaut…
Do you know, by the way, of a major Canadian film critic and teacher, Peter Harcourt? Peter died just last summer, aged nearly 83. Canadian born, U of T grad in music, actually. Went to England in 1955, did a degree in English at Cambridge…started writing for Sight and Sound in London and wrote this book which was published around 1970, called Six European Directors. It’s about Eisenstein, Renoir, Bergman, Fellini, Bunuel and Godard. It’s not a scholarly study exactly, but a very thoughtful, critical book about European art film of the time…Peter was really foundational. He founded Film Studies at Queens in 1967 and out of the school came all sorts of people who went on to be very influential in Canadian cinema. Piers Handling, Peter Raymont, Geoff Pevere, Brigitte Berman… It was an environment of critical and creative Film Studies. Peter encouraged everybody to make films. You can’t study film theoretically unless you know something about how they’re made, how to handle a camera, the rudiments of editing. Peter was very much preoccupied with people like Godard. And I would say that A Tout Prendre is the same sort of very personal, auteur-ish, autobiographical, low light, low budget feature as the Nouvelle Vague people were making in France in the early 1960s. One of Peter Harcourt’s essential contributions was to try to make English and French-speaking film-makers more aware of each other in Canada.
So you would say there are two streams in Toronto going on at the time…one is geared toward filmmakers trying to be in this feature stream and the other one is experimental (from OCAD)?
Yes, yes I would say that. If you really want to be a commercial, professional filmmaker, you’ve got to make films for theatrical release. If you’re not trying to do that then you are putting yourself on the margin, and remaining an esoteric, minority interest. Nothing wrong with that at all, but it’s a different approach to cinema. Some film-makers, and some films, occasionally manage to jump the gap.
Would there have been any other venues, other than the Cinethon, where that intersection would have taken place?
Nothing regular. We sometimes had to set-up our own screenings. We would find a venue at a University or school auditorium…We had one screening, an outdoor screening at night, in a courtyard behind Honest Ed’s, and I somehow managed to get Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, to announce it from the stage of the O’Keeffe Centre during a rock concert…what is now the Hummingbird Centre…and we’d just set up a projector and show films. So it was always a rather improvised, minimal, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation. Nobody made any money. And some people wanted to graduate to serious commercial filmmaking…and some did. And others wanted to stay in this artistic niche.
Was that the heart of their politics? They didn’t want to be associated with anything commercial?
Yes, probably. It would be regarded as a kind of sell-out. And also it’s impossible…that kind of movie is intrinsically un-commercial.
Were there any tensions between the different kinds of filmmakers?
I don’t think so, no. There used to be gatherings of filmmakers…there was always the question of funding. Why doesn’t Telefilm Canada support independent filmmaking? The answer was, “It’s not interested in independent filmmaking”. Telefilm Canada was set-up as an investment bank, really…to co-produce commercial movies, with the notion that they would take off and become a fully fledged movie industry. In Quebec it’s slightly different because in Quebec, nationalism was all involved in that. Language nationalism. So the NFB and the Quebec government fostered the films of people like Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Denys Arcand… But that’s another story.
Hofsess was quite central to all this activity, and it was certainly his Redpath 25 which had set the ball rolling in a way. But he was deliberately kept at arm’s length from the day-to-day operations of the CFMDC, as we were setting it up, because we feared, quite frankly, that he would be tempted to “borrow” what little money we had for his own purposes.
You stated in an article from Take One “In many ways, the development of the CFMDC over the past 30 years mirrors the growth of experimental filmmaking in Canada.” Please explain.
I can’t really talk with any authority about that, because I wasn’t involved with the Distribution Centre much after about 1975. The last film I made was fairly straight, that is to say, not experimental at all - it was a 30-minute documentary called Campaign, about the campaign for election to the provincial Parliament of our local NDP candidate. We were actively canvassing for the candidate, Barbara Beardsley, so they treated us as insiders, and allowed us to film at their strategy meetings and so on, and we’d walk about the streets canvassing with the candidate and that kind of thing, so it wasn’t in any way an experimental, so-called underground film at all. I continued to be on the board of the Distribution Centre for a while, but I ceased to be an active film-maker. Around 1969, we had set up a nationwide union of co-ops from Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, and maybe Winnipeg. And we started getting grant money from the Ontario Arts Council, even the Canada Council…probably not Telefilm Canada, cause they were promoting the feature film industry and we were not headed in that direction. Some people did grow out of the very early underground movement and became feature filmmakers, people like Cronenberg and Ivan Reitman and Clarke Mackey. You know Clarke Mackey? Do you know his film called The Only Thing You Know? It’s a lovely little feature film - Iain Ewing is in it, doing a wonderfully crazy little cameo role…and it won the Canadian Film Awards top prize for a feature in 1971, I think, when the Canadian Film Awards only had about four entries. It took place over two evenings, and Clarke, who was only about 21 at the time, took the top prize. It was this very innocent, but very winning and quite charming, 16mm feature film. Clarke went on to become the Chair of the Film Department at Queens, where he still teaches.
