Depth of field

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This article was published 03/09/2022 (1453 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Howard Curle was not the type of professor who bolted out the door the moment his lecture ended.

That wasn’t his style; the bare minimum was nowhere near enough. His office hours were actual hours. When he wanted students to understand a concept in practice, he wouldn’t simply tell them to go watch the work of the Italian director Vittorio De Sica: he would hand over a copy of Umberto D at the next class.

When his students at the universities of Winnipeg and Manitoba were creating short films, Curle didn’t wait until the projects were submitted to leave his mark. He accepted invitations to visit the set, and would do whatever needed to be done: holding microphones, working a light and often standing in front of the lens for a cameo. He knew what it meant to make a movie.

“Any time anyone asked him to act, he did,” says University of Winnipeg associate professor John Kozak, who was Curle’s friend since 1973. “There are a lot of films out there, somewhere, that have a bit of Howard in them.”

Humble, brilliant and kind are frequent descriptions given of Curle, who died of multiple myeloma at age 74 on Aug. 12. “One of his favourite words was ‘engaged,’” says Curle’s wife Bev Phillips, who married the affable professor inside their Broadway apartment in 1990. “He liked to be engaged with everything going on around him.”

Curle and Phillips met in 1988 but Phillips, who’d done some copy editing here and there, realized she already knew Curle through his dispatches from the Toronto International Film Festival, published in the arts periodical Midcontinental. “I thought he was very funny,” she says. When they met, she was charmed, but friends of Curle’s issued a warning. “Are you interested in movies? Because to date Howard, you have to be,” Phillips recalls them saying. “I said, ‘Yes. Yes I am.’”

As a boy growing up in the St. James area, Curle was engaged with many of the same obsessions and loves that remained within him for the rest of his life: reading, watching, learning and, most importantly, teaching. While his parents Johnny and Mollie — an electronics salesman and a homemaker, respectively — were busy, a young Curle would sit his brothers Warren and Wayne down and set up a blackboard, jotting down lessons in chalk.

He was interested in history and studied it in university, along with a smattering of film classes, before pursuing graduate studies in film at New York University in the 1970s. “What struck me when I first met him was his rigorous adherence to academic study,” said Kozak, who roomed with Curle while also at NYU. “We spent a lot of time talking about film, and it did inspire me to take it more seriously and study harder. That came from Howard.”

In New York, Curle studied under professors such as William K. Everson, and with Kozak took advantage of what felt like a cheap double bill every night.

He often would watch movies with a notepad, Phillips says, and if not, was paying extremely close attention to the themes, the techniques, the bad mistakes and the good ones. He absorbed what he watched and developed a critical eye and analytical mind that would make him highly respected among colleagues, students and casual acquaintances.

Curle was noted for listening more than for talking. When people spoke, Curle actively heard them, says Milos Mitrovic, a former student of Curle’s who became his colleague at the University of Winnipeg and now teaches a few courses Curle ran before he retired in 2019. That meant a lot, because “the analytical portion of his mind was just insane.” In conversation, he treated the freshest of filmmakers like old pros, challenging ideas and asking students questions — not carrying them down the road, but showing them how to get to the end on their own feet.

Curle had been there before. As a teen, he shot short films on his handheld camera and had a clear understanding of the practical difficulties of filmmaking. And as a young adult, he and Kozak made what is now regarded as a cult classic of Winnipeg shortform cinema. Made in 1976 and shot in Winnipeg, Two Men in Search of a Plot is a simple jaunt, and likely one of the funnier films made about serial murder. Two men are trying to dispose of a body in the woods, but when they’re spotted by a young girl, they suddenly have two corpses on their hands. Then three. Then four. And so on.

His practical experience, combined with his curiosity and academic rigour — he co-edited with Stephen Snyder a well-received collection on De Sica — made Curle the ultimate film professor. On top of those attributes were Curle’s humanity, joie de vivre, conversational skills, and passion.

Local film editor Nathalie Massaroni took Curle’s experimental film course at the University of Winnipeg. “We always joked it was experimental because we were his first,” Massaroni says. For one project, Massaroni used a green-screen effect. It looked cool, Curle said, but what did it all mean? What was it trying to say? Curle made some suggestions, and Massaroni and classmates ran with them, not because Curle was assessing their work, but because they trusted his opinion.

“(That class) opened my world up in a major way,” says local filmmaker Ryan Steel, who borrowed many DVDs from Curle.

“He taught me to look deeper into the way I do everything,” Massaroni says.

Deeper, but not without joy. One memory of Curle that stands out to Massaroni is when the professor arrived one morning with the biggest smile on his face. “He was telling us about a conversation he and his wife had over breakfast,” Massaroni recalls. “He was so happy he had to tell us about it. I don’t think I ever saw him upset.”

Phillips said when challenges came about, Curle maintained his joy in engagement: they took walks, went to the library, spent time by the lake in Gimli. Even when the pandemic struck and Curle was dealing with cancer, “we were so fortunate to have each other,” Phillips says. “We were two little squirrels in a tree, cosied up together.”

Although more comfortable behind the scenes, Curle was a star to those who knew him best. Asked who she would cast to play her husband in a biopic, Phillips doesn’t hesitate much. “I think George Clooney would be good. He has that goodness and that niceness. And that’s what Howard was like. He had a tremendous generosity of spirit.”

A former bookseller, Curle always picked the perfect books to give as gifts, and was ready with recommendations. Ami Kotler, a Winnipeg Crown attorney, worked with Curle at Mary Scorer books in the 1980s, and remembers mentioning a surfing movie to Curle.

“The next time we worked together, he produced a handwritten list of surfing movies he thought I might want to explore,” Kotler says. “I asked him how he knew so much about movies and he simply answered that he enjoyed them.”

Before his death, he purchased a book on John of Gaunt for his wife’s upcoming birthday after seeing she’d been reading about him online, and told her where to find it.

“I’m saving it,” she says.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com