One of the two films analyzed by Daniel Garrett in this issue, Beans, is a fictionalized account of the Oka Crisis, which was a 78-day standoff over a proposed expansion of a golf course onto Native land between the Quebec government and the Mohawk community of Kanesatake between July 11 and September 26, 1990. The same incident was the basis for the remarkable documentary by one of the greatest (living) Native filmmakers, Alanis Obomsawin, Kanesatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). Clearcut was made just one year after the Oka Crisis and is also concerned with a (fictional) land dispute between corporate interests wanting to further exploit natural land in the shape of a mill, and a Native community (Anashinabe in this case) resisting the capitalist spread for cultural and ecological reasons. Altercations and land disputes between the Canadian government and Native communities go far back (obviously since, as they saying goes, the Natives were here first). In fact the extensive folk horror Blu Ray box set featuring Clearcut, All The Haunts Be Ours: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched includes a classic 1969 NFB short on the same subject as an accompanying special feature, You Are on Indian Land (Michael Kanentakeron Michell).

While these earlier (and later in the case of Beans) films are dramas or documentaries, Clearcut takes this venerable political reality into the unusual genre territory of folk/eco-horror, with one of the most recognizable Native actors, Graham Greene (Dances With Wolves, The Green Mile, Wind River) as Arthur, who steals the show as a rogue Indigenous man who sees the last in a long line of failed government backed injunctions against a logging company's clearing of Native forests as the final straw. Arthur appears as a mystery man, omnipotent in his ability to appear and disappear; Arthur embodies the power of editing. He is first scene at eight minutes into the film in the periphery of a shot, his face off-screen, but catching Peter’s eye before he walks away. His ability to seemingly travel quickly suggests a shapeshifting trickster character who just may be taking the form of the young, cigarette smoking girl Polly (Tia Smith).

Peter (Ron Lea) is the well-meaning but ultimately powerless white lawyer representing the Native community against the logging company, and its owner Bud Rickets (Michael Hogan). The first time we see Arthur’s face is at the twelve minute mark, where he now makes eye contact with Peter before turning to walk away. The Native community leader Wilf Redwing (played by venerable actor Floyd ‘Red Crow’ Westerman, who also appeared in Dances With Wolves) invites Peter into his lodge to take part in a sweat ceremony with other elders, hoping it may help him in his dealings with the owner of the logging company Bud Ricket (Michael Hogan). The experience affects Peter more than Wilf could have imagined. The scene turns into a psychedelic trip into Peter’s dark inner desires for revenge against all the ‘Bud Rickets’ he has lost out to in courts of law, playing out in abstract imagery (blood running down rocks, men in deep sweat set off against black backdrops) culminating in the appearance of Arthur staring at Peter, with a mischievous smile. Is Arthur an outward projection of Peter’s anger? Is the violence and torture that Arthur will soon enact against Bud Ricket a manifestation of Peter’s dark unconscious desire? (Which likens this plot device to the wish fulfilling room in Tarkovsky’s Stalker.)

Right after the sweat ceremony is when Peter first meets Arthur, on a pier. The scene where they are taken across the lake on a small boat by Wilf seems heavy in symbolism, the ride signaling the start of Peter’s journey into self-discovery (his hell). From this point on Arthur will be the wolf leading Peter along his journey of self-discovery (of sorts) that is ultimately just a confirmation of what he desired in the sweat ceremony: payback against the logging company and for all the court cases he has lost to other “Bud Rickets”. The way Arthur is framed in the boat, arms splayed out Christ like, leaning back, suggests a certain moral superiority. Arthur and Peter have a conversation where Arthur challenges him on every things he says, mocking him. And as Chad Uran notes in the commentary track on the Severin Blu Ray, the way shots of Wilf at the helm are continually inserted into the conversation to show his non-committal reactions suggests that there may in fact be no one else on the boat other than him and Peter, and that Arthur is a figment of Peter’s imagination (a reading which Uran feels dissipates by the end).

The hotel scene where Arthur 'helps' Peter to quelch an irritant can be read as your classic case of weak male fantasy projection. Peter's noisy motel neighbors are keeping him awake. On cue, Arthur appears at his door and urges him to go over and tell them to stop the noise. Arthur stays out of view as Peter knocks on the door and is met by a surly man, with two other men and a woman inside the room, with TV blaring. The group is not about to listen to Peter’s complaints. Instead he is once again humiliated. Until an aggressive knife wielding Arthur bursts into the room and their perceived bravado dissipates under Arthur’s intimidation. It is the first time Arthur shows his true self to Peter, making good Canadian use of duct tape to tie up and muzzle the four partiers. This scene is a warm-up for what is to follow, in terms of violence, which Arthur announces when he tells Peter, in a determined tone, “Now let’s go do some real work. You and me.”

