Sex, censorship and celluloid

>> A retrospective highlights the amazing oeuvre of Larry Kent

by MATTHEW HAYS

“Don’t get me started on Canada,” Larry Kent says, as he sinks into a chair to discuss his films. “We’re a country that doesn’t believe in ourselves. It’s clear to me—all of the filmmakers I know from the ’60s have been terribly treated by the film establishment.”
It may sound somewhat bitter, but Kent, now 63, can be forgiven for feeling a tad underappreciated. If there’s one thing the Canadian film pioneer has consistently been called, it’s undervalued and underrated. In the ’60s and ’70s, Kent wrote, directed and produced a string of fresh, unusual and sexually frank films that pushed boundaries, upset critics and had the censors’ tits tied up in knots. Now the uninitiated will get a chance to see six of Kent’s best films, all of which will be screening in early March at the Cinémathèque québécoise in a retrospective.

South African born, Kent began making films after emigrating to Canada and becoming a theatre and philosophy student at UBC in Vancouver. He wrote an anti-Apartheid play, The Afrikaner, which was performed there. But Kent found the theatre department too authoritarian and conformist, a reaction that would find its way into his films thematically. “People were tremendously conservative then,” he says now. “Everyone was employed but there was always worry that another depression was around the corner. So everyone held onto their hats and their jobs. Perhaps because there was no official career to be had in film, maybe that’s what drew me to it.
“I met a glassblower on the campus who owned a Bolex camera. We just started making movies.”

Primal breast

The Bitter Ash (1963), his first film, was shot on the UBC campus with his friends from theatre school. Typical of Kent’s work, the film opens with a couple awakening in bed together (it may not seem risqué today, but then a couple of barely-clad bodies in the sack was unusual). The scene sets the tone as the couple, who don’t seem to be in love, exchange barbs about the prospect of marriage; he describes it as a trap, while she seems affronted by his views. She’s missed her period and he knows what that means: a potential shot-gun wedding. Bitter Ash has become notorious for a number of reasons. It’s thought to be the first Canadian feature to include a shot of an exposed breast. It was also the first film ever to tour the university circuit, drawing large numbers of student viewers before a circuit of that kind had been established. The film had sold out in advance at McGill, but the students were so eager to see the breasts and sex scenes that they broke down the locked doors and stormed the cinema.

This film was followed by Sweet Substitute (1964), another film in which the prospect of marriage is treated by Kent’s male characters as a trap. It’s also a film in which the male characters spend a lot of time sitting around plotting ways to get laid. Girls in this period, of course, were taught to just say no. Kent says that though this film did well in the U.S., it was banned in Britain for a time as the censors there felt it too sexual. “It’s funny to think about now,” Kent says, “because the ’60s don’t seem that far away. But censorship was much more common then.”

Pleasing the public, scaring the critics

Did Kent think about the parameters he was pushing at the time? “You know, no, I don’t think I thought about it. When I made Bitter Ash I thought I was making it on university for a university crowd. And that’s what we talked about then, so I didn’t think about it. The public seemed to like it. But the critic from The Province came with his wife and had a bird. He said, ‘How could I invite him to see this stag movie?’ He was horrified!”

With When Tomorrow Dies (1965), Kent would continue with his themes of marriage and life as traps, but would complete his filming in Vancouver. By ’67, he had moved to Montreal and completed his first film there, High. This feature is as noteworthy for its censorship woes as it is for its content. The film has a young, amoral couple living amorously in Montreal and Toronto, unable to make ends meet. They take to seducing men and then robbing them. It was Kent’s most experimental film to date, leaping between black and white and colour stock and featuring a hallucinogenic credit sequence. But the free-living, heavy-drugging characters at the centre of High didn’t please everyone—particularly the censors. The film was to have its Canadian premiere at the Montreal Film Festival (then an event run by Rock Demers), but the Quebec censor board took one look at the film and pulled the plug on it. This act of censorship turned the film into a cause célèbre; Warren Beatty, then at the festival with Bonnie and Clyde, expressed his praise for the film. Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang were then members of the jury and praised High. That year, Allan King (Warrendale) and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre (Il ne faut pas mourir pour ça) shared the fest’s Grand Prix, but shared the prize money with Kent out of outrage over his film’s censorship.

Getting High

Kent says High suffered censorial woes because of the shift in thinking at the time. Though younger film audiences weren’t concerned with its content, censors often came from different, older generations and were thus much, much more uptight. “I don’t think there was anything shocking in High for the audience. The problem was the censors, who were coming from a different generation. I mean, it was shocking to me that they were going to censor the film. If a film got banned back then, the first thing they’d say is that it’s a dirty movie. They’d say, ‘Oh, it got banned… who’s this guy making dirty movies?’”
So they thought of you as one step away from a pornographer?

“No, they thought of me as a pornographer.”
Kent contends that though the stereotype indicates that Canadians don’t want to see Canadian films, his early experience defies this body of thought. “There was a real boredom with Hollywood films at the time. There was an explosion going on, what with the Italian neo-realists and the French Nouvelle Vague. There will always be a huge audience for American films, but I think there’s also a huge audience of young people who are absolutely fed up. And I think they’re fed up again. I don’t think In the Bedroom would have done so well three years ago. I think there’s a yearning once more for something different.”

In the ’70s, Kent would continue to make movies, but ironically enough, the success of his earlier works, along with the successes of other independent Canadian directors, would lead to the creation of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC), an organization he says actually hurt Canadian independent cinema. Launched in ’68, the government body doled out money for feature filmmaking. But they neglected to think about distribution or promotion of films, thus very few of the films they backed actually got seen.
“What happened was that as the CFDC became more entrenched they felt that they couldn’t really trust a filmmaker. They put a lot of power into the hands of producers. So the director was really hampered in the end. Then they came up with the tax credit [a tax-grab incentive to producers which would lead to some of the very worst films in Canadian history] and that was it.”

Having a retrospective of his work has put him “over the moon,” says Kent. And the fact that a print of the original cut of High was found at the Cinémathèque is one of the reasons the retrospective is happening. But Kent still laments the fact that his—and so many other trailblazing Canadian filmmakers’—works are so rarely seen. “In England, films like these would constantly be on television. The CBC doesn’t even put these on, late night. When one looks at the number of cable stations, you’d think they’d have a place to show them.”
In the meantime, Kent continues to rail against the system for not properly supporting Canuck film product. On megaplexes: “The least they could do is show one Canadian film at each of those multi-screen cinemas.” On Canada’s largest film company, Alliance-Atlantis-Vivafilm: “The Canadian government gives Alliance six million every year. They make a fortune distributing American movies. They could do a lot more to support Canadian movies.”

And Kent is currently working on another project. “It’s called The Hamster Cage. It’s about fratricide, patricide, matricide—the ultimate dysfunctional family. Basically, it’s a very, very dark comedy.” :

The Larry Kent retrospective begins at the Cinémathèque québécoise on Saturday, March 2