Notes for a Film About Donna and Gail

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Notes for a Film About Donna & Gail
Directed byDon Owen
Written byDon Owen
Gerald Taaffe
Produced byJulian Biggs
StarringJackie Burroughs
Michèle Chicoine
CinematographyJean-Claude Labrecque
Edited byBarrie Howells
Production
company
Release date
1966
Running time
49 minutes
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish

Notes for a Film About Donna & Gail is a Canadian drama film, directed by Don Owen and released in 1966.[1] The film centres on Donna (Michèle Chicoine) and Gail (Jackie Burroughs), two young women who work together at a dress factory and live together as roommates, tracing the evolution and decline of their friendship in a documentary-style format.[1] The film makes use of the then-novel device of an unreliable narrator,[1] ultimately revealing that the film is much more about the narrator's skewed perceptions of the women's relationship than it is about the women themselves.[2] It was inspired in part by the contemporaneous films of Jean-Luc Godard.[1]

The characters of Donna and Gail recurred in Owen's 1967 feature film The Ernie Game.[3] Prior to the release of The Ernie Game, in which Donna and Gail were involved in a love triangle with Alexis Kanner's Ernie, some critics who had seen only Notes perceived Donna and Gail as being in a quasi-lesbian relationship; however, Owen demurred on this perception by saying "I really don't know, because, well, what is a lesbian relationship?"[4]

The film won a Canadian Film Award in the General Information category at the 19th Canadian Film Awards in 1967.[5]

References[]

  1. ^ a b c d Steve Gravestock, Don Owen: Notes on a Filmmaker and His Culture. Indiana University Press, 2005. ISBN 9780968913246.
  2. ^ James Leach (1980). "Don Owen's Obliterated Environments" (PDF). The Dalhousie Review.
  3. ^ Martin Knelman, "Donna and Gail shows what we ought to be doing in film". Toronto Star, August 17, 1968.
  4. ^ Roy Shields, "Festival's fiction and MPs' fictions". Toronto Star, November 2, 1967.
  5. ^ Maria Topalovich, And the Genie Goes To...: Celebrating 50 Years of the Canadian Film Awards. Stoddart Publishing, 2000. ISBN 0-7737-3238-1. pp. 77-79.

External links[]


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