Courtesy of the NFB
Faithful gathered in Montreal for the 1984 papal visit, an event featured in the rarely screened doc Passiflora
PASSIFLORA as part of Studio For Media Activism And Critical Thought symposium, Friday (November 10), Ryerson University School of Images Arts (122 Bond), 7 pm. Free. Facebook event page.
In 1985, the National Film Board of Canada released an experimental documentary about queer and trans people for an oft-reported budget that would strain the credulity of many modern indie doc makers: $1 million.
The money wasn’t unprecedented at the time. The NFB was in its heyday and had produced the official film of the XXI Olympiad in 1977 for $1.37 million.
But that was the Olympics. This was Passiflora ("passion flower"), a visually erratic and conceptually loose doc-fiction hybrid about the 1984 visits to Montreal by Pope John Paul II and Michael Jackson.
Actually, Passiflora is only ostensibly about the spectacle of those visits. It also chronicles marginalized people and equally marginalized topics in 1980s Quebec society. It depicted gay men, trans women, civil protest, domestic abuse, mental illness and abortion – people and issues ignored by the media.
Long thought to be censored, the film is rarely screened in English Canada. But a group of activists and archivists are unearthing it in hopes that younger audiences will embrace the “brazen queerness” that caused scorn during its original run.
Passiflora will screen publicly for the first time in nearly a decade on Friday (November 10) as part of Ryerson University’s second annual Studio For Media Activism And Critical Thought symposium. This year it’s titled DIRT: Intersectional Approaches To Messiness.
And the film’s history is decidedly messy. First off, there's the budget. NFB collection curator Albert Ohayon says the film received $658,000 rather than the vaunted $1 million. It's still an impressive number, more in line with what an NFB feature would cost in the early '80s.
The uniqueness of the situation, the high-profile and contrasting visits of one secular and one spiritual superstar, warranted the budget. But the Winnipeg Free Press would come to dismiss Passiflora as “homosexual body worship of the Pope and Michael Jackson.”
Dig into the Internet archives for stories around Passiflora and you’ll find more contradictions. On one hand, it was supported by that budget, and on the other it’s gone down in lore as the film the NFB suppressed.
In a 2008 interview with the National Post, Concordia University film professor Tom Waugh, who screened it with painstakingly typed English subtitles for Toronto’s Inside Out LGBT Film Festival, charged the NFB with “damage controlling what was a very expensive and controversial film.”
After all, this is a film that prompted the Archdiocese of Winnipeg to publicly denounce the Counterparts International Festival Of Gay And Lesbian Film in Winnipeg (now Reel Pride) for screening it in 1987, according to DIRT co-programmer and research assistant Jonathan Petrychyn.
A Point Of View Magazine article from this year states that NFB brass were so put off by the film’s “brazen queerness” that they refused to provide English subtitles for the French language film’s showing at the Toronto Festival Of Festivals (now TIFF), “a clear way to censor the film, given that the vast majority of those lining up to see [it] almost certainly would not be able to understand it.”
Courtesy of the NFB
Passiflora
NFB’s Ohayon has researched the Film Board’s online files to uncover another story behind Passiflora – one that strips the film of its banned mystique.
“A film is a lot sexier when somebody says it’s a suppressed film [because] everybody’s ears perk up. ‘Oh wait. I want to see this,’” says Ohayon. “It’s a bit of a problem for us because it says that we’re trying to censor our own films, which is never the case.”
It wasn’t controversy that relegated the film to the archives, he says. It was poor box office.
Passiflora had a small theatrical run, screening in repertory cinemas in Montreal and nine other Quebec towns and cities. It also screened in nine festivals worldwide.
Critics charge the NFB with suppressing the film by not versioning it in English. Starting in the mid-70s, however, strained budgets meant the NFB couldn’t version all of its films in both languages, a constraint which ended in the early 2000s.
The NFB was selective about which films to subtitle, and since Passiflora didn’t perform well with its target French audience, it concluded that it wasn’t profitable to make a subtitled version for an English audience.
But there is renewed interest in the film, says Claudia Sicondolfo, a member of film collective Ad Hoc, which partnered with the Ryerson School of Image Arts to remount Passiflora.
“I went to see a talk by a professor from Yale’s cinema studies institute about the archives being a place where [film prints] go to die – because they get preserved, they get embalmed,” she says. “But what happens if we reinvigorate them with life? Give them a cinematic audience they never necessarily got? What kinds of new conversations could circulate around this previously embalmed film?”
Two months ago, she reached out to the NFB about releasing Passiflora online. Its rights department is currently evaluating the film and will make a decision, as it does for all its films, based on cultural relevancy and affordability.
The marginalized communities documented in the film are played by actors – 21 in total – and purchasing ACTRA rights may prove expensive.
If Passiflora is distributed online, the NFB will also make a decision regarding subtitles. The film board has a supplementary budget of $5,000 to subtitle online films, which equates to only three hours of material per year.
For now, the film can only be viewed in English at special screenings like DIRT, which challenges the idea of an archive as an organized space and focuses instead, Petrychyn says, on the archive as a repository for “dirty histories that don’t often get to see the light of day.”
Petrychyn and Sicondolfo will screen a 16mm print from York University’s Sound and Moving Image Library and manually project 470 PowerPoint slides with the subtitles from Waugh’s 2008 screening on top.
“It’s not going to be a perfect digital/analog experience. We’re just going to do our best and make a joke about messiness being the theme of the conference,” says Sicondolfo. “People might either get annoyed or they’ll get into the novelty of it and think it’s kind of neat.”
An earlier version of this story has been updated to include information from the NFB about the film's $658,000 budget.