What about the filmmaking style at the time and how was Toronto filmmaking influenced by New York? How were Toronto filmmakers influenced by the Warhol factory and what were the characteristics of it? What was happening at the time in terms of playing with film form and how did your film Oddballs fit in with what was going on?
Oddballs doesn’t really fit in. As I’ve said, it was a little home movie, really. Sami Gupta – Sehdev Kumar, as he is nowadays - and I were grad students in Massey College in 1965-6, and in the quadrangle at Massey they used to play croquet in a very English, Oxbridgy sort of way, and we had the idea of making a little joke film about a game of croquet which gets out of the quadrangle and goes all over the city of Toronto. That’s all it was. We started out to make it on 8mm, but discovered we could have access to a 16mm camera, which is to say we actually borrowed one from Ryerson, a klunky old thing called a Kodak Cine-Special. The camera only took 100 foot rolls…of black and white Kodak film…and we edited on a Moviescope, on rewinds just like these. And we then discovered that other people were making their own little movies, just like we were. But we had no artistic aspirations when we started out.
Hofsess was the one who was influenced by New York. Very much so. He was quite ambivalent in some ways about what he wanted to do. On the one hand he was kind of entrepreneurial and rather devious, and on the other he was quite idealistic…I think he wanted to create Cinematic Art with a serious purpose. If there was anything that could be called New York style of filmmaking it was perhaps a sort of psychedelic, free form, improvised, wave the camera around, pull the focus to the point where car headlights all become blobs on the screen. Use rock music, overlap two or three soundtracks on top of each other. Hofsess’s Black Zero had recordings of Leonard Cohen reading his own poems, with rock music laid on top of it, footage re-photographed through a kaleidoscope, throw everything you can on to the screen, sexy if you could manage it, which didn’t mean very much…a bit of nudity and vaguely erotic looking. That kind of thing.
The film of mine which is more influenced by the New York style, if such a thing existed, is called Solipse. It’s distinctly and obviously influenced by a film called Relativity, by Ed Emshwiller, whose name appears on the Cinethon poster. Solipse is about a man who gets obsessed with the idea that everything he does is being replicated millions of times over by everybody else in the world. He kind of becomes haunted by it and eventually focuses on the idea of his uniqueness being in his own fingerprints, which he then tries to erase. The title is taken from the word solipsism, which is the philosophical idea that you’re the only person who exists. I don’t think Emshwiller actually came to Toronto, but his film did. Some of the films in the Cinethon were really striking and original; others were really feeble.
Which ones?
The feeble ones? There was a film called something like Flimper Pimple. The very name is contemptible. It made Oddballs look quite sophisticated. It was just a silly student movie. There was a film called Allen for Allen, by a New York woman named Barbara Rubin. Basically, Barbara Rubin followed Allen Ginsberg around for a few days with a camera and filmed him, but it was all kind of shooting from the hip. You know, hand-held Bolex kind of thing and she edited the footage together, or maybe didn’t edit it at all, just took the film out of the camera and processed it. It was nothing. I think we actually refused to show it in the Cinethon. And I think maybe she was here and complained that we had no right to make curatorial decisions. But, I mean we were trying to put together programs that audiences would stay through to the end of. The film was so slight…but maybe we were wrong to make any kind of judgments about things…who were we, after all, to decide? So that was one aspect of the New York influence.
