By Darrell Varga
John Walker is considered one of Canada's such a lot prolific and critical documentary filmmakers and is understood for his many considerate, in my opinion inflected motion pictures. His masterwork, Passage, centres on Sir John Franklin's failed excursion to discover the ultimate hyperlink of the Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans throughout the Canadian Arctic. It additionally supplies us the tale of John Rae, the Scottish explorer who chanced on the destiny of Franklin and the ultimate hyperlink within the passage, yet was once left to the margins of historical past. Walker's movie brings to this tale a layering of dramatic motion and behind-the-scenes documentary pictures that construct pressure among the tale of the earlier and interpretations of the present.
Darrell Varga offers an in depth research of Passage, situating it inside Walker's wealthy physique of labor and the Canadian documentary culture. Varga illuminates how the movie should be seen throughout the lens of Harold Innis's theories of communique and tradition, establishing up the paintings of this nice Canadian political economist to movie stories.
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Extra resources for John Walker's Passage (Canadian Cinema, Volume 9)
Example text
For Michael Chanan, the film and its approach are pointedly distinct from Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, a film with a similar theme in reproducing the hunt: ‘Unlike Flaherty, who hid the fact that his walrus and shark hunts were re-enactments, here the hunt is openly revived at the filmmaker’s instigation as a symbolic act (the whale ends up being sold to an aquarium in New York). ’13 With Michel Brault as cinematographer, Pour la suite du monde is an important film in the development of Cinema Direct.
In 1994 the first Hot Docs festival was held, an event that has since become a major stop on the international documentary festival circuit. Along the same lines, Walker’s other great influence Paul Strand became a photographer at a time when the idea of photography as a fine art was not widely accepted, and he had to argue for the medium’s value as art. The blind spot for film scholars who typically focus on the finished ‘text’ is the degree to which independent filmmakers in Canada need to lobby and organize collectively (for instance, through the various filmmaking cooperatives and groups such as DOC, the Director’s Guild of Canada, and, among others, the Canadian Media Production Association).
King would become for Walker a model for learning how to work and survive as a private-sector filmmaker. In addition to Warrendale, King’s many films include the direct-cinema masterpiece A Married Couple (1969). In this project he was ahead of his time in that he was not interested in simply making a copy of reality. ’11 What Druick goes on to point out in King’s work, and what Walker comes to master in his own, is that the art of documentary is not in the reproduction of reality but in the filmmaker’s self-conscious engagement with the challenge of encountering reality.