‘TAKE TWO’ is a new series celebrating the legacy of enduring cinema, where our writers revisit these films to express what makes them special and remarkable to them today.
WINTER KEPT US WARM, Canadian director David Secter’s debut feature from 1965, begins by mirroring one of the original milestones in the history of film itself: a train pulls into a station. With a slight twist on what is by now almost a tropey reference to early cinema, the train in the film’s opening shot delivers the doleful first-year Philosophy and English university student Peter (Henry Tarvainen) into Toronto’s Union Station.
What follows is Peter’s first eventful year of his undergraduate career, which is largely defined by his profound connection with a senior student: the suave, svelte, Elvis Presleyite Doug (John Labow). The boys become fast friends after some initial friction. Doug mocks Peter at the latter’s server job and later encounters Peter in the library, offering an apology. Doug’s reveal is startling. From a first-person perspective, the camera catches Doug slamming his book shut, revealing Peter’s fidgety, diminutive figure behind it. They bond over Peter’s affinity for T.S. Eliot’s poetry, with Doug quoting directly from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michael Angelo.” From there, they spend almost every waking moment together.
The tenor of their connection shifts along an uneven route. Peter performs in a student theatre production, and in the process, Doug bonds with Peter’s co-star, Sandra (Janet Amos). Despite the boys’ closeness – something Doug’s lukewarm date, Bev (Joy Tepperman), prods Doug about – their almost frantic friendship runs cold. They fight over Sandra, Doug kicks Peter in the groin, and the film draws to a sorrowful close at the end of the school year.
From the beginning of his career, Secter was concerned with the power of film as a medium. In Secter’s nephew Joel Secter’s documentary THE BEST OF SECTER AND THE REST OF SECTER, archival footage of the elder shows him describing what he saw as film’s limitless range of effects: “you can be spectacular, sweeping, intimate, pathetic, humourous.” WINTER KEPT US WARM stands as an ambitious step towards doing it all.
A photo montage interrupts an early scene of Peter and Doug settling into their residences at the start of the semester, showing stills of university students in class, a civil rights march, and student life at a football game. The camera pans up and down a trombone’s slide in tandem with the wind instruments playing over the scene. This montage does double duty, fastidiously setting the political and social backdrop for the narrative. While every scene’s tone is different – some yearning, some grim and noir, some intimate – there is always some assonance or interplay between the film’s form and its tone.
In the same archival footage where he lauded the potential of film in general, Secter expressed his belief in the vastness of the horizon of what could be done with the medium in Canada specifically. WINTER KEPT US WARM carries a tinge of devout and insistent regionalism that permeates the film from script to mise en scene. Much of the film is shot at the University of Toronto, and in Doug’s first moments on screen, he references working at a steel mill in Hamilton over the summer. Although Secter’s interest in imagining, or constructing, a deeply filmic Canadian national cinema is evident from the jump, WINTER KEPT US WARM will see its sixtieth anniversary pass by this year from a stubbornly cult position with film audiences.
“Secter’s interest in a national cinema tacitly invests in so-called Canada’s colonial engine. This mindset is almost pedestrian amongst settlers on occupied land: the assumption that Canada can produce a unified, holistic approach to film production is a prime example of that attitude.”
Secter’s vision is not entirely unsung. David Cronenberg famously pointed to WINTER KEPT US WARM as an early and central inspiration in his career, and in 1966, the film became the first English-language Canadian film to appear at Cannes. In that regard, there is some additional irony in the Canadian film world’s frigidity towards the film. Secter’s interest in a national cinema tacitly invests in so-called Canada’s colonial engine. This mindset is almost pedestrian amongst settlers on occupied land: the assumption that Canada can produce a unified, holistic approach to film production is a prime example of that attitude.
But Secter held these beliefs at a time when his film’s subject was entirely ostracised in Canadian legal and cultural spheres. To those who pay attention, the reason for the nod to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland in the film’s title and in Peter’s curriculum suddenly becomes obvious: Secter is gay, and WINTER KEPT US WARM itself has become an early touchstone in queer cinema.
