The Champ de Mars is one of Montreal’s most storied places. It derives its name from the French colonial era, when it was a military parade ground, but in the eighteenth century it was the site of the city’s northern wall. After the wall was torn down in the early nineteenth century, the Champ was used as a farmer’s market. Eventually, in the twentieth century, it was converted into a municipal parking lot.
While the field was restored and converted into a public park in the 1980s, it still maintains the essence of the parking lot it once was. Despite its stunning view of the downtown skyline and its location next to City Hall and the tourist hub of Place Jacques Cartier, the Champ de Mars feels like it isn’t quite living up to its potential. Something needs to be done to make it relevant, once again, to Montrealers.
Just a couple of ideas ago, I was walking through the Champ with my friend Sam, and he proposed a great idea: why not project movies on the blank concrete wall of the Palais de Justice? Free film projections are already a big hit at Place des Arts during the World Film Festival, and thanks to Montreal’s liberalism, we wouldn’t be stuck with a bunch of family-friendly schlock. It would be a great way to bring people together while highlighting one of the city’s historically significant public spaces as well as some of its best views and architecture.
Radio Canada International, a branch of the CBC that broadcasts around the world in several different languages, has launched an interesting competition. Digital Diversity, or Métissé serré as it’s known in French, invited young filmmakers to submit short films on the theme of immigration. From now until December 2nd, you will be able to vote on 60 videos that can be viewed online. Among this week’s finalists are five that, in some way or another, touch on the issue of cultural exchange in the city and the relationship between place, language and identity.
(Unfortunately, due to the competition’s form-over-function Flash interact, it’s impossible to link directly to each video. You can find them all here and check this week’s list of films.)
“Jahsun,” by Paul Aflalo and Laura Cohen, is a short but polished look at Jahsun, a Montreal drummer and the leader of Kalmunity, a musical collective that blends funk, hip hop, jazz, soul and spoken word. Kalmunity’s goal is to bring people together in a positive way — hence the name, which blends “calm” with “community.” (I’ve seen Kalmunity live and it does indeed bring together and interesting, almost unlikely, mix of people.) Part of Jahsun’s philosophy might come from his childhood experience in different parts of Montreal.
“Growing up in Ville Saint-Laurent, which is very multiethnic, going to a school that was like Asians, Indians, blacks, Québécois, Anglo-Saxons, just a nice mix, and moving to Châteauguay, where I did my high school, that was just a culture shock,” he says. “You’re one of two black males and maybe three black females in the whole school and that was it. It was a hard time. All of that is why being creative spoke to me. I’ve always loved music because but it really came to me in Châteauguay, because that’s when I was more on my own.”
In “Binding Borders,” Tiffany Hsiung weaves a story of four Torontonians — one from Vietnam, one from Mexico, one from the Philippines and one from Rwanda — and their lives before immigrating to Canada. What I like about this film is that it explores the backgrounds, at least briefly, of the strangers with whom we share the city everyday. How many times have you looked at someone on the street, or in the bus, and wondered who they are, where they are from, what life they have lived?
“The Ride,” by Onur Karaman, is another fictional film about the encounter between a Muslim taxi driver and two white passengers in Brossard, a suburb of Montreal. As he drives them to their destination, the three start talking: first about language — the driver understands French but doesn’t speak it, and the women won’t speak English — and then culture and religion: the women see a photo of the driver’s wife and take issue with the fact that she is veiled. Although the acting is a bit stilted, and the film is a bit didactic, it’s still nice to see this kind of intercultural exchange on film.
Unlike the other films I’ve selected, “Regard,” by Medhi Benboubakeur doesn’t have much dialogue. Although it focuses on the “quest for identity” of Maiwenn Méhrer, a young French violinist of Chinese and Breton descent, who has recently settled in Montreal, it doesn’t have any characters in the traditional sense. Rather, the whole of la métropole and its habitants become the stars of this homage to the city’s multiculturalism, set to an eloquent violin score.
