Celluloid and the city

Concordia presents film renditions of our
burg in Montreal on Screen

REPLACED BY MILE END HIPSTERS:
Jewish kids from The Street (1976)

by MATTHEW HAYS

When Luc Bourdon’s stunning experimental documentary The Memory of Angels premiered two years ago, it made one thing perfectly clear: Montreal is an incredibly photogenic city. Bourdon had pored over the NFB’s vaults, slicing together vintage footage of the city from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. The result was a dreamlike love letter to Montreal.

Now, Concordia University is showing a number of different filmic representations of the city in Montreal on Screen, a five-day event that is entirely free. Curated by Concordia film studies professor Thomas Waugh and graduate film student Marcin Wisniewski, the programming is eclectic and stretches all the way back to 1934.

Montreal on Screen isn’t just nostalgic and fun, it’s an amazing anthology of films both short and feature-length—each and every one is well worth catching. As well as Bourdon’s mash-up of NFB classics, there is Little Burgundy (Maurice Bulbulian and Bonnie Sher Klein, 1969), which tells the story of protest against Mayor Drapeau’s bulldozing of much of a neighbourhood during the build-up to Expo 67. Also screening is Caroline Leaf’s animated classic The Street (1976). “With her unusual technique of painting directly on glass under the animation camera,” Waugh notes, “Caroline Leaf created a stronger sense of St-Urbain Jewish culture than any documentary.”

Also screening will be Montréal vu par, the anthology feature made in 1991 to celebrate the city’s 350th birthday, with segments directed by Denys Arcand, Michel Brault, Léa Pool, Atom Egoyan, Jacques Leduc and Patricia Rozema. “Montréal vu par has improved with age, operating as a time capsule, including an elegy for the Forum. The two films by the women directors, both queer as it would turn out, hold up especially well, with their urbanscapes inflected by tragedy and farce, each with its own undercurrent of carnal lust.”

Kudos to Waugh and Wisniewski for including a warts-and-all movie. After the rather disastrous fallout from a 2002 visit to Concordia by Israeli right-wing nutjob Benjamin Netanyahu, two Con U grads (Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal) made a thoughtful meditation on the controversy, aptly titled Discordia. Refreshing were the words of Noam Chomsky, who condemned the protestors’ shutting down of Netanyahu’s speaking engagement, sensibly pointing out that once you’ve silenced speech, you’ve set a very bad precedent.

But cinephiles will also have a rare opportunity to watch Frank Vitale’s Montreal Main (1974) on the big screen. The film is an entirely frank and honest reflection of the then-erupting sexual liberation that was engulfing the city. Johnny, at 12, has a huge crush on Frank, who’s 28—which led some to dub this Death in Venice on St-Laurent. “This is a reminder of how rich and vibrant the anglo indie film scene in Montreal was in the early ’70s,” says Waugh. “A raw street-level hymn to sex and drugs with no one ever getting off or high… The critic for La Presse called it the only authentic anglophone Quebec film ever made. This is where Canadian cinema should have gone, rather than in the direction of Meatballs and Porky’s.”

And be sure to look for the late great Peter Brawley in a supporting role.

MONTREAL ON SCREEN UNREELS
FROM SATURDAY, MAY 29 TO THURSDAY,
JUNE 3. FOR A SCHEDULE AND
FULL LIST OF FILMS GO TO
CINEMAPOLITICA.ORG/
MONTREAL-ON-SCREEN