MORNING ON THE LIÈVRE is a highly successful film adaptation of Archibald Lampman's 1888 poem of the same name, released by the National Film Board of Canada in 1962. The film won awards for best theatrical short at film festivals in Brussels, Edinburgh, the US, and Canada, and was a staple of the literature classroom throughout the 1960s and '70s. Morning on the Livre is currently available on the NFB YouTube channel, and whenever I assign Lampman's poem in my Canadian literature survey course, many of the students arrive in class having watched the movie in preference to reading the text. This has led me to speculate about the differences between the two, and what the effect of encountering Lampman's words first through the film might be on a subsequent reading of the poem. This essay uses records obtained from the National Film Board archives to recount how the film was made and suggest why the state-supported National Film Board of the early 1960s might have felt this film was an appropriate way to fulfill its mandate. More importantly, it argues that the film elides the poem itself and its historical context in order to make it consistent with a mid-twentieth-century discourse of nationalism, and that in doing so it participates in a general erasure of the specificity of nineteenth-century Canadian literary works in favour of their reinterpretation or even replacement by narratives of nationality as a direct response to place.

The NFB was founded by statute in 1939 with a mandate to communicate government policy, boost civilian morale, and disseminate war news during World War II. This mandate continued after the war, with the NFB producing the series of upbeat newsreels called "Canada Carries On" until 1959; in addition, the post-war years saw the NFB expand to create educational films, artistic and animated shorts, and promotional films under contract for government departments.[1] According to Peter Dickinson, in the 1950s "the NFB/ONF quickly developed a parallel tradition of producing live-action, theatrical shorts and mid-length features, many of them based on works of Canadian literature" (24). The goal of this policy was to promote an independent Canadian cinema, and to create educational, experimental, and artistic films in anticipation of the growth of television in Canada. But most of these early literary adaptations were based on conventional modern-ist short stories that exhibited the classic elements of narrative unity, strong focus on an individual character, and a single climactic moment of emotional intensity. "Morning on the Livre" is a descriptive lyric with little in the way of plot and no characters, and the choice to adapt it to film was a significant departure from the previous literary adaptations created by the National Film Board. However, the poem was also a popular selection in anthologies intended for general readers as well as textbooks for schoolchildren, and promotional material for the finished film assumes that viewers will already be familiar with it: "Anyone who thumbs a Canadian Reader, must picture in his mind the river as Archibald Lampman described it, shrouded in morning mist" (NFB, Promotional Flyer). Thus the choice to adapt the poem to film fit the mandate of the NFB to make educational films that could be used in classrooms, as well as films that were visually artistic and experimental.

The poem[2] begins with the call of a blue jay, and proceeds through a metaphoric description of a river landscape shrouded in mist in the early morning. The second stanza identifies the speaker as seated in a canoe on a placid river, and describes reflections in the water of the canoe itself and the surrounding forest landscape. The final stanza adds detail to the picture with a small creek, muskrats, sunken trees on the edge of the river, and finally a group of ducks that rises from the surface of the water to disappear around a bend. The focus on concrete description and the lack of commentary made it stand out among Lampman's poems, and it continued to be popular despite the modernist critics' rejection of much nineteenth-century Canadian poetry for its Victorian moralism and sentimentality.[3] "Morning on the Livre" avoids inherited form and uses characteristically short lines, "an irregularly rhymed and relatively free verse" (Bentley, Gay]Grey 57), which is another reason the modernists might have liked it. Eric Ball's close reading of the poem demonstrates its main literary device — what he calls "syntactic delay": "The buildup of seemingly unrelated sub-images preceding the main statement," which he argues increases the sensory effect by forcing "us to train our senses on the objects described, without fully comprehending, so that our appreciation of the qualities of things precedes our understanding of what is taking place" (86).

Thus the effect of the poem is visual and emotional; it has no plot, and little action; it is only forty-four lines long, comprising less than two minutes of narration. So it is surprising to find the finished film running thirteen minutes long, with a strong sense of closure provided by the successful running of a rapids from 9:57 to 11:16, a minute before the credits roll. Clearly the film is not an adaptation of the poem but an elaboration of it. Documents from the "Production File" obtained from the archives of the National Film Board in Montreal provide a narrative of the way that the project evolved from an "experimental" film that was initially projected to run approximately four minutes to the finished film.

