Theodore A. Harris, On the Throne of Fire, 2008, mixed media collage

I first came into contact with Theodore Harris when I was given the opportunity to moderate “Art as a Weapon: Critical Thinking and the Media,” the keynote event of Culture Shock 2011 co-organized by QPIRG McGill and the SSMU (Student Society of McGill University). Culture Shock is an annual series of events on McGill University campus focused on the stories and experiences of immigrants, refugees, communities of colour and indigenous people. This year’s keynote speakers were artists Sundus Abdul Hadi [i] and Theodore A. Harris.

I was born in the U.S. in 1966 to a biracial couple active in the civil rights movement. Our family moved from Boston to Montreal in the early 1970s; however I have always felt a strong cultural connection to Black America and some of my earliest, deepest impressions are of the 1960s in the American northeast, even though I was too young to really remember this time and place. I have found much inspiration in African American art history and especially in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and ‘70s.  My career has transitioned over the past 15 years or so, from social services to community work to a broader cultural work involving community art and education, situated within African diaspora histories of emancipatory education programs initiated from within the community, for the community[ii].

I immediately connected with Theodore’s art and saw it in the tradition of BAM, an impression that was reinforced as I discovered his collaborative work with renowned Black poet-playwright Amiri Baraka[iii].  Following the Culture Shock event in October, Theodore generously agreed to stay in contact with me and to discuss his work and ideas.  The following conversation represents some of the issues we have been engaging with by email and telephone in the past six weeks.

Rosalind: In addition to my appreciation of your artwork Theodore, my motivation for initiating this dialogue is my research, which explores the potential social, cultural and economic benefits of inter-generational art education that is critically and culturally grounded in the lives of Black community members.  My key interests right now are (a) understanding how the notion that visual ‘art isn’t for Black people’ is perpetuated both within the community and in art discourses; and (b) working with other community members to advance student-centered, critical multicultural approaches to art education that work to broaden conceptions of ‘art’ and ‘artist,’ and seek to examine and dismantle the powerful traditions of racism and ethnocentrism ingrained in the histories of Western art and art education.

Last summer I discovered a study by art education scholar William Charland in which he addressed what he described as the “Black avoidance of art as an area of study or career aspiration”[iv].  Charland examined the attitudes and behaviours toward visual art and the career identity of ‘artist’ of fifty-eight African American adolescents from four different high schools.  The teenagers were asked to describe stereotypes what they believed White people attributed to Blacks, and then later in the study were asked to relate widespread stereotypes that people have of artists.  Charland found, for example, a “startling overlap between informants’ understandings of society’s demeaning stereotypes of artists and African Americans” (i.e., both as poor, marginalized, moody, unable to function in ‘normal society’, etc), suggesting that “an African American adolescent who assumes the mantle of artist willingly takes on social stigma aligned with racial stereotypes as well”[v].  The teens also talked about family and community objections to an art career, something I hear often as well, suggesting that stereotype-informed beliefs about artists exist across generations.

So Theodore, given the exclusivity and elitism of formal institutions of art and what Charland describes can you talk about how you became an artist?

Theodore: First I want to thank you for moderating the keynote panel with the great artist Sundus Abdul Hadi and myself as part of the Culture Shock events at McGill University.

This is a great question and one that gets to the heart of some deep concerns for me. I was born in 1966 in Manhattan, New York City, but I grew up in Philadelphia. My mother was a single parent with a drug addiction raising my sister and me, while my father was still in New York dealing with his own addiction (which he did manage to control enough to obtain a degree in social work from NYU).  I say all that to say with all of this dysfunction my parents respected the arts; my mother could draw and play the piano very well, so music was for the most part was dominant art form in our lives, not visual art.  Jazz was always playing and I am very grateful for that because it has had a great influence on my life and work.  You see, my mother also worked at Aqua Lounge Jazz Club on 52nd street in West Philly, where greats like Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, and Art Blakey and The Messengers played and she also hung out with them.  My mom was into music in a deep way and I think music was the thing that made her the most happy.

As early as I can remember I was always drawing, whether I was in school or at home, and my mother always encouraged me to make art, but I don’t remember any one saying you should go to art school, or college period, and this is something I just started thinking about within the last few years—why wasn’t the idea ever put out there? The only person that was, somewhat, of a father figure in my life was my grandfather, who tried to discourage me from the arts.  He knew nothing about the visual arts and for some reason thought art was not reliable, in other words, ‘how can you make money from it?’  At this point I was into graffiti, so one thing he did because I guess he could see I was not giving it up, he got me a job working with a sign painter and sign builder named Mr. John Wilson and I loved it. Working with Mr. Wilson was the first time I ever held a paint brush.

Art is not promoted as a career choice in inner city public schools, which is why, among other things, I left school in the 11th grade and hung out in libraries and bookstores in the art history sections trying to figure out what life and art were about. My life is all about art, it is how I see life, I guess that is because it is the only thing I have that I think I do well. And although we lived below the poverty line, I always felt like with art I was intelligent and could make some kind of future for myself if I could stick with it. And as an artist you know what I mean, you eat and sleep art.

I am sure that reading about art and artists also improved my reading skills, because you are not just reading on the surface, you have to know what those words and metaphors mean and in turn you learn about the world through art and artists and come to understand that the block you live on is not the whole world. In my opinion this is why art is not taught in public schools in the inner city, because it teaches you how to think and understand images and that is what the business class does not want you to do; become a critical thinker and an intellectual. They don’t’ want another Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Romare Bearden, Augusta Savage. Because these visual artists and writers force you to see your self in the world, although you may disagree with what you see in the mirror they are holding up to you, you have to deal with it.

Yes, the art world is elitist and backward in its politics, because it is mostly managed by what Hans Haacke has called “Museums, Managers of Consciousness:” the 1 % class born into money who think that art is all about aesthetic pleasure, which is why war profiters see innocent people on death row or killed in war, as collateral damage.  And that drove Walter Annenberg and the blue bloods of the art world crazy: in their world art is used to disenfranchise people in the under class through promoting European art as the standard of what is human and intelligent and the rest of us as primitive and subhuman. My visual art became blatantly political after I heard and read the poetry of Sonia Sanchez; I think it was because her use of metaphors made me see what I could create with visual art, and the poetry was also a history lesson, that made me see myself in a new way.  After this I went right out and read more of her poetry and the writing of other poets and got into reading the literature and literary history of Black America and this opened up a new world to me.  I fell in love with literature and it inspired and added meaning to my artwork; before that I described my work as “just pretty colors,” I was painting mostly flowers, still life and art historical subject matter and was preoccupied with mostly formalist concerns.

The Charland study mirrors my experience, but some how I ignored the un-constructive things people would say to discourage my art and becoming an artist and kept going, because art was the only thing I had to hold onto and it kept me in museums, bookstores, libraries, and out of jail.

Theodore A. Harris, Postcard from Conquest, 2008, mixed media collage

Rosalind: Can you talk some more about your early influences and mentors?  Did someone or something in particular teach you that a Black man could be an artist?

Theodore: Off the top of my head, it was that the more books I was exposed to with African American artists’ work in them and the more African American artists I met; that was how I knew I could pursue art.  Artists such as Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, and always staring at those Blue Note [jazz] album covers reflected something back at me that was so powerful it even made me change the way I dressed; I started wearing suit jackets, dress shoes.  This in effect causes you to walk different and you take your self more seriously, you see yourself, community and world view differently and this shapes your art.  The more you know about the world the more you can teach yourself and your children to think globally.  That is why I refuse to be called a minority just because most of America claims the social construct of whiteness.  I am a citizen of the world and most of the world is made up of people of color, which makes them, the whites, the minority.

Theodore A. Harris, Assemblage for Decolonizing the Mind, for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2011, assemblage

Rosalind: I find this so important Theodore; it really underscores the significance of ethno-cultural influences, and how, even in the absence of direct mentorship, access to cultural history and art that we can relate to our own lived experiences can make all the difference in our lives.

I can see your concern with the global picture particularly in your anti-war pieces, and in the ways they raise questions about America’s place on the world stage.  Can you speak about the emotion and particularly the notion of violence for example, in the Collage and Conflict series?  I’m curious about whether you would describe art as a non-violent response to violence, and how you understand the use of art as a weapon.

Theodore: Yes, it is a non-violent response to violence in our homes and interpersonal relationships, but most of all it is a critique of America’s domestic and foreign policy, its self destructive militarism in the name of democracy. The Collage and Conflict series began as a compositional challenge to myself because I wanted to see what would happen. Working with the three panels all at once opened me up to experimenting with the surface, and I decided to attack it—to go to war on the surface by writing curses, setting it on fire, hitting it with a hammer, ripping it apart and putting it back together—and have figures in the piece attacking each other to raise the issue of ‘friendly fire.’  Bloody flesh wounds on the panels are meant to give the viewer a visceral feeling, as if they, their flesh, are being struck by a whip or a drone missile. And the blood that is spilled is a mirror in which I see the middle passage; our flesh in knots, fire-hosed with the slobber of biting dogs and pepper spray, under the orders of Sheriff “Bull” Connor, whose mouth is a little white tank moving backwards, camouflaged with Kara Walkers’ silhouettes.

I see art as an offensive and defensive weapon to defend your self and community, as it was in the great work Emory Douglas made for the Black Panthers’ news paper—I would say Emory is a Charles White turned up a few notches. Because of the influence of documentary film on my work, I would say the Collage and Conflict series are cinematic confrontational collages; cinematic because I see the juxtaposing and layering of images as creating a sense of movement as captured in film stills, and confrontational because of the weight of issues the work is dealing with. My work is about looking beneath the “Surface Politics” of aesthetics and formalism, to visualize a Black Aesthetic that is about “life over death” like Addison Gayle said.

Theodore A. Harris, Purple Hearts Bleed, 2008, mixed media collage

Rosalind: I find collage to be somewhat of a ‘violent’ method in and of itself, in terms of the cutting, severing, disassociating and dislocating it involves.  I notice that you refer to it as ‘surgery’ and I find your work is similar to Wangechi Mutu’s, who has also described her collages as ‘delicate surgeries.’  Both of you also use wounds in your work in similar ways.  You describe war as a ‘map of wounds’ and have said that in your work the wounds might be from shrapnel, gunfire, friendly fire… I also think of those wounds in your and Mutu’s work as wounds of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism. And the violence in yours and perversion in Mutu’s work, for me, have so much to do with the violent distortions and perversion of these systems, the ways they act on human bodies—flesh and blood—and on human-ness overall.  I’m also very intrigued by your identification of the Challenger explosion as a starting point.

Theodore: As an artist the goal of my work is to get the ideas in your head, so I would say Wangechi Mutu, John Heartfield, Romare Bearden, and I are attempting a kind brain surgery on the mind of the viewer, to do what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o termed “de-colonizing the mind.”  And yes those wounds are the result of damage done to our minds and bodies under capitalism, colonialism, Jim Crow, and the prison industrial complex—a plantation with stock options in sizzling electric chairs…I wonder if an innocent prisoner on his way to the electric chair, who has exhausted all his appeals to a crooked court, I wonder if he feels ‘Post-Black?’

In the two person exhibition “War is a Map of Wounds,” Howardena Pindell and I had at New Jersey City University, I had this quote by Amiri Baraka on the wall of the gallery above my work, for the most part to be directed at the art students: “It is a new world we want not an endowed chair in the concentration camp…art must be our magic weapon to create and re-create the world and our selves as part of it…This is my motto and the standard on which I make my work as magic weapons, created in the ‘Black Labs of the Heart.”

But another way to view that blood is to see it as the artist sacrifice in sweat and tears, Augusta Savages’ tears when she could not get back her sculpture “The Harp” she was commissioned to make for the 1939 New York Worlds’ Fair, that had been inspired by the song ”Lift Every Voice and Sing” and was destroyed after the Fair.

I was frozen when I witnessed the Challenger explosion, the images were so powerful that I started to collage them with images of crying babies, this is how I got into collage. Then I went on from there to collaging the U.$. Capitol building by turning it upside down, first done in my collage Vetoed Dreams of 1995.  Some people have asked me will I turn it right side up because President Obama is in office.  Why, because he is African American?[vi] I say no way; its too early for that, like I said before the scales of justice are not blind and even, and that is why now a world wide struggle is exploding.

Theodore A. Harris, Iced Leaders, 2011, assemblage

Rosalind: I think that may be a critical note that we might end on for now: that while our conversation for this paper has been largely driven by our common concerns and interests in relation to Black learners and communities, and Black artists and their art work, we both understand that the issues are not just “Black and White”—critical thinking, like your collages, is always more nuanced, layered and complex than that.

Theodore: From the outset it has been so great talking with you and we need you in the university and community to debunk how we see and what we think about ourselves in relation to the arts.

Rana Bose (RB): Canadian Literature has been evolving in all directions.  Literature out of a newer multicultural context is also making its presence felt. The Globe and Mail reviewer in reviewing your best seller The Love Queen of Malabar says “It is also a truly original example of the cross-cultural adventuring – typically with an Asian focus – that has become so unexpectedly common in Canadian literature.” These are not your words, of course, but can you reflect on this “unexpectedness.”  Should it be “unexpected.”?

Merrily Weisbord (MW):  I’ve been thrilled to see Canadian literature opening up to the world, or the world opening up Canadian literature. Raised in a left-wing, internationalist home, I had trouble relating to much of the earlier Canadian canon. Too tame, too constrained, not enough sex until Ian Adams, an underrated Canadian writer wrote Bad Faith. I guess for those steeped in our literary past, cross-cultural adventuring is unexpected. For me, it’s a great part of the transcendent nature of literature, a way to lift mind and spirit into the further reaches of words.

