Hamilton Babylon: A History of the McMaster Film Board by Stephen Broomer (review)

Experimental filmmaker Stephen Broomer's new book, Hamilton Babylon, is the engaging and exhaustively researched recounting of the brief (1966–75) rise and fall of McMaster University's student film production club and the part it played in the creation of an independent Canadian cinema. The story largely takes place in three acts. The first deals with campus provocateur John Hofsess, who founded the McMaster Film Board (MFB) so that he and a handful of like-minded friends would have the means to make personal, non-commercial, experimental films at a time when Canada's independent film scene consisted of a handful of individuals scattered across the country. After two years of controversies involving charges of undisciplined and unauthorized overspending, accusations of obscenity, threats of lawsuits, and even the brief arrest of Hofsess himself, the MFB was shut down. But not before producing several groundbreaking films, notably Hofsess's Palace of Pleasure (1966–67), an avant-garde short that received wide distribution on North American campuses and the US underground film circuit, and not before playing a key role in the launching of a Canadian distribution network for independent films.

The second act concerns the revival of the MFB a few months later by music student Ivan Reitman, future director of Ghostbusters (1984) and a string of Hollywood hit comedies. Not surprisingly, Reitman took the MFB in a new direction, fostering the creation of accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies, more concerned in showing a command of the medium than in personal expression. While Broomer's heart is clearly with fellow avant-garde filmmaker Hofsess, he gives the Reitman-era MFB films the same respectful, in-depth analyses that he gives the earlier experimental films, and, even though he cannot disguise there is less to talk about, he is careful to point out that they were much more popular with McMaster students.

The third act recounts the unlikely teaming of Reitman and Hofsess in the making of the MFB's only feature film, Columbus of Sex (1969), which was banned by the Ontario Board of Censors and led to Reitman and his fellow producer Dan Goldberg being convicted of creating pornography. The bizarre, sometimes comic, events of their obscenity trial highlight the unlikelihood of all this happening in the midst of the sleepy, mid-1960s McMaster campus, let alone the even sleepier, socially conservative Hamilton of the era.

Broomer also provides a broader historical view, carefully situating the actions of the MFB within the first stirrings of feature film production in Canada, which included University of Toronto undergraduate David Secter's Winter Kept Us Warm (1965) and University of British Columbia theatre student Larry Kent's The Bitter Ash (1963). However, he stresses an important difference between the MFB and both of these independent social realist films and those of NFB documentarians-turned-feature film directors like Gilles Carle or Don Owen. Broomer argues that Hofsess and Reitman both represent, and helped start, alternative currents to the downbeat realist dramas that are identified with this period and have sometimes been cited as the beginnings of a distinctively Canadian cinema. Hofsess, inspired by the New York avant-garde scene, and, in particular, Jonas Mekas, was interested in more complex, non-narrative film forms and played a key role in the creation of an experimental film community in Canada. Reitman, in turn, also rejected realism, in his case, for Hollywood-influenced mass audience entertainment. His early, Canadian-produced films Foxy Lady (1971) and Cannibal Girls (1973) were quirky, lowbrow comedies not far removed from his MFB work, and, as genre films with their eyes firmly set on the American market, can be seen as trailblazers for any number of films with similar intentions that have since followed.

This is an interesting, and often passionately written, contribution to Canadian film history that shines a light on a key moment in the creation of the country's independent cinema, and, in particular, argues for a re-evaluation of...