We Are Where We Come From: The Founding of a Film Community in British Columbia, 1945–1970

We Are Where We Come From: The Founding ofa Film Community in British Columbia, 1945-1970 STANLEY FOX* This essay constitutes an attempt to fill a small but not unimportant gap in the cultural history of Canada. It chronicles and comments upon the birth and growth of a regional film movement that was active in British Columbia from the immediate post-war period to about 1970. It traces the development of some of our most important film artists, people whose work continues to influence the shape of Canadian cinema. It also raises questions common to all Canadian artists and, indeed, to the development of any group or regional sensibility. What are the conditions necessary for the birth and nurture of these movements? What is the influence of regional and political isolation? How is a sense of common purpose achieved? And, most importantly , how do these factors relate to the fragmented, decentralized context of the Canadian experience? In film, as in other areas of cultural and economic life, the centralists in Ottawa and Ontario have attempted to enforce a purely national focus. This they have done with the most convincing weapon at their disposal: money. By the 1950s federal bodies like the National Film Board, the CBC and the Canada Council, all of which dispensed the sort of funding necessary to sustain artistic development, were firmly entrenched. Very little funding was available at the provincial level and - at least in English Canada - the private financing of film activity had come to a virtual standstill during the 1940s and early 1950s.! The underlying, if unstated, concept behind federal initiatives was old and European. Canada would have national institutions for the arts, including film. While the CBC and NFB built lavish headquarters in Toronto and Montreal, the small Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 16. No. I (Printemps 1981 Spring) disorganized film communities in the Maritimes, the Prairies and British Columbia could only hope that token gestures of support would fall their way. Adding to the dilemma was a federal cultural policy designed to ''divide and conquer,'' encouraging artists from the regions to compete for the attentions of a centralized Canadian consciousness . In a modest effort to soften its position, Ottawa saw to it that its national institutions offered some encouragement to indigenous activity in the provinces. The NFB contracted out a tiny amount of work in areas like British Columbia, which could claim to have demonstrated some filmmaking capacity. The CBC went somewhat further and, as we shall see, built its own modest facilities in the regions. However, in both radio and television, Toronto maintained a virtual monopoly over the prime time periods. A region like British Columbia could depend on occupying no more than a few hours a week of network time and this for programmes made for a fraction of the funds available to Toronto productions . Daryl Duke 23 The result of federal neglect was less a feeling of resentment toward its cultural policies than a sense of isolation. Daryl Duke, who was to become one of the leading figures in the British Columbia film movement of the 1950s, describes the environment in this way: We were all of the post-War generation that drifted through school. There was a great emphasis on English, philosophy and the written word. We were more familiar with what was being written in The New Statesman or The Economist or The Spectator or The Paris Review than with Canadian literature. We would read poets like C.D. Lewis and Auden. There was a great attention to and awareness of things a long, long way away. But it never occurred to us that one could possibly make a living in the arts.2 Of course, there had been some history of attempts to make a living in the arts - even in film - in British Columbia. From the earliest years of film production to the end of World War II, sporadic attempts had been made to build film studios or to launch large-scale feature film projects.3 Although all of these attempts had met with varying degrees of failure, the desire to build a film community in British Columbia had become something of a local tradition. . Throughout...