Essays on Quebec Cinema weaves together the reflections of filmmakers and scholars from Canada, the United States, and Great Britain as they move to a fresh assessment of one of the most dynamic film industries in the Western Hemisphere.
Quebecois cinema, too long neglected and too long unknown by American viewers, and often not appreciated on its own terrain, receives its well-deserved defense in Janis L. Pallister's The Cinema of Quebec: Masters in Their Own House.
Containing 24 essays, each on a different film, this work provides a fascinating historical account of the development of film and documentary traditions across the diverse national and regional communities in Canada.
In Quebec National Cinema Bill Marshall tackles the question of the role cinema plays in Quebec's view of itself as a nation. Surveying mostly fictional feature films, Marshall demonstrates how Quebec cinema has evolved from the innovative direct cinema of the early 1960s into the diverse canvas of popular comedies, glossy co-productions, and reworked auteur cinema of the postmodern 1990s. He explores the faultlines of Quebec identity - its problematic and contradictory relationship with France, the question of Native peoples, the influence of the cosmopolitan and pluralist city of Montreal, and the encounters between sexuality, gender, and nation traced and critiqued in women's and queer cinemas. In the first comprehensive, theoretically informed work in English on Quebec cinema, Marshall views his subject as neither the assertion of some unproblematic national wholeness nor a random collection of disparate voices that drown out or invalidate the question of nation. Instead, he shows that while the allegory of nation marks Quebec film production it also leads to a tension between textual and contextual forces, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, and between major and minor modes of being and identity. Drawing on a broad framework of theory and particularly indebted to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Quebec National Cinema makes a valuable contribution to debates in film studies on national cinemas and to the burgeoning interest in French studies in the culture and politics of la francophonie. Bill Marshall is professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Glasgow. He has written several books and numerous articles on film and Francophone culture.
This collection of ten chapters and three original interviews with Québécois filmmakers focuses on the past two decades of Quebec cinema and takes an in-depth look at a (primarily) Montreal-based filmmaking industry whose increasingly diverse productions continue to resist the hegemony of Hollywood and to exist as a visible and successful hub of French-language – and ever more multilingual – cinema in North America. This volume picks up where Bill Marshall’s 2001 Quebec National Cinema ends to investigate the inherently global nature of Quebec’s film industry and cinematic output since the beginning of the new millennium. Through their analyses of contemporary films (Une colonie, Avant les rues, Bon cop, bad cop, Les Affamés, Tom à la ferme, Uvanga, among others), directors (including Xavier Dolan, Denis Côté, Sophie Desrape, Chloé Robichaud, Jean-Marc Vallée, and Monia Chokri) and genres (such as the buddy comedy and the zombie film), our authors examine the growing tension between Quebec cinema as a “national cinema” and as an art form that reflects the transnationalism of today’s world, a new form of fluidity of individual experiences, and an increasing on-screen presence of Indigenous subjects, both within and outside the borders of the province. The book concludes with specially conducted interviews with filmmakers Denis Chouinard, Bachir Bensadekk, and Marie-Hélène Cousineau, who provide their views and insights on contemporary Quebec filmmaking.
Melnyk argues passionately that Canadian cinema has never been a singular entity, but has continued to speak in the languages and in the voices of Canada's diverse population.
Documentaries have dominated Canada's film production and have been crucial to the formation of Canada's cinematic identity. This volume will be an indispensable companion for anyone seriously interested in Canadian film studies.
Canadian National Cinema explores the idea of the nation across Canada's film history, from early films of colonisation and white settlement such as The Wheatfields of Canada and Back to God's Country, to recent films like Nô, LE ConfessionalMon Oncle Antoine, Grey Fox, Highway 61, Kanehsatake, and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.
The Cinema of Robert Lepage is the first critical study of one of the most striking artists of Quebecois and Canadian independent filmmaking. The book examines Lepage's creative methods of filmmaking in their cultural and social context and argues that his work cannot be seen separately from his oeuvre as a multidisciplinary artist and challenges the notions that Lepage should be considered only in the terms of Quebecois film tradition. The author explores such themes with Lepage in a new exclusive and detailed interview.
This extensive bibliography and reference guide is an invaluable resource for researchers, practitioners, students, and anyone with an interest in Canadian film and video. With over 24,500 entries, of which 10,500 are annotated, it opens up the literature devoted to Canadian film and video, at last making it readily accessible to scholars and researchers. Drawing on both English and French sources, it identifies books, catalogues, government reports, theses, and periodical and newspaper articles from Canadian and non-Canadian publications from the first decade of the twentieth century to 1989. The work is bilingual; descriptive annotations are presented in the language(s) of the original publication. Canadian Film and Video / Film et vidéo canadiens provides an in-depth guide to the work of over 4000 individuals working in film and video and 5000 films and videos. The entries in Volume I cover topics such as film types, the role of government, laws and legislation, censorship, festivals and awards, production and distribution companies, education, cinema buildings, women and film, and video art. A major section covers filmmakers, video artists, cinematographers, actors, producers, and various other film people. Volume II presents an author index, a film and video title index, and a name and subject index. In the tradition of the highly acclaimed publication Art and Architecture in Canada these volumes fill a long-standing need for a comprehensive reference tool for Canadian film and video. This bibliography guides and supports the work of film historians and practitioners, media librarians and visual curators, students and researchers, and members of the general public with an interest in film and video.