Double-Takes: Intersections between Canadian Literature and Film

Beyond the National-Realist Text: Imagining the Impossible Nation in Contemporary Canadian Cinema

Jim Leach 25 Beyond the National-Realist Text: Imagining the Impossible Nation in Contemporary Canadian Cinema Jim Leach “Nation” and “realism” are two of the most contested terms in contemporary film studies, not least in critical discussions of Canadian cinema. Film theorists have argued that the study of national cinemas reinforces reactionary nationalistic ideologies and is, in any case, increasingly irrelevant in the age of globalization. Similarly, the aesthetics of realism, as developed in much early film theory, have been attacked for simply showing the way things are rather than encouraging the viewer to adopt a critical perspective. In this paper, I will explore some of the implications of the linkage between nation and realism in the discourses of Canadian cinema and then discuss the ways in which these discourses have been challenged in the work of three contemporary Canadian directors: Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand and Guy Maddin. In my book Film in Canada, I coupled these contested terms by describing the mandate assumed by John Grierson, when he came to Canada in 1939 as the first commissioner of the National Film Board, as a national-realist project . I was alluding to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “national-popular” to suggest how Grierson sought to use the conventions of documentary realism to provide evidence of the existence of the nation as an imagined community.1 Grierson was building on his own work in Britain in the 1930s, but there he was seeking to inflect already existing national traditions in order to encourage the modernization that he felt those traditions were impeding. Canada, as Grierson saw it, did not have “a great store of national images,” and his task was thus one of nation-building (qtd. in Evans 94). It should also be noted that, even before Grierson arrived in Canada, a very similar documentary project had been undertaken in Quebec in the documentary films made by a number of Catholic priests, notably the Abbés Proulx and Tessier, although, of course, the “nation” there had very different connotations.2 Although Grierson was involved in a “nation-building project,” my identi- Imagining the Impossible Nation 26 fication of the tradition he inspired as a national-realist one does not entail, as one reviewer of the book suggested, a belief in the “the stability of the national” (Burgess 92). I agree with Stuart Hall that “modern nations are all cultural hybrids” and that, “instead of thinking of national cultures as unified, we should think of them as constituting a discursive device which represents difference as unity or identity” (297). The national-realist project sought to contribute to the building of a national culture, in this sense, and its products often show the strains and tensions involved in representing difference as identity. Indeed, Grierson’s own thinking about both nation and realism was complex, not to say contradictory, and we need to examine each term a little more closely to see what was at stake in their articulation. Another critic transformed my term into “nationalist-realism,” but Grierson was very much an internationalist, and his goal was to build a sense of national identity in Canada that would enable it to become a progressive force in international affairs (Melnyk 20). Although he was undeniably concerned to produce identity out of difference, he nevertheless insisted that Canada’s “lack of unity” was “healthy and interesting” (qtd. in Evans 94). Under Grierson , the NFB would document regional differences, but would also try to provide evidence of common interests that transcended those differences. In this respect, Grierson’s attitude has much in common with Northrop Frye’s later claim that “the tension between [the] political sense of unity and the imaginative sense of locality is the essence of whatever the word ‘Canadian’ means” (iii). “Realist” might seem to be a simpler matter, but this aspect of the project has provoked very different critical reactions. On the one hand, Alan Lovell argues that, for Grierson, “the essential nature of the cinema came from its ability to record the appearances of everyday life (this for him was ‘the real world’)” (24). On the other, according to Ian Aitken, “Grierson did not use the term ‘the real’ to refer to empirical reality, but to abstract underlying reality , and he believed that the essential function of cinema was to record this underlying reality, and not the superficial details of everyday life” (12). I think that these apparently opposed formulations are both correct: the goal of the national-realist project...