Film and the City: The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema

Abstract

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) 229 conclUsion National Identity and the Urban Imagination 255 notes 265 BiBliogRaphy 285 index 293 i n t R o d U c t i o n The Urban Imaginary in Canadian CinemaThis book is a study of the focus on Canada's urban environments that has emerged in Canadian narrative cinema over the past decades. It draws its inspiration in part from another recent trend, that toward interdisciplinary approaches. In what follows, I seek to integrate insights from three well-established fields-Canadian studies, with its ongoing exploration of national-identity formation for both individuals and collectives; film studies, which contributes concepts of genre, authorship, and audience; and urban studies perspectives on the built environment and the urban experience. Mark Shiel, co-editor of Cinema and the City, argues that interdisciplinary approaches "can be profoundly useful and fruitful in addressing key issues." 1 Ideally, interdisciplinarity creates intellectual linkages that generate fresh approaches to subject matter. Shiel's work, for example, uses interdisciplinary methods to generate what he calls "a sociology of cinema." 2 My goal is different: I want to link the construction of urban identity in a film text with the urban influences on the filmmaker and the film's audience. Through the integration of theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches from three different fields, I seek to move the discussion of film and the city beyond the conventional boundaries of any particular field of scholarship. By linking films and cities and analyzing how the two are related, I also hope to offer a distinctive statement about contemporary Canadian identity-to clarify how Canadian urban cinema contributes both to our understanding of urban realities and to our efforts to articulate what it means to be Canadian.The importance of the urban to recent Canadian cinema begins with the established public discourse on cities such as Toronto or Montréal, which has has come to mean "country" in the sense of a nation. In the popular imagination, cities are associated with change, migration, and innovation rather than stability, homogeneity, and tradition. As sources of disruption, cities become symbols of subversion in cultures that seek to promote an essentialized vision of national identity. The view that Paris is not the "true" France, for example, or that London is not the "real" England is thus normative for public mythology in these countries. In his essay "The True North Strong and Free," Rob Shields points out that, in Canada, the "great national foundational myth" of the North as "an unconquerable wilderness devoid of 'places'" encouraged the view that the essence of Canadian identity lies in the country's natural landscape, rather than in the built environment. 3 Perhaps because national discourses about identity promote a division between the rural an...

The ‘Frozen’ Heart of the Continent: Place-Myths and Winnipeg in Canadian Crime Films

“…Reliability, validity, replicability, and the ability to predict and forecast future events-while not wholly irrelevantare methodological concerns and are rarely and directly useful "for the purposes of qualitative analyses of what are often unique sets of signs" (ibid). Nevertheless, our research contributes to the literature on Canadian film studies by filling the literature gap concerning Canadian shared meanings and Canadian places that repeatedly proliferate such embodied experiences (Melnyk, 2014;Bookman and Gacek, forthcoming;Lam, forthcoming). We selected films set in Winnipeg that conform to Nicole Rafter's (2006: 6) definition of crime films: "films that focus primarily on crime and its consequences."…”