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Duncan M. McHugh
Features Bureau

VANCOUVER (CUP)—In the
early 1960s, there were no inde-
pendent filmmakers in Canada.
In fact, in Vancouver, there
werent really any filmmakers at
all. That changed in 1963 when
Larry Kent, a 26-year-old stu-
dent at the University of British
Columbia (UBC), raised $5000
and made the first modern fea-
ture film in Vancouver's history.
Kent and his debut feature— The
Bitter Ash—are being toasted this
week in a seven-film retrospec-
tive at Vancouver's Pacific
Cinémathéque.

Kent is looking forward to
screening his films in Vancouver
once again. “This is the most
exciting, of course, because this is
where it all started,” he says.

The retrospective, which has.

also played in Montréal and
Toronto, has gained even more
significance in Vancouver,
because here Kent will be pre-
miering his very first film, the
1963 short Hastings Street.

The film, which was aban-
doned because of sound prob-
lems before the filming of The
Bitter Ash, is being dubbed this
week and will be seen for the first
time on Thursday night. Because
of the recent attention given to
the problems of Hastings, which
crosses the poorest neighbour-
hoods in all of Canada, Kent is
eager to show what the street
used to look like.

“Hastings Street seems like it’s
boarded up and there’s not much
life except really down-and-out
life,” says Kent, reflecting on the
Hastings Street he saw this week.
“When you see the film, the one
thing that will get you is how full
the street is. There’s all sorts of
people walking about. We go
through beer parlours, we go to
the Blue Eagle—a heroin hang-
out—we go to pool halls and we
go to rooming halls.”

The $600 film may be exciting
for Kent today, but in 1963, it
was a major disappointment.

“We were standing around
kicking our rear ends, and I sud-
denly said “Well, you know, if it

_ 4 a ete A
Forty years after it was banned,

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costs—which it did—$600 to
make a half hour, it’s only going
to cost 1800 bucks to make a fea-
ture film,’ which had never been
made [in Vancouver] before. So
we went on to shoot The Bitter
Ash.”

The difficulty in bringing The
Bitter Ash to the screen was near-
ly immediate. With little money
and controversial subject matter,
the film hit a number of snags.
The cameraman Dick Bellamy
had to leave for six weeks during
the shoot, and the film, again,
suffered from sound problems.
Kent was forced to have his
actors record dialogue after film-
ing was completed.

“When you dub a film, you
generally dub it in 20 to 30 sec-
ond time frames,” says Kent.
“We had no knowledge of film-
making. You must remember,
there wasn’t a film school in
Canada. The only filmmaking in
Canada was the National Film
Board (NFB) or the CBC, so
making an independent film—
nobody knew anything about it.

“We got all the actors, they sat
in a row, and we dubbed it at
half-hour intervals. We would be
going through it, they would run
to the mikes, say their lines, run
away, the next guy would come
up.”

The problems did not stop
with the sound. When they took
the film to a lab to get it mixed
and developed, the lab refused,
due to the film’s sexual content,
and threatened to take the film
to the RCMP. Eventually, Kent
managed to negotiate to get the
negatives back and tried to find
someplace else to process his
film.

“There was one other lab—a
small lab—that processed news
footage... They didn’t know any-
thing about [Ash]. They
processed it and then they
screened it because they wanted
to make sure that it was okay. So
they screened the first reel, the
second reel and we were coming
up to the sex scene and |
screamed “Okay, that’s great,

  

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http://otherpress.douglas.bc.ca

~

that’s terrific!’ And they said “No,
we want to see it.’ And I said,
‘No, no, we've got to go, we
can't. Give us the film.’ So, they
never saw it,” remembers Kent
proudly.

The film had another holdup
when one of its stars refused to
allow the screening. Lynne
Stewart was worried about hay-
ing appeared nude in the film.

“We brought it to UBC and

then Lynne Stewart, on the
morning of the screening, got
cold feet, crying and stuff. She
said, ‘No, no, we can't show it. I
can't show it. Please don't.’ And I
got furious and said, ‘How could
you not show it? We've done all
of this work, all those fights,’ and
eventually she succumbed and
signed the release and we put it
on.”
When The Bitter Ash made its
premiere at what is now UBC’s
Old Auditorium on Monday,
October 7, 1963, the result was a
major sensation. The first show-
ing had been a matinee and had
attracted 250 people. That
evening, word of the film’s con-
tent ensured a full house.

