THE GRANDCHILDREN OF FOGO: THE FOGO ISLAND FILMS AND THE 'CULTURAL REVOLUTION' IN NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR, 1967-1977
by
Susan P. Newhook
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
at
Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia May 2008
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Appendices Copyright Releases (if applicable) TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES vi
ABSTRACT: vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 Literature Review 9
1.2 The Times: Canada and Newfoundland in the 1960s 23
1.3 Goals, Strategy, Chapter Outline 25
CHAPTER TWO: HOW THE FOGO 'EXPERIMENT' CAME TOGETHER 28
2.1 Fogo Island Before the Fogo Island Experiment 31
2.2 The National Film Board and Challenge for Change 35
2.3 MUN Extension Service, Don Snowden and Fred Earle 39
2.4 Principal Photography: Summer 1967 48
2.5 Conclusion: A Meeting of Minds and Agendas 51
CHAPTER THREE: READING AGAINST THE GRAIN, BEYOND THE FRAME... 53
3.1 A Sampling of the Films: 59
3.2 Themes 69
3.2.1 Challenging the Government 69
3.2.2 Challenging the Community 72
3.2.3 Outmigration 74
3.2.4 Women in Outport Society 79
3.2.5 Modernity vs. Tradition 81
3.2.6 Self-sufficiency 82
iv 3.3 Reading Outside the Frame 83
3.3.1 Selection of Guests 83
3.3.2 Cross-scripting 84
3.3.3 Staging of Scenes 87
3.4 Conclusion 96
CHAPTER FOUR: FILM AS FODDER FOR A CULTURAL REVOLUTION 98
4.1 First Reactions to the Fogo Island Films 103
4.2 Spreading the Word 106
4.3 The Unintended Audience 107
4.4 Backstage at the Revolution 108
4.5 The Revolution on Stage and Elsewhere Ill
4.6 Conclusion 119
CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION 121
5.1 Postscript 126
BIBLIOGRAPHY 130
v LIST OF TABLES
Table 1 : List of theFogo Island Films 8
VI ABSTRACT:
The Fogo Island films of 1967-69 played an unintended, and unacknowledged, role in the development of Newfoundland and Labrador culture as Canadians recognize it today. The films were made to support community development on Fogo Island, but their influence goes well beyond what is known as the "Fogo Process." The films and the partnership behind them helped to create the province's distinctive modern-day film and theatre communities. They were also a catalyst for its broader contemporary culture. The
NFB has often received exclusive or near-exclusive credit for the Fogo project, but the work began in Newfoundland with Don Snowden, Fred Earle, Memorial University
Extension Service and the Fogo Island Improvement Committee. While the project owes much of its success (particularly in its cinematic aspects) to director Colin Low and the
NFB, the others' roles were at least as important, and predated the NFB's involvement by several years.
vn ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My supervisor, Dr. Jerry Bannister, has been a wonderful source of guidance and
support. His no-nonsense advice and editing were invaluale and I am grateful for his his
confidence in a graduate student who had been so long away from the classroom.
Dr. Shirley Tillotson's course on the welfare state, and her canny choice of readings,
showed the way to this topic. At the University of King's College, Kim Kierans is an
invaluable mentor, colleague and friend. Thanks as well to Helen Hambly Odame at the
University of Guelph's Snowden Centre and to Wendy Quarry. In Newfoundland and
Labrador, thanks to the late Fred Earle's nephew, Don Noble, for access to his uncle's
papers and for taking the time to go through them with me; to Dan Roberts, Don Best,
Randy Coffin, Dr. Philip Warren, Edythe Goodridge and Paul Macleod for their help with
identification and background information. The Centre for Newfoundland Studies at
Memorial University, and the people who work there, are together one of the province's
great cultural treasures; special thanks to Linda White, Susan Hadley and Joan Ritcey.
Finally but not least, I hope my my family and friends know how important their support
has been, and is.
viii 1
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
It is summer on a rocky ocean coast. Waves crash on an empty sweep of shoreline. We hear a soprano voice - unaccompanied and wordless, as if floating on the breeze - drift gradually into the traditional folk song, "She's Like the Swallow". The camera pans to find whitewashed and weather-beaten saltbox houses, fishing stages and stores. A woman, her back to the camera, pins laundry to a clothesline as it billows in the wind. Then the scene shifts to a quiet harbour: small boats bob at their moorings and we see more houses and clotheslines, all much like the first one. Two small boys play in a field, supervised only by the dandelions and the upended and rusting carcass of an old car. Slowly, the singing fades away, and the scene changes again to follow a well-used station wagon bumping and clattering its way along the hills and curves of a rough dirt road. It is 1967 in outport Newfoundland and pavement is still the exception. The community worker is heading into town. As the car squeaks and clunks along in a cloud of dust, a male narrator begins to explain the more abstract journey ahead. "Challenge for
Change is an experiment in the role of communications in social change," he intones. "As part of this experiment we filmed local people, talking about the problems of a changing community, and played back these films in that community."1
So begins An Introduction to Fogo Island, the overview chapter of the
"Newfoundland Project" of 1967-68, which was undertaken jointly by the National Film
Board of Canada and Memorial University of Newfoundland's Extension Service. The
1 Colin Low (director), An Introduction to Fogo Island (National Film Board of Canada, 1967), timecode (approx): 1:30-1:45
2 The Extension Service was more than a department of continuing education. At this point in its existence, it included community outreach and focused on providing practical skills and information to outport communities. In St. John's, the Extension programs also included music, visual arts and theatre programs. 2
NFB/MUN crew shot more than 20 short films over two summers, as a local development committee worked to establish a fisheries and boatbuilding co-op. The
NFB called the films the "Newfoundland Project"; the project was one of the first in the long-lived national Challenge for Change program, which aimed to use film as an agent of social change in the contemporary 'war on poverty'. In Newfoundland, the films were known as part of the Fogo Experiment, as Extension workers tried to help the Fogo
Islanders reach a consensus on their future.3 The films have been almost forgotten by many of the relatively few people who knew of them (and the fewer still who actually saw them) at the time. In community and international development circles the films are known as part of the first attempt at what became the Fogo Process, in which film (and later video) became a player in group discussions of community development.4 In
Canadian film studies, the films are remembered almost exclusively as the brainchild of the Montreal-based NFB director Colin Low. This thesis will show that the films' provenance and legacy are greater than either of these descriptions suggests. The drive to create the Fogo Island film project began in Newfoundland, and its success played an important role in shaping the province's so-called 'cultural revolution' of the 1970s.
Concluding in the early 1990s that the framework had outlived its usefulness, the university closed it down and replaced it with the more conventionally-structured department of Distance Education and Learning Technologies (DELT). 3 The official name of the province at the time was Newfoundland, not Newfoundland and Labrador. For that reason as well as for brevity's sake, that term will be used throughout the paper to refer to the province as a whole at the time, as well as to the island portion. 4 It is important to differentiate among the stages in the growth of the Fogo Island exercise. Some writers use a number of descriptors interchangeably, but this paper will refer to the pre-production planning and principal photography periods as the Fogo Island experiment; to the moving-image records as the Fogo Island films; to the two combined as the Fogo Island project; and to the developments after the project as the Fogo Process. I use "Fogo Island" instead of "Fogo" in deference to sensitivities on the island; the fact that people in communities outside the town of Fogo are bothered by the prospect of it getting all the 'credit' suggests that there is still progress to be made in the name of island unity. However, I have left the term "Fogo Process" as it is, since it appears so often that way in the literatures of film and community development. 3
In discussing these effects, I want to emphasize that the Fogo Island Experiment was not the child of outsiders who arrived in a community without hope, as has often been suggested, and it is not only about the National Film Board doing good by using film well. The Newfoundlanders were not the passive recipients of an intellectual transfer payment from Montreal; rather, the NFB was recruited to a project which had already begun, and contributed its considerable talents toward the success of that project, and for the benefit of all concerned.
Refraining the story in this way shows its importance as a contributing factor in the development of post-Confederation society and culture in Newfoundland and
Labrador. The Fogo Island Experiment was not a one-off exception, but a counterpoint to the government's centralization strategies; not political in the party sense, often staying intentionally out of public view, the development workers hoped to convince the people in small communities that they could survive by taking charge of their futures. This concept ran contrary to contemporary government policy and to generations of passively accepting decisions from St. John's, London or Ottawa. Its success was to play a role in a re-invention, even a re-definition, of the Newfoundland 'character' by
Newfoundlanders themselves. If "definitions belong to the definers, not to the defined,"5 that element of agency goes some way to removing the influence of the so-called 'tourist gaze' from the image of the province.
In 1967 on Fogo Island, the forces of modernity at home and abroad were pushing its ten scattered communities to the edge of social and economic collapse. The popular belief (then and now) that the government was about resettle the entire island is untrue, but some people were leaving on their own and others were almost ready to go. In
5 Toni Morrison, from the novel Beloved. 4 contrast with the province's focus on industrialization, the Memorial University
Extension Service was encouraging the small communities to work together to survive, but it needed an extra push to make its project work. When the Extension Service director heard of a new NFB unit called Challenge for Change, he aggressively courted its attention on behalf of Fogo Island, and seems to have set aside the fact that the unit's mandate was one he had suggested himself, some time earlier.
The filmmakers on the 1967-68 project included some of the best at the NFB, which is to say that they were among the best in the world. They were working with a committed group of social and community workers from Memorial University and a motley crew of young Newfoundland interns, some of whom were young "townies" excited to travel so far from St. John's.6 The crew filmed Fogo Islanders working, playing and, most importantly, discussing their collective future. The films were played back at community meetings across the island, encouraging further debate. Further screenings in St. John's served to bring the islanders' concerns to cabinet ministers and other 'experts'. The films were not a typical documentary production but part of an innovative approach to community development, in which people in remote or otherwise isolated communities discussed social problems through film. It grew out of a face-to- face process called 'social animation' in which trained facilitators, or animateurs, helped community groups air and overcome differences as a step toward shared, grassroots solutions to social problems. When the project was over, Fogo Island had a fisheries co operative and was said to have been 'saved' from resettlement.
This thesis will study the Fogo Island films in terms of their value as documents of Newfoundland social history and explore their influence on the development, over the
6 Bryan Hennessey, "Working in a Fledgling Film Industry," Newfoundland Quarterly 99, 4 (2007). 5
n next decade, of Newfoundland's 'cultural revolution'. It will look at the films' unlikely genesis, their unusual and (for the time) provocative, even controversial content, and finally at the films' effect on some of the students, artists and activists who drew both skills and ideas from the Fogo Project.
Although the films never played to a wide general audience, some of the people who did see them included filmmakers, playwrights and other artists who would become part of a reinvented Newfoundland culture through the 1970s and 1980s. The artists, most of them St. John's-bred and ironically, a group at whom the films were not directed at all
- took the small-is-beautiful message as a call to cultural nationalism. Some took advantage of the NFB/MUN partnership to become filmmakers themselves; others took the Fogo Process into collective theatre, helping in the process to create a social
infrastructure that drew others into its orbit. Such groups as the Mummers' Troupe,
CODCO, and the Newfoundland Independent Filmmakers' Co-op appeared to be a crew
of scruffy young rebels when they began challenging the idea that the province needed to
catch up in every way with the rest of the world; today, that rebellion is part of the
mainstream, and they are seen as the vanguard of a cultural revolution.
Two generations after Fogo Islanders saw a crowd of townies and mainlanders
unloading boxes of film equipment at the ferry terminal, Newfoundland and Labrador
boasts one of the most active and vibrant arts communities in Canada. No one person or
group creates a culture, or invents a tradition. In 2008 it may seem that the traditionalist
strain of Newfoundland culture has been as commercialized as any other in North
7 This term, and its variant, 'the Newfoundland Renaissance' have become common usage in Newfoundland and Labrador. They were coined for a 1976 article in Saturday Night magazine, in which author Sandra Gwyn describes the explosion of artistic work in the province. The article is discussed in greater detail later in this paper. 6
America, but two things make it different: one, much of it is a real part of everyday life, not just 'something for tourists'; and two, it is not a creature of a tourism department.
Quite the contrary, it became popular in spite of an initial lack of interest from the provincial government. It grew - like the Fogo Process - from the ground up.
I can find no detailed discussion of the Fogo Island films as a single body of film work or documentary history, but there is range of literature in two other areas: one focuses on the film project's influence in community and international development, and the other on its role in Canadian film of the period, particularly as part of the National
Film Board's Challenge for Change program. This paper draws on these materials, as well as on works relevant to the history of Newfoundland and Labrador society, culture and politics in the 1960s and 1970s.
One article on Newfoundland's 'cultural revolution' was the first to use the term in the popular media, and was a major factor in my decision to study the topic. Sandra
Gwyn's 1976 article for Saturday Night magazine, called "The Newfoundland
Renaissance," is regarded as the first national announcement of the province's so-called cultural revolution. It is an insider's love song to that revolution, and serves as a useful overview of the members and factions in Newfoundland and Labrador's arts and culture
community in the mid-1970s.
The films themselves are the ultimate primary source for this paper: twenty-seven
produced in the original production period of 1967-68, and four more from 1971-72. The
list may be found at the end of this chapter. Until quite recently the films were difficult to find. My assumptions that I could find them in a number of libraries or borrow them
easily from the National Film Board were incorrect; nowhere were they archived or even 7 catalogued as a set. The best description I could find was in the National Film Board's
1986 catalogue (now out of print), from which is drawn the list of films described and discussed in this paper (see table, next page).
When I began my research in the fall of 20061 discovered that the Extension Services' tape collection was not well-archived, and the library catalogue listed some films in the sketchiest of terms. It was a similar story at the National Film Board. When I tried to order a complete set, I learned that only a few of the better known films had been digitized and transferred to DVD; in some cases, the NFB had to go back to the film prints to make VHS copies because there were none available. I am happy to report that this problem is partly remedied, and in late 2007 the Digital Archives Initiative project at Memorial University's Queen Elizabeth II Library posted many of the films online. The DAI's online postings exclude some of the films discussed here, and include others I have left out because they do not appear in the NFB record. 8
Table 1: List of the Fogo Island Films title (in alphabetical order) running time released Andrew Britt at Shoal Bay 14' 38" 1968 Billy Crane Moves Away 17' 40" 1968 Brian Earle on Merchants and Welfare 10' 10" 1968 The Children of Fogo Island 17' 30" 1968 Citizen Discussions 28' 16" 1968 Dan Roberts on Fishing 16' 18" 1968 Discussion on Welfare 06' 53" 1968 Fishermen's Meeting 27'21" 1968 Fogo Island Improvement Committee 13' 18" 1968 Fogo's Expatriates 15*06" 1968 Founding of the Co-operative 21'18" 1968 Introduction to Fogo Island 16'35" 1968 Jim Decker Builds a Longliner 19* 15" 1968 Jim Decker's Party 06* 46" 1968 Joe Kinsella on Education 07' 18" 1968 McGraths at Home and Fishing 11*03" 1968 The Mercer Family 09* 58" 1968 The Merchant and the Teacher 13' 16" 1968 Some Problems of Fogo 21' 26" 1968 Songs of Chris Cobb 07'41" 1968 Story of the Up Top 08' 55" 1968 Thoughts on Fogo and Norway 1968? Tom Best on Co-operatives 12' 20" 1968 Two Cabinet Ministers 18*50" 1968 A Wedding and a Party 10' 58" 1968 William Wells Talks About the Island 11'55" 1968 A Woman's Place 16' 15" 1968
Films shot later in/about the Fogo Experiment: Memo from Fogo 41*55" 1972 The Specialists at Memorial Discuss the Fogo Films 26*50" 1968? "When I Go...That's It!" 11*27" 1972 Winds of Fogo, The 20*24 1969 9
As history, the films are unique, and rich in ways this paper cannot explore fully.
Produced with extensive input from the people who appear in them, they represent a moment when Newfoundlanders - particularly in the outports - saw themselves at a crossroads. Furthermore, unlike news footage or traditional documentary, the interviews and other activities recorded were not speaking to posterity, or even to outsiders. The recordings were considered important only insofar as they helped the islanders determine where and how, on a continuum between North American modernity and a centuries-old culture, they wanted to live. The discussion was not presented as an either-or, and was broken down into individual topics, even personal opinions. The "vertical structure", as it was called, of individual short films was flexible; in many ways (particularly in concert with the conversations they were designed to provoke, but to which we do not have access today) it came closer to reflecting the real challenges of Fogo's decision-making process than the imposition of a formal documentary narrative structure could have allowed. The resulting montage touched at the time on such topics as welfare, resettlement, denominational education, family, the future of the fishery, and the importance of culture and a sense of place. Forty years on, we see these and other issues too, from the gender divide to the mixed blessings of education and the choices that come with it.
1.1 Literature Review
The non-linear structure of the film project was paralleled in the way the filmmakers organized themselves. Two men - Extension director Don Snowden and
Colin Low of the NFB - were the prime movers and visionaries on the project, but both relied heavily on the local Extension Service field worker to smooth the road. Fred Earle 10 is the person who appears most often in the Fogo Island films. Mr. Earle passed away several years ago, but with the help of his nephew, in the summer of 2007 I found dozens of boxes of mildewed files in the basement of his home at Lewisporte. They show how
Earle slowly and diplomatically laid the groundwork for what would become the
'experiment' of 1967-68, and the Fogo Island Co-operative. Beginning in 1961, extensive correspondence with family, friends and colleagues shows how he coaxed and prodded the Fogo Island Improvement Committee to get things done, and how he became a friendly and trusted broker both between the communities on Fogo and Change Islands, and between the islanders and the fisheries, welfare and resettlement bureaucrats in St.
John's. Earle's papers from later years include Extension Service memos and reports, newspaper clippings (usually undated) and local newsletters and other notes related to his continuing support work on Fogo Island.
