Allan King

Allan King

Allan Winton King, OC, DFA (b. February 6, 1930, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada – d. June 15, 2009, Toronto, Ontario, Canada)^[1]) was a Canadian film director.

Life

During the Depression King attended Henry Hudson Elementary School in Kitsilano, Vancouver.^[2] He 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."^{[citation needed]}

In 2002, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. A collection of ten of King's films was released as a collection representing various stages of life. His work was also the focus of a retrospective at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival. In 2007 New York City's Museum of Modern Art hosted a retrospective of his work.^[3]

Preeminent documentarian

King was a leader of the documentary technique known as cinema-verite.^{[citation needed]} He ran Allan King Films Limited in Toronto. 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, by paying particular attention to movement patterns, routines and light quality.

Warrendale

The film tells about emotionally disturbed children who live in a Toronto institution known as Warrendale. The school practiced an experimental "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. Rather, Warrendale is an absorbing, empathetic glimpse of children in distress.

Unlike Frederick Wiseman, who spends a short period exploring an institution before he begins filming, King spends a significant amount of time with subjects before filming to develop trust with his subjects. King spent four weeks at the Warrendale school with 12 children and then another two weeks there with his camera crew before filming began. The crew had complete access to all aspects of the home/school situation at Warrendale - including one meeting 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 had said, "because in order for anything significant to occur in action or drama the subjects must make a huge leap of faith in the filmmaker".^{[citation needed]}

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 intimate during the most tense and tender moments - with the camera 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."^{[citation needed]}

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which commissioned the film, refused to show it because the children often swore, uttering such words as "fuck" and "bullshit" that were not permitted on Canadian television at the time. Instead, the CBC allowed King to show Warrendale in cinemas. Shown in the Parallel Section at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967, it won the Prix d'art et d'essai. It also shared BAFTA's Best Foreign Film Award with Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up and the New York Critics' Circle Award (1968) with Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour.

A Married Couple

Despite censorship, King continued to innovate^{[peacock term]} 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".^{[citation needed]}

Other genres

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 has also directed episodic television and feature films. His first dramatic feature film, Who Has Seen the Wind (1976), based on the novel by W. O. Mitchell, 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.

In 2003, he produced the documentary, Dying at Grace, a docudrama about five people in their final days at the Palliative Care Unit of the Salvation Army Toronto Grace Health Centre as they come to terms with their deaths. It won awards at film festivals in Toronto and Berlin.

Death

Allan King died from brain cancer on June 15, 2009, aged 79, at his home in Toronto.

Filmography

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)

Television series

• Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985)
• Philip Marlowe, Private Eye (1986 episode)
• Friday the 13th: The Series (1987)
• The Twilight Zone (1988 episode)
• Bordertown (1989 episode)
• Road to Avonlea (1989)
• Neon Rider (1990 episode)
• Dracula: The Series (1990, 1991 episodes)
• Madison (1993 episodes)
• Kung Fu: The Legend Continues (1993)
• Twice in a Lifetime (1999)

Further reading

• Seth Feldman, ed., Allan King: Filmmaker, Indiana University Press 2002, ISBN 0968913210
• Stanley Kaufmann, Children of Our Time, 1967;
• Nik Sheehan, Crisis, What Crisis, 2002)

References

External links

• Allan King at the Internet Movie Database
• Allan King Films
• The Philosopher King