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Certain tendencies in Canadian cinema: temporary insanity and the national tax-shelter masquerade

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Certain tendencies in Canadian cinema: temporary insanity and the national tax-shelter masquerade

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CERTAIN TENDENCIES IN CANADIAN CINEMA:
TEMPORARY INSANITY AND THE NATIONAL TAX-SHELTER MASQUERADE

by

Janice Laurie Kaye

___________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2007

Copyright 2007 Janice Laurie Kaye

ii

Dedication

To my parents, Alex and Elinor Kaye, and my grandfather, Dr. A.W. Ross Doan,
who taught us to love learning

And to Dr. Marsha Kinder,
who showed me what it means to be a teacher

iii

Acknowledgements

To my teachers at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario — Dr. Frank Burke, Dr. Blaine
Allan, Clarke Mackey, and then-graduate students Shelley Stamp-Lindsey, Christie Milliken
and Jody Baker — without whom I would not have gone on to the USC School of Cinema-
Television.

To my professors at USC who guided me over the great divide between undergraduate and
graduate work: Dr. Michael Renov, Dr. Drew Caspar, Dr. Richard Jewell, Dr. Lynn Spigel
and David Shepard.

To Peter Harcourt, the unofficial dean of Canadian film studies, who was instrumental in the
publishing of my first academic paper, in the Journal of Canadian Film Studies, and whose
passion for Canadian cinema remains a consistent inspiration.

And finally and most especially to my chair, Dr. Marsha Kinder at USC, who unfailingly
shows every student both great brilliance and great kindness, and who to me represents the
epitome of teaching.

Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract iv

Chapter 1: Identity, Nation and Masquerade 1
Who are we? Where are we? 2
The Films: You Can Dress Us Up But You Can't Take Us Out 3
Gender and National Masquerades 7
Harold Innis and Cultural Glossophagia 10
Canons, Borders and Blind Spots 17
Themes and Tropes Across Genres 23
"Narrativus Interruptus" 29
Chapter Endnotes 31

Chapter 2: Gimme Tax Shelter — The Emergence of the TSE 36
The Scenics 38
The "Quota Quickies" or the QQE 40
The National Film Board (NFB) 1939 43
The Canadian Co-Operation Project (CCP) 1948-1958 45
The Massey Report 1951 47
The Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC) 1967 51
The TSE begins 54
Chapter Endnotes 67

Chapter 3: Coming of Age in an Era of Cultural Anxiety 73
Coming of Age in North America: An Explosion of Sibling Rivalry 81
Coming of Age at the Box Office: Meatballs (1978) and
Porky's (1979) 85
Coming of Middle Age: Middle Age Crazy (1979) and
Your Ticket is No Longer Valid (1979) 91
"Narrativus Interruptus" and Canadian Ruptures 92
Chapter Endnotes 105

Chapter 4: Recontextualizing High Culture, Madness and Homosexuality 110
Those Crazy Canucks – Method in the National Madness 112
Madly Outrageous! (1977) 115
Twins and Double Trouble: Double Negative (1979) 117
The Changeling (1978) and Dead Ringers (1988) 123
On Deadline for Artistic Frustration 128
Chapter Endnotes 135

Chapter 5: Foreign Relations in the Two Solitudes: It’s All in the Family 138
International Auteurs in Canada 1946-1954 140
TSE Auteur Co-Productions 147
Incest Among Chabrol's Blood Relatives (1977) 152
Families and Nations: The Wars (1981) 157
Passing as the Other: Hard Feelings 166
My History’s Better Than Yours: Dirty Tricks (1979) 170
Chapter Endnotes 175

Chapter 6: Women Disguised as Canada: Naming the Two Solitudes 180
What's In A Name? A Rose, An Isabel, A Wendy, A Caroline,
A Julia, A Madeleine Is…? 183
Wendy 185
Waiting for Caroline 188
Madeleine Is… 192
Eliza's Horoscope 199
Naming and the Divine Performative 209
Chapter Endnotes 212

Chapter 7: The Postcolonial Potential of Making the Invisible Visible 214
Blind Spots: Love at First Sight and If You Could See What I Hear 215
Homeland Insecurity: Fetishistic Amputations 219
Impersonating Success — Outrageous! (1977) 225
The Silent Partner (1978) Speaks Volumes 228
Perfectly Normal, Eh? (1991) 235
Chapter Endnotes 239

Chapter 8: The Neo-TSE: Back to the Future 243
Bon Cop, Bad Cop: Tackling Solitudes Head-On 247
Shifting and Expanding Solitudes 250
Chapter Endnotes 256

Bibliography 261

Appendix: The Films of 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981,1982 272

iv

ABSTRACT

"Certain tendencies in Canadian cinema" refers to gendered national themes of
masquerade and madness that appear in all periods of Canadian cultural production. Issues
of self-identity and the repressed politics of the Two Solitudes reveal themselves in the
coming-of-age genre, family dysfunction, the influence of international auteurs, connections
with high culture and homosexuality, naming females in the name of the country, and
obsessively repetitive tropes of homoeroticism, blindness and fetishistic amputations. These
ideas are nowhere more significantly interwoven than in a period of English-Canadian
feature film production of the 1970s and '80s called the Tax-Shelter Era. I call it the "TSE,"
an acronym for the Toronto Stock Exchange, because many movies were financed as tax-
sheltered public offerings. Big-budget productions starring Americans attempted to carve out
a place for Canadian film in world cinema by masquerading as American and essaying
genres unfamiliar to the traditional Canadian filmmaking lexicon. Distinctively Canadian, or
"DC" films, made at the same time and sometimes part of the TSE, were often critically
acclaimed as artistic while their TSE cousins were reviled and ostracized. Both sets of films
show a story structure I call "Narrativus Interruptus," which exhibits psychoanalytic aspects
of rupture that undermine storytelling and genre. Both uncover a multitude of key theoretical
issues touching on canon, cultural policy and global politics. Both were government-
supported and operated with Canadian cultural, geographical and political specificity. Both
illustrate thematic similarities between "popular" and art cinemas and map key relationships
among nation, gender and madness. The TSE represents an illuminating case study
in film of a performative national masquerade, in which one country dressed as another. In
view of globalization and a recent Canadian return to Hollywood North I call the Neo-TSE, it
is more possible than ever to rethink the whole tax-shelter movement in transnational terms
and to consider how and why a guerilla Canadian cinema could and should make a
difference.
Chapter 1: Identity, Nation and Masquerade

A person who is 'here' but would rather be somewhere else is an exile or a prisoner; a
person who is 'here' but THINKS he is somewhere else is insane.

Margaret Atwood, Survival, 1972

The subject is graspable only in the passage between telling/told, between 'here' and
'somewhere else,' and in this double scene the very condition of cultural knowledge is
the alienation of the subject.

Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation," 1994

In the opening of Movies and Mythologies Peter Harcourt quotes Margaret Atwood
about issues of place and madness in the context of nation. Atwood goes on to discuss a
"there" that is more important than "here." She adds:
But when you are here and don't know where you are because you've misplaced your
landmarks or bearings, then you need not be an exile or a madman: you are simply
lost…Canada is an unknown territory for the people who live in it…I'm talking about Canada
as a state of mind, as the space you inhabit not just with your body but with your head. It's
that kind of space in which we find ourselves lost…we need to know about here, because
here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their
place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.
1

Bhabha's "between here and somewhere else" outlines the position not only of exiles
and immigrants, but also of the Canadian subject in culture, as well as of culture itself. When
he describes subjects as being "between" here and there in terms of identity, he touches on
one of the premiere quest/ion/s in Canadian film, where images of silent subjects abound
and issues of identity, gender, family, nation and madness predominate. The
"inbetweenness" of Bhabha's latterly examined diasporic and exilic identities resonates in
Atwood's "unknown territory" of the "here." The subject of and in Canadian culture is situated
in that wilderness, the liminal spaces of that "someplace else." The illustrative images and
strategies have continued through genres and eras, to the present day.

2

Who Are We? Where Are We?

The Canadian discourse revolves around the language and cultural similarities and a
cultural inferiority complex predicated by the geographical proximity as well as the economic
and political power of the U.S. While Bhabha's terms are of the marginalized and diasporic,
Harcourt says Canada has developed "an uncertain sense of our collective self," that it
constitutes " an unfinished text" that has been "insufficiently imagined." Her asserts that has
"never really existed as a fully sovereign nation state."
2
While no nation perhaps can be so in
an era of globalization, the questions in the particular Canadian case have existed for
decades, even when national and economic sovereignty seemed more assured. Canada
struggled with issues of its having begun as well as remained indeterminate, ambivalent,
fragmented and hybrid in identity/ies in the face of multiple and various colonizations.
For the aforementioned reasons, Canadian artists speak from the liminal, and
sometimes blank, spaces, interrogating from the sidelines and negotiating from colonial
positions. Dennis Lee explains his marginalized position as a Canadian poet: "The colonial
writer does not have words of his own...The words I knew said Britain and they said
America, but they did not say my home. They were always and only about someone else's
life. All the rich structures of the language were present, but the currents that animated them
were not home to the people who used the language here."
3

The Canadian imagined community has consistently defined itself in the structural
negative, by what it is not, i.e. not American, not British, not French. Its image is
consequently formed in part by an "absence," in Jim Leach's observation,
4
taking after
Atwood's concept of the negative in Survival.
5
In Katherine Monk's terms, Canadian film
takes up "negative space" or is "probing the negative." There is "something missing."
6
Hamid
Naficy refers to such space as the "thirdspace of identity," one that must be constructed (in

3

his case by the woman who selects a third passport in The Third Woman (Mitra Tabrizian
1991).
7

Although Canadian culture speaks in large measure from Naficy's "thirdspace," the
country cannot be said to be colonized, marginalized or exiled in the common use of those
terms, although it is home to diasporized populations and filmmakers. Whereas Bhabha's
postcolonial subject refuses to become part of the colonizer's project, thereby "menacingly
hanging loose from the margins."
8
Canada can hardly be called "Third World,"
"disadvantaged," "developing" or "enslaved." It does, however, hang from the margins, its
colonization consisting in the individual and/or cultural imagination/s that produce/s its
cultural products.
As a result of cultural colonization and policies stemming from it, Canadian films have
in large part been differently imagined. They generally use themes, tropes and narrative
strategies that do not conform to the Hollywood product that controls about 98% of
Canadian screens. Canadian genres are blurred or mixed, the narratives truncated or
fragmented, the pacing slow or alternately extremely fast, the writing and casting ensemble-
rather than star-based, and many tropes repetitively or perhaps even compulsively
reproduced in all periods of Canadian film.

The Films: You Can Dress Us Up, But You Can’t Take Us Out

Nowhere are these issues more prominent or interwoven more significantly with
national identity than in a period of English-Canadian feature film production in the late
1970s and early 1980s called "the Tax-Shelter Era." For this is the period when Canada
faced numerous political and cultural challenges relating to its self-image vis-à-vis the United
States as well as the rest of the world. I am proposing a study of Canadian cinema as one of

4

a national and narrative masquerade in which narrative strategies, images, tropes and
themes represent a state of cultural colonization repeated across genres. The era began in
1974, expanded in 1977, reached a peak in 1979 and 1980, and ended in 1981. A study of it
uncovers a multitude of key representational and theoretical issues, imbricating gender,
nation, identity, cinematic canon, cultural policy, narrative strategy and global politics. While
the relationship between popular cinema and art films has been explored in studies of other
national contexts, such as France and Australia, the kind of comparison I am proposing has
not been previously addressed. This is because it is specific, if not limited, to the Canadian
cultural, geographical and political context.
I call the Tax-Shelter Era the TSE, a fitting acronym for the time, since TSE actually
stood for the Toronto Stock Exchange (now the TSX), which had an important bearing on
the tax-shelter films, many of which were financed as public offerings. The attraction was a
100% tax write-off for investors in Canadian film. Multi-million-dollar budgets were for the
first time made available to produce Canadian movies. Many of these productions
masqueraded as American ones, by the hiring American stars, the utilization of big budgets,
and attempts at familiar genres that included sex and violence not seen before in Canadian
film. And yet they remained—not only nominally, but also visually and narratively —
Canadian, and this fact has been under-analyzed. At the same time the tax-shelter films
were being produced, there existed a body of more "Distinctively Canadian" — or DC —
films. I use "DC" as the acronym because of its ironic association with the U.S.
capital/capitol, invoking both American monetary and political connections to Canadian film.
This latter set of nation-specific movies contained recognizably Canadian elements,
seemingly continuing the tradition of the Canadian New Wave of the '60s that coincided with
the cinematic New Waves around the world.
The TSE’s proponents and participants aimed to carve out a place for Canadian film
in American and world cinema. Governmental regulatory agencies, cultural policymakers

5

and some filmmakers, in conjunction with financial markets, carried out a method of building
a film industry using money and American stars, with the goal of producing popular and
commercial movies attractive to general audiences. The provision of the finances, combined
with the stated political will for a cultural identity through a homegrown popular movie
culture, made the TSE possible.
The movement was underpinned particularly by the establishment of the CFDC
(Canadian Film Development Corporation) in 1967. Out of that communications regulatory
body, as well as certain other historical movements and initiatives, grew a series of failed
film policies on the part of the federal government outlined in Chapter 2. As the TSE
attempted to build a Canadian film business and culture, it also contradictorily tried to hide its
"Canadianness" and disappear into the American myth-making and moneymaking machine.
Canada’s lack of, and search for, a national mythology, formed one part of the rationale for
TSE legislation, while the other consisted of a desire to become part of an American one.
The doubling of Canadian and American interests contributed to a signifying body of films.
Although several films funded and begun during the TSE were not released until
several years later, I am nevertheless considering them within the group because they help
reveal the full range of works connected to the movement with all its contradictions. Although
many remained obscure, they still exhibit some remarkable tendencies generally
unexamined in the critical Canadian film literature. Canadian cultural policy created a
combination of governmental and independent cinema unable to compete with Hollywood
because of its narrative strategies and certain types of historical and cultural conditioning.
In 2002, Jim Leach noted the "aesthetics of failure" both in Canadian films and their box-
office receipts. He mentions "the infamous Capital Cost Allowance Act of 1974," the early
beginning of the TSE that funded low-budget movies, and the movies that "point to
strategies and pressure also apparent in films that are more readily accepted as significant
components of the national cinema."
9
Here he hints at the connections or overlaps between

6

what I am calling the TSE and DC moves.
10
Their specific tropes and strategies, however,
rather than representing an anomalous period, have repeated almost obsessively
throughout Canadian film.

My analyses of the movies will reveal sets of themes and images concerning
gendered and sexualized national identity, repeated representations of lack of vision,
dysfunctional families, physical and cultural castration, and madness. These themes exist
within an overall unspoken narrative strategy I call "Narrativus Interruptus." It involves a
dislocation of storytelling that bespeaks at times a lack of knowledge of, or training in,
narrative techniques that connect with audiences, at times a desire to tell stories differently
from Hollywood, an obsession with resisting compliance and/or closure, and/ or an
compulsion to repeat certain images fraught with meaning. If norms and expectations set by
Hollywood standards have been internalized by Canadian audiences and/ or viewers/
screenwriters, why do Canadian movies not exhibit more Hollywood tendencies, if the aim,
as has been stated, is to capture an audience?
When TSE movies show Canadian themes, they have been academically and
journalistically recuperated as DC movies, rather than relegated to the "bad old tax-shelter
era," as it was commonly called, which spawned them. It is significant that the derogatory
label was usually reserved for the reviled Hollywood imitations. The period remains
stereotyped as a shameful illustration of moviemaking failure. Both groups, however, exhibit
combinations of genres whose subtexts address repressed politics, history, art and
sexuality. Even though geographical specificity was often hidden, the Canadianness
returned in other ways, as we shall see. In view of recent Canadian cultural policy and world
events, it is more possible than ever to rethink the whole TSE movement in transnational
and global terms. While the TSE began with the Special Investment Programme in 1974,
progressed to the 100% write-off in 1976, and was officially cancelled in November of 1981,
its ramifications persist to this day. In fact, a new TSE has begun, a phenomenon I discuss

7

in Chapter 8. The TSE has been so reviled and considered in academic and journalistic
quarters as such a misguided error that I have named it "Temporary Insanity." Its
significance and tie-ins to gendered tropes of madness are illuminating. In analyzing the
TSE movies as a case study in Canadian national identity, I will draw on a number of critical
discourses from inside as well as outside Canada. They address and help illuminate issues
and theories of transnational and/or transgender relations.

Gender and National Masquerades

One of the key images for the TSE, and indeed in other period of Canadian film, is
that of masquerade—a provocative and longstanding trope whose theoretical implications I
find particularly productive in specifying the cultural dynamics of the TSE films and their
engagement with national identity.
Clowns, masks, make-up and dress-up abound in diverse cultures. The legacy of the
Commedia dell' Arte has been theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin through transgressive carnival;
by Judith Butler, after Rivière and Lacan, through gender masquerade and its repetition; and
by Homi Bhabha through colonial mimicry. Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque turns
centralizing power on its head by empowering the watchers of the spectacle with the space
to critique. Butler's theories of the masquerading possibilities of "the play of appearances"
develop into the performativity of gender. In her explanation, Butler suggests that
masquerade denies the ontology of gender, that femininity is a mask
11
rather than an
underlying reality, that there is no femininity "prior to mimicry and the mask,"
12
and that
masquerade exposes Rivière's "necessary failure of masculinity."
13
If "gender is an imitation
without an origin,"
14
then masquerade is the repeated performance of that gender-without-
an-origin. Steven Cohan refers to spectacular masculinity in 1950s Hollywood, interrogating
the prevailing representations, as "masquerade," complicating it with issues of class, and

8

noting the use of the male body as an object of desire for female characters and viewers,
and foregrounding male failure in the face of desperate, demanding and insatiable women
as well as in front of other men. Thus he is masquerading as the whole male of sexual
completeness and desire. He is "posing as a stud."
15
That stance challenged the norms with
"a male form of masquerade…Hal's impersonation of masculinity crosses gender lines
insofar as both the spectacle and the fakery link him to what Hollywood has routinely and
historically defined as the feminine position of representation."
16
He takes his term
masquerade from Butler's concept of performance.
17

The repetition of heterosexual or homosexual power relations strategies helps
establish the norms themselves. The norms are then repeated and become part of culture,
ideology and sexuality. The desire to transgress the norms in order to undermine them also
repeats itself in such tactics as carnival, which then form new norms. I will thus be asking
which kinds of thematics, situations and characters are repeated in films. How do these films
use repetition for establishing or transgressing norms? Gender identity, freed from fixity and
thought of as a cultural norm, therefore remains in flux. These concepts are particularly
relevant to Canadian films, frequently peopled with male characters in drag, as well as
characters of both genders in masks, make-up, costumes or disguises.
Under or behind a masquerade lies mimicry, which Bhabha sees as correlated to the
ambivalent desire for the Other
18
that underlies the process of identification. His three points
in the identification process are that the subject's coming into existence involves a necessary
relating to something else; a doubling/ splitting/ being in two places at once; and an
identification that is not predetermined but always in production.
19
He extends identification
with an Other into the formation of cultural identities. Like Butler, he argues for multiple and
variant identities not produced peripherally by a dominant central power but acting in various
ways on the colonizer to disrupt the fiction of its unifying narrative. Bakhtin, Butler and
Bhabha all deal with issues of creation and presentation of the subject/s in trying to attain

9

subjectivity, identity, agency and power. In the TSE, these intersections of identificatory
selves and others reveal themselves in Canadian cinema's trying to imitate the U.S., not only
to disrupt its power with carnival but also to borrow some of it through mimicry and
masquerade.
If, as Butler has outlined, gender is a construct, and, as Bhabha has shown, identities
are not unified, then, using Benedict Anderson, national identity, too, is not simply a
construct, an "imagined community," but one fractured and performed repeatedly in a futile
effort to become or appear whole. Although Anderson does not expand on gender in relation
to nation, his references continually imply the universal gender, i.e. male, with nations
imagined as a place of the "fraternity"
20
of equals, a new way of linking fraternity, power and
time. He does, however, mention the socio-cultural concept that "everyone can, should, will
'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender—vs. the irremediable particularity of its
concrete manifestations."
21
In referring to popular national movements in Europe since the
1820s that took after the United States and France, Anderson is even more specific about
the possibility of gendered notions of nationalism. He writes, "[A] certain inventive
legerdemain was required to permit the empire to appear attractive in national drag"
22
(my
emphasis). Anderson suggests here that empires invent and impose a certain magic, a
sleight-of-hand on their colonies. The empire, which came after the nation, did this in order
to make the merger of the nation and the empire appealing to the people and thus to
maintain central power. Nations then can dress up to appear "attractive" to populations for
various reasons. Movies, the ultimate sleight-of-hand and trompe l'oeil project, would serve
as a useful tool for nations or empires wishing to gain or retain power.
Although Anderson alludes to the masquerade of the colonizing empire, it is perhaps
even more likely that a colonized nation might be induced to play dress-up. If imitation is, as
is said, the sincerest form of flattery, it implies some sort of original, or as Naficy would have
it, an "ur-iginal," representing a fetishized homeland. For Canada, the "ur-iginal" would be an

10

intersecting combination throughout its history of Britain, France and the U.S. The "ab-
original" homeland has been excised until recently from the history of Canada and from
depiction in Canadian movies. The elder countries do not constitute an originary identity but
rather the most powerful historical influences at hand and therefore the ones to be
mimicked, imitated and/or disrupted. Instead of an originary national identity, there is an
imagined community dressed up in drag and/or performing a masquerade.
Connections between gender and nation are represented by repeated instances of
male cross-dressing and drag. The intersection begins in the TSE with Outrageous! (Richard
Benner) in 1977, continues with The Silent Partner (Daryl Duke 1978), and reaches into the
1990s with Perfectly Normal (Yves Simoneau 1991), M. Butterfly (David Cronenberg 1993),
and The Five Senses (Jeremy Podeswa 1999) and is still seen into the next century with
Touch of Pink (Ian Iqbal Rashid 2004). I do close textual analyses of The Silent Partner,
Outrageous! and Perfectly Normal in Chapter 7, examining how they negotiate dressing up
and crossing borders between nation and gender. The TSE attempted the type of "inventive
legerdemain" mentioned by Anderson and needed for a nation to "appear attractive in
national drag." Rather than being the colonizing country, however, Canada acted as the one
wishing to identify with the American "Other" that constituted the culturally colonizing empire.
The glittering object of desire, envy and contempt was the "legerdemain" or the "magic" of
Hollywood movies.
Yet these dynamics of Canadian identity were not limited to the movies. They
pervaded the whole of Canadian culture since the middle of the last century.

Harold Innis & Cultural Glossophagia

Canada is a country in search of an identity, a nation with more geography than
history, and one torn at least in two, by the English and French "founding" nations, a rent

11

given the name Two Solitudes, after the 1945 nationalist novel by Hugh MacLennan.
Preceding as well as being coincident with MacLennan's work was that of cultural theorist
and historian Harold Innis, whose communications theories criticized the U.S. for cultural
imperialism. The 1950s and '60s marked the beginning of the "CanLit" authors in the years
leading up to such significant initiatives and events as the Massey Report, Expo '67, the
Trudeau years, and the formation of the Canadian Film Development Corporation. The '60s
also marked the re-entry of Canadian feature fiction films, which had languished since the
establishment of the National Film Board the same year as the start of World War II. The
English-language film industry, historically in disarray and comprising only about one-to-two
percent of onscreen movies in Canada, has struggled unsuccessfully for decades against
the Hollywood monolith that considers Canada a "domestic" market.
23

While Canada has looked south at U.S. culture, the opposite has not been true.
Canada has, until recently, acted as the blind spot of America — neither seen nor
acknowledged, conceived of as a big blank white space north of the border as well as a
literal blank space on American maps. Fear of assimilation, closely associated with not being
able to speak, and stemming from the erasure of language known as "glossophagia," goes
back to English and French, the two "founding" cultures and "nations" of Canada.
In 1841, Lord Durham, Governor-in-Chief and Lord High Commissioner of British
North America, held as a goal for the new Union of the two Canadas, spelling out
"glossophagia" for the French: English would be the only recognized tongue.
24
Although it is
ironic that French flourished, a kind of "cultural glossophagia" remains a very real possibility
for English-Canada and its movies. This is one reason for the obsession with border issues,
national identity, the use of a strategy I call "Narrativus Interruptus," and a certain cultural
castration complex.
The first Canadian cultural historian to warn of American control in a global context
was Harold Innis. He wrote explicitly against the dangers of American cultural control. His

12

warnings did not go unheeded: Vincent Massey turned some of them into the film policy that
resulted in the 1951 Massey Report, the 1967 CFDC and the ensuing TSE. Innis' work on
space, time, transportation, communication and culture goes a long way towards explaining
the way in which Canadian movies represent geographical space and narrative time.
In criticizing excessive media domination that tends to centralize power and establish
cultural and economic monopolies, Innis also recognized the existence and possibilities of
resistance to such power, with margins influencing centre. "Innis has no utopian vision of an
egalitarian future free from such restrictions," say Heyer and Crowley. Innis thought the
inequities resulting from the institutional structures' domination, which is disguised as local
while serving the interests of a small powerful sector, ought to be challenged.
25
Innis first tied
culture and economics together in the context of a global economy, an idea of particular
relevance to the study of national and international cinemas, and particularly the TSE.
Innis foresaw "cultural disturbances" among regional groups as a reaction against
universalizing forces.
26
In positing culture as difference, he wrote, "It is perhaps a unique
characteristic of civilization that each civilization believes in its own uniqueness and its
superiority to other civilizations. Indeed this may be the meaning of culture—i.e. something
which we have that others have not. It is probably for this reason that writings on culture can
be divided into those attempting to seek in other cultures and those attempting to strengthen
their own."
27

Innis first outlined the ways in which navigational practices and the timber industry
helped shape modern, nationalized communications empires. His thinking was based on
modes of transportation and specific resources that organize life and culture in certain ways
and with certain results. "Just as Frye's image of entering Canada is dependent on river-boat
technology and not on the contemporary jumbo jet, so in Innis' logic is the geographical
uniqueness of the nation of Canada similarly dependent upon the technologies of surface
transportation."
28

13

Innis' early work on the fur trade, the cod fisheries, lumber, coal, oil, and the Canadian
Pacific Railway in the 1920s and 1930s served as a foundation for "the staples thesis" in
political economy. Its foundation in transportation — the fur trade flung out across North
America from Canada and the need to move staple goods — led Innis to an interest in
modern culture and technology, global communications and the nature and fate of
civilizations. He wrote much about global issues and, most importantly for my purposes, the
commodification of communications. As an economist Innis was aware that the revenue of a
country which traded in staples — meaning an economically weak one — was siphoned off
to centres of power located elsewhere, leading to exploitation, one-sided wealth, and social
instability.
29
Given the degree of global saturation of American movies, many financial
resources of small countries are similarly being drained in a direct pipeline to Hollywood —
in Canada's case, at least 90 percent of box-office revenue.
30
The TSE oppositional strategy
resulted from such knowledge and experience.
31

Innis first applied the idea of the commodification of communications to the news
media, an obvious Canadian choice for analysis, given the influence of Grierson and the
documentary tradition. Innis explained how the tendencies of information distribution toward
monopolies of knowledge created another kind of dependency relationship between the
centre and the margins. He wrote, "The economic history of Canada has been dominated by
the discrepancy between the centre and the margin of western civilization."
32
Even then, he
was concerned with issues still holding currency in today's cultural debates. He notes that
Canada participated in the growth of the U.S. by becoming the gateway to European
markets, contributing to and being influenced by the Industrial Revolution. The European
and global markets he historicized have metamorphosed from the slow but steady
transportation of staple goods to lightning-quick transmissions, resulting in the
commodification and commercialization of culture. It did not escape Innis, however, that the
Canada-U.S. relationship was not strictly one of submission-domination. For instance, in the

14

conclusion of The Fur Trade in Canada (1930), he sums up the effects of North America
aboriginal peoples on the dominant European civilization. Until then, colonization was
assumed to be a one-way affair, but Innis points out the existence of reverse dependence,
elaborating on how "the peoples of the homeland" helped the Europeans survive, trade and
travel to the interior.
33
Such a relationship can be seen as having a chance to influence or
profit from the universal centre through an ability to be close to it. It is an idea that can apply
to Canada's contributions to the evolution and maintenance of the "Hollywood nation" or the
"Hollywood empire." It can also refer to Canada's historical and ongoing attempt to become
part of that "Other." Rather than defining the colonizer as the untouched controller, Innis,
before Bhabha, ascribes major influence to the colonized as well. Each relationship shapes
the other through the shared colonial space and colonial agency. What kind of influence can
a small marginal nation have on a large powerful one?
One of Innis' most influential theories is that of tradition-oriented, time-biased societies
dependant on durable media difficult to transport such as stone or clay — vs. present- and
future-directed, space-biased societies — modern electronic communications characterized
by administration over great distances. Innis' tradition-oriented time-biased societies take
their time. Space-biased societies, on the other hand, almost transcend rather than take up
time, taking up a great deal of space instead.
The space-biased communications so widespread today embrace the prevailing myth
that the greater their influence the greater the democratizing factor. Innis, however,
maintained that they entrench their already vast domination to the point of monopoly — not
just economic, but cultural. Space-biased communications become a particular issue in the
feature films of a country obsessed with geography, with a great deal of land occupying very
little cultural space and historical time. The unknown territory of Canada forms an imaginary
instance of Bhabha's "terra incognita" or "terra nulla," of de Certeau's "non-place" of the
colonial space "whose archives must be filled out."
34
In the "time-lag" revealed by Bhabha

15

where postcolonial agency can o.mj-ccur, in the splitting of time, in the distance from the
event, Canadian culture lurks and cultural differences are revealed or elided.
Innis favoured audience studies, believing that communications technologies had
effects on audiences. With this belief, he not only foreshadowed reception studies but also
parted intellectual company with American sociologists who believed there were few
examples of the effects of the dominant medium — radio — on the formation of audience
opinion.
35
If extrapolated, Innis' contention of the effects of media, combined with his
warnings about American cultural domination, have much to tell us about Canadian film.
The fact of Innis' "Canadianness" has often been taken for granted, ignored or elided.
Although international scholars such as James Carey revere Innis and know he was
Canadian, it seems, to them, merely anecdotal. Had Innis not written about the fur trade in
Canada, it is doubtful his national origins would have been noted. Innis is not only a global
thinker, but also one whose rural Ontario upbringing and Canadian academic training in
history and economics surely influenced his thought on the oral tradition, staples, empire,
information as a commodity, and monopolies of knowledge. In his space-biased theory, he
sees the creation of abstract scientific and technical knowledge as indicative of a loss of a
sense of place and community,
36
a typically, though not exclusively, Canadian concern. That
Innis himself knew and commented on the importance of place, time and language for critics
and scholars, i.e. Spengler and Germany, Toynbee and English-speaking countries, Kroeber
and the United States,
37
is significant. In calling for a balance between the demands of time
and space in order to "develop conditions favourable to an interest in cultural activity,"
38
Innis
reveals his roots in a country where cultural activity was marginal, uncertain and
precarious.
39
His work on the staples thesis begins with his local knowledge and, in this light,
marks him as a specifically Canadian thinker, rather than a thinker who happens to be
Canadian.
40
William Wonders also concludes that, although scholars from other countries,
notably the Scandinavian, have gathered to discuss regionalism, the theme is particularly

16

important to Canada.
41
Wonders would have been well aware of Innis' statement, "The
present Dominion [of Canada] emerged not in spite of geography but because of it."
42
The
statement is a clear precursor to Frye's observation about Canada's having more geography
than history. It is also an important concept in understanding Canada's emphasis on
geography in its films as well as the country's place within a globalized economy of
cinematic production.
Innis even indirectly attacked the idea of freedom of the press. "Freedom of the
press," he wrote, "has been regarded as a great bulwark of our civilization and it would be
dangerous to say that it has become the great bulwark of monopolies of the press.
Civilizations have their sacred cows."
43
Whereas in 1930 he was able to write, "Canada has
remained fundamentally a product of Europe,"
44
by 1951, Innis had moved beyond classical
formations of cultural imperialism and dependency theory. He not only touched on nation
theory, but also emphasized a country's intertwined economic and cultural survival. The idea
that a country that lets go the production of its monetary currency also lets go its national
sovereignty was previously expressed by Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime
minister.
Heyer and Crowley claim Innis was not a confessed nationalist and that to him
national boundaries falsely limited the posing of intellectual questions.
45
In 1951, however,
the Massey Report, a review of the state of the arts in Canada, appeared.
46
Harold Innis'
response to it was as follows: "We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic
points against American imperialism in all its attractive guises."
47
(italics mine) The words
are reminiscent of Anderson's later description of the empire as "attractive in national drag."

17

Canons, Borders and Blind Spots

Although the notion of national cinema has in recent years come under consideration
by many countries' film scholars, I would argue that value remains in understanding national
and cultural specificity in addressing transnational and post-colonial relations — issues that
risk being effaced within the larger concept of global media.
Some methods of defining a national cinema are: the auteur theory, government
interventionist strategies, co-productions, the popular reception of movies, and language.
The TSE films can be said to constitute what Anderson calls, in terms of the contradiction
between the English empire and the nation, "official nationalism."
48
Canada, like other small
film-producing nations, has a long history of government-supported cinema, from the
"Scenics," designed to lure immigrants, to the National Film Boards mandate to show
Canada to itself and the world and which made films available to the public on a large scale,
through schools, churches and theatres. Almost all Canadian films still have some level of
governmental participation in the form of financial, and often artistic, input, suggesting
dependence, contradiction and an uneasy alliance between government funding and cultural
output.
If an auteurist cinema, the TSE films and the DC films cannot be said to stand as a
Canadian "national" cinema, what then constitutes the Canadian cinema? The TSE films
instead comprise what Urquhart calls a "historical blind spot" in the Canadian film canon. In
"You Should Know Something—Anything—About this Movie. You Paid For It," he cites
certain titles that have remained "invisible," and noting the consequences for the definition of
a Canadian film canon. He cites the relatively neglected film Suzanne (Robin Spry 1980),
detailing some specifically Canadian themes that include Québec politics, as one that has
been unjustly denied canon status as a result of "received wisdom" about the TSE. He
mentions "films that masquerade as Canadian," and analyzes Suzanne, Yesterday and Hot

18

Dogs, for their specific references to English-French relations.
49
Rather than masquerading
as Canadian, however, these movies are Canadian and, in many ways, are not only
masquerading as American but also negotiating its national and international, as well as
provincial, relationships.
When Katherine Monk mentions the Tax-Shelter Era, she calls it "a pathetic waste of
time and money that deflated the image of Canadian film domestically and abroad." She
then, however, positively reviews two of the more successful and better known TSE
movies—The Silent Partner (Daryl Duke 1978) and Meatballs (Bob Clark 1978).
50
Gittings
similarly summarizes the era in one page, arguing that The Grey Fox was "an exception to
the rule" because of its overtly Canadian locations.
51
There were, however, many other TSE
films with Canadian locations, such as Outrageous!, The Silent Partner, Who Has Seen the
Wind and Alligator Shoes. The argument for the inclusion in the authorial canon of such films
as The Grey Fox revolves around an allegedly Canadian sensibility seen to be lacking in the
TSE films. This canonical blind spot allows Canadian film to omit some TSE movies while
allowing others privileged place, as Urquhart points out. Porky's (Bob Clark 1980), the most
successful Canadian movie of all time, is often cited as a marker of artistic failure, while such
TSE movies as My American Cousin and The Grey Fox are lauded as distinctively
Canadian. The latter two were produced by longtime Canadian creative producer Peter
O'Brian, known to be a champion of Canadian film. The two exceptions — the wildly
successful and widely known Porky's and A Christmas Story — were Canadian co-
productions but mostly viewed and reviewed as American or American imitations. Both were
tax-shelter era movies, but did not have CFDC contributions. Porky's, however, is often
used as a Canadian example of shameless imitation while A Christmas Story is usually
called a Christmas classic, but not seen as Canadian.
Of what then does the Canadian cinematic canon consist? Ideas of national cinematic
canons must be disrupted and revised. If nations themselves cannot be securely defined

19

and the concept of nation itself is malleable, what, then, is a national cinema? And what is a
Canadian cinema? If a Canadian crew, mostly Canadian cast members, Canadian funding,
and a Canadian novel source do not make a movie Canadian, then what does? Almost
inevitably, the national cinemas of small film-producing countries has been defined by a
small number of auteurs making DC films. Canada's well-known auteurs are Atom Egoyan,
David Cronenberg, and Denys Arcand in Québec. More recent and directors not at all known
to the public include Deepa Mehta, Clement Virgo, John Greyson and Vincent Natali. None
are successful at the box office in any way that approaches the $100 million garnered by the
three TSE coming-of-age comedies Meatballs, Porky's and A Christmas Story. A huge hit in
Canada would be a film that made $2 or $3 million. The categorizing of official TSE vs. "real"
DC and/or auteur culture is exacerbated by the fact that almost none of the films produced in
Canada, neither Hollywood imitations nor the auteur films, has proved popular in Canada,
aside from the noted exceptions. The DC films can be seen only partially as an auteurist
national cinema, since only some directors showed a distinct style. The DC films that were
"auteured" followed the worldwide New Wave strategy that contrasted with such populist film
movements as Italy's White Telephone films and India's musical romance melodramas, the
equivalent of which do not exist in Canada. There is, and has never been, a popular
Canadian film movement. Claims of Canadian authenticity for the DC films, whether funded
by government or not, ignore the fact that they can be as derivative of French New Wave,
Britain's New Cinema and Italian Neo-realism as the TSE movies are of American
Hollywood classicism. Although the TSE films were an attempt to foster a popular film
movement, Canada's popular national film culture has been, and still is, American film.
52

Categorizing co-productions can be equally problematical. Many of the TSE films, for
instance, utilized British screenwriters, Canadian producers; American, French or British
directors, and/or American stars. Porky's was a Canada/U.S. co-pro. The first Canadian co-
production agreement was negotiated around 1978, as officials realized the limited nature of

20

Canadian investment and the necessity of international financial input. Many of the films are
French, British, Israeli, Italian or German co-productions. In fact the global norm of co-
productions can be seen as beginning with TSE co-productions. Murder By Decree (Bob
Clark 1978) was a U.K./Canada co-pro in 1978 with a British theme (Jack the Ripper) and
setting. Atlantic City, U.S.A. (Louis Malle 1979) was a Canada/France co-pro in 1979, set in
the U.S.; Quest For Fire (Jean-Jacques Annaud 1980), a Canada/France co-pro made in an
invented pre-historic language. Map of the Human Heart (Vincent Ward 1993), went even
further with a four-country co-pro involving Australia, the U.K., Canada and France; and
Grey Owl (Richard Attenborough 1999), the UK/Canada co-pro, a Canadian story about an
Englishman/Scot masquerading as a Canadian aboriginal. Quest for Fire and Atlantic City,
U.S.A. were considered in Canada to be tax-shelter films made by French auteurs and both
were relatively well-received in Canada and internationally. They were not, however,seen to
be Canadian because their locations and themes were not Canadian. Other auteur-directed
movies by Claude Chabrol were received as minor works by a great artist. One TSE movie
by John Huston was reviled and the one starring Orson Welles, never finished.
Within a global economy, which country's location/ writing/ sensibility will be
dramatized when many nations are involved in production? With so many countries
involved, a loss of a sense of nationality, regionality or locality can be lost, blurred or shared.
The Scandinavian co-production Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996) was set in a
Scottish village as well as in the North Atlantic sea, with Scottish and Danish casting. All the
Scandinavian countries were involved, as were all their governmental funding bodies. Is the
movie Scandinavian? Scottish? Neither? Both? Because of the locations and one Scottish
star and one Danish star, the movie bridges two nations as well as addressing larger
transnational themes of religion and family.
Methods of defining a national cinema break down when examined. When the guest
auteur director is well known, such as Louis Malle, then it's "a Louis Malle film." Although it's

21

a Canadian TSE movie starring Americans and co-starring Canadians, Vincent Canby called
Atlantic City "Louis Malle's fine new movie" in his 1980 review, thereby implying that the
auteur trumps the location and the stars.
53
When the star is better know than the director,
reviews usually hinge on the performer in the role, such as Christopher Plummer in Murder
By Decree or Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City, thereby rendering it a star vehicle although it is
still a Canadian TSE co-production.
54
When the location is France, then it becomes "a
French film" or, if in Britain, "a new British film." Only when Canada is specified in the film as
the location is it noted as a "Canadian film." While Canby called The Grey Fox – "Phillip
Borsos's Canadian film,"
55
he also referred to it generically as a Western. This marker is
somewhat of a stretch for this particular movie but the known genres hold credence even
though Canadian movies rarely fit into them. Blood Relatives is seen as a Chabrol film,
similar but inferior to his French movies which are also psychological thrillers.
56
Another of
his Canadian movies, however, Violette Nozière, is seen as strictly a French film starring
Isabelle Huppert. The New York Times site in its biography of Chabrol, writes, "Huppert
essayed the title character in Violette Nozière (1978), one of Chabrol's most acclaimed films
of the 1970s. Based upon the true story of a 19-year-old girl (Huppert) who was convicted of
poisoning her father and attempting to kill her mother, the film achieved the remarkable feat
of lending its unlikable protagonist a degree of three-dimensional sympathy, and drew
favorable comparisons to Hitchcock, whose work provided Chabrol with a constant source of
inspiration."
57
The best-known sources are often cited as the origins of a film. With only 20%
invested in this 80% French co-production, the Canadian contribution of producers, actors
and money, while the director, cinematographer, main actors, editor, setting and story
characters are French, is not apparent on the screen and therefore understandably not
acknowledged. This TSE offering is very much a Chabrol film in keeping with his other
suspense thrillers involving women and social and family issues. There are, however,
repercussions for Canadian film, which continued, even after the TSE, to try for heights of

22

shock value with what Katherine Monk would call "weird sex." The relationships evolved
mostly in family situations, in an attempt to equal some of the works of such masters of the
French New Wave as Chabrol and to emulate the "sexiness" of American cinema but in a
different articulation. National cinemas form around auteurs, locations and characters/actors
rooted in cultural and geographical milieux. If none of those markers is present, a national
cinema is neither noted nor served.
While it has been suggested that most Canadian cinema is "art" or "experimental"
cinema, it is perhaps just as accurate that most Canadian cinema is more "foreign" to
Canada than is Hollywood cinema. Canadian cinema can also be seen to be "foreign" or in
exile to itself, since so few people see it. "For what is a national cinema if is (sic) doesn't
have a national audience?" asks Higson. It is perhaps a hidden cinema — Canadian
cinema. Only television movies, not feature films, gain large Canadian audiences. Canada's
auteurist cinema cannot be said to constitute a national cinema on its own, nor can the TSE
or DC films. Perhaps there are many Canadian cinemas, often overlapping: a small auteurist
cinema; a government-supported documentary cinema; a government-supported fiction
cinema; an experimental/art cinema; a commercial American cinema; animation; and
television.
Another way of characterizing films made in Canada is to take a thematic
approach across genres, which reveals another kind of repetition that is perhaps even more
revealing about the culture. The themes and tropes obsessively repeat and continually
perform and re-perform issues buried perhaps not so deeply in the doubled Canadian
consciousness. These overdetermined tropes reappear in both TSE and DC films, and
transgress generic boundaries, throughout sex comedy, melodrama, horror, thriller, romantic
comedy and coming-of-age, as well as international auteurist co-productions, often including
a mixture of genres in one movie.

23

Themes and Tropes Across Genres

Both TSE and DC groups have been virtually obsessed with the issue of borders,
especially the Canada/U.S. one, known as "the world's longest undefended border," which
divides over-determined political/ geographical/ sexual spaces in Canadian movies. Blaine
Allan has outlined the importance of the crossing and re-crossing of the American border as
a marker of difference in The Grey Fox (Phillip Borsos 1882)
58
Others, such as Christine
Ramsay, Brenda Longfellow and Gaile McGregor have also outlined how the nation can be
produced in gendered ways, through landscape, animals, and male and female characters
in certain films.
59
The early TSE movie The Far Shore (Joyce Wieland 1975) references the
Group of Seven, whose cultural importance is so thoroughly explored by McGregor in The
Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Langscape (sic), through a Tom
Thomson-like artist figure in the landscape. I have illustrated how Renzo and Alonzo in
Perfectly Normal (Yves Simoneau 1991) represent Canada and America, sibling substitutes
standing in for the two nations, with Renzo as the feminized Canadian male and Alonzo as
the masculinized American con-man.
60
In addition to being a physical boundary, the border
also becomes gendered, with the U.S. coded masculine and Canada coded feminine, a
theme illustrated in Canadian movies of all decades.
Other themes and tropes often overlap and intersect with those of movies of other
periods. At the same time the geographically specific Scenics were being produced, the
Group of Seven was on the rise. The importance of its bleak, fierce and uncompromising
landscapes in bold forms and colours cannot be underestimated as a background factor in
film representations. With an intense focus on geography rather than history, on great
landscapes rather than great men, the Group underlies Frye's insistence that Canada is a
land with more geography than history, as well as Atwood's view of the overwhelming nature
of the Canadian territory as something that cannot be sufficiently grasped but must be

24

survived. We will see the corresponding importance of painters and other kinds of artists in
the TSE movies. In the absence of an ability to prove physically and sexually adequate,
there is a tendency to try to substitute artistic and intellectual prowess. The educated artist
theme is explored in multiple instances of writers, painters and professors in the TSE movies
and beyond. Their artistic frustration is extreme and in Deadline, where the main character is
a Canadian male screenwriter, leads to violence and madness. The inability of the artist to
find motivation and the means to success points to a dearth of artistic vision or at least of a
way to implement that vision.
Coincident with the rise of the Group was the First World War, an important building
block in the image of 20
th
-century Canadian identity. The intersection became explicit when
some of the painters worked as war artists, as well as commercial artists, and their work was
widely seen in daily life. The Second World War was similarly interpreted as an official and
publicly collective sense of pride, accomplishment and national self-image. One TSE film in
particular deals with WWI — The Wars (Robin Phillips 1980). There are no glorious heroes,
only a doomed and frightened young man coming of age in a troubled family. Another TSE
war movie — Jack Darcus' Deserters (1982) — deals with the Viet Nam war and Canada-
U.S. relations. The Canadian identity being built in the TSE was one of pro-war/ anti-war,
with participation in foreign wars represented in the absence of a defining revolution. The
wars, including the one fought with madness in Double Negative against the imagined
backdrop of a Middle-Eastern conflict, are internal, with external references to other
countries.
Robert Fothergill, in his seminal 1972 article on Canadian film, "Coward, Bully or
Clown: The Dream Life of a Younger Brother," positioned Canada as the little brother unable
to match the sexual prowess and monetary status of his elder brother, the U.S., having not
endured an Oedipal revolution in order to separate from their joint parent, Britain. One film
Fothergil does not reference, however, is the 1969 Explosion, whose themes and tropes

25

underpin not only his thesis but also the TSE movies that followed it. The first big-budget
movie to be made after the 1967 institution of the Canadian Film Development Corporation,
it seems to exemplify the "dream life of a younger brother" is Explosion, While Fothergill
examines a number of other movies for their treatment of loser heroes and their failed
dreams, he ignores this important forerunner, with its issues of sibling rivalry, border-
crossing, war and madness. An inordinate number of later movies would feature actual
brothers, sisters or brother- and sister-coded characters, their British- or French-coded
mother/ father/ parents, and U.S.-coded brothers/ friends/ cousins/ uncles/ lovers — all
becoming blended into dysfunctional couples, threesomes and families. The sibling image
recurs in a doubling/ doppelganger effect, with twins or twin-coded characters, as in Dead
Ringers, The Changeling, The Haunting of Julia and Dirty Tricks.
The film families represented are highly dysfunctional, emphasizing incest, parental
alienation and the impossibility of resolution. Within the family, issues of incest are so
frequent as to be startling. In Circle of Two the older man and teenage student form the
father-daughter-coded couple. The incest taboo, according to Freud primarily the denial of
the desire for either sex parent, is denied and the desire displaced onto siblings and sibling-
coded characters. Such scene are set between cousins in Blood Relatives and Alligator
Shoes, between brother and sister in The Wars and Summer's Children, and between
parent and child in The Wars and Hard Feelings, and between a surrogate parent and child
in Circle of Two. The desires and acts must be hidden because of the incest taboo and thus
emerges the theme of things that cannot be seen, shown or spoken. There is often the
character of "The Watcher," who hides in cars or closets or behind doors or windows,
waiting and witnessing or surprising other characters having sex.
61

The quintessential Canadian genre might be the coming-of-age. While it is by no
means exclusive to Canada, the genre's preponderance in Canadian film, often to the
exclusion of others, as well as its particular unfolding, point to underlying factors. Like incest

26

and war, the many coming-of-age themes play out within the family or a group family
substitute. In the lighthearted sex comedy Meatballs, which pre-dates Porky's, Bill Murray's
character offers big-brother-type support to young Rudy. The sexuality of the male hero is
often at stake, more prominently in the "coming-of-middle-age" films, such as Middle Age
Crazy, Your Ticket is No Longer Valid and Deadline, with male sexual performance a key
issue.
The Oedipal complex moves beyond the family to become cultural and national. The
lack of culture and an attendant fear of loss lead to representations of themes of male
physical inadequacy. These include lameness, head injuries and missing limbs, in addition
to the lack of vision already noted. The Terry Fox Story and Crossbar both feature one-
legged sports figures. The lack of sight, limbs, and success presuppose a certain fetishism
of the homeland/ otherland and a resultant national cultural castration anxiety.
The instability of both gender and national identity, as well as doubling, often results in
the manifestation of characters' mental instability or outright madness and/or
institutionalization. Insanity is extremely overdetermined in the TSE movies, with characters
repeatedly calling each other crazy, behaving erratically and being admitted to and escaping
from mental hospitals. This border-crossing into madness often stems from or results in
violence within the dysfunctional family/nation.
The analysis of the TSE necessitates an expansion into the movies before and after
its limited official dates, because the period constitutes such a large part of Canadian
cinematic history, encompassing hundreds of movies. In Chapter 2, "Gimme Tax Shelter—
Governmental Film Initiatives and the Emergence of the TSE," I examine the decades of
governmental film policy, initiatives and social influences that gave birth to the entire tax-
shelter period.
In Chapter 3, "Coming of Age in an Era of Cultural Anxiety," I characterize the most
prevalent genre in Canadian film, beginning with Explosion (Jules Bricken 1969). That

27

particular feature film introduced many of the tropes that would be repeated throughout
Canadian film, including sibling rivalry, border-crossing and national identity vis-à-vis the
U.S. and Europe. Such TSE movies as Meatballs, (1978), Who Has Seen the Wind, Middle
Age Crazy (1979) and Circle of Two 1979 exemplify coming-of-age as well as coming-of-
middle-age. Movies about limited vision — in Love at First Sight (Rex Bromfield 1975) and If
You Could See What I Hear (Eric Till 1980), and missing limbs — Crossbar and The Terry
Fox Story — illuminate issues of cultural blindness and castration anxiety. When the border
constitutes the edge of mapped space, the feminized space of Canada—the big white
"thirdspace" north of the border—attempts to see, to see itself, and to be seen. As the TSE
represents the blind spot in the Canadian cinematic canon, Canada stands as the blind spot
of America. Characters search for a goal they can neither see clearly nor often even
envision. Many try to see better with glasses or through various kinds of lenses. The cultural
castration anxiety is tied up with sporting accomplishments, sibling rivalry and the Oedipal
complex.
Chapter 4, "Recontextualizing High Culture, Madness and Homosexuality," closely
examines how the TSE films used high-cultural tropes combined with Canadian themes and
American genres in Outrageous!, Double Negative, The Changeling (1978), Dead Ringers
(1988) and Deadline (1979).
"Foreign Relations in the Two Solitudes: It’s All in the Family," Chapter 5, looks at how
incestuous desires in families erupt into racial fears, murder and war in Hard Feelings
(1979), Blood Relatives (1979), The Wars (1981) and Dirty Tricks (1979). The connections
between coming-of-age and family relationships are so prevalent in Canadian movies as to
form part of the basis of its cinematic canon, with many of these narrative constructs having
remained largely hidden and unacknowledged. The contribution and influence of foreign
auteurs such as Claude Chabrol, Jules Dassin, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Roger Vadim, John
Huston and Orson Welles further muddies the waters of Canadian identity.

28

The meaning of the portrayal of women is examined in Chapter 6, "Women Disguised
as Canada: Naming the Two Solitudes." Women and their bodies are used as powerful tools
in the search for personal, regional and national identities. There is a particular focus on
Names and Naming, with women and their names often substituting for the Canadian or
Québéc nation. There are at least 25 TSE movies with female names as the title or
contained within the title. This number represents more than the usual number of Canadian
films produced in an entire year. Some of the TSE/ DC films that deal directly or indirectly
with the idea of Québec separatism or nationhood often map English-Canada onto male
characters and French space onto female characters, as a way to negotiate the Two
Solitudes. Women having affairs with men from English-Canada, Quebec and the U.S. bear
the burden of Canadian national identity in Wendy, Waiting for Caroline, Madeleine Is… and
Eliza's Horoscope. I examine them in the context of the importance of Naming, after Butler,
as a way to solve or resolve national issues.
Male transvestism comes out of the closet in Chapter 7, "The Postcolonial Potential of
Mimicry, Masquerade and Making the Invisible Visible." Beginning with Outrageous! (1977),
and continuing with The Silent Partner (1978) and Perfectly Normal (1991), male cross-
dressing exemplifies how a colonial nation dressed in drag and masqueraded both to imitate
as well as to upset filmic conventions. What is the potential of such dressing up?
Is the TSE really over? A Neo-TSE has dawned with a "back to the future" cultural
policy beginning in 2002 and still ongoing. The head of Telefilm Canada, now the head of
the CBC, has voiced policies for both organizations based on "commercial" films. The head
of Telefilm, formerly the head of the Canadian Film Centre, heads an agency in disarray in
2006. In Chapter 8, a Neo-TSE emerges, along with a vision for the future.

29

"Narrativus Interruptus"

If Canadians prefer American movies, and if norms and expectations set by
Hollywood standards have been internalized by Canadian audiences and/ or viewers/
screenwriters, why do Canadian movies not exhibit more Hollywood tendencies, if the aim,
as has been stated, was and still is to capture an audience?
Canadian movie producer Peter O'Brian told me, "When a bunch of Canadians get in
a room to talk about making a Canadian movie in English, the entertainment factor goes out
the window." He said Canadian screenwriters have told him they do not want to tell stories
the way Americans do.
62
Differentiation seems to be as important in storytelling as in other
Canadian endeavours. Canadian filmmakers have evolved a non-Hollywood method of
telling stories. The telling has a tendency to repeat certain narrative structures across genres
and decades. I call it "Narrativus Interruptus." Because the Latin for to interrupt is
"interrumpere" and the word for story is "fabula," the term might more accurately be "fabula
interrupta" or interrupted story. The alliterative similarity, however, of "Narrativus Interruptus"
to "coitus interruptus" is intentional and appropriate.
"Narrativus interruptus" consists of disjointed, discrete plot segments, often
incomprehensible or slim storylines, new characters introduced late or for no apparent
reason, loose story threads, unlikable or undeveloped protagonists, lack of character names
or conversely the presence of nationally significant naming, lack of foreshadowing and
suspense, unmotivated violence, unmotivated characters, lack of developed sub-plots, and
lack of cohesive or coherent character development, lack of classical structure and pacing,
little suturing and few happy endings. The story stops frequently in order to make symbolic
or personal statements rather than to move the narrative forward. These characteristics
persist in Canadian film, revolving particularly around sibling rivalry, incest, duality, gender,

30

nation and madness.
63
They are characteristics unfolding in a way that has not appealed to
audiences.
Even decades after the TSE, newspaper critic Peter Howell noted, "Most of the films
on Canada’s Top Ten [critics list] don’t hold to conventional three-act narratives, and at least
half of them…are primarily visual excursions, seducing the eye to better engage the mind.
There isn’t a popcorn flick amongst the lot… But the jury members are encouraged to reflect
the diversity of Canadian filmmakers, who are increasingly willing to take risks and
experiment. [Piers] Handling [former head of the Toronto International Film Festival] believes
that Canadians want to see more Canadian films, but they need encouragement and
access."
64
The idea that Canadians are waiting to see Canadian movies but that they are
unavailable to the general public is a popular one in Canadian discourse. Canadians,
however, had plenty of encouragement and access to Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies.
They did not go to see it, despite the extensive publicity around its 2005 Cannes opening
and subsequent Fall theatrical release. On the other hand, David Cronenberg's The History
of Violence, with a more conventional and accessible narrative and riveting characters, as
well as a timely and thought-provoking theme, captured bigger audiences for a longer period
of time on both sides of the border. It is clear that audiences do not patronize Canadian
auteur films in great numbers because of the director's name value.
The evolution of the thematics began when border-crossing meant immigration, a key
starting point for Canadian film, with the Scenics, and stretching through the establishment
of the National Film Board and the Canadian Co-Operation Project. Issues of regional and
national politics and culture that began with MacLennan and Innis became paramount with
the Massey Report and the creation of the Canadian Film Development Corporation. They
persist to this day.

31

Chapter 1 Endnotes — Identity, Nation and Masquerade

1
Harcourt, Peter. Movies and Mythologies (Toronto: CBC Publications, 1977), 18.

2
"The Canadian Nation—An Unfinished Text," Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Volume 2 Nos. 2-3 (1993): 5-26.

3
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (New York and Canada: Routledge, 1995), 399.

4

Jim Leach, "The Reel Nation: Image and Reality in Contemporary Canadian Cinema," The Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture, The Canadian
Journal of Film Studies, Volume 11, No. 2 (Fall 2002): 6.

5
Margaret Atwood, Survival (Toronto: House of Anansi Press Ltd., 1972), 35.

6
Katherine Monk, Weird Sex and Snowshoes, and Other Canadian Film Phenomena (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2001), 92.

7
Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 89-118.

8
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 282.

9
Leach, 7.

10

Michael Spencer and Suzan Ayscough, Hollywood North: Creating the Canadian Motion Picture Industry. Montreal: Cantos International
Publishing Inc., 2003. First head of the CFDC Spencer and journalist Ayscough call one chapter of their book "100 Percent Tax Shelter
Abuse, 1978-1979," 155-170. In it they quote film critic, journalist and author Geoff Pevere, as saying that "the national folly that was
Hollywood North cannot be forgotten." His three reasons are: "First, because it reveals much about the inevitable schizophrenia [italics mine]
that grips a country trying to produce commercial culture according to bureaucratic blueprints; second, because it stands as a particularly
abject example of what tends to happen when Canadians attempt to be just like Americans, except without the history, money, population,
promotional savvy or market base, and third because it is a national farce of truly riveting dimensions."

11
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (NewYork/London: Routledge, 1990), 47

12
Ibid.,, 53.

13
Ibid.,, 48.

14
Ibid.,, 138.

32

15
Steven Cohan, "Masquerading as the American Male in the Fifties: Picnic, William Holden and the Spectacle of Masculinity in Hollywod
Film, Camera Obscura, Number 25-26 (January/May 1991), 42-72.

16
Ibid.,,56.

17
Ibid., 61.

18
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 122.

19
Ibid., 63-67.

20
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (London, New York:
Verso), 1991, 36.

21 Ibid., 5.

22
Ibid., 86-7.

23
www.boxofficeguru.com states, "All figures are in millions of US Dollars. Gross As Of date represents date when figures are published.
Domestic amounts include US and Canada. Foreign and Domestic percentages indicate share of worldwide gross earned internationally and
domestically." The industry practice of onsidering Canada "domestic" to the U.S. is standard across the board.

24
Ramsay Cook, Canada, Quebec, and the Uses of Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1986), 153.

25
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, Introduction by Paul Heyer and David Crowley (Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto
Press), 1951, Reprinted 1995, xx.

26
Ibid., xv.

27

Ibid.,132-3.

28
Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden, Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: House of Anansi Press Ltd., 1971), 217. Frye describes
seaboardless Canada: "The traveller from Europe edges into it like tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the Straits
of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St.
Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country, with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United
States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent."

33

29
Harold Innis, Bias, xiii

30

"Chinese fret about being swamped by Hollywood," AFP, Globe and Mail (May 18, 2007): R3. China is the latest in a long list of countries
finding their theatres saturated with American product. "We feel sad and wonder why Chinese don't watch their own movies. It's
unreasonable that almost all screens in all cinemas show Spider-Man 3, " said Chinese-born actress Vivien Wu, adding, "If Chinese cinemas
are occupied by foreign big-budget films, no one will dare to invest in Chinese films."

31
Mel Hurtig, The Betrayal of Canada (Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd.), 1991. While more television movies are made in Canada
than in Hollywood, the U.S. took $56.255 billion (total profits sent to the U.S. from 1984 to 1990, plus the growth of U.S. ownership in Canada
out of Canada.

