North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980 (review)

During the 1970s, film studies in Canada as an academic and cultural pursuit had developed and had become recognized and respected as a modern discipline worthy of study in Canadian universities. Consequently, several anthologies and monographs were written in the latter half of the 1970s and early 1980s that demonstrated not only the now widely recognized significance of both Canadian cinema as an art form and cultural reflector, but also the maturity of the "new discipline" of Canadian film studies. Most of these anthologies and monographs focused on either specific periods of Canadian film history or provided a comprehensive overview of cinema in Canada in all its forms. The books that defined the maturity of Canadian film studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s included Peter Morris's seminal Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895-1939, and the two highly regarded collections from the period, 1977's Canadian Film Reader and 1984's Take Two: A Tribute to Film in Canada. To these books, as essential inclusions in the canon of Canadian film scholarship and criticism, can now be added William Beard and Jerry White's 2002 anthology, North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980.

Appropriately, the foreword to North of Everything was written by Seth Feldman, coeditor of the groundbreaking Canadian Film Reader (with Joyce Nelson) and editor of Take Two, who was as important a figure as any in the then-emerging field of Canadian film scholarship. As Feldman succinctly states, North of Everything is an "overdue and much-needed collection of writing on the last twenty years of Canadian cinema" (xi). Additionally, Feldman makes a point of stressing an obvious, and yet often overlooked, aspect of the compilation of an anthology of this scope: not only does the book highlight a new generation of Canadian films, filmmakers, institutions, styles, and forms, but it also "spotlights so many of the recently emerging and even not-so-recently emerging commentators who make Canadian film studies at least as lively an experience as the films themselves" (xi). Indeed, the scholarship found throughout the collection is first-rate.

North of Everything follows the style of the two earlier anthologies by being structured as a general overview, although this recent anthology's contents reflect a modern viewpoint of Canadian film studies and therefore, by definition, Canadian filmmaking. An apparent weakness, garnered on an initial glance at the contents of the book, is the lack of specific sections dedicated to documentary film and to French-Canadian/Quebec filmmaking. However, by way of the editors' introduction and the sections and articles themselves, the reasons for this organization become clear and this structure can be seen as a strength of the book. The editors defend their lack of a specific section focusing on documentary filmmaking in Canada by including articles and references to this ubiquitous Canadian cinematic form throughout the book. Documentary film, such an integral film style throughout the history and historiography of Canadian film studies, pervades every style of Canadian filmmaking and therefore does not necessarily warrant its own section, the editors logically and succinctly argue. Rather than suggesting that documentary film in Canada has lessened in importance since the 1970s, we find discussions on documentary film in each section of the book, demonstrating that the form transcends Canadian cinema, an even stronger endorsement of the style's place in Canadian film history than had documentary film been segregated to its own section. Likewise, the decision to include only "English-Canadian Cinema since 1980" in the book is very humbly, and lucidly, defended by the editors, who argue that French-Canadian and Quebec cinema warrants its own anthology covering the past two decades, with each of the same sections as North of Everything. Quebec cinema is its own national cinema that would be done a disservice if given only a relatively small section in this book, the editors...