“We came in [for the screening
that night] and there was pande-
monium. Of course, there was
hell to pay,” says Kent. “We had
invited the downtown critics and
they were just furious and out-
raged. And we hadn't put this
before the censor board and there
were [questions of] how we
could show it and all that.”

The film’s frank depiction of
youth, sex and drugs was
slammed by some as immoral.
The film critics present were dis-
gusted, calling it “a grubby,
gauche film.” After a few days
and several phone calls from irate
parents, UBC’s student union
decided to step in.

“On Thursday, which was the
big day at UBC for a screening,
the student union closed us
down. They slammed the door.
But they negotiated with the
censor board and we were
opened again. ..it was a great ker-
fuffle and it was just terrific.”

ver's first feature film is getting ano

For Kent, who had emigrated
from South Africa to Vancouver
in 1957, the film was meant to
cause a stir. He had already
staged an anti-Apartheid play—
The Afrikaaner—in 1962, but
was attracted to the cinema
because it was new ground.

“The theatre department was a

bunch of very, very controlling
freaks,” says Kent. “It’s one of the
reasons we wanted to make a
film—to get out from [under
their thumbs]. It was not a good
department in those days.”
Kent and his friends in the
department were frustrated by
the lack of student representation
in plays, which were frequently
cast with professional actors.

“We wrote an article in the
Ubyssey [the campus newspaper]
which was a manifesto against
the theatre department. I think it
was very stifling...To break out
into film was really great.”

Kent went on to make two
other films in his time at UBC,
1964’s Sweet Substitute and
1965’s When Tomorrow Dies,
before moving to Montréal in
1967 to take a job at the NFB.
After six frustrating months, he
quit the NFB and made his most
notorious film: High. Kent calls
the film loose with “lots of sex
and drugs and a menage-a-trois.”

Despite the raciness of the
content, the film was accepted
for the Montreal Film Festival,
only to be banned by Québec
censors. What was left after the
censors were done was a shadow
of its former self. Though Kent
gave up on the film, in the
1990s, Dave Douglas, a film prof
at Montréal’s Concordia
University, tried to revive it.

“Dave Douglas had seen it and
he wanted me to tell him what
was cut out, but I refused to look
at it. I just said, ‘I can’t look at it.’
One day he came up to me and
said, “You know, I've got a feeling
that the Québec Cinémathéque
has a copy of it, because some-
where, I think, they screened it.’
So, I phoned and they said ‘Yes,
we have a 35 and a 16.” The

       
  
 
  
      
  
   
   
   
  
  
    
   
  
   
    
   
   
   
   
  
   
 
   
  
   
    
   
   
   
  
  
   
  
   
    
   
  
   
 
   
 
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
 
   
   
  
   

ae

ther screenint

unedited, 16mm print of High
a part of this week’s retrospecti

Kent is still busy as a filmma
er. In 1992, he made the fil
Mothers and Daughters and he
currently trying to finance a fil
called The Hamster Cage.

“It's a film about a bourgeo
family, and there’s abuse, murd¢
mayhem and all of those da
things...but it’s a comedy,” |]
says, laughing.

Still, for the next week, it’s
early films that he'll be conce
trating on.

“For a while, we thought w4
go back and do the sound effed
in [The Bitter Ash], because
had very little or few sou
effects. But I thought, ‘No,
don't want to change anything
Its a historical document, yd
know, leave it.”

He rejects, however, the id
that the films were created
document the times, beca
they were too personal.

“I think I was telling a sto
that was very important to md
he says. “It was a very perso
movie. We did know what tha
were; we didn't know perso
movie, independent movie,
that...it never struck us that 4
years later, we'd be showing
Remember, nobody, but nobos
was making film in Canada.”

Its a milestone that has n
been lost on Kent. He is critic
of UBC for not doing more
pay tribute to the work that
and others did four decades ag

“In 1963, the first indepen
ent film is made in Vancouver.
1963, the first film made by
university student in Canada
made and its a UBC filt
Nobody has recognized or do
anything about this—why?
think it’s a scandal.”

Good or bad, scandal alw
seems to follow Larry Kent.
Exile on Main Street (
Hastings): The Films of Larry Ké
runs from February 13 to 17
the Pacific Cinémathéque, 11
Howe Street, with a _ gq
Saturday night at 6:30p.m.

 

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