PERIPHERAL VISIONS: PIERRE TRUDEAU’S FUNERAL AND INCIDENTAL HISTORY
A funeral has all the natural elements of a story. A beginning, a middle, and an end (so to speak), and ‘characters’ who find themselves in an unexpected and profoundly emotional situation.
But when that funeral is a state funeral, and it’s Pierre Trudeau’s — — which took place twenty years ago (October 3, 2000) — — the elements of drama and history are significantly elevated.
We tend to think about history in terms of stories. That’s often because that’s how we’ve approached history, shaped it and re-presented it. Indeed, every event is an ‘historic’ event, if you give it enough time. The most, well, seemingly pedestrian film footage of people walking on a Manhattan street in 1911 is now, to our eyes, deeply fascinating, every detail telling, every person indubitably unaware that they are living in the past.
I was at the Trudeau funeral, as a producer for the National Film Board of Canada, with two crews, documenting the event (on film, not videotape), not to gather material for a documentary, but with the purpose of preserving it in the NFB’s archives for future historians and storytellers.
CBC’s three-hour live coverage documented the grand sweep of the day’s purpose, but we were there as somewhat furtive historians. The funeral had the kind of solemnity rarely seen in Canada, and a coming-together of French and English Canadian ‘elites’ hardly seen since.
The narrow streets surrounding Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica were filled that morning, creating an atmosphere that was variously respectful and festive. Looking at the footage now, taken less than a year prior to 9/11, it’s remarkable to see how casual and benign it all seems — no metal detectors, security passes barely looked at, and people like Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, a then un-scandalous Prince Andrew, and every Canadian politician of the day chatting within arm’s reach of the crowds.
Actress Margot Kidder, who once dated Trudeau, was among the first to arrive. Carter and Castro displayed a remarkable ability to ignore each other while standing side-by-side. Leonard Cohen, an honorary pallbearer, seemed bemused by the spectacle of it all.
We positioned our second film crew inside on a balcony, the only camera other than CBC’s allowed inside, as I had argued that what we were capturing would become part of the national heritage. We had a much more fluid view of the faces, reactions and small details, such as how the applause from the crowds outside watching on a large TV screen affected the attendees inside, and a shot of performing arts legend Brian Macdonald looking on slyly as three former prime ministers, Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney and John Turner, banter in front of him prior to the service (Turner’s state funeral this coming week in Toronto will have a completely different quality, lacking a public component due to the pandemic).
And, as documentarians everywhere know, you don’t leave an official event just because it is officially over, and so we caught the mixture of smiles and tears as the streets emptied — and government protocol staff posing for a team photo.
For Lea Nakonechny, Sales Manager of the NFB Archives, archival footage begins to feel ‘historical’ after twenty years, and its candid nature gives it cultural and creative potential. “Because the material is unedited, it lacks an editorial voice. That lack of editorial voice is what makes it so valuable, because it can be taken by someone else in the future to tell a different story, from a different angle.”
She cites raw footage from an uncompleted 1960s documentary about residential schools: “Indigenous filmmakers are often using this footage to talk about the residential school experience in their own way.”
American archivist and thinker Rick Prelinger, who has collected, curated and contextualized ephemeral footage and thousands of archival films agrees. “Today’s storytelling is nothing more than provisional. Let tomorrow’s media-makers have at the archives, and we’ll see our sense of history changing before our eyes. Archives can be powerful forces for justice, especially when they’re open to emerging filmmakers to rethink and retell old stories. The truth is in the outtakes.”
Archive Producer Elizabeth Klinck searches the globe for the most pertinent and often unseen historical shots for broadcasters and filmmakers, in a time when an explosion in content creation is opening the archival vaults to foster new interpretations. “The intent of the Trudeau funeral footage was as a record of a place and time. It was observational. This is an archivist’s dream — pure gold. It only matures and gains greater importance over time.”
We might assume that pretty much everything is caught on camera these days, from smartphones to ubiquitous security cameras and, soon, drones. But little of that gathering is done with archival intent, and most of it won’t be collected, catalogued and preserved. (The NFB’s footage from the funeral, unedited, is preserved on film, the most robust audio-visual medium, its analog nature ensuring it will survive the vagaries of electronic deterioration and technological obsolescence. Good luck viewing your VHS home movies in 100 years — or in five years).
While we can probably count on events of national import always being well-documented and viewable decades from now, what are we not capturing? What of the human experience are we missing? Can we solve the technology issues to preserve records of everyday life? There are stories to be told from our peripheral vision, if we just pay attention.
Gerry Flahive is a writer in Toronto.
(a version of this article originally appeared in the Globe and Mail on October 3, 2020).
“File:Pierre Elliot Trudeau-2.jpg” by Pierre_Elliot_Trudeau.jpg: Chiloa derivative work: Jbarta (talk) is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
