Take One's Essential Guide to Canadian Film ed. by Wyndham Wise (review)

468 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 engaged. Robert Wallace revisits the Canadian Fortune and Men=s Eyes and its reception, situating it within a climate that obscured a queer reading of the play that he now undertakes. Susan Pfisterer rereads a narrative of Australian theatre history through the representation of women=s suffrage. Links between form and gender recur. Parody and the grotesque in Peta Tai=s article on queer circus bodies challenge traditional norms of gender and sexuality while stories of women in Ann Wilson=s article on George Elliott Clarke=s Beatrice Chancy fail to escape the male imaginary of femininity . There are many fine essays in this collection, although closer editing is needed. The several typos and misspellings (sometimes of key theorists like Bhabha and Spivak) are distracting. A more fluid arrangement of essays and markers, such as titles indicating the synergistic quality of many of the papers, could make the book more reflective of the postcolonial project it is undertaking and still avoid the trap of homogenization that Maufort cautions against in his introduction. On the whole, the provocative, nuanced readings of many of these essays will make the collection of interest to a wide readership. (MARLENE MOSER) Wyndham Wise, editor. Take One=s Essential Guide to Canadian Film University of Toronto Press. xiv, 272. $60.00, $21.95 This new work follows in a line of similar guides to film in Canada or Quebec over the last thirty years. Eleanor Beattie=s two editions of her handbook in 1972 and 1977 addressed film students, teachers, and librarians, along with those interested in the industry. Peter Morris=s The Film Companion was linked with the Canadian film retrospective at the 1984 Toronto film festival. Its alphabetical list of 650+ articles targeted >lovers of film everywhere,= the potential festival crowd maybe. The first Québécois dictionary of film was compiled in 1978 by Michel Houle and Alain Julien, and was aimed at specialists (educational and commercial) and general public alike. The three similar editions of Le dictionnaire du cinéma québécois edited by Michel Coulombe and Marcel Jean (1988, 1991, 1999) can claim to be the most exhaustive, with over 800 entries, a filmography of 400 titles and a three-page bibliography, all spread over 721 pages. The editor-in-chief of the popular film magazine Take One has taken on Canada as a whole in the first of a promised series. His 716 entries are followed by a thirty-page chronology of Canadian film landmarks and a fourteen-page list of award recipients and nominees. The bibliographies characteristic of its predecessors (especially Peter Morris) are omitted, as is any mention of internet resources. 342 films, including 60 shorts, receive entries. Selection seems determined by awards won (about 60 per cent), the auteur status of directors humanities 469 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 (e.g. Arcand, Cronenberg, and Egoyan), or box office success. The tone is that of the hip mini-review. Director Patricia Rozema=s foreword speaks of the role that cinema has played in nation-building and identity formation in Canada. With few exceptions there is little in these reviews to show how. In the 364 articles on people, the book departs even further from this project. Listed are numerous Canadian expatriates who actually built the Hollywood industry (e.g., Allan Dwan, Mary Pickford, Arthur Hiller) or just their own Hollywood careers (e.g., Yvonne de Carlo, Walter Huston, Norma Shearer, William Shatner, Deanna Durbin). Recognition may boost a belief in our global competitiveness, but it is difficult to see its nationbuilding significance in Canada. Perhaps if inclusion were limited to expatriates who made some contribution to film-making in Canada (e.g., Norman Jewison, Ivan Reitman, Nell Shipman), the others could have been listed in an appendix. The categories of film people generally are also telling. Of the 364 listed, the greatest number (157) are accredited as actors and 151 as directors (some as both). 96 individuals have been producers and 87 writers. 12 experimental film-makers are included and 18 animators. This guide differs...