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In Spartree, highrigger Marv Trudeau climbs up to top a tree
Ever wonder what happens to film school dropouts? On the West Coast, Phil Borgos went on to make two lovely films and to win two Etrogs for them. What’s more, he has taken care of their marketing.
by doug herrick
Like many talented professionals with an impatience for academic formalities, Phil Borsos began his career inauspiciously. He flunked his first filmmaking course.
But Borsos is not your average underachieving West-coast filmmaker. Today, at the tender age of 25, he has made two films, Cooperage and Spartree, both of which won the Etrog in the Theatrical Short category for the respective years of 1976 and 1977. In addition, he owns his own production company and backs up his considerable filmmaking skills with the promotional instincts and marketing savvy not always associated with the independent filmmaker.
Borsos has not let his visual style be seduced by the physical scale and epic quality of the British Columbia landscape. Instead, he prefers to work his camera in close, minutely documenting the processes of such dying arts as barrel-making and tree-topping. And he does so with the precise craftsmanship of his subjects. :
Although he dabbled in photography in high school, Borsos is more conscious of the effect that silkscreening had on his visual discipline. As he tells it, “My father taught me silkscreening quite early. | became more and more drawn to the medium because it is so stark. | liked that. 1 also liked the fact that you could follow one single image to its logical conclusion. In fact, the idea of a single image is important in my inspiration for a film. If I walk into a place and I see something right off the bat, | know I have a film. The idea for Spartree, for example, came from a Vancouver Sun photo I saw of a giant fir being topped because it was infected with dry rot. Wow, what a shot!” (What a shot is right. For the dramatic topping of the giant fir in Spartree, Borsos assembled
Doug Herrick is the film librarian for the Canadian Consulate General in Boston.
Cinema Canada/17