Blood in the Maple Syrup: Canon, Popular Genre and the Canuxploitation of Julian Roffman

In his entire career, Julian Roffman (also alternatively known as Hoffman) has directed only two feature length films. Despite modest international success of his second feature, The Mask (1961), which also represented only feature-length fiction film to be distributed outside country in its year of release, Roffman has not received recognition from any critics for his work, and his small corpus of films has faded into near-obscurity. Prior to 2001, no mention of his work could be found in any books on cinema, not even in such timelines as Self Portraits A Chronology of and Quebec Cinema: 1896-1976. Here, one would expect at least a passing reference, but in 1959, year of The Bloody Brood's release, Pierre Veronneau only mentions the private production of [unspecified] feature while in 1961, Seul ou avec d'autres (Claude Jutra) is only film cited as being produced that year. (1) Thanks to respective efforts of Peter Harry Rist, Wyndham Rise, and diligent co-editors of Guide to Cinema(s) of Canada and Take One's Essential Guide to Film in providing comprehensive and encyclopaedic viewers' guides to cinema, both The Bloody Brood and The Mask are referenced. For better or for worse, Julian Roffman has been accorded a place within Canada's cinematic heritage, if only by exhaustive default. Prior to 2001, oversights of Veronneau and Peter Morris in their efforts at compilation seem more than accidental. Roffman's thrillers at least deserved an acknowledgement of their status as precursors to big-grossing exploitation films produced by Hollywood North in late 1970's and early 1980's. In 1977, for example, out of 8.9 million dollars from top 10 English films in Canada, 5.7 million were earned by schlock items, and over half that gross was produced by David Cronenberg's Shivers. (2) Suggesting that Roffman's own work made Cronenberg's success possible sixteen years later is contestable, however, it is not untenable to regard Roffman as somewhat of a pioneer within genres of horror and suspense. Before The Bloody Brood and The Mask, both genres were left virtually unexplored by filmmakers. Since then, filmmakers have made several noteworthy contributions to critically disreputable but popularly adored slasher genre, including Cannibal Girls (Ivan Reitman, 1973), Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974), and Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980)--all of which are regarded as classics in their own right. (3) Not are Roffman's films (and those of his lineage) dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration by film scholars, but critical minimization of his work is indicative of a larger tendency to discount various kinds of films that do not fit into corpus of what constitutes a Canadian With exception (that proves rule) of Cronenberg's work, suspense and horror films, both exploitative and are not co-opted into framework of national cinema. And by our national cinema, I am referring to various conceptions of cinema circulated by academic film scholars. cinema as conceived by academics and cinema as conceived by average moviegoer are two different things entirely, as any fan of Porky's (Bob Clark, 1982), Les Boys (Louis Saic 1997), or Flesh Gordon 2 (Howard Ziehm 1974) could tell you. At any rate, these films do not adhere to criteria of an Elderian Cinema We Need, nor Peter Harcourt's idealized realist tradition, nor Eurocentric aesthetic values of a Northern art Furthermore, critical neglect of The Bloody Brood and The Mask are compounded by their production before 1964: year popularly (and quite erroneously) regarded as legitimate birth of cinema. In short, Roffman's films are anathema to exclusionary specifications of canon builders because of their perceived lack of quality and complexity, their generic status, and their untimely release. …

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