RB. “Reciprocal revelation, self-realization, eavesdropping” etc—these are some of the expressions used in reviews about your book. I felt your writing went way beyond that. Tell us something about your Love Queen Book that has been difficult for you to convey?

MW:  It’s hard for me to know exactly what The Love Queen of Malabar does convey. I know from talking to readers and from their letters, that the book speaks differently to everyone. Some love Kamala, some think she’s an impossible drama queen. Some think she’s a victim, some consider her a courageous rebel. Some readers are moved by our friendship, others can’t understand Kamala’s love for a husband who treated her badly and they can’t get their heads around her converting at age 67 for love. What makes me happiest is that readers enjoy taking the trip into Kamala and her world. Yet Kamala was an extremely complex person. I think what has been most difficult for me to convey is the aesthetic, moral, emotional weight of her Malayalam childhood in Malabar. Even when he was 80, George Bernard Shaw never forgot the natural beauty of his childhood and he counted it as a factor of first importance in his real education “which was essentially aesthetic.” I identify with the important nature/family aspects of Kamala’s real education and am inadequately equipped to fully convey the Nayar, goddess, Malayalam, Sanskrit, traditionally moral aspects.  I could also never adequately convey the feelings of trust and love we felt for each other, and my growing hindsight realization of how very lucky I was to know Kamala Das.

RB: There is such a wealth of Literature across Canada– new writers, poets, e-zines. CanLit has seen exponential growth. There are departments in Asia, awarding degrees on CanLit.  I am not just talking about Atwood, Ondaatje, Mistry and a whole host of others. I am talking about those who set their stories in Canada for a long time. Has Canada found an identity for itself in world literature today? And what is that identity?

MW:  Oh Rana. This is the question, isn’t it? I have no idea. This is why I never wrote a PhD. thesis.

RB: Did Canadian Literature have a significant impact on the world? Has it really made its mark in world literature as “Canadian”? Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, Irving Layton, Alice Munro, and Carol Shields –these are big names. Then there are the diasporic writers, whose stories go back to the Holocaust period and further back into the First War, then there are those who go back to the Prairies or Atlantic Canada and describe the soul of life there and there are those who write about urbane Canada today and now. Given that there are so many streams emerging, whether they get nominated or not for various prizes, has there been any genre of Canadian literature that has maintained an essentially longstanding appeal for you?  Something you could categorize as “essentially Canadian.”

MW:  The Canadian writers I know best are Margaret Atwood and Ted Allan. Two more dissimilar writers would be hard to find. I started reading Atwood in the 70’s, my marriage on the rocks, isolated in the country, searching for other women with feelings like mine. I was saved from isolation by magazines like Aphra and poets like Diane di Prima and Atwood whose poetry was sharp, biting, cleansing.

You fit into me

Like a hook in an eye

A fish hook

An open eye.

Later, I wrote an NFB film on Atwood called Margaret Atwood: Once Upon a Time in August:

http://www.onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/collection/film/?id=15249

I met Ted Allan when I first went to London as a young CBC radio journalist. He had plays in the West End, had published stories in the New Yorker, was friends with Sean Connery (a chorus boy at that time), was at the centre of ex pat successful, Canadian cultural life, and had written the biography of Norman Bethune The Scalpel, the Sword, which I read in my teens. He was my first radio interview. He taught me to work the tape recorder and suggested questions. We became friends and I followed his career: the Academy award nominated film Lies my Father Told Me, Broadway with his play Chu Chem, LA writing for Cassevetes (Lovestreams won a Golden Bear at Berlin), Stephen Leacock Award for Love is a Long Shot, and more. I wrote and co-directed an NFB film about Ted called: Ted Allan: Minstrel Boy of the 20^th Century which is largely unknown, as regrettably is Ted. He is, interestingly, a character in the new novel by Susanna Fortes, Remembering Robert Capa.

RB: You have an extraordinary insight and family association with the evolution of the left not only in Quebec and Canada, but also in North America. Your family background and personal engagement in writing the story of the left in Quebec and Canada, in making significant films, being a journalist leaves one craving for many details that folks today are totally oblivious about. Especially during the McCarthy era.  Was it easy to write about left wing issues then? Is it easy now?

MW:  I was a radio journalist in the 80’s when I started researching communists in Canada. I wrote the book,  The Strangest Dream: Canadian Communists, the Spy Trials and the Cold War because the CBC was still scared to do a documentary on communists. An old time CBC staffer advised me to write a book instead. It wasn’t easy to get people to talk. They trusted me but The Cold War was still in the air and it was dangerous for work and community relations to be to be identified as ever being a communist. In fact, it appears that the reason the South African government revoked my visa when I was working on the film Songololo, is that some concerned agency told them I had written The Strangest Dream.

I am still not sanguine about Canada’s tolerance for socialist or Marxist ideas. It’s disquieting in 2011 to read that the government is withholding parts of Tommy Douglas’s secret RCMP file, dating from 1936, because releasing it would compromise national security. When I applied for my files from the CSIS data banks, our intelligence service answered. They couldn’t help me because they didn’t know my birthday. Finally they informed me that I did not have a file in two of the data banks I’d inquired about. As for the file on people of ongoing interest to CSIS, they couldn’t tell me if I had a file or didn’t have a file because to do so would be a threat to national security.

**

To read a review of Merrily Weisbord’s book entitled The Love Queen of Malabar,  click here.

Editors Note:  Guy Rodgers, writer and scenariste, has been a tireless campaigner for English Language Artists in Montreal Quebec.

Guy Rodgers at the ELAN RAEN launch in 2011

Anna:   Were you born in Australia?

Guy Rodgers:    I was actually born on a little farm on the prairies, and my parents moved to warmer more prosperous climes– that meant Vancouver. When I was twelve they decided that it still wasn’t warm or prosperous enough so we moved even further west to Australia, and landed in Sydney. After a year or so, my dad got work out near the Blue Mountains at the edge of the desert. My two younger brothers instantly adapted. I was thirteen and couldn’t bond with Australia, and after twelve years I was still asked where I was from. One month in Canada and no one asked me that again.

I was always into music, and I got married to an Australian and her family thought I should do something more substantial to support her, so I got a degree in economics. Oddly, my degree and my divorce papers arrived at the same time in November 1979. So, in January of 1980 I left Australia. I had relatives all over Canada. In the Vancouver Sun there was an announcement that the National Theatre School had a brand new playwriting program. I had always written, but now I bought a second hand type writer and started working and by the time I got to Montreal I just walked into the theatre school and handed it, in person, to the receptionist.

A while later I had a chat with the artistic director of the school; and then I left on my travels in Europe Britain and Ireland. One day I went to the general post office in Dublin and called Montreal and I had been accepted.

Perhaps I was accepted because I grew up in Australia. It was really macho and suddenly, in Canada,  I was surrounded by the opposite in the program at the theatre school. There were only three of us in Playwriting, and there were not many acting students, and it felt like a hothouse of delicate emotions.

I needed to get some air. So I bought the book French For Beginners hoping to meet someone francophone, and hopefully female to aid me in my language acquisition. I found myself in Place Ville Marie at a pub and I heard someone say “pas froid sans souliers?”  So I held up my book and she repeated in English: “Aren’t you cold without shoes on?”  I had lived in Sydney on a beach and never wore shoes, so I was wandering barefoot in Montreal in September and I looked a little like a bum. We started chatting. Here it is thirty years later and we are still together. Her name is Louise Gauthier.

Anna:   So you learned French. What happened when you got out of The National Theatre School?

Guy :   Well at that time there was actually nothing happening in Montreal in the theatre scene. I had spent my whole life moving around and I had spent three years in Montreal and I liked it here and that was it, this was where I was going to make my stand. The limited resources at that time revolved around Playwrights Workshop, and the Quebec Drama Festival.

I started hanging out at Playwrights and the next thing I knew I was president of the board.  I saw that I had kind of a gift for organization, for bringing people together and helping them work together in a constructive way. Then a number of us at Playwrights started working at the Drama Festival and started to think about the fact that they had an annual grant and were not actually doing a lot. In fact we thought that if the festival were actually a federation of professionals it would be of more benefit to the community. We took over the board and then changed the name.

This is one of my regrets, not that we changed it, but the way it was done. The old guard remembered the old Dominion Drama festival and they wanted the Quebec festival to go on the way it was. So, not having the heart to contest them, I simply stopped inviting the old members to board meetings for six months. It was a kind of coup d’état, I would do things differently today. I would sit down with them and explain the need for change. Ultimately I think it was a necessary and inevitable change.

A QDF picture from 1989 with Rahul Varma, Catherine Cahill, Hugh Mitchell, Elsa Bolam, Guy Rodgers and Philip Fine

Anna:   What do you think of it now?

Guy:   Having held that job and I know the diverse communities it serves: professional, amateur, urban, rural, educational community, large companies, emerging theatre companies, and individual artists. It is very difficult to please everybody, and I think that QDF is at a stage in its development where we need to sit down and rethink its vocation and refocus. You can’t be everything to everybody it is just going to upset a lot of people.

Anna:   I can’t be on the board of QDF because I work occasionally as a journalist and they have a rule about that.

Guy:   I’ve never heard of such a thing. But I am not on that board either. It really needs to focus. Is it going to serve amateur theatre or professional theatre or emerging artists?

Anna:   So how did you get from the QDF to the Quebec writers Federation?

Guy:   Well between the two there was the Conseil des arts et des lettres duQuébec. It was formed in ‘92 and was more inclusive under Liza Frulla, and they wanted at least two Anglos on the board. I had trained as a playwright but I knew quite a few writers. It was Liza Frulla who came up with the idea that there should be some kind of organisation which serves the English-speaking community.

So we got together and started planning and bickering. Liza was ready to write us a check and when we were done we had a meeting and I found myself the president. Originally it was called FEWQ the Federation of English-Writers in Quebec. There was also QSPELL which was the awards organization. Ideally there should be one organisation which provides services to writers and also handles the awards. A number of us got active with them and soon I found myself the president of both organisations and I brokered this merger.

The difference between QDF and QWF is that QWF doesn’t have a huge difference in its constituency. It is there to serve writers and is well perceived as doing just that.

A QDF board picture from 1992. There are a lot of active people from that scene in the picture including: Nik Pynes, Clare Schapiro, Cas Anvar, Paulina Abarca, Ralph Allison, and Bert Henry.

Anna:   I really like QWF and think that Lori is doing an amazing job there. I have been a beneficiary of that organization and really appreciate it. Then came ELAN.

Guy:   Between Playwrights Workshop and QDF, I was the general manager of the Saidye Bronfman Theatre. And they didn’t have kosher wine. So I shopped around and found out that Shenly’s had kosher wine. The manager said that he liked us so much that they would give us five cases of this and the other. We got a  lot of free alcohol and you know theatres run on a shoestring.

We have nothing behind the bar but this Shenly’s and who comes to the next opening but Charles Bronfman and he checks out the bar. The next day he takes all his money out of the theatre.

I became the executive director of the Quebec drama federation and took only 40% of the salary and then hired someone to just write grant applications.

Anna:   Ah it was that degree in economics. Once the QDF and QWF were on their feet, you went on to found the English Language Arts network.

Guy:   That was a total accident.

Anna:   Whose time has come.

Guy:   In 2000 Canadian Heritage approached the English Speaking Community and said: ”We are providing matching grants to Francophone artists outside of Quebec via the Canada Council. Would the English speaking artists in Quebec be interested in such a program?” So in May 2001 there was a meeting and about one hundred and fifty people showed up.  As an example of how far we have come: at that meeting there were people who were actually nervous about being identified as ANGLOS. Heritage persisted and said that they would put in about 600,00 dollars to help the community. When the meeting finally came to finalise the agreement, this poor woman was sent from Ottawa to tell us that there was no more money. So I wrote a scathing report on this and the woman who was running the Quebec community groups network was handling our communications and was supposed to send the letter only to the participating artists and she accidentally sent it out to all of the government people, and the next thing we knew the money was back on the table.

We were still finding our identity as a minority, and even people in Ottawa were having trouble thinking of this community as anything but the immensely powerful one that it was in the past.  IPOLC was the Interdepartmental program for official language communities. Between 2001and 2004 while we sat on this committee we realised this was a rapidly growing community, and heritage encouraged us to create some kind of gathering. This was just after my fiftieth birthday. I took this on a purely volunteer basis and it kind of took over and I ended up writing and re- writing, and I justified all this work as my contribution to the community. I thought after the meeting it would be done.So we organised The Quebec Arts Summit and we had to practically drag people kicking and screaming to participate. They thought it was dangerous, they thought it was ridiculous.

Anna:   I thought it was wonderful.

Guy: Well they found that these are not the people I expected to meet, these people are alright. Then we realised that the stereotype that the Francophones don’t like, is the same stereotype we don’t like. So instead of saying “I’m not one of them, whatever they are,” it was time to say “this is what we are.” So when we came out of the summit everybody said this is great “Let’s do it.” “You do it!” It just seemed like such a good idea, So, here we are.

Anna:   So, now what are you thinking, It’s 2011.

Guy:    These have been some of the most satisfying years of my life. My personal work has taken a hit. I find myself getting up at four o’clock in the morning to work on my own stuff. When you realise you are working on something for which there is a real need. It is also a rapidly growing community and we are at a critical juncture right now. The English speaking community has become too large to be ignored, and so the rest of Quebec has to decide, Yes, they are  a valuable asset and you don’t want to see another massive exodus. So we are at this point and if they want everything to be in French it could trigger a huge reaction.

