Globalization and National Identity in Canadian Film Brenda Longfellow r.

L CE TEXTE PROPOSE QUE LES TENDANCES ACTUELLBS DE GLOBALISATION CONTBSTBNT LES DEFINITIONS COURANTES DE L'IDENTITE NATIONALE DU CINEMA CANADIEN.

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EXAMINANT DE PRES PAR UNE ANALYSE

TEXTUELLE SYMPTOMATIQUE BLACK ROBE,

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LOVE A MAN IN UNIFORM

E1' CALENDAR,· CE TEXTE SUGGERE QUE, DANS CHAQUE FILM, LES CONDITIONS ECONOMIQUES DE PRODUCTION, LES SITllS INSTITUTIONNELS, LES MODES DE DlSCOURS AINSI QUE LES UNIVERS DISCURSIFS DE CHAQUE REPRESENTENT TROIS DlFPERENTS TYPES DE REPONSE DBVANT LES EXIGENCES ET REALITES DE LA GLOBALISATION DANS LE CONTEXTE CANADIEN.

decade, the vexed question of national identity, which I Inhasthesolasthaunted Canadian film studies from its inception has ,I

undergone a profound rethinking as a result of new theoretical paradigms and cultural socio-economic developments. Feminism, the lesbian and gay rights movement, a resurgent native militancy and the recurring and inevitable movement toward Quebec independence have all challenged the assumption of any notion of Canadian identity as homogeneous or unitary and have opened up new perspectives, asJim Leach has suggested. "which go well beyond the familiar binary oppositions: Canada/USA; English/French."l From a broader perspective. however, nationalidentity in Canada has also been contested by that process which contemporary political theory ha; termed glob~lization. Globalization is the shorthand term evoked to refer to the threat to cultural sovereignty posed by new information and communications technologies whose intensifying reconstruction ofeveryday life is transforming the relationship between

Canadi4~Joumal of Film Studies/Revue canadienne d'etudes dntmat"graphiques Vol 5 N 2 G

Globalization and National Identity...

Brenda Longfellow

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the concrete territorial space ofnation and the boundarilessnessof global image systems. Fonnost globalization theorists, the supranational spread of corporate empires and global reach of new technologies and media culture has been read as signalling the o~solescence of the nation and the dissolution of discrete and parochial forms of identification and belonging. The case of Canada, however,. poses a stubborn retort. In Can·ada, globalization can hardly be conslder~d a startlingly new phenomenon given the long history of Amencan domination ofour theatres and television screens and th.e even long:r history of colonial ownership and control of our maJor economiC resources. What is curious and perhaps anom~lous i~ ~ana~a, however, is that against this backdropofincreasing ~loba~ ratlonahzation ofour economy and culture, issues ofnationalldenuty ha~e lost none of their resonance and seductions (and not only for dyed m the . ' wool cultural nationalists.) What 1 would like to do in the rest of this paper IS to examme three very symptomatic films: Black Robe, I Love. a M~n i~ U~Wmn .and Calendar whose economic conditions ofproduction, mstltutlonal Sites, modes of address and discrete discursive worlds represent thrt:e v~ry different responses to the exigencies and realities of globaltzatlon within the Canadian context.

1. Black Robe Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is essential to the creation ofa nation.... Ernest Renan, IBB2.z

From its very inception, Black Robe was represented .by the publicity machine at Alliance Releasing (the largest ~roductlon and distribution house in Canada) as a· milestone in Canadian film prod~c­ tion both because of its production budget (unrivalled at that polOt at ~elve million dollars), and by its epic pretensions (three months of shooting in the dead cold of winter with an international cast and crew.) Black Robe also had the highest promotion budget of any Canadian film (two million dollars) and this too was circulated as part ofthe publicity surrounding the film. For several month~ in 1991 a?d 1992, the image of as priestly Lothaire Bluteau in .the midst of a Wild Canadian landscape (with smaller native figures m the backgro~nd) ftlled full page adds in major dailies, billboards, bus stops and trailers

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on television. The opening night gala at Festival of Festivals in 1991, Black Robe was an event. Canada is no s!ranger to co-productions as Manjunath Pendakur points out in his book Canadian Dreams and American ControU In an era ofescalating film costs (or so goes the logic ofthe co-production deal) no individual national cinema can hope to compete with the astronomical budgets of recent Hollywood spectacles. According to Pendakur: Coproduction is the principal mechanism used by film and television producers to pool capital and labor from around the world and gain market access globally. Given the uncertainties of access to capital and markets compounded by the relatively small domestic market, Canadian producers loo[k) outside the country to compete in the international financing game of feature film production.~

