Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance

• Study notes for film studies are detailed below

Back to God's Country

• Set in Canada's North and privately funded
• Distributed by New York-based First National in North America, Britain, Europe, and Japan
• The film made $500,000 in its first year, a 300% return for Calgary investors
• It was foundational but excluded from the "cannon" for a while
• It deals with sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and melodrama
• It featured an Anglo-Protestant white homosocial nation haunted by its others like the white woman, Inuit woman, Chinese man
• Camera denies the characters subject formation, instead of treating them as spectacles/subalterns
• The movie presents characters subjected to abuse, death, humiliation etc
• Film includes resistance and re-inscribing
• Male gaze

Nass River Indians

• Marius Barbeau directed
• CPR-funded
• Centers on Mulvey's gendered visual pleasure raced visual pleasure
• Shows visual pleasure for the Caucasian viewer through a representation of the Other as degenerate/inferior
• Colonial discourse construes the colonized as degenerate to justify conquest and systems of control
• Degenerate is defined as one who has lost qualities proper to their kind or is physically/mentally debased
• The Nisga'a Lisims Nation became self-governing on May 11, 2000, challenging the idea they have vanished
• Otherness defines the boundary of normality
• Images of otherness exercise a disciplinary function, serving as warnings and marking difference
• The savage is indispensable to establishing a civilization's place in the universe
• The Other is perceived as lacking "civilization"
• The colonized are seen as "savage" to elevate the white nation
• Colonizers subject the colonial other to a double bind, to impersonate the image the colonizer offers
• Colonizers dictate how the colonized must imitate the colonizer's idea of essential difference
• Colonizers issue a doubled command
• The white nation frames its identity by repeatedly asserting its intention to subsume and mourn the aboriginal other
• The nation aims to give itself a distinctive white Canadian subjectivity
• The nation cannot achieve its goal of absorbing others due to the boundary that separates them, highlighting its own nationhood

Of Japanese Descent

• It's a propaganda film by D.C. Burritt
• Government-funded by the NFB/Ministry of Labour in 1945
• Colonial discourse plays a role in the Ministry of Labour and D.C. Burritt's depiction of Canadians of Japanese heritage
• In 1942, all people of Japanese racial origin were to be removed from the coastal defense zone
• Uses the concept of hailing/recruiting (Althusser) -If a Japanese Canadian whose citizenship was revoked survived internment, they might not respond to being hailed because it’s not meant for them
• Shows improvement of conditions via a sound bridge voice-over narrating this cut from the Japanese fishing village to the interior of B.C
• In the early 1900s, the B.C. press portrayed the Japanese body as a machine requiring less sustenance and pay than a white man
• The film circulated when the government wanted a receptive response to the police dispersing Japanese Canadians east of the Rockies
• It represents evacuation and internment as a necessary relocation of Japanese Canadians to a healthier environment, improving them through assimilation
• Japanese Canadians are depicted as abject, and the "Asian" body could "infect" the nation
• It includes a male voice-over

Kanehsatake 270 Years of Resistance

• This is a counter-cinema resists the hegemonic colonial discourse of Quebec and Anglo-Canadian nations
• Historical Background: Mohawk dispossession
• The Mohawk nation is disposed of their lands by the French Roman Catholic Order
• in 1716, granted a plot at Kanehsatake by the French Crown
• In 1717, secret negotiations erased Mohawk's title to the land (without their knowledge)
• The land now belongs to Sulpicians
• In 1936, the land was sold to Belgian Baron Empain
• 1930s: Oka residents began playing golf on the Mohawks' traditional gathering place and sacred Pine area, which was eventually seized by the municipality for a golf course
• The transactions involving the land involved the sand spiritual ties to the land
• Bhabha stated colonial discourse construes the colonised as degenerate to justify conquest/establish control
• The text references “The Other Question...” Screen 24:6 1983: 18-361983, 23
• The settler system of justice does not serve them well
• Police and the Canadian military violated the sovereignty of the Mohawks
• The film reverses the white fantasy of the Indigenous Other as terrorist, in order to comprehend the white terrorism of internal colonialism
• The film narrates the colonialism unfolding through the false creation of a golf course on sacred land
• It shows how their behavior indicates the persistence of colonialism
• Reversal of white fantasy
• It's a POV documentary that blends the spectator into the perspective of the Mohawks behind the barricades
• Highlights how colonial discourse is interrupted by Obomsawin
• The film is a site of resistance to internal colonialism and racist colonial stereotypes -It immerses the audience in the perspectives of the Mohawk protesters, conveying the tension and uncertainty they faced -It displays emotional tension, unpredictability, in a way unsettling -It gives the story more truth and portrays commitment to advocacy, making it more authentic
• Can you think of examples of Obomsawin disrupting/interrogating colonial discourse? -Gives voice to the indigenous people, through the use of interviews and footage -Humanizes them, presenting them as defenders of their land/sovereignty -Connects the events of 1990 to broader patterns of colonial dispossession and erasure, disrupting the colonial portrayal of the crisis as an isolated incident or "uprising" -It documents the violence perpetrated by the army, showing the indigenous people are the victims
• Reversal of the colonial gaze deconstructs televisual representations/ stereotypes of the Mohawks as violent warrior savages -It focuses on a more traditional, community-based way of storytelling & avoids a detached narrator It shows the people involved and witnessing the events first hand
• Affect, hate, Chaos vs peacefulness, Irony - calling them savages when they are the ones burning and chanting
• The film re-historicizes Oka - why mid-way through the film? It re imports the imagery of imperal colonialsmin

Mon Oncle Antoine

• This film was launched in 1971, NFB, budget of $450K
• The screenplay was co-written with Clément Parron
• It premiered without English subtitles at the Stratford Film Festival
• Won two Canadian film awards got best direction
• Focuses attention to POV which became a hallmark of Quebec cinema
• It’s a very unstable environment with many people facing an exploitative, hegemonic ruling class
• Small crew
• "Capitalist landscape that consumers labour"
• "Capitalist industry and the Roman Catholic Church constitutes the disciplining and omnipresent structures that regulated the subject formation and social relations of the townspeople"
• Reading: allegorical reading, a fable that tells essential truths about a community
• It uses the setting and driving during funeral scene

Beninots Gaze

• Transfer of identification to Benoit -Aligned with Benoir's gaze we begin to see through social and cultural instruction -Priest is supposed to represents the moral and spiritual authority in the town seeing him drinking undermines this idea -Class tensions are evident in the contrast between the mine workers and figures like Antoine, who though part of the working class, enjoy slighlty better conditions/degrees of authority
• Economy is based in resource extraction
• Workers face unsafe conditions this highlights the exploitative nature of the industry
• Through Benoit the is the film hints at ther awakening consciousness of the younger generation
• The death of Marcel scene makes Beniot confronts mortality and grim realities of adult life in the town
• final shit benoit reflects the realities of hard
• Humor neighboors shows humor and white noise

Goin' Down The Road

• Shebib went to California for training, then returned to Canada, and made a highly relait film about economic migancy in Canada in the1960s0s
• it was set up to break to of documentery _budget of 75 dollars -text of renewal
• Gendered buddy dynamic
• social resiliame
• Hippes trasveling on the east coast

Important Terms

• Capitalist Exploitation: Defined as a Marxist concept explaining how capitalists profit Colonial Discourse: Is a system of knowledge as maintained by Edward Said Genre: Shared conventions of artistic production Ideology + Ideological state apparatuses: Explained asLouis Althussers Colonizing Gaze: Reinforeces hierarchies Parody: a imitation with the attempt to be comedic Degenerate type" term from the science with moarkes with moral infereity Male Gaze: Perspective of the male form with Laura Mulvey post Modernims: Comment of self representation with " a postmodern text" -Draw attention community with culture

READINGS "Modernity and Postmodernity in Quebec Cinema" Shift in Quebec Cinema ( 1980s -1990s)

Explore the film's humanization of indigenous people and disruption of colonial stereotypes. Analyze Obomsawin's storytelling and connection to colonial patterns. Understand the portrayal of otherness and its function.