Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium

Cover: Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium

Book front cover for Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium, edited by Lee Carruthers and Charles Tepperman. The cover is a sepia-toned photograph of an art gallery exhibition by dominique t. skoltz, featuring a large, thick free standing wall that has a projection of two people floating in water. The wall at the back of the gallery shows a row of tv screens, each with similar versions of the first image.

Back Cover: Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium.

Book back cover for Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium, edited by Lee Carruthers and Charles Tepperman. The back text includes the description of the book (which is written out in the body of this website post). It also includes the following quoted reviews:

“Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium convenes a diverse symposium of critical interventions on the last twenty years. A renewal of critical activity is exactly what we need right now, and that’s what this terrific collection gives us.” Jerry White, University of Saskatchewan and editor of The Cinema of Canada

“A timely and valuable set of accounts of and responses to developments in Canadian cinema over the last two decades and a strong and original contribution to Canadian film scholarship.” Christine Ramsay, University of Regina and co-editor of Atom Egoyan: Steenbeckett

Finally, the cover notes that both editors are professors of film studies at the University of Calgary.

edited by Lee Carruthers & Charles Tepperman

Published by McGill-Queens University Press (2021)

My contribution to this volume is Chapter 14 “dominique t. skoltz and New States of Cinematic Matter” p. 256-272.

Shifts in technology and new awareness around cinematic exhibition practices have increasingly blurred disciplinary boundaries. Borrowing from visual arts and theatrical design of space and spectatorship, the moving image often breaks outside of traditional theatrical spaces, to present in galleries and public venues. Although expanded cinema has been doing so since the 1960s, the new millennium has seen a strong interest in the possibilities of cinema as it slides off the screen and into the space of the spectator; however, when cinema is brought into the gallery space, the result often diminishes the specific ontology of the form in favour of the rules and traditions of the white cube. Monitors are placed on pedestals in brightly lit rooms where the spectator is expected to stand, or—at best—secluded into a dark room with a single bench. The wide-open space of the gallery reigns, and encourages a kind of peripatetic viewing that does not allow for the longer, beginning-to-end of narrative cinema. Alternately, visual arts practices that influence single-channel film are often constrained to the screen and theatrical staging of spectators passively seated within an immersive darkness.

The work of Montreal-based artist and filmmaker Dominique Skoltz offers a different approach, merging the unique properties of cinema, sculpture, and even performance, to create work that richly investigates the possibilities of cross-disciplinary encounters. Using her single-channel film, Y20 (2013), as a starting point, Skoltz investigates the tensions inherent in the shared encounters between isolated subjectivities. To do so, she depicts the physical form of a man and a woman as they act out the decay of a romantic relationship; however, the filmic narrative also offers an entry point into thinking about the meetings between the different disciplines that inform the materiality of the work, and the friction between spectator and the aesthetic object. Through three different exhibitions, Skoltz expanded the single-channel version of Y20 (originally screened at film festivals) into multi-screen installations, a single-screen version that explores the original film at a new temporality, photographs, sculptures, and even a performance within the final exhibition space. These works stand as individual objects that operate in relation to one another, and most importantly, each work balances the needs of cinema and visual art; the photographs and sculptures incorporate cinematic forms, and the single-channel exhibition of the film itself bleeds off the screen and into the gallery space using a variety of architectural devices. The installations act out phenomenological relationships with the spectator, underscoring the inevitable human condition of sharing space and experiences, while remaining painfully isolated from the world around us. By bringing these concerns together within a situation that draws attention to the beautiful materiality of the work, Skoltz creates an exhibition that is thrillingly contemporary and uniquely Canadian.

About the book:

At the turn of the millennium Canadian cinema appeared to have reached an apex of aesthetic and commercial transformation. Domestic filmmaking has since declined in visibility: the sense of celebrity once associated with independent directors has diminished, projects garner less critical attention, and concepts that made late-twentieth-century Canadian film legible have been reconsidered or displaced.
Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium examines this dramatic transformation and revitalizes our engagement with Canadian cinema in the contemporary moment, presenting focused case studies of films and filmmakers and contextual studies of Canadian film policy, labour, and film festivals. Contributors trace key developments since 2000, including the renouveau or Quebec New Wave, Indigenous filmmaking, i-docs, and diasporic experimental filmmaking. Reflecting the way film in Canada mediates multiple cultures, forging new affinities among anglophone, francophone, and Indigenous-language examples, this book engages familiar figures, such as Denis Villeneuve, Xavier Dolan, Sarah Polley, and Guy Maddin, in the same breath as small-budget independent films, documentaries, and experimental works that have emerged in the Canadian scene.
Fuelled by close attention to the films themselves and a desire to develop new scholarly approaches, Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium models a renewed commitment to keeping the conversation about Canadian cinema vibrant and alive.