Anna:  But after the last election do you think that the younger generation even thinks in those terms?

Guy:   The younger generation doesn’t think that way but there are still some very powerful people who control a lot of funding and programs, and who still think in very “us” and “them” ways and we still have to weather their transition out of the system. You can see it’s around the corner because young people don’t think that way. Moving up through the ranks there are more people who

have changed and in a way the Arcade Fire victory was  a big moment. The National Assembly for the first time ever voted to applaud artists and specifically mentioned Francophone and Anglophone artists.I think about this most recent election, the one fascinating thing about it– across   linguistic lines ethnic lines racial lines religious lines, we pretty much all voted the same way. It seemed to say that we are part of the same culture, we read the same journals. The time is right to say we are all trying to work something new out together. I never meet individuals who are opposed to that aside from one or two bureaucrats. Individuals who work in the arts and even the general public like the idea of a Quebec that is more inclusive. They do want to protect the French language, and so do we, but that should not mean that no other language should exist here.

Anna:   So what do you see for ELAN? Are you going to remain the executive director for ever?

Guy:    I have a very limited horizon. I can see the things I want to do now. I am not looking at this like a life sentence.

Anna:   What about your own projects?

Guy:   Beneath this community development, my primary area of interest has always been religion. Why people who have always been drawn to religion for all kinds of positive reasons have turned them into something ugly and destructive. I spent most of my life studying Christianity asking “Why do I have to be saved and who is mad at me?” So beneath the positive side of religion there is this negative destructive aspect. So I have studied when that happened and why it happened. A couple of Roman Emperors decided they wanted to impose Christianity on the Empire. Everyone who was not Christians didn’t want to convert. So to avoid a really bloody war St. Augustine came up with the brilliant idea of terrifying people into wanting to become Christian. It is the brutality of this system that he devised which is at the heart of the wars which have been fought between the Catholics and the Protestants where they slaughtered one another like beasts. The imposition of Christianity around the world was imitated by the Moslems. Jihad can be an internal process of purification and growth or it can be interpreted as imposing Islam through the sword.

So I am in the process of putting up a web site concerning this.

Anna:   So what is your wish for the arts community for Quebec for Canada?

Guy:   I’d like to see greater dialogue between the English-speaking community and the rest. I see this transition from Quebec as it was  into a more diversified culture. I‘d like to see the process of sharing the community  wealth and  power. I’d like to help negotiate this transition. I see Quebec moving very quickly and positively in that direction. I think this is a very exciting time to be working here.

Q1: What inspired you most to become a director? Was it always a life-long passion?

Absolutely not, I always wanted to work in some sort of creative discipline for sure, but growing up on a reserve I didn’t even really know that was a viable option.  It was more or less carpenter, fisherman lumberjack, something blue collar, feed your family, keep a roof over your head…  I remember telling a guidance counselor at a young age that I wanted to be a writer but even then, I think, it was just to shut him up.  When I was growing up, college and university was just starting to become feasible – something that little Indians could actually explore and get something out of.  I drew and wrote a lot as a kid and I never thought that it would ever turn into anything legitimate.

It really wasn’t until I went that post-secondary route and attended Dawson that I started becoming interested in film, as an academic pursuit, rather than just pure entertainment. It was the professors there that really opened me up to how much I had an aptitude for it, and how well all the skills I had mustered up until that point translated into the filmmaking, which is basically an amalgam of other artistic disciplines anyway.  I already had a pretty honed visual sense by the time I got there. Film to me was just another way of expressing it, which at the end of the day is what really interested me.  But I wasn’t reenacting scenes from Star Wars with a super 8 camera in my back yard or anything like that, cinematography was new and exciting, and gave me a platform to do all the things that I had been doing up until that point on top of things that I’ve never done before.  To this day, I think it’s what actually keeps me loyal.  Love it or hate it, there are no ‘boregasms’ in filmmaking.

Q2: How would you define your artistic style?

If it were to be in a single phrase it would be ‘eclectic saturation’.  I try not to weigh myself down with any particular approach, i.e. just watching movies, or reading comics or even focus on art in general.  I think any good commentary, which is basically what good art is, comes from experience – getting your hands dirty.  I’d like to think my movies, poetry, and drawings, whatever, are basically hyperbolic interpretations of things that I’ve gone through or seen firsthand.  And again, just coming from a variety of artistic backgrounds those experiences go through a myriad of filters before they find themselves on a page or a screen, sometimes to the point where I don’t necessarily recognize myself in what I’m doing.  I also like to engulf myself in the technical process of whatever it is I’m doing at the time, I think part of the discipline of being a good artist is getting to know your craft, know how to load a camera, how to adjust a light, how to draw a storyboard, how to take a basket case actor out off their trailer using only a cucumber sandwich.

There’s this great quote from Tsunetomo Yamamoto, the man who wrote the book of the samurai: “a person who is said to be proficient at the arts is like a fool. Because of his foolishness in concerning himself with just one thing, he thinks of nothing else and thus becomes proficient. He is a worthless person.”  I approach my life, and my work with that spirit.  That way given the chaos you find on any given set: an escaped giant cockroach, someone shooting up, a chainsaw that might accidentally kill your lead actor, you take it all in stride and dare I say welcome it.

Jeff Barnaby

Q3: Funding agencies in Canada often fall into a pattern of promoting what you refer to as “feather and drum” stories with respect to aboriginal film-makers and artists. How would you describe the present state of aboriginal film in Canada?

I really don’t know how to answer that because, a)  that answer is pretty much a novel, and  b) as of late I’ve been slowly withdrawing from that particular scene and I really wasn’t 100 percent a part of it anyway.  Being in Montreal I feel like I’m more of a part of the film and art scene here then I am part of any native scene, despite the language barrier or maybe even because of it.  At any rate, I’ve been turned from every major aboriginal envelope in continental North America, and some of the things these organizations have said to me have been pretty ugly.  The majority of my funding comes from Le Sodec who are more interested in making good films then they are in representing any particular kind of ideology, which is what makes them so off-the-charts awesome to me.  When everyone else rejected the first draft of the colony, they stuck by me and told me, specifically told me, NOT to tone it down.  I’m interested in being uninhibited, imaginative, thoughtful and evocative in the things that I do and put out there; otherwise what the fuck is the point?  A lot of these organisms are more interested in righting the wrongs that a century of cinematic misrepresentation has wrought more than they are making good provocative films.  And I can totally understand that approach, but I think the people that are running these organizations and festivals need to understand that what they are doing is censorship and undermining the whole purpose of promoting native cinema in the first place and that’s to give voice to a marginalized section of our culture not to make propaganda movies of positivity.

Despite having one of the highest suicide rates and aids rates and murder rates in any developed nation on the planet, you actually never see that represented in main stream native cinema.  I remember I had a First Nations in film class when I was at Concordia, and one of the questions our professor asked us was, is there such a thing as a positive stereotype.  To which I kind of jokingly replied: “yeah, that Indians have big dicks.”  I couldn’t help it.  Haha, anyway, after I thought about it bit more the answer was invariable no, no there isn’t, because either way you’re still totally misinforming, so where you have little Mi’gMaq kids wanting to be John Wayne, you have little Mi’gMaq kids wearing head dresses instead of taking an interest in their own culture.

So, Indians in film went from dog-eating pedophile cannibals to tree hugging shamans holding crystals up to the fucking moon.  And the film industry has never really let go of that white guilt stereotype of Indians.  And you see it manifest itself over and over again, you get movies like Pathfinder, Dances with Wolves, you get movies like Pocahontas (there’s no way an Indian would have an ass that big) and the latest cluster-fuck, Avatar.  I think one of the things that I’m trying to do in my films is get rid of that imagery and humanize, flaws and all, Mi’gMaq men and women, and I say that specifically, Mi’gMaq, I am Mi’gMaq filmmaker not a native one, because by far one of the worst by-products of that drum-and-feather stereotype is pan-Indianism. You know, even if shamans could make fire flies dance around and talk to trees and shit, I would still rather share a beer with that carpenter, or the lumberjack, or the fishermen, if only because they have better stories to tell.

Q4: In your short film The Colony, there is a magnificent scene where one of the two main characters, Maytag (played by Glen Gould), sits drinking beer and describes how it was like growing up and reading comics where the bubble dialogue of the animated characters was being translated into Mi’gMaq – cinematographically, the comic and the graffiti merge very well creating a dark mood of being frozen in childhood which permeates and enhances the film. Can you tell us about a bit about what it was like growing up and how that influenced your storytelling?

My growing up is Listuguj, simply put is my storytelling.  The way people talk, the way they interacted, the dark humor, the characters, right down to the specific words they use – and how they use them. Listuguj needs a fucking reality show.  It’s not only that either, the pride that they have in the culture and the Mi’gMaq language itself was just starting to revive, actually when I grew up there they were still calling it by its English name, Restigouche, you see the film Alanis Obomsawin made during the early 80’s in was incident at Restigouche not Listuguj, so that from a very early age that sense of pride was instilled in me.  And growing up around the time that movie happened also instilled this sense of confrontation in me and self-worth in me, that indeed being Mi’gMaq was something to fight for, to bleed for, to die for.  I did a doc on the Mi’gMaq language for a television show called Finding Our Talk, and the I interviewed this old timer that had left to go work in Maine because there was really no work in community at the time, and as he got older and ended up coming back home and one of the last things he said in the interview, which was predominantly in Mi’gMaq was “I’ll die here.”  No matter where I lay my head between now and the day they dig my hole, that hole is going to be in Listuguj.  That is the place that built me.

Q5: What do the cockroaches represent in The Colony?

Well I guess that really depends on the viewer I guess, for me they represented a whole whack of things, I wanted to put allusions in there to both naked lunch and Kafka’s seminal novella the metamorphosis, and use the symbolism from both of those books to reinforce the main character’s alienation from society – his loneliness.  The only thing keeping him company there are the bugs.  Reinforce this idea of the grungy urban dirtiness also.  For some reason I only associate cockroaches with the city, although I’ve never actually seen one in the 12 years that I’ve lived here.

I also wanted to make a movie about the after math of some of the history of first nations people in Canada, which is one of the things that we do share in common, that same background, but I didn’t want to do it in a preachy romantic kind of way where there were any “once we we’re warrior” speeches at the end.  I wanted to have shit blow up and there not be any happy fixes at the end.  So, I needed something to represent this post-colonial indifference effectively displayed by non-natives and not have it be the clichéd villainous white man – so what better device to use then the insect.  I’m reminded of Seth Brundel speech from the fly: “Have you ever heard of insect politics?  Neither have I.  Insects don’t have politics. They’re very brutal.  No compassion, no compromise.  We can’t trust the insect.”  Even taking that out of context it applies to the relationship between natives and non-natives.  The native scene needed a film like that, a film that very bluntly stated, albeit through symbiotics, that there was indeed an aftermath, and that it was inhuman, and that the ignorance was very literally killing us.  I think a lot of people think that since there are no small pox out breaks anymore and that all the residential schools shut down Indians should stop whining and open a casino or start selling cigarettes.  At the end of just breaks my heart and makes me rage, because you just feel so helpless to stop any of it.

Q6: Tell us about your other short film – FILE UNDER MISCELLANEOUS – it’s a surreal story that features a very deep-rooted identity crisis. How would you describe this film?

I had come up with the poem that the film was based on quite a while ago, during my first year of university at Concordia.  I was in a poetry class with a bunch of hipster douche bags and there was a serious disconnect going on within the class that spoke to a larger problem of my just not feeling like I belonged anywhere in particular, something that I have to say that still happens when I’m at festivals or other events where I’m the only reserve Indian within miles, and I’m not one to project sycophantic arty douch baggery circle jerk look how clever we are either, so needless to say I flat out do not fit into to any of these scenes to well.  So rather than don a poor me attitude and self-destruct, I poured all that grief into this hollow point bullet of a poem, and it was based on these conversations I had with friends of mine who would say things like “I wish I was white.”  And the more I talked about it the more I realized how much of a common sentiment that was.

On a public platform you’ll hear a lot native pride, on a private one you’ll hear a lot of self-loathing, which I think is symptomatic of what I was talking about earlier, post-colonial aftermath, Indians were taught to hate themselves, we didn’t just wakeup doing it one day.  And it was the same approach I take to all my films, present and execute the concept in an original way that was both conceptually and aesthetically challenging, which to me meant doing a Sci Fi film.  Plus no one has ever really done that before; to me, it just made sense to put this Indian in a hell raiser/blade runner type atmosphere in a unspecified timeline in the future where skin replacement was not only a viable option it was the only option viable for individuals that felt dehumanized and wanted to feel connected to something.  It’s a sensitive subject in a climate where multi-culturalism is promoted as a positive thing and I don’t necessarily think that’s the case with native people.  Be it if you’re Muslim or French or Spanish or Mexican or Greek, there are whole countries that share that culture and if you’re getting lost in the diversity of a large populace of a Toronto or a Montreal you can always go back and touch base with the progenitors and relearn the intricacies of that society again. But what if you don’t have that base anymore? Then you will get lost.  I mean it’s not a stretch to say that young native people are more enthralled by pop-culture then they are their language teachers.  And if you go back to this idea of promoting pan-Indianism as an accurate representation of all native cultures then you have individuals with no real touch stones to who they are, hanging dream catchers from their rear view mirrors, or wearing Washington redskin apparel to express their identity.  I genuinely believe that as horrific as the world is in FUM – it’s where we’re heading if this attitude continues.

