Cinema Canada (Jun-Jul 1973)

Quotations in this article are from Toronto, Montreal and New York newspapers, and magazines as noted, as well as transcribed from Owen's talks at a Toronto Film Society Seminar in May 1970, film class notes and taped personal interviews. Natalie Edwards is a Saskatchewan-born free-lance writer living in Toronto. She loves film. + * % Personally, | don’t give a damn about film as film. | want to communicate with it. Asa poet, the only people | reached were my fellow poets. | think it’s important not just to make good films, but films that audiences want to see. Said Don Owen to Howard Junker of the Montreal Star in 1964. This relative newcomer to the National Film Board's Unit B was being interviewed by the venerable Star because at 30, with only two small but worthy little black and white NFB shorts to his name, he had just shot a full feature-length film called Nobody Waved Goodbye (shoving the NFB’s intended first feature, The Drylanders, in the shade), and was about to make history (Canadian) with it. Times passes. It’s almost a decade since 1964. Those who don’t say “Who's Don Owen and what's he done?” may be saying, ‘What's Don Owen doing now?” He started out like many a potential film maker thinking he was something else — maybe a poet. And he went to University of Toronto as people do now, taking whatever interested him, skipping the important-paper bit, the degrees. No grants, so he worked summers for Forest Rangers, in a mine, as a fire spotter. He naturally ended up as a CBC stagehand. And he hung around the Greenwich Gallery and worked at being a poet, just like Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen. And maybe had second thoughts about his poetry. About Leonard Cohen he said in a Saturday Night article: | could get used to the idea that he was a better poet than | was, but he always seemed to leave the gallery with the most interesting woman there, the one I'd spent all evening trying to get up enough nerve to say hello to. And he discovered film. Living in Toronto when | was a teenager there was very very little film to be seen. Weil, that’s not accurate. | was not aware of film, that’s all. | came from a working class background and found my way into writing somehow and it took me a while to discover what film was all about. That took place when | started attending meetings of the Toronto Film Society. | saw a few of those masterpieces . . . and suddenly | began to realize what the fantastic potential of the medium was. And then the TFS had a series on Sundays in which they showed 2 or 3 works by one director — and | remember seeing Max Ophul’s work, three films | think, something staggering, and the whole kind of possibility of film began to bloom for me. So it wasn't long after that that | took the opportunity of going down to the Film Board in Montreal to work, and it was there that | began to learn how to put a film together. In Tom Daly’s Unit B of the National Film Board were Colin Low, Roman Kroiter and Wolf Koenig when Don Owen joined it. Daly became a kind of guru for Owen, taught him, encouraged him, let him develop. Daly, himself influenced by Grierson, now heavily influenced Owen, who was ripe for hard work and a direction for his creative energies. When | went to the Film Board .. . | felt like a man who was desperately escaping from some terrible misery because | was very unhappy in Toronto. | was working as a poet and | had come to realize that my work was pretty poor, and | felt very badly about it and of course | ... sort of dried up — all those things having to do with a relatively emotionally mixed-up childhood. Runner (1962) His first film, Runner was a black and white 12 minute short about Bruce Kidd. A film that was in praise of an athlete, but praising him ina rather lofty way... | was interested in the idea of the Pinderian Odes: and soon... Classically constructed, with a commentary written by W. H. Auden at Owen’s request, the film was described by the British Film Institute in 1964 as a poem. “. . . it is a film about running or the runner. Matching a very apt quasi-Greek commentary by W. H. Auden, the camera focuses on legs, feet, balancing arms, the body in motion. The style is Spartan, spare and very disciplined; this matches perfectly the control and grace of the runner, and results in a poem to the human body in motion which is wholly successful.” Actually, not quite, according to Owen. There is a sense in which Runner is a kind of perfect film with a very very serious flaw, and that is the commentary is just too dense to understand. Owen is grateful to the National Film Board for the training he got with them, and the freedom to work without time or commercial pressures. After |’d finished shooting the film the executive producer, Tom Daly, put me ina cutting room by myself and said, cut it. And left me alone for two months. In this first film Owen's talent of marrying the technique and style of a film to its subject matter, in this case a classical construction to the sense of discipline and single-mindedness of the runner, was already apparent. Meanwhile, about 1960, the new light-weight, sync-sound, hand-held cameras created cinéma vérité. Godard’s Breathless in 1959 was revolutionary; in 1961 Cassavetes made Shadows. Owen, at this time, added to his experience by working with the French Unit of the NFB as a cameraman on films like September 5 at St. Henri (a documentary of a day in a working class district) and La Lutte (on wrestling). He liked the French Unit's spirit and use of improvisational techniques. Toronto Jazz 1964 Toronto Jazz is my first example of working in a candid tradition. It was a film in which | did a lot of experimenting with cinéma vérité, with the idea of shooting things just off the cuff. Ina sense | think Toronto Jazz is a less successful film, in fact it’s considerably less successful — it just never worked. There are lots of good things in it nevertheless, like seeing 1964 Toronto again, the streets and trees and buildings (now so changed), the nightclub life, Michael Snow as a little-known artist and musician, Don Francks in one of the ups of his bobbing career. But most of all the film is interesting as part of Owen’s work for illustrating the way he again uses a technique that harmonizes with his material. The casual hand-held camera, unscripted dialogue, the scenes whose length is determined only by their interest, the improvisational inventiveness, all are themselves like the jazz they are showing: spontaneous yet controlled. Mind you, it doesn’t quite work. Owen, the poet, is not quite a jazzman on film. But by 1972 he had a firm grasp on this technique for his recent film Cowboy and Indian, which has, incidentally, the same subliminal theme: the nature of the creative male, his surroundings, ambiance, the landscape of his creative life. Nobody Waved Goodbye 1964 Now, with a 12 minute and a 27 minute film behind him, Owen was assigned a half-hour documentary about a probation Cinema Canada 31