The father of the Fogo Process, Don Snowden, was not a professional academic, and published little work of his own on the subject. Snowden first went to Newfoundland in 1964 to conduct a study on co-operatives for the provincial government and the Co operative Union of Canada. His report urged the government to use the Memorial
University Extension Service in the service of co-operative and grass-roots rural development and adult education, and recommended that Extension co-operate with other institutions "especially in the fields of educational radio and television, and in co operative extension work".9 The report also reflects the thinking that would direct his work when the province, after receiving the report, promptly hired him to implement his own recommendations as the director of MUN Extension: it acknowledges that "the rural
9 Donald Snowden, The Co-operative Movement in Newfoundland: An ARDA study of co-oeprative organization from the viewpoint of industrial and social development (Prepared for the Government of Newfoundland and the Co-operative Union of Canada, 1965), 132. 11
Newfoundlander.. .faces a world in which his traditional techniques for earning a living are almost totally obsolete" but argues against centralization of rural communities.10
The most detailed source of written information on Snowden and his role in the
Fogo Island films is Wendy Quarry's unpublished MA thesis for the University of
Guelph's Department of Rural Extension Studies.11 Quarry conducted extensive interviews with Snowden shortly before his death in 1984; they discussed in some detail the genesis of, and obstacles to, the first Fogo Process. The material supports the argument that Snowden's co-operative goals included Fogo Island almost from the beginning. It also shows that he wanted to use film to further those goals, and that he worked to corral the resources of the National Film Board when, in the advent of the
Challenge for Change program, he saw the opportunity to do so. This runs contrary to much of Canadian film history, which virtually ignores the Newfoundlanders' role in
"greatest success of this first year" in the Challenge for Change program.12
Quarry is one of many who have written about the Fogo Process from the perspective of community development, and the general theories of what is variously called social animation and development communications. Other writers in
Newfoundland and Labrador include Tony Williamson, Paul MacLeod and the late Tony
Williamson. Williams left the Memorial University geography department to work for the
Snowden, The Co-operative Movement in Newfoundland. 102-103. 11 The University of Guelph also hosts the Donald Snowden Program in Communications for Social and Environmental Communications. This program was first hosted by Memorial, but appears to have been orphaned with the closure of the Extension Service. Although Snowden and his projects were strongly supported by senior Memorial University administrators such as M.O. Morgan and Leslie Harris, there is some anecdotal evidence that because so few of the people at the Extension Service were academics 'by trade,' they received short shrift from some of those who benefited (then and since) from their work. 12 See, for example, Gary Evans, In the National Interest: a chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 163. 13 In the social animation process, trained facilitators, or animateurs, guide community groups through discussion and debate, as a way of finding solutions to collective problems. The Fogo Process is credited with the successful introduction of film into the mix. 12
Extension Service, and spent most of his career there. He bequeathed his papers to
Memorial, and they have just recently been made available to the public. Paul MacLeod worked with both the NFB and the Extension Service; his 'personal perspective' on the time helps to show some of the evolution of the Fogo Process in its early years, as local people with video cameras replaced professional film crews, and new recordings travelled with the Fogo films along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador.14 Ivan
Emke explores later developments in the province, in Port au Choix, Buchans and
Ramea.15
From the mainland Canadian perspective, no fewer than three major histories of the National Film Board cover this period: In The National Interest, by Gary Evans;
Movies and Memoranda, by D.B. Jones; and Film as a National Art, by C. Rodney
James. The principal sources for these histories appear to be NFB files and interviews with insiders, either at the Board or in related sections of the federal mandarinate. In all three accounts of the Newfoundland Project, the principal character and mastermind is the films' director, Colin Low. Low's work on the Fogo Island films was part of a career that began in animation, where he worked with Norman McLaren. He joined Challenge for Change after completing Labyrinth, the celebrated centrepiece of the Canadian pavilion at Expo '67 and the film which pioneered the wide-screen format that would lead to IMAX. His
Paul G. MacLeod, "A Legacy on Which to Build," abbreviated version of a paper presented at "Participatory Filmmaking and Video - building on the legacy of the Fogo Process, Celebrating Communication for Social and Environmental Change," University of Guelph, October 2004. Posted online in Glocal Times, issue 3. Students of the more general area of Canadian film also give near-exclusive attention and credit to Low; in this context he merits it more, though in at least one major anthology of Canadian film history, the NFB is even given credit for Extension work on the Fogo Process in which the film board had no direct involvement.17 Most film-studies writers locate the films within the cinema verite and direct film/process film movements of the 1960s.18 Some writers clearly did not see all, or even most, of the films, but dismiss this as unimportant, since the films themselves - the 'product'—were deemed inconsequential except insofar as they served the 'process' of community discussion aimed at collective consensus and social change; hence the term 'process film' and the Challenge for Change motto of "process over product". It was an unusual and determined effort to divert attention from the films themselves, and the effort was so successful as to be the most likely reason that history has paid them so little attention. Janine Marchessault offers a highly theoretical critique of the films, and credits NFB director Colin Low as the "pioneer (of) the participatory techniques that gained Challenge for Change its reputation as one of the cornerstones of the alternative movement.. .(the techniques were) conceived as a means to counter both the 16 Wendy Quarry, "The Fogo Process: an experiment in participatory communication" (Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Guelph, 1994), 9. Used with permission. 17 Jerry White, "Winds of Fogo" in Jerry White (ed) The Cinema of Canada (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 75. Among other inaccuracies in this essay (discussed further in Chapter 3), the author calls Extension's "The Fogo Process in Communication", published ca. 1971, an 'anonymously written 1968 NFB booklet'. The reader is also left with the impression that a 1972 Extension seminar on the Fogo Process, the report on which was written by Sandra Gwyn, was also an NFB event. 18 These include Tom Rosenthal, Jerry White, Dorothy Henaut, et al. 14 objectification of earlier ethnographic approaches and the aestheticism of an emerging auteurist tendency at the NFB (especially in Quebec)."19 A 1970 essay by Patrick Watson illustrates the contemporary excitement in the national arts community about Challenge for Change and its projects: Hardline revolutionaries will hate (the idea).. .Putting the tools of change into people's hands is drastic only in a subtle way. Nobody gets killed. But it does constitute what these filmmaking social activists call 'decentralizing the power of propaganda'. Another way of saying that is, once the dispossessed and the powerless have access to the means of information they can no longer be misled by Establishment bullshit. And that in itself is a revolution.20 In 1972, Marie Kurchak was more skeptical of the Challenge for Change mantra, noting that amateur filmmakers made amateurish films, and that "the problem with a new technique is that it can be seized as a panacea for all kinds of problems."21 Four years after the first films were released, she wondered how much good they had actually done. She concluded, however, that "many boring tapes may have been made by citizens' groups but this was not the case in the 'process' films made by Challenge for Change and Societe nouvelle. The professional filmmakers such as Colin Low.. ..never lost sight of the importance of product in effecting attitudinal change in the viewing audience". As Webb has noted, there was already a long tradition in Newfoundland of using broadcast media in adult education; the Commission of Government "hoped to improve the quality of the commercial programming and to use broadcasting to foster social and 19 Janine Marchessault, "Amateur Video and the Challenge for Change", in Mirror Machine: Video and Identity, ed. Janine Marchessault (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1995), 14. 20 Patrick Watson, "Challenge for Change" in Canadian Film Reader ed. Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson (Toronto: Peter Nelson Associates, 1977), 119. 21 Marie Kurchak, "What Challenge? What Change?" in Canadian Film Reader ed. Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson (Toronto: Peter Nelson Associates, 1977), 123. 22 Kurchak, "What Challenge?", 127 15 cultural change that would make the people self-supporting." More recently, the Newfoundland contingent in this project had had some experience with television, but nothing that would compare with the combined skills of Low, executive producer John Kemeny and their internationally-respected production crew. The opportunities to learn from them led to the seeds of a local film community which is thriving today. Besides the major omission of Snowden and the Extension Service, the literature as a whole is inconsistent, and often incorrect, in describing many of the details of the Fogo Island project, from the order of events, to production dates, to misnaming communities. Even the number of films produced varies among accounts. This last is understandable, since more than two dozen short films about Fogo Island and the Fogo Island Project were produced over a two-year period, and some seem to have been made by MUN Extension independently of the NFB, therefore showing up in some searches but not others. A management studies paper unintentionally sheds light on how MUN Extension and the NFB might have forged so successful a relationship. It describes the Film Board's management structure as an "adhocracy" - an organization which, among its other characteristics, "operates in an environment that is both dynamic and complex, demanding innovation of a fairly sophisticated nature. Each output tends to be unique.. ."24 The authors might have been speaking of Snowden and the Extension Service as easily as of the National Film Board. The shared informal, "get-it-done" approach of the NFB and Extension made for a successful partnership, but it also makes 23 Jeff Webb, "Mass Media," Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website, 1998. The first and best-known national mass-media discussion of Newfoundland's 'cultural revolution' is Sandra Gwyn's 1976 article for Saturday Night magazine, called "The Newfoundland Renaissance." Its personal and celebratory tone makes little attempt at journalistic detachment, although Gwyn does not explain her personal connections (discussed in Chapter Four). Gwyn's article, one of the initial sparks to this study, provides an overview of the members and factions in Newfoundland and Labrador's arts and culture community in the mid-1970s. Newspapers were relatively few in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1960s, but the St. John's Evening Telegram is a useful source of material on the politics of the time, the work of the Extension Service and some of the initial responses to the Fogo Experiment. The remarkable growth in the historiography of post-Confederation Newfoundland and Labrador may itself be related to the cultural revolution. Much of the material has been published since 1970, and is the product of local or regional publishers. An elementary-school textbook on Newfoundland history published in 1968 provides a useful snapshot: A "select bibliography" makes note of selections "suitable for independent pupil reading... (and) teacher use." However, the list of suggestions is thin gruel indeed: none of the books recommended for children, and few on the list as a whole, were written after 1949; some are from the nineteenth century. A twenty-first -century version of such a list would be very different. For general history of the 1960s and 1970s I have relied mainly on some better- known works, particularly Richard Gwyn's and Harold Horwood's Smallwood 25 Leslie Harris, Newfoundland and Labrador: A Brief History (St. John's: Breakwater Books, 1968), 171. 17 biographies. In describing the political wars in the later days of the Smallwood era, they are even-handed in telling the well-known stories of corruption and malfeasance, as well as reflecting Smallwood's increasingly despotic rule. Horwood had been a cabinet minister in the first provincial government, and brings a backstage perspective to his biography, though his relationship with Smallwood ran hot and (mostly) cold over the years, and even-handedness might have been surprising to readers at the time. He once described a Smallwood election win as proof that "he can still appeal to the ignorant, the stupid, the illiterate and the purely selfish."26 Gwyn's work is particularly useful since, as Chapter Four explains, he played his own small role in the Fogo Project, and in Newfoundland's 'cultural revolution.' He is also among the few early writers on Smallwood who were not, like Horwood, former cabinet ministers on one side or the other of the political divide. One, Herbert Pottle, argues that Gwyn's description of Smallwood as an 'unlikely revolutionary' is incorrect: "If Smallwood had been of seasoned revolutionary timber, he would not have found himself pattering the shopworn cliche of his day, that more is better, even though saying it more loudly and more often than his contemporary mimics." That a long-departed cabinet minister, in his seventies as he wrote in 1979, considered Newfoundland still ripe for revolution, spoke to the contemporary atmosphere as well as to the earlier time it addressed directly. The story of the Newfoundland inshore fishery runs through every study of the province. For my purposes, two seemingly dissimilar books offer helpful and sympathetic 26 quoted in Patrick O'Flaherty, The Rock Observed: Studies in the literature of Newfoundland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 164. 27 Herbert L. Pottle, Newfoundland: Dawn Without Light - Politics, power and the people in the Smallwood era (St. John's: Breakwater Books, 1979), 172. Pottle was a member of the Commission of Government and Minister of Public Welfare in the first Smallwood government. He resigned in 1955 and spent the rest of his career on social-welfare issues, with the United Church of Canada, the Canadian government and the United Nations. 18 insights into the struggles in communities like those on Fogo Island. Miriam Wright's A Fishery for Modern Times (2001) is a well-researched study of corporate and intergovernmental jostling for control and money - a wrestling match in which the inshore fishermen were often ignored. In The Broadcast (1987), Jim Wellman describes the rapid changes in the fishery and their effects as he and others saw them while hosting the Fishermen's Broadcast on CBC Radio in Newfoundland and Labrador. In the mid-1960s, people in some Newfoundland communities might have taken on the joke said to have been common in the Arctic at the time, that the family unit included a mother, a father, children, and a researcher. Among the many studies on rural Newfoundland, the university's Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) published the work of sociologist Robert DeWitt, who spent a year between 1966 and 1967 on Fogo Island. Although his work does not address the Fogo Island project, it was conducted at the same time, and is an excellent complement to the film material. Other ISER papers, including work by Cato Wadel (who appears in the films) provide more historical, economic and social background than the films offer, as well as giving individuals an opportunity to speak anonymously and more frankly than they might on camera. The many studies of Newfoundland's resettlement programs take the reader over a bumpy road of good intentions. There is a clear sense of urgency in the early determination to bring health care, education and other social services to the province's outports as quickly and efficiently as possible, but as the programs went on, researchers began to focus more on the social costs of displacement, first as obstacles to be overcome and eventually as arguments against the program. The sociologist Ralph Matthews seems 19 to have worked through this process himself, first as co-author, with Noel Iverson, of a 1968 research paper which argued that the government should take a stronger role in guiding community decisions to move.28 In a later study, Matthews made the case for "a more realistic alternative" to such programs as resettlement, beginning "with developing a body of practical suggestions and guidelines for changing the direction of current regional development policy.. .(There) is a distinct difference between the values of the planners and those for whom they plan."29 Cultural and social histories of Newfoundland and Labrador are even more plentiful than political ones, though the categories overlap frequently; they hold various points of view, but a degree of cultural nationalism is often part of the world view. Nationalism has always been easy to find in the Newfoundland body of work. While there is no shortage of assertions that Newfoundland became a cultural hotbed in the 1970s and continues to be today, there are no clear explanations of why, apart from the Zeitgeist of the time and an alleged genetic gift for gab, song and story in the province 'east of Canada'. Again, much of this work comes out of the same time as its subject matter; it may be that it is difficult, even metaphorically, to step away and study the current while you are swimming in and swept along by it. Paul O'Neill's history of St. John's, published in 1975, includes an insider's view of the city's conservative arts community in the 1950s and 1960s. From the other side of the generational fence (at the time, something of a wall), Chris Brookes's A Public Nuisance includes valuable insights into how Fogo led to his founding of the Mummers' 28 Noel Iverson and D. Ralph Matthews, Communities in Decline: an examination of household resettlement in Newfoundland (St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1968), 139. 29 D. Ralph Matthews, "There's No Better Place Than Here": social change in three Newfoundland communities (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1976), 134. 20 Troupe. In their tone and language, both books show almost as much as they tell about the shifts in Newfoundland's cultural environment during the 1970s. More academic studies of cultural history describe a generations-long struggle between basic survival and the softer questions of culture: "Wrestling a livelihood from nature.. .was not considered especially conducive to the cultivation of the arts. In Newfoundland, as least, hardship and creativity appeared inimical to each other."30 Rompkey describes three stages in the province's post-1949 cultural evolution as it relates to government policy: a developmental period during the Smallwood era, the nationalistic tack taken by the Peckford government, and finally the industrialization of culture by the Wells and later governments. Among Patrick O'Flaherty's many books on Newfoundland and Labrador, The Rock Observed is a survey of Newfoundland writing from 1497 to 1979. In working to create a literary timeline, he goes back to the Cabots' and Gilbert's descriptions of the "new fund Yle", draws upon missionaries' chaplaincy reports and private doggerel, geographers' diaries, Victorian travel literature, the adventure fiction of Norman Duncan and the art books of Rockwell Kent, as well as the more recent work of native-born writers such as Margaret Duley, E. J. Pratt, Bob Bartlett and Harold Horwood. Throughout there is the dichotomy of views: writers who commented on the "distinctiveness of the people... (evident) in the impressive way they had learned the special skills demanded by the Newfoundland milieu"31 and those who "(related) the 30 Ronald Rompkey, "The Idea of Newfoundland and Arts Policy Since Confederation," in Literature and Identity: Essays on Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John's: DRC Publishing, 2006), 66. The essay first appeared in Newfoundland Studies 14 (1998). 31 Reference to notes by Laurence Coughlan in O'Flaherty, The Rock Observed, 26 21 familiar tale of the people's 'low cunning' and meanness."32 O'Flaherty's survey was prepared with the express purpose of "(indicating how the) general Canadian view of Newfoundland, and more significantly, Newfoundlanders' conceptions of their own history and character have been shaped to some extent by the written word".33 The phrase "more significantly" is important here: like O'Flaherty, many writers of the 1970s and 1980s were working within the nationalist ethos of the Newfoundland Renaissance. It was (and still is) an article of faith that the culture and character of Newfoundland and Labrador is distinct, and important to nurture and preserve. There is a natural segue here to the work of such writers as James Overton and Ian McKay, who argue to varying degrees that the celebration of traditional culture, or as McKay calls it, "the Folk" is an elitist construct, created by government to commodify and romanticize primitivism and poverty for the tourist trade. McKay's work, in particular his Quest of the Folk, is by turns elegant and doctrinaire, thought-provoking and difficult to recognize as related to real people. It has taken on a prominent role in the general discussion of social history in the Maritimes, but less so in Newfoundland and Labrador. Overton is more evenhanded; while the collected essays in Making a World of Difference often point to a capitalist manipulation of neurotic expatriates' nostalgia in order to stimulate tourism, he "(wishes) to stress that Newfoundland culture can be seen as something which has been invented... (but the) aim is not to expose culture as an empty abstraction and to suggest that Newfoundland culture is an illusion. Rather it is to suggest that culture is a particular lens through which the world is 'seen' and to raise some questions about how this lens was ground and the nature of the vision that it 32 Quoting James Balfour in O'Flaherty, The Rock Observed. 27. 33 O'Flaherty, The Rock Observed, ix. 22 allows."34 Overton's more recent article, "Sparking a Cultural Revolution" makes a case for the odd couple of Farley Mowat and Harold Horwood as fathers of the Newfoundland Renaissance, and explores how Mowat and Smallwood became its "folk devils".35 None of these discussions is unique to Newfoundland and Labrador. In Hobsbawm's The Invention of Culture, Prys Morgan's exploration of a revival in ancient Welsh culture during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries contains a number of parallels to the events in Newfoundland. The description of culture or tradition as 'invented' is often used in a pejorative sense, depending on the assumed motives behind the defence or celebration of traditional and regional culture: that various actors or groups are naive romantics, hard-hearted corporatists, self-indulgent urbanite tourists, determined patriots, and so on. The literature offers both perspective and a caution in studying the Fogo Island films: it is important first to separate the filmmakers' and the islanders' backgrounds and long-term agendas, and then to remember that the twenty- first-century marketing of Newfoundland and Labrador as the place where, "when the sun goes down, the place goes up,"37 is on a distant point in the timeline of the province's cultural and social evolution. James Overton, "A Newfoundland Culture?" in James Overton, Making a World of Difference (St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1996), 57. Original version first appeared in The Journal of Canadian Studies, 23, 1 (1988). 35 James Overton, "Sparking a Cultural Revolution: Joey Smallwood, Farley Mowat, Harold Horwood and Newfoundland's Cultural Renaissance," Newfoundland Studies 16, 2 (Fall 2000), 199. 36 Prys Morgan, "From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period," in eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 37 This is a catchphrase in recent tourism advertisements sponsored by the provincial government of Newfoundland and Labrador. 23 1.2 The Times: Canada and Newfoundland in the 1960s For Newfoundland, Canada and the world at large the 1960s were a tumultuous time, but the sources and nature of tumult varied. In North America and most of the Western world, the summer of 1967 is itself legendary; the 'summer of love' has become emblematic of the social change, youthful idealism, protest and energy of the 1960s. Like its baby boomers, Canada was coming of age, preparing for its hundredth birthday party in 1967. Newfoundland was influenced by both waves, at the same time as it was still being "dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century."38 The 1960s were an era of social reform in Canada. The two minority governments (1963-1968) of Lester Pearson established a range of new social programs, and joined in the Americans' "war on poverty." Lester Pearson's background in the civil service also made the walls more porous between government, the civil service, academia and the so- called literati, creating an influential new cultural class in central Canada. Though their names may not have been well-known in the average household, they set much of the agenda for society and mainstream culture. As Centennial Year began, the youngest sibling in the Canadian family was on the verge of its own Quiet Revolution. More than a decade after Confederation, its railway and school systems were still among its many idiosyncrasies, but Newfoundland and Labrador was almost used to being a part of Canada. The 'transitional period' after 1949 had involved integrating social programs, defence, trade, political parties and myriad regulations codes, and procedures, not to mention fisheries policy.39 Three themes permeate the popular and academic literature: first, Premier Joseph Smallwood's power, 38 Joseph R. Smallwood, cited in O'Flaherty, The Rock Observed. 162. 39 The transitional period is discussed in detail in Raymond B. Blake, Canadians at Last: Canada integrates Newfoundland as a province (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 24 near-total after the 1966 general election landslide, had peaked; second, the post- Confederation generation was coming of age; and third, the controversial resettlement program loomed over fishing communities such as those on Fogo Island, sparking a province-wide debate over how to balance modernity and tradition. On top of the province's growing pains inside Confederation, changes and problems in the fishery had hit outport Newfoundland hard. The traditional inshore fishery, in which families caught, dried and salted cod and nothing else was beset on all sides by longliners, draggers and the shift to frozen fish and a growing demand for species other than cod. Catches were down. Merchants were leaving, and a culture that had survived for centuries seemed not far behind. Neither Ottawa nor Newfoundland was overmuch concerned with supporting the inshore fishery through a modernization period. Both saw centralization and rationalization of processing facilities as inevitable; neither had much understanding of how outport communities and their citizens might want - or be able - to adapt.40 Focusing on industrialization and improved social services, the federal and provincial governments saw part of the solution in centralization and resettlement. Beginning in 1953, the province began to offer help for small communities to relocate. Individual households could apply for financial support in moving, and additional funding was provided if everyone (this was later reduced to 75% of the people in a community) agreed to leave. By the time the province officially dropped the resettlement policy in 1971, more than 24,000 people would be resettled.41 The premier was still a 40 Among many others, see Miriam Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times: the state and the industrialization of the Newfoundland fishery. 1934-1968 (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2001), 122. 41 This number combines estimates for the centralization and resettlement programs from 1954 to 1970. Source: Melanie Martin, "Centralization", Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website, 2006 25 larger-than-life figure, particularly in the outports; even in the 1960s some people still held the belief that he was personally responsible for the existence, and administration, of post-Confederation social programs.42 This sense that their lives were controlled by Smallwood and civil servants may have led in part to the popular misconception in places such as Fogo Island that communities could be resettled by "government order."43 1.3 Goals, Strategy, Chapter Outline This thesis aims to turn the Fogo Project's priorities on their collective head. It is not so much concerned with Challenge for Change, the Fogo Process or the effects of either, as with the films themselves: how they came together, what they show, and their effect on the cultural evolution of Newfoundland and Labrador. First it will outline how the project came together; in the process, it will address inaccuracies and outright myth in the 'legend' of the Fogo Project, not to deprecate the films or their makers, but to show that legend and myth are unnecessary: the truth is remarkable enough. Chapter Two shows how the three groups behind the project came together, with a focus on the Memorial University Extension Service. Central Canadian histories have tended to give the lion's share of the credit to the National Film Board, but this was not the case. There were no junior partners: the NFB, the Fogo Island Improvement Committee, and the MUN Extension Service were at first glance an unlikely triumvirate, but each had attributes the others needed and none came to the process unprepared or inexperienced. Chapter Three will explore the content of the films themselves: the 1967 production period resulted in a collection of short films, running a total of more than six hours; related and follow-up films add another two hours. Most are between ten and twenty minutes long, and the total is far more than the sum of the parts: individuals and themes appear in some films and not others, and it is impossible in this setting to parse them all. Instead a representative sample will track the major themes and storylines. Much of the content was remarkable for its time: when Joey was "king" and films about Newfoundland promoted either development or tourism, the Fogo Island films put forward radical views - anger at and criticism of government, celebrations of tradition over modernity, skepticism toward 'experts' - views so provocative that at an early screening, the president of Memorial argued against their release. Chapter Four will draw the first two strands together, to explore some of the connections between the project and the so-called Newfoundland Renaissance. The films, and the project of which they were a part, gave a gentle nudge to a nascent arts community, as well as to the people of Fogo Island. The films contain an assumption that was radical by the standards of the time: that Fogo Island, and by extension outport Newfoundland, was something worth saving. This assumption ran counter to the 'burn your boats' and 'develop or perish' thrust of post-Confederation government policy, but it sowed hardy seeds among younger Newfoundlanders, part-time expatriates and the young artists based mainly in St. John's. One of the challenges to using moving-image documents in text-based research is that citations cannot be snipped and pasted into the discussion. I transcribed all the films listed as part of my research, and was successful in identifying most of the speakers. This 27 information supports the argument that the filmmakers were not always just 'flies on the wall'; the films are selective in their subjects and often less than direct in stating what appears on close study to be their agenda. In their defence, though, it is clear that the ultimate goal - to find a survival strategy for Fogo Island - was the same for everyone involved, from merchants to fishermen, from filmmakers to community workers. The Fogo Island films are valuable artifacts of twentieth-century Newfoundland. The films chronicle Fogo Islanders' struggle to decide their future, as well as reflecting the changing times in the province. They went against the prevailing wisdom that industrialization was the key to development, and challenged the power of the Smallwood government. The makers of the Fogo Island films wanted them to be secondary to the process of making them, and partly for that reason, they have received less study than they deserve. Drawing on the films and other contemporary documents, this thesis will invert the Fogo Process by putting the films first, and then explore how young artists discovered them and applied them to their own practice in Newfoundland's cultural revolution. 