Challenge for Change

Review by Martin Potter

"The films and tapes were not important in themselves. It

was the process and the ideas". George Stoney Executive Producer,

Challenge for Change/ Societe Nouvelle, 1968 – 70.

In 1967 the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) created

an ambitious participatory media programme called Challenge

for Change/ Societe Nouvelle (Challenge for Change) that sought

to give disenfranchised and marginalized communities of

Canada a voice by giving them access to the media.

Post World War II, the NFB had prided itself on its

activist agenda. 1960s technological and cultural

developments inspired the development of Challenge for

Change, with a vision that the process of filmmaking not

only document social issues, but play an active role in

them as well. Challenge for Change was envisioned in three

streams with one stream forming a platform whereby non-

media professionals in Canada could make films about

their own concerns and problemsi, with NFB support. This

was a process that John Grierson observes as the shift

from films made about people to films made with people.ii

For directors such as Colin Low and others involved, the

Challenge for Change studio represented a return to the

Grierson philosophy of government-sponsored documentary,

with a new twist – not only would the government inform

the people, but the people would also inform the

government, a rare example of a government funding public

criticisms of itself (as George Stoney recalls when

asked, “Does the government know you’re making these

films?” he replies – “Know! They’re paying for it” (p.

318)). Low wrote in 1972: “The means of communication –

real two-way communication – must be made accessible to

ordinary people for dialogue in meaningful local debate.

In this way, we could generate a much more vigorous

problem-solving capacity based upon local initiative and

creativity.”iii

Challenge for Change was a diverse programme subsidized

across multiple government departments and by the time it

closed in 1980 it had produced 145 English language films

or videos and 63 in French. These videos, and the act of

making, screening and discussing them, was intended to

enable better communication and understanding between

(mostly poor) communities and government and to provoke

social change. What was actually achieved within Canadian

society through the programme is a site of some

contention. Waugh, Baker and Winton’s eclectic anthology

collection of thirty-eight chapters, including original

essays from 26 authors from a range of disciplines

attempt to reflect the conflicted and contrary responses

to a unique programme, and this book also represents the

first substantial chronicle of Challenge for Change.

Whilst the impact of the program at a community and

societal level may be debatable, Challenge for Change

influence on other media can still be observed 30 years

after its closure. At the end of the programme there were

18,000 subscribers (from around the world) to the monthly

Challenge for Change newsletter indicating significant

outside interest in the ‘stories behind the story’. The

Video Access Centre Videographe, set up through the Societe

Nouvelle program, and reviewed in a chapter in this

collection, inspired other centres including a network of

Australian centres now identified nationally as Screen

Development Australia – including FTI (WA) and the MRC

(SA).

An early participatory media project of Challenge for Change

known as the Fogo Process (1967) set an aspirational

benchmark in terms of community transformation as well as

establishing a process of production, community

engagement and feedback that has since been adopted

around the world on participatory video and communication

for development programs. The Fogo Process and director

Colin Low are well represented in the book with Low’s

insightful reflection on the development of the program

the opening chapter of Part 1 and numerous other chapters

referring to this project – often seen as the embodiment

of the Challenge for Change idealism. Challenge for Change laid

the groundwork and training for Studio D - the first

government funded film studio dedicated to women

filmmakers in the world and Studio D founder Kathleen

Shannon is featured in an interview from 1975, and other

Studio D filmmakers (Henault and Sher Klein) are also

well reviewed. Challenge for Change also provided training,

structural or programmatic support to alternative media

groups such as the Memorial University of Newfoundland’s

Extension film unit, Appalshop and the Aboriginal

People’s Television Network who produced the acclaimed

feature Atanarjurat (The Fast Runner) in 2002 with the NFB. The

Indian Film Crew of the NFB and productions such You Are On

Indian Land are featured across a number of chapters. Noel

Starblanket’s brief plea (1968) for continued support for

the Indian Film Crew conveys some of the tensions and

frustrations clearly felt within the Challenge for Change

Studio over conflicted priorities in light of a limited

capacity for support.

Children of Fogo Island, from the 'Newfoundland Project', now

known as the Fogo Island Project. 1967, Colin Low.

Filmmakers engaged in the project have also had

considerable impact on how we view and make media.

Executive Producer George Stoney would go on to found the

Alternative Media Centre in New York and is known as the

“father of public access television.” Colin Low, who

embraced the influential anti-aesthetical and process

driven approach to the films on Fogo Island, is

identified as a creator of the IMAX format (Labyrinth,

1967), and has been cited as a key influence by Ken Burns

(City of Gold, 1957) and Stanley Kubrick (Universe, 1960).

Kathleen Shannon, who headed up Studio D, became an Oscar

winning producer (for Studio D films: I'll Find a

Way (1978), If You Love This Planet (1983) and Flamenco at

5:15 (1984)). Dorothy Henault and Bonnie Sher Klein who

collaborated on VTR-St Jacques and other Challenge for Change

programs created documentary works including Not A Love

Story, and Klein’s daughter Naomi Klein is interviewed by

Winton for the preface to this book. More than twenty-

five years later the NFB re-imagined Challenge for Change as

part of the innovative Filmmaker in Residence project

(http://filmmakerinresidence.nfb.ca/) - a participatory

and online media program directed by Katerina Cizek, also

featured in the closing chapters of the book discussing

how new developments in media and technology impact on an

interventionist media with intent to provoke social

engagement and change. In the final chapter Vijaya Mulay

looks at the use of participatory video by the Deccan

Development Society in India and credits the Fogo Process

as a key influence whilst exploring differences between

the Community Media Trust and the Challenge for Change.