32
Innis, Bias, 28.

33
Ibid., 26-30.

34
Bhabha, Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990, 352.

35
Innis, Bias, xxiv.

36
Ibid., xix.

37
Ibid., 132.

38
Ibid., 90.

39
Ibid., 31.

40
The work of his student, Marshall McLuhan, was also largely based on the politics of location of being Canadian.

41
William Wonders, "Canadian Regions and Regionalism: National Enrichment or National Disintegration?" (In Mandel and Taras, A Passion
for Identity. Scarborough, Ontario: Nelson Canada, 1988), 239.

42
Innis, Bias, 33.

43
Ibid., 139.

34

44
Innis, "Conclusion from The Fur Trade in Canada." 1930. (In Mandel and Taras), 26-36

45
Harold Innis, Bias, xiv.

46
Mark Raboy, Missed Opportunities: The Story of Canada’s Broadcasting Policy (Montreal & Kingston/London/Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1990), 94. The gist of the commission's findings, discussed more fully in Chapter 2, was an upholding of public rather than
private broadcasting. But the Department of Transport, in favour of adopting American technical standards, opened the national borders to
an influx of American television programs. "A truly independent Canadian policy position on this question at this time could have obviated the
next forty years of lament," says Raboy.

47

Andrew Wernick, "American Popular Culture in Canada: Trends and Reflections," (In Flaherty and Manning), 294.

48
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 93.

49
Peter Urquardt, "You Should Know Something — Anything — About This Movie. You Paid For It.," Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol
12 No. 2 (Fall 2003): 64-80

50
Katherine Monk, Weird Sex, 270.

51
Christopher E.Gittings, Canadian National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 96-8.

52
Egoyan's relatively monumental Ararat (2002) played in Toronto cinemas for several months in 2002 and 2003, longer than any of his
previous films and much longer than most Canadian films, which last about a week. Perhaps not coincidentally, it has the clearest storyline of
any of his films. Cronenberg had a relative success with Spider in 2002. Cronenberg's A History of Violence, however, began to break that
streak, lasting several weeks in Canadian theatres and being nominated for two 2006 Golden Globes. Egoyan and Cronenberg, however,
make films that may not be about Canadian locations and sensibilities, but that resonate with critics and cinephiles, and not with the
marketplace. By the same token, it can also be analyzed for its Canadianness, including issues of sexuality, family and nation. The TSE did
not produce auteur directors. Many Canadian TSE directors, both DC and TSE, died tragically young, of cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's,
accidents and suicides, including Phillip Borsos, Claude Jutra, Jean-Claude Lauzon, Francis Mankiewicz, Peter Carter and John Trent,
leaving large holes in the Canadian cinematic landscape. The TSE did produce creative producers, however, such as Peter O'Brian, Ivan
Reitman, John Kemeny and Robert Lantos, and such journeyman directors as William Fruet, George Kaczender, George Bloomfield and Bob
Clark.

53
Vincent Canby, New York Times, April 3, 1981.

54
Audience members know whether cast members are indigenous or have been trained in local customs. In Atlantic City, U.S.A., Susan
Sarandon, an American, mispronounces Canadians' pronunciation of the province name, which generally sounds like "Sus-KAT-chawahn,"
rather than her more emphastic "SASS-KAT-chawahn." The differences are minuscule yet obvious to Canadians.

35

55
Canby, Vincent. New York Times, July 13, 1983.

56
The difference is that his French movies are seen as narratively satisfying, with clear storylines. From the New York Times review of 1988,
The website www.filmref.com wrote of The Story of Women, "Claude Chabrol, noted for his prolific career as a director of psychological
thrillers, transcends social commentary with pathos and humanity in this deeply disturbing story of imperfect people driven by circumstance
into committing desperate acts. The narrative tone is even and uninflected, logical and precise, perhaps as a consequence of his mother's
absence from his life."

57
New York Times site, www.nytimes.com.

58
Blaine Allan, "Canada's Sweethearts, or Our American Cousins," Canadian Journal of Film Studies Vol 2 Nos. 2-3 (1993): 67-80.

59
Christine Ramsay, "Canadian Narrative Cinema from the Margins: 'The Nation' and Masculinity in Goin' Down the Road," Canadian
Journal of Film Studies, Vol 2, Nos 2-3 (1993): 27-49; and Brenda Longfellow, "Gender, Lanscape, and Colonial Allegories in The Far Shore,
Loyalties and Mouvement du désir," Gendering the Nation (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 1999), 165-
182.

60
Janice Kaye, "Perfectly Normal, Eh?" Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall 1994): 63-80.

61
Judith Butler uses the term "watches" to describe the actions of Willa Cather's character Paul, as he observes himself, an act resulting in a
displacement of the policing gaze of his "persecutorial 'watchers'" as well as outlining the psychic activity of the Freudian super-ego in
watching the ego. Gender Trouble, 164-6, 181.

62
Janice Kaye, "Hollywood North," Take One. (Sept-Dec. No. 43, 2003).

63
The Red Violin is such an example. While it was expensive, with high production values, and the concept of a violin's journey across
centuries complex, the stories are discrete and truncated, and end with an American making off with the valuable violin. Century Hotel
similarly tells four unconnected stories, anchored by the hotel motif. Egoyan's The Adjuster uses the motel image, as examined by Naficy as
a similar trope, with characters passing through the location on a temporary basis.

64
Peter Howell, "Jury picks our Top 10 films," The Toronto Star, January 22, 2003, F2 .

36

Chapter 2: Gimme Tax Shelter — The Emergence of the TSE

"The Americans have come to know and love us as the country which, given an inch,
will take half an inch and go away happy."

Sandra Gathercole
1

Populus est cœtus multitudinis rationalis rerum quas diligit concordi communione
sociatus; profecto ut videatur qualis quisque populus sit illa sunt intuenda quœ diligit.

A nation is an association of reasonable beings united in a peaceful sharing of the
things they cherish; therefore, to determine the quality of a nation, you must consider
what those things are.
St. Augustine, The City of God, XIX — xxiv

The quote from St. Augustine appeared, in Latin as well as English, on the cover of
the 1951 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, the
influential document known as the Massey Report that included recommendations for
government film production.
2
The report supported the National Film Board and its
documentary method, as well as the continuation of relinquishing the area of the fiction film
to the United States. The search for a national identity was integral to film policy and this
quote exemplifies it. Sandra Gathercole's description of Canada vis-à-vis the United States
encapsulates not only Canadian film policies over the decades, both before and after the
Massey Report, but those in sectors as well, including the North American Free Trade
Agreement. Both comments on the nature of Canadian national identity reflect an obsession
with the issues which runs through cultural policy as well as through the movies themselves.
In 1922 Hollywood mogul Lewis Selznick exemplified a colonialist U.S. attitude
towards Canada. He wondered why Canadians bothered making films at all: "If Canadian
stories are worthwhile making into films, companies will be sent into Canada to make
them."
3
The takeover of the nascent Canadian industry was already underway. In 1925, D.
W. Griffith visited Toronto and, in a speech contrary to that of Selznick, made a speech in

37

which he said, "You in Canada should not be dependent on either the United States or Great
Britain. You should have your own films and exchange them with those of other countries.
You can make them just as well in Toronto as in New York."
4
In Hollywood's Overseas
Campaign, Ian Jarvie refers to American dominance as mere "entrepreneurship" in the
arena of supply. Whether American control is intentional or inadvertent, the result is
nonetheless the virtual exclusion of Canadian films from Canadian screens. As we shall see,
this state of affairs has other contributing factors.
Hollywood business practices have dealt with Canada as a "domestic market" of the
United States movie industry, as opposed to a separate country. While always an important
consideration in small film-producing nations, cultural policy has loomed particularly large in
Canadian history and identity as a result of the lack of a national and moviemaking identity.
There are as many Canadian film books on policy as on individual auteurs or Canadian film
history. Government funding agencies assess, approve or reject scripts, outlines and
budgets on criteria not necessarily clear to those accepted or rejected. Filmmakers who
apply for government money are subject to the whims and decisions of bureaucrats, most of
whom have no filmmaking experience. These issues are explored both in film and on
television after the TSE, in such productions as Paint Cans (w. d. Paul Donovan, 1994) and
Made in Canada (CBC TV 1998-2002).
While more than a hundred countries carry quota restrictions or taxes on U.S. box
office revenues, Canada is a film-producing country with no protections for its films in its own
market. Peter Harcourt has noted: "If we are Nationalists and believe in ourselves as
Canadians, the American product really is the enemy--both in the cinemas and on television:
not because it is bad in itself (which it obviously isn't) but because by monopolizing our
screens it has colonized our imaginations, offering its product as if it were our own...when we
don't find those qualities in our own films, we tend to think of them as inferior."
5
In order to

38

address the difficulty of building a film industry, government policies have come into play
across the decades.
Many previous attempts at government influence in the business were made in
concert with the American government. Gathercole cites the example of a 1965 economic
partnership agreement process during which the Canadian negotiator had capitulated to
each U.S. demand. The American then reportedly advised the Canadian negotiator, "You
take this one for Canada, Arnold. It will look good when you get home."
6
Clayton Yeutter, the
U.S. trade representative, who negotiated the Free Trade Agreement, told the Toronto Star,
"The Canadians don't understand what they have signed. In 20 years, they will be sucked
into the U.S. economy." Already 77% of all magazines, 83% of records and tapes, 96% of
videocassettes, 76% of book sales, 90% of English-language television drama, and at least
96% of movies in Canada are foreign.
7
Craig Turner wrote an article in the Los Angeles
Times, March 30, 1997, called "Canadian Culture? Whatever It Is, They Want to Preserve
It." Canada is perceived to have no culture to protect or no culture worth protecting.
Canadian culture carried markers of being hidden, invisible, lacking or absent.
The imbrication of film policy with issues of nation began early in the 20
th
century.
From the Scenics to the Quota Quickies to the Canadian Co-Operation Project to the
National Film Board to the Canadian Film Development Corporation, the goal was to project
some sense of Canada in some form onto the big screen. The "Scenics" did it with
geography, laying out a vision of a Canada without snow to entice immigrants. They also
collaborated with American companies.

The Scenics

Morris shows that, "[S]ince 1918, the federal government has operated a national film
production organization: the oldest continuing operation of its kind in the world."

39

Government intervention in the film industry is a Canadian tradition. The early "Scenics" or
"interest" films were short agricultural and ethnographic actualities representing Canadian
life, trade, manufacturing and commerce. They sprang out of the objective of the Canadian
Pacific Railway Company to attract European, mainly British, emigrants to Canada to settle,
and the decision by the Canadian government to become involved in using film as a political
and cultural tool, and the desire of Manitoba farmer James Freer to document and promote
Manitoba life. Americans were hired from the beginning, when the CPR took on a Chicago
company in 1913 to produce some scenics.
8

From the "Ontario Motion Picture Bureau" (1917) to the "Exhibits and Publicity
Bureau" (1918) to the "Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau" (1923, absorbed by
the NFB in 1941), film, trade and government have been intimately connected. Part of the
government’s concern was the loss of "Britishness" in the Canadian West and thus the
possibility of losing it to the border-crossing Americans.
9
One answer was to produce filmed
documents of Canada to show its advantages, a tradition that would continue and expand
under the NFB. The Scenics, the earliest representation of Canada on screen, combined
film, journalism, the land, government funding, border-crossing American production
companies, and a nascent national identity to viewers. These issues were to haunt
Canadian cinema and continue, in varying degrees, up to and including the TSE. Even
today, Canadian feature fiction films, television series and MOWs retain strong documentary
elements, both in style and content.
The Scenics served as the genesis of Canada’s destiny as a location for American
film crews and distributors. The CPR instructed the Bioscope Company of Canada, set up
by Brit Charles Urban, not to shoot any Canadian winter scenes, since Canada already had
a reputation from earlier scenics of being cold and snowy. The bid, at first successful, fell
prey to a popular feature film, that perpetuated the image that was to cling to Canada like an
icy cloak for decades. Nell Shipman and Ernest Shipman’s Back to God’s Country (Hartford,

40

1919), Canada’s first extant feature film, extended the stereotype far and wide in 1919 with
the commercially successful border-crossing northern action tale of a determined woman
and her dog. Canadian film, as well as literature and art, has to a great extent been
obsessed with geography and relationships to the landscape. The Scenics gave way to the
Quota Quickies, another step on the way to the TSE, still decades away.

The Quota Quickies or the "Q.Q.E." – 1928-1937

During the era of the "Quota Quickies," which I call the "QQE," or "Quote Quickie Era,"
some of the same conditions existed as would come into play at the time of the TSE—
difficulties in finding financing, experienced crews, and distribution. The Cinematograph Film
Act was passed in 1927, requiring a certain quota of exhibited films to be British. In 1928,
movies made in the British Empire had to constitute 7½ percent of films in British theatres.
Like Canada's, the British film industry, as well as those of other countries, had been taken
over by American movies during the First World War, when America preached isolationism.
The Quota Quickies constituted one of the first attempts to keep at bay American domination
of the Commonwealth film industries. As Morris shows, European countries and Australia
introduced legislation to protect their industries. Canada took no moves in 1927 to ensure
that its films were exhibited,
10
relying instead on the new British system. The QQE lasted
from 1928 (the first was called His Destiny) to 1937, during which time 24 Quota Quickies
were made in Canada.
11
In 1938, Britain prohibited Canadian films from participating in the
quota law and, without protective legislation, Americans stopped producing British films in
Canada for the British film market, and the burgeoning Canadian film industry collapsed.
12

The fear of Hollywood's withdrawal from Canadian runaway production is ongoing. In
2003, the government introduced legislation reducing funding to Canadian production and

41

increasing tax credits for foreign producers from 11 to 16 percent to keep American
production money funding Canada’s branch-plant film industry. Also in 2003, American
politicians and filmmakers protested runaway production, including California governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Robert Altman.
The case of the QQE offers an interesting precedent to the TSE because of six
notable similarities between the two:

1. Both attempted to ensure production of movies that were "Canadian." With percentages
or point systems instituted, the question of exactly what constitutes a Canadian film, both
legally and culturally, was a consideration in both eras and remains a bone of contention.

2. Both set some stories in Canadian locations. Like their precursors, the Scenics, the Quota
Quickies were openly set in Canadian locations, with no attempt to disguise the country as
another. This in itself renders them Canadian in one important cultural sense: geography,
landscape, animals and natural resources, all of which were, and are, extremely important
Canadian cultural markers. Some of the TSE/DC films also are set in Canadian locations.

3. Both had some commercial success, although not enough to warrant continuing the
program. Bishop’s quickies were seen not only in Britain but in the U.S. Many also lost
money, such as 1923’s Blue Water, a film for which high hopes were held but which had
only a limited release in the Maritimes.
13
The QQE failed to stem the tide of American
control. Successions of Canadian federal governments, until 1975, rejected quotas as
ineffective and/or impolitic. The TSE took up the challenge by spending money instead of
imposing restrictions.

42

4. Both showed certain narrative Canadian as well as American markers: Some Quota
Quickies were not unlike others being produced in the U.S. at the time, the frozen exotic
wasteland and vast wood-and-water landscapes comprising the backdrop for conventionally
told Hollywood narratives. Like the TSE films, some of the quota films were seen to have
Canadian content and others were viewed as Hollywood imitations. Says Morris, "None of
the quota films produced during that decade can be considered Canadian in any cultural
sense.
14
He also calls them "nothing better than counterfeit Hollywood films."
15
This view,
however, assumes an authentic, essential "Canadianness" as well as an essential, genuine
"Hollywoodness" that speaks for the American nation. There are nevertheless many
"Canadian" tropes, such as capable female characters, in both eras.

5. Both had ties to the U.S. and Britain: American and British influences present in the QQE
would become even more prevalent and quantified in the TSE films with official American
and U.K. co-productions. Canada formed early partnerships with U.S. companies; B.C.
quota producer Kenneth Bishop and his company, Central Films, allied with Columbia
Pictures. Bishop also mined Hollywood for British-born actors and crew to meet the quota
criteria, as did the TSE films. Canadian actors were supporting players in both schemes.
Quota quickie stars included Mary Astor (an unknown at 16), Norma Shearer and a 19-year-
old Rita Hayworth.
16
The sheer volume of Canadians in Hollywood as well as the repetition
of certain genres and represented border-crossings begun in the QQE would be repeated in
the TSE. Morris cites an exodus of talent to the States in the QQE, an entertainment "brain
drain" that not only contributed to the failure of an indigenous industry, but also in many
ways to the success of Hollywood.
17
As Innis noted, the periphery can influence the centre.
By the time of the QQE, the Canadian film industry had already declined, taken over by
American companies during WWI.

43

6. Both used the same set of creative teams and crew members repeatedly in the process of
building an industry: The names Ernest Shipman (producer), David Hartford (director), Faith
Green (writer) and others are listed in the production, direction and writing of many of the
films in the QQE. Later, during the TSE, the names of producers Garth Drabinsky, Ronald I.
Cohen, William Marshall, Henk van der Kolk, David Perlmutter and Jon Slan would be
among the recurring names films, while recurring names of writers are conspicuously
absent.

The National Film Board (NFB) 1939

The QQE led immediately into the era of the NFB and the increase in the output of
documentaries over the fictional QQE films. Raymond S. Peck, Director of the Exhibits and
Publicity Bureau in 1920, believed Canada should act as a scenic backdrop for Hollywood
films and opened Canada’s location doors even wider. That view would prevail until the
TSE. Jack Valenti would later proclaim, like Peck, that if Canada could make "good"
pictures, then it would have a feature film industry. Peck thought that task better left to
Americans.
18

In 1939, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King invited John Grierson, who had
been at the helm of Britain’s Empire Marketing Board, to Canada to make films by and for
Canadians about Canada and Canadian social issues. The creator of the new government
agency, the National Film Board, used the term "documentary," which entered the language
as an adjective in 1802. Grierson was the first to apply the word to film. Canada had
produced WWI documentaries, such as Canada’s Fighting Forces and B.C. For The Empire
in 1914. Grierson’s stated goal was to use film as a propaganda tool, in order to effect social
policy changes. Just as in the Scenics and Quota Quickies, there was a strong focus on the

44

land, resources and industry, and on Canadians as hewers of wood and drawers of water.
NFB documentaries, both short and long, animated and live-action, were regularly shown in
schools, libraries and church basements.
19

Feature films were neither important nor numerous, compared to the social idealism of
the non-fiction alternative. Although a champion of Canada, Grierson wanted the Americans
to continue making narrative films and thus leave the social policy documentary filmmaking
to Canadians. It was Grierson who created the distinction between what he called "films"
and "movies"— the difference between high and low culture, i.e. education and
entertainment. Grierson’s appointed head of the NFB, Ross McLean, also wanted the
Americans to spend some of their Canadian-made revenues on films made in Canada and
believed that situation would not take place without legislation.
20

The strategy of abandoning fiction has worked significantly in two ways. First, it made
Canada famous worldwide for its documentaries. Secondly, leaving narrative filmmaking to
America has contributed to, but is not entirely responsible for, the virtual eradication of
Canadian narratives as any kind of viable competition in Canada against the U.S.
Eric Barnouw describes the classic Grierson documentary as dealing with "impersonal
social processes."
21
Both the Empire Marketing Board, where Grierson began his career,
and the General Post Office into which it merged in 1934 were involved with
communications and media development. "Grierson saw the situation as a mandate to
explore the entire role of communication in modern society – a favorite Grierson topic."
22

The "impersonal" nature of Griersonian documentaries constitutes one reason Canadian
filmmakers have consistently failed, refused or avoided to tell stories with strong central
characters against a social backdrop. The social condition itself was the main character. The
government responsibilities of funding and making Canadian films, along with the
documentary tradition, were accepted, internalized and taken for granted until 1974 and the

45

TSE, when the government then took the role of supportive partner with the private sector in
creating what was hoped would be feature fiction films with commercial appeal.
The National Film Board became part of the TSE as a participant in some of the DC
movies as well as a critic of American cultural imperialism. As the TSE moved into more
American-coded movies, in 1978 the NFB produced a documentary about the TSE, called
Has Anybody Here Seen Canada? with research by Piers Handling (executive director
emeritus of the Toronto International Film Festival) and written by documentary master
Donald Brittain. The NFB mandate was to make films about Canada for Canadians. The
TSE movies were, ironically, attempting to accomplish the same goal, but in a different
way—searching for ways to represent Canada and Canadian identity in the face of
American domination. Documentary, the one area that had not yet been usurped by classic
Hollywood cinema, became a major factor in the narrative genre as well. Documentary
elements were never hidden in favour of classic Hollywood style, but remained obvious even
in the TSE movies and beyond. Americans such as Michael Moore and Morgan Spurling
have recently transferred narrative storytelling to documentaries, thereby unwittingly
usurping the reputedly Canadian form by making documentaries as suspenseful, surprising
and narratively entertaining as fiction, tell "real" stories, sometimes political ones and making
millions at the box office.

The Canadian Co-Operation Project (CCP) 1948-1958

In 1948, another program, the Canadian Co-Operation Project, came into existence.
An agreement between the federal government and the Motion Picture Association of
America, the CCP was essentially a public relations arrangement with political and economic
aims. The main objective was to redress the imbalance in Canada’s post-war trade deficit

46

with the U.S. The on-screen result was a number of references to Canada in American
movies.
Under the plan, which continued for ten years, the U.S. suffered no disadvantage in
making small concessions to Canada, allowing more dollars to flow from Canada to the U.S.
to pay down the trade deficit, as well as to avoid any quota or tax legislation on the import of
American movies. Canada, for its part, was looking for increased tourism, expecting more
filmmaking to be a by-product of the agreement.
23
The CCP actually began as a quota
system, advanced in Washington by Deputy Finance Minister Clifford Clark and Finance
Minister Douglas Abbott.
24
Rather than impose restrictions on film imports, however, the
Canadian government negotiated the CCP. The MPAA, for its part, wanted to avoid another
quota scheme that might cut into its profits. It echoes the QQE because of its close ties to
issues of trade, transport and immigration.
The seven proposed tactics of the CCP to achieve its economic objective included
arrangements by which: the U.S. would make short films and radio recordings meant to
increase tourism; some NFB films would be distributed in the U.S; and Canada would be
mentioned or included in U.S. newsreels and feature films.
25
The latter tactic, however,
amounted to no more than mentioning a Canadian location as a honeymoon spot or a locale
to which the hero or the bad guy had decamped. Pierre Berton, in Hollywood’s Canada,
outlines in detail the often contrived inclusions of Canadian place names in Hollywood
movies. One instance among hundreds sees Humphrey Bogart’s character, with his
recognizably New York accent, named a Canadian in The African Queen. Another involves
James Stewart's assertion in Bend in the River that "red-wing orioles from Canada" have
been sighted. A third sees a character saying, "We tie in with the authorities north of the
border in Canada," in Red Skies of Montana.
26

As Magder notes, Canada accounted for four percent of Hollywood’s revenues in
1948 when the CCP began, a number that rose to 10 percent three years later.
27
The MPAA

47

touted the success of the CCP as "an example of the mutual cooperation and understanding
as opposed to restrictions and retaliatory measures in international trade." The number of
dollars that actually flowed south to help the trade deficit has been variously reported as $17
million, $24 million.
28
As far as filmmaking was concerned, however, the U.S. continued to
consolidate its already tenacious grasp over the most important branch of the pop culture
tree. Few Canadian features were produced and none competed with the Hollywood
blockbusters. Canadians eagerly attended the post-war American movies that dominated
their theatres. It was only in the Canadian newsreels and NFB shorts that Canadians saw
any representation of their own country on the screen. Even those constituted more
Canadian content on the screen than exists today in Canadian movie theatres. The CCP
was yet another harbinger of the TSE, in which, instead of American movies making vague
and passing references to Canada, Canada would proceed to make Canadian movies with
only vague and passing references to Canada. Before that, however, one man would make
an appeal for Canadian culture that initiated a new era of Canadian cultural nationalism.

The Massey Report (1951)

In 1951, Liberal cabinet minister Vincent Massey revealed the Royal Commission
Studies: A Selection of Essays Prepared for the Royal Commission on National
Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, called the Massey Report.
29
The Royal
Commission that produced the report, which was commissioned by then-Prime Minister
Louis St-Laurent, held 114 public hearings across Canada and received 462 formal
submissions. Canadian cultural policy was ripe for an overhaul and the Massey Report
would lead indirectly both to the creation of the CFDC some 16 years later as well as laying
the cultural and political foundation for the TSE. For the first time, a Canadian government

48

stated that it was not only important but also crucial for the nation to tell and see its own
stories. "Hollywood refashions us in its own image," was the way the Report put it.
30
Instead
of an emphasis on trade and political issues, Massey advocated the establishment and
nurturing of a national culture for its own sake as well as for the sake of national sovereignty.
Like Grierson, the Report defined "culture" as high culture, something outside the popular
commercial sphere, such as NFB documentaries. The NFB had been under attack by
Conservatives and the Liberal government aimed to save it and Canadian culture at the
same time.
The Commission’s chair was Massey, who would become the first Canadian-born
Governor-General. In 1937, his private secretary, Ross McLean, had written a report on how
few films, and of sub-standard quality, could be seen in Britain. It was McLean who urged his
boss to approach Prime Minister Mackenzie King to invite Grierson to Canada.
31

Members of the Massey family were well-known border crossers and wealthy
philanthropists, with ties both to Britain and the U.S. As the Queen’s representative in
Canada, Massey was an avowed monarchist, who had attended Oxford and retained an
appreciation of English traditions and European culture. In 1926, he was appointed first
Canadian Minister to Washington and in 1935 would become High Commissioner to
London, making such a favourable impression that in 1946 King George VI invested him
with the Companion of Honour. Massey would later institute a similar system in Canada and
would himself become one of the first appointees in the Order of Canada. Highly privileged
scion of the philanthropic-minded family that founded the giant agricultural equipment
manufacturer Massey-Harris, he ran the business his father had founded for four years, and
his wealth enabled him to pursue interests in the arts, education and letters.
The famous family name also had Hollywood connections: Massey’s brother,
Raymond, was the Oxford-educated Torontonian who became a well-known "American"
character actor.
32
In The Imperial Canadian, Massey's biographer, (former U. of T.

49

chancellor) Claude Bissell notes, "More than any other Canadian, he was responsible for the
first major movement of the arts and letters from the periphery of national concern towards
the centre. It was a notable achievement." Massey served as governor-general from 1952
until 1959, travelling extensively in Canada by plane, train and, where necessary, dog-sled.
He saw his job description as strengthening the bond between Canadians and the Crown,
and was committed to using his office to promote Canadian unity and identity as well. His
belief in fairness and justice for all Canadians was legendary and he was honoured by the
Blood First Nation in Alberta at a time when Native Canadians were being sent to
brainwashing "residential schools," run by government and churches, to have their culture
and language beaten out of them. Massey encouraged the arts, promoting a national festival
of the arts that eventually led to the founding of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. At
Rideau Hall, his official residence, he established writers’ weekends to help create a
Canadian literary identity. He supported the then-fledgling Stratford Shakespearean Festival
and made a point of attending art exhibitions. In 1953, he established the Governor
General's Awards for Architecture, and presented Canada Council awards to many artists.
33

Here was a humanities-educated patron of the arts, monarchist, supporter of social
change and cultural nationalist. The Massey Foundation compiled one of the great arts
collections of Canada. The Massey Medal named for him recognized national exploration,
development, and description of geography for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society in
1959. In 1961, the annual Massey Lecture was created in his name, and remains the most
important public lecture series in Canada. Massey was extremely influential in Canadian
culture and politics, seeding ideas that would later be developed by Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau, such as the acceptance and promotion of cultural diversity and bilingualism.
Trudeau would be prime minister during the TSE.
The major recommendations of the Massey Report, all of which were implemented by
1957, involved the establishment of guidelines for broadcasting, the creation of the Canada

50

Council to dispense funds to various types of artists, financial assistance for universities, and
the establishment of a national library. The Report stated, "Physical links are essential to the
unifying process but true unity belongs to the realm of ideas. It is a matter for men’s [sic]
minds and hearts."
34
The Report recognized the importance of culture to the identity of a
nation. It also recognized, as Benedict Anderson would some four decades later, that a
nation’s unity is imagined, that it "belongs to the realm of ideas."
35
The ideas can translate
into practices, such as movie-making. The climate created a focus on the question of how
and why to make Canadian movies. The Report supported the NFB and the CBC as two
institutions that could help Canadian culture through producing films for television.
36
Those
films, however, would be documentaries, not dramas.
A dilemma existed as to how to counter Hollywood without interfering directly in the
marketplace. The Massey Report, in its zeal to promote documentaries and Canadian
culture as the antidote to American movies, offered no direct support for feature filmmaking.
This is an important point because Canadian feature films would almost invariably become
non-commercial, both in reality and in structure and style. When the TSE arrived, Canada
had become almost incapable of making a commercial film, so differently had it defined its
"culture" from American mass appeal products. Culture was meant to be uplifting and
enlightening, and the relationship between it and the nation was assumed and extolled as
superior to American mass culture. The TSE would attempt to bridge this gap between high
and low culture, a task easier stated than accomplished. Massey’s upper-class attachment
to high art made it even more difficult. Such support of the European monarchist tradition,
and Britain in particular, is evident in the TSE movies.
Massey’s contribution to the awareness of the arts in Canada cannot be
underestimated. He was instrumental in the establishment of a new Canadian identity, both
through his passion for Canada and his creation of policies and institutions that supported
it.
37
Although his tenure ended in 1959, the Massey influence continued through the 1960s.

51

As English-Canada searched for its identity, his influence set the stage for the creation of the
CFDC and the TSE. After Massey, various Secretaries of State would attempt to put into
place regulations to help the flagging Canadian feature film industry. During the tenure of
Lester Peason’s secretary of state Maurice Lamontagne, which began in 1964, the position
expanded from a largely bureaucratic regulatory office to one in charge of the Canada
Council, the CBC, the Broadcast Board of Governors, the NFB, the National Gallery, the
National Museum, the National Library and Public Archives, the Centennial Commission,
and the Queen’s Printer. The agency thus greatly increased its influence on culture, based
on Massey’s recommendations.

The Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC) 1967

The TSE years represented the culmination of efforts from the foregoing agencies and
initiatives but were also indirectly influenced by other earlier trends and precedents. In 1946,
a $750,000 movie was produced. After the first Canadian Film Awards were presented in
1949, some writers and filmmakers considered Canada ready for a resurgence of its feature
film industry. A 60% tax write-off on investment in any film, whether Canadian or not, had
been in effect since 1954 and by 1957 there were 60 production companies.
38
In 1963,
Canada’s first co-production agreement was signed--with France, one of many such deals
behind some of the TSE movies. Secretary of State J.W. (Jack) Pickersgill that year
established a body with the peculiarly circumspect name of the Interdepartmental
Committee on the Possible Development of Feature Film Production in Canada. Two
members of the Committee, NFB executives Guy Roberge and Michael Spencer (who
would later become head of the CFDC), recommended a fund of $3 million to be
administered and dispensed to filmmakers, with no more than $50,000 given to any one film.

52

The $3-million figure was revised to $10 million to be spent over five years, with $1.5 million
to be used for craft improvement.
39

The CFDC could not have existed without the spawning of a nascent Canadian
identity articulated and embraced by the Massey Report. Magder cites the Royal
Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the Canada Council, the National Museums
Act of 1964, the tax-exempt status of Time and Reader’s Digest, the Centennial celebrations
and the new Broadcasting Act of 1968 as evidence of the importance of cultural concerns to
politicians and policymakers.
40
In addition, the great flag debate of 1965, under Prime
Minister Lester B. Pearson, ended with the distinctive red maple leaf on a white background
with two red vertical borders winning out over any inclusion of the Red Ensign or the Union
Jack. Pearson’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize and the success of Expo ’67, the World’s
Fair in Montreal, initiated an increased awareness of Canada on the world stage. Canada’s
opposition to the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam war reinforced its image as a peacemaker
and refuge. The Baby Boom generation was coming of age, the economy was booming, and
universal health care was instituted. The effects of the sexual revolution and the third wave
of feminism began to ripple through society.
The establishment of the CFDC itself stemmed originally from two speeches written
by Pickersgill’s successor Maurice Lamontagne: one in 1956 for Prime Minister Louis St-
Laurent, and the other for Lamontagne himself in 1964. While both speeches advocated
government intervention in culture, the second specifically mentioned "motion pictures."
Lamontagne said that a country must set up its own institutions and not borrow cultural
material from others, an idea that comes directly from Vincent Massey. Lamontagne
extended the term "culture" to include movies, which he called "both seductive…and highly
efficacious."
41
Lamontagne recognized specifically that it was the "mode of expression," as
he called it, of feature film that made them "seductive," and not simply the fact that they were
American. When Lamontagne resigned in 1965 under a cloud of scandal, his replacement,

53

Judy LaMarsh (1965-68), who brought in the Broadcasting Act, presided over the Centennial
celebrations, and established the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada,
also shepherded the CFDC into existence. The organization was created through an Act of
Parliament — Bill C-204 — in June 1966, and which passed in March 1967. LaMarsh’s goal
was for the Corporation to produce films that would compete in the global marketplace.
42
In
the process, it would contribute to the unity and identity of Canada as a nation.
43
The
multiple purposes behind the creation of the CFDC therefore encompassed political,
national, artistic and commercial aims.
The young literary community that began writing at the end of World War II spawned
"CanLit" in the 1960s. Novelists and poets came to the fore, and names such as Margaret
Atwood, Margaret Lawrence, Mordecai Richler, Farley Mowat, W. O. Mitchell, Robertson
Davies, Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton became prominent and began to sell
domestically. In the 1960s and ’70s, pop music received public attention as a result of
"CanCon," or "Canadian content" regulations, whereby the broadcast regulatory body, the
CRTC (Canadian Radio and Telecommunication Commission), decreed that a percentage
of Canadian radio airwaves be filled with works by Canadian singers and songwriters. Anne
Murray, Gordon Lightfoot, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Bruce
Cockburn and Buffy Ste. Marie became famous in their own country, their popularity and
sales bolstered by cultural nationalists, music promoters and the new cultural policy.
Conversely, some artists, such as Neil Young, Robbie Robertson and Paul Anka, moved to
the U.S. to carve out careers and were not acknowledged there as Canadians.
The first huge Canadian pop-rock star, Burton Cummings and the group The Guess
Who, paved the way for the Canadian musical stars of today — Shania Twain, Diana Krall,
Alanis Morissette and Avril Lavigne. If it worked for music, why not for movies? Canadian
literature and music remain more popular, internationally known and commercially
successful than Canadian movies. One would be hard-pressed to find a Canadian on the

54

street who could name a single Canadian feature film, although most could name several
Canadians who became famous in the U.S.
44
In a crossover attempt to parlay Cummings'
musical stardom to movies, he was cast as the lead, an alcoholic pop star, in one of the TSE
films — Melanie (Rex Bromfield, 1980).
Canadian literature and music were coming of age. The time seemed ripe for
Canadian feature filmmaking.

The TSE Begins

For the purposes of this study, I count the year in which the films were shot, rather
than the year in which they were released. There are three reasons for this approach: 1)
Many of the films were unreleased, while most of the rest of them gained only limited
release, i.e. a week or one city or one theatre, 2) There is usually a large time gap,
sometimes two years, between production and release because of the difficulties in
obtaining distribution, and 3) The production date is close to the date in which the CFDC
invested money in any particular film, partly causing the 1979-81 spike in production. 4) I am
discussing narrative and directorial strategies that were chosen at or before the time of
production and are not connected with a later release date or no release date at all. The tax
shelter films have been blamed in many quarters, especially journalistic, as being what was
"wrong" with Canadian film, perhaps even scapegoating the TSE for foregrounding the
larger tendencies in Canadian cinema. The facts show that the genres and tropes of the
TSE films were merely in disguise, the "Canadianness" hidden but not altogether erased
and that the TSE symbols cross over from the TSE to the DC films and beyond.
One of ways the TSE manifested a filmmaking strategy was in producing genre
movies not familiar to the Canadian canon. By imitating Hollywood genres such as the sex

55

comedy and the cop thriller, Canadian films might attract audiences. Stephen Neale in his
book on genre talks about genres as ways to vary the same basic Hollywood ideology.
Where genres give the appearance of variety, they repeat the same basic commercial
strategy that created and supports the studio system.
45
Canada, however, had not yet
developed its own cinematic ideology or enough films to fill out genres. It was still working on
emulating British, French, Italian and American film. In concentrating on American
Hollywood narrative types, the TSE films gave the appearance of variety in imitation. The
effect, however, was a repetition of the same basic artistic strategies. The TSE movies
changed genre but maintained the artistic and narrative strategies that defined the earlier
decades of Canadian film. The same images and tropes recur in these new-to-Canada
genres. And because the narrative strategies did not cleave closely enough to Hollywood's
to be mistaken for American movies, Canada did not have financially viable movies. That
was what much of the failed or aborted cultural policy was working towards — that elusive
commercial success. What did happen, however, was a repetition of the artistic strategies
that persist to this day. The international nominations and awards for Canadian films tend to
justify and highlight these artistic strategies while effacing the films' relative lack of
commercial appeal.
The average number of Canadian feature films produced from 1938 through 1968 had
remained relatively stable, averaging 1.86 per year, and three in 1967. The CFDC began
distributing its $10-million budget in the fall of 1969, when the number of movies produced
increased significantly to 19, more than double the 1968 number. No more than $300,000 or
50 percent of production costs was to be invested in any single production. By October of
1971 the money was gone — $6.7 million in 64 productions. They made back only $600,000
or 9 percent.
46
During the two peak tax-shelter years, however, the average more than
doubled to almost 45 per year, with 47 in 1979 and 42 in 1980, for a two-year total of 89,
falling back to 25 in 1981. Compared to the years leading up to the TSE, 1979 and 1980

56

were extraordinary in terms of the cinematic output and the number of financial and
production players in the industry.
47

Tax write-offs existed previous to the creation of the CFDC, but there were few
features made in that time. As Wyndham Wise writes in his 1986 unpublished paper," The
Canadian Film Industry: The Tax-Shelter Years," there was a 60% write-off for film
investment as early as 1954. The TSE is often cited to have begun in 1977 or 1978, but it
more accurately began in 1974 with the Special Investment Programme, a CFDC plan to
assist low-budget films with a $100,000 grant each, plus loans. In 1973, when the
government announced that it intended to close the loopholes against highly leveraged
investment deals, the movies in the CFDC pipeline were suddenly postponed. In 1974,
however, the government extended the Capital Cost Allowance section of the Income Tax
Act to the production of feature films with the Special Investment Programme, which began
to encourage investment in Canadian film. The CFDC contributed 60% of the budget if that
budget did not exceed $100,000 in 1972. In 1975, the tax regulation that allowed investors to
deduct 100% of their film investment was initiated and made retroactive to November 1974.
In May of 1975, regulations decreased the write-off for investment in non-Canadian films to
30%. Four films were made that year with budgets of more than $1 million and the point
system began a year later. In 1977 the amount the CFDC gave rose to $165,000.
48

By the mid-1970s, the conditions were in place for the CFDC to invest millions in
single films. Before that happened, however, a new secretary of state, Hugh Faulkner, gave
quotas one more try. He brought in a voluntary quota with the American exhibition majors—
Famous Players and Odeon--by which any movie in English was to be guaranteed a two-
week run in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, and extended another two weeks. Then came
the Tompkins Report prepared by the Bureau of Management Consulting in March of 1976,
eschewing exhibition quotas and leaving all to market forces. If a film were "good," it would
succeed internationally.
49
In 1977, yet another new secretary of state, John Roberts,

57

promised initiatives to help the Canadian film industry. Gittings cites the Tompkins Report as
the impetus for the Canadian industry to make "Hollywood-style films" or, as the Report
called them, "'films with a mass audience appeal beyond the boundaries of any one
country.'" Gittings devotes less than a page-and-a-half to the hundreds of TSE movies in his
book on Canadian National Cinema, citing The Grey Fox as "an exception to the rule,"
because of its "overt Canadian content." Like others, Gittings prefers to concentrate on
auteurs films or "good" films in his analyses. There is no entry in his index for the tax-shelter
films.
50
The Grey Fox was in fact a TSE movie, shot in 1980 with an undisclosed amount of
CFDC money, starring an American (Richard Farnsworth), and with a large budget of
$3,480,000 that increased to $4,500,000.
51

Roberts' intentions, like those of his predecessors, were thwarted by Jack Valenti,
former longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America, and protector of the
American film industry and Republican policy, Valenti, who controlled American movie policy
for four decades, was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Motion Picture
Association of America, only the third in its history (after Will Hays and Eric A. Johnston).
Valenti was closely connected with Washington, having become an aide to President
Lyndon Johnson in 1963 and head of the then-MPA in 1966. In 1968, he instituted the
ratings system that controls both American and Canadian releases. The MPAA website
states it succinctly: "Valenti has presided over and led the American film and television
industry as it has confronted a sea change in the landscape of the industry, both in the
United States and abroad." Valenti was perhaps more influential in the history of Canadian
film policy than American. Despite all the writing on cultural policy, the debate has boiled
down to Valenti on one side, saying that if Canadian films were any "good" they would be
seen and embraced by Americans and the world, an indication of what Global Hollywood
refers to as Valenti's "hearty, gum-chewing populism."
52
On the other side, Canadian

58

policymakers, filmmakers and journalists claimed, and still claim, the fault lies in the lack of a
distribution system, lack of exhibition, and/or lack of publicity and marketing.
For decades, Valenti influenced the Canadian film industry, weighing in whenever
Canada made noises about film legislation. The U.S. government inevitably retaliates with
threats of taxes and/or protectionism against Canadian imports, such as steel, shakes and
shingles, wheat, beef, fabrics and other products. If movies are a medium for the
communication of ideas, however, they are then social and cultural products and not merely
commercial ones. As Canada knew decades before, movies affect the culture of a country
and the minds and hearts of people. When the stance is in its business interests, however,
the U.S. conveniently regresses to its 1915 position, when movies were not protected as a
form of expression or a part of the press.
53
Valenti's frequent implication, sometimes echoed
by Canadian politicians, is that, if Canada could make "good" pictures, then its movies would
succeed at the box office. When Valenti adopted the argument of Hollywood aesthetics
against Canadian films, saying that if they were "good," they would be able to get
mainstream distribution, he implied that movies are in fact cultural products and not simply
imitable commercial products. When necessary for his purposes, Valenti reverted to the
position that movies are merely a business, threatening to retaliate and pull American movie
"product" if Canada brought in quota measures. The Canadian cultural industries, however,
since Innis and the Massey Report, have historically seen them as a part of culture as well
as a latterly significant source of revenue. Former foreign correspondent and current
President of CTV News Robert Hurst referred to Valenti as "Canada’s Culture Minister."
54

Valenti retired in 2004, but promised to keep "an umbilical relationship" with the
organization he headed for 38 years.
55
The TSE used its similarly umbilical relationship with
the U.S. as an entrée into the American world that was physically, socially and emotionally
so close and yet financially so far away. If only we could access that world…after all, we had
the crews, the money from the CFDC, the actors. Why not join this American behemoth and

59

take advantage of that close cultural relationship? It was just across the most porous border
in the world…why should it be out of reach? Canadian venture capitalists and investors were
induced to put money into Canadian movies and crack the American market.
Since it appeared that Canada could not "beat 'em," it decided to try to "join 'em."
During the major years of the TSE, 1977 to 1981, well-known foreign actors were hired at
huge salaries, resulting in officially Canadian movies starring Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum,
Sophia Loren, Cliff Robertson, George C. Scott, Ava Gardner, James Coburn, Ann-Margret,
Jack Lemmon, Richard Burton, Ernest Borgnine, Suzanne Somers, Bruce Dern and Lee
Majors, to name a few. In order to register additional points for certification, such Canadian-
born but American-identified stars and expatriates such as Glenn Ford, William Shatner,
Donald Sutherland and Christopher Plummer
56
were cast. Britons such as Donald
Pleasance, David Warner and David Hemmings starred in several movies. Co-productions
were important, too, because such films were nominally Canadian to the Canadian
government and also afforded the other country a "home-grown" product. Hence such
movies as Murder By Decree (Bob Clark 1975) with Great Britain and Atlantic City, U.S.A.
(Louis Malle 1981) with the U.S. Both these movies also raise questions about nation and
nationalities within the cinematic worlds of the movies themselves, Murder By Decree being
about Britain and Atlantic City, U.S.A. about America. The latter, directed by a Frenchman,
Louis Malle, further complicates issues around nation and the national canon. Even such
international superstar directors as John Huston and Orson Welles, both with ties to Great
Britain but, like Charlie Chaplin, identified as Americans, were contracted to direct and star,
respectively, in two Canadian tax-shelter movies, Phobia and Never Trust an Honest Thief.
The average budget for the English-Canadian film soared to more than $3 million. The
films made in 1979 carried total budgets of $130,560,000 and those in 1980, $134,155,000.
Agency, for example, was the last film to begin shooting that year, on December 4, 1978, but
the first to be financed through the new public offering arrangement, which had just begun

60

as a method of injecting funding into a movie. Units were sold to the public by investment
bankers and financiers. This situation allowed the banking community to have approval over
stars and members of the general public to become involved in the film business. Agency’s
budget was $4.4 million with $200,000 of CFDC money. Starring Robert Mitchum, Lee
Majors, Valerie Perrine, Canadian international star Alexandra Stewart, and Canadian Saul
Rubinek, who was not well known then and still living in Canada. Produced by Robert
Lantos and Stephen Roth, it was another film that afforded the opportunity for relatively
novice producers to work with big budgets and big stars. Lantos went on to found Alliance
Films, which merged with Atlantis in the ‘90s to become Alliance Atlantis, the largest
producer of film and television in Canada and one of the largest in the world. Lantos left to
found his own production company, Serendipity Point Films, making Sunshine, Men With
Brooms, The Statement and Being Julia. The TSE provided some producers, such as
Lantos and Drabinsky, as well as some actors, such as Rubinek, with the means to rise to
riches and relative fame. In 1979 only nine of the 47 films had budgets of less than a million
dollars (see Appendix), at a time when Canadian movies could be, and frequently were
being, made for a few tens of thousands of dollars.
The Distinctively Canadian or DC films that attempted to speak to a Canadian
sensibility in a Canadian voice were made by some of the same filmmakers who had been
making films since the '60s and early '70s, such as Allan King and Donald Shebib, as well as
by younger directors, such as Phillip Borsos and Clay Borris. Sometimes the nation-specific
films overlapped with the tax-shelter films, such as Who Has Seen the Wind (Allan King
1977) and The Grey Fox (Phillip Borsos, 1982),
57
both relatively big-budget narrative movies
that nevertheless spoke to Canadian subjects, characters and narratives. Some of the TSE
films, however, such as Silence of the North (Allan King 1978),
58
hired American stars (Ellen
Burstyn and Tom Skerritt) as well as Canadian (Gordon Pinsent) as supposed box-office
draws, but could be considered DC because of its Canadian story, location and well known

61

documentary director. Even some DC movies that feature only Canadian actors use some of
the same narrative strategies as the TSE films. Some filmmakers made both TSE and DC
films, with and without CFDC funding. The TSE movies, however, came to be known at the
ones that effaced any Canadian references, locations or subjects and the DC ones became
known as distinctively "Canadian." There was, however, much overlapping, in the way
nation, gender and family relationships are depicted as well as certain core similarities and
repeated tropes. Much was made in the press of movies featuring recognizable Canadian
locations, while those in which Canadian identity was ignored were vilified. The location of a
film was particularly important to a country that had not seen its landscapes, either urban or
rural, portrayed in fictional films since the silent days, and so the DC films became those that
made it into the Canadian canon. The TSE films, despite the difficulty in disentangling them
from the DC films, were blamed for failed narrative as well as policy strategies.
At the end of 1977, Roberts tried again and failed, with a new film policy called the
Ten Per Cent Solution—a 10% tax on distributors’ movie grosses with a rebate equal to the
amount the Canadian movie returned from foreign revenues. There was much discussion
within industry and government about how to proceed. In the spring of 1978, Roberts
replaced CFDC head Michael Spencer, after a ten-year term, with political insider Michael
McCabe, whose personality and policies were much more aligned with commercial profits
than cultural priorities and the TSE began in earnest. Canada was about to depart from its
traditional but financially unsuccessful filmmaking strategy. At stake was the very future of
Canadian culture and identity, partly as a result of decades of failed film policy by the federal
government. Canada, and particularly Toronto, was to become known publicly as
"Hollywood North."
Roback outlines the regulatory and industry details of the TSE. Investors were
attracted by the tax write-off and the immediate tax loss created in the year of production.
There was a substantial tax deferral because profits would not be recouped until a later year

62

and, in the case of Canadian feature film, probably never would be. Film units were sold to
investors, who were personally liable for the full amount of the investment. As Roback
outlines, "The interpretation of this clause caused tremendous problems for Canadian
producers and investors and was a major factor in the collapse of the Hollywood North film
boom."
59
Investors, after saving some money on their taxes, most often lost money, and
investing in Canadian film turned out to be more risky than oil and gas drilling or MURBs.
60

In order to determine whether a film was Canadian or not, the 1976 point system was
introduced, with so many points allotted for each Canadian in a position of importance on the
film, such as producer, director, writer, star, etc. to make the film a "certified" Canadian
one.
61
"The intention of the point system," says Roback, was to ensure that Canadians were
employed in the film industry."
62
One positive aspect of the tax-shelter years was that this
intention was indeed realized. The industry was better financed than it had ever been.
Almost nobody, whether American or Canadian, moviegoer or critic, wanted to see the tax-
shelter films. And the industry had hoped to attract hordes of people from both countries.
The 100% tax write-off suddenly drew dentists, lawyers and accountants, in addition to the
government, into the until-then obscure and arcane film industry. Feature film began to be
funded by private investment, attracted by the write-off and the prospect of attending
glamorous premieres and rubbing shoulders with American stars. Most of the investors were
upper-income Canadians who could afford $10,000 to save on their taxes, whether or not a
film was distributed or made money.
Roback maintains it was the poor reception of 1974’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy
Kravitz in the U.S. that convinced the CFDC they would have to make movies that would
appeal to Americans. The movie launched the career of Richard Dreyfuss, then an unknown
American who auditioned for Toronto director Ted Kotcheff. Duddy was made at the
beginning of the early TSE, about a quirky loser-hero, with no attempt to cash in on
American name stars. Randy Quaid was also an unknown quantity in the part of Virgil, the

63

best friend. It set a tone, however, along with The Luck of Ginger Coffey in 1964, of an
arrogant young male Montreal immigrant or second-generation immigrant. It used the
coming-of-age genre and the themes of siblings, geography, strong women, the Two
Solitudes, and border-crossing that would recur in Canadian film. Duddy's French-Canadian
chambermaid girlfriend, Yvette, played by Québec actress Micheline Lanctôt, represents
Québec and the strong Canadian female. Duddy is the struggling, ambitious young Jew who
uses her name to avoid anti-Semitism and sign a land deal. The three friends — Canadian
Jewish male, Québec female and American male — end up living together in a classic
Canadian love/ friendship triangle. The American has a head injury (epilepsy) and ends up in
a wheelchair (paralyzed), like many Canadian male characters to come. American Jack
Warden and Briton Denholm Elliott also play major roles. The Mordecai Richler novel was
actually published in London and Boston in 1959, but not until 1969 in Toronto. Canada's
"parent" and "brother" got to see the novel before English-speaking Canada.
Duddy is in the coming-of-age genre, featuring a multi-generational family in the
Jewish ghetto of Montreal, with a dead mother and a sometime cab-driver, sometime-pimp
father, and a doting grandfather. The family situation fails to provide adequately for young
Duddy's education, either formal or social, and he grows into a manipulative, selfish and
dishonest exploiter. In contrast to his brother, Lenny, who is being financed through medical
school, Duddy, as the younger and less smart sibling, feels additional pressure to succeed
as an entrepreneur. The Montreal setting served as the starting point for several coming-of-
age movies focusing on Jewish and Italian boys growing up, from Lies My Father Told Me
and The Lucky Star to the later Léolo and Perfectly Normal. Geography is a key issue, with
Duddy intent on owning a piece of Canada and making his fortune in real estate. His
grandfather instilled in him the concept that, "A man without land is nobody." The theme of
land is central to Perfectly Normal as well.

64

Duddy's Uncle Benjy writes him a letter in which he warns his nephew that he has
become two people — both the schemer and the good boy who wants to buy his
grandfather a piece of land. Like Canada, Duddy has at least two sides, or "solitudes."
Duddy must choose between his two selves and he chooses his larcenous "American" side.
He is a greedy liar who forges the signature of his friend, Virgil, whom he renders a
quadriplegic, forces Micheline to have sex, smuggles illegal drugs, and lets nothing stand in
the way of his blinding ambition. Duddy gains commercially in the end but loses out on love,
friendship and self-awareness. In his character arc, he fails to learn from his journey and so
remains the loser-hero. The difference between Duddy and other Canadian movie heroes is
that Duddy experiences many adventures on his journey that make his story more
interesting, and because he has clear aims, faces obstacles, and reaches his dubious goal.
Narrative catharsis, however, in the Aristotelian sense, is denied. Duddy fails to suffer the
consequences of his actions, nor does he learn from his gargantuan mistakes. He does get
the money, however, a narrative situation that had not happened before in a Canadian
movie and would not again until The Silent Partner in 1979. Even the border-crossing issue
is addressed in Duddy, when he smuggles heroin to the U.S. while working for his hero,
Jerry Dingleman, known as "The Boy Wonder." Although Duddy is a fascinatingly complex
character, he is still an unlikable anti-hero. The lack of a happy ending and attractive leading
man and lady set it apart from successful American melodramas.
The press response was positive both in Canada and the U.S. At the time, the movie
was called the best American film shot in Canada and considered slick in a way Canadian
film had not been to date. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin, was nominated for a Best
Adapted Screenplay Oscars® and for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. It was awarded
a belated film of the year prize at the Canadian Film Awards, which had not taken place the
year before because of a revolt by the Québec film industry. Mordecai Richler and Lionel
Chetwynd won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy Adapted from Another

65

Medium. (In 1987 it was adapted into a musical for the New York stage.) In 2004, the movie
was hailed again as a classic and a restored print briefly re-released across the country. The
CFDC had high box-office hopes for Duddy, hoping it would turn things around for English-
Canadian feature films. Although the expected revenue did not follow, the movie was seen
to be an international success, Canada's first in feature film. Roger Ebert said it "was the
most popular film to have come out of Canada through the early seventies (that country
which, in cinema as in other things, remains more foreign for many Americans than any
place in Europe)."
63

"The problem was that the content of the films would have to be ‘commercial’ and not
necessarily of cultural significance to Canadians," Roback writes.
64
The term "commercial,"
in this sense, and particularly where Canada is concerned, inevitably meant "American." The
term has come to mean financially successful in the U.S., since Canadian movies cannot be
profitable by showing only in Canada. Roback then refers to Sandra Gathercole. "When the
CFDC was being established, Liberal cabinet minister Jack Pickersgill warned that
Canadians had to be careful that they didn’t wind up making Hollywood’s movies for it, and
paying for the privilege." Where Gathercole, however, states that the jury was still out on
Pickersgill’s prognosis, hindsight now makes it clearer that Pickersgill had in fact understated
the case. Rather than making Hollywood’s movies for it, Canada ended up making
Hollywood-style movies for itself, i.e. for Canada. And even worse, the Canadian movie-
going public was completely oblivious to those movies. Gathercole’s own prognosis from
1984 remains the more accurate one: "The belief that Canada can play ball with the
Americans and win has been maintained [in Canada] in the face of consistent evidence and
advice to the contrary."
65

Roback poses three reasons the Canadian government got into the film business: to
foster national pride, to attempt to evade the U.S. cultural influence, and to promote
economic development. When the TSE ended in 1981, David Silcox was Chairman of the

66

CFDC, offering the same arguments as the Massey Report had engendered three decades
earlier. Roback quotes Silcox: "If our character and tastes are formed by what we consume--
and they are — we are in mortal peril of becoming anything and everything except
ourselves...For any independent nation which wishes to nurture in its people, or convey to
others, a distinctive identity of image, the development of an indigenous, authentic motion
picture production industry is indispensable." It is doubly ironic, then, in view of Silcox's
stated aims, that the TSE became a time when Canada not only did not achieve cultural
autonomy in the area of movies, but in fact sought and achieved a good measure of cultural
erasure as well as journalistic censure. To complicate Roback's second point, that Canada
tried to escape the U.S. influence, the TSE films show, in many cases, a desire to
assimilate, undetected, into American culture. One important statement in Gathercole’s
article is this: "Production naturally takes on the cultural assumptions of its primary
market."
66
For whom, then, were the tax-shelter movies made? Its intended markets were
the United States and Canada. The TSE therefore attempted to take on the cultural
assumptions of the U.S. in hopes of making money by using "American culture" and at the
same time protecting and adding to "Canadian culture."
67

In Silcox’s statement about the necessity of fostering a national cinema, there is an
assumption that the terms "nation" and "cinema" are definably transparent, that an identity of
images is or can be created by a "nation." In the case of the Canadian "nation," he seems to
mean the government as separate from its "people," who were not necessarily demanding a
Canadian cinema. The question then arises of who is doing the creating. The push for a
"national cinema" was coming from the federal government and supported by various
groups of filmmakers for various reasons. In the case of the TSE the Canadian nation was a
group of elite citizens deciding on a way to manufacture an image for and of Canada
separate and distinct from the encroaching cultural image of the U.S. As was the tradition in
Canadian history of the Scenics, the Quota Quickies, the NFB, and the CFDC, the TSE was

67

also tied up with issues of cross-border and international trade, immigration, transportation
and communication. It was a matter of national commercial and artistic importance, a
necessity and a survival tactic.
The movies begun during the TSE, which had essentially jump-started a film industry
in Canada, continued to be made until 1985. This factor partially accounted for the larger
number of films begun in 1984. Although the money for feature films had officially dried up,
those in the pipeline continued in production, with 13 features produced in 1985. Even
though the number of features made in 1982 dropped to 22, it jumped to 29 in 1983, and to
39 in 1984. In February of 1984, the CFDC became Telefilm Canada and fostered optimism
within the industry that a Canadian film industry, and a television industry, would continue to
exist and improve. The momentum of the TSE was gone but not forgotten.
68

Chapter 2 Endnotes — Gimme Tax Shelter: The Emergence of the TSE

1
Seth Feldman, ed., Take Two (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984), 36.

2
www.collectionscanada.ca.

3
Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows, A History of Canadian Cinema 1895-1939.
(Montreal & Kingston/London/Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978. Reprinted 1992), 57.

4
Morris, Embattled Shadows, 175rf.

5
Harcourt, Movies and Mythologies.

6
Sandra Gathercole, "The Best Film Policy This Country Never Had," in Take Two, ed. Seth Feldman (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984), 36.

7
Hurtig, 186-189.

8
Morris, Embattled Shadows, 127-130.

9
Ibid., 33.

68

10
Ibid., 177.

11
Twelve produced by Kenneth J. Bishop qualified for official "quickie" status.

12
Morris, Embattled Shadows, 182.

13
Ibid., 192-3.

14
Ibid., 182.

15
Ibid., 241.

16
Six quota films were made in 1937: Woman Against the World, Death Goes North, Manhattan Shakedown, Murder Is News, Patrol to the
Northwest Passage, Gold Is Where You Find It. In 1938, Convicted and Special Inspector, the latter also known as Across The Border, both
starred Rita Hayworth, in the former under the name Jerry Wheeler. D.J. Turner, Canadian Feature Film Index, Public Archives Canada,
1987.

17
A partial list of Canadians who went to the U.S. in its early days includes Florence Lawrence, Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Mack Sennett,
Mary Pickford, Marie Dressler (the first woman ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine), Fay Wray, Victor Jory, Walter Pidgeon, Ruby
Keeler, Walter Huston, Gene Lockhart, Beatrice Lillie, Nell and Ernest Shipman, Norma Shearer, and sound engineer Douglas Shearer.

18
Peck and his successor in 1927, Frank Badgley, were both journalists. It took decades before journalists were to take up the cause of
Canadian film. Today they are more supportive, and sometimes coddling, of Canadian feature films and filmmakers.

19
The NFB has won some 4,000 international awards, including 12 Academy Awards, from 1941, including one for its body of work in 1989,
on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Donald Owen and others made their first dramatic features on the sly, while leading the NFB to
believe the films were documentaries.

20
Ted Magder, Canada's Hollywood (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 1993): 63-71.

21
Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Second revised edition, 1993),
99.

22
Ibid.,, 93.

23
Magder, 72.

69

24
Michael Dorland, So Close to the State/s: The Emergence of Canadian Feature Film Policy (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of
Toronto Press Incorporated, 1998), 77-8.

25
An additional clause that restricted the number of gangster films released in Canada is interesting from the point of view of the evolution of
genre in Canada. There are almost no Canadian gangster movies.

