"We must be burning film like mad": Exploring Canadian production cultures at Cinepix, 1976-1986.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the Canadian production, distribution, and exhibition company Cinépix between the years 1976-1986. Best well-known for their films Valérie (1969), Shivers (1975), Meatballs (1979), and My Bloody Valentine (1981), Cinépix has been neglected in the field of Canadian film studies. This thesis uses the framework of Media Industry Studies, and especially John Caldwell’s research on production culture, examining Cinépix’s previously unused archival material, including original memos, letters, storyboards, scripts, production notes, location documents, and producer’s notes on rushes. Films researched include the previously under- examined Meatballs III (1986), State Park (1988), Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), The Vindicator (1986), and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983), among others. This research argues that Cinépix’s production cultures were defined through commercial adaptability, independence, masculinity, and most importantly, the concept of the producer, exemplified by the company’s figureheads John Dunning and Andre Link. Through its use of Media Industry Studies approaches, this thesis also presents a new way of conceptualizing Canadian cinema and provokes new research within the discipline.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".