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Bonnie Sherr Klein | |
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| Born | 1941 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Education | Barnard College, Carnegie Tech, Stanford University master's degree in Broadcasting and Film |
| Occupation | Filmmaker |
| Notable work | Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography (1981), Shameless: The ART of Disability (2005) |
| Spouse | Michael Klein |
| Children | 2 (Naomi and Seth) |
Bonnie Sherr Klein OC (born 1941) is a feminist filmmaker, author and disability rights activist.
| This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(September 2019) |
Bonnie Sherr Klein was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1941 to working class Jewish parents. She attended public schools until high school, when she then attended Akiba Hebrew Academy.[ citation needed ] She received a bachelor's degree in American studies at Barnard College, and became more active in the Civil Rights and anti-nuclear movements. After a year of teaching high school, she was admitted to Stanford University for their MA program in theatre. There, she attended a presentation by Claude Jutra and Marcel Carrière from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). It inspired her to switched her major from theatre to film.[ citation needed ] Her thesis film, For All My Students, was completed under the supervision of visiting professor George C. Stoney, and was funded by the US Department of Education.
Upon graduation, she was invited to New York to work on some of Stoney's film projects, and gained experience as a freelance editor.
She and her husband, Michael Klein, immigrated to Montreal in 1967 as resisters to the Vietnam War. [1] Soon after, she began to work with the NFB. [1] Her father died in 1969. As her daughter, Naomi Klein, points out in her latest book Doppelgänger.
John Kemeny hired Klein to work at the NFB's Challenge For Change program. One year later, he resigned and she recommended her mentor, Stoney, who led the program until 1970.
In the Challenge for Change program, Klein co-directed Organizing for Power: The Alinsky Approach (1968), a five-part film series on community organizer Saul Alinsky. [2] With Dorothy Todd Hénaut, she produced the first citizens' community video project, VTR St-Jacques. [3] They provided equipment and training to residents of one of Montreal's poorest neighbourhoods to facilitate community dialogue and organizing. A short documentary was also produced by Klein and Hénaut. Other projects with Challenge for Change include Citizen's Medicine and Little Burgundy. [4]
In 1970, Klein moved to Rochester, New York, and, based on the Challenge for Change model, established Portable Channel, "a community-access media and documentary centre" that was aligned with the guerilla television movement and funded by the New York State Council on the Arts. [5] In 1975, she was invited by her Challenge for Change colleague, Kathleen Shannon, to join the newly formed Studio D, the women's unit of the NFB.
As the only government-funded feminist film production agency, Studio D was committed to making films not just about women or by women, but also about social issues from women's point of view. [6] Klein, an avowed feminist, was one of the first film directors assigned to the studio by the NFB. However, due to shortage of funds for the studio and internal politics, she spent a lot of time organizing training programs, developing film series, and advocating for feminist film productions. "Studio D was a total integration of film and the movement. We were inspired by and inspired the movement," she recalls. "It was really heady. Intellectually it was incredibly stimulating. Every idea was a new idea. Discovering the patriarchy behind every corner. The whole movement about violence against women was unheard of. It was just a soup that was constantly bubbling." [7]
In 1981, Klein made what is probably her best-known film, Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography . [8] It went on to become one of the most popular and commercially successful films the NFB ever made.[ citation needed ]
In 1987, Klein had catastrophic stroke caused by a congenital malformation in her brainstem. She became locked-in, quadriplegic, respirator-dependent, and experienced panic attacks. She spent more than six months in hospital and another three years in formal rehabilitation. She went on permanent disability pension from the NFB and began her work in disability activism, as told in her memoir Slow Dance: A Story of Stroke, Love and Disability (1997) which she co-authored with writer and artist Persimmon Blackbridge. [9] She writes, speaks, consults, and counsels on issues of disability; in particular access, health care, and representation. In 1998, she co-founded kickstART: Disability Arts and Culture, and they held their first festival in 2001. [10]
Klein's most recent film is Shameless: The ART of Disability (2006). She is featured in the film, along with poet and writer Catherine Frazee, humourist David Roche, dancer and choreographer Geoff McMurchy, and Persimmon Blackbridge. Vancouver musician Veda Hille contributed music for the film.
