Table Of ContentWORKING ON SCREEN: REPRESENTATIONS OF
THE WORKING CLASS IN CANADIAN CINEMA
As themes in film studies literature, work and the working class have
long occupied a peripheral place in the evaluation of Canadian cinema.
Such themes have often been set aside for the sake of a unifying narra-
tive that assumes a division between Québécois and English Canada’s
film production, a social-realist documentary aesthetic, and what might
be called a ‘younger brother’ relationship with the United States.
In Working on Screen, contributors examine representations of socio-
economic class across the spectrum of Canadian film. In doing so, they
cover a wide range of class-related topics and deal with them as they
intersect with history, political activism, globalization, feminism, queer
rights, masculinity, regional marginalization, cinematic realism, and
Canadian nationalism.
Of concern in this collection are the daily lives and struggles of
working people and the ways in which the representation of the experi-
ence of class in film fosters or marginalizes a progressive engagement
with history, politics, and societies around the world. Working on Screen
expands the scholarly debates on the concept of national cinema and
builds on the rich, formative efforts of Canadian cultural criticism that
focused on the need for cultural autonomy.
malek khouri is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Communica-
tion and Culture at the University of Calgary.
darrell varga is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in
Contemporary Film and Media Studies at the NSCAD (Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design) University.
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Working on Screen
Representations of the Working Class
in Canadian Cinema
Edited by Malek Khouri
and Darrell Varga
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9076-6 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-8020-9076-1 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9388-2 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8020-9388-4 (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Working on screen : representations of the working class in
Canadian cinema / edited by Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9076-6 (bound)
ISBN-10: 0-8020-9076-1 (bound)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9388-2 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-8020-9388-4 (pbk.)
1. Working class in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures – Canada –
History. I. Khouri, Malek, 1953– II. Varga, Darrell, 1966–
′
PN1995.9.L28W67 2006 791.436352624 C2006-902205-4
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to
its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to
Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for
its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
Foreword ix
thomas waugh
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Working on Screen 3
malek khouri and darrell varga
PART ONE: WORKERS, HISTORY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
1 In Search of the Canadian Labour Film 25
david frank
2 Communists, Class, and Culture in Canada 46
scott forsyth
3 The Image of the ‘People’ in the CBC’s Canada:
A People’s History 73
darrell varga
PART TWO: WORK, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY
4 Work It Girl! Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 95
rebecca sullivan
vi Contents
5 Not Playing, Working: Class, Masculinity, and Nation
in the Canadian Hockey Film 113
bart beaty
6 Other-ing the Worker in Canadian ‘Gay Cinema’:
Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden 134
malek khouri
7 Whose Museum Is It, Anyway? Discourses of Resistance
in the Adaptation of The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum into
Margaret’s Museum 148
peter urquhart
PART THREE: DIRTY WORK
8 Activating History: Sara Diamond and the Women’s
Labour History Project 161
susan lord
9 Dirty Laundry: Re-imagining the Canadian Pacific Railway
and the Construction of the Nation 178
margot francis
PART FOUR: WORKING ON NATIONAL CINEMA
10 Look like a Worker and Act like a Worker: Stereotypical
Representations of the Working Class in Quebec Fiction
Feature Films 207
andré loiselle
11 Inscriptions of Class and Nationalism in Canadian
‘Realist’ Cinema: Final Offer and Canada’s Sweetheart:
The Saga of Hal C. Banks 235
joseph kispal-kovacs
12 Rude and the Representation of Class Relations in
Canadian Film 246
john mccullough
Contents vii
13 Counter Narratives, Class Politics, and Metropolitan Dystopias:
Representations of Globalization in Maelström, waydowntown, and
La moitié gauche du frigo 268
brenda longfellow
Selected Bibliography 283
Contributors 291
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Foreword
This excellent collection of essays on representations of the working
class in Canadian cinemas reminds me of my grandmother.
Clara Gertrude Waugh (1884–1961) was a Jackie Gleason fan. When I
knew her, my father’s mother was a working-class widow subsisting on
her pension in a rooming house in South London, Ontario, sharing
many a pot of tea and a communal TV set with the other elderly women
who lived there. Grandma Waugh’s taste also included Don Messer’s
Jubilee (Canada, 1958–69) and romance novels, and reflected her
Middlesex County class roots and culture. I didn’t get it at all, and as a
pretentious, four-eyed, future queer intellectual I found Jackie Gleason
vulgar and boring. Not that I was a devotee of the then emerging
corpus of Canadian moving images either – far from it – for my expo-
sure had been restricted to National Film Board shorts projected in
Grades 6 and 7, and to Tommy Hunter and Juliette on the CBC. These
latter bizarre manifestations of outmoded provinciality I immediately
switched off, along with Don Messer and Hockey Night in Canada, in
deference to hipper American pop culture artifacts such as The Dick Van
Dyke Show, which bowed out a few months after my grandmother died
in 1961. Her daughter-in-law, my mother, Hope (b. 1919), a high school
teacher, had tendencies towards upwardly mobile class snobbery. I
shared her aspiration to middle-class values, which for her was finally
fulfilled around the start of the 1960s. At that time my father, Thomas
Ralph (b. 1920), a United Church minister who had been the only child
in Clara’s family of seven to go to university, moved from a working-
class congregation in Brantford, Ontario, to a middle-class congregation
in nearby Guelph. In Brantford, I had denied point-blank at a sharing
circle in my kindergarten class at King George School that my father
