Trouble-fête (1964)

Nighttime is often the wrong time for our protagonist, Lucien, in Pierre Patry’s explosive Trouble-fête, an early example feature filmmaking in Quebec channeling the frustrations and the desire for change that fuelled the Quiet Revolution. In other words, nighttime may be associated with bohemianism and liberation at times in this film, but it is also connected to some of the narrative’s greatest conflicts and tensions (hooliganism, homophobia, manslaughter, death).

From our perspective as viewers, however, nighttime is often the right time in this film, because so many of its nocturnal sequences, as captured by veteran cinematographer Jean Roy, are so breathtaking. From the film’s opening moments featuring a gang of young roustabouts cruising along rue Sainte-Catherine, to its chase scene that begins at the belvedere Camilien-Houde and continues through the streets and alleys of the Plateau and Little Italy, to its climactic finale in centre-ville against the backdrop of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day Parade, Montreal by night circa 1963 is a major focus of this film.

“Faîtes votre choix! Les jeux sont faits! La révolution tranquille est en marche!”

If you’d like to check out this early youthquake film (it was marketed as a controversial film, a “film-choc”) set in the colleges, jazz clubs, and streets of Montreal, you can find it HERE.

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[Montreal by night; nocturnal cinematography; rue Ste-Catherine; Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day; restaurants; police; car chases; cruising; drag racing; troublemakers]

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.

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[solar eclipses; rural Quebec; Montrealers]

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.

[reconditioned hippy school buses; trans-Canadian odysseys; Dorchester Boulevard; rue Ste-Catherine]

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.

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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.

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Joyeux Noël!

fig. a: Aéroport Montréal-Dorval, 1968

Earlier tonight we were told the government of Quebec predicts a “steep exponential rise” in the number of COVID-19 cases as the Omicron variant sweeps the province. In fact, the provincial case count is expected to surpass 9,000 tomorrow, up from about 1,000 just a couple of weeks ago. As a result, tighter restrictions will come into effect not tomorrow, not on Christmas Eve, and not on Christmas Day, but on Boxing Day.

So, sure—live it up! Go ahead and have a joyeux Noël, but, please, play it safe, people. COVID-19 cases have literally been swirling all around us these last few days.

And if it makes you feel better, and helps to keep you from going stir-crazy, let your mind wander to a time when airports were sites of adventure and intrigue (and nurseries!), when pay phones were commonplace (and people used them to place phone calls!!), and when internationally renowned filmmakers allowed themselves to rub elbows with portly old bearded men in hideous red & white outfits.

Of course, if the thought of any of the above—Montréal-Dorval in 1968/pay phones/Godard/Santa/Christmas—just triggers you, forget about it. I get it. 2021 has been tough enough already.

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[Santa Claus; Jean-Luc Godard; Dorval International Airport]

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.

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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]

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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.

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

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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.

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*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.

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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.

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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]

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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

New York Lightboard Record (1961) & Opening Speech: McLaren (1961)

New York Lightboard Record (1961), dir. McLaren

In 1961, the National Film Board of Canada received a commission to create a promotional film that would entice Americans to travel to Canada (and spend tourist dollars here). The project was a unique one. The Canadian Government Travel Bureau had secured access to a large electronic screen (a “lightboard”) overlooking Times Square in New York. They wanted a work of animation that would capture the attention of passersby and lure Americans to “visit Canada.” Not surprisingly, it was Norman McLaren, the NFB’s animation wizard and the founder of its animation program, who got the assignment. The result was a typically whimsical, ultra-creative, and highly entertaining short film based on the use of paper cutouts that came to be known as New York Lightboard.

Why should Americans visit Canada? How did the film make its pitch? Well, it did so by associating Canada with things like “fun,” and “play,” and “sun.” It used catchy rhymes to help capture some of Canada’s appeal: “East / West / North’s the Best.” And it hyped Canada’s festivals (the Montreal International Film Festival, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, etc.), its events (the Calgary Stampede), and its great outdoors (forests! fish! canoeing! waterskiing!). Better yet, it presented this material in a playful, light-hearted, and even ironic manner. In other words, Canada came across as hip, not square—quite possibly for the first time in its history.

It was also slyly informative: Want more information? Call PLaza7-4917. (That’s PL7-4917.) Or visit Canada House, at 680 Fifth Avenue. Or write “Canada Travel, Ottawa.”

That same year, McLaren also made a film that documented the projection of his animated advertisement in Times Square, as well as the reactions of its denizens, visitors, and passersby. This film became known as New York Lightboard Record and it’s the one that you see featured in the images above.

What does any of this have to do with “Montreal as seen in its cinema, circa 1960-1975”? Well, this project was a literal extension of Montreal’s film culture, an intervention on the part of Montreal’s film culture, and a representation of Montreal’s film culture, in the nocturnal space of Times Square (it played from dusk till 1:00 a.m. every night for the length of its run). It was a peaceful and bloodless invasion (une invasion pacifique* [et électronique]) of the American consciousness on the part of Canada (or at least its Film Board).

