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Documenting the Documentary features essays by 27 film scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives. Each essay focuses on one or two important documentaries, engaging in questions surrounding ethics, ideology, politics, power, race, gender, and representation-but always in terms of how they arise out of or are involved in the reading of specific documentaries as particular textual constructions. By closely reading documentaries as rich visual works, this anthology fills a void in the critical writing on documentaries, which tends to privilege production over aesthetic pleasure. As we increasingly perceive and comprehend the world through visual media, understanding the textual strategies by which individual documentaries are organized has become critically important. Documenting the Documentary offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balance between theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.
Long recognized for outstanding National Film Board documentaries and innovative animated movies, Canada has recently emerged from the considerable shadow of the Hollywood elephant with a series of feature films that have captured the attention of audiences around the world. This is the first anthology to focus on Canada's feature films - those acknowledged as its very best. With essays by senior academics and leading scholars from across the country as well as some fresh new voices, Canada's Best Features offers penetrating analyses of fifteen award-winning films. Internationally acclaimed directors David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand, and Claude Jutra are represented here. Notewort...
This pioneering work in Canadian pop music criticism analyses the work of some of the country's most acclaimed musicians, winners of national and international awards and recognition. Marco Adria examines the songs of eight Canadian artists who belong to pop music's literati--singer-songerwriters whose work reflects considerable refinement and taste. Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLaughlan, Jane Siberry and k.d. lang are all artists with considerable insight both in Canada and abroad. Individual chapters on each offer thoughtful accounts of their careers and their achievements as interpreters of contemporary popular culture. Music of our Times presents new insights and new understandings of Canada's most acclaimed musicians.
The primary critical purpose of Dante & the Unorthodox is to examine the aesthetic impulses behind the theological and political reasons for Dante's allegory of mid-life divergence from the papally prescribed "way of salvation." Marking the septicentennial of his exile, the book's eighteen critical essays, three excerpts from an allegorical drama, and a portfolio of fourteen contemporary artworks address the issue of the poet's conflicted relation to orthodoxy.
Sixteen essays, written by specialists from many fields, grapple with the problem of a popular culture that is not very popular — but is seen by most as vital to the body politic, whether endangered by globalization or capable of politically progressive messages for its audiences. Slippery Pastimes covers a variety of topics: Canadian popular music from rock ’n’ roll to country, hip-hop to pop-Celtic; television; advertising; tourism; sport and even postage stamps! As co-editors, Nicks and Sloniowski have taken an open view of the Canadian Popular, and contributors have approached their topics from a variety of perspectives, including cultural studies, women’s studies, film studies, sociology and communication studies. The essays are accessibly written for undergraduate students and interested general readers.
In this new collection of essays on film, all written over the last ten years, Peter Wollen explores an extraordinarily wide range of topics, stretching from an analysis of 'Time in Film and Video Art' to a study of 'Riff-Raff Realism' in British films. There are provocative discussions of the works of established auteur directors such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock and of the film-making careers of such experimental movie-makers as William Burroughs and Viking Eggeling, the dadaist pioneer of abstract film. The collection also includes fascinating studies of a number of film classics, such as John Huston's Freud, Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Other e...
Canadian progressive rock band Rush was the voice of the suburban middle class. In this book, Chris McDonald assesses the band's impact on popular music and its legacy for legions of fans. McDonald explores the ways in which Rush's critique of suburban life—and its strategies for escape—reflected middle-class aspirations and anxieties, while its performances manifested the dialectic in prog rock between discipline and austerity, and the desire for spectacle and excess. The band's reception reflected the internal struggles of the middle class over cultural status. Critics cavalierly dismissed, or apologetically praised, Rush's music for its middlebrow leanings. McDonald's wide-ranging musical and cultural analysis sheds light on one of the most successful and enduring rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s.
Can the different pictures of Jesus in the New Testament be reconciled? Or are they simply simulations, the products of a virtual Gospel? 'Simulating Jesus' argues that the gospels do not represent four versions of one Jesus story but rather four distinct narrative simulacra, each of which is named "Jesus". The book explores the theory and evidence justifying this claim and discusses its practical and theological consequences. The simulations of Jesus in each of the gospels are analysed and placed alongside Jesus simulacra elsewhere in the Bible and contemporary popular culture. 'Simulating Jesus' offers a radical understanding of Scripture that will be of interest to students and scholars of biblical studies.
Since the mid-1980s, US audiences have watched the majority of movies they see on a video platform, be it VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Video On Demand, or streaming media. Annual video revenues have exceeded box office returns for over twenty-five years. In short, video has become the structuring discourse of US movie culture. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens examines how prerecorded video reframes the premises and promises of motion picture spectatorship. But instead of offering a history of video technology or reception, Caetlin Benson-Allott analyzes how the movies themselves understand and represent the symbiosis of platform and spectator. Through case studies and close readings that blend indus...
The Guess Who. Gordon Lightfoot. Joni Mitchell. Neil Young. Stompin' Tom Connors. Robert Charlebois. Anne Murray. Crowbar. Chilliwack. Carole Pope. Loverboy. Bryan Adams. The Barenaked Ladies. The Tragically Hip. Céline Dion. Arcade Fire. K-oS. Feist. These musicians are national heroes to generations of Canadians. But what does it mean to be a Canadian musician? And why does nationality even matter? Canuck Rock addresses these questions by delving into the myriad relationships between the people who make music, the industries that produce and sell it, the radio stations and government legislation that determine availability, and the fans who consume it and make it their own. An invaluable resource and an absorbing read, Canuck Rock spans from the emergence of rock and roll in the 1950s through to today's international recording industry. Combining archival material, published accounts, and new interviews, Ryan Edwardson explores how music in Canada became Canadian music.