Chapter 8 | Michael Dorland

(continued)

More ironic than despairing, I repeat, but no less complicated for all that. You can imagine readily enough some of the resulting difficulties that such a civil culture then tends to produce for the elaboration of cultural practices (never mind policies for now) in their reified or stabilized sense of the production of cultural commodities, that is, as objects fundamentally of exchange, whether in a meaning-sense or in a commercial sense. How can such commodities be exchangeable when one could say that by definition they are not really meant to be exchangeable at all, but are at best reinforcing of a given, prior set of the beliefs, not to call these the prejudices, of the producing individual or group? Above all, what gets created, as I have argued elsewhere (Dorland, 1998) with respect to the emergence of Canadian feature film policy, are “discursive economies,” in which the key term is the first more than the second, i.e., more discursive than economies, in which what is being attempted to be guarantee is the continued production of discourse that seems otherwise mainly to stutter, to begin and then stop. Or if one prefers, what is being attempted is the establishment of the possible preconditions of exchange as opposed to exchange itself.

This is not to say that even this is an easy or simple matter. One might imagine, for instance, that one way of ensuring the circulation of exchange would be through translation in its usual acceptation, and on one level this seems obvious enough. So-and-so is a bestselling author in Quebec. Let’s then translate the book, the film, the TV program into the other language, and voilà. Well, as you know, this has been tried and doesn’t work, or at least not very well, or only within certain specializations in academic literary or film studies, say. Because there is more involved, as I’ve attempted to suggest, in translation than the mechanical conversion of one language into another. If only it were that simple.

Let’s take another example. Québécois films for a while in the 1970s had a certain succès d’estime in France; they were exotic; they spoke somewhere to atavistic notions of a “France profonde;” they were also incomprehensible to contemporary French cinema audiences, except for film festival devotees. And so to the horror of their makers here, the films were shown in France with subtitles! Again, there is more to translation, as this example shows, than a common language.

One could take further examples, also from film and TV, but from English-Canadian production this time. Here one could revert also to the 1970s and the production of the so-called tax shelter films, in which Toronto or Montréal, or rather some streets and locations there, were decorated with US flags and Budweiser beer neon signs; the cops ran around being sheriffs and wore the stars and stripes on their shoulders; all this to be able to lull US audiences into thinking that this simulacrum of appearance was a “good, old, made in the USA type” film or TV show. One of my favorite moments in many of these films always included a long lingering pan of Mont-Royal and the Montreal skyline (or the CN Tower, though less commonly) that would not have especially meant anything to an American audience, but was a clin d’oeil to Canadian viewers who might see the film. But there is more to translation than dressing people up in county sheriff police department uniforms and flying a few US flags.

The pressures of economics, greater continental trade coordination and, beyond these, globalization, have brought about changes to many of these issues. They have forced exchange into more predictable paths, making often reluctant partners have to learn to work together, or even to have to compromise their claims to distinctiveness in the name of an overriding common fiscal objective. Or not, given the diversification of possible markets brought about by ever-increasing demand for product, and the niching that becomes more possible in media rich environments. To contrast the example above of the tax-shelter films, take for a moment Christian Duguay’s recent feature film The Art of War, just out on video, starring Wesley Snipes, and seemingly set in New York City, but into which Montréal has been seamlessly woven. However, no more loving pans of the Montreal skyline now. On the other hand, a feature film is often edited together from a number of varied shooting locations that one cannot distinguish except by carefully reading the credits. And the credits to The Art of War not only reveal an almost entirely Québécois crew but also the logos of Canadian federal and Québec government financial participation through various programs of subsidy and tax credit. This film, one could say, is a more successful illustration of the suturing that is involved in processes of cultural translation — not to mention the fact that the storyline pits yellow — and brown-skinned people of colour against evil white America Firsters attempting to bring back a whitebread and vanishing past with the unwitting aid of UN General Secretary actor Donald Sutherland, a peace-keeping and peace-loving Canadian stooge.

Chapter 8 , continued >

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