<p>Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by<br>twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of<br>wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to<br>support what film scholar Jim Leach calls "the<br>nationalist-realist project," a documentary style that emphasizes<br>the exoticism and mythos of the land. Over the past several decades,<br>however, the hegemony of Anglo-centrism has been challenged by<br>francophone and First Nations perspectives and the character of cities<br>altered by a continued influx of immigrants and the development of<br>cities as economic and technological centers. No longer primarily<br>defined through the lens of rural nostalgia, Canadian urban identity is<br>instead polyphonic, diverse, constructed through multiple discourses<br>and mediums, an exchange rather than a strict orientation. Taking on<br>the urban as setting and subject, filmmakers are ideally poised to<br>create and reflect multiple versions of a single city.</p><br><br><p>Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from 1989 to 2007,<br>including Denys Arcand's <i>Jésus de Montréal</i> (1989),<br>Jean-Claude Lauzon's <i>Léolo</i> (1992), Mina Shum's<br><i>Double Happiness</i> (1994), Clément Virgo's <i>Rude</i><br>(1995), and Guy Maddin's <i>My Winnipeg</i> (2007), <i>Film<br>and the City</i> is the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and<br>"urbanity"-the totality of urban culture and life.<br>Drawing on film and urban studies and building upon issues of identity<br>formation in Canadian studies, Melnyk considers how filmmakers, films,<br>and urban audiences experience, represent, and interpret urban<br>spatiality, visuality, and orality. In this way, <i>Film and the<br>City</i> argues that Canadian narrative film of the postmodern period<br>has aided in articulating a new national identity.</p><p><b>George Melnyk</b> is associate professor in the Department<br>of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. He has<br>published a number of books on Canadian cinema, including <i>One<br>Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema</i> (2004), <i>Great Canadian Film<br>Directors</i> (2007), <i>The Young, the Restless, and the Dead:<br>Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers</i> (2008), and <i>The Gendered<br>Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers</i> (2010).