Last Thought on the Genies: Restoring the Arts to their Rightful Place

While I cannot say that storytelling is our oldest art form, I would be hesitant to argue against it. From oral traditions that pass on a culture’s lore to the written word that holds our imaginings on parchment of one kind or another to the film screen that is now quickly becoming digital, we have never left behind our need to tell and listen to our stories. Though the medium may change, the expression of our narratives remains a constant. "There have been great societies that did not use the wheel but," said Ursala Le Guin, "there have been no societies that did not tell stories." To the extent that the dominant medium for storytelling has, for good or for ill, become increasingly more expensive, countries such as Canada have to consider how its stories will be told…and heard. Perhaps the digital age will be launching us into a world where the possibility of making films becomes more democratic and less expensive, but until that possibility is fully realized, the role of government in supporting the telling of its stories must be central.

Too often governments base their support for film (or literature or music) in terms of what is the expected Return on Investment. The arts “industries” then fall into the trap of trying to provide an answer. When the government wants to cut funding, the industries show how many people are employed in the sector, how much it contributes to GDP, etc. It is an attempt at self-justification the arts communities would be better off avoiding, if for no other reason than it buys into the assumption that the arts should be measured in the same way as any other industry. Suddenly poetry and film are the same as lumber, wheat and steel. That may serve the purposes of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) but it doesn’t serve the purposes of countries that lack the heft of Hollywood and whose stories are obliterated in the face of its marketing machine.

Nothing good can come from Canada judging the arts’ worthiness for support as we judge the auto industry. We go to our factories—and our stores and our schools and our offices--to work; we go to the arts to make sense of work (and family and community, even nation). Livelihood without meaning is not sustainable; the same can be said for nationhood. The ever elusive meaning of Canada is held in trust by its storytellers. “Telling our stories is what saves us," said the novelist James Carrol. "The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy.” The movie theatre has become the modern world’s church for narrative, film its sacred text, the audience its loyal parishioners. Somewhere in that triangle, the Canadian government has a role to play in what sacred texts are written, distributed, and read.