Doc about poet exposes Canada’s cultural roots
Al Purdy Was Here, Brian D. Johnson’s documentary about the deceased, highly combative Canadian poet, is not only one of the most engaging treats in this year’s TIFF Docs program; it’s multi-dimensional.
Part warts-and-all investigation of how a rebel poet created his own myth and part total-pleasure songbook, the film will have its world premiere on Tuesday at TIFF Bell Lightbox. And 15 years after his death, this should remind a lot of people that Al Purdy was indeed here.
From the perspective of fall 2015, this is not just nostalgia but a timely reminder of those golden pre-Harper years decades ago when culture played a key role in Canadian nation-building, and poets led the charge.
Just as striking for many is the emergence of Johnson, best known for more than two decades as the film critic at Maclean’s, as a hot director.
No one is more surprised — almost apologetic — than Johnson himself.
“I know this sort of looks like a man-bites-dog case about a longtime film critic deciding to reverse engines,” he told me one recent evening at a Yorkville café.
True, he had retired from Maclean’s in early 2014 and had time to do something completely different.
“But it wasn’t a career choice. I got pulled into this thing gradually and before that I didn’t know a thing about Al Purdy.”
It was Marni Jackson, the talented author, who lured her husband into this project, one chapter at a time.
“Marni had interviewed Purdy and she had written about him,” Johnson said. “I owe the film to her.”
Jackson knew all about the legendary A-frame cabin that the back-tothe-land poet and his wife, Eurithe, had built out of discarded lumber in Ameliasburgh. That’s in Prince Edward County, which later became a high-end rural favourite of Ontario’s social elite.
Indeed, Eurithe, at 90, emerges
“It evokes nostalgia for a time when poetry mattered.” BRIAN D. JOHNSON ON HIS DOCUMENTARY, AL PURDY WAS HERE
now as one of the great strengths of the new film, with sheer star quality. Terrific songs and a surprise Act 3 plot turn are the other ingredients that make this a breakthrough not just for Purdy followers but for many who know little or nothing about the poet.
Along the way we get performances by Bruce Cockburn, Tanya Tagaq and Sarah Harmer, as well as insights from Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Leonard Cohen.
“Marni was well down the Purdy road,” Johnson said. She worked on a 2013 event at Koerner Hall: a fundraiser to restore the A-frame house and keep it going as a mecca for writers, while raising money to maintain a poet-in-residence program there.
The event was filmed and Jackson asked Johnson to edit the footage.
“I found this guy enchanting and charismatic,” he recalled. He was also boisterous and an entertaining raconteur.
But there were many sides to this hard-drinking, high-school dropout who hopped a freight train, heading west during the Depression, and worked in factories before pioneering the idea a guy could earn a living writing poems.
A lot of bad poems came before the good ones, such as his best known work “At the Quinte Hotel,” in which beer drinking looms large. He won the Governor General’s Award twice.
Songwriters agreed to contribute to the Purdy legend. The obvious next step was a documentary film about this larger-than-life character.
Asked for his advice, Johnson replied that maybe there could be a half-hour for TV.
It was the music that later made him think this should be a fulllength documentary. And since he had previously made a seven-minute short film in which other poets read a book by Dennis Lee, Johnson was the right guy to direct this movie. It was the CBC, through its documentary channel, and film distributor Ron Mann (of Films We Like) that drove the project forward. Now the film will probably have a limited theatrical release before reaching TV screens in 2016.
For CBC management, this was a great opportunity. The public network was enduring scandal, crisis and cutbacks.
It helped that the team for this film included Jackson as co-writer, Nicholas de Pencier as cinematographer and a young co-producer, Jake Yanowski, who, according to Johnson, wound up mentoring his much older partner.
“This is a tale about Al Purdy and his legacy, but people are bringing more to it,” Johnson told me. “This is about our cultural roots. It evokes nostalgia for a time when poetry mattered, when Canadian culture was still being invented and this activity was a key part of nationbuilding. Today that seems like a far-fetched ambition for anyone to entertain.” mknelman@thestar.ca