The ‘Frozen’ Heart of the Continent: Place-Myths and Winnipeg in Canadian Crime Films
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within Canadian national cinema, audiences view places that draw attention to the shared experience of being within these geopolitical, socio-spatial locations. This paper contends that crime films set in Winnipeg, a city situated in the centre of North America, reflect and contribute to the cultural identity of the city within the national imaginary. Place-myths have the potential to construct meanings about a particular place, indicating whether it is romantic or dangerous, progressive or “backward,” vibrant or decaying. While currently branded by local civic boosters as the ‘Heart of the Continent,’ (Kives, 2008) the construction of Winnipeg-as-place on film tells a different tale. By implementing a qualitative media analysis, we argue that place-myths manifest themselves within Canadian crime film narratives, and that a better understanding of place allows us to observe how Winnipeg becomes socially spatialized onscreen. As our paper suggests, one’s sense of space can only constellate when one’s experiences of being and acting within a place is taken into account. Winnipeg ultimately becomes represented on film as a place where crime is rampant and law enforcement is unable to combat the criminal behaviour within the city—in other words, where law and justice is ‘frozen.’ Dans le cinéma national canadien, les auditoires vont associer les lieux avec leur propre expérience de ces emplacements géopolitiques et de leur espace social. Cet article soutient que les films policiers qui se déroulent à Winnipeg, une ville située au centre de l’Amérique du Nord, reflètent et contribuent à forger l’identité culturelle de la ville au sein de l’imaginaire national. Les mythes liés aux endroits ont le potentiel de construire des significations autour d’un lieu spécifique, indiquant si cet espace est romantique ou dangereux, progressif ou « rétrograde », animé ou déserté. Même si des représentants de Winnipeg vont qualifier la ville de « cœur du continent » (Kives, 2008), sa construction imaginaire au cinéma raconte une autre histoire. Par la mise en œuvre d’une analyse qualitative des médias, nous soutenons que les mythes des lieux se manifestent dans les trames narratives des films policiers canadiens, et qu’une meilleure compréhension des lieux nous permet de constater comment l’espace social de Winnipeg a été présenté à l’écran. Comme notre article le suggère, notre perception de l’espace ne peut s’exprimer pleinement que si nous expérimentons concrètement et agissons dans celui-ci. Winnipeg devient finalement représenté au cinéma comme un endroit où le crime est à la hausse et les organismes d’application de la loi incapables de combattre les comportements criminels dans la ville – en d’autres mots, où la loi et la justice sont « immobiles ».
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".