As opposed to letting Canada develop its own grassroots sense of culture - much like the USA with jazz, hip-hop, and the dense, local cultures in Mississipi, Texas, Chicago, etc the government has tried to systematically define its own vision of Canadian culture through the use of institutions and grants.
And this cultural institutionalism has plagued our cultural industries and left Canada with a rag-tag forum of a cultural and arts community - un- and under-employed. And not only are the workers un- and under-employed, the Canadian people are un- and under-served/represented/entertained/cultured and so on. By chronically trying to top-down, spoon-feed Canadians their culture we have ended up with a pitiful characterization of Canadians as a breed of happy-go-lucky, beer-swelling, white males - depicted best in Canadian iconic films such as Phil the Alien, Men With Brooms, Corner Gas, Trailer Park Boys, etc. Recently I watched a spat of Canadian shorts screened at a Canadian short film festival and found myself chronically cringing in shame at the forced Canadian 'quirkiness' found in the scripts... from lumberjacks losing arms to skinheads with dandruff... quirkiness reigned.
The National Film Board is one of the prime examples of a cultural vestibule that muddies our cultural water. As early as the 1950s the NFB was provided with an institutional mandate to create Canadian culture:
“to produce and distribute and to promote the production and distribution of films designed to interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations.”
which has slightly softened 60 years later (in 2002) into:
“The NFB's mandate is to produce and distribute distinctive, culturally diverse, challenging and relevant audiovisual works that provide Canada and the world with a unique Canadian perspective.”
This top-down approach has led the film industry to overlook major cultural trends, to supress local cultural push, to deny multi-cultural new voices, and to continue to ride the coattails of movements from 20 years prior. Defining a national identity was a movement of the 80s that is still depicted in more recent films like the many I mentioned above. And instead of seeing a multitude of complex multi-cultural/integrated films that should be inherit in Canada - think bon-cop/bad-cop in every Canadian culture pairing possible - we are still watching our institutions and government prop up styles of yore.
And now our film industry is in deep trouble... er our non-French-speaking film industries that is. Instead of looking towards successful Canadian cultural industry examples, such as music where de-institutionalization and regulated distribution have created a healthy and vibrant industry, the NFB continues along a neo-barbaric economic and cultural view that institutions should drive our culture instead of visa-versa:
"...the Committee recommended in its report that the NFB be transformed into a research and training centre and give up producing and distributing films. The NFB rejected this recommendation..."
We have missed boatloads of opportunities to be the dominant force in multi-cultural films dripping with tension and delicate relationships. Few places in the world offer the cultural possibilities available in Toronto.
And ignorance of these cultural needs of Canadians has created an ill industry. From 1999-2005 the net results in the film industry have been this - under a Liberal government in case anybody was curious and thought the Liberals a lover of the motion arts:
-Box-office revenues fell to 1.1% of market share in english-language films
-Public sources accounting for 51% of funding
-Gross film production down to $253M, a drop of 31%
-A loss of 4700 jobs in the sector
-Foreign investment is down 13%
Given a few facts...
-The average budget for a Canadian feature film is $3M
-The production budget for NFB films was $40M which returned $181k in box-office revenue, i.e. every $1 invested results in a payback of half a cent.
-Total production in Canada is $253M which returns approximately $12M in box-office revenue, i.e. every $1 invested results in a payback of 5 cents.
...wouldn't it make sense to transfer the NFB budget into the hands of our under-employed film workers and let them produce grass-roots culture, which also conveniently improves return on investment. The average feature film requires a budget of $3 and a bit million. $40M would increase production by 13 feature films a year!
Also, letting the government funds channel through private capitalists and investment funds would create a pseudo-capital market for films in Canada, hopefully spurring on a healthier and more vibrant industry with niche indie investment, production and distribution vertical channels.
Or we could take the NFB route:
"The NFB is a unique organization — it provides an environment for filmmaking that is free of the financial pressures that mark independent filmmaking, and allows adequate time to research, develop and complete a film."
It also creates an unrealistic organization that doesn't prepare filmmakers for the real world where aligning the right investors and handling financial pressures is part of the artistic process.
I for one am tired of the NFB and Telefilm forcefeeding me their view of Canadian culture. The political parties of Canada need to take our cultural institutions into a modern area of de-centralization and let culture come from the people, instead of giving us more of this:
Sources
1. NFB - Strategic Plan 2002 - 2006, http://www.nfb.ca/publications/flash/en/strategicplan2002_2006
2. NFB - Annual Report - 2005-2006, http://www.nfb.ca/publications/en/annualreports/rep2005-2006/ONF_AnnualR_05-06.pdf
3. Canadian Film & TV Producers Association, An Economic Report on the Canadian Film & TV Production Industry, http://www.cftpa.ca/newsroom/pdf_profile/profile2006-english.pdf
4. Telefilm Canada, Annual Report - 2005-2006, http://www.telefilm.gc.ca/annual_report/pdf/en/annual_report_2005-2006_TFC.pdf
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