Le Dictionnaire du cinéma québécois by Michel Coulombe, et al (review)

HUMANITIES 253 The last fifth of Documents in Canadian Film is dominated by the debate surrounding Bruce Elder's manifesto, 'The Cinema We Need' (itself printed, strangely, in abridged from). In 1985, Elder declared that Canadian cinema had wasted its efforts on feature filmmaking, documentary , and indeed anything other than the most austere redefinitions ofthe medium itself. Five critics responded at length and with a passion that encompassed the entire experience of film in this country. Taken together,.this beehive ofinsecurity and celebration ofintellect provides as good a definition as any of Canadian cinema's long project. (SETH FELDMAN) Michel Coulombe, Marcel Jean, et al, editors. Le Dictionnaire du cinema quebecois Editions du Boreal. xxv, 530 . $39.95 The vogue for encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and checklists of our films and filmmakers continues unabated. Some, like Eleanor Beattie's two handbooks of the 1970S and the Who's Who volumes of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television of the 1980s, primarily serve the industry itself, with their curricula vitae, addresses, and telephone numbers. Others, like the checklists of films published by the National Film, Television and Sound Archives or the Cinematheque Quebecoise, fill an archival need. Leo Bonnefoy's Le Cinema quebecois par ceux qui Ie font (1979) and John Hofsess's more modest Inner Views: Ten Canadian Film-makers (1975) present sets of journalistic interviews. Those that appeal to scholars, students and the general public alike are the collections of brief articles in encyclopaedic form. Such are Peter Morris's The Film Companion (1984) on film throughout Canada and an earlier work by Michel Houle and Alain Julien, Dictionnaire du cinema quebecois (1978). The new dictionary of Quebec cinema by Michel Coulombe and Marcel Jean fits neatly into this latter category and is a welcome addition to these earlier works. Itis a prodigious work compiled by a team of prominent film scholars in Quebec. The bulk of the book consists in over 650 articles, of which about 600 deal with prominent film personalities in Quebec. A further fifty pages list the principal credits of some 333 Quebec films (both shorts and features), followed by a select bibliography of 32 titles (only three in English). This may be compared with the HoulelJulien book with fewer than one hundred names in its three hundred or so pages of comparable text, a chronology of Quebec feature films, a filmography of a score or more films on Quebec's film history and a twenty-two-page fully annotated bibliography of books and periodicals. The difference in the length for the CoulombelJean collection lies not so much in the ten intervening years of film output as in their inclusion of 254 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 players, writers, producers, and .technicians alongside directors, an enrichment that certainly lends encyclopaedic weight to the enterprise, even if at times the shorter articles are little more than checklists of films. Entries include partial filmographies - saving space rather irritatingly by omitting mention of films already alluded to in the body of the article and occasIonal bibliographies, consisting chiefly of books and university dissertations (although Gilles Carles's list is lacking). Houle and Julien restricted themselves to French-language films in Quebec. Coulombe and Jean have included all Canadian films made in Quebec, French or English. Since the NFB'S head offices are in Montreal, this has considerably expanded the corpus for such a dictionary. For example, most important NFB anglophone documentarists are included (Daly, Low, Koenig, Kroitor, Brittain, Rubbo, Duckworth, etc), although there are curious gaps. The NFB'S founder, John Grierson, is tossed off in six lines, Stuart Legg is not given an entry, and the seminal documentary work of Terence Macartney-Filgate has to be sought in Gilles Marsolais's piece on 'Cinema direct.' Multiple authorship creates inconsistencies. Marcel Jean's article on Don Owen restricts itself to the Montreal films of the 1960s, thereby omitting any mention of Owen's best-known work, the Toronto-made Nobody Waved Goodbye (1964). But Jose Arroyo mentions Ted Kotcheff's Hollywood films alongside his two Richler adaptations set in Quebec and includes the Toronto-made Christopher's Movie Matinee (1968) in the Mort Ransen entry. There are several articles devoted...