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.

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

Le Chat dans le sac (1964)

 
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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.

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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.

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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)

 
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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.

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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)

 
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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

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.

aj