Canuxploitation inspires an artful film
If they bother to think of them at all, most people regard the hundreds of Canadian movies made during the “Canuxploitation” era of the early 1970s to late 1980s as the most commercial of CanCon fodder.
Made to cash in on a generous 100-per-cent federal tax deduction for maple movies, and intended for drive-ins rather than art houses (of which there were precious few), these films harboured few illusions of grandeur, even though stars such as Donald Sutherland, Christopher Plummer and Helen Shaver were serious about their careers.
These tax-shelter productions traded heavily in genre, like David Cronenberg’s 1975 sex-parasite horror Shivers. It was memorably condemned by Robert Fulford of Saturday Night magazine, who called it “an atrocity, a disgrace to everyone connected with it — including the taxpayers.”
Fulford further fulminated that if English Canada needed public money to make films like Shivers (Quebec, as usual, was more independent), “then perhaps English Canada should not have a film industry.”
How ironic, then, that clips from Shivers and 433 other Canuxploitation films have been melded together to make Taking Shelter, a distinctly artful film by Toronto collagist Jonathan Culp.
It had its world premiere on Canada Day at CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave., with an encore screening scheduled there for 8 p.m. on July 10. Culp also plans a fall campus tour. (Several clips and the Taking Shelter trailer can be viewed online.)
Culp says he spent seven years — “Three of collecting titles, two of transcription, two of editing” — stitching together thousands of snippets from the sampled films, working a loose and manic theme of space aliens invading Canada.
“This serves as a metaphor for the film industry itself in this era,” he says.
The invasion part of the collage, Culp explains via email, comes mainly from three cheesy sci-fi flicks: “The big-head alien is from Ed Hunt’s Starship Invasions (which Christopher Lee said was the worst film he ever appeared in), the robot is from George McCowan’s wonderfully goofy The Shape of Things to Come, and the Pinhead guy is Michael Ironside in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.”
Bouncing in and around this sci-fi scenario are such bizarre subplots as Maury Chaykin acting as the most Rob Ford-ish of mayors (“It is not a commie-owned town anymore!” he shouts) and Carole Laure as a “hypo-seductress” who teaches the gullible to dance like crazy.
Watching this barrage of images is like seeing the entire film history of Guy Maddin ( My Winnipeg, The Saddest Music in the World) and the late NFB collagist Arthur Lipsett ( Very Nice, Very Nice) flash before your eyes. Culp does acknowledge Lipsett as a major influence, along with music sampling pioneer Dickie Goodman.
The Canuxploitation era is also known for the habit of producers flying in American stars as marquee talent atop a roster of mostly Canadian actors, such as Bill Murray in Ivan Reitman’s Meatballs and Elliott Gould in Daryl Duke’s The Silent Partner, two of the more successful movies from the time.
Culp tends to favour Canadian talent in his clips, although U.S. stars do suddenly flash across the screen, such as an impossibly younglooking Martin Sheen.
Many of the films sampled in Tak- ing Shelter — Culp leaned heavily on the “fair use” exemption granted by copyright now — have titles that pretty much say it all about their content. The roll call includes such lowbrow fare as The Corpse Eaters, High-Ballin’, The Mystery of the Million Dollar Hockey Puck and something intriguingly called Firebird 2015 A.D.
But the tax-shelter era also produced more than a few good Canadian films, among them The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, A Christmas Story, The Decline of the American Empire, Jesus of Montreal and Un Zoo la Nuit.
Some actors could be both Canadian and Hollywood at the same time, such as New Brunswick-born Donald Sutherland, who appeared in way more Canuxploitation movies than he’d like to admit. Culp points out that Sutherland was well compensated for these paycheque gigs, since 1970s M*A*S*H made him a bankable star, as it did Gould and also Sally Kellerman, who has her own tax-shelter resumé ( Meatballs 3: Summer Job).
Like many Canadians, Culp grew up erroneously thinking that this country’s movies are inferior to ones made elsewhere, even though Hollywood pumps out infinitely more trash than Canada ever could.
“I knew at a young age that Canadian films were laughable — which didn’t stop me from getting really angry because my mom wouldn’t take me to a casting call for Screwballs 2!”
He was inspired to make Taking Shelter because he was curious about an era that seemed to be more talked about than studied.
“What I noticed was that whenever the era came up in conversation, the focus seemed to be on the policy, not the movies themselves — or, on a kind of sanctioned canon of ‘good tax-shelter movies’ like The Silent Partner and The Changeling (both of which I think are slightly overrated) or, of course, Cronenberg himself. There was a lot of chat about the flood of movies but visibility was at a trickle.”
Culp also realized that the decades after the Canuxploitation era have greatly improved the standing of Canadian filmmakers on the global stage, with such directors as Cronenberg (now considered an auteur), Atom Egoyan, Denis Villeneuve, Xavier Dolan, Deepa Mehta and Sarah Polley being invited to festivals and winning awards.
The Canadian movie industry got to where it is in large part on the strength of talent and infrastructure established and honed during the tax-shelter years.
“In light of all this ambiguity, I just looked at the whole cinema of the two decades as a transition period where genre was integrated into the national cinema,” Culp says. “It encompasses Goin’ Down the Road and Atom Egoyan and is meant to depict a journey between the two, in a way.”
Aliens, robots and frenzied seductresses as the missing links of Canuckfilm? That sounds like a Canadian movie classic all its own. phowell@thestar.ca
The Canuxploitation era is also known for the habit of producers flying in American stars as marquee talent atop a roster of mostly Canadian actors, such as Bill Murray in Ivan Reitman’s Meatballs