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Bonnie Sherr Klein's 'Not a Love Story'
by Rebecca SullivanBonnie Sherr Klein's "Not a Love Story" provocatively examines the first Canadian film to explore pornography's role in society from a feminist perspective. Directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein for Studio D, the National Film Board's women's unit, the film featured both Klein and Lindalee Tracey, an activist, performance artist, and stripper, as they toured the seamier fringes of pornography and sex work in Montreal, Toronto, New York, and San Francisco. Censored in Ontario upon its release in 1981, Not a Love Story collided with the escalating "Porn Wars" that contributed to the tearing apart of the second-wave feminist movement.Using interviews with members of the crew and extensive archival research into the production process, Rebecca Sullivan delves into the creation and reception of Not a Love Story to explore the issues of censorship, sexual labour and performance, and documentary practice that the film raised. An insightful analysis not just of the film itself but of the issues which surround feminist analyses of pornography as a genre, Bonnie Sherr Klein's "Not a Love Story" offers a fresh assessment of Canada's women's movement and the politics of feminist filmmaking during a volatile era.
Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Fourth Edition
by Mieke BalSince its first publication in English in 1985, Mieke Bal's Narratology has become an international classic and the comprehensive introduction to the theory of narrative texts, both literary and non-literary. Providing insights into how readers interpret narrative text, the fourth edition of Narratology is a guide for students and scholars seeking to analyze narratives of any language, period, and region with clear, systematic and reliable concepts. With the addition of in-depth analysis of literary nuances and methods, award-wining cultural theorist Mieke Bal continues to present narrative concepts with clarity. Bal uses a systematic framework to better explain how narratives function, are formed, and eventually interpreted by the reader, while presenting a comprehensive study of the surface perception of language, the perceived narrative world, point of view, and characterization.
The Canadian Horror Film
by Gina Freitag André LoiselleFrom the cheaply made "tax-shelter" films of the 1970s to the latest wave of contemporary "eco-horror," Canadian horror cinema has rarely received much critical attention. Gina Freitag and André Loiselle rectify that situation in The Canadian Horror Film with a series of thought-provoking reflections on Canada's "terror of the soul," a wasteland of docile damnation and prosaic pestilence where savage beasts and mad scientists rub elbows with pasty suburbanites, grumpy seamen, and baby-faced porn stars.Featuring chapters on Pontypool, Ginger Snaps, 1970s slasher films, Quebec horror, and the work of David Cronenberg, among many others, The Canadian Horror Film unearths the terrors hidden in the recesses of the Canadian psyche. It examines the highlights of more than a century of Canadian horror filmmaking and includes an extensive filmography to guide both scholars and enthusiasts alike through this treacherous terrain.
The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg
by William BeardPAPERBACK INCLUDES TWO NEW CHAPTERSDavid Cronenberg is one of the most fascinating filmmakers in the world today. His provocative work has stimulated debate and received major retrospectives in museums, galleries, and cinematheques around the world. William Beard's The Artist as Monster was the first book-length scholarly work in English on Cronenberg's films, analyzing all of his features from Stereo (1969) to Crash (1996). In this paperback edition, Beard includes new chapters on eXistenZ (1999) and Spider (2002).Through close readings and visual analyses, Beard argues that the structure of Cronenberg's cinema is based on a dichotomy between, on the one hand, order, reason, repression, and control, and on the other, liberation, sexuality, disease, and the disintegration of self and of the boundaries that define society. The instigating figure in the films is a scientist character who, as Cronenberg evolves as a filmmaker, gradually metamorphoses into an artist, with the ground of liberation and catastrophe shifting from experimental subject to the self.Bringing a wealth of analytical observation and insight into Cronenberg's films, Beard's sweeping, comprehensive work has established the benchmark for the study of one of Canada's best-known filmmakers.
Creative Canada: A Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Creative and Performing Artists (Volume #1)
by Reference Division, McPherson Library, University of VictoriaDid he ever play Hamlet? Has she worked in television? What was the title of his first novel? Under whom did she study? How many children has he? Answers to such questions about contemporary Canadian artists have often been difficult, even impossible, to find. This series has been created to provide the answers; it covers creative and performing artists who have contributed as individuals to the culture of Canada in the twentieth century.Each volume in the series presents a cross-section of many different kinds of artists: authors of imaginative works, artists and sculptors, musicians (performers, composers, conductors, and directors), and performing artists in ballet, modern dance, radio, theatre, television, and motion pictures; directors, designers, and producers in theatre, cinema, radio, television, and the dance; choreographers and, for cinema, cartoonists and animators. Within each category of art is included a selection of those who have achieved national and international recognition; those who have been recognized locally, and some, now deceased, who markedly influenced their contemporaries locally, nationally, or internationally. This is not a critical compilation; rather it is an objective and factual reference work for those interested in contemporary Canadian culture. Information was collected by painstaking research in a wide variety of sources, and wherever possible it has been verified by the artist to make each entry as accurate and comprehensive as possible.
Creative Canada: A Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-century Creative and Performing Artists (Volume #2)
by Reference Division, McPherson Library, University of VictoriaDid he ever play Hamlet? Has she worked in television? What was the title of his first novel? Under whom did she study? How many children has he? Answers to such questions about contemporary Canadian artists have often been difficult, even impossible, to find. This series has been created to provide the answers; it covers creative and performing artists who have contributed as individuals to the culture of Canada in the twentieth century. Each volume in the series presents a cross-section of many different kinds of artists: authors of imaginative works, artists and sculptors, musicians (performers, composers, conductors, and directors), and performing artists in ballet, modern dance, radio, theatre, television, and motion pictures; directors, designers, and producers in theatre, cinema, radio, television, and the dance; choreographers and, for cinema, cartoonists and animators. Within each category of art is included a selection of those who have achieved national and international recognition; those who have been recognized locally, and some, now deceased, who markedly influenced their contemporaries locally, nationally, or internationally. This is not a critical compilation; rather it is an objective and factual reference work for those interested in contemporary Canadian culture. Information was collected by painstaking research in a wide variety of sources, and wherever possible it has been verified by the artist to make each entry as accurate and comprehensive as possible.
Allegories of Contamination
by Patrick RumbleThe Trilogia della vita (Trilogy of Life) is a series of three films that Pier Paolo Pasolini completed before his horrifying assassination in 1975, and it remains among the most controversial of his cinematic works. In Allegories of Contamination Patrick Rumble provides an incisive critical and theoretical study of these films and the Marxist filmmaker's complex, original concept of the cinematic medium.With the three films that make up the Trilogy of Life - The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights - Pasolini attempts to recapture the aura surrounding popular, predominantly oral forms of storytelling through a pro-modern vision of innocent, unalienated bodies and pleasures. In these works Pasolini appears to abandon the explicitly political engagement that marked his earlier works - films that led him to be identified with other radical filmmakers such as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, and Godard. However, Pasolini insisted that these were his 'most ideological films,' and his political engagement translates into a mannerist, anti-classical style or what he called a 'cinema of poetry.' Rumble offers a comparative study based on the concept of 'aesthetic contamination,' which is fundamental to the understanding of Pasolini's poetics. Aesthetic contamination concerns the mediation between different cultures and different historical moments. Through stylistic experimentation, the Trilogy of Life presents a genealogy of visual codes, an interrogation of the subjectivity of narrative cinema. In these films Pasolini celebrates life, and perhaps therein lies their simple heresy.
