Kevin McMahon is one of Canada's best and busiest documentary filmmakers, but now the lens is pointed at him

by Craig MacInnis
The Ottawa Citizen - Sunday, October 13, 2002

Filmmaker Kevin McMahon directs his documentary 'Truth Merchants,' one of a number of his films to be featured in a retrospective in Ottawa beginning next weekend.

Long before he became a documentary filmmaker of renown, Kevin McMahon was famous -- at least in his immediate circle of friends and acquaintances -- as the most talented sleep-talker in Niagara. 

In the early 1980s, it was not odd to find McMahon nodding off in the middle of a spirited late-night bull session, usually in the living room of his apartment on Cherry Street in downtown St. Catharines. McMahon's second-storey flat, which he shared with his girlfriend and future wife, Angela Stukator, was the closest thing St. Catharines had to a midnight salon, a way station for the insomniacal slackers who arrived, usually unannounced, to drink coffee, smoke DuMauriers, play new albums by The Clash and Gang Of Four, and pronounce on the vagaries of modern life.

The post-teen ambience that Richard Linklater captured in Slacker, his 1991 film about aimlessly wiggy twentysomethings, was drawn from Linklater's Austin, Texas but could just as easily have been shot in McMahon's Cherry Street digs a decade earlier: Six or Seven Loud-Talking Guys And A Girl.

As a sometime-visitor to these summits, I recall that this is where I saw my first "performance video," a bracingly nervy piece by McMahon's pal Fred Bacher, who took footage of Pope John Paul II from a religious procession in some nameless basilica and set it to Tom Waits's boozy lament, Tom Traubert's Blues. In another, Bacher dressed up as a Greek poet -- flowing white robes, a grapevine wreath jammed over his tonsured noggin -- and wandered through the Pen Centre shopping mall, reading verse to bewildered consumers. Fred, as his early videos made clear, was a guy who knew the value of ironic juxtaposition but, according to reliable reports, "didn't have a clue how to make a sandwich."

Pathologist Dr. Lee Cyn Ang at the Rotman Institute in Toronto dissects a brain, looking for abnormalities. From the film 'Intelligence' which will be showcased in Ottawa next Saturday.

Within the ranks of the Cherry Street clique, this hardly set him apart. Twenty years later, what I remember best about those evenings in the McMahon pad was that the host's enthusiasm never flagged, even when the Sandman beckoned. For those who witnessed this narcoleptic rite, the signs were unmistakable. Without warning, his chin would tilt chestward, his eyelids would droop to half-staff and the inevitable lit cigarette in his left hand would smoulder ever closer to the soft web of flesh between his index and middle fingers. McMahon was a reporter then for the St. Catharines Standard, a medium-size daily now part of the Southam chain but then owned by the Burgoyne family, which happily provided the young cub carte blanche to write meaty, investigative pieces on topics ranging from abuses within the Niagara Regional police force to life behind the Iron Curtain.

Then, as now, writing was more of a nervous itch for McMahon than a 9-to-5 proposition, so sleep was something he grabbed on the fly. The amazing thing is that his insta-slumber hardly ever squelched his zeal for staying in the game. As others in the room continued to chatter, their inanimate host -- eyes half shut, a beatific smile on his face -- would chime in with a medley of "hmmphs" and "uh-huhs," as if the idea of catching a few Z's could be accomplished while continuing to moderate a debate on, say, the urgency of nuclear disarmament.

A young Inuit in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut. From 'In The Reign Of Twilight,' the story of NORAD's impact on the Canadian Arctic.

"He used to try," recalls Vit Wagner, one of the late-night guests at those long-ago sessions. "I don't know if he was ever really contributing to the conversation, but yes, every once and a while you'd hear some noise out of him." Wagner, now a music writer for the Toronto Star and a friend of McMahon's since they met as arts students at Brock University 25 years ago, recalls that when McMahon fell asleep someone would always pry the lit cigarette from his dangling fingers.

