Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Feature filmmaking began in Canada with Evangeline
(1914), made by Canadian Bioscope Company in
Halifax, Nova Scotia, but after only six more films, the
company failed financially. For the next fifty years, feature filmmaking in Canada was only intermittent. Carry
On Sergeant (1928), an expensive World War I epic, was
a commercial flop and did not provide the stimulus
needed for renewed production. The introduction of
sound to cinema around the same time eliminated the
few fledgling film companies that did exist because they
could not afford the cost of converting to sound.
American financial interests have consistently
worked to hinder the development of an indigenous
feature film industry in Canada. In the late 1920s, when
several other countries moved to establish quota systems
to combat the dominance of American films, American
companies moved into Canada to take advantage of
Britain’s quota system, which allowed for films made
anywhere in the British Empire to enter Britain duty free.
In Canada, they produced a wave of ‘‘quota quickies’’—
low-budget exploitation movies—most of which were
imitation Hollywood films with no relation to Canada.
By the time the British quota laws were amended in 1938
to exclude films produced outside of Britain, a true
Canadian film industry had ceased to exist.
For ten years beginning in 1948, Canada acceded to
the infamous Canadian Cooperation Agreement, an initiative of the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA). In essence, Canada agreed to refrain from
encouraging feature film production, thus allowing for
continued American control of the industry, in return for
which American studios would shoot some films on
location in Canada and make occasional favorable references to Canada in movie dialogue for the purpose of
promoting tourism. As if the obvious disadvantages of
this arrangement for Canada were not enough, the occasional references to Canada tended to stereotype the
country as a frozen wilderness. In the epic western Red
River (Howard Hawks, 1948), for example, one cowboy
on the cattle drive complains that if they keep heading north, they’ll soon be driving the cattle ‘‘up and down
the icebergs in Canada.’’