Canadian Film by David Clandfield, and: Documents in Canadian Film ed. by Douglas Fetherling (review)

250 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 analysis, and the 40 per cent of the book devoted to providing capsule examples of media analysis gives compelling evidence of the virtually limitless application of these four principles to the data. The method is evidently a powerful tool for training awareness, and the attention to four simultaneous processes can produce results at all levels of intellectual quality across a full range from the trivial to the quadrivial. Equally apparently, the method is far too elastic in its operation to produce anything like the Popperian falsifiable 'laws' to which the authors aspire. The most likely audience for this text, however, will probably find this a relief rather than a loss. Itmay be, in the long run, that the most enduring value of this book lies in its deeper structure, underneath the specific 'laws of media.' After all, this was meant to be different from McLuhan's <;ustomarily aphoristic phenomenology of culture. It was to be nof a mythos but a logos of media; it was to be McLuhan's Logic. And the form of this logic, beyond the particular results it has so far generated, is itself of real interest. McLuhan's logic is analogical and numerological, and the current text provides a fuller and clearer access to its features than any of the earlier McLuhan books. It dedicates attention to four processes, apprehended simultaneously, and organized appositionally, neither in sequence nor by logical connections such as equivalences or oppositions, but rather in rations, proportions, resonant analogies. McLuhan shares aspects of his modeofthoughtwith Vico, Yeats, andJoyce, among others, butthisbook makes them cognitively most readily available. That the mode of apprehension is fours is itself fixed by the McLuhans as a metaphysically privileged explanatorystructure - in effect, as a figure minus a ground - is a flaw and contradiction in their argument. But for the reader, it need only subvert the scientistic claims of their law-giving efforts. The retrieval of this model of thought can stand - among the multiplicity of other models that foreground ones, twos, threes, fives, tens, or twelves, for example - as a fruitful supplement to a complex cognitive and cultural repertory. In its interplay with the McLuhan letters and biography that are being made available more orless simultaneously, Laws ofMedia makes a valuable contribution. (JOHN FEKETE) David Clandfield. Canadian Film Oxford UniversityPress 1987. Perspectives in Canadian Culture. viii, 136. $9.95 paper Douglas Fetherling, editor. Documents in Canadian Film Broadview Press. 343. $24.95 paper As David Clandfield notes in the preface of his Canadian Film, the project of writing a comprehensive history of cinema in this country is now HUMANITIES 251 entering its third decade. Clandfield, Bruce Edler, Robert Fulford, Martin Knelman, and John Hofsess all set out upon that undertaking in the yearsimmediately following the Centennial. The time, it seemed, was ripe. At Expo, Canada's multi-screen, McLuhanesque extravaganzas had startled the world. Art houses on two continents were booking shoe-string features like Nobody Waved Goodbye, Mon Oncle Antoine, and Goin' Down the Road. With the establishment of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (now Telefilm Canada) in 1967, the feature film industry was declared a national priority. At the same time, the National Film Board's 'Challenge for Change' program was busy institutionalizing the radical documentary. By the end of the 1960s the return of Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland to Canada was recognized as a new beginning for Canadian experimental film. In retrospect, those heady years were a time to argue and critique, to write history on the run rather than history as history. Fulford, Knelman, and Hofsess never got further than anthologizing their reviews, polemics, and historical snapshots. Fothergill's work - perhaps the most erudite criticism of the first wave of CFDC features - survives in one out-of-print anthology (Joyce Nelson's and my Canadian Film Reader). Elder, the most prolific voice in Canadian cinema, has only now moulded his writings into a single coherent argument for a Canadian cinema aesthetic: Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Fil1Jl and Culture (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 1989). There have been other voices. Peter Harcourthas spenthis two decades as a champion of Canadian film culture and education. Pierre Veronneau has written extensively on the history of cinema in Quebec. Peter Morris has done the same for English Canada. His Embattled Shadows (McGillQueen 's University Press 1978) takes the story up to the founding of the Film Board in 1939 and his work in progress will extend the story to the beginnings of CBC television. And what of David Clandfield? Having contributed his two decades of criticism on anglophone and francophone cinema, Clandfield has chosen to present us with an outline for that long-awaited history of Canadian cinema. Written for the Oxford University Press 'Perspectives on Canadian Culture' series, the book's one fault is the brevity imposed upon its author. Given barely one hundred pages with which to work, Clandfield provides us with a whirlwind of fleeting names (thankfully boldfaced). Few films rate more than one or two sentences; entire movements are reduced to annotated lists in paragraph form. Canadian Film's triumph is the critical statement that emerges from its restricted length. If it is a very short book, it is also a very thorough argument for a particular definition of its subject. Clandfield writes with the understanding that the achievement of Canadian cinema cannot be measured against the image of some perpetually imminent Hollywood 252 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 North. The big-budget feature may be the yardstick for other national cinemas. To use that yardstick here is simply to admit defeat. Rather than use his small canvas to paint detailed portraits of a few .Canadian features, Clandfield chooses to define Canadian film as the balancing of all the modes of cinematic practice: the feature, the documentary, experimental film, short films, animation - anything, in fact, that may keep the cameras rolling with some semblance ofcreativity. A poor cinema must count all its treasures. What emerges is a cinema of ideas. In lieu of a big-budget entertainment industry, Canadians take for granted the arguments and counterarguments screened in a rich documentary heritage. No nation's visual sensibilities are better encapsulated in its experimental films. The shorts, animations and the true Canadian features that Clandfield catalogues are recorded as guerilla actions against the mind-deadening popular culture of the late twentieth century. Readers with a concern for Canadian or cinematic culture will finish Canadian Film having compiled their own list of films that must be seen. If the book inspires raids upon the Moving Image and Sound Archive, La Cinematheque quebecoise, the vaults of the National Film Board, and the collections of the nation's filmmakers' co-ops, it will have made its contribution to the long-awaited history. In their forays, film-archive raiders may wish to arm themselves with Douglas Fetherling's anthology, Documents in Canadian Film. The collection is a judicious compromise between the promise of its title and yet another anthology of critical writing. Given the bureaucratic nature of Canadian film institutions, it is somewhat surprising how few of Fetherling's documents are actual legislation, lobbying statements, or official proclamations, i.e. documents in the strictest sense. He chooses to publish John Grierson's 1944 article 'A National Film Policy for Canada,' rather than Grierson's 1938 report laying the foundation for the Film Board or, for that matter, the Film Act itself. An excerpt from the Canadian Film Development Coporation's' first annual report is used instead of the legislation defining that organization. A critic's lament appears where Fetherling might have reprinted any of the dozen or so manifestos written by ad hoc filmmakers' organizations for publication in Cinema Canada. Still, Fetherling's selections do capture the spirit of Canadian cinema's several eras and modes. There is a contemporary review of Evangeline, the long-lost first Canadian feature. Budge Crawley, founder of Canada's longest-lived independent studio, describes his lot in the bad old days of the early 1950S. Fetherling reprints the shrewd and acerbic Wendy .Michener on the mid-196os scene, Kay Armatage and Linda Beath's first. sketch of a feminist critique, and Manny Farber's discovery of a Canadian avant-garde. 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 ...