Abstract

In 2000-2001, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a television documentary series, in both English and French, on the history of Canada. The seventeen episodes of the series ranged from North American pre-history to the early 1990s. Working from journals, diaries, and letters, the series ostensibly presented Canadian history from the perspective of the people who experienced it. The visual narrative was comprised of reenacted events, actors portraying historical figures, as well as paintings, sketches and photographs. Visual narration was accompanied by a female voiceover. Broadcast during a period of mounting internal social diversification and the external pressures of globalization, the series seeks to re-affirm a unified national identity while linking a colonial past to a modern present. By examining the visual form and content in the series' historical narrative, this thesis serves as a study of the manner in which visual material--both still imagery and film--functions in the discourse of national identity. This study argues that the visual narrative's mode is colonialist and its discursive formation is romanticist, with the representational form given to First Nations' subject identity serving as the comparative basis for that of the non-Native identity, and landscape and nature contributing to the delineation of subject identity. The main theorists employed in this analysis, are Jacques Lacan and Homi K. Bhabha.