Celluloid Cities

Once upon a time the paradigm of Canadian film history located the documentary as the foundational genre, and the rural, whether dense wilderness or vast, largely unpeopled landscape, as the foundational subject. Funded at first by the Canadian Pacific Railway at the turn of the last century and then by the National Film Board just before and then during the Second World War, the first extended efforts to represent Canada on screen showcased the natural world, often in implicit opposition to the crowded, oppressive worlds from which many Canadians had fled, either voluntarily or by force. For a long time, this paradigm helped to inform our understanding of the dominant characteristics of Canadian cinema. Americans might have funded Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in 1922, but the subject of that important, romantic documentary was nothing less than the vast Canadian North and the hardy people who managed to endure it. The discourse that emerged to articulate...