Genius loci, eh? A review of Penny Cousineau-Levine

Afterimage, March-April, 2004 by Peter Wollheim

FAKING DEATH: CANADIAN ART PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE CANADIAN IMAGINATION

Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003/324 pp./$49.95

Canada's ongoing collective identity crisis provides their patchwork country with somewhat of a distracting parlor game and source of never-ending introspection, academic conference material, moral self-righteousness, pillow talk and gossip. Especially when discussing themselves as living within the eclipsing penumbra of their neighbor to the south, many Canadians are apt to refer to their supposedly distinctive approaches to bilingualism, multiculturalism, federalism, or respect for individual freedoms and rights. All this supports a steady, if not spectacular, cottage industry for the Canadian intelligentsia. Like helpless relatives of a family member with a chronic terminal illness, Canada has watched the systematic wasting away and amputation of its onceproud cultural infrastructure of government-sponsored or protected film and TV production, music broadcasting and recording, print publishing and telecommunications.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As the old joke has it, Canada should be an ideal country: French culture, British government and American technology. Instead, it inherited French government, American culture and British technology. Neither fish nor fowl (ni poisson ni poulet) as a modern nation-state, Canada's multiple personality disorder began in the seventeenth century. Unlike the United States, the landed squires of the original French and British colonies never rebelled against their imperialist masters, and clung to holdings that served as a bloody frontier battleground between the last of I'ancient regime and the neuropathic scion of the House of Hanover. Decades before the rag-tag Americans settled the British army's hash, the decisive battle of the Seven Years War in North America took place on the Plains of Abraham, just outside Quebec City. The battle site is still visited, like a shrine, by those Quebecquois nationalists who harken back to "les good old days" of an autonomous New France. The battle itself was additionally notable because both opposing generals, Wolfe and Montcalm, received mortal wounds. This no doubt pleased those in the ranks but left a legacy of commingled blood to curse at least seven subsequent generations. The victorious British, not powerful or bloodyminded enough to either exterminate or assimilate the French and having not yet invented the term synergy, fostered the growth of a comprador class of bankers, merchants, politicians and clergy which quickly got down to the business of exploiting its own underclass as well as the indigenous Cree and Assiniboine.

Fast forward to 1867: after a series of political clashes, uprisings and armed insurrections on part of the dissatisfied French and English proles and the native populations, accommodations hardened into institutions. The business of exploiting indigenous peoples and newer immigrants had now become an industrial-strength, three-ocean-coastline policy habit. England, somewhat tired of policing this troublesome potage but firmly intent on skimming off its profits, passed the British North America Act (BNA). This formally established the Canadian federal system (Parliament, provinces, police) but left the new confederation's foreign policies (especially trade) and major constitutional powers firmly in Whitehall's hands and the British monarch at its sovereign head. Now a self-administering unit within the British Dominion, with the French pacified under a form of protectorate, Canada largely continued to export primary resources and import them back as finished and more expensive products.

World War One demonstrated that Canada's ethnic fissures remained as deep as tectonic plates. While Anglo leaders urged entrance into the war under the slogan "For King and Country," they also saw a timely opportunity to extract further political concessions from a beleaguered Britain. The French, for their part, would have none of it and talk of conscription nearly precipitated a constitutional crisis. But just as Canada began toddling away from Britain, the emergence of the United States as an international power hobbled its first steps. At a post-war conference to allocate electromagnetic frequencies, Canada received the smallest and weakest part of the radio spectrum. This and wattage restrictions meant that American programming could easily penetrate cross-border markets and create national audience networks. In the same era, Hollywood bought up and swamped Canadian theatrical outlets with its own products, monopolized raw film sales and photofinishing, and drew top cinematic talent into its own orbit. Similar incursions resulted in American dominance over newspaper and magazine publishing, advertising, textbook authorship, music recording and other cultural industries. British and American media barons battled it out, with television broadcasting and production representing the modern Plains of Abraham and the Yanks acting as unrepentant victors. Government sponsored and subsidized media such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the National Film Board of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and, eventually, the Canadian Film Development Corporation did attempt to maintain some vestiges of national self-consciousness. Despite an official arms-length distance between themselves and Parliament, their content was often criticized by the government of the day.