Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Lewis Randolph
Title : Alanis Obomsawin The vision of a native filmmaker
Year : 2006

Link download : Lewis_Randolph_-_Alanis_Obomsawin_The_vision_of_a_native_filmmaker.zip

Preface. I got off a plane in Montreal a few years ago, hopped into a taxi with too many notebooks and not enough luggage under my arm, and asked the driver to take me to the offices of the National Film Board (nfb).With a pensive frown and an old-world twist of his mustache, he put the car into gear and adjusted the mirror to give me a glance. Not a few seconds passed before he was compelled to ask why I was going there? The Film Board? On a sunny day? It didn’t seem like very much fun for an American tourist to visit a sprawling bureaucratic maze so far from the cafés and sights of Vieux-Montréal. I laughed and explained that I was meeting a filmmaker named Alanis Obomsawin. Because documentary filmmakers tend to labor under a shroud of semiobscurity, I was prepared to add that she was an important Abenaki filmmaker who had been at the nfb since the 1960s and had made more than twenty films, some of them classics. I assumed I would have to throw out a few film titles like Kanehsatake and Rocks at Whisky Trench to evoke a glimmer of recognition, at least after an awkward pause in which I would begin to wonder about the relevance of what I do for a living. But I had no such need. “Mademoiselle Alanis!” he exclaimed with delight, his voice thick with a French Canadian accent as he wove through the light midmorning traffic. “Oui . . . I watched one of her documentaries on television last night.” ...