Film and Media Studies – serie

Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television, the first anthology dedicated to analyses of Canadian television content, is a collection of original, interdisciplinary articles, combining textual analysis and political economy of communications. It explores the television that has thrived in the Canadian regulatory and cultural context: namely, programs that straddle the border between reality and fiction or even blur it. The conceptual basis of this collection is the hybrid nature of television fare: the widely theorized notion that all mediations of reality involve fiction in the form of narrative or symbolic shaping. Each of the contributions here is a reminder, too, of the significant relationship of television to nation building in Canada - to the imaginative work involved in thinking through the relations that constitute nations, citizens, and communities. The collection focuses on English-language Canadian television because the imperatives guiding its texts are markedly different from those pertaining to their French-lanugage counterparts. The collection, therefore, develops a nuance of perspective on the cultural and political economic specificities that inform the imaginative work of television production for English Canada.

He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western explores the construction and representation of masculinity in low-budget western movies made from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These films contained some of the mid-twentieth-century's most familiar names, especially for youngsters: cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Red Ryder. The first serious study of a body of films that was central to the youth of two generations, He Was Some Kind of a Man combines the author's childhood fascination with this genre with an interdisciplinary scholarly exploration of the films influence on modern views of masculinity. McGillis argues that the masculinity offered by these films is less one-dimensional than it is plural, perhaps contrary to expectations. Their deeply conservative values are edged with transgressive desire, and they construct a male figure who does not fit into binary categories, such as insider/outsider or masculine/feminine. Particularly relevant is the author's discussion of George W. Bush as a cowboy and how his aspirations to cowboy ideals continue to shape American policy. This engagingly written book will appeal to the general reader interested in film, westerns, and contemporary culture as well as to scholars in film studies, gender studies, children's literature, and auto/biography.

This book is the first major study of Canadian women filmmakers since the groundbreaking Gendering the Nation (1999). The Gendered Screen updates the subject with discussions of important filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta, Anne Wheeler, Mina Shum, Lynne Stopkewich, Léa Pool, and Patricia Rozema, whose careers have produced major bodies of work. It also introduces critical studies of newer filmmakers such as Andrea Dorfman and Sylvia Hamilton and new media video artists. Feminist scholars are re-examining the ways in which authorship, nationality, and gender interconnect. Contributors to this volume emphasize a diverse feminist study of film that is open, inclusive, and self-critical. Issues of hybridity and transnationality as well as race and sexual orientation challenge older forms of discourse on national cinema. Essays address the transnational filmmaker, the queer filmmaker, the feminist filmmaker, the documentarist, and the video artist - just some of the diverse identities of Canadian women filmmakers working in both commercial and art cinema today.

During the last decade, contemporary German and Austrian cinema has grappled with new social and economic realities. The ""cinema of consensus,"" a term coined to describe the popular and commercially oriented filmmaking of the 1990s, has given way to a more heterogeneous and critical cinema culture. Making the greatest artistic impact since the 1970s, contemporary cinema is responding to questions of globalization and the effects of societal and economic change on the individual. This book explores this trend by investigating different thematic and aesthetic strategies and alternative methods of film production and distribution. Functioning both as a product and as an agent of globalizing processes, this new cinema mediates and influences important political and social debates. The contributors illuminate these processes through their analyses of cinema's intervention in discourses on such concepts as ""national cinema,"" the effects of globalization on social mobility, and the emergence of a ""global culture."" The essays illustrate the variety and inventiveness of contemporary Austrian and German filmmaking and highlight the complicated interdependencies between global developments and local specificities. They confirm a broader trend toward a more complex, critical, and formally diverse cinematic scene. This book offers insights into the strategies employed by German and Austrian filmmakers to position themselves between the commercial pressures of the film industry and the desire to mediate or even attempt to affect social change. It will be of interest to scholars in film studies, cultural studies, and European studies.