Take One's Essential Guide to Canadian Film
by Wyndham WiseTake One's Essential Guide to Canadian Film is the most exhaustive and up-to-date reference book on Canadian film and filmmakers, combining 700 reviews and biographical listings with a detailed chronology of major events in Canadian film and television history. Compiled by Wyndham Wise, the editor and publisher of Take One, Canada's most respected film magazine, with a foreword by Canadian director Patricia Rozema, this is the only reference book of its kind published in English. Each film title is listed with credits, a mini review, and significant awards. Biographical listings of directors, producers, actors, writers, animators, cinematographers, distributors, exhibitors, and independent filmmakers are accompanied by date and place of birth, date of death if applicable, a brief career overview, and a filmography. Wise celebrates Canadian achievement on both a national and an international scale, and juxtaposes the distinctly Canadian with Canada's exports to Hollywood: Maury Chaykin and Jim Carrey, John Candy and William Shatner, Mon Oncle Antoine and Porky's, Highway 61 and Meatballs, The Red Violin and The Art of War.From great early Hollywood stars like Walter Huston, Fay Wray, Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer, and Marie Dressler, to our current crop of star directors - including Patricia Rozema, Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Denys Arcand, Peter Mettler, Guy Maddin, and Robert Lepage - Canadians have made an important but largely unrecorded contribution to the history of world cinema. Impressive for its breadth of coverage, refreshing in its opinionated informality, this comprehensive and lively look at Canadian film culture at the start of the twenty-first century admirably fills the gap.
Candid Eyes
by Jeannette Sloniowski Jim LeachBeginning in 1922, when Robert Flaherty filmed 'Nanook of the North' in Canada's Arctic, and encouraged by John Grierson and the federal government in 1939 when they created the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), documentaries have dominated Canada's film production and, more than any other form, have been crucial to the formation of Canada's cinematic identity.Surprisingly, there has been very little critical writing on this distinguished body of work. Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries not only addresses this oversight in the scholarly literature, but in doing so, it presents an exceptional collection of essays by some of Canada's best known film scholars. Focusing on works produced in French and English under the NFB umbrella, the fourteen essays discuss and critique such landmark documentaries as 'Lonely Boy' (1962), 'Pour la suite du monde' (1963), and 'Kanehsatake' (1993). Long awaited and much needed, this volume will be an indispensable companion for anyone seriously interested in Canadian film studies.
On Location
by Serra TinicFilm and television production are important components of the Canadian economy. In Vancouver, popular American television series like The X-Files and Canadian series like Da Vinci's Inquest have boosted the city's profile as a centre for international and domestic productions. Serra Tinic's On Location is the first empirical analysis of regional Canadian television producers in the context of developing global media markets.Tinic observes that global television production in Vancouver has been a contradictory process that has, on one level, led to the homogenization of culturally specific storylines, while simultaneously facilitating the development of new avenues for international ventures. The author explains how federal and regional network considerations, funding guidelines, and partnerships with international co-producers affect the capacity of Canadian television producers to negotiate culturally specific storylines in the development process. She further interrogates the concepts of globalization, culture, and national identity, and their relationship to broadcasting from the perspectives of members of the television industry themselves, highlighting the extent to which industry practices in Vancouver epitomize current trends in global television production. On Location fills a major gap in contemporary media and cultural studies debates that question the connections between the politics of place, culture, and commerce within the larger context of cultural globalization.
Bruce McDonald's 'Hard Core Logo'
by Paul McewanConsistently ranked as one of the best Canadian movies of all time, punk-rock mockumentary Hard Core Logo (1996) documents the last-ditch reunion tour of an aging rock band led by vocalist Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon). Well received by critics at the time of its release, the film continues to enjoy a devoted international cult following.This entertaining analysis of Hard Core Logo explores many of the film's key themes, including the responsibility of documentary filmmakers to their subjects, the development of close male relationships, and the relationship between art and commerce in Canada, especially for touring musicians. Paul McEwan examines Hard Core Logo in the context of other adaptations of Michael Turner's 1993 novel of the same name, as well as against other films from McDonald's celebrated career. Featuring interviews with McDonald himself and others involved in the film, Bruce McDonald's 'Hard Core Logo' provides an engaging look at one of Canada's most mythologized movies.