Arthur drives to a seedy part of town, somehow knowing this is where Bud Rickets will be. Sensing Arthur’s intentions, Peter implores Arthur that he can beat Bud in court. As a car drives up the following conversation happens:

Arthur: Here he comes (as we hear the sound of Arthur ripping a piece of duct tape).

Peter: Violence will accomplish nothing. Nothing you understand.

Arthur: Now who are you lying to?

Arthur rams his car into Bud’s parked car to initiate an altercation with Bud, who yells racial epithets at Arthur. This is the first time a character other than Peter acknowledges Arthur’s presence, which puts into question the reading Arthur as an imaginary character. But does not eliminate the possibility of reading Arthur as a ‘more than human’ presence, either a projection of Peter’s desires, or a Trickster character not bound by laws of nature. This latter reading seems to be upheld by the presence of the Polly character, who we see sitting in the dark woods opening a business suitcase as the car drives by and parks at Wilf’s home.

Arthur once again uses duct tape to tie up Bud and Peter and takes them for a second boat journey across the lake, taking us deeper into hell. (Thanks to the Canadian comedy show The Red Green Show, the creative use of duct tape is as good as any indication that this is a Canadian film!). An altercation with a couple of hunters sends the trio back on the boat, to ride further into “hell”. This third stop on the journey is visually different, darker, with a campfire the only illumination, the surrounding fog now heavier than ever. It is also the moment (63 minute mark) where the film turns, when audiences realize that the nice Canadian social drama they thought they were watching was but a façade for pure anger directed at the colonizer, or all colonizers the world over.

Peter wakes up on a flat rock to the distant sound of Arthur singing and Bud screaming. He walks toward the sound to witness Arthur, knife in hand, flaying Bud’s shin. Rather than maintaining a distance the scene cuts to a close-up of the leg, Bud’s skin being slowly lifted off his shin bone. A stunned Peter, shaking from the horrifying scene, yells “Stop!” Arthur continues, reasoning as he holds a red hot branch in his hand, “I am cauterizing the wound. You want him to bleed to death? I don’t want him to bleed to death.” This scene is as gory as you’ll find in any 1980s Italian zombie film. Or New French Extreme cinema a decade or so later. This is not supposed to occur in a Canadian social drama. But we should not forget that Canada, home of the NFB and SCTV, is also home to David Cronenberg, the Capital Cost Allowance Period 1980s stalker film, Brandon Cronenberg, Guy Maddin and the Soska sisters. This is not gore for its own sake but to purpose a strident political message. When Arthur skins Bud's leg, living up to the stereotype "crazy Indian” (as he does throughout by playing out to exaggerated form of Indian stereotypes), he is only throwing the violence that colonizers have used to conquer and Nation build right back at them. Peter follows Arthur into the woods and finds the boat’s engine’s neatly disassembled into pieces, and Arthur nowhere to be found.

Peter is seen waking up again, as if in a constant stream of dreams, surprised to find Wilf there soon followed by a boat carrying two police officers. How did they know where to find him? The two officers are shot by offscreen bullets. Arthur appears, rifle in hand, only for the rifle to magically transform into a war club a shot later, which he uses to bludgeon one of the officers. And then it turns back to a rifle. Bearing the weight of the injured Bud on his side, Peter is led through the woods by Wilf. But with the puff of a hand clap, Wilf disappears into thin air. They are back on the boat to yet another stop on the journey. Shane Harvey’s understated music really takes flight here, blending western classic choral music with Native percussive strains. Peter realizes that the only way to stop his dream is to kill the dreamer, Arthur. Arthur smiles, then sets his knife down where it can be taken. Peter is unable to kill Arthur and stabs a tree branch instead, which begins to bleed what looks like blood, or maple syrup reminding us that Nature is a living thing.

