Film 345: Canadian Cinema
Dr. Jonathan Petrychyn
University of Regina, Fall 2020
Unit 1: Introduction: What is Canadian Cinema?
Week 1: Canadian Cinema Three Ways: Bureaucratic, Cultural, and Regional
Required Screening: Fire (Deepa Mehta, 1996, 108 min),
Required Reading:
Liz Czach, “Film Festivals, Programming, and the Building of a National Cinema.” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 76-88
Ira Wagman, “Three Canadian Film Policy Frameworks,” In The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema, 2–20. edited by Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Peter Harcourt, “The Canadian Nation—An Unfinished Text,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2:2-3 (1993): 5-26.
Unit 2: Bureaucratic: Policy Frameworks for Canadian Cinema
Week 2: Educational: The National Film Board of Canada
Required Screening: Churchill’s Island (Stuart Legg, 1941, 21 min)
Pas de Deux (Norman McLaren, 1968, 13 min)
Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (Alanis Obomsawin, 1993, 119 min)
Recommended screening: Les raquetteurs (Michel Brault, 1958, 15 min)
Required Reading:
George Melnyk, “The Rise of the NFB: Grierson and McLaren,” One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema, 58-77.
Bruno Cornellier, “The Thing About Obomsawin’s Indianness: Indigenous Reality and the Burden of Education at the National Film Board of Canada.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21, no. 2 (2012): 2–26.
Week 3: Industrial I: Tax Shelter Era
Required Screening: Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975, 87 min)
Required Reading:
George Melnyk, “The Escapist Seventies,” One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema, 113-124
George Melnyk, “David Cronenberg: Mapping the Monstrous Male,” Great Canadian Film Directors, 79-98
Week 4: Industrial II: Telefilm
Required Screening: Last Night (Don McKellar, 1998, 95 min)
Required Reading:
Peter Urqhart, “Film History/Film Policy: From the Canadian Film Development Corp. to Telefilm Canada,” in Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada Since Telefilm, edited by André Loiselle and Tom McSorely (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute: 2006), 29-54
Charles Tepperman, “Bureaucrats and Movie Czars: Canada’s Feature Film Policy since 2000,” Media Industries Journal 4, no. 2 (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mij.15031809.0004.204.
Paul Salmon, “Don McKellar: Artistic Polymath,” Great Canadian Film Directors, 363-384
Weekk 5: Intermedial: CBC, Netflix, and Over-the-Top Streaming Services
Required Screening: Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de
Pencier, Edward Burtynsky, 2018, 87 min)
Optional screening: Canada’s A Drag: Season 1, Episode 1, “Allysin Chaynes,
Toronto” (Peter Knegt & Mercedes Grundy, 2018, 6 min)
Canada’s Drag Race, Episode 1 (Crave TV, 2020, 60 min)
Required Reading:
Diane Burgess, “TIFF: Netflix and Streaming Means Canadian Feature Films Struggle to Find Audiences,” The Conversation, September 2, 2019, http://theconversation.com/tiff-netflix-and-streaming-means-canadian-feature-films-struggle-to-find-audiences-121851
Ben Schnitzer, “Netflix: Canadian (Dis)Content. Competing Sovereignties and the Cultural Politics of Cultural Policy,” American Review of Canadian Studies 49, no. 1 (January 2, 2019): 85–104, https://doi.org/10.1080/02722011.2019.1572205.
Charles Davis and Emilia Zboralska, “Transnational Over-the-Top Media Distribution as a Business and Policy Disruptor: The Case of Netflix in Canada,” The Journal of Media Innovations 4, no. 1 (January 12, 2017): 4–25, https://doi.org/10.5617/jmi.v4i1.2423
Unit 3: Cultural: Auteurs, Art, and Identity
Week 6: Queer Cinemas – John Greyson and Thirza Cuthand
Required Screening: Lilies (John Greyson, 1996, 95 min)
Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory (Thirza Cuthand, 1995, 3 min)
2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com (Thirza Cuthand, 2017, 5 min)
Required Reading:
Christopher Gittings, “Activism and Aesthetics: The Work of John Greyson,” Great Canadian Film Directors, 125-148
Lindsay Nixon, “‘I Wonder Where They Went’: Post-Reality Multiplicities and Counter-Resurgent Narratives in Thirza Cuthand’s Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory,” Canadian Theatre Review 175 (July 14, 2018): 47–51.
Thomas Waugh, “How to Queer Sexualities, Nations, and Cinemas, or The Romance (and Paradoxes) of Transgression in Canada and Elsewhere,” in The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 3–27.
