Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture by R. Bruce Elder (review)

HUMANITIES 207 The oldest of Miller's subjects in Jazz in Canada are Trump Davidson, who died atseventyin 1978, and his brotherTeddy, who spoke for both of them but has since died (in 1983). The youngest are Brian Barley and Ron Park, saxophonists who died in their twenties in 1971. For some of the survivors, the six-year interval between editions has made a difference. P.J. Perry, who apprenticed in his father Paul's prairie dance band as did another subject, trumpeter Herbie Spanier, wondered aloud if he would survive his 'unsavoury' habits, and he has. Spanier, whose braggadocio makes an unforgettable chapter, has seldom appeared in jazzclubs since, and Sonny Greenwich, known equally as a guitarist and a recluse, has played publicly with some regularity in Montreal as well as releasing at least two records. Montrealers Nelson Symonds and Guy Nadon, a guitarist and a drummer virtually unknown beyond the city when Miller singled them out, are now sought out by every jazz fan who visits. The other principals are pianists Chris Gage (1927-64) and Wray Downes, and drummers Larry Dubin (1931-78) and Claude Ranger. Miller chose these fourteen people not only because they spanned the history and covered the geography of Canadian jazz. Their representativeness goes beyond that. Most ofall, theyhave the spiritthat is essential to jazz but so elusive to its writers. Miller lets them express it in their unpredictable ways, and their restless creativity suffuses his book. 'I just wanted to be a jazz musician,' says Larry Dubin, and then he adds the qualifier that could have come from any of the thirteen others: 'But more than even wanting to be a jazz musician, I wanted to be the musician I wanted to be.' (JACK CHAMBERS) R. Bruce Elder, Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture Wilfrid Laurier University Press in collaboration with the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television 443, filmography, bibliography, index. $39.95 Bruce Elder remarks in the preface that this book 'is not an objective survey of an artistic field but an artist's statement of his credo and an attempt to construct a usable tradition.' This rhetoric is appropriately ceremonial and sounds modest, but the author's meaning is quietly ironic. An important Canadian avant-garde filmmaker since the late 1970s, Elder has already published a number of seminal essays on experimental cinema. These texts not only formed part of his apprenticeship as an artist, as he suggests here, but also they have already created a tradition around the small but internationally esteemed group of films made byMichael Snow, Jack Chambers, David Rimmer, Chris Gallagher, Ellie Epp, and others. Image and Identity expands thatcritical work. Such a project stands in sharp contrast to most writing on other types of English-Canadian films. These take the form of rather bloodless but all-inclusive historical surveys. Methodologically, this survey format has 208 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 proven inadequate in many regards. It implies an institutional history of Canadian film without theorizing its dynamic in a country without a successful culture industry. More important is the perennial failing to pose the primary question: What place does Canadian cinema havein the national culture? This is another way of asking, just why should anyone in English Canada care about Canadian films when it is fairly obvious most do not? Within its compass, that of Canadian intellectual history, Image and Identity is a methodological correction to the state of Canadian film studies. Elder's study seeks to perform a contextual redress for Canadian film, negatively in the case ofdocumentary cinema and realistfiction film, positively in the case of the avant-garde. He manages this task admirably, arguing clearly and in depth as a scholar fully conversant with the exemplary recent work in Canadian Studies by Armour and Trott and by Wilden, Reid, and Kroker, and with the original sources their writing explores. His disclaimer about an 'artist's credo' must be taken as a slightly resentful reminder that a filmmaker who teaches at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, rather than a Canadian university professor, undertook the task of writing such a book. Elder's critical strategy is to dig underground. If English-Canadian filmmaking...