Oka Crisis: Colonialism & Indigenous Resistance

• These notes cover films, including "Back to God's Country," films about the Nass River Indians and Japanese descent, "Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance," "Mon Oncle Antoine", "Neighbours", "Goin' Down The Road", and "The Grey Fox," followed by important terms and the impact of globalization on Quebec cinema, drawing connections to themes of colonialism, identity, and cultural representation.

Back to God's Country

• Set in Canada's North and privately funded.
• Distributed by New York-based First National across North America, Britain, Europe, and Japan.
• Made $500,000 in its first release year, a 300% return for investors from Calgary who financed the film.
• Considers sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and melodrama.
• An Anglo-Protestant, white homosocial nation is haunted by its "others," including a white woman, Inuit woman, and a Chinese man.
• The camera denies these characters subject formation, presenting them as spectacles and subalterns facing humiliation, abuse, and death

Films About Nass River Indians

• Marius Barbeau produced these films
• Corporate funding provided by CPR.
• Visual pleasure for the Caucasian viewer stems from representing the Other as degenerate/inferior.
• The objective of colonial discourse involves construing the colonized as a population of degenerate types rooted in racial origin, justifying conquest and establishing systems of administration and instruction, quoted from Homi Bhabha 1983, 23.
• The term degenerate type refers to one is deficient in the qualities considered proper to their race or kind or a person with a debased physical or mental constitution (OED Online).
• On May 11, 2000, the Nisga'a Lisims Nation became a self-governing Indigenous nation.
• Otherness defines the boundary of normality, exercising a disciplinary function as mirrors of difference and warning signals.
• Jan Nederveen Pieterse's "Image and Power" is relevant, found in Raymond Corbey and Joep Leerssen eds., Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. (201).
• Colonized individuals are seen as lacking "civilization."
• Colonizing someone as "savage" is essential for a white nation's self-construction of superiority.
• Colonizers subject the colonial Other to a double command of needing to be like them but also not, demanding mimetic identity and total otherness.
• Colonized individuals are required to impersonate the colonizer's image while imitating the colonizer's version of essential difference.

Of Japanese Descent

• Directed by D.C. Burritt.
• A propaganda film.
• Government funded by the NFB/Ministry of Labour in 1945.
• Poses the question if colonial discourse plays a role in the Ministry of Labour and D.C. Burritt's representation of Canadians of Japanese heritage and how degenerate types are constructed.
• In 1942, a decision demanded removing people of Japanese racial origin from the coastal defense zone.
• Relates to Althusser's concept of hailing/recruiting, stating that Japanese Canadians, having faced revoked citizenship and interment, might not respond to a hail, recognizing it's not meant for them.
• Included sound bridge voice-over narrating a cut from a Japanese fishing village to the interior of B.C. as an improvement of conditions.
• In the early 1900s, the B.C. press framed the Japanese body as a "machine" needing less sustenance and pay than white laborers.
• The film circulated when the government wanted to create a favorable response to its police dispersing Japanese Canadians east of the Rockies.
• The film represents evacuation and internment as a necessary relocation of Japanese Canadians into a healthier setting, assisting their improvement through assimilation.
• Japanese Canadians are depicted as abject, and the Asian body as an object capable of "infecting" the nation.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance

• A counter-cinema resisting the hegemonic colonial discourses of Québec and Anglo-Canadian nations.
• The Mohawk nation suffered land dispossession by the French Roman Catholic Order.
• In 1716, a plot at Kanehsatake was granted by the French Crown.
• Secret negotiations in 1717 erased Mohawk title to the land, unrecognized until it became Sulpician property, confirmed in 1840 by the British Crown.
• In 1936, land sold to Baron Empain.
• 1930s: Oka residents played golf on the traditional gathering place of the Mohawks in the sacred Pine area, overtaken by the municipality for the site of a golf course.
• Land transactions occurred secretively, continuously stripping the community despite spiritual ties to the land.
• The film uses handheld camera work to immerse the audience in the perspectives of Mohawk protesters, conveying tension and unpredictability.
• Documentary Realism in the film enhances truth, commitment to advocacy, and authenticity.

