The Imagined City: Toward a Theory of Urbanity in Canadian Cinema

cinema, like most national cinemas, strong sense of place. Place often carries geographic connotations--oceans, grasslands, tundra, boreal forests and mountains and flora and fauna associated with them. Geography in turn carries seasonal identities such as snowy winters. film scholar Jim Leach calls this orientation toward place in cinema the nationalist-realist project. (1) In this project it is natural reality of Canada that is privileged as abiding way to visualizing national identity. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Since beginning of cinema in Canada images of unspoiled wilderness and unpopulated spaces have been posited by colonizer as Canadian in opposition to Europe's urban historicity or America's tumultuous cityscapes. One need only reflect on agrarian propaganda films of 1900 sponsored by CPR or such classics of Canadiana as Back to God's Country (1919). Ironically, popularity of location shooting of American-produced films in Canada in latter half of twentieth century allowed landscape to be used as substitute for American landscapes with Alberta being an example of contemporary landscape that replaces lost landscapes of American west. much-lauded documentary tradition in film was both an outcome of this naturalism and national-realist project and its signifier. literary scholar W.H. New considers concept of a verbal trope in writing. (2) He writes how culture created language of land and reading of land as basic ingredient of national identity in both fiction and nonfiction representation. (3) This old country/new dichotomy was product of European exploration and conquest and of culture that evolved from it. For example, doyenne of contemporary literature, Margaret Atwood in her Clarendon Lectures in English Literature at Oxford University in 1991 admitted privileging the North, or wilderness, or snow, or bears or cannibalism .. [over] literature of urban life in her lectures on literature. (4) It was, she implied, much more fun to talk to English about how their cultural fantasies of Canada had played out in its indigenous literature than to discuss urban life, which they knew so well. (5) It was bow to an exoticization in which city is presented as monolithic anti-land without differentiation or specificity. Concepts of identity that are grounded in nationalist-realist project view globalized present of cyberspaced urbanity as uniform and anti-nationalist monoculture. Yet we intuitively know that people visit other cities simply to experience their otherness, be it Toronto for Americans, Venice for Canadians or Mumbai for Swedes. If we lived in universe of small city-states, like Greeks did, rather than nation-states then nationalist identification with distinct geographic features would evaporate and be replaced with focus on urban difference rather than urban similarity. Curiously, universality of first world urban experience proposed by nationalist-realist ideology allows cinematic representations of urbanity to hold within them opposites. For example, 2006 UK film Breaking and Entering allows spectator to visualize and imagine London as distinct cultural entity while simultaneously offering urban viewer identification with its leitmotif of gentrification and migration now associated with most cities in world. As result urbanity embraces self-referential multiplicity, while rejecting superficial categorization. London is different but its problems are similar to that of other urban centres. feature film, which began in earnest in 1960s, been product of urban culture, economics, and sensibility. (6) The cinema, as commodity and art form, writes Allan Siegel, has been inextricably linked to cultural and economic realities of city. …

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