American Film Genres and Non-American Films: A Case Study of "Utu"

Abstract

A recent essay by Jim Leach breaks new ground in study of film genres in an international, cross-cultural context by chracterizing relationship between American film genres and Canadian cinema as struggle between an attempt to evolve a film language capable of responding to Canadian experience and temptation to take over (or be taken over by) ready-made language of American genres.' As title of his essay The Body Snatchers, implies, Leach raises fear that a national filmmaker who succumbs to latter temptation would produce films bearing a superficial likeness to national culture but with an alien soul. Drawing illustrations from Canadian films of seventies, Leach proposes two alternatives to falling victim to body snatchers: either rejecting Hollywood genres outright, or subverting or deconstructing them by denying expectations they arouse in viewers saturated by American mass culture.2 Theoretical issues of fundamental and continuing concern are touched upon in Leach's essay, issues of sort more extensively grappled with in Parts One and Two of another recent study, Roy Armes's Third World Film Making and West. Armes initially distinguishes two kinds of third world cinemas that have some claim to call themselves national: commercial cinemas, and cinemas that answer (or that ideally would answer) the demands of a 'national culture' as formulated by [Amilcar] Cabral or [Frantz] Fanon. Regarding first kind, he concedes that, with respect to their claim to be national, commercial cinemas at least ostensibly address the key issues of a true national culture: language, tradition, society. However, commercial films fail to meet CabralFanon demands because of following multiple refusals: (1) to look directly and critically at contemporary society, (2) to adopt a standpoint rooted outside particular class position of artist, (3) to make real use of local traditions of narrative (in terms of handling of time or creation of space), or (4) to break with formulas designed to do no more than extract a commercial return from audience.3 It would be reasonable, I think, to contrast Leach's position with Armes's by saying former is essentialist and latter is materialist. In theory, Leach would accept as national any Canadian film, commercial or noncommercial, that