Patrimonialization and Filiation at the National Film Board of Canada: Cinema as a Heritage1

Abstract

Over the last decade, institutions such as the National Film Board—those that are, simultaneously, culturally conservative, productive, and mediatory—have seen their relationship to films of the past come to be marked by two potentially rival logics. One is a commercial logic, focused on the exploitation of footage accumulated over 50 years of existence; the other is a social logic, inscribed within approaches to creativity whose distinctive forms have been those of remakes of documentary films of the 1960s and 1970s. The key question to which this article will attempt to respond is that of the role of the digital turn in heightening the opposition between these two logics. The second question has to do more specifically with the social function of filiation, with the nature of the link that takes shape, through film, between inhabitants of the past and those of the present, across a period which, while rarely longer than two generations, has been marked nevertheless by an acceleration of history that renders acts of transmission problematic. We will see, behind these remakes and practices of reusing archival images, how the gestures of filiation seek to keep Québec's documentary films central to those dynamics through which the feeling of belonging to community is aroused.