Image and Reality in Contemporary Canadian Cinema

JIM LEACH
THE REEL NATION: IMAGE AND REALITY IN
CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN CINEMA
The Martin Walsh Memorial lecture 1001
Resume: La question A savoir si Ie cinema canadien represente une ou deux
nations se complique si ron indut les films realises par certains cineastes issus
des diasporas et consid~re les faeteurs economiques relies A la globalisation des
marches mediatiques. le nouveau contexte dans lequel Ie cinema canadien
evolue transforme Ie projet nationaliste assode au realisme griersonien, mais
evite la (con)fusion de I'imaginaire et du reel que l'on retrouve dans la tradition
hol1ywoodienne. ~auteur explique que Lulu de Srinivas Krishna et Emporte-moi
de lea Pool sont des exemples probants de films qui explorent les realiMs complexes des diasporas, I'impaete des nouvelles technologies mediatiques et leurs
effets sur I'experience corporelle.
ne of the major problems involved in discussing Canadian national
cinema has always been the question of whether it consists, as Gilles
Marsolais insisted in 1968, of "two cinemas; the 'Canadian' and the
Quebecois, whose interests are divergent."· This question is still far from
resolved, and it receives different answers in two recent books on Canadian
cinema. Christopher Gittings calls his book Canadum National Cin""a, but he
agrees with Marsolais that there are "two very different national cinemas:
QuebecOis and Anglophone Canadian cinemas: although he does later
admit that there are "dynamic moments of intersection and imbrication."l
In her more imaginatively titled book Weird Sec " Snow Shots, Katherine
Monk argues that, despite the ·obvious and distinct differences between
the two OJltures,· their films ·offer more similarities than difference."]
Nations and national cinemas are discursive constructs that work only if
enough people find them plaUSible. National discourses must convince
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people that their allegiance as citizens complements, or at least does not
seriously canAiet with, other aspects of their identity, such as those related
to social class, gender, or race. If they can do this, they will achieve a sense
of unity that will, however, exclude those who do not belong, just as
national cinemas are usually defined by canons of films that supposedly
accord with national myths and by the exclusion of films that do not. As
far as Canadian cinema is concerned, it is possible to construct critical discourses that will support either the one cinema or two cinema hypothesis,
and people will be convinced or not according to their political sympathies.
There are many forces at work in ,contemporary adture that make us
aware of the instability of national discourses. Canada's status as a nation,
for example, is under pressure not only from the separatist movement in
Quebec (and perhaps other parts of the nation) but also from the development of multi-national corporations and political instirutions. As an
officially multicultural nation since the mid-1960s, Canada has also had to
find ways to reconcile the idea of national unity with a ne\'1 emphasis on
cultural difference. Under these circumstances, Peter Harcourt has suggested that "Canada has moved from the dual cinema of the past towards
a cinema of cultural diversity.""
Certainly, some of the most important Canadian films of recent years
have been made by filmmakers from the diasporic communities established by migrants who left their original homelands for political or economic reasons. There are also more commercial factors, such as the
increasing prominence of international co-productions and the demands
of the global media market-place, that contribute to the hybridity and
diversity of contemporary Canadian cinema. It is therefore tempting to
conclude that the national context is no longer relevant to most people's
experience and that it has no significant role to play in the production and
reception of Canadian films. However, myths of national identity still
function in complex ways that interact with local and global inAuences.
These developments are not, of course, unique to Canada, and they
serve to place the vexed question of national unity in the context of post·
colonial theories that stress what Homi Bhabha calls "the impossible unity
of the nation as a symbolic force.- The point is that there are no rtal
nations but that national discourses work to c:n=ale reality effects. As
Bhabha suggests, the modern idea of the nation developed in tandem with
a literary discourse of "realism- that had a major impact on the development of cinema. However, while he draws on Benedict Anderson's argument that "the space and time of the modem nation· are analogous to "the
ntl RElL IUlION 1
narrative structure of the reaJist novel," Bhabha insists that "the nation.. .is
an agency of ambivaltflt narration/" in which the drive to create unity out of
difference is never completely successful'
Stuart Hall also challenges the unifying tendencies in national discourses when he argues that "modern nations are all cultural hybrids."6
The increasing visibility of cultural difference simply exposes what has
always been the case, with the result that the experience of decentring,
dispersal and fragmentation has become "the representative modem experience."1 HaJi uses the tenn "modem," but these developments are part of
a general erosion of national, cultural and other boundaries often viewed
as a sign of the "postnlodern condition." While Hall himself stresses the
possibilities opened up by the "cultural polities of difference," other critics have raised concerns about the extent to which "difference" has itself
been commodified in postmodem consumer culture. 8
As we shall see, contemporary Canadian Alms often deal with the
ambivalent implications of new hybrid cultural forms. In exploring their significance for the national cinema, we need to take into account the ways in
which their meanings and (I would add) pleasures are caught up with their
status as commodities in an increasingly global entertainment industry. My
concern in this paper is with how Canadian cinema works in this contemporary rnltural environment and, in particular, with the ways in which the
