Through documentaries, animations, live-action dramas, and more recently through clips incorporated into interactive materials on new media platforms, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has been mapping out a cinematic version of Canada as it pursues its evolving mandate related to the telling of Canada to Canadians, a nation-building and nation-maintaining goal. One way it has mediated the laying claim to cultural space has been through the selection and reworking of diverse literary texts for cinematic adaptation. The retention, erasure, and changing of source content for film adaptation can reflect adapters’ intentions as well as the social and political contexts to which they may be responding, particularly in an institutional setting, as the scholarly work of Brian McFarlane, Robert Stam, and Linda Hutcheon variously suggest. Although live-action drama never became a major form of production at the NFB for budgetary reasons, some filmmakers remained committed to trying their hand at it, in part through adaptations. In this context the pointed selection of material for the relatively small number of live-action adaptations actually made gains of significance. They arguably reflect a greater fascination for the selected subject matter than the actual quantity of such productions would at first suggest.
In the 1970s and 1980s, after decades of neglect, a small surge of interest in exploring the francophone presence in the West through adaptations that were rendered either entirely or partially through live-action film was manifested at the NFB, notably by reworking texts by, about, or addressed to one of two iconic francophone figures: Louis Riel and Gabrielle Roy.1 This interest in finding ways to represent cinematically French-language writing from the West coincides with the general movement towards regionalization at the NFB, which resulted in numerous documentaries on francophones in the West after an apparent near dearth of any production interest.2 It also parallels the development of regional and alternative theatre that fostered and mounted productions on local themes, some of which were showcased in NFB films.3
Marginalized in the West and marked by a history of periodic contestation both in the West and at the NFB, francophones constitute a group with an evolving set of relations with the dominant political and cultural apparatus. Although francophones from the West have received relatively little attention in NFB adaptations, whether in the form of live-action drama or otherwise, representations of them have been varied. These representations not only reflect the changing dynamic of those relations and disparate anglophone perceptions of francophone cultural contributions, but also reveal the trace of Québécois appropriations of Franco-Manitoban literary heritage. This chapter examines how these films alternatively erase, refashion, perpetuate, contest, or grapple with the claims each iconic figure makes directly or has had made in his or her name to linguistic and cultural, if not national, place. Given that chronologically the first film in this set of adaptations is based on a text by Roy and given that films inspired by Riel carry on after those based on Roy’s texts (even though Riel lived and died long before Roy), the adaptations of the Roy texts are examined first, namely: Un siècle d’hommes/Of Many People (1970), based in part on Roy’s La petite poule d’eau (1950),4 and Le vieillard et l’enfant (1985), based on Roy’s similarly titled novella published in 1966.5
Un siècle d’hommes/Of Many People, which boasted English and French versions, was, according to NFB internal documents, a multimedia production consisting of film footage, stills (photos and drawings), slide projections, and music. It was instigated at the request of the Secretary of State and produced for the Government of Canada and the Government of Manitoba in honour of Manitoba’s centennial year in 1970 by the NFB’s innovative, Montreal-based Studio G, “the multimedia section responsible for sound-film strips for schoolchildren.”6 It thus followed on the heels of Canada’s own centennial celebrations, and traces of the evolving federal vision for Canada can be found in the extant production and its files.
Stanley Jackson (1914–1981), a Winnipegger by birth and a long-time NFB director and producer whose work exhibits at times a particular interest in the West, directed the production.7 Robert Verrall and John Spotton, major creative forces at the NFB, produced it. The production was made during and after the closing of the NFB’s first, short-lived attempt at regional production operations in Winnipeg, which were wound down in the 1969–70 fiscal year, and preceded the 1974 opening of the Prairie Studio proper by four years.8 Premiering on July 1, 1970, it enjoyed an extended run until the end of March 1971, with a projected total of 440 presentations. Shown in smaller communities over the summer of 1970, where it received respectable audiences given the size of the communities, attendance picked up considerably when it was shown in Winnipeg. By the end of the centennial year, the chair of the Manitoba Centennial Corporation declared it “la plus belle réussite de l’année du Centenaire,” as reported by the head of Studio G.9 Considering the technical attention given the production, this success is perhaps unsurprising. The show’s publicity material indicates that extensive image research was done, with over 10,000 slides and 8,000 feet of 16mm film considered, and NFB engineers were commissioned to design and build special projection equipment. With a production budget estimated at $60,000, excluding presentation costs, the NFB accorded the means to make a quality production.
Although research to date has uncovered only the fragmentary remains of what was apparently a twenty-five minute show—the most useable material being a print of the French version with approximately eight minutes of film of the original production along with blank spaces where stills would have been inserted or projected and the accompanying soundtrack—it appears, if one accepts the order on the extant print, that the production accorded a paradoxically prominent but muted position to francophone historical presence in the province and that it did so from a particularly Canadianist stance.10 The production followed the recent passing of the federal Official Languages Act in 1969, enacted on one of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, and seems to seek to make the French fact a natural, non-threatening part of not only Manitoba’s history but of the nation-building process itself.
The first half of the multimedia production is based on the Roy text, a fact corroborated by the catalogue descriptions of both the French and English versions as well as internal NFB documents.11 The loose adaptation is rendered partly by film image, partly by the now-missing stills and slides, and most fully by voice-over narration, which is audible although somewhat degraded in the extant French version. Narrating an idealized yet not unrealistic account of the settlement experience of the isolated Tousignant family in what Roy calls Water Hen country in northern Manitoba, Roy’s text was selected because of “the tribute [it makes] to the pioneering spirit of the Manitoban,” one that NFB officials felt could serve as a representative “story of a province where its early settlers conquered the wilderness to build for later generations.”12 Indeed, the English translation of the source text had become popular among English speakers in the West for these reasons.13 While acknowledging the conditions of an isolated life, the adaptation tends to highlight the idyllic aspects of the family’s pre-mechanized agrarian life, retaining, for instance, references to the Tousignant’s beautiful house or “belle maison” and good, sufficient meals. The intent never seems ironic, although the visuals depict the house as small and rustic; rather, the adaptation intimates the pleasures of simple, rural living.
This tendency to lean to a form of idealization, this time in the direct service of nation, continues with the adaptation’s portrayal of the education of the Tousignant children. Roy gives extended accounts of their difficulties in acquiring any education, let alone one in French, on their isolated island, recounting their disparate experiences with a series of live-in school teachers sent by the government at the request of their mother, Luzina Tousignant. The adaptation, however, emphasizes the culturally integrative results of their education—its part in the nation-building process. The children’s education is shown to be efficiently absorbing them into the Canadian nation-state. In one shot, for example, the camera slowly pulls back from a school map showing the family’s location on the Water Hen to reveal the entire nation, while the reminiscing narrator recalls the children’s lesson: “Nous sommes des canadiens.” While the adaptation does elaborate on some of the teachers’ activities, noting humorously, as in the source text, that one of the teachers, Miss O’Rorke, was bothered by the family’s sheep, it does not expound much on the latter’s active attempts to mould the children into British subjects or her neglect of French-speaking explorers and fur traders, although the film’s planning document indicates the adapters foresaw a shot of the raising of the Union Jack sewn under Miss O’Rorke’s instructions. Later, the eventual migration of the French-speaking children to the more populated, and we deduce, largely English-speaking, south is naturalized by images of migrating birds. The spectator understands they are contributing to the birth of modern Manitoba, becoming, as the title affirms, “of many people.” The complexity of their linguistic future does not seem to have been explored as it had been in the source text.
