Rasky gives Wendy Michener Lecture - feels despair, some hope for CBC

By Cathy Carlyle

When leading documentary director Harry Rasky talks about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of today, there is despair and frustration in his voice.

"You have to consider what was lost at the CBC when they decided to fire their producers," he said, referring to events of a few years ago. "It would be, in the context of this place, like a university that decided to get rid of its professors and have occasional lecturers do the teaching. What would you be left with?" Acclaimed documentary-maker Rasky was presenting the lecture at the conclusion of the Wendy Michener Symposium which, over several weeks, featured five productions chosen from the Harry Rasky film archives at York.

He talked of his early, happier days at the broadcasting company when the idea of the CBC ever dispensing with the likes of Rasky and other creative producers was inconceivable. "It was not long ago," he said, "that the British Broadcasting Corporation envied our documentary skills. We dared to dare."

Rasky said he was honoured to "...produce the first TV news magazine anywhere. We satisfied the need to show Canada to itself and still be at an international level....Not only that, we believed we had to unite the country as once the railroad had and, for a dream-time, the news was the same in both English and French, and we were bonded to our French Canadian brothers.

"It seemed too good to be true and I am afraid it was," he added. "The middle management guys from radio suddenly discovered what we were doing....We would just not go away. So the memos began, endless bureaucratic memos."

Rasky and his colleagues' "upstart, dynamic TV service" ceased when he and others left to find work in the United States. There, while working for CBS, he witnessed the banishment of Edward R. Murrow, "who was to television what Mozart was to music". He was seen as the most influential broadcaster in the history of world broadcasting, was the celebrated documentary-maker of the program See It Now and became president of CBS news. According to Rasky, Murrow gave an impassioned speech in the late 1950s criticizing the news media after he helped bring down Senator Joseph McCarthy, "who was doing a splendid job of trying to destroy America with his notorious witch hunt" [Rasky].

Murrow was, in effect, repudiating his own child -- television, said Rasky, all to try and correct a process he saw as self-destructive. Said Murrow, if "kinescopes" from all three American networks were preserved for one week, people would find evidence of "decadence, escapism and insulation" from the realities of the world. According to Rasky, Murrow saw TV as having the power to illuminate and teach, but only if humans are determined to use it to those ends. "Otherwise, it is merely wire and lights in a box".

For having taken such a stand, Murrow was persona non grata with CBS, said Rasky.

"I was pleased to be a Canadian then," he added. "I had a place to take refuge. It couldn't happen here, could it?....I was truly proud of the CBC in those [early] days."

He returned to the Canadian media, but later lamented the changes that were seeping into the Canadian company. "It was as if the 'CBC mandate' had been thrown away in favour of some kind of pop chart....Perhaps it was a desire to be 'with-it' that gradually made the CBC without it, without meaning....The National Film Board just seemed to fade away."

Said Rasky, "While we were not paying attention, a revolution took place. About five years ago, our prime minister appointed a person to be president of the CBC....He had no history in broadcasting." The president's priority was to cut $200 million from the company's annual budget. Rasky's advice -- concentrate on quality in broadcasting and fund programs to make Canada proud -- was ignored.

"The guillotine sounded," he said. "Heads rolled. Almost all the producers were fired. The memo writers and middle managers moved into the offices with windows. You think I exaggerate. I wish I did. The result? The audience vanished with the programs.

"I challenge you to watch a week of CBC television, as Murrow challenged all those years ago to the Americans. It would be as if Beethoven,...all of Mozart, all of Shakespeare were banned. Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood gone....And then there is hockey. Whoopee."

While not denigrating the game of hockey, Rasky did bemoan the profusion of it on television. He said that CBC executives, anxious to collect the commercial revenue it brings, are "blinded by the puck and the buck." He added, "Hockey Night in Canada. Of course, an old tradition. But now its Hockey Week in Canada, Hockey Month in Canada. Hey, how about the thinking person's night, the cultured person's week in Canada?

"I would not carry on so much if I didn't have such a love for this rocky, craggy, often humid and often savagely cold place....It may not sound that way, but I have come to praise the CBC, or at least try to make it come to its senses."

Rasky is proud of some of the corporation's great moments, "programs that were done not because they competed in the ratings, but because it was just good to do them, good for the public, good for the world, and only a public broadcaster could have done them." And he wants the CBC to continue as the main unifying force for people across the nation. "Here it is vital, more than most places. Canada depends on it for its link. We are a small nation with vast geography."

Rasky has a positive feeling about the new CBC president. He has three choices, said Rasky: the first is to maintain the status quo. The second, he said, is to get rid of everyone there and begin again, which is what happened at the Costa Rican Broadcast Authority. The third and "right" way is simple: "If the program does not have quality, don't do it. Quality. What is it? I can tell you what it is for me. Programs made with fire and flare -- entertainment that transcends time. It is not imitation American cops and robbers."

He has not lost his optimism about television either, still seeing it as something that can be a superb art form, although "you need an ample memory to recall when that seemed possible". He advises writers and producers to experiment and try to be different.

"I say, give goodness a chance, and perhaps, just perhaps, it might lead to greatness," said Rasky. "I get so excited, so excited that I am often sleepless at the prospect."

Harry Rasky dubbed "poet with a camera"

Known as the "poet with a camera", Harry Rasky ranks among the leading documentary directors of our time. In his career, spanning more than 40 years, much of it associated with the CBC, he has written, produced and directed hundreds of productions, including cultural, political and historical documentaries and news magazines. His signature works include 40 feature-length non-fiction films, among them biographies of such internationally-renowned artists, performers and writers as March Chagall, Tennessee Williams, Leonard Cohen, Teresa Stratas, George Bernard Shaw and Yousuf Karsh. In 1952 he co-founded the news-documentary department of the CBC.

Rasky has been honoured with retrospectives on CBC TV and many major American networks, and his films have been translated into approximately 30 languages. He has received more than 200 international prizes and citations for his work, including the Venice Film Award, the Golden Eagle, several Peabody awards, an Emmy and two Oscar nominations. In 1992, he was given the lifetime award of the Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists, and was inducted into the Order of Ontario.

He is the author of six books, including his latest, The Three Harrys, released by Mosaic Press in fall 1999.