FilmCAN Fall Festival Preview

A crash diet of fresh-for-festival movies can leave one feeling alternately overstuffed, undernourished and ready to tuck in early for the night. What one hungers for most of all amid this seeming bounty of dignified literary adaptations, well-intentioned docudramas, respectable art-house outings, Hollywood prestige productions and more modestly equipped indie pics is something startling. Good is good but nothing beats a genuine surprise.

I like to mark the occasion whenever it happens by scrawling WOW in cringingly teen-girly fashion in my non-Hello Kitty notebook. (Sometimes the rest of my notes are so illegible, it’s the only word I can read, though I did notice the word HILARIOUS! in the pages devoted to Guy Maddin’s new film.) A WOW can be elicited by many things – it could be a particularly ingenious fight sequence, like the epic battle between Donnie Yen and Collin Chou in Wilson Yip’s Flash Point, a grade-A actioner in TIFF’s Midnight Madness program. It could be a dramatic scene so charged with feeling and tension it threatens to rupture the screen, like the best moments in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, this year’s Palme d’Or winner from Romania, or Secret Sunshine, the South Korean Cannes entry that deserved the prize even more. It could be some new outrage or degradation like those that punctuate Ex Drummer, a nasty Belgian import that’s sure to excite the nihilists in Gaspar Noe's fanbase, or Import Export, the masterful second feature by Austrian maverick Ulrich Seidl.

Or it could be the sight of Viggo Mortensen – naked but for his character’s elaborate array of tattoos – giving the business to two baddies in a London steambath in what is already becoming one of the most notorious scenes in David Cronenberg’s career. A noir-ish and mildly ludicrous thriller about white-slaving Russian mobsters in the UK, Eastern Promises may be Cronenberg's most conventional movie to date, but this setpiece – as visceral and vicious as any example of screen violence – proves the filmmaker will always prefer to use his own playbook than adopt the dictums of the mainstream. I think it might’ve even gotten two written WOWs and a whispered utterance of “holy shit.” Anything more than that and I was likely to pass out.

As usual, Cronenberg sets a very difficult standard for the rest of the nation’s filmmakers to match. Perhaps the only filmmaker of comparable longevity and prestige to have a new offering hitting the country’s festival circuit this September, Denys Arcand already crapped out at Cannes with L’Age des tenebres, an often amusingly acerbic but frustratingly muddled satire about a Walter Mitty-like fantasist who escapes from his dreary family and work life in a very-near-future Quebec by dreaming of fame, wealth and a beautiful blonde. Arguing that western society has entered a new set of Dark Ages, Arcand has rarely seemed more misanthropic, a sin that would’ve been more forgivable had his jokes been funnier. Another disappointment has been the film that marks the return of François Girard, a mere nine years after the worldwide success of The Red Violin. As pretty as his previous hit but thin as rayon, Silk is a period romantic drama that’s sunk by the soporific presence of the woefully miscast Michael Pitt. Between the two productions, Telefilm Canada expended the majority of the funds designated for French Canada, but word is strong on more modestly budgeted new films by Bernard Émond (Contre toute espérance) and Denis Côté (Nos vies privées).

As for the Anglophones, only two other filmmakers besides Cronenberg inspire scrawled WOWs. The first is Vancouver’s Bruce Sweeney, who seems to have been gone from the scene nearly as long as Girard. Six years after his TIFF opener Last Wedding, he’s back with American Venus, a scabrous little satire about gun-crazy Yankees that’s energized by a gonzo performance by Rebecca De Mornay. She plays a clingy American mom who follows her grown daughter to Vancouver, where she discovers that her usual method of venting her rage – discharging one of her beloved firearms – is decidedly frowned upon. Her meltdown is a marvel to behold and Sweeney’s strange, bracing movie follows her all the way around the bend.

Putting the unprofilic likes of Sweeney to shame, Guy Maddin is about to release his fifth feature-length work in as many years. My Winnipeg is an incalculably odd and idiosyncratic tribute to the city he could never leave, no matter how hard he tried. Though nominally a documentary, the film involves such typically Maddinite flights of fancy as a series of dramatic re-enactments that were shot in his childhood home and star his mother as herself. The filmmaker freely intermingles his personal remembrances with the wider history of Winnipeg, which Maddin portrays in terms heroic (the General Strike!), occultic (Masonic séances in the Legislature building!) and tragic (the betrayal of the Jets!). As imaginative as any of Maddin’s recent films, it might also be the most fun.

The same vigour marks two other major Canadian films that originally debuted at Berlin in January. Unfortunately, both Clement Virgo’s Poor Boy’s Game and Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments are hampered by flaws that have afflicted the directors’ past works. A melodrama about a boxing match meant to settle scores in a racially divided Halifax community, Virgo’s film has a wealth of strong performances and great moments but is undone by a shaky script that relies too much on contrivances. Featuring McDonald’s most ambitious use of split-screen, The Tracey Fragments is periodically exhilarating but lacks a narrative throughline strong enough to support its stylistic strategems. Nevertheless, both are well worth seeing, partially because they express a sense of risk and boldness largely absent in the latest batch of first features, which includes Martin Gero’s Young People Fucking, an appropriately titled but only modestly funny ensemble sex comedy.

Elsewhere in the world, truly remarkable debuts are similarly hard to come by, though two Cannes hits from Israel – The Band’s Visit, a sweet first feature by Eran Kolirin about an Egyptian police band that gets stranded in an Israeli backwater town, and Jellyfish, a whimsical, Camera d’Or-winning ensemble dramedy co-directed by Israeli writer Etgar Keret – and one from Lebanon – Caramel, which plays like Sex and the City if it were transplanted to a Beirut hair salon – are likely to become big audience favourites. The best new film to come out of Britain also qualifies as a first feature, though before he directed Control, Anton Corbijn managed to become the most famous rock photographer in the world, so it’s hard to consider him a neophyte. With Control – a deserving prize-winner in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes – he has crafted a sympathetic but clear-eyed portrait of Ian Curtis, stripping away the layers of myth that have accrued around the Joy Division singer since he killed himself in 1980. The fact that this year has already produced one great rock biopic raises hopes for I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan fantasia – news of the Weinstein Brothers’ lack of enthusiasm for the project suggests that Haynes’ latest will be thoroughly unorthodox and commercially doomed.

