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Episode 3

WAR AT HOME: MAINSTREET SOLDIER AS ANTI-EPIC

Bleary-eyed Ray Le Clair performs a haze of drunken regrets, mutterings about the man he used to be, rambling about lost love and abiding rage. As Mainstreet Soldier begins, he offers a litany of false starts, pivoting around the question, “why should I change?” Le Clair’s self-pitying and self-fictionalizing character – a traumatized battlefield ghost – tests the documentary’s insistence on truth. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer situates Leonard Yakir’s celebrated short film in the context of CanLit’s disillusioned anti-heroes, and the tensions of performance in cinema verité.

Creators

  • Stephen Broomer is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, and film preservationist. He is the founder of the Black Zero Film Collection, restoring and publishing Canadian experimental cinema. His films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Lincoln Center and the Canadian Film Institute. He teaches in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.