Working on Screen: Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema 9781442683686

Citation preview

WORKING ON SCREEN: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WORKING CLASS IN CANADIAN CINEMA

As themes in film studies literature, work and the working class have long occupied a peripheral place in the evaluation of Canadian cinema. Such themes have often been set aside for the sake of a unifying narrative that assumes a division between Québécois and English Canada’s film production, a social-realist documentary aesthetic, and what might be called a ‘younger brother’ relationship with the United States. In Working on Screen, contributors examine representations of socioeconomic class across the spectrum of Canadian film. In doing so, they cover a wide range of class-related topics and deal with them as they intersect with history, political activism, globalization, feminism, queer rights, masculinity, regional marginalization, cinematic realism, and Canadian nationalism. Of concern in this collection are the daily lives and struggles of working people and the ways in which the representation of the experience of class in film fosters or marginalizes a progressive engagement with history, politics, and societies around the world. Working on Screen expands the scholarly debates on the concept of national cinema and builds on the rich, formative efforts of Canadian cultural criticism that focused on the need for cultural autonomy. malek khouri is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. darrell varga is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Contemporary Film and Media Studies at the NSCAD (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) University.

This page intentionally left blank

Working on Screen Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema

Edited by Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN-13: ISBN-10: ISBN-13: ISBN-10:

978-0-8020-9076-6 (cloth) 0-8020-9076-1 (cloth) 978-0-8020-9388-2 (paper) 0-8020-9388-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Working on screen : representations of the working class in Canadian cinema / edited by Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9076-6 (bound) ISBN-10: 0-8020-9076-1 (bound) ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9388-2 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-8020-9388-4 (pbk.) 1. Working class in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures – Canada – History. I. Khouri, Malek, 1953– II. Varga, Darrell, 1966– PN1995.9.L28W67 2006

791.43′6352624

C2006-902205-4

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Foreword ix thomas waugh Acknowledgments xv Introduction: Working on Screen 3 malek khouri and darrell varga PART ONE: WORKERS, HISTORY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY 1 In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 25 david frank 2 Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 46 scott forsyth 3 The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 73 darrell varga PART TWO: WORK, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY 4 Work It Girl! Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 95 rebecca sullivan

vi Contents

5 Not Playing, Working: Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 113 bart beaty 6 Other-ing the Worker in Canadian ‘Gay Cinema’: Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden 134 malek khouri 7 Whose Museum Is It, Anyway? Discourses of Resistance in the Adaptation of The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum into Margaret’s Museum 148 peter urquhart PART THREE: DIRTY WORK 8 Activating History: Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project 161 susan lord 9 Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Construction of the Nation 178 margot francis PART FOUR: WORKING ON NATIONAL CINEMA 10 Look like a Worker and Act like a Worker: Stereotypical Representations of the Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 207 andré loiselle 11 Inscriptions of Class and Nationalism in Canadian ‘Realist’ Cinema: Final Offer and Canada’s Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks 235 joseph kispal-kovacs 12 Rude and the Representation of Class Relations in Canadian Film 246 john mccullough

Contents vii

13 Counter Narratives, Class Politics, and Metropolitan Dystopias: Representations of Globalization in Maelström, waydowntown, and La moitié gauche du frigo 268 brenda longfellow Selected Bibliography 283 Contributors 291

This page intentionally left blank

Foreword

This excellent collection of essays on representations of the working class in Canadian cinemas reminds me of my grandmother. Clara Gertrude Waugh (1884–1961) was a Jackie Gleason fan. When I knew her, my father’s mother was a working-class widow subsisting on her pension in a rooming house in South London, Ontario, sharing many a pot of tea and a communal TV set with the other elderly women who lived there. Grandma Waugh’s taste also included Don Messer’s Jubilee (Canada, 1958–69) and romance novels, and reflected her Middlesex County class roots and culture. I didn’t get it at all, and as a pretentious, four-eyed, future queer intellectual I found Jackie Gleason vulgar and boring. Not that I was a devotee of the then emerging corpus of Canadian moving images either – far from it – for my exposure had been restricted to National Film Board shorts projected in Grades 6 and 7, and to Tommy Hunter and Juliette on the CBC. These latter bizarre manifestations of outmoded provinciality I immediately switched off, along with Don Messer and Hockey Night in Canada, in deference to hipper American pop culture artifacts such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, which bowed out a few months after my grandmother died in 1961. Her daughter-in-law, my mother, Hope (b. 1919), a high school teacher, had tendencies towards upwardly mobile class snobbery. I shared her aspiration to middle-class values, which for her was finally fulfilled around the start of the 1960s. At that time my father, Thomas Ralph (b. 1920), a United Church minister who had been the only child in Clara’s family of seven to go to university, moved from a workingclass congregation in Brantford, Ontario, to a middle-class congregation in nearby Guelph. In Brantford, I had denied point-blank at a sharing circle in my kindergarten class at King George School that my father

x Thomas Waugh

had a job, as I condescendingly thought ‘jobs’ were the factory occupations that all my classmates’ fathers had, rather than the role in the intelligentsia played by my university-educated father. When this claim was recounted to the entire Marlboro Street United congregation across the street, full of farm-equipment assembly-line workers from Cockshutt and Massey-Ferguson, they were all amused. My mother had perhaps inspired my class confusion: shaped by her prairie Depression girlhood (where her father got most of his salary in kind, supplemented by one egg a week and charity underwear shipments from Ontario) and seemingly ashamed of her rural relatives from Oxford and Waterloo County, Ontario, with their bad grammar and German accents, she had been bedazzled by the university professors who were part of her congregation in Guelph. She dreamed of having a mink stole, but was able to acquire one only at the end of the 1960s, thanks to an inheritance of hand-me-downs from a condescending and distant, wealthy cousin from the middle-class Wasp side of her family – when, in my view, mink stoles were already hopelessly out of style. Clara, despite her fourth-generation Upper Canada Protestant roots, had little faith in delayed gratification, and would argue with my mother that if you always ate the bad apples first, as Hope did, this would be all you would ever eat. That sentiment was no doubt one of my grandmother’s recipes for prevailing over what had been a very rough life. Bringing up seven children on a single working-class income during the 1920s and 1930s had not been a breeze, but even if my twin aunts had found it necessary to share the same ‘good’ dress between them, the formal family photos are full of dignity, love, and smart, working-class, shoulder-padded fashion sense. Their family had started on the farm in Middlesex County but were compelled to leave it during the 1920s for reasons that are now obscure. No doubt my grandfather was not successful as a farmer, and they joined the migration to the big city, one of the demographic dynamics of twentieth-century Canadian history. In one of the only 1920s photos of my grandfather, Thomas Anderson Waugh (1880–1943), in all probability set up by an itinerant photographer to include an unprosperous-looking farmhouse, Grandpa looks stooped and older than he was. In London he ended up as a not very successful vendor at the CNR station, where, hard of hearing, he was run over by a train during the Second World War, at the age of sixty-three. His eldest sons, Ellis (1906–91) and Morley (1908–81), had long since joined the workforce as a bus driver (like Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners, 1955–6) and a CNR worker, respectively. Along with

Foreword xi

their other siblings, they helped their youngest brother, my father, to graduate from the University of Western Ontario. My father received an exemption from wartime service as a clergyman, and my uncles, who were married and in their thirties, were too old to join up. Thus, all three brothers were invisible in the NFB’s seminal series Canada Carries On and the other films that were being made in Canada about the epic crisis of national formation and global engagement. Unfortunately, I had little in common with these uncles, never really getting to know them or their working-class children, but I had other cousins who paralleled our family in the emergence of the great English-Canadian middle class. Their mothers, Clara’s daughters, had been able to gingerly ascend the class ladder: the nurse who married an upper-crust doctor during her wartime service overseas, the two schoolteachers, and the prosperous farmer’s wife in Perth County. It is only as an adult, with a cozy academic job and eco-feminist-queer-leftist principles, and, thanks to my sister Joanna’s inspired genealogical detective work, that I have been able to look back at this familial archeology. This ‘people’s history,’ this saga of two women and their husbands, whose common name I have inherited, is a history that is rich in the undercurrents of class meanings, identifications, and mobilities – upward and downward – of social and geographic place. It stirs up my indulgent and contradictory feelings of pride, discovery, loss, and regret. Canadian film studies is infused with similar indulgent and contradictory feelings as a discipline when it reflects on the representations and inscriptions of the working class in our corpus. Thanks to the inextricability of the New Left from the emergent discipline of film studies in the late 1960s and 1970s, class has never been invisible within our scholarly conversations about film, nor from our films themselves – though as Darrell Varga and Malek Khouri point out in the introduction, it has often been deflected for the sake of nationalist concerns. As this volume makes clear, the tradition is rich and ongoing, and contradictions have been rife: the denials and the caricatures, the idealizations and the prejudices (both among the makers and the analysts), within the films and the film reviews alike. Class has often come back to haunt us like a guilty secret, or like a bull in the china shops of art cinema, elitist academic discourse, and chic festival evenings. We cannot, therefore, say that this collection of brilliant reflections on a cultural history spanning the Second World War to the present is a pioneering one: it is instead part of an ongoing and necessary dialogue. Contributors such as Scott Forsyth and Brenda Longfellow have been working on this

xii Foreword

subject for some time, but even the kids in the hall – such as Darrell Varga, Malek Khouri, and Susan Lord – have made important contributions in their short careers. Not the first, this book is all the same a very important one in its scope and focus, depth and diversity, fervour and lucidity – and the fact that these contributions are all together in the same place. This book makes great strides in telling it like it is, in deciphering images on the screen with all their contradictory meanings about social, economic, and cultural life in this unjust society. It will by no means be last the book to do so. One of this book’s major achievements is the directions it points to for further research: will the next book on class in Canadian film, for example, offer due tribute to the great epics of class alienation and struggle within the continuous tradition of the Quebec documentary from the 1950s to the 1980s, and invoke makers such as Gilles Groulx, Arthur Lamothe, Denys Arcand (yes, him!), Maurice Bulbulian, Martin Duckworth, Studio D, and Sophie Bissonnette? Concordia University, where I teach, is a great multicultural university that grew out of the amalgamation of Sir George Williams University, a downtown night school for immigrant and working-class people who could not afford or were banned outright from McGill, with Loyola College, a suburban Jesuit college that functioned, among other things, as an upwards escape hatch for the anglophone Irish poor. The tradition is persistent, and many of my students are still the first in their families to go to university. I often think of my father here, and wonder what it was like for him at Western, a rugger-playing theology student from South London suddenly finding himself working his way through that fraternity-ridden crucible of Upper Canadian establishment formation. When I talk about class in my Concordia classroom – not too fatuously I hope – I sometimes think I see a certain resentment mixed with bemusement, and perhaps even a glimmer of validation in the eyes of my students who know a lot more about class than I do, with their huge tuition debts, part-time and even full-time jobs on top of the pressures they face from families who do not understand how film and cultural studies will help them find jobs. I hope this book will help establish for my students the pertinence of our field. My own book on Canadian film and video, The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, and Cinemas (2006), is structured around the themes of sexual identity and desire, analysing traditional heterofamilial socialization and the margins of sexual subversion. But the book always threatened to be displaced by the problem

Foreword xiii

of class, much more conspicuous in its classical forms than postmodern punditry about its obsolescence and invisibility would lead us to believe. Queer filmmakers, film curators, and writers are still compensating for generations of our invisibility in ‘progressive’ discourses, both on screen and off, of the cinematic Left. Accordingly we have developed an often autonomous tradition of documentary, fiction, and experimental discourses, celluloid and digital, anchored in the dozen or so well-entrenched community film festivals from coast to coast. A typical film riding the crest of this tradition, the accomplished Class Queers (2003, 62 min.), by Torontonians Melissa Levin and Roxana Spicer, impressed viewers in the festival circuit and its CBC Newsworld Rough Cuts broadcast with its energized profile of Toronto’s Triangle Program, an ‘alternative’ high school for queer kids who are refugees from ordinary high schools. A moving tribute to a community’s commitment to its up-and-coming generations, Class Queers cannot help being, at the same time, a most vivid documentary cross-section of class conspicuously at work in metropolitan English Canada in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Following three students through the peripeteias of queer adolescence and studenthood over the course of the school year, the film reflects the momentum of a whole genre of queer melodrama around GLBT2Q (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, two-spirited, queer/questioning) kids coming of age and negotiating conflict, autonomy, and reconciliation in relation to parents and family – a genre about stigma and pride, rupture and growth. Adam and Adina make it bravely through the traumas of alienation, ostracism, and shame over gender and sexual identity, and come out on top: they are shown ultimately reconciled with family, community, and their middle-class suburban neighbourhoods. The third subject, Richard, an effeminate young man from the ‘projects,’ who may or may not make it as a hairdresser and is torn between immediate validation with his new boyfriend and the delayed gratification of high school and vocational training, is not so lucky. Richard is almost smothered, although less by gender and sexual stigma than by the economic and class disadvantages accruing to his working-class family background. Adrift in the corporal, vestimentary, linguistic, narrative, and cultural codings of class capital, Richard seems pushed relentlessly by systemic social pressures towards dropping out – of school and of the film. The documentary is rich in the semiotics of familial dysfunctionality and substance abuse among the urban poor: the mother who cannot afford dental care, the stepfather who is both punitive and indifferent, as well as economi-

xiv Foreword

cally inflected issues around personal privacy and space, and so on. Levin and Spicer stop just short of any implication that working-class homophobia is more virulent than the middle-class homophobia faced by Adina and Adam. But troubling ambiguities remain about the representation of Richard’s class context as well as the documentary stakes around subject ethics and representations of class. The working-class resilience that Richard undoubtedly shows may eventually serve him in good stead, but the film provides none of this reassurance. Ironically, ‘class’ in the title of this superb documentary – Class Queers – means educational space and cohort, not the socio-economic designation or affiliation ‘discovered’ by Marx. In fact the title acquires a marvellous and felicitous aptness on both scores. Like that documentary, the wonderful book you have in your hands could also be called ‘class queers’ for the provocative ways in which it queers the ‘natural’ intersections of regional, linguistic, ethnic, and sexual identities with class affinities, status, and economics on the historical cinematic plane. Canadian moving image audiences and Canadian society have evolved considerably since the generations who preferred The Honeymooners and The Dick Van Dyke Show to the emerging ripples of Canadian screen cultures, and this book does them justice. It is an honour to present a volume of thirteen class queers confronting the obstinacy of class discourses, disguises, and foreground obstacles within Canadian cinemas and socio-cultural discourses, so expertly marshalled by Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga. It is a pleasure to reflect on the ways in which genealogies of families, societies, and cultures, of Clara and Thomas and their descendants, of Canada Carries On and Jackie Gleason, resonate behind these thirteen voices and the exemplary work they are carrying out. I am proud to smash a grandmotherly cup of tea across its prow. thomas waugh

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Siobhan McMenemy, acquisitions editor for University of Toronto Press, for her efforts on our behalf, as well as our excellent copy editor, Barbara Tessman. This book began as a series of conference presentations jointly sponsored by the Film Studies Association of Canada and Socialist Studies during annual conferences held at l’Université Laval in 2001, University of Toronto in 2002, and jointly at Dalhousie and NSCAD University in 2003. We are especially grateful to our film and cultural studies colleagues in Canada for support and encouragement. Darrell Varga wishes to acknowledge the Department of Communications, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University, where he carried out his share of the editorial work on this book, as well as the generous support of colleagues and administration at his current intellectual home, NSCAD University. He is especially thankful to Annemarie Smith for encouragement and courageous proofreading. Malek Khouri would like to thank the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. He also extends thanks to Dr Kathleen Scherf, whose friendship and support contributed to the completion of this project, and to Michelle Coyne for her editing work. Thanks also go to his friend Barbara Rockburn ... just for being herself! The editors of this book would also like to recognize the effort and insight of the anonymous external readers, whose generous and challenging comments have helped transform this work into the present book. Shortcomings remain our responsibility.

This page intentionally left blank

WORKING ON SCREEN

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: Working on Screen malek khouri and darrell varga

There is by now extensive film studies literature on the subject of Canadian cinemas – mainly in relation to national identity but also in connection with genre, style, historical periods, specific filmmakers, and more recently gender and sexuality. Prior to the 1980s, film critics tended to define Canadian cinema through the connotation of national cultural traits that were imagined as specific to the Canadian experience. Those traits were introduced as embodiments of national identity and, as Peter Morris points out, those works that tended to be celebrated and canonized were those that best reproduced this explicit cultural nationalism.1 These films were also identified as expressions of resistance against power structures that dominate the Canadian social, economical, political, and cultural landscape. Within this paradigm, critical discourse explored variable ontological and epistemological binaries between Canadian and American film models as representative of cultural distinction. The interest in studying Canadian cinema coincided with a wave of Canadian nationalism that grew during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For many Canadians on the left and for writers on Canadian films, nationalist anti-Americanism variously typified and shaped how they assessed the state of their own emerging cinema. Because interest in the subject of Canadian film developed largely during this particular period, and in the wake of a political project that was closely associated with affirming national identity, it was perhaps inevitable that what was to emerge later encompassed some diametrically opposing arguments and interests. There is certainly no shortage of images of workers in Canadian cinema. Hundreds of documentaries and numerous feature films focus

4 Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga

on work, workers, and the significance of the labour process. This cinema has been able to document and recreate a wide range of episodes in the struggles, defeats, and victories of working-class Canadians. However, the dominant tendency within Canadian film studies has been to subsume these stories within the unifying narrative of national or regional identity. In this narrative, class becomes another category within the myth of liberal inclusiveness. What is absent from Canadian film studies, however, is substantial analysis of class relations. Instead, the narrative and critical focus on the trajectory of individuals (whether as heroes, villains, or the more familiar trope of ‘losers’) contributes to what John McCullough has described in this volume as an aporia in Canadian national culture, whereby discussions of redemption or failure deflect from analysis of the structure of economic relations through which the social landscape is determined.2 The desire of film scholars and critics to define a Canadian ‘national’ agenda through the canonization of films and other cultural texts that are claimed to represent a shared mythology has lead to significant blindspots in cultural understanding. It is not only class that has been marginalized but also, until recently, analysis of the representation of such aspects of experience as gender, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation. The canonical impulse has tended to ignore films that do not fit the prescriptive template: Canadian scholars have provided critical analysis with respect to the concept of national identity while marginalizing other aspects – for example, conflating the working-class subject with the ‘loser’ trope, and negating the social context in which the subject and the audience exist. In comparison, cultural studies in the United Kingdom has been especially sensitive to class differences in studies of the construction, use, and reception of cultural texts. The tendency in Canada and the United States has been effectively to downplay class, as articulated in David Frank’s contribution to this collection. Nationalistinflected criticism has privileged the assertion of Canadian identity as distinct from, in particular, American culture.3 In turn, determinant social conditions such as class, which cut across the arbitrary political boundaries of the nation-state, are negated. We are not suggesting that there is no significant value in this formative Canadian film scholarship, but rather that its blindspots require an engaged response. By the early 1980s a growing base of academic work exploring representation of gender, region, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation in Canadian cinema was taking form.4 Those texts sought to assert, often in reaction to the ‘nationalist’ or national-based project, different ap-

Introduction 5

proaches based on gender, postcolonial, and queer theory in dealing with Canadian cinemas. These readings helped enhance a socially conscious analysis of the cinematic depiction of marginalized identities in Canadian societies and demonstrate that this cinema is as socially constructed as the notion of being Canadian itself. Factors of class, labour-market relations, ethnicity, and sexuality, as well as individual experience and relations, are centrally implicated in the formation of film identities, just as the conceptualization of narrative and the organization of labour in the film-production process are determinant influences. Such different socialization processes and variations in how Canadians relate to each other and to the world suggest that it makes little sense to see Canadian cinema as a single category, as though it were an ‘outcome.’ To take this further, there has been an emphasis in recent critical work from Foucault to Judith Butter, Donna Haraway, and others, on the ways in which identities are constructed dynamically (and performatively) in social and cultural interaction. Differences among Canadians and questions of marginality have been increasingly brought to bear in considering the construction of regional specificities, such as in the case of Atlantic Canada, the Prairies, and the North, and, of course, in relation to Quebec and in the experiences of First Nations peoples. The culture and range of experiences available in a given region are by no means natural or fixed: they are as contingent and socially produced as class and class relations. The significant political gains with respect to gender, sexual, ethnic, and racial identities provide some grounds for being optimistic that Canadians can and do change, and that the paradigmatic order of ‘national identity’ is not unshakeable. Likewise, more recently, the struggles and gains based on class association and solidarity seem less monolithic and perhaps have greater potential for interactive solidarity between various social and socially constructed identities. As editors of this volume, it is our perspective that the subject of class informs and crosses multiple boundaries of social identity. Moreover, the subject of class must be considered beyond the limited frame of national identity if critical cultural scholarship in this country is to avoid the reproduction of received ideological fantasies of the nationstate. The fact that an overwhelming majority of Canadians demographically belong to the working class, irrespective of ideologically determined consciousness formation, testifies to the need for a more inclusive use of the concept of class. This inclusiveness provides a means of understanding the dynamics of power relations in Canadian

6 Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga

society and serves as a tool for addressing interactivities in various social struggles and how they affect each other. We do not regard class as belonging to a separate sphere that can be cordoned off from other social specificities, interests, and concerns. In putting together this collection, we are conscious of the need to emphasize complexity and diversity in the definition of class and approach to the subject. We use the term ‘working class’ broadly and inclusively, in contrast to the more dominant tendency to frame the discourse of this class with respect to male industrial workers. Our inclusive approach is not arbitrary; rather it is in response to the prescriptive exclusion of a whole host of workers – white collar, teachers, intellectuals, agricultural workers, civil servants, and those in the information and technology sector – and others, such as the unemployed, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and children, from constructions of the working class. Indeed our approach subscribes to an understanding of various workingclass formations as agencies for social and political change that involve those who have been traditionally categorized as working-class subjects as well as those who (for various historical, political, cultural, and status-related reasons) misleadingly conceive of themselves, and/or are conceived by others, to be beyond class or as part of a grand ‘middle class.’ In this regard, this book aspires to re-engage discussions around working-class politics not merely as an issue of class categorization, but more importantly as a question of engagement in contributing to social, economic, political, and cultural agendas that respond to the interests of a heterogeneous and largely hybrid majority of those living under the conditions of capitalism. The focus on industrial workers is certainly important within Marxism, beginning with Marx’s own study of nineteenth-century industrial workers, who at the time constituted an overwhelming majority of working-class people in the capitalist societies of Europe and North America. However, the increased material affluence of the industrial workforce in the second half of the twentieth century as well as the rise of the service sector economy have blurred traditional class categorizations. A number of chapters in this book do indeed deal with the representation of industrial workers, but this analysis is made in the context of understanding the subject of class in relation to factors such as gender, geography, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. The point is not to privilege one identity category above another but to understand the complexity of class and its representation in a cultural context. The book is likewise a response to the marginalization of class analysis both within

Introduction 7

scholarship and in a broader social discourse. There is a general assumption, certainly on the part of conservative commentators, that because industrial workers no longer constitute the majority of working-class people, the concept of class is no longer relevant as a subject of analysis. This position is erroneous: it ignores the fact that changes in the composition of the industrial working class cannot be understood separately from the processes through which capitalism has advanced beyond its earlier era of direct colonization and colonial expansion. In his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Vladimir Lenin describes early manifestations of the new era of capitalist ‘imperialism’ in connection with the specific growth of international finance capital. This understanding lies at the heart of what we refer to today as ‘global capitalism,’ which operates transnationally mainly through financial conglomerates. This form of imperialism, with its inherent tendency to extract increasingly higher demands of surplus value from cheap labour, today places a greater burden of manual labour on less advanced capitalist societies within the previously colonized world. Moreover, the rise of the service sector has simply shifted the form of labour rather than transformed the class-bound relation to production. One consequence of these changes is the increasing globalization of industrial work. The postcolonial theoretical perspective informing a number of contributions to this book, notably those by Longfellow, Urquhart, McCullough, among others, integrates the social force of globalization and colonization with the continued relevance of class. In general, the working class today, both globally and within the specific context of Canadian society, has become more heterogeneous than ever before in its work composition. In other words, today this class is involved in all areas of work, including industrial labour as well as the multiple forms of white-collar and intellectual work. Within this anthology the term ‘working class’ comprises those who sell their labour for wages. We use a definition that broadly demarcates as members of the working class those who create in their labour and whose work passes through the direct and the indirect processes of capitalist accumulation of surplus value. This definition includes those who have relatively little control over the nature or products of their work and those who work in locations other than the traditional, classstratified industrial workplace. We distinguish between the terms ‘working class’ and ‘labour.’ This distinction is consistent with an important initiative in Marxist scholar-

8 Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga

ship undertaken by Gregory Kealey, founding editor of the influential journal Labour/Le Travail. Kealey uses the term ‘working class’ as a means to define a wider perspective on the study of the position of workers and their families within social history. He advocates a move beyond what is narrowly signified by the term ‘labour’ within political economy – that is, a concept Kealey describes as being traditionally used in industrial relations dominated by capitalist villains and benevolent union leaders and articulated through chronicles of picket-line militarism. As Kealey explains, ‘Workers are no longer seen as isolated figures engaged only in trade unions, strikes, and radical politics; instead they are studied in a totality that includes their cultural backgrounds and social relations, as well as their institutional memberships and economic and political behavior. In addition, they must be seen neither as a class in complete social segregation nor as an undifferentiated mass. A class exists only in relation to another class and the new social history studies these relationships.’5 Focusing on class, however, should not be seen as a shift away from other projects, but as a complementary endeavour – indeed one that is organically linked to other modes of analysis. We do not seek to replace one dominant paradigm, that of cultural nationalism, with another. Rather, the contributors to this collection are building upon the formative efforts of cultural criticism in Canada, efforts that recognized the need for cultural autonomy in the process of identity formation. Progressive critical engagement involves an ongoing interrogation of underlying assumptions, not the least of which are the structuring conditions through which social and economic life are configured. Films, and other forms of cultural production, are conditioned by this dialectic. We acknowledge the debt owed to those artists, filmmakers, critics, and scholars who have made Canadian film possible – including, especially, those whom we choose to argue with. What makes Canadian cinema and criticism vital today is its diversity and multiplicity. In putting together this book we have neither endeavoured to account for the breadth of these achievements nor claim the establishment of a new methodology. Our efforts are more modest: We seek to fill a need to expand the debate on the issue of representing class in Canadian cinemas and to introduce the research and commentary of writers taking on this issue from a range of perspectives. This collection begins with historian David Frank’s quest for the Canadian labour film – a film that effectively engages the struggles of Canadian working people and that can be used by union activists and

Introduction 9

labour educators to communicate this history to a general audience. Frank’s chapter also functions in dialogue with film studies, invoking the historical context of representation. His analysis encounters headon the problem that has dogged Canadian film studies from its inception, that of distribution and access. The perennial problem, along with issues of subject matter, raises the question of whether a film can begin to engage the history of working people if its very subjects cannot see the finished product. Frank’s study provides an intriguing starting point for the identification of Canadian films where workers are represented.6 This research serves the specific needs of historians seeking to make use of film material, but also speaks beyond the specificity of that community by serving to remind filmmakers and film scholars of the informed interest in the cross-disciplinary discussion of these concerns. Frank discovers that while labour issues are manifest in many films, the reference categories of ‘labour’ and ‘workers’ are substantially underutilized in Canadian film history. This observation, while a symptom of the methodological peculiarities of film studies and the breadth of opportunities available for historical research in this still nascent field, also reiterates the usefulness of this anthology in emphasizing work and workers as subjects for analysis. Frank concludes that the ‘Great Canadian Labour History Film’ is yet to be made and that the combined tendencies of elision and privatization form significant obstacles to its production. Even as the diversity of approaches to cinema, criticism, and history preclude a single approach to such a project, the many representations identified by Frank affirm its importance. A useful complementary approach to Frank’s chapter is to recall earlier efforts to integrate culture with progressive movements. Scott Forsyth’s chapter examines the history of cultural activism and politics undertaken by the Canadian Left, particularly through the Communist Party from its peak as an anti-capitalist movement in the 1930s through to the 1950s. A reading of Forsyth’s essay along with David Frank’s brings to mind E.P. Thompson’s important invocation of the function of history in contemporary life: ‘In the end we also will be dead, and our own lives will lie inert within the finished process, our intentions assimilated within a past event which we never intended. What we may hope is that the men and women of the future will reach back to us, will affirm and renew our meanings, and make our history intelligible within their own present tense. They alone will have the power to select from the many meanings offered by our quarrelling present, and to transmute some part of our process into their progress.’7

10 Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga

To write the history of communist cultural activism is to write against the twin forces of the neo-liberal present: first, the ascendancy of global capitalism with its gloating, if premature, dismissal of progressive social alternatives and, second, the culture industry’s depoliticization of culture. E.P. Thompson’s statement was likewise made against the grain of dominant social theory, notably that of Althusser and his followers. The invocation of history is not simply a veil of quantitative mimesis but, as Thompson indicates, a process of narrating and illuminating contradictory impulses within the present for the express purpose of making meaning, and making the representation of meaning matter. With this in mind, Forsyth’s essay serves as a case study on the relation between politics and culture. Even though the radical integration of a revolutionary political movement with a vibrant working-class culture has, for the moment, faded, this history provides, as Forsyth points out, again echoing Thompson, ‘a reminder, and a lineage, of oppositional possibility.’ Indeed, radicals of this earlier era had to contend with many of the same issues faced by activists in the present: problems of organization across class and racial lines, the urgency of international solidarity, and the desire to include artists and cultural workers in the struggle. It is in the formation of an integrated (and, to be sure, often fractious) community that the relation between art and culture is manifest. Forsyth describes the formation, in 1931, of what was described then as the ‘cultural front of the class struggle’ – the Progressive Arts Club (PAC), beginning in Toronto and then branching out across the country. The PAC included a film and photo league, literary and visual art contributions, and most importantly, agitprop workers’ theatre groups. A key target of the PAC’s lively journal, Masses, was middle-class conformism and the timidity of prevailing Canadian culture – a criticism that can surely be carried into present circumstances. The cultural workers involved with the PAC were at the forefront of the formation of a Canadian art and literary environment. Consider how far contemporary Canadian media culture is from the progressive inroads made in the 1930s. Forsyth notes that the Communist Party and leftist unions made regular and frequent radio shows consisting of campaign speeches, skits, and plays: ‘What is worth remarking is that the Communists, alongside their devotion to making art, and in a rudimentary and instrumental way, were also actively responding to the rise of new mass media.’ There are no undiscovered cinematic masterpieces in this history, but regular discussions of Hollywood film were part of various

Introduction 11

leftist publications, and these serve to illuminate the immersion of the working class in popular entertainment. This study demonstrates a progressive project to include not only production but also exhibition activities and reception practices. The gap between such radical uses of media and contemporary Canadian practices is illuminated by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s representation of history in its series Canada: A People’s History. Darrell Varga’s analysis of that series builds upon David Frank’s observation that while it invokes the ‘people,’ the series displays little of the complexity and vibrancy of working-class culture. The title recalls radical historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which tells national history through the perspective of the marginalized: Natives, Blacks, workers, radicals, feminists. Yet, despite CBC’s use of ‘the People,’ the series is largely a narrative of the building of the nation-state, quite unlike the radical perspective Scott Forsyth uncovers along the margins of history. While the term ‘the People’ raises the spectre of mass progressive movements, it is used in this series to collapse class differences while enshrining an official mythology of diversity and tolerance; that is to say, class struggles and the diversity of radical experience and struggles are overcome in the construction of the nation-state. While ‘the People’ are provided with a visually dynamic tale of national history, the use of the medium is limited by its institutional and commercial constraints, not the least of which is its function as appendage to the ruling class. Varga discusses the limits of historical discourse through the medium of television, drawing upon Gramsci’s invocation of the relation between language, philosophy, and history. What is particularly interesting is the process through which authority is mystified via formal and narrative strategies of representation. Varga analyses the process of mystification within the series in relation to its accompanying corporate sponsorship, read as co-extensive with Canadian technological nationalism, as well as affirming the ascendancy of the corporatization of the Canadian nation-state and the corresponding erasure of class. The first section of this anthology serves as an overview of the absence of and institutional limits to the representation of the working class in Canadian film. The next section focuses on the interrelation of class with the social production of gender and sexuality. Rebecca Sullivan provides a close reading of the 1968 Quebec soft-core film Valérie, which claimed to be aligned with women’s liberation and was widely popular

12 Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga

with audiences at the time of its release. The film’s specific approach to feminism and the woman as subject is fascinating, especially when analysed in relation to the rise of second-wave feminism, Quebec nationalism, and the development of a Canadian feature film industry. Such a discussion is highly relevant in light of the contemporary consolidation of feature-film production within the global media marketplace and the coincident neo-conservative backlash against feminism. Sullivan points out that this successful film – it was the first Quebec title to gross over a million dollars and was popular as an export commodity – signified the modern in its anti-religious theme, urban context, and explicit Quebec nationalism, but it did so ‘through the figure of a naked, sexually available young woman.’ Sullivan’s analysis demonstrates the problematic disassociation of questions of sexuality from those of labour within the women’s movement and the translation of this disconnect in popular cinema. In Canadian popular culture, hockey is the preeminent masculine activity, and cultural representations of hockey typically mythologize play as a performance of masculine national identity. This ‘play’ divorces our understanding of the history of labour relations within professional sport and the specific signifiers of class on the part of players and fans. Bart Beaty’s chapter surveys the representation of hockey in Canadian culture and particularly, in a range of films that are themselves markers of the contemporary history of feature-film production in this country. These films articulate recurring themes of regionalism, masculinity, and Canadian identity in the face of the intrusions of American mass culture. Indeed, as Beaty argues, hockey as a dominant form of Canadian cultural expression is a significant product of the nationalist mandate of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Beaty’s analysis of the Atom Egoyan made-for-television film Gross Misconduct, a biography of hyper-violent hockey player Brian ‘Spinner’ Spencer, reveals the intersection of nationalism, masculinity, and class explicit in the text and implicit in the construction of the national game. Beaty’s chapter argues that Gross Misconduct posits national mythology as dysfunctional, but that the film, emerging as it does from the perspective of a filmmaker who embodies a transnational art-film sensibility, offers little understanding of the determinant condition of class within professional sport. Instead, Beaty argues, the film reifies assumptions of working-class life while concentrating on the frequent Canadian cultural theme of anti-Americanism through which an elite, anti-popular sentiment is fostered. While it posits a critique of the

Introduction 13

nationalist agenda of the CBC, the film emerges from a privileged social space that elides the regional and class-based social tensions that are significantly articulated in sport. Malek Khouri’s chapter examines the problematic representation of the working class in the critical and commercial success The Hanging Garden. While acknowledging its cinematic artistry, Khouri points out how the film is consistent with the Canadian art-film tendency of eliding the complexity of working-class life for the sake of stereotype and, in this case, to foster an allegorical tale of redemption, which ultimately serves to reproduce a depoliticized middle-class hegemony. The film presents us with the ultimate dysfunctional family, from which the main character, a gay man, must escape. The family’s dysfunction is represented as rooted in stereotypical working-class regional backwardness, while redemption is associated with the glimmering materialism of fashionable clothing, a new sports car, and a middle-class life in Toronto. Khouri argues that The Hanging Garden’s association of social progress with middle-class pleasures is consistent with a shift in gay rights activism towards inclusion within traditional institutions such as marriage and family and away from the history of a more radical politic. Khouri’s intention is not to downplay the significance of the achievements of gay activists; he points out that this shift and corresponding cinematic narratives are consistent with the contemporary neo-conservative backlash against progressive political movements and the advocacy of social change rather than reification of existing institutions. The allegorical narrative of The Hanging Garden affirms the metaphysical over the representation of material reality such that the important story of a gay man’s coming out is idealized as detached from the material conditions of everyday life. In its idealization of the subject, the film assumes what Khouri calls a ‘conflict between William and his working-class environment, an environment that “naturally” hinders his journey’s goal of becoming a socially acceptable “middleclass” subject.’ Although the narrative remains compelling and the film serves as a useful text in the articulation of gay rights through the mass media, it nevertheless does so through the reaffirmation of negative stereotypes about working-class life. Peter Urquhart’s chapter examines the complex transformation of the literary story The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum into the film Margaret’s Museum. The author agrees with David Frank’s observation of how the film depoliticizes the collective narrative of working-class struggle, a

14 Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga

transformation that is typical of mainstream cinema’s emphasis on the individual and, of course, the broader hegemonic tendency of marginalizing labour from the national historical narrative. Unlike the more typical film studies analysis of adaptation, which concentrates on the identification of how the inherent qualities of each medium are manifest in the work and the relation between medium and narrative, Urquhart begins with the structural similarities in the various realist media through which this story has been told. In this way, following Raymond Williams, the author asserts the radical potential of realism, contrary to the assumption, dominant through 1970s Screen theory, that a radical form is the necessary frame for radical political content. While Urquhart acknowledges the Screen observation that the form of mainstream cinema is inherently limited by its location within a capitalist economic apparatus, he argues that the nature of the medium dictates the emphasis on the individual over the collective. It is easier to make visible a personal story than to give representation to the determining social or structural factors. The novel that is the source of the film’s material does make labour and class struggle central; the change of title for the film certainly indicates a shift in emphasis and points to the question Urquhart raises in his title: ‘Whose museum is it, anyway?’ Urquhart points out that while, in the transformation to a personal narrative, the film marginalizes labour struggles, it emphasizes gendered resistance. Indeed, Margaret’s actions at the end of the film demonstrate that the personal is political, and that politics are literally made on the ground of the body. Unpaid women’s labour was, and still is, essential to the maintenance of a mining family and community. The women who have been excluded from better-paying jobs underground, and who have contributed their unpaid labour to maintain the mining family and community, have lived to tell the tale of exploitation. As Urquhart observes, ‘It is the humiliation and exploitation related to Margaret’s gender, rather than to her class or her heritage, that the film, because of the tendencies of the form, instinctively emphasizes.’ In this way the film takes up the limited form of radicalism possible within contemporary commercial uses of the medium. An interest of this collection is the interweaving of analysis of mainstream cinema’s representation of class along with the articulation of radical history in non-mainstream media such as artist-based film and video, which typically provide a greater challenge to our twin assumptions of representation and social history but which also have limited

Introduction 15

distribution. Artist video is the subject of analysis in the next section, called ‘Dirty Work.’ Susan Lord’s chapter provides a contextual history of former Vancouver artist Sara Diamond (who became president of the Ontario College of Art in 2005) and her labour history documentaries. Diamond’s productions build upon Andreas Huyssen’s claim that the process of representation serves to ‘disturb’ not only the neat categories of the personal and the public but also the promise of history as objective record. What emerges in her work is an examination of the tensions between history and memory in the context of the increasingly corporatized memory industry, and the tendency of presentness in mass media excursions into the archive (as in the use of archival footage in television news). This artist’s work draws our attention to the complex relation between representation and the systematization of power through which marginalized peoples are excluded from official history. Susan Lord points out that, in the politicized art context in which Diamond’s work emerged, to be on the Left was to be historical, but today to be historical is to be left behind, even as archival footage is deployed to illuminate present social and political conditions. Diamond’s work examines this tension between history and memory, raising the important question of what role images of the past are performing. Lord asks, ‘Is the image from the past activated by an interrogation of its status as truth, or is the image from the past an unquestioned testimony of injustice?’ In this respect, critical analysis of Diamond’s documentaries is closely related to the act of representation itself, and that relation is dialectical in its materialist base. As Lord points out, ‘work on history and the history of work are necessary to a dialectical materialism that looks to what could be through the lens of that which is not yet or is no longer.’ The train has been mythologized as a central iconic technology in the formation of the Canadian nation, and Canadian cultural critics have tended to emphasize the determinant function of the technology while marginalizing the labouring bodies through which the national apparatus was constructed. The history of nation building via the construction of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway is one that cannot be divorced from the racist policies of labour exploitation. Margot Francis, in her essay on video artist Richard Fung’s production Dirty Laundry, examines the artist’s representation of the ‘contested histories associated with the Chinese bachelors who built the most dangerous sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway.’ She begins with the title’s reference to the cultural stereotype of ‘feminized’ labour and, following the artist’s

16 Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga

own comments, the marginalization of aspects of national history as ‘dirty laundry not to be aired in public.’ Francis’s analysis concentrates on Fung’s problematization of the national narrative in his destabilization of the twin categories of normalcy and perversion, through which a racialized homosocial discourse is produced. In addition to its function as an engaging work of art, Dirty Laundry contributes to the historical discourse by addressing the specific charge that sodomy was a common practice among Chinese immigrants, a charge that was deployed to legitimize racist immigration policies but that has not been extensively taken up by historians. Fung’s video and Francis’s critical exegesis together demonstrate the usefulness of class as an analytical device through which discrete questions of race, sexuality, and labour are brought together in the production of a critical discourse on national history. What is especially compelling about Fung’s work, as Francis points out, is how the silences and absences of the historical record are, in a compelling way, made to speak. We are forced to reflect upon the processes of marginalization through which nation and history are constructed and, through this process, deconstruct the linear trajectory of history. Historical truths are predicated upon relations of power, and it is the function of critical discourse to illuminate the blindspots of this cultural narrative. Within the critical discourse of national cinema, the tendency towards mythologization on the part of critics and filmmakers has obscured the classed reality of social relations. A goal of this anthology is to put forward multiple perspectives on Canadian cinema that address the complexities of identity and citizenship and offer a critical reconsideration of assumptions of coherence and community articulated in national cinema. The final section of this book provides an interrogation of conventions of national cinema in Canada through an analysis of key films. In his contribution to this book, André Loiselle examines the dominant assumption that Quebec films are more explicitly political than other Canadian films and that they, in particular, represent members of the working class as active subjects. It is certainly the case that, prior to the 1980s, Quebec films prominently represented the urban working class and that this representation was linked with the rise of a collective nationalist consciousness. The history of Quebec national cinema has always troubled the cultural coherence of the Canadian nation-state insofar as it has been generally understood by critics as distinct from English-Canadian film practices and concerns. However, the assumption of two distinct soli-

Introduction 17

tudes, while having an important linguistic base and reflecting the uses of popular culture by specific audiences, ignores the use of common themes (especially the fact of class), international influences, and dominant conditions of cinema production. Moreover, critical assumptions of thematic tendencies within Quebec cinema depend upon selective canonization and do not necessarily withstand close critical scrutiny of specific films. Although leading characters in Quebec cinema are often identified as workers, the articulation of progressive class consciousness cannot be taken for granted. What emerges instead is a tendency towards the fetishization of the working class on the part of the artists and intellectuals who have an abstract sympathy for class struggle appended to the project of Quebec cultural nationalism. Loiselle points out the recurring tendency to represent workers as disconnected from the working class as an identifiable social group and as unable or unwilling to actively engage in resistance to class rule – a tendency familiar in EnglishCanadian cinema as well. Through this analysis, Loiselle deconstructs prevailing assumptions of film in Quebec, while critically engaging with the fact of class as a vital aspect of social organization and cultural representation. The chapter by Joseph Kispal-Kovacs similarly engages a close critical analysis of films that articulate the working class as active subjects but tend to obfuscate the complexity of class structure and struggle for the sake of an individualist narrative. The focus of his chapter is on two films released through the National Film Board in 1985: Final Offer, a documentary on labour leader Bob White during the formation of the Canadian Auto Workers Union upon its divorce from the Americanbased United Auto Workers, and Canada’s Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks, a docudrama on the conflict between the militant Canadian Seamen’s Union and business and government interests determined to undermine the radical promise of this union. Both films are engaging representations of important events in Canadian history, but they both tend to emphasize the familiar conflict of Canada–American relations rather than the complex and fascinating history of union militancy that cannot be readily contained within the individualist narrative frame. Kispal-Kovacs suggests that the tendency to transcend social conflict by structuring narrative through the plight of the individual, which is common in classical Hollywood cinema,8 applies directly to the case of Canadian film as well. This tendency is contrary to cultural assumptions of difference and institutionalized conventions, which assert that

18 Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga

products of the National Film Board are sympathetic to radical social movements, at least in comparison with American cultural products. As Kispal-Kovacs explains of the two films he analyses: ‘Both are constructed around an individual hero or villain who become the narrative centre of the films. Both reduce complex class and nationalistic conflicts to struggles between heroic individuals and their supporting casts. Both deflect really fascinating chapters in the history of the Canadian labour movement into stories concerning U.S. domination of our economy and trade union movement.’ It is the assertion of nationalism within these films and as a structuring force of production and distribution institutions that invites the erasure of class conflict as a significant aspect of Canadian history. John McCullough’s chapter on the films Rude and Soul Survivor directly addresses the problem of the elision of class within cinema narratives, in Canadian culture and, in particular, in the relation between Black Canadian film and third cinema. The author’s argument invokes the postcolonial position of resistance to class-based imperialism articulated in third cinema, in contradistinction to the common conflation of third cinema with a specific politics of race. McCullough examines the relation between two Canadian films and the American ’hood genre, suggesting that they draw as much from the tradition of Hollywood gangster films as from the larger context of Black male identity within a culture of racism. He demonstrates that social and economic class is the veiled determinant of the moral and material frame through which the characters function, and that this frame gives shape to the representation of masculine identity. To see Rude and Soul Survivor, therefore, as conservative manifestations of Black male masculinity without considering the structuring force of class is to see neither the films nor the cultural context very clearly. As McCullough points out, genre films all provoke ‘a variety of audience pleasures, including critiques of capitalism by working-class, criminal, and outsider heroes, as well as critical evaluations of America’s attitudes towards youth.’ These pleasures are not exclusively racialized and do not exclude audience members who do not identify with the characters through race; notwithstanding the history of racism and injustice, social relations under capitalism are formed through a vast inequality of power, wealth, and privilege across the spectrum of identity positions. Indeed, the articulation of resistance is central to the appeal of the ’hood film, but the complexity of articulating identity within the larger

Introduction 19

social structure invites a vast range of viewer positions. In this process of articulation, responses that are simultaneously conservative and progressive are manifest. The rubric of class provides a means of engaging with the contradictions of representation so that the experience of spectatorship can have progressive impact upon the awareness of viewers. The specificity of the Canadian ’hood film, McCullough argues, is distinct from the American genre. While American ’hood films are inflected by discourses of slavery and segregation, Canadian ones are instead shaped by the experiences of immigration, racism, and state capitalism. Rude and Soul Survivor are complex and cinematically distinguished films. They are also examples of the Canadian state’s emphasis, through the culture industries, on directing the efforts of artists towards articulations of individual transcendence amidst the larger ideological process of negotiating social contradictions, thus eliding the revolutionary impulse emergent with the question of class. The final chapter in this collection, by Brenda Longfellow, examines a selection of films all released within a year of the millennium and takes up issues of everyday urban life in the context of globalization. Longfellow provides a useful model of how to undertake the examination of national cinema through an awareness of the conditions of Canadian cinema production, as well as an engagement with the increasingly international context of filmmaking and distribution. The author’s goal is both to test the concept of globalization and to conceptualize Canadian cinema in this context. She draws, in particular, on Arjun Appadurai’s model of the overlapping cross-border flows of people, media, technology, finance, and ideology in contrast to a strictly economically determinist understanding of globalization as produced by the shifts of transnational corporate capital. The films under consideration represent metropolitan experience – the experience of work and the rhythms of everyday life as circumscribed by the particular conditions of contemporary urban-based global capitalism and the structuring force of architecture. What we see in these films is the now familiar image of the city as soulless and claustrophobic, where the promise of modernity has been transformed into lifeless functionalism. The question then becomes how meaning is made, how identity and the specificity of place are constructed, and whether this process of construction transforms assumptions of nationalism and cinema. Canada, as a consequence of its colonial origins and economic integration with the U.S. war economy, has been faced with the fact of globalization long before the concept became an intellectual fashion.

20 Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga

The primary gap between cultural criticism and the political and economic organization of the nation is the persistent nationalism on the part of the state intelligentsia, a position at odds with the reality of social organization. Longfellow’s inquiry into the representation of identity in contemporary filmmaking is bound up with the question of class as a dynamic force integrated with both contemporary social organization and practices of representation. A key task of criticism is to come to terms with the specific relation between these elements in a way that matters to contemporary social reality and the potential of social transformation. The contributors to this collection examine the complexity of Canadian cinema from multiple perspectives and engage in numerous concerns but have in common the saliency of class as a primary means of social organization and as a structuring force of everyday life, even as class consciousness has become a marginalized means of identity formation within western capitalism. It is the gap between the reality of class and its obfuscation within the culture industry that facilitates the heightened attacks against the economic and social gains made by working people. Our collective concern is with the struggles and lived realities of working people in Canada and throughout the world and with how the cinematic representation of the fact of class and the urgency of struggle fosters or marginalizes a progressive engagement with history and the conditions of contemporary social reality. As Tom Waugh’s eloquent foreword to this book reminds us, the complexity of representation is forever bound up with the contradictions and desires of class, demonstrating the connecting force between progressive critical engagement and personal experience.

NOTES 1 Peter Morris, ‘In Our Own Eyes: The Canonizing of Canadian Film,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 3, no. 1 (1994): 27–44. 2 The still dominant critical paradigm for Canadian film criticism was established in 1973, when Robert Fothergill asserted the specificity of the ‘Canadian condition’ as corresponding with an outsider or loser sensibility, describing Canadian films as structured through the ‘radical inadequacy of the male protagonist’ (see ‘Coward, Bully, or Clown: The Dream Life of a Younger Brother,’ in Canadian Film Reader, ed. Seth Feldman and Joyce

Introduction 21

3

4

5 6

7 8

Nelson (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1977), 235). The primary response to this position is Peter Morris, ‘In Our Own Eyes.‘ As important as this response is, it nonetheless marginalizes the determinant fact of class. The key canonical text in the matter is Peter Harcourt, Movies and Mythologies (Toronto: CBC, 1977). We wholeheartedly acknowledge that our present critical interventions could be carried out only with the valuable groundwork of earlier scholars of Canadian film. Among the important texts are articles published in the numerous issues of the journal CineAction devoted to Canadian cinema, the anthology Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema, ed. Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine Marchessault (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999) and Chris Gittings, Canadian National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Also very influential is Thomas Waugh, ‘Cinemas, Nations, Masculinities: The Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture (1998),’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 8–44. For an excellent brief overview of the trajectory of Canadian film studies, see Will Straw, ‘Canadian Cinema,’ in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 523–6. Gregory S. Kealey, Workers and Canadian History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 1995, 104. One goal of Frank’s study is to provide a comprehensive reference to Canadian films about labour in a way similar to the American-based book by Tom Zaniello, Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Organized Guide to Films about Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). A complementary American text providing critical essays on the representation of class is David E. James and Rick Berg, eds., The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). E.P. Thompson ‘The Poverty of Theory,‘ in The Essential E.P. Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York: New Press, 2001), 450. David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

This page intentionally left blank

PART ONE Workers, History, and Historiography

This page intentionally left blank

1 In Search of the Canadian Labour Film david frank

Take One: Introduction Is there a Canadian labour film? The question has been on my mind for a long time, probably since the first time I saw Salt of the Earth (Herbert Biberman, 1954), the classic American labour film that has circulated among labour educators and cultural activists for more than half a century now. The question remained with me in the 1970s and 1980s, when I first began to teach Canadian labour history and think about the ways film could be used in the classroom and in the popularization of history. I can remember my frustration, first in trying to identify such films, and second in trying to locate them. For instance, I had seen Allan King’s Maria (1977) when it was first shown on television, but I was never able to locate a print or video copy that I could use in class.1 The catalogues of the National Film Board have been wonderfully helpful over the years, as have those of distributors of alternative cinema, but there is nothing in Canada that is the equivalent of Tom Zaniello’s book about labour films, Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff. This is a very fine and useful reference work – a selective, critical guide to films about workers and unions that identifies appropriate films, discusses their content, organizes them by occupational groups and social themes, and proposes supplementary reading. The context, however, is mainly American: only a few entries are Canadian.2 Take Two: Titles In the standard titles on the history of Canadian film, Canadian workers and their history are not immediately visible. A filmography of

26 David Frank

features for the period 1928–90 contains no references to ‘labour,’ ‘work,’ or ‘workers,’ but a look under ‘strikers and strikes’ and ‘unions’ produces three results. Plot summaries in that filmography show more evidence of an occasional working-class presence – as in Rough Romance (1930): ‘Lumberjack O’Brien works in a lumber camp in the Canadian Northwest. Chandley is the romantic interest.’ A major two-volume bibliography also seems discouraging at first, as there are no entries under ‘labour,’ ‘unions,’ or ‘workers.’ Yet there are numerous entries for individual films and filmmakers, and more than thirty entries under the genre ‘Industrial Films/Cinéma industriel,’ mainly from the 1940s and 1950s. Meanwhile, perusal of the CD-ROM database Film/Video Canadiana produced thirty-eight references to ‘unions,’ twenty-nine to ‘strikes,’ and eleven to ‘working class.’3 One standard bookmark is the Internet Movie Data Base (www.imdb .com). In response to keyword queries with various combinations of labour/union/worker/work and Canada/Canadian, this site reported only one palpable hit, in the form of Canada’s Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks (1985), Donald Brittain’s docudrama about crime and corruption on the waterfront in the days when the Seafarers’ International Union was doing battle against the Canadian Seamen’s Union. Meanwhile a visit to the National Film Board site (www.nfb.ca) yielded 342 individual entries under the category ‘Work and Labour Relations’ (one of eighty-seven subject categories). The earliest entry in this list is also the NFB’s first production, The Case of Charlie Gordon (Stuart Legg, 1939), a film addressing issues of youth unemployment, and originally commissioned by the Dominion Youth Training Programme. Take Three: Flashback In his history of early Canadian film, Embattled Shadows, Peter Morris has shown that the first films made in Canada were at once novelty items and travelogues. James Freer’s early films, none of which have survived, included such apparent pioneering epics of Canadian social realism as Six Binders at Work in Hundred Acre Wheatfield and Cyclone Thresher at Work. By 1910 the Canadian Pacific Railway was sponsoring short melodramas with romantic plot lines, all calculated to encourage workers to migrate to Canada. Surviving examples include An Unselfish Love and The Song That Reached His Heart, each featuring a male working-class hero whose hard work on the resource frontier produced economic rewards and a reunion with a lost love. The Little Station Agent

In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 27

was the story of a capable young woman who operated a railway depot in the Rockies, where she fended off unwanted lovers and prevented train wrecks.4 This material reminds us of a time when Hollywood did not exist, or at least before it came to dominate film production and distribution after the end of the silent era. Before that happened, a certain amount of diversity in film production was possible. Given the low survival rates of early film stock, it is difficult to be certain of the numbers, or to discuss the content in any depth. But there can be no doubt that the early movies were patronized by working-class audiences and addressed themes of interest to these audiences. As Steven Ross has pointed out in Working-Class Hollywood, this context helps explain the positive images of workers, and sometimes unions, that are visible in pre-Hollywood films, notably in the work of D.W. Griffith and, from the point of view of a comic anti-authoritarian, that of Charlie Chaplin. Ross argues that the movies helped workers to ‘visualize’ class in the silent era, but that this became less possible after the structures of production and consumption in the film industry were transformed by Hollywood.5 No study of the theme has yet been undertaken in the Canadian context, but it is clear that the movies were occasionally the subject of comment in the labour press. Chaplin’s The Idle Class (1921), for instance, received an appreciative review in the pages of the Maritime Labor Herald, stating, ‘The only fault with Chaplin comedies is that they end.’6 One of the most interesting surviving early Canadian films is Carry On, Sergeant (Bruce Bairnsfather, 1928), which was conceived as a tribute to the hard-working heroes of the lower ranks in the Great War. For the purposes of this discussion, what interests us is that the film features a working-class hero. In the early scenes prior to the war, Bob MacKay and his buddy Syd Small are presented as industrial workers employed at the Atlas Locomotive Works (later to be converted to wartime production). MacKay is what labour historians will recognize as an ‘honest workingman,’ a self-respecting, dependable, productive worker who takes his work and responsibilities seriously; his chief ambition is to wed his sweetheart, who works at the local five-and-ten store. By contrast, Small is the comic relief, an idler who cannot be taken seriously by the foreman and must be protected from his own follies. Their world of pipes and boilers and smoke is far different from the handsome country lodge where the company president entertains visitors. And when the war comes, there is no question how these workers will behave: ‘It didn’t much matter whose war it was, or what about,’

28 David Frank

says the silent title, ‘MacKay and others just had to go.’ The war turns out to be more than a ‘great adventure’; it is instead ‘the championship disaster of the world.’ MacKay struggles his way through the trenches, gas attacks, and enemy fire of the front lines, and his travails justify the film’s final dedication to ‘all those unsung heroes who silently make history by just “carrying on”.’7 The two decades that followed the 1920s turned out to be one of the most remarkable moments in North American cultural history. In The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, Michael Denning has described the emergence of a popular social democratic culture in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Antifascist, anti-racist, and pro-labour in its outlook, this cultural bloc established a creative working relationship between cultural innovation and movements for social change. The centrality of this moment to the formation of twentieth-century culture is obvious when we mention some of the most prominent names: Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Aaron Copeland, Dorothea Lange, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Tillie Olsen, Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, Richard Wright. We see glimpses of this cultural scene recreated in Cradle Will Rock (Tim Robbins, 1999), a recent film about attempts to stage Marc Blitzstein’s pro-labour musical of the same name. Among the participants in this cultural formation were a number of creative artists, often with roots in theatre and radio, who went on to become prominent film directors – people such as Jules Dassin, Nicholas Ray, Joseph Losey, Elia Kazan, Martin Ritt, and, of course, Orson Welles.8 Canadian cultural producers shared much of the same experience of interaction with contemporary social democratic and radical politics, and some scholars have focussed their attention on progressive Canadian poets, novelists, artists, and theatres of the time.9 But it appears that in the realm of film, the critical conditions of production and opportunity did not exist in Canada in the same way as they did in the United States in this period. Instead, these decades were marked by the virtual disappearance of feature film production in Canada. Take Four: Documentary The documentary tradition looms especially large in any discussion of Canadian film. The man who founded the National Film Board in 1939, British documentary filmmaker John Grierson, always distinguished his work from what he considered mere travelogues or lecture

In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 29

films, and staked out his territory in his famous description of the documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality.’ He regarded the documentary as the greatest achievement of the film culture of his time; Hollywood productions were in his view mere ‘movies’ designed for the purposes of escapism and entertainment, and he specifically discouraged the idea that the NFB, or Canadian filmmakers generally, should become involved in making feature films.10 Although Grierson’s film aesthetic may have been limited by his preoccupation with the documentary, it is notable that much of the Canadian feature film tradition, as it later developed, contains significant traces of the documentary legacy. The wartime NFB films are a familiar reference point for film historians, as well as labour historians. Under the direction of Grierson, the NFB saw itself as a branch of the state dedicated to the mobilization of citizens for public purposes connected to the war itself and the construction of a postwar liberal democracy. There was even room for notions of anti-fascism, internationalism, and social democracy that were less acceptable prior to the war.11 During the war this meant, among other things, the making of films that promoted the recruitment of women into the armed forces as well as into the civilian labour force in unprecedented numbers. Some fifty thousand women enlisted in the several women’s services; and, at the height of wartime demand, about one million Canadian women had entered the full-time labour market, many of them in non-traditional sectors directly related to war work. Several of these films have received close scrutiny from historians of Canadian women in recent years, and the NFB has released a compilation videocassette called Women in the ’40s and ’50s, allowing easy access for study purposes. It includes films such as Wings on Her Shoulder and Proudly She Marches (both Jane Marsh, 1943) that portray the participation of women in the armed forces in positive terms but also depict the situation in not-so-subtle ways that identify women’s new roles as abnormal, secondary, and temporary. No one voiced this limitation more succinctly than Lorne Greene, in one of his voice-over narrations, when he stated that the ‘girls’ employed in industrial establishments were finding factory work ‘no more difficult than house work.’ It was even clearer in postwar films such as Careers and Cradles (Jack Olsen, 1947) that the promises of women’s equality implied in wartime films were not central to Canada’s plans for reconstruction.12 The theme is pursued effectively in more recent productions, such as Rosies of the North (Kelly Saxberg, 1999), a film that documents the

30 David Frank

experiences and explores the memories of a selection of women representing the several thousand who worked in Canada’s largest Second World War aircraft plant, in Fort William, Ontario. The film treatment cuts back and forth between present and past, as the women review the evidence of their experience and share personal observations. As such, it seems very much an exercise in a visual form of oral history. From these women we learn that they hired on at the plant because they needed work. Their mothers were widowed or incapacitated, and at the end of the Depression their families were much in need of money. Whereas domestic labour paid $10 a month, factory work could bring in $20 a week. They also tell us that the women were dedicated to their work – they never missed a shift. The women followed the progress of the war and took pride in their contribution to the war effort. They were better welders than the men, but the men received higher wages, even those who were trained by women. At quitting time men insisted on punching out first. There were romances, but a woman lost her job if she married, unless she kept it quiet. Unlike the men, the women were under the supervision of matrons, who served as nurses, nannies, and cops. The women interviewed, who all appear to have been local residents, expressed sympathy for the young women recruited from across the prairies and housed in barracks at the plant site. One of the most memorable documents in the film is a still photograph showing several of these women holding up a ‘We Want Work’ sign at the end of the war. It was not to be. By August 1945 only three women worked on the shop floor, all that remained of a workforce of almost 3,000. In the same film, the story of Elsie MacGill, the pioneer Canadian woman engineer employed at the same plant, runs like a subtheme. MacGill was obviously respected by the women workers for her achievements, but it is also clear that there was no special relationship between this formidable woman professional and the workers on the shop floor. Some workers resented the recognition she was receiving, for MacGill was celebrated in the media – even in a comic book – as ‘Queen of the Hurricanes.’ As one of the women notes, reporters ‘couldn’t see anybody but Elsie,’ even though thousands of other women were employed at the plant. The film would obviously be different without MacGill, but the tensions are solved by keeping the working class women at the centre of the story.13 In the same vein, another effort to recover women’s workplace history has focused on women who worked at Alberni Plywoods in British Columbia, both during and after the war. The Plywood Girls (Susanne

In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 31

Klausen, 1999) was made by a researcher who had already produced a substantial academic article on the subject. Susanne Klausen came out of the experience with an enhanced appreciation of the importance of the collaborative process in filmmaking and the power of film to communicate in ways that the printed word cannot. Despite a series of successful public screenings of this innovative film, Klausen received a stream of rejection letters from potential distributors reluctant to deviate from standard expectations. She concludes, ‘there is a desperate need for documentaries that represent the history of working-class experience in Canada and that ask class-based questions about our society.’14 Take Five: 1919 and All That In Canadian film history, 1919 was notable as the year of The Great Shadow (Harley Knoles), a film supported by the CPR and other employers as part of an effort to combat the influence of ‘Bolshevism’ on organized labour. With British-born actor Tyrone Power (father of the Hollywood leading man of later decades) in the starring role, the film was shot principally at studios in Trenton, Ontario. When scenes were shot at the Vickers factory in Montreal, union members were recruited to serve as unpaid extras. The Great Shadow received a favourable response from the daily press; in Saturday Night Hector Charlesworth compared it to Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.15 No copies of this film have survived, but another ‘red scare’ film, made in the United States and released two months earlier (and still available in video catalogues), is a close cousin and tells much the same cautionary tale. In Dangerous Hours (Fred Niblo, 1919), the all-American university graduate John King has a natural instinct for interfering in social conflicts on behalf of the underdog. As a result he is rapidly seduced into the cause of class struggle and violent revolution, personified by a ‘New Woman’ by the name of Sophia Guerni and a Bolshevik agitator called Boris Blotchi. Their intentions are conveyed in flashbacks to scenes of the Russian Revolution that include the destruction of churches and the ‘nationalization of women.’ There are also a couple of unsavory labour agitators and disreputable labour bureaucrats in evidence, who use the opportunity of a national steel strike to engage in blackmail and extortion. As it turns out, the proprietor of the shipyard turns out to be a young woman who is John’s childhood sweetheart. Soon enough, John sees the light, and the outcome is not in doubt.

