1988 & 2023 4K revision (Revision sponsored by Telefilm Canada Reignite program (for historical valuable Canadian films and to archive such films) which allowed me to transfer my 1988 16mm film to 4k video. A post-punk gonzo doco from the 1980’s restored for the digital realm. The Squamish Five story — a significant historical Canadian recollection, a refreshment of memory in a time of ever increasing environmental suicidal somnambulism & social, political dementia. The Reagan era (1981 – 1989) in the USA marked a time of heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the deployment of cruise missiles, whose guidance systems was being made in Canada at Litton Systems, Toronto. Public opinion polls of the time indicated that a majority of Canadians were against the manufacturing and the presence of these missiles on Canadian soil. In the early 80s, a Vancouver area group of five young people bombed a Litton Systems cruise missile guidance plant, a hydroelectric installation and three violent pornography Red Hot Video stores. Known as The Squamish Five, the group became central in a debate amongst left and anarchist circles regarding the legitimacy of violent direct action. ~ “The film’s inability to settle on a fixed mode or modes for representing the world evidences an inner nihilism beneath its fundamental, and authentic, commitments. The shifts begin to open, in the viewer’s mind, a kind of vacuum in which nothing is possible, in which nothing can live –the vacuum, perhaps, of the world after the holocaust toward which Hockenhull believes we are headed. In the words of one of the film’s texts, “At the end of the world . . . figure becomes lost in ground,” and fine art is rendered irrelevant. Chicago Reader, Fred Camper, “must see”
