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 © Copyright by Susan P. 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The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY To comply with the Canadian Privacy Act the National Library of Canada has requested that the following pages be removed from this copy of the thesis: Preliminary Pages Examiners Signature Page (pii) Dalhousie Library Copyright Agreement (piii) 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.