I sat down with Robert Lang, Kensington’s founder, President and Executive Producer, on the occasion of Kensington’s 30th anniversary to learn about how things have changed within the film industry over the last 30 years.
Amanda:
You started your film work at the National Film Board (NFB) in Montreal as a freelance camera operator and director and you’ve said you watched many inspiring films made there. Tell us about your time at the NFB.
Robert Lang:
“I met a lot of the great doc filmmakers there including Donald Brittain, Tom Daly (with whom I worked), Wolf Koenig and Colin Low. I even met folk legend Pete Seeger who was collaborating on an NFB film. It was a really creative melting pot, an amazing place to be in the mid-late 70s. The Challenge for Change Program was up and running and a newly-established women’s unit was making waves. I worked as a cameraman with Bonnie Klein who went on to make “Not a Love Story.” There were many people who were doing challenging POV films with a social and often political take… I was in my early 20s and it was inspiring but also intimidating to be around such smart and talented people. I saw making docs as a way to discover the world, to expand my limited horizons and perhaps even change the world (laughs).”
Amanda:
What happened after you left the NFB in Montreal?
Robert:
“In late 1979 I moved to Toronto after being asked to direct and co-write a film on youth sexuality. Called “Taking Chances”, it won a Genie Award and many others. So I stayed on, hoping to convert my newfound success into more film work.”
“I teamed up with a friend to make a film on youth suicide which we called “Childhood’s End”. We felt it was an important subject at the time because there were reports coming out saying the youth suicide rate had gone up in all sorts of communities.”
Amanda:
What events made you decide to start Kensington Communications?
Robert:
“There were very few independent film companies producing docs at the time. To make a documentary, generally, you had to work as staff or as a freelancer at the CBC, the NFB or TVO. There were very few opportunities to pursue.”
The CBC did not want their film, but TVO was open to it, even though they had not worked with many independent producers at that point. They told Robert that he needed a company to contract the work to, so he started his own.
Robert:
“I was living in Kensington Market, so I started the company with that name. I thought of myself as a cameraman / director – I only became a producer by default. I started Kensington as a way to make a film that nobody else would make.
There were only a few broadcasters in 1980. When you look around today it seems incredible that there weren’t more, but there were literally only three: CTV, CBC and TVO. They mostly did their own productions … and there were almost no documentary windows.
In fact that was part of the reason that in 1982 and 1983 a small group of us who worked on contract for the NFB and the CBC started the Canadian Independent Film Caucus (CIFC), which then became the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC). We knew if we were going to continue to make a living creating documentaries we were going to need some broadcast windows to accommodate the documentaries that we wanted to make.
As a filmmaker in the early 80s, I had an aversion to the business side, but I had to learn how to do it otherwise I would have been forever dependent on the NFB or CBC and wouldn’t have been able to make my own films.
I began to realize that owning your own film and being able to make sales in the educational market could generate some revenue that would allow me to develop new projects and still pay the bills (just). That was the biggest lesson I learned in terms of the business – and it was by accident…”
Amanda:
You’ve said that the ‘80s were an incredible time of change. What changes in filmmaking specifically took place over that time?
Robert:
“We moved from 16mm film and double system editing in the early 80s to crappy video cameras with linear editing in the mid 80s to non-linear editing by the end of the decade. With film, you put your trims up in editing and it was cumbersome, but you could change things around in a non-linear fashion. But then … the first linear video editing systems came in and it seemed we were taking several steps backward. Every time you made a change you’d have to make a copy on a copy, and sometimes the quality would become so degenerate that you’d have to start over and reconstruct the whole thing. It was a nightmare. A lot of editors left the business and a lot of directors were very frustrated.
At first video was supposed to make stuff really easy, with picture and sound on the same tape medium… But really it was a creative step backwards from film in terms of the look and the editing process. What we’ve got now is way better, freeing you up creatively with all kinds of low cost cameras which can be used to generate a wide range of visual looks and editing systems. It allows great freedom to experiment. In the days of film, every foot you shot was costly – you tended to try and have as clear a story concept as possible, to avoid waste… Whereas now people often just shoot and shoot until they find the story in the material…”
Amanda:
How did you come to appreciate new media?
Robert:
“I’ve always been quite comfortable with change, experimenting with new ways of storytelling … So when internet speeds and bandwidth allowed, we started to think of ways we could expand what we did beyond the one-way communication that tended to occur with conventional documentary storytelling. In 1997, during the making of a film with Bruce Cockburn in Mali, I discussed with Al Booth (who still works with us) how we could give Bruce’s fans a way of tracking his journey over there. People were starting to use satellite phones for voice and even to send low-res images through. So we used a satellite phone to do an audio blog from the field. We told people what we were up to, who we met, about encounters we had, and Bruce’s personal observations.”
Each night Allen Booth would get questions from the website users / fans and he would pass them along via sat phone to Robert and Bruce, who would respond through an audio blog the next day.
Robert:
“I just loved it. It was so strange to be in such a remote part of the world, in Timbuktu, in the Sahara Desert, in small villages, stopping in the evening at a house that didn’t even have electricity and using our satellite phone to recount the day’s adventures, with Al then uploading our phone conversation to our website online. I got a taste for that kind of engagement with an audience – to hear back from people immediately is a treat, a real privilege and making films becomes much more interesting and satisfying.”
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You can read Robert’s professional biography here.
And if you have questions of your own for Robert, please post them below and we’ll consider answering them in a future blog post.