YOU SHOULD KNOW SOMETHING-ANYTHING-ABOUT THIS MOVIE. YOU PAID FOR IT

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Fall 2003 by Urquhart, Peter

Resume : Les nouvelles politiques du gouvernement canadien a la fin des annees 70 ont mene a une remarquable croissance de production cinematographique souvent appelee le « Boom des abris fiscaux ». Selon le mythe populaire, les films realises pendant cette periode sont tous des navets a l'amaricaine. L'auteur de cet article remet en question cette perspective en suggerant que Ie nationalisme culturel des critiques et historiens a oblitere un bon nombre de films qui meritaient notre attention. Denoncant les ramifications limitatives de la position critique etablie, l'auteur analyse trois films de l'epoque-Suzanne, Yesterday et hot Dogs-qui, loin d'etre des clones hollywoodiens, traitent allegoriquement des rapports Quebec-Canada.

The latest edition of James Monaco's popular American textbook, How to Read a Film, contains a thirty-one-page "chronology of film and media," and the first entry for 1979 reads, "Canada and Australia emerge as film powers."1 The description in an undergraduate film textbook of Canada as a "film power" should be startling to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Canadian film history. Even those who are well acquainted with this history have evidently chosen to ignore or downplay Canada's briefly-held powerful position in world cinema production, since the prevailing characterization of the Canadian cinema has been one of failure and absence.2 The year Monaco cites as the moment of Canada's accession to cinematic power marks the height of what has become known as "the tax-shelter boom." In 1979 seventy certified-Canadian feature films were shot, more than in any other year and a very large number for Canada by any measure.3

Beginning from the position that there is a received wisdom on the tax-shelter boom, I examine what the literature reveals this received wisdom on the period to be, and then pose some questions about it. My goal is to demonstrate that culturally nationalist biases endemic to Canadian film studies have had serious historiographical consequences. It is my contention that these biases have resulted in a limited, skewed, and inaccurate perception of what actually constitutes the Canadian national cinema, by rendering numerous films invisiblespecifically the films of the tax-shelter boom, which remain more or less ignored up to the present. Redressing this situation should help to produce a fuller, more accurate understanding of what exactly constitutes a Canadian national cinema, as well as demonstrate the consequences of such historical blind spots. I argue that all the films of the tax-shelter boom need to be taken into account and, further, that certain titles that have been made invisible can be shown to be representative of attitudes associated with specific times and places of importance in Canadian history and culture. Noting that the height of the tax-shelter boom coincided with Quebec's "sovereignty association" referendum in May 1980,1 conclude by suggesting how three of the invisible films of the period can be read in terms of the contemporary debates over Quebec's future in Canada.

THE RECEIVED WISDOM

December 15, 1980. Prime Minister Trudeau, in black tie, a blood-red rose ever so slightly wilted on his satin jacket collar, looked pensive. A journalist had gestured toward the ballroom. Taking in the fur, the diamonds, the hairdos, the journalist had commented, "Your government is in some sense responsible for all this." The prime minister smiled. "It is amazing what a few tax laws can do, " he said. Then he added, with a shrug, "There are now many Canadian films. But there aren't too many good ones, are there?"4

Jay Scott's anecdote sums up the conventional take on the anomalously inflated productivity in the Canadian film industry during the boom: that the investment-encouraging tax shelter provided by the "Capital Cost Allowance" worked extremely well, but also that a huge majority, if not all, of the films produced under this scheme were wretched.5 Could it be that these films are underregarded or unacknowledged because they do not meet a certain taste standard of Canadianness? All we seem to know about the period can be summed up in such generalizations as the one Jim Leach offered in his 2002 Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture: "[T]he infamous Capital Cost Allowance Act of 1974 encouraged tendencies already present in the film industry to produce films that imitated the narrative structures of Hollywood genres and did their best to conceal any signs of the nation in which they were filmed. In these films...it was Canada that disappeared."6 That is the habitual, but not entirely accurate, characterization of the tax-shelter-boom period. I do not accuse Leach of doing anything other than repeating the received wisdom on the period, and I select this example only because of its recentness, its high profile, and the nodding reception which greeted this familiar and therefore apparently accurate claim.7 If it is true that many films of the period hid their Canadian origins, it is also true that many did not. Yet these have been erased from Canadian film history because of their association with the period in which they were made.