Eclipse at Grand'Mère (1963)

Here’s the thing about cinéMontreal—in most cases, we’re dealing with films that are set either entirely or primarily in Montreal and its immediate environs, but there are exceptions. Take Eclipse at Grand’Mère, for instance. None of it takes place in Montreal. As the title suggests, the entire film is set in Grand’Mère, a small town that is now part of Greater Shawinigan, roughly 200 kilometres to the NE of Montreal. And as the title also suggests, Grand’Mère was a prime location for glimpsing the total solar eclipse that occurred on July 20, 1963. What makes this a “Montreal film” is that a special train service was created for the occasion in order to bring amateur and professional astronomers from Montreal directly to Grand’Mère (still #1)—so, for one fateful day, the town was essentially an extension of Greater Montreal, a town that had been incorporated into Montreal.

In addition, the National Film Board of Canada sent a film crew from Montreal in order to document the occasion, and, as the film makes clear, a group of scientists from McGill University also visited Grand’Mère that day to carry out some experiments (still #9).

With another total solar eclipse coming to the region on April 8, 2024, this short gem of a film can help get you in the mood. It’s also an excellent reminder that you should come prepared with proper eyewear. Watch it here.

aj

Réjeanne Padovani on BRD!

Very excited to announce in these pages Canadian International Pictures’s ( https://www.canadian-international.com ) upcoming release of Réjeanne Padovani!

Denys Arcand’s 1973 film is a masterpiece of political cinema and I had the pleasure (and the honour) to contribute an audio commentary for the 50th anniversary region-free BRD.

Fantastic cover art for the limited-edition slipcover version, too.

That image of Gabriel Arcand as Carlo “Lucky” Ferrara is priceless.

Pre-orders are now available from Vinegar Syndrome: https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/rejeanne-padovani

Bon cinéma!

aj

Chut... (1971)

A film about the Bibliothèque nationale de Québec (now the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec) produced by l’Office du film du Québec. An homage to Alain Resnais’s extraordinary Toute la mémoire du monde (1955). An artifact of 1970s Québécois cultural nationalism. Behold Jacques Gagné’s Chut… (1971).

A long-haired Man With a Movie Camera. Nerds (“On a plus peur d’être des intellectuals,” the narrator tells us. “We’re no longer afraid to be intellectuals” [read: nerds]). Big Hair. Big Sunglasses. Hippies. Reservoir Dogs. This film has got it all. Plus, it’s got a great title and a great conceit: “chut!” In other words, “shhh! Be quiet!” This is a library, after all.

If you’d like to check out this fascinating film for yourself in the original French version, of course, you can find it in the digital collection of the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec HERE.

aj

p.s. Many thanks to my dear friend Caro for drawing my attention to this gem.

Super Bus (1969)

A school bus gets souped-up like a Canadian version of Furthur, but instead of carrying Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters across America, here the bus transports a psychedelic rock band across Canada, a mari usque ad mare. This unnamed band plays to audiences from time to time, most notably on the beach of Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Ultimately, the bus’s destination is the Pacific Coast, where it is loaded on a freighter so it can travel the seas to Japan. The film was produced by the National Film Board of Canada for Expo ‘70 in Osaka. I’m assuming that’s where the Super Bus was destined.

Soon after its stunning transformation from a lowly school bus into its psychedelic alter-ego, Super Bus makes an appearance in Montreal, the first major city on its trans-Canadian tour.

fig. a: Saint Catherine St.

fig. b: thumbs up!

fig. c: Dorchester Blvd.

To see this crazy film for yourself, check out this link.

aj

p.s. Many thanks to Andrew Burke for alerting me (and others) to this gem.

Caroline (1964)

Keywords: Montreal; boulevard Décarie; ennuie; motherhood; domestic drudgery; workplace drudgery; modern living; anomie.

Nothing says “Mother’s Day” like a disenchanted young mother living in a Décarie boulevard high-rise, caught in a double bind of domestic drudgery and the banality of the modern workplace.

Clément Perron and Georges Dufaux’s Caroline is an example of Quebec’s New Wave cinema at its cool, mod best. Emphasis on the cool.

Don’t worry. It’s got a happy ending. Kind of.

You can find this classic in the original French here.

aj

Don't Let the Angels Fall (1968)

Keywords: Montreal; anglo-Montrealers; life among the bourgeoisie; life among the business class; Metro-Bonbons-Dodo; art installations; interviews; reflexivity; MLK.

George Kaczender specialized in Nobody Waved Goodbye-like family melodramas set in Montreal. John Kemeny, the prolific NFB producer (Ladies and Gentleman… Mr. Leonard Cohen; Memorandum; The Things I Cannot Change; The Children of Fogo Island; The City: Osaka; and dozens of others) who would go on to produce everything from Atlantic City, to Quest for Fire, to Les Plouffes, produced this film. And Paul Leach, another seasoned NFB veteran (Ladies and Gentleman… Mr. Leonard Cohen; The Things I Cannot Change; Impressions of… Expo 67; etc.) who provided its often striking cinematography, including this sequence dealing with the liberal pieties of anglo-Montreal’s business class in the Brutalist confines of the newly built Metro.

Interested? You can watch the film here. Be careful, though: THIS FILM CONTAINS SCENES OF NUDITY AND/OR SEXUALITY. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED. You’ve been warned.

aj

Griffintown (1972)

Keywords: COLD!; godforsaken.

Griffintown is Part 2 of Michel Régnier’s monumental Urbanose series from 1972, examining the state of the modern city in the early 1970s, and its possible futures, with a particular focus on Montreal.

Despite its proximity to Downtown, Griffintown was an abandoned district at the time—abandoned by the city, abandoned by the greater population of Montreal, as the architect Joseph Baker puts it in the film—consisting primarily of dilapidated housing, empty lots, and small industry.

Its bleak conditions were all the more bleaker when Régnier shot the outdoor interviews for his film, on a bitterly cold winter day, not unlike today.

If Régnier found a glimmer of hope in the districts citizen’s committee and the architects and grad students who had dedicated themselves to lobbying for consultative urban renewal and quality affordable housing, he also found it in the spirit and the antics of its grade school children.

Baker, one of the film’s featured architects, died in 2016. His work in Griffintown was part of an illustrious career dedicated to community-centred architecture in Montreal and beyond.

You can watch the film in its original French version here.

aj

Réjeanne Padovani (1973)

Réjeanne Padovani (1973), dir. Arcand

As our upcoming mayoral election gets closer and closer, we’d like to take a moment to express the following:

• No more Drapeau impersonators

• No more Drapeau wannabes

• No more urbanism at the mercy of the development industrial complex

• No more urbanism in the service of the automobile

• NON!

Thank you.

aj

Blood and Fire (1958)

Blood and Fire (1958), dir. Macartney-Filgate

Though its title might lead you to think otherwise, Terence Macartney-Filgate’s Blood & Fire is a film about the workings of the Salvation Army in Montreal in the late 1950s, and especially their outreach work, the counselling and hot meals they provided, the newspaper they sold on the streets and in the taverns, their music program, the open-air ministry they ran, and the elaborate parades they were still staging at the time.

Macartney-Filgate was a pioneer of the National Film Board of Canada’s “Candid Eye” team, and Blood and Fire was one of the earliest films in the series. Among the highlights of the film are the many telephoto-lens shots of spectators and passersby looking on as the soldiers of “God’s Army” run an outdoor ministry downtown.

The film’s closing parade scene is perfect for a rainy fall day in Montreal—a day like today. Just look at the determination in their eyes. Just look at the architecture, the cars, the dress, the signage. Just look at those rain-slicked streets.

While we’re at it, we might as well take the opportunity to listen to Niney the Observer’s “Blood and Fire,” even if it is a little anachronistic.

And though the subject matter is a little far-flung, there’s something about P.J. Harvey’s “Written on the Forehead” that seems appropriate here.

