Essays on Quebec Cinema


Book Description

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.




The Cinema of Canada


Book Description

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.




One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema


Book Description

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.




Canadian National Cinema


Book Description

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.




Quebec National Cinema


Book Description

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.




Cinema as History


Book Description

With a career spanning more than five decades, director and cinematographer Michel Brault is one of the most influential figures in Québécois cinema. Cinema as History: Michel Brault and Modern Quebec is André Loiselle’s study of his life and his work. Brault’s early works, including Les Raquetteurs (co-directed with Gilles Groulx) and Pour la Suite du Monde (co-directed with Pierre Perrault) reflected a hitherto unacknowledged and unfulfilled need on the part of Québécois society to see their own culture reflected onscreen—and helped spark a cultural renaissance in Quebec. His 1974 fiction feature Les Ordres, which deals with the FLQ crisis and the invocation of the War Measures Act by then prime minister Pierre Trudeau, has consistently been listed as one of the best Québécois and Canadian films. Brault’s work as cinematographer has been equally essential, with groundbreaking films like Claude Jutra’s Mon Oncle Antoine (1971) and Francis Mankiewicz’s Les Bons Débarras (1980). He was a key contributor to the development of the cinema-verité movement, serving as cinematographer on French director Jean Rouch’s legendary Chronique dun Été (1961). André Loiselle’s study of Brault’s work and career moves beyond traditional auteurist studies to explore how Brault’s work reflected (and in some cases helped instigate) changes in Quebec society over four decades. More than any other filmmaker, Brault managed to capture the culture’s zeitgeist. Distributed in Canada by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Distributed outside Canada by Indiana University Press.




The Films of Denys Arcand


Book Description

Denys Arcand is best known outside Canada for three films that were nominated for Academy Awards for Best Foreign-Language Film: The Decline of the American Empire (1986), Jesus of Montreal (1989), and The Barbarian Invasions (2003), the last of which won the Award. Yet Arcand has been making films since the early 1960s. When he started making films, Quebec was rapidly transforming from a relatively homogeneous community, united by its Catholic faith and French language and culture, into a more fragmented modern society. The Films of Denys Arcand sheds light on how Arcand addressed the impact of these changes from the 1960s, when the long-drawn-out debate on Quebec's possible separation from the rest of Canada began, to the present, in which the traditional cultural heritage has been further fragmented by the increasing presence of diasporic communities. His career and films offer an ideal case study for exploring the contradictions and tensions that have shaped Quebec cinema and culture in a period of increasing globalization and technological change.




ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan


Book Description

Ever since his first feature film I Killed My Mother premiered at Cannes, every film from the 29-year-old director Xavier Dolan has generated significant critical interest. A recipient of numerous awards, Dolan has recently taken his career to an international level with The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. As the first book-length study about Dolan, with case studies of key films like Mommy (2014), Tom at the Farm (2013) and It's Only the End of the World (2016), this volume explores the global reach of small national and subnational cinemas. In particular, it uses Dolan's cinema as a departure point to reconsider the position of Qubec film and cultural imaginary within a global cinematic culture, as well as the intersections between national, millennial and queer filmmaking.




Pierre Perrault and the Poetic Documentary


Book Description

One of the great exponents of the direct cinema style, Quebecois poet, essayist, and film-maker Pierre Perrault (1927-1999) began his documentary career in radio before joining the more traditional Ren’e Bonni’ere filming life in the lower St. Lawrence. In the 1960s he joined the National Film Board of Canada to shoot films in the new direct style, taking a small two-man crew into communities to reveal their beliefs and allegiances as they coped with social change. His legendary trilogy on the Ile-aux-Coudres opened with his most famous work, Pour la suite du monde (1963). Ostensibly a look at the local people’s effort to revive a traditional beluga hunt, it is actually the beginning of a lifelong inquiry into the relationship between community and national identity. This relationship emerges most clearly in the highly poetic Un pays sans bon sens! (1970), which brought Perrault into conflict with the NFB. The film was sidelined for many years. After a trip outside Quebec to Moncton to document francophone student unrest, Perrault made a second trilogy, this one in northwestern Quebec, showing the collapse of traditional farming communities relocated to the Abitibi during the Great Depression. Further explorations took Perrault to the northern interiors of Quebec, the hunting woods of Maniwaki, and to the tall ships retracing Jacques Cartier’s voyages of discovery. The triology culminated in the desolate arctic landscapes of the mysterious muskox, and two of his most haunting creations. The first major publication on Perrault in English, Pierre Perrault and the Poetic Documentary discusses not only the world that Perrault’s cinema revealed but a revolution in film-making from a great poet. Co-written and edited by David Clandfield, Principal of New College in the University of Toronto, Pierre Perrault and the Poetic Documentary also features contributions from scholar Jerry White, as well as translations of some of Perrault’s writings on film. Published by the Toronto International Film Festival. Distributed in Canada by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Distributed outside Canada by Indiana University Press.




Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century


Book Description

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.