Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries (review)

Recently, there has been a distinct rise in the amount of scholarship generated on Canadian film. Jim Leach and Jeannette Sloniowski contribute to this phenomenon with their recent collection of essays on Canadian documentaries. As the editors' brief introduction indicates, their goal is to provide close readings of single films in their 'historical, cultural, and cinematic contexts.' To this end, the volume features ten original essays and four reprinted works, with each contribution focusing on a specific film and accompanied by a filmography. All the films discussed were produced by the National Film Board of Canada between 1954 and 1997, and because the volume is organized chronologically, the reader is provided with a sense of historical, ideological, and aesthetic development in documentary film production at the Film Board. Although the editors acknowledge that the volume lends itself to a certain amount of overlap, I found very little, and when it did occur, it provided a type of dialogue between some of the essayists that ultimately proved quite interesting. For example, while Richard Hancox's essay on Paul Tomkowicz: Street-Railway Switchman and Seth Feldman's on The Days before Christmas deal separately with issues of nation and tradition respectively, they also both provide explicit accounts of the legacy of Unit B. In particular, Feldman's essay engages in a lively and useful comparison between the philosophical and aesthetic issues surrounding the birth of cinema vérité, candid eye filmmaking, and direct cinema.

The scope of the volume is quite broad. For example, Barry Keith Grant's essay on Lonely Boy explores the pop idol phenomenon while Brenda Longfellow explores popular culture in Project Grizzly and Jeannette Sloniowski considers Waiting for Fidel as performative documentary. This allows the reader to engage with a wide variety of theoretical perspectives. Standout essays include Joan Nicks's splendid discussion of the feminist interventionist project of Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography and David Clandfield's and Zuzana Pick's compelling accounts of how documentary form is used to represent and locate specific worldviews in Pour la suite du monde and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, respectively. Pick's astute comment that 'elements of documentary become components of storytelling to create a narrative and a visual space that represents knowledge and social experience and reclaims traditional and contemporary stories' is especially evocative of the volume's goals.

One of the very positive aspects of this volume is the way in which it considers questions of Canadian nation and identity from a variety of viewpoints. Such perspectives include Jean Bruce's deft delineation of issues of sexuality and lesbian culture in Canada in her analysis of Forbidden Love as queer cinema and Marion Froger's examination of 'américanité,' national identity, and travelogue form in Voyage en Amérique avec un cheval emprunté. In addition, Peter Harcourt and Jim Leach focus on issues of social justice in Bûcherons de la Manouane and On est au coton, respectively, and Peter Baxter deftly brings to the fore the inventive biographical construction of Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. Hence, although the documentaries are drawn from National Film Board productions, they also demonstrate the breadth of human experience and scholarship in Canada.

Overall, Candid Eyes is an excellent and useful anthology, offering some of the best work on Canadian documentary to date. It is difficult not to acknowledge the influence/legacy of Grierson, and all the essays do, explicitly, or implicitly, demonstrating how the films either engage with, or challenge and go beyond, his original idea of documentary as the 'creative treatment of actuality.' The volume is suitable for both the specialist and general academic audience and offers a glimpse into the disputed terrain of Canada as a nation and the multiplicity of voices that contribute to its complexity.