Week of December 9, 2004, Issue #477
ARTS
Nell by mouth
By PAUL MATWYCHUK
Jean-Luc Godard once defined film as “truth, 24 frames a second.”
But Sharon Pollock takes precisely the opposite view in her play Moving
Pictures, which begins with the voice of Thomas Edison explaining
how the apparently continuous action of movies is only an illusion. What happens
between the still images on a strip of film, Pollock argues, is the real truth—as
a record of what really happened in our lives, movies are as unreliable an authority
as... well, as our memories.
Pollock sets out to illustrate this thesis through the story of Canadian film
pioneer Nell Shipman, a second-rate juvenile vaudeville performer who got involved
in filmmaking during the movie industry’s rough-and-tumble early years
back in the mid-teens. She flourished in the new medium, and became a full-fledged
star in 1919 with the shot-on-location outdoor epic Back to God’s Country,
in which she wrote a plum role for herself as a young bride who is forced to
fend for herself in the Canadian Arctic when her husband is killed by a villainous
ship’s captain. With that success under her belt, Shipman took increasing
control of her subsequent vehicles, writing, directing and producing them, as
well as financing them independently and shooting them at Lionhead Lodge, a
combination film studio/nature preserve she set up in Priest Lake, Idaho. But
the growing corporate control of film distribution, coupled with a series of
truly terrible decisions in her professional and personal lives, eventually
left Shipman isolated and unable to get any new projects off the ground. By
the time she died in 1970, she was almost completely forgotten, her pathetic
final film more than 33 years in the past.
Moving Pictures’ version of Shipman’s life, however, is considerably
less linear than mine. (Old-fashioned movie mogul Sam Goldwyn, who appears as
a character in the play, would have been appalled.) Pollock sets the play in
a kind of nowheresville of Shipman’s imagination—a stylized empty
movie theatre where three incarnations of Shipman at different ages try to make
sense of their collective life. Kelly Spilchak plays “Helen,” the
free-spirited, almost hyperactive youngster (Shipman changed her professional
name from Helen Barham when she turned 20); Candice Woloshyn is “Nell,”
the defiant, obsessive filmmaker; and Pollock herself plays “Shipman,”
the grouchy, embittered woman she became at the end of her life, and who would
rather not remember anything to do with her past selves.
The play suggests that the only way to arrive at a true portrait of Nell Shipman’s
character is to layer these three versions of her on top of one another, like
three-strip Technicolor. But even with three Shipmans onstage at all times,
I don’t know if Moving Pictures gives us a full understanding of this
intriguing figure. That’s partly by design—Pollock is too smart
about playwriting (and about people) to pretend that she can boil down a person’s
essence into two hours of stage time.
But it still feels like too many important chunks of Shipman’s life have
been left offstage. Shipman’s love of animals, for instance, seems to
come out of nowhere and is hard to reconcile with the brassy, very urban woman
we see talking turkey with movie executives. How did she turn into such a nature-lover—a
woman who dedicated the novels she wrote later on in her life not to her children
or her husband but to her pets? Also, Shipman devotes so much energy to her
films and sacrifices so much of her relationships with her son and her two husbands
to make them, and yet we never get a clear sense of what those movies were like—of
what stories it was so important for her to put onscreen, or what made them
so unique. It might have been interesting to have seen Pollock really exploit
the ironic contrast between Shipman’s onscreen persona as a strong woman
who often saved the lives of her male co-stars, and her offscreen inability
to save her second husband Bert from suicidal despair.
Woloshyn’s performance as the “middle” Shipman tries hard
to bring the character into focus, but unfortunately, she fails to convey the
single-minded drive and vision and charisma that the real-life Shipman must
have had in abundance to get all these projects off the ground (even if her
lousy business sense ultimately doomed them). I think she plays the role a little
too heroically—anyone, male or female, who writes, directs, produces and
stars in their own movies, is going to be a little bit of a monster (or at least
a little callous towards others) and you don’t see that dark side come
out here. Spilchak has a lot of fun moments in a more limited role as young
Shipman—especially when she drags a disgruntled-looking Pollock onto centre
stage to help out with a silly song-and-dance routine.
Moving Pictures could use more playful, human moments like that one. Instead,
Pollock’s complicated structure keeps getting in the way of the interesting
woman her script is actually about—battling Shipman’s story instead
of serving it. This show is a bit of an anomaly: it’s a stage biography
where the playwright often seems less interested in its subject than the audience
does. V
Moving Pictures
Directed by Heather Inglis • Written by Sharon Pollock • Starring
Sharon Pollock, Kelly Spilchak and Candice Woloshyn • Timms Centre for
the Arts (U of A) • To Dec 11 • 492-8710