Montreal, open city

Our town is feted with Luc Bourdon’s
fantastic new collage film
The Memories of Angels

SENSUOUS AND STUNNING: The Memories of Angels

by MATTHEW HAYS

Luc Bourdon says the idea began almost like a daydream. It was about 15 years ago, and he was talking to a producer, Colette Loumède. “I wondered aloud about why it is we still shoot footage,” Bourdon recalls. “I mean, why not reuse some of that old footage to make new films? It would be ecological and cost-effective.”

And that, he thought, was the end of it. Bourdon continued making videos and art installations, while also teaching courses in video production at Concordia and film at the National Theatre School. In 2005, Loumède, then a producer at the NFB, brought up Bourdon’s idea. “I had just thought of it as fantasy, but then we were talking about it as a very real idea.”

That idea has now come full bloom into an astonishing feature-length film, titled The Memories of Angels. And it’s a tricky one to describe, as Bourdon himself acknowledges. Bourdon has woven together fragments of 120 different classic NFB documentaries and reshaped them into a sensuous, dream-like travelogue of Montreal, with films made between 1947 and 1968. Taken together, they serve as a reminder of the city’s stunning beauty, as well as an ode to the NFB’s brilliant legacy. “It was like taking 200 boxes of puzzles, throwing them on the ground and then trying to make a new puzzle out of a series of old ones,” says Bourdon.

Elegant, funny and playful, The Memories of Angels is mesmerizing, and it feels as though you’re in the middle of a retro dream. Bourdon was careful to include the music of the era too, so we get snippets of everyone from Oscar Peterson to Paul Anka. Meanwhile, the film shifts from motif to motif, moving from Parc Lafontaine in the summer to a series of shots of children running in a playground to street scenes. 

Initially, Bourdon had simply envisioned making a film from various bits and pieces of others. He was also looking into access to archives in France. But then, as he looked at the NFB library, he realized he had more than enough to work with from this source alone. “When I looked at the films from the ’50s and ’60s at the NFB, everyone from [Michel] Brault to [Wolf] Koenig, there was a pattern. There was a sense of playfulness with people in the street. There was a candid way of expressing a subject. It was a new way to see people and to express ourselves. It was a golden period. It was a school for many, many filmmakers.”

CANDID CAMERAWORK: TMOA

The classic look

And Bourdon says a funny thing struck him as he looked at films from the ’70s and ’80s. “There, I saw films with men who had long hair and beards and spoke of love. I admit I found that less interesting. The style of men and women in the ’50s and ’60s was more interesting. It was not a perfect period, of course, but it was more classic, it was very controlled and it was so well-filmed.”

Bourdon explains that he wanted to take the film through various thematic shifts. “I knew though there was no narrative, that there had to be some tension within it. I wanted parts to be political, parts to be musical, another part to be intimate, some of it musical and other parts silent.”

And he knew he didn’t want it to be a greatest-hits anthology. In fact, it’s funny how few of the shots are actually recognizable. “I took many of the shots that we might think of as inconsequential, like bridging shots in between scenes in a film.”

While working on The Memories of Angels, Bourdon says he was haunted by one question: will this thing actually work? He put together a 20-minute teaser trailer, so they could test it out with several of the NFB brass. “They were extremely enthusiastic,” he recalls. “Then we knew that what we were doing was working, and we could proceed.”

Bourdon notes that his film remains tricky to categorize. “It’s not really a documentary. And it’s not a fiction film. There’s trickery involved too: it seems like Montreal all the way through, but I’ve mixed in some shots of Ottawa, Hull, Quebec City and even Toronto. It is cinema, after all, so it’s not really about the truth.”

THE MEMORIES OF ANGELS HAS ITS
MONTREAL PREMIERE AS PART OF THE
FESTIVAL DU NOUVEAU CINEMA ON
FRIDAY, OCT. 10, 7 P.M., SUNDAY, OCT.
12, 5 P.M. AND SUNDAY, OCT. 19, 9:20
P.M. AT EX-CENTRIS