28 CHAPTER TWO: HOW THE FOGO 'EXPERIMENT' CAME TOGETHER In 1965, and in the years which follow, the rural Newfoundlander faces an environment in which he will have growing mobility, greater purchasing power, greater educational opportunities, and a growing involvement by governments in the way he makes his living, retains his health, and takes his leisure. He faces a world in which his traditional techniques for earning a living are almost totally obsolete.. .He is being confronted with technical change and the transformation of social patterns at a rate unparalleled in Newfoundland history. He must be given opportunities for education, in its broadest scope... (but) no matter how obvious the trend toward centralization and population concentrations, the character, tradition and interests of the Newfoundlander and the dictates of the economic both militate against a total urban population in this Province.44 The island of Newfoundland is the tenth-largest in the world. It is separated from the Canadian mainland by 94 miles of ocean and centuries of history in which "her face (turned) to Britain, her back to the Gulf."45 Today, if the weather and the airlines are on your side, you can have breakfast at Toronto's Pearson Airport, fly to St. John's in three hours, and drive to the ferry at Farewell in less than five. After about an hour on the water, with a brief stop at Change Islands, you can be Little Seldom in time for supper. Another 45-minute drive on two-lane blacktop will take you across the barrens to Tilting, the most remote of Fogo Island's ten surviving communities. Of course, if you just need to talk to someone on Fogo Island you can call or e-mail. High-speed internet is slow to establish itself, but cell phones work in most areas, even for some distance out on the water. Measured by travel time rather than miles, the distances between communities in Newfoundland, and between Newfoundland and the rest of the world, were far greater in Donald Snowden, The Co-operative Movement in Newfoundland: an ARD A study of co-operative organization from the viewpoint of industrial and social development, prepared for the government of Newfoundland by the Co-operative Union of Canada, p. 102-103. 45"The Anti-Confederate Song," Old Time Songs of Newfoundland, fifth edition. (St. John's: Gerald S. Doyle and Co., 1976), 55. 29 1967 than they are today. What roads there were on Fogo Island were recent and raw, like those across the island of Newfoundland itself. It would have been easier to get from Little Seldom to Lewisporte than to Tilting, and easier to get from St. John's to Toronto than to Little Seldom. For those homes with telephones, long-distance telephone calls were for important or special occasions, and air travel was still a luxury for the average person; across Newfoundland, it was not yet unusual to meet someone who had never been to 'the mainland'. Even by contemporary standards, travel and communications were slow and difficult in Newfoundland in the early 1960s, and moving "away" had a greater air of finality, not least because the island was changing so fast that the rhythms of one's home town might be unrecognizable in a matter of years. These points are important to remember in this story, because they magnified the impact of events in such areas as outmigration and resettlement, rural development, education, politics and basic communications. This chapter will explain the background to the events filmed on Fogo Island in 1967 and 1968, and show that while the work of an internationally-known film crew was certainly a boon to those working toward co-operative self-sufficiency, the work to establish a co-op on the island had been going on for several years at least. MUN Extension files and other old documents show that much credit is due to the Extension Service, particularly its regional field officer at Lewisporte, Fred Earle, and its director, Don Snowden. It is true that the story of the Fogo Island film project and how it came to be is a testament to the determination of the NFB's activist filmmakers and to the strong roots of outport Newfoundlanders; however, it is also a story of careful planning and networking over a period of years, paying off when two projects - Challenge for Change 30 and Extension's work on Fogo Island - met and travelled together, creating a process that become more than the sum of its parts. The Extension contingent were community workers with an interest in media, and the NFB crew were media workers with an interest in community work. Both organizations were organized along fluid, even ad hoc lines, both groups were intensely engaged in the work at hand, and all were used to working in flexible teams. Getting the job done came before paperwork and punching a clock. This may be part of why the literature includes so many different versions of how and when things happened, and of who was responsible for one idea or another. As well, to paraphrase Churchill, history has been kind to the NFB on this story, likely because most of those writing about it have been closer to federal agencies, their offices and employees than to remote regional capitals and development workers on offshore islands. Writers in Newfoundland and Labrador have focused on the Fogo Process as an influential approach to international development, without exploring its ripple effects in Newfoundland and Labrador. While film director Colin Low was a vital ingredient in the principal photography period, creating the films' unique 'vertical structure' and shaping the final product, the film project would never have happened without the director of Extension, Don Snowden and the local field officer, Fred Earle. Snowden saw Fogo Island as ripe for co-operative development, and invested Extension resources in making it come together. His greatest resource was Earle, a dedicated community worker with networking skills and connections on Fogo Island that were at least as good as Snowden's in St. John's and Ottawa. 31 2.1 Fogo Island Before the Fogo Island Experiment For Newfoundland outports of the 1960s, the frictions between traditional culture and industrial and social development were matters of life and death. Like scores of other outports, Fogo Island was dependent on an inshore fishery facing apocalypse: falling catches, changing markets, new technologies and insufficient capital to adapt to modern circumstances. At the same time, the island's post-Confederation baby boomers were coming of age with high-school diplomas and expectations of a life beyond the small-boat fishery and the truck system. These were just a few of the influences on a historic stream of outmigration that was threatening to become a tide. After three hundred years as launching point and service centre for the Labrador fishery and home to many inshore fishing families, Fogo Island's future was more uncertain than ever before. Merchants who for generations had bought and sold salt cod and conducted their business with fishermen through the truck system either would not, or could not, compete with foreign ships buying straight from the fishermen, nor convert to dealing with fresh catches and other species. Markets for salt and dried cod were down and being replaced by demand for frozen fish; there was no local fish plant in operation, inadequate infrastructure to ship fresh fish off the island, and no local system of finding out the going price for the various qualities and types of fish. If a fisherman held out against a local merchant's offered price for a fresh catch there was no guarantee that foreigners would better it, or even show up in time to buy it before it spoiled. At any rate, the inshore trap fishery was dying, unable to compete with new technologies: longliners on the inshore grounds and the first factory trawlers working twelve miles offshore (and 32 closer, illegally). In the spring of 1967, the last of the old Fogo Island merchant houses, Earle and Sons, announced it was closing down at the end of the season.47 The choice for some seemed to be between the rock of welfare and the hard places of resettlement and outmigration; with government fisheries policies directed toward centralization and industrialization, it was easy for Fogo Islanders to think they had no other options. The work of sociologist Robert DeWitt is extremely useful in describing the communities and their relationships (or lack thereof) with each other. In the late summer of 1966 DeWitt moved with his family to Fogo Island for a year of research, sponsored by Memorial University's Institute of Social and Economic Research. DeWitt's work began as a study of religious behaviour, but he soon expanded it to include a wider view of Island society and its views on development. Within a few weeks of his arrival it "increasingly became clear that resettlement was an important issue for most people there...fear over resettlement was expressed at Town Council, Improvement Committee and church meetings; and even the women and children asked what would become of them if they were 'forced' from the island."48 That misconception that the government was about to force, or at least coerce, people to leave is perpetuated to this day in most histories of the Fogo Island project.49 Sources here are general knowledge, several sections of the Fogo Island films, particularly An Introduction to Fogo and Andrew Britt at Shoal Bay, and Robert DeWitt, "Public Policy and Community Protest: the Fogo case." Newfoundland Social and Economic Studies no. 8 (St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1969), pp. 1-12. 47 "Closing down plant at Fogo Island," Atlantic Fisherman & Shipping Review, June 1967, 18. 48 DeWitt, The Fogo Case , 2. 49 The myth that resettlement involved forced evacuations permeates the lore of the period. Marchessault, Watson, and others - including the current NFB website—cite a government 'plan' for evacuation as part of the reason for the films, and the cancellation of the 'plan' as evidence of the films' success. Dorothy Todd Henaut gets both the genesis of the project and the government's policy wrong when she describes the films happening almost by accident, after "Colin Low had been invited to Newfoundland to make a film aboiut how nice it would be for the people of Fogo Island to be relocated to a 'development town'." (Dorothy Todd Henaut, "Video Stories from the Dawn of Time," Visual Anthropology Review 7, 2 (Fall 1991), 85. 33 In fact, the opposite was true: a government report clearly states that, far from something to be encouraged, mass resettlement was a bad idea for Fogo Island.50 The program was not designed to handle 5000 people at a time: where would they go? The report even recommends a government subsidy to entice Earle's to stay open for another year. At the same time, there was a steady stream of inquiries about resettlement from a number of communities on Fogo Island; DeWitt reported that 67 households had applied to the program between 1965 and 1968.51 DeWitt found that Fogo Islanders were generally ambivalent or apathetic about the future, and concluded that many had "favourable attitudes to resettlement.. .The conditions that the Islanders ask for these attitudes include the provision of jobs and adequate housing in the new setting... (emphasizing) that those responsible for planning either resettlement or development must take into account the important sociological issues involved."52 His study portrays the island's scattered small communities as sharply divided by religion and class, and unsure and fearful of a future over which many felt they had no control. Of the able-bodied men on the island, 60% were receiving welfare at some point in the year, and the local welfare officer's caseload was one of the heaviest in the province53. For generations, the communities had been remote even from each other: "Many of the older residents suggest that it has been only during the past few Depending on the period, between 75% and 100% of the households in a community were required to petition for resettlement before an entire community qualified for government support. Individuals could petition, but all government funding depended on moving to an approved 'growth centre,' and many people left for mainland Canada on their own. As their neighbours left and the province withdrew or declined to provide services, many people who wanted to stay in their home communities felt they were indeed being forced out. 50 Unknown author, "Report M-l: Mini-area plan for Fogo Island, Department of Community & Social Development", Sept. 1967. J.R. Smallwood papers, Memorial University Centre for Newfoundland Studies, file reference 3.21.032. 51 DeWitt, The Fogo Case, 24. The files of Premier Smallwood and Fred Earle include a number of letters from various communities around Fogo Island, inquiring about resettlement. 52 DeWitt, The Fogo case, 45. 53 DeWitt, The Fogo Case, 13. 34 years, since the road was completed, that the idea of being a "Fogo Islander" rather than a Tilting Harbour or Deep Bay man - really has become relevant."54 Those households with electricity and access to broadcast signals bought new gadgets which showed them a world of wealth and ease, not the least of whose benefits were smooth paved roads, automatic washers, and indoor plumbing. "Before television, we didn't know what we were missing," one resident told the researcher.55 The islanders' choices were to wither away on welfare, find a way to modern economic development, or leave. As one of the Fogo Island films would later put it, (and DeWitt seems to agree), the settlers had always depended on the merchants or the clergy to make their everyday decisions.56 This generalization, however broad, appears to have held in the genesis of the Fogo Island Improvement Committee. Its roots were in the Fogo Island Road Improvement Association, a group "of clergy, merchants, teachers and fishermen" who first met in 1964 to lobby the government for road improvements, and quickly concluded "that the Association could serve a useful function in pressuring the Federal and Provincial governments for other major improvements." The Committee struggled to overcome "inter-community jealousies, suspicion, and even violent conflict,"57 and its existence would be considered a plus for National Film Board officials and producers, who were looking for partners in a radical social experiment called Challenge for Change. DeWitt, The Fogo case, 21. DeWitt, The Fogo Case. 21. Colin Low, director, An Introduction to Fogo (National Film Board of Canada, 1968). DeWitt, The Fogo Case, 50-51. 35 2.2 The National Film Board and Challenge for Change In his history of the NFB, Gary Evans says the roots of Challenge for Change are in a 1965 letter from Gordon Robertson, the clerk of Privy Council and a member of the Film Board, to the NFB's commissioner, Guy Roberge. Robertson told Roberge that "he believed there was little understanding of the way in which poverty can.. .become self- perpetuating, despite the existence of social services and of welfare programmes. He thought that a film on poverty could be of real value." Evans says Roberge assigned executive producer John Kemeny to develop a proposal for a series of films on poverty, and took it to R.AJ. Phillips at the Privy Council Office; a series of meetings followed with advisors from fifteen different departments to discuss ideas and storylines with the filmmakers. Finally, a core group of federal departments59 and the NFB pooled $400,000 for the two-year experiment which would become Challenge for Change .60 Although some writers call the Fogo Island films the pilot project for Challenge for Change, others cite an earlier, feature-length documentary. The Things I Cannot Change was filmed in Montreal in 1966, and released in 1967. It was seen as a remarkable and disturbing case study of contemporary urban poverty. It was intensely controversial for its unflinching depiction of its central character, who later claimed the notoriety ruined his life. There was much debate within the Challenge for Change Evans, In the National Interest 158. 59 The lists of departments involved at the start vary in different accounts. Evans (In the National Interest) lists Manpower, Health and Welfare, the Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Agency (ARDA) and the Special Planning Secretariat; James (Film as a National Art, 192) lists Health and Welfare, Manpower and Immigration, Labour, Fisheries, Agriculture, Justice, the Atlantic Development Board and the Prairie Development Commission; Jones (Movies and Memoranda, 159) lists the original core as Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Agriculture, Health and Welfare, Labour, Regional Economic Expansion, the Secretary of State and the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation. In any event, the makeup of the committee changed over time, and its numbers dwindled as the program lost support before its eventual demise in 1980. 60Evans, In the National Interest, 160. 36 committee, the production unit and the NFB in general about whether filmmakers had the right to expose a subject's life in so raw a fashion, and whether the subject had fully understood the nature of the project and his role in it.61 The debate led to a consensus that the power relationship between filmmaker and subject should not be taken lightly, but negotiated at every stage, a conclusion which would set the tone for later Challenge for Change projects. After The Things I Cannot Change, Challenge for Change was looking to prove that film could be a positive influence for disadvantaged individuals and groups. Long before the activist Sixties, the NFB had had an activist agenda: its founder, John Grierson, had once described his job in part as being "one inch to the left of the party in power."62 In the 1960s the Board and its filmmakers were influenced by the trends of cinema verite, cinema direct and the French New Wave. The Board had also gone through a corporate reorganization in 1964, moving from a 'unit' to a 'pool' structure in which directors had more freedom to choose their subjects and projects.63 In 1957, the Board had moved its headquarters from Ottawa to Montreal, which was also home to several social animation groups.64 The process was already gaining popularity in the early 1960s and at least one group in Montreal, where the NFB had its headquarters, was making extensive use of social animation. According to D.B. Jones, the NFB Challenge for Change unit, led by executive producer John Kemeny, first envisioned the program in three streams. The first would be in a traditional documentary style, aimed at a wide middle- to high-brow audience; it would make the general public more aware of the problems of poverty. The Things I Cannot Change was in this 61 Evans, In the National Interest. 158-160. 62 Cited in D.B.Jones, Movies and Memoranda: an interpretive history of the National Film Board of Canada. (Toronto: Canadian Film Institute, 1981), 144. 63 Mintzberg and McHugh, "Strategy Formation", 181-82; Evans, In the National Interest. 92. 64 Blondin, Social Animation. 1. 37 category. The second stream, more in the area of training films, would be aimed at social workers and other welfare professionals. The third would be almost completely in the hands of the people: the process of discussion, and looking for solutions to problems, would itself be more important than the product, i.e., the film which resulted from it.65 This third category, known as process films, was the most innovative; it was aimed at empowering (although the term did not exist at the time) disenfranchised, poor, underprivileged and underserved communities themselves. The Fogo Island films were the first, and eventually the most influential, of the projects in that stream.66 The process films were the most radical departure from traditional filmmaking. Challenge for Change documentarians allowed their subjects to control their own stories: to determine the subject matter, the narrative lines, and even, eventually, the final cut. From a social- welfare perspective, the program was considered forward-thinking in that it encouraged citizens to discuss and criticize government policy, and to publicize and circulate their critiques. John Kemeny acted as producer of the Fogo Island films. A contemporary and colleague of Donald Brittain, Kemeny was a documentary producer who had handled a range of well-respected and successful documentary productions. Colin Low, the films' director, had begun his career in the board's animation department. He had pioneered innovative filmmaking techniques at Expo '67, including an early version of the IMAX large-screen format, which made its debut at Man and His World/Jerre des Hommes. Low came from rural Alberta and one of his earliest documentary efforts was a 65 Jones, Movies and Memoranda. 159. James describes the framework a bit differently: he says the first, general-audience category originally included fictional dramas using actors, such as The Best Damn Fiddler from Calabogie to Kaladar; however such films were later moved outside the Challenge for Change program as the program focused on factual films only (James, Film as a National Art, 193-96). 66 The series includes examples from the other streams as well, and these are discussed in Chapter 3. 38 romanticized depiction of roundup time near the ranch where he spent his childhood. Corral won first prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1954. Low had also directed City of Gold, about the Klondike Gold Rush, and Circle of the Sun, in which a young oil worker returns home to his Blood reserve. The early stages of Challenge for Change coincided with the end of Low's work for Expo '67, a time when he was looking for new challenges of his own. He is said to have gravitated to the project for a range of reasons: frustration with the "glorification of the individual filmmaker"; concern with the nationalist tone of films coming out of Quebec, a growing awareness of class disparities and environmental problems in Canada, and a curiosity about the "new twist to (the) collaborative relationship" offered by the Challenge for Change concept68. There is no specific discussion in the NFB histories of why the filmmakers chose to go to Newfoundland before going west, north or to native reserves (all of which they would do later); nor is there much detail as to how they came to choose Fogo over other parts of the province. According to Evans, Low chose Fogo as his subject after examining several federal -provincial resettlement projects in another part of Newfoundland, where pork-barrelling was a way of life. He believed that to have made a film indicting the authorities would have stirred emotions, then left the population worse off than before. Such a film probably would have also meant a stillbirth for Challenge for Change. He chose Fogo Island because it had an informal improvement committee, rather than local government, and because the people were determined to resist resettlement. He arrived to discover the government freezing out services in hope that the people would partly resettle themselves.69 In conversation with Jones, Low is blunt: from the film description of Corral, on the NFB website: I began my work on Fogo after I had examined a couple of federal-provincial resettlement projects in another part of Newfoundland. They were criminal in their indifference to people and were an example of political porkbarrelling I could not believe. I could have shot an indictment of the programme easily but I realized that it would be politically suicidal—it would have ruined any chances of the Challenge for Change programme in the province in the early stages of the programme...1 It may be that these quotations draw on the same interview, but they serve to make clear the fact that Low felt pressures on the line between the documentary church and the welfare state, even at the height of the socially conscious 1960s. In any event, neither of these accounts explains why Fogo Island, or even Newfoundland, was on Low's shopping list in the first place. The most likely conclusion is that the filmmakers' gaze was being gently guided by their would-be partners in the exercise. 2.3 MUN Extension Service, Don Snowden and Fred Earle There is a history of government and social-service attempts to encourage cooperative community development in Newfoundland, often through the use of broadcast and moving-image media. As Webb has noted, the Commission of Government assigned the Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland (BCN) a mandate to encourage adult education and co-ops; among its broadcasters was the Director of Co-operatives, Ted Russell.71 Russell's support for co-operatives would continue after Confederation, particularly through his famous radio series, The Chronicles of Uncle Mose, first aired on CBC Radio's Fishermen's Broadcast. The MUN Extension Service moved into film and television not with the arrival of the NFB, but several years before; its Media Unit was Jones, Movies and Memoranda. 162. Italics added. 71 Jeff Webb, "Mass Media", 1998, Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website Extension project, which aired on the private television station, CJON. As well, film copies of some programs were circulated to remote communities for screenings.73 Extension's interest in co-operatives and media as tools of community development can only have increased with the arrival of Don Snowden as the service's director in early 1965. The histories of the NFB assert that the Fogo Project was almost entirely the brainchild of Colin Low and John Kemeny, and that the filmmakers from Montreal "saved" Fogo Island from resettlement. However, documents from the Newfoundland side of the story argue persuasively that the groundwork for the project began in Newfoundland well before 1967, in the work of Donald Snowden and the Extension Service. Snowden's background included work in co-operative development with the federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. He was a Manitoban who studied at the University of Manitoba and had worked as a journalist before going to work for the federal government in the Arctic.74 He was involved in the establishment of at least one of the early artist-run Inuit co-ops, at Baker Lake, NWT, a project which facilitated the "Celebrate Memorial History: the 60s: report of the president for 1961-61," Snowden's report outlined the history of co-ops and buying clubs in Newfoundland and Labrador, some of which had been fairly successful for a while before failing; failures were usually due to insufficient administrative, management and educational support. His findings included the suggestion that Fogo Island "merits special attention by the Newfoundland Co-operative Union."78 He noted that Memorial University's Extension Service "has embarked upon a broad program, most of whose components are designed for rural Newfoundlanders.. .bringing organized music and drama to some rural parts of the province... (and is involved) with the development of television programming that will acquaint rural citizens with changes and techniques in the primary industries in which many of them are engaged." 79 He strongly recommended that Extension take an active and leading role in co-operative work as 75 Kyra Vladykov Fisher, "The Baker Lake Printmaking Revival", Arctic 50, 2 (June 1997) 193. 76 The acronym ARDA was used to refer to the administration and programs which were part of the Agricultural and Rural Development Act. ARDA was replaced in the first Trudeau government by the Department of Regional and Economic Expansion, or DREE. 77 Foreword, The Co-operative Movement in Newfoundland: an ARDA study of co-operative organization for the viewpoints of industrial and social development. Prepared for the Government of Newfoundland by the Co-operative Union of Canada under direction of Donald Snowden, i. 78 ARDA report, 44. 79 ARDA report, 53. 42 SO well.™ Within the year, he was hired to take charge of that work and more, with an appointment as the new director of the Extension Service. According to Quarry, Snowden started working in short order on a plan to use film in community development. He told Quarry that "it all began in 1965 when he read The Economic Council of Canada's Report on Poverty in Canada: 'When I saw that I was enraged. The report dealt with poverty in terms of urban values, it was written from the perspective of urban economists writing about poverty in the country and not knowing what the hell people thought about poverty, who had lived in places that were by their definition poor (Quarry, 1984; 32)' "As a result of this reaction, Snowden thought of producing a series of films on poverty in Newfoundland.. .(he described to Quarry) how he got in touch with R.A.J. Phillips in the Privy Council who was in charge of...The War on Poverty Program'."81 Snowden told Quarry that Phillips visited Newfoundland, and at Phillips's request, Snowden filed a letter and proposal for the films, but never received a response. This is presumably the same R.A.J. Phillips mentioned in the Evans account above. As Quarry puts it, "Snowden speculated that Phillips.. .(visited the NFB) and suggested the idea of making a series of films on poverty.. .The first Snowden heard of the idea, however, was when he was summoned to the Film Board to meet with film producer John Kemeny." Snowden was happy to hear that Kemeny was thinking of Colin Low for the project: "Snowden had worked with Low's films in the Arctic and knew him to be a sensitive film producer capable of communicating with a wide range of people... It was decided that Colin Low would come to Newfoundland and Snowden would arrange his "ARDA report, 132. 1 Quarry, 7. 43 itinerary to show him some four or five different Newfoundlands for filming. Snowden saved Fogo Island until the last." He introduced Low to Fred Earle, and they went to a meeting of the Fogo Island Improvement Committee, where they discussed the project with the committee members. The few relevant interviews with Snowden and Low suggest both men had great respect for each other and worked well together, and the accounts of their colleagues offer no hint otherwise, but the historical record has largely ignored Snowden's major role in making the project happen. While Extension is referred to fairly frequently in contemporary Challenge for Change documents, and the relationship is held up as a model for other universities and community development groups, later NFB and film- studies discussions pay little more than lip service to Memorial's involvement, let alone suggest that the idea started there. D.B. Jones does not mention MUN at all. Patrick Watson says the "films were shot with the guidance and co-operation of the people (of Fogo Island) themselves", noting parenthetically that people at Memorial "played a vital role in getting the Fogo experiment started."84 Smith says Memorial was "a collaborator on the series"85 and James and Evans call the project a partnership: James describes it with passing reference to a MUN "community development project," Evans credits only Low with the groundwork and production planning, right up to the first screenings, at which Low "(used) a professional social worker to lead general discussions.... (Later) Quarry, 8-9. Quarry, 10. Watson, "Challenge for Change," 113-114. White, "Winds of Fogo," 74. James, In the National Interest. 196. 44 media dialogue was continued in other parts of the province by a Film Board-trained crew from Memorial University." 87 This downplaying of Extension's role does not appear to have affected the relationship between the partners. They seem to have worked well together; many of the people on both sides of the partnership are said to have become friends as well as colleagues, and some moved back and forth between St. John's and the NFB. It was an extremely good match for everyone. Given Snowden's background and the times, his professional and social connections would likely have extended into the central Canadian mandarinate, including its artistic and social-welfare communities. The internal cultures of the National Film Board and the Extension Service were well suited to each other. A study of the NFB as an "adhocracy" described its hierarchy as relatively weak: "Controls exist in the NFB and attempts are made at formal planning, but most of the real coordination has to be achieved through mutual adjustment."88 There is no comparable study of the Extension Service, but the Fogo region's field officer, Fred Earle, recalled that when he was hired, his new boss "said that Fred should get on with the first task of creating and defining the job itself.. .Both community development and field work were in their infancy, a fact which gave Earle the freedom to do pretty well what he wanted."89 That boss was soon replaced by Don Snowden, but there is no reference to a change of approach. Later, as the film project fell under ferocious time pressures, flexibility would lead to innovation. Evans, Film as a National Art. 163-64. 