Q7: What are your future production plans?

Well the idea was to do a zombie movie, a little piece of trivia for the film buffs out there, the CGI blood you see in the colony at the end is actually leftover blood from the dawn of the dead remake.  So I wrote this script called blood quantum, which of course makes reference to the practice of measuring the degree of ancestry of for the individual of a specific racial or ethnic group, this was put into practice to define who was or wasn’t native as far back as the 1700’s.  So the idea would be that these immune Indians on this fictional island reserve called red crow of course based on my home community of Listuguj, are faced with the horrific idea that any non native person on the reserve can – at any minute – turn into a homicidal flesh eating cannibal.  Haha – it should get funded on that statement alone.  And so goes the question of do we excommunicate these potential zombies or help them.

Though the time is right, given the interest in both zombie pop culture and sexy leading native protagonists, I just don’t think I’m right.  So my producer, John and I, decided to do something a little less EFX laden, even though all our films thus far have been crammed with EFX and we have one of the best CGI appliance EFX teams a filmmaker can ask for, I think we need to build up our stamina for what would be realistically a 40 plus day shoot.  So, I started writing another feature called Rhymes for Young Ghouls, about a young Mi’gMaq girl wrapped up in her family’s drug trade dealing with the death of her mother and father’s imminent release from jail.  I’m really starting to get into that now, it’s starting to get a face. It’s not blood quantum, but I’m starting to feel it.

Hopefully if all goes well, we can shoot that sometime this year.  Some of my own personal projects involve a book of short stories and poems that I’ve been working on, I’m starting to bone up on my illustration skills again, trying to integrate Photoshop, and Illustrator into my skill set, trying to ink on tablets rather than the more traditional methods, and writing and drawing are still my first loves.  Setting some music down in something other than my films would be nice also.  I have a lifetime to chase rainbows.

Q8: What would you like people to know most about you or your work?

Authenticity and fearlessness, at the end of the day I want to represent.  I want to be honest.  I want people to know the places I take them are genuine, not a romanticized version of an ideology that never existed.

If you are interested in seeing some of Jeff’s works please click on one of these links:

http://www.eyesteelfilm.com/thecolony

http://www.nativelynx.qc.ca/en/cineastes/barnaby.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-nRFpkrvKY

Kamal AlJafari’s Port of Memory (2010) is situated in the port of Jaffa. The film explores the formation of time in space—durational affect—and constitutes a relation of space and architecture via the cinematic lens that conjures up a new way of expressing occupation and gentrification.  The use of space and architecture in the film perpetuate a new mode of expression that renders time in its suspension—an act of waiting.

Port of Memory, in rendering time in suspension, evades a narrative that situates the viewer in an already pre-known setting. Aljafari’s film deposes of the narrative that is already at work—that in between Palestine and Israel, occupied and occupier—in order to release the effect of the image from its representational context. He experiments with form and illustrates a rigor in technique that is constituent of a cinematic space that refuses to adhere to any pre-positional set-up.

Rather, we are situated in the in-between of space: the already there of the ruin, the disappeared landscape, the demolitions of homes, the development of new ones, and the complete erasure of the old Palestinian homes and cemeteries, to make way for the new developed condos and parks. Aljafari’s film invites us to dwell in the most fragile of spaces: disappearance-in-progress. How does one engage with what has already disappeared and is disappearing? Port of Memory draws on a different type of political inquiry that manifests in the non-representational form of the image through the architecture of time.

Aljafari is a graduate of the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne where he received the Visual Arts Award of the City of Cologne in 2004. His film The Roof won the Best International On Screen (Video) Award at the 2008 Images Festival in Toronto as well as best soundtrack at the FID Marseille Documentary Festival in France. His new film Port of Memory, opened the 2010 Images Festival, and has just received the Prix Louis Marcorelles given by CULTURESFRANCE of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was a featured artist at the 2009 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in New York. Through 2009-2010, he was the Benjamin White Whitney fellow at Harvard University. He lives in New York City.

Nasrin Himada (NH): How would you position yourself in the trajectory of Palestinian cinema? You grew up around films that were being made by Palestinian filmmakers, like Michel Khleifi, and seeing the kind of progression of Palestinian cinema taking form. I was wondering how you saw yourself fitting into the canon today, while it’s obviously still in development.

Kamal Aljafari (KA):  I have seen films by Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman and most other films by Palestinian filmmakers. But I would say the only one, which at the time inspired me to make films, was Chronicle of Disappearance by Elia Suleiman.

Though, I wouldn’t say I am part of any cinematic movement in Palestine and I don’t see myself belonging to any. I find it very problematic that people often try to declare “A Palestinian Cinema.” There is no industry. We are only individuals living around the world who from time to time, once every couple of years, make a film. The situation, at times, is disheartening.

NH: You are doing something different and new that’s never been done before in terms of how you manage to consistently challenge any kind of framed national agenda through experimentation with form and rigor in technique, which is definitely challenging to the viewer. The use of specific technique in your film is very striking— especially sound. Can you talk about that?

KA: I am collecting and recording what exists in my immediate environment, places as well as people. I am treating sound exactly as I am treating image. They are documentary, in that sense, because this is what I find, but I’m not a documentary filmmaker.

Listen to the soundtrack, which exist in daily life, and you would never need to add any sound effects and ‘music’ to your film. Everything is there – for me, for instance, the sound coming from the TV is a great source of music.  Sound is a mode of composition. 

I’m searching for what resembles my lost country, which has become a search for a cinema. Adorno says that for a man who no longer has a country, to write becomes a place to live. I would say for a Palestinian, the cinema is a country.

NH: Sound is not in the foreground, at least in some scenes. When the woman, for example, goes out to feed the cats, we can hear the demolitions going on in the background, which is very important for the film, in the context of gentrified Jaffa.  In this other scene, we hear the gunshots in the background in the café, before this man goes back to pick up the coal. This is a clever way of reminding the viewer that there is a kind of politics going on that is implicit. It’s a politics that is of a day-to-day violence, whether it is dealing with demolitions of Palestinian homes, or of people getting shot. What I find important about this audio-image technique is that it avoids falling into the trap of narrative capture that situates the viewer in an already pre-known setting. For example, can we talk about the scene where the film crew is inside this house? Is this your family’s house?

KA: No. It’s my neighbor’s.

NH: The neighbor’s house. For me this scene is very important because it pronounced these subtle moments of political inquiry that, again, wasn’t explicit. The scene starts with the two Palestinian women in a bedroom, with an Israeli film crew present, they shut the door on them, and they start filming a scene with an actor who’s having trouble emphasizing the phrase “I made these windows.”

KA: The owner of this house, the neighbor of my grandparents in Jaffa, told me about an Israeli film crew who came to her house to shoot a scene. Ironically enough, an Israeli bulldozer hit this same house four years ago (and was featured in my previous film The Roof). What you see is a re-enactment, but not what really happened.

This stems from an idea I had, which is very much related to reclamation of places and things. A couple of years ago, I was filming a short miniature in my father’s hometown Ramle. I was filming raw unfinished balconies when suddenly a young Israeli guy appeared and stood just behind my back. He waited and waited until he became impatient. He asked me: what are you filming? I said, the balconies. He reacted by saying: “you see all these balconies, they are mine.” Obviously, the balconies were much older than him.

Dozens of films were shot throughout the 60s and 70s and 80s in Jaffa – in most of them you would never see a Palestinian. And even if you see Arabs in films like The Delta force, staring Chuck Norris, they’re not Palestinians, they’re Israeli Mizrahi Jews acting as Arabs. We were completely excluded from the image and therefore uprooted twice in reality and in fiction.  

These Israeli films were claiming the city. As if saying, “this is our city, these are our stones, these are our houses, and this is our sea.” For me, that’s the biggest and the strongest witness that they are not theirs. It may sound surreal but at times these films were even stealing the narrative of the remaining Palestinians of Jaffa – like in the film Kasablan from 1973, in which all the inhabitants of Jaffa are Jews who are struggling against the demolition of their houses by the Tel Aviv municipality.

I would like to know why these films weren’t shot in Tel-Aviv. There is a difference between shooting a film where the background is white, of white walls – and shooting a film where the background is an old wall. Cinema needs history – to create emotions you need history.

NH: I want to talk about the motifs that show up in your film.  There are several of them. The recurring image of the man in the café holding the coal up to his neck, for example, or the man on the motorcycle who screams, and the washing of your aunt’s hands, or, the recurring theme of your family watching a wedding video. These become part of how time is formed in your film. Also, there’s a lot of waiting around in different scenes, in cafés, or in the lawyer’s office. There’s a lot of play with time and waiting. I was wondering if that was intentional?  And if it was, how the motifs played with time in that sense? 

KA: Everything you see is intentional. The long take of the washing of hands, watching TV, or the man who picks up the coal with tongs moving it toward his neck, are my favorite scenes in the film, because they resemble for me what cinema should be. I wish I could just have the washing of hands in my film in their actual length and rhythm, which lasts much longer than in the film.

NH: And they also are part of how the film avoids a representative form of expression, because they’re never complete images, or they never complete a thought, or whatever it is, as a viewer, you’re expecting to come next.

KA: I’m not fulfilling any desires on the side of the viewer, or fulfilling any desired narrative. I do what I find works best when I am composing the image. Some people are clever enough to see and to appreciate this kind of cinema. But I would say that I made this film for myself. I am not trying to target a specific audience, which again makes the financing and finding of resources for my films difficult.

NH: Can you explain more about how you are making the film for yourself?

KA: What is the value in watching somebody wash his or her hands? This is what I see.  She is my aunt, and I find the way she washes her hands to be beautiful and elegant. Although, every time I screen it somewhere, there is somebody who says, “my sister is the same way,” or “I know somebody who is doing the same thing.” And it has nothing to do with being Palestinian. I don’t want to explain how the washing of hands is significant, or representative of something. I find the image in itself valuable and I am happy when people share with me this affinity. People who appreciate it and who can relate to it, connect with what I feel. These elements are very much of a private inclination. And, in this specific project what I wanted to do is give these rituals or elements of daily life of my characters, if you want, a cinematic meaning.

For me, making a film is very much a search into the life of these people, and obviously, the place where these people have lived, which is my place, which is where I come from, and which is part of how and where I search for a cinematic language.

NH: This gets me to the part that I wanted to talk about – because I noticed this in The Roof as well, and was wondering about it. I feel like it’s become a trademark of yours – something you took from The Roof and used a lot in Port of Memory. You have this curious way of panning across, in close-up, onto buildings and walls, and the rubble that we see in Port of Memory. It’s almost like you want the buildings to move with you. Can you talk about that a little bit? Describe what attracts you to that building?

KA: I love these old walls, old stones. And I want to capture them. I know now that there were many films shot in my hometown, using my hometown as something else and excluding me from it, erasing my history from these images and from these films. I have a good reason to film this place the way I see it. And cinema can do it: with framing, and by shooting something for a long time, you can claim it, giving it a special importance, be it a stone or a human face. What I am trying to do in The Roof and in Port of Memory is to give attention to these places, reclaim them. Personally reclaim them. I see this as my project.

NH: This gets me to the question of how architecture plays such a significant role in Port of Memory, especially the recurring return to the derelict building, the one that you show at the beginning and that comes back often, maybe twice more throughout the film. Can you talk about the significance of the building itself – your relationship to it, and how it manifests in the film?

KA: I had been working for quite a while to find financing for Port of Memory – it took me about three years to find the resources to shoot this film –I was traveling between France, where I was living at the time, and Jaffa. Every time I went there, I hoped that this building that you mention was still there. These old buildings that you see in my films, are vanishing. They are being destroyed. And for me they are a witness to a city that existed. Jaffa is not a city anymore, it is just a couple of streets in the south of Tel Aviv, and my desire to capture its disappearance is obviously very strong, because I know that tomorrow it will not exist. So this becomes part of my role as a filmmaker, to capture something and to keep it. It becomes, in that sense, a document. The building stands there in the middle of the street. It’s a witness to all this destruction. An expression of what we have gone through since 1948, or for the last 100 years in fact. I treat this specific place exactly as I am treating my characters, and there is a cinematic attraction between them, these objects, and the characters. And the film is very much about place, being excluded from it, about being there and not being there at the same time. I know these buildings will vanish from reality, so at least I have them in my film. And these images are very much of the streets of my childhood.  These are my memories of this place.

NH: This reminds of the scene where you show the Israeli singer singing the song and walking on the beaches of Jaffa, juxtaposed with the scenes of your uncle walking through a landscape that’s really deteriorating and disappearing–

KA: It’s not disappearing.  It has disappeared.

NH: Right.

KA: When I shot the scene with my uncle I had brought him to Germany, and we shot it with a green screen. I made him walk in a certain way so that I can insert him into the image instead of the Israeli actor. And when I showed him the scene—where he is walking on the port of Jaffa, walking in the streets of Jaffa—he was so touched, he could hardly believe it. So it’s not only a film – in the sense of a cinematic object—it’s more than that. It affects.  I made my uncle go back and walk in the streets of his childhood, to the places that don’t exist anymore. I may have created pleasure for him, or more sadness, I’m not sure. Maybe both, I don’t know. But I made it possible for him to go back and be in these places for a moment.