32 David Frank

But what of the actual historical events of that year? The year 1919 is the most famous year in Canadian labour history, and the Winnipeg General Strike is the one event in Canadian labour history that might be considered part of the general knowledge of educated Canadians. The Winnipeg strike remains controversial, as indicated in the comments of labour historians on a recent History Television documentary, Prairie Fire: The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 (Audrey Mehler, 1999). The documentary featured a strong narrative line, identifying the principal stages in the strike story, and a good mix of sources, including photographic images and interviews with eyewitnesses and historians. The main criticism of the film voiced by specialists was that it gave little indication of the relatively rich and diverse body of historical writing on the strike, including the wave of unrest that existed across the country at this time. This lack of interest in historiography seems to be one of the characteristics of history on film as it has been practised. Because documentary films like to rely on the authority of ‘History,’ they rarely show historians disagreeing with the content of a film or even with each other. In his comments on Prairie Fire, David Bercuson (author of one of the standard treatments of the strike and credited as ‘creative consultant’ for the film) agrees that a film of this kind cannot be expected to do full justice to the subject: ‘What those viewers saw was, no doubt, much more superficial a treatment of the strike than what they may read in Confrontation at Winnipeg, or in the dozen or so serious treatments of the strike written by others of different ideological perspectives. But so what? At least the 100,000 plus viewers now know something about the strike and if their curiosity is aroused, they can easily seek out more substantial reading matter on the subject.’16 The results of a productive collaboration between filmmakers and historians are apparent in The Notorious Mrs Armstrong (Paula Kelly, 2001), a visual biography of Helen Armstrong (1875–1947). To the extent that her name is mentioned in narratives of Canadian labour history, Helen Armstrong has been known as the spouse of one of the Winnipeg strike leaders arrested in the famous police raids of June 17. More recently historians have drawn overdue attention to the role of women in the strike, and in this film Helen Armstrong finally comes into her own as the most significant local woman labour leader at the time of the strike.17 The daughter of Alfred and Emma Jury, she was raised in the late-nineteenth-century milieu of labour and social reform in Toronto, where she met her future husband, the carpenter, socialist, and union man George Armstrong. They lived on the industrial frontier

In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 33

in Montana, where they married, as well as in Manhattan, before they settled down to raise a family in Winnipeg. At a time when the suffrage campaign associated with Nellie McClung was enjoying success, Helen was emerging as the leading agitator for the rights of working-class women. In 1917 she was arrested for anti-conscription agitation, but she also organized a local Women’s Labor League, led a successful strike of retail clerks at Woolworth’s, and campaigned for a provincial minimum wage law, which was enacted the following year. During the General Strike she organized ‘labour cafés’ at local restaurants to feed striking women, especially the young single women whose wages left them so close to the starvation line. She was arrested on three separate occasions during the strike, on charges such as disorderly conduct and causing a disturbance. All this gave her a reputation as ‘the wild woman of the west’ and ‘the notorious Mrs. Armstrong,’ epithets that seemed to reflect the difficulty contemporaries had in accepting the prominence of a female labour leader. Director and narrator Paula Kelly uses a variety of creative resources to bring the story to life, including contemporary music and staged background scenes that give Helen and George a real human presence on the screen. These devices of reconstruction are used with a good sense of directorial balance and do not overshadow the larger purpose of presenting an analysis of Armstrong’s life and times. The account of historical conditions is given authority by contemporary documents and photographs and through observations by labour historians and social activists such as Linda Kealey, Nolan Reilly, Anne Molgat, and Catherine Stearns. The success of the film also depends on the lively participation of two of the Armstrongs’ grandchildren, Helen Cassidy and Bob Waters, whom Kelly succeeded in tracking down and engaging as participants. They see their grandmother as a pragmatic reformer – ‘a humanist and an activist.’ As Helen Cassidy puts it, her grandmother was motivated by a strong sense of personal responsibility, not only for her own family but for others: ‘You can run away from evil in other people, but you have to live with yourself.’ The film offers a fresh perspective on the famous strike and a human portrait of an early-twentieth-century woman reformer. There are no doubt going to be more documentaries on the Winnipeg General Strike, yet there are also opportunities for creative treatments. The strike produced several contemporary novels, including Ralph Connor’s To Him That Hath (1921) and Douglas Durkin’s The Magpie (1923), both structurally and historically interesting documents of the

34 David Frank

times. Yet none of the plays and novels located in and around the events of 1919 seem to have made their way onto the screen. Much the same can be said about the dramatic moments of the 1930s, such as the On-toOttawa Trek of the unemployed or the struggles for union rights in major industries in the 1940s and in the public sector in the 1960s. There are excellent documentaries on all of these subjects, such as On to Ottawa (Sara Diamond, 1992), Defying the Law (Marta Nielsen Hastings, 1997), and Memory and Muscle: The Postal Strike of 65 (Michael Ostroff, 1995). Labour history journals and publications of the past thirty years are filled with historical information and analysis about these and other turning points in Canadian labour history, and the raw human materials are available in the memoirs and biographies of several generations of activists. One catches glimpses of such moments in recent popular novels, such as Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin (2000). Beyond the documentaries that continue to contribute to the recovery of this history, there are exciting creative opportunities here for dramatic treatments that contribute to understanding the history of Canadian workers. Take Six: Cinéma Québécois The condition of the labour film often seems healthier in Quebec than in the rest of Canada. It is true that the evolution of cinema in Quebec has favoured a ‘refusal of Hollywood’ and the emergence of a distinct Quebec film culture. Language has provided a natural form of protectionism that was not available in English Canada, as did the legislative exclusion of children from movie theatres during the golden age of Hollywood (because of a disastrous fire in Montreal in 1927). Another contributing factor was the relocation of the National Film Board from Ottawa to Montreal in the 1950s, which provided creative opportunities for a generation of talented filmmakers. The use of portable sound equipment stimulated the growth of techniques that captured the language as well as the images of a changing society.18 Among the most important documentaries of the Quiet Revolution were portraits of working-class life in films such as Clément Perron’s Jour après jour (1962) and Arthur Lamothe’s Bûcherons de la Manouane (1962). The most controversial was Denys Arcand’s On est au coton (1970), which ran into official disapproval at the NFB and contributed to Arcand’s transition from the documentary to the feature-length fictional film. In the making of feature films, the documentary imperative

In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 35

has remained visible. This imperative is evident in Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971), a coming-of-age story set in asbestos-mining country on the eve of the Quiet Revolution, even though the filmmaker prefers to place the issues of adolescence in the foreground and leaves those of class and ethnic relations relatively unexplored. A viewing of Jean Beaudin’s J.A. Martin photographe (1977), which focuses primarily on the relationship between a rural photographer and his long-suffering wife, is rewarded with glimpses of working-class life in nineteenth-century rural Quebec, such as a visit to a small sawmill employing numerous children. Another notable example is the feature film La Sarrasine (Paul Tana, 1992), which recreates the world of Italian working-class immigrants in early-twentieth-century Montreal. This film is especially interesting to labour historians because it is based on a true story and involved the full participation of a historian who accepted the unique opportunities and challenges of working in a dramatic form and a visual medium. As Bruno Ramirez has pointed out, the film is not about strikes and unions, but it falls within the scope of contemporary labour history because it is very much about the world of working-class immigrants in the early-twentieth-century Canadian met r o p o l i s . 19 Meanwhile, the documentary tradition has also continued to produce contributions to the representation of working-class history. One influential example is the film by Richard Boutet and Pascal Gélinas, La Turlutte des années dures (1983). This wide-ranging, episodic treatment of the Great Depression has been described as a ‘documentary musical tragedy.’ In the tradition of the cinéma direct, the film features a working-class narrative and reveals a rich visual portrait of the decade, energized by the songs known as turluttes that run throughout. The technical achievements of the film in creating a visual archive and capturing the folk music of the streets earned this film a major award. At the same time, the political engagement of the filmmakers is also obvious, as the film does not pretend to treat the era with the authority of retrospective objectivity and insists on making direct links between the past and the present.20 Another remarkable feature-length production is Sophie Bissonnette’s treatment of the life and times of the late Léa Roback, A Vision in the Darkness (1991). This is an exceptional visual document of an antifascist, feminist and labour activist who grew up with the twentieth century. Born in Quebec in 1903, the daughter of eastern European immigrants, she moved easily in both francophone and anglophone

36 David Frank

milieux, learning firsthand about the shape of anti-Semitism in Quebec and the exploitation of workers, especially young women. One comes away from this film with an understanding of the spirited sense of social responsibility that animated activists such as Roback, and the unfailing humour and gros bon sens that made her so effective as an organizer. Equally impressive are the preparation and care that have gone into this production. There are some newspaper and magazine articles about Roback, but no major books or biographies. We are reminded that documentary films need not be simple translations of wellestablished historical material, but that they have the capacity to seek out new sources and new information, most notably in the areas of oral testimony and visual evidence.21 Take Seven: More Features The long famine in feature film production in English Canada lasted with little significant interruption from the end of the 1920s to the beginning of the 1970s, when the cultural nationalism of the times established tax incentives and funding opportunities to encourage filmmaking in Canada. There are glimpses of working-class life in dozens of feature films produced in this period. The popular film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Ted Kotcheff, 1974) shows revealing scenes of neighbourhood and workplace life in Montreal in the 1940s, although, like the novel on which it was based, the film is primarily about characters who wanted to get out of the working class. By contrast, John and the Missus (Gordon Pinsent, 1987), based on a novel by Pinsent and starring that actor as a hardrock miner, was about a character who embraced his class identity and, however individualistically, resisted attempts to restructure his social environment through a state-sponsored resettlement program in Newfoundland in the 1960s. Similarly, Bye Bye Blues (Anne Wheeler, 1989) is not only the entertaining story of a female singer and piano player, but also a perceptive account of both the opportunities and frustrations facing a single woman who is seeking to make a living in the rural West during the Second World War. Why Shoot the Teacher? (Silvio Narizzano, 1977) is an appealing memory film about a young man from Toronto, who, while teaching in Saskatchewan during the Great Depression, learns something about the place and the people. My American Cousin (Sandy Wilson, 1985) is mainly about growing up young and female in rural British Columbia in the 1950s, yet it

In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 37

also allows the viewer to reflect on the shape of the household economy in the Okanagan fruit orchards and, for a few moments, the role of itinerant pickers who help bring in the harvest. But the classic depiction of working-class life in English-Canadian film remains Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road (1970), a film more tragic than comic in its account of the misadventures of two likeable Maritimers who set out to seek their fortune in the big city at the end of the 1960s. They leave behind a broken landscape of abandoned mines and boats, and arrive ready to work and prosper in the office towers of Toronto. It does not take long for them to discover that working-class life in the big city presents its own challenges, and they make their troubled adjustments to these reduced expectations. The best work they can get is in the warehouse of a bottling plant, which has its own thresholds of frustration and alienation – and even this does not last. Peter Harcourt has captured the sensibility of the film thoughtfully in a comment originally published in Cinema Canada in 1976: ‘Pete and Joey are pals, real comrades in the way that Shebib believes in; but they are also very different guys. While they are both typical members of the “lumpenproletariat” – unskilled workers with no sense of the political implications of the role society has assigned them – Pete has a more reflective nature. He tries to think about things. Clumsy though his articulations may be (for language, among other things, is the property of the middle-classes), he is doubly aware that life for other people offers something more, something which he wants access to.’22 A generation later, the most memorable scenes in this film still ring true, and the film was re-released in 1999 for the benefit of a new generation of viewers. More recently several features, made primarily for non-theatrical audiences, have addressed themes closer to the traditional focus of labour history. One of the most appealing of these is Canada’s Sweetheart (1985), Donald Brittain’s treatment of the degradation of labour relations on the waterfront from the time of the Canadian Seamen’s Union (CSU) strike in 1949 to the investigations of the Norris Commission in 1962. The film does not shrink from identifying the complicity of employers and governments in plotting the downfall of the CSU and condoning the activities of the villainous Hal Banks; however, as Joseph Kispal-Kovacs describes in his chapter of this book, the film shifts from social analysis to a narrative focus on individual villains. Similarly, Net Worth (Jerry Ciccoritti, 1995) presents another unsavoury episode in the

38 David Frank

history of labour relations in the 1950s, in this case in the context of the National Hockey League, a subject taken up in detail in Bart Beaty’s chapter on the relationship between class and masculinity in film and television representations of hockey. The film shows how the hockey heroes of the time were treated as shabbily as any low-paid blue-collar employee. Especially in the characters of the young Gordie Howe and the veteran Ted Lindsay, one gets a feeling for the complexity of emotions among these workers as they struggle with issues of deference, resistance, and solidarity. Take Eight: Germinal? And what of the coal miners, who figure so prominently in labour films in advanced industrial states such as Britain and the United States, where the coal industry sits close to the cultural imagination and political economy of the country? In Britain a group of remarkable dramatic films in the late 1930s brought images of the coal industry and class conflict to national attention: The Citadel (King Vidor, 1938), The Stars Look Down (Carol Reed, 1939), and The Proud Valley (Pen Tennyson, 1940). These were films that could be broadly defined as social problem films, and to a greater or lesser degree they implied solutions based on class solidarity and socialist politics. Even in Hollywood there were coal-mining films, notably Black Fury (Michael Curtiz, 1935) and How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941), although the messages were somewhat less positive as far as labour unions were concerned.23 More recently, productions such as Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and John Sayles’s Matewan (1987) have set a much more sympathetic standard. In the Canadian case, setting aside for the time being documentaries such as the wartime mobilization film Coal Face Canada (Robert Edmonds, 1943) and the attempt at local labour history in 12,000 Men (Martin Duckworth, 1978), coal miners have remained largely in the shadows. In the case of The Bay Boy (Daniel Petrie, 1984), a well-received coming-of-age film set in the coal town of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, in 1937, the town’s predominantly working-class population is almost invisible. This is in part explained by the class position of the family at the centre of the story. The father is a local soft-drink manufacturer who is trying to rebuild his failed business in the basement of their home; the mother, an immigrant war bride, keeps the family economy going by baking for local restaurants and taking in boarders. In one of the few

In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 39

references to coal miners, Donald’s mother comments briefly on the status of the coal miners, who are perceived as the least fortunate members of the community: ‘I am glad your father isn’t a miner. The worst job for the poorest wages. Having to live in those company houses, shop at the company store.’ The conversation, misleadingly, goes on to lament the influence of the company stores – which in reality had closed permanently a dozen years earlier, at the time of the 1925 strike. For Donald (played by Kiefer Sutherland), the surrounding environment is a negative one, and the only option for him is to effect his escape from ‘this mining town at the edge of the earth.’ From this portrait, it is impossible to know that Glace Bay was coming out of the Great Depression with one of the country’s strongest local unions and social reform movements and was about to elect the first Co-operative Commonwealth Federation member of Parliament east of Manitoba. In dramatic terms, The Bay Boy works well and addresses several difficult themes, but it falls short as a portrait of life in 1930s coal country.24 Some similar reservations apply to Margaret’s Museum (Mort Ransen, 1995), a very successful feature whose action also takes place in Glace Bay, in this case a decade later. Here the coal miners and their families appear to be much closer to the centre of the story, as the main character is a young woman (Margaret, played by Helena Bonham Carter) who has already lost her father to the coal mines and is watching her grandfather waste away from respiratory disease; she is determined to do what she can to protect her brother, Jimmy, and her husband, Neil, from the same fate. In Sheldon Currie’s original stories, which provided the basis for the film, Jimmy is an articulate advocate of labour organization and political action. However, the labour theme virtually disappears in the translation from the page to the screen, thus providing a misleading impression of the balance of class forces in the mining community and the choices available to the local population. Again, in this film there recurs the persistent illusion of the company store, that powerful symbol of company domination, long after its actual historical demise. The explanation appears to be that the film subscribes to a view of mining communities as unchanging places exempt from history. Accordingly, the sensibilities of the 1990s can be applied to the social relations of the 1890s and the physical landscape of the 1940s without interrupting the static essentialism of local history. Margaret’s Museum is a well-crafted film, but it is essentially a romantic tragedy rather than an historical film. Peter Urquhart’s contribution to this book takes up the question of the transformation of the original texts to film,

40 David Frank

from the perspective of opportunities for the expression of progressive politics within a popular culture form.25 Take Nine: Labour’s Story In the end, it should come as no surprise that the Great Canadian Labour History Film does not exist. There are only short takes, many of them arising from incidental processes of documentation and fictionalization. There is also a more purposeful body of work, but its promise has remained contingent on circumstances of patronage and funding, and the contending priorities of other projects. The virtual absence of labour history from the sample version of Canadian history contained in the Heritage Minutes, for instance, suggests the difficulties in gaining access to the cultural apparatus that governs the Canadian discourse. It is true that workers are represented there, most notably in cases such as ‘Nitro’ and ‘Springhill.’ But the series lacks the more explicit labour stories that have contributed to the making of Canadian history. Nor is the example of the CBC/Radio-Canada production of Canada: A People’s History encouraging. Despite the traditional association of ‘people’s history’ with working-class history, and the presence of consultants with appropriate backgrounds, the references to labour history in the series were underwhelming. Darrell Varga’s chapter on this series further argues this point, with reference to the larger context of media culture in relation to this marginalization of both the specificity of the experience of labour and its intersectionality with other social processes. In Canada: A People’s History, perhaps the most notable absence was in Episode 10, which focused on the 1870s and 1880s without a single reference to major developments such as the Trade Union Act (1872), which pronounced unions to be acceptable social institutions within the meaning of the law. The thousands of pages of testimony collected by the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital, or the rise of the Knights of Labor as a major oppositional social movement in the 1880s, might well have provided appropriate ‘stories’ for visual treatment. By the time the People’s History reached the year of the Winnipeg General Strike (1919), the scope of labour history in the series had been effectively limited to a traditional approach that identifies labour as a ‘special interest’ theme of limited relevance to the national narrative. Modern Canada is to a significant degree the outcome of recurring struggles on the part of working people to extend their political, social, and economic rights within the prevailing eco-

In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 41

nomic system, yet the theme is barely recognizable in this version of ‘people’s history.’26 I was unexpectedly asked a few years ago to advise on a planned series of films on Canadian labour history. The results have been relatively well received, despite difficulties along the way.27 By the time I was contacted, the project had been contracted out to a major production house, a treatment for the series had already been written, and directors for the segments had already been hired. It proved a frustrating experience. My function was to provide advice and, especially, to correct errors. Indeed it gradually dawned on me that I was there largely at the insistence of the sponsors, who had put up the money for the project and wanted some kind of informed quality control. But the fact that I had spent some twenty years teaching and writing on this subject did not seem all that relevant to the creative process. Do you ever use historians to work on historical films, I asked the series producer. The answer sounded something like ‘not if we can avoid it.’ Given such attitudes, and the shrinking budgets for documentary films in a fragmented market, it seems that the historian is likely to be among the first specialists to be dropped from a production team. Take Ten: Final Cut It has been some years now since Michael Bliss cautioned us against the ‘privatization’ of history, by which I believe he meant several related sins of self-absorption on the part of professional historians. Chief among them was the failure of academic historians to communicate their knowledge in ways that would help meet the widespread public appetite for historical information and understanding. And he warned academics that if they did not do better in this respect, they would have to accept the reality that other practitioners were addressing the demand and would continue to do so.28 Adventures in public history are not only a good idea, they are part of the historian’s most important responsibilities. They are not like giving lectures or writing books, for they speak their own languages. Natalie Davis and Robert Rosenstone have argued at length that historians who want to think about films need to learn how to think in pictures.29 At the same time, filmmakers have something to learn about thinking historically and making use of accumulated historical work. Filmmaking is a collaborative art that involves people with various kinds of experience, skills, and knowledge, and I believe we should encourage more projects

42 David Frank

that are conceived and constructed in partnership between the researchers and writers of academic history and the producers of popular history in all its varieties. Rather than encourage a competitive struggle over what has been called ‘the spoils of history,’ we should seek out more forms of collaboration between those who practise different kinds of history. If we are concerned about the privatization of history, indeed about the privatization of civil society generally, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a popular visual history will benefit from greater collaboration between historians and filmmakers.

NOTES 1 In his fascinating reminiscence of the making of Maria, presented at the annual conference of the Film Studies Association of Canada held at l’Université Laval in May 2001, Allan King explained the genesis of this film in the Drama Department of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Although sometimes attributed to the National Film Board, Maria in fact disappeared into a creative rights and distribution limbo at the CBC, from which it and other productions have never emerged. King’s talk, ‘Memories of Maria’ has been published in Take One (December 2001). 2 Tom Zaniello, Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). For my review, which includes suggestions for additional Canadian entries, see Labour/Le Travail 41 (Spring 1998): 292–5. A more extended survey of the Canadian labour film was published as ‘Short Takes: The Canadian Worker on Film,‘ Labour/Le Travail 46 (Fall 2000): 417–37. The present manuscript is a revised version of that text, as presented at the Symposium on the Working Class in Canadian Cinema, Annual Conference of the Film Studies Association of Canada, 26 May 2001. 3 Ian K. Easterbrook and Susan Waterman MacLean, comp., Canada and Canadians in Feature Films: A Filmography, 1928-1990 (Guelph: University of Guelph, 1996), 5, 216–17; Loren Lerner, ed., Canadian Film and Video: A Bibliography and Guide to the Literature, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 1: 84–8 and passim; Film/Video Canadiana 1994 (Montreal: National Film Board – OPTIM, 1994) [CD-ROM]. There are a variety of useful articles in the standard anthologies as well as in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and CineAction. 4 Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895–1939 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978), 30–44. 5 Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class

In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 43

6 7

8

9

10 11 12

13

14 15 16

17

in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). For suggestions for the Canadian research agenda, see my review in Labour/Le Travail 44 (Fall 1999): 259–62. Maritime Labor Herald (Glace Bay), 25 February 1922, 7. This film was unfortunately named, at least for the purposes of film history. As it happened, ‘Canada Carries On’ was the NFB’s premier domestic wartime series; and then there were the ‘Carry On Gang’ British comedies of the 1950s and 1960s. For the background, see Morris, Embattled Shadows, 71–80. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996). In addition, Bryan Palmer in Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the History of Transgression (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), chap. 18, has pointed out the critical intentions of much of the mid-century film noir tradition. See, for instance, James Doyle, Progressive Heritage: The Evolution of a Politically Radical Literary Tradition in Canada (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002). See also the chapter by Scott Forsyth in the present collection. John Grierson, ‘A Film Policy for Canada’ [1944], in Documents in Canadian Film, ed. Doug Fetherling (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1988), 51–67. Gary Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda, 1939–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). Yvonne Mathews-Klein, ‘How They Saw Us: Images of Women in National Film Board Films of the 1940s and 1950s,‘ Atlantis 4, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 20–33. See also Ruth Roach Pierson, Canadian Women and the Second World War (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1983). The film can be viewed in conjunction with a very good article on the subject, Helen Smith and Pamela Wakewich, ‘“Beauty and the Helldivers”: Representing Women’s Work and Identities in a Warplant Newspaper,’ Labour/Le Travail 44 (Fall 1999): 71–107. Susanne Klausen, ‘Off the Page and Onto the Screen,’ Labour/Le Travail 47 (Spring 2001): 277–81. Morris, Embattled Shadows, 67–70. ‘History Television and the General Strike: Three Views,’ Labour/Le Travail 45 (Spring 2000): 255–70. This includes comments by David Bercuson, Kurt Korneski, and James Naylor and Tom Mitchell. For the historical context, see Craig Heron, ed., The Workers’ Revolt in Canada, 1917–1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). See especially Linda Kealey, Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour and the Left in Canada, 1890–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).

44 David Frank 18 For some background, see Paul Warren, ‘The French-Canadian Cinema: A Hyphen between Documentary and Fiction,’ and Philip Reines, ‘The Emergence of Quebec Cinema: A Historical Overview,’ both in Essays on Quebec Cinema, ed. Joseph. I. Donohoe Jr (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991). 19 Bruno Ramirez, ‘Variations on a Theme,’ Labour/Le Travail 45 (Spring 2000): 227–30. 20 ‘La Turlute [sic] des années dures,’ Cinema Canada (May 1984): 18–20. 21 Bissonnette has made several films on contemporary labour themes, such as A Wives’ Tale (1981), which can now be regarded not only as reportage but also as documentary constructions of the past. See Himani Bannerji, ‘Sophie Bissonnette and Her Films,’ Fuse (February–March 1986): 25–7. 22 Peter Harcourt, ‘Men of Vision: Some Comments on the Work of Don Shebib,’ in Canadian Film Reader, ed. Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1977), 211. 23 See Peter Stead, Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society (London: Routledge, 1989), chap. 5, and Francis R. Walsh, ‘The Films We Never Saw: American Movies View Organized Labor, 1934– 1954,’ Labor History 27, no. 4 (1986): 564–80. 24 My thanks to Mark Van Horn for sharing insights from his research on this film. See Mark Van Horn, ‘A Tale of Two Films: A Reading of Johnny Belinda (1948) and The Bay Boy (1984)’ (MA report, University of New Brunswick, 2000). 25 In addition to Urquhart’s chapter in the present book, see my earlier critique, ‘The Social Landscape of Margaret’s Museum,’ Canadian Dimension, July–August 1998, 41–3, and comments in ‘One Hundred Years After: Film and History in Atlantic Canada,’ Acadiensis 26, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 132–5. For additional commentaries on the film, see Noreen Golfman, ‘Mining: Margaret’s Museum,’ Canadian Forum, April 1996, 28–31; Lee Parpart, ‘Pit(iful) Bodies: Colonial Masculinity, Class and Folk Innocence in Margaret’s Museum,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 63–86; Chris Gittings, Canadian National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge): 135–41. 26 For an extended critique from the standpoint of a labour and social historian of Atlantic Canada, see David Frank, ‘Public History and the People’s History: A View from Atlantic Canada,’ Acadiensis 32, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 120–33. 27 See Gavin Hainsworth, ‘Canadian Labour’s Untold Stories: The Workers’ Millennium Project,’ Our Schools/Our Selves, Spring 2002, 58–63. 28 Michael Bliss, ‘Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History,

In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 45 the Sundering of Canada,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 26, no. 4 (Winter 1991–2): 5–17. The opportunities for labour historians are explored in Craig Heron, ‘The Labour Historian and Public History,’ Labour/Le Travail 45 (Spring 2000): 171–97. 29 See Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), and Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

2 Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada scott forsyth

The awakening proletariat must have a revolutionary culture. Editorial, Masses (1932)1

This chapter will discuss the cultural activism and politics of Canadian Communists, and their sympathizers and fellow travellers, in the thirties – the peak of a brief but vibrant anti-capitalist cultural movement – and, more summarily, into the forties and fifties. These young revolutionaries formed theatre and dance troupes, literary journals, film and photo groups, painters’ clubs, and artists’ unions; planned films and workers’ symphony orchestras; energetically wrote stories, poems, and novels; and painted images of the working class at work, destitute, and engaged in struggles. They organized baseball teams and summer camps. They imagined a revolutionary working-class culture integrated with the revolutionary movement the Communist Party hoped, and expected, to lead. The moment is remembered in memoirs, party histories, some notable documentary and fiction films, and in recent scholarly work that usually focuses on one art form in a movement that boldly covered all the arts. However, this cultural Left is marginalized in cultural histories of Canada. The artists have been dismissed for their politics or the art condescendingly appraised as merely the early work of later luminaries. In relationship to expanding postwar cultural industries, and especially more recent developments in film considered in this volume, this study may seem like a prehistory: perhaps later developments are prefigured; perhaps failures structure later limitations or absences in the Canadian cultural landscape. This diverse cultural activity needs to be understood as an important

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 47

dimension of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) history and its relationship to working-class life. It is not only an underappreciated tradition within Canadian culture; for socialists and other radicals, the period represents the high point of leftist cultural politics and its impact on the cultural mainstream – a radical class culture that has faded, but whose existence provides a reminder, and a lineage, of oppositional possibility. This generation struggled as activists and artists with issues of organization, class and ethnic identity, racism, international solidarity, and class aesthetics and representation that we still must confront. This discussion covers this movement’s ambitions and accomplishment across the arts. For readers interested in film and film studies, the developments in filmmaking and film culture will seem rudimentary. However, those nascent developments, and what follows, are better understood in the wider political and aesthetic context of history and historiography that I hope to survey before taking up a discussion of film activity later in this chapter. Many accounts of the CPC and this period look back from the viewpoint of later defeats or the party’s own mistakes of sectarianism and opportunism, from the acceptance of the marginalization of radicalism. However, I want to begin with a measure of optimism: it is useful to recall that, despite its small membership and ethnic marginalization, the CPC entered the decade of the Great Depression with revolutionary hopes, predicting and reflecting the radicalized movements that developed. Though hobbled by ferocious red-baiting by all establishment political voices, repeatedly outlawed, and faced with continual police harassment, the party contended for leadership of the working class and the Left with the newly formed social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), played a crucial part in mass union organization, maintained a prominent role in many immigrant communities, and led the movements of the unemployed and of solidarity with the Spanish Republic. While cultural work was never a central priority, given so many urgent political demands, the party nonetheless achieves considerable influence among artists and intellectuals.2 Part of the party’s success can be seen as rooted in its inheritance of what historian Bryan Palmer calls the ‘movement culture’ of the Canadian working class. He analyses how the Knights of Labor in the nineteenth century used ‘ritual and procession, symbolism and soiree, combined to proclaim the unity of all labour.’3 Unions and early socialist groups continued the tradition of demonstrations, parades, dances, sporting events, and picnics, and even built community centres. In the

48 Scott Forsyth

twenties, the party connected to this tradition largely through its language sections – the organization of the bulk of the party’s members by ethnicity, particularly Jewish, Ukrainian, and Finnish. These sections had a rich life of amateur theatre, sports clubs, dances, choirs, and summer camps. Dozens of Farmer-Labour Temples were built across the country by the Ukrainian-language association. Though not formally part of the party, these were expropriated by the state during the Second World War with the claim that they were connected to an illegal organization. At the end of the twenties, the party embarked on a long, fractious attempt to Canadianize and Bolshevize itself, convinced that the cultural was overwhelming the political. One delegate at the 1925 party convention complained that the language sections spent too much time organizing dances and concerts, although other comrades pointed out that such events were largely funding the party press.4 Indeed, much of the party’s strength and resilience – relatively speaking, considering its small and beleaguered status – might be owed to the rich sense of an oppositional community, the intense relationships among members, including their families, scorned by the mainstream, disciplined by increasingly Stalinist centralism, but united in a glorious struggle for a better world. Yet the radical culture of the thirties extended beyond the party’s subculture and helped create a ‘cultural world’ of the Left.5 Much of the period has been debated, analysed, and perhaps mythologized, based largely on polarized opposites: pro- and antiCommunist, Trotskyist against Stalinist, the revolutionary Third Period and the reformist Popular Front, the Communist International’s Soviet line against native radical expressions; in cultural matters, proletarian culture against socialist realism, or modernism against realism, working-class assertiveness fading to middle-class liberalism. While these polarities are certainly part of the period, recent scholarship on communist movements, in Canada and internationally, has often focused on different emphases that bring out a more balanced, detailed, and sympathetic treatment of the party: issues of race and ethnicity, the importance of culture itself, more tempered aesthetic evaluation of cultural works, the many sides of party life, grassroots participation.6 In what follows, I want to try and deepen our comprehension of this cultural moment and connect to what remains inspirational and ‘usable’ about a past that is all too often the victim of the ‘enormous condescension’ of the present.

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 49

Class against Class The Soviet-led Communist International declaration of a Third Period of world capitalism after the First World War promised a period of militant class struggle, ‘class against class,’ with the possibility of revolutionary crises.7 The proclamation took on added urgency with the onset of the predicted Great Depression, and Canadian Communists threw their best efforts into building revolutionary trade unions. Party leader Stewart Smith returned from Moscow and commented, ‘in a very short time the streets of Toronto will be running with blood.’8 The militant turn in strategy, heightened activism, and robust rhetoric inevitably combined with economic collapse and ruling-class anxiety to bring police repression and eventually the arrest of the party’s leadership. Nonetheless, the party grew dramatically and enjoyed considerable success organizing the Workers’ Unity League and mounting a vigorous defence of its imprisoned leaders. In this period of intense social and economic disruption and militant struggle, cultural activism built on the modest beginnings of the twenties and found rich opportunity. In 1931, young radicals, many connected to the University of Toronto, formed the first Progressive Arts Club (PAC). The group included the poet Dorothy Livesay; the historian and future party leader Stanley Ryerson; Oscar Ryan, who will become the party’s film and theatre reviewer; Jean Watts and Toby Gordon Ryan, who will be crucial in radical theatre in Toronto; and the artist Avrom Yanovsky. They regarded the PAC as the ‘cultural front of the class struggle,’ and began an artists’ group, the Toronto Workers’ Experimental Theatre troupe, and a literature section. PAC branches soon started up in Winnipeg, Montreal, Halifax, Vancouver, and London.9 The lively, if belligerent, class rhetoric of the Third Period is reflected in the journal Masses, published by the Toronto PAC from 1932 to 1934. On one hand, the journal’s scorn was poured on the middle classes and the conformism and timidity of existing Canadian culture: ‘we are possibly exaggerating when we say there is an intelligentsia in this country ... [We are] disgusted with the barren fields of Canadian bourgeois culture, with the smirking complacency of Canadian artists and writers, with their puerile ignorance and contempt for social questions, with their snobbish disdain for the workers movement and workers.’ On the other, it called for an explicitly class-based culture: ‘the awakening proletariat must have a revolutionary culture that will expand with

50 Scott Forsyth

the growing realization of its need and the methods necessary for their fulfillment.’ The journal reflected this radicalized milieu with poetry, short stories, reportage, reviews, educational discussion of the arts, and fledgling theoretical debates. Poems and chants attempted to directly address and reflect the ravages of the Depression and the working class’s fighting back. The PAC made particular efforts to draw workers into literary production for the journal, even if most of the group was middle or upper class, struggling guiltily against their class origins. Artists such as Yanofsky and Leonard Hutchinson provided cartoons and woodprints to illustrate each issue in forms considered closer to the non-expertise of a working-class audience. Masses also demonstrates the Left’s appreciation of film as an essential part of its cultural world and the growing sense of the complex importance of popular art. A Film and Photo League is formed by members of the Progressive Arts Club and announces ‘the camera is also a weapon when it is pointed in the right direction, at the class struggle.’ Regular reviews in Masses underlined the importance of movies as working-class entertainment. For example, Lon Lawson was pugnaciously scornful of the latest bourgeois film, but concluded, ‘however, as the program included some thrilling scenes of the militant May Day Demonstration in Hamilton and an excellent comedy in which everybody hit everybody else with crullers, the evening was not a total loss.’ The rival liberal magazine, Canadian Forum, with connections to the social democratic CCF, also began to react to the economic times with more militant stories and poetry. It received particularly antagonistic analysis in Masses, with all the scorn of Third Period sectarianism for ‘parlour pinks.’ Such a rivalry would continue throughout the decade with the new journal New Frontier. The internationalism of the period is represented by poems and reports from the United States, England, Latin America, and the Soviet Union. This journal, like similarly innovative little magazines in the United States, broke ground for both proletarian radicalism and literary innovations – both realist and modernist – that was important in the thirties and beyond.10 The high point of Canadian cultural radicalism of the early thirties was certainly the agitprop of the workers’ theatre troupes. Over one hundred troupes were rapidly established across Canada, building on the party’s language section experiences and connecting vitally to the organizing – both of unions and the unemployed – that was helping the party to grow dramatically. The theatre troupes were made up of activists performing agitprop skits and mass chants in the streets, at demon-

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 51

strations, and on picket lines, as well as short social dramas in theatres. Short works such as Dimitroff, Scottsboro Limited and Ryerson’s War in the East covered international causes, but the troupe performed dramas based on domestic issues as well. Livesay’s play for young people, Joe Derry, dramatized the arrest of a Montreal Communist militant. Unemployment and Looking Forward are grim melodramas, the latter part of the strategy for organizing unemployed marches in Ontario. Theatre Our Weapon announced the reigning aesthetic. The troupes were sometimes hampered by their inexperience – a Masses reviewer commented that one performance’s finale was hampered by the early drop of the stage curtain – but were exhilarated nonetheless. The aesthetic and political peak of such theatre was a performance of Eight Men Speak in Toronto, attended by over 1500 people. The elaborately staged play had a cast of thirty. Its six acts, which dramatize the imprisonment of the Communist Party leadership in Kingston Penitentiary and call for their release, range in style from satire to chant to mock courtroom drama to call to revolution. The local police immediately banned the play and arrested A.E. Smith of the Canadian Labour Defence League – a CLDL organizer is a character in the play – for ‘seditious utterance.’ Despite the ban, the campaign based around this play freed Tim Buck and the other leaders – thousands greeted them at a packed Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.11 As exciting as this episode was, many artists were frustrated with the artistic limits of agitprop, and the party later criticized some efforts as ‘anti-aesthetic.’ Yet, this work also reflected a didactic and defiant plebian and working-class aesthetic of long standing as well as the nascent influence of more sophisticated theatrical developments in New York, Moscow, and Berlin that were being internationalized by the Comintern through the International Union of Revolutionary Theatres. The first meeting of the international union in Moscow was excitedly covered in Masses, though no Canadian delegation was there. But Toby Gordon Ryan, for example, was able to attend the leftist New Theater School in New York and was particularly inspired by the German-language agitprop of Prolet-Buhne.12 The Canadian comrades knew little of Piscator, Brecht, or Meyerhold, but they identified specifically with an international revolutionary movement. The energies and excitement of this proletarian period dissipated in the mid-thirties. The journal and many theatre troupes closed down. The Film and Photo League was ‘somewhat impeded by lack of equipment and forces.’ Many later leftist commentators blame the Comintern’s

52 Scott Forsyth

promotion of the Popular Front against fascism and its strategic opening to the middle class and to liberalism. Doubtless there is evidence of this in the disorientation of many party activists in the union movement and in the arts. At the same time, the idealization of proletarian identity, which provided so much energy, was also an aesthetic and political limitation. Artists wanted to move beyond agitprop; class politics was more complex than calls for proletarian unity and combat. Indeed, the working class itself was changing. Well before the Popular Front, comrades debated changes in cultural politics, sometimes posed bluntly as art against propaganda in the pages of Masses, reflecting growing theoretical sophistication as well as the influence of the Comintern and its sharp condemnation of ‘leftism’ in cultural work. As Canadians, the activists recognized that they were at the beginning of cultural developments for both the Left and Canada. Livesay captured the conundrum: ‘There is no proletarian literature in Canada but there is no Canadian literature either.’13 However, the seeds had been planted, and the later thirties would see the cultural movement of the Left revive and expand. The Popular Front The strategy of the Popular Front, which comprised all political forces against war and fascism, dramatically changed the CPC’s relationship to mainstream politics and the rest of the Left. The formerly reviled CCF was courted, though the social democrats never responded with any degree of trust or cooperation to the Communists, whom they had themselves reviled. The revolutionary unions of the Workers’ Unity League were painfully sacrificed to the building of a broad union movement. The cultural front was revived and a new journal launched. The difference in tone from Masses could not have been greater: New Frontier aimed to reach formerly scorned middle-class intellectuals ‘with a positive reaction to the social scene and a forum for progressive opinion.’14 The journal was filled with poetry and short stories that respond to the urgent politics of the day, but it also featured successful writers such as E.J. Pratt, Morley Callaghan, and Hugh MacLennan. A perhaps exaggerated theme of self-criticism of the earlier proletarian period’s ‘leftism’ was important to the cultural politics of the Popular Front; the cultural Left had to be open to the greatness of bourgeois culture and its sophisticated forms, learn from the professionalism of the cultural industries and artists, and broaden its appeal beyond an idealized proletariat. In the Soviet Union, this turn was formalized in the orthodoxy of

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 53

socialist realism, but in the West that term was little used; party cultural organs champion social realism, which endeavoured to incorporate and construct national cultural traditions of resistance and democracy in every country. Again, in the Soviet Union, this nationalism was part of the bureaucracy’s increasingly conservative ideological and institutional consolidation. As in the Third Period, radical theatre played a leading role. Theatre troupes were reconstituted in major cities – the Progressive Arts Players in Vancouver, the Theatre of Action in Toronto, the New Theatre Group in Montreal – and immediately reached significant audiences. While there was considerable continuity of personnel and many party activists were involved, this theatre consciously moved beyond the agitprop aesthetics of the early thirties. These troupes situated themselves within the Little Theatre movement, the conventional beginnings of professional theatre in Canada, although they were careful to denounce ‘the existing Little Theatre as an enfeebled expression of a moribund society.’ Still, the activists were anxious to establish ‘stationary’ theatres, learn from professionals, and respect the craft of theatre. The class rhetoric of the Third Period was certainly diluted by this professionalization and institutionalization, but the plays performed still followed the class themes and priorities of party politics. Successes include the fierce anti-imperialism of Roar China, by the Soviet playwright Tretiakov, and American class-centred dramas – Bury the Dead, Of Mice and Men, and, most of all, Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty. The Progressive Arts Players staged this defining hit of American leftist theatre and won the Dominion Drama Festival. The play toured the country, mounted in the Farmer-Labour Temples of the Ukrainian association, illustrating the institutional continuity of cultural radicalism, along with the differences, from the twenties. In Toronto, the Theatre of Action included many young actors, directors, and designers who went on to considerable fame – Lorne Green, Lou Jacobi, Sidney Newman, Louis Applebaum, Guy Glover, Johnny Wayne, and Frank Shuster.15 More broadly, this radical theatre continued the formal inventiveness of agitprop – ‘quick blackouts, choric recitations, tableaux, symbolic pantomime, freeze poses, cycloramas of lights’ – refining and introducing modernist style and technique into the conservative Canadian theatre world.16 In painting, this period saw a continuation and broadening of the group of social and socialist realist painters from the early thirties. New Frontier championed, to name a few, Leonard Hutchinson, Charles Com-

54 Scott Forsyth

fort, Fritz Brandtner, Paraskeva Clark, Pegi Nicol, Marian Scott, Miller Brittain, Fred Taylor, and some members of the Group of Seven. Some of these artists continued to work in what they considered ‘democratic’ lithographs and woodprints, reflecting the class aesthetic of the early thirties, but also moved on to professional success in oil painting. They offered compelling portraits of the ravages of the Depression, a frankly ‘ennobling’ iconography of the working class, and sensitivity to the representation of race and gender in that class, which belies contemporary stereotypes of the narrowness of political art. Hutchinson, for example, portrayed the misery of the Depression in Breadline, beautifully dignified working men in Black Worker and Tobacco Workers (Bright Leaf), and the people in action in Protest. Painting after painting by this group features working-class characters as figures in struggle, not simple objects of sentiment or pathos. These leftists saw themselves as founders in a fledgling Canadian art world but set their subject as urban and working-class, challenging the nascent Canadian nationalism of the Group of Seven. Clark boldly demanded, ‘You, whose soul and mind understands the secret life of the forms of trees and rocks and skies and are moved to tears by them. Why do the people and their struggles and dreams not interest you?’ Her superb Petroushka memorably captures the vitality of both working-class street life and leftist agitprop. Hutchinson specifically articulated his goal as ennobling the working class and oppressed, redefining landscape painting as part of the class struggle by representing ‘the working figure in class struggle.’ Clark’s Petroushka is an excellent example of this effort to paint the landscape of urban-industrialism. Many of these artists were also teachers, most were active in solidarity with the Spanish Republic, and some were instrumental in a short-lived Artists Union in southern Ontario. They struggled as artists with only a few group shows; some worked as commercial artists, some were modestly subsidized by leftist organizations. This painters’ movement would be ignored in official art histories for decades and then rediscovered by a new generation of radicals in the sixties and seventies.17 The favoured literary form of writers on the Left in the thirties was surely the short story. Every issue of Masses, New Frontier, and Canadian Forum included several examples; contests were held and prizes awarded. Although some efforts remain interesting only as period pieces, others demonstrate a creative and bold politicizing of the form. The one extant collection shows varied and inventive approaches – fables, satires, grim slices of life, tales of radicalization and commitment. Few

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 55

stories fit the often-dismissed stereotype of proletarian literature, but we can see a continuation of the proletarian themes of the early thirties. Those themes are treated with a complex consideration of class differences, race, ethnicity, working life, women’s participation in work and politics, homelessness and unemployment, culture and making art itself. If anything, a grim and pessimistic perspective prevails – so much so that the editors of New Frontier even joked that they could not print any more unsolicited stories of men who had lost limbs as a result of falling off freight trains.18 There are only a few novels associated with the radicalization of the thirties. Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage is a powerful and angry novel written from within the Vancouver unemployment protests and riots. Party journalist Ted Allan celebrates the internationalist campaign in Spain and laments its defeat in This Time a Better Earth. Both novels were published in 1939, others came later. Allan’s biography of Dr Norman Bethune, the most famous of all Canadian Communists, The Scalpel, The Sword: The Story of Dr Norman Bethune (1952), became a best-seller for decades and the inspiration for future documentary and feature filmmaking. The protagonist of Hugh Garner’s memorable tale of a poor Toronto boy, Cabbagetown, is confused and attracted by Communism and finally joins the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, along with hundreds of Canadian Communists, to fight in Spain. The early novels of Hugh MacLennan were profoundly influenced by proletarian literature, his study of Marxism, and his participation in the American Popular Front. A number of activists look back at these years in notable novels and memoirs: Oscar Ryan’s Soon to Be Born, Dorothy Livesay’s compelling collage Right Hand Left Hand, Mavis Gallant’s play What Is to Be done? The singular Trotskyist of the cultural Left, Earle Birney, will relive, tragicomically, the excitement and difficulties of marginal leftist organizing and factionalism in Down the Long Table. His popular satire of wartime military bureaucracy, Turvey, can also be interpreted as a continuation of the Trotskyist/Stalinist battles of the thirties Left. Anger and disgust at the human cost of the crisis of capitalism had spread far beyond the revolutionary cadre to the leading figures of developing Canadian literature: the short stories and novels of the liberal Catholic Morley Callaghan, the romantic but dour anti-capitalism of Frederick Philip Grove, and, a few years later, the important early novels of Gabrielle Roy, the postwar epics of Hugh MacLennan, and the short stories from France of Mavis Gallant. A literary historian observed, with some alarm, that the social devastation of the Depression

56 Scott Forsyth

produced a sea change in Canadian literature in the thirties: ‘social injustice and disorder, poverty and suffering among the underprivileged; greed and complacency in high places; the concept and theories of reform and revolution; these had become the dominant subject matter of Canadian literature.’ The same historian, writing in 1965, offered a condescending dismissal: ‘much of the literature of the Hungry Thirties has little purely aesthetic value and therefore it has been forgotten by its original readers, perhaps even by its writers.’ In contrast, a positive evaluation in 1999 documented the widespread affiliation, mostly informal, of Canadian writers, from the thirties on, to ideas and organizations of socialism, communism, and radicalism; the literary Left had a constitutive role in the developing national literature. Apparently forgotten in the margins, the literary Left had a surprisingly powerful impact on the mainstream.19 Similarly, the poets of the Left were first dismissed and then evaluated more carefully and appreciatively. The party press and cultural journals featured poetry, usually of a robust and militant kind: from the populist Joe Wallace, a favourite within the party, whose work harks back to the evangelical traditions of Canadian working-class radicalism, to the more challenging Montreal poets – Leo Kennedy, A.J.M. Smith, A.M. Klein – to Dorothy Livesay, rightly now the most celebrated writer of the leftist thirties. More broadly, the Left was nurturing such major poetic voices as the Trotskyist Birney; one of the founding intellectuals of the CCF, F.R. Scott; and later poets such as Irving Layton and P.K. Page. Livesay is now honoured as both a pioneer of modernism and a ‘foremother’ of contemporary feminist poetry. Much of her work from the thirties in poetry, short stories, reportage, agitprop, and radio drama focused on urgent themes of work, unemployment, and struggle. But she was also developing a militant aesthetic she called documentary, which addressed conflicts and contradictions of Canadian nationality, colonialism, race, sexuality, and the erotic. Her work has proven lastingly influential and challenging.20 Livesay and the other leftist poets espoused a rhetoric of ‘red-blooded realism’ in the thirties and hoped that poetry would be instrumental, would be a weapon in the struggle – at workplaces, in the streets, and, most memorably, in solidarity with the Spanish Republic.21 Much literary criticism has posed a polarity in the thirties between these socialist and realist imperatives and the more rarefied aesthetic experiments of imagistic modernism. This tension clearly existed, and it was used to marginalize the leftist poets in the

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 57

postwar canonization of formalist poetry and literary criticism. A closer look reveals many connections between modernist innovations and the political urgencies of the decade; literary theorist Barbara Godard comments on the compressed emergence of English-Canadian modernism with ‘a Marxist aesthetic of social realism and engaged revolutionary poetry ... [in which] Anglo-Canadian poets mixed a modernist poetics with Marxist themes.’22 Livesay’s work exemplifies the richness of this cultural dialogue across the arts and across distinctions between high and low art. Her work in radio grew out of her agitprop playlets and chants and included short educational radio shows offering Marxist analysis of poetry, and a play on racism in the United States, The Times Were Different, which was dramatized on the CBC in the later thirties. She went on to write other radio dramas – both in lyrical and realist voices – in the forties and fifties on subjects that ranged from the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War to the Riel Rebellion. (She had left the party by this time, but themes developed in party politics during the thirties remained integral to her work.)23 Radio was a regular part of party organization in the thirties. The party paper, the Daily Clarion, produced a weekly show on Toronto radio, and leftist union locals and party branches across the country frequently hosted radio shows, particularly during election campaigns in the thirties and forties. Although these shows were often limited to campaign speeches, they sometimes included short plays and satirical skits.24 What is worth remarking is that the Communists, alongside their devotion to making art, and in a rudimentary and instrumental way, were also actively responding to the rise of new mass media. This consideration and appreciation of the new mass media of advanced capitalism is most important with regard to film. Although film scholars will not find an undiscovered Renoir or Welles in the Canadian thirties, film was a crucial part of the broad ‘cultural world’ of the Left. The party press and journals regularly reviewed Hollywood films, often scathingly but with a sense of working-class immersion in this popular entertainment. While there is little discussion of theoretical conceptions of film, the reviewers have a sense of humour and draw sharp cultural and political distinctions; they articulate a savvy working-class perspective on Hollywood and treat such films as an expected part of class experience. For example, an anonymous reviewer complains about John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939): ‘Perhaps it is too much to expect Hollywood to attempt to deal with Geronimo and his Apaches

58 Scott Forsyth

more like human beings and less like cutthroat bandits.’ But the review concludes that film is still ‘worth seeing.’ In the late thirties, as the American Left begins to have an impact in Hollywood, reviewers were careful to laud any progressive content in films like Modern Times (1936) and gleefully reported the union and solidarity campaigns of the Hollywood Left. One reviewer crows with bravado that ‘Hollywood each day becomes more labour-conscious in a struggle which promises to be an epic of a type the films have never screened.’ Of course, special attention was always devoted to any new Soviet films; the 1937 party convention even adjourned for a special screening of the latest Soviet film, Prisoners. In 1936, the Clavir brothers, who were close to the party, formed Cosmopolitan Films, opened the Little Theatre at College and Spadina in Toronto, and ‘promise[d] the finest of progressive films.’ Throughout the thirties, they worked as distributors and toured Soviet films across the country to considerable theatrical success, particularly among the progressive Ukrainian community. This distribution was more than a commercial operation: it usually required battles with provincial censors and all the organizational dexterity of a political campaign.25 The devotion to film was the beginning of a leftist film culture. That it did not – perhaps historically could not – come to fruition should not lead us to dismiss its possibilities. Few films, or even extensive photographic work, were successfully produced on the Left in Canada during the thirties. Several newsreels of May Day demonstrations and Communist picnics survive in Manitoba archives; unfulfilled plans were made by the Toronto Film and Photo League; the organizers of the massive unemployed sit-ins in Vancouver used photo postcards of the violent riots that ensued in an inventive defence campaign.26 For the Canadian Left, the cinematic highlight of the thirties was undoubtedly the production and distribution of Heart of Spain (1938), focused on the blood transfusion work of Dr Norman Bethune. A joint initiative of the Montreal Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy and the American Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, it was produced by Frontier Films, one of the documentary-filmmaking groups of the American Popular Front. One film historian considers this the finest documentary of the American Left in the thirties. It was one of the most financially successful, touring throughout North America, with an ambulance to be donated to the Spanish republicans, opening in thirty to forty first-run theatres, and, in Canada, becoming part of Bethune’s triumphant return from Spain.27 Bethune is famous for his international activism, of course, but he is

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 59

an exemplary figure of the cultural Left as well. A talented painter, he also published poems and reports in the party press and New Frontier on the Depression, Spain, and China. In Montreal, he exhibited his paintings and, along with the painters Marian Scott and Fritz Brandtner, started art classes for poor children. Indeed, activists of the cultural Left were with Bethune in Spain. Perhaps somewhere in Heart of Spain we might glimpse Ted Allan observing the heroic doctor who will become his life-long artistic fixation. We may see Jean Watts, one of the Blood Transfusion Service ambulance drivers, who will return to Toronto and continue her key role in the Theatre of Action. Or perhaps we may see Hazen Sise, another member of Bethune’s team, radicalized son of a wealthy Montreal industrialist (like his friend, the painter Fred Taylor). Allan, Sise, and Watts broadcast regular radio appeals from the front in Spain, and after his return Sise wrote a number of scripts on artistic and architectural subjects for the CBC. Of course, the defeat in Spain is a bitter disappointment.28 Consistent with the opening to liberals and other leftists, the Popular Front years had been characterized by a relative lack of literary factionalism and perhaps a concomitant lack of theoretical development. In contrast to developments in France, England, and the United States, Canadian cultural criticism in the thirties did not engage in serious theoretical or sectarian battles over culture. The Trotskyist Earle Birney, cultural commentator at the Canadian Forum, was muted in debates by his CCF editors, and his differences with the Communists were relatively polite. Unlike in the United States, no serious pole of cultural Trotskyism developed. Rather than factional battles, New Frontier proposed broad artistic education to foster the grand cultural ambitions of the Left and to address the cultural underdevelopment of Canada. But, as its writers noted with Canadian diffidence, this was happening in ‘the comparative safety of Canada, a wasteland where no literary dispute worthy of the name could possibly find roots and flourish.’ Nonetheless, New Frontier repeatedly, chillingly, celebrated the Moscow show trials and the execution of opposition leaders, reminding us that, while in the West the Popular Front was an opening to liberalism, in the Soviet Union these were the years of the Great Purges, which brutally confirmed the Stalinist dictatorship.29 The end of the thirties brought disillusionment and factional disputes to the cultural Left. The unexpected announcement of the Soviet nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany and then the beginning of the war disoriented many in the party. Opponents denounced the pact as yet

60 Scott Forsyth

another Soviet-directed shift in party strategy, and liberal sympathizers rapidly disappeared as the party enforced a hard anti-war, anti-imperialist line; the Toronto Theatre of Action, for example, dissolved in political disagreement and confusion. Soon, the CPC was again declared illegal and over one hundred leaders and members were interned. Even the language associations were attacked, and the Ukrainian Farmer-Labour Temples all over the country were expropriated. Of course, cultural work continued; Joe Wallace, one of the internees, kept up his imprisoned comrades’ spirits with poetry. In 1940, Lawrence Cherry and Evelyn Spice Cherry, veterans of British documentary, made two films for the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool – New Horizons and By Their Own Strength. Although not connected to the party, these films, with self-conscious, even nostalgic, reference to early Soviet films, and with majestic prairie imagery and heroic collectivism, stand out as the only realized films of the broad Left in this moment; they seem like a coda to the movement of the thirties.30 People’s War to Cold War After the Soviet Union joined the war, the CPC was able to come cautiously above ground and its internees were eventually released. What historian Eric Hobsbawm called communism’s rescue of liberal capitalism allowed the party to recreate the Popular Front as a National Front supporting a People’s War against fascism. The class rhetoric and language of the CPC (and the CCF as well) was increasingly diluted by the language of reforms and the invocation of the people and the nation. But the party’s class role and influence, particularly in the booming union movement, remained relatively strong during the war years. Cultural activists of the Left begin to orient towards the mainstream, adopting individual strategies in the absence of a vital movement. Ted Allan headed for Hollywood; there he wrote a script about Bethune’s life for a proposed film, starring George Sanders. However, the film was never produced, and the script became the basis for an NBC radio drama. Several of the painters of the social realist movement became war artists, providing a memorable record of the war. Fred Taylor became president of the Quebec wing of the Canadian Federation of Artists; he patiently, and unsuccessfully, lobbied for government support for artists to paint scenes from war industries, thus celebrating workers on the home front. His own work with union locals in several factories resulted in some of his most powerful paintings: works such as

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 61

Applying the Track and Applying the Track, for Victory and After, which memorialize the Angus CPR shop, illustrate the continuity of the proletarian aesthetic – the ennobling and dynamic portrayal of workers labouring in the war against fascism. The tenacious Taylor had exhibits of his work in the Vancouver Labour Arts Guild (successor of the Progressive Arts Club), the Workers Educational Association in Port Hope, Ontario, and the union hall of the International Association of Machinists, war plant workers, in Montreal.31 Many of the activists of the thirties, including Guy Glover, Irene Baird, and Hazen Sise, gravitated to the newly formed National Film Board, joining P.K. Page, Mavis Gallant, Lawrence Cherry, and Evelyn Spice Cherry. The NFB quickly began its celebrated wartime production of stirring propaganda for the Allied war effort, abroad and on the home front. Many historians have argued that the NFB in the war years marked the beginning of a progressive national film culture. Malek Khouri, even more explicitly, has argued that many of these wartime films were part of the ‘counter-hegemonic discourse’ initiated by the Popular Front and the People’s War and that their representation of working people was a ‘labouring’ of Canadian culture. Certainly, we can see the influence of thirties leftist documentary work from Britain and the Soviet Union on NFB films. For example, The Case of Charlie Gordon (1939) shows the face of working-class youth in the Depression. Work in factories, mines, and fisheries was heroically portrayed in Toilers of the Grand Banks (1940), Thank You, Joe (1942), and Coal Face, Canada (1943). The Cherrys continued their celebration of prairie collectivism in Battle of the Harvests (1942). Other films championed housing programs, cooperative fisheries, labour-management factory committees, women’s new role in society, and the heroic role of the Soviet Union in the war. The NFB hired legendary Communist documentarist Joris Ivens to make Action Stations!, a successful staple of patriotic wartime newsreels. Many of these films implicitly or explicitly propose the Popular Front theme of a People’s War for a reformed world. At the same time, the NFB built a network of distribution and exhibition in churches, union halls, and community centres that could be seen as an alternative to the commercial and American domination of film. Many of the filmmakers recalled the collective spirit of work at the board during the war: Jim Beveridge recalled his co-workers as ‘inspirational, motivational, patriotic, forward-looking and generally left in a discreet way.’ Of course, this ‘left’ space had its limits; for example, Ivens, despite the latitude his ‘star’ stature earned, found the timid bureau-

62 Scott Forsyth

crats of the board a constraint on his creative and political ambitions. Grierson apparently inquired about leftists: ‘Are they Reds? Are they known?’ They would be hired, but only if not known, and presumably could exert a circumspect ‘counter-hegemonic’ influence.32 Other views of the NFB war years have emphasized the authoritarian control of the studio and the subordinate, rather than alternative, role of the NFB in relation to Hollywood. They point out that many of these films also illustrate the absorption of class and leftist politics within populist nationalism and reformism, with the dramatization of the Canadian state as collective hero. Even the possibility of cultural radicalism is eliminated when the NFB is subject to fierce red-baiting, fostered by the RCMP, the Conservative opposition, the media, and self-interested lobbying by the tiny private film industry. Many of the leftist cultural activists in the board were victims of the Cold War blacklisting. As film historian Thomas Waugh has noted, this stunting attack on the fledgling Canadian film industry coincided with ‘the dissipation of the cultural left.’33 The CPC, especially in its union strongholds, was under brutal attack from the beginning of the Cold War as the National Front and wartime alliances dissolved. Despite the increasingly desperate political circumstances, this period saw the most systematic and organized approach to culture and cultural activism in the party’s history. In the forties, party branches began to hold classes on Marxist cultural and aesthetic theory and its leaders specifically demanded attention to the role of culture in strengthening party life and politics. A Toronto Labour Theatre was founded; in Montreal, a youth branch formed a puppet troupe; a cultural journal, New Frontiers, was launched, modelled on its thirties precursors. In 1950, the party formed a National Cultural Commission; over the next several years, it held national conferences for party artists and cultural activists. As well, the orientation to the mainstream continues, despite Cold War hostility, in the party’s lobbying, largely following the Massey Commission’s direction, for a Canada Council and in support of the CBC, the NFB, community cultural centres, and a Canadian flag. Indeed, the party’s cultural politics presaged the institutional basis for later development of Canadian cultural industries as well as the defensive stance of cultural activists in more recent years. Ideologically, the party argued for ‘a democratic Canadian People’s Culture,’ emphasizing, in concert with Communist Parties around the world, a national and nationalist tradition of democracy and popular resistance. At the same time, party members poured critical, even hysterical, scorn

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 63

on ‘Yankee war culture,’ ranging from anti-Communist Hollywood films to comic books, which they saw as the cultural preparation for war and even fascism. The party aims ‘to combat the effects of decadent, degrading Yankee war culture which is poisoning the minds of the Canadian people and to stimulate genuine’s people culture.’ Nation has not entirely eclipsed class, but the party has obviously journeyed from proletarian culture to the broad terrain of national culture.34 Significant high points of the party’s cultural work in the early Cold War include the dramatic border concerts by Paul Robeson, initiated by unions that heroically resisted the purges and remained under Communist leadership; spirited, if unsuccessful, campaigns for the blacklist victims at the NFB and the Toronto Symphony Six, and against the shooting, in Ottawa locations, of Hollywood’s first Cold War film, The Iron Curtain (1948), based on the Gouzenko spy case; the popular success of the Travellers, a folk music group begun at Camp Naivelt in the party’s youth group; and key cultural leader Margaret Fairley’s book, The Spirit of Canadian Democracy, a stirring canonical reconstruction of Canadian literature as popular and national resistance. These stood out against the fierce hostility of all mainstream political and cultural forces that, by purge and repression, increasingly marginalized the party and radical culture. In the fifties, the CPC seriously addressed organizational, intellectual, and institutional issues and attempted to reprise the allure of the ‘cultural world’ of the thirties Left, but its ranks are dwindling and it cannot recreate a movement that has passed.35 Lessons? Socialist historical scholarship always looks for lessons – for good or ill – from the past, asks what is still inspiring and usable, what has structured the present, and what might have been. In looking back at the cultural movement of the thirties, we can see a vital oppositional culture, with a complex relation to ethnicity and nationality, but centred on class identity, voice, and experience. This class focus was heightened by the Communist Party’s initial stance against Canadian nationalism and radical artist/activists’ scorn for Canadian cultural conservatism and openness to international inspiration, particularly from the United States. For Livesay, the United States was a place for a Canadian to breathe. A similar openness to ‘cultural dialogue’ across the arts and between modernist and realist aesthetics animates the movement, despite factional and theoretical limitations. Beyond the thirties, a vision

64 Scott Forsyth

of the working class remains central to Communist conceptions of culture, even as we see the party increasingly orienting beyond that class to the middle class, to the people, to the nation and nationalism, but always to international solidarity and models. Many contemporary commentators argue that the possibility of class culture will be diluted in the tremendous postwar growth of commercial media culture. There may be some sense in this observation, but the party and the working class are not simply passive receivers of that media culture; the party’s cultural work started a leftist orientation towards cultural industries that only rarely developed in Canada but lets us imagine the potential. Just as important, the postwar growth of Canadian cultural industries changed the seemingly barren national culture that the activists of the thirties confronted.36 It would be too simple to leave the cultural activism of the thirties in the museum, invoking Brecht against Lukacs, and claiming there is no use trying to paint like Fred Taylor or write like Dorothy Livesay. That would ignore the intricate lineages of aesthetic influence and the stubborn persistence of cultural radicalism. Livesay, in her multi-faceted way, still inspires poets; the persistent painterly traditions of social realism may reinvent themselves, historically refiguring the alwayschanging picture of class. Canadian theatre revived something of the traditions of the radical thirties in the seventies, and that revival influenced decades of subsequent theatre, film, and television. The rambunctious spirit of agitprop animates the anti-globalization movement’s work in video, guerrilla theatre, puppetry, and other popular representational strategies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The cultural nationalism of the beleaguered Communists in the Cold War demanded a cultural program of reforms that to this day remains the agenda of a tamer Canadian cultural Left. The barriers and limitations to the representation of class in film discussed in this collection may still be traced to the ways in which a Canadian Left film culture can be glimpsed but does not develop. Perhaps some of the activists themselves should have last words. Lea Roback, legendary Montreal union organizer, is beautifully celebrated in Sophie Bissonnette’s documentary A Vision in the Darkness / Des lumières dans la Grande Noirceur (1991). In one memorable scene, Roback discusses her radicalization in Berlin in the early thirties, galvanized by the oppositional culture of the Communist theatre and art world. With Roback, we watch Kuhle Wampe (1932), Bertolt Brecht’s film for the party, and she silently weeps. The silence, and the flickering cinematic

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 65

images, evokes the moment in all its internationalism, class idealism, and youthful cultural excitement. Another old revolutionary, Ted Allan, persisted for almost fifty years to bring Norman Bethune to the popular screen. Despite terrible production difficulties, creative battles, and hostile critical reception, Bethune: The Making of a Hero (1990) stands as a memorable epic of the radical thirties and its legendary Communist hero. Again, unexpectedly, from the margins to the mainstream.37

NOTES 1 Editorial, Masses 1, no. 1 (May 1932): 1. 2 On the history of the Communist Party of Canada from various perspectives, largely unsympathetic, see Ivan Akumovic, The Communist Party of Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975) and William Rodney, Soldiers of the International: A History of the Communist Party of Canada, 1919– 1929 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968). Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks (Montreal: Vanguard, 1981) emphasizes, from a Trotskyist perspective, the Stalinist deformation; Norman Penner, Canadian Communists: The Stalin Years and Beyond (Toronto: Methuen, 1988) is both an insider narrative and a critique of the party from the left; Gerry Van Houten, Canada’s Party of Socialism (Toronto: Progress, 1977) provides the party’s own views; Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920–1950 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989) provides an incisive feminist analysis. An invaluable resource has been provided by the state’s constant surveillance: see Greg S. Kealy and Reg Whitaker, eds., RCMP Security Bulletins: The Early Years, 1919–1929 (St John’s: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 1994) and their RCMP Security Bulletins: The Depression Years (St John’s: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 1993) as well as Sean Purdy, Radicals and Revolutionaries: The History of Canadian Communism from the Robert S. Kenny Collection (Toronto: University of Toronto Library, 1998). On the movement of the unemployed, see Lorne Brown, When Freedom Was Lost (Montreal: Black Rose, 1987) and Victor Hoar and Ronald Livesedge, Recollection of the On to Ottawa Trek (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973); on Communists and union organizing, see Irving Abella, Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973); on solidarity with the Spanish Republic, see Victor Hoar, The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion: Canadian Participation in the Spanish Civil War (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1969). Labour/Le Travail 49 (Spring 2002) is a special issue on milestones in the history of the Communist Party of

66 Scott Forsyth

3 4

5

6

Canada. The National Film Board has made a number of documentaries related to radical politics in the thirties, including Bethune (1964), Los canadienses (1975), and on the Cold War years The Un-Canadians (1996) and The Man Who Might Have Been: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Herbert Norman (1998). On working-class life and politics in Canada, see in particular Bryan Palmer, Working Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800–1991 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992); see also Craig Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement: A Brief History (Toronto: Lorimer, 1996). The best account of Canadian Communists and culture is James Doyle, Progressive Heritage: The Evolution of a Politically Radical Literary Tradition in Canada (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002), which focuses on literature from early Canadian history to the sixties. Palmer, Working Class Experience, 127. University of Toronto, Robert S. Kenny Collection, Minutes, Proceedings of the Fourth National Convention of the CPC (1925), 4; on the vital life of the Ukrainian association, see John Kolansky, ed., Prophets and Proletarians: Documents of the History of the Rise and Decline of Ukrainian Communism (Edmonton: Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1990); on the Jewish association, see Ester Reiter, ‘Secular Yiddishkait: Left Politics, Culture and Community,’ Labour/Le Travail 49 (Spring 2002):121–46; on sports and the left, see Bruce Kidd, The Struggle for Canadian Sports (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); on summer camps and culture in the United States, see Paul G. Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia Univerity Press, 1999). Merrily Weisbord, The Strangest Dream (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1983) and Wendell MacLeod, Libbie Park, and Stanley Ryerson, Bethune: The Montreal Years (Toronto: Lorimer, 1978) provide fascinating personal stories. There is a wealth of material on similar themes in the United States: see Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic, 1977), and, in particular, Annette Rubinstein, ‘The Cultural World of American Communism,’ in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed. Michael Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993). New historical scholarship is most developed in the United States. For an excellent overview, see the introduction in Brown et al., New Studies. The reconsideration of culture and Communism has been especially rich: see

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 67

7

8 9

10

11

Paul Buhle and David Miller, Radical Hollywood (New York: New Press, 2002); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996); Robert Shulman, The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Robbie Lieberman, ‘My Song Is My Weapon’: People’s Songs, American Communism and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); James Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Barbara Foley, Radical Representation: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); and Alan Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Caren Irr, The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) is the only account to offer a comparative discussion of American and Canadian developments in Left culture. On the history of the Comintern, see Fernando Claudin, The Communist International (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); on the Canadian party’s adaptation of the Third Period line, subordination to the Comintern and Stalinist factionalism, see Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, passim; Penner, Canadian Communists, passim; and John Manley, ‘“Audacity, Audacity, Still More Audacity”: Tim Buck, the Party and the People, 1932–39,’ Labour/Le Travail 49 (Spring 2002): 9–42. Quoted in Palmer, Working Class Experience, 205. A concise overview of this burst of cultural activism, centred on theatre, is provided in the introduction to Richard Wright and Robin Endres, eds., Eight Men Speak and Other Plays from the Canadian Workers Theatre (Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1976), xi–xxxvi; also see Doyle, Progressive Heritage, 89–160; Sean Purdy, Radicals and Revolutionaries, 45–51; Palmer, Working Class Experience, 257–9. Sangster, Dreams of Equality, 155–7, emphasizes the enhanced opportunities for women in this artistic milieu. See, Editorial, Masses 1, no. 1 (May 1932): 1, the Film and Photo League is hailed in a note on page 2; Lon Lawson, ‘Movies,’ Masses 1, no. 4 (July– August 1932): 10. For an overview, Dean J. Irvine, ‘Among Masses: Dorothy Livesay and English Canadian Leftist Magazine Culture of the Early 1930s,’ Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (Summer 1999): 183–212. See Sandra Souchotte, ‘Workers’ Theatre in the Thirties: Part I,’ This

68 Scott Forsyth

12 13

14 15

16 17

18

19

Magazine 9, no. 2 (1974): 3–5, ‘Workers’ Theatre in the Thirties: Part II,’ This Magazine 9, no. 3 (1974): 3–6; Toby Gordon Ryan, Stage Left: Canadian Theatre in the Thirties. A Memoir (Toronto: CTR Publications, 1981), and Wright and Endres, Eight Men Speak. See Ryan, Stage Left, 21–2. M. Bloom, ‘Film and Photo Group,’ Masses 2, no. 11 (January 1934): 7, notes the problems with filmmaking; for the running aesthetic debates, see Edward Cecil-Smith, ‘What is “Pure” Art?’ Masses 1, no. 4–5 (July–August 1932): 2; J. Richardson, ‘In Defense of Pure Art,’ Masses 1, no. 4–5 (July– August 1932): 3; Edward Cecil-Smith, ‘Propaganda and Art,’ Masses 2, no. 11 (January 1933): 10–11; Stanley Ryerson, ‘Out of the Frying Pan,’ Masses 2, no. 12 (March–April 1934): 6–7; Edward Cecil-Smith, ‘Let’s Have More Discussion ...’ Masses 2, no. 12 (March–April 1934): 7; Livesay is quoted in Irvine, ‘Among Masses,’ 183. Editorial, New Frontier 1, no. 1 (April 1936): 1. See Michael Tait, ‘Drama and Theatre (1920–1950),’ in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, ed. Carl F. Klinck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 633–57. For a personal portrait of radical/ progressive thirties theatre, see Ryan, Stage Left. Souchotte, ‘Workers’ Theatre: Part II,’ 6. Paraskeva Clark, ‘Come Out from Behind the Pre-Cambrian Shield,’ New Frontier 1, no. 12 (April 1937): 17. On the realists as a group, see in particular Barry Lord, The History of Painting in Canada: Towards a People’s Art (Toronto: NC Press, 1974), 178–203, a rediscovery of these painters and the Left, marred by Maoist and nationalist sectarianism. For a general account, see Charles Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1975). Hutchinson’s credo is in Lynn Hutchinson Brown, ed., Leonard Hutchinson, People’s Artist: Ten Years of Struggle, 1930–1940 (Toronto: NC Press, 1978), 11. See Donna Phillips, ed., Voices of Discord: Canadian Short Stories from the 1930s (Toronto: Hogtown Press, 1979); also see the excellent discussion of thirties fiction in Doyle, Progressive Heritage, 89–123. Frank W. Watt, ‘Literature of Protest,’ in Klinck, ed., Literary History, 472–3. The positive and expansive account of the widespread influence of the Left on Canadian writers, and arguably the liberal diffusion of class politics, is by Larry McDonald, ‘Socialism and the English Canadian Literary Tradition,’ Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (Summer 1999), 213–42; for the impact of proletarian literature and Popular Front politics on the first novels of Hugh McClennan, see Irr, Suburb of Dissent, 68–94. The relative paucity of Canadian Left novel production in the thirties was

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 69

20

21

22

23

24 25

26 27

usually contrasted unfavourably at the time with the extraordinary success of Left novelists in other countries, particularly the United States, see Foley, Radical Representation; Murphy, Proletarian Moment; Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire; and Wald, Exiles. Even in the United States, the leftist tradition will be derided and marginalized by Cold War and formalist criticism. Of numerous critical discussions, the critical biography by Lee Briscoe Thompson, Dorothy Livesay (Boston: Twayne, 1987) is aesthetically and politically astute; for a contemporary feminist account, see Susan Gringell, ‘Claiming Positive Semantic Space for Women: The Poetry of Dorothy Livesay,’ Essays on Canadian Writing 74 (Fall 2001): 1–27; in relation to modernism, see David Arnason, ‘Dorothy Livesay and the Rise of Modernism in Canada,’ in A Public and Private Voice: Essays on the Life and Work of Dorothy Livesay, ed. Lindsay Donney, Gerald Noonan, and Paul Tiessen (Waterloo, ON: University of Waterloo Press, 1986). For a striking collection of poetry in solidarity with the Spanish Republic, see Nicola Vulpe with Maha Albari, eds., Sealed in Struggle: Canadian Poetry and the Spanish Civil War (Ottawa: Centre for Canadian Studies, 1996); see also Joseph Wallace, Hi, Sister, Hi, Brother (Toronto: New Frontiers, 1956). Dorothy Livesay’s work from the thirties is in various collections, notably her memoir, Right Hand Left Hand (Erin, ON: Porcepic Press, 1977), as well as Day and Night (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1944) and The Documentaries (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968). Barbara Godard, ‘Review: Exil, révolte et dissidence: Étude comparée des poesies quebecoise et canadienne,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 56, no. 1 (1986): 200. See Paul Tiessen and Hildi Froese Tiessen, Dorothy Livesay and the CBC (Waterloo, ON: MLR Editions Canada, 1994); also Paul Tiessen and Hildegard Tiessen, ‘Dorothy Livesay and the Politics of Radio,’ in Donney et al., A Public and Private Voice. See Tiessen and Tiessen, ‘Dorothy Livesay.’ See ‘Toronto Theatres,’ Clarion, 29 April 1939, n.p., John R. Chaplin, ‘News of the Week from Filmland,’ Clarion, 9 October 1937, 8, John R. Chaplin, ‘Hollywood Highlights,’ Clarion, 12 October 1937, 6, ‘Will Show Soviet Epic,’ Clarion, 1 May 1936, 11; on Cosmopolitan films see Note, New Frontier 1, no. 8 (November 1936): 2. See Joe Zuken Collection, University of Manitoba Archives, and Photograph Collection, Vancouver City Archives. See William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 158–67. A more

70 Scott Forsyth detailed and less sympathetic critique is in Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States, 1930–1942 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), 163–89. For comparative developments in film in Europe, see Chris Faulkner, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Bert Hogenkamp, Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain, 1929–1939 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986); Bruce Murray, Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic: From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). 28 See Ted Allan, ‘Blood for Spanish Democracy,’ New Frontier 1, no. 9 (January 1937): 12–13; MacLeod et al., Bethune, Lord, History of Painting; Ryan, Stage Left; radio scripts and the appeal from Spain are in the Hazen Sise Papers, National Archives of Canada. 29 See Editorial, ‘Thunder on the Left,’ New Frontier 1, no. 7 (November 1936): 5; see also Earl Birney, ‘Proletarian Literature: Theory and Practice,’ Canadian Forum 17, no. 196 (May 1937): 58–60. Fierce denunciations of Trotsky include William Lawson, ‘Trotsky and Terrorism,’ New Frontier 1, no. 9 (January 1937): 14–16, Editorial, ‘The Moscow Trials,’ New Frontier 1, no. 11 (March 1937): 3. For a superb discussion of cultural Trotskyism in the United States, see Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 30 On the party and the so-called Nazi-Soviet Pact see Penner, Canadian Communists, 161–81; on the complexity of the inter-imperialist, colonialist, anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist dimensions of the war, see Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War (London: Verso, 1986) and Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914– 1991 (London: Abacus, 1994). On the Communist internees, see Ian Radforth, ‘Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees,’ in Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad ed. Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 194–223. Radforth argues that the Communists in prison re-created the cultural world of the party with educational classes, sports, singsongs, and poetry readings: ‘their group commitment to tight organization, mutual improvement through education and furthering the cause of their movement.’ Wallace’s prison poems were published as Night Is Ended (Winnipeg: Contemporary Publishers, 1942). Copies of New Horizons and By Their Own Strength are in the National Archives of Canada, and the Evelyn Spice Cherry Papers, also in the National Archives, contains production notes for the films.

Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 71 31 Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes (London: Abacus, 1995). On the war painters, the Federation of Canadian Artists and Taylor’s war industry painting, see Lord, History of Painting, 191–7. Posters for these wartime exhibits are in the Fred Taylor Papers, National Archives of Canada, MG30-D-360, vol. 3, Files 1942–45, 1944–48. 32 See Malek Khouri, ‘Counter-Hegemonic Discourse on the Working Class in National Film Board World War II Films,’ History of Intellectual Culture 1 (2001): 1–12, www.ucalgary.ca/hic; Beveridge is quoted in Rick Salutin, ‘It Happened Here. Earlier. And Worse,’ in Marginal Notes: Challenges to the Mainstream (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1984), 68; Grierson is quoted in MacLeod et al., Bethune, 178. 33 Thomas Waugh, ‘Action Stations! Joris Ivens and the National Film Board,’ in Flashback: People and Institutions in Canadian Film History, ed. Gene Walz (Montreal: Mediatexte, 1986); Waugh is quoted in Khouri, ‘Counter-Hegemonic Discourse,’ 12. On the Cold War in Canada and the purges in the NFB, see Roger Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of A National Insecurity State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 227–61; they elaborate on the earlier research of Salutin, ‘It Happened Here.’ Salutin, a key figure in the left nationalist renaissance of Canadian theatre in the seventies, explored this forgotten episode and wrote a memorable television drama of the NFB during the war and under Cold War siege, Grierson and Gouzenko (1986). Also see my sceptical discussion, ‘The Failures of Nationalism and Documentary: Grierson and Gouzenko,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 1, no. 1 (1990): 74–82; an even more sceptical view of Grierson and the wartime NFB is Joyce Nelson, The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1988). 34 See the Resolution, ‘For a People’s Culture,’ Minutes, Fourth National Convention, Labour-Progressive Party (1950), 4, and also see Tim Buck, Opening Report, Third National Convention, Labour-Progressive Party (1949), 2–6, Robert S. Kenny Collection, University of Toronto. Also see undated notes for classes titled ‘Marxist Aesthetics’ in Fred Taylor Papers, National Archives of Canada. The Labour-Progressive Party was the legal wartime organization of the Communist Party. It existed until 1959, when the CPC returned to its old name. For the differing periodizations and conceptions of national culture in Canada and the United States, see Irr, Suburb of Dissent, 1–68. 35 See Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada, 291–2, on the Symphony Six; on the Robeson concerts, see Laurel Sefton MacDowell, ‘Paul Robeson in Canada: A Border Story,’ Labour/Le Travail 51 (Spring 2003): 177–222; for an international perspective, see Paul Swann, ‘International Conspiracy in

72 Scott Forsyth and around The Iron Curtain,’ Velvet Light Trap 35 (Spring 1995): 52–60. See Margaret Fairley, The Spirit of Canadian Democracy (Toronto: Progress, 1946); on Fairley, see James Doyle, ‘Margaret Fairley and the Canadian Literary Tradition,’ Canadian Literature 147 (Winter 1995): 77–97. Various party cultural activists from this period go on to later success, including Nathan Cohen, theatre critic for the Toronto Star, and playwright George Ryga, both important in the growth of Canadian theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. 36 For comparative purposes, see the discussion of the ‘laboring of American culture’ through the influence of the Popular Front across the arts and media in Denning, Cultural Front. 37 See Barbara Evans and Scott Forsyth, ‘Women and Political Documentary in Quebec: An Interview with Sophie Bissonnette,’ CineAction 28 (Spring 1992): 66–77; on Bethune: The Making of a Hero, see Wyndham Wise, ed., Take One’s Essential Guide to Canadian Film (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 20, for a superficial dismissal.

3 The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History darrell varga

Walter Benjamin’s important invocation to ‘rub history against the grain’ offers a conceptual link between critical theory, the everyday, and political activism with respect to the narration of history.1 Benjamin problematizes official/nationalist history as an idealization of state power, whether in the form of military conquest, or political or business leadership, or in the equating of scientific and technological development with social progress. The appeal of Benjamin’s thinking to film and media scholarship and to progressive thinking across disciplinary boundaries is the emphasis on cinema-like images that ‘flare up briefly’2 to lift the veil of aura and individual autonomy, revealing ideological and social or physical constraints to real freedom in the reimagining of the relation between the class-bound subject and structures of power. A utopian moment of Benjamin’s thinking occurs with his description of the experience of the moving picture as disrupting the power structure that heretofore contains and controls the work of art, enabling the masses to exit the movie theatre with the ability to see the city and the nation in new critical ways.3 This insight is the necessary step to social transformation. It is with the transformative potential vested in the moving image in mind that the representation of history becomes useful for critical praxis; that is, to understand history not merely as a sequence of events from past to present, but as flashpoints that invite critical engagement with the power relations of the present through which we are formed as both subjects and objects of history. Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history, written under the cloud of Nazi Germany and against the idea of philosophy as universal and detached from the everyday and from the political, are, themselves, objects that signal the primacy of material

74 Darrell Varga

experience in the processes of knowledge formation and social change. Where wars are waged and national boundaries erected, it is always in the power and economic interests of the ruling class and only incidentally, if at all, in the best interests of working people, who are more likely to be caught unwillingly in the blast furnace of historical progress, and who may have interests that cannot be neatly compartmentalized within the terrain of any one side of a power struggle. Vested in the title of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s television series Canada: A People’s History is the promise of a historical narrative less caught up in the ideological blind spots of a teleology of progress.4 Fundamental to progressive history and criticism is engagement as a dialectical process rather than the maintenance of an established evaluative hierarchy. We must understand that history is made through human struggle and the action of ordinary people; it is not something that simply happens or is directed from above. From a dialectical perspective, the value of any given work is measured by the degree to which it can be argued with and in turn stimulate critical engagement with the world and efforts towards real social change. Although the narrative structure of the CBC series signals a perspective from the ground, in part through the use of actors reading commentary gleaned from ordinary people (based on letters, diaries, and the like), it situates these voices within a teleology of historical progress. In this way, the critical perspective is situated in the particular historical time frame, but is not set in critical relation with the present. None of this is surprising, given the tendency of broadcast television to simplify complex issues, and given the determinant relation between the form of the TV narrative and dominant ideological conditions. The title of the series itself signals both promise and problem. The French broadcast of the series on Radio-Canada uses the title Une Histoire populaire rather than a less ambiguous title such as L’Histoire d’un peuple.5 The ambiguity of the title conveys the double meaning of a ground-up people’s history as well as a ‘culture populaire.’6 The CBC reduces these meanings to free-floating signifiers with the elision of these terms, obscuring, but not eliminating, the top-down nature of broadcast television. In an even-handed evaluation of the merits of the series as history text, David Frank writes: ‘If there is an implied viewer, it seems to be the patriotic Canadian citizen seeking an historical explanation of the country’s success in creating a society of tolerance, security and opportunity that, to paraphrase the Prime Minister’s [Jean Chrétien] frequent boast, is the envy of the world.’7 Whereas ‘the People’

The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 75

could evoke a progressive view of history, the CBC instead deploys it to denote social cohesion while preserving the illusion of democratic freedom.8 Irrespective of the French or English titles, what the series offers is popular history in an apolitical sense, a history that serves to make major historical events accessible to a non-specialist audience. It functions in the transmission of existing historical research, though some original research had also be undertaken to, for instance, insert new visual material in an already-existing narrative. Rarely does a populist approach significantly challenge received methodologies or interpretations of history, nor does it encourage criticism of the historical narrative through a historiographic perspective. I fully respect the difficulty of accounting for the complexity of national history for a regionally fragmented nation-state within the confines of even a relatively lengthy (thirty broadcast hours) television series, and none of my comments are meant to disparage the honest efforts of creative and technical workers. However, popular history is typically the story of the initiatives and achievements of ‘great men’ (often cast as political, military, and/or business elite at the centre of geographic space and social power) and the identification and veneration of foundational nation-building events such as war or large-scale technological developments and the intestinal movements of the monarchy. Whatever interesting and important information of the past is on offer is secondary to the larger message concerning what kinds of stories are deemed important, and how circumstances of the present are implicated as the naturalized outcome of an inevitable chain of events. In this context, my question is: Who are the ‘people’ of the people’s network? Against the radical, if unfulfilled, implications of the title, the series tends to collapse class differences while enshrining an official mythology of diversity and tolerance – that class struggles are somehow overcome in the construction of the nation-state. I am interested in this question of the ‘people’ with respect to the structure of the series as a whole (rather than debates over the accuracy of specific historical claims), rooted as it is in the conventions of American television, and the two major advertisements embedded therein during its initial broadcast: one for the CBC itself and the other for the main corporate sponsor, Sun-Life Insurance. The contemporary homogenization of massmediated popular culture has resulted in the marginalization not only of spaces for the production of working-class entertainment but also of the popularizing working-class history. As a consequence, the series can imply progressivism while the limited form of representation can

76 Darrell Varga

make it difficult to imagine alternatives. The nation-state’s broadcaster, while providing a progressive outlet, also serves to manage consent and set the terms for public and historical discourse. In this way, following Antonio Gramsci, we can understand the CBC as serving a hegemonic function in the regulation of popular memory. 9 Gramsci understood that hegemony itself cannot be eliminated; rather one form is replaced by another in the realization of political struggle. This process emerges with the development of class consciousness and an understanding of the ways in which the state overdetermines civil society in conformity with dominant economic interests. A Gramscian radical philosophy is not simply the presentation of a set of ideas; it strives to reveal structural and social forces that give rise to particular ideas and that legislate the ideologically determined notion of ‘common sense.’ For Gramsci, everyone is potentially able to engage in the labour of political and intellectual debates, but the masses are typically excluded through social processes that engender the specialization of language and give rise to the specialist. Thinking through this question of the perspective of the historical narrative can allow the ‘people’ to shift from spectre to historical force. The construction of the historical narrative is crucial to this process, as it can serve to rationalize and legitimize present social and economic conditions as well as systems of government and the generalized acceptance of particular forms of authority. Alternative histories have always had an uneasy relationship with the official narrative, and it is at least naive, if not entirely counterproductive, to assume that the history of class struggle is compatible with nationalist history. I am, of course, simplifying in my account of the nature of mainstream history. Contemporary library shelves in Canada are filled with both arcane and accessible books on previously marginalized histories of, for instance, First Nations struggles, women, and visible minorities. Yet, prominent, at the time of this writing, on the display shelves of major bookstores is Jack Granatstein’s Who Killed Canadian History?, in which those recent social histories are derided as divisive and insignificant to the larger saga of nationhood, engendering a lack of pride and faith in the nation-state.10 Granatstein demands a return to the teaching of content in strict chronology, demonstrating a fetish for numbers that explains his economically determined lament: ‘We pay vast sums for education, and we are simply not getting the returns we should.’11 The theme of lack or absence is a familiar and recurring lament in Canadian studies. But rather than mourn the absence of a coherent national identity, I am suggesting that the terms

The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 77

through which identity and nation are structured need to be conceptualized with respect to the discord between cultural nationalism and the processes of exclusion and marginalization experienced by the working class. The CBC functions to articulate a narrative of unity. It is a symptom of what Maurice Charland calls Canadian technological nationalism, his description of the rhetoric of technology from the mythologization of the Canadian Pacific Railway to the establishment of the CBC in service of nationalist ideology. As Charland indicates: Canada is valorized as a nation because it is the product of a technological achievement, and the railroad is the great product of heroic individuals who dreamt a nation. Curiously, The National Dream [a CBC production based on über-nationalist Pierre Berton’s best-selling book on the building of the railway] rearticulates a rhetoric that gave rise to its own materialization. The rhetoric is offered through a product of itself, the CBC. The CBC exists by virtue of a discourse of technological nation building, and reproduces the rhetoric that legitimizes it and the Canadian state when it invites us to join Berton and the dream of nationhood.12

Each episode of Canada: A People’s History begins with that resilient image, the train – the wheels of industry coming towards the camera, and then covered over with the corporate sponsor logo. As the music swells, the dirty industry of the steam-train era is neatly transformed by the so-slick image of transnational capitalism. Canadian nationalists claim that the CBC carries out a nation-building function similar to the building of the transnational railway. David Taras provides this position: ‘The CBC’s influence, its gravitational pull, has been such that it ranks alongside the other great nation-building projects in Canadian history – the National Policy of 1879, the web of social programs such as unemployment insurance and Medicare that were created in the postwar period, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that came into force in 1982.’13 Taras cites social programs as signifiers of Canadian distinctiveness, but these can also be understood as a form of subsidy to capital and a means to pacify the ‘people.’ Such programs are part of the postwar compromise designed to placate labour and forestall militancy, a tactic less important to capital in the era of globalization. Understanding the CBC in this context better reveals its hegemonic function. The 1974 production of Pierre Berton’s train as nation saga came into

78 Darrell Varga

being as the veil of Canadian liberal democracy and the postwar compromise began to wear thin. Anxieties about Quebec separation, rising inflation, the energy crisis, and increased labour unrest emerged as some of the most obvious symptoms of the destabilization of the nation-state. It is here that capitalism began the transformation into the most recent version of globalization, characterized in the first instance by a dislocation of production from the site of consumption and a deregulation of financial markets in order to continue the long-standing practice of forcing wages downward and subsequently weakening the nation-state’s abilities to enact policies aimed at economic and social self-determination. The pleasures of the nationalist narrative need to be understood as set against, and co-extensive with, the economic reality of the ‘people’ as capital’s reserve army of labour, who are politically marginalized, distracted by the routinization of the everyday, and pacified by consumerism. In his insights into the contemporary usefulness of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, David Harvey points out how the mass media can describe the abuses of sweatshop labour, while valourizing celebrity endorsers of the products of sweated labour. He further argues, ‘And then there is the whole question of how an “industrial reserve army” of labor has been produced, sustained and manipulated in the interests of capital accumulation these last decades, including the public admission by Alan Budd, an erstwhile advisor to Margaret Thatcher, that the fight against inflation in the early 1980s was a cover for raising unemployment and reducing the organizational strength of the working class.’14 It is this history that belongs to the people as much as the more familiar icons of nationhood. The People’s History series can be understood as the updated elite cultural response to the crisis of capitalism. Berton’s The National Dream provides powerful images of large numbers of labourers struggling to heave the steel rails in place, of working long hours in horrible conditions to realize the nation-building project. However, these images serve as background to what is presented as the selfless efforts of politicians and businessmen to ensure the project’s success. That the managerial elite is described by Berton in heroic terms as responsible for the building of the railway is evidence of the elision of class and the materiality of history in the nationalist narrative. Berton’s text is an apologia for the nation’s exploitive employers. He describes the railway tycoons in romantic/masculine terms: ‘They were evenly matched adversaries and, in many respects, remarkably alike – short, fierce-eyed, muscled men with backgrounds crammed with adventure

The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 79

and romance.’15 Daniel Francis contrasts the nationalist myth of origins with a materialist perspective: ‘The railway was built chiefly on the backs of Chinese coolie labour, using land obtained for almost nothing from the Indians and capital raised for the most part in Britain. Nevertheless, for many people, it has become over the years a great “Canadian” achievement and a symbol of the bonds which unite us as a people.’16 The railway is, in fact, a privately controlled money maker created, like many Canadian enterprises, in large measure with public funds. Francis also reiterates the well-known fact that the motivation for the Canadian government to save the railway from bankruptcy through additional financing came about with the decision to use the railway to move troops to quell the Métis uprising of 1885.17 Thus was born not only the nation in its technologized form, but also the resilient alliance of business and government in the control of popular dissent. The railway was then deployed, like the CBC after it, to communicate a particular image of Canada in accordance with corporate economic exigencies – simultaneously as exotic wilderness tourist destination and as garden available for agricultural and resource exploitation. Where images of labour are presented in popular history, they are condensed as the admirable sacrifices of early immigrants to Canada, at whose expense some contemporary Canadians live in material abundance and leisure. This elision of material history depends on the good liberal myth that hard work in itself leads to prosperity under the clear-headed guidance of a benevolent elite. The producers of Canada: A People’s History have taken pains to avoid a simplistic narrative of ‘great men,’ and they express a desire to represent negative aspects of Canada’s past. The problem, in part, is the distorting effect of the hegemonic form of broadcast TV irrespective of the intentions of the producers. The series was conceived and developed by CBC producers, not through any government directive, and certainly not as a result of any additional state funding. Yet cultural products that make claims to a nation-binding function exist, like official bilingualism and multiculturalism, as vehicles through which the state manages diversity and the production of difference, vehicles that distract from the everyday struggles of class conflict and statesanctioned violence. Contrary to the assumption of value in nationalist mythology, Daniel Francis describes how myth functions against the realization of material history: ‘It turns out that many of our cherished myths were invented by government agencies or private corporations for quite specific, usually self-serving purposes.’18 Francis goes on to

80 Darrell Varga

explain that, while myths are not always outright lies, they emphasize specific idealized truths at the expense of marginalized critical perspectives for the sake of a coherent narrative. We must understand that history is shaped not only by what is revealed in a coherent narrative, but also by what is lost, forgotten, and repressed, as well as by the conditions under which both of these practices come into being. The myth production that is Canada: A People’s History has proven to be popular with the Canadian audience. This popularity affirms an interest in Canadian history; even if as exotic novelty, and the series is popular precisely because much of this history is not readily available to a non-specialist audience. However, the very scale of the project and its positive reception provide a level of comfort that negates further questioning of the legitimacy of a particular historical narrative. Executive producer Mark Starowicz, in a speech to the chauffeur-driven crowd of the Canadian Club of Toronto, invokes a shared mythology of storytelling as revealing the essential Canadian discourse. He describes what he notes as the common habit of Canadians to tell stories of the suffering of their forebears – newcomers to the land of plenty (a straightfaced version of the old Monty Python skit).19 Starowicz’s point is that immigrants to Canada endure, in spite of the hardships they experienced, because, in his words, they have ‘escaped ideology.’ The successful TV man knows how to please his audience, in this case with an affirmation of the neo-conservative myths that Canada is free from constraints of class and ideology and that hard work is always rewarded with prosperity – positions easily questioned by even a cursory glance at lived history. The project of critical engagement requires an understanding, following Fredric Jameson’s influential book The Political Unconscious, of the context and form of a text as a political fantasy in which social relations are articulated. In this way, the content of any particular text is connected with the larger social processes of which it is symptomatic.20 Neither the series, the rhetoric surrounding its production, nor its advertisements can be thought of separately from one another. The form of television, what Raymond Williams called its ‘flow,’ integrates these images together with the rhythms of late-capitalist everyday life. As Williams states, ‘To see international news brought by courtesy of a toothpaste is not to see separable elements, but the shape of a dominant cultural form.’21 The fragmentary nature of TV in turn integrates viewers into a culture dominated by commercial-commodity exchange. The CBC makes claims to an engagement with public culture while, like the

The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 81

Canadian state, having significant involvement with private sector interests.22 The production of Canada: A People’s History, a project that no existing private-sector broadcaster would undertake, is a vehicle for the CBC to reclaim national usefulness; the consequences are, however, a formal homogenization of history. One consequence of homogenization is a limited understanding of class and the tacit legitimation of the neo-conservative ideological claim that class is no longer relevant in an era of so-called post-industrialism. An emphasis on class raises the question of what constitutes a proper historical subject, and how that subject is discursively constituted. Whatever this historical representation may tell us about the past, the decisions about what story to tell and how to tell it reveal the class-bound conditions of the present. The ephemeral presentness of television, its formal immediacy, and its tendency to individualize social complexity certainly invite this relation with the present. Of course, the CBC does not want this program to be ephemeral. The spin-off ventures of publishing, an extensive website, merchandising, and home video and DVD sales suggest a sense of permanence and authenticity to the story. Popular history is big business, and the CBC production follows the success of the televisual marketing of history, and the marketing of a particular narrative of the nation-state, through such venues as the History Channel and the A&E Biography series. But what is being sold here is the CBC itself: the triumphal telling of the story of the nationstate is the saga of legitimation on the part of the state broadcast institution. With its title, The People’s History, we are asked to believe that the series offers access to the voice of the people. The historian Irving Abella describes the form of the series as one that allows ‘history to speak directly to contemporary Canadians without the intrusion of historians and experts commenting on events.’23 He goes on to indicate that, for the CBC, the use of experts would disengage the audience from the story. The series’ emphasis is on the desire for conventional narrative and the veiling of the processes by which a given story emerges. Each episode is presented in a form suitable for channel surfers, a series of short segments introduced with nostalgia-tinged inter-titles, and with frequent repetition of the main narrative themes. Actors and the omniscient narrator explain events staged as if ‘live,’ conveying the assumption of objectivity and the positivist truth-value of a given image. The form of the series veils important debates among historians over the critical interpretation of history, debates over what moments of

82 Darrell Varga

the past are important and how information should best be conveyed and related to the present. The actors’ speeches are culled from such everyday sources as letters and personal diaries and are deployed as a means of giving voice to the ‘people,’ with the assumption that an actor’s speaking these words provides direct access to the historical figures. But historians cannot speak with the dead even through the séance technologies of the mass media. They can only offer translations through the ruins of place, memory, and artifact; and all translations are fundamentally transformative. Abella goes on to describe the approach of the series as similar to ‘shooting raw footage, rather than acting as movie makers manipulating events with constant takes and edits.’ I simply do not know whether he is trying to make a rhetorical point for a general readership or whether some historians accept the moving image as unaffected by the cumbersome apparatus of production, not to mention the ideological overdetermination of what constitutes an acceptable TV image. The close-ups of actors conveying information provide access to accounts from the historical time period, but it is mediated by the tendency of television to individualize and personalize complex social and class movements. If the ‘people’ are invited into the narrative because they do not have to listen to the interpretation of history through the eyes of experts, this agency comes at the cost of negating the fact that history is a contested field, and instead assumes that what the ‘people’ really want is a good story told in the conventions of American television. It is a form of agency that relies on the populist antagonism towards intellectuals and on the assumption that history is separate from material concerns of the present.24 Where the series could raise complex and even uncomfortable questions about the relationship between the everyday, the ‘people,’ and the systems of power that comprise the nation-state, it instead integrates this narrative into the state and institutional exigencies of the present. A key institution is of course television itself, and the way that it codes narrative pleasure. Senior producer Gordon Henderson has indicated, ‘We want to avoid history class, we want to keep telling stories.’ On the other hand, the producers make claims to objectivity by the use of television journalists and camera operators rather than crews experienced with large-scale dramatic productions. In an episode called Making History, on the behind-the-scenes machinations involved in the production of the series, the camera operator for the confederation episode is introduced as ‘more used to war zones than ballrooms’ while the qualifications of

The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 83

the director (TV journalist Jim Williamson) come from his experience in having ‘covered every Canadian political crisis for fifteen years.’ The narrator then explains: ‘Starowicz doesn’t care about their politics. His strategy is to take the best television storytellers of today, and point them at the past.’ 25 The use of journalists as directors is consistent with the Canadian institutional preference entrenched by National Film Board founder John Grierson for the instrumental over the imaginary, however embellished by his defining slogan for documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality.’ By this claim I do not mean to caricature the range and complexity of work produced through the NFB, but merely to point to dominant and historically rooted tendencies. The CBC’s blurring of the forms of historical documentary and television news confuses the utilitarian value of liveness with the documentary’s ideologically determined gaze into the past, and allows for the collapse of the distinction between the actual and the constructed. In any case, the shooting of the confederation ballroom dance sequence is in rather stark contrast to a defining moment in the development of American television history, the employment of Cecil B. DeMille to direct the choreographed broadcast of Eisenhower’s inaugural ball. That 1957 live TV spectacle was designed as a means of utilizing the new technology to unify the nation with respect to the newly elected president.26 In contrast, Williamson describes, with characteristic Canadian selfeffacement, the directing of his own ballroom scene: ‘I just kind of weakly said to them, would you mind just dancing in a circle until the music stops?’27 Canadian cultural nationalists may argue that the comparison is proof of Canadian distinctiveness, that we are characterized by a more level-headed concern for realism. But surely it is a mistake to assume that the credentials of practitioners furnish a guarantee of truth, just as it is highly problematic to assume that the form of representation can ever be unaffected by prevailing ideology. In one of the commercials for the CBC itself playing during the series, the network claims its own history as an extension of the tradition of documentary and makes use of footage from sources outside of its own archives to do so. The ad begins with images from Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922), the American fur-company–sponsored film canonized within film studies for its formal innovations. The CBC provides no reflection on the problematic simplification of northern peoples in that film, and the repetition of those images serves the mythic idealization of the nation and of the CBC. Nanook functions dramatically by idealizing a heroic individual in conflict with nature, a view of northern

84 Darrell Varga

culture formed in the urban South and quite unlike representations of the North created by more contemporary northern producers. Although much of the CBC’s self-image utilizes images of technology, Flaherty constructed his mythic North as separate from the technological advances of the time and, in turn, he infantilized northern peoples. What follows in the ad is a fast-paced montage through the archives, beginning with a familiar photograph of Papa Grierson standing over his busy staff and a newsreel-style shot in which the apparatus is seen to be deployed in pursuit of a politician. Other footage emphasizes international events, signifying the CBC as mediator or ‘peacekeeper’ on the world historical stage. What follows is the pretentious fashion-model pose from the opening sequence of Starowicz’s Dawn of the Eye (CBC, 1997) series on the history of film and television journalism, in which a glamorous woman gestures with her hands to frame the beam of light cast from behind her and towards the camera. We then see Hollywood director and reconstituted Canadian nationalist Norman Jewison on the set with American movie star Danny DeVito in production of another narrative product for the global media marketplace, followed by that quintessential image of Canadian productivity, the Dionne Quintuplets – a newsreel image presented often throughout the 1930s as distraction from the social realities of the Depression era. In the images that follow, Pierre Berton introduces his National Dream series; women join the army during the Second World War and find hallucinogenic bliss in Toronto’s then counterculture-oriented Yorkville of the 1960s, in both cases articulating their own independence, and deployed here to suggest the CBC’s own organic relation with this spirit. Emancipation is then constrained by images of male politicians, Diefenbaker and Trudeau, and recurring shots of technology. A close-up of the painted face of a First Nations man signifies racial tolerance, yet its decontextualized presentation transforms the complexity of culture into disposable image-object. Stalwart protectors of the nation-state’s ability to contain the ‘people,’ the RCMP are then shown in rehearsal for their promotional horse-show spectacle, the musical ride. Recall Daniel Francis’s description of the myth of the national police force: ‘They project just the right mixture of stern rectitude and pleasant helpfulness which Canadians like to think we all possess.’28 In contrast with the primary emphasis on cinéma-vérité footage as signifier of the truth value of CBC productions, the opening credit sequence for Canada: A People’s History posits a return to myth produc-

The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 85

tion through a hyper-Photoshop montage of historical images, with emphasis on the spectacle of battle, fire, explosion, close-ups of actors, the ships of imperialist explorers, and text that appears to mimic historical documents such as newspapers and hand-written correspondence. All of these elements are sutured together with a soundtrack that reminds Canadians that history is as serious as Hockey Night in Canada. What the credit sequence suggests is a reassuring flow of completeness, that all sources have been consulted, and that there is no need for us to be exposed to the toxic dust of the archives. If the images have been sanitized through digitization, the function of television history is similarly presentation for the purpose of reassurance rather than critical engagement. The nostalgia-styled graphic design evokes the hand-drawn look of an early explorer’s map, and the show is a cultural map – that is to say, a process of legitimizing nation-state borders. The graphic quality of this opening sequence also looks a lot like currency – not surprising, as nationalist history is the story of the dividing up of the loot. At around the time of the broadcast of this series, a Canadian bank, the CIBC, ran a print advertising campaign more directly linking nationstate history with the colour of money. In it we see the likeness of Canadian prime ministers doing some mundane labour, printed in the graphic style and colours of our currency. For instance, Laurier, in fivedollar blue is operating a jackhammer while John A., in ten-dollar purple, is standing with vacuum in hand, no doubt restoring order to the domestic scene after a drunken binge the night before. The images offer a link between the idea of finance, political leadership, and real work, predicated on the always-deferred promise of leisure, which is the basis of all retirement investment advertisements. The caption explains that the investment fund will ‘Make your money work harder.’ These now employed historical icons are no longer confined to the life of leisure in the staid portrait. Individual retirement investing is likewise motivated by the fear that contemporary politicians are not working to properly sustain the collective funds of the Canada Pension Plan. The ads do not name the prime ministers; recognition and importance is signified not with historical reference but with the colour of money. The bank, with a little help from the ghosts of history, is trading in images of the kind of work done by the ‘people’ when they have not been laid off, downsized, or otherwise screwed over by transnational capitalism. This aside on the yearly Canadian propaganda ritual of retirement investing is not far-fetched when one considers that the major sponsor

86 Darrell Varga

of A People’s History is Sun-Life Insurance. Broadcast during each episode is an advertisement framed with the grand claim ‘We have history too.’ It is a romanticization of the past in a suturing of historical images with the high-tech present, affirming the naturalization of the corporatization of the Canadian nation-state and the assumption of the corresponding erasure of class. The Sun-Life ad opens with an allencompassing view from above the clouds and cuts to the waves of the ocean crashing against the hard geography of the shoreline, and then to an archival photograph of a poor woman, probably a recent immigrant, holding her child, followed by footage of the wheels of a steam train and lens of a camera. The implication is that the corporate history is linked with modest beginnings but that hard times are of the past, that the story of struggle to make a better life for oneself is co-extensive with the building of the transnational corporation and the technologized present. Black-and-white photographs of workers and footage of soldiers marching to war are followed by the literal building of the corporate office tower. This history is the history of property and the state; the benevolent capitalists look on while the moulded crown of the building is hoisted upward. Needless to say, no mention is made that these corporate headquarters were abandoned when the company moved its offices from Montreal to Toronto following the political expressions of the ‘people’ agitating for Quebec independence. An extreme close-up of a human eye opens and the vibrant colour images suggest a future/ present in which the technology of global capital transactions are imprinted over the faces of the multi-ethnic white-collar proletariat, fully integrated with the modern technologies of vision and control. A colour shot of dragon-boat racing is followed by the final image, a return to black and white as an infant’s hand grasps the finger of an adult, sentimentalizing the ascent of the corporation with the individualized joy and wonder of childhood. These final two images enforce an innocent nostalgia for the parent and child relationship (a great sentiment but hardly the whole story of the relation of the multinational corporation with the nation-state) along with an image reflecting official multiculturalism that allows us to forget the history of racist policies towards Asian immigrants. Here, the corporation is positioned as even-handed patriarch lending a guiding hand to its innocent children/citizens. In the CBC commercial discussed earlier, the strategy is to integrate the state broadcaster with the long history of the documentary form, signified as socially important. In another of the CBC’s self-advertisements, the images collapse together entertainment and information in a

The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 87

montage that swims in nationalist pride formulated through technological achievement. Class differences are hidden by the assertion that there is something for everyone: Glenn Gould for the highbrow tastes, and flamboyant pro-violence hockey commentator Don Cherry for everyone else. While mass media facilitates cultural homogenization, it does so through market-defined differentiation: ballet, figure skating, and the images of iconic news anchors Barbara Frum and Peter Mansbridge juxtaposed with The Beachcombers, Mr Dressup, The Friendly Giant, and pop singer Burton Cummings. We see the invention of cultural tradition in the down-home music of Don Messer and Tommy Hunter and a stylized shot from the TV movie of the Dionne Quintuplets. The comedian Red Green (Steve Smith), whose humour is predicated on the pleasures of proto-masculine activities involving the burning of fossil fuels, is cut with environmentalist David Suzuki, presumably demonstrating the so-called balance of journalistic objectivity. The opening shot of actor Al Waxman from his starring role in The King of Kensington shows him walking through the working-class immigrant neighbourhood of Toronto’s Kensington Market, and we can recall that the lyrics of the show’s theme include the line, ‘He’s the only king without a buck.’ Yet economic inequity is typically resolved within each half-hour episode of that show, as is generally the case in the Americanderived situation comedy genre. While the ‘King’ is a shopkeeper and perhaps less alienated from control over the conditions of his labour than are his factory-worker customers, his economic and social wealth depends on the working-class milieu of the neighbourhood. The montage of images deployed in this advertisement likewise reflect cultural clichés from snow to hockey, mediated by technology: the extreme winter weather of the January 1998 Quebec ice storm, the now American-owned Canadarm, and Paul Henderson’s 1972 winning goal for Team Canada – breaking the ice of the Cold War and figuring sport as another commodity for global transaction. Representations of sport, like those of military battles, are deployed as national unity ritual, and as David Whitson suggests, ‘sporting competition [offers] occasions for the dramatization of communal rivalries, and for public demonstrations of collective allegiances and defiances.’29 The CBC is heavily reliant on revenues from professional sport broadcasts, while, as Whitson indicates, television facilitates the increased professionalization and globalization of sport as entertainment product even as the CBC deploys sport imagery to foster local community and national pride, both of which are at odds with globalization.

88 Darrell Varga

The CBC advertisement’s negotiation of the relationship between community and globalization is nowhere more evident than in its imagery of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, a strong nationalist who simultaneously presented himself as a citizen of the world. The iconic status of Trudeau, particularly at the time of his funeral, which was broadcast on the CBC (he died on 28 September 2000), forces reconciliation of the question of the body of the state and the corporeal body of the leader. Trudeau’s famous political slogan, ‘Reason Over Passion,’ situates him as a stable father figure in control of his children and of the nation. He is shown, in a black-and-white clip from the 1960s, speeding through Ottawa in his sports car and, much later in life, serenely paddling his canoe – at one with, and in control of, nature. He is revealed as in charge of the nation-state during the FLQ crisis by cutting a close-up of his utterance ‘I think that power must be stopped’ against a still photograph of a defiant Quebec nationalist with clenched fist. What is significant is the absence of Trudeau’s notorious ‘Just watch me’ riposte, uttered during the same interview from which the above quote is taken. Rather than choosing a clip that reveals Trudeau’s and the nation-state’s frenzy for militaristic control, the CBC depicts him here as reasonable and reassuring – an interesting choice given Trudeau’s penchant, like Diefenbaker before him and Prime Ministers Mulroney and Chrétien after, for calls to censor the CBC when it does not fit with his view of government and state institutions.30 By redeeming these political figures in this advertisement, the CBC is able to have its cake and eat it too. It provides a hegemonic function for the nation-state through the redemption of political leaders in the narrative of national unity while also presenting itself as objectively including even its own critics, and thus placating charges of bias. In any case, television advertisements tend to rely upon collective cultural amnesia; most viewers watching the ad are unlikely to recognize these politicians as antagonistic to the CBC. Instead, these images, detached from particular political debates and struggles, signify themselves simply as images. The CBC has invested heavily in the redemption of the body of Trudeau through extensive coverage of his funeral. This CBC advertisement makes use of several of those images, including the tearful shot of his son resting his head on the coffin. In this way, the political leader is literally laid to rest as noble father figure. Yet the repeated use of Justin Trudeau’s very private emotional gesture reveals television as, finally, pornographic in its invasive commodification of the personal. It is this structuring force

The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 89

of the medium that strongly influences the broadcast representation of history. All of these historical moments are sutured together with repeated images of the technology itself, allowing us to forget that history, as Fredric Jameson puts it, ‘is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this history can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force.’31 The desire for a unifying national narrative should not substitute for a critical understanding of the very real struggles carried out by the ‘people. ’ Moreover, the specific historical narrative circulates within the flow of media culture and the ideological function of nationalism. As historical documents of contemporary struggles are increasingly digitized, there arises the possibility of new voices and new interventions in the process of history making and historical understanding, knowing that form itself is no guarantee of radical praxis. We must strive to produce multiple histories that argue with one another, and we must engage with practices of representation that, following Walter Benjamin, blast apart the seamless narrative.

NOTES 1 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256–7. 2 Ibid., 257. 3 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations, 217–51. This essay must be read alongside Theodor Adorno’s response: ‘On The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,’ in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 26–52. 4 Originally broadcast nationally in English Canada on the CBC and in Quebec on Radio-Canada during the 2001 and 2002 seasons. For further information, see the CBC website http://history.cbc.ca/history. 5 My thanks to André Loiselle for translation advice. 6 For a discussion of the discourse of the popular in other contexts where it signifies an oppositional sphere to dominant hegemony, see Douglas Kellner, Media Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 33.

90 Darrell Varga 7 David Frank, ‘Public History and the People’s History: A View from Atlantic Canada,’ Acadiensis 32, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 124. Frank’s pays particular attention to the marginalization of social history in Atlantic Canada, suggesting that the series perpetuates the stereotype of helpless victims while eliding complex progressive movements. See Frank’s contribution to the present volume for further reflections on the relation between A People’s History and the trajectory of representations of labour in Canadian film. 8 Following Herbert Marcuse, see for instance One-Dimensional Man, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 256. 9 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. and trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). 10 J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998). 11 Ibid., 142. 12 Maurice Charland, ‘Technological Nationalism,’ Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory 10, nos. 1–2 (1986): 197. 13 David Taras, ‘The CBC and Canadian Television in the New Media Age,’ in A Passion for Identity, 3rd ed., ed. David Taras and Beverly Rasporich (Toronto: ITP Nelson, 1997), 266. 14 David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 7. 15 Pierre Berton, The Great Railway (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 113. 16 Daniel Francis, National Dreams: Myth, Memory, and Canadian History (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997), 15. 17 Ibid., 21. 18 Ibid., 9. 19 Mark Starowicz, speech, Canadian Club of Toronto, 28 May 2001. Broadcast in Toronto for the common folk on Roger’s Cable 10, 11 June 2001. 20 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), passim. See especially 35. 21 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), 63. 22 Continued cutbacks in state funding have encouraged the further commercialization of the CBC, as Marc Raboy succinctly explains: ‘Reduction in service has been apparent at many levels. The shutdown of local stations, trimming of staff, cancelled programmes, increased reliance on advertising, and farming out of production, have all translated into a less

The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 91

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

distinctive, less popular personality – particularly in English television – which the encroaching 500 channel universe continues to undermine.’ Job losses are a bitter indexical counter-referent to the mythologization of the nation. ‘Canada: The Hybridization of Public Broadcasting,’ in Public Broadcasting for the 21st Century, ed. Marc Raboy (Luton, UK: University of Luton Press, 1995), 113. Irving Abella, ‘The Greatest Show Unearthed,’ Globe and Mail, 15 November 2000, A15. For a thorough overview of academic, media, and general viewer responses to the series, see: http://www.carleton.ca/ccph/ peopleshistoryintro.htm CBC, Making History, Fall 2001. Cited in Douglas Gomery, ‘Rethinking Television Historiography,’ Film and History 30, no. 2 (2000): 17. CBC, Making History. Francis, National Dreams, 29. David Whitson, ‘Hockey and Canadian Identities: From Frozen Rivers to Revenue Streams,’ in Taras and Rasporich, Passion for Identity, 299. Calls for CBC censorship by these prime ministers are cited in Taras and Rasporich, Passion for Identity, 270. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 102.

This page intentionally left blank

PART TWO Work, Gender, and Sexuality

This page intentionally left blank

4 Work It Girl! Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie rebecca sullivan

Quebec national cinema is often hailed for its challenging and provocative films about women’s social status. Pioneer filmmakers such as Anne Claire Poirier and Mireille Dansereau and later artists such as Léa Pool began in the early 1970s to make inroads into the burgeoning film community, creating works that utilize themes of women’s subordination and struggle for equality in Quebec society. Their efforts, under the rubric of government-sponsored programs such as the Groupe de recherches sociale and En tant que femmes constitute a major chapter in the history of Quebec film and of feminist cultural politics in Canada generally.1 Yet there is a clear and distinct line between ‘important films’ and popular films. While the latter enjoy box-office success and widespread media attention at the time of their release, they tend to fall by the wayside once the heady work of canon formation begins. In the case of cinematic representations of women, these early feminist films from Quebec may tell us much about the state of second-wave feminism as a social movement in Quebec, but the story of mainstream acceptance of women’s liberation and the reconfiguration of women’s social value remain hidden. At a time when even the word ‘feminism’ is under attack as outmoded, unfashionable, and overly strident, it is helpful to look beyond those cultural texts that claimed an affiliation with the movement, and focus on those that sought to represent feminist values and mores in a popularized context. Valérie, released in 1968 with great fanfare to record audiences, claimed to be a film about modern Quebec and liberated women. Yet, its relationship to the aims of feminism appears tangential at best. The adventures of a convent-school runaway who enters the sex trade before finding true love amidst symbols of urban Quebec nationalism is obvi-

96 Rebecca Sullivan

ously influenced by the cultural explosion of the Quiet Revolution. It would be easy to dismiss the film as exploitative of women and their struggles for greater political, economic, and social freedom. To claim it as merely a form of false consciousness or pseudo-feminist pap for the masses is to miss a broader point. The shift in women’s roles and representations in Quebec society in the 1960s and the radical edge of second-wave feminism provided the foundation for soft-core films like Valérie to play in local theatres. Upon entering the mainstream through popular culture, however, they tended to privilege questions of sexuality over those of labour, and the relations of the body over the politics of education. As Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs argue, the emphasis on sexual liberation as the defining feature of women’s liberation in popular culture made feminism palatable to a mainstream audience, while pushing to the backburner issues of economic and social equality.2 André Loiselle contends that while early Quebec popular cinema had nationalist elements, it was not as concerned with language as it was with the body.3 This trend is quite clear in Valérie, which has a minimal use of dialogue, probably to enhance its marketability in the burgeoning foreign film industry. In fact, the lead character doesn’t speak for the first ten minutes, preferring to let her breasts handle the introduction. The opening sequence, played over a jazzy-pop soundtrack, has Valérie in front of a vanity mirror in an otherwise stark room. She is topless and is applying heavy eye makeup while smoking a cigarette. A crucifix hangs on the wall, watching her almost as closely as the nun hiding behind the door. Caught, she is then taken to the Mother Superior, who castigates her for her wanton, wayward behaviour. Unrepentant, Valérie arranges her escape on motorcycle. After a rebaptismal skinny dip, she and her Easy Rider boyfriend head to the big city, where she promptly dumps him in search of her own adventures. She eventually finds a job as a topless go-go dancer in one of the many new dance clubs opening on Rue Ste Catherine, and bunks in with a sexy but predatory lesbian. Her evening job leaves her tired and listless so she spends her days in Parc Mont Royal, where she meets a dashing artist, Patrick, and his young son. They begin a love affair, but Valérie keeps her way of life a secret from him. It becomes an even darker secret when she gives up the hard labour of topless dancing for the relatively easy life of a high-priced call girl. Eventually things start to unravel when she attends a gallery opening with her new boyfriend and is recognized by some of her regulars, who noticeably shun her. Later, after Patrick discovers her secret life and leaves her, she is brutalized by a particu-

Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 97

larly wealthy but grotesquely ugly client. She realizes that she cannot be a wife and mother by day and whore by night, so decides to leave the city to forget all her mistakes. She makes one last trip to the park to say goodbye, but Patrick decides that he must forgive her. He chases after her as she walks away towards the lookout. On the plaza, against a backdrop of the Montreal skyline and a ring of Quebec flags, he embraces her. His son runs after him and they all join hands, the family unit triumphant. ‘Our cinema will be mature when we dare to undress the girl next door,’ announced Denys Héroux, the director of Valérie, in the Quebec edition of Maclean’s.4 This rallying cry and his later proclamation that it was high time to undress ‘la petite Québécoise,’ as a political gesture against the old order caused outrage in the fledgling film community. Denouncing Valérie as ‘antiquébécois,’ Yves Lever complained not only about its sexism but also the media hype surrounding it and its comely star, Danielle Ouimet. Insisting that for Quebec to evolve culturally, it must abandon the bourgeois values promoted in Valérie, he also argued that the film’s success could lead to an industry dangerously based on a star system and sex appeal rather than authentic experience, as befitted a national cinema: ‘The star, this woman-object, available but inaccessible, no longer corresponds to the modern liberated woman, who sees herself as an authentic person, respected for her subjectivity and capable of establishing honest interpersonal relationships.’5 By labelling the film ‘antiquébécois,’ Lever established an antagonistic relationship between authentic art cinema and crass and exploitative popular cinema. Certainly this dichotomy is nothing new, but the added elements of nationalist fervour and the clamouring over the soul of Québécois women cemented a link between class, gender, and nationalism in public debates about the appropriate direction for a liberated Quebec culture. While politically oriented artists fumed, new ‘films de fesse’ or ‘maple syrup pornos’ like Valérie, its follow-up L’Initiation (1970), and Deux femmes en or (1970), chalked up big profits and became lucrative exports.6 Valérie was the first Quebec film to gross more than one million dollars. It appeared across Canada and in twenty-six other countries. Finland and Yugoslavia selected it as their first-ever Canadian film purchase.7 With its anti-religious stance, its celebration of the city, and the strategic use of Quebec flags, the film toyed with the serious political issues of the Quiet Revolution and the province’s late entrance into modernity, but did so through the figure of a naked, sexually available young woman. The dominant theory of Quebec film argues for a tradition that blends

98 Rebecca Sullivan

documentary and social commentary into realist narratives about the actual living conditions of its people. Cinéma direct is generally considered ‘the forte of Quebec film.’8 This characterization has been sanctioned by the Quebec government in its official overview of the province’s film history. As Pierre Jutras claims, by the sixties filmmakers ‘began to associate cinema with social intervention and preferred to make films that more closely reflected the realities of the socio-economic condition in Quebec.’9 He skims over the films, like Valérie, that attracted huge Québécois audiences. Calling them ‘une vague érotico-comique’ (‘an erotic-comic wave’), he complains about audience’s early gullibility for such fare before returning to the canonical work of filmmakers in the 1970s whose work he praises for successfully blending elements of popular and auteur cinema.10 Yet, as Loiselle argues, there needs to be greater acknowledgment of the films that the general public was actually more likely to see; we need to reflect on their value as social and historical documents rather than simply dismiss them on aesthetic grounds, as Lever and Jutras have done.11 On the one hand, it is not surprising to note that popular cinema succeeds with less intellectual exegesis from the characters and more physical and sexual display. However, the underlying gender distinctions between high and low cinema cannot pass unnoticed here, especially as they are linked to notions of nationalism. Chantal Nadeau claims that nation and masculinity are unproblematically associated with the state of ‘l’identitaire’ in Quebec cinema, while women’s cinema is marginalized as personal and not national in consequence. It is reduced to ‘a cinema of the body,’ rather than a preferred cinema of the mind, with a foregrounded concern for a politics of language.12 Thus, women’s cinema unwillingly shares a space with a popular cinema that usurps, undermines, and subverts potential feminist praxis. As Denyse Therrien critically observes, the efforts of popular-cinema producers to capitalize on the new-found liberation and artistic daring in Quebec led to ‘increasingly virile, misogynous and violent’ films in the 1960s that audiences thoroughly enjoyed.13 The taking up of feminist, or at least woman-centred, themes by popular cinema in the late 1960s did little to promote women’s independence or sovereignty over their bodies, as was the aim of second-wave feminism. It is not enough to suggest simply that they got it wrong. Rather, it calls into question the changing role of women as a class while Quebec was reorienting itself into a modern, industrial, and secular state. Thus, the significance of Valérie can be understood not so much through the

Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 99

framework of film studies, with its emphasis on the text and aesthetics. Rather, popular cinema is more productively explored when placed in a social and historical context and examined for its role in mediating certain anxieties or ambivalences embedded in the culture. The postwar independence movement in Quebec was not a clean break from the past but rather was rooted in values derived from prior nationalist sentiments. Under Maurice Duplessis and the Union Nationale, Quebec maintained its sense of distinction through religion more so than language. The ultramontane French-Canadian Catholic Church enjoyed an elaborate power base as the centre of social, cultural, and educational life. It supported a vision of Quebec as a rural, agrarian economy where the principles of hard work, sacrifice, and humility guided the people. It further fostered an analogy between this distinct French-Catholic society and the traditional family unit so that the aims and goals of the people should be precisely in step with those of the (church-controlled) state, thus undermining any notion of individualism or emancipation in the modern sense.14 Rewards came later, but they were more spiritual or heavenly than materialistic and earthbound. In this ideological milieu, the sort of indigenous films produced had to meet the strict edicts of the church – which was never a big supporter of cinema – and elaborate on the nationalist myth of a proud and noble peasantry. It therefore comes as no surprise that the most successful filmmakers of the Duplessis era were in fact priests. From the 1930s to the 1950s Père Albert Tessier and Père Maurice Proulx produced a number of documentary films that were exhibited across the province.15 Featuring images of people scraping together a subsistence off the land while looking to the church for guidance, their films promoted an idealized image of the traditional working class – uncomplaining, pious, family oriented, and willing to sacrifice personal success for the good of the whole. In many ways, as René Bouchard argues, the work of Tessier, Proulx, and others anticipated both the cinéma-direct style and the nationalist identity politics of the 1960s, but with a significantly different ideological perspective.16 Despite the obvious problems with the conservative ideology of the humble habitant, it did recognize and value women’s work in maintaining this society and carrying the bulk of religious and familial duty. The popular culture of rural Quebec earlier in the century seemed to acclaim working women far better than its modern counterpart, albeit within the tightly controlled framework of maternal feminism. Yvette Cohen offers an alternative theory in the history of Quebec feminism

100 Rebecca Sullivan

that bridges the divide between the traditional and the modern in the discourses of nationalism. Her argument can help shed some light on the problematic representations of women as sexual object at a time when they were purportedly experiencing liberation. In popular magazines from the first half of the twentieth century, farm wives were treated as far more than sexual appendages and endowed with a sense of community. In a 1920 issue of Terre et Foyer, the farm wife was described as someone who ‘pledges to concern herself exclusively with her natural domain, which is the welfare of rural women as a class.’17 The separation of public and private spheres is not easy outside major cities, in rural communities where everyone must contribute just to survive. Thus the farm wife was an economic force to be reckoned with, and could not be treated along the same lines as the postwar urban housewife. While discourses of pious maternalism prevailed, there was also a deeply held belief in women as productive agents of their own survival and self-worth. Magazines encouraged women to improve their job skills through government-supported programs and treated the role of the farm wife/mother as a legitimate profession or even a vocational calling.18 What’s more, in the alliance of church, state, and family, women’s roles were not merely housebound but took on a vitality and importance to the maintenance of authentic Quebec society. Nestled between eternal images of sacrificial maternalism, best personified by the Virgin Mother, were challenges to women as a labouring class to produce and reproduce for the suffering and unacknowledged nation.19 There were initial forays into popular narrative film during the 1950s that sought to express that same sense of humility and devotion to the church in the face of suffering and that incorporated this contradictory view of Quebec women as the bastions of suffering and sacrifice for a greater cause. The most prominent among these is the 1951 melodrama La petite Aurore l’enfant martyre. It is the story of a young innocent who is beaten by her stepmother while her widowed father stands by helplessly. Eventually the local parish priest discovers the abuse and urges Aurore to pray to her real mother and her supernatural mother, Mary, for assistance. Promising to return with help, he leaves her alone in the house. The stepmother, realizing that her crimes have been discovered, kills the child. When the priest returns, he has both parents arrested, and they are ultimately sentenced to hang. The sacrifice of Aurore reasserts the importance of family and faith to the maintenance of Quebec society. Although some might rightly think that the torture and

Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 101

murder of a child is asking too much, it is this deep sense of suffering for the collective good that marked Catholic piety at the time. Furthermore, it was representative of a popular belief that the Québécois were a suffering people seeking deliverance through trust in God, the state, and the idealized family.20 Some might argue that the Quiet Revolution swept away such moralizing ideologies in favour of political realism, supported cinematically through the direct style. However, while there were some noticeable cosmetic changes in popular cinema – most obviously the marginalization of the church – elements from this earlier, conservative era resonated well into the Quiet Revolution and are on display in Valérie. How the church began to relinquish power over everyday life, and how nationalist rhetoric switched from religion to language, is a longstanding debate that can never be satisfactorily resolved. Certainly the death of Duplessis in 1959 and the subsequent election of the Parti Libéral after twenty-four years of Union Nationale leadership had a major role in sparking the Quiet Revolution. It is generally assumed that the creation of a francophone middle class created the impetus that led to sweeping reforms in economic, political, and social policy, which led in turn to an outburst of creative energy trying to capture the ‘épanouissement’ of modern Quebec.21 Movements like Refus Global, which joined artists and intellectuals in demanding aesthetic independence from a stultifying society that feared modernity, have become hallmarks of Quebec’s cultural history, important precursors that anticipated a full-scale cultural revolution in the 1960s. Certainly there is no doubt that the politically tinged, nationalistic cinéma-direct movement shares an affinity with these earlier artistic rebellions. However, I’m not convinced that the same can be said for popular cinema, which sought commercial rather than artistic success. Rather, coming to terms with films like Valérie as more than an ‘erotic-comic wave’ that happened in a moment of folly or weakness means realizing that Quebec’s cultural awakening was as much a result of socio-economic shifts that made possible a francophone middle class, as it was an autonomous, spontaneous groundswell of artistic and intellectual rebels from the margins. The rejection of traditional working-class values, grounded in piety and humility and the view that rural life was Quebec’s ordained destiny, could happen only if there was an alternative way of life to replace it. Scholars such as William Coleman claim that new modes of thought and action were less the products of a motivated and conscientious new class than of policy initiatives based on government and

102 Rebecca Sullivan

industry partnerships.22 By turning away from arts and culture and examining shifts in social policy, films like Valérie cannot be easily dismissed as cultural roadkill on the way to real art. Coleman argues that at the time of the Quiet Revolution, education and labour were still tightly controlled by either the church or the state.23 However, by the 1960s, the Catholic Church was in the throes of massive reforms on a global scale, with the convening of the Second Vatican Council from 1959 to 1963. Under the principle of aggiornamento, the modernizing and updating of all facets of Catholic religiosity, church leaders promoted a greater sense of individuality and personal conscience in matters of faith. They also took measures to devolve their massive institutional network in favour of a grass-roots approach to social services. In Quebec, the reaction to the Second Vatican Council was not as dramatic as in other places, most notably the United States. Still, with the demise of the Union Nationale’s power and the death of Duplessis, it was clear that the Catholic Church would have to reassess its role in public life. Common sentiment likes to present a picture of an intransigent, corrupt, and dictatorial church grasping for power against the inevitable. That is, however, not entirely the case. As Gregory Baum points out, even members of the clergy were calling for change before the widespread reforms of the 1960s. Activists such as Père Gérard Dion and Père Louis O’Neil championed Catholic political progressivism and a modernization of social services. An anonymous tract from 1960 entitled Les Insolences du Frère Untel, later credited to Frère John-Paul Desbiens of the Marist Brothers, called for the church to assist in the formation of a better-educated, individualistic, and modern Quebec society.24 It can only be speculated how successful any kind of social revolution would have been without the cooperation of the church, but it is still important to recognize the degree of acceptance and even support that it offered. Beginning in the 1960s, then, the educational stranglehold of the church was relaxed, with at least its partial consent, paving the road for a new model based on industrial and technological progress in contrast to the old ways of cultural and spiritual belonging.25 In the meantime, other changes were occurring in economic and political life as the Parti Libéral sought to reform the government. The Duplessis ideology of a peasant society served nationalist ends by promoting Quebec isolationism as an issue of cultural survival. There were two competing versions of Quebec national history that supported the exaltation of the peasant. The clerical model cherished the earliest days of the founding of New France and claimed its people as a

Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 103

kind of ‘rural race’ destined to work the land and resist modernity. The political model viewed the conquest of New France as the origin of a distinct Quebec rural society. Having lost economic and political power to the English elite who controlled the urban centres, the pure laine French people had no choice but to retreat and reinforce the bulwark of rural society in order to save themselves.26 Regardless of the differences between these two perspectives, the outcome was the same: the cultural preservation of Quebec lay in a rural agrarian society and not in the cities. It was the ideology of the peasantry, and not the actual material conditions of French working-class life, that the Union Nationale fostered and the Parti Libéral sought to undo. Theories of the Quiet Revolution almost inevitably rest on questions of class and the reorganization of business and labour. The most popular is of a grassroots movement led by an urbanized, educated, and newly bourgeois francophone public. This version, which makes no distinction between liberators and liberated, assumes an easy overthrow of state and religious institutions that had, not long before, seemed permanently fixed. However, it fails to take into consideration how this new middle class attained a secular-progressive education or entered into industrial and business life in the expanding cities. The ideology of the francophone peasantry, so cherished by the Duplessis government, reflected more an anxiety than a reality. Quebec, like everywhere else in the postwar era, was lurching towards industrialization and rationalist business principles along the lines of scientific management. The noble peasant image may have existed in the films of Tessier and Proulx as a self-preservation strategy, but it was not reflected in the economic realities of the state. Later educational and cultural reforms of the Parti Libéral were a response to the economic and social status of the province as an urban, industrial society. This is in direct contrast to the dominant culturalist version of the Quiet Revolution, which, as some prefer to view it, credits the cultural awakening for spearheading changes to everyday life and the organization of social classes.27 In order to improve their chances of expansion and market domination, small- and medium-sized francophone business-owners lobbied the Quebec state to reform education to produce workers better suited for the technologically driven bureaucratic economy. This trend reverses the relationship between class and society in 1960s Quebec. Rather than claiming the new middle class as the proponents of widespread social and cultural reform, they are perhaps more likely the products of reforms implemented at the behest of modern industry. The distinction is cru-

104 Rebecca Sullivan

cial in the consideration of popular cultural accounts of Quebec’s modernization, as well as in understanding the gendered power relations that underscore them. The celebration of the urbanized middle class and the demise of the old representations of noble peasantry were not direct challenges to state controls, but rather were in step with their goals for a modern Quebec. As such, they are riddled with ambivalent images that seem unwilling to let go of the past. The fact that this ambivalence is mediated through the feminine body transforms the idea of the productive, female labourer envisioned by old orders of nationalism into a passive consumer of urban frivolity. In this new society, Valérie seemed to express all the excitement of the era, just before things exploded into righteous anger and conflict. Its release was not so much a challenge to the cultural order as a culmination of changes in governmental cultural policies to support both a sophisticated artistic community and a thoroughly modern audience. Right from the earliest days of cinema, Quebec had sought to curtail the distribution of films and discourage people from attending. In 1912 it established a Bureau of Censorship and passed laws to enforce its power. Catholic dioceses were welcome to assist in the maintenance of the censorship system and could make interventions into the film industry if they saw fit.28 Films were not allowed to be shown on Sundays, and until 1967 children under the age of sixteen were prevented from seeing anything that could not claim educational value. There were the usual edicts against sex and violence, although Loiselle suggests that they seemed much more lenient towards violence compared to a near-hysterical level of censorship against even the mildest kind of sexual content.29 There were additional safeguards in the laws to protect the ideology of the habitant, which both church and state exploited to justify their overbearing control over society. Any kind of negative connotation of the church or its clergy was deemed unacceptable. Also listed as reasons for censorship were disrespect for social and civic responsibility, undermining the prestige or authority of parents, and promoting a generalized sense of fear and anxiety. This suggests the degree to which both church and state were concerned with limiting any kind of voice that dissented with their own vision of a distinct Quebec society. In terms of sexuality, the conditions were laid out quite clearly: no ‘improper’ clothing, no lascivious kisses, no impropriety, and certainly no indication of sexual excitement.30 This status quo for film continued until well into the 1960s despite calls from the media and the new breed of modern Quebec intellectuals

Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 105

for a more progressive cultural framework. Frustrated by the extent of cultural institution-building undertaken by the federal government in the years following the Massey Commission (1951), organizations in Quebec’s urban centres demanded that Duplessis start paying closer attention to the question of culture. Around the time of his death, the Montreal Junior Chamber of Commerce recommended a provincial arts council to support theatre and films that represented French-Canadian culture, while the opposition Parti Libéral recommended the appointment of a minister of cultural affairs.31 It is not that Duplessis was completely unwilling to consider culture an important bulwark for Quebec nationalism, but he wanted to modernize the industry to increase the province’s financial stability while continuing to promote traditional ideals in its productions. The report of the Tremblay Commission in 1956 blended together concerns about Quebec’s economic strength with educational reforms and a vision of a distinct culture along the lines of the traditional pious model.32 That the government believed there was a way to modernize in some areas while retaining the ideology of a pure laine peasantry exposes the level of anxiety felt by traditionalists. It is evident in the conclusions of the commission, which complained that the industrialized working class was displaying characteristics more in line with anglophone, Protestant culture than with their rightful heritage.33 The commission’s recommendations that the political and economic infrastructure be changed to fit the cultural and spiritual ideals appear incredibly naive and suggest deep divisions in Quebec culture between traditional values and the changing realities of everyday society. Inevitably, of course, the efforts of the commission to put faith before commerce failed, paving the way for a relaxation of censorship controls and a promotion of indigenous culture not shackled to the church. In 1961, the newly elected Parti Libéral introduced the Department of Cultural Affairs into the government, promising to revitalize and reorient culture to meet the challenges of a modern Quebec. Its early years were a constant struggle for legitimation, and tended to emphasize the high arts, leaving mass media with its presumed lower-class audience to the foreign cultural industries.34 It was not until 1967 that film came to the attention of political leaders. The Office du Film du Quebec was transferred out of the hands of the clergy and into the Department of Cultural Affairs. At the same time, the censorship bureau was replaced by a ratings system, loosening the restrictions on depictions of sex, violence, and the mocking of once-sacred Quebec values. This move,

106 Rebecca Sullivan

coupled with a new federal policy to promote the production of popular cinema through the Canadian Film Development Corporation, considerably changed the conditions of Quebec filmmaking.35 As Loiselle argues: ‘Quebec audiences willing to encourage indigenous production but also eager to enjoy their viewing experience naturally flocked to comedic “films de fesses,” whether subversive or not, for what they wanted was to see themselves not as troubled young intellectuals in search of an identity but as bons vivants enjoying the many pleasures of life.’36 This was the new culture of épanouissement, which eagerly embraced films like Valérie. Its immediate and unprecedented popularity flies in the face of canonical claims of aesthetic authenticity, but it also suggests that audiences were primed for a film so irreverent of both traditional piety and modern cultural politics. It apparently had everything that modern Quebec could ask for: easily shocked nuns, expansive cityscapes, a vibrant counterculture, avant garde artists, and a half-naked woman at the centre of it all. Reviews for the film tended along the lines of bemusement. Although few could call it a good film in the aesthetic or artistic sense, some did argue that it reflected the conflictual morality of Quebec society as it contended with such movements as second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, and the Quiet Revolution. While nationalists like Lever fumed over the false consciousness of the film, other more mainstream critics remarked on its amazing verité when it came to the problem of Quebec. One critic commented that Valérie ‘was Aurore’s big sister,’ a reference to the 1951 melodramatic film.37 This was certainly not the kind of association that the filmmakers were going for, with their thoroughly modern take on ‘la petite Québécoise.’ Yet it shows how popular cinema had yet to shake off the conservativism of earlier forms of cultural nationalism, at least as it concerned the representation of women. Both films exploit the female body to signify the plight of Quebec and its possible redemption; both films put conventional domestic morality in conflict but end with its reinforcement after ensuring that the female lead suffers appropriately (one murdered, one raped). Other critics picked up on the ultimately moralizing tone of Valérie, bare breasts notwithstanding. Le Devoir stated that the film ‘gives us a good image, vague but justifiable, of contemporary Quebec society. Not in the psychology of the characters, who remain almost always opaque, but in the moral standards one can discover in them.38 English Canada also identified the similarities between past and present. Robert Fulford, writing under his pen name of Marshall Delaney, noted in Saturday Night maga-

Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 107

zine that ‘Valérie doesn’t just describe Quebec morality, it embodies it.’ Further, ‘what is so beautiful and so historic about Valérie is the way it defines, in 1969 terms, the traditional morality of Roman Catholic French Canada.’39 The soft-core elements of the film, extremely radical at the time, obviously drew critics to comment on the changing morality of Quebec society and to see the lead character as little more than a trope. Yet, as many noted even at the time, this was a deeply conservative film that continued to insist on a domestic role for women. The difference was that in this modern conception, women were no longer being represented as productive members of society but as seductive consumers. It is perhaps worth acknowledging that Valérie does not merely give up on the church and traditional morality when she motors out of the convent. As the Mother Superior reminds her, she is abandoning education and the possibility of a respectable teaching job. It is apparent right from the start that she is looking for the good life without having to work too hard for it. Her first job, selling newspapers on the street (shades of Jean Seberg in Breathless), leaves her too tired to enjoy herself at nights so she decides to find different work. After lying about her experience, she lands a job as a go-go dancer. As a brief Maclean’s report from 1969 noted, such a job was highly lucrative for young women. Marie, a single mother on welfare, recalled her four-month stint in a club, working for ten to twenty-five dollars an hour. ‘Where else could I get that money with my grade six? And no stripping, either. I made myself those cute costumes and I really felt good.’40 It is interesting that even a conservative magazine like Maclean’s looked to the sex trade and its peripherals as a way out of poverty for working-class women. They were not alone, as it seemed that even social services, rather than offering programs for adult education and skills training, recommended to their female clients that they begin selling sex. A married mother seeking social assistance complained in Maclean’s that welfare workers told her ‘You have a nice body, why don’t you make use of it?’41 This idea of putting the working-class female body to good use as a sexual toy may have appeared liberating and modern to some, but it highlights the deep ambivalences of second-wave feminism as it gained momentum at the same time as the sexual revolution. This is evident in Valérie as the lead character becomes a greedy consumer, offering her body in exchange for the pleasures of modern Montreal. In one very telling scene, Valérie boards the métro for the first time. Inside the subway car, she is inundated with advertisements extolling women’s desirability. As the camera moves frantically between shots of

108 Rebecca Sullivan

the ads and back to Valérie, she begins to writhe seductively along the walls, aglow in a frenzy of consumerism. A pantyhose ad urges her, ‘pour l’amour, épilez-vous’ (‘shave your legs for love’). Another features ‘Les Scandaleuses’ and ‘The Look’ with glamour images of highly seductive-looking women. There are bra ads and panty ads, the latter an image of a woman’s torso with a pair of daisy-patterned panties and a flower in her navel. It is little wonder that, after this epiphany, Valérie decides to join the ranks of ‘les scandaleuses’ and become a topless dancer. However, even that demands too much of her, so she decides to become a prostitute because ‘it pays better, is less tiring, and more amusing.’ Now a successful sex worker, she enjoys decorating her new apartment and, after meeting her artist lover, decides to indulge in some art. She purchases some books on classic paintings, sharing them with one of her johns. They then play a game with her imitating the poses, the film flashing between the original paintings and the mock dress-up by Valérie. Her foray into art continues to take a consumerist position as she agrees to pose for her boyfriend. Whereas all his other paintings are more modern expressionist, this one is a traditional nude study. Such representations problematize the relationship between sexuality and modernity, signaling that even with their shirts off, women might always be left behind with the traditional and the passive. These scenes also contain a not so subtle condemnation of Valérie’s crass bourgeois aspirations, which are so easily purchased but are ultimately meaningless to her when she realizes that they may cost her the chance for a traditional home life. However, in this modern, consumerist, and highly sexualized model of women’s liberation, the way forward appears to actually be leading her back to traditional notions of Quebec maternalism. Though she may have escaped the church when she hightailed it out of the convent, Valérie is repatriated into the domestic family order through the forgiveness and acceptance of Patrick, a new-style Québécois: modern, intellectual, and artistic. To complicate matters further, this decision, which harkens so clearly back to old orders of pious peasantry represented in women’s magazines like Terre et Foyer, is represented as the culmination of new Quebec nationalism. In the longshot of Valérie and Patrick’s reconciliation, his son races to join them as a ring of Quebec flags flutter wildly before the cityscape. Together they rush to the edge of the lookout and stand staring out towards the future. As the music swells, the camera closes in on Valérie’s hand reaching for the boy. It is on that shot that the film freezes and the credits roll.

Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 109

Could there have been another option for Valérie in this new nationalist order? Certainly by the late sixties, education rates for women were rising. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women claimed a rise in women university enrolment from 26 per cent at the beginning of the sixties to 36 per cent by 1967/8. Quebec was also the only province to legally recognize ‘sex’ as a category of discrimination in the workplace.42 From the onset of the Quiet Revolution, the rate of women working in Quebec doubled in twenty years, from 26 per cent in 1960 to 48 per cent by the time of the first referendum on sovereignty. Also, motherhood was on the decline, with fertility rates dropping precipitously in the 1970s to one of the lowest in the world.43 Of course, there is no doubt that the film would have been much less popular if Valérie had returned to school, got her law degree, and went to work with the poor and marginalized of the city. Nonetheless, by perpetuating a whore/madonna stereotype, the film did very little to promote the liberation of women as part of the nationalist dream for Quebec, though it does call into question conventional associations of conservative, traditional attitudes with the subjugation of women and modern, liberal attitudes with efforts to emancipate them. As Cohen argues, it is perhaps within the darkest, most archaic days of Quebec culture that working-class women received the most recognition as important contributors to society. With the bougeoisification of Quebec during the 1960s, women may have actually lost ground, which it would take years to recover. Her somewhat controversial claim is that when the women’s liberation movement in the late sixties and early seventies rejected all old forms of feminism as retrograde, particularly due to their affiliation with Catholic values, the alliance between maternal feminism and pietic nationalism collapsed, leaving a sense of confusion and anxiety about the role women played in the new configuration of Quebec society.44 Domesticity was not really challenged: it was sexualized rather than spiritualized, in keeping with postwar discourses of women as objects of consumption. Increasingly, the modern, liberated woman was represented in sexual rather than economic terms. This problem was at the core of criticisms of Valérie by radical nationalists such as Lever, but was not acknowledged to be a reality in either Quebec society or its culture. By denying it as antithetical to the agenda of Quebec identity, the result was that films that explored body politics and women’s culture were dismissed as tangential to the goal of sovereignty. Dealing with images of class and labour in cinema reminds us of their

110 Rebecca Sullivan

masculinist underpinnings. The working-class hero is rarely a woman unless a helpmate or source of inspiration. Thus, the portrayal of women who are seeking to stand alone collapses under the weight of hegemonic expectations that they remain passive and pliant. Valérie exemplified this ambivalence towards women once their value as productive, working members of society was undermined and their options limited. The fun-loving whore who finds redemption through the family may have been ‘antiquébécois,’ as Lever charged. She certainly did not fit the mould of the old forms of nationalism, but she also highlighted a missing element in the new: the recognition and value of women’s labour and their potential to contribute to a reconfiguration of the public sphere. Lever claimed with a manifesto-like bravado: ‘If we are to evolve, it will be in the abandonment of those bourgeois “values” proposed by Valérie, in the authenticity of expression, in social activity, investigation and in the clear effort to refuse the easy path, such values that we have held true since Jean-Pierre [sic] Lefebvre and others showed us that in cinema there is possibility.’45 While it may have been possible to realize such a vision through popular cinema, it is hard to come up with a film that celebrated women’s role in this new society without resorting to crude sexual imagery. From productive worker to consumer-driven slut, the first modern Quebec woman on film cemented a link between bourgeois values and effeminacy but could not offer a way out of the conundrum. There were only the ‘good’ middle-class values of heterosexual domesticity versus the ‘bad’ values of sexual decadence. Both are ultimately concerned with the control of women’s bodies and their utility to men. It was left to avant-garde or art cinema to challenge these representations, but they lacked the widespread audience appeal to make a significant social impact. As feminism still struggles to be depicted on the screen as a vibrant and liberating possibility, we can see this legacy of the body in the celebration of high kicks and sexy tricks over critiques of the challenging working conditions women still face.

NOTES Special thanks to Kate Sullivan for assistance with translations. 1 J. Pallister, The Cinema Of Québec: Masters In Their Own House (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 94.

Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 111 2 B. Ehrenreich, E. Hess, and G. Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (New York: Anchor Press, 1986), 72. 3 A. Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive or Simply Stupid: Notes on Popular Québec Cinema,’ Postscript 15, no. 3 (Winter/Spring 1999): 76. 4 Denys Héroux: ‘Déshabiller la petite voisine …’ Maclean’s, January 1969, 45. 5 Y. Lever, ‘Valérie, film antiquébécois,’ Relations, October 1969, 281. ‘La star, cette femme-objet à la fois offerte à tous et inaccessible pour tous, ne correspond plus du tout au type de la femme moderne libérée, qui se veut authentique, respectée dans sa subjectivité et capable d’établir de véritables relations inter-personnelles.’ 6 Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive,’ 79. 7 K. Dzeguze, ‘Ottawa Gambled Some of Our Money on a Naughty Film – And Won,’ Maclean’s, August 1970, 60–1. 8 Pallister, The Cinema of Quebec, 35. 9 P. Jutras, Une brève histoire du cinéma québécois, http://www.mri.gouv.qc.ca/ le_québec_un_profil/culture/cinema_fr.html: ‘associent cinéma et intervention sociale, favorise la production de films encore plus proches des réalités socio-économiques québécoises.’ My translation. 10 Ibid. 11 Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive,’ 76. 12 C. Nadeau, ‘Barbaras en Québec: Variations on Identity’ in Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema, ed. K. Armatage, K. Banning, B. Longfellow, and J. Marchessault (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 197. 13 Denyse Therrien, cited in P. Reines, ‘The Emergence of Québec Cinema: A Historical Overview,’ in Essays on Québec Cinema, ed. J.I. Donohue Jr (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991), 23. 14 Y. Cohen, ‘From Feminine to Feminism in Québec,’ in A History of Women: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, vol. 5, ed. F. Thébaud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 555. 15 Reines, ‘The Emergence,’ 17. 16 Bouchard, cited in Pallister, The Cinema of Quebec, 24. 17 Cohen, ‘From Feminine to Feminism,’ 551. 18 Ibid., 559. 19 Ibid., 557. 20 G. Baum, The Church in Québec (Ottawa: Novalis, 1991), 22. 21 W. Coleman, The Independence Movement in Quebec, 1945–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 6. 22 Coleman, Independence Movement.

112 Rebecca Sullivan 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

40 41 42

43 44 45

Ibid. Baum, The Church in Québec, 23. Ibid., 20. R. Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 66 Coleman, The Independence Movement, 6. Pallister, The Cinema of Québec, 18. Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive,’ 79. Pallister, The Cinema of Québec, 18. Handler, Nationalism, 88. Coleman, The Independence Movement, 67. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 141. Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive,’ 79. Ibid., 80. Y. Lever, Les Films de la Revolution Tranquille, http://www.CAM.ORG/ ~lever/Films/films.html Quoted in ibid. ‘Valérie donne une bonne image, obscure mais juste, de la société québécoise actuelle. Non pas dans la psychologie des personnages, qui nous demeurent presque toujours opaques, mais dans le niveau de valeurs qu’on peut y découvrir.’ My translation. M. Delaney, ‘When It Comes from Quebec, Even a Skin Flick May Echo Jansenist Catholic Morals: You Must Be Either Very Good or Very Bad,’ Saturday Night, September 1969, 40–1. ‘They Won’t Even Let a Mother Earn Some Money Go-Go Dancing,’ Maclean’s, November 1969, 7. ‘You Have A Nice Body. Why Not Use It?’ Maclean’s, November 1969, 7. B. Freeman, The Satellite Sex: The Media and Women’s Issues in English Canada, 1966–1971 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), 106. Cohen, ‘From Feminine to Feminism,’ 550. Ibid., 562. Lever, ‘Valérie, film antiquébécois,’ 281. ‘Si nous évoluons, c’est précisément dans la ligne de l’abandon des ‘valeurs’ bourgeoises proposées par Valérie, dans la ligne de l’authenticité des témoignages, de l’animation sociale, d’une recherche et d’un effort de lucidité dans le refus de la facilité, valeurs sûres auquelles on croit depuis que Jean-Pierre Lefebvre et d’autres nous en ont montré, au cinéma, la possibilité.’ My translation.

5 Not Playing, Working: Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film bart beaty

Hockey holds a privileged space in the Canadian imagination, producing a distinctive form of national celebrity: the professional hockey player. As a potent signifier of class, nationalism, masculinity, and race, the Canadian hockey star is a locus for contestation between popular and highbrow articulations of what constitutes the acceptable range of Canadian identities. The limits of this signification are coded not only in contemporary sports pages and on broadcasts of Hockey Night in Canada, but also in a growing number of Canadian films that have sought to mobilize representations of hockey as commentaries on the state of Canadian society. Richard Gruneau and David Whitson have argued that ‘reminders of hockey’s significant presence in Canadians’ collective memories help to keep alive the idea of a national common culture.’1 Yet the commonality sought in the hockey tradition has been dependent on a number of assumptions that privilege the social spaces of urban, middle-class, white men as nationally normative. Like any other representational system, hockey is a subject of particular and locatable social discourse, as well as the vehicle for its dissemination. Yet, in Canada hockey has achieved a position of dominance that privileges it in ways approximated only by other media rather than other sports. The history of efforts to build national audiences and consensus in Canada is inextricably tied to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the history of the CBC is likewise linked to that of hockey. Naturalized and mythologized as a reaction of Canadians to icy, long winters, and the physical and moral toughness required to survive in a hostile climate, hockey has become a contested site of culture mediated in the twentieth century by a broadcasting apparatus charged by the state with the establishment and preservation of national characteris-

114 Bart Beaty

tics. Yet, in seeking to reveal the dysfunctionality that is masked by the very myths supporting the relationship of hockey and Canadian nationalism, contemporary films about hockey offer few viable alternatives. In their rethinking of the relationship between sport and the national media and celebrity infrastructure, hockey films reify a different, though no more satisfactory, set of assumptions relating to community, fame, violence, and working-class Canadian masculinities. Hockey films, rooted as they are in both an anti-American and anti-popular sentiment, are suggestive of a long-standing highbrow reluctance about the role that sport plays in illuminating social tensions across regional and class lines. The history of hockey in Canada can be understood in a number of ways that illuminate traditional national tensions. Sport, as Garry Whannel has observed, provides many of the national ritual occasions of public life, and concepts of nationality and sports are often difficult to separate.2 In Canada this relationship is most explicitly manifested around hockey. The ideological articulation of unity found in the operation of sport broadcasting, coupled with the desire to produce an entertaining spectacle for national consumption, has elevated Canadian hockey broadcasters to a prominent role in the construction of a largely mythical national unity. In so doing, both the representation and articulation of hockey have been stripped from its historical roots in antagonistic regional discourses. Gruneau and Whitson, for instance, suggest that the regional development of hockey in Canada, which was formulated around amateur teams made up of players from local communities who competed with other communities for prestige, was eclipsed in the 1930s by the professionalization of the sport and the nationalization of hockey in Saturday night radio broadcasts originating in Toronto.3 Harold Innis’s conception of the Canadian experience as an economic history of disparities seems apropos here. The relationship between centre and margins in sports culture, encapsulated as it is in the production and consumption model that privileges Toronto-based professional hockey, helps to reify dominant rather than localized understandings of Canadian identity. At the same time, however, this process of cultural imperialism is repeated in international terms, as hockey is added to the list of cultural forms that function primarily as branch plants of industries located in the United States. As centre/margin distinctions are confirmed in cultural industries such as film, television, and music, the sense of local culture is downplayed in favour of the promotion of a Toronto-centric

Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 115

vision of nationalism offered as a viable alternative to the internationalism represented by the United States. At the practical level, these concerns are played out as a reaction against the increasing implication of Canadian sport in, and its subordination to, American economic, political, and cultural domination, through federal support for sports, while ignoring completely the metropole/hinterland construct as it relates internally to the relationship between Toronto and the rest of the nation. The distinction between community and nation is at the heart of Canadian films about hockey, emphasizing the role of class and masculinity in creating a viable Canadian cultural identity. Community and Nation in the Hockey Film The hinterland/metropole construct of Canadian mass media has had a tremendous impact on the way Canadians conceptualize not only hockey but also the game’s importance for the nation. Hockey, like other cultural industries, is preoccupied with the need to create popular entertainment as a commodity. The historical relationship of popular culture and consumerism was structured by nineteenth-century industrialism and, in particular, the industrialization of culture through the emergence of leisure institutions, goods, and services. Fundamentally, the idea of popular culture has always been defined by social and class asymmetries, which are the result of disequitable distribution of material and social power. Dominant responses to popular culture have tended to seek to repress – as in the cases of gambling and alcohol consumption – or commodify and market specific aspects of popular practices. As such, popular culture has functioned as an important site within and through which various social groups have actively and consciously negotiated their relationships with one another. To this end, the dominant reading of professional men’s hockey as the only nationally significant version of the game is put to the challenge by several films that mobilize discourses of amateurism in productive ways. In Perfectly Normal (Simoneau, 1990) the construction of hockey is intimately bound to discourses of Canadian nationalism. Hockey is a subplot in Perfectly Normal, a film about Alonzo, a brash American entrepreneur who convinces Renzo, a dull Canadian brewery worker, to invest in an extravagant opera-themed Toronto restaurant, and further to star as Bellini’s Norma in the restaurant’s stage show each night. Janice Kaye has pointed to the significant ways that the film uses transgendering in order to bring the Canada–U.S. dynamic to life.4

116 Bart Beaty

Kaye, however, downplays the significant role of hockey in the film, citing it simply as an effort on the part of Renzo to search ‘for a strong masculine identity.’5 While Kaye is correct that the film signals Renzo’s unease in the normative working-class masculine role, hockey is used throughout the film as a device to signal the difference between community-based and individualistic forms of knowledge. The hockey rink is the sole arena in the film in which a strong sense of community is established and traditional working-class notions of camaraderie are reinforced. Renzo is cut off from his colleagues at work, but at the hockey rink he is shown to be among friends and potential lovers. At the same time, Alonzo – who knows nothing about hockey and cannot discern a warm-up from a game – is the bearer of high culture that will collide with the lowness of hockey in the film’s finale. Ultimately the decision facing Renzo, framed by Alonzo as a choice between dullness and ‘what opens in Gay Paree,’ is between the collective values of low culture and the self-improving values of high culture. Renzo’s attempts to bridge these cultures simultaneously, by playing the big game against arch rivals Eastern Clay and singing in the stage show on the same night, becomes unsustainable, as the pastiche devolves into a hockey brawl when barely sublimated homoerotic desires erupt. Perfectly Normal seeks to envision Canada as a contemporary postmodern nation that incorporates the various class positions suggested by hockey and opera into one world view, although it does so only tentatively. A very different nation is envisioned by Louis Saia’s 1997 film Les Boys. This film, the top-grossing Canadian film of all time, centres around the exploits of a bar-league team and their attempt to win a game against a team of goons representing local mafia interests. At stake is the ownership of the bar at which all of the teammates congregate to escape their jobs, their debts, and their wives. Set in an identifiably real Montreal, the film mobilizes the team’s solidarity – or lack of same – as a form of commentary on contemporary politics in Quebec. When a drunken Jean-Charles recalls the night of the 1980 referendum, the date is more significant to Montreal Canadiens’ super-fan Fernand as the night of a spectacular New York Islanders playoff win. Learning that hockey-obsessed Fernand failed to vote in the referendum, JeanCharles condemns him by noting that ‘it’s because of people like you that we don’t have a country.’ While this may be true, the film makes clear that the real nation here is a hockey nation. In this regard the nonvoting Fernand is the ideal citizen. Highly informed and deeply committed to his ideals, Fernand rattles off the order of goal scorers in

Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 117

championship games from the 1970s and drunkenly dreams of meeting Maurice Richard. Fernand’s fixations prove that, as with Hollywood’s films, hockey is a site wherein any number of potential fantasies and desires are negotiated by audiences. That deep attachments to teams and players are formed into amicable communities can be in little doubt. The 1955 riot in Montreal, which occurred after NHL president Clarence Campbell suspended fan-favourite Maurice Richard, serves as an indication of the degree of affinity that can be located in fan reactions to star players. These dreams, however, are often played out through the mediation of broadcasting. Beginning in the Depression of the 1930s, hockey owners began a process of distancing live hockey performances from working-class audiences in an effort to appeal to an increasingly large middle-class audience. The gentrification of hockey stemmed largely from the new arenas that were built in Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, and Detroit in the 1920s and 1930s, which priced the working-class audience out of their seats, relegating that audience to participation by radio.6 The availability of radio broadcasts, cheap entertainment in the midst of a severe economic crisis, helped to establish an audience of knowledgeable and enthusiastic fans across Canada. The active solicitation of fan support had originated in hockey during the 1880s and had helped to fundamentally alter the relationship between sporting events and audiences. The advent of professionalism within hockey largely displaced notions of community in the sport, as no longer were the players people that the average fan was likely to know or to work with. The contemporary audience for sports can be referred to as a community only accidentally. Members of the community do not share a common fate or a need to improve and maintain the status of the community; rather they are bound together solely in a common entertainment experience, temporarily united by shared assumptions, memories, and desires located around a product preference. The maintenance of these preferences was relatively easy in the sixteam NHL that existed from 1942 until 1967. Because none of those teams relocated and owner collusion made the transfer of star players difficult, it was easy to imagine that the teams in part ‘belonged’ to the cities in which they performed. Les Boys recalls this period with Fernand’s constant Canadiens trivia, through Ti-Guy’s cocaine-induced fantasy that he is the reincarnation of Guy Lafleur, playing in the old Montreal Forum, and by Mario’s desire to name his first born Saku. The postexpansion NHL, on the other hand, found the project of community

118 Bart Beaty

identity-building to be increasingly difficult, with increasingly mobile teams apt to abandon cities where they could not generate sufficient profits or concessions from regional governments. To compensate for this tendency, hockey broadcasters have largely adjusted by placing increased attention on the role of individual players instead of on teams. The narrational line of the broadcasts – centred primarily on the question ‘who will win?’ – is augmented by the personalization of the athletes accomplished by interviews, and by placing the games within a larger social context by the repeated use of phrases like ‘our players.’ Additional ideological preferences for ‘hard work’ or ‘fearless player’ express more highly coded notions of appropriate behaviour, which is seen as being embodied within these athletes.7 The player best associated with community, therefore, becomes the most hard-knocked individual, the man who is willing to throw down his gloves and fight for his friends. This furthers the dichotomy between working-class fans and middle-class audiences by introducing the element of violence and problematizing its value. Representations of Violence in the Hockey Film Distinctions between elite and working classes have been coded in hockey since its inception and initial attempts at organization. Gruneau and Whitson argue that the two games that contributed to the formation of hockey as a sport – ricket and field hockey – have historical associations with working-class participants and British army officers respectively. The modern game, which originated in Montreal in the 1870s, was established by wealthy anglophones and subsequently promoted to a national standard by the influence that this social class was able to exert. To this degree, the development of hockey in Canada can be regarded as originating with a patrician view that culture was a thing to be established by social elites and disseminated among populations that would be unlikely to adopt ‘self-improving’ leisure practices. Educated elites, it was held, were required to utilize their own influences to create institutions and cultural practices that would be morally uplifting and would help to overcome regional biases and cultures rooted, like shinny, in mass participation. What is most apparent about the ability of anglophone Montrealers to constitute their version of hockey as the acceptable version is the fact that notions about the ‘good of the game’ have always been historically located in the domain of those who could best assert institutional au-

Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 119

thority in economic terms. While gambling and drinking established the association of money, alcohol, and male sports culture very early in the history of Canada, it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that economic capital became indispensable for the majority of sports pastimes. The process by which land was drawn into systems of economic exchange, and the resultant commodification of urban space, enacted powerful pressures on recreational and leisure-time land use, with elite groups often erecting their own recreational areas in order to exclude underprivileged classes. Similarly, the ongoing process of professionalization of sports created a class of athletes who were willing to relocate in order to play sports as a form of employment, an evolution that had dire effects on regionally based participatory teams that lacked the demographic base and economic capital to compete with major urban centres in the east. As a consequence of this development, the ability to organize a sports team became tied to economic privilege. The establishment of formal rules for many sports was also tied to the whims of profit, and the first formalized rule books often originated with sporting-goods manufacturers who saw nothing wrong in altering rules in order to necessitate the types of equipment they manufactured. The exclusionary aspect of these developments sat in an uneasy relationship to a generally held belief that it was necessary for the elite classes to aid in the development of the physical, moral, and mental health of the nation as a whole. Consequently, the goal of increased participation in organized hockey carried with it a dream of class reconciliation, but a reconciliation that would be established according to the interests of business and the upper classes. The CBC’s Peter Gzowski perpetuated this elitist attitude of hockey culture but added an extra dimension of Canadian nationalism. Gzowski took the position that the influx of American-based teams into the NHL in the expansion of the 1960s was detrimental to the Canadian identity. He suggested that the bullying tactics and physical intimidation that was escalated in the 1970s by teams like the Philadelphia Flyers degraded the sport by eliminating the skill and propriety that the best players brought to it.8 Gzowski’s argument holds that NHL, seeking to find entries into markets with no hockey tradition, sought to sell fights as public spectacle. Don Cherry, on the other hand, staunchly defends English-Canadian toughness as an integral part of a national character. Cherry, the lowbrow commentator for Hockey Night in Canada, celebrates ‘guts’ as a form of macho-nationalism that privileges Canadian players as normal and Europeans as sissies or ‘Chicken Swedes.’

120 Bart Beaty

Cherry’s position is contemptuous of the middlebrow argument, consciously celebrating the working-class hard-man tradition located in Canadian industrial towns like Thunder Bay, rather than urban centres like Toronto. In Cherry’s view, the tough-man ideal in hockey is one of the last refuges of male activity where unrestrained physicality and violence are not only regarded as acceptable but are actively encouraged. The Canadian culture of hockey has tended to side with Cherry. It celebrates the physical or violent player to such a degree that these players come to regard physical intimidation as a performative ritual. In order to have ‘respect,’ one must earn it through physical courage and toughness. The association of Canadian identity, hockey violence, and respect is most forcefully articulated in cinema by Peter Pearson’s 1973 film Paperback Hero. Set in rural Saskatchewan, the film follows the exploits of Rick, the self-styled marshal of the town and the best player on his local team. The film follows the dissolution of that small-town team. In Paperback Hero the team is folding due to the cost of maintaining the arena, leading to resentment among the working-class population of the town. Throughout the film it is clear that Rick and his friends place hockey above all other considerations. When the wife of Pov, one of Rick’s teammates, suggests that he take a welding job elsewhere, he complains that there is no team there. Unable to move away from Dreighton Valley, Rick and his teammates lose themselves in dreams of what might have been and complaints about their historical circumstances. Sitting in a bar adorned with pictures of hockey professionals, Pov tells Rick ‘If it were ten years ago now, we’d both be playing pro in the expansions,’ to which Rick replies, ‘Twenty grand a year, all Cadillacs and California.’ Rick’s invocation of making it big in California recalls not only the classic myth of American success in the West but the expansion of the league into areas (Los Angeles and Oakland) where hockey was not part of the indigenous culture. Thus, Rick and Pov express the quintessential working-class Canadian complaint about the loss of national sovereignty when they suggest that ‘our’ game has been taken from us. The film’s finale – which sees Rick fleeing the scene of an outrageous hockey brawl where he assaults a police officer, only to return to the town later and lose to the police in his own version of a classic American western gunfight – seems to prove both Gzowski and Cherry correct as commentators on Canadian identity. From the Gzowski perspective, Rick is killed because he over-identifies, in his town marshal persona, with American violence. From the Cherry perspective,

Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 121

however, Rick’s demise is the death knell for Canadian masculinity at the hands of an economic system that has endangered traditional smalltown ways of life. Whether one sides with Gzowski or Cherry, the effect is ultimately the same, and this conundrum leads to questions of how sport celebrity damages the working-class roots of the game. Hockey and the Question of Fame For many young males in Canada, hockey is regarded as a career path out of a marginal existence and towards fame, fortune, and respect. The dream of making it in the NHL is often a powerful motivator and is the one most featured in the media construction of hockey. The archetypal myth of hockey success is rooted in small-town origins and marked by the departure from local arenas to the national stage of Hockey Night in Canada and the big cities of New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Montreal. Located in assumptions about the desirability of both geographic and social mobility, the myth of hockey success is deeply rooted in both Canadian culture and the ongoing production of hockey for cultural consumption. Yet, just as the term myth implies a reality against which it can be measured and, for the most part, found wanting, the dream of fame and fortune stemming from hockey is largely unreal. It is in the process of telling and retelling myths that they acquire cultural currency and that they come to be regarded as cultural truths and stock cultural knowledge that is transformed into narrative pleasure. Gruneau and Whitson have pointed to the ways that Wayne Gretzky’s rise from a highly skilled player in Brampton, Ontario, to a Hollywood marriage and international name-recognition is, perhaps, the quintessential distillation of the Canadian dream against which the fantasies of young boys are rehearsed. However, this is essentially a conservative legacy. It can be argued that Gretzky’s rise to fame merely reiterates traditional themes of individualism and upward mobility as a reward for diligence and hard work that are at the core of Western capitalist societies. Furthermore, it could be argued that the success stories that Gretzky signifies serve to deflect attention away from those barriers that hold so many others back from attaining those levels of success. In its ability to act as a sounding board for the popular imagination, and to dramatize collective aspirations, hockey performs a function not unrelated to popular cinema. And while it is possible to suggest other readings of the Gretzky myth – the pure artistry of sport, for example – what is most

122 Bart Beaty

important in this instance is the recognition of the role hockey plays in the Canadian popular imagination as an arena in which stars are established in order that collective dreams might be negotiated.9 No movie about hockey addresses the success myth as clearly as the film Face-Off (McCowan, 1971). The film follows one year in the career of Billy Duke, a hot-shot young star drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs. Made with the cooperation of the National Hockey League, and featuring NHL players as themselves, Face-Off traces the rise of Billy as a hockey superstar, and the concurrent decline of his folk-singer girlfriend, Sherry, into drug dependence and death. On the one hand, FaceOff is an early 1970s gloss on Love Story, a book read by one of Billy’s teammates on the plane, refashioned for a Canadian setting by the inclusion of a sports setting and identifiable hockey stars. On the other hand, the film functions as a very subtle – and often explicit – critique of a middlebrow masculinist culture that makes stars out of young working-class men on terms established by corporate and media interests. As the lovers in this film are both depicted as nationally celebrated in their respective fields, fame is the crucial story element in the film. Billy and Sherry first meet when she acknowledges his game-day performance from the stage of one of her shows, even though she does not follow hockey and does not know who he is. Billy’s fame is established early, as is its link to capital as the film follows the negotiations of his agent and the management of the Toronto Maple Leafs. He is established quickly as a newly wealthy superstar who is treated as an equal by people who are better known than he is. At the same time, however, the specific cultures of hockey playing and anti-war folk-singing ultimately threaten the relationship of Sherry and Billy. Sherry is put off by the brashness of Billy’s rural, workingclass upbringing and his interest in hunting. Upset when she learns that other players in the league are gunning for Billy, Sherry urges him to quit the sport. Billy, however, cannot forego the masculine heritage that is central to his identity: ‘I’m younger and stronger and tougher. That’s why you dig me,’ he tells her. Ultimately the hockey system conspires to separate the lovers. With Sherry unable to commit to the role of a hockey wife, and Billy unable to accept her free-love ways, the couple break up. By the time Billy recognizes the error of his ways it is too late: he is unable to meet with the strung-out Sherry because of a coach’s curfew before the final game of the season. Sitting angrily in his hotel room, real-life Maple Leaf player and Native Canadian George Armstrong puts the reality of the situation bluntly for the young super-

Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 123

star: ‘You’re a slave. By choice. We all are. Haven’t you figured that out yet? Great white hunter say jump, we jump. Great white hunter no like Billy Duke, sell Billy Duke, new master.’ Clued in to this reality, Billy flees the hotel and his teammates, only to learn that Sherry has been killed in a drug-related car accident. The film concludes dramatically with him rejoining his teammates midway through the second period of the team’s final regular-season game. The final shot is a freeze-frame as Billy leaps over the boards onto the ice. In this moment he has realized that his love of the game matters more than any woman, and he chooses to stay true to his particular form of working-class fame and the economic structures that support it. The ability to make stars on a national stage is, of course, dependent on a national communications media infrastructure that has provided hockey with a privileged position in the nation’s cultural landscape. It is difficult to divorce the broadcast of hockey games on the CBC – initially on the radio network, later on television – from the mandate originally given the Crown corporation and reiterated in a number of ways in the years following. Centrally, the mandate of the CBC has been the promotion of Canadian culture. As a result, the CBC has been charged with extending service to all geographic regions of Canada in order to serve in the dissemination of cultural and regional information and the arts, with the ultimate goal of the development and expression of a Canadian cultural identity; since 1931 this expression has included hockey. The broadcast of hockey games on the radio originated in 1923, from (and limited to) Toronto, on the Toronto Star–owned station CFCA, featuring Foster Hewitt as an announcer. Hewitt’s association with Toronto hockey was extended nationally via the Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts, which were heard coast-to-coast every Saturday on a patchwork network of stations assembled by the sponsor, General Motors. By 1934, Hockey Night in Canada reached an audience of over one million listeners, a figure that doubled before the end of that decade. The CBC entered the world of hockey broadcasting during the Second World War, when the National Hockey League was encouraged to maintain its schedule in order to boost morale on the home front. After the war the CBC did not relinquish its rights to hockey broadcasting, and in 1952 Hewitt was transferred to the fledgling television broadcast to announce games for a new audience of television viewers. By 1960, when more than 80 per cent of all Canadian homes contained at least one television, Hockey Night in Canada had established itself as the most popular program in the country, drawing an audience as large

124 Bart Beaty

as 3.5 million English Canadians and 2 million French Canadians. As Kidd and McFarlane noted, more Canadians watched hockey than engaged in any other public event: ‘Hockey Night in Canada really is hockey night in Canada. We schedule our lives around it.’10 The importance of hockey to the overall success of the CBC was forcefully demonstrated in 1984, when the corporation, along with its hockey-broadcast partner, Molson Breweries, sued CTV and CarlingO’Keefe. CTV had signed a contract with the Quebec Nordiques – the sole Canadian franchise not included in the CBC/Molson contract with the NHL – and the fourteen teams based in the United States to broadcast games originating from those sites. CBC’s concern over the diminution of their hockey rights illustrates the shifting nature of the CBC mandate in recent years. Funding for the CBC has for some time operated along a commercial model that impels the corporation to justify its funding through reference to measurement principles such as the Nielsen ratings that form the basis for commercial broadcasting. Consequently, the CBC has attempted to compete with American networks on the terms established by those broadcasters in a battle for prime-time viewership. By competing on the terms laid out by Americans, the CBC has entered into a battle centred around notions of ‘quality television’ that are, for the most part, beyond their own control. This has led to a further displacement of regional concerns. Knowlton Nash’s lament that the CBC is becoming more commercial, more ‘American-like,’ and more concerned with mass-appeal programming is at once a failure to acknowledge the ways in which the CBC has historically been tied to the interests of capital and also a despairing recognition that the CBC is, as its focus on hockey demonstrates, a vehicle for popular culture, essentially not unlike the product of Hollywood.11 Gross Misconduct: The Hockey Film as Art Film Canadian popular culture has tended to be concerned with local activities and organizations. In a country in which the idea of nationalism as an impelling self-project has come to be regarded as historically groundless, the persistence of regional and local cultures has largely frustrated the aspirations of those seeking a thoroughly Canadian sense of nation. The frustration of critics unable to locate specifically Canadian cultural experiences has led many of them to argue, following Harold Innis, that Canada has been unable to develop its own culture because of its historical and economic domination by Europe and the United States.

Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 125

They heed Innis’s warning that the dominance of American commercial culture in Canada creates conditions that seem fatal to the country’s cultural interests. This opinion, which equates American commercialism and Canadian popular culture with the inability of Canada to develop a distinct national culture of its own, most often finds fault with American television and the role that it has played in the shaping of Canadian cultural institutions such as the CBC. Thus, Knowlton Nash writes of the ‘spellbinding boxes of mass culture’ that have entranced Canadians and suggests that without the CBC Canada would be ‘a soul-starved nation, hiccupping the cultural values and history of our southern neighbour.’12 Insofar as broadcast media are cast as the villains in this cultural drama, popular culture can only be victimized. Cultural practices enjoyed by a wide number of people in Canada generally gain truly national connotations only after they have been given national media exposure and have been articulated as ‘national’ by the popular media. Certainly this has historically been the case for hockey, which came to national prominence fundamentally through Hockey Night in Canada. Yet, as Gruneau and Whitson point out, hockey sits in an uneasy relationship with the nationalism that perceives ‘Canadianism’ to be a code word for the promotion of highbrow sensibilities. Paternalistic references to duty and morality do not mesh well with a sport whose participants seem prone to sporadic outbursts of quasi-sanctioned physical violence. The constant reminders that professional hockey is, at this point, primarily an entertainment commodity overseen by breweries and banks serve to recall the sense in which hockey is seen to have moved away from its roots in localized experience, the source of its distinctly Canadian status. For many nationalist commentators, the violence and commercialization that characterize contemporary hockey function as a dramatic symbol of Canada’s absorption into American finance and degraded popular culture. The CBC telefilm Gross Misconduct (Egoyan, 1993) plays with the discourses surrounding both the hockey tough and hockey as a Canadian cultural form. This film is about Brian Spencer, a player who entered into the NHL during the period of expansion and transformation that so worried Peter Gzowski and who embodied those traits – physical intimidation and a lack of finesse – that Gzowski equates with a degraded American style of hockey. In a number of respects Spencer matches the archetype of the hockey myth in a precise fashion. The first article to focus on Spencer was Martin O’Malley’s 1971 Globe and Mail Magazine feature story ‘A Capacity for Anger.’ In that article O’Malley

126 Bart Beaty

points out that Spencer is ‘from the bush and he is not yet accustomed to the casual surliness of the city.’ O’Malley constantly reiterates the sense of western alienation that Spencer was said to have carried with him from the British Columbia interior to Toronto, setting in motion the dynamics of the metropole/hinterland opposition again, in an effort to explain Spencer’s violent form of play. Spencer, though he ‘believes some day he will be a great hockey player,’ never amounted to much in the NHL.13 In many respects he is representative of the type of role player who performed important tasks in the NHL but was easily replaced. He played in the NHL for ten seasons, slightly above the average, and scored eighty goals, well below the average. Like other role players, he was traded and demoted often, beginning his career with a mediocre Toronto Maple Leafs team and slowly moving his way down, ending his career when he was fired by the last-place Pittsburgh Penguins. Spencer’s career was emblematic of what sports experts have termed ‘career skidding,’ the process whereby a player not only ends his career on a note of downward mobility but allows that inertia to carry over into his life after hockey, because he was not financially or mentally prepared to re-enter the work force after a brief career in the limelight.14 In Spencer’s case this skidding manifested itself in his retirement in Florida, where he lived in his van with a prostitute until he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of murder. At his trial in Florida none of the thirty-six potential jurors were familiar with Spencer from his days as a professional athlete. The most notable feature about Brian Spencer was the violence that surrounded his life both on and off the ice. The Globe and Mail describes Spencer as a ‘fanatic’ about physical fitness and his style of play as ‘a blur of hot blood and sudden, rapid punches.’ The physical threat that Spencer embodied on the ice can best be described in terms of masculine violence. Sociologists and sports historians have maintained that masculine identity and honour have been deeply bound in the stakes of sporting spectacles throughout the history of Western societies. Within this deeply sedimented tradition, losing has traditionally carried with it the possible connotation of effeminacy. In a cultural area such as hockey, which invites such strong levels of spectator identification as an affirmation of masculine identity and rivalry, Spencer quickly became something of a fan favourite because he seldom lost fights and, on those occasions on which he did, he was able to maintain the integrity of masculine identity by refusing to back down. As Spencer told the Globe: ‘The way I think is that I can’t be beat. You use discretion, of course, but

Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 127

I can take all kinds of punches and I know I’m not going to get hurt. If he hits you with a stick, fine; you bleed a little, you get sewn up. This is what hockey is geared for now.’15 Whannel has argued that the most traditional media construction of star athletes reiterates a very narrow set of traits: youth, toughness, aggression, and the ability to withstand pressure.16 Certainly these are the traits ascribed to Spencer, traits at odds with the middlebrow conception of sporting masculinity that was derived from English conceptions of fair play and gentlemanly conduct. In the ideal highbrow or cultivated position, sport would serve to introduce discipline, hygiene, and self-improvement. Spencer, on the other hand, harkened back to a different tradition: that of the workingclass hardman, which recalled both vulgarity and a lack of cultivation. Jim Gregory, the general manager of the Maple Leafs when Spencer played for the team, suggested that ‘Spencer will be all right if he doesn’t try to be too fancy.’17 This suggests a connection to the workingclass culture of the British Columbia interior antithetical to highbrow conceptions of on-ice artistry and marks the player as a lowbrow. Spencer’s popularity, therefore, became problematic. Because the stakes of spectator identification in hockey have not been restricted to masculinity alone, but sit alongside the dramatization of class, racial, ethnic, regional, and national identities and rivalries, the popularity of players such as Spencer, clearly demarcated as of and from the working classes and historically marginalized regional groups, threatens to disrupt claims made on behalf of a classless and nationalized Canadian identity. That a filmic biography of a player like Spencer should be undertaken by a filmmaker like Atom Egoyan is, then, a curiosity. In his brief career as a filmmaker, Egoyan has leapt to a vaunted status within the highbrow Canadian cultural realm. Geoff Pevere noted in Film Comment that Egoyan is ‘so key to our film culture that it’s impossible to speak of it without taking him into account, it’s amazing to believe that merely a decade ago Egoyan didn’t (culturally speaking) even exist.’18 Egoyan, who received his start when the CBC ran one of his student films and who later directed programs for the network, is best known as the Genie Award–winning director who returned the English-Canadian film industry to international prominence. Egoyan’s successes speak to an entirely different audience and set of cultural expectations than did Brian Spencer’s. Egoyan produced work whose primary audience lies in the international film festival communities and domestic art houses, and his preoccupations are more classically those of the highbrow nationalists with the cultural knowledge that allows them to

128 Bart Beaty

appreciate aesthetic formalism and avant-garde filmmaking techniques. Egoyan’s audiences are expected to counterpose his work against the crassly commercial products originating in Hollywood, products that Egoyan has nonetheless engaged with and rejected. Canadian film scholar Peter Harcourt suggests that the central preoccupation of Egoyan’s film work is the ‘classic Canadian dilemma formulated by Northrop Frye a good many years ago’: Where is here? Identifying the three themes in Egoyan’s work that ‘reflect and analyse the cultural uncertainties of the Canadian situation’ as family, identity, and the necessity of exile, Harcourt goes on to identify three stylistic strategies: acting, dialogue, and narrative structure.19 Formally, Egoyan’s work is structured in triptyches, an abstraction that Harcourt argues contributes to suspense as the viewer is forced to wait in order to figure out precisely how the story elements will come together to form a whole. Pevere argues that Egoyan’s films are concerned with the ‘spectacle of people making spectacles,’ most often through mediated technologies such as video, which Harcourt argues is ‘everywhere’ in the films.20 Egoyan’s films are marked most precisely by emotion gone awry, not an absence of emotion, but a feeling of unnaturalness that attends it. Egoyan’s cinematic work is, in many ways, antithetical to the popular. While the films do, as Harcourt maintains, speak to the formation of identity in localized communities, they are at the same time abstracted from any conception of everyday lived experience and reside mainly at the level of the philosophical and introspective. It is not surprising then that the Toronto Star’s television critic, Greg Quill, summarized his review of Gross Misconduct with the phrase ‘So much for abstraction. There was a great story here.’21 The great story, in Quill’s view, was the biography of Spencer published by Martin O’Malley in 1988 that lent the film its title and basic material. The relationship between the book and the film is tenuous at best. The book is truecrime, a genre known primarily for its appeals to lurid sensibilities, quick publications, and lowbrow appeal. O’Malley’s book broke Spencer’s life into sections that accompanied and foregrounded his two-week trial for first-degree murder, placing all of its emphasis on the courtroom drama and the ways in which that drama illuminated aspects of the player’s life. Egoyan’s film, on the other hand, is a highbrow telefilm. The film’s triptych interlaces autobiography, story, and subplot. The film is narrated by Spencer as a young boy getting ready for a hockey game and philosophizing about the misdirections his life had taken and would later take. There is a straightforward, if highly

Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 129

condensed, presentation of Spencer’s life from boyhood to the NHL through retirement, prosecution, and, ultimately, a violent death during a robbery. Finally, the film incorporates the tale of Spencer’s father, Roy, who upon learning that the local CBC station had pre-empted his son’s Hockey Night in Canada interview in order to broadcast a game featuring teams from the West Coast, went to the station and threatened the staff at gunpoint. He was subsequently killed in a shootout with the RCMP. Egoyan’s film performs two radical reinterpretations of O’Malley’s book. In the first instance the film significantly downplays the murder trial, devoting little time to it, and that in the middle of the film where its dramatic impact is undercut. Second, the film heightens the tragic importance of the death of Spencer’s father. O’Malley deals with Roy’s death in less than a page, but Egoyan intersperses the events of the day of his death throughout the film. The film foregrounds the installments through the use of repetitive intertitles in order to unite the shooting deaths of father and son as the dramatic culmination of the events of the film. As such, the film suggests that the death of Roy Spencer was the crucial event in determining the direction that the son’s life would ultimately take. Early in the film, Roy insists that the choice facing his sons is hockey or the grave: ‘This is it. Life at the Fort. You can live here and be buried here, or you can play hockey.’ Egoyan reformulates the narrative to entitle Brian Spencer to both. The project of the film is, most specifically, the systematic undercutting of the position occupied by Brian Spencer. Egoyan’s film is a morality tale that features repressed Canadians and libidinous Americans, presenting both hockey and the United States in vulgar terms. The America of the film is filled with orgies; the hockey rink a site of tantrums and near-psychotic rages. The film succeeds in arguing its point that hockey can be a world of insanely punitive masculinity and, in the scenes that feature Spencer’s specially built van, is suggestive of a model of masculinity that is clearly driven by fetishistic and paranoid impulses. Insofar as it works to suggest the obverse of traditional hockey success myths, the film is on relatively sure footing; yet it more importantly fails to take hockey seriously as a site of cultural negotiation. Quill cites a number of historical inaccuracies in the film relating to the representation of hockey that clearly mark it as ‘not a hockey movie.’ Indeed, the film is certainly anything but a hockey movie. It is, first and foremost, a critique of hockey culture and the national culture that had allowed players such as Brian Spencer to rise to the level of fan favourites. Egoyan suggested in Maclean’s that he incorporated archival material of

130 Bart Beaty

Spencer playing hockey with recreated scenes featuring the actor Daniel Kash in the same positions in order to ‘make viewers aware that they are engaged in the very medium that somehow set in motion the whole story they are watching.’22 The entire narrative trajectory of the film, culminating as it does in part with the shootout resulting from a Hockey Night in Canada broadcast altered to reflect regional instead of national concerns, becomes an allegory about popular culture. The argument seemingly runs along lines that suggest that hockey has been stripped from its regionalist roots by the advent of professionalization and corporatization. Therefore, hockey became a site of violent masculinity in the expansion of the 1970s. The CBC highlights hockey violence in the name of Canadian nationalism. The CBC’s emphasis has helped to create a culture in which individuals react violently when they do not get what they want in terms of programming, not unlike life in the United States, where people like Brian Spencer are shot for spare change. Gross Misconduct is a CBC film about hockey that seeks to indict fans of CBC’s hockey programming. At the same time, it works to privilege a differing series of discourses that surround the director’s own work. By conflating the worst elements of a violent masculine culture with an American influence on Canadian television and increasingly commercially driven concerns, the film works to suggest that the way out of the perceived Canadian cultural dilemma of social and economic imperialism is a return to the values embodied by avant-garde art and highbrow cultures. The formal and philosophical components of the film work simultaneously to problematize the aesthetic conventions and the content of Canadian television, suggesting that video is not so much a contested site – as it is represented in Egoyan’s Family Viewing, for instance – but a corrupting site wherein both individuals and nations are lost, pathologized, and ultimately destroyed. Ultimately what Gross Misconduct becomes about is the relationship between Americanized popular culture, as it is represented in the forms of television and hockey, and an elite Canadian culture based in experimental film. Spencer is regarded as problematic on both levels: he is a thug in the Canadian sports world and a low-level grifter in the United States. Beyond the ostensible responsibility of hockey and Canadian television, no attention is paid to the systemic structures that contributed to his fate. The CBC, by mediating the positions that the film allows Spencer to occupy, is regarded as culpable in the deaths of both of the Spencer men. Gross Misconduct is a rupture of the ideology of hockey, to be sure, but the question remains: Is it a useful rupturing of the discourses?

Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 131

Conclusion Gruneau and Whitson have suggested that Canadian intellectuals have a ‘lingering resentment’ for the game of hockey: What kind of country, someone inevitably writes at playoff time, postpones the national news for a hockey game?23 Egoyan’s ‘autopsy’ on hockey as Canadian culture certainly fits this mould, suggesting as it does that the meanings and enjoyments found in hockey by a variety of audiences are merely the celebration of masculine violence and American commercialism. In so far as the film addresses itself to the idea of Canadian celebrity, it falls short. Little effort is made in the film to suggest the fantasies that would have been mobilized by various communities around a player like Brian Spencer or his teammate Dave Keon. A case can certainly be made that there are connections to hockey stars that cannot be explained simply in terms of commercialism or marketing. The national hysteria that met the performance of the Canadian men’s Olympic hockey team at the 2002 games in Salt Lake City testifies to the extent to which affinitive communities in Canada structure themselves around players who are taken to symbolize competing value systems and agendas in the ideological landscape. What Gross Misconduct fails to account for are the various and complex ways in which sports stars signify meanings within cultures that are constantly attempting to reposition themselves in relation to other social groups organized around regional, ethnic, and class divisions. It is particularly telling that the reviews of Gross Misconduct found their comparison in the American film Raging Bull rather than in the myriad Canadian films that have taken hockey as their subject. Raging Bull is the film of a respected director concerned with the association between stardom and masculine violence. Canada’s hockey films, on the other hand, are generally overlooked and neglected by audiences, critics, and scholars alike. By structuring Gross Misconduct as a highbrow condemnation of popular aspirations and meaning making, Egoyan sadly obviates the possibility of a critical look at highbrow notions of nationalism and the anxious quest for a definitive representative of Canada to the populace. Instead, it reiterates that ideology to become more about the rising star of Egoyan himself than the fallen star of Spinner Spencer. This distinction sets Gross Misconduct apart from the majority of Canadian films about hockey, which tend to downplay aesthetic considerations in favour of the presentation of more popular – and populist – discourses about hockey and its relationship to traditional working-class masculinities. What unites these films, and sets

132 Bart Beaty

them apart from American films such as Slapshot and Mystery, Alaska that explore similar issues, is their relentless focus on myths of Canadian nationalism. As these films so aptly demonstrate, hockey’s articulation on the screen throws into question many accepted middlebrow notions about the structure of Canadian popular culture.

NOTES 1 R. Gruneau and D. Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1993), 277. 2 G. Whannel, Fields in Vision: Television Sport and Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. 3 Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 69. 4 J. Kaye, ‘Perfectly Normal, Eh? Gender Transformation and National Identity in Canada,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 74–8. 5 Ibid., 64. 6 Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 103. 7 Ibid., 220. 8 Ibid., 188. 9 Ibid., 133–5. 10 B. Kidd and J. MacFarlane, The Death of Hockey (Toronto: New Press, 1972), 8. 11 K. Nash, The Microphone Wars: A History of Triumph and Betrayal at the CBC (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994), 11. 12 Ibid., 9. 13 M. O’Malley, ‘A Capacity for Anger,’ Globe and Mail Magazine, 16 October 1971, 7. 14 M. Smith and F. Diamond, ‘Career Mobility in Professional Hockey,’ in Canadian Sport: Sociological Perspectives, ed. R. Gruneau and J. Albinson (Don Mills, ON: Addison-Wesley, 1976), 285. 15 O’Malley, ‘Capacity for Anger,’ 3. 16 Whannel, Fields in Vision. 17 O’Malley, ‘Capacity for Anger,’ 71. 18 G. Pevere, ‘Letter from Canada,’ Film Comment, March 1992, 61. 19 P. Harcourt, ‘Imaginary Images: An Examination of Atom Egoyan’s Films,’ Film Quarterly, Spring 1995, 4. 20 Pevere, ‘Letter from Canada,’ Film Comment, March 1992, 62; Harcourt, ‘Imaginary Images,’ 3.

Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 133 21 Greg Quill, ‘Atom Egoyan Misses Wide Open Net in Golden Opportunity to Score Big,’ Toronto Star, 28 February 1993, C2. 22 V. Dwyer, ‘Hockey’s Hell-Raiser,’ Maclean’s, 1 March 1993, 50. 23 Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 215.

6 Other-ing the Worker in Canadian ‘Gay Cinema’: Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden malek khouri

Upon its release in 1997, Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden quickly claimed the attention of film critics as well as gay communities in North America. Subsequently the film went on to gain recognition in several film festivals. Among the awards won by the film was Canada’s prestigious Claude Jutra Genie.1 Enthusiastic reviews and commentaries in mainstream media and in trade and academic cinema journals alike eventually helped the film attain acknowledgment as a welcome addition to the canon of Canadian ‘art cinema.’ Along with the positive reaction from the general public, the Garden’s ‘gay theme’ – which tackles a young gay man’s struggle against the demons of repressed childhood – won it fervent praise from Canada’s largest gay and lesbian lobby organization (GLAAD), which nominated the film for its top Media Award. For its part, the international web publication Queer View encapsulated its acclaim for the film in an article that was titled ‘Ridiculed, Beaten, and Forced to Have Heterosexual Sex, a Heavy Boy Returns Home to His Family as a Happy and Body Conscious Gay Man.’2 As such The Hanging Garden transcended the stature of an ‘art film’ to gain further attention as a ‘coming out’ film. The aesthetic and artistic aspects of The Hanging Garden, exemplified in its visual beauty and poetic resonance, are significant to an appreciation of the film. This chapter, however, concentrates on the hegemonic implications of the film as they function as part of an ideological cultural practice. A crucial consideration in this regard is that this film – and for that matter most other ‘art’ films – functions on more levels than artistic self-expressive cinematic practice. While some readings might opt to base analysis of the film on the traditional assumption of ‘art’ as an endeavour free of politics and ideology, this chapter gives

Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden 135

prominence to exploring how a seemingly sympathetic approximation of gay life and culture inadvertently subscribes to, and eventually operates as an extension and a reaffirmation of, hegemonic ideological values. The chapter maps out historical elements that have helped reshape the notion of gay liberation in Canadian society since the mid1980s. It also examines how The Hanging Garden engages class politics by way of inferiorizing its working-class characters, and how it utilizes allegory to reaffirm anti-working-class stereotypes and ‘common-sense’ ideas and values about the lives and cultures of industrial workingclass people. In a society where subtle and/or explicit manifestations of homophobia are part of hegemonic ideology and where gays in many respects remain socially and politically oppressed and marginalized, it is rather perilous to indulge in a critique that, with its emphasis on contentions within the politics of gay liberation, might appear to be divisive. But considering the importance of Fitzgerald’s film as a powerful example of a specific model within Canadian ‘gay cinema’ since the 1990s, and given how this model informs and is informed by hegemonic portrayals of the working class (particularly ‘blue-collar’ workers), as well as gay and bisexual Canadians, it is rather imperative that we discuss the significance of this film as a hegemonic cultural practice. In any case, pointing out contentious shades within gay politics simply reflects the heterogeneous reality of the gay community, and hence its susceptibility to the social struggles and conflicts that afflict other groups in society. The Story The film allegorically tells a story of a waiter who returns home to his family in a small working-class town in Nova Scotia. He is back to attend his sister’s wedding to his former school buddy. Eventually the film suggests a tale about redemption from the tyranny of being part of a traditional working-class community. While the plot tends to downplay the relevance of class to the development of the main characters, the film rehashes several stereotypical ‘common-sense’ portrayals of people who work in manual labour. It also reiterates hegemonic depictions of industrial working-class culture as backward, repressive, anti-progress, sexist, and homophobic. On the surface, The Hanging Garden is one of those fine tales of familial existence, self-explanation, and coping with repression of a

136 Malek Khouri

certain kind of sexuality in a community that will have none of it. Its central character, William, a man who returns home after years away, seems out of place in the crude and rugged environment of Canada’s East Coast. William must, in a certain kind of mindset, face what he was and try to bury his past for good. His struggle, one of growing to realize what has happened and how he has been transformed, leads him on a bizarre journey of acceptance and growth. The young man is introduced as a formerly obese teenager suffering the twin tortures of being gay and fat. But when the twenty-seven-year-old ‘Sweet’ William returns home, he is a slim, slickly dressed, and attractive man with a brand new sports car. Although he is a happily settled waiter and a wannabe actor living and working in the big city, William still needs to confront the anxieties that beset him as a teenager. As the film unfolds, we discover that at age seventeen William had an interrupted sexual experience with a friend named Fletcher. Their sexual experimentation was cut short by William’s horrified grandmother, a religious fanatic. Fletcher loses his nerve and ends the tentative relationship, while William’s mother takes her son to a local prostitute to verse him in the ways of straight sex. Despairing over Fletcher’s abandonment, the boy attempts to hang himself in the yard but is discovered and saved by Whisky Mac, his alcoholic and abusive father. William ultimately leaves his family and town, gets a job, and loses over a hundred pounds. We learn that William’s sister is marrying Fletcher, a good-looking young man who still harbours an attraction to William. Though ostensibly a mature adult, William behaves at Rosemary’s wedding as if he is trying to experience the childhood he missed. He is late for the ceremony, dancing with his grandmother in her attic room while he is supposed to be with the rest of the wedding party, and hides under a table during the reception so he can throw flower petals onto the grass for guests to slip on. The pleasures of youth are abruptly halted when he must take care of his drunken father and then help organize a search for his missing mother. Compounding the difficulties are visions of himself as a young boy, using food to assuage hurt feelings, and the imaginary memory of his own hanging ‘corpse.’ William’s sister, the new bride, laughingly encourages her husband to have sex with William. When Fletcher finally gets William alone and starts kissing him, the latter suffers an asthma attack and is unable to rekindle his desire for Fletcher and achieve some sense of liberation from past repression by finally having sex with his long-time object of

Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden 137

desire. At the same time, he discovers that a ten-year-old girl who has been living with his parents is actually his child with the prostitute who deflowered him. Having given up on reliving the past in a more pleasant way, he opts for putting it to rest so he can start anew. The film closes with William taking the young girl to the big city to live with him and his partner, presumably as part of a new happy gay family. The story is told through a non-linear narrative and a loaded exchange of allegorical metaphors. The film is punctuated by picturesque beauty and imaginative interweaves of metaphoric references and an impressionistic depictions of characters. The garden motif presents an allegorical enhancement – it ushers the beginning/middle/end of the film by way of conveying the protagonist’s impressionistic outlook on his own life story. Sweet William grows up learning about the garden’s different flowers, ‘kills’ himself metaphorically in its midst, and in the end buries the family’s dog in it. Names of flowers and plants are employed figuratively to identify each family member as well as various other characters. For example, along with Sweet William we are introduced to his father, Whiskey Mac, the alcoholic patriarch, and Iris, the mother, who seems like a rock of stability. On one level, allocating names of particular flowers to characters in the film, particularly its main protagonist and his antagonists, allows for ambivalent interpretation of their roles. This ambivalence, however, does not hinder the typifying which describes the film’s portrayal of the role played by each character. Instead, it helps to assign a fairy tale–like feel to the story of a dysfunctional family. Allegory and allegorical references within specific moments of history cannot be assessed in isolation from their impact on hegemonic ideology. In The Hanging Garden, values and lessons drawn from pictorial and metaphoric rendering inform and are informed by historically and socially specific hegemonies as much as they reflect aspects of shared human values. Although the allegorical identities of the main characters are co-opted into a symbolic paradigm that emphasizes William’s ‘universal’ and ‘classless’ struggle for redemption (enhanced by the metaphoric references to the garden and its flowers), the specificity of the working-class background of his and other characters allows for a pivotal spin on the theme of the film and how it implies particular ideological dispositions. By-and-large the film is about William the waiter returning home to what we presume to be a working-class family (the audience assumes the father is involved in some sort of manual labour). The film enhances

138 Malek Khouri

its specification of the social background of the main characters by using carefully stylized exterior and interior sets and mise-en-scène of family home and the town surroundings, as well as through typifying the depiction of their behaviour and mannerisms. To begin, the family lives in a clearly marked economically depressed town on the East Coast. The limited development of the character of the father, the mother, the sister, and Fletcher augments the film’s clichéd portrayal of industrial working-class life in this region. This portrayal includes allusions to tacky clothes, rugged and dirty old trucks, and crude behaviour (getting drunk and becoming abusive). The film also echoes a common theme in Canadian feature films, which tends to deem social struggles in Atlantic Canada as reflections of the backwardness, anti-progress nostalgic fixations, traditionalism, and religious fanaticism of the region’s people.3 To provide a sense of the proactive hegemonic significance of these references, I will first place the film within the historical moment of its production in the mid-1990s. The Film as Extension to Ideological Emergences within Gay Subculture The Hanging Garden was released at a time when right-wing rhetoric was rejuvenating its resonance within Canadian political and cultural discourse. Less than five years after the earth-shattering collapse of the Soviet Union and other eastern European ‘socialist’ regimes, proclamations about the ‘death of Marxism’ and ‘the end of class struggle’ and rhetorical attacks against labour unions and their role in society were becoming defining features of the political and cultural climate. Liberal capitalism was pronounced triumphant. This triumph was most clearly encapsulated in American academic Fukuyama’s theoretical pronouncement of the ‘end of history.’4 Technology, both industrial and informational, was celebrated as a vehicle through which capitalism had finally rendered class division and class struggle outdated and irrelevant to new world politics. Political establishments in advanced capitalist societies were recovering from fears of, and preoccupation with, the Communist menace. Having finally secured a break from contending with any noteworthy opposition from labour or left-wing groups, Western governments had unprecedented carte blanche to pursue their neoliberal political and economic agenda. As the Reform Party (later the Canadian Alliance and the Conservative Party of Canada) emerged onto the Canadian political scene, the

Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden 139

Liberal Party was jockeying to claim its own share of right-wing grassroots support. Meanwhile, the left-of-center New Democratic Party was struggling with internal divisions regarding how to respond to the changing political agenda after its government in Ontario was defeated by the neo-liberal proponents of the ‘Common Sense Revolution.’ The new political agenda reaffirmed the myth of Canada as a democratic, liberal, and classless – that is ‘middle-class’ – society and encouraged Canadians to conceive of their social and political roles within this context. This reaffirmation also informed the ideological parameters within which the gay community in Canada saw itself. By the mid-to-late 1980s, the growth of gay-based and gay-oriented businesses and commercial outlets in major Canadian urban centres steadily influenced aspects of Canadian gay subculture. In many ways this growth permitted the business section of the gay community to assert its economic dominance and conceive of its own interests, influences, ambitions, and values as synonymous with those of the entire gay community (i.e., what is good for gay business is good for all the gay community). These developments contributed to reshaping the gay subculture’s conception and definition of itself – at least in terms of its self-image – as part of the great Canadian middle class. As the increasingly influential gay business class jockeyed for acceptability and recognition among Canada’s economic and cultural elite, a new political discourse was also on the ascendance. The emergence of gay-activist politics in Canada in the mid-1970s, exemplified in the discourse of the journal Body Politic, had been largely associated with left-leaning politics that advocated grassroots radical alternatives not only to patriarchal culture but also to puritanical social and sexual relations and to middle- and upper-class values and interests. In comparison, by the 1990s the emphasis of gay-activist culture appeared to shift in the direction of adopting policies and causes that were characterized by unmistakable idealization of ‘middle-class’ lifestyles and values. Manifestations of such shifts were most clear in the demands by major Canadian gay and lesbian lobby groups, which focused largely on issues such as gay marriage and acceptance within religious groups and hierarchies. Also, gay ‘activist’ circles gave more weight to gaining the support and blessing of the corporate and political elite. Annual gay pride parades across the country were increasingly transformed into mass billboards for corporate advertising and for the celebration of consumerism and consumerist society and culture. In politics, gay caucuses and groups within the Liberal and Pro-

140 Malek Khouri

gressive Conservative Parties were created and fashionably portrayed as expressions of the ‘maturation’ and deradicalization of the gay community. Ideologically, the notion of ‘gay pride’ itself was rendered identical with the idea of securing a personal lot and acceptance within the mainstream, economically successful, family-oriented, and savvylooking middle class. By the mid- to late 1990s, gay representation in mass media was also shifting. After historically painting gays in negative stereotypical images, media outlets, including TV and films, were finally becoming more sensitive to how they depicted gay characters and lifestyles. But while less stereotypical representations were inaugurated in mainstream media, another form of stereotyping was picking up what previous explicitly negative images has left behind. After briefly toying with the idea of a sitcom featuring a gay working-class character played by John Goodman in Normal, Ohio, television programmers finally chose a more ‘acceptable’ formula for the presentation of gays. Eventually, programs such as Will and Grace, which idealized the gay male as professional, ‘artsy,’ sophisticated, young, slim, good-looking, and an avid capitalist consumer, gained celebrity status as quintessential ‘gay-positive’ shows.5 In short, gay identity was being revamped to fit typical and acceptable middle-class images and discourse. The Hanging Garden functioned in a way that informed and was informed by this same discourse. In addressing the theme of coming out, the film basically affirms the universality of ‘middle-class’ culture – its values, goals, and ambitions – and its transcendence of social categorization and class divisions. At the same time, the film poses ‘middle-class gay culture’ against what it conceives as ‘traditionalist and anti-progress working-class culture.’ By presenting a story about a young man’s struggle to be part of a ‘modern’ gay community, The Hanging Garden revamps the image of the ‘new’ gay man to assume the status of a replica of an ‘ideal’ ‘Canadian middle-class’ male. Out of the Cave and into the Light: Allegory and Imaging of East Coast Workers Moodily photographed by Daniel Jobin, The Hanging Garden gives its Nova Scotia setting, including the family’s home and particularly its garden, a midsummer-night’s-dream visual glow. This formal aesthetic, however, is somewhat inconsistent with how documentary Canadian cinema traditionally represented Atlantic Canada. Throughout a long

Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden 141

documentary filmmaking tradition, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) produced powerful images of the struggles of working-class life on Canada’s East Coast. Since the 1940s, NFB films continually explored the homes and the workplaces of miners, lumberjacks, fishermen, and farmers of the Atlantic provinces in numerous NFB documentaries. Films such as Toilers of the Grand Banks (1940), Heroes of the Atlantic (1941), People of Blue Rocks (1941), Inside Fighting Canada (1942), Coal Face, Canada (1942), Coal Miners (1943), and Labour Front (1943) became landmarks of early NFB production.6 The same tradition continued through the 1960s and 1970s with the two series Fogo Island and Challenge for Change, and survived even the largely conservative period following the mid-1980s (for example, the socially conscious An Untidy Package was produced in the same year as The Hanging Garden). Later the documentary Westray (2001), which dealt with the 1992 disaster at the Westray coal mine in Nova Scotia, won the Genie as best Canadian documentary. As they maintained a primarily class-conscious characterization of their subject matter, these films also largely subscribed to what was referred to as ‘social realist’ tradition. In fiction films, the subject of working-class life on the East Coast was also the focus of numerous classics in Canadian film history, beginning with Goin’ Down the Road (1970) and including John and the Missus (1987) and Margaret’s Museum (1995). Yet while these films differed in their thematic and stylistic approaches to the issue of class, they nevertheless mostly favored mise-en-scene that sought to capture detailed textures of working-class life in Atlantic Canada. The Hanging Garden departs from both these documentary and ‘realist’ traditions and their privileging the social and collective presence of the working-class subject. In spite of its working-class setting and cultural references that I have alluded to earlier, the film’s emphasis on allegory reframes these references within what some critics favourably described as ‘hyper-realist’ and, more cautiously, surrealist visual style. But given that it deals with a highly complex issue such as gay repression, and for that matter the specificity of gay life in a working-class milieu, The Hanging Garden presents a much too abstract rendering of a concrete dilemma. As it favours the metaphysical over the material, the film transforms Sweet William’s story into a journey of discovery of the gay ‘ideal.’ This journey is, however, complicated by the conflict between William and his working-class environment, an environment that ‘naturally’ hinders his journey’s goal of becoming a socially acceptable ‘middle-class’ sub-

142 Malek Khouri

ject. On the other hand, the plot positions his friend Fletcher’s bisexual desire as an example of working-class crudeness and resistance to conform to ‘higher’ and ‘more sophisticated’ middle-class values and morality. (One gets the impression that Fletcher would be willing to have sex with anybody, while the ‘married’ and out-of-the-closet middleclass William does not actually have sex except with his partner, a semblance of a ‘good’ traditional straight boy who is intent on maintaining his virtue.) The message of the film in a way parallels Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave. In a crucial section of The Republic where Plato discusses the practicality of his ideal state and the qualities and attributes required of the philosopher king, Socrates asks his listeners to imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance as wide as the cave itself and open to the daylight. In the cave are men who have been prisoners all their lives. Their feet and necks have been chained so that they cannot turn their heads: they can only look straight ahead. At some distance behind them burns a fire – their only source of light, as a screen blocks the light coming through the entrance to the cave. Thus, for the prisoners in the cave, every object, even their own bodies, appears only as a shadow from the fire. For these prisoners the shadows become the whole truth until some of them are able to escape from the cave and see the sun, which renders all objects visible. Socrates highlights the prisoners’ ascent from the realm of the illusionary to that of absolute knowledge and the necessity of their eventual descent back among the cave dwellers to help dispel the shadows and illusions of their existence. The rest of the allegory involves the relationship between the few who have escaped into truth and reality and the rest of the prisoners in the cave. The allegory is meant to provide a vivid visual image of the human condition: its ignorance and the means of its enlightenment. In The Hanging Garden, the allegory of recognizing truth and ‘real’ identity becomes part of ‘liberating’ one’s self from the chains and shackles of working-class identity. As such, the film assumes a hegemonic outlook on the life, role, and destiny of the industrial working-class, who are represented mainly by William’s father and by Fletcher. The fates of both resemble those of an historically superfluous class, an ideologically regressive, anti-progressive, self-repressive, sexist dying breed. William’s struggle to affirm his sexual identity is essentially tantamount to seeking personal success. In turn, success itself is presented as redemption that can be attained only by asserting one’s free will and by participating in the culture of capitalist consumerism (William’s sports

Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden 143

car and his celebrated slim ‘urbanized’ look are perfect examples). Unable to comprehend or distance themselves from the ‘inferiority’ of their own class reality, William’s family and his former best friend (as extensions to all those who do not fit into the new ideals of middle-class life) are bound to self-destruct and to wither in the dark cave of history with the rest of the dwellers who failed to see beyond their shadows and illusions. But what we have in the film by way of a ‘Teacher’ amounts to nothing more than a deserter who in the end, and in the best tradition of capitalist ‘free will’ and ‘enterprising’ spirit, finds his own personal Truth and solace (for example, illusion) in finally becoming part of the middle class. The film avoids dealing the background of any of its characters. This includes both William’s Toronto home as well as his boyhood in Nova Scotia. Instead, it relies on William’s impressionistic observation and recollection of his family home’s interior and exterior spaces. The dark kitchen, the messy living room, the grandmother’s room filled with religious iconography, the garden and the flowers, all become signifying substitutes for social materiality in the film’s depiction of its characters’ background. The overall effect of this visual design complements the film’s own emphasis on the theme of personal redemption. William’s redemption is measured through his success in erasing the collective memory that connects him with his family and community. He moves from his confused and still not fully empowered former self by liberating himself from the embrace of a dysfunctional past. Initially, he is represented as resistant to, but nevertheless a victim of, the past. His final departure from the confines of that past is accomplished only by literally burying repressive memories of childhood. This allows William’s departure from his working-class surroundings and paves the way for his ‘peaceful’ reconciliation with the decision to leave his childhood town and his family and move to the big city. As such, the film presents a powerful hegemonic fable about salvation from the repression associated with the protagonist’s working-class Maritime background and memories. But as an allegorical tale about the personal triumph of a gay man struggling to rid himself of childhood demons and to affirm his own sexual identity, the film also poses this struggle as synonymous with religious redemption and resurrection. The film’s rendition of aspects of repressive Catholicism remains largely engrossed within the Judeo-Christian theme of redemption as evolution that is necessarily mediated by death. As William buries the obese ghost and nightmare of his childhood, his new-found identity –

144 Malek Khouri

presumably in the promised land of Toronto’s ‘gay ghetto’ on and around the city’s Church Street – overpowers death and resurrects itself as a reconciled and revamped version of the New Gay Man. Whiskey Mac wishes to hold on to the boy he knew ten years ago. It is revealed that he, too, has sensed the corpse when William tells him he has buried it. Devastated, the father tries to exhume it, but the son will not permit him to do so. Of course no physical remains would appear, as none exist, but William does not want his father going through the motions of digging up what should be left in place. After all, redemption is a matter of rectitude and virtue, an affirmation of death as the road to resurrection, one that emulates a fable that equates human progress with moral evolution, transcendence, and rebirth. The Erosion of Class Class relations within Canadian society are characteristically obscured in most Canadian films through their absence. As John McCullough demonstrates in his chapter of this book with reference to the film Rude (1995), such absence has also led to significant critical blindspots that have tended to misread class relation and identities in the Canadian film canon. McCullough describes how a critical approach to Canadian film that ignores the concept of class conflict does not get around such matters, but is unconsciously inspired to develop concepts of metaphysical identities that tend to be idealized. In this respect dealing with gay identity does not seem different. For all its social baggage, The Hanging Garden suggests that class and economics have no relevance to the reality of sexual repression. As we have seen earlier, the film opts to mystify the complexity of the relationship between class and sexual oppression by reaffirming stereotypes about working-class backwardness and homophobia. The Hanging Garden demonstrates how a dynamic story of enormous social and counter-hegemonic relevance is jettisoned within an allegorical setting that empties it of any dialectical vigour. While class-informed scenarios could open themselves onto a wealth of multi-layered relations, The Hanging Garden presents a story that tends to confirm general and vapid situations, struggles, and concepts. The film avoids telling us much beyond what is necessary for the construction of William’s story of personal redemption. For instance, neither William (the waiter with the unexplainable luxury Mustang), his boyhood friend Fletcher, nor his father (despite hints about his social background through

Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden 145

stereotyped markers of his abusive and alcoholic character) is developed well enough as a socially constructed character. In the end, the mystification and lack of depth in developing the assumed workingclass identity of the main characters are premised on such identity being that of a threatening ‘Other.’ Such mystification reaffirms the tactful avoidance of class-based questions: the ones that have the potential of delving into relationships between, for example, gay bosses and gay workers. Similarly, this same mystification of the economic in social identity conveniently avoids reference to complex and multifaceted forms of oppression, ones that more likely involve relationships between gay, white, non-white, migrant, and immigrant upper-class individuals, and gay, white, non-white, migrant, and immigrant workers. There are a number of occasions in the film where work and class are suggested as prominent social realities. For example, we assume that when William decided to leave home to seek new life in the big city, he risked the possibility of failure (not unlike what the characters in Goin’ Down the Road faced in their own journey to Toronto). This implication opens the film to the possibility of elaborating on the complex theme of regional and class marginality compounded by the complexities of sexual oppression. Furthermore, such a premise could imply interrelationships between sexual emancipation and economic emancipation. Yet the film limits itself to wishing away William’s dilemma by reproaching the ‘typically’ and ‘naturally’ dysfunctional working-class family unit. Here, even the concept of breaking with patriarchal repression is perceived as an individual struggle that is resolved only within the realm of affirming some sort of family values, in this case gay family values. Sexuality and Middle-Class Family Values The Hanging Garden is an allegorical tale about an ideal (and not so ideal) familial existence. William seems out of place in the crude and rugged environment of small-town Nova Scotia. As a result, he must face what he was and try to bury that past for good. The heart of this burial ritual also includes the burial of the concept of a dysfunctional family unit, which allows for the resurrection of an alternative, more ‘ideal’ one. As the film weaves in and out of time zones, we experience a full portrait of the ultimate dysfunctional family. Yet, the question arises: Are families really like that, or is it just something in the Nova Scotia water? What is the real basis for such a dysfunctional situation?

