Quebec National Cinema

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.

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.

Publisher Description

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.

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 Confessional Mon Oncle Antoine, Grey Fox, Highway 61, Kanehsatake, and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.

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.

Making a significant advance in the study of the film industry of the period, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s is also an ideal text for students, researchers, and Canadian film enthusiasts.