Women in Canadian film.

From its preoccupation with consciousness-raising and documentary realism (driven to a large extent by the nowdefunct Studio D), women's film culture in Canada has evolved into a banquet of diverse and rich offerings. Politically engaged and concerned with articulating female desire, women's filmmaking has come a long way since the often earnest efforts of the late 1960s, and 1970s, when titles like This Film is About Rape pretty much said it all.

Building on the best work from that era (in the films by Joyce Wieland, Mireille Dansereau, Paule Baillergeon and Anne Claire Poirier), women in Quebec and English Canada have gradually managed to push their way into an industry that until 1988 was still giving only nine percent of all funding to female directors. Canadian women have now entered the high priesthood of the avant garde (Patricia Gruben, Kay Armatage, Midi Onodera), pioneered hybrid forms (Brenda Longfellow, Cynthia Scott), added new rigour and sophistication to the documentary (Terre Nash, Gail Singer, Alanis Obomsawin, Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman, to name only a few), and carried on sustained feature filmmaking careers (Lea Pool, Patricia Rozema, Anne Wheeler, Micheline Lanctot, Sandy Wilson, Deepa Mehta). Women have also established themselves as producers, guiding the business end of such male-authored films as Le confessionnal, Exotica and Eclipse, as well as Rozema's 1987 smash hit, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.

If the films of Canadian women have anything in common (and they are far from homogeneous), it may be a tendency to put smart, capable women at the centre of the action. This comes as no surprise, but it's the naturalness of these portrayals--their lack of Thelma & Louise swagger or Bigelowesque bluster--that's unusual and maybe even indigenous. Whether it's Aussie feminist Marilyn Waring holding forth about sex, lies and global economics (Who's Counting?, Terre Nash, 1995), Eulalie jumping into a northern lake (The Far Shore, Joyce Wieland, 1976), or the nun whistling off to fix a broken bus (The Company of Strangers, Cynthia Scott, 1990), the women in these films are firmly positioned as subjects.

The pattern goes right back to Canada's first pro-feminist film, Back to God's Country. As screen writer and star of this 1919 mega-hit, Nell Shipman made sure that her character (Delores LeBeau) has plenty to do. She jumps into a river nude; she cavorts with bears and porcupines; and she saves her injured and effete husband, Peter, from the evil of the villain Rydal. She's a thoroughly modern gal, and set a high standard for what would eventually become known as feminist filmmaking in Canada.

While LeBeau's struggles took place in a world full of men, today's female directors have a tendency to put their women together in sometimes unlikely, but crucial alliances. It's partly this sense of political purpose and solidarity-in-diversity that sets films by Canadian and quebecoise women apart from the fevered visions of alienation created by so many of this country's male directors. Sometimes the solidarity thing works, sometimes it seems slightly propagandistic, but it's very often there. In films as diverse as La vie revee, Mourir a tue-tete, La femme de l'hotel, Anne Trister, Loyalties and When Night is Falling, women are forever getting it together, ditching or escaping dangerous or unsatisfactory men, setting off to make films, crossing boundaries of culture or race or turning to each other for erotic fulfilment. Even a film like Sonatine (Lanctot), which seemingly reeks of alienation, has at its core the partnership of a pair of young women clinging to each other against a monde indifferent. The cruel world may kill them, but there's comfort in the fact that they are found slumped together, in each other's arms.