Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Students, teachers, historians, and aficionados of Canadian film will
appreciate this collection of 14 essays by pre-eminent Canadian film
scholars and authors from Brock, Queen’s, Concordia, Carleton, and the
Universities of Montreal and Toronto. Co-editors Jim Leach and Jeannette
Sloniowski, both of Brock University, aim to provide the first detailed
analyses of some of Canada’s most celebrated and classical
documentaries while simultaneously considering more recent documentaries
of an innovative and controversial nature.

All of the major films in the survey are from the National Film Board
of Canada, and the essays are as much an elucidation of the style and
craftsmanship of their filmmakers as they are an exposition of the
content of the films. Leach and Sloniowski acknowledge the overarching
role of the NFB in the history of Canadian documentary production,
especially through the efforts of the Candid Eye series and Studio B
filmmakers.

Each essay is thoroughly researched, clearly written, and followed by
extensive endnotes and reference sources. Feldman’s essay on The Days
Before Christmas, jointly directed by Terence Macartney-Filgate, Wolf
Koenig, and Stanley Jackson, discusses the NFB’s Candid Eye series and
the emergence of “candid eye” filmmaking. Harcourt’s study of
Arthur Lamothe’s Bucherons de la Manouane and David Clanfield’s
discourse on Pour la suite du monde reference the distinctive
contributions of Canada’s francophone filmmakers. Leach’s essay on
Denys Arcand’s On est au coton examines the differences between film
as education and film as propaganda.

Sloniowski’s essay on Mike Rubbo’s portrayal of Fidel Castro in
Waiting for Fidel deals with the tensions that exist between the
creativity of the filmmaker and the policies of mainstream television
distributors. Peter Baxter’s essay discusses whether a film such as
Donald Brittain’s Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of
Malcolm Lowry qualifies as a documentary.

The remaining essays by Jean Bruce, Marion Froger, Brenda Longfellow,
and Janine Marchessault deal with the NFB titles Forbidden Love: The
Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Love, Voyage en Amerique avec un cheval
emprunte, Project Grizzly, and Tu as crie Let Me Go, respectively.

This is a valuable collection of scholarly views about some of the
NFB’s best-crafted, most interesting, and most controversial films.