Darrell Varga – författare

Atlantic Canada has a rich tradition of storytelling and creativity that has extended to critical and audience praise for films from the region's four provinces. Until now there has been no comprehensive history of this diverse body of work. In Shooting from the East, Darrell Varga traces the emergence of art cinema in the 1970s and '80s, and subsequent rise of a contemporary commercial feature film and television industry by way of representative examples of a great range of titles, including The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood, Life Classes, The Disappeared, and Trailer Park Boys. He provides analysis of documentary filmmaking to emphasize concerns such as the establishment of the regional National Film Board studio and the influence of broadcast policy, but also considers significant recurring themes including the environment, the body, race and First Nations, and the North. Through critical analyses of key films and interviews conducted with filmmakers from all corners of the region, Varga uncovers patterns of meaning across diverse productions and interrogates the concept of region in relation to prevailing notions of national cinema and transnational media culture. With a focus on short films and an extensive history and analysis of the filmmaking production co-operatives located in each province, Shooting from the East sheds light on the creative processes and local economic and cultural conditions for making images on the edge of the Atlantic.

As themes in film studies literature, work and the working class have long occupied a peripheral place in the evaluation of Canadian cinema, often set aside in the critical literature for the sake of a unifying narrative that assumes a division between Québécois and English Canada's film production, a social-realist documentary aesthetic, and what might be called a 'younger brother' relationship with the United States.In Working on Screen, contributors examine representations of socio-economic class across the spectrum of Canadian film, video, and television, covering a wide range of class-related topics and dealing with them as they intersect with history, political activism, globalization, feminism, queer rights, masculinity, regional marginalization, cinematic realism, and Canadian nationalism.Of concern in this collection are the daily lives and struggles of working people and the ways in which the representation of the experience of class in film fosters or marginalizes a progressive engagement with history, politics, and societies around the world. Working on Screen thus expands the scholarly debates on the concept of national cinema and builds on the rich, formative efforts of Canadian cultural criticism that held dear the need for cultural autonomy. Contributors:Bart BeatyScott ForsythMargot Francis David FrankMalek KhouriJoseph Kispal-KovacsAndre LoiselleBrenda LongfellowSusan LordJohn McCulloughRebecca SullivanPeter Urquhart Darrell VargaThomas Waugh

John Walker is one of Canada's most prolific and important documentary filmmakers and is known for his many thoughtful, personally inflected films. His masterwork, Passage, centres on Sir John Franklin's failed expedition to find the final link of the Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Canadian Arctic. It also gives us the story of John Rae, the Scottish explorer who discovered the fate of Franklin and the final link in the passage, but was left to the margins of history. Walker's film brings to this story a layering of dramatic action and behind-the-scenes documentary footage that build tension between the story of the past and interpretations of the present.Darrell Varga provides a close analysis of Passage, situating it within Walker's rich body of work and the Canadian documentary tradition. Varga illuminates how the film can be viewed through the lens of Harold Innis's theories of communication and culture, opening up the work of this great Canadian political economist to film studies.