Imaging the Imagination: Films on Canadian Writers

Abstract

Normally, I think, exploiting an as a tourist attraction presents a problem that also crops up in writing an author's biography: What's to see? The labor that makes a world-famous novelist worth writing about was almost certainly clone while he was sitting all by himself in a quiet room. The raw material was probably invisible to everyone but him. A visitor to Herman Melville's study couldn't expect to find any whales. What exactly would the tourist-development director of Samuel Beckett's home town display? (Trillin 59) In the past few decades the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has produced about 20 documentary portraits of English Canadian authors, and I have been involved in about a dozen of them as the writer of cine-fiches, or what are less enticingly known as information sheets. The impetus for these cinematic portraits came from the 1976 report of The Commission on Canadian Studies, To Know Ourselves. Its author, T.H.B. Symons, said, 'Really, I would have thought it was all fairly obvious, but clearly it isn't and so the argument is that the reason for Canadian Studies is not political[;] it is the deepest educational function of self-knowledge' (qtd. in J. Page 1). Explicitly, then, these literary films were conceived as teacherly, to fill in what had been omitted from consciousness. They were similar in their informative zeal to the recent documentary, Paris Was a Woman, which shows the neglected role of lesbians in the creation of Modernist culture. Implicitly, the NFB biographies of poets and novelists advocate that the imaginative shaping of written words is central to the making up of a Canadian identity. Picturing this elusive process through celluloid encapsulations of the lives of selected Canadian writers was the challenge for the various film-makers. My job, seeking to set down in prose some of these filmic lives, seemed less complicated. I came to realize, however, that my task was not simply to describe a few cinematic elements and to contextualize the writerly subjects through a brief biography and a selected bibliography: I also had to promote a cultural commodity to attract the programmers of public broadcasting, classroom teachers and casual browsers. By providing copy for the front and back of video jackets I was not merely educating, but also advertising. And, as a wary consumer, I knew that advertisers used deceptive strategies for disguising or avoiding unattractive facts, for presenting descriptions in such a way that the inattentive may miss the bad aspects or imagine good aspects of a (Cook 152). Writing cine-fiches, I partly resisted these strategies, but I was never without an awareness that my national literature in English, for a long time, had a reputation of being second-rate, imitative and dull. The recent international acclaim given to such figures as Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Carol Shields, Mavis Gallant, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje makes it easy to forget that in the 1970s many Canadians, gazing out from a national site over-shadowed by British and American literatures, believed exciting works of art must come from somewhere else. Few of the faces of writers in Canada were then recognizable. Artistically, this lack of a public persona might have been a good thing since, as Ondaatje says, Privacy is essential. I've seen a lot of writers being interpreted by their personalities -- Ginsburg, Layton, serious writers turned into personas.... You want the book to be read, not the author (C1). Nevertheless, in my non-scholarly role as writer of cine-fiches, I wished that more Canadian authors possessed celebrity value, or had the instant, self-proclaiming status of known commodities because, as Guy Cook points out in The Discourse of Advertising, [b]y having its own brand-name written on it, every product is both and an ad for itself (25). When composing promotional texts for these film portraits, I envied the commercialization of American culture, where the famous telegenic face of the had become a personality to be consumed, a product like chocolate and soap, [wherein] the brand name is not only written on the wrapping, but also cut into the object, making the substance which carries the name the same as the subject to which it refers(Cook 25). …