new fonns envisage the relations between the nation and the "reaL"
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In his study of Hollywood cinema, published in t977, David Thomson
comments that "to crave the imaginary and the real is contradictory, but it
un.derlies the Hollywood movie and is a knot runn.ing through American
history."9 Thomson's point is that this contradiction accounts for both the
strengths of Hollywood movies and their ideological shortcomings. For
some commentators, the terrorist attacks of I I September 200 t exposed
the destructive consequences of this contradiction and exploited a contemporary cultural environment in which images and reality have become
hopelessly entangled. Jean Baudrillard, for example, suggested that the
"symbolic dirnensionlll of the events required an awareness that "it was they
who did it but we who wished it" through our participation in the fantasies
enacted in "countless disaster films."\O
There is no need to completely accept Baudrillard's hyperbole to recognize that it does account for important tendencies in contemporary
•
JIM L£ACH
cultural experience. For those who watched on television, the awesome
and endlessly repeated images of the destruction of the World Trade
Center were simultaneously "Real," in Jacques Lacan's sense of "'the impossible thing' that turns our symboliC universe upSide down," QlId "hyperrcal,"
defined by Baudrillard as a state in which the "contradiction between the
real and the imaginary is effaced."11 The hyperreal is, I would !>Uggest, well
illustrated by a film like Ptarl Harbor (USA, 2oot, Michael Bay) which uses
computerized special effects to recreate an earlier spectacular act of
aggression against the United States, in images that are Simultaneously
highly realistic and just like computer .games/ and in a narrative that ends
with a fantasy of heroic revenge prefiguring the response of the Bush government to the attacks that shortly followed the film's release.
In distinct and explicit opposition to Hollywood, John Grierson based
his case for documentary cinema on the need to distinguish clearly between
the imaginary and the real. While he was certainly not a naive realist who
believed that cinema could objectively capture reality, Grierson argued that
documentary deals with the '!actuallll in an attempt to represent "'the really
Rat."l:! \X'hen he came to Canada in 1939, his dO<.1.Jrnentary aesthetic
became a national-realist project, the National Film Board would produce
documentary images that proved the existence of the nation.
This project began under the urgent conditions of World War II, and
Grierson insisted that he did not want to emulate US filmmakers who
managed "by superb showmanship to make a great spectacle" out of the
War. He felt that, unlike the US, Canada lacked a "great store of national
images" but, in any case, should IIconcentrate first on a clear-cut system of
infonnation and education."ll
In some ways, this project was highly successful. It is stHl possible for a
critic to claim that "cinema in this country is virtually synonymous in many
people's minds with documentary film." and even that "realism is at the
root of the Canadian psyche."'" Yet Griersods efforts to couple the nation
and the real generated its own contradictions. Although he himself
thought that Canada's "lack of unity" was "healthy and interesting; his critics argued that the NFB was engaged in public relations rather than publiC
infonnation, image-building in support of a versir of national unity that
served the interests of the federal government. IS .
The NFB's wartime documentaries, with their voice-of-Cod commentaries, exude confidence about the war effort, the state of the nation, and
the capacity of realist images to represent both, but younger filmmakers at
the NFB in the t950s developed a new form of documentary realism that
THE IUL MAllON 5
transformed the national-realist project. The "direct cinema" documentaries of the 1950s and 1960s developed a less assertive style that was often
taken as a marker of Canadian distinctiveness, but that also called into
question the existence of a clearly defined national identity. Although
there are important distinctions between the work of anglo phone and
francophone filmmakers, both groups produced films that were less
assured about national identity and/or unity and that often drew attention
to their own involvement in the business of turning reality into images. 16
This sceptical outlook carried over into the fiction films of the early
19605 that used direct cinema techniques to ground their narratives in the
observed reality of specific locations but depicted characters adrift in a
world that comes to seem unreal to them. At the end of Claude Jutra's A
tout pr",d" (1963), for example, Claude simply disappears, while Don
Owen's Nobody W"""d Good-by, (1964) ends with Peter driving away from
the city through what Northrop Frye once called the 'obliterated environment" of a modern urban highway. I ] The experience of these characters is
represented in a low-budget aesthetic that blurs the distinction behveen
documentary and fiction and has ohen proved unsettling to viewers.
Just as the cultural politics of difference may be commodified in consumer culture, so the characteristics of direct cinema, such as hand-held
cameras, jump cuts and grainy images, have become familiar devices contributing to what TImothy Luke calls "the proliferation of second-hand
authenticity" in contemporary media texts. II I would argue, however, that
the conjunction of the real and the imaginary has had very different
effects in the Canadian context. I have used the term Uaesthetics of failure" to suggest that many Canadian films remind us, as we watch them, of
their inability to capture reality in its full complexity, often alluding to
established forms, such as Hollywood popular cinema or European art
cinema, which, for cultural and economic reasons, they cannot emulate. '9
I would suggest that such films work against the erosion of the "real"
because they affinn its existence even if it is beyond our capacity to fully
comprehend or represent it. Films that use the full arsenal of visual technology to create a perfect illusion of the "real" are more likely to contribute to its disappearance.
