John Greyson - Film Career

Film Career

He directed several short films, including The Perils of Pedagogy, Kipling Meets the Cowboy and Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers, before releasing his first feature film, Pissoir, in 1988. Pissoir is a response to the homophobic climate of the period and, particularly, to police entrapment of men in public washrooms (toilets) and parks and police raids on gay bathhouses.

Greyson's next film was The Making of "Monsters", a short musical film produced during Greyson's residency at the Canadian Film Centre in 1991. The film deals with the 1985 murder by five adolescent males of Kenneth Zeller, a gay high school teacher and librarian, in Toronto's High Park. The film is a fictional documentary about the making of a movie-of-the-week, entitled "Monsters," in which the young murderers are depicted as psychopathic monsters, rather than 'normal' teenage boys. The film features Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács as the producer of "Monsters," with Bertolt Brecht (played by a catfish) as director. Greyson's film was pulled from distribution when the estate of Kurt Weill objected to its use of the tune of Mack the Knife. Greyson had originally received copyright permission to use the tune, but it was withdrawn, apparently because Weill's estate objected to the film's gay theme. Although copyright is no longer an issue, having lapsed in 2000, fifty years after Weill's death, the film has not yet been re-released by the Canadian Film Development Corporation.

Greayson directed the feature length films Zero Patience and Lillies.

Greyson's other films include Un©ut (1997), The Law of Enclosures (1999) and Proteus (2003). He has also directed for television, including episodes of Queer as Folk, Made in Canada and Paradise Falls.

In 2003, Greyson and composer David Wall created Fig Trees, a video opera for gallery installation, about the struggles of South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat. In 2009, a film version of Fig Trees was released. This film, a feature length documentary opera, premiered at the Berlinale as part of its Panorama section, where it was winner of the Teddy Award for best documentary.

In 2007, Greyson was the recipient of the prestigious Bell Award in Video Art. The award committee stated: “John Greyson is perhaps best known to a general public as a feature film director. He shoots his “film” projects on video with trademark video post-production techniques, thus colonizing the space of cinema with the aesthetics of video. An incisive social and political critic, Mr. Greyson is in fact one of the leaders in the AIDS activist video movement, among others. Mr. Greyson has supported the practice in many ways and he influences many emerging artists.”

Greyson is popular with film critics but controversial with some audiences because of the flamboyant theatricality and thematic complexity of his filmmaking style, and the frank depiction of gay themes in his work. His feature works have all been commercially unsuccessful.