Metafiction, Pararealism and the "Canon" of Canadian Cinema Deborah Knight

Document generated on 09/26/2021 5:48 a.m. Cinémas Revue d'études cinématographiques Journal of Film Studies Metafiction, Pararealism and the "Canon" of Canadian Cinema Deborah Knight Cinéma et Musicalité Article abstract Volume 3, Number 1, Fall 1992 Critical thinking about the English-Canadian and Quebec cinemas has focused lo a large degree on the realist tendencies of our fiction filmmaking-tendencies, URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1001184ar it is argued, which fiction filmaking has, historically inherited from Canadian DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1001184ar documentary film practices. But in recent fiction filmmaking, Canadian filmmakers have moved beyond social realism. Indeed, the emergence in See table of contents English-Canada and Quebec of filmmaking that is metafictional and pararealist — in films like Léa Pool's La Femme de l'hôtel, Bruce McDonald's Roadkill and Patricia Rozema's White Room — gives us occasion not only to rethink the criteria that have been used to identify "canonic" film, but more importantly to Publisher(s) see how these self-conscious fictional strategies, which initially seem to reject Cinémas the norms of social realism, are in fact part of an ongoing re-examination of the limits of fiction. ISSN 1181-6945 (print) 1705-6500 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Knight, D. (1992). Metafiction, Pararealism and the "Canon" of Canadian Cinema. Cinémas, 3(1), 125–146. https://doi.org/10.7202/1001184ar Tous droits réservés © Cinémas, 1992 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Metafiction, Pararealism and the "Canon" of Canadian Cinema Deborah Knight RESUME La pensée critique relative aux cinémas canadien anglais et québécois s'est orientée pour une large part vers les tendances réalistes de notre production de fiction — la réalisation de fiction ayant hérité, sur le plan historique, des pratiques du cinéma documentaire canadien. Mais dans la récente production de fiction, on constate que les cinéastes canadiens sont allés au-delà du réalisme social. En effet, l'émergence au Canada anglais et au Québec d'une réalisation qui est métafictionnelle et pararéaliste — dans des films comme La Femme de l'hôtel de Léa Pool, Roadkill de Bruce Me Donald el White Room de Patricia Rozema — nous donne non seulemenl l'occasion de repenser les critères qui onl été utilisés pour identifier les films «canoniques», mais davantage encore de voir comment ces stratégies fietionnelles auto-réflexives, qui d'abord semblent rejeter les normes du réalisme social, sont en fait partie prenante d'une ré-évaluation constante des limites de la fiction. ABSTRACT Critical thinking about the English-Canadian and Quebec cinemas has focused lo a large degree on the realist tendencies of our fiction filmmaking-tendencies, it is argued, which fiction filmaking has, historically inherited from Canadian documentary film practices. But in recent fiction filmmaking, Canadian filmmakers have moved beyond social realism. Indeed, the emergence in English- Canada and Quebec of filmmaking that is melafictional and paranealist— in films like Lea Pool's La Femme de l'hôtel, Bruce McDonald's Roadkill and Patricia Rozema's White Room — gives us occasion not only to rethink the criteria that have been used to identify "canonic" film, but more importantly to see how these self-conscious fictional strategies, which initially seem torejec t the norms of social realism, are in fact part of an ongoing re-examination of the limits of fiction. My point of departure is the emergence, in roughly the last seven years, of fiction filmmaking practices which can be described as metaftctional or pararealist . The sorts of films that I have in mind challenge the traditional criteria which have served to establish a "canon" of Canadian cinema. What I hope to accomplish in this paper are three things. I want to sketch what have thus far served as acceptable criteria for constructing a canon of Canadian film. In the main part of the paper, I will discuss in some detail three cinematic metafictions to demonstrate how metafictions problematize and in some cases repudiate these criteria. I will return, at the end of the paper, to the question of the canon, primarily to question of the value of a canon and of canonicity, and to suggest an alternative to canon-formation. If there is such a thing as a "canon" of Canadian cinema, it is a critic's construct. And it has been constructed in relation to fiction filmmaking practices dominated by the conventions, concerns and technology of cinematic realism and naturalism, often called "social realism". Canadian social realism is exemplified in the 60s and 70s by films like Nobody Waved Goodbye (Owen, 1964), Le Chat dans le sac (Groulx, 1964), Between Friends (Shebib, 1973), and, moving into the 80s, by Les Bons débarass (Mankiewicz, 1980). This close connection between fictional forms and technology ought not to surprise : as we know very well, the kinds of films we have made in this country, whether fictional, documentary or experimental, have consistently been tied to specific developments in technology, and to the availability of technology. Cinematic realism and cinematic naturalism in Canada follow from the rise of particular kinds of documentary filmmaking practices and the general ideology of documentary filmmaking best exemplified by Unit B in the 50s and early 60s. Most of the fiction films of the Canadian "canon" can be thought of as bringing together two important tendencies of "realism" : (i) a photographic or cinematographic realism of the sort diagnosed by Bruce Elder, a "realism" based in the technology that produces cinematic images; 1 and (ii) a particular sort of narrative realism based upon the construction of an internally coherent and plausible 126 Cinémas, vol. 3, n° 1 fictional world, a fictional world that aspires to be taken as essentially consistent with our social world because actions are linked together temporally and causally, a fictional world in which characters act for the same sorts of reason that cause us to act in the social world. This is more true of English-Canadian fiction filmmaking than of Quebec fiction filmmaking, but we certainly see this sort of realism in both cinemas. These two tendencies cash out in the naturalism of so much Canadian filmmaking — a social realism informed by the traditions of our documentary film practice in which fictions are understood to capture or depict our actual social conditions. Geoff Pevere puts this aptly when he describes Canadian social realism as "a kind of filmmaking more concerned with documentation (or an impression of it ) than dramatic reconstruction of events" (22). And the centrality of social realism, starting with the documentaries of the 50s and remaining with us into the 90s in fiction and in docudrama, has contributed to one main critical tendency: the tendency to interpret Canadian films of all sorts as, in the first instance, documents that tell us about our existence — social, national or cultural. The sociological inclination of Canadian film criticism depends on social realism as a film mode. But there have been a number of challenges to this essentially realist mode of representation. Films as different from one another as La Femme de l'hôtel (Pool, 1984), Speaking Parts (Egoyan, 1989), Jésus de Montréal (Arcand, 1989), Roadkill (McDonald, 1989) and White Room (Rozema, 1990) share this: they all break with dominant realist/naturalist conventions. All the mainstays of social realism — coherence of character psychology, coherence of plot action, the construction of a coherent fictional world — are challenged by the metafictional or pararealist strategies of our contemporary filmmakers. Many of these films are tremendously self-conscious and self-reflexive : they draw attention to themselves as fictional constructs; they play with different and occasionally even inconsistent textual strategies; they question the epistemological and the social role of cinema. The notion of metafiction came into its own in the 80s in the study of literature, and has been variously defined. Here is one way of describing it : metafiction is "a celebration of the (...) creative imagination together with an uncertainty about the validity of its representations; an extreme self-consciousness about language, literary form and the act of writing fictions; a pervasive insecurity about the relationship of fiction to reality" (Waugh, 2). What is crucial here is that the sort of textual self-consciousness and self-reflexivity we find in metafictions has to do with the Metafiction, Para realism and th e "Canon" of Canadian Cinema 127 construction of fiction itself. So wherever we find metafictions, we find attentiveness to the narrative form of fiction. And where we find attention paid to the narrative form, we find a recognition that not all narratives are fictions — that both fictional and non- fictional narratives carry with them particular sorts of knowledge claims. The recognition that both fictions and non-fictions raise questions about what sort of knowledge we derive from narratives in turn poses the question of what sort of "reality" narratives depict or represent, and how the picturing or representational relationship between narrative and the world is to be understood. In metafiction, what characteristically occurs is a deliberate problematization of such knowledge claims within the construction of a self-reflexive fiction. In the context of cinema, we can see metafictional tendencies in films which are self-reflexively about filmmaking and in films that are self-reflexively about story-telling.

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