The attraction (to the moneyed backers) is that co-productions spread the financial risk among many different producers while allowing "the merchants of culture"as Pendakur puts it "to make 'world-class' films acceptable to global audiences and survive as an . industry. uS While the national cinema-as Canadian film studies has traditionally deftned it-is always auteurist and director driven, the coproduction is driven by the "deal" and by producers. As]ean-Pierre Lefebvre observes:' "It's cinema as business."6 The particular deal struck on Black Robe was only made possible through a formal international treaty between Canada and Australia which was signed because of the direct intervention ofthe director of Alliance Releasing, Robert Lantos. According to Lantos: "We pursued, lobbied and pressured both governments to get it signed and we got a good co-operation from Canada's Department ofCommunication."7 Filmed on location in the Lac St.]eanl Saguenay region ofQuebec with post-production carried out in Sydney, Australia, the production itself makes an ironic commentary on the exigencies ofpost-colonialism. Here are two ex British colonies, collaborating to produce a film about French colonialism with a subtext which addresses their shared history of genocide against aboriginal peoples. Directed by the Australian director Bruce Beresford, one of the most mainstream of Australian directors (known for liberal social purpose films such as Breaker Morant and Driving Miss Daisy) and written by one ofCanada's most respected writers, Brian Moore, the film's cultural capital

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Brenda LongfelloW

credentials are impeccable. It is a project lauded for its courage and 'ty and moral earnestness. ,h . d' th film focused on its historical stamped Wit mtegn M h f the hype surroun lUg e uc 0 .' h number of native consultants, the degree authenticity, highhghti~g t e . ostume and cultural mores. of meticulous research mto bnativpe. deco~l~ck Robe's art director on the Ward Churchill quotes Her ert mter, minute detailing of the set design: Is out of birch bark. used shoulder bones Pinter fashioned rectangu~ar ~hO~~ lement bound stone axes with spruce of a moose for another dlg&lng d p d dar bark (obtained free from a roots, knitted ropes of fibre an. use ~~o in transport) to build the outer merchant in Vancouver, but COSt1~gS37, t the end oftlw film, Pinter . the Huron vUlage scene a walls of the h utS... 1n , I' 1 h .1 lit only by candles waxed onto created a strikingly authentic Itt e cape" 8 stones that are wedged into the fork of stag antlers,

.. oducers endeavoured to distinguish the film f W'th Wolves (a constant pre-text In every mstanc~, t.he p~ from the romantic 1deahsm 0 Datt~~S t ~ of native stereotyping and in this case) and from the sorry 1S o. J . Hollywood films. caricature that ch ar~cter1zes 1 f h' t 'cal accuracy and realism, . . . t t avowa 0 1S on Th1s persIs en . . 'ed as a retaliatory retort to a native however, s~emed ~reclse1y di~:~~ around issues ofcultural appropriamovementincreasmgly ~ob . 11 the stand off at Kanehsatake tion and mis-representation · IroUlca. y'hooti'ng in Northern Quebec, . . I h n the fil m crew 1S s . '11 b thdetermine the film's reception occurs prec1se y w, e, I and that uncanny S1mu tane1ty WI 0 and its marketing. b film that so prides itself on its Buti what is so uncanny a out a he French characters speak historic authenticity is the fact t~t. all : course the language of the unaccented English. hile ~ng 1~. ,1s':f1inguis~ic difference, at least global marketplace, thiS curiOUS e dlsl0nd Quebec seems like a blatant . 1 tator in Cana a an • for the nat10na spec _. . The French "fact" and the long uebec from the defeat of endeavour to homogenize h1story.. history of nationalist moveme~ts m Q r d English history of Montcalm on, is simply folded mto a genera lZe

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Canada. .., . 11 ed to flourish, however, is in Where lingUlstiC d1fference 1S a ow are subtitled as they speak the speech of the native actors. They alone d' to Ward Churchill, h' gues Yet accor mg in their alle~edly ~u.t . entlc ton fi1 . biished in Z, "the Cree verbiage th in a fascinatmg crmqueof e m pu

Globalization and National Identity...

