Yesterday is relevant again…
My favourite Canadian National Film Board movie is a story only six or seven minutes long, in black and white—and it stabbed. Not a story for me to see at bed time, not unless I have a stiff drink at hand, not unless I want to stagger up out of a warm bed during the lonely hour of the wolf to drink.
The Canadian part of the name means the Board “interprets Canada to Canadians.” I’m Irish myself. I wouldn’t expect the NFB to do stories about my people or an Irish banshee. Do you know our legend? The banshee comes by and perches out of reach out on the barn roof or up above the lintel on your own roof—and when it wails, it means someone is going to die. (I heard it when I was a boy) Too bad the NFB won’t do a story about my people, or the nearby US of A.
Establishing shot: an idyllic pastoral farmyard on a nice day. The film convention of an invisible band isn’t followed, because there is no score. The special aural convention is that the plain kitchen counter radio is not audible.
We hear: a farm wife make clucking noises as she feeds the chickens. She is followed by the dogs as she goes over to check on the ducks in the pond. She claps her hands and shoos some chickens away from trouble, goes to the henhouse and gathers eggs, As she takes care of her morning chores there is a bit of skip to her walk, like a child on Little House on the Prairie. The dogs enjoy following her.
At last she settles onto a chair at the kitchen table, solidly, as a grown woman does, her face tired, or grim—or is it the news on the radio? Both hands on her coffee mug, so calm…
—She leaps to her feet! Scattering the dogs, she darts out the door, racing across the yard and down, down and across a field with crops half grown. She is a small figure in a great field, her husband on a little tractor, as from the bottom of her lungs she rips out a cry of utter despair, “Andy-yyy!”
And a banshee wails, louder and louder, filling the field and the entire sky… just like I heard as a boy on Sundays when they tested the air raid sirens.
…
Somewhere south of me a white haired old man is shouldering a responsibility I can scarcely imagine.
He continues to order the Ukraine Department Of Defence not to defend their civilians, not to fire across their border onto bases in Russia. His words make me tense up in rage, “It’s not fair!”. Nevertheless I understand he is afraid of “escalation.” Yesterday is relevant again. For that well meaning old man, I am not without sympathy.
.
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Sean Crawford
Lethbridge
September
2024
