Click on the image above to see a clip from the symposium, "Sharon Pollock: Portraits of the Female Artist," in which Sharon Pollock answers a question about her dislike of labels.

Anne Nothof is a professor of English at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. She has published widely in international academic journals, hosted a weekly radio programme on drama for twelve years, and developed a television series on world theatre. She has edited a collection of essays on Sharon Pollock for Guernica and a collection of Pollock's plays for NeWest Press. She is a board member and editor for NeWest Press in Edmonton, and past president of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research.

Sharon Pollock's plays are characterized by "persistence of vision": she has consistently focused on ethical conundrums and historical ironies in terms of difficult individual choices that result in personal and social disasters: Major Walsh's denial of the right of Sitting Bull's people to remain in Canada, the Canadian government's rejection of Punjabi refugees in The Komagata Maru Incident, the Loyalists' reiteration of the self-destructive American civil war in Fair Liberty's Call. Although her most infamous dramatic portrait is that of Lizzie Borden in Blood Relations, she avoided female protagonists in her early plays; as she has explained, she could not refrain from judging them, and she is "a great believer in not judging her characters." And, as she also has claimed in a presentation for a Workshop on Autobiographics at the University of British Columbia last February, she "generally hates plays about art and artists, anyone who works for an ad agency or publishing house." However, her last three plays, Moving Pictures, End Dream, and Angel's Trumpet, have focused on the lives of individual women, and in Moving Pictures and Angel's Trumpet these women have been artists - Nell Shipman the Canadian filmmaker, and Zelda Fitzgerald, American writer and painter. The temptation to read these lives as self-referential portraits is difficult to resist, particularly when the role of Shipman is played by Sharon Pollock in the University of Alberta production of Moving Pictures. However, Pollock prefers to see them as playing out "the conundrum of the artist." As she has explained in an interview in The Calgary Herald about the significance of Zelda Fitzgerald in Angel's Trumpet:

Recently it's been a female character who is unable to conform to what is expected of her (or whose) sense of herself doesn't conform to what she's told she should be. . . . Here is someone who began as a very strong individual . . . and who gradually through pressure begins to self-censor and to become what others say [she is] - as a means of defence or even as a means of perverse victory when [she has] very little avenue for real victory (Clark ES5).

Pollock appraises the personal price paid by a willful, creative woman for her art. And, as in her other dramatizations of strong-minded, imaginative women -- Blood Relations, Moving Pictures, End Dream -- the price is high: madness, isolation, or early death. In Angel's Trumpet Zelda Fitzgerald's life is complicated by the constraints and assumptions of society in respect to women's roles, which result in an inhibiting self-censorship, and a compliance that often results in exploitation by her husband, the author of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda plays out the highly conflicted roles of self-assertion and self-denial: she is both artist and model, authentic voice, and appropriated voice.

In Moving Pictures the artist/protagonist, Nell Shipman, also plays out conflicted roles. When director Brian Redmond asked Pollock to write a play about Shipman, she initially resisted, because she disliked what she knew about Shipman's compromised life, and the revisionist interpretation of her as an eco-feminist:

In the beginning I wasn't excited about the story. I didn't want to recast her to conform to our contemporary ideology. And she has the raw material in some aspects that makes it possible to do that with her, so she becomes this great forerunner out of her time. But I didn't really believe that was her. She had aspects of that, but if we really want to talk about her relationship with animals there were lots of aspects that were not forward looking at all. Even in her idea of film we could explore differences between the "feminist" vision of a story and a "masculine" vision. But she never had any idea of the environment in which she worked. She never understood the economic environment of the studios and the place for the independent producers. She wasn't someone who rejected the system to do it her way; she was more someone who did it her way, and couldn't understand why it wasn't working better. She wasn't particularly perceptive. In the beginning that was a real blocking point for me. I wasn't interested in writing a documentary. I wanted to find a way into this woman that provides a doorway for us. I was less interested in finding a doorway into her. After doing a lot of research, and beginning to create out of the raw material a rough idea, and to discard material, gradually I became engaged in the reasons for telling stories in general (Pollock interview, Nothof 174).

