An international network

DEC’s first films came from the Tricontinental Film Center in New York.[57] [open endnotes in new window] Tricontinental was a business as much as a political project, says Glen Richards, and DEC had money to spend, which the New Yorkers gladly welcomed.[58] According to Richards, DEC was also able to convince Tricon to invest in translation, especially for The History Book. Some of the key films acquired in this fashion in addition to the work of Littin, Gleyzer, and Rios, included The Tupamaros (Jan Lindqvist, Sweden, 1974, The Brickmakers (Martha Rodriquez and Jorge Silva, Colombia, 1972),[59] and Black Dawn (Robin Lloyd and Doreen Kraft, Haiti, 1979).

Other distributors who supplied DEC functioned as a loose international network of like-minded cinema activists, and included:

• The Other Cinema, London (1970-1977), source for The Miners Film, etc.[60]
• Contemporary Films, London (1951- present). The oldest independent film distributor in the U.K., source for The Dispossessed.[61]
• Third World Newsreel, New York (1971 – present), source for The Woman’s Film.[62]
• California Newsreel San Francisco (1968 – present) source for Controlling Interest, etc.
• Women Make Movies, New York (1972 – present)
• Icarus Films, New York (1978 – present)
• Cinema Guild, New York (1981-present)
• Films Transit, Montreal (1982 – present) [63]

In addition, many independent filmmakers, as well as leftist film collectives, in Germany, France, Scandinavia, and Japan approached DEC on their own or through a recommendation from another distributor or filmmaker.

Another source of information came from coverage in international print sources. The magazines Jump Cut, Cineaste, and Women and Film provided reviews and analysis of new important work. Jump Cut’s editors in particular (John Hess, Julia Lesage, and Chuck Kleinhans) showed an unusually keen and knowledgeable interest in Canadian and Quebec politics. The New York-based Guardian newspaper and London’s Time Out also published timely reviews but more importantly coverage of innovative film showings and the political or community groups who organized the screenings. Gary Crowdus in New York, so helpful to Kae Elgie in 1973, continued as a long-time source of films, ideas, and moral support for DEC, first at Tricon, then through Cinema Guild distribution, and as the founder of Cineaste.

A much more unusual source of film prints arrived one night as an anonymous donation, most likely from a political group in Kingston, Ontario, which had over several years acquired many prints from the Newsreel collectives in the United States. Most of these were U.S. Newsreel films, but several were Cuban. The most impressive was the Santiago Alvarez tour de force, Hanoi, Tuesday, March 13 (Cuba, 1967). One Alvarez film from the cache proved especially popular. This was Now (1965), on the U.S. Civil Rights movement, featuring Lena Horne singing the title song, a work that had been blackballed by U.S. radio. Although all the footage in Now was shot by U.S. TV and newsreel companies, which had somehow made its way to Cuba, some of it recording the Watts uprisings of 1965, most of it had never played on U.S. screens. Michael Chanan, in his indispensable book, The Cuban Image, describes the film’s tone as one of “skeptical irony.” To my ears, however, it’s white hot rage. The DEC print was later “lost” by a visiting U.S. professor at McGill University, widely believed to be an FBI agent working undercover in Canada. Obviously some authorities agreed with DEC: this was an important, radical film.

Finding an audience / building an audience

Throughout the 1970s and beyond, audiences for the films grew to be quite large, in screenings across the country. Some public shows involved hundreds of spectators, other times the venues were tiny, with crowds to match. For most of its twenty years a DEC film would be showing every day of the year. The biggest users of the films were NGOs such as churches, unions, and political groups. Equally important were the high schools, colleges, and universities, who rented or purchased the films primarily for classes in Politics, Sociology, and History. Other teachers of Women’s, Indigenous, and Labour Studies, International Affairs, and Economics became regular users. A history professor at Kingston’s Royal Military College tried on several occasions to rent films on guerrilla movements, such as The Tupamaros. He was ignored.

