Two DOXA picks, 2022: The Fire of Love, Doug and the Slugs and Me

Last year, a friend lent me a striking documentary: William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, about a controversial, colourful lawyer whose career began in aid of activists and revolutionaries - most famously the Chicago 7 - and developed over time into defending high profile gangsters and criminals. It was a great film, as Kunstler led an interesting, much-storied life, which connects with various larger-than-life countercultural icons and episodes in American history, but as rich as the material was, the documentary's key charm was that it had been made by Kunstler's daughters, Emily and Sarah. Growing up, they'd shot plenty of home movies, some involving their father, which they drew on liberally to tell his story, which was to some extent their own. The personal touch - something surprisingly rare in documentaries of yore, which tend to cling to a pretense of objectivity - made it very easy to trust the filmmakers, and made the making of the film a part of the story.

Doug and the Slugs with Ted Okos, Commodore, Feb 29 2020, by Allan MacInnis

At least two remarkable documentaries this year at DOXA make excellent use of archival footage, one of which, Doug and the Slugs and Me, reminded me a great deal of the Kunstler doc. It was not made by Doug Bennett's daughters (though they are in it), but rather, the friend and neighbour of one of the daughters, Teresa Alfeld (and speaking of colourful lawyers, she also made a doc about Harry Rankin, a socialist criminal lawyer who almost became Vancouver's mayor). Alfeld has access to plenty of video footage, shot in the early 1990's, of the Bennett family at home; she also had access to all of Doug Bennett's journals, and an impressive array of interview subjects, most of whom will be highly familiar figures to Canadians who grew up with Doug and the Slugs' music, including veejays Terry David Mulligan, Ed the Sock, publicist-turned-veejay Denise Donlon, and Michael Williams - the one black veejay at MuchMusic, who gets a good laugh out of the question as to whether Doug and the Slugs use of reggae counted as cultural appropriation (they have to be a whole lot better at it for it to be appropriation, he says with a grin; the Slugs never really played a reggae tune, even if reggae does inform some of their music). Alfeld also gets input from some high profile and very familiar industry figures, including Sir Bob Geldof - who was an editor for the Georgia Straight when Bennett was a cartoonist there - and talent agent/ manager Sam Feldman, as well as musicians Ron Sexsmith, Steven Page, Bif Naked, Darby Mills, and others (Alan Thicke even pops up in archival footage - it's a real flashback to early 1990's Canadian television). And of course all the surviving Slugs are involved.   

Doug and the Slugs complete with their slug "sound enhancers"

Now, if you only know the singles you've heard being piped in off soft rock radio at the doctor's office, you might not be a huge fan of Doug and the Slugs - because (with the exception of "Too Bad") the most played songs by them are from their later years, when the band had tasted sufficient success for it to have affected their sound, with record execs and such giving them very bad, very typical advice about how to tarnish their legacy get on the radio. Doug himself - in passages from his journals - laments his selling out in no uncertain terms, and even people like Terry David Mulligan, who I have always associated more with the "industry" side of the biz,  remark on camera that with the Slugs third record, Music for the Hard of Thinking, you can hear compromise setting in (Mulligan describes the album as "overproduced" but there's more wrong with it than that - some of which comes up in the film around Bennett being made to violate his own rule not to use the word "love" in his lyrics, which ended up being modified for one of the singles on that album, "Who Knows How to Make Love Stay.") If that is where you are at - if you are skeptical that Doug and the Slugs have anything to offer besides shmaltzy commercial pop - then, look, you still have time before the DOXA screening on May 15th to correct your course: find, by whatever means possible, their first album, Cognac and Bologna (the title of which gets explained, almost in passing, by Simon Kendall) and their second Wrap It!, which  while being a bit less writerly - Cognac and Bologna is like the pop album Raymond Chandler never made -  actually manages to show the band upping their game, emboldened by the relative success of their first LP, making something bigger, brasher, more varied, more daring, and more colourful (Alfeld begins her doc with footage from the Alan Thicke show of the band kicking into "Dangerous," the opening cut from that album, which choice is inspired and delightful; it was not one of their hits, but it makes a superb starting point both for that album and the film.)  

But even if you've checked out those two albums and you're still not a Doug and the Slugs fan - I mean, I guess if you're really into grindcore or harsh noise or chamber music, they may be a little too cute, a little too much of a novelty act for you -  if you grew up in Vancouver, that's another good reason to see this film, as many of the locations are instantly recognizable, including Neptoon Records, where Slugs' bassist Steve Bosley is interviewed, and Grandview Lanes, the Commercial Drive bowling alley where the film scores its biggest hat trick: having built up a bit of suspense (which I am now, I guess, going to spoil) as to whether the filmmaker will reunite with her childhood friends, whom she has not seen since before their father's death, Alfeld brings all three of Bennett's daughters (Shea, Della, and Devon) to the lanes and gets them bowling on camera with her... then whips out footage of the three daughters bowling with Alfeld and their Dad when Alfeld was five. She appears not to have prepped them for this, so it jolts memories and emotions, but perhaps to Alfeld's own surprise, she also notices a key moment where Bennett hands HER the video camera, giving her instructions as to how to shoot. This was, as she recollects, the first footage she ever shot, and she did it thanks to the man she's now making a movie about - a pretty fun personal touch, there. 