And indeed the life of Nell Shipman, nee Helen Foster Barham, was full of contradictions. She was born in 1892 in Victoria B.C. to impoverished upper-class English parents, and started her stage career at the age of 13, working as an actress in theatrical stock companies. At the age of 18 she married Canadian film entrepreneur Ernest Shipman, who was nineteen years her senior, and assumed the name of "Nell Shipman." She sold the rights to her screenplay, Under the Crescent to Universal Studios for a serial, and in 1916 she became an overnight success for her production and direction of Oliver Curwood's story God's Country and the Woman, in which she also acted. She was one of the first film directors to shoot her films almost entirely on location, and her subsequent films also capitalized on the popularity of "wild animal pictures" and wilderness locations. Her notoriety and popularity were heightened by the brief nude scene in Back to God's Country (1919), which was shown around the world, and which returned a 300% profit on the original investment - the most successful Canadian silent film ever made. During the shooting at Lesser Slave Lake, she had an affair with the production manager Bert Van Tuyle which lasted five years. She and Van Tuyle formed their own production company, and produced four films, including The Girl from God's Country, an ambitious epic in which Nell played two roles - of twin sisters, one evil, one good, and which was a spectacular box office failure. Nell relocated to Idaho with her private zoo, and continued to write and direct films, without success. The monopoly of the "Big Five" Hollywood studios precluded the sale and distribution of her films, and her personal and financial situation was also compromised by bad financial decisions and the mental deterioration of Bert Van Tuyle. She continued to write novels and scripts for the next twenty years, and the film Wings in the Dark (1934) with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy was based on one of her stories. She died in 1970, shortly after completing her autobiography, The Silent Screen and My Talking Heart.

Click on the link above to see a clip from the symposium, "Sharon Pollock: Portraits of the Female Artist," in which Sharon Pollock answers a question about what she thinks it takes to be an artist.

According to Gwendolyn Foster, author of Women Film Directors: An International Bio-Critical Dictionary, Shipman "artfully created a persona of herself as a rugged and exotic 'New Woman' of outdoor adventure. She often adapted the material of 'masculine' authors such as Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and James Oliver Curwood. She was remarkably adept at perceiving and manipulating audience expectations. For example, she frequently cast herself against type as a strong woman 'having to protect a weak and ailing husband' (www.utoronto.ca/shipman/frames/bio-1.htm). And in her "autobiography" she projected an image which was conflated with that of her screen image, as Sherrill Grace points out in her detailed analysis, "Creating the Girl from God's Country: From Nell Shipman to Sharon Pollock."

In Moving Pictures Sharon Pollock puts into play the many roles of Nell Shipman, filmmaker, actor, author; wife, mistress, mother. She recreates her life as the flickering illusions on a screen. To quote the definition of "moving pictures" advanced by the inventor, Thomas Edison in the play: isolated, fixed, and single images appear to flow together, "when brought successfully into view and intermittently advanced" (Moving Pictures 48). Pollock demonstrates that there can be no "authentic" representation of a life on stage or on film. As she observed at the "Autobiographics" Workshop at the University of British Columbia last February, "Life can never be written or portrayed; it can only be lived." The playwright can only assemble and shape "bits" and "chunks" to provide a semblance of "truth". The play is more real than the subject. As Calgary Herald critic Martin Morrow commented, "Moving Pictures isn't a flat-out biography of Shipman, any more than Pollock's Blood Relations was a biography of Lizzie Borden. As always, Pollock has a thesis up her sleeve and she uses the facts of Shipman's life . . . to her own ends. To her, Shipman represents the creative person who has to keep creating in spite of everything, whose life, for better or worse, is a succession of make-believe. It may be a means of denial - we see how Nell used her film work to avoid her responsibilities to her parents, her lovers, her son - but it may also be a means of survival" (C6).

In her introduction to the unpublished MS of Moving Pictures, and which appears in a slightly amended version in the published play text, Pollock comments on her recreation of Nell Shipman:

There are 3 Nells in MOVING PICTURES, the woman at different stages of her life and work. The woman plays for and against herself in the reconstruction of a life dedicated to the creation of play on stage, on screen, and in life. She creates fiction in order to experience being. She transforms her life experience into fiction in order to determine how well she lived, why she lived - in order to know she did live and that her life has meaning the fiction reveals to her that the actual living of her life did not (2).

