In 1969, Dorothy Livesay affirmed that, beginning in the 1930s, the Canadian long poem had evolved into a new genre by following the "experimentations" originally made by John Grierson---father of the British documentary movement and NFB film commissioner---in film ("Documentary Poem" 269). Echoing the well-known Griersonian assertion that documentary film should "interpret Canada to Canadians," Livesay also attached a special nation-building value to the Canadian documentary poem by stating that its methods and conventions "subtly [...] cast light on the landscape, the topography, the flora and the fauna as well as the social structure" of Canada (269). Prompted by Livesay's statements, and by the current lack of scholarship examining the Griersonian heritage of her documentary poetry, this thesis performs a critical examination of the points of continuity between the Griersonian tradition of nationalist filmmaking and the Canadian documentary poem as Livesay defined it. Drawing on key Canadian film policy documents of the modernist era and on close readings of seminal documentary texts by the National Film Board, I trace the ideological maneuvers and narrative practices that the Griersonian documentary traditionally deployed in order to fulfill its mandate of interpreting Canada to Canadians, foregrounding the representational gaps and disturbances underpinning these conventions. I then examine the extent to which these conventions penetrated Livesay's own documentary project, highlight the efforts she made in order to transcend the limitations of her original format. In an effort to chart the aesthetic and political ramifications of this representational struggle, in a concluding section I explore the ongoing reappraisal of the Griersonian documentary tradition in key postmodern documentaries by Livesay and another prominent Canadian documentary poet, Daphne Marlatt.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/28076 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Aguila-Way, Tania |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 146 p. |
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