CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
1971

The Journey Experience:

PAUL ALFORD’S UNDERSKY by Rick Kline, The Official Scribe

“This film will be a product of our collective minds and bodies.” Paul Alford was talking to his cast and crew on the first day of production of his new film, Journey. Everyone listened and smiled politely and went right on not believing him. They’d been on too many productions where directors started out talking like synergistic Buckminster Fullers and ended up swaggering around like miniature Hitlers. But as he spoke, thin beams of light broke through the clouds and fell like descending grace on the little group — a kind of cosmic “right on!” and a promise of things to come. But no one noticed and the meeting broke up, leaving the people free to wander around the community that Bydwell had built for the movie.

This was Undersky, a combination of all the country roads James Taylor had ever travelled, complete with a square timbered house, hand-made pegged furniture, and an enormous thatched roof barn, all of it surrounded by mountains and bordered by the Saguenay and Marguerite rivers. The community members, who in more normal times were merely actors, included Geneviève Bujold, John Vernon, Luke Gibson, (Kensington Market Rock Group,) Gale Garnett (an AM radio folk-singer, of “We’ll sing in the Sunshine” fame) Gary McKeehan (Perth County Conspiracy, a combination commune-theatre-rock group) — all there to make a film. No one would have guessed at the outset, except possibly Alford, that the same people would in large part become a real community, but they did.

Removed from family and friends and their familiar urban environments, they’d been exiled by the powers that be (Alford) to an imaginary village called Undersky, located near an only slightly less imaginary village called Tadoussac, in northern Quebec. Having abandoned their normal lives, there was little left to order their present existence except the film — and the very film, with its emphasis on dream and the way dreams became realities, didn’t make things any easier.

Journey’s script began to unravel from its seams: the actors were forced into a kind of existential confrontation between themselves and their characters. And since there was very little left of the actors’ old selves, the actors more often than not lost the battle, succumbed completely, and became their characters. Half way through the film, Luke Gibson confessed; “I haven’t been me since three days before I came here.”

The crisis reached its peak by the fourth week as actor after actor tried to come to grips with the various realities by which the film was affecting their lives. At a week-end party, Alford’s ex-wife and current leading lady Geneviève Bujold, slipped him a small note on official Peanuts stationery. Right next to Linus and the bubble reading “the greatest potential is the biggest burden,” she had written: “I have faith.” Mere techniques and reason had by this time been exhausted. Faith was the only thing left.

This was revolution from the top: Alford himself had caused most of this confusion by launching a cultural war on his own script. After twelve rewrites and innumerable script conferences, many of which he spent padding around the room muttering: “Not enough truth, not enough truth,” like some blind prophet, he remained totally dissatisfied. The dissatisfaction crystallized into distrust and he began systematically to explode his script at every turn with suggestions from actors and production people, rewriting whole scenes, or creating new ones out of improvisation. The effect of all this on the actors was decisive.

Alford again: “All movies have a life of their own; it’s only a question of how far the people involved are willing to surrender themselves to it.” In Journey, by choice and through circumstance, the surrender was nearly complete. The resulting movie, though not radically different from the original script, was totally transformed by three dozen cast and crew having lived it completely for two months. By the end, nothing was being done the way movies normally did things.

In the beginning, Alford tried setting up a shooting schedule so that everyone would know at any moment what was being shot and what their part was in it. This procedure proved to be totally out of the question. Weather rolled down the river like a bowling ball down an alley — you could see it coming for miles, but its actual effect was always unpredictable. Changes would come in five minute shifts: first sunlight, then clouds, then rain, then sunlight again, and fog and rain, all in varying patterns, wreaking havoc on the film’s continuity. Behind all this demonology was the river, this Saguenay — at 900 feet, the deepest river in the world, carrying beneath its surface icy arctic currents which profoundly disturbed local atmospheric conditions — and the minds of the local weatherman assigned to chart these conditions. Given this problem, the weathermen had long since weirded out. Call them from the set in the pouring rain, drenched to the bone, and ask them for the forecast? They’d cheerfully tell you it would be sunny all day. They’d know it was a lie, of course, but they’d learned after all these years that cheerful lies go down a whole lot better.

Bogged down by this combination of bad weather and prevaricating weathermen, Alford’s precisely detailed attack on the film soon faltered, then retreated, and finally turned into a rout as the local weather deities displayed the full range of their power and perversity. Shortly afterwards, Alford surrendered, leaving the whole company truly “Under Sky,” dependent for its shooting schedule, its locations, the whole pattern of the film’s day-to-day life, on the motions of the clouds. It became common to see gofers, gaffers, actors, and assorted production people all walking around looking up at the sky in some vain attempt to determine what they should be doing.