[Salvation Army; open-air ministry; spectators; rainy days; financial district; centre-ville; taverns; parades]

You can find Blood & Fire here.

aj

À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre (1962)

Back to school special 2.

À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre (1962), dir. Aquin

Produced with a veritable who’s-who of Quebec cinema superstars (Brault, Groulx, Jutra, Borremans, Carrière, Dufaux, Godbout, Owen, Portugais, and Lipsett among them, plus Hubert Aquin, of course) over the course of a single day in 1961—Tuesday, the 5th of September, the day after Labour Day (not unlike today), and the first day of school.

Working-class districts provide a particular frame through which one can understand a city, we’re told, and here Saint-Henri, in Montreal’s southwest, is the prism that’s used to come to terms with the metropolis of “French North America.”

Heavily inspired by the works of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Jean Rouch, Hubert Aquin’s film is both probing and touching, a masterpiece of the new Quebec cinema of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

[late summer; back to school; Saint-Henri; dog days of summer; working-class districts; Lachine Canal; RCA Building; showgirls]

You can find Aquin’s film here in the original French, and here in English.

aj

l'Initiation (1970)

Back to school special 1.

From the lakehouse to the university. From the Laurentians to l’Université de Montréal.

Denis Héroux’s scandalous l’Initiation is a tale of the country and the city, at least in its early stages, when the film plays upon tensions between leisure and labour, the Laurentians and the modern spaces of late sixties Montreal (lUniversité de Montréal, Hotel Bonaventure, Place Ville-Marie, the Metro, etc.), anticipating key aspects of Denys Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire (1986) by roughly 15 years. But mostly it’s a bittersweet tale of sexual awakening, one that stars Chantal Renaud (whose life is a snapshot of the Quiet Revolution: yé-yé singer, actress, script writer, and, eventually, the wife of former politician and Parti Québécois leader Bernard Landry) and Jacques Riberolles (Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, among many titles) and co-stars the legendary Danielle Ouimet (Valérie, also by Héroux).

L’Initiation (1970), dir. Héroux—prod. Cinépix

[late summer; early fall; waterskiing; motor-boating; sunbathing; the Laurentians; Université de Montréal; bookstores; post-secondary education; Maple Syrup Porn; Danielle Ouimet]

aj

Un jeu si simple (1964)

NOTE: The day I posted about Robert Charlebois, the Montreal Canadiens, and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre’s Jusqu’au coeur (1968), the Habs started winning again, after having gotten into a 1-3 hole in their opening series against the Toronto Maple Leafs. They ended up storming back to win the series in 7 games, and tonight, after having trounced the Winnipeg Jets and vanquished the Vegas Golden Knights, they begin the final stage of the quest for that elusive Stanley Cup, a trophy the Habs last hoisted nearly 30 years ago, in 1993. Does posting about the Canadiens’ Sixties heyday help them win? Well, being the superstitious man that I am, I decided that I could only post such material when the 2021 Canadiens were in the hole. But now that they’ve actually reached the finals, it’s time to go for broke. In other words, there’s only one way to find out.

Un jeu si simple (1964), dir. Groulx—prod. ONF/NFB

Gilles Groulx’s 1964 documentary is one of the great films on sport of any kind. The “game” in question is hockey. The context is that of Montreal, the Montreal Forum, more specifically, and the city’s profound passion for the Montreal Canadiens, the “world champions” at the time. The action takes place at the Forum, in the Canadiens’ practice grounds, and on television, and there’s one road game in Chicago that’s used to compare sports cultures. And, as was the case with Wrestling (1961), another NFB classic of the period, and another film that takes place almost entirely within the confines of the Montreal Forum,* much of the attention is on the team’s fans, on spectators, spectatorship, and issues of spectacle.

Yes, it is a “simple game” in many ways, but no other sport gets to the core of what it means to be a Montrealer, no other sport is as heavily implicated or as consequential, even after a punishing decades-long drought.

[Montreal Forum; Montreal Canadiens; les Habitants; le Club Canadien; spectators; spectatorship; spectacle]

Watch this film in the original French here.

