Two Films by Amnon Buchbinder: Some Questions about the Future of Canadian Cinema
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whole New Thing, the new movie by Amnon Buchbinder, appears (unlike the majority of Canadian films) to be achieving a considerable success, at least in Toronto, after its screening in the last Toronto Film Festival. It is deservedly attracting reasonably large and highly responsive audiences and is now entering its third week (his previous film, The Fishing Trip, only lasted one). It is, however, screening in only one auditorium in one of our smaller theatres. I want to discuss both his films in the wider context of Canadian cinema in general and especially the works of the younger generation. (It should be understood that I am talking of English-Canadian cinema; I am not qualified to discuss Quebecois). Buchbinder is the third filmmaker of his generation to command both my attention and enthusiasm, the other two being Gary Burns and Scott Smith. Juxtaposed, their films so far reveal a strikingly similar pattern and raise questions that I would very much like to see answered. In the case of each I am speaking of two films; Burns made a third, his first, The Suburbanators, which I have not been able to see. Apparently it achieved a release on video, but I can't find it in any of our stores. We have, then, the following: Gary Burns: Kitchen Party; Waydowntown. Scott Smith: Rollercoaster; Falling Angels. Amnon Buchbinder: The Fishing Trip; Whole New Thing. In each case my personal preference is for the earlier film over the second, though the gap is narrower with Buchbinder than with Burns and Smith. With all three the first film seems more personal, more serious, more disturbing, more challenging, the second more obviously a crowdpleaser, lighter in tone, with plenty of humour, more ingratiating, as well as more polished (bigger budget), determinably 'clever'. Predictably, in each case the second film has been the more commercially successful, not to mention somewhat better publicized and promoted. Despite this, neither Burns nor Smith has so far made another film, although a couple of years have gone by. I met Smith briefly once and he told me, with obvious enthusiasm, that he was working on a project about a gay wedding and its repercussions within the family--surely a fascinating and highly topical subject. Perhaps it is being made, but I have seen no news of it. Why are Canadian films of the quality, intelligence and originality of Rollercoaster, Kitchen Party and The Fishing Trip not celebrated here in the way in which the French Nouvelle Vague films were and still are celebrated? True, we appear to have no Godard (or have I missed him?), but I don't see how the early films of Smith, Burns and Buchbinder are necessarily much inferior to those of Truffaut and Chabrol. One might compare Rollercoaster to Les Quatre Cent Coups and Kitchen Party to early Chabrol without absurdity. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If we care about the future of Canadian cinema, these facts raise a number of important bread-and-butter questions--about financing, about publicity, about distribution. I'll consider these in that order. Elsewhere in this issue I've complained of the shocking treatment of William D. MacGillivray's films and the consequent virtual termination of his career as a potentially major figure within mainstream cinema. There I lay the blame on the various funding agencies. I assume, however, that there are different levels (hence different responsibilities) to the business of funding: the government, the funding agencies, the production setup ... At none of these levels do I detect any serious interest in quality ('entertainment' seems the dominant criterion) or any strong commitment to developing a serious and varied Canadian cinema. I have the impression that the word 'quality' has changed its meaning over recent decades, with the advance of corporate capitalism. It used to mean 'artistically superior', but it's come to mean 'Will it make money? …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it