The rural, non-mechanized settlement experience as expressed through the adaptation of the Roy text in the first part of the production prefaces the province’s shift to urbanization and mechanization shown in the review of Manitoba’s history in the second half of the production, rendered through a wide assortment of archival film, (missing) stills, and 1970s-style instrumental pop music. The film images reveal technological progress through, for example, shots of early twentieth-century cars negotiating city streets and threshing machines at work during harvest times. The province is thus shown to have moved beyond the pioneer past of Roy’s text, one that while treated with gentle nostalgia is presented as trying, as symbolized by the mailman’s cutter tipping over at the beginning of the film while making its arduous way to the Tousignant home through the lonely, snow-drifted lands.
One could cynically argue that the production also inadvertently suggests that, over Manitoba’s history, the province moved from ethnic primitivism to superior British ways, since the production’s fragmentary remains show the province developing from the less technologically developed French and other non-British immigrant pioneering ways of life into a more advanced, British-dominated society within the British Empire and then the Commonwealth, symbolized in the production’s second half by archival footage of the young Queen Elizabeth’s visit.14 However, with no visual evidence from the missing stills, which constitute the bulk of the production, and no such indication in the narration, it is difficult to make any conclusive observations.
Indeed, the more elaborate first draft of the “Centennial Project Handout” reveals that an a-linguistic form of multiculturalism informed the production's publicity material. This is a little different from the form that was soon to unfurl at the national level in which the federal government, under Pierre Trudeau, advanced “a policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework.”15 The draft handout describes the contact between the Tousignant family and other ethnic groups as mutually enriching but omits subjects related to language. In a bid to write Manitoba’s multi-ethnic heritage into the national narrative, the document states that “Manitoba, a province of many national origins, has benefited from its diverse population, nor is there any doubt that Canada has gained from the unique character of Manitoba and its people.”16 The earlier “Approach to Treatment for Water Hen,” however, described one of the production’s planned sequences in multilingual terms also, i.e., as containing a “multiplicity of ethnic groups using voice and music. We should hear snatches of Icelandic, German, Ukrainian, Polish…. The sequence ends with very lively Ukrainian dancing.”17 However, Nick Sluzick, the Ukrainian mailman, speaks in English in the extant production material. Although a secondary character in both the source text and the adaptation, he arguably accrues multicultural significance in the latter, while serving as an example of the English-language assimilation of settler populations. During the course of its work, the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission had encountered “a certain degree of protest by relatively established ‘ethnic groups’ such as Ukrainian-Canadians.”18 Greater access to French-language instruction was also accorded in Manitoba during this period, with small steps in 1963 and 1967 and a major one in June 1970.19 Thus the adaptation’s increasing of the narrative importance of this secondary character in conjunction with the muting of the source text’s concerns with French-language issues suggest the NFB was using the Roy text to work around the shifting ground of policies and approaches surrounding the fostering of bilingualism and multiculturalism as they were advanced and reacted to federally and provincially.
Roy, the daughter of a Quebec-born, federal immigration official in Manitoba, always wrote with interest and sympathy about people of various cultural backgrounds and, in this particular text, repeatedly mentions of Luzina Tousignant’s positive multicultural encounters in her travels south. This character takes deep pleasure in hearing Icelandic, for instance. Studio G’s elaboration on the source text’s multicultural openness likely contributed to the production’s finding such great favour with Maitland Steinkopf, the chair of the Manitoba Centennial Corporation. Billed as Manitoba’s first Jewish cabinet minister, he was sympathetic to the multicultural approach to the interpretation of history. Indeed, he literally wore it on his sleeve during Canada’s centennial year, going to the point of hamming it up in a multi-ethnic costume in his duties as chair. For example, in the caption of a photo taken in 1967 and held by Library and Archives Canada, he is described in “Indian headdress, Hungarian shirt and vest, German lederhosen, Ukrainian sash, Dutch klompen, and shillelagh.”20
The spirit of technological progress and multicultural idealism notwithstanding, the production’s first and last film images suggest that difficulties encountered among the early settlers persist into the modern era. The production ends with a reference to Roy’s text, having it serve as the overarching narrative tie to the panoramic overview of the province’s history, one that ultimately suggests that change poses challenges to one’s comfortable world. No longer having to deal with the tipping over of his cutter, as he did at the beginning of the film, Nick Sluzick now drives an early-model car, which he attempts to negotiate along a primitive road in the woods. He has decided, as the film’s treatment states, “to move further north.21 As his voice-over explains, in a summarizing of a sentiment he expresses in the source text, “Il commence y avoir trop de monde.” (“There are starting to be too many people here.”) Placed as it is at the close of the production, the mailman’s desire to move northward carries greater weight than it did in its secondary narrative position in the source text. The production thus ends with emphasis on what is likely unintended irony, with one of the symbols of cultural interaction and negotiation fleeing, albeit with some minor difficulty, the ever-growing, multicultural world of the more southern parts.22 In spite of itself, the production leaves the spectator wondering about the inherent good of social change.
The fifty-minute Le vieillard et l’enfant (1985) is based on Roy’s similarly titled, poetic, semi-autobiographical novella, which was originally published in the collection La route d’Altamont in 1966.23 The film is the only entirely live-action drama adaptation in the NFB corpus based on a strictly literary source text (as opposed to songs, legends, or life-writing) by a francophone from western Canada about francophones from the region.24 Produced by the NFB’s French-language production arm in the West (Production française/Ouest) in 1985, the film was made more than ten years into French production in the West and was shot in Manitoba. The producer, René Piché, was a Franco-Manitoban with a track record of productions about francophones in western Canada. Despite the film’s evident connections to Manitoba, the film has a strong Québécois flavour; the director, Claude Grenier, the scriptwriter, Clément Perron, and all the key actors were from Quebec. Notably, the central role of the little girl, Christine, was accorded to the young up-and-coming Quebec actress Lucie Laurier and established Québécois actors were cast in the main supporting roles, with the old man played by Jean Duceppe, the girl’s mother played by Patricia Nolin, and the narrator played by Michèle Magny.25
This Quebec slant may be attributable, at least in part, to the fact that the film was made in collaboration with the Société Radio-Canada (the French-language CBC), creating an impetus to make a film with broad French-language audience appeal. This aim is suggested in the very French heard in the film. Although standardizing the oral French along Quebec norms may mean the language more closely reflects the French spoken by Roy’s fictional family, originally from Quebec, the film silences the very regional voices it is meant to let speak, leaving the impression that there are no competent Franco-Manitoban actors. It also glosses over the origins of the old man, Monsieur Saint-Hilaire, who had emigrated directly from France, something explained in the novella. Although at least once he does use a word more frequent among continental French speakers, the film mutes his French accent and suggests his emigration only obliquely when he explains he arrived in Canada by boat.
