Man with a movie camera

Stanley Fox
An essay by Dennis J. Duffy

*

In the mid-1980s, while researching the history of filmmaking in British Columbia for a BC Archives project, I came across an interesting Vancouver Sun story from 1950. It described the local premiere of In the Daytime, a documentary film by Stanley Fox and Peter Varley. ¹ It was an intriguing glimpse of independent production in BC, and from a much earlier date than I’d expected.

At my urging, Derek Reimer (of the archives’ Sound and Moving Image Division) reached out to Mr. Fox in Toronto and persuaded him to donate two of his early films. I was later contracted to supervise the restoration of In the Daytime, so that a cleaned-up duplicate negative and composite print could be generated. Stan and I first met over the telephone during this process.

I met him in person at Vancouver’s Pacific Cinematheque in March 1986. On one memorable evening, Stan introduced the new synch-sound print of In the Daytime, and the archives launched my book Camera West: British Columbia on Film. As a bonus, director Philip Keatley showed his film The Education of Phyllistine (1965), an award-winning episode of CBC Vancouver’s Cariboo Country series.

In June 1988, I recorded a four-hour oral history interview with Stan about his life and activities up to 1953. ² It covered a lot of ground.

*

Early photography and film interests

Born in Vancouver in 1928, Stanley grew up in Kitsilano. At the age of seven, he received his first still camera, a Kodak Baby Brownie. It was the beginning of a lifelong engagement with photography and film. At the time, Stan and his recently-widowed mother were living at the Leland Hotel in Kamloops, on a sort of retreat from their home in Kitsilano. He used the little camera to document their unfamiliar surroundings—a practice he continued in Vancouver.

Stan was given a “do-it-yourself” home darkroom kit as a birthday gift when he was twelve or fourteen. By age sixteen, he had a job at the studio of R. H. Marlow, ³ a well-known Vancouver portrait and wedding photographer. He learned the secrets of the darkroom by processing and printing Marlow’s proofs, and went along on the wedding assignments to help with set-up and take candid shots.

Stan was a student at Kitsilano High School, but his interests and enthusiasms went well beyond the school curriculum. He explored great literature (through the Modern Library and Pocket Books series), visual art (in Albert Skira’s lavishly illustrated books about modern artists), and classical music (guided by Irving Kolodin’s New Guide to Recorded Music). He became a kind of “Renaissance teen.” ⁴

He was also a frequent and discriminating moviegoer, often seeing two or three films a week and recording his impressions. Stan wrote his succinct and well-observed one-page reviews in an old notebook of his father’s. Here he is at age 20, describing William Wyler’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943): “A tremendously powerful outcry against mob lynching and, by implication, against all jingoism. I can think of very few pictures which have aroused such a terrible feeling of horror in me. Perhaps the most noticeably great aspect of it was the beautiful unity of the story and the complete integration of all the minor details.” ⁵

In 1946, Fox and his classmate Allan King ⁶ heard about the Vancouver Film Survey Group of the Labour Arts Guild. This was a partial revival of the Vancouver Branch of the National Film Society (which was founded in 1936 and had been inactive during the Second World War). The group brought together interests in the arts, cinema, and politics. In the words of film curator Graham Peat: “The series was programmed by a very left-leaning group of colourful individuals who seemed to have stepped out of German Expressionist films.” ⁷ Founded by cinéastes Moira Armour, Dorothy Burritt, Vernon van Sickle, and (painter) Jack Shadbolt, the Film Survey Group assembled an ambitious program of silent, classic, and international films. ⁸

Stan recalled: “There was to be a Main Series at the Paradise Theatre downtown and a Silent Series at the John Goss Studio Theatre.” The John Goss program (at 641 Granville) featured European silent films in 16-millimetre prints. Mainstream classic and foreign films were shown in 35-millimetre prints at the Paradise (861 Granville). ⁹

Fox and King had joined the Film Survey Group as eager audience members, but soon they were serving as projectionists—and as disc jockeys. They learned how to assemble live musical accompaniments for the silent films shown at the John Goss. A console with dual turntables allowed them to fade and mix together selections from 78–rpm discs. It was a combined education in film history and music editing. Their mentor was Dorothy Burritt (1910–1963), who King later called “a remarkable heroine of film culture in Canada.” ¹⁰

The repertoire of the Film Survey Group included great works of the silent and early sound eras. These ranged from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Story of Gösta Berling (1924), and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) to Carnival in Flanders (1935), The Informer (1935) and La Grande Illusion (1938). Beyond the appeal of the films themselves, Stan found that he was receiving an informal arts education through this heady milieu.

