ABSTRACT
Joseph Clark extends consideration of production and reception geographies through the case of Brooklyn-born Roy Tash, who joined the Associated Screen News (ASN) as a cameraman in 1925. Founded in 1920 with help from the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Montreal-based ASN was the major producer of newsfilm in Canada until the formation of the National Film Board in 1939. Although Tash worked on a variety of projects at ASN, his primary job was to film Canadian stories for U.S.-based newsreel companies. For most of its history, ASN did not release its own regular newsreel. Its footage found Canadian audiences, however, through the Canadian editions produced by U.S. companies in New York. By comparing material in the ASN archive, including Roy Tash’s own diary and notes (held in the National Archives of Canada), with archival material found in the Universal Newsreel Archive (held by the National Archives and Records Administration) this chapter begins to map out the complex transnational flows of newsfilm between Canada and the U.S. in the 1930s and ’40s. These movements shed new light on the ways in which nonfiction film was produced and circulated in Canada and the United States. They also raise broader questions about the relationship between local and (inter)national film institutions and audiences, as well as the role newsreels and other nonfeature films played in shaping modes of transnational spectatorship. The Canadian newsreel industry of this period was neither an example of purely indigenous Canadian filmmaking nor of crude U.S. cultural imperialism. Rather, the stories produced by Tash were the product of reciprocal, if unequal, flows of finance and film. As Clark shows, Tash’s Canadian news stories often engaged what John Urry has called the “tourist gaze,” focusing on the peculiar, the picturesque, and other. But when these films were distributed in Canada, this gaze was turned in on itself. Whether it was the Dionne Quintuplets or a local bucksaw competition in Peterborough, Ontario, what emerged from Tash’s films reflected a country both familiar and strange, a country seen at once from within and outside its own borders.
