Biutiful: Anything But

Javier Bardem in Biutiful

One of the most telling aspects of film criticism these days is what I call the double standard when it comes to reviewing foreign language art house films. Reviewers, and sometimes the public, have no trouble calling out or exposing crass, manipulative or exploitative Hollywood movies (and there is no shortage of those) for the frauds that they are. But stick subtitles on an equally meretricious film, albeit one that takes place in a European, South American or Asian setting, and suddenly the superlatives and praise are thrown out with wild abandon. From Michelangelo Antonioni’s terribly pretentious and terrible Red Desert (1964) through to more recent offensive movies such as The White Ribbon (2009), Michael Haneke’s facile ‘expose’ of fascism, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's startlingly inept and empty Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), this blind spot is persistent everywhere in film reviewing circles. Biutiful, the latest film from Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores perres, Babel), fits neatly into this category.

The Wrong Men: Innocents in Noir Nightshade

One of the cornerstones of film noir is the inevitability of fate. The deeper fear being that despite your best intentions, or your honest nature, bad things will happen to you – for no reason at all. That is, for no reason that is consciously intended. In Fritz's Lang's spiraling nightmare The Woman in the Window (1944), Edward G. Robinson's meekly self-effacing Professor Richard Wanley entertains his erotic fantasies gazing at an oil portrait of Alice Reed (Joan Bennett) in a storefront window. But when he suddenly meets Reed, in the flesh, on the street, his fantasies begin to have true consequences. After killing Alice's lover in self-defense, Wanley finds himself being pursued by Heidt (Dan Duryea), an ex-cop with blackmail on his mind. It also doesn't help that Heidt was the dead man's bodyguard. Suddenly, the milquetoast professor is stewing in primal juices he'd only dabbled in with his imagination.

Recollections of Reagan: A Confounding Centennial

President Reagan (Credit: Ronald Reagan Library)

While visiting embattled Nicaragua as a journalist in 1984, I met the grieving mother of a four-year-old killed by the Contras. These vicious mercenaries, not-so-secretly funded by the United States, had been firing mortars into the remote mountain town of Teotecacinte. After residents spent 17 consecutive days in rudimentary bomb shelters, Carmen Guttierez Suyapa was allowed to play outside when it seemed as if the attacks had finally ended. She died under a sapodilla tree, where someone later planted a tiny flowering begonia in her memory.

Ronald Reagan lost his memory to Alzheimer’s disease, at the end apparently no longer able to recall having been the 40th president. Upon his death in 2004 at age 93, he had lived 89 more years than the Nicaraguan child whose blood essentially was on his hands. The Contras – he referred to them as “freedom fighters” and “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” – got their weapons and other supplies with his blessing.

There is, of course, no mention of little Carmen in Reagan, a thought-provoking and beautifully crafted profile that's perhaps a bit too kind to its controversial subject. The documentary premiered at January’s Sundance Film Festival before a February 7 broadcast on HBO (with a repeat at 8 p.m. on February 9) during a week that marked what would have been his 100th birthday. Director Eugene Jarecki, who divides his time between New York City and Vermont, covers that 1980s period of intervention in Central America primarily to examine the Iran-Contra affair: Proceeds from illegal arms sales to the Ayatollah supported the counterrevolutionaries trying to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who spearheaded the entire operation, has since said of Reagan’s participation: "I have no doubt that he was told about the use of residuals for the Contras, and that he approved it. Enthusiastically."

Digging into the Past: Watching Public Domain Films Online

We've all seen them. When video tapes first came out, and then later DVDs, the market was swamped by unknown video/DVD companies releasing a group of movies that had all passed into the public domain (PD). Some of those titles were: The White Zombie (1932), Impact (1949), D.O.A. (1950), Quicksand (1950), The Big Combo (1955), The Last Man On Earth (1964 – the original film version of the 2007 I Am Legend), Night of the Living Dead (1968). They always seemed to be the same 70 or 80 films. Well, now you don't have to go to the cut-rate vid store to see any of these offerings.

