The late filmmaker Mort Ransen helped shape Canadian cinema
Mort Ransen
Mort Ransen who recently died at the age of eighty-eight was a very important Canadian filmmaker and an extraordinary person. I first met Ransen in 1968 when I was a teaching assistant for a large film class at McGill University. Ransen was at that stage really interested in putting the tools of creativity into the hands of young people. It was natural for him to address that issue in the class because he believed in democracy, in making the tools of creativity available for everyone and in giving voice to those who were excluded from the film sector.
Why is he not better known in Canada? It is evidence of a vast gap between the creative sector in Canada and the Canadian media and the Canadian public. We celebrate a small number of successful writers, filmmakers, theatre practitioners, artists, musicians and dancers in the country, consigning the vast majority of committed creative people in many areas, practices and disciplines to the margins of our awareness and the margins of our society.
I don’t blame the press for this. It is part and parcel of the intense regionalization of the country, the lack of knowledge of the extraordinarily important work going on in many disciplines in Quebec and the isolation of the Maritimes and the West from the mainstream in Ontario. We don’t distribute our national institutions but instead centralize them in Ottawa with a few exceptions. The axis of Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa has the vast majority of creative practitioners in the country. There is no unified national model driven by the recognition that we live and breathe culture everyday. There are very few cross-cultural national projects that engage Canadians in thinking about their cultural priorities.
Ransen, who was born in Montreal, lived the latter part of his life on Saltspring Island. One of his most important films, “Christopher’s Movie Matinee” (1968) is a masterpiece of Cinéma Vérité, a precursor to many films which copied its informal style and ‘real’ life look and feel. The cameraman who worked with Ransen, Martin Duckworth is one of the most important cinematographers in the history of Canadian film. Margaret’s Museum, (1995) which is set in the 1940’s in Nova Scotia is a master class in how to depict an important historical event, aside from its importance in unveiling the challenges of the mining industry in Canada.
Frederick Wiseman, the other master of this style of cinema, made his mark with a film entitled, “High School,” in the same year (1968) as Christopher’s Movie Matinee was released. Both men owe a debt to Pierre Perrault, Gilles Groulx and Michel Brault at the National Film whose work in the 1950’s established Canada as a leader in the documentary cinema worldwide.
Ransen was a gentle, loving soul, a man devoted to the cinema and to a life of filmmaking. He made a short documentary entitled “Falling From Ladders” in 1969 in collaboration with the Swedish Film Institute that documents and explains our culture’s obsession with data. “Simply by putting about twenty Swedish men, women and young people in front of his camera and having them read aloud from the Statistical Year Book, filmmaker Mort Ransen has recorded a wide range of impressions of Sweden's economic and social existence. Quotations vary from the whole gamut of exports and imports, marriages formed or dissolved, to the number of people who fall from ladders annually.” The film is not available on the NFB site which is a real shame. (Quote Reference)
Ransen described his career in Making Movie History a short, beautiful film that shows how creative, intelligent and sensitive Ransen was. It is six minutes long. During the film, Ransen mentions Arthur Lipsett who also worked at NFB. Lipsett’s film, Very Nice, Very Nice is a true masterpiece and influenced Ransen and many other filmmakers for decades to come.
During this same period 1955-1969, similar explosions of experimentation in the cinema were happening in Toronto and Vancouver. Take One, an early film magazine started in 1966 in Montreal and reported on many of these developments. Joyce Wieland began making some of the most important experimental films of the decade.The experimental filmmaker, David Rimmer’s “Migration,” influenced filmmakers across the country. The same can be said for Gary Lee-Nova, whose film, Steel Mushrooms is well worth watching. Kathleen Shannon began to discuss the founding of Studio D at the NFB during this time. Kathleen Shannon: On Film, Feminism & Other Dreams is a portrait of her extraordinary contribution to the growth and development of Canadian feminist cinema.
This short article began with a discussion of Mort Ransen. It quickly morphed into a more contextual piece because Ransen worked in a setting of tumultuous change during which an entirely new cinematographic language was being created. Canada was in the lead during the 1950’s and1960’s in developing the cultural foundations for a national cinema. Ransen’s death highlights how much work there is left to do, how important the cinema has been to our cultural history and how crucial it is to inform a new generation of our heritage of experimentation and exploration in film and many other disciplines.
