Films A to Z
The Making of Monsters
- Runtime:
- 35 min.
- Year of Production:
- 1990
- Country:
- Canada
- Director:
- 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
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.
BIOGRAFIE 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.
FILMOGRAFIE John Greyson (selection)
2021 International Dawn Chorus Day
2020 Prurient
2020 Auterson Clock
2018 Towel
2018 Gazonto
2017 Memurial
2011/2012 Teddy Kurzfilmrolle 2012
2011 Green Laser
2010 Rex Vs. Singh
2010 Covered
2008 Fig Trees
2007 Orange Clouds
1997 Uncut
1993 Zero Patience
1990 The Making of Monsters
1988 Urinal
John Greyson IMDb
John Greyson in conversation with Teddy Award