One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema/they Came from Within: A History of Canadian Horror Cinema

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF CANADIAN CINEMA George Melnyk Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, 361 pp. THEY CAME FROM WITHIN: A HISTORY OF CANADIAN HORROR CINEMA Caelum Vatnsdal Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2004, 256 pp. Reviewed by Peter Urquhart These two books tell us almost as much about the state of the publishing industry in Canada as they do about their given topics. On the one hand, we have a film textbook published by a leading scholarly press and written by a university professor. On the other, we have a breezily written published by a small regional press and written by a fan and vernacular critic. While one can imagine how each book might find an audience in their targeted readership, one of them makes a considerable contribution to our knowledge and understanding of Canadian cinema as a cultural formation, and the other makes no contribution at all. What is perhaps surprising is which book falls into which category. George Melnyk's One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema begins with the observation that his book was motivated by the absence of a single volume of Canadian cinema, and he set out to rectify this gap. He was inspired by the impression that we needed a book like his for university teaching, since before his book, all such courses on Canadian film history, including his own, depended upon reading packages, with articles and essays culled from various sources. Thus, what he produced was a textbook, one that we can assume the University of Toronto Press hoped would be adopted by the proliferating courses on Canadian cinema. An unfortunate result of this set of motivations is a history which contains virtually no historical research and a book which, as an inevitable result of its near complete lack of primary research, accomplishes little more than assembling and repeating the account of Canadian film history. While it may be easier for a university teacher to organize a course around one textbook rather than taking the trouble to assemble a package of readings from many sources, and while Melnyk's book may do a competent job of pulling together some of what we already think we know into one monograph, one wonders if the result is necessarily a better tool. The repetition of a received wisdom that does not revisit historical events, and instead merely repeats already existing accounts, has characterized much historical writing on Canadian cinema. The result is an extremely limited account that is almost always skewed by a narrow cultural nationalist perspective. Examples of this particular nationalist practice abound in Melnyk's book, particularly in his entirely inadequate treatment of popular film in either English-Canada or Quebec. Following a couple of sentences about Ivan Reitman's Meatballs -which are entirely concerned with the film's commercial performance-Melnyk writes further down the page, It was this humourless fictional realism which seemed to make films like Coin' Down the Road and The Rowdyman so appealing to Canadians. When a film was obviously about one of 'us' there was a Canadian audience for it, and when it was about a distinct regional community of seemingly unusual characters its appeal was only heightened. Melnyk may believe that these two little auteur films were appealing to Canadians (a fact certainly up for debate), but his explanation for this appeal is nonsense, since so many other, far more popular, Canadian films do not share the characteristics he valorises. What of the much larger commercial success in Canada of Meatballs, Paul Lynch's Prom Night, or Arna Selznick's The Care Bears Movie? Here lies one of the fundamental failures of Melnyk's book. His regurgitation of the cultural-nationalist insistence that so-called Canadian themes (whatever those might be) and identifiable locations are fundamental to a Canadian cinema severely limits his view of what is worthy of discussion, and also leads him to several false conclusions. …

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