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uttered throughout the movie was not the language spoken by any of the Indians to whom it is attributed."9 A great deal of the contradiction surrounding the representation of native people- in the film has to do with what Bill Marshall has identified (in another context) as the "gap between the enunciation of the moment in time of the narration (the relationship between narrator and implied reader I viewer) and the enonce of the events being narrated,"·o What this gap implies is that the process of representing history (no mattet: how allegedly authentic its sources) .is always overdetermined by the ideological perspectives and available narrative structures ofthe present. This "transtemporality," as Marshall puts it, the "to-ing and fro-ing between temporal periods and cultural/political ~pochs" is most evident in Black Robe in its contemporary liberal appreciation of the rights of native people to their own culture and spirituality. The "nowness" of the telling, however, frequently interrupts the illusion of historic diegesis with a knowing wink at the spectator as in the scene where Chomina (August Schellenberg) admonishes his wife (Tantoo Cardinal) that they are in trouble because her daughter lusted after the Frenchman. As if they were in a Flinstone cartoon, Cardinal responds with the weary and atemporal insight of a mother of a teenaged daughter "what do you mean my daughter, she's your daughter too:' This knowingness of the present imbues the narrative with its sense ofdestiny and fatality, a sense supported diegetically by the black and white visions that Father Laforgue and Chomina have oftheir own doomed lives. Within the liberal perspective ofthe film, all are victims of a tragic encounter pre-ordained by the religious fervour of the Jesuits and by the ferociousness of the Iroquois who (unlike the Algonquin and the Huron) refuse to succumb. . As Ward Churchill encapsulates the film's moral message: "we fmd not good guys or bad guys, not right or wrong, but rather 'wellmeaning but ultimately devastating' European invaders doing various things to a native population which, through its own imperfections and 'mystical' obstinacy, participates fully in bringing its eventual fate upon itse1f...:'11 The European genocide of the native populations of North America is thus neatly elided and displaced onto the "war-like" Iroquois. In this particular national narrative, no blame need be assigned. While the narrative provides the pretext for a revisionary articulation of the historic relations between European colonization and

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aboriginal peoples, what the film really appears to be selling is an auratic experience of the Canadian landscape. Shot in cinemascope with dolby sound, the film sets out to preserve the auratic experience of cinema, a film you really must see in the theatre. Not since the early Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) films, used to lure immigrants to the country, has the landscape been so exploited as a commodified and easily exportable signifier of "Camlda." Endlessly repeated sequence shots feature the "majesty" of the Canadian landscape: the mist rising on an early morning lake, the vivid colours of autumn, the starkness of the ,hills of the Lac St.]ean region as they rise covered with snow. Several shots feature bird's eye (god's eye?) shots of the characters dwarfed by the landscape as a swelling symphonic score underlines the transcendental quality of the vision. 4'his is a very familiar exportable image of Canada steeped in that particular ideological fix where Canada comes to stand in as a synedoche for a fantasy of Nature, unmediated by urban blight, class struggle or political difference, a virginal fantasy untrammelled by contemporary environmental catastrophe. If what the film sells to an international spectator is this fantasy of auratic contact with nature and exotic aboriginals, its address to a spectator located in Canada takes a slightly different tum. In the beginning of the film the landscape is anchored and named by a superimposed title as: Quebec, North America. Here the landscape acts as the virginal pre-text of the coming nation, Canada. As spectators-French, English and aboriginal-we are sutured into place as national· subjects through the recognition of our shared atavistic experience ofthe landscape. Within this homogenizing spectacle, real historical and political differences are ultimately mediated and secondarized. The appropriation of landscape as the principal mediator of national identity has long been a maxim of nationalist discourse within Canada. According to Homi Bhabha, however, this prioritization of landscape is always embedded within a regressive and conservative discourse of nation: "The recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national identity emphasizes the quality of light, the question of social visibility, the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric ofnationalaffiliation and its forms ofcollective expression."12 Such a discourse is regressive precisely because it relies on a specular constitution of the nation with its claim that meaning and identity are inherent in an image and not in social and historical

Globalization and National Identity...

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discourses. This is not to say that landscape does not play its role in the defmition ofsocial belonging. But the experience oflandscape does not occur in a transcendental void: it is mediated by prior cultural expectations and social discourses. And it is precisely the differences in the cultural meaning assigned to nature and landscape that distinguishes the historical experience of aboriginal people, the French and the English. For the global spectator of Slack Robe, however, the landscape functions to totalize the national narrative as one singular experience ofa sad, but nonetheless inevitable, national destiny. In this narrative, the real political effects of European colonization in North America are repressed as history becomes myth and difference is usurped into pathos. .

