Canada

BEGINNINGS

Feature filmmaking began in Canada with Evangeline (1914), made by Canadian Bioscope Company in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but after only six more films, the company failed financially. For the next fifty years, feature filmmaking in Canada was only intermittent. Carry On Sergeant (1928), an expensive World War I epic, was a commercial flop and did not provide the stimulus needed for renewed production. The introduction of sound to cinema around the same time eliminated the few fledgling film companies that did exist because they could not afford the cost of converting to sound.

American financial interests have consistently worked to hinder the development of an indigenous feature film industry in Canada. In the late 1920s, when several other countries moved to establish quota systems to combat the dominance of American films, American companies moved into Canada to take advantage of Britain's quota system, which allowed for films made anywhere in the British Empire to enter Britain duty free. In Canada, they produced a wave of "quota quickies"—low-budget exploitation movies—most of which were imitation Hollywood films with no relation to Canada. By the time the British quota laws were amended in 1938 to exclude films produced outside of Britain, a true Canadian film industry had ceased to exist.

For ten years beginning in 1948, Canada acceded to the infamous Canadian Cooperation Agreement, an initiative of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). In essence, Canada agreed to refrain from encouraging feature film production, thus allowing for continued American control of the industry, in return for which American studios would shoot some films on location in Canada and make occasional favorable references to Canada in movie dialogue for the purpose of promoting tourism. As if the obvious disadvantages of this arrangement for Canada were not enough, the occasional references to Canada tended to stereotype the country as a frozen wilderness. In the epic western Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948), for example, one cowboy on the cattle drive complains that if they keep heading north, they'll soon be driving the cattle "up and down the icebergs in Canada."