Publisher Description

"Screening Justice in Canada is a scholarly exploration of films that focus centrally on crime and justice in Canada. Defining Canadian crime films as those that focus significantly on crime and its consequences in Canadian society, the book is as much about the ways crime films provide vehicles for understanding what it means to be Canadian as it is about the depiction and representation of crime and justice in Canadian cinema and television. The films examined in this book span all regions of Canada and include case studies of films set in Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Nunavut, British Columbia's Lower Mainland, the Canadian prairies, Ontario, and Quebec. Moreover, Canadian crime films produced from the 1930s to the present are included in these analyses. Contributors to this multi-and interdisciplinary volume are drawn from Criminology, Criminal Justice Studies, English literature, Art History, Film Studies and Communications, Cultural Anthropology, Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies. This is the first comprehensive Canadian volume on crime films that takes up cultural criminology's call for more critical scholarly analyses of the interplay between crime, culture, and society. Adopting American criminologist Nicole Rafter's concept "popular criminology," the essays in this volume all take crime films seriously as popular efforts to understand the causes, consequences and meanings of crime in Canadian society."--

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.

From the 1950s to the 1970s Walter Gordon was the voice of English Canadian nationalism, first as chair of the Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects, then as a minister in Lester B. Pearson's cabinet, and finally as founder and honorary chair of the Committee for an Independent Canada. In the late 1960s many Canadians heeded Gordon's call for limits on the level of American investment in Canadian industry and joined with him to form a broad movement to limit American influence in Canada.