While the director, Grenier, was interested in Franco-Manitoban subjects, making several documentaries on them during this period, he also had a prior history of involvement in nationalist-oriented film production on Quebec-centered subjects.26 This interest is reflected in his casting choices, most notably that of Duceppe, one of the “main artistic proponents for the Yes camp in the first Quebec sovereignty referendum in 1980.”27 Given Duceppe’s symbolic status and his popularity in Quebec, and given the adaptation’s themes of memory, loss, and change, the film may be read in terms of the concerns of Québécois cinema, which in this period is marked by a response to the sovereigntists’ loss of the 1980 referendum (exemplified, for example, in Denys Arcand’s documentary Le confort et l’indifférence, 1981). This interpretation is arguably as compelling as reading the film as an adaptation of a Franco-Manitoban fictional memoir dealing symbolically with universal themes of memory, “the recuperation of childhood,” the desire to explore the world, and the coming to terms with death, themes explored in Gordon Collier’s discussion of the film.28
The quest to see and experience the great blue lac Winnipeg, called the “mirage d’eau libre,” can be interpreted in this socio-political context as the eternal desire for the (elusive) francophone nation. The white sails and white gulls against the expansive blue recall the colours of the fleurdelisé (the Quebec flag), while the white-tipped waves suggest a period of agitation; the latter concept is reinforced by the lake’s steely colour in some shots.29 The blue and white colour scheme is further complemented by the panoramas of blue sky, at times studded with white clouds during the little girl and old man’s visit to the lakeshore. All the main characters can be seen as assuming allegorical roles in the sovereigntist drama: Christine’s dead grandmother, whose death Christine must come to terms with, symbolizes the generational death of the dream; the child, Christine, charmed by the idea of seeing the great blue lake, embodies the youthful quest for the site of the dream’s eternal regeneration; the old man, who bewitches her with his tales of the eternal lake, acts as the transmitter of that dream; Christine’s mother represents the indecisive middle ground, engaged as she is in polishing tarnished, silver heirlooms—the dulled but renewable dreams of the past. Christine pleads for her mother’s permission to see the lake, to make her first steps to independence accompanied by the old man, not her mother. “Dis oui,” the girl begs, in a line not in the novella, but mimicking the sovereigntists’ call in the referendum campaign, while her mother remains, like the undecided voters, pensive and uncertain for a notable period. Returned to the safe fold of her mother’s arms at the end of the film after her brief flirt with independence along the lakeshore—the line between stasis and flight—Christine imagines she will eventually meet her grandmother and the old man, whom she will never see in life again, by the waters of the great lake.30 The dream is not dead.
It is not surprising, then, that the adaptation divests the text of non-francophone regional names—gone are terms such as saskatoons and any mention of the neighbouring Saskatchewan—to focus instead on details in the source text that emphasize the francophone presence in the history of the West, details that intimate it could have been a French-speaking land. As in the novella, the word “coulée,” a regionalism with French origins, finds its way into the film. Most developed is the scene in which Christine play-acts the fur trader and explorer La Vérendrye, in which she and the old man dream that the explorer will take possession of the West “pour le Roi de France” before the English come.31 In the novella, she had also sometimes imagined herself to be the Chinese launderer or the Italian peddler. These immigrant references are erased in the film, as are her pained imaginings of finding piles of animal bones and corpses, possibly an allusion to the decimation of the buffalo and First Nations peoples or perhaps a fear of the current drought’s consequences. Thus over Roy’s subtle laying claim to past visions of Franco-cultural space through her nostalgic accounts of people and place—one that acknowledges the hardship and trials of others—Grenier’s film superimposes another sentiment. Through symbolic resonance with Quebec’s post-referendum blues, the film evokes a more recent and pointed sadness over the loss of the French nation in the form of an independent Quebec. The adapters create both a palimpsest and an erasure of cultural-linguistic losses. As the narrator suggestively affirms at the beginning of the film when ostensibly referring to complaints about the weather: “Nous vivions toujours insatisfaits, entre l’avenir et [le] passé, entre l’attente et le regret.” (We live forever dissatisfied, between future and past, between expectation and regret.)
That said, the Franco-Manitoban sense of loss and struggle is not without socio-political resonance in the film. Although its narrative is set in 1935, the political situation during the crucial pre-production period could have encouraged the adaptation team to incorporate subtle symbolic traces that would speak to the wider contemporary context. Certainly it encourages the viewer to look for them. Just prior to the adaptation’s summer shoot in 1984, Manitoba was embroiled in a language crisis, notably “from May 1983 to the end of February 1984.”32 Fuelled by reactions to the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the Forest case in 1979, which ruled Manitoba’s Official Language Act of 1890 “inoperative,” it reached a fevered pitch during the meandering of the Bilodeau case through the courts. A notable period in the legislative debates was the “long hot summer” of 1983.33 The Supreme Court of Canada ruled on the latter case in 1985, giving the provincial government three years to translate its major laws and statutes into French.
Given this context, it is possible to read the film as subtly weaving the colours of the Franco-Manitoban flag into its visual narrative—yellow (for wheat), red (for the Red River), and green (for a plant emblemizing francophones, which is evoked on the flag by two back-to-back F shapes illustrating the plant from roots to leaves). The large white background into which the plant reaches can also be detected in the film. With the flag adopted in 1980, not long before the film’s production, its colours carried important symbolic weight. Except for yellow, mentioned to describe drought-stressed grass, none of the veritable colours are mentioned in the novella.34
Although, as a visual medium, film inevitably adds to a scene described in print and although colour film, in particular, immensely multiplies visual signifiers, careful direction can select clusters of images that suggest, underscore, or contain certain colours of symbolic significance. Since colours accrue political meaning in a charged socio-political context, they cannot be dismissed as a signifier in a cultural text. Yellow, evoked at the opening of the film through shots of expansive wheat fields, conveys a sense of cultural rootedness. This sentiment is then visually and aurally reinforced with a shot of a sad, young Christine missing her deceased grandmother, her feelings explained by the voice-over of her adult self. Neither wheat fields nor yellow are mentioned in this opening scene in the novella. White as a wide wash of comforting non-colour is also put to emblematic use early in the film, with the panning of the length of the sheltering, outer white walls of the family home behind which the mother draws white curtains and white blinds to take refuge from an oppressive heat wave. The peeling paint on the walls suggests the pressure that they and, by extension, the family within are under from outside forces. Later this wearing but invisible meteorological event leaves the young Christine, the symbol of the future, prostrate with heat stroke; her mother soothes her burning forehead with a white cloth dipped in cooling, restorative water, the element that becomes the object of Christine’s quest in the film. None of this type of use of white is in the novella, and it is the old man who is more affected by the heat.
Red and its derivatives also form motifs in the film, connoting the care for, transmission, or furtherance of Franco-Manitoban heritage or culture. For instance, the mother frequently wears some type of red dress, such as when she nurses her heat-stricken daughter or polishes the family silver in the decision-making scene. In Christine’s early adventure scenes, she regularly dons red shoes, for instance when she takes risks with her make-believe voyages on stilts or pretends to be La Vérendrye. During some of her imagined exploits she also frequently wears ruddy overalls or a dress edged with reddish trim. During Christine and the old man’s visit to the lake, red stands out as a protective colour on umbrellas, clothing, or the inside of a kiosk, underscoring the sheltering of self from the blistering sun. The dotting of diverse red coverings along the shore that skirts the great blue expanse of the white-capped waters symbolizes the complementarity of Quebec and Franco-Manitoban aspirations in protecting French heritage as well as the relative bigness of Quebec’s occasionally disruptive ambitions.