The images were from Kasablan an Israeli film about Mizrahi, or Oriental Jews living in Jaffa, and their struggles with the Ashkenazi, European-born representatives of government. The narrative completely elides not only Jaffa’s Palestinian history, but also its remaining Palestinians, enacting a virtual, cinematic emptying of the city. In the film, the Israeli actor, Yoram Gaon playing a downtrodden Mizrahi, sings while walking through empty and ruined streets, along abandoned houses, open windows and doors:   “[…] It’s a place which is still far away, Narrow alleys near a huge sea, And empty houses crying silently, My heart’s still there behind the sea, I hear a prayer from an empty house, There is a place that’s still far away. Anywhere I run, there is a place I can’t forget, I’ll always have it in my heart. There’s a place, I’ll always love.”

This is my song.

In January 2009 Caryl Churchill penned the play Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza in response to Israel’s Operation Cast Lead military strike upon Gaza.  Cast Lead lasted 3 weeks, ending January 18^th 2009 and was responsible for the deaths of some 1,400 Palestinians, including 300 children. 

Controversially, SJC is a play that spans 70 years of Jewish history, alluding to events from the Holocaust to the present day Israel/Palestine conflict.  Consisting of 7 scenes that deliberate upon what the children should be told and what we would have them know, the play is delivered in the form of a tense litany that repeats the lines “Tell her,” “Don’t tell her”.  Churchill has said the play is ultimately about how we explain violence to children; a universal theme certainly, delivered in as little as 10 minutes.

Viewing it as a political event, Churchill has invited anyone to download and produce the play for free, the one proviso being that a collection is taken for the people of Gaza, with proceeds to go to Medical Aid for Palestine.

A number of productions have since been staged in various parts of the globe.  Here in Montreal, in May of last year, Stéphane Jaques, of the theatre company La Tsé-Tsé Bis, directed a powerful interpretation, an excerpt of which is featured here.

Stéphane spoke with MS about the play and where it has taken him since.     

MS:  Stéphane, I was wondering how you came to direct Seven Jewish Children?

SJ: I was working at radio CKUT doing my chronicle.  And at some point I was talking about the film Waltz with Bashir, which showed the victim becoming the oppressor, as so often happens in life.  Then Gaza happened, the end of December.  At the time, I said to my friend we have to do something.  I was thinking that as an actor and a director I wanted to do something and I was really hoping that someone was writing about it.  Then in April I found out about the play and met Fabienne of the advocacy group Independent Jewish Voices that wanted to produce it.

MS: Would you agree SJC is a great piece of guerrilla theatre, with a foot in the mainstream because it just so happens to have been written by a popular playwright?

SJ:  Yes.  It’s great that it did not take the usual 2 years to happen.  I really liked Caryl Churchill’s spontaneity.  And structurally, it’s so simple.  It’s just sentences, spaced sentences, rather than numbered scenes.  In French the play addresses a neutral gendesr and is even more open.  The characters could be addressing the same child or seven different children.  There might be one family, or seven different families.  She left it so open.  It’s very adaptable.  In our production there were seven different children. 

MS:  What did you do with the play? 

SJ: What I realized was that Churchill really describes this circle of the victim becoming the oppressor.  I wanted to show that. I wanted to show the reality of the Holocaust and the reality of Gaza in January 2009. That it is the same hatred.  Neither is better or worse.  It is the same thing.  It is hatred. Of course with the Holocaust there is a collective memory that we all have.  So in theatre we can suggest a steam train leaving.  And we can do this with sound, and lighting.  In the play we used a band of light across their eyes to suggest cattle cars.  For Gaza, at the end of the play, we do not have this collective memory to draw upon.  So how can we show the end to be as strong as the beginning?  There are some pictures…10 pictures, that gradually zero in on Gaza 2009, while the actors hold the same positions they held at the beginning of the play.

MS:  What was your process of staging it?  Was it a group process?

SJ: No.  The first production we didn’t have time.  We had a week. I had to find 7 actors and then we had three meetings of a couple of hours and that was it.  So we kept it simple; but created this magic thing with the lights.  And it is war so we showed guns.  We only had a little time with the technicians, few props but great lighting and sound.  The second production we had longer; a week in which to rehearse and involve two young DJs who came up with some very evocative ideas; a great sound design.

MS:  How did the actors respond to the play?

SJ: I was thinking of having an opera singer that I knew but she did not want to be involved in something so political.  But these actors were enthusiastic.  And interestingly, they aged from 20 to 65, were from different generations then, but also from different schools of acting, yet together on the same stage, which is seldom seen in theatre.

MS:  You have since been to Israel and Palestine on a solidarity tour.  How did this experience affect you?

SJ: I was surprised by the ways in which the government brainwashes the people. It was very disturbing to see the way hatred is produced by the political/civil machine.  I felt disgusted by this machine and what people do to each other because of it.  I left feeling very aware that there are a lot of places in the world with similar machines. 

MS:  Did this in any way change your mind about the Montreal production of SJC? 

SJ:  For the play I had pushed the actors to express this feeling of hatred.  I thought at the time maybe this is too much, that I’m pushing them too hard.  Then I thought that this is theatre and its purpose is to make the audience question ideas.  But then when I was actually there I realized I had been quite soft with the actors, in fact.  It was really much bigger than that.  The hatred was much greater.  Even among the children.

In the play there is a rhythm, until the last three lines: Don’t tell her that.

                                                                                                Tell her we love her.

                                                                                                Don’t frighten her.

Churchill fractures the rhythm and when she does this she also fractures the hatred.   But I was thinking after the tour that I would like to cut those last three lines because they generate such catharsis.  The next time I would like to leave the end of the play in the hands of the audience.  I would like to ask them, “So what do you think?  Can we do something about this?”  Because we have to shake the cage, you know.  I don’t care very much for messages and message theatre and prefer to raise questions.  And I like it when people come to me and say after a play, “I didn’t realize that point,” and it’s really good when I can say, “Really?  Neither did I.”

Our production was twenty minutes long but I am developing an idea for making it much longer.

To read the play:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/feb/26/caryl-churchill-seven-jewish-children-play-gaza

To see an excerpt from the play:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnGMqfx3cUo

For an interview with Caryl Churchill about the play:

http://www.map-uk.org/regions/uk/view/media/-/id/24/

Photo by Owen Egan, courtesy of McGill University.

Dr. Shree Mulay , Professor Emerita of the Department of Medicine of McGill University in Montreal, is currently Associate Dean and Professor of Community Health and Humanities Division,  Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s.  Dr. Mulay served for eleven years as  Director of the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women.  She has also held office in different capacities in the Executive Board of SAWCC, the South Asian Women’s Community Centre of Montreal, of which she was one of the founding members. Dr. Mulay also participated in the decision making process of  NAC, National Action Committee for the Status of  Women in Canada. Shree Mulay has received numerous awards and honours for her academic and community work, including the establishment of the endowed “Shree Mulay Graduate Student Award in Women’s Studies” in recognition for her contribution to women’s studies at McGill University, the Humanitarian of the Year Award,  Indo-Canadian Chamber of Commerce and  the Woman of Distinction Award for the Advancement of Women, YWCA, Montreal. Dr. Mulay, who was born in India, has not forgotten her roots – she travels to South Asia  several times a year for  research and community work. And yes, she is also a gourmet cook, a creative gardener and a friend women can count on.

Montreal Serai:  Good morning, Shree. We  first met a long time ago! What happened then?

Shree Mulay: In 1980. That was the start of the South Asian Women’s Community Centre. If you remember, we met over the summer and we were thinking of setting up a South Asian Women’s Organization. Nine women from different countries  met to talk about the issues that South Asian Women faced.

MS: Yes, I remember our first meeting very clearly because you said that you would have very little time for the future centre yet you’ve certainly worked  very hard and were one of the main persons there. What satisfied you the most about your work with SAWCC?

SM: I want to make it clear from the outset that I was not one of the main persons  in SAWCC because it was really a collective effort. To go back to your question:  that which gives me the greatest satisfaction about SAWCC’s work is, first of all, that it was possible to shape and work with other women in what the organization should look like, what issues should be taken up in the organization and the careful placing of that in the context of Canada and what was happening in South Asia itself.

MS:  As an endocrinologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal you must have an understanding of the  dynamics between pharmaceutical companies and their research in Third World countries. How do you think that these new technologies and pharmaceutical products have affected the life of women in South Asia?

SM: Doing research in endocrinology gave me a better opportunity to actually see what kind of research is being done on women and thanks to my understanding of contraceptives  I began to teach about reproductive endocrinology. While doing  some background reading for my undergraduate students  I realized that  it was women from developing countries who were being experimented on with early versions of  oral contraceptives which were quite harmful. These studies were considered unethical and now informed consent is a cornerstone of any research on human subjects.

MS: What is your take on the morning-after pill?

SM: The morning-after pill provides what would be considered emergency contraception. The problem is  that it is easily available here but in developing countries it is not…

MS: Really?

SM: …easily available. It’s good if you’ve had  unprotected sex and  you think you could be pregnant because you can do something about it within 72 hours. But it is a hormonal combination which when misused can have terrible effects on women so it’s a tradeoff. However, the real question is one of access  because the moral conundrum is that many women’s organizations here have suggested that the morning after pill  not be controlled by pharmacists but be freely available like condoms.  Some concern about its misuse might be justified  but at least with proper material accompanying those pills it should be possible to  regulate it much better.

MS: I thought that in some parts of the United States it was already available without a prescription.

SM: I believe that is true. In Canada it is available but you have to have a pharmacist give you information about it. You cannot go and just  pick it up .

MS: What’s your take on in vitro fertilization? And the question of so-called surrogate mothers and the whole debate from an ethical, moral and medical point of view?

SM: You know, it is amazing how women get blamed, dammed if you do and damned if you don’t. Earlier  women were blamed for having too many children  too early and now women who have become part of the work force and have to delay pregnancy  are being blamed for not becoming pregnant earlier. I find that a bit ironical. However, women’s capacity to become pregnant does decline  with age, while so many women seek motherhood at a later age. In earlier years I used to be much more critical about IVF and assisted human reproduction; I am less so now but do think that the industry exploits women. Moreover, there is a  real difference in treating female infertility and subjecting women to IVF treatment to overcome male infertility. This is done by inserting a sperm directly into an egg through intra cytoplasmic sperm insertion (ICSI) to produce embryos. Recent publications suggest that boys born through ICSI have very low fertility.  It perpetuates male infertility which would have been nature’s way of limiting infertility. The real issue is that women have to bear the burden of fertility treatment which is not innocuous. You have to take a drug which stimulates your ovaries which produce the eggs and that can be a big roller coaster because you are producing 8/9 eggs instead of one that you would have in a normal cycle, But let me speak to another issue  which has become much more controversial in this last little while, namely surrogacy where people rent a womb -  perhaps this is the correct nomenclature because it is a monetary transaction and it is done in a third world country such as India …now there is evidence that it is done in some of the Eastern European countries as well where you have women who will accept an embryo and bear the child through that particular process. There are actually no laws at the moment which protect the woman who is the surrogate and the parties in any way. Some very interesting cases have come up – the case of a Japanese man  in India who had hired somebody to bear a child and the couple divorced and the woman did not want the child,  the man could not claim the child because he was not married to the woman who bore the baby and it was a legal mess. There are numerous other cases like that. Surrogacy where the parents know the woman and she does it for altruistic reasons to be able to help the couple; these have also been quite problematic. You also have cases where you have five parents involved in producing one child.

MS: Five parents? How so?

SM: You have the husband and wife who commission the baby to be produced, then the egg donor because the woman is unable to produce eggs and then there is the sperm donor who donates the sperm. It could be the husband or a third person and then the surrogate mother into whose womb the egg is implanted. I am not saying that this happens all the time but theoretically you could have five people involved in the production of this one child, but most of the time it is three people.

MS: Do you think many of these problems could be avoided if women had their children earlier on when they are healthier and provided that the State supported them with child care and so on?

SM:  Women’s groups have felt that appropriate support should be provided to families. But at what stage should  women take time off to have children? And yes, without appropriate State support this is difficult. If  you remember, it was a novel idea that women would get time off to nurse their babies because if you were a working woman and you wanted to breast feed your child  you had no time off. During the Allende government in Chile women got time off to nurse their infants.  Of course now we do have good maternity benefits in Canada but this did not happen without a struggle.  So it is a question of what the State is willing to do and who decides what the State does. There is a direct link between what support is provided and notions about the family. Right-wing ideas have become quite important. Essentially the tax breaks that were provided and the subsidies for each child that the Harper government instituted was that instead of providing day care  women were given a $100 a month to be able to stay at home and be moms. I think that this particular subsidy basically meant that women were not able to benefit from outside employment. It also reinforces the notion that women should really be at home taking care of their kids instead of going out looking for a job and if you look at some of the right wing literature,  they say they also take away the manliness out of manhood because women are competing for the same jobs  and then  men are not able to be  good providers. This ignores the reality that many women have to work to support the family and it also puts a burden on the man to be the sole bread winner.

MS: You  were not only a member of the SAWCC Executive on several occasions but you were also director of the MCRTW, McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women for eleven years.  I understand you were the first scientist to be heading an institution that was part of the humanities section of the university. Is it because you felt that as a scientist you needed to be involved in social issues as well? What were your most important challenges and achievements during your tenure as director?

