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.
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