146 Malek Khouri

The film’s answer lies in its association between, on the one hand, William’s family and its isolated community and, on the other, their working-class backwardness and homophobia, which holds them captives or victims – or in the case of the father, instigators – of repression and abuse. No one exemplifies this more than Fletcher, whose ‘closeted’ sexual attraction towards William is denied consummation, not because of any sense of loyalty by William to his sister (who in fact urges the two to get it on), but because of what appears to be William’s sense of ‘responsible’ loyalty towards his gay ‘family’ back in the big city. William’s rejection of the traditional heterosexual, patriarchal (read, working-class) family is supplanted by his embrace of a superior family, whose usefulness lies not in its different structure (William’s gay family, the film tells us, will indeed maintain a relatively traditional structure of two parents plus the newly discovered daughter), but in its embrace of middle-class values and class associations. Within the same ideological breadth, the film reincorporates patriarchal values by rejecting the notion of sex as recreational activity. While the sister appears amused and even titillated by the idea of her new husband having an affair with her openly gay brother, William is intent on aspiring to a monogamous relationship with his lover and refusing to get involved in any extra-’marital’ affairs. Thus, only ‘sex with a goal’ can be tolerated. By the end, William’s refusal to have sex with his buddy (although the affection between the two is consistently built within the film as legitimate mutual desire) is vindicated by giving it the moral highground over Fletcher’s advances. Furthermore, the thwarting of Fletcher’s sexual desire for William is offered as the price to be paid for, first, being bisexual, second, remaining part of this Nova Scotia working-class community, and third, choosing to ‘remain in the closet.’ Even when Fletcher utters the words ‘I love you’ to William before he prepares to leave for Toronto, the latter chooses to firmly ignore this symbolic reminder of the past. William’s choice is to be content with what he now cherishes most: his middle-class family status and his monogamous relationship with his partner in Toronto. The Hanging Garden is a prototypal example of the type of film that has become associated with Canadian art cinema. But, although it bases itself on a ‘gay liberation’ theme, it also reiterates various ideological outlooks that reflect the shifts that have been affecting gay struggles since the 1980s. Under the banner of ‘gay unity,’ another form of homogeneity is perpetuated, this time through the elision of the complex materiality of interrelated gender, race, ethnic, sexual orientation, and

Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden 147

class concerns. Yet, the more often queer cinema repositions itself within the materiality and the broader dynamics of sexual liberation, the more it transcends isolation. Only such practice, I contend, could help reforge gay liberation as an integral component of humanity’s struggle for sexual, social, political, and economic emancipation.

NOTES 1 The film won the best Canadian film award at festivals in Sudbury and Vancouver in addition to the 1999 Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Outstanding Film Award. It also won major prizes at Troia and Mar del Plata International film festivals. 2 See home.snafu.de/fablab/queerview/600er/694hanginggarden/ english694.htm. 3 My article on Gordon Pinsent’s film John and the Missus in CineAction 49 (June 1999): 23 elaborates on the hegemonic significance of the theme of anti-progress traditionalism on the East Coast. 4 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History,’ The National Interest, Summer 1989. 5 More complex and arguably less stereotypical shows such as Queer as Folk (2000–5) and Six Feet Under (2001–5) remain cable-based or variously limited in their broadcasting accessibility. 6 See Malek Khouri, ‘Counter-hegemonic Discourse on the Working Class in National Film Board World War II Films,’ History of Intellectual Culture 1, no. 1 (2001), available at www.ucalgary.ca/hic.

7 Whose Museum Is It, Anyway? Discourses of Resistance in the Adaptation of The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum into Margaret’s Museum peter urquhart

The film Margaret’s Museum (Mort Ransen, 1995) is the end result of a lengthy and meandering evolution of literary texts by Sheldon Currie: beginning with a ballad written in 1962 (‘The Ballad of Charlie Dave’), to the short story ‘The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum’ (1976, republished in 1979 and 1995), to Wendy Lill’s radio (1991) and stage (1995) plays based on this story, and finally to the novel The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum (1995), a text that is not, strictly speaking, the ‘source’ for the film Margaret’s Museum.1 This linage is extraordinary by any standard, but certainly as far as the study of adaptation is concerned, and Currie has himself remarked: ‘Sometimes I ask myself: where did this story get the strength to withstand so many transformations, and finally to attract the enormous resources of the movie industry to our beloved island? This is what I think: the key to the story is its narrator Margaret, a smart resourceful woman who made the best of life in a coal town. When I discovered her voice, it was if the story wrote itself.’2 Although this chapter is specifically concerned with examining the novel The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum and the film Margaret’s Museum, Currie gestures in this brief quotation towards some of the threads I want to pull on: that the key to the story is Margaret’s narration, and that it is their ‘enormous resources’ that ultimately characterize the movie industry, and that, along with the absence of Margaret’s firstperson narration in the film, partially recast the story into Margaret’s Museum. One of my premises is that each text is a resistant one on some levels – primarily concerning class, nation, and gender issues – and that the form each version adopts almost necessarily alters each text’s resistant thrust considerably, each emphasizing different discourses.

Discourses of Resistance in the Adaptation of Margaret’s Museum 149

Typically, studies of adaptation have centred on attempts to locate the intrinsic or essential qualities of each medium in order to discover what each can and cannot ‘do.’ Here, though, I want first to explore the theoretical and structural similarities between realist novel and realist film, and suggest (as is generally agreed) that the main point of comparison ought to be the study of narrative itself and the relationships between narrative and form in fiction and in cinema. Barbara Foley’s book Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 asks whether, ‘as a form historically linked to bourgeois individualism, the novel – in particular, the realist novel – can be effectively employed as a vehicle for contesting bourgeois consciousness, and articulating a class or collective consciousness.’3 She notes how literary radicals in the 1930s often insisted on radical form to complement challenges to bourgeois thought,4 describing the thenprevailing view thus: ‘[that] the production of social revolution enabled, and was enabled by, the production of revolutionary forms of representation and that continuing to use inherited forms would impeded the promotion of revolutionary consciousness.’5 Of course, the politics of representation are not as simple as this. The vanguardism of various avant-garde movements in representation are swiftly co-opted by corporate entities with ever-increasing speed. When IBM, CocaCola, and Nike adopt ‘radical’ representational strategies to hawk their products, what are we to make of claims for the radicalness of form itself? Conversely, if the form of representation cannot guarantee resistant or progressive content, need politically motivated artists rely on ‘radical’ forms, or will staid ones do? It would appear that the ‘problems’ for resistant content are virtually analogous in the cases of films and novels, and that a study of both ‘story’ and ‘discourse’ (to use Seymour Chapman’s useful terms) is necessary to discover the relationships between the texts being considered here.6 Briefly, the text’s ‘story’ is causal, with a chronological unfolding of the text’s events (readers/ audiences create this). It relies upon the text’s ‘discourse,’ which is the systematic presentation of the story’s events; that is, the discourse is the way the story is told. Therefore, in the case of novel-to-film adaptation, we face the duel comparison of literary discourse to cinematic one, plus literary story to cinematic one. The task, then, is to weigh each story against the other, compare the discourses as well, and draw conclusions based on both of these litmus tests. The very process of adaptation often assumes that it should be possible for the same story to be told by both

150 Peter Urquhart

(or many) discourses, a premise based on the notion that the discourses novel and film must be significantly different, which might not be the case. Let’s test this hypothesis first. Returning to Foley’s discussion of the formal problems faced by proletarian fiction that adopted the realist novel form, she first cites the many and various arguments for the latter’s essentially bourgeois nature (arguments that have been applied to realist cinema as well). This includes: the pronounced displacement of social change by character development (and the fact that any change effected will always be by individuals, not societies or collectivities); the appearance of choice or freedom of interpretation for the reader/spectator in the face of actual coercive and authoritarian enforcement by the text; and, crucially, the inevitability of ‘solutions,’ as the narrative drives towards its ultimate closure. Following from this summary of the critique of the realist novel, Foley notes that those subscribing to this view necessarily discount the possibility of resistant content in any text adopting this form, quoting Lennard Davis’s Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction: ‘as soon as the author creates characters, puts them in a place, has them engage in dialogue, and gets embroiled in a plot ... the novelist is stuck with the baggage of ideology.’7 These kinds of arguments are old hat in film studies too, of course, based on the same principles of individual (rather than collective) struggle or development, a false appearance of a hierarchy of discourses, and an almost built-in optimism that problems can and will be solved. Throughout the 1970s, some film theorists, while essentially agreeing with the position that narration itself renders the narrative cinema politically inert, saw the cinema’s principle property – visual imagery, especially as it is used in the name of cinematic realism – as further compounding the problem. Colin MacCabe, for instance, ‘identified the epistemology underlying the classical realist cinema as empirical: for the knowledge which the classic realist film delivers is founded, fundamentally, on sight.’8 Summarizing MacCabe’s conclusion from this, John Hill writes, ‘knowledge of social and political relations do not derive from what is visible, but from an understanding of what is invisible.’9 Thus, writes MacCabe, classic realist cinema is ‘fundamentally inimical to the production of political knowledge.’10 Christine Gledhill observes that ‘cinematic realism is dependant upon an ideological proposition that reality equals what you can see; that perception equals cognition.’11 Thus, a realist film can ‘show’ poor people in the streets, but ‘mechanics of capitalism or distribution of wealth are not

Discourses of Resistance in the Adaptation of Margaret’s Museum 151

things which can be seen,’ a fact that explains the inevitable emphasis of the personal over the socio-political under this representational system.12 Let us test this idea on the texts being examined here. Consider one of the pivotal scenes of the novel The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum – one that is necessarily quite different from its analogous one in the film, and with this difference illuminating both Gledhill’s point as well as the possibilities for resistance in these forms. In The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, Peggy’s father, Mr Campbell, the mine manager, arrives at the Currie house to drag his daughter home from an evening of card playing and radio listening. Instead, he is provoked into an explanation of the futility of mine strikes in Cape Breton: he explains in some detail how political and economic machinations well beyond his (and the miners’) control severely limit his (and their) options. Campbell is a sympathetic, if uninspiring and perhaps too resigned, character, and convinces Ian and Neil (miners and strike organizers) that what he says is true – that any strike at the mine is doomed. However, in the analogous scene in Margaret’s Museum, Campbell’s self-confessed failing or inadequacy is not political/ideological, but utterly personal. It is true that he could have been shot delivering the speech about the complex international web of finance and power that forces the workers into exploitation, but instead we find the following exchange, with no mention of a strike: Neil: You don’t own me, I’m not a miner. Campbell: I’m not an owner, I’m a manager, and I can’t even manage my own daughter.

Consider another example: one of the integral totems of resistance in the novel (not to mention a vital ‘exhibit’ in each text’s museum) is the collection of scribblers, which, Margaret discovers, contain more than just grandpa’s prosaic daily requests. Pages of the novel are devoted to describing the centrality of these scribblers to Margaret’s rising selfawareness as a woman and as a working-class woman with a long history. What do we find in Margaret’s Museum’s scribblers? Do we find anything like the seething material history located in the novel’s scribblers? No. Instead, the only thing we find in the film’s scribblers is Jimmy’s exceedingly juvenile ‘erotica,’ which is wielded by Neil as an article of humiliation. This is another example of how the strictly personal motivates many of the serious story events in the film, whereas

152 Peter Urquhart

they are dominated by oppositional politics in the novel. One explanation for these choices made in the course of the adaptation may be that Gledhill is right about film’s tendency to emphasize the personal over the socio-political. On the other hand, Foley cites Carole Snee and Peter Widdowsdown, contemporary literary critics who argue not that form is neutral but that, in instances, politics (or ‘content’) may be primary, and form secondary, in a text’s ultimate ability to put forward a resistant stance. Foley calls this the ‘tendency’ position – one that allows the possibility of progressive politics even within the bourgeois ideology bound up in the practice of the realist novel. This is a position that even Lennard Davis’s hard-core argument must grudgingly admit to. He writes: ‘to argue that the novel can defy its defensive function is to argue that horses are born without legs – it happens, but not very often, and in spite of formal requirements.’13 This ‘tendency’ position seems useful for my purposes here as well, as a position that helps explain at least one significant reason for the textual differences between Currie’s novel and Ransen’s film, for, as Foley writes, ‘we must ... insist that discussions of the ideologies embedded in genres always be linked to discussions of the specific politics encoded in specific [texts].’14 This is also, in essence, one aspect of Raymond Williams’s rebuttal to MacCabe and ’70s Screen theory: that realism and naturalism have a long tradition of political progressive content; that ‘the diagnosis of realism as a bourgeois form is cant.’15 Of the significant differences between each text’s story, the most important must be absence of a strike in Margaret’s Museum.16 It is true that the exploitation of coal miners is a subtext of the film, but the novel devotes a large part of its narrative to outlining the events leading up to, during, and following a strike by the miners in Reserve Mines and Glace Bay. In a typically cinematic manoeuvre, the film chooses, instead of difficult-to-represent collective action, to show us a scene of individual character development: Angus burns down the company store. As David Frank points out in his contribution to this anthology, the scene is historically inaccurate, as the company store had been disbanded long before the time period of the film. This scene (which looks terrific cinematically) cannot, in any case, be read as especially politically charged, as it is played for laughs and has very small consequences for the characters. The miners and their families loot the burning store, a rather chaotic and depoliticized action instead of an act of organized, planned protest. Likewise, two of the story’s main charac-

Discourses of Resistance in the Adaptation of Margaret’s Museum 153

ters, Neil Currie and Margaret’s little brother Jimmy (who is called Ian in the novel), are miners throughout the novel, but only towards the end of the film. Labour and class, it seems, are much less important concerns in the film. Chris Gittings’s insightful discussion of the film appears to disagree with this conclusion, claiming that ‘it is not so much that labour and class are “less important concerns in the film,” rather the film’s interest is in tracking the displacement of alienated labour into the domestic sphere through melodrama to make visible the destructive ramifications of an alienating system of production on family members, on the women who must negotiate alienated labour in its displaced domesticated context.’17 This may just be another way of saying that the resistant thrust of each text is somewhat different and that the process of adaptation itself seems to have been a significant cause of this transformation. As well, Lee Parpart’s equally thoughtful discussion of the film and its adaptation, while making a strong case for the film’s treatment of colonialism and its effects on masculinity, describes the claim that Ransen’s film may be ‘a pale and politically-compromised version of Sheldon Currie’s short story The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum.’ This claim is not entirely unjustified.18 In his essay ‘When Class Disappears,’ American cultural critic Thomas Frank explains how the ascendance of what he calls the ‘lifestyle revolution’ has overwhelmed and completely subsumed labour (and/ or class) struggle in the United States in the recent past. He writes: ‘For contemporary American media-makers, complacent with an almost unprecedented world-historical self-assurance, the market is the only appropriate matrix for understanding human affairs. Business is life; management is government; markets are democracy; entrepreneurs are artists. And the more directly these principles are stated, the better.’19 Similarly, David E. James explains in his introduction to a book on cinema and the question of class, that the ‘zero-sum rules of academic identity politics’ have seen class pushed to the margins of scholarship by the ascendancy of scholarly inquiry into race and gender questions.20 It is in this climate of class erasure that the film Margaret’s Museum – as a cultural artifact and as an artifact of mass culture – must be read. The principal agent of class struggle, or labour resistance, in The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, is Margaret’s brother Ian, while Neil Currie represents the text’s resistance on the issue of nation.21 Interestingly, one of the film’s major departures from the literary text was to markedly

154 Peter Urquhart

diminish the brother’s stature, both literally and figuratively, so that what we find in the film is a young immature boy who is scarcely capable of mining and is surely without the moxy and strength of character required of a union organizer, strike instigator, and leader of men (as the brother appears in the novel). Strangely enough, the film even changes the lad’s name from the Scottish Ian to the English James (Jimmy in the film). If this decision to render Jimmy/Ian virtually inert as a character was not part of a strategy to diminish class as the prominent discourse of resistance – as Neil and his national concerns so clearly dominates the cinematic text – it certainly has that effect. Nevertheless, gender overshadows even nation, ultimately, as the film’s dominant resistant discourse. Sheldon Currie’s observation on Margaret’s ‘voice’ will help to explain this observation. Is the film narrated by Margaret? Literally speaking, of course, subjective camera (which might link Margaret to the film’s point of view) is strictly regulated by the classical system, and, in fact, we find zero emphasis on Margaret’s point of view (POV). True, we are supplied with ample POV shots from Margaret’s subjectivity, but no more than are narrationally motivated, and none outside the classical construction of POV as being one-half of the conventional shot/reverse-shot structure. This fact is crucial in determining the relative weight of Margaret’s narration in The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum and in Margaret’s Museum. As a first-person account, everything we see of the events of the novel is through Margaret’s ‘eyes,’ while in the film, everything we see is through the conventional invisible ‘narrator’s’ eyes. Realist films must, and successfully do, efface narration. Transparency and invisibility are the terms used to describe the narrational properties of the realist cinema, which is, ‘omniscient, highly communicative, almost never self-conscious, almost never acknowledging its own address to the audience.’22 One implication of these properties for texts that may hope to transcend the ideological constrictions of the form itself – for texts that hope to offer resistance – must be that narration itself as a mode of ‘didacticism’ (to use Foley’s term) is lost as a possibility. Margaret does not tell the story in Margaret’s Museum, while in the novel she clearly does. So what? Foley notes that, according to narratologist Gérard Genette, ‘story is, in purely linguistic terms ... objective, discourse is subjective in that it denotes language expressing the opinions and attitudes of some subject.’23 After explaining the centrality of ‘redundancy’ in narrative

Discourses of Resistance in the Adaptation of Margaret’s Museum 155

story-telling to didacticism (a condition that Bordwell notes as necessary to the classical Hollywood narration as well,24 Foley remarks, ‘since “discourse” comprises a broad range of features of narrative, redundancies between “story” and “discourse” take a variety of forms. The most obvious of these is commentary issuing from a narrational voice. Any narrator who delivers a running commentary ... is in a strong position to influence the reader’s response to characters and events.’25 In the absence of this commentary, Margaret’s corporeal body, her very presence, by default, becomes the film’s core, while Margaret’s story of class resistance (told in her voice) remains the novel’s. The ‘shock ending’ of the film has typically been read by reviewers as an angry political gesture, one provoked by, in the words of one critic, ‘corporate callousness and greed.’26 I have tried to show here how this may have been a large part of the motivation for Margaret’s deed in the novel The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, but that the film Margaret’s Museum is much less interested in the exploitation of workers by corporate capital. Instead – consider the obvious repercussions of the title change: whose museum is it, anyway? – the film is a far more personal story, a fact that by no means renders Margaret’s seemingly deranged act apolitical. Rather, by necessarily shifting the text’s resistance to the personal, Margaret’s Museum can arguably be seen as enacting the classic feminist stance: the personal is political. After all, the theme of gender resistance is central to both texts, just emphasized in the cinematic one.27 For further evidence of this conclusion, one could point to the film’s first sequence: it is perhaps narratively extraneous that young Margaret should be shown humiliated by a boy in a pretend rape, until one considers what light this casts on Margaret’s bloody deed. It is the humiliation and exploitation related to Margaret’s gender, rather than to her class or her heritage, that the film, because of the tendencies of the form, instinctively emphasizes. This conclusion may seem paradoxical – that even though Margaret personally narrates the novel, it is the film that must emphasize personal resistance – but the stories and the discourses of film and novel must be considered both separately and in comparison to one another. Finally, as if it need be stated, the tendency of the realist film is surely exaggerated by the profit motive. In remarks to Take One, Margaret’s Museum’s director Mort Ransen complained that ‘it isn’t a level playing field in Canada and the only way you can draw attention to your film is to hire a high-profile cast. It’s almost impossible to score at the box office without stars.’28 This is usually true, and, despite the fact that it is

156 Peter Urquhart

possible to imagine a hit film about strikes and exploited workers, Ransen’s observation speaks directly to the tendency of the film industry’s ‘enormous resources’ to influence story and discourse.

NOTES This chapter is based on my publication ‘The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum / Margaret’s Museum: Adaptation and Resistance,’ CineAction 49 (1999): 12–18. It has been significantly revised in response to more recent scholarship on this film and to incorporate a post-colonial and gender-based analysis. 1 The novel’s copyright page describes the book as ‘a contribution toward Jerry Wexler and Mort Ransen’s script’ for Margaret’s Museum. This distinction shows that this is not really a case of weighing an ‘original’ text against its cinematic adaptation so much as the comparison and contrast of the content and form of somewhat discrete texts. 2 Sheldon Currie, ‘The Ballad of Charlie Dave,’ Nova Scotia Government Website, http://explore.gov.nc.ca/virtualns/chalied.htm. (Accessed December 1997). 3 Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 249. 4 Ibid., 250. 5 Ibid., 252. 6 Seymour Chapman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). 7 Foley, Radical Representations, 257. 8 John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 60. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Christine Gledhill, cited in ibid. 12 Hill, Sex, Class and Realism. 13 Lennard Davis, cited in Foley, Radical Representations, 227. 14 Foley, Radical Representations, 226. 15 Raymond Williams, ‘Realism, Naturalism and Their Alternatives,’ CineTracts 1, no. 3 (Fall/Winter 1977–8): 3. 16 The film does allude to a strike or potential strike at two moments. In one, Neil asks Angus if he is ‘in on the strike,’ to which Angus replies, ‘not if I can help it.’ Later, Mr Campbell’s daughter (renamed Marilyn for the film) tells Jimmy that ‘my father says the strike was started by communists.’

Discourses of Resistance in the Adaptation of Margaret’s Museum 157

17 18

19 20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27

28

These are the only two references to a strike in the entire film, and they are glossed over without further comment. Christopher E. Gittings, Canadian National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 139. Lee Parpart, ‘Pit(iful) Bodies: Colonial Masculinity, Class and Folk Innocence in Margaret’s Museum,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 65. Thomas Frank, ‘When Class Disappears.’ Baffler 9 (1997): 6. David James, ‘Introduction,’ in The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class, ed. David James and Rick Berg (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996), 1–4. Throughout both novel and film, Neil makes repeated references to his heritage, and to that of his fellow Cape Bretoners, evoking the Battle of Culloden, ‘our language, our music,’ 1745, the Isle of Skye, and so on. David Bordwell, ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures,’ in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Phillip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 29. Foley, Radical Representations, 265. Bordwell, ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema,’ 21. Foley, Radical Representations, 269–70. Peter Matthews, ‘Margaret’s Museum,’ Sight and Sound 7, no. 5 (May 1997): 50. The gendered specificity of Margaret’s experience as observer and agent is clearly central to both works, which each turn on the fact that women were excluded from mine work, and thus live to tell the story. Ingrid Randoja, ‘Ransen Rising,’ Take One 6, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 30.

This page intentionally left blank

PART THREE Dirty Work

This page intentionally left blank

8 Activating History: Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project susan lord

Whatever the specific content of the many contemporary debates about history and memory may be, underlying them is a fundamental disturbance not just of the relationship between history as objective and scientific, and memory as subjective and personal, but of history itself and its promises. At stake in the current history/memory debate is not only a disturbance of our notions of the past, but a fundamental crisis in our imagination of alternative futures. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts1

People are scattering: young children, men, and women of different races. Their hand-painted banners are dropping to the ground, where they are being trampled by the police horses. Police drag off several men while others cover their heads, crouching forward under the weight of the police batons falling upon them. Although this description sounds like a recent anti-globalization march, the image would not be seen on an activist video or website because what I have just described is an image from 1935 cut into a series of other archival images in a video made in 1992 by Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project (WLHP). The tape represents the culmination of her decade-long engagement with history, to which she has not returned since becoming artistic director of the Banff Centre’s New Media Institute and, in 2005, president of the Ontario College of Art and Design. The comparison between contemporary activist media and politically engaged media art produced a generation ago is both useful and limited: it permits one to see a shift in historical consciousness and political vision, yet it compares two groups constituted through very

162 Susan Lord

different processes (activist videographers are not necessarily part of an artworld or art institution; artists such as Diamond undertook work as artists within political contexts). With the limits in mind, I nonetheless use the comparison at the outset as a means by which to particularize what has become known as the ‘history/memory debate,’ through an analysis of the work and times of one artist. Activist media in these opening years of the millennium have burgeoned from a few ‘in the crowd’ leftoid media artists to thousands of digital-video-carrying protesters from the anti-capitalist, largely anarchist, international crowds. Images, evidence, testimonies, factoids, and demands for change constitute what I will call the intense present of the activist archive. This present tense is arguably part of digital culture, broadly speaking, and it has been met with a range of responses, from fear of the loss of cultural memory to jubilation over the instantaneousness of what is hoped to be history-in-the-making. While Homi Bhabha makes the point that ‘there is a danger that the “presentism” of the net may drain everyday life of its historical memory,’2 the message emanating from Indymedia.org is that there is no time but the present to help hunger-striker Simon Chapman (a young man arrested by Italian police during the anti-globalization demonstration in Genoa in 2001). Although the Indymedia.org Web site offers a page of Internet links to activist libraries, none of the images I could find date from before the mid-1990s. That the activist media are dominated by an under-thirtyyear-old group of people raised in a vehemently anti-aging era is but one way to understand the shift in temporal consciousness that has taken place since the activist/politically engaged ‘old’ new-media artists of the 1970s and 1980s, who busied themselves in the interrogation, assemblage, and reordering of archives. That work on the archive was a critical engagement with history as a project of human creation. As such, it was an extension of a modern, western project of historicity and political imagination, where the future was thinkable, albeit unknowable and unstable, and where one sequence of temporal events, although internally unified, could be radically discontinuous from another. This kind of temporality can also be understood as filmic and its practice is that of montage. The video artist of the ’70s and ’80s was, however, between the filmic and the televisual consciousness – between sequence and flow. Thus, the archive raiders of this period were granted a moment of collision between time zones, historiographical processes, media, and politics.3 The juxtaposition of these two moments of political media – that of,

Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project 163

say, Indymedia.org and the Women’s Labour History Project – produces a series of questions about the politics of time as it relates to the takeover of historical documentary by the History Channel, the privatization of archives, the de-lefting of anti-capitalist culture, the culture of obsolescence, the expansion of the memory industry, and the institutionalization (in universities, bureaucracies, etc.) of the artists and intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s. If we accept Allan Antliff’s claim that all activist media are anarchist, then the culture of the Left is not only concerned with history, it has actually become historical.4 But, there is more to the story. The intense present of digital activism lives alongside what Andreas Huyssen calls the global ‘memory industry’: ‘the seduction of the archive and its trove of stories of human achievement and suffering has never been greater.’ ‘The form in which we think the past is increasingly memory without borders rather than national history within borders’ and has been read variably, argues Huyssen, as a bulwark against obsolescence, an attack of the present on the rest of time, and a sign of the loss of national or communal memory.5 The pages that follow are bound to the history debate in so far as they revisit the 1980s in Vancouver through the video projects of Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project; they analyse that moment and its projects as an activation of history and they work through the implications of the tension between historical and memory work. I believe that the concern for class in the art of the 1970s and 1980s was inextricable from an historical consciousness about political life; that is, to be Left was to be historical insofar as the future was thinkable. Now, to be historical is to be left behind, but to remember is to be of the present. Interestingly, this tension between history and memory can be found across Sara Diamond’s work, from the early Influences of My Mother through the series Lull before the Storm, to the tapes of the earlyto mid-1990s dealing with the On-to-Ottawa Trek and the Depression years. The images of the working class that constitute the work undertaken by Diamond until the 1990s can be understood as having emerged from a process of working through the problematic polarity between historical consciousness and memory work. Images taken from public archives are set within a Brechtian fiction or poised against the personal archives of social subjects of the documentaries; personal testimonies are set against public records and, in Diamond’s own personally derived works, layers of memory are strewn between and disturb the public faces of the loved ones. As I discuss at length below with regard

164 Susan Lord

to the major, four-part work Lull before the Storm, in applying generic types to story structure and to character, Diamond’s historical subject (broadly, women and work after the Second World War) is figured in the role of Dorothy. But because Dorothy is not a subject of history as it is constructed in the grand narratives of either class struggle or of bourgeois progress, her particularity begins to wear away at the structural limits of genre and of character. The second half of the series about communities of women workers on the West Coast is then organized by memory and testimony, rather than by political signifier and the ideology critique at the heart of Dorothy’s existence as a type. This juxtaposition in one work permits us to see the limits for art of a direct/overt political content and marks Diamond as truly an artist of her time. Across Diamond’s work, then, we see two divergent methods of engaging historical records – of, in a sense, activating potentialities of historical change via archival footage – methods that are themselves linked to either a utopian desire for the future, issued from the present but rooted in an historical narrative, or a desire for the present as a place of re-memory and of particularized community, where the future is unthinkable and where time unfolds through specific acts of common interest. The dual work on history raises a series of questions relevant beyond the specifics of Diamond’s work. What do we want from the past? What longing is the image performing? Is the image from the past activated by an interrogation of its status as truth, or is the image from the past an unquestioned testimony of injustice? I am not asking whether the police really used batons on the people described in the opening paragraph (mindful, however, that after the Rodney King trial, such images of power and injustice are used to further power and injustice), but what meaning for the present or future is their suffering supplying for us? The answer to this question, as posited from a Marxist position, is the continuity of oppression. This consciousness is what motivates the assemblage of a Left archive and what informs the montage of sequences. In an article analysing Patricio Guzmán’s films about Chile, memory, and history, Thomas Miller Klubock discusses how the dynamic between the distortions of memory found in testimonial footage and history’s metanarratives found in archival material is a necessary tension for the process of social change. ‘While memory guides history to issues of critical importance for the present, history critically engages personal memory to establish the conditions for collective forms of recollection and solidaristic action.’6 Working on this project today, viewing Indymedia.org’s footage of

Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project 165

police beating protesters and the next day looking at beatings of the Onto-Ottawa trekkers in 1935, the issue of ‘learning from the past’ comes hard and fast to mind. Yet, as Huyssen writes, ‘The enlightened notion that one can learn from history has been so violently disproved both at the social and political levels as well as in its experiential dimension that the very legitimacy of the historical enterprise is shaken.’7 History, in Any Event Vancouver, British Columbia – a place Gerry Gilbert, city poet, called a small village at the edge of the rainforest. Terminal City. Logging. Fishing. Real estate. Land claims. On 23 April 1935 the mayor of Vancouver read the Riot Act in an effort to quell the protests being mounted against forced labour camps (‘relief workers camps’), starvation-level relief payments (60,000 families in British Columbia were on relief), the increasing numbers of deportations (7,000 in 1933), and poor wages and work conditions for those who did have jobs. One week later, on May Day, 20,000 people of several races and nationalities took to the streets; one month after that, the On-to-Ottawa Trek began from Terminal Station in Vancouver, with hundreds of jobless men hopping the freight cars in which they planned to ride to the nation’s capital with their demands. By the time they reached Regina, the hundreds had swelled to thousands. They were met with a welcome parade, three days of relief, a huge support community, and, a few days later, thousands of RCMP and local police called in by the federal government. One hundred people were injured and eighty men were jailed under section 98 of the Criminal Code, which gave the government the power to simply name any organization illegal. Sound familiar? In May 1983 British Columbia’s Social Credit (‘Socreds,’ in the local parlance) government, with Bill Bennett (W.A.C. Bennett’s hardware store–managing son) as premier, was re-elected with a democracydefying math (including the redrawing of electoral boundaries to favour the Socreds) that repeated itself in the 1990s throughout North America.8 Utilizing the discourse of ‘restraint’ in the campaign, the legislative package that came with the July 7 budget revealed a government dedicated to the fullest and most brutal devastation of social programs ever seen on that parliamentary floor, including the repeal of the Human Rights Commission, the dismantling of collective agreements (thereby giving public sector employers the right to fire with little cause, remov-

166 Susan Lord

ing gains around pregnancy leaves and pension, ‘restraining’ unions so that they could only bargain for wages, etc.), granting doctors the ability to opt out of medicare, abolishing the Tenants Rights Act, and much more. Equally comprehensive but more brutal in its timing than Mike Harris’s Ontario Conservative omnibus bills more than a decade later, the Socred plan was in effect written by the Fraser Institute, a right-wing ‘independent’ policy research and advisory body whose board of trustees represented ‘no less than 157 corporate directorships.’9 In the months that followed, British Columbia saw waves of public protest across the province, but it was in Vancouver that the Solidarity Coalition grew to include thirty-five women’s groups, the ad hoc Cultural Workers against the Budget, anti-poverty activists, and fifty other organizations, advocacy groups, unions, and political bodies.10 Vancouver then saw 25,000 people at the July 23 demonstration at B.C. Place, and protests such as the Stone Soup Luncheon with Gracie (the human resources minister, Grace McCarthy), the October 15 Solidarity march of 60,000, and a set of walk-outs, all leading, it was hoped, to a general strike that would see the repeal of the entire legislative package, from those bills affecting the definition of human rights to those axing the office of rent controls, to those affecting the public sector’s organized labour force. However, in the end, the heads of labour (Jack Munro of the Forest Workers) and government made ‘a gentleman’s agreement on the Premier’s porch, in which nothing was stated and nothing was recorded or committed to paper.’11 The Solidarity movement was thus sold for the repeal of parts of legislation dealing only with public sector unions. In the years surrounding the events of 1983 and ending in 1995, video artist Sara Diamond, in collaboration with others working first on Amelia Productions and later on the WLHP, produced a series of tapes about women and work, women and labour history, the Second World War and local labour history, poverty, the Depression, and the brutal squelching of the 1930s On-to-Ottawa protest movement. In the late 1970s and 1980s Diamond was one of numerous intellectuals, students, and artists whose New Left politics brought together unionism, feminism, gay and lesbian politics, cultural politics, and membership in the Trotskyist/ Fourth International faction of the Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG), which became the Revolutionary Workers’ League (RWL). She was involved in May Day magazine and the Working Theatre, a Brechtian agitprop theatre group; she ran for the provincial legislature in 1975 as a RMG candidate and was sent to university by them.12 Simon Fraser

Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project 167

University in the late 1970s and 1980s was a dynamic intellectual, artistic, and political environment, with a professoriate drawn largely from the expat American Left who had come to Canada during the U.S. war against Vietnam. It was in this context that many of the artists and intellectuals involved in the Solidarity movement met and undertook collective projects in the downtown artist-run centres. This is where Diamond went – not to cinema and its publics, but to art – and while overlaps certainly exist (especially in feminist and experimental media), these are two different spheres, with different economies, historical discourses, and publics. The political culture of Vancouver has a long history of engagement, as well as confrontation, with artistic culture. Mr Peanut (aka Vincent Trasov, artist) ran for mayor of Vancouver in 1974; decades earlier, in 1938, the Vancouver Art Gallery was the scene of a major labour protest and was taken over by workers and the unemployed; in 1983 the Solidarity Times newspaper, funded by labour movements and edited by Stan Persky, published articles about the punk band DOA and the film Scarface alongside articles about rape crisis centers, teaching in Nicaragua, and Leonard Peltier. Though this mixture of art, publics, and politics is not exclusively ‘Vancouverite,’ each city does particularize its formations of publicity. What was it about Vancouver’s particular history that allowed artists to play a central role in the Solidarity movement? Was this the last moment in which art and class were joined on a broad-based and (for the artists) unembarrassed scale? Does the fact that funding for art did not exist at either the civic or the provincial level until meagre crumbs were handed out in a true act of political cynicism in the early 1990s mean anything to the way in which stakes were assessed or internalized? Did the Pacific nation, as opposed to the Canadian nation, present a significantly different axis for art’s political imagination? Internationalism and its activists were already noisily and creatively marking out the troubles of globalization because of the very politicized culture of Latin American refugees and immigrants who made a ‘home’ at La Quena coffee shop on Commercial Drive. And Coop Radio, an active member of the international community-radio wave, linked the cultural and the political every hour. This is yet to say anything about the artist-run centres (ARCs), such as the Western Front, Metro Media, Video In (of which Diamond was a founding member), Or Gallery, and Women in Focus, all significant channels of culture and politics.13 (This scene has been written about extensively by Nancy Shaw, Sara Diamond, Keith Wallace, and others.) Of course, versions of

168 Susan Lord

these events were taking place in every major city in North America. But in the 1970s and 1980s Vancouver was not a major city. Its status as a minor metropolis fed the interchange and produced an intense localism that distinguished its cultural field from that of Toronto and Montreal. Diamond was not alone in Anglo-Canada in this project of joining art and politics and history though a Marxist lens and agitating for a larger and more diverse public for art.14 Visual artists Carol Conde and Carl Beveridge, Jeff Wall, Clive Robertson, Gary Kibbins, Lisa Steele and Kim Tomzack, and Nancy Nichol were the main players in the old ‘new media’ of the Left: performance art, conceptual photo-based art, video, public art projects. Drawing art historical connections and the utopianism from the Russian Constructivists, Brecht, the Situationists, Joseph Bueys, and Fluxus, as well as the emergent video discourses on public culture by Martha Rosler, Ant Farm, et al., the art discourse was one framed by Marxist class consciousness. Of these artists, Conde and Beveridge are the only ones who continue to make work about class, and they do so from within the framework of labour unions. What happens to the social histories contained in those art-images when such art becomes anachronistic? Why are art-images of labour and the working class anachronistic? The 1970s and 1980s described above has become history. When does something become history? When its time is past/has passed? When it comes to be known as a significant moment of contribution? When it comes to be known as a time when something just about happened? When that ‘just about’ was the last moment of a history? I suggest, here, that the 1980s in Vancouver represent Anglo-Canada’s last moment in the history of a century-long inequitable, perhaps, but nonetheless passionate and dedicated affair between art and class politics. It is not surprising, then, that the word of the day on the street was ‘solidarity,’ but was translated in art as ‘utopia’ – not because it was at hand, not because it could be, but because it really was nowhere. A no-place. A small village at the edge of a rainforest. Work/Works It is in this context of a loss of confidence in the utopian powers of art to conjure up, approximate, or embody a utopian plentitude – in life, in the text, or in transcendence – that the contemporary turn to history, memory, and the past assumes its full significance. What is at stake … is not the creation of the

Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project 169 utopian epiphany so central for modernism, nor is it the reverse, the aesthetics of terror and violence that scar so much modernist literature and art. Both modes are fundamentally tied to modernism’s belief in momentary transcendence, the puncturing of the oppressive continuity of time, redemptive disruption, and ultimately radical alterity in another life. But this other life was always opposed to an everyday present that seemed mired in oppressive traditional values, in pain and prejudice, and in reification in every level. When this present itself, however, has become progressively unmoored from tradition, when media saturation wipes out spatial and temporal difference, by making every place, every time available to instant replay, then the turn to history and memory can also be read as an attempt to find a new mooring … The art of memory counters aesthetic desublimation and the ideology of the anti-aesthetic. Huyssen, ‘Memories of Utopia’15

Read of a piece, as a narrative of British Columbia’s working class, it is possible to see Diamond’s work as a record of those who were left out of the bargain on Bennett’s porch: women, the unemployed, First Nations peoples, immigrant labour, children, and the homeless. It is very important to note that the work about labour and history was produced with others, that it was a collective project, an activism or activation of the potentialities of a history all but abandoned by official histories. In other words, it was praxis. This work of activating the archive was central to the feminism of the 1970s and 1980s of which Diamond was a part, and it was being undertaken in various forms across Europe and North America. Within the culture of feminist avant-garde media, Janine Marchessault has presented the history as one moving from introspection to retrospection, from a primary concern with subjectivity, desire, and the body to one concerned with the tensions between history, memory, and social identity.16 Also, of course, work on history and the history of work are necessary to a dialectical materialism that looks to what could be through the lens of that which is not yet or is no longer. But the projects of the WLHP are heterogeneous in their aesthetic practice and in their historiography: at times a very straight realist corrective using the archive as proof of the social subjects’ accounts, and at other times a Brechtian interrogation of the audience and the archive; at times based in subjective memory, and at other times based in the authority of History. Rather than reading this as incoherence or as an indication of some authorial failure, I see it as both symptomatic of and

170 Susan Lord

engaged in the struggle between history and memory as it was being played out within the faultlines of the increasingly alienated relationship between politics and art. In 1992 the National Gallery of Canada presented a retrospective of Diamond’s work entitled Memories Revisited, History Retold. The catalogue essay by Jean Gagnon presents us with a succinct orientation to the works’ underlying themes: Of all these works, the installation Patternity (1991) and the four-part tape The Lull before the Storm (1990) undoubtedly illustrate in the most artistic and detailed manner the artist’s objective, namely: the reconstruction of the history of women’s work – both in the personal and social spheres – and the affirmation of the feminine subject, which has been largely neglected within the framework of a patriarchal interpretation of history ... The works of Sara Diamond cause us to re-examine our concept of historical ‘truth’ and reveal that historical knowledge, far from being objective, is actually remodeled by memory and imagination; it is a cognitive structure wherein fiction and history overlap to create human time.17

Gagnon’s essay goes on to locate the discourse of the works in Lacanian psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Paul Ricour, the former being common to those working on gender and memory in the 1980s and early 1990s. In fact, all of the writings about Diamond are organized primarily by feminist psychoanalytic adventures. Between Renée Baert and Jean Gagnon, there is little more to add to this type of reading of Influences of My Mother, in particular.18 Therefore, I will use the video as a way to elaborate on the terms of the history/memory debate, the function of photographic and moving image archive in the production of memory, and the activation of counter-genealogies that results from the dialectic between history and memory. Made in 1980–2, the twenty-three-minute video Influences of My Mother is ostensibly about Diamond’s attempt to make an identity out of and for her mother, who died of cancer when Diamond was ten years old. As it is about her mother as an absence – as present only in photographs, the elusive memory of a ten-year-old girl, and memorabilia – the tape speaks to fundamental issues about identity as that which is produced from loss and from the remains of time (‘How do you go about recreating a once living woman through whom to see yourself?’). This work is key to the later projects, because it brings together three distinct and contesting orders of temporality: subjective and private

Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project 171

memory; the photograph; and official, public (i.e., published) history of class struggle, unionism, and left politics. In a repeated and key gesture that brings these together, Diamond holds up a photograph of her mother to the photographs on and between the covers of history books. The non-fit between the image of her mother – herself a Jewish unionist and Communist – and the images in these books about unionists, anarchists, communists, and Jews in the United States is as much about the non-fit of the public and private identity (which Diamond’s work overall critiques) as it is about the feminist debates over class and gender (production versus reproduction) that were animating the Left and left histories in the 1970s. And the act of constructing a historical identity for her mother, a place of community and belonging to public history, is not merely a kind of boosterism or recovery project; rather, its performance in this tape puts Diamond’s practice squarely in the then fairly recent debate over the foundations of social history – the debate over experience. The historiography of experience was articulated by the British historian E.P. Thompson in the following terms: ‘We have explored, both in theory and in practice, those junction concepts (such as “need,” “class” and “determine”) by which, through the missing term “experience,” structure is transmuted into process, and the subject re-enters history.’19 He wrote this in his book The Poverty of Theory, a critique of the structuralist Louis Althusser. This, for an avowed Althusserian, as Diamond claimed herself in those days, was a sticky wicket. The sympathy for the Thompsonian approach to history is clear across all of Diamond’s tapes, including those that employ most intensively the aesthetic strategies of estrangement, such as the first two episodes of The Lull before the Storm and Ten Dollars or Nothing. Craig Ireland succinctly describes Thompson’s project: In order to avoid the reduction of class to the passive effect of an ulterior structure, while at the same time acknowledging the pervasiveness of dominant cultural hegemony, Thompson argued that class specificity resides in the specificity of its members’ daily immediate experiences – experiences that are determined by the position of a class within a mode of production, and which are mediated or ‘handled’ (to use his expression) by the local culture of a particular class. It is through such a localized sharing and articulation of experience, so Thompson tells us, that a class can achieve self-consciousness, come to discern its socioeconomic interests, and thus galvanize itself into concerted political action.20

172 Susan Lord

But, for Diamond, as a feminist whose intellectual affiliation sat with feminist post-structuralism, appeals to ideas of immediate experience would have to be met with a mediating counter-concept, such as history or language. Experience is mute without a correlative reflection on a socio-cultural and historical process; thus, Diamond would find herself in the company of Joan W. Scott (and others) on the matter of experience and history and would be very critical of the attempt to locate ‘resistance outside its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent attribute of individuals,’ for such ‘naturalizes categories such as woman, black, white, heterosexual and homosexual by treating them as given characteristics of individuals.’21 This is certainly the case in Influences of My Mother, Patternity (a multimedia installation about story telling, history making, and the disavowal of the feminine), and Keep the Homefires Burning (an ironic ‘artumentary’ about women working during the Second World War). In these pieces, the performance of historicity engages experience as that which is born into language. For example, in Keep the Homefires Burning, presented as an agitprop theatre piece, the back screen is a continuous compilation of archival material related to women working during the war. Front screen are ‘actors’ dressed in period costume, acting out scenarios culled from oral testimony of women workers and organizers. The two ‘histories’ collide and contradict each other, with the living ‘actor’ functioning as a corrective to or supplement of the archival material. This technique functions to bring into relief a space between oral and image histories, one homologous to that between experience and ideology. Just as the testimonial is a performance, the archive loses its status as self-evident or self-sufficient. For example, the effort to organize for better working conditions and for protection is counterpoised with the ideology of self-sacrifice and volunteerism. And, just as the difference between memory and history is heightened, we also learn from this historiography the differences among women of various classes or class aspirations. Two very different formations of the relationship between history and memory can be found in the central work of the WLHP: The Lull before the Storm. This four-part, made-for-broadcast series in effect comprises two pairs: the first is a soap opera about Dorothy and George Sanderson, their son, Bobby, and their dreary life during the 1940s and 1950s; the second combines archival footage with testimonials of now elderly white and South Asian women who lived and worked in a logging community in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island during the same period as the Sanderson’s. The two pairs are dramatically

Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project 173

different, aesthetically and historiographically. The first participates in modernism’s anti-aesthetic through its feminist/Brechtian drama, which is at turns ironic, critical, and, as Diamond has called it, ‘hysterical.’ The second pair of episodes is a sympathetic recollection of the suffering and achievements of authentic social subjects. In the first set, the archive is suspect, Dorothy grows progressively unheroic and unsympathetic, and, while the set employs techniques from radio and film melodrama, the aesthetic works against the pleasures of identification. The first episode is called ‘Educating Appetites’ and it opens with archival propaganda footage about teaching women how to avoid waste and develop a new respect for food. We then find Dorothy at home filling out an application for postwar employment while listening to a radio panel about the status of women now that the husbands are returning from war. Interspersed with footage of women working in factories, the panel sets about discussing whether women should be permitted to work outside the home. The panel is hosted by Mr Grey, a figure who also regularly enters the diegetic space as a type of confidante-confessor-cum-analyst for both Dorothy and George, and the panelists are thin stereotypes of social attitudes towards gender roles. Mrs Royston is a Royalist and, not surprisingly, believes women should stay home and raise Canadian citizens; Dr Spark presents ‘reasonable’ economic arguments for women in the workforce; and Mrs Cotwood is an upper-middle-class feminist. In the midst of one of Mrs Royston’s statements about women’s domestic duties, Dorothy’s anger is sublimated into a fantasy wherein she projects herself onto the panel and performs a passionate argument on behalf of women’s autonomy. The technique used here and at other key moments of desire, fantasy, and/or remembrance involves a white iris and soft focus that combine to produce a highly artificial space and an utter disruption in the diegetic world. For example, George’s recollection of having first met Dorothy begins with archival footage of women working at the Trocadero lunch counter in 1938, the time of the Vancouver strike and takeover of the art gallery, with George telling of how Dorothy would give free lunches to the organizers. But when he goes on to give an imagined memory about their separation during the war, there appears a white iris cameo of Dorothy, alone in her bedroom, dressed in a satin dressing gown, sad and lonely, drinking whisky from a bottle. Further on, this technique is used as a mock advertisement, with Dorothy dancing with her vacuum. Equally disruptive is the way archival material is used. At times, it merely moves the narrative along, such as when war propaganda or newsreel material creates transitions in time and place; but, while the

174 Susan Lord

image-track provides continuity, Diamond intervenes with sound. For example, after the panel ends its debate, we are given war ministry propaganda about the final battle and the return of the soldiers. The victorious melody of ‘The Maple Leaf Forever’ plays over the equally victorious bombing campaign; then the footage cuts to a cemetery full of white crosses marking the graves of the war dead, but the soundtrack continues to play the tune of celebration. These sound and image montages, along with the ongoing disruption of the narrative world, make it increasingly difficult to find a means by which to fully enter and identify with the story of George and Dorothy. The narrative itself is about failure, not about success, progress, or achievement. The traps of patriarchy, nationalism, war, and capitalism shrink the characters’ potentialities. George is unable to find meaningful work at a good salary; he does not permit Dorothy to work, and all of her passion in the opening scene becomes a mere memory and a source of resentment against George. They compensate for the loss of meaningful work – George by drink, Dorothy by consumer desires. Even her poker-group-coffee-clatches become a scenario for complaint instead of action. At the end of the second episode, she is off to work a night shift: she has given George and Bobby dinner and the television is on. While these episodes are clearly located in the past – are about historical conditions – their inevitable chronological movement forward, combined with the denaturalizing techniques, presents the viewer with a critical vantage through which to consider not just the past formations of capitalist and patriarchal culture, but also the present formations. There is no space for nostalgia, nor is the present good enough; hence, the work is pitched to the future. In the second pair of episodes (‘Women of the Wood’ and ‘Community Acts’), the trajectory is clearly towards the past. It is not deeply nostalgic, but the act of re-collecting and rescuing from amnesia a culture of women and work demands an authenticity and insists on a truth, however subjectively presented such truth may be. The motivation for the use of archival material is now much less consistent: sometimes it confirms the oral histories; sometimes the oral histories seem to undo the truth of the archive. But, here, truth is with the social subject. The women are both heroic and everyday. The stories function as testimony to the incredibly hard and dangerous lives lived by loggers and their families. While the main thrust of this history takes place around the same time as the depictions of Dorothy and George, the earliest date given is 1917, when Pritam Kaur Dley’s husband-to-be arrived in British Columbia from India. By 1931 eight hundred East Indians lived in

Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project 175

Vancouver, most of whom worked in the agricultural or logging industries. The eight women (four white and four East Indian) interviewed tell of their experiences of the close-knit communities in logging camps, of the racism experienced by them and their children, of the dangerous work done by them and their husbands, and the deplorable conditions in the camps. A majority of the screen time is given to the Indian women. These stories in the forth and final episode focus on organizing, unionism, and the issues facing women within a union context. The Indian women disappear from this history, and the archival footage of union events shows a white community. The history the women tell, too, is a history of the women’s auxiliary and the struggles they had with the union leaders. Whereas in parts 1 and 2, the archival material was all from the public record, in parts 3 and 4, the family and community photographs stand in for the lack of publicity of these women’s lives. Through the combination of oral history, on-camera interviews with elderly women, and the family album, the viewer is engaged in the history through a much more affective and ethical process. The women’s acts of remembrance, of re-collecting from the remains of time a history neither told by the unions nor by the state and labour historians, makes for a complex viewing experience that leaves one with a feeling for the past. These projects of historical critique, on the one side, or memory work, on the other, shape the work of Diamond and the WLHP. Although I have discussed only the first half of the decade of work here, I see the same issues about history and memory repeated in the second half. Diamond and the WLHP provide us with a double archive: a rich resource of historical material on the lives and contexts of workingclass women, and a set of works that embodies the shifting political and aesthetic ground between pasts and futures.

NOTES Thanks to Paul Kelley for his knowledge, experience and conversation about the specific history discussed here. 1 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2. 2 Homi Bhabha, ‘Preface,’ in Home, Exile, Homeland, ed. Hamid Naficy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), viii.

176 Susan Lord 3 For more on the relation between modern historiography, temporality, and media, I strongly recommend Philip Rosen’s Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), especially chapter 3, which works through the theories of historiographer Reinhart Koselleck, and chapter 8 on old and new media. 4 Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics and the First American Avant Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 5 Huyssen, Present Pasts, 5 and 11. It should be noted that much of the literature on memory to which Huyssen refers addresses itself to the Holocaust and other, more recent, traumas of global violence, such as the disappeared of Latin America. While I am not making a homology between the subject matter of Diamond’s tapes and the Holocaust, for instance, there is much to be said about the trauma of gender and class violence and poverty and their occlusions and distortions in the written and visual history of modernity. The reliance on oral testimony for the production of a counter-history of class and gender makes Huyssen’s remarks especially cogent for the material with which Diamond is working. 6 Thomas Miller Klubock, ‘History and Memory in Neoliberal Chile: Patricio Guzmán’s Obstinate Memory and The Battle of Chile,’ Radical History Review 85 (2003): 274. 7 Huyssen, Present Pasts, 5. 8 See Stan Persky, Fantasy Government: Bill Vander Zalm and the Future of Social Credit (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1989), esp. chap. 1. 9 Brian Palmer, Solidarity: The Rise and Fall of an Opposition in British Columbia (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1987), 20. 10 Ibid., 27. 11 Ibid., 76. 12 For more biographical information than I supply in this chapter, see the interview with Diamond conducted by Frances Pohl, ‘Sara Diamond: Video Art and Activism in Canada,’ Women’s Studies 25 (1996): 269–91. 13 This scene has been written about extensively. See, for instance, Stan Douglas, ed., Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art (Vancouver: Talon Books, 1991); Keith Wallace, ed., Whispered Art History: Twenty Years at the Western Front (Vancouver: Western Front, 1993); Jennifer Abott, ed., Making Video ‘In’: The Contested Ground of Alternative Video on the West Coast (Vancouver: Video In Studios, 2000). 14 For a more detailed sense of the scene, one need only look through back issues of Fuse – the culture magazine of the Left. Although there are institutional histories anthologized by Abbott, Douglas, and Wallace, this history of art and politics in Canada at this time has yet to be written. Nor

Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project 177

15 16

17 18 19 20

21

has a history of Fuse been undertaken. As for the Marxism of Vancouver’s intellectual scene, certain key moments became vectors of debate and dissent: Victor Burgin’s attack on John Berger marked the shift from social history to Althusserian ideology critique; TAs unionized at Simon Fraser University; the weekly tabloid The Georgia Straight published polemics about poetics and politics. Huyssen, ‘Memories of Utopia,’ in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 100. ‘Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema: From Introspection to Retrospection,’ in Gendering the Nation, ed. Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine Marchessault (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Jean Gagnon, Sara Diamond: Memories Revisited, Histories Retold, exhibition catalogue (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1992). Renée Baert, ‘Desiring Daughters,’ Screen 34, 2 (Summer 1993): 109–23; Gagnon, Sara Diamond. E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin, 1978), 170. Craig Ireland, ‘The Appeal to Experience and Its Consequences: Variations on a Persistent Thompsonian Theme,’ Cultural Critique 52 (2002): 89. Ireland presents Thompson’s development of this project as such: ‘By the time Thompson set out to write his history of the English working class, Althusser’s version of structuralism had turned ideology into so tentacular an entity that the very possibility of agency became wishful thinking at best. It was no longer sufficient to clamour for counter-histories and local cultures, for as readily penetrable as these appeared to be by ideology, they were unable to guarantee the specificity of group identity – a specificity without which a group would hardly be in a position to differentiate itself from other groups (such as those of the ruling class), let alone articulate its own socioeconomic interests. Counter-histories, moreover, had yet to be written, and subaltern cultures, when present, were in need of reinvigoration’ (98). Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience,’ Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 777.

9 Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Construction of the Nation margot francis

From its earliest days, the train has been romanticized and even sexualized, most often as a double for male sexuality ... One of the train’s great effects on modern Western culture was, in fact, its historical role in disrupting and uprooting traditional Victorian culture by literally destabilizing its social-sexual hierarchies. Lynne Kirby1 There were few Canadians who were not in some manner affected by the presence of the Canadian Pacific Railway; no other private company, with the single exception of the Hudson’s Bay, had such an influence on the destinies of the nation. Pierre Berton2

As Marnie Flemming comments, ‘everybody has a train story,’3 but most of these tales narrate the intrigue of train voyages and not the racialized and sexed history of the railway’s role in constructing the nation. However, the latter are the landscapes explored in Richard Fung’s video Dirty Laundry (1997). Here the liminal space of train travel intersects with the contested histories associated with the Chinese bachelors who built the most dangerous sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The title, Dirty Laundry, references both the stereotype of the Chinese laundry and the notion that aspects of Chinese-Canadian history have been considered too shameful to be re-remembered – dirty laundry not to be aired in public.4 Fung’s video problematizes these historical narratives of shame and ‘perversion,’ and destabilizes the very ground on which exclusive notions of national history and racialized subjectivity are constructed.

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 179

The specific dirty laundry around which this video revolves emerged from testimony to the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (1885), which charged that sodomy was a ‘common practice’ among Chinese men who were immigrating to Canada’s West Coast.5 Although Canadian scholars have documented the 1885 ‘head tax,’ which restricted Chinese immigration after the CPR was completed, and the constructed discrimination that made it impossible for most Chinese women to enter Canada until after 1947, none of this work acknowledges the allegations of ‘sodomy,’ nor does it attempt to decipher what these charges might have accomplished.6 Similarly, no Canadian artists besides Fung have taken up this area in their artistic production.7 Dirty Laundry’s sophisticated engagement contributes an important visual and intellectual text that warrants further analysis. My interest is in exploring how the visual strategies developed in Dirty Laundry reconfigure the seductive power of realist narrative – disidentifying with the conventions of traditional historical investigation and ‘identity’-based video. In the analysis that follows I will do two things. First, I situate Dirty Laundry at the juncture of a historiographic examination of raced, classed, and sexed masculinity, examining how these representations were reconstituted in the crucible of western Canada. Secondly, I draw on the theory of disidentification articulated by José Esteban Muñoz to examine how the video works on and against dominant cultural norms, not by aligning with or against exclusionary practices, but by reworking them from within.8 These tactics suggest a redeployment of the past in ways that offer a sophisticated critique of ‘single-stranded’ historical narratives.9 Like the acclaimed film Looking for Langston, the evidence that Fung brings together in Dirty Laundry is composed only partially from historical fact. Instead, the video fleshes out a mode of reading/viewing history that is attentive to the silences that echo through narratives of the western frontier. Indeed, Dirty Laundry invites the reader to imagine, remember, and flesh out what Willa Cather has called ‘the inexplicable presence of the thing[s] not named’ in the construction of the nation.10 ‘An Alien Race in Every Sense’11 I start this investigation with a brief examination of how particular kinds of masculinity were reconstituted in the crucible of the western frontier. In the 1880s the colonial politics of exclusion were contingent on constructing categories, among which were legal and discursive classifications identifying who was ‘white’ and who was a ‘resident

180 Margot Francis

alien,’ as Chinese settlers were designated until 1947, the year they were granted the vote. Among other things, these categories determined the types of employment that would be granted to different ‘classes’ of men. While it was commonly asserted that only white men were genuinely fit to develop the resources of the young nation, Chinese labourers were actually a lynchpin for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Their cheap wages saved the company between three and five million dollars and, according to Pierre Berton, ‘undoubtedly’ saved Andrew Onderdonk (the contractor for the western section of the CPR) from bankruptcy.12 Indeed, Chinese workers were often described as ‘living machines,’ a remarkable comment on the ambivalent place they held in the settlers’ imagination. This language suggests no small amount of admiration – a sentiment echoed in the Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (1885), which concluded, ‘as a railway navvy, the Chinaman has no superior.’13 Nevertheless the actual treatment accorded these workers confirmed that they were regarded as a lower order of men. Chinese labourers were paid roughly one-half to two-thirds the amount accorded Euro-Canadian workers. The discourse that made Chinese labour so self-evidently ‘cheap,’ however, was not made through racial categories alone: constructions of gender and sexuality were themselves abiding and flexible strategies of racial dominance. Yet the intersections between these axes of power were not always homogeneous or predictable. For instance, while Chinese labourers were thought of as members of an inferior race, white employers also represented them as industrious, sober, and docile workers.14 Virtually all the major industries in British Columbia employed a two-tired labour system where white men were employed in the ‘skilled’ positions and Chinese men were assigned the ‘menial’ work.15 Here, it was precisely Chinese men’s diligence and supposed obedience – traits that were represented as distinctly ‘feminine’ – that justified employers’ relegating them to the most menial tasks, underpaying them, and often minutely controlling their labour. Similarly, the jobs available to Chinese men outside of railway work and resource extraction were also distinctly feminized: laundry, domestic service, and tailoring.16 Indeed, these were open to Chinese men precisely because white women were in short supply in the province.17 This history might imply that Chinese workers did not resist economic exclusions or maltreatment, but this was not the case.18 Nevertheless, even their efforts at resistance met with racialized inscriptions

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 181

of gender and sex, which reproduced racial dominance. For example, in 1881 the province of British Columbia attempted to collect school taxes from Chinese labourers working on the CPR. As previous attempts had forced the local constable ‘to beat a retreat’ in fear of bloodshed, the next delegation included eight special constables and Chinese interpreters. As the Cariboo Sentinel reported, at the first camp near Spuzzum, ‘the demand to pay the School Tax only caused our Celestial friends visited to look more comical than usual when amused. As the demand for payment was repeated in a voice and manner that argu’d business was meant, John Chinaman’s bristles commenc’d to rise, and it looked as if a “spec of war” was on hand. Capt. Todd placed his men, all well armed with first-class revolvers in battle array, and this caused the antitaxers to weaken, and becoming docile again they paid their taxes “like little men.”’19 The men recruited for the CPR could not bring their wives and children to live in the work camps set up along the line. Even if their children had been nearby, they were forbidden to attend white Canadian schools. Yet despite these barriers, the Sentinel ridiculed Chinese workers’ outrage when they were asked to pay taxes for services they were forbidden to use. Further, their acquiescence, when faced with the threat of violence, resulted in their being characterized as ‘little men.’ Needless to say, this discourse produced Chinese men as exploitable through demeaning their masculinity.20 The gendering of racial discourse started early in western settlement. At a public meeting called in Victoria to discuss road construction in 1860, the assembled crowd entertained a motion for a poll tax on Chinese immigrants. As Peter Ward tells us, after the Chinese had been denounced as ‘a nuisance – a moral scourge – a curse,’ the chairman continued to the ‘great amusement’ of the crowd to ‘disdainfully declare that “the Chinaman came to this country but produced nothing; he didn’t even reproduce himself.”’21 Here the clear implication is that Chinese settlers were not virile or manly enough to reproduce themselves, not that they were paid insufficient wages to bring their wives and children with them, or even that their own patriarchal norms favoured the immigration of men. Indeed, Chinese settlers were considered an ‘ancient and effete civilization,’ a representation that was useful precisely because it allowed white men to construct contrasting ‘new world’ forms of what it meant to ‘be a man,’ constituting them as properly masculine and forwardlooking. Thus representations of the new dominion emphasized its

182 Margot Francis

youthful promise, and the prime of Canadian manhood was understood to be self-evidently healthy, vigorous, and virile. This discourse was aided through identifying and castigating those civilizations (and men) thought to be ancient, effete, and unmanly.22 However, some did comment on the contradictions. For instance, Commissioner Gray from the 1885 royal commission found it ‘strange to hear the strong broadshouldered superior race, superior physically and mentally, sprung from the highest types of the old and the new world, expressing fear of competition, with a small, inferior, and comparatively speaking feminine race.’23 Racist politics have shaped colonial discourses of exclusion and constituted different categories of men in the early Canadian West. How then does Richard Fung’s video Dirty Laundry re-imagine this history? From a Foucauldian perspective, the CPR can be seen to symbolize the decentred strategies of imperial rule and is a consummate emblem of ‘the capillaries of colonial appropriation.’24 In the United States it was the railroad, rather than the military that tipped the balance of power with Native peoples and made the outcome of the war for the western territories inevitable. Similarly in Canada, the railway cemented the transition to white imperial rule and became a central trope of Canadian nation building, (signifying imperial speed, power, size, and control). With this in mind, I shall explore how Dirty Laundry’s visual and narrative text provide a different point of entry for rethinking the ways in which particular kinds of gendered and racialized masculinity were reconstituted on the western frontier. Dirty Laundry: Activist Video and the ‘Theatre of History Making’25 Dirty Laundry originates from the experimental documentary tradition and brings together disparate modes such as historical investigation, travelogue, and narrative drama. The video combines a montage of archival photographs, film images, and acted sequences to reconstruct the conflicting narratives associated with early Chinese work on the CPR. This visual material is overlaid by interviews with historians, writers, and activists, whose perspectives sometimes stand in uneasy relation to the archival images. As Thomas Waugh argues, the video embodies a fundamental disjuncture where the secret compartments and corridors of a transcontinental train provide the setting for a collision of Chinese diasporas and the queer nation.26 This convergence

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 183

engages and transgresses a multitude of boundaries, blurring distinctions between the past and the present, subjective meanings and external definitions, and assumptions regarding the innocent and degenerate tropes of citizenship. The video begins with historian Nayan Shah’s reflections on the nature of historical memory and the patterns of erasure and forgetting that mark the West. Archival film footage presents an early railway trek through the Rockies with CPR workers on the margins of the tracks, their very presence a blur on the edge of our vision, indistinct and fleeting as the train hurtles forward. Then the scene shifts to a presentday railway car, in which Roger Kwong, a Toronto writer, travels through the mountains to Vancouver. The camera shows Roger’s line of vision wander pleasurably over the butt of a white passenger adjusting his luggage. However, when Roger approaches a Chinese railway steward to request a seat change, the narrative shifts. Roger does not speak any of the languages of China and cannot produce the privileged marker of linguistic belonging. ‘How can you be Chinese and not speak Chinese?’ the railway steward asks him. The question hangs uncomfortably in the air between the two men, disrupting any easy or automatic assumption of a shared identity.27 The video’s movement back and forth between historical analysis and fictional travelogue is based on Fung’s belief that different kinds of narrative forms convey different kinds of truth. The director suggests that he didn’t want viewers to feel too secure with either fiction or history.28 Indeed, the historical and current sequences are all acted by the same cast, intimating how one generation’s narratives about honour, misery, intimacy, and ‘vice’ bleed into the next and echoing the instability of the discourses of sexuality and history. Further questions of interpretation are highlighted throughout, in the movie’s construction as a cinematic ‘triptych.’ Here the inspiration was primarily aesthetic. Fung describes most of his video work as operating in ‘movements,’ suggesting the classic forms of musical composition.29 In Dirty Laundry, we see this form used to articulate the discursive tropes that have structured Chinese-Canadian history. While national histories tend to reconstruct ideas of ‘heroes’ and ‘vices,’ Fung deploys these notions as a narrative device, structuring the video into three sections: ‘A History of Heroes,’ ‘A History of Vices,’ and ‘A History of Questions.’ On their own, the first two approaches represent a kind of controlled symmetry: they represent ‘opposite’ but mutually reinforcing approaches to Chinese-Canadian history. However, their juxtaposi-

184 Margot Francis

tion with ‘A History of Questions’ ironizes these parallels while at the same time staging a fundamental query about the paradoxes of historical investigation. Fung lists among his contemporary influences a variety of independent film and video makers in Britain including John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien.30 These artists now represent an established tradition in Black British cinemas where questions of history are mapped simultaneously through several different time frames. This aesthetic is not unique to Black cinema but, as Jun Xing notes, informs much independent Asian-American film as well.31 Indeed, Fung suggests that Dirty Laundry was partly influenced by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film Naked SpacesLiving Is Round, which articulated the fragmentary quality of knowledge through a series of unsettling visual and narrative juxtapositions.32 Many of these cinematic attempts to rethink historical memory employ visual and narrative strategies that are consistent with Foucault’s theory of genealogy. While traditional history (and Hollywood cinemas) is usually productive of links that unite events into a coherent story, Foucault suggests that ‘writing genealogy, on the other hand, involves the recognition of disparity, of the dispersion of origins, and links, of discontinuities and contradictions.’33 Indeed, genealogical and postmodern approaches to history have pushed debates about objectivity to a critical juncture, where, as Joan Scott has observed, new work has multiplied not only stories, but subjects, insisting that histories are written from fundamentally different and sometimes irreconcilable standpoints, none of which may be completely ‘true.’34 However, if genealogical methods involve the recognition of these contradictions, then artistic resistance, for example, can also work through this discontinuity. As Foucault elaborates in The History of Sexuality, ‘we must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.’35 These approaches have been translated into the visual arena through the techniques of montage. Originated by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, these strategies rely on juxtaposing a series of attractions that, on the level of traditional novelistic logic, both clash with and complement each other in dialectical relation. Eisenstein was particularly attracted to techniques that combined realist and abstract film

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 185

fragments into cinematic forms that interrupted the literalist assumptions of conventional narrative.36 He was also interested in the strategies of emotional combination that produced what he called ‘emotional dynamization.’ This kind of montage, if successful, led to the ‘liberation of the whole action from the definition of time and space.’37 Fung’s interpretation of montage juxtaposes a series of different textures, including poems, historical dramatization, vintage newsreel, travelogue, traditional Chinese instrumental music (composed by a contemporary Chinese-Canadian artist, Lee Pui Ming), still archival photographs, and a variety of nationalist and ‘honky tonk’ musical tunes. These juxtapositions suggest the dialectical interplay between past and present in a way that is transhistorical.38 In Dirty Laundry, Fung draws on and reconstitutes the filaments of a Chinese-Canadian cultural imaginary to enable what Foucault called a ‘history of the present.’ These crisscrossings of different visual, narrative, and historical forms allow viewers, as David Halperin has observed, to re-remember a past where ‘we appear different from ourselves, or from what we thought we were, and so we recover a sense of ourselves as sites of difference – hence, sites of possible transformation.’39 Indeed, these meditations ask us to consider how Dirty Laundry opens up the possibilities for a ‘non-indifferent’ response: through retelling histories that enable not just a learning of previously unknown facts and stories, but an unsettling of the frames of certitude that ground everyday understandings of the body and the nation.40 Listening to ‘A History of Heroes’ Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth, the immigration building in Victoria, British Columbia, contained a holding area where Chinese men were detained before they were granted admission to Canada. A dramatized representation of this holding area, along with the stone wall where generations of men scratched messages of despair, bitterness, and hope in rough-hewn Chinese characters, is a central image in the visual lexicon of Dirty Laundry. The actual wall on which this dramatized image is based was demolished in 1977, but some photographs have been preserved. In Dirty Laundry, Fung combines these archival images with historical dramatizations to explore the Chinese men’s complex practices of resistance in the face of state power. This first movement of Dirty Laundry starts with newsreel footage of

186 Margot Francis

hundreds of Chinese workers as they arrive in Victoria and are shipped to a new life in the Canadian West. The scratchy images are reminiscent of other mass shifts in population and signify both the dreams and apprehensions of diasporic populations. However, these associations are soon intercut with the haunting image of Chinese men carving on ‘the wall’: Fellow countrymen, quick read this. Scrapping together a few hundred dollars I left my home for a foreign land. Now I have been thrown into a prison cell, I cannot sleep because my heart is filled with hate. When I think of these foreign devils, my anger rises.

