Ty-Peupe (1971), dir. Bélanger—prod. ONF
WARNING: This film contains hippies.
[hippies; hippie uprising; hippie convergence; Mount Royal Park; Olmsted Trail; Park Avenue; Pine-Park Overpass; Sainte-Catherine Street; Place des Arts; rock & roll; psychedelic rock; Royal Canadian Mounted Hippies; take back the streets]
Interested? Want to get turned on, man? Check out this film here in the original French.
C'est pas la faute à Jacques Cartier (1967), dir. Dufaux & Perron—prod. ONF
There’s been some question as to the practicalities of the CAQ’s proposed Bill 96. Apparently, part of the campaign to solidify and strengthen the French language in the province of Quebec will involve a technology first unveiled on the streets of Montreal in 1967 (pictured above). Of course, they may have to update the text on the technology itself, or at least couple it with the words “français instantané” in a more prominent position and in a larger font, but, otherwise, the concept here is both generous and democratic. It’s also been proven effective in overcoming the resistance of anti-French, Franco-hesitant, and Franco-skeptical Anglos.
What’s the state of French, “the official and common language of Québec” at the moment? Is the French language imperilled?
Why is this man frowning?
Well, whatever the case, just remember, it ain’t Jacques Cartier’s fault. That OS* did his part for France, New France, and the French language.
If there is a problem, it may have something to do with our neighbour to the south, though.
It’s possible.
[Ste-Catherine Street; Décarie Boulevard; Dorchester Boulevard; language politics; centre-ville; Denys Arcand; Americanization; Bill 96; motorpsychos; Gibeau Orange Julep]
Watch this film here.
aj
*Original Settla
Jusqu’au coeur (1968), dir. Lefebvre—prod. ONF*
Will Robert Charlebois lead the Canadiens to victory tonight and keep the Habs’ playoff hopes alive? Or will the 2021 season end in bitter and humiliating defeat and yet another embarrassingly early exit from the Stanley Cup Playoffs? Both scenarios are contained within Jean Pierre Lefebvre’s dystopian and highly experimental anti-war fable.
This one’s dedicated to all those “fans” who’ve already renounced this year’s team.
[Robert Charlebois; Jacques Plante; Jean Beliveau; Montreal Canadiens; les Habitants; rue St-Hubert; stickhandling; he shoots; he scores]
Watch this film here in the original French.
aj
*Lefebvre’s title translates as “Straight to the Heart”
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.
aj
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
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
Où êtes-vous donc? (1969), dir. Groulx—prod. ONF
[May Day; little red book; Chinatown; rue de la Gauchetière; fellow travellers; Maoism]
aj
Où êtes-vous donc? (1969), dir. Groulx—prod. ONF
[signs; signage; advertising; Expo 67; Cinema Verdi; Coca-Cola; St-Hubert BBQ; Rhythm & Blues; Restaurant Des Ondes; Hotel le Relais; Chez Paree; What Me Worry?; Gilles Groulx; Yé-Yé; chansonniers; Le Choc est arrivé]
Watch this film here (en français).
aj
Adultes sans réserve… (1962), dir. Jack Zolov and Marc Beaudet—prod. ONF
[Boulevard Saint-Laurent; The Main; nightclubs; neon; burlesque; delicatessens; showgirls; jaywalkers; The Main Café; Schwartz’s Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen; Warshaw; tap dancers]
Watch this film here (en français).
aj
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.
Fabienne sans son Jules (1964), dir. Jacques Godbout—prod. ONF
Fabienne stars the iconic Pauline Julien in the title role, playing a free-spirited chanteuse much like herself. The film is notable for its scenes of Montreal nightlife and of the city at night more generally (which is why it was part of a “Night and the City” screening that some friends of mine and I organized at the Cinémathèque québécoise 20 years ago), but it also has something to say about cycling and romance and the airport and cinephilia (the film’s central conceit is that Fabienne is trying to get in touch with none other than Jean-Luc Godard):
“J’adore le cinéma!”
And with Montreal presently in thrall to an epic early spring (and the cycle-mania that comes with it), well…
[cycling; flowers; romance; cinephilia; Montréal-Dorval; YUL; cigarette smoke; telephone booths; newsstands; singers; chanteuses; Pauline Julien]
Watch this film here (en français).
And for more about Pauline Julien, her art, her career, and her politics, check out Pascale Ferland’s Pauline Julien, Intimate and Political (2018) here.
aj
Remember, Easter is almost upon us!
Manger [Eat] (1961), dir. Gilles Carle & Louis Portugais—prod. ONF
[food; food culture; restaurants; diners; supermarkets; charcuterie platters; corned beef; French fries; Dunn’s; rue Sainte Catherine; electrical signage; business lunches; consumer society; consumption; sexism]
Watch this film here (en français).
aj
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
My Name is Susan Yee (1975), dir. Shaffer—prod. NFB (for Children of Canada series)
[childhood; Chinese-Canadian community; school; Milton-Parc; Chinatown; Mount Royal Park; winter; snow; summer; shorts]
Watch this film here. It’s only 12 minutes long.
#stopasianhate
#racistviolenceagainsttheasiancommunityisdomesticterrorism
aj
Les Filles du roy (1974), dir. Anne Claire Poirier—prod. ONF
[office workers; garment workers; wait staff; bar staff; doctors; information society; computing; Montreal General Hospital; St-Hubert BBQ; labour; gender]
Watch this film with English subtitles here.
Watch this film in the original version, without subtitles, here.
Happy International Women’s Day!
aj
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
L’École des autres (1968), dir. Michel Régnier—prod. ONF
[children; the war on poverty; experimental school; crossing guards; Plateau Mont-Royal; avenue des Pins; snow; winter]
Watch this film here.
aj
Citizens’ Medicine (1970), dir. Bonnie Sherr Klein—prod. NFB (Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle)
[restaurant; sculptor; sculpture; statuary; le Faubourg à m’lasse; rue Wolfe; public health; snow; winter]
Watch this film here (CAMPUS subscription required).
aj
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
