C I NÉ • F O R U M
RO U DTAB LE:
H I STO RY O F CANAD IAN F I LM STU D I ES
CONVENED BY HAIDEE WASSON AND MICHAEL ZRYD
Résumé : L’histoire des études cinématographiques considérées en tant que discipline n’a reçue que tout récemment l’attention des chercheurs. Dans un effort pour
initier l’assemblage des histoires de cette discipline, cette table ronde regroupe des
personnes qui furent importantes pour la fondation de programmes d’études au
Québec et en Ontario : Kay Armatage, André Gaudreault, John Locke, Peter Morris,
and Maurice Yacowar. Les premiers développements discutés incluent la cinéphilie,
les sociétés de film et les cinémas de répertoire, l’enseignement du cinéma dans les
départements comme ceux d’anglais, d’études féministes, de communication et de
Beaux-Arts, les technologies comme le projecteur analytique et la vidéo, le nationalisme ou l’internationalisme et les publications influentes.
Roundtable hosted by Advanced Research Team on the History and Epistemology
of Moving Images Studies (ARTHEMIS) and the Film Studies Association of
Canada (FSAC), June 4th 2010, at Concordia University
Convened by Haidee Wasson (Concordia University) and Michael Zryd (York
University)
Participants:
Kay Armatage (University of Toronto)
André Gaudreault (Université de Montréal) [Translation: Timothy Barnard]
John Locke (Concordia University)
Peter Morris (York University)
Maurice Yacowar (University of Calgary)
HAIDEE WASSON and MICHAEL ZRYD
What do we know—and not know—about Canadian film studies? We know that,
in general, film studies has always been in dialogue with other fields. Yet, mapping
interdisciplinary links is complicated. In the context of the Canadian university,
we can observe that the study of cinema happens in different departments (Cinema,
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English, Communications), across different faculties (Arts and Science, Humanities,
Fine Arts) and with differing emphases (production, art, aesthetics, cultural studies,
public policy). To be sure, Canadian film studies has been inflected by debates
about Canadian nationalism. The late 1960s and early 1970s, when film courses
began to be taught and the first Canadian film programs founded, was a time
when the Canadian centenary in 1967 was in full bloom and intense opposition
to American imperialism was evident across a wide range of cultural and political
activities. It’s not surprising that Canadian film studies concentrated on, and celebrated, Canadian film. Indeed, at one extreme, Canadian film studies has been
defined by the study of specifically Canadian film. This nationalism manifests in
a tension palpable at past meetings of the FSAC: Is it a scholarly association for
people who study Canadian film or a scholarly association for people who study
film in Canada?
Parallel tensions manifest at the level of scholarly training and disciplinary
formation. Most faculty members working in Canada who received a doctoral
degree in film studies, received this degree from somewhere outside of Canada
(usually the US or the UK). For those trained in Canada, degrees have been
granted by interdisciplinary programs¾like York’s Social and Political Thought
program or McGill’s Art History and Communication program, to name two
prominent examples. That is, we have either been trained internationally or
interdisciplinarily—or both. Another observation to be made about Canadian
film studies is the gulf between scholarship in English-Canada and Québec, a linguistic, cultural but also methodological gulf stemming from different scholarly
traditions. These tensions have not been prominent in published histories
addressing the history of film studies in other national contexts. We do know
that studying films at universities from the 1920s through the 1940s was characterized by many, but generally isolated, sites of educational activity. Films were
screened for educational purposes in film societies, cine clubs, art museums, and
women’s organizations but also in University-based departments as diverse as
psychology, geography, business, foreign language, and drama throughout the U. S.
and Canada. In the 1950s, the study of films was tethered to sustained national
and international organizations, and to the influential Filmology movement in
France, which inspired the 1959 formation of the Society of Cinematologists in
the U.S. (eventually the Society for Cinema and Media Studies). It wasn’t until
the 1960s that film programs on university campuses took a turn toward the arts
and the humanities, establishing deep ties to filmmaking as well.1
In short, film studies enjoys a long, polyglot but determined interface with
changing university, technological and cultural landscapes. While we recognize
the value in what we are starting to understand about the national specificities
of Film Study in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and elsewhere, we
feel that continuing to expand this geography is crucial.2 Today, we are gathered
with the hope that we can initiate a dialogue and shore up our collective under-
118 Volume 20 • No.1
standing of the specifically Canadian scene, considering the known tensions in
the context of unknown and under-considered histories.
Overall, at heart, examining the history of film studies should provide
insight into more than studying film. Beyond national or cultural specificity, a
better understanding of film studies allows us as scholars to understand better
why we do what we do. We need to know why studying film matters, in the local
sense but also in the more abstract sense. What larger movements are we a part
of when we study, advocate for, and argue about movies? What kinds of knowledge? To be sure, excavating the multiple dialogues of film study allows a salient
entry point into the modern university as a whole. It offers insight into how the
university adapts to, accommodates or rejects emergent technologies, humanist
inquiry, modes of cultural expression, new aesthetic forms, and shifting paths to
knowledge production, art, and politics.
Many recent discussions about the history of the field often veil their history in the language of prescription. That is, very often histories of our field are
actually prescriptive or normative assertions about what Film Study should be,
rather than what it has been. So, in the spirit of acknowledging what film studies in Canada has been rather than what we think it should be, we have invited
our participants to speak freely about their early experiences in the field, building institutions and forging new knowledge. Here we begin with personal recollections in order to build the foundation for a rigorous consideration of our
field’s history, present and future.
PETER MORRIS
I should warn you that much of what I want to talk about is going to have a personal bias because I lived through and experienced most of it. We could say there
are two godmothers of film studies in Canada: One is departments of English in
universities and the other is film societies or film clubs. In fact, it was through
film societies that professors learned that film could be an art. They could actually
see European art movies, French films, Ingmar Bergman films, and they learned
that we could talk about film seriously, or as seriously as we could do with novels.