I have also argued that Canadian films tcnd to accentuate the negative
and to produce an unsettling sense of "absence,· as opposc:d to the positive
thrust and intense illusion of presence in classical Hollywood cinema. 10
Katherine Monk makes a similar point in her book, in which she develops
the idea of "negative space" and argues that "there is always something
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JIM Luat
'missing' in Canadian movies."ll This effect is, I would suggest, an integral
part of the "aesthetics of failure," and it involves a challenge to our sense
of the "real" and the "nation'" and the relations between them.
The idea of the "aesthetics of failure'" does not neces~rily imply commercial failure but l in the Canadian context, it cannot be separated from the
apparent indifference of Canadian audiences to Canadian films. In an
attempt to resolve this problem, the infamous Capital Cost Allowance Act
of 1974 encouraged tendencies already present in the film industry to produce films that imitated the narrative structures of Hollywood genres and
did their best to conceal any signs of the nation in which they were filmed.
In these films , it was Canada (not to mention the direct cinema filmmakers)
that disappeared, but it is not enough to deplore the commercial pressures
that led to the effacement of the nation. They point to strategies and pressures also apparent in films that are more readily accepted as significant
components of the national cinema.
While the emergence of television and video as alternatives to theatrical distribution has encouraged a greater diversity of approaches,
pseudo-Hollywood films in which Canada stands in for somewhere else
(or nowhere else) continue to be made, often by Hollywood producers
attracted by the low Canadian dollar. However, the effacement of signs of
the nation in many recent Canadian films is often motivated by a more
thoughtful concern with the erosion of national identities. One such film
is Possibl, Worlds (2000), directed by Robert Lepage and based on a play
by John Mighton. This film explores the idea that "each of us exists in
an infinite number of possible worlds."" It does so through a hybrid
science-fiction/detective plot in which the characters meet in different
simultaneously.existing worlds while the police investigate the murder of
a man, whose brain has been removed. They discover that the brain has
been kept alive by a scientist, and the whole film has apparently been
imagined by this disembodied brain. Directed by a QuebecOiS filmmaker,
Possiblt \Vorfds is a Canadian-British co-production, made in English, and it
takes place in an unnamed imaginary setting. The idea of "possible worlds"
is thus accompanied by the disappearance of distinct cultural and national
identities, both inside and outside the text.
As the film constantly pulls the ground from under our feet, the characters slip between worlds defined primarily by the interests of big business and scientific research, in stylized contemporary settings that cany
no markers of nationaliry. The different worlds show no evidence of cultural diversity, but the film creates an unsettling metaphor for a cultural
11tE un NATION 7
situation in which, as Stuart Hall puts it, "we are confronted by a bewildering multiplicity of possible identities, anyone of which we could iden.
tify with--at least temporarily"" The absence of Canada in the Capital
Cost Allowance films can thus be seen as a symptom of the emergence of
urban environments in which increasingly homogenized spaces are
inhabited by increasingly heterogeneous people, with the effect that the
coordinates of location become detached from traditional national myths.
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The old questions of national duality and the inAuence of US popular culture continue to preoccupy English-Canadian and Quebecois filmmakers
in their different aJltu.ral contexts. However, these themes now often
become entangled with the new interest in cultural diversity, and Canada
has recently produced a number of films that engage with this experience
on several levels and in tenns that link their national contexts to the
broader experience of globalization and postmodemity. In particular, the
films' images and narratives are often organized around three iHttrTtlat(d
themes: the literal experience of diaspora, the impact of new media technolo~es, and the effects of both on bodily experience.
Diaspora is defined by Paul Gilroy as "the 'scattering' of peoples, whether
as the result of war, oppression, poverty, enslavement or the search for better economic and social opportUnities, with the inevitable opening of their
rolture to new influences and pressures." Gilroy argues that "diaspora as a
concepti therefore, offers new possibilities for understanding identity, not
as something inevitably detennined by place or nationality."" Cultural difference thus leads to the celebration of hYbridity rather than the coexistence of distinct cultural identities, as envisaged by official multiculturalism.
Canadian diasporic cinema tends to stress the pressures as well as the
pOSSibilities of cultural diversity. In films such as Srinivas Krishna's Mas.la
(199I), Mina Shum's Daubl, HappintsS (1994), and Oement Virgo's R.d,
(1995), the characters must negotiate between the cultural traditions of
their original communities and the demands of life in a new country that
is uncertain of its own values. The balance of sympathies between old and
new is different in each film, but all involve a difficult movement towards
new cultural identities that are both hybrid and provisional.
As Gilroy points out, the diasporic effect is not just a matter of the
physical movement of peoples but also of media technolOgies that circulate images from one culture into another. He argues that -technological
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lUll LUOt
acceleration, arising from digital processing and computer-mediated communications, means that individual identity is no longer limited to forms
of immediate physical presence established by the body."1S The elimination of the need for physical "presence" also produces a kind of temporal
diaspora in which messages and images from different historical sources
are recycled and combined in contemporary culture. Such practices
encourage us to think: of identity not in terms of the cause and effect structures of the realist novel but rather as analogous to the intertextual and
hyperte~ual strategies through which contemporary texts refer less to a
reality outside the text than to other texts and images.
