Documenting D: Studio D of the NFB and its representation of women's lives in Canada, 1974--1996

This dissertation examines the tenure of Studio D within the National Film Board from its creation in August 1974 to its closure in Canada in 1996. An example of second-wave Canadian feminism, Studio D was organized around such tenets as 'the personal is political' and a notion of women united in a global sisterhood, deploying its own particular version of consciousness-raising to spectatorship politics and praxis. Celebrated as a 'national treasure' and the only state-sponsored feminist film studio in the world, Studio D has been criticized for embracing the politics of 'liberal feminism', for producing rigid and reductive filmic representations of women. This dissertation asks can we read Studio D more productively, thereby assessing the efforts of 'liberal feminism' more generously by exploring the complex and often contradictory territory Studio D occupied within the embrace of a state-funded cultural and traditionally patriarchal institutional created to 'present Canadians to each other and to the world'. Emphasizing and probing the nature of the insider-view culled from a personal interviews and internal documents, a strategy mimicking the politics of the female voice-over in documentary film, this study finds that the sometimes competing accounts of women's experiences, 'dialogic' in nature, illuminate and celebrate---rather than paralyse---the project of tracing feminist histories. This study is organized within three clusters of theoretical influence: feminist historiography and narratology, cultural theory and media: theory including documentary and feminist film theory that, in combination, situate Studio D in its relationship with the film board, the state and the Canadian women's movement. Studio D emerges as an appropriately 'messy assemblage', illustrating Tom O'Regan's definition, an instance of feminist narratology. In sum, this study makes a claim for a fresh, more positive valuing of Studio D, arguing for the continued, if necessarily shifting significance of consciousness-raising made possible in feminist film---not because Studio D's documentaries held up a mirror to show us unproblematically 'who we are' as women, but, rather, because they afford us opportunities to become resisting readers to the cultural limitations of our own lives, and to imagine who 'we' might become.