In Conversation with Ian McLachlan

By Jinian Harwig
Feb 2, 2023

Artspace has been in Peterborough since 1974. It was one of the first artist-run galleries in the country and has a rich and varied history since its opening. One such event in that history happened in 1980. Canadian Images Festival, a Trent organization, and Artspace decided to screen Al Razutis' film A Message From Our Sponsor as an act of defiance against the Ontario Censorship Board. I interviewed Ian McLachlan, who was prominent in both boards at the time to get an inside look at this period of time. “I think everybody held it in contempt, in art circles, and also in the left wing political circles that I was involved in. I was somewhere between Marxism and anarchism in my own sort of thinking, a bit of both. And so the whole idea of censorship and what it was protecting –thought to protect – people from was a big topic of debate generally.” 

Al Razutis' film had been part of a film package curated by the National Gallery of Canada; however when it came time for the film to leave the gallery the Censorship Board would not approve the film for screening in Ontario based galleries without edits. Ian describes the Board's point of contention with the film. “A Message From Our Sponsor is about ten minutes long and it's all sort of layered. Most of Al's work has layers of images, so A Message From Our Sponsor was about advertising, but it was also linked with images from films that were considered by the Censor Board to be pornography. And so there was about 15 seconds of fellatio in there, which you could read as being fellatio just about – despite all the other images that were going on. As our lawyer later on described it, It was ‘the quickest and most expensive blowjob there has ever been’ And so Al Razutis’ films came up because there was just generally this move to resist censorship at that time at a whole variety of different levels. There was a long discussion at the Canadian Images board, first of all, about whether we should go ahead with this film or not in the programming. And there were two university presidents on the board of Canadian Images, Donald Theall, who is the current university president and Tom Symons, who had retired as the founding president of Trent. And there was a unanimous agreement on the board that we should go ahead with trying to show the film. But there was a lot of disagreement about how we should do that. One of the solutions that we found or thought we found was that the film should be programmed for an invited audience and then we should invite everybody as the audience to come. And we gave tickets out to people who then became guests of the festival. Then it went to the Artspace board after that. And the Artspace board voted for it almost unanimously – except for a lawyer who resigned from the board not because he was opposed to showing it, but because he didn't want to deal with the fallout of doing something that was then found to be illegal. And so the decision was made [for Canadian Images Festival] to show it and program it at Artspace.” 

I asked Ian if he could remember the talking points in these meetings; after all, people were putting themselves on the line by making the decision to show this film unedited. “Well, there was Susan Ditta, who was the executive director of Canadian Images, and myself. And I guess we were pushing very strongly to resist the Censor Board. And it's arbitrariness. It was making a lot of really dumb decisions and imperious decisions. The head of the Censor Board, Mary Brown, was actually quite an impressive woman when she came to give evidence at the trial. But coming from a really very conservative Catholic, Roman Catholic, kind of perspective on morality because it was all defined as community standards. And community standards can mean absolutely anything to a whole variety of different consumers of the object. And Mary Brown had her own imperious perceptions to what community standards were, and other people on the board were really just there to back her up. Anyway, it went to the Artspace board, and the decision there was much more strongly in favor of showing the film than the kind of hesitancy that there had been about how to do it. The board of Artspace, David Bierk and Dennis Tourbin and Chris MacGee - all three of them dead now -  were all local artists who had reputations that went quite a long way outside of Peterborough. They were all completely committed to this idea that the Censor Board shouldn't be telling them what to do. And it was as simple as that, really. One of the decisions that had been taken was this decision about the invited audience.”

The purpose of this invited audience was an attempt to obfuscate the board by implying the film was to be shown to a private audience. This strategy, however, did not work as intended. “That was a red flag, I think, to the Censor Board. They started sending people up to Peterborough to check on what was being done and they started asking more and more questions about what this invited audience was going to be. And I think Sue and myself, when I was asked, probably both tried to make it as unclear as possible what was going to happen. Donald Theall, the president of Trent, who was very strongly opposed to censorship of any kind, was great through all of this. And we set it up so that there would be a forum discussion about censorship of film at the opening night, and then we would ensure that it got big coverage in the Toronto Star that this was happening. And the Censor Board just didn't want there to be any kind of publicity about this. I think if it had just been done quietly in a hole in the corner, then it would have been okay. It would have been like one of the exceptions, exemptions that they gave to art galleries at times, but we didn’t want that.”