When the director, David Bairstow, pitched the poem "Morning on the Livre" as appropriate for film adaptation, he envisioned "an attempt to combine two separate arts — poetry and film" ("Proposed Production Program"). He specified that the film "can have no story line. Any attempt at such would be . . . contrary to the spirit of the poem." Bairstow argued that, in the absence of a narrative, "the basic continuing structural element should be music" ("Experimental Film" 1) and described a way of linking the scenes together with a recurring musical motif. The project was "authorized" by the "experimental division" of the NFB on April 14, 1959 ("Advice of Production") and initial filming took place in October of 1959 at the Livre River near Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette in Quebec.

In the Spring, Bairstow had requested the "loan" of Stephen Greenlees "as assistant director and general production advisor" (Bairstow, Memo), and engaged Grant Crabtree as cinematographer. Greenlees, who was on salary with the NFB in the "Liaison" office, had directed and produced several films for the NFB in the early 1950s that featured wilderness settings and canoeing; he had also worked with Crabtree and with Eldon Rathburn, the composer engaged to create a musical score for the film, on previous occasions. Unfortunately, the weather was bad during the two weeks in the Fall set aside for filming, and in addition the speed indicator for the camera wasn't operating properly, and much of the footage of the canoeists looked comically speeded up. But after viewing the rushes Greenlees wrote in a memo to Bairstow that "the atmosphere due to the mist on the river is so unusual that you would be justified in finishing the job next Fall. . . . I think about the same number of days of additional shooting . . . would result in a remarkably good short film" (Greenlees, Memo). Despite this promising beginning, Greenlees also commented that "the material is too monotonous" and in his opinion, needed the addition of staged "sequences of breaking camp and of rapids running" to create a narrative structure, adding, "I believe it needs these additions even if the film is used strictly as an accompaniment to the poem." In the Spring of 1960 Bairstow was planning to return to the river again in September, not only to re-shoot the spoiled footage but also to shoot "rapids or fast water" as a "resolution to quiet water" ("Effects to be Secured in Second Season's Shooting") in order to create an explicit narrative structure.

After the successful second session of filming in October 1960, Bairstow decided he had enough good footage to create a much longer film than he had originally planned. In late October 1960 he wrote to Lorne Pierce at the Ryerson Press to inquire about the rights to include not just one, but five poems by Lampman: the sonnets "Solitude," "After Mist," "A Dawn on the Livre," and "Ambition," as well as "Morning on the Livre." At first glance the reason for these specific choices is not clear; while "Morning on the Livre" and the sonnet, "A Dawn on the Livre," were both composed in 1886 in response to Lampman's first trip on the river with his friend Duncan Campbell Scott,[4] the other poems derive from completely different times in Lampman's life, and some were not published until after his death.[5] While "Solitude" and "After Mist" similarly focus on direct description of the landscape, "Ambition" is much more reflective, providing commentary on the effects of nature on the individual, consistent with the historical ideology of "therapeutic nature" shared by many of Lampman's neo-romantic peers.[6] Bairstow may have chosen these poems because they are sonnets: the sonnet is one of Lampman's most characteristic forms, and Lampman's sonnets were frequently anthologized and praised by influential modernist critics such as A.J.M. Smith and E.K. Brown.[7] A reading of the poems in the order in which they appear in the film provides another clue to why they were chosen: the film opens with "A Dawn on the Livre," followed by "After Mist," "Morning on the Livre," and "Solitude"; all four of these poems focus on detailed imagistic description of the forest, providing a narrative timeline progressing from early morning to dawn and full day. These poems are accompanied in the film by images of the river and the canoe. The music changes abruptly at 9:48, increasing in tempo and volume to introduce the rapids[8] and finally, after the canoe has run the rapids at 11:16, "Ambition" provides a sense of closure by asserting the poet's rejection of contemporary society and his choice to remain apart in nature. These poems and their specific arrangement in the film provide the narrative that was lacking in the initial plan, and demonstrate Bairstow's decision to take Greenlees' advice and make the most of the attractive and "unusual" footage he had in order to create a more conventional short film.

