A Comparative Study of Vancouver’s Reflection in Two Eras: Bitter Ash and Out of the Blue
City and Responsibility
Amir Siadat
Both Bitter Ash and Out of the Blue reflect their respective eras, focusing on countercultures in Vancouver. They explore themes like generational conflict, rebellion, and responsibility, with music—jazz in Bitter Ash, punk rock in Out of the Blue—highlighting their cultural contexts. The films also examine how people interact with urban space, showing a mutual influence between identity and the city. The differences between Bitter Ash and Out of the Blue enhance their comparison by revealing the historical and cultural contexts behind each film. Out of the Blue follows a more conventional, dramatic structure typical of Hollywood, while Bitter Ash aligns with European art cinema and alternative or experimental styles found in the margins of American cinema. From a production standpoint, Out of the Blue is professionally made, whereas Bitter Ash is low-budget and amateur in style. Despite their differences, the two films reflect contrasting moral and aesthetic perspectives, offering valuable insights into Vancouver’s cinematic representation. Bitter Ash stands as a landmark of 1960s independent filmmaking in Vancouver, while Out of the Blue, with its industrial production style, presents a vision of the city that later helped shape its identity as the “Hollywood North.”
Embrace the Beats/ Escape the Streets
In Bitter Ash, the camera seems to turn away from the city and its attractions, just like the characters do. Unlike Larry Kent’s first film, Hastings Street, this film shows fewer urban images and no signs of the city’s appeal. Most of the scenes take place indoors—either at home, in factories, or in other workplaces. Over a third of the film’s ending happens at a crowded party, where people are packed closely together in a small physical space. The first exterior shot in Bitter Ash shows a bleak industrial area, initially appearing as the view from Des’s window but later revealed as the outside of Laurie and Colin’s apartment.
Furtheremore, Bitter Ash often skips introductory or transitional shots. For example, it cuts directly from Laurie at home to her working in a restaurant, without showing the space in between. This editing style contributes to the film’s avoidance of the city, keeping the urban environment largely out of view. This editing choice symbolically suggests that the dull, industrial setting encompasses both families, subtly linking their homes as marginal spaces on the city's periphery. The film shows only a few short shots of city life: a couple of brief street shots where people walk before entering a house, and a shot of a neighborhood when Laurie and Des leave the city in their car. Their departure, accompanied by music and wind, evokes a sense of longing and freedom, suggesting that true joy lies in escaping the city. The only city attraction shown in Bitter Ash is the amusement park, where Laurie and Colin appear playful and innocent before their wedding. This childlike freedom is also seen in natural settings—among the trees and on the beach—where their closeness feels like the happiness of Adam and Eve before they gained knowledge. In these moments, nature replaces the city and brings a sense of freedom and purity. David Douglas links Bitter Ash to the Beat Generation, describing Colin as the “quintessential Beatnik” who embodies its rebellious spirit. He notes that the film’s only moments of joy—Laurie’s flashback and the beach scene—are “stylized,” while the rest of the film uses an “observational” style to portray everyday struggles (91). Kent’s camerawork visually express the ideas and desires of the Beat Generation, which reached cultural prominence by the 1950s and early 1960s and valued personal freedom, spontaneity, and non-conformity. Critical of the capitalist city, the Beats saw the open road and nature as spaces for authentic experience and self-discovery. Jazz, with its improvisational and free-flowing style, reflected the energy and ideals of their worldview (Belgrad, 231). Larry Kent’s camerawork reflects the spontaneity and emotional rhythm of the characters. The line “Live for here and now” expresses the mindset of living in the moment, and the camera follows this philosophy. In the early scene where we enter Colin’s house, the camera moves like an independent character, slowly climbing the stairs as if intruding into private space. This is even more evident during the rented party sequence: like the guests, the camera moves freely and unpredictably, like an observer immersed in the action. This wandering movement, combined with the constant presence of jazz, creates a sensory experience that mirrors the characters’ impulsive lives and the film’s Beat-inspired aesthetic. The film adapts its filmmaking approach to reflect the lives of its characters, who live on the margins of society. it is raw, made with limited resources, and shaped by its low-budget production. it’s bold depiction of nudity and intimacy aligns with the counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, while its “novice” style mirrors the vulnerability of its characters. According to Patricia Zimmerman, the dominant film industry shaped the discourse on amateur cinema to uphold professional filmmaking as the norm, turning amateur work into a preparatory phase for professional production. By valuing technical mastery and adherence to Hollywood’s polished narrative style, the industry established a cultural standard that framed deviation as illegitimate. This structure functioned as a form of political control, neutralizing contradictions between amateur and professional