In this context, diasporic experience is a highly ambivalent one that
unsettles not only traditional forms of identity but our sense of embodiment. In an article on "The Body and Difference; Chris Shilling suggests
that, "as a result of developments in biological reproduction, genetic engineering, plastic surgery and sports science, the body is becoming less of a
given, and more a phenomenon of options and choices." The emphasis on
"choice" implies that the body has become just another consumer product,
but Shilling adds that, ·while science facilitates greater degrees of intetvention into the body, it also destabilizes our knowledge of what bodies are.""
One early attempt to deal with technology and embodiment was in the
work of Marshall McLuhan, whose ideas were taken up and extended in the
"body horror" films of David Cronenberg. Donna Haraway's "Cyborg
Manifestoll might seem more relevant to recent Hollywood science-fiction,
but her effort to define "what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds"
has much in common with contemporary Canadian cinema. Haraway suggested that the boundaries between human beings and animals and between
organic life and machines are breaking down all around us, and she concluded that "the issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora."17
In Atom Egoyan's films, notably Ntxl of Ki" (1984), Family Vitwi"9
(1987), and Ca/rndar (1993), video technology functions as a means of
recording, surveying, or substituting for, bodily experience in the lives of
characters seeking to come to terms with their displac.ement from their
ethnic roots. In Egoyan's films, as in many other recent Canadian films,
there is a strong sense of disembodiment or bodies that cannot be contained in traditional frames of reference. This helps to explain the scandalous reputation for "weird sex" that has grown up around Canadian dnema, often seen as out of keeping with the national ·psyche" but arguably
the product of a roltuTC' whose structuring "absences" prefigured the contemporary diasporic experience.
lHl an NJmON 9
These films do not simply celebrate or deplore the new media culture,
Ma'ala attTaeted a good deal of attention, Lulu received Iukewann reviews and
rather, they ask us to think about spectatorship and the fusion of technology and subjectivity that characterizes the postmodem condition. They
obtained only a very limited theatrical release, In this respect, it shared. the fate
of many Canadian Films, and one of the reasons for its failure is its undeniably
do this in many different ways, and I am not trying to suggest that all of
bleak depiction of multicultural and sexual relations. However, it works less as
them can be reduced to the same common denominator. Although there is
a realistic depiction of life in Toronto in the 1990s than as an allegory built on
Hall's claim that diasporic identities have become the common experience,
a popular cinema in Quebec and (more sporadically) in English-Canada
and many films rely on the festival circuit in the Hart cinema" mode,
Canadian films rarely fit comfortably into either category_ J will discuss
two recent films, Lui. (1995, Srinivas Krishna) and Empon,.moiIS" M, Frrr
(1998, Lea Pool) to explore the uneasy, but often rewarding, ways in which
they relate to the cultural frameworks that I have been discussing.
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Both Krishna and Pool came to Canada as students, and both became
filmmakers whose work has a definite but ambiguous place in the national
cinema. Pool established herself in the J 980. as one of Qu<bec's most
important directors with a series of low-budget films usually dealing with
charcicters who feel in some way alienated from their surroundings. Her
best known early work was La Frm11li d, l'boltl (1984) in which three
women-a film director, an actress playing the leading role in her film, -and
a stranger whose life uncannily resembles that of the character in the
film-gradually merge into one·composite figure. While the theme of lIexile"
Whereas Ma",la focused on one diasporic group with which Krishna
was personally familiar, the characters in Lulu come from a wide range of
national and cultural backgrounds, The film is less concerned with their
origins than with the impact on thei~ lives of the media·sarurated con·
sumer society, It is rarely specific about the characters' origins: Lulu, whose
real name is Khuyen, comes from Vietnam, and has spent time in a refugee
camp in Hong Kong, but she refers to the country from which she escaped
only as ''back home"; another character is called Miguel in the final credit<, and is apparently a re~gee from Chile, but he also refers only to his
experiences in "the country [ come from,"
The only one of the main characters who is white is Lulu's husband,
Steven, known to his friends as Lucky, ironically because he is the stereo-
typical Canadian "loser." Hi< best friend is Clive, a black Canadian who
appears to be of Jamaican descent but whose mother is white, although
again the film does not explain his background. The most explicit bio·
graphical information is provided by an Asian business man, played by the
Indian actor SaaedJaffrey, who poses as a philanthropist but actually trades
figures prominently in Pool's films, it has not prevented them from being
in illegal shipments of meat, and who describes his expulsion from Uganda
widely accepted as products of Queb<cois culture, perhaps because their
by Idi Amin at some length. The film's setting is obViously Toronto, but
uprooted characters resonate with the way in which the diasporic experience mirrors the feelings of many in Quebec of not being Hat homeu in
one's own culture.
neither the city nor the: country is ever named. 19 At one point, Lucky says,
with some understatement, that he lives in a "mixed neighbourhood."
