The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

As mentioned, d/e has been at the heart of Canada’s cinema troubles since the
first publicly held exhibitions by Ouimet in 1906. Hundreds and hundreds of Canadians
assembled at the country’s first movie palace – which seated 1200 – to watch films that
were overwhelmingly foreign-made. (Beaty, 2006, p.151) Canada lacked the industrial
and financial might of its largest trading partner, as well as the talent pool – from
technicians to stars – to enter the global cinema scene as a powerful player. By the 1920s,
Beaty reports:
…the Hollywood studio system [was] vertically integrated by owning both
the studios that made the movies as well as the theatres in which they were
seen, Canada had been all but squeezed out of its own film industry. (Ibid)
There was little in the way of domestic feature filmmaking, with a few exceptions, and in
1923 the Canadian government created the world’s first government-sponsored film
agency. (Ibid, p.152) The Motion Picture Bureau had as its mandate, the promotion of
Canada’s image in the US in order to increase trade and tourism by producing travelogue
shorts. This humble beginning to state policy concerning filmmaking in Canada perhaps
typifies the long running relationship concerning the culture industries of Canada and the
USA, a partnership based on what Dorland – evoking Foucault – has called
“governmentality” or “governmentalism,” (Foucault, 1991; Dorland, 1998, p.20; Druick,
2007, p.24) where history is seen through the seemingly continuous lens of the state. The
agency, clearly not overly concerned with engendering a domestic film culture in Canada
for Canadians, was dismantled by the late twenties after failing to keep up production
standards with other national cinemas. The thirties saw Canada’s colonizer, Britain
introduce protectionist measures against the Hollywood barrage by introducing screen
quotas for UK theatres. One result of this policy was American filmmakers seized on the
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