The idea of Cate Blanchett as Dylan circa Don’t Look Back is enough for an automatic WOW. As for the definite WOWs of the other movies coming into circulation, one need only look to the two best features in the Cannes competition slate, as well as the one that actually won the Palme d’Or. Ulrich Seidl’s Import Export is an often shocking though surprisingly tender (if only by Seidl’s standards) film about two characters forced to contend with life on opposite sides of the border that separates the wealth of Western Europe with the desperation of the East. From South Korea comes Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, an uncommonly nuanced story of grief and recovery that features an astonishing performance by Jeon Do-yeon. And though it is not the best of the new Romanian cinema, Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days – about a young woman’s peril-filled attempt to procure an illegal abortion for her roommate during the waning days of Ceaucescu’s rule – is sure to become its breakthrough work. A Palme d’Or can come in handy sometimes. A WOW is even better.

 

Chaque année, le festival international du film de Toronto sait faire place belle au cinéma québécois. Les trois dernières années ont ainsi vu 3 films de la belle province gagner le prix du meilleur film canadien (La peau blanche de Daniel Roby, Familia de Louise Archambault et Sur la trace d’Igor Rizzi de Noël Mitrani, en 2006). Flatté comme un chat, le cinéma québécois sait aussi rendre au TIFF les mêmes honneurs. Car aux yeux du milieu montréalais, une sélection québécoise au Festival de Toronto sera toujours plus prestigieuse qu’une sélection par un des deux festivals montréalais (Festival des Films du Monde et Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, ce dernier proposant d’ailleurs souvent au public d’ici de voir les films québécois montrés en avant-première dans la ville Reine. Drôle d’ironie).

Et cette 32ème édition 2007, que réserve-t-elle au cinéma québécois? Outre une présentation du chef d’œuvre restauré Les bons débarras de Francis Mankiewicz, une rétrospective consacrée à un des véritables piliers du cinéma québécois, Michel Brault et un livre que le festival publie lui-même (Cinema as History: Michel Brault and Modern Cinema), on y retrouvera bien sûr les deux gros canons de l’arsenal de l’année, le contraire aurait été étonnant : L'Âge des ténèbres, de Denys Arcand (maître incontesté de la production québécoise, malgré la tiédeur de l’accueil cannois lors de sa présentation en clôture) et Soie de François Girard, méga-production réunissant Michael Pitt et Keira Knightley dont les échos semblent peu réjouissants. Reste que ces deux films, les plus attendus de l’année, présentés en soirée gala, représentent une branche plus « internationale », plus « exportable » du cinéma québécois. Un cinéma qui, tout en sachant rester personnel et maîtrisé, semble toutefois rompu à l’exercice du compromis international, soumis à la pression d’un désir mondialisé.

 

 

Mais 4 autres films se nichant dans l’escarcelle de TIFF 2007 sauront peut-être, eux, montrer le vrai visage du cinéma québécois. Ou du moins révéler quelque chose de son identité, si tant est qu’il en ait une.
Contre toute espérance, de Bernard Émond est le premier (Contemporary World Cinema). Suivant le parcours festivalier de son précédent La Neuvaine (Locarno, TIFF), le film est le second volet de la trilogie que le réalisateur souhaite consacrer aux vertus théologales, vertus chères au cœur du Québec. La foi, l’espérance, la charité. Véritablement porté par Guylaine Tremblay en épouse forte et courageuse dont le mari est impotent suite à un accident cérébral, Contre toute espérance expose encore davantage la rigueur humaniste d’Émond. À travers cette femme, le film navigue alors entre la douleur intime et l’injustice sociale pour faire le portrait d’un Québec meurtri mais courageux, solitaire mais d’une abnégation totale, portrait d’un peuple qui souffre mais se tient debout, d’un peuple révolté en silence, tout de colère rentré, tendant au spectateur, et notamment québécois, un miroir peu glorieux mais salutaire. Minimal, sobrissime, parfois simplificateur, Contre toute espérance représente en réalité un cinéma d’ancienne garde, traversé par une retenue flirtant avec le rigorisme.

Pour plus de fraîcheur, il faudra se tourner vers les 3 autres longs retenus par le TIFF.

Si on retrouve chez Denis Côté (Nos Vies privées, Contemporary World Cinema) le même souci de laisser s’exprimer des acteurs d’une intensité remarquable (les bulgares Penko Gospodinov et Anastassia Liutova), ce dernier défonce pourtant les portes d’un cinéma identitaire en soulignant une évidence : un cinéaste est avant tout un créateur, son point de vue sur le monde n’est pas nécessairement cantonné à son paysage natal. Car Nos Vies privées, bien que situant son décor dans la campagne québécoise profonde, s’amuse plutôt à dresser les contours d’une histoire d’amour singulière entre une immigrée bulgare et son correspondant virtuel venue la rencontrer pour la première fois. Comme il le disait en entrevue à la Presse : « Le cinéma québécois a une langue, la planète Cinéma n'en a pas. Nos vies privées n'a pas d'étiquette, pas d'identité culturelle. ». Pourtant, Denis Côté oublie que sans travailler frontalement la question identitaire québécoise (comme peuvent le faire les films d’Émond en scrutant avec rigueur et austérité la survie des valeurs traditionnelles de cette identité), il est aussi peut-être celui des jeunes cinéastes à savoir le mieux ciseler la tradition d’une manière de filmer tout à fait québécoise : le cinéma direct (voire une des scènes du film tournée de façon quasi-documentaire au festival du cochon de Ste-Perpétue). Tourné avec un minuscule budget, se rapprochant sans cesse de ses acteurs et paysages comme pour mieux laisser éclore une vérité des gens et des lieux, exacerbant les particularités du territoire au lieu de les gommer en plantant sa caméra dans des villages que le cinéma populaire préfère ignorer, il renoue en le laissant s’adapter à une modernité avec un geste fondateur du cinéma québécois : celui du filmer vrai.

 

 

On ne s’étonnera pas d’ailleurs de retrouver le même sens du réel, la même assimilation d’une certaine histoire cinéphilique chez Rafaël Ouellet, grand collaborateur de Denis Côté. Le cèdre penché, prix du public aux derniers Rendez-Vous du cinéma québécois, présenté dans Canada First!, témoigne en effet lui aussi d’un beau sens du naturalisme et parvient, par le biais de la musique, actrice quasiment principale du film, à magnifier la nature québécoise. Avec chaleur et douceur, le film suit deux sœurs (attachantes et charismatiques Viviane Audet, Marie-Neige Chatelain) se retrouvant à la suite de la mort de leur mère dans la maison familiale. Vivant chacune leur deuil de leur côté, elles se rejoignent finalement grâce à leurs guitares, leur musique et les chansons de leur mère, une chanteuse country. Ici encore, la fiction se fait flottante – sans pourtant ne jamais hésiter – pour laisser le réel prendre sa place.

