Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Over time, Quebec has developed its own film distribution,
exhibition, and production systems. The province’s
cinema has its own star system, and some of the
actors—Geneviève Bujold, Lothaire Bluteau, Monique
Mercure—have successfully made the transition to
Hollywood. In addition to the many distinguished art
and auteur films, Quebecois cinema also produces its
own popular cinema. Films such as Cruising Bar
(1989), Ding and Dong le Film (1990), and Les Boys
(1997) are broad and bawdy comedies that have been
enormously popular with filmgoers in Quebec.
EXPERIMENTAL AND ANIMATED FILMS
John Grierson’s famous definition of documentary as
‘‘the creative treatment of actuality’’ would seem also to
express the two traditions of filmmaking at the National
Film Board. For along with documentaries, the NFB also
produced many experimental and animated films that
hardly seemed to fit into the Board’s mandate. Some
created films that combined a documentary impulse with
the stylistic strategies of experimental film. Arthur Lipsett
(1936–1986), for example, in such films as Very Nice,
Very Nice (1961) and Free Fall (1964), used a collage
style of found footage—frequently outtakes from other
NFB films—to create bleak statements about contemporary
alienation. The interest in using documentary footage
unconventionally informs Canadian experimental
film from Circle (Jack Chambers, 1967–1968), which
consists of shots of four seconds taken each day for a
year from the same camera position, to Moosejaw (Rick
Hancox, 1992), which is a documentary of the filmmaker’s
prairie hometown in Saskatchewan and a poetic
meditation on memory, home, and the process of documenting
the past.
Outside the NFB, experimental filmmakers such as
Joyce Wieland (1931–1998) and Bruce Elder, who is also
an important film critic, have been influential in the
development of an experimental film culture in Canada.
But the country’s most well-known experimental filmmaker
is Michael Snow (b. 1929). Some of Snow’s films
reveal the influence of documentary, as in La Région
centrale (1971), which is shot by a camera positioned
on a hilltop and attached to a machine with preprogrammed
movements. Snow’s somewhat infamous
structural film Wavelength (1967) is a 45-minute zoom
shot across a room. Despite the challenging nature of his
non-narrative films, Snow is known popularly for his
installation of Canada geese in the Eaton Centre,
Toronto’s first urban mall (and home of Cineplex’s first
multiplex) and the sculptural facade of the Rodgers
Center (formerly Skydome), home stadium of the
Toronto Blue Jays baseball team.
Canada
The NFB also produced many important short animated
films by artists such as Richard Conde, George
Dunning (1920–1979) (who went on to head the international
team of animators that produced the Beatles’
animated feature Yellow Submarine [1968]), Co
Hoedeman (b. 1940), Derek Lamb (1936–2005), and
Gerald Potterton. At the NFB, a number of artists experimented
with unusual and innovative animation techniques.
In The Street (1976), an adaptation of the Canadian
author Mordecai Richler’s story, Caroline Leaf (b. 1946)
animated drawings composed of sand on a glass slide, lit
from below; the German-born Lotte Reiniger (1899–
1981) used silhouette cutouts in Aucassin et Nicolette
(1975); and the Russian expatriate Alexandre Alexeieff
(1901–1982) used his unique pinscreen method in En
Passant (1943), a wartime sing-along film. Norman
McLaren (1914–1987), both an animator and an experimental
filmmaker, was the NFB’s most acclaimed artist.
In many of his abstract films, McLaren painted directly
onto the filmstrip, as in Begone Dull Care (1949), which
is set to the jazz music of Canadian pianist Oscar
Peterson. But McLaren’s work could also draw inspiration
from the real world: the pixillated Neighbours (1952)
is a powerful antiwar fable that won an Oscar Ò for Best
Short Documentary in 1953.
THE CANADIAN NEW WAVE
Since the 1980s, a generation of new filmmakers has
emerged in Canada who together have taken Canadian
films in different directions from the downbeat realism
that characterized the first wave of Canadian feature films
in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these directors, including
Jerry Cicoretti (b. 1956), David Cronenberg, Atom
Egoyan (b. 1960), Bruce MacDonald (b. 1959), Don
McKellar (b. 1963), Kevin McMahon, Jeremy Podeswa
(b. 1962), and Patricia Rozema (b. 1958), are located in
Toronto. The city is home to the annual Toronto
International Film Festival (TIFF), which, since its
inception in 1975, has grown to become one of the
largest and most important film festivals in the world.
A major part of the festival each year from 1984 to 2004
was the Perspective Canada series, a program of new
Canadian features. The series provided the highest international
profile anywhere for new Canadian films, and
all of these filmmakers had their work featured within
it. As of 2004, TIFF altered its programming format
so that only first-time directors are featured in the
Canada First series, while work by other Canadian directors
is integrated into the other programs. As of 2006,
TIFF has screened an astonishing 1,500 Canadian
feature films.
David Cronenberg’s international success as a
Toronto-based filmmaker, moving from low-budget
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 213