""My name is Joe, and I AM Canadian!"" How did a beer ad featuring an unassuming guy in a plaid shirt become a national anthem? This book about Canadian TV examines how affect and consumption work together, producing national practices framed by the television screen. Drawing on the new field of affect theory, Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect tracks the ways that ideas about the Canadian nation flow from screen to audience and then from body to body. From the most recent Quebec referendum to 9/11 and current news coverage of the so-called ""terrorist threat,"" media theorist Marusya Bociurkiw argues that a significant intensifying of nationalist content on Canadian television became apparent after 1995. Close readings of TV shows and news items such as Canada: A People's History, North of 60, and coverage of the funeral of Pierre Trudeau reveal how television works to resolve the imagined community of nation, as well as the idea of a national self and national others, via affect. Affect theory, with its notions of changeability, fluidity, and contagion, is, the author argues, well suited to the study of television and its audience. Useful for scholars and students of media studies, communications theory, and national television and for anyone interested in Canadian popular culture, this highly readable book fills the need for critical scholarly analysis of Canadian television's nationalist practices.

Beyond Bylines: Media Workers and Women's Rights in Canada explores the ways in which several of Canada's women journalists, broadcasters, and other media workers reached well beyond the glory of their personal bylines to advocate for the most controversial women's rights of their eras. To do so, some of them adopted conventional feminine identities, while others refused to conform altogether, openly and defiantly challenging the gender expectations of their day. The book consists of a series of case studies of the women in question as they grappled with the concerns close to their hearts: higher education for women, healthy dress reforms, the vote, equal opportunities at work, abortion, lesbianism, and Aboriginal women's rights. Their media reflected their respective eras: intellectual magazines, daily and weekly newspapers, radio, feminist public relations, alternative women's periodicals, and documentary film made for television. Barbara Freeman takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining biography, history, and communication studies to demonstrate how their use of different media both enabled and limited these women in their ability to be daring advocates for gender equality. She shows how a number of these women were linked through the generations by their memberships in activist women's organizations.

From the dawn of cinema, images of Indigenous peoples have been dominated by Hollywood stereotypes and often negative depictions from elsewhere around the world. With the advent of digital technologies, however, many Indigenous peoples are working to redress the imbalance in numbers and counter the negativity. The contributors to Reverse Shots offer a unique scholarly perspective on current work in the world of Indigenous film and media. Chapters focus primarily on Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and cover areas as diverse as the use of digital technology in the creation of Aboriginal art, the healing effects of Native humour in First Nations documentaries, and the representation of the pre-colonial in films from Australia, Canada, and Norway.

Canadian Television: Text and Context explores the creation and circulation of entertainment television in Canada from the interdisciplinary perspective of television studies. Each chapter connects arguments about particular texts of Canadian television to critical analysis of the wider cultural, social, and economic contexts in which they are created. The book surveys the commercial and technological imperatives of the Canadian television industry, the shifting role of the CBC as Canada's public broadcaster, the dynamics of Canada's multicultural and multiracial audiences, and the function of television's ""star system."" Foreword by The Globe and Mail's television critic, John Doyle.

What do images of the body, which recent poets and filmmakers have given us, tell us about ourselves, about the way we think and about the culture in which we live? In his new book A Body of Vision, R. Bruce Elder situates contemporary poetic and cinematic body images in their cultural context. Elder examines how recent artists have tried to recognize and to convey primordial forms of experiences. He proposes the daring thesis that in their efforts to do so, artists have resorted to gnostic models of consciousness. He argues that the attempt to convey these primordial modes of awareness demands a different conception of artistic meaning from any of those that currently dominate contemporary critical discussion. By reworking theories and speech in highly original ways, Elder formulates this new conception. The works of Brakhage, Artaud, Schneeman, Cohen and others lie naked under Elder's razor-sharp dissecting knife and he exposes the essence of their work, cutting deeply into the themes and theses from which the works are derived. His remarks on the gaps in contemporary critical practices will likely become the focus of much debate.

The Radio Eye: Cinema in the North Atlantic, 1958-1988, examines the way in which media experiments in Quebec, Newfoundland, the Faroe Islands, and the Irish-Gaelic-speaking communities of Ireland use film, video, and television to advocate for marginalized communities and often for ""smaller languages."" The Radio Eye is not, however, a set of isolated case studies. Author Jerry White illustrates the degree to which these experiments are interconnected, sometimes implicitly but more often quite explicitly. Media makers in the North Atlantic during the period 1958-1988 were very aware of each other's cultures and aspirations, and, by structuring the book in two interlocking parts, White illustrates the degree to which a common project emerged during those three decades. The book is bound together by White's belief that these experiments are following in the idealism of Soviet silent filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who wrote about his notion of ""the Radio Eye."" White also puts these experiments in the context of work by the Cuban filmmaker and theorist Julio García Espinosa and his notion of ""imperfect cinema,"" Jürgen Habermas and his notions of the ""public sphere,"" and Édourard Glissant's ideas about ""créolité"" as the defining aspect of modern culture. This is a genuinely internationalist moment, and these experiments are in conversation with a wide array of thought across a number of languages.

