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  • Rain/Drizzle/Fog: Film and Television in Atlantic Canada
  • David Frank
Rain/Drizzle/Fog: Film and Television in Atlantic Canada. Edited by Darrel Varga. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009. Pp. 300, $34.95 paper

Rain/Drizzle/Fog, the terms at the top of the title, sound like a scriptwriter's instructions for a film in the land of the Maritime stereotype; in fact they are borrowed from a 1998 documentary that mocks regional stereotypes while celebrating the vigour of urban life in St John's, Newfoundland. The collection that follows offers critical insights into past and present film traditions in the Maritimes and Newfoundland. Editor Darrell Varga, the Canada Research Chair in Contemporary Film and Media Studies at nscad University, has encouraged contributors to situate their work within the social and historical contexts of the region and the prevailing structures of cultural production. As Varga explains, the approach is 'to understand film and video production not simply as closed texts but also as a social technology through which concepts of place and space, or of margin and centre, are produced and negotiated' (xiv).

In an introductory chapter, historians Colin Howell and Peter Twohig explore documentary traditions in the region, noting that filmmakers often conformed to anti-modernist assumptions about regional culture and history at the very time that regional scholars were advancing interpretations that called for more sophisticated visual texts; more recently, however, filmmakers have broken new ground in presenting layered versions of contemporary life. Similarly, film historian Pierre Vérroneau contributes an informative chapter on Acadian filmmakers, highlighting their struggle both for recognition of the francophone film outside Québec and for alternatives to folkloric and picturesque expectations; he notes their achievement of a distinctive 'fictive documentary' style and a 'fragile state of maturity' (38), often led by independent producers. The earliest days of film culture in small-town Nova Scotia prior to 1914 are examined by Gregory Canning; he finds a steady diet of vaudeville, film, and music, and fewer anxieties about the new medium than in the better-studied bigcity environments of North America. However, by the time the new tele-visual age had arrived in full force half a century later, the [End Page 178] Maritimes had been effectively coded as a source of 'simplicity' and 'nostalgia' within Canadian culture; Jen Vanderburgh implies that the cancellation of Don Messer's Jubilee in 1969 can be read as a rejection of a partial version of 'Maritime culture' in favour of an equally incomplete performance of Anglo-Canadian nationalism. Meanwhile, the representation of Newfoundland on film is considered by several authors. Noreen Golfman identifies the dominant theme in film images of the seal hunt, from the time of The Viking (1931) onward, as one of respect for the arduous conditions of the labouring men on the ice, a tradition more recently challenged by a 'misguided environmentalism' favouring 'seal snuff footage' (74) and in turn contested by contemporary Newfoundland filmmakers. Jerry White's reconsideration of the Fogo Island films produced by the Challenge for Change project of the National Film Board in the 1960s invites us to consider these as a form of 'non-narrative poetic cinema' (103) rather than as 'process' films promoting community agency in outport Newfoundland in the 1960s. Also addressing a film dealing with the same era, Malek Khouri's reading of Gordon Pinsent's John and the Missus (1987) shows this to be a highly nuanced drama on responses to the era of resettlement, sympathetic to individualized resistance but ultimately acquiescent in the prevailing common sense of modernization.

Perhaps the most striking observations in this book relate to the ambiguous position of the regional film today within what is called the New International Division of Cultural Labour. Filmmakers who wish to take the complexity of their home region seriously are increasingly drawn into a world where they risk becoming no more than hewers of stories and drawers of pictures for the international market. John McCullough's provocative chapter on Gullage's and Trailer Park Boys suggests that these television series have mobilized humanism and regionalism in ways that normalize the ethnography of underdevelopment and satisfy a niche market for 'glocalism' (160...

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