“Do not try to cross the U.S./Canada border with a big bucket labelled ‘mass-casualty blood,’ ” warns two-time Oscar nominee Lawrence Hott, director of a new documentary, The War of 1812.
Last summer, Canada Customs officials stopped Hott at the border near Buffalo as he was en route to Hamilton’s Westfield Heritage Village to oversee the recreation of some War of 1812 battles for his ambitious film marking the bicentennial next year of that peculiar conflict. In the car, courtesy of a Hollywood supplier, was a vat of powdered artificial blood that Hott’s makeup artist had reminded him to bring from his home in western Massachusetts.
“So the customs agents come out and they ask you, ‘What are you doing and can we take a look?’ ” Hott recalled. “And then they see this stuff labelled ‘mass-casualty blood.’ ” Asked to explain, Hott promptly replied: “We’re going to a shoot,” and just as promptly realized this was a poor choice of words. Eventually, the agents relaxed, but “the look on one guy’s face was like, ‘Next time use different language.’ ”
Hott’s doc, airing Monday on PBS, deals with the ultimate “misunderstanding” between border mates, one played out with muskets, bayonets, cannon and sword. To this day, Canada and the United States have different takes on what went down. Canadians tend to think of it as the war in which we and our British masters kicked American butt – at the Battle of the Chateauguay in 1813 in Quebec, for instance, and at Queenston Heights, Ont., near Niagara Falls. It’s the war of “plucky” Laura Secord, “brave” Isaac Brock and the “noble” Tecumseh.
Americans, by contrast, don’t think very much about the War of 1812. Indeed, when Hott and his wife Diane Garey started preparing their PBS documentary, its working title was The Forgotten War. “Americans know the expressions, the tropes, the clichés that come out of it,” Hott observed. “ ‘Don’t give up the ship’ and ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours,’ Francis Scott Key writing the lyrics of The Star-Spangled Banner, the Johnny Horton hit The Battle of New Orleans.... But they have no idea what it’s about. And if they do have an idea,” he said with a laugh, “it’s usually wrong. They think it entailed some heroic second War of Independence against the Evil Empire of Great Britain. Or a kind of existential battle for the [United States’] very survival.” (A recent Ottawa study found Canadian respondents woefully ignorant as well; only 14 per cent of those interviewed by the Department of Canadian Heritage were able to identify the three countries involved – Great Britain, the United States and Canada.)
Many of the misconceptions on both sides are corrected in the two hours of The War of 1812. Mixing re-enactments and narration with animation, illustration and commentary from more than 20 experts, Hott’s $1-million doc is a lively, scrupulously balanced account of a war that was at once small (casualties totalled about 45,000 in close to three years of fighting) and wide-ranging (hundreds of battles took place on land and sea, from Quebec to Louisiana, the Canary Islands to Brazil). It was also inconclusive (neither side delivered a knockout punch) yet terribly important.
