The work of contemporary Atlantic Canadian filmmaker William O. MacGillivray is a set of confrontations. His five fiction feature films investigate, perhaps even recalibrate, conventionally understood ideas of centre and margin, time and space, and most pointedly, traditional and modern. What MacGillivray presents in his work is not, in the manner of George Grant, a lament for a traditional or old and noble world locked inexorably in the processes of technological erasure. Instead, echoing the actively ambivalent response to technology-induced change advanced by Harold Innis and others, what the films reveal is a range of possible alternative critical positions within the experience of modern lite in contemporary Atlantic Canada. As Carlos Fuentes reminds us, this does not necessarily entail 'sacrificing the past in favour of the new,' as much of the rhetoric surrounding notions of the modern insists, but rather the 'maintaining, comparing, and remembering values we have created, making them modern so as not lose the value of the modern.' ln a sense, this process is about remembering time. Fundamentally, in creating rich, complex narratives about a part of Canada facing considerable and rapid change, MacGillivray is making his own cinematic 'plea for time' in his confrontations with notions of what constitutes a modern existence. It is also a plea for space, to remember that as there are 'different modern times' there are also 'different modern spaces.'
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.33477 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | McSorley, Tom. |
| Contributors | Straw, William (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of Art History and Communication Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001808750, proquestno: MQ74868, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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