Arthur’s final stage comes and it is a repeat of the earlier sweat lodge scene, only much darker, violent and disturbing. Bud and Peter are mainly witness to Arthur’s singing and self-mutilation, cutting his chest, cutting off fingers, all in a darkly lit, reddish hue with streaks of light that recall the final moments of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. The heart of darkness indeed. Two cultures come together as Bud’s singing of “Our Father” is drowned out by Arthur’s Native chanting (recalling the contrasting Christian prayer sung by Sergeant Howie and the pagan song sung by the Summerisle heathens at the climax of The Wicker Man). Peter’s hand calculator is seen submerged under water, like the many underwater artifacts lost to time in Stalker.

Moments later in a penultimate enigmatic moment, a wounded (not fatally) Arthur returns to the sea from whence he came. An overhead shot of Arthur sinking below water level lingers as the undulating waves morph into with Arthur’s shimmering arms. The image darkens, leaving only the bare skin of his arms visible; has his body sunk below, or he has transformed into a fish? Ultimately the film lets the audience decide Arthur’s fate and presence. Even if Bud asking Peter, “is he dead?”, takes away the idea of Arthur being a figment of Peter’s imagination, it still does not answer the other enigmas surrounding his behaviour, and leaves open the possibility that he is a mythical presence; or even a physical projection of colonial guilt.

Nor does it explain the next scene, where Peter and Bud are resting by a bonfire and a boat carrying Wilf slowly drifts into the right foreground of the shot, ready to bring them back to the mainland. How did Wilf and the police know where to find them? As they arrive back at the mainland pier, we see Polly standing there, holding Peter’s suitcase. Peter notices that she is wearing the same necklace as Arthur. Are Arthur and Polly one and the same? As Bud and Peter are driven away in separate police cars, Bud points an accusatory finger at Peter. It is clear that Bud has learned nothing, while Peter is a changed person.

As much as Clearcut can be seen as folk and eco-horror, it also has element of a landscape film. The film is set largely in nature (filmed in Thunderbay, Ontario), the camera alternating between broad vistas of mountains and fords, and up close shots of cave walls, trees, water and mountains. The natural splendor is meant to offset the violence and comment on the ruinous practices of industrial capitalism (logging, pulp and mill, electric companies) that exploit natural resources for profit.

The film was made just after the Oka Crisis and breeds a heightened sense of Native anger and frustration at the ineffectiveness of legal attempts for Native People to stop encroachment on their lands and gain just compensation for hundreds of broken treaties. Whenever Peter is referred to by a Native he is "the man who talks for us," a caustic reference to someone who talks but does very little. Someone who knows they are helpless to enact real change. When Peter joins the Native men in their sweat lodge ritual, which is supposed to illicit one's true desires, what Peter sees in his hallucinogenic state alternates between visions of blood dripping down the mountains and the sweaty, grinning face of Arthur and then a bundle of torturous naked trees, a symbol of what the white man has done to their forests. When Arthur asks Peter what he will do for him he says, "Kidnap the mill owner and skin him alive," which is exactly what happens. Hence, like his desire to shut up his noisy motel neighbors, Arthur is Peter's dark side who puts his deep wishes into action. While Peter just 'talks' Arthur ‘acts’. Not unlike the battle between Ethan and Scarface in The Searchers. Arthur pushes Peter to his limit, breaks him, like the mild mannered math teacher played by Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs. When Arthur has managed to 'harden' Peter is when he willingly drowns himself ritualistically in front of (only) Peter, since Bud is out of his sights. The community elder Wilf (Floyd 'Red Crow' Westerman) magically finds them with his canoe and tells him, "Nice fire white man," then returns him and Bud to safety. When Peter returns he is a changed person. When Bud says Arthur is dead, Peter says, "He'll be back". He looks at Polly and her necklace, as if she has absorbed Arthur. Peter symbolically renounces his suitcase and Polly picks it up, as if changing places with the White man.

As a concluding aside I don’t agree with Chad Uran’s final assessment in his otherwise excellent audio commentary that the film removes all its ambiguity at the end. Uran thinks the ending reduces the story down to a kidnapping, with Peter arrested and Bud’s power unrelinquished. I disagree with this for the many reasons I noted throughout where Bugajski leaves little plot moments and events open-ended. To Uran’s point, I think there is an intention on Bugajski ‘s part to bring some resolution to the story, perhaps in an effort to appease the producers, but it is at best, a partial and ‘unsatisfying’ resolution.

Volume 29, Issue 3-5 / May 2025 Essays   canadian cinema   eco horror   folk horror   graham greene   landscape film