“Somewhere in California”: New Regional Spaces of Mobility in Contemporary Vancouver Cinema
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars of critical regionalism have argued convincingly for a complex re-definition of regions/regionalism that examines the inherent mobility of cultures and their re-appropriation of place. This article aims to bring American-based critical regionalism into dialogue with research on Canada-U.S. cross-border regions, specifically the Pacific Northwest (Cascadia). I will examine an emerging aspect of western culture in the Lower Mainland of Vancouver, i.e. a (post)regional space of flows governed by the hyper-volatile film and television/entertainment industry that links Vancouver to Los Angeles. The cinema of award-winning Vancouver auteur filmmaker Carl Bessai is illustrative of this phenomenon. Bessai’s two most recent films, Fathers and Sons (2010) and Sisters and Brothers (2011) feature characters in non-traditional families who desire to work in film and television in Los Angeles. Through caustic humor, the films engage in multiple levels of critique: of the dysfunctional nature of these cross-border families, but also of the superficiality of image-culture and the “forced” migration of talent who are sucked into the entertainment vortex. Analyzing these films through the lens of critical regionalism foregrounds “West Coastness” as a region of flows, of bodies in mobility/circulation yet—in the case of Bessai—without side-stepping the obvious asymmetries inherent in Canada’s complex and enduringly ambivalent relationship with the United States.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it