So the night of the screening arrived, and without any permissions given from the Censor Board, the decision had to be made about whether to go forward with the screening. “There was a long discussion on the staircase at Artspace. This was the Artspace on Hunter Street. Orm Mitchell, who had been one of the two people who founded Canadian Images, said he didn't agree with us showing it like this. And Sue and I decided to go ahead with showing it. We said that that was the decision that the board made. And it was, though this kind of unraveled a bit at the trial subsequently. Artspace wasn't a big space, but there were people sort of standing on top of each other in order to see this whole event. It was so exciting. Made even more exciting by this rather furious argument taking place on the staircase. John Fekete, who was a friend of Don Theall’s – he was in the English Department at Trent and has written lots of articles, academically and more popularly, opposing censorship of any kind. He replaced Don Theall on the panel. There was a great discussion at the panel, and there were a lot of journalists from Toronto, from the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. And then the film was shown, Al Razutis switched on the projector because he said he didn't want Bill Kimball, who was working for Artspace, to get into trouble. Jay Scott, who was the main film critic for the Globe and Mail, wrote a big article about this the next day, and he was obviously clearly in favor of what was happening. So was everybody in the film community.”

Ian informed me it was about a year later when he, Sue, and David Bierk were charged for showing the film. Instead of accepting small fines they committed to a trial, something the crown prosecutor was frustrated by. “We got legal coverage [from Trent]  that in the end was over $100,000. There was this very good lawyer - his name was Joe Colangelo - who was handling the case, and he spent pretty much three months of his time working on a defense that said that this was effectively unconstitutional and an interference in the rights of Canadians.” It was in fact only a year after this trial that the Censorship Board of Ontario was deemed unconstitutional and disbanded so this evidently was an argument with some merit. “The press coverage of the trial made the absurdity of the Censor Board's operations apparent, the fact that it functioned so inefficiently and that there was no real set of standards that they had, that it was all sort of formulated on the go from one incident to another. Mary Brown was cross-examined for more than a day by our lawyer, Al Lenczner, who was thought of as being the most aggressive and best trial lawyer in the country at that time…. I think what happened at this trial was that the censors overstepped. That kind of culture runs on the basis of a set of tacit political assumptions and compromises generally. And people don't flex their muscles too much unless they really have to in order to protect themselves. People in power, in this case, exposed themselves to this kind of ridicule. There were quotes of that sort that showed that this was, I think, like something Mary Brown said, ‘there is no regulation that regulates our power to regulate’ - something like that.”

By the time the results of the trial were decided, the publicity around the trial had died down, but it had done its job to expose and ridicule the Censorship Board in a public forum. And as for The Peterborough Four, “Al was found innocent and David and Sue and I were found guilty. I was found to be more guilty than they were because I'd been on both boards and I was somehow seen as being the person who made this happen, which wasn't really true. It was a consensual decision that was made. And so I had to pay a larger fine. Then we were left with the bills to pay for David Bierk's lawyer and Al's lawyer and for other costs along the way. So I applied for and got funding from what used to be the Explorations Department of the Canada Council to organize an exhibition called Arts Against Repression. That show was shown first of all at Artspace in ‘82. It opened on the first day of the trial. Later on it traveled to Hamilton and Saint Catherines, and some of it was shown in Ottawa and Los Angeles. This exhibit was really tremendous. And there was a lot of material in it, including film that had been subject to censorship in Canada.” After our interview Ian expanded on how liberating this exhibit was after the intensity of the trial. “When you get caught up in a court case, you feel the walls closing in around you. People - friends, lawyers - tell you what you should and shouldn't do, what you can and can't say. The exhibit gave us the chance to break out of that situation and to extend the discussion to other people and places. One shouldn't just be fighting against censorship. One should be celebrating the right to claim one's own freedom and what one can do with it.”

To close out our conversation I asked Ian for  his thoughts on censorship today. “I think it always becomes the imposition of subjective opinion on other people's tastes. And I think that there's a lot of speech that I think of as being dangerous, yes, but I would rather have that out in the open than going on underneath the surface. Because I think out in the open, it can be held up to ridicule in a different kind of way. And I think satire is the best way of undermining all forms of stupidity, and censorship is a form of stupidity. I don't think you undermine oppressive statements by responding to them with oppressive statements. I think you undermine them with reason and mockery. I think reason and mockery are the two best ways of preserving freedom, in a sense. I don't think one preserves freedom by exercising more power. I think that in the end, it's power that is the destructive language.”