This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema's lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film's provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life. This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media's materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author's previous, Harmony & Dissent , examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.

The artistic impact of Jean-Luc Godard, whose career in cinema has spanned over fifty years and yielded a hundred or more discrete works in different media cannot be overestimated, not only on French and other world cinemas, but on fields as diverse as television, video art, gallery installation, philosophy, music, literature, and dance.The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard marks an initial attempt to map the range and diversity of Godard's impact across these different fields. It contains reassessments of key films like Vivre sa vie and Passion as well as considerations of Godard's influence over directors like Christophe Honoré. Contributors look at Godard's relation to philosophy and influence over film philosophy through reference to Wittgenstein, Deleuze, and Cavell, and show how Godard's work in cinema interacts with other arts, such as painting, music, and dance. They suggest that Godard's late work makes important contributions to debates in memory and Holocaust Studies.The volume will appeal to a non-specialist audience with its discussions of canonical films and treatment of themes popular within film studies programs such as cinema and ethics. But it will also attract academic specialists on Godard with its chapters on recent works, including Dans le noir du temps (2002) and Voyage(s) en utopie (2006), interventions in long-running academic debates (Godard, the Holocaust, and anti- Semitism), and treatment of rarely discussed areas of Godard's work (choreographed movement).

The first serious book-length study of crime writing in Canada, Detecting Canada contains thirteen essays on many of Canada's most popular crime writers, including Peter Robinson, Giles Blunt, Gail Bowen, Thomas King, Michael Slade, Margaret Atwood, and Anthony Bidulka. Genres examined range from the well-loved police procedural and the amateur sleuth to those less well known, such as anti-detection and contemporary noir novels. The book looks critically at the esteemed sixties' television show Wojeck, as well as the more recent series Da Vinci's Inquest, Da Vinci's City Hall, and Intelligence, and the controversial Durham County, a critically acclaimed but violent television series that ran successfully in both Canada and the United States.The essays in Detecting Canada look at texts from a variety of perspectives, including postcolonial studies, gender and queer studies, feminist studies, Indigenous studies, and critical race and class studies. Crime fiction, enjoyed by so many around the world, speaks to all of us about justice, citizenship, and important social issues in an uncertain world.

Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville are among the most important postwar filmmakers; they have worked across forms, across media, and across countries. This book, the first to be devoted specifically to the work they did together, examines the way they expanded the possibilities of cinema by using cutting-edge video equipment in a constant search for a new kind of filmmaking.Two Bicycles examines all of the films, videos, and television works that the two did together, and moves slowly across France and Switzerland, with detours in Quebec, Mozambique, and Palestine. Their amazingly varied body of work includes a twelve-hour television series, some experimental videos, an acclaimed feature film with Isabelle Huppert, a cigarette commercial, and much else. Overall the book shows the degree to which this work departs radically from the legacy of the French New Wave, and in many ways shows signs of having been formed by the distinct culture of Switzerland, to which Godard and Miéville returned in the 1970s to set up their ""atelier,"" Sonimage.Two Bicycles offers a chance to explore a body of work that is as unique and demanding as it is rich and revelatory. Godard and Miéville have worked together for four decades but have never seemed more relevant.

Largely forgotten during the last 20 years of his life, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) has occupied a singular and often controversial position over the past sixty years as a founding figure of documentary, avant-garde, and political-propaganda film practice. Creator of Man with a Movie Camera (1929), perhaps the most celebrated non-fiction film ever made, Vertov is equally renowned as the most militant opponent of the canons of mainstream filmmaking in the history of cinema. This book, the first in a three-volume study, addresses Vertov's youth in the largely Jewish city of Bialystok, his education in Petrograd, his formative years of involvement in filmmaking, his experiences during the Russian Civil War, and his interests in music, poetry and technology.

