Canada's Best Features: Critical Essays on 15 Canadian Films (review)

This book came out two years ago with little promotion or distribution - almost like a Canadian film. It deserves a good look. Under an international imprint, film scholars have contributed studies of fifteen Canadian feature films. The selections cluster around two fertile moments in Canadian film production, 1970-4 (four films) and 1990-4 (five films), the first more closely linked to the established social documentary tradition, the second more oriented towards personal and international styles. Historians may find it difficult to accept the idea that Canadian feature-film history did not begin until the 1970s, because the story can be traced back to an early production of Evangeline (1913), but Gene Walz makes the point that the entire output of feature films in Canada prior to the 1960s barely equalled the output of a single Hollywood studio in one average year. The arrival of more accessible technologies, the exploration of new nationalist (and other) identities, and the provision of support by the Canadian Film Development Corporation (now Telefilm Canada) have all contributed to a significant increase in film production since that time. This raises the possibility that, as the critic Gerald Pratley had long hoped, the Canadian film tradition may at last be strong enough to provide a reasonably informative window on the Canadian way of life. Moreover, even if they receive no more than 3 per cent of the screen time in domestic theatres, Canadian films have earned a good deal of international attention in recent years, and there is a growing critical literature, of which this book is an accomplished example. Each chapter includes brief notes on the film, a short filmography for the director, and a bibliography of published sources, usually one or two pages but more than five pages in one case. The volume ends with a selective annotated bibliography for Canadian film studies.

It is difficult to disagree with the choice of Don Shebib's Goin' Down the Road (1970) and Claude Jutra's Mon oncle Antoine (1971). Both classics are now studied for their place in the evolution of the feature film in Canada, but they also have historical interest as treatments of the imagined Canadian community. For instance, Christine Ramsay rejects the temptation to see the story of two working-class Maritimers in Toronto as a metaphor for national victimization; instead she identifies Goin' Down the Road as a social text revealing the contradictions of region, class, and gender within Canadian society. In the case of Mon oncle Antoine (originally titled Silent Night), Jim Leach explains that this film about the social life of the asbestos country on the eve of the Quiet Revolution demonstrates the tensions between folkloric nostalgia and social criticism in the making of modern Quebec. Tom McSorley examines another classic film of the 1970s, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), a relatively high-budget production involving expatriate and American talent; he points out that Ted Kotcheff's disturbing but sympathetic portrait of a young man on the make is largely faithful to Mordecai Richler's original novel and that the film's success has been received with some parallel ambivalence about its commercial ambitions. Meanwhile, also in 1974, cinematographer Michel Brault directed one of his few feature films, Les Ordres; André Loiselle notes that the observational style almost obscures the fact that this was not a documentary but a fictional treatment about the humiliating treatment of prisoners in the October Crisis; the film was acclaimed internationally (Brault received the best director award at Cannes) though it was also criticized closer to home for failing to establish the political significance of the events it portrayed.

Among the studies of films from the 1980s, Blaine Allen presents a historically informed appreciation of The Grey Fox (1982), a handsome period piece set in British Columbia in the first years of the twentieth century. In a treatment influenced by his own documentary eye...