Mafia Movies
by Dana RengaRico 'Little Caesar' Bandello, Michael Corleone, and Tony Soprano are just some of the onscreen mafia figures that have fascinated audiences since cinema's inception. Portrayals of the Italian and Italian-American mafia, though, have differed markedly over time and across multiple cultures--from the Godfather trilogy to contemporary Italian films, and in works both by established producers like Martin Scorsese and emerging directors like Matteo Garrone.Mafia Movies encourages mafia aficionados to explore the rich variety of classics and rarities within the genre with provocative analyses of over forty films. The essays in this volume provide a comprehensive exploration of the myth of the mafia onscreen, identifying key features and connections to styles such as film noir, thrillers, and even westerns. Mafia Movies also questions whether there are uniquely American or Italian ways of depicting the mafia, exploring how filmmakers from both countries have approached the subject in divergent ways.
Race under Reconstruction in German Cinema
by Angelica FennerRace Under Reconstruction in German Cinema investigates postwar racial formations via a pivotal West German film by one of the most popular and prolific directors of the era. The release of Robert Stemmle's Toxi (1952) coincided with the enrolment in West German schools of the first five hundred Afro-German children fathered by African-American occupation soldiers. The didactic plot traces the ideological conflicts that arise among members of a patrician family when they encounter an Afro-German child seeking adoption, herein broaching issues of integration at a time when the American civil rights movement was gaining momentum and encountering violent resistance.Perceptions of 'Blackness' in Toxi demonstrate continuities with those prevailing in Wilhelmine Germany, but also signal the influence of American social science discourse and tropes originating in icons of American popular culture, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Birth of a Nation, and several Shirley Temple films. By applying a Cultural Studies approach to individual film sequences, publicity photos, and press reviews, Angelica Fenner relates West German discourses around race and integration to emerging economic and political anxieties, class antagonism, and the reinstatement of conventional gender roles.The film Toxi is now available on DVD from the DEFA Film Library.
The Silvering Screen
by Sally ChiversPopular films have always included elderly characters, but until recently, old age only played a supporting role onscreen. Now, as the Baby Boomer population hits retirement, there has been an explosion of films, including Away From Her, The Straight Story, The Barbarian Invasions, and About Schmidt, where aging is a central theme.The first-ever sustained discussion of old age in cinema, The Silvering Screen brings together theories from disability studies, critical gerontology, and cultural studies, to examine how the film industry has linked old age with physical and mental disability. Sally Chivers further examines Hollywood's mixed messages - the applauding of actors who portray the debilitating side of aging, while promoting a culture of youth - as well as the gendering of old age on film. The Silvering Screen makes a timely attempt to counter the fear of aging implicit in these readings by proposing alternate ways to value getting older.
Donald Shebib's 'Goin' Down the Road'
by Geoff PevereSince its release in July 1970, Donald Shebib's low-budget road movie about displaced Maritimers in Toronto has become one of the most celebrated Canadian movies ever made. In this study of Goin' Down the Road, renowned film critic Geoff Pevere provides an engaging account of how a film produced under largely improvised circumstances became the most influential Canadian movie of its day as well as an enduring cultural touchstone.Featuring extensive interviews with the film's key participants, Pevere provides behind-the-scenes history and explores how the movie's meaning and interpretation have changed over time. He gives special attention to the question of why the film's creative mix of documentary techniques, road movie tropes, and social commentary have proven so popular and influential in Canadian filmmaking for decades.
John Walker's Passage
by Darrell VargaJohn Walker is one of Canada's most prolific and important documentary filmmakers and is known for his many thoughtful, personally inflected films. His masterwork, Passage, centres on Sir John Franklin's failed expedition to find the final link of the Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Canadian Arctic. It also gives us the story of John Rae, the Scottish explorer who discovered the fate of Franklin and the final link in the passage, but was left to the margins of history. Walker's film brings to this story a layering of dramatic action and behind-the-scenes documentary footage that build tension between the story of the past and interpretations of the present.Darrell Varga provides a close analysis of Passage, situating it within Walker's rich body of work and the Canadian documentary tradition. Varga illuminates how the film can be viewed through the lens of Harold Innis's theories of communication and culture, opening up the work of this great Canadian political economist to film studies.
