Unlike Canadian literature, which currently enjoys great international popularity, Canadian movies remain, shall we say, an acquired taste, both at home and abroad. While the publication of a book like Gendering the Nation won’t go very far toward increasing the audience for Canadian film – it’s too specialized a work – it will help promote an appreciation of many of our best – and most neglected – filmmakers.

An anthology of critical essays, both original and previously published, edited by a collective of Toronto-based academics, Gendering the Nation is an ambitious project. As the editors state, Canadian women’s cinema is tremendously diverse, and they have taken great pains to embrace that diversity. Thus, there are essays on documentary, avant-garde, and feature filmmaking traditions, and discussions of works by native, Québécoise, black, and lesbian filmmakers. Seeking to find coherence in such an eclectic activity, the editors have tried to view women’s cinema through the lens of national identity.

This is a landmark work on one hand, but it’s also rather limited. It is about time that our cinema received this type of academic scrutiny, but it is this same kind of criticism that too often scares off even the most devoted cineaste. The unfortunate stranglehold that psychoanalysis and semiotics still have on film scholarship is clearly evident here, particularly in Susan Lord’s essay on filmmaker Patricia Gruben and Catherine Russell’s on The Company of Strangers. However, essays like Elizabeth Anderson’s (on the NFB’s Studio D) and Brenda Longfellow’s (on space and landscape) offer more useful and rewarding historical, formal, and cultural analysis.

A reliance on shopworn theory is also reflected in the films discussed. While striving for inclusiveness, the editors have neglected more recent work by a younger and arguably more radical avant-garde – filmmakers such as Kika Thorne and Gariné Torossian.

These criticisms aside, Gendering the Nation remains a worthwhile and necessary addition to the small body of Canadian film criticism.