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Record W3134505360 · doi:10.1080/17409292.2021.1865060

Brain Drain: Rural Poverty and the Quebecois Zombie Film

2021· article· en· W3134505360 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
George F. MacLeod

Bibliographic record

VenueContemporary French and Francophone Studies · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGothic Literature and Media Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsZombieRivieraAllegoryHistoryPovertyArtArt historySociologyLiteratureArchaeologyPolitical scienceLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Robin Aubert’s 2017 film Les Affamés is a zombie genre film, set in an unspecified region of rural Quebec. The first Quebecois addition of note to the zombie film genre, Les Affamés follows the few remaining humans who have avoided contamination from their infected, flesh-eating pursuers. The rustic setting provides a haunting backdrop as the protagonist, a bearded science-fiction devotee named Bonin, and his five companions, attempt to flee through the woods to safety, pursued by a screaming, blood-thirsty horde of their former friends and neighbors. Les Affamés functions in large part as an allegory for rural poverty and economic isolation. Decaying farmhouses, rusting tractors, and an abandoned mine are just a few of the iconic images that invoke the real-world struggles of once-healthy agricultural and mining communities in a twenty-first-century neo-liberal economy. This paper will focus in particular on the zombie as an avatar for Quebecois and, more broadly, North American rural decay, noting how Aubert uses a zombie virus as an allegory for depopulation and economic marginalization. Indeed, the Affamés of the film’s title also suggest the ravenous appetites of a capitalist system which, like the film’s titular flesh-eating monsters, appears insatiable.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.038
Threshold uncertainty score0.231

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0180.004
Scholarly communication0.0040.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0220.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.270
Teacher spread0.252 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2021
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueContemporary French and Francophone StudiesSame topicGothic Literature and Media AnalysisFrench-language works237,207