The Making of Monsters

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In 1985, gay teacher Kenneth Zellers was murdered by five teenage boys in High Park, Toronto. In his experimental musical, John Greyson, enfant terrible of Canadian cinema, undertakes a comprehensive, activist’s analysis of the case. Employing Brecht’s strategies of defamiliarisation and an exuberant dose of provocation, Greyson reconstructs both the course of events and the media hype surrounding them in the form of a fictitious documentary that chronicles the making of a film about the murder. This, in turn, is subverted by his use of a number of different styles – including elements of news reports, staged drama, archive footage and music video sequences. The result is a radical, multi-layered study of homophobia that cuts through the thicket of white heteronormativity with bitterly ironic flair. Bertolt Brecht himself appears as a director in the guise of a fish, while dancers in jockstraps with ice hockey sticks and goaltender masks ignite a firework of queer joie de vivre, full of anger and self-determined charisma.

details

  • Runtime

    35 min
  • Country

    Canada
  • Year of Presentation

    2019
  • Year of Production

    1990
  • Director

    John Greyson
  • Cast

    Lee MacDougall, Ray Kahnert, Taborah Johnson, David Gardner, Stewart Arnott, Clare Coulter
  • Production Company

    Canadian Film Centre
  • Berlinale Section

    Panorama
  • Berlinale Category

    Short Film

Biography John Greyson

The Canadian film and video artist was born in Nelson, British Columbia in 1960. He studied film at the Canadian Film Center and has made over 60 award-winning feature films, installations, transmedia works and shorts. In 1989, he won a Teddy Award for Urinal; in 1991, he received another for The Making of Monsters. His work combines documentary and fictional elements and explores issues including queer activism, homophobic violence, AIDS activism, anti-apartheid and anti-war struggles, conflicts in the Middle East, police entrapment and prison abolition. He has taught film production at York University in Toronto since 2014.
 

Filmography John Greyson

1993 Zero Patience | 2007 Orange Clouds | 2010 Rex Vs. Singh | 2017 Memurial | 2018 Gazonto | 2018 Towel | 2020 Prurient | 2020 Auterson Clock