PROGRAM: MIDDAY STATION: CBC TV

DATE: JUNE 16, 1993 TIME: 12:38 P.M.

FILM "MOOSE JAW"

Audio clip from Moose Jaw: “Very exciting and a lot of train activity, and that sort of thing. It was fabulous. Looking from the train station up Main Street. It may have been small, but it had a marvellous Main street. They used to call it the Golden Mile.

KEVIN NEWMAN: That was a scene from a film called " Moose Jaw". It's by one of Canada's more influential film makers, Rick Hancox. Last year it won a special citation for excellence at Toronto's Festival of Festivals, and in the spring the film was acquired for the National Gallery's permanent collection. This week it's being screened halfway around the globe at the Sydney Film Festival.

CLIP: The city of Moose Jaw is located in the centre of southern Saskatchewan, midway between Calgary and Winnipeg, on the Trans Canada Highway, and CP mainline.

KEVIN NEWMAN: The movie which contains documentary and experimental techniques, is a collage of images and sounds of Moose Jaw. It was a 14 year labour of love for Hancox, who began the project as a look back at the place where he grew up. The film is bracketed by a train journey, and explores what happened to small Canadian cities like Moose Jaw when the importance of the railroad gave way to the jet age.

CLIP: Thousands of jobs are gone. Ottawa announced deep budget cuts to VIA last spring, but it wasn't until today that Transport Minister Benoit Bouchard revealed just how where those cuts would be.

KEVIN NEWMAN: Now, Hancox says, giant Moose statues and museums are all that's left of Moose Jaw's once thriving economy and prairie culture.

TINA SREBOTNJAK (HOST): Rick Hancox joins us now from the National Gallery in Ottawa. Hi Rick.

RICK HANCOX: Hi.

TINA SREBOTNJAK: Now the film is called" Moose Jaw" and the subtitle, I think, tells a lot of what the film is about. There's A Future In Our Past, which I take it you're saying with a bit of irony.

RICK HANCOX: Yes, I'm now dropping that as the subtitle. I'm just simply calling the film "Moose Jaw" because I think people might think it's simply a promotional film, or an educational film about Moose Jaw, and it's really quite a subjective film. But that had come from a Main Street renovation project in Moose Jaw in the early 80's and that had been the motto for that project. But I realized during the making of the film that over the fourteen year course of the film it had, in effect, become my motto in that the film was really about my own past more than simply about Moose Jaw.

TINA SREBOTNJAK: And you say it took you fourteen years, which is astonishing. I mean this was a labour of love for you, obviously.

RICK HANCOX: Yeah, well it did become somewhat of an obsession. When I began the project in 1978 I had no idea it was going to turn into this. But I had originally begun the film on a trip out west, and I hadn't seen Moose Jaw for about 20 years, having left at age twelve in 1959. And I just had a camera with me and began recording the landscape of my childhood, and every few years I would go back and I would keep collecting images. Now, I hasten to add, I've done more films than just this in the last 14 years.

TINA SREBOTNJAK: So this hasn't been your job for the last fourteen years.

RICK HANCOX: Yeah, I made six or seven others. This has been on the back burner, and it's been an interesting way that it came together. it slowly developed. And it seemed to take that much time to begin to notice the changes that took place in Moose Jaw, in Saskatchewan, in Canada, and in my own maturing in relation to the project and in relation to the place of my childhood.

TINA SREBOTJNAK: And the changes had not been for the good.

RICK HANCOX: Well, I remember a Moose Jaw, a sort of post war boom era of th 50' s . It was still a time when there was still a pioneering spirit out west. Nobody ever though about the past. There weren't museums at that time. But there had been some economic hard times. It's no secret they had some bad drought for many years on the prairies. The farmers getting no prices at all, and that's affected Moose Jaw. Another problem, of course, is that Moose Jaw, just as Regina as the capital city was built just too close to Moose Jaw, and Moose Jaw has suffered as a result of this sort of government largesse in comparison. But Moose Jaw still has the air base there. It seems to be one of the biggest industries.

But there have been other changes. I think the population has stayed about the same, but it's quite changed from what I remember, and I'm trying to deal with my childhood memories and my difficulties in adjusting to the Moose Jaw of the present. Although people still have to live there, and I respect that and I show that in the film. There's a parade scene at the end of the film in which everyone comes out into the street for the annual Kinsmen International Band Festival, and I'm stuck up still in my hotel room behind a window, and at this point totally alienated from Moose Jaw because there's nobody there that I know anymore.

TINA SREBOTNJAK: Now the train plays a pivotal role in this, partly because Moose Jaw used to, I guess, a cross roads for the train, and when VIA pulled out, I mean, that was devastating for Moose Jaw, I take it.

RICK HANCOX: Oh, definitely. It was a town that was really built by the CPR- CPR along the CPR rail line that was being built in the 1880's. And it continued to be the main employer in moose Jaw. There's still quite a few people who work for it. It's still a freight centre. It was also the terminal for the Sioux Line coming up out of Chicago and there are many rumours about in the gangster era they escaped from Chicago and go to Moose Jaw's infamous River Street, including Al Capone.

TINA SRSBOTNJAK: Wow!

RICK HANCOX: But as the Jet age became the more popular way for people to travel, passenger service really went down. I continued to take the train out there partly because the train is so important in Moose Jaw, but also in my own childhood. Every summer we would take the train down to Ontario down to my Grandfather's cottage. And also I became sort of a white knuckled flier because there was a very serious air accident, a collision over the skies of Moose Jaw, a TCA plane in 1954.

TINA SREBOTNJAK: Yes which you show in the film. There are all these clippings of this disaster. And r mean it must have obviously scarred you.

RICH HANCOX: Yes, and so it had an effect and that is dealt with in the film. And throughout the film there is this kind of sense of imminent crashing about to take place. We hear sounds of crashes occasionally in the sound track and reference to transportation and, of course, air travel taking over from train travel, but the ultimate crash, I suppose at the end of the film is my ability to even make a documentary about Moose Jaw. I mean, there are so many stories to tell, it's almost impossible to do them all, and ultimately all I was able to do was to tell my own story, which I think in many documentaries, is one of the things which is inevitable. The film maker is essentially telling his or her own story about the subject. I think it's important in new kinds of documentary to acknowledge that.

TINA SREBOTNJAK; And you certainly do, because you play a role. I mean, we don't see much of you. Your parents-I mean, part of the film is done as a slide show where your parents are commenting on pictures of you as a boy, pictures of Moose Jaw, you know, in the days when it was a different kind of town.

RICK HANCOX: Yes, I think that's, I think people are interested in the personal aspect of the lives of ordinary Canadians. I think when we try to gloss over that, films don't have the credibility that they might otherwise have. But yes I do use stills from my past, and pictures of Moose Jaw in the present, with my parents, as you say, commenting in the soundtrack in the background.

TINA SREBOTNJAK: Do you know Rick Hancox any better now that you've made this film?

RICK HANCOX: Yes, I think I do. But I also know that I probably won't make another film like this one again.

TINA SREBOTNJAK: Yes, I bet after fourteen years you want to give it a rest. Well, thanks for talking to us today, Rick.

RICK HANCOX: Thank you, it's my pleasure.

TINA SREBOTNJAK: Bye.

RICK HANCOX: Good bye.