For 26 years I had been working as a
journalist for daily newspapers. I usually quit after three years, and I had
just quit for the last time in 1971. Actually I had worked for The Montreal Star for fourteen years,
but this was the second time I had been on the point of quitting them. The
first occurred in 1960 after my first three years. That would have been
eminently achievable, because there were only my wife and myself to worry
about, no children. But I was rescued from my solid intention to quit, indeed
to leave Canada after spending six years in the country, when my boss suddenly
asked me if I would like to go to London, England, to represent them. I have
written about this already in my Chronicle 6, on December 29.
In London I had what I have always
said was the best job in world journalism, so good a job, indeed, that I never
had the guts to quit it. The home office
--- that is to say, those fellows sitting at their desks who had theoretical
authority over me --- never bothered me.
When I arrived in London I found that we bought a bewildering array of news
services from all the great newspapers of the English-speaking world, assuring
that whatever happened in the way of news, we were covered for it. So I decided
to ignore all that stuff and just do my own thing. This was a fortuitous decision because these
assembled desk-men, I discovered, were happier than sandboys, so long as they
got a regular supply of copy early enough in the morning that they could put it
into every edition for the coming day. With all the deadlines in my favour ---
pity those poor Indians and Pakistanis, nice fellows, whose deadlines ran the
other way and were always looming in their faces! ---- I could not have asked
for a more favourable working environment.
I figured that if I couldn’t find something to write about in London, I
shouldn’t be in this line of work.
But eventually, after eight glorious years,
I was recalled to Montreal, where once again I came under the purview of these
guys at their desks. I had a favourable
gig, as one would now say, wandering around the country freely to write about
things that interested me. But the knowledge that I had to be careful about
what I could and could not write, as usual began to grind on my nerves, and after
a few run-ins with management, three years after my return --- that three-year
limit on my tolerance for newspapers reasserting itself inexorably --- I handed
in my notice. This time it was a highly speculative decision, because I now had
four children to feed, and extremely questionable prospects of making a living.
The CBC for which I had worked on a freelance basis ever since I had arrived in
Winnipeg in 1957, showed absolutely no interest in hiring me for anything, so
one can imagine how eagerly I accepted the suggestion made by Colin Low, one of
the NFB executive producers, that maybe I could do a little research for him.
The research achieved, Colin
suggested I might like to co-direct its first fruit, a proposed film on
Aboriginal Rights, a subject not widely understood in Canada at that time. Well, to make a long story short, the work
environment of film-making was completely strange to me. I had been accustomed
to working alone, to wandering around the country with a notebook and pen,
writing up the result, and handing it in. I discovered that to make a film you
had to be part of a team, and to my surprise I found that, in spite of my
life-long enthusiasm for team sports, I was not what one might call a team
player.
To make the NFB film we had to
assemble a formidable array of equipment, food, and all the rest of it, not to
mention the four team members --- cameraman-director, sound man, electrician,
and research-writer (that was me) --- and fly it to a Cree hunting camp
hundreds of miles north in the Quebec wilderness. I had dabbled in making a
film a few months before for the Indians of Quebec Association, and it was easy
to compare that extremely amateurish effort with the smooth efficiency of the
NFB team, because the story we were telling was roughly the same in each case. We
were trying to find a way to allow our Cree subjects --- a subsistence hunting
people most of whom could speak neither English nor French, and whose most
important members were older men who had never been to a school of any kind
---- to express to the outside world their opinion of the recently announced
policy of the Quebec government to build a huge series of dams and electricity
generating stations, on the several great rivers that had always been central
to their hunting life, which they had followed for thousands of years. One can
see, I hope, that we were present at what might be termed an historic clash
between a civilization closer to the Stone Age than to our present day, pitted
against a multi-billion dollar, super-technological advance of modern life,
smashing insensately into the very centre of their world.
As a journalist I had always been
interested in public issues, and on this job I had the biggest issue I could
ever have imagined, a matter of life and death for a small group of people
whose fate seemed to lie in the hands of their attackers, so ludicrously
unequal was the balance of power between the two sides. So I was essentially
interested in finding a way to collect and transmit their opinion.
