Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World by David L. Pike (review)

This volume by David L. Pike examines the rise of Canadian feature films as a presence on the international festival and art-house circuit of the 1980s and 1990s, taking as its starting point the 1986 release of Deny Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire. From this beginning, the book examines the emergence of several prominent English- and French-language Canadian directors who for a time became fixtures on the international scene, and seeks to locate them and their work in the context of both the international economic and aesthetic particulars of that time, and the history of domestic Canadian cinema. The author does this through an approach that roughly alternates between fairly standard but effective auteur case studies of specific directors and thoughtfully composed chapters addressing broader issues of Canadian cultural policy, the ecology of the international feature film market during this period, and cinematic aesthetic trends. The result is a highly readable, well-researched, and useful book that manages to explore deeply a particular time in Canadian filmmaking and to relate this to broader global trends in feature film production.

Beginning with Decline and continuing through to the release of the Cannes prize-winning Inuit tale Atanarjuat (2001), Pike’s thesis is that during this period “Canadian cinema was at the forefront of a profound transformation in the economics, the form, and indeed, the very identity of world cinema. And because of the unique position it occupied, it also produced some extraordinary films, for Canadian cinema underwent a veritable golden age in the fifteen years between the mid eighties and the new millennium.” In support of this argument, Pike gives a brief but thorough overview of the history of Canadian fiction filmmaking, followed by several chapters that focus on major Canadian directors, writers, and performers prominent in the era studied. These are nicely balanced between English and French Canada, examining the careers of well-known figures such as Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Denis Arcand, and Robert Lepage as well as lesser-known but significant filmmakers, including those working outside the Toronto/Montreal orbit. He also provides a highly original look at Canadian genre and exploitation cinema, a substantial but largely overlooked aspect of the Canadian cinematic output that has not frequently been the subject of the serious academic attention it is given here.

Pike brings a wealth of research to his writing – the bibliography alone is an invaluable resource for the study of Canadian fiction cinema – but his style is lively and readable throughout while being free from the excesses of theoretical jargon that can sometimes mar academic writing.

But it would do the book an injustice to portray it as simply a history of recent Canadian cinema with auteur profiles. The real value in what Pike manages to do is to relate the emergence of Canadian cinema on the world stage in the 1980s and 1990s to the larger flowering of international art-house cinema during the same period, and to trace the economic, aesthetic, and policy factors that encouraged this development, as well as the factors that ultimately led to the decline of this movement as the production and distribution systems of modern cinema continue their seemingly inevitable absorption into the digital world. This book is a valuable addition to the study of Canadian cinema specifically and to the more general study of national and transnational cinemas, and it is a great resource for students and teachers.