Essays On Quebec Cinema

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.

Since the defeat of the pro-sovereigntists in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the loss of a cohesive nationalistic vision in the province has led many Québécois to use their ancestral origins to inject meaning into their everyday lives. A Cinema of Pain argues that this phenomenon is observable in a pervasive sense of nostalgia in Quebec culture and is especially present in the province’s vibrant but deeply wistful cinema. In Québécois cinema, nostalgia not only denotes a sentimental longing for the bucolic pleasures of bygone French-Canadian traditions, but, as this edited collection suggests, it evokes the etymological sense of the term, which underscores the element of pain (algos) associated with the longing for a return home (nostos). Whether it is in grandiloquent historical melodramas such as Séraphin: un homme et son péché (Binamé 2002), intimate realist dramas like Tout ce que tu possèdes (Émond 2012), charming art films like C.R.A.Z.Y. (Vallée 2005), or even gory horror movies like Sur le Seuil (Tessier 2003), the contemporary Québécois screen projects an image of shared suffering that unites the nation through a melancholy search for home.

Long recognized for outstanding National Film Board documentaries and innovative animated movies, Canada has recently emerged from the considerable shadow of the Hollywood elephant with a series of feature films that have captured the attention of audiences around the world. This is the first anthology to focus on Canada's feature films - those acknowledged as its very best. With essays by senior academics and leading scholars from across the country as well as some fresh new voices, Canada's Best Features offers penetrating analyses of fifteen award-winning films. Internationally acclaimed directors David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand, and Claude Jutra are represented here. Noteworthy films include Mon oncle Antoine, often cited as Canada's number one film of all time, such Cannes Festival favourites as Le déclin de l'empire américain and Exotica, and cult films Careful by Guy Maddin and Masala by Srinivas Krishna. The essays offer the latest word on these films and filmmakers, done from a variety of perspectives. Some of the films have never been examined in-depth before. Complete filmographies and bibliographies accompany each essay. A contextualizing introduction by Professor Gene Walz provides the necessary overview. An annotated bibliography of books on the Canadian film industry completes this impressive package.

Beginning 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.

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.

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.

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.