There are several sites on the internet that allow you to watch/download movies and other PD material. Some are better, but one of the best (yet difficult to search through) is Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/). Internet Archive is a website that not only contains 400,000+ of PD “Moving Images” (movies, TV shows, shorts, government documentaries ... you name it, and if it's in the public domain, you'll probably find it), but also music, audio files (such as old-time radio plays), books, software, and any other ephemera you can think of. This site is obviously inspired by Napster, because 'volunteers' post the material on the site and then others watch or download it from the site. Internet Archive confirms the material is PD before they allow it to go up on the site.

Arab Labor: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Checkpoint

The cast of Arab Labor (Season 1).

Watching great foreign television is often a multilayered pleasure. It gives the viewer access to a whole new world of talent – writers, actors, and directors – and the stories and themes that other cultures choose to explore are often surprising in themselves. Television is too often a generic art form, and even its innovations sometimes seem to be confined to variations on familiar, well-trodden situations. Not only can the best of foreign television be refreshingly unique in its execution, but watching these shows can also reveal heretofore unknown or unobserved aspects of our own domestic television. Our most basic assumptions about character, plot, and human interaction (presuppositions that can function as a kind of storytelling shorthand, and therefore often pass without being perceived) can become visible, precisely in their absence, in these new programs. This is a fact that cinephiles have known for decades, which is why foreign language films are watched with such dedication and enthusiasm by movie lovers. But foreign television – especially foreign language television – has never been as accessible as foreign film. While cinephiles have long been able to enjoy movies from all over the world, telephiles (why isn’t this word in the OED yet?) haven’t been quite so lucky.  

For decades, networks like PBS and the CBC have been bringing us the best of British television, but the TV powers-that-be rarely, if ever, broadcast non-English programs in North America. More often than not the North American TV viewer’s sole access to foreign television is indirect, by way of domestic adaptations of the original shows. I’m sure there are some well-intended reasons behind this practice: the very nature of TV storytelling, be it drama or comedy, often relies on cultural cues and references which can be obstacles to new audiences, even when language isn’t an issue. In the past month alone, US cable networks have launched three high profile remakes of British series, all of which are still in production in the UK: Being Human, Shameless, and Skins. And, as touch-and-go as remakes notoriously are, that is not to say that US networks haven’t had some stunning successes in the past: often as much can be gained as is lost in translation. Still, for every All in the Family (based on the BBC’s working-class comedy, Till Death Us Do Part) and The Office, there are tone-deaf failures like NBC’s Coupling and ABC’s recent Life on Mars. An avid TV viewer has more than enough reason to approach these new efforts with some caution. But if you want to watch original non-English TV, even in our current 200-channel universe, you’ve got to program them for yourself. Fortunately for us, each of us individually has access to more television than ever before, and even if the shows aren’t airing with any regularity, Internet streaming (from services like Netflix and from international websites) and DVDs from Amazon can more than make up for it. Today I want to talk about Arab Labor, a series running on Israeli television which recently completed its second season.

The Day Players: Single-Scene Attractions

Oksana Akinshina in The Bourne Supremacy

Oksana Akinshina and Danielle DuClos. Never heard of either of these actresses, have you? Neither one has had what you could call a major career, at least not in English-language films. Akinshina is a still-working Russian actress who has made only one American film, The Bourne Supremacy (2004), and American Danielle DuClos's career in movies essentially ended shortly after she appeared in her one major motion picture, Midnight Run (1988). And yet, their small contributions to both films enriched the finished product immeasurably. In both films, they were what are called in the industry a day player. Sure, it may take more than a day to shoot their scenes in a motion picture (since the process is so slow), but essentially they are hired for one scene. Fortunately, for both of them, they got to appear in an extended sequence with the film's star.

