Following the box-office success of his first major film, Shivers, David Cronenberg was critically confined by an assortment of directorial titles, including the ?Baron of Blood? and the ?King of Venereal Horror.? Indeed, Cronenberg was pigeonholed as a horror/sci-fi director throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s.
Mack Sennett was the outstanding pioneer and primitive of American silent comedy. Although Sennett's name is most commonly associated with the Keystone Company, which he founded in 1912, Sennett's film career began four years earlier with the Biograph Company, the pioneering film company where D.W. Griffith established the principles of film narrative and rhetoric. Sennett and Griffith were colleagues and contemporaries, and Sennett served as actor, writer, and assistant under Griffith in 1908 and 1909.
?We want to make films so that people can see what they normally are not exposed to and have some kind of understanding.? Such are the noble intentions of Janis Cole and Holly Dale, the highly esteemed independent documentary filmmakers from Canada, whose fruitful collaborations have involved sharing the duties of director, producer, and editor. Their films have been widely screened at film festivals around the world, including Berlin, Sydney, Paris, London, Cr?teil, Los Angeles, and Lyon. Associated with Canada?s film boom of the 1970s, their work has been praised for tackling marginal, da
Alison Maclean is one of a group of Australasian women filmmakers?the list only begins with Jane Campion, Gillian Armstrong, and Jocelyn Morehouse?who have brought distinctly female perspectives to a male-dominated movie industry. In her films, Maclean has exhibited a special concern for gender roles and empowerment; words and their meanings; and the manner in which women communicate (as well as lack of communication and its ramification).
All of these issues are articulated in Talkback, one of Maclean?s earlier short films, the story of a female talkback radio producer who r
Documentarian Alanis Obomsawin has become one of Canada?s leading native filmmakers?and has garnered international renown?in a career spanning more than a quarter of a century, a career that emerged out of a unique background. Soon after her birth in New Hampshire, her family moved to Canada, where they initially lived on the Odonak Reserve, northeast of Montreal. There, Obomsawin learned the songs and stories of her people, the Abenaki. When she was nine, her family moved again, this time settling in Trois-Rivi?res, a small town 75 miles northeast of Montreal, where Obomsawin was the only
Throughout her long career, Anne-Claire Poirier has consistently made films with feminist and humanist concerns. She explores serious issues facing young, contemporary women, from defining one?s place in society and attaining personal satisfaction to dealing with the aftereffects of sexual violence. In the two outstanding fiction films she made in the 1980s, however, her characters are neither youthful nor fashionable. Rather, they respectively are aging, and aged.
Between the mid-teens and early 1920s, Canadian-born and California-bred Nell Shipman had a fascinating but short-lived film career. During that period, which might be dubbed the brief but gilded age of women film pioneers, Shipman acted on-screen, directed, wrote screenplays and the stories upon which they were based, represented writers in their dealings with film companies, and even formed her own production company?thus becoming her own boss. She was a woman of incredible fortitude who insisted on shooting her films on location in the wilderness of Idaho and Canada, and was unafraid to
Joyce Wieland achieved her reputation as one of a group of experimental filmmakers who contributed to the creation of an avant-garde film style in the middle and late 1960s. Wieland?s films formally investigate the limitations and shared properties of several media while they developed increasingly pointed themes regarding Canadian nationalism and feminism.
When Toronto developed into a leading Canadian art center in the late 1950s and 1960s, Wieland became the only woman who achieved artistic prominence among the new group of Canadian painters influenced by Abstract Expressionism and