One key group in the 1970s centered on the Anti-Apartheid movement. As Glen Richards remembers, the 1975 TCLSAC series “showed many of our films for the first time in Canada. Then word spread that we had films. In a sense, the network built itself.” [64]

In addition, as the academic discipline of Film Studies began to take shape in Canada, first at Queen’s University, in Kingston, documentary scholars such as Bill Nichols, Jacqueline Levitin, Zuzana Pick, and Tom Waugh, became strong advocates of the DEC Films collection. (I first became aware of DEC Films in Nichols’s documentary class at Queen’s in 1975, when he invited Glen Richards and others from DEC to present their ideas). This in turn prompted DEC to think more about the value of basic film education and not simply education through film. One concrete example of DEC’s film education efforts centered on encouraging community groups to get more out of their film showings. In other words, take better advantage of what a film could offer. This culminated in the guidebook, Images in Action, A Guide to Using Women's Film and Video, written by Cristall and Barbara Emanuel, another veteran staff member at DEC. [65] The book gathered many of DEC’s ideas and principles of activist distribution and attempted, in part, to encourage others to follow the DEC model.

The book’s design pre-figures what today would be termed “graphic non-fiction.” Its unusual, square design format also suggested a work-book, rather than an academic monograph.

It also created an exemplary mix of theory and practice and in its blend of images and text reflected DEC’s strong links to popular education. The book centers on an argument for the use of film in the women’s movement:

“It is becoming more and more apparent that women organizing showings of women’s culture is one way of taking control over our lives and developing pride in our achievements, awareness of histories, our futures, and our present situations.” [66]

Activist librarians within university, high school, and public libraries formed a third important group of allies in the project of screening political films to general Canadian audiences. Each year librarians would rent, purchase, and actively program hundreds of DEC Films. Kathy Elder, for example, became an exceptionally knowledgeable ally at York University, and played a key role through her strong national influence within libraries. Politically this was quite strategic because for most Canadians the library serves as a safe, neutral space for both individual learning and community building. A screening in a library gave any film stature and status – a credibility and worthiness that could help the work find a broader audience. There wasn’t one film in the DEC collection, no matter how unusual artistically or radical politically, that wasn’t screened by an enthusiastic librarian.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, following the massive expansion of Canadian universities and colleges in the 60s, educational budgets for schools and libraries soared well beyond levels of previous decades. Starting in 1981 DEC played an active role in the Ontario and Western Canada Film Showcases. These trade shows provided a sober reminder of how well organized and successful were their mainstream competitors. However, DEC also discovered how thirsty were radical librarians for what DEC had to offer. Even after the Mulroney Conservatives took power federally in 1983 provincial education budgets remained healthy. This is an important part of the story.

TV broadcasts never comprised an option for DEC before the mid-1980s. Even when the films were deemed to be “broadcast quality,” programers in these years at the CBC rejected all attempts to have them aired. One senior buyer lectured me as to the standard CBC outlook: “If there is something happening internationally we will send our crews to cover it.” This in stark terms shows a bias that works to exclude different points of view, under cover of Canadian nationalism. Most CBC buyers also alleged that Canadian viewers could not handle sub-titles.

Within DEC many debates focused on the effectiveness of various exhibition strategies. Was a large audience for a single-showing, TV broadcast preferable to small-scale showings co-sponsored with groups who could use a film for specific purposes?

“A good speaker [accompanying a film] in the right setting can draw specific connections for Canadian users. Our role as distributors makes us facilitators as well.” [67]

In later years DEC became marginally more successful in selling its films to the new, smaller Canadian broadcasters and renting to commercial theatres. This however was never seen as a substitute for screenings arranged for and with activist groups.

A key element of political film exhibition in these years came with the understanding that the films would be seen in groups. Rental and sale prices prohibited most individual buyers, along with the pricey and bulky projectors. This changed radically in the mid-1980s when lower priced VHS cassettes came to dominate the non-theatrical market. However, what was gained in terms of accessibility because of price and ease of showing was accompanied by a loss of public community-based political discussion and the opportunity for film education.

Business disrupted

In 1979 DEC could sell a 30-minute 16mm print to a Canadian school, library, or union for $600. The business was healthy, relying only to a small degree on government grants, and creating surpluses that were plowed back into DEC’s other endeavors, such as the book store and radio programs. Throughout the 70s DEC Films relied on grants for only about 10% of its operating budgets. These came from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Canada Council for the Arts. The relationships with these funders might best be described as tenuous, at times characterized by political cat and mouse. CIDA wanted DEC to promote the largesse of Canadian development projects abroad; the agency’s bureaucrats would have been hard pressed however to find any such resource in DEC’s catalogs. In fact, DEC lost all its CIDA funding for a time after publication of two provocatively-titled books, Perpetuating Poverty (Robert Carty and Virginia Smith, 1981) and Ties That Bind (Robert Clarke and Richard Swift, eds., 1982), which directly challenged the practices of Canadian foreign aid.

By the mid-80s however, the new video technologies were, in today’s parlance, proving “disruptive.” Customers could now purchase a 30 minute ¾ inch or ½ inch video for $100. Of course, cheaper rental and sales prices made for a broader range of potential purchasers. Now a union local could purchase on their own without relying on their regional or national education department.

Nevertheless, during the 1980s the market for 16mm sales disappeared seemingly overnight. Although the rental market for 16mm held on until the early 1990s, this situation became a real challenge for DEC Films and was certainly one of the factors in its mid-1990s demise.

The politics of distribution

Although one or two staff members had flirted with organized left parties, none were members during their years at DEC. The atmosphere in the group steered clear of party-building. In the first years especially, staff believed that left parties and the existing labor unions were not well-educated about the Third World or the racial issues taken up in the films. Many in the larger DEC collective (as well as many of the filmmakers) saw themselves more as independent journalists or educators and thus, for better or worse, wished to hold themselves apart from organized left movements. This applied more to some of the men than the women of DEC, who had no problems identifying with the rapidly growing women’s movement. In fact, most of the DEC collective used the term “independent left” rather than New Left. For some the label New Left had become corrupted by the dominant media, as too closely connected with an apolitical counter-culture.

Of course, strong debates and conflicts often flared up over specific political issues, campaigns, philosophies, and trends.  These included analysis of the Soviet Union, China and its Cultural Revolution, Cuba, and the prospects for radical change in South America. Closer to home, in the early 1970s the main topic for debate revolved around the hopes for Quebec independence. In those years the tumult within the left in Quebec seemed much in advance of “English” Canada. The power of Quebec’s unions, especially strong in the early 70s, and the exuberance of its political cinema proved inspiring. 

Another political strain centered on Canadian nationalism and the degree to which this broad movement could be harnessed by the left. In the late 60s and early 1970s these debates exploded in the left caucuses of the NDP and most loudly in the avowedly Marxist Canadian Liberation Movement (1968-1976). Not everyone was happy with the new nationalism. Brain Palmer, for one, argues:

“At the very historical moment when the muffled voice of class began to be heard in Canadian scholarship, then, its weak articulation was overwhelmed with a revived presentation of the myth-symbolism of ‘northern nationhood.’" [68]

The members of DEC took pride in the diversity of their interests, connections, and causes. They saw the organization as a type of clearing house for all manner of left/feminist discussions and points of view. As part of the New Left in general, DEC felt the need to radically broaden the political discourse, far beyond traditional class and labor or vanguard party politics. Members felt personal pressure to quickly educate themselves not only about Namibia and Indonesia but also around the bold concept of the women’s movement that the “personal is political.”

Although the famous Toronto-based gay and lesbian magazine, Body Politic, had been launched as early as 1971, for some years DEC had nothing to offer. The first film in the collection to deal explicitly with LGBTQ issues was In the Best Interests of the Children (Iris Films, U.S. 1977), a gentle, yet serious work that focused on lesbian mothers—a landmark film says B. Ruby Rich. [69] This was followed by the more raucous Australian production entitled Witches, Faggots — Dykes and Poofters, made by Digby Duncan and the One in Seven Collective (1979).

DEC Films continued for another ten years, until the mid-1990s, drawing in some of the most dynamic practitioners of left film activism in Toronto, many with rich family ties to the Caribbean. These included the financial wizard Karen Knopf, the producers John Greyson, Richard Fung, and Helen Lee, and the writer-programmers, Cameron Bailey, Gabriele Hezekiah, Marva Jackson, and Valerie Wint. During the 1980s DEC launched its most ambitious projects, the Colour Positive Anti-Racism Festival, in 1984, and the Euclid Community Film Theatre, in 1987. I will leave the history of these events, plus the final disintegration of DEC, to others and another time.    

