Working on Screen: Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema

As themes in film studies literature, work and the working class have long occupied a peripheral place in the evaluation of Canadian cinema, often set aside in the critical literature for the sake of a unifying narrative that assumes a division between Québécois and English Canada's film production, a social-realist documentary aesthetic, and what might be called a 'younger brother' relationship with the United States. In Working on Screen, contributors examine representations of socio-economic class across the spectrum of Canadian film, video, and television, covering a wide range of class-related topics and dealing with them as they intersect with history, political activism, globalization, feminism, queer rights, masculinity, regional marginalization, cinematic realism, and Canadian nationalism. Of concern in this collection are the daily lives and struggles of working people and the ways in which the representation of the experience of class in film fosters or marginalizes a progressive engagement with history, politics, and societies around the world. Working on Screen thus expands the scholarly debates on the concept of national cinema and builds on the rich, formative efforts of Canadian cultural criticism that held dear the need for cultural autonomy. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: working on screen / Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga -- In search of the Canadian labour film / David Frank -- Communists, class, and culture in Canada / Scott Forsyth -- The image of the 'people' in the CBC's Canada: a people's history / Darrell Varga -- Work it girl! Sex, labour, and nationalism in Valerié / Rebecca Sullivan -- Not playing, working: class, masculinity, and nation in the Canadian hockey film / Bart Beaty -- Other-ing the worker in Canadian 'gay cinema': Thom Fitzgerald's The hanging garden / Malek Khouri -- Whose museum is it anyway? Discourses of resistance in the adaptation of The Glace Bay Miners' Museum into Margaret's Museum / Peter Urquhart -- Activating history: Sara Diamond and the Women's Labour History Project / Susan Lord -- Dirty laundry: re-imagining the Canadian Pacific Railway and the construction of the nation / Margot Francis -- Look like a worker and act like a worker: stereotypical representations of the working class in Quebec fiction feature films / André Loiselle -- Inscriptions of class and nationalism in Canadian 'realist' cinema: Final offer and Canada's sweetheart: the saga of Hal C. Banks / Joseph Kispal-Kovacs -- Rule and the representation of class relations in Canadian film / John McCullough -- Counter narratives, class politics, and metropolitan dystopias: representations of globalization in Maelström, waydowntown, and La moitié gauche du frigo / Brenda Longfellow.

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