REVISIONS: A Special Issue in Honour of Peter Morris

The small-but-vital magazine introduced in Canada's centennial year, Take One, featured in its first issue not only secretary of State judy LaMarsh on the Canadian Film Development Corporation and an interview with Alfred Hitchcock, but also, between these two forces of cinema, Morris's initial revelations about the career of "Canada's First Movie Mogul," Ernest Shipman. From the 1970s, he produced reference tools and further recoveries of Canada's cinematic heritage, culminating in the twin achievements of the feature-length documentary, Dreamland: A History of Canadian Cinema 1895-1939, for which Morris directed research, and his own book, the landmark Embattled Shadows. Some of the writers, for example, point to his "In Our Own Eyes" article, first published in 1992, commending it for placing issues of canon formation on the agenda and for its disclosure of "blind spots," in the words of Darrell Varga, who also indicates that Morris's 1984 Film Companion-quickly adopted as a standard reference tool-might be seen as a symptom of the very tendencies he questioned eight years later.