Oilsands refinery in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photo by Chad Young
VBS.tv, the online documentary arm of Vice Magazine run by Spike Jonze, has a thought-provoking documentary called Toxic Alberta available to view for free (in 15 segments, with some interruptions for ads). The film touches on the extreme environmental impact of tar sands operations; the burning of natural gas to reform bitumen into crude oil is responsible for a staggering 20% of all of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and this is set to rise as there are calls to quintuple output in the next decade.
However, the film also inadvertently exposes the crisis the boom towns face, in terms of managing a 9% population growth rate. Most cities struggle to deal with 2-3% growth; 9% would be crippling. (Imagine adding another 100,000 people to Montreal in a very short time.) Thousands of people — many of them Maritimers looking for work — have flocked to the towns of Fort McMurray and Fort Chipyewan. I’ve heard stories of people getting paid insane amounts of money — even fast food workers make $20 an hour — and thus everyone with some sort of skilled trade has headed west. The documentary bears this out, with one surveyor mentioning a $10k monthly paycheck.
The problem is that planning has lagged far behind. The influx of newcomers and lack of housing has left many in a quasi-homeless situation. On top of that, the enormous salaries have distorted the local economy; a one-bedroom apartment rents for $1800 a month, and a small house can cost upwards of $500,000. Developers are building everything from dormitory-style bunkhouses, to subsidized apartments. One developer, quoted in the film, says that ‘anyone making less than $70,000 here basically needs public assistance.’
When the boom is over — or if there’s a massive switch to renewables and energy efficiency — what will become of these towns?
It turns out that I’ve been oblivious to some strange goings-on just two blocks from my apartment. Since last summer, a group of artists have been producing some interesting and inventive videos in a loft they call the Moment Factory, at the corner of Hutchison and Van Horne. Most interesting of all is their new series, Minute Moments, which consists of minute-long videos produced by various Montreal artists.
Thien Vu Dang, alias VJ Pillow, and Yasuko Tadokoro, aka VJ Mademoiselle, have produced some of the best work for Minute Moments. I first encountered Pillow and Mademoiselle at a strangely fascinating improv session in which they jammed with a scratch DJ named Manna and the Toronto-based experimental musician Lee Pui Ming. Manna mixed sounds and Lee, through a realtime audio and video feed from Toronto, contributed what might best be described as piano noise and animalesque wails. Pillow and Mademoiselle, meanwhile, did a great job of mixing video footage from the streets of Hong Kong with live shots of Lee and Manna. It was downright hypnotic.
The Minute Moment clip I’ve shared above isn’t quite as trippy. Shot by Pillow and featuring Mademoiselle, it was filmed on a lonely industrial street on the edge of Mile End. It opens with a few lines in French, credited to Jean-Luc Godard, which can be translated as “I am not sad that you are leaving. I am not in love with you. I will not join you in Brazil. I do not kiss you tenderly.” As Mademoiselle wanders down the street, yellow balloon in hand, she passes by a piece of graffiti lurking in the background: “Love is a mystery,” it reads.
Director Gary Burns (Waydowntown) moves from fiction to documentary mode, teaming up with journalist Jim Brown to bring us Radiant City, a look at suburban sprawl from the point of view of a typical family living in a new tract development in Calgary, interspersed with commentary from the likes of Mark Kingwell and James Howard Kunstler. It is now playing in select cities (but not in Montreal, yet).
Toronto documentarian Gregory Greene, meanwhile, presents a sequel to his earlier End of Suburbia, with a look at how we move forward in an era of energy scarcity: Escape from Suburbia, which is due out in theatres soon. Interviewees include the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins, the Hon. Ed Schreyer, economist Jeremy Rifkin, and researcher/journalist Richard Heinberg, among others.
Running across the boulevard Saint-Germain, through the Carrefour de l’Odéon, we dashed into the box office and bought our tickets, ducking into the darkened cinema just as the opening credits finished. We sat down in the back row, interrupting a clearly annoyed couple’s face-sucking session, and watched as the first short began: “Montmartre.”
