Film in Canada

Jim Leach is professor and director of the Interdisciplinary MA in Popular Culture program in the Department of Communications, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University. His main research and teaching interests include Canadian and British cinema, film theory, and cultural theory. He is the author of numerous books, including Doctor Who (2009), Understanding Movies, now in its fourth edition (with Louis Giannetti, 2008), and British Film (2004).

• TimelineIntroduction: Not Just Another National CinemaBlame HollywoodScreening the NationIdentifying the NationPart 1: Imagining Canada1: The National-Realist TraditionDocumenting the Nation1964 Revisited: The Sense of a BeginningThe Persistence of Realism2: Realism and Its DiscontentsQuestioning Cinema TruthToo Real? A Married Couple and Les OrdresFaking It: The Canadian Mockumentary3: Traces: Space, Place, and Identity'Vrais films de chez nous': Post-war Quebec Feature FilmsObliterated Environments: Space in Direct Cinema Fiction FilmsA Sense of Placelessness: The Capital Cost Allowance Act and After4: The Canadian FantasticPaul Almond's Fantastic TrilogyCanadian GothicLost and Delirious: The Films of André Forcier and Guy MaddinPart 2: Popular cinema/Art cinema5: Are Genres American?Inflecting American GenresDeconstructing GenreImplanted Memories6: In Search of the National Popular: Carle and CronenbergThe Sins of Gilles CarleThe Challenge of David Cronenberg7: Two Canadian Auteurs: Arcand and EgoyanUps and Downs: Denys Arcand's History LessonsDark Mirrors: Reflections on Atom EgoyanPostscript8: Stupid Films and Smart FilmsBoys and Girls: The Quebec Stupid FilmDeath and Irony: Canadian Smart FilmsPart 3: Redefining Canadian Cinema9: Shifting Centres and MarginsThe Cinema We Need?Dirty Movies and Aerial Views: Jack Darcus and William MacGillivrayJean Pierre Lefebvre and the Quebec Imaginary10: Engendering the NationSex in a Cold ClimateDream Lives: The Rise of Women's Cinema in CanadaThe Real and the Visionary: Léa Pool and Patricia RozemaThom Fitzgerald's Alien Bodies11: Possible Worlds: Diasporic Cinema in CanadaWhere Is Home? Diasporic Filmmakers in English CanadaQuebec: Métissage and the Politics of IdentityNew Worlds/Old Stories12: The Real and the Imaginary: Canadian Film and the Postmodern ConditionStaging the Global and the Local: Bruce Sweeney and Robert LepageFilm in Canada in the Twenty-First century: Congorama and Away from HerAppendix A: Timeline: Canadian FilmsAppendix B: 'Lights, Camera, Action' Study QuestionsNotesBibliographyFilmography

The book reads well from beginning to end as an evolving argument and discussion with many facets, yet it knits together without simplifying. . . Leach's discussion of direct cinema is the most useful I have found anywhere."