The exercise of state power in detaining Chinese men in holding cells prior to their being released for ‘cheap’ labour was a performance in which the meaning was public and clear. Here the physical act of detainment was clearly racialized. While British and European immigrants were screened briefly and then released for settlement (often with a free parcel of land to get them started), Chinese workers were detained for unpredictable periods under conditions that articulated the following assumptions: these men are, by nature of race, incapable of citizenship and suspect for disease; they must be quarantined, controlled, and inspected. In the scene described above, Fung cites and reconstructs the Chinese detainee’s performance of fury at and resistance to the white Canadian ‘foreign devils.’ Perhaps the power of the poems and stories makes it no surprise that ‘the wall’ was demolished and removed from public view. Nevertheless, this artistic reiteration suggests the duel meanings inherent in ‘dirty laundry.’ Here historical dramatization reinserts a combative ‘other’ into the Canadian state’s detached narrative of mass migration. Indeed, ‘the wall’ serves as a forceful reminder of the inequities and erasures that underlay tidy nationalist euphemisms of a ‘multicultural’ and depoliticized history. In a later scene, Fung takes up practices of erasure and silence again, but this time from a different angle. The video presents an interview with the novelist Sky Lee (with ‘the wall’ in the background), where she describes silencing as a form of self-protection. Indeed, Lee suggests that for early Chinese settlers, some practices of forgetting were also double-edged strategies of survival: ‘Chinese people clamped down on

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 187

revealing who they were and we still see the effects of this today. I call it misplaced cultural protectionism. Because we were so misinterpreted by the racist dominant culture that we just didn’t talk – about it – in front of them. [However] before long we found ourselves not talking about it at all. We just internalized that stigma, as shame.’ Here strategies of survival produce their own lesions. Despite the ironic title of this section – ‘A History of Heroes’ – Lee’s analysis suggests the potentially self-destructive contradictions of Chinese settler’s resistance. Indeed, blithely ahistorical notions of ‘cross-cultural dialogue’ pale before the effects of generations of this kind of silence. In this context, ‘shame’ is a symptom of an imperialist history where those traumatized by racism often carry an impossible legacy. Indeed as Cathy Caruth remarks, this trauma is a symptom of a history that cannot be possessed and yet has not been resolved.41 These different forms of ‘silenc(e)(ing)’ require multiple readings. Indeed, the meanings reverberate: Who has dirty laundry? Why are some ashamed and others not? For what ends the practices of silence and erasure? Always it is relations of power that structure these narratives, while the juxtapositions suggest the complex narratives through which, as Foucault suggests, discourse becomes ‘both an instrument and an effect of power, but also ... a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy.’42 In David Li’s archival photographs of ‘the wall,’ the narratives of Chinese detainees form a haunting template imprinted on the stone masonry of the immigration building. Although Chinese men were known in Canada (and the United States) as ‘bachelors,’ most had wives and children in China. Dirty Laundry highlights repeated instances where archival writing on ‘the wall’ suggests that these men sometimes took on the voice of their wives in order to admonish themselves for failing in their obligations to adequately support their families at home. Thus while present-day viewers have no unmediated access to these writings, it appears Chinese men often took on women’s voices in what Fung has called a kind of ‘authorial transvestism.’43 As Edward Said points out, the word ‘author’ springs from the same etymological roots as authority and is attended by potent notions of engendering, mastery, and property.44 The term ‘transvestite’ derives from the prefix ‘trans,’ which means ‘across’ and the Latin ‘vestire,’ meaning clothe.45 In this context, ‘authorial transvestism’ suggests that Chinese men transgressed the (in)vestments of gender to take on the voice, manner, and concerns of women.

188 Margot Francis

In this context, the kind of authorship articulated on ‘the wall’ presents the possibility that Chinese men expanded marital relations beyond those of property – or at least ventriloquised their wives’ rebuke for their own failures in this regard. Dirty Laundry dramatizes this history through its re-presentation of these doubly authored narratives of bitterness and disappointment. For instance, in one dramatized sequence we see a woman braiding her husband’s hair in front of an evening fire while a female voice speaking in the rural Toisan dialect (translated into English subtitles) angrily reproves her partner: ‘Not half a cup of rice can be scooped from the pot. All our things are broken. Our house is falling apart. Your gambling has driven us to poverty.’ Titled ‘My Wife’s Admonishment,’ this reproof articulates the words of an anonymous message from ‘the wall’ pictured in Li’s image. This fragment may have been written by the ‘gambling’ husband himself or by a relative or friend who was sympathetic to the impoverished lives these women led. Here we see that Dirty Laundry does not simply replace one ‘true’ narrative with another. Instead, a range of doubled visual and narrative strategies work to dislodge the certainties of historical ‘truth’ from their privileged moorings. The sequence above acknowledges the familial loyalty and financial responsibility that tied these men to their wives, children, and homeland. At the same time, the video’s central focus is an exploration of the queer possibilities implicit in Chinese men’s lives as ‘bachelors’ in Canada. Further as Peter Steven remarks, while most documentaries construct expert knowledge by placing interviewees in a book-lined study, here the historians, activists, and writers are all shown with fictional or archival images in the background, a visual technique that problematizes the airtight boundaries between history and fiction. This strategy shifts conventional associations between professional status and ‘true’ knowledge, implying ‘that these professionals are as tangled in messy reality as the rest of us.’46 Indeed, the early ‘professionals’ who testified before the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration constitute a prime example of this tangle. Earlier in its triptych, Dirty Laundry shows us a garrulous and self-important white miner who testified to the commission about the difficulties of making ends meet on meagre wages, ending his monologue with the rhetorical question, ‘How is it with the Chinaman?’ A short while later, the miner answers his own query in a voice tinged with resentment and anger:

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 189 The Chinaman can do as much work underground as I can. He has no wife or family. He performs none of these duties. Forty or fifty of his kind can live in a house no larger than mine. He craves no variety of food. He has inherited no taste for comfort or for social enjoyment. Conditions that satisfy him and make him contented would make my life not worth living ... The Chinaman comes in, taking advantage of our skill and of our toil and of our struggles, and drives us from the fields of industry which we have created and which our race alone could create.

However, in the midst of this monologue, the miner rematerializes (complete with a natty new set of clothes and more authoritative speaking voice) as Senator Jones of Nevada. Here Fung reconstructs a second performance of ‘authorial transvestism.’ This time the narrative is based on an actual presentation by Senator Jones to the royal commission, where he took it upon himself to act as a ‘representative’ of ‘the people’ and ‘condensed many a harangue from his white workmen’ in his testimony.47 In this instance, the senator’s ventriloquism (transgressing the boundaries of class) functions in the interests of white racial dominance. Whatever the motives of Jones’s original performance, it is likely its effect was to deepen existing cleavages between differently racialized groups of working-class men. It seems that for Jones, solidarity was rooted in race or, to be more specific, in whiteness. Interestingly, Jones’s actual testimony to the royal commission also articulated everyday assumptions about Chinese ‘bachelors’ as men who were unencumbered by heterosexual responsibilities. As we have seen, these ideas are dramatically at odds with the written texts that chronicle many Chinese men’s own conflicted response to diasporic separations. If this kind of testimony played a leading role in constituting public discourse about Chinese men, it also worked to define the racial ‘norm.’ As Nayan Shah observes in the video, ‘whiteness’ as a category was being produced during the late nineteenth century, and the classed and raced tensions informing Senator Jones’s testimony illustrate precisely this process of ‘white’ racial formation.48 As Shah is interviewed, a series of visual images rearticulate his analysis with eerie familiarity. Here the video juxtaposes Shah’s appraisal with those oh-so-familiar imperial tropes: imperial soldiers on parade and eminently respectable women in all their finery on the church steps. These images imply a startling set of meanings, namely that whiteness itself was consolidated through both military power and imperial ritual. How might these

190 Margot Francis

grainy images of military pageantry and gendered morality have actually worked to constitute white Canadian national traditions? Anne McClintock argues that national collectivity has been established predominately through the vehicle of spectacle, and that nationalism, in this respect, inhabits the realm of fetishism.49 Indeed, while European nationalism espoused the nation-state as the embodiment of rational progress, fetishistic visual rituals worked despite, or perhaps because of, the Enlightenment’s denigration of such cultural forms as the antithesis of Reason. McClintock continues: ‘More often than not, nationalism takes shape through the visible, ritual organization of fetish objects – flags, uniforms, air plane logos, maps, anthems ... as well as through the organization of collective fetish spectacle – in team sports, military displays, mass rallies ... Far from being purely phallic icons, fetishes embody crises in social value, which are projected onto and embodied in, what can be called impassioned objects.’50 The cartoon that constitutes the next image in Dirty Laundry provides an eloquent illustration of the images and ideas that have fuelled Canada’s ‘impassioned’ image of itself. The drawing shows a group of European men, each representing the figure of a country (Belgians, Englishmen, Russians, Americans, Austrians, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Scandinavians), all brought together by a Canadian Mountie who conducts them in singing ‘The Maple Leaf Forever.’ If Canada’s crisis can be figured as the need to rethink colonial authority for a polyglot settler community, then images like these emphasized the transnational markers of Europeanness: all brought together to sing from the same songsheet. Here the words and images of the anthem illustrate the primacy of ‘British’ heritage at the same time as they obscure the history of England’s brutal relations with its own ‘internal’ colonies: The Maple Leaf our emblem dear The Maple Leaf forever, With Lily, Thistle, Shamrock, Rose, The Maple Leaf forever.51

The populist iconography of the cartoon illustrates different shades of imperial ‘white,’ but there is no room in this cozy circle for a nonwhite national identity. Importantly, of all the ‘peoples’ represented in this image, none stray from the ‘Homo Europeanus’ of ‘superior’ health and intelligence who was assumed to constitute the national norm. Indeed, these symbols of white nation building have been crucial to

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 191

papering over myriad racial and classed tensions that have always threatened Canada’s unity. In this context, it is useful to remember that the icon of the railway is also a potent image of white imperial progress. In this image we see linear time represented as a forward-thrusting track of steel traced across the space of the wilderness, symbolizing an unfolding national drama of masculine vigour and racial advancement. ‘A History of Vices’ The scene that sets the tone for ‘A History of Vices’ opens with Roger Kwong nodding off to sleep as the sole occupant of a coveted upper rail car – a private space that facilitates both his writing and a sexual affair with the railway steward. As Roger’s head slumps to the table, he inadvertently knocks a small portrait of his great-grandfather to the floor, smashing the glass cover. Roger’s great-grandfather worked on the railroad, and his father insisted that Roger bring the picture along as he travelled through the mountains. However, when the portrait comes loose from its frame, a second image is revealed hidden behind the first. In the second portrait, Roger’s great-grandfather is joined by another Chinese man. The two men stare directly into the camera and lightly hold hands. Later, when the railway steward arrives to wake Roger, he notices the pictures. Looking at the second portrait he comments, ‘This is normal in China.’ Roger, surprised, asks what he means. The steward responds, ‘That men hold hands.’ The question of how the ‘normal’ is constituted in different cultural contexts and historical eras is one of the most fascinating puzzles raised in Dirty Laundry. In China, as in many non-western countries, homosocial norms may have produced practices of friendship that could be read as queer in the present-day West. Post-colonial and queer scholarship have yet to provide more than a scattering of studies that analyse these configurations.52 Dirty Laundry engages this arena in its third movement, after an interlude during which Roger and the steward engage in a steamy sex scene that renders visible relatively explicit contemporary sexual identities and practices in contrast to the homosocial ambiguities of history. As Gina Marchetti has pointed out, the relationship between Roger, who is a typical Asian ‘guppy’ (gay, upwardly mobile professional), and the steward provides an implicit critique of class-related stereotypes.53 Roger’s guide to the history of same-sex relationships among Chinese men is not an emperor, eunuch, or court favourite, but the

192 Margot Francis

working-class porter. And unlike colonial representations of homoeroticism, the steward does not play a ‘houseboy’ for the affluent journalist. Instead, the porter takes the lead in bed as well as acting as an intellectual and cultural guide who encourages Roger to gain a better appreciation of this own great-grandfather and his history. Thus the erudite and assertive steward affirms the working-class gay Chinese past as an integral part of Canada’s globalizing future.54 It is in this context that Roger asks the porter, ‘You know what you were saying about men holding hands. What does it mean?’ The steward replies, ‘It means that they like each other, that they’re friends or brothers.’ Roger: ‘Not lovers?’ Steward: ‘Well, it’s a smart thing. If they’re lovers they can hold hands and nobody asks any questions.’

While the historical notions of friendship that the railway steward references problematize modern western uses of terms like homosexual and heterosexual, the history of same-sex friendship in the West also holds considerable ambiguity. For example, for white upper-middleclass men in Victorian England, life revolved around predominantly male institutions, including the public school, the university, the armed forces, the church, parliament, the club, and the city. In this context, marriage was often deferred, ostensibly for economic and social reasons, and clergymen, schoolmasters, dons, and army officers usually remained bachelors. Although the complex notions of gender and sex produced in these contexts are now receiving some attention, the disproportionate numbers of Chinese and white bachelors working on the railway and on the early western frontier have attracted less notice. It is striking that many normative frontier activities required homosocial pairings: cowboy bosses advised men to take a partner when exploring new trails; bachelor homesteaders often staked out their claim with a male partner to share the work and lessen the isolation; and mining claims were often worked by two men together in virtually all-male work camps.55 The hierarchical terrain of Canadian imperial settlement was marked by deeply homosocial codes, yet white men were rarely suspected of any improprieties. Instead, Chinese ‘bachelors’ were the target for charges of sexual ‘perversion.’ As Nayan Shah comments in an interview early in the second movement of Dirty Laundry, the multi-racial and sex-segregated societies that

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 193

typified the late-nineteenth-century frontier allowed for a range of sexual, racial, and gender crossings that may not have been as common in eastern Canada. Indeed, this period also witnessed a number of historic shifts in legal and sexual codes that present a telling juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated but potentially linked events. While Fung often uses the technique of montage to highlight these associations, the video also uses the more straightforward strategy of a printed text against a background of dramatized sequences or archival images. Early in the second triptych, for example, a text reminds us that ‘In 1885, the year Canada institutes the Head Tax, Britain criminalizes all sexual activity between men as “gross indecency.”’ This simultaneous tightening of the codes that regulated men’s movement across sexual and national boundaries suggests a hardening in the norms of citizenship. The strict enforcement of heteronormative sexual contact is only one of many forms of regulation, all of which operated to produce the ideal citizen as a respectable, white, heterosexual man. How might we understand the trope of the ‘perverse’ Chinese bachelor in this context? I argue that this discourse did the ideological work of focusing attention away from the mass of not-so-ideal white bachelors who thronged the bars and brothels in settlements throughout the West. Discourses regarding the ‘degenerate Chinaman’ or ‘Orientals’ kept the boundaries of ‘civilized’ white society from becoming dangerously blurred. Many different men found themselves ‘batching it,’ as the saying went, yet western discourse about ‘bachelors’ was not a seamless whole.56 Cecilia Danysk suggests that early journals, novels, and newspaper reports from the West represented Euro-Canadian bachelors as living in squalor, disorder, and loneliness, many of the same conditions often attributed to Chinese bachelor communities. Yet these images did not usually cause white bachelor settlers to be castigated as perverse. Indeed, the situation was quite the reverse: white women viewed these men with ‘tolerance, concern and benevolence, and often with bemused affection.’ Danysk continues: Westerners, particularly [white] women, felt a certain responsibility towards them. Part of a women’s duty in the west ... was ‘being kind to poor [white] bachelors round about who needed kindness badly.’ Bachelors were more to be pitied than scorned, and the sorrier their existence, the greater the solicitude ... Bachelor homesteader S. Jickling and his partner Stan were often in-

194 Margot Francis vited by the women in the district ‘for a clean bite,’ as they called it. Clearly, there was a special niche reserved for [white] men without [white] women. ‘I used to feel so sorry for those boys,’ recalled one pioneer: ‘They were so pitiful. My mother, she worried over them and she babied them and they came to her with all their troubles.’57

Danysk argues that the major reason (white) bachelors found such acceptance was that their ‘condition’ was temporary – it was assumed that most bachelors would eventually find wives and settle in a town or on a farm. Yet in order for this assumption to have any meaning, these men had to be seen as ‘marriageable’ in the first place. And ‘marriageability’ was a quality only white men shared. The contrast between representations of Chinese and white bachelors could not be more stark. Madge Pon points out that, that instead of receiving ‘bemused affection,’ Chinese men were subject to a full-scale moral panic that branded them as ‘yellow fiends,’ ‘yellow devils,’ and ‘yellow Chinamen.’58 These designations formed condensed epithets whose meaning reproduced ideas about a jaundiced and unhealthy race who epitomized a cowardly and degraded masculinity. Gail Bederman reminds us that western imperial cultural norms identified advanced civilizations by the degree of their gender differentiation. In civilized society, women were womanly – delicate, spiritual, and dedicated to the home – and men were the most manly ever evolved – firm of character and self-controlled.59 In this context, racial slurs indicating that Chinese men were ‘unmanly’ also suggested that they lacked a masculine ability to restrain their passions. Similarly, terms like ‘fiends’ or ‘devils’ summoned up ideas about evil beings who were prone to any manner of perversity or licentiousness.60 Shah argues that, despite a widespread moral panic about the high rates of venereal infection among men, a discourse of ‘deviant heterosexuality’ was the main explanation used to frame white men’s sexual ‘indiscretions.’ In contrast, speculations of sodomy were entertained primarily when questioning the syphilic infection of Chinese men.61 All this, despite the thousands of bachelor homesteaders like S. Jickling and his partner, Stan, who settled in communities all across the West. In this context it is useful to remind ourselves that Asia and the Orient had been a site of sexualized European imaginings long before western Canada was settled.62 The proximity of Euro-Canadian and Chinese settlers constituted a new site in which sexual paranoia about ‘the far East’ was utilized to constitute the boundaries of a civilized white

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 195

hetero-morality. Indeed, the Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration contains fantastical descriptions of Chinese men’s supposed affinity for a variety of ‘perverse’ and outrageous sexual antics, testimony that Dirty Laundry appropriates for a hilarious and fleeting spoof. If accusations of perversion were always/already written on the body of Chinese men, Dirty Laundry uses an innovative set of visual techniques to reconfigure these associations. Near the end of ‘A History of Vices,’ a dramatized sequence shows a bare-chested Chinese man entering a darkened room, where Chinese characters are projected onto the wall behind him. As the man walks towards us we hear a narrator, speaking in rural Toisan, whispering the words for male love. Then the text (made visible through faint light in the dark space) flickers over the actor’s body, as subtitles provide a translation: adopted brother, rabbit scoundrel, husband (hustler), ass ghost. The epithets range from several centuries and combine terms that may be understood both as despised insults and, occasionally, as intimate expressions of endearment. Here Chinese characters, formed through the play of shadow and light, flicker across the body, with words that brand and caress.63 Later in this sequence we return to a similar image. The same Chinese man is juxtaposed with Mr E. Stevenson, MD, of Victoria, who testifies to the royal commission in an attempt to defend the honour of the Chinese community. The words flicker from the wall behind both men to the body of the Chinese actor. This time the text is in English: ‘Gentlemen, you have heard several witnesses testify unfavorably on the Chinese Question ... It has been inferred, by Christian people, well I hesitate to say it, that sodomy was by them practiced. I stamp it a damnable slander. A man who so acts bears the mark of Cain, not only on his forehead, but also all over him.’ The words flickering over the Chinese man’s body are Stevenson’s words. Yet despite Stevenson’s attempt to defend the Chinese bachelors, the visual effect of the accusation of sodomy remains the same. The text brands the Chinese man with ‘the mark of Cain’ while the white man remains both invulnerable and unscathed. ‘A History of Questions’ The final movement of Dirty Laundry opens with archival photographs of Chinese ‘bachelors’ and ‘prostitutes’ being submerged under a swirl of dirty water. These are the images of perversion, which epitomize the supposedly shameful aspects of Chinese-Canadian history. However,

196 Margot Francis

Dirty Laundry represents these emblems of a tainted past in ways that reconfigure the discourse of shame. As Eve Sedgwick comments in a recent essay: ‘The forms taken by shame are not distinct “toxic” parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to ... the process in which identity is formed. They are available for the work of metamorphosis, reframing, refiguration, transfiguration ... but unavailable for effecting the work of purgation and deontological closure.’64 In other words, the discursive shaming of a group or individual cannot simply be purged or willfully evacuated. But the process of disidentification can recycle this history in order to use it as raw material for a performance that reconfigures its meaning – in ways that have usually been unthinkable to those in the dominant culture. Dirty Laundry suggests that the constructions of ‘shame,’ which emerge from a history of Chinese bachelors in building the CPR, are integral to both Euro-Canadian and Chinese history. My analysis has attempted to dislodge Chinese and white bachelors from the protective custody of the shadows for a much needed reassessment. I have argued that Dirty Laundry represents the process of negotiating multiple and conflicting racialized, classed, gendered, and sexed identities as a site of constant conflict and struggle – indeed, as an integral component of the work of constructing the Canadian nation. Fung decided to use an historiographic approach to making Dirty Laundry after conversations with several gay Chinese-Canadian friends prompted the realization that few had heard of the historic ‘bachelor societies.’ Indeed, the most common response to his queries was ‘were those the triads?’65 His own introduction to the early moral panic that branded Chinese-Canadian (and American) bachelors as ‘sodomites’ did not come from reading the history of early Chinese settlement on the Canadian frontier. Indeed, no Canadian historians have analysed these accusations. Instead, he came across a copy of the Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration while visiting the Chinatown History Museum in New York City. There, he flipped through the index and unearthed the references to ‘sodomy’ along with the attendant accusations of perversion. However, there are multiple stories of origin for this video, including that form of genealogy usually associated with family history. Fung’s father travelled through Canada after he left China in 1929 for the West Indies. The route involved travelling by sea from China to British Columbia and by rail – the Canadian Pacific Railway – across the dominion. Once on the east coast, he journeyed south by sea to Trinidad. Fung Sr travelled during the period known as the Exclusion Era (1923–46),

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 197

when no Chinese immigrants were allowed to settle in Canada, save a very few merchants and diplomats, along with their wives and servants. Thus while prospective Chinese immigrants were the target of the most racist immigration legislation in Canadian history, it did not affect them all equally. Those with monied status and connections could migrate, even during the period when others were shut out. However, for the vast majority of those who, like Fung’s father, sought to escape poverty and war in China, their view of Canada was shaped by the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was the railroad that provided the transcontinental route for a quick passage through the country and on to more hospitable destinations. The narratives in the video illustrate how the question of borders – those racialized, classed, gendered, and sexed mechanisms of exclusion – continues to haunt the present. At the end of the nineteenth century, western discourse about bachelors was crucial to the forms of regulation that secured Canada’s internal borders. Here, practices of whiteness and heteronormativity were secured through a host of separations that were anything but ‘natural.’ Needless to say, in the polyglot settler community of the West Coast, some bachelors were assumed to be more perverse than others. This analysis of Dirty Laundry has examined how particular kinds of racialized and sexed masculinity were reconstituted in the crucible of the western frontier. Dirty Laundry neither fashions a new coherence for this story nor provides a tidy resolution of contradictory events. But it does provide a starting point for exploring the queer valence that has always subliminally charged early nationalist discourse at the same time as it highlights the racialized codes that produced such differential narratives about ‘batching it’ on the frontier.

NOTES A previous version of this article has been published as ‘The Inexplicable Presence of Thing[s] Not Named: Dirty Laundry, the Railway and the Construction of Nation,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 10, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 48–69. It has been substantially revised for inclusion in this anthology. 1 Lynne Kirby, ‘Steamy Scenes and Dream Machines,’ in Marnie Flemming ed., Track Records: Trains and Contemporary Photography (Oakville, ON: Oakville Galleries in collaboration with the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 1997), 25–7.

198 Margot Francis 2 Pierre Berton, The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881–1885 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 6. 3 Marnie Flemming, ‘Preface and Acknowledgements,’ in Track Records, 9. 4 Richard Fung, Personal Interview, Toronto, 18 August 1999. 5 Hon. Mr Chapleau & Hon. Mr Justice Gray, Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa: Printed by Order of the Commission, 1885), 194. 6 Some of the major works that take up the labour of Chinese migrants on the CPR are: Patricia Roy, ‘A Choice between Evils: The Chinese and the Construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia,’ in The CRP West: The Iron Road and the Making of a Nation, ed. Hugh A. Dempsey (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1984); Anthony Chan, Gold Mountain: A History of the Chinese Communities in the New World (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1983); Edgar Wickberg ed., From China to Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982); Frank Kunyin Moy, ‘The Political Economy of Chinese Labour in Canada, 1858–1923’ (MA thesis, York University, 1970); Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991); W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990); Patricia E. Roy, A White Man’s Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858–1914 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1989). 7 To my knowledge no other Canadian artists have dealt with the possibilities or allegations of same-sex sexual practices among early ‘bachelor’ settlers of any race. 8 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). As Munoz elaborates, this approach allows us to: examine theories of a subject who is neither the ‘Good Subject,’ who has an easy or magical identification with dominant culture, nor the ‘Bad Subject,’ who imagines herself outside ideology. Instead, they pave the way to an understanding of a ‘disidentificatory subject,’ who tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against a cultural form (12). 9 ‘Single-stranded’ is Richard Fung’s term. 10 Willa Cather, ‘The Novel Démeublé,’ in Not Under Forty (New York: Knopf, 1936), 50; cited in Siobhan Somerville, ‘Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, 2 (1994): 246. 11 Sir John A. Macdonald (1882), quoted in Moy, ‘Political Economy of Chinese Labour,’ 60.

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 199 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26

Berton, Last Spike, 206. Quoted in ibid., 198. Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown, 56, and Berton, Last Spike, 200. Moy, ‘Political Economy of Chinese Labour,’ 49. Black seamen (or Lascars as they were pejoratively known) faced a similar gendering of work and wages on British ships. As Laura Tabili recounts, ‘In the eyes of employers and perhaps of the men themselves, each of these jobs [of a steamship] carried a status based on its perception as manly or menial, skilled or unskilled. Stewards’ jobs were dismissed as “women’s work” and stoking had “no seagoing traditions to support it.” These jobs were also typecast on racial lines, and Black seamen more often filled them while white men dominated deck crews. Blue Funnel ships had put Chinese in catering and stokehold crews and white men on deck; the Palm Line used Nigerian catering departments, “Somali” firemen and white deck crews ... Consistent with the definition of unmanliness, catering and housekeeping crews of certain lines were alleged havens for homosexuals and transvestites.’ Laura Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 48–9. The only occupation where Chinese communities challenged this association was market gardening. For further analysis of how Chinese workers fought back through organized protest and physical violence – despite the fact that the courts often treated them with greater severity than they did white men – see Patricia E. Roy, ‘A Choice Between Evils,’ 17–22. Ibid., 20. Interestingly, when the Manchus conquered China they also attempted to feminize and thus disempower their subjects through a decree that Chinese men must wear their hair in a pigtail as a mark of submission to this empire. Ibid., 24. Quoted in Ward, White Canada Forever, 25–6. Emphasis in the original. For a fascinating analysis of the construction of related forms of imperial masculinity see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Quoted in Roy, A White Man’s Province, 59. Cole Harris, The Re-settlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 184. I have borrowed this phrase from Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 103–27. Thomas Waugh, ‘Good, Clean Fung,’ Wide Angle 20, no. 2, A Festschrift in

200 Margot Francis

27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Honor of Erik Barnouw on the Occasion of His Ninetieth Birthday (April 1998): 164–75; reprinted in Peter X. Feng ed., Screening Asian Americans (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). Peter Steven, ‘The Art of Calculated Risk: Richard Fung’s Dirty Laundry,’ POV 29 (Spring 1996): 30–1. Ibid., 30–3. Richard Fung, personal interview with the author, Toronto, 7 March 2000. These two artists are part of a broader based Black London arts scene that began flourishing in the 1980s. These artists use a broad range of media technologies and visual formats to reinvigorate an artistic examination of identity, culture, and history. Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 223. Jun Xing, Asian America through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identity (London: Altamira Press – Sage Publications, 1980), 161–2. Richard Fung, Interview, 6 March 2000. Quoted in Xing, Asian America, 162. Joan Scott, ‘Experience,’ in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 24. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 100–1. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 60–1. Ibid., 58. Munoz, Disidentifications, 60. David M. Halperin, Saint = Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 105. Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction,’ in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5. Foucault, History of Sexuality. Richard Fung, personal interview with author, Toronto, 18 Aug. 1999. Quoted in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 300. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998). Steven, ‘Art of Calculated Risk,’ 33. Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, v. While some historians would place the development of white racial formation somewhat earlier, I am persuaded that the late nineteenth century constituted a crucial moment in the development of changed

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 201

49

50 51

52

notions of race in Canada. First, following on the work of Laura Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colonial Cultures,’ in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), my analysis assumes that definitions of Euro-Canadian and Chinese masculinity were not simply preformed in their respective metropoles and exported to the Canadian West. Instead, I suggest that British Columbia’s polyglot settler community required a radical rethinking of colonial authority. Second, as Anne McClintock elaborates, the development of ‘commodity racism’ played a crucial role. To expand, ‘if, after the 1850s, scientific racism saturated anthropological, scientific and medical journals, travel writing and novels, these cultural forms were still relatively classbound and inaccessible to most Victorians, who had neither the means nor the education to read such material. Imperial kitsch as consumer spectacle, by contrast, could package, market and distribute evolutionary racism on a hitherto unimagined scale.’ McClintock, Imperial Leather, 209. For further analysis see the chapter ‘Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising’ in McClintock’s book, 207–31. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 374. Anderson in, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), argues that nationalism has emerged primarily from the Gutenberg technology of print capitalism, neglecting, as McClintock points out, the fact that print materials have, until relatively recently, been accessible to a small literate elite. McClintock, on the other hand, argues that nationalism’s singular power has been its capacity to organize a sense of popular, collective unity through the management of mass commodity and nationalist spectacle. Ibid., 374–5. The references in the lyrics apply to the following countries: Lily = Wales; Thistle = Scotland; Shamrock = Ireland; Rose = England. While it is possible that the ‘lily’ could also refer to French Canada, it seems clear that in the context of this ditty, the intended referent was the four groups that composed the motherland of ‘Great Britain.’ Two wonderfully complex articles are Nancy Lewis, ‘Unthai-ing Gender and Sexual Constructions,’ presented at the 1995 CSAA Meetings, Université du Québec à Montréal, Session, Transgender Studies II: Historical, Ethnographic, and Anthropological Contributions, and Didi Khayatt, ‘The Place of Desire: Where Are the Lesbians in Egypt?’ unpublished paper, Faculty of Education, York University, June 1996. For an overview of same-sex relationships between men in China, see Bret Hinsch, Passions

202 Margot Francis

53

54 55

56

57 58

59

60

of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Gina Marchetti, ‘Still Looking: Negotiating Race, Sex and History in Dirty Laundry,’ in Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung, ed. Helen Lee and Kerri Sakamoto (Toronto: Insomniac Press – Images Festival, 2002), 80–9, 83. Ibid., 87. An excellent starting place for examining the meanings associated with gender and sex in European contexts is Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Meridian, Penguin Group, 1989). See the sections on the nineteenth and early twentieth century. For analysis of the western frontier see Terry L. Chapman, ‘“An Oscar Wilde Type”: “The Abominable Crime of Buggery” in Western Canada, 1890–1920,’ in Criminal Justice History: An International Annual, vol. 4 (New York: Crime and Justice History Group, 1983), 97–118; Walter M. Williams, ‘Seafarers, Cowboys, and Indians: Male Marriage in Fringe Societies on the AngloAmerican Frontier,’ in The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Terry L. Chapman, ‘Male Homosexuality: Legal Restraints and Social Attitudes in Western Canada, 1890–1920,’ in Law and Justice in a New Land: Essays in Western Canadian Legal History, ed. Louis Knafla (Toronto: Carswell, 1986), 277–92. Cecilia Danysk, ‘A Bachelor’s Paradise: Homesteaders, Hired Hands, and the Construction of Masculinity 1880–1930,’ in Making Western Canada: Essays on European Colonization and Settlement, ed. Catherine Cavanaugh and Jeremy Mouat (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1996), 154–85. Danysk explains that the term ‘to batch’ entered the prairie lexicon with ease, indicating the social acceptability of labouring men without women. Ibid., 160. Madge Pon, ‘Like a Chinese Puzzle: The Construction of Chinese Masculinity in Jack Canuck,’ in Gender and History in Canada, ed. Joy Parr and Mark Rosenfeld (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996), 88–100. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25. As Marianna Valverde and Madge Pon note, white fears of Chinese masculinity were marked by a distinct contradiction. Chinese men were thought of as too ‘timid’ and ‘unmuscular’ to engage in the aggressive sexual entrapment of white women. Nevertheless, they could still be conceptualized as a threat due to their ability to ‘lure’ white women into

Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Construction of the Nation 203

61 62 63 64 65

opium dens, where they would be easy prey to sexual danger. Pon ‘Like a Chinese Puzzle’; Marianna Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999), 110–11. Nayan Shah, ‘Perverse Geography and Sexual Contamination’ (unpublished manuscript, October 1998), 19. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage – Random House), 1979. Thanks to Holly Baines for directing me to analyse this particular image. Quoted in Muñoz, Disidentifications, 12. ‘Triads’ is a vernacular term for Chinese criminal gangs.

This page intentionally left blank

PART FOUR Working on National Cinema

This page intentionally left blank

10 Look like a Worker and Act like a Worker: Stereotypical Representations of the Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films andré loiselle

Discussing representations of the working class in Quebec cinema (or any cinema for that matter) entails at least two problematic notions: first, that the working class can be identified as an entity and, second, that this entity can be represented. The latter issue is especially difficult to apprehend when dealing with feature fiction films. Virtually every cinematic practice in Europe and North America that would qualify as ‘fictional’ or ‘narrative’ focuses on individual heroes or very small groups of protagonists. This trend raises the question of the fiction film’s ability to represent any large group in general and the working class in particular. In other words, because a film such as Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992) focuses on a few characters who (seem to) belong to the working class, can it be seen as representing the working class as a whole? Is it representing only Quebec’s working class or, more precisely, Montreal’s? Or perhaps is it representing only these specific characters who belong to a small segment of the working class. It could be argued that characters in fiction films can stand only for the individuals that they embody and that generalizations as to whatever larger group they might represent can only be misleading. I would argue, however, that the leap from individual characterizations to the interpretation of these characters as representatives of a class could be achieved if the characters are conceived as stereotypes. The following discussion proposes that working-class characters in a number of Quebec feature films function precisely as stereotypes. Of Workers and Stereotypes It should be stated at the outset that stereotypes are not necessarily negative distortions. They can serve as means to establish partial knowl-

208 André Loiselle

edge about a reality that is too complex to be fully grasped. As cognitive psychologist Yoram Bar-Tal suggests, ‘recent developments in the study of stereotypes have shifted the focus of attention from an emphasis on the negative content of the stereotypes to an attempt to understand the cognitive processes and structures that underlie the formation of stereotypes considered as a specific category of knowledge.’1 In his article ‘Perceiving Other People: Stereotyping as a Process of Social Cognition,’ Russell A. Jones writes, ‘because of the tremendous amounts of information impinging on our eyes and ears in any given situation, we usually have to be quite selective about what we attend to. We simply cannot take it all in, so we pick out what we think are the most important aspects of a situation ... Once we have categorized a person in a particular way, we are likely to ignore differences between that person and others who have been so categorized simply because categorization is, by definition, based on the perception of similarities.’2 So, we construct stereotypes on the basis of the limited information we can process at any one time, and project this stereotypical knowledge onto people who seem to fit this conception. Stereotypes are not wrong by definition. Clark R. McCauley et al., in the concluding chapter of the book Stereotype Accuracy, suggest in fact ‘group stereotypes and perceptions of members of stereotyped groups can be quite accurate.’3 The crucial point about stereotypes, then, is not that they are wrong or negative, but that they function on the basis of partial but salient information and thus are likely to be shared by a large number of people who also construct knowledge on the grounds of conspicuous features. Given this definition of stereotypes, it could be argued that films can show only stereotypes, for within the temporal and narrative limits of any motion picture only ‘conspicuous features’ can be perceived and processed by spectators; even lengthy fiction films expose spectators to characters for only three or four hours, which, all things considered, is a very short period of time to develop any thorough understanding of the ‘person’ behind the stereotype. The question to ask next is, what might be the conspicuous features of the working class that are used in films to suggest that individual characters should be interpreted as stereotypical representatives of their community? Clearly, as Harry Braverman remarks, ‘it is not just the fact that people work which makes them part of the working class.’4 I would argue that there are two main strategies that are used to identify fictional characters as ‘proletarians’: one is based on spectacle, the other on narrative; one is based on the way characters look and the other on the

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 209

way they act. As we will see below, up to the 1980s, the way characters act was central to the representation of the working class in Quebec films; since the 1980s, their look has been at the foreground. Academics working in cultural studies and related disciplines have argued that classist discrimination has been based on issues of taste and the display of cultural values. Sally R. Munt suggests that ‘in social interaction the identifying characteristics for deploying classed designations tend to be aesthetic, to do with way of life, appearance or language.’5 Reviewing literature on working-class taste and aesthetics, such as Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979) and Hoggart’s The Use of Literacy (1957), Jon Cook points out that for these authors, working-class taste distinguishes this group from other groups. But there is also a circulation of taste. For Hoggart, Cook says, ‘taste becomes both aspirational and mimetic. It is a way of imagining oneself as being in another class, even a class apart. What taste does is imitate what is imagined as the taste of another class, a class which is felt to embody “good” taste.’6 Cook, of course, is not commenting on what working-class taste actually is but rather what it is imagined to be by upper-class authors who assume that the working class bases its taste on what it imagines the upper class’s taste to be. The stereotype here represents an imagining of an imagining. Regardless, this stereotype about working-class taste and aesthetics has found its way into Quebec cinema, especially since the 1980s. Sociologists, for their part, have established parameters around the notion of the working class related to the position of individuals within a system of dominance associated with labour relations. Michael Zweig defines ‘classes in large part based on the power and authority people have at work.’ He argues that the workplace engages people in more than their immediate work, by which they create goods and services. It also engages them in relationships with each other, relationships that are controlled by power. A relative handful of people have great power to organize and direct production, while a much larger number have almost no authority. In a capitalist society such as ours, the first group are the capitalist class, the second group the working class … [The latter] are skilled and unskilled, in manufacturing and in services, men and women of all races, nationalities, religions … For all their differences, working class people share a common place in production, where they have relatively little control over the place or content of their work, and aren’t anybody’s boss.7

210 André Loiselle

In terms of narrative, therefore, the working class can most ostentatiously be represented, regardless of how they look, as people who function within a system that denies them power over others. Narratives of powerlessness are staple ingredients of Quebec features about the working class prior to the 1980s. The characters’ actions in those films are seen to be futile, ineffectual, and powerless. In addition to being useful in its inclusiveness, Zweig’s definition is relevant within the context of this chapter, for it evokes a relation between the workers and the capitalist class that parallels the situation of the average film actor working for a director or producer who controls the movement of the performer within the discursive field of the cinematic apparatus and, to a certain extent, owns the actor’s image, the actor’s look. The feature-film industry, even on a relatively small scale as in Quebec, remains a heavy industry dependent on sizeable capital. Thus it is like any other ‘big business,’ whose main purpose is to augment capital through wage labour. The performer is required to look a certain way and act a certain way to receive her/his wage, and this performance in exchange for a wage will generate, or so the producer hopes, profit from which the actor will not directly benefit.8 While it could be argued that every feature film is, at some level at least, an embodiment of uneven labour relations, this chapter will limit its consideration of this imbalance of power to those Quebec feature films that stage in their content conditions of inequality in terms of power, capital, and cultural agency. This survey of French-Canadian films will suggest that even productions that seem to advocate for working-class issues still reproduce implicitly or explicitly the power imbalance that they putatively seek to denounce. While there have been a number of variations in the ways in which the French-Canadian proletariat has appeared in feature fiction films, there always seems to remain a degree to which the working class is put on an ironic pedestal that follows stereotypical conceptions. On the one hand, workers are seen as being more genuine and honest than members of the upper classes. But simultaneously, they are shown as lacking social awareness, as displaying bad taste, and as being often politically ineffectual and at times profoundly conservative. Most Quebec feature films, I contend, speak from the perspective of the dominant classes, which might be interested in, or even fascinated by, the working class, but ultimately constructs the worker as an inferior and passive other. This paradox results, I believe, from a gap, a distance between proletarian characters and the filmmakers who represent them. This is

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 211

not unlike what Cook notes about Bourdieu, Hoggart, and other intellectuals writing on the working class; there is some ‘anxiety about the gulf between the writer and his subject.’9 The discourse of these scholars on the working class remains disconnected from their object of study. Similarly, while the proletariat might be one of the more common objects of Quebec filmmakers’ gaze, it has rarely been one of their more fully integrated subjects. The Leftist Half of the Fridge Is on the Right: The Filmmaker and the Working-Class ‘Subject’ Philippe Falardeau’s La Moitié gauche du frigo (2000), which is discussed further in Brenda Longfellow’s contribution to this collection, is a thought-provoking and amusing illustration of the relationship between the filmmaker and the ‘worker’ on whom the film focuses. La Moitié gauche shows a videographer, Stéphane (Stéphane Demers), making a documentary about his unemployed roommate, Christophe (Paul Ahmarani). Falardeau’s film emphasizes the relationship between the ‘subject’ and the ‘observer,’ which is representative of the way in which Quebec films have often dealt with the issue of abusive labour relations. It must be noted that Christophe is not strictly speaking a member of the ‘working class’ per se. Although he is unemployed, and therefore below the working class, he is university educated and trained in mechanical engineering, and therefore ‘above’ the working class. His condition of powerlessness, however, positions him within the general definition of the proletariat. Falardeau actually underlines the tenuous distinction between the educated middle class and the working class in a brief scene where a Vietnamese clerk at a convenience store tells Christophe and Stéphane that he used to be a veterinarian in his native country. The point of this brief sequence is clearly to state that those who are comfortably within the middle class one day might very well find themselves the following day swelling the ranks of the working class. Initially glad to be freed from his less than satisfying job as an engineer, Christophe becomes increasingly demoralized and falls under intensifying financial stress as he fails to find meaningful employment. As this process unfolds, Christophe increasingly looks and acts like a stereotypical member of the working class: increasingly unkempt, behaving with less genuine self-confidence and more aggressiveness, and increasingly swearing and using ‘proletarian’ language. He eventually

212 André Loiselle

gives up and moves to Vancouver, where he joins a punk band and sells encyclopedias door-to-door for a living. His yellow-died hair, his generally dishevelled appearance, as well as his passive response to a physical attack from his boss complete his movement from upper-middle-class engineer to lumpenproletarian punk. Interestingly, punk culture, while quite different from traditional working-class values, has been as romanticized by scholars such as Dick Hebdige in his Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) as the conventional proletariat has been by Bourdieu and Hoggart.10 Videographer Stéphane reproduces from beginning to end the attitude of condescension common among these and other scholars (like myself). Throughout this process of increased alienation, Stéphane and his soundman follow Christophe to interviews, the unemployment centre, parties, the grocery store. Stéphane is not a silent observer, though. Very much an armchair socialist, Stéphane lectures Christophe on the evils of globalization, interferes during interviews, and records scenes that Christophe would obviously prefer to keep private. More significantly, Falardeau highlights the power imbalance between the videographer, financially supported by a production company and living comfortably, and Christophe, who is not only at the mercy of global corporations and shifting capital, but also of his ‘leftist’ roommate. Shots of the fridge attest to this inequity: the left side of the fridge, Christophe’s, is always virtually empty, while the right side, Stéphane’s, is increasingly wellgarnished as news that the mighty CBC is interested in the project encourages more investment in the documentary. As well intentioned as Stéphane might be in making a documentary about his jobless friend, he remains a rich kid (a line in the film states explicitly that his father is wealthy) whose interest in Christophe is at best patronizingly ethnographic and at worst scornfully exploitative. It could be argued that Mon oncle Antoine (1971), the quintessential Quebec film, emerged from the same kind of exploitative good intentions on the part of its upper-class director, Claude Jutra. Clément Perron, a writer for the National Film Board, had submitted a screenplay to Jutra, but the latter turned it down. Angry not only at this refusal but also at Jutra’s condescending, rich-kid attitude (this bourgeois who had travelled the world and was on a first-name basis with François Truffaut), Perron started telling stories about his youth in a mining town, as a means to show that he, at least, had been in touch with the real people of Quebec. Jutra loved these quaint anecdotes about simple Quebec folk and decided to make a film based on them,

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 213

which became Mon oncle Antoine.11 Jutra actually puts himself in the film, as Fernand, the clerk working at the general store of uncle Antoine (Jean Duceppe). As a rather passive but attentive character who constantly observes others, Fernand literally stands for the filmmaker, who records life in and around Antoine’s store. But Fernand is not a distant, objective documentarian. A seemingly aloof and ironic fellow, he does not hesitate to take advantage of the working class (he insists on selling to a naive client a pair of pants that is clearly too large), and he betrays Antoine by sleeping with his wife (Olivette Thibault). Jutra-as-Fernand thus resembles Stéphane, the ostensibly well-intentioned observer who proves to be selfish and abusive. The liberal upper-class attitude towards the lower classes, implicitly self-critical in Jutra’s film and explicit in Falardeau’s criticism of Stéphane, is typical of a certain leftist attitude that ‘insist[s] that the only good worker is a revolutionary one.’12 But because ‘the working class has failed to fulfill its revolutionary role,’13 stereotypes of the proletariat are sure to show the worker as a loser. And this is exactly what Jutra does in his depiction of proletarian Jos Poulin (Lionel Villeneuve). While the film’s coming-of-age story is very sensitive to young Benoît (Jacques Gagnon) and his gradual discovery of the corruption of the adult world, its portrayal of the ‘working Jos’ is much less flattering. Although Poulin looks like a rugged worker, especially when compared with the soft-spoken, cherubim-faced Fernand, what is most significant about his role as the ‘representative’ of the working class in this film is the way he acts. Unable to hold a job either at the asbestos mine or the logging camp, Jos drinks as much beer as he can so the ‘Anglais’ won’t get it – his only means of rebellion against the English boss. Although he displays some degree of autonomy by quitting work when it becomes unbearable, Jos’s resistance against English power is explicitly shown to be futile when, following his leaving the mining job and his family for the logging camp, he quits his lumberjack job and returns home only to find that his eldest son (Mario Dubuc) has died. Jutra’s paradoxical representation of the proletarian at once as a robust fellow who is not afraid to talk back to the mine’s Englishspeaking foreman (Jean Dubost) and a loser who can’t hold a job and take care of his family is in fact an amalgamation of a conventional binary conception of the working class. Sally R. Munt posits that the traditional Left has often tended to recognize the ‘“deserving poor” as opposed to the “the working-class-gone-wrong” … There are the good poor, who are industrious ... and there are the bad poor who make

214 André Loiselle

childish, dangerous and unrealistic demands.’14 Jos Poulin proves a convenient narrative device for Jutra as he embodies both sides of the stereotypical working class – poor but honest and strong, yet incapable of commitment to either his work or his family. Stereotypes are also convenient to represent English power in Mon oncle Antoine, especially in the scene where the mine owner (George Alexander) tosses cheap Christmas toys to children in the street. The action of the owner readily displays his contempt for his employees. As one character points out, his token gesture of throwing gifts signifies that he won’t give workers a raise. The real purpose of the scene, however, is less to expose the exploitative practices of the English boss, than to give Benoît and his friend Maurice (Dominique Joly) an excuse to rebel against authority and throw snowballs at the oppressor. But like Jos’s rebellion, Benoît’s remains ultimately futile. Except for scaring the boss’s horse, the snowballs have no concrete effect on the villagers’ subservient position. Like Jos, Benoît incarnates two sides of the proletariat. On the one hand, he looks like a rebellious youth who could spontaneously rise against the capitalist tyrant. But on the other hand, Benoît actually does nothing. He does not, in fact, throw snowballs at the boss – Maurice does. Later, when he returns with Antoine from picking up the body of the Poulin boy, he takes the reigns of the sled, while his uncle is sleeping, drunk, and pushes the horse to run. This image of taking control (literally taking the reigns) actually has no positive effect. It leads only to their dropping the coffin, and Antoine admitting that he is afraid of cadavers. Significantly, when he returns to the general store, sans coffin, Benoît is silent, bitter, but not energized to effect any change. He now knows that Antoine is a coward, but does nothing about it. At the end of the film, when he sees Jos and his family mourning the death of the eldest son, Benoît stares at the scene without reaction: neither shock, nor sadness, nor anger. Thus Jutra, at once, romanticizes the potential of working-class youth and shows the boy’s inability to act positively. Uncle Antoine, for his part, personifies both sides of the lower middle class that barely manages to climb above the unwashed working-class masses. His general store is the village’s main gathering place, and the owner can be as generous with those who deserve it as he is stern towards ‘bad’ workers. Antoine proudly shares his alcohol with his lower-class guests, and he knows when to stand firm against the deadbeat father of his hired girl, Carmen (Lyne Champagne), when he comes to collect her wage. But like Jos Poulin, who functions as both

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 215

sides of the proletarian stereotype, Antoine also incarnates the cowardly half of the small-business owner, who manifests no real leadership in times of crisis and was never truly committed to his community; he would have preferred to live in the United States, but his wife wouldn’t let him. While Jutra seems to have some respect for Poulin, in spite of his weaknesses, and definite affection for Benoît, regardless of his ineffectualness, his judgment of Antoine is unequivocally negative. As an essentially working-class character who has climbed a few steps towards the tiny bourgeoisie, Antoine represents the worst of both worlds. He is as uneducated, uncouth, and unaware as ‘bad’ workers, but also lacks the pathetic circumstances that afford ‘good’ workers the degree of patronizing pity that losers always deserve. The way in which the intellectual artist, either Jutra or Stéphane, defines himself righteously and condescendingly as the one who can judge the inferior other is not so clearly stated in all Quebec films. However, it still appears more or less tightly woven in the fabric of a number of both old and new productions. Since the 1980s, in films ranging from Denys Arcand’s Déclin de l’empire américain (1986) to Manon Briand’s La Turbulence des fluides (2002), the focus of the narrative has been on upper-middle-class characters, who may not hold cameras but still look at working-class characters as foils for their sexual and existential crises. Prior to the 1980s, as Michel Houle argues in his piece ‘Quelques aspects idéologiques et thématiques du cinéma québécois,’ the opposite was true. Most Quebec films made before the end of the 1970s found their protagonists among the working class and ignored almost entirely the petite bourgeoisie.15 However, even if the middle and upper classes are not necessarily present at the centre of those films, there is still a strong sense that the working class is being looked at from a standpoint that is at once admiring, condescending, and scornful. Whatever the workers do, whatever their actions are, they always end up on the losing end of the narrative. The Prototype of Stereotypes Gratien Gélinas’s 1952 feature film Tit-Coq is perhaps the earliest example of this perspective on the French-Canadian worker. The film, set during the Second World War, is often cited as a landmark of FrenchCanadian cinema. For instance, upon seeing the film for the first time, René Lévesque declared, years before becoming premier of Quebec, that with the production of Tit-Coq ‘le cinéma canadien sort de l’âge des

216 André Loiselle

cavernes.’16 Among other innovative qualities, the historical significance of this work, and of the 1948 play on which it is based, rests on its representation of the urban reality of Quebec in the 1940s and 1950s. Unlike most French-Canadian films made at the time, such as Un Homme et son péché (1948), Le gros Bill (1949), Curé de village (1949), and La petite Aurore l’enfant martyre (1951), Tit-Coq does not unfold in a rural setting with farmers, lumberjacks, and village priests as its main characters. Rather it focuses on a soldier, a tough city guy with street smarts to match his fiery temper (his nick-name ‘Tit-Coq’ means ‘Cocky’). As such, Tit-Coq embodies the new reality of postwar Quebec. In his book Luttes de classes et question nationale au Québec, Roch Denis argues that, starting in 1940, the traditionally agricultural character of Quebec society underwent a drastic change, with a radical push towards urbanization and industrialization.17 While the church sought to resist this movement and encourage French Canadians to remain close to the land and preserve their rustic heritage, the emergence of an urban working class in the 1940s was irreversible. The growing influence of workers’ unions and the Asbestos Strike of 1949 demonstrated clearly that the proletariat had become a force to be reckoned with in Quebec.18 It is no coincidence then that Tit-Coq would be seen as marking the beginning of modern cinema in francophone Canada, for Gélinas’s work did not only reflect the new urban working-class reality but also suggested that this new reality was intertwined with French Canada’s desire for emancipation from the conservative forces of the Catholic Church and Maurice Duplessis’s ultra-conservative Union Nationale government (in power from 1936 to 1959, with a brief interruption during the Second World War). Tit-Coq (Gélinas) is not just a tough guy from the city; he is also a man who dares to confront the forces of tradition personified by an army chaplain, the ‘Padre’ (Paul Dupuis). As I have discussed elsewhere, the Padre first comes across as a friend to Tit-Coq, but then proves to be interested only in upholding the tenets of the Catholic Church that compel people to mindlessly respect tradition.19 By establishing this relationship between urban working-class issues and nationalist aspirations to escape the trap of religion, Gélinas identified the two axes upon which the ideological discourse of Quebec was going to be based throughout the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s up to the end of the 1970s. ‘Tout pendant ces années, au Québec,’ says Denis, ‘tourne finalement autour de deux axes centraux: la conquête de l’indépedance nationale et la conquête de l’indépendance de classe des travailleurs.’20

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 217

Various permutations of the representation of the working class and the emergence of nationalist consciousness introduced in Tit-Coq can be detected in several films made in Quebec before the 1980s. However, these representations are never quite as straightforward as one might imagine. While on the surface Quebec cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s seems to focus on the proletarian as the central hero of a march towards national independence, an examination of the canon reveals a more ambiguous portrayal of the worker. In fact, the nexus between class struggle and nationalist aspiration might have been more a coincidence than an actual correlation. Even a cursory look at Tit-coq shows that although the main character shares much with the growing urban proletariat of the 1940s he, himself, is not a member of that class, and whatever desire for freedom he might express in the end is not necessarily shared by the proletarian characters who surround him. Born out of wedlock, raised in orphanages, at home in the inhospitable barracks of an army camp, and having never enjoyed the emotional stability of a lasting relationship, Tit-Coq describes himself as a ‘bastard.’ At first his most ardent desire is to join the respectable working class to which his girlfriend, Marie-Ange Desilets (Monique Miller), and her family belong. When Tit-Coq first meets Marie-Ange’s father (Fred Barry), the old man describes his family as follows: ‘We’re neither rich nor very clever. Just simple workers…’ These simple workers are robust, joyful, and generous people, who welcome Tit-Coq with open arms and introduce him to the pleasures of belonging to a large extended family. The general portrait of the proletariat that is drawn in the first several scenes of the film displays workers in action: it is not only the way they look and speak that makes up proletarian culture, but also the way they act. The characters eat, drink, congregate, and work: Marie-Ange is seen doing her job in a hat factory. Yet the actions of the Desilets eventually betray their prejudice against uprooted Tit-Coq. While the orphan soldier is in Europe doing his tour of duty, Marie-Ange’s parents and cousin Germaine (Denise Pelletier) encourage her to give up on him and settle for an unhappy marriage with a middle-class suitor, Léopold Vermette (Jean Duceppe), an administrator at her work. Typically, Germaine, who works at the same place, is seen trying on the fancy hats that she embroiders while reminding Marie-Ange of the importance of financial security in a relationship, security that Léopold can offer, but Tit-Coq cannot. The gesture of trying on a hat she makes but can’t afford signifies Germaine’s middle-class aspirations and rejection of Marie-Ange’s lower-class boyfriend. Tit-Coq’s own ambition to

218 André Loiselle

climb up the social ladder and join the working class is thus undercut by the working class’s own aspirations towards the middle class. Significantly, at the end of the film, Tit-Coq does not join the working class. Rather he is shown in the last scene resisting the conservative rhetoric of the Padre and walking away from Marie-Ange and her brother JeanPaul (Clément Latour), both standing behind a gate that represents the limitations that proletarian life imposes on them. Tit-Coq is last seen literally walking towards the light at the end of the tunnel, while MarieAnge and Jean-Paul remain trapped by the narrow-minded tunnel vision of an uneducated class blinded by the sermons of Catholic priests. While the spectator can empathize with Marie-Ange’s unhappy circumstances, stuck in a marriage of convenience, and might even agree with the Padre’s cautious advice against divorce, it is difficult not to accept the point of view of Gélinas’s Tit-Coq, who is as attracted by the quiet normality of the worker’s life as he is repulsed by working-class conservatism and prejudice. Not unlike Stéphane, Tit-Coq fetishizes the working class; that is, whatever attraction it may hold is in fact constituted in its absence. For both Tit-Coq and Stéphane, the idea of the proletariat is far more appealing than the working class itself. The same could be said about Jutra and, I would argue, a large proportion of filmmakers who have presented the working-class struggle as a fundamental aspect of the nationalist agenda throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Setting aside the two foundational feature fiction films of the early 1960s, Jutra’s A tout prendre (1963) and Gilles Groulx’s Le Chat dans le sac (1964), in which young intellectual men, both named Claude, seem to have more interest in finding themselves than in dealing with proletarian issues, the bulk of the corpus of pre-1980 Quebec features present an image of the worker that ranges from amused indulgence to outright contempt. The ‘Merry World’ of the Alienated and the Powerless Gilles Carle’s 1965 La Vie heureuse de Léopold Z., known in English as The Merry World of Léopold Z., offers a comic look at a day in the life (the day before Christmas, that is) of Léopold (Guy L’Écuyer), a friendly snowplow operator whose actions have only one purpose: to make his wife (Monique Joly), his boss (Paul Hébert), and everybody else happy. He runs around all day, doing errands for everyone, without any financial or emotional reward. But it is all worth it in the end, when he hears his son singing in the choir at midnight mass. According to Houle, Léopold

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 219

is the symbol of the ordinary French-Canadian worker, who is happygo-lucky, docile, and satisfied with his condition, and whose life is circumscribed by his workplace, the hockey arena, the tavern, and the church.21 Carle constructs an entertainingly ironic film that invites the spectator to look down with amused pity at the cheerful but empty existence of the working class. The way Léopold is perfectly happy being abused by everyone, from his wife and his boss to mechanics and financial advisors, make him a character that appears slightly out of date with the ‘evolved’ Québécois of the 1960s Quiet Revolution. The filmmaker himself has called Léopold a ‘pre-revolutionary character,’ and said that he wouldn’t want himself or his children to be like Léopold.22 Léopold’s joyful obliviousness is not unlike the earthy joie de vivre of the Desilets that attracted Tit-Coq from the start. But behind this easygoing energy lie the signs of inescapable alienation. This is perhaps nowhere more obvious than when Léopold proudly describes Place Ville-Marie in Montreal to his wife’s cousin (Suzanne Valery) as a ‘cruciform building, the tallest structure in the British Empire.’ This sentence, uttered without a hint of irony on the part of our hero, attests to the double alienation – from both church and British power – of which he remains blissfully unaware. Yet, while it is easy to see Léopold as a quaint remnant of the Duplessis era, whom spectators can mock from the progressive perspective of the 1960s, his inability to improve his circumstances would remain the core quality of proletarian protagonists in Quebec films until the 1980s. Indeed, the depiction of the working class barely evolved at all over the next decade. But as it became increasingly obvious that the proletarian revolution and Quebec’s independence were not happening, the tone became gradually darker and more pessimistic, especially in the 1970s films of Denys Arcand. Arcand’s first fiction feature film, La maudite galette (1971) exposes the alienation of the working class not with tongue-in-cheek smugness à la Carle, but with scornful violence. After making his notorious documentary on the textile industry, On est au coton (1970), Arcand lost faith in the Marxist utopia of a self-ruling working class as he witnessed only despair, desolation, and alienation among the workers.23 La maudite galette, which he described as ‘a shapeless expression of [his] outrage,’ follows a group of proletarian characters who steal money from one another.24 A scrapyard owner, Roland (René Caron), and his wife, Berthe (Luce Guilbeault), steal money from their uncle Arthur (J.-Léo Gagnon), only to have it stolen from them by Roland’s handyman, Ernest (Marcel

220 André Loiselle

Sabourin). In the end, Berthe and Ernest blow each other’s heads off, and Ernest’s parents use the loot to buy themselves a vacation in Florida. The way these working-class characters act makes La maudite galette less a thriller in the Hollywood vein than an exercise in naturalist cynicism. The film makes its point about greed and selfishness among the working class (or any class for that matter) through scenes that range from lengthy sequence-shots of repetitive manual work at the scrapyard to images of senseless torture and bloody murder. Throughout the film, the various sub-classes of the proletariat prey on one another but never consider the possibility of resisting the capitalist system that turns them into animals ‘who speak with grunts rather than words.’25 One of the most ironically beautiful scenes of the film shows Roland, Berthe, and two accomplices (Gabiel Arcand and Jean Pierre Saulnier) driving to Uncle Arthur’s at night while small isolated houses roll by and a nostalgic folkloric melody is heard on the soundtrack. These images of ‘desolate beauty’ suggest that, on their way to rob and kill Uncle Arthur, the passengers of the old truck are ushered by, or bring along with them, all of French-Canadian culture.26 Arcand’s two other features of the 1970s, Réjeanne Padovani (1973) and Gina (1975), corroborate this interpretation as they both include in their depiction of violence and mayhem not only the proletariat, but the upper class, the mafia (Réjeanne Padovani centres on wealthy mafia bosses and corrupt politicians and lawyers), the middle class, the intelligentsia, and sextrade workers (Gina features everything from strippers and textile workers to local middle-managers and filmmakers). While violence against women is especially reprehensible in Réjeanne and Gina, Arcand also makes the point that lefty journalists in the former and textile workers in the latter have been and continue to be similarly abused physically by the dominant classes. In these two films, Arcand seems to suggest that there are actually few differences among classes: they all act according to their perceived self-interest, and all abuse weaker members of society to get ahead. Houle has argued along similar lines that a number of Quebec films of the 1960s and 1970s sought to gloss over class distinctions to stress similarities among all Quebeckers as an oppressed ethnic group.27 This argument would seem to apply best to a film like Michel Brault’s Les Ordres (1974), in which textile workers, doctors, housewives, social workers, and the unemployed are all equally victimized by the War Measures Act of October 1970. But differences do remain between the depictions of various classes. Although all the main characters in Les

