This landmark collection of essays considers the global legacy of John Grierson, the father of British documentary. Featuring the work of leading scholars from around the world, The Grierson Effect explores the impact of Grierson's ideas about documentary and educational film in a wide range of cultural and national contexts - from Russia and Scandinavia, to Latin America, South Africa and New Zealand. In reconsidering Grierson's international infl uence, this major new study emphasises the material conditions of the production and circulation of documentary cinema, foregrounds core issues in documentary studies, and opens up expanded perspectives on transnational cinema cultures and histories.

"Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television," the first anthology dedicated to analyses of Canadian television content, is a collection of original, interdisciplinary articles, combining textual analysis and political economy of communications. It explores the television that has thrived in the Canadian regulatory and cultural context: namely, programs that straddle the border between reality and fiction or even blur it. The conceptual basis of this collection is the hybrid nature of television fare: the widely theorized notion that all mediations of reality involve fiction in the form of narrative or symbolic shaping. Each of the contributions here is a reminder, too, of the significant relationship of television to nation building in Canada--to the imaginative work involved in thinking through the relations that constitute nations, citizens, and communities. The collection focuses on English-language Canadian television because the imperatives guiding its texts are markedly different from those pertaining to their French-lanugage counterparts. The collection, therefore, develops a nuance of perspective on the cultural and political economic specificities that inform the imaginative work of television production for English Canada.

This landmark collection of essays considers the global legacy of John Grierson, the father of British documentary. Featuring the work of leading scholars from around the world, The Grierson Effect explores the impact of Grierson's ideas about documentary and educational film in a wide range of cultural and national contexts - from Russia and Scandinavia, to Latin America, South Africa and New Zealand. In reconsidering Grierson's international infl uence, this major new study emphasises the material conditions of the production and circulation of documentary cinema, foregrounds core issues in documentary studies, and opens up expanded perspectives on transnational cinema cultures and histories.

Long before 'Reality TV, ' Canadian filmmaker Allan King caused a stir by mixing people's private and public lives in his 1969 documentary A Married Couple. This observational cinema piece, which took an unscripted look at the urban Edwards family, was deemed too contentious to air by commissioning network CTV on the grounds of excessive nudity and obscenity. Nevertheless, the documentary was accepted by the Cannes festival, and it is now cited as a milestone in realist filmmaking.

In Allan King's A Married Couple, Zoe Druick examines the film in the context of late 1960s cinematic and cultural movements. Through a scene-by-scene synopsis and an analysis of contemporary responses to the piece, she traces A Married Couple's influence on documentary and Canadian filmmaking. The fifth volume in the Canadian Cinema series, this work is an accessible and engaging introduction to a controversial film and its fascinating director.