There seemed to be in Vancouver a very sophisticated group of people . . . that seemed to “feed” on each other, and keep each other abreast of what was happening in the rest of the world. . . . Dorothy [Burritt] herself was a very influential person, because she was very involved with the arts and had a very good sense of values about things of an aesthetic nature. And I think that I was really in the middle of almost an “artists’ colony.” Although there weren’t a great many practicing artists, there were certainly an awful lot of people who really lived for things artistic, whether it was painting or film or books or whatnot. [Fox, 1988 oral history interview.]    

The Film Survey Group of the Labour Arts Guild barely survived for two years. Then the city’s original film society—the Vancouver Branch of the National Film Society —scrambled to take up the slack. In 1950, it was reorganized as the Vancouver Film Society (VFS), with Fox and King (then twenty-two and twenty years old, respectively) as senior board members. Through the film society membership, Stan met some interesting fellow cinephiles, including novelists Malcolm Lowry and Margerie Bonner Lowry—and student Janet Cates, who Stan would marry in May 1953.

Regular exposure to great movies kindled Stan’s desire to make his own films. He acquired a simple 16-millimetre movie camera and began shooting street scenes of postwar Vancouver. To save money, he used inexpensive low-speed printing stock and reverse-processed it, using homemade equipment in a bathtub. ¹¹

Between 1947 and 1953, Fox made a handful of promising and unusual amateur films. He collaborated with his friends and film society colleagues, taking inspiration from the experimental and documentary films he was seeing. Impressed by Stan’s first footage, Dorothy Burritt loaned him her husband Oscar’s Bolex movie camera to shoot his first complete films. ¹²

Stan’s amateur work included the following films—all described in the University of Calgary’s unique Amateur Movie Database (AMDB). The titles listed below are hyperlinked to the AMDB’s descriptive records (most of which, in turn, link to excerpts on YouTube).

• Glub (1947): A brief surrealist slapstick farce, shot on the sand dunes of Sea Island, Glub parodied the early works of iconic American avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961). Fox co-stars with Tom Baird and Rolph Blakstad. ¹³
• Suite Two: A Memo to Oscar (1947): A film about Dorothy and Oscar Burritt’s Vancouver apartment—the former billiard room of a Robson Street mansion that was slated for demolition. Directed by Dorothy and photographed by Stan, Suite Two is a charming record of light and life in the Burritt home, and the community of artistic friends that gathered there. They watch a film, of course, and Stan is the projectionist.
• Abelard Before a Mirror (1948): An unfinished attempt to depict the tragic romance of the medieval monk Peter Abelard and nun Héloïse—using life masks, stylized gestures, and complex visual metaphors. The scenario was written by poet-playwright Norman Newton; the masks were created by Rolph Blakstad.
• In the Daytime (1949): This ambitious “city symphony” shows a day in the life of Vancouver, depicting its residential streets, Stanley Park, Chinatown, skid row, and waterfront, ending with the gathering of shadows at twilight. It was directed and photographed by Stanley Fox and Peter Varley; the poetic commentary was written by Norman Newton and read by UBC English professor Roy Daniells.
• The Suetonius Version (1953) — Gerald Newman portrays a university English prof who finds himself the object of fascination for one of his female students. Written and directed by Stanley Fox and Gerald Newman.

At the 1949 and 1950 Canadian Film Awards ceremonies, respectively, Suite Two and In the Daytime received honourable mentions in the amateur film category. In 1985–86, Stan donated the original edited picture rolls from both films to the BC Archives.

After our 1988 interview, I always meant to record a follow-up with Stan covering the rest of his career—but we never got around to it. Luckily for me (and this essay), he took time to write about his experiences, and produced a multi-volume video autobiography on DVD!