SM: Yes, at McGill I was the first full-time director who came from the sciences although there was Abby Lippman who was an acting director for a year before that. My  involvement with SAWCC  and with NAC -  National Action Committee for the Status of  Women gave me a greater appreciation of what the social sciences and humanities had to contribute. And I certainly thoroughly enjoyed my term because there were new challenges.  I became director at a time when McGill was cutting back on funding so making the place go was a challenge. At that time women’s studies involved courses from different  departments and had actually no courses other than one seminar course. So getting all that in place – that is having a Women’s Studies Department, with its own status offering its own courses along with courses from other departments stabilized the program. Having a graduate option in women’s studies was also a plus.   But I particularly feel very thrilled about the fact that we were able to open the doors for community participation because women’s studies without their being integrated into the community are meaningless. Academic women’s studies and the debates around feminism, first wave, second wave is one thing,  but opening the doors to the community was an important part of the activities of the centre.  We also benefited tremendously from this vibrant relationship because the Friend’s Committee managed to raise about $250,000 not from contributions of big donors but the small, tiny contributions by women who identified themselves with the MCRTW.

MS: After  you left this post you accepted a more challenging one  at  Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. You did this at an age when most people, if not dreaming of retirement, are  at least dreaming of working in the slow lane. Why?

SM: Because it was a new challenge, something different. In  my work  every ten years or so  I’ve had a career change in spite of a certain continuity. When I came to work in the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1972 I was supervising clinical labs till I left in 2008. But the main change was the eleven years I served as the director of the MCRTW. Then my work with the community,  with NAC and with SAWCC,  was an important part of what I did. What the Memorial University job allowed me to do was to  consolidate my involvement with the community and to incorporate the understanding that I had gained through the work that I had done to be able to bring together  academic issues with community work. Looking back,  I think I cannot sit back and move into the slow lane given the fact that my 89-year old mother just published a major book in 2010 after having worked on it for close to ten years. I also had a grandmother who raised three daughters single handed at a time when she had no education and no money and had to struggle her way  through when education was the most important thing that women needed to have.

MS: And of course that must have been even more difficult in India in those days.

SM: Absolutely. She was an uneducated widow without any means yet she raised these three daughters and inspired them to go on to their own academic careers. Unfortunately one of my aunts died at a young age. But the other two went on to have illustrious careers. There are three women in my life who have had a great influence: my grandmother, my mother Vijaya Mulay in an indirect way and Madeleine Parent. They have inspired me by their work in the public and private sphere. My grandmother’s work has been very much in the private sphere – she was not a public figure, she was not out there organizing people but leading the life that she led it was very clear that she believed that women should be able to do anything that anybody else does.

MS: Your grandmother’s name should be recorded.

SM: Her name is Saraswati Bai Ranade and I’m happy to say  that a school has been opened in her name in Sonale, Maharashtra (India) to which the whole family contributed.  

MS: Her name was well chosen – Saraswati is the Hindu  goddess of learning!

SM: That is true.

MS: Please tell our readers from outside Canada who Madeleine Parent is.

SM: Madeleine has been absolutely instrumental in, first of all, beginning the dialogue about how women of color and immigrant women are part of the Canadian women’s movement and has reached out to them. She has also worked with aboriginal women. Madeleine got me involved with NAC, a direction I would have never taken alone. Growth comes in so many different ways. I only spent four years with the executive of  National Action Committee yet during those four years I met such incredible women from across Canada. It was the first time that I was out of Montreal into a much larger Canadian context. I owe that to Madeleine. Aside from her well-know contributions there is the lesser known fact that through sheer persistence she made francophone organizations more effective at a time they were not,  because they did not see how the  whole question of Quebec nationalism could fit into the Canadian context.  Madeleine opened the path for women and SAWCC, to join hands.  

MS: Well, women have struggled all their lives to get rid of patriarchy but  lately there seems to be a  polarization of attitudes  throughout the world and a resurgence of patriarchy  both in the East as well as in the West. What’s do you say to this?

SM: Patriarchy is lurking all the time. We have to be very vigilant. It can be quite innocuous like subsidies for women to raise children. But in extreme patriarchy people use cultural practices and culture as a way of reasserting patriarchy on women. There is a constant struggle between women asserting their rights and those who wish to push them back.  One can argue that Islamic fundamentalism is a reaction to the demonization of Islam. Once can also say that not only Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise, but so is Christian and Hindu fundamentalism. We women cannot afford to say that we have won the battle.  We have to be vigilant and respond to those threats and make sure future generations understand those struggles.

MS: What’s your advice to our granddaughters’ generation? 

SM: I hope the world will be different for them, but we have to tell them to understand the world and see what is happening around them, to be critical, not to accept individual benefits as if they benefit the whole world.  We have to ingrain in them the value of social justice. That is one of the most important things that we can pass on to our children and grandchildren.

MS What you are saying Shree, is that equality for women equals social justice.

SM: Absolutely!

MS: Thank you very much.

Think old people can be troublesome?

You don’t know the half of it!

Why didn’t my mother warn me?

It didn’t feel like it at the time but was it a stroke of luck for me that my friend Rose Hacker died  two years ago, just shy of her 102^nd birthday?  If she hadn’t, I’d probably be in prison now – or at least awaiting trial, for conspiracy under Britain’s increasingly draconian “anti-terrorism” (read “anti-freedom”) laws.

101 year-old Rose makes a point about age, gender and work stereotypes.

Of course I’m not happy she’s dead.  We were friends for fifty years.

So, how could Rose, who would have been 104 this month, and her friend Hetty Bower, six months her senior, 105 this October, have put me in the security services’ firing line?

Rose, Hetty and Rose’s friend Alice Herz-Sommer are just three among the ever-growing number of centenarians who challenge most of our pre- or mis-conceptions about ageing, what it is to be old and much else.

Alice Herz Sommer playing piano at 104

At 107 this year, Alice is the eldest.  An internationally renowned pianist for more than eighty years, she survived the Nazi holocaust in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, losing almost all her family except her young son who survived only to die suddenly aged 65.  Just a few weeks ago the BBC screened Everything Is A Present, an hour-long interview with Alice speaking and playing piano.  She still lives alone and practices for three hours daily.  She holds no grudge against the Germans, unlike many Jews, and made it clear that even Wagner’s well-known anti-semitism and role in the Nazis’ masterplans did not prevent her admiring his music.

When I saw Roberto Benigni’s film ‘Life is Beautiful’ I thought the story of a father not only keeping his young son alive but shielding him from the horror of concentration camp life by a mixture of play and humour far-fetched.  Yet that was the reality Alice created for her son.  His brief description in the introduction to her biography A Garden of Eden in Hell explains just how effective she was.  And her love of life and sense of humour continue unabated.

How many major anti-war or pro-peace demonstrations take place each year in London?  Probably around a dozen.  At how many can you expect to find Hetty Bower marching – usually leading?  Around a dozen.  Rose and Hetty went on every march against the 2003 Iraq invasion.  On 5 March a story about Joe Glenton, a young soldier facing Court Martial for desertion after refusing to return to Afghanistan, was screened hourly on BBC News.  Who appeared alongside him in the archive footage?  None other than Hetty Bower.

How does Hetty keep in practice?  She walks daily, protests other major issues, takes annual walking holidays, staying in Youth Hostels.  She has been on two demos against Israel’s actions in the occupied territories this year.  In February, the worst in London for many years – and she hates cold and snow – she was out leafleting in the streets against closure of her local hospital’s Accident and Emergency unit before taking part in a two-mile protest march to draw attention to the problem.  Questioned on national television before the start about why she was marching she declared, “It’s my patriotic duty.  I would die trying to save the Health Service.  I believe it was the first of its kind in the world and used to be immensely proud of it.”  She then told a local newspaper reporter, “I prefer to march at the front.  People walk too slowly further back along the line.”  Clearly the ramblings of a feeble-minded, weak, old woman!  After the march she confided,  “I know I’m getting old.  I had to stop twice for a little rest and a cup of tea.”  But that didn’t prevent her completing the march, all uphill, in around an hour, before many other people.

Over lunch she said she doubted she would do her annual Oxfam fundraising hike  this year.  Last September she walked three miles and raised nearly two thousand pounds.  But then her daughters and I both reminded her she had said the same thing last winter when it was cold and grey.  Just let one ray of sunlight come out and so will her get-up-and-go.  Hetty’s the best argument I know for switching to solar energy now.

104 year-old Hetty with daughter Margie completing hospital protest march

And how did she recover from her exertions on the hospital protest?  By going next evening to a chamber-music Sunday Concert in memory of Rose who died two years earlier after attending them for seventy years.  Despite poor hearing, the expression of rapture on Hetty’s face showed she adored every moment.  Many of the more than 200 people attending were clutching copies of the Camden New Journal in which Hetty had written a tribute piece to Rose about the importance of music in education and much else.

That recovery process may hold at least part of the clue to their longevity.

Just a few weeks after her 100^th birthday Rose asked if I could drive her over to see her friend Alice for her 103^rd birthday.  She could have walked the two miles but she wanted to arrive fresh in order to …

Let’s go back to a little story told at her funeral by one Rose’s hundreds of close friends; everyone that met her immediately considered her a close friend. Rabbi Lionel Blue, a mere stripling at only 80, is probably Britain’s best known, out, gay, religious leader.  He speaks regularly on radio and television, writes extensively and does a national public speaking tour – An Evening With Lionel Blue.  He told the mourning crowd how he had met Rose at a Passover Seder dinner at the home of mutual friends.  She was then only 90.  The two of them kept everyone in stitches before Rose rose, announcing it was time to teach the children how to belly dance.  And she did.

For Alice’s 103^rd birthday Rose and Wendy, a young friend in her 80s decided to entertain Alice by belly dancing for her.  I still have pictures.  In her sixties Rose had joint and back problems.  She overcame them and roared back to good health by learning and continuing to follow the Alexander technique.  In her eighties she took up belly dancing and in her nineties added Tai Chi to her repertoire.  At 97 she was given an award as Britain’s oldest working artist – she was a skilled sculptor.  And like both Hetty and Alice, she loved walking especially in sculpture rich Kenwood on Hampstead Heath and in smaller local parks.  A week before her 101^st birthday, Rose and two friends in their nineties starred on stage at one of London’s main dance venues, The Place, in Remembrances, a piece specially choreographed for them.  It recounted the story of the twentieth century through dance.  They stole the show.

Four or five times a year Rose and Hetty used to, Hetty still does, attend concerts of Musicians Against Nuclear Arms (MANA).  Almost every week Rose also went to the opera, another concert and lectures or meetings.

Even with failing hearing and eyesight, both still loved theatre and cinema.  A couple of months ago I took Hetty to a Sunday morning London Socialist Film Co-op screening of Memories of Underdevelopment, a 1968 Cuban film.  Hetty speaks no Spanish, could only pick out occasional subtitles and get a vague impression of the images on the screen, she claimed.  At the end she whispered,  “I must be getting old, I couldn’t tell whether that was a feature film, a documentary or a film about the making of a film.”  A discussion led by a professor of Latin American studies began,  “When this film came out in 1986, it was probably the first film to combine documentary footage into a feature film and it was interesting for being highly self-referential, a film about film-making.”  Clearly Hetty’s understanding has waned with age.

Last month we went to see one film about protest in Iraq and another, Waiting for Mordechai about the international team that assembled to greet Mordechai Vanunu on his release from Israeli prison.  This month it will be two retrospectives on the Spanish Civil War.  Then two films on Palestine and maybe a bit of Michael Moore for relaxation.

In various ways all of them have spent their lives working for peace.

Both Rose and Hetty have described the process by which, during World War I they became pacifists.  Both were swept up in the wave of patriotism in which young men were sent off to Europe to die.  Both were taken by school teachers to wave goodbye to “our brave boys”.  Both saw the limbless, shell-shocked, traumatised, emotionally wrecked, young men who returned from the battlefields their lives in shreds.  And quite independently, well before that war was over, both came to the conclusion that war was wrong and far from solving any problems, created disaster. True patriotism meant working for peace and both committed themselves there and then to fighting against war and for peace.  Hetty’s father had taught her before WWI to recognise anti-German propaganda for what it was.  Like my parents (with me), in 1958 both Rose and Hetty marched in the first of what became annual marches by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, an Easter-weekend-long protest against the Nuclear Weapons production and storage base at Aldermaston.

All three came from comfortable, middle-class Jewish families and enjoyed good health.  Rose and Hetty had strongly egalitarian fathers and much more conservative mothers. Rose described her father as a ‘feminist’, Hetty described hers as a ‘political radical’. Rose was and Hetty still is an active supporter of Jews for Justice for Palestine.  Last summer Alice persuaded a Muslim friend to offer a fascinating introductory course on Islam at the local University Of The Third Age which she only recently stopped attending.

Rose and Hetty both became committed socialists early in their lives.  Rose, working as a designer in her father’s fashion house overlooking Oxford Circus in London witnessed the 1920s hunger marches.  She was shocked when she realised the miners she could see from her window were so much smaller than Londoners because of malnutrition.  Hetty was influenced by her older, suffragette sister and her political friends.  Hetty worked in progressive cinema, refugee relief and education.  Both strove ceaselessly for the improvement of society through politics, policy, art, music, culture and example.

While Alice’s life was bound up in music, Hetty and Rose were involved in education, politics, human rights; minority, immigrant, children’s, women’s prisoners’ and refugee rights, among others.  Rose worked in social welfare, marriage and relationship counselling and sex therapy.  She researched for a 1949 UK study of sexual behaviour that went much further than the Kinsey Reports.  In 1956 she wrote The Opposite Sex Britain’s first book on sex directed to children and young people.  The initial run sold around a quarter of a million copies.  In between she found time to raise a family, sculpt, paint, write poetry and speak publicly, particularly on mental health and the rights of the disabled, mentally ill, homeless, elderly and generally dispossessed.

At an age when many people were retiring Rose became a Councillor on the Greater London Council, considered so left-wing by Margaret Thatcher that she abolished it.  Interestingly, many of its most radical policies, hated by Thatcher, championed by Rose, have since become mainstream.  Rose had particular responsibilities for music and theatre in education and the community and the canal network for the Greater London region.

