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Stan Fox of the CBC in Vancouver was the next film professional to conduct the Workshop. Fox, whose students when he taught film at UBC included Richard Leiterman and David Rimmer, describes the Workshop approach as ‘‘one of the results of the educational experimentation which was going on in the mid-Sixties, where it was felt that universities should change their whole approach radically, and have centers and places that don’t involve the usual academic ritual of having courses and credits and grades and diplomas.”
‘‘Unfortunately it is not possible,’’ says Fox, ‘‘for the model to be accepted within the university structure as readily as the academic model.”
Sandy Wilson’s remarkable career with the National Film Board began in Fox’: Workshop when she made Penticton Profile with the backing of the NFB Challenge for Change program. Her first short had been made in Reljic’s Workshop. Mike Collier, another Workshop member of that time, is now customer service manager at Alpha Cine in Vancouver. Another Workshop regular was Brent Straughan, whose multi-screen Enfilony premieres this summer in Hamilton Place, Ontario, with the backing of a live symphony orchestra.
A unique aspect of Fox’s Workshop was the parallel emphasis on video and film. Judith Eglington was active in both areas, as was Diane Edmondson.
The next film resident after Fox (who is now associate chairman of the Film Program at York) was the late Luke Bennett, a film editor from New York. A major Workshop project during his residency was a successful film on architecture for the B.C. Association of Architects. Participants included Ron Orieux, Zale Dalen, Rick Patton, Joanna
36 Cinema Canada
Moss, and Lee Dombrowski.
Essentially the same group subsequently made the NFB documentary Seven Steps to Freedom on a prison self-help group, produced independently of the Workshop in 1972, as well as the NFB’s Bye Bye Blues, in 1973. Both films were directed by Joanna Moss.
Eugene Boyko of the NFB remarks that an outstanding characteristic of the Workshop is the opportunity to go out and make mistakes.
‘‘In an academic course,’’ remarks Boyko, “‘you’re getting marks, rather than doing and experimenting. When you're going for marks you’re playing it safe a lot of times but when you're getting both your feet into it as you do at SFU, you make a lot of mistakes but hopefully you won't
repeat them.”’ Ron Orieux, another Vancouver professional camera
man, with extensive experience with NFB and industrial documentary films, who studied with Luke Bennett in the Film Workshop and who recently set up Edgewater Productions in Vancouver with Workshop alumnus Doug White, remarks in the same context on what he learned at the workshop conducted some time back by Richard Leiterman at the Banff School of Fine arts.
‘‘There was an advantage to the conference,’’ says Orieux, ‘‘just to get a sense of Richard Leiterman. It was a delightful experience of the intuitive nature of that man, you know, which cuts through all the intellectual bullshit about film-making, which makes for a point that a person can’t become a film-maker just by taking a good four-year course in film-making. That’s not a prerequisite; it’s nota Production stillfrom ‘‘Afterthe Dance’’ directed by George Johnson