But of course there were other things too. The Warhol films were marked by a kind of rigorous minimalism, Sleep, and Empire State, for example. It’s impossible to locate a single, recognizable New York “style” I think. It was more of an approach to the process of making films. Individual, personal, quite anarchic, rule-breaking, provocative. Some of it was fairly political too, of course, because we were getting into the period of the Vietnam War and protests against that war. There was that split in the sixties always between the impulse towards political, even revolutionary, commitment, and the dropout sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll kind of thing. And they didn’t really merge very much. There is a film by Robin Spry called Prologue…it may have even been made within the National Film Board…which follows two people, one of whom goes to the Chicago convention in 1968, the Democratic convention where the big riots took place, and the other character joins a commune and you know, it’s the sort of drop out, free love, grow your own food, have children in common kind of thing, and that theme of the 1960’s was quite…it was a theme that people were living through you know, what life choices do we make? And movies became part of that self exploration.
Drug trip movies too…there’s a film I refer to in my memoir called The Hyacinth Child’s Bedtime Story, by Burton Rubenstein, which was the one that got shown upside and backwards at the Cinethon, and there was nothing we could do about it because we had loaded about two and a half hours of film onto a huge reel, and it was the middle of the night. And Burton’s movie was in the middle of this reel. You couldn’t take it off, take it out, turn it around and show it properly, so it just went on running. And everyone by that time was so stoned they hardly noticed. I mean, it had the Beatles song “Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream”…do you know that? But it was playing backwards, of course, on the soundtrack, and rock songs often sound quite good played backwards. Burton was in the foyer of the theatre screaming at us, “You’ve got to stop it!” and we said, “There’s nothing we can do Burton, just cool it.”
But it was a kind of druggy, psychedelic, trippy kind of thing…if you’ve ever been inside an old barn, with very strong sunlight coming through the boards of the barn, if you pan the camera back and forth across it, you’ll get these weird flashes of light, there are all kinds of ways of getting psychedelic effects on film. There was quite a lot of that in Hyacinth Child’s Bedtime Story, whose subtitle was “The horses are more important than the pig” So anyway, that’s something about the style. And some people got more serious and political, I suppose. The most substantial film I ever made was more of a TV program called Countdown Canada. We made it in the TV studios at York University in 1970, as a reaction to the trial of the Chicago Seven, and it dramatizes, like a TV News special, the day that Canada becomes part of the United States. We did it very realistically…so realistically that when the CBC actually bought it and showed it nationwide on September 1970, they flashed a subtitle from time to time saying, “simulated.” Nobody but a complete idiot would have thought it was really happening, but it had real people in it, Barbara Frum - the big atrium at the CBC is named after her and she was the host of the radio program As It Happens - so there were real people in a real studio arguing about the end of Canada as a sovereign nation. At the climax the President of the United States comes to Ottawa and makes a speech welcoming Canadians into the greater United States of America. It was meant to generate opposition to the possibility of Canada somehow losing its separate identity.
Ivan Reitman, to take a famous example, simply wanted to make successful commercial films. His first film was a thing called Orientation, a twenty-minute student comedy about a young man’s first weeks at McMaster University. It dates from the time when a bunch of guys who went on to be very big in American comedy, like Eugene Levy, were at Mac… it was a little sitcom, and he had the fantastic luck to show it at a screening in Montreal, in October 1968, where one of the major distributors, trying to show that he wanted to help fledgling filmmakers, picked it up. He had it enlarged to 35mm, made a number of 35mm prints, and distributed it commercially as the theatrical short, ahead of a Dustin Hoffman movie, John and Mary. So suddenly Ivan’s movie was being shown in theatres in front of a rather successful movie.
Then he and Hofsess made this thing called the Columbus of Sex - do you know about that? It was supposed to be projected onto two screens. This was Hofsess’s thing, to run twin projectors, side by side, at the same time. (Like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, I think) He had made Palace of Pleasure, also on twin screens, drawing on the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, the disciple of Freud who believed in psychic liberation through orgasm and stuff. With Columbus of Sex Hofsess wanted to make a film which was going to be sexually liberating, while Ivan wanted to make a commercial piece of soft core pornography, and together they made this terrible thing called Columbus of Sex, which is basically a lot of unrelated nude scenes, not much more than that, nothing much happens. There’s a bunch of naked people who lie on top of each other on a beach at night in front of a big bonfire…it’s so bad, really. But the soundtrack consists of readings from a book called My Secret Life, which is the sexual autobiography of an anonymous 19th century sexual fanatic. He spent his life…he claimed to have had sex with about 1200 women and a few men along the way…and he describes, in graphic and quite humorous detail, all these sexual encounters, and the soundtrack is me reading bits of it, for which Ivan Reitman paid me the grand sum of a hundred dollars. The film was first shown at McMaster. It was seized by the police and became the basis of quite an important legal challenge. They got various notable cultural types, like Pierre Burton, and movie critics and academics to come to the court, essentially to defend it as art. Hofsess felt that this was rather like the trial of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, the D.H.Lawrence novel, in England in the early 1960’s. Ivan just wanted to get off the embarrassment of being fined or jailed or something. I think they were found guilty and maybe fined some token amount. But Ivan took all the print materials of the film, and I helped him get on the train at Union station to take it to Los Angeles, to sell to a man called Jack Harris, who blew it up to 35mm, shot some extra footage and released the film as a sort of soft core porn flick called My Secret Life - with my soundtrack, which Ivan paid me another 100 dollars to re-record, still on it. It opened in New York, in Times Square, in a twin cinema, side by side with Love Story. Pity anyone who walked into the wrong one by mistake!
