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

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.