This continuing disorientation is part of Alford’s basic philosophy. “When things are really upset,” he says, “a little confusion clears the air!” — confusion elevated to the status of a technique. Alford creates the outlines of a world, places his company inside it, and films the result. It is a technique that works perfectly with Journey’s script, for the movie is very much concerned with “how things you create have a way of taking over.” It is a dream-vision, structured internally by a series of dreams-within-the-dream, which incarnate into increasingly tangible forms of reality as the movie moves on, appearing at first as fleeting thought, then as recollected dream, then as a hallucinated obsession, and finally as nightmarish reality, confronted and disarmed.

Side by side with this dream world is the real story of the community, of the heroine’s impact on their lives, of the whole feeling of life as it is lived out in the country, including its less idyllic sides: pigs are slaughtered, bulls mount cows, people take shits and calves are born: realities she must learn to accept. The girl lives in a dream; she must learn to live in the world, and she can do that only by living out the dream in order to be released, to find her authentic self. It is the old Cocteau theme set to music: “I must live out my dream, and thus become real.”

 

A couple of unplanned dramatic incidents: (told by the Company Scribe)

 

NIGHT FLIGHT

Today Geneviève, Paul, Elton, Boffety, John Vernon, Patrick Spence-Thomas (sound) and Tim Hurson (1st AD) flew to Quebec City to see an assembly of the film in a Quebec laboratory and have a press conference — a simple trip: up by six and back by five this afternoon.

They got more than they bargained for.

The assembly went fine, and the press conference was its usual success. Only on the flight back did things begin to get, well, funny. Geneviève noticed that the plane was making strange noises as it circled La Malbaie airport. Then the pilot turned to announce that he was having trouble landing; the indicator light showed that the landing gear had not locked. He had no way of knowing whether the indicator had failed, or whether the wheels really weren’t down. They circled around for a while longer; his passengers were alarmed to see him take out his instrument manual and begin reading studiously.

John Vernon’s face froze into a Zen-like smile; Geneviève Bujold settled back with a slightly bored attitude (“Such an undramatic way to die”). Jean Boffety tried to be comforting with his wine-red face completely white. Elton, usually the heartiest of the Undersky inhabitants, turned ashen grey beneath his beard. While people sat around waiting for their lives to end, Paul huddled with Tim Hurson, deciding his schedule for the coming week, visibly annoyed at this unscheduled delay. Tim, meanwhile, trying hard to emulate the master, cast significant looks at everyone. Meanwhile, the pilot headed back for Quebec City, where the airport facilities could deal with crash landings. They were further disconcerted by the ambulances and fire trucks lining the runway.

The pilot tried touching down to see if the gear would in fact buckle. It did not and they landed successfully, not without a few bitten lips and white knuckles.

Straight away everyone headed for a bar. Two hours later, well soused, they took off in three separate small planes right back to La Malbaie and safety, drunk — with success?

 

THE PIG KILLING

Death. Cut with equal parts of wind and rain, it swept through Undersky all day today. Everyone felt it. Never had it rained this hard before, heavy, metaphysical, falling everywhere. Outside and in the barn, three pigs were being slaughtered one after another to cover the various angles and the close-ups.

The actors taking refuge in the main house sat quietly, woodenly, with ashen faces, singing old rock-and-roll songs, afraid to stop because the silence might bring to their ears the squeals of pigs as knives sliced into them. Outside, other animals were going berserk from the smell of blood and scalded flesh. Saul, the bull, pulled back to the end of his tether; geese and ducks agitated loudly and the one frantic calf raced away. From inside, the actors heard Alford’s voice: “Fantastic, fantastic! Patrick, did you get the sound of the thunk as the hammer hit the pig’s head?” The crew wrestled with their consciences.

In fact, they did rebel and tried to start an actors’ strike, but Alford set Elton upon them, and he, as a farmer himself, finally put that to rest.

Norman Mailer once said that no-one should eat meat until they’ve visited the Chicago slaughterhouses. Up to this day, most of the actors thought meat came from little plastic trays in Steinberg’s meat department. What a rude awakening. Inside, Luke Gibson, a confirmed vegetarian, nodded as he played his guitar: “I think it’s a good thing. Those middle Americans are really going to have their minds “blown.”

 

FAMOUS LAST WORDS FROM JOURNEY

Anonymous gofer: Will you please tell me what it is I’m looking for?

Geneviève: Paul, talk to us. Paul: I’m listening.

Paul: Shall we go as we go?

(About the film) It would really be good if it were good.

(Looking at a bunch of actors basking in the sun) If everyone were starving and hungry and miserable, it could really be much worse.

Tim: After watching the pigs being carried into the barn by their ears) Elton, why are their ears so red?

Elton:Ah gee, Tim, I don’t know. Maybe they got too much sun.

Tim again: (At an interior) All right, clear the room — of everybody but non-essential people.