Names are less important than images in this film, and Lulu's name is
a way of making her confonn to Lucky's image of her. But this is also an
image that comes from the cultural image-bank.. Although Clive says that
it makes her sound like someone's pet, Lulu is the name of the alluring
On the other hand, Krishna has insisted that his work has nothing to
do with Canadian film traditions. He has made only two feature films,
the first of whkh was Masala, a satiric treatment of offiCial multiculturalism, incorporating fantasy sequences that parody the musical numbers
in popular Indian cinema. The hybrid fonn of the film differentiated it
Jrm... Jatal,
figure in two plays by Franz Wedekind, an opera by Alban
Berg, and the 1928 German silent film Pandora, Box, directed by G. W.
from the realist films made by the NFB to promote multiculturalism,
and Krishna argued that it was not a Canadian film because it did not
adopt "the observational way of looking at the world" found in the
Pabst. Krishna's Lulu wears her hair in an approximation of the style
made famous by Louise Brooks, the American actress, who starred in
Pabst's film as the showgirl who destroys all the men who are attracted
direct cinema tTadition. 18
L.I. was Krishna's second film, and its commercial failure led to the
to her.
In both films, the expressionless faces of the women make it difficult to
demise of his production company. While the controversy surrounding
understand their motives. The blurb on the web-site for Lulu emphasizes
10
JIN LEACH
mE IEEL NATION 11
move~ from the cold outSide:: to the: warm inSide:
or the depanmcnt store
where: Lulu works at lhe ~rfumc counter, At first this seems to
be a con-
but then the image goes out or loco., and peofront of the woman who seems to be the object at the: camera's
ventIonal establlshmg shot,
ple walk tn
gaze The>c effeets ""ggest a documentary look and when ,he image
frtczcs With a linc across the screen. we realize that It is a video Image. and
we may now a~~umc that it is taken from a survcdlancc camera In the store.
Vida> images figure prominently in the film: the opening ,hot turns out
be taken from a camera bdongmg to l\1igud who IS makmg a televiSion
documentary about refugee-s; Lulu watches a musIc video with images from
the Vietnam War shown on a bank of televisions in the stOre Lucky ha~
discovered Lulu through 3 Video made In the refugee camp by a "matrlmo·
OIal service." Although Miguel uses a documentary aesthC':tlC to capture the
truth about the experience o( refugees, his obJccltvlty IS comp"calcd by hIS
evldent attraction co Lulu, and his Images thus cannot be completely disltngulShed from 'he use of video sell Lulu to a Western husband In both
'0
cases, xuality becomes fused With technolobry and commocLFicauon.
The f,m pos,-credlts sequence ,akes pl.ce III an old people's home
where lulu VISItS her parents Her father complall1s 'ha' they arc belOg
treated Ilke anImal. prepared for slaughter. and hIS opemng words, .ubEnglish-Canadian film. IOlroduce a conCern Will. the breaktitled on
down of boundan("S between human, ammal and machine similar to
Harawa 's viSion but rather less optimistic. We 10lter find th~1 the: warehouse used for the stolen meat is next door to a business that pays people
to donate their bodies (or medical research a(tcr they d.c Clive gelS a job
Will. thIS comp.ny, and sells his own mother's body after he fmili hcr dead
In her apartment. When Lulu's father dies, she nnds that her parent!) have
sJsncd a contract with this company. The film thus depicts a culture that
turns bodies, on the one hand, into images and, on the other, mto meat
E".port(~",ol offers a rather morc optimistic lake on Image·maklOg a~ a
means of coming to (eRnS with the diasporic cxpent.."flce. Ii IS certainly a moR."
accessible 101m than L.'. (aod PoolS earlier films) and can be apprecIated as a
n~lalgic au(obiographical Film about a young woman's coming-of-age A
Canadian-Swiss-French co· production, It transfers Pool'.. mcmones of her
childhood in 'he 19605 from Swil7.erland, where she grew up '0 Quebec
where she has lived as an adult. She wrote the screenplay WIth ane)'
Huslon, a writer from Alberta who lives In Paris and writes In French, and
who appears '" 'he f,lm as a teacher. The style of the him h." many o( the
quahtl~ of European "art cinema," but this can be: at least partially allnbuted
,I."
!ulu: (I) The film open' with. funy imOS' 01 Lulu (l(im lJeu).t her pedum. COOn'e<. (2)
CustomerS' pass by bloc.king the "'lew and then (3) tile image Irtens, revealing that it is
taken hom a video camera. (4) Lulu (now on film) listens to the complainb of her (off~
s<:reen) father.
the resemblance to the earlier film. 10 the men In her life. Lulu's beauty
hides a complex and mysterious woman,.. [nhe film gradually unravels
Lulu's mystery and exPQSe' the desires and emotIOnal hunger that, ultimately, bll1d ,he three men in Lulu's "fe: It is described" 'a poignan, film
about the SCt..TCIS and masks bchlOd which lives are hlddcn." JO This: may
work as a descnption of Parulo¥a; Bn. but the disturbll1g poin' 111 L.l. IS
that there IS no truth behind the mask. lulu', body and her image have
meaning only 111 the way people (including hersel look a' her.
The film begins With an image o( snow fallll1g, which presumably estab"shes ,he setting as Con.do. As the credilS begin '0 appear, the camera
I]
JiM l£\CM
THfuntumoH 1]
to Pool', deslle 10 p;ly homa~ to lhe French ew Wav-e films that opcn<d
up new possibolities for person.1 filmmaking in the 1960s.
