Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg

Author: Darren Sean Wershler-Henry
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442642467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
Guy Maddin is Canada's most iconoclastic filmmaker. Through his reinvention of half-forgotten film genres, his remobilization of abandoned techniques from the early history of cinema, and his unique editing style, Maddin has created a critically successful body of work that looks like nothing else in Canadian film. My Winnipeg (2008), which Roger Ebert called one of the ten best films of the first decade of the twenty-first century, has consolidated Maddin's international reputation. In this sixth volume of the Canadian Cinema series, Darren Wershler argues that Maddin's use of techniques and media that fall outside of the normal repertoire of contemporary cinema require us to re-examine what we think we know about the documentary genre and even 'film' itself. Through an exploration of My Winnipeg's major thematic concerns - memory, the cultural archive, and how people and objects circulate through the space of the city - Wershler contends that the result is a film that is psychologically and affectively true without being historically accurate.

Playing with Memories

Author: David Church
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887553540
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Playing with Memories is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of internationally acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. It offers extensive perspectives on his career to date, from the early experimentation of The Dead Father (1986) to the intensely intimate revelations of My Winnipeg (2007). Featuring new and updated essays from American, Canadian, and Australian scholars, collaborators, and critics, as well as an in-depth interview with Maddin, this collection explores the aesthetics and politics behind Maddin’s work, firmly situating his films within ongoing cultural debates about postmodernism, genre, and national identity.

Film and the City

Author: George Melnyk
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1927356598
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
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 Jésus de Montréal (1989), Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992), Mina Shum’s Double Happiness (1994), Clément 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.

Into the Past

Author: William Beard
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442610662
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 489

Book Description
Guy Maddin started making films in his back yard and on his kitchen table. Now his unique work, which relies heavily on such archaic means as black and white small-format cinematography and silent-film storytelling, premieres at major film festivals around the world and is avidly discussed in the critical press. Into the Past provides a complete and systematic critical commentary on each of Maddin's feature films and shorts, from his 1986 debut film The Dead Father through to his highly successful 2008 full-length 'docu-fantasia' My Winnipeg. William Beard's extensive analysis of Maddin's narrative and aesthetic strategies, themes, influences, and underlying issues also examines the origins and production history of each film. Each of Maddin's projects and collaborations showcase his gradual evolution as a filmmaker and his singular development of narrative forms. Beard's close readings of these films illuminate, among other things, the profound ways in which Maddin's art is founded in the past - both in the cultural past, and in his personal memory.

Documenting Cityscapes

Author: Iván Villarmea Álvarez
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231850786
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
While film studies has traditionally treated the presence of the city in film as an urban text operating inside of a cinematic one, this approach has recently evolved into the study of cinema as a technology of place. From this perspective, Documenting Cityscapes explores the way the city has been depicted by nonfiction filmmakers since the late 1970s, paying particular attention to three aesthetic tendencies: documentary landscaping, urban self-portraits, and metafilmic strategies. Through the formal analysis of fifteen works from six different countries, this volume investigates how the rise of subjectivity has helped to develop a kind of gaze that is closer to citizens than to the institutions and corporations responsible for recent major transformations. Documenting Cityscapes therefore reveals the extent to which cinema has become an agent of urban change, in which certain films not only challenge the most controversial policies of late capitalism but also are able to produce spatiality themselves.

Fictocritical Strategies

Author: Gerrit Haas
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839437040
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Book Description
Gerrit Haas re-theorises the peculiar textual conduct of ficto/critical writing, which inextricably intersects fictional with critical discourses as well as aesthetics with poetics and ethics. The slash here signals the conjunction between a self-reflexive ficto-critical insight and a wider discursive ficto-critical motivation. In its refined form, this twofold trope shifts perspective from the prevalent generic between onto the meta-generic level of our textual practices. Ultimately, the ficto/critical is thus qualified as an unheard-of interventionist aesthetic of deconstruction directed at the ramifications of our textual cultures.

The Reenactments

Author: Nick Flynn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344355
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Nick Flynn chronicles the surreal experience of being on set during the making of the film Being Flynn, from his best-selling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and watching the central events of his life reenacted: his father's long run of homelessness and his mother's suicide.

Comprehending Cinema

Author: Scott MacDonald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197758746
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 571

Book Description
Comprehending Cinema is a collection of in-depth interviews and panoramic essays that models a generalist approach to modern audiovisual media, prioritizing remarkable cinematic accomplishments that can get lost within our overwhelming modern mediascape. The 18 interviewees featured in this publication include Oscar-winning documentarians Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin; Dean Fleischer Camp, whose Marcel the Shell with Shoes On was an internet smash, then an Oscar nominee; canonical filmmakers Guy Maddin and Su Friedrich, still building on remarkable careers; renowned poet (and cineaste) John Ashbery; Irish independent Tadhg O'Sullivan who is entranced by the moon; indefatigable cine-historian, Paul Cronin; LA artist Jennifer West, who collaborated with 11,500 visitors on New York City's High Line to produce a new kind of City Symphony; Penny Lane, whose documentary films continually surprise; a collaborative filmmaking team who provide an immersive motion study of a crowd taking selfies with the Mona Lisa; cine-explorers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel; master of the cine-archive Bill Morrison; cine-scientist Erin Espelie; video-essayist Chloé Galibert-Laîné; and the Alloy Orchestra, who entertained silent-film audiences for three decades. Comprehending Cinema combines engaging conversations with accomplished filmmakers and essayistic explorations of recent contributions to modern media-making by filmmakers creating a tradition of "cine-nocturnes," and by filmmakers exploring archival representations of World War 1. The book offers a reading adventure dedicated to opening the door to exciting new kinds of film experience.

Savage Detours

Author: Lisa Morton
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786457066
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
This is the first book-length study of the career and life of Ann Savage, whose performance in Detour earned her a place in Time Magazine's list of the top 10 greatest movie villains. The biography covers her abused childhood and her career as a studio contract player, pin-up queen, B movie star, jetsetter and award-winning aviatrix. A complete annotated filmography with release date, credits, cast, synopsis and commentary for each of her films is included.

Postcolonial Film

Author: Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134747276
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance examines films of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries from postcolonial countries around the globe. In the mid twentieth century, the political reality of resistance and decolonization lead to the creation of dozens of new states, forming a backdrop to films of that period. Towards the century’s end and at the dawn of the new millennium, film continues to form a site for interrogating colonization and decolonization, though against a backdrop that is now more neo-colonial than colonial and more culturally imperial than imperial. This volume explores how individual films emerged from and commented on postcolonial spaces and the building and breaking down of the European empire. Each chapter is a case study examining how a particular film from a postcolonial nation emerges from and reflects that nation’s unique postcolonial situation. This analysis of one nation’s struggle with its coloniality allows each essay to investigate just what it means to be postcolonial.