Reeling Back

OK, today (July 1) is Canada Day. In 1974, when the national holiday was still known as Dominion Day, the celebrations were held during the last week of a federal election. On July 8, Pierre Trudeau’s governing Liberal party went from a minority to a majority in Canada’s House of Commons. To the best on my recollection, film policy was not an issue in the campaign. Support for the struggling domestic industry was neither mentioned in finance minister John Turner’s pre-election budget speech on May 7, nor his post-election speech on November 18. On that day, though, the government increased its Capital Cost Allowance for films from 60 to 100 per cent. Under the new rules investors could deduct from their taxable income 100 per cent of the dollars they put into domestic productions. A Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office (CAVCO) was created to administer the CCA, and the result was the “tax shelter era” of Canadian filmmaking. Eight years of excitement, controversy and disappointment followed. In the positive spirit of the day, though, we’ll stay with 1974, and recall four of the Canadian features that opened in Vancouver during a year in which the most popular baby names in the U.S. were Michael and Jennifer. Today’s additions to the Reeling Back archive (with links to each following the Afterword to this posting) include director Claude Jutra’s award-winning 1973 historical epic Kamouraska.

On this day (July 5) in 1946, Parisian lingerie designer Louis Réard introduced a two-piece, navel-baring swimsuit he called the bikini. There is no evidence that Annette Funicello ever wore anything really itsy bitsy, and certainly not in her 1987 trip Back to the Beach.

Today (July 4) Turner Classic Movies is celebrating the 80th Anniversary of what it calls “Hollywood’s Greatest Year.” I had some fun with the same subject on its 50th anniversary, writing a tongue-in-cheek feature on home video in an alternative reality 1939.

On October 4, 2013, the day that Reeling Back went live on the Internet, I thought I knew where all this was going. Five years, four months and 12 days later, I’m older, perhaps wiser and certainly more aware of the “innumerable confusion” of our times that Marshall McLuhan first noted in 1964.