Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World by David L. Pike

Abstract

Reviews 295 the Champs-Élysées, selling copies of La commune. This reference is reinforced when a purse thief is gunned down in the street. The thief, the police who shoot him, and the mesmerized crowd all seem to be thrown into the movie by chance, their only purpose being to highlight this act of irrelevant violence. With scenes such as bar owners killing their patrons, the loss of limbs and lives to the guillotine, and even a gunfight with the police, meaningless violence quickly emerges as a theme. This random violence, coupled with the absurdity of the storyline’s progression, echoes the director’s view of contemporary society as overly and senselessly violent. While at the core La fille du 14 juillet tells a simple story of a young man trying to impress a young woman with a road trip, it quickly becomes confused and complicated. The spectator must sort through time discrepancies, disconcerting flashbacks, and characters who continually break the traditional fourth wall; all of which force the spectator to take an active role in piecing together the story. The film, appropriately categorized as a road film by its director, contributed to the 2014 My French Film Festival . While it is at times hard to follow, with several miniadventures along the way and flashbacks to events that were initially (and intentionally) skipped over, Peretjatko’s film is entertaining as well as intriguing. This film, a must-see for those who want more than just visual stimulation, is not for the faint of heart, but for true lovers of the absurd. University of Alabama Ann Marie Moore Pike, David L. Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4426-4399-4. Pp. 367. $75 Can. Published during a resurgence of Québécois film on the global stage, Pike’s “sprawling academic monster”(xv) is a timely addition to a body of English-language work on cinema north of the 49th parallel. More than a decade has passed since Bill Marshall’s Quebec National Cinema (2001) examined the relationship between Quebec cinema and le projet national, while all of the titles discussed in Scott Mackenzie’s Screening Québec (2004) were released prior to 2001.Enter Pike and his broad,sweeping look at the “golden age” of Canadian national cinema, a fifteen-year period that saw the unparalleled rise of an outward-looking independent filmmaking sector and the creation of a rich hybrid cinema of high artistic value.Written in a style that might be described as hybrid, Canadian Cinema locates the origins of this phenomenon within the fertile tensions and polarities that define Canadian society as a whole, and which place its national cinema in a unique position vis-à-vis Hollywood’s global culture and Europe’s art cinema tradition. The book looks at influential filmmakers and movements, and includes close readings of individual films, both French- and Englishlanguage , canonical and genre. It also examines ways in which government and industry policies (e.g., the creation of the National Film Board in 1939 and its long attachment to documentary realism) and key political events (e.g., the 1980 Quebec sovereignty referendum) influenced how narrative fiction films have been created, distributed, and viewed both locally and by global audiences. Borrowing from approaches used in textual analysis, cultural studies, genre studies, and queer studies, Pike’s “variegated methodology” (12) results in a work whose nine chapters alternate loosely between broad survey and detailed case study. The latter are especially rich in their ability to challenge widely-held cultural assumptions opposing art and commerce , cinema and advertising, international film and local television, English and French. For example, chapter 3 revisits the “time capsule” films of Anglo-Canadian Patricia Rozema and Québécois Denys Arcand, juxtaposing the career paths of two idiosyncratic directors who succeeded in bringing an art cinema perspective into the realm of popular commercial film, using satire as a vehicle for expressing deep personal concern with societal and spiritual values. In his treatment of contemporary screen stars, Pike profiles Québécois ‘crossover icons’ Pascale Bussières and Roy Dupuis, whose popularity and professional longevity can be...