Not so fast, comrade. I discovered
that the NFB team was concentrated on something I had never given a moment’s
thought to, which was the need to produce a quality product. At an early stage
of our filming one evening, crouched in a tent alongside one of the countless
lakes that are scattered over this entire wilderness, I was asking questions of
the leading hunter, Sam Blacksmith, my questions and his answers being
translated by our interpreter Philip Awashish, a young Cree who spoke English,
with the discussion being recorded by our soundman, Richard Besse, and filmed
by our expert cameraman-director Tony Ianzelo.
I was well pleased with the way the conversation was going, Sam giving
us profound but simple-sounding answers that we could never have received from
any anthropologist, when suddenly Richard threw off his earphones with a
disgusted gesture, and said, “It’s no good. There’s too much noise.”
I had thought we were filming in what
seemed like ideal conditions of total silence, something that is always hard to
find wherever you are filming, so I was unreasonably irritated by this
interruption. “Noise?” I demanded.
“It’s the snow falling on the tent,”
Richard remarked. “It’s just totally drowning out the answers.”
I could hardly believe my ears. Here was this
technician deciding we could not take note of this epoch-making conversation
bearing directly on the quality of our civilization, because of the noise being
made by falling snow?
That I was so far from understanding
this, could be put down to my total ignorance of the film-making process. I thought all that mattered was to get the
opinions of the hunters on to tape, and I kept my contempt for this technical
impediment to myself, so as not to disturb the crew, to whose judgment,
obviously, I had to bow.
It took me quite a long while, months
in fact, perhaps even years, to understand that if a serious message was to be
delivered by film, it was better that the quality of the film in which it was
delivered should be of the highest order.
When we returned to Montreal and
began assembling our raw footage into what began to look like the semblance of
a film, every week or two we would hold a screening of what we had assembled
and invite other members of the staff to come and watch it. As many as 25 people
might turn up for such a screening, and every opinion they uttered --- no
matter they might know nothing of the issue, have never seen a Cree person on
film before, and had no idea of the problems we had overcome to obtain the
footage --- every opinion was recorded and considered seriously by the
producers and technicians on our film crew.
I thought this was ridiculous. What interest did these people have in our
film? So what interest could we possibly have in their opinions?
And yet, eventually, after being
repeatedly subject to his procedure, I began to realize that these onlookers
represented what would eventually be the audience for our film, and we would be
more likely to reach that audience as we wanted to do, if we managed to set our
message in a technically-sound setting of the highest possible quality.
It was this quality which lay at the
basis of the immense, world-wide success the National Film Board achieved with
its documentaries, making it the leading factory for documentary film that
existed certainly in the Western world.
It was this quality, the superb
sensitivity of Ianzelo’s camera work especially, the meticulous perfection of
Besse’s sound, that earned this very film, Cree
Hunters of Mistassini, an award in 1975 from the British Academy of Film
and Television Arts named in commemoration of the great Arctic film-maker,
Roberrt Flaherty.
This award was gratifying, of course,
but for me the film deserved another award, for the remarkable act of
generosity of Colin Low and Tony Ianzelo, who took on board a complete neophyte
who to this day doesn’t know one end of a camera from another, and carried him
with them through the whole process, opening up to him a whole new world of
persuasion in which a camera might be as effective --- possibly more effective ---
than his notebook and pen.
·
* *
As a last-ditch line of defence, I might argue
that it depends how many pens one is using. I recall one occasion on which,
after having had a tempestuous three-day acquaintance with a beautiful,
hard drinking and rather eccentric investment counsellor in Norway --- I met
her when we bumped into each other on a ferry crossing Oslo harbour, and she
said, “Will I sit in your lap, or you in mine?” --- I used my waiting time at
Schipol airport in Amsterdam by writing her a letter for which I used every one
of the 22 pens I discovered I was carrying with me. I would bet on them against the camera any
time.
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