To recover and reclaim

Throughout the first ten years of its life DEC Films, along with its sister groups in publishing, radio broadcasting, etc. managed to push the Canadian discussion about development education to the left. In most instances DEC was able to challenge the entire notion of capitalist development in favor of a discourse centered on international solidarity and socialism. Many of the films on international issues in the DEC catalogs stressed the links between first world capitalism and third world poverty. While Canadian government homilies on development strained to highlight the positive aspects of Canadian aid projects abroad, DEC countered with material on revolutionary upheaval or deadly forms of political repression in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. To this end, DEC’s most powerful and disturbing films of the ‘70s and early ‘80s included Tongpan (Isan Film Group, Thailand, 1977), The Tupamaros (Jan Lindquist, Uruguay, 1972), Prisoners of Conscience, and El Salvador: The People Will Win. [70]

During the 1970s DEC Films was fortunate to benefit from the rapidly expanding academic fields of Film and Cultural Studies. These provided the theoretical legitimacy and the tools for DEC’s attempts at adult film education, for example running through the Images In Action book. DEC’s role thus increasingly became not only to provide resources but to push community audiences in particular see more in those resources. Consequently, viewers might value the emotional power and non-verbal knowledge that films could deliver. In the end this meant not simply finding existing audiences, but at times creating them.

The 1970s continued what the 1960s New Left had started, launching a new formation that expanded beyond class analysis to include all those suppressed, repressed, and discarded by Canada’s advanced capitalism. DEC’s initial focus on international issues pulled it away from the excesses of Canada’s resurgent nationalism vis-a-vis the United States. Throughout this period DEC took on many films about Canada and many about the menace of U.S. imperialism but none of these abandoned a class analysis. Of course, the resurgent nationalism in Quebec placed a different set of issues on the agenda, but here as well DEC’s films on Quebec focused on the labor and women’s movements.

Finally, DEC’s early films on Indigenous peoples made it clear that Canada’s governments and corporations played an imperial role akin to the U.S. and Britain. Two of these works focus on mercury poisoning in the Northern Ontario community of Grassy Narrows and both show the links between global capitalism, the Canadian state, and home-grown corporate behavior. Significantly, Grassy Narrows (Hiro Miyamatsu, 1979) and Hands Across Polluted Waters (Noriaki Tsuchimoto, 1975) were made by Japanese filmmakers. Tsuchimoto in particular ranks as one of Japan’s finest documentarists, best known for his Minamata series (1970s-80s), also distributed by DEC. The links between media activists from Japan working together with First Nations in Canada certainly pulled the notions of solidarity (let alone development) into a radically different frame. DEC worked hard to promote these films and both were seen by significant numbers of Canadians, providing the first glimpse of these issues that combine racism and environmental degradation.

“And yet, perhaps prompted by this specific case, we must ask, 'To what effect?’ The tragedy of mercury poisoning at Grassy Narrows carries on to this day—the toxins have not been removed and the various governments continue to delay either clean-up or community compensation.”[71]

In documentary studies these haunting words of Brian Winston in his critique of John Grierson keep this question of documentary use value front and center. After all the thousands of social issue documentaries on, for example, housing problems, starting in the 1930s, says Winston, have any of these problems gone away?[72]

Clarke Mackey, for one, still believes in the power of some documentaries:

“Surely, the Brian Winston question has to be answered with a qualified ‘yes.’ We never get exactly what we want, but things do change over time.”

Or recall, says Jonathan Forbes, one instance when a DEC film made a difference. In 1980 DEC sent El Salvador: Revolution or Death to Thunder Bay, Ontario for a community screening organized by the renowned labor activist, Evelina Pan. The day after the screening a new Salvador solidarity group launched in the city.

On another optimistic note we might also emphasize that forty years on many filmmakers championed by DEC continue to produce challenging, powerful cinema. India’s Anand Patwardhan, Argentina’s Juana Sapire, Julia Reichart in the U.S., Sophie Bissonnette and Sylvie Groulx in Quebec, Hiro Miyamatsu in Canada and Japan, Jannik Hastrup in Denmark. As well, thousands of the activists who screened and organized using DEC films still work on many of the same issues confronting Canadian society. To pick just one, Evelina Pan recently helped launch the Thunder Bay chapter of the Canadian Labour International Film Festival (CLiFF).

To return to the debates on the chronology and legacy of Canada’s New Left I’ll turn again to Peter Graham, who calls into question any dismissal of the New Left achievement in transforming daily life in Toronto’s many communities.

"Across a vast spectrum of issues …New Leftists insisted on putting forward a distinctive agenda. They struggled mightily to transform professions into weapons of people’s struggle…. In retrospect, what stands out are not the inevitable limitations of the New Left’s bid to transform Toronto’s daily life, but its lasting and surprising victories. The New Left remade Toronto in the 1970s. And much of its legacy, even after three decades of neo-liberalism, remains.” [73]