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FSAC award winners: Third year in a row for Film Studies PhDs
Two PhD students from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema have won major national awards for film scholarship: the 2016 Film Studies Association of Canada (FSAC) Student Writing award and the 2016 Gerald Pratley Award.
This marks the third year in a row that a Concordia Film Studies PhD student has won the Gerald Pratley award, which recognizes graduate students who show outstanding ability in film and media scholarship.
“I am so pleased to see that our students’ research into Canadian Visual Culture has been recognized because this is an important part of what we do in Film Studies,” says Catherine Russell, Chair of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema.
'There’s just so much more to discover'
Rachel Webb Jekanowski won the Gerald Pratley Award for her essay, "Entanglements of Resource Extraction in Hudson’s Bay Company Films” which forms a section of her dissertation in progress, “A Nation of Fur, Fish and Fuel: Documenting Resource Extraction in Canada, 1920-1980.” She draws on impressive archival research and interdisciplinary approaches to film and environmental humanities.
“Winning the award is definitely validating for my research. Even ten years ago this footage was not available. It was brought over from the UK. Their archive is completely new and I am definitely on the early wave of scholars writing on this,” says Webb Jekanowski.
“This is a fascinating period of Canadian film history," adds Webb Jekanowski. "Usually scholars have focused on NFB productions or Nanook of the North, but there are lots of promotional and industrial films that were made then that will widen the conversation about Canadian film at this time. There’s just so much more to discover.”
Another win for Kester Dyer
Kester Dyer won the Pratley award in 2014 for his research on the Wapikoni mobile cinema initiative. This year, Dyer won the FSAC Student Writing Award for his essay "‘Against National Orthodoxy’: 24 heures ou plus and Fourth Cinema."
Kester's essay took up questions of national and transnational cinema and politics from the 1970s to the present. The jury felt the essay provided a provocative reading of the work and career of Gilles Groulx and teased out complex interrelationships between a Third Cinema and a Fourth.
“Kester Dyer’s research on the Quebecois filmmaker Gilles Groulx challenges conventional nationalist assumptions by positioning him within an international critical context,” says Russell.
Read more about the awards given by the FSAC.