Moran AM, et al. Film Policy: International, national, and regional perspectives. 1st ed. London (United Kingdom): Routledge; 1996. 7, Policy rhetorics of an imaginary cinema: The discursive economy of the emergence of the Australian and Canadian feature film; p. 111-124.
7
POLICY RHETORICS OF AN IMAGINARY CINEMA
The discurse economy of the emergence of the Australian and Canadian feature film
Michael Dorland
Times have changed… [L]arger production companies and software houses… and the publicly listed production houses are leaving town and beating the competition at their own game rather than circling the wagon. It’s time to export or die rather than protect or die.
(Ellis 1994)
THE CANADIAN CONTEXT
Very early on in the institutionalization of the contemporary Canadian feature film, whose initial mechanisms of support were in place by the late 1960s, an astute observer of the cultural scene, a novelist, essayist and filmmaker in his own right, made the following observation. ‘The establishment of a feature film industry’, wrote Jacques Godbout in 1968, ‘is a mirage in our desert.’ And it was a mirage not least because of the contradiction between the discourses of Canadian filmmakers, who had been lobbying government for the previous half-decade for feature film production and assistance policies, and their own film making practices:
for the last five years they have all been clamouring and working for a traditional feature film industry, in which they will never participate themselves and against which, in fact, they have made their films. It is an avant-garde determined to create its own rear-guard—which is a very ironic situation indeed.
(in Paquet 1968: n.p.)
Eight years later (…) after the establishment of the Canadian Film Development Corporation in 1968 (and since 1982 Telefilm Canada), the principal federal state agency set up to fund feature film production, (…) André Lamy, the National Film Board commissioner (…) would come to a conclusion remarkably similar to Godbout’s. The entire enterprise (…) of attempting to create a feature film industry in Canada was founded upon an illusion; namely, the presumption that a feature film industry actually already existed in Canadian reality (as opposed to being a long-term objective of both cultural and economic policy). ‘The problem of the feature film industry in Canada,’ Lamy wrote, ‘is precisely that it is not an industry in the classical sense of the word. And any policy based on the presumption that such an industry exists can only produce catastrophic results, economically or culturally’ (NFBC Archives, Film Policy Box 262, Lamy to Litwack, 13 April 1977, my translation).
The end of the 1980s witnessed various attempts within the Canadian film ‘industry’ to provisionally assess what some twenty years of public funding of Canadian feature film production had brought about. (…) Connie Tadros, then editor of Cinema Canada, took the occasion of the magazine’s 150th issue (…) to review a course of development succinctly summed up in her title, ‘From community to commodity’. Until the mid-1970s, she argued, the developmental options had seemed clear: ‘One either participated in a communal adventure toward the creation of a national cinema, or one was reduced to a commodity in the American marketplace’ (Tadros 1988:9) If the Canadian industry had grown phenomenally since 1972, ‘fed by tax shelters and a weak dollar’, it had not become ‘an independent industry, despite the rhetoric’.
[…] In Tadros’ analysis, an initially articulate national cultural vision—integrating ‘production, distribution, information and promotion supported by government policy’—had resulted instead in a subsidized industry ‘so dependent upon public funds and tax measures that divergent points of view find no expression’.
In Tadros’ account, Canada’s bicephalous production ‘industry’ consisted of a dominant component which as a result of identifying with, and working with, the American entertainment industry, had made considerable economic strides. […] But the apparent wealth of the ‘industry’ had been secured at the expense of a national ideal of cultural production. Instead, that ideal had been replaced by a dominated production component, a subsidised creature of government policies, whose efforts produced ‘not the industrial products of a healthy, private industry,’ but the independently produced authors’ films that ‘the government takes on the festival circuit to impress the world with our ability’.
Tadros went on to make various attempts to explain how Canada’s two-headed production ‘industry’ had come into being. A key factor was the ambiguous role played by federal government film policies and agencies that ‘had delivered the Canadian industry into the hands of the American marketplace’ (Tadros 1988:12). (…) the ‘final arbiters’ of policy would be not the Canadian state, but Hollywood Canadians who had ‘convince[d] our government that economic independence for the Canadian film/television industry is unnecessary’ (1988: 9–10). (…) Tadros would conclude that the ultimate pressures on the course of Canadian film policy development were not external, but were, in fact, internal to the Canadian national ‘psyche’, in the form of a weakness of will—the will to independence, both individual and governmental (…). […] As a result, for Tadros, Canadian policy development consisted in a dialogue of illusions, between, on the one hand, a production milieu given to massive self-delusion as to its own capacities, and, on the other, a state apparatus given to ‘totally misguided readings of the industry workings’ (Tadros 1988: 8). The interaction between the two would produce film policies she characterized as ‘the great lie’ (Tadros 1988:9).
THE AUSTRALIAN CONTEXT
Assessments of Australian cinema since that country’s feature film revival beginning in 1968 identify many of the same questionings as found in the Canadian context. […] From the perspective of the late 1980s, ‘the ideal of a[n Australian] national cinema has looked increasingly naive and anachronistic’ (Dermody and Jacka 1988b:117). Australian cinema of the late 1980s was ‘safe and respectable’, ‘middle-class and middle-aged’, ‘subdued and tame’ (Dermody and Jacka 1988b:68, 74).
Australian cinema is in a limbo, poised between a past which is a history of the attempt to found a national cinema, or perhaps only a local industry, and a future which is uncertain and only dimly imagined by those who work with this local industry. There is a loss of vision, a failure of nerve… in spite of all the surface busyness.
(Dermody and Jacka 1988b:127)
[…] (…) the point, the touchstone, the justification for this activity remained the ambiguous ‘history of the attempt to find a national cinema, or perhaps only a local industry’. (…) Australian cinema remains positioned within ‘the complex set of discourse and institutions in which cinema exists’ (Dermody and Jacka 1988b:128). […] Above all, what characterizes this discursive apparatus, of which cinema is but one locus, is the consistency of the rhetorical positions expressed. […] (…) suffice it to be described as ‘a realistic aesthetic combined with a unitary conception of Australia’s national identity’ (…). First, it is a policy rhetoric that consists in the repetition of well-worn formulae (‘remarkably short on critical interrogation of the terms in which the debate is couched and the underlying philosophy of a national cultural policy’ [Dermody and Jacka 1988b: 120). Second, these formulae, by the late 1980s, remained significantly unchanged since the 1960s and 1970s. (…) the discourse of Australian cultural policy retains a high degree of autonomy both from changing historical circumstances and practices, is largely impervious to cultural critique (Cunningham 1992), and derives its efficiencies from a political nationalist discourse which ‘in spite of its inadequacies…does have…a strong rhetorical effectiveness…and is the easiest…to legislate for’ (Dermody and Jacka 1988b:120; emphasis added).
DISCURSIVE ECONOMIES
In the case of both Australia and Canada, readily comparable countries in their constitutional and institutional histories as former, predominantly white, British colonies, with similar cinematic pasts and comparable government-film institutions (…) discovering—or rediscovering—the feature film at approximately the same time, in a process of mutual institutional and policy exchange, we are dealing, then, with equivalent semi-peripheral political economies (Alexander 1979). (…) the problematic of the discontinuous film industries of countries such as Australia and Canada (or New Zealand) is posed within a shared contextual paradigm of ambivalent decolonization, as Sylvia Lawson (1979) pointed out (…). […] (…) the difficulty of film history in the English-speaking ex-colonies is that it is confronted with a double form of continuous colonization, both practical and intellectual, to be recouped into conscious knowledge: 1) for the ‘industry’, not so much a struggle against American cultural imperialism as (often desperate) strategies of survival in spite of Hollywood; and 2) perhaps more importantly, for academics and policy makers, to have to overcome ‘the political and cultural apathy of their own societies’ (Lawson 1979:66). Because the ex-colonies were ‘politically divided, socially and culturally fragmented’ (…), a number of specific knowledge-effects had been produced that would have to be compensated for, not the least being the disarticulation (notably between technology and social structure) characteristic of peripheral economies. Principal among these (…) would be the dualistic structure of film industry organization. […] Thus, the ensuing disjunction of film industry organization between the exhibition-distribution-consumption of an imported cinema in Canada and Australia, and the chronic scarcity of resources allocated to the production of Canadian or Australian films. The fundamental structural disarticulation of industry organization would, in turn, systematically disequilibrate not only the subsequent development of national policies with respect to the local ‘industry’, but as well the reception context of movie-going (or TV watching) audiences for whom the norm has historically been determined by the audiovisual output of (highly selected) other countries. Among other relevant displacement effects that should be mentioned is the consistently problematic and chronic belatedness of the development of the academic study of the history of displaced national cinemas: not until the early 1980s in Britain, the mid-1980s in Australia, and the early 1990s in Canada, has serious study of each respective national cinema been much more than wishful.
The point here is that, in the context of displaced national cinemas, of intermittent ‘film industries’ undergoing the major organizational and capitalistic upheaval represented by the transition towards increased private production of feature-length films—in the growing contradiction between economy and culture that crystallized by the late 1970s in the development of cultural industries policies—discourse, and the various forms of discourse, comes to play an increasingly central function in providing the semblance of coherence making the transition possible. […] This is, then, to foreground the primarily discursive or imaginary nature of the emergence of a feature film industry in the Canadian and Australian contexts, not as an economic object, but as the discursive articulation of a public idea, an imaginary construct upon which another imaginary construct, national identity, is seen substantially to rest and become manifest.
As a result of all that talk and declamation, ‘the industry’ was already an overdetermined and even fetishized object before it had any claim to material existence.
(Dermody and Jacka 1987:26; emphasis added)
In the historical polemic for feature film revival, the ‘overdetermined and fetishized object’ that survived over time (…) would not be a film industry per se, but at least certain elements of a peripheral film production infrastructure sufficiently established to support the periodic emergence of discursive formations (among critics, filmmakers, producers, or government bureaucrats, for instance) that produce ‘talk’ about an imaginary or potential industry. In displaced national cinema contexts, it is the survival of these production elements that made possible the continuation of the polemic. (…) the ‘film industry’ both exists and does not exist simultaneously. If its existence in the economic reality of the 1960s and 1970s was small-scale and precarious (…), its existence in the discursive economy constituted by the public talk of its protagonists, in ‘the verbal force field in which the industry has been conceived, argued and legislated for, and put into public existence’ (Dermody and Jacka 1987:197), is of another order of reality altogether. It is on this largely imaginary, discursive level that the perhaps naive, but honourable dream of a national cinema, and a film industry of one’s own, of the desire for cultural independence, of the aspiration to cultural modernity (…). (…) the distinction between economic and discursive realities becomes blurred, particularly in times of heightened cultural nationalism, and in periods of the emergence of new discursive formations, and the legislative and institutional forms by which these emerging discourses will be given more concrete incorporation.
However, as Dermody and Jacka would demonstrate in their study (…), the discursive economy of the emergence of the contemporary Australian feature would be formed from the combination of the two major discourses (…). Industry-1, the discourse of a national cinema, as articulated by the producers (but also many directors, writers, actors and union-leaders) who became established in the 1970s, represented
a certain style of film making (modest, artisanal, democratic); a certain style of film (socially concerned, gentle, humanistic, sometimes didactic, but nonconfrontational and often aesthetically timid), and a certain politics of Australian film culture—against the monopolies, somewhat distrustful of America and its cultural domination (…), in favour of government regulation and safeguards on the Australian character of the industry.
(Dermody and Jacka 1987:198)
Industry-2, the discourse of initially the traditional distribution/exhibition interests and latterly of the film financiers, packagers, brokers and producers who emerged with the tax incentive legislation of 1980, is, on the other hand, ‘reactionary’:
anti-intellectual, anti-film buff, anti-art, anti-government regulation of the industry, scornful of Australian nationalism and the concern about US domination, concerned with the mass audience, bums-on-seats, box-office dollars and the business of film (as against film as art or communication).
(Dermody and Jacka 1987:199; emphasis in original)
‘The life of this industry as a double personality is especially striking’, for it structures both an operational discursive space and at the same time establishes the limits of this discursive space. Thus, it allows, first, ‘the industry at any one time to say one thing and be the other’, which produces, second, an oscillation over time that evens out
into an uneasy, uncertain, unconfident status, leaving the industry neither one thing nor the other, neither a repository of the values of a potential national cinema nor an aggressively successful business, pushing into foreign territories. Between these two projections lies a zone of inertia, in which the past is being replayed for an audience that seems to have lost interest, patience, and any remnant of loyalty.
(Dermody and Jacka 1987:201; emphasis added)
Third, it establishes the aesthetic—indeed, discursive—patterns that define the limits of Australian feature production (and its discourses) as ‘a narrow field of conservative aesthetic choices [i.e. the repetition of well-worn formulae], repeated over and over’ (ibid.:201).
THE DISCURSIVE ECONOMY OF THE EMERGENCE OF THE CANADIAN FEATURE FILM
(…) the duality of the emergent film industry as a double personality (…) it will be even more pronounced in the Canadian case. Because of the linguistically differentiated enclave represented by Quebec, not only would the dualistic structuration prevalent in film ‘industry’ organization common to the political economy of displaced national cinemas be a decisive element of emergence, but (…) it would be multiplied and reinforced by the environing social and political organization of Canada as a cultural duality. Not only would dualism bear upon contextual organizing structures, it would apply as well to the political economy of language in Canada, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s politicization of language from an instrument of communication to a symbol of membership in an increasingly self-conscious collectivity that by the 1970s would distinguish itself from the rest of Canada by the use of the descriptor ‘Québécois’. Thus, the problematic of feature film emergence in the Canadian context takes place diachronically in not one but two languages at a time of rising contestation and renegotiation of the political, economic and cultural relations between Canada’s two founding language groups. In this sense, the Canadian feature film is, as much as the Australian, an over-determined and fetishized object, but additionally is the designator of a range of unresolved (constitutional, ideological and cultural) contestations, designating the historical sedimentation of existentially contrived values and norms in search of institutional denouement. (…) the emergence of the Quebecois feature film has been viewed as part of the larger ideological continuum of the struggle for Quebec’s affirmation of its ‘national’ identity, both prior to and since Confederation (1867) (Véronneau 1987).
(…) the emergence of the Quebecois feature—postulated on the aesthetic, technological and social continuity between madefor-television documentary and fictionalized series production of the late 1950s and the documentary shorts of the ‘direct cinema’—took place institutionally within the film agency of the federal state (…). (…) the role of federal institutions is paradoxically central to the emergence of French-language versions of the discourses of Industry-1 and Industry-2 in the Canadian context. In the first instance, a francophone version of Industry-1 as the emergence of the desire to make feature-length films (and in some instances to actually do so, as in A Tout Prendre in 1963 or Le Chat dans le Sac in 1964) identifiably occurs within the National FilmBoard in the early-mid 1960s. However, this discourse, in the context of its emergence in the National Film Board, is predominantly conceptualized (…) initially as a public service cinema (Caughie 1986). In the second instance (…) the creation of a second federal cinematographic institution, the Canadian Film Development Corporation, to support private-sector, commercial feature film making, would be both the result, and the principal institutional embodiment of the emergence of an Industry-2 discourse that some Quebecois film critics would see as the politically motivated ([…] culturally genocidal) move by Ottawa to ‘exterminate the Quebecois cinema that at the beginning of the 1960s had given birth to all the new (…) cinema throughout the world’ (Staram n.d.:37; my translation), (…) to preserve the American film monopoly in Canada. (…) the events do not respect linguistic compartmentalizations, but reflect instead the emergence of two cinematic discourses, whose boundaries are far from clearly delimited. (…) if there are two linguistic sites of the emergence of an Industry-1 discourse, one French, one English, their institutionalization will be defined in emergent Industry-2 forms. (…) one could say that, in the Canadian context, an embryonic Industry-1 discourse articulating an aesthetic or cultural desire to make feature-length films emerges from within the state film making (and television) apparatus, but, given the reluctance—or (…) inability—of the state agencies to alter the dominant (i.e. Industry-2) political economy of audiovisual circulation, of which they are now an integral component, the Canadian Industry-1 discourse has also to seek institutionalization in the form of an Industry-2 discourse, but in the claim to be the embodiment of an emergent Canadian industry, thus proposing a shift in the political economy.
This claim itself is partly real, and partly imaginary: it is real to the extent that the advent of television in the Canadian context of the early 1950s had created the infrastructure of a private production industry (…). But it is also imaginary, to the extent that the development of the alternative political economy being proposed is not only contingent upon the reduction of existing state structures, but its future growth was, at that point in time, purely speculative (…). […] In this sense, the dualistic role of the Canadian state would be that of coordinating the first and second options, of inversing the historical predominance of the state sector in favour of the emergent private sector by integrating the development of the latter into that of more developed private industries (…).
(…) the role of the liberal capitalist state, as that of the other actors, is also dual: on the one hand, the development of Canadian forms of capitalist enterprise in film, which is a cultural as much as an economic objective, and on the other hand the economic development of those forms through their integration within the dominant capitalist structures, those of the American (or global) industry. (…) the emergence of the Canadian feature film sees the discursive encryption of three intertwining processes of emergence:1) a Canadian film industry; 2) within it, the publicly financed but privately produced commercial feature film; and 3) within this, contemporary Quebecois cinema in its own forms of 1) and 2). […] In the period of its emergence (1957–68), the Canadian discursive economy remained disarticulated (…). (…) the discursive economy of the Canadian feature film in the period of its emergence established a verbal force field in which the dominant discourse is an Industry-2 discourse. (…) the 1960s witness the emergence of the discursive economy in which an Industry-2 discourse is predominant. In the first half of the 1970s, an Industry-1 discourse develops that, among other reasons, since it is internally divided by the increasingly vocal claim to difference of Quebec filmmakers, will remain marginal to the Industry-2 discourse that, as of mid-decade, is reinforced by 1) the governmentalization of Quebec cinema that follows with the entry in 1975 of the previously abstinent Quebec state as coordinator of a replica discursive economy, and 2) as of the same year, the ‘industrialization’ of feature film capitalization that results from modifications to tax legislation. The 1980s, following the largely self-inflicted collapse of the capital market as a result of the economic inexperience of the emergent private producer ‘class’, will as a result see the incorporation, by state policy, of the broadcasting system into the discursive economy. Throughout, it should be strongly emphasized, the dominant discourse remains an Industry-2 discourse, constant in its demands for the creation of a private industry oriented towards world markets as the dominant force in Canadian audiovisual production
SECOND CINEMA POLICY
The discursive economies of the emergence of the Australian and Canadian feature film were dualistic in the sense of being both discourse and economy, of both a public idea and an economic telos. Their emergence meant that, henceforth, the possibility of more speech about an object-field had been institutionalized; but this could not guarantee the coherence of that speech, nor even that it meant what it said about itself (…). If one can generalize from the Canadian-Australian experience, that experience would seem to suggest that the study of ‘second cinema film policy’ might constitute a discrete object of knowledge with particular problematics, structures, etc. of its own that would warrant more systematic preoccupation than it has so far received. (…) it might be possible toargue that the notion of ‘second cinema’, in post-colonial contexts, would appear to be a more productive one than that of ‘national cinema’, to the extent that the latter conceptualization has been so over-determined by the problematic notion of nationality (Buscombe 1980; Straw 1991; […]). The notion of second cinema, as Dermody and Jacka have suggested (1982, 1988), by foregrounding secondariness, acknowledges realistically, on the one hand, the primacy held in theatrical exhibition and distribution in peripheral national contexts by the ‘first cinema’ of Hollywood; but, on the other hand, at the level of the imaginary, also acknowledges the double dream of not only establishing a film (or television) industry of one’s own, but one that also (…) of being able to compete with Hollywood either at home (as in Australia), or, failing that, as in Canada, since the one need not imply the other, abroad. (…) the acknowledgement of the imaginary dimensions of second cinema film policy makes possible the realization that one is dealing with an historical phenomenon, albeit one that is fragmented and discontinuous, but which has been widely shared by the film cultures of respective English-language contexts (…). It further makes possible the realization of the extent to which the dimensions of the imaginary have been the touchstone of various national policies in film, not to mention the larger field of mass communication in post-colonial contexts. This entails inquiry in greater detail into how the dream/desire of a second cinema takes on material/textual form. But, most broadly perhaps, the acknowledgement of secondariness entails the recognition, in the study of film policy, of the complexity of the transition from disarticulated elements of (a state-supported) production infrastructure to the beginnings of capitalist forms of the internal economic organization of film production, of which the emergence of the commercial feature film signifies the highly condensed expression.
Not only is the transition to a capitalist economy always cataclysmic (…) but, simplifying considerably, the transition to an economy of generalized exchange is also accompanied by conjunctural transformations in the realms of subjectivity, aesthetics and discursive articulations. (…) one might look again at the Canadian and Australian discourses on national identity as experimental forms of ‘currency’ (nodes of sociability) attempting to establish a civil economy of symbolic exchange. (…) would make it possible to better understand the various shifting grammars that come into play in the transition to commodity exchange in the political economy of culture. The emergence of the feature film in the Australian and Canadian (…) represents particular articulations of the complex tensions between the spheres of economy and culture that all industrializing countries have historically experienced.
[Film: À tout prendre, 1963, dir. Claude Jutra]
[About the film above: « Dédié à toutes les victimes de l’intolérance »]
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