Igloos and Cannibalism

You would think that the great outcry against the death of Canadian culture would give the evil hair shelf (a.k.a. Prime Minister Stephen Harper) pause. Pissing off Margaret Atwood is something that no sane person would do, but Harper apparently lacks common sense.

If Harper does manage to get re-elected, one organization that might be for the chopping block is the venerable National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Unique in the world, the film board has produced films for Canadians for the past 65 years, but even that might not be enough to save it. Canadians tend to take things for granted, and the NFB is no exception.

So, in the name of all that is Canadian, rise up!

Take your cultured self off to the Vancouver International Film Festival, where the NFB has a total of nine films screening, everything from experimental animation (Drux Flux) to Velcrow Ripper's latest (Fierce Light), which caused my sister and I both to burst into tears.

You can support Canadian artists, prove the Harper wrong, and see some pretty amazing stuff all in one fell swoop.

Cold facts

One of the things that I find consistently compelling about NFB films is that while they tell Canadian stories, they're very much international in both scope and approach. This is particularly true of John Walker's documentary-cum-fiction film Passage, which recreates the journey of arctic explorer John Rae, who uncovered the fate of the infamous Franklin expedition.

On May 9th, 1845, Sir John Franklin set sail with two well-equipped ships and a crew of 134 stout-hearted sailors. Egged on by his ambitious wife, the extremely formidable Lady Franklin, Sir John intended to cement his place in history by discovering the long-sought and greatly desired Northwest Passage. Franklin and his crew were never heard from again, until a Scottish doctor named John Rae set out on foot, looking for any traces of the expedition's passing, and discovering a tale to freeze the blood.

Inuit reports of English sailors pulling enormous sleds across the land, howling like a chorus of the damned, were confirmed by the discovery of frozen butchered corpses. In a final act of desperation, the men finally resorted to cannibalism to stave off starvation. Or in Rae's own words, "From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource -- cannibalism -- as a means of prolonging existence."

Blame the Inuit

When Rae returned to London, the news of Franklin's fate was soon splashed across the newspapers, much to the horror of Franklin's widow, who quickly set about rescuing her husband's reputation with help from Charles Dickens. Dickens penned an article for Household Words, which laid the blame for the expedition's gruesome end squarely on the shoulders of the Inuit people. The stories of Englishmen eating their fellows didn't go over very well in the motherland, and Rae's reputation being impeachable, suspicion fell easily upon a people who were still considered to be savages. The Inuit were branded murderous cannibals, and pilloried ruthlessly in the press. John Walker's film sets out to right this very old wrong, and in the process reveals how uncovering the past can bring the present more clearly into focus.

Passage employs the conceit of a film within a film by following the actors who play the principal roles within the drama. Actor Rick Roberts, who plays John Rae, and ostensibly himself, visits Orkney, Rae's birthplace to better understand the nature of the man he is portraying.

Roberts also retraces the Rae's footsteps in the great open spaces of the Canadian North, discovering along the way the giant stone house that Rae and his men constructed during the winter of 1846-47. The tumbled walls, almost two-feet thick in places, did little to stop the men from freezing. When Rae visited an Inuit igloo and discovered that it was warm enough inside to thaw his long-frozen waistcoat, he quickly adapted and built igloos for his own men, complete with a handy little diagram that details both the right and the wrong way to put the bricks together. As history, fiction and reality interweave, Roberts, playing Rae, discovers that building an igloo isn't nearly as easy as it might appear. The cheerful disgust of the two Inuit men helping him adds a nice note of humour that is echoed throughout by Tagak Curley, an Inuit statesman and advisor to the production.

'Isn't history wonderful'

Long consigned to the dustbin of history, Rae was resurrected and vindicated in writer Ken McGoogan's exhaustively researched book Fatal Passage. McGoogan uncovered not only Rae's own life story, but also the means and methods by which he was robbed of his legacy. Collusion, power, racism, as well as overweening English pride, combined to give Sir John Franklin the honour of discovering the Northwest Passage, when in fact it was Rae's singular achievement. A bronze sculpture of Franklin in Central London trumpets this untruth, much to the amusement of Curley, who quite rightly says, "A dead man cannot find something."

The film's most remarkable scene comes at the end when Ernest Coleman, a retired member of British navy, confronts Tagak Curley. The war of words is riveting, and makes explicitly clear that the wounds of history are not gone or forgotten but still bleeding brightly, as fresh and painful now as they were hundreds of years ago. As the great-great grandson of Charles Dickens says, "Isn't history wonderful, how many hundreds of years does it take?" Director John Walker, himself something of a Canadian icon, peels back the layers of art and artifice to reveal that history is what we choose to make it. Whether engraved in stone, cast in bronze, or in this case, written, acted and reinvented on film.

'FLicKeR'

Like John Rae, Brion Gysin is a little known figure in Canadian history. Gysin was also an intrepid explorer, delving deep into the little known regions of the human brain responsible for divine visions and transcendent experiences. The apocryphal story is that Gysin discovered the ability of flickering light to send human beings into a trance state, quite by accident, while dozing on a bus or a train (stories differ). Whatever the means of transport, this experience sent Gysin off on a quest to recreate this 'drugless high' through the invention of a device called the dream machine.

Inspired by William Grey Walter's best selling book The Living Brain, the dream machine was able to bring on visions by stimulating alpha waves in the human brain. The machine itself was composed of a light bulb, a sleeve of metal or paper, peppered with cutouts, and a means of spinning at a precisely timed rate. The dream machine was, however, only one of Gysin's many projects. He pioneered the use of cut-ups, and his paintings influenced a number of other better known artists, who are often credited with techniques that Gysin invented.

Gysin is perhaps most famous for his long-term collaboration with William S. Burroughs. The two men met in Tangiers and their relationship continued on in Paris at the infamous Beat Hotel. As one person interviewed in the film notes, Gysin always managed to self-sabotage, and his reputation and achievements have been largely lost in the shuffle of history. Director Nik Sheehan's terrific documentary undoes this injustice and brings the dream machine and Gysin back into the spotlight, which is where they belong.

FLicKeR is packed with some truly fascinating individuals including Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithful and Genesis P'Orridge, each of who have had their own intimate experiences with the dream machine. Scenes of musicians and artists with their little noses pressed almost into the whirring strobing slits of the machine made me of course want to try it myself. The film's final triumphant celebration of light, sound and rebellion is simply great!

And in that spirit... Long live the NFB! Long live Canadian culture! And off with Harper's hair!

John Walker's Passage and Nik Sheehan FLicKeR both screen at the VIFF on Friday, October 3rd and Saturday October 4th.

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• Who Are Great Canadians?
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• Cold Reality in the High Arctic
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