Rick Hancox

Biography

Hancox, Richard, "Rick," filmmaker, film teacher, musician (born in Toronto, January 1, 1946). Hancox grew up in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island. All three locations have informed his poetic and finely crafted experimental documentaries, which fuse personal landscapes with issues of time, memory and history. Hancox was introduced to film at the University of Prince Edward Island by American documentary filmmaker George Semsel. He went on to do graduate work in film and photography at New York University and at Ohio University, where he earned an MFA in film in 1973. During that period his short films won five major awards in the Canadian Student Film Festival. After working briefly in New York as an independent filmmaker, Hancox went on to teach film at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ont (1973-85). There he influenced a generation of Canadian independent filmmakers including the documentarians Holly Dale and Janis Cole and experimental filmmakers such as Richard Kerr, Philip Hoffman, Michael Hoolboom and others, who, along with Hancox, have been recognized as belonging to a movement in Canadian experimental film that is referred to as the "escarpment school" - named after the geological feature, the Niagara Escarpment. Hancox left Sheridan to teach in the Communication Studies Department of Concordia University in Montréal. Hancox often blends the poetic with the cinematic as in the trilogy of "poetry films" Waterworx (1982), Landfall (1983) and Beach Events (1985). He is also known for autobiographical documentaries best illustrated by Home for Christmas (1978). Moose Jaw (1992), which was recognized in Take One magazine as one of the ten best films ever made in Canada, marks a new direction for Hancox. Like all his best work, Moose Jaw charges the term "landscape" with extra meaning. His work demonstrates, through the cinematic image, how personal memory is mediated by social and historical contexts.