Film Club interview

from The Canadian Press. Here's an excerpt (emphases mine):

What [the book] details is a father's struggle to connect with a beloved son who is totally disinterested in homework and who, at six-foot-four, is a man-sized adolescent frequently skipping out of high school to wander about the big city at will.

"All we ever talked about was his poor performance at school," the Toronto author and winner of a Governor General's award for A Perfect Night to Go to China explains in an interview.

"And it really was turning him into a liar. And it was creating antagonism between the two of us. And finally I just said 'I can't do this, I've already done Grade 10. I can't do your homework for you. I can't do this. You're going to have to make a choice.' And to my horror, he said 'I don't want to go to school anymore."'

Gilmour makes a deal with Jesse, telling him he can quit school as long as he watches three movies a week with his dad and absolutely stays away from drugs.

"I was trying to salvage my relationship with him because I thought not only am I going to lose the school battle but I'm going to lose him over it."

Jesse Gilmour, now 21, is doing a few interviews alongside his well-known father as the book about his sometimes tumultuous adolescence is launched, and he concurs that dropping out was the correct -- and probably the only -- course of action for him.

"I hated high school, I hated it. I was completely happy to get out of there. And even now, I'm going to university now, which I like, but even if I could go back, I probably would do the same thing again," he says emphatically.

"For some people high school just doesn't work for them. It's just terribly straining and boring in a way that it becomes unhealthy to you."

But if high school was a strain for Jesse, the decision to let him opt out was nothing short of terrifying for his dad.

"I spent about a year waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning with my heart thumping thinking, my God, he's going to end up in a cardboard box in Los Angeles ... where can you go in this world with a Grade 9 education?" Gilmour says.

People of his own generation went to school out of fear because they were terrified of what would happen if they didn't have an education, he notes.

"Most of us got a B.A. because we were frightened of the consequences," Gilmour says. "His generation isn't frightened of that stuff at all. I don't know why they're not. But they're really not."

Gilmour, who has worked as a film critic and cautiously served up erudite observations about plot, direction and acting techniques to his son, doesn't even attempt to describe the three films per week as a substitute for an education.

"He really didn't get anything out of it except he got to spend time with his father, and what teenage boys really need is to spend time with their fathers," he says.

"We could've gone skydiving, or we could've gone scuba-diving. It wouldn't have made a difference. It wasn't really the films. It was an opportunity for the two of us to spend time together before he was gone for good."

As it turns out, the films worked as a kind of conversation-starter, and father and son would go outside on the porch, smoke cigarettes and "talk about everything under the sun" - including Jesse's attempts to sort out matters of the heart when he falls hard for one girl, and later, for another. There are troubled times, too, when Jesse breaks his vow to stay away from drugs.

But Jesse's opinion diverges somewhat from that of his father when he talks about the "nourishment" he got from seeing a range of movies, including some he describes as "great art."

"On The Waterfront," "Notorious" and "A Streetcar Named Desire" were among the many films the pair watched together.

"The more you learn about it the more you can appreciate it. So it's true the movies were more just kind of a jumping off point that me and my dad could spend time together, and have a real relationship during that time. But yeah, I think I got a lot out of the movies."

A few years after the film club began, Jesse decided to go back to school and signed up for a crash course in the required subjects, with tutoring by his mother. Last month, he began studying Italian cinema, classical mythology and world religions at the University of Toronto. ...

Gilmour, 57, says that during those "film club" years, his professional life was "a catastrophe." Now, he calls it an unbelievable stroke of luck because it gave him time at home with his son at a time when teens are "gradually shutting the door on their parents and they're keeping their private lives to themselves."

"It was like winning the lottery, and not recognizing it until about halfway through that this was actually a victory, not a life catastrophe."

You can read the rest here.

An alternative education

First up on this morning's CBC Radio "Sunday Edition" show, my favorite weekend listening, was host Michael Enright's interview with film critic and writer David Gilmour, author of the just-published The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and a Son. Film Club is Mr. Gilmour's account of his decision, several years ago, to let his son drop out of high school. What he kept coming back to during the radio interview was his son's need for time.

I found a very good review by Ian McGillis in yesterday's Montreal Gazette, entitled "Learning from film: A father, a son and an unusual education". From which,

It's the kind of thing a movie producer would label "high concept." A father, at his wits' end over his teenage son's extreme aversion to anything classroom-related, suggests that the son drop out of high school on the condition that the two of them watch three films per week, together, for two years. [The other condition was no drugs.]

But this is no movie. The father is David Gilmour, award-winning novelist and former CBC film critic, the son is [16]-year-old Jesse. And their experiment, for which the term "hare-brained" might seemingly have been coined, has turned out against all reasonable expectations to make for a book that's insightful, surprising and, yes, moving.

It's a handy hook, of course, that the mere idea of what Gilmour has his son do is sure to cause the taking of mass umbrage by good parents everywhere. It's not as though Gilmour isn't aware of this. Even at an advanced stage in the program, when it's too late to undo, he's attacked by doubts: "What if I'd allowed him to f--k up his entire life under some misinformed theory that might just be laziness with a smart-ass spin on it?" What if, indeed.

On the surface, Jesse does provide plenty of cause for concern. He has very little sense of geography. ("The United States are right across the lake?" asks the lifelong Torontonian.) He takes his loves and his lost loves extremely seriously and -- surprise, surprise -- he wants to be a rapper.

But this young man, we come to see, has hidden reserves. The child may never quite become father to the man, but at many times, the dynamic is much more big brother-little brother than Pop and Junior.

