Research Profile

Clarke Mackey, Fall 2006

Feature Filmmaking

Clarke Mackey has worked as a director, cinematographer, editor, producer or writer on over 50 film and television projects. His first feature film, The Only Thing You Know, won two Genies in 1971. His second feature, Taking Care, won a Canadian Film and Television Association award as best feature and was nominated for the Best Actress Genie in 1987. Dance on the Edge, Mackey's next feature, premiered at the Figueira da Foz International Film Festival in Portugal in 1996. He is currently writing the screenplay for a new feature set in Kingston called King Blue and a book on vernacular culture.

Television

Mackey began directing for television in the mid 1970s. Two notable examples are Fight Night for the series The Peep Show (another director on that series was David Cronenberg) and The Haircut for the series Inside Stories. In the 1980s, he directed several episodes of the Emmy Award-winning TV series Degrassi Junior High.

New Media

Target, a pioneering project in digital interactive drama which Mackey directed, won him a Cindy award (Association of Visual Communicators, Los Angeles) in 1989 . For the past decade Mackey has been developing interactive new media projects for CD-ROM and the World Wide Web. His award winning web site, Memory Palace: Vernacular Culture in the Digital Age, can be viewed at http://sunsite.queensu.ca/memorypalace.

Community Arts

Clarke Mackey has been involved in community arts for over thirty years. In the early 70s he was one of the first recipients of the Ontario Arts Council's "Artist in the Schools" grants, working with children in Regent Park in Toronto and in several native communities on James Bay and at the Six Nations Reserve. He also made a film with inmates at the Guelph Correctional Institution. In the summer of 2003 he was invited to participate in the Kingston Insights Project. He worked with ex-federal inmates and they produced a photograph-based video called Eyes in the Back of Your Head.

Vernacular Culture

Mackey has been interested in what he calls "vernacular culture" - grassroots, unoffical art, music and performance created by non-professionals - since the early 80s. In 1985 he began a research project called The Vernacular Project with funding from the Canada Council's Explorations Program. He travelled to England and U.S. as well as Canada to interview a number of important artists, performers and writers about this topic. People he talked to included Raymond Williams, Pete Seeger, R. Murray Schafer and Dee Dee Halleck. In 1995 Mackey invited Sue Gill and John Fox, the founders of England's Welfare State International, to run a three- week workshop in celebratory arts at Queen's with students and members of the public. It culminated in an outdoor performance at dusk. Three years later, Mackey completed a web site called Memory Palace that incorporates all the interviews he did in the 80s with hundreds of photographs he has taken over almost two decades. Disrobing the Emperor (2000) is a video Mackey produced that deals with "post-modern" vernacular culture in Mexico among the country's most economically disadvantaged communities. He is currently compiling 20 years of research into a book/DVD publication called The Vernacular Imagination: Grassroots Cultures in the Post-Digital Age.

Film Programming

Mackey is the founder and director of Cinema Kingston, a popular monthly film series affiliated with the Department of Film and Media that runs out of Etherington Auditorium on the Queen's Campus. He is also a programmer and board member for the very successful Kingston Canadian Film Festival (2001-04).

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