"When they could see that he was snorkelling his way back up (toward consciousness), they'd stick the cigarette back in between his fingers and everything would proceed as if he had never been 'away.' He had an amazing capacity to rejoin the conversation without missing a beat."

When one enumerates the elusive traits one expects of a great director, McMahon's ability to "check out" while staying half-engaged with the conscious world cannot be discounted. I imagine most filmmakers, typically sleep-deprived and behind schedule, would love nothing better than to set up their next shot while simultaneously catching a few winks. Of course, there is no point in asking McMahon about any of this now because, well, because he was asleep at the time and can't be held accountable. More pressingly, he is a 44-year-old father of three rambunctious pre-teen children -- Dylan, Molly and Aidan -- and the husband of a busy academic. Angela, an undergraduate film student at Brock when she and Kevin first met, is now the chair of the University of Western Ontario's film studies program and during the academic year spends up to four nights a week in London, away from the family.

A maid disinfecting a honeymoon suite tub adds a grim, if mirthful touch to McMahon's documentary, 'The Falls.'


Around this hectic domestic schedule, McMahon has found time to become one of Canada's most productive documentary filmmakers, walking each day the two blocks from his house to his Bloor Street West offices, where he and producer/brother Michael McMahon preside over their longtime production firm, Primitive Features. McMahon's house in downtown Toronto is decorated with brightly painted ladybugs crawling around the front-porch posts while the living room floors are generously strewn with Lego blocks, announcing the tumultuous, life-affirming presence of kids who will not let you sleep -- even if you are narcoleptic.

Beginning Saturday, Ottawa's Canadian Film Institute will mount a mid-career retrospective of McMahon's films, Thinking Pictures: The Films Of Kevin McMahon. The program, to be unfurled over three consecutive weekends at the National Archives Auditorium, ranges from the 1987 short The Zoo (made while McMahon was a student at the University Of Bristol in England) to his latest non-fiction feature, McLuhan's Wake, which offers a highly stylized re-imagining of the life of Canada's great philosopher of the technological age, the late Marshall McLuhan. In between those two bookends, McMahon has amassed a body of work dreamlike in its evocation of otherworldly moods yet shaped by its commitment to earthbound themes -- specifically, the environment and man's culpable role in trying to "manage" it. Non-linear yet clear-sighted, angry yet calming, McMahon's documentaries could only have sprung from the bifurcated mind of a guy who can fall asleep and still keep talking.

Kevin McMahon, seated, and brother and producing partner Michael: One of Canada's busiest filmmakers.

When he quit The Standard in 1985 to move to Britain with Angela, McMahon wasn't yet sure if he was bidding adieu to print journalism, or merely taking a break from it. Angela had been accepted into the University Of Bristol's PhD program in film theory, and McMahon, who had already taken the (now defunct) one-year journalism program at Carleton in 1979-'80, thought he'd tag along, mostly for the experience of living in another country. So, while his partner was immersed in parsing the narrative strategies of avant-garde filmmaker Chantal Ackerman (the subject of her thesis), McMahon was enrolled in the university's one-year film production course. At the very least, he figured he could hone his chops in basic camera technique and learn a few new things.

"At the time, I guess it seemed sort of mildly risky," McMahon recalls. "The Standard was always giving me sabbaticals to go off and take trips, so I thought, 'Well, I can always go back there if I have to.'"

Modesty prevents him from saying so, but when he did return to Canada, two years later, he was brandishing a brilliant new short film, The Zoo, a student documentary he had made for the BBC about animal management at the Clifton Zoological Society, a fortress-like Victorian zoo situated in the heart of the middle-class neighborhood McMahon walked through every morning on his way to class.

McMahon prefers not to think of his films as ironic although he uses what he calls 'ironic juxtaposition' when creating them.

