| Made in Canada: Cultural Policy, Cinema, and the (Re)ordering of Priorities at Telefilm Canada explores the evolving and shifting logics of Canadian feature film policy. It is through the example of English-language feature film, in particular, that I address some of the key issues that continue to percolate in Canadian cultural criticism: namely, the relevance and effectiveness of national cultural policies at a time when global markets and digital technologies are redefining the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural products; and, equally important, the instruments, models, and mechanisms needed to inform, and make relevant and effective, national cultural policies in light of these changes.;Though my dissertation takes the position that English-language feature film can only operate with state support and public subsidy, it does not treat the connection between cinema and culture as self-evident. Rather, it interrogates the conditions under which these concepts have been mobilized through Canadian cultural policy at different historical moments, and to what purpose. Thus, I examine the history and function of feature film policy through one of the country's most important cultural agencies, Telefilm Canada, adopting a multidisciplinary approach to understand what purpose feature film serves governmentally. Using the 2000 From Script to Screen: New Policy Directions for Canadian Feature Film (FSTS) as a framework, my dissertation explores how English-language feature film has developed through official cultural policy and, more importantly, the critical ways in which it has been mobilized through policy to invoke culture in the first place.;Implicit in FSTS is the overarching assumption that feature film needs to be articulated, shaped, and valued through cultural policy, and that the Canadian government, as protector and keeper of that which is defined as cultural, has a primary, strategic, and intervening role to "secure" it in the name of cultural and national sovereignty. Rather than take these ideas for granted, my dissertation addresses the situated practices that underwrite them, and the global transformations and structural changes in the circulation of culture that have, in recent years, put pressure on them. |