88 Henry Mintzberg and Alexandra McHugh, "Strategy Formation in an Adhocracy," Administrative Science Quarterly 30, 2 (June 1985), 164, 89 Rick Hayes, "Fred Earle: a lifetime of service to Newfoundland," The Newfoundland Herald (Aug. 8, 1981), 15. 45 Snowden would have known very well that the partnership with the NFB was a golden opportunity; if more credit went to Ottawa than to St. John's, it would not matter that much as long as the work was done. For its part, the NFB likely saw clear advantages to working with an experienced social animator such as Snowden, not to mention the guiding hand and support of Fred Earle, as the crew arrived on a remote island whose people were not used to strangers. DeWitt describes Earle's 1964 arrival as the new Extension field officer as having given "new hope to all those who claimed an interest in improvement. Here was the man, they felt, who could provide a well-needed link with the remote government in St. John's."90 It is hard to imagine any of the developments that followed Earle's appointment happening without him and his employers at the Extension Service. He would be portrayed in the Fogo Island films as an interested but uninvolved observer; nothing could have been further from the case. Based in Lewisporte, he made frequent visits to Fogo Island. His job was "to carry on community development work.. .This would necessitate frequent consultation with federal and provincial government departments... (including) the ARDA division and the Co-operative Extension Division."91 His background and his engaging personality enabled him to move between classes, religious denominations and communities as he coaxed and lectured Fogo Islanders to save their communities for themselves - but not ultimately by themselves; he and the Extension Service were strong but relatively quiet partners with the Fogo Island Improvement Committee. Earle's active, even take-charge role becomes clear in his first year as Extension Service officer, as he worked to organize an "island-wide 90 DeWitt, The Fogo Case. 53. 91 Meeting minutes, April 3, 1964, Memorial University of Newfoundland Extension Service Working Committee on Fisheries, April 3, 1964. Papers of Fred Earle, filename: Extension Service. 46 conference.. .We will have a meeting of the Improvement Committee next week and decide where it will be held. We will invite chaps from the Provincial Government to attend and this will give the Fogo Island people (a chance) to express their needs.. .1 am a believer that if all Fogo Island can assemble, and have fellows from the Government out to listen to our trouble and desires, everyone will have a better (understanding)."92 Fred Earle was no outsider. He was born on nearby Change Islands and moved to Fogo Island in his teens. The current owner of the Earle and Sons merchant house was a cousin, and Fred had once worked for Earle and Sons, first as an errand boy and later as a bookkeeper.93 Earle's files between 1964 and 1967 include correspondence with a Change Islands merchant named Dan Roberts. At some point in this period, Roberts moved to Fogo Island, where he became owner of the Fogo Island Motel, located in the middle of nowhere, i.e., the centre of the island.94 Roberts became a major voice on the revived Improvement Committee, which eventually moved its meetings to Roberts's motel - after the clergymen who had disapproved of meeting in an establishment with a bar had left the committee. The motel's location made it neutral territory for the various community factions. DeWitt does not mention his name, but in Earle's papers and in the films, Roberts appears to be a prominent and vocal player. He would later become the first manager of the Fogo Island Shipbuilding Co-operative. From letters to Charlie Hart and Titus Jones, November 6, 1964, papers of Fred Earle, filename: Fogo. Nine days letter Earle wrote these men and others, saying the conference would have to be delayed until government people were available. It is unclear when or if this particular conference finally took place; the plan may have been the genesis of the 1967 conference referred to repeatedly in the Fogo Island films. 93 Hayes, "Fred Earle", 14. Fred and Brian Earle's comfortable relationship with each other is apparent as they recall school days in the film Brian Earle on Merchants and Fishing. There is no reference to the fact that they are related, though many islanders would have been aware of it anyway. 94 Like most of Newfoundland, settlements on Fogo Island had traditionally grown up along the coast, around sheltered harbours and close to fishing grounds. As roads were built, the 'middle of nowhere' was accessible and free of the baggage of community and denominational loyalties. Isolated in 1967, the motel's example led to other buildings serving all the island's communities being located there. 47 With Fred Earle's encouragement, the Improvement Committee asked the Extension Service to sponsor a fisheries conference on Fogo Island in the spring of 1967. Among the items for discussion was the idea of a fisheries co-op; though "many.. .had mixed feelings" in the wake of earlier failures, "the idea soon spread throughout the meeting."95 The Improvement Committee wanted government support for a partnership with the Maritime Fishermen's Union to start a co-op, but the province turned down the idea. Even a delegation to the premier in St. John's was unable to make any headway. It is not clear why the province was dragging its feet, or whether it preferred Yellow Fish over the MFU. One of the central tenets of the Extension Service philosophy was that it should support, not lead, community development initiatives. It is important to note that Earle's and Snowden's personal interests in Fogo Island never appear to have crossed the line into telling people what they should do; however, having found people who might be disposed to their ideas, they actively encouraged and supported those people. Snowden could cheer on the co-op idea even as he played devil's advocate. Consider his comments to some islanders before the co-op was established: You're going to have to convince people that you're very serious about this. You're not going to convince them by simply having a lot of meetings where you say, 'Well, we want to have a producer cooperative.' You're going to convince them by having a lot of meetings...and by putting a percentage of your catch into an investment fund which may not be used until.. .next year. .. .it's a different thing, I suggest, from signing a petition .. .to government where you get 800 or 900 names on it. You're talking about money now. You're talking about involvement. You're talking about loyalty and responsibility. And Manson H. Sheppard, "A Brief History of the Fogo Island Building and Producer's (sic) Cooperative: A report submitted to Dr. WDW Nowak," unpublished paper, March 1972, on file at the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University Queen Elizabeth II Library, 6. 48 these come a little bit harder than putting your name on a telegram.. .This is the time where you put up or shut up.96 2.4 Principal Photography: Summer 1967 For their part, Low and Kemeny's good intentions and admirable accomplishments alone would not have carried much weight on Fogo Island. At first they were not welcomed by the Fogo Islanders, who did not trust the outsiders and "refused to talk on camera, since they were nervous about what friends might say or what might happen to them if the film were shown elsewhere." 7 After some persuasion from Low (and, one may guess, Fred Earle, though it is not recorded), Evans says they eventually agreed to participate: Low promised that he would show (the film) to the participants before anyone else would see it. They trusted him and he kept his word.. .He shot the films in a rational, unemotional way; high emotion and conflict look interesting on national television, but he believed those two elements hindered the communication process (and would) exacerbate, not lessen, tensions. He saw himself as a kind of mediator.. ."98 Even with Earle's support and their own promises, the filmmakers would not able to persuade everyone to participate in the Fogo Experiment. The filmmakers were working in a narrow production window, but the fact remains that almost all the principal players are members of the Improvement Committee or other supporters of the co operative idea, a fact almost never mentioned in the films and largely unknown beyond Fogo Island. It was well-known on the island, however, and would be a point of some criticism after the films were completed. In a society so strongly influenced by religion, members of the clergy are also conspicuous by their absence. This is addressed, but not 96 Recorded comments of Don Snowden, ca.1965-67, exact date and location unknown, "Fogo History Part II", tape 01388 Extension Services Tapes collection, Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University Library. 97 Evans, In the National Interest. 164. 98 Evans, In the National Interest. 164. 49 explained, in The Specialists at Memorial Discuss the Fogo Films, when, under questioning, the filmmakers say that most clergymen declined to participate." Again, DeWitt suggests an answer: in 1969, he wrote that the "Fogo Island Improvement Committee represents the 'anti-resettlement' forces on the Island.. .The exclusion of the clergymen from active participation, when they were identified as either for resettlement or neutral, suggests the degree of emotionalism attached to the resettlement issue."100 This dispute may well have influenced the clerics' decisions to decline any invitations, if they were seriously offered. Different sources show Colin Low offering different and even conflicting versions. In a quote for an early report on the MUN/NFB partnership, Low said, "I had more trouble eliminating potential candidates (for interviews) than in getting candidates."101 This may have been a bit of public relations work; D.B. Jones says that Low had first "encountered apathy about the project, an apathy rooted in deep hostility and bitterness toward the government."102 What is clear is that there was sufficient consensus that the film crew arrived on the island at the beginning of August.103 Over a five-week period, they shot in eight of the island's ten communities, with an extra stop on Change Islands. Accounts that address the point say Low started out with the intention of making a traditional documentary feature, but somewhere along the way he changed his mind. Jones suggests that the idea of many short films instead of one or two longer ones Colin Low, dir., The Specialists at Memorial Discuss the Fogo Films, timecode 21:00 100 De Witt, The Fogo Case. 84-85. 101 MUN Extension report (no author cited), Fogo Island Film and Development Project (no date, early 1968), 5. Files of Fred Earle, filename: Fogo Island Films. 102 Jones, Movies and Memoranda. 162. 103 MUN Extension report (no author cited), Fogo Island Film and Development Project (no date, early 1968),. Files of Fred Earle, filename: Fogo Island Films. 50 came to him during the principal photography period,104 and Marchessault says Low '(refused) to make an overall film about the Island".105 However, that is not how the story was presented at the time: The major decision in editing was to cut the material vertically rather than horizontally. In other words, the films were based on personalities discussing a variety of issues, rather than an issue incorporating a variety of personalities. The material was shot in this manner, and to start restructuring would have required more time than was available. More important, it was as valuable to highlight personalities as it was to present issues, since action would require leaders and community support for them. This method also avoids the obvious editorializing that occurs when personalities are juxtaposed by an editor. Furthermore, certain people did embody specific issues and horizontal editing was not needed.106 By mid-November the first edits were completed on twenty-three films, and screenings began on the island on November 22,1967 and continued to the end of January. In mid-December, a film crew recorded the founding meeting of the fisheries co-operative. By January 31 there had been thirty-four separate screenings on Fogo Island, and four more in St. John's for various university and government officials. By any standards, it was a quick turnaround, and by the standards of the time it was astonishingly fast. Was the famous (in film theory) "vertical structure" of the Fogo Island films all part of a carefully conceived and brilliantly innovative process, or an ad hoc solution to a time crunch that happened to work? It may have been a bit of both. As the first screenings beyond Fogo Island began, for government and university people, the first ripples of the Fogo Island films began to spread. 104 Jones, Movies and Memoranda. 162. 105 Marshessault, "Amateur Video and the Challenge for Change," 15. 106 MUN Extension report no author cited), Fogo Island Film and Development Project (no date, early 1968), 8. Files of Fred Earle, filename: Fogo Island Films. Emphasis added. 51 2.5 Conclusion: A Meeting of Minds and Agendas The final products of the 'Togo Experiment" on Fogo Island and at the National Film Board were the result of hard work and innovative thinking from a number of sources. The Fogo Island films did not "save" Fogo Island from a government plan to force resettlement for two reasons. The first is simply that there was no government plan to resettle Fogo Island. Although many islanders believed rumours of such a plan, the province had in fact been advised to discourage them from leaving. The second reason is that while the films were indeed innovative, provocative and effective, they were a late chapter in a long story, the product of several years of meetings, research, education and community development work by the Improvement Committee and the Extension Service. While the Fogo Island Improvement Committee was indeed rooted in the community, it was not a group of average fishermen, as the films suggest, nor was it first constituted with the goal of starting a co-op. Its roots were in transportation problems; many of its members were not fishermen at all. Most if not all of its members were predisposed to the idea of establishing a co-op, and in this, they were actively supported and encouraged by ex-officio member Fred Earle, although much of his work was behind the scenes. His role is not explained in the films, and is downplayed in the historic record as well. These are relatively minor contradictions to the accepted record, in comparison with the varying accounts of what was going on before the summer of 1967 on Fogo Island, and of who came up with the idea that became the Fogo Process. Donald Snowden and Colin Low share credit for the Fogo Process, but each has been largely ignored by writers more interested in the work of the other; given their locations and the 52 nature of their work, Snowden's role seems to have been underestimated most by general history, though in all likelihood he would not have cared. For filmmakers and communities who have used the Fogo Process, it does not matter who came up with the ideas. In a discussion of its effect on Newfoundland and Labrador social history, however, it becomes very important: through whose eyes, whose experiences and priorities were these images and ideas filtered? If the Fogo Experiment were entirely the brainchild of the NFB (as many mainland Canadian writers assert) it would be a short step to argue (as they have) that people from 'away' singlehandedly 'saved' Fogo Island. Even today, the National Film Board website asserts that "after seeing the (Fogo Island) films, officials scrapped the relocation plan and helped in the creation of a co-operative".107 It is not true that the films led to the scrapping of a resettlement plan, because there was no such plan; neither is it true that the NFB was the prime mover of the project. It is true that the driving forces behind the 1967 'experiment' on Fogo Island - the NFB's Challenge for Change team, the Memorial University of Newfoundland's Extension Service, and the Fogo Island Improvement Committee - were a remarkably complementary trio of skill sets and agendas, and the timing was opportune for all of them. But as the Newfoundlanders benefited from the NFB, so did the Film Board benefit handsomely from years of groundwork by MUN Extension, and from the networking savvy and vision of its director, Don Snowden. Filmmaker in Residence, "Challenge for Change", http://www.nfb.ca/filmmakerinresidence/ 53 CHAPTER THREE: READING AGAINST THE GRAIN, BEYOND THE FRAME Yet even the eyewitness does not bring back a naive picture of the scene. For experience seems to show that he himself brings something to the scene which later he takes away from it, that oftener than not what he imagines to be the account of an event is really a transfiguration of it. Few facts in consciousness seem to be merely given. Most facts in consciousness seem to be partly made. A report is the joint product of the knower and known, in which the role of the observer is always selective and usually creative. The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes. --Walter Lippmann 108 The Fogo Island films were not intended to become documentary artifacts. In the ideology of the exercise, the films themselves were considered unimportant: "process over product" was the Challenge for Change motto. The goal of the film project was to help the islanders to be heard by the powers that be, as ordinary people came together and took charge of their collective future. When the films were shown outside Fogo Island, the aim was to set an example for, and to provoke discussion among (or an official response from) those watching, not to tell them what life was like on Fogo Island in the summer of 1967. Others have written at length about the effects of what became the Fogo Process on community and economic development on Fogo Island and in remote communities around the world, and some have critiqued individual films as part of the Canadian film-studies canon, though none seems to have seen the whole series. There has been little if any reflection on where the Fogo Island films fit in the social and cultural evolution of post-Confederation Newfoundland and Labrador. This chapter will begin to do just that, turning the "process over product" motto on its head to study the films as documentary productions and historical documents in the 108 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion cited on the Columbia University website, Metaphorical points of view and their influence on social history have become a topic of discussion and debate in recent years. The so-called 'tourist gaze,' as described by Overton and McKay, is said to reduce traditional culture to a commodity, and 'the Folk' to a middle-class fairy tale. The framework is itself reductionist in dismissing the importance and relevance of traditional culture to those who still live within it. In particular, the Fogo Experiment's goals were unrelated to the commodification of culture: they were not part of a corporate, government or tourist agenda and most of the content decisions were made by local people, for a local audience. The intention was to make something close to home movies, working with the help of friends (such as Fred Earle) and visitors (the NFB crew). To extrapolate from McKay's original term, the original 'gaze'in the Fogo Island films was a hybrid: the issues at hand were seen through the eyes of community workers and cinematographers. It eschewed the melodrama and romanticism of anti-modernist writers such as Farley Mowat in This Rock within the Sea: 55 a Heritage Lost in search of a more even-handed and pragmatic optimism. Two generations later, we who were not there in 1967 cannot watch these 'home movies' from the original audiences' point of view. Just as old films and photographs of long-ago birthday parties yield their own narratives about social and family relationships, so do the Fogo Island films show and tell many tales today that would have gone unremarked in 1968. Whether or not they did so intentionally, the films can be seen today as advocating a path for the islanders. This chapter sets aside the issue of whether the path was right or wrong, and looks behind the curtain at who was, or may have been, pulling the levers to make the films come together as they did. This is partly a shift and partly an evolution in point of view: the original gaze cannot hold at a forty-year distance, because we know how the story ends. We are able to step away from the process's direct goals of community renewal to consider a range of influences and themes in the product. The 'tourist gaze' has no role in the Fogo Island films, except perhaps if we wish to see it in a rear-view mirror. The influence of provincial tourism officials was nowhere to be seen; quite the contrary. There were concerns that the films would provoke government anger. More importantly, they were never intended to promote Newfoundland to outsiders, or to anyone else. The goal was to reflect a community to itself. The filmmakers wanted the films to be as neutral as possible, for their gaze to be authentic and ordinary, but the ordinary eye is far more talented than the ordinary person behind a camera. If the filmmakers failed, it is because it was impossible for them to shoot poorly or in an amateurish way, just as it would never occur to them to "allow" an interview to be boring; their sense of selection, and their cinematographer's eyes were just too sophisticated. 56 In studying the films as documentary product and historical documents, it is impossible to avoid some overlap; this is true in many cases besides the Fogo Island films, because most documentarians work to achieve a deeper and more considered version of journalism's 'first rough draft of history'. For the purposes of this chapter I have defined the first category (documentary product) to include a discussion of the films' content and production style: it is a reading against the grain in that attention was never supposed to focus on the films themselves. This section begins by describing examples of the different types within the series: films for the general audience, aimed at raising public awareness of the issues of poverty; the 'entertainment' films, which were a kind of opening act for more serious topics; and the discussion (or true "process") films, in which the thorny and provocative issues at hand were to be tackled first on screen, and thereafter by the audience. Also in this section, there is a discussion of the broader themes which appear in the films as a whole. This is a point at which recording history and the historic record overlap: not all these themes would have been apparent to the filmmakers or the community at the time, but they are clear to us today. The second section, looking at the films as historical documents, focuses more on information and events from outside the frame. It tracks speakers' identities, backgrounds and points of view, as well as considering the ways in which lines of questioning, choice of interview clips and other production elements influence what we 'read' in the Fogo Island films. Additional information from contemporary sources -Fred Earle and Robert DeWitt among them - will fill in blanks left by the inevitable decisions demanded by the production and editing processes, and by a format in which individuals were not introduced. In the Fogo Process it was unnecessary to identify people: after all, the people 57 on screen were usually themselves the audience, and the audience's neighbours. Additional information will also take us outside the frame to look at staging of scenes, cross-scripting and the thorny questions around if and how the presence of a camera affects what the camera sees. The collected films of the 1967-68 production period create a montage. A difficulty in studying individual films in isolation from the others is that each film tells one story on its own, and others when considered in concert with one or more of its fellows. As we learn about what is not in the films -the names and backgrounds of the people who appear on camera, the connections among them, and what is going on outside the frame - more dimensions and layers appear. If we think of each film as a mirror to some aspect of Fogo Island's society and challenges, the collection becomes a huge hall of mirrors: each image picks up fragments of the others, but no single film, or even the whole collection, offers a complete and accurate picture. I do not use the mirror metaphor in the same senses as Janine Marchessault. Marchessault borrowed the term "mirror machine," said to have been coined by Dorothy Henaut of the NFB, for a collection of essays on "Video and Identity", the goal of which was for "the reader (to) derive a sense of the productive dialectic that is needed to think about video in the age of identity."109 My goals are nowhere near so lofty. The purpose here is to explore documents which have been largely ignored for decades, and to add information (either left out or taken for granted at the time) that will help us to understand them better. This hall of mirrors is complicated by the fact that we see them through a window of forty years' distance. Some images bear the patina of the time, tinting or 109 Janine Marchessault, "Preface", in Mirror Machine: Video and Identity ed. Janine Marchessault (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1995), 8. 58 obscuring what we see: the virtual exclusion of women from the debates on camera, the limits of transportation and communications, and outsiders' stereotypes of rural Newfoundland, traditional life and modernity. The social historian's gaze can take these into account, as well as drawing on other accounts that were not available at the time, and corroborating (or correcting) impressions of people at the time. Such reminders may not be necessary to the reader of printed documents from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, but watching real people move across a screen speaks to a different part of the brain. Film and video "civilians" (as a colleague calls those not involved in the medium) are often unable to read clearly the elements of a moving-image story, either through ignorance of the technology and its grammar, or because they are caught up in the story itself, or both.110 It might be easier to stand aside from the events and people in the Fogo Island films if the material were recorded on paper. We are more accustomed to stepping back from print, and most letters and documents from the time seem distant to us, speaking in a formal tone long banished from most business correspondence (not to mention e-mail). The conversations on film are informal and heartfelt; most of what they say would not sound out of place today. This makes the sight of (for example) a town meeting at which no women are present that much more striking, and it reminds us that however familiar the situations, we are watching another time, and we can only watch with an outsider's gaze. We cannot be the people for whom the films were made. 110 An excellent example of how 'civilians' watch films, and the problems it creates, appears in a recent New York Times online post by documentarian Errol Morris. Morris tells of being interviewed by a big- city newspaper reporter, who asks him how he came to be on a remote highway with a camera to film a pivotal sequence in his documentary, The Thin Blue Line. "The question seemed insane.. .It never occurred to me that someone might think that the re-enactments were.. .honest-to-God verite footage shot while the crime was happening." ("Play it Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One)", Zoom, the New York Times blogs, April 4, 2008 < http://morris.blogs.nvtimes.com/2008/04/03/play-it-again-sam-re-enactments-part- one/index.htm^th&emc^th > 59 3.1 A Sampling of the Films: A sampling of the films made in 1967-68 illustrates the range of categories outlined in the Challenge for Change strategy, and the approach and style of the Fogo Island/Challenge for Change processes. There is a variety of production approaches, and the films are remarkable, not just because they are among the first of their kind. Later iterations of the Fogo Process, in Canada and elsewhere, would be recorded by trained camera operators, but few if any would bring the same depth of knowledge, breadth of experience and sophisticated aesthetic sense to their projects as did the crew on Fogo Island. As a genre, "process" films are generally described as ragged, hard to watch and even boring to outsiders - not unlike home movies. This reputation comes in part from the fact that later process film projects were actually video, and the people operating the equipment were amateurs. Most of the Fogo Island films, by contrast, are lovely examples of subtle and elegant cinematography. The choice of featured speakers shows solid production sense: subjects are passionate and well-spoken (though some outsiders would later find their accents hard to understand). The editing is of the highest professional quality; although it may not always have met the NFB style standards of the day, it is usually seamless. Today, in the era of MuchMusic and YouTube, many viewers would not notice most cuts. The aesthetic quality of these films is in part a fluke of timing. Colin Low considered shooting them on videotape, but the technology was still unwieldy, so the 111 decision was made to stay with film and a film crew. Soon after this, the advent of the consumer-level video cameras meant that anyone could make a documentary, if not 111 Gary Evans, In the National Interest: a chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 164. 60 necessarily a good or even technically competent one. Sony Corporation would introduce the first video "porta-paks" to the consumer market in 1968; later iterations of the Fogo Process, and other social animation exercises, would make almost exclusive use of video. The production style of the Fogo Island films is consistent throughout: Low wanted to shoot "in a rational, unemotional way; high emotion and conflict look interesting on national television, but he believed those two elements hindered the communication process.112 In all the films, framing, lighting, and editing are as neutral as possible. The camera maintains an even eyeline with all subjects - that is, speakers do not look up or down at the lens, inviting the suggestion that they are to be looked down upon or up to metaphorically as well as literally. Artificial lighting, where it is used, is flat and unobtrusive. An Introduction to Fogo Island is the first, perhaps the only, Fogo Island film a casual viewer would watch. It was likely among the last to be scripted and edited, since except for the opening sequence introducing Fred Earle as he drives into a community (likely Joe Batt's Arm), the images in this film are drawn from other films in the series. As its title suggests, the film contains an overview of the island, its issues and the filmmakers' reasons for being there. It is unique among the original Fogo Island films: it is the only one to include a voice-over narration; the narrator's voice and the overall tone are reminiscent of Hinterland Who's Who as the script describes a sympathetic and admiring outsider's view of this remote island and its "fewer than six thousand people living in ten separate villages, only recently linked by adequate roads."113 The film sets out the story of an isolated community on the cusp of major change: Evans, National Interest. 164. Colin Low, dir., An Introduction to Fogo Island, 04:09 61 We wanted to involve ourselves with a community in trouble, and one whose problems are typical of other places, so the results of our project could be applied; and we wanted a community whose people had already begun to organize for change, so we could affect the organization process by improving communication.114 Introduction is also exceptional among the Fogo Island films as the most like mainstream government (or in NFB parlance, "sponsored") documentaries of the time. It is the only one of the Fogo Island films which appears to fit the first of the three categories of Challenge for Change films: "directed to the middle and upper class audience, (serving) to create a favorable climate for the program and (to) inform the public of the causes and conditions creating and perpetuating poverty."115 Most of the Fogo Island films are 'process' films: bare-bones recordings of interviews, conversations and meetings, all intended to spark further discussion by the audience. Two of the better known examples are Billy Crane Moves Away and Andrew Brett at Shoal Bay. Andrew Brett at Shoal Bay is a partial record of an informal discussion, presumably in Shoal Bay (near Joe Batt's Arm), among men sitting around a wood stove in some sparsely-furnished room; it may be part of a fish store emptied of its equipment, or the meeting room of a church. Women are shown listening from the sidelines, and there is some reminiscing about the group's shared past before the main speaker, Andrew Brett, launches into a passionate case for hard work and a united front to overcome the difficulties currently faced by Fogo Islanders. Brett says islanders must take charge of their future by demanding government support for a fish plant on the island. A transcription goes only part of the way to imparting the power of his speech: Low, Introduction, 1:30- 3:03 115 Rodney C. James, Film as a National Art: the National Film Board of Canada and the film board idea (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 193. 