Of course, even with five poems there are only about six minutes of narration in this thirteen-minute film; the rest of the film is taken up with images of the Livre River accompanied by Eldon Rathburn's music. It's worth looking at the images to tease out the potential that Greenlees saw when he first viewed the rushes in 1959. Bairstow had written in his plan for the film that "the visuals should be impressionistic above all" ("Experimental Film" 1), and the final film provides many visuals that are specifically linked to the images in the poetry: frost-covered branches, trees and canoeists reflected in still water, mist rising from the river in the early morning, dripping canoe paddles, ducks, downed trees in the current. But the film also includes many images of the forest and the river from a variety of perspectives not specifically tied to the poems, shots he describes in his plan of "Effects to be Secured in Second Season's Shooting," including what he called "abstract compositions — miniatures" and shots of the forest from the canoe, "especially red [leaves]." The iconography of these images evokes a very specific tradition of landscape art that is well known to Canadian viewers: the work of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven painters, who were active in Canada in the early part of the twentieth century and remain central to any discussion of the historical development of visual arts in Canada. This connection seems intentional: Bairstow chose to shoot his film in the Fall in order to feature the yellow, red, and orange colours of the leaves in that season, which are a defining element of the landscape tradition of the Group of Seven, rather than in the Spring, when Lampman actually took the trip that inspired the poem; moreover, the images that represent the river and forest landscape in the film Morning on the Livre specifically recall paintings by the Group, such as The Red Maple by A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald's Falls Montreal River, and Tom Thomson's In the Northland. This tradition in Canadian painting is perhaps best known to literary scholars through its evocation in Margaret Atwood's short story, "Death by Landscape," and it continues to inspire imitation, parody, and pastiche in contemporary Canadian art.[9]

The Group is generally categorized as post-impressionist because they rejected the dark and conventional nineteenth-century landscape painting of the British Academy, and are frequently characterized as the precursor of modernist abstraction in Canada. While each of the painters evolved an individual style, what they shared was an unconventionally brilliant colour palette, a strong commitment to painting outdoors in wilderness settings, and a conviction that they were representing the nation through its landscape. The iconic images that define the tradition include Thomson's Jack Pine, Lawren Harris's North Shore, Lake Superior, and A.Y. Jackson's Red Maple. The Group of Seven tradition provides a way of seeing the forest, framing direct experience of the natural world within an iconography of the emptied wilderness landscape. And it is emptied; Jonathan Bordo, among other more recent critics, has commented on the way that Thomson and his Group of Seven colleagues purposefully avoided representing Indigenous people in their paintings in the interests of creating what Charles C. Hill, in the 1995 show he curated for the National Gallery of Canada, called an Art for a Nation. Morning on the Livre similarly keeps Indigenous people on the outside of the nation's art by keeping them out of the range of the camera: Bairstow's plan for the film specifies that he intends to hire "two white actors who know how to paddle rhythmically and expertly" to appear in the film "plus at least one Indian boatman and possibly two to handle the camera boat" (Bairstow, Memo). Bairstow is aware that the locale where he intends to film includes Indigenous communities, and he intends to hire casual labour from among them, but he also assumes that these competent "Indian boatmen" are not appropriate to appear in this film, despite the fact that the poems focus on landscape description and not on culture or race.

Of course Bairstow might have been intending the white actors to represent Lampman himself and his friend the poet Duncan Campbell Scott, who often accompanied him on his trips. But while the opening title specifies that Lampman travelled the Livre River, it makes no mention of Scott, or a specific trip, and instead focuses on the river itself. In addition, there seems to have been no attempt to dress the men in period costume, and indeed there was no budget set aside for that; these men are generic canoeists, not specific historic figures, and the canoe itself was an ordinary factory-made wood-and-canvas canoe purchased second hand in Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette. So in specifying that his canoeists would be white, and utilizing the iconography of the Group of Seven, Bairstow is evoking a tradition of representing the landscape from a settler perspective, and of representing Canadians as non-native.

