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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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!

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

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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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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