The SILENT TREATMENT

The Yukon Film Society rescues a forgotten Canadian classic — with a little help from Shakespeare

In 1923, two years before Charlie Chaplin made his Klondike film The Gold Rush, a Canadian woman named Nell Shipman was there first. It wasn’t an unusual position for Shipman. Born in Victoria in 1898, she was a cinema pioneer: a director, writer, producer, actress and sometimes stuntwoman in silent films. She was also known for appearing in the first nude scene in a movie in North America, a 1919 drama called Back to God’s Country that was Canada’s first feature film. She was a talented eccentric who kept a menagerie of 100 abused and rescued animals, including a bear named Brownie that she would take into downtown Los Angeles on shopping trips (the bear would wait in the car with her collie, Laddie).

Brownie, and a lot of the other animals, also appeared in her films. They have a part in The Grub Stake, her Klondike movie that told a silentscreen melodrama: A pretty young woman named Faith Diggs (Shipman) is lured to the Klondike during the gold rush days with the promise of a grubstake for a gold mine. When she gets there, she learns a villainous bounder wants to sell her to the local dance hall. She escapes and goes looking for a lost gold mine. Virtue wins the day.

The Grub Stake — which Shipman wrote and co-directed with her husband at the time, Bert Van Tuyle — beat Chaplin to the North, but it didn’t get much distribution in theatres.

That’s all changed now, thanks to the Yukon Film Society, a composer named Daniel Janke and William Shakespeare.

The Grub-Stake

Revisited

is

a refigured version of the movie: reedited, set to an original score of roots and classical music that’s performed by live musicians, and given a new, ironic subtext with the addition of a narration comprised of lines from Shakespeare’s plays. Actors deliver the words as Shipman and her company of long-dead stars act out the adventures of Faith and her loyal friends.

“We thought we’d play with the cliches and the stereotypes and revisit them in a modern way,” says Andrew Connors, producer of the film and artistic director of the Yukon Film Society in Whitehorse.

“In a lot of scenes there is a lot of comedy in the interplay between the Shakespearean dialogue and what’s happening in the story. The music

‘We thought we’d play with the stereotypes and revisit then in

a modern way’

kind of grounds the Shakespearean text. It doesn’t let it run off to being a farce or too much of a parody.”

Connors says the original idea was to compose a score for a silent film — which Janke had done before — and it just grew from there. Connors supplied the film: he had been interested in Shipman’s career ever since the Toronto International Film Festival paid tribute to “Canada’s forgotten star” in 2003. Janke supplied the music and the inspiration to add Shakespearean dialogue “to sort of create a parallel or mirrored narrative that matches the film,” Connors says in a telephone interview.

Janke was inspired by the 1966 Woody Allen movie What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, in which Allen removed the voice track from a cheesy Japanese spy movie and recorded new dialogue, turning the film into a comedy about a search for a secret recipe for egg salad.

“That was the starting point, but there were three writers, and once they started into it they realized they could actually shape the dialogue to match the dramatic action in the original film,” Connors says. “If you’re just taking passages or lines, you can just shape it a lot of different ways. The film matches the Shakespearean structure.”

The show had its premiere at last year’s Yukon film festival, then screened in Edmonton and at the Vancouver film festival. It hits the road again in May, with screenings in Calgary, Ottawa and Toronto, accompanied by the troupe of five actors and five musicians.

In a way, it represents the first wide release of The Grub Stake, although in a form that Shipman wouldn’t recognize.

“It’s much more exciting because everything is done live,” Connors says. “And it’s also much funnier because of the extra layer with the Shakespearean text. There’s a lot of recognizable passages and lines as you’re going through: it’s like Shakespeare’s greatest hits at times.” The film has also been edited: the intertitles were removed and 30 minutes were cut, making it faster-paced.

Connors says the producers plan to film their version to create a performance-art/documentary h ybrid that they hope will have a theatrical release or become a TV special.