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 221

Ordres find themselves in jail, they are treated differently both by characters within the film and by the film itself. For instance, while the socialist physician, Dr Beauchemin (Guy Provost), is respectfully addressed as ‘Docteur’ by prison officials, the unemployed man, Richard Lavoie (Claude Gauthier), is the victim of a cruel practical joke on the part of prison guards, who stage a mock execution just to scare him. More significantly, the film itself focuses primarily on proletarians Clermont and Marie Boudreau (Jean Lapointe and Hélène Loiselle), who are the first characters to be introduced and who get more screen time than the other victims of Trudeau’s response to the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) hostage crisis. It is not a coincidence that this film about the powerlessness of Quebeckers in the face of federalist forces would foreground the powerlessness of the working class. The doctor might be arrested for his socialist ideas, but he is not presented as being powerless under ‘normal circumstances.’ He lives in a comfortable home and has powerful friends that his wife (Louise Latraverse) can call upon when he is taken away by the cops. Clermont, on the other hand, even before the wave of arrests of 15–16 October 1970, is already placed by the film in a position of subjugation. We see him early in the narrative being threatened by a foreman at the textile mill because of his involvement with the union. Next time we see him, he has been fired and must go back to driving a cab. At the conclusion of Les Ordres, when Clermont and the others are released from jail, the futility of his actions is underscored again in his pathetically ineffectual rant against the prison guards. As much as Brault’s good intentions are to show the condition of oppression in which Clermont finds himself and expose the mechanisms that enact such oppression, the result of this display of powerlessness is to reassert the workers’ stereotypical inability to act and effect constructive change in their lives. This might be why Pierre Vallières, the author of the biting nationalist treatise Les Nègres blancs d’Amérique (1968), and himself a member of the FLQ, writes in his article ‘Témoignage d’un otage privilégié des “ordres”: Brault a manqué son coup’ that the film amounts to a mere ‘Kafkaesque melodrama’ about a helpless existential struggle against some abstract, oppressive force.28 The proletarian as ineffectual loser is also present in another film inspired by the October crisis, Jean-Claude Lord’s 1974 commercial hit Bingo, about a group of workers on strike who decide to kidnap a politician to advance their cause. Here also, the filmmaker is seemingly on the side of the working class but, as the film unfolds, the workers are

222 André Loiselle

not only shown to be unable to improve their conditions, they are also seen as being so naive that they become puppets of the bourgeoisie. In the film’s concluding scene, it is revealed that the strike and the kidnapping were actually orchestrated by right-wing politicians who easily fooled the workers into doing their dirty work for them. By inciting the workers to commit illegal acts, the right-wing schemers expose to the public the dangers of leftist extremism and, as a result, ensure the success of their own conservative agenda. An early 1980s film that functions similarly is Bruno Carrière’s Lucien Brouillard (1983). The eponymous character, played by Pierre Curzi, is a proletarian activist who demands better working conditions for his peers. When he starts to be a liability for his childhood friend, Jacques Martineau (Roger Blay), who has high political ambitions, Lucien becomes the victim of his friend’s deadly scheme that involves a plot to assassinate Quebec’s premier. While Lucien Brouillard is certainly more sensitive to the plight of the worker than Bingo is, the film still presents the worker as a naive character unable to comprehend the complex mechanisms of political power. Anne Reiter, in her review of the film, praises Carrière for constructing a likeable proletarian character. But the very qualities that she praises are the stuff stereotypes are made of: ‘Pierre Curzi is marvelous as a working-class Quebecer whose battle for right is finally selfdestructive. There’s something very childlike about Lucien and Curzi captures it perfectly ... His angry disbelief at the crooked legal system and his naive trust in Martineau’s intentions are what gives Lucien his sad-eyed grace: he is set up for crash from the beginning because he believes so badly.’29 Brouillard might be one of the ‘good’ workers who deserve our pity, but he remains unable to fulfill his revolutionary role in the Marxist drama that armchair socialists wrote for him. Not surprisingly, critic Richard Martineau noted the film’s lack of actual social resonance and its pessimism, which is similar to that of Bingo. Lucien Brouillard ‘ressemble beaucoup à Bingo ... Sa finale plutôt pessimiste vehicule le même message, à savoir que l’action terroriste (ou l’assassinat politique, qui est plus ou moins la même chose), ne donne aucun résultat valable ... Lucien Brouillard ne devient qu’un outil servant les ambitions de son copain Martineau, qui vise la succession du Premier Ministre ... Le drame est d’abord et avant tout individuel et non social.’30 Not all Quebec films of the 1970s and early 1980s are as pessimistic in their depictions of the working class as Les Ordres, Bingo, and Lucien Brouillard. The extremely popular soft-core sex comedies of the early 1970s, known as ‘films de fesses’ in French and ‘maple-syrup porn’ in

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 223

English, often feature working-class men who end up ‘on top.’ As I have argued elsewhere, Claude Fournier’s Deux femmes en or is the prototype of these films, in which unattractive, lower-class men enjoy sexual adventures with middle-class, suburban women. What Quebec audiences find in these popular films, I suggest, is the demonstration that French-Canadian working-class characters, eccentric, marginal, and deviant though they may be, can still come out as winners.31 Although the popular appeal of these films is unquestionable, at least in the late 1960s and early 1970s, their political significance remains debatable. Working-class characters are represented only as objects of pleasure for the middle-class, and as much as the leading female protagonists are ‘sexually liberated,’ this emancipation is expressed exclusively through promiscuity. Furthermore, in Deux femmes en or and other films de fesses, the sexual liberation of women is always mediated through the middleclass male gaze, thus undermining any true agency on the part of the female characters. The thoroughly middle-class perspective of the films de fesses is nowhere more evident than in the body types of the women whose ‘sexual liberation’ serves the lascivious purpose of male spectators. The slim, toned, slender-hipped, small-breasted bodies of Monique Mercure and Louise Turcotte in Deux femmes en or fit middle-class feminine ideals32 and avoid the more threatening, working-class bodies displayed in contemporary soft-core films from other nations. Here, I am thinking primarily of Russ Meyer’s nudies, such as Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1965), Common Law Cabin (1967), and Cherry, Harry & Raquel (1970), in which overwhelmingly curvaceous heroines dominate men, but one could also include other films ranging from José Díaz Morales’s Besos, besos y mas besos (1969) to Fellini’s Amarcord (1973). ‘Liberated’ though they may be, the physically diminutive golden women of Quebec’s films de fesses never truly challenge middle-class male potency the way Meyer’s formidable female protagonists tend to do. In Meyer’s films, close-ups of large breasts spilling out of low-cut garments, as buxom go-go dancers, nurses, and milkmaids subdue men, evoke the uncontainable threat that female sexuality symbolizes within patriarchy. While such images can hardly be read as feminist statements, they nevertheless appeal to the unavowed masochistic tendencies of male spectators wishing to indulge in their desires for passive submission. Conversely, films de fesses never exhibit threateningly voluptuous female figures, catering instead to the stereotypically middle-class male pleasure of looking at lean, tight suburban bodies moving inoffensively

224 André Loiselle

through amusing narratives. As such, the petite protagonists of FrenchCanadian soft-core porn are not unlike working-class characters, as they never physically put forth a veritable opposition to middle-class male establishment. While the 1970s opened on harmless images of lustful suburban housewives and their comical working-class lovers, it closed on a violently antithetical image with Anne-Claire Poirier’s 1979 Mourir à tuetête, a radical denunciation of violence against women and of the society that allows crimes such as rape to go unpunished. Poirier’s film is especially interesting for the purpose of this essay in terms of its preface to the tragic story of a rape victim. The first few minutes of the film present a succession of vignettes showing men from a wide range of classes and backgrounds, all played by the same actor, Germain Houde, who are implicitly accused of rape. However, the one male character who does perpetrate a rape in the film is explicitly identified as a proletarian whose attack on the main female character, Suzanne (Julie Vincent), is associated with class differences: the rapist makes the point that he is a trucker who has no luck with women, while she is a nurse dating doctors. Rape, in his mind, is part of a proletarian attack against the upper classes.33 Some critics have accused the cineaste of classist discrimination. But as I have discussed at length elsewhere, while critics ‘are right in suggesting that Poirier resorts to stereotypes when depicting rape, they fail to acknowledge that the director’s purpose in doing so is more complex than a simple failure to perceive her own prejudice.’34 Poirier is fully aware of her use of stereotypes. So much so, in fact, that she includes a mouthpiece – a fictional filmmaker discussing the rape scene with a film editor sitting at a Steinbeck – to engage with the very issue of stereotypes. Through the device of the-film-being-discussed-within-thefilm, Poirier stresses, ‘the use of stereotypes is essential to ensure that people will get the point that rape is horrific and repugnant.’35 In keeping with issues discussed in the introductory paragraphs of this chapter, Poirier chooses certain salient features of masculinity that are sure be recognized and understood by a majority of spectators. The character of the rapist is constructed so as to embody everything that is reprehensible in men: rudeness, drunkenness, violence, a fanatical need to dominate others, and an obsessive insecurity that translates into perverse aggressiveness. It just so ‘happens’ that these negative traits, once amalgamated, project the image of a stereotypical proletarian. Admittedly, it is a fine line between using stereotypes to make a point

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 225

and discriminating against the group being stereotyped. But Poirier would rather be labelled a classist than run the risk that her audience will miss the point about the horror of rape. Where Poirier’s choice is most unfortunate is in its implicit exoneration of middle-class men. In spite of the preface of the film, where men of all classes are singled out, her decision to use the stereotypically violent worker as the actual rapist could be seen as letting middle- and upper-class men off the hook. Male spectators can distance themselves from the ugly proletarian rapist and hide behind the notion that only ‘they’ – that is, the lower classes – could do something that brutal; ‘we’ upper-class gentlemen would never mistreat a woman. This safe distancing, which displaces the worker from the empathetic centre of the narrative, foreshadows a turning point in representations of the proletariat in Quebec cinema, not so much that all working-class characters would henceforth become violent rapists, but rather that they would become more explicit emblems of otherness. From the time of Poirier’s film, the classist perspective of most Quebec fiction films would no longer be implicit. Starting in the 1980s, it is no longer just the subtext that is classist, but the very characters with whom the spectator is expected to identify. The Spectacle of the Working Class The failure of the 1980 referendum shattered the illusion that the class struggle and the nationalist agenda were united in their march towards victory. Nationalist issues disappeared almost entirely from the screens, and the worker became more important as a spectacle of that-whichthe-middle-class-is-not than as an agent, however ineffectual, of the nationalist narrative. The beginning of the 1980s was marked by a certain nostalgia for an era when changes were still possible. This is evident in period pieces such as Gilles Carle’s Les Plouffe (1981) and Claude Fournier’s Bonheur d’occasion (1983). Both films were based on novels from the 1940s that sought to honestly depict the life of the proletariat, the former by Roger Lemelin, published in 1948, the latter by Gabrielle Roy, published in 1945. The soft-focus image of the working class that appears in both films translates a longing for a period in history that still held the promise of progress and freedom. In spite of the oppressive regime of the church and Premier Maurice Duplessis, or perhaps because of it, the 1940s were seen as a time when all dreams were still possible. The nationalist aspirations of French Canadians

226 André Loiselle

were still legitimate, and the Quiet Revolution was still in the making. The workers presented in these two films are not the workers of 1980 who voted ‘No’ to sovereignty-association, but rather the romanticized proletarians who were going to lead Quebec to freedom. Hoggart describes this unproblematic pastoral view of the working class in these terms: ‘The working classes are at bottom in excellent health – so the pastoral description runs – in better health than other classes; rough and unpolished perhaps, but diamonds nevertheless.’ 36 In their unproblematized depiction of the ‘simple workers’ of the 1940s, Fournier’s Bonheur d’occasion and even more so Carle’s Les Plouffe clearly adopt the ‘pastoral’ perspective towards the proletarian. This perspective becomes even more obvious when the films are viewed in contrast with Tit-Coq’s more immediate and yet more lucid picture of the period. After the nostalgia of the early 1980s subsided, films started adopting a more explicit perspective on the contemporary working class. The worker became something to look at, either with envy or distain, from the standpoint of central characters belonging to the petite bourgeoisie. Hoggart’s point that the working classes are healthier than others is perhaps best represented in Arcand’s Déclin de l’empire américain. The eight intellectuals who meet to talk about sex and have a fancy meal embody the politically disenchanted middle class of the 1980s. Their abstract hedonism – most of them only talk about sex and are sexually ‘active’ only in the form of questionable flashbacks – is contrasted by the raw energy of the only working-class character in the film, Mario (Gabriel Arcand), the new sadistic boyfriend of a masochistic lecturer, Diane (Louise Portal). Mario might not be the ‘simple worker’ featured in Les Plouffe’s nostalgic discourse, but he is certainly equally foregrounded as a spectacle of the working class. Mario is never actually seen working in the film (in fact we don’t know what his ‘profession’ is). But he looks like a member of the working class, because of his leather jacket, his jeep, and his use of joual, which contrast with the clean outfits, BMWs, and standard French of the academics. Mario is somewhat admired by the intellectual protagonists for his assertive sexuality (‘When I’m horny, I fuck. What d’you say?’ he tells Dominique [Dominique Michel], the head of the history department at the university), and is an explicit object of desire for Claude (Yves Jacques), the homosexual aesthete of the group. But he remains strictly outside the main perspective of the film. Mario merely offers a counterpoint for the intellectuals, who see in him an intriguing alternative to their lifestyle without ever contemplating it as a genuine option.

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 227

The sexually potent worker is also present in Manon Briand’s arthouse success La Turbulence des fluides. The main character of the film is Alice (Pascale Bussières), a seismologist working in Japan who returns to her native Baie-Comeau in northern Quebec to study a peculiar phenomenon: the tides have inexplicably stopped. The still waters are, in part, a metaphor for the lack of emotional tides in Alice’s life, as she has adopted passionless reason as a coping mechanism to recover from a painful breakup. Her jaded attitude towards romantic love is apparent from the start, as she is first seen at the morning end of a one-night stand with a Japanese man who declares his love for her. She dismisses him: ‘Bullshit,’ she cynically responds. At some point she literally says, ‘Je n’ai pas de sentiments.’ Yet, once in Baie-Comeau she develops an interest (merely carnal at first) for a rugged, beefy aerial tanker pilot called Marc (Jean-Nicholas Verrault). From the start, Marc is identified as a rebel, a tough guy who dismisses safety orders: the moment he comes into view, a voice, which he ignores, reprimands him for dangerous flying. He is also instantly constructed as the object of Alice’s gaze, through a classical shot-reverse-shot sequence where they look at each other with obvious physical attraction. Conversely, other men, especially the agents of the hydrographic services with whom Alice works, are depicted as awkward, slightly effeminate, unattractive intellectuals. Although being a tanker-plane pilot might not qualify Marc as a proletarian (he probably earns a respectable salary), he certainly looks as though he belongs to a class other than Alice’s. He is a healthy, uncomplicated ‘hunk’ who drives a pickup truck and doesn’t like golf, and whose (working-class) straightforwardness counterbalances Alice’s cold, repressed, intellectual angst. In addition to being the object of Alice’s sexual desire, Marc also has a secret: his wife disappeared in the St Laurence River after a plane crash, an event that seems related to the stopping of the tides. Through her curiosity towards Marc’s mysterious past, Alice becomes something of a typical Mulveyan37 hero, whose object of desire also hides an enigma that she must uncover. Turbulence is evidently not a classical Hollywood film. But given his function as an attractive spectacle whose ownership by the hero relies on the discovery of his secret, Marc ultimately functions as an artsy displacement of the traditional object of desire in mainstream films. His otherness vis-àvis the audience is one of class rather than sex.38 As is the case for Mario, Marc’s working-class ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ renders him a passive object for the intellectual gaze, which finds in this object the material of its own self-definition. In the end, Alice, using modern satellite

228 André Loiselle

technology, locates the body of Marc’s wife. The recovery of the body allows Marc to mourn her death and makes him available for Alice. They finally have sex on the beach! Magically, the union of the intellectual and the worker triggers a mild earthquake, which causes the tides to flow again. Swallowed up by the tide, Alice has a near-death experience that frees her from her jaded rationalism and opens her eyes to the possibility of a world where not everything can be explained scientifically. Although Marc has a much more important role than Mario in Déclin, he remains a sounding board upon whom the cynical intellectual can project her repressed desire for passion and love, and work out her own problems. A similar structure appears in Denis Villeneuve’s art film Maelström (2000), in which the working class also serves as a counterpoint to the intellectual center of the film. Bibiane (Marie-Josée Croze), the intelligent, wealthy, and screwed-up protagonist, who recently had an abortion, finds her life meaningless until, while driving drunk, she runs over and kills an old man (Klimbo) who worked in a fish factory. Through an intricate set of circumstances, this accident eventually allows her to find love with the son of the fishmonger, Evian. JeanNicholas Verrault, in the role of Evian, plays roughly the same character he played in Turbulence. While not strictly speaking a proletarian (he is a diver at a hydroelectric damn and again probably earns a good salary), he again looks like a ruggedly handsome member of the working class. His worker’s clothes, permanently dishevelled hair, poorly shaved chin, earthy speech, and no-nonsense (yet, deep-down inside, sensitive) attitude make him the typically irresistible, unkempt, blue-collar hunk who can revitalize the morbidly self-aware upper-class girl with a good lay. Like Alice and Marc, Bibiane and Evian manage to transcend water and death and embrace in the end. As much as the film is rich in watery symbols (Evian!) and formally inventive (a fish called ‘the Entity’ narrates the story), it remains traditional in its characterization of the worker as a foil who allows the upper-class subject to move through the narrative. Interestingly, the story-telling fish is shown through vignettes that display the striking spectacle of the raw but vibrant environment of the working class. Dark, humid, foggy, and sensual, the surrealistically naturalist set in which an ‘infernal fishmonger’ constantly chops off the head of the talking fish – seemingly to no avail in terms of the unfolding of the narrative – recalls the rosserie that appealed to the late-nineteenthcentury fashionable Paris crowd who attended performances of working-class plays like Die Weber (Gerhart Hauptmann, 1893) et Les

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 229

Bouchers (Fernand Icre, 1888) at André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre.39 The appeal of Villeneuve’s expressionistically abject talking fish, for Canadian art-cinema enthusiasts, perhaps reproduces the allure of the slums that drew the late-nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie to the bleeding carcasses of beef, on the stage of Théâtre Libre, during the production of the otherwise lyrical tale of jealousy and passion that unfolds in the picturesque butcher shop of Les Bouchers.40 My point here is only to suggest that the working class has long been an intriguing spectacle for the upper classes. The most extreme example of this appealing mixture of raw naturalism and spectacular surrealism, which transforms the working class into a grotesque mirror image of the film’s subject, is found in JeanClaude Lauzon’s Léolo, which deals with a young boy who rejects his working-class surroundings and escapes into a world of fantasy. As a dreamer and a budding poet, the only member of his family interested in reading books, Léolo (Maxime Collin) can be interpreted as the incarnation of the intellectual who is, at once, fascinated by certain aspects of his proletarian background and repulsed by others. Profoundly attached to the female members of his entourage – his mother (Ginette Reno), sisters (Geneviève Samson, Marie-Hélène Montpetit), and an attractive female neighbour (Giuditta Del Vecchio) – he rejects the masculine component of his working-class heritage: his father (Roland Blouin) and grandfather (Julien Guiomar). In other words, the exoticism and sensuality of the proletariat as spectacle remains appealing while the gritty reality of its condition (the father is seen working in an infernal factory) is to be discarded. The distance between the beauty of imagination and the ugliness of the ‘real’ working class is further emphasized by the character of the Word Tamer (Pierre Bourgault), who is the only character to appreciate Léolo’s poetry. Typically, the Word Tamer is associated with high culture and good taste (he lives in a candle-lit study filled with manuscripts, religious statues, and works of art), while Léolo’s father and grandfather are disgusting incarnations of all that is ugly, petty, and mean. Equally contemptuous of a certain segment of the working class (those who seek to climb the corporate ladder), but adopting a humorous tone, Pierre Falardeau’s Elvis Gratton (1985), Elvis Gratton 2: Miracle à Memphis (1999), and Elvis Gratton XXX: La Vengeance d’Elvis Wong (2004) expose the bad taste, the ‘kétainerie,’ of members of the FrenchCanadian lower classes who fancy themselves members of the American upper class, through the character of Bob Gratton (Julien Poulin), an

230 André Loiselle

Elvis impersonator. While the first film makes a spectacle of the mundane life of Bob ‘Elvis’ Gratton and his wife Linda (Denise Mercier), the second demonstrates through absurd slapstick comedy that even when Elvis becomes a millionaire he still remains the ‘kétaine’ upwardly mobile working-class loser he has always been. Pierre Falardeau’s point is evident here: the culture of the envious proletarian who is blinded by the American Dream has little to do with the actual working conditions of the characters or even their financial status. It is strictly a matter of aesthetics, of spectacle. The films were quite successful with Quebec audiences. Ironically, a large portion of the public who enjoyed the spectacle of Elvis in his tacky outfits, garish car, and ostentatious house are likely to belong to the very same upper working class that Falardeau and Poulin ridicule so viciously. As a federalist (in the first film he wears a bathing suit decorated with a huge red maple leaf; in the third, he owns the federalist television network ‘Radio-Cadenas’), Elvis represents the worst type of proletarian for Falardeau: the one who has completely failed to recognize the necessity of the revolution and has rejected the nationalist ideal that his class was once believed to embody. Quebec audiences have also flocked to see Louis Saïa’s enormously popular Les Boys series (1997, 1998, 2001, and 2005), which revolves around a tavern owner and his amateur hockey team. As much as these films are based on a type of humour similar to that of the Elvis films, and could certainly be blamed for appealing to the lowest common denominator in the population, they display a much more positive, if more naive, outlook on class dialectics, suggesting that the hockey arena is in fact the great equalizer among men (women are systematically excluded from the centre of the narrative). On ice, auto mechanics, punk rockers, lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, and media personalities are all equal. So, at least on the surface, the class struggle seems to disappear in the name of our national sport. This interpretation, however, is not unproblematic. At one level, this notion of classlessness, as Terry Eagleton has argued, might mean ‘in effect a society which universally subscribes to ... middle-class liberal values,’ which is far from ideal.41 At another level, while hockey seems classless, the films themselves certainly aren’t. In all three films Stan (Rémy Girard), the tavern owner, is at the center of the story, and, more importantly in Les Boys I and Les Boys III, his friends are called upon to help him maintain or regain ownership of his tavern. The notion of property is thus at the core of these films, and the fact that Stan is the coach of his team emphasizes his

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 231

position at the top of the hierarchy. Furthermore, the characters with most clout with Stan, and who are played by actors with top billing in the films’ credits, are all financially comfortable. Bob (Marc Messier) the successful playboy, François (Serge Thériault) the womanizing doctor, and Ti-Guy (Patrick Huard) the hyperactive real estate agent form with Stan the core of the films, and Messier, Thériault, and Huard share top billing with Girard. With the significant financial success of the Les Boys series and a number of other films over the past twenty years, the Quebec film industry has become increasingly ‘big business.’ It just stands to reason, therefore, that the films it produces would continue to convey a capitalist ideology that associates financial success with subjectivity and power, and working-class culture with the spectacle of the grotesque and the powerless. The End of a Historical Coincidence Quebec cinema since the 1980s has generally not been particularly concerned with the working and living conditions of the proletariat. Although the second half of this survey hardly does justice to the entire output of Quebec cinema during the past two decades, it still reveals that the change from a focus on the actions of the working class, common to many films from the 1950s to the 1970s, to a display of the proletariat as something to look at from a temporal or ideological distance, is in fact less a transformation of attitude towards the lower classes than a clarification of the issues. With the failure of the 1980 referendum, the historical coincidence that created an imaginary link between nationalism and the proletarian cause came to an end, and filmmakers only became more honest, perhaps, in their attitude towards the working class: an attraction mixed with discomfort and even disdain. The coincidental connection of nationalism and the proletarian struggle from the 1940s to the 1970s emerged from the fact that workers and nationalists happened to embark on their respective causes at the same time. Certain coalitions were indeed formed: the Asbestos Strike did see proletarians and nationalists marching together in protest against Duplessis’s regime and American capitalists. But the films surveyed here suggest that these coalitions were not based on a genuinely common cause. To put it simply, while the English-speaking boss became a useful stereotype in the nationalist–working-class film, the actual working class in Quebec included anglophones (Tanya Ballantyne’s The Things

232 André Loiselle

I Cannot Change [1965] was one of the first films made in Quebec to acknowledge this fact), and the nationalist cause itself did appeal to a number of upper-class francophones (think of Jacques Parizeau). I would argue that the horizontal structure of the proletariat is in stark contrast with the vertical organization of nationalism, and this is why Quebec national cinema always represented the working class so ambiguously. There are certainly Quebec feature films that could be adduced to counter my argument. However, the fact remains that such important artistic achievements as Tit-Coq, Mon oncle Antoine, and Déclin de l’empire américain as well as box-office hits like Deux femmes en or and Les Boys point in the direction of a cinema that has tended to display stereotypes of the proletariat based on a middle-class image of how workers are supposed to look and expected to act.

NOTES 1 Yoram Bar-Tal, ‘Can Leaders Change Followers’ Stereotypes,’ in Stereotyping and Prejudice, ed. Daniel Bar-Tal and Yona Teichman (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989), 225. 2 Russell A. Jones, ‘Perceiving Other People: Stereotyping as a Process of Social Cognition,’ In In the Eye of the Beholder: Contemporary Issues in Stereotyping, ed. Arthur G. Miller (Westport, CA: Praeger, 1982), 42. 3 Clark R. McCauley, Lee J. Jussim, and Yueh-Ting Lee, ‘Stereotype Accuracy: Toward Appreciating Group Differences,’ in Stereotype Accuracy: Toward Appreciating Group Differences, ed. Yueh-Ting Lee, Lee J. Jussim, and Clark R. McCauley (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1995), 297. 4 Harry Braverman, ‘The Making of the American Working Class,’ in U.S. Labor in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Hinshaw and Paul Le Blanc (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), 25. 5 Sally R. Munt, ‘Introduction,’ in Cultural Studies and the Working Class (London: Cassell, 2000), 3. 6 Jon Cook, ‘Culture, Class and Taste,’ in Munt, Cultural Studies, 106. 7 Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 3. 8 One of the main achievements of the Union des Artistes, the performers’ union in Quebec, is to have negotiated ‘des conditions minimales de travail et de rémunération pour les artistes engagés par les producteurs

The Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 233

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17

18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

oeuvrant dans différents secteurs d’activité.’ See UDA’s website, http:// uniondesartistes.com. Cook, ‘Culture,’ 109. Ibid. Martin Knelman, This Is Where We Came In (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977), 50. Cook, ‘Culture,’ 109 Ibid., 110. Munt, ‘Introduction,’ 8. Michel Houle, ‘Quelques apects idéologiques et thématiques du cinema québécois,’ in Les cinémas canadiens, ed. Houle (Montreal: Cinémathèque québécoise; Paris: Pierre Lhermier Éditeur, 1978), 150–2. ‘Canadian cinema emerges from the stone age.’ Quoted in Pierre Véronneau, Cinéma de l’époque duplessiste (Montreal: Cinémathèque québécoise, 1979), 120. Roch Denis, Luttes de classes et question nationale au Québec: 1948–1968 (Montreal: Presses socialistes internationals; Paris: Études et documentation internationales, 1979), 119–22. Jean Hamelin and Jean Provencher, Brêve histoire du Québec, 3rd ed. (Montreal: Boréal, 1987), 102–4. André Loiselle, Stage-Bound: Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 55–6. ‘Ultimately, everything in Quebec during those years revolves around two crucial aspirations: achieving national independence and attaining independence for the working class.’ Denis, Luttes, 11. Houle, ‘Quelques aspects idéologiques,’ 145. Jean Pierre Lefebvre, ‘Entretien avec Gilles Carle,’ Objectif 34 (1966): 13–14. André Loiselle and Brian McIlroy, Auteur/Provocateur: The Films of Denys Arcand (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 1995), 142, 153. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 143. Houle, ‘Quelques aspects idéologiques,’ 152. Pierre Vallières, ‘Témoignage d’un otage privilégié des “ordres”: Brault a manqué son coup,’ Cinéma/Québec 4, no. 1 (December 1974): 19. Published in English as ‘Translated as An Account by a Privileged Hostage of Les ordres: Brault Has Missed His Shot,’ in Canadian Film Reader, ed. Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1977), 264–8.

234 André Loiselle 29 Anne Reiter, ‘Bruno Carrière’s Lucien Brouillard,’ Cinema Canada 96 (May 1983): 43. Emphasis in original. 30 Lucien Brouillard ‘closely resembles Bingo … Its pessimistic ending conveys the same message, namely, that terrorist actions (or political assassination, which is basically the same thing) are useless ... Lucien Brouillard is merely a cog in the political machinations of his friend Martineau, who wants to become premier … The film presents a personal drama rather than a social commentary.’ ‘Lucien Brouillard,’ Séquences 112 (April 1983): 23. 31 André Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive or Simply Stupid: Notes on Popular Quebec Cinema,’ Postscript 18, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1999): 79. 32 As Marianne Thesander argues in The Feminine Ideal (London: Reaktionbooks, 1997), the tightly contained, thin female body is a symbol of middle-class financial means: ‘It is desirable to be slim because it is difficult and often demands time and money. If everyone had the same opportunity to stay slim, the ideal of slimness would quickly be replaced by another status ideal’ (33). 33 See Réjean Beaudoin’s reading of the classist implications of rape as social revolt in ‘Le violeur violé ou comment réduire une question,’ Liberté 134 (March–April 1981): 156–7. 34 André Loiselle, A Scream from Silence/Mourir à tue-tête (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 2000), 7. 35 Ibid., 15. 36 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 15. 37 No need to repeat the well-known argument that Laura Mulvey presented in her ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Screen 16, no. 3 [1975]) about the visual and narrative function of the hero’s object desire in classical films. 38 His otherness is also one of race, indirectly expressed through his adopted daughter, who is of Chinese origin. 39 Oscar Brockett and Robert Findlay, A Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama since 1870 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 94. 40 Théâtre Libre’s audience quickly changed in 1888 from a small group of enthusiasts to mainstream spectators attracted by fashionable naturalist devices such as the bleeding carcasses. See John A. Henderson, The First Avant-Garde, 1887–1894 (London: George G. Harrap, 1971), 52–3. 41 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 94.

11 Inscriptions of Class and Nationalism in Canadian ‘Realist’ Cinema: Final Offer and Canada’s Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks joseph kispal-kovacs

This chapter examines two made-for-television films, Final Offer and Canada’s Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks, produced and released under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in 1985. Both films enjoyed a large viewership by virtue of being broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) during prime time. Both films promise the opportunity for examinations of two important sets of events in Canadian labour history. They drew on the long-standing Canadian realist film aesthetic most commonly associated with the National Film Board – the documentary and the docudrama. Further examination of these two films, however, reveals that, while they inscribe nationalist themes, they largely erase images of class and class conflict that are at the heart of labour history. Perhaps the trope we are looking for is the ‘palimpsest.’ Traces of class remain, but much of it has been erased and written over, particularly by concerns raised by nationalist discourses and by individualism. This chapter is an attempt to theorize that absence. How can two films purportedly designed to deal with labour erase class from their diegesis? How can we account for the ways in which film narrative can contain and express the historical complexities of class conflict, a subject that by its nature tends to be messy and difficult to express? The narratives themselves are subject to continued contestations about power and power relations. One could undertake any number of examinations of specific periods in film history (across a number of decades and national boundaries). Such an examination would demonstrate that film narratives, when dealing with complex social issues, tend to fall back on a series of simple narrative conventions. These conventions are both filmic (concerning the film’s formal properties) and historiographical (dealing with methodology).

236 Joseph Kispal-Kovacs

I will outline these conventions in the course of a case study of these two Canadian films, which are often cited as examples of how Canadians have sometimes done a better job than their American filmmaking counterparts of telling such stories on film. I argue that there is a tendency towards narrative simplification and weak historical methodology in most films dealing with class, whether the Hollywood narrative film, Canadian feature documentary, or Canadian docudrama and dramatic feature films. For the purposes of this project, I have taken up a certain aspect of the pioneering formal method of narrative analysis developed by people such as David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger in relation to the classical Hollywood cinema. Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger’s discussion of the impact of the philosophy of individualism (central to American society and culture) and of the economic organization of the film business is an invaluable place to start thinking about the evolution of film narrative. They summarize the effect of such influences as follows: Narrative resolution can work to transcend the social conflict represented in the film, often by displacing it onto the individual (the hero torn between duty and personal urges), the couple (the romance-plot taking precedence over the pretext-action), the family, or the communal good. Recent Marxist critiques of Hollywood cinema have demonstrated its persistent habit of reconciling social antagonisms by shifting the emphasis from history and institutions to individual causes and effects, where ethical and even religious moral terms can operate. Spectacle can be used to elide or wish away uncomfortable contradictions. Classical temporal continuity between episodes can deny the audience time to reflect about alternatives to the events presented.1

This shift in emphasis is at the heart of the matter when examining the Hollywood cinema. The question at hand is, are Canadian ‘realist’ films (such as the two under question) part of this same narrative tradition? Both Final Offer and Canada’s Sweetheart were produced under the auspices of Canada’s two most visible national media institutions, the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (the latter participated in financing and broadcast both films nationally). In early critical works on these films and others, Scott Forsyth outlined the ways in which an official nationalist position has been a hallmark of these institutions’ offerings.2 Forsyth theorized the failure of the pre-eminently Canadian film tradition of documentary realism to

Class and Nationalism in Canadian ‘Realist’ Cinema 237

constitute a critical and oppositional cinematic tradition and set of filmmaking practices. What I want to demonstrate is that this ‘distinctly Canadian tradition’ owes much to the set of conventions in the ‘dominant’ Hollywood narrative. It is my argument that, although there are some important formal differences between the two public sector nationalist films and the private sector entertainment products of the dominant Hollywood narrative systems, the underlying conventions are remarkably similar. Both Canadian films draw on the long individualist narrative traditions popularized by Hollywood. Both are constructed around an individual hero or villain who become the narrative centre of the films. Both reduce complex class and nationalistic conflicts to struggles between heroic individuals and their supporting casts. Both deflect fascinating chapters in the history of the Canadian labour movement into stories concerning U.S. domination of our economy and trade union movement. This kind of Canadian nationalism has always been a good way to distract us from the fact that our own bourgeoisie can be as ruthlessly effective as the Americans. It also masks the fact that Canadian business and political elites have willingly entered into relations with their American counterparts as relative equals, not as a colonized neighbour. Finally, it ignores the reality that many Canadian trade unions have willingly collaborated in the agenda and policies of the American trade union centrals (particularly the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations). The ‘real’ history of the Canadian Seamen’s Union (the subject of Canada’s Sweetheart) is a history of treachery. Canada’s Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks (Donald Brittain, 1985) masks a larger struggle between the Canadian Seamen’s Union (CSU) on the one hand and Canadian right-wing trade unions and their American sponsors on the other. Forsyth has described the film as a Cold War morality play with a gangster movie simmering below the surface.3 As a result of such an approach, original players in the drama are absent from the film. I am referring to the 12,000 members of one of the most militant and democratic unions of the period: the CSU, which lasted only from 1936 to 1949. The fight over the CSU was not just about alleged communist influence; it was also about the dangers that rankand-file unionism posed for the Canadian business class and its friends in Ottawa. The film downplays ruthlessness of both the state and the shipowners towards the CSU and instead presents a tale of a gangster who overstayed his welcome.

238 Joseph Kispal-Kovacs

Banks is represented literally as a gun-slinging American gangster in an early scene in the film. About to cross the border into Canada, he checks his suitcase. It contains a sawed-off shotgun, two pistols, and thousands of dollars in cash. Connotations of American capital and military prowess are neatly encapsulated in this short scene. Subsequent scenes in which we see Banks mercilessly beat his Canadian opponents serve to reinforce this notion of American domination. In fact, Banks’s villainy was only a small part of the attacks on the CSU by the combined forces of part of the Canadian dominant power structure (various police forces across the country, the shipowners, and hostile rival unionists). The fight to build and maintain the CSU was between the principles of democratic unionism and business unionism. The narrative of this film deflects this conflict and instead chooses to focus on a more manageable nationalist drama about unwieldy Americans dictating their labour policies to Canadians. The film presents a story where craven Liberal Party politicians betray the Canadian people by importing gangsters and then letting them stay, while countless innocent business unionists (themselves in the ranks of Banks’s Seafarers’ International Union [SIU]) have their lives turned upside down and suffer terribly. This narrative suggests that it is one thing to attack thousands of workers whose leaders may or may not be Communists; it is quite another when the attack is on an ‘ordinary’ worker. Such an attack undermines our imagined desire and need for ‘peace, order, and good government.’ This film is a docudrama that seamlessly melds three distinct formal strategies: historical reconstruction (presented in dramatic, highcontrast black and white), colour documentary (interviews with people who knew Banks, his principal allies and enemies), and colour reconstruction (the proceedings of the 1962 Norris inquiry into these affairs). The Norris Commission of Inquiry and its aftermath (the inquiry, the sentencing, Banks’s jumping bail and his successful fight against extradition back to Canada) constitute the frame around which this story hangs. These events are shot in colour, in contrast to the black-andwhite ‘historical reconstructions.’ The film’s director, Donald Brittain, has summarized his overall approach to storytelling as follows: ‘“I have a strong desire to make documentaries as entertainment,” he explained … No matter how exalted the subject matter, Brittain always pitched his films to the guys at the back of the tavern. His aim was to move them emotionally, reach them in the gut.’4 In Canada’s Sweetheart he deploys a somewhat ironic

Class and Nationalism in Canadian ‘Realist’ Cinema 239

and detached mode of address that partially, though not entirely, softens the film’s strong nationalist message.5 Brittain’s work from the 1960s onward is consistent with the NFB’s shift away from the more stridently earnest use of voice-over, representing a more nuanced and less didactic approach to documentary filmmaking, while still maintaining ties to the nationalist sentiments that were first developed at the NFB under John Grierson’s direction. In this way, the film exhibits the two consistent strands evident in Brittain’s work: the personal portrait (for instance in Bethune, 1964, and Volcano, 1976) along with the use of irony as a means of creating some distance from the kind of sentiment often attached to nationalist stories. The privileging of the nationalist and statist solutions to the problems addressed in the film is evident in the framing material at the beginning and end (as well as in the middle a number of times). The film begins with an off-screen, authoritative voice (that of Brittain) reading the following text, which precedes the credits: ‘The following story is based on court transcripts, sworn affidavits, minutes of meetings, eye-witness statements and the verbatim records of the Norris Commission of inquiry.’ This approach helps to establish the film’s claim to represent the real story of Hal C. Banks. The film’s mode of address appears to both engage and distance its audience. On the one hand, the film evokes the Griersonian tradition of didacticism, especially evident in the films of and immediately following the Second World War, with their authoritative voice-over narration giving intelligibility to the images we are about to watch. On the other hand, it lacks the stridency of that earlier tradition and incorporates a more observational sensibility in keeping with the work that the NFB produced in the 1960s. Brittain’s work within the NFB canon is fascinating precisely because he has internalized so much of its past traditions and then deployed them in new and innovative ways. As the film opens, we watch Banks entering the courtroom followed by a phalanx of lawyers and hangers-on. The voice-over continues, describing Banks’s ruthlessness and criminality and the protection he had long enjoyed from various political and business figures in the Canadian establishment. The audience infers that the Norris Commission, like the film that frames it, will get to the bottom of this sordid saga. As the credits end and Banks is finally seated before the judge, the film cuts to a scene from the past, signified by a transition to black and white. The subsequent reconstructed scenes of Banks’s first days in Canada are occasionally intercut with documentary images of Montreal

240 Joseph Kispal-Kovacs

and Canada in the late 1940s and early 1950s, thereby reinforcing the film’s claims to verisimilitude. The scenes from the past are also intercut with the reconstruction of CBC radio news programs (another voice of authority) that recount the major events in the shipping industry during this period. The continuing voice-over narration seems to sum up the complex set of events with the following words: ‘In thirteen months, the Communist-led CSU had been destroyed. New crews, recruited by Hal Banks and the SIU, were manning 157 Canadian ships sailing out of every port from Halifax to Vancouver. Any Communist threat to Canadian shipping no longer existed.’ Anyone familiar with the story would know that this is a gross oversimplification of the events that transpired. No mention is made, for example, of the debates over Canadian shipping policy that occurred after the Second World War and the fact that it had become the official policy of the Canadian government to withdraw from shipping. The result was a serious decline in the number of Canadian jobs in the industry.6 The voice-over narration throughout the film is at times ironic, mocking the complacency of the Canadian establishment and its tolerance of Banks. The implied message is that, while it was acceptable to bring Banks to Canada to get rid of the communists, it was not acceptable to keep him on for another thirteen years. The rest of the film recounts the long list of Banks’s subsequent sins. A series of interviews (in colour) with surviving victims of Banks’s crimes again adds to the veracity of the narrative. According to the film, it is only through the heroism of the prosecutors and Justice Norris that this reign of terror is brought to a halt. This appeal to the nobility of the civil service and the judiciary is fawningly contrasted to the behaviour of Banks’s allies in the federal cabinet and the Canadian business establishment. The actor playing Justice Norris says the following in his summation scene: ‘Banks is the stuff of the Capones and the Hoffas, of which the dictators from the early times to the totalitarians, Hitler and Stalin, are prototypes. He is a bully, cruel, dishonest, greedy, power-hungry, contemptuous of the law.’7 In the actual inquiry, Norris went on to indict the Canadian leaders who ‘looked the other way’ during Banks’s reign of terror. Banks was subsequently convicted of assault and sentenced to five years in prison. While out on appeal he jumped bail and returned to the United States. The Ontario government tried for four years to extradite him to face an additional charge of perjury. Last-minute intervention by the American secretary of state, Dean Rusk, quashed the

Class and Nationalism in Canadian ‘Realist’ Cinema 241

extradition order. When asked why, he replied that it was at the request of a Canadian cabinet minister. Banks returned to San Francisco and lived a life as a harbour boat captain, dying of old age just shortly before the film was released. The film’s narrator, in concluding the story, further ironizes the hypocrisy of Banks’s ability to escape justice. Later in this chapter I will look at some of the reasons why the film takes this point of view. The telling subtitle of the second film under discussion – Final Offer: Bob White and the Canadian Auto Workers Fight for Independence (Sturla Gunnarsson, 1985) – is a good indication to the audience of the direction in which this narrative will go. (Interestingly the subtitle is absent from the film’s titles but can be found in the NFB’s promotional literature for the film.) This fascinating, quasi–cinéma-verité film mirrors some of the nationalist sentiments expressed in the Hal Banks film. Final Offer is not an historical film per se, but it does record an important set of events in the history of the Canadian labour movement: the negotiations between the United Auto Workers of Canada (UAW) and General Motors in 1984, which precipitated the divorce from the UAW of the Canadian section of the union and the establishment of the Canadian Auto Workers Union (CAW) shortly afterwards. The film follows the conventions of cinéma verité but differs from pure verité in its use of an authoritative off-camera voice to render more sensible the images we are seeing. Like another famous labour film, Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple’s 1976 film about a strike in the U.S. coal industry), the project started as a rather modest one and grew as events unfolded. In this regard, the American cinéma-verité movement contains both progressive and conservative practices, demonstrating, as Peter Urquhart describes in his contribution to this collection, that form is itself no guarantee of political efficacy. In the case of Final Offer, the filmmakers were given close access to many of the participants in the unfolding drama. As events developed, it became more and more apparent that this was an important milestone in Canadian labour history. What is more significant to this writer is how the unfolding events effectively changed the kind of film that would be made. However, unlike the Kopple film, Final Offer would not be an examination of the various rank-and-file picketers and their concerns. Instead of an integration of multiple and perhaps conflicting stories, we are left with a portrait of Canadian labour leader Bob White. The original working title for the film was Motors, and the prelimi-

242 Joseph Kispal-Kovacs

nary screenplay treatment called for the examination of collective bargaining in a modern industrial setting. The writer, Robert Collison, already knew that the GM-UAW talks would be historically significant. How significant was still in question as preparations for filming were underway. The treatment called for a balanced representation of the union leadership’s negotiating tactics with GM to be intercut with scenes of workers’ concerns as well as those of the communities in which they live: ‘By interweaving these three elements – The Talks, The Line, and The Town – we hope to present a vivid portrait of the North American Auto industry at a critical point in its history.’8 The remainder of the treatment also indicates that the author has a rather sophisticated understanding of the complex global context within which the Canadian auto industry was operating in the early 1980s. Important to an understanding of this analysis is the degree of success on the part of the filmmakers in articulating this context. The film begins with some views of the assembly line in the large GM auto plant in Oshawa. Workers on the line are shown engaged in various activities. The audience is led to believe that they will be an important part of the narrative. A shop steward is seen talking to some members about the upcoming strike vote. From this we move to an exterior shot of the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. Voice-over narration by Henry Ramer tells us that the upcoming negotiations will take place here. The narrator (still off-screen) introduces us to main union leaders as they set up shop at the hotel. This introduction suggests that the film we are about to see will follow the plan in the original script. For a while, this appears to be the case. After the scene at the Royal York, we return to the line in Oshawa. The next section of the film shows us an ongoing and festering conflict between individual autoworkers and their floor manager. A shop steward tries to intervene but is not successful. This short sequence is a fascinating look at the slow-burning conflict at the heart of many of the problems in the large industrial setting and invites anticipation of further insights. However, over most of the rest of the film, the workers in the plant, and later on the picket line, recede in importance, as does their explicit integration in the bargaining process. The screen time given to the workers all but disappears in the second half of the film, except as largely irrational and aggressively boisterous respondents to the negotiation committee’s presentation of its bargaining efforts at a meeting of the union membership. Images of work on the assembly line are displaced by work around the boardroom at the Royal York. The bulk of the last three-quarters of the film deals with scenes between GM

Class and Nationalism in Canadian ‘Realist’ Cinema 243

and the Canadian negotiators for the UAW, and the conflicts unfolding between the Canadian and American sections of the UAW. The lives of the rank-and-file autoworkers and the communities they live in recede into the background. They are rendered virtually invisible. Instead, we are treated to a rather hagiographic portrait of the great labour leader Bob White, who is willing to ‘wrap himself in the Canadian flag’ to get the job done. The point here is not to dismiss White’s important bargaining gains or organizational leadership, but rather to demonstrate how the complexity of class struggle and working-class experience is elided in dominant practices of cinematic representation, most importantly in the reproduction of the myth of nationalism and the trope of individualist leadership. Near the climax of the film, the autoworkers themselves briefly re-emerge as misled wildcatters who have been duped by dissident elements in Local 222 (the Canadian section’s largest). Their iconoclastic activity is seen as a threat to the power of the master bargaining committee (the leadership) and its control over the membership. The hero and his trusted lieutenants are eventually able to regain control over the situation and save the day. These two films focus on individual protagonists (as heroes and villains), and this representational strategy is one we associate with much of film narrative over the past eighty years or so. The economic reasons for Hollywood’s adaptation of such a narrative formula has been enunciated by numerous American film historians (including Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, among others). Time constraints imposed by the discipline of the workday under industrial capitalism added to this impetus. Capitalism’s structuring of leisure time has affected the types of entertainments available to us. This effect even appears to be the case with the programming provided by Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC. Pressure to compete with Canada’s private broadcasting networks by offering compelling and ‘entertaining’ stories has placed strict limits on the development of alternative film practices (documentary or otherwise). It is clear from the analysis of these two films that it is extremely difficult, but no less essential, for filmmakers to put complex stories about class into the dominant narrative paradigms encouraged by the cultural industries as they are presently organized. It is much easier to graft these stories onto the individualist paradigm favoured by Hollywood. What is interesting is how these narrative strategies have caused the class dimensions of the stories to be deflected into the arena of nationalism. In the Hal Banks film, the story of the CSU is rewritten to

244 Joseph Kispal-Kovacs

provide an official nationalist critique of American interference in the affairs of Canada. The film is not about persecuting militant trade unionists, but about the fact that certain members of the Canadian establishment have not acted patriotically enough in defence of Canadian interests. The film’s hero, Justice Norris, is an official and stateemployed Canadian nationalist. Unlike the toadies in the Canadian cabinet, Norris is willing to stand up to preserve the integrity of the state. Instead of representing the cabinet ministers as venal lapdogs of the Canadian business establishment (which they were then and often are now), the film chides them for being un-Canadian. This kind of nationalist deflection of class concerns is evident in Final Offer as well. The story of the break-up in the UAW can be told in a number of ways. A compelling argument can be made that the real impetus for the break-up came because of the increasing drift to the political right in the international executive of the UAW. Canadian members of the union were appalled by the numerous sellouts of American UAW members by their leaders. The Canadian section was able to resist this development for a while, but their position became more and more untenable. They had two options: organize a continent-wide opposition to the treachery of the top brass, or set up shop on their own. They decided to go it alone. Bob White, in his autobiography, lamented the fact that American militants lost a strong ally in the Canadian section of the international.9 The establishment of the CAW was a defeat for those American autoworkers who wanted to fight against concessions. However, the filmmakers chose to simplify the story by focusing on the charismatic White, who becomes a kind of unofficial nationalist hero. He is a man who stood up for Canadian workers when others would not. The decision to tell the story in this manner makes it extremely difficult to address the complex rank-and-file politics at play in the union, politics that extend beyond the strict confines of national borders. Both these films offer compelling entertainments, and they are well produced and engaging. However, as stories about labour, they fall disappointingly short.

NOTES Special thanks to Bernard Lutz and the staff at the National Film Board archives in Montreal for allowing me to peruse the material collected on the two films that are the subject of this chapter.

Class and Nationalism in Canadian ‘Realist’ Cinema 245 1 David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 82–3. 2 Scott Forsyth, ‘From Silver Screen to Red Flags: Marxism, Revolution and Popular Film’ (PhD diss., York University, 1987), 221–34, and ‘Grierson and Canadian Nationalism,’ CineAction! 16 (Spring 1989): 77–9. 3 Forsyth, ‘From Silver Screen to Red Flags,’ 230. 4 Ron Blumer, ‘The Filmmaker,’ in Donald Brittain: Never the Ordinary Way, ed. Terry Kolomeychuk (Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1991), 17. 5 Terry Kolomeychuk has edited a useful and though but somewhat hagiographic overview of Brittain’s work (ibid.). He traces the evolution of Brittain’s craft from his earlier more straightforward portraits and biographies such as Bethune (1964) and Volcano (1976) to the more reflexive style evident in Canada’s Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks. 6 Jim Green, Against the Tide: The Story of the Canadian Seaman’s Union (Toronto: Progress Publishers, 1987); John Stanton, Life and Death of the Canadian Seaman’s Union (Toronto: Steel Rail Educational Publishing, 1978). 7 From the NFB press release for the film, 30 August 1985. 8 Robert Collison, Motors, screenplay treatment dated 5 May 1984, National Film Board Archives, unpaginated. 9 See Bob White, Hard Bargains: My Life on the Line (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), 329.

12 Rude and the Representation of Class Relations in Canadian Film john m c cullough

This chapter is an attempt to describe the absence of representations and discussions of class relations in Canadian films and Canadian film culture. This absence includes a general lack of interest in labour histories, the experiences of class struggle, and the complex relations between ideology, class, nation, gender, and race. I argue that, while there are rare exceptions, the dominant tendency in Canadian cinema is to ‘dematerialize’ and depoliticize representations of class relations. This is evident in the documentary and experimental traditions, as well as in the history of feature films made for export, most of which jettison references to Canadian issues and themes altogether. Although some critics have held out hope for the politicization of Canada’s art cinema, I suggest that, even here, class relations and the history of Canadian class struggle are regularly obliterated by indifference. Our national cinemas, given their liberal political tendencies and their commercial orientation, appropriate, rather than encourage, radical social criticism. I have chosen to present my argument through an extended analysis of a remarkable Canadian film, Clement Virgo’s Rude (1995). The film has been roundly acknowledged as a model of what is best in Canadian art cinema, and it is particularly popular because it responds to, and reproduces a vivid picture of, Canadian life since the prime ministership of Brian Mulroney (i.e., post-NAFTA, global, urban, ‘post-industrial’). Some fans of the film also see it as an embodiment and a fulfillment of the potential of a new Canadian ‘national popular’ film form, given its exciting hybridization of commercial entertainment forms, international urban style, and postcolonial sensibility. The film has also encouraged extensive critical commentary on ‘multiculturalism’ in contemporary Canadian cinema, foremost of which has been the work of Rinaldo

Rude and the Representation of Class 247

Walcott.1 As extensive as the writing on this film has been, the bulk of the discussion and analysis has been notable for its indifference to questions of class relations, preferring to see the film almost exclusively as an expression of race and gender identities. To be fair, the film does not encourage class-based interpretations, and I contend that such an elision of class relations is status quo in Canadian film culture. My analysis begins with a scene, towards the end of the film, in which Luke (Maurice Dean Wint) confronts his brother Reece (Clark Johnson), wrestles for possession of a gun, and, in a mix of emotions, asks, ‘Reece, when are we going to grow up? When are we going to be men?’ Reece has no answers, Luke has nothing further to add and disappears into the night, and the audience can quite safely assume that there is nothing more to this sibling showdown. As it turns out, the unanswered question can be read as one of the themes that ties the three stories of the film together. If Rude is ‘steeped in the hood film genre,’ as Walcott argues, then the question (‘when are we going to be men?’) seems appropriate, even mandatory. Walcott describes the ’hood film as primarily concerned with issues of masculinity and, in particular, the theme of ‘(re)gaining manhood for black men.’2 Undoubtedly, the ’hood film includes a conservative tendency to privilege the victimization (and reconstruction) of Black male subjectivity, but these films have a variety of meanings that exceed this summary overview. For instance, ’hood films are subgenres of the Hollywood gangster film: they borrow much of their mythos, style, and thematic material from classic films like Public Enemy (1931, William Wellman), Little Caesar (1931, Mervyn LeRoy), and Scarface: Shame of a Nation (1932, Howard Hawks). Robert Sklar has described these films as ‘social pathos,’ and he claims that ‘the classic gangster films did have a message: their heroes’ chaotic lives were more than matched by the chaos in society around them.’3 For critics and fans alike, the gangster film has been understood as veiled criticism of capitalist social relations, including the myth of the American Dream. Take, for instance, The Godfather Part II (U.S., 1974, Francis Ford Coppola), which, John Hess argues, provides a critique of American society, and ‘capitalism specifically.’ ‘The film’s all-pervasive theme is the warmth, strength, and beauty of family ties, which, in bourgeois society, alone appear to meet the desperate need we feel for human community. The counter-theme, and the real strength of the film, is its demonstration that the benefits of the family structure and the hope for community have been destroyed by capitalism.’4 Additionally, another cultural form that influenced the ’hood film, the blaxploitation film,

248 John McCullough

routinely succeeded by playing to its audiences’ pleasure in ‘reading’ the exaggerated narratives, extreme action, and flamboyant characterizations as allegories about the oppression, poverty, crime, spectacle, and violence of contemporary life. ’Hood films are also substantially informed by, and are one of the expressive forms of, hip-hop and rap culture. For American rappers and hip-hop artists and fans, gangster films are inspirational because they feature an underclass hero who uses ethnic, gender, and class identity in imaginative and empowering ways – no wonder hip-hop artists borrow names like Public Enemy and Scarface. In a sense, these artists (like rockers, punks, gays and lesbians, and members of other marginalized groups) are ‘decolonizing’ their identities, turning mainstream assumptions and criminalizing rhetoric to their advantage. The character of the misunderstood gangster hero, who is forced by economic, racial, or ethnic social structures to feel like an outsider, defines one significant aspect of hip-hop culture: its exploitation of subaltern identity. Because 1980s hip-hop music routinely sampled from commercial culture without paying royalties, the artists’ work was often characterized as ‘piracy.’ Ironically, this provided a degree of ‘legitimation’ to the cultural form’s ‘criminal’ identity. Overall, the ’hood film hero should be seen as a complex, often contradictory, subject position that refers to themes such as crime and class struggle, rugged individualism, (ethnicized) masculinity, territorial competition, cultural alienation and appropriation, and community and personal empowerment.5 The ’hood film, in its attempt to represent this complex subjectivity, and to ‘transcode’ the larger socio-cultural context of rap and hip-hop, provides a series of audience positions that encourage reassessment of capitalist social relations, including the nature and purpose of work and property. ’Hood films also wrestle with the theme of ageism and the exploitation and oppression of youth in contemporary society. These films, which represent a world of teens and young adults facing low-wage work, high unemployment rates, crumbling social traditions, marginal political representation, and physical and psychological abuse, also find their roots in teen films like Rebel without a Cause (U.S., 1955, Nicholas Ray). Like the gangster film, the teen film typically features a central character defined as an outsider, a malcontent, or a rebel, whose identity is defined in antagonism to normative social and moral codes. In film culture, these characters flourish in the social problem film, and since the 1950s Hollywood has responded to various ‘youth crises’ with

Rude and the Representation of Class 249

a series of provocative films that play specifically to youth markets. This is part of the tradition that fuelled the development of the ’hood film, and, given that these issues and this history are grafted onto the gangster film, it seems clear that the form allows for a variety of audience pleasures, including critiques of capitalism by working-class, criminal, and outsider heroes, as well as critical evaluations of America’s attitudes towards youth. Ultimately, although Rude appropriates some ’hood film conventions, it is not really a film about boys becoming men, and it is only barely interested in representing the rites of passage of youth that distinguish many American ’hood films. In fact, as John Singleton’s Boyz N’ the Hood (U.S., 1991) tells us, in introductory on-screen text, the coming-of-age theme itself is significant to contemporary Black American films because of the reality of high mortality rates for ghetto-born Black males. But, in Rude, Luke’s question, ‘When are we going to be men?’ already suggests that growing up is not threatened in Canada so much as it is deferred, delayed, or retarded. In fact, Luke’s question is inspired by his gender and class insecurity, and it also vaguely relates to diminished masculine power in the context of multiple gradients of colonization and oppression. In this sense, the question fits within the long tradition of Black diasporic culture and criticism and the types of postcolonial cinema that are inspired by the art and theory of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, for example. In view of this, Virgo’s film should be seen as part of a diverse, transgenerational, and international group of works that express a postcolonial thematic and aesthetic. This is why Walcott’s chapter on Rude is dedicated to investigating the possibilities of a Canadian variant of ‘third cinema,’ for third cinema is a solidarity movement associated with postcolonialism, organized around the ‘decolonisation of culture,’ as two of its architects famously put it.6 On the surface, at least, Rude seems to have the aesthetic and intellectual characteristics of third cinema, including an anti-colonialist stance, as well as a progressive attitude regarding race, gender, and class relations. Paul Willemen’s overview of the history of the concept of third cinema provides us with a sense of the commitment involved in taking on the tradition. He writes: ‘The notion of a Third Cinema was first advanced as a rallying cry in the late 60s in Latin America … As an idea, its immediate inspiration was rooted in the Cuban Revolution (1959) and in Brazil’s Cinema Nôvo, where Glauber Rocha provided an impetus with the publication of a passionate polemic entitled “The Aesthetics of

250 John McCullough

Hunger” [a.k.a. “The Aesthetics of Violence” (1965)].’7 Third cinema filmmakers share a history of revolutionary ideals and a commitment to progressive political change, but there has never been a strict doctrine of aesthetics that characterize third cinema practices. In fact, third cinema now serves as a general category of film and video production that is assumed to be alternative and politically minded work and that is produced around the world but located in cultures that are considered subaltern. The result is that a diverse spectrum of interests and identities now characterize the history of third cinema, and the category is flexible enough to include, for example, the work of early Latin American documentarists, contemporary African television producers, and university professors working in Europe and the United States. This multiperspectival field of visual expression allows for a wide range of representations, and results in a diversity of interpretations of the meaning and purpose of third cinema. Walcott’s own definition of third cinema is primarily influenced by Black British art cinema (e.g., the work of Isaac Julien) and is organized around the politics of Black expression and identity construction. To the extent that this definition of third cinema is quite alien to the socialist movements in Latin America and Africa that actually gave rise to the concept, it is worth drawing attention to the slippage that has occurred in Walcott’s deployment of the term third cinema. Although the phrase emerged from a theory and practice rooted in postcolonial and antiimperialist political activism, and was therefore engaged in understanding the interactions of race, class, and gender in the context of various liberation movements, Walcott sees Black identity as the dominant social relation in third cinema. This obscures the historical significance and sense of the word ‘third’ in the phrase, which originally referred to the Cold War imperialist and colonialist terminology of ‘three world’ geopolitics, including the various identities and subjectivities associated with these histories. Third cinema came about as a political act of refusal. It was defined in contrast to the ‘overdeveloped’ first cinema of Hollywood and the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘intellectual’ second cinema found in ‘art house’ films. This history is lost in Walcott’s definition of third cinema, and, as well, his definition places an unreasonable burden on Black films to serve as the radical conscience of the nation. Moreover, the suggestion is that third cinema in Canada would be necessarily and profoundly connected to Black Canadian cinema. But as Christopher Gittings has shown, the Canadian nation-state has been able to routinely massage potential social crises around issues of

Rude and the Representation of Class 251

race relations by providing policy and programs that shape and contain dissent and discord.8 In such a situation, culture that is rooted in personal identity tends to be absorbed into the capitalist and multiculturalist state. Within this context, although Rude seems to promise that it, too, will be the voice of a dispossessed population, ultimately the film can only flirt with radical politics, as it mimics the styles of first and second cinemas. It is unlikely that a third cinema in Canada will be inspired primarily by race identities. For one thing, it is evident that the state has its own purposes in developing film-subsidy programs and initiatives for culture, and state multiculturalism must be understood as intentionally reformist and not conducive to the political activism of third cinema. Because anglophone Canadian filmmakers have never answered, in large numbers, the class-based or decolonizing challenges typical of the original aspirations of third cinema, and because there has never been a sustained and substantial anglophone revolutionary political movement in this country, there has never been a revolutionary film movement. Without a radical social movement and a history of activist culture, the dream of third cinema in Canada will remain a fantasy. The recent manifestation of diversity (i.e., new identities) on the horizon of Canadian filmmaking is a crystallization of various state projects and market trends, and this should not be confused with a history of third cinema. Such diversity, Homi K. Bhabha reminds us, ‘is the recognition of pre-given cultural “contents” and customs, held in a time-frame of relativism; it gives rise to anodyne liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange, or radical rhetoric of the separation of totalized cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity.’9 In a country so thoroughly dedicated to reformist politics, it is misplaced enthusiasm to anticipate a revolutionary culture in Canada at the dawn of the third millennium. If Rude is not a good example of either the ’hood film or third cinema, it leaves the critic with a ‘crisis in naming,’ a crisis that has become somewhat emblematic of anglophone film culture in Canada.10 Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the question that Luke asks is a familiar one within the history of the Canadian feature fiction film. To the extent that it suggests themes of immaturity and underdevelopment, it relates to the anxiety of being ‘little brother,’ the ‘silent subject,’ the ‘loser,’ and the ‘victim,’ all of which are designations that have been applied to most male characters in Canadian movies, and to the Canadian fiction

252 John McCullough

film itself.11 In fact, Luke’s question certainly reveals a good deal about national and gender identity in Canada. Specifically, while the confidence of the American film hero is legion, and has always impressed viewers worldwide, the hesitant attitude of Luke and Reece seems typically Canadian. Within the film itself, the relations between the men (they are never boys) and their boss Yankee (Stephen Shellen) are similarly structured by domination, such that they become mere fodder for (the) Yankee, who expresses his desires, plans, and character forcefully and repeatedly. The name he gives Luke, for instance, is ‘General,’ which refers specifically to Luke’s privileged role as head of the Canadian operation of Yankee’s drug empire. The name is also meant to highlight Luke’s grandeur as a strong, Black male hero, and this elevates him both stylistically and morally in the hierarchy of male characters in the film. Predictably, while the name indicates Yankee’s esteem for Luke, the process of naming is also meant to represent the boss’s ‘plantation style’ appropriation of his workers. The final irony is that only in name could Luke assume the rank of General in Yankee’s army: his ultimate lack of power stands as an obvious allusion to the history of Canadian branch-plant capitalism. Nonetheless, as much as the film may articulate Canadian insecurities and take a shot at U.S. hegemony, Rude is not a politically committed project. In fact, it is difficult to see it as much more than a contemporary contribution to the respectable tradition of Canadian art cinema. It is distinguished by technical beauty, the imaginative interweaving of three distinct narratives, and its believable and well-rendered characters. Walcott observes that ‘Virgo’s cinematic virtuosity is clearly playful, and sometimes reveals a diasporic sensibility,’ and Peter Harcourt enthusiastically claims that Rude is ‘the crowning achievement of the new Canadian cinema.’12 It is not surprising that, like the overwhelming majority of Canadian art films, it is a product of state subsidy, and thus illustrates one version of state-sanctioned national cultural identity. We could say even more on this matter to the extent that Rude is distributed in the context of international film festivals and art film exhibition circuits, so it is consumed as a particular example of successfully managed and state-sanctioned multiculturalism. Yet this does not even account for all that the film represents institutionally, for as well as being produced with state funding, it is also a product developed within the context of the Canadian Film Centre.13 This is an elite media-training facility in Toronto, founded by Norman Jewison, dedicated to preparing talent and product for international commercial

Rude and the Representation of Class 253

distribution. Like the Sundance Film Festival, founded by Robert Redford, the Canadian Film Centre is an example of New Hollywood’s ‘neo-colonial’ outreach programs, which feature industry veterans developing facilities that provide new contexts for ‘research and development,’ but which are nonetheless fully dedicated to reproducing Hollywood’s hegemony. The result is that, in the case of Rude, its form reflects the prevailing bourgeois ideas about commercial Canadian film. From this perspective, it is not difficult to see that the film is equal parts state policy (i.e., as it reproduces Canada’s official endorsement of multiculturalism, tolerance, and justice, for instance) and commerce (e.g., its negotiation and appropriation of the ’hood film so as to capture consumer markets). Gittings and Walcott have discussed this as the production of Canadian Blackness, and both authors tend to interpret the film from strictly race and gender perspectives. My intention is to contribute to this discussion by adding a class-based analysis, one that helps to understand gender, nation, and race in the context of class relations in Canada. I concentrate on Virgo’s film, the ‘crowning achievement of the new Canadian cinema,’ though I also analyse a crucial sequence in another significant Black Canadian film released in the same year, Soul Survivor, directed by Stephen Williams. Although Rude refers to the Caribbean immigrant and Black Canadian experience in Toronto, the actual place of the film is highly metaphoric. Most of the interiors use painted flats as walls or partial sets (e.g., the deejay’s space is signified by a console and some equipment), and the only documentary-like footage in the film consists of a few shots of the Regent Park projects that lie east of the city’s downtown. Other than this, the city is designated as Babylon, the symbolic site of Western oppression and decadence (a concept that the film borrows from Rastafarian cosmology). Additionally, pixilated long shots of urban spaces and horizons serve as segues between the stories. The overall effect of Virgo’s visual design is to emphasize the universal theme of rebirth at the expense of specific references to a ‘real’ Toronto and real neighbourhoods and communities. In fact, Virgo’s attempt to universalize his story extends to the trope of the pirate-radio deejay Rude (Sharon M. Lewis), whose presence in the ether is the only site that links the characters and their stories. As previously used in Born in Flames (U.S., 1983, Lizzie Borden), Do the Right Thing (U.S., 1989, Spike Lee), and Young Soul Rebels (U.K., 1992, Isaac Julien), pirate radio serves to suggest community (because it assumes a committed and local audience), as well as displacement (because this is a community maintained in the

254 John McCullough

ether). In this way, pirate radio has come to serve as a synecdoche for alternative, subaltern, and marginal identity, generally. All in all, with its sophisticated references to Black expressive culture and its exaggerated artifice, the formal aesthetic of Rude is somewhat unique in the history of Canadian film. As well, its urban setting and subject matter, and its emphasis on symbolic meaning, seem contrary to the documentary roots of Canadian film, in which the natural environment and realism are privileged. This difference has inspired Harcourt to describe the style of the film as ‘hyperrealist’ and, more cautiously, as ‘magic realism.’ Walcott has a more negative evaluation of Virgo’s aesthetic, but he does see Rude’s style as associated with Black expressive cultural practice. Specifically, the use of repetition, the use of music as a commentator on the characters and action, and the foregrounding of oral traditions in the central character of Rude, principally, are all associated with techniques recognized by Clyde Taylor, and developed later by Manthia Diawara, as common rhetorical figures in Black film aesthetics.14 Given the film’s style and form, it is not surprising that it communicates to the viewer on a somewhat abstract or conceptual level. The theme of redemption, for instance, is fundamental to all three narratives, which take place on an Easter weekend. In his story, Luke moves from confusion and disempowerment, to conscious resistance to Yankee, and, finally, towards freedom from ‘the man,’ in the embrace of his family. Maxine (Rachael Crawford), for her part, is initially represented as the resistant, but captured, prey of her lover’s camera (a gift he bought her), but she achieves a sorrowful independence by which she has come to terms with both her lost love and their child, which she has chosen to abort. Jordan (Robert Chevolleau), the boxer who has been involved in a gay bashing but who is clearly gay identified, has moved beyond violent repression, and when we last see him he accepts punishment for his complicity with the bashing, or ‘lynching,’ as the film describes it. The redemptive transcendence involved in all these stories is thoroughly problematized, though, to the extent that traces of the real world cling to all the characters. Luke’s wife, Jessica (Melanie NichollsKing), the police officer who saves her family by killing Yankee, may be infected with HIV contracted from an errant needle in the process of doing her job. Maxine’s crisis is not only moral and spiritual; it is fundamentally materialist, in the sense that, as both Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) and Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust (U.S., 1991) make clear, the reproduction of Black culture, within the winds of diaspora, depends on the continuity of daughters. As for Jordan, his

Rude and the Representation of Class 255

weekend transformation suggests that his world has now been turned irrevocably upside down. The portrayal of the boxer seems to borrow some of the ideas about repression embedded in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (U.S., 1980), in which the boxer’s aggressive homophobia is the more or less direct outcome of disavowed homoeroticism. In the bashing scene, Jordan denies his own desires, which allows him to deliver the knockout punch. Later, after being confronted by his victim and embracing his sparring partner (both wonderfully evoked instances of the return of the repressed), Jordan becomes submissive and welcomes his punishment. In Virgo’s weekend, as the sun and moon skim the horizon and exchange their roles, Jordan moves from sadist to masochist. Part of the film’s success as a redemption story is that it clearly presents itself as a mythic tale. There is little realism in the film, and this suggests that its effects lie not in its verisimilitude but in its storytelling. This draws Rude fully within the Canadian film canon, which Harcourt characterizes as distinguished by a narrative structure that is visual, connotative, and contemplative. Its exemplary form is the fable, and, as Harcourt astutely observes, this kind of filmmaking ‘is a mode that does not spell out with great psychological authority a specific social problem.’15 I would argue that, among a variety of other reasons, this helps explain the evasive politics of Rude. Measured by the standards of realism, the film falls short, and we never learn much about the characters or their situation beyond what is schematically crucial for the story. But Rude is a powerful fable about missed opportunity and the chance to repeat, differently. One might argue that this is potentially Brechtian filmmaking (i.e., artifice and pedagogy foregrounded; epic structure, overlapping stories, and themes that comment on each other), but, contrary to Brecht, the alterity that Virgo presents is not revolutionary but, in fact, wholly assimilationist. In this sense, Walcott’s objection to what he terms the ‘socio-religious narrative’ is particularly insightful.16 The film’s counter-revolutionary stance is not unusual in Canadian culture, and it is associated with a generalized and recurrent repression of class consciousness. In Canadian film, representations of class relations (including work, class struggle, and class identity) are historically marginalized by the concept of national identity, or they are displaced by an emphasis on idiosyncratic character psychology. For instance, Luke’s principal foe is Yankee, the white drug lord; he is aggressive, competitive, and racist. His denunciation within the narrative is premised on his identity as a threat. But, by his name, the source of his

256 John McCullough

threat is assumed to be American. There is no shortage of this trope in the Canadian canon, and it has been routinely used to obscure class relations that exist in this country. Undoubtedly, branch-plant identities are woven within the national fabric, but the figure of the venal American does nothing to clarify this colonized identity, let alone initiate a discussion of the effects of class struggle within Canada. For Virgo, Yankee is not so much a boss as he is a spectre of U.S. imperial reach, and this approach allows the tactful avoidance of class-based questions such as the relation between bosses and workers, male workers and female workers, white bosses and workers of colour, the Canadian state and the Canadian business elite, the migrant worker and the immigrant worker, and so on. It is easy to see how many dynamic stories are obscured when the national question is given priority in the construction of cultural product. While each of these class-based scenarios would provide a number of particular insights, Rude’s specific stories are in place to confirm general and vapid concepts. Furthermore, representations that play to international hostility assume the dubious claim of consensus around the concept of Canadian national identity and assume that, for instance, women, people of colour, and workers (and owners for that matter) on this side of the border have nothing in common with their counterparts on the other side. Additionally, the conception of Yankee as universally repugnant on the basis of collective Canadian hostility to the United States diminishes the significant regional and national differences that constitute this nation. Stephen Williams’s Soul Survivor appears to be poised to make critical comments on those very features of Black Canadian life that seem to silence the characters in Virgo’s film. In particular, the film develops a critique of the role of capital and class relations in the construction of contemporary Black Canadian identity, and it also foregrounds the role of money in everyday life. In the opening sequence, the protagonist Tyrone (Peter Williams) describes in voice-over that ‘in this life it’s not about collecting other peoples’ debts, it’s about paying for your own’; and, elsewhere, a character named Gold Finger claims that ‘the whole country is run by criminals.’ These observations about the role of money and power in the Canadian nation are refreshing, and their significance is amplified when the devilish Mr Price (George Harris) offers his own version of citizenship in Canada: ‘In this country you’re nothing without money, you’re not inside, you’re outside.’ With this statement, the filmmaker is able to efficiently characterize the attraction and repulsion of the neo-liberal thesis that ‘explains’ the integration of capital, immi-

Rude and the Representation of Class 257

gration, and national identity embodied in the complex concept of Canadian multiculturalism. In Soul Survivor there are a series of representations that align class, gender, and racial oppression, and these are seemingly far superior to Rude’s handling of the same type of narrative content. Given such meaty anti-capitalist material, there is a sense throughout the film that class-based insights and representations will continue to ground the actions of the characters and, in this sense, provide a useful materialist analysis of Black identity in Canada. To the extent that Rude and Soul Survivor invest themselves in similar stories, in the same historical context (Toronto in 1995), it is useful to consider the effects of their different strategies for negotiating shared themes and conflicts. In what follows, I want to discuss these differences by reference to a sequence in Soul Survivor, and then I will return to my analysis of Rude. Soul Survivor provides a series of sketches of diverse Black Canadian experiences. At the centre of it all is Tyrone, who finds himself torn between allegiances to several characters, all of whom represent a variety of contemporary social ‘problems’ including poverty, unemployment, addiction, crime, and violence. The sequence I want to discuss occurs in the last half of the movie. Though it is brief, it suggests the extraordinary power of realist narrative to stage grand conflicts in provocative, but unassuming, ways. It is also a lesson in normative ideology’s ability to negotiate social contradictions. It begins with Tyrone and his new boss, Mr Winston Price (a wealthy Jamaican-Canadian criminal), in conversation, at Winston’s mansion, surrounded by conifers and blue sky. The setting is emblematic of one aspect of traditional Canadian ‘culture’ (i.e., images of nature), and we are also aware of the nouveau riche status of the garden fixtures, which reiterate the message that consumption is the ticket into bourgeois Canadian identity. This, in itself, is a strong insight, and could be the beginning of a solid anticolonial criticism along the lines of Sembene’s work. Tyrone is characterized as a young and sensitive member of the working class, who has had to take work with loanshark Price. The bulk of Tyrone’s story is dedicated to his attempt to find redemption as a debt collector. As well, Tyrone’s protective stance towards his immigrant parents and his cousin Reuben (David Smith) makes it clear that he is ambivalent about the success that wealth promises. He is also not confident that Canadian state multiculturalism can protect his family heritage and cultural identity in the face of capitalist class relations. Tyrone’s cousin Reuben and his father (Ardon Bess), a former union

258 John McCullough

leader and Jamaican socialist, are represented as failures in Canada, while Price defines the profile of the financially successful assimilated immigrant. Price knows that in capitalism everyone has a ‘price,’ and he is the embodiment of both a theory and a practice of capitalism in the New World Order. The fact that he is a criminal both ironically comments on capitalism and reaffirms Walcott’s point that Black male identity, in the ’hood film, is routinely associated with criminal activity. By contrast, Tyrone’s relatives tend to represent the other pole of Walcott’s discussion, as they are examples of Black male victimhood and impotence. His father laments that he has ‘not been fruitful in this land of strangers,’ and his memories of an authentic Black experience in Jamaica are represented as delusional nostalgia. His cousin’s attempts to sell his music and spiritual artifacts are portrayed as opportunistic appropriations of his heritage, and the protest strike he leads against Price is an embarrassing caricature of activism, ultimately leading to his death. The film concludes with Tyrone resigning himself to capitalism and the Canadian state, as he sits on the sidewalk with his former girlfriend Annie, a community social worker, who offers comfort and redemption (as Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ plays over the final scene). My analysis begins with Tyrone collecting debts for Price. This includes shots of him taking money from immigrants and their children as well as from older and unemployed individuals. The scene cuts to Price’s mansion, where Tyrone is asking him about his belief in God (hoping to find some solace for his guilt). The boss (resplendent in sunlight with his mansion and pine trees behind him) replies, ‘But this is capitalism! The most difficult obstacle course the West has ever created. It’s about money, bottom line. End of the day, man with the most wins. End of story … That’s the whole cricket match.’ After pronouncing these basic ground rules as a rationalization for neo-liberalism, Price suggests the moral rationale for individualist competition when he explains that a ‘man should always look after his family.’ The next scene features Tyrone’s exhausted father who, coughing and sputtering through his reveries, provides Tyrone and the audience a (barely) living example of failed resistance. His crippled body and broken spirit emphasize the weakness of any alternative to capitalism. Clearly, the socialist father is losing ground, and the implication is that his liberalism, his compassion, and his humanity are bound up with his ‘obsolescent’ political commitment that, in the end, has left him isolated and unable to care for himself or his family.

