SOURCE: Sheridan Scholarly Output, Research, and Creative Excellence

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  Martin Scorsese and the Music Documentary

  Michael Brendan Baker

  A Companion to Martin Scorsese comprises original essays by prominent scholars on the career of filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The essays examine Scorsese's work within the history of American and world cinema, his work in relation to auteur theory, and his use of popular music, as well as examining Scorsese's use of themes such as violence, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, and race.

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  Who’s on the Home Front? Canadian Masculinity in the NFB’s Second World War Series “Canada Carries On”

  Michael Brendan Baker

  A study of the National Film Board of Canada's World War II film series in terms of its demonstration of assumed cultural values regarding identity, agency, and "manliness" in the context of the NFB's wartime nation-building project.

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  Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada

  Michael Brendan Baker, Thomas Waugh, and Ezra Winton

  Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada examines the ambitious initiative "Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle" that brought together the unlikely partners of government bureaucrats, documentary filmmakers, community activists, and "ordinary" citizens. Launched in 1967 by the National Film Board of Canada and several government agencies with the primary goal of addressing poverty in Canada through the production and dissemination of documentary cinema, the objective was to engender social change through media. This edited collection studies dozens of films produced by the program, their themes, aesthetics, and politics, and evaluates their legacy and the program's place in Canadian, Québécois, and world cinema.

  Michael Brendan Baker contributed to the Introduction, "Forty Years Later… a Space for Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle" that summarizes the NFB's Challenge for Change initiative, the origins of the book project, and the legacy of Canadian activist documentary in the contemporary moment. He is the author of the essay, "The Curious Case of Wilf: Popular Music in Canadian Documentary," in which he provides an in-depth examination of the single film, Wilf (1968), using textual analysis, archival research, and interviews to illustrate the curious place this work occupies within the CFC program and the central role played by music in the project.