Canada



A FEATURE FILM INDUSTRY BEGINS

The NFB has been drastically downsized since the 1980s, the result of a series of government funding cutbacks, to the point that it has little presence in Canadian culture. Nevertheless, the board's documentary emphasis has left an indelible influence on feature filmmaking in Canada. In the absence of a commercial film industry, the NFB has allowed many filmmakers who would later become the country's most important directors to hone their craft on government-sponsored films. The two films that are generally acknowledged as marking the beginning of the Canadian feature film industry, Nobody Waved Good-bye (1964) by Don Owen and La vie heureuse de Léopold Z ( The Merry World of Leopold Z [1965]) by Gilles Carle (b. 1929), in English Canada and Quebec respectively, began as NFB documentaries. Carle's film, about a Montreal snowplow driver working on Christmas Eve, began as a documentary about snow removal in Montreal. Similarly, Nobody Waved Good-bye was initially intended to be a half-hour docudrama about juvenile delinquency in Toronto, but the director Owen, who earlier in his career had worked as a cameraman on some of the NFB's direct cinema films, improvised most of the dialogue and script, shooting each scene in chronological order, often using a handheld camera and lapel microphones. The film's teenage protagonist (Peter Kastner), rebelling against authority and the Establishment, is, like the film itself, an act of rebellion against the established norms of production at the NFB.

DAVID CRONENBERG
b. Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 15 March 1943

The Canadian director, screenwriter, and actor David Cronenberg has been one of the most important directors of the horror film renaissance that began in the 1970s. His explorations of biological terror and sexual dread have provided a strikingly original approach to the genre.

Beginning his career with a series of effectively creepy horror films, Cronenberg moved from exploitation to art cinema and achieved international acclaim with several challenging and unconventional films ( Dead Ringers [1988], Naked Lunch [1991], M. Butterfly , 1993), which culminated in his daring adaptation of J. G. Ballard's novel Crash (1996), a movie condemned by reviewers as "beyond the bounds of depravity" and awarded a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Cronenberg's first feature, Shivers (aka They Came from Within and The Parasite Murders , 1975), featured a compellingly repulsive parasite that releases uncontrollable sexual desire in its human hosts. The film, partially funded by the Canadian Film Development Corporation, was a wry commentary on the contemporary ideology of sexual liberation. But in Canada it was perceived as so offensive that members of Parliament protested against government support for such "disgusting" movies. Cronenberg's later horror films took the same visceral approach, emphasizing bodily terror and scenes of gross physical violation. In Rabid (Rage, 1977), actress Marilyn Chambers (a former Ivory Snow Girl and porn star), develops a murderous phallic spike that protrudes from her armpit, killing the men she embraces; in The Brood (1979) the metaphor of bodily mutation is literalized as an external manifestation of repressed emotional rage. Cronenberg's 1986 remake of The Fly (1958), which depicts in horrific detail the protagonist's gradual physical disintegration after his DNA is accidentally fused with that of a common housefly, has been read as a metaphor for the bodily ravages of AIDS.

Videodrome (1983) is perhaps Cronenberg's most accomplished horror film. Its story of an opportunistic TV producer (James Woods) who becomes obsessed with a sadistic-erotic program emanating from a mysterious American pirate station is a postmodern parable about the seductive effects of television and media. Videodrome is a stylistic tour-de-force in which fantasy merges with reality, and neither character nor viewer can tell the difference. Cronenberg would later use the same technique in his cyberpunk film about computer games and virtual reality, eXistenZ (1999).

Cronenberg's emphasis on bodily horror has been the subject of considerable critical debate. Some critics have argued that Cronenberg's work is motivated by a sense of sexual disgust that bespeaks a conservative, repressive ideology, while others have argued for Cronenberg as a progressive director who exposes the contradictions of western culture's concepts of sexuality. However one interprets Cronenberg's films, their fantastical nature freed Canadian cinema from the realist model that had dominated it previously.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Shivers (aka They Came from within and The Parasite Murders , 1975), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1992), M. Butterfly (1993), Crash (1996), eXistenZ (1999), A History of Violence (2005)

FURTHER READING

Beard, William. The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Grant, Michael, ed. The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg . London: Flicks Books, 2000, and Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000.

Handling, Piers, ed. The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg . Toronto: General Publishing, and New York: New York Zoetrope, 1983.

Rodley, Chris, ed. Cronenberg on Cronenberg . London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

Sinclair, Iain. Crash . London: British Film Institute, 1999.

Barry Keith Grant

The tax-shelter years (1974–1982), when investors were able to write off 100 percent of their investment in

David Cronenberg.

Canadian films (Capital Cost Allowance), witnessed a second wave of mostly mediocre movies. Intended to stimulate production of Canadian films, the tax shelter produced mostly B movies with second-rate Hollywood actors, although a few quality films, such as the effective crime thriller The Silent Partner (1978) and Atlantic City (1980) by French director Louis Malle, also were made. One of the least pretentious movies of this era, Porky's (1982), a raucous, American-style teen film about a group of frat boys trying to lose their virginity in South Florida in the 1950s, remains as of 2006 the most commercially successful Canadian film ever made.

Given an audience formed largely by Hollywood genre movies, many Canadian feature films of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately played off American film genres in an attempt to establish a distinctive approach to popular cinema while finding success at the box-office. American genre movies have impossible heroes who overcome enormous obstacles and succeed in their goals; Canadian movies often feature fallible protagonists, antiheroes who are less mythical in stature. Some of these films use the conventions of American genre movies to comment on American cultural colonization. In Paperback Hero (1973), the American actor Keir Dullea plays a hockey player in a small Canadian prairie town who causes his own death as a result of clinging to fantasies of American westerns. Canadian genre films also tend to emphasize character and situation over action and spectacle, as in Goin' Down the Road (1970) by Donald Shebib (b. 1938), a road movie about two naive hicks from Nova Scotia who come to Toronto to realize their dreams but fail miserably, and Between Friends (1973), a caper film with a bunch of inept amateurs whose robbery plan collapses even before it begins. This downbeat tendency in Canadian movies of the 1960s and 1970s also reflects the country's earlier emphasis on the somber quality of traditional documentary filmmaking.



Also read article about Canada from Wikipedia

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: