Feature Films

From 1900 to 1960, Canada produced only about 100 feature-length films. Over that same period, Hollywood produced three times as many every year. Part of the explanation is that U.S. companies exercised so much control over both production and distribution in the film industry. Canadians did not have the financial resources or distribution networks necessary to produce, market and exhibit feature-length films and so instead became masters of documentary film, experimental film and animated film, for which they received many awards. The films of Canadians such as Norman McLaren, Michael Snow and the members of the famous Studio B at the National Film Board (Roman Kroitor, Colin Low, Tom Daly and Wolf Koenig), among many others, could easily be included in a list of the top 10 animated, experimental and documentary films of all time.

In the 1960s it finally became possible for young Canadian filmmakers to make feature-length films, but few of the resulting works were very impressive. In the 1970s, with support from federal funding programs and tax credits, Canadian filmmakers made a multitude of feature films. Many were never completed or distributed, but a few managed to achieve some success in Canada, generally because they had received praise from abroad. Since the mid-1980s, the reputation of Canadian feature films has grown. Filmmakers such as Denys Arcand, David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan are well known and respected in international film circles and have won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 1984, in light of the growing popularity of Canadian films, the Toronto International Film Festival surveyed film critics, programmers, academics and fans to compile a list of the “Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time”. TIFF repeated this exercise in 1993. In 2004, the film magazine Take One (now gone) took charge of this task and compiled a list of the top 20 Canadian films. Although Mon oncle Antoine headed the list for the 10 years of its existence, many films no longer held the same rank, while others were added. These changes forced people to reconsider their preconceived notions about Canadian films.

When the first list was compiled, the critics agreed to rank Canadian feature-length films in the documentary and realist tradition of the National Film Board. But in doing so, they underestimated the predominant influence of feature films from other countries. For example, Claude Jutra, who was working for the NFB at the time and filmed Mon oncle Antoine under its auspices, was inspired mainly by the films of François Truffaut and other directors of the French New Wave of the 1960s. Don Shebib, whose film Goin' Down the Road gave a perfect, low-key depiction of life in Toronto in the 1970s, was clearly in the lineage of the great Irish-American film director John Ford. Denys Arcand drew his inspiration both from European art films and from American genre films. In the 21^st century, Canadian filmmakers have sought their models farther afield. For example, The Saddest Music in the World, by Guy Maddin, echoes both German expressionist films and the Hollywood musical comedies of the 1930s.

Canadian feature films are often falsely thought to be obsessed with life’s victims and losers and to serve as pretexts for profound musings on Canada’s quest for a national identity. But it has become increasingly clear that Canadian filmmakers are more interested in the vitality and nobility of the non-heroic than in any national propensity for self-pity. There is nothing exceptional about the quest for identity in Canadian films, and nothing fundamentally Canadian about this theme.

Naïve characters are a recurring presence in many of the best Canadian films, which is no surprise, because such characters are the protagonists of most of them. Mon oncle Antoine, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and Léolo by Jean-Claude Lauzon are just a few of the many Canadian films that focus on young innocents learning the hard lessons of life.

Crash, The Decline of the American Empire and Exotica, three films with a cynical outlook, provide further examples of the predominance of naïve characters in Canadian films. They tell the stories of troubled, dissatisfied individuals in contemporary urban settings. Beneath their sexually sophisticated guises, these characters are suffering from their immaturity and naïvety. Like many respected Canadian films, they exalt both innocence and experience.

Although most funding for Canadian films comes from federal and provincial agencies such as Telefilm Canada and its provincial counterparts, the films themselves resist any bureaucratic or moral influence from these organizations. Canadian filmmakers have a taste both for risk and for the risqué, as witness Léolo (1992), which depicts deviant acts committed in a bathroom; The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica, both of which deal with father-daughter incest; Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996), which portrays sadomasochistic rituals; and Kissed (Lynne Stopkowich, 1997), which addresses the theme of necrophilia.

Canada’s feature-film industry did not really get started until the 1970s, but it has made great strides since. Canadian feature-film makers have lacked many advantages. They have not had a national star system and the prestige presumably associated with it, or national models from which to draw inspiration, or sophisticated special-effects teams to manufacture fantasy and shock effects, or a nation-wide network to promote and distribute Canadian films and make them known throughout the country. But nevertheless these artists have succeeded in creating films that attract and move their audiences.

And these audiences have grown considerably. More importantly, Canadian filmmakers are now part of the global market and create films that are funded or co-funded internationally. Directors such as Atom Egoyan, Deepa Mehta and Sturla Gunnarsson, long considered strictly Canadian filmmakers, have gone abroad to shoot films in their ethnic homelands (Calendar, Water and Beowulf and Grendel, respectively). Young Canadian filmmakers have emerged and taken the industry in entirely new directions. Probably the most striking example of this trend is the film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, an epic Inuit tale shot entirely in Nunavut by Zacharias Kunuk. Films such as C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) by Jean-Marc Vallée (which took most of the Canadian and Québec film awards in 2006), It's All Gone Pete Tong (2005) and The Saddest Music in the World (2004) prove once again that poetic, independent films can do well in parts of Canada as diverse as Québec, Alberta, Winnipeg and Nunavut.

The increase in the list of the top 10 films reveals several facts about Canadian cinema. Canadian films are always auteur films. Three films by Denys Arcand and three films by David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan appear among the top 10 films, and two films by Guy Maddin are among the top 20. In the new list, Canada’s reputation as a maker of highly regarded experimental and documentary films is now assured by Pierre Perrault’s film Pour la suite du monde (1963), an evocative depiction of fishing on Québec’s St. Lawrence River, as well as by Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and Maddin’s short film The Heart of the World (2000), an energetic, offbeat experimental film that, the year of its release, beat out many feature films to make the top 10 lists of several international film critics.

The 2004 list shows that a new canon of Canadian cinema has begun to emerge. The top six films of 1993 still appeared in the top 10 list of 2004. But our list is, for better or worse, subject to changing tastes. Recent films by Canada’s best directors have replaced older ones on the list—perhaps because they are better, or perhaps because they are simply fresher in people’s memories. The Canadian film repertoire may not include any great classics like Gone with the Wind or Citizen Kane, and no Canadian films yet appear on the list of the world’s top 10 films of all time, but the growing number of talented Canadian artists and the growing Canadian film audience suggest that one day room may have to be made for them on this list.