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210 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 and within the trajectory of the international avant-garde cinema. Here Elder works throughhis dualpurpose, to show how the traditions behind Canadian film artists engendered a critical difference in the history of avant-garde cinema (Michael Snow's films of the late tg6os staged a revolution in the movement), and how their films work through the epistemological questions that have long troubled Canadian art. The critical core of the book is an immensely detailed study of two paintersbecome -filmmakers, Chambers and Snow, focusing on the former's Circle and Hart of London and the latter's Wavelength, ~ (Back and Forth), Presents, and La Region centrale. The case he makes, that Chambers and Snow transpose themes which first emerge in Canadian philosophy and painting through their films, is persuasive and handled with great care and clarity. For those unfamiliar with the issues arising from Canadian experimental films, there is now no better place to turn for an in-depth discussion. For specialists, moreover, Image and Identity makes two valuable contributions to the study of Canadian film. Elder actually shows how some Canadian films arise from a culturaland intellectuallineage. Healso indicates through the methods he uses in performing that demonstration how such an enterprise might be carried over to some other Canadian films. That method combines close interpretations of formal work in paintings and film with analysis of philosophical ideas, a procedure which is hardly eccentric to studies of art or film but which is new in the discussion of Canadian cinema. By the same token, Image and Identity incidentally raises practical questions too. Is there really another body of English-Canadian cinema that might be treated in a way comparable to these experimental films? My own view is that there is not, that Canadian cinema produces only weak narrative films, that the documentary tradition is compromised, and that the avant-garde-dramatic hybrids currently represented by Atom Egoyan and others still suffer from creative confusions. Image and Identity is an excellent critical study of Canadian cinema, but it also unwillingly suggests by its example that this cinema has only a small canon of works that can bear Elder's style of critical scrutiny. (BART TESTA) Claude Chabot, Michel Larouche, Denise Perusse, et Pierre Veronneau, editeurs. Le Cinema quebecois des annees Bo Onematheque quebecoise/Musee du cinema. 179. $10.00 paper Denys Arcand. Jesus de Montreal Boreal. 188. $13.95 paper The first publication noted above contains a selection of papers given at a HUMANITIES 211 colloquium, on the topic of the title, organized by the Association quebecoise des etudes cinematographiques in the fall of 1988 (a little over a year before the end of the decade in question). The second basically contains the dialogues of Denys Arcand's much-honoured film, which was first shown at the Cannes Festival in the spring of 1989 and was published almost simultaneously. It thus escaped the scrutiny of the critics in the 1988 colloquium, although its predecessor, the very successful Le Declin de ['empire americain (1986), also published in similar form by Boreal, received considerable comment by these same critics. Le Cinema quebecois contains several excellent texts and in general · presents much food for thought on francophone cinematic production of the last decade, in both the documentary and fiction genres, as well as the increasingly frequent 'metissage' of the two. This latter docudrama approach is studied by Yves Lever, Alain N. Moffat, and partially, Paul Warren. In addition, two critics (Denise Perusse and Brigitte Filion) discuss questions related to the portrayal of women in current film; Mary Alemany-Galway and Pierre Veronneau study filmic adaptations of Quebec novels; Veronneau, Denis Bellemare, and Gilles Blain analyse a single fiction film (Tinamer, Kalamazoo, and Sonatine, respectively) with particular stress by the first and third on problems of audience reception caused by the breaking of habitual codes; and Louis Goyette examines the formal implications of the use of theme songs in a number of productions. Of a more general nature are Ian Lockerbie's 'Le cinema quebecois: une allegorie de la conscience collective,' and Esther Pelletier's probing of the impact of federal and provincial government intervention in film production on stylistic...

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