Research On The Canadian Immigrant Films Since The1990s

Since the1990s, Canadian immigrant films have been mainly made by a batch of new youth directors with the Third World ethnic backgrounds. The new migration groups are the major objects in their videos, especially for those from the Third World countries and regions, such as west Asia, North Africa, Latin-America, and Southeast Asia. These films tend to show the survival and adaption of "the other" group when they encounter heterogeneous cultural environments, as well as their selection and position between old and new identity, which essence is to explore and reflect on the individual identity and memory. It also helps Canadian films (especially feature films) to embark upon a brand-new development journey through the immigration narrative discourse with a distinctive style of light and shadow and the unique structure of this theme.After the documentary, immigrant films help the immigrant to get the identity of the mirror image, relieve the pain, and practice the function of promoting the cohesion of overall national sense. These films improve communications and understandings, soften the conflict led by the difference, and agglomerate the identity of the country, leading to a mixture of cultural self-consciousness of the director and the national ideology. All these make the films deeply different from the traditional culture from European continental countries like Great Britain and France, and the melting pot culture from America, making the Canada’s culture kind of "Cultural mosaic" has a very high identification.Besides, Canadian immigrant films, the popular cultural goods, depend on market capitalization for financial support in development. It is also unavoidable that the rhetoric strategy of Canadian immigrant films is inevitably affected by the capital logic and ideology. Meanwhile, they are shackled by the Hollywood industrial system due to the profound geopolitical and cultural impact.If it is said that the rhetoric and the audio-visual language of Canadian immigrant films during the early independent filmmaking, pay closer attention to express scattered emotions sensually, demonstrate profound exoticism, and be filled with metaphors of signs. They also attempt to help minority groups voicing out their views and reach a balanced discourse in the Western-dominated discourse multicultural context. By comparison, later Canadian immigrant films turn to pursue a dramatic and commercial visual with a middle-class conservative value orientation, the narrative strategy of classification, rather than the individualization of images. They also carefully lay out the plot and emphasize the mental experience of watching films with a great pleasure, catering to the aesthetic taste of the dominant market. At the same time, later immigrant films give more importance to universal individuals in the modern society by drawing support from the body of some marginal ethnic groups. The historical topics are replaced by universal topics, such as humanity, psychology, passion, love, death, dream and so on. As the consequence, cultural conflicts among the nationalities are tend to evaded and Canadian immigrant films are looked forward to win recognition with the greater scope.Furthermore, the realistic pursuit and historical discourse of marginal population are continually remodeling under the power of the discourse mechanism and the capital logic from western force. However, the narration about "otherness" for immigrants’identity is regarded as the symbol of the cultural spectacle in the abstract, becomes a topic for conversation being consumed by masses and ultimately leads to the disappearance of "nationality". Audiences from migrating groups and Third World countries are likely to be interpellated as well as sutured together with screen images due to their imagination of national psychology while they are watching immigrant films. Meanwhile, they are greatly affected by the narrative logic of consumption capital, which means that they cannot speak their mind and keep silence to send into tragic exile.Therefore, based on the evolution of the creation of Canadian immigrant films since the1990s, this paper aims at reflecting the realitic epitomes in Canada through the lens of cloister of mirror image. It also reveals the enchanting veil of the illusory appearance, and exposes the power mechanisms and the capital logic which function all the time behind various narrative discourse among the realistic phenomena in Canada, thereby approaching infinitely the spiritual core of the world essence.