2 Members of the Fogo Island Development Committee looking out

to sea. Colin Low, 1967.

Although Stoney declared the Challenge for Change films

unimportant, documentaries such as You Are On Indian Land, The

Things I Cannot Change, Cree Hunters of Mstassini, Working Mothers, Les

Filles Du Roy and Up Against the System were well received and

widely viewed. Some of the most fascinating chapters in

the book however focus on the ‘forgotten’ Challenge for

Change films and filmmakers. Working on the margins of

both the NFB and society, filmmakers were seen to work in

service to community needs and ideas, subsuming their own

creative ambitions. The resulting works were often

considered “long and boring” (Low himself reflecting on

the Fogo films in 2002 in an interview with Baker and

Meier!) and only of interest to the community. The

extensive review of both films and filmmakers challenge

an idea of a simple focus on the physical residue of the

media left behind. Rather than read the products of

documentary as representational texts, a number of the

chapters approach the videos as multi-sensory, non-

representational practice that makes “space livelier” and

is “interested in how events are shaped as they happen”

(Rusted, chapter 20). If documentary is approached as

non-representational performance, attention moves from

the rhetoric of texts to the practices of community

organizing, the technologies of portable video and the

embodied material relations that produce a collectively

enacted sense of place.

Stand out chapters addressing both practice and

product/text include Rusted’s exploration of the early

use of Portapak videotape in St-Jacques and Rosedale;

Czach’s tribute to the prolific Michel Regnier and

Charbonneau’s curious approach to Bonnie Sher Klein’s

films on US community organizer Saul Alinsky. Rosenthal’s

interview with Stoney exploring the film You Are On Indian

Land covers a vast period of Stoney’s participatory media

work with a focus on the period around the founding of

the Indian Film Crew (IFC) program within Challenge for

Change, and its unfortunate demise. This chapter provides

an excellent foil to the earlier chapter by Starblanket

charting the frustrations experienced by both (outside)

producer and (inside) participant in trying to manifest

marginalized voices. It reinforces Rusted’s extensive

list of opposing quotations (pp. 219–220) that observes

Challenge for Change as empowering/ disempowering, activist/

pacifist, anti-aesthetic and amateur/ aesthetic and

professional – and it is clear that this conflicted

experiences exist for producers and filmmakers, as well

as for the community. The continuous and contrary

descriptions of the program (and its process and

outcomes) are surely the embodiment of the ‘Challenge’

central to an aspiration of creating a new society, or

manifesting change using film and video. Perceptions of

the programme (and individual projects and processes

within Challenge for Change) through the course of the book

are challenged and revisioned. In Longfellow’s

revisionary reading of the much vilified documentary The

Things I Cannot Change (Ballantyne Tree, 1967) we find a

detailed exposition that unpacks received opinion (and

repeated in previous essays in the text) of a film

originally intended as a prototype for Challenge for Change

films and instead held up as an exemplar of the kind of

films and process to avoid (the family featured in the

film were allegedly so humiliated by their representation

in the film that when it was screened on TV they were

ridiculed to such an extent they had to move).

Left: A member of the Comite des citoyen de St-Jacques films

using the new portapak video tape system. Still from Bonnie

Sher Klein's VTR St-Jacques, 1969. 

Right: The VTR-St-Jacques Project - the first use of the

portapak video in the Challenge for Change program. Bonnie

Sher Klein, 1969.

With such diversity and volume of material, the editors

have a challenge to illuminate a pathway for readers.

Breaking material into five parts they have attempted to

create a navigable structure, from historical

reflections, community issues, a spotlight on films and

filmmakers, a theoretical section and finally a brief

review of contemporary reincarnations of the programme.

The material ranges from essays to journal articles to

interviews – some contemporary, some dating back to the

1970s. The history of Challenge for Change is somewhat

clouded through the oft-conflicted opinions and

historical retellings, and some of the more mythological

projects such as the Fogo Process maintain an

unchallenged purity that authors such as Newhook (2009)

and Crocker (2008) have substantially challenged.

The book offers a vast array of views on the Challenge for

Change programme and projects, communities, filmmakers and

others working within it. Anyone interested in

documentary process and ethics, participatory, community

or activist media will find an exceptional collection of

documentation, review and critique that finally provide

an insight into the importance of not just the Challenge for

Change programme, but the importance of government

cultural institutions such as the NFB.

Members of the Comite des citoyens de St-Jacques in Montreal

interviewing people from their community on the street. From

VTR St-Jacques, Bonnie Sher Klein, 1969. 

Playlist - Challenge for Change:

http://www.nfb.ca/playlists/michael-brendan-thomas-waugh-

ezra-winton/challenge-for-change/

Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of

Canada, edited by Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker &

Ezra Winton, Canada: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010.

i Jones, D.B. Movies and Memorandum (1981) An Interpretative History of the National

Film Board of Canada, Toronto: National Film Institute, p.159.ii Sussex, E. and Grierson, J. (1972) “Grierson on Documentary: The Last

Interview” in Film Quarterly, 26: 1, 24-30. (downloaded from

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1211408, August 2010). P. 24

iii Quoted in Memorial University of Newfoundland Extension Service

(1972), op.cit.