*

At CBC Vancouver (1953–1969)

In 1953, when CBC Television was developing its new Vancouver station, CBUT, Stan was one of the first three people hired for the film department. He was an assistant film editor, working under the veteran editor Arla Saare (1915–2013), formerly of the National Film Board. ¹⁴ Among his early work assignments, Fox edited Summer Afternoon (Pacific 13 series, 1956), director Ron Kelly’s wordless documentary film about two boys on the loose in Vancouver’s Chinatown. ¹⁵

Fox eventually became the director of film services at CBUT, managing the technical personnel and resources assigned to shoot, record, and edit the station’s filmed documentaries and dramas. The unit’s output included the filmed episodes of the renowned drama series Cariboo Country (1964-66), regional documentary series such as Discovery and Camera West, and film inserts (short topical items) for The 7 O’Clock Show, CBUT’s nightly public affairs program. ¹⁶

In the 1950s and 1960s, Fox was also a key organizer of the VFS, and (while working at CBUT) ran one incarnation of the Vancouver Film Festival for four years (1958–62).

In the mid-to-late 1960s, Stan became more personally involved with CBUT program content, making documentaries about social issues for the anthology series Camera West and Heritage. ¹⁷ Most significantly, he and his colleague Gene Lawrence (1929–1992) created two new series reflecting artistic and social trends: the new wave of experimental film, electronic music, and video art, as well as counterculture figures like Zen philosopher Alan Watts and psychiatrist Dr. Frederick Perls.

The first of these series, The Enterprise (1967–68), was an experimental program that aired late on Friday nights, running programs of no fixed length. Province film critic Morris Ruvinsky wrote: “[The] Enterprise was without doubt the most exciting experiment conducted on television in this country.” ¹⁸ The second series, New World (1969), was more structured, but still expanded on some of the ideas from The Enterprise.

In both series, Fox made room to showcase the work of emerging Vancouver filmmakers, providing 16-millimetre film stock and processing costs for the creation of new works by Gary Lee-Nova, Al Razutis, David Rimmer, Dallas Selman, Danny Singer, Sylvia Spring, and Tom Shandel. Another of these creators, Morris Ruvinsky, would call Fox “the Patron Saint of Vancouver filmmakers.” ¹⁹

Fox’s own films for CBC Vancouver included:

• Where Have All the Children Gone: A Study of Creativity (Camera West series, 1966): Examines creativity in children.
• The Be-In (The 7 O’Clock Show series, 1967): A record of the “Human Be-In,” a celebrated hippie spring festival held in Vancouver’s Stanley Park on March 26, 1967.
• What Happened Last Summer (The Enterprise series, 1967): A documentary about the influx of hippies into Vancouver during the “Summer of Love,” its impact on Kitsilano’s 4th Avenue neighbourhood, and the response of local residents.

The Enterprise and New World attracted a lot of attention and some praise from the press, and considerable criticism from mainstream viewers and CBC management. Seeing the corporation’s dwindling support for his programming ideas, Stan resigned from CBC Vancouver in January 1969.

*

Simon Fraser University (1969-71)

At SFU, Fox became “Resident in Film” at the Centre for Communications and the Arts, running the non-credit student film workshop. The workshop’s activities are documented in the seasonal events brochures published by the Centre. The Spring 1970 brochure, for instance, highlights screenings of student films from the Vancouver School of Art (VSA) and the SFU Film Workshop—including Penticton Profile (1970), a group project directed by student Sandy Wilson. ²⁰ The brochure also lists the Cable 10 Series of the SFU Videotape Workshop, an early experiment in community television initiated by Fox.

*

Here and Now: Gestalt Sessions with Fritz Perls (and Aquarian Productions)

Stan’s final CBC production had been A Session with Dr. Frederick Perls (New World series, 1969), an hour-long film of a group-encounter therapy session led by the influential German-born psychotherapist Frederick (Fritz) Perls (1893–1970). After leaving CBUT, Fox continued to collaborate with Perls, filming 55 hours of psychotherapy sessions with volunteer participants in 1969.

Perls died in 1970. Perls’ associate, Dr. Norman Hirt, joined with Fox to form Aquarian Productions Limited and complete the Gestalt series. The company opened a storefront office and post-production facility on Lower Lonsdale in North Vancouver. Eventually, Stan and editor Don Cumming would assemble eighteen 16-millimetre colour films from the 1969 footage. ²¹ Stan would finish cutting the second batch of films at his new job in Toronto. ²² The educational series was successfully distributed as Here and Now: Gestalt Sessions with Fritz Perls.

