Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker

Preface

Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page xi / / ALANIS OBOMSAWIN / Randolph Lewis 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [-11], (11) Lines: 419 to 454 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-11], (11) 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 atWhisky 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.” Kim — University of Nebraska Press / Page xii / / ALANIS OBOMSAWIN / Randolph Lewis xii PREFACE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [-12], (12) Lines: 454 to 470 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-12], (12) “Really?” It seemed so improbable—Obomsawin’s films had almost never appeared on television in the United States. “Oh yes,” he said, grinning in appreciation. “Ah . . . Mademoiselle Alanis . . . Elle est magnifique!” At that moment my suspicion was confirmed: Alanis Obomsawin was not the usual documentary filmmaker. In the few years since this exchange with the taxi driver, it has come to seem emblematic of how she is regarded by those who know her work. Other stories come to mind: The student photographer who saw Obomsawin shooting footage behind the razor wire at Oka and was inspired to become a documentary filmmaker. The soft-spoken Métis woman, hardly out of college, who glowed whenever her cinematic mentor walked into the room. The prominent Native artist who gushed about how Obomsawin had cleared a path for subsequent generations of indigenous mediamakers. The list goes on for quite some time before a dissenting word is heard, and even then it is muted in nature. Indeed,by virtue of her myriad accomplishments and lofty reputation , Obomsawin could be considered the grande dame of Canadian documentary filmmaking, if not the Canadian film industry in general . Still one of Canada’s most distinguished filmmakers at the age of seventy-two,she has made almost two dozen documentaries about the lives and struggles of Native people in North America. All these films have their roots in her childhood experiences on the Abenaki reserve called Odanak and in French Canadian towns such as Three Rivers, where she spent her difficult adolescence. Then as now, creativity was her salvation. After a stint as a fashion model, she found widespread acclaim as a traditional Abenaki singer and storyteller on the folk circuits of the early 1960s. With friends such as the novelist and songwriter Leonard Cohen, she became a fixture in bohemian Montreal until her Native activism prompted the nfb to hire her as a consultant in 1967. Within a few years of joining the nfb, she seized an opportunity to direct her first film, Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), a study of life in a small northern settlement based solely on children...