Toujours dans Canada First, on s’attardera enfin sur l’un des longs les plus attendus de cette cuvée québécoise : Continental, un film sans fusil, également sélectionné au Festival de Venise. Déjà repéré par ses courts (Karaoké, mention spéciale du jury à Toronto en 99, Snooze et Claude co-réalisé avec Louis-David Morasse et présenté à Toronto en 2005), Stéphane Lafleur y pose un regard sur des personnages marginaux et malheureux, aussi seuls que maladroits dans leurs rapports aux autres. Film choral, Continental fait en effet se croiser une réceptionniste d’hôtel, un vendeur d’assurances, une femme dont le mari a disparu et un ancien joueur compulsif vieillissant. Tonifié par quelques astuces de montage (Lafleur est également monteur), le film est mis en scène avec énormément de retenue, comme pour mieux laisser affleurer l’empathie évidente du réalisateur pour ses personnages, chargés, eux, peut-être à l’inverse des démarches de Côté et Ouellet, de porter la part de réel de ce cinéma, bien décidé à nous conduire à observer ceux que le cinéma, justement, préfère habituellement oublier.

Même souci du réel, que ce soit dans leurs choix de mise en scène ou de personnages, même volonté de chambouler les codes (en tout cas pour les 3 plus jeunes), les 4 films sélectionnés cette année à Toronto représentent clairement les moteurs de la cuvée québécoise 2007, au contraire de ceux d’Arcand et Girard, en ce qu’on les sent tous clairement décidé à dynamiser une production générale beaucoup plus triste, beaucoup plus calquée sur un modèle américanisé et sans âme.

 

The Toronto International Film Festival knows how to treat quebecois cinema. Every year, it proves it. For example, in the last three years, three quebecois movies have won the CityTV Award for best Canadian first feature film (La peau blanche by Daniel Roby in 2004, Familia by Louise Archambault in 2005 and Sur la trace d’Igor Rizzi by Noël Mitrani last year). Very proud of those distinctions, quebecois cinema also knows how to treat TIFF well. Indeed, for the Montreal milieu, a selection of a quebecois film by the TIFF is always more prestigious than one by one of the two Montreal festival (Festival des Films du Monde and Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, where local audiences can often see the quebecois movies that premiered in Toronto. Ironic, isn’t it?).

And what about quebecois movies in this 32nd TIFF? In addition to the presentation of a restored copy of the 1981 masterpiece by Francis Mankiewicz, Les bons débarras; a retrospective dedicated to one of the masters of Quebec cinema, Michel Brault; and the launch of a book edited by the festival itself (Cinema as History: Michel Brault and Modern Cinema), we’ll of course see there the two big shots of this year's production calendar: L'Âge des ténèbres, by Denys Arcand (still the most important quebecois director, even with the cold welcome the film received in Cannes) and Silk by François Girard, an almost-blockbuster with Michael Pitt and Keira Knightley about which rumors are not very good. If they are the most anticipated, and will be screened in Gala presentations, these two movies represent the "international" branch of Quebec cinema, or at least the "exportable" one – a cinema that, while still personal and controlled, seems more used to international compromise, made under the pressure of a globalized desire.

 

 

Four other films presented at TIFF might be the ones to show the real face of Quebec cinema, or at least to reveal something of its identity, if one can say it has one. Contre toute espérance (roughly: "Against every hope") by Bernard Émond is the first one (screening in Contemporary World Cinema). Following the festival path of his last film, La Neuvaine (Locarno, TIFF), Contre toute espérance is the second part of the trilogy that Émond wants to dedicate to the theological values that are deep in Quebec’s heart: faith, hope and charity. Literally carried by Guylaine Tremblay, one of Quebec's most talented tragic actresses – playing here a strong and courageous spouse whose husband is impotent following a stroke – Contre toute espérance exposes even more of Émond's humanist rigor. Using Tremblay, the film navigates between intimate suffering and social injustice to draw pictures of a wounded but courageous Quebec, of a country alone but with abnegation, of a suffering but stand-up people, of a silent riot with a lot of inner anger, thereby offering a not-so glorious but still salutary mirror to the spectator, especially the quebecois one. Minimalist, sober, sometimes over-simplifying, Contre toute espérance stands for an old-fashioned cinema, where reserve is sometimes not so far from rigor.

For more freshness, a look at the other three features selected at TIFF seems necessary.

Denis Côté’s new film (Nos Vies privées, Contemporary World Cinema) also lets actors with great intensity (Bulgarian actors Penko Gospodinov and Anastassia Liutova) express themselves, but doesn’t fit into the mold of identity cinema by simply reminding us of evidence: a filmmaker is, before all, a creator, and his point of view about the world doesn’t have to limit itself to his birth landscape. Even if Nos vies privées is set in the quebecois countryside, the film focuses on a singular love story between a Bulgarian immigrant and her virtual lover who’s coming to visit her for the first time. Denis Côté told La Presse, "Quebec cinema has a language. Cinema (of the) planet doesn’t. Nos vies privées doesn’t wear a tag, doesn’t have a cultural identity". But Côté might be forgetting that, even without directly questioning identity (as Émond is doing, by looking with austerity and rigor at the survival of traditional values essential to this identity), he might also be the one among young quebecois filmmakers who can most effectively play with a really quebecois way of filming: the direct camera (look at one of the scenes of the film, shot documentary-style, of the pig festival in Ste-Perpetue). With a tiny budget, always looking closely at his actors and landscapes as if he wanted to let people and places hatch the truth, exacerbating particularities of the land by filming some villages that popular cinema prefers to ignore, Côté joins again – but with a modern edge – with one of the most essential gestures of quebecois filmmaking: the filmer-vrai (something of the meaning would be lost in translation here; it means something between "filming of the reality" and "filming truly").

 

 

It won’t be a surprise to see the same sense of reality and the same assimilation of cinephile history in Rafaël Ouellet’s Le cèdre penché. Ouellet is one of Côté’s great collaborators. Winner of the public award at the last Rendez-Vous du cinéma Québécois, Le cèdre penché (Canada First!) also shows a nice sense of naturalism and uses music (almost the principal actress of the film) to magnify Quebec countryside. With warmth and tenderness, the film follows two sisters (the charismatic Viviane Audet and Marie-Neige Chatelain) finding themselves in their family house after their mother’s death. Each grieving in their separate ways, they finally unite thanks to their guitar, their music and their country-singer mom’s songs. Here again, fiction knows how to float, but never hesitates to let reality take its place.

