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CANADA'S TOP 15 MOVIES (by year)
*d. = director These films are covered in my book "Canada's Best Features" Feature Film
Between 1900 and 1960 barely 100 feature films were made in Canada, while Hollywood regularly made three times as many each year - a disparity in production often accounted for by the control Americans have exercised over the exhibition and distribution sectors of the FILM INDUSTRY. Canadians, deprived of financial resources and the distribution outlets required to produce, exhibit and market feature films, developed award- winning traditions in the areas of documentary and experimental films and for animation. Films by Norman MCLAREN, Michael SNOW or the NATIONAL FILM BOARD's famous Unit B (Roman Kroitor, Colin Lowe, Tom DALY and Wolf Koenig), among many others, would easily qualify for top-10 lists in animation, experimental and documentary filmmaking respectively.
In the 1960s feature filmmaking began to emerge as an option for young filmmakers. Few films were of lasting value, however. Aided in the 1970s by federal financing measures and tax credits, Canadian filmmakers produced record numbers of feature films, many of which were never completed or distributed. Still, several films stand out - sometimes celebrated elsewhere before they were recognized in Canada as estimable films. Since the mid-1980s, Canada's reputation in the area of feature films has grown. Filmmakers such as Denys ARCAND, David CRONENBERG and, more recently, Atom EGOYAN have become known and respected on the international festival circuit, garnering major awards at events such as the Cannes Film Festival.
In response to the growing reputation of Canadian filmmakers, the Toronto International Film Festival in 1984 polled film critics, buffs, professors and festival organizers to create a "best 10" list - an exercise which was repeated in 1993. Although the number one film on the list, MON ONCLE ANTOINE remained the same over the 10-year-span, many films changed positions on the two lists and new films were added. These changes forced people to rethink their stereotyped notions about Canadian film.
When the first list was compiled, the accepted critical view held that Canadian feature films were best understood by placing them in the realist or documentary tradition of the NFB. This context may be less important, however, than the feature film traditions of other countries. Claude JUTRA, for instance, who worked for the documentary-oriented NFB and made Mon oncle Antoine under its auspices, was more heavily influenced by François Truffaut and the French "new wave" films of the 1960s. Don SHEBIB whose loose, easy style in GOIN' DOWN THE ROAD perfectly captured Toronto life in the early 1970s, was schooled on the Irish-American filmmaker John Ford's films. Denys ARCAND looked to both European art films and American genres for his inspiration. More recently, Canadian feature filmmakers have gone farther afield for their models. Guy MADDIN's film CAREFUL, for example, owes much to German expressionism and the arcane genre of the German mountain film. Srinivas Krishna grew up watching Indian musical melodramas; his film MASALA is very much in that tradition.
Another misconception about Canadian feature films was that they were obsessed with victims and losers and were sober examinations of the national search for identity. It is increasingly apparent that Canadian filmmakers are more interested in the vitality and nobility of the unheroic rather than the inevitability of - or the national propensity for - victimization. Searches for identity in Canadian films are neither grim nor inherently Canadian.
A recurrent figure in many of the best Canadian film - not surprising in a country with such character-based scripts - is the naif. Mon oncle Antoine, THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ, I'VE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING, and Jean-Claude LAUZON's Léolo are merely four of a host of Canadian films which revolve around young and innocent characters who are brought to a new understanding of the cruel ways of the world. LES BONS DÉBARRAS inverts the device: the child character is crueler than her innocent and well-meaning mother.
Even THE GREY FOX and COMPANY OF STRANGERS, films which focus on mature characters, achieve much of their artistic appeal from the convincing way in which their aged central characters are presented as charming naifs. In The Grey Fox, an older man who has spent virtually his entire life behind bars is released wide-eyed to the new world of 20th-century inventions and opportunities; in Company of Strangers, seven very old women, marooned in the woods, deal with their plight with the enthusiastic simplicity of schoolgirls. Michel BRAULT's LES ORDRES generates its extraordinary power from the literal and legal innocence of the older characters who are jailed so unjustly. VIDEODROME, THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE and EXOTICA, three films which project a worldly cynicism, reinforce the predominance of the naif in Canadian feature film. All three are contemporary urban stories whose central characters are restless and unsatisfied. In spite of their superficial sexual sophistication, these characters suffer because of a peculiar immaturity or naive blind-spot. Like many of Canada's highly regarded films, these are also cinematic songs of innocence and experience.
Although Canadian cinema is mainly financed by both federal and provincial tax subsidies (through Telefilm Canada and its equivalents), the films themselves largely resist bureaucratic and moralistic interference. Leolo (1992), with its frank depiction of bathroom perversities, Careful, and Exotica, with their themes of father-daughter incest, and more sensationally Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996), with its sado-masochistic rituals, and Kissed (Lynne Stopkowich, 1997), with its sympathetic treatment of necrophilia, all indicate that Canadian filmmakers can be both risk-taking and risque. It can also be bluntly commercial, as Porky's, Les Boys, and recently, Ginger Snaps attest. Or just plain risque -- see Bubbles Galore.
For a feature film industry that is barely 30 years old, Canada has come a long way. Without a national star system and its attendant glamour, without genre paradigms of national consequence, without elaborate special effects departments and the fantasy and brutality they often glorify, without a coast-to-coast distribution or promotional system to facilitate country-wide exposure, Canadian filmmakers have still managed to make films that find and affect audiences.
In the past five years these audiences have continued to grow. Three of the top-grossing Canadian films of all time have been produced recently -- The Red Violin (Francois Girard, 19988), Sunshine (Istvan Szabo, produced by Robert Lantos, 1998), and The Art of War (Christian Duguay, 2000). Young filmmakers capable of launching the industry in exciting new directions have emerged. Masala by Srinivas Krishna, Double Happiness (1996) by Mina Shum, and Rude (1995) by Clement Vigo, new cinematic voices from the cultural mosaic, have already made their mark. Careful and The Hanging Garden (Thom Fitzgerald, 1997), Maelstrom (Denys Villeneuve, 2000), waydowntown ( 2000), and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001) prove once again that poetic, independent films are thriving in regions as disparate as Winnipeg and Halifax, Quebec, Alberta, and Nunavut.
Still, with the current global marketplace dominated by Hollywood blockbusters, it is difficult to be anything but cautious about future possibilities. Two of this country's best directors have, for better or for worse, turned to international (and less recognizably "Canadian") productions. The amalgamation of the country's two largest production and distribution companies into one, Alliance-Atlantis, lessens the number of filmmaking companies but may increase clout. Alliance-Atlantis has already optioned several Canadian novels for adaptation into feature films (reversing a trend in which national treasures such as Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Carol Shields' Swann, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace were produced in other countries).
Perhaps the next time it is compiled, the list of Canada's best films will not only be reshuffled, it will be unrecognizable. In Canada, more than in the USA, it is not only film critics, buffs, professors and festival organizers who can change the list; because the industry is so young and independent, filmmakers can change the list too - just by completing a classic new film. Canada may not have venerable old film classics such as Gone With The Wind or Citizen Kane and its films may not yet be mentioned on anyone's world list of top 10 films of all time, but with a growing talent pool and an expanding audience, the list of top-10 films in Canada will constantly be in a state of healthy revision.
GENE WALZ To the Top |
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