Where was everybody going? What was the movement all about? I guess what I’m saying is that some people, the purists, wanted to pursue film as a minority art-form, a quite esoteric mode of expression and communication, that stands in relation to commercial cinema the way that poetry stands to popular fiction. Others wanted to make their way into the wider realm of commercial cinema. Ivan Reitman wanted to make feature movies and went on to make things like Foxy Lady and Cannibal Girls, which were fairly simple-minded, but then he went to Los Angeles with Joe Medjuck and Danny Goldberg, and is now fantastically successful and still, I believe, a very nice man. Been married to the same woman for about 40 years, and used to have dinner parties with intellectuals like Carl Sagan. I had lunch with him in Los Angeles, quite a few years ago now, and he was still so nice and friendly. Cronenberg, as we’ve said, went on to make Stereo and then a thing called Crimes of the Future, and thence into making the serious and idiosyncratic feature movies that have made him world famous. Clark Mackey made The Only Thing You Know but never really took off as a feature filmmaker. David Sector burned his boats. He made Winter Kept Us Warm in about 1964, a feature film in 16mm about students at the U of T, and got some attention in the media. He then tried to make a film in 35mm – The Apprentice was it called? - and declared that he was not going to use union labour on the film. So the unions blacklisted the film, which meant projectionists wouldn’t show it in theatres, so that finished him off. I don’t think he did anything much after that. Big breakthrough in 1969 was Don Shebib’s Goin' Down The Road. Do you know the book by Geoff Pevere? Published about two or three years ago now about the making of Goin' Down The Road, it’s a very useful account of Toronto filmmaking in the late sixties.
What about Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow? Where do they fit into all of this?
They go back a bit earlier because they were out of the Ontario College of Art, now called OCAD. There was a painter called Jack Chambers who was an artist in London, Ontario, and Greg Curnoe…they were serious visual artists. Painters, sculptors, makers of installation pieces. They were getting towards a kind of conceptual art, where it’s not so much the intrinsic interest of the thing you look at, as the idea behind it. And they started making films. And Joyce and Michael Snow were married at the time…later Michael married Peggy Gale…and they had a sort of jazz band called something like the Nihilist Spasm Band which, as I remember, was almost totally free form, just a bunch of people who played musical instruments at the same time, and that was about all it amounted to. They would have these things called Happenings, where they would project film loops on a screen, and the band would play, and people would recite or perform…but they were kind of outside this New York-influenced, psychedelic film-making. It all came together in a way with the Cinethon in 1967. So the names of Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland are on the poster, and Joyce created a mixed-media Happening in the Cinecity theatre as part of the Cinethon.
In 1968 (I guess it was) Michael made a film called Wavelength. I happened to be at the first screening of Wavelength. It was at the same event in Montreal where Ivan’s Orientation was shown and picked up by a distributor. The two films could hardly be more different! Wavelength was a continuous, very, very slow zoom, from a fixed camera position, lasting about forty five minutes. And as the zoom inexorably progresses, you gradually begin to realize that’s it going to end up looking at a picture on the opposite wall of the room. And the picture is a black and white photograph of little waves breaking on a beach. The soundtrack is just a very slowly rising sine wave, becoming inaudibly high, and ending in five minutes of silence, as the camera looks at the photograph. So it’s the most rigorous, nearly abstract film you can imagine. At the end of the screening, the lights went up and somebody stood up at the back of the theatre and said, “Can anyone give me one reason why I should sit through this piece of total nonsensical crap…?” and someone else stood up and said, “If you can’t see why this is the greatest movie made since Un Chien Andalou then I’m sorry for you…” It looked for a minute as if a fight might break out, but then somebody turned the lights down and showed the next movie instead. Which is a pity really, as it have been a memorable moment in Canadian film-making. Michael went on to make a film called La Region Centrale, and built himself some huge kind of robotic structure with a camera that would go through all kinds of strange convolutions and 360 degree turns, set up on a hilltop somewhere in the wilderness. He also joined the Board of the CFMDC, as did Avrom Isaacs, the gallery owner who promoted a lot of avant-garde art. And then there’s Bruce Elder, who seems to take purity and intellectual rigour to a whole new level. So there’s that stream of things and that probably became the most interesting part of the filmmaking co-op scene in Toronto.
