Great Canadian Film Directors (review)

There was a time when a ‘great Canadian film director’ was someone who had released two feature films. If either one of those films lasted more than a week in an art house cinema, the director would then be elevated to the stature of legend.

George Melnyk’s anthology begins at that time. Its first essay is Kay Armatage’s comparison of Nell Shipman’s Back to God’s Country, a 1919 silent feature, with artist and experimental filmmaker Joyce Wieland’s only feature film, The Far Shore (1976). Shipman spent a long life struggling to replicate the success of her film – for which she was never actually given directorial credit. Wieland’s film was, to be kind, critically dismissed at the time. It is typical of this fine collection that both works are given a thorough airing by exactly the right person. Armatage has published numerous articles and a book on Shipman. She has not only written about Wieland but made the definitive film on Wieland’s life and work.

This same high level of discourse is true throughout the anthology as it works its way from the bad old days to contemporary Canadian directors. David Clandfield and Jim Leach, two of the nation’s leading anglophone scholars of Quebec film, take on the two great tragic figures of that ‘national’ (to quote our prime minister) cinema. Clandfield assesses the depth of Claude Jutra’s association with Quebec’s history and iconography. Jutra, best known for Mon Oncle Antoine (for decades, the sentimental favourite for best Canadian film) had, as it turns out, a far more complex relationship to the rising nationalism of his time.

Leach looks into the darkness of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s two features, Un Zoo la nuit and Leolo, through the prism of contemporary theory. His most telling quotation, one that might serve as subtitle for the entire volume, is from Slavoj Žižek, the notion of breaking down ‘the barrier separating the real from reality.’

Entering the land of the living director, Melnyk demonstrates his nearly flawless ability to choose the right specimens of their time and place and to pair them with the most able writers. Pierre Véronneau’s career as scholar, curator, teacher, and cineaste about town corresponds exactly to that of his subject, Denys Arcand. Christopher Gittings, who literally wrote the book on identity politics and Canadian cinema, writes here on Canada’s best-known contributor to international queer cinema, John Grayson. William Beard, co-editor of the last definitive Canadian cinema anthology, takes on Atom Egoyan.

As we arrive at the last section, ‘Future Greats,’ Melnyk turns, with two exceptions (Patricia Gruben on Gary Burns and Jerry White on Zach Kunuk) to less senior figures in film studies. Leaving the discussion of emerging talents to emerging scholars works reasonably well, relieving these relatively short essays from the burden of past prejudices and associations.

If there are reservations to be had about this ambitious work, they might begin with the shortness of the essays – the best of which just seem to be working up a head of steam when they come to an abrupt end. Another qualm is about the bibliography, which for some reason combines all the source materials for all the essays into one straightforward alphabetized lump.

In all, though, this is a valuable compendium and, as is undoubtedly the intention, a prime candidate for required text in any Introduction to Canadian Cinema course. Melnyk, a tireless encyclopedist of literature and film, has since gone on to a series of collections of interviews of Canadian directors – probably all of them. His able editorial skills, as evidenced here, bode well for the success of that enterprise.