A year and a half ago a haunting and beautiful documentary emerged in Quebec. Une tente sur mars (A Tent on Mars) takes a meandering visual stroll through the Northern Quebec mining town of Schefferville and surveys the effects of industry on the local Innu people. It is a quiet and disarming poem against colonization, with some unsettling scenes of intoxicated aboriginal people and a very quixotic sequence involving a rambling anthropologist in a garbage dump with black bears prowling in the background.
What is most captivating about this 2008 film by Martin Bureau and Luc Renaud is its approach to storytelling. In typical Quebecois fashion, standard formulae are abandoned in place of a lyrical, non-chronological approach that emphasizes the aesthetics of mise-en-scène and a soundscape that is sometimes heavy-handed, but overall, hypnotic and dream-like. Art Threat had the chance to ask the filmmakers a few questions about the project.
Originally published in the Spring 2010 issue of POV Magazine.
Einstein on the screen
Recently, Disney, the largest children’s entertainment firm in the world, offered rebates on its hugely popular educational DVD set Baby Einstein. While the company refused to acknowledge the link, many point to the ongoing lobbying efforts by the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood as the reason behind the company’s capitulation. Apparently, research shows that little Abdul or Suzy can’t learn much at all from screen media, that is, if they’re under two years old.
Disney had marketed Baby Einstein to eager parents and created the impression that toddlers could indeed benefit cognitively from screen media, maybe even picking up a little physics along the way. But the information proving the contrary was all in the documentary Consuming Kids by the Media Education Foundation, an organization of academics and media makers based in Northampton, MA who produce educational documentaries on topics ranging from homophobia in hip hop culture to corporate greenwashing. Their documentary had warned of such marketing ploys.
This begs the question: if babies can’t learn from screen media, can the rest of us learn from documentaries?
Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story takes aim at the elite bankers and CEOs who are steering America’s economy into the gutter, and among the bad guys he goes after is none other than the world’s largest and most brutal retailer, Wal-Mart (now re-branded as Walmart). Moore exposes Walmart’s dirty practice of taking out insurance claims on its employees and cashing in on their deaths without telling their families.
So it may come as a bit of a surprise that Moore’s anti-capitalism, anti-Walmart documentary goes on sale today…in Walmart. Yes, you can buy the DVD at your local low-wage, environment-destroying, human-rights abusing Walmart, as well as at Amazon and other video retailers. Moore thinks that the reason Walmart is happily carrying Capitalism: A Love Story is due to the fact that they are uber-comfy in their position of ruler of the world. In an email sent out today, he writes:
To celebrate the ending of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and the launch of a new book about political documentary and art as social intervention we have chosen You Are On Indian Land (YAOIL) as our Friday Film Pick.
Produced under the National Film Board of Canada’s Challenge for Change Program in 1969 YAOIL was one of the first documentaries produced with members of the Indian Film Unit (a production unit made up of aboriginal filmmakers, cancelled some years later). The 37 minute black and white film, made by Mort Ransen and Mike Mitchell (who is currently Grand Chief of Akwesasne) is a powerful instalment of cinema verité and an incredibly important historical document that still measures up to today cinema standards.
For the last three years I’ve been working on a book about a daring documentary initiative that took place four decades ago at the National Film Board of Canada. Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, co-edited by Thomas Waugh, Mike Baker and myself and introduced by Naomi Klein, is a 600-page collection of articles and essays about the Challenge for Change program, which ran from 1967 to 1980 and produced over 200 documentaries in English and French (the French sister project was Société nouvelle).
Challenge for Change (CFC) became famous around the world for not only using documentary to tackle social problems but because it was a government-funded project that produced films highly critical of the government. From First Nations problems to housing, CFC documentaries didn’t hold back in their critical analysis of the things the Canadian government was doing wrong. In an era when Alberta’s Ministry of Culture attempts to censor would-be films critical of the tar sands and anti-Olympics signage in Vancouver were prohibited, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary version of the Challenge for Change project.
A year and a half ago a haunting and beautiful documentary emerged in Quebec. Une tente sur mars (A Tent on Mars) takes a meandering visual stroll through the Northern Quebec mining town of Schefferville and surveys the effects of industry on the local Innu people. It is a quiet and disarming poem against colonization, with some unsettling scenes of intoxicated aboriginal people and a very quixotic sequence involving a rambling anthropologist in a garbage dump with black bears prowling in the background.
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