Also in Canada First!, we find one of the most anticipated quebecois movies of the year: Continental, un film sans fusil, also screened at the Venice Film Festival. Well-known for his shorts (Karaoké, which earned a special jury mention at TIFF in '99; and Snooze and Claude, which was co-directed with Louis-David Morasse and screened in Toronto in 2005), Stéphane Lafleur looks at marginal and unhappy characters, as alone as they are awkward in their relationships with one another. A chorus-like movie, Continental lets a hotel receptionist, an insurance salesman, a woman whose husband just disappeared and an ex-compulsive gambler growing old cross each other's paths. Invigorated by several editing tricks (Lafleur is also an editor), the film's mise-en-scène has great reserve, as if Lafleur wanted to let his empathy for his characters take over. Contrary to Côté and Ouellet’s ways, here, the characters are charged with carrying the reality of the cinema, forcing us to observe those who cinema, in fact, ordinarily forgets.

With the same sense of reality, in their mise en scène or characters, and the same will to upset codes (at least for the three youngest), these four films selected by TIFF clearly represent the engines of this year’s quebecois production, in contrast to Arcand and Girard’s films, whose directors decided to mold their films on an Americanized and soulless production technique. And that means a lot, here in Quebec.

 

 

 

The Toronto International Film Festival programs over 250 films each week-and a-half of its evanescent season (September 6-15 this year), so patrons, in an effort to pin down what exactly to see, can often be found absconding entire programs with the slash of a marker -- whether it’s celebrity cameos, obvious upcoming theatrical releases, or actor-directed galas, there are clearly many good reasons for ignoring a particular section of the festival.

In contrast, Wavelengths, TIFF’s program of experimental film and video efforts, is a relatively straightforward deal. With its opening weekend screening (Friday, Sept. 7 at 6pm; Varsity) and its finale six programs but just three days later (Monday, September 10, 9;30pm; AGO’s Jackman Hall), it makes the first four days (96 hours and counting) of the festival the ideal opportunity to catch one-to-two hour long collections of truly alternative works of cinema. Considered as a nighttime warm-up before a Midnight Madness session or late-night party elsewhere in the city (hey, some bars don’t close til 4am!), these programming slots are ideal for a moment of mental de-fragmentation amidst the madness of continuous four-movie-day onslaughts.

 

 

Cleansing the narrative cinematic palette has been a pre-occupation of many of my favourite experimental works, whether through an exploration of the power of still photography in the classic La Jetée, laying bare the mechanics of the zoom in the Michael Snow film that gave this program its name, or the flicker of leader and light in the works of Stan Brahkage. Returning to both the real world and(inevitably) another cinematic/televised world is a highly contrasted experience when you allow yourself to stare at images that exist singularly on celluloid and videotape, impossible to project quite the same way outside of the theatrical frame. And the challenge put forth by experimental filmmakers, often nonchalantly brushed aside by the artists themselves as the only working practice they feel comfortable with, can often be a fun game of free-associative thematic sleuthing.

Experimental film rarely fits into any feature film paradigms, including length, but to aid in the making of connections, Wavelength’s programmer Andrea Picard (also the programmer of Cinematheque Ontario), has conveniently organized 6 thematically linked groups: What the Water Said; Winds of Change?; Cross Worlds; In The Space of Time; Schindler’s Houses; Pour Vos Beaux Yeux. All groups sound interesting. Winds of Change is notable for featuring Europa 2005, 27 Octobre, the final film created to legendary avant-garde partners Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, and Evertwo Circumflicksrent…Page 298, a dual projector performance by Brooklyn based Bruce McClure. The latter weds patterned film loops and guitar pedals into a feverish excursion of light and reverberating sound – in other words, a bang of a finale. But timing being what it is within the frenzy of festival fervour (not to mention a full time job), there are two sections in particular that I’m placing at the top of my must see list.

 

 

My selections are inspired more by artists than the films themselves. Number 5, Schindler’s Houses, features projects by two fascinating contemporary artists: Thailand’s feature film darling Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady; Syndromes and a Century), and Heinz Emigholz, an avant-garde German filming his twelfth episode in the series Photography and Beyond, begun in 1984. Weerasethakul's The Anthem, a response to the Royal Anthem (honouring the King) played before each domestic Thai screening, is a cheeky blessing of a positive film screening, and only five minutes in length. Schindler’s Houses (99 mins), meanwhile, is Emigholz’s look at architecture as autobiography – it’s an examination of forty houses built in and around L.A. by Austro-American architect Rudolf M. Schindler between 1921 and 1952. Austerely introduced via a simple title card, each house is photographed from a unique perspective, and the audio treatment is purely diegetic, unscripted, on-location sound. Given these frank yet timely and specific observations, alternative, human themes emerge out of the housing patterns’ growth from blueprint through a multitude of inhabitants and functions, and into their current "old" age.

Local Toronto filmmaker Isabelle Pruzhka-Oldenhof, and former Toronto (now San Francisco based) programmer and filmmaker Chris Kennedy are the other artists I’m interested to catch on the big screen, and both are featured in program No. 3, Cross Worlds (Sat. Sept. 8, 9:45pm; Varsity). Pruzhka-Oldenhof has been making unique film projects since the turn of the century, and given all I’ve heard, I’m disappointed I've waited so long to check out her work. Echo, her newest film, is actually somewhat of a biography, exploring homesickness and cultural yearnings through a photogram of her body that acts as a matte as the film travels through the countryside and she mouths Polish immigrant songs. (And you thought South Korean films could get weird!). Chris Kennedy has been programming for Images Festival and was also on the board of programming at both VTape and Pleasure Dome for significant stints. Over the past four or five years he’s also received encouraging critical response to short structuralist film works that take turns deconstructing the medium into its architectural foundations (the frame; photo-chemical responses to light; and narrative expectations) and reveling in its nature to capture moments of whimsy and inspiration. Tape Film (2007), screening in program No. 6, is a surreal study of the artist himself at work, literally taping over the projected image – top to bottom. Framed through a strange mirror, shot on different stocks, and processed through a wide-range of colours, it’s a concise example of Kennedy’s recent cinematic fixations. His vertigo challenging The Acrobat (2007), screening in No. 3, explores the nature of connections and building relationships through onscreen text from a poem, contrasted with archival footage of a skyscraper under construction. A collection of seven shorts in total, No. 3 (Cross Worlds) seems a solid bet to catch a wide variety of experimentation without having to walk out on a longer flick that doesn’t fit your fancy.