26
Pierre Berton, Hollywood’s Canada: The Americanization of Our National Image. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1975),189-90. Berton
points out that there is a movie called The Canadians starring Robert Ryan. Among Berton's important contributions is his pointing out the
inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the American movies shot in Canada about Canadians as well as the fact that such American locations
as Arizona, Idaho, Washington state, Lake Tahoe and Yosemite Park were used as Canadian, 33-56.

27
Dorland, 75.

28
Ibid., 90.

29
Canada Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1951): 517.

30
Dorland, 62.

31
Morris, Embattled Shadows, 174, 233.

32
Although Massey’s best-known role was Dr. Gillespie in the Dr. Kildare television series, he also played Abraham Lincoln twice in film —
Abe Lincoln in Illinois (John Cromwell 1940) and How the West Was Won (John Ford, Henry Hathaway , George Marshall, Richard Thorpe,
the latter uncredited 1962).

33
Don Carter, "His Excellency The Right Honourable Vincent Massey P.C., C.H., 1887-1967." Research and Information Services, Ottawa
Library and Archives Canada. (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1951). Available from World Wide Web www.collectionscanada.ca.

34
Magder, 81.

35
E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. (Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney: Press Syndicate of
Cambridge, 1990). Hobsbawm wrote, "Above all, where ideologies are in conflict, the appeal to the imagined community of the nation
appears to have defeated all challenges. What else but the solidarity of an imaginary 'us' against a symbolic 'them' would have launched
Argentina and Britian into a crazy war" (here referring to the Falklands with regard to late 20th-century nationalism), 163. Hobsbawm,
however, more or less diminishes the importance of cinema, even while claiming it as part of the important ways in which industrialized, high-
tech societies express themselves: "The first, which requires little comment, was the rise of the modern mass media: press, cinema and
radio." He calls cinema one of the "popular ideologies" that could be "exploited for the purposes of deliberate propaganda by private interests
and states," and notes "the ability of the mass media to make what were in effect national symbols part of the life of every individual," thus
downplaying its importance even while explaining its enormous influence, 141-2. In addition, he cites "the sense of the Canadiens' insecurity"

70

and the "defensive reactions" of the "petty-bourgeois linguistic nationalism" of French Canada in the face of multiculturalism, claiming that
"what lies behind the fear and insecurity of French Canadians" is the social change engendered by the "sudden collapse of the Catholic
Church," 165-6. He ignores the effect of culture and the possibility that Québec maintained its culture and language in the face of English-
Canada's closer alliance to the U.S.. He connects Quebec to Welsh nationalists whose rise coincided with a decline in church-going and
temperance. Hobsbawm does not acknkowledge such a situation as being a reaction against colonial powers or a partial result of popular
culture, nevermind a powerful combination of the two.

36
Ibid., 83-84.

37
Massey himself might have been aspiring filmmaker. A few films exist which he made at his estate, both directing and appearing in them.

38
Gordon Roback, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, "A Study of the English-Canadian Feature Film Industry, 1977-1981" (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Southern California, 1986): 121-2, and Magder, 92.

39
Magder, 121-6.

40
Ibid., 114-115.

41
Dorland, 111.

42
Magder, 127-8.

43 Ibid., 5

44
Just a few of the Canadian actors on American television and in American movies, past and present, are: Kim Cattrall, Jill Hennessy,
Michael J. Fox, Eric McCormack, Evangeline Lilly, Scott Speedman, Gil Bellows, Jason Priestley, Leslie Nielsen, Jennifer Tilly, Pamela
Anderson, Neve Campbell, Keanu Reeves, Natasha Henstridge, Keanu Reeves, Clark Johnson, Martin Short, Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Lorne
Greene, Raymond Burr, William Shatner, Dan Aykroyd, Derek McGrath, and Arthur Hill. Canada has also gone to great, or even desperate,
lengths to claim as Canadians any famous "Americans" born in Canada, even if they left Canada as children, or had only one Canadian
parent: Mary Pickford, Louis B. Mayer, Walter Pidgeon, Rita Hayworth, Arthur Hiller, John Frankenheimer, Daniel Petrie, Ivan Reitman,
James Cameron and Norman Jewison. Cameron left his Niagara Falls, Ontario, home as a teenager. Jewison returned home to Toronto and
is revered there both for his fame as a director and for his establishment of the Canadian Film Centre for aspiring filmmakers, known
commonly as "the Jewison centre." Canadian actors such as Wendy Crewson, Victor Garber, Colm Feore and Michael Ironside have
achieved co-starring roles in high-profile American movies.

45
Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London, New York: Routledge, 2000).

46
Magder, 137. The 1969 features included the seminal and now classic Goin' Down the Road, made for $87,000. Often cited as one of the
finest Canadian films, it was specially screened for the public at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto on the occasion of the film’s twentieth

71

anniversary, with the filmmaker, many of the stars, and several film pundits and preservationists in attendance. The movie's Toronto director,
Donald Shebib, was educated at the UCLA film school.

47
Turner, Canadian Feature Film Index. There had been six in 1966, seven in 1965, four in 1964, three in 1963, two in 1961 and 1962, three
in 1960, four in 1959, two in 1958, three in 1957, one in 1956 (Oedipus Rex), none in 1955, one in 1954, none from 1951 to 1953, one in
1950 (The Butler’s Night Off), one in 1949 (Forbidden Journey), one in 1948 (Sins of the Fathers), none in 1947, two in 1946 (Bush Pilot,
Whispering City/La Forteresse), none from 1942 to 1945, one in 1941 (Here Will I Nest, the first Canadian colour feature), none in 1938 or
1939 (only two films shot in 1939 and both were documentaries about the Royal visit). Piers Handling, in his chapter on Canadian cinema,
claims 29 films were made in 1977, 17 in 1978, 70 in 1979, 50 in 1980, 37 in 1981, 17 in 1982, 34 in 1983 and 27 in 1984, and that the
average was about 28 per year over this period, ("Canada," in World Cinema Since 1945, ed. William Luhr. The Ungar Publishing Co., New
York, 1987), 86-115, 111.

48
Wyndham Paul Wise, ""The Canadian Film Industry: The Tax-Shelter Years." (M.A. thesis, York University, 1986), 7-10. The Special
Investment Programme for low-budget films contributed to the existence of the extremely high-budget movies to come, as well as to co-
productions starring Americans and Britons. In 1974, Echoes of a Summer (Don Taylor 1974) cost $900,000, with 25% Canadian and 75%
U.S. participation, starring Richard Harris, Geraldine Fitzgerald, William Windom, Brad Savage and Jodie Foster. It remained the most
expensive movie produced in Canada with Canadian input until It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time broke the million-dollar mark in
1975. The $1.2 million film starred Anthony Newley, Stefanie Powers, Isaac Hayes, the born-in-Canada Yvonne De Carlo, and Canadians
Lloyd Bochner and John Candy. Produced by David M. Perlmutter and directed by John Trent, it was another of the first high-budget films to
launch major TSE filmmakers in their careers. That year, White Line Fever (co-w. Jonathan Kaplan) for $1.4 million starred almost all
Americans, such as Jan-Michael Vincent, but was produced by Canadian John Kemeny, part of the so-called "Hungarian mafia" in Canadian
cinema, who was to go on to become a major player, along with Robert Lantos and Andras Hamori, with In Praise of Older Women and
others.

49
Magder, 150-166.

50
Gittings, Canadian National Cinema, 96-98.

51
D. J. Turner. Canadian Feature Film Index 1913-1985, 346-7.

52

Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria and Richard Maxwell. Global Hollywood. (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), 1.

53
David A. Cook, History of Narrative Film, Second Edition (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 81.

54
Phone interview, April 13, 1999.

55
Bridget Byrne, "Valenti Rated R for Retiring," www.eonline.com (Mar 23, 2004).

56 Plummer is identified in Canada as Canadian now, since he has returned home so many times in recent years to work, including playing
an acclaimed King Lear on the Stratford stage and getting a star on the Canadian Walk of Fame in Toronto.

72

57
The Grey Fox, re-released in 2002 in Toronto, is acknowledged by most Canadian film critics as one of the finest Canadian films.

58
The movie was known on set as "Asylum of the North," in keeping with the cheeky practice by crew members of re-naming feature films
on set as they unfold. Personal interview with unit publicist of the film, Penny East, May 18, 2007.

59
Roback, 124.

60
Ibid., 131-2.

62
Ibid., 136.

63
Roger Ebert,.www.rogerebert.com.

64
Roback, 43-44.

65
Gathercole, in Feldman, 45-6.

66
Ibid., 44.

67
Monopolistic control such as exerted by Hollywood is contrary to the U.S. Anti-Trust Decrees of 1949, which banned the vertical
integration of film companies’ production, distribution and exhibition arms. The 1952 U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1915 Mutual v. Ohio
verdict that stated that motion pictures were merely a business to be governed by the laws of commerce alone. The so-called Miracle
Decision (after the name of the short film The Miracle) held that movies also constituted "a significant medium for communication of ideas."
They were therefore entitled to protection by the First and Fourteenth Amendments covering freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
The idea that movies communicate ideas was already part of the Canadian Massey Report.

68
$2.5 billion in TSE, DC and other movies, old and new, are at this writing about to be sold to American interests. Gayle MacDonald, "Crisis
time for Canadian film: Some of the film industry's biggest names are issuing a blunt and dire warning to the Stephen Harper government:
police the sale of this country's largest movie distributor to a U.S. company. Otherwise, they say, Canadian film may go up in smoke," Globe
and Mail, Weekend Review, June 23, 2007. This was a two-page article about the sale of Alliance Atlantis' Motion Picture Distribution to
Goldman-Sachs, the Manhattan-based investment house, bringing the TSE connection to financial transactions full circle. $2.5 billion is the
amount Canadian taxpayers have subsidized the library of 6,000 hours of Canadian movies and television shows, 1,200 titles in all and the
largest collection of Canadian film and television fiction in the country, collected over some forty years.. Unless part of the sale is stopped, the
financial house will then sell the programming back to Canadian television networks who are required to air 50 to 60 percent Canadian
content as set by the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission). Atom Egoyan said, "Culturally speaking, we'll
becaime another [U.S.] state, because there is no incentive to continue to develop a domestic industry or a distinct alternative to the
American system." Other supporters include Wayne Clarkson, David Cronenberg, Robert Lantos, Denise Robert and Denis Arcand.

73

Chapter 3: Coming of Age in an Era of Cultural Anxiety

The most common and urgent sentiment emerging from the discourse around
Canadian film and television in the last decade is the stated necessity, for purposes of
cultural and national survival, of "telling our own stories." It is a concept the importance of
which is reiterated on Canadian stages, radio, television, and in political and cultural
debates. Its meaning is presented as transparent and its acquisition, crucial. What has been
omitted from the conversations is the manner and method of "our" storytelling. What indeed
are "our own stories" and, as Geoff Pevere asked in 1988, "just who are 'we' anyway?"
1
It is
time to examine the history of Canadian film in this regard. In this chapter I look at some of
the TSE films themselves, the preponderance of the coming-of-age genre and the reasons
behind its use, as well as some repetitive images, characteristics and narrative patterns.
When the TSE came about, what sorts of stories were chosen and how were they told? How
do they tie in with stories from other periods in Canadian film, other nations and Québec?
The most prominent genre in Canadian storytelling is the coming-of-age. Despite the
existence of other types of movies, the coming-of-age has unfolded in all periods since
1922. Perhaps because of the coming-of-age genre and the reasons and strategies behind
its prevalence, other genres either failed to materialize or were thwarted by the inclusion and
exclusion of certain elements. The most successful Canadian movies turn out to be those
that embraced the coming-of-age theme and conventional genre elements. Those that
combined elements of too many different genres failed to build successful stories.
In 1978, Peter Harcourt suggested the Canadianness of the coming-of-age genre in
an article on filmmaker Allan King. Harcourt describes King's then-new film Who Has Seen
the Wind: "[T]he film becomes a distinguished example of what is really a Canadian genre,:
films that create the world through the eyes of a young child." Harcourt goes on to cite the
DC films Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra 1971), Le Temps d’une chasse/ Once Upon a

74

Hunt (Francis Mankiewicz 1971), and Lies My Father Told Me (Jan Kadar 1972). "If we
extend the age to take in adolescents," he notes, "Then the list of films is enormous—in
terms of richness and productivity, virtually the Canadian equivalent of the American
Western!"
2

Harcourt by no means overstates the case, even when considering other national
cinemas, such as French and Mexican, that foregound coming-of-age. Taking his argument
even further and extending the model to both female and male protagonists who either
refuse to grow up or have difficulty doing so, the Canadian list lengthens considerably. While
not essentially and initially Canadian, Canadian film takes the genre into national and
international cinematic territory. It is telling that Harcourt refers only to DC movies. He keeps
his list contained to movies featuring Canadian geographical specificity. And he singles out
only male protagonists for their coming-of-age. In keeping with and showing respect for the
Two Solitudes, Harcourt weights his trio with two Québec movies, which are always DC or,
more particularly "DQ," i.e. Distinctly Québécois, as Québec movies always are. In 1978, the
TSE was an already seen and being written about as an embarrassment to Canadian
filmmakers, policymakers, journalists and academics, and having even one English-
Canadian film in a set of DC examples was a boon. At least five English-Canadian movies
precede the three mentioned by Harcourt: The Bitter Ash, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (Irvin
Kershner 1964), The Ernie Game, Nobody Waved Goodbye and The Rowdyman (Gordon
Pinsent 1972), and one that follows them—Why Shoot the Teacher (Silvio Narizzano 1976).
All revolve around troubled young male protagonists coming of age in societies inimical to
their personalities or aspirations.
The critical and journalistic discourse on the coming-of-age of girls and young women,
however, is conspicuously absent. There are many, such as Wendy, Waiting for Caroline,
Madeleine Is…, Eliza's Horoscope (Gordon Sheppard 1970), Isabel (Paul Almond 1972)
which is Québécois and in French, Wedding in White (William Fruet 1971), The Little Girl

75

Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicolas Gessner 1975), Cathy's Curse (Eddy Matalon 1976) and
My American Cousin (Sandy Wilson 1985) — all pre-TSE or TSE films starring girls and
young women in some sort of identity crisis. Their situations also explore emotional and
sexual collisions with men and family. It is a trend that continues to the present day, with
such films as The Five Senses (Jeremy Podeswa 1999) and I, Claudia (Chris Abraham,
Kristen Thomson 2004).
In all eras, regardless of genre or gender, the main characters try to negotiate the
perils of coming of age, including sexual encounters, problems with parents, and efforts to fit
in, rebel or get ahead. In some, the coming of age includes issues of race and ethnicity. Next
of Kin (Atom Egoyan 1984)
3
may be the first since the Irish protagonist played by Robert
Shaw in The Luck of Ginger Coffey to examine an immigrant Canadian experience. The
young man in Egoyan's film, Peter Foster, unhappy with his own parents, masquerades as
the long-lost son of a dysfunctional Armenian-Canadian family. As his alter ego, Bedros
Deryan, he functions as a catalyst for healing relationships in his new family. In 1991, Sam
and Me (Deepa Mehta) featured an elderly Jewish man teaching, Nikhil, a young Indian
immigrant to Canada, about life. Later came two more female-centred immigrant movies—
Double Happiness (Mina Shum 1994) about a Chinese-Canadian girl under the cultural
thumb of her immigrant parents, and New Waterford Girl (Allan Moyle 1999) about a
pugnacious and pugilistic American newcomer to rural Nova Scotia and her empowering
effect on the local girls.
The most prevalent group of immigrants referenced is Italian. There are four post-TSE
coming-of-age movies about Italian boys and young men. Brown Bread Sandwiches (Carlo
Liconti, 1989) follows an Italian-Canadian boy who yearns to fit in at school. Léolo (Jean-
Claude Lauzon 1991) features a second-generation Italian boy in Montreal with family
problems. Renzo in Perfectly Normal (Yves Simoneau 1994), another Italian Montrealer
(though the city is unnamed), deals with an American interloper-brother who crosses the

76

border and changes his life. Later, in the comedy Mambo Italiano (Emile Gaudreault 2003),
Angelo causes family chaos when he comes out of the closet to his parents and sister. One
other movie, Touch of Pink (Ian Iqbal Rashid 2004), addresses gay coming-of-age, that of
an Ismaili-Canadian young man living with his lover in London, England and in the closet to
his Muslim mother visiting from Toronto. All are coming-of-age movies, replete with sibling
rivalry and sexual and cultural angst. Even when coming-of-age movies use other cultures,
nationalities, ethnicities and regionalities in their representations, the key issues of
adolescent identity remain, through genres and over time.
At least two TSE movies feature protagonists who fixate directly on American cowboy
mythology. David Goldberg in The Lucky Star thinks the identifying Jewish star sewn on his
clothing signifies that he is a star or a sheriff. Rod Steiger plays a Nazi officer. The main
character of Paperback Hero (Peter Pearson 1974) is young store clerk Rick Dillon, who
struts around his Saskatchewan town like TV's Marshal Dillon or an American cowboy in a
western.
The first coming-of-age film may be the 1922 silent Glengarry School Days (Henry
MacRae, known as The Critical Age in the U.S., executive producer Ernest Shipman). The
filmed version came from a popular 1902 novel by Charles William Gordon (pseudonym
Ralph Connor) published in Canada, the U.S. and England. The story focuses on a young
schoolteacher, led to faith, moral reform and life as a minister through the guidance of his
minister's wife, and his effect on the schoolboys of the Scottish-named Ontario county of
Glengarry. Gordon himself was a clergyman who served in World War I as a chaplain,
traveled the U.S. encouraging American participation in the war, became moderator of the
Presbyterian Church and was one of the founders of the United Church in 1925. The themes
of education, religion and the moral suasion of women would stand as staples in Canadian
film.

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The coming-of-age genre lay dormant during the production of the Depression-era
"Quota Quickies," the establishment of the National Film Board, and the events of World
War II. There was, however, one big-budget feature made in the 1940s that may be the
original pre-cursor of the TSE. Russian director Fedor Ozep made The Whispering City in
English and, at the same time and with different actors, La Forteresse in French. Ozep had
previously directed the Québec Le père Chopin in French in 1945. The novelty of shooting
the same film in two languages, as well as the scenically "quaint" Québec locations, were
noted by the New York Times. The movie's plot about a wicked lawyer/ patron of Québec
arts and an enterprising reporter, however, was criticized as "lethargic" and "garrulous," with
a plot taking "a tediously long time to tell a transparent and none too impressive story."
4
The
technique of shooting in both French and English would later be used in the two Québec
television series Les Plouffe (Gilles Carle 1981) and The Tin Flute (Claude Fournier 1982),
the latter also a feature film in both languages. Whispering City/La Forteresse cost a
staggering $750,000 in its 1946 production year, constituting a pre-TSE attempt to use
Canadian funds to employ a foreign auteur, Ozep, and American actors in a generic murder
mystery with Canadian locations.
The coming-of-age theme returned to film in the 1940s owing in great measure to
MacLennan's novel, Two Solitudes. The phrase itself came from Rilke's Letters to a Young
Poet,
5
in which the poet says, "Works of art are of an infinite solitude."
6
It is fitting that a
Canadian should have borrowed the phrase that would name its historical and ongoing clash
between French and English from yet a third European country and from a literary figure.
Canadian identity would not only be imbricated with all three countries, as well as Italy where
three of the letters were written, but would also obsessively portray struggling artists.
Rilke was only 27 when he wrote the ten letters to a military student who asked his
advice on becoming a writer. It seems likely that the origin of MacLennan's Two Solitudes,
i.e. Rilke, connected Canadian cinema to issues of art, love, motherhood, pregnancy,

78

relationships, cowardice, the professor, the Church, Christmas, the shortcomings of the
male, incipient feminism, narrative,
7
naming,
8
and coming-of-age. Rilke explores all the
aforementioned themes in the letters. His two solitudes actually refer not to geographical
places but to a nascent feminism whose emergence he predicted. He foresees a new,
positive, more equal, "more human," and transforming love between men and women —
"the new female human being," a relationship he says "will resemble what we are now
preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes
protect and border and greet each other."
9
Rilke's solitudes, while not geographical, were
certainly gendered. These feminist concerns raised by Rilke are not explored by
MacLennan, although they will surface later in Canadian movies. His novel follows a young
bilingual Québécois struggling to write a novel about his Canadian cultural identity. It begins
at the end of the First World War and ends at the beginning of the Second World War,
during which it was written.
The novel was made into a TSE movie, shot in 1977 and released in 1978 to
English-Canadian and American reviews ranging from mediocre, from Variety,
10
to
disgusted, from the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. The Canadian reviews tend to
focus on the political and cultural significance of the movie. The review by Jay Scott of the
Globe is subheaded, "The real drama is off-screen." While acknowledging that "At first, the
elation of seeing a major film about us — about our roots — is sufficient to compensate for
writer-director Lionel Chetwynd's stolid, stately style, which belongs to Hollywood's neo-
classical period, the mid-fifties," Scott lights into the cultural and linguistic anomalies:

But in two key cases, the actors playing Canadians are American and French
actors, and they are obviously American and obviously French. Usually,
nationality is irrelevant. Here, perhaps more than in any other Canadian film, it
matters. It matters that Jean-Pierre Aumont, who is otherwise persuasive,
does not expend the slightest effort on faking a French-Canadian accent; it
matters that Stacy Keach, who isn't up to the part, is playing an American
mogul. And when Keach's characters says to Aumont's character, "[Y]ou must
relax, Jean-Claude, you're as fidgety as an American," it matters so much it
utterly destroys the credibility of the film and you begin thinking dark thoughts

79

about the actual statement made by this movie, which may well be the best,
and so the worst, example we have yet had of the American colonialization of
Canadian art.

The representation of Canada and Canadian issues was paramount in the TSE and
the promise fell short. Scott continues, "It is not enough that we make exploitation films for
the Americans; now we are copying their ponderous historical dramatizations." He goes on
to say the movie "does not resemble any contemporary American film of quality as much as
it resembles made-for-TV novels like Washington: Behind Closed Doors, and Rich Man,
Poor Man; it's a passionless political soap opera. With good guys and bad guys."
11
The
Toronto Star similarly points out that the movie is "almost entirely in English," despite the
"ancient conflict, still seething today." He also objects to the casting of non-Canadians in the
two major roles "in this quintessentially all-Canadian chronicle," noting that Aumont and
Keach "are hardly names to set the pulses racing," and then asking, "How many potential
customers in chicago or Melbourne would be likely to storm the box office to see Stacy
Keach in anything?" He then complains that Keach "never sounds like a Canadian" and
Aumont "sounds like what he is, an elegant globetrotter from Old France."
12
To add insult to
injury, the movie credits misspelled MacLennan's name, to which the subhead of Gilmour's
article alludes. Gilmour praises the supporting Canadian actors "in a gallery of performances
that could have been distinguished had there been a distinguished script or inventive
direction." He also writes, "Pierre Berton once wrote a splendid book about what the
Americans did to our cinematic self-image. Two Solitudes could inspire the inverted sequel:
Canada's Hollywood."
13
The journalistic anger and disappointment at the betrayal of the
"quintessentially all-Canadian chronicle" is evident in these reviews. The London, England-
born, Canadian-raised writer-director, Lionel Chetwynd, had co-written the script of The
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz for his friend Ted Kotcheff (who has also lived and worked
in the U.S. for many years). Chetwynd was already living and working in the U.S. when he
wrote and directed Two Solitudes. There was more at stake with the movie Two Solitudes

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than with Porky's or A Christmas Story, both set in the U.S. and featuring American
characters. Two Solitudes, with a large-budget of $1.7 million and $200,000 of CFDC
money, was a betrayal of Canadian history and the hope of its cinematic future.
When the MacLennan novel appeared, the stage was set for literary and cinematic
attempts to break away from the parents and grow up, a theme evoked by name in a literary
review in the University of Toronto Quarterly. It read in part, "Canada should stage a coming-
of-age party this year," in celebration that, "We have produced two novels of the full stature
of manhood," naming MacLennan's as one of them.
14
The novel added cultural weight to the
already entrenched issues of English and French in Canadian history. It also served as a
basis for the issues of male identity and national coming-of-age.
15

The genre in film echoed in the late 1950s when Sidney J. Furie directed two low-
budget independent films about rebellious teenagers — A Dangerous Age (1957) and A
Cool Sound from Hell (1958). Well-reviewed in London, England they were not released in
Canada. A Torontonian, Furie moved to London to direct and, after the success of the British
The Ipcress File in 1965, directed American features. An inspiration to Canadian
moviemakers, Furie left a career legacy of Canadian, British and American movies to that
point unmatched. The coming-of-age trend continued with The Bitter Ash (Larry Kent) in
1963, Nobody Waved Goodbye (Don Owen) in 1964, Wendy (Fred J. Fox) in 1966, Waiting
for Caroline (Ron Kelly) and The Ernie Game (Don Owen) in 1967, Goin' Down the Road
(Donald Shebib) in 1970, and Madeleine Is... (Sylvia Spring 1971). These movies show
themes of childlike-ness, immaturity and/or prolonged or eternal adolescence in both males
and females. The male proponents, such as Ginger in The Luck of Ginger Coffey, emanate
from an imitative incentive induced by the angry young man of Britain's New Cinema.
Although Harcourt does not discuss the TSE, it is a period that utilizes the genre at
least as much as do previous and succeeding eras. In fact, it exemplifies the coming of age
of the Canadian movie business as well as the country itself. As noted, the first TSE coming-

81

of-age movie was Explosion, which introduced many of the tropes that would be repeated
throughout Canadian film. Neither including commercially successful nor well reviewed, it
seems to straddle the TSE and DC movies, being set in Washington state and then moving
across the border to British Columbia. It marks the first time images of sibling rivalry, incest,
border-crossing, war, the Oedipal struggle, madness and national identity vis-à-vis the U.S.
and Europe that came together for the first time in a Canadian movie.

Coming of Age in North America: An Explosion of Sibling Rivalry

Explosion (d. co-w Jules Bricken 1969) was the first CFDC-funded film to be released
across Canada, underwritten by the agency for half its $500,000 cost. Explosion is a
significant film, not only because it has remained unacknowledged 35 years, but also
because it sets the stage for Fothergill's seminal 1972 thesis on Canadian film. As the first
English-Canadian TSE film underwritten by the agency, Explosion paved the way for the
hundreds of films that followed it. Moreover, it exhibits many of the repeated tropes and
tendencies of Canadian film across genres and decades.
16
Explosion explores themes of
Oedipal rage, sibling rivalry with homoerotic undertones, sexual and social impotence,
psychic and physical violence against male and female erotic and authority figures, national
and emotional exile, border-crossing and madness as tropes and themes in a gendered
national masquerade that resonates in Canadian film today. It was the first Canadian movie
to do so explicity. The theme of authority figures run amok begins in earnest here. Later, in
such movies as Improper Channels (Eric Till 1981) and Paint Cans (Paul Donovan 1994),
main male characters, such as an architect and a government worker, at the mercy of
bureaucracies out of control. There is a general distrust of doctors, police officers,
bureaucrats and government workers, as well as of family. Other ISA's, such as the church,

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the military, banks and universities also work to sap the male characters of power, virility and
ability to become heroes, even as they try to succeed in such occupations.
17

Although Fothergill does not discuss the movie, Explosion exemplifies his thesis of
Canada as the unfulfilled younger brother and the U.S. as the confident, successful elder. In
identifying the coward, bully and clown as the three types of male protagonists in English-
Canadian films, Fothergill compares Canada and the United States to two brothers, one
dominant, rebellious, prosperous and attractive to women, the other, timidly suffering from
an unresolved Oedipal complex. According to Fothergill: "Back in their family history, in
1776, while his brother was successfully waging the Oedipal struggle with the father and
asserting his autonomy, he [Canada] refused the combat and stayed dutifully at his father's
side." These ideas suggest why Canadian film focuses on coming-of-age stories, often
involving "the entire line of losers in English-Canadian features."
18
What was not known in
Fothergill's time was a scientific study that found men with older brothers more likely to be
gay. The researchers studied "four groups of Canadian men…the number of brothers and
sisters each had, whether or not they lived with those siblings and whether the siblings were
related by blood or adoption…" The study concluded that "having several biological older
brothers increased the chance of a man being gay." The effect was seen only in brothers
who had the same mothers, whether or not they were raised together.
19
Canada has been
feminized, infantilized and homoeroticized with specific sibling overtones.
The complex sibling relationship in Explosion contains decidedly national overtones. It
begins in the U.S., crosses the border, and ends in British Columbia. "Look, all brothers
grow up and leave home. It’s just that I grew up first," says American-coded elder brother
Peter. "Couldn’t I come with you?" pleads Alan, his Canadian-coded younger sibling. Peter
goes to Viet Nam and gets killed, becoming a hero to his father and younger brother. Alan
runs away to Canada after Peter’s death, enduring the scorn of his father, who calls him a
coward for refusing to fight like a man and an American.

83

In this sibling war, Alan cannot live up to Peter's image. Peter says, "I’m going to
Canada—my passport to freedom…a one-way ticket to Vancouver." Alan responds, "You’ll
never be allowed to come back...You’ll be an exile." Peter retorts, "I’d rather be an exile than
a murderer." As it turns out, Alan, standing in for Peter, becomes both an exile and a
murderer. When Alan advises him to finish his schooling, Peter equates the younger brother
with the father, saying, "You sound just like Pop." The brothers share a confused
Canadian/American identity as well as a big-brother/little-brother and parent-child
relationship. Alan, the emotionally exiled coward with an older brother whose deeds he
cannot possibly emulate, embarks on a murderous, cross-border rampage with a brother
substitute. In failing to become an American-like hero, he ends up insane, a killer who rebels
against such authority figures as his father, his psychiatrist, the media, and the police who
eventually gun him down.
Tied up with Alan’s insecurity and lack of an effective parental role model, the father
being critical and the mother absent, is his inability to perform sexually with women. He is
doubled with his brother not only in a confused conflation of American and Canadian, but
also as a would-be sexual partner of Doris, Peter's girlfriend. Alan imagines Peter’s death in
flashback, then Peter and Doris having sex — itself a rare instance of nudity and sexuality in
Canadian film, but one that would become commonplace. After Peter’s death, Alan brings
Doris to the exact spot where she and Peter had sex, blames her for Peter's death and
sexually assaults her. "So that’s what you wanted all along--what I gave Peter," she cries, as
the camera lingers over her bruised body. Full of fear and anger, she exhorts him: "You’ve
won. Come on then…take it!" As she screams hysterically, the camera pans to a portrait of
Dad, whose image Alan stabs in the heart and slashes with a fencing épée. His fury is split
between his brother’s success with an unattainable woman and his critical, overbearing
Oedipal father. He attacks both with an ancient, upper-class weapon, then flees the country,
unable either to win approval or to castrate the father and gain phallic power.

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The "explosion" of the title is not at first a physical American one, but rather a psychic
Canadian one — an explosion of coming-of-age emotions. The tropes of children, exploring
male sibling rivalry, violent sexuality and homoeroticism, abound. The non-diegetic opening
and closing song, sung in a semi-operative style by a lone male voice, is called "Little Boy"
and includes the phrases "Look around, little boy. Go where you want to go, look ahead, little
boy…as you grow you’ll surely come to know that life is a game played by the strangest
rules, most of them made by fools, but you are not to blame."
Explosion marks an early attempt on the part of filmmakers and the governmental
agency that chose to fund this film in an apparent attempt to be perceived as modern and
sexy, as well as serious, and to compete with American film or attract audiences by setting
the film in the U.S. The unfolding of the genre, however, is muddied, neither psychological
thriller nor murder mystery. The identificatory split between Peter and Alan is difficult for the
characters and the plot to negotiate. Once the hero dies, the transfer to identification with
Alan is impossible, owing to his unheroic actions and inability to discern his goals. When one
brother, Peter, disappears, he is replaced by Alan's friend, a substitute-brother, in Richie.
The characters is Explosion, as in so many other Canadian movies, fail to grow up
successfully. In this case, both brothers die. The fact that director and co-writer Jules
Bricken was American-born and had directed episodes of the original Alfred Hitchcock
Presents series, rife with Freudian imagery, adds a further layer of meaning to the theme of
two brothers with psychoanalytic problems, as well as an expectation that an experienced
American television director could perhaps birth the first financial blockbuster of Canadian
cinema.
20

The coming-of-age genre in the TSE ushered in by Explosion moved to include sexual
and family comedies. Three of the most prominent and commercially successful were
Meatballs, Porky's, and A Christmas Story. Positioned against them were the DC movies
Who Has Seen the Wind, a gentle, sensitive tale of a boy growing up on the prairies and

85

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, about a young Jewish huckster in Montreal trying to
make his mark. All five saw relative commercial success, but higher hopes were put on the
DC movies because of their Canadian markers. They were seen as serious, while the
Florida-set Porky's was reviled for its sexual content and conventional plot structure. The
underlying national narrative in all, however, whether TSE or DC, is the coming-of-age, not
only of male characters, but also of a culture in transition.

Coming of Age at the Box Office: Meatballs and Porky's

Meatballs (Ivan Reitman 1978)
21
constitutes the first in a particular style of comedy in
the coming-of-age genre. It led to Porky's (Bob Clark 1979), the biggest commercial success
in the history of Canadian film, and the now-classic A Christmas Story in 1982. Both were
directed by American Bob Clark, who worked a great deal in Canada, particularly during the
TSE.
22
An interesting case study for the Canadianness of TSE movies, Meatballs was the
first commercially successful picture of the TSE and a relative critical success as well. Some
critics saw Meatballs as a more or less competent Canadian attempt at making an
"American" picture. Others were less accommodating.
23
The public responded to its
predictable but well-paced story and conventionally engaging characters, even though the
actors, other than Bill Murray, were relative newcomers. The narrative structures and editing
techniques are conventionally American, and yet the ways in which it is resolutely Canadian
have remained unexamined. Director Reitman, who makes highly successful features in
Hollywood, is a Canadian who remains committed to Canadian film.
24

The summer camp setting and characters are stereotypically generic—the fun-loving
head camp counsellor, the fat kid, the nerd, the girl-next-door female counsellor, and the
hated rival sports team from across the lake. Scenes of setting a sleeping camp official adrift

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on the lake, making out in the woods, a hot-dog-eating contest, a footrace, a team
competition, ghost stories around the campfire, are reminiscent of similar scenes from
American movies.
Despite the attempt at an American sensibility, the narrative and characters take on a
particularly Canadian context. Tropes of children abound, with the catchy camp theme song
sung by kids, as in Explosion. The setting is quintessentially Canadian, and particularly
Ontarian, taking place in the area called "cottage country," north of Toronto. Although never
specified, this is clearly not New England, Minnesota, or California. It could be Muskoka, or
Haliburton, or the Kawarthas, names familiar to every Ontarian but unnamed in the movie.
One of the counsellors wears a Montreal Canadiens hockey jersey, not only a nod by
Reitman to Canada’s national game and his homeland, but also a reference to the presence
of Québec, one of the factors that differentiates Canada from the U.S. The CIT (Counsellor-
In-Training) overnight excursion happens in canoes, a particular Canadian image harking
back to historic and idyllic representations by the Group of Seven. Canoes, especially red
ones, occur prolifically in Canadian painting, literature and film, with gallery exhibits, an
entire canoe museum in Peterborough, and a later comic icon, Mr. Canoehead, devoted to
the icon. Other Canadian markers in Meatballs include the fact that the camp is named
Camp North Star and its team the North Stars. Canada’s "north," however, is here portrayed
in summer rather than the usual winter. The opposing camp is Camp Mohawk, indicating
here that the Canadians are the "cowboys" and the other team "the Indians," or the "bad
guys," not only reversing the image of the Americans as cowboys but also appropriating the
Native Canadian and American name and image as negative. The cheerleaders wave
tomahawks, another indication not only of casual racism but also of the equation of the
powerless female with the powerless male Native.
Rudy Gerner (Chris Makepeace) is the shy, self-doubting Canadian loner who wants
to quit camp and go home to his parents. The adolescent learns to believe in himself.

87

Although Duddy Kravitz also becomes a winner, he remains an unlikable one, owing to the
cavalier way he treats his girlfriend and his best friend — winning by abusing and taking
advantage of others. While both have big-brother mentors, Rudy wins by learning self-
confidence rather than con-artistry. Meatballs offers an exception and alternative to the
Canadian male loser-younger-brother seen in Explosion and its precursors and successors.
While the loser issue remains central, it is rendered comic. "We’re gonna lose," says
head counsellor Tripper, "But we can lose with some self-respect." In his pep talk to the
team, he gets them pumped up, chanting, "It just doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter!" The
line denies the U.S. emphasis on winning at sports. Once they embrace their Canadian
"loser-ness," they immediately begin to win, inspired by their own identity as non-winners.
They’ve been beaten 12 years in a row. The traditionally unlucky 13 turns out to be lucky for
the Canadians.
Tripper acts as a supportive father figure/ mentor to the lonely young man. This is also
a departure in Canadian film where the father is often absent or emotionally distant, in that
Tripper becomes the catalyst for Rudy’s success and self-esteem. Tripper is in some ways
similar to the U.S. intruder, Alonzo Boyd (played by Robbie Coltrane) in Perfectly Normal
(Yves Simoneau 1991) — larger-than-life, a leader, unplugged, loud, sarcastic, funny,
exasperating but likeable. He is marked as both American, for his outgoing brashness, and
Canadian, for his loser sensitivity.
Rudy does not measure his success or failure through sex, unlike some of his fellow
campers and the teens in Porky's. In fact, the issue of coming-of-age sex slips
metonymically to the older Tripper and Roxanne,
25
and the act is hidden from the audience.
We hear Roxanne say, "That was nice," and Tripper thanks her. Their strewn clothing in the
woods is shown, but only their voiceovers are audible until the sound of a splash. They
become visible, supposedly naked, in the lake — an effectively subtle way of portraying sex
while keeping a General Admissions rating. Roxanne is also a typical Canadian leading lady

88

– friendly and natural, not particularly sexy, not at first particularly interested in the leading
man. In fact, she firmly rebuffs Tripper in the beginning. When he mock-attacks her to show
his interest, he pretends that she was the aggressor as they roll around on the couch and
floor. They resemble kids playing, a common trope in Canadian film, with little or no sexual
content. Although the scene feels innocent and not threatening, the words and actions imply
a joke about rape. Like Rudy, Tripper and Roxanne also come of age on another level. At
the end Tripper asks her to live with him, and it is made clear that neither has lived with
anyone of the opposite sex in a romantic relationship. For the late '70s, this is something
akin to being a virgin. Meatballs is a movie from the kids’ point of view and even Tripper and
Roxanne, not that much older, resemble kids.
The sophomoric pre-Porky's hi-jinks in Meatballs address sexual orientation,
homophobia and lesbianism. The "fat boy," Fink, asks the "nerd," Spaz, "What are you, a
homo?" Fink accuses Spaz, but the girls, who have caught Fink spying on them, are actually
behind him and removing his pants. He has witnessed one girl reading a romance out loud
as two others act out the scene by rolling off the bed, one on top of the other, acting out the
"male" role. The lesbian content occurs in a scene directly before the implied homoerotic
content of Spaz and Fink’s conversations about girls and sex, revealing teenage sexual
experimentation, questioning and confusion about gender roles.
There are several references to border-crossing and American markers as well as
British ones. Tripper asks Rudy if he’s going to Las Vegas. Tripper calls Bruce Lee "the
patron of self-defense," calling to mind American-style action movies. There is a reference to
Monty Python, a popular TV phenomenon in all three countries. The national anthem
announced by Tripper in the very first scene turns out to be a Scottish bagpipe tune, and not
"O Canada," a reference to Canada's Scottish heritage. This is a Canada with close
American and U.K. ties, but perhaps without a clear national identity separate from its
colonizers. Tripper, however, is closer to an American male hero, i.e. one who gets the girl,

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takes a young boy under his wing with humour and sensitivity, and is an effective and
inspiring, though unconventional, leader. Meatballs has an unCanadian happy ending. It is
significant that the two most commercially successful movies in Canadian history —
Meatballs and Porky's — were both TSE generic coming-of-age comedies with happy
endings.
Meatballs, made for $1.6 million, was a huge hit for a Canadian film. It won the Golden
Reel Award in 1980 for highest-grossing Canadian film. Pre-sold to Paramount as a summer
movie for a $3.3million advance, it made $55 at the box office.
26
It was one of the highest
grossers of the year in Hollywood.
27
Kate Lynch, who won the Best Actress Award at the
1980 Canadian Film Award, remarked in her acceptance speech on the dearth of Canadian
movies and starring roles for actresses. The movie also won Best Original Screenplay.
Meatballs may seem to bear little resemblance to the serious DC film Who Has Seen
the Wind (Allan King, 1977). The latter, however, is another coming-of-age about a boy of
Rudy’s age, Brian, growing up in Depression-era Saskatchewan. Like Meatballs, it was
relatively successful for a Canadian film, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1977-8. Like
Meatballs, it features an American star, José Ferrer, as well as a Canadian one, Gordon
Pinsent, a positive father-son relationship and a happy ending. Although Meatballs and Who
Has Seen the Wind seem very different aspects of the genre — one a modern-day comedy,
the other a Depression-era drama — they deploy conventional story-telling techniques, with
the main characters easily identifiable and defined, one scene generally leading to the next,
unfolding the plot without confusion, complication or obfuscation. Who Has Seen the Wind
received more critical acclaim because it was an adaptation of the classic Canadian novel by
W. O. Mitchell, directed by a revered Canadian director, and with serious subject matter. All
these aspects led to its acceptance into the Canadian national canon as defined by
journalists and film academics.

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Porky's, the Canada/U.S. co-production set in Florida, where director Bob Clark grew
up, focuses on teen sex through stereotypically generic characters. The first to make $100
million worldwide, it remains the most successful Canadian film ever made from the advent
of Canadian feature films in 1915 to 2007.
Porky's represents the first TSE film to achieve its national masquerade of misleading
many countries into thinking it was American. Steve McIntyre, writing about Scotland, takes
Porky's as an example of filming at the "centre," and how the margins cannot compete. He
discusses Porky's, quoting screenwriter William Goldman, with the assertion that "if you
weren't living and working in Hollywood you would have missed out altogether on the
opportunity of cashing in on a major business trend...Hollywood and Hollywood alone, has
its collective finger on the pulse...of public taste and has the machinery in place to respond
rapidly and exploit it."
28
McIntyre seems unaware that Porky's was co-produced by a
marginal culture — Canada, starring Canadians, and with 37.5% Canadian financing. It was
made, however, with 62.5% American financing and a U.S. setting. It is a teen sex comedy
in the generic comedy tradition of Animal House. When a TSE movie succeeded in
masquerading as the United States, with Porky's, its nation-ness is effaced because its icons
are either not visible or not recognized by other nations and cultures. Although Meatballs
has Canadian markers, they might be visible only to Canadians or others familiar with
Canadian locations, traditions and concerns. Mixed with American narrative and editing
techniques, Meatballs and Porky's contain more "American" strategies, their successful box-
office adding to the image. Their producers and directors had American filmmaking
experience and went on to make more movies in the U.S. Meatballs and Porky's spawned
many other less successful TSE coming-of-age comedies, including Crunch, Hot Dogs, Hog
Wild and Pinball Summer. The TSE was on a mission to attract audiences. The coming-of-
age teen sex comedy worked to that end.

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Coming of Middle Age: Middle Age Crazy and Your Ticket is No Longer Valid

The coming-of-age genre was not limited to adolescent boys, but continued with
several "coming-of-middle-age" movies that infantilize men. The most prominent of these
was the large-budget ($5,150,000 with CFDC input) Middle Age Crazy (John Trent 1978).
29

Bruce Dern stars as suburban husband Bobby Lee, a Texas car salesman entering a mid-
life crisis, complete with new Porsche and mistress. Ann-Margret plays his wife, Sue Anne.
On the surface, Middle Age Crazy appears to be a comedy about American male suburban
and sexual angst with no Canadian geographical markers. On closer examination, however,
we find telltale signs of Canadianness, though not geographical ones. Ann-Margret is the
strong sexual aggressor, in keeping with many Canadian heroines, even Kim Cattrall in
Porky's. In fact Sue Anne may be seen to have been the cause of Bobby Lee's mid-life
crisis; like other inadequate Canadian male "heroes," he has no desire or ability to have sex
with her, even though she is willing and beautiful. The sexual and identity confusion on the
part of the male is not that of the adolescent, or even the young adult, but of the middle-aged
married male whose mother lives with them.
30
Bobby Lee is as confused in his middle age
as the boys in Meatballs and Porky's. The trend to middle-aged men in crisis will continue
with Richard Burton in Circle of Two and Richard Harris, George Peppard and Jeanne
Moreau in Your Ticket is No Longer Valid. The coming-of-middle-age movies did not enjoy
commercial or critical success. The telling of their stories did not connect with audiences as
did Meatballs and Porky's. They seemed to focus more on the mental anguish of unlikable
male anti-heroes and the suspicious power of peripheral women than on clear genre
conventions, plot or character development.
In Your Ticket is No Longer Valid, two middle-aged businessmen, Briton Richard
Harris as Jason and American George Peppard as Jim talk extensively about being able to
achieve only "partial erections." Jason has a much younger lover, Laura, a Brazilian in Paris

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played by Canadian Jennifer Dale. He seems to have narratively contracted his sexual
impotence from Jim, since it occurs in him immediately after their first conversation on the
topic. Only a fantasy about a young gypsy man on horseback having sex with Laura now
excites him and he becomes obsessed with finding the young man, who turns out to be a
Spaniard, Antonio Montoya (Winston Rekert, a Canadian). "The Watcher" here is another
sexual voyeur. Jason watches Antonio make love to Laura. His old friend Lil, played by
French movie legend Jeanne Moreau, takes over as "The Watcher" as Jason makes love to
Laura. Then, at his previously made request, she kills him with a long hatpin, with a heart on
the end, which she used to murder Germans during World War II. While in the coming-of-
age comedies, such as Meatballs and Porky's, "The Watchers" are kids spying on girls and
women in order to learn about sexuality, in the thriller Blood Relatives and the coming-or-
not-coming-of-middle-age Your Ticket is No Longer Valid, sexual watching turns to murder.
The sexual impotence in the latter is imbricated in a business deal involving Harris’ son,
bringing in the Oedipal element.
The video jacket portrays Harris and Peppard with big cigars and a plane behind
them. Sometimes, Freud noted, a cigar is just a cigar; this, however, is not one of those
times. The coming-of-middle-age is as threatening as, if not more threatening than,
adolescent coming-of-age.

"Narrativus Interruptus" and Canadian Ruptures

When the TSE movies such as Meatballs and Porky's succeeded at the box office, it
semmed partly because they followed genre and screenwriting conventions. It was not
owing to critical reviews, which reviled both, especially Porky's. Such successful financial
examples, however, were few and far between. Much more common were instances of
"Narrativus Interruptus," where the story often stalled or broke down, where genres were

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combined unsuccessfully if not randomly, and where the movie concentrated on factors
other than plot, character and visual pleasure. Martin Knelman wrote of the TSE in 1977,
"The scripts were inadequate because we had no trained screenwriters, and money was
given to people who had almost no preparation for making movies."
31
In the TSE period
particularly, Canadian directors, producers, cultural critics, movie critics, television critics,
and government funders seemed to have a blind spot about narrative and its age-old hold
over viewers.
32
It is ironic that the goal of the TSE was somehow to induce the Canadian
public to see Canadian movies whose qualities held little appeal for them. That strategy is
repeated to this day.
Canadian policymakers seemed intent on producing directorial auteurs rather than,
and perhaps at the expense of, writers. The screenplays funded by the CFDC/ Telefilm
Canada were and still are read and approved by government employees, rather than by
filmmakers. There are few Canadian screenwriters in Canada and even fewer successful
ones. Many who achieved initial success on Canadian television, such as Lionel Chetwynd,
Joe Wiesenfeld, Graham Yost, Paul Haggis, David Shore, and Donald Martin, moved to L.A.
and still write American-style scripts (which could, nevertheless, be analyzed for their
"Canadianness"). In 2006, Haggis achieved fame in the U.S. as the writer of Million Dollar
Baby (Clint Eastwood 2004) and writer/director of Crash (2005). Ironically, Crash, winner of
Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing at the Oscars®, is told in an
alternative fashion and with an ensemble cast — both key tactics in Canadian "Narrativus
Interruptus." Successfully told alternative narratives, however, seem to subvert the known
tenets of storytelling through a thorough understanding of them, as in Memento (Christopher
Nolan 2000) rather than through the types of ruptures seen in the "Narrativus Interruptus" of
the TSE. "Narrativus Interruptus," however, repeatedly breaks the rules of screenwriting with
ruptures and denials that can confuse and alienate or alternatively be used to transgress or
transform genre conventions.

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When executing genres other than the coming-of-age, Canadian movies did not
adhere closely to the tenets of whichever genre they attempted. When they adapted from
novels, as in In Praise of Older Women, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Who Has
Seen the Wind, the plots moved forward in a more conventional fashion, following the plot
outline of the novel. Conventional genres also had more success when they moved forward
in a clearly understandable fashion, as in The Changeling, Black Christmas and The Silent
Partner. None of them, however, achieved the acknowledgement that American or British
thrillers attained. In the thriller genre, the writer, director and editor usually strive for
suspense in the execution of the script and its filming. Certain requisites in screenwriting
apply, such as showing rather than telling, i.e. using the cinematic language rather than
dialogue to reveal dramatic plot points, and editing to build suspense in a classic or
Hitchockian fashion. In The Changeling, many examples of thwarting suspense can be
seen. The climactic discovery that a woman at the historical society is in cahoots with the
corrupt senator is revealed in an expository scene in a restaurant between the two lead
characters, John the professor and Claire the historian. Instead of showing the discovery of
such information and subsequently confronting the senator, they tell it to each other: the
sick child was murdered by the father and an orphan substituted. Without build-up,
suspense and revelation the scene falls flat. Another expository scene in a car tells the story
of how the rightful heir was bypassed in the will and the money funnelled to the estate of the
sickly child. Another example occurs with the daughter in the house where the murder took
place. She experiences nightmares about a small boy coming through the floor. The
audience is not aware of the identity of the daughter or her mother, and the estate is neither
the senator's house, nor that of the professor, resulting in a lack of suture with these newly
introduced characters in a nevertheless important and revelatory scene. These scenes
illustrate how suspense is often dispensed with, whether owing to a lack of knowledge of the
screenwriting craft or to a lack of time and money to shoot the scenes required. The latter

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reason, however, does not hold in the TSE. The budgets were huge, each enough to make
ten or twenty movies the way Canadians had previously made them. The Changeling cost
$6,600,00, enough then to make a dozen movies. It is interesting that producer Garth
Drabinsky has been rumoured to be planning a remake of his 1978 production, perhaps one
that adheres more closely to the generic conventions of the thriller
.

Is it lack of knowledge? fear of story? Other movies show similar narrative strategies
that result in movies with sound storylines that fail to reach their potential as well as their
intended audiences because of structure, dialogue, character, and a certain drive towards
documentary truth. The TSE movie Klondike Fever, about the Yukon gold rush, a subject
representing a historical axis of American and Canadian interests, actually opens with a
caveat about narrative. The on-screen text explains that great storytelling sometimes
requires adding something to get closer to the truth, so they hope Jack London, being a
great storyteller, will forgive the addition of some fiction to the facts. These particular
Canadian filmmakers, steeped in documentary tradition, apologize on-screen to Americans
for using one of their American myths to tell an allegedly Canadian story of the north,
starring Rod Steiger and Angie Dickinson. The classic storytelling of Jack London,
admittedly abandoned, failed to translate to the screenplay of Klondike Fever. The image of
the TSE movies as failures continued to spread. The fear of moving away from Griersonian
documentary truth and into dramatic storytelling is made manifest in the textual warning/
apologia. Perhaps Canadian storytellers would not have anything to say. Perhaps there are
no Canadian stories. Perhaps American stories are better.
In the TSE movie My American Cousin, teenage Sandy has the opening line, in
voiceover: "Dear Diary: Nothing ever happens." Similarly and previously in Blood Relatives,
Patricia wants to know what her cousin Muriel wrote in her diary, because, “Everything that
happens to me is dull and stupid,” she says. The statement echoes the traditional and
prevalent view by Canadians that Canadian movies are boring in comparison to American.

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Canadian movies have often depicted Canada as a boring place that becomes exciting only
when Americans, such as Sandy's American cousin, Butch, arrive on the scene.
33
Even
Sandy's phrase is derivative, drawn from the end of Grand Hotel. Things do happen in
Canadian movies and television shows.
34
Much of the action, however, is below the surface
and deals with the subconscious, affect, suppressed or repressed feelings and troubled
relationships. The plots are interrupted in a way that brings to the surface these hidden
aspects.
The "Narrativus Interruptus" style contains certain visual and narrative codes built
around repeated themes and tropes. The images that loom so large and discrete render the
usually truncated plots secondary. It is as though such overdetermined representations
become more important than anything else in the movie, including coherent character and
subplot development. The story, sometimes simplistic, sometimes confused and difficult to
follow, often stops cold in order to focus excessively on certain images, character types and
situations.
As noted in Chapter 1, there are many features of rupture that undermine classical
storytelling. These can include a series of emotionally unsatisfying storylines and characters,
plots with discrete scenes, loose threads, fuzzy character introduction, unlikable or
undeveloped heroes, incomprehensible or excessively simple storylines, lack of naming or
excessive naming, split focus among ensemble casts, lack of foreshadowing and suspense,
unmotivated violence, lack of sub-plots, lack of character development especially in the
sense of overcoming obstacles, new characters introduced late and for no apparent reason,
and uninvolved characters involved in resolution, no resolution, and ambiguous or unhappy
endings. Canadian movies avoid certain types of emotional expression and catharsis as
well. These tactics seem important at all costs, many of them monetary. The phenomenon of
"Narrativus Interruptus" points to underlying Freudian, as well as social and industrial,

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reasons, rather than narrative goals, for including and dwelling on scenes that fail to move
the plot forward and in fact sabotage it.
Filmmaker Allan King explains the Canadian narrative way according to a historical
perspective. "Well, it was certainly my theory," he told Harcourt in 2002, "that Canadians’
difficulty writing fiction well into their history can be traced to the Ulster and Scots
background that made banking and insurance our first and primary industries. For
accountants, bankers and insurance people, fiction was close to lying and much
disapproved of. So I think there was that repression." King's thesis is bolstered by several
movies about bank-robbers and frustrated corporate workers. King himself made one of the
biggest-budget TSE movies, Silence of the North, plus one of the DC films, One Night
Stand. In explaining why he considered himself a poor storyteller incapable of writing fiction,
the documentary master explained, "I didn’t have the vision." Part of the Canadian narrative
vision, or lack of it, seems to encompass emotional instability verging on or tipping over into
madness. "The most terrifying thing of all for most people is to lose their identity. It’s the
hardest, most painful aspect of schizophrenia," said King.
35
The preponderance of identity-
searchers who are blind, lame or mad in Canadian narrative seems to support King's
theories of narrative and nation.
Harcourt has suggested that Canada is, to an even greater extent than many other
"imagined communities," an unfinished, uncertain, fragmented and contingent nation.
36
This
may be one of the reasons Canadian films maintain — in the face of all other choices,
possibilities, and even stated goals — a particular type of unfinished or ruptured narrative
structure. "Narrativus Interruptus" speaks to a lack of certainty, vision and clarity. The lack
itself, ironically enough, forms part of its identity, one that has always been related to the
castrating power of the United States, the U.K., France, Italy and Germany lurking in the
cultural background, and often the cinematic foreground, of the Canadian national
imaginary. The result of that uncertain and unfinished identity is a film culture that is

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unpopular/ invisible/ hidden; a cinema that rarely emerges from the shadows, remaining
instead on the sidelines; a cinema that represents a difficult family history and the attempt to
forge a separate sibling identity.
Coming-of-age stories are by no means limited to English-Canada. They are common
in other national and regional cinemas as well. The French New Wave trend towards movies
about alienated teenagers, parental neglect and coming-of-age loneliness began with
Truffaut's first feature film, Les 400 coups/The 400 Blows, in 1959, themes he also explored
in The Wild Child (1970) and Small Change (1976). The childhood search for identity
resonated with Canadian filmmakers, who already had a French national heritage in
Québec. The masculine figures in Les 400 coups are portrayed as tyrants, weaklings or
absent fathers. Unwanted or illegitimate children and cold and/or seductive mothers are
common. As in Canadian film, such images are repeated in the French New Wave. The
narratives are child-centred and from the child's point of view. A move from the city to the
wild seascape at the end of the film signifies freedom but also exile. In Canadian movies, the
adolescent searching for identity and belonging is also alienated. The landscape itself is
seen to be dangerous and something to be survived, per Atwood, as in The Far Shore
(Joyce Wieland 1975, sold illegally in the U.S. as The Art of Lust in 1976), The Changeling,
Surfacing (Claude Jutra 1980), and The Snow Walker (Charles Martin Smith 2003). Another
Truffaut theme, the ménage à trois, as in Jules et Jim (1962) and Deux filles anglaises
(1971), also appears in Canadian cinema. In Truffaut's world, however, women are
attainable. In Canadian film, they elude the male heroes. Surfacing from the Atwood novel
re-introduces the female protagonist seen in the 1960s in an Oedipal complication of the
daughter's search for her father.
It was perhaps the Christmas tree in The 400 Blows that first induced English-
Canadian film to take up Christmas as a particular and recurring theme, along with its
northern as well as Christian connotations. The Christian religion is represented in many

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Canadian films, from a simple Christmas tree or the setting of the Christmas season to
whole movies about Christmas, such as Black Christmas, A Christmas Story and One Magic
Christmas, three movies in three different genres. The importance of Roman Catholicism in
Québec and Protestantism in Ontario, however, cannot be underestimated as a contributing
factor. There is a Christian symbol or ritual in almost all Canadian movies. An undeniably
important influence on English-Canadian film was Québec film, which was rife with Roman
Catholic imagery. Before the Quiet Revolution and the advent of television, Québec had a
film production company that promulgated Roman Catholic ideology in popular movies
wedded to traditional Québec values. Renaissance Film Distribution was founded in the mid-
1940s by Joseph-Alexandre DeSève, who brought directors and film workers from France. It
would be 20 years before any other religion was explored in Québec movies.
The first dramatic representation of Jews was in an hour-long drama by Ted Allan,
whose longer version became Lies My Father Told Me in 1972 about a Jewish boy in 1920s
Montreal. In 1974, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz also explored a Jewish family,
focussing on the ambitious young entrepreneur who mistreats others while trying to prove
himself in business to his father and his cronies. Three other TSE movies emerged about
Jewish characters and their coming of age. The Lucky Star (Max Fischer 1979) is the only
Canadian feature to address the Holocaust, doing so from the perspective of a 13-year-old
Dutch Jewish boy and his misapprehension that the yellow star marking Jews in the
Holocaust was an honour, there would be no more Jewish heroes until Bernie in Hard
Feelings (Daryl Duke 1980), another TSE coming-of-age movie. Its focus, however, is on
American issues of race that define Bernie as a White male, rather than a Jewish one. An
attempt to replicate the relative success of Duddy Kravitz occurred with a movie from
another Richler book, Joshua Then and Now (Ted Kotcheff 1985), about a Jewish Canadian
writer returned to Montreal from London and remembering his childhood. The Outside
Chance of Maximilian Glick (Allan A. Goldstein 1988) is about a 12-year-old Jewish boy in

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Manitoba who is forbidden by his parents to play the piano with a Christian girl. The only
Jewish woman in Canadian film is aspiring poet-actress Barbara in Le chat dans le sac
(Gilles Groulx 1964), who in direct address to the camera says she is Jewish. Her
Jewishness and upbringing, however, are not explored; the focus is on Peter, her troubled
gentile Anglo, revolutionary, hero-loser boyfriend in Montreal. There are few other Jewish
characters at all, except the two negative portrayals of the American movie producer in
Deadline and the American fashion executive in By Design. Colin Chandler in Dirty Tricks is
nominally Jewish and played by Elliott Gould. Chandler is the main character, a university
professor, whose unseen Jewish mother wants him to marry a "nice Jewish girl," which he is
quick to point out does not describe Polly.
In Deadline, the Black students are not as important to the narrative as the Jewish
character, American producer Burt Horowitz. The Jewish American character is used to map
misogyny onto English and French Canadian identities. When in Montreal, Horowitz
proclaims, "One thing about these French broads—they don’t bleed you to death to fuck
’em. If you’re gonna get it, you know right away and if they hate your guts you know that, too.
English broads—you don’t even know if you’re gonna get it and by the time they drain you
for a couple of hundred you’ve lost interest anyway." There is a cut to a close-up of his big
cigar. "Wasps are the worst," he says. The earlier portrayal of Jews in Canadian movies as
sweet boys coming of age in Montreal here turns to a broad American anti-Semitic
stereotype that defines some parameters of gender, religio-cultural and intra-national
identity.
The connection between Canadian and Italian culture initiated not only with Canada's
connection with Italy through battles in the Second World War on Italian soil but also with
Fellini's clown figures. The attempt at European high culture on the part of Canadian movies
sometimes manifests and is rendered explicitly in regional or national representations of
Italians in Canadian movies. Canadians masquerade as Italians or Italians as Canadians, in

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Léolo (Jean-Claude Lauzon, 1992) and Brown Bread Sandwiches (Carlo Liconti 1989), both
about second-generation Italian boy children in Montreal, as well as in Perfectly Normal,
about a national and sexual coming-of-age for a second-generation Italian man. Italians,
Jews and Québécois are used as peripheral regional/ national identities to prove Canada's
national identity as a "cultural mosaic" as well as to show some sort of specific character
different from American. In Mambo Italiano (Emile Gaudreault 2003), the Italian Canadian
coming-of-age story is about a gay young man and the troubles of his amusingly
dysfunctional family in accepting and/or rejecting his gayness.
37

While English-Canadian pre-TSE movies were producing coming-of-age tales in
Montreal, from such acclaimed novels as The Luck of Ginger Coffey ((Irving Kershner
1964)) by Brian Moore and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler,
Québec cinema in French also abounded with stories of young people's sexual and political
awakenings. Such movies as Mon oncle Antoine, Le chat dans le sac, Isabel, Les bons
debarras (Francis Mankiewicz 1980), Le temps d'une chasse, Suzanne and others featured
male and female protagonists trying to find their way. Even later Québécois films, such as Le
confessional (Robert Lepage 1996), C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée 2005) and La Familia
(Louise Archambault 2006) all have themes of adolescent or immature adult coming-of-age
amid sibling and parental problems.
Canadian filmmakers in the 1960s, leading up to the TSE, closely monitored the films
of Britain's New Cinema, with its use of male working-class loser-heroes and their unfulfilled
and abused girlfriends and wives. The Luck of Ginger Coffey, for instance, echoes works
featuring the angry not-so-young man, from which Canada's silent loners descend. This
component of Canadian film is related to films by Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Lindsay
Anderson and John Schlesinger. Coincident with the French New Wave, the working class
social realism often portrayed sex, pregnancy and abortion, which became commonplace in
Canadian movies as well. The Luck of Ginger Coffey was one of the first loser-hero movies,

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starring Robert Shaw as the charmingly irresponsible, egotistical Irish dreamer in Montreal.
An early critical success, it paved the way for other key British actors to be imported during
the coming TSE in order to lend credibility, star quality and artistic seriousness to
productions. Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Rita Tushington, Peter O'Toole, David Warner,
David Hemmings and Donald Pleasance all starred in TSE movies, some multiple times.
38

When Peter O'Brian produced and directed his satire of the TSE era, Hollywood North
(2004) he cast another New Cinema star Alan Bates (in his final role), as the egotistical
foreign star.
Many of the British documentary filmmakers who began in the Griersonian movement
would produce World War II films, another connection between Canada and Britain and one
that would become key in the formation of a modern Canadian identity. During and after the
war, some British actors became prominent, including Stewart Granger, Greer Garson, Alec
Guinness, John Gielgud and James Mason. They would come to be seen as American stars
despite their British accents because they starred in films that became popular in the United
States. Directors David Lean and Carol Reed became well known, as did producers Michael
Powell and Emil Pressburger and the production companies the Rank Organisation and
Ealing Studios. In the 1960s, the Bond franchise strengthened the link between British and
American cinema, while British cinema remained distinct because of the British accent. The
Beatles and the image of Carnaby Street London cemented the reputation of Britain as cool
and sexy. The Ipcress File in 1965 was seen as the vehicle for new star Michael Caine, and
not a movie directed by a Torontonian, Sidney J. Furie. Three of the great world directors of
the time made films in Britain — Michelangelo Antonioni, François Truffaut and Roman
Polanski, as well as American Stanley Kubrick (who lived out the rest of his career and life in
Britain). In the 1960s, four successful British films won Academy Awards. America was
investing in British films, not Canadian ones, while Canada was investing in American stars.
Canada seemed to have no choice but to imitate the European New Wave films in order to

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assert its newfound identity as well as to make a dent in the American market. In doing so it
would espouse the coming-of-age film.
The influence of Italy was important in the development of Canadian cinema as Neo-
Realism produced the post-war Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica 1948). The experience of
World War II, with Canadians fighting in many countries, cemented those connections.
Canadian soldiers were instrumental in Dieppe, Juno Beach and D-Day in France, in the
battle up the Liri Valley to Rome, and in Ortona and the Battle of the Gothic Line in the long
Italian compaign, and in the Battle of Britain and The Blitz in England. Italy represented a
type of "thirdspace" country to Canada, i.e. not English and not French, the founding
nations, and not German, the decades-long enemy. Its history of opera, particularly Italian,
would become a key image in Canadian film as a marker of high culture. Canada had a
connection with the Netherlands, having played a major role in liberating that country from
the Nazis. Dutch cinema, however, has had only a small influence on that of Canada. The
Lucky Star, set in Rotterdam, is the only Canadian movie referencing the relationship. The
other European countries, more often depicted, were not only larger and more important on
the world stage, but they also all had vital new cinemas in the 1950s and/or 1960s that
resonated with Canadian filmmakers. In Canadian films, Germans often play villains, as in
The Lucky Star and Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia (Jean LaFleur 1977), while British, French
and Italian heroes or anti-heroes are more emulated.
Québec movies have historically been more overtly political than English-Canadian
ones since before the formation of the CFDC. In 1968, a group of Québec filmmakers, the
Professional Association of Québec Filmworkers, or APCQ, formed the Etats-généraux, a
group dedicated to politicizing film. The resulting Québec Council for Film Distribution
promoted Québec films in the early period of the TSE, just before the 100% tax write-off.
The APCQ created a manifesto, "Cinema: Another Face of Colonized Québec," which
specifically declared opposition to American cinema and Canadian cultural policymakers.
39

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This position would be in direct contrast to the TSE, which, although of the danger of
American cultural colonization, embraced American genre and narrative models, even
though it would not achieve success through them. Québec film, on the other hand, dealt
with Québec culture and flourished. By the time the TSE reached its peak, Québec film had
won the hearts and minds of Québécois and brought them into the box office.
In the 1970s, the decade that culminated with the height of the TSE, Québec
produced about 25 films, as opposed to 14 in the 1960s and 16 in the 1980s, many of them
with CFDC money. In the 1990s, however, there were 29 features and, in first half of the first
decade of the new millennium, 29 movies. Overall they enjoyed much more commercial and
artistic success than those of English-Canada. Québec filmmakers, in the tradition of the
APCQ and its manifesto, made movies specifically for and about Québec. Although genre
comedies and romances have also been produced since then, they inevitably take place in
Québec, in French, and refer to Québec life, values and culture. Québec's distinct society
has traditionally made cultural products for its own population and its language, culture, and
strong historical roots have traditionally drawn audiences to its movies and television shows.
A Québécois TV series or drama can attract as many as two million viewers out of its six-
million population, while an English-Canadian show would be a huge hit with one million and
frequently gets fewer than 300,000. The relatively high number of movies produced in the
1990s and 2000s shows the greater success of Québécois cinema in comparison to
English-Canadian. That trend continues to this day, to the frustration and perhaps envy of
the English-Canadian film industry. In 2004, Denys Arcand and Denise Robert won the
Oscar for Best Foreign Film for Les invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions). That a
Québec movie could earn an Oscar® for Best Foreign Film and an English-Ontarian (Paul
Haggis) living in Los Angeles for decades could earn an Oscar® for Best Motion Picture
indicates how far apart are the solitudes of Canadian cinema.

