“Something to Fall Through”: Grid Forms in <i>The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood</i> (1986)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article revisits Mike and Andy Jones’ 1986 feature film The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood, a landmark Newfoundland film that has appeared in too few accounts of Canadian cinema besides Darrell Varga’s groundbreaking treatise on Atlantic Canadian regional cinema, to analyze its pervasive use of grid forms, themes, and metaphors. It discusses the grid’s significance in the film beyond grid-reality, a theory that Faustus’s boss, Fred-Bonia Coombes, develops after seeing an expansive grid suspended in the sky when a friend gets fatally struck by a falling bag of frozen soup. In dialogue with writings on the grid as a form by thinkers such as Eugenie Brinkema and Rosalind Krauss, it examines the film’s graphic grids and metaphors—windows, chain-link fences, ceiling tiles, crosses, modernist architecture, television monitors, and a grape seed catcher—as crucial meeting points for structure and contingency. In doing so, this article not only makes an argument for the film’s historical or political importance for a culturally modernizing province or the Newfoundland Renaissance but also offers an in-depth reading of the film that argues for its historiographic and theoretical importance as a film that formally engages with questions of structure and contingency and cinema’s role therein.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".