Unruly Women
by Margaret BoyleIn the first in-depth study of the interconnected relationships among public theatre, custodial institutions, and women in early modern Spain, Margaret E. Boyle explores the contradictory practices of rehabilitation enacted by women both on and off stage. Pairing historical narratives and archival records with canonical and non-canonical theatrical representations of women's deviance and rehabilitation, Unruly Women argues that women's performances of penitence and punishment should be considered a significant factor in early modern Spanish life.Boyle considers both real-life sites of rehabilitation for women in seventeenth-century Madrid, including a jail and a magdalen house, and women onstage, where she identifies three distinct representations of female deviance: the widow, the vixen, and the murderess. Unruly Women explores these archetypal figures in order to demonstrate the ways a variety of playwrights comment on women's non-normative relationships to the topics of marriage, sex, and violence.
Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography
by Janice Hladki Sarah BrophyFrom reality television to film, performance, and video art, autobiography is everywhere in today's image-obsessed age. With contributions by both artists and scholars, Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography is a unique examination of visual autobiography's involvement in the global cultural politics of health, disability, and the body. This provocative collection looks at images of selfhood and embodiment in a variety of media and with a particular focus on bodily identities and practices that challenge the norm: a pregnant man in cyberspace, a fat activist performance troupe, indigenous artists intervening in museums, transnational selves who connect disability to war, and many more.The chapters in Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography reflect several different theoretical approaches but share a common concern with the ways in which visual culture can generate resistance, critique, and creative interventions. With contributions that investigate digital media, installation art, graphic memoir, performance, film, reality television, photography, and video art, the collection offers a wide-ranging critical account of what is clearly becoming one of the most important issues in contemporary culture.
Remembering Mass Violence
by Steven High Thi Ry Duong Edward LittleRemembering Mass Violence breaks new ground in oral history, new media, and performance studies by exploring what is at stake when we attempt to represent war, genocide, and other violations of human rights in a variety of creative works. A model of community-university collaboration, it includes contributions from scholars in a wide range of disciplines, survivors of mass violence, and performers and artists who have created works based on these events.This anthology is global in focus, with essays on Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. At its core is a productive tension between public and private memory, a dialogue between autobiography and biography, and between individual experience and societal transformation. Remembering Mass Violence will appeal to oral historians, digital practitioners and performance-based artists around the world, as well researchers and activists involved in human rights research, migration studies, and genocide studies.
Vicarious Kinks
by Ummni KhanWho decides where "normal" stops and "perverse" begins? In Vicarious Kinks, Ummni Khan looks at the mass of claims that film, feminism, the human sciences, and law make about sadomasochism and its practitioners, and the way those claims become the basis for the legal regulation of sadomasochist pornography and practice. Khan's audacious proposal is that for film, feminism, law, and science, the constant focus on taboo sexuality is a form of "vicarious kink" itself.Rather than attempt to establish the "truth" about sadomasochism, Vicarious Kinks asks who decides that sadomasochism is perverse, examining how various fields present their claims to truth when it comes to sadomasochism. The first monograph by a new scholar working at the juncture of law and sexuality, Vicarious Kinks challenges the myth of law as an objective adjudicator of sexual truth.
Unfinished Business
by Dana RengaUnfinished Business is the first book to examine Italian mafia cinema of the past decade. It provides insightful analyses of popular films that sensationalize violence, scapegoat women, or repress the homosexuality of male protagonists. Dana Renga examines these works through the lens of gender and trauma theory to show how the films engage with the process of mourning and healing mafia-related trauma in Italy.Unfinished Business argues that trauma that has yet to be worked through on the national level is displaced onto the characters in the films under consideration. In a mafia context, female characters are sacrificed and non-normative sexual identities are suppressed in order to solidify traditional modes of viewer identification and to assure narrative closure, all so that the image of the nation is left unblemished.
