Abstract

This thesis studies the emergence since the late 1970s of a feature-film industry in British Columbia. The thesis asserts that the relationship of this cinema its place of production can be best understood in terms of media globalization, rather than in the more conventional terms of national cinema development. Through an assessment of the history of cinema in British Columbia, the political economy of the North American film industry, provincial film policy and the way films made in British Columbia are located spatially and temporally, it is argued that the British Columbia feature-film industry belongs to a continental media ecology, closely, but not fully, integrated with the transnational commercial cinema based in Hollywood. The thesis concludes with a discussion of changing conceptions of place in a period of globalization, and proposes that British Columbia is particularly well-suited to Doreen Massey's notion of place as 'meeting place' or 'intersection.' Such a sense of place is critical to situating the British Columbia feature-film industry, which has been built upon a complex interface of distinct transnational and regional/local regimes of production.