Do you think the formal, experimental filmmaking was more authentically Toronto whereas any other psychedelic films were influenced by New York? Is there a distinction there?
You might say that. Although I’m sure there were other people making formalist - to use a rather rough and ready term - films in other places…people like Stan Brakhage of course. And there was a guy in Chicago, Gregory Marcopoulos…
You made Oddballs with Sami Gupta. What did he do? How did you meet him?
We were just fellow students at Massey College. He taught for a very long time at Waterloo in what was called the Department of Man/Environment Studies…but we just thought it would be fun to make a movie together. I tend to regard the movie as 80% mine, 20% his. Well, it was more my idea, and I think I edited it pretty much single-handedly. And we took turns on the camera. He’s in the film at one point, so I must have been holding the camera. Neither of us had handled a movie camera before. I learned what little I ever knew about editing simply by doing it. It’s more my film than his, but as I say, it’s a very unassuming little thing. I don’t make any claims for it.
It’s interesting because some of the articles I have read have said “Oddballs is playing with film form and it’s a result of the limitations of technology…” and all this meaning is ascribed to it…
There are articles about Oddballs? If it’s about limitation of technology, it’s only by virtue of the fact that our technology was rather limited! We were using an ancient camera, a wind up camera. You had to crank the thing up like clockwork. You’d crank up the spring and then it would run for two and a half minutes, which is the length of a one hundred foot roll. And the soundtrack! Here’s the problem with the soundtrack. We screened the movie while a little jazz trio played along to it, occasionally punctuating moments in the film with drum-beats. The trouble was, the tape recorder was not synchronized to the movie projector. We didn’t even think of that. Which meant, as we discovered later, that the film’s soundtrack was getting further and further out of sync with the picture. And the only way we could correct for that was to splice in a few seconds of silence, to bring them into sync again. The limitations of technology were just that. We didn’t know we were doing. It was very crude. We weren’t “playing with film form” or anything like that. And it’s not some kind of artful parody of the French Nouvelle Vague or anything. Several times in the film we see a rather menacing guy running around pushing a wheelbarrow, but it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just a visual gag. Robertson Davies makes an appearance in the film, the tall bearded gentleman who hands the cup to the winner. The famous Canadian novelist. He was Master of Massey College at the time. So you will understand that when we saw Hofess’s Redpath 25, at that screening in January or February 1967, it opened our eyes to more ambitious possibilities.
Was it the first time you had seen anything like that before?
It was the first time most of us had. I mentioned a film called This by someone called Glen McCauley, who was virtually never seen again. And it too, like Oddballs, was a black and white, and jokey, pseudo Western, filmed in High Park. Young Clark Mackey was only about sixteen and made a film called On Nothing Days, which was a very simple film about a teenager who lurks around downtown. Don Shebib had made a very neat little film called Revival – he went to UCLA Film School and made a couple of films as his graduation projects. They were pretty good. I think he also made films at the NFB. You have to remember that, although we talk as though we were inventing cinema, in Toronto at the time, you had the CBC. And most, nearly all, television programs were either live-to-air in the studio, cause videotape wasn’t invented yet, or they were made on film. So a huge amount of film was being made for television by professional filmmakers. People like Paul Almond who made Isabel and Journey… Norman Jewison was a CBC film director…You gotta remember that while we were running around with our little wind-up Bolexes, making our little nothing films, CBC was a highly professional organization, producing masses of material for national distribution: documentary, news, features, drama, all on film. There was a place called Film House down on Front Street, right next door to what is now the Hockey Hall of Fame, and it was one of the big processing houses and they were terrific. They would let us, with our little tiny rolls of black and white nothing, into the editing suites in the middle of the night. Free. Just as kind of encouragement. So anyway, there’s tons of film being made by professional people who’d been making it for decades…You’ve also got the National Film Board and some of the earliest Canadian features in the sixties…including Shebib’s Goin' Down The Road….were NFB documentaries that “got away” as it were. Like Don Owen with Nobody Waved Goodbye. They were given a budget, a very strict budget, to make some sort of documentary about a runaway teenager in Toronto… and they kind of took the money and ran with it and made a feature and brought it back to the NFB who said “You shouldn’t have done that, we told you not to, but it’s quite good, let’s see what you can do with it…” So that was another way films were getting made. And then Down Owen went on to make a film called the Ernie Game …a funded feature. And Peter Pearson made Best Damn Fiddler… The NFB was toying with the idea of getting into feature filmmaking. It wasn’t clear whether its mandate permitted it.
