The Cinema of Canada/film in Canada

THE CINEMA OF CANADA Edited by Jerry White London: Wallflower Press, 24 Frames Series, 2006, 268 pp. FILM IN CANADA Jim Leach Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2006, 196 pp. Two new books survey terrain of Canadian cinema, each striving to present a cohesive, contextually-grounded snapshot of a national cinema with an insecure identity. While Jerry White's anthology, The Cinema of Canada, comprises twenty-four essays focussed on films drawn from categories of English-Canadian, Quebecois and Aboriginal cinema, Jim Leach's monograph, Film in Canada, takes a topic-centred approach to examination of key assumptions. When read together, books seem to speak to each other, invoking fundamental debates about critical discourse and nation-building along with troubling absences in study of Canadian cinema. Leach begins in 1960s with emergence of a feature film industry from direct cinema movement that developed at National Film Board. Although he proceeds to revisit 1964 to locate commercial alternatives like Crawley Films' The Luck of Ginger Coffey, book's historical overview only reaches back to inception of NFB. White's selection of films also lacks an entry that pre-dates Film Board, further anchoring Canadian film history in relation to federal cultural institutions. Yet, neither sets out to explore political or industrial landscapes of Canadian cinema, except insofar as context informs production of cinematic texts. Instead, by adopting a text-centred approach to defining national cinema, both authors engage in differing ways with canon formation. Leach provides an assured, if non-committal, literature review that sidesteps cinemas debate. He is critical of prescriptive selection criteria that obscure full range of Canadian film production. Even so, he opts to limit his own analysis to fiction feature films, mainstay of approaches that favour discussion of national, popular and commercial success, and asserts that significance of his selective focus lies in link between national cinema, storytelling, and myths of national identity. In contrast, in introduction to The Cinema of Canada, White identifies two basic assumptions behind his anthology, first being that because Canada is a nation-state (with stamps, an army, and an Olympic team), it provides a reasonable way to organize a cinematic inquiry. This reasoning suggests that currency, sovereignty and subsidy act as politico-juridical markers through which individual nations can be differentiated in an international context. It is interesting that film policy is not cited as a fundamental link between nation-state and cinema, although tangle of issues surrounding competing intra-national production jurisdictions in Canadian context might serve to undermine anthology's nationalistic structure. Instead, in reducing rationale for study of Canadian cinema to classificatory value of nationstate, White strives (by his own admission, coyly) to sidestep subject of national identity. Similarly, in introduction to Film in Canada, Leach refers to ongoing influence of Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film on the underlying assumption that films reveal something about social and cultural context in which they appear. Rather than attributing undue explanatory power to national cinema as a means of delineating cultural identity, Leach sets out to explore broader discursive field that affects critical reception. National identity and national cinema are not so easily pulled apart, however. His invocation of Northrop Frye's obliterated environments in English Canada and an ideology of conservation in Quebec inevitably brings questions of space and cultural identity to bear on textual analysis. Leach's critique of historical privileging of documentary realism in Canadian film studies does help to decouple cultural context from text with a shift toward a consideration of categories such as genre, popular film, and auteurs. …

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