Canada's Hollywood: the Canadian state and feature films

Abstract

CANADA'S HOLLYWOOD: THE CANADIAN STATE AND FEATURE FILMS. Ted Madger, Toronto 1993: University of Toronto Press.Rhetorics of Divided VoiceIn a provocative discussion in late 1994 of sterility of debates in film criticism (a discussion which, like debates themselves, seems to have been met with usual indifference), Bart Testa (University of Toronto) drew attention to consensual moralism that has underlain relatively limited critical analysis medium of film has received in context. In Testa's view, actors participating in elaboration of film industry - from critics and government officials in particular, to filmmakers occasionally - have all shared a belief that film should first serve a high moral purpose however this formula was to be understood by individual participants. Testa noted considerable extent to which critical discussion of film in context has been a discourse, preoccupied with defining what film ought to be at expense of whatever else it may actually have done or currently might be doing (see so - called Cinema We Need debate in Fetherling: n.d., 260 - 336). Testa traced this moralism to what he termed the social - reflection prescription, fundamental obligation that cultural production somehow must reflect Canadian conditions in a unique manner that would in turn constitute identity. Cultural production had to be distinctively Canadian; failing that, it would be nothing at all. In Testa's perspective, because film criticism in Canada had not amounted to much more than its moralism, its achievements were, for most part, insignificant and repetitious.Had Testa looked beyond film criticism, he would have perceived a more generalized phenomenon. The consensual moralism he found in film criticism was not restricted to it; rather, that consensual moralism formed sine qua non of cultural production in Canada, basis on which it received critical attention, articulation in public sphere and, last but not least, subsidy by state. The publicization of cultural production by consensual moralism has not, then, been limited to critical discussion of film, but broadly speaking has been historical burden of production of culture in twentieth - century context, in literature as in painting, especially in those hybrid art forms that derive to a greater extent from capital - intensive (or industrial) modes of organization - namely, cultural industries (in their classic incarnation in book and magazine publishing, sound - recording, film and television production in particular).But why this has been case was not a question Testa (1994a, 1994b), in his discussion of film criticism, dealt with other than drawing attention to determining (and still puzzling) legacy of John Grierson's influence since 1930s on film discourse and its contemporary critical avatars. The extent to which a prescriptive moralism has framed discussion of cultural production is worth dwelling upon further, however, since it would itself appear to have come to constitute a veritable medium of its own. Indeed, I would argue that it has been primary medium through which discourses of cultural production were to be publically conducted and given institutional form.The decades that followed Second World War saw extension, at public cost, of an increasingly elaborate legislative, administrative, fiscal - in a word, regulatory - apparatus of federal and also provincial agencies that have provided institutional framework for development of cultural production activities in a variety of domains, from traditional fine arts to media arts, in higher education, and select domains of mass media. In mass media of film and broadcasting, state had already established institutional precedents for intervention - in state - produced film as early as teens of century, and in state - owned broadcasting as of early 1930s. …