Imaginings of and beyond the Public Sphere

IMAGININGS OF AND BEYOND THE PUBLIC SPHERE SCREENING QUEBEC: QUEBECOIS MOVING IMAGES, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE Scott MacKenzie Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, 240 pp. Quebec is a timely book that explores vicissitudes of Quebec cinematic history from its inception at hands of Louis Ouimet to recent films such as those of Denys Arcand, Robert Lepage and Pierre Falardeau. MacKenzie describes in great detail role of Church in Quebec cinematic discourse, focusing also on concept of national that emerges with cinema direct and documentary influence. Quebec is timely not only because few books address in a comprehensive manner history of Quebec cinema, but also because there remains a need for new publications on Quebec cinema that trace links between cinema and historical quebecois concerns such as family, Church, sovereignty, Quiet Revolution, and what Lepage calls (in No) nos futurs projets. MacKenzie begins with suggestion that cinema in Quebec creates an environment through which a new political space can be ascertained. This space is, for MacKenzie, a non-hegemonic space, a space in stark contrast to other spaces, which he defines as spaces of Church and State. Rather than situating this societal shift in 1950s and 1960s era of cinema direct, MacKenzie sees this politically altered space emerging as early as 1906, when Louis Ouimet opened first movie theater in Quebec: I argue that latent potential of an alternative public sphere has been at heart of French-Canadian and Quebecois cinema since fin de siecle. My sense is that MacKenzie wants to do two things in Quebec: 1} highlight often-forgotten history of Quebec cinema and its trajectories in line with political mandates for self-government; 2) address ways in which cinema can and does alter ways in which we think, act and react to our worlds today. The Habermasian concept of public sphere is central to Quebec. Through concept of public sphere, MacKenzie hopes to offer a narrative of identity politics as constructed not only via cinematic image in Quebec but also through gaze and interaction of spectator: I consider how Quebecois filmmakers attempted to unite documentation of Quebec's cultural and natural landscapes with definition of a national-if not nationalist-sense of identity. What is at stake for MacKenzie is discovering why the political goals of Quebecois cineastes, namely emergence of a truly democratic society and separation of Quebec from Canada, failed to materialize. Democracy is asserted here as a given and is already intimately associated with public sphere, which is, in turn, associated with generation of political as a space open to transformation: Screening Quebec postulates that political action can emerge from public spheres surrounding both cinematic spaces and concurrent popular and critical discourses generated around cinema. This idea is directly in line with Habermasian thought. For Habermas, public sphere denotes a space that promotes debate and discourse between individual subjects. This public discourse alters or even replaces authoritarian decree, creating a modus operand! for advent of democracy (often understood as taking place in conjunction with founding of concept of nation-state). As MacKenzie writes, Prior to this development, separation of public from private reflected radically divergent kinds of discourses that could take place in either sphere; furthermore, power to act as an agent of change rested only in private sphere. For Habermas, discourse promoted by concept of public sphere rests on a concept of direct communication between speaker and receiver, a concept already challenged in McLuhan's early writings, as well as in Derrida's critique of Searle's similar concept of communication developed in Limited Inc. …

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