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The Young, the Restless, and the Dead

Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers

Edited by George Melnyk
Subjects Film & Media
Series Film and Media Studies Hide Details
Paperback : 9781554580361, 150 pages, October 2009
Ebook (EPUB) : 9781554584338, 150 pages, October 2009

Table of contents

Table of Contents for The Young, the Restless, and the Dead, edited by George Melnyk
The young, the restless, and the dead: An introduction |
George Melnyk
The Young
1: “It needed to go to a dark place” | Michael Dowse interviewed by Bart Beatty
The Restless
2: “The funniest people in the world are Canadian”: The boys from Anagram Pictures | Blake Corbett, Andrew Currie, and Trent Carlson interviewed by Peggy Thompson
3: “I’m shockingly unchanged since I picked up a camera” | Guy Maddin interviewed by George Melnyk
4: “Your secrets shouldn’t be so secret” | Mina Shum interviewed by Jacqueline Levitin
5: “I like telling stories that are off the beaten track” | Lynee Stopewich interviewed by Kalli Paakspuu
6. “It’s a job and you have to do it every day” | Gary Burns interviewed by George Melnyk
7. “I like to work one-on-one” | Anne Wheeler interviewed by Peggy Thompson
The Dead
8. “It is an image that I have retained from infancy” | Jean-Claude Lauzon interviewed by Claude Racine; Translated from the French by Jim Leach
Filmography
Contributors
Contributors
Bart Beaty is an associate professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (University of Toronto Press, 2006), and, with Rebecca Sullivan, Canadian Television Today (University of Calgary Press, 2006). His monograph, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, is the inaugural book in the Canadian Cinema series published by the University of Toronto Press (forthcoming, 2008).
Jim Leach is a professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University. His publications include Claude Jutra, Filmmaker (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999) and British Film (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He is also the author (with Louis Giannetti) of Understanding Movies (fourth Canadian edition) (Pearson, 2005) and co-editor (with Jeannette Sloniowski) of Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries (University of Toronto Press, 2003). His most recent book is Film in Canada (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Jacqueline Levitin is a filmmaker and film historian-critic who teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Her recent film work has been in ethnographic documentary (“Building Bridge: A Housing Project for Women” [2003]), live video collaborations for dance and theatre, and an experimental documentary, Mahjong & Chicken Feet (2008), on China’s relation with her Jewish “others.” She is the co-editor of Women Filmmakers: Refocusing (2003), a dialogue between women filmmakers, critics, and theorists.
George Melnyk is an associate professor of Canadian Studies and Film Studies, Faculty of Communication and Culture, at the University of Calgary. His publications on cinema include One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (2004), My Mother Is an Alien: Ten Takes on Life and Film (2004), and Great Canadian Film Directors (2007). He is currently completing a monograph on urbanity in Canadian cinema and organizing the second volume of this series.
Kalli Paakspuu teaches at York University and is a Genie-winning filmmaker, new media, and theatre artist. Her dissertation, “Rhetorics of Colonialism in Visual Documentation” (University of Toronto), examines early cross-cultural communication and the dialogical storytelling on both sides of the camera. Her publications and art projects specialize in visual, oral, and mnemonic knowledge practices. She is developing a feature-film musical based on Liliane Atlan’s play Les Mers Rouges, about the Sephardic Jews exodus from Spain, after directing a successful English world premiere at Toronto’s Fringe Festival in 2005.
Peggy Thompson is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. She is the screenwriter of the feature films The Lotus Eaters (1993), for which she won a Genie Award for Best Screenplay, and Better Than Chocolate. She was one of the producers on the feature film Saint Monica (2002) and most recently was one of the executive producers on the documentary The Oldest Basketball Team in the World (2006).

Description

The Young, the Restless, and the Dead captures the spirit of Canadian filmmakers through interviews with the most accomplished and dynamic of yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s film greats. Funny, provocative, and enlightening, the filmmakers reflect on their careers and explore with the interviewers the issues that challenge them.
This book features an interview with a late director (Jean-Claude Lauzon) whose work is recognized in the canon as outstanding; interviews with filmmakers who are accomplished in their fields and have to their credit a sizeable body of work (Blake Corbet, Andrew Currie, Brent Carlson, Guy Maddin, Lynne Stopkewich, Anne Wheeler, Gary Burns, and Mina Shum); and an interview with a young director new to the field (Michael Dowse). Together these players in the Canadian film scene capture the energy, success, and tribulations of a fascinating cultural industry.
The Young, the Restless, and the Dead is the first volume in a series of interviews with key cultural creators in the field of cinema. It seeks to bring to a wide audience the insights and emotions, the trials and achievements of significant figures in Canadian film.
George Melnyk talks about The Young, the Restless, and the Dead with Eric Volmers of the Calgary Herald. Read the interview online.

Reviews

The Young, the Restless, and the Dead will contribute to putting Canadian filmmakers, upcoming and established, on the national and international map.

- Claudia Kotte, H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, April 2009, 2009 April

Interview books can have the advantage of enhancing the accessibility and plasticity of a topic, and Melnyk, who tagged this collection in an interview as a ‘fun little book’ that is to ‘capture the fun of filmmaking–certainly zeros in on this effect by including storyboards, film stills, photos and a very clearly arranged layout. Moreover his selection of directors is far from being well-worn, Guy Madden being the only realy big name among Michael Dowse, the Anagram Picture boys Blake Corbet, Andrew Currie and Trent Carlson, Mina Shum, Lynn Stopkewich, Gary Burns, Anne Wheeler and Jean-Claude Lauzon, thus presenting a panorama.

- Johannes Springer, University of Bremen, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 23.2, 2010 December