 

 

Of course, screenings by filmmakers who actively seek to test (if not reward) a viewer’s narrative and pacing patience can be found in many parts of the regular program of films; Bela Tarr and Carlos Reygadas return with understated and slow paced Dreyer like efforts -- Tarr with The Man From London (albeit starring Tilda Swinton, and only 132 mins) and Reygadas with Silent Light (127 mins; partly in Amish). As for free public events, even with the second year of Nuit Blanche right around the corner and Artscape’s Queen West Art Crawl taking place from Sept. 14-16, TIFF has also programmed the new 2007 venture Future Projections. It's a collection of installations and gallery experiences across the city, most of which are free to TIFF ticket holders, and offer the opportunity to engage with alternative, often site-specific programming. Acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Peter Lynch (Project Grizzly; A Whale of a Tale) also continues his path into surreal narrative realms with his collaboration with artist Max Dean on A Short Film About Falling (part of the Short Cuts Canada programme), which features Dean’s infamous "re-assembling chair,” and a Nic Metivier gallery exhibition.

Still, for the purest allure of basic flickering light, Wavelengths is the star.

 

 

This is the second part of a three-part series contrasting the film industries in Canada and South Korea. Part one looked at South Korean netizen funds, online funds that allow film fans and other private investors to contribute small amounts of money towards the production of feature films. Part II looks at one of the most hotly contested and often-debated issues in the history of Canadian – and, increasingly, Korean – cinema: should there be quotas mandating how many domestically produced films must be shown in theatres?

It’s tough to find the right analogy for the battle between most national film industries and Hollywood. David and Goliath doesn’t cut it, in part because David wins, but also because the imbalance isn’t nearly pronounced enough. In fact, there may not be any archetypal stories that tell of such an absurd contest, since a story like that would offer no suspense and only one lesson: you’re fucked. If you use your imagination, you might be able to come up with a decent approximation – Zeus versus a gnat, or the Transformers’ planet-swallowing Omnicron versus a piece of dandruff from an arthritic goat.

In the ongoing struggle to stand up to Hollywood imperialism, South Korea’s film industry has done reasonably well. Unlike many other national film industries, especially those outside of Western Europe and Japan, it has produced some bona-fide financial and popular successes, as well as nurturing an auteur culture that doesn’t hinge on the kind of absolute polarization of art and commerce that usually results in alienated audiences. Witness Park Chan-wook, the director of films such as JSA and Chinjeolhan geumjassi (Lady Vengeance), which fuse intelligence and aesthetic rigor with communicative storytelling instincts.

No small part of the reason for the Korean industry’s success is the existence, in Korea, of what sometimes seems like the Holy Grail for Canadian filmmakers: screen quotas. Since 1966, when South Korea was struggling to recover from the damage done by the Korean War, theatres have been required by law to screen domestically produced films for a certain number of days every year; these days, the magic number is 73. Like the CRTC’s Canadian content rules for radio and television, this measure is intended to ensure that locally-produced media doesn’t get choked out of the market by the voracious American entertainment industry money machine, and its tendency to mow down anything that dares take up space in what it deems its global cinema beachhead.

These quotas are not solely responsible for the health of Korea’s film culture. Good films help, as do creative funding strategies like netizen funds and investments from chaebol corporations (massive, family-owned companies, such as Samsung and Lotte, that own just about everything). The quotas are, however, definitely responsible for having created opportunities for Korean audiences all over the country to not only see Korean films, but to watch the industry shift and develop into something worthy of fervent national pride. In 2006, when the quotas were cut due to pressure from the U.S. ahead of a free-trade deal between the two countries, there were actually street demonstrations to protest the change. Granted, these were not affairs on the same scale as say, a major anti-war protest. Yet the very idea that Koreans were upset enough about the whittling of the quotas (which, before the change, required cinemas to screen Korean films for 146 days of the year) to take to the streets suggests a kind of impassioned attachment to the national cinema that is absent in Canada. If we did have quotas, and the government cut them, there would be some grumbling and maybe an ACTRA strike before industry professionals moved on to moving to the States and audiences and exhibitors got on with ignoring wholesale the existence of a Canadian film culture distinct from Hollywood. The CBC would run a story. Atom Egoyan would be piqued. Nothing would happen.

Of course, that’s all speculation. Because we don’t have quotas, despite our being the place where they make the most sense. Unlike South Korea – or Italy, Mexico, France and other places where similar measures do exist – Canadians (outside of Quebec, which can reasonably be considered a separate entity as far as film goes) make films in English. We share with Americans, if not the same cultural headspace, then at least the same physical continent and virtual media sphere, and our concerns and interests are entwined in thousands of essential ways, whether or not we like to admit it. (We don’t.) We are the easiest market for Hollywood to corner. We are, at least in stereotype, polite, and don’t want to appear arrogant by exaggerating our own importance and asking the man with the cigar and the hookers to please leave us a little space to show our movies about being cold.

Need statistical proof? In 2005, Canadian films made up just over one percent of the total English box office take at Canadian cinemas. That’s dismal enough as is, but consider this: the highest grossing Canadian film of that year was Resident Evil: Apocalypse, made in Canada by producer Don Carmody, who also made legendary Canadian cinematic ham hocks Porky’s and Meatballs. RE:A picked up $6 million at the domestic box office, meaning the rest of the films that added to the one percent tally probably made, in total – give me a minute to do some math – about seventy-five cents.

If the lack of quotas is curious, especially given the CRTC broadcast regulations, it’s also highly contentious, and many filmmakers and film enthusiasts have tried to persuade the government to do something about it. Vancouver director Carl Bessai, for example, has been a vocal advocate for introducing quotas, founding the Citizens’ Coalition for the Protection of Feature Film to give a public voice to the issue. (Its website, www.citizenscoalition.ca, is now seemingly, inevitably defunct.) “We’ve built a system where we create all this stuff, but there’s no market for the stuff we create,” he told the CBC in a 2006 interview. Bessai has said he wants 20 percent of all films shown in Canadian theatres to be homegrown, and has lobbied the government to make this happen.

Although you won’t usually find them anywhere near a position of real influence, select politicians have argued the same point. NDP member Peter Tabuns, Ontario MPP for the Toronto-Danforth riding, had plans to introduce a private members’ bill pushing for quotas for Canadian films and trailers. “We have difficulty – in a world where American studios really have tremendous power – having our voice heard and there has to be some rebalancing,” Tabuns told the CBC in the same article that quoted Bessai. Alas, Tabuns’ office didn’t respond to email queries about the status of the bill, so I can only assume it’s gone the way of Bessai’s website petition: dead, or at least moribund. Not that it’s surprising – compared to Capital Letter issues like the Environment and Afghanistan, why we can’t see our own movies is an easy thing for a busy politico to ignore.

