Author Description

"Screening Quebec" explores the connections between Quebecois image-making practices, national identity and the possibility of film, television and video functioning as the site of an alternative public sphere. Beginning with the ground-breaking work of Quebecois film pioneer Leo-Ernest Ouimet in the silent era and continuing on through to Pathe's presence in Quebec, the first French-language features in Canada, cinema direct, the video activism of Challenge for Change/Societe nouvelle and the "post-referendum" cinema of Denys Arcand and Robert Lepage, the text traces recurring instances of the cinema functioning as a contestatory and alternative public sphere in French-Canadian and Quebecois culture.