New political columnist Rose Hacker. Enjoying overnight success at 101

In 2006 I asked the organisers of an annual Hiroshima Day commemoration which my mother had launched in 1967 and Rose always attended, to invite Rose, then 100 years old, to speak. She not only mesmerised the crowd, she caught the attention of  the editor of a local newspaper.  He was so impressed that he decided he needed her to write a hard-hitting political column every two weeks.  Her column became a big hit.  Under the banner “The World’s Oldest Columnist”, she was able to write things nobody else could get away with.  She soon had a new cult following.  Daily papers picked up on her story, she was frequently interviewed by international media.  She was asked to speak to ever more organisations, appear on more platforms, take part in more demonstrations.  Often Hetty and some other near centenarian friends went along.

One request Rose received was from a TV production company proposing a four part series about sex.  Each episode was to deal with a different age group and Rose was asked to become the presenter for the oldest segment.  She had already done something similar in a documentary called Little Kinsey.

I probably should have known better than to take Rose and Hetty to see Mark Thomas, a brilliant satirical, political activist much of whose work has been devoted to sabotaging Britain’s massive arms manufacturing and trading industry (universally regarded as phenomenally successful if you discount the bribes it has traditionally and illegally paid out).  With Rose then in the record books as the world’s oldest working columnist and Mark a Guinness record holder for the highest number of demonstrations in twenty four hours, some kind of symbiosis was inevitable.  In a packed theatre in which the induction loop system didn’t seem to be getting sound to their hearing aids, Rose and Hetty sat entranced as he went through his routine.

In the panic following 9/11 the British Parliament rushed through legislation to protect all that it holds most valuable, namely the British Parliament.  It passed the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 banning any demonstrations around London’s Parliament Square without prior police approval.  The real aim was to remove the embarrassing Brian Haw, a lone protestor who had camped on Parliament Square to protest the 2001 Afghanistan invasion and stayed.  In its haste Parliament left a vacuum and a loophole.  The loophole was that the law could not have retroactive impact and was therefore useless at removing a protestor who had already been there for four years.  The vacuum was that it forgot to give police any grounds to refuse permission or any resources to handle applications to demonstrate.

Mark Thomas happily devised a series of schemes to fill that vacuum.  For people who wanted to protest in front of Parliament but were tired, too busy, couldn’t find a baby-sitter, had a previous appointment or needed to wash their hair, he could offer a complete service including permit application, poster or banner preparation and even a person to wave them.  Realising that twelve hundred individuals staging one-person demonstrations could not be seen as a mass demonstration (taking longer to process), he came up with the concept of ‘mass lone demonstration’.  Within days the Westminster police were tied up in knots, forced to process thousands of applications for demonstrations in the area around Parliament with no option of refusing them. 

Despite the packages Mark offered, Rose and Hetty had ideas of their own.  Both were incensed at the loss of freedom of speech, which they viewed as the thin end of a very dangerous wedge.  Both wanted to protest against the government’s trampling on long-established rights of protest and while Hetty was not keen to go to prison, Rose was quite willing to do so.  She had worked in prisons for over fifty years and they held no fear for her.  The plan was simple.  Hetty would apply for a permit to protest.  Rose would not.  Robust Hetty, “I’ve still got very good legs,” would push a wheelchair in which frailer Rose “My legs aren’t what they used to be” would sit.  Hetty would carry a placard saying:

HETTY BOWER
LEGAL 102-YEAR-OLD PROTESTER
AGAINST LIMITATION OF THE RIGHT TO PROTEST

Rose a banner declaring:

ROSE HACKER
ILLEGAL 102-YEAR-OLD PROTESTER
AGAINST LIMITATION OF THE RIGHT TO PROTEST

The police were required to arrest Rose or risk condoning lawbreaking.  We would obviously have ensured good media presence and adequate TV coverage, then sat back and waited to see which police officer would be the first to dare arrest a fragile-looking, 102-year-old in a wheelchair on national television. Planning was difficult because of all the giggling.

My role in all this?  I introduced them to Mark Thomas.  I was present when they were discussing their evil ploy.  I was expected to help co-ordinate, transport and provide refreshments.  All material support of conspiracy to commit serious crime.

Sadly – and not just for the plan – Rose died just before her 102^nd birthday.  Hetty could not make that particular protest alone.  The plan died with Rose.  For months Hetty was depressed by Rose’s death, they shared so many interests and at Hetty’s age, so many of her friends and relatives had already gone.  A film then nearing completion about life in the wonderful Mary Feilding Guild residential home where Rose and Hetty lived, ‘The Time of Their Lives’ starring Rose, Hetty and a fascinating younger woman, Alison Selford, had to end without Rose and Hetty’s demonstration.  Nonetheless it has gone on to win international acclaim in film festivals around the world (including Canada), as well as being widely shown on television.  And Hetty has revived, continues to do things that matter to her and has agreed to address this August’s Hiroshima Day commemoration.

Is there a secret to being a vibrant, radical, centenarian role-model?  Being born over a hundred years ago is a good start.  Making and keeping your life interesting helps. Positive and accepting attitudes seem to play a role.  All three are humanists, convinced atheists.  Do they fear death?  No.  They welcome it.

So why didn’t my mother warn me against such centenarian trouble-makers?  Was it because, when she was dying over thirty years ago, barely a half-centenarian, despite an unbelievably busy schedule, Rose made time to help me nurse her, the only person to do so?

No.  I think it’s because she aspired to being one of them and wanted me to as well.

Link to a recently released BBC film called “Alice Sommer Herz – Everything is a present”:

http://www.allegrofilms.com/film/Alice_Sommer_Herz_EVERYTHING_IS_A_PRESENT_Alice_Sommer_Herz_music_documentary.php

Here is a ten-minute interview with Alice Sommer Herz on the BBC radio (Radio 4) Front Row  =>

In October 1975 Roy Lowther was charged with the murder of his wife, Pat, a gifted and renowned Canadian poet, when her two young daughters, Chris and Beth, were seven and nine. In this film, the two women revisit the circumstances surrounding the violent death of their mother and try to make sense of their father’s brutal act and its aftermath.

BATTLE OF WILLS tells a story of obsession and intrigue in the art world worthy of Shakespeare himself. It travels from the high-tech labs of North America, to the art galleries of Bond Street and the windswept castles if the English midlands to unravel the mystery behind a painting that shook the art world.

Interview:

 Q. How did you choose the subject for your film Water Marks?

A. I was in British Columbia, about ten years ago now, and I found a book called Furry Creek written by Keith Harrison, which was a fictionalized biography of a poet, Pat Lowther. It included her poetry, the story of her murder and references to her daughters. I was immediately attracted to the story for a very personal reason. My brother Alex had been a west coast lawyer and his very first law case was to represent Roy Lowther, Pat Lowther’s husband. Alex was a young lawyer starting out and she was a much beloved Vancouver poet.  The whole arts community was outraged at the murder. I remember my brother telling me about this case and how high-profile it was for a young lawyer. I knew the back story from my brother’s point of view but I hadn’t yet investigated the larger story, the story of Pat and her husband and her children. And of her poetry. I had studied English literature at Mcgill was going to be a English professor until I got side tracked into film. So a lot of things came together in the subject matter.  I wanted to do a film on the west coast, because it is a second home for me.  My brother had lived there, my parents. I grew up in Montreal but everyone else in my family had migrated west. Pat Lowther was a great poet of the West Coast landscape, much of her imagery conveys that rain forest feeling of the West Coast. I read her poems when I began that film.  There were a number of levels that interested me, there was the tragedy of two young girls, the West coast, poetry.  There was a lot of creative room for me to explore. Plus it was a strong feminist story, a story of the two daughters of Pat Lowther trying to reclaim their childhood which was robbed from them and to  reclaim their family history.

Q. How long was it after Pat Lowther was killed that you did the film?

A. She was killed in the mid-seventies and I did the film around 2001. It is a story that has continued to resonate in poetry circles in Canada. There is the Pat Lowther prize that is given to an emerging female poet every year.  She had been active in the League of Canadian Poets and a much beloved figure in those circles. I would not have considered doing the film without that. She was an important figure in the mythology of the West Coast literary circles. The seventies had been a particularly fertile period for writers. With the aftermath of the sixties, the West Coast was laid-back, bohemian and people drifted to that area. Visual artists as well.

Q. Where did Pat Lowther live?

A. She lived in the city of Vancouver. She and her husband owned a tiny rudimentary cabin on Mayne Island, which is in the film. After  Roy Lowther murdered her, he took their two children over to this cabin and hung out there until he was arrested. And that was another way in which the story overlapped with my own life. My brother had a rustic cabin just off Mayne Island. So it was a place I knew well.  There were all these resonances for me and it seemed that I was supposed to do it.  So I did.

Q. Was the murder more important than the other aspects, the children, the poetry and the family context.

A. I would not like to think it was more important. One cannot sum up the life of an artist by a catastrophe that happens to her in one instant.  That would be diminishing her, but I cannot deny that as a film maker I am always trying to find the drama and murder, of course, heightens the stakes. Particularly in documentary, you are trying to find some element that is going to give the drama of fiction.  So, yes, the murder ended up being an important dramatic element. I tried very hard not to fall into that “Allo Police” kind of mentality, which is all about blood and gore, so there are no scenes of the body or anything like that, instead I let Pat Lowther’s voice come through, by using her poetry, her voice is present on the screen, in a collage of images. I was giving a sense of who she was. The end of the film, doesn’t end up with her murder, it ends up with her daughters who put together her collective work, a beautiful book – a heartfelt attempt to reclaim a painful history and to move on from it.

Q. What I mainly remember from the film, which I saw quite a few years ago, is the lushness of the scenery and the colouring.

A. The entire film was tinted blue and I had never done that before. I worked with a genius cinematographer, Marc Gadoury. I wanted to film some scenes underwater – we have scenes of jellyfish floating, and a scene where the camera is underwater and Chris Lowther is swimming above.  Both the daughters are writers too, not as well known as Pat, but Chris has published a collection of poetry.  All these women’s voices come through.  When I told my cinematographer that I wanted the film to have this watery feel to it, images of water, the wetness, the fog of the west coast, he suggested that we tint it blue. I was terrified, I thought it would look hokey.

Q. The second main memory, other than the fluidity and lushness, was the daughters, their emotional sense that came across.

A. They are fascinating.  They have a complicated relationship. In the aftermath of that kind of tragedy, where both parents are missing, the mother dead, father in prison (where he died), it is not surprising. The younger resented the older because she was the surrogate boss. But they are of course very close even though the relationship is complicated. They are opposites. The older one, Beth, was urban, edgy, lived in the east side of Vancouver, part of the bohemian milieu. The other had escaped to a wilderness part of the west coast, in Tofino. She and her boyfriend had an apartment in Tofino but even that was too urban for her and they lived on a houseboat most of the time in a bay off Clayoquot Sound which is all rain forest and many uninhabited islands and bays. If you don’t have a lot of money, you can spend ten thousand dollars on a houseboat, take it out, moor it in a bay and you have a mile of waterfront. That’s what Chris Lowther and her boyfriend had done. Living in this paradise, growing organic vegetables on the deck of her houseboat. That was interesting to me, the differences between the sisters.

Q. What did you most like about this film?

A. I always like stretching the creative chops. As a documentary film maker, you are essentially a story teller trying to create a narrative using music, imagery, poetry, character.  How to be true to your subject and how to create a story that will engage and this one was rich with those elements.

Q. Eight years later, is there anything you would do differently?

A. Yes. I have never done a film where I have felt one hundred percent satisfied. I will never be the type of film maker who says “that was just right”. I learned one thing in that film. The subject was charged because the daughters had so many emotions about what had happened and because my brother had represented their father. I was walking on eggshells during the time I was making the film. Because of this somewhat tense situation, I pre-interviewed them a lot before we ever shot. Their best interviews, their best responses, were before the cameras were on. When I repeated the questions on camera, they didn’t have the same freshness, spontaneity. I could have done better interviews if I hadn’t been nervous and over prepared. That is tricky about documentary. It is so much about creating trust and comfort with the person you are interviewing. If they are trying to respond to the question, they are having to think harder because it is a new question, they can get distracted from the camera. I should have trusted my instincts as a film maker and not over prepared. I don’t do that anymore.

Q. Do you like Pat’s poetry?

A. Yes. Some of it’s quite challenging. She writes a combination of poetry that is an homage to the west coast. She writes political poetry, about Chile, and poetry about women’s lives;  she worked for the NDP, and her husband, Roy, was a quasi-communist, they were always left-leaning and that comes through in her poetry.

Q. Is there a poem of Pat Lowther’s that would represent her?

A. Yes.

 ANEMONES

Under the wharf at Saturna

the sea anemones

open their velvet bodies

chalk black

            and apricot

                        and lemon-white

they grow as huge

and glimmering

                        as flesh chandeliers

under the warped

and salt-stained wharf

  letting down

      their translucent mouths

                                                of arms

even the black ones

have an aura

like an afterimage of light

Under our feet

   the gorgeous animals

        are feeding

                                    in the sky

© Pat Lowther

Q. Were you changed in the making of the film?

A. I am changed by every film I make. It was not an easy film to make as the daughters were quite prickly. I cannot fault them considering the circumstances.  But I felt that I had to keep them happy. Documentary film making can be intrusive since you are asking personal questions. 

