Dissenting Shadows: A History of Film Policy and Production in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1933-1997

This thesis examines the development of film policy and production in Newfoundland and Labrador between the vote to suspend Representative Government in the Dominion of Newfoundland in 1933 and the establishment of the Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation in the province of Newfoundland in 1997. Both the Commission of Government, established by Britain in 1934, and the Provincial Government, established upon Canadian Confederation in 1949, attempted to use film to rehabilitate what was widely understood to be abject space, rendered so by its malfunctioning political and economic systems. With the development of these systems under the auspices of the Canadian state, a range of filmmakers began to use the medium to interrogate, challenge, and at times actively contravene both those corrective representations that had come before as well as the modes of governance they espoused. Part one considers the development of film policy and production on the Island of Newfoundland, the seat of both the Dominion and Provincial Governments. Beginning with a reading of the Commission of Government’s general mandate, this section traces the manners in which that mandate came to bear upon the development of film exhibition policy as it was articulated by the Department of Education and how, in turn, that exhibition policy came to affect the film production practices by agents of institutional and local culture. It forwards the idea that film was utilized to develop contesting ideas of spatial capability. Part two examines the development of that same policy articulated in Newfoundland and how it came to affect film production practices in Labrador. Historically conceived of as a region meant to benefit Newfoundland, here the primary conflict between the agents of institutional and local culture was not one of spatial capacity but spatial ownership. What emerges are two distinct yet intimately bound histories of film’s unique ability to represent, rehabilitate, manufacture and reclaim space. They reveal as much about the difficult nature of Newfoundland and Labrador’s relationship to one another as they do the province’s relationship to Canada.Ph