Le Cinéma à l'épreuve de la communauté: le cinéma francophone de l'Office national du film, 1960-1985 (review)

Though founded in 1939, the National Film Board of Canada did not receive its current mandate 'to promote the production and distribution of films designed to interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations' until 1950. From the outset, the 'production and distribution' of film was almost an entirely anglophone affair. But when the NFB studios moved from Ottawa to Montreal in 1956 and a specifically French section of the Board was subsequently created on the eve of what would become known as Quebec's 'Quiet Revolution', the seeds were sown for a remarkably fruitful period of cinematic production in which suddenly pressing questions around the connected notions of nation, identity, and community would find fertile ground. Despite her subtitle, Marion Froger's book is not a history of the NFB during those glory years (readers looking for such a history should turn to Gary Evans's In The National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board from 1949 to 1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), a title surprisingly absent from Froger's bibliography). It is, rather, a speculative essay on the nature of 'community' as this notion is refracted, desired, and even created by the practice of documentary film production in Quebec. Deciding to focus on 'community' in a field so heavily overdetermined by 'nation' and nationalism is itself an interesting choice. What does 'community' bring to our understanding of the films of this period that 'nation' perhaps leaves to one side? It allows the author to read the documentary films she has chosen for analysis not as discursive artefacts communicating some pre-existing identity, or as evidence of the growing national(ist) self-consciousness of film-makers — indeed, it generally allows her to escape reading the content of the films altogether — but as a new sort of dynamic that in some way (re)constructs a much looser network of social relations than that postulated by the nation and its teleological vector of political independence. This dynamic is made possible, according to Froger, on the one hand by the uniquely collaborative nature of the NFB at the time, and on the other by uncertain social bonds (liens) that are not presented as ostensible themes by films, but are, rather, marginally inscribed within film-making practice itself, a practice that Froger reads as an index pointing to the essentially risky relation between the documentary film-maker, the filmed subject, and the viewing public. Although these two perspectives might seem to be yoked together by a theoretical syncretism sailing under the fashionable colours of interdisciplinarity (sociology, anthropology, moral philosophy, film criticism, semiotics, and intermediality all make their appearance at diverse points in this work), and the argument for the 'ligagenetic' capacities of film may at times seem tinged with an unverifiable optimism, by and large Froger's gageure is met and the paradoxical mandate of the NFB — conjoining production, distribution, and interpretation of and for the 'nation(s)' of Canada — is teased out in a fascinating essay on a multifaceted object that is all too often viewed through the single lens of nationalism, and where an interdisciplinary approach pays clear dividends.