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While Québec has succeeded, there is little national narcissism possible for English-
Canadian cinema, little pleasure in seeing one's national reflection or representation on
screen. In Language and Cinema, Metz argues that genres go through cycles.
40
Canadian
cinema has little investment in genre except for the coming-of-age. It tries to be
unpredictable but in ways that confuse and obfuscate with "Narrativus Interruptus." If movie
identification is with the point of view, then Canadian film is in some ways missing or denied
point of view. In other ways, it involves doubled or multiple points of view through "Watchers"
and ensemble casts. There is little investment in individualism or individuality. What Turner
calls the "narrating authority" is confused and the "organizing principle of the film" scattered.
Metz says the spectator must identify with the point of view in order to achieve mastery over
the film.
41
English-Canadian stories in great measure deny that pleasure.
Life is tough in Canadian film for children, teenagers and young adults. Coming of age
within the family is bound up with incestuous desires among family or family-coded
members and bound up with relationships with mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, cousins
and lovers in national, regional and international contexts.

Chapter 3 Endnotes — Coming of Age in an Era of Cultural Anxiety

1
Geoff Pevere, "'The Rites (and Wrongs) of the Elder' or 'The Cinema We Got: The Critics We Need,'" Documents in Canadian Film, ed.
Douglas Fetherling (Peterborough, Canada; Lewiston, N.Y: Broadview Press Ltd., 1988), 327. Blaine Allan at Queen's University has taught
film courses asking, "Where is Here? Where is Home?" The questions here are repeated ones of Canadian nation and identity.

2
Harcourt, “Allan King: A Celebration of People.” In Feldman’s Allan King: Filmmaker, 64.

3
Egoyan's Family Viewing also features a child, Van, who, with his mother, is separated from the father by a window. The child is able to
bridge this gap, moving back and forth from one side of the window to the other, from outside to inside and back again. The window image is
already on video, already a generation removed from reality, like Van. He tries to bridge the "generation gap" by getting back to his reoots, his
ethnicity, through his grandmother. All generations seem to be lost, with everyone mediated by the video screen and camera. One cannot see,
however, through a video screen, as through a window, although the editing technique pretends one can), so the isolation seems more
profound. That isolation is emphasized by Egoyan's implication of Canada's disappearing ties to the land. Where the country's window on its
world previously reflected the vast sweep of the landscape, that relationship now consists only of nature shows on television. Where people
were once separated by the land, they are now separated from it. As Stan attempts to wipe out the past on the videotapes, Van struggles to
preserve it. The video "window" thus becomes the site where ethnic cultural memories are replaced with images of sex, themselves
technologically initiated and perpetuated. Van's inability to move and act is a metaphor for national inertia. Like Québec, Aline tries to be

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independent and maintain her ethnic ties at the same time. Like Sandra and Van's mother, she, too, is forced into sexual ties with the morally
corrupt and powerful—the father who wipes out his own as well as other cultures' histories without seeing any harm in it. The most extreme
position of silence, inactivity and powerlessness is represented by Van's mother, gagged and bound by her husband, pleading with the camera
to let her go. Stan can't get it up except through technology; he needs Aline's phone call as well as the video camera and screen. Aline and
technology stand in for phallic power; Stan even rests the phone on his crotch while waiting for her call. The one overt reference to the U.S.
occurs in the video of Van as a child in the garden. He holds a Mickey Mouse doll, symbol of American popular culture. Separated from his
father by the window, the boy imitates his father's mechanical waving gesture, perhaps hoping to grow up to like him. As he runs into the
house to repeat an English nursery rhyme, the young Van, like Canada, is caught between English and American cultural realities, struggling
to grow up and find an identity.

4
A.W., New York Times, "At the Gotham," May 10, 1948.

5
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (New York and Toronto: Random House, 1984), 78.

6
Ibid., 23.

7
Ibid., 92. "Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage."

8
Ibid., 95. "One must be so careful with names anyway."

9
Ibid., 77-8.

10
The Variety reviewer concentrated on a generic assessment of the picture, calling its theme "still relevent but…treated in too stolid a
manner to bring a needed breath of life into this literary tale." Even so, the critic opined, " Film should spark interest at home but is somewhat
too cold and mannered to get a dramatic edge into this saga about a family in a time of change." That, however, was not the case. The film
was a box-office failure. The nuances of the representations escaped the writer, who focuses on the direction as "workmanlike," the actihng as
"good but not effective enough for a needed dramatic charge to lift I tout of an academic treatment."

11
Jay Scott, "Two Solitudes outside Canadian province: The real drama is off-screen." Globe and Mail, September 30, 1978, Entertainment
section, 19.

12
Clyde Gilmour, "Sloppy crtedit was a tip-off: The author of classic Canadian novel Two Solitudes poorly served." Toronto Star, October 3,
1978, Entertainment section, C1.

13
That title would be used by Ted Magder for the title of his book on Canadian film policy.

14
www.mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1583. "Canada should stage a coming-of-age party this year. We have produced two novels of the
full stature of manhood [including] Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes ... Here is the substance of Canada, her countryside, her cities, her
conflicting cultures, and, above all, her people." The Canadian Forum. "Two Solitudes is the most impressive book that comes within my range
this year...The general theme of the meeting of the two cultures is excellent." The University of Toronto Quarterly.

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15
The theme of coming-of-age was used directly to refer to the Canadian film industry as well. Liam Lacey, "Our filmmakers hit their stride:
This year's festival showed Canadian cinema coming of age in unexpected ways—think genre flicks and an ode to Parkdale," Globe and Mail,
Review section, September 16, 2006. The article begins, "Are we commercially there yet?" Later, Lacey writes, "The encouraging news is that
there are more Canadian films this year with commercial potential and that don't hide their origins."

16
Martin Knelman, This Is Where We Came In, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1977), 90. Co-written by the husband-and-wife team of
Julian Bricken and Alene Bricken, from a story by Julian Bricken and Robert Hartford-Davis, it was produced by Julian Roffman for Meridian
Films Ltd of Toronto and Bing Crosby Productions Inc. of Los Angeles. Explosion had a major American distributor, AIP, and International Film
Distributors in Canada. Roffman had produced and directed The Mask in 1961, which had a psychoanalytic theme of masquerade and
transformation, and The Bloody Brood in 1959, the horror precursors to the tax-shelter Prom Night and others. The Mask had achieved U.S.
distribution and Roffman, who formed Taylor-Roffman Productions with Nat Taylor, may have been seen to have achieved some success and
could be counted on to deliver on this, the largest CFDC-funded production. Martin Knelman's comments about Explosion reflect journalistic
sentiments that have precluded serious analysis of TSE movies: "It's about a boy driven by his hawkish father, who hounded his older brother
to Vietnam and his grave. And where is he driven? Across the border to Vancouver, which is awfully convenient for people who need enough
Canadian content to get a CFDC bundle and enough US (sic) content to guarantee commercial appeal." Knelman does, however, helpfully
note that the poster for the film was "hopelessly out of touch with the times," harking back to the "coolness" of James Dean some 15 years
earlier.

17
The impossibility of communication is symbolized by the non-functional or ringing phone turned into a threat or murder weapon. Murder By
Phone, also called Bells, Hell's Bells, and The Calling (Michael Anderson 1980) stars Richard Chamberlain as an environment professor with
an activist father-figure mentor professor (John Houseman) who helps solve a series of murders in which victims are paralyzed and bleed from
the eyes when they answer phones. The murdered bank clerk's phone is a Mickey Mouse phone, implying an involvement by the U.S.
entertainment business. Chamberlain's girlfriend, a painter of murals at the phone company, has a phone with a phallic shape. The
significance of the phone and its inability to perform its proper function is paralleled by the lack of emotional communication between
characters. The phone in Black Christmas is equally dangerous, used by a stalker to terrorize a sorority house. The murder in One Night Stand
is accomplished by strangulation by a telephone cord. The telephone recurs as malevolent trope in the TSE. In Murder By Phone, the phone
becomes the means to contact and murder strangers at a distance. In Dirty Tricks, when William the student calls the FBI about his letter from
George Washington, the gay thugs crash the phone booth and kill him. In One Night Stand, the young stranger strangles a woman with a
phone cord.

18
Feldman, Take Two, 54.

19
Randolph E. Schmid, "Study: Men with older brothers more likely gay," Associated Press, June 26, 2006.

20
The poster for the movie shows the faces of Alan and his friend Richie, his brother Peter kissing a woman, Richie half-naked holding a half-
naked woman from behind, Alan pointing a rifle at his brother's back, and the convertible sports car. The text reads, "THIS PICTURE TELLS
IT LIKE IT IS! TODAY'S GENERATION — Living by their own code! Strung out, hung up, hassled by the establishment! pressured to the point
of…EXPLOSION". The poster's upper half is blue and the lower half pink, as though male and female were being equally interpellated and
infantilized. The word "EXPLOSION" is situated on the pink portion which is slightly larger. Richie's head is in the blue while his neck and
shoulders are in the pink.

21
Reitman had just completed the phenomenally successful Animal House before Meatballs.

108

22
In addition to Porky's and A Christmas Story, Clark also directed the TSE films Black Christmas, Murder By Decree and Tribute.

23
Globe and Mail film critic Jay Scott cancelled a planned interview with the director after screening the movie. Personal recollection.

24
Reitman donated the land in downtown Toronto for the forthcoming new Toronto International Film Festival building.

25
The name Roxanne is clearly a literary reference to the Cyrano de Bergerac heroine, whose suitor, like Tripper, is afraid to make his
feelings known, a reference to classical culture that recurs in Canadian film.

26

Manjunath Pendakur, Canadian Dreams & American Control: The Political Economy of the Canadian Film Industry (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press), 183, 190, 210.

27
Magder, 188.

28
McIntyre, Steve. "Vanishing Point: Feature Film Production in a Small Country," 97. In Hill et al. John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul
Hainsworth. Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe. (The Institute of Irish Studies, the Queen’s University of Belfast in
association with the University of Ulster and the British Film Institute, 1994), 88-111.

29
Executive produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, Middle Age Crazy was produced by Robert Cooper and Ronald I. Cohen, both of whom would
go on to illustrious careers, Cooper at HBO and Cohen in the Canadian regulatory area. Co-producer John Eckert, who began work in
Canadian commercials and then features, works on such big-budget American fare as Legends of the Fall. The late Reginald Morris would be
the Director of Photography (called DP in the U.S. but DOP in Canada) on at least 16 precursors and TSE movies from 1974 through 1983.

30
Knelman, “Rhombus’ plate is filled with project” Toronto Star, March 9, 2003, Entertainment section. Canadian movies that concentrate on
some aspect of border-crossing, coming-of-age continued. Knelman writes about the art/performing art cinema company Rhombus Media as it
moves into larger-budget movies: “It’s tempting to call Rhombus the Miramax of Canada," except for the fact that it plans a $6 million film
written by and starring "Toronto’s versatile actor, writer and director of stage, TV and movies." The movie, Child Star, stars Don McKellar,
about a Hollywood teen star “who comes to Toronto to make a movie in which he plays the kidnapped son of the U.S. president.” McKellar will
play “an eccentric experimental film director who takes a job as the child star’s driver.” Child Star addresses Canadian filmmaking and
American star-making directly.

31
Knelman, This Is Where We Came In, 98.

32
Shebib says the criteria for choosing which movies get to be made are skewed. His two questions are: "Should this movie have been
made? And should it have been made in the way it was made?" Personal interview with Shebib, Fri. March 14, 2003.

33
Similarly, in Shebib's movie Between Friends, the Canadian's hero is an American surfer.

109

34
The phrase is repeated in the hit TV comedy series Corner Gas. In the beginning of one episode (aired on CTV Sunday, June 3, 2007),
Karen says to her police partner, as they are parked as usual on an empty highway by endless fields, "Nothing ever happens." It sounds like
both homage to and satire of Canadian movies.

35
Feldman, ed. Allan King: Filmmaker, Toronto International Film Festival, 2002.

36
Peter Harcourt. "The Canadian Nation: An Unfinished Text," Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Volume 2 Nos. 2-3 (1993).

37
Newfoundland has been part of the use of regionality to stand in as part of the nation, with The Rowdyman (Peter Carter 1971) and John
and the Missus (Gordon Pinsent 1985), joined more recently by Rare Birds (Sturla Gunnarsson 2002) and the American co-pro The Shipping
News (Lasse Hallström 2002). Its Otherness, compared to the too-familiar territory of the English/ French duality, opened new spaces for
Canadian film as well as a new location for American co-productions.

38
Rita Tushingham, famous at the time from having starred in the Brit hits The Girl with Green Eyes (Desmond Davis 1964) and The Knack
and How to Get It (Richard Lester 1965), was married at the time to Toronto commercial director Ousama Rawi who was associate producer
on the 1984 Flying directed by Paul Lynch. Donald Pleasance starred in nine TSE movies, David Hemmings in four, Richard Harris in three,
David Warner in two, and Canadian Christopher Plummer, with both British and American cachet, in eight. These actors were not box-office
draws in and of themselves.

39
Michel Houle, "Québec cinema," Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 22 (May 1980): 9-14.

40
Christian Metz. Language and Cinema . New York: Praeger, 1975 ,

41
GraemeTurner, Film as Social Practice (London, New York: Routledge, reprinted 1990), 115.

110

Chapter 4: Recontextualizing High Culture,
Madness and Homosexuality

Underlying the glossy, expensive TSE surface of big budgets and stars, connections
emerge among high culture, madness, doubling, homosexuality, horror and artistic
frustrations. The movies served as a way in which to continue such themes and larger
narrative patterns that cut across genres and tones. The aspect of high culture is offered as
an alternative to American popular culture. It comes in the form of art, opera and higher
education as the backdrops to and reminders of familial troubles. Characters, both male and
female, are doubled in ways that suggest homoerotic fear and denial as well as sibling and
parental attractions. Artistic and professional frustrations and deviations conjoin with religion,
incest, horror and murder. Many protagonists are already mentally unbalanced or follow
paths that lead to madness. These images often break through the narrative in rather
startling ways. From the doubling of homosexual Robin and schizophrenic Liza in
Outrageous, to the twinning of the institutionalized Michael with homosexual Larry in Double
Negative, the twin boys in The Changeling and the mad medical twin surgeons in Dead
Ringers, and the horrors of Canadian/American screenwriter Steven in Deadline, artists,
writers, photographers, performers, professors and doctors are portrayed as frustrated and
verging on, or tipping into, madness. High art, madness and homosexuality represent
deviations from what is perceived to be the norms of the "low culture" of U.S. movies. The
obsession with European high art and the insistent ruptures of "Narrativus Interruptus" stand
in direct opposition to, and denial of, Hollywood conventions.
In both TSE and DC movies of every genre and genre mix, high-art markers mix with
specifically Canadian images in an uneasy blend of classical art and popular culture. Without
a clearly defined culture of its own, Canada turned to close ties with its European colonial
ancestry to raise its filmic content and style to a higher intellectual and cultural plane, above

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American popular culture. Plots, characters and conversations involving art, literature, music
and institutions of higher learning are endemic. Many attempts were made to legitimize
movies as art by having "real" artists involved in their creation. Ashley’s paintings, for
instance, in Circle of Two, were executed by noted Toronto artist Harold Town. Other films
used famous Canadian composers, both classical and popular, mostly notably Glenn Gould,
Leonard Cohen, Moe Koffman, Hagood Hardy, Paul Hoffert and Harry Freedman. Particular
markers include the remarkably common inclusion of both diegetic and non-diegetic opera
music and classical piano pieces, in addition to paintings, sculptures and still photographs.
Tosca's cry of "I live for art!" in Puccini's famous aria might stand as the artistic battle cry of
the frustrated artist in Canadian film. Many of the instances of opera in Canadian film are
particularly Italian, as in Double Negative and Perfectly Normal. Instances of opera are often
used as a substitute for homosexuality/ homoeroticism.
The prevalence of movie characters in the guises of artists, writers, professors and
photographers, such as painter Ashley in Circle of Two, professor John in The Changeling,
screenwriter/ professor Steven in Deadline, novelist/ journalist Michael in Double Negative
and professor Colin in Dirty Tricks, represents the high cultural and educational ideals of
Canadian artists and filmmakers. Moreover, the small academic and film communities are
closely related and often interdependent. The auteur filmmakers are often intellectuals
themselves, as well as actors, sometimes from professional, artistic, educated or privileged
backgrounds, such as Michael Snow, Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Claude Jutra,
Denys Arcand and Don McKellar. The tendency to claim high cultural ground can be seen in
the DC films Who Has Seen the Wind (from the acclaimed Canadian novel by W. O.
Mitchell), The Grey Fox, where the Canadian heroine is an opera-loving photographer and
the American an opera-loving train-robber, and My American Cousin, where the Canadian
mother acts in a theatre group and the American is an irresponsible teenager. Artistic
concerns are prevalent in Québec movies as well. La femme de l'hôtel (Paule Baillargeon

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1984) is about a woman filmmaker, her art and a mysterious double of her lead actress. In
La vie rêvée, a Québécoise, married to a Toronto businessman, falls in love with a Toronto
painter, a situation that enables an examination of the English-French question as well.

Those Crazy Canucks – Method in the National Madness

Images of Canadian cinematic madness go back to the 1960s, coincident with the
emergence of a modern Canadian identity. Forms of insanity almost always play out in the
context of family. Madness is also imbricated in the historical inability to bring together the
dualities of English/ French, Canadian/ American, male/ female, gay/ straight, centre/
periphery, child/ adult, metropolis/ hinterland, local/ global. The instances are legion.
Mental instability is evident in cinemas other than Canadian. For example, the
introduction to the book on British cinema, All Our Yesterdays, is entitled "Amnesia and
Schizophrenia." Barr uses the metaphors to refer both to postwar protagonists and films as
well as to the critics trying to come to terms with British cinema. While British cinema
encompasses both amnesia and schizophrenia, Canada's madness resists amnesia. This is
perhaps because there is little known and shared history to remember, let alone to forget.
Instead, Canadian madness represents itself as schizophrenic, a disorder that involves a
doubled consciousness along with a disconnection from reality. In Canadian cinema,
instances of twinning, incest, and a general "craziness" abound, usually represented with
national specificity.
1
Although schizophrenia does not technically refer to dual identity, many
characters in Canadian film, if not technically insane, are dualized, doubled, culturally
unbalanced or caught between two identities. They may also be marked by a lack of self-
knowledge, a lack of knowledge of place, excessive border-crossing, and exaggerated
quirkiness.
2
They can be insecure, narcissistic or generally out of touch on some level.
3
The

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words "crazy" or "insane" are repeated incessantly as characters grapple with sexual,
regional and national identities. Journalist/ screenwriter Tom Hedley writes, "We are a
nation, after all, whose collective imagination has never been able to overcome our
institutions or our geography. The tradition of our cultural heroes is that they are shaped by
the mystique of space and distance — the myth of the land — and finally absorbed by our
institutions. It's part of our cultural insanity (italics mine) that deep within our most private
yearnings the Group of Seven lives, though most of us dwell in cities; our economic realities
are one thing, our dreams another."
4
Dreams of identity and economic exigencies are seen
to be mutually exclusive. The glossophagia of language effacement can be extrapolated to
mean cultural and national erasure. The characteristics of Canadian cinematic territory and
consciousness, coupled with the realities of the global marketplace, invite both assimilation
and rebellion. The locus has more than a little of the loco in it.
There is repetition as well as meaning in the national movie madness. In many DC
films in particular, both English and French, male and female main characters suffer not only
from schizophrenia but also from sexual confusion, hallucinations and mental imbalance. In
The Ernie Game (Don Owen 1967), a confused young man is just released from a mental
hospital. In Outrageous!, Liza is schizophrenic. In Slipstream (David Acomba 1972), a disc
jockey ends up in a mental hospital, after setting fire to his farmhouse. In Isabel (Paul
Almond 1967), a young woman is mentally unbalanced through incest. In Paperback Hero
(Peter Pearson 1972), a Canadian loser dresses and behaves as though he were the town
marshal in an American western, one of the direct references to Hollywood in the early TSE
period of the Special Investment Programme for low-budget movies. In The Wars (Robin
Phillips 1980), Robert becomes unbalanced after witnessing the terrors of World War I,
homoerotic attractions and the emotional horrors of an incestuous home. In Alligator Shoes
(Clay Borris 1980), an aunt, released from a mental institution to the care of her family,
makes incestuous overtures to her nephew and finally commits suicide. In I Love a Man in

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Uniform (David Wellington 1993), an actor/ bank clerk imagines himself to be, and dresses
as, a policeman. In Dancing in the Dark (Leon Marr 1986), a betrayed wife's shattered
illusions of a happy marriage lead her to murder her unfaithful husband and end up
institutionalized and catatonic. In Sam and Me (Deepa Mehta 1991), an old man
experiences a freeing kind of dementia with a young man. In One Night Stand (Allan King
1977), an unbalanced young man of indeterminate sexual orientation, picked up for sex by a
young woman, mentally tortures her and murders her friend with a phone cord. The
aforementioned DC films gathered at least some consideration in the Canadian press.
The TSE group, on the other hand, feature more conventionally generic ways of being
crazy, with the use of stereotypical murder mysteries, thrillers, and horror movies which as
genres normally showcase mentally and emotionally unbalanced characters. Some,
however, still reference mental hospitals. In Double Negative (George Bloomfield 1979) was
a higher-budget TSE movie, Michael is in a mental hospital because of his having witnessed
war atrocities in the Middle East. Mr. Patman (John Guillermin1979) stars James Coburn as
a beloved orderly in a mental hospital who gradually exhibits delusional behavior and ends
up being admitted as a patient.
The TSE suddenly showed a notable excess of these genres for a country
accustomed to making what might be called small, quiet, national home movies about
"crazy" dreamers and losers. Instead of concentrating only on lone unbalanced individuals
struggling with inner demons, the TSE films turn frustration and lack of success into incest
and multiple murders, involving the supernatural, bodily horrors, parents, siblings, cousins,
doubles and prostitutes. In The Silent Partner, Black Christmas, The Changeling, The
Haunting of Julia/ Full Circle, East End Hustle, The Pit, Covergirl, Murder By Phone, and
others, lead characters are plagued by unexplained fears, hidden "Watchers," stalkers and
killers. In Outrageous!, the sibling-coded characters avoid such interpellation by leaving the
country. But they cannot avoid personal and national madness.

115

Madly Outrageous!

In Double Negative and Outrageous!, the madness, both male and female, emerges
in part from a mother who creates problems by being overbearing, manipulative, phallic,
cold, unloving, too absent or too present. In the case of Outrageous!, Liza is schizophrenic.
Her mother lays the blame for her daughter's illness, ill-advised pregnancy and subsequent
stillbirth on Liza's homosexual friend Robin, even though he was in Toronto when Liza gave
birth in New York. His transgressive sexuality, unspoken by the mother, and his willingness
to leave Canada for the U.S. seems to be at fault. As soon as Robin signs his American
contract, there is a cut to Liza on the hospital phone, saying, "The baby was born dead." As
soon as Robin crosses the border to find show-business success, Liza gives birth in Canada
to a dead baby. Liza's mother grabs the phone from her, crying, "You see what you've done
to my little girl in your wild life…it's your fault, Robin Turner!" Liza counters, "It wasn't his
fault." Mom replies, "Well, it was somebody's fault." Robin has also saved Liza from her
mother and the other phallic authority figures in Canada and taken her to America, his
imagined cultural home. The borders between Canadian and American, crazy and sane,
female and male, are frequently crossed and hotly contested.
Liza's madness, rendered visible and nameable — schizophrenia and pregnancy — is
equated with Robin's homosexuality. It is as though crazy people speak a language all their
own: hers, madness; his, homosexuality. "The other language," she tells him. "It's hard to
translate into English." The language of masquerade and insanity is tied to sexuality, gender
and nationhood. When Liza repeats, "I'm dead," he responds, "No, you're not. You're alive
and sick and living in New York like eight million other people…You're Liza…You're not your
mother…you'll never be normal, but you're special…there's only one thing. You're mad as a
hatter, Dahling! But that's all right. So am I…I've never known anyone worth knowing who

116

wasn't a positive fruitcake. We're all nuts. You and me are here for love and to look after
each other. You're not dead. You just have a healthy case of craziness." Liza's craziness is
a positive state as long as she's in the United States and away from the mad controlling
parental authority figures in Canada. Liza smiles at his acceptance of her. "Craziness?" she
asks. "Yes," says Robin. "Make it work for you. Mad, mad, Dahling!" they laugh, shouting
"Maaaaad...Maaaaaad!" at each other. Both Liza and Robin have been diagnosed and
judged by the establishment as sick and crazy. Robin leads Liza to believe she is not crazy,
that she "belongs out here," i.e. not in the closet of mental illness where her mother, the
nurse and her doctors continually try to shove her. Both are attempting to emerge from their
own individual gender and national closets.
Liza refers to her schizophrenic episodes — which include delusions and a
dissonance among thoughts, emotions and actions — as the "bone-crusher." She thus
makes the connection to the physical and anthropomorphizes the disease. At the time the
film was produced, shock treatments were used not only as remedies for schizophrenia but
also for homosexuality. Like madness, homosexuality was an undesirable condition to be
overcome. Such a connection between mental disorder and sexual orientation marks Robin
and Liza as mad soulmates.
5
When homosexuals and schizophrenics transgress borders,
fears arise that not only medical and familial notions but also nations will fall. Both Liza and
Robin ultimately embrace their madness/ difference and feel they must escape their country/
captors to become whole again. Both their transgressions are against the ISA's — Liza's
against the medical/ familial and Robin's against the cultural/ social. They inhabit the crazy
Canadian periphery and must escape to America in order to be accepted as free artistic
spirits. The narrative triumph of Outrageous! consists in the representation that, even though
Liza is punished by the phallic mother for her "sins" of sex, pregnancy and disavowal of
authority, she and Robin flee the oppressive institutions to attain personal happiness.

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When Robin grabs his agent/ cab driver in New York and tells him to drive across the
border and back to Canada, he collects Liza and takes her back to New York, thus rescuing
her from the stillborn culture of Canada. He tells her, "You're home. Say 'home' for Dada."
Robin begins to find the artistic and commercial success unavailable to him in Toronto. The
rare happy ending, however, is a border-crossing event. They must leave Canada to find
freedom, happiness and the possibility of popular culture.
6
They must become mad to find
sanity.

Twin Trouble: Double Negative (1979)

Double Negative (George Bloomfield) presents the backdrop of a foreign war to
examine the madness and homoeroticism of Michael, a journalist in a mental hospital in an
unidentified North American city played by Toronto. The movie uses an unnamed Middle
Eastern conflict from which Michael has emerged mentally scarred. The war doubles for the
conflict inside Michael between sanity and insanity, heterosexuality and homosexuality, and
sexual shenanigans involving his wife, his mother, and his mistress. He is also both the
"Watcher" and the "Watched."
Michael's fellow patients in the mental hospital are also "Watchers." They comprise
most of the Canadian cast of the Second City stage and television comedy team, including
John Candy, Joe Flaherty and Andrea Martin. The success of Canadian sketch and stand-
up comedy, then and now much more successful than Canadian movies, has sometimes
been seen as resulting from an ability to stand outside the U.S., watch, and then turn those
observations into satire. That situation would render them a popular and successful version
of the "Watchers," not entirely participatory but there to watch and/or record the main or
primal scene. In Double Negative, rather than being self-consciously funny, they are merely

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inmates. The trip between comedy and madness, however, could be a short one. A
knowledge of the Canadian Second City cast is necessary to read the mad comic subtext.
Like Steven in Deadline, Michael is a writer, both journalist and author of an acclaimed
book. As a "Watcher," he witnessed unnamed war atrocities and suffers flashbacks. There
is, however, no further reference to the tortured people. The white male and his problems
are the focus here. Michael lives in the mental hospital, having been driven crazy by his
experiences. As in Explosion and Outrageous!, doctors and psychiatrists deal with mental
instability and are represented as important but ineffectual authority figures. At one point,
Paula says to Michael, "Where have I been? I’ve been crazy! Let’s go to Jamaica, just for a
week, lie in the sun and make love." Although Michael says, "I know what I’m doing," the
male is not in control here, even of his own sanity or sexuality. Women and doctors are in
control and homosexuality lurks dangerously. Michael’s wife was raped and murdered while
he was with his mistress Paula. His insanity begins when he returns from the Middle East,
intent on telling his wife he wanted a divorce. In the asylum, Michael is monitored by Paula,
his mother, a gay friend, a private investigator and a British psychiatrist.
Anthony Perkins, who is often coded crazy as well as gay in movies, particularly
Psycho, which involves the mother in clearly Freudian patterns, plays Larry, a gay-coded
security cop. Michael meets Larry in a bar with the provocative name of the Velvet
Cucumber. In a fight, Michael gets knocked unconscious and wakes up on Larry’s couch
with Larry watching him. Larry tells Michael he is not in the habit of picking up strangers but
he liked his book. He mentions that he has a shower, a Jacuzzi and a sitz-bath, and also
that he loves the Middle East, "politically, geographically, erotically." Larry is a gay-coded
"Watcher," in charge of "security." Throughout the movie, the gay subtext is, as noted,
repeatedly affirmed and denied. Paula tells Larry, "Stay away from him," meaning Michael.
Paula undresses for Michael in his hospital room, while a non-diegetic song plays, including
the phrase, "You’ve got to open the door." The line seems to signify the door to heterosexual

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sex, as though advising Michael to disavow the homoerotic door represented by Larry. To
support that thought, Paula kicks the physical door closed and she and Michael have sex.
To help disavow homoerotic attraction further, Larry is seen in bed with a naked woman.
She is on top and her name Frances, which could be the name of a man or a woman
(played by Elizabeth Sheppard, who is gay). Both wear sunglasses as a thin disguise for
their heterosexual masquerade. They listen to classical music, one of the signifiers of
European high culture. When Paula comes to the door and interrupts them in bed, Larry
covers himself with a short white fur rug. When adults have sex in the TSE movies, there is
often a third person involved, watching, waiting or interrupting. The tactic is repeated in Hard
Feelings, Blood Relatives and many later movies, such as the Québécois C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-
Marc Vallée 2006).
Psychoanalytical aspects of Michael's life seem to be more important to the movie
than the plot. Michael's doctor wants to know about Michael's childhood and dreams in
which his mother is dead. The mother, however, is very much alive, a transgressive border-
crosser who arrives from Philadelphia. She is introduced to Paula, and the film cuts
immediately to Michael breaking into Larry’s apartment and going into his closet. There he
finds copies of cheques signed by Paula. The film cuts back to Michael’s mother, who says
that he grew up without a mother. The edit suggests a correlation between girlfriend, mother,
gay lover and money. "His father got rid of me," the mother continues to the doctor. "I
shocked the upper-middle-class pants off them." The doctor asks, "And did you shock
Michael as well?" seeming to suggest child sexual abuse and incest or at least a primal
scene. She replies, "Michael was only four," giving the doctor a long ambiguous look. She
and her husband, she says, were "sexually incompatible…he had no feelings for warmth or
pleasure…and then Herbert came to stay with us…he was a student…I suppose you could
say I was sexually starved…we became lovers…he still sends a card every Christmas." The
connection between dominant mothers, homosexual sons and son-substitutes, and absent

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or emotionally distant fathers, all shown in The Wars as well, is drawn. The implication is that
war plus family problems, especially with women, plus homoerotic attraction equal male
madness.
The "Watchers" are in the shadows, peering and spying, with many characters unable
to see clearly if at all. Michael and Larry are being watched by Harlan (American actor
Howard Duff), a private investigator who loves classical music and opera, markers of artistic
elitism and effeteness. Like other "Watchers," this one wears gloves, which mark him as a
film noir-type character who stands outside or waits in cars, with a touch of shadiness and
danger about him. He tells Paula, "I’m no peeping Tom," his words belied by a photo of a
gay-coded man over his right shoulder and an opera poster over his left. "Puccini?" she asks
him. "Rossini," he replies. Opera music plays as Larry returns home to catch Harlan the
"Watcher" in the apartment. "I think you’re a faggy cat burglar," Larry tells him. "After all, Mr.
Miles, your door was open," Harlan explains. At this suggestion, Larry shoots him, with scant
motivation other than the psychoanalytic fear of homosexuality, and the need for a
"Narrativus Interruptus" rupture. The film cuts to Michael's mother telling Paula that Michael
discovered her making love to the student, Herbert, thought Herbert was smothering her and
began to cry. Here is proof of the primal scene and its effect on Michael's mental state. He is
equated with Harlan as a "Watcher," but also as a child who has happened upon the primal
scene between his mother and her lover rather than the father. Paula is standing between
the doctor and the mother, who is dressed in a blood-red suit and pure-white blouse as she
continues the tale. Her husband discovers his wife with her young lover and throws her off
the bed. "I hit my head," she says. "And there was little Michael there on the floor, watching,
crossed legs." Harlan is doubled with Michael, who both watches and is watched. Harlan
drives a Studebaker, symbol of automotive and social failure. He is on the payroll of
Michael’s doctor, symbol of failed authority. All doubled, all sexually obsessed, they unfold
stories more relevant to a psychoanalytic than a genre reading.
7

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Michael's mother and Paula are doubled as phallic females. His mother has been both
physically absent and oppressively present in his mind and dreams. Paula, an architect, is
equally powerful. To indicate her influence, onsite she trades her toque for a hardhat,
certainly a male-coded accoutrement when the movie was made. When her female
assistant says one of the construction workers complained to the foreman that his hardhat
was too tight, Paula responds, "Maybe he’ll get a headache," another reference to the many
headaches and head injuries for Canadian movie men, beginning in 1919 with Dolores'
husband in Back to God's Country. The head wounds of the inadequate male seem directly
related to the strong female and his inability, in her presence, to overcome obstacles and
become heroic. The woman frequently saves him. The man who drove home Michael’s
murdered first wife, Lorraine, the night she died, was whacked over the head and received
ten stitches in the eye. Showing Paula his wound, he says it was dark and that "nobody
could see nothin’." Later, as they both watch from a car, he tells her, "I can’t see nothin’." In
addition to head wounds, many men, as in The Wars, If You Could See What I Hear and
Love at First Sight, have trouble with their vision.
Michael's doctor tells Paula that Michael is still "very disturbed" and "decompensated,"
i.e. acting strangely. That word can also be interpreted as a reference to money —
compensation, or de-compensation. Money will later be transferred among the characters,
originating with the female. It is Paula who has control of the money. Larry calls her, needing
$10,000 immediately. "You’re late, Bitch," he tells her, taking the money from her in a
crowded elevator. "I don’t think I trust you any more." Michael has been following them.
Security guards shoot Larry as he tries to board a plane by running through a blood-red
vaginal-type corridor. Cut to the flashing red lights of a police car, connecting sexuality and
birth to ineffective law-enforcement. As though to underscore this point, a policeman tells
Michael he has done a lot better than they have. When Paula finds out how Larry died, she
says, "Poor Miles. A security cop. It’s perfect!" She laughs and laughs exaggeratedly. Larry,

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who was blackmailing Paula, was the lover of Michael's wife, Lorraine, another disavowal of
his homosexuality. They are also twinned in name — Larry/Lorraine. Now Paula, who was
Michael's lover, flashes back to what happened when she drove him home from the airport
on his return from the Middle East. It was Michael who strangled his wife as Larry left their
house. Paula finds Lorraine dead and Michael catatonic. His jealousy on having come upon
the primal scene, further confused by Larry's ostensible homosexuality, caused his
temporary insanity. Back in the present, Paula exhorts Michael, "Come to bed," attempting
to reinstate the heterosexual norm. "Aren’t you afraid?" asks Michael. "Of course. Aren’t
you?" says Paula. The fears of crossing sexual boundaries and becoming insane remain
ever-present fears that dictate the ambiguous ending.
Butler, after Lacan, sees identification with the Other as a factor contributing to the
Doubling Effect. If the subject is divided inside, because of the duality of the sexes, then
psychic doubleness is caused by the Law. As Rose says, duplicity underlies that split
because of repression and denial of homosexuality. Psychic doubleness is therefore
inherently bisexuality.
8
In the Canadian context, Ramsay writes about doubled
consciousness in conjunction with I Love a Man in Uniform (David Wellington1996) with
reference to self and other, the individual and society.
9
Because the subject cannot see itself
represented, there is a double loss of self and culture. The self-destructive, delusional lead
character with a "cold and authoritarian father" and "[h]aunted by an oppressive phallic
mother," is referred to as a "repressed bank clerk-cum-actor" who never gets to be the hero.
One psychiatrist in the early 1900s described what he called a "double consciousness," in
which a pathological liar "runs two narratives in his or her head, a desired life and an actual
one, with the former often overwhelming the latter." In Canadian film, the desired cultural life
is both Canadian and American. Ramsay, referring to the American "hyper-nation," sees
both narratives, American and Canadian, running in Canadian culture at the same time. The
phenomenon is not true of mainstream America, where the American myths reign and

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Canada is the blind spot. Shohat and Stam, however, discuss the doubled consciousness
which W.E.B. DuBois suggests is available when negotiating both the margin/s and the
centre/s.
10
Canadian movies and culture repeatedly and obsessively attempt to balance two
consciousnesses.

The Changeling and Dead Ringers

Doubling as a key issue can become twinning, as in The Changeling (Peter Medak
1978) and Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg 1988). In the former, the twinning takes place
between the two boys — one dead and one alive. The theme is of children being killed by
parents and a child's return to haunt the adults. Child-killing themes recur in The Haunting of
Julia. Set in "Upstate New York," The Changeling (with Americans George C. Scott, Trish
Van Devere and Melvyn Douglas) features a child drowned in a bathtub, the twinning of
sickly and healthy sons of a wealthy American senator, as well as the doubling of a dead girl
with a murdered son, and elements of the supernatural, including a séance. The father of
Douglas' character murdered the natural son, and the substitute was taken to Europe to be
"cured" of his physical weakness. This "changeling" boy returned to America and grew up to
become the senator. Scott plays John, a composer and classical pianist, who comes to
Seattle to become a professor after the death of his wife and little girl in a freak car crash.
Claire works for the historical preservation society and rents him a historical haunted house
with a music room, a library, and a piano that begins to play by itself. The doubled boys are
psychically associated with the professor's dead daughter. Her ball bounces down the stairs
of its own accord, a carefree symbol of lost childhood. The dead boy's music box opens by
itself and plays, emphasizing the presence of absence.

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Other props serve as warnings of psychic horror. As in Deadline and later in The
Wars, the bathtub is such a marker. Usually a place signifying issues between women and
sons, this tub, accentuates the relationship between mother and daughter. The tub fills by
itself with the face of the dead girl reflected in the water, a reminder of the fact that the
mother is also dead. She was killed in a phone booth by the car that ran over her daughter.
The Changeling and Deadline, in the absence of appropriate mother figures, plays out with
wifeless fathers and murdered dead children.
The use of wheelchairs and canes moves into the horror genre. The male characters
are more than frustrated artists. They are lame and paralyzed. Atwood devotes an entire
chapter to "The Paralyzed Artist" in Canadian fiction
11
and movies have followed in the
tradition she outlined. In The Changeling, an old-fashioned wheelchair takes a central place
in the narrative, foregrounding the physical absence and psychic presence of the dead
crippled child. The wooden chair chases Claire downstairs, moving inexplicably by itself, and
serving as a symbol of the inadequate son who had to be killed and whose legacy was taken
by another. The Changeling seems to be an American film, set in the U.S. and with U.S.
stars, but its repressed Canadianness returns in psychic vengeance. The Changeling child
can be seen as a sickly Canadian brother effaced and substituted by a strong American
brother who succeeds and inherits a fortune. The Changeling ends with a close-up of the
wheelchair as an image of psychic horror and loss. Many other Canadian movies feature
characters in wheelchairs, for non-narrative as well as narrative reasons. Sandy's brother in
My American Cousin happens to be in a chair, with no narrative reason necessary. A
psychoanalytic reading might see him as the inadequate younger brother who lacks a story.
In The Wars, the wheelchair is aligned with a disabled younger sibling, a sister, and warns of
a desire for incest and impending death. The power of children, and especially siblings, from
beyond grave is undeniable. It is seen again in The Haunting of Julia.

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Despite the elements of "Narrativus Interruptus" described earlier, The Changeling
was a relative success in the U.S., won seven of the newly created Genie Awards in Canada
in 1980, including Best Motion Picture of the Year, as well as the Golden Reel Award for the
Canadian film with the biggest box-office that year.
Another prominent twinning movie that ties doubling to gender, pregnancy, doctors,
naming, English/French identity, siblings, incest and threesomes is David Cronenberg's
Dead Ringers (1988). Although just post-TSE, it had been in the works since 1980. Twin
male gynecologists, both of whom are played by the British actor Jeremy Irons, become
involved with the same woman, called Claire, the same name as in The Changeling. One of
the twins is named Beverly, usually a female name. Peter Morris notes the last name of
Beverly and his twin brother, Elliot, is Mantle, as in "a sense of concealment and of
'mental.'"
12
The word carries the connotation of accepting a role, a history, a coat worn by
others and is also an anagram, not only for mantel, but also for mental. In addition to the
Cronenbergian theme of the body-out-of-control, Dead Ringers follows many other
Canadian tropes in distinctly Freudian ways with overtones of "Narrativus Interruptus." Not
only that, but the border-crossing twins represent American- and Canadian-coded traits, as
well as male-female ones, while the woman in the threesome stands for Québec.
The twins wear red surgical garments resembling the garb of Christian cardinals. The
connection between religion and medicine emphasizes the power of looming authority
figures. Like so many other authority figures, the Mantles will fail in their quest for male
control over the female as well as over themselves and each other. The object of their
medical and sexual explorations is Claire Niveau, a famous actress played by Canadian
Geneviève Bujold. Her two names mean "clear level." Not only is there a direct connection to
movies, with her identity as a French actress, but the actress playing her is also French-
speaking, a Québécoise. Bujold's screen persona is described in the press kit as revealing
"the contrasting qualities of strength and vulnerability, maturity and childlike innocence."

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These are the same characteristics found in numerous other coming-of-age and TSE
movies, including Isabel (Paul Almond 1968), starring Bujold as a sexually abused young
woman returning to her family home in Québec. Claire, unable to conceive, visits the Mantle
Clinic and becomes sexually involved with the identical sibling-doctors. Their personalities
are split between the introverted scholar Beverly and the outgoing, confident Elliot. One shy
with women and the other successful, they mirror the Canadian-female and American-male-
coded characters rife in Canadian film. Shot in Toronto, the movie was transposed from the
New York setting of the novel. There is literal border-crossing as well, when Elliot attends a
medical convention in Washington, D.C. Cronenberg voiced the problems with identity in the
movie. The press kit quotes him: "The idea is that the twins had not really managed to
create an identity, even given the two of them together." The solitudes of Canadian,
American and British meet and destroy themselves in a sexual relationship with Québec.
The twinning takes on a violent urgency in this movie.
The beginning of the movie depicts the twins at the age of twelve in sexual exploration
and performing "surgery" on a female doll. They ask a neighbour girl if they can have sex
with her. For their wardrobe in this scene, costume designer Denise Cronenberg, sister of
David, copied her brother's clothing from a family photo of him at the same age.
13

Cronenberg's movies are to some extent family affairs in any case, with many of the same
crew members behind the scenes. The director's assistant, camera assistant, associate
producer/1
st
AD, and 2
nd
AD all appear in cameos. The co-producer plays the Mantles'
accountant. Crossovers between reality and the movie world are rife.
In the dream of the drug-addicted Beverly, the twins, in bed with Claire, are joined at
the abdomen by an umbilical cord. Claire tries to separate them by biting the cord. Beverly,
convinced that women with gynecological deformities are taking over the world, creates a
set of radical and fantastic instruments to treat them. The grotesque tools are elevated to
and equated with art when the doctor hires a sculptor to fashion them. The concept of men's

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attempts to understand women through physical dissection is addressed directly by the
producer, Norman Snider, in the press material: "David was also interested in the notion of
two men trying to understand woman, with a capital 'W,' via the vehicle of medical science."
The Freudian imagery cannot be denied.
The extended, bizarre and unsettling images of the twins, their gynecological
instruments, and their affair with a woman unaware she is having sex with two different men
plays out at the expense of plot-building. The psychoanalytic images of men trying to
"understand" women manage to overtake the story, which lurches from one sexual/
gynecological scene to another, interspersed with the drug-addicted decline of Beverly. The
"Narrativus Interruptus" is noted in different terms by one critic who wrote, "At times, Dead
Ringers also tilts out of coherence, with scenes that are dramatically stillborn."
14
Cronenberg
himself alluded to the Freudian nature of twins and his interest in them. "It's very
mysterious...but the implication of all this is that a huge amount of what we are is biologically
determined."
15

Cronenberg's work spans the early and the later TSE years. In addition to Dead
Ringers, other Cronenberg movies adhere to the dysfunctional family and to repressed
emotional issues made manifest. As early as 1975, beginning with Cronenberg's first
feature, Shivers/ It Came From Within/ The Parasite Murders, monstrous creatures either
live within or burst forth from the bodies of victims. The movie's one-sheet features a terrified
woman in a bathtub, locus of emasculation of the male. In Shivers, the trouble begins when
Dr. Hobbs, a mad middle-aged medical doctor and professor inserts a parasite in a young
woman with whom he started an incestuous/pedophilic sexual relationship when she was
12. She is dressed in a schoolgirl's uniform when he attacks and kills her. His
experimentation results in an epidemic spread by sexual contact. The victims become sex-
crazed zombies. In one scene, as a man lies on top of a male security guard, a woman

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helps him hold the man down while her daughter, about nine years old, kisses the guard on
the mouth. The camera holds on this strange little family tableau before it ends.
In Rabid (1977), the young woman's vampirism results from botched medical work as
well, in this case, experimental surgery. Her victims go mad. The extreme female or childish
body out of control involves blood ties out of control as well, leading to madness and murder.
In The Brood (1979), a Cronenberg movie made at the height of the TSE, evil children
attack and kill swiftly from shadowy, secret places under the stairs and closets, in fact, in the
family home. The tagline was "The ultimate experience of inner terror." The Brood, like
Shivers and Rabid, also begins with the experimental treatment of a mad or at least
questionable doctor. Here a psychiatrist practices new techniques on a woman, played by
Samantha Eggar. She is married to a man played by another Briton, Oliver Reed. The wife's
British parents are attacked by the mutant children produced by the wife, bringing the horror
directly into the realm of the family. The colonized children, nurtured outside the mother's
British womb and secreted from their Canadian father (Art Hindle), attack their European
grandparents.
The instances of adult-child sexual behavior show that incest-coded events as well as
murders by children occur in horror movies as frequently as in other Canadian genres. The
oppressive presence of incompetent doctors and psychiatrists seen since Explosion also
crosses into horror, all explored in terms of the family.

On Deadline for Artistic Frustration

The legions of Canadian artists in a personal search for identity lead to murder and
madness within the family. That frustration reaches a zenith in the TSE movie Deadline
(Mario Azzopardi 1979), about Steven Lessey (played by American actor Stephen Young
16
),
a Toronto screenwriter being pressured by a Hollywood producer to continue writing

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successful horror movies for the American market instead of his own personal Canadian
vision. Atwood posited, "One way of coming to terms, making sense of one's roots, is to
become a creator, and most artist figures in Canadian fiction are in fact third-generation
Children."
17
Deadline’s narrative strategy moves beyond Circle of Two’s portrayal of a high-
culture icon, a British painter, to deal directly with the issue of Canadian movie production
under the control of Hollywood. Steven's dilemma leads to family problems, murder and
madness.
The film opens with a typewriter, the central wheel resembling a camera lens or a gun:
the American-style success of this Canadian will turn violently against him and his family,
Steven experiences writer’s block in the face of an immediate deadline for his next
screenplay, which will come to stand in for the difficulty, if not impossibility, of producing
Canadian popular culture. He is defined, ironically enough, as a highly successful and
renowned Canadian screenwriter of American movies, living in Canada — a situation that in
reality has never existed. The writer is the star, a Canadian view of the importance of the
literary author. He is called a "genius" and "hot stuff," wishful thinking to date for Canadian
screenwriters in Canada. Steven is also a prisoner of his success, wanting to write "better"
movies, something other than American horror. His American producer — Burt Horowitz —
is portrayed as a crass, brash, aggressive, cigar-smoking, bracelet-wearing, American Jew.
Burt tells Steven to leave the "artsy fartsy" stuff to the Europeans because "they’re better at
it." He wants something tough, something American. Burt makes civic and national identities
overt, claiming, "I like Toronto, you know. It’s clean. Too clean. Still it’s just about the only
city you can walk around in at two in the morning and not get mugged. They don’t make
good pictures though. I don’t understand why you don’t move to L.A., Steve."
18
The
implication is that if he leaves Canada Steve would acquire or re-acquire the ability to write
effectively, i.e. commercially. The Canadian writer rebels against the American oppressor,
refusing to be whisked away to writing seclusion. When he refuses the American deadline

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though, Steven begins to get into trouble. He goes to a club, where the singer appears to be
trans-gendered, and picks up women for a drunken drug party at his house, with his little girl
present. If he refuses to act more "American," it appears he will be doomed.
Steven’s bi-national nature and name create a dichotomy within him that symbolizes
his artistic frustration and identity confusion. The result is not only professional but also
personal, in the downfall of his neglected family. His wife Elizabeth undergoes a hysterical
breakdown. His children ignore him as an authority figure and resent his behaviour and
absences. His five-year-old daughter tells him, "You work too hard, Daddy…it’s no fun." His
two boys, dressed in private-school-style British blue blazers, like Alan in Explosion, hang
their little sister. They mimic a scene they see in one of their father's movies on television, in
which the hanging of a little girl by her brothers is intercut with hooded child executioners
(his first novel was called The Executioners). The Haunting of Julia hinges on a scene of a
girl child castrating a boy child. Elizabeth and Steven blame each other and then Steven
blames his own son, saying, "Why did you do this to me?" His son replies, "Daddy, I hate
you." Family troubles include children killing children.
Deadline overtly uses a trope from Psycho to underscore Steven’s ability to write
successful horror movies. It cuts to a woman naked in the shower, through a clear shower
curtain. The American scene seems to exist in Steven’s imagination, haunting him. When he
promises his daughter they will all go away together with Mommy, there is a cut to blood in
the shower and a woman covered in bloody water, struggling. His desire to kill his wife and
His general misogyny and desire to kill his wife, in particular, are underscored. Instead of the
American shower, the Canadian trope more often chosen is that of the bathtub. The symbol
of literal or psychic horror, with emasculation at its centre, occurs in The Changeling, Phobia,
The Wars and Dirty Tricks. Here the evocation of the shower trope foregrounds the
American horror legacy the Canadian is trying to escape.

