Double-Takes: Intersections between Canadian Literature and Film

Reading Canadian Film Credits: Adapting Institutions, Systems and Affects

Peter Dickinson 113 Reading Canadian Film Credits: Adapting Institutions, Systems and Affects Peter Dickinson What makes a “creditable” film adaptation? On one level, textual fidelity seems less important than fiduciary responsibility. To explain by way of a reductive distinction between opening and closing film credits: In the Hollywood production model, opening credits signify “above-the-line,” marquee investments aimed at ensuring a profitable return at the box office. A star’s name, a director’s track record, even the acknowledgement of a prior literary pedigree: all participate in the branding of a film’s relative credentials for success—as, for example, a familiar genre vehicle, a sure-fire hit or a “quality ” picture. Closing credits, by contrast, mostly reflect “below-the-line,” outof -pocket expenses, the cost of building sets and props, designing costumes, renting equipment and locations, generating technical effects, feeding and watering cast and crew (see Glatzer). In Canada we haven’t quite figured out how to make this accounting system work, although not for lack of trying. Which is why in the debit column at the end of most Canadian films made since 1995 one sees routine acknowledgement paid to the following confidence broker: the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit program (CPTC). Then, too, for those of us who regularly sit through the entire end title sequence of a film, waiting to see by what strange monikers the gaffer or best boy seeks to be known, or to confirm that that was indeed Vancouver masquerading as Chicago, the brief space of impressionistic nullity we then occupy as we vainly struggle against the desire to communicate in words feelings we would prefer to keep to ourselves, tells us something equally important about our emotional investments in movies. That those investments frequently yield a negative return speaks as much to how different spectator communities come together through a process of strategic dis-identification with screen images as they do about the general perfidy of the following ques- Reading Canadian Film Credits 114 tion when applied to any film, let alone one adapted from literature: “So, what did you think?” In this essay I approach the question of adaptation’s credibility in the Canadian context by teasing out the multiple meanings of “credit” (belief or trust in a story; acknowledgement of merit or services rendered; extending or authorizing financial payment). I first review the institutional structures at work in the issuing of tax credits for Canadian-made films, focusing on the tax-shelter era of the 1970s and early 1980s, and the CPTC’s much maligned precursor, the Capital Cost Allowance (CCA); I then briefly sketch some connections to the Conservative Party’s recently shelved plans to amend the CPTC by introducing what would have been a decency clause. Referencing select films from both periods, I suggest that the prioritizing of fiscal accountability over narrative content and artistic expression buys into an equivalency model that is just as bedevilling for corporate capitalism as it is for adaptation studies. One of the legacies of the tax-shelter era, for English-Canadian film at any rate, has been the regular casting of foreign actors in lead roles, often in films adapted from literature. Their star wattage is meant to attract investors, distribution markets and the general paying public in equal measure. However, one can argue that this system has also produced an internalized cultural cringe, a tendency to diminish, or discredit altogether, the work of talented Canadian co-stars, or to insist that stardom at home must first come from elsewhere. In this regard, I focus the second section of this essay upon what the EnglishCanadian film industry can learn by adapting elements of the Québécois star system, using my own fan identification with Roy Dupuis to comment on how star-gazing operates across media, genre and gender. In the final section, I explore what credit we give to our affective responses to film. I examine various anti-normative affects that I see constituting a larger theory of post-AIDS queer spectatorship, and that I locate in a series of postmillennial shorts and medium-length features adapted from literature. In treating emotion as a negative supplement to the viewing experience, I posit parallels with adaptation as a process of necessary repudiation, and suggest that reading Canadian film via its encumbrances (be they monetary or moral) may yield surplus benefits. Across all three sections I am attempting to engage with the recent “sociological turn” in adaptation studies, leaving aside...