Michael Snow made films – on the tundra of northern Quebec, in a New York loft – which explored space, not stories, and were more interested in the camera's zooms than in actors and action. In Toronto, Michael Ondaatje composed a series of "left-handed poems" that read like a novel, incorporating photos, drawings and prose into his poetic project. Vaughn-James was part of a scattered national vanguard, a generation that reinvented the art forms in which they worked. For young artists and writers like the British-born Vaughn-James – who in 1975 published a finely tooled whatsit called The Cage, now newly back in print – the Canadian revolutions under way throughout the seventies would not be political so much as artistic in nature. Canada, in contrast, had preferred her revolutions to be of the Quiet variety: the tumult of an October Crisis simply would not do, Trudeaumania was but an echo of the rambunctious Beatles' brand, and even the celebrations of the centennial had been performed with due decorum. In the early 1970s, as Martin Vaughn-James would recall over 30 years later, "the fog of distant revolutions drifted through the safe, tree-lined streets of Canada." London had had the Swinging Sixties, while the student movement spread across the States, and the barricades went up in Paris in May '68.
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