Race and belonging: a review of recently issued National Film Board DVDs.

Bell, Sandra ; Rajiva, Mythili

Race is a Four-Letter Word. Written and directed by Sobaz Benjamin. Produced by Annette Clarke. National Film Board of Canada, 2006.55 mins, 19 secs, Language: English. Full Screen, $59.95. Closed captioned--decoder required. Dolby sound.

This film is a collage of autobiographical and biographical narratives combined with artistic performances on the complex issue of race, racism, and identity in contemporary Canadian society. The director and narrator is a young black radio show host who presents the audience with a personal journey of exploration to address his own demons centering on race and belonging. He interweaves his story with those of three others: a young black Caribbean woman from England who moved to Canada to escape British racism; a young black Canadian female performance artist who reacts to the dominant racialized aesthetic of beauty as white; and an aging white, male artist who was raised by a black family and sees himself as more attached to blackness as an identity than whiteness.

This is also a film about the body politic and representations of self. For instance, in a photo-shoot, the aging male body is contrasted to the young body as well as white to black, each in opposing masks--black to white. The photo-shoot is a performance of race, gender, ageism, and sexuaiity, where the homoerotic context of two nude male bodies entwined also comes face to face with the issue of miscegenation and ageist fears in Western society and the race masks that we all wear, whether we are white, black, or in-between. The nude masked poses are an effective means of de-stabilizing how the black male body is stereotyped and viewed in Western culture through its Other, the dominant image of the ideal: the young white male body. As another example, the young black performance artist challenges dominant images of white beauty and beauty queens by declaring herself "Miss Canadiana." Resplendent in red satin gown and beauty queen sash and tiara, she features herself in parades and public events at a variety of locations across the country.

Sobaz Benjamin does a wonderful job of personalizing the painful scars of racism on individual lives, without reducing it to simply a problem of the individual. If his objective is for the audience to understand the complexities of race as the lived experience of individual Canadians, he has done that masterfully and in an extremely personal yet abstract and thought provoking manner. The film is successful in raising questions about race and identity, about racial issues that go far beyond structural issues of discrimination. Through the characters' reflections on their lived experiences of race and self-hatred, racism is exposed as a personal struggle for racial identity and feelings of "home" in a society that privileges white skin.

While the use of art, performance, and personal narrative makes the film extremely compelling, the narrator's leaping back and forth between different people's stories is somewhat annoying. The film needn't have been organized in a traditionally linear fashion, but there is too much self-conscious post-modern collage that ultimately contributes to a sense of confusion. The stories also do not have equal weight. While Sobaz and the female performance artist are the strongest characters, the white male artist, though complex, remains aloof, while the young English immigrant, who came to Canada to escape racism in England, is little more than a rant against the hypocrisy of Canada as a country of racial tolerance. This leads to a superficial understanding of their issues. Without more information on these characters' stories, their issues are only about race. Perhaps this is the point of the film, but since the viewer is not able to connect with these characters, they remain shallow, and we do only see their skin colour. In this regard, the white male artist's story seems out of place: while his life story was moving and, in some ways, even tragic, Sobaz Benjamin needed to do a better job of explaining why this person is in the film in terms of what his identity crises can tell us about racism in Canadian society.

Overall, this is a sophisticated and powerful film, a very post-modern and useful interdisciplinary approach to race, class, sexuality, and gender. It is likely far too abstract for high school students and even first- and second-year undergraduates would struggle with it, although it would certainly speak to minority students on a gut level. The film would be a great pedagogical tool for a third or four year seminar on a specialized topic such as a course on the body or courses in cultural studies, art, identity or race/gender/class, or sexuality.

Journey to Justice. Dir. Roger McTair. Written by Laine Drewery, Roger McTair and Alan Mendelson. Produced by Karen King-Chigbo. National Film Board of Canada, 2000.47 mins, Language: English. Full Screen, $59.95. Closed captioned. Dolby sound.

This film presents a short history of the pioneers in Black Canadians' legal struggles against racism and discrimination. Archival film and photographs are used along with personal stories to describe the political resistance of activists from the 1930s to the 1950s through tumultuous times, like encounters with the Ku Klux Klan in Canada--only different from their counterparts in the United States because of the red maple leaf on their white robes. The film is a powerful antidote to the popular myth in Canadian culture that Canada has always been far less racist than the United States. Instead, we are offered a poignant and deeply moving glimpse into what it was like to live as black men and women in pre-civil rights Canadian society.

The film uses the experiences of various black activists in Canada to tell its story: Ray Lewis, a 1932 Olympic gold medal track athlete from Hamilton, Ontario, who was refused employment as an athletic coach; Fred Christie who, in 1936, was refused service in a bar and whose legal fight ended with the Supreme Court of Canada upholding facial discrimination by businesses; Viola Desmond, jailed in the 1940s for refusing to abide by seating segregation in a Nova Scotia movie theatre; Hugh Burnett, whose struggle to change segregation laws in his hometown of Dresden in 1949 was turned back by his fellow townspeople. We also learn about how change was initiated through the actions of people such as Donald Willard Moore who fought Canada's immigration policy from 1954 to 1962 so that it would no longer differentiate by skin colour; and Leslie Frost, the Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario in the 1950s, who, in opposition to his own party, drafted the first civil rights legislation to end discrimination.

