Introduction: Peter Morris and Canadian Film History

Peter Morris (1937-2011) is well-remembered as one of Canadian Film Studies' true pioneers. He was the first editor of the journal you presently hold in your hand, guiding its course from his post at York University from 1990-1993. And no student of Canadian cinema can do without his 1978 book Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895-1939. That's the work that showed us that had a cinema before the NFB, a cinema that wasn't just a matter of forgettable quota quickies but a complex corpus that bore scrutiny.That's why we're so pleased to present this previously unpublished essay by Morris, in which he thinks through what serious scrutiny looks like. This is mostly a work of historiography rather than an attempt to explain some of the basic problems that a historian faces when trying to make sense of a large, diverse body of material. Historiographic rather than historical may make it sound like Morris is addressing a particularly specialised audience, but very much the opposite was actually the case. This is the text of a talk that Morris gave on 2 November 1999 to the Brownbag Research Seminars sponsored by Atkinson College's Department of Science and Technology Studies. (Atkinson, as many readers will know, is the college of York University traditionally devoted to further education, what would be called at some Canadian institutions its Faculty of Extension.) The term's programme of speakers featured assorted humanities types from religion, anthropology and languages/literatures, but also included computer scientists, statisticians, biologists, and international development specialists. It was clearly part of Atkinson's ongoing commitment to interdisciplinarity and also to broadly conceived outreach work. Morris is speaking here to people interested in Canadian film, but also to those interested in cultural history broadly, interested in the way that historians do their work. Morris was keenly aware of the degree to which historians in countries like Canada-overshadowed by various empires, not exactly colonised but always embattled-faced special problems.One such issue that feels very contemporary indeed is the unacknowledged hegemony of models in Film Studies. Although it's titled Film History, it's actually a book about the methodologies for studying history, Morris writes mid-way through the essay. The breezy conflation of and American film speaks to problems in scholarly discourse that have only become more profound. models continue to be imported wholesale throughout the English-speaking humanities worldwide, and discomfort about the homogenisation that this inevitably produces are all-too-easily dismissed as nostalgic 'Laments for Nations,' or national specificities, that more and more seem to be relics of the pre-globalisation bad old days. Morris never would have had much truck with the nostalgia end of that equation (next to Embattled Shadows his best-known work is a series of takedowns of the romanticism aroundjohn Grierson), and his sceptical interest in the writing of Hayden White shows that he takes these approaches seriously enough to figure out their value and their limitations. What Morris does find chez White is a vigorous rejoinder to how we historians have a tendency to forget that the evidence was constructed by someone, somewhere, for some purpose. That constructedness, that purposefulness, does not need to be explicit; it is always there, whether those who create or adopt the sources, or the methods, acknowledge that or not. …

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