If you’d prefer with English subtitles, you can find that version here.

Go, Habs, go!

aj

*Wrestling is another strong contender for “greatest sports film of all time.”

Bozarts (1969)

Ha! I thought that might get your attention.

Following up on last week’s themes of Place des Arts and cultural interventions, in this week’s edition we have a case study in what happens when “pure,” uninhibited artistic expression clashes with city bylaws and the philistines who enforce them. The conflict zone in question was a construction site on the grounds of the Place des Arts complex in 1968.

NOTE: In case you can’t make it out: “Jesus Xst est mort. Vive Che Guevara. [Jesus Xst is dead. Long live Che Guevara.]”

Bozarts (1969), dir. Giraldeau—prod. ONF

[artists; art; political art; censorship; repression; Place des Arts; Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal; SPVM; erotic art; Prague Spring; Che Guevara; Jesus Christ]

There’s much more to Jacques Giraldeau’s Bozarts than just this flare-up at Place des Arts. To check out the whole film in the original French, follow this link.

aj

Ty-Peupe (1971)

Ty-Peupe (1971), dir. Bélanger—prod. ONF

WARNING: This film contains hippies.

[hippies; hippie uprising; hippie convergence; Mount Royal Park; Olmsted Trail; Park Avenue; Pine-Park Overpass; Sainte-Catherine Street; Place des Arts; rock & roll; psychedelic rock; Royal Canadian Mounted Hippies; take back the streets]

Interested? Want to get turned on, man? Check out this film here in the original French.

C'est pas la faute à Jacques Cartier (1967)

View fullsize

C'est pas la faute à Jacques Cartier (1967), dir. Dufaux & Perron—prod. ONF

There’s been some question as to the practicalities of the CAQ’s proposed Bill 96. Apparently, part of the campaign to solidify and strengthen the French language in the province of Quebec will involve a technology first unveiled on the streets of Montreal in 1967 (pictured above). Of course, they may have to update the text on the technology itself, or at least couple it with the words “français instantané” in a more prominent position and in a larger font, but, otherwise, the concept here is both generous and democratic. It’s also been proven effective in overcoming the resistance of anti-French, Franco-hesitant, and Franco-skeptical Anglos.

What’s the state of French, “the official and common language of Québec” at the moment? Is the French language imperilled?

Why is this man frowning?

Well, whatever the case, just remember, it ain’t Jacques Cartier’s fault. That OS* did his part for France, New France, and the French language.

If there is a problem, it may have something to do with our neighbour to the south, though.

It’s possible.

[Ste-Catherine Street; Décarie Boulevard; Dorchester Boulevard; language politics; centre-ville; Denys Arcand; Americanization; Bill 96; motorpsychos; Gibeau Orange Julep]

Watch this film here.

aj

*Original Settla

Le Chat dans le sac (1964)

Le Chat dans le sac (1964), dir. Groulx—prod. ONF

[anti-colonialism; post-colonialism; anti-imperialism; Black Lives Matter; The Wretched of the Earth; Frantz Fanon; Louis E. Lomax; atrocities; genocide; Godardian; cinephilia; New Wave; Montreal; movie theatres; Gilles Groulx]

Watch this film here with English subtitles.

Learn more about its beautiful soundtrack by John Coltrane and the collaboration with Groulx that inspired it here.

Circa 1964, the political and geopolitical conflicts that “Claude” concerned himself with included the Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Revolution, anti-colonial and postcolonial struggles in Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere, and torture and other atrocities in North Africa, Southeast Asia, and beyond. If this film was made today, about a similar character, of a similar age, with similar concerns, it seems likely that “Claude” would be outraged with the injustices and horrors being waged against the Palestinian people over and over and over again, for decades, and with increasingly devastating results. At least, one would hope so.

It seems certain that “Claude” would have followed the numerous instances of anti-black and anti-POC police brutality, abuse, and murder over the last year (and for too many years leading up to 2020) with considerable alarm. It seems certain that his wall of clippings would have included images of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Jacob Blake, Rayshard Brooks, Ma’Khia Bryant, and others, including many closer to home. As it stands, his collection of current events included an image of an act of police brutality perpetrated against a black man by mounted police in the U.S.