116 This film is incorrectly listed in the NFB Catalogue as Andrew Britt at Shoal Bay. 62 (If there were a) body of people to protest and say they want this (fish plant), and stand to that, I thinks they'd get it. ... There is a class that says it's no good, no good for us to try for that, (that) we're too small a group. There's people on Fogo Island, they considers we're too small to apply for a thing like that, but I say, no. We are a people worth recognizing. And the .. .few pioneers of this island should still continue on and protest to the government that we want this thing, and we must have it. As I said earlier, we are part of Canada. And (I will) not abide to the other fellow who said, 'boy, I'm going to leave. I don't see no future.' That's a man that don't know what he wants. Wherever he goes he's gonna have to work! But we got to stand together, stand in unity and protest, fight, and we'll succeed. "7 On its face, this is a simple film, simply shot: a roomful of men talking about life in the fishery. However, the conversation and images also contain examples of- and references to - nationalism, gender roles, community solidarity and the rifts between communities. The film shows that fishermen with elementary (or less) education are as capable of thoughtful discussion and eloquence as university graduates - a fact that would likely have been a revelation to some at the time. The identities of the men speaking, and of the women listening on the sidelines, are unknown to an outsider or modern-day viewer; no one is identified on the film and we assume we know which one is Andrew Brett, not because he speaks first, but because he speaks more than the others. Perhaps the names did not matter to the filmmakers in 1967, but as we shall see, all of these things affect how we understand what is being said, and how it might have been interpreted by audiences at the time. As part of the social animation exercise, Andrew Brett at Shoal Bay is simply a record of a meeting, to be used for later discussion. As documentary film, it is an example of the adage that few images are more interesting than the human face. The film 1 Colin Low, dir., Andrew Brett at Shoal Bay, 3:25-3:55. (Note: the NFB archive misspells his name as Britt.) 118 Low, Andrew Brett, 1:10. An unidentified man says "Fogo Island was the (whole) universe (when we were young).. .You didn't have to go to school. All you needed was a fishing boat. Grade two was just as good as grade five or ten or anything else." 63 features artful and intuitive camerawork, which, with equally skilled editing, creates a dramatic monologue out of what appears on closer study to be a series of comments over a longer conversation. A number of the Fogo Island films have Andrew Brett's clear, direct and homespun quality, but Billy Crane Moves Away overflows with anger. In speaking with people familiar with the Fogo Island films, I have found this one to be a consistent favourite. It deserves to be known more widely: in counterpoint to Andrew Brett and others like him, Billy Crane is the fishery's surly Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. Crane is leaving the water and Newfoundland itself because of what he says is a dying fishery and an uncaring government. Minute for minute, Billy Crane Moves Away may be the single most powerful of all the films. Like the others, it is framed and filmed simply: a man on a wharf, talking to Fred Earle and the crew as he and his young sons tidy up his fishing gear. The camerawork is remarkably fluid and intuitive, making the editor's job easy: the camera pans to Crane's hands as he coils rope, and the movement covers a sound and visual cut; other edits are covered by well-motivated cutaway shots of the elderly man with whom Crane first went to Labrador as a boy, and of Crane's two sons, silent and watching as they work alongside their father. The film does not specifically state that Billy Crane is putting his gear away for the last time, but implies that he has already made his last trip out on the water. Anecdotal evidence suggests the crew heard Crane was leaving for Toronto and rushed to Change Islands to speak with him first. Billy Crane looks to be about thirty-five. He tells Fred Earle, Colin Low and visiting sociologist Cato Wadel that he has been a fisherman since he was nine years 64 old.119 His first trip to the Labrador fishery was entirely under sail. A transcription cannot convey the anger that simmers in his voice and on his face: I don't want to (leave, but) I mean, twenty-five years here now and what have I got in twenty-five years.. .around me? As far as I'm concerned now, only a pile of stuff you'd heave in the garbage.. .Mr. Smallwood, when he went into government first, he was gonna have two jobs for each Newfoundlander.. .(but now) there's ten Newfoundlanders for each job, far as I'm concerned.. .120 Billy Crane Moves Away is a slap to the stereotype, common at the time, of the lazy Newfoundlander. Clearly unschooled and rough around the edges, Crane almost 191 spits at the prospect of accepting welfare, of "working under another man" at sea or in a fish plant, and of being told where to live in return for a resettlement grant: "That's too 1 99 foolish to talk about." He may have left school after Grade Two, but his assessment of the new dragger technology is more than a generation ahead of events: FRED: Why do you think fish is so scarce as it is.. .it's always gone well over the years. What's happening in recent years? BILLY: I don't know, Fred, but - so many boats, offshore boats dragging up the fish, I suppose the fish can't stand it. They're over here from Russia and all the countries. One time, if fish didn't swim in the cod trap or get the trawl, you didn't get them but now they throws down and just scoops 'em up off the bottom. So. Fish can't stand that. I don't think it can. I might just be foolish now, but I don't think the government give the inshore fishermen a square deal...Sir.123 The social hierarchy of the time is subtly noticeable, as it is at other points in the films. Crane addresses Fred Earle by his first name, but the question about "a square deal" was posed by Cato Wadel, an outsider and a representative of Memorial; both times Crane refers to Wadel's question, he uses "sir" to address him. The difference and I identified the interviewers by sight and/or by the sound of their voices in other films. 1 Colin Low, dir., Billy Crane Moves Away, clips between 4:52 and 8:10. 1 Billy Crane, 2:11 Billy Crane, 6:43 Billy Crane, 5:52 65 Crane's body language offer a hint of Earle's importance to the project: at this point (and many others) it is clear that he is the only one who is accepted by the local people as an understanding and informed peer. The Founding of the Co-operative is a partial record of an important event in the history of Newfoundland and Labrador: the smoke-filled meeting at the Fogo Island Motel where almost 100 islanders met to form the Fogo Island Co-op in December of 1967. It is assembled differently than other 'meeting' and 'process' films, where there is no exposition or denouement, just sections of a conversation or debate. Instead of narration, a series of graphic 'boards' (literally, black cards with titles superimposed on the resulting blank frame) explains the beginning of each chapter in a way that is reminiscent of silent films. The film begins with a graphic board: "Crews of fishermen on Fogo Island have always worked together in facing the seasons and the elements. Can they stand together in other kinds of rough weather?"124 The first scene is not of the meeting, but a vignette in which a group of a dozen or so men launch a large fishing boat using a rudimentary system of poles, pulleys, ropes and chains attached to a battered truck, and their own brute strength. The boat nearly tips - "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" the men yell to the truck driver - but they put their shoulders and backs into it; we do not see the end of the operation, but the message is clear: they are successful by working together. The main action of the film takes place in what would be a historic meeting at the Fogo Island Motel. Committee chair Stan Kinden introduces the manager of Newfoundland Co-operative Services to a standing-room only crowd of men in the hotel bar (the bar is closed). NCS's David Garland admits to some nervousness before the film 124 Colin Low, dir. The Founding of the Co-operative, 00:36 66 camera and lights, and goes on to explain how to set up a co-op. The film shows one question from the floor. Around the fourteen-minute mark, another graphic announces the main item on the evening's agenda: "a motion... to establish a ship building and producers (sic) co operative." The only speaker from the floor is William Wells of Joe Batt's Arm: "I've been a co-op member for over 20 years, and it's got into the blood.. ..we've made mistakes, but I hope that by those mistakes, we shall learn." He sits down to make way for the film's dramatic climax: chairman Kinden calls the question, raised hands are counted, the vote is unanimous and applause fills the room. But the work is not yet done: more slides and film sequences explain the adoption of a constitution and the election of a board of directors. Kinden is one of those chosen, and he assures the room, "I will not betray your faith. I will do everything I can to better our lots, and I'm sure the rest of the board members is anxious to get to work to do the same thing."125 The film concludes with shots of waves breaking on the shore. In a sense, this meeting marked the end of the first Fogo Process. Its content puts it outside the strict definition of process film, since it shows the conclusion of the summer's process: with the vote, a decision has been reached and the debate is concluded, at least for the moment. The Founding of the Co-operative has the tone of a training film, as defined by the Challenge for Change program. It could easily have been used as part of the social animation process in communities other than those on Fogo Island, as a way to demystify the work involved in starting other co-operatives in other areas. 125 Founding of the Co-operative, 20:12 - 20:30 126 Anecdotal evidence suggests that the meeting may have been filmed by an Extension crew, perhaps working with Colin Low. Fred Earle's files include a letter to Low anticipating his presence at the meeting. 67 The Founding of the Co-operative is a fascinating social and documentary artifact. It records a turning point in the history of Fogo Island: although the shipbuilding co-op would close after only six years, the fish processing arm adapted to and survived many industrial, social, ecological and political changes up to this writing; so did most of the communities on Fogo Island. A viewer familiar with the other films will recognize many of the people in the room, particularly Dan Roberts, Stan Kinden and William Wells. A Wedding and a Party belongs to the third category of films in the Fogo Island project: the "entertainment" films. These lighter short subjects were intended as a kind of "warm-up act" or conclusion to an evening of screening and discussion, but forty years later they are windows on the time. Some of the entertainment films {Children of Fogo, Jim Decker's Party) have been studied more than the "serious" Fogo Island process films. A Wedding and a Party takes us first to a wedding at the small Roman Catholic church in Joe Batt's Arm South, and then to a party after another wedding, in an unknown hall.127 The church ceremony is shot from one location; it is likely that the priest would have frowned on a camera crew moving its equipment around in the middle of the sacrament of holy matrimony. Given the general lack of support from the island's clergy for the project as a whole (discussed later in this chapter), the crew probably considered themselves lucky to get in at all. The couple are in their early twenties at most; the lanky groom wears a suit and a pompadour; the bride's dress is as fine as any, but she may remember to this day the housefly that hovers and lights on her veil, literally before her eyes, as she prepares to make her vows. The congregation is made up of all ages; many of the adult women have their hair in curlers, covered with scarves tied 127 The church is not identified in the films, but I visited it in the summer of 2007; I was unable to findan y information on the couple or location appearing in the second part of this film. 68 kerchief-like, as was common at the time.128 After the ceremony, people spill out onto the front stairs as the newlyweds get into a sedan and drive away. The action resumes at a wedding party where set dances are taken on with great vigour; however, this party takes place after a different wedding than the one we have just seen, since the bride watching in the background is not the same one we saw in church. Fred Earle is an enthusiastic participant in the proceedings, first as part of a set dance, and then playing his impressive piano accordion as others take the floor.129 In many of these films, pictures and interviews often speak more strongly and eloquently than the written word. It takes more than a sample to develop a sense of the broader themes percolating through the Fogo Island films. Some of these themes ring out loud, clear and often: challenges to the government and to the community, a call for self- sufficiency, and concerns about outmigration. Others are more apparent to the modern- day viewer: the absence of women from the debate, the conflict between tradition and modernity, the post-Confederation generation gap, and the stirrings of a cultural nationalism. The Fogo Island films address many of these themes from the perspective that local people can and should be involved in the discussion and resolution of issues that affect them. The term "empowerment' was yet to enter the everyday vernacular, but it was certainly the goal here, and the message runs throughout the films. Issues of nationalism and gender roles arise less directly; neither subject was on the table at the time, but with our distant gaze there are several examples worth remarking upon. 128 The logic behind attending a wedding in curlers was that one's hair would then be nice for the party; heads had to be covered in church anyway. 1291 assume this is the accordion as the one stored in the late Mr. Earle's house. I saw it in the summer of 2007, on the day I collected the files referred to throughout this thesis. 69 3.2 Themes 3.2.1 Challenging the Government In Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary, Richard Gwyn is among the many writers to reflect on Joseph Smallwood's drive for power and control: "Like most populists, who love the mass rather than the individual, it was always in Smallwood's nature to become a dictator." The premier had little time for dissenting voices, "(stamping) out the slightest sign of opposition. Journalists who dared to write critical articles.. .were denounced in the legislature...Smallwood in full fury was a terrifying figure." In the context of such times, many of the comments and conversations in the Fogo Island films are quite daring. Part of the value of Andrew Brett's comments, and many others in the series, is that they were hard to come by at the time. In 2008, we are used to seeing everyday people saying their piece in the mass media. In 1967, news reporters and crews did not make day trips 'around the bay,' and even the Fishermen's Broadcast at CBC Radio did telephone interviews of any length only rarely. Furthermore, many Fogo Islanders would never have been to St. John's, just as many 'townies' would have been unlikely to take extended trips been to any outport where they did not have relatives.133 Communication between the island and the capital was mainly by letter and telegram: if Andrew Brett was as fluent in written English as he was well-spoken, he still could not 130 Richard Gwyn, Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary, revised ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999), 158. 131 Gwyn, Unlikely Revolutionary. 286. The fear of Smallwood's wrath extended to the president's office at Memorial University, as Chapter Four will discuss. 132 Jim Wellman, The Broadcast: the Story of CBC Radio's Fisheries Broadcast, p. 110. Wellman writes that throughout the 1950s and much of the 1960s, telephone service was the exception in outport Newfoundland; when it was possible to reach someone by telephone, the line quality was often not good enough for broadcast. 133 In Two Cabinet Ministers, John Crosbie says the visit being filmed was his first to Fogo Island. 70 have made the kind of argument on paper that he does in conversation, on film; if he had had the opportunity to make it in person, it is possible he would not have done so, like the speaker in Some Problems ofFogo. Brett's comments are more measured than many others in the Fogo Island films. Billy Crane's are among the strongest: a direct and personal attack on the premier and his policies. In The Fogo Island Improvement Committee, various speakers talk about their frustration at being put off repeatedly by the premier's office: STAN KINDEN: The premier is a very busy man and we've got a commitment from him, and it seems that a lot of our people is already disappointed because he hasn't already visited Fogo Island... (ANOTHER MAN) Mr. Chairman, the premier was coming in July, and he haven't turned up and this is August. Well why not let the Fogo Island Improvement Committee know the reason? .. .1 can't see why he'd let us down and not notify us at all. (ANOTHER MAN) He goes everywhere else. Why can't he come here? 'Tis no good for he to come around this island in November, for to try to do something for next year. Too late then, isn't it?134 With some nudging from Fred Earle, the committee decides to push the premier's hand: it will build a speaking platform for him and send a letter (closer to a press release) to the Evening Telegram to announce its existence: a deliberately provocative act. The film ends with images of the platform under construction in the middle of an empty gravel lot behind the Fogo Island Motel. In Citizen Discussions, the Improvement Committee members try to understand why the government is not helping them more. They question the government's lack of support for a fisheries proposal, favoured by the Improvement Committee and many islanders, to get the United Maritime Fishermen (IMF) to take over an empty fish plant Colin Low, dir.,The Fogo Island Improvement Committee, various clips 4:30 -9:10. 71 on the island. It appears the province is more interested a competing proposal from a foreign company, the Yellow Fish Company, but no one is sure what is happening or why. As committee member Stan Kinden puts it: In our correspondence with certain government officials, I think it can be proven in our records that we would be advised immediately as to who would operate the Seldom fish plant.. .But apparently a decision was already made, before this telegram was even dictated, y'see? and of course it seems that quite a number of our people, they didn't like this very well. They think that all the time that we were being put off or something.135 Committee member Dan Roberts seems discouraged by the entire process, especially after a recent trip to meet with the premier in St. John's. I did hear another member of the provincial cabinet, tell another person outside the Confederation Building (provincial legislature), down in the parking lot — mentioned the cabinet meeting they had that day, (and a) request from the people of Fogo Island under UMF to guarantee a bank loan of four hundred thousand dollars. He thought 'twas crazy. "We give 'em the four hundred thousand, he said, they'll only blow it away we'll have to give 'em another four hundred thousand the next year, (pause) Now. If that's what certain members of the government, if that's their opinion of us on Fogo Island, I don't know what to make of it.... The part that hurts me is that we asked the government to help us to help ourselves, by a measly four hundred thousand dollar guaranteed bank loan. They turned it down. In the meantime, they'll spend four hundred thousand dollars every two or three months in relief orders on the island. Throwing it away. Not helping the people at all. Helping them to get, to be lazy, and forget work.136 The usually soft-spoken Roberts's voice rises as he tells another story to the group. It shocked me, what (one government official) said.. .the reason why he didn't attend the fisheries conference was because there was too much bullshit went on. I didn't sleep a wink that night, when I heard that. Because as far as I was concerned, the conference we had here last year, there was no bullshit handed out by the people on Fogo Island. If there was any.. .it was handed out by the government bull. Colin Low, dir., Citizen Discussions,8:04- 8:45. Low, Citizen Discussions, 10:47-12:45. Low, Citizen Discussions, 14:10 - 15:10. 72 It speaks to the importance of the medium and the process that a group of voters from 'around the bay' would likely never have spoken so frankly if they had been face to face with the politicians at whom they are upset. In Some Problems ofFogo, a member of one of the island's school boards suggests he and other members of the recent delegation to the premier in St. John's had been overwhelmed by the great man's presence: SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER: That meeting we had with the premier. We didn't get a chance to say anything. He did all the talking, (laughter) But I thought if we had another session with him after, in the afternoon.. .we could've went home for lunch, talked over lunch ourselves and went back in the afternoon and had another session with him. We'd've got more satisfaction than we got. So far as I'm concerned we didn't get any satisfaction at all. FRED EARLE: So in other words, the people that went in, they weren't willing to speak to Mr. Smallwood, were they? SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER: (unclear) Some of them were, yes.. .(but) I'd say a good many of them wouldn't. Only three or four of us said anything to the meeting. The rest sat back and listened.138 3.2.2 Challenging the Community A process aimed at challenging people to change would be short-lived if it allowed participants to put all the responsibility for solving Fogo Island's problems on government. Just as revolutionary as criticizing Smallwood was Snowden's idea that communities accustomed to top-down decision-making (in a framework in which they were always at the bottom) needed to overcome generations of passivity and push both the government and themselves hard, if they were to reach their goals. Andrew Brett is among those who say that Fogo Islanders must stand tall and united: (There are) good workers (here). Boat builders, carpenters. You can find almost every type of person on this island.. .we're not as bad off as we protest to be, I don't think for a minute. We're better off than we realize, but we're not as well off as we should be, and I thinks some of the reason, is that we're afraid of ourselves.. .We know that we're not educated, therefore we're inclined to keep our tongues still. We should never do it, I Low, Some Problems of Fogo, 13:06- 14:10. 73 don't think. We got children growing up, who is getting their education, they can show us a lot of things we don't know. But yet on other hand, there's a lot of sense we can show them, in spite of their education. In A Discussion on Welfare, Elizabeth Russell Miller is considerably more blunt: Now I'm not criticizing the program of social welfare... (but) it can go a little too far... (P)eople will get the attitude, why bother to work? I mean, so-and-so is getting this much, welfare, and I'm working like a slave and only getting this. And I think there's a tendency.. .of some people to not to bother to work so hard.. .because they know this, this money is there.. .1 think this attitude is dangerous after a while, and I think it kills initiative. .. .Nothing brings out the best things in a person better than hard times.. .We must strive, we must work together, but when you take this away, the crew feels, well, if we don't get any fish, there's always the dole. We can always go up and get our (relief) order.140 The speakers cited above, like most of those in the films, appear to be at least thirty years old. A few younger people say they are interested in helping to make change, though they argue that their elders stand in the way. Others say the easiest course is just to move away. A young teacher in Some Problems ofFogo says the island's maze of school boards will never manage to agree on a location for an amalgamated school, and will not hire him because he is local.141 In The Mercer Family, one of the younger men says that ancient rivalries stop anything from being done: (If you try to put a school) in Joe Batt's Arm (Fogo town will) be too jealous, Tilting be too jealous. That's what wrong with the place. That's what wrong with the fishery here; it's sinking, gradually, because of jealousy. FRED: The place is not pulling together? YOUNG MAN #2: No. Falling apart, because of jealousy, and when the people fall apart, place falls apart, the fishery sinks because.. .it's not the fishery they're thinking about.. .it's just greed, or something like that.142 Low, Andrew Brett, 14:00- 14:33. ' Low, A Discussion on Welfare, various clips 2:18-3:31 and 4:53 -5:14 Low, Some Problems of Fogo, 20:00 (approx). ' Low, The Mercer Family, (timecode unavailable) 74 In The Fogo Island Improvement Committee, even those supposedly at the forefront of the movement for self-sufficiency are challenged by Fred Earle to try harder. The Extension Officer's comments lead to the plan to pressure the premier by press release: FRED: Mention was made that, uh, the premier is letting the committee down. But I speak coming to the island from an outside source.. .1 ask this committee the question, is the Fogo Island Improvement Committee letting down the people of Fogo Island?... (A) great majority of Fogo Island had every confidence.. .that when you came back and said, the premier is coming, or something was going to be done, something would happen. So coming in again, I hear a different word from the people. I'm just asking... I'm as disturbed as you are.143 The meeting decides to lobby the premier through the media, and the film concludes with visuals of men building a speaking platform, complete with bunting, in the gravel parking lot behind the Fogo Island Motel. Smallwood finally visited the island in September.144 3.2.3 Outmigration The films rarely refer directly to the government resettlement program. Without any other background, an outside viewer might think the more urgent question was how to stem the gradual and growing outmigration of young people, but the spectre of resettlement was what drove the Improvement Committee to its work and the filmmakers to the island. The word "resettlement" is mentioned only three times, and then by outsiders - by Fred Earle in Billy Crane Moves Away, by the narrator in An Introduction to Fogo and by Robert DeWitt in The Experts At Memorial Discuss the Fogo Films - though it is clear from De Witt and other sources that it was very much on the minds of Fogo Islanders and many other outport Newfoundlanders at the time. As discussed in 143 Low, The Fogo Island Improvement Committee, 6:22 144 Photo with caption, St. John's Evening Telegram, Sept. 29, 1967 (page reference missing from file). 75 Chapter Two, the fact that the government could not directly force a community to resettle was virtually irrelevant in the face of a widespread belief that it would. That belief may have been a useful bogeyman to incite the islanders to action. The popular stereotype of the homesick Newfoundlander rarely addresses the fact that not all expatriates leave the province because economic circumstances leave them with no alternatives. Certainly, outmigration was an issue for Fogo Island and in Newfoundland society and culture long before Confederation, but it took on a new edge after 1949, as more people than ever before acquired the wherewithal to leave: the removal of immigration restrictions, the transition from a credit to cash economy and sweeping improvements in education afforded young people more opportunity for trips to mainland Canada. There, they might find their fortunes, not to mention the chance to sow a few wild oats, away from the omnipresent eyes of family and neighbours at home. That many did not return to stay afterwards is a matter of record. In 1967, the combination of the resettlement programs and the troubles in the fishery added a new wrinkle to an old story. Resettlement money was not available to families and individuals who chose to leave the province: the goal was to centralize, not depopulate, but people like Billy Crane were leaving anyway. The falling fortunes of the cod fishery were driving still more young people away, but interestingly, in the Fogo Island films it is the older men who bemoan this. The few teenagers and young adults who speak are looking beyond what they know - many of them with eagerness. In The Mercer Family, the senior Mr. Mercer's sons listen as he talks about the heartbreak of seeing young people leave: "(It's) just like someone is dying on to you . You lose your father or your mother, you'd feel pretty hard, wouldn't you? Well. Every 76 man who got sons, they feel the same way."145 But when the younger Mercers speak - it is unclear from the framing of the shots whether their father is still present and listening - they are ambivalent about life on the water. One says he supposes it would be good to be home; but he would rather move away than fish.. .though he wants to be sure of a job first.146 The other son complains that generations of bickering elders and jealousies between communities stand in the way of modernizing the fishery. At this point, a seemingly frustrated Colin Low interrupts and asks, from off camera, why young Mercer and others like him don't change the mistakes of the past. The young man shrugs and says it can't be done.147 Later, as the film concludes, he says, "I'm not interested in fishing, myself. Never was, really.. ."148 A final shot, of a lone man who appears to be Mercer senior painting the keel of a boat propped up in a cradle by the shore, suggests that if the father stays in the fishery, he will be doing so on his own. In William Wells Talks About the Island, William Wells mends nets and puffs on his pipe in a fish store as he reflects on the world. He reckons that "some will stay and some will go," and it has been that way for three hundred years.149 Even though he went to Ontario himself for a while in his youth, he is bemused by young people's desire to leave: "To me, Fogo Island is the gem of Notre Dame Bay. I can't see what there is off the island any more than... (shrug) I know, yes, there's big industries and there's everything else up on the mainland.. ..even so, in Montreal and in Toronto they got poor people."150 145 Low, The Mercer Family, 4:11- 4:22. 146 Low, The Mercer Family, 5:00 - 5:20. 147 Low, The Mercer Family, 6:40 - 7:30. 148 Low, The Mercer Family 9:25- 9:35. 149 Low, William Wells Talks About the Island, :50 150 Colin Low, dir., William Wells Talks About the Island, various clips 2:07 - 2:50. 77 Wells's sons are older than the Mercer boys. He predicts that none of them will be around to fish with him; three of the four are already gone. The most recent departure was the "same is if I'd lost my right arm, to a certain extent. It (was) hard to know what to do.. .Well, anyway, I said, well, that's it. (If) he's gone, he's gone. That's what he wanted.. .but I'm still going fishing."151 In Joe Kinsella on Education, Joe Kinsella reflects on the mixed blessings of modernity: It has speeded up the movements of young people, off the island. There was always a great deal of movement off the island. ... but there's another factor that's coming into play and I don't think that it has made itself evident yet in the population of the island. That is that most of the younger people are getting an education. Before... there were only a few that managed to squeak through high school, and the only thing they could do then was to go on to university. There was no opportunity to go to trades school or fisheries college, there was none of that. And it meant that only the academically minded went on. But now there are opportunities in other fields, and it means that the people, the young men - and the young girls, too - who are not academically minded.... can leave, can go and take trades and get jobs. And this is happening more and more.152 The three men interviewed by Dr. Philip Warren in Fogo 's Expatriates are exemplars of the pre-Confederation generation to which Kinsella refers. The Rev. George Earle (Fred's older brother), civil servant Cec Roboethan and an unknown businessman talk about how they and others like them were "educated out" of Fogo Island.153 They wax nostalgic about their early days - "There were no grave economic problems, there were no big social problems, there were no pressures and tensions you find in centralized areas today,"154 says Roebothan—but they are relatively hard-nosed about the best way to plan for the future: Earle suggests centralizing the island's ten communities into one or Low, William Wells, various clips, 10:00-11:05. Low, Joe Kinsella on Education, 00:18- 01:55. Colin Low, dir. Fogo's Expatriates, 6:24. Low, Fogo's Expatriates, 1:27 78 two "in one area, nearest to the mainland of Nfld., with a good ferry service."155 None seems to know much about current events on Fogo Island, but Roebothan says, "Holding meetings (to talk about change) is a good thing, but I think that there should be some follow-up. Now if we had some kind of an arrangement and organization whereby you could invite people into meetings, get them where you could promote ideas, and stimulate their thinking, and then as a follow-up you could show them how to do certain things, I think they'd be much more inclined to follow."156 It is not likely intentional, but Roebothan's suggestion is a perfect description of what Fred Earle had already been doing with the Fogo Island Improvement Committee for the past several years. Earle's comment - and the fact that the other two take no issue with it - reflects the acceptance of the philosophy behind the centralization and resettlement programs. Colin Low's small outburst in The Mercer Family suggests frustration with the idea that young people would capitalize on their new opportunities by leaving, instead of staying on to improve life on Fogo Island. This is one of the points in the films where it is clear the filmmakers have developed a point of view. They seem to believe that change is desirable and possible, if the community pulls together; certainly, this belief is a cornerstone of the entire Challenge for Change program. But in the cauldron of changes that was Newfoundland in the 1960s, the preservation of outport communities was not universally seen as a priority, even - perhaps especially - among those who would inherit them - at least, not yet. Fogo's Expatriates, 14:45 Fogo's Expatriates, timecode 10:30 - 11:05 79 3.2.4 Women in Outport Society At a recent talk in St. John's on the Fogo Island films, the samples screened included a scene from The Founding of the Co-operative. Afterwards, in the question- and-answer session, the very first question from the audience was, "Where were the women?"157 Certainly one of the most striking facts in this film is that in a crowded public meeting that may decide the fate of hundreds of families, not one woman is present. Historians and everyday observers alike may be more susceptible to presentism in the area of gender issues than in many others; a discussion of women's "place" in the films tends to be informed more by modern-day sensibilities than those of the day. It is glaringly obvious to a viewer in 2008 that few women appear on camera in any of the 1967 films, let alone speak. With one exception, the films make little comment on the roles of women in Fogo Island society, except to show them as supportive listeners and, with their husbands and children, at work making fish. The discussion film A Woman's Place seems almost an afterthought: two women talk about the need for better shopping, and better (i.e., any) plumbing facilities in the island's schools. They are not asked to comment on the fishery that pays for the catalogue orders, the quality of education in the schools, or government policy, let alone the question of whether to start a fishery co-operative. Apart from one unnamed woman who appears with her in A Woman's Place, the only woman to speak in the films is Elizabeth Russell Miller. Neither is identified in the films, but Miller's earlier outspoken comments, in A Discussion on Welfare, on the evils of welfare mark her as something other than a 'typical Fogo Island housewife'. In fact, I gave this talk on October 4, 2007 at the Provincial Museum, The Rooms. 80 she likely knew as much or more about co-operatives as anyone on the island. Her father was the prominent educator, broadcaster, storyteller and writer, Ted Russell, who both before and after Confederation worked to guide and encourage cooperative development in Newfoundland. He was also responsible for radio broadcasts promoting the co-op idea; in her biography of her father, Russell Miller notes she took part in them at least once during her childhood.158 Russell Miller was likely a school principal in Joe Batt's Arm at the time the films were produced, but she had grown up in St. John's and appears to have left Fogo Island not long after the filming.159 Why is she (with one exception) the only woman to speak in these films? The omission of women's voices might not have been as glaring in 1968; however avant- garde the production philosophy at Challenge for Change may have been, the NFB was not at this point a hotbed of early feminism. If the filmmakers did consider the lack of women's voices a problem, it would have been contrary to their concept of detachment to lobby for more gender balance if women were not already part of the public discussion, and it seems clear that, at least in public, they were not. DeWitt reports that on Fogo Island, women were not expected to participate in 'men's business'. He notes that many Committee members "claim(ed) that they would leave if women were allowed to participate as 'the Improvement Committee is men's business'," and among his respondents, "few women could imagine" being involved with the Improvement Committee."160 Later research on the roles of women in traditional outport society 158 Elizabeth Miller, Uncle Mose: the life of Ted Russell (St. John's: Flanker Press, 2005) 114. 159 One of Fred Earle's files of Extension Service memos refers in 1970 to "Dr. Elizabeth Miller of the NTA (Newfoundland Teachers' Association)," which likely means she was back in St. John's. Today, Dr. Miller is professor emerita of English at Memorial University, and an internationally respected expert on the literature and mythology of vampires. 160 Robert L. DeWitt, Public Policy and Community Protest: the Fogo Case (St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1969), 63. 81 shows that these attitudes were not unusual, even years later.161 The gender divide is clear throughout the films, including The Children ofFogo, which make a point of showing how children 'play' at their parents' jobs: the boys are fishermen, builders, musicians and step dancers, but the girls are all housewives, mothers, and observers. 3.2.5 Modernity vs. Tradition The fact that Fogo Islanders were being pulled in different directions by the familiar and the new runs unspoken throughout the films; but neither influence is dismissed out of hand. In a time when the "develop or perish" philosophy encouraged the abandonment of the old ways, many speakers and situations in the Fogo Island films suggest that old ways and new each have their benefits. In The Founding of the Co operative, we see the backbreaking job of launching a longliner with no technology but a pickup truck and a few pulleys; the message is that working together can accomplish much, but the goal of the co-op is to give the island more modern technology. In another film, Fred Earle speaks easily with the last of the Fogo Island merchants, his cousin Brian Earle. Standing on the wharf outside Earle and Sons Fogo premises, they recall the old class hierarchy. Neither misses it, but Brian says, "It's no incentive to anyone to be a merchant (anymore)." Fred prompts him for more: "Pity, though, actually— that lack of communication between the fisherman and his merchant," and Brian agrees. "Sure. We should be working together and instead of that, too often, one doesn't know what the other one is doing.. ..Maybe this is the answer, to give up and 161 In her study of women along the Southern Shore of the Avalon Peninsula, Marilyn Porter explains how women organized separate community organizations from men's groups ('"The Tangly Bunch': Outport Women of the Avalon Peninsula," Newfoundland Studies, 1,1 (1985), 77-90). In 1967, a group of male filmmakers might have been unlikely to take such groups seriously, even if they had known they existed. 82 start something new."162 By "give up", Brian Earle seems to be referring to his recent announcement that Earle and Sons, whose collection of buildings forms a backdrop to the men's conversation, will be closing at the end of the season. The most profound and difficult conflict between modernity and tradition on the island is economic; the fishermen as small businessmen have little or no capital, and the changing industry demands it. Fred Earle's files show that he spent a great deal of time helping people navigate government bureaucracies. While the fishermen's knowledge of fish prices, regulations, marine carpentry and such is encyclopedic, they are frustrated by modern government and business practices. Most examples of this theme are more reflected than raised directly. In Jim Decker Builds a Longliner, Jim Decker is frustrated when the Fisheries Loan Board won't give him a loan "because I had no money... If I had the money I wouldn't want to go to them, I'd spend me own money."163 Dan Roberts talks about similar problems in Dan Roberts on Fishing. 3.2.6 Self-sufficiency Jim Decker Builds a Longliner is the story of Jim Decker's determination to have a new boat, despite a snarl of government red tape. As a half-dozen men work on his longliner, and as many more boys watch, Decker tells how he enlisted friends and neighbours for "a loan of.. .labour", with a promise to pay them back from an eventual federal subsidy. He tells Fred Earle his original plan was to buy a used boat: "timber is scarce (on Fogo Island).. .and I thought it was better if they could get me a good second hand boat, but of course they just laughed at me (in St. John's)." 164 After rejection by the Fisheries Loan Board, Decker took a small boat and some friends to a timber stand on 162 Colin Low, dir., Brian Earle on Merchants and Welfare, 3:30. 163 Low, Jim Decker Builds a Longliner, 3:20 approx. 164 Low, Jim Decker Builds a Longliner, 3:00. 83 New World Island, where they chopped raw timber, milled it into lumber, and built his longliner themselves. This is one of a number of stories fishermen tell about giving up on help from a provincial bureaucracy which seems to know little of the reality of their lives (more government criticism), and making do on their own. In The Story of the Up Top, an unidentified man tells Fred Earle the story of his small longliner, as it sits at the wharf. He had refloated a boat that had been sunk for four years, lengthened it and rebuilt its engine without "one cent, not one penny did we get" from any of the province's subsidy or loan programs. 165 Despite the widespread dependency on various forms of social assistance at the time, DeWitt's study of Fogo Island showed a deep resentment of people who were "on the dole" even among people receiving welfare themselves. Elizabeth Russell Miller's comments in A Discussion on Welfare, discussed above, would be controversial even today; it is possible she was the only person who could be persuaded to make them on camera. 3.3 Reading Outside the Frame 3.3.1 Selection of Guests Our questions about women's role in the debate, in society, or even in the films are heavily influenced by the passage of time. In the period immediately after the films' release, the principal criticism of the Fogo films at the time was that the films concentrated too much on members of the Fogo Island Improvement Committee.166 While avoiding such judgmental terms as "too much," it certainly is true that most of the 165 Low, Story of the Up Top , time unavailable. 166 Robert DeWitt makes this comment in The Experts at Memorial Discuss the Fogo Films; there are also references to the same complaints in Sandra Gwyn's Cinema as Catalyst and Dorothy Henaut's "What Challenge? What Change?" 84 people who figure prominently in the films were connected in some way with the Improvement Committee or with the co-operative movement. This is an important point to remember when watching the films. While it is difficult to avoid family or social connections of any sort in Newfoundland as a whole, let alone one small region, it is useful to be aware of them, and to consider if or how they influence the way people watched them at the time, as well as how we are to understand them today. 3.3.2 Cross-scripting A contradiction between script and visuals is called cross-scripting. The simplest example of this is to show a picture of Person A while talking about Person B: instead of paying attention to the story, the viewer is distracted, wondering, "To which do I pay attention - words or pictures?" Like the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words, one of the fundamentals of film and television production is that images overwhelm script: if the brain is asked to choose between watching and listening, it will choose watching almost every time, "particularly if the image is powerful, attractive and emotional." It is tempting to read these images not as unintentional cross-scripting but as a subtle counterpoint: notwithstanding the summer weather, the filmmakers might have been able to show grinding poverty, but neither An Introduction to Fogo Island nor any of its fellows do so. The result is a sense of optimism instead of despair. In An Introduction to Fogo Island, the script tells the tale of a remote and forgotten outpost, whose people live by outdated rules and traditions: a subsistence economy reliant on nineteenth-century technology, and a society held back from progress by illiteracy, religious chauvinism, and a lack of modern-day infrastructure: roads, 167 Lesley Stahl of CBS News quoting Ronald Reagan's communications director Michael Deaver in Dawn of the Eye: A History of the News Camera (Mark Starowicz, director: CBC/PBS/BBC, 1994). 85 telecommunications, even municipal government. But the images tell a different story. Watch this film with the sound off and the portrait is quite different. It begins with that broad sweep of coastline; clean laundry fluttering in the breeze; then a man arrives in a small but tidy fishing community and looks about approvingly. There are houses, root cellars, a general store and a half-dozen churches. We see a wedding - a universal symbol of hope and faith in the future. In a string of harbours, boats bob at their moorings; small boys play with home-made toy boats while girls in bathing suits hop from rock to rock along the landwash; on the water, fishermen pull their traps as sunlight flickers on the waves; the fish is carried ashore, cleaned and salted by hand and spread on the flakes by families who are dressed as if for a casual picnic. As the sun sets, a party is underway in a small community hall - another bride and groom watch the traditional set dances, young people flirt and older women gather around the teapot set on the wood stove. The next day (at least, in the film's implied chronology), a ferry leaves this rustic paradise laden with cars and trucks. If An Introduction to Fogo Island had no narration, and if it were a single film instead of part of a series, one would be tempted to describe it as prone to the 'tourist gaze'. We see no signs of a harsh environment, hard times, ignorance or unhappiness. Compare the images in the Fogo Island films to those in another portrait of outport life at the time, Farley Mowat and John de Visser's This Rock Within the Sea: A Heritage Lost. As the title suggests, Mowat's message was far different from that of the films in the Fogo Project. The written and visual tone, the dire predictions for the future, even (perhaps especially) the time of year in which the stark black-and-white images were made (the dead of January), paint a portrait of hopeless victims of "the bitch-goddess 86 Progress." On the other hand, the Fogo Island films say in words as well as in images that times are tough, but no tougher than the people's resolve to overcome their problems with the same determination that has let them survive under difficult conditions for three hundred years. At the end of Introduction to Fogo Island, the narrator concludes: When we came to Fogo Island, there was no specific government plan for its future, either resettlement of its people, or redevelopment. The government policy for Fogo and places like it is being formulated now, and can be influenced by the local people if they can reach a consensus and propose a plan of action... Fred Earle has helped channel this desire (to stay and live on Fogo Island) into concrete organization... and an island development committee has been formed to try to make Fogo viable in the twentieth century. The committee believes there are still enough local resources, including labour, to provide a good living for people on the island... if they are willing to invest in its development. 169 This overview of Fogo Island's options is reasonably but not entirely accurate - albeit more accurate than the paraphrases of its content in many later accounts. The script implies that government may decide to resettle the entire island. While there were persistent rumours to this effect, it was not at all the case, as noted in Chapter Two. Several other points in An Introduction to Fogo Island require clarification, if not outright correction. The narration suggests that "Fogo Island" is a single, if factionalized, community; certainly the Fogo Island Improvement Committee was working to develop a single united voice for the island and its fishermen, but at the time, it would have been almost as accurate to suggest that the Avalon Peninsula was a single community. The script also suggests that the Fogo Island Improvement Committee had been formed recently "to try to make Fogo Island viable in the twentieth century." Again, as discussed in Chapter Two, this was not the case. Fred Earle figures prominently in most of the Fogo Farley Mowat and John de Visser, This Rock Within the Sea: a heritage lost (Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown and Co, 1968), not paginated. 169 Low, Introduction to Fogo, various clips, 9:36-10:40. 87 Island films, and his role in the project is much larger than the films suggest. As the principal character in An Introduction to Fogo Island, he is portrayed here and elsewhere as the supportive local guide to a group of filmmakers whose lack of knowledge of the fishery and the area is clear to viewers and locals. We also see him act as mentor to the islanders as they draft letters to St. John's, argue over strategy and try to decide their future; and, not unimportant to these other roles, we see him as an accomplished step dancer and pickup accordion player at weddings and kitchen parties. Fred Earle was all those things and much more that is not apparent anywhere in the Fogo Island films: he was actively involved in the work of the Fogo Island Improvement Committee and its efforts to establish the co-op; with the possible exception of Don Snowden, he is the only individual without whom the Fogo Process could not have happened. 3.3.3 Staging of Scenes In the work of capturing news and documentary material on film or video, ethical challenges can be a moving target. If the images we see depended solely on a photographer's ability to anticipate what is about to happen, and get into position to catch it first, most news and documentary work would be far choppier than it is. Many television journalists and film documentarians participate in the never-ending debate about how much - if any - "staging" is acceptable.170 Some say any interruption in natural action is false; some ask a guest, "What would you be doing if we weren't here?" and proceed to ask the guest to do it; others will say re-enactments are perfectly acceptable in order to show the camera what it needs to see, as long as the re-enactment is acknowledged. To use two common and simple examples, almost all (alas, not quite all) 170 This debate is a recurring theme in the 1987 film Broadcast Nevus. When one character yells, "You were way over the line!" for staging a shot; the other replies, "They keep moving the damned thing." 88 journalists would agree that encouraging strikers to chant on a picket line is very unethical, but most accept the staging of the cliche coffee-making sequence as a hackneyed but harmless way to introduce a character. The formal visual grammar and technical limitations of filmmaking in years gone by made it even more difficult to catch action "on the fly". It takes relatively little practice, but a slight adjustment in point of view to recognize a shot or sequence of shots that has been staged by a cameraperson or director. For example, the viewer must pay attention to framing and camera placement: the way a complex action or sequence of actions is cut in the middle can only mean that it was shot from two or more angles; this is strong evidence of staging because the action has to have been either repeated, or rehearsed and shot with two or more cameras. It is common practice for experienced news and documentary photographers to shoot repeated actions - - dancing, for example, or a song with repeated choruses - from many angles and then intercut them as a single sequence. A skilled photographer may be able to "edit in the camera" in some situations: for example, if s/he knows the pot is about to boil, the camera can be moved to see the pot before a subject reaches to pick it up — 'jumping ahead of the action' to give an editor the material for a seamless edit, without interrupting the actual action. This is done repeatedly in the subtly brilliant Billy Crane Moves Away. The cameraman, perhaps with cues from the director, moves away from Crane's face as he is completing one thought, to pick up another thought as he is out of the frame. It is odd that many otherwise well-informed assessments of the Fogo Island films as examples of cinema verite and "real life" fail to notice the amount of staging in some 89 of the films. The Winds ofFogo is one of the more outstanding examples. It is not really part of the 'process films' phase, having been shot in the summer of 1968 and outside the Fogo Process, so perhaps it is a bit unfair to use it as an example of extremely staged material, but it is held up in a major anthology on Canada's film history as one of the high points of the project: "a good example of the combination of aesthetic and social idealism."171 The Winds of Fogo expands on the interview film of the previous summer, William Wells Talks About the Island. William Wells was ailso prominent in The Founding of the Co-operative. One may speculate that the frankness and simple, moving eloquence Wells senior showed in the earlier films spoke to qualities the NFB filmmakers wanted to explore more closely, using more of the visual language at their disposal than had been possible with the more naturalistic marching orders of the previous year. Here, the principal characters are Wells and two of his sons, Pierce and Don.172 The camera follows them through a series of scenes. First, they attempt, with women and children in tow, to go somewhere in a car which will not start; as one of the sons tinkers underneath the hood, he reflects in voiceover on how he would like to have a Cadillac with automatic windows, but "Father, never seen him behind the wheel of a car; I don't think I ever will.. ..he thinks he's safe on the ocean."173 In the next scene, the Wells men abandon the four-wheeled icon of modernity to take their fishing boat, with William Wells at the more reliable wheel, to the Funk Islands bird sanctuary off Fogo Island. The 'boys' admire seabird chicks as their father stays on 171 Jerry White, "The Winds of Fogo" in 24 Frames: The Cinema of Canada, ed. Jerry White (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 76. 1721 can't tell for sure which is which. 173 Low, Winds of Fogo, 5:35. 90 the boat; when there is engine trouble on what we assume is their trip home, it is solved without event. Then we see younger Wellses in a busy boat shed, likely at the newly established co-op, inspecting the half-finished hull of a wooden longliner; in voiceover, one of them admits he is ambivalent about his future: "I'd like to build a boat.. ..but if you build a boat, you gotta use her. I don't know what I'm gonna do for sure. I'll try anything for a change.. .learn something else, you know... like farming, or ranching. You know. Something different altogether than fishing." Aloud, he says to his brother, "I'll get (a boat). I'll have one before you know it."174 In the final scenes, we see family and community members flying kites, the most prominent a box kite emblazoned with the new Canadian flag. The ferry leaves, with one son on board; at William Wells's boat, children play in a small skiff sitting on the wharf as William and his younger son Pierce head back out on the water, their Canadian flag flying. Intercut between the storylines are other evocations of rural tradition and its imagined timelessness: a cat on a window ledge, the steady tick of a pendulum clock in an otherwise silent house; a woman, her hair in a kerchief against the rain, waiting and watching the horizon from a wharf; young children 'playing grownup' and mirroring the traditional roles of men and women, builders and fishermen. Some images placed in tandem illustrate the conflict between tradition and modernity in the province: the editor cuts from wild birds on the Funks to mass-produced ornamental ceramic birds on a kitchen wall, and from a fishing boat on the water to goldfish circling lazily in a bowl at home. Most of this film was clearly staged in one way or another. The scene in the car is shot from three or more different angles and would have required the family to stop, 174 Low, Winds ofFogo, 14:50. 91 restart and repeat their actions as the camera (or cameras, though this is unlikely) repositioned. The conversation is forced and stilted and several of the comments are off camera, over cutaway shots.175 This suggests that they required a number of takes. White describes the trip to the Funks as "a striking example of the everyday facts of life,"176 but the astonishing, if malodorous, beauty of an offshore bird sanctuary is far from an everyday sight, nor is it easy to experience. Boats may only land in these protected areas with permission from the federal government. Sure enough, Fred Earle's correspondence makes reference to his work securing permits for the Wellses and the film crew to go there. This would not have been a casual day trip but a logistically complicated shoot, the complexity of which we see little. For example, as the younger men jump carefully from the skiff to the sheer and slippery rocks of the bird island, the camera is already positioned on land; offloading the equipment and the mainlanders must have been something of a challenge. It would be interesting as well to know if the shots of Wells father and son working on the engine were shot out at sea, or later, close to shore; they are remarkably steady for hand-held close-ups, below decks on supposedly turbulent open water. In any event, it would be impossible for a single camera working in close quarters to capture both sides of an argument, while it is happening, in close-up. The memorable images of the Wells family and a flock of children flying kites in The Winds ofFogo were not part of a spontaneous summer day's amusement, nor were they set in the Wellses' community of Joe Batt's Arm. The event was a contest, with 175 A cutaway is a shot, related to but not part of a continuing action, that covers an edit - it cuts away from the action. 176 Jerry White, "Winds of Fogo" in The Cinema of Canada, ed. Jerry White (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 77. 177 Memo to Extension Office, St. John's from Fred Earle, July 8, 1968: "I have made all arrangements for filming on the Funk Island with the exception of permission to land there.. .1 was wondering if your office could ring Dr. Leslie M. Tulk's office and request permission to land for the purpose of making a documentary film." Fred Earle Papers, filename: "Extension Office". 92 prizes, sponsored by Extension for the benefit of the film crew. In July of 1968, Fred Earle wrote Colin Low, "The mothers of Tilting were even more excited than the children with regard to the kite flying contest which will be filmed on a day to be announced in August.. .1 look forward eagerly to working with you again."178 In the 1960s, many Newfoundland children still knew how to build simple kites from scraps of paper, wood and string, and all the kites except for the Canadian-flag box kite are clearly home-made. There were no department stores on Fogo Island in 1968: it is possible, but unlikely, that one of the few small local shops might have sold the Wellses the kit for their photogenic and relatively expensive kite, or that they ordered it by mail. Finally, no reference is made as to how William Wells comes to have two of his sons with him; in the film shot the previous summer, William Wells Talks About the Island, he said that two of his three sons had moved away and only Pierce remained. Perhaps the son boarding the ferry at the end is returning to the mainland, but we can only guess. The formality of the film language in Winds of Fogo is an exception to the rule among the Fogo Island films, but there is strong evidence of at least some staging in some of the films from the year before, particularly those intended to warm up the crowd before addressing more serious topics. Among film students and historians, Jim Decker's Party is one of the better-known Fogo Island films. It is one of the "entertainment" films, and would have been used as an opening or closing chapter at public screenings. It is framed as a cinema verite vignette of social life and traditional outport culture: the camera moves up and down and among the dancers and singers in a montage of activities at a seemingly ordinary house party: step dancing, set dances and singing, accompanied by a squeezebox and a piano accordion. Canadian film historian Jerry White writes: 178 Letter from Fred Earle to Colin Low, dated July 8, 1968. Papers of Fred Earle, filename: "Colin Low". 93 Some of verite's loveliest moments can be found in the Fogo Island series. Jim Decker's Party, for example, is a very short, entirely self-contained film (truly the title says it all); but it is also a marvel of verite aesthetics, intimate and kinetic and using the power of lightweight sync-sound cameras to capture resonant images that speak volumes about the rhythm of life on Fogo.179 However, close study of the images and editing, along with some additional information suggests much of the film is staged; the audio is moved around and layered as well. On first screening, Jim Decker's Party is simply a snapshot of a typical house party on Fogo Island, with some lively step and set dances, singing and a few drinks. A closer study, however, shows that the first few minutes of dancing feature no one but Fred Earle and Elizabeth Russell Miller, and the accordion player; is the room otherwise empty, or are others outside the frame watching? It is difficult to know. The two finish their dance, and with one smooth edit, the room is full of people getting ready for a set dance. The dancers include, among others, Elizabeth Russell Miller, Jim Decker and the film crew's young local intern, Randy Coffin. Besides appearing in one of the first films shot {Jim Decker Builds a Longliner), Decker went on to become the first manager of the co-operative's shipyard. The camera may have had a synchronized sound system but it was not used for the final edit: the stamping feet we see in the set dance are out of sync with the sound track, and even more obvious is the audio between the set dance and the sing-along. We see Fred Earle getting his piano accordion ready to play, and talking to another man on guitar, but there is no lip-sync; in fact, we hear Earle's voice on the 1 SO soundtrack, saying, "you change your partner" three times. The dance begins and dancers jostle each other and the camera as they move in their prescribed patterns around the room. Russell Miller sweeps by in one shot, but as 179 White, "The Winds of Fogo," 75-76. 180 Jim Decker's Party, 3:31, 3:50, and4:07. 