Film is a double-edged business for Vancouverites. While the industry booms, it remains a dissonant experience to see, in countless Hollywood movies, our hometown playing anything but itself. And when we do get to see ourselves on the big screen? “It can be an overwhelming experience,” says author David Spaner, a longtime champion of regional, independent cinema who'll be introducing a free screening of Larry Kent’s landmark feature The Bitter Ash at the Cinematheque on Monday (January 30).  Situated right in the heart of Vancouver’s West End back when it was the locus of the city’s bohemian scene—what Spaner calls “pre-hippy hip”—Kent’s black and white, jazz-infused tale is built around Laurie (Lynn Stewart), an unhappy waitress, and her husband, Colin (Philip Brown), a would-be playwright whose latest unproduced work, he insists, is “too much for a cultural backwater like Vancouver.” A third character, Des (Alan Scarfe), is a former boxer and an archetypal, early-‘60s angry young man whose arrival at Laurie and Colin’s rent party (complete with bongos!) spells trouble.

“It’s the first narrative film made in Vancouver, and it’s also the first Canadian independent film, and that makes it a major historical film document,” Spaner tells the Straight. “When it came out in 1963, it was completely groundbreaking. The look of the film, the sensibility of the film, the edginess was new in terms of sexuality and tough language. You can see that it’s really influenced by the French new wave, the British wave, early American indie stuff like John Cassavetes’s Shadows, Jack Garfein’s Something Wild, Leslie Stevens’ Private Property. The Bitter Ash totally fits in with those films, stylistically.”

Screening right after The Bitter Ash, Peter Bryant’s ultra-rare The Supreme Kidgives viewers a sense of what might have happened to Vancouver between Spaner’s pre-hippy hip and the remaining minutes of life before punk. Filmed in colour 16mm and released in 1976, Bryant’s woolly picaresque stars Frank Moore and Jim Henshaw as Ruben and Wes, a couple of young indigents drifting between single room occupancies, roadside campouts, and sexual encounters with freewheeling thumb-trippers (Helen Shaver, in this case, in her first film role.) 

The alienation established in The Bitter Ash has gone nuclear by the time we get to The Supreme Kid, with Vancouver presented as a cold, desolate, garbage-strewn city. Spaner mentions that Kent’s film emerged from a global era of promise. “It was one of those moments in history when you knew something was about to happen,” he says. Thirteen years later, Bryant’s film looks like the hippy hangover as interpreted by a West Coast Samuel Beckett. While the incidental details fascinate—including Terry David Mulligan’s sideburn-heavy appearance in a small role and a killer rock soundtrack featuring local legends like guitarist David Sinclair and drummer Ray Ayotte—the greatest value comes from the film’s clear sense of where and what we came from. Vancouver in the mid-70s looks like a heartless “backwater”, but how badly does it really compare to the globalist’s wet dream we’ve ended up with in 2017?

Georgia Straight, January 2017