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The Negative Effects Of Canadian Cinema

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A nation’s cultural texts are often used and appropriated in its quest for self-definition.2 Canada’s national identity is a much-debated topic and has often been conceptualized as a crisis, especially through important cultural products like film. Canadian cinema bears a responsibility of reflecting and creating a national identity, with blurred boundaries and a lack of coherent definition. Negatives often seem to outweight positives; Canadian cinema, more prominently its English industry, is considered amateurish and boring, and one bad Canadian film tends to reflect on the industry as a whole. These views often derive from Canadians themselves, and such self-loathing stances originate from a history of industrial and socio-cultural effects, …show more content…

With a wave of patriotism following the war, Canada still had the potential to build its industry, with numerous independent Canadian production companies in operation.4 However, the American film industry was flourishing, with the advantage of a larger urban population and strengthened economy.5 As a result, Canada has been trying to come out with a workable film policy for years to support homegrown films, an effect that can still be sensed today. The National Film Board of Canada was then created, originally as an advisory board to coordinate production, but later shifting towards active production. By 1945, the NFB became one of the world’s largest film studios, with a staff of 800 people and more than 500 films released, shown monthly in Canadian and foreign theatres.6 It was a leading producer of world-class documentaries, animation and experimental films, and its productions have won more than 5,000 international awards. Despite critical success, the NFB “did little to solve the problem posed by the dominance of foreign films”; 7 they brought little commercial success or attention from …show more content…

Though such policies have arguably improved the state of the Canadian industry, many problems still persist. Funding cuts began to take their toll on the industry in the mid-1990s, with the NFB budget reduced by 4 million. Canadian box-office figures are included as part of the American domestic market, a fact that still remains true years later after the American vertical integration in 1927.22 The Canadian economic dependence on the American film industry, as will be discussed in the second part of this essay, is one of the key obstructions of Canada’s cinematic identity, as well as its identity at large. The industrial context of Anglo-Canadian cinema has heavily affected the views that Canadians hold of themselves as they consume national films, but it goes the other way as well; the collective films of a nation can reveal much about its collective consciousness, acting as a metaphor for its state of mind.23 The second part of the essay will examine Canada’s insistence on comparing its films to Hollywood models due to the industrial contexts previously mentioned, then reveal the problematic implications of defining Canada’s identity in that

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