NFB filmmaker was a ‘self-effacing giant’
Wolf Koenig was a man of many talents. The veteran filmmaker’s credits included animator, cinematographer, editor, director and producer during his 47-year career with the National Film Board (NFB). He died Thursday at the age of 86.
“Koenig’s films were lauded for their sophisticated style and what was often a subtle irony in their observation of human behaviour and modern society,” read a tribute on the NFB website.
Born in Dresden, Germany, on Oct. 17, 1927, Koenig grew up in Galt (which became Cambridge), Ont., where his family settled in 1937. He joined the NFB in 1948, after meeting a film crew near the family farm, and lived much of his professional life in Montreal.
He was the cinematographer for Norman McLaren’s Oscar-winning 1952 short, Neighbours, which featured innovative use of stop-motion photography. He was an animator for Colin Low’s Oscar-nominated short, The Romance of Transportation in Canada, which won best animated short at the Cannes Film Festival.
He co-directed City of Gold (1957) with Low, using archival photographs of the Klondike gold rush; it won the Canadian Film Award for film of the year, was nominated for an Oscar and won best documentary short at Cannes.
Koenig was one of the leaders of the direct cinema movement at the NFB’s Unit B, which sought to ex- pand the parameters of filmmaking. He and Roman Kroitor made three notable music documentaries: Glenn Gould — On & Off the Record (1959); Lonely Boy (1962), about Paul Anka; and Stravinsky (1965).
His animation on Kroitor and Low’s 1960 film Universe was cited by Stanley Kubrick as an influence for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Koenig was executive producer of the NFB’s animation studio from 1962 to 1967, and from 1972 to 1975, during which time he produced or executive produced several Oscarnominated films.
He won a Genie Award in 1984 as producer on Michael Mirus and John Paskievich’s documentary short, Ted Baryluk’s Grocery. He co-produced Alanis Obomsawin’s Genie-nominated documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), about the 1990 Oka crisis.
Koenig retired in 1995, with a CV including more than 170 films he had contributed to over the years, and moved to Westport, Ont.
“In my time at the board, I never met anyone more generous with his time and talent than Wolf,” wrote retired director Paul Cowan on the NFB website. “He was a great filmmaker, yes, but even that was eclipsed by his desire and ability to inspire others. ... He was a self-effacing giant.”
Read the National Film Board’s tribute to Wolf Koenig and view several films he worked on at nfb.ca