Canadian Cinema in the Age of Globalization

I feel very uncomfortable about this stuff, because for so long I've gotten a certain energy from being outside that it's difficult for me to accept the fact that part of me has now been accepted into the system. But of course it completely has. The moment you make a film that as many people have gone to see as Exotica, or has been awarded by industry as Exotica, you've been absorbed by the system. So anyone who's defined themselves outside of it can't help but feel a bit uncomfortable. But that's happened, and I don't feel I've compromised anything in order to allow it to happen. --Atom Egoyan (1995) Nearly ten years ago, Kass Banning introduced a previous CineAction special issue on Canadian Cinema by announcing that In spite of the ascription that Canadian culture cannot exist--that it is indeed an impossibility--we are witnessing a surge, a 'new wave of filmmaking in this 'imaginary' nation. (1) If that wave can be said to have crested in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997) being feted at Cannes and nominated for two Academy Awards, and David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) gaining notoriety worldwide and a special jury prize at Cannes, the sure signs that it had come down, to be transformed into something else, were clear to see by 1999, which saw the release of Egoyan's, Cronenberg's and Patricia Rozema's deepest forays into echt commercial territory ever: the Ireland-set serial-killer drama, Felicia's Journey, the English heritage classic, Mansfield Park (part of a three-movie deal with Miramax), and the video-gaming science-fiction comedy, eXistenZ. While the first two were quasi-independent 'art' films, all three were produced, distributed and exhibited far more within a commercial Hollywood framework than outside of one. I will argue below that these three films do not necessarily represent either a sell-out or a repudiation of some essential 'Canadianness' in the filmmaking of any of these directors; for the moment I want simply to register the fact that they constitute a new direction, perhaps the most important feature of which is a different relationship to the multi-national film production world, a relationship evident even in Guy Maddin's most recent feature (and first in 35mm), Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997). None of the directors of this so-called 'New Wave' have lacked in critical coverage, but there has been little serious critical attention paid to outlining the characteristics of the movement as a whole, to studying the ways in which it may have been related to changing attitudes to Canadian culture in general, and to a fundamental transformation in the relation of these films to Hollywood-derived practices of production, storytelling and representation. Uniquely in the history of Canadian cinema, this New Wa ve was at least in part a commercial phenomenon, not just within Canada, but especially in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. (2) As Geoff Pevere noted around the same time as Banning, the New Wave, which he limited to Ontario, emerged Out of the ruins of the tax-shelter debacle created by the Capital Cost Allowance (CCA) authorizing a one-hundred percent tax writeoff between 1974 and 1984. (3) By channelling nearly all available funding into fly-by-night Hollywood-bound rubbish, the CCA made it extremely difficult for key figures in both Quebecois and English Canadian film of the '60s and early 70s to continue making films. Moreover, the ensuing mutual antipathy between aesthetic and commercial goals polarized a scholarly community already primed by the uncompromising dictates of post-structuralist theory, and a critical community radicalized by the injustice of the CCA and furious at its effects on a fledgling film culture. The result has been an enduring critical bias against any signs of departure from the documentary-based, local and explicitly politically engaged realism of the pre-tax-shelter years that has caused world-class di rectors such as Egoyan and Cronenberg to be recognized far sooner abroad than at home, and led to a reluctance even to look for common features among the ever more diverse output of Canadian filmmakers. …

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