Moving Pictures begins with a montage of three ages of Nell: Helen, the ingénue, Nell the star, Shipman, the critic, one standing behind the other. The stage directions in the MS version indicate that "the effect is of the three melded together as they gaze front" (4). The stage directions in the published text also clearly indicate that a "life" is a performative act: "Black and white film plays on the bodies of the characters, which provide the 'screen.' Elusive images flicker and flash, a strobe-like effect, illuminating SHIPMAN, NELL, and HELEN. All are looking out as if watching a film they see playing on a distant screen, as the film plays on them" (17). The first word spoken - by Nell - is a command to "play", and it is rejected by Shipman, who believes that she has nothing left to say. She negatively applies Thomas Edison's definition of film, her chosen medium, to herself. For her, "The illusion of continuous movement through persistence of vision" has become "a personal intimate statement of her failure" (Moving Pictures 4). But in the performing of her life as an artist in a kaleidoscopic memory play, Shipman creates her final moving picture which in effect becomes an assertion of the value and necessity of creating illusions, regardless of the social and personal price. Nell's response to Shipman's initial defeatist attitude is that "she make something of her life" by replaying it: "The beginning, the middle, the bits in between, then the end" (22) - beginning with her first audition in her early role as Helen Barham for the part of Lady Teazle, in which she speaks the lines from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy, The School for Scandal that will typify her own attitude in life: "As you please, Sir Peter, you may bear it or not, but I ought to have my own way in everything, and what's more I will too" (23). Helen's enthusiastic attempt to involve Shipman in her own story is unsuccessful, and so she exhorts Nell to play her part at a critical juncture in the story -- when Nell was denied her financial share from her most successful film, Back to God's Country, because she upstaged the dog.

The early scene which enacts Nell's apotheosis as a popular filmmaker and actor is also the scene which reveals her lack of financial acumen, her failed marriage to Ernie, and her essential stubbornness. It projects backwards and forwards in her life, anticipating the reasons for her "tragic" fall. As Carl points out, if she had followed the commercial route to Hollywood, and sold herself to Sam Goldwyn, she would have been a "Star." But she preferred not to play the "star" as a vamp "in a slinky dress, blond curls, and cupid lips!" (33), and her willful independence was what attracted her husband Bert, when he first met her as "Helen":

She's got sparks coming out of her hair and ideas pouring out of her head, she's got an idea for film and story, and a kick-ass attitude and by God if you aren't willing and able to follow her out on the ice you better pack your bags and hightail it home . . . She's a beautiful woman . . . I can't walk on water but she - she sure as hell . . . she sure as Hell . . . (33)

In replaying the early family history, all three Nells participate, feeding off each other's memories, and differing only slightly in their interpretation of events, modifying, correcting, and commanding each other to "play" out the story, initially using the words of the "three little maids" from Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, The Mikado, to recall the father's taste in theatre and their strong emotional connection. The words of the song also provide an ironic choric comment on the "three little maids" who comprise Nell Shipman:

Everything is a source of fun

Nobody's safe for we care for none

Life is a joke that's just begun (39)

Nell assumes control of "her" story to justify missing her father's funeral, because she would not leave the film location and her work. Shipman acts as her conscience and her doubts - refusing to allow Nell's rationalizations. She questions her love for her father, her husband, and her son, and recalls the sacrifice her mother made. Even the optimism and hope of young Helen, who would prefer to tell a happier story, cannot mitigate the painful memories of the lonely deaths of both parents, and Nell's abandonment of her son to a military academy.