Mon Oncle Antoine

• Released in 1971.
• Produced by the NFB, with a budget of $450K.
• Co-written by Clément Parron.
• Premiered without English subtitles at the Stratford Film Festival.
• Won two Canadian film awards for best direction
• Making the audience aware of the camera, featuring unstable settings involving a working class group aiming to alter their reality from a ruling class.
• The film features as small crew.
• Features landscapes of labor.
• Catholic Church power structures regulating the subject formation and social relations of townspeople.
• Reading: film is an allegorical fable addressing essential community truths that would be recognizable almost everywhere.
• Film has themes of asbestos.
• Contains driving to the funeral scene.
• Includes linear movement, as the car is driving toward death.
• Has green interspliced between bland, banal settings.
• Contains commentary on environmental exploitation.
• Shows dullness and grayness of settings and funeral scenes to instill audience 'affect'.
• Depicts a family-like relationship tension between Antoine and Benoit, mirroring broader tensions, serving as a societal critique.
• Benoit's gaze allows viewers to see through social façades to realities structuring identity as based around a political economy.
• Obstructs or undermines the town's moral authority figure, the priest.
• Film: economy based in resource extraction sees workers face unsafe conditions and low wages to highlight industry exploitation.

Neighbours

• Known for humour
• Depicts a white picket fence

Goin' Down The Road

• Shebib returned from training in California to direct a highly realist film on economic migration in Canada during the 1960s-70s.
• With a budget of $75K, it was funded by CFDC.
• A text of renewal in Canadian feature productions during the timeframe.
• An Anglo-Canadian film aesthetic, which influenced a generation of directors.
• Includes documentary "realism" and fiction.
• Film presents a gendered buddy dynamic.

The Grey Fox

• Directed by Philip Borsos.
• Had a budget of $4.5 million and funding from CFDC and Famous Players which included participation from Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios.
• Distribution: United Artist Classics.
• The box office earned $5.5 million.
• American form tells a Canadian story, sharing the continent.
• Film subverts the Hollywood Western's violent, hyper-masculine individualism by presenting Miner as an adaptable, charming outlaw.
• Borsos's doubled vision engages and critiques Western mythology, deconstructing its romanticized imagery.
• By including The Great Train Robbery, Borsos highlights Miner as both a real figure and character in a developing myth.

Terms

• Capitalist Exploitation: Marxist theory concept, capitalists profit from paying workers less labor value, accumulating profit and maintaining class divisions.
• Colonial Discourse: A knowledge, representation, and power system maintains colonial rule, constructing colonized people/spaces as inferior, exotic or needing Western domination.
• Genre: A defined category of cultural production, such as conventions, shared themes, and stylistic elements.
• Ideology: A concept from Louis Althusser referring to institutions that reinforce ideology and social norms.
• Colonizing Gaze: Observing and representing colonized people reinforces power structures, constructs them as primitive, exotic, or agency-lacking.
• Parody: A work's elements are exaggerated or distorted, often comedy or critical to subvert or reinforce source meanings.
• Degenerate Type: framed certain individuals or groups as biologically or morally inferior, often used oppressively against those deviating from standards.
• Male Gaze: Visual media structure centers media on a heterosexual male perspective, presenting women as passive objects, reinforcing gendered power dynamic.
• Postmodernism: A self-reflexive comment on representation, blurring narrative borders, interweaving texts, realizing the original text's content in actors' lives.
• Metanarrative: Filmmakers display awareness, troubles self-aware audiences.

Readings

• "Modernity and Postmodernity in Quebec Cinema"

Globalization On Quebec Cinema

• Transition, from Canada's national self-definition towards recognizing Quebec integrate into global cultural and economic flows.
• Quebec increasingly integrated globally.
• 1990s Quebec referendum on sovereignty
• Issues of ethnic pluralism and Indigenous rights are more prominent.
• Postmodernity challenged old narratives and accelerated commodification.
• Denys Arcand's films were used as case studies.
• Modernization introduced secularism, consumerism, and transformed society.