Christopher’s Movie Matinee (Canada, 1968) 85 min color DIR-EDITOR: Mort Ransen. PROD: Joe Koenig. DOP: Martin Duckworth. MUSIC: 3’s a Crowd, Darius Brubeck, Sandy Crawley, Amos Garrett, William Hawkins. (NFB)
This candid documentary, following a handful of long-haired teenagers through their daily existences, is not as dated as other counterculture films of the period, but in general stands as a document of youthful naivete, and in specific, how these spacey young hippies observe the real world outside of their cocoons. One well-fed bespectacled youth, in a friendly argument with an old man on a bus, compares himself with the black population as to how the world looks down on hippies!
The subjects of this movie are in a sense representative of 1960s-early 70s Canadian cinema: youthful, naive, yet free. Claude Jutra’s A Tout Prendre, Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye and Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road pointed their cameras into the streets to tell stories that were at once Canadian yet universal, and freely experimented with form. While not as radical as The French New Wave, Canadian films of this time recall the freewheeling style of the British Kitchen Sink movement. Not yet daunted by self-consciousness or deluded by tax credits to create ersatz Americanized movies, our films of this period were fresh and alive.
While this unscripted picture is most interesting for a look back at the counterculture period (especially those glimpses of the pre-yuppified Yorkville, where the streets are teeming with young people), and seeing how these kids react in whatever situations the camera finds them (I love the one guy going on about how he loves little kids’ drawings because they’re beautifully abstract), there is another interesting layer… which happened accidentally. This documentary becomes a movie within a movie: the organic process of creating this film becomes self-referential, and ends with the realization that the NFB has pulled the plug on the project, leaving the kids to ask what is going to happen to the movie. This fatalistic ending is also emblematic of the flower power movement: something that ended much too quickly before really getting started.
My sole viewing of this nearly-forgotten curiosity piece was at a rare 1998 public screening at Cinematheque, introduced by local musician Chris Whiteley, who also worked on the joyful soundtrack. It can now be viewed for free at nfb.ca.