The film bt-gins in the countryside wheI'C Hanna is on vacation with her
grandp;lrents. In this traditional Freneh·Can.dian settmg, she h.s her first
period .nd discovers both the praeliealapproach to the body and the Lnh,bition about discussing II that eharaetmzes rural Cathol,e culture. When
she returns: to hcr family in the city, she confronts a more confusing world
in which different cultural traditions oflereompeling Ideas of sexuality and
identity. Her f.lher " JewISh and her mother Calholic, while her friends
listen to the pop music of the new yOUlh culture, much 01 it emanating
from the US. The city IS explicitly identif'ed as MonlrC.l, but there' no
n:ference to the pOlitical debates about language and culture that accom·
p;lmed the "Q"iet Revolution" in Quebec dUring the 1960..
Hanna tries 10 resist the demands 01 her overbearing f.ther, a struggling
poet (and nOt a very good one judging by what we hear of his work), and
to make contact with hcr mother who IS suffering (rom some kind of ",,"ast·
109 disease, either caust:d or worsened by the: long hours she puts in at a
gamlcm factory and typIng hcr husband's poems. Her father tries (0 mterc,t her in the Jewish heritage by giving hcr a copy of Tht Drmy of Alii" Fralllt,
but H.nn. hnds her own role model when she sees Anna Kann. mJcan-wc
Godard's V,or< sa "" (1962). The image 01 Karina, the DanlSh·bom .Ctress
who was Godard's Wife at the tune, fascinat(!s Hanna, and extracts from the
earl'er f.lm are tntcrspersed .hroughout E"por1<-MOI.
E.mporlu.~o;: (1) Hanna (Karine Va08Se) w.tches • prostrtute puttlna on make-up In
a washroom mirror intercUl with a shot (2) of Nana (Anna Karina) applying tipsttdc In
Vwre so vie. (3) Hanna appHes ~pstick and (4) ~Ib the streets lille Nana In Godard's film.
trytng to control hiS daughter's sexuality. th(' hair-au mak.es her look more
hke Nana/Anna. As an .dded (fony, It
IS
Hanna's teacher (or t'.ncy
Karm.s character IS callcd .n., a name that, like wlu, has cultural
connotaLions that associate it wirh prostitution In this. case, the: allUSIOn is
to N.M (1880), a novel by Emile lola which is also about a showgirl who
destroys the men who .rc .Itracted to her." In the narrat,vc 01 Godard's
Huston) who looks mort: like Annil Karina. and Hannas allTactton to the
latter may be a sublimation of her feelings for the teacher,
him Nana becomes a prostitute but. instead of dtslroYlOg men. she loses
control over he.r own life. In any case, Hanna IS attracted I~s by the char-
example of the pattern of audio·visual allusions IS a sequence In whICh
Hanna, aher running away from home, befriends a stray dog and thinks
acter than by the actress as an Image of energy and potential freedom, and
her pleasure In lookmg allhe screen image is linked to her tentative C'xpto~
ration of her own bisexual d~ires.
aboo. becommg • proslltute. We first hear the wng, "Runaround Sue" by
Dion and the Belmonts, pl.ying softly on the radio in the truck of • m.n
who dnves away and abandons his dog. It then well. up on 'he soundtrack
The sequence in whIch Hanna sees Vwrt sa Ptt echoes Nana's ViSit to a
emema ",here she IS moved to tears by Tht Pass.... of )0''" of At< (1928), the
silent film dircc1<d in France by the D.nish filmm.ker C.rI Dreyer.
Although this sequence from God.rd' film is not included in E"por1<-..Ol,
there is an allUSion to it when Hanna's father insists on having her hair cut
short, rc--enacting the famous sequence in Dreyer's film in which Joan' halt
is cut before ber execution. Ironically, although Ihe father is app.rently
.1 '1M LfAOt
The French f,lm and the pop songs on .he soundtrack providc a framc·
work Within whIch Hanna tria out different possible idenu£lC'S. A good
and becomes a non·dlcgctic commentary on Hanna'~ Journey through the
city, although
It
may .Iso suggest that ,he sees herself .cting out the ,ong',
Vi'Drr sa vir Inserted Into this sequence can be
imerprettd both as the film's commentary on her SItuation ;}nd as flashes
lynes.
imJlarly, unages from
of her memory of viewing the film.
The use of music and the montage effects in this sequence suggest the
·postmodem" aesthetic of musi videos, but, ""hen:as ul", uses the: VIdeo
THlURH,JmON 15
image as a way of exploring the compromised role of visual culture in the
postmodem environmentl Emporfl-mai stresses the possibilities of the film
cornmunication."34 This is an uncomfortable strategy and may help to explain
why Canadian films do not attract large audiences, but it also suggests that
camera as a tool for sell-discovCIY. Hanna's teacher lends her a movie camera, and she returns to the countryside that she left at the beginning. She
they have much to offer in a complex cultural environment in which national
traditions must interact with the effects of globalization and diaspora.
uses the camera to Film her mother who seems to have recovered and comes
to meet her at the bus stop. As we see the mother through the lens of
Hanna's camera, the hand-held 8mm footage records the mother's image
and relegates her to the past. The power to make images puts Hanna (and
by extension Pool) in the position of Godard rather than Karina, but it
Gilles MalSoiais, Le Cinema CcJnodien (Montreal: Editions du jow. 1968), 104. See also
my artides: -second Images: Reflections on the Canadian Cinema(s) in the Seventies;
in Take Two, Seth Feldman, ed. (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984), I(KHO. and -Lost
Bodies and Mlssing Persons: Ccmadial) Cinema(s) in ltIe Age of Multi-National
Representations," Post SCript 18.2 (1999): 5-17.
