Description
Book SynopsisFor many years, Canadian cinema was dominated by the documentarytradition of the National Film Board, which tended to promote what filmscholar Jim Leach has called the “nationalist-realistproject”—films that privileged Canada’s naturallandscape and sought to conjure a unified sense of Canadian identityfrom images of empty, untrammelled wilderness and bucolic farmlands.Over the past several decades, however, the hegemony of thisfundamentally colonial, Anglo-centric vision has been challenged byfrancophone and First Nations perspectives and by the growth of cities,where most Canadians now reside, as economic and technological centres.In opposition to the mythic “Canada” shaped through thelens of rural nostalgia, Canadian urban identity asserts itself aspolyphonic, diverse, constructed through multiple discourses andmediums, as an ongoing negotiation rather than a monolithicorientation. Taking the urban as setting and subject, filmmakers areideally poised to capture this multiplicity, creating their own,idiosyncratic portraits of the Canadian urban landscape and of thepeople who inhabit it.
Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from the late 1980sonward, including Denys Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal(1989), Mina Shum’s Double Happiness (1994), and GuyMaddin’s My Winnipeg (2007), Film and the Cityis the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and“urbanity”—the totality of urban culture and life asrefracted through the filmmaker’s prism. Drawing on insights fromboth film and urban studies and building upon issues of identityformation long debated in Canadian studies, Melnyk considers howfilmmakers interpret and employ the spatiality, visuality, and oralityof urban space and how audiences read the films that result. In thisway, Film and the City argues that Canadian narrative film ofthe postmodern period has contributed to the articulation of a new,multifaceted understanding of national identity.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction: The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema
The City of Faith: Navigating Piety in Arcand’s Jésusde Montréal (1989)
The City of Dreams: The Sexual Self in Lauzon’s Léolo(1992)
The Gendered City: Feminism in Rozema’s Desperanto(1991), Pool’s Rispondetemi (1991), andVilleneuve’s Maelstrom (2000)
The City Made Flesh: The Embodied Other in Lepage’s LeConfessional (1995) and Egoyan’s Exotica (1994)
The Diasporic City: Postcolonialism, Hybridity, and Transnationalityin Virgo’s Rude (1995) and Mehta’sBollywood/Hollywood (2001)
The City of Transgressive Desires: Melodramatic Absurdity inMaddin’s The Saddest Music in the World (2003) andMy Winnipeg (2006)
The City of Eternal Youth: Capitalism, Consumerism, and Generationin Burns’s waydowntown (2000) and Radiant City(2006)
The City of Dysfunction: Race and Relations in Vancouver fromShum’s Double Happiness (1994) to Sweeney’sLast Wedding (2001) and McDonald’s The Love Crimesof Gillian Guess (2004)
Conclusion: National Identity and the Urban Imagination
Notes
Bibliography
Index