This one’s obviously more than a little bittersweet, given the circumstances. The border has been largely closed for over a year now. The idea of enticing Americans to “visit Canada” in search of “play,” “fun,” “sun,” or anything else still seems distant at the moment.

[Norman McLaren; tourism; Canada; the Idea of North; Times Square; advertising; animation]

If you’d like to watch this film, you can find it here.

Opening Speech: McLaren (a.k.a. Norman McLaren’s Opening Speech) (1961)

1961 was also the year of the inaugural edition of the Montreal International Film Festival. This was likely one of the reasons McLaren and the NFB were so enthusiastic about the New York Lightboard project. For this particular occasion—launching the MIFF—McLaren devised a film that was meant to make light of the pomp and ceremony that surrounds the opening night of a major international festival. That film was given the title Opening Speech: McLaren (although its title card reads Norman McLaren’s Opening Speech), and, as its title suggests, here it is McLaren himself—and a particularly willful microphone stand—that take centre stage.

What does any of this have to do with “Montreal as seen in its cinema, circa 1960-1975”? Well, here we have a representation of a gala event at the Montreal International Film Festival that was in all likelihood produced and shot within the NFB’s state-of-the-art studio facilities in Ville Saint-Laurent, just outside of Montreal.

[Norman McLaren; the Montreal International Film Festival; whimsy]

If you’d like to watch Opening Speech, you can find it here.

Today happens to be Norman McLaren’s birthday. It is the 107th anniversary of his birth, to be exact. If there’s a heaven, there most certainly is a lightboard that looms over it, and Norman is in charge of the Animation Department there—the one that develops the “whimsical, ultra-creative, and highly entertaining” content that animates its thousands upon thousands of lightbulbs. Either that, or he’s the one who gives the “opening speech” (or tries to) night after night after night.

Bravo, maestro!

aj

* To borrow a phrase from Michel Brault.

Fabienne sans son Jules (1964)

Fabienne sans son Jules (1964), dir. Jacques Godbout—prod. ONF

Fabienne stars the iconic Pauline Julien in the title role, playing a free-spirited chanteuse much like herself. The film is notable for its scenes of Montreal nightlife and of the city at night more generally (which is why it was part of a “Night and the City” screening that some friends of mine and I organized at the Cinémathèque québécoise 20 years ago), but it also has something to say about cycling and romance and the airport and cinephilia (the film’s central conceit is that Fabienne is trying to get in touch with none other than Jean-Luc Godard):

“J’adore le cinéma!”

And with Montreal presently in thrall to an epic early spring (and the cycle-mania that comes with it), well…

[cycling; flowers; romance; cinephilia; Montréal-Dorval; YUL; cigarette smoke; telephone booths; newsstands; singers; chanteuses; Pauline Julien]

Watch this film here (en français).

And for more about Pauline Julien, her art, her career, and her politics, check out Pascale Ferland’s Pauline Julien, Intimate and Political (2018) here.

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Manger (1961)

Remember, Easter is almost upon us!

Manger [Eat] (1961), dir. Gilles Carle & Louis Portugais—prod. ONF

[food; food culture; restaurants; diners; supermarkets; charcuterie platters; corned beef; French fries; Dunn’s; rue Sainte Catherine; electrical signage; business lunches; consumer society; consumption; sexism]

Watch this film here (en français).

aj

Le Chat dans le sac (1964)

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

[winter; centre-ville; skyscrapers; Pont Jacques Cartier; escape to the country]

Watch this film with English subtitles here.

Watch this film in the original version, without subtitles, here.

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Labyrinth (1967)

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Labyrinth (1967), dir. Roman Kroitor, Colin Low, et al.—prod. NFB

Labyrinth/Labyrinthe was an audacious multimedia and multi-sensory pavilion designed, executed, and hosted by the National Film Board of Canada for Montreal’s 1967 International and Universal Exposition, a.k.a. Expo 67. Its Brutalist form contained a number of multi-screen cinema chambers. One of them projected a series of moving images in a 5-screen cruciform arrangement. Though Labyrinth’s humanist perspective was also explicitly internationalist (hence the shots of the Sahara Desert that surround the first image), many of the featured images were of Montreal, where many of the filmmakers involved in this project lived and worked.

[snow; winter; commuters; gravedigger; traffic; public transportation; Dorchester Boulevard; Mary Queen of the World Cathedral; the Queen Elizabeth Hotel; camels; Sahara Desert]

Watch this film here.

And to learn much more about multi-screen experimentation at Expo 67, check out Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), edited by Janine Marchessault and Monika Kin Gagnon. Featuring essays by Seth Feldman, Gary Mediema, Aimée Mitchell, Johanne Sloan, Monika Kin Gagnon, Janine Marchessault, and Yours Truly.

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