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]

Labyrinth (1967)

 
Labyrinth 1967 winter bus commuters.png
Labyrinth 1967 winter Mary Queen of the world Queen Elizabeth Hotel.png
Labyrinth 1967 winter walkers gravedigger.png

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.

aj