Cinemas Off Centre - Böcker

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was created in 1939 to produce, distribute, and promote Canadian cinema both domestically and abroad. During the early years of the NFB, its creative output was largely informed by the turbulent political and social climate the world was facing. World War II, Communism, unemployment, the role of labour unions, and working conditions were all subjects featured by the NFB during the period from 1939 to 1946. In Filming Politics, author Malek Khouri explores the work of the NFB during this period and argues that the political discourse of the films produced by this institution offered a counter-hegemonic portrayal of working class people and presented them as agents of social change. These films also saw an organic link between Canadian struggles for social progress, in the war against fascism and for peace, and those promoted at the time by the Soviet Union. Khouri also analyzes the various social, institutional, and political elements that contributed to the formation of the NFB's discourse. Filming Politics brings to light a number of films from the early years of the NFB, most of which have long been forgotten. Khouri presents a thorough reading of these films and the historical context within which they were produced and viewed. As such he proposes a radically new outlook on the films from how they have been appropriated in previous studies on Canadian cinema.

This is an exciting new collection sure to create ripples throughout Canadian film studies - an important new addition to the literature on Canadian screen culture. Zoë Druick, School of Communication, Simon Fraser UniversityRain/Drizzle/Fog is the first scholarly study of film and television in Atlantic Canada. With contributors from across the country, the book provides a broad historical overview of film and television in the region, as well as essays on specific topics in contemporary popular television (Trailer Park Boys), early television (Don Messer's Jubilee), and the work of filmmakers such as Bill MacGillivray, Andrea Dorfman, Thom Fitzgerald, and others.This collection is informed by a critical perspective on prevailing stereotypes of culture in the Atlantic region, as well as by history and political-economy debates on the relationship between Atlantic and central Canada. It is also in large part a response to the continued marginalization of regional film and television within the field of Canadian film studies, which has traditionally been dominated by a critical and artistic canon from central Canada and Quebec.Rain/Drizzle/Fog challenges the prevailing tendency to homogenize the complexity of Canadian cultural production and instead celebrates the regional distinctions that make Atlantic film and television unique.

Revisioning Europe is among the few existing English-language discussions of the films made by British novelist John Berger and Swiss film director Alain Tanner. It brings to light a political cinema that was unsentimental about the possibilities of revolutionary struggle and unsparing in its critique of the European left, and at the same time optimistic about the ability of radicalism - and radical art - to transform the world.Jerry White argues that Berger and Tanner's work is preoccupied with ideas that were both central to the Enlightenment and at the same time characteristically Swiss. Translations of previously unpublished essays by both John Berger and Alain Tanner are included as appendices.