Canadian National Cinema

Chris Gittings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134764853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Canadian National Cinema explores the idea of the nation across Canada's film history, from early films of colonisation and white settlement such as The Wheatfields of Canada and Back to God's Country, to recent films like Nô, LE Confessional Mon Oncle Antoine, Grey Fox, Highway 61, Kanehsatake, and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.

1

IMMIGRATION AND EMPIRE-BUILDING

Film as a colonizing discourse

Canada has long been subject to various formations of the colonizing gaze. Here Canada is a problematic signifier. Is its signified the territory north of the forty-ninth parallel? The people – indigenous, white invader-settlers,¹ multi-cultural immigrants? The state? The nation, or in Benedict Anderson's phrase, the ‘imagined community’? All of these very different but interrelated signifieds have been organized under the signifier Canada. In the present context Canada will be read as all of the cultural co-ordinates used to narrate the nation. As these co-ordinates are often variant and in competition with each other, the nation or idea of Canada is necessarily indeterminate. While the recognition of this indeterminacy, this failure of the nation to signify in a totalizing manner, is a central tenet of this project, the films considered in this chapter were created by those with an investment in a monolithic, homogeneous representation of Canada that would exclude or marginalize the ambvialent differences of ‘nationness’ that concern Homi Bhabha in his introduction to Nation and Narration:

the heimlich pleasures of the hearth, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other; the comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class; the customs of taste, the powers of political affiliation; the sense of social order, the sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of bureaucracy, the strait insight of institutions; the quality of justice, the common sense of injustice; the langue of the law and the parole of the people.

(Bhabha 1990, 2)

These film-makers then, are apprehending and shooting the nation through a colonizing gaze, a hegemonic and controlling way of looking at the world that is, as E. Ann Kaplan explains, ‘determined by history, tradition, power hierarchies, politics, economics. Mythic or imaginary ideas about nation’ and ‘national identity’ as well as race, gender and sexuality (Kaplan 1997, 4). This looking is structured by the white, male, heterosexual, British and Canadian colonial subjectivity of film-makers who represent Canadian landscape as a commodified resource to be exploited in the project of empire-building, and who see the indigenous peoples as entertaining spectacles, exotica, that must be traversed, denigrated, manipulated to further the ends of empire.² In short the lens of the cameraman views the land, its indigenous and invader-settler populations as materials to be narrated. This narration or representation of Canada determines through the codes of language and image who belongs to the nation and who does not. Jean-François Lyotard is well aware of the power of such narratives when he argues that ‘Narrative is authority itself. It authorizes an infrangible we, outside of which there is only they’ (Lyotard 1992, 32). The infrangible we authorized by these films is a white, Anglo-Protestant or Anglo-Saxon, male camera eye that projects itself as the normative ‘we’ of the imagined community Canada.

IMMIGRATION FILMS – ATTRACTING THE RIGHT/WHITE KIND OF INVADER-SETTLERS

Among the very first cinematic images of Canada produced in 1896 by American and European firms were ‘interest’ shots of such physical features as Niagara Falls and the Rockies (Morris 1978, 29). These films were popular with both foreign and domestic audiences and helped to create a space in the market for what are widely regarded as the first Canadian-produced films of the country, photographed by James S. Freer. A white invader-settler from Bristol who arrived in Manitoba in 1888, Freer recorded positive experiences of immigrant life in Canada, and, with an accompanying lecture and the financial backing of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, toured these films in Britain in 1898 under the title Ten Years in Manitoba. These films, which include Harnessing the Virgin Prairie, constitute a gendered and colonizing narrative in which the territory of the Dominion of Canada is represented as a fertile and passive terrain awaiting the cultivation or domination of the male British settler.³ As Peter Morris comments, the tour was a great success and revealed the power of the motion picture as an ‘emigration agent’ (Morris 1978, 30). Both the CPR and Canadian government realized the potential of film to act as an agent for the settlement of the West. Many more films were produced to create a desire for emigration to Canada, but a very specific emigration revolving around the matter of whiteness and the furthering of the British Empire. At this time Canadian nation-building occurred within the British Empire, and was tantamount to empire-building. After all, Canada was known, in the imperial rhetoric of the day as the ‘Britain of the North’ (quoted in Berger 1966, 4).

What Richard Dyer refers to as the ‘matter of whiteness’, the construction of white as a normative category existing outside of race, suffuses the images and narratives of these films (Dyer 1997, 1). In the dominant imperial ideology of the time, white is a normative category against which all other races are judged and found lacking. French imperialist Jules Harmand spoke in 1910 of a ‘hierarchy’ of superior ‘races and civilizations’ constituted by whites that legitimized the conquest of non-white native peoples (quoted in Said 1993, 17). In Canada where between 1896 and 1914 three million immigrants arrived – 800,000 of them from the non-Anglo-Saxon world – Angus McLaren notes a similar white supremacist hierarchy of race that was deeply entrenched in thinking around immigration: ‘British and Americans were viewed as the most desirable, next northern and western Europeans, after them the central and eastern Europeans (including the Jews), and last of all the Asians and blacks’ (McLaren 1990, 47). Ironically, the Chinese and Sikh labour imported into British Columbia by the railway companies to complete the master code of Canadian nation, the national railway, is considered other to that nation. In the interests of creating a racially, culturally homogeneous, unitary idea of nation, images of a white Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Protestant Canada are circulated at home, and more importantly in Britain, to solicit an immigration that might reflect this fictive ethnicity of the nation projected on to the movie screen and the national psyche. For, as Etienne Balibar argues in his theorizing of fictive ethnicity and its role in the construction of nation, ‘No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally’ (Balibar 1991, 96). The denigration or exclusion of a dominant group's other in social or cultural formations helps to create what Balibar describes as a ‘fictive ethnicity’, that is the ethnicity of the fabricated ‘community instituted by the nation-state’: in the Canadian context, white Anglo-Protestant or Anglo-Saxon invader-settler culture (Balibar 1991, 96).