Heart & Soul: The Beaches of Agnes & Soul Power

It's commonly held that January is a graveyard month for film releases. If Christmas supposedly brings us plenty of treats, the early New Year generally offers us no party favours. One look at the mean-spirited arrogance of The Green Hornet, or the tone-deaf comedy of Ron Howard's The Dilemma, you'd be tempted to give up movie-going for good. But we have also seen a surprising number of terrific movies open in Toronto in the last month. Besides Sofia Coppola's luminous Somewhere, there is the bittersweet poignancy of Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist, the plaintive urgency of Patricio Guzman's ongoing quest to come to terms with Chile's traumatic past in Nostalgia for the Light, plus Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve turning Wajdi Mouawad 's schematic play, Scorched, into a fever dream of familial conflict in Incendies. Movies rarely get much better than that diverse group. But just in case you are all caught up, there are some pictures currently out on DVD that you just might have missed.

In the opening moments of her movie, The Beaches of Agnes, director Agnes Varda tells us that she’s “playing the part of a little old lady.” But there is a fair bit of youthful playfulness still in evidence in this imaginative and affectionate memoir. Varda (Cleo From 5 to 7, Vagabond) is perhaps the least celebrated of the great French New Wave directors of the sixties and she is one of the only females in the group. She left dramatic narrative behind a while back, but in recent years, with The Gleaners and I (2000) and Cinevardaphoto (2004), Varda has been turning out fascinating and idiosyncratic film essays. In The Beaches of Agnes, Varda looks back on both her life and career by invoking it through the objects that symbolized the varied loves of her life. That love includes her relationship with director Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), as well as her intellectual friends from Paris’s Left Bank and the American counter-culture who she embraced when she began making movies in California in the seventies.

Sanctum: Enough with the 3-D, already!

The increasing trend of films being made in 3-D (Toy Story 3) or having 3-D added to the finished movie (Alice in Wonderland) is increasingly tiresome, since, frankly, it’s a technological advance that rarely if ever adds any value to a project. Once in awhile it has a purpose, as in the recently released Tron: Legacy, which is largely set in a world located inside the internet. There, depicting the ‘computer’ world in 3-D as a contrast to our world, in regular, mundane 2-D, makes sense. It didn’t result in a good movie, however, as the sequel to Tron (1982) was basically a loud, empty and finally boring concoction that faded from memory as soon the (lengthy) credits rolled. But Tron: Legacy at least had Jeff Bridges, in a dual role as an evil computer creation and a kindly inventor, who had lost control of the world he originally had intended to build for peaceful purposes. Bridges isn’t great in the parts. He's stiff, partially because of the lame SFX in the computer-generated sections. (He also lazily channels 'The Dude' from The Big Lebowski.) But at least he offers a reason to check out the movie. Sanctum, a 3-D extravaganza which has the distinction of being executive produced by James ‘Avatar’ Cameron (big whoop) can’t boast of having any big stars – unless you consider Ioan Gruffudd (Fantastic Four, W.) to be of that calibre – or any reason whatsoever to check it out.

Rediscovering His Home: Gregg Allman’s Low Country Blues

Any assessment of a musician, in whole or in part, can only be made with the hard facts. On Low Country Blues, the new release by Gregg Allman, we have the musical evidence of a great and unadorned player. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, Allman’s new record features the weathered, but soulful voice of a long, often turbulent life, too.

Low Country Blues is not a bumpin’ and grindin’ record. It’s pure, plain and simple while featuring Allman’s inspired vocals backed by the “Burnett Band” featuring Jay Bellerose on drums and percussion, Dennis Crouch on acoustic bass, Doyle Bramhall II on electric guitar; all rounded out by Mac Rebennack, aka Dr. John, on piano. The result is a balanced mix with different acoustic colours and shadings. It’s a style Burnett has applied to some of the most significant albums of the past few years such as, Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss and Elvis Costello’s under-recognized, National Ransom, released last year. And like those records, which married the innate talent of the artists to their love for genuine American sounds, Burnett has successfully done the same with Gregg Allman. Low Country Blues is the perfect music mix featuring Burnett’s “sound” and Allman’s desire to re-discover the home of his life-long journey found in the blues.

