Quebec National Cinema

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In 11 informative chapters, Bill Marshall, a professor at the University
of Glasgow, defends his thesis that, having met the four tests of
“recognition, space, time and ontology/identity” since the early
1960s, francophone fictional feature filmmakers in Quebec have created a
cinema worthy of international study and recognition, and of designation
as a “national cinema.”

Marshall identifies the various issues related to the province’s
status as a “nation”: the early rumblings of the Quiet Revolution;
the ambivalence of Quebec’s connections to France; the FLQ crisis and
the War Measures Act; the treatment of the anglophone, aboriginal, and
immigrant minorities; the erosion of the Church’s influence; rural
versus urban attitudes toward morality, sexuality, and homosexuality;
the changing role of women; and the perceived threats to Quebec’s
culture and language posed by American mass media and NAFTA. He proceeds
to delineate the role of such filmmakers as Denys Arcand, Jacques
Godbout, Gilles Carle, Anne Claire Poirier, Clemont Perron, Gilles
Groulx, Jean Pierre Lefebrve, Murielle Dansereau, and Pierre Patry in
interpreting and reflecting these issues in a “national” context. In
doing so, he supplies detailed textual analyses of the filmmakers’
works within the broader philosophical and critical constructs of such
gurus as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and the principles of
auterism, modernity, and postmodernity.

Marshall’s book, “the first comprehensive theoretically informed
work in English on Quebec cinema,” will undoubtedly prove to be a
landmark in the ongoing debate about Quebec’s language and culture,
and its films.