Q. What was their reaction to Water Marks?

A. I think they were happy. Initially they didn’t quite know what to make of it because it was so personal to them, but they received a huge amount of feedback. It went to different festivals, to screenings and it brought attention to their mother’s work, their mother’s life and to her book which they had just brought out, which was a labour of love.  We are still in touch, it goes on. Allan Safarik, a Canadian poet who was in the film because he was Pat Lowther’s best friend wrote his memoirs and sent a chapter about Water Marks to me. he said that participating in the film, was a huge catharsis because he had kept so much emotion bottled up about Pat and the children and he had felt guilt, and seeing them again and giving them some of her work was incredibly important.

Q. Your latest film Battle of Wills is about Shakespeare. Both films have something to do with writing and literature.

A. In the film I just did, I used Shakespeare’s poetry and “his voice comes through” in the sound track. Like Water Marks, it is about a writer and also about landscape, this time about England. Battle of Wills tells the story of two portraits that are duking it out, both claiming to be the only image of Shakespeare painted from life. It is a deconstruction of two portraits, from the point of view of the outsider, the long shot; the Sanders portrait is owned by Lloyd Sullivan an elderly man in Ottawa whose family has owned this portrait for four hundred years, passing it from generation to generation. It’s an engaging face, an authentic 17th century Elizabethan portrait. Sullivan has spent almost all his lifetime savings vetting this portrait and it is 100 percent Elizabethan painted on oak. But is it Shakespeare? The contending portrait is owned by the National Portrait Gallery in London, a huge, august institution and it is the founding portrait in their collection and they have a huge stake in it being Shakespeare. The film is about the politics of the art world, the dishonesty of the authenticity debates, the hidden agendas in the world of Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is an industry. The film is about the mysteries around him, because we know his works so well and absolutely nothing about his life. He is a big cypher and there are theories upon theories about him. This film plays into those theories. And I have some sexy people in it, like Joseph Fiennes and Simon Callow. It was filmed at Yale University in Ottawa, Toronto, London, Stratford-upon-Avon, the British Midlands and Montreal.

Q. What was your push to do this film?

A. It was a series of articles from the Globe and Mail dating back to 2002, about a new portrait of Shakespeare that had been discovered. It was a big story and then a book by Stephanie Nolen came out. I always thought there has to be a good story here. There were three or four film companies that were competing to tell the story and I lucked out. I love Shakespeare. Water Marks is a serious film, Battle of Wills is tongue-in-cheek. It was my chance to make fun of English pomposity and the art dealers from Bond street with their noses stuck right up in the air – a romp with serious questions.

Q. Is there anything else you want to add about film making.

A. Making documentaries is the most wonderful thing imaginable, except I only get to do it five percent of my time, the rest of the time I am looking for money to do it. It is not for everybody. Young film makers starting out think they will be going into the film industry and spend all their time making films, it is just not the case.

 The Last Room

I am waiting for you

In the lowest room beneath the building

I am smooth as a gourd

without resistance

my shape spreads

            downwards

                        seeking the lowest

centre of gravity

I spend hours memorizing

the labyrinth

            beneath our skins

                        by which I came

waiting for your long shadow

in the passage

I am green as a gourd

but inside I am red

All through the folded hours

I am burning

            quietly

I am becoming a red hollow

skin

            a gourd for drinking

Only now do I recognize

shards patterning the dust

between my legs

they are my former skins

How many times

have I come here

How long have I been waiting

© Pat Lowther

KITCHEN MURDER

Everything here’s a weapon

i pick up a meat fork,

imagine plunging it in,

a heavy male

thrust

in two hands

i heft a stone-

ware plate, heavy

enough?

rummage the cupboards:

red pepper, rape-

seed oil, Drano

I’ll wire myself

into a circuit:

the automatic perc, the dishwater, the

socket above the sink

i’ll smile an electric

eel smile:

whoever touches

me is dead.

© Pat Lowther

For further information on Battle of Wills by Anne Henderson: http://www.informactionfilms.com/en/productions/battle_of_wills/index.html

For further information on Pat Lowther:

www.poets.ca/linktext/awards/lowther.htm

Anne Henderson has been writing and directing documentaries for 25 years, with many international titles to her credit. Her documentaries encompass a wide variety of subjects concerning culture, human rights, history, and the environment. She likes to tell stories about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. She makes her home in the midst of Montreal’s vibrant arts community.

Montreal-born Martin Duckworth came to filmmaking from a background in history. Duckworth was on staff at the National Film Board of Canada from 1963 – 1970 and since that time, has made films there as a free lancer. He has done camera work on 84 films and has directed or co-directed close to 30, most, but not all of them at the Film Board. 

He is active in the Canadian peace movement, and his 1994 film, Peacekeeper at War: A Personal View of the Gulf War follows in a line of work concerned with war and its effects.

Some of Duckworth’s later films are Acting Blind (2006) and The Battle of Rabaska (2008), which he co-directed with Magnus Isacsson.

Duckworth is a member of the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC) and l’Association des Réalisateurs et Réalisatrices du Quebec (ARRQ). He is the father of six daughters and a son, grandfather of ten, and lives in the shadow of Montreal’s mountain.

 He is currently working on a film about Palestine.

 To see some of his films, including No More Hiroshima, Return to Dresden and Riel Country: http://www.nfb.ca/explore-by/director/Martin-Duckworth/

 Interview:

Q: How do you understand or see the relationship between art and democracy?

A:  Without art, democracy would be dead. Art is the most important thing in keeping the critical awareness alive.  In art, I am including creative journalism, as well as music, painting, film-making, poetry.  I think it is essential, the most essential thing there is. I don’t think about democracy very much. I do think about art a lot. I devote my life to art in all its forms.  I do read political journals.  I read The Nation, I read Naomi Klein’s every word. I think her quality of journalism is high art because she is a master of the English language.  So I guess democracy is a political word and doesn’t imply art.  Art is a separate realm. And art would need a democratic political framework in order to thrive.  One world depends on the other, in both directions.

Q. What about all the incredible art that came out under the church, which wasn’t democratic.

A. I would have to say that was what kept critical intelligence in those times when there was no democratic framework.  You’re talking about the windows in the Gothic cathedrals.

Q. All the ceilings, Michelangelo, da Vinci.

A. Those guys, it was quite a freedom of expression, in the Renaissance, when those guys were working.

Q. Some, with De Vinci, he was backed by the Medici family.

A. Probably right up to the twentieth century, artists needed some kind of backing. When you say there were far fewer artists before than there are today, it’s because the arts have flourished more when there is a democratic political setting. Bad art and good art.  When art depended on wealthy backers, it was only the geniuses that got the backing, the Rembrandts, the Bachs, the Beethovens, but who knows what other artists might not have flourished if they had the financial backing.  Today we have a much bigger pool.  So maybe geniuses now have a better chance of arising out of poorer circumstances than they used to. I don’t think I would have been happy living in the Renaissance. I don’t think so.  You really had to be a genius to survive as an artist in those times.

Q. So you are positing somewhat that in a democracy we get more bad, but also more good stuff.

A. The arts are flourishing, but documentaries are starting to go downhill in Canada because the right wing is starting to take over. Our funding is cut. Documentaries take a lot of money, it takes a lot more money to make a documentary than to write a poem or a song.  We are dependent on state subsidies. I don’t have private backers. They do in the US. There are private backers for filmmakers in the US. I think we are more conservative, less risk-taking in this country.

Q. If your documentaries were less political, would you get more money?

A. No. Money is affecting not only political film-makers, but all documentary film-makers because a good documentary makes you think critically, not only on politics but on all other aspects of life.  We are heading towards a fascist era in this country, if we keep going the way we are going now, where there is no place for critical thinking.  I have been active in the Justice for Adil Coalition*.  I just flew with him to Halifax where he had a speaking engagement and I witnessed the terrible harassment he was subjected to by the border guards, who followed him on the airplane, followed him all the way home.  He wasn’t able to get on the plane to come back so he had to rent a car to come back and they followed him on the highway. We have fascism in the bushes now.

It’s getting worse.  It started to go that way under Paul Martin

Q. Has the way you approached documentary changed over the years? 

A. They have become more political.  I started off making films about friends and family and got more political when I met my wife, Audrey, who comes from a very politically active family.  Actually, the Hiroshima film was a suggestion of her father, who was in touch with the peace movement in Japan.  He is an active member of the Anti-Imperialistic League in Boston. He did a history of it, he’s an historian. So I have tried to make films that combined characters with political stories, messages, over the years. 

Q. Going back to the October crisis, can you tell us if artists from the Anglophone milieu, like you, feel that Quebec’s democratic rights had been usurped and if so, are you involved in such issues?

A. The October 1970 issue? Gaston Miron, Gerald Godin, Pauline Julien, Michele Lalonde led a fantastic outburst of poetry and music at that time. Certainly there was suppression of Quebec artists prior to Bourassa under Duplessis, but it was the artists that led to the Quiet Revolution, Borduas, Riopelle, Felix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault   In 1972, that was the worst thing that Trudeau did, declaring the War Measures Act, sending the army in.  But he did not succeed in suppressing the arts. The arts exploded as a result.  In the same way, they defeated the Tories in Quebec last year.  They tried to suppress the artists in Quebec and had the opposite effect.

Q. In your documentary, Return to Dresden, what were the atmosphere and feelings you encountered when you were shooting the film about the allied carpet bombing of Dresden and the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union and East Germany?  What were your feelings and reactions?

A. It was under the Communist regime. East Germany was still alive and well under Hünniger. It was a very difficult film to shoot.  We were under surveillance, weren’t allowed to meet any people in the peace movement in East Germany, they made it impossible, a very repressive atmosphere.  We were allowed to film because the subject of the film was what happened in 1945.  And the people of Dresden were very moved to have among them someone who had come to apologise for his role in the destruction of their city. We were followed everywhere. I didn’t have freedom of movement at all.  But the authorities had to display a certain respect for former allies coming over to apologize for the bombing of Dresden, so they allowed us to work as long as we didn’t get in touch with members of the peace movement. The woman who greets us at the beginning of the film, recites a poem near the end, committed suicide soon after we were there. We suspect it was because life had been made difficult for her as an actress because she was too outspoken.  It was a courageous thing for her to make herself available to us, a western film crew.

Q. Are you satisfied with that film?

A. I am crazy about classical music so whenever I can do a film about classical music, I am happy, particularly if there is a political message.

Q. What recent work has struck you with its artistry or honesty or beauty?

A. Mark Achbar, The Corporation. It’s a superb work of research, on the same level of intelligent frameworking and researching as Naomi Klein’s work.  Great characters. Very strong story line.  Those are the elements of any good documentary. The same Robert Cornellier’s film about the Alaskan oil spill twenty years ago, Black Wave, The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez. It’s a film that just came out last year and it’s an extraordinary film. The visuals are kind of secondary. The visuals are there to tease you, to get you into the content, whatever the story is.

Q. What issues are presently important to you?

A. Palestine. Palestine is the worst thing happening now and we are all going to be dragged into another terrible confrontation if we don’t give the Palestines justice.

Q. You heard Robert Fisk speak about the Middle East and his position was rather pessimistic.

A. I was brought up in a socialist, pacifist, Quaker family that gave us confidence in ourselves and in human nature and through building alliances that we can change the world. And I still believe that. I have to believe that. I can’t see any point to living if I don’t believe that. Robert Fisk has other ways of enjoying life besides writing books. He listens to a lot of classical music, he reads great literature, he is very knowledgeable about Shakespeare. He doesn’t let politics get him down, because he sees a lot of hope in other arts. I have Palestinian and Jewish friends who believe it is essential to find justice for Palestinians and I share a belief with them that it has to come. We can’t allow it to go on like that.

Q. What film are you presently working on?

A. I have a Palestinian friend who is a business man, whose family owned a hotel in Haifa before they were evicted in 1948. He was three years old at the time. He’d like to get that hotel back and open up Haifa to Palestinians abroad.

Q. So the film about Palestine is close to your heart?

A. Yes. I’ve been in Palestine on three or four films and quite aware of the situation there now.

Q. Given free rein, what subject would you choose to work on?

A. I would go into my Haifa story.  I’d like to do a thorough research in the role played by Lester Pearson in splitting up Palestine into two pieces in 1947. Pearson has a major role to play in that. Initial research shows that it’s been largely covered up. It would require a person of Naomi Klein’s stature to dig into it and find out more about it.  It’s one of the worst things this country has ever done, under a good man, supposedly.  How did he allow himself to do it. I heard from one of his colleagues that he regretted it. But I would like to get more evidence of that.

Q. What else would you like to do?

A. I can’t imagine doing anything else. Although I started late in life, I didn’t get into film making until I was thirty years old, it’s become pretty much an obsession with me, I can’t imagine doing without it. I have a very manageable, high-definition camera, light-weight enough to carry in spite of my age. I love working on my Final Cut Pro editing system. What else would I like to do?  I wish I could play the piano again. I still have a piano and I do play once in a while. If I had time, I would love to play it a lot more.

 * In February 2009, the Federal Court finally lifted most of the interim conditions imposed on Adil Charkaoui. Adil was arrested under a so-called security certificate in 2003. Adil Charkaoui is one of five men in Canada who are undergoing the Kafka-esque security certificate process. All are still subject to the agonizingly irrational “security” certificate process, deeply invasive and suffocating bail conditions, and live under threat of deportation and torture. The Coalition Justice for Adil Charkaoui formed in Montreal in a matter of days after Charkaoui’s abrupt arrest.
 
The Coalition is an alliance of Muslim groups, refugee and immigrant rights organizations, anti-oppression groups and the Charkaoui family.