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Even the land as a cultural icon turns against Canadians here. In a clip from one of
Steven's horror movies, a mechanic is sucked into a farm machine, apparently through the
psychic power of a goat he mistreated. A farm accident is also responsible for cutting off
Aaron's leg in Crossbar. "We are all dying or being executed by our culture and our
environment," Steven tells his university class. His observation about the physical and
artistic environment also refers to his home, his marriage and his children. The scenes of his
university lecture are intercut with scenes in his house of a bed and children’s laughter as a
child’s song plays; two children play a game where they tie up their grandmother on the bed,
blindfold her and burn her.
His artistic crisis deepens, connected to his misogyny. Steven becomes more violent,
blaming his wife and conflating her with his own mother, telling her, "I got Burt [his producer]
on my ass. I’ve got my mother on my ass…you’re driving me crazy…I don’t need you, damn
motherfucking bitch!" This scene is intercut with a woman giving birth and dying covered with
blood. The voiceover says the fetuses consciously decided to die rather than be born and
take their mothers with them. When Steven approaches his wife sexually, she rejects him,
asking, "What do you want, Steven?" the opposite of Freud's question, "What do women
want?" As in Explosion, the hero is frustrated, violent and unable to perform sexually as well
as artistically.
Family dysfunction often involves or includes Christian imagery and especially
Christmas, that frequent trope in Canadian movies. The star of one of Steven’s movies is a
nun. Immediately after the scene of Steven’s sexual rejection by his wife, the film cuts to a
church scene with nuns, blood, torture, sacrifice, and the eating of raw flesh by nuns from a
young crucified man’s solar plexus (locus of the emotions and personal power in Eastern
philosophies and site of unspeakable creatures trying to emerge in Cronenberg's Shivers of
1977). The inability of the male hero-loser to deal with his emotions towards women, and the
usurpation of his power by women, especially the wife/ mother, is rendered visual and

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physical. Elizabeth snorts cocaine, singing, "I’m dreaming of a white Christmas." Steven
asks, "What kind of a mother are you?" and then, "What am I going to tell my mother?" His
wife replies, "Whimper a lot. She’ll understand." The imbrication of religion with power,
authority and gender roles is narratively confused but psychoanalytically inflected.
Well-meaning but inept doctors and policemen repeat a misplaced reliance on
authority figures that results in an inability to assist or save the main characters. When
Steven suggests to Elizabeth that they see a doctor, she laughs. "What doctor’s gonna help
you write again?" TSE doctors and psychiatrists figure in Explosion, Double Negative, Black
Christmas and many others. They are inevitably unable to cure the problems or prevent new
family horrors.
"This is insane!" says Steven, as he himself moves toward madness. After suffering a
bloody head wound inflicted by a woman — intercut with a nun in his bathroom door and
bloody water in the tub — another woman smashes him over the head and he falls,
bloodied. He sees a nun in his bathroom door, and bloody water in the tub. As his life
deteriorates and his American deadline looms, Steven tells Burt: "I am not writing horror any
more…I’m talking about the ultimate terror." Burt replies, "Don’t jerk me off…I need pages."
Steven eventually begins to write his own story — a Canadian story from his own
experience — and we see his life intercut with his writing. His hand reaches for a gun in the
drawer and points it at the camera, as the sound of typing continues. Whether or not Steven
kills himself is left unseen, another ambiguous and unhappy ending. The lyrics of the final
song impart a vague philosophy of life, emotion and religious belief: "Life is just a game that
makes us real…gladness comes to only those who feel…God must come to tell us what
shall be…" "The ultimate horror" proclaimed by the video box and the "ultimate terror" voiced
by Steven turn out to be loss of family, artistic failure, and selling out to Americans instead of
being true to an unclear and perhaps impossible Canadian vision. The hidden feelings and
aspirations of "true" artists are seen to be more important than American pop-culture money

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and success. Without high culture, however, the Canadian is seen to be succeeding. This
movie straddles the line between high and low culture and comes to no conclusion.
19

In Circle of Two (Jules Dassin, 1979), the coming-of-middle-age crisis occurs in a
famous British painter, Ashley Sinclair, played by Richard Burton.
20
His sexual frustrations
are equated with his artistic failures and coupled with incestuous tendencies he tries to deny
and ignore. The adolescent/ young adult is embodied in the character of precocious and
sexually aggressive schoolgirl Sarah, played by American Tatum O’Neal. Circle of Two
outlines how the coming-of-age/ coming-of-middle-age genre works within the family — both
Sarah’s family as well as the pseudo-incestuous relationship of Sarah and Ashley’s father-
daughter-coded bond. Sarah manipulatively and assertively imposes herself as Ashley’s
muse when fear of old age and death paralyze his artistic output. His artistic frustration and
insecurity translate into an irresistible attraction to the teenage girl. Unlike the American
movie, Lolita, 15 years earlier, there is no consummation between the two, robbing the
movie of its sexual and narrative "climax," and rendering it narratively unsatisfying. In
Canadian movies, the main characters rarely get a chance to climax, either sexually or
narratively, a function of rupture in "Narrativus Interruptus." Like Steven, Ashley can muster
neither the motivation nor the discipline to act, and refuses to perform sexually. Despite the
borrowing of U.K. and U.S. actors and international directors, European high art and
American "low culture", this TSE movie achieves neither artistic nor commercial
satisfaction.
21

Stories centred on the tortured and frustrated artist, writer or university professor
proliferate across thrillers, comedies, melodramas and horror movies. High culture is
presented along with the perils of pop culture. The aforementioned tropes and images are
so prevalent in Canadian movies as to form the basis of a hidden, imaginary and
unacknowledged national construct, not only in the TSE but also beyond it. Young or old,
artistic figures inevitably experience the difficulty or impossibility of artistic satisfaction. The

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frustration of being unable to initiate, continue or complete art projects verges on an
obsession, not only during the TSE, from The Ernie Game (Don Owen 1972) to I Heard the
Mermaids Singing (Patricia Rozema 1986) to The Red Violin (François Girard 2000) to
Touch of Pink (2004). Such repeated tropes strongly suggest deeply psychoanalytic as well
as filmic and cultural readings of identity.
Issues of high culture and artistic frustration cut across genres and include both TSE
and DC films. Themes of doubling occur as a form of denial of homosexuality or
homoeroticism in family situations complicated by the Two Solitudes of brothers, or brother
and sister. The prevalence of madness, not only in the masquerades of Outrageous!, The
Silent Partner and Perfectly Normal, but also in diverse genres over several decades,
extend to television, with such TV movies as By Reason of Insanity (Donald Shebib 1981),
about an insanity defense, Ada (Claude Jutra 1976), about a woman in a mental hospital,
and The Sleep Room (Anne Wheeler 1998), about CIA shock-treatment experiments on
unsuspecting Canadian patients.
22
Journalist Russell Smith suggests the existence of a
global "schizophrenic Zeitgeist," in which there is "an atmosphere of looniness and secrecy
and repression and uncertainly" that, instead of leading to caution, leads to increased drug
use and the throwing of caution to the winds. He notes periods of such confusion, such as
the Cuban missile crisis, Weimar Germany and the then-current invasion of Iraq, in which
people turn to drugs, depravity and art-making. "Almost all of our clichés of urban decadence
— the S & M costumes, the abandonment of gender roles, the spending while poor —come
from artistic interpretations of that [Weimar Berlin] scene."
23
The madness, sexual
repression and budgetary excess of the TSE renders such confusion visual.
24

Elsaesser refers to "a whole generation of Germans [who] grew up with the
schizophrenic experience of watching John Wayne ride through Monument Valley, or
Humphrey Bogart wander down those mean streets, while their (German) voices never left
the cavernous spaces of the dubbing studio." (italics mine)
25
The fact that Germany was

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inundated with American movies around the same time international auteurs were directing
movies in Canada points to similar experiences by various countries in terms of the ways
Hollywood inevitably influenced national cinemas. Elsaesser's reference to a coming-of-age
mental disorder expands in relevance and scope when applied to Canadian film. The nature
and frequency of such repetitive tropes and ruptures can be read as a manic performativity
lacking narrative wholeness. As one cliché goes, "The definition of insanity is doing the
same thing over and over again and expecting a different result," or, as Dr. Phil would have
it, "How's that workin' for ya?" The assumption that big budgets and American-style genres
and stars alone would result in commercial success seems doubled in the mad disruptive
narratives. The TSE, a conscious strategy against the madness of national and cultural
erasure, repeatedly seems to refer to the national identity crisis behind the temporary
insanity.

Chapter 4 Endnotes — Recontextualizing High Culture, Madness and Homosexuality

1
Allan, "Movies and Mythologies: Coast to coast fever," Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 20, 1979): 37-9.
www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlineessays/JC20folder/MoviesMythologies
. Allan attributes a "schizophrenic nature of the Canadian film industry" which, he
claims, "has always appeared to fluctuate between vibrant life and imminent death," to economic factors. "On the one hand, it has no
Hollywood, no highly organized studio or independent source of capital," he writes. "On the other, it hasn't the total government support,
which, for example, helped along the rise of the Polish film in the 1950s or the Czech New Wave of the 1960s. Canadian filmmakers find
themselves in between these two economic poles."

2
Canadian film and television critics often us the word “quirky” when describing Canadian characters and films.

3
The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary define schizophrenia as: "A form of mental disease in which the personality is disintegrated and
detached from its environment; 'split-mind.'"

4
Fetherling, Documents in Canadian Film, 105.

5
One hospital in Toronto that treated schizophrenics was named Morningside, the same name as the country's national three-hour CBC
radio weekday morning show. Part of the CBC's mandate from its inception in the 1930s has been to keep the nation together.

136

6
Another aspect of Canada's representational madness is seen in its prison movies before and during the TSE. The exile of prisoners in
these movies echoes a Canada is in exile from its own culture. Prison is seen as a prism of gender and national exile for both men and
women, in Fortune and Men's Eyes (Harvey Hart 1970) and Black Mirror (Pierre Alain Jolivet 1980). Both encompass a theatrical queering of
the prison, with gay, lesbian and drag queen characters.

7
Despite psychoanalytic readings of Hitchcock films, the movies themselves never sacrifice plot or character development to subconscious
processes.

8
Butler, Gender Trouble, 54-55.

9
Ramsay, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, "Social Surfaces and Psychic Depths in David Wellington's "I Love a Man in Uniform," Vol. 4,
No. 1 (Spring 1995), 3-25.

10
Shohat & Stam, Eurocentrism, 48-9.

11
Atwood, Survival, 177-94.

12
Peter Morris, David Cronenberg: A Delicate Balance (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994), 114-22

13
According to the press kit.

14
Richard Corliss, Time Magazine, September 26, 1988.

15
Morris, David Cronenberg, 117.

16
Deadline is one of many films, such as Michael Sarazzin as Michael in Double Negative, in which the main character has the same name
as the actor, as though there might be some ontological connection between the character and the actor. "Steven" is the American spelling of
the name, whereas "Stephen" is the British/ Canadian version, coding Steven as American as well as Canadian.

17
Atwood, Survival, 181.

18
One of the legendary stories of Canadian film shooting involves a night shoot on an episode of Night Heat. The crew had strewn garbage
in a Toronto alley to simulate the dirtiness of New York. When they returned from a dinner break, the garbage had already been cleaned up
by city workers.

19
Documentaries, as well as feature films, feature artists and their pursuits, as in Imagine the Sound (1981) and Poetry in Motion (1982) by
Ron Mann.

137

20
Burton is popularly thought of as British, but was actually Welsh, another instance of “trans-nationing” a star. Rosemary Kingsland reveals
she had an affair with Burton when he was 30 and she a 14-year-old schoolgirl. David Thomas, special to the Toronto Star, July 11, 2003.

21
"What then is the matter with trying to be popular?" asks the artist/art history professor, David Severn, in The Painter (Jack Darcus 1992).
The talky, arch, theatrical, issue-driven work of Darcus here makes explicit connections between high art, "filthy lucre," artistic prostitution,
and the will of the consumer.

22
Like Peter in Nobody Waved Good-bye, Ernie retains child-like, childish qualities. Thomas Waugh has dealt with the queering of Ernie. (In
Gittings, 284)

23
Russell Smith, “In the grip of the schizophrenic Zeitgeist,” Globe and Mail, January 8, 2003, Review section, R1.

24
Given the Canadian propensity for representing gender, nation and madness, it is perhaps surprising that no film has yet been made
about characters who might be “intersexed” or hermaphrodite. Hermaphrodism is generally discovered during childhood with profound social
ramifications and discrimination.

25
Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 12.

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Chapter 5: Foreign Relations in the Two Solitudes: It's All in the Family

In their discussion of European treaties, the authors of Global Hollywood state,
"Hollywood movies move; European ones linger; Asian ones contemplate."
1
There is no
mention of Canadian movies. The missing line might be as follows: "Canadian ones
disappear." While Hollywood and European movies have attained a certain status, and
those from diverse Asian countries have recently arisen, Canadian movies have struggled to
be seen at all and especially as a distinct and distinctive English-speaking cinema. More
often, they have disappeared, a blind spot in world cinema.
Canadian film has long been influenced by international auteurs. In addition to the
influx of American production companies between the two World Wars, Canada was
affected variously, in the 1950s by Italian Neo-Realism, in the 1960s by the French New
Wave, and in the 1970s by British New Cinema. The French and British influences must be
seen not only in terms of style and subject but also of historical substance.
In the wake of its newfound national identity after World War II, Canada looked to
international co-productions. Canada was one of the first countries to engage in film co-
production treaties, which were instituted in 1950,
2
and has continued to sign them to a
greater extent than any other country. Since then, 66 bilateral co-production treaties have
been signed among 35 countries. By September of 1994, Canada had increased the
number of co-production treaties to 29, with its agreement with Chile, having already signed
with Argentina in 1988 and Mexico in 1991. By 2001, the number had climbed to 47 co-
production treaties with 55 countries. "Co-pros," as they are known in the industry, have
made possible many Canada-U.K. movies in particular, from Murder By Decree (Bob Clark
1978) to Being Julia (István Szabó 2004). Some early post-war co-productions, from 1946 to
1954, were directed by well-known American and European auteurs. Bringing in British,
French, Italian, German, Russian and American influences offered both artistic cachet and

139

added monetary funds that helped make possible the production of feature films in Canada
and paved the way for "Hollywood North."
The extent of Canada's co-production contributions has been seriously
underestimated in the industry and academic literature, including as already noted, in Global
Hollywood. According to Paul W. Taylor, almost half the co-producing film countries were "in
the Americas." He cites Canada as having been involved in 23, Brazil in five, Mexico in four,
Argentina in two, and Cuba and Chile in one each. Rather than considering five countries'
co-production of 13 features, it seems that one country's co-production of 23 features would
have constituted a factor more significant than the statement that half the co-producing
countries were "in the Americas." No further mention or analysis of the Canadian statistic,
which amounts to more than four times the number made by its nearest competitor, and
more than five times the number of Mexico's contribution, is made.
The authors of Global Hollywood seek to explain Hollywood's enduring global
popularity. Although the most obvious case to consider would seem to be Canada, the book
fails to refer at all to Hollywood's enormous influence on Canada and vice versa. European
cinema is emphasized, with the U.K., the Czech Republic, and Italy examined, as well as
Australia and Mexico.
3
Each country is accorded two or three pages. The references to
Canada in that chapter, however, comprise just three sentences, one referring to Canada as
"not Hollywood North so much as Mexico North."
4
The authors then note that a total 81
percent of Hollywood runaway production was produced in Canada. The remarkable fact
that Toronto has doubled as New York in more than one hundred movies is noted in one
sentence. Another sentence notes that the television series Due South, which aired in both
countries, used Toronto as Chicago.
5
One sentence refers to the fact that 45 percent of
American MOWs were shot in Canada in the 1998-99 season. Two sentences, without
additional comment, mention that US$352.8 million was spent in first six months of 2000 and
that "several Canadian provinces" have filmmaking facilities,
6
seriously downplaying

140

Canada's contribution from the margins. The fact that 81 percent of runaway productions
went to Canada is both profound and quotidien. The prevalence of Canadian actors does
not translate into a Canadian presence in American movies or television shows the way it
does for British or even Québécois. Nor does the infusion of co-pro money hold as much
currency in the U.S. as the story, location and stars. Canadian actors, locations, stories and
money become invisible in co-productions.
Global Hollywood asks, "To what extent do 'their' national cinemas engage people,
and do they spend more time watching imports than their 'own' films?" That is an extremely
valid question. There is, however, no reference to the example that could best illuminate the
answer — Canada.
7
Miller, et al seem to take for granted the "domestic" place of Canada in
Hollywood's economy. That a country other than the U.S., however, could produce or host
four-fifths of American runaway production and still produce an ostensibly "American"
product goes unnoticed in a book claiming to present an intensive examination of national
cinematic production in a global context.
The prevalence of international co-productions in Canada, both American and other,
began before those of other countries and continues to this day. Sometimes they created an
image for and of Canada, while at other times, they effaced one in the mélée of competing
interests that constitute the making of a movie in a global context.

International Auteurs in Canada 1946-1954

Global Hollywood quotes John Ford as having said in 1964, "Hollywood is a place you
can't geographically define. We don't really know where it is."
8
Similarly, with the advent of
co-productions, funding countries become places that are less than, or more than,
geographical. While they may be named as countries of origins, not all countries are
represented on the screen. The country most often identified as originating is the one in

141

which the movie is set, if the country is named, as well as the one associated with the actors
who have an accent or other identifying national feature. When the productions involve more
than one country, however, the manipulation of writers, actors, locations and storylines can
change or split the focus. One country usually emerges, so to speak, victorious. When no
one country is featured, some countries' voices may be compromised or complicated.
Whether or not Canada is portrayed on-screen, many of the themes represented in
early international auteur productions in Canada that opened the door to later co-productions
also laid the foundations of the obsessive tropes of religion, failed institutional authority, high
culture, the "Watcher," coming of age, the family, incest, and the presence of American
stars, long before the TSE.
In the relative wasteland of Canadian feature film represented by most of the 1940s
and 1950s, five prominent American directors helmed movies in Canada. Otto Preminger
directed two — The Thirteenth Letter in 1951 and River of No Return in 1954; William A.
Wellman shot The Iron Curtain in 1948; Henry Hathaway directed Niagara in 1951; Richard
Fleischer made The Happy Time in 1952; and Alfred Hitchcock completed I Confess in
1953. All were American productions, some shot with Canadian-identified locations.
Preminger and Hitchcock were Europeans, from Austria and Britain respectively, who
emigrated to America as adults, while the other three were American-born. Hathaway made
The Thirteenth Letter in small-town Québec and Niagara (1953) in Niagara Falls, Ontario,
with Marilyn Monroe. Preminger shot the American western River of No Return in 1954 in
the Canadian Rockies near Jasper, Alberta, starring Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe and
Rory Calhoun. Two of these movies, Niagara and River of No Return, had no Canadian
content or concerns. The other four, however, did reference Canada in a variety of ways.
There was one other production by an international auteur in this period — Fedor
Ozep's Whispering City, produced in 1946 and released in 1947 by Québec Productions/
Eagle-Lion. This TSE pre-cursor was a fully Canadian production. Although following an

142

American film noir murder genre and style, and starring American actors (Paul Lukas, Mary
Anderson and Helmut Dantine), it is set in Québec City. After being hit by a car and before
dying, a famous actress, Renée, dies confides in a journalist, Mary, relating to her the
scheme of a prominent lawyer who she believes murdered her fiancé. The diary of the
actress, whose story was previously suppressed by having her committed to a mental
asylum, helps Mary with the case. The lawyer convinces an alcoholic pianist and music
composer with a nagging wife, Blanche, to kill the journalist, Mary, while the lawyer plans to
kill Blanche. The composer, whose current work is called "The Quebec Concerto," ends up
having a dual identity as Michel Lacoste/ Paul Duval, both creator and destroyer. Mary turns
into a "Watcher," as she stalks the lawyer, who thinks she's dead. The movie set the
precedent for the other six pre-TSE auteur productions shot in Canada in the next seven
years.
9

In 1948, Wellman directed a film version of the prominent Canadian news story of
suspected Soviet atomic spy Igor Gouzenko. The Iron Curtain stars Dana Andrews and
Gene Tierney. Shot partly in Ottawa, where Gouzenko worked as a government employee.
The music, by prominent movie scorer Alfred Newman, incorporated the work of four
Russian composers—Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Miaskovsky and Khatchaturian. The use of
music by such famous composers may have marked the beginning of Canada's use of
classical music and scores by its own renowned musicians, plus the American Henry
Mancini, in many TSE movies.
Preminger filmed the U.S. mystery The Thirteenth Letter, with Linda Darnell and
French star Charles Boyer, at a studio in St-Hyacinthe, Québec in 1951. Written by Howard
Koch from a story by Louis Chavance of France, it stars American Michael Rennie as a
Canadian doctor who receives threatening and disruptive letters. American and French
actors masquerade as Canadians. Both The Iron Curtain and The Thirteenth Letter used
Canadian locations, Ontario and Québec, as settings for Canadian stories. The decisions

143

showed more faith in the usefulness of Canadian locations than the TSE would two decades
later, as it tried to hide its geographical specificity. The American writers and directors,
however, were unable or unwilling to portray Canadian characters as Canadian.
The New York Times notes in its original review, "Not only have they switched the
locale of this tale of a 'poison pen' plot from a town in France to one in Quebec, thus
achieving a new atmosphere, but they have considerably cleansed the characters of some
of their more noxious impurities." Near the end, the reviewer says, "The surface appearance
of a town in Quebec Province [sic] has been accomplished by filming the picture there, but
the character of a narrow, prudish community, open to suspicion and social cruelty, which is
obviously latent in the story, is but remotely suggested in this straight who-does-it film." The
blind acceptance of Québec as interchangeable with France is neither accepted nor
particularly challenged by the reviewer. The movie is noted as a minor Hollywood genre
movie by a major writer and a major director. "Mr. Koch has used most of the devices and
surprises of the original job, and Mr. Preminger has assiduously directed in a taut,
melodramatic style. Unfortunately, the characters lack the depth and credibility they might
have in a more comprehensive social survey, but they shape up as ample plot pawns."
10

Would the missing "social survey" have been Canadian because of the location, French
because of the original story, or American because of the producing entities and actors?
Another collaboration between American, French and Canadian components occurred
when Richard Fleischer made the comedy The Happy Time, in 1952, starring Charles Boyer
and Louis Jourdan. The stars from France, known in America, play two of three Québécois
siblings. The screenplay by Earl Felton won him the Best Written American Comedy award
from the Writers Guild of America. The Happy Time involves the coming-of-age of Bibi, an
adolescent boy in a French-Canadian family. Unaware of the history of Canadian film, the
New York Times reviewer saw the movie as a genre film, calling it too crude and sexual
rather than the tender tale he perceived in the original play.
11
Leonard Maltin, after a recent

144

screening, called it "a beautifully realized story of love, family, and coming of age. Charles
Boyer [who had also starred as a Québécois in The Thirteenth Letter] plays the head of a
boisterous household in Ottawa during the 1920s…(Louis Jourdan) is a traveling salesman
who delights in his female conquests—and his collection of garters from dancers at the
burlesque theater. Boyer's lively son, Bobby Driscoll, is on the verge of puberty, unaware
that the girl next door has a crush on him, uncertain about his feelings toward a beautiful
magician's assistant (Linda Christian) who comes to stay with the family."
12
Maltin also notes
the genre, the ensemble cast, and the presence of the Oedipal story: "The film cannot
completely disguise its stage origins, but the performances are so fresh, and the feeling of
ensemble so strong, that it simply doesn't matter. At the end of the movie, Boyer embraces
his growing son and we see the glint of a tear in his eye. I had the exact same
response." The emotional impact of the movie is favoured as the organizing principle of the
review over the director's identity, the lead actors and the "Canadian" story. The setting of
the movie seems to be in contention among reviewers, i.e. between the province of Québec
and the province of Ontario. There are no French-Canadians in the cast. The "Two
Solitudes" of Canada are not visible or distinguishable to America. The coming-of-age
theme, however, may have precipitated that genre in Canadian movies of both solitudes, in
addition to the many other factors involved. The presence of a big American movie
ostensibly about a Canadian story was an important event. The Happy Time was nominated
for four Golden Globes, including Best Director and Best Picture.
In 1952, Hitchcock shot I Confess in Québec City, based on a 1902 French play by
Paul Anthelme called Nos Deux Consciences or Our Two Consciences. A murder-blackmail-
psychological-religious mystery set in Québec about a priest, Father Michael Logan
(Montgomery Clift), German refugee Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse), and the sanctity of the
confessional. Hitchcock, himself a Catholic, treats the subject of his own religion in I
Confess. Comparisons have also been drawn to the McCarthy witch-hunts, in which

145

innocent people were accused and lives destroyed, events still taking place when the movie
was made. The priest refuses to testify against the murderer because of the confidentiality
rules of the confessional. The priest becomes implicated in the murder as well as
blackmailed for a secret affair before his ordination with Ruth Grandfort (Anne Bancroft), still
in love with him and now married to a prominent lawyer. The agonized priest, blackmailed
and betrayed by employee Keller, steadfastly refuses to break the confessional seal and
stands trial for the murder. The ineffective authority figure is the policeman, Inspector Larrue,
played by Karl Malden, who forges ahead, unable to see the truth. Part of the chase occurs
in a performing arts theatre, bringing in the theme of high culture.
The New York Times review from the time of the release of I Confess notes, "And
even though moments in the picture do have some tension and power, and the whole thing
is scrupulously acted by a tightly professional cast, the consequence is an entertainment
that tends to drag, sag and generally grow dull. It is not the sort of entertainment that one
hopefully expects of 'Hitch'…Shot on location in Quebec, it has a certain atmospheric flavor,
too. But it never gets up and goes places. It just ambles and drones along."
13

One Internet review states, "'I Confess' is the most under exposed/ appreciated/ rated
of Hitchcock's films. It is as convincing (except for the minimal flashbacks) as 'Shadow of a
Doubt' in terms of both its art and its reality. Its mise en scene captures Quebec City, its
specifically Catholic culture, its history, its moral dramas, and its character types. I think Clift
and Baxter are perfectly cast, as are Aherne and Maldon [sic]. Keller and Alma truly hit
home as Catholic parish staff and carry effectively much of the drama and suspense of this
true Hitch sleeper, which is also a memorable romance. (There is indeed a great deal of
genuine emotion and deep feeling in this very ordinary and convincing world)."
14
With no
knowledge of Quebec or its culture, this viewer found it "realistic." All the reviews, original
and more recent, discuss this film, as others, as a Hitchcock auteur film, whether or not it
was shot in Canada. It is not a specifically Canadian story and the presence of the auteur

146

outweighs any national specificity, including American and British, unless nation and location
are intertwined in more obvious ways.
I Confess was relatively financially successful. Bill Krohn writes, "Despite the myth of a
box-office flop which Hitchcock started with these remarks, I Confess made money for
Warner Bros. It's possible the director was bitter because, after spending $60,000 of Sidney
Bernstein's money and some of his own to develop the project, he had to turn it over to
Warners when independent financing fell through, and his Warners contract denied him a
percentage windfall until after a film had recouped 4 times its production budget, which was
not the case with I Confess."
15
The remarks referred to are among those Hitchcock made to
Bazin: "So André Bazin, although he was not himself a 'Hitchcocko-Hawksian', was
surprised when the director told him in 1954 that I Confess was a failure because it lacked
humor."
Bazin was the first, in the course of the same interview, to explain the workings of the
now-famous 'transference' to Hitchcock." Bazin referred to the process of transference of
identification from the patient to the therapist, as well as to the transference of guilt from the
murderer to the innocent priest. There is a third form of transference to consider in I Confess
and The Happy Time. It is the national transfer of Canadian locations and stories to
American productions, despite allegedly French-Canadian characters. The "two
consciences" upon which I Confess rests could also be interpreted in yet another way — as
the consciences of the Two Solitudes.
The European and American auteurs of the aforementioned six movies came into
Canada and told Canadian stories masquerading as American ones, or American stories
masquerading as Canadian ones. The statement of Lewis Selznick in 1922 had become
reality: "If Canadian stories are worthwhile making into films, companies will be sent into
Canada to make them."
16

147

TSE Auteur Co-Productions

The post-war auteur presences in Canada may have influenced parts of the course of
Canadian cinema. Some of the themes explored in all six of the Canadian-located auteur
movies are sexual threesomes, a mad psychiatrist, a troubled Catholic priest, secret spying,
a boy's coming-of-age in a Quebec family, the American western, and the biggest American
star in movies, Marilyn Monroe. In the TSE a new set of auteur movies would emerge
directed by Claude Chabrol, Boris Sagal, John Huston, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim, Bob
Clark, one starring Orson Welles, as well as several by Canadian filmmakers, including
David Cronenberg. Such themes as incest, threesomes, a crazy doctor, and taking money
from an older female are repeated and explored in Angela, Phobia and Never Trust an
Honest Thief. Other TSE co-productions Blood Relatives by Claude Chabrol, Atlantic City,
U.S.A. by Louis Malle, Murder By Decree by Bob Clark, and The Wars and Dirty Tricks by
Canadians Robin Phillips and Alvin Rakoff respectively include national, international and
regional issues as interpreted by visiting as well as home-grown filmmakers.
Angela, a 1976 Canada/USA/Italy co-production directed by Russian Boris Sagal,
stars Sophia Loren as a married Italian-Canadian woman, Angela Kincaid, who unknowingly
has a child by her son. The original title of Jocasta and the theme of incest make explicit the
Freudian, Oedipal connections. Both titles correspond to the name of the title character, a
phenomenon echoed in many Canadian movies obsessed with naming the female
character. John Huston plays a Mafia leader, with John Vernon as Angela's husband,
returned to Canada from World War II.
17
The movie, distributed by Astral and Warner
Brothers, is estimated to have made $Cdn3,000,000, according to IMDB. It was written by
Indiana-born Canadian Charles E. Israel, who also wrote Klondike Fever and Louisiana.
18

After Angela, several other incest films followed, including Summer’s Children (Julius
Kohanyi 1976), Chabrol's Blood Relatives,
19
The Wars (Robin Phillips 1980) Alligator Shoes

148

(Clay Borris 1982),
20
and Dead Ringers David Cronenberg 1988), all within the TSE
parameters. Not only a TSE theme, however, incest recurs later in Rachael & Gaetan (Suzy
Cohen 2003), about a teenage sister and brother in a secret affair, Blood (Jerry Ciccoritti
2004), with the sister propositioning the brother, and Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin
2007).
21
The Canadian theme of incest could be said to have started with the jealousy and
sexual desires of the border-crossing brothers and their object of desire, Doris, in Explosion.
In a small film-producing country, this level of incest across decades begs to be read in
national and psychoanalytic lights.
The tagline for Phobia (John Huston 1980), a Canada/USA co-production written by
an Emmy-winning American, Peter Bellwood, and U.S.-born Canadian Lewis Lehman (from
a story by two other writers), was, "What do you do when your psychiatrist is insane?" The
psychological murder mystery echoes Canadian themes of doctors and madness begun in
The Thirteenth Letter. It stars Paul Michael Glaser and Canadian actors such as John
Colicos, Susan Hogan, Alexandra Stewart, David Eisner, Lisa Langlois, Kenneth Welsh, Neil
Vipond, Patricia Collins and Marian Waldman. A psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Ross, treats five
prison inmates, promising them jail release if they comply with his controversial treatment of
screening their diagnosed phobias on huge television monitors. The representation echoes
real experiments done by Canadian doctors funded by the CIA in a Montreal hospital in the
1950s. The movie calls Ross' treatment "implosion therapy," in contrast to the "explosions"
that occur in Explosion. Instead of being cured of their phobias, however, the patients in
Phobia are murdered. A female patient (Langlois) is drowned in a bathtub by someone
wearing medical gloves. There is a substantiated fear of medical personnel here, as well as
the bathtub as a locus of terror. When the Paramount release aired on television, TV Guide
wrote, "Director John Huston's only foray into horror is a disappointing effort, crippled by a
simpleminded script that will leave most viewers bored after the first 15 minutes…
Regrettably, the whole affair is extremely contrived, with a solution even a simpleton could

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decipher after the credits sequence. Though Huston attempts to spice up things by juggling
the narrative in a fairly creative manner, the film is crippled by its unsatisfying conclusion and
Glaser's distinctly weak performance."
22

While Phobia was an American production shot in Canada, Never Trust an Honest
Thief (1979) was a fully Canadian production with a large budget of $4,100,000 and Orson
Welles as hard-drinking Sheriff Paisley. Michael Murphy stars in the dual-identity role of
Burt/Tom, a small-town deputy in New York with a criminal past, who undergoes a crisis of
conscience after stealing money from an elderly woman. He is both a formerly imprisoned
ex-con and a current upstanding law-abider. Welles told Time magazine, which mentions the
movie was shooting In Las Vegas (not that it was also being shot in Canada), that he took
the role for the money.
23
Going for Broke was also a title considered.
24
The presence of
Orson Welles, a coup for Canada, did not positively affect the movie.
25
Director George
McCowan took his name off the film, which is credited to its Canadian producer, Zale
Magder. While there is no Canadian presence, the movie still belongs to a genre of bank-
robbery or heist movies that includes The Silent Partner; A Man, A Woman and A Bank;
Owning Mahowny and Foolproof.
Within a global economy of cinematic co-productions, which country's location/ writing/
sensibility will be dramatized when many nationalities are involved? "The tension inherent in
the cultural industries is exacerbated by international co-productions. The cultural objectives
require that the film or program reflect the cultural specificity of the originating country, while
the industrial objectives necessitate that the finished product travel easily across borders.
The fulfillment of one mitigates against the fulfillment of the other."
26
Washington compares
Europe's aim to "re-invigorate the film industry with a view to protecting a rich cultural
heritage" to Canada's purpose of using co-productions "as a mechanism for nation-building
as the young country tried to find itself in a popular culture dominated by its southern
neighbour." Perhaps various countries could keep Hollywood at bay by collaborating

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financially, Paul Washington explains, in the centre-periphery theory of Innis and others. He
also mentions that Sharon Strover (1994) cautions a "loss of national identity in the co-
production process." This is a particular concern in Canada. Paul Washington says of TV co-
production, "…what emerges is a profile of programming that reaches profitability with
minimal ratings while not aspiring to reach any cultural objectives." He then quotes The
Globe and Mail as having "correctly concluded" that the co-productions were "not exactly
American but close enough to pass.'' He also says that the fact that major companies are
involved should be "a reminder that the constituent industries do not necessarily share the
cultural objectives of the government that subsidizes them with public funds."
Head in the Clouds (written and directed by John Duigan 2004) was a USA/ UK/
Spain/ Canada co-pro set in 1930s England, France and Spain, and starring Charlize
Theron, Penelope Cruz and Stuart Townsend. The Canadian contribution may be the
threesome and the lame female. The Red Violin (François Girard 1998), the Canada/ Italy/
U.K. co-pro whose most visible star is Samuel L. Jackson, is set in Montreal but the star of
the movie is a violin that travels through centuries in four stories with discrete characters (a
form copied in the later Canadian production Century Hotel, directed and co-written by David
Weaver 2001). In many of the U.K. cases, including Murder By Decree with Christopher
Plummer and James Mason as Sherlock Holmes and Watson in the Jack the Ripper case,
and Being Julia, with Annette Bening as a British stage diva, the locations and high-culture
subject matter are British. One particularly well received in Canada or abroad—Annaud's
Quest for Fire (1981) — had nothing to do with any particular country, since it was about
prehistoric peoples and written in an invented language. Rather than representing a cluster
of cultures, Quest for Fire more resembles the kinds of mythical aboriginal narratives of the
Australian Rabbit-Proof Fence and the celebrated Canadian Inuit movie Atanarjuat: The
Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk 2001). The theme of survival against nature and outside
threats, however, renders the Annaud movie perhaps more Canadian than it at first seems.

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Canadian actors Rae Dawn Chong stars with American Ron Perlman. The fact that Chong's
character teaches her mate how to make love in the "missionary position" rather than have
sex from behind, "doggie-style," may bespeak yet another instance of Canadian female
sexual aggressiveness and know-how in telling the ineffectual male what to do and how to
do it.
When Canada acts as a participant in TSE co-productions, the results often concern
family issues, just like home-grown Canadian movies. Many of the deals are struck with
France, the U.K. and the U.S., the three countries that colonized Canadian history and
culture. Incestuous desires and acts erupt variously into murder, racial fears, competing
nationalisms, war and madness. The international connections surface in the Canada/
France co-pro Blood Relatives (Claude Chabrol 1979), the Canada/ West Germany movie
The Wars (Robin Phillips 1981), and the Canada/ USA film Hard Feelings (Daryl Duke
1979). Only in the fully Canadian production from an American novel by Thomas Gifford,
Dirty Tricks (Alvin Rakoff 1979), is the Canadian-American connection made politically
explicit, with references to George Washington and a dispute about American history.
Even when not overt, foreign relations commonly creep in and make themselves felt
covertly in family issues. While national and international connections are imbricated not only
with family but also with war, the horrors of actual war pale next to the battles taking place
inside families and individuals. The subject of race, unusual in Canadian film, is introduced in
this period as well. Just as TSE movies tried to "pass" as American, one particular Canada/
USA co-production appropriates Black American power and sexuality for a White Canadian
character.
On a practical level, the drive to find stories that would prove more commercial, thus
justifying the millions of private and public dollars poured into them, writers, producers and
directors turned to increased incidences of sex and violence, in the hope they would find
audience approval. The influence of international auteurs on international cinema is

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generally acknowleged only when their movies become well-known in their own culture and
then travel the world or, conversely, if they are marketed abroad and gain recognition even if
they are not well-received in their home country/ culture. Once they leave their "home," they
sometimes fare well abroad. European directors from Capra to Polanski have excelled at
making "American" or "Hollywood" movies. The same can be said of such Canadian
directors as Norman Jewison, Arthur Hiller, Daniel Petrie, Jr. and, more recently, Paul
Haggis. Marsha Kinder refers to the selling of Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura as an exalted
auteur reinscribing franquismo in international cinema markets.
27
The kind of
commodification of auteurs referred to by Kinder as theorized by Elsaesser in reference to
the directors of New German Cinema also took place in the TSE. The influence of the
European auteurs similarly lent cachet as well as selling and marketing power to Canadian-
shot or Canadian-produced movies before Canada had its own auteurs, such as Atom
Egoyan and David Cronenberg. International auteurs afforded Canada a way to gain
attention for its TSE productions and to package the movies as higher art than American
popular culture. Hence the presence of Claude Chabrol, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Jules
Dassin and Louis Malle in Canadian co-productions, all melodramas, all involving sex and
families.

Incest Among Chabrol's Blood Relatives (1977)

Claude Chabrol made three TSE movies in Canada. They were received abroad as
auteur films rather than as Canadian co-productions. They do, however, have Canadian-
specific aspects to them. Blood Relatives is a case in point.
Hiring a real "French-from-France" auteur of the stature of Chabrol would have
constituted a Canadian coup. Chabrol's violent films noirs in colour were well known by the
time of the TSE. In a superficial way, Blood Relatives may be seen as a typical Chabrol

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thriller, dealing with issues of sex, violence and family melodrama. The director, who himself
borrowed from Hitchcock's lexicon of English and Hollywood connections, made his own
auteurist mark on Canadian cinema. I would argue not only that the Chabrol films retain their
French identity as members of his own family of melodramas with their themes of violence,
madness, doubling and incest, but also that these themes and tropes are identified in
particular ways in Canadian movies and that his Canadian co-productions take on an added
dimension when read in the Canadian context. The presence of the aforementioned themes
in all three of his TSE movies points to imbricated national and personal meanings as well
as to the complexities of co-productions. Chabrol's involvement in a Canadian co-
production, however, suddenly complicates the issues of the national identities of
characters, actors and the incestuous family dynamics depicted.
The theme of incest expressed in Angela and the fully Canadian movie Summer's
Children was repeated the next year in Chabol's Blood Relatives. It may have helped
entrench the representation of sibling and parent/ child sex, both implied and actual, that
was hinted at in Explosion and forms an important thread in Canadian film.
In Blood Relatives, two teenaged cousins, Muriel (Lisa Langlois) and Patricia (Aude
Landry) are attacked in an alley after a party, and Muriel, whose parents are already absent,
owing to a car-crash backstory, is knifed to death. The initiatory violent death is in itself
unusual in Canadian film and a marker of the TSE. The presence of a party, a key trope of
the era, hints that the characters are supposed to be having a good time. Canadian parties,
however, lead to sex and violence. The funeral and its trapping is another key event. Here
Muriel’s funeral features a priest speaking in Latin, a nod to the long-standing power of
Québec Roman Catholicism. There is also a picture of the Virgin Mary and a baby Jesus
above her bed in the flashbacks. The significance of the Christian religion in both English
and French provinces is generally emphasized with such images and non-narrative scenes

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involving funerals, churches, priests and nuns.
28
Such scenes are tied up with issues of
sexuality and family problems, as in Deadline and The Wars.
Flashbacks show Muriel and Patricia sharing a bedroom, and Muriel sleeping with her
young cousin, André, Patricia’s brother. Muriel thinks she’s pregnant — another key trope in
the TSE movies. Women are often pregnant, having an abortion, having children, or talking
about and/ or fearing these events. Julie in Nobody Waved Goodbye, Betty in Goin' Down
the Road, Eliza in Eliza's Horoscope, Liza in Outrageous!, Julia in The Haunting of Julia, and
both women in By Design as well as many others are pregnancy-preoccupied. In fact the
title, Blood Relatives, relates to Muriel's possible pregnancy by her cousin. She breaks off
her relationship with André, saying, “It wouldn’t be right for us to have a baby…we’re Blood
Relatives…I won’t go on.” He tells her, “You started it,” a phrase reminiscent of fights
between sibling children. Muriel did initiate the first explicit sex scene with André, in keeping
with the aggressively sexual Canadian female in movies.
After Muriel's decision, André orders her to remove her dress, telling her she owes
him that. “I don’t owe you a thing,” she retorts defiantly. He pulls her to her knees: “Do as I
say!” taking the parental and abusive male role. “Go on, take it!,” he orders her, as her
mouth is level with his penis, which is shielded by his arms, hands and the window bar
through which the shot is taken. She drops to her knees and we see her head moving back
and forth as she performs fellatio on him. “I know you’re dying to—take it!…You bloody
rotten bitch!” He suddenly falls; she’s bitten him. She, crying, comforts him and then says,
“Go away, go away.” He does. Now Patricia is in the doorway, saying, “The library was
closed.” Has she been a "Watcher"? She has, however, announced the symbolic death of
high culture in favour of the first oral sexual assault scene in Canadian feature film. As co-
writer as well, Chabrol pushed the envelope of sexual explicitness.
More than an incestuous relationship between cousins, the members of the
dysfunctional Lowery family represent British, French, English-Canadian and Québécois.

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Muriel, played by Langlois, a Franco-Ontarian, seems English-Canadian. Patricia is
supposed to be Québécois and asks for help with her English, but she speaks English with a
British accent, which is common in Europe. Except for Langlois, many of the actors who play
the family members speak English with a faint British accent, although they are all supposed
to be French, and the family has an English surname (Lowery). Cousin/ brother/ lover André
is alternately called Andrew, the anglicized version of his name. Canada’s Two Solitudes,
narratively sublimated here, rise to the surface with no purpose in the plot.
29
The
relationships and accents appear confused without prior knowledge of the underlying
political situation and history. The French Patricia turns out to be the murderer of her
English-Canadian cousin. Muriel is killed by her jealous female cousin for having had illicit
sex with Patricia’s French brother. Patricia, who claims to love André, exhibits confused
loyalties as well: she identifies a cop in the line-up as the murderer, then changes her mind
and says her brother André did it. The female names used—Patricia and Muriel—have both
English and French pronunciations.
On the parental front, older British males are portrayed as colonial predators of young
women and girls. Donald Pleasence (the British actor who stars in several TSE movies) is a
suspect formerly arrested for the sodomy of a 10-year-old girl and David Hemmings, also
British, is Muriel’s married boss, who takes a prurient interest in her. These older British
males are also represented as having little power, knowledge or narrative function outside
their unseemly attraction to girls. The father, Mr. Lowery, says André and Muriel were "like
brother and sister." He says he was strict—no dating until they were 17, and yet he was
oblivious and unable to protect his niece. Although all the older male characters except the
father are sexually implicated with girls, it is Muriel’s aunt/ mother-figure, Mrs. Lowery, who is
obliquely blamed. She drinks a lot. "What do we do about the mother?" a cop keeps asking
the investigating detective. Since the mother has no narrative purpose, her hanging
presence seems to serve a psychoanalytic function of absence, blame and/or inability to

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deal with the actions of the males in her children's stories. The mother/ aunt in the movie is
played by Stéphane Audran, then Chabrol's wife.
30

The detective eventually solves the crime only because his girlfriend (Micheline
Lanctôt) leads him to uncover Muriel’s diary where he finds key clues. The girlfriend is there
for this one narrative purpose—to serve as the strong female catalyst and to help or save
the male. Detective Steve Carella (Donald Sutherland, expatriate Canadian and star of
several TSE movies) who obsessively hunts Muriel’s killer, is himself the father of a 12-year-
old girl. When he puts his hand on Patricia’s shoulder during his gentle interrogation, it can
be interpreted as a paternal gesture; the camera, however, lingers in close-up, intimating an
inappropriately sexual aspect to the touch. Sexual and gender identities are being reframed.
Fothergill's coward/ bully is now a girl—and a murderer. Patricia tells Carella, "I don’t want
the kids to think I’m a coward."
Chabrol directed another TSE movie with the word "blood" in the title—The Blood of
Others/Le sang des autres (1983). The Canada/ France/ USA co-production, written by
Canadian novelist and screenwriter Brian Moore from a novel by Simone de Beauvoir, takes
place in France and stars Jodie Foster and Michael Ontkean as French Résistance
members in Paris, Hélène and Jean, along with Irish-born Sam Neill. Canadians Alexandra
Stewart, John Vernon, Kate Reid (the mother from Double Negative), and Monique Mercure
play key roles. Troubled family relationships follow. Hélène is rumoured to be asking around
about an abortion and Jean (Ontkean) brings the abortion "doctor." Hélène pretends to be
Jean's sister to find him at the front, as she tries to save him. He ends up in the hospital.
Bathtubs, doctors, siblings, pregnancy, nuns, mothers, head wounds, and feelings of going
mad all play out in a war melodrama by French, English, English-Canadian and Québecois
filmmakers.
31
Chabrol also made Violette Nozière (1978), another TSE France/ Canada co-
pro from a novel, with Langlois and Audran of Blood Relatives, about a teenage girl (Isabelle

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Huppert), her sexual life, and problems with her parents. It was better received than
Chabrol's two other TSE movies.
32

Families and Nations: The Wars (1981)

War, a key theme in Canadian movies, is fought more on the battleground of the
home than in the theatres of war. In The Wars (directed by Robin Phillips and scripted by
Timothy Findley from his novel, 1981), incestuous and homosexual desires erupt into world
war, dismemberment and death. The Canada/ West Germany co-pro portrays one young
man's experiences before, during and after World War I.
33
It eschews Germany as the
enemy, with settings of Montreal, France and Britain. Rather than Canada's being effaced, it
is foregrounded by the names of the well-known Canadian novelist and the theatre director.
World War I, however, can hardly compete with the real horrors, which are the inner
emotional wars within the family.
The wider troubles grow from an implied incestuous mother-son relationship and a
homoerotic-male/disabled-female sibling triangulation with the mother. The situation ends
with all their deaths. Robert Ross, whose two masculine first names fail to guarantee him
heterosexual authority, is an upper-crust young Ontarian. His beloved younger sister,
Rowena, is in a wheelchair. They live with a tough, cold, domineering mother, Dolly Ross,
and a kind, distant and ineffectual father. His governess and his mother’s hired companion,
Miss Davenport, called Davvy, frames in voiceover the story of Robert's World War I
experiences and how a compassionate young nurse helped him die.
The first image, accompanied by the sound of classical piano music, shows Robert
riding out of the landscape on horseback, uniform torn, half-crazed, muddy and burnt. Then
the movie cuts to him in hospital, with a bandaged head wound. He is twinned with his
wheelchair-bound sister from the beginning, as Davvy recounts, "Rowena was born

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ill…unable to walk…quite incapable." Here not only does the capable female heroine of
Canadian film disappear, but the men, traditionally burdened by head wounds and missing
limbs are equally unable to thrive. Davvy indicates explicitly that the coming-of-age task was
difficult if not impossible for them: "In 1914, it was as if we asked all our boys to become
men." The glories of war do not allow Canadian men to come of age successfully. Like other
Canadian movies that take place during wars—such as the Viet Nam explorations of
Explosion and Deserters (Jack Darcus 1982)—the real horror consists of internal affairs.
Robert’s unconsummated desire for his little sister Rowena culminates at the family
New Year’s party when he asks her to marry him. Immediately, external fireworks go off,
sounding like bombs. The next scene shows Robert naked in bed. The movie cuts
immediately to Rowena falling out of her wheelchair and dying, as though it were a direct
result of Robert’s inappropriate lust for her. Although only the horse in the stable sees her,
Robert senses something, goes to the window and sees his parents saying that Rowena is
dead. "It was a Sunday," says Davvy in voiceover about Rowena's funeral, at which Robert
is devastated and his mother Dolly implacable. In many movies, the funeral of a character
already known to be dead is omitted or excised in the interests of moving the plot forward
and maintaining a certain pace. In Canadian movies, however, the movie frequently lingers
on the ceremony as though to emphasize the cultural importance of the church or to
foreground unspoken emotions. Later, the father plays the piano, with Dolly in the next room
and Robert at the window. The sibling/ child death precipitates and intensifies the distance
among Robert and his parents, their emotional separation indicated by physical distance
and increasing silence. High art cannot bridge their gaps.
Family dysfunction leads to jealousy, violence, doubling, death, war and madness.
One of the servants, Anne (Clare Coulter), later says to Robert as he barrels past her too
quickly on the stairs, "One person dies, the rest of the world goes crazy." Robert acts out his
rage towards his mother’s emotional distance/ sexual closeness and his grief at his sister’s

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death. Robert, who had given Rowena a white rabbit, the symbol of madness in Alice in
Wonderland, takes a baseball bat to her rabbits after her death. His mother insisted they be
destroyed, "because they were hers." Asks her husband, "Have you gone mad?" Robert is
doubled with helpless animals—first the rabbits and later with a horse whose leg is broken
on the ship that takes him to war. He is forced to destroy both the rabbits he had vowed to
look after and the wounded horse. Later, however, he will save a stable full of horses in a
rebellious move against British authority.
Robert's sexual coming-of-age or possible coming-out is thwarted by the mother bent
on infantilizing him. She tells him it is ridiculous for him to look after rabbits: "You’re a grown
man." He cries, belying that statement, implying that in fact he is not yet a man. She barges
in on him in the bathtub, site of male troubles in Canadian film, declaring, "Mother’s
prerogative to visit the wounded." His emotional wounds will soon enough turn to physical
ones, foreshadowed by Dolly's words. Standing behind him, she recounts stories of his
falling down as a child. She goes to hug him, while he in turn hugs his knees in the tub,
making a sound indicating pain as she approaches. She accuses him of mistakenly
believing that Rowena belonged to him. "Well, I’m here to tell you no-one belongs to
anyone…we’re all cut off at birth with a knife and left to the mercy of strangers. Do you hear
that? Strangers!" She tells him, "Go to hell." He does; he goes to war. "I can’t keep anyone
alive. Not any more," she says, lamenting her failure to protect Rowena. She will be equally
unable to protect Robert from homosexuality, war and death.
Robert showers naked with other soldiers, having moved from smothered child to
homosexual man—from the mother-dominated child's bath to the male-dominated man's
shower. The war anthem "It’s A Long Way to Tipperary" plays in the background in this as
well as several other scenes. It may be a long way to Tipperary, but not so far as it is to
homosexuality, or from one sexual masquerade to another. Robert is coded gay, but in order
to disavow this knowledge, Robert and his fellow soldier-friend, Clifton, both virgins, visit a

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brothel with a group of soldiers before shipping out to war. Robert: "Get in there. Do you
want them to think we’re a couple of crazy virgins?" Clifton: "We are crazy virgins, aren’t
we?…God, if they’re all naked, I’ll faint…well, goodbye." An American-coded cowboy comes
out, "Yer next, Boy." Ella, the prostitute asks him, "You got a name?" Robert remains silent
at the seemingly innocuous but overdetermined question, appearing uneasy, perched on the
bed fully clothed, with his legs together like a frightened schoolgirl. Heterosexuality is
reaffirmed as he ejaculates in his pants before Ella gets his coat off. "Nevermind," she tells
him. "Just a sign of youth. So you jumped the gun—once—at least you heard it. At least
your hearing’s not impaired." At this point the film cuts to his mother on a train saying, "I
don’t even know where we are." His father tells her, "We’re in Montreal," a locus of things
French and sexual. It seems she has divined her son’s sexual act with another woman and it
has quite disoriented her, psychically as well as physically.
Robert’s hearing may not be impaired at this point, but his vision of his own identity is
failing. As happens repeatedly in TSE films, irreparable emotional wounds will manifest
physically, sometimes in blindness, sometimes in head wounds, sometimes in leg wounds
and/or amputations. It falls to Robert to shoot the shipboard horse and before he does so, he
says, "I need more light." He is not blind, but has trouble seeing clearly. "Goddamn
you…die!" he shouts, as he transfers his mother-anger to the horse and shoots it, just as
they near England, 's mother country. Clifton, also mother-fixated, says that he promised his
mother he would not drink. Robert writes his own mother, "Every day we wait to see when
we will cross the channel into France." The implied wait is the one in which Robert will cross
the border into another more sexualized country, often symbolized by Québec or France or
Italy. Before he has a chance to cross over, Clifton falls ill and dies. First, Robert denies they
were friends, afraid of the homoerotic connotation. Clifton had no country, either sexual or
national. "He didn’t belong to England any more than he belonged to the army," Robert tells
Lady Barbara. The beautiful older aristocrat represents England, resembles his mother, and

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is visibly attracted to him. Robert has to remind her, "Boston’s not in my country." Ignorant of
Canada, she replies, "Oh, yes, you’re further north, with the Eskimos." As they scatter
Clifton’s ashes in the river, piano music swells, and Robert says, "Go in peace, my friend,
and sing with the whales." The identification with Canadian movie characters with animals,
high culture, Europe, sexual border-crossing and coming-of-age is played out in the context
of family and war.
During a shelling of their barracks, Robert’s knees are injured and bloody. Now
physically as well as emotionally wounded, he arrives at Lady Barbara’s mansion with a
cane, one of the props of the wounded, castrated Canadian hero. A little girl in a white dress
with a blue ribbon on her hat — twinned with Rowena’s white dress and blue sash seen
earlier — carries his suitcase, and echoes his sister's previous words to Robert, "Do you
need to be rescued?" The girl’s favourite brother is Clive, who is coded gay and doubled with
Clifton, who had a similar name. Robert visits Lady Barbara’s friend, Captain Taffler, in the
hospital. He has lost both his arms. "You’re limping," the captain says to Robert. Both males
are grievously wounded.
At Lady Barbara’s table, the little girl and Robert are both visibly upset at the talk of
the Prince of Wales’ heterosexual exploits to the point that Robert has to excuse himself.
They are sexually twinned just as Robert was with the similarly named Rowena. The little
girl, bringing a tray to Robert’s room, is stopped by Lady Barbara’s mother, who is also the
little girl's mother, making them sisters born years apart, and both attracted to Robert. "You’ll
spoil that young man, Julia, feeding him in bed." Only now is the little girl's name revealed
and it is one of the most common names in Canadian film—Julia.
"Nevermind, Mummy," says Julia to the mother old enough to be her grandmother.
"It’s my affair, not yours." Robert again finds himself positioned between figures of a younger
sister/lover and an older mother/lover. Julia peeks through the door of his room, and is
horrified to see him naked on top of her much-older sister, Lady Barbara. She asks her

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brother, "Clive, why are Robert and Barbara so afraid?…are you afraid?" "Yes," he answers.
They are all afraid of the unspoken incest and homosexuality. Robert emerges from the
house with his bags, his cane under his arm, no longer wounded now that he has had
heterosexual sex with an older woman /mother-figure and homoerotic fear has been allayed.
The cane is now carried by the British officer (Alan Scarfe, star of Deserters) as a
symbol of the ineffective authority of the castrated male. "All you need is a sense of
direction," he claims, calling Robert "good boy." This authority figure, through bad judgment,
will cause the death of numerous men and horses, with many others being saved by Robert.
Shots of the men, at Robert’s direction, urinating on their handkerchiefs and pressing them
to their faces to survive the mustard gas, are intercut with Dolly’s mouth blowing out smoke,
as she dons dark glasses. Robert shoots a German soldier who is watching them, but "all he
was doing was reaching for his glasses." The symbol of the glasses at home and in war
reasserts the impossibility of vision for the men. Dolly's vision is so bright she has to wear
sunglasses, but that will change. Robert looks through binoculars to see a big phallic stick
sticking out of the ground near the German. The inept British authority figure says they have
"lost touch with our observers," the "Watchers." The "Watchers" in war function similarly to
those in the family with psycho-sexual connotations.
When the British officer says, "I don’t give a damn about your bleeding horses,"
Robert shoots him and instead saves the imperilled horses. The next scene is Dolly in a
white nightgown, crumpling half-way down the stairs, saying, "I can’t see, I can’t see…where
is he, Tom?" This is the first time we hear the name of the father. Robert hides in a barn with
the horses, bleeding from the head. The military police, symbol of state authority, set the
barn aflame and the horses stampede out, with Robert riding one of them. He is identified
with and twinned with the animals, in defiance of societal and familial authority figures.
Instead of riding triumphantly into the sunset in the end, the wounded Canadian anti-hero,
now a criminal, rides out of it in the beginning, already wounded. The end is worse. Although

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the prostitute Ella told him there was nothing wrong with his hearing, the nun/nurse in the
hospital says to him, "You can’t get better…can you hear me?" He has only his right eye
open and exposed. The military policeman guarding his room says to the nun, "You ain’t
deaf." Robert is, however, half-blind and wounded in the head.
The Wars deals unromantically with a war that helped define Canadian identity and
equates the nation with a dysfunctional family. Canada/ Robert begins to break away from
the Mother Country, Britain, by distancing itself from Britain’s ignorance about its colony
(Lady Barbara’s remark about being near Boston or "Eskimos"). An American cowboy
reference in a Canadian movie, such as the one coming down the stairs in the brothel can
never be incidental and always refers to America. The reference is brief but almost identical
to one in which a cowboy descends a staircase in Eliza's Horoscope. Canada is portrayed in
a situation of sexual coming of age, but the relationships with national family members
America, Britain and France are not only difficult but also transgressive. The unions between
Robert and Rowena/ Julia, Dolly and Clifton must be disavowed and parts of the main
triangulations must die — Rowena, Clifton, Dolly, and Robert himself. Only the elderly
female "Watcher" of the destroyed Ross family remains to tell the tale.
With so many nations involved in co-productions, the idea of the "cultural mosaic" is a
key one for dealing with the TSE. In contrast to the U.S. "melting pot," in which all ethnicities
and cultures are first and foremost American, Canada's self-image as a "cultural mosaic"
encourages and funds citizens and residents to retain national and cultural identities from
other countries or backgrounds. For a country founded on the mistaken but long-accepted
assumption of two distinct European cultures, the idea of diversity and divisiveness stands in
opposition to the TSE assimilation attempt.
While the United States emphasizes assimilation, it also values and extols
individuality. Contrary to the "American dream" and ideas of excelling, standing out,
achieving and being acknowledged, Canada builds a mosaic, allegedly giving each distinct

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tile equal focus, attention and value. In the mosaic scenario there is historically and culturally
no room for individual heroics. Few such figures exist in the version of Canadian history that
has been passed down and provided in schools as curriculum. While "Canadian values" of
universal healthcare, peacemaking, tolerance, and acceptance of immigrants could be
debated and disproved, they still hold currency. The same could be said of such "American
values" as the individual's right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," in contrast to
Canada's motto of "Peace, order and good government."
The two opposing ideas of the individual and the group form the historical bases of the
two nations' moviemaking and movie-going tendencies. The U.S. makes movies about
heroes and their exploits. Canada generally stories of families, often with a split focus and
rarely a single achieving hero. This is not to say that Hollywood movies do not have family
stories or stories about groups. Hollywood has built so many stories on heroes that
searching for them is not an issue as it is in Canada. In contrast, ensemble casts are the
norm in Canadian film, where no single character receives focus or sometimes even a
continuous narrative thread. Stories are sometimes split between two competing narratives,
usually without resolution. A story can begin with one character and end with another, as in
the hospital-nursing-social conscience movie Taking Care (Clarke Mackey 1987). Two or
three characters sometimes receive equal focus, as in the jewellery-heist threesome of
Foolproof (William Phillips 2003). It is Canada's virtual inability to produce a movie with a
hero or a mythic journey that is highlighted in all the stories with ensemble casts or anti-
heroic males as leads. The dearth of movies not about dysfunctional families accentuates
the plethora of those that foreground them. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is perhaps the first
Canadian movie with a hero and a mythic journey. It is in neither English nor French, but in
the Inuktitut language of an Aboriginal legend.
The main dichotomy in the U.S. has been Black/White, whereas in Canada it is the
French/ English. Whereas African Americans represent about 10 percent of the U.S.

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population, Francophones make up about the same percentage of the Canadian population,
with Blacks and Jews comprising a much smaller proportion—about 2 percent each. The
Italian population and influence rose post-World War II and remains high, especially in
Toronto and Montreal. Canadian movies frequently deal with Jewish characters, often from
Montreal, such as I Never Sang for My Father, Why Shoot the Teacher, The Apprenticeship
of Duddy Kravitz, The Lucky Star (Max Fischer, 1980), and Italian characters, as in Brown
Bread Sandwiches, Léolo, Perfectly Normal and Mambo Italiano. The rising Asian
population is heavily concentrated in urban centres, with the first Canadian feature film
starring Asians, Double Happiness, having been made in 1994.
Very few Black characters appear in Canadian movies before Clement Virgo's Rude
in the 1990s. There is a Black wrestler in Blood and Guts, the Black inmate suffering from a
snake phobia in Phobia, the Black john in Eliza's Horoscope, and the head of the advanced
tribe in Quest for Fire, played by mixed-race Canadian Rae Dawn Chong. In Deadline, white
screenwriter-professor Steven, a guest speaker at the University of Toronto, inadvertently
defining the marginal state of Canadian culture in the face of American dominance. A Black
student then challenges him on the use of horror as a way of expression, saying he doesn’t
want to identify with horror. Steven’s response, "Well, that’s tough," intimates Canadians will
have to write American-style if they expect commercial success. The students accuse him of
peddling junk for money. "Keep your sickness—we don’t want it any more," the Black
student tells Steven, turning Steven American-coded and the Black character, Canadian-
coded. When they impugn his sense of social responsibility, Steven responds that horror is
his vocabulary and he talks of the free market, choice and success. The Black student
represents the Canadian social conscience.
34

In other movies, Blackness is treated partly as a disability, and partly as an
appropriation to prop up the white narrative hero. A peripheral Black character appears in
Love at First Sight. The leading Black character, Heather/Chanel #5 in If You Could See

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What I Hear, is portrayed as rejecting Tom, the white hero. She sees her Blackness as a
"problem" in their relationship, thus ultimately rejecting herself as well as Tom. The
interracial romance is narratively denied, Tom's "colour-blindness" and the allegedly tolerant
Canadian mosaic notwithstanding. Once in bed, Chanel #5 (we still do not know her name)
asks Tom, "How can you tell I'm Black?" Tom, till then oblivious to her colour, answers, "I
think I'm colour-blind, too." Then she asks, inexplicably, "How come you never talk about
your mother?" His mother, he recounts, helped him overcome his blindness and act
"normal," thus contributing to his confidence and success. In the end he gets the girl—a
white girl.
There is one TSE movie, however, that tries to pass as the Other when the Other is
not only American but also Black.