There's lots else to recommend the film - including other surprising blindsides, where Alfeld hands Doug's journals to various people to read what Doug had written about them, some of which is quite touching. There's also abundant archival footage, clips from rock videos that Bennett himself directed, and angles on the band's story that I knew nothing about - like the debut album that Tomcat Records put out by Suzanne Gitzi, which I'd never heard of, let alone heard (don't these lyrics like they could be Doug's?). I hope to have an interview with Alfeld up before the film screens at DOXA; suffice to say, I recommend her film enthusiastically. You may also want to read my interview with Simon Kendall, for more background; note that my 2004 obit of Doug is also online here, while Alex Varty's more researched and professional one is here, and fellow Straight alum Adrian Mack's interview with Alfeld is here. The streaming link for the film is here - it's available starting May 14th - but it also will screen May 14th and 15th at two locations (the VIFF Centre - formerly the Vancity Theatre - and the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema).

Vastly different, but also making striking use of archival footage, is the opening night film The Fire of Love, which tells the story of Katia and Maurice Krafft, who are a rarity among volcanologists in that they're a couple. Director Sara Dosa appears to have shot no footage herself for the film, weaving her story together from footage shot by the Kraffts, along with supplementary news reports and other sources, giving the film a rather queerly retro feel; when the opening credits announce that it's a National Geographic presentation, given both that and the vintage stock, you might be forgiven for wondering if you're watching some forgotten 1970's doc that is getting a new life. It's not - Dosa's narration is contemporary, as is the film's wit and occasional animations, such as the arrow that appears when Maurice tosses a rock at his wife's helmeted head, to illustrate the protection that the helmet gives her - then flashes a grin at the camera, because helmet or not, he's just hit his wife in the head with a rock. People accustomed to nature docs shot in high-definition - 3D Imax fare and the like - might have to adjust their expectations a bit over the archival nature of the photography, but the power of the images of volcanos, caught up close by the Kraffts, is still palpable, as is the quirky nature of the couple, who ultimately die in the pursuit of their enthusiasms - without regret, one feels; Maurice and Katia speak about how they've been "disappointed" by humans, but take great solace in their shared passion for volcanos, as "a volcano is greater than a man."

Fire of Love - which screens May 7th - is narrated by another filmmaker, Miranda July, who contributes the only misstep I caught, pronouncing "Krakatoa" like "Krakatao," which hopefully someone will set right while the film is still in festivals (it may even have been amended since the screener I saw was prepared). July and Dosa wisely keep the film's tone poetic, reflective, and observant, avoiding any drift into Herzogian dramatics - which would be entirely appropriate for the images captured by the film, of erupting volcanos and the devastation in their wake, except really, it's become a bit of a cliche even when Werner Herzog himself waxes on about awesome destructive forces and nature being red in tooth and claw, indifferent to human puniness, and so forth... the film dodges those temptations and if anything, makes the extreme landscapes the Kraffts are drawn to seem less terrifying than they really are, since the Kraffts are fearlessly given to walking right up to lava flows (sometimes in protective gear, but still getting a lot closer to active volcanos than *I* would ever wish to). Maurice, the bigger risk-taker of the two, even talks about his fantasy of riding a canoe down a lava flow, and elsewhere proves his fearlessness by getting on a dinghy to float on a lake of acid. While there is, obviously, less of a local angle on this film, there is footage of Mt. St. Helen's erupting, and of the Kraffts rushing to get to the Pacific Northwest to study the aftermath. There are a few disturbing images, but mostly even these are very striking, like the indentations left by the bodies of elephants killed by a lava flow, which are carved into the ground around the skeletons of the elephants themselves... never quite seen anything like that before!

Fire of Love would be a superb film for anyone who admires the documentaries of Werner Herzog (or the late Michael Glawogger, who has some striking volcano footage in his film Workingman's Death) - or anyone whose partner is drawn to extremes (and yes, I even thought, while watching it, of Jan de Bont's delightful, if silly, hurricane-chaser film Twister, about a couple whose relationship is rooted in a shared fascination for tornados). 

There's lots else to see at DOXA 2022, with both stream-at-home and theatrical options for most films. see the DOXA website for more information, and stay tuned for possibly one or two more previews of films...!