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Afferent drama / efferent cinema: the structure of modern Canadian and Québécois film-mediated drama from 1972 to 1992

University of British Columbia

The great majority of the Canadian and Quebecois plays that have been made into films between 1972 and 1992 are neither popular hits nor critically acclaimed works. The question that this dissertation poses is thus why were these rather marginal works adapted for the cinema? The suggested answer is that, beyond the critical or popular success of the plays (or lack thereof), it is their dialectical structure that gives coherence, through recursive symmetry, to the corpus of Canadian/Quebecois film-mediated drama. To buttress this claim, I conduct a tripartite analysis of the plays and films of the corpus: the first section is devoted to the dramas; the second scrutinizes the process of film-mediation; and the third evaluates the significance of the corpus in relation to various theoretical and cultural discourses. I examine four texts in detail: William Fruet's Wedding in White (film: Fruet); Marcel Dube's Les Beaux Dimanches (film: Richard Martin); Carol Bolt's One Niaht Stand (film: Allan W. King); and Rene-Daniel Dubois's Being at Home with Claude, (film: Jean Beaudin). Subsequently, a brief survey of other works shows that the conclusions drawn from these case studies also apply to the corpus as a whole. To realize this analysis, I follow the structuralist methodology proposed by Thomas Price in Dramatic Structure and Meaning in Theatrical Productions (1992), which explicates dramas and films in terms of the dialectical conflicts that they display. The first phase of inquiry shows that the plays exhibit an afferent-withdrawal/efferent-escape dialectic, that is, a tension between a coercive inward pressure and an explosive outward force. The second part argues that this tension finds further expression in the cinematic adaptations, as the closed dramas are "opened up" through the addition of outward filmic imagery. The final part suggests that this tension constitutes a key characteristic of film-mediated drama as a genre, for it embodies the clash between a dramatic concentration on a nucleus of characters (afferent drama), and a filmic tendency to explode this nucleus (efferent cinema). Part III evidences as well that the afferent-withdrawal/efferent-escape dialectic relates to a prototypical expression of the Canadian/Quebecois imagination as defined by Canadian studies scholars such as Gaile McGregor.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-04-22

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7488

Theatre

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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