Experimental films from Québec and Canada

The three programmes we have gathered here are marked by a great heterogeneity. They do not aim to propose a prescriptive definition – despite the title – of what “experimental films from Québec and Canada” are supposed to be. At the very most, they allow us to glimpse the eclecticism that this term covers: three psychedelic films shot by