Life in the shadow of mortality

NFB doc examines Western culture’s difficulty with death

MICHAEL POSNER   The Globe and Mail   August 22, 2008

There are certainly bigger, more commercial films on the roster for Montreal's World Film Festival, which opened last night, but at least thematically there's unlikely to be any as important as Griefwalker.

Tim Wilson's compelling 73-minute documentary is important not for its budget or its stars, but for its subject matter. The film confronts the ultimate elephant in everyone's room: death. Spurred by his own near-death experience a few years ago - the result of a fractious gallbladder - Wilson contacted an old friend, Stephen Jenkinson, a Harvard-trained theologian and social worker who now devotes his life to teaching and palliative care.

The film that emerged was produced by the National Film Board's Annette Clarke and edited down from 200 hours of footage by Hannele Halm (Up the Yangtze) on a budget of about $400,000. It shows Jenkinson counselling terminal patients and a young couple grieving over the loss of their daughter and, in conversations with Wilson, ruminating at length on death and how it ought to be treated.

Some people call him “the angel of death.” At core, he's sharply critical of how Western society tends to deal with death, denying its inevitability for as long as possible and heavily medicating the grief that surrounds it. Instead, Jenkinson maintains, we need to live our lives with a greater appreciation for death, seeing it as the incubator and cradle of life itself.

As he puts it on his website, orphanwisdom.com, “a culture addicted to security, comfort, and ‘be all you want to be,’ makes no time in its public or private life for sorrow or uncertainty or the end of things ... Our hearts elbow our lives out of the way in their headlong search for safe landings and getting their needs met. But what would our culture look like and how would our children think of us 50 years from now, if we began to honour and teach grief as a skill, as vital to our personal and cultural and spiritual life as the skill of loving?”

Jenkinson's message is not simply a new twist on carpe diem, though the importance of seizing the day is part of it. It's an attempt to get the culture to invite death to the dining-room table, to make it part of the family discussion.

"He's an amazing individual," Wilson says. "His style is poetic and he has the rhetorical gift that preachers have, but he's able to bring in big ideas from left field yet somehow preserve the mystery and the elusiveness of things. He's a theologian, but I can count on one hand the number of times he's used the word ‘God’ in my presence. There's never a cliché, never a pat answer, always an invention in the moment."

Even without his full frontal approach to death, Jenkinson cuts a fascinating figure. He's a fifty-something white man who has in many ways adopted an aboriginal lifestyle, a sort of thinking man's Grey Owl. He speaks fluent Ojibway, makes his own birch bark canoes, built a straw bale house that won a Governor-General's award for architecture, tries to invest even mundane tasks with a sense of the sacred, and speaks eloquently about society's need to cede more honour and memory to the dead.

“My wife Simone got in touch with him when I was sick," says Wilson, recalling the film's origins. "I don't actually remember it, but he told me I looked very grey, that concern for me was well founded. He said, 'You weren't seeing death, but death was seeing you.'”

Western culture's deep denial of death, Wilson suggests, is only half-successful. "It's weird, but it comes squirting out everywhere, in a distorted monster-like way, in subliminal expressions - in the violence that's all around us, in heavy metal, in video games. That's connected somehow. Thanatos is very much alive."

Now living with three young sons in Bear River, N.S., Wilson, 61, is a native Winnipegger. He's been making radio and film documentaries for three decades. His film work is astonishing, at once visually lush (he works as his own cameraman) and scripturally poetic, each piece a finely crafted elegy for a lost or dying world.

His own near-death experience five years ago constituted an urgent wake-up call. "I'd read the books about death, but had not really bitten it, and suddenly you understand, 'I'm not going to change this. I'm going to die. I should have realized it long before.' In cultures that have any wisdom, you get to walk alongside your death in a vital way."

Tim Wilson trains his lens on our approach to death

JOHN GRIFFIN, The Montreal Gazette   Sat., August 23, 2008

The 32nd World Film Festival got off on the good foot Thursday night.

Patrons of the opening gala at Place des Arts were ushered into the place by strangely hot, sunny, summer weather. Once everyone was seated, festival VP Danièle Cauchard took the opportunity to sling a few subtle barbs at the various tiers of government in attendance for cultural budget cuts. With luck, lovely Governor-General Michaëlle Jean was paying attention from her A-list seat.

Then founder Serge Losique assured famed American producer Alan Ladd Jr. that, 50 Oscars notwithstanding, none of Ladd's many honours could match the festival's Prix d'Ameriques bestowed upon him last night.

Then it was on to the opening film, an official competition entry called Faubourg 36, by France's Christophe Barratier. General consensus at the party afterwards was that this period piece by the director of the hit Les Choristes was a perfect way to launch the next 11 days of film.

"Sweet and charming" were words used to describe Barratier's movie, and his radiant young star Nora Arnezeder. She lit up the red carpet entry and was the belle of the ball at an after-party notable for lots of food, lashings of wine, and the appearance of virtually everyone who was at the PdA screening. All in all, a great start to a festival whose presumed death a couple of years ago was greatly exaggerated.

Tim Wilson wasn't at the film or party. The filmmaker and broadcast vet was making his way from the Maritimes for yesterday's premiere of his provocative, very personal NFB documentary Griefwalker.

Griefwalker might not have made an ideal opening-night film. It is a film about death. More specifically, it's about how Western culture approaches death. Even more specifically, according to Wilson's close friend Stephen Jenkinson, Griefwalker is about how Western culture doesn't approach death.

Jenkinson is an odd duck, and this picture's about him. He's a Harvard-trained theologian whose substantial learning has taken him away from Western religion and toward those elemental beliefs held by older, aboriginal cultures, including those here in North America.

Not for Jenkinson the namby-pamby caregiving, and dulling drugs meted out to terminal patients as a matter of course and institutionalized humanity. For him, death is not to be denied or avoided, or compartmentalized. It is to be embraced as the only friend we have our entire lives.

A fitting death is our responsibility, Jenkinson tells brave individuals dying in front of Wilson's camera; clinicians in workshops whose job it is to keep the Reaper away from the cabin door; and grieving parents coping with the impossible loss of a child.

The quiet, exquisitely framed and scored Griefwalker affects viewers, Wilson admits, "like a slow detonation."

Speaking with enthusiasm, candour and eloquence on the phone this week, he said "Death is the big question. It's on my mind, and the mind of my generation - the baby boomers."

Or should be, according to Jenkinson. In direct contradiction of the mantra many boomers were weaned upon, the goal isn't success, personal growth or happiness. "The cradle of your love for life ... is death."

Jenkinson is a gentle-voiced man of many words whose appearance, ritual and lifestyle suggest he's reverted to a time before the white man in this country, when our first nations lived in harmony with the land. He simply tells people things they may not want to hear. He believes they should.

"I didn't want a threatening film," says Wilson. "But I did want mordancy and bite." He has both in abundance. Griefwalker offers plenty of food for thought.

But it's also inspiring, in its own bracing way. And Jenkinson, for all his native appropriations, is, too. "The point is," Wilson says, "how do you carry the knowledge of your death in your life. It's not morbid - it's paying the rent."