94 the next cuts to the accordion player, the feet of a seated woman beside him are wearing Russell Miller's shoes. It should be noted that, notwithstanding the praiseworthy verite style, the images we see are not exactly what happened, though none is 'over the line' ethically, or all that unusual even today;181 if Ted Russell's daughter and the Extension service officer had a few 'scuffs' to get things started at Jim Decker's party, few would blame the director for recording it. More awkward, and less defensible against charges of the 'tourist gaze', is the sudden appearance of songbooks in the last scene, as the by-now comfortably lubricated partiers sing "The Ryans and the Pittmans", better known as "We'll Rant and We'll Roar (Like True Newfoundlanders)." It is not a song most Newfoundlanders sing spontaneously among themselves, because almost no one knows the verses. Certainly that is the case here; people peer over each other's shoulders to read the lyrics from a half- dozen or so identical songbooks. Where would these apparently new copies of the songbook, Old-Time Songs and Poetry of Newfoundland have come from, who would have brought them along to a house party, and why is Fred Earle ready to accompany them on his elaborate piano accordion? It is unlikely that so many copies were lying around someone's house, or that there was a tourist office with stacks of such material on Fogo Island in 1967. The likeliest conclusion is that the sing-along was not entirely spontaneous. A scene like this is too good to be true, a gift for any filmmaker waiting for a picture worth the proverbial thousand words: a happy crew, drinks in hand, singing 181 in the late winter of 2007-08,1 spent an afternoon in a Halifax coffee shop, working on an earlier draft of this chapter. Beside me, two young filmmakers were engaged in an earnest conversation about the importance of letting their subjects get used to their, and the camera's presence. Let the camera run for a while, one told the other, and don't worry about the shot until they forget it's there. How much more might this have been the case on Fogo Island in 1967? 95 "like true Newfoundlanders." The recipient of this gift had, in all likelihood, at least hinted at what he wanted. It may seem that all these examples of 'movie magic' in some of the best-known Fogo Island films consign the films as a whole to the box labelled 'tourist gaze', but that is not the case; they speak rather to motivation, and what Lippman called 'the habits of our eyes.' The challenge to any stereotype is the question of whether it is true. The films most prone to charges of the tourist gaze are those intended for outsiders {Introduction to Fogo Island, Winds of Fogo) or intended mainly for the entertainment of local people {Jim Decker's Party, A Wedding and Party) As McKay points out, citing John Berger, "all we see is affected by what we know."182 The role of films such as Jim Decker's Party was not to propagate stereotypes in urban Canada, but to amuse a local audience, perhaps to relax them a little before moving on to matters more serious than the quality of Fred Earle's accordion playing. The camerawork is well and fashionably done, but a National Film Board cinematographer could hardly work otherwise, and the film was not designed with potential visitors from Toronto in mind. To know, when we watch them today, that they were made to speak to the people of Fogo Island, increases rather than discounts their value. The Winds of Fogo, in particular, is different in tone and structure from the other Fogo Island films, and not just because it is the only one of the series shot in colour. It adheres much more closely to the traditional grammar of film documentary, with its carefully framed sequences, visual metaphors and narrative arc: William is all at sea in a car, where a younger man is in control, but at his ease on the water, even in a gale, and 182 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: antimodernism and cultural selection in twentieth-century Nova Scotia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994), xiii. 96 orders his son around. Meanwhile, a woman we assume is Mrs. Wells watches and waits silently on shore. It is beautifully executed and interesting to parse, but it never matches the natural elegance of the earlier film, William Wells Talks About the Island, which likely moved Low to return for more. If anything the comparison shows the difference between images driven by the tourist gaze and those of the actual Fogo Process films. Any one of the activities might have been something the Wellses would have done away from the camera, but none rings as true as when they say what they choose to say, without direction. 3.4 Conclusion The collected films offer a wide range of content, styles and material for further study. They are not a complete picture of life on Fogo Island, but they reflect at least part of the communities' struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world. On the wider horizon, they are among the first examples of ordinary people challenging the government and its pro-industrialization, 'develop or die' philosophy, and they hold a mirror to the contemporary social attitudes and concerns. The filmmakers may not have wanted or seen themselves to take a point of view, but the series of decisions, negotiations and compromises which go into creating a film ultimately does not allow them to avoid it. This is not to detract from the films' usefulness and importance as history, but rather to say that they must be read in the context of their limitations as well as their strengths. Overall, to study the films in concert with other research and articles is to add a whole new layer to the history of the period. In the histories of both Fogo Island and the development of modern-day Newfoundland culture, this sample underscores why we must be prepared to read 97 moving-image archival documents differently from their text-based counterparts: we can forget that the world inside the frame is at best only a slice of reality, and even that needs additional information important in all media: checking the facts, knowing the background and context to events, and finally, knowing who is doing the 'writing', who is doing the talking, and what is left out. 98 CHAPTER FOUR: FILM AS FODDER FOR A CULTURAL REVOLUTION An often-quoted 1976 magazine article by Sandra Grwyn reflects the early days of a burgeoning new Newfoundland arts community, of which she was a sometime part. It describes much of the revolution's 'family tree'; almost all of the people and groups mentioned had some connection to the Fogo Island project or the MUN Extension Service. The Fogo Island project left a cultural legacy that reached far beyond Fogo Island. As in the Fogo Process, the ideas and attitudes behind Newfoundland's so-called cultural revolution were politically daring for the time, and ran contrary to the provincial government's view of what Newfoundland needed, but again, timeliness and connections were on their side. The Fogo ideas found a home among the first post-Confederation generation as it came of age, and as the tide was beginning to turn against the Smallwood and his vision of Newfoundland's future. The Fogo project's most direct artistic legacies are in film and theatre, which in turn helped to establish a base for the long-term survival of the cultural community. At the same time, people such as Sandra Gwyn and Edythe Goodridge knew how to promote the revolution to the country at large, and to federal programs that would help to fund the 'Newfoundland Renaissance.' This chapter will trace how the people in Gwyn's article were influenced, directly and indirectly, by the Fogo Island films, and how the artists' supporters at Extension might have used their links to networks in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto to further the cultural agenda. But Newfoundland's cultural revolution would have been talking to itself in downtown bars if it had not found an audience at home first: an educated generation with time to play, and an interest in where it came from. These events are not unique, and they are not driven only by effete urbanites. A relatively small coterie of artists, 99 bureaucrats and journalists had much to do with sending the ripples of the Fogo Island films into everyday life in Newfoundland and Labrador. They did not 'invent' Newfoundland culture, any more than the Fogo Island project invented the co-operative; they helped to create an environment in which Newfoundland culture could watch itself, and talk about what it saw. The nature of Newfoundland culture is often discussed in racial or nationalist terms. A disparate collection of locals, expatriates and outsiders has dealt in variations on these stereotypes: among 20th-century writers on Newfoundland and Labrador, Farley Mowat is one of the most romantic, Ray Guy one of the most acerbic, yet both assert bred-in-the-bone traits of character and culture. Mowat in full flight described pre- Confederation outport Newfoundlanders (in his view, the pur laine of the North Atlantic) as "vigorous.. .a unique and fascinating breed. They were quick, confident, eminently successful survivors of an evolutionary winnowing-process that few modern races have undergone.. .Under-educated and largely illiterate as they may have been, their understanding of and empathy with strange peoples with strange ways was deeper and embraced more tolerance than most of us can claim today." 183 Tongue only partly in cheek, Guy wrote, "Your (average) Newfoundlander has undergone four centuries of an extremely rigorous breeding program.. .This fortuitous distillation has left us with an 1 84 exceedingly durable race." Nor are academics entirely immune to temptation: Patrick O'Flaherty concluded that "the hardy Newfoundlanders along the 'loose lines' drawn by (Richard) Howley might not exist, but that the Newfoundlander was in some way 'a Mowat, This Rock Within the Sea, not paginated. 184 Ray Guy, "A fortuitous distillation", in You May Know Them as Sea Urchins. Ma'am, ed. Eric Norman (St. John's: Breakwater Books, 1976), 116. 100 special type' could not be doubted."185 Journalism and other popular media almost unfailingly refer to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador as having been 'bred' to survive in an inhospitable environment, and often as a simple if not simple-minded tribe who inherited the alleged Irish love of party, story and song; tourism promotions praise hospitality, humour and friendliness.186 There is a disconnect between these stereotypes, easy to associate with McKay's and Overton's critiques of tourist gaze, and the existence of an innovative, thriving and sophisticated arts community whose work is part of everyday life in the province. O'Dea has argued that "Newfoundland's history is Newfoundland's culture;"187 in the early 1950s a cranky Harold Horwood notoriously argued against the "belief that we have in this Province a very distinctive and flavourful culture.. .The truth is that Newfoundland has no literature, no music, no art, little philosophy and less science. The only culture which we have is the culture of the fish flake, though even that isn't our own, having come with our peasant ancestors from England and the Channel Islands."188 Horwood overstated his case, but with few exceptions, much of Newfoundland visual and performance culture before the late 1960s was based either on folk traditions or what was popular in Britain and on the "mainland". There are strong parallels between the cultural environment in Newfoundland during the 1950s and early 1960s, and that of early nineteenth-century Wales, as described by Prys Morgan in Eric Hobsbawm's The Invention of Culture. The cultural revolution in Newfoundland and Labrador may have begun in downtown flats and university offices of St. John's, but it found its audience in 185 O'Flahertv, The Rock Observed. 91-92. 186 Jerry Bannister, "Making History: Cultural Memory in Twentieth-Century Newfoundland," Newfoundland Studies 18, 2 (2002), 180. 187 Overton, Culture on the margin, 73. 188 Quoted in Overton, "Sparking a Cultural Revolution," 192. 101 the public at large, as the province was emerging from the Smallwood era. Smallwood's cultural legacy is complex: as radio's Barrelman, "making Newfoundland better known 1 QQ to Newfoundlanders," he "constructed a national mythos for Newfoundland, so that in 1947 possibly no one else was more ready to pronounce upon its tradition and culture."190 As premier, he established the Arts and Letters Competitions in 1951 and made the province's Arts and Culture Centres the main Centennial project, but he had little to do with them thereafter; certainly the resettlement programs paid scant attention to culture or tradition. In his later years he struggled physically and financially as he tried to complete the Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador. A new generation would come to criticize his views on culture (among other things) as out of date and even subservient to mainstream North American standards, but then there is the irony in the fact that he helped to create that generation, particularly through his educational legacy, the heart of which was Memorial University. Most post-1949 writers on Newfoundland and Labrador are both observers and part of a cultural and academic community which began to grow rapidly in the late 1960s, in concert with the sprawl of Memorial and the baby boomers' coming of age. Few have ventured explanations of how allegedly genetic character traits and the obstacles of history somehow spawned CODCO and Rick Mercer, Christopher Pratt and Festival 500, Michael Crummey and Lisa Moore. Throughout the 1960s, the world was changing at a remarkable rate - space travel, the baby boom and its 'youthquake', the welfare state - at the same time as Newfoundland was racing to catch up. It meant that two, or even three generations' worth the slogan of the program. Rompkey, Literature and Identity, 67. 102 of change elsewhere was happening for Canada's newest province in one. The challenges of getting roads, schools, government services, electricity and telephones to as many people as possible, as fast as possible, drove much of the federal and provincial government agenda. Voters wanted it all and many were willing to accept resettlement if that was the only way to get it. As the decade progressed, however, the questions of what these new opportunities would cost in non-financial terms were being asked more and more. That 1976 article in Saturday Night magazine is often cited as an early and important national acknowledgement of a vibrant regional culture in Newfoundland and Labrador, but the elements of 'The Newfoundland Renaissance' had been at work for some time by then. The essay, by the magazine's Ottawa editor, Sandra Gwyn, trumpeted the debut of a saucy newcomer on the national scene: "Only yesterday, Newfoundland stood for cod and Joey Smallwood; now it stands for some of freshest, brashest, most compelling art in the country.. .painters and actors and poets are popping up in sweet and splendid profusion... (many are) members of the populist activist movement in the province that attempts both to celebrate the past and to build a democratic future."191 This description is reminiscent in spirit of Gwyn's 1972 report for Extension: "The people (of Fogo Island) were trapped in a cycle of isolation and poverty.. .Through looking at each other and themselves (in the films), Fogo Islanders began to realize the commonality of their problems as important, they began to become conscious of their identity as Fogo Islanders; they discovered that preserving the Fogo environment 1 Sandra Gwyn, "The Newfoundland Renaissance", Saturday Night (April 1976), 40. 103 mattered to nearly all of them."192 The similarity between the artists' 'movement' and the Fogo Islanders' realizations is striking; if the voice seems similar as well, it is because the writer is also Sandra Gwyn. She prepared the report for the Extension Service on a conference revisiting the Fogo Project and other iterations of the process. Perhaps this is one of the "relatively marginal tasks" referred to by her Saturday Night editor and mentor, Robert Fulford, as having helped to hone her journalistic skills. Fulford also described Gwyn as "the first (and, for a while, the only) national journalist who eloquently urged an appreciation of Newfoundland's cultural and historical uniqueness."193 From the bully pulpit of Saturday Night, Gwyn was able to direct national attention to Newfoundland culture. 4.1 First Reactions to the Fogo Island Films We see public comments like those in Andrew Brett at Shoal Bay and Billy Crane Moves Away every day in 2008, but they were unusual in the Newfoundland and Labrador of the mid-1960s. The Smallwood Liberals had just won another whomping majority the previous year, leaving the Progressive Conservatives with three seats - down from seven - out of 42. It would be late 1971 before another election began to pry Smallwood's fingers from the reins of power; in early 1968, the content of the Fogo Island films was enough to make the president of Memorial, Lord Taylor, very nervous. Don Snowden told Wendy Quarry that Taylor "thought the Fogo films would cause political problems.. .particularly since some of the comments in the films were extremely critical of the provincial government... (E)veryone at the screening became upset and 192 Sandra Gwyn, Cinema as Catalyst: film, video-tape and social change, (St. John's: Memorial University Extension Service, 1972), 5. 193 Robert Fulford's eulogy for Sandra Gwyn, delivered May 30,2000; published in the National Post, May 31, 2000. Downloaded from www.robertfulford.com/SandraGwyn.html 3 May, 2008. 104 even talked of stopping work on Fogo." Snowden called on author Richard Gwyn, who had just completed his biography of the premier. "It was felt that he could best advise them as to what would be Smallwood's reaction to the films. Gwyn did not agree with the university president's fears that the films would be harmful to the university and suggested that a screening be set up for the Premier and his cabinet."194 Sandra Gwyn describes the impact of that screening, in late January 1968, as "profound."195 As Richard Gwyn had predicted, the overall reaction was largely positive. Provincial fisheries minister Aidan Maloney asked to be interviewed for a government response, and sections of the film appeared in two of the Fogo Island films.196 Like the films' vertical structure, it may not have been part of the plan, but it was touted as another coup for the Fogo Process, marking "the first back and forth use of the material between communities and decisions (sic) makers (as) another part of the Fogo Process was born."197 There are few first-hand accounts of how Fogo Islanders reacted to seeing themselves on film. An anonymous internal report from Extension said that like most people, they laughed nervously at first, and then got used to, even enjoyed seeing Quarry, The Fogo Process. 14. 195 Gwyn, Cinema as Catalyst. 6. 196 Maloney appears in Citizen Discussions and Fishermen's Meeting, but it is apparent both segments were recorded in one sitting. Oddly, however, the audio on the off-camera questions was relaid, replacing the voice of the actual interviewer with another, which appears to be Snowden's. 197 Quarry, p 15. Sandra Gwyn corroborates this story, told to Quarry by Donald Snowden, but relates it less specifically than Quarry does. She says that "there was.. .considerable doubt as to how the Newfoundland Government would react to this unprecedented exercise in participatory democracy", without mentioning Taylor or Small wood by name, though she does say that Richard Gwyn's familiarity with Smallwood was the reason "Snowden sought his advice." (Cinema as Catalyst. 5-6). None of the NFB-focussed histories mentions it at all, suggesting only that recording a government response was all part of the plan (Jones, 163), or that the fisheries department filmed its own response (Evans, 164). Watson says the filmmakers discussed with the Fogo Islanders whether the films should be shown to government officials (Watson, 114). In the 1999 revised softcover edition of Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary, Richard Gwyn describes the Fogo Island project (376-378), but makes no mention of his role in its latter stages. 105 themselves and their neighbours on the screen. However, the report (likely authored by Snowden) came to the ironic conclusion that "the presence of camera and equipment (at screenings) had an inhibiting effect on discussion."198 The report noted both "overall approval and enjoyment"199 by audiences, and the importance of ensuring that tensions did not get out of hand during discussions: "We strayed from the format (of using entertainment films to lighten the tone).. .with disastrous results. (One night) we ended the presentation with a critical film on welfare and lost our audience - they walked out."200 The most consistent problems appeared to come from members of the clergy: one 'forbade' the films to be shown off the island; another restricted access to the hall, and the screening in a Pentecostal church hall could not show drinking, music or dancing. At the early community screenings of the Fogo Island films, attention was focussed on what people were saying about specific issues - the "process" - and not on what the films - the "product" - said about the people, their history or their culture, let alone how audiences might have felt about any such comments. There were more immediate issues to deal with; it must have been one of the busiest Decembers Fogo Island had seen in years. As the filmmakers took their show on the island's roads for more than two dozen separate screening events, the Improvement Committee prepared for the late December meeting that founded the co-operative. However, it seems fair to argue that twenty-six films about the problems of five thousand people would have had an effect on their assessment of their, and their communities' importance. 198 MUN Extension report (no author cited), Fogo Island Film and Development Project (no date, early 1968), 68. Files of Fred Earle, filename: Fogo Island Films 199 MUN report, 11. 200 MUN report, 10. 201 MUN report, 10-11. 106 4.2 Spreading the Word After the Fogo Island project, the NFB took Challenge for Change to other parts of the country, and Extension continued to develop the Fogo Process. As the films travelled around Newfoundland and Labrador, the ideas behind them continued to evolve in some unexpected ways. In Port au Choix on the Northern Peninsula (another region noted as ripe for co-operatives in Snowden's 1965 ARDA study202) people talked first about a co-operative, and later about a fishermen's union. In 1970, one of the founders of the Northern Fishermen's Union (which would become the Newfoundland Fish, Food and Allied Workers' Union) was Father Desmond McGrath, a local priest who had participated in the Port au Choix process.203 In Cinema as Catalyst, the 1972 review of the Fogo Process, Sandra Gwyn wrote that "(for Newfoundlanders, the) act of seeing ourselves on the screen.. .strengthens our sense of self; emphasizes our sense of dignity.. .(I)t is only a step to self-respect, a quality which has been defined as the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life. Often that willingness is the foundation on which consensus for social change can be built."204 Four years later, in "The Newfoundland Renaissance," she describes the "intense psychological experience" of watching a Mummers' Troupe play about the 1959 woodworkers' strike, in an audience of people whose own stories had formed the script. It "moved me profoundly and gave the women sitting next to me a sense, possibly for the 202 Snowden, ARDA study, 91, 96. 203 Bill Gillespie, A Class Act: an illustrated history of the labour movement in Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John's: Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour, 1986), 128. Gillespie notes that McGrath was no stranger to co-operatives: he attended St. Francis Xavier University, and worked with Moses Coady. 204 Gwyn, Cinema as Catalyst. 1-2. 107 first time in their lives, of having been important."2®5 If watching actors say one's words engenders empowerment or agency, would not seeing oneself or one's neighbours on a screen do the same thing? There is little doubt that Gwyn would have thought so: if the Mummers' IWA, a child of the Fogo Process (as we shall see), could engender such a reaction, how could this not have been the case for people across the province watching the Fogo Island films? 4.3 The Unintended Audience The impact of the Fogo Island films was magnified because of who saw them. At first glance, this statement is obvious enough: if they had been shown to groups of film students in London, say, they might have led to a discussion of cinema verite but not to any community-changing action. The films were aimed at people on Fogo Island and at bureaucrats and politicians in St. John's; these people saw them and at least partly because they did, there is today a co-op on Fogo Island. The artists and young people in and around Memorial University in St. John's were not targets of the project at all, but their adaptations of the films' approach and goals helped create what is today a vibrant and well-established arts community in Newfoundland and Labrador. The films and the thinking behind them introduced a new, or at least refocussed, view of Newfoundland culture and society. The connections between the Fogo Island films and almost every aspect of contemporary local culture in Newfoundland and Labrador range from the direct to the tangential, but over two generations few artists can say they owe no debt to the project; thence the title of this chapter. It is not possible to connect all the dots here; what follows is an attempt to make the point which others may Gwyn, "The Newfoundland Renaissance", 44. 108 pursue over a beer at the Ship Pub (once the Ship Inn), perhaps the only bar to win an award for its patronage of the arts.206 4.4 Backstage at the Revolution The Gwyn essay is frequently cited as a point of departure for the "Newfoundland Renaissance", but by the time it appeared in 1976, responses in the arts community to the Fogo films' view of a salvageable and desirable Newfoundland traditional society and culture had been established for years. The article introduced the rest of Canada to the network of individuals and groups whom Gwyn called revolutionaries, but who today are part of the province's cultural establishment: CODCO, the Mummers' Troupe, Ray Guy, Gerry Squires, et al. The title of the article became a term in itself, but it may well have been coined by an editor, since Gwyn never uses it. Instead, she describes a "cultural revolution." She could find, she wrote, only one possible parallel in Canada to what was happening in Newfoundland, and that was Quebec's Quiet Revolution: "for joual, read Newfspeak..Just as Quebec artists were at the leading edge of the Quiet Revolution, many Newfoundland artists are spiritual or practical members of the populist activist movement that attempts both to celebrate the past and to build a democratic future. It's an intensely political movement that as yet has no visible political expression, except indirectly through the powerful Fishermen's Union."207 And, one should note, through the Fogo Process. Sandra Fraser Gwyn was a journalist, but she was no detached observer of the booming cultural and nationalist awareness in Newfoundland. She was part of a small 206 The Ship Pub, across the street from the LSPU Hall, has been an artists' hangout since it opened in the 1980s. The Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council named the Ship Inn, as it was then known, "Patron of the Arts" in 1999 and 2000. Project and the MUN Extension Service. Born in St. John's, she spent much of her working life with one foot planted in central Canada's media community with her husband Richard, and one planted in Newfoundland, in the midst of everything her Saturday Night article talked about.208 Her connections went well beyond her report for the Extension Service. Her cousin and close friend since childhood, Edythe Ryan Goodridge, is introduced in "The Newfoundland Renaissance" as director of "the crossroads and command post for Newfoundland's cultural revolution", the Memorial University Art Gallery. "(A) cross between Dorothy Cameron and La Pasionaria... (Goodridge) promotes Newfoundland artists on the mainland with the same baroque, bamboozling eloquence with which Joey Smallwood once promoted Confederation.. .A couple of years ago, for instance, she persuaded officials at the Department of the Secretary of State that the Mummers (theatre troupe) had as much claim to multiculturalism funds as Ukrainian folk-dancers."209 Goodridge is also part of the Fogo Island films' family tree. Before becoming director of the Art Gallery, she had been an Extension Service officer. Her assignments included the print edition of Decks Awash, and helping Fogo Islanders to start the Fogo Islander, a newsletter which kept Fogo Islanders up to date on happenings around the Gwyn and Goodridge interviews with Peter Gzowski, Gzowski and Company: Edythe Goodridge (CBC Television, fall/winter 1985-86, produced and directed by Ron Crocker). I did the research, and many of the interviews, for this program. 209 Gwyn, "The Newfoundland Renaissance", 41. The comparisons are apt if dated: Dorothy Cameron was a prominent and influential, as well as controversial Toronto art dealer in the 1960s; La Pasionaria (Dolores Ibarruri Gomez) was a flamboyant and outspoken Communist Party leader in the Spanish Civil War. 110 island and at the co-op.210 After her time at the MUN Art Gallery, Goodridge went to Ottawa, where she became head of the visual arts section at the Canada Council, and continued to support many of the artists mentioned in Gwyi's essay. She has been described as the "mother.. .of the New Newfoundland... (who) convinced Ottawa that Newfoundlanders should be treated as a distinct ethnic group and made sure that Canadians saw what was distinctive about us."211 Both Goodridge and Gwyn were well-positioned to proselytize both for the ideals behind the Fogo Process, and for the province's 'cultural revolution'. That Snowden was able to call 'unofficially' on Richard Gwyn to intercede in the Lord Taylor affair suggests that they were part of the same network. Other threads in Snowden's background suggest he also maintained useful connections to the cultural and governmental powers in central Canada. In a previous job, as a bureaucrat with Indian and Northern Affairs, Snowden had been instrumental in establishing some of the early Inuit art co-operatives; he saw the effects of developing art and craft skills in remote communities. Sandra Gwyn's Saturday Night article alone was pivotal to the recognition of "Newfcult"; her influence on the arts community in Newfoundland and Labrador has continued despite her death in 2001. Richard Gwyn established the province's largest literary awards in her memory. The Winterset Award is named after her childhood home in St. John's, and awards three prizes (one of $5000 and two of $1000) for "excellence in 2I0A copy of the first issue is part of the Tony Williamson papers in the archives of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University. Goodridge and other members of the editorial staff put their signatures on the front page. Fred Earle wrote a regular column in the Fogo Islander, as did several area clergymen, including a United Church minister who arrived from British Columbia after the films were completed. In 1972, Rev. Ivan Jesperson appeared in the NFB/Extension film revisiting the Fogo Experiment, A Memo from Fogo; he would go on to play his own role in the province's cultural life, as the founder of Jesperson Press. 2llShane O'Dea, "Ovation honouring Edythe Ryan Goodridge", Oct. 29, 1998. 4.5 The Revolution on Stage and Elsewhere Supporters such as Goodridge and Gwyn played an important role in the Newfoundland Renaissance. Such people, popularly referred to as culture mavens, are important to artists, and to cultural trends, by virtue of their networking skills and the attendant influence on others; but the so-called revolution would have begun to sputter in short order without a steady supply of fuel. As Extension had nurtured the idea of a co operative on Fogo Island for some time before 1967, so did the Fogo Island project lead to the nurturing of artists in film (on purpose) and in theatre (almost by accident). Part of the original 1967 co-operation agreement between Memorial and the Film Board was that the Board would "collaborate in establishing this (film) Unit, by giving technical assistance and advice, until it becomes self-sustaining within the University." The unit and the people who trained there were the forerunners of the ETV (Educational Television) unit at Memorial, and of the Newfoundland Independent Filmmakers Co operative (NIFCO), to which most of the province's established filmmakers have a connection. NIFCO was started in 1975 by a group of young filmmakers who included Michael Jones, John Doyle, David and Paul Pope and Extension Service employee Derek Norman, and "a small cache of used and borrowed equipment provided by MUN Extension. The Extension service also gave NIFCO $7000 and the NFB donated office NLAC website, http://www.nlac.nf.ca/awards/winterset.shtml 213 Draft press release dated Jan. 29, 1968. Fred Earle papers, file name: Fogo Films. Also discussed in Quarry, 18-20. 