The film society movement goes back to the 1930s in Canada, notably the
National Film Society, which became the Canadian Film Institute. Film societies
could get around censorship laws and the cost of importing films from the Museum
of Modern Art. The film society movement entered a moribund phase during the
war years until the early 1950s. The Canadian Federation of Film Societies was
founded in 1953, as a division of the Canadian Film Institute, and the two organizations worked in very close relation. The movement grew rapidly through the
1950s and by the end of the decade, there were over a hundred film societies,
with organizations in every major urban centre and in many small towns. One
of the smallest was in Trail, B.C., which had about thirty members. Many of the
film societies in urban centres were extremely large. Edmonton and Calgary had
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over two thousand members who went to regular screenings. The reason for the
growth was due partly because there were not, of course, any repertory theatres
at the time, and no VHS nor DVDs. Film societies were the only place you had
access to films that were not mainstream Hollywood films in regular theatrical
release. Because film societies were membership organizations—officially they
were “private clubs”—they were not subject to censorship rules. They could
show almost anything they wanted. Similarly, they also got around the Sunday
Observance laws. In all provinces, except Québec, commercial theatres closed
down on Sundays, giving film societies access to major theatres with plush seats
and 35mm projection, and could show films in ideal conditions unlike 16mm
scratched prints projected in church basements. So, they had a huge following.
As film societies grew, they began to be more active in things like film education.
Screenings were always accompanied by program notes, which included details
about the filmmaker, the production process, awards, its critical reception, etc.
There was always an educational component. It was never only a film screening.
The program notes were often voluminous. A famous example was Triumph
of the Will (1935) for which the Toronto Film Society prepared a 50 pages dossier
around 1960 that included a whole history of the Nazi party, the history of propaganda, and a history of the film itself and how it got made. The Toronto Film
Society also prepared English titles on slides, which were projected at the same
time as the film, with translations of Adolf’s infamous speeches.
Film societies also began to show thematic film programmes. Instead of simply
screening the latest art film from Europe or Japan, which was the lifeblood of
film societies, they also began showing classics of film history, like the Western,
or the Musical. If you ever wanted to see Singing in the Rain (1952) or High Noon
(1952) after they first came out, the only chance was at a film society screening.
The film society movement began to take itself a little bit more seriously
when it started to create awards, the first of which was in honour of a key figure in the development of the film society movement, Dorothy Burritt. The first
Dorothy Burritt Memorial Award went to Maurice Yacowar in 1964. He got two
hundred dollars to go to New York and watch films for a week! The award was
meant to develop film studies, film education and film appreciation.
The first sectors of universities to get involved with film education were
adult education programs and/or extension departments. In 1956, Gerald Pratley
taught a summer course at Queen’s University. It was the first film course ever
taught in the country, as part of Queen’s extension department. In 1960, UBC’s
extension department also ran a film course, which I taught with Stan Fox, who
was at the time the head of CBC television. Stan was also involved with the Vancouver Film Society and was one of the founders of the Vancouver Film Festival
in 1958. He later became chair of the Film Department at York University. A couple
of years after this course, McMaster University’s extension department collaborated with the Canadian Federation of Film Societies to organize a week long res-
120 Volume 20 • No.1
The “The Art of Film” Seminar in 1963, Canterbury Hills, near Hamilton. Peter Morris at the
lectern. Ernest Callenbach is front row center, and off to the far right is Richard Ballentine, who
was running the filmmaking component of this seminar. Ballentine was known for a direct
cinema film he made on Hugh Hefner called The Most (1963) as well as a film on Lester B.
Pearson, called Mr. Pearson (1962), that was banned by the CBC who deemed it too “intimate”
in following the Prime Minister around doing his job.
Andrew Sarris debating the
Auteur Theory (far left) at
“The Art of Film” Seminar.
idential seminar called “The Art of Film,” which was held in 1963 at the Canterbury Hills retreat just outside of Hamilton. The lecturers at this seminar were
similarly foretelling of a new discipline. They included: James Card, who was
head of George Eastman House in Rochester, Ernest Callenbach, who was then
editor of Film Quarterly, Andrew Sarris, who was at the very beginning of his
fame and notoriety as the father of Auteur Theory, and me, who was director of
the seminar. The seminar was restricted to thirty-six people, although it wasn’t
full. We had many lively debates, among them was one concerning the value of
Sarris’s Auteur Theory, which Ernest Callenbach staunchly argued against.
If there is one image I could identify as marking the birth of film study in
Canada it would be a still from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), which
appeared on the brochure for the seminar. The knight playing chess with Death
really was proof to English professors that film was “serious stuff.” It had big
themes in it, as well as metaphors, and all that good stuff. Plus, it was visually
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Cover for a brochure advertising “The Art of Film” seminar. On the cover is a still from
Ingmar Berman’s Seventh Seal (1957).
exquisite, so you could not pretend it was just like a novel; it had to be studied
as something separate. I’m sure this explains the choice of that image for the
cover of the seminar’s program.
The following year a similar seminar took place in Ottawa, organized by
Carleton University. It was run by Larry Kardish, who went on to become a film
programmer at the Museum of Modern in Art in New York. Carleton University Extension Department later ran an evening film course with which I was also involved.
What grew out from these and other initiatives (including film festivals
co-founded by film society members) was a developing interest by university
English departments in this new “art.” This started of course in 1967 with
Queen’s University, where some professors, who were also members of the
Kingston film society invited Peter Harcourt from England to teach an academic
film course. That was quickly followed by a course at Sir George Williams University (later to become Concordia University) in 1968. Brock University as well
as UBC and others followed quite quickly. In 1969, York University started the
first film degree program, as part of the Faculty of Fine Arts. What is astonishing in retrospect is that when FSAC was set up in 1976, there were already
enough film teachers in this country to make the association viable.
KAY ARMATAGE
I’m also going to tell a more or less personal narrative, which has been assiduously researched in the University of Toronto archives to fill in the memory gaps.