With the film shot in the summer, it is unsurprising that lush shades of deep green proliferate visually in the form of plants, canopies of tree leaves, shrubs, and varieties of grasses. The more specific suggestion of the cultivation of the francophone socio-cultural presence does find expression in this generalized green context, however. For instance, following a scene in which the old man replenishes Christine with a glass of milk and they exchange tidbits that reveal their estrangement from certain family members, they go outside to garden together.35 At their leisurely task, the old man shares with Christine his sense of wonder about the eternal presence of the vast lac Winnipeg, an entity she has never seen and which for him eclipses the greatness of the land of the girl’s uncles. With only its coulées and wells, it lacks sufficient and—by implication nurturing—water in his view. Their exchange culminates with Christine generously watering the flowerbeds thick with tall, green leafy flower stems that boast large red and red-variant blossoms, an action suggesting the sustaining of the local francophone community with the nourishing waters derived from the larger French one.
Green is also used to embody the road to cultural roots, a road the narrative intimates one must not stray from. For example, heavy, tall, green growth edges the same path that leads Christine into the forest where she remembers her deceased grandmother and that then guides the worried old man to the quietly grieving girl. Comforting her in the green enclave, he affirms, “On [ne] contrôle pas toujours la barque [lorsqu’on voyage loin]…. L’important…c’est de… retrouver son chemin.” (We can’t always control the direction of our little boat [when we travel far]. The important thing is to find our path again.) In another scene, Christine’s mother nurtures her love and nostalgia for the past; she play dresses with a green gown of her youth while her daughter and the old man enjoy their precious time between past and future by the great blue lake. Made during a time of uncertainty for Franco-Manitobans and Quebec sovereigntists, the adaptation holds out the hope that assuring one’s cultural future lies in cherishing those elements that are beautiful and sustaining from one’s heritage and caring for them into the present so that one’s culture may one day fully blossom on its own.
Issues related to cultural loss and the French presence in the West are also bound up in the story of Louis Riel. The NFB has paid less attention than one might expect to either him or the Métis resistance of the nineteenth century when compared to that accorded to him by historians and other cultural producers. This is surprising considering the political significance of the resistance movement with which he was associated (and for which he became the leader), his broad appeal to the Métis and francophones and to Westerners, historians and otherwise,36 and the amount of study to which his story has been subjected by numerous anglophone and francophone scholars, regardless of their regional affiliations.37 In the over 125 years since his death, he has been the subject of an array of cultural texts, both in English and French, including plays, novels, poetry, children’s literature, and a television mini-series.38 The interest continues unabated in the twenty-first century with, for example, Chester Brown’s graphic novel Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (2003) and Pascal Boutroy’s independent documentary Mon Riel à moi (2008). Indeed, except for the two short adaptations discussed in this chapter—This Riel Business (1974) and Louis Riel: dernier songe (1983)—and two other projects outside the scope of this chapter, no other NFB production specifically names him in its title, and few others deal with the events of either 1869–70 or 1885.39 He is a secondary figure in several other productions, as he is, to a certain degree, in the English-language adaptation examined in this chapter.40
The idea that the NFB may be eschewing the “great men in history” approach to historiography—an approach reflected in some of its earlier films and series—is undercut by the fact that the NFB continued to make historical portrait films of well-known political figures both around the time of and after the films on Riel. It also continued to make films that either explore the influence of key political figures or survey constellations of figures of political significance. Perhaps the NFB felt others had Riel’s story well covered. Whatever the case, the lack of overall film production on Riel by the NFB means that the film adaptations related to him, while minor works, gain importance as far as how they convey the history surrounding him, what he advocated, and the group with whom he particularly identified, “les Métis canadiens-français.”41
Grappling with a mythologized figure upon whom has been projected a wide range of divergent readings, reflecting at times French-English socio-political tensions, these adaptations serve as barometers for linguistically inflected perceptions—not surprising given that they emanate from an institution structured along linguistic lines. While the scholarship on Riel has gone through various phases depending on the linguistic, regional, and ethnic affiliations of history-tellers—and while he was largely neglected by Québécois scholars from the 1950s to the mid 1980s in spite of Quebec’s early sympathy—to this day he still attracts strong partisan commentary among some francophone scholars and remains a central figure in Métis and Western iconography and history.42 These linguistic-inflected interpretations of Riel are reflected in the two adaptations from literary sources to which I will now turn: This Riel Business (1974), based on Rod Langley’s comic play Tales from a Prairie Drifter (1972), and Louis Riel: dernier songe (1983), inspired by correspondence Riel received from loved ones.
Directed and produced by Ian McLaren as part of a 1973–74 English-language documentary series on the West (called simply West) that was broadcast on the CBC,43 This Riel Business was originally conceived as a documentary showing the mounting of a performance of Langley’s play, selected scenes and historical visuals, and reactions of an invited audience of Métis and First Nations people.44 However, as the NFB’s online catalogue indicates, the NFB categorizes the film as an adaptation of a literary work, and in so far as it makes a coherent selection of episodes from one particular performance of the play at the Regina Globe Theatre in the fall of 1973, it is. In the end the documentary never showed the behind-the-scenes efforts; rather it focused on showing a performance of some scenes inter-cut with on-the-spot and later audience reactions, some from Howard Adams and Gordon Tootoosis, location shots of battle sites, and historical stills. The result is a layered and partial re-recounting of historical events interpreted by the playwright (who sets up the play as a story within a story), reinterpreted by director Kenneth Kramer and his theatre company, reselected by the film director, and finally commented on by audience members. Their commentary takes the form of inter-cut observations and opinions laced with alternative and diverse versions of historical memory and oral histories involving Riel. As a complicated set of mediated adaptations and interpretations of the original events, the filmed version serves as an especially rich example of the appropriation of history of national import.45
While some scholars have expressed discomfort with the play’s blatant use of caricature and its simplistically negative portrayal of Riel, reviews suggest audiences responded positively to its burlesque treatment of history in which all the main characters, except perhaps Gabriel Dumont, are satirized, some more successfully than others.46 The playwright, who empathized with the plight of the Métis and First Nations people under Western expansion, acknowledged he saw history “as a series of cartoons.”47 This less sanctimonious approach to history helps explain audience reactions. According to McLaren’s proposal, “the play…invariably [brought] the house down.” Moreover, Métis audiences responded well. During its initial run “a couple of busloads of Métis” were brought to the play by activist Howard Adams. The audience gave it “a ten-minute standing ovation, and several Métis women were weeping.”48 Since the play came out during a period of Métis and First Nations activism, it provided the NFB with an opportunity to capture some of the spirit of that activism through the safe filter of professionally sanctioned theatre.49
Large swaths of the original two-act play are deleted so that it and the audience commentary could fit the half-hour format. Numerous scenes dealing with a range of historical events and peoples involved in the westward expansion of Canada and contributing directly or indirectly to the events of 1885 are simply cut. Excised content includes a Protestant clergyman sermonizing on the righteousness of white settlement, white buffalo hunters hoping to make a quick buck, and political negotiations involving Sitting Bull. It is thus difficult to assert that the depiction of issues involving one particular ethnic, religious, or linguistic group is specifically or uniquely deleted. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the explicitly French-speaking fact of the main players in the historical event, already secondary in the play, disappears in the film completely, a trend seen in the anglophone appropriation and depiction of Riel in other cultural texts, as Albert Braz has shown.50