112 space at its building in (St. John's)."214 Most members of the province's filmmaking community today have started or developed their filmmaking practice at NIFCO. They include William D. MacGillivray, Ken Pittman, Anita McGee, Barbara Doran, and Gerry Rogers. NIFCO projects in their turn created a workspace and experience for other young artists: one example, the legendary ten-year marathon of production and post-production that is now known as The Adventure ofFaustus Bidgood involved literally hundreds of people on and off camera, working for little or no pay. They may not have profited on paper, but the Fogo Project's investment paid handsome dividends in the evolution of a film community. Concurrently, a revolution in locally created and produced theatre was also underway. The stage had long been part of St. John's social and cultural life, but for the most part, the post-Fogo explosion of original local theatre evokes the days of Johnny Burke of the late nineteenth century more than the relatively sedate community theatre companies of the first half of the twentieth. The principles behind the Fogo Project, stoked by the radical youth politics of the 1960s, helped to fuel a movement for community-focussed, often very political, theatre in Newfoundland. The group with the most direct ties to the Fogo Island project was the Mummers' Troupe. In 1972, the Extension Service hired Chris Brookes, as an artist in residence. Born in St. John's, Brookes had "emerged from the 1960s with a theatre degree from an American university, which I had earned, and a temporary place in the American Jamie Fitzpatrick, "Early Days: film and video" Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage website, I happened to see some of the community development films the people from Memorial Extension had made on Fogo Island, and it struck me that maybe theatre could be used to the same kind of end."216 With Lynn Lunde, John Doyle and Kevin Pittman, he founded the Mummers' Troupe, a theatre company which would use Fogo Process principles to create collaboratively written, topical and highly political plays such as Gray Mourn, Company Town: the Story ofBuchans, IWA, and Dying Hard (about the health problems of fluorspar industry workers on the Burin Peninsula).217 Echoing the ideals of the Fogo Process, Brookes told Gwyn, "We have to show people themselves.. .before they forget who they are."218 Most viewers would say these plays had a strong point of view, but Brookes (echoing Extension's Don Snowden) maintained that he aimed to be neutral in regard to how people responded to what they saw. In his 1988 book on the history of the company, Brookes asserted that while some writers associated the Mummers with the Canadian Workers Theatre Movement of the 1930s, "Our work was far less doctrinaire, more similar to the kind of 'theatre for development' methodology used today in areas of the Third World."219 Although concurrent with similar developments in other parts of Canada, notably Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, the Mummers' productions were modelled on the Fogo experiment. Brookes was connected to Fogo through a residency with the Extension Chris Brookes, A Public Nuisance: a history of the Mummers' Troupe (St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1988), 5. 216 Gwyn, "The Newfoundland Renaissance", 44. 217 Brookes, A Public Nuisance, p 43. 218 Gwyn, "The Newfoundland Renaissance", 40. 219 Brookes, A Public Nuisance, xii. 114 Service, and also worked with Extension Service employees on several community theatre projects.220 The translation of the community development process to the creative process is clear: during the creation of Gros Mourn, a play about communities resettled to make way for a new national park, Brookes wrote, "8 August 1973.. .We are becoming a workshop for these kids (in Sally's Cove, one of the towns being relocated.. .A) dozen are trooping down the road with Mary Walsh, videotaping everything in sight with our 991 borrowed portapak camera." Much of McKay's criticism of urban collectors of traditional culture, such as Helen Creighton, revolves around the researchers' alleged sense of ownership over, and the ensuing commodification of, the materials collected. This is not the case in the Fogo Process or in the work of such groups as the Mummers. The Mummers' voice was highly political, and took the issues of small and often isolated communities to urban centres across Canada. They also performed in the communities whose people had been part of the script development process. Gwyn describes the prelude to a performance of the Mummers' IWA (about the 1959 woodworkers' strike) in Badger. "The cast is having a bad case of the jitters. The guts of IWA come straight out of interviews the Mummers conducted with people in Badger. 'I keep thinking,' says Donna Butt, 'of the last thing one of those people said to me. 'Now for God's sake, missus, don't make fun of us.' .. .When the play gets to the sequences Donna worked out, where she plays a striker's wife .. .two women (in the audience) sit bolt upright. Almost before the scene ends, they e-mail communication with Chris Brookes, 14 December 2006. Brookes, A Public Nuisance. 84. 115 jump to their feet and start clapping. Then they turn and put their arms around each other."222 Money problems, competing agendas and ego clashes led to rifts and departures starting not long after Gwyn's article appeared, and the Mummers' Troupe closed for good in 1982. Brookes's history of the company lists more than fifty members over its decade of life as "a public nuisance". More than half the people on the list are well- known for their work in a range of disciplines: music (Ron Hynes, Don Wherry, Denis Parker, Kelly Russell, Pamela Morgan), visual art (Geoff Butler, Frank Lapointe, Steven Osier, Gerry Squires), publishing (Clyde Rose), and arts production and administration (Mary-Lynn Bernard, Ann Narvaez, Glen Tilley) as well as theatre (from Kay Anonson to Michael Wade). Throughout the 1970s, such groups as CODCO, the Newfoundland Travelling Theatre Company, Rising Tide and other, more ad hoc groups worked with musicians and visual artists as well as with each other.223 If outport and working-class Newfoundlanders liked the outspoken tacks taken by such productions as IWA, others did not. The frictions foreseen at early screenings of the Fogo Island films were apparent in relations between the young artists and their supporters on one side, and the St. John's establishment on the other. Gwyn's article has a clear point of view here: "not to be rude about stuff like (the novelty country song) Aunt Martha's Sheep or the well-intended but insane attempts to mount a full-scale symphony orchestra in St. John's... (The old.. .songs, tin-whistle melodies and elaborate recitations) are the real musical tradition of the island."224 She described "the new order" 222 Gwyn, "The Newfoundland Renaissance," 42. 223 Denyse Lynde, Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage website, Codco and the Mummers as not part of his priorities and invests instead in retread productions of Gypsy and The Music Man." Brookes is more blunt, frequently castigating provincial bureaucrats, particularly at the Arts and Culture Centre, for their disinterest in Newfoundland-based productions and performers. In a 2008 article for the Newfoundland Quarterly, journalist Roger Bill quotes Andy Jones, Pamela Morgan and Edythe Goodridge as critical of the director of cultural affairs, John Perlin: "Goodridge... described him as her 'nemesis' for more than ten years."225 If the political was personal at some levels, the divisions were more porous at the ground level of the revolution. Members of the Mummers and other companies migrated back and forth between the company and other projects, many of which had their own varying degrees of connection to the Fogo Island films. As well as working on Gros Mourn, Walsh was a member of CODCO, along with Andy and Cathy Jones (Michael Jones's brother and sister). Another CODCO founder, Greg Malone, had been an intern on the Fogo Experiment (as was another future actor, Brian Hennessey). CODCO's first show was funded by Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, but the group established its base in St. John's, where its fractious and talented members would diversify into music (the Wonderful Grand Band), mainstream theatre and films (Bob Joy, Andy Jones, and Mary Walsh in particular), and television (WGB, CODCO, This Hour Has 22 Minutes). This branch of the cultural family tree extends to a second generation with the work of artists such as Greg Thomey, Mark Critch, Shaun Majumder and Rick Mercer, the last two of whom were first successful as solo comedians; Mercer's network television series The 225 Roger Bill, "Culture vs. Policy vs. Culture," Newfoundland Quarterly online feature for issue 426, spring 2008. Rick Mercer Report is a spinoff from This Hour has 22 Minutes. As well, percussionist Don Wherry was part of Mummers' productions, as well as working with the Gwyn- maligned St. John's Orchestra. A musician without boundaries, he later founded Sound Symposium, a bi-annual festival of alternative sound and music which fits no imaginable tourist-board stereotypes. The musical, visual arts and literary communities were less directly influenced by the Fogo Island project than were film and theatre, though all were nurtured by the Extension Service and its philosophy. South of St. John's, the St. Michael's Printshop co operative supported and taught dozens of printmakers, and the growing community of young local artists included rock drummer Noel Dinn. Dinn and his Philadelphia Creamcheese Band mate, Laverne Squires, provided the musical soundtrack for An Introduction to Fogo Island.226. In the early seventies, the Creamcheese Band morphed into the more Newfoundlandesque but still rock-focused Lukey's Boat before it became Figgy Duff. The members of Figgy Duff were assiduous collectors of Newfoundland traditional music, particularly through Dinn and singer Pamela Morgan. Besides their own work, they collaborated with, and popularized, traditional musicians such as Emile Benoit, Rufus Guinchard, playing electrified backup band to the elderly fiddlers. As the people on Fogo Island were fearful of resettlement, many Newfoundland artists in the 1970s were driven by a belief that they were fighting to save a loved one on life support. In Saturday Night, Gwyn asked, "Can the flower endure? I just don't know. This generation of artists - my own generation - is also a transitional one. 'The last of the real Newfoundlanders,' to use (Patrick) O'Flaherty's phrase. The old order that produced 226 The film had no credits, but Squires's voice is distinctive, and I have been told by Randy Coffin that Dinn was responsible for die arrangement and the recording. 118 all of us is being smashed, homogenized and trivialized out of existence."227 She described Christopher Pratt's "austere clapboard houses and blank windows (as not) so much paintings as visual laments for a nation," and Chris Brookes concluded, "If we're going to redirect things.. .we have, at best, five more years. After that, if things continue to happen the way they're happening now, it's going to be too late."228 The young townies and students at Memorial were not the first to take up the cudgel of traditional culture for these reasons. Compare (on this one level) Newfoundland in the mid- to late twentieth century with Prys Morgan's description of Wales at the turn of the nineteenth: When one looks at the cultural life of Wales in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries one is struck by a paradox; on the one hand the decay or demise of an ancient way of life, and on the other an unprecedented outburst of interest in things Welsh and highly self-conscious activity to preserve or develop them.. .Decay and revival are curiously intermixed, because very often those who bewailed the decay were the very ones who brought about the revival.229 The Welsh revival was led by urban and expatriate Welshmen, as Newfoundland's was first centred in and around St. John's. There were other influences besides the Fogo Island films and other Extension works: after bewailing Newfoundland's cultural decay, Horwood would play a role in its cultural revival.230 Just as Wales revived the twelfth-century eisteddfod, a competition for musicians and poets, young Newfoundland artists revived mummering and the 'time'; with the Welsh grammar book, the study and promulgation of Welsh folk music and instruments, and a fashion for various forms of patriotic heraldry, the Welsh cultural revival of the 227 Gwyn, "The Newfoundland Renaissance," 45. 228 Gwyn, "The Newfoundland Renaissance," 45. 229 Prys Morgan, "From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 230 Overton, "Sparking a Cultural Revolution," 192-94. 119 nineteenth century matches step with the so-called Newfoundland Renaissance of the twentieth. The two revival-revolutions shared another characteristic: an upsurge in rural literacy rates and education levels. In some quarters, resettlement received part of the credit: "Since the inception of this (centralization) policy..,the many hundreds of school children who would have been doomed to semi-illiteracy in the one-room schools of their original communities are now in a position to attend the large modern schools near their new homes." Better education, more opportunity and more leisure time would help the Renaissance find and hold its audience for decades. 4.6 Conclusion The post-Confederation generation of artists such as Brookes, the Joneses, Dinn and Morgan drew inspiration directly from the Fogo project, but only indirectly from the films themselves, in their cultivation and celebration of Newfoundland's history and culture. They did not intentionally 'invent' traditions with a view to commodifying them for the tourist trade; rather they revived elements and artifacts of traditional culture, and adapted them to the world in which they had grown up. Evolution is unpredictable. A species may plod along steadily for scores of generations before some inner mutation or change in the external environment presents the challenge: adapt or die. The strategies a species adopts in these circumstances may seem unlikely, the symbiotic relationships developed with other species unforeseeable, and yet, these things happen all the time. Sometimes the spark to adaptation is not an ultimatum but an opportunity. Nature is rife with examples of random mutations or pairings which, having proven advantageous, gradually become species traits. 231 Frederick W. Rowe, The Development of Education in Newfoundland (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1964), 159. 120 The Fogo Island films and the project to which they were attached were just such an opportunity in Newfoundland's social and cultural history. Their message was to encourage people on Fogo Island and in other small communities to think about ways in which they could take charge of the nature and pace of change, harnessing elements of traditional life to adapt on their own terms, as much as possible. As the films travelled around the province, this message percolated through other outports, and other, less geographically distinct communities as well, particularly the arts community. Although the Fogo Island films' message was not aimed at artists, a restless part of the arts community heard it nonetheless and made it their own. Like the original Fogo Project, rural and urban partners drew together, but this time to make a 'cultural revolution' fomented with help from some of the same people who had worked on the Fogo Project. In less than a decade, they invented a tradition of lively arts and culture in the province. This motley crew of artists, many of whom would move from theatre, to film, to music, to writing and back again, grew and evolved into what we think of as Newfoundland culture in the twenty-first century. 121 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION Today few people on Fogo speak often about the filming, yet many believe their lives were changed enormously by it. This can never be accurately measured. But it is certain that the fishermen formed an island-wide producers' cooperative which handled and processed large catches, enabling them to keep the profits on their island. Unemployment of able-bodied men disappeared, and government directed their efforts to helping people stay... Films did not do these things: people did them. There is little doubt, however, that film created an awareness and self-confidence that was needed for people-advocated development to occur.232 Given the many and varied influences of the Fogo Island films on the recent cultural history of Newfoundland and Labrador, it seems strange that they are not better known. Outside the filmmaking and arts communities in Newfoundland and Labrador, they are virtually unknown. There are two likely reasons for their obscurity, the first of which goes back to the filmmakers' original goals. Neither the NFB nor the Extension Service had a particular interest in the profile of the films per se; both the NFB and the community development people touted 'process over product', before, during and after the time in which the films were made. The second reason is the time in which they were made: at the end of one era, just before the start of another. Black and white short films of non-standard lengths had few outlets for public viewing, as television took over from community film nights. Concurrently, videotape quickly replaced film as a medium for later versions of the Fogo Process; neophyte camera operators replaced the trained cinematographers of the Fogo Island films, leaving all such projects with a reputation for amateurish and boring material. Don Snowden, 1983, quoted in the editors' introduction to Donald Snowden, "Eyes see, ears hear", SD Dimensions (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Sustainable Development Department), posted July 1999 at http://www.fao.org/WAICENT/FAOrNFO/SUSTDEV/CDdirect/CDreOQ38.htm 122 In the absence of first-hand information, a mythology has grown up around the Fogo Island films: that they were choppy and difficult to watch, that they were boring, that they had saved Fogo Island from certain evacuation, that they were relevant only insofar as they helped people in an isolated community take charge of their future. None of these assertions is true. For the most part, the camerawork and editing is in keeping with the high standards of the National Film Board; given that some of its best people worked on the project, they could hardly have been otherwise. Neither are they boring: although outsiders and modern-day audiences need more background information than the films offer on their own, and some people may have difficulty understanding some of the Newfoundland vernacular, the conversations are well-focused, the topics relevant even today, and speakers eloquent. Again, this is due in large part to the discerning eyes and ears of the field crew, but also to the research and advance work of such trusted community guides as Fred Earle. The films did not save Fogo Island from certain evacuation, because the province had no intention of trying to evacuate it. While the government resettlement programs were sometimes purposely vague about their plans, it seems clear that the province did not want to move five thousand people out of the island's ten communities; in fact, a report advised against it. In any event, the communities would have had to petition for resettlement: this may seem like a fine distinction given the government's potential power to influence community decisions by withdrawing services, but it had not done so. The belief that such a plan was in the works was stoked by provincial inaction on a fisheries plan for the island, community rumour mills, and the announcement that the last of Fogo Island's longtime merchant houses was closing down. The fear of forced 123 resettlement may, however, have had a silver lining in pushing people to consider alternatives to the status quo. The provenance of the Fogo Island "experiment" is also clouded in myth. Film historians give the lion's share of credit - and sometimes all of it - to the National Film Board, producer John Kemeny and director Colin Low, while international development scholars ascribe most of it to Donald Snowden. Both Low and Snowden, along with their institutions, were invaluable contributors in the development of both the films and the larger Fogo Process, but the consistent story that it all grew almost spontaneously out of an "experiment" in the summer of 1967 is untrue. Extension field worker Fred Earle had been encouraging the Fogo Island Improvement Committee towards co-operative ideals since 1964, and his boss, Snowden, had pinpointed Fogo Island as ripe for such a project that same year. Snowden proposed a film project very similar to what eventually came to pass in 1965, almost two years before the NFB's Challenge for Change program was first proposed. The 1970s' cultural revolution in Newfoundland and Labrador was not spawned by the provincial government, or by a long-established creative tradition in the province. It grew out of a mix of factors, among them the Fogo Island films and the community development project of which they were a part. For decades, the films were thought of as mere by-products of the project itself, and the filmmakers and community developers wanted it that way. Gwyn's reference to cinema as catalyst is a perfect metaphor for the filmmakers' goals: to encourage and accelerate an action without directly influencing it. Many writers appear to have accepted the project's view of itself; while the overall Fogo Process and some individual films have received scholarly attention, the 124 films' content and messages, as a stand-alone body of work, have not. Certainly, it was never a convenient exercise to screen them all, given their unwieldy vertical format and collective six-hours-plus running time. The growth of television, with its inflexible broadcast windows, the death of the rural community film night, and the advent of videotape further reduced viewing opportunities. In more recent years, the closure of the Memorial University Extension Service in 1991 and continuing funding limitations at the National Film Board have made the films difficult to find. Although its precise contribution is difficult to measure, the film project certainly helped the Fogo Island Improvement Committee achieve sufficient consensus among the citizenry to establish a fishery and boat-building co-operative. The films also had a second life after Fogo Island, and after their related achievements in other small fishing communities. The agreement between Extension and the National Film Board included training and funding for a film unit in St. John's; that unit led in turn to what is today a thriving filmmaking community. As well, young artists drew on the films' spirit and approach in building their own practices, leading directly to such institutions as the Mummers' Troupe and the Resource Centre for the Arts, and influencing many more, including CODCO, Figgy Duff and St. Michael's Printshop. Gradually, the community achieved something of a critical mass, in which people became artists because, unlike those of earlier generations, they saw a career (lucrative or not) in the arts as an option. Most artists in any discipline practising in Newfoundland and Labrador today can trace their existence in some way to the Fogo Island project and the Extension Service. There has been much discussion of Newfoundland and Labrador's lively traditional and contemporary arts communities, but relatively little study of how they 125 came to be. Their existence is generally attributed, almost in passing, to a near-genetic talent for story and song, along with a rustic, cheery determination to survive in a harsh environment. Overton has identified Farley Mowat and Harold Horwood as contributors (albeit controversial and cantankerous ones) to a heightened sense of Newfoundland as a unique place. Rompkey notes that despite his conservative and personally disinterested view of culture, Smallwood considered its development important enough to fund arts competitions, the Arts and Culture Centres, and of course Memorial University.234 McKay's broader assessment would place most if not all of Smallwood's cultural initiatives as part of the commodification of culture in general, and of the reduction of traditional culture to a tourism marketing strategy. These arguments are plausible, but none explains the bottom-up drive to create the so-called Newfoundland Renaissance described by Sandra Gwyn in 1976. No one person, group or event can take the credit for a cultural movement, but the Fogo Island film project, and the people behind it, deserve at least as much as anyone else. If the films had been purely a product of the minds at Challenge for Change, they would not have been so successful - if they had been made at all. Community leaders on Fogo Island were already working to achieve consensus when Colin Low paid his first exploratory visit. The Challenge for Change agenda dovetailed with work that had already begun in Newfoundland. To argue the reverse is to deprive the Newfoundlanders of that amorphous power of 'agency' which makes the difference between being the James Overton, "Sparking a Cultural Revolution: Joey Smallwood, Farley Mowat, Harold Horwood and Newfoundland's Cultural Renaissance", Newfoundland Studies , 16, 2 (Fall 2000), 166-204. 234 Ronald Rompkey, " The Idea of Newfoundland and Arts Policy Since Confederation," in Literature and Identity: Essays on Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John's: DRC Publishing, 2006), 68. Originally published in Newfoundland Studies. 14 (1998). 126 definer and the defined; that is why the question, "Who made Fogo work?" is so important to a study of the project's effect on the larger community. 5.1 Postscript It is the nature of research that every question answered tends to raise several more; that has certainly been the case here. Focusing on documents has its benefits in a subject so dominated by memoir as contemporary cultural history. Over the course of this project, it became clear to me that, even though people remember things in different ways, there is a great deal of inaccurate history around the Fogo Island project; tracking the contradictions and fact checking can become projects in themselves. I hope to undertake some of them in the near future on Fogo Island, this time with a tape recorder and camera, and at the Snowden Centre in Guelph, Ontario, where, I am told, many boxes of old Extension files are waiting to be opened and archived. My own research priority for the immediate future focuses on an aspect of the Fogo Island project which did not make its way into this project at all, and that is to pursue potential uses for the films online. The structure of the films and of the Fogo Process as a whole foreshadowed the way we use the Internet and the World Wide Web today. The original information was recorded in such a fashion that the viewer can decide how much, or how little to watch, and in what order - a format very similar to a modern- day website. The information is then watched at a remote location, where it is made interactive by the recording of responses to the issues raised - in this context, the interview with the fisheries minister and The Specialists at Memorial Talk About the Fogo Films become something like a teleconference, albeit in very slow motion - months instead of seconds. The films' potential for online adaptation is enormous: a website that 127 explained the links between the films and those in them, and updated the issues, would be an exciting project likely of great interest to the general public (at least, in Newfoundland and Labrador). I have had very preliminary conversations along these lines with Memorial University's Centre for Newfoundland Studies and the library's Digital Archives Initiative. The DAI has already asked permission to link the shotlists from this paper to the selection of Fogo Island films which were posted online in the fall of 2007.1 look forward to doing more. There are intriguing connections between the Fogo Process and the founding of the Fishermen's Union as well. As this paper notes in passing, Fr. Desmond McGrath was the priest at Port au Choix when the Extension unit (without the NFB, this time) undertook the second iteration of the Fogo Process. McGrath, like Don Snowden, was familiar with the work of Moses Coady, and may have known him personally. I know from a project of some years ago that Edythe Goodridge and the Gwyns were good friends with Richard and Rosanne Cashin, though the nature of their connection escapes memory. In any event, there is some research to be done there as well. The connections traced in this paper among Extension, the Gwyns and others are the tip of a fascinating iceberg. Despite working in daily media for many years, I confess I had not given much conscious thought before this project to the relationships among academia, media and government and their roles in shaping public attitudes. Apart from the many jokes about the incestuous social circles of the CBC, I had not reflected on how the collective makeup of those groups tends to resemble a Venn diagram in which individuals often move from one circle to another. These groups and their remarkable, if often subtly exercised, influence on policy and culture are waiting for careful (and even- 128 handed) study. Some of the groundwork has already been done, on the national level, by such work as McKillop's Matters of Mind and Kuffert's A Great Duty: names and institutions show up in clusters, and then again in the Massey Report or at the CBC. These people did not always remain in the background: one of them was Lester Pearson; another was Jack Pickersgill. In 1967 Pickersgill was Smallwood's pal, and a powerful federal cabinet minister. His portfolio made him responsible for the National Film Board; and he was also regional minister for Newfoundland, as the MP for Fogo Island. Coincidence? Perhaps; I found no suggestion of meddling, though it was a tangent I decided against exploring. Low's concerns about political fallout for Challenge for Change (cited in Chapter Two) hint at some political awareness, if not self-censorship. In the original Fogo project, the roles of women were almost ignored on camera and, apparently, in the public debate, but the arguments of recent writers such as Marilyn Porter suggest that there was more going on than we see in the films. Add to this the fact that Sandra Gwyn and Edythe Goodridge played a part in the afterlife of the films, and there is fodder for an interesting discussion (or two, or more) on gender, class and the lines between rural and urban women's lives in the province's cultural revolution. Fred Earle's life and work, and the boxes of papers still sitting untouched in his basement, demand attention, as do those of his fellow field workers and the history of the Extension Service in general. Earle counselled fishermen, businessmen, students and widows; he badgered St. John's merchants and government bureaucrats; he flirted by mail with the secretaries at Extension Service, sulked at having to file more and more paper as the years went on, and seemed to know every nook and cranny of Notre Dame Bay. As the first of the Extension Service field officers, he was the first of his kind, but 129 like the films, he lived on the cusp of change; as the world shrank, we do not see his like today. The Extension Service, as I hope I have shown, was much more than a continuing and adult education department of Memorial University, but if it had done no more than bring skills training and concerts - bread and circuses - to remote communities for more than twenty years, it would still deserve more attention than it has received to date from scholars. Like the Fogo Island films, Extension is mentioned in passing but rarely put at centre stage, and its institutional dislike of paperwork makes talking to those who were there, and getting older today, a relatively urgent matter. Shane O'Dea has said, "Newfoundland's history is its culture",235 and writing the history of Newfoundland and Labrador became part of the cultural revolution. It is difficult to write about a tide when one is caught up in it, especially if one believes the one is swimming for one's life; the romanticizing and mythologizing of Newfoundland's history was a common theme in Newfoundland's culture in the 1960s and 1970s. As that sense of life-and-death struggle for survival has passed, there is a shift in the historian's gaze: the case for Newfoundland culture no longer needs to be proven, and we can step back now, to watch how others made it. While the Fogo Island films soft-pedalled many of the harsher aspects of outport problems, and staged some events for the cameras, they did not create an unrealistic picture of day-to-day life and where it might be going; their most powerful accomplishment was to direct the viewer's gaze. The most important thing for us is to recognize what we are seeing, and to know how and why we are seeing it. Legends and myths are unnecessary: what really happened is good enough. 235 Shane O'Dea, "Newfoundland: the Development of Culture on the Margin", Newfoundland and Labrador Studies. 10, 1 (1994), 73. 130 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources: Films and Television Programs Hart, Roger (director) A Memo from Fogo. National Film Board:Challenge for Change, 1972 "When I Go ... That's It!" National Film Board: Challenge for Change, 1972. Low, Colin (director) and Tom Daly (producer). The Winds of Fogo. National Film Board: Challenge for Change, 1969. Low, Colin (director), John Kemeny (producer). Andrew Britt at Shoal Bay. National Film Board: Challenge for Change, 1967. Billy Crane Moves Away. National Film Board: Challenge for Change, 1967. Brian Earle on Merchants and Welfare. National Film Board: Challenge for Change, 1967 The Children of Fogo Island. National Film Board: Challenge for Change, 1967. Citizen Discussions. National Film Board: Challenge for Change, 1967. Dan Roberts on Fishing. 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