1.
remains uncertain whether the camera brings Hanna closer to her mother
or allows her to see her from a distance and thus move on with her own life.
•
•
•
At the time of the release of Emporn-moi, it was reported that Pool's next project would be a story about three immigrants from Turlcey, Cuba, and Yemen.
The film would be set in Quebec but, because English is the only language
in which the immigrants could speak to each other, it would be made in
English" Instead, Pool's first English-language film proved to be Lost a>tJ
D,liriou, (2001), another story of sexual awakening and identity crises, this
timeset in a private school for girls. The (as yet) unrealized project does suggest that, despite the differences in style and vision, Emporn-moi shares with
2.
Christopher E. Gittings, Canadian National Cinema (London: Roudedge. 2002), n. IDS.
3.
Katherine Monk. weird Sex & Snowshoes and Other uJfJodian Film PhetJomeno
(VancolNer: Raincoast Books. 2001). 158.
4.
Peter Harcourt. '"Faces Changing Colour Clanging Canon: Shifting CWtural Foci Within
Contemporary Canadian Cinema.... CineAdion 45 (1998): 7.
5.
Homi'lt Bhabha. ·Introduction: Narrating the Nation: in Nation and Narration, Bhabha,
ed. (london: Routtedge, 1990), 1-3. see also Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities~' Refledians on the Orig;ns and Spreod of NaOOnaIism, revised edition
(london: verso, 1991), 24-5.
6.
Stuart Hall, -rhe Question of Cultural klentity; in Modernity and Its FutuIeS,
Hall David
Held. and Tony Mc.Grew, eds. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 2'>1.
7.
Stl¥'rt Hall, ~injmaJ selves,· in Studying Culture: An Introductory Reoder, Ann Gray and
Jim McGuigan, eels. (loodon: Edward Arnold.. 1993), 134.
ulu a concern with the possibilities and constraints of diasporic experience. B
8.
Both films also depend on a sense of an authentic but unseen elsewhere
9.
Ibid., 135.
David Thomson, America in the Dark: Hoflywood and the
William MallOW, 19TI), 38.
10.
Jean Baudrillard, "'I:Esprit du terrorisme; Donovan Hahn, trans.. Halper's 304.821
of Israel, about which Hanna's father speaks but which are not part of her
experience. The "real" lurks outside the frame, while the films depict visible
11.
A1enka ZUpandc,. Ethics of the Real: Kant,. Lacon (tondan: Verso, 2000), 235; Jean
Baudriltard.. Simu/ation$ Paul Foss, Paul Patto~ and Philip 8eitdmlan, trans.. (New York:
urban landscapes that do not provide a clear sense of location. Although it
12.
John Grierson. quoted in Ian Aitken. Film and Refonn: John Crietson and the
DoaJmenrary Film M<wement (london: Routledge, 1990), 109.
13.
John Grierson. quoted in Gary Evans.. John Grierson and the National Rim Boord af
Canodo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1984).94.
14.
Monk. 10.
that links them to earlier Canadian films. In Lulu it is the camp from which
Khuyen "escaped" and the lover she left behind there, as well as the coun-
SemKllext(e), 1983),142.
ate images and narratives in which the actual environment is less impor-
15.
tant than the interplay of the real and the imaginary.
The effect of these films is not to efface the difference between real and
imaginary but to contribute to what Donna Haraway calls, in a rather different context, "the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect
16.
11
JIM LU.QI
at Unreality (New York:
(2002): 13.
try in which she was born; in Empartt-mai it is the Holocaust and the state
is difficult to forget that Emporn-moi is set in Montreal in the 19605, the place
and time are subordinate to the film's fable of sell-discovery. Even in Lulu,
local knowledge will ensure that people who recognize the locations will
experience the film differently from those who do not, but both films cre-
Gffl
John Grierson, quoted in Evans. 94. For a detail~ attempt to expose the aUeged ideok>gical deficiencies of Grierson's projed., see Joyce Nelson, The Colonized Eye:
Rethinking the Grierson Legend (foronto: Between the Unes, 1988).
See the essays by seth Feldman, David dandfield, Barry Glant, and Jim Leach on direct cinema films in Candid Eyes: E:ssoys on Qmadion Documentaries, Learn and Jeannette
Sioniowski, eds.. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2002).
tHERULNImOM 11
17.
