ROCKINGHAM
It may be hard to imagine now, but back in the halcyon years of the mid-’60s McMaster University was a hotbed of avant-garde filmmakers, expanding the boundaries of art with sensual psychedelic swirls, railing against war and questioning the tenets of mainstream morality.
A small cadre of counterculture artists found their muse in the McMaster Film Board (MFB), a student-run society founded on campus in 1966 by a Hamiltonian by the name of John Hofsess who had become enamoured with the work of New York artists such as Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground and the Filmmaker’s Cooperative.
Within a couple of years, their work was being screened in underground venues in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago and praised by critics who were open to the new art.
Their work was also vilified by the local student government and monitored by police morality squads for violations of the obscenity laws.
By the end of the decade, the early freeform pioneers of the MFB had been replaced by more audience-oriented filmmakers such as Ivan Rietman, who would go on to produce Hollywood blockbusters like “Animal House” and “Ghostbusters,” and Eugene Levy, of SCTV fame.
By the mid-’70s, despite the mainstream success of some of its alumni, the MFB had largely disappeared, along with many of its early films.
Stephen Broomer, a Toronto filmmaker who teaches communication and culture at Ryerson University, is a huge fan of the MFB, especially its early pioneers. Broomer recently published a book — “Hamilton Babylon: A History of the McMaster Film Board” (University of Toronto Press) — which explores the MFB’s brief but turbulent existence.
In researching his book, Broomer searched out original 16 mm copies of MFB short films and went through the painstaking task of digitalizing them.
On Thursday, June 23, at 9:30 p.m., the Art Gallery of Hamilton will host a free screening of four of these films, including Hofsess’ 1967 groundbreaking work “Palace of Pleasure,” in the gallery’s Irving Zucker Sculpture Garden. Also screened will be Peter Rowe’s 1967 hippie pastiche “Buffalo Airport Visions,” Eugene Levy’s 1969 six-minute short “Garbage,” and Robert Arlington’s 1968 “… and Dionysius died.”
“This is the first time these films have been shown in Hamilton in more than 40 years,” Broomer says.
Broomer points to “Palace of Pleasure” as defining the early ethos of the MFB. He found a print at the National Film Archives in Ottawa. It was in pieces, mislabeled and incorrectly copyrighted.
“Hofsess really believed there was nothing barring them from creating a culture in Hamilton as rich as they were seeing in New York in 1966,” Broomer, 31, says in an interview from his Toronto office.
“Palace of Pleasure is a work that I believe is as rich and authentic as anything being made in the American underground at the time.”
“Palace of Pleasure” is a 38-minute split screen film with one screen showing sensual scenes of lovemaking draped in psychedelic shapes and colours, while the second screen displays black and white news reel films from the Vietnam War.
The film’s soundtrack includes poetry readings by Leonard Cohen and music by The Who and the Velvet Underground. In short, “Palace of Pleasure” is what the kids of the time would call “trippy.”
David Cronenberg, who would go on to direct visceral horror films such as “Scanners” and “The Fly,” has a cameo role slipping into bed with a nude man and woman. It was that kind of scene that likely caused the Toronto police to seize the film from the lab that was processing it.
“Someone in the lab complained that the film was pornographic,” Broomer says. “They called the police and the police seized it.”
The film was eventually returned to university administrators, who then returned it to Hofsess after some heated negotiations.
Hofsess’ other directorial MFB work, “Columbus of Sex,” didn’t fair as well. The film was confiscated by police on its initial screening and Hofsess and Reitman (credited as producer) were charged with obscenity.
The movie was eventually found not to have violated community standards, but the scandal finished Hofsess at the MFB.
Despite his early MFB work, Hofsess is best known in Canada as a crusader for assisted suicide in Canada, founding the Right to Die Society of Canada in the early ’90s. He was an advocate for B.C. ALS sufferer Sue Rodriguez and her unsuccessful court challenge of Canada’s laws against assisted suicide.
In February, Hofsess ended his own life with an assisted suicide at the Eternal Spirit Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. He was 77.