Challenge for Change and the birth of participatory documentary

The National Film Board came to my school in Cape Breton in flat round cans, and the gym was the only room big enough to show it in. A teacher threaded the projector, someone killed the lights, and the bleachers filled with the smell of floor wax and warm dust. Most of what we watched was about somewhere else. Now and then a film came along about places like ours, outports and mill towns and harbours where the young people were leaving, and those were the afternoons the gym went quiet.

I didn't know then that a few of those films grew out of a federal experiment with an earnest name. Challenge for Change ran at the NFB from 1967 to 1980, and Société nouvelle, its French-language counterpart, worked alongside it. The premise sounds modest now. In the late 1960s it was close to radical: that people living with poverty and official neglect should have a say in how they were filmed, and should eventually hold the camera themselves.

A program built on a worry

Challenge for Change was a government program in the plainest sense. The Film Board ran it with money from several federal departments, at a moment when Ottawa was paying fresh attention to poverty and to the communities that postwar prosperity had skipped. The films were meant to be used. They were made for church basements, union halls and kitchen tables as much as for television, and they were supposed to start arguments.

Underneath sat an uncomfortable question. What happens to the people in a social documentary once the crew has packed up? The Things I Cannot Change (1967), Tanya Ballantyne's film about a struggling Montreal family, is the title usually cited when that question comes up. It is a sympathetic film, and the standard account is that its subjects paid a price for being seen by their neighbours on national television. The lesson the program drew was blunt: good intentions on the filmmaker's side of the lens were not enough.

Fogo Island, 1967

The answer people still talk about came from an island off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Fogo Island in the mid-1960s was a scatter of small fishing settlements with an inshore fishery in trouble, many families relying on government assistance, and a provincial resettlement policy that encouraged outport families to move to larger centres. A good many islanders expected Fogo to be emptied. Nobody had asked them, in any organized way, what they wanted.

Memorial University of Newfoundland's Extension Service, led by Donald Snowden, had field workers on the island and saw the trouble as partly a problem of communication. The settlements were separated by distance and old rivalries, and their views rarely reached the people making decisions in St. John's. The Film Board sent Colin Low, already respected for City of Gold (1957, made with Wolf Koenig) and Universe (1960, with Roman Kroitor), to see whether film could help.

Low's method is the part worth studying. Rather than cut one documentary that argued a case, he made a series of short films, most built around a single person or a single gathering, so that each speaker was heard at length and in context. The approach became known as vertical editing, as opposed to the usual horizontal kind, where fragments of many people are spliced into one argument. The people on screen saw the footage first and could ask for material to come out before anyone else watched it. One of the titles, Billy Crane Moves Away, is exactly what it says: a fisherman explaining why he is giving up and leaving.

Then came the screenings. The films were shown in halls around the island, and people from settlements that rarely dealt with one another watched their neighbours describe problems that turned out to be shared. After that the films went to St. John's. Provincial officials watched fishermen speak to them directly, with no reporter or delegation in between, and a cabinet minister recorded a filmed reply that was carried back to Fogo and shown in turn.

What the Fogo process was, and wasn't

Over the following years the method picked up a name, the Fogo process, and a reputation that sometimes ran ahead of the evidence. The short version goes like this: film shown back to a community lets people see their own situation from a little distance. Seeing it together turns private complaints into a common problem. Carried up the chain, film lets a remote place speak to government on its own terms. The islanders formed a co-operative, began building boats and processing their own catch, and Fogo was not resettled.

How much of that was the films? Nobody can measure it, and I distrust anyone who claims to. The co-operative came out of years of organizing and patient field work, and the islanders did the hard part. What the films provided was a shared object to look at and argue over, plus a channel to St. John's that had not existed before. For a documentary, that is a very large claim made in modest terms.

People often shorten all this to "giving cameras to communities." On Fogo the camera stayed in professional hands. What changed was the order of permissions, and it is worth spelling out:

• The people filmed see the footage before anyone else does.
• They can remove what they don't want shown.
• Each film keeps one speaker or one event whole instead of cutting people into a montage.
• The first audience is the community itself; outsiders come second.
• The film travels to the people with power, and their reply travels back.

Handing over the camera

Back at the Board, Challenge for Change spent the next decade pushing the idea further. George Stoney, an American documentary maker, served as the program's executive producer in the late 1960s and argued hard that the subjects of films should become their makers. Portable half-inch video, the Sony Portapak, made that practical. Tape was cheap, it could be played back on the spot, and it needed no lab. Bonnie Sherr Klein's VTR St-Jacques (1969) shows residents of a poor Montreal neighbourhood using video in their own organizing, and it still reads like a field manual for community media.

The Indian Film Crew, formed within the program in the late 1960s, trained First Nations people to make films for and about their own communities. You Are on Indian Land (1969), which follows a Mohawk blockade of the international bridge at Akwesasne, comes out of this period and still plays with real force. The crew's history deserves its own telling, and it belongs near the start of any account of Indigenous filmmaking at the Board.

Société nouvelle did comparable work in Quebec, in French, with its own priorities and its own fights about who spoke for whom. Not everything worked. Some films are earnest to the point of stiffness, and the obvious objection, then and since, was whether a federal agency could really hand power to communities that were often at odds with federal policy. That tension never resolved. I think it is part of what keeps the program interesting.

A timeline

Where the idea travelled

The influence is easier to trace than the results. Snowden and the Memorial extension staff took the Fogo approach into development work abroad, where it fed into what is now called participatory video: communities filming their own circumstances and deciding who gets to see the results. Stoney, back in New York, became one of the loudest advocates for public-access cable, the local channels where anyone could book a camera and some airtime. Writers on community media in many countries point back to Fogo as a starting point.

The questions also stuck to documentary ethics in general. Did the people on screen see the cut, and could they change it? Who was the first audience, and who benefits when the film travels? Those are the questions I bring to the credits of any social documentary now, and they sit comfortably beside the ones in Claire Archambault's guide to watching a documentary critically. Anyone planning a film about a real community should also read the craft guide on background research before the first interview, not after.

Watching the films now

The films are not hard to find. The NFB streams a large share of its catalogue free at nfb.ca, and several of the Fogo films, VTR St-Jacques and You Are on Indian Land are good places to begin. Watch three or four of the Fogo shorts in a row rather than one on its own, because the method only makes sense in sequence, as each voice adds a piece the last one left out. Then put on a slick contemporary issue documentary and notice how quickly it cuts people off mid-sentence. More of the Board's regional history is collected under Canadian cinema.

If you programme a library series or a film society, these films still work in a room, because they were made for one. Set the projector at the back of a hall, invite people whose own street or harbour could have been on screen, keep the lights low afterwards and let them talk. That was the whole idea on Fogo in 1967, and I have not seen it bettered.