Film and the City ― The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema

Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by
twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of
wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to
support what film scholar Jim Leach calls "the
nationalist-realist project," a documentary style that emphasizes
the exoticism and mythos of the land. Over the past several decades,
however, the hegemony of Anglo-centrism has been challenged by
francophone and First Nations perspectives and the character of cities
altered by a continued influx of immigrants and the development of
cities as economic and technological centers. No longer primarily
defined through the lens of rural nostalgia, Canadian urban identity is
instead polyphonic, diverse, constructed through multiple discourses
and mediums, an exchange rather than a strict orientation. Taking on
the urban as setting and subject, filmmakers are ideally poised to
create and reflect multiple versions of a single city.

Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from 1989 to 2007,
including Denys Arcand's Jesus de Montreal (1989),
Jean-Claude Lauzon's Leolo (1992), Mina Shum's
Double Happiness (1994), Clement Virgo's Rude
(1995), and Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2007), Film
and the City is the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and
"urbanity"-the totality of urban culture and life.
Drawing on film and urban studies and building upon issues of identity
formation in Canadian studies, Melnyk considers how filmmakers, films,
and urban audiences experience, represent, and interpret urban
spatiality, visuality, and orality. In this way, Film and the
City argues that Canadian narrative film of the postmodern period
has aided in articulating a new national identity.

George Melnyk is associate professor in the Department
of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. He has
published a number of books on Canadian cinema, including One
Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (2004), Great Canadian Film
Directors (2007), The Young, the Restless, and the Dead:
Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers (2008), and The Gendered
Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers (2010).

George Melnyk is associate professor in the Departmentof Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. He haspublished a number of books on Canadian cinema, includingOneHundred Years of Canadian Cinema (2004), Great Canadian FilmDirectors (2007),The Young, the Restless, and the Dead:Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers (2008), andThe GenderedScreen: Canadian Women Filmmakers (2010).