And yet the Canadian government loves nothing if not media regulation. The CRTC has been waving Cancon broadcast regulations in our faces since the early 1970s, stirring up much dust but also, undeniably, propping up the Canadian music industry and helping it grow into its current, unprecedentedly successful (no matter what the record companies tell you) guise. In a 2006 editorial, Eye Weekly argued that film quotas couldn’t work the same way – “music and film are not entirely analogous,” they wrote. “Music is an ambient experience; we hear it whether we choose to or not… However, when we go to the cinema, we have made a predetermined decision about we want to see.” The point is a good one, but flawed; perusing the newspaper or Internet listings for movies is much the same as scanning the radio for a song you like. If hearing more ambient Canadian music “hypnotizes” people into buying Canadian records, it stands to reason that simply seeing more Canadian films on offer in the listings, thereby legitimizing the films as equally feasible options for a night at the cinema, would make more Canadians inclined to try some homegrown movies for a change.

Here the question of marketing becomes inescapable – how do Canadian films compete with the cosmic marketing budgets of Hollywood? Simple: get creative. Tabuns’ idea for more Canadian trailers is a good one, as is Eye’s suggestion of reduced ticket prices for Canadian films (although that’s been tried, with minimal success; recall the $6 rebate audiences were offered to go see Sudz Sutherland’s Love, Sex and Eating the Bones – which doubtless could have benefited more from the deal if it didn’t have such a shitty title). The Internet still offers plenty of cheap marketing opportunities, and more festivals could run promotional events like TIFFG’s Canada’s Top Ten.

 

 

Getting back to Korea, it’s easy to jump on the numbers for evidence the quota system works. Statistics like the number of tickets sold for Bong Joon-ho’s megahit The Host (13,019,740) make it tempting to proclaim quotas the saviour of Korean filmmaking. Negative numbers work the same way; to date for 2007 – the year quotas were reduced – seven out of the top ten most successful films in South Korea are Hollywood product (versus four in 2006). The quotas fall, and lo and behold, the arts and culture headlines start talking of a slump in the South Korean industry and Chung In-youp, president of the Korea Film Directors Society, tells AFP that the industry is in danger of slipping back twenty years.

Yet the numbers aren’t really the most important thing at work. The most common objection to quotas is that they’d result in a slew of mediocre films being dumped into theatres, created simply to fulfill a requirement. (Similar statements are being made in Korea right now; see the above link.) Anyone who claims to be honest about Canadian cinema needs to admit that these fears are not groundless. There are some very bad Canadian films – Bessai, for example, has made at least one inexcusably poor movie. However, what the opponents of the quota system overlook is the toll that struggling to find a market in Canada exerts on filmmakers. More than many other arts, cinema needs an audience. Movies need people to watch them; that’s when the artistic transfer takes place, wherein audiences feed off of a filmmaker’s vision, and, in some cases, give back to a filmmaker a better idea of how he or she should proceed – what the collective filmgoing consciousness of a nation wants and needs. This kind of chemistry helps filmmakers blend the inherent selfishness of artistic pursuit with the ability to reach people on a scale that translates into commercial success. You can see this at work in situations where access to audiences is not an issue on the same level that it is here. Take an artist like Gus Van Sant, whose early small-budget films led to larger, commercial ventures, which subsequently allowed him to explore the margins of cinema in odd, affecting pictures like Jerry and Last Days. Filmmaker makes films, films get seen; filmmaker, encouraged by the reception and the openness of the market, makes more films that more people see; filmmaker, having established a reputation and a certain level of comfort as an artist and within the market, makes films that are uncompromising but that people will still see, because now he is allowed that luxury. The same trajectory can be seen in the career of Stephen Soderbergh, and also in that of Park Chan-wook. A director like Lee Chang-dong, whose Milyang (Secret Sunshine) won raves at Cannes this year and picked up an award for actress Jeon Do-yeon, would probably never have been able to make his most recent film if the quota system hadn’t created an environment in which his previous features, Chorok mulgogi (Green Fish, 1997) and Bakha satang (Peppermint Candy, 2000) – both thoughtful dramas that bear zero resemblance to Hollywood filmmaking – could gain significant audiences and win the filmmaker a reputation as a rising talent.

So to all those who say that quotas would encourage bad filmmaking, I say just the opposite. If anything encourages bad filmmaking, it’s a system in which filmmakers work without any motivation to connect with audiences, because audiences are chimeras, phantoms drifting spectrally somewhere beyond theatrical release in a grimy corner of Toronto’s Suspect Video or a TIFF Open Vault screening. Quoth Bessai, in a Georgia Straight article from last year, “I’d be glad to give back all the subsidies, the tax credits, and the public money the government has given me if I could just get access to a market.” Canadian filmmakers aren’t looking for a free ride; they’re looking for a chance to share their visions with people, and they’re frustrated and sometimes creatively hobbled by their inability to do so.

In any case, the bad films argument is not the real one. Not even close. The reason there are no Canadian films in Canadian theatres – the fundamental reason – is what Hollywood types and Conservative governments like to call the “free market.” At the risk of sounding like a left-wing blogger, that term is no longer anything but hollow bit of code used by people who are wealthy and want to continue getting more wealthy in the easiest possible way. The film industry is money, and Canadian films do not make money. Therefore, they do not fit into the Canadian film industry. Ask yourself, what harm would a few modest quotas do? Why don’t we have them – or even just try them? The only answer is that the men with the cigars and the hookers, standard bearers for outrageous free-market capitalism, cinematic imperialism and cultural belligerence, do not want it that way.

Recently, Warner Bros. cancelled all of its press screenings in Canada, citing the degeneration of Montreal into a festering, tumouresque rothole of movie piracy. Knitting their swarthy brows in solidarity, the bigwigs at Twentieth Century Fox feinted threateningly that they might consider delaying releases to Canadian screens if the trend continues. It’s a shame that the Harper government decided to heed their warnings and plan tougher laws for movie pirates, because nothing would make me happier than to see Hollywood films disappear from Canadian (big) screens, antiquated by downloading that surely will not stop because of a few measly laws, leaving only our own pictures to fill the gap: The Tracey Fragments on four screens at SilverCity, Guy Maddin given his own three-week run at the Colossus. If, as some predict, no one would go see Canadian films at Canadian cinemas, and the withdrawal resulted in the collapse of megaplex culture in Canada altogether, all the better. At least then all of us – Omnicron and Lady Vengeance and Carl Bessai together – would be on a level playing field.

