Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
The NFB has been drastically downsized since the 1980s,
the result of a series of government funding cutbacks, to
the point that it has little presence in Canadian culture.
Nevertheless, the board’s documentary emphasis has left
an indelible influence on feature filmmaking in Canada.
In the absence of a commercial film industry, the NFB
has allowed many filmmakers who would later become
the country’s most important directors to hone their craft
on government-sponsored films. The two films that are
generally acknowledged as marking the beginning of the
Canadian feature film industry, Nobody Waved Good-bye
(1964) by Don Owen and La vie heureuse de Le ´opold Z
(The Merry World of Leopold Z [1965]) by Gilles Carle
(b. 1929), in English Canada and Quebec respectively,
began as NFB documentaries. Carle’s film, about a
Montreal snowplow driver working on Christmas Eve,
began as a documentary about snow removal in
Montreal. Similarly, Nobody Waved Good-bye was initially intended to be a half-hour docudrama about juvenile delinquency in Toronto, but the director Owen, who
earlier in his career had worked as a cameraman on some
of the NFB’s direct cinema films, improvised most of the dialogue and script, shooting each scene in chronological
order, often using a handheld camera and lapel microphones. The film’s teenage protagonist (Peter Kastner),
rebelling against authority and the Establishment, is, like
the film itself, an act of rebellion against the established
norms of production at the NFB.
The tax-shelter years (1974–1982), when investors
were able to write off 100 percent of their investment in Canadian films (Capital Cost Allowance), witnessed a
second wave of mostly mediocre movies. Intended to
stimulate production of Canadian films, the tax shelter
produced mostly B movies with second-rate Hollywood
actors, although a few quality films, such as the effective
crime thriller The Silent Partner (1978) and Atlantic City
(1980) by French director Louis Malle, also were made.
One of the least pretentious movies of this era, Porky’s
(1982), a raucous, American-style teen film about a
group of frat boys trying to lose their virginity in South
Florida in the 1950s, remains as of 2006 the most
commercially successful Canadian film ever made.
Given an audience formed largely by Hollywood
genre movies, many Canadian feature films of the
1960s and 1970s deliberately played off American film
genres in an attempt to establish a distinctive approach to
popular cinema while finding success at the box-office.
American genre movies have impossible heroes who overcome enormous obstacles and succeed in their goals;
Canadian movies often feature fallible protagonists,
antiheroes who are less mythical in stature. Some of
these films use the conventions of American genre
movies to comment on American cultural colonization.
In Paperback Hero (1973), the American actor Keir
Dullea plays a hockey player in a small Canadian prairie
town who causes his own death as a result of clinging to
fantasies of American westerns. Canadian genre films also
tend to emphasize character and situation over action and
spectacle, as in Goin’ Down the Road (1970) by Donald
Shebib (b. 1938), a road movie about two naive hicks
from Nova Scotia who come to Toronto to realize their
dreams but fail miserably, and Between Friends (1973), a
caper film with a bunch of inept amateurs whose robbery
plan collapses even before it begins. This downbeat tendency in Canadian movies of the 1960s and 1970s also
reflects the country’s earlier emphasis on the somber
quality of traditional documentary filmmaking.