See Jim leach, "000 Owen's Obliterated Environments," Dalhousie Review 60.2 (1980):
2n-89. N. tile end of Gilles Groulx's Le Chat dans Ie sac (1964), the other major dired
cinema feature film of this period, Cfaude withdraws to the countly where he apparently
lB.
itmothy W. luk,e, "-ouring Hyperreality: Critical Theory Confronts Informational Society,"
in Oitkol Theory Now, Philip Wexler. ed. (london: The Falmer Press, 1991),6-7.
19.
Jim leach, Claude Jutro Filmmaker (Montr~aJ: McGill-Queen's University Press. 1999),
32. J borrowed the term "'aesthetics of ~ilure'" from Siavo Mek. "Rossellini: Woman as
Symptom of Man." October 54 (Fall 1990): 18-44.
PETER DICKINSON
abandons the complications of rus personal and political life in the city.
20.
21.
Monk, 92. Monk does not cite my artide, so Iassume she arrived at this idea independently.
John Mighton, Possible Worlds and A Short History of Night (Toronto: Playwrights
Canada Press, 1992), 23.
23.
Hall, "The Question of Culturaf Identity," 2n.
24.
Paul Gilroy, "'Diaspora and the Detours of ktentity,- in Identity and Dffference, Kathryn
Woodward, ed. (Mittan Keynes: Open University Press, 1997), 304.
25.
Ibid., 314.
26.
Chris Shilling. "The Body and Difference,.... in Identity and Difference, 67.
27.
Donna Haraway, Simians. CyborgS, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 170.
Krishna, quoted in Cameron BaiJey, "'W1at the Story 15: An Interview with Srinivas
Krishna: CineAction
28 (1992), 47.
29.
The location of the -matrimonial sefVice" is identified as Toronto on the video through
which Lucky met Lulu.
30.
W'NW.telefilm.gc.ca/en/prod/film/fiIm96/16.htm, accessed 24 May 2002.
31.
The novel had been filmed at least three times by 1962: by Jean Renoir
(France, 1926),
Dorothy Armer (USA,. 1934), and Christian-Jaque (Ffance, 1955). Godard does not seem
to allude specfficaUy to any of these films..
Fest.- Toronto Sun (10 September
32.
Bruce Kirkland, WPool Dives into the
33.
Pool's latest film is a S12.5 million project called The Blue Butterfly, based on the story
of a tenninaJly ill Qu~becois boy who went to Mexico in search of a rare butterfly. The
film, starring William Hurt, is in English and filmed on location in Costa Rica. In his artide on the film in the Toronto Star (31 May 2002), Sid Adilman suggests it could mark
Pool's "crossover into popular territory."
34.
MEN'S EYES
See leach, "Lost Bodies and Missing Persons....
22.
28.
CRITICALLY QUEENIE: THE LESSONS OF FORTUNE AND
Resume: I.:adaptation du drame carceral de John Herbert, Fortune and Men's Eyes,
realisee en 1971 par Harvey.Hart, nous permet de reflechir a certains codes binaires
qui contrOlent les' representations de la se.xualite et des roles sexuels dans les
espaces institutionnels. S'attardant a I'adaptation comme acte transformateur dans
la representation gaie. I'auteur propose que les difMrences entre la piece de
Herbert et Ie film de Hart impliquent des d[fferences epistemologiques narratives et
sexuelles. Tout en faisant reference a d'autres films pertinents, I'auteur se concentre
particuli~rement sur Ie role crucial et hautement visuel que joue Ie travesti et« mere
de cellule. Queenie, dans Fortune and Men's Eyes. I.:artide suggere que ce person~
nage offre un mod~le iconographique puissant de la representation et de 103 reception du travestisme dans tes cinemas canadien et quebecois.
1999).
Haraway. 176.
JIM LEACH is a Professor in the Department of Communications. -Popular
Culture and Film at Brock University. He is the author of A Possibl, Gn""a,
Th, Films ojAlain Tann" and Claud, Jutra Filmmaktr. He prepared the Canadian
edition of Louis Giannetti's UndtrstandiH9 Movies and is co-editor (With
Jennette Sioniowski) of Candid Ey", Essays on Canadian Docum",tari".
anadian playwright John Herbert died in June 2001 at the age of
C
seventy-four. Although he wrote more than twenty-hve plays in a
career spanning five decades, was a respected teacher and dramaturge, and
enlivened the Toronto gay scene with his drag artistry and activism, he is
best known for writing Fortun' 4Hd Mens Eyes, his exploration of the
dynamics of sex and power in a men's prison that premiered off-Broadway
in 1967. The play would go on to receive more than one hundred
productions world-wide, and would be translated into some forty different
languages. fn 1971, it was also turned into a film by director Harvey Hart,
based on Herbert's own screenplay. Given the acclaim that Tom Fontana's
television series Oz has recently garnered for its frank depiction of life on
the inside, including sexual life on the inside, t it seems only appropriate,
thirty years after its initial release, to reconsider Hart's film in light of its
11 JIMUAOt
CANADIAN JOURNAL Of fiLM STUDIES· REVUE CAtUlDI£NNE O'ttuDI.S CINtMAroGllAPHIQUfS
VOLUME II NO.2· fALL • AIITOMNE 110::1 • pp 19-43