TY  - BOOK
AU  - George Melnyk
AB  - Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to support what film scholar Jim Leach calls “the nationalist-realist project,” a documentary style that emphasizes the exoticism and mythos of the land. Over the past several decades, however, the hegemony of Anglo-centrism has been challenged by francophone and First Nations perspectives and the character of cities altered by a continued influx of immigrants and the development of cities as economic and technological centers. No longer primarily defined through the lens of rural nostalgia, Canadian urban identity is instead polyphonic, diverse, constructed through multiple discourses and mediums, an exchange rather than a strict orientation. Taking on the urban as setting and subject, filmmakers are ideally poised to create and reflect multiple versions of a single city. Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from 1989 to 2007, including Denys Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989), Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992), Mina Shum’s Double Happiness (1994), Clément Virgo’s Rude (1995), and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007), Film and the City is the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and “urbanity”—the totality of urban culture and life. Drawing on film and urban studies and building upon issues of identity formation in Canadian studies, Melnyk considers how filmmakers, films, and urban audiences experience, represent, and interpret urban spatiality, visuality, and orality. In this way, Film and the City argues that Canadian narrative film of the postmodern period has aided in articulating a new national identity.
DO  - 10.15215/aupress/9781927356593.01
ID  - OAPEN ID: 16236
KW  - Quebec studies
KW  - Atom Egoyan
KW  - Film criticism
KW  - Robert Lepage
KW  - Bruce McDonald
KW  - Postmodern film
KW  - Guy Maddin
KW  - Bruce Sweeney
KW  - Patricia Rozema
KW  - Canadian film
KW  - Mina Shum
KW  - Urban studies
KW  - Deepa Mehta
KW  - Jean-Claude Lauzon
KW  - Denis Villeneuve
KW  - Clement Virgo
KW  - Gary Burns
KW  - Denys Arcand
KW  - Jim Leach
L1  - http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120232
LA  - English
LK  - https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/47627
PB  - Athabasca University Press
PY  - 2014
SN  - 9781927356593
SN  - 9781927356609
SN  - 9781927356616
TI  - Film and the City: The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinemanull
ER  - 
