Documentary filmmaker Allan King, whose career spanned over five decades. (National Archives of Canada/CBC)

When you work at a news organization, you’re supposed to be able to compartmentalize your feelings — that is, shut them off when a story breaks. But sometimes, like when I heard about the death yesterday of Canadian filmmaker Allan King, it didn’t seem possible to shut off my feelings — in fact, that would be the opposite of everything King stood for in his remarkable filmmaking career.

The drunks, the dying, the emotionally disturbed, the couple whose marriage is imploding – Allan King showed them respect and never judged, and in turn, they shared their stories on camera.

At their core, King’s diverse films were all about empathy. As early as his first official documentary, a project he did for CBC Vancouver entitled Skid Row (1956), you could see empathy creeping in. Yes, the film was shot with the scripted narration and formal interviewing style that was fashionable at the time. But if you look at the sequence where King hunkers down to interview Jimmy, one of the derelicts populating Vancouver’s skid row, you sense something else is up.

King gets in close with his camera and lets the man talk, sitting quietly as Jimmy tells a story of a life filled with alcoholism, thievery and jail time. When King does ask a question, he actually includes the man’s name: “You say you don’t eat, Jim – why?” It has a curiously humanizing effect, giving a flash of dignity to a homeless man.

After honing his documentary skills in Canada and England for the next decade, King burst the medium wide open in a CBC-commissioned documentary called Warrendale (1967). Centred on the lives of patients and staff members at an Ontario residential centre for emotionally disturbed kids, the film was the first of King’s “actuality dramas” – movies shot in a loose, handheld vérité style that aimed to capture “the drama of everyday life as it happens, spontaneously without direction, interviews or narrative.”

A scene from Warrendale, King's 1967 film about emotionally disturbed children. (Allan King Films)

There was much drama to be found at the Warrendale School, where unorthodox therapy methods – which involved holding kids down as they screamed out their frustration and rage – were common practice. After earning the trust of the Warrendale staff and kids, King was granted intimate access. At times, the proximity of his camera to the events inside is unnerving. A scene where the residents learn that their cook, Dorothy, has died leads to emotional outbursts so piercing that the film burns itself into your brain. Though the profanity guaranteed it would never air on CBC, Warrendale went on to garner a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, ensuring that the Canadian filmmaker was now world class, taking his rightful place alongside other doc pioneers like the Maysles Brothers or Frederick Wiseman.

King’s next project, A Married Couple (1969), is my favourite of his works. He employed many of the techniques from Warrendale – the up-close-and-personal camera, the delicate lighting – to take on another unexplored documentary subject: the day-to-day dealings of Antoinette and Billy Edwards, a middle-class married couple. The film is still shocking for its intimacy, particularly a scene where, mid-argument, Billy shoves Antoinette out the front door. But to only remember the bickering — and there’s lots of it — is to miss the point of A Married Couple. For me, the film’s best scene arrives when Billy and Antoinette are listening to the hi-fi stereo, doing a playful little waltz around the living room to the Beatles’ A Day in the Life. King shows you that, name calling aside, these two really love each other. Marriage is something complicated, but these two are still struggling to make it work.

In an interview filmed for a recent retrospective of his work, King said, “I’ve always made films for a purely selfish reason, which is to answer the question, ‘Why?’” This curiosity, and his need to look in the corners where nobody else wanted to look, runs through all his work, from Skid Row right up to his trio of recent triumphs, Dying at Grace (2003), Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005) and EMPz 4 Life (2006).

A scene from King's 2003 documentary Dying at Grace. (Allan King Films)

Filmed while he was already in his 70s, these latter films show that King was as spry and compassionate as ever – looking at the racism grinding teens down in a low-income Toronto suburb in EMPz 4 Life, or staring death and dementia square in the face in Dying at Grace and Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company. King pushed filmmaking boundaries by daring to show the demise of at least one resident in Toronto’s Salvation Army Grace Health Care Unit, which is the setting for Dying at Grace.

Far from being exploitative, King’s films always struck me as deeply humane. He aimed to show us the people on the margins. The drunks, the dying, the emotionally disturbed, the couple whose marriage is imploding – he showed them respect and never judged, and in turn, they shared their stories on camera, so the rest of us could learn from both their wisdom and their mistakes.

In another recent interview about EMPz 4 Life, King talked eloquently about racism, defining it as “a wish to divide the world into them and us.” King’s gift was that he never believed in a “them” or an “us.” In his films, there’s only all of us.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.