The association of Lampman's poem with the Group of Seven is clearly anachronistic: Lampman was dead by 1900, and the Group of Seven did not really become well known until the 1920s. Lampman's poetry is more often associated with the Romantics[10] than with modernism, and "Morning on the Livre" is typical of Lampman's work in that it evokes the vocabulary and the ideology of the British Romantic poets. The opening of the second stanza ("Softly as a cloud we go / Sky above and sky below") seems to reference the opening of Wordsworth's "Daffodils" ("I wandered lonely as a cloud"), and the second stanza ends with the word "dream," which for Lampman signifies a state of meditative engagement different from, but in some ways comparable to, Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquility" described in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. As previous scholars have shown,[11] much of Lampman's work is linked intertextually to Romantic and neo-romantic writers: not just Wordsworth but Keats, Matthew Arnold, the American essayists Washington Irving and John Burroughs, and his Canadian contemporaries Roberts, Scott, and Campbell. This suggests that "Morning on the Livre" can only have its full meaning in the context of Romantic attitudes to nature and the way that Romanticism was reinterpreted by the Canadian poets of Lampman's generation (see Bentley, "Nervous").

All of this context is erased when the poems are represented as direct responses to the landscape of the Livre River, and when that landscape is represented through the visual vocabulary of modernist Canadian painting. The choice to set the film in the Fall specifically in order to enable filming of the "fall colour" scenes reminiscent of the Group of Seven further distorts the meaning of the poem in the context of Lampman's cosmology. David Bentley's pioneering analysis of the way that Lampman uses symbolism to create "quadrants" related to the sea-son and the time of day (described in "Watchful Dreams and Sweet Unrest") provides a framework for interpreting the symbolic significance of details such as colour in his poems. Bentley persuasively argues that when Lampman describes Fall landscapes, he uses dark colours and imagery of death, a distinct contrast to the reds and yellows of Bairstow's film. While the colour imagery in "Morning on the Livre" does not seem to fit securely into a single quadrant,[12] the setting amid the brilliant Fall colours typical of the Group of Seven seems manifestly wrong in the context of Lampman's other work.

However, Bairstow is not alone in reinterpreting Lampman's Romantic techniques to fit modernist aesthetics. A.J.M. Smith, the influential poet and editor of The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), suggested that as much of a third of Lampman's work could easily be dismissed, including all of the philosophical and narrative poems inspired by his Romantic predecessors, in favour of those works that, like his descriptive sonnets, conformed to modernist preference for concrete imagery and organic form. "Sensation rather than idea is what Lampman derives from landscape" (175), Smith argues, likening his "descriptive method" to impressionism: "Details of shape seen always in the light of a precise minute, and valued for their own sake alone" (176) is how Smith characterizes Lampman's work. Other critics have taken up Smith's description of Lampman's work as impressionist, most notably Anne Compton, who characterizes Lampman as a "Poet-Impressionist" because she finds "light, changeful light, is the optical phenomenon which predominates" in his landscape description. E.K. Brown, another influential modernist critic, praises Lampman's "absolute fidelity and . . . painter's insight into the essence of a scene," and while he does not dismiss Lampman's narrative poems, he prefers those from later in his career that experiment with organic forms and thus look forward to modernism.

The judgment of these critics that Lampman's best poetry does not derive from Romantic aesthetics, but instead represents a highly visual and impressionistic response to direct experience, is one reason Bairstow might have felt free to associate these poems with a Group of Seven iconography. The other reason might be the way both poems and paintings seem to substantiate a discourse of the pre-modern roots of the nation in a direct response to the land. This form of nationalist discourse is described as "antimodernism" in Ian McKay's classic The Quest of the Folk, and elaborated in Lynda Jessup's edited collection Antimodernism and Artistic Experience. In the post-war period "the hunt was on for 'authenticity,' 'roots,' 'originality,' and 'history,' as nationalism's historically new consciousness created a radical break with the past" (Anderson 98); the founding of the League of Nations and the prominence of the idea of national self-determination drove members to manufacture a past that justified their self-presentation as unified and unique autonomous nations on the world stage. The manufacture of a historical folk tradition vitally connected to the land was a necessary complement to the parallel representation of nations "as 'gliding into a limitless future,' developing in perfect synchrony with the breakneck speed of Progress" (Anderson 98).