John Fawcett's Ginger Snaps
by Ernest MathijsFew studies of Canadian cinema to date have engaged deeply with genre cinema and its connection to Canadian culture. Ernest Mathijs does just that in this volume, which traces the inception, production, and reception of Canada's internationally renowned horror film, Ginger Snaps (2000). This tongue-in-cheek Gothic film, which centres on two death-obsessed teenage sisters, draws a provocative connection between werewolf monstrosity and female adolescence and boasts a dedicated world-wide fan base.The first book-length study of this popular film, John Fawcett's Ginger Snaps is based on the author's privileged access to most of its cast and crew and to its enthusiasts around the world. Examining themes of genre, feminism, identity, and adolescent belonging, Mathijs concludes that Ginger Snaps deserves to be recognized as part of the Canadian canon, and that it is a model example of the kind of crossover cult film that remains unjustly undervalued by film scholars.
The Sopranos
by Franco RicciOften hailed as one of the greatest television series of all time, The Sopranos is a product of its time, firmly embedded in the problems of post-industrial, post-ethnic America. In The Sopranos: Born under a Bad Sign, Franco Ricci examines the groundbreaking HBO series and its impact as a cultural phenomenon.Ricci demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of the series, the genre, and their social context in his analysis of the show's complex themes and characters. He explores The Sopranos' deep engagement with problems of race, class, gender, and identity, specifically in its portrayal of the Italian-American experience, consumer and media-driven society, and contemporary psychosocial issues. The series' protagonist, Mafia boss and patriarch Tony Soprano, in many ways embodies the anxieties of our age. Focusing on Tony's internal struggles and interactions with his therapist, family, and associates, Ricci traces this archetypal character's existential conflicts and sheds light on his search for self, connection, and meaning.Comprehensive in scope and sophisticated in approach, The Sopranos: Born under a Bad Sign is richly rewarding reading for anyone with an interest in the popular television drama, both as entertainment and social commentary.
Hamilton Babylon
by Stephen BroomerFounded in 1966 at McMaster University by avant-garde filmmaker John Hofsess and future frat-comedy innovator Ivan Reitman, the McMaster Film Board was a milestone in the development of Canada's commercial and experimental film communities. McMaster's student film society quickly became the site of art filmmaking and an incubator for some of the country's most famous commercial talent - as the well as the birthplace of the first Canadian film to lead to obscenity charges, Hofsess's Columbus of Sex.In Hamilton Babylon, Stephen Broomer traces the history of the MFB from its birth as an organization for producing and exhibiting avant-garde films, through its transformation into a commercial-industrial enterprise, and into its final decline as a show business management style suppressed many of its voices. The first book to highlight the work of Hofsess, an innovative filmmaker whose critical role in the MFB has been almost entirely eclipsed by Reitman's legend, Hamilton Babylon is a fascinating study of the tension between art and business in the growth of the Canadian film industry.
OuterSpeares
by Daniel FischlinFor Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptation, the global digital media environment is a "brave new world" of opportunity and revolution. In OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, noted scholars of Shakespeare and new media consider the ways in which various media affect how we understand Shakespeare and his works.Daniel Fischlin and his collaborators explore a wide selection of adaptations that occupy the space between and across traditional genres - what artist Dick Higgins calls "intermedia" - ranging from adaptations that use social networking, cloud computing, and mobile devices to the many handicrafts branded and sold in connection with the Bard.With essays on YouTube and iTunes, as well as radio, television, and film, OuterSpeares is the first book to examine the full spectrum of past and present adaptations, and one that offers a unique perspective on the transcultural and transdisciplinary aspects of Shakespeare in the contemporary world.