Rough draft:

The U.S. film industry is justifiably respected for its craft. To
borrow a phrase from literature, the U.S. industry would represent
the summit of the "well-crafted" film. However, this focus on the
well-crafted film, typically with a standard narrative paradigm, can
be seen to be rather conservative. Other than popular politics
(liberalism as epitomized by Frank Capra and Elia Kazan in their
well-crafted masterpieces and Robert Aldrich in his potboilers), the
conservatism in U.S. film likely is rooted in their conservative
approach to audience participation.

In other words, the audience of U.S. films is not usually enlisted
as a "co-author" of their experience but is catered to as a passive
spectator. The U.S. film, through craft (particularly editing and
music that "cues" audience response) manipulates its audience
towards predetermined responses. Whereas the reader of a novel is an
active participant through using his/her imagination, the movie
audience member is passive, with his/her images provided and
emotional responses manipulated on cue. (TV comedy, with its use of
canned laughter to elicit response and an illusion of community and
communal response, is the extreme manifestation of this.)

There have been moviemakers that have broken this mold. At the
height of his powers, Otto Preminger in such films as "Anatomy of a
Murder" eschewed overt editorializing to provide a more "neutral"
experience for the audience, more akin to the novel in that
the "reader" of the film is more actively be engaged in "reading"
and understanding the motivations of the characters to know what is
transpiring.. Most famously (and spectacularly, being more obvious
than Preminger's narrative technique), Robert Altman – by using
genre which provides audiences with ready knowledge of plot that he
does not then have to provide – in his own words fills the edges of
the screen to fill a frame with visuals and sound that demands a
viewer "read" absent obvious clues.

In homage to the great Canadian Marshal McLuhan, one could
see "American" commercial film as a hot medium in which the emotions
and thoughts of an audience are actively manipulated. I am taking
about an experience different than Stanley Kubrick, who through a
mastery of technique, manipulates an audience visually and
narratively, but for quite different ends; the shock of a Kubrick
film pushes an audience back on its heels so that it must cope with
the experience. Most "American" commercial films always returned to
a socially defined reality that is comforting to an audience, at the
end. Ambiguities are eliminated, and an audience – rather than
having a catharsis outside the theater – goes home satisfied that
they have experienced a good entertainment.

Kubrick decamped the U.S. for the U.K. to make his kind of
provocative cinema, reasoning that it would have been impossible to
make the kind of films he wanted to make in the U.S., L.A. in
particular. Altman, a man of the same generation but who began his
film career a decade after Kubrick and broke through in the post-
"Easy Rider" `70s, managed to stay in L.A. but was a qualified
success in the fact that other than M*A*S*H, he had never had a
major hit movie, and was ignored by the mass audience.

My question(s): Is there a difference in U.S. and Canadian films
that can be discerned? With less of a mandate for commercial success
until recently, was Canadian film able to develop its own paradigm
that was less centered on audience manipulation? (One thinks of "The
Sweet Hereafter" and other Egoyan films as requiring greater
audience participation, that is, a demand that they interpret what
they are seeing, than does a normal "American" film.)

Is film inherently political? We are not talking in overt films of
content, but of form. That is: Is a manipulative film emblematic of
a culture that circumscribes freedom, that dumbs down the critical
capacity of its members? Is a film that requires a thinking audience
more inherently democratic in calling on its audience to think? Or
is it anti-democratic: elitist? What is the nexus of the democratic
and the elitist in film? Is a democratic film one that makes people
think and participate or is it a "popcorn" film appealing to the
lowest common denominator?