What’s even more sure is that a filmmaker like Gilles Groulx would have addressed such issues in all types of ways in his artful and political cinema, much as the actual Gilles Groulx did repeatedly over the course of his career.

The following four slides are just one instance of such commitment on Groulx’s part from a film—Où êtes-vous donc? (1969)—that contains many of them. Here, one of the film’s protagonists, Georges, chances upon an anti-war/anti-Vietnam War/anti-US imperialism protest in Dominion Square.

Smash colonialism in all its forms. Palestinian Lives Matter. Free Palestine.

Smash white supremacy in all its forms, especially its most violent. Black Lives Matter.

aj

The City (Osaka) (1970)

The City (Osaka) (1970), dir. Pindal—prod. NFB/ONF

The 1970 World Exposition held in Osaka, Japan—known more familiarly as Expo 70—holds a special place in Canadian film history. After having mounted a number of the brash and ambitious experiments in multi-screen, split-screen, and expanded cinema that were so central to the experience of Expo 67—the international exposition held in Montreal three years earlier—Canadian filmmakers made another big, and, in many ways, even more lasting, splash in Osaka, when two of them, Graeme Ferguson and Roman Kroitor, unveiled IMAX to the world. Many of the most daring examples of expanded cinema at Expo 67—Labyrinth, Polar Life, We Are Young!—were essentially site-specific, and therefore hard to reproduce. IMAX maintained many of the awe-inspiring elements of expanded cinema, but did so in a format that would eventually be reproduced widely.

Understandably, Tiger Child, the very first film IMAX film, directed by Roman Kroitor and Kichi Ichikawa, got most of the spotlight when it came to cinematic experimentation at the Osaka exhibition. But the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada followed up on its audacious Labyrinth project from Expo 67 with another major contribution to Expo 70: The Land. Shot in Panavision, blown up to 70 mm, and then projected on an immense triangular screen (read: site-specific), The Land, as its title suggested, was a film about the vast Canadian landscape, one that combined the natural sublime with the technological sublime.

The NFB’s other contribution to Expo 70 was a much more modest animated film by veteran animator Kaj Pindal that dealt primarily with the forces of urbanization in Canada. That film was called The City (and has come to be known as The City (Osaka)), and it seems to have been inspired at least in part by Frans Masereel’s The City, a “novel without words” and “city symphony on paper” made up of 100 woodcuts that was published as book in 1925. Masereel’s bold, graphic images captured the energies and tensions of the modern metropolis, and did so in a way that highlighted its rituals and activities, class divisions, and types.

Pindal’s The City does something very similar, in a similarly stark black & white form, but updates the vision to include late-twentieth century types (hippies!) and technologies (television!), and transforms it into an actual city symphony of sorts, an animated one that is scored to the sounds of driving jazz-rock. And although The City had a more modest form than The Land, its multimedia presentation was suitably “switched on.” As the NFB explains, it was screened on a massive lightboard “made up of thousands of 5-cm-wide luminescent wafers.” This panel served as the backdrop for a “three-dimensional exhibit and a light show,” one that dealt with “the theme of life in the city.”

The NFB’s current gloss on Pindal’s The City is that the film is light-hearted and “humorous,” an “animated fantasy that shows Canadians as urbanized people developing a vast wilderness with the aid of the latest technologies.” In truth, the film has a lot more in common with John & Faith Hubley’s Urbanissimo, an animated short that was presented at Expo 67, and one whose title belies its bitterly critical depiction of the metropolis as all-consuming and megalomaniacal: a true megalopolis. Here, too, in Pindal’s film, the forces of urbanization are represented as sprawling and destructive, and the vision it presents of its social order is largely one of alienation and chaos. Such themes were not new to Pindal, however. His earlier collaboration with Les Drew, What on Earth!, from 1966, featured a similar critique of urbanization coupled with a sweeping indictment of car culture, all in the form of a parody of Roman Kroitor and Colin Low’s NFB classic of popular astronomy and advanced special effects, Universe (1960).

