Don Owen took on the NFB to push Canadian cinema into the spotlight.
HOW DON OWEN WENT AGAINST THE NFB AND CINEMATIC CONVENTIONS TO BRING AUTHENTICITY TO CANADIAN FILM
One of the enduri ng l egends of Canadian cinema, Nobody Waved Good- bye, is scheduled to open a TIFF series of key films on Thursday. It’s an enjoyable film, and an undoubted piece of cultural history, but the story behind it is as striking as the film itself.
It began in the mid-1960s when the National Film Board set out to make a half- hour TV documentary on j uvenile delinquency and how police dealt with it. Don Owen, a talented young director on the NFB staff in Montreal, was given the assignment and sent off to shoot it in Toronto, his home city. As he developed the idea, he began to think that it might be better as a work of fiction at greater length. And so, disobeying his superiors ( though with furtive help from some midlevel executives), he turned it into just what he wanted to create, a feature film in a country that seldom produced features and his own first real movie, the one that made his reputation.
As the film came together ( at feature length, an hour and 20 minutes) the original theme of juvenile delinquency was set aside. Instead, Peter Mark (played by Peter Kastner), the central figure, represents another phenomenon, a character type that soon became familiar as 1960s radicals began turning against fighti ng in the Vietnam War. In his teens Peter rebelled against bourgeois society but has no idea what a better world might look like. He lacks ambition of any kind and his businessman father considers him “a bad investment.” Peter rejects his own background, an increasingly popular stance in those days: “I don’t want to get in the kind of rut my parents are in.” He’s struggling, incompetently, toward manhood.
His mother, exquisitely played by Charmion King, is a prosperous, smug matron who doesn’t begin to understand him. To make peace she takes Peter to the high-WASP Georgian Room in Eaton’s — t he ultim- ate in prim Toronto during that era. She, and the backgrounds chosen by Owen, give the film a distinctly Toronto tone, definitely not the tone that any local booster would endorse. Peter leaves home, works in a parking lot, gets his girlfriend Julie (Julie Biggs) pregnant, is rejected by her, and seems headed for disaster. We last see him as he drives a stolen car along the highway to an unknown destination.
The improvised dialogue, though sometimes clumsy, is more often effective. Owen suggested that the script was improvised as part of English Canada’s maturing of its own culture. He chose ad-lib because “I didn’t know what it was to be English Canadian, nor did anybody else.”
Back at the National Film Board, Owen was criticized, then forgiven and eventually praised. Still, the Board did little to promote the movie when it came out. The first critics who saw it were unimpressed: Frank Morriss in the Globe and Mail called it “dreary.” In December, 1964 it opened and closed quickly in Toronto and Montreal.
But it came to life again the following year when it was shown at the New York Film Festival. Judith Crist of the New York Herald-Tribune, an influential reviewer of the period, called it the highlight of the event.
That led to a release in New York theatres and much better reviews i n many places. Critics were charmed and also impressed because it was up- to- date, a portrait of an alienated young man of the type that Paul Goodman had investigated in his successful book, Growing Up Absurd. The New Yorker reviewer, Brendan Gill, described the purity and clarity of Owen’s theme. He compared it to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
Owen, who died last winter at 84, was an intellectual who shaped himself into an artist in several stages. At the University of Toronto he wrote poems for a while and later set up a studio as a painter. But by his late twenties he was fixed on a career in movies.
He drew inspiration from jazz ( one of his documen- taries was called Toronto Jazz) and perhaps even more from the artists who flourished in the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s — Michael Snow, Graham Coughtry, Robert Markle and Gordon Rayner. He made one film about Snow at the Venice Biennale, another about Coughtry in Spain and still another about Markle and Rayner. Much of the art they made originated in improvisation, which was also part of Owen’s film style.
He had a rich career at the NFB. With Donald Brittain, Owen made a famous documentary, Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen. He made High Steel, a documentary on Mohawk high steel workers. He directed Runner, a film about Bruce Kidd, an Olympian Canadian distance- runner. He persuaded the poet W. H. Auden to write and voice the narration. He made three more features, mostly unpraised: Notes for a Film About Donna & Gail, The Ernie Game and Unfinished Business, a sequel to Nobody Waved Goodbye. Steve Gravestock has written a thoughtful account of his career, in Don Owen: Notes on a Filmmaker and his Culture (Indiana University Press).
In the history of Canadian cinema he holds a place as one of the most admirable trailblazers. His original transgression, it appears, has been forgiven. When he died the current chair of the National Film Board, Claude Joli- Coeur, paid tribute: “Owen brought a new spirit of risk- taking and authenticity to Canadian cinema.”
OWEN BROUGHT A NEW SPIRIT OF RISK-TAKING...TO CINEMA.