Film and the City The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema

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.

About the Author

George Melnyk is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. He has published a number of books on Canadian cinema, including One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (2004), Great Canadian Film Directors (2007), The Young, the Restless, and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers (2008), and The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers (2010).

Table of Contents

1. Acknowledgements
2. Introduction
   The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema
3. 1. The City of Faith
   Navigating Piety in Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989)
4. 2. The City of Dreams
   The Sexual Self in Lauzon’s Léolo (1992)
5. 3. The Gendered City
   Feminism in Rozema’s Desperanto (1991), Pool’s Rispondetemi (1991), and
   Villeneuve’s Maelström (2000)
6. 4. The City Made Flesh
   The Embodied Other in Lepage’s Le Confessionnal (1995) and Egoyan’s Exotica (1994)
7. 5. The Diasporic City
   Postcolonialism, Hybridity, and Transnationality in Virgo’s Rude (1995) and Mehta’s
   Bollywood/Hollywood (2001)
8. 6. The City of Transgressive Desires
   Melodramatic Absurdity in Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World (2003) and My Winnipeg (2007)
9. 7. The City of Eternal Youth
   Capitalism, Consumerism, and Generation in Burns’s waydowntown (2000) and Radiant City (2006)
10. 8. The City of Dysfunction
    Race and Relations in Vancouver from Shum’s Double Happiness (1994) to Sweeney’s
    Last Wedding (2001) and McDonald’s The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess (2004)
11. Conclusion
    National Identity and the Urban Imagination
12. Notes / Bibliography / Index

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