spheres (65). In this context, Larry Kent’s work challenges this hierarchy by rejecting industry norms and embracing a form of filmmaking where meaning emerges through simplicity and imperfection rather than professional polish. The amateurism in The Bitter Ash is most apparent in its handling of sound. Shot without original audio, the film was later dubbed, a choice that highlights its raw, unpolished aesthetic. Kent even deliberately avoids adding sound to certain moments, such as when Laurie’s mother pours a drink into a glass, emphasizing the film's unrefined nature. It can be said that Kent embraces a raw, unpolished aesthetic as a rejection of the values of the dominant system. In place of development, professionalism, utility, purpose, and foresight, he turns to wandering, aimlessness, idleness, and being in the moment2. He favors the amateur over the professional, the margins over the center, the path over the destination, and the suburbs over the city. The Bitter Ash critiques the material relations within a capitalist system, exposing its flaws through the characters’ experiences. They discuss debt, alienating work, and the reduction of individuals to mere numbers. Even their social gatherings are “rent parties,” organized to cover basic expenses. The family unit is shown as fractured and absurd—Laurie’s father is mocked, and both her parents' and her own marriage are failures. Colin, an unemployed writer, expects Laurie to support him and their child while he avoids responsibility. When he learns of her affair with Des, his reaction is disturbingly passive. Laurie’s desperate plea—“Do something! Be affected! Just do something!”—captures the emotional void they all face. Colin views Vancouver as the source of his failure, projecting his frustrations and lack of success onto the city. He sees it as a “cultural backwater” incapable of nurturing real talent, especially his own. His gaze turns toward America, particularly New York’s “Off-Broadway,” as the place where his work would be truly recognized. As Colin voices these complaints, the camera slowly pulls away, suggesting discomfort or silent judgment, as if distancing itself from his self-pity. This movement exposes the inferiority complex behind his words, revealing the weakness he tries to mask with grand ambitions. The visual distance feels ironic today, given that Kent’s artistic identity was shaped in Vancouver, and his work is now studied as part of Vancouver’s significant contribution to experimental filmmaking (Douglas, 90). Although The Bitter Ash clearly shows influences from the French New Wave, with its handheld camerawork, loose narrative structure, and techniques like the jump cuts (in the elevator scene or Laurie’s mother pacing with a glass of wine), and draws inspiration from John Cassavetes’ Shadows (a film closely connected to the Beat Generation and jazz culture), it maintains a tone and atmosphere entirely its own, one that is recognized as a regional identity—something distinctly tied to British Columbia.
Hollywood's Favor and Echoes of a Failure
Colin was dreaming of being in America. But what if Vancouver—the city he calls “a cultural backwater”—had already become American? The Vancouver portrayed in Out of the Blue seems to reflect this idea: a city that, from an outsider’s perspective, looks more like America than Canada. The camera supports this impression by moving away from the regional identity seen in The Bitter Ash, adopting instead a clearly American—or more specifically, Hollywood—style of representation. Today Out of the Blue serves as a remarkable visual record of Vancouver in the late 1970s. This aspect has garnered attention from essayists like Kier-La Janisse, who explored it in the video-essay Terminal City Blues, along with other critics and writers who have examined the film’s numerous city locations (from Pacific Boulevard, Seymour Street, and the Granville Bridge to the Ridge Theatre, the CBC building, Northwest Marine Drive, Viking Hall, Harvey Road, and Bowman’s Garage) and their transformations over time in various reviews and articles. However, as far as the film’s narrative is concerned, the city is never explicitly named; in fact, it has been effectively stripped of its distinct identity—de-Vancouvered, in a sense—reduced to an unnamed, generic urban backdrop. In The Bitter Ash, although the city rarely appears visually, Vancouver is explicitly mentioned in the dialogue, anchoring the story in a specific context. Laurie refers to the West End during her escape, and later mentions Toronto in a conversation with her parents. These brief references, along with subtle cues like a banknote labeled “Canada,” quietly situate the film within Canada. In contrast, it can be felt that many of the locations in Out of the Blue were chosen for their resemblance to American settings (as highlighted in the mentioned video essay; for instance, Kitsilano—a once-bohemian neighborhood in 1960s Vancouver—was often compared to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury). Moreover, bands like The Pointed Sticks, The Subhumans, and Teenage Head, while iconic in Vancouver’s punk scene, are not as internationally recognized as American stars like Elvis Presley or Marlon Brando; as a result, although the film offers a hybrid experience to both American and Canadian audiences, its American influence is more pronounced for viewers outside North America. It should also be noted that the film’s main cast—Linda Manz, Dennis Hopper, Sharon Farrell, and Don Gordon—is entirely American, and Manz, in particular, with her “unflappable New York City accent”, further reinforces the film’s distinctly American tone (Bengal). The heightened attention to Out of the Blue's Vancouver today stems not from an original intention to depict the city itself, but from the unintended archival value the film acquired as time passed and the urban landscape changed. Randolph Jordan notes about Hastings Street, “the forty-five-year gap between shooting and the final editing and sound production, there is plenty of room for Kent and his collaborators to reinterpret the material.” Therefore “at the heart of the film’s position as found footage is Kent’s retitling of the film from the generic The Street to the more regionally specific Hastings Street” (236). As he explains, in 1962, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside reflected urban ambition, but by 2007, it had come to signify decline, giving Hastings Street a stronger sense of place. It seems that a similar shift occurred with Out of the Blue: its current value as a document of Vancouver stems from the city's transformation and the loss of many of the spaces it captured. Out of Blue, while visually striking in its depiction of late-1970s Vancouver, showcases a narrative “placelessness.” It can, however, be interpreted as “positive unoriginality,” allowing for diverse readings shaped by local context. This duality—and, one might say, the contradictory nature—of the film's visual and narrative strands underscores the tension between global media production and local identity (Matheson, 132). The film was made before Vancouver became “Hollywood North,” yet the tendency to transform Vancouver into “Hollywood North” is clearly evident. On the other hand, the prominence of mainstream cinema elements reveals that Out of Blue adheres to the same capitalist framework that Larry Kent’s counterculture characters once blamed for their misfortune. Made shortly before the Reagan era, the film aligns with the moral values that would come to define his presidency—a return to patriarchal order—confronting and seeking revenge on the legacy of the counterculture. Though a great distance separates the Beat and Punk countercultures, a faint imaginary line links them—one that helps trace the path from the former to the latter. The faint imaginary line between Beat and Punk runs through the Hippie movement. The Beats influenced the Hippies by rejecting conformity, searching for new spiritual paths, and exploring experimental art—often using marijuana as part of their break from mainstream culture (Weaver, 24-27). Punk emerged around 1970 as a “post-hippie” counterculture, rejecting hippie idealism for something more aggressive and chaotic—what some called “streetpunk” (Mattson, 36). Each movement reacted to the one before, all sharing a common dislike of mainstream society but expressing it in different ways. From this perspective, there is not a great distance between the figures in Bitter Ash, spilling from the city onto the roads, and the Hippies of Easy Rider, where the road becomes a space for confronting societal issues and exploring personal freedom. It is ironic, however, that in Out of the Blue, the road becomes the starting point of trouble. It all begins with a driver in jeans and an accident. Even more ironic is that the driver is played by Dennis Hopper, who, as a key figure in Easy Rider, entered the pantheon of countercultural icons (Anderson). Hopper himself considered Out of the Blue a follow-up to Easy Rider, imagining it as what might have happened to the characters ten years later. In this sense, Out of the Blue, released eleven years after Easy Rider, reflects a return to the city—and one that, due to the legacy of their journeys, seems far less safe than before. Unlike Larry Kent’s Bitter Ash, where the camera moves among the characters with intimacy and sympathy—as if it is one of them—Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue maintains a distanced, moralizing gaze. His film views its characters from the outside, portraying a world where sexual freedom, alcohol and drug use, and irresponsibility have led to the collapse of the family and the rise of a rebellious, psychologically unstable generation on the verge of self-destruction. Perhaps the early 1960s, when Bitter Ash was made, still allowed room for idealism, and for the countercultural critique to be welcomed within the broader discourse. But two decades later, with the darker consequences of those ideals more visible than ever—and in a cultural moment marked by the return of patriarchal values—the conservative backlash against counterculture had grown sharper. In both style and ideology, Out of the Blue aligns more closely with a mainstream, conservative turn—it is more straightforward than Hopper’s earlier works like Easy Rider or The Last Movie. It mourns the disappearance of the authoritative father figure, whose absence is framed as the cause of chaos. The figure of the father as a symbol of authority, mocked in Bitter Ash, feels absent here—as if unrestrained and irresponsible countercultures have undermined that authority, reducing it to vulgarity and leaving chaos in its place. From this perspective, the image of Don behind the garbage truck in the suburbs—surrounded by birds and accompanied by Neil Young’s music—can be read as a metaphor for the vulgarization, or even a satirical echo, of the ideals that once envisioned liberation on the road and in the suburbs. If in Bitter Ash people escape from the street into the house, in Out of the Blue, the house is no longer a place of refuge. For CeBe, it is far from a sanctuary—it feels barren, empty, and even threatening. What should be a safe and private space becomes exposed and unsafe, especially when Don's friends come and go freely, even glancing into her bedroom.
