Movie Envy

“Canadian cinema.” The term may appear self-evident but is problematic. First, one may question the value of national approaches to culture, especially here, in Quebec and Canada, where the debates over the Nation seem interminable, and especially now, in an era of globalization. Next, one may question the value of media-centered approaches to culture, especially when the successive waves of the “digital revolution” have blurred the boundaries between technologies and among artistic practices. Rather than try to survey “important” fiction films for theatres in Quebec or Canada, this essay adopts another point of view to examine the presence of cinema in Montreal museums over the past few years by focusing on three singular exhibitions. It may well be symptomatic of the current state of film in Quebec and Canada—but also, paradoxically, everywhere else—and says much about the relationship between medium and nation, the expansion of cinema beyond the movie theatre, and the internationalization of culture.

Mutable Views

This chapter addresses the contemporary renewal of landscape art in Canada, arising at the intersection of visual art and cinema. Artworks, installations, and experimental films are discussed according to four categories: figure/ground, spatial illusions, the historicity of landscape, and digital scenery. Landscape—as a distinct art historical genre, conventional cinematic background, and ideological ground—has historically played a key role in Canadian visual culture. The contemporary artists and filmmakers in question have remade landscape in pictorial terms by remixing legacies from the visual arts and cinema and also in political terms, by calling attention to the damaged natural world of the Anthropocene, confronting Indigenous claims to the land, and foregrounding struggles over nationhood, identity, and collective memory.

The Musicality of Canadian Cinema

This chapter offers a narrative account of music in Canadian cinema that highlights the contributions of its pioneers. Case studies spanning the critically acclaimed, the curious, and the marginalized allow for an effort to flesh out the place of music, particularly popular music, in this national cinema. While the esthetics and dollars-and-cents of music in film may be similar in Canada as elsewhere, the expectations of filmmakers and audiences are perhaps uniquely Canadian as a result of industrial and institutional forces. Animation, the avant-garde, and documentary are particularly vibrant spaces for the innovative use of music and differentiate the history of music in Canadian cinema from other more commercially oriented contexts.

The Emotional Geographies of Québécois Cinema

This text examines four Québécois movies and their impact on the affective relation of the province to key aspects of its territory: La Mort d’un bûcheron (Carle 1973), Kanehsatake 270 ans de résistance (Obomsawin 1993), Les Racquetteurs (Brault and Groulx 1958), and Le Chat dans le sac Groulx (1964). This chapter is divided in two main parts that are devoted respectively to the experience of thresholds, frontiers, and territorial conflicts as well as to the concrete effect of seasons and weather on exterior movie settings and film equipment. It uncovers a long-lasting instability in the relation between the rural spaces of Québécois cinema and the commonly associated emotions, as well as a corresponding unpredictability in the actual filmic experience tied to weather elements not directly associated with sight and sound. Ultimately, the text calls for the integration of this instability and this unpredictability as critical tools in Canadian cinema historiography.

A Poetics of Discretion

Through an analysis drawn from microsociology and attentive to the tiny and subtle trials of the relational experience that the “new generation” of Quebec filmmakers tend to point out, this chapter explores how a poetics of “discretion” contributes to give form to a collective sentiment that does not presuppose a community belonging to be felt. By filming the urban sociality, understood as a fleeting experience of an “invisible binding,” the filmmakers find new forms to express this sense of collectivity, which does not pretend to be a sense of collectivity grounded in group identity but instead tends to blur the very issue of collective identity and its correlate (social imaginary). This blurring notably makes sense in the particular context of “the Printemps Erable” and its casserole concerts, which argues for a significant shift in research on imaginary and community in film studies.

Canadian Cinema and the Intellectual Milieu

Canadian cinema has evolved precariously between the myth of its encounter with an implacable nature and the sense that it is the product of a deterministic technology. Both positions derive from the Canadian intellectual tradition, particularly as articulated by Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. Frye stands behind Bruce Elder’s work on film philosophy, which, paired with Frye’s notion that movies derive from melodrama, provides a productive framework for understanding the work of both Guy Maddin and John Greyson. Similarly, McLuhan’s writings on technology inform the work of David Cronenberg and Joyce Wieland, while Atom Egoyan has taken up McLuhan’s notion of the global village. Complicating these influences has been Canada’s proximity to the most powerful film empire on earth, which has tended to push it toward documentary film—as in the work of John Grierson—and away from the commercially oriented products generated south of the border.

From Expanded to Intimate Cinemas in Canadian Experimental Film/Video

This chapter establishes two markers for fifty years of experimental media arts in Canada: Joyce Wieland’s 1967 Bill’s Hat, an expanded cinema event, and Midi Onodera’s To Poll or Not to Poll (2016), the latest in her ongoing series of year-long, Web-based films created for mobile devices, which she has called intimate cinema. This chapter complicates boundaries between histories of contemporary art, film, and video in Canada, and selectively animates the lively people, contexts, events, genres, and networks that have sustained the cultural ecosystems of experimental media arts in Canada. With specific examples drawn from thousands of mediaworks, events, festivals, and symposia, this chapter demonstrates that these ecosystems have been largely self-propelled by artists and mediamakers acting as creative, technical, administrative, pedagogical, and critical advocates since at least the 1960s to ensure the creation of dynamic artworks in dialogue with multiple communities both local and international.

Political Modernism, Policy Environments, and Digital Daring

Quebec ciné-feminism has continuously evolved since the 1970s to adapt to new policy environments and changing discourses of feminism through the evolution of new platforms of dissemination, production, and funding. Both the early films produced at the En Tant Que Femmes series at the National Film Board and the first independent features directed by women in Quebec incorporated a distinct form of political modernism. This chapter demonstrates how such modernism came to be marginalized throughout the 1980s, facilitated and accompanied by a shift in cultural policy that was increasingly oriented around the prioritization of commercial objectives. The final section of the essay analyzes various contemporary sites of feminist film practice in which the adaptability to new policy environments, the emergence of unique cross-cultural collaborations, and the appropriation of new platforms of media delivery attest to the diversity and ingenuity of Quebec ciné-feminism.

Still Here, Still Queer? Rethinking Queer Canadian Cinemas/Canadian Cinemas Queered

This chapter pushes for a broad revision of Canadian national cinemas, arguing for queerness as their privileged mode of expression. The prominence of queerness in the Canadian cinematic imaginary is explored throughout four sections that demonstrate the uniqueness of Canadian cinemas over examples of queer cinema elsewhere. First, the roots of queer cinema/cinema queered in Canada are located in the work of pre-Stonewall pioneers such as Claude Jutra, Norman McLaren, and David Secter. Second, queerness is seen informing the institutional and political structures of Canadian cinema through practices of activism around identities, intersectionality, and serostatus. Third, queerness is recentered in the oeuvre of the nonqueer auteurs Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, and Denys Arcand, as a synonym for sexual fluidity and a symptom of sexual/national anxiety. Finally, the contributions of Léa Pool, John Greyson, Thirza Cuthand, and Xavier Dolan uncover the intersectional heritage and souls of contemporary queer Canadian cinemas.

Quebec Cinema as Global Cinema

This chapter examines the transformations that have affected Quebec cinema since 2000: greater success at the domestic box office, increased international recognition by audiences and through awards, and the more visible presence of Quebec filmmakers in Hollywood and international production. Nuancing this narrative of success, the chapter traces continued local/national and global tensions in Quebec cinema and argues that recent changes can be understood in terms of their intensification. Certain Quebec film narratives are seen to draw on these evolutions and possible generational shifts in attitudes toward both the sovereignty project and the English language, which invites reshapings of cinematic stories about the relationship between self/world for white francophone Quebec audiences. The chapter argues for remappings by critics and scholars of cinematic spaces through a re-energized notion of “francophone cinema”—a “cinéma-monde” attentive to decentered analyses of borders and language. This affords fruitful lateral connections between worlds within Quebec cinema.