Paul:(With the actors, auctioning off lines he’s just made up for a scene he’s just invented) Out of what? Who wants to say “Out of what?” That’s a brilliant line. Now who wants to say “Out of what?”

Ratch: I’m interested in human values and all that shit.

John Vernon: (On the film) This could be a fantastic commentary on ... on ... on something.

 

JOURNEY AS VISIONARY EXPERIENCE

by Prof Paul T. Piehler

Throughout most of history there have been two radically different types of experience open to mankind: the prosaic or everyday experience, and the more important visionary experience.

The peoples of western Asia and of the Mediterranean basin from whom we draw our fundamental cultural identity carried on most of their important business of life through the medium of visionary experience. A nation in a state of crisis would call upon its soothsayers and dreamers to sleep in the temples of the gods until the right dream or vision was vouchsafed, showing the correct course to take. In fact, the Egyptian Pharaoh or the Babylonian Priest-King was in reality just the best dreamer, the principal visionary of his people. The greatest of these visionaries expressed their experience through poetry, myth, sacred book and epic, and in the Middle Ages, allegory. Up to the period of the Renaissance, all serious art was visionary in nature, and the greatest poets, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, were its foremost practitioners.

The visionary experience is essentially unifying — it implies a harmony of the intuitive and rational faculties — abandoned in that Faustian compact that gave man control over the material world, on condition it seems, that he cease to associate it with the spiritual world. Since that time, man’s spiritual and technological faculties have gone their separate ways, with the result that the man of vision, the artist, has become increasingly alienated and embittered — as prophesied in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922). We see grim and negative evidence that a failure to grasp the spiritual dimension of the physical world will lead to the extinction of life on earth — life, in its true form as meeting place of matter and spirit.

The way forward is the way back, to a reintegration of physical and spiritual, and the artist must lead the way. The first duty therefore is the recovery of Visionary Allegory, the greatest of the artistic achievements of western man, in the expression of a unified comprehension of the world around us.

It is thus an enormous pleasure to welcome the creation, in Canada, of Paul Alford’s film Journey, one of the first works of this decade to express this unified vision for which we are searching. It faithfully follows a form hardly seen in English since the Renaissance — a form at once archaic and yet now ultra-modern which may well leave audiences somewhat baffled and yet strangely moved. Its setting is both a perfectly visitable locale of almost unearthly beauty on an inlet of the Saguenay River in northeastern Quebec, and at the same time, a place outside normal time and space, the place of vision. The medieval allegorist would have no difficulty in recognising it, knowing that an ordinary landscape can at times glow with the lineaments of the pastoral vision, or the Earthly Paradise. The mediaevals lacked our sharp distinctions between place and state of mind, and were the better for it.

Rivers, sources of both fish and transport, were at once Rivers of Time; High Places might be climbed to look for a lost sheep or, indeed, for a vision of Truth. Their waterfalls flowed with real water but could also loosen a girl’s dammed-up passion. Thus it is in Journey. There is nothing of romantic vagueness here.

What makes Journey a visionary allegory in the ancient and most modern sense, is the journey itself. Visionary experience was never lightly conferred; Dante himself did not achieve it until angst and terror had brought him almost to the point of death. So too the heroine of Journey is plucked from the river where suicidal frenzy had driven her.

And so she finds herself rescued into the visionary otherworld, which is perhaps no more than an eccentric upcountry commune, where the slow uncertain process of soul healing takes place; for Journey, like all serious visionary allegory, is therapeutic and reintegrative. And again, in accordance with the ancient tradition, the healing takes place in a kind of pastoral paradise which reconciles the polar opposites of city and wilderness, reason and intuition, the two mighty opposites whose antagonism is pulling man apart in our modern world.

In one highly significant respect, Alford breaks with the tradition of earlier allegorists. Soul-healing in past allegory often involved a mysterious feminine figure with deep powers of understanding and consolation. In Alford’s allegory there is no such a figure. Thus, in her search for herself, Saguenay has no one other than the equally tormented figure of Boulder, leader of his pastoral community, to lend help and strength. Thus, the process of soul healing that Saguenay undergoes is considerably less complete than one would expect to find in a medieval vision. By the end of the film, Saguenay has passed through a critical stage of psychic reintegration but has not yet achieved any deep enlightenment.

This circumstance is, I believe, indicative of the insight and essential honesty of Alford’s vision. Today we are far from recovering, even on a visionary level, the kind of spiritual authority which medieval visionaries had no difficulty in achieving. It is as if these mysterious soul powers that once guided our psychic destinies have decided that this time, we must learn to do the job ourselves, no matter what extra sweat and anguish is caused. Nonetheless, what remains most striking in Alford’s vision in Journey is that after decades of artistic disintegration and decadence, we have in this film a searching and honest attempt to recover the ancient neglected mainstream of western artistic achievement, a vision of soul-healing and reintegration.