 

 

Easy Rider ended with Peter Fonda’s cryptic “we blew it” line, followed by the brutal slaying of the two main characters on the open road. Interestingly enough, Out of the Blue, which Dennis Hopper made eleven years after his generation-defining counterculture film, begins where that film left off: with death on the highway.

In Out of the Blue, Hopper plays a character named Don Barnes, a guy who probably worshipped Easy Rider, or at least the culture that it spawned: the devil-may-care, hard-living outlaw lifestyle that Neil Young describes in film’s title track with the phrase, “it’s better to burn out than to fade way.” When we first see Don, he’s barrelling down the highway in an 18-wheeler, drinking, popping pills, driving his daughter to school. He asks her, “Do I look like a ’60s Elvis?” Moments later he slams into the side of a school bus that’s stalled in the middle of an intersection. When Don emerges from prison five years later, Elvis is dead and the only job he can get is at a garbage dump. So much for the easy lifestyle.

This grim opening gives way to a loosely-constructed plot centred around Don’s daughter Cindy, AKA “CeBe” Barnes, a 15-year-old girl from a poor town somewhere outside of Vancouver. CeBe’s mother, Kathy (Sharon Farrell), works as a truck-stop waitress and might be augmenting her salary by serving as mistress to the owner, Paul, (played by the film’s production designer, Leon Erikson, credited here as Eric Allen). Kathy also shoots smack, which she gets from Don’s best friend Charlie (Don Gordon). When CeBe runs away to Vancouver, she narrowly avoids getting raped, meets Vancouver punk legends Pointed Sticks, steals a car, gets arrested and is released just in time for her father’s homecoming.

The party is cut short when an angry man claiming to be the father of the one of the dead children crashes it. The scene is highlighted by Don pouring most of a bottle of scotch over his head while raving “You know what, man? I’m an asshole.” That’s a good indicator of the direction Don’s life is going: from bad to worse. His drinking only increases. He gets fired from his job at the dump, largely thanks to the angry father. Don and Charlie beat the angry father, who may be owner of the town’s bowling alley. They might also steal the angry father’s briefcase, containing money or something else of value which they plan on using to start some business venture; Hopper is often pretty vague about plot details like this. CeBe’s admiration for her father understandably begins to fade, Kathy continues to shoot junk, and the film’s river-like plot glides along until the current eventually takes us into the rapids. When the film arrives at its disturbing conclusion, it seems inevitable but still shocking.

Dennis Hopper made this film eight years after the disastrous premiere of The Last Movie, which seemed to dash his directorial hopes. He was originally hired just to act in a film scripted by a couple from Quebec, Leonard Yakir and Brenda Neilson, which was to star Raymond Burr as a kindly child psychiatrist who helps troubled children. But, at the producer’s insistence, Hopper took over direction from the inexperienced Yakir and rewrote the script.

As such, like Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Out of the Blue shows an actor/director with a singular vision moving into a world he did not originally create. Welles was originally hired only to act in what was then called Badge of Evil, but somehow ended up rewriting and directing the picture, and in the process elevated it from being a rather generic Hollywood thriller/melodrama into a swirling tragedy. Hopper did the same thing with Out of the Blue, taking it out of the shallow world of B movies and investing the picture with elements that move it beyond the clichéd world of the original script. The result is Hopper’s finest work to date, both as a director and an actor.

There are no easy rhythms in the film, nor is there much in the way of plot structure. However, the rambling one-thing-after-another storytelling helps it break away from the rigid necessities of the commercial movie form. There are no heroes and villains, no pat solutions and platitude-ridden conclusions – Raymond Burr doesn’t save the day. The characters feel real and lived in as opposed to written and performed.

That’s not to say it has no wide appeal. In fact, the film succeeds in part because of the balance it strikes between its two polarizing forms: the art film and the commercial movie. Hopper makes all the tacky late ’70s Canadian TV movie touches work for him instead of against him. There are a couple of awkwardly staged scenes, some lame minor performances, that cheesy Tom Lavin music that pops up from time to time in order to reinforce the plot. (You’d think it would clash with the Neil Young and Pointed Sticks songs, but somehow it doesn’t.) These are the elements that contrast with Hopper’s art film technique and ultimately prevent the material from descending into a Larry Clark or Harmony Korine prototype. The unpleasantness of the story is always present, but it never becomes so all-encompassing that it chokes the energy out of the film.

The battle between art and commerce has been the focus of two of Hopper’s films as a director, The Last Movie and the made-for-cable movie Backtrack. Even Easy Rider was a blend of American naturalism (the images and the pace) and outright consumerism – the soundtrack album became a mega-hit in its own right. If Easy Rider spawned a lifestyle, then Out of the Blue is the response to that lifestyle. Through Don and CeBe’s shared obsession with Elvis, the drugs and the destructive self-mythologizing typified by rock stars, we see the effects of the packaging and distributing of the ’60s counter-culture into tangible items like movies and soundtrack albums.

Hopper’s films as a director changed after Out of the Blue. In his subsequent pictures, the art film technique all but disappears and in its place is a strange and not very successful attempt at genre-deconstruction. He made the cop movie/nihilistic social study Colors, the film-noir homage The Hot Spot and finally, his last picture to-date, Chasers, an artless rehash of The Last Detail, staring former Playboy Playmate Erika Eleniak. These films seem to be the product of a man with nothing left to say. Maybe burning out isn’t so bad after all…

While reading the latest report on the Canadian Television Fund (CTF), I was reminded of a friend who put herself on a personal weekly “point system” as a way to reward herself for accomplishing certain daily tasks. If this friend got out of bed before 10 a.m. and made the bed, she received one point. Working on her art that day got her five points. She even had a score for making love to her husband (I don’t know the score of that particular). Throughout the week, she was able to “redeem” certain accumulations of points for prizes, like the latest issue of Wallpaper (25 points) or a new CD (50 points). This scheme had the effect of controlling her personal finances and motivating her at a particular moment in time. However, the CTF report isn’t inspiring, and it isn't a story of self-motivation, unless you view beaureaucratic bodies such as the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) as an integral part of the Canadian identity. Regulatory boards such as these can often seem like nagging moms reminding you to eat your broccoli or brush your teeth before you go to bed, and most debate on media regulations is sure to be intensely boring to someone in Anytown, Canada eating a bag of Lays in front of the latest episode of CSI: NY.

