Is there such thing as a Canadian auteur?

            The Canadian film industry is thriving.  It is much stronger and more predominant than before, and Canadian films are slowly being more recognized as both important works of art and pleasing forms of entertainment not only in its homeland but also on an international film market.  But what is it that is making these films more recognized inside and outside of Canada?  The true answer to this is authorship, specifically Canadian authorship.  Our auteurs are the reason Canadian films are either recognized or not recognized both inside and outside of Canada.

But often the answer to that is many of the films emerging from Canada as of late still have much of an art-house style to the aesthetics of the films, yet at the same time are much closer to traditional Hollywood aesthetics found in more mainstream films.  On the other hand, there are still many films that remain more artistic and less traditional than the more popular films seen in the multiplexes.  Some will say that it is more Canadian to depart from the mainstream films and be more artistic in the style of filmmaking.  “It is not uniform, nor does it follow any one formulaic pattern.  It metamorphoses and mutates generation by generation, and speaks in many tongues.  Diversity of approach, individual voice and ambiguity are what unite Canadian cinema as a whole.” Canadian films are often seen having more of an art-house style and are often viewed as a departure from the conventional Hollywood style of filmmaking.

But that has been slowly changing over the past several years, with such films as Ginger Snaps, Men With Brooms and Four Days taking a more Hollywood style approach to filmmaking.  Still, the majority of the films to emerge from Canada have a very unique, artistic, and personal style that is always profound in Canadian films.  This includes such Canadian films as The Sweet Hereafter, Thirty Two Short Films About Glen Gould, The Red Violin, and New Waterford Girl.
            But whether it is a more mainstream style or a more personal and inventive style that is given to a Canadian film, the auteur or director, who ultimately has complete control over a film and its production, makes that decision.  And the direction that the film could take is based solely on the auteur’s style of filmmaking.  Authorship in the film industry is a feature often studied throughout the world by looking at directors from around the world and studying what makes them and their films different and ingenious from others.  An auteur is known all over the film industry as “An individual, inevitably the director, whose contribution to a film’s style and theme is considered so significant that he or she can be considered the ‘author’ of the film despite the fact that a film’s production is dependent of a large number of people with specific skills and talents working collaboratively.  An auteur establishes his or her identity across a body of films which can be seen to bear a distinctive ‘signature’.” This would be looking at such directors and their styles as Billy Wilder’s glossy, shadowy images or John Woo’s high energy and slow moving action sequences.

Film critic Andrew Sarris studied authorship in film and came up with the widely used and often criticized auteur theory in Cahiers du Cinema in the early 1960’s, and developed a model to help understand it.  This model consists of three points that define an auteur: technique, which focuses on the auteur’s filmmaking style, personal style, which is a focus on recurring motifs found in an auteurs’ resume of films, and interior meaning, which is what a film or the films mean to the auteur on a personal level. While other critics sometimes disparage this model, it is seen as an essential model to understand auteur theory, and it is a simplistic paradigm that will help us understand the full intentions of an auteur, especially a Canadian auteur.

But most often when authorship is looked at, the auteurs that are of focus are the ones that usually follow the traditional Hollywood style of directing films, ones that are usually a part of the mainstream and who direct films that are more forms of popular entertainment.  With that is mind, can we say that there is such this as Canadian authorship?  Do we, as Canadians, have Canadian auteurs?