| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga, eds. Working on Screen: Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006)

IDEALLY, A COLLECTION of essays on a cinematic genre or other related category (feminism, for example, or a national cinema) should accomplish a number of goals. The essays should collectively illuminate films most of us know well, introduce us to films we have missed or neglected, argue for a new interpretation of films we have perhaps treated like poor relations, and finally provide the collection with some overarching themes. This collection of 13 essays edited by Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga (who also contribute essays of their own and an introduction) succeeds admirably on all counts.

The essays are neatly divided into four categories: "Workers, History, and Historiography," with essays on labour films, the Canadian Communist Party, and CBC's landmark Canada: A People's History; "Work, Gender, and Sexuality," with more narrowly focused essays on the salacious classic Valerie, hockey films, gay themes in The Hanging Garden, and the well-known Margaret's Museum; "Dirty Work," with essays on the Women's Labour History Project and the Chinese-Canadian Dirty Laundry; and "Working on National Cinema," with essays focused on Québécois cinema, top-down films (Final Offer and Canada's Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks), class and race (especially Rude and Soul Survivor), and "metropolitan dystopias" (such as waydowntown). And while this remarkable survey may occasionally miss a Canadian film worthy of discussion it nonetheless travels border to border in an impressive manner.

One might add that this collection offers a bonus: it discusses Canadian films in such a way that Canadians encounter their national cinema without being bored with the obvious, while non-Canadians (like myself), even if they may have seen many of the films discussed in the essays, benefit greatly from the context and nuance developed by the contributors.

The lead essay after the editors' introduction begins with a lament by labour and labour film historian David Frank that there exists no guide to Canadian labour films. He proceeds to outline such a guide with examples from both documentary and feature film genres, from 1919 through the 1990s. The reasons for the absence of such a guide, Frank makes clear, are not surprising when the (massive) CBC/Radio-Canada production of Canada: A People's History offers only an "underwhelming" presence of actual labour history. (A separate essay in the volume by Varga covers that CBC production.) Instead of a volume on labour films, then, this volume moves through a series of essays with much greater aspirations.

The editors set out their task succinctly in their very helpful introduction: "What is absent from Canadian film studies ... is substantial analysis of class relations."( 4) What is present instead, clearly, is an extensive body of study that defines Canadian cinema "through the connotation of national cultural traits that were imagined as specific to the Canadian experience."(3) This virtually all-class approach has led to studies of "national or regional identity" while "marginalizing other aspects" such as work, class, gender, and ethnicity.

What is to be done? According to the editors, we must undo the marginalization of the working-class Canadian majority – "a whole host of workers – white collar, teachers, intellectuals, agricultural workers, civil servants, and the information and technology sector," not to mention "the unemployed, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and children." (6) Although some of these groups sometimes "misleadingly conceive of them- selves, and/or are conceived by others, to be beyond class or as part of a grand 'middle,'" (6) the editors strive to include the formerly excluded.

This program is admirable and for the most part determines the success of this volume, a readable compendium of forays into films about all those members of the working class the editors have defined. Readers should be aware, however, that this inclusiveness comes with a price that I suspect most readers will be willing to pay, that is, the contributors have great latitude in defining how their particular film or set of films will fit into the elastic rubric, "working class." To take what may be an obvious and I hope not too facetious example: Valerie (1968) is a defining film of "films de fesse" (or to use an equally wonderful term, "maple syrup porn"); yet it is not only Valerie as a sex worker or even as a member of the working class that is the primary focus of Rebecca Sullivan's essay. ("Work It Girl! Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valerie") Instead she shows how such films inevitably and inadequately represent "the modern liberated women" in "sexual rather than economic terms" as this dramatizes the perceived status of women in Québec society. Similarly Bart Beatty's essay on hockey films ("Not Playing, Working: Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film") foregrounds "the social spaces of urban, middle-class, white men as nationally normative," (113) especially the relationship of hockey to the media ("the history of the CBC is ... linked to that of hockey"(113)), its essential role in defining Canadian nationhood, and its function (similar to that of the National Basketball Association in the USA) as an economic escalator for the talented few; hockey players as workers (e.g. struggling for a union in Net Worth) are therefore not quite as important a focus.

This tension between the ostensible subject of the volume – "representations of the working class" – and its inevitable survey of numerous related themes that transcend the actual working class runs through a number of other essays. Essays by Malek Khouri and John McCullough illuminate brilliantly numerous problems associated with the representation of gay and Black Canadian characters respectively but it is the gayness and racism at the centre of the films (The Hanging Garden for the former and both Rude and Soul Survivor for the latter) that lead the writers to lament the absence of adequate dramatization of class relationships. This should not come as a surprise since there are virtually no workers in any of these films, except perhaps for the wonderful media (radio) construct Rude herself, the voice that sums up the film as one in which "the Zulu nation meets the Mohawk nation." (263)

An essay collection has to deliver the goods over and over again. For the most part this volume succeeds. Despite my occasional apprehension that the real Canadian working class is in danger of slipping away from the authors' grasp, the contributions of Joseph Kispal-Kovacs, Peter Urquhart, and David Frank admirably bring to the foreground auto workers, miners, and other representative workers featured in such sturdy and important films as Margaret's Museum, Final Offer, and Canada's Sweetheart, despite the perhaps inevitable drift in the latter two to working-class leaders and mis-leaders.

This is a welcome addition to the evergrowing library both in print and on-line of work on Canadian cinema. Its emphasis on class will only help sharpen the debate on the Canadianness of Canadian films, already joined by such works as William Beard and Jerry White's North of Everything: English Canadian Cinema Since 1980 (2002), Bill Marshall's Québec National Cinema (2000), or even the Canadian Film Encyclopedia (Film Reference Library at www.filmreferencelibrary.ca). While Frank's "search" for a guide to Canadian labour films remains to date unfulfilled, Khouri and Varga's volume will admirably serve in the meantime in that capacity, among others.


TOM ZANIELLO Northern Kentucky University

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