Shine a Light: Oscar’s Unlikely Nominees

It’s a funny thing about the Oscars, whose 2010 nominations were recently announced. I’m not one of those film critics who label great performances as Oscar worthy, since the nominations and awards are not a reliable barometer to gauge fine acting. If they were, Dustin Hoffman (Barney’s Version), Lesley Manville (Another Year) and Andrew Garfield and Arnie Hammer (The Social Network) would not have been passed over this year. Yet, I am not completely down on the awards either, for the various reasons I outlined last year. One of their virtues is that they shine a light on films that would otherwise not be seen by too many film-goers. I’m not referring, obviously, to The King’s Speech or Black Swan or even The Kids Are All Right, but about small movies, some from unlikely countries, that don’t have big-name stars, or a studio pushing the film or its actors with all the publicity that money can buy. Here are reviews of three of those smaller Oscar-nominated films, which, though not favoured, may win something on Hollywood's big night.

Defying Genre: Iron and Wine’s Kiss Each Other Clean

Samual Beam (aka Iron and Wine)

At first glance, the dishevelled and heavily bearded Iron and Wine (aka Samuel Beam) bears a striking resemblance to a Yeti. Yet this folk singer, who inhabits the American Bible Belt with his wife and five children, seems to specialize in defying stereotypes. The prolific, multi-talented, highly educated artist has recently released his fourth full-length album Kiss Each Other Clean. If you’re still not familiar with the name, you may be about to witness a breakthrough. With Kiss Each Other Clean, Iron and Wine should finally gain the exposure he deserves. Over the last ten years, many members of his cult following remain disappointed with his migration away from his earlier trademark acoustic folk sound to multi-instrumental experimentation (and approve even less of his release on a major label, Warner Brothers), but Iron and Wine has done anything but sell out with this new masterpiece.

Talking Out of Turn #12: John Cage (1982)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

One section of Talking Out of Turn included a chapter examining the role of the experimental art on eighties culture. Contemporary composers like Philip Glass, R. Murray Schafer and John Cage were now having their music felt in pop circles. Cage was perhaps the most influential of those avant-garde composers. He had a huge impact -- both artistically and philosophically -- on popular music (including Frank Zappa, Cabaret Voltaire, Yoko Ono and Brian Eno).

Heavy Metal Thunder: R.E.D. (2010)

There's something strangely satisfying about watching Dame Helen Mirren fire round after round of heavy ordinance at bad guys. In the movie R.E.D. (just released on DVD – the title is an acronym for Retired: Extremely Dangerous), Mirren plays a retired CIA sniper who is forced out of her now-genteel life by circumstances beyond her control. The fact that she doesn't appear in the movie until the one-hour mark is one of this comic thriller's few problems.

At the start of the picture, we are introduced to Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), a lonely, also retired, former CIA black ops agent who has fallen in love with the voice of Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker), the woman at the benefits office that manages his pension. He is so smitten that he's practically a telephone stalker. She's kind to him, but she's also a little creeped out. After one of his phone calls, his house in a quiet residential neighbourhood is attacked by several assassins. (Yes, his house. The shooters essentially blast the shit out of the place, à la the 'let's shoot a million rounds into that truck' in the Clint Eastwood film, The Gauntlet). He dispatches the killers and then pops up at Sarah's house in Kansas City, insisting that her life is also in danger.

Here, the logic of the film veers off the rails. The first 25 minutes are a little incomprehensible. There seems to be no credible reason for Willis to connect the attack on him to Sarah and then deduce she is now in danger too. Perhaps it's on the cutting room floor. Essentially, he kidnaps her because she doesn't believe he is former CIA. (Does she not know what pension she's dealing with?) They go to New Orleans for no reason I can think of other than New Orleans looks good (except for those New Orleans sequences, the rest of the picture was shot in Toronto – it is fun playing 'spot the T.O. locales'). It's not until she escapes him and then is almost kidnapped by a New Orleans 'police officer' (Moses rescues her) that she finally believes him. As I said, the first 25 minutes are confusing. The attempts to kill Moses seem to be connected to a list of operatives who, many years prior, were sent into Guatemala to extract an American military unit, led by an unnamed rogue officer that supposedly annihilated an entire village. I think Moses was among them, or some old friends were (it really isn't clear) and I think Sarah had pension dealings with some of those men on the list, most of whom now dead.

