FILMMAKERS CRY CENSORSHIP! NICOL CRIES HYPOCRISY!
This is exactly the kind of baby step I have wanted to see from a conservative government for a long time. And it is a baby step.Of course, other papers like the Globe and Mail are trying to fear monger about this being an Evaneglical movement.
In one article, David Cronenberg alludes that this is something found in a communist country.
The irony of course is lost on him that a majority of filmmakers in Canada have a Marxist worldview and that the government funding of art itself is a communist proposal.
I am a screenwriter who writes here under a pseudonym. Nicol Dumoulin is a derivation of, but not my real name. I can tell you that there is certainly censorship in the Toronto/Vancouver English Canadian film industry by persons at funding agencies. Nine times out of ten if the script you are peddling is a genre (action, comedy, drama etc.) you get shut out.
Nine times out of ten if your script does not explicitly deal with the world from a left wing, secular, urban white perspective, you do not get funding. If your script does feature "alternative sex" you will most likely go to the front of the list.
The late film critic John Harkness of EYE magazine knew this too well. After he died, this essay of his made the rounds. He was perceptive:
"...you have to satisfy a group of well-meaning, highly educated cultural bureaucrats. This means three or four things. It means that a filmmaker would be far likelier to get approval for a move that espouses whatever liberal cause is fashionable at the moment than for anything truly audacious, unsettling or interesting. I suspect that the entire career of the terminally tedious Anne Wheeler is based on the fact that she’s a “two-fer” – a woman director and a regional director in one package, fulfilling a big chunk of whatever unconscious quota system exists in the minds of the culture-crats. (and that system exists.
A few years ago, I was talking to one of the principals in Deepa Mehta’s Sam and Me, who told they had a devil of a time getting funding because, someone at Telefilm Canada told them, Telefilm already had an Indian film that year.)When something daring comes through the English-Canadian offices of Telefilm, like John Greyson’s Zero Patience or Srivinas Krishna’s Masala, one can bet that it is being funded not because it is daring, but because it fulfills some minority quotas."
What these filmmakers crying censorship do not - cannot - make the case for is why in 2008, should the government be funding and films at all?
I am a free speech libertarian. I am also a screenwriter in Toronto and I can tell you that the type of censorship that occurs is within the agencies themselves in the type of films and scripts that are chosen. Many people will admit to this in private but do not in public for fear of being blacklisted. Yes, it is that bad and I know I have hurt my chances of success by voicing my views on several occasions.
It is worse than Hollywood because that is private capital.
Even more noxious because these films do not even find an audience at home. This battle is only the first step, but like Harkness, I call for an eradication of all funds from the Canadian Film Industry.
It is time for the baby bird to be thrown out of the nest and the maturation process to begin.
posted by Nicol DuMoulin @ 8:42 AM
1 Comments:
Hi NicolD. I've been reading further on this, and I think the Facebook crowd has shot themselves in the foot by making this into a right-left issue. Under these rules, it would be possible for the government to deny tax credits for such productions as, say an adaptation of a Stephen Leacock story or documentary that takes a favorable look at the history of free enterprise in Canada, if they feel it is not in the "public interest" to allow a conservative perspective in film. Obviously, by your experience, this situation already exists, but this will make it even more difficult, I think, for non-left Canadian artists to get a leg up. The economic arguments the anti-C-10 crowd make are compelling, and I think Cronenberg was accurate when he used the word "communist" instead of "fascist", because the government shouldn't be making decisions for private investors (this is different than cutting funds directly from the NFB), and deciding what constitutes a "Canadian" viewpoint. Telefilm Canada may be a public sector corporation, but its main goal is to help encourage private sector film production. Obviously, it still has a long way to go; we would have never had this outcry if the Canadian film industry wasn't so utterly dependent on the welfare state. How we can create a truly independent Canadian film industry is beyond me.
Anyways, I think I should leave with this. It's by someone else who's been in the same boat as you, and it's pretty damn funny too.
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