Passing as the Other: Hard Feelings

Hard Feelings (Daryl Duke 1980), a Canada/ USA co-production, seems to imply that
Black issues were American rather than Canadian. The movie is told from the point of view
of Bernie, Canadian-coded as a nice, polite, white, boring, confused, Jewish, border-
crossing New York university student in Atlanta. The white hero appears to be American but
has Canadian characteristics has a white girlfriend, Barbara, and meets a Black woman,
Winnie. The women serve as opposite but interchangeable female "siblings" for the White
male hero's explorations of border-crossing "Blackness."
In Atlanta, Bernie meets Winona — or Winnie. For a good part of the movie he does
not know her name. The phenomenon of female naming, or the lack of it, is significant in
Canadian movies, especially the names of women. They frequently have two names, no
name, or a name that ties them to a geographical place or cultural space. The only public

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connection to "Winnie" in the TSE era would have been Winnie Mandela, connecting to
Africa and foregrounding the issue of Blackness. Winnie, the social aggressor, immediately
invites Bernie to a party, a place of strife and violence in TSE movies. Bernie’s insecure
male identity is immediately in jeopardy on his way there: he falls over a piece of junk in the
street and hurts his leg. At this all-Black party, he experiences for the first time the feeling of
being the only White person in a group. After accidentally receiving a punch to the eye, he
tells her, "I’m going blind." The only thing Black about Bernie is his temporary black eye.
Winnie takes care of him, in the maternal way that often infantilizes the Canadian movie
male.
Bernie's mother also takes care of him, but in a different way. You’re a missing
person…here, talk to your mother," his father says to him on the phone. The Oedipal
connection is broken by the father, who then narratively disappears. Bernie's mother says
she will wire him money, another instance of money originating with the solicitous mother/
wife/ girlfriend, also seen in Double Negative, Crossbar and Perfectly Normal. "I was a little
crazed but I’m fine," Bernie assures them. Back in school, supposedly in New York, a fellow
student, Barbara (Lisa Langlois from Blood Relatives and seven other TSE movies) picks
him up seductively, playing the aggressively sexual Canadian female. This female-dominant
situation, as well as his own position as a coward, cause him to be narratively punished:
school bully Russell calls him "cuntface" and pulls a knife on him. Barbara and Winnie are
twinned as sexual "sisters," one Black, one White, by Barbara’s constant questions to Bernie
about Winnie—about her body, her Blackness, her difference. She asks how he had the
"nerve" to "date a Negro girl." Replies Bernie, "They’re not so different," disavowing Winnie's
Blackness. Later, however, when pressed by Barbara about whether he and Winnie had
sex, he describes his relationship with Winnie as "different," showing ambivalence when
compared to his earlier observation. When Barbara asks him pointedly about Winnie’s body,
they are necking on the couch, the conversation exciting them both sexually. They use

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Winnie’s absent Blackness to fuel their own white passion, as the camera lingers in close-up
on their shoes and white socks. Immediately, they are again narratively punished for their
Canadian sexuality, as occurred earlier in this movie, as well as in others, such as Perfectly
Normal (when a policeman puts a ticket on Renzo's car as he's making love to Denise for
the first time): "My father!" Barbara cries out, as she hears a car in the driveway.
35
Both their
homes repeat as loci of family problems: Bernie’s mother and father have been fighting, with
the result that his father has been sleeping in his son’s room. Bernie still has an erection in
the presence of Barbara’s father; he covers his lap with the tablecloth as the three play
chess, a game notable for its black and white pieces. The camera then cuts to three girl
children, one of them playing with a large plastic apple, signifying the original sin tied up not
only with sex and the female temptress, but also with two temptresses—the present White
one and the absent Black one, doubled as objects of sexual desire and racial confusion for
Bernie.
In addition to his doubled girlfriends, an incestuous relationship is implied with
Bernie’s mother. She plays Blanche in a community theatre production of A Streetcar
Named Desire, disguised in a blonde wig. After the play, she takes the wig off, laughs with
Bernie in a narrow, grey hallway and kisses him. Right after this suggestive mother-son
scene, Russell the bully kills Bernie’s dog, then rips his own T-shirt, in a Stanley Kowalski-
like way. The white Southern American classic A Streetcar Named Desire is invoked for
national and artistic legitimacy, for its sexual and family dysfunctional aspects, as well as
acting as a narrative catalyst for action and emotion. Bernie's mother is seen as keeper of
the money as well as a sexual attraction for her son. These are her narrative functions.
Winnie is narratively transported from Atlanta to Harlem. Christian iconography
abounds in her mother’s apartment, a base for Winnie to attend her grandmother’s funeral.
As the American south stands as a symbol of violence for Black at the hands of Whites,
Harlem stands in as a traditional northern Black site of trouble for Whites. Winnie is seen to

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be a good girl in the North, protecting Bernie from local "Black trouble," and also not having
sex with him. Harlem, however, is seen to be a dangerous "zoo," as she calls it, where naïve
white Canadian boys might be unsafe. Her brother, Lathan, infantilizes Bernie by calling him
"son" and, when he calls him "boy," turns the White-on-Black insult into a Black-on-White
one.
The Black American teaches the White Canadian how to negotiate dangerous Black
America in terms of using temporary insanity as a masquerade to remain safe. "Look
crazed, be crazy," Lathan counsels Bernie in how to gain a bully’s respect. "Bernie, you’re a
chicken," he says, "Go after him." Lathan safely escorts him to the subway, giving him a
wrapped-up gun that Bernie hides between his legs, a substitute for his absent Canadian
phallic power. "Are you insane?" his friend later asks him. "I’m just gonna scare the prick,"
Bernie responds, referring to the school bully. "Of course it’s dangerous…everything’s
dangerous." When his friend says, "He is insane," meaning the bully, Russell, Bernie
responds, "I’ll shoot his foot." The connection is made between the Canadian victim, a bully/
coward relationship, absent phallic power, and the foot as fetish object or phallic substitute to
allay castration anxiety. The male substitutes his own or another’s foot or leg, often injured,
or a cane, as the phallus, as in The Wars. Bernie hurts both his leg and his head. The theme
song says in part, "When you got a headache…" When Bernie leads the bully to the gun
buried on the beach, Russell reaches it first. Bernie hits him with his tennis racket in the
ensuing fight. Bernie, then bleeding from the head, wins, sitting astride the bully. "I could kill
you right now…you’re not worth messing up my life for," he says, first pointing the gun at
Russell and then tossing it aside. He staggers away, smiling, having proved himself the
better man — the law-abiding gunless Canadian who uses his sense/ head instead of his
emotions/ gut. His friend later asks, "I wanna know where you got the balls." It appears the
Jewish Canadian coward got "the balls" from a tough Black man, his doubled American
brother, appropriated his Blackness to defeat the White bully back on home turf and thus

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completing his coming-of-age. Bernie never gets the girl, either Black or White, in the end.
Their sexual and national identities are also ultimately subsumed in the male Whiteness of
the narrative. The "hard feelings" of the title connote adolescent sexuality as well as
emotional and national confusion about race.

My History’s Better Than Yours: Dirty Tricks

In the comedy Dirty Tricks (Alvin Rakoff 1979), the sexual coming-of-middle-age
extends to explicitly national and historical themes pitting Canada against the United States.
This movie is a fully Canadian production, partly, perhaps, because of the negative light in
which the Canadian director and the novice screenwriter portray George Washington. Colin
Chandler, a Harvard University history professor (played by American Elliott Gould, who also
stars in the TSE movie The Silent Partner), is sleeping with one of his young female
students. The older man in authority and the younger woman represent the same sexually
transgressive boundary that characterizes Circle of Two. Chandler subsequently becomes
embroiled in the search for an important letter that would prove George Washington to be a
traitor to his country, representing a corresponding nationally transgressive boundary.
William (Nicholas Campbell), the student in possession of the coveted letter, is
followed by twin thugs who are muscular, mustachioed, gay-coded, and dressed identically
throughout the movie. Their gayness is made explicit when Colin tells them, "You’re not
cops, but I like your shirts very much…they’re sweet," putting on a fey face and voice as he
says "sweet." They wear white sleeveless mesh tank tops, a gay fashion marker of the time.
Rich Little, the Canadian impressionist who became famous in the U.S., plays Robert
Brennan, a former academic pal of Chandler’s who has written a best-selling book about sex
and politics called Our Founding Fathers: A Sexual Exposé. Chandler is jealous of
Brennan’s fame. Rich Little, the Canadian playing the American Brennan tells the Canadian-

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coded American, Chandler, "Look at your shoes, look at your clothes — you’ve got no style."
Brennan encourages Chandler to write his own book. Chandler, however, is coded the
serious historical academic, on the side of high culture and history, while Brennan
represents American low culture and the commercialization of history, politics and sex
combined in a best-selling book.
Chandler comes to understand that his former teacher, played by Canadian ex-
patriate Arthur Hill, is involved in the letter theft. "You, you!" Chandler accuses his mentor-
betrayer. A border-crossing Canadian is at fault here for the potential loss of a beloved
American myth, resulting in unresolved sexual and national Oedipal issues for Chandler.
Colin says to Brennan sarcastically, "Tits and ass are better than stars ’n’ stripes," intimating
that Canada could make up for its lack of history, sex appeal and cultural identity by "out-
sexing" America. When Brennan whacks one of the twins in the face and the other twin
asks, "Are we all right?" they intimate that together they constitute one person. The
difficulties of separating Canadian from American, heterosexual from homosexual, male
from female, and son from mother are embodied in the doppelganger images of Canadian
movies. The Two Solitudes are made manifest and yet sublimated at every turn.
Although Chandler is allegedly American, Dirty Tricks turns him into a Canadian hero-
loser, with particular sexual and national markers. It also renders Kate Jackson, as television
news reporter Polly Bishop, male-coded and more aggressive than Chandler. When she
visits to his university class, she tells him, "I’m not television. I’m news." He condescendingly
calls her "Dearie" and holds her chin as he spells his name for her. She responds in kind by
grabbing his beard and spelling her name for him. This instance of female naming has
resonance in the legion of Canadian female naming movies. When Colin, an academic who
hates TV, refuses to give her an interview, she follows him into the men’s room, leaving only
as he starts to unzip his pants. "Got rid of her," he says to himself. She does, however, get
her interview, conducted on the steps of the university building, where they exchange good-

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natured insults. The attempt at rapid-fire romantic comedy dialogue lacks wit and comes
across as mean-spirited. "I’ve been to bed with many women who didn’t like me and who
were twice as ballsy as you," he tells her. "Chandler, you’re really a pig," she retorts, as he
makes pig sounds. She turns around to a fat crew member laughing behind her, and says,
"What’s so funny, Porky?" a reference to the eponymous adolescent comedy shooting at
approximately the same time as Dirty Tricks. The reference by Colin mocks not only Polly,
but also denigrates the entire news interview process so important to Canadian television
and culture. In response, Polly swings her microphone on its cord and purposely whacks
Colin in the balls. He falls in pain. "I am not involved," announces Brennan at this event,
thereby Canadian-coded as a coward. Chandler also marks himself similarly, actually
proclaiming, "I guess I’m just cut out to be a coward. I’m too intelligent to be anything else. I
don’t like those guys with guns." The sexual and historical identities are laid out, with
Canadians as "cowards" and the Americans as "those guys with guns." The genre
incorporates comedy, romance and political thriller, in the "Narrativus Interruptus" style that
stops to take care of Freudian and/or national considerations.
36

Colin is sometimes coded feminine, especially in a scene where he is in his bathtub,
wearing a frilly shower cap. Polly, who makes a living in TV news at a time when it was still
difficult for women to be accepted, works in the next room. As in The Wars and The
Changeling, the tub is the locus of male-female and/or son-mother psychic disturbances.
"Would you bring back some crazy-foam and a rubber ducky?" Chandler asks Polly, from
the tub. "A blue one." Infantilized, he must regain his masculinity, his overdetermined balls,
his blue ducky, from Polly, the phallic female.
Chandler has a love/ hate, girlfriend/ mother fixation. A stereotypically Jewish "mama's
boy," he repeatedly mimes calling his mother on the phone. In doing so, he assures "her"
he’s met "a nice girl," even though he’s just compared Polly to Nazi Adolf Eichmann, when
Polly asserts she was just doing her job. "Hello, Ma?" he says. "She’s got a heart of

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gold…not Jewish."
37
Colin asks a cab driver, "How could you trust a female long enough to
marry her?" He says Polly has seduced him and lied to him. He becomes angry, feels
betrayed and yells at her, then says he loves her. He tells her she’s "great in bed, but that’s
not everything." When his elderly next-door neighbour, Mrs. Cohen, a Jewish-mother-
substitute, wants to introduce him to "a nice girl," he says of Mrs. Cohen, "Give me a break.
She wants to marry me." But does Mrs. Cohen want to marry him or to marry him off? It is
not clear. While not a plot point, the reason for the inclusion of the scene seems to have
more to do with psychoanalytic issues in addition to a need to appear funny or "edgy."
In this uneasy mix of comedy and thriller, the confused narrative swings from dog-pee
jokes to unknown men and women in fedoras, from car crashes to murders, from an
unmotivated dance in a rest home to the two gay thugs in hot pursuit.
One reason the story and its many characters remain unclear is owing to the fact that
the real narrative consists of the Canadian-American historical subtext and its underlying
Freudian questions. The history of the revolutionary war in Dirty Tricks, while made by
Canadians, is portrayed ostensibly from an American point of view. Chandler, however,
frames the revolution in some terms that could be taken straight from Fothergill. Chandler
tells his class, "So families were split on the issue: one brother loyal to the crown, another
saying, ‘Hell, no, the only answer is revolution…and although many fought in this
revolution—fought and died—it came down in history embodied in the figure of one man—
the father of our country, George Washington." Canadians are effaced here and represent
the blind spot in American history and consciousness. The focus is on Britain as the parent
and America as the revolutionary child within which "split families" warred. The sibling
Canada is not mentioned, nor is the exodus of Loyalists who chose to leave the United
States to come to Canada. Dirty Tricks ignores the Canadian story in favour of a confused
American one. Canada’s history in the scenario of fighting brothers, the part of the "family"
that remained loyal to the Crown, is omitted. One student, however, confronts Chandler

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about his view of George Washington as hero. As the repressed Canadianness of the TSE
returns, Colin becomes inexplicably angry and considers the student’s opinion to be
revisionist history by smaller minds — "two minuscule faggot rats" — who want to tear down
George Washington. The rant, as written, is somewhat incomprehensible, but carries the
implication that anyone who fails to support the heroic American "great-man" view of history
is not only unpatriotic but also homosexual. Nationality and patriotism are linked with
homosexuality, with the attendant implication that no loyal heterosexual American would ask
such a question. By default then, it might be a traitorous homosexual Canadian asking the
question and becoming enmeshed in "Narrativus Interruptus."
In the end, after pledging to do his best to authenticate the letter by George
Washington, Chandler eats it, as though the Canadian-coded, sexually and nationally
confused hero could physically ingest American history and therefore become important and
loyal by protecting it. Polly tells him, "Chandler, you’re eating my story." Later, in bed with
Colin, she asks for a history lesson. "The British were winning," he explains to this
apparently uneducated female American journalist. "The British were here," he says,
pointing first to one of her breasts. "The Americans were here," he continues, pointing to her
other breast. Now that Polly has been subdued and her heterosexuality recovered and
under the control of the male academic hero, her body serves as the site of the map of
struggle between America and its parent. He writes his, American, history on her body. At
this point, when Brennan appears on a talk show plugging his book, Chandler turns him off,
whereas he previously listened to him. Chandler has become an ersatz hero himself
because he has restored the quintessential American hero, George Washington, to his
rightful place. "I cannot tell a lie," he tells Polly, equating himself with George Washington.
The last line of the film is, "And that’s the truth," recuperating American history and national
pride, as well as invoking the comedy from the by-then-famous line by comedian Lily Tomlin
from the popular television show Laugh-In. There is no mention of the possibility of George

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Washington’s alleged bi-sexuality, which adds yet another layer to the gendered nationalism
of the film.
38

In addition to the sexual and national confusion exhibited in the movie, the issues and
characters are characterized as a type of insanity in the marketing. The Dirty Tricks video
box proclaims, "Everyone here is crazy…everyone else is cracking up…in the hilarious
comedy that casts off in total insanity." The front of the box features a caricature of Chandler
in the "madcap" shower-cap bathtub scene. Another ironic "dirty trick" related to the movie is
that a government-funded Canadian movie attempts to use American history to make
money. The assumption that Canada has no discernible history of its own and no successful
film business necessitates an especially manic national and international masquerade.

Chapter 5 Endnotes — Foreign Relations in the Two Solitudes: It's All in the Family

1
Toby Miller, et al. Global Hollywood, Chapter 3, "Co-producing Hollywood," 83-109, 98.

2
Paul W. Taylor, "Co-production – Content and Change: International Television in the Americas." Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol.
20, No. 3 (1995), http://info.wlu.ca/~wwwpress/jrls/cjc/BackIssues/20.3/taylor.html. Taylor quotes his 1994 article in which he documented "66
bilateral co-production treaties between 35 countries signed since 1950, with just less than half of the total involving countries in the Americas
— Canada (23), Mexico (4), Cuba (1), Brazil (5), Argentina (2), and Chile (1)."

3 The U.K. is looked at in pages 73 to 75, the Czech Republic in pages 71 to 72, and Italy in pages 70 to 71. Australia takes pages 66 to 69,
and Mexico, 75 to 76.

4
Mike Gasher, "The Audiovisual Locations Industry in Canada: Considering British Columbia as Hollywood North," Canadian
Journal of Communications, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1995. Gasher writes, "Rare are stories which cast the locations industry in a critical light.
In a business story, Sun reporter Greg Ip reports the comments of B.C. film director Charles Wilkinson on the fragility of location
production due to its Hollywood dependency. The story also cites the concerns of producer Tim Gamble, who describes location
production as 'Mexico North' because, Ip paraphrases, it 'remains predominantly a factory for foreigners.'" There seems a colonial
superiority in the implication that Canada's role in Hollywood movie production ought to be more important, thereby relegating
Mexico to a third-world or third-space of production identity.

5
Millet et al, Global Hollywood, 59.

6
Ibid., 60.

176

7
Ibid., 15.

8
Miller et al, Global Hollywood, 1.

9
The only other feature film in 1946 of note is Bush Pilot, about two war pilot brothers in Northern Ontario who ferry passengers about the
wilderness in small planes. The Canadian production stars Canadian newcomer Austin Willis as the "good" brother, American actor Jack La
Rue (same name as the Karl Malden character, Larrue, in I Confess, as the "bad" brother and Rochelle Hudson as the woman they both love.
It marked the only feature by director Sterling Campbell and producer Larry Cromien.

10
Bosley Crowther, The Screen: 3 New Movies At Local Theatres," New York Times, February 22, 1951.

11
Bosley Crowther, "The Screen in Review, ' The Happy Time,' Adaptation of Stage Play, With Boyer, Has Bow at Music Hall," New York
Times, October 31, 1952.

12
www.leonardmaltin.com.

13
Bosley Crowther, "The Screen in Review," ' I Confess,' Hitchcock Drama of Priest's Dilemma Starring Clift, Opens at Paramount," New York
Times, March 23, 1953.

14
www.imdb.com.

15
Bill Korhn, "I Confess – Historical Note," www.sensesofcinema.com, October 2000.

16
Morris, Embattled Shadows, A History of Canadian Cinema 1895-1939 (Montreal & Kingston/London/Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University
Press,1978, Reprinted 1992), 57.

17
Original music is by Henry Mancini, a model for later TSE movies that would use famous composers. The movie editor was the French
Yves Langlois, who shot eight TSE films, three of them for Chabrol.

18
Louisiana was a France/USA/Canada/Italy co-pro directed by Philippe de Broca in 1984, who had been an assistant to Chabrol and
Truffaut, and written by two French writers from one's novel, and starring Margot Kidder, de Broca's then wife. Louisiana was set in Paris and
in the U.S. deep south about plantations.

19
From the www.imdb.com review: "A prime cause of this film's failure is its very disjointed screenplay…" The original screenplay by Jim
Osborne was nominated for a Genie Award. in 1980. It was the first and only feature film directed by Kohanyi, who wrote the 1985
Yugoslavia/Canada co-production The War Boy.

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20
Alligator Shoes cost only $250,000 and was one of the most talked-about movies of the decade, proving that large budgets did not ensure a
movie’s success, either critically or commercially. Although Alligator Shoes is a DC film, unabashedly Canadian and set in and around Toronto,
the theme of incest between cousins recurs, overlapping with TSE concerns. Like Blood Relatives, it leads to the ultimate and "intimate" act of
violent death — in this case, suicide.

21
Maddin's silent film features a phallic perfectionist mother who is a "Watcher," making sure through binoculars, a telescope and a
searchlight that her children, especially her sexually awakened teenage daughter, are not misbehaving, especially sexually. There is a scene
of incest where she lifts her pubescent son's nightshirt and repeated kisses his buttocks as he tried to push her away. She is seen in a bathtub,
with the intertitle informing viewers that she regularly bathes in vinegar to wash away her wins. Bisexual love is depicted among the two
children and a twinned pair of male/female teenage detectives in a gender masquerade. The father is a mad scientist in a basement lab in their
lighthouse home/orphanage, whose corpse-wrapping and funeral stretch into long scenes.

22
www.tvguide.com. The screenplay was partly scripted by veteran Welsh-born thriller writer Jimmy Sangster, among four others, including
American-born Torontonian Lew Lehman, plus two uncredited contributors. The music is by André Gagnon,a well-known contemporary
Québécois singer and musician.

23
www.time.com.Time magazine (October 8, 1979): "In his time, Orson Welles has played everything from Kane to king. Now he is a country
sheriff in Never Trust an Honest Thief, shooting in Las Vegas. Welles, who complains of the state of his personal exchequer, says he was
attracted to the role partly because 'the villains are the tax gatherers.'"

24
The movie, much of which was reshot by producer Zale Magder, lay unfinished for several years, and was eventually released as Hot
Money in 1983. It had three additional titles at various times: Getting Centred, The Great Madison Country Robbery and Zen Business.

25
The only Internet review of this movie is from " sol -" from Perth, Australia, "My brief review of the film," 10 January 2005. who writes, "A film
about the psychological impact of a robbery in a small town may sound interesting, but that is what this film is and it is not interesting at all.
Terrible music the least of the problems of this film with low production values. Being top quality actors, it is very perplexing to think that this
was all that Murphy and Welles managed to eventuate to after such great careers. Needless to say, their talents are not used here, but it is not
really a film made by people with talent anyway. Although one can bear the watch, there is nothing rewarding at all along the way, unless male
nudity turns you on. Even [Thomas] Kopache's earnest acting is no virtue to poor writing and directing."

26
Taylor, Canadian Journal of Communication.

27
Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press, 1993), 92-96.

28
The Hounds of Notre Dame (Zale Dalen1980) is about Father Athol Murray and the hockey team of a Catholic boarding school on the
Saskatchewan prairies in 1940s, combining the theme of religion with hockey and higher education.

29
Langlois remembers, during the looping sessions in Montreal, informing director Chabrol that the French actors who were not Canadian, all
but the father played by the English-speaking Montrealer Walter Massey, were speaking English with a British accent. Native French-speaker
Chabrol was unable to detect it. Chabrol, said Langlois, was also fascinated by American game shows and would come to set quoting lines
from The Price is Right. "He was observing how people behaved in North America and was watching things he couldn't see in France," she

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remembered. "He came to Montreal, saw English and French living and interacting together." Donald Sutherland's little boy was a case in
point. He spoke fluent French, better than that of Sutherland. The boy's mother was Québécoise actress Francine Racette. Phone interview,
January 22, 2007.

30
Langlois remembers that Audran's presence in Chabrol's movies had something to do with an alimony agreement. Phone interview,
January 22, 2007.

31
www.imdb.com, nbott from Washington DC reviews the movie: "Jodie Foster and Michael Ontkean playing French war resistors is a stretch
of the imagination I could not entertain. This story should have been in French with French actors and actresses. I really do not like films that
have English lines but songs that are in French etc. At least they did not attempt to have phony French accents. I hope Mr. Chabrol was paid
well for this lapse in his usual brilliant film career. This is truly the worst film I have seen directed by this classic filmmaker."

32
While an issue of cineACTION was devoted to "Framing the Family" in 1992, its articles dealt with Thelma & Louise, the Alien trilogy, Boyz
'N' the Hood, Imitation of Life, and issues of race, gender and ethnicity, but not about Canadian movies.

33
Both wars were formative experiences for Canada. The statue overlooking the monument to Canada's dead at the site of the WWI Battle of
Vimy Ridge is a female, called "The Spirit of Canada," holding laurel leaves downwards in her hand. The war image of Canada is of a woman
of peace in one of the founding nations of "her" birth.

34
A TV movie, Race to Freedom (Don McBrearty 1994), dealt with race directly, showing the African Americans who escaped slavery to
freedom in Canada, as merchants and pillars of the community in Southern Ontario.

35

As happens frequently in Canadian movies, the hero is punished for sexual desire by authoritarian threats, characters and actions.
Reiker calls Miles twice, from a phone booth right outside the apartment, as soon as Miles starts to make love to Julie. Miles replies, "Go
fuck yourself," a different response from the more passive portrayals of Renzo, absent as a cop tickets his car in Perfectly Normal and the
young couple, panicked about being discovered by her father in Hard Feelings.

36
Ararat, the most narratively conventional movie by Atom Egoyan to date, has much in common with Canadian movies. Its history, like that
of Dirty Tricks, is explored in terms of that of another country. Annie (played by Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan's wife), the "A" echoing in the names
"Annie," "Arsinée" and "Atom," is an art historian, another professor. The unfolding of the plot to do with the artist Arshile Gorky, another "A"
name, involves not only high-culture "Art," this time modern, but also war. Not a war in which Canadians as a nation were involved but the war
between Armenia and Turkey, a war in the historic past of immigrant Canadians, a war that did not shape the previously understood history of
"Canada" and its Two Solitudes. In keeping with so many other Canadian movies, Ararat deals not only with religion, family conflict and history,
but also with the remembrance of the maternal legacy. Arshile Gorky has only a photo of himself as a child with his mother with which to
remember his past. He uses that memory and the still photo associated with it to create part of his artistic legacy as an Armenian artist. The
photo of the mother was used in Two Solitudes, when the English businessman, Huntley McQueen, reveals his nefarious plans to a portrait of
his dead mother. Egoyan, as a Canadian growing up in Vancouver, coming of age and educated in Toronto, and born in Cairo of Armenian
parents, stands as an emblem of educated, artistic immigrant Canadian identity. Egoyan is a symbol of Canada as much for his varied
immigrant background as for his highly acclaimed yet unviewed (by Canadians) filmic works. The director of the movie is called Edward
Saroyan, connecting him to art and high culture through the poet William Saroyan. The implication is that war should be fought by artists and
that culture survival is a battle. The film indicates that film can and ought to make a difference.

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37
As noted, the Jews in Canadian film are usually nerdy or childlike, except Duddy and Burt in Deadline, who are American coded and
aggressive. Elliott Gould’ characters in The Silent Partner and Dirty Tricks are a combination of the nerd and the go-getter.

38
Evidence of the homosexual tendencies of Washington, Lincoln, Hitler and Byron are discussed in Sandra Martin’s article “Les vies en
rose,” Globe and Mail, January 23, 2003. Review section, R3

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Chapter 6: Women Disguised as Canada:
Naming the Two Solitudes

In all eras of Canadian film, gender and nation overlap and intertwine. There is a
particularly strong symbolic connection between the woman and the nation. Gaile McGregor
and Christine Ramsay have explored the connection between gender and the landscape in
Canadian art and film. Kay Armitage et al, in Gendering the Nation, have related Canadian
women's cinema, including dramatic, documentary and the avant-garde, to ideas of nation,
identity and difference. The gendering is evident from the first extant Canadian film, Back to
God's Country. In subsequent films, the strength of the female characters has been shown
as well, in articles by Ramsay and myself.
1
In such pre-Tax-Shelter Era movies as Nobody
Waved Goodbye (Owen 1964), Explosion (Jules Bricken 1969), and Goin' Down the Road
(Shebib 1970), TSE movies such as The Grey Fox, My American Cousin, and post-TSE
movies such as Perfectly Normal, women characters are seen as single, independent, wise
advisers to weaker men, sexual aggressors, and fighters against sexual harassment and
attempted rape. The connections between gender and nation, however, have not previously
been connected directly to Canada's Two Solitudes, nor to the naming of characters as
complex symbols of regions and nations. These lines can be finely drawn especially in four
pre-TSE movies from 1966 to 1970. All four of these movies have the names of women in or
as the title: Wendy, Waiting for Caroline, Madeleine Is…, and Eliza's Horoscope.
The strong but sensitive female characters are portrayed in relationships with men
who are physically, emotionally and/or sexually abusive. The women are caught between
two different types of men or two political or social choices. The genre is coming-of-age, with
the women searching for identity, sometimes self-doubting and manipulable, often as
accomplices or obstacles in their own stories against the dreams and mad failed exploits of
male loser-heroes. The men are also shown to be in various stages of growing up,

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sometimes bullying, sometimes infantilized or feminized. A clear identification between
women and the nation takes on Canadian cultural and historical specificity, with the female
character caught between national and gender solitudes.
With similarities to movies in which males masquerade as females, such as
Outrageous! and The Silent Partner, these four movies involve young women attempting to
forge an identity in the overwhelming face of a boyfriend. The women — also infantilized, as
well as confused, creative, imaginative and sometimes delusional — are used as the
vehicles for political and emotional statements about men and the state of the nation. All
these female-named films occurred between the time of the seminal coming-of-ager Nobody
Waved Good-Bye and the beginning of the TSE, bridging a time when a nascent Canadian
identity was emerging in politics and film culture.
Some characters in Canadian film, even major ones, are rarely introduced by name,
and it can sometimes be several minutes or even an hour into the movie before main
characters' names are revealed. Other naming strategies involve discussion about a
character's name, two names, no name, a bilingual name, a name that changes within the
movie, or a character name identical to the actor's name. Unlike in American movies,
Canadian characters rarely call each other by name, and it can be confusing to puzzle out
the names and identities. There is a degree of intimacy in speaking a person's name. By
omitting a name, an intimacy is assumed that is not necessarily created or established by its
filmic world. The flip side of naming is a corresponding reluctance to name, indicating a lack
of willingness or inability both to reveal or to pin down the nature of a character, place or
country. The emotional connection made by naming or not naming is missing in most
Canadian movies, which creates a distancing effect.
2

In discussing the significance of masculine naming in Willa Cather's work, Judith
Butler calls the name a site of identification. She explains that a name can function both as a

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prohibition as well as an enabling occasion, associating it with Oscar Wilde's love that dares
not speak its name and also "working, exploiting that prohibition for the possibilities of its
repetition and subversion." After Lacan, if a name is the agreement by which two
parties recognize the same object or person, then an attempt exists to stabilize that name
and the thing for which it stands.
3
Elsaesser notes the prevalence of "titles containing a
proper name." These include Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, The Lost Honour of
Katharina Blum, The Morals of Ruth Halbfass, The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Death of
Maria Malibran, Effi Briest, The Second Awakening of Crista Klages, The Yearning of
Veronica Voss, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and at least eight others. Elsaesser,
however, does not analyze these titles in terms of the meaning of their female naming,
instead calling the titles "bombastic," "ironic" or "sentimental."
4
Butler examines the names
of Ántonia and Jim Burden in Willa Cather's My Ántonia.
5
Jim is burdened by his patronym,
a situation avoided by the women in Canadian movies, who have only first names. They
cannot be stabilized but rather float freely in their bilingualism.
All four of these female-naming movies interconnect sexual and national identities with
the names of women. They are not, however, the only ones. There is an inordinate amount
of emphasis placed on names, naming or lack of naming throughout Canadian film. In fact,
there exists an entire set of films in which female names constitute, in whole or in part, the
titles of the movies. At least 25 pre-TSE and TSE movies have the names of women as, or
in, the title. That number is equivalent to more than an entire annual output of Canadian
movies. The names often relate significantly to regions of Canada and reveal various
political issues, sometimes obliquely and sometimes overtly rendered. There is often a
reference to the United States and Canada's relationship to it. These issues usually appear
in the context of the coming-of-age genre, and in a romantic or sexual relationship and/or
within the family or family substitute.

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What's In A Name? A Rose, An Isabel, A Wendy, A Caroline, A Julia, A Madeleine Is…?

Many nations' cinemas, such as Spanish and Cuban as well as German, burden the
female with national political meaning. The preponderance of Canadian female-naming
movies, however, is of particular relevance to Canadian themes of psychoanalysis and
national identity, with some distinctive ways the phenomenon functions. The 25 Canadian
films from 1964 to 1981 with women's names in the title are: Lydia (1964), Wendy (1966),
Isabel (1967), Waiting for Caroline (1967), Valérie (French 1968), Madeleine Is… (1970) La
Vrai Nature de Bernadette (French 1971), Marie Queur (French 1970), Eliza's Horoscope
(1970), Christina (1973), Gina (French 1974), Sally Fieldgood and Co (1974), La Tête de
Normande St-Onge (French 1974), Angela (1976), Julia (1976, Full Circle in Canada and
The Haunting of Julia in the U.S.), Cathy's Curse (1976), Marie-Anne (1977), Just Jessie
(1977), I, Maureen (1977), Violette Nozière (French 1977), Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia
(1977), Cordélia (French 1978), Suzanne (1979), Melanie (1980), Kelly (1980), and Julie
Darling (1981). Later, a new trend would emerge with I, Claudia, Being Julia and Marion
Bridge (Wiebke von Carolsfeld), all in 2004.
The naming often relates to the French/English duality, with sexual and gender issues
intertwined with the regional and the national. The female bears the mark of the male's
insufficiencies as well as certain meanings of regional identities, sexuality identity and issues
of national and international families. And the naming theme is not just an English-Canadian
phenomenon. Many of the aforementioned titles are French-language Québec films,
including Valérie, Gina, Isabel and Violette Nozière. The critical connection to the Two
Solitudes has been elided, perhaps because the concept seems to Canadians too obvious.
6

The French-English divide has existed and been managed, for good or ill, for centuries. The
gap has sometimes opened wide, as in the FLQ crisis and the two separatist Referendums,
or been unsuccessfully sealed over, as when Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the man whose name

184

came from his French-speaking father and English-speaking mother, attempted a policy of
national bilingualism. It has remained either a double gaping wound or a hardened scar in
Canadian history and politics. It can hardly have escaped continual representation in film,
even if obliquely. One movie on the subject, Les ordres (Michel Brault 1974) tackled the
subject head-on, resulting in a movie that won him the Best Direction award at Cannes and
four Canadian Film Awards, as well as a legacy as one of the greatest Canadian films of all
time (he also shot Mon oncle Antoine, a perennial critics' favourite, and a male coming-of-
age movie). The two solitudes, however, have been discreetly portrayed in other Canadian
films for decades. Many of those films are pre-Tax-Shelter Era and Tax-Shelter Era films
that seriously explored imbricated relationships of men, women and aspects of national/
cultural/ regional/ sexual identity.
Leading up to the TSE, Wendy (Fred J. Fox 1966), Waiting for Caroline (Ron Kelly
1967), Madeleine Is… (Sylvia Spring 1970), and Eliza's Horoscope (w/d. Gordon Sheppard
1970) all use the main female main characters as a way to explore both female coming-of-
age and sexuality, as well as the Two Solitudes of English and French, in which the
women's sexuality is imbricated. All are also coming-of-age stories in which women try to
stand up for themselves against the abuse of their male lovers and other men. All four
women are in abusive relationships with men. Wendy uses the university as the locus of
confrontation to examine female sexuality in a male environment. Waiting for Caroline and
Madeleine Is… place the female protagonist in relationships with French and English men.
Eliza's Horoscope allies both men and women with Native Canadian culture and
revolutionary issues, as well investigating sexuality and identity in particularly Freudian
ways. Female main characters masquerade as the nation or parts of the nation, their journey
towards self-identity tied up with issues of naming/ non-naming. These four films form part of
a corpus of female-titled movies. The names are almost always bilingual, as with Madeleine,
Caroline, Suzanne, Bernadette and Isabel, making it highly unlikely that the Two Solitudes

185

did not play a part in the naming, whether consciously and intentionally or not. The other
issues for women in the female-naming movies are sex/pregnancy, men's immaturity,
freedom to choose who she will become, and the choice between one type of man and
another.
7

Wendy

Wendy (Fred J. Fox 1966) and Waiting for Caroline (Ron Kelly 1967) feature
agreeable and confused young women in the title roles. They are aware of their tenuous
political positions in the world at this period in their personal and political history and that
they may be at the mercy of men's political and sexual desires as they come of age. Wendy
says, "I felt strong and weak at the same time, like a flower…strong because I had
somewhere to go…weak because I was inexperienced…the whole world was watching."
Wendy is being pulled in two different directions. At the same time that her boyfriend
Earl tells her what to do, he berates her for not being able to run her own life. Madeleine,
Caroline, Wendy and Eliza are all seen as not only as women wanting to learn and grow but
also as neophytes needing initiation into life by more knowledgeable and worldly men.
Wendy joins a casual group of free thinkers at university. The women, however, are
represented as being interchangeable: "Hey, she can replace Mona…Mona should be
replaced," says one young man. Wendy's cousin, Janice, who has become sexy and
sophisticated allegedly through university education, dresses up in a provocative devil
costume with horns and a pitchfork. The business of growing up as an educated female is
seen to be dangerous and evil as well as enjoyable and empowering. Janice and Wendy are
doubled, as women, as relatives, and as doppelgangers — the good cousin and the bad
cousin. Despite her newfound freedom and friends at university, Wendy strives for male

186

attention. Although it is implied that Janice is the strong new woman, she remains tied to old
ideas. She wants Wendy to be unavailable so as not to distract her boyfriend Carl from
important meetings. He is destined to become president of the student council in order to
wield power in the world. Women are expected to use their power to relinquish or sublimate
their desires in favour of the political aspirations and personal needs of men. There exists a
contradiction between the modern status of a young woman on the cusp of the second wave
of feminism and a pull towards the unenlightened past. Janice talks the talk of power when
she says to Wendy, "The real power in American life (italics mine) is the woman." The social
structures depicted in the movie, however, which positions itself as American with Janice's
statement, are quite different. Whether a statement about the North American sexual
revolution or a reference to the U.S. itself, the movie attempts to deny its Canadian origins
while critiquing society.
There is an indication that two of the social referents of the age are psychoanalytic
and spiritual. Carl belongs to a university group called "The Blue Hand of Bliss," which
argues for controlled regression to past age levels for self-understanding. The implication is
that by regressing to adolescents and children, these young adults will find a clearer self-
identity in their coming-of-age. The diegetic reference to psychoanalyic and New Age-type
procedures indicates a desire to discover something about the self and to connect to social
movements, both past and present. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy held currency in the
1960s as tools for solving personal problems. The fact that the writers chose regressing to
the past is a further indication of the Canadian obsession with coming-of-age.
In the meantime, Québec was not regressing to the past. On the contrary, the Quiet
Revolution was underway, from about 1960 to 1966, the year this movie was made. The
death of conservative Québec prime minister Maurice Duplessis had ushered in a new era
of liberalism with Jean Lesage, in which the traditions of religion, an agrarian society and
rejection of change were challenged. A strong sense of Québec nationalism was emerging.

187

The strange group, the Blue Hand of Bliss, portrayed in Wendy, with its revolutionary ideas,
can be read as a reference to political groups forming at the time. Discussions about
education, language, Québec sovereignty and the Constitution were rampant, as were
demonstrations against such English-run corporate entities as the Canadian National
Railway. The FLQ (Front de Libération du Québec), formed in 1963, had begun terrorist
activities.
In the 1960s, sex education was starting to be taught in Ontario high schools and
universities were dispensing information about birth control. Wendy continues the trend
begun by Nobody Waved Goodbye in 1964. Like Julie in that movie, she becomes pregnant,
despite the fact that sex is seen to be difficult, impossible, negotiated or watched. Pregnancy
and abortion are generally considered problems for the man, a scandal that will hurt him, or
a problem the woman must solve for herself. The real reason Wendy's boyfriend is
compromised turns out not to be the fault of the female, but of himself. "He has no future
because he has no backbone," says Wendy articulating his hero/ loser/ coward position.
Both males and females have difficulty negotiating a world in which neither has much power.
The group tries to manipulate Wendy's decision behind her back. Like Madeleine, however,
Wendy stands up for herself. She makes a speech in the classroom. "Stop using people,"
she tells the crowd. "People need to be cultivated like flowers." While the insensitive men are
busy changing the world, the sensitive woman is seen as influencing groups of people by
dealing with personal issues and emotions. In Nobody Waved Goodbye, Julie's pregnancy,
though shocking as well as prevalent for the time, is seen through the eyes of the male
protagonist, Peter. Here, the pregnancy is seen from the perspective of the female
character. Moreover, The ambiguous ending sees flower-child Wendy, a willing victim of the
sexual revolution, picking up the phone to call about an abortion. The film ends with her
dialling a busy signal. Ending on this note, the film gives her the choice.

188

Waiting for Caroline

Waiting for Caroline is about a beautiful, baffling, irritating, confused, contradictory,
complex woman. What could be more interesting, in fiction if not in fact?…You may
find Caroline, the character and the film, poignant and pitiful. Or you may find her
and it exasperating, even shocking. I just wanted to remind you that Caroline does
represent an aspect of our diverse Canadian life — a woman who has not yet found
herself, her values, her maturity and the film should be viewed in the context of the
type of life it represents. It is a film for adults.
8

The foregoing is the on-screen text the opens the film Waiting for Caroline, which was
written by two men and made by the CBC and the NFB. It not only explains the coming-of-
age theme — "a woman who has not yet found herself, her values, her maturity." It also
makes explicit the connection between the young woman and the nation — "Caroline does
represent an aspect of our diverse Canadian life." According to the two male writers, a
woman constitutes a device to be used in movies to stand in for the Canadian nation and its
national story, but is not interesting in and of herself. As "a film for adults," i.e. males, noted
in the on-screen text, it assumes that women understand that they themselves are
uninteresting but might find being used, as a national symbol, of interest or value.
Like Wendy and Madeleine, Caroline has a bilingual name and is a French-speaking
English-Canadian. She asks her Québécois boyfriend in both languages, "Pourquoi
m'aimes-tu? Why do you love me?" The question can be read as one posed by a bilingual
English-speaker to a unilingual Québécois. The boyfriend, Marc, also with a bilingual name,
responds, "Well, I suppose it's because you're different but I don't really know you…I only
know one part of you—you know that -- the French part." He acknowledges here that he
does not understand the English part of her. The so-called "French part" in Canadian films is
both political and sexual, producing a further gendering of the nation. The sexual aspect is

189

frequently displaced onto the Québécoise, as with Elaine, another woman with a bilingual
name, in The Silent Partner.
9

The female, whether Québécoise or not, is often involved with at least two men,
emphasizing everyone's dual identity and the ensuing confusion. In Waiting for Caroline, her
previous boyfriend, Peter, an English-Canadian, reappears in her life. Peter asks her, "Do
you think I'm going to become a threat?" a not-so-veiled reference to the danger of English-
Canada's overpowering Caroline/ Québec/ Marc. She is associated with both solitudes and
finds herself caught in the middle. When Caroline accuses Peter of being unfair in giving her
a gift—a pendant to hang around her neck—he replies, "It's all fair," as in, "It's all fair in love
and war," i.e. between male and female, between Upper Canada and Lower Canada,
between English and French. As in Blood Relatives, a love triangle occurs with linguistic and
national undertones.
An entire undercurrent of political allegory unfolds as Caroline and Marc laugh and
play together; suddenly she says he's hurting her and to please get off her. A French friend
says Caroline is quiet, adding, "The quiet ones are dangerous," a clear reference to
Québec's Quiet Revolution against English-Canada and French cultural, financial and
religious oppression. The threat of the female is immediately quelled by his infantilizing her.
Marc says she looks just as she did the day they met, "like a little child…she was like a little
schoolgirl so prim and proper, waiting for the bus…just like a little English schoolgirl, so
correct."
Caroline is infantilized further and even more directly when the threat of family arises.
She sucks her thumb on the plane home to Vancouver to visit her father in the family home.
He has a too-young girlfriend, who looks to be about Caroline's age, to whom Caroline
introduced him. The visit brings up earlier childhood traumas: she remembers her parents'
fighting. She sleeps in her old bed, surrounded by her childhood toys, including that icon of
comfort--a teddy bear. The age of the young woman raises the spectre of implied incest,

190

doubling Caroline with her father's young girlfriend, who has replaced her dead mother in her
childhood home and in her father's life.
Sexual and national confusion exhibits themselves in homoerotic attraction in the
marital home. It is intimated that Peter may be sexually interested in Caroline, but he is also
interested in the French-Canadian Marc. Peter pushes Marc down, as they talk of spending
the night with Caroline. Marc says, "You have to admit it's kind of funny." Caroline walks in,
asking, "What's kind of funny?" She asks one, "Who are you anyway?" and then the other,
"Who the hell are you?" These questions make little sense in terms of the narrative, since
Caroline knows who both of them are. It makes more sense, however, in terms of her
interrogating their sexuality and national identity. Neither the French nor the English, the
female or the male solitudes, has a secure identity. She recognizes neither of them. Nor is
she secure in her own identity—half English and half French, half Anglo Vancouver, half
French-speaking Montreal.
The sexual tension is exacerbated by the presence of family. Caroline walks in, like a
"Watcher," on her two boyfriends. They play out a kind of substitute parental scene that hints
again at homoeroticism between the two men. Peter then wants to see where Caroline and
Marc make love, his desire now placing him in the position of a "Watcher," similar to
Caroline. Like Alan in Explosion who wants to see where his brother Peter made love to
Dolores, like the investigator in Double Negative, like Patricia in Blood Relatives, and many
others, the "Watchers" arrive to witness the parental scene. Sometimes they watch from
closets, sometimes from behind windows and doors, or from cars. The idea of standing back
and gaining some perspective on the duality of English/ French, male/ female, region/
nation, homosexual/ heterosexual is evoked here. Peter displays enlarged photos of
women's faces over his bed, as if to remind him of the gender to which enforced
heterosexuality dictates he must be singularly attracted. This tack recurs in By Design,
where the photographer Terry shows off his wall of photos of breasts to the women he wants

191

to photograph and bed. These men's heterosexuality is in question, as are their regional or
national border-crossings. The photos represent an attempt to pin it down and display it.
As soon as Peter rejects Caroline, blaming her for not loving him, the phone rings and
it is Marc. Caroline runs into the trees, dressed in a virginal white, little-girl dress with a Peter
Pan collar, her father following her, saying, "Caroline -- Baby." Her calls her by a name that
evokes both childhood and romantic relationship—Baby. She says nothing and walks away
from a scene with incestuous overtones. From the woods she sees Marc and Peter at the
front of the house. In this long shot, she becomes the unseen "Watcher," observing her two
lovers getting in the car with their suitcases and driving away together. She has lost them
both – French and English — and they have found each other. The French Canadian and
the English-Canadian males were waiting for each other and she, the young female-coded
nation-state, is left alone at the house of her father. These Two Solitudes were not "waiting
for Caroline" after all, but for each other, with the female serving as the catalyst for the
unspoken homoerotic love story.
Caroline works in an art gallery, a specific reference to frustrated artists as well as
aspects of high vs. low culture also illustrated in Deadline, Circle of Two, Dirty Tricks and
others. In the art gallery, traditional site of French high art, Yvette touches Caroline softly,
erotically several times. Yvette tells her, "So your French is pretty good. That doesn't make
you one of us…you'd better make up your mind what you want." This art gallery scenario will
be repeated in Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987). The French lesbian
gallery owner, Gabrielle, the boss on whom Polly has a crush, touches the artistic, confused
Polly in a very similar way. The French language/ woman/ lesbian/ lover stands in for
Québec as well as traditional European culture against a confused, artless, cultureless,
envious and desirous English-Canada. In a party scene, another recurring site of
unhappiness and "dis-ease" in Canadian film, the floor features black-and-white tiles like
those in The Rules of the Game, a a self-conscious reference in 1967 to well-known and

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revered European cinema. The rules of the Canadian game, however, are entirely unclear.
Caroline is seen as English-Canadian by the Québécoise Yvette. Even though her French is
"pretty good," she will still be seen as non-French. How does one gain entrée into one or the
other?
Although it is the women who are named in the female-naming movies, the question
"What's your name?" is asked of men as well as women. The search for love, power,
recognition and identity is desired by both English and French males and females, but either
difficult or impossible to obtain. The male identity is fragile, too, as indicated in the many
"male loser" movies, and often uses the female body to try to track and pin down national,
regional and sexual identities.
While Wendy represents the new North American young woman at university in the
1960s, Caroline stands in for the underage nation with choices to make. Even more explicitly
than Wendy, Waiting for Caroline directly links the lead female character to Canada. It also
refers to Freud's question about the unknowable nature of woman, made explicit in the
scene with the psychoanalyst/therapist. The ineffability/ unspeakableness/ unutterableness /
inexpressibility of the immature nation/ state is equated to the title character. Caroline, like
Canada, is caught between opposing forces. She is the object of attention of two men, one
French and one English. Caroline is portrayed as trying to find herself, caught between two
males and the Two "founding" Solitudes. Caroline/ Canada consists of French and English—
irreconcilable, existing uncomfortably in one woman/ nation/ region/ movie.

Madeleine Is...

Madeleine Is…(Sylvia Spring 1970) is the first Canadian feature film directed by a
woman. Another in the coming-of-age genre, it opens, like Explosion, with a child-like song.
This one is sung off-key and includes the lyrics, "need to know, need to grow…" The young

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woman of the title is a sensitive, confused artist dominated and infantilized by her Jewish
boyfriend named Toro. The Jews in Canadian movies, as previously discussed are usually
either pubescent boys, as in Lies My Father Told Me, The Lucky Star, The Apprenticeship of
Duddy Kravitz, or overbearing American-coded businessmen, as in Deadline and By Design
(Claude Jutra 1982). In Madeleine Is..., rather than coming of age sexually or
chronologically, the Jewish male comes of age politically and socially. Toro, a nickname for
Thomas Collins, is a radical social worker who wants to open a commune. In the midst of the
era of "flower children" or "hippies," Toro entertains grandiose social ideas of using people
for wider political goals, beginning with talk of turning a group of kids into a revolution. In
contrast, Madeleine is a painter who would prefer an artists' community. She says, "I just
want to know people…and to have them know me." Her desired coming-of-age is personal.
While it appears she is all heart and he is all intellect, she is actually the more rational, as is
illustrate when his political passions grow out of control.
As part of her emotionality in contrast to his intellectualism, Madeleine represents one
of the first in the long line of frustrated artists of Canadian cinema: "When are you going to
let me paint you?" she asks her bullish boyfriend. When he tries to dictate which colours she
should use, she stands up for herself, like Wendy, and refuses. As she attempts to grow, he
tries increasingly to dominate and humiliate her. He wants her "to support me in everything I
do." When she says she needs help, too, he promises, "Later on." Like Wendy's boyfriend
Earl, Toro has important political work to be done. The male comes first. Madeleine's
personal and artistic aspirations are diminished and dismissed. Madeleine's aspirations to
grow up and become an artist are ridiculed by him. When he and his hippie friends engage
in vague philosophical discussions about turning the commune into a work camp, he
dismisses Madeleine's idea of using it as a place for artists. He shoos her away, telling her,
"Go play with your friends." He is condescending, parental and dismissive; she, while

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admitting to not understanding very much, charges him with not giving her credit for knowing
anything.
Toro is a politically charged male character in a time when political revolutionaries
were in the news. The FLQ was setting off bombs in mailboxes and Québec society was in a
state of flux after the Quiet Revolution. The changes were to lead to a much-expanded role
for the provincial government, a new spirit of modernism, and what might be called a
"provincial nationalism." The strong expressions of Québec as a nation would lead to the
rise of the Québec revolutionaries, culminating in the "October Crisis" of 1970 in which
terrorists kidnapped two government officials and executed the Québec labour minister.
10

Madeleine Is…was produced in March and April of that year, before the October Crisis. Its
portrayals, however, dovetail with the political and cultural currents of the time. The politics of
Québec were of prime importance to the rest of the country, while cultural questioning
emerging from the Massey Report resulted in the subsequent rise of "Can Lit" and popular
music. Combined with the prominence of the European New Waves and realist-style black-
and-white movies about young people in romantic relationships, the characters in movies
such as Madeleine Is… , Waiting for Caroline and Wendy took on the Canadian-specific
concerns of revolution and artistic activity. The women in the naming movies all want their
freedom as well as a romantic love relationship. The men want political change. If the desire
for separation leads to terrorism, then Madeleine will have no part of it. She rejects
revolution and chooses to paint.
While Toro represents the violent revolutionary of 1970, a bully and a coward,
Madeleine turns into the clown. First, a clown appears to play with her, returning repeatedly
as a real or imagined part of her coming-of-age. Madeleine wears a white little-girl dress, as
does Caroline. The clown is a symbol not only of childhood but of European art cinema. The
use of the clown image for Canadian filmmakers can be traced to European culture and
particularly Italian cinema of the 1950s, which, along with the French New Wave, greatly

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influenced Canadian directors. Fellini's use of the clown image from its Italian roots in the
Commedia dell'Arte is appropriated to support Canada's desire to be seen as an artistic
cinematic force. The clown represents Canadian concerns that cannot be expressed directly
and that relate to images of children, the ability/ inability to have fun, the problem of sibling
rivalry, and the desire to imitate and emulate European art films and culture. The clown
image is evident as long as creativity and the ability to be childlike exist. It will be repeated in
Eliza's Horoscope and will turn malevolent in The Haunting of Julia and The Clown Murders
(Martyn Burke 1975) uses the image overtly and violently as a mask to hide the murderer.
The former features a malevolent clown toy and child murderers, while the latter uses the
clown image as a mask to hide the murderer. When childlike emotions are left unexpressed
and identity is denied, the harmless, carefree clown recedes, replaced by angry and violent
young people or evil children rebelling against authority figures represented by mothers,
fathers, police officers and doctors. The clown image elsewhere hovers in the background or
on the edges, suppressed, yet visible as make-up or a circus figure.
Madeleine is young, naïve and playful, doubled with her imagined clown playmate.
Toro calls her clown fantasy "crazy," and says she must stop thinking about it or she'll turn
into a clown herself. The clown can be seen as a double of the main character, a kind of
doppelganger standing in for a childlike part of their character. In Madeleine's case the clown
even takes part of the role of "The Watcher," since it sees her, often from a distance, even
as she sees it/ him /herself.
One day Madeleine recognizes the clown of her imagination in a nerdy bespectacled
young man, David, whom she chases down the street. She finds it "pathetic" that he does
not want to have his dreams analyzed. When she goes home to Toro, he has another
woman in bed for a threesome and offers to call their friend Barry for a foursome. Dreams
and childlikeness are better: Madeleine runs off into the neon night. When she and David
play hide and seek, she says, "I enjoy playing games with you, but can't you be serious for

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once? Why are we always playing games like we're ten years old?" He replies, "I'm David
Saunders, whatever that means." Here is a man who knows his name but does not equate it
with an identity. The clown, with whom she plays and laughs and hugs, is equated with
fantasy, with a lack of seriousness, with an inability to grow up.
Psychoanalysis shows up in this movie, as it did in Wendy. Madeleine is shown in a
dream analysis group. The doctor states, "I is I and you is you." The interchangeableness of
individuals is restated, as it was in Wendy, where the women were seen to be replaceable.
In the session, Madeleine recounts a dream she had when she was eight, in which a statue
of a little boy stands in the middle of a lake. "I don't know much about myself," she says. The
Freudian connections are made explicit with the dream analysis and a psychotherapist
leading the group. The importance of psychoanalysis in exploring identity is made clear.
Once stripped of direct power over Madeleine, Toro becomes a "Watcher." He shows
up at David's apartment with a hammer and a bottle of wine, threatens them, and orders
them to strip as he watches. "I hold the power here…you can't make love unless I order you
to," he tells them. Right in front of him, David and Madeleine are making an emotional and
sexual connection too powerful for Toro and he staggers away, psychically pushed out by
the strength of their tenderness. When he leaves, they put their clothes back on.
In an article on Madeleine Is… for Take One magazine, André Loiselle correctly
identifies some of the feminist aspects of the movie. He fails to point out, however, the power
and meaning of the sex scene near the beginning of the movie. Referring to "coupling," Toro
equates their sex life to the trains behind their apartment and they have sex to the sound of
the trains. He tells Madeleine sternly, "How many times have I told you not to wear pants?
It's a question of barriers, of impediments, of things getting in the way. When I want to give
myself to you I want you to be ready to receive me. And vice versa. That means being open
and accessible all the time. When I want you those goddamned pants get in the way."
Loiselle mentions Toro's demand that Madeleine be sexually accessible by not wearing

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"underwear." The social implication, however, is that, rather than wearing "those goddamned
pants," she should be wearing skirts. Madeleine responds to Toro's demand submissively,
saying, "OK. I'll go make dinner." This key conversation plays up the contradiction, not only
between male and female, but also between the traditionally passive image of the 1950s
woman in a dress and the active woman of the 1960s in trousers. Although Loiselle later
notes ,"Spring continues to make us see and hear the world through Madeleine's
perspective,"
11
he makes no reference to the powerful sex scene between Madeleine and
Toro. It is a scene in which the woman is portrayed as enjoying sexual desire and pleasure.
Madeleine makes high-pitched moans during sex with her boyfriend. The camera is only on
her, with her pleasure visually and audially highlighted over him and his perspective. It is
probable and apparent that, without the female directorial perspective, Madeleine's orgasmic
responses might not have been conceived of, nevermind shown. Madeleine Is... is the first
and perhaps only Canadian movie to show exclusively female sexual pleasure on screen.
Madeleine is in the process of asserting her identity and personal freedom against
Toro's abusiveness, as he tries to make his mark on society Madeleine's self-confidence
grows with her decision to kick Toro out of the apartment. She's the one who pays the rent.
"Blame it on the system," says Toro, but Madeleine makes the political personal, telling him
that he uses people, that he needs to cure his own sickness, that his only indulgence is sex
and for that he needs kinky games. "Now get out!" she tells him. Once alone, she begins
painting again, with renewed confidence in her art and herself.
Madeleine's story is framed by male authority figures. The film begins with a male
voiceover of her father's letter to her — in French — that moves into her voiceover in English
as she reads the letter, in which her father apologizes for not being the strong father she
wanted. Like other male figures in Canadian film, this father is feminized by being weak, and
here also by being French. Madeleine is of a weak French father; she then seeks to be
oppressed by an angry, violent man, the opposite of her father. Toro is also from the

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margins, being Jewish and a revolutionary. The traditionally and historically oppressed Jew
is turned into a tyrant. We will not see another Jewish main character until Lies My Father
Told Me, shot in 1972. It will be the coming-of-age story of a pubescent Jewish boy. Then
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, shot in 1973, returns to the unsympathetic portrayal of
a grasping young Jewish man who abuses his friends and lovers. He will also be seen in a
negative light. Neither figure satisfies her, but both show aspects of her filmic identity as a
part of or parts of the nation.
Madeleine ultimately finds an identity for herself, although framed by male voiceovers,
as an isolated, carefree, artistic clown-figure, close to water, on the west coast. She takes
the artistic inclinations of the French and moves them to Vancouver, her hometown. The film
ends with the image of the clown on an island, and Toro's voiceover that the clown is
Madeleine herself. When Madeleine asks Toro, "Where's all your courage?" he replies, "I
don't have any, remember?" He is the coward; the female here has become the clown of
Fothergill's thesis. Coupling in this movie is more than sexual. The doubling also refers
metonymically to the coupling of the artistic with the political, the personal with the social, the
French with the English, the Gentile with the Jew, and the regional with the national.
Madeleine Is…Canadian. Neither the reviews at the time, however, nor Loiselle's much
more recent article, noticed the regional, national or cultural identity politics alluded to by the
movie.
Loiselle provides insight into the fact that Madeleine Is…has been omitted from the
canon. This in spite of the fact that the first French-Canadian movie directed by a woman, La
Vie rêvée (Mireille Dansereau, released 1972), also about young women, oppression and
liberation, is deemed to be an important text and, as Loiselle says, has been thoroughly
canonized.
12
The young women in Dansereau's movie, however, are obsessed with finding
a man, while Wendy, Caroline and Madeleine are engaged in self-discovery and end up
alone – single women with only their first names.

