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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We Are Young! (1967)

 

We Are Young! (1967), dir. Hammid & Thompson

We Are Young! was a massive multi-screen film experiment produced for the Canadian Pacific Railway/COMINCO pavilion at Expo 67 by Alexander Hammid (né Hackenschmied) and Francis Thompson.

[skyscrapers; department stores; neon; new space; abstract space; working girls; architectural sublime; urban sublime; centre-ville; rue Ste-Catherine]

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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