Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia

HOLLYWOOD NORTH: THE FEATURE FILM INDUSTRY IN BRITISH COLUMBIA Mike Casher Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002, 176 pp. Though the title implies conventional expository history, do not be fooled. Gasher's character sketch of the British Columbia feature film industry is theoretically informed and notable for its self-reflexive stance, its textual analysis of B.C. feature films, and its richly detailed material account of the industry. A central preoccupation of the author is the question of what we are to make of the B.C. film industry as industry with clearer links to Hollywood than to As location-based industry established partly by B.C.'s aptitude for disguise in Hollywood features, the B.C. film industry (or is it the film industry that happens to be in B.C.?) lends itself to paradox, and that is precisely what interests Gasher. For him, the B.C. Film Commission's promotional stance that empties of its specificity goes beyond mere irony: it challenges the ways in which and cinema are thought to interact. Hollywood North does trace the development of the industry and the practice of thinking about B.C. as cinematic place, but it also deliberately subverts the tendency to reify the relationship between film production and the reflection of culture. Rooted in sense of material history, Gasher's book poses significant challenge to traditional ways of contending with cinema and culture in Canada. Inherently, the book offers itself as problematic within the context of nation, since what is to be made culturally of cinema based almost entirely on the American industrial model? Gasher suggests that cultural-reflection bias among scholars and critics of Canadian cinema studies might have led them to ignore B.C. because its film industry does not conform to what are widely considered to be more culturally informed film industries in Quebec or Ontario. But Gasher does not simply favour political economy approach as an antidote. Instead, he reconfigures cultural approach to industry and local cinema in the midst of global flows, an approach that is informed by thinkers such as Harold Innis and Doreen Massey. Hesitant to call the B.C. industry symptom of globalization, Gasher instead prefers Massey's concept of place or global/local interface, where is imagined as a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at particular locus. While the social relations that Gasher describes are largely American in terms of the film industry, the conceptualization of B.C. as locus is not simply attributed to favourable exchange rates for American capital. Rather, Gasher's sense of is configured within an Innisian framework of flow in which tradition of exporting raw or semi-processed materials continues in the context of the B.C. film industry, in the form of the labour of British Columbians and the export of B.C. locations. Meeting place is also how the book might be described with reference to the dialogue Gasher creates from breadth of scholarship. The introductory chapter takes the book from the informational to an informed treatment of theoretical problematic. …

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