Examining film and identity
Jennifer Gauthier, Concordia’s Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in North American Society and Culture, loves nothing more than digging around in old film production archives, looking for that elusive connection.
“I’m sort of a nerd in that respect,” she says, laughing. “You never know what you’re going to find out about. Whose idea was this [film], and whom did they have to convince? How did it all happen? A lot of people don’t get excited about looking through old papers, but I do.”
Gauthier is on loan to Concordia from the Department of Communication Studies at Virginia’s Randolph College. During her semester at Concordia, Gauthier will examine representations of First Nations people and their cultures in films produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). “I’m particularly interested in the changes that happened,” she says. “Early on it was mostly white guys who were making films about native people, and then right around the 1960s, with some changes at the board, the Indian film crew was born. First Nations started to be trained to work behind the camera and make their own films.”
She is particularly interested in examining how representations of First Nations people and their culture changed after First Nations people themselves got involved in filmmaking. Montreal, home of the NFB headquarters, is a great place to start; the only problem is that Gauthier is having difficulty accessing the board’s production archives.
New rules and systems for accessing the NFB’s paper archives have been put in place since Gauthier was last in Montreal five years ago. Back then she happily rooted through the archives while researching her doctoral thesis on Canadian films, cultural policy and national identity.
“I sat with boxes of files and looked through them, made photocopies and took notes,” she recalls. Now the archives are housed off-site, and the visiting researcher has to file special requests for the documents she wishes to view.
Fortunately, while Gauthier waits for her archive requests to come through, she’s able to keep busy watching films at the NFB’s CinéRobothèque.
“Watching films has been the best part of my research so far,” she says. “I’ve got so many new ideas for my work. I'm getting really interested in the 1940s, 1950s short films about native people made by the NFB for the Department of Tourism and the Department of Education. They are a hoot! The voice-over narration is so outdated and phony. I mean, the board meant well, but these early films are so exoticizing (and demeaning). It really makes the contemporary work by First Nations filmmakers all the more important.”
While she’s in Montreal, Gauthier also plans to interview young Natives to find out whether they are watching films made by First Nations filmmakers, and if they do, whether they like them or not. “This idea that the National Film Board is making films for native people to help them to revive their culture: are young people really seeing them? That’s more the people side of the research than the documents and films side of it.”
Gauthier also hopes to meet other people researching films depicting First Nations, and First Nations filmmaking. “Where I work is a really small college,” she says. “I’m really the only person on my campus working in film studies, let alone anything specific like Canada or indigenous media. I don’t have any colleagues to speak of, so this is a great chance for me to make connections with other scholars — to either work with them, or just pick their brains.”
Meanwhile, there are guest lectures to give and a whole new city to explore. Gauthier brought her mother and her young son with her to Montreal, and so far the trio has already checked out the Botanical Garden, the Insectarium, and the Atwater Market. They even ventured out to Ste. Eustache for some apple picking. Gauthier admits she’s really enjoying living in the city. Now, if she could just get at those archives…
Related links:
• The National Film Board of Canada
• Fulbright Canada