This is an exciting new collection sure to create ripples throughout Canadian film studies a| an important new addition to the literature on Canadian screen culture. - ZoA" Druick, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University Rain/Drizzle/Fog : Film and Television in Atlantic Canada is the first scholarly study of film and television in Atlantic Canada. With contributors from across the country, the book provides a broad historical overview of film and television in the region, as well as essays on specific topics in contemporary popular television (Trailer Park Boys), early television (Don Messer's Jubilee), and the work of filmmakers such as Bill MacGillivray, Andrea Dorfman, Thom Fitzgerald, and others. This collection is informed by a critical perspective on prevailing stereotypes of culture in the Atlantic region, as well as by history and political-economy debates on the relationship between Atlantic and central Canada. It is also in large part a response to the continued marginalization of regional film and television within the field of Canadian film studies, which has traditionally been dominated by a critical and artistic canon from central Canada and Quebec. Rain/Drizzle/Fog challenges the prevailing tendency to homogenize the complexity of Canadian cultural production and instead celebrates the regional distinctions that make Atlantic film and television unique. With Contributions By: Bruce Barber Andrew Burke Gregory Canning Noreen Golfman Sylvia D. Hamilton Colin Howell MalekKhouri John Mccullough Peter L. Twohig Jen Vanderburg DarrellVarga Pierre Veronneau Jerry White Tracy Y. Zhang

The city has long been an important location for film-makers. Visually compelling and always "modern," it is the perfect metaphor for man's place in the contemporary world.
In this provocative collection of essays, a diverse range of films are examined in terms of the relationship between cinema and paradigmatic urban experience in Europe and North America since the early twentieth century. Moscow, Leningrad, Berlin, Prague and Warsaw--sites of dramatic upheaval in the 1920s-1930s, and again in the 1970s-1980s--feature strongly in the first part of the book. In the cinematic representation of these cities, modernist experimentation combined with social and political change to produce such memorable films as "The Man with the Movie Camera," " Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City," " Berlin Alexanderplatz" and, more recently, the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jan svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. The different but comparable space of the North American city since World War Two provides the primary focus for the second part of the book. Here, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto provide the settings for an investigation of the relationship between cinema and race, and cinema and postmodern global capitalism, in a comprehensive range of films from "Point Blank," " Medium Cool," " Network "and" Annie Hall "in the 1960s and 1970s, to "Boyz N the Hood," " Falling Down," " Pulp Fiction," " Safe]," " Crash "and" The End of Violence" in the 1990s.
Throughout the book, the cinema's artistic encounter with the city always intersects with a social and political engagement in which urgent issues of class, race, sexuality, the environment, liberty, capital, and totalitarianism are everywhere at stake.

John Walker is one of Canada's most prolific and important documentary filmmakers and is known for his many thoughtful, personally inflected films. His masterwork, Passage, centres on Sir John Franklin's failed expedition to find the final link of the Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Canadian Arctic. It also gives us the story of John Rae, the Scottish explorer who discovered the fate of Franklin and the final link in the passage, but was left to the margins of history. Walker's film brings to this story a layering of dramatic action and behind-the-scenes documentary footage that build tension between the story of the past and interpretations of the present.

Darrell Varga provides a close analysis of Passage, situating it within Walker's rich body of work and the Canadian documentary tradition. Varga illuminates how the film can be viewed through the lens of Harold Innis's theories of communication and culture, opening up the work of this great Canadian political economist to film studies.