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By Sam Fraser

In November 1968, Ron Foley Macdonald and a group of young friends piled into his father’s beige Pontiac and left Clayton Park for a trip to the movies. It was Macdonald’s ninth birthday, and tradition had his father treat him and his friends to a film. This year’s fare: Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi magnum opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Macdonald and company were ecstatic as they took their seats in the regal Paramount Theatre on Barrington Street.

As the film rolled, the boys were captivated by the spectacle. They had gone in expecting a riveting space opera, and for the first two hours, the film had delivered.

“Then,” Macdonald now says, “weird things started to happen.”

He refers to what he now calls the film’s “freak-out section,” when the character David Bowman enters the Star Gate. The operatic wails of the soundtrack swelled and gleaming, technicolour beams streaked past Bowman as he hurdled through time and space. The terror and confusion upon the astronaut’s face mirrored the expressions of Macdonald and his friends. Their epic space adventure had suddenly morphed into a psychedelic horror show.

Macdonald, his friends, and his father had little to say after the film ended. They walked, dazed, out of the theatre, struggling to process the experience.

Reflecting on the ordeal, Macdonald says, “I think it kind of put an end to the whole ‘taking the kids to the movies’ thing.”

This experience stayed with Macdonald, who would go on to become an essential part of Nova Scotia’s film scene, beginning his career as a National Film Board librarian in 1981. In the 34 years that followed, he worked as a programmer and event calendar writer for Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Cinema, and the Atlantic International Film Festival. He’s worked as a critic of film, theatre and music, having appeared in Canadian film magazines Take One and Cinema Canada as a freelancer, and in the Halifax Daily News. From 1986 to 2001, he lectured on film history at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

He’s seen 95 of the British Film Institute’s Critics’ top 100 films list. His all-time favourite film is Andrei Rublev, which he hails as “beyond understanding.”

These days Macdonald makes his living through his company, Winter Light Productions, which he co-founded in 2015. Named after the 1963 Ingmar Bergman film, Winter Light has produced several Eastlink TV series, most notably the paranormal investigative series Haunted.

Winter Light has also produced Cinema 902, a mini-series presenting local, independent films made by the company, including award-winners like Aliens With Knives and Exit Thread (which Macdonald co-wrote). Macdonald recently completed his directorial debut feature, Shadow in the Mirror, which for its subtle, psychological themes he likens to “The Shining… on Valium.”

Obsession

For his dedication to film, Macdonald could be described as an obsessive, and like many obsessives, he has his share of idiosyncrasies. His past as a lecturer shines through when he speaks.

Each exchange becomes an opportunity to impart knowledge. A simple question will often lead to a colourful anecdote which has little to do with the initial subject. These divergences inevitably end with Macdonald throwing up his hands and shouting a playful “Sorry! Sorry!” before shaking his head and getting back on track.

Macdonald’s dedication also manifests itself physically. His hands flutter excitedly to punctuate a point, and at times he gestures almost as if taking an idea into his hand and passing it along to you.

While praising a scene in the 1950 Japanese psychological thriller Rashomon, Macdonald becomes possessed by the ghost of director Akira Kurosawa. He illustrates the scene by energetically miming multiple shots — imaginary camera in hand — then proceeds to drum out the score on the table, chanting “bom, ba-da-da-bom, ba-da-da-bom…”

Such devotion to a singular obsession often comes with a cost. Macdonald’s sacrifice has been the security of steady employment. It’s been years now since he chose to subsist on freelancing, festival programming, and eventually setting his own hours with Winter Light. “I’ve been in the now-legendary ‘gig economy’ since 1995,” he says. That was the year he was let go from his marketing post at the Film Board, only to be brought back on contract six months later. It was also the last year he took a vacation.

Building a Canadian film culture

Macdonald’s film obsession, not unlike religious devotion, goes beyond passion to become his life’s cause. All of his involvement in producing and promoting local cinema is part of his drive to help “build a Canadian film culture.” It’s a largely thankless task, due to the cultural domination of what he calls “the American Empire.”

Much of Macdonald’s trivia and lectures champion Nova Scotia’s particular role in film history. The first film ever shot in Canada, a now-lost adaptation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline, was filmed in Halifax in 1913. David Manners, who played Jonathan Harker in Tod Browning’s celebrated Dracula adaptation, and Austin Willis, of Goldfinger fame, were both born in Halifax. Then there are the artists who make Nova Scotia their part-time home and muse: Talents like Ethan Hawke, Sam Shepard, Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer have all sought refuge and inspiration in rural Nova Scotia.

Macdonald believes the only way for a national film culture to thrive is for Canadians to support local arts scenes and seize upon what makes them special. Nova Scotians need only look in their own backyard to find the same inspiration American outsiders have found here for years.

Screen time

Shadow in the Mirror quietly premiered March 16, on Eastlink TV (it also showed at the FIN Atlantic International Film Festival in Sept.). The absence of an extravagant red-carpet premiere was no inconvenience for Macdonald, who surprisingly is not a regular theatre-goer. He prefers the comfort of home-viewing and stakes out department store bargain bins to feed his colossal DVD collection. He’s yet to embrace Netflix and shops on Amazon begrudgingly, two more acts of resistance against the “American empire.”

Macdonald tries to watch at least one film a day, “sometimes two or three.” It’s a step down from his heyday as a festival programmer, when he’d often take in between 1,200 and 1,500 films a year. Now the only media he’s obligated to watch are his own productions.

“I feel almost like I’m luxuriating right now,” Macdonald says.

Even one film a day starts to add up: two hours of viewing each day amounts to 730 hours a year. If these last three years of luxuriating are combined with his 34 years as a festival programmer, when he watched at least 2,400 hours of films a year, this comes to a staggering 83,790 hours: more than nine whole years and almost a quarter of his professional life.

Naturally, half of these films are either silent classics with inter-titles or international productions with subtitles. So not only is Macdonald watching more films than you are, he may also be reading more than you.

If the idea of a life spent sitting in a dark room watching nearly a decade’s worth of subtitled fiction play out before you seems like a life wasted, you probably wouldn’t get along with Ron Foley Macdonald. This life suits him just fine. Besides, he says, “some people just sit and watch a lot of bad television.”