Strange Things Happening Every Day: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Graham Parker

"There's something about the gospel blues that's so deep the world can't stand it," gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe once pronounced. In the Forties, Tharpe was quite the fiery performer who could play a steel-bodied guitar like Chuck Berry and swing her hips like Elvis Presley. She often captured in her recordings the persuasive force of gospel blues to the degree that you could comprehend the power it held and why the world couldn't stand it. But, by 1944, Tharpe was herself wavering between the sins of the secular world and the promise of God's kingdom. So she gave voice to those struggles in her rollicking single, "Strange Things Happening Every Day":

On that great Judgment Day
When they drive them all away
There are strange things happening every day.

The view she offered us was no less apocalyptic than most gospel blues like Charley Patton's "High Water Everywhere," or Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night," only Tharpe sounded ecstatic. She told us that even if you could never fully comprehend God's will, it might still be experienced and accepted through the mystery of miracles and salvation. After all, strange things do happen to mankind every day:

Recent Documentaries: Exploitative (Part 2)

At first glance, Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished is seemingly cut from the same moral cloth as Inside Job and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (see yesterday's review of both those films) Those two political films, respectively, exposed the forces behind the recent worldwide economic meltdown and laid bare the events leading to the downfall of one politician who was prepared to tackle Wall Street and its greedy minions head-on, and both came from a deep and justified well of anger. A Film Unfinished initially seems similar in tone, but actually this is one offensive documentary that left a bad taste in my mouth.

A German-Israeli co-production, but made by an Israeli filmmaker, A Film Unfinished is a look at a recently unearthed, and unfinished, propaganda film made by the Nazis and shot in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. The ghetto was eventually liquidated by the Germans in 1943, and all its remaining Jewish inhabitants killed, but only after a staunch and heroic resistance (one which lasted nearly a full month). Using footage from the never-before-seen, until now, propaganda film, which was titled Das Ghetto, and incorporating some docudrama techniques (not something I much like) of a post World War Two trial which touched on the making of the film (and also interviews with a few survivours from the ghetto), A Film Unfinished ostensibly brings something new to the subject of the Holocaust. The problem is that the movie exploits far more than it illuminates. 

Recent Documentaries: Informative (Part 1)

I have a theory about documentaries. If you're a halfway decent filmmaker, and you've picked a good subject for a film, then, presto, you'll come up with a worthwhile documentary. It's when you don't have the instincts to shape a good doc, or have chosen a subject you can't do justice to, that pitfalls can and do occur. Because very few documentaries are made with box office in mind, most of the fact-based films that are released are usually made for the right reasons – either to inform or educate on issues which cry out to be addressed, or to open windows on worlds we know little about. As for the difference between good and great docs, such as Capturing the Friedmans (2003) or Man on Wire (2008), well, that's a whole different ballgame, having as much to do with the story depicted on screen as they do with the person doing the depicting. 

Last year's best documentary films, Frederick Wisemans's La danse, Banksy's Oscar nominated Exit Through the Gift Shop and Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol, coincidentally all dealt with art: Wiseman's comprehensive, probing behind-the-scenes look at a famous French ballet troupe; Banksy's witty take on L.A, street artists and their British inspiration; Malmberg's moving portrait of a mentally damaged man's unique and therapeutic art project. (See my Best Films of the year list for more on those movies.) Three more recent, and comparatively lesser, documentary movies, Inside Job, Client 9 and A Film Unfinished, deal with history, from the ripped-from-the-headlines present to the relatively recent past.

