Film directors articulate creative visions that provide insights into national cultures. 18 essays highlight Canada's prominent Anglophone and Francophone filmmakers.

Great Canadian Film Directors is the first major study that reflects the cultural and linguistic diversity of Canada’s most dynamic film directors. The 19 essays in this collection focus on each filmmaker’s ability to create a vision that both reveals and redefines our national cultures. Together, these essays, by established and emerging scholars, highlight the diversity, imaginative power, and talent of Canadian filmmakers. This collection’s value is in its contemporary analysis of major figures as well as critical discussions of the work of women directors and young filmmakers. Filmographies and selected bibliographies for each director provide film students and the movie-going public with an unrivalled study of a cinema that now garners world attention.

Who were Canada's ten most romantic couples of the twentieth century? What were this country's worst disasters, its ten best beers, and its most controversial works of art in the past one hundred years? Where will you find the most haunted places in Canada and who are Canada's greatest heroes, its most accomplished athletes, and its most despised criminals? The Great Canadian Book of Lists chronicles a century of achievements, trends, important and influential people, and fascinating events that have shaped this country as it heads into a new millennium. Award-winning writers Mark Kearney and Randy Ray, who have delighted readers with their bestselling books The Great Canadian Trivia Book and The Great Canadian Trivia Book 2, turn the spotlight on the twentieth century to determine the best, worst, and most significant happenings in our lives. Not content with supplying a shopping list of items about Canada, Kearney and Ray provide plenty of details to support why certain people and events are included on the lists. And their statistical snapshots comparing a variety of societal trends over different years show readers how Canada has changed in the course of the past century. You'll also learn how experts from the worlds of science, sports, lifestyle, literature, and politics rate the personalities and events that have made Canada what it is today. And several guest celebrities weigh in with lists they've created exclusively for The Great Canadian Book of Lists. Enlightening, controversial and fun, The Great Canadian Book of Lists is bound to start as many arguments as it settles. Was Guy Lafleur a better hockey player than Rocket Richard? Why are rower Silken Laumann and actress Margot Kidder on the same list? What were the best Canadian novels of the twentieth century? And what are some key milestones achieved by Canadian women, medical doctors, inventors, and musicians? Innovations and flops, successes and failures, comebacks and breakthroughs, record setters and trend setters: You'll find them all in The Great Canadian Book of Lists.

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.

Containing 24 essays, each on a different film, this work provides a fascinating historical account of the development of film and documentary traditions across the diverse national and regional communities in Canada.

Award-winning author David L. Pike offers a unique focus on the crucial quarter-century in Canadian filmmaking when the industry became a viable force on the international stage. Pike provides a lively, personal, and accessible history of the most influential filmmakers and movements of both Anglo-Canadian and Quebecois cinema, from popular movies to art film and everything in between. Along with in-depth studies of key directors, including David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema and Denys Arcand, Jean-Claude Lauzon, Robert Lepage, Léa Pool, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s reflects on major themes and genres and explores the regional and cultural diversity of the period. Pike positions Canadian filmmaking at the frontlines of a profound cinematic transformation in the age of global media and presents fresh perspectives on both its local and international contexts. Making a significant advance in the study of the film industry of the period, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s is also an ideal text for students, researchers, and Canadian film enthusiasts.

Melnyk argues passionately that Canadian cinema has never been a singular entity, but has continued to speak in the languages and in the voices of Canada's diverse population.

Denys Arcand is best known outside Canada for three films that were nominated for Academy Awards for Best Foreign-Language Film: The Decline of the American Empire (1986), Jesus of Montreal (1989), and The Barbarian Invasions (2003), the last of which won the Award. Yet Arcand has been making films since the early 1960s. When he started making films, Quebec was rapidly transforming from a relatively homogeneous community, united by its Catholic faith and French language and culture, into a more fragmented modern society. The Films of Denys Arcand sheds light on how Arcand addressed the impact of these changes from the 1960s, when the long-drawn-out debate on Quebec's possible separation from the rest of Canada began, to the present, in which the traditional cultural heritage has been further fragmented by the increasing presence of diasporic communities. His career and films offer an ideal case study for exploring the contradictions and tensions that have shaped Quebec cinema and culture in a period of increasing globalization and technological change.

A two-volume biographical/critical dictionary of major, filmmakers from all countries, covering the entire history of the medium from 1890 to the present. Each director is treated in a separate essay that includes a detailed, chronological account of the subject's life and work and a summary of critical opinion. Includes filmography and a selective bibliography of books and articles.