The city we see in Pindal’s The City bears a remarkable resemblance to Montreal, from the nighttime view of its downtown core with its central Place Ville-Marie-like skyscraper tower (complete with spotlights), to its dominant forms of traffic and transportation (cars, buses, trucking, trains, but, sadly, no Metro), to its forms of entertainment (discothèques, boxing, dining). Even more striking is the fact that the only force that is depicted as being able to unite the city’s disparate urban types and provide them with a shared sense of purpose (albeit an alienated one) is the television broadcast of a hockey game, a Montreal Canadiens hockey game (note the Habs jersey in one of the stills above), one where les Canadiens took on Bobby Hull and the Chicago Black Hawks, winning 4-1.

Even the city’s cats and dogs are able to put their differences aside to share their fandom in harmony.

This post was inspired by the fact that the NHL’s ill-fated 2021 “regular” season is coming to a close, and its playoffs are on the verge of getting underway. In the team’s glory days, May was a month that often set Montreal on fire (sometimes literally), as the Canadiens would make yet another electrifying playoff run. Will 2021 be the Canadiens’s year for the first time in over a quarter of a century? Sure doesn’t feel like it at the moment.

You can watch Pindal’s The City (Osaka) here. (Please note that because of the fact The City was part of a multimedia presentation, the animation only begins at the 2:16 mark, after 2:15 of black screen accompanied by about 23 seconds of city sounds [traffic, voices, etc.] followed by hot jazz-rock, with a tiny bit of overlap between the two.)

[cities; city living; Frans Masereel; Kaj Pindal; animation; city symphonies; jazz-rock; chaos; alienation; urban types; hippies; transportation; urbanization; television; hockey; Montreal Canadiens; cats & dogs]

For more on expanded cinema at Expo 67, see the book Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 or check out the Cinema Expo 67 website.

For more on the NFB’s involvement with Expo 70, see this biog post.

For more on Frans Masereel’s The City, especially in its Dover edition form, see this “letter of recommendation” from The New York Times.

aj

Rock-A-Bye (1974)

Rock-A-Bye (1974), dir. Jacques Bensimon—prod. NFB

[rock & roll; Montreal Forum; The Rolling Stones; 1972; Mick Jagger; Mick Taylor; Bill Wyman; hippies; hashheads; acid freaks; dirtbags; marijuana; cops; riot police; CHOM-FM; AOR radio; The Esquire Show Bar; Muddy Waters; rhythm & blues; blues; show business; Alice Cooper; Dorval International Airport; The Gay Power]

Watch this film in three parts: here (pt. 1—including The Rolling Stones 1972 Tour), here (pt. 2—including Muddy Waters)), and here (pt. 3—incl. Alice Cooper).

Part rockumentary, part anti-rock & roll/youth culture screed (mostly the latter), Rock-A-Bye is chock full of memorable early ‘70s rock culture moments of the kind you might expect, as well as numerous unexpected elements, and much of it was shot in Montreal.

Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, but unavailable via its otherwise very generous website (for obvious reasons [namely, The Rolling Stones and their legal team]), Rock-A-Bye is presently available in a poor quality version on YouTube. Somehow the washed-out colours and terrible resolution befit much of the made-for-TV movie’s down & dirty content and its attempts to denigrate the culture.

aj

May Day Special 2021

Où êtes-vous donc? (1969), dir. Groulx—prod. ONF

[May Day; little red book; Chinatown; rue de la Gauchetière; fellow travellers; Maoism]

aj

Adultes avec réserve... (1962)

Adultes sans réserve… (1962), dir. Jack Zolov and Marc Beaudet—prod. ONF

[Boulevard Saint-Laurent; The Main; nightclubs; neon; burlesque; delicatessens; showgirls; jaywalkers; The Main Café; Schwartz’s Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen; Warshaw; tap dancers]

Watch this film here (en français).

aj