Working on Screen: Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema PDF
Preview Working on Screen: Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema
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. Such themes have often been set aside for the sake of a unifying narra- tive 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. In doing so, they cover a wide range of class-related topics and deal 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 experi- ence of class in film fosters or marginalizes a progressive engagement with history, politics, and societies around the world. Working on Screen expands the scholarly debates on the concept of national cinema and builds on the rich, formative efforts of Canadian cultural criticism that focused on the need for cultural autonomy. malek khouri is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Communica- tion and Culture at the University of Calgary. darrell varga is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Contemporary Film and Media Studies at the NSCAD (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) University. This page intentionally left blank Working on Screen Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema Edited by Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9076-6 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-8020-9076-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9388-2 (paper) ISBN-10: 0-8020-9388-4 (paper) Printed on acid-free paper Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Working on screen : representations of the working class in Canadian cinema / edited by Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9076-6 (bound) ISBN-10: 0-8020-9076-1 (bound) ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9388-2 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-8020-9388-4 (pbk.) 1. Working class in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures – Canada – History. I. Khouri, Malek, 1953– II. Varga, Darrell, 1966– ′ PN1995.9.L28W67 2006 791.436352624 C2006-902205-4 University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). Contents Foreword ix thomas waugh Acknowledgments xv Introduction: Working on Screen 3 malek khouri and darrell varga PART ONE: WORKERS, HISTORY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY 1 In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 25 david frank 2 Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 46 scott forsyth 3 The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History 73 darrell varga PART TWO: WORK, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY 4 Work It Girl! Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 95 rebecca sullivan vi Contents 5 Not Playing, Working: Class, Masculinity, and Nation in the Canadian Hockey Film 113 bart beaty 6 Other-ing the Worker in Canadian ‘Gay Cinema’: Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden 134 malek khouri 7 Whose Museum Is It, Anyway? Discourses of Resistance in the Adaptation of The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum into Margaret’s Museum 148 peter urquhart PART THREE: DIRTY WORK 8 Activating History: Sara Diamond and the Women’s Labour History Project 161 susan lord 9 Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Construction of the Nation 178 margot francis PART FOUR: WORKING ON NATIONAL CINEMA 10 Look like a Worker and Act like a Worker: Stereotypical Representations of the Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films 207 andré loiselle 11 Inscriptions of Class and Nationalism in Canadian ‘Realist’ Cinema: Final Offer and Canada’s Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks 235 joseph kispal-kovacs 12 Rude and the Representation of Class Relations in Canadian Film 246 john mccullough Contents vii 13 Counter Narratives, Class Politics, and Metropolitan Dystopias: Representations of Globalization in Maelström, waydowntown, and La moitié gauche du frigo 268 brenda longfellow Selected Bibliography 283 Contributors 291 This page intentionally left blank Foreword This excellent collection of essays on representations of the working class in Canadian cinemas reminds me of my grandmother. Clara Gertrude Waugh (1884–1961) was a Jackie Gleason fan. When I knew her, my father’s mother was a working-class widow subsisting on her pension in a rooming house in South London, Ontario, sharing many a pot of tea and a communal TV set with the other elderly women who lived there. Grandma Waugh’s taste also included Don Messer’s Jubilee (Canada, 1958–69) and romance novels, and reflected her Middlesex County class roots and culture. I didn’t get it at all, and as a pretentious, four-eyed, future queer intellectual I found Jackie Gleason vulgar and boring. Not that I was a devotee of the then emerging corpus of Canadian moving images either – far from it – for my expo- sure had been restricted to National Film Board shorts projected in Grades 6 and 7, and to Tommy Hunter and Juliette on the CBC. These latter bizarre manifestations of outmoded provinciality I immediately switched off, along with Don Messer and Hockey Night in Canada, in deference to hipper American pop culture artifacts such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, which bowed out a few months after my grandmother died in 1961. Her daughter-in-law, my mother, Hope (b. 1919), a high school teacher, had tendencies towards upwardly mobile class snobbery. I shared her aspiration to middle-class values, which for her was finally fulfilled around the start of the 1960s. At that time my father, Thomas Ralph (b. 1920), a United Church minister who had been the only child in Clara’s family of seven to go to university, moved from a working- class congregation in Brantford, Ontario, to a middle-class congregation in nearby Guelph. In Brantford, I had denied point-blank at a sharing circle in my kindergarten class at King George School that my father
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