Abstracts
Abstract
For Indigenous youth living in Québec, music is a key tool used for self-discovery and identification. As they listen to pre-recorded albums and make their own their music, they discover what cultural markers they possess in terms of national identities, gender boundaries, sexual preference, etc. This article assesses how recent Indigenous Québécois cinema depicts this process of self-discovery in relation to national markers, through the feature film 3 histoires d’Indiens (dir. Robert Morin, 2014) and three short films from the Wapikoni Mobile project. It contemplates how successful these characters are in using music to discover their own identities, the intercultural encounters they have as they go about this process, and crucially, how Indigenous and settler directors represent this cultural journey in differing manners. Through this analysis, this article assesses the important role that music plays in self-discovery, and why the self-representation of Indigenous voices and musicality matters.
Keywords:
- Indigenous cinema,
- music in film,
- Indigenous sovereignty,
- sound studies,
- voice,
- representation of Indigenous peoples
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Appendices
Biographical note
Claire Gray is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Her research surrounds the role of sound and music in contemporary cinema and how they represent national and political shifts, such as the questions over Québécois identity or the Brexit movement. She has previously presented her research at conferences such as the Film Studies Association of Canada, the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, and the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States. She has also previously worked on projects relating to Indigenous cinema across the Americas, such as the creation of a database of Indigenous women filmmakers and the remediation of the Arnait Video Productions archive. She is currently co-writing a chapter on the Arnait project, to be published in the Archive/Counter Archive anthology next year. She is also currently co-editing an anthology on diverse and everyday heroisms in contemporary cinema.