The lives of all the supporting male characters in Shipman's story are played by two actors, MAN #1 and MAN #2 -- as Carl, the founder of Universal Studios; Bert, her lover and the producer of her films; Ernie, her husband and theatre entrepreneur; and Sam, founder of Goldwyn Pictures. As is the case with all of her memory plays, all of the actors in Moving Pictures remain on stage: the three women who enact Nell, and the two men who play antagonistic or supportive roles. The voice of Thomas Edison, inventor and authority figure - the creator of the medium which becomes the message - provides a choric comment on Shipman's struggle to envision herself as an artist. The past is always present in the life of an artist, informing her way of seeing and interpreting. The other characters in her drama exist on her terms, lurking in the background until they are summoned to play their roles: Helen claps her hands to summon the figure of Carl Laemmle, and commands him to "Play" (26);. Nell later takes off "Carl's" coat and provides a hat to conjure up Ernie Shipman (40); Nell/Shipman/Helen all contribute to a consideration of Ernie's physical appearance - his stature, hair colour, and particularly the colour of his eyes. Pollock specifies in the stage directions in the published text that although MAN #1 and MAN #2 "may seem to play roles assigned by the women, real power is vested in them" (16). However, the composite character of Nell Shipman occupies the emotional and aesthetic centre of the story; it is her vision that persists, despite the power plays of the men, even the brutal beating by Bert near the end of the play, when their life at Lionshead Lodge has become impossible. The business and financial power may be vested in men, and Nell may make bad financial decisions, but she refuses to compromise her artistic integrity. Her response to Sam Goldwyn's contract conditions is confidant and courageous:

Hold it! Here's another hot flash! . . . I'm writing the screenplay and I'm playing the role. Guess what? Female lead: strong woman. Male lead: sick husband. She beats arctic weather and villains. Saves husband and self with the aid of a great vicious hound everyone's afraid of but her. The villains all want it. But none of them get it. . . Why don't you try changing the name at the top and see if you can buy someone else? I'm not for sale! (59).

Her vision informs her films, even though the making of them may exceed her grasp:

So we have miles of film. I'd love more miles. Up there in the blue, blue sky, and those World War One Jennies skipping across the clouds, and you've got it on film, Bert, it's all there. The planes, wing tip to wing tip, Joe standing up in his Jenny cranking the camera, and me standing up in my Jenny playing the heart out of Marion. You on the ground. No communication between us. Director, Cameraman. Actress. We're reading each other's minds. A tiny mistake from the pilots? End of movie. Real end of movie. We've got to be crazy but just look at the footage! (65).

The story of Nell's career in film is conditioned by her choices, but from the perspective of lived experience, with a wider camera angle, Shipman finally realizes that she had "no choice" (96) but to play out her personal imperatives, driven by ambition and vision - her own "life force." Nor is her story "complete" or finished: the conclusion which may provide a resolution or a "meaning" is deferred by the command to "play." No life is ever "complete": it changes each time it is remembered by the self, or by others. There is no such thing as "still life."

Edison's filmic metaphor is aptly applied to the variant points of view of the three "Nells": "the motion of the subjects is documented simultaneously by three cameras - the subjects' movement is captured in bright relief . . . with a transparent, translucent film fed through the camera producing pictures of subjects in motion over an extended period of time" (48). Only at the end of this particular "moving picture," when Shipman finally "takes her life" (like Isobel, the dead protagonist in Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets), do the three Nells coalesce as one - validating her choices and actions because they were all necessary for the artist to create. She did not stay at a safe distance from the heat of the light source, but perhaps there can be no "playing safe" in the creation process. However, unlike the scenarios in many Canadian plays and films, in Moving Pictures the female protagonist is not shot at the end. Bert does not shoot her with the hand gun that has been on her desk for the duration of the play. Nell Shipman remains a living, moving target even when the play closes.

Works Cited

"Nell Shipman (1892-1970)", www.utoronto.ca/shipman/ frames/bio-1.htm

Clark, Bob. "Playwright likes 'simple stories'", Calgary Herald 10 Mar. 2000. C9.

Grace, Sherrill. "Creating the Girl from God's Country: From Nell Shipman to Sharon Pollock." Canadian Literature 172 (Spring 2002): 92-111.

Morrow, Martin. "Pollock's New Play Impresses," Calgary Herald 14 March 1999. C6. Pollock, Sharon. "Moving Pictures", in Sharon Pollock: Three Plays. Toronto: Playwrights, 2003. __________.

Interview, Sharon Pollock: Essays on Her Works. Ed. Anne Nothof. Toronto: Guernica, 2000.