Film and the City: the Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema

FILM AND THE CITY Copyright © 2014 George Melnyk Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 Cover and interior design by Marvin Harder, marvinharder.com. Cover photo by Jody Shapiro. Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers. doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781927356593.01 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Melnyk, George, author Film and the city : the urban imaginary in Canadian cinema / George Melnyk. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-927356-59-3 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-927356-60-9 (pdf).— ISBN 978-1-927356-61-6 (epub) 1. Motion pictures—Canada—History. 2. City and town life in motion pictures. 3. Cities and towns in motion pictures. I. Title. PN1995.9.C513M44 2014 791.43’658209732 C2013-905401-4 C2013-905402-2 We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Multimedia Development Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons licence, Attribution–Noncommercial– No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons licence, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. A city is not only a place but a state of mind. — Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix INTRODUCTION The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema 3 THE CITY OF FAITH 1 Navigating Piety in Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989) 27 THE CITY OF DREAMS 2 The Sexual Self in Lauzon’s Léolo (1992) 51 THE GENDERED CITY 3 Feminism in Rozema’s Desperanto (1991), Pool’s Rispondetemi (1991), and Villeneuve’s Maelström (2000) 77 THE CITY MADE FLESH 4 The Embodied Other in Lepage’s Le Confessionnal (1995) and Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) 101 THE DIASPORIC CITY 5 Postcolonialism, Hybridity, and Transnationality in Virgo’s Rude (1995) and Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood (2001) 137 THE CITY OF TRANSGRESSIVE DESIRES 6 Melodramatic Absurdity in Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World (2003) and My Winnipeg (2007) 167 THE CITY OF ETERNAL YOUTH 7 Capitalism, Consumerism, and Generation in Burns’s waydowntown (2000) and Radiant City (2006) 201 THE CITY OF DYSFUNCTION 8 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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book owes its existence to my own urban identity, my attraction to Canadian cinema, and the extensive critical commentary on the films discussed here by numerous critics, scholars, and filmmakers. The book could not have been completed without the two six-month research leaves that I was granted by the University of Calgary. These leaves allowed me the time to explore the ideas of others and to formulate my own. The work of the film studies and Canadian studies communities in Canada served as an inspiration for what might be possible. The manuscript has gone through numerous revisions based on the comments of my peers, who shall remain anonymous and whose criticisms contributed immensely to its improvement. For several years, I have used the evolving manuscript as a text for my senior undergraduate seminar in Canadian studies at the University of Calgary. As part of their interaction with the manuscript, the students were asked to provide critiques of various claims that it made. Their insights were incorporated into my revisions. In terms of improving the manuscript, I am particularly grateful to Pamela MacFarland Holway, senior editor at Athabasca University Press, for her intellectual engagement with the manuscript’s ideas, which made me rethink a number of key aspects and arguments. I also want to acknowledge her speedy shepherding it through the approval and publication process. The copy editor for the press, Joyce Hildebrand, added clarity to my statements. She lifted my writing to a higher level of readability and lucidity, and I am deeply grateful for the numerous improvements she made. Athabasca University Press takes the edito- rial process seriously, and the author is the beneficiary. I am indebted as well to ix Elaine Melnick (no relation), who prepared the index with her usual expertise and professional timeliness. My wife, Julia, has been gracious about my writing obsession. Her encouragement has helped me to persevere through the rough patches that accompany a manuscript as it moves from gestation, to execution, to revision. Writing this book was a long process, and her faith in me kept me going. She was also most helpful when I got bogged down in Internet research, using her skills to go further than my patience would allow, which often resulted in valu- able new insights and material. I will be forever grateful for her presence. Finally, I want to express my thanks to the filmmakers who made the films discussed in the book. I owe everything to them. Their creative genius continues to reinvigorate my belief in the power of Canadian cinema to help us define who we are. x Acknowledgements FILM AND THE CITY INTRODUCTION The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema This 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 conven- tional 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 3 long recognized the social and economic vibrancy of those cities and their importance as cultural centres. Historically, these cities have also served as symbols of division—signifiers of opposing political and cultural identities. Nationalist discourse, with its goal of promoting a unified sense of Canadian identity, has accordingly encouraged an emphasis on the rural. A basic prem- ise of this position is that our overall identification with the land unites us into a single nation. This view of national identity, which equates the “country” with countryside, is common to many cultures. For example, the French word pays, which appears in the terms paysage, “landscape,” and paysan, “peasant,” 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 mythol- ogy 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 and the urban that privileges the former, Canadian urban identity has come to include within itself an attraction to the rural. This attraction, rooted in the obvious absence of the much-lauded rural in Canadian urban environments, is visible in public discourse, which is often laced with disquiet about urban life and identity. I have lived my whole life in Canadian cities, yet, because of the power of the rural myth, I find that urban spaces do not measure up to my inherent sense of Canadianness. When I think of being “Canadian,” I think more of my experience of hiking in the Rocky Mountains or canoeing down a fast-flowing Precambrian Shield river. As an urban dweller, I am divided in my loyalties: the valorization of the nonurban environment has instilled doubts about the ultimate value and authenticity of city life. A question I attempt to answer in this book is how this ambivalence is articulated and interpreted in cinematic images of Canadian cities. 4 Introduction While the rural myth of Canadian national identity ignores the contri- bution of the urban to that identity, that same urban reality now comprises a diversity of cultures and peoples, a multiplicity of social voices and lan- guages, and a growing sense of transnational and diasporic identities.

Load more