Cinema Canada (Jul-Aug 1975)

academic terminology. And we’d have exams every once in a while where we'd get questions where you'd have to have taken notes in class. All this stuff which was completely irrelevant because you didn’t know what you were talking about. It was all memorization of all these terms, you know. You don’t learn by looking in a book. You learn by doing it.’ One advantage of academic lectures is that it allows the mind to wander very freely. On one particular daydream in class three year ago, MacLeod imagined filming a liveaction metaphor of all human and physical processes involved in the journey of ‘‘rawstock”’ to the finished film. Three years later, with the help of many film Workshops and two film residents, but mainly thanks to her own determination, ‘‘Mr. Rawstock’’’s epic march across ‘The Playing Field of Life’’ is finally ready for screening. MacLeod is now working on a multi-media ‘‘Canadiana’’ spectacular introducing ‘‘Aurora Laughter,’’ ‘‘Moose Jaw Mouth Wash,”’ and ‘‘Husky Thermal Heating Units’ as a unique addition to the development of Canadian culture. In the same vein but through different means, C.R. Wrench has pursued an original concept to satisfying filmic conclusions in his first Workshop film, Sequences, which involved the transfer of a beam-starved, feedbacktransformed series of exquisite movements of dancer Zella Wolowsky from a series of Video monitors to 16mm film with a 30 frames per second Arriflex (to avoid the roll bar), which he then proceeded to extend in time using an optical printer he had built in the Workshop from a bench moviola and a Bolex. In the context of the Workshop’s practical approach to film-making. Ron Precious’ story fits in particularly well. Now a professional film-maker in Vancouver, Precious came to Simon Fraser Workshop after travelling to northern British Columbia via York University Film Department, on an NFB National Museum of Man archeology film project. Originally an elementary school teacher in Toronto, Precious had taken a filmmaking workshop for teachers conducted by Julius Kohanyi. After teaching successful workshops for his English students for two years, (his students chose scripts among themselves and made them into Super-8 films), Precious decided he’d rather make films himself than be a producer. He therefore went to York, looking for film work in Toronto during the summers. He wasn’t successful until the third year of his course when, with Stan Fox’ help, he got on the archeology crew in the summer of 1972 as a cameraman. In the fall of that year, he dropped out of York because his visits over previous summers to production companies convinced him that a degree would make no difference in finding work as a filmmaker. He arrived in time at SFU for Vaitiekunas’ Workshop, which he found to be an ideal culmination for his training at York, where production as a concentrated activity does not begin until the fourth year. Both Aikenhead and Windsor had the good fortune to have as a lead in their films the versatile actor, editor and raconteur Harlan Dorfman. Dorfman, who, like Zale Dalen of Highlight Productions in Vancouver, had at an earlier stage of life planned to be a short story writer, was introduced to the SFU Workshop while sitting one day at the Cecil Hotel Tavern in Vancouver, not long after arriving in Canada from Berkeley. He happened to be complaining about the future of the short story writer in an age of decreasing readership to his friend Dennis Hoffert. Hoffert, who has been in several Workshops over the years, suggested he get into films up at Simon Fraser. Actress Valerie Ambrose also starred in both McLaren Award films. She was ‘discovered’ by Mary Anne McEwen, a commercial writer who made The Garden of Eden in Vaitiekunas’ first Workshop. 38 Cinema Canada OO Chris Windsor Vaitiekunas inculcated a sense of professionalism among his students, including MacLeod. He taught them to respect the tools of filmmaking. ‘‘T perhaps usually give a false impression to people,”’ says Vaitiekunas of his attitude toward the machinery of film production. ‘‘I hate the machines. I hate moviolas. I hate cameras. They get in the way. I have to bow down to them in order to make a film. But I know also I have to be a prudent and smart guy, and to understand that I cannot wishfully think that the bad machine, malfunctioning camera, will go away or take pity on me. Those bloody machines have no brains; they’re totally uncompromising. And I’m at the mercy of them. If I don’t handle them properly my most glorious ideas will look like a pile of shit on the screen. Unexposed, badly composed. My sound will be garbled. If my editing machines are wrong, I lose the sync and everything else compounds throughout the production. At the end, that great vision will look pretty lousy. And what will happen? Everyone will laugh at me. ‘“‘T learned that through bad experience and bad mistakes. And I remember those mistakes, indelibly. Unforgettable mistakes. I thought that since I’ve had a lot of problems, because nobody ever told me and I made bloomers, what I could do is short circuit. I could close the gap quicker. But, of course, you know people don’t understand that. They think that I’m impossibly technologically oriented. I’m not. ‘IT believe very strongly,’ says Vaitiekunas, “‘that in order to be free in manipulating your medium, you have to be familiar with the tools that you work with. The whole filmmaking is a series of minute little judgements that go on like bullets. And they come from left and right field. You catch them in mid-air, grab them, exercise your judgement, and you proceed further. You have to do it quickly; the quicker you do it the more spontaneous and fresh the effect will be in the longrun. But you cannot have that when you're solely occupied with how to make the bloody equipment work.”’ The film on V.D. (entitled It Takes Two) which a group of Film Workshop students made in the summer of 1974, after Vaitiekunas left for York, carried within its structure the lessons which the group had learned in making their own -)