Embracing Gabor
THE BEST DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS don’t want to wrap their subjects up in fine funereal cloth and treat them with phony sanctimony. Nor would any self-respecting artist want to be thought of that way. When we look at documentarians looking at subjects, we should expect that their creative impulses will be as resonant as the people they’re profiling. If you read literature, it’s obvious that Samuel Johnson wouldn’t have half the reputation he has without his brilliant scribe, James Boswell, and, in contemporary times, another Johnson, Lyndon, is more than lucky that the superb biographer Robert Caro has seen fit to make him the subject of a magnificent series of books.
Such musings may seem pretentious in describing Joannie Lafrenière’s affectionate and humorous treatment of Gabor Szilasi, the great Hungarian-Canadian photographer. A photographer herself and an admirer since her adolescence of Szilasi’s precise, humanistic documentary work, Lafrenière made a film, , which is less about his camera practice and more about the kind of life he’s led in Quebec since coming from Hungary when he was 29. Clearly embracing freedom after the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, Szilasi was able to establish a reputation as a documentary photographer first at the Quebec Film Board and latterly as a sought-after freelancer and professor at Concordia University.