The fact that Riel was French-speaking is only indirectly acknowledged in both texts and in the minimalist of ways, while Kramer, who plays Riel in the version of the play recorded in the film, makes no attempt to convey the fact in his speech patterns.51 The farcical, stereotypical scene depicting the Métis population’s growth, resulting from the coupling of “Frenchmen” and “Indian Maidens,” is also deleted, removing all overt explanation of mixed ancestry.52 Two scenes in the play depicting the Métis sending petitions in French written for them by a priest to the Ministry of the Interior are also cut from the film version, excising from the text all indication of the Métis’ use of French in such a context. The play’s burlesque vision of the Ministry’s reaction to the petitions is highly xenophobic and even anachronistic. Statements like “[i]t’s the French…. Not only are the beggars totally illiterate they can’t even speak white” no doubt did not help matters in the linguistically charged atmosphere following the federal government’s passing of the Official Languages Act in 1969.53 Michèle Lalonde’s galvanizing poem “Speak White,” recited first at Poèmes et chants de la résistance in 1968 and then in a triumphant encore at the famous La Nuit de la poésie in 1970 and published in its official form in 1974, cast a long political shadow over the disparaging term. Originally written to help raise funds for the defence of, notably, the incarcerated Front de libération du Québec member Pierre Vallières, author of Nègres blancs d’Amérique (1968), the poem decries the linguistic, cultural, and economic subjugation of French Canadians. Its socio-political import did not go unnoticed at the NFB. The French program released one film containing a reading of the poem in 1970 and would go on to release two more, one in 1977 and one in 1980.54
To return to the Riel film, the inserted audience reactions do not directly comment on the French factor, either because audience members did not mention the language issue, or, if they did, because those remarks were cut. The commentary that is included reflects an a-linguistic interest in First Nations or Métis interpretations of decisions regarding the respective peoples’ part in resistance activity. These challenge ideas advanced in the play and by fellow commentators, creating a dynamic text that acknowledges alternative historical narratives between the play’s version of a non-Indigenous view and Indigenous views and among Indigenous peoples themselves.
In steering clear of all allusions to French-English linguistic tensions, the film focuses on a select set of issues related to period discontent among the Métis, and to some degree the First Nations people, including the suffering following the decimation of the buffalo. It also spends time on the military events that culminated in the Battle of Batoche. The filmmaker’s intention seems to have been to open a space for First Nations and Métis viewpoints on this history through audience commentary. The suppression of some of the play’s French content, however, raises the question of whether the NFB perceived it easier in this period, so soon after the October Crisis and the move to bilingual federal government services, to broach—in English-language films at least—issues related to Indigenous peoples rather than ones related, even historically, to the French language. None of the other films in the West series are about francophones in the West, but one is about an up-and-coming chief, Noel Starblanket.
Unlike the wide-ranging, multi-character Langley plays, the approximately eight-minute Louis Riel: dernier songe (directed by Claude Grenier and produced by René Piché at the NFB’s western French-language production arm, Production française/Ouest) offers an intimate and sympathetic portrait of Riel. Released in 1983, two years before the centenary of his execution, it focuses exclusively on him through the enactment of a daydream the filmmaker imagines Riel may have had on the eve of his hanging. In it Riel returns alone to his empty family home in St.Vital, Manitoba. The fact that the film is in French—with about one-third devoted to Riel remembering two letters written to him in French, one from his (now deceased) sister Sara and the second from his former fiancée, Evelina Barnabé55—reinforce Riel’s French linguistic heritage. French is shown to be part of his daily, private life, connecting him with his loved ones. Indeed, his sister Sara writes to him about his mother thinking of her son. These few lines reinforce the notion of French as mother tongue. Riel’s mere use of French in the film while reflecting on the fate of “la nation métisse” and the “les ennemis” who, in his words, have risen against it and him shows the language to be integral to his Métis identity. This identify is further underscored by his wearing of the Métis sash. Visual and verbal signals thus adroitly and succinctly build the concept of the Métis as French-speaking.
Grenier’s film more positively depicts Riel’s Roman Catholicism than Kramer’s production of Langley’s play in This Riel Business. The latter caricatures Riel as a dictatorial, mad prophet bent on martyrdom; he is shown bearing an enormous processional cross in such a way as to emphasize his messianic tendencies.56 By contrast, Grenier’s film naturalizes Riel’s Roman Catholicism, which when coupled with his francophone identity has often been used to other him.57 Setting the film in Riel’s family home allows the filmmaker to integrate emblems of his deep faith naturally into the mise en scène. Shots from Riel’s vantage point of crosses commonly found in home décor during the period and other cross-suggestive POV shots—notably of the cross-like elements in the home’s multi-paned windows and glass cupboard door frames and of cross shadows from those window panes—intimate that Christianity informed Riel’s very act of seeing. Gentle pans to an open Bible from which Riel eventually silently reads and over a picture of the Madonna and the Christ child further weave worship into the domestic space, normalizing it. His Roman Catholicism is also alluded to through his remembering a letter from his sister who became a nun. While her vocation is not revealed in the film, it is familiar to those who know Riel’s personal history. In addition, his allusions to his period of alleged madness suggest that his mental breakdown during his exile was triggered by his neglect of his health when he was separated from family, rendering this episode more understandable than the relentless focus on his esoteric religious vision for the West highlighted by Langley in This Riel Business.58
While Grenier focuses on Riel the man, humanizing him by returning him to domestic space and his familial roots, the director reminds the spectator that ultimately Riel remains a mystery. A prologue acknowledges the many conflicting ways historians have labelled him: hero, traitor, prophet, madman. More significantly, the film never shows the face of the actor playing Riel. All shots are either from the back, in shadow, or in profile. The only face-on shots are of photographic reproductions of the historical Riel, reminding us that we only have a projected image of him; we cannot really know him. Thus while the film returns him to his French Catholic roots, it underscores that even they do not reveal him fully to us. As his voice-over asks: “Où se cache la vérité de mon être?” (Where does the truth of my soul hide?) He remains a freedom-seeking enigma, caught between the sounds of the military might from which he attempts to flee in the film and the silence of the spaces he will leave behind—an imagined presence, a spirit of the place.
With the production of Of Many People marking Canada’s centennial year and the production of Louis Riel: dernier songe leading into the centenary of Riel’s execution, it becomes evident that the NFB perceived film adaptations based on or inspired by texts by or about iconic francophone figures as instrumental in helping shape the national imagination. But the question remains: Whose national imagination? With the production of Le vieillard et l’enfant contributing to the recognition of the official regionalization of French-language production in the West, it also becomes evident that the NFB saw the adaptation of such texts as central to the fostering of regional imagination. Again, however, one might ask: Whose region? The answer is partly determined by the linguistic group to which the adaptation team belonged. Indeed, the four examples of NFB adaptations examined here betray differences in the French- and English-language approaches to texts by or about iconic francophone figures and the claims to place made within their texts (or that these figures symbolize through their texts).