Jessup describes the antimodernism typical of the turn of the century in Canada as an attempt to address a "pervasive sense of loss" ("Antimodernism" 3) that accompanied modernization, and a "desire for the type of 'authentic,' immediate experience supposedly embodied in pre-industrial societies" ("Antimodernism" 3). In this sense, antimodernism is not the opposite of the modern but part of a "larger concept of which civilization and overcivilization are mutually constitutive parts" (Jessup, "Bushwhackers" 134). This discourse imagines a wilderness landscape that "was not a place of productive labour, nor a permanent home, but rather a place of recreation — of scenic value and spiritual renewal" that is "predicated on the erasure — in their case, pictorially — of the country's Aboriginal populations and, with them, Aboriginal claims to prior settlement, hereditary lands and resources" (Jessup, "Tourist Landscape"). Jessup states in her article, "The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape," that "the dual influence of the romantic movement and a growing antimodernist backlash to the perceived ills and artificiality of contemporary life" constructed a wilderness landscape of the sort represented in Morning on the Livre "as the preferred landscape of elite, urban tourists hoping to return to what they saw as an elemental environment untainted by civilization." A variety of cultural practices that became popular in the early twentieth century can be linked to the discourse of antimodernism, including the creation of national parks, the invention of the "realistic" animal story, and the idea that recreational hunting, fishing, and camping trips can be "therapeutic" and cure individuals of physical and psychological malaises caused directly by city living.

Indeed, by 1964 the film of Morning on the Livre was listed in a report prepared for the "Federal Provincial Tourist Conference 1964" as a tourism film, and various screenings were arranged by diplomats in the U.S., Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Britain, and France as initiatives to support tourism (NFB, "Report"). The promotion of tourism was one of the ways that "the state arrived to play a leading role in developing anti-modern modernism" (Anderson 98), and McKay has analysed in detail how the "invented tradition"[13] of Celtic roots in Nova Scotia was exploited by the government in order to drive tourism, and also to placate local people who complained about the loss of industry and the breaking of industrial unions. The Group of Seven, rather than being, as they assert in their self-created mythology, oppositional to state-sponsored art, were in fact picked up and promoted by state institutions as representing an authentic link between contemporary art and the land itself. Their practice of sketching outdoors on location and their reputations as outdoorsmen lent them authenticity as exemplars of the kind of direct physical experience of the land that corresponded with the "invented tradition" of the founding of the nation by fur traders and explorers (Jessup, "Bushwhackers"). In this narrative, settlers who gained knowledge of the land by hiking and canoeing performed the role of the "folk," whose intimate knowledge and responsiveness to the land were supposed to be formative of the nation itself. And of course Lampman himself, who wrote "Morning on the Livre" after his own therapeutic visit to the wild, also fits with this tradition.

This "invented tradition" of outdoorsmen/artists as constituting the foundation of Canadian culture has the effect of suggesting that the works of the Group of Seven, or of poets like Lampman and his contemporaries, because they are experiential responses to the land itself, justify the sovereignty of the Canadian state, and this positions settler Canadians as anchored to the land through their adoption of these artworks as representing the nation. This narrative leaves out First Nations altogether by replacing "one vector of difference (the difference between the colonizing subject and the colonized subject: settler-indigene)" with "another (the difference between colonizing subject and imperial centre: settler-imperium). We can see this, with the benefit of postcolonial hindsight/analysis, as a strategic disavowal of the colonizing act" (Brydon, qtd. in Blair et al. xxix). Alternatively, First Nations peoples and their cultures may also be subsumed as "ancestors" of the modern Canadian state, a logic signalled by the use of the canoe in the poem (and in the mythology of the artist/woodsman) (see Dean).[14]