*

York University (1972–81)

In 1972, film professor (and longtime National Film Board producer) James Beveridge (1917–1993)—who Fox called “a wonderful man!”—invited Stanley to join the faculty of the Film department at York University in Toronto, Canada’s first university film program.

As a new working academic, Stan revelled in his new circumstances at York; he enjoyed his colleagues, and found the students talented and stimulating. Many of them went on to work in film with distinction. Notably, York graduates Niv Fichman, Barbara Willis Sweete, and Larry Weinstein co-founded the production company Rhombus Media, which would produce an impressive list of arts documentaries and feature films over its 28-year lifespan (1979–2007). ²³

In 1978-79, James Beveridge and Stan Fox established York’s Graduate Program in Film—again, the first in Canada. Then they went on an overseas adventure. With funding from the Canadian International Development Agency, Fox accompanied Beveridge on a trip to India to work on plans for a mass communication school at the Jamia Millia University in New Delhi, created in association with York.

*

TV Ontario

Fox was offered another excellent opportunity by former CBC Vancouver colleague Gene Lawrence, the program director of TV Ontario. Stan joined TVO as Director of Adult Programming in 1981. He was responsible for commissioning and acquiring new programs, with an annual budget of $8 million for production and acquisition. In search of international film content for broadcast, he attended major film festivals in Europe, including Cannes, Karlovy Vary, and Monte Carlo. On top of all this behind-the-scenes work, he occasionally appeared in front of the camera—on Elwy Yost’s Movies of the Eighties, for example.

In 1988, at sixty, Stan left TVO, and the Foxes moved back to British Columbia. Semi-retired and living in Victoria, Stan continued to review project proposals for BC Film, the Knowledge Network, and Rogers Cable.

In the late 1990s and 20-naughts, Stan and I lived six blocks apart in Victoria’s James Bay neighbourhood. Stan and Janet’s house on South Turner Street became a modern annex to Dorothy Burritt’s Suite Two. There was a guarantee of good company, good talk, and cups of tea—and films to watch in the big back bedroom, the Fox screening room. (I like to think of it as “The Stanley Theatre.”)

2007 was the 40th anniversary of the “Summer of Love.” Stan put together a live presentation that included his two 1967 hippie documentaries, as well as related footage of the 1966 “Trips Festival” and the political response to the hippie presence in Vancouver. These were augmented with Stan’s personal recollections of visiting San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and meeting such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary.

The show was billed as Stan Fox presents the Summer of Love: The Vancouver Scene. It played to full houses at the Kitsilano 4^th Avenue Business Association and the Pacific Cinematheque in the summer of 2007, and to the Friends of the BC Archives in Victoria the following January. Audience members were delighted with this visual souvenir of “the Summer”—whether they remembered being there or not.

For some years, Stan and I got together for lunch every other week. Those lunches always involved intense discussions about the movies. Sometimes strangers would appear beside our table; I thought they wanted to complain that we were being too loud. But no, they said that they enjoyed overhearing our conversation, and thought that what Stan was saying was fascinating.

And it always was.

*

In March 2019, the Learning people at the Royal BC Museum put together an early evening event, a “Museum Happy Hour,” inspired by the theme of Moving Images. In the Third Floor galleries, attendees watched archival films and “mash-ups” (some with live musical accompaniment); took part in a collaborative draw-on-film animation activity (which was projected at the end of the night); and enjoyed drinks and snacks on the main street of Old Town. Stan Fox was a special guest. By absolute coincidence, the date chosen for the event—28 March 2019—was his 91st birthday.

Sitting in front of a “store” on Main Street, we watched as Dorothy and Stan’s Suite Two was projected onto the two-story-high wall of the “hotel” building. Singer/electric guitarist Ora Cogan, watching the film from below, improvised a live soundtrack. It occurred to me much later that this was precisely the kind of performance that Stan had presented on CBC’s The Enterprise, fifty years before.*

Afterwards, we sang “Happy Birthday” and had some cake. I think Stan was quite touched by the recognition coming from the young audience. A year later, the pandemic hit, and I didn’t see him again for quite a while.

* Dennis Duffy’s video memoir of the Museum Happy Hour performance can be seen on YouTube

Stanley Harold Fox died in Victoria on May 20, 2025, at the age of 97.