Nonetheless, the report demands examination from anyone working in Canadian film and television today.

Currently, in order for a production to receive CTF funding, it requires ten points out of a possible ten to qualify as Canadian content. The new taskforce report recommends reducing this requirement to eight out of ten. Meaning: free up space to bring in American “names” (an actor's worth one one point, so you can bank on two names) or hire one of those funnier American writers (which will cost you two points) or an American director (again, two points).

What’s The Big Question?

The question being debated at the moment in the film and TV industry is, “How can we employ more Canadians?” This is different from its previous incarnation -- “How can we compete as Canadians?” When you consider the arduous task of re-writing mandates for beauracracies, this may as well be a 180 degree turn in thinking. The word limit to this piece precludes a primer on the recent doings of the Canadian Television Fund (Google it and hit the news tab), because the sequence of events that has occurred since Jim Shaw (CEO, Shaw Communications) fired his first shot across the bow of independent production in Canada has set off a firestorm of press-releases, policy-making intiatives and a strike. In January 2007, ACTRA went on strike, for the first time in their 64-year history, against the Canadian Film and Television Production Association (CFTPA), after months of acrimonious negotiating over the issue of "new media" rights in their new Independent Production Agreement. The jist of it was, ACTRA (the labour union) wanted their members' rights to be recognized within new media (internet usage, video-on-demand etc.) and the CFTPA (the "boss" union) said that the rights were too new to be valued properly, and that they wouldn't have their hand forced. The two associations came to an agreement a month later with the caveat that they would re-address the issue of new media before re-negotiating their next IPA. A victory for labour, a compromise for the producer.

The strike was a necessary evil to highlight the inevitable issue of new media, and how each party is to either exploit it or be compensated for its exploitation. The CFTPA was a puppet for its U.S. studio bosses, who were anxious to keep the upper hand (although the CFTPA claimed that ACTRA was “willing to sacrifice the Canadian industry to placate [its] old bosses at SAG [Screen Actors Guild].”) The issue of new media and SAG were probably at the heart of the matter, as the U.S. studios will soon be renegotiating their contracts with SAG (their current agreement expires on June 30th, 2008), and studio bosses were not looking for a settlement that acknowledged a labour union’s claim on this issue. Broadcasters and studios want to own and control rights for this new platform, but without sharing the wealth; producers have to sign away those rights and accept meagre liscensing fees; and creators (talent, writers, directors….whatever you want to call them), in Canada at least, can only negotiate with producers. Apart from striking against the only body that you can negotiate with, you can address a Parliamentary Committee. Not exactly the stuff of a free market.

At the same time as the strike, the production industry was dealt a huge blow from Shaw and Videotron with their decision to withdraw contributions to the CTF. (ACTRA titled one of their press-releases “Dear CFTPA: time to stop fiddling while our industry burns.") This one-two punch -- the strike and the withdrawal of funds -- only highlighted the imminent need for solidarity within the production industry.

How Should Things Be?

Everyone will have a different answer to the above question. But we may be able to figure out, at least, “How is it right now?” -- although there's so much deflection happening at the committee level, we have several choices for understanding “the way things are” in this business. The broadcasters would have you believe that, despite their best efforts to create marketable Canadian programming, the sluggish hand of big government acts as a nemesis that “props up shows nobody wants to watch”. The labour unions espouse the belief that the Canadian writer/director/actor is getting squeezed out of work and the national voice. The producers are crying foul between the rock of broadcasters demanding universal rights and low license fees and the hard place of workers that don’t want to work for free (or less than the gains they’ve fought for in previous years).

And, rather than sit at the table together and work out a collective agreement for investment in Canadian production, these three separate entities (Broadcaster, Producer, Labour), have to address various standing committees comprised of legislators instead of each other. And why is that? Because everything (and I mean everything), that occurs within our industry is, at its inception, an act of legislation. When considering how a dollar gets passed down from the Treasury of Canada to the independent producer, it has to be understood that the very first act that actually pushes that dollar our way is done to achieve a policy objective for the Government of Canada. In other words, it’s a beaureaucratic process from the get go.

If this is the case, we should ask the question, “What does the government want?”. We may never find out precisely what that is. We can, however, look at the statements and actions taken by our current government with regards to the funding and creation of Canadian content.

The Harper government has explicitly stated that they want a more “market friendly” board in the CRTC. When corporate powers decide to manipulate the financial process, dialogue begins immediately. To this day, Jim Shaw continues to threaten his withdrawal from the CTF. Despite industry-wide discussion, the broadcaster is asserting its power as the ultimate power.

Which brings us back to the story of the point system, and to the question: what good is devising a point system that doesn’t reflect the wants and desires of those who are supposedly benefitting from it? The CTF Taskforce has recommended that point-driven funding requirements get scaled back in an effort to make Canadian programming more "successful." In this case, "successful" means only "profitable." To recommend this action as a solution exposes an inherent belief that Canadians are incapable of producing content that is entertaining enough to be marketable to a wider audience. Of course, we know this is not the case. Yet for every successful show, where the funding agencies manage an audience (and therefore financial) return on investment (ie Trailer Park Boys, Corner Gas, Little Mosque on the Prairie), how many projects get snuffed for cheaper, more lucrative programming from the south? (And they complain about runaway productions!)

Perhaps, if we were to really believe in the invisible hand of the free market, our market-oriented government would provide us with the tools to actually compete with our competitors. That is to say, we would have a financial infrastructure similar to that of the Americans which is not solely reliant on government subsidy and policy objectives.

But at the highest levels, there are new ideas about what the free market, and government policy, look like. If we want to find out what policy objectives are being pursued right now with respect to commerce and national identity, we need only search “North American Community” (or simply peruse the news about the recent Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Quebec). Perhaps we will be able to finally understand why the current glut of American programming fills our airwaves. But, if it is to be a fait accompli, it would at least be in our best interests to understand that the great homogenization of our airwaves is reaching a new level.

And that is an issue that should unite all interested parties, rather than divide. But then again, maybe that’s exactly what the government wants. If this seems a bit of a stretch, consider the current search for the next CBC president, and how close those in charge of filling that position are to the PMO.

Sources:
1. Report of the CRTC Task Force on the Canadian Television Fund, June 29, 2007
2. CFTPA website, Jan 8, 2007
3. Canadian Producer Newswire website, by ACTRA, Jan 24, 2007
4. Toronto Star, Top Tory to head search for CBC execs, by Jim Brown CP, Aug 02, 2007