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SCOUTS ARE CANCELLED
Scouts Are Cancelled: An examination of the soul of Nova Scotia
Submitted by Ron Foley Macdonald on 09.6.07 at 6:52pm.
One of the cinematic marvels I watched in the programming run up to AFF ‘07 is ex-Haligonian director John D. Scott’s feature-length literary biography enigmatically titled Scouts Are Cancelled.
It’s a 72-minute portrait of the former Toronto performance poet John Stiles, a longtime friend of Scott’s who has built a minor reputation as the writer and performer of sketches steeped in the vernacular of the Annapolis Valley, where Stiles was raised.
In the main body of Scouts Are Cancelled, Scott follows Stiles on a lonely first-book tour of the Maritimes. Interspersed are some artful studio-concocted dramatic clips, and old footage from 1995 of Scott and Stiles doing the post-university wandering thing through India, Spain and Prague.
The overall impact of the film, however, is curiously fluid and melancholy. You get the feeling that Scott is both a little jealous and skeptical of Stiles newfound success with the downtown hipster Toronto crowd who find his Valley-in-a-backwoods-voice sketches hilarious. The filmmaker also seems to see through Stiles literary creation, but is too polite to probe too deeply.
Meanwhile, the film follows Stiles through a series of crappy jobs, ultimately to find him temporarily parked teaching English at a hard-to-get-to through Toronto Public transportation private school. At the end of the film he flees to England, to remain true to his bohemian nature.
In between all this restless movement, John Scott perfectly catches Stiles’ fragile but pungent art. Stiles’ sketches balance satire with sentiment; ultimately a portrait of the Annapolis Valley’s true nature comes shining through the performance poet’s tall tales, funny stories and canny complaints.
It’s remarkably close in spirit and execution to Nova Scotia’s first internationally successful writer, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who rose to global fame from another end of the Valley (Windsor), writing about a character named Sam Slick. Slick was an imported Yankee clockmaker who revealed the quirks and drawbacks of Maritime society through similar pungent - but loving - satire.
John Scott draws out some of these subtleties in this marvelous feature, one of the best literary biographies I’ve ever seen. And while Scouts Are Cancelled - the title comes from one of Stiles sketches - initially seems like a film about friendship and the passage of time, it eventually settles in on a very moving examination of the soul of Nova Scotia, a subject that clearly fascinates both John Stiles and John Scott as they continue their own respective jouneys.
Scouts Are Cancelled, directed by John D. Scott, USA/Canada, 2007, 72 minutes. Playing at the Atlantic Film Festival Saturday September 22nd at Park Lane 4 at 4:05 pm.
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John D. Scott, director of Scouts Are Cancelled, and a scene from the film below.