Rude and the Representation of Class 259

The film portrays this weak father as a sympathetic character (at least in part). The implication is that socialism and socialists are morally defensible, but that the reality of contemporary capitalism forces pragmatists and ‘survivors’ to turn their back on revolutionary projects. Notably, because the filmmaker senses that capitalism is based on exploitation, the film is ultimately ambivalent about what is best for Tyrone. This ambivalence helps explain the numerous images that provide a negative comment on capitalist social relations. For instance, at the beginning of the sequence, the daily ‘realities’ of capitalism (the images of Tyrone collecting debts) are clearly connected to the ‘theory’ of capitalism that is articulated by Mr Price, and the effect is that we are encouraged to understand the gap between the progressive rhetoric of capital’s apologists and the aggressive operation of capitalism (e.g., its poverty, its ruthlessness, its recurrent mode of crisis). Specifically, the film explains that all human allegiances in capitalism are subject to erosion, and this is represented, for instance, in the debt-collecting scenes in which Tyrone takes money from the sick, the old, the young, and working-class immigrants. Recognizing himself and his family in those he shakes down, Tyrone begins to feel uncomfortable; the sequence then serves as a lesson about the crimes and ‘price’ of laissezfaire capitalism. But the greater lesson learned is that, while capital is morally rancid, its power is undeniable. This is a theme that is shared with Rude, and it is disheartening that these films encourage the impression that, when left to their own devices, individuals in capitalism will abandon collectivist and anti-capitalist movements and find solace in love and/or money. Predictably, the sequence concludes, not on the moments that encourage criticism of capital, but on the shots of the dying father, representative of an exhausted socialist ‘idealism.’ Ultimately, Soul Survivor, which seems to have some promise as a materialist portrayal of class and race, is as equivocal as Rude. Both films are structured as lessons, and they depend on allegories to make arguments about contemporary Canadian life. Mr Price, for instance, is a representative of globalized and unregulated capital – he is the hard father, the no-nonsense figure of recent capitalism. As we’ve seen, Tyrone’s father is the weak father, whose vision is failing and whose socialist aspirations wither in his bleak apartment. The central drama of the film is Tyrone’s relationship with these two father figures, and we are meant to learn lessons about the choices made.17 On the one hand, Tyrone’s appreciation of Price teaches him/us about ruthless and competitive individualism, but it

260 John McCullough

also teaches us about the shortcomings of the weak father. Specifically, the filmmaker’s unwillingness to represent a vital socialism suggests that socialism, unlike capitalism, is not an international or empowering project, and is not an appropriate topic or tradition within immigrant identity in Canada. As well, the film suggests that, because socialism fails to take root in Tyrone’s ‘second-generation’ immigrant life, there is no possibility, beyond the buffoon cousin, of reviving or rediscovering the vibrant tradition of Black anti-capitalist struggle. The film could have told another story with different lessons, but it would have had to do this by affirming the history of Caribbean socialism and Black Marxism. If the lessons were to be contemporary, they would have had to recognize the emergence of anti-capitalist struggle in the shape of anti-globalization movements, which, as it turns out, were active at the very time that Soul Survivor was telling us about the twilight of resistance. The film could have been a serious critical comment on Canadian capitalism, but it concludes on a defeatist note, denouncing brutal neo-liberal capitalism but admitting that, in the face of resonant images of exhausted alternatives to capitalism a young man can, with equal parts love and redemption, find his place (sitting on the sidewalk) in the Canadian urban landscape. Like Rude, this film does not have the intellectual or political commitment to fully understand what is at stake for marginal populations in Canada. Instead, it encourages an acceptance of Canadian multiculturalism and statism as a morally superior and politically effective resolution to the aggravated and extreme gender, class, and race relations that give definition to the film’s characters. In a typically Canadian way, both Rude and Soul Survivor provide resolutions that deny their own potential as political art. Walcott’s general dislike of Rude is based on the film’s evasion of the topic of the body, which is central to discussions of Black identities.18 I am indebted to this critique of ‘body evasion’ and would like to extend it to the evasion of bodies as regards work and class. It is not as though working bodies are not visible in Rude – all the main characters are workers and producers. But the effective disappearance of the ‘classed’ body, as a story topic, is one of the effects of nationalist ideology, which tends to dematerialize bodies on the road to redemption. In the film, there are numerous occasions when work and class are suggested as prominent social realities. For example, when Luke turns down Yankee’s job offer, he does so to avoid losing Jessica and his son. This is a potentially powerful evocation of a complex theme: the role of working-class family solidarity in the face of

Rude and the Representation of Class 261

invasive capitalist greed. Furthermore, this series of events implies that, in capitalism, work and love are rarely compatible and neither work nor love is the guarantor of the other. But this is not the perspective of the film: instead, it wishes to solve Luke’s sense of emasculation, not by critiquing capitalism, but by demonizing the drug-dealing Yankee. Unfortunately, this demonization suggests that there is a difference between Yankee as a drug dealer and Yankee as a capitalist. This distinction is the heart of the moral judgment that Virgo is attempting to teach his audience. The nastiness that Yankee gets up to, which includes injecting customers with contaminants, kidnapping Luke’s son by tempting him with treats that his father cannot afford, and humiliating his workers with racist slurs, is organized to make (the) Yankee morally indefensible. This quasi-nationalist appeal to a faint and fashionable antiAmericanism is typical of Canadian film culture, and the result in the film is that Yankee is understood to be an immoral man, but not that he is a typically exploitative employer. Class relations within Canadian film are regularly obscured in this way. The implication is that feature film in Canada is organized by class, as an absence. Chris Byford has suggested, in re-evaluating Goin’ Down the Road (1970, Don Shebib), that such an absence has also led to significant critical blind spots, the result being a series of misrepresentations and ‘misreadings’ of class relations and identities throughout the history of Canadian film culture. This insight can also be extended to contemporary Canadian films. Atom Egoyan’s work, in particular, has received many critical accolades, and it is worth recalling that his films have always privileged the metaphysical over the materialist. For instance, to the extent that much of his early work features the role of technology, critics have been quick to associate this theme with the theory of ‘technological nationalism,’ and this association has perpetuated a conception of Canadian culture that is, at one and the same time, bound to tools and defined by metaphysics.19 What gets lost in this interpretation is the role of elite American and Canadian ownership of media, workers’ lack of access to mass media, and the overwhelming desire of ordinary Canadians for U.S. media product (and not necessarily Canadian national identity). A critical approach to Canadian culture that ignores class conflict does not get around such matters, but unconsciously reproduces bourgeois myths about Canada as well as idealist concepts about national identity. Despite all the money and power that would affect the various real relations that are represented in Rude (e.g., the drug trade, boxing,

262 John McCullough

male-female and adult-child relations), the film curiously suggests that money and class influence only those events that are part of Luke’s story. Here, then, the narrative that derives its primary influence from the United States, the ’hood film, is the one that points most clearly to class conflict. This suggests an interesting premise: American film stories, to the extent that they are engaged in retelling the American Dream of private acquisition of wealth, can generally be read on the basis of class analysis. By contrast, in the context of the liberal state capitalism that defines the Canadian perspective, class is often marginalized by humanist tales of good and evil, winners and losers, and big and little brothers – all tropes that critics have used to establish the Canadian canon, and that filmmakers have relied on to codify and, inevitably, elide material reality. In Rude, the roll of bills that passes between the customer, Yankee, and Luke (and that Luke eventually returns to Yankee) is the only literal manifestation of capitalist relations among these characters. By contrast, it is worth noting that in both Do the Right Thing and Boyz N’ the Hood, the purchase of ice cream is used as a signifier of the desperate poverty, and barely concealed class war, that exists in the inner city. In Rude, Virgo reprises these scenes but emphasizes Luke’s poverty as a matter of male impotence, not class structure, and the scene is ultimately used to intensify our identification with his sense of victimization. Virgo pedantically represents Luke’s humiliation, but in the ’hood films, the ice cream scenes are brilliant and incisive snapshots of desire, commodity fetishism, freedom, and, of course, class struggle – but not capitulation. Admittedly, for those who understand Canadian national identity as synonymous with weak masculinity, there is a certain satisfaction in recognizing that only in a Canadian movie could a man be emasculated by ice cream. The stories about Maxine and Jessica, and the character of Rude, suggest Virgo aspires to progressive gender politics. Superficially, this may be the case, but a gender analysis that includes a class perspective reveals that Rude’s gender politics are profoundly conservative. For instance, Maxine and Jessica have jobs and cash, but their power and identity are always supplementary to the love and respect they receive from men, whose own gender identity, in turn, is overwhelmingly related to their financial security. This perspective is portrayed in the film in many ways. It is worth noting that, on those rare occasions when money is actually exchanged, it is passed only between men, which suggests that the film’s unconscious desire is to exclude women from economic power. This exclusion is done, curiously, so that strong women

Rude and the Representation of Class 263

can maintain their role as the moral backbone of the film – that is, because the film assumes that ‘money is the root of all evil’ (which is one of the moral lessons that Yankee teaches us), it is difficult for Virgo to give women economic power without ‘degrading’ their moral superiority. By disengaging class and money from the concerns and lives of the film’s female characters, Virgo reproduces a cultural bias against understanding women, money, and class relations. Of course, it follows that on the rare occasions when money, work, and morality are combined in the female characters, the male characters become threatened by their own insignificance. A good example is the portrayal of Jessica as a threat to Luke: she has a job, money, and morals – in short, he is the supplement in the family. But Virgo has invested in Luke as one of the principal characters, so he must consistently redeem him; such redemption is routinely achieved by compromising the representations of the active female characters. Rude, for instance, is nominally the film’s central character, but she is without material presence, and in this sense her identity is insubstantial and abstract. It is not even clear that she can be heard by any of the characters of the film, so her presence seems random, and her power fragmentary and incoherent. By contrast, even the hapless Luke is substantial enough to be redeemed. Ultimately, the film’s inability to consciously represent class relations influences its choice of narrative structure and characterization. The film sees redemption as a matter of morality (e.g., Maxine resolves her anxiety about baby and boyfriend around the ethics of choice; Luke rejects Yankee in a moral repudiation of evil; and Jordan finds pleasure in sacrifice), and this resonates as an idealist fantasy that equates human progress with moral evolutionism. By contrast, the tonic for what ails everyone in Rude is the redemption of human existence by way of class revolution. By this, I mean to draw attention to the fact that, if class conflict were an explicit narrative component in the film, the characters’ stories would evolve towards revolution, not absolution. As it is, Luke, Maxine, Jessica, and Jordan are reborn, but ultimately they, and all the Canadians they are meant to represent, are bound to repeat their oppression in class society, for they have not realized how it orders their existence. When Rude says that these stories take place in the land where the ‘Zulu nation meets the Mohawk nation,’ this should be a call to radically challenge capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. When the film does not pursue this sentiment, the statement seems gratuitous and, ultimately, serves as a justification for state-sanctioned multiculturalism (one can see the tourism poster already). If Rude were a

264 John McCullough

radical film about human redemption, it would lead, to borrow from Walter Benjamin, ‘into a world that borders not only on the tombs of the Sacred Heart or altars of the Virgin, but also on the morning before a battle or after a victory.’20 Rude is a paradigmatic contemporary Canadian movie, and, given that its design and thematic content are consistent with the tradition of Canadian art cinema in particular, it can be provisionally argued that the theme of national identity in Canadian films consistently serves to obscure material realities of life in Canada. In a sense, this is not surprising, as nationalist ideology is necessarily idealist. But the extent to which the Canadian cultural sphere supports nationalism through indifference to class relations is provocative. In Canada, there is a profound history that links class relations to nation, but the use of representational codes and cultural shorthand (e.g., hostility to Yankee becomes synonymous with moral and national rectitude) to express this relationship has obvious pitfalls. If Yankee, and by extension the United States, is to be hated, let it be done not as a national duty, but as an expression of class antagonism against owners, first, and then the imperialist American state, which reaches everywhere, including the hearts and minds of many Canadians. And if the spirit dancer who graces the opening and closing of the film is to be admired, then let it be done not as multiculturalist genuflection, but in a moment of recognition of the ancestors on whose bones the Canadian nation treads. A radical Canadian cinema would expose class, race, and gender struggles, and it would challenge the liberal state apparatus that willingly funds film culture that consciously, or unconsciously, points southward as the source of all social problems, and heavenward for solutions.

NOTES This chapter has been substantially changed from its original publication as ‘Rude, or the Elision of Class in Canadian Movies,’ CineAction 49 (June 1999): 19–25. It also draws upon the following: ‘Class as Aporia and Social Gesture,’ New Directions in Film Studies: The Second Annual FSAC Graduate Colloquium, York University, March 2000; ‘Roundtable on Class in Canadian Movies,’ Film Studies Association of Canada Annual Conference, University of Toronto, May 2002; and my PhD dissertation, ‘Tedium and Torture: Representations of Work, Class Relations, and Nation at the Beginning of the 21st Century’ (York University 2003).

Rude and the Representation of Class 265 1 Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1997); Walcott, ed., Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2000); Walcott, ‘De-celebrating Black Expressive Culture: A Polemic,’ Fuse 22, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 11–16; Kass Banning, ‘Conjugating Three Moments in Black Canadian Cinema,’ in North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980, ed. William Beard and Jerry White (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press), 84–99; Christopher E. Gittings, Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2002); Marc Glassman, ‘Where Zulus Meet Mohawks,’ Take One 9 (Fall 1995): 16–21. 2 Walcott, Black Like Who?, 127. 3 Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1994), 181. For an early account of the gangster hero, refer to Robert Warshow, ‘The Gangster as Tragic Hero’ [1948] in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 127–33. 4 John Hess, ‘Godfather II: A Deal Coppola Couldn’t Refuse,’ in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 82. 5 Mark A. Reid, ‘The Black Gangster Film,’ in Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 456–73; Tommy L. Lott, ‘A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema,’ in Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence and Oppositionality, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 40–55; Paula J. Massood, ‘Mapping the Hood: The Genealogy of City Space in Boyz N’ the Hood and Menace II Society,’ Cinema Journal 35, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 85–97; Tommy L. Lott, ‘Hollywood and Independent Black Cinema,’ in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (New York: Routledge, 1998), 211–28; Kenneth Chan, ‘The Construction of Black Male Identity in Black Action Films of the Nineties,’ Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 35–48; Ed Guerrero, ‘A Circus of Dreams and Lies: The Black Film Wave at Middle Age,’ in New American Cinema, ed. John Lewis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 328–52; Michael Eric Dyson, ‘The Politics of Black Masculinity and the Ghetto in Black Film,’ in The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility, ed. Carol Becker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 154–67; Rinaldo Walcott, ‘Keeping the Black Phallus Erect: Gender and the Construction of Black Masculinity in Boyz N’ the Hood,’ CineAction 30 (December 1992): 68–74. 6 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, ‘Towards a Third Cinema,’ in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 44–64.

266 John McCullough 7 Paul Willemen, ‘The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections,’ in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1989), 4. 8 Gittings, Canadian National Cinema, 231–62. 9 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,’ in The Post-colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 206. 10 Brenda Longfellow, ‘The Crisis in Naming in Canadian Film Studies,’ in Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art, ed. Jody Berland and Shelley Hornstein (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 200–15. 11 For a recent exchange regarding these topics refer to Christine Ramsay, ‘Canadian Narrative Cinema from the Margins: “The Nation” and Masculinity in Goin’ Down The Road,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2, nos. 2–3 (1993): 27–49, and Chris Byford, “Highway 61 Revisited,” CineAction 45 (February 1998): 10–17. I would add to Ramsay’s overview of male characterization in Canadian movies Seth Feldman’s ‘The Silent Subject of English Canadian Film,’ in Words and Moving Images: Essays on Verbal and Visual Expression in Film and Television, ed. William Wees and Michael Dorland (Montreal: Mediatexte Publications, 1984), 203–12. 12 Peter Harcourt, ‘Faces Changing Colour Changing Canon: Shifting Cultural Foci within Contemporary Canadian Cinema,’ CineAction 45 (February 1998): 2–9. 13 Both Clement Virgo and Stephen Williams have received training at the centre. 14 Clyde Taylor, ‘Decolonizing the Image: New U.S. Black Cinema,’ in Jump Cut, ed. Peter Steven (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1985), 166–78; Manthia Diawara, ‘Black American Cinema: The New Realism,’ in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 405–27. 15 Peter Harcourt, ‘Introduction,’ in Canadian Film Reader, ed. Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1977), 372. 16 Walcott, Black Like Who? 127–8. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Byford, ‘Highway 61 Revisited.’ Maurice Charland, ‘Technological Nationalism,’ Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 10, nos. 1–2 (1986): 196–220. Charland concludes: ‘A technologically-mediated Canadian culture, based in the experience of media commodities, would contribute little to a Canadian self-understanding’ (217). Typical of many Canadian

Rude and the Representation of Class 267 critics’ responses to Egoyan’s work is Cameron Bailey’s essay ‘Scanning Egoyan,’ CineAction 16 (Spring 1989): 45–51. Bailey opens his essay with the claim that ‘technology is Canada’s alphabet, our first and last resort.’ While Bailey is careful to avoid technological determinism, his approach tends to reiterate a common Canadian critical approach to media, borrowed from Innis, McLuhan, and Kroker, which sees Canada as held together, and thus defined, by technology. 20 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism,’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 181.

13 Counter Narratives, Class Politics, and Metropolitan Dystopias: Representations of Globalization in Maelström, waydowntown, and La moitié gauche du frigo brenda longfellow The metropolis is, above all, a myth, a tale … an allegory; in particular it represents the allegory of the crisis of modernity … To go beyond these bleak stories of exile and that grey, rainy country of the anguished soul, it to establish a sense of being at home in the city, and to make of tradition a space of transformation rather than the scene of a cheerless destiny. Iain Chamberlain, Border Dialogues1

While an enormously disputed and internally differentiated body of literature, theories of globalization provide a resonant framework for reading contemporary Canadian cinema as a field shaped by international flows of money, textual influence, and ideologies, as much as by national determinations. There is, perhaps, no better place to begin an analysis of this topic than with Arjun Appadurai, who has devised an expansive model that encompasses (as is well known) the cross-border flow and social integration of transnational ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes.2 For Appadurai, this broad dimensional approach to globalization necessitates a deep rethinking of issues of mediation and causation beyond economist approaches that privilege transnational corporate capital as the single most crucial vector in considering globalization. According to Appadurai, flows of capital, technology, immigrants, and ideas are not ‘coeval, convergent, isomorphic or spatially consistent. They are … in relations of disjuncture ... [and] have different speeds, axes, points of origin and termination.’3 Appardurai’s enormously influential model allows us to theorize the incomplete, uneven, mutually contradictory histories of globalization in Canada. Separating the economic from the socio-political in

Class Politics and Metropolitan Dystopias 269

relation to their discrepant histories of development might go some way towards explaining the continuous vivacity of regional and subnational cultural identities in Canada (Quebec and First Nations communal formations being the paramount examples) against the backdrop of accelerated continental economic integration and American domination of mass media consumption. In addition to Appadurai, a reorientation of the theoretical object of globalization theory in the work of Saskia Sassen provides a clear alternative to thinking of globalization as a single integrated or unified conceptual scheme. Sassen suggests shifting analysis from the conventional global/national axis to a consideration of how globalization is actualized in concrete localized forms at the sub-national level of cities. Writing against common-sense assumptions of globalization that stress the hyper-mobility of capital or the immateriality of the information economy, Sassen argues for a renewed emphasis on concrete location and place, arguing that even information economies require substantial site-specific infrastructures and agglomerations of population. Introducing sub-national groupings like cities into an analysis of globalization not only adds concrete specificity but allows for a consideration of the way in which economic globalization affects everyday life, particularly the lives of marginal subjects, ‘women, immigrants, people of colour,’ as she puts it, ‘whose political sense of self and identities are not necessarily embedded in the nation or the national community.’4 Sassen’s approach goes well beyond the consistent and often consistently banal evocation of the local as situated or essentially resistant counter-ballast to the homogenizing and imperializing flows of global corporate influence. Reorienting the analysis of globalization from the macro to the micro involves a focused consideration of the specific places where the everyday reality of globalization is performed, felt, and resisted by embodied subjects. Central to this shift in focus is the understanding that, while the cultural dominant may have a huge impact, its effects are circumscribed and not monolithic, and the everyday is the site where the contradictions of globalization and the tensions of registering differences or resistances are most apparent. I want to look at a group of three Canadian films: most extensively, Maelström (Denis Villeneuve) and, briefly, waydowntown (Gary Burns) and La Moitié gauche du frigo (Philippe Falardeau), all produced in the year 2000, for the way in which they take up issues arising from the everyday metropolitan experience of globalization and re-imagine the city in relation to global flows of capital and architectural traditions.

270 Brenda Longfellow

In each, the city has been transformed by the power of global corporate culture into a dystopian soulless site of claustrophobic anonymity and redundant functionalism: chrome, steel, and glass, food courts and malls. In each, the city is strangely, almost uniformly, ethnically homogeneous (white), and the major narrative protagonists are proletarianized white-collar workers in their twenties and early thirties (i.e., that class fraction and generation most emphatically effected by a postfordist universe of globalizing capital, branded consumption, mall culture, and mass-mediated existence). All of these films represent work in relation to the globalized restructuring of the economy, whether this includes the low-end information-processing sector in waydowntown, or the deindustrialized landscape of employment impossibilities in La Moitié gauche, or the haute couture retail sector in Maelström, whose success is built on the ephemera of style. In all cases, the emotional texture of everyday life is one of a generalized melancholia explicitly tied to the colonizing and territorializing flows of corporate capital into all aspects of life – the intimate as much as the work environment. One of the most crucial historical sites of resistance to the territorializing impulse of capital, as David Harvey has argued, was the ‘romantic reaction,’ which had its roots in the eighteenth-century writings of Rousseau – most particularly, in his second Discourse.5 For Rousseau, and for later writers such as Wordsworth, Schiller, and Thoreau, the ravages of industrialization and massive social inequality could be offset by the passionate expression of pure subjective interiority, or by a retreat into a nature that is identified as a zone of authenticity and nonmediated experience. Contrary to both the Marxist and capitalist traditions, which claimed nature as a resource to be exploited in the interests of either emancipation or industrial progress, romanticism valued nature as an inherent value in itself, ‘a privileged means,’ as Harvey writes, ‘of not only regaining what seemed to be lost elsewhere, but of defining a future for humanity in which self-realization could only be achieved by liberating the human senses to the sublime and transcendental experience of being at one with the world.’6 I would like to explore the manner in which the resistance to the omnipresence of global corporate culture in Maelström is compromised by its recourse to this romantic fantasy of non-coded, non-territorialized spaces of nature. By contrast, waydowntown and La Moitié gauche du frigo share a far more explicit class politics, where downsizing, corporate greed, massive layoffs, and outsourcing are confronted directly, and the possibility of an

Class Politics and Metropolitan Dystopias 271

escape from the corporate territorialization of the world remains a chimera. Although I have commented elsewhere on how globalization has affected federal film policy with its recurring emphasis on export markets and co-productions,7 I want to take a different tack here by thinking through how the cinema produced within particular metropolitan contexts might be read as a site of contradiction between space rendered as a product of international flows (of capital and architectural tradition) and space as a coefficient of place, of a particular nexus of affect and identity. In both Maelström and waydowntown, the urban landscape is intentionally (and ironically in waydowntown) presented as an anonymous, generic anyplace – or anyplace within continental North America. The representation of space in these films stands in sharp contradistinction to the conventional repertoire of images (the stampede in Calgary, or open plains of the Prairie provinces, or the wrought iron staircases, the bar salons, and balconies of working-class Montreal) that have typically defined regional geographies in the national cinemas of the seventies and eighties. Most startlingly, Maelström represents Montreal primarily by its financial district (continuously visible from the apartment window of the main protagonist), as a conglomeration of skyscrapers, chrome, steel, glass, and casual consumption, a graphic embodiment of the specularity of late capitalism. Maelström opens to an operatic chorus of Norwegian voices and to a travelling shot of blue sea. This recognizable geographic space is immediately transcended in the next sequence where we enter an irreducibly fabulistic space, a dank bloody dungeon presided over by a hairy executioner/fishmonger. The camera focuses on a grotesquely barnacled fish, who presents himself as the narrator and who announces, in baritone voice, that with his last breath he will tell us a pretty story, the story of a young woman who makes a long journey towards reality. The next shot pulls us into the high-tech chrome and glaring light of a clinic, where the protagonist Bibiane (Marie-Josée Croze) is undergoing an abortion. It is this willful act of terminating life (there are clearly Catholic overtones to the story) that plunges Bibiane into existential search for meaning, connection, and purpose against the precariousness, the ubiquity, and the endless random possibility of death. Returning from a party a few days later, drunk and stoned, she runs over a Norwegian fishplant-worker, who stumbles into his home, a great gash in the back of his head, to die at his kitchen table.

272 Brenda Longfellow

The stylistic excess of the fish dungeon sequences signals an immediate departure from any realist tradition of Quebec cinema. The inner contemporary story of Bibiane’s fall and redemption through love is framed by this narration as a kind of fractured fairy tale whose end is already inscribed by fate and predestination. The narration sequences recall the archaic time of the fable by the manner in which they reference the forms and models of traditional oral cultures, for whom the telling of a story had pedagogic value as a lesson in life to the community, and the address of the narration is to this imagined archaic and unified originary community. Oral cultures, particularly as they are considered from the nostalgic vantage point of modernity, are cultures unmediated by technology, whose knowledge systems and transmission of culture are realized only through face-to-face communication and through communal, performative practice. Within the supermediated societies of modernity, then, oral narratives frequently come to stand as ideological markers of authenticity and presence, bearers of deep meaning and spiritual truths. In Maelström, however, the oral narrative is delivered by a fish in a space of campy art direction, an excessive symbolic rendering that hints at depth while its very hyperbole acknowledges that, in a disenchanted post-sacral world, the archaic-allegorical can be represented only from a space of extreme irony or naïveté. Maelström evokes both. As Fredric Jameson argued in relation to a series of postmodern texts, this is ‘Surrealism without the Unconscious,’8 a simulacra of depth and of the archaic whose final reference is its own ironic impossibility. In his study of Quebec cinema, Bill Marshall consistently highlights the deep ambivalence of Quebec culture towards the project of technological modernity.9 With the province moving from a traditional Catholic rural society to a secularized, industrialized world in the space of a single generation, the project of modernity, as Marshall notes, was always incomplete and always riven by a profound distrust of technology and instrumental rationality as primary social values. The temporal and spatial oscillation in Maelström between the archaic-allegoric and a contemporary urban dystopia of technologized relations plays to this ambivalence and collective desire for older communal values wedded to something more than the augmentation of profit. Yet the conjuring of an archaic-allegoric in Maelström feels much like Jameson’s catalogue of postmodern angst with its longing for deep memory, long history, and real tradition. ‘What is mourned,’ writes Jameson, ‘is the memory of deep memory; what is enacted is a nostalgia for nostalgia,

Class Politics and Metropolitan Dystopias 273

for the grand older extinct questions of origin and telos, of deep time and the Freudian Unconscious.’10 In a post-sacral world where collective ‘deep’ traditions have been eclipsed by the ubiquity of American consumer culture founded on the principles of immediate gratification, sappy optimism, anti-intellectualism, and infantilism so humorously captured in the song that plays as Bibiane exits from the abortion clinic (‘Gliddy glub gloopy nibby nabby noopy, La la la lo lo…’), the absence of depth leaves only beautiful seductive surfaces. In Maelström there is no more beautiful or seductive surface than the protagonist, Bibiane. Exquisitely passive, luminously beautiful, an embodiment of fragility and vulnerability, she is also nearly verbally catatonic. In a narrative sequence where Bibiane is interviewed by a writer for a high-end business magazine, she is surly and adolescent, monosyllabic in her resentful responses. And while her best friend Claire (Stephanie Morgenstern) is a doctoral candidate who prattles on about epistemological ruptures with absolutely convincing intellectual vivacity, Bibiane never ventures any abstract or conceptual utterances. Even as the film attempts to construct an Oedipal depth psychology for her by explaining her angst as a result of the shadow cast on her life by her preternaturally beautiful and famous mother, Bibiane remains a void waiting to be filled with meaning. Equally, the city is frequently represented as a blur of surface, a cacophony of sensation, a din of traffic, a constant swoosh of cars and people moving by, a rave shot in disjointed flashes of images. As noted earlier, the Montreal of Maelström is not the Montreal of the workingclass quartier, the Plateau Mont-Royal. The world visible to Bibiane through the wall of windows framing her cool blue designer apartment is a world of skyscrapers, chrome, and glass, a world of financial flows, the ‘abstract space,’ in Henri Lefebvre’s terms, of globalized capital.11 For Lefebvre, the towers and monuments of the financial district represent the architecture of ‘total spectacularization,’ a condensed signifying ensemble of late capitalist power, which, as he puts it, ‘finds objective expression in derivative ways: monuments have a phallic aspect, towers exude arrogance, and the bureaucratic and political authoritarianism immanent to repressive space is everywhere.’12 This is space that is completely de-natured, inscribed only with relations of power and politics, a space where capitalist social relations are seen to appear as co-extensive with all space, excluding any possibility of an outside. Bibiane’s apartment is a mirror of this abstract space. Flanked by a wall of clear glass, through which the city is constantly visible, her

274 Brenda Longfellow

apartment completely attenuates the distinction between inside and outside, the world of territorialized capital and her intimate domestic space. Almost entirely devoid of personal effects, with the exception of a Warholesque print of Chairman Mao, the apartment stands as a minimalist statement of haute bourgeois coolness: a single couch and acres of the most pricey square footage in the city. The coolness is translated in the consistent use of blue in the art design of Bibiane’s interiors, even Mao is reproduced in this shade, a commentary, no doubt, on the process of commodification and reification from which no historical subject is exempt. Bibiane is fully implicated in this world of international capital flows. The manager of a chain of high-end fashion boutiques, Sumatra Boutiques, resonating with the branded third world chic of companies like Benneton or the Body Shop, Bibiane is caught out by her brother/business partner, who phones Jakarta to confirm that she had neglected to arrange the latest shipment. While largely unremarked within the film, the mention of Jakarta can surely be no coincidence given the international mobilization of the anti-globalization movement, which brought world attention to the conditions endured by Indonesian workers in the sweatshops of Nike and the Gap. According to Lefebvre, what is remarkable about the construction of space under globalized capital is that, for the first time in history, nature begins to disappear completely, to be replaced by a reconstituted nature, a ‘second nature’ of territorial infrastructures, the market, social regulations, discourses, and institutions. Whereas in previous epochs (early competitive capitalism, for example) space constituted the scaffolding in which commodities were produced, in the epoch of globalization the social relations of capitalism are reproduced precisely through the production of totalizing space itself, a space that is now isomorphic with the entire planet. This concept of second nature also provides a major thematic in the Frankfurt school. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the domination of nature actually precedes capitalist relations in the first divisions of labour in primitive societies. Within the era of advanced capitalism, however, nature is completely set apart from the social, as an inert object that is ultimately seized on by instrumental reason for the purposes of domination and resource extraction. This ‘othering’ of nature, they insist, is an integral byproduct of the operations of instrumental reason, which subjects all relations to quantification. The domination of nature by instrumental reason, thus, comes to pervade all aspects of society and acts, in fact, as the paradigm for the domination of other humans and the quantifica-

Class Politics and Metropolitan Dystopias 275

tion of their relations to each other.13 The resistance to this totalizing impulse has assumed many forms, but one of the most enduring, as I have argued, is a certain strain of romanticism that posits nature as an uncorrupted or presocial sublime, a notion that remains vibrant in certain wings of the environmental movement. Surely, part of the continuing appeal of this notion stems from the way it responds to the social ambivalence generated by capitalist modernity and by the way in which it harbours a utopian aspiration for non-commodified and nonreified relations to things and people. Within the Canadian context, the romantic sublime has historically held little purchase, as Atwood so famously argued, given the geographic realities of Canada’s harsh climate and the persistence of antiromantic elements like mosquitoes, blackflies, and forty-below winters.14 But within the cinematic cultures of Quebec and Canada, the representation of rural or northern landscapes as sites of escape or nostalgic retreat from the effects of capitalist modernity is a long and resonant tradition. In Quebec, the paradigmatic example of such representation is the Iles aux Coudres series by Pierre Perrault. Beginning at the height of the Quiet Revolution, the series develops from a nostalgic reflex that seeks to recreate a lost world of tradition within the insular, but never completely closed, island community precisely at that time when, as Bill Marshall observes, ‘the relentless pace of modernity [had] transformed the physical face of Montréal and consolidated the way of life of the vast majority of Québécois according to the norms of consumption, suburbanization, tertiary-sector growth, and mass media.’15 Marshall notes that sympathetic readings of Pour la suite du monde (by no less a critic than Gilles Deleuze) argue that the film is less concerned with fixing essentialist identities than with its own participatory ethnographic process, which provokes ‘not a recalling’ (an unreflexive representation of the past) but a ‘calling forth’ (a future directed becoming).16 Within the Quebec context, though, Perrault’s work has been variously disparaged and exalted precisely for the way in which it links tradition, the past, ethnic homogeneity, and the rural landscape as ciphers of a unique Quebec cultural identity. The ongoing critical controversy around Perrault’s legacy, a controversy far more complex than the classic binary of tradition versus modernity, is deeply embedded in the Quebec cinematic consciousness and manifests itself in deliberate and overt citations. To mention two glaring examples, Le Déclin de l’empire americain (Denys Arcand, 1986) and Un Zoo la nuit (Jean-Claude Lauzon, 1987) are both resolutely films of Quebec’s modernity, featur-

276 Brenda Longfellow

ing urban protagonists and narrative and generic references to globalizing (American) culture. They also include, as a kind of homage to Perrault, pointed representations of empty northern landscapes with contradictory semiotic possibilities. On the one hand, in these films of urban alienation, the landscape can no longer function as a source of affiliation or of deep belonging. In Le Déclin, the characters, while they meet for dinner at a sumptuous country home, never, in their narcissistic obsessions with sex and power, comment upon or appear to be affected by the breathtaking vistas that surround them. In Un zoo, la nuit, Albert’s memories of moose hunting in the north recall the authenticating masculine traditions of Pour la suite du monde, which are here reenacted only as simulacra, in the shooting of a caged elephant in the metropolitan zoo. While the films assert the impossibility of a simple return to a rural mode of life as a means of reconciling alienation, the landscape nonetheless functions as a melancholic reminder of all that is lost by the travails of modernity and technological rationality. In Maelström the portrait of nature is frequently unheimlich, strange, and uncanny like the forest wallpaper in the Norwegian fish-worker’s apartment, or the bay of water dwarfed by a huge industrial dam somewhere near Baie Comeau. While these are contradictory images of nature, the one a simulacra, the other framing nature as an always already territorialized site of ‘second nature’ and resource extraction, they are at the same time deliberately troping on the landscape tradition initiated by Perrault and subsequently appropriated, ironized, and reframed by subsequent generations of Quebec filmmakers. While, for the most part, the space represented in Maelström aligns perfectly with Henri Lefebvre’s definition of abstract space, there is an alternative circuit and flow of goods, people, and ideas in the film, presented with some qualification as bearing the potential for authenticity. This circuit, which links fish, immigrant fish-workers, Norway, and the son of the murdered man who becomes Bibiane’s romantic saviour, is characterized both by its cultural otherness (outside of a Chinese restaurant, the only place in the film that features immigrants is the fish warehouse, a condensed site of alternative ethnicities and linguistic difference) and by its alleged embeddedness in older systems of exchange and barter in which the object possessed an inalienable use value (quite unlike the high fashion imported from Jakarta). These potential sources of deterritorialized space and non-reified relation, however, are captured by the film’s consistent tendency to render them as high camp, the highest, of course, being the artifice of the talking fish.

Class Politics and Metropolitan Dystopias 277

Situating Norway as the site of the romantic sublime and archaic premodern can only be ironic, given the absolute irrelevance of both to everyday life in a postmodern Quebec. Thus the final shot of the film, featuring the consolidation of the heterosexual couple aboard a boat ‘somewhere off the coast of the Loften Islands,’ offers no reassurance of a social or political reconciliation of the contradictions generated by a globalized modernity. Represented by an eerie expanse of gray sea, nature appears only as second nature, dead, cold, and inhospitable, a site linked irrevocably to death by the final scattering of the father’s ashes. Neither does the heterosexual embrace provoke any sense of future optimism. With the couple locked in a clinch in a space that is so utterly deterritorialized, deracinated, and denationalized as to be imaginary, the fairy tale ending remains just that, an empty allegory. In the post-sacral, secular zeitgeist of metropolitan Montreal, what confronts the soulnessness of everyday life in corporate capital is a patently faux archaic and a particular sense of affect grounded in irresolvable loss and melancholy. In a rather more parodic style, Gary Burns’s digital feature waydowntown takes the concept of second nature as built on the displacement and eradication of all natural and unmediated space to absurdist limits. The film takes place entirely within the sixteen-kilometre web of interconnected malls, office buildings, and walkways that link the downtown core of Calgary, the so-called Plus 15, built fifteen feet above street level. Like the Hotel Bonaventure, famously deconstructed by Fredric Jameson, the Plus 15, with its collapse of work and leisure spaces, represents, as Jameson writes ‘a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city.’17 The plot of waydowntown revolves around a wager concocted by four office drones to see who can stay inside this web for the longest period. When the film opens, the four have been incarcerated for nearly a month, and tempers and personalities are beginning to fray. The narrative elements of the film, however, are secondary to the film’s ambition to offer a satirical take on this new kind of ‘postmodern’ space. The mall and self-contained environments of linked architectural spaces represent a very different spatial metaphor than the glass and chrome skyscrapers of the financial sector represented in Maelström. If, as Lefebvre argues, the skyscraper represents capital’s extroverted manifestation of architectural metaphors of ‘phallic verticality,’ what kind of power relations are represented by the mall and interior office cubicle? In part, the distinction between the phallic verticality of office towers

278 Brenda Longfellow

and the horizontal claustrophobic space of the built environment might parallel the distinction between industrial capitalism and the postfordist transformation of late capitalism towards consumption and the service and information economy. Indeed, stemming from the late 1960s, during what is considered to be the last phase of classical industrial capital, Lefebvre’s highlighting of the office tower as the most emblematic visual instantiation of power bears a more retrospective than future-oriented resonance,18 as the mall progressively insinuates itself as the paradigmatic public space by the end of the century. What distinguishes the Plus 15, however, is the irreducible banality, anonymity, and reproducibility of these spaces. Here power is defined not in relation to an extroverted or panoptic force but in relation to the utterly administered nature of everyday life where work, leisure, eating, and so on, are all regulated and contained by the disciplinary function of corporate architectural space. Chained to their desks, in cubicles in windowless offices, in an escalating series of frames and enclosures, the characters in waydowntown are all visually bound (like the film’s obvious metaphor of the ants in the ant farm) by the spaces they inhabit. While Jameson remains ambivalent about these spaces, attracted by the manner in which they proffer public space but wary of how this is mediated solely through consumption, Burns in waydowntown is more conscious of the way in which populist vernaculars, at least in Canada, are indistinguishable from the globalizing effects of American cultural and economic influence.19 All his characters are precisely immersed in the American popular culture world of video games and soap operas; even the central character’s fantasies of destruction are mediated through the quintessentially American format of the comic book. Globalization for these characters means a world of endless repetition and banal routines. They buy coffee and donuts from a chain, then log on, play video games, or tap meaningless data into their computers. Work itself has no substance or particular purpose, for it is nonproductive (non-industrial) labour of the highest order, a caricature of the routinized nature of work in the white-collar ‘information’ sector. In waydowntown, the critique of work is articulated not so much in terms of exploitation, as in the classic Marxist categories of alienation and surplus value extraction, as it is in relation to boredom. While Maelström, as I have argued, is haunted by that peculiarly postmodern affliction of ‘nostalgia for the grand older extinct questions of origin and telos,’20 in waydowntown even the memory or longing for older forms of narrative

Class Politics and Metropolitan Dystopias 279

and meaning is irrevocably lost. Lingering modernist angst and the existential quest for meaning are replaced by a postmodern anomie and half-hearted search for distraction. The bet, for example, is based on the assumption that there is something more, an outside to the built environment of the Plus 15 that is more authentic and natural or, at least, that possesses a degree of less circulated air. There is no visible evidence provided in the film, however, that substantiates this claim. Two of the characters do finally exit the Plus 15 (one trapped in a garbage can, the other to ostensibly breath the fresh air of downtown smog), but the ‘outside’ – as much as the shots of the North Atlantic in Maelstrom – offers no possibility of transcendence or escape. These potentially ‘other’ spaces are neither utopian nor radically alternative but, in the absence of any imagined or real possibility of an outside, tactics such as the bet can only accommodate themselves to existing disciplinary and territorializing space as a wager, not against social transformation but against overwhelming and irreducible boredom. Like Maelström and waydowntown, La Moitié gauche de frigo does not forecast the possibility of a utopian radical disjuncture from contemporary conditions of globalization. What it does, in a humorous and imaginative manner, however, is to foreground the real material effects of economic globalization on working-class lives. The conceit of the fiction is that the film is a documentary directed by the political radical Stéphane Demers, who is following the trials of Christophe, his roommate who has recently become unemployed from his job as a mechanical engineer, having quit for ‘moral’ reasons when he was demoted to quality control. Christophe, a dedicated exhibitionist and natural comic, provides the perfect foil for documenting the personal fallout of corporate structural adjustments as he is compelled to send out his résumé, attempt to hustle job interviews, apply for unemployment insurance, and sell his car and guitar as the elusive prospect of job security continues to elude him. The choice of Christophe’s profession is no coincidence, given that the development of an indigenous technocratic and bureaucratic class was a major achievement of Quebec’s modernity. As represented in La Moitié gauche, however, the engineer is less an embodiment of pure technological rationality than a deprofessionalized drone of consumer capitalism, reduced to designing a better sanitary napkin. The faux documentary style of La Moitié gauche may be faux in relation to the contrived story and characterization of Christophe, but it

280 Brenda Longfellow

is resolutely documentary in its reference to place. Unlike Maelström or waydowntown, space in La Moitié gauche is not metaphoric, either as an architectural statement about power as embodied in the phallic verticality of office towers or in the disciplined spaces of American mall architecture. In La Moitié gauche space is always place, always firmly situated within identifiable local neighbourhoods, the plateau, the bars, streets, and apartments in metropolitan Montreal, an actual Employment Help Centre, and, most particularly, the industrial zone on the edge of the city where factories are, all too frequently, dismantled and shipped to Mexico. These are all sites explicitly crossed and transformed by global economic flows, and yet they are equally sites of local and popular resistance. I would argue, however, that the film’s notion of resistance and its own implicit sense of politics is broader than the worldview of Stéphane Demers, the leftist guerrilla filmmaker. While the film clearly shares a certain politics with him, his domineering tendencies, his willingness to instrumentalize relationships for the sake of the film, are all subject to ironic exaggeration and critique. The film’s more expansive sense of politics is far more embedded in the subversive humour of the film, in Christophe’s deadpan performance, in the common sense of his punk grocery-store-clerk girlfriend, in the documentary observation of factory closures and sites of deindustrialization. Articulated out of the material realities of everyday life in contemporary Montreal and Quebec, this signifying ensemble is expressed through a popular and local vernacular that includes the deliberate intertextual web of the film, referencing not only the socialist tradition of Quebec documentary, but the pre-eminent film of Quebec’s postmodernity, Le Déclin de l’empire américan, a reference embodied in the film’s inclusion of Daniel Brière (the young graduate student in Le Déclin). In a wry, reflexive turn, Brière plays himself in Le Moitié gauche: an out-of-work actor forced to reinvent himself as a social welfare bureaucrat at a provincial Unemployment Help Centre. What is perhaps most interesting about La Moitié gauche is its consciousness concerning the distinction between the time and space of economic globalization and the survival and enhancement of local identities and forms of resistance. That the film ends with Christophe forsaking both the technological rationality of an engineering career and the identitarian politics of Quebec national space to join a punk band in Vancouver seems appropriate to the political perspective of the film, which is wary of the romanticism of revolutionary rhetoric

Class Politics and Metropolitan Dystopias 281

as much as it is critical of the idea of nature as an antidote to capitalist modernity. Framed by this awareness, the film is as good an example as any of Appadurai’s thesis on the disjunctive relation between the economic, cultural, and ideological vectors of globalization.

NOTES This chapter was originally published in Canadian Journal of Film Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 69–83. 1 Iain Chambers, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1990), 112. 2 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3 Ibid., 33. 4 Saskia Sassen, ‘Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims,’ Public Culture 8 (1996): 206–7. 5 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 128. 6 Ibid. 7 Brenda Longfellow, ‘The Red Violin, Commodity Fetishism and Globalization,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 10, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 6–20. 8 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 174. 9 Bill Marshall, Quebec National Cinema (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 10 Jameson, Postmodernism, 156. 11 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 49. 12 Ibid. 13 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum Press, 1982). 14 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1972). 15 Marshall, Quebec National Cinema, 47. 16 Ibid., 29. 17 Jameson, Postmodernism, 40. 18 Obviously, the semiotic valence of towering office buildings has shifted

282 Brenda Longfellow seismically since 9/11. Height is now less connotatively connected to the arrogance of phallic verticality than to acute vulnerability precisely because of its visibility. 19 In ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,’ in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), Jameson offers to think about globalization in relationship to American economic and cultural imperialism, a point, of course, that Harold Innis and Canadian nationalists have been making for over fifty years. 20 Ibid., 156.

Selected Bibliography

Acland, Charles. ‘National Dreams, International Encounters: The Formation of Canadian Film Culture in the 1930s.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 3–26. – Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documentary from 1931 to 1942. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Allan, Blaine, Michael Dorland, and Zuzanna M. Pick, eds. Responses: In Honour of Peter Harcourt. Kingston, ON: Responsibility Press, 1992. Antliff, Allan. Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics and the First American Avant Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Armatage, Kay, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine Marchessault eds. Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi Press, 1972. Backhouse, Charles. Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1974. Bannerji, Himani. ‘Sophie Bissonnette and Her Films,’ Fuse, February–March 1986, 25–7. Beard, William, and Jerry White. North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002. Becker, Carol, ed. The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility. New York: Routledge, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

284 Selected Bibliography Bordwell, David, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press: 1985. Buxton, William J., and Charles Acland, eds. Harold Innis in the New Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Byford, Chris. ‘Highway 61 Revisited.’ Cineaction 45 (1998): 10–17. Campbell, Russell. Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States, 1930–1942. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982. Chambers, Ian. Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1990. Charland, Maurice. ‘Technological Nationalism.’ Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 10, nos. 1–2 (1986): 196–220. Clandfield, David. Canadian Film. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987. Cohen. Y. ‘From Feminine to Feminism in Québec.’ In A History of Women: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, vol. 5, edited by F. Thébaud, 548–66. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1996. Donohoe, Joseph, Jr., ed. Essays on Quebec Cinema. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991. Dorland, Michael. So Close to the State/s: The Emergence of Canadian Feature Film Policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Doyle, James. Progressive Heritage: The Evolution of a Politically Radical Literary Tradition in Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002. Druick, Zöe. ‘Documenting Government: Re-examining the 1950s National Film Board Films about Citizenship.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 55–79. Easterbrook, Ian K., and Susan Waterman MacLean, comp. Canada and Canadians in Feature Films: A Filmography, 1928–1990. Guelph: University of Guelph, 1996. Elder, R. Bruce. Image and Identity: Reflections of Canadian Film and Culture. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989. Evans, Barbara, and Scott Forsyth. ‘Women and Political Documentary in Quebec: An Interview with Sophie Bissonnete.’ CineAction 28 (Spring 1992): 66–77. Evans, Gary. John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda, 1939–1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Faulkner, Chris. The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Selected Bibliography 285 Feathering, Douglas, ed. Documents in Canadian Film. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1988. Feldman, Seth, ed. Take Two: A Tribute to Film in Canada. Toronto: Irwin, 1984. Feldman, Seth, and Joyce Nelson, eds. Canadian Film Reader. Toronto: Peter Martin, 1977. Francis, Daniel. National Dreams: Myth, Memory, and Canadian History. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997. Frank, David. ‘Public History and the People’s History: A View from Atlantic Canada.’ Acadiensis 32, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 120–33. Forsyth, Scott. ‘From Silver Screen to Red Flags: Marxism, Revolution and Popular Film.’ Ph.D. dissertation, York University, 1987. – ‘Grierson and Canadian Nationalism.’ CineAction 16 (Spring 1989): 77–9. Freeman, Barbara M. The Satellite Sex: The Media and Women’s Issues in English Canada, 1966–1971. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000. Gasher, Mike. Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002. Gittings, Christopher E. Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference and Representation. New York: Routledge, 2002. Golfman, Noreen. ‘Mining: Margaret’s Museum.’ Canadian Forum, April 1996, 28–31. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited by Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Grierson, John. ‘A Film Policy for Canada’ [1944]. In Documents in Canadian Film, edited by Doug Fetherling, 51–67. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1988. Grossberg, Lawrence, and Cary Nelson, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Gruneau, Richard S., and D. Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1993. Handler, Richard. Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Québec. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Harcourt, Peter. ‘Faces Changing Colour Changing Canon.’ CineAction 45 (February 1998): 2–9. – Imaginary Images: An Examination of Atom Egoyan’s Films.’ Film Quarterly, no. 4 (Spring 1995): 2–14. – ‘Men of Vision: Some Comments on the Work of Don Shebib.’ In Canadian Film Reader, edited by Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson, 208–17. Toronto: Peter Martin, 1977. – Movies and Mythologies. Toronto: CBC, 1977. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.

286 Selected Bibliography Heron, Craig. The Canadian Labour Movement. Toronto: Lorimer, 1989. Hogenkamp, Bert. Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain, 1929–1939. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum Press, 1982. Houle, Michel. ‘Quelques apects idéologiques et thématiques du cinéma québécois.’ In Les Cinémas canadiens, edited by Pierre Lhermier, 150–52. Montreal: La Cinémathèque québécoise, 1978. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Irr, Caren. The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. James, David, and Rick Berg, eds. The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. – The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. – Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Kaye, J. ‘Perfectly Normal, Eh? Gender Transformation and National Identity in Canada.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 3, no. 2 (1994): 74–8. Kealey, Linda. Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour, and the Left in Canada, 1890–1920. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995. Keohane, Kieran. ‘Symptoms of Canada: National Identity and the Theft of National Enjoyment.’ CineAction 28 (1992): 20–33. Khouri, Malek. ‘Counter-hegemonic Discourse on the Working Class in National Film Board World War II Films.’ History of Intellectual Culture 1, no. 1 (2001). www.ucalgary.ca/hic/ – ‘John and the Missus: Progress, Resistance, and Common Sense.’ CineAction 49 (1999): 2–11. Klausen, Susanne. ‘Off the Page and Onto the Screen.’ Labour/Le Travail 47 (Spring 2001): 277–81. Knelman, Martin. This Is Where We Came In: The Career and Character of Canadian Film. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977. Kroker, Arthur. Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis, McLuhan, Grant. Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1985. Leach, Jim, and Jeannette Sloniowski, eds. Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Lefebvre, Jean Pierre. ‘Entretien avec Gilles Carle.’ Objectif 34 (1966): 13–14.

Selected Bibliography 287 Lerner, Loren, ed. Canadian Film and Video: A Bibliography and Guide to the Literature. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Loiselle, André. Stage-Bound: Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. – ‘Subtly Subversive or Simply Stupid: Notes on Popular Quebec Cinema.’ Postscript 18, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1999): 75–84. Loiselle, André, and Brian McIlroy, eds. Auteur/Provocateur: The Films of Denys Arcand. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1995. Longfellow, Brenda. ‘The Crisis in Naming in Canadian Film Studies.’ In Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art, edited by Jody Berland and Shelley Hornstein, 200–15. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. – ‘The Red Violin, Commodity Fetishism and Globalization.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 10, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 6–20. MacIntosh, D., T. Bedecki, and C.E.S. Franks. Sport and Politics in Canada: Federal Government Involvement since 1961. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1987. Magder, Ted. Canada’s Hollywood: The Canadian State and Feature Films. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Marchetti, Gina. ‘Still Looking: Negotiating Race, Sex and History in Dirty Laundry.’ In Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung, edited by Helen Lee and Kerri Sakamoto, 80–9. Toronto: Insomniac-Images Festival, 2002. Marcuse, Herbert. One-dimensional Man. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Melnyk, George. One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Morley, David, and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Morris, Peter. Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895–1939. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978. – The Film Companion. Toronto: Irwin, 1984. – ‘In Our Own Eyes: The Canonizing of Canadian Film.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 27–44. Munt, Sally R. Cultural Studies and the Working Class. London: Cassell, 2000. Murray, Bruce. Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic: From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Nadeau, C. ‘Barbaras en Québec: Variations on Identity.’ In Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema, edited by K. Armatage, K. Banning,

288 Selected Bibliography B. Longfellow, and J. Marchessault, 197–211. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Naficy, Hamid, ed. Home, Exile, Homeland. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Nash, Knowlton. The Microphone Wars: A History of Triumph and Betrayal at the CBC. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994. Nelson, Joyce. The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1988. Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Pallister, Janis L. The Cinema of Québec: Masters In Their Own House. London: Associated University Presses, 1995. Palmer, Bryan. Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the History of Transgression. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Parpart, Lee. ‘Pit(iful) Bodies: Colonial Masculinity, Class and Folk Innocence in Margaret’s Museum.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 63–81. Pendakur, Manjunath. Canadian Dreams and American Control: The Political Economy of the Canadian Film Industry. Toronto: Garamond, 1990. Pierson, Ruth Roach. Canadian Women and the Second World War. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1983. Posner, Michael. Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films. Vancouver: Douglas and MacIntyre, 1993. Ramirez, Bruno. ‘Variations on a Theme.’ Labour/Le Travail 45 (Spring 2000): 227–30. Ramsey, Christine. ‘Canadian Narrative Cinema from the Margins: “The Nation” and Masculinity in Goin’ Down the Road.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2, nos. 2–3 (1993): 27–49. Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Rosenstone, Robert. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Ross, Steven J. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Sassen, Saskia. ‘Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims.’ Public Culture 8 (1996): 206–7. Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1994. Smith, Helen, and Pamela Wakewich, ‘“Beauty and the Helldivers”: Representing Women’s Work and Identities in a Warplant Newspaper.’ Labour/Le Travail 44 (Fall 1999): 71–107.

Selected Bibliography 289 Smith, M., and F. Diamond, ‘Career Mobility in Professional Hockey.’ In Canadian Sport: Sociological Perspectives, edited by R. Gruneau and J. Albinson, 275–93. Don Mills, ON: Addison-Wesley, 1976. Stead, Peter. Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society. London: Routledge, 1991. Steven, Peter. Brink of Reality: New Canadian Documentary Film and Video. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1993. Straw, Will. ‘Canadian Cinema.’ In The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, 523–6. London: Oxford University Press, 1998. Taras, David, and Beverly Rasporich, eds. A Passion for Identity: Canadian Studies for the Twenty-First Century. 4th ed. Toronto: Nelson, 2001. Thompson, E.P. The Poverty of Theory. London: Merlin, 1978. Varga, Darrell. ‘The Local and the Global Revisited: Un 32 aôut sur terre.’ Cineaction 65 (January 2005): 30–6. – ‘Locating the Artist in Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 99–120. – ‘Panic Bodies and the Performance of Space.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 10, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 80–101. Véronneau, Pierre. Cinéma de l’époque duplessiste. Montreal: Cinémathèque québécoise, 1979. Véronneau, Pierre, Michael Dorland, and Seth Feldman, eds. Dialogue: Canadian and Québec Cinema. Montreal: Mediatexte, 1987. Véronneau, Pierre, and Piers Handling, eds. Self-Portrait: Essays in Canadian and Quebec Cinemas. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1980. Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1997. – ed. Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2000. Walsh, Francis R. ‘The Films We Never Saw: American Movies View Organized Labour, 1934–1954.’ Labor History 27, no. 4 (1986): 564–80. Walz, Eugene P. Canada’s Best Features: Critical Essays on Fifteen Canadian Films. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. – ed. Flashback: People and Institutions in Canadian Film History. Montreal: Mediatexte, 1986. Waugh, Thomas. ‘Cinemas, Nations, Masculinities: The Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture (1998).’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 8–44. – ‘Good, Clean Fung.’ Wide Angle 20, no. 2 (April 1998): 164–75. Whannel, G. Fields in Vision: Television Sport and Cultural Transformation. London: Routledge, 1992.

290 Selected Bibliography Whitaker, Reginald, and Gary Marcuse. Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Zaniello, Tom. Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 1996.

Contributors

Bart Beaty is an associate professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (2005) and Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (forthcoming). Scott Forsyth teaches film studies and Marxist cultural politics in the Departments of Film and Political Science at York University in Toronto. He is one of the founding editors of the film journal CineAction. Margot Francis is an assistant professor in women’s studies and sociology at Brock University. Her research employs feminist and postcolonial theory to explore the visual legacy of national identity while also investigating how a diverse range of artists are challenging the exclusionary inheritance associated with national belonging. David Frank teaches Canadian history at the University of New Brunswick, including a course under the title ‘Canadian History on Film.’ His work in labour history includes the prize-winning book J.B. McLachlan: A Biography (1999). Malek Khouri is an associate professor of film and communications and coordinator of the film studies program in the Faculty of Communication of Culture, the University of Calgary. His past and upcoming academic publications are found in CineAction; History of Intellectual Culture; Nature, Society and Thought; Arab Studies Quarterly; and Arab Forum, among others. Khouri has a forthcoming book on counter-

292 Contributors

hegemony and the NFB Second World War films and is currently working about a book on Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine. Joseph Kispal-Kovacs teaches in the Department of Film and the School of Arts and Letters at York University. Research interests include the study of narrative forms and their relationship to narrative production under capitalism. His doctoral dissertation examined the relationship between Hollywood’s working class and their representation on screen in the 1930s. André Loiselle teaches film studies at Carleton University and specializes in Canadian/Quebec cinema, adaptations of drama, and the horror film. He has published half a dozen books, including Le cinéma de Michel Brault, a l’image d’une nation (2005), Stage-Bound: Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama (2003), Self-Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada since Telefilm (2006, co-edited, with Tom McSorley), and Michel Brault: Oeuvres/Works, 1958–1974 (2006, co-edited with Christian Medawar and Carol Faucher. He is currently working on a new book, Stage to Scream: The Performance of Villainy in Theatre and Film. Brenda Longfellow is an award-winning filmmaker and associate professor in the Department of Film and Video at York University. She is currently working on a series of articles about globalization and Canadian cinema and a feature-length documentary on weather, climate change, and fear of the future. Susan Lord is an associate professor in the Department of Film Studies at Queen’s University, where she is cross-appointed to art and women’s studies. Her main research areas are feminist media, Cuban cinema, and new media cultures. She is co-editor of two anthologies: Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence and Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema. John McCullough teaches in the Department of Film, York University. His current research projects include Canadian film and television labour, First Nations film and television, and the representation of professionals in commercial culture. Rebecca Sullivan is an associate professor of communications at the University of Calgary, specializing in feminist film, media, and cultural

Contributors 293

studies. She is the author of Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture (2005). Her latest project is on the films and celebrity persona of Natalie Wood. Peter Urquhart teaches film studies at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include Canadian film and television, cultural policy and cultural industries, and non-fiction film and television. Darrell Varga is Canada Research Chair in Contemporary Film and Media Studies at NSCAD University (the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) in Halifax. His research examines the relationship between culture, space, and nation in the context of globalization. Varga’s essays have been published in Canadian Journal of Film Studies and CineAction, among others. Thomas Waugh has been teaching film studies since 1976 at Concordia University, Montreal, where he has also developed queer studies and curriculum on AIDS. Among his books are ‘Show Us Life’: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (1984) and Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (1996) as well as The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (2006).