CeBe flees her broken home in search of refuge in the city, but urban spaces offer no safety. Violence erupts in public and private settings—from the streets to the punk club, and even the house where she nearly faces assault. Her movement isn’t aimless wandering but a displaced search for safety that leads nowhere. From home to school, bowling alleys, cafés, bars, and punk clubs, every space is temporary and unstable—none provide belonging or security. In such a city, the collapse of traditional morality and structure is evident, with no authority left to provide guidance. The absence of “the father”—or more precisely, the law of the father—signals not only a broken family but a broader symbolic and social collapse. The film suggests a longing for the return of a stabilizing authority—the same order that the previous generation had once rejected. With Don’s return, the household deteriorates further. He remains irresponsible—drinking while driving and showing no concern when his friend enters the bedrooms of his wife and daughter. The film quietly suggests that the sexual liberation and rejection of patriarchal norms embraced by the previous generation may have led to a collapse of moral boundaries, leaving the family in disarray. Peace is no longer possible anywhere—not even on the beach, where, unlike in Bitter Ash, the “cold wind” now blows. CeBe had created a fantasy about Don, but this falls apart when he returns from prison. The image of Don in her room—styled like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, surrounded by a toy truck and the phrase “Public Enemy”—captures the fantasy she once created. She despises him because he has destroyed her ideal of fatherhood. In response, she mirrors this myth by adopting the personas of Elvis and Brando. This transformation is made possible only by wearing Don’s clothes and leather jacket, solidifying her punk-rock identity. Her final image—combining her father’s myth, the rebellion of his generation, and the punk spirit of her own time—highlights her “tomboy” character through a tough, masculine attitude. In this way, the destruction of that image at the end—mixing influences from hippies to punks—reflects the film’s conservative and even homophobic tone, as it seems to criticize several countercultures all at once.
Conclusion
At the end of Bitter Ash, Laurie’s loneliness, emphasized by the camera pulling away, underscores her isolation but also her unique responsibility in a world of irresponsibility. While the lack of a happy ending may seem disappointing, it highlights her awareness in an unaware world. In contrast, Out of the Blue ends in total darkness, reflecting the insecurity of the time and possibly contributing to the rise of conservatism. The film feels deeply American, echoing national concerns. As the Easy Rider ad put it, “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.” But in Out of Blue's Vancouver, one might quietly say, “We can find it everywhere.” Both films depict irresponsibility leading to chaos and family breakdown. Viewing them together suggests that Larry Kent’s film, with its warning about irresponsibility in the early 1960s, predicted the urban and familial situation in Dennis Hopper’s film from the early 1980s, which advocates a return to traditional conservative values. The contrasting representations of Vancouver in Bitter Ash and Out of the Blue show a larger change in cinematic style and cultural attitude. In Bitter Ash, Vancouver is not shown very clearly, but it is still present as a real city in the background. The characters try to escape from it, just like many people in the 1960s counterculture who rejected the idea of a growing, modern city and preferred to live closer to nature. In Out of the Blue, although Vancouver is more visible on screen, it becomes a nameless and generic setting, reflecting the city's shift toward becoming “Hollywood North” and embracing the mainstream values that Bitter Ash and its characters once resisted. Together, these two films show how Vancouver has changed—not only in real life, but also in the way it is used in Canadian cinema.
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