Director Don Owen, sitting right, on the set of 1967’s The Ernie Games.
The English Canadian filmmakers who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s were notable not simply for their groundbreaking, sometimes extraordinary work, but because they were able to create it in an environment which seemed not just indifferent to artistic pursuits, but downright hostile toward them.
That was certainly the case when Don Owen – who died in Toronto on Feb. 21 at the age of 84 – began his career. Along with contemporaries such as Larry Kent, Allan King and Don Shebib, Owen launched the English Canadian feature-film industry with his internationally acclaimed debut Nobody Waved Goodbye in 1964, and his career trajectory leading up to and following that milestone is illustrative of the challenges facing film artists in this culture.
Born in Toronto in 1931, Owen grew up obsessed with movies, but he originally wanted to be a poet. This kind of career choice was hardly conducive to finding one's place in the Toronto of the 1950s. Far from the multicultural city we know today, Toronto then was "Laura Secord heaven," as Owen called it: super-WASPy, fanatically uptight and inclined to view artists of any kind as good-for-nothing loafers.
Owen's memories of this restrictive milieu surely had something to do with his predilection for artists as both subjects in his documentaries – the artists profiled in Cowboy and Indian (1972); the musicians featured in Toronto Jazz (1963) – and characters in his fiction features, such as Peter Kastner's teenage hero in Nobody Waved Goodbye, Hollis McLaren's would-be photographer in Partners (1976); the artist-cum-activist boyfriend in Unfinished Business (1984).
Leaving Toronto for Montreal, Owen found a haven in the more welcoming confines of the National Film Board. It was a fortuitous moment to arrive at the NFB, as the conservatism of the John Grierson era was giving way to a new generation of cineastes. Equipped with lightweight 16-mm cameras and mobile audio-recording systems, directors such as Michel Brault, Gilles Groulx, Claude Jutra and Pierre Perrault began to document life in Quebec, and eventually, the rest of Canada, in the process reinventing the NFB's entire approach to filmmaking.
During his time in Montreal, Owen had the chance to work as cameraman on some of the NFB's key films of the period, including À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre (1961) – and this despite the fact that his status as a Torontonian made him an outsider among the NFB's leading lights.
Given the chance to direct his own short film back in Toronto, Owen made Runner (1962), a portrait of middle- and long-distance runner Bruce Kidd. Though his film is clearly a cousin to the American Direct Cinema movement of the period, Owen distinguishes himself from contemporaries such as D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers – who tended to latch on to high-profile subjects with built-in conflicts – by focusing on the essential loneliness of his runner rather than the drama of victory and defeat. (It's not even clear who wins the race depicted in the film.)
Owen showed even greater chutzpah when he directed Nobody Waved Goodbye, which grew out of an assignment to make a half-hour docudrama about middle-class juvenile delinquency in Toronto. As he began improvising dramatic situations with his young performers, Owen moved farther away from his original brief. According to legend, the NFB higher-ups were on vacation during the production, and no one was monitoring how much footage Owen was shooting; he simply kept ordering more film stock as the summer went on, until he had shot enough material for an entire feature film.
This was not Owen's only sin against orthodoxy. During the shooting, the director had the audacity to argue with the veteran cinematographer John Spotton, insisting that they shoot a crucial scene in the evening, during a rainstorm, over the DP's objections. The result was one of the film's most touching and poignant sequences.
Initially released in Canada with little fanfare, Nobody Waved Goodbye seemed destined for obscurity until a rapturous reception at the New York Film Festival sparked a domestic re-release. Canadian film scholar Peter Harcourt argued that Goodbye heralded the emergence of a genuinely English Canadian perspective in homegrown cinema, and Owen, once a near-pariah, now came to be viewed as the future of the NFB.
Though Owen's later features do not reach the heights of his work in the 1960s, all of them strive to depict significant changes in Canadian culture that were rarely reflected in the country's cinema.
I didn't meet Owen until 2004, although I had attempted to do so a couple of years earlier when he attended a panel discussion at the Toronto International Film Festival, but was foiled when he bolted from the room and across Avenue Road immediately after the event. I soon found out that this was the pace he maintained at all times. Owen possessed a character trait that, while not unique to pioneers, is a crucial element of their character: the overwhelming need to plow forward, even when circumstances are less than advantageous.
I witnessed this quality firsthand when we mounted a large exhibition of Owen's paintings as part of the retrospective of his work. Many of the pictures came directly from his country home, and some had significant water damage. As I borderline-panicked about how to deal with this, Don grabbed a bottle of Windex, sprayed it on the canvases, and wiped the mould right off. And just like that nighttime rain shot in Nobody Waved Goodbye that wasn't supposed to work, the paintings emerged unscathed and the show went off without a hitch.
It was that fierce determination that allowed Don Owen to break new ground in Canada's cinematic landscape when the powers-that-were decreed not only that it couldn't, but shouldn't be done.
Steve Gravestock is a senior programmer with the Toronto International Film Festival