The Performer
1959 · 58m · Canada
Directed by Donald Ginsberg
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Leading Canadian performers from opera, ballet, theatre, radio, television and jazz, including Teresa Stratas, Oscar Peterson and Christopher Plummer, discuss and demonstrate the realities of building an artistic career in Canada during the late 1950s.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1959 NFB documentary about Canadian artists sounds like the most institutional, consensus-friendly project imaginable—and yet Ginsberg somehow made a film that refuses easy hagiography, letting Oscar Peterson and Christopher Plummer sit with real doubt about their place in a colonial cultural apparatus; it's subversive precisely because it looks conventional.
Ginsberg's decision to let these artists speak directly about craft and career in their own moment creates a document that gains authority through restraint—no narrative voiceover, no dramatic reconstruction, just the formalist rigor of testimony as primary material, which places it in a lineage of Canadian documentary that trusts witness over intervention.
The film's quiet coup is letting each performer choose what they demonstrate—Stratas singing, Peterson playing, Plummer reciting—which means the editing becomes an act of permission rather than commentary, and that single curatorial choice transforms archival material into something that breathes.