The major storyteller in the film is Stanley G. Grissel, a man who could not rent a hotel room in Toronto for his honeymoon and was only allowed to clean toilets as a serviceman in World War II until he successfully challenged his superior officers and became a quartermaster; it was he who joined Donald Cartier in forming the Brotherhood of Sleeping Porters Union and became its president. Grissel is currently a Citizenship Court Judge. The film combines these personal histories with the larger political context of systemic and everyday racism against blacks in Canada. There is a narrative voice-over that offers a clear and thoughtful analysis of the events and experiences that this group faced. Roger McTair does an excellent job of combining personal histories of black Canadians with the larger history of racism in Canada. The film is engaging and informative and an excellent pedagogical tool that would be very useful for high school students, and first- and second-year university students. This is also an inspiring film about legal struggles for civil rights in Canada and about the courage of the human spirit.

Remember Africville. Dir. Shelagh Mackenzie. Produced by Shelagh Mackenzie, Daryl Gray, Germaine Wong, and Sami Fareed Ahmed. National Film Board of Canada, 1991.35 mins, Language: English. Full screen, $59.95. Closed captioned.

This film is structured around a 1989 public forum in Halifax at which former residents of Africville, their families, and city politicians discuss the city's decisions and actions in 1964 to relocate all the residents of a once vibrant area of the city. While the city's program was declared a relocation, to the former residents and their descendants and families, it was a policy of forced evacuation. The film tells the story of this infamous dislocation of an historical community of black Nova Scotians in Halifax. Using interviews and live discussions with black Nova Scotians together with old footage from the evacuations, the director tells this tragic story, in part as a way to explain the position of blacks in contemporary urban Halifax. The director goes back and forth between the past and the present, using a narrative voice-over to guide the viewer through this movement.

This is still an important issue as the title aptly shows. It is important for people of Halifax and all Canadians to remember Africville, to see the painful memories. It is a good lesson of racism disguised as humanitarian sentiment. The film would be suitable for high school students and first- or second-year undergraduate students. Nonetheless, the film needs to be redone to have an impact on contemporary audiences. It needs to be located in a contemporary context of political economy. Canadians and the people of Halifax need to see the consequences of these policies forty years later. We need to see the housing today that was created in the 1960s, the social fallout, and the failure of current governments to address the issue which began forty years ago. It also requires a little more analysis. Not enough is explained. For example, what is the public forum from which some of the interview footage is drawn? What was the rationale for the re-location and how was this able to be effected through the denial of the legal rights of the homeowners? Who currently lives on the old site, and who benefited directly from this tragic event? The historical context of racism against blacks needs to be highlighted much better. The question was raised in the 1989 public discussion as to why the people of Africville were not helped to raise their properties to standard rather than evacuated.

There are many Canadian stories of evacuation and genocide. Our federal government is today apologizing to First Nations and Aboriginal peoples for residential schools, but it continues colonial policies of evacuation and "relocation" all of which are socially, economically, politically, and culturally devastating. The story of Africville needs to be contextualized within this larger picture.

Ame Noire. Black Soul. Dir. Martine Chartrand. Produced by Yves Leduc, Pierre Hebert, and Marcel lean. National Film Board of Canada and Animation and Youth Studio of the NFB French Program, 2000.9 mins 47secs, Language: no dialogue. Full screen, $59.95. Technique: painting on glass. Dolby sound.

This is a visually beautiful film with a moving music track. Through the use of images and music (without dialogue or narration), the film depicts the history of black culture in the Western world by taking us from the images and sounds of Africa to the images and sounds of slavery and colonialism and then to that of sounds of post-slavery jazz in urban America. The film is very short and lacks the depth required for high school or university students who need to discuss issues of racism. However, the brevity makes it attention grabbing, and, as such, it is probably pedagogically useful and ideally suited for children who are more accustomed to responding to graphics and music rather than complex dialogue. In spite of its length, nine minutes, the film does send a very powerful message--one of dignity lost and the violence of slavery and racism.

Joe. Dir. Jill Hargas. Produced by George Johnson. National Film Board of Canada, 2002.8 mins 51 secs, Language: English. Full screen, $59.95. Closed captioned. Dolby sound.

The story is of Seraphim "Joe" Fortes from the West Indies who spent his life teaching white children to swim in early 1900s Vancouver. The film, presumably intended for children, is meant to celebrate this man who dedicated his life to public service. It purports to deliver an antiracism message, but not only falls to do this but actually portrays stereotypical racist images. The film uses older animation technology and weaves the images in with a narrative voice-over of a white British child.

According to the DVD cover, the film is intended to "introduce a whole new generation of children to a hero." Unfortunately, it falls to do this because the "hero" is not a man but rather a black cartoon character with no human qualities as an adult male. The film maintains subtle forms of racism in that Joe's personal history and the seemingly small amount of racism that he suffered are not put into a larger context of Canadian racism. Most disturbingly, Joe is presented as a kind of male black mammy to white children, and he seems abjectly grateful for this opportunity. He is held up in the film as a shining example of good citizenship, but it seems that he essentially gave free labour by looking after other people's children and white children at that. This film is highly offensive and not recommended for children or for educational viewing, unless the latter is in the form of anti-racist and ironic critique.

SANDRA BELL is associate professor of Criminology at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. She is the author of Young Offenders and Youth Justice: A Century after the Fact and "Crime Statistics and the 'Girl Problem'" in C. Brooks and B. Schissel, eds., Marginality and Condemnation (2008).

MYTHILI RAJIVA is assistant professor of Sociology and Criminology at Saint Mary's University. She has a recent article on race, adolescence and girlhood in the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology (2006). Her current research explores the issue of bullying among non-adults.