The first fifteen years of the twenty-first century have been an exciting transitional period in Russian cinema, as the industry recovered from the crises of the late 1990s and again stepped onto the global stage. During these years four generations, from the late Soviet directors through post-Soviet and New Russian filmmakers to the Russian millennials, have worked in varying visual styles and with diverse narrative strategies, while searching for a new cinematic language. Financing and distribution models have evolved, along with conservative politics driving Ministry of Culture regulation. This reader is intended both for contemporary Russian cinema courses and for modern Russian culture courses that emphasize film. It does not attempt to establish a canon for the period but seeks to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to significant Russian films released between 2005 and 2016 that are also available with English subtitles. The twenty-one essays on individual films provide background information on directors’ careers, detailed analyses of selected films, along with suggested further readings both in English and Russian.

The first fifteen years of the twenty-first century have been an exciting transitional period in Russian cinema, as the industry recovered from the crises of the late 1990s and again stepped onto the global stage. During these years four generations, from the late Soviet directors through post-Soviet and New Russian filmmakers to the Russian millennials, have worked in varying visual styles and with diverse narrative strategies, while searching for a new cinematic language. Financing and distribution models have evolved, along with conservative politics driving Ministry of Culture regulation. This reader is intended both for contemporary Russian cinema courses and for modern Russian culture courses that emphasize film. It does not attempt to establish a canon for the period but seeks to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to significant Russian films released between 2005 and 2016 that are also available with English subtitles. The twenty-one essays on individual films provide background information on directors’ careers, detailed analyses of selected films, along with suggested further readings both in English and Russian.

Largely forgotten during the last 20 years of his life, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) has occupied a singular and often controversial position over the past sixty years as a founding figure of documentary, avant-garde, and political-propaganda film practice. Creator of Man with a Movie Camera" (1929), perhaps the most celebrated non-fiction film ever made, Vertov is equally renowned as the most militant opponent of the canons of mainstream filmmaking in the history of cinema. This book, the first in a three-volume study, addresses Vertov's youth in the largely Jewish city of Bialystok, his education in Petrograd, his formative years of involvement in filmmaking, his experiences during the Russian Civil War, and his interests in music, poetry and technology.

She Animates examines the work of twelve female animation directors in the Soviet Union and Russia, who have long been overlooked by film scholars and historians. Our approach examines these directors within history, culture, and industrial practice in animation. In addition to making a case for including these women and their work in the annals of film and animation history, this volume also makes an argument for why their work should be considered part of the tradition of women’s cinema. We offer textual analysis that focuses on the changing attitudes towards both the woman question and feminism by examining the films in light of the emergence and evolution of a Soviet female subjectivity that still informs women’s cinema in Russia today.

She Animates examines the work of twelve female animation directors in the Soviet Union and Russia, who have long been overlooked by film scholars and historians. Our approach examines these directors within history, culture, and industrial practice in animation. In addition to making a case for including these women and their work in the annals of film and animation history, this volume also makes an argument for why their work should be considered part of the tradition of women’s cinema. We offer textual analysis that focuses on the changing attitudes towards both the woman question and feminism by examining the films in light of the emergence and evolution of a Soviet female subjectivity that still informs women’s cinema in Russia today.

Cinemasaurus examines contemporary Russian cinema as a new visual economy, emerging over three decades after the Soviet collapse. Focusing on debates and films exhibited at Russian and US public festivals where the films have premiered, the volume’s contributors—the new generation of US scholars studying Russian cinema—examine four issues of Russia’s transition: (1) its imperial legacy, (2) the emergence of a film market and its new genres, (3) Russia’s uneven integration into European values and hierarchies, (4) the renegotiation of state power vis-à-vis arthouse and independent cinemas. An introductory essay frames each of the four sections, with 90 films total under discussion, concluding with a historical timeline and five interviews of key film-industry figures formative of the historical context.

Cinemasaurus examines contemporary Russian cinema as a new visual economy, emerging over three decades after the Soviet collapse. Focusing on debates and films exhibited at Russian and US public festivals where the films have premiered, the volume’s contributors—the new generation of US scholars studying Russian cinema—examine four issues of Russia’s transition: Its imperial legacy The emergence of a film market and its new genres Russia’s uneven integration into European values and hierarchies The renegotiation of state power vis-à-vis arthouse and independent cinemas. An introductory essay frames each of the four sections, with 90 films total under discussion, concluding with a historical timeline and five interviews of key film-industry figures formative of the historical context.

