Modern times : time and the modern in the fiction films of William D. MacGillivray
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The work of contemporary Atlantic Canadian filmmaker William O. MacGillivray is a set of confrontations. His five fiction feature films investigate, perhaps even recalibrate, conventionally understood ideas of centre and margin, time and space, and most pointedly, traditional and modern. What MacGillivray presents in his work is not, in the manner of George Grant, a lament for a traditional or old and noble world locked inexorably in the processes of technological erasure. Instead, echoing the actively ambivalent response to technology-induced change advanced by Harold Innis and others, what the films reveal is a range of possible alternative critical positions within the experience of modern lite in contemporary Atlantic Canada. As Carlos Fuentes reminds us, this does not necessarily entail 'sacrificing the past in favour of the new,' as much of the rhetoric surrounding notions of the modern insists, but rather the 'maintaining, comparing, and remembering values we have created, making them modern so as not lose the value of the modern.' ln a sense, this process is about remembering time. Fundamentally, in creating rich, complex narratives about a part of Canada facing considerable and rapid change, MacGillivray is making his own cinematic 'plea for time' in his confrontations with notions of what constitutes a modern existence. It is also a plea for space, to remember that as there are 'different modern times' there are also 'different modern spaces.'
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".