The Paradox of Norval Morrisseau
1974 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Duke Redbird, Henning Jacobsen
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Ojibway painter Norval Morrisseau works amid northern lakes and forests while reflecting on a career that carried him from obscurity to national acclaim, caught between Indigenous heritage and settler art-world influences, with commentary from Toronto gallerist Jack Pollock.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1974 doc about a canonized Indigenous painter sounds like the safest possible biographical move—and yet Redbird and Jacobsen seem genuinely uninterested in smoothing the paradox (it's right there in the title) into a redemption arc, letting the tension between Morrisseau's vision and the settler market's appetite for it just sit there, unresolved.
This is precisely the kind of archival document that ages into a curatorial object itself—a portrait of how two filmmakers in the mid-70s chose to frame Indigenous artistic legitimacy through formal restraint and the northernness of the landscape, now read as much as a statement about documentary ethics as about Morrisseau's own trajectory.
The decision to anchor the film in Pollock's gallery-world perspective rather than Morrisseau's own voice could have been disaster, but instead it becomes the film's spine—forcing the viewer to read absence as argument, making us do the work of centering the artist by refusing to let the gatekeeper's framing go unexamined.