July 23rd, 2008
The National Film Board of Canada is about to release La mémoire des anges, a new film by Luc Bourdon about life in 1950s and 60s Montreal, created by stitching together footage from the NFB’s vast archives. If this trailer is any indication, it will be an absolutely fascinating look at a city that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. The Montreal you see here is brash and cocky, a self-assured metropolis still unaware that it would be forced to suffer a prolonged existential crisis in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
Just as the images in La mémoire des anges seem to capture so well the city’s past life, another soon-to-be-released NFB documentary, Roadsworth: Crossing the Line, reflects the current state of Montréalitude. Eclipsed economically by other urban centres, racked by decades of political instability and cultural uncertainty, Montreal has regained a measure of its old self-confidence, but this time in a somewhat different way. The old hustler city of the past has transformed itself into a city of flâneurs, a creative, self-referential place that thrives on its own eclecticism.
September 29th, 2006
Photographer under the Van Horne Viaduct, Montreal
It was rush hour on a brisk evening in early March which couldn’t decide between winter and spring. I stepped onto a crowded bus and clasped the handrail as it lurched down Park Avenue. Fifteen minutes and two metro stops later, I walked quickly through a few corridors and dashed across Ste. Catherine—up an unmarked staircase, Café L’Utopik awaited.
I arrived at this crowded, sprawling café—a maze of brightly-coloured rooms, mismatched chairs and squeaky hardwood floors—to participate in a University of the Streets Café discussion on the flâneur. Ironically, I had come in a rush—just another bow-headed pedestrian pressing forward—but I’m usually what is considered to be a flâneur; my favourite pastime is to wander aimless around the city, camera in hand, recording anything that strikes my eye.
At a little after seven o’clock, as a dozen or so people sat near the front of the café waiting for the discussion to start, Mia Hunt, a doctoral student in Design Art and Urban Studies at Concordia University, got things rolling. The flâneur, she told us, emerged in nineteenth-century Paris, the product of a new bourgeois class and Baron Haussmann’s dramatic makeover of the city. A dandyish figure who strolled unhurriedly down the capital’s boulevards, the flâneur was best captured in the work of Charles Baudelaire. “For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer,” he wrote, “it’s an immense pleasure to take up residence in multiplicity; in whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite: you’re not at home but you feel at home everywhere; you see everyone, you’re at the centre of everything yet you remain hidden from everybody.”
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