News / Events

The Guardian Features Late Canyon Filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin

Posted July 14th, 2012 in Announcements, News / Events

Stephen Dwoskin in the Guardian

Canyon is sad to lose another great filmmaker, Stephen Dwoskin. A wonderful feature on Dwoskin’s work appeared in this week’s Guardian:

Stephen Dwoskin, who has died of heart failure aged 73, was among those film-makers whose work is recognisable from just a few frames. A trembling, handheld camera, often observing people from an intimate, low angle; studies of women moving, dancing, stripping, making love to Dwoskin himself, or simply looking into the lens with a steely, defiant gaze; a relentless, droning, musical accompaniment. This is the impression left by his best-known films, Dyn Amo (1972), Behindert (1974) and Central Bazaar (1976).
This way of looking and filming came directly from Dwoskin’s physical circumstances. Born and raised in New York, he contracted polio at the age of nine during the 1948 epidemic. “They didn’t expect me to live,” he recalled in 2009. “I was a whole history of polio in one person.” He spent much of his life on crutches, and later used a wheelchair. Dwoskin’s films never hid his disability; indeed, the human body – his own or other people’s, in all imaginable states of pleasure and pain – became his central subject. He developed, across 50 years, a cinematic style to capture, convey and explore these sensations.

“Stephen Dwoskin, who has died of heart failure aged 73, was among those film-makers whose work is recognisable from just a few frames. A trembling, handheld camera, often observing people from an intimate, low angle; studies of women moving, dancing, stripping, making love to Dwoskin himself, or simply looking into the lens with a steely, defiant gaze; a relentless, droning, musical accompaniment. This is the impression left by his best-known films, Dyn Amo (1972), Behindert (1974) and Central Bazaar (1976).

This way of looking and filming came directly from Dwoskin’s physical circumstances. Born and raised in New York, he contracted polio at the age of nine during the 1948 epidemic. “They didn’t expect me to live,” he recalled in 2009. “I was a whole history of polio in one person.” He spent much of his life on crutches, and later used a wheelchair. Dwoskin’s films never hid his disability; indeed, the human body – his own or other people’s, in all imaginable states of pleasure and pain – became his central subject. He developed, across 50 years, a cinematic style to capture, convey and explore these sensations.”

Read the rest of the article on the Gaurdian’s website:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/12/stephen-dwoskin

For more information on Dwoskin and to rent his films from Canyon…