Early immigration films such as Wonders of Canada (1906) produced by the English Charles Urban Trading Co. depict the process of commodifying Canada's resources. Shots of harvesting grain cut to shots of logging, which in turn give way to the harvesting of salmon at Steveston, BC. The shots of white men harnessing the resources of the land are interrupted by a Native powwow and a shot of a First Nations chief smoking a pipe in a canoe. The jump cut from a white nation-building that revolves around a harvesting of the environment to images of First Nations cultural practice creates a narrative rupture in which the ideology driving the narrative becomes visible. Juxtaposing shots brings about a collision that produces meaning; the various shots in this short film comment on each other. Although the cuts between the white invader-settler sequences are not match cuts, they do not call attention to themselves or disrupt the narrative in the way that the jump cut from white invader-settler activity to First Nations cultural practice does. The white invader-settler images illustrate the white man's industry and domination over a series of natural resources. The jump cut sets these ‘progressive’ activities apart from those of the Other, Indigenous peoples who are represented as indigent. Given the previous frames of film which represent the white man's successful and productive conquest of the natural world, the First Nations, figured here as non-producers, serve as a further index of the white man's domination of his environment. First Nations are indeed figured as part of that environment whites have attained mastery over. Through the technology of cinema, First Nations are commodified, ‘produced’ for a domestic and international market. The chain of signification initiated by the harvesting sequences of devastated forests, and geometric fields of wheat, works to deny First Nations subjectivity, structuring them as part of a disappearing wilderness. Wonders of Canada, an immigration recruitment film exhibited in Britain, and in Germany under the title daas Mutterherz Joye, establishes a racial hierarchy for the potential white immigrant spectator to identify with: whites control and benefit from the land that they have displaced First Nations from.⁴ The spectator is always-already structured as white and male. If we accept that ideology is in part the ‘discourse that invests a nation or society with meaning’ (Hayward 1996, 181), and that ‘ideology constitutes false ideas which legitimate a dominant political power’ (

i

ek 1994, 3), this film narrativizes the ‘fact’ of Canada as a white nation of male producers and fixes the Aboriginal other as an inert figure of another time on the margins of that nation. This false image of First Nations as a non-productive part of the landscape is deployed to legitimize the theft of their territories by the white nation. First Nations did work the land successfully, so successfully that on the prairies large-scale Aboriginal agricultural projects which threatened the profits of white invader-settler farmers were undermined by the white nation through the imposition of a system of ‘peasant’ or subsistence farming (Carter 1991).

The Wheatfields of Canada (1908), made by the English company Warwick, is another immigration film constructing a racial economy of the nation through a representation of the processes of production in Western Canada. The establishing shot shows a horse pulling a plough with white men walking behind holding the reins. This shot then cuts to an intertitle reading ‘Ploughing By Steam Power – 250 Miles of Furrow Per Day’, which in turn cuts to a shot of a steam-driven plough in action. As in Wonders of Canada, the image of a wilderness disappearing under the domination of white technology signifies progress. Subsequent shots and intertitles narrate the cycle of production: threshing, transportation to markets and the transformation of the grain into a finished product, bread. Composed of seven white children sitting in a wheatfield eating bread, the final shot of the finished product is the site of an intersection of racial, cultural and political economies of nation. A preceding intertitle interprets this image for the spectator, emphasizing the allegorical level of the film: ‘The Realization of Canada's Ambition’. This film is an allegory for the production of the nation. ‘Canada's Ambition’ – white nation-building – is fed by the development of a vibrant economy, in this context the contribution of wheat production to a GNP, which in turn feeds the white settlers the bread necessary to sustain the settlement and nation-building process. The children's location in the field of production frames them, like the finished product they are consuming, the bread, as the produced of the national narrative, the product of a racial economics of nation underscored by the presence of an infant held in the arms of one of the children. The infant, a sign of white settler reproduction, supports Dyer's contention that heterosexuality is an essential dimension to whiteness, race and imperialism: ‘If race is always about bodies, it is also about the reproduction of those bodies through heterosexuality’ (Dyer 1997, 25). Heteronormativity and reproduction of white settlers are dominant motifs in films of immigration during this period.

Clan Donald: A British Farm Colony (1925), an immigration film sponsored by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company's Department of Colonization and Development, continues the ‘actuality’ reportage of real immigrants established by Freer, and developed by films such as Wonders of Canada and The Wheatfields of Canada. The film narrates the development of a Scottish colony at Vermillion, Alberta, by the Catholic church and contains ideological content similar to earlier films of this genre, such as the white ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• NATIONAL CINEMAS SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Canadian national cinemas – ideology, difference and representation
• 1 Immigration and empire-building: film as a colonizing discourse
• 2 Who is ethnographiable?
• 3 Producing a national cinema
• 4 Narrating nations/ma(r)king differences
• 5 Visualizing first nations
• 6 Multicultural fields of vision
• 7 Screening gender and sexuality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Select filmography
• Index