So do you think Don Owen, Claude Jutra, Gilles Carle, Gilles Groulx, Larry Kent, and David Sector were making bolder steps in filmmaking because they were involved with the NFB?
Partly, but the thing is, they were trying to make serious feature films…I mean, Claude Jutra’s first feature is a thing called A Tout Prendre, 1963 I think…but it’s up there with the Nouvelle Vague things. Godard, Truffaut…
Do you know, by the way, of a major Canadian film critic and teacher, Peter Harcourt? Peter died just last summer, aged nearly 83. Canadian born, U of T grad in music, actually. Went to England in 1955, did a degree in English at Cambridge…started writing for Sight and Sound in London and wrote this book which was published around 1970, called Six European Directors. It’s about Eisenstein, Renoir, Bergman, Fellini, Bunuel and Godard. It’s not a scholarly study exactly, but a very thoughtful, critical book about European art film of the time…Peter was really foundational. He founded Film Studies at Queens in 1967 and out of the school came all sorts of people who went on to be very influential in Canadian cinema. Piers Handling, Peter Raymont, Geoff Pevere, Brigitte Berman… It was an environment of critical and creative Film Studies. Peter encouraged everybody to make films. You can’t study film theoretically unless you know something about how they’re made, how to handle a camera, the rudiments of editing. Peter was very much preoccupied with people like Godard. And I would say that A Tout Prendre is the same sort of very personal, auteur-ish, autobiographical, low light, low budget feature as the Nouvelle Vague people were making in France in the early 1960s. One of Peter Harcourt’s essential contributions was to try to make English and French-speaking film-makers more aware of each other in Canada.
So you would say there are two streams in Toronto going on at the time…one is geared toward filmmakers trying to be in this feature stream and the other one is experimental (from OCAD)?
Yes, yes I would say that. If you really want to be a commercial, professional filmmaker, you’ve got to make films for theatrical release. If you’re not trying to do that then you are putting yourself on the margin, and remaining an esoteric, minority interest. Nothing wrong with that at all, but it’s a different approach to cinema. Some film-makers, and some films, occasionally manage to jump the gap.
Would there have been any other venues, other than the Cinethon, where that intersection would have taken place?
Nothing regular. We sometimes had to set-up our own screenings. We would find a venue at a University or school auditorium…We had one screening, an outdoor screening at night, in a courtyard behind Honest Ed’s, and I somehow managed to get Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, to announce it from the stage of the O’Keeffe Centre during a rock concert…what is now the Hummingbird Centre…and we’d just set up a projector and show films. So it was always a rather improvised, minimal, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation. Nobody made any money. And some people wanted to graduate to serious commercial filmmaking…and some did. And others wanted to stay in this artistic niche.
Was that the heart of their politics? They didn’t want to be associated with anything commercial?
Yes, probably. It would be regarded as a kind of sell-out. And also it’s impossible…that kind of movie is intrinsically un-commercial.
Were there any tensions between the different kinds of filmmakers?
I don’t think so, no. There used to be gatherings of filmmakers…there was always the question of funding. Why doesn’t Telefilm Canada support independent filmmaking? The answer was, “It’s not interested in independent filmmaking”. Telefilm Canada was set-up as an investment bank, really…to co-produce commercial movies, with the notion that they would take off and become a fully fledged movie industry. In Quebec it’s slightly different because in Quebec, nationalism was all involved in that. Language nationalism. So the NFB and the Quebec government fostered the films of people like Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Denys Arcand… But that’s another story.