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Eliza's Horoscope

Eliza's Horoscope ups the TSE ante by making the identity struggle both extremely
expensive and extremely Freudian.
Eliza's Horoscope was one of the first TSE movies, made in 1970, the same year as
Madeleine Is… It was the beginning of the tax-shelter arrangements, although, before 1978,
those funds were usually reserved for lower-budget productions. Madeleine Is…had a
budget of just $100,000. In contrast, at $1,4 million, Eliza's Horoscope was the most
expensive Canadian movie to that date. Unable to find wide distribution, the Québec
distributor opened it only in Stratford in 1975, five years after it was shot, and in Montreal, at
the Church of the Messiah, in 1976. It was Elizabeth Moorman's first and only starring role
and writer-director-producer-editor Gordon Sheppard's only feature as well (the video
release was in 1995).
Categorized as a "romantic fantasy" on www.imdb.com, the movie was referred to as
"this supernatural romantic Canadian fantasy" in the brief review by the New York Times.
13

The genre mix, however, is confusing. In an apparent attempt to appeal as a mystery or
thriller movie, the moviemakers bring in many characters and plot elements that fail to
coalesce. It combines the female coming-of-age movie with elements of a psychological
thriller, a political thriller and a psychological romance. The main male character, called Tom
and Tommy (played by American actor Tommy Lee Jones in his fourth starring role), is not
Eliza's love interest. She is looking for a wealthy man. The new character of the doctor is
introduced late in the film as a possible mate for Eliza and father of her imagined child.
Tommy's political aspiration, to blow up a bridge between Québec and Native lands, comes
halfway into the movie and yet the ending is almost entirely about him and the physical
explosion of his personal and political anger. Eliza's own desires are confused and

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dissipated. The plot lacks focus. The threads of the peripheral characters and their subplots
are neither drawn together nor connected.
The use of a genre is generally to imply to audiences what kind of film it will be and to
use codes and conventions that apply to that genre while offering enough differing elements
to keep the genre conventions from appearing stale. This movie, however, offers not enough
elements of a genre to be recognizable as that genre, as well as many elements of
psychoanalytic rupture to bring to the surface several questions about Canadian narrative.
The movie also uses these broken narrative strategies to address some of the male/ female/
national/ sexual issues of the previous three low-budget female-titled movies.
The naming of both main characters is pegged to their real names — Elizabeth
Moorman as Eliza and Tommy Lee Jones as Tommy, also called Tom (he was also Tom
Lee Jones in Love Story). There is a documentary-style nearness of the actors to their
character names that appears to invoke reality. In contradiction to that reality, however, there
are scenes of the female character's delusions and imaginative flights of fancy that belie
reality. Astrology and prophecy are relied upon to show the women how to proceed. In
Waiting for Caroline and Eliza's Horoscope, there are two female characters who are seers
or psychics. In Waiting for Caroline, an older woman, a psychic named Lally, asks Caroline
what she remembers about her mother and "sees" that Caroline's father took care of her
mother in her last days. In Eliza's Horoscope, the supernatural function is again fulfilled by
an older woman. Rose—a Chinese psychic astrologer with an English accent, whose real
name is also Rose -- forecasts "love and danger" for Eliza within ten days.
The title character is a variation of the aimless flower-children/woman, like Wendy,
Caroline and Madeleine, looking for love and self-identity. Eliza wears a Red Riding Hood-
style cloak, similar to one worn by Madeleine. Eliza walks the streets, while a voiceover
says, "I'm looking, looking for love…when I find my love, I'll find my child, too." Her Montreal
roommate is French, Leela, played by European Academy Award®-winner Lila Kedrova,

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another self-named character. She is an old whore who drinks and smokes, the sexually
experienced European/ French older woman to Eliza's naïve English-Canadian from
Montreal. All the characters live in a rooming house, in an extended family situation. Eliza
keeps a pair of baby shoes and a picture of a woman on a horse in a circus in her box of
precious mementoes. She wants to know if Leela has ever been in the circus. Eliza is a
Pisces, the astrological sign of the fish, water and sensitivity. Tommy is an Aries, sign of the
aggressive, unstoppable ram. Tom is a confused, sensitive, southern American cowboy. He
is both cowboy and "Indian," identifying with his Native ancestors. He shows Eliza a poster
of a Native, and says, "That's who I am." Then he swears and tears up the poster, saying,
"Even my grandmother looks like that." He equates himself with his Native heritage and with
an older female relative. Later his grandmother's face will morph into the iconic poster of an
Indian. Even Americans, when in Canada and Canadian movies, are seen to have difficulty
with their identity. Another misguided revolutionary like the men in Madeleine and Wendy, he
wants to blow up the bridges that connect Canada with First Nations land. Tom's Native
heritage spans Canada and America, just as the First Nations cross the border of Québec
and the U.S.A., since they seem to be in Canada but he seems to be American. He and
Eliza speed down the road -- in a red sportscar--to the Native reserve to meet his Native
grandparents in Caughnawaga, Québec. His grandmother puts a feathered headband on
Eliza, and Eliza's face is painted with red lines, another masquerade for her to try in the
search for love and identity. A Native man watches them as Eliza prepares a conjuring spell
and Tom prepares dynamite for his revolutionary act. The women and men are split, with the
angry man involved in politics and the child-like woman in self-identity.
Perhaps for the first time in Canadian feature film, characters not only of Native but
also of Black heritage appear. Leela kicks a Black man, a client, out of Eliza's bed. He is
dressed in a pink satin robe, a situation that feminizes him and gives power to the white
female Christian European prostitute over the Black male's "other." The power of the

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cultured sexualized female also limits the threat to her of his Black male physicality and
alleged sexuality. He is a fleeting character. The next Black character in Canadian film will
be in If You Could See What I Hear (1980) and Hard Feelings, shot in 1980 and '81.Both
Black and Native characters here, however, notwithstanding Tommy's half-Native
background, exist only to help define identity for the White characters.
Tom shows Eliza a rifle. "Scared of guns?" he asks, and she is seen imagining horses
running and hears shots. As noted earlier, Canadian identification is frequently with fish and
animals and handguns, illegal in Canada, are rare in Canadian movies. The sensitive main
character is often associated with animals, especially horses, which appear frequently in
Canadian films. Here Eliza can be twinned not only with her sensitive flower-child sisters,
Wendy, Caroline and Madeleine, but with the heroine of another TSE coming-of-age movie,
Wild Horse Hank (Eric Till 1978), American Linda Blair as a teenaged saviour of wild horses.
Here Eliza is frightened both by the gun and the thought of what it could do. Guns and
horses again collide in Canadian film in The Wars, when the young soldier, Robert, frees the
horses from the burning stable in the First World War.
Like Toro and Carl, the male love object, Tommy, is abusive to the young woman who
is the title character of the movie. When Tommy tries to kiss Eliza, she laughingly resists. He
then not only rejects her, but also pours beer on her. Alternately laughing and resisting, she
beats on him, goes to the door, throws him a whip, equating herself with a horse, and says,
"Why don't you use this?" Like Doris in Explosion, Eliza challenges Tommy to use violence
against her, all the while resisting or getting away. Eliza and the other female heroines such
as Doris, Madeleine, Wendy and Caroline, carry on extremely ambivalent relationships with
the male cowards, bullies and clowns of Canadian cinema. When the women themselves
become clowns, they are non-violent ones.
Some images -- of race, guns, mothers, children, the circus — all seem more
motivated by Freudian than narrative concerns. In "Narrativus Interruptus," one scene

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morphs into another with little regard for plot or continuity. Freud's question, "What do
women want?" is one of the key questions. Eliza is obsessed with becoming pregnant and a
mother. "Eliza, what do you want?" Tom asks her. "What the hell do you want to have a kid
for?" "I just do," she replies. "Like being hungry or wanting to be warm…I don't think we want
the same things, Tom." Eliza feels more connection with her unconceived child, whom she
has named Josh and with whom she converses. She is looking for a wealthy father for the
child -- an Aries, as Rose advised her. She goes looking beyond Tommy the Aries.
Eliza eventually meets a rich, umbrella-toting boat captain with a French accent.
Inviting her on board his boat, he asks, "Do you like my boat? It belongs to my mother." He
says he is a doctor and that he has "a centaur at home…I call him Judy." The captain says
his centaur sculpture, half-man and half-horse, is armless and has holes for eyes, blind
owing to syphilis. In their first scene, many of the key images of "Narrativus Interruptus,"
where obsessive tropes dominate, including horses, blindness, sexual problems, female
naming, mothers, doctors and canes/ umbrellas.
The doctor's Frankensteinian butler, Flip, plays the "Watcher." He is charged with
taking photographs. Photographers and cameras are another important theme in Canadian
film. There is often a camera and/or still photographs/ photographer, a phenomenon
perhaps stemming from the NFB documentary tradition of realism and the position of
Canada as an outsider, a voyeur. The camera itself is used, as well as a variety of other
types of lenses, to show characters trying to capture something of themselves, their
surroundings, and particular the primal scene. Such images and characters recur with
photographer characters in I Heard the Mermaids Singing, Perfectly Normal and Touch of
Pink, among others. Photography is seen an art. It is also a necessary precursor to cinema
itself. And it is one in which "Watchers" might excel, standing as they do on the sidelines.
Photography also watches, encompasses and captures the seeing and not-seeing crucial to
Canadian themes. Eliza, too, has vision problems. While with the doctor, she removes a

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white eye-patch from her eye. The butler parts the curtains and peeks through, watching the
half-naked captain and waiting for his signal to photograph this primal scene. He is the "Flip"
side of the active participant. Eliza is now suddenly made up as a geisha, a particular type of
masquerade, and one that will be repeated in the later films Nô and M. Butterfly. The captain
is wearing a robe and white socks. Together they ride the centaur, she beating it at his
direction. At this point the camera of the "Watcher" stops working. The captain asks him,
"Did you get it?" Flip shakes his head. The photographer-artist-Watcher has failed to capture
this bizarre Freudian tableau.
In response to Eliza's seeking a rich man, Tom says he's going to give those rich
friends of hers a taste of what's coming to them. Tom's fight is seen to be a socio-economic
struggle. She calls him "a crazy violent man." The upper classes, however, symbolized by
the doctor/ boat captain and his butler/ "Watcher," are portrayed as sexually perverse and
perhaps crazier than non-working, working-class Tommy. When Eliza gets picked up by a
rich man in a Rolls Royce who offers her champagne, he dons her rainhat, and tells her, "I'm
a composer," another reference to an artist. "Yeah, but what do you do?" asks Eliza, a
subtextual acknowledgment of the near-impossibility of making a living in Canada as an
artist, especially a classical music composer. None of these characters, not the doctor, the
composer, Leela, Rose, nor Tom's grandmother will figure in a plot resolution. They are
passing characters in a national Freudian parade. In a confused ending of multiple cuts, full
of clowns, ballerinas, dolls, horses and violence, Tom is shot and, as he screams, a female
scream comes out of his mouth. When the male screams or sings, like Renzo in Perfectly
Normal, his voice is feminized. Everybody and everything is confused and there is no
emotionally satisfying ending for anybody, including the audience. The predictable genre
ending is denied.
Rose the psychic tells Eliza that her house of love is ruled by Neptune, planet of
dreams and illusions. As she tries to find the man of her dreams and illusions, Eliza's identity

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becomes problematical. She is twice mistaken at a convention for a hooker, and she will
soon be trying out other identities, using wigs, masks, Leela's makeup and props. She has a
poster of a clown on her wall and begins painting red spots on her face like a clown. She
wears a red wig, black eyeliner, smokes a cigarettes and swings an umbrella like Charlie
Chaplin, passing a man with a cane who turns and looks at her impersonation of the ultimate
filmic clown. She is a clown/"Watcher," trying on gender as she watches two golfers, one an
effeminate man, the other a dyke-ish woman in a tie. Now Eliza appears in harlequin-like
makeup and blue-ringed eyes. Funerals and religious symbols are tied in, with a priest seen
swinging a cross. Eliza is also "Watched," by a Native in the street. "The Indians think we're
all children of the sun and moon," Tom tells her and that the man in the moon is actually an
old lady, a statement supported filmically by a cut to Rose and then to the moon. Eliza
imagines a clown in full face paint, making circular crazy motions to the camera and himself,
as if saying, "You're a crazy clown and so am I." In a voiceover, Eliza relates a story to Tom
of once getting her face painted by a silent clown with her brother Luke, another bilingual
name. In her story, when the clown took off his mask, she says, "Do you know what he had
on? A beard. We never had seen a clown with a beard before. We never knew there was
such a thing. And after that, Luke could hardly wait to grow up and grow a beard. Poor
Luke." Her dead brother will never grow up and grow a beard. The clown masquerade
means never having to grow up, or a symbol of childhood that must be removed in order to
reveal the grown-up still trying to come of age. Children solemnly play "Ring Around the
Rosy" (or "Roses") outside a house with a casket in it. Childhood has died and the clown of
summer is now seen in the snow with his inside-out umbrella, walking away from the
camera.
As noted, Canada is not the only country trying to find its way and a national identity in
changing times through female naming. Spanish cinema contains many nationally explicit
gender-bending episodes, as Marsha Kinder explores in Blood Cinema. Kay Shaffer maps

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the Australian female onto the Outback. Susan Hayward examines French national cinema.
Ruth Wodak et al look at the discursive construction of Austria as a formation. All manifest in
ways different from Canadian film. The strategy of using women and their bodies to stand in
for the nation and/or its historical stages, is used in Cuba as well, as seen in the four women
and their names standing for four stages of Cuba in Memories of Underdevelopment
(Gutierrez Alea 1969). The United States is the destination of those leaving Cuba and
leaving Sergio behind to explore his own identity and that of his young country in revolution.
As in so many Canadian movies, Memories of Underdevelopment features a loser-hero with
no goals or plans. He is also a professor and a representative of the old high culture. He
thumbs through a book on classical art, stopping at a photograph of Botticelli's Venus Rising
from the Sea, and fingering the image of the naked goddess. Ambivalence and inaction
reign in Sergio as the revolution rages around him. At one point, Sergio dresses in drag in
the clothes his wife left. He is trying on the female persona, as well as the one who left her
country for the U.S. Sergio is also driven to descend into madness by his confusion and
inaction. He is as underdeveloped as Cuba, as Toro and Peter and Mark and the university
students in the Canadian movies are under development as well. All use the female form,
psyche and names to explore issues of nation.
In 1993, Alea explored more current themes in another movie about Cuba –
Strawberry and Chocolate. The coming-of-age theme involves young David and the older
Diego, a gay intellectual, in a teacher-pupil relationship verging on the sexual. The movie
was a huge success in Cuba, resonating with the populace in a way a Canadian movie
about Canada has never done. The character of Nancy, with an American name, represents
popular culture. Alea has spoken about using a language that can reach an audience. His
later movie uses melodrama and in-jokes about his country to reach not only the Cuban
audience, but viewers around the world.
14
The film was released in Canada and the U.S. as
well and received positive reviews. Alea used the popular genre of the melodrama to

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engage viewers in a fashion as entertaining as it is dialectical. In this way, he uses a
combination of coming-of-age and melodrama to interrogate national and sexual issues.
Alea is both using Hollywood genres as well as transgressing them for politically
revolutionary purposes.
Movies such as Memories of Underdevelopment relate heavily to the period of time in
which Cuba was undergoing a revolution. Similarly, the four Canadian woman-titled movies
discussed above were made between 1966 and 1970. They all came at the height of the
1960s and 1970s, when sexual revolution, the second wave of feminism, and issues of
economic and social class were foremost in North America. In addition the first two movies
were produced the year before and the year of Expo '67, Canada's World's Fair. That event
was seminal in the introduction of a modern era of Canadian identity and one that resulted in
worldwide attention and tourism for Montreal and Canada. The time was integral to the
identity of both solitudes, French and English. It is ironic that the event, which was especially
important for the image of English-Canada, was held in the mostly French, and much more
European, metropolis of Montreal. Québec was throwing off the shackles of control of the
Roman Catholic Church and the oppressive and patriarchal reign of Duplessis. In a time
both exciting and confusing for the country, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, became prime minister in
1968 and would attempt to close the two solitudes with his policy of national bilingualism.
Coming-of-age and naming movies were unspooling issues of national and regional identity
at a time when the politics of gender and nation were reaching a fever pitch in Canada.
Eliza's Horoscope has been seen as a sub-par genre movie and an interesting art-
house production. It is, however, specifically Canadian and of its time, with distinctly political
connections and aspirations. Its writer and director, Gordon Sheppard, was born in Montreal
and raised in Toronto. He had a documentary background in both film and television. His
2003 documentary/ narrative novel Ha! was shortlisted for the Hugh MacLennan award. This
re-imagining of the death of his friend, Québec writer and terrorist Hubert Aquin in 1977, has

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been deemed wildly brilliant by many reviewers. Sheppard himself was extremely political,
having served as Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Canada in 1963, Special
Consultant on the Arts to the Federal Government in 1965, and having written "A Special
Report on the Cultural Policy and Activities of the Federal Government of Canada 1965-
1966" in 1966. An author, journalist, essayist, film and television documentarian (including a
devastatingly satirical portrait of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner in the award-winning film The
Most in 1962), and, until his 2006 death, a photographer, Sheppard was deeply involved in
the arts in Canada and Québec at the time of the making of Eliza's Horoscope, working in
both English and French. In addition to the feminist concerns of abuse by male partners,
sexual freedom and coming-of-age, the movie also deals with economic issues, as Eliza
searches for a rich man to support her and her unconceived son. She is soon disabused of
that notion as an answer to her problems, since the upper-crust Aries-doctor-captain turns
out to be less desirable than the violent revolutionary half-Native, Tommy.
One reviewer, an American, saw the movie as political, although not politically
Canadian. Steeped in genre and auteur movies and not knowledgeable about Canada,
Charles Champlin in 1977 titled his review "Eliza's Rocky Horoscope Show," immediately
connecting it to an American cult movie. He calls the lead character "a childlike survivor," "a
sympathetic innocent," and a "naïf approaching half-madness at least," and says many of
the "fantastic images…inevitably evoke the name Fellini."
15
Despite scenes that are
"awkward," "experimental" and "strained," Champlin found the hallucinatory flight sequence
"a remarkable piece of filmmaking by any standards" and the "cumulative effect" of the
movie "very powerful." He calls it "a boldly assertive and original work in which the creative
imagination and social conscience are joined in a way you seldom see." Without reference
to Québec or Canadian politics, Champlin finds the movie a "Marxist parable." He was
correct that it was a political movie, but one with particular overtones of the Two Solitudes
and the U.S. Sheppard writes, at the end of Ha!, in an echo of the end of James Joyce's

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Ulysses, "Montréal-Hollywood-Toronto-Montréal 1977-2003." The knowledge of Canadian
and Québec politics is necessary to understand the film fully as a political one, rather than
simply as a strangely convoluted genre film. Its subtexts escaped its few Canadian
audiences as well. If the location of and references in the movie had been more overtly
Canadian, Eliza's Horoscope would have been perceived as specifically Canadian and its
various layers unpeeled as a psychoanalytic and social inspection of a collection of national,
regional and sexual issues. Neither does Champlin address the movie as a feminist parable,
a perspective that is fairly obvious, given the young female protagonist and her dilemma of
choosing between an upper-class sexual deviant and an unstable, unemployed
revolutionary.

Naming and the Divine Performative

In the context of naming, Butler goes further, provocatively raising the issue of
baptism, the act of naming from on high, i.e. the divine performative. Such an extension of
naming from the social patronymic to the religious resonates with Canadian filmic naming.
The baptismal scene can be paralleled to the primal scene between God and man, surely a
homoerotic subtext in itself. As God names Adam, so father names daughter. Then daughter
typically falls under the control of a father/ boyfriend figure. In Canadian film, she rebels,
against any and all authority figures, in an attempt to escape parental/ male/ God-control. If
God touches Adam and names him his own, the father does the same to his children. In
Canadian film, those children are usually female. The females have sex with fathers or
father-figures. Mothers are implied in sexually desirous situations with sons. The gender
confusion is imbricated with the repetition of ubiquitous religious imagery. Crosses,
churches, funerals and Christmas trees form backdrops or extended scenes. There are

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entire movies based on religious holidays and practices, such as Black Christmas, A
Christmas Story, Jesus of Montreal and One Magic Christmas. It would be difficult to find
any Canadian movie that did not suggest the presence and awareness of religion, whether
Protestant, Roman Catholic and/or Jewish. Those that do not would be remarkable precisely
for such an absence. Even later movies interrogate or underscore the importance of religion
in coming-of-age stories for pubescent boys and girls with sick and/or troubled mothers. In
Saint Ralph (w. d. Michael McGowan, 2004), a boy in 1954, Ralph Walker, punished for
masturbating in a community pool believes fervently that becoming a runner in the Boston
Marathon will bring his mother out of her coma. In Saint Monica (w. d. Terrance Odette
2002), a Roman Catholic Portuguese-Canadian girl with an unhappy single mother and a
loser-uncle (her mother's brother) misses her chance to appear in a religious parade, steals
a pair of angel's wings, and becomes involved with a homeless religious fanatic. The
particular act of naming in these instances sanctifies both the boy and the girl and plays as
well on their charming pre-pubescent illusions of grandeur and importance through belief. In
contrast to the TSE movies in which religion, faith and church authorities are suspect or
undermined by reality, the later movies examine the simple faith of a believing child seeking
to heal family and/or personal wounds. Only the boy has a patronym. And it is one that
contradicts his self-identity in the movie. He wants to be a runner, but his patronym is
Walker. Although ridiculed at school, he does in fact overcome his last name and become a
"Runner."
The naming of females in these four films and others attempts to investigate or identify
a woman/ region/ nation in a rapidly changing age. The female naming films accomplish this
task by naming her in the title and using her name as a kind of psychoanalytic entry into
identity. What is woman? What does she want? Who is she? These Freudian questions and
the subsequent answer—"She is herself the problem" — are asked and explored although
not resolved, either narratively or psychoanalytically.

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All four women in the naming movies do, however, manage to escape genre
predictability, patronymic authority and male control. How does female Canadian naming
work to stabilize as well as to de-stabilize the female and male subjects and ideas of nation?
If, as Butler declares, the performative power of the name cannot be separated from the
patronym,
16
how can the female name have power if she is constantly reinscribed into
patriarchal authority? The females in Canadian movies are given only given names, i.e. first
names. They have no patronyms. In this way, the female naming movies, one of whose core
themes is female self-identity, attempt to give voice to females with single names. To an
extreme extent, these women are young, single, abused by male partners and looking for
personal freedom. They are single. Their patronyms are irrelevant. They are linked by their
emotions and circumstances, denying patriarchy its nominal control. Even if it is impossible
in society, as Godard observed and challenged in Weekend, for a woman to have her own
name because her surname will always be her father's name or her mother's father's name,
the Canadian women in the naming movies continually try to evade or overcome their
patriarchal shackles. "If the process of naming of objects amounts to the very act of their
constitution, then their descriptive features will be fundamentally unstable and open to all
kinds of hegemonic rearticulation," writes Butler, quoting Laclau.
17
The naming of objects,
and certainly of people, may be subject to the escape of an object or person from the
meaning ascribed by the namer.
Rilke, the European artist from whose pen the "two solitudes" first emerged,
criticized the convention of marriage. He himself left his wife and child. He saw women
"imitating male behaviors and going through disguises" in an attempt to relate, "one
individual to a second individual,"
18
when "We are solitary."
19
He wrote, "[S]omeday there
will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but
something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but
only of life and reality: the female human being."
20
Wendy, Caroline, Madeleine and Eliza all

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escape the power, control and/or abuse of their male lovers/ associates and social
institutions such as marriage, through their own means, which include childlike innocence,
artistic imagination, refusal of subjection, and the use of linguistic, cultural and gender
masquerade. Wendy, Caroline, Madeleine and Eliza are…growing up solitary and
confused, used as regional, provincial, national and gendered symbols.

Chapter 6 Endnotes — Women Disguised as Canada: Naming the Two Solitudes

1
Ramsay, "Canadian Narrative Cinema from the Margins: ‘The Nation’ and Masculinity in Goin' Down the Road." Canadian Journal of Film
Studies. Vol. 2, No. 2-3 (1993): 27-49, and Janice Kaye, "Perfectly Normal, Eh?" Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 3 No. 2 (Fall 1994):
63-80.

2
Nor are the names given to characters generally memorable or evocative names, such as Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell in Escape from
New York 1981). While the names of Canadian movies are female, the female names in American television are often male. While the
recurring male name in American movies and television shows seems to be Jack, the predominant female names have been Ally, Alex and
Sydney.

3
Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex," 152.

4
Elsaesser, 128-130.

5
Ibid., 145-56.

6
Piers Handling refers to it parenthetically in his discussion of the relationship in La vie rêvée, saying that it is, "(like the relationship in Le
chat dans le sac, and a number of other films, a microcosm of our cultural and historical reality)." He casually states that "the country's
filmmakers mirrored the national psyche." In World Cinema Since 1945,107, 110.

7

The cover of Gittings' book, Canadian National Cinema, features a production still from Robert Lepage's oppositional Québec film about the
October crisis of 1970, Nô (1998) showing a Québécoise, a member of a Canadian theatrical troupe in Japan, applying geisha make-up. The
movie, though a comedy, is also a political satire. The image chosen to represent all Canadian film is one of national masquerade.

8
The film aired on the CBC television program Festival on on November 29, 1967.

9
Handling acknowledges "two culture and two official languages" and that "this fact is basic to Canadian cinema." In World Cinema Since
1945, 86.

213

10
1999 Claude Bélanger, Marianopolis College. http://www2.marianopolis.edu/quebechistory/events/quiet.htm "The process of questioning
the social order inevitably led to a redefinition of the role and place of French Canadians in Canada. Demand for change was heard
everywhere: for bilingualism, for biculturalism, for the respect of the autonomy of Quebec, for equal status in Confederation. The tokenism of
the past was rejected. The concept of French Canadian was replaced by that of the Québécois."

11
André Loiselle, "Madeleine Is…Worth a Second Look," Take One, No. 38, 37 (July/August 2002): 34-37.

12
Loiselle, "Madeleine Is…." Loiselle also makes the connection between the clown image and Madeleine's identity as an artist, 34

13
Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide, www.movies2.nytimes.com. The movie was not reviewed at the time of release.

14
The director in the movie is played by Alea himself, who inserts himself as the artist/filmmaker of the text, foregrounding the importance of
the filmic art in revolutionary texts. Newsreels, documentary footage and television also play important parts in the movie, as they do in
Canadian texts.

15
Charles Champlin, "Eliza's Rocky Horoscope Show," www.gordonsheppard.com. June15, 1977, reviewing a Quebec film series in L.A.

16
Butler, Bodies that Matter, 216.

17
Ibid., 210.

18
Rilke, 76..

19
Rilke, 87.

20
Rilke, 77-8.

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Chapter 7: Postcolonial Potential of Making the Invisible Visible

Mimicry is thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform,
regulation and discipline, which 'appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry
is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which
coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and
poses an immanent threat to both 'normalized' knowledges and disciplinary powers.

Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man," 1994

When the TSE movies borrowed Hollywood stars and genres to become visible in the
marketplace, they ended up reiterating the Two Solitudes, the double articulation of the
state/ nation of Canada. The Two Solitudes, rather than assimilating or disappearing, could
not help being represented on screen. Direct mimicry of U.S. genres in Canadian movies
was not possible because so many additional colonial identities needed to be seen. How
could Canada's masquerade be used to disrupt "normalized" knowledges and disciplinary
powers, as Bhabha suggests, to reveal something else, a "here" with an identity as well as a
dominant/ dominating power? As a strategy, the TSE utilized not only masquerade but also
mimicry, drag, blindness and amputations, all in a perhaps futile attempt to attain or portray
national or cultural wholeness and visibility. Canada, as the Other, visualized power but
could neither achieve it nor disrupt the colonizer.
Masquerade differs from mimicry or drag. Mimicry is an imitation of an "ur-iginal," to
use Naficy's term, as well as a site of recalcitrance, resistance and difference, while drag
works on the distinction between the performer's body and the gender performed. Butler
writes, "As much as drag creates a unified picture…it also reveals the distinctness of those
aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the
regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence."
1
Masquerade, on the other hand, is to appear
in disguise, to make a show or pretence by wearing a mask or being in fancy dress, and not
necessarily crossing gender lines, as does drag. Many of the Canadian films show

215

masquerade as well as drag. Three of the most successful cross gender lines, as in
Outrageous!, The Silent Partner and Perfectly Normal.
Robert Kroetsch observed, "People who feel invisible try to borrow visibility from those
who are visible."
2
The concern with borrowing, dressing and visibility was itself borrowed
from a governor-general before Kroetsch and reiterated after him by another governor-
general. When Adrienne Clarkson addressed the nation in her Canada Day 2002 speech,
she recovered a comment made by Vincent Massey in his 1957 speech to the Federal-
Provincial Conference on Tourists and the Canadian Tourist Association: "When it is
possible, what we do should have a Canadian character. We should be ourselves and the
traveller, the tourist, the visitor from wherever he comes, will respect us the more if we are.
No one looks his best in somebody else's clothes." (italics mine) The two quotes, 45 years
apart, are à propos of the national TSE masquerade that occurred between the reigns of
these two governors-general. The Massey quote refers obliquely to the "clothes" of
Americans, an issue addressed directly in his 1951 Massey Report. Clarkson, in echoing her
predecessor, emphasized her position as a cultural nationalist and arts supporter. As
illustrated in the tropes of blindness and lack of vision, the TSE masquerade was part of a
larger struggle for acceptance and visibility, both at home and next door. The ability to attract
"the traveller, the tourist, the visitor" hearkens back to the first purpose of Canadian film —
immigration — making Canada visible in the eyes of the world. The "Third Solitude" of the
immigrant point-of-view, however, would wait some times to appear.

Blind Spots: Love at First Sight and If You Could See What I Hear

Instead of visualizing power, Canadian heroes become visually impaired or blinded.
With the blind surveillance of another country's culture ever-present, they cannot see their
way clear. Unlike in classic Hollywood cinema, where heroes and their narratives are

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ideologically aligned in ways that are repeated and recognizable, direct representations of
Canadian ideology and mythology have not even seemed possible, nevermind visible. Have
the men lost their sense of sight as well as their sense of site? their vision, their sense of
place, their situatedness? Or have they gained it?
In his article "The Uncanny," Freud refers to the child's fear of blindness in Hoffman's
tales and the psychoanalytic background in dreams and myths that indicate blindness is a
substitute for castration dread. The castration fear is tied up with the death of the father at
whose hands castration is expected. Freud discusses a "whole mass of themes to which
one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative." Some of the themes Freud
quotes include tropes so close to Canadian film—lack of sight, castration, threatening
authority figures, siblings, head wounds, twinning, children, dolls, Italians, professors and
madness—that it is…well…uncanny.
Gittings looks briefly at an instance of "tension between visibility and invisibility, sight
and blindness" in John Greyson's Zero Patience (1991), relating George's retinitis
pigmentosa to the public's blindness to the media's vision/ version of the AIDS story, as Zero
and Burton look through a microscope at Zero's blood.
3
Borrowing visibility in the form of
genres and stars from America happened in the TSE. As the blind spot of America, Canada
has been neither seen nor acknowledged, conceived of as a big blank white space north of
the border. Fear of assimilation or "glossophagia" fuels the Canadian cinematic symbology
of blindness and castration. While story can be seen to be cut off in "Narrativus Interruptus,"
it is joined by sight and limbs. There exists a disproportionate number of Canadian films
featuring a hero who is totally blind, has difficulty seeing, needs glasses, or is "in the dark."
There are few movies that do not refer to site, glasses, lenses or a lack of vision. Also
numerous are the instances of limb amputation. There is evidence that both stand in for
cultural castration.

217

The national blind spot is played out in two Tax Shelter Era films—Love at First Sight
(Rex Bromfield 1974) and If You Could See What I Hear (Eric Till 1980). Both feature blind
male heroes whose blindness occurred in childhood and is linked to coming-of-age and
sexuality. In the end, both get the girl, almost unheard-of in Canadian movies and a situation
that would scarcely be repeated until Perfectly Normal in 1991. The other blind-centred
movie, If You Could See What I Hear, turns the somewhat shy, relatively physically
unattractive, virginal Roy character of Love at First Sight into a good-looking, girl-chasing,
middle-class university student, Tom Sullivan. In both, the blind hero is seen to be a
relatively happy, well-adjusted loser/dreamer with goals and whose blindness is linked to
coming-of-age, sexuality and wholeness. They become successful by following an inner
direction instead of seeing themselves as others see them — with no vision. They simply
see differently. Partly because of her actions, a future seems visible for Roy and Shirley. If
he cannot see, that is fine with him because he can be seen.
In Love at First Sight, a low-key working-class romantic comedy, the hero is not
consistent either with the silent Canadian loser or the coward/ bully/ clown. Although Roy
gets fired at the beginning of the movie, he nevertheless becomes a successful person with
a commercial future and a stable romantic relationship. A curio shop employee (played by
Canadian Dan Aykroyd, not quite famous then from Saturday Night Live), Roy lost his sight
as a child, from staring at an eclipse of the sun. "It was my own fault," he says of his
blindness, but he is not embittered, depressed, anguished or frustrated like most other
Canadian hero/ losers.
4

Shirley, Roy's girlfriend, seems unconcerned that her man is in any way disabled. She
hugs a lamppost—in a pose almost identical to that of suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst in a
famous photo—to prevent her father from bodily dragging her home. Roy becomes a hero
for transcending the patriarchal father and aligning them with the fiscal legacy of Shirley's
grandmother. The movie ends unusually happily for a Canadian film: a country-style song

218

play, as they are "Goin' Down the Road," with lyrics about how Roy and Shirley buy a
restaurant and Grandma later joins them. The disabled Canadian male emerges triumphant,
getting the girl and looking forward to a successful future. Interestingly enough, however,
Roy will become an American-style entrepreneur and not a frustrated Canadian artist.
In If You Could See What I Hear, Tom Sullivan is a popular, witty and charming
university student. His surname evokes the real-life Annie Sullivan, who taught the blind and
deaf Helen Keller to communicate, and who was fictionally immortalized in the American
play, and 1962 movie The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn). Blind from a lack of oxygen in his
incubator, Tom is immediately feminized and homoeroticized in the opening scene. Naked in
the shower, he is surprised by fellow student Will Sly (played by R. H. Thomson). Will, who
will become his best friend, enters fully clothed, smoking a pipe, almost a father figure. Tom
loses the soap at Will's feet and kneels to find it, feeling Will's ankle. "What're ya, blind?"
asks Will. "As a matter of fact I am," Tom replies. They become so close as to resemble
brothers, almost lovers, although Tom's "tomcatting" prevents further homoeroticism. The
opening song says, "I look at the world with my heart. I see things no-one could see…life
sings a love song to me…"
This white Canadian hero shows un-Canadian aggression in pursuing the beautiful
Black American-coded cheerleader he calls "Chanel #5" (played by American Shari
Belafonte) because, although he doesn't know her name, he can identify her French
perfume. In one scene, as they walk, lights all over the campus suddenly extinguish and
Tom pretends, with a loudspeaker, that a blind coup d'état is taking place. Once in bed,
Chanel #5 (we still do not know her name) asks Tom, "How can you tell I'm Black?" Tom, till
then oblivious, answers, "I think I'm colour-blind, too." Then she asks, inexplicably, "How
come you never talk about your mother?" His mother, he recounts, helped him overcome his
blindness and act "normal," and this is seen to have contributed to his confidence and
success. In the end he saves a little girl from drowning, becomes a hero and, like Roy, gets

219

the girl. She is, however, a white girl not involved in the plot as was the African-American
woman. The interracial romance is narratively denied, Tom's "colour-blindness" and the
allegedly tolerant Canadian mosaic notwithstanding.
Blindness becomes part of the heroes' growth; the video box for If You Could See
What I Hear says, "…we get to share this unique man's coming of age." This is the
Canadian perspective; the Hollywood Reporter, on the other hand, sees Tom in the
pantheon of typical leading men: "…A rollicking film that is, by turn, warm…funny and above
all celebrates the joie de vivre of its principal character."
5
The coming-of-age theme is not a
selling point to Americans; that genre evokes a more European filmic sensibility to which
Canadians have historically aspired.
The difference between these blind Canadian heroes and the more prevalent loser/
dreamers is that the completely blind ones are confident and ultimately find love. They have
no fear of losing their physical sight; they have already lost it. Although, or perhaps because,
they cannot see, they become successful by following an inner direction.
6

Homeland Insecurity: Fetishistic Amputations

In Remy de Gourmont with Freud: Fetishism and Patriotism, Jeffrey Mehlman
discusses links between Freud's fetishism and Remy de Gourmont's "patriotisme," referring
to the amputation of the province of Alsace from France.
7
This theory of regional castration
anxiety is instructive in looking at English-Canadian film, Québec and the U.S. In Fetishism
as Cultural Discourse, Apter, Emily and Pietz examine fetishism in terms of the imaginary
phallus that has no fixed territorial place.
8
In the Canadian cinematic sexual imaginary, the
male continually experiences castration anxiety and denial of amputation in the female,
shown repeatedly in visual images of the national phallic mother, as in Outrageous! and The

220

Wars. While English-Canada attempted to find its own identity separate from Québec,
castration anxiety moved to the fore in the TSE. In "Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of
Theory in Marx,"
9
Pietz refers to Marx's mature thesis that "capital" ought to be "a species of
fetish."
10
The TSE certainly fetishized U.S. capital, especially in terms of its bank-robbery
movies, such as The Silent Partner and A Man, A Woman and A Bank as well as the
tendency toward maternal fiscal legacies in Love at First Sight, Crossbar, Double Negative
and Perfectly Normal. It also fetishized the wounded male leg as a damaged phallic
substitute. In two TSE movies, the leg becomes so damaged that it disappears. The inability
to succeed moves into overt limb amputation in Crossbar and The Terry Fox Story.
Crossbar portrays one-legged Canadian high-jumper Aaron Kornylo (Brent Carver),
who won the Bronze Medal at the 1976 Olympics.
11
Aaron's leg was cut off in a farm
machinery accident on the family farm. The story is trumped by Aaron's heart-to-heart talk
with his father about the accident, which forms the real climax of the movie. The Terry Fox
Story concentrates on the dark side of the runner's personality. The film is in fact less
narratively effective and emotionally engaging than the documentary news footage about
Fox. A 2005 Terry Fox television movie was marginally more engaging. The "missing limb"
movies are not about the drama of winning or fame, but about something else.
Aaron's attempt to qualify for the Olympics is portrayed narratively as a metaphor for
the father-son Oedipal story rather than the story of a young athlete. In fact, flying in the face
of Canada's virtual obsession with documentary fact, we never actually see Aaron compete
at the Olympics. His heart-to-heart talk with his father forms the real climax of the movie,
during which both come to grips with the castrating accident. "I guess a parent wants to
make sure a child has everything he needs," Dad tells Aaron. "I love you and I respect you
and I hope you'll forgive me in being so slow in telling you and showing you." Aaron cries
and they hug. This emotional father-son relationship develops only when the older male
finds the expression of his feelings, instigated by the wife/ mother and aided by the sister-like

221

girlfriend,
12
but lacking the obligatory American sports win and heterosexual coupling. With
the Oedipal problems addressed, however, the movie never returns to the Olympics,
rendering the narrative fragmented and incomplete.
Aaron Kotylo is not a famous Canadian, despite his exploits, his story remaining
culturally and historically obscure. Terry Fox, however, is one of Canada's most beloved and
best known national figures. The 21-year-old dipped his artificial leg in the Atlantic ocean off
the coast of Newfoundland and ran/ walked/ hopped/ skipped 2,000 miles, reaching Thunder
Bay, Ontario, about half-way to the Pacific Ocean, before cancer spread to his lungs and
killed him in 1981. The name and image of the young man who raised $24 million for cancer
research live on every year in annual "Terry Fox Runs" across Canada and now around the
world. In portraying Fox's dark side and denying the drama inherent in some moments, his
heroic determination takes a back seat. No emotional catharsis takes place for the audience;
the film is in fact less narratively effective and emotionally engaging than in documentary
news footage of him that rendered him a hero and the reality voter show that placed him
third in the 2004 CBC Television series competition for The Greatest Canadian. Both Aaron
and Terry exemplify the lame male of Canadian film, which resists offering unscathed
heroes, successful romances or happy endings. They are two of the few heroes who do not
go mad, perhaps because their narratives are resolved through death, failure and the
knowledge of who they are and why they are "here." While women previously bore the brunt
of being the castrator, here the men take responsibility for their own missing limbs.
The theme of physical amputation is not limited to the males of Crossbar and The
Terry Fox Story. It continues with legless females. In The Saddest Music in the World (Guy
Maddin 2003), Isabella Rossellini stars as Lady Port-Huntly,
13
the owner of a beer company,
who wears a blonde wig and, having suffered a surgical accident, is fitted with glass legs
filled with bubbling (presumably Canadian) beer. Another woman, the girlfriend of an
American whose brother and father figure in the narrative, is a nymphomaniac amnesiac.

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Musicians from Scotland, Mexico and other nations perform nationalistic music in a 1933
Winnipeg contest to find "the saddest music in the world."
14

Female leglessness continued with The Limb Salesman (Anaïs Granofsky 2006), a
futuristic story about a mad doctor hired by a man to create limbs for his mutant, adopted,
legless daughter, Clara.
15
It takes place in the family, in a farmhouse and involves a mad
matriarch.
16
If the doctor fails in his surgical attempts, the result for the girl will be incestuous
rape by her adoptive father, echoing earlier TSE themes. Slotek refers to the town as having
"the Pinteresque name of 'Junction,'" and says the "only other identified location is referred
to as 'City'." He also writes, " I didn't even mind the gaps in exposition and logic." The
aforementioned concerns, however, are more about the past than the future — family
troubles, incest, missing limbs, lack of recognizable locations, and Narrativus Interruptus.
"It's all about atmosphere and imagery," writes Slotek. Another journalist called the movie
"complete with variations on the incest and suicide themes that seem to have been a TIFF
[Toronto International Film Festival] admission requirement for Canadian dramas when the
film played there back in 2004," noting that it "[N]eeds to be weirder."
17

The limb fetish in these four movies, the first two from the TSE and the second two
from two decades later, indicate a connection between the loss of one male leg and two
female legs and the anxiety of castration. That castration extends from the physical to the
national. Terry Fox, Aaron Kotylo are both Canadian athletes running for their country. Lady
Port-Huntly is a British-named Winnipeg beer heiress played by an Italian. Clara's filmic
Canadianness is evident in the circumstances of her family and situatedness, her removal
from a specific time and location emphasizes her Canadianness even more.
The physical blindness and amputations have distinctively national and cultural
overtones. The blind and limbless movies refer repeatedly and fetishistically to an imaginary
phallus with no fixed territorial or cultural place. Canadian culture is cut off, as surely as
Alsace was amputated from France.

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Could the particularly Canadian way of using blindness, amputation, drag and
mimicry, both in genre and characters, possess the potential of disrupting American
culturally colonial power, of threatening normalized knowledges and disciplinary power?
Bhabha talks of mimicry of the colonial "author" as being built around ambivalence and
indeterminacy. "[M]imicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a
process of disavowal." Mimicry therefore inappropriately appropriates its colonial Other with
its difference and in doing so threatens the dominant power. Bhabha states, "The effect of
mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing."
18
He refers to an
"area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by
the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double. The ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same,
but not quite) causes a discursive break and reveals that the colonial project and subject are
both partial and perhaps even not-real, rendering mimicry "at once resemblance and
menace."
19
Having threatened the colonial power with "Narrativus Interruptus," however, the
colonized culture has represented its difference and still not been seen. It has mimicked
ineffectively and disturbed only itself, not the colonizing power. If mimicry is partial and
disavows its otherness, as Bhabha claims,
20
then the TSE failed in its mimicry mission, but
both disavowed and reasserted its otherness. With a different strategy, could Canada
become the "author/other"?
The difference between imitation and identity is the difference between denying the
limitations of the ego and assimilating unwillingly into the other. Between these two "I"s, says
Bhabha, "culture's double returns uncannily — neither the one nor the other, but the
imposter — to mock and mimic, to lose the sense of the masterful self and its social
sovereignty."
21
If mimicry is also related to camouflage, then the TSE represented a hidden
aspect of imitating the colonizer. It camouflaged its Canadianness with varying degrees of
success by mimicking the use of stars and genres. It represented "hiddenness" within the
movie with the trope of "The Watcher." That image can stand in for the lack of ability to be

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seen, by "The Watcher" as well as by the well-hidden nature of Canadian cinema. Without
ever having possessed the "masterful self," the fractured Canadian "I," i.e. "neither the one
nor the other," recognized itself in the pervasive American movie culture. The TSE effort
failed to mock and mimic, but rather imitated and emulated.
Subversive mimicking came from first from the Wayne and Shuster comedy team on
Canadian and American television in the 1950s and '60s, then from Canadian comics within
the American system (Saturday Night Live), and later from Canadian television of the 1980s
and '90s (The Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes). While mocking shows
up the colonizer, and indicates an unwillingness to assimilate, the TSE aim was rather to
assimilate willingly into American popular culture. The factor of civil disobedience Bhabha
mentions as part of the mimicry project
22
that might also have emerged as a result of the
power of mocking remained hidden. It need not have, but it did, to a large extent owing to
the ineffectiveness of "Narrativus Interruptus" in performing any possible function of rupture
as rebellion.
Three movies — one pre-cursor, one TSE movie, and one post-TSE — illustrate
some of the shifts in masquerade, mimicry and national identities in Canadian film from the
1970s to the 1990s. Outrageous, The Silent Partner and Perfectly Normal all involve identity
search, cross-dressing, and border-crossing between the Canada and the U.S. In the first,
Outrageous, the Canadian male dresses in drag and moves across the border in search of
artistic and commercial success. In The Silent Partner, an American actor plays a Canadian
and a Canadian male plays an American woman — masquerades that help them rob a
bank. In Perfectly Normal, an American male crosses the border to live with a Canadian
male who performs in drag to help his American friend make money. All three films feature
male characters who adopt both a national and sexual masquerade to gain financial success
and achieve personal fulfillment.

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All three reveal the political potential of mimicry and masquerade to which postcolonial
theorists such as Bhabha and Naficy allude, a potential only partially outed in Outrageous
but deliberately disavowed and silenced in The Silent Partner and not more fully realized
until Perfectly Normal.

Impersonating Success - Outrageous!

Outrageous! (Richard Benner 1976) is the first critically and commercially successful
Canadian movie dealing overtly with Canadian/ U.S. border-crossing and cultural relations.
The barrier, crossed and re-crossed by two allegedly crazy characters, is tied up with drag,
homosexuality, gender, doubling, success, pregnancy and national identities. Director
Benner was an American, born in Illinois, who would also director the less successful sequel
in 1980. Critically acclaimed, Outrageous! won the Silver Bear from the Berlin Film Festival
for Toronto real-life female impersonator Craig Russell. He plays Robin Turner, a gay
Toronto hairdresser, who leaves his boring hometown to seek fame and fortune in exciting
New York. Robin is a Canadian who worships American movie stars, saying of Toronto,
"There's no dazzle…this is all there is." It is commonly acknowledged in Canada that
Canadians become famous at home only after they have been recognized south of the
border. For the first time, a movie makes this phenomenon explicit. "No Canadian act makes
it without the U.S. seal of approval," says a friend of Robin's. Robin makes fun of dominant
American women in the mimicry of his professional act. A feature is American stars abusing
each other — such as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane? and Davisand Anne Baxter in All About Eve. Robin, who has no parents, claims to be
Lana Turner's love child.
23

As a female impersonator, Robin is doubled as a woman and as various female
American stars. As opposed to a lip-synching drag queen, Robin dresses as a woman and

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talks and sings as a woman, imitating Bette Davis, Bette Midler, Carol Channing, Barbra
Streisand, and other American divas. He is unable to give voice to Canadian stars. He refers
to "all those Canadian stars I never heard of," in the context of a popular '70s Canadian
television show The Party Game. The series evolved from "Charades," the parlour game in
which players cannot speak, have no voice, and act out the names of movies, stars, books,
songs, sayings, or plays that are usually not Canadian. Charades is a masquerade of
silence. Robin/Craig defines himself and gives himself voice by the charade of the female
impersonator and the masquerade of the Canadian male dressing up as an American
female for attention, money and fame. Robin is another frustrated artist whose problems
stem from the inability of expressing his talent in Canada and having it be heard and
appreciated.
Robin's last name, Turner, has a double meaning. He "turns" from one identity to
another, switching from male to female performing characteristics and back again. He also
moves between Canadian and American locations and identities, twice crossing
geographical borders to get from Toronto to New York and back, in his quest for American-
style fame. Unlike most of his predecessors and successors in film, however, Robin
succeeds in the U.S. and finds unconventional love.
24

Robin's best friend, Liza — with a "z," a name tied directly to the then-current
popularity of gay icon Liza Minnelli. The sweet-natured schizophrenic has been in and out of
mental hospitals. Played by an American, Hollis McLaren, playing a Canadian, Liza crosses
the border with Robin and both end up self-professed mad people in New York. Liza is seen
by some of the other characters to be crazy for wanting to have a baby. That pregnancy,
however, is represented for the first time in Canadian film as a positive state of affairs, i.e.
one that is desired by the pregnant woman. In the New Wave, such as in Nobody Waved
Good-bye, and before, as in Wendy, it is seen as a "problem" to be hidden or solved by the
woman. In Eliza's Horoscope, pregnancy is a desired state, but one seen to be impossible

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because of the lack of a willing father-figure as well as the lack of finances to support the
motherhood venture.
In Outrageous!, however, Liza wants to have the baby. She joyfully defied the
patriarchy with the one-night stand that resulted in her pregnancy. Only the transgressive
Robin supports her against the patriarchal figures in her life. One reason for Liza's
unbalanced mental state is seen to be her coldly critical mother. "She always gets me so
depressed and then I can't keep my mind steady," says Liza. "She comes with good
intentions but she leaves visions of lepers behind her." At one point, her mother accuses,
"You blame me, don't you?" The relationship between the two characters is underscored by
the art direction: they are always visually separated — by a door, the phone — evoking
emotional distance. The intrusive home nurse, her mother and her doctor — all warn Liza
not to become pregnant because of her schizophrenia. General blame is assigned to the
patriarchy and its repressive but ultimately ineffectual authority figures such as Liza's doctor.
In addition to Liza's mother, other women are portrayed as phallic mothers. At a Christmas
party, a group of women engaged in an argument about feminism, accuse Robin of using
Liza and pushing her around. Robin, cut to the quick., flees to the bathroom, site of mother/
son dramas in Canadian film, and cries. Liza follows to comfort him. While in drag, Robin is
too feminine while, in the presence of phallic mothers, he is deemed too masculine. In
Canada, he cannot win. Both Robion and Liza, are severely punished for their sexual
openness — Robin by being harassed by Canadian authority figures and lack of success,
and Liza by being schizophrenic and losing her baby.
By exiling themselves to the U.S., Robin and Liza find a mad masquerade that works
and the happiness denied them in Canada. When the drag queen crosses the border, he
gains acceptance and success, at a time when the TSE films were plotting a similar move.
Outrageous! directly linked the trope of gender masquerade to issues of national identity and

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border-crossing. The dress-up image would come to speak volumes about Canadian male
anti-heroes.

The Silent Partner Speaks Volumes

The authors of Global Hollywood refer to "the promiscuous nature of capital."
25
As
classic Hollywood cinema spread around the world, there was no country of which this
statement was truer than Canada. The importance of capital to finance films and the
imbrication of bank-related capital with sexual relationships and national issues came to the
fore with several movies involving bank robberies. In 1975, It Seemed Like A Good Idea at
the Time (John Trent) was a comedy about greed and art. Roger Vadim's TSE co-pro, Hot
Touch (1980), was about two partners in an art fraud business. Martin Knelman explicitly
equates a husband's alimony payments, which represent a tax write-off, to the tax-shelter
investment of the film itself.
26
A Man, A Woman and A Bank (Noel Black 1979), with the
working title of A Very Big Withdrawal, and The Silent Partner came at the height of the TSE,
both featuring amateur bank robbers. The bank-heist caper for Canadians has meanings
other than genre, being tied up with the sexualities, nationalities and personal deficiencies of
characters in their relationships with money. A key underlying issue was the banks' funding
of the TSE films, with the image of the bank emerging in light of the CFDC's function as a
banking or funding agency for the TSE. As Knelman writes, "When the Canadian Film
Development Corporation was finally established, after years of study and preparation, it
was clearly stated that economics came first. The idea wasn't necessary to subsidize artists,
although nobody would complain if that happened. But what we needed was a strong
commercial base. The CFDC wasn't going to be an agency like the Canada Council, with

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the objectives of supporting artists and subsidizing culture. No, the CFDC was to be in
investment outfit, operating like a bank to stimulate production."
27
(italics mine)
The Silent Partner made no attempt to disguise its Canadian location, making use of
the Toronto subway, the Beaches neighbourhood and the Eaton Centre as locations and
showing Canada's multi-coloured paper currency. Canadian newspaper accounts during the
TSE made much of the use of non-use of Canadian geographical and cultural markers
during the TSE. The location, however, has no direct bearing on the plot and is not named.
The characters mimic the pattern of Canadian, American, British and French/
Québecois. Miles Cullen (Elliott Gould) is a mild-mannered but prickly bank clerk, who could
be taken as a Canadian character in a Canadian location, or a middling American star in an
American movie. Miles steals $48,350 from the bank where he works — a manageably
modest Canadian amount, rather than the millions that would be expected in an American
movie or even a British one. He begins as a typical Canadian anti-hero, i.e. ordinary, not
particularly good-looking or heroic, even somewhat geeky. Then his personality begins to
change and he becomes a larcenous, violent, American-coded bank robber. The change in
Miles is triggered when he meets Reiker, the really bad guy, played by Canadian
Christopher Plummer. Reiker has a German name reminiscent not only of the enemy --
Germany -- from two World Wars, but also from Rikers Island, the New York prison. Reiker
is not only a violent predator, but also one of ambiguous sexuality, evoking both Nazi anti-
homosexuality and prison. His masquerade begins when he dresses as Santa Claus and
end with him disguised as a woman. In the middle, Reiker stalks Miles and they become
embroiled in a murder plot with homoerotic undertones.
British star Susannah York plays Julie, who works at the bank with Miles and
becomes his girlfriend--the British "Bonnie" to his American "Clyde"--and ultimately complicit
in his scheme. No mention is made of York's Britishness whereas, in an American movie,
she would more likely have been British for some narrative reason. As noted, many

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Canadian movies feature Canada's British roots as a matter of course or as a representation
of some authority figure. Julie represents that tie. Together, the Brit-playing-a-Canadian and
the American-playing-a-Canadian represent both the good guys and the bad guys. Unlike
Bonnie and Clyde, however, as well as most other movie bank robbers, Miles and Julie get
away with their paltry sum.
Céline Lomez as Elaine has an obvious French/ Québécois accent. She insinuates
herself into Miles' life by pretending to have been his father's caregiver, a sexy maternal
figure. She is portrayed as the site of Canadian sexuality, often posited in the Québec
female and a reference to the stereotype of the French as sexy and perhaps dangerous
lovers. Bristling with coy sexuality, she is fickle, the betrayer, playing the two men against
each other in a deadly game of love, sex and money. Elaine tries to participate in the
international charade, but is a small-time, manipulative con-artist who gets killed for her
sexual and political transgressions against the British, American and English-Canadian
characters. After Reiker kills her, in a particularly gruesome fashion, Miles rolls her body in
the carpet on which they had sex and buries her under a construction site. In contrast to
Outrageous! and the later Perfectly Normal, both featuring sweet and harmless anti-heroic
cross-dressers, the masquerade in The Silent Partner is malevolent and doomed. There is
nothing artistic, humorous or redeeming about it.
Miles and Reiker represent a kind of double image, opposites who share a
homoerotic subtext, with Elaine as the go-between. When Miles threatens to kill him, Reiker
becomes visibly upset and insulted, saying, in a way that makes them seem almost lovers,
that they are partners. The text implies that Reiker kills Elaine because she had sex with
Miles instead of with him. The subtext, however, is that Reiker is attracted to Miles and must
deny it by substituting violence. Now that Elaine is dead, the possibility of a sexual liaison
between the two men means at least one of them must die. As soon as Miles decides to
leave the bank, takes the money and invites Julie to come with him, Reiker rides the

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escalator dressed as a middle-aged, Chanel-suited, white-gloved bank customer. He
performs the female gender with feminine-coded gestures, such as delicately touching his
hair and tossing his head. The implication is that, if Reiker can't have Miles, then neither can
Julie. At the counter, Reiker tells Miles, "Give it to me." Miles reaches down near his pants
somewhere and pulls up something, in a seemingly sexual way. "What are you waiting for?
Give it to me," Reiker repeats. He soon ends up indecorously splay-legged in his slit skirt,
riding upside-down on the escalator he came in on—dead.
The case of Plummer is of particular note because, as a Canadian ex-patriate, he
underwent something of a transnational transformation. Having lived out of the country for
some 30 years, Plummer told an elite audience at a benefit for the Canadian Centre for
Advanced Film Studies in 1987 that he and others who had left Canada had forgotten "what
fun it was to fight for dear old art on our own front lawn...the great big movies we finally got
to make here for world consumption were a bit derivative. There wasn't much of us in them.
We forgot how to be original. We forgot who we were and where we came from...we do
have something to say...It's part of what makes us different, unique — us...From now on
we're not going to hide behind our borders...we're not going to run away from home no
more!" As Knelman writes, "Plummer invented a new myth for himself -- the repentant sinner
who escapes damnation in Hollywood by being born again in Toronto, the man who marvels
that once he was lost but now he is saved."
28
Plummer is now extremely successful in both
countries, both on stage and in movies. His comments came on the heels of the TSE
attempt to assimilate as well as to quantify Canadian difference. The consensus was that the
"great big movies" that masqueraded as American were not successful as art.
Inasmuch as Canadians masquerade as Americans, Americans also masquerade as
Canadians. Philip Seymour Hoffman, for example, played the gambling Canadian banker in
Owning Mahowny.
29
The difference is that, because there are so many representations of
Americans as Americans, it matters little if they sometimes play Canadians (even they still

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seem to Canadians to be American). The fact has little or nothing to do with the survival of
American culture nor does it threaten to hijack or derail any national images, icons or
representations.
Instead of developing the political potential of masquerade opened up by Outrageous!
the TSE thriller The Silent Partner (Daryl Duke, 1978) deliberately disavowed these
dimensions. Starring American Elliott Gould, Canadian Christopher Plummer, Briton
Susannah York, and Québécoise Celine Lomez, it is one of the first TSE dramatic features
to sublimate issues of national identity and replace them with money, sex and violence — as
stapes of the previously unfamiliar bank-heist genre.
30
The repressed Canadian returns. Part
of the subtext can be seen in reading Canada as "The Silent Partner" of the U.S., and
especially of the movie business. As noted in Chapter 2, ten percent of Hollywood's movie
revenues come from Canada. Toronto is the top per capita movie-going city in the world. In
order to share some U.S.-coded success with TSE movies, some attempt was made to
imitate/ emulate popular genres such as the thriller.
The Canadian's identity in The Silent Partner is ambiguous, changing, hidden and/ or
uncertain. "Are you the type people usually underestimate?" asks a sexy party guest, as she
dances with Miles. Julie watches. "Does anyone really know you, Miles?" asks Julie as they
make their way up to his apartment after the party. Miles is also representative of a kind of
fish-out-of-water subtext for Canadian characters. In the beginning, he collects fish in an
aquarium. Here, the fish tank, which appears in an inordinate number of Canadian movies,
along with water imagery, turns deadly. The shattered glass of Miles' fish tank is used by
Reiker to decapitate Elaine. Miles is suddenly adrift from his normal humdrum life, lost in
American cultural waters that are far too deep.
31

Money is seen to be tied up with American-coded sexuality as well as murder. After
Miles has decided to steal the money, Julie tells him he has changed and that he can
consider that a compliment. When he steals the money, he becomes more confident, more

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desirable—more American. He starts calling the "safety deposit" box a "safe deposit" box,
the American term). When he gives Julie the key to the box, she puts it coyly between her
breasts, equating sexual flirting with money a monetary payoff. Miles begins smoking cigars
and drinking cognac, indicating he is becoming more wealthy and worldly. He finds the
courage to seduce the willing woman. At this point he also decides to get rid of his aquarium
-- no more a fish out of water. When he disguises his voice to call the cops on Reiker, he
uses a Southern U.S. accent that disguises any Canadianness. Miles is the first Canadian
hero since Duddy Kravitz and Robin Turner to experience success equated with money,
even though all three successes are heavily mediated by other circumstances.
The attempt to move between genders can be as uneven and variable as that
between national identity constructions.
32
In the end the American Canadian, Elliott Gould,
outsmarts the Canadian American, Christopher Plummer. The Québécoise and the
Canadian playing the American both die, while the American playing the "Canadian" gets
shot and survives. Miles is a confused and ambivalent combination of the American winner
and the Canadian loser. In the final scene, he tells Julie in the ambulance, "I always
wondered what it felt like to be shot. It hurts a lot." He is curious about one of the iconic
American images — the handgun. He is, however, unable to take being shot like an
American hero, and his reaction foregrounds the stereotype of the American gunshot scene.
It is not taken for granted, but rather interrogated. This Canadian-American anti-hero does
manage to abscond with the money and the British girl. He co-opts and then gets to
overcome his former colonizer, who is attracted to his colonial combination in spite of
herself.
Money intersects with tranvestism in The Silent Partner, as it does in Outrageous!
Money is the motivating influence in both movies, moving Robin to move to the U.S. and
Miles to steal the bank's money. In Perfectly Normal, money comes to Renzo through the
maternal legacy and is filtered through the hands of the American "brother." The issues of

234

money and drag would return in Perfectly Normal, where a border-crossing American steals
a Canadian's money through the medium of the high art of opera.
In Perfectly Normal, the hero's transvestism straddles a line between a brilliant artistic
performance and a demoralizing humiliation, a liminal state that risks not only ridicule and
failure but also physical violence and possible death. It is this courageous confrontation of
alternatives that enables the film to fulfill the political potential of mimicry that was opened in
Outrageous! and disavowed during the TSE.
Mary Ann Doane discusses the female spectator as the site of an oscillation invoking
the metaphor of the transvestite, while the male is, in contrast, locked into sexual identity.
She sees male transvestism as "an occasion for laughter." Her observation works for
Outrageous! in which Robin's transvestism is accepted and allowed because he is a gay
female impersonator who confines his comic dress-up to the entertainment field, both
diegetically and non-diegetically. The sight/ site of Reiker's transvestism, however, in The
Silent Partner, is chillingly serious and even murderous. When transvestism hits the streets,
where allegedly heterosexual males roam, as in The Silent Partner, the results are fatal and
sexual and national identities also threatened.
An instance of official transvestism is Cronenberg's M. Butterfly, in which John Lone
dresses and lives or "acts" like a woman, Song Liling, unbeknownst to Jeremy Irons as her/
his lover of 18 years. As in Perfectly Normal, opera plays a key role in M. Butterfly, since
Liling is an opera star. Opera also allows the characters' repressed emotions to surface in an
acceptably artistic and melodramatic fashion. In addressing Comrade Chin's question of why
men played the roles of women in Beijing opera, as they did theatrical roles in
Shakespeare's time, Song Liling answers, "It's because only a man knows how women are
supposed to act." The observation is particularly relevant to Butler's contention that the mask
of gender is performed repeatedly along prescribed social and cultural lines of ingrained
heterosexuality.

