Though a principal member of the Toronto New Wave (along with Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, Peter Mettler, Jeremy Podeswa, and John Greyson), Bruce McDonald has never entirely seemed to fit in with this group. Where the other filmmakers were influenced by European art films, the avant-garde or queer cultural theory and politics, McDonald devoted his early career to the road movie genre, possibly one of the most disreputable sub-genres in film history. And while the others cite Antonioni, Bergman, Godard, et al., McDonald cites Norman Jewison, Jim Jarmusch, and APOCALYPSE NOW as his major influences. (Noel S. Baker, the screenwriter for HARD CORE LOGO, which many consider McDonald's best, once wrote that McDonald was the only Canadian filmmaker who made “fun” movies.)
In CLAIRE'S HAT: THE UNMAKING OF A FILM, McDonald describes himself not as an intellectual but as a dope-smoking suburban punk. Exuberant, slyly funny, and endearing, films like ROADKILL and HIGHWAY 61 (HARD CORE LOGO is far darker and more ambitious) draw on a near-encyclopedic knowledge of rock music. DANCE ME OUTSIDE, the only early McDonald film which isn't a road movie, refutes stereotypes about First Nations Canadians by linking its teenage characters to contemporary pop culture. McDonald in fact often refers to himself as a myth-maker, one determined to construct a Canadian mythology.
While this hipster-populist element seems to dominate McDonald's early work, it's far from being the only significant strain in a career distinguished by very different facets and emphases. In between his road movies, he made ELIMINATION DANCE, based on a poem by Michael Ondaatje - hardly the most obvious choice for a dope-smoking suburban punk. Around the same time, he shot an adaptation of Michael Turner's novel, American Whisky Bar , a Mamet-like piece about a group of seedy characters in a saloon. Shot live for television (McDonald's mentor, Jewison, established himself in live TV in the Fifties), the film is both experiment and drama, more the product of a cineaste than a pop-obsessed punk. As Aaron Taylor notes in a perceptive piece on McDonald in the recently published Great Canadian Film Directors, much of McDonald's work has targeted the
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