Recommended Reading
Jonathan Petrychyn, “Film Festivals in the White Cube: Queer City Cinema as Artistic Practice.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 27.1 (2018): 59–72. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.27.1.2017-0015
Week 7: Indigenous Cinemas – Zacharias Kunuk and Lisa Jackson
Required Screening: Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zach Kunuk, 2001, 172 minutes) and Savage (Lisa Jackson, 2009, 6 min)
Recommended Screening: The Banished (Berny Hi, Candy Fox, Carla (Caroline) Otter,
Janine Windolph, Meka Mi, Shannon Dumba, Trudy Stewart, 2016, 3 min)
Required Reading:
Jerry White, “Zach Kunuk and Inuit Filmmaking,” Great Canadian Film Directors, 347-362
Kristin Dowell, “Residential Schools and ‘Reconciliation’ in the Media Art of Skeena Reece and Lisa Jackson,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 29, no. 1 (May 25, 2017): 116–38.
Recommended Reading:
Janine Windolph, "Intertwined Legacies -- mispon: A Celebration of Indigenous Filmmaking and its Last Visionary." In Landscapes of moving image: prairie artists’ cinema. Solomon Nagler & Melanie Wilmink, eds. Winnipeg: WNDX, Forthcoming 2021.
Week 8: Asian Cinemas – Mina Shum
Required Screening: Double Happiness (Mina Shum, 1994, 87 min)
Required Reading:
Jacqueline Levitin, “Mina Shum: The ‘Chinese’ Films and Identities,” Great Canadian Film Directors, 271-294
David Hanley, “Contextualizing Questions of Identity and Space in Mina Shum’s Double Happiness,” Offscreen 18, no. 11/12 (December 11, 2014): 1–1.
Elaine Chang, “Introduction: Hyphe-Nation; or, Screening ‘Asian Canada,’” Reel Asian: Asian Canada on Screen, ed. Elaine Chang (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007), 11-24
Anne Marie Fleming and Mina Shum, “F-Words,” Reel Asian: Asian Canada on Screen, 77-84
Week 9: Quebec Cinemas – Robin Aubert
Required Screening: Les Affamés (Robin Aubert, 2017, 96 min)
Required Reading: Bill Marshall, “New Spaces of Empire: Quebec Cinema’s Centres and Peripheries,” in Cinema at the Periphery, ed. Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 119–34.
Linda Ogwang, “Hometown Horror: Robin Aubert’s Les Affamés,” Cinema Scope, 2017, https://cinema-scope.com/columns/canadiana-hometown-horror-robin-auberts-les-affames/.
Robert Everett-Green, “Zombie Film Les Affamés Echoes Quebec’s Cultural Fears,” The Globe and Mail, October 20, 2017, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/zombie-film-les-affames-echoes-quebecs-culturalfears/article36676802/.
Unit 4: Regional: Atlantic and Prairie Cinemas
Week 10: Atlantic Cinemas
Required Screening: Maudie (Aisling Walsh, 2016, 116 min)
Optional Screening: Radical (Deanne Foley, 2019, 6 min) and Come Into My Parlour (Mary Lewis, 1990, 5 min)
Required Reading:
Darrell Varga, “From Anti-Modernism to Global Media,” in Shooting from the East: Filmmaking on the Canadian Atlantic (Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 3–16.
Jennifer VanderBurgh, “Screens Stop Here! Tax Credit Thinking and the Contemporary Meaning of ‘Local’ Filmmaking,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 25, no. 1 (2016): 135–48.
Week 11: Prairie Cinemas
Required Screening: The Saddest Music in the World (Guy Maddin, 2003, 100 min)
Optional Screening: My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007, 80 min)
Required Reading:
Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson, “‘I’m Not An American, I’m A Nymphomaniac’: Perverting the Nation in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World,” Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin, ed. David Church (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009), 227-238
Steven Shaviro, “Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin,” North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 1980, William Beard and Jerry White, eds. (Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2002): 216-221.
Alison Calder, “Who’s from the Prairie? Some Prairie Self-Representations In Popular Culture,” Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, History, ed. Robert Wardaugh (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2001), 91-100.
Recommended Reading:
Ian Robinson, “The Critical Cinematic Cartography of ‘My Winnipeg,’” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 23, no. 2 (2014): 96–114.
Christine Ramsay, “Made in Saskatchewan!” in Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada Since Telefilm, edited by André Loiselle and Tom McSorely (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute: 2006), 203-235.