Russian TV Series in the Era of Transition examines contemporary Russian television genres in the age of transition from broadcast to post-broadcast television. Focusing on critical debates and the most significant TV series of the past two decades, the volume’s contributors—the leading US and European scholars studying Russian television, as well as the leading Russian TV producers and directors—focus on three major issues: Russian television’s transition to digital post-broadcast economy, which redefined the media environment; Russian television’s integration into global television markets and their genre systems; and major changes in the representation of gender and sexuality on Russian television.

Russian TV Series in the Era of Transition examines contemporary Russian television genres in the age of transition from broadcast to post-broadcast television. Focusing on critical debates and the most significant TV series of the past two decades, the volume’s contributors—the leading US and European scholars studying Russian television, as well as the leading Russian TV producers and directors—focus on three major issues: Russian television’s transition to digital post-broadcast economy, which redefined the media environment; Russian television’s integration into global television markets and their genre systems; and major changes in the representation of gender and sexuality on Russian television.

Making Feminist Media provides new ways of thinking about the vibrant media and craft cultures generated by Riot Grrrl and feminism's third wave. It focuses on a cluster of feminist publications - including BUST, Bitch, HUES, Venus Zine, and Rockrgrl - that began as zines in the 1990s. By tracking their successes and failures, this book provides insight into the politics of feminism's recent past.Making Feminist Media brings together interviews with magazine editors, research from zine archives, and analysis of the advertising, articles, editorials, and letters to the editor found in third-wave feminist magazines. It situates these publications within the long history of feminist publishing in the United States and Canada and argues that third-wave feminist magazines share important continuities and breaks with their historical forerunners. These publishing lineages challenge the still-dominant - and hotly contested - wave metaphor categorization of feminist culture.The stories, struggles, and strategies of these magazines not only represent contemporary feminism, they create and shape feminist cultures. The publications provide a feminist counter-public sphere in which the competing interests of editors, writers, readers, and advertisers can interact. Making Feminist Media argues that reading feminist magazines is far more than the consumption of information or entertainment: it is a profoundly intimate and political activity that shapes how readers understand themselves and each other as feminist thinkers.

Music in Range explores the history of Canadian campus radio, highlighting the factors that have shaped its close relationship with local music and culture. The book traces how campus radio practitioners have expanded stations from campus borders to sur-rounding musical and cultural communities by acquiring FM licenses and establishing community-based mandates. The culture of a campus station extends beyond its studio and into the wider community where it is connected to the local music scene within its broadcast range. The book examines campus stations and local music in Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Sackville, NB, and highlights the ways that campus stations - through music-based programming, their operational practices, and the culture under which they operate - produce alternative methods and values for circulating local and independent Canadian artists at a time when ubiquitous commercial media outlets do exactly the opposite. Music in Range sheds light on a radio sector that is an integral component of Canada's musical and cultural fabric and positions campus radio as a worthy site of attention at a time when connectivity and sharing between musicians, music fans, and cultural intermediaries are increasingly shaping our experience of music, radio, and sound.

This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema's lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film's provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life. This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media's materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author's previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.

This is a collection of writings by the giant of experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage, that shows him in a completely new light, as part of world cinema. For the duration of the 1980s, Brakhage contributed to the Boulder literary magazine Rolling Stock, mostly publishing reports from the Telluride Film Festival. These reports show that Brakhage was keenly interested in world cinema, anxious to meet and dialogue with filmmakers of many different stripes.The book also contains substantial discussion of Brakhage's work in light of the filmmakers he encountered at Telluride and discussed in Rolling Stock. Long chapters are given over to Soviet filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Larissa Shepitko, and Sergei Parajanov, as well as the German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Brakhage was a keen viewer of these filmmakers and their contemporaries, both at Telluride and in his role as teacher at the University of Colorado, and Stan Brakhage and Rolling Stock attempts to place his work alongside theirs and thus reclaim him for world cinema.The book's appendices reprint letters Brakhage wrote to Stella Pence (Telluride's co-founder and managing director), as well as summaries of his work for Telluride and a brace of difficult-to-find reviews.