Despite its brief, 30-minute running time, The Zoo was an instant hit, as much for its fresh stylistic rigour as for its subject matter, i.e., the way we defang, denature and otherwise mistreat our furry, four-legged friends. Set to a plinking soundtrack of dark piano arpeggios, the film offered poignant scenes of animals being "cared for" and fed, school children on a day trip to the zoo, and meetings of the institution's board of directors. In short, an exercise in wry juxtaposition. While these weren't the easy laughs of, say, Fred Bacher's Tom Waits Meets The Pope riff, The Zoo nonetheless drew its energy from a succession of conflicting sights and sentiments.

The Zoo veers, typically, from shots of live animals pacing their cages or being cleaned and groomed by zoo staff, to shots of the same creatures reproduced as fetishized, dime-store objects -- i.e., the rows of stuffed animals for sale in the zoo gift shop. Controlling and paternalistic, the zoo's board of directors come off less as guardians of a natural trust than wardens in a prison for gorillas and elephants. And McMahon does it not by shouting or wagging his finger like some cranky Greenpeace activist, but by methodically, deliberately, alternating images and scenes.

At a banquet to mark the zoo's 150th anniversary, we watch as servants tote steaming platters of carved meat to the zoo's august patrons. It doesn't take much imagination to sense a connection between the animals in their cages and the ones whose roasted flesh will form tonight's repast. Such juxtapositions and ironies have become McMahon's authorial signature, present in virtually every one of the dozen films he has made since the mid-1980s, from In The Reign Of Twilight, his exploration of the effects of white settlement on native inhabitants of the Far North, to Truth Merchants, his look at the symbiotic relationship between journalists and public relations operatives.

"It had an inherent irony built into it," he says of his decision to make The Zoo. "I remember thinking, 'I can't lose here.' I think the sort of basic concerns about how space is organized, the irony between what we do and what we think we're doing, and what we say and how we act -- all that stuff is in there."

Because we're a culture weaned on a degraded form of irony -- the snarky wit of FM morning jocks and TV talk-show hosts, for example -- McMahon is careful to articulate his sense of what the word means to him.

"I think I'm using essentially what people classify as 'ironic juxtaposition,' but I don't think these films are ironic. Irony is a great way to tease out a kind of subtle humour, which is a great way to keep from going out of your mind, but I don't think the films are ironic in the way the term is understood now.

"The way it's used in this culture, we're not talking Swift very often, we're talking David Letterman's ability to collapse the meaning and importance of everything down to a joke, thereby saving his viewers from having to give a shit about anything. That's not what I'm interested in at all. It's more like trying to use the camera to find the irony that exists in the situation than it is me trying to manipulate things to look ironic."

American tourists pose in a photo booth in Niagara's Skylon Tower in this scene from 'The Falls,' which premiered at Toronto's Festival of Festivals in 1991.

The Zoo earned a berth in the Perspective Canada sidebar of the 1987 Festival Of Festivals (now the Toronto International Film Festival), announcing an undeniably important new voice in the Canadian documentary genre. A few years later, McMahon would return with his hometown magnum opus, The Falls, a feature-length work that premiered at the 1991 Cannes festival. Set along the polluted waters of the Niagara River and always within earshot of the rampaging cataract, The Falls was a meditation on the raw, unknowable power of nature and the corresponding folly of man's arrangements, from the atrocities of toxic waste-dumping in nearby Love Canal to the phoney, enervated eroticism of the city's "honeymoon" culture.

In one scene, as mirthful as it is grim, a maid is pictured down on her knees, scrubbing the grime from a red, heart-shaped hotel room tub. Shot by cinematographer Doug Koch (who lensed I've Heard The Mermaids Singing for Patricia Rozema) and narrated with a lilting, spirit-world cadence by McMahon's sister, Rita, the film earned comparisons to Errol Morris's Gates Of Heaven, about pet cemeteries, and pop icon Laurie Anderson's spoken-word musings. (Footnote: McMahon, who has always used female narrators and has loved Laurie Anderson since his days on Cherry Street, persuaded her to narrate the script for McLuhan's Wake.)

