Taking it to the streets: Space, labour and resistance in the Vancouver and Paris film industries from 1970 to 2005

This dissertation uses the film industries of Vancouver and Paris between 1970 and 2005 to examine the relationship between space, visuality and labour in one "image sector" of the contemporary communication industry. By engaging a spatial perspective in this work, I propose a means of understanding the city as a medium of communication that moves analysis away from a functional transmission view of communications to one based on social practices. Otherwise stated, I argue that research conducted to date has largely failed to provide a sustained analysis of the social construction of space. Given the prominence of urbanism in contemporary policy debates and visual markets in cultural industries, understanding the relationship between these two areas is crucial in assessing the contemporary political economy of communication in a spatial sense. I address this shortcoming by drawing from urban, geographic, film and communication literature to construct a framework for recognizing the interaction of the visual production sector in global markets. My research involves developing a political economy of the film location shooting trend in the "culturally authentic" city, investigating the role of labour in spatial dynamics of visual production and conducting a textual reading of visual products against the sites of their production. I find that the communicative function of the city, present through symbolic capital and perceived by its inhabitants compared to the film industry's engagement of urban space opens the door to a fertile ground for conflict and resistance. The spaces of the local neighbourhood become sites of production and interpretation of social meaning.