One important element in the final film is the narration. The poems were read by George Whalley, a professor of English at Queen's University, a published poet as well as a freelance broadcaster on literary topics. The final promotional material for the film cited him as a poet, and his reputation made the film plausible as a work of art; Ralph Gustafson confirms this when he writes in his journal that he invited a pantheon of modernist writers and artistic figures, including "Louis Dudek, Buffy and Elma Glassco, Eldon and Sylvia Greer, Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen and Derek May, Doug Jones and Micheline" to lunch and a special viewing of the film on a Sunday afternoon in Montreal in 1966 (Cecil 89). Whalley's authority as a poet, and a well-known friend and supporter of contemporary Canadian writing,[15] gave the film credibility among the poets Gustafson invited, and the authority of his university position made sure the film would be authoritative in the educational context as well. However, despite Whalley's identification with Canadian poetry and culture, my students always respond viscerally to Whalley's accent; to them, as to me, the narration sounds distinctly English, and for that reason somewhat pretentious and formal in the Canadian context. Whalley was born in Canada, though he served in the Canadian Forces in England during World War II and after, and like many Canadians of his generation may have associated high culture with a British accent; as Daniel Coleman argues in White Civility, settler culture in Canada has traditionally seen itself located on a timeline of increasing civility, with British culture as the ideal, and English literature as the standard.[16] So the effect of Whalley's narration is to present the poems as high culture, and to authorize the vision of the nation as nature that the film presents.

So, to return to the question I posed at the outset, what is the effect of first encountering Lampman's poetry through this film? In my experience, because the film removes the poems from their neo-romantic context and thus from the transnational web of textual relationships that produced them, readers have difficulty situating "Morning on the Livre" within its own historical context. The film suggests that Lampman wrote poetry out of a direct experience of nature, and thus obscures the way that Lampman's work references English and American writers like Wordsworth and John Burroughs. By associating Lampman's poems with the Group of Seven visual iconography, the film rejects Lampman's own distinct use of colour symbolism and his seasonal cosmology. Instead, by presenting the poems as an authentic experience of the land by authentic woodsmen/artists, the film reinforces a narrowly nationalist antimodernism and elides Canada's colonial past. Like many contemporary literary works that re-present literature from the past in terms of the present, such as Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie or Rudy Wiebe's Discovery of Strangers, the film Morning on the Livre is easier to consume and more memorable for contemporary readers than the nineteenth-century text that inspired it; the iconography is familiar and the values unchallenging, so that the film tends to be perceived by students as more useful, evocative, and authoritative than the text. In this way the easy availability of the film on YouTube, rather than facilitating access to the text, tends to obscure it, and contributes to the general emphasis on the contemporary in Canadian literature as a field.

As Paul Martin demonstrates in his study Sanctioned Ignorance, nineteenth-century Canadian literature is rarely taught in Canadian university English departments with the specialist attention afforded to U.S. and British authors of the same period; the focus in many departments on the single, one-term survey of Canadian literature means that students perceive Canadian literature as mainly "a post-nineteenth-century phenomenon" (161), and authors from the nineteenth century and even the modernist period are increasingly being dropped from courses that are already packed with contemporary material. Morning on the Livre contributes to this effect by eliding the neo-romantic specificity of Lampman's poem and folding it into a larger narrative of Anglo-Canadian nationalism that is consistent with mid-twentieth-century aesthetics, essentially turning it into a new and modernist artwork. Martin argues that this narrative is likely to remain in place as long as the structure of the English major in Canadian university literature departments discourages most students from venturing beyond the one-term survey course, "until we as Canadianists demand a greater place in the English curriculum" (186) and develop requirements and specialised programs that recognize the historical as well as the cultural diversity of Canadian writing. This is a shame, because it suggests that the only way to oppose the nationalist narrative in Canadian literature is to reject settler literature altogether, and focus instead on indigenous or minority literatures as representing dissent from the defining dynamic of colonialism. While study of minority and indigenous literatures is an important component of university study of Canadian literature, it is reductive to suggest that these are the only oppositional voices; to do= so would be comparable to arguing that the whole field of Victorian literature, for example, is reducible to the way it can be fit into a twentieth-century narrative of colonialism. This leaves settler students (and professors) with no potentially ethical subject position from which to claim to be Canadian themselves (as well as depriving readers of some lovely and interesting reading). This analysis of Morning on the Livre, then, might be considered to support the larger goal of expanding both teaching and scholarship on nineteenth-century Canadian writing, if only to be sure we get it right.