This chapter concerns a small group of films produced at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Golden Age of Canadian documentary. These short films, which aired on Radio-Canada TV as part of the television series Temps présent (1957–64), intended only to deliver direct reportages of their subject material without overt sociological or political agendas.¹ And yet, by making “visible the complex and changing face of French Canadians” (Morris 1984, 291), the films became an aesthetic and political turning point for Québécois cinema and Québécois cultural representation in general (Véronneau 1987,...

How can a fictional film character potentially be considered a Québécois folk hero in a contemporary narrative setting? The attempt to suggest or discuss the heroic nature of Robert (Bob) “Elvis” Gratton (affectionately known as Elvis Gratton), the Québécois film character and social political parody, is a daunting task because of the sheer oxymoron it represents. Though the very notion of Elvis Gratton as a folk hero in Québec seems unlikely to viewers of the film series, the character’s phenomenal status in popular Québécois culture makes it feasible to consider him that way. When I discussed my interpretation with potential...

With its celebration of mountains and masculinity, of pure white landscapes and strong white men, the popular genre of Weimar cinema known as the mountain film (Bergfilm) lends itself readily to interpretations that emphasize its relation to Nazi ideology. A number of factors have encouraged the perception of the mountain film as Aryan-myth wish fulfillment. The growth of the genre closely mirrors the rise of National Socialism, with production petering out once the Third Reich was established in 1933. Additionally, the content of the films conforms to popular conceptions of Nazism: the white, athletic characters can be seen to represent...

What viewer of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) can forget the moment when the computer HAL 9000 faces his death and sings “A Bicycle Built for Two”? The melody winds down as HAL loses consciousness. It is a poignant moment in which the technological creation, a conscious being whose increasing power we are supposed to fear, regresses to the point of his seemingly innocent creation. The melody reminds us that he was created like a child and sung to by a creator who must have deployed the song as, on the one hand, a recording test and, on the other,...

The transnational circulation of people and media that helps define both contemporary and colonial globalization makes it possible for us to speak of global folklore. This chapter explores the emergence of global folklore by focusing on the transformation of the figure of the jinn as it moves intertextually from Arab folklore through the transcultural Arabian Nights collections into Euro-American film and television, and back into Middle Eastern media and oral performance in transmogrified forms. Genie in this essay refers to the Orientalist construct of powerful, wish-granting beings trapped in objects, while jinn alludes to the free-willed, invisible beings of Middle...

What makes Hamlet’s ghost so memorably disturbing, for audiences as well as its unwilling interlocutor? Jacques Derrida has pointed out in Specters of Marx that the ghost’s inscrutable form and ambiguous provenance are crucial to its power. We grasp, with Hamlet, the familiar lineaments of a demanding father, yet “that does not prevent him from looking at us without being seen: his apparition makes him appear still invisible beneath his armour” (1994, 7). We “do not see what looks at us,” and this “spectral asymmetry” grants the ghost’s implacable gaze the power to judge the living (1994, 7). In the...

In Germany, Pale Mother (1980), Helma Sanders-Brahms depicts her childhood experiences in Germany during and after World War II. The film’s tripartite structure consists of the prewar courtship of the filmmaker’s parents, the wartime tribulations and adventures of mother and child, and the postwar era of domestic misery. In an attempt to survive during the war, mother, Lene (Eva Mattes), and child, Anna (Anna Sanders), form a self-sufficient bond that excludes the father, Hans (Ernst Jacobi), who returns from the war an embittered man. His desperate, sometimes brutal efforts to reassert his authority drive Lene to silence and ultimately to...

Kasi Lemmons’s neoclassical (re)visioning of the conjure woman in her film Eve’s Bayou (1997) not only reinforces the idea of this archetype as the place where West African and early African American spirituality and consciousness melded to formulate one means of a people’s psychical mediation and survival; it also reinvigorates the tendency of black women griots to cling to the past as a means to determine the present and the future. In creating this film, Lemmons joins a distinguished cohort of African American women storytellers who return to the traditional image of the conjure woman to discover and celebrate their...

Ed Guerrero argues in Framing Blackness, “Hollywood’s unceasing efforts to frame blackness are constantly challenged by the cultural and political self-definitions of African Americans, who as a people have been determined since the inception of commercial cinema to militate against this limiting system of representation” (1994,3). Guerrero’s comments point up the systematic continuums that create discursive battles that shape and inform national and international discussions about not only African American people’s subjectivity but also their woundedness. Because of the volatile nature of race, African Americans have had to represent the brutality of their historical experiences in ways that amplify the...

Two films could not be executed more differently than Ingmar Bergman’s crisp, black-and-white Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring, 1960), and Wes Craven’s boldly bloody The Last House on the Left (1972), yet both ultimately spring from the same source: a ballad of tragedy and revenge dating to at least the sixteenth century. The plot of the ballad details the murder of a daughter by robbers. Seeking shelter, the robbers unknowingly ask hospitality of the girl’s parents and then display her belongings. The parents, realizing what has occurred, kill the killers. The two filmmakers share not only this story but also a...

Many classic studies of foodways by folklorists and other scholars have effectively shown the sophisticated ways that food functions to foster communitas, a heightened sense of group cohesion. Owing to the ethnographic tradition of representing cultures in a decidedly celebratory manner, as well as the tendency for individuals and groups to perform self-consciously, it follows that most depictions of food within communities adhere to this paradigm of communitas (cf. Humphrey and Humphrey 1988). Recently, a few studies have moved beyond this positive function of food behavior to consider how food may be employed simultaneously to reinforce hegemonic or patriarchal structures...