David Davidson: Can you tell me how your
book So Close to the State/s: The
Emergence of Canadian Feature Film Policy (UTP, 1998) came to be? What
sparked this research? What methodology problems did you have to solve?
Michael Dorland: I was working as a reporter/editor for Cinema Canada magazine, once upon a time
the voice of a nationalist Canadian and Quebec cinema. In the time I was there,
roughly from 1980-1985, the major federal policy change regarding film was a
shift away from previous attempts to foster feature films (initially using a
small $10m production and later through tax-shelter) with a turn to fostering
TV production (the Telefilm Television Fund). After all, the broadcasting
system was Canadian-owned whereas the cinema distribution system was and
remains mainly US-owned. Also working as a reporter, one tends after a while to
see the same things come around, and around, and this was systemically the
case, whether in attempting to “foster” Canadian film development, or through
the CRTC to “foster” Canadian content in broadcasting and music. What I wanted
to figure out was why all this endless and seemingly unaware repetition. So in
1987, I got the opportunity to start a Phd in Communication at Concordia. The
book is drawn from my dissertation.
The principal
methodological problem I faced was finding an operationalizable concept that
captured the role of the government/state in film production. Marxist methods
had clear limitations in that it was never clear which “bourgeoisie” the
Canadian state ‘worked’ for. Cultural studies in Canada at the time, and
perhaps still, did not have a clear method other than the subcultural. What
worked in the end, and it was something of a fluke, the result of much reading
of Foucault, was the concept of governmentality, which seemed ideally suited
for the Canadian context; that is, of an overriding state interest in the
orientation of both economy and society without being clearly a class interest,
but a muddle of some nationalist ideas mixed in with state interests as an end
in itself. The other problem, with which I began first, was access to
information held in government bureaucracies.
DD: How was its research process? The
references from government documents, archival sources, unpublished material,
personal letters and notes, an extensive referencing of newspaper and Canadian
film journals and periodicals is quite erudite in its depth and range. How did
you know what to look for, and were they easy to access?
MD: Bureaucracy is many-headed, so if you can access one major
bureaucracy, there is a strong likelihood of accessing them all through
duplication. My way in was through the National Film Board. I knew the head
archivist at the time; I had interviewed him for the magazine; and he basically
explained the structure of the Board’s archiving system and I was off and
running. This was still before computerization, and the ensuing nightmare of
computer dumps that fortunately I did not have to deal with. So using the
Board’s archives, from minutes of the Board of the Board and all of the
attached documentation that covered most of the bureaucracy involved in the film
policy process, to production files for given films as well as television,
really opened up the whole field for me. Especially the conviction at the time,
early 1950s, that the Board thought it would be responsible for television in
Canada. This was hugely important, especially when it came to untangling the
symbiotic relationship between film and TV in the Canadian context of the ‘50s
and ‘60s. How to know what to access and whether it was easy is basically hit
and miss. You follow a thread and see where it takes you. If it doesn’t take
you anywhere, you follow another thread. Easy? Never, and I don’t think the
dissertation and book would have been doable without the NFB lifeline into the
state bureaucracy.
DD: How was the book received? Did it
have any effect, that you are aware of, on the domains of its dissertation such
as Canadian filmmaking, government policy, or Canadian film scholarship?
MD: The book itself was quite well received in the small
universe of Canadian film scholarship, and to some extent also in Australian
film scholarship. ‘Well received’ is of course a relative notion. A few people
noticed and said nice things. Outside of these small scholarly worlds, I don’t think
the book had any impact at all.
DD: The book seems to answer the specific
question of is there a ‘Canadian cinema’ by closely examining the formation of
its industry in the 50s and 60s through the role of governmentality and its
mediation between public institutions and private interests. It both brings
together many dilemmas and problems still facing Canadian cinema today as well
as the ground-work that contributed to making Canada a world-class country for
industrial filmmaking (four of last years Best Picture Oscar contenders were
Canadian co-productions, for example). How do you view the arguments from the
book from the vantage point of 2016?
MD: I am not sure the book attempts to answer the specific
question of “is there a Canadian cinema” for the reasons that there isn’t a
Canadian cinema, but rather many Canadian cinemas, some ceaselessly
rediscovered, some endlessly hoped for, and some that couldn’t care less as
long as there is “product,” and if Canadians are involved that’s a plus.
Canadian cinema has been all of these things at various times.
What was the
case in the late 1960s was that there were a handful of filmmakers, usually of
shorts and documentaries, and some of these wanted to make feature films. The
government also wanted there to be more made-in-Canada feature films, without
getting too picky about the phrase made-in-Canada. The government in particular
wanted a feature film industry with
only the vaguest idea of what this might actually mean or entail. With the
creation in 1968 of the first feature film fund of $10m, the head of the fund
called up his pals in Hollywood and said, hey, we’ve got $10m to play with,
wanna play? And of course they did.
That was sixty
years ago and in that time something like a film and television industry has
been created, with all this implies in terms of infrastructure, labs,
equipment, lighting, computerization, etc. Parts of that industry, in Vancouver
and Toronto, sometimes in Alberta, (and in Montreal, though Quebec is always
somewhat different), are capable of producing product that can sell to
Hollywood or elsewhere, and to television all over the world, and in pretty
much any genre imaginable. But that industry is still not “Canadian cinema”, a
creature that remains as elusive as ever. Again, what the Canadian government
of the 1960s wanted was a film industry. Eventually, it got one, after a
fashion.
DD: What contemporary issues do you feel
deserve more attention in the discussion of Canadian cinema today and its
relation to government legislation and the private industry? And can you
envisage any challenges in realizing it? (The conclusion on Policy Knowledge
versus Academic Knowledge seems quite relevant in regards to this).
MD: As you say, there is Academic Knowledge and Policy
Knowledge and they rarely meet each other. There is a large Policy apparatus in
Canada very little studied by academics, which is unfortunate, but the ends are
completely different. To the extent that Academic knowledge is about a broader
understanding of context, and Policy knowledge is (not that it should be) about
selling to bureaucrats something they want to hear and will pay for, there is
still a very long way to go. Since the publication of So Close to the State/s my sense of the direction of academic work
is that it is more regionally focused and more firmly set in the realm of
production studies. As for Policy knowledge, that is a field entirely up for
grabs by interested academics.
MD: You didn’t ask me this, but the title of the book is a play
on the Mexican proverb, “So Close to the
United States, So Far From God.” You can draw your own conclusions.