So Bad It's Good?: Cruise Into Terror (1978)

Last year, on February 6^th, I wrote a brief piece on the wretched TV movie called Cruise Into Terror. Two days before, I’d inaugurated an on-again, off-again series (mostly off) called Mini Masterpieces in Mediocre Movies. The purpose was to look at one sequence in a specific film and examine why it worked and the rest didn’t. The film I did on that occasion was James Cameron’s mediocre The Abyss. During the writing, I added a sidebar on Cruise Into Terror because its last line – “That there is a devil, there is no doubt, but is he trying to get into us or is he trying to get out” – had stuck with me (in the piece, I said it was the only good thing about the film). During the editing of The Abyss post, the sidebar was just not working out, so I removed it and planned to run it as a standalone. It was so short, we decided to title it David's Mini-Masterpiece Addendum and it ran two days later.

Over the last year, this little bitty post has become one of our most popular pieces (and hopefully not because it’s so fast to read – we timed it; it takes less than 30 seconds). Often in the top 10, it returned again this past week to top five status. So, it was decided I had to see this thing again and determine why my short post was so popular. I thought I had it on video tape, but when I went through my boxed tapes (yes, I own a functioning VCR that I still use) I couldn’t find it. My colleague, Kevin Courrier, told me the whole film, in 10 minute chunks, was posted on Youtube. So, that’s how I watched it.

Read All About It! Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists

Every single person we pass each day has a story, a history, one that’s rich with broken hearts, broken dreams, personal triumphs and secrets. Regardless of how hard-hitting, aloof, or kind-hearted these people may seem, no doubt there are many layers that lay beneath the surface of their lives – layers we likely never get to see. Since it would probably be too overwhelming for us to consider, we don’t too often reflect on those hidden depths. But Tom Rachman’s debut novel The Imperfec-tionists (Dial Press, 2010) does. He examines with thoroughness many of those layers as they exist in a colourful assortment of characters.

The Imperfectionists revolves around an English newspaper in Rome circa 2007. The novel reads likes a series of short stories. It profiles the staff members, plus one reader, of the paper. Each chapter is dedicated to cracking open the life of one of the characters and then relentlessly showing us what makes them tick. While many of the characters play supporting roles, in the novel's multiple chapters, they soon become misunderstood colleagues outside of their section. The chapters themselves get linked together with excerpts of the paper’s beginnings. From its Mad Men-like origins in the 1950s, by founder Cyrus Ott, to the present day, run by Ott’s uninterested grandson Oliver, The Imperfectionists deftly explores the challenges that so many papers face today in competition with their online counterparts. (Rachman, born in London, England, raised in Vancouver, Canada, is a journalist himself, having worked in both Rome and Paris.) But it also begs the question: Just how reflective is The Imperfectionists to the realities of Rachman’s former colleagues? Or is Rachman just onto something much deeper. Are these tragedies isolated to one’s profession, or to one’s lifestyle?

Talking Out of Turn #11: Julia Reichert/James Klein (1985)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

One of the book's chapters, The Arc of the Cold War, dealt with both its peak and decline since the Soviet Union would dissolve by December 1991. The interviews in this chapter, which included SF author Frederik Pohl on his novel Chernoybl and spy novelist Fletcher Knebel's Crossing in Berlin, provided a cross-section of observations about the psychology of the Cold War rather than detailing the different aspects of it. In their film, Seeing Red, documentary filmmakers Julia Reichert and James Klein examined the early years of the American Communist movement, its beginnings in the thirties, its rise in the WW II years, the later disillusionment with Stalin, and then its legacy in the eighties. 

The Prism of History: Daniel Francis’s Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror

When you look at the world through the prism of history, the events that unfold today can appear luminously connected to the events of the past. In Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror (Arsenal Pulp, 2010) by historian Daniel Francis, this valuable prism comes with a fascinating story.

Francis is an historian based in Vancouver and he’s written over twenty books about Canadian history, including the Encyclopedia of British Columbia. His latest book covers 24 months in Canadian history, namely the post-war years leading up to the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. His premise is simple. In the years after the First World War, political activism by the masses was at its peak. Led by Unions, people felt the urgent need to achieve economic equality and launched an often highly charged political battle against the Federal government and industry for better rates of pay, better working conditions and more say in the political process. This revolt, leading up to the Winnipeg General Strike, was characterized as the “Red Scare” by the government and media of the day.