Allan King was one the cinema’s most acute chroniclers of unadorned reality,but the term documentary seems to puny to describe the intense,passionate stories he contrived to fashion from that reality.King’s early nonfiction features are generally considered part of the 1960scinema verite and direct cinema schools of filmmaking,named alongside works by such pioneers of those movements as Jean Rouch,Richard Leacock,D.A.Pennebaker,and the maysles brothers King shared with these artists a desire to capture life as it happened,as well as a questioning of the ethics of that desire and a self-reflexive acknowledgement of the camera’s inherently mediating presence.But King’s films,known best in his native Canada because of limited distribution elsewhere,stand out from the field for their sheer sense of drama;indeed,the term he coined for these unique flimic experiences was actuality dramas,From moments out of time,captured as unobtrusively as possible,King sculpts narratives with the finesse of a great scenarist.And in each of his five most renowned films-Warrendale,A Married Couple,Come On Children,Dying at Grace,and Memory for Max,Claire,Ida and Company-he does so from the lives of people(or characters,as he often called them) who are situated at some remove from society,whether due to emotional instability,disease,youth,or old age.Taken together,his films paint a compassionate picture of humanity along a startling continuum of estrangement.
Born in Vancouver in 1930,King wasn’t initially artistically inclined.The child of a tumultuous,ultimately broken marriage,he spent summers as a logger when he was a youth,becoming a union representative by the time he was fifteen.His interest in filmmaking was sparked by a teenage friend,Stan Fox,with whom he would eventually run the Vancouver Film Society.In 1954,after graduating with a degree in philosophy from the University of British Columbia,King got a job as an assistant editor at Vancouver’s first television station,CBUT.Soon he was directing his own shorts for broadcast on CBC,Canada’s national channel.Late in life,he would say,”I’ve always made films for a purely selfish reason-which is to answer the question,why?”And this inquisitiveness was apparent from his first film,the nonfiction short Skidrow(1956),a respectful portrait of derelict men in Vancouver that was King’s attempt to understand not only life on the other side of the tracks but also his own alcoholic father.This and his other early films were influenced by the documentaries of British filmmakers Humphrey Jennings and Lindsay Anderson(King called Anderson’s Thursday’s Children “a model for my work”).These were purely emotional,nonpolemical works-including Rickshaw(1960),about pedicab operators in Calcutta,and A Matter of Pride(1961),about a family stricken by unemployment-and they paved the way for King’s breakthrough,Warrendale(1967).
The origin of that film was a pitch King made to CBC for a documentary about a school for gifted children in Britain;a producer at the network preferred that the project be set in Canada,and he recommended Warrendale,an experimental Toronto rehabilitation home for emotionally disturbed kids.This environment would prove ideal for King,who would discover there the mix of distance and cmpassion that became his trademark,and further refine the verite aesthetic he had been developing over the previous decad;no talking-head interviews,no voice-over,no readily apparent narrative structure.King,having gotten his first portable camera from Albert Maysles,credited the Boston-born filmmaker with helping him adapt to these methods.Released from the burden of bulky equipment,King’s crew maneuvered their new lightweight cameras effortlessly around the interiors of Warrendale,gliding from one electrifying moment to the next,capturing the children’s tumults as easily as their occasional joys.As with all of King’s actuality dramas-which would be interspersed throughout his career with television work,fiction features,and more straightforward documentaries-this is drama ripped from life but drama nonetheless,a blurring of commonly observed cinematic boundaries.
Warrendale was certainly a place where intense human experience could be located:what the school’s founder,John Brown,was trying to establish was not just a treatment facility but a kind of home environment where complex psychological wounds would be treated with physical contact,attention,and confrontation rather than medication.One of his most striking techniques was the “holding method,” involving the creation of a sort of human staritjacket by wrapping the children’s arms across their own torsos and pinning their wrists to their sides when they acted out,which we see practiced on-screen by Warrendale’s staff.The care is extreme and appears bordering violent at times,an attempt to get the children to regress to an infantile state.There’s a moment,for instance,when King dissolves to an a image of Irene,one of the home’s teenage residents(and one of the film’s most dramatic personalities),suckling on a baby bottle while being cradled by a counselor.At other times,King’s camera watches as the caregivers allow the children to indulge in cigars and beer.
In order to capture such occasionally shocking intimacy,King had to establish a relationship of complete trust with his subjects.He found that when he was in the room with the kids,they were more apt to goof off,so after getting to know the principal subjects and the building’s layout,he mostly retreated and let his crew take over.He wanted the camera to become part of the scenery as well as a tool to encourage sharing.(He would continue to employ this method in all of his actuality dramas.)The authentic pain and outsize emotions King ultimately captured in Warrendale place the film high in the Direct Cinema pantheon.And few set pieces from any film are more wrenching than the extended sequence in which the already fragile kids are informed of the death of their beloved cook,Dorothy,which results in a screaming,wrestling,tearstained frenzy of titanic proportions;Carol’s incessant howling of “I don’t want nobody!”while being held down by caregiver Walter Gunn,his shirt soaked through with perspiration,is a particularly vivid evocation of immutable human agony.
Though it provides the climax of the film,this fraught scene actually occurred early on in the five-week shoot;as King later said,”The rest was filling in the background.”Knowing this provides insight into the careful craftsmanship involved in his seemingly off-the cuff cinema.And mediation didn’t occur in postproduction alone.of course:when watching King’s actuality dramas(and most other verite films,for that matter),viewers have often wondered how much of the subjects’ behavior is the result of the camera’s presence-whether they are,in a sense,performing.King once stated,”It’s not that in any of these films the people aren’t aware of the camera and using it.”Indeed,the prepubescent Tony,one of Warrendale’s most memorable figures,appears to relish spouting what sometimes seems a constant stream of expletives in the camera’s presence.
Little Tony’s outbursts contributed to a ruckus outside the walls of Warrendale as well.ONce executives at CBC saw the footage,and heard the number of times the word fuck was uttered by these damaged young souls,they refused to air the film.But King was allowed to retain theatrical distribution rights,in Canada and abroad,and Warrendale went on to great success,winning special prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and the British Academy of Film and Television Awards.King’s arrival in the cinema world was cemented when he found a fan in none other than Jean Renoir,who wrote to the fimmaker’s publicist that “Allan King is a great artist,” and that while watching Warrendale he was “under the impression of being hidden in a corner of this children’s hospital and of actually witnessing the events registered on-screen.”
That sense of being a part of the world that King presents,almost too firmly ensconced in it,would come to typify King’s actuality dramas,all of which are severely contained in time,space,and action.The entrapment is part of the point,perhaps.His films are essentially the opposite of what most people expect from movies:escape.As he put it:”Escape is wonderful,but as a diet,you end up with a funny society.And I don’t know that it’s that much fun.”---MK