In addition to The Falls, 1991 was also the year of Bruce McDonald's rollicking, hardtop epic, Highway 61, a road movie that crossed the U.S.-Canada border with its pedal to the metal, swaggering south toward New Orleans with a half-friendly, half-mocking regard for our southern neighbours, who were personified by the character Mr. Skin, a megalomaniacal "would-be Satan" played by Earl Pastko.

Aerial view of the Horseshoe Falls at Niagara from the film 'The Falls,' directed by Kevin McMahon and produced by Michael McMahon.

McMahon's film, poised on the international boundary at Niagara, found a different kind of devil altogether, one whose spirit lurked in the lethal hydro grids of the Adam Beck generating station, the malformed beaks of baby cormorants and in the poisoned, deserted streetscapes of Love Canal. The late Globe And Mail critic Jay Scott called The Falls "nothing less than an historical inquiry into morals."

An eloquent promoter of Canadian cinema until his death in 1993, Scott reserved some of his most lavish praise for McMahon's film, tying it to visual traditions that less observant commentators might have failed to notice.

"Composed predominantly of languid tracking shots of the sort directors Peter Greenaway and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre have spent their careers perfecting, The Falls communicates the grandeur of the tumbling tonnes of water by bathing the eyeballs in soaking, wide-screen splendour; the shots of the falls illuminated at night are at once gaudy and overwhelming, exact cinematic replicas of Canadian artist David Thauberger's famous paintings of the same site."

The Niagara of McMahon's The Falls -- a city where he was raised and where his parents still live, and where he still likes to hike the ravines and cliffs around the Niagara River each spring and fall -- was many things: tourist arcade, natural wonder, man-made triumph, unspeakable tragedy. As Rita McMahon's narrator intones over and over again: "It's all in the framing."

Tom McSorley, director of the Canadian Film Institute and the programmer of Thinking Pictures, says that beyond the walls of Canada's scholarly film community, McMahon's career has "pretty much flown under the radar." That means that he is not as famous -- if "famous" can ever be a word associated with documentary filmmaking -- as such heavy-hitters as Peter Lynch (Project Grizzly) or Ron Mann (Grass). "It's probably fair to say he's not as concerned with promotion as Peter Lynch is," McSorley ventures, referring to the Toronto filmmaker who earned much comic mileage in the media for his movie about an obsessive guy planning to do gladiatorial battle with a grizzly bear.

McSorley says McMahon's impact has been, in some ways, sneakier and more gradual than those directors who steadfastly tilt toward populist themes.

"Everything I've seen from him, from The Falls onward and even behind that with the shorts, I've really liked. It's always been: 'Gee, why don't we do a retrospective on Kevin?'"

The program's opening film, McLuhan's Wake, which was also the opening film at this year's Hot Docs festival in Toronto, gives the retrospective a cutting edge, adds McSorley. "McLuhan's a great tag for this. Hopefully we'll get the Ottawa literati, as it were, out of their closets to come out and see it." McMahon will be in attendance at the opening night screenings.

Documentary filmmaking, like virtually every other endeavour in what is broadly known as the communications industry, is a field rife with internecine struggle, gossip, rivalry, bad blood and resentment, much of it directed toward the funding agencies and broadcasters that can make the life of a documentary filmmaker a living hell.

As a friend, I have spent enough time around McMahon over the past quarter century to know that he is not exempt from ill feelings toward those he perceives as getting in the way of what he wants to do as an artist and journalist. He will, for instance, bluntly describe his experience on Lifting The Shadow, a documentary about nuclear armaments which he made two years ago for CBC's Witness program, as "a personal thorn for me." Discussing it, even now, is almost more than he can bear.

