Originally published in Cineaste Vol. 49 no. 3, Summer 2024
The labor of nonprofessionals includes the act of showing up and assuming the identity of “actor,” which is already work, especially since for the nonprofessionals of neorealism this new identity made it difficult for them to return to being nonactors. In fact, Cesare Zavattini (scriptwriter on
Bicycle Thieves) already recognized this in his treatment for a film he never made called at first The Great Swindle, and renamed Tu Maggiori, about the lead actor of Bicycle Thieves. The script is a cautionary tale about the “impossible future” of the untrained actor.
That interpretation for many decades cloaked the systemic racism embedded in settler-colonial culture, and digital technologies have provided the ideal tools to dismantle and challenge that interpretation. If the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67 was a transitional point in an ongoing national project of ‘staging Indianness’, The Souvenir Project is merely another point in that continuum, which still has a long way to go before Indianness is not staged, but recognized as central to the past and present of Canadian culture.
