For me, the most obvious change in 40 years is the number of Canadian films released in Toronto, the largest market for English-Canadian films in the world. Back in 1970, apart from Goin’ down the Road, there were only four other films playing Toronto that year: Gilbert Taylor’s Flick (aka Frankenstein on Campus), the first Canadian horror film funded by the CFDC, John Trent’s Homer, a Canadian film financed with American money starring Mia Farrow’s less-talented sister Tisa, The Heart Farm, also directed by Trent and made for American TV (starring Sandy Dennis, Stuart Whitman and Burl Ives, it had a short theatrical run in Toronto), and something called I’m Going to Get You… Elliott Boy, a forgettable prison drama described by TV Guide online as “tawdry.”

In 2010, 50 Canadian features were released in the Greater Toronto Area, including two Oscar nominees, Barney’s Version and Incendies, and 2011 is on course to top 2010. Any talk about an invisible film culture – a pervasive narrative that permeated the discussion of Canuck movies for two generations – has finally been put to rest. In fact, TIFF head Piers Handling, a long-time observer of the Canadian scene, caused a minor stir when he suggested too many Canadian films were now being made. He has a point. Of the 50 films released in Toronto in 2010, a full 60 per cent never made it beyond two weeks running time. It is still not uncommon to walk into a Canadian film and find an audience of two and a dog… well, perhaps not a dog. I made that up.

Speaking of TIFF, what began in 1976 as a scrappy, audience-and-media-friendly event I looked forward to with anticipation and pleasure every year, by the late 1990s had morphed into the corporate monstrosity it is now, more to do with tourist dollars, the fashion industry, gawking at celebrities and Oscar picks than film appreciation. TIFF’s best years were immediately following the launch of the Perspective Canada program in 1984; the high point being 1991 when Bruce McDonald held his Perspective Canada/Highway 61 party sponsored by the NFB in Yorkville. Those halcyon days are long gone and this year the Bell Lighthouse was a milling, packed human zoo full of very unhappy people, akin to a bad day at the CNE.

Continuing on this downward spiral is the decline in relevance of the Academy of Canadian of Cinema and Television and its Genie Awards. It has gone from the black-tie ceremonies held at Toronto’s venerable Royal Alex with presenters such as Donald Sutherland and Peter Ustinov and attendees such as Prime Minister Trudeau, with the beauteous – and future Sex and the City star – Kim Cattrall on his arm, to a clip show on cable TV packaged for a one-hour broadcast.

It should be noted that the Genies replaced the Canadian Film Awards in 1980, which fell into disrepute with its ‘international’ jury and such harebrained things as giving the best feature film to the inept Slipstream in 1973 when the competition that year was Claude Jutra’s Kamouraska, Denys Arcand’s Réjeanne Padovani, Don Shebib’s Between Friends and Peter Pearson’s Paperback Hero. Now the awards are once again in crisis, in part for blatantly ignoring Ruba Nadda’s impressive Cairo Time and Xavier Dolan’s I Killed My Mother, winner of multiple international awards, including three Prix Jutras, at the 2010 ceremonies. Who knows where the Canadian Film Awards/Genies go from here, but after 40 years I don’t hold out much hope for the future. It should also be pointed out that while the Genies have floundered, Quebec’s Prix Jutra ceremony has gone from strength to strength since its inception in 1999 and puts the Genies to shame annually.

On the upside, while Quebec cinema continues to produce world-class directors in a direct line from Claude Jutra and Gilles Carle to Denys Arcand and Denis Villeneuve, English-Canadian cinema is now well represented on the world stage by the holy trinity of David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin. It’s dizzying just trying to recall the amount of academic verbiage lamenting the state of English-Canadian cinema was penned in the 1960s, ‘70s and early-1980s. The arrival of Toronto’s new wave of filmmakers in the mid-1980s – Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, Patricia Rozema, Ron Mann, Peter Mettler, John Greyson — along with Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988) and Maddin’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) finally put an end to all that. It’s now possible to speak respectfully of an English-Canadian cinema without endless, boring discussions about ‘losers’ and ‘landscapes.’

In a weird way, the Oscars have continued to fascinate me over the years. My favourite line in this regard comes from The Last Remake of Beau Geste, starring Michael York and the late, great Marty Feldman. At the end of the film, York, the recent recipient of a medal for outstanding bravery, turns to Feldman and delivers this gem: ‘medals are like hemorrhoids, Digby, sooner or later every asshole gets one.’

Much in disrepute in the 1970s – it was considered uncool to even watch them on TV – the Oscars rebounded in the 1990s with Billy Crystal as host. It’s now a major worldwide event, the super bowl of award shows, speculated on and written about for five months in advance. For filmmakers (unless you are Woody Allen), winning an Oscar is an important, unique marker, and a nomination really does count for something. Canadian feature filmmakers scored with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in 1975 and Lies My Father Told Me in 1976, both receiving nominations for best adapted screenplay, and Louis Male’s Atlantic City in 1981 with its five nominations, including best picture; it’s a co-production to be sure, but a certified Canadian co-production nevertheless.

Since 1986, the films of Denys Arcand, François Girard, Deepa Mehta, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Sarah Polley, Richard J. Lewis and Denis Villeneuve have been nominated; Cronenberg’s The Fly winning for best makeup in 1987, Girard’s The Red Violin for best musical score in 2000 and Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions for best foreign-language film in 2005. A Canadian film has never won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, something I would dearly like to see in my lifetime. The closest so far is Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, which won the Grand Jury Prize, second after the Palme, in 1997. Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal (in 1989) and Cronenberg’s Crash (in 1996) both won the Jury Prize – third place, but still on the podium. The only Canadian film to win the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival is The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (in 1974). From a personal point of view, the most significant festival win was Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, winning the Prix de la Jeunesse at Cannes in 1987. After 16 years in the business and down in the dumps, I saw something new, something different, something hopeful from a 29-year-old Toronto director I had never even heard of… it renewed my faith in Canadian filmmaking.

As the former publisher of Take One: Film in Canada, I deeply regret the demise of a national English-Canadian film magazine. Filmmakers had a strong, independent, informed and supportive voice – free from politics, lobby groups or trade organizations with a particular axe to grind or craft to represent – in the original Take One (1966–79), through Cinema Canada (1972–90) to Take One: Film in Canada (1992–2006). But no more. I take a certain pride in the two degrees of separation I hold with the other two mags: my film prof in the early 1970s at the U. of T. was Joe Medjuck, the associate editor on the original Take One, and I was the last Toronto reporter for Cinema Canada before it folded.

Forty years – I wouldn’t have credited it possible in 1971. It’s been a long, strange trip indeed (apologies and many thanks to The Grateful Dead).



Wyndham Wise is the former publisher and editor-in-chief of Take One: Film in Canada. Currently, he is a contributing editor with Northernstars.ca and consultant with The Canadian Encyclopedia online. Visit wyndhamsfilmguide.ca.