Lifting The Shadow, which is included in the CFI retrospective, is an object lesson in how a film can go wrong when there isn't a shared vision between supposed collaborators. In this case, CBC wanted a more traditional, "current affairs"-style documentary, while McMahon, true to form, wanted a film that probed the dilemmas of nuclear build-up with less certainty and more poetry.

Watching it now, it seems entirely wrong -- the misshapen, rogue piece in his otherwise carefully arranged oeuvre. For one thing, the film is narrated by news veteran Bill Cameron, whose smooth, television-trained delivery seems inane in this context. McMahon had wanted to use noted Canadian actor and peace activist Sarah Polley as narrator, a motion that was quashed by his corporate masters.

"You can imagine how far removed Sarah Polley would have been from Bill Cameron, which I think is a hectoring voice," says McMahon. "It's the voice of the typical news documentary," he adds, dropping to a deep, authoritative baritone: "THERE'S A PROBLEM!!!"

He elaborates: "Somehow, when you take that voice and put it to a problem -- that voice that's so heavy with portent -- and you put it on top of a problem as big as nuclear weapons, what you do is trivialize it." The film ended up the way it is because McMahon had little choice but to wave the white flag and meet the demands of his bosses.

"If you don't, it's simple. You don't get paid and as someone who is constantly aware of the need to bring in income and support a family, that's a big consideration."

Overall, though, McMahon is not a "difficult" personality, or an unhappy one. He is deferential with his friends, extremely generous with his time and tends to apologize for a lot for things he hasn't even done.

"Of all the people I know, I've always felt that Kevin is the 'saintliest,' somehow," says Vit Wagner. "I don't know of anyone who's more generous or sympathetic.

"What I've come to realize is there's nothing about him that's really overt. You have to be around him for a long time to appreciate all of his great qualities" -- a sentiment which might also describe the nuances found in his best films.

The old gang from Cherry Street doesn't get out much together any more. The responsibility of marriages, kids, long working hours and the plain inertia of middle age have all taken their toll. For most of us, going out for a couple of quick beers on a Thursday night now constitutes a major social outing.

However, each summer, for two weeks, McMahon and his family rent a chalet-style cottage just down the road from my own summer place near Barry's Bay. This past August, during a canoe trip across our lake, McMahon and I noticed what I immediately registered as the kind of "moment" that could easily have been a sequence from one of his films. Flapping helplessly alongside a floating water dock, a seagull had become ensnared in a tangle of broken fishing line.

We paddled over to see what we could do to help, and discovered that the bird had swallowed a lure, left there, no doubt, by some fisherman who'd snagged his line on the water dock. McMahon gently reached over and unwound the line from the dock, which enabled the distressed gull to fly off, trailing three metres of fishing filament, a sinker and a small spinning spoon.

It seemed likely the bird would die with the barbed lure still embedded in its crop. I left the next day for the city, but a few days later I spoke by telephone to McMahon, who was still at the cottage. "I saw the bird," he reported. "He was back on the dock and I'm pretty sure it's the same one. I think he got rid of it. He looks like he's OK."

Craig MacInnis is a Toronto writer and frequent contributor to the Weekly.

When to Catch McMahon

The Canadian Film Institute's retrospective of Kevin McMahon's documentaries can be seen at the National Archives Auditorium, 395 Wellington St., Ottawa (free parking).

Oct. 19, 7 p.m. -- McLuhan's Wake (94 mins.); 9 p.m. -- Intelligence (76 mins.)

Oct. 20, 9 p.m. -- In the Reign of Twilight (88 mins.)

Oct. 26, 9 p.m. -- The Falls (89 mins.)

Nov. 2, 9 p.m. -- Truth Merchants (46 mins.); Lifting the Shadow (42 mins.)

Nov. 3, 9 p.m. -- The Music Garden (60 mins.)

For more information contact the CFI at 232-6727, or visit its Web site:

www.cfi-icf.ca/mcmahon.html