Klein received a lifetime achievement award from Women in Film and Television Toronto [11] and a Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case. [12] She was named a YWCA Woman of Distinction in 1996. In 2012, she was invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada. [13] In his remarks, the Governor General of Canada said, "Bonnie Sherr Klein has used her talents to shed light on social issues and to give voice to the voiceless." [14]
She received two honorary Doctor of Law degrees from Ryerson University in 2003 and from University of British Columbia in 2014. [15] [16]
Klein and her husband, Michael, immigrated to Canada in 1967 as resisters to the Vietnam War. The pair have two children. Their daughter is the Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein [17] and their son, Seth Klein, was director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives for 22 years. [18]
Klein's film Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography (1981) was instrumental in launching a fierce public debate on pornography across Canada.[ citation needed ] In 2015, the Toronto International Film Festival screened it as part of their Open Vault series and stated "it remains both timely and essential viewing today." [19]
She has been described as "a radical icon" and "a groundbreaking filmmaker" by Point of View Magazine . [7]
Reflecting on his time at the NFB, George C. Stoney noted "The two women who persuaded us to launch our first community videotape project were no ordinary film-makers. Dorothy Hénaut and Bonnie Klein brought to the task a philosophy about democratic participation that shaped every aspect of the work, from the way to run training classes to the way editorial decisions are made. It is largely their concept, their way of working, which guides social animators, teachers and community leaders generally who are now applying Challenge for Change techniques across Canada." [20]
Community organizing is a process where people who live in proximity to each other or share some common problem come together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest.
Susan Brownmiller is an American journalist, author and feminist activist best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which was selected by The New York Public Library as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century.
George Cashel Stoney was an American documentary filmmaker, educator, and the "father of public-access television." Among his films were Palmour Street, A Study of Family Life (1949), All My Babies (1953), How the Myth Was Made (1979) and The Uprising of '34 (1995). All My Babies was entered into the National Film Registry in 2002. Stoney's life and work were the subject of a Festschrift volume of the journal Wide Angle in 1999.
Veda Hille is a Canadian singer-songwriter, keyboardist and tenor guitar player from Vancouver, British Columbia. She writes songs about love and tragedy, as well as about topical British Columbia subjects. As well as solo work, she has taken part in many musical collaborations, and has organized two recording projects, Duplex! and The Fits.
Alix Kates Shulman is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism. She is best known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement."
Participatory video (PV) is a form of participatory media in which a group or community creates their own film. The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible, and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories. It is therefore primarily about process, though high quality and accessible films (products) can be created using these methods if that is a desired outcome. This process can be very empowering, enabling a group or community to take their own action to solve their own problems, and also to communicate their needs and ideas to decision-makers and/or other groups and communities. As such, PV can be a highly effective tool to engage and mobilise marginalised people, and to help them to implement their own forms of sustainable development based on local needs.
Catherine Frazee is a Canadian educator, activist, researcher, poet and writer. She is currently professor emerita in the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Prior to her retirement from Ryerson in 2010, she served for a decade as professor of distinction and as co-director of the Ryerson/RBC Institute for Disability Studies Research and Education. She is known for her role as Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission from 1989 to 1992. Her father was prominent Canadian banker Rowland Cardwell Frazee.
Kiss and Tell is a Vancouver, British Columbia based performance and artist collective whose work is concerned with lesbian sexuality. In 1990, collective members Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart used the intense debates within the queer community around sexual practice in the early 1990s to create the photographic exhibition Drawing the Line. Their photographs depicted a continuum of lesbian sexual practice ranging from kissing to whipping, bondage, and voyeurism. The project encouraged gallery viewers to comment on what they saw and how it made them feel by writing directly on the walls around the prints; allowing the viewer to "draw the line" and examine their ideas and beliefs about different sexual behaviors. “Drawing the Line” was made in response to the “porn wars” of the late 80’s-the feminist debate of if female sexual imagery was more oppressive to women, or if it was empowering to women. Kiss and Tell’s work explicitly embraced depictions of female sexuality, and encouraged the conversation between anti-porn feminists and sex positive feminists. The art was controversial, even more so as it was released in the era of the Red Hot Video Store bombings. The collective displayed their work to point out the double standard in which artists exploring politics and sexuality are “cause for alarm” and yet adult films and magazines that are much more explicit are of no concern. This show was about desensitizing the view of queer sex and relationships. It intended to make lesbian relationships just as visible as straight relationships. Through the intimate exploration of queer bodies, The Kiss and Tell collective gave space for lesbians to perform and share their experiences. The show traveled widely in Canada and the United States in the 1990s, as well as showing in Australia and the Netherlands. In the summer of 2015 Kiss and Tell had redisplayed and revisited their exhibition “Drawing the Line.” This was featured at the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival in celebration of the work’s 25th anniversary, and was the first time in 13 years that it had been displayed.
Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives is a 1992 Canadian hybrid drama-documentary film about Canadian lesbians navigating their sexuality while homosexuality was still criminalized. Interviews with lesbian elders are juxtaposed with a fictional story, shot in fifties melodrama style, of a small-town girl's first night with another woman. It also inserts covers of lesbian pulp fiction. The film presents the stories of lesbians whose desire for community led them on a search for the few public beer parlours or bars that would tolerate openly queer women in the 1950s and 60s in Canada. It was written and directed by Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman and featured author Ann Bannon. It premiered at the 1992 Toronto Festival of Festivals and was released in the United States on 4 August 1993. It was produced by Studio D, the women's studio of the National Film Board of Canada.
Tony Ianzelo is a Canadian documentary director and cinematographer.
Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography is a Canadian documentary film about the pornography industry, directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein and released in 1981.
Lindalee Tracey was a Canadian broadcast journalist, documentary filmmaker, writer, and exotic dancer. She is best known for the documentary film Not a Love Story, a controversial 1981 film about pornography. Her credits include work on many films on controversial topics.
Challenge for Change was a participatory film and video project created by the National Film Board of Canada in 1967, the Canadian Centennial. Active until 1980, Challenge for Change used film and video production to illuminate the social concerns of various communities within Canada, with funding from eight different departments of the Canadian government. The impetus for the program was the belief that film and video were useful tools for initiating social change and eliminating poverty. As Druik says, "The new program, which was developed in tandem with the new social policies, was based on the argument that participation in media projects could empower disenfranchised groups and that media representation might effectively bring about improved political representation." Stewart, quoting Jones (1981) states "the Challenge for Change films would convey messages from 'the people' to the government, directly or through the Canadian public."
Shameless: The ART of Disability is a documentary film by Bonnie Sherr Klein about persons with disabilities. Produced in 2006 by the National Film Board of Canada, it is Klein's first film since a catastrophic stroke in 1987 left her a quadriplegic. The film explores disability culture and the transformational power art has for people with disabilities.
Feminist pornography is a genre of film developed by or for those within the sex-positive feminist movement. It was created for the purpose of promoting gender equality by portraying more bodily movements and sexual fantasies of women and members of the LGBT community.
John Kemeny was a Hungarian-Canadian film producer whom the Toronto Star called "the forgotten giant of Canadian film history and...the most successful producer in Canadian history." His production credits include The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Atlantic City, and Quest for Fire.
Persimmon Blackbridge is a Canadian writer and artist whose work focuses on feminist, lesbian, disability and mental health issues. She identifies herself as a lesbian, a person with a disability and a feminist. Her work explores these intersections through her sculptures, writing, curation and performance. The novels she has written follow characters that are very similar to Blackbridge's own life experiences, allowing her to write honestly about her perspective. Blackbridge's struggle with her mental health has become a large part of her practice, and she uses her experience with mental health institutions to address her perspective on them. Blackbridge is involved in the film, SHAMELESS: The Art of Disability exploring the complexity of living with a disability. Her contributions to projects like this help destigmatize the attitudes towards people with disabilities. Blackbridge has won many awards for her work exploring her identity and the complexities that come with it.
Kathleen Shannon was a Canadian film director and producer. She is best known as the founder and first executive producer of Studio D of the National Film Board of Canada, the first government-funded film studio in the world dedicated to women filmmakers.
Studio D was the women's unit of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the world's first publicly funded feminist filmmaking studio. In its 22-year history, it produced 134 films and won 3 Academy Awards. Cinema Canada once called it the "Jewel in the Crown Corporation."
The Federal Women's Film Program (FWFP) was created in 1980 by the Canadian government as a partnership of federal ministries and agencies. Its purpose is to create and distribute films about the status of women. Studio D handled the administration of it in both French and English. Its creation was an attempt to address the “swelling demand for women-centered films and filmmaking opportunities". however many female freelancers became increasingly frustrated with the dozen staff members employed by Studio D who had the privilege of permanent positions. In 1987, the program was revived by executive producer Rina Fraticelli and was charged with “producing shorter, basic information films dealing with issues of immediate concern to Canadian women, including domestic violence, reproductive choice, career choice, health care, and aging.”
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