*

Dennis J. Duffy is the author of Camera West: British Columbia on Film, 1941-1965. (BC Archives, 1986) and the producer of the DVD Evergreen Playland: A Road Trip through British Columbia (Royal BC Museum, 2008). He retired from the Royal BC Museum in 2017, after a long association with the BC Archives’ audio-visual collections. He writes about BC film history on his blog, Seriously Moving Images.  [Editor’s Note: Dennis J. Duffy previously contributed the essay Knowing the country: the unfilmed Ethel Wilson to The British Columbia Review.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

 

1. Gilmour, Clyde (11 February 1950). “Vancouver-Made Film Gets Premiere Sunday.” Vancouver Sun, p. 17. Peter Varley (1921-2000) would become a well-known commercial, architectural, and art photographer. ↩︎
2. Fox, Stanley (20 June 1988). Oral history interview by Dennis J. Duffy, Victoria, BC. Audio tapes T4349:0001–0004, BC Archives/Royal BC Museum. ↩︎
3. Mattison, David (n.d.). “Marlow, Reuben Hmara.” Camera Workers, 1858–1950: The British Columbia, Alaska, and Yukon Photographic Directory. Database entry. ↩︎
4. Fox, Stanley [ca. 2004]. “The Autobiography of Stanley Fox, volume 1.” Unpublished video memoir on DVD; the first of seven discs. ↩︎
5. Fox, Stanley (January 1949). “A Critical Record of Contemporary Cinema.” Handwritten notebook entries [ca. 1945–1951]. ↩︎
6. Allan King (1930–2009) later became a celebrated director of Canadian documentaries (Skidrow, A Married Couple) and fiction features (Who Has Seen the Wind?, Termini Station). ↩︎
7. Peat, Graham (2008). “City Beats: Lost Vancouver from the ‘40s to the ‘60s.” DOXA Documentary Festival, May 27–June 1, 2008 [program guide], p. 38. ↩︎
8. Shadbolt, Jack (1983) “A Personal Recollection.” Vancouver: Art and Artists, 1931–1983. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, p. 41. ↩︎
9.  Fox, Stanley (2012). “Notes on my cinema.” Unpublished manuscript. ↩︎
10. King, Allan (2002). “Apprenticeship.” Canadian Film Encyclopedia. Toronto International Film Festival. Online essay. ↩︎
11. Fox, Stanley (1946). “Stan Fox on his first 16mm film footage.” Film clip on YouTube. ↩︎
12. Amateur Cinema (2016). “Filmmaker: Stanley Fox.” Database entry. ↩︎
13. Rolph Blakstad (1929-2012) studied architecture and became a cinematographer, shooting some early films by Allan King, before setting up a design firm on Ibiza. ↩︎
14. Newman, Tim (December 2014). “Mediating Collaborations: Arla Saare, the CBUT Film Unit, and the Emergence of the West Coast School”. Off-Screen, 18:11-12. Newman underlines Saare’s pivotal role in the development of the CBC Vancouver Film Unit. ↩︎
15. Hagemoen, Christine (4 May 2020). “The curious case of the 1956 roll of Kodak Super XX – Part 2.” Vanalogue. Online essay. ↩︎
16. Fox, Stanley (Spring 1981). “We Are Where Come From: The Founding of a Film Community in British Columbia, 1945-1970.” Journal of Canadian Studies, 16:1, pp. 23–35. ↩︎
17. Duffy, Dennis J. (1986). Camera West: British Columbia on Film, 1941-1965. Victoria: Provincial Archives of British Columbia, pp. 17–21. ↩︎
18. Ruvinsky, M. J. (7 March 1969). “Why Stan Fox is leaving his old lair.” The Province, p. 47. (By the way: The Enterprise took its series title from the name of the starship in the original series of Star Trek.) ↩︎
19. Ruvinsky, M. J. (15 January 1969). “Film co-op gets off with a great and groovy start.” The Province, p. 10. ↩︎
20. Sandy Wilson (b. 1947) later made several NFB and independent documentaries before directing feature films, including My American Cousin (1985) and Harmony Cats (1992). ↩︎
21. “Collection MsC-98 – Fritz Perls film collection” [archival description], Simon Fraser University Library Special Collections and Rare Books. ↩︎
22. Wasserman, Jack (8 June 1972). “Jack Wasserman” [column], Vancouver Sun, p. 39 ↩︎
23. Rhombus Media is perhaps best-known for two Genie-Award-winning features: Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) and The Red Violin (1998). ↩︎