Scott MacKenzie (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2005 835 (p. 45). Examples include Catherine Rodgers's searching discussion of the conflicting feminist interpretations invited by the many evocations of extreme states of being contained in early texts by Marie Darrieussecq. Shirley Jordan's exploration of the transgressive and often violent fictions of Virginie Despentes is marked by a similar interest in the feminist implications of female-authored textual productions. Despite the absence of an index, the collection is presented with a good deal of clarity.A short chapter summary?provided both in French and in English?appears at the head of each of the fifteenarticles and, forthose wishing to investigate the work of the featured authors further,a list of primary texts by each author is included at the close of each chapter. University of Birmingham Sarah Fishwick Screening Quebec: Quebecois Moving Images, National Identity,and thePublic Sphere. By Scott MacKenzie. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2004. viii + 224pp. ?45. ISBN 0-7190-6396-5. Scott Mackenzie's Screening Quebec addresses the paradoxical nature of Quebecois cinema. On the one hand it appears to exist on the margins ofother national and world filmcultures, seemingly concerned only with localized problems of French-Canadian identity. On the other hand it has demonstrably influenced these other film cultures, in particular the cinema direct movement. In his introduction, MacKenzie maps four main sets of relations central to a full understanding of the nature of Quebecois cinema. These are: the ideas and ideolo? gies that the filmmakers themselves believe they are articulating in their cinematic texts, the cultural discursive practices surrounding the texts, the institutional dis? courses of government, Church, and legislature, and the actual content and context of the films. Mackenzie argues persuasively that new discursive spaces have emerged momentarily, allowing viewers to reimagine themselves. He situates his argument in relation to standard theorists, in particular Habermas, identifying his notion of the 'public sphere' as the space enabling self-understandingand, more importantly, poli? tical and other intervention through the creation of new kinds of public. Mackenzie then extends the debate, linking three major discourses of modernity?community, collectivity, and individuality?to contrasting models of Quebecois national identity. Mackenzie thus uses many of the themes to be found in Bill Marshall's Quebec National Cinema (Montreal, London, and Ithaca: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001; see MLR, 98 (2003), 470-71), but he explores his material in a differentway. Marshall sees the concept of Quebec national cinema as problematic, provisional, and shifting,and constantly undermining itself.MacKenzie focuses on the multiplicity of public spaces, the sets of national or cultural identities within each one, and the real or imagined boundaries that surround each of them. It is interesting to see how the two authors treat one film that acts as a paradigm of the debate on discourses about nationality?Le Confessionnal by Robert Lepage. Marshall focuses on flux in his analysis of the final image of the film, the steel girder bridge across the Saint Lawrence at Quebec City, taking Deleuze's concepts of 'movement-image' and 'time-image' and the way in which a single object becomes multiple, passing through different planes depending on the mode of perception. MacKenzie, however, concludes that the film is a rumination on the nature of the relationship between local and international publics, the cultural images relating to each of these publics and the foregrounding of the way in which these cultural images work within and across the boundaries between cultures and publics. Where Marshall problematizes perception of the image, MacKenzie problematizes the actual image 836 Reviews and its function. The two approaches are equally valid, serving to show the complexity of the debate. For the undergraduate studying Quebecois cinema for the firsttime, MacKenzie is likely to be more fruitfulthan Marshall, since his work enables analysis of the filmic image in and for itself. There are occasional typographical mistakes. MacKenzie incorrectly spells Le Confessionnal as Le Confessional and Montreal sometimes loses its accent in references to Denys Arcand's Jesus de Montreal. It would be nice to argue that this was part of the debate, proof of the blurring of an image as it crosses over a boundary from one public...