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Butler dissects the psychoanalytic narrative whose founding moment is in the
prohibitive law of sexual desire and enforced heterosexuality.
33
While these sexual
prohibitions are allegedly natural in the Oedipal scene, Butler argues against Freud's causal
narrative and for Foucault that the desire is an effect of the law and not a cause. The
repressed incest desire that produces heterosexuality, or that which can be spoken, is that
which is unspeakable, i.e. homosexuality. Canadian cinema exemplifies both the incest
desire, with the many incestuous scenes in family films, as well as return of the repressed
homoerotic desire allowed to surface because of the failure of enforced masculinity in the
anti-hero. Song tells the Comrade, "I'm trying my best to become somebody else...I despise
this costume." Song, no longer disguised as a woman, hates wearing the male uniform
necessary to repeatedly perform his gender as a man. As René Gallimard tells his lover
Song, "I'm a man who loved a woman created by a man. Anything else simply falls short."
The double love masquerade with its associated spying and watching, results in Gallimard's
suicide, in full female make-up/ maquillage, in front of the opera audience.

Perfectly Normal, Eh?

In Perfectly Normal, directed by Québécois Yves Simoneau in his first English-
language film, (1991), Renzo's transvestism straddles a line between artistic performance
and possible ridicule, failure or violence. In the climax, the main character, Renzo Parachii
(Michael Riley), an Italian-Canadian factory worker/ hockey player/ cab driver, dresses up in
a long, blonde wig and a gossamer sequinned gown to sing the woman's part in an aria from
Bellini's opera, Norma. The spectacle takes place on the opening night of an Italian
restaurant which has been capitalized by Renzo's maternal inheritance at the insistence of
his opportunistic American friend with an Italian first name, Alonzo Turner, played by Robbie

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Coltrane, a Scot affecting a New York accent. His last name, not incidentally, is Turner, the
same as Robin's in Outrageous! Besides being the chef, the likeable, larcenous, opera-
loving Alonzo casts himself in the male role of his theatrical presentation. At first Renzo
categorically refuses to engage in what the persuasive Alonzo calls "a little innocent cross-
dressing." Alonzo asks him, "What's the big deal? It's just clothes." Yet the incident suggests
a good deal more, for it marks an important shift not only between "masculine" and
"feminine" subject positions but also in English-Canadian national identity. Renzo also
functions as a temporarily frustrated artist, because his deep longing for an Italian operatic
identity, jump-started and financed by an American, is cut short the evening it begins. In the
end, however, neither American commercialism nor European high culture ends up
seducing the Canadian.
Within the restaurant mise-en-scène, Canada is not only dressed up, but it is also
masquerading as Italy, a transformation purposely designed by Turner to cast a spell over
imagined local working-class patrons in order to awaken them from their drab Canadian
lethargy. As in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, this awakening becomes
associated with transgressive sexuality. For surprisingly, Renzo's cross-dressing proves to
be a "turn-on" not only to his girlfriend Denise, who whispers to herself that he is "beautiful,"
but also to his comic nemesis on the ice and in the factory, Hoblisch, a.k.a. Hopeless, who
becomes erotically mesmerized by the whole operatic performance. Yet instead of leading to
a triumphant debut for Renzo, Alonzo and their restaurant, the homoerotic attraction quickly
erupts into a brawl, as Hopeless assaults a hapless diner for making too much noise,
thereby demolishing the transformative mise-en-scène.
Since Renzo and Alonzo are narratively and stylistically coded Canadian and
American respectively, their characteristics inevitably evoke issues of national
consciousness and global politics. Although Renzo is portrayed as searching for a strong
masculine identity (as blue-collar worker, taxi driver, and hockey player), the Canadian hero

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is nevertheless feminized through the transvestite and homosexual subtexts -- positioned as
the object of the male gaze, cast as the passive player in a European mise-en-scène and
American plot, and identified with Mother Nature (the Canadian landscape).
In addition to his European cultural heritage, his monetary legacy, hidden in the opera
recordings, also comes from his just-deceased mother. Renzo's close relationship with her is
stylistically unlined by Dutch-angle eyeline match cuts from her dying in their apartment to
him playing hockey, and back again. Moreover, these gender dynamics are mapped onto
colonial relationships—with Canada playing the young subordinate female to the older, more
powerful Euro-American male who seduces her with his allegedly superior culture, history
and economic sense. Representations of gender intertwine with issues of national identity
constructions and lead to broader implications of these dynamics for Canadian cinema.
In Nationalisms and Sexualities, Eve Sedgwick asks provocatively what distinguishes
the "nation-ness" of the United States from "that of the nation-ness of Canada, the different
nation-ness of Mexico, of the Philippines, of the Navajo Nation (within the U.S.), of the Six
Nations (across the U.S.-Canada border), the nationalisms of the non-nation Québec...and
so forth and so forth"? She notes that the term "nationhood" does not take into account the
many differences within, between and among nations. These are issues that need to be
discussed in terms of national cinemas, especially in relation to Hollywood cinema. The
construct of Canadian identity can by no means be monolithic, especially in view of
Sedgwick's questions. In fact, certain recurring cultural definitions imply that "Canadianness"
is so tentative as to be constructed in the negative, i.e. not American, not British. As a
country without a self-defining moment, Canada continues to understand itself partly in
terms of what it is not, having difficulty deciding what or who it is, or what it wants to be when
and if it grows up.
Although Renzo is placed in a feminine subject position as the erotic spectacle of the
gaze, he returns from this boundary crossing renewed, refreshed, unthreatened, and ready

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to carry on with his Canadian dream, secure in the knowledge that it is the correct one for
him. He returns to his allegedly "perfectly normal" state, before American intervention and
attempted recolonization. His transvestism, however, can be seen as a trope for the post-
colonial condition of Canada, one which encompasses and is informed in multiple and
complex ways by the issues of history, culture, gender, sexuality and nationalism.
Fothergill ends Coward, Bully or Clown with this prediction: "The most interesting
Canadian cinema will probably be that which bypasses the terms of my formula altogether."
As I noted in my 1994 article, this would seem to be the case with Perfectly Normal.
Although Renzo shares some of the uncertain or weak characteristics of Fothergill's anti-
heroes, he emerges strong, neither coward, bully nor clown. As a new exception to the rule,
Renzo opens up a reconfigured space for the Canadian hero, not simply as a non-loser, but
as a figure who problematizes and yet tries to redefine national and sexual boundaries in
relation to the United States. But Renzo, a quiet, self-assured Canadian hero, could not
have existed without the kind of aspiring loser-hero outlined in so many previous films,
including Explosion and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Renzo endured the
transvestism in order to find himself and keep his land.
As a nation in drag, Canada comes out of its sexual and national closet with Perfectly
Normal, gaining confidence, airing its sexual proclivities, appreciating the legacy of its dead
parents and standing up to its bully brother, the U.S. Canadian cinema in the 1990s begins
to pull away from the TSE and emphasize more coherent and traditional narrative, while
addressing the Canadian-American duality.
Although Canadian films masqueraded as and mimicked American film, the United
States is also in drag, standing in for the country, with Hollywood masquerading as the
global cinema, when it is in fact just part, although a large and powerful part, of a national
cinema. All such national cinemas have implications in the global cinematic economy.
Having the closest relationship with the U.S. of any other nation, Canada could use its film to

239

institute and become instrumental in a radical social mission. Influence from the margins, by
using Hollywood's forms, could find itself at the centre. With a new schematic structure and
an eye towards social or cultural revolution or change, Canadian film could combine art and
social science, mediated by show business. Canadian film critics praise certain Canadian
films because of their differences from most Canadian film and from American film. What is
at stake is the cultural and therefore economic survival of a country as well as the ability,
opportunity and willingness to influence in a profound way the evolution of world cinema and
a particular political engagement on a global level. Canadian film is in a unique position, by
using its unique position, to become part of, or to initiate, a cinematic revolution by using the
tools already in its possession.

Notes to Chapter 7 — Postcolonial Potential of Making the Invisible Visible

1
Butler, Gender Trouble, 137.

2
Mandel, 340.

3
Gittings, Canadian National Cinema, 289.

4
Roy's parents are absent—the mother dead and the father estranged. Just as Shirley, the sexual aggressor, is about to kiss him, there is a
cut to an old lady, Shirley's grandmother, entering a theatre to see Gone with the Wind -- two direct references to the importance of the
mother as well as the Canadian cinema overwhelmed by American blockbusters. The woman in the box office booth watches Star Trek and
we hear Canadian William Shatner's voice. Television, not film, is Canada's popular medium. Later comes a reference to Roy as Charlie
Chaplin, as he, in silhouette, taps his cane along a tunnel and the camera focuses on his big splayed feet. Naming again is significant: the
names, even of Shirley's grandmother's bird, are all the names of American icons: "Shirley" Temple, "Roy" Rogers, "Marlon" Brando (Shirley's
brother Marlon is a male model who moved to N.Y.), John "Wayne." Shirley asks directions of a man in the park who looks exactly like
Colonel Sanders, another American marker popular in Canada, and refers directly to American cinema when she says to her mother on the
phone, "Guess who's coming to dinner?" The reference to the American film equates Roy's disability to being Black. This 1974 Canadian film
was greatly affected by the 1960s American movies addressing issues of race, such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and In the Heat of
the Night. Here, however, it is the comedy, rather than the characters, that is black. After dinner, for example, Roy and Shirley's family play
the children's game, Blind Man's Bluff. Roy wears a shirt embroidered with the name "Dick." Other males are also disabled, stereotyped,
feminized and/or ridiculed, such as the stutterer in the café who is meant to be laughed at, or the guy Shirley's father wants her to marry, who
has missing fingers and acne. He objects to her marrying Roy, "a guy who has to sit down to take a leak." Together they see GWTW
regularly. The grandmother is watching Star Trek in the box-office, a conflation of film and TV, and we hear the voice of Canadian William
Shatner.

5
From the video box.

240

6
The theme of blindness continues in 2007 with plans for an upcoming film by direction Fernando Meirelles from the Nobel Prize-winning
novel Blindness by Portuguese author Jose Saramago and produced by Niv Fichman of Rhombus Media of Toronto. American, Canadians,
Japanese and a Brazilian are set to star, including Canadian Don McKellar who wrote the screenplay. In keeping with themes that recur in
Canadian film but also must be present in other national cultures, the story is about a doctor who suddenly goes blind. The international cast,
a Canadian producer and a $25-million budget echo the TSE. Gayle MacDonald, "Ruffalo, Moore tapped for Canadian film," Globe and Mail,
June 13, 2007, Review section.

7
Jeffrey Mehlman, "Remy de Gourmont with Freud: Fetishism and Patriotism," In Apter, Emily & William Pietz, eds, Fethishism as Cultural
Discourse (Cornell University Press, 1993), 84-9.

8
Apter, Emily and William Pietz, eds. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, 3-4.

9
William Pietz, "Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx," in Fetishism,. 119-151.

10
Ibid., 129.

11
It is not atypical of the Canadian loser-hero to be a third-place finisher or even a non-finisher. Heroism lies elsewhere. With the advent of
more American television coverage in Canada, even a second-place win is increasingly seen as a loss. American culture recognizes only
winners and losers, as is also illustrated in its two-party political system. A 2004 Nike ad for the Olympic Games proclaimed, "You don't win
silver. You lose gold." An American crossword puzzle answer for the clue "runner-up" is "loser."

12
The girlfriend is played by Canadian Kim Cattrall, another actor who experienced her first starring roles in such TSE movies as Porky's
and Tribute, another movie about the troubled father-son relationship.

13
Huntley is the name of the English-speaking businessman who hatches evil plans against the Québécois in the Two Solitudes novel and
movie.

14
Jason Anderson. "Best of the Fest," Eye Weekly (September 2003). Anderson writes that "the Winnipeg fabulist's first major feature in
seven years may win something even sweeter: the affection of the masses." This view, however, was highly optimistic and the movie remains
an avant-garde classic. Anderson called it "delirious and idiosyncratic," saying that the "battle between two brothers" benefits from "more
robust pacing, greater narrative coherence and less preciousness overall," adding, "But it's still plenty weird."
www.eyeweekly.com/eye/issue/issue, September 4, 2004.

15
Jim Slotek, "'Limb Salesman' a weirded-out Canuck flick," Toronto Sun, April 28, 2006. It should also be noted that Clara is the name
of Rilke's wife. In Egoyan's Speaking Part (1989), Clara is the name given a screenwriter whose brother is dead

16
Slotek calls it "A bad dream come to life in starkly lit scenes and flashes of dementia, The Limb Salesman is a sci-fi romance set in a
future world where potable water is a scarce commodity. That said, it takes place almost entirely within the claustrophic confines of an old

241

farmhouse, where a rich "water miner" named Abe Fielder (Johnson) and his family live an anachronistic existence (Victrolas, '80s cars,
antique furniture and typewriters) and behave like something out of Tennessee Williams."

17
Wendy Banks, "Organ Grinders," Now magazine, Vol 25, #35 (April 27-May 3, 2006)

18
. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 122-3.

19
Ibid., 12.3

20
Ibid., 130.

21
Ibid., 195.

22
Ibid., 172

23

The worship of American stars and the perceived impossibility of achieving that level of stardom in Canada will be depicted repeatedly,
including the young Asian-Canadian woman in Double Happiness (Mina Shum 1994), whose goal is to win an Academy Award.® The last
scene in that movie shows Sandra Oh as Jade Li, having left her parents' traditional home, in her first apartment, hanging a curtain with images
of Marilyn Monroe on it.

24
The name Turner evokes the Mick Jagger character of the same name in Performance, the debut movie by Nicolas Roeg and Donald
Cammel, in which Jagger plays a legendary androgynous bisexual performer who gets stuck in a single identity from which he has to be
liberated.

25
Miller et al, Global Hollywood, 41.

26
Knelman, This Is Where We Came In, 94.

27
Ibid., 89.

28
Ibid., 21-2.

29
Owning Mahowny (Richard Kwietniowski, 2003), which represents part of a new era of the TSE, revisits the theme of larcenous Canadian
losers seeking cash from banks, starring American Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role of the Canadian bank employee/ embezzler/
gambler and directed by a Briton. Canadian producer Peter O'Brian had years ago unsuccessfully attempted to obtain the rights to the novel
and make Owning Mahowny as a strictly Canadian movie.

242

30
The Silent Partner, based on the novel Think of a Number, by Anders Bodelsen, shows an intriguing tale told by an experienced
scriptwriter, with suspense, foreshadowing, some interesting characters and a surprise ending. The screenplay is by American Curtis Hansen
(credited as Curtis Lee Hansen, also associate producer). Hansen went on to write Never Cry Wolf in 1983, a Canadian-influenced American
production from a classic Farley Mowat novel and shot in Canada, then to direct Bad Influence (1990), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
(1992), L.A. Confidential (1997), and 8 Mile (2002).

31
Water imagery is particularly prevalent in Québécois as well as English-Canadian movies. The phenomenon has been particularly
noticeable with the release of Chaos and Desire/La Turbulence des fluides (Manon Briand, 2003), about an inexplicable stopping of the tides
in the small town of Baie Comeau (hometown of former prime minister Brian Mulroney). Other Québec films featuring water imagery are
Maelstrom (Denis Villeneuve 2000) and Un Crabe dans la tête (André Turpin, 2002). The water symbol equates to the body's sexual centre of
energy in some Eastern philosophies. Geoff Pevere notes in his article "Fishy" that "Canadian filmmakers seemed to care so much about
fish," calling attention to the "weirdness" in four films from 2000. In North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 1980, ed. William
Beard and Jerry White (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2002), 100-2.

32
Thomas Waugh has briefly examined The Silent Partner as an example of queering the nation. In Gittings, 284.

33
Ibid., 64.

243

Chapter 8: Back to the Future: The Neo-TSE

"Hollywood is an invitation to replication and domination, an invitation both desired
and disavowed," says Global Hollywood.
1
In the purported desire to emulate and succeed,
the TSE pursued the invitation to replication through mimicry and masquerade. The results
were, paradoxically, both a return to continued cultural domination and the beginning of a
feature film industry. While some stories, stars and talent were co-opted and incorporated
into Hollywood, Canada also reaped the benefits of billions of U.S. dollars poured into
Hollywood North. In view of what Global Hollywood correctly refers to as "the promiscuous
nature of capital,"
2
has Canada, 40 years after the institution of the Canadian Film
Development Corporation, produced any movies popular to its own citizens and residents?
English-speaking Canada appears to be in an advantageous position to replicate
Hollywood strategies and make money for its own movies rather than, or in addition to,
American ones. Sharing with the U.S. a 3,000-mile border near which approximately 80
percent of Canadians live, and having an experienced filmmaking history resulting from the
TSE, Canada continues to strive for difference through an obsessively performative
repetition of tropes and genre mixes. Now a twinned Neo-TSE has tumbled out of the
national closet.
3
It began around 2004 with studio-building,
4
attracting American
productions,
5
attempting to appeal to the North American box office by making what Telefilm
refers to as "commercial" movies, and government funding of Canadian features and co-
productions.
6
The goals and many of the results are similar, with issues of cultural identity
and government intervention raised since the Quota Quickies and later the Massey Report
still part of the current cultural discourse.
7
At the beginning of the TSE, there was fear in the
industry that the movie business was headed in the wrong direction by masquerading
shamelessly as the U.S. Early in 2007, a two-page story in the Toronto Star reported that

244

film and TV production in Toronto had fallen drastically.
8
The camera union reported the
drop as being from $929 million in 2001 to $594 million in 2006.
9
The new fear is that the
lucrative "Hollywood North" may have gone south.
10

The Neo-TSE is evident in both DC and TSE movies. In 2003, DC producer Peter
O'Brian addressed the issue/ problem of the TSE directly with his directorial debut,
Hollywood North, a satiric insider feature about the TSE. It stars Canadians, Americans and
Britons. It played one Toronto theatre for one week. The Canadian film industry is far more
interested in the politics of its film history than is the Canadian public. The discourse and the
number of productions about the making of Canadian film and television indicate an
obsession with and anxiety about the functioning of the national screen culture industries.
The inside joke is not available to the general public, which is barely exposed to the movies
of the industry, nevermind its inner workings. An earlier satiric DC feature, Paint Cans (w. d.
Paul Donovan1994), features Wick Burns, the ineffectual head of a regulatory government
agency funding obscure Canadian films.
11
The television sitcom Made in Canada (CBC
1998-2003), set in a production company headed by an arrogant, ineffective leader, lasted
five seasons with middling ratings, while the two movies about the movie business were
commercially unsuccessful.
12

The Neo-TSE includes big-budget co-productions uncannily reminiscent of the first
TSE and its precursors by international auteurs. Being Julia (István Szabó 2004),
13
a
Canada/ USA/ Hungary/ U.K. co-pro, stars Annette Bening, who was nominated for an
Academy Award® for her role as a London theatrical diva,
14
and is directed by an
internationally renowned European director. The location, the accents and Jeremy Irons
make the picture seem British; the presence of Bening gives it an American flavour. The
USA/ U.K./ Spain/ Canada co-pro Head in the Clouds (w. d. John Duigan 2004) takes place
in France and stars South African Charlize Theron playing an American, Penélope Cruz as a

245

Spaniard, and Stuart Townsend as a Briton in a political melodrama set in wartime France.
Both movies seem to achieve almost complete cultural erasure for Canada, the key
locations and players being American, American-coded and British. In Being Julia, Bening's
histrionic character moans that the only thing left to her would be touring Canada and
Australia — the colonies — a comment reminiscent of the Canadian Cooperation Project of
1948 when Canada paid Hollywood to mention its name in movies. These types of co-
productions raise questions about the nature of a co-production's "nation-ality." The content
and location of such productions as the Canada/ India co-pro Water
15
(Deepa Mehta 2005)
neither refers to Canadian life or history nor adds to the construction of Canada or
Canadians on-screen. It does, however, contribute to Canada's cultural cachet abroad and
adds Mehta to the short list of Canadian auteurs.
International narratives that adhere closely to Hollywood techniques, but with national/
regional flavour, such as Chocolat (Lasse Hallström 2002) and Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet
2001) from France and Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore 1989), Il Postino (Michale
Radford 1994), a France/ Italy/ Belgium co-pro, and Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni 1997)
from Italy, contain conventional narratives and sympathetic characters, but impart a feeling
of the language and culture of another country. They appeal to Americans and Canadians
alike. Such movies, often described as having "universal appeal," are accepted as long as
they are not too "different" from conventional narratives and broad-based audiences need
not work extremely hard at understanding them. This means that all movies that receive
wide distribution will of necessity be within certain norms, a situation that has expanded to
include films of every country — a more global view of margins versus centres. Part of the
branding project of nations, intended or not, they amount to an international genre.
The Neo-TSE co-productions present Canada on the screen only when a location is
Canadian and/ or one of the main characters is Canadian, even if that character lives

246

abroad, as in Touch of Pink (Canada/ U.K., Ian Iqbal Rashid 2004). About a gay
Torontonian, from an Ismaili-Indian family, living in London, England with his British partner,
and in the closet only when his mother visits, it features London and suburban Toronto
locations. Congorama (Philippe Falardeau 2006), a Canada/ Belgium/ France collaboration,
takes a Belgian and plants him in rural Québec to search for his Canadian birth parents,
reversing but also illuminating aspects of the Canadian national identity crisis vis-à-vis
Québec.
16
These inter/national productions have Canadian content and also include other
countries/ nationalities.
Both movies take colonization and use it to take the Canadian out of Canada, but not
"Canadianness" out of the Canadian. Touch of Pink refers directly to the imaginary American
colonizer living inside the cultural heads of Canadians, even those of immigrant
backgrounds. He is rendered physical, in the persona of Cary Grant, an important imaginary
friend since childhood whom only Alim can see.
17
In the end, Alim sends Cary packing. No
longer seduced by American pop culture, he has grown up and found his own personal
narrative with a happy ending on his own terms. Toronto ultimately and ironically serves as
the location where they are empowered to reveal their relationship to Alim's family.
18
While
Rashid's U.K. "people" suggested setting the film in New York so it would "travel," he
refused. "These are my two countries," he said. "It was my perverse pleasure to use Toronto
as Toronto, and Toronto as London—the seat of Empire. It felt really important to name
Toronto as Toronto."
19
Mainstream enough to play for several months in Toronto, the movie
is indicative of a Canadian cinema that may be starting to tell stories in a new way,
addressing gender and colonial issues, but recognizing the importance of character and plot
in telling a comprehensible story free of an overload of psychoanalytic ruptures.
Some other relatively recent Canadian movies, such as Rude (Clement Virgo 1995),
Double Happiness (Mina Shum 1994), Sam and Me (Deepa Mehta 1991) and Mambo

247

Italiano (Emile Gaudreault 2003), have also mined parts of the Canadian immigrant
experience. By doing so, they help break down, fragment and expand the "duolithic"
Canadian view of nation, opening up to include other national and sexual borders.
20
The
mythic Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk 2001) is the beginning of a fictional
exploration of the Aboriginal Canada that pre-dates the Two Solitudes by several thousands
of years. The movie is said to take place in about the year 1000.

Bon Cop, Bad Cop: Tackling Solitudes Head-On

By February of 2007, Porky's had overtaken as the highest-grossing Canadian feature
by Bon Cop, Bad Cop (Eric Canuel 2006),
21
in which two policemen, one French, one
English, are forced to work together on a series of hockey murders.
22
While many of the
same classical Canadian themes of brother-coded relationships, fractured families, bilingual
first names (Martin and David), plus elements of "Narrativus Interruptus" pertain, Bon Cop
handles the Two Solitudes directly rather than obliquely. The dead body that demands the
story hangs over a provincial Ontario/ Québec border sign. English-French stereotypes
abound,
23
exploited in the print ads, which show the Frenchman in sunglasses and a leather
jacket, the Englishman slightly behind him in suit and tie. The tagline is, "Shoot first, translate
later." In an article titles "Language no barrier" the Toronto Star's called it "the ultimate
Canadian buddy movie," putting it into a genre context. The two actors were "so in sync
during a Toronto interview…they were finishing each other's sentences." Star/co-writer
Huard, well-known in Québec and unknown in the ROC, noted, "I thought maybe what we
have in common is actually our differences."
24

248

There is no mention of the Two Solitudes that clearly define Bon Cop, perhaps
because the concept is so internalized or obvious to Canadians that it seems redundant
even to mention it. Because the public would perceive a movie about Canadian history or
identity as boring and/or educational, actor Feore downplayed its "Canadianness" in
interviews, calling it "not Canadian in its attitude, in its style" and "not Canadian in the sense
that it's going to be any good for you." He went on, "Stuff's going to blow up. There will be
naked people. We're going to swear a whole lot. And people will die. Apart from your tax
dollars I can see very little Canadian about it. On the other hand, it's shot on our street
corners, it really speaks to us."
25
The desire to be Canadian and not-boring is evident.
Bon Cop is a genre mix: not a police thriller because there are not enough details to
the crimes; not suspense thriller because there is little suspense to the plot; not a traditional
comedy because the jokes are there but not numerous; not a psychological thriller because
the necessary delving into the personalities is overshadowed by the importance of
foregrounding the Two Solitudes. "Narrativus Interruptus" appears in the confused and
unfocussed beginning of a man pleading for his life, saying to his killer that they used to be
best friends. Various dead bodies are presented as a way to explore the relationship of the
two cops.
26
Action scenes are dark and confused with little suspense. The murderer, neither
identified nor outlined, is not a worthy adversary.
27
As the credits roll, a smaller screen
appears and Buttman announces at a press conference that there will be no more Canadian
teams going to the U.S. What should be the triumphant, dramatic moment in the film was not
presented as the main conflict, so its power is lost in Narrativus Interruptus. At the end,
Martin and David walk off together, like Rick and Captain Renault of Casablanca, in
reference to the iconic American love story. The movie equally denies the homoerotic
connection between men/nations. Its real concern is repairing the ruptures between the Two
Solitudes.

249

"It's all a bit hackneyed and cliché," wrote another reviewer. She begins her article
with, "BCBC is being billed as the first bilingual film in Canadian cinema history. But, really,
who cares, if it isn't a worthwhile movie?"
28
A third review called it "a broad, crowd-pleasing
movie pitched to an audience, as opposed to an arts committee."
29
Another writer mentions
Ward's comment that stuffing bodies in car trunks is "a Québec tradition," referring to the
discovery of the murdered Québec government minister in a car trunk during the FLQ crisis
of 1970 (a remark that only a Québec writer/ actor could get away with).
30
A fourth reviewer
says, "Yippee!! Here's a commercial Canadian movie that avoids both slavish imitation of
brain-dead Hollywood and our own tendency toward dreary earnestness."
31

As these reviews show, Bon Cop, Bad Cop carries multiple and fraught meanings for
Canadians. At the Jutra Awards ceremony in 2007, winning filmmaker Falardeau
acknowledged the expansion of Québec movies beyond its border, saying, "I'm happy to see
that we are telling stories about foreign places. Rwanda with Un Dimanche à Kigali, Japan
with Kamataki, and Ontario with Bon Cop, Bad Cop."
32
Calling Ontario a foreign country
came from Claude Jutra himself during the TSE.
33
Alexandra Shimo in the Globe and Mail
speculated before the opening that it would mean more than a summer blockbuster, and that
it would prove to actor/ co-writer Huard "that Québecois and English-Canadian do indeed
share a culture."
34
The social and cultural issues produce much better box office than
previous big-budget TSE or Neo-TSE, by tackling the Two Solitudes head-on.
Other new filmmaking in both Solitudes foregrounds gay siblings, as in the family
comedies Mambo Italiano and C.R.A.Z.Y.
35
While they continue to use the tropes of family
dysfunction, siblings, and psychoanalytic readings, they take a more traditional narrative
tack. Mambo Italiano maintains some narrative ruptures, such as an interruptive voiceover
and visual stylistic flourishes, which are entirely comprehensible and cohesive within the
story. The tropes, such as the gay "Watcher" in C.R.A.Z.Y. who comes upon the primal

250

scene enacted by the brother and his girlfriend, and the gay male protagonist coming of age
in a traditional Italian Canadian family, are incorporated into the narrative rather than
disrupting it.
36

Shifting and Expanding Solitudes

With Congorama, a success in Québec and about to open in Ontario, the French
Solitude displaces its colonial troubles onto an African country — Democratic Republic of
Congo — and connects its Belgian colonial history directly to Canada/ Québec. The title
refers both to a 1958 Congolese festival shown in archival footage and to the name of a
revolutionary new electric car.
Michel Roy, a failed middle-aged Belgian inventor with a paralyzed, mute father,
searches rural Québec to recover his family line, ruptured by an incomplete adoption
through a nun who met his adoptive parents during a power blackout (italics mine) at the
World's Fair in the "Belgian Congo" colony of 1958. He is led by a local priest
37
to Louis
Legros, who was born not only at the Montreal World's Fair, Expo '67, but also specifically in
the "Man in the Universe" pavilion.
38
His father, who worked at the "Man at Work" Pavilion,
was the inventor of a revolutionary electric car battery whose development was denied by
shortsighted provincial authorities. Louis will later find film footage of the seminal event in his
mother's house. Michel becomes successful in Belgium by passing off the inventions of
Louis' father as his own, calling the prototype car the "Congorama," in a reference to his
wife's nationality as well as the 1958 fair. Michel and Louis turn out to be brothers, raised in
different countries, and with the father-inventor in the U.S.
39

251

In the last shot of Congorama, Michel drives a car in an ECU of him looking unhappily
to his right, away from the windshield and into the camera, his left eyepatch clearly visible.
The implication is that he and his brother have paid the price for their lack of vision and
disruptions to the patriarchal order. While an ocean separates the brothers once again, the
Canadian family secrets have been revealed and patriarchal authority both denied and
reinstated. In the last shot, Michel drives through the Congolese countryside, search for that
"thirdspace of identity" or a "Third Solitude" outside the nations of Belgium and Québec.
Nation/ nationalism, in addition to being an imagined construct, per Benedict
Anderson, can be viewed as a tool to be used for reform. Eve Sedgwick proposes this idea
in her minoritizing/ universalizing in The Epistemology of the Closet. Rather than finding a
definition of nationalism, she asks how it can be used — or "nationalist ideology is nothing if
not malleable."
40
Sedgwick considers the questions of what distinguishes the "nation-ness"
of the United States, for instance, from "the nation-ness of Canada, the different nation-ness
of Mexico, of the Philippines, of the Navajo Nation (within the U.S.), of the Six Nations
(across the U.S.-Canada border), the nationalisms of the non-nation Québec, the non-
nationism of the non-nation Hawaii, the histories of African-American nationalisms, and so
forth...?" Sedgwick properly questions not the definition of a nation but the power dynamics
at work between and among cultural and political groups. Anderson's concept of "imagined
communities" as limited by geographical boundaries tends to fade in the face of satellite
technology and cross-border cultures, as Morley and Robins discuss: "Satellite broadcasting
threatens to undermine the very basis of present politics for the policing of national
space…[Richard] Collins notes further that the emergence of satellite television has been
argued to presage the 'Canadianisation of European television.'"
41
Along the lines of Morley
and Robins, Blaine Allan notes, "The wilful disregard on the part of electronic
communications and multi-national corporations for the conventionalized borders of nation-

252

states offers only moderate consolation [to Canada] by throwing the rest of the world into an
identity crisis Canada might previously have claimed as its private property."
42

While we have seen how Canada, as Allan puts it, "has developed a culture of
borders,"
43
the boundaries of the Canadian nation have officially shifted, rendering
Sedgwick's categorization of Québec as a "non-nation" untrue. In 2006, after two decades of
post-TSE "two solitudinous" wrangling by federal political parties, Canadian Conservative
Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared with little fanfare and relatively mild opposition, that
Québec was indeed a nation, specifically "a nation within a nation." The surprise statement,
suddenly front-page national news, not only acknowledged the Two Solitudes Canadian
movies struggled to represent but also created new parameters for the discussion of nation
and national canons. Without changing borders, governments or policies, the province of
Québec had become a "nation." The Two Solitudes have been not only intertwined but also
redefined. Québec, both acknowledged and engulfed. It remains a nation with its own
centuries-old culture, and its own publicly and culturally significant movies, a power its
English-Canadian "brother" can only dream of emulating. While CBC dithers about funding
and cultural policy, Radio-Canada (the French CBC) in 2007 contributed $12 million to the
development and production of Québec feature films. Executive vice-president Sylvain
Lafrance announced at a Montreal press conference, "It's important for us to be involved in
making films...particularly in Québec, where there is a great deal of crossover between TV
and film,"
44
There is no acknowledgement that his statement is perhaps as true for English-
Canada as for Québec.
The authors of Global Hollywood ask, "What would it take for screen studies to matter
more?" They suggest the need to exert influence over the media discourse and public policy.

45
In addition to doing work that studies screens, putting work on screens that influences
public opinion and social policy could matter even more. How could Canadian filmmakers

253

use cinema to seduce and counteract at the same time? How could they make and put on
the screen narratives and ideas that matter, that resonate around the world, and that are
politically and socially motivated and relevant? As Mike Wayne noted when discussing the
dialectics of Third Cinema, "All films are political, but films are not all political in the same
way." He discusses Third Cinema as a cinema of emancipation and a necessary tool for
transformation, proposing a "critical practice" to accompany the films themselves and
challenge mainstream and auteurist/art cinema.
46
In solidarity with Solanas and Getino's
groundbreaking "Towards a Third Cinema," a radical cinema could work against domination
and for change. Could Canada use mimicry and masquerade to go global? Perhaps the
dilemmas and dichotomies of Canadian film could be explored and partially resolved by
making movies that more resemble American ones in the narrative sense and yet differ
substantially in political, social and cultural aspects. Rather than smoothing over the
differences between Canada and the U.S., or English-Canada and Québec, post-TSE
movies might do well to address, highlight and use rupture to move towards wide and
international appeal.
If Canadian filmmakers were to collapse the TSE and DC movie strategies, move
away from "Narrativus Interruptus" while maintaining some surprising but logical ruptures,
and deal with national/ regional divisions directly and in a way that is comprehensible outside
Canada, they may yet achieve the level of success and American acceptance they profess
to want and yet denigrate contradictorily as shallow American pop-culturism. Such success
might result in movies that are more Canadian, with more Canadian locations, characters
and concerns, with deeper themes. Telling Canadian stories in a more conventional way
seems to appeal to Canadians, who are accustomed to seamless Hollywood conventions.
The Canadian and the global public continue to attend American movies, whether critics
consider them "good" or "bad," and continue to stay away from Canadian movies, whether

254

critics consider them "good" or "bad." The proof that narrative trumps stars resides in the
facts that successful narrative movies and especially new television series often feature
unknown or untried talent and that star-studded movies such as those in the TSE and the
Neo-NSE can fail abjectly.
Would Americans care about Canadian issues or even understand them unless they
present in a more universally accessible context? An important precedent for Canada has
been set with Crash (w. d. Paul Haggis 2005).
47
The Canadian nature of this American
movie by a Canadian comes through both in the ensemble cast and the nature of its social
commentary.
48
Had Crash been Canadian-produced and contained some Canadian
locations and characters, it might have been hailed a Canadian sensation instead of an
American one. Even so, Narrativus Interruptus prevented the movie from achieving even
wider appeal. Haggis himself fell into a more serious case of Narrativus Interruptus in his
latest venture, the just-cancelled ensemble-cast NBC/Global TV series, The Black
Donnellys, based on the history of his London, Ontario birthplace, telegraphs his connection
to his Canadian roots. Television nevertheless offers a most hopeful tool for Canadian
filmmakers in several solitudes, including English-speaking, French-speaking, Quebecois
(not always the same as French-speaking, since many Anglophones live in Quebec and
many Francophones live in other parts of the country, particularly New Brunswick and
northern Ontario). Canadian television shows garner many more viewers per week than
almost all Canadian movies. While many Canadian television stars and technicians move to
the U.S.,
49
Canadian television has its own stars, unknown in the U.S. Canadian television
comedy, news and documentaries are highly successful compared to Canadian feature film,
with Corner Gas and Little Mosque on the Prairie garnering more than a million weekly
viewers each on CTV and CBC respectively. Crash represents a milestone in the success
not only a Canadian television producer in American feature film but also in Canadian values

255

in American cinema, with themes of racial tolerance, moral integrity and the promise of a
better and more just society. (Perhaps only a Canadian director would end a picture set in
Los Angeles by having it snow.) While only the second feature film directed by a Canadian
from either Solitude to win Best Picture,
50
it barely raises the image of Canada and its
concerns abroad. Although Haggis is hailed at home, his movie remains a "Canadian" movie
in American clothing/ locations.
Canada could be utilizing the reality of its shifting Two Solitudes in movies in an
entirely innovative way. In a CBC radio interview, B. W. Powe praised Governor General
Michaëlle Jean for her 2006 comments about sensing a deepening of the solitudes. Powe
stated, "This is a great country of solitudes," but sees a "need to reach out," for
communication. He compared the relationship between English and French Canada
obliquely as relating to the solitude of the Other who lives in a love relationship, in which
some solitude is necessary, noting "I don't think this is something we want to overcome." He
referenced "our two greatest cultural philosophers" — McLuhan as a writer "of electricity"
and Frye as one "of identity." He suggests there are "many solitudes" needing
acknowledgement, referring to the mosaic as solitary pieces of tile that differ from the
assimilation if the melting pot. "Democracy must be a delirium of choices," he said (italics
mine). Powe thinks Canada possesses that kind of energy. "Canada is moving beyond our
ability to define it," he said, seeing indefinition as a positive situation, as does Sedgwick. Bon
Cop, Bad Cop and Congorama indicate some of the new directions the "Two or More
Solitudes" might pursue. Canada might actually have a delirium of choice in making movies
as well.
Canadian movies have certain tendencies that have been and can no longer be
ignored. A Neo-TSE has returned in an obsessive performative of repetitive tropes. If,
however, Canadian film uses the experience of its national and gender masquerades to

256

interrogate its Two Solitudes and other national and international relationships, English-
Canada may yet gain the vision to move beyond mimicry and masquerade, stand on its own
two cultural feet, and use its ruptures in a new style of glossy guerilla filmmaking made
possible by the TSE to infiltrate the American market in its own language, produce the
international blockbuster the TSE national masquerade intended, and make Canadian
screen studies matter.

Chapter 8 Endnotes — Back to the Future: The Neo-TSE

1
Ibid., 1.

2
Ibid., 41.

3
Graham Fraser, "Film’s hype a test of culture policy," Toronto Star, January 4, 2004.

4
In late 2004 Toronto Film Studios planned a huge studio complex near downtown Toronto to attract big American productions. The bid
failed. In 2007, the production company partly owned by filmmaker brothers Tony and Ridley Scott, Pinewood Studios Group of London,
teamed up with a Toronto real estate developer, Castlepoint Development, to build a five-sound-stage studio in the west end.

5
This is still where most Canadians in the film industry earn their living, through American runaway productions in Canada.

6
In 2004, the head of Telefilm, Richard Stursberg, quit about half-way into his five-year term, to become head of the CBC. Telefilm's next
direction remains to be seen. Its recently funded films, such as Daniel MacIvor's 2004 Wilby Wonderful, far from having commercial
appeal, continue the Canadian tradition of slow-moving, downbeat family dramas (in this case the family is a group of denizens of a
fictional Nova Scotia town) featuring quirky unhappy characters in an ensemble cast.

7
Immediate past director of Telefilm Canada Richard Stursberg was "focusing on commercial success rather than creative vision for its
funding decisions," according to reporter Graham Fraser. "For those who think that Canadian culture matters, that Canadian history is
important, the signs are disquieting...culture is not a frill. History is not a luxury. The ability to see an imaginative recreation of one’s world
projected, whether in books, on television, in a movie theatre or a museum, is a critical aspect of collective identity." Stursberg became
president of CBC and was succeeded by former Toronto International Film Festival director Wayne Clarkson. The government agencies
are often intertwined in personnel and goals.

8

Bruce DeMara, Toronto Star, "9/11, SARS, the Loonie, unfair taxes, no studio space, now an actors' strike. Is Hollywood North heading
for…The End?" January 13, 2007, D Section. This was a two-page story because of its perceived importance.

257

9
IATSE Local 667 figures, "Film Industry Rally" PDF, February 16, 2007.

10
Posner, Michael and James Adams. "Budget turns its back on TV," The Globe and Mail, Review section, February 20, 2003. This was
a full front-page of section, with two colour photos. While federal government contributions to home-grown English-Canadian film and
television productions decreased, increased tax credits for industry personnel, as well as the lower Canadian dollar, encouraged
American productions such as Chicago (Rob Marshall 2002) and Cinderella Man (Ron Howard 2005). The jobs encouraged and provided
are even more important now than during the TSE when they were created because so many workers depend on branch-plant production
and some of the high-profile movies shot in Toronto bring cachet. Some of the government tax credits are used to hire and pay American
stars, just as in the TSE. The Hollywood industry, supported by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, recently began to notice the
blind spot of Canadian production. The vice-president of the Entertainment Industry Development Corp in Los Angeles, Kathleen Milnes,
said of the Canadian tax incentive program for foreign productions, "[W]e hope it fails miserably…We'd like to have it all."

11
The title refers to the name of a film by a would-be filmmaker, Wick's friend Vittorio Musso (Bruce Greenwood), who says he wants to
make "metafilm" full of symbology and not bogged down by the conventional trappings of filmmaking.

12
An interesting counter-example is Hot Fuzz, a commercially successful 2007 British feature film released in North America. The
filmmakers, who made the spoof Shaun of the Dead, produced a thoroughly British movie grounded in a British village, using as well as
satirizing the highly emotional and melodramatic theatrics of ultra-violence made famous by Americans in the past 30 years. The two main
characters become best friends, almost brothers, in the buddy tradition, rather than the Two Solitudes as it unfolds in the Canadian
particularity.

13
It was produced by Robert Lantos, a key player in the first TSE.

14
Her role references TSE-style British high culture. Brit Jeremy Irons co-stars as a Brit, with Canadian Bruce Greenwood as a Brit and
other seasoned Canadian actors, such as Sheila McCarthy and Maury Chaykin, in smaller Brit and American roles. McCarthy and
Chaykin were also active in the TSE years.

15
Shot in India in Hindi, it was the 2007 Academy Award®-nominated Best Foreign Language Film.

16
The movie won five Jutra Awards in 2007, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, as well as Best Screenplay at
the Genie Awards.

17
The epitome of ambivalently masculine sexuality, coolness, class and classic Hollywood cinema, "Cary Grant" dispenses advice to the
gay Canadian throughout the movie. The title refers to American '50s icon Doris Day and her movie, That Touch of Mink (Delbert Mann
1962), starring Day and Grant. Alim's mother loved Doris Day and dresses like her in the movie.

18
"I love Toronto," the Cary Grant character tells Alim, adding, "Did time always drag here like this?" The line is reminiscent of the
musing Sandy's opening line in My American Cousin: "Dear Diary: Nothing ever happens," depicting a boring Canada that becomes
exciting only when Americans arrive on the scene. Unlike Hollywood, "Toronto is not a tourist destination," as "Cary" tells Alim.

258

19
Janice Kaye, "Touch of Pink: A Canadian Cross-Cultural Comedy," Take One, #46 (Spring/Summer 2004): 8-12. Personal interview
with Ian Iqbal Rashid, March 5, 2004.

20
Ibid. Asked whether he and the movie are British or Canadian, Rashid answers, "The movie has the same nationality I do, but I don't
know what that is! I feel Canadian in the U.K. and vice versa. The film really belongs to both countries, but it is not a forced co-production.
It's hard to give it one national identity."

21
The film took in $10 million in a few weeks. A week after it opened there were more than half-a-million websites references referencing it.
Porky's remains the longterm international box-office champion of Canadian movies. It remains to be seen how Bon Cop does outside
Canada.

22
The murderer wears a hockey mask, like Jason in the American Friday the 13th movies. When he is revealed, and he turns out to be
nobody, he has an effete quality and a rather high tenor voice and glasses, unmasculinized and lacking vision.

23
The Englishman is uptight and the French, emotionally volatile. They overtly insult each other, with David saying Martin has "Ontario up
your ass." Martin telling David that he should "get over" the Plains of Abraham and the provincial motto that recalls it, Je me souviens. French
and English stereotypes are emphasized: The Québecois is sexy, hotheaded, sloppy, working class, drinks beer and knows ballet terms. The
Ontarian is uptight, priggish, snobby, neat and drinks wine. The Englishman is the cook, though and the Frenchman's wife says he can't cook
anything but "his famous French toast." Both are bilingual, both divorced, both with teenaged children. The script carefully balances these
attributes to make them evenly matched at home and at work, but with different histories and personalities. The English cop attended elite
Upper Canada College, which the French cop has never heard of. He says "Upper what?" The Englishman's French is perfect, but Parisian
rather than Québecois and therefore subject to the same ridicule Québec long endured from France for its regional accents. They argue
about the jurisdiction of the body. The two hockey teams are called the Montreal Patriotes and the Toronto Loyalists. There are references to
hockey scandals, as when Peter Pocklington, here called Pickleton, sold Wayne Gretzky from under the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles
Kings, and the Québec Avalanche franchise went to Colorado. Both solitudes have something in common when their teams go to the U.S.
The family interrelationships are further played out in an affair between Iris, Martin's sister, and David. Reminiscent of Perfectly Normal, there
is parallel editing between the scuffling of Martin and the hockey-mask murderer and the intercourse of Iris and David upstairs. The sounds
meld and the atmospheres differ, as Martin struggles for his life and Iris cruises to her orgasm, crying, "Vive le Québec libre!" a line David has
just taught her and which, hilarious to those who do, is incomprehensible to those without knowledge of the line's history and meaning.

24
Susan Walker, Toronto Star, August 16, 2006, Entertainment section. The "action comedy topped records for a first-weekend box office
gross in Québec, at $1.4 million. It came in at 17 on the North American box office tally. By yesterday, receipts were nearing $4 million, for a
movie that cost $8 million to make."

25
Ibid.

26
The presentation of dead bodies is a common trope to introduce American movies and television series drama but rare in Canadian film.

259

27
The villain's role is split between the murderer and team owner Buttman, introduced only near the end. The "little person" is meant to
represent NHL pres Gary Bettman, who is short in stature.

28
Jane Stevenson, Toronto Sun, August 18, 2006, Entertainment section.

29
The website www.thetyee.ca says all Canadian movie reviews have to be adjusted for inflation because of boosterism and that Bon
Cop, Bad Cop would have received terrible notices had it come from another country. "Not that it could have," writes Steve Burgess. It is
"no ordinary crappy movie. It's a Canadian crappy movie," says Burgess." The mission statement was clearly 'Lethal Weapon' meets 'Two
Solitudes…'" He notes all the clichés including the giant beaver mascot and the barroom brawl scene stolen from 48 Hours, the barroom
brawl. He says if this is the best we can do we should never again complain about "Hollywood sludge" because we deserve to be
"overrun by crap from other nations." The website is B.C. based. The West is less concerned with, and more weary of, the Two Solitudes
undercurrents than Ontario and Québec.

30
Stephen Cole, Globe and Mail, August 18, 2006, Entertainment section.

31

Andrew Dowler Now magazine, August 16, 2006.

32
Falardeau also claimed he did not want "to polarize Québec cinema into two camps—auteur films and more commercial ones," then
noted, "…it's the more popular films that bring people into theatres." Falardeau, a graduate in political science from the University of Ottawa
and a native of Hull on the border of Québec and Ontario, would be well aware of the national and cultural issues of his movie.

33
While shooting the TSE movie By Design in 1980, Jutra said making a film in Ontario was like making a film in a foreign country.

34
Alexandra Shimo, Globe and Mail, August 16, 2006, Entertainment section.

35
Out of the nine features in the 2006 TIFF "Canada First" program, fully one-third of them, are about brothers and sisters. La Coupure
(Jean Châteauvert, 2006), translated as Torn Apart, is the Québecois director's first feature, about incest between a grown-up sister and
brother who have been in love since adolescence. Also TIFF-shown was Acts of Imagination (Carolyn Combs 2006), about a Vancouver
brother and sister whose parents were murdered in Ukraine. The sister, whose consciousness is split between their past in Ukraine and their
present in Canada, slips into the character of their mother. A Stone's Throw (Camelia Frieberg) is about a woman with a young family whose
brother shows up to make trouble by opening old wounds

36
C.R.A.Z.Y. won the Genie Award for Best Picture in 2006 and its first-time director seconded to a high-profile feature about Queen Victoria
with U.S. backing by Martin Scorsese. Such successes indicate that audiences are not averse to issues of Canadian siblings or solitudes.

37
The parish priest of Ste-Cécile is played by iconic Québec actor and filmmaker Gabriel Arcand. The parish priest in Two Solitudes was
played by the most iconic Québec film director before Arcand, Claude Jutra.

260

38
The 1958 fair in Belgium is twinned with Expo '67, showing footage of the King of Belgium. Michel's adopted last name is Roy, "king" (roi)
in French.

39

The father has no lines and is seen only from the back in two brief scenes.

40
Cook, 211.

41
Morley and Robins, "Spaces of Identity: Communications Technologies and the Reconfiguration of Europe," Screen, Vol. 30, No. 4
(Autumn 1989): 10-34.

42
Allan, "Canada's Sweethearts, or Our American Cousins." Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Vol 2, Nos 2-3 (1993), 77.

43
Ibid.

44
Patricia Baily, "Radio Canada puts $12 million into features." Playback, June 5, 2007.

45
Miller et al, Global Hollywood, 15.

46
Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema (London; Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2001), 1.

47
Written and directed by a Canadian who began in television, it won the Academy Award® in 2006 for Best Picture, as well as Best
Original Screenplay and Best Editing.

48
Haggis created Due South, a border-crossing Mountie television series with elements of family, including his father in a closet, a close
relationship with an animal, a sibling-coded American brother, and a sexually shy hero. Benton Fraser, however, was a handsome hero
rather than an anti-hero, and the series was successful in both countries, more so in Canada because of the many Canadian references and
American put-downs. The show was not, however, simply a series of inside jokes, but featured a compelling narrative structure and slick
production values.

49
In addition to Haggis, Canadians Jon Cassar, director and co-executive producer of 24; Ted Kotcheff, former Canadian movie director
and now executive producer of Law and Order; and David Shore, creator of House, indicate that Canadians can succeed at the highest
levels of U.S. television drama.

50
The first was Norman Jewison for In the Heat of the Night in 1967, directed but not written by a Canadian. Jewison's films could also be
analyzed for their "Canadianness," given their usually socially conscious nature, stolidness, documentary realism, "Narrativus Interruptus"
and, except for Moonstruck (1987), general lack of box-office success.

261

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Appendix: The Films of 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982

Title Budget (in Canadian $)

Films of 1977 (27)

Blackout 1,200,000
Blood & Guts 700,000
Blood Relatives 1,450,000
High-Ballin' 2,000,000
Home to Stay 1,200,000
I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses 350,000
I, Maureen 300,000
Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia 250,000
In Praise of Older Women 1,500,000
Just Jessie (no budget available)
Kings and Desperate Men 1,200,000
Leopard in the Snow 1,100,000
Marie-Anne 500,000
One Night Stand (no budget available)
Outrageous! 165,000
Plague 420,000
Power Play/State of Shock/Coup D'Etat 2,200,000
Starship Invasions 1,800,000
Tell Me My Name 1,100,000
The Disappearance 1,788,000
The Fighting Men 400,000
The Silent Partner 2,500,000
The Slavers (no budget available)
The Third Walker 825,000
Three Card Monte 250,000
Tomorrow Never Comes 2,341,000
Two Solitudes 1,700,000

Films of 1978 (24)

A Man Called Intrepid 6,000,000
Agency 4,400,000
Bad Company 20,000
Bear Island (cost 12,100,000) 9,380,000
City on Fire 5,300,000
Crossbar 500,000
Dilemma 900,000
Fast Company 1,200,000
Fish Hawk 1,900,000
It Rained All Night the Day I Left (Cda 50%/Fr/Israel) 5,000,000

273

Meatballs 1,600,000
Murder by Decree (Cda 35%/UK 65%) 5,000,000
Riel 2,700,000
Running 3,500,000
Search and Destroy (co-fin. Cda/U.S.) 1,500,000
Something's Rotten 800,000
Stone Cold Dead 1,680,000
Summer's Children 200,000
The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood 329,000
The Brood 1,400,000
The Changeling 6,600,000
The Courage of Kavik The Wolf Dog 800,000
The Shape of Things to Come 3,200,000
Wild Horse Hank 2,800,000

Films of 1979 (42)

An American Christmas Carol 2,000,000
Atlantic City, U.S.A. 6,500,000
Circle of Two 5,700,000
Cries in the Night 1,200,000
Crunch 2,500,000
Deadline/Anatomy of a Horror 491,000
Death Ship 4,200,000
Dirty Tricks 5,200,000
Double Negative 3,400,000
Final Assignment 6,400,000
Going for Broke/Never Trust An Honest Thief 4,100,000
Head On 1,350,000
Hey Babe! 1,250,000
Highpoint 7,278,000
Hog Wild 2,700,000
Hot Dogs 1,025,000
Improper Channels 3,557,000
Klondike Fever 4,000,000
Mary and Joseph: A Story of Faith 4,000,000
Middle Age Crazy 5,150,000
Mr. Patman/Crossover 6,900,000
Nothing Personal 5,000,000
Off Your Rocker 2,850,000
Out of the Blue 2,200,000
Parallels 300,000
Phobia 5,100,000
Pinball Summer 750,000
Powder Heads 750,000
Prom Night 1,500,000
Scanners 4,100,000
Seasons in the Sun 500,000
Silence of the North 8,400,000

274

South Pacific 1942 500,000
Surfacing 2,250,000
Suzanne 1,200,000
Tanya’s Island 1,400,000
The High Country 2,600,000
The Intruder 650,000
The Kidnapping of the President 3,500,000
The Last Chase 4,900,000
The Lucky Star 3,700,000
The Pit 900,000
Your Ticket is No Longer Valid/Finishing Touch 5,200,000

Films of 1980 (41)

(cost 3,500,000)
(cost 4,500,000)
A War Story (doc/fiction) 368,000
All in Good Taste 200,000
Alligator Shoes 250,000
Baker County, U.S.A./The Killer Instinct/Trapped 2,000,000
Best Revenge/Misdeal 6,900,000
Big Meat Eater 200,000
Black Mirror 2,400,000
By Design 2,800,000
Curtains 3,700,000
Firebird 2015 AD 975,000
Gas 5,400,000
Ghostkeeper 650,000
Hank Williams “The Show He Never Gave” 578,000
Happy Birthday to Me 3,500,000
Hard Feelings/Sneakers 4,000,000
Harry Tracy 8,300,000
Heartaches 3,575,000
Hot Touch 4,700,000
If You Could See What I Hear 5,600,000
Incubus 5,100,000
Kelly 3,000,000
Latitude 55 800,000
Love 2,000,000
Melanie 4,300,000
Murder By Phone/Bells 5,600,000
My Bloody Valentine 2,300,000
Odyssey of the Pacific 2,000,000
Sweet Country Music (fiction/doc) 500,000
The Amateur 10,600,000
The Burning 1,500,000
The Funny Farm 2,300,000
The Grey Fox 3,480,000
The Hero 290,000

275

The Hounds of Notre Dame 1,200,000
The Magic Show 4,000,000
Threshold 5,700,000
Ticket to Heaven 4,500,000
Tribute 8,400,000
Tulips 3,800,000
Utilities 6,000,000
Visiting Hours 5,500,000

Films of 1981 (26)

A 20
th
Century Chocolate Cake (shot 1978-81) (no budget available)
American Nightmare 130,000
And When They Shall Ask (doc/fiction) 450,000
Class of 1984 4,300,000
Covergirl/Dreamworld 5,820,000
Cross Country 2,500,000
Dante’s Inferno 500,000
Dead Wrong 624,000
Deadly Eyes 1,500,000
Deserters 220,000
Evil Judgment 800,000
Falcon's Gold/Robbers of the Sacred Mountain 1,500,000
Films of 1982 (23)
Freeloading 360,000
Going Berserk (co-fin. Cda/U.S.) (no budget available)
Heavy Metal (animated) 7,300,000
Humongous 2,000,000
Julie Darling (co-pro Cda 35%, Ger 65%) 2,000,000
Killing 'em Softly/Man in 5A (cost 7,000,000) 6,200,000
Losin’ It ("American Teenagers" in France 7,000,000
Low Visibility (shot 1982-1984) 166,000
Of Unknown Origin 4,000,000
Paradise 3,500,000
Porky's (co-fin. 37.5% Cdn, 62.5% US) 4,000,000
Porky's II (co-fin. Cda/U.S.) 6,500,000
Quest for Fire (Cdn 55%, Fr. 45%) 12,000,000
Recorded Live 50,000
Ring of Power/Rock & Rule (animation) (cost 8,000,000) 5,400,000
Running Brave 8,000,000
Screwballs (cost c. 600,000) 800,000
Sentimental Reasons 250,000
Siege 300,000
Snapshot/Three Geeks, A Bimbo and a Goon (cost 290,000) 280,000
Spacehunter (cost 14,000,000) 6,000,000
Spasms/Death Bite 4,900,000
Spring Fever/Sneakers 4,300,000

276

Stations 200,000
Strange Brew 4,000,000
Tell Me That You Love Me (Cda 33%/Israel 67%) 1,000,000
Terminal Choice 3,900,000
That's My Baby! 750,000
The Kid Who Couldn’t Miss (doc/fiction) 375,000
The Music of the Spheres (cost c. 200,000) 160,000
The Terry Fox Story 2,400,000
The Tin Flute 3,450,000
The Wars 3,000,000
Till Death Do Us Part 600,000
Track Two (doc/fic) 100,000
Ups & Downs 1,200,000
Videodrome 5,952,000

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kaye, Janice Laurie (author)

Core Title Certain tendencies in Canadian cinema: temporary insanity and the national tax-shelter masquerade

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 08/08/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Canadian cinema,Canadian film industry,Canadian identity,Canadian movie themes,Canadian movies,Canadian storytelling,certain tendencies,certain tendencies in Canadian cinema,distinctively Canadian,English-Canadian feature film,female naming,international auteurs,Narrativus Interruptus,national and gender masquerade,OAI-PMH Harvest,tax-shelter era,Two solitudes

Place Name Canada (countries)

Language English

Advisor Kinder, Marsha (committee chair), Alker, Hayward R. (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email creativecommunications@rogers.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m754

Unique identifier UC1427469

Identifier etd-Kaye-20070808 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-542188 (legacy record id),usctheses-m754 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Kaye-20070808.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kaye, Janice Laurie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu