Take Two

Cam Tolton is a professor of French and Cinema Studies at the University
of Toronto.

Take Two derives its title from two sources. First of all, it is a sequel to a volume of essays on Canadian cinema, The Canadian Film Reader, compiled by Take Two’s editor, Seth Feldman, and by Joyce Nelson in 1977. In the second place, the title discreetly recalls the late, lamented pioneering Canadian film journal, Take One.

Feldman has chosen his 27 articles from both journalistic and scholarly sources. Some are printed here for the first time. He organizes them under five headings. “The Big Picture” groups overviews of Canadian film history and problems written mainly by the journalists on his team: Marshall Delaney (i.e., Robert Fulford), Martin Knelman, and Jay Scott.

The second and third sections focus on the English screen and the Quebécois screen respectively, with individual studies on the likes of Paul Almond, Allan King, Peter Pearson, Pierre Perrault, Gilles Carle, and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. This is the very kind of article which, as Feldman points out in his preface, was all too rare at the time of his earlier volume. What is still missing here — especially in the Québecois section — is the Quebec critical viewpoint. The contributors are all from English Canada.

Section Four deals with “Film and the State,” stressing primarily some contributions of the National Film Board and its chief artists and artisans. The fifth section covers aspects of the Canadian avant-garde.

The academic contributors represent a wide range of Canadian institutions: The University of Toronto (Kay Armatage and David Clandfield), Carleton (Peter Harcourt), Queen’s (Lianne McLarty and Peter Morris), Brock (James Leach), Simon Fraser (Al Razutis), Ryerson (Bruce Elder), and York (Feldman). Armatage, Elder, and Razutis are, in addition, all filmmakers themselves.

There are four women contributors: Armatage, McLarty, Sandra Gathercole, and Brenda Longfellow. There could be more.

The whole worthy enterprise — for Toronto’s Festival of Festivals 1984 Canadian retrospective — is under the general editorship of contributor Piers Handling.