II, I Love a Man in Uniform We

are all playing at being American. John Caughie.

[Love a Man in Uniform externalizes the market pressures that drive Black Robe i? a supremely ironic metacommentary on the tragic effects of "global'" television on national identities. I Love a Man in Uniform tells the story of Henry, a repressed bank derk by day and aspiring actor by night. When Henry is cast as Flanagan, a tough cop on a generic American cop show "Crimewave," he takes method acting to where it has never been before. Purchasing a gun and walkie talkie, he begins patrolling the streets in his cop uniform where he wanders into an underworld ofAsian drug dealers and corrupt cops. Gradually, the distinction between the "real world" and the imaginary universe of "Crimewave" begins to dissolve for Henry. He becomes Flanagan, locked within the violent world view of the character he is playing, with deadly results. In I Love a Man in Uniform, American popular culture is represented not as something external or foreign, but as a deeply internalized facet of our national psyche. This is I Love a Man in Uniform'S affront to that nationalist discourse which defines Canadian identity in opposition to that of the Americans. Within this discourse, one of the cherished differences has been our pride in being a country of "law and order" where the tight governmental grip on immigration and settlement and .our contemporary gun control regulations ensure that Canada would

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Brenda Longfellow

never fall into the frontier lawlessness ofthe American experience. In I Love a Man in Unifonn, this difference vanishes in an escalating pace ofanonymous urban violence which begins with the shooting ofa cop in the opening scene and continues through to Henry's grotesque and . aestheticized suicide at the end of the film. As the single most homogenizing cultural force in this country, American culture (to paraphrase David Morley and Kevin Robins) is "[Canada's] alter ego, an exaggerated reflection ofwhat [Canada] fears it will become, or perhaps what [Canada] already is," 13 This is precisely what the film enacts in its narrative movement and performance. For it is not simply Henry~s transmogrification from mealy mouth bank clerk to American styled vigilante which is at issue, it is the social vision articulated by the film which comes to increasingly coincide with the paranoid world view of American television. As the director informs us: "In this film, the camera expresses Henry's perception of every situation.... The reality of the film is no more or less than Henfy's reality and we had to be true to that. The character motivates · the camera, the cuttmg, everyth'mg. "14 WiPJin Henry's blurred perspective, the merging of narrative frames occurs on several levels. Visually, the cliched rain drenched st~ets and blue lighting design ofthe "Crimewave" series are matched in the framing narrative where the streets ofToronto (althougJ: never named as such) take on a similar chiarscuro menace. In one sequence, obviously quoting Taxi Driver, Henry cruises down the red light district of the city, stopping to watch a hooker and her pimp, as muted neon lights flicker across his windshield. Here the cliched signifier of urban moral decay eradicates the particularities of place. Toronto becomes New York becomes Los Angeles becomes Hong Kong. At the level of the narrative, the pimps, scumbags, hookers and petty crim~nals wh~ch populate the ritualized storylines ofth~ cop show. a~s~ b:gm s~o~mg up with increasingfrequency in Henry s world as IfIt 15 hIS deSire Itself _hich calls thetn forth.

As spectators, however, we are not sutured into Henry's warped point of view. His paranoic vision of urban catastrophe and rampant criminality is rather observed at an ironic distance as an all too telling symptom, a worst case scenario of what would happen if one's only source of information about the world were derived from America's Most Wanted. Irony, as Linda Hutcheon has observed, is a dominant mode of (post-modern) consciousness with a particularly strong and resonant tradition in Canada, obsessed-as it still is-with deciphering

Globalization and National Identity...

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an identity against a heritage ofcolonial domination. Irony, she writes, "allows speakers to address and at the same time slyly confront an •official' discourse, that is, to work within a dominant tradition but also .to challenge it-without being utterly co-opted by it."u In I Love a Man in Unifonn, the irony stems from the parodic repetition of the cultural psychosis of the American cop show, appropriating its tropes and its visual cliches, its cast ofcaricatures and its violently manichean vision ofreality without ever finally surrendering to this Vision. This kind ofappropriation is very close to whatJohn Caughie refers to as "playing at being American," a particular mode of reception he identifies within those margins and peripheries of the American cultural empire. According to Caughie, watching American television in the Spanish Pyrennees (or Canada or anywhere else on the globe but America'itself) produces a kind ofdoubled consciousness, an ironic knowingness ... which m~y escape the obedience ofinterpellation or cultural colonialism and may offer a way ofthinking subjectiVity free ofsubjection, It gives a way of thinking identities as.plays of cognition and miscognition, which can account for the pleasures ofplaying at being, for example. American, without the paternalistic disapproval that goes with the assumption that it is bad for the natives. I.

"Playing at being American" is obViously very different than the ontological fIxity of being A"merican and it is precisely in that margin of play that I Love a Man in Unifonn installs itself. As fast paced, slick, seamless and dark as its American "origins," the film offers the seductions of generic identification while "slyly" confronting the vacuousness, the sexism and the racism which fuel prime time pleasures. In the end the progressive potential of the film depends on the ability of the spectator to read the doubleness and irony of the text. .,Pl~ying. at being American, as some of us have learned through the ,~Pftured history ofcinema and broadcasting in this country, carries its own risks. The danger, of course, lies in the very close line the film •~kates between irony and cynicism. Appropriating the gestures and world view ofthe "American," the film's margin ofcritique and critical distance can be easily construed as amoral detachment and opportun~sm. In I Love a Man in Unifonn, the dissolution of a Canadian "real" to:.

Brenda Longfellow

Globalization and National Identity...

into American simulacra alerts us to the dan~er ofpermanent cultural assimilation.

The sites only become imbued with a living sense of history through the stories relayed by a local "informant" who guides the photographer and his wife (Arsinee Khanjian) through the mesmerizing beauty -of the Armenian countryside. Locked behind the 'lens of his camera. the photographer remains offscreen, "present"·only through the sound of his voice or through a thumb carelessly smudging the camera lens. For him, Armenia is simply an economic proposition and the church scenes provide an easily commodified and tourist version ofethnicity and culture. He doesn't speak the language and is isolated both formally and diegetically by never appearing on screen in this first section of the film. His is a disembodied voice and a dislocated body, a body present only in the trace of his gaze through the camera. His nostalgia for a homeland, however. comes to be complexly bound up with his desire for his increasingly estranged wife. In the first movement of the film she functions to mediate between her husband and the local guide. As their journey continues. however, she merges more and more with her surroundings. singing, drinking and speaking Armenian with the locals. Imperceptibly, her loyalty begins to shift ~nd ,she allicrs herself with Armenia and with the guide. In the end, the estrangement the photographer and his wife is produced by their radically different senses of national belonging. For him Armenia is just a job, but for her it signifies homeland, motherland. the place where she would want to raise her children. Now this discourse of maternalism is very close to a classically conservative ethnic nationalism where the mother is represented as the vessel of the nation, the matrix of national being, the inspirational muse of national heroics. Certainly. in the deeply sensual presence of the wife in the film, there is a romantic association made between the feminine, birth. spirit and homeland. Before accusing Egoyan ofsexism. however, it is surely significant that much of the observation of the wife is mediated through the photographer's Hi-8 video tourist footage, It is this footage that signals the inscription of the photographer's desire as his hand-held video traces longingly over her body, spies on her as she increasingly ignores him and watches her as she begins to slowly inhabit this other space, the imaginary homeland of Armenia. For Egoyan this mediated relationship comes to substitute for any real emotional attachment. Within its blurred and grainy aspects, she becomes a fantasized projection of his desire so that the film's acute sense of nostalgia, of melancholy and loss is complexly bound up with the doubled disap-

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III. Calendar ...oUHontemporary thought seems to be a thought ofexile, a thought hiding behind nostalgia/or a recent past, a thought spealdngfrom spaces and 'cultures that no longer exist and were dead before the death ofthe long nineteenth century. I V.Y.Mudimbe. Introduction to Nations, Identities, Cultures. '

One of the most telling critics ofconventional globalization theory. Arjun Appadurai. has argued that a theory of globalization cannot be contained solely in an analysis ofthe transnational capital and the spread ofAmerican media culture worldwide. There is a third factor. he notes: the giobal transmigrations of people in which globalization takes the form of"a multitude of deterritorialized globalist-localisms that operate above and below the nation state."u Nations in this contemporary epoch are now increasingly made up of refugees, immigrants; diasporic populations 7""hose heterogeneity defies any possibility ofconjuring up the nation as defined by a singular linguistic or ethnic origin, an enduring impossibility in Canada giv~n its inherent ethnic plurality and diversity. ' Atom Egoyan's Calendar. more than any recent Canadian film. addresses the challenges to cultural belonging and identity produced by the evolving ethnoscapes ofthe later part ofthe twentieth century. Calendar is his most personal and intimate film made in co production with ZOF. the German national broadcast system which has long been a beacon ofenlightened and innovative programming associated with the productions of Europe's leading art cinema directors (Wenders. Fassbinder, Akerman. Sanders.) Produced for the extraordinarily modest budget of $100,000, the film is a model of what creative international co-production endeavours might look like that are not simply driven by the deal. In Calendar, narrative desire circulates around the longing for a homeland, a longing that is never finally realized, either in the"old" country. Armenia. or in the new. Canada. In Armenia to produce a calendar, a photographer (played by Egoyan himself) chooses a series of church ruins, as iconic signifiers of Armenia. As he meticulously frames and composes, waiting until the light is just right, the images as seen through his lens are empty and flat-cliched versions ofthe old country devoid of living history or meaning. 19

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pearance of the wife and the loss of a unitary sense of national belonging. As the photographer returns to Canada to nurse his betrayal, the sunny golden hues and lush wide open vistas that characterized the representation of Armenia, yield to the cold, claustrophobic interiors ofth~ photographer's apartment in Canada. In this half of the film, the representational strategies are reversed. Here the photographer's body is fully present and it is the wife who is disembodied, rendered as an offscreen voice and as a video image, replayed by the photographer who sits naked before his television, masturbating to his sense ofloss. Additionally, he attempts to displace and compulsively re-enact that repetition of loss through a series of staged encounters with women from various ethnic and racial backgrounds. In these encounters, organic cultural belonging is represented as the exclusive province of the "other"; the woman who, in each case, leaves the tortured courtship ritual of the dining room to place a phone call to another. Whispering passionate messages in their mother tongues, the women's conversations speak to the possibility of deep emotional intimacy through a shared cultural and linguistic tradition. This is diasporic subjectivity at its most humorous. Egoyan is supremely ir9nic in these sequences and supremely aware of the way in which fantasies of national belonging are all too often relayed through the perverse desires of a male subject for whom the body of the woman acts as mirror and anchor to identity. In Calendar, it is the excess of these bodies, heavily coded for their marks of femininity and" otherness" which renders ethnic identity as a performance. In the end, all security ofplace and belonging remains out of reach for the male subject who is left, as the quintessential postmodern subject, only with his loss and his melancholy. In summing up, I would suggest that tbis remarkable film asks us the question that has guided the writing of this essay: what are we to make of national identity in the latter part of the twentieth cemury?ZD While one response to this question has been a particularly virulent strain of ethnic nationalism which is transforming Eastern Europe, Rwanda and other "hot" spots, there is equally a reconstitution. of forces in the West in which traditional notions ofhome, belonging and identity are being radically challenged. Perhaps the hope for Canada is that its sense of national belonging could evolve (thanks to the native rights movement, vocal new immigrant politics, feminism, the gay and lesbian movements) into an idea of political citizenship and

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respect for difference. Perhaps too, in the face ofthat irrefutable diversity lies the possibility of recasting national identity as a place in between Old and New Worlds, a place of transnational, transsexual and transcultural movement, a negotiation between spaces of difference.

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NOTES 1.

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4. 5. 6. 7.

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8. 9.

Jim Leach, "Lost Bodies and Missing Persons: Some Reflections on the Canadian Cinema(s) in the Age of Multi-National Representations," paper presented at Film Studies Association of Canada, Brock University, June, 1996. Ernest Renan, What Is A Nation?, trans. Wanda Romer Taylor (Toronto: Tapir Press, 1996). [page number] Manjunath Pendakur, Canadian Dreams and American Control (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), p. 194 et ssq. Ibid, 194. Ibid, 194. As quoted by Pendakur, 194. Quoted by Ward Churchill, "And They Did It Like Dogs in the Dirt," Z (December, 1992), p. 21. Churchill,p. 194. Churchill, p. 21.

10. Bill Marsh~IL "Gender, Narrative and National Identity in Les Filles de Caleb," CanadianjoumalofFirm StudieS/Revue canadienne d'itudes cinematographiques. vol, 2 nos. 2-3 (1993), p. 55. 11. Churchill. p. 22. 12. Homi K. Bhabha. Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha, ed., (New York, Routledge, 1990). p. 295. 13. David Morley and Kevin Robins, "Spaces of Identity: Communications Technologies and the Reconfiguration ofEurope," Screen 34: 1(Spring 1993), p.18. 14. "Production Notes." David Wellington, I Love a Man in Uniform, Alliance ReleaSing Press Package. 15. Linda Hutcheon, As Canadian as...possible...under the circumstancesJ (Toronto: ECW Press and York University, 1990), p. 4. 16. John Caughie. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics," in Logics ofTelevision, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 1990) p. 54. 17. V.Y.Mudimbe. "Introduction," Nations, Identities, Cultures. Special Issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly (Fall 1995), vol. 94, Number 4, p. 983. 18. Frederick Buell, National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 316.

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Ironically, too, the harsh political reality of the contemporary civil war between the Armenian and Azerbaijhan commucnitiesneverintrudes into the detached observance of the photographer's gaze. 20. Egoyan's film seems to correspond to Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson's insight that: "as actual places and localities become ever more blurred and indeterminate, ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places become perhaps even II!pre salient. It is here that it becomes most visible how imagined communities come to be attached to imagined places, as displaced peoples cluster around remembered or imagined homelands, places or communities in a world that seems increasingly to deny such firm territorialized anchors in their actuality." Cultural Anthropology, Volume 7, Number 1 (Pebruary, 1992), p. 10. 19.

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Cinema, Theatre and Red Gushing Blood inJean Beaudin's Being at Home with Claude

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RESUME L'ADAPTATION CINEMATOGRAPHIQUE DE LA PIECE DE THEATRE BEING

AT HOME WITH CLAUDE, DE RENE-DANIEL DUBOIS, DEBUTE AVEC UN PROLOGUE EN NOIR ET BLANC QUI NOUSMONTRE LES ANTECEDENTS DU DRAME ORIGINAL. CEPROLOGUE, CREE DE TOUTES PIECES PAR LE CINEASTE JEAN BEAUDIN, A PLUSIEURS FONCTIONS, DONT CELLE DE

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GATOIRE CONSTITUANT L'ENSEMBLE DU TEXTE DE DUBOIS. MAIS AU DELA

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DE SON R6LE INFORMATIONNEL, CETTE PREFACE ILLUSTRE AUSSI DE

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FOURNIR CERTAINES DONNEES SUR LE MEURTRE QUI PRECEDE L'INTERRO-

FAC;:ON SUBTILE, SURTOUT PAR SON UTILISATION TRBS BREVE DE LA COULEUR POUR REPRESENTER LE SANG QUI GlCLE, LE PROCESSUS D'ADAPTATION AUQUEL LA PIECE A ETE SOUMISE. EN ANALYSANT tES

Brenda Longfellow is an Associate Professor and Co-ordinator ofthe Film Program at Atkinson College, York University. She has written extensively on Canadian andfeminist cinema, and has recently completed a documentary, Balkan Journey I Fragments From the Other Side of War which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1996.

RAPPORTS QUI EXISTENT ENTRE LE TEXTE ORIGINAL, LE FILM DANS SON ENSEMBLE ET LE PROLOGUE,EN P.."RTICULIERAU NIVEAU DES SIGNIFIANTS CHROMATIQUES ET DES MODES DE VISUALISATION EMPRUNTES PAR BEAUDIN POUR CINEMATISER LE PROPOS DE LA PIECE, CET ARTICLE TENTE D'OFFRIR UNE LECTURE DE BEING AT HOME WITH CLAUDE QUI SITUE L'OEUVRE DANS LE CONTEXTE DE CERTAINES THEORIES COMPARATIVES DU CINEMA ET DU THEATRE.

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ean Beaudin's 1992 cinematic treament of Rene-Daniel. Dubois's drama Being at Home with Claude (1985) marks a turning point in the recent history of Canadian cinema, for it was the first production to demonstrate clearly the commercial and artistic potential offeature film adaptations of Canadian plays. As I have explained elsewhere,l prior to Being at Home with Claude, there had been only a handful of Canadian and Quebecois dramatic texts brought to the big screen and, beside a few notable exceptions like Gratien Gelinas's Tit-Coq (1953) and William Fruet's Wedding in White (1972), these adaptations generally attracted very little critical and popular interest. Since the

Canadian }OlInull of Film Stlldte5/1tevIIe a1nadtenne d'etllde5 dnbnatograplti'l"e5 Vol' N° Z