The films they watch, handpicked by the father, range from undisputed classics (Citizen Kane) to French New Wave standbys (The 400 Blows) to outright kitsch (Showgirls). It's a commendably catholic list, though Gilmour père proves utterly unable to predict which films might set his enigmatic son alight. Jesse's blank response to A Hard Day's Night, starring Dad's beloved Beatles, is priceless. But then, the author surprises himself no less on revisiting some old touchstones. "Some films let you down; you must have been in love or heartbroken, you must have been wound up about something when you saw them because now, viewed from a different trajectory, there's no magic left."

An index at the end lists nearly 150 films mentioned, but the book somehow never feels weighted down with the references. In fact, in what may or may not be a coincidence, at about the time the reader begins to tire of the device, so do the participants. But that's fine, because by then, it's the relationship we really care about. ...

In fact, after three years, Jesse rose off the couch and decided that he was indeed interested in further education. He is now 21 and attending university in Toronto.

And an excerpt from yesterday's Globe & Mail review by Charles Wilkins:

...Gilmour's intimate and free-wheeling book is, in large part, the story of the role he played in his son Jesse's life (and vice-versa) when the teenager crashed out of high school at 16 and seemed headed for what Gilmour refers to as "a bad life."

In a stroke of strategic educational genius (and of optimal deployment of his own fascinations and resources), the writer offered his son freedom from school and employment on the condition that the boy join him in watching and discussing a minimum of three feature films a week.

The deal was made, and over a period of three years, the films became a curriculum unto themselves, a varied and fascinating syllabus rich in ideas, social values, character study, history, geography, family, ethics, music -- and, of course, in the import of filmmaking and art, of dramatic writing and acting and directing.

As Jesse learns, we learn -- about Hitchcock and Kubrick and Truffaut; and Brando and Bogart and Hepburn; Annie Hall, On the Waterfront, The Godfather. Gilmour was once a film commentator for CBC Television, and his knowledge of the art and industry is both rangy and deep -- and is happily charged with anecdotal vigour and gossip.

"I knew I wasn't giving Jesse a systematic education," he writes. "We could as easily have gone skin diving or collected stamps. The films simply served as an occasion to spend time together, hundreds of hours, as well as a door-opener for all manner of conversational topics -- Rebecca, Zoloft, dental floss, Vietnam, impotence, cigarettes."

The book is also the story of the travails of a middle-aged writer who, at the time the action takes place, was, by his own admission, down on his luck, and is painfully honest about it. At one point, when other options have been exhausted, he seeks work as a bicycle courier, and is turned down - too old. (It bears mentioning that Gilmour's luck changed dramatically in 2005 when he won the Governor-General's Award for Fiction for his novel A Perfect Night to Go to China.)

And a helpful caution from The Globe & Mail,

...there were points at which I felt as if I were reading through a keyhole and that, given the context, there was simply too much grovelling over "relationships," over "the game," over "chicks," which unfortunately detracts from the book's erstwhile innocence and integrity. ...

In the end, a majority of the pages in the book might more appropriately have appeared under the title The Dating Club or The Mating Club than The Film Club.

And yet the book is meaningful, is insightful, is valuable. On a social level alone, it challenges our notions of education, of productivity, of high schools that have fallen catastrophically behind in their capability to inspire young men. It is, what's more, a compelling, often tender account of a parent's deep concern for his child.

Our late summer visitor

I noticed this morning while feeding the chickens that all eight roosters were outside in the pen. This is unusual because the four at the top of the pecking order generally stroll around the pen, lording and swanning around, while the four at the bottom of the pecking order quake and cower on the roosts in their little coop. But they were all outdoors this morning. I neared the door, to fill the feeder and peer into the semi-darkness.

And there I saw a bird on the roost. It didn't look roosterlike, though. It was much more straight up and down, with its head tucked in its shoulder. I whistled, and it raised its head. It was a hawk. In my chicken coop. I quickly and quietly closed the door, and when we got back to the house, instead of proceeding with the chokecherry syrup odyssey, phoned the Fish & Wildlife office in town. I've learned to do a lot of things since moving to the farm, but catching raptors isn't one, and I have a healthy respect for their talons.

An officer turned up on our doorstop before too long, and the kids were all excitement to tumble into the truck and show him our visitor. (I grabbed the digital camera so Tom wouldn't think I'd been hitting the sauce, chokecherry or otherwise, in his absence.) The officer headed toward the coop with a net,























and quickly and easily netted the hawk. Then the untangling,





















and identifying. I had thought from my brief glimpse in the partial dark that it might be a young red-tailed hawk but it was a ferruginous hawk (Buteo regalis), and regal the young male was. Ferruginous hawks aren't quite as common around here, since their range is a bit further south, usually the southeastern corner of the province. The ferruginous hawk dives for prey from high soaring flights, which is probably how our visitor got between the squares of the page wire over the chicken pen.

And then the best part, when the Fish & Wildlife officer asked the kids if they'd each like to hold the hawk. Davy kept his distance and said no, thanks, but Daniel and Laura were eager. The officer helped them grab the bird's legs (thank goodness for kids who keep work gloves at the ready) and then let each child hold the bird alone. Daniel got to go first,
















Laura went next



















and later got to release the hawk, I tried to snap pictures as quickly as possible, and then the cautious Davy got to ride partway home in the officer's truck and sound the siren and the lights (needless to say, more than one of the kids has added "Fish & Wildlife officer" -- or junior falconer -- to the list of possible desirable occupations). After Laura released the hawk, throwing her arm up high and steadily as instructed, our young friend took off for the trees at the edge of our corrals to rest and recuperate from his adventure,























It's almost enough to make me sorry that the kids aren't headed toward a regular classroom next week, so they could answer the old question: What did you do on your summer vacation?!