Vue Weekly on BILL MARSDEN's book
PRINT CULTURE
By CHRISTOPHER WIEBE
Vue Magazine
Championing Alberta
Alberta’s publishing record with regard to its own cultural history is
extremely patchy, perhaps befitting a province that doesn’t know whether to
gush with pride over its attainments in the arts or “to reach for its
revolver.” Important pieces of the historical puzzle, nevertheless, continue
to fall into place. George Melnyk performed the thankless and invaluable work of
pawing over Alberta’s literary history some years back, while retired U of A
English professor Diane Bessai continues her mammoth project of writing
Edmonton’s theatre history. Meanwhile, memories are bleached away and paper
trails disappear. Anyone who has done research in public archives knows that
their sieve-like mandate for preserving the past can be disappointing indeed.
The serendipitous preservation of documents makes the work of historians who
mine living memory all the more important. Thankfully some of those who have
held key roles fostering Alberta’s cultural scene are now completing their
memoirs. Alberta’s Camelot (2003) by Fil Fraser was an incisive and
entertaining analysis of the provincial government’s farsighted support for
the performing arts in the 1970s and ’80s. Now Bill Marsden, who has been
involved in the Alberta film industry since its nascent stages in the 1950s, has
published a memoir and history of Alberta film pioneers, Big Screen Country:
Making Movies in Alberta (Fifth House). It’s a path-breaking book complete
with photographs, anecdotal sidebars and a detailed appendix of all the feature
movies made in the province between 1946 and 2003.
While filmmaking in Alberta goes back to Nell Shipman’s Back to God’s
Country (1919), shot at Lesser Slave Lake, Marsden begins with the era
inaugurated by the big Hollywood productions, the first being The Emperor Waltz
(1946), shot in Jasper by Billy Wilder. The infrastructure for local production
was built up over the following decades: the first film studio opened in Calgary
in 1953. Marsden’s route into filmmaking sprang from his work as an itinerant
commercial photographer in the 1940s. In 1958 he worked for the Glenbow
Foundation making documentary films (including Okan, a celebrated record of a
Blackfoot sun dance in 1961) and later founded his own production company.
Marsden’s book analyzes the making of important Alberta films like Why Shoot
the Teacher?(1976) and Bye Bye Blues (1988) and discusses the founding of the
provincial funding agency Alberta Motion Pictures Development Corporation (AMPDC)
in 1981.
If Alberta’s Camelot had a sort of “look back in anger” backbone, the same
level of cultural conviction isn’t always immanent in Marsden’s prose. That
said, he comes out with guns blazing on the idiocy of Steve West’s
ideologically driven termination of the AMPDC in 1996. Though on paper it
“saved” a few million dollars of film seed money, the cut virtually
destroyed the film industry goose that laid golden eggs of economic
“enhancement”—droves of pivotal figures like director Arvi Liimatainen and
the major production company Great North moved out of the province. Pointing to
successes in Australia, Marsden is equally impassioned about the importance of
“regional” filmmaking in the development of a national cinema. In total, Big
Screen Country is an indispensable guide to Alberta’s boom and bust cinematic
life. V