Just as Eliot’s work continues to present as elusively queer in retrospect, so much of WINTER KEPT US WARM’s queer-coding scans as naked text rather than subtext. In treading along the subtle pathways exploring a queer cinematic frontier, there also lies Secter’s skill in straddling the line between the quietly wry and the playfully coy. One of Doug’s friends teases him that he “really go[es] for the blonde ones, eh?” as they scout out girls on a night out. That Peter is blonde, and Doug gravitates toward him to the point where their peers take notice, is paramount.
“…so much of WINTER KEPT US WARM’s queer-coding scans as naked text rather than subtext. In treading along the subtle pathways exploring a queer cinematic frontier, there also lies Secter’s skill in straddling the line between the quietly wry and the playfully coy.”
Meanwhile, Doug takes Peter on as a mentee, expanding his masculine horizons by dragging him to cabaret shows and men-only saunas alike. A stolen glance, a stray copy of beatnik queer poet Allen Ginsburg’s Howl, and an abundance of nude men getting rowdy and close together bring Secter’s sensuous interest in sexuality into sharp focus.
Alongside the abundance of guys frolicking around in the nude, the preponderance of poetry in the film seems to indicate something about the core of film that affords it the tonal range Secter saw in it from the beginning. In particular, poetry and film compact moods, sensations, and moments into dense, affectively intensive packages. Call them scenes, or call them stanzas.
Midway through, Doug and Peter roughhouse in fresh snowfall, non-diegetic swing music blasting over the scene. They collide, they slip around the field, they harass a squirrel, and in the end, they walk up a hedgelined pathway before parting ways. This vignette is just one of many in the film that collect a wide array of feelings, from curiosity to attraction to repulsion, in poetic units. Music works like rhyme in verse, and the cut works like a line break.
Releasing just a few years after Ginsburg’s poem found itself at the centre of an obscenity trial for its depictions of queer sexuality, WINTER KEPT US WARM is as firmly grounded in queer artistic traditions as it was boldly open about its subjects. With the general public in the 1960s lacking non-derogatory shared terminology to describe queer love, the film charts that territory primarily through its poesis, evoking rather than invoking.
That evocation takes the shape of a joke at times, like Doug’s pal commenting on his propensity for pursuing blondes. At others, the exact nature of the boys’ relationship bleeds through different moods. Bev presses Doug to explain why he is so drawn to Peter, even though Peter is distinctly different from his peers. Doug says simply, “That’s what I like about him.” Lablow’s performance, chock full of steamy stares, is entirely heartthrobbing.
“It is easy to see how the film’s sensuousness, affective intensity, and emotional suspension influenced even Cronenbergian body horror cinema in such a pivotal way.”
It is easy to see how the film’s sensuousness, affective intensity, and emotional suspension influenced even Cronenbergian body horror cinema in such a pivotal way. Secter’s work bottles potent bodily sensations in a way that is conducive to the sort of extreme somatic visual scripts we find in horror cinema.
At a dance, a shot of the upper corner of a room evokes SKINAMARINK (2022) while Peter’s and Doug’s swinging snowball fight brings to mind A ROOM WITH A VIEW’S (1985) nude pond scene. Whether or not most of us know it, Secter’s core belief in what film could do anticipated so many of the stylistic directions that Canadian and queer filmmakers have taken in the decades since.
Some aspects of Secter’s legacy are likely beneficial to leave behind. The notion of a Canadian cinema, a cinema of a state built on stolen land, among them. But WINTER KEPT US WARM preserves a singular lifeworld in poetic form, bringing the raw and honest tumult of youthful romance into lyrical harmony with all the advantages cinema offers. The plentitude of queer love spills out in each shot of Peter’s room, as the men “come and go, dreaming of Michael Angelo.”