GOING STRONG AFTER 80 YEARS
The Canadian Film Institute
It was an unusual note for its day.
On April 2, 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, an Ottawa-based journalist named Donald Buchanan issued a statement of principles for a new organization in the capital.
His motivation: To ensure that the citizenry had the opportunity to see films from places other than Hollywood. Funny how that was happening even then.
Buchanan, who wrote about arts and culture for Saturday Night magazine and has a biography of the artist James Wilson Morrice to his credit, proposed the creation of a film institute that would be dedicated to the propagation of his idea. By Aug. 26 of that year, the group, then known as the National Film Society of Canada and the first of its kind in this country, was made official. Buchanan would be employed by the society and would organize film societies across the country.
Today, 80 years later, the Canadian Film Institute is still following Buchanan’s original marching orders. It creates festivals, screening films of all types from around the globe (including an annual animation festival), along the way hosting interesting filmmakers from the places such as Sweden, the U.S. and, gulp, Canada. Buchanan based his model on the British Film Institute, the world’s oldest (the CFI is the second oldest by the way).
“It’s based on the BFI model where you have a centre in the capital and then you have a bunch of satellite cinemas operating in cities across the country,” says Tom McSorley, executive director of the CFI. “There were national film theatres set up in places like Halifax and Kingston, Winnipeg and Vancouver,” he says, but those cinemas disappeared in the 1980s.
Today, the CFI is a typical arts organization with a small budget and a small and very dedicated staff, located in an office in the Arts Court building.
For McSorley, whose voice is regularly heard on CBC Radio and who teaches film at Carleton University, the work is a labour of love. He has been with the CFI since 1986, when he applied for a job after university. He became director in 1996.
“Everybody left and there was me.”
He had a personal passion for film after taking a Film 100 course at Carleton taught by the legendary Peter Harcourt that turned out to be much more interesting than his major English literature.
“It was just pure luck. And he cleaned my glasses for me and I could see. It was unreal.”
There have been some famous graduates of CFI including film critic Geoff Pevere, Piers Handling (Toronto International Film Festival) and Wayne Clarkson (Telefilm and TIFF).
“The city of Ottawa has supported this organization by people’s interest in cinema,” says McSorley.
“That’s how it started in 1935 — with a group of people in the community who wanted to watch films that weren’t coming from Hollywood. We build relations with sponsors and industry but it is the audiences who come out and buy the tickets that keep us going.”
Some may feel Ottawa is not a very cosmopolitan city, “but I completely differ,” McSorley says, noting the longstanding interest in the CFI as his prime example.
The institute will formally celebrate its anniversary Thursday at Jean Pigott Place inside Ottawa City Hall from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Theose attending will be able to sample food and drink provided by local embassies and organizations. Memorabilia will be on display and there will be speeches and a video of congratulations from prominent Canadian filmmakers starting at 6 p.m. The CFI will also announce its new season.
During his tenure, McSorley has witnessed a transformation in his work, created by technological change.
These days movies move digitally. When he started in the mid 1980s, the fax machine was just being introduced and films arrived in canisters. Nowadays it’s by the click of a computer button.
He has also weathered the ups and downs of funding.
In the 1970s, the CFI was in a fiscal upturn. There was lots of money around and that allowed the institute to broaden its reach. It hosted regular retrospectives of filmmakers, including a look at the work of the British director Ken Russell, with the man himself in attendance, and a memorable review of the cinematic contribution of Russ Meyer, best known for campy soft-porn movies.
But in the 1980s the funding environment turned sour and the CFI was forced to retrench, which it obviously did successfully.
That period did show that the core goal of the institute — to bring unknown or hard-to-find cinema before Ottawa audiences — was the way to go.
That has built up into festivals of films from countries in Europe and Latin America built on support from patrons, three levels of government and from embassies located here that are interested in having films from their countries screened in a G-8 capital. McSorley does spend time looking for films to screen in Ottawa, but he says he attends only one festival each year — Cannes, where all the films are, he says.
There have been other bumps along the way, including, most recently, being booted from its longtime home at the National Archives building on Wellington Street.
But as they say, when one door closes another opens. This one was opened by Carleton, which offered the theatre inside the brandnew River building as a venue for screenings.
That has been a massive success McSorley says.
And just down the road is a new 250-seat theatre inside the expanded ArtsCourt, which will be on-stream in a couple of years, he says.