A Postmodern Cinema: The Voice of the Other in Canadian Film / Canadian National Cinema

A POSTMODERN CINEMA: THE VOICE OF THE OTHER IN CANADIAN FILM Mary Alemany-Galway Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002, 259pp. CANADIAN NATIONAL CINEMA Christopher E. Gittings London: Routledge, 2002, 338pp. It is good to see two non-Canadian presses adding to burgeoning list of books on Canadian While Mary Alemany-Galway's A Postmodern Cinema is revision of (indeed it is still referred to thesis in Introduction), Christopher Gittings's Canadian National Cinema is part of Routledge's series on national cinemas and is presumably intended textbook. Despite their different origins and purposes, both books deal with Canadian films in conjunction with theoretical agenda that provides much of their interest, but also gives rise to number of problems. They both discuss Canadian films within context of national culture, but they are founded on radically different ideas about film spectatorship. Alemany-Galway sets out to construct a poststructuralist/postmodern film that draws on earlier formalist, phenomenological, and structuralist theories. She adroitly synthesizes these theoretical perspectives, often seen mutually exclusive, and argues that they can be combined to account for a particular film style and its underlying epistemology. The style in question is a resistant postmodernism that has enabled Canadian filmmakers to foreground point of view of 'other' within society. Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal, Patricia Rozema's I've Heard Mermaids Singing, Atom Egoyan's Family Viewing and William MacGillivray's Life Classes are analyzed postmodern films which do not resolve their contradictions, leaving conclusions up to viewer. The viewer has much less freedom in model used by Gittings. Drawing on ethnographic methodology, he explores the contested ground of national...across range of Canadian cinemas, from early white-invader settler films...through to ethnographic cinemas, documentary, experimental and feature films produced by Canada's so-called 'founding nations' and including First Nations cinemas and multicultural fields of vision. This admirably broad perspective is, however, tied to version of ideological theory associated most notably with Louis Althusser, which tends to regard viewer passive consumer of dominant ideology. The trajectory that book traces takes us from colonial melodramas like Don Haldane's Drylanders, which recruit viewers invader-settler citizens, to post-colonial texts like Alanis Obomsawin's Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, in which spectator is treated a terrain to be organized, and Srinivas Krishna's Masala in which white spectator is forced to identify with Indo-Canadian camera eye. Although Gittings does refer to recent critical work on melodrama by Peter Brooks, Christine Gledhill, and Susan Hayward, he stresses their accounts of genre's ideological constraints and ignores their interest in tensions and ambiguities at work within melodramatic texts. Contrary to recent feminist work on Back to God's Country, for example, Gittings argues that the spectator posed by discursive organization of film is a white Anglo-Protestant male and that Nell Shipman's creative contribution is negated by her function as passive erotic object on display and by an ending that re-inscribes dominant. As in much of theory derived from Althusser, there is rather mechanical quality to this analysis that reduces films to their ostensible ideological projects. In his reading of Robert Lepage's use of Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess in Le Confessional, Gittings even surprising claim that Hitchcock's film makes no reference to itself cinema. The structure of both books is governed by their authors' theoretical interests. The first five chapters of Alemany-Galway's A Postmodern Cinema-roughly half book-do not deal with Canadian cinema at all. …

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