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.”

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

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.

This is a Photograph (1971)

It may be fleeting (it usually is!), but for the moment, spring is here! New Life!

This is a Photograph (1971), dir. Kish—prod. NFB

[New Life; supermarket; fresh fruits; choice meats; imported groceries; free delivery; new half zaur pikls; muscle cars; Coke vs. Pepsi; The Main; the immigrant experience; experimental cinema; photographs; nostalgia]

Watch this film here.

aj

Trafficopter (1972)

Trafficopter (1972), dir. Barrie Howells—prod. NFB

[traffic; helicopter; aerial cinematography; Champlain Bridge; Cartier Bridge; St-Lawrence River; highway infrastructure; congestion; winter]

Watch this film here.

aj

The Changing City (1963)

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The Changing City (1963), dir. Jones—prod. NFB for the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation

[urban planning; aerial cinematography; Place Ville-Marie; centre-ville]

aj