Warrendale

Warrendale was a suburban Toronto institution for emotionally disturbed children. Sharing their daily lives with staff members, the children were placed in groups of 12, separated from their families, and subjected to an experimental treatment that involved physical restraint in order to give free rein to the aggressive impulses they were holding back. If Allan King chose to place his camera there, it was certainly not to make the apology of the psychiatric methods defended by the institution. It was more a question of using this eminently charged space to witness the dramatic intensity that unfolded through the interactions between the nursing staff and the child residents, without judgment, without comment, without explanation.

Warrendale is a difficult film to watch. The treatments offered seem rather untenable today. But the cinematographic proposal is of a modernity, a frankness and a boldness that testify a specific time; 1967. Emerging from a rigid, distant, stilted cinematographic tradition, the "cinéma-vérité" (or direct cinema in Quebec) breaks all the boundaries. It seeks to reach everything that was previously held back. An orgy of intensity, an overflow of experimentation, an uninhibited outpouring of reality... Warrendale encapsulates a time when the dam broke under pressure. If the contention method was to allow the child "to express his innermost and most terrifying feelings in a context where love and concern are physically manifested", the film seems to reflect the same process. Under the framing of the camera, in the limits of the picture which captures hysteria to the closest, it is the living forces of the impulses that had been repressed for so many years that express themselves in an intensity that is difficult for the spectator to accept.

If it is tempting to judge Warrendale according to our morality, I believe that it is rather necessary to see it as a key document in order to understand to what extent the sixties marked a major turning point in the individual and collective psychic expression and the will of the time to free oneself from the constraints of the old world. Here, the children are the protagonists of a revolution which was played at the same time in the streets and in the psyches. An unquiet, vital and explosive liberation!

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director