“Somewhere in California”: New Regional Spaces of Mobility in Contemporary Vancouver Cinema
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".