Paris, je t’aime, which we had just handed over our seven euros to see, is a collective film (it’s composed of eighteen segments) directed by a number of big names from around the world, including the Coen Brothers, Gurinder Chadha and Olivier Assayas. Each segment is set in a different part of Paris and deals with, in some way, love. In “Loin du 16ème,” Walter Salles depicts a young Latin American mother who must leave her own child in a suburban daycare in order to care for another in the wealthy sixteenth arrondissement. Sylvain Chomet’s “Tour Eiffel” is an irreverent and off-kilter take on the life of mimes.
Paris, je t’aime is more than just a collection of disparate shorts. Its producers like to call it a “collective film,” since it understands the futility of trying to reduce the Parisian experience into a single story—any attempt to do so will result in an enjoyable but empty Amélie fantasy. Instead, Paris, je t’aime suggests that Paris is a city of vignettes, a collection of dramas that share the same stage. Of course, every city is like this to some extent, but in Paris the effect is exaggerated by geographical compactness. Central Paris is a neat circle just ten kilometres across, ringed by the Périphérique highway; within its boundaries, the city is a treasure chest of humanity.
I was having coffee with a French immigrant recently and the conversation swung towards Schwartz’s. He recalled seeing a group of kids, on a class trip from somewhere else in Canada, lining up to eat there. “When I went on school trips in France it was always about going to castles or battlefields, ‘Napoleon did this and that here,’” he said to me. “Here it’s different. There aren’t any castles; the culture here is a popular culture. People go to Schwartz’s because of that. It’s where you feel the history of Montreal and its immigrants.”
With that in mind, it was about time that Schwartz’s got its own movie. Last night, Garry Beitel’s documentary, Chez Schwartz, premiered at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma.
Manufactured Landscapes follows Edward Burtynsky’s photographic exposition of unprecedented human transformation of the landscape.
Edward Burtynsky’s China photos explore what has always been a veritable fount of intriguing images. Recalling Antonioni’s 1972 Chung Guo China, which in a coolly detached manner examined the ordinary, everyday facet of a society that was nevertheless rife with political tension, his work, with equal detachment, goes underneath the surface of prosperity, and discovers tension of an entirely different kind: us vs. nature.
The Cinéma Beaubien, which is, along with the Parc, one of the few remaining arthouses in Montreal. Photo by Antoine Rouleau.
On October 27th, like a zombie in a George Romero flick, the Cinéma du Parc will rise from the dead. The Parc closed early last August after seven years as Montreal’s premiere English arthouse, its last remaining repertory cinema and the epicentre of the local cult film scene. Now, its new owner, an old hand in the arthouse biz, has said that he will focus on first-run arthouse and foreign films instead of repertory fare. “If I play Clockwork Orange, it will be part of a retrospective of the films of Stanley Kubrick,” he told the Montreal Gazette last week. “There is no place for repertory cinema with DVDs.”
That’s a shame. Although the list of theatres that have closed over the years is many times longer than the list of those currently operating, Montreal remains a good city to catch a new foreign or independent film. But there is no longer any cinema that offers regular and extensive repertory programming, aside from the government-funded Cinémathèque, despite a clear a demand for eccentric programming. After the Parc closed, a few people formed the Film Club, a weekly gathering at a bar on the Main where people can take in a free flick with cheap beer and popcorn. Cinema Politica, weekly screenings of politically-conscious films at Concordia University and the Université du Québec à Montréal, has proven popular since its launch a couple of years ago.
But these are not replacements for good cinemas; they only speak to the demand for film screenings that are a community event. Cinemas such as the Parc offer this on a permanent basis, although the effect is diluted if the programming becomes less adventurous. Even that, the survival of the new, reborn Parc isn’t certain. The life-death-ressurection cycle is common to arthouse cinemas everywhere, but lately, the combination of mainstream mega-cinemas and DVDs seem to be making their struggle to succeed much more difficult. Without them, what then will happen to the cinema-as-social-space, the cinema-as-neighbourhood-landmark?
Montreal Apartments