Allan King

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Allan King
Allan King
 This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (July 2007)

Allan Winton King (b. February 6, 1930, Vancouver, British Columbia) is a Canadian film director. He currently runs Allan King Films Limited in Toronto. During the Depression he attended Henry Hudson Elementary School in Kitsilano, Vancouver.[1]

King was one of the pioneers of direct cinema also known as cinema-verite documentary filmmaking. King describes his style as "actuality drama - filming the drama of everyday life as it happens, spontaneously without direction, interviews or narrative." He says he strives to "serve the action as unobtrusively as possible" and does so by becoming very familiar with the environment and people he films- paying particular attention to movement patterns, routines and light quality. He believes actuality drama does not and cannot effectively provide information and background. Rather in King's hands, direct cinema is pure, visceral form.

After 11 years of documentary filmmaking, his 1967 film Warrendale transformed King from journeyman filmmaker into a legend. "Warrendale" is a story about emotionally disturbed children. They live in a Toronto institution that practices a "holding" technique of safely restraining a child when she or he loses control because of fear, rage or grief. the therapy is designed to push children to verbalize their emotions so they learn to identify and deal with them. Holding is employed instead of drugs or other techniques. The documentary is not an expose of the restraining technique. It neither chastises or applauds the approach. Instead Warrendale is an absorbing, empathetic glimpse of the process of being a child in distress.

Unlike Frederick Wiseman, who spends a little time exploring an institution before he begins filming, King believes in spending a significant amount of time with subjects before filming to develop a sense of trust. King spent four weeks at the Warrendale school with 12 children and then another two weeks there with his camera crew before a single frame was shot. The crew had complete access to all aspects of the home/school situation at Warrendale - even meetings where the top school administrator gently admonishes a counselor for using the holding technique at an inappropriate time. King lit the entire home and replaced dark paneling in a hallway with lighter paneling to improve the lights. Filming lasted eight weeks. Getting to know people before filming and staying with situations for a significant chunk of time is essential, he says, "because in order for anything significant to occur in action or drama the subjects must make a huge leap of faith in the filmmaker."

The pivotal moment in "Warrendale" is when the counselors break the news to the children that their cook Dorothy has died suddenly. Children with emotional illnesses often believe their thoughts and feelings cause trauma and tragedy. The filming is very intimate during the most tense and tender moments - sometimes inches from pained faces as they scream and cry all the while being restrained by counselors. The cook's death happened early on during the filming, but King made it the film's climax.

Upon seeing "Warrendale," director Jean Renoir wrote, "Allan King is a great artist. His remarkable work exposes one of the most suspenseful action I have ever seen on a screen."

The Canadian Broadcast Corp. (CBC), which commissioned the film, refused to show it because often the children uttered words such as "fuck" and "bullshit." But CBC allowed King to distribute "Warrendale" to theaters. It won the Priz d'art et d'essai at Cannes in 1967. It also shared the British Academy's Best Foreign Film Award with Michaelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up" and the New York Critics' Award with Jean-Louis Buouel's "La Belle du Jour."

Despite censorship, King continued to innovate and in 1969 directed "A Married Couple," which explores a crisis in a real marriage and the issue of choice. New York Times' critic Clive Barnes described "A Married Couple" as "quite simply one of the best films I have ever seen."

During more than 50 years of filmmaking, King has worked in every film genre except animation, creating an enormous and diverse portfolio. To support his documentaries, King also directed episodic television and feature films. His first dramatic feature film, Who Has Seen the Wind, (1976) won the Grand Prix at the Paris International Film Festival and the Golden Reel Award for the highest grossing Canadian film of the year. The many television dramas he has directed have won top awards.

Now (2007) in his seventies, King's passion for actuality drama is vibrant. In 2003, he produced the documentary Dying at Grace, an intimate actuality drama about five people in their final days at the Palliative Care Unit of the Salvation Army Toronto Grace Health Center as they come to terms with their deaths. It has won awards at major film festivals including Toronto and Berlin.

King says he became a documentary filmmaker because, "I used to have a fantasy everyone would see my films and be changed for the better. That's why you want to make films."

In 2002, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

A collection of ten of King's films were released as a collection representing various stages of life.

(Resources: Allan King Filmmaker by Seth Feldman 2002; Children of Our Time by Stanley Kaufmann 1967; Crisis, What Crisis by Nik Sheehan 2002)

Contents

[edit] Filmography

[edit] Films and telefilms

  • Skid Row (1956)
  • The Pemberton Valley (1957)
  • Rickshaw (1960) (TV)
  • Interview with Orson Welles (1960) (TV)
  • A Matter of Pride (1961) (TV)
  • Dreams (1962) (TV)
  • The Field Day (1963)
  • Joshua: A Nigerian Portrait (1963) (TV)
  • Running Away Backwards (1964)
  • Children in Conflict: A Talk with Irene (1967)
  • Warrendale (1967)
  • A Married Couple (1969)
  • Come on Children (1973)
  • Red Emma (1974) (TV)
  • Maria (1977) (TV)
  • Who Has Seen the Wind (1977)
  • One Night Stand (1978) (TV)
  • Silence of the North (1981)
  • Tucker and the Horse Thief (1985) (TV)
  • The Last Season (1986)
  • Termini Station (1989)
  • The Dragon's Egg (1998) (TV)
  • Leonardo: A Dream of Flight (1998) (TV)
  • Dying at Grace (2003)
  • Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005)
  • EMPz 4 Life (2006)

[edit] Television series

[edit] Further reading

  • Allan King: Filmmaker, ed. by Seth Feldman, Indiana University Press 2002, ISBN 0968913210

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Memories of Maria: A Contribution to the Discussion on "The Image of the Working Class in Canadian Media", Allan King, Take One, 1 December 2001

[edit] External links



v • d • e
Cinema of Canada
Languages