Gabrielle Roy’s texts are used to look back to assert nationalist-inflected claims of factions of the particular official language group making the adaptation. These claims are contemporaneous to the period in which the adaptation is produced. Made by English-language adapters, the multimedia presentation Of Many People draws on Roy’s La petite poule d’eau to portray what was considered a foundational settlement period, the paradoxically hardy yet romanticized and multicultural period from which the province of Manitoba and, by extension, the nation of Canada are shown to spring. Still the fragments of the extant production betray a sense of uneasiness with the change that population growth and technological development have brought, an equivocal sentiment inspired by the source text. The adaptation is thus an unstable expression of nationalist pedagogy, to use Homi K. Bhabha’s term. This is unsurprising, given that the source text, itself, was never intended as such a tool. While not a direct response to the production of Of Many People/Un siècle d’hommes, Le vieillard et l’enfant can be read as replacing or effacing the multicultural ideology promoted by the multimedia production. In focusing exclusively on the French social and historical context, Le vieillard et l’enfant erases the cultural heterogeneity evoked in Roy’s novella to centre the adaptation around the symbolic expression of the loss and renewal of the dream for a French nation. As such, it intimates the need to keep cultural memory strong and to foster nurturing links with the larger French nation of Quebec, symbolically evoked in the adaptation’s performance and aesthetic interpretation of the source text and subtly articulated by means of the adaptation by the director and scriptwriter of Quebec origin.
Although the selections of a performance of the play Tales from a Prairie Drifter recorded in the film This Riel Business do convey Riel’s claims to nation for the Métis, the play also locates his views within the realms of the messianic and the mad. In caricaturing Riel, the play seeks to debunk his iconic status, as it does with that of various other historical characters, but it also ends up perpetuating a more commonly perpetuated one-dimensional view of Riel. However, the film’s insertion of audience commentary and interviews around the recordings of the performance shows Métis and First Nations audience members grappling with the play’s representation of the history of Western settlement and Riel’s role within it, revealing that there is a counter-reading beyond the caricature. Offering individual interpretations that contest some of the historiographical views of the dominant settler society, this commentary allows This Riel Business to offer a more complex engagement with the Riel myth and to give voice to the larger Métis and First Nations communities and their views regarding claims to place. The film reveals the willingness of the English-language adapters to give cinematic space to this view, while they temper the francophone aspects of the history. In contrast, while acknowledging the range of historical interpretations of Riel’s character and deeds, Louis Riel: dernier songe builds on none of them, deciding instead to recuperate his basic humanity. By situating him within the linguistic, cultural and religious womb—the family home—that nourished his formative years, the film seeks to replace cultural stereotypes with a more sympathetic and enigmatic glimpse of someone we ultimately can never truly know. Here the filmmaker of Quebec origin merely seems intent on giving Riel, as a francophone and a Métis, a place in the local landscape. Perhaps because Riel’s fate was historically so contested in Quebec, the adapter makes no attempt to recuperate Riel for the larger Québécois national narrative.
In the end these adaptations can be read in dialogue with their times as well as one another—voicing, even debating, various claims to place and, in some cases nation, of the Franco-Manitoban and Métis peoples. These NFB productions also show how, in some cases, the adapters attempt to harness these claims for either the Canadian or Québécois national narratives. These four relatively short adaptations thus become complex sites where place is alternatively and, at times, simultaneously contested, reworked, and re-appropriated, underscoring the fact that the cultural mapping of place is ultimately an unstable process.
I wish to thank my research assistants Sheila Mawn and Ramla Belajouza as well as Catherine Holmes of the Saskatchewan Archives Board and the personnel of both the University of Saskatchewan Archives and the National Film Board of Canada, notably Richard Cournoyer at the NFB Conservation Laboratory and André D’Ulisse at the NFB Archives. Darren Préfontaine of the Gabriel Dumont Institute also gave me helpful leads.
Le vieillard et l’enfant, directed by Claude Grenier (NFB Production, 1985).
Louis Riel: dernier songe, directed by Claude Grenier (NFB Production, 1983).
This Riel Business, directed by Ian McLaren (NFB Production, 1974).
Un siècle d’hommes, directed by Stanley Jackson (NFB Production, 1970).
1 An exception to this disinterest in live-action drama involving francophones from the West is the short film Ti-Jean s’en va dans l’Ouest directed by Raymond Garceau (NFB Production, 1957). It documents the foray of the folkloric figure Ti-Jean into the West in one of several adaptations of the Ti-Jean legend. For a discussion of NFB live-action drama adaptations of English-language literary sources about the West, see Elspeth Tulloch, “Screening the Outsider In/Out in NFB Adaptations of Western Canadian Literature” in West of Eden: Essays on Canadian Prairie Literature, ed. Sue Sorensen (Winnipeg: CMU Press, 2008), 219–242.
2 Apart from an early documentary in French entitled Les Canadiens français dans l’Ouest (1955), the NFB online catalogue lists no films about francophones from the West until 1976 under its most obvious category Francophonie canadienne (à l’exclusion du Québec/Ouest du Canada), although a few other films categorized elsewhere are of some relevance, such as L’Âge du castor (1951) and Les voyageurs (1964), which have English and French versions. Some thirty documentaries are listed under the former category from 1979–2009, the vast majority produced in the 1980s. This calculation excludes films made in co-production, the odd animated film, as well as film compilations that repackage individual films as group sets.
3 One of the films discussed in this study, This Riel Business, was partly filmed at a performance by Regina’s Globe Theatre, a professional, regional theatre that became known for mounting works by playwrights, from the region and otherwise, whose plays addressed social and political concerns of interest to the audience. See Mary Blackstone, “Globe Theatre,” Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan, http://esask.uregina.ca/entry/globe_theatre.html, accessed April 10, 2011. In 1979, the NFB showcased a play by the alternative theatre movement: Saskatoon’s 25th Street Theatre’s production of Paper Wheat. It is featured in a film by the same name as well as in Scenes from Paper Wheat.
4 Gabrielle Roy, La petite poule d’eau (Montreal: Boréal, 2009).
5 Gabrielle Roy, “Le vieillard et l’enfant,” La route d’Altamont (Montreal: Éditions HMH, 1966), 61–154. The article will not consider Mirage de la plaine (1978), an experimental short that borrows a line from Gabrielle Roy, given that the film is not strictly an adaptation.
6 Gary Evans, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 304.
7 Joining the NFB in 1942, he immediately began directing documentaries about agricultural production during the Second World War: Battle of the Harvests (1942), Hands for the Harvest, and Home to the Land (both in 1944). A later film he directed with a Western connection is Cornet at Night (1963), an adaptation of the Sinclair Ross short story. He also produced Ukrainian Festival (1947), set on the prairies.
8 For more on regionalization, see Ronald Dick, “Regionalization of a Federal Cultural Institution: The Experience of the National Film Board of Canada 1965-1979” in Flashback: People and Institutions in Canadian Film History, ed. Gene Walz (Montreal: Mediatexte Publications, 1986), 107–133, at 114, 118, 121. For information on the production schedule see NFB Memorandum, Of Many People production files, “Water Hen Display,” Don Hopkins to Pierre Fontaine, May 25, 1970.
9 See NFB, Of Many People production files, letter from Don Hopkins to Paul-Marie Paquin, December 14, 1970. The letter from Don Hopkins, head of the NFB’s Multi-media Division, to Paul-Marie Paquin, director of Éditions littéraires, Librairie Beauchemin (Gabrielle Roy’s copyright representative) is on the subject of extending the program’s run to 440. The request was subsequently approved. The same letter cites the chair (or the “président” in French) of the Manitoba Centennial Corporation (mistakenly called the “commission”) commenting on the production’s success. More positive feedback from the chair, Maitland Steinkopf, is paraphrased in the following letter: NFB, Of Many People production files, letter from Graham Glockling, Secretary of State, to Don Duprey, National Film Board of Canada, October 21, 1970.
10 The extant English material was less intact than the French. The NFB’s conservation unit has so far been unable to recover any of the stills used in the production. Citing the limited copyrights accorded to the production at the time and anticipated extra costs to procure extensions on them, the NFB declined the University of Manitoba’s request to donate the prints from the production to the university. See NFB, Of Many People production files, Memorandum, “La petite poule d’eau,” Lucile Bishop to Don Aylard, Winnipeg, August 10, 1972. It is unconfirmed whether this donation occurred later.
11 The NFB memorandum “Water Hen” stipulates, “In all cases reference to the novel is to say ‘based on the novel,’ rather than ‘adapted from,’ ” suggesting that the NFB understood it was making a loose adaptation, one little concerned with fidelity. See NFB, Of Many People production files, “Water Hen,” Don Hopkins to Ron Jones, June 17, 1970.
12 NFB, Of Many People production files, “Centennial Project Handout,” First Draft, Revised Draft, and Printed Pamphlet, n.d.,1 and 2.
13 Linda Clemente and Bill Clemente, Gabrielle Roy: Creation and Memory (Toronto: ECW Press, 1997), 178.
14 It is not clear whether the production even included images of First Nations peoples.
15 Pierre Elliott Trudeau, “Federal Multicultural Policy: House of Commons Debates, October 8, 1971” in Multiculturalism and Immigration in Canada, ed. Elspeth Cameron (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2004), 401–407, at 402. Although the production’s actual content avoids language issues, the production, itself, indirectly expresses support for the notion of bilingualism via its English and French versions.
16 NFB, “Centennial Project Handout,” 2.
17 NFB, Of Many People production files, “Approach to Treatment for Water Hen,” 2.
18 Eva Mackey, The House of Difference (London: Routledge, 1999), 64.
19 Raymond M. Hébert, Manitoba’s French-Language Crisis (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 17–20.
20 Library and Archives Canada, photo PA-185504. It is hard to overlook the fact that nothing in the costume signals the province’s French heritage. Admittedly, though, it was donned for comic effect, so its mix of cultural references was not meant to be taken too seriously. More à propos for Roy’s case, when the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names accepted to commemorate Gabrielle Roy by naming an island on the Waterhen River in her honour, it respected the Waterhen Community Council’s rejection of the use of the French “île,” so the island is officially called “Gabrielle-Roy Island” and not “Île Gabrielle-Roy.” See Ismène Toussaint, “Inauguration de l’île Gabrielle-Roy dans la rivière de la Poule-d’Eau (Manitoba),” Cahiers franco-canadiens de l’Ouest 2, 1 (1990): 91–95.
21 NFB, “Approach to Treatment for Water Hen,” 2.
22 He was, after all, the one who brought Luzina Tousignant, the central figure, south every year to give birth.
23 An English version was released in 1986.
24 Since the NFB had never done a documentary on Roy and since she had just died in 1983, perhaps the film, with its concern with memory and death, was thought to be a fitting tribute, following the NFB’s partial involvement with the adaptation of her novel Bonheur d’occasion (1983) set in Montreal. It was certainly intended to mark the tenth anniversary of “la Régionalisation Ouest” of the NFB; see Michel Larouche, “Le vieillard et l’enfant: le scénario de Gabrielle Roy,” Cahiers franco-canadiens de l’Ouest 9, 1–2 (1997): 3–17, at 4.
25 Jean Duceppe (1923–1990) was a stage and film actor who remained popular over his nearly fifty-year career. An established stage, film, and television actress, Patricia Nolin began teaching at the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal in 1987. Graduating from the École nationale de théâtre du Canada in 1968, Michèle Magny went on to enjoy an active stage career and teaching at her alma mater.
26 For example, he directed Le pays de Menaud, Félix-Antoine Savard (1970) with the production company Cinéastes associés, founded by three nationalist directors (Denys Arcand, Gilles Groulx, Michel Brault) disaffected by the NFB.
27 Canadian Encyclopedia, “Jean Duceppe” by Stéphane Baillargeon, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com, accessed April 2, 2011.
28 Gordon Collier, “Childhood in Prairie Film,” in Screening Canadians: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Canadian Film, eds. Wolfram R. Keller and Gene Walz (Marburg: Schriften der Universitätsibliothek Marburg, 2008), 99–117, at 103, 101–04. Other critics have also observed these themes.
29 Gabrielle Roy, “Le vieillard et l’enfant,” 99. Blue appears rarely in the novella. It is the colour of the old man’s eyes and the lake, objects holding wonder for the girl. White is rarely mentioned and is linked both to passion and death. It is used to describe the agitated lake and allude to the girl’s excitability. Once it refers to the whites of the old man’s eyes, visible when he is sleeping, causing the girl to fear he has died. Given the cultural context, it would be a misreading to interpret the blue and white in terms of the Métis flag, although themes of eternity, the symbol of which is on the flag, imbue both texts and although the girl is eight, and she draws the symbol 8 in the sand, in an ironic comment on eternity.
30 The old man and the girl’s relationship involves a make-believe courtship dance and carries subtle sexual connotations, for example, in their positioning when lying on the beach in the film. I thank my graduate student Cristina Artenie for her seminar observations on the sexual suggestiveness of this relationship. Collier, “Childhood in Prairie Film,” refers to its “illicit nostalgia,” 103.
31 Gabrielle Roy, “Le vieillard et l’enfant.” La route d’Altamont, 61–154, at 66. The phrase appears in both the novella and the film.
32 Hébert, Manitoba’s French Language Crisis, xi.
33 Ibid., 32, 104–117.
34 Although it may be the subject of debate whether white is a colour, I am not including it as one in this statement. White is, in fact, mentioned in the novella but does not and cannot carry the same connotations that I read in the film, since the novella predates the adaptation by nearly twenty years.
35 In this scene she also dons his daughter’s straw hat, ribboned in symbolic blue. Her gesture visually puns on the verb “chapeauter,” suggesting that the larger francophone “nation” can serve to shelter and oversee the smaller Franco-Manitoban society with its emerging sense of self, symbolized by the ruddy-clad Christine.
36 See Douglas Owram, “The Myth of Louis Riel,” Canadian Historical Review 63, 3 (1982): 315–336, at 336.
37 Apart from the films discussed in this article, Riel is mentioned in the following NFB productions or productions for which the NFB offered assistance: Les Canadiens français dans l’Ouest (1955), La Ceinture d’Elzéar Goulet (co-production company: Les Productions Tilt, 1987), Making History: Louis Riel and the North-West Rebellion of 1885 (CD-ROM, 1997), Chiefs: The Trial of Poundmaker (production agency: Galafilm, 2002), Engage-toi! La blogue (Site Web) (2008), which includes a clip of the blogger’s, Andréanne Germain’s, pilgrimage to Riel’s gravesite. He is a near-mythic figure in the NFB documentary Riel Country (1996). A visual reference is made to him in the animated short Jours de plaine (1990).
38 See Albert Braz, The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) for an extensive analysis of this cultural production. Also see Jennifer Reid, Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012), 32–48.
39 The only other projects that feature him in their titles are Riel Country (1996) and the CD-ROM Making History: Louis Riel and the North-West Rebellion of 1885 (1997). Indeed the CD-ROM and This Riel Business (1974), are the only entirely NFB productions listed under the English-language category History-Canada 1867–1919/Northwest Rebellion in the NFB’s online catalogue, although a few other productions (see earlier note) refer in some way to these events. There is no specific sub-category for the “Northwest Rebellion” in the French online catalogue.
40 The NFB has shown, however, some interest in Métis subjects more largely, with over twenty productions (dramas or documentaries) on various aspects of Métis life, apart from the films under consideration here.
41 See his brief outline of the positive characteristics of the “Métis canadiens-français,” in Louis Riel, The Collected Writings of Louis Riel, vol. 2, ed. Gilles Martel, under the general editorship of George F.G. Stanley (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1985), 297–298.
42 On the subject of Quebec’s sympathy for Riel, one need only recall that in 1885 crowds of thousands (one up to 50,000) demonstrated against his hanging. See Jacques Mathieu and Jacques Lacoursière, Les mémoires québécoises (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1991), 359–60.
43 McLaren, who was born in England, raised in Ottawa, and fluently bilingual, was an experienced director and producer by the time of this production. He had worked in these capacities at the CBC in Montreal, where, among other things, he made documentaries about Quebec separatism before coming to the NFB in 1972, when he produced Adieu Alouette, another series about Quebec. After a successful career at the NFB, culminating with his appointment as Director of English Production in 1977, he went on to administrative positions at the Secretary of State, Telefilm Canada, and in the private sector. For information on the broadcast of the West series, see Blaine Allan, “CBC Television Series, 1952–1982/Directory of Television Series.” Queen’s Film and Media, 1996, http://www.film.queensu.ca/CBC/, accessed April 15, 2011. McLaren’s film was broadcast March 20, 1974, according to a Globe Theatre press release (March 11, 1974).
44 NFB, Tales from a Prairie Drifter production files, Ian McLaren, “Proposal for the Western Series for a Film on Dramatic Expression/Working Title Tales from a Prairie Drifter or Just Simply Tales,” July 11, 1973, 3–4.
45 For more on the cultural phenomenon of appropriating history, see Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 138–146.
46 Positively qualified as a “myth-breaking play” and “lively agitprop,” the play has also been described as a “political cartoon” that champions Dumont and blames Riel for the defeat of the Métis.” See Chris Johnson, “Riel in Canadian Drama, 1885–1985” in Images of Louis Riel in Canadian Culture, eds. Ramon Hathorn and Patrick Holland (Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 175–210, at 197, 199, and 198, respectively. It has been qualified as a darkly cynical burlesque by Margaret Gail Osachoff in “Louis Riel in Canadian Literature: Myth and Reality” in Canadian Story and History 1885–1985, eds. Colin Nicholson and Peter Easingwood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, Centre of Canadian Studies, 1985), 61–69, at 67, and it has been seen to exhibit “contempt for Riel, a scorn bordering on hatred.” See Albert Braz, The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 171. For an example of a review that testifies to a mainly positive audience response, see Jean Macpherson, “Premiere Pleases Playwright,” Star-Phoenix, February 2, 1973.
47 Saskatchewan Archives Board, Globe Theatre Production Files, unidentified newspaper, “How the West Was Stolen!” February 2, 1973.
48 NFB, Tales from a Prairie Drifter production files, Ian McLaren, “Proposal for the Western Series…Tales from a Prairie Drifter,” 1 and 3.
49 For background on Métis activism, see John Weinstein, Quiet Revolution West: The Rebirth of Métis Nationalism (Calgary: Fifth House, 2007), 33–34.
50 The part of the story dealing with the particular situation of First Nations people is greatly reduced but not completely eliminated. Their suffering as a result of the elimination of the buffalo is documented. Riel states that he wants Big Bear and Poundmaker at his side. The point of view of First Nations people is introduced and maintained through some of the audience commentary. For an example of the effacing of Riel’s French identity, see Albert Braz, “Western Canada’s Man: Rudy Wiebe and the De-Frenchification of Louis Riel,” unpublished paper presented at the colloquium Imagining History in the Literatures of Canada and Quebec, Congrès national des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, Quebec City, June 6, 2008. Also see Braz, The False Traitor, 178–179.
51 In both texts, Riel affirms he is Métis and will found “a new church…the Catholic and Apostolic Church of the French Canadian Métis.” In other scenes, the play reiterates the fact that the Métis speak French.
52 Rod Langley, Tales from a Prairie Drifter [copyright 1972] (Toronto: Playwrights Co-op, 1974), I.6.5.
53 See ibid., I.7.7 for the reference to “speak white” in the play.
54 In 1970 it released the film La nuit de la poésie 27 mars 1970; in 1977 it released a separate clip of Lalonde reading her poem as part of the series Extraits de la nuit de la poésie, and in 1980 Pierre Falardeau and Julien Poulin directed an illustrated version of a reading of the poem by Marie Eykel in a new, six-minute film.
55 His sister’s lines are from a letter she wrote to Riel in September 19, 1870. See Sara Riel, Letter No 42, in To Louis from your sister who loves you Sara Riel, ed. Mary V. Jordan (Toronto, Griffin House, 1974), 112–113. It is yet unconfirmed whether the quotation from his former financée, Évelina Barnabé, is from an actual letter. They did correspond.
56 While in interviews Langley claims that Riel was insane (see Saskatchewan Archives Board, Globe Theatre Production Files, unidentified newspaper, “How the West Was Stolen!” February 2, 1973) and while McLaren does not shy away from the scenes depicting him as a religious fanatic, including Langley’s depiction of Riel as a “cardboard prophet,” audience commentary from Howard Adams argues that the federal government was constructing Riel as a “religious demagogue” in a political manoeuvre to discredit him in the eyes of devout Roman Catholics in Quebec and that the play merely reflects this situation.
57 One audience member’s comment on the Langley play qualifies the notion of “other” along racial and cultural rather than Christian denominational lines, explaining Riel’s religion was “a white man’s religion,” which led to his lack of support from “the Indian people.”
58 Some, such as Gilles Martel, argue Riel was a Millenarian, “one of a long list of Christian mystics,” Riel, The Collected Writings, xxvi. Others believe he was insane. In the play Riel expounds on his ideas for the Exovidat, “a special council,” composed of ten Métis, men of God, who will pass laws and run the nation (Act II, Scene 8, 34).