This personal narrative is not my own, however, but that of the founder of cinema
studies at the University of Toronto. I am following this personal genealogy
because I suspect it is typical of Canadian geographical and cultural migrations
in the era of the first steps towards institutionalization of cinema studies in Canadian universities.
Joe Medjuck moved from Fredericton to Montreal in 1961, where he started
his BA at McGill. He had never seen a foreign film before. At McGill, there was
122 Volume 20 • No.1
Joe Medjuck began teaching film at the
University of Toronto in 1967 in affiliation with the School of Architecture.
a cine-club running three programs (classics, foreign contemporary and just
“plain good films”), and Joe became an active member. He was an autodidact
with a voracious reading habit, a near eidetic memory and cinephilic passion. By
the time he graduated, he was in charge of the silent series. In 1965, he came to
the University of Toronto as an MA student in English and promptly joined the
Toronto Film Society. When he went to a provincial gathering of film society
folks, he met a whole gang of Toronto cinephiles, including George Baird of the UT
Architecture faculty and Bob Huber, an unaffiliated film scholar who would later
open the Cinema Lumière on College St. and the Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles,
two of the major art cinemas in Toronto. In 1967, Medjuck was assigned as an
English Department teaching assistant to the School of Architecture, where he was
encouraged to offer an interdisciplinary course rather than the straight “English for
Engineers” course (taught by English Department teaching assistants). That
same year, he got a call from Peter Lebensold, who was starting a film magazine
in Montreal to be called Take One.3 Soon Medjuck was teaching a non-credit film
course in the extension department as well as a film-heavy course in architecture, and a few years later, he was co-editor/co-publisher of Take One.
At the same time in the University of Toronto, the Humanities departments,
which were affiliated with colleges, were off-loading their college connections to
amalgamate into the huge and hugely powerful units they became, leaving the
colleges without academic identities. New kid on the block Innis College (founded
in 1964) seized the opportunity to develop credit courses that would offer an
“educational experience not available through the teaching departments.” These
courses were deemed to be “experimental” because, in the words of the Principal’s
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report for 1968-69, “their subject matter was not identified in terms of established disciplines.” Yet this same report documents a bold grab for cinema studies
as “a serious teaching commitment on the part of Innis College” in light of college
plans to include a multi-media lecture theatre in their scheduled new building. It
may be worthwhile noting that the initiative came from college committees,
which, in this 1960s college, were run on a student/non-student parity basis.
There was such a high proportion of students in voting positions that a studentonly governing body was seen to be redundant. This new college incidentally
offered non-credit courses on Love, Poetry and Student Power and Varieties of
Revolutionary Thought. I don’t think I need to rehearse here what was happening culturally and politically in the 1960s, but suffice it to say that I thrived in
this environment and have been a citizen of Innis College ever since.
Medjuck recalls hearing about the proposed cinema course by chance and
high-tailing it over to Innis to offer himself for the job. The Innis course, entitled
Modern Arts: The Cinema, was first offered in 1969-70. The course offered a
chronological history in more or less a Great Books approach, as well as documentary, avant-garde and Canadian films with a strong dose of theory (Eisenstein, Bazin, auteurism, semiotics). The entire first term was dedicated to the
silent era. Medjuck pointed out recently that this temporal weighting reflected
history at the moment: in 1969 the silent era represented just under fifty percent
of the elapsed history.4 Forty years later, the silent era has become much shorter.
The intellectual context, as so many of the recent books have pointed out,
was rich in theory but undeveloped as an academic discipline. Dana Polan’s
Scenes of Instruction outlines the intellectual and academic milieu in terms of the
US context, and in Canada similar conditions prevailed. Pedagogically, the dominant tendency was the Great Books approach, tempered especially in Britain by
a Leavisite social concern, with auteurism contesting the canon.
Indulge me for a moment in a footnote that I love from this era. Until Sarris’s
book came out in 1968 (with all credits from memory, legend has it), it was
tough to track those auteurs. As Joe Medjuck recalls and Laura Mulvey recounts:
“in terms of actually going to the movies […] in the mid-60s, we were […] chasing
around London trying to identify a Boetticher, a Fuller, a Nick Ray movie […]
because the listings didn’t name the director. You had to know.”5
Like Medjuck, I was also brought up in a small town, even smaller than
Fredericton, with only one movie theatre. When he and I met in our first year as
MA students, I had no idea of such things as Godard. I was smitten and my film
education began. I taught the evening section of the Innis intro course in 1970-71,
at the same time as I was working with a group of women to develop one of the
first courses in Women’s Studies. The evident question of this combined emerging
field was: where are the women directors? In 1971-72, Phyllis Platt and I co-edited
a special issue of Take One on women filmmakers.6
124 Volume 20 • No.1
Cover of Take One, vol. 3, no. 2
(1971-72), an early volume devoted
to “Women in Film” co-edited by
Phyllis Platt and Kay Armatage.
Except for the section called “Ladies Auxiliary” in Andrew Sarris’s book, we
had absolutely nothing to go on. In an issue of Film Comment that came out in
the month of October after our own issue came out in 1972, there was a filmography of 150 women directors published. Serious work was evidently needed. That
same summer of 1972, I was working on my dissertation in London and hanging
out occasionally on Dean St., where somehow, probably from Ian Christie, I heard
about the Women’s Film Event at Edinburgh. Ian’s girlfriend Patsy Nightingale
and I shared a cottage on the outskirts of Edinburgh and drove into the festival
every day on Patsy’s motorcycle. As soon as I got back to Toronto, I began working
with a group of women to organize a women’s film festival, which happened in
July 1973, and I proposed a course on Women’s Film and Literature that was
mounted in 1974. By 1976 there were enough critical reading materials and films
available for classroom use to teach a full course on women’s cinema.
Since the summer of 1972, the Edinburgh Film Festival under the directorship of Lynda Myles and Screen journal (which had shifted its editorial mandate
in 1971) had become my intellectual event horizons. I went to Edinburgh every
summer, through the 1974 auteurism event, the psychoanalysis conference in
1976, in which I was in Stephen Heath’s seminar group, the memory/history
conference in 1977, and the legendary Feminist Film event in 1979. By 1978, I was
teaching a course on what later became known as Screen theory.
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In 1975, Cinema Studies was accepted by the Faculty of Arts and Science at
the University of Toronto as a Minor college program (now equivalent to a Major
—6 courses required), which is a lesser order of institutional unit than a department by far—and Cinema Studies is still a long way from being a department.
Mounting this program was a great victory at this very conservative institution,
and it was the theoretical puissance of Screen that pulled us through.7
In 1980, Medjuck got a call from the coast and left for L.A. to become a film
producer. He there became one of the founders of Criterion. Bart Testa was hired in
his place and promptly adopted Bordwell’s Film Art, which had emerged in 1979 and
shifted the disciplinary paradigm. The theory and gender battles of the 1980s and
1990s ensued. They have, thank goodness, finally mellowed in the 21st century.
Now, I want to turn to consideration of how the early moments in the history of film study as I have lived them “might relate or not relate to the changes
currently characterizing our field,” as the convenors of this roundtable suggested
to us. The first is about lack of change. Despite the estimable increases in numbers
of women scholars in cinema studies, the floods of feminist scholarship on gender
issues in cinema over four decades, and the vast contemporary publications on
women in a variety of roles in the silent era, there is precious little of this work
taught in our courses. Gender is given a week in the intro and theory courses.
“Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema” is taught again and again throughout the
undergrad program, with undergraduates never really understanding it, some
faculty buying into the anti-theory “fixed spectator” reading, and that’s about it
for feminist scholarship.8 Films by women as creative producers aren’t regularly
included in courses. Although gender is de rigueur in certain areas, such as the
western or melodrama, rarely are films by women directors sought out, and with
the Historical Turn, studies of women practitioners have increasingly been siloed
in the early cinema period. In the discipline in general, feminist concerns have
devolved into an academic specialization. At the graduate level, as far as I can
glean from our own program, women and gender, like Canadian cinema, aren’t
at issue. There are a few women students who seek feminist scholarship and
theory, but the majority of students know that it needn’t concern them. Welcome
to the same old same old. This returns me to the same question we asked in
1971: “Where are the women directors?”
The second consideration is, somehow, a simple joke, concerning current
changes in our field. In my own view, discussion about those changes in the field
is going to seem very much like a historical hiccup very quickly. Yet I would like
to share one great line I heard at a discussion at SCMS 2010 about the beginnings
of television studies. I think it was Christine Geraghty who said acerbically that
the only reason our field wasn’t called Media Studies from the beginning was
that the film people were too snobby to give up the French root, cinéma. We’re
still snobby. At UT, we are calling our proposed PhD “Cinematic Media,” retaining a chic echo of that logophilic French connection.
126 Volume 20 • No.1
MAURICE YACOWAR
The first time I heard of film studies, I was at Birmingham finishing my Doctorate,
scrounging for a job. I got a letter from Brock University, saying: “Would you be
interested in teaching a film course, because we don’t need another Shakespeare
man.” I had never thought of teaching a film course; I had never heard of such
a thing. But I had this one line on my resume: “Film reviewer for the Birmingham
student newspaper,” and that little worm worked. As I look back on it, there was
a certain inevitability to my career turn. Film did occupy the centre of my attention and the centre of my life for as far back as I can remember, which is roughly
1947, when I was living in Leader, Saskatchewan, which had one movie house that
would only run movies on Friday and Saturday nights. I am sure it would also have
run on Saturday afternoons, but we had harvest issues in Saskatchewan, so we
had only evening shows. I remember watching Wild Boys on the Road (1933) and
I was mightily impressed not by the auteurist value of William Wellman, which
came along much later, but by one shot of poor railway travelling boys, so hungry
that they were eating earthworms. When we moved to Calgary, in 1950, I was
delighted to find that there was a movie house a few blocks from where we lived
in a rooming house in East Calgary. It was called the Hitchin Post. Every Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, they ran adult melodramas and crime films in their second
or third run. Thursday, Friday and Saturday they ran Westerns, and I went every
Saturday, unless I went to the Variety or the Strand.
When I turned fifteen, I got a job as an usher. Sixty cents an hour in an itchy
woolen uniform, but I was in heaven! The films I saw then stayed in my mind.
They had a value that I came to realize much later, following the pleasure that I
got from them, a pleasure that quickly became obsessive. It was at this time that
I found out what the Theatre of the Absurd was by watching the Marx Brothers
films, although, of course, the concept did not find the vocabulary until I read
Martin Esslin’s book. It was in the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope road movies that
I learned about intertextuality. It was in a movie called Skipalong Rosenbloom,
starring a retired heavy-weight boxer named “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom, that
I learned about self-referentiality. Although again, the term did not hit me at the
time. The idea did. So it took my academic career to hang the term on the idea.
But the ideas were planted that far back.
Then came the film society movement. When I turned sixteen, I could go to
the Calgary Film Society screenings at the Jubilee Auditorium. I began borrowing
16mm prints of Chaplin to run on campus at the university. When I went to
Lethbridge for my first teaching job, I started a film society there. The deal was
five films for five dollars. Every season would include a Bergman, a Fellini, an
Antonioni, an Ozu, a Kurosawa, etc.. But this is what happened: every program
evening, the film failed to arrive. At the last minute, I would phone Warner
Brothers in Calgary, and they would send out a replacement. Five films for five
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dollars ended up being ten films for five dollars. The first screened program
always showed a week late, and the John Ford or the Hitchcock or the Billy
Wilder substitute ran the week originally scheduled. It was the best film society
deal ever. It worked out even better for me, for the executive of the Lethbridge
Film Society nominated me for a Dorothy Burritt Fellowship. I remember that
vividly because I was the executive of the Lethbridge Film Society.
I finagled a free trip from Calgary to Montreal, as a chaperone for young
teenagers who were in an exchange programme. So I only had to cover my fare
to New York. I spent my days watching Jeanne Moreau reruns on seedy 42nd
street at 8:30am, and ended up at the midnight screenings of experimental films
at St. Mark’s Church. I saw seventy-nine movies in eight days, bought all the
back issues of Film Culture and a bunch of other used film books, a brown
leather sports jacket in which I gave my lectures for the next fifteen years, and I
had fifty dollars left over. Indeed, the Lethbridge Film Society had a seminal
influence on me.
All of this experience gave me the confidence to go to Brock and pretend
that I could teach film. I arrived in 1968 and my assignment was the first year
English course and an introductory film course at the third year level. I taught
two hours of lecture per week in film, plus a three-hour lab. These labs were very
important because we were talking to students who had never thought about
thinking about a film. We wanted to get them analyzing rather than just taking
notes. One of the values of the English department at Brock was that they actually forbade students from reading pieces by critics. They encouraged students
to think and analyze for themselves in small seminars. (There were only 500 students on campus). They even went so far as opening the faculty coffee rooms to
students, which at the time was a radical departure. The English department was
perfectly willing to sponsor film analysis courses, but when it came time for a
film course to be taken in lieu of a traditional English course in an English major
program, they balked. They relented on one course: not the Fellini or Bergman
course, but the silent cinema course, because then people were reading—the
intertitles. I tell you that story because even in a forward-looking university, as
Brock was at the time, there was still that last spasm of traditionalism.
We brought in 16mm films (we taught in the antediluvian situation preceding
not just DVDs, but VCRs), which we ran once for the students. Then we would
try to do a shot by shot analysis in the three-hour lab, so that we could read the
single image, the scene, the combination of scenes, and then move to the thematic overviews. But the students would never have access to these films again,
so we could not expect them to write essays on them. For their essays, we would
expect them to see a film two or three times to come up with a reading of substance and independence. They had to use whatever film passed through town
or that they could find on television. To get around that, on Sundays I would
come in and set up a camera and a projector, and I would videotape off the
128 Volume 20 • No.1
screen the 16mm prints that had arrived for that week’s classes. That would provide an archive for the students who wanted to check a film. To my knowledge,
not one student ever took out one of those prints to review.
The Brock film program ended up being very fruitful. I started in 1968. Jim
Leach came on a year later, and then we added Barry Grant. We created what
was a very early major in film studies by combining English literature with dramatic literature, the option of an alternative language or literature, and a steady
stream of changing film courses in order to put together a fairly solid package.
At Brock, our mandate was to have the class screenings in the evening and
open to the university community. Because of minimal resources, we would do
a different country every year in the national cinema course, and different
auteurs in the Auteur course. One memory sticks out in my mind. At the end of
Night and Fog (1955), a physics student was sitting in the eighth row, crying after
everybody had left. Naturally, I went to him and asked what was the matter. He
said: “I didn’t know that happened.”
We also had to be strategic about the censorship regulations. I remember
when Pretty Baby (1978) was banned in Ontario, we ran it as a public event calling
it “an illustrated lecture.” We showed the movie, I yapped about it before and
after, and then people discussed whether or not the film should have been
banned. Another enterprise like that was when a student managed to get a print
of Deep Throat (1972). He was running it and arranged for me to talk about it.
We titled it She Stooped to Conquer as a way of getting the word out without getting
the word out. Brock gave me tremendous latitude.
I should say that the first official product from the Brock film program was
Eleanor Beattie. But there is a footnote here: the Brock film program produced
Eleanor Beattie before there was a Brock film program. In 1968, I met with
Eleanor who had just graduated in English and hadn’t left town yet. We went to
see The Quiller Memorandum (1966) together and talked about it. At that point,
she was not sure what to do with her life. So I told her: “This is a pretty good
movie. Why don’t you write an MA on Pinter’s films? You could go to McGill.
They would probably let you do that.” And they did. She went and about five or
six years later out came The Handbook of Canadian Film.9 Eleanor Beattie went
on to teach film at Dawson College.
Brock never undertook to train filmmakers. We had the same objective as
we had in the English program and in the dramatic literature program: to
produce people who could analyze for themselves a structure, whether it is in
literature, or in film, or in popular culture. Analyzing a structure. That to me was
the most valuable, the most ambitious undertaking we could make. I vividly
remember one day in my first months at Brock when I noticed that I was lecturing
on King Lear in the morning and The Seven Samurai in the afternoon and said
to myself: “They are paying me for this!?” It was marvelous. And I close with
this quote: “I hope you have as good a time with the movies as I did.”
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ANDRÉ GAUDREAULT
There are four universities with film programs in French in Quebec, all of which
I know from the inside. First there is UQÀM, which did not have a film program
at the time I was studying philosophy there in the early 1970s. This would soon
change, because over the course of the decade, cinema, and especially film production, assumed a large presence in the Communication department. Then I
went to Université Laval, still as a student (in journalism and then art history).
There I took my very first university-level film course in 1973 (and it was there
that I was able to teach university-level courses for the first time a few years
later). Third is UQÀC (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi), where I was offered
my first position as a regular professor. I did not accept it, and in the end, I
worked there only as a part-time instructor because Université Laval also offered
me a full-time teaching position that same year, in the early 1980s, which I
accepted. At Laval, I was in charge of the film studies program until 1991, when
I left for the Université de Montréal.
One aspect of film studies in French-language universities in Quebec is the
way it is attached to different disciplines in different universities. At UQÀM, cinema
grew up in the Communication department. At UQÀC, film studies courses are
offered by the Faculté des lettres alongside theatre courses. At Laval, the Art History program first hosted film courses, but eventually the Literature department
became the administrative home for film studies. At the Université de Montréal,
the Art History department (known in recent years as the Département d’histoire
de l’art et d’études cinématographiques) is the program’s home, which is a very
positive thing for the discipline’s development because cinema is one of two
equal partners in the department, where it enjoys a remarkable degree of autonomy.
Its success in the past twenty years has seen the number of full-time teaching
positions triple.
For me, the first film course I took at Laval in 1973 was a true revelation, a
bolt of lightning. I remember entering a classroom and viewing a long excerpt
from Citizen Kane, which literally fascinated me (sorry for the cliché!). I was
amazed by the professor’s explanations. I recall also having realized in a course
given by an editor from the NFB that there was a completely blurry zone around
the beginnings of editing (in the work of Porter, Méliès, Griffith, etc.). Also, very
important for me and my fellow students was the discovery of the films of Eisenstein and Vertov, but more specifically, their writings. And, of course, the first
books by Christian Metz, with their scientific rigour, presented the reader with a
real challenge to understand the “language of cinema.” The program inaugurated
at Laval in 1974 was quite small but dynamic: a Minor run by the university’s
first two full-time film professors, François Baby and Paul Warren. I was part of
the first group of students, and a few years later I became the third professor on
this little team (later, I set out to earn a doctorate in cinema at La Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, which I received in 1983.) It was in this small Minor program at
130 Volume 20 • No.1
Université Laval that I was encouraged to undertake my first research in the field,
which led to my first “scholarly” article, about editing in Life of an American
Fireman. This article was written in the summer of 1977 and opened the door
for me to the famous Brighton Congress held in March 1978.10
At almost exactly the same time as Laval, the Université de Montréal was
creating a Minor program under the only full-time professor of film studies there,
Gilles Marsolais, who, if I am not mistaken, was the only French-speaking
Quebecer at the time to hold a Ph.D. in film studies, which he obtained in Paris.
One of the essential features of the Université de Montréal’s Secteur des études
cinématographiques was to do a lot with little. This has its downside, of course,
but its upside as well. A few years later, in fact, with the arrival of a second fulltime professor, Michel Larouche (like me, a representative of a new generation),
who had just completed a doctorate in literature at the Université de Montréal
on a “cinema” topic, the Secteur des études cinématographiques developed a
Major program with a particularly heavy production component, given the small
number of full-time professors (three and a half positions until 1991).
This, moreover, is one of the essential features of film programs in Frenchspeaking Quebec universities: none of them has developed without placing great
emphasis on practice. This is true of UQÀC, where film is part of artistic practice
in a broad sense; there, under Denis Bellemare, some of the instructors are wellknown practitioners in the field. It is also true of UQÀM, where the production
section is run by the Quebec filmmaker Paul Tana, and of Laval, where practical
aspects are an important part of its program, even if it is limited in size (a Minor).
It is also true, finally, at the Université de Montréal, where we have developed a
fairly unique model: every production professor we hire is an experienced or wellknown filmmaker who, at the same time, holds a Ph.D. and is also a scholar (I
refer to Isabelle Raynauld, Olivier Asselin and Serge Cardinal). It’s a rare and
quite demanding combination, and these professors divide their teaching pretty
much evenly between film production and film studies. This approach enables
us to create a fertile dialogue between film practice and film study. It also enables
our programs to observe without difficulty the principle that they are not, first
and foremost, the gateway to a career in the film industry but a laboratory of
experimentation and artistic enquiry, where the accent is placed on the creation
of meaning and forms rather than on technical virtuosity alone.
As you can see, film studies is doing very well in French-speaking universities
in Quebec, even though for some reason it was impossible to keep the AQÉC
(Association québécoise des études cinématographiques) alive beyond the recent
turn of the century, precisely when film studies began to get some wind in its
sails. Since its founding in 1983, this early association, whose vice president
became the husband of the Governor General of Canada Michaëlle Jean (yes,
Jean-Daniel Lafond is not only a filmmaker, but he also published a book of film
theory in 1983!), had established a fairly close working relationship with the
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FSAC despite the fact that there were not a lot of French-speaking film professors
in Quebec at the time. 11 There was, though, sufficient critical mass to found the
Association, thanks, in part, to film professors in Quebec’s junior colleges, or
CEGEPs, who were also involved, as well as some students. It had organized, at
Université Laval in 1986, a joint conference with FSAC: “Le cinéma au Québec
et au Canada: un dialogue critique,” the proceedings of which were published
in Dialogue: cinéma canadien et québécois.12 It also co-hosted, with FSAC, the
Society for Cinema Studies (SCS) conference in Montréal in 1987, but AQÉC
became inactive around 1999.
JOHN LOCKE
Before I outline the development of Film Studies at Concordia, I will give some
background about how I came to be a film person. My undergraduate degree was
in analytical philosophy from Emory University. Then I used a Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship to continue work in the philosophy of language and aesthetics at the
University of Pennsylvania. At this time in the 1960s, art was particularly interesting in New York, and I found myself there many weekends as geometric
abstract painting and Pop Art developed. Gradually, I became an art person as
well as a philosophy person. Around this time, I was introduced to Annette
Michelson who was focused on art and film. I taught my first university course
as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania; the course was Aesthetics.
It was definitely aesthetics as philosophy, not film aesthetics, but I selected a
contemporary critical essay for analysis and discussion: Pauline Kael’s New Yorker
essay on Bonnie and Clyde.13 I was beginning to think about film seriously.
At this time, I became aware that New York University was starting its new
graduate program in Cinema Studies. I applied, was accepted, and moved away
from philosophy to do graduate work in film with Annette Michelson, William
Everson, Jay Leyda, Andrew Sarris and Lewis Jacobs. When I entered New York
University I had never had a course in film. While at NYU, I supplemented
fellowship income by being a long-haired night-time taxi driver. I learned about
a full-time Film Studies position in Montreal, was interviewed, offered the
tenure-track position and took a salary reduction from taxi driving to immigrate
to Canada.
The move was in 1973, and I have taught film at Sir George Williams/Concordia University since then. Film studies at Concordia began between 1965 and
1967, when two film courses were introduced: History of Film and Film Aesthetics. I came in the Fall of 1973. At that point, there was a Joint Major in Moving Pictures—that was the phrase, “Moving Pictures”—but no Major in “film.”
Let me tell you an anecdote about those early years. Since 1973, I have
missed only two classes. Once, I was at a conference in California. The second
time I missed a class was when the Dean called me to a meeting, because Sir
George Williams University, which is what it was called then, and Loyola Col-
132 Volume 20 • No.1
lege were going to merge into Concordia University. There was a unit at Loyola
College [eds: Department of Communication Arts, soon to be re-named Communication Studies] that was teaching film studies and film production. The
leader of this unit did not want Fine Arts—which is where I was—to offer film
courses and programs. In the end, it was resolved. Both programs have coexisted
at Concordia, and have been very successful over the years. But it was touch and go.
In 1974, Concordia University was formed and the Faculty of Fine Arts came
into existence. In 1975-1976, there was a minor in Cinema. The year 1976-1977
saw the first BFA in Cinema. However, it required film production and film animation, so it was not yet a film studies major. Then, Tom Waugh arrived; he was
the first appointment after me. 1979-1980 was the year we put “Women and
Film” in the calendar. The following year, we added a specialization in Film Studies
as an option within the BFA degree. That was the first real film studies degree at
Concordia. At that point, we also added a whole series of new courses: one was
“Third World Cinema,” another was “Moving Camera Aesthetic,” an unusual
course in an undergraduate program. A year later, we added the Film Studies
option for the major in Cinema.
Technology was distinctive and specific to those pre-video years. We had
16mm analytical projectors that had been widely used for football teams to analyze plays. We had one in 1973. It allowed still frames, forwards and backwards
motion, slow forward and multiple speeds for film analysis. I would have never
taught a class without using an analytical projector.
For this roundtable, we were asked to elaborate on the particular circumstances that helped film studies develop. Well, we began in a Department of Fine
Arts, which became a Faculty of Fine Arts. It was run by a Chair, who then
became the Dean: a very particular person: a painter and a fighter. The second
person was the Assistant Chair/Associate Dean who was an Art Historian who
understood finance and understood university administration. This was the team
of people who created an atmosphere in which film studies could develop. At
that time, in 1973, there were no trained, full-time film people in Fine Arts until
I arrived. But the Fine Arts administration wanted to create a film program. They
trusted the people who came in 1973 and after. There was no sense in Fine Arts
that we were competing with more established programs; there was no senior
professor with a little knowledge of film in any other area. We were it.
Film studies at Concordia has always been linked with production and animation. First, in the decade after 1973, it was clearly film production that had
gained the support of the university’s most senior administration. Film Production had larger applicant numbers and needed space and capital budget. We got
to know the administration and it served us well. Second, at the undergraduate
level, film production and film animation students are required to take film studies
courses. I have always found that some of my best students were from the film
production program, and many film production students say they have learned a
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lot in their film studies courses. I think it is of some importance also that a generation of filmmakers in Canada has a university degree and training in film studies.
I have one last comment: occasionally, when I read about academic departments, I sense that some departments are associated with a single point of view.
Perhaps Economics at the University of Chicago would be an example of that. In
terms of film studies at Concordia, I never had a sense that this was the goal. A
single point of view school may provide a wonderful and intense research environment for graduate students and professors, but I am not confident that it
would be the best educational goal for film studies in Canada.
QUESTION PERIOD
Question from audience
Could each of you think back and share recollections about the general time or
moment when these programs were being initiated? Was there a general sense of
a “wave” or national movement in the inception of film studies in Canada,
maybe as a way to keep pace with the development of the Humanities elsewhere,
or was it, on the contrary, a much more localized endeavour at each of your
home institutions?
MAURICE YACOWAR
I think there is a reason why it happened in 1968. Film had such an explosive
presence at Expo ’67. When Brock hired me, they insisted on sponsoring me for,
I think, a two-week workshop in Montreal that Peter Ohlin, at McGill, and Terry
Ryan, at the NFB, put together for film teachers or prospective film teachers. I
think Graham Petrie was there, as well as Peter Harcourt. There were people
from Manitoba, others from B.C., and that was the training that we carpetbaggers
from English or from wherever else got, which helped provide the courage to
stand in front of a film class.
KAY ARMATAGE
We certainly knew what was going on in England because Movie had been publishing for a while and Screen started in 1971, I think. While doing the research
for this talk, I came across a book edited by John Stuart Katz in 1971.14 The book
was constructed as an argument defending why film should be taught in universities. The first essay is by Aldous Huxley who invokes scientology and the
senses to insist that other visual ideas should be taken into account. Katz has a
very long bibliography that is a kind of intellectual history of the last twenty to
twenty-five years. So we were in that environment and were conscious of it.
PETER MORRIS
There was actually an earlier book than John’s, which was a British book that
Jim Kitses, I think, edited. It was about film teaching, and it was published, I
134 Volume 20 • No.1
believe, in the early 1960s.15 So there was an atmosphere. I do not think there
was an agenda, but there was a sense of things happening.
KAY ARMATAGE
Toronto was small enough at the time that the day a movie opened, whatever it
was, everybody was there and everybody even knew where everyone else was
going to sit. We all knew each other.
ANDRÉ GAUDREAULT
In the early 1970s, it seemed like film studies was in the air. We saw how things
had started happening in France on a scholarly level, particularly in publishing:
these were the years when essential books by Noël Burch and Christian Metz
were published, in addition to others by Jean Mitry (published by Éditions universitaires, appropriately enough) and a fairly lavish edition of Georges Sadoul’s
Histoire générale du cinéma, etc.16 An academic and scholarly discourse around
cinema rose up which, despite the necessary contributions of other disciplines,
began to derive from within cinema itself. Universities were more and more open
to the idea of creating teaching posts in cinema. Earlier, I could have mentioned
the example of Jean Mitry being hired by the Université de Montréal in the late
1960s—it was a full-time position, if I’m not mistaken—before any kind of cinema
program existed there. This would have been unimaginable in the early part of
the decade. Cinema was beginning to become respectable within and in the eyes
of academia.
Question from audience
Could you reflect back on those early moments when you were building your
programs and each name one book or an essay that you felt at the time was particularly important?
MAURICE YACOWAR
The book that taught me how to watch films was Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s
Films.17 For my entire career, whenever I had students come to me for permission to take a senior film course without having done the introductory courses,
I would have them read Louis Gianetti’s Understanding Movies and Wood’s
Hitchcock’s Films, so that they got the overview and then the fieldwork that
Robin so splendidly did.18
KAY ARMATAGE
I cannot think of a specific film book because my education in film was so collapsed. But of the influential books from outside the territory, Gombrich’s Art
and Illusion was very, very important for me.19
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JOHN LOCKE
Interesting how we come together because there is not a year that I have taught
a seminar where I have not recommended Art and Illusion by Gombrich as a
great read. So, if there is a graduate student here that has not worked on it, you
should. But the two things I would mention are, first, an André Bazin essay—
not the standard “Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” but an essay about
William Wyler.20 There are passages that are the best criticism I have ever read.
The second thing I would mention is Andrew Sarris’ American Film as one of the
first compilations of filmographies.21 I used the earlier version that was published
as a special issue of Film Culture. For years, this copy of that original issue has
been ragged as I went through it, because it was all there was. In the years before
IMDB.com, it was a wonderful but terribly inaccurate thing.
PETER MORRIS
I am not sure which book I would assign first, but I know the first film book I
read was Paul Rotha’s Film.22 It taught me all the basics of film history. I read it
when I was very young, and I suppose it influenced me a great deal. I am sure it is
not in print and that nobody reads it anymore. After all, a lot of film history books
have came out since then, but it was an immensely readable world history.
ANDRÉ GAUDREAULT
I think that Eisenstein’s writings (which began to appear in French in the 1960s)
were fundamental, (don’t forget the enormous influence of two special issues of
Cahiers du Cinéma on Soviet cinema and Eisenstein),23 as was the discussion of
the camera as an “ideological device” (Jean-Louis Comolli, Gérard Leblanc and
Jean-Patrick Lebel at Cahiers, Cinéthique and the publishing house Éditions
sociales) and the rise of the concept dispositif (in the work of Jean-Louis Baudry
in particular). The most important, however, was Metz’s effort to create a new
“science”: the semiology of cinema, whose rigour and method called into question every other approach to cinema before then, which were all rather more
“impressionistic.” Metz’s writings provided a structure, and they provided an
object lesson in the value of research, an approach that contributed to the methods we would devise to work not only on film theory, but also on film history.
In my view, the “Brighton Revolution” owes a lot to this new way of looking at
things, even if film history itself is not a major theme in Metz’s work.
NOTES
1.
See for instance recent publications seeking to flesh out and consider this history: Lee
Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds., Inventing Film Studies (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2008); Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Lucy Fisher, ed., “In Focus: SCMS at 50,”
Cinema Journal 49.1 (Fall 2009): 128-176; Dudley Andrew, “The Core and the Flow of
Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 879- 915.
136 Volume 20 • No.1
2.
For more international perspectives on film studies in Australia, Latin America, China and
beyond, see James Donald and Michael Renov, eds., The Sage Handbook of Film Studies
(London: Sage, 2008).
3.
Take One (Montreal: Unicorn Pub.).
4.
Personal conversation, May 2010.
5.
Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, and Lee Grieveson, “From Cinephilia to Film Studies,” in
Inventing Film Studies, 229.
6.
I interviewed Joyce Wieland (Women in Film Special Issue, Take One, vol. 3 no. 2, Feb. 1972).
For this issue, we had absolutely nothing to go on; our issue came out in Feb 1972, and
Richard Henshaw’s filmography of 150 women directors came out the next November
(Richard Henshaw, “Women Directors: 150 Filmographies,” Film Comment 8.4 [Nov.-Dec. 1972]).
7.
The Innis course offerings consisted of “Introduction to Film Studies” (with branches at
two other colleges), “Filmmakers: The Personal Vision,” “Modern Arts: The Cinema” (now
a course on the major theoretical writings, from Eisenstein to Metz) and a new course,
“Film: Conventions and Anti-Conventions” (all taught by Medjuck) and “Women in Film &
Literature.” These courses were augmented by cultural studies courses from the language
departments (Italian, French, etc).
8.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann
Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 34-47.
9.
Eleanor Beattie, The Handbook of Canadian Film (Toronto: P. Marin Associates, 1977).
10.
André Gaudreault, “Detours in Film Narrative: The Development of Cross-Cutting,” Cinema
Journal 19, no. 1 (1979): 39–59.
11.
Jean-Daniel Lafond, Le film sous influence un procede d’analyse (Paris: Edilig, 1982).
12.
Pierre Véronneau and Michael Dorland, et al., Dialogue : cinéma canadien et québécois
(Montréal: Mediatexte Publications, 1987).
13.
Pauline Kael, “Onward and Upward with the Arts, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’,” The New Yorker
(21 October 1967): 147-171.
14.
John Stuart Katz, Perspectives on the Study of Film (Boston: Little Brown, 1971).
15.
Jim Kitses, with Ann Mercer, Talking About the Cinema: Film Studies for Young People
(London: BFI, 1966).
16.
Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinema (Paris: Denoël Éditions, 1975).
17.
Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films (London: A. Zwemmer, 1965).
18.
Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1987).
19.
E.H. Gombrich, Art & Illusion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960).
20.
André Bazin, Qu’est ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Editions du Cerf: 1958-65).
21.
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 (New York:
Dutton, 1968).
22.
Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now: A Survey of the Cinema (New York: J. Cape & Smith, 1930).
23.
“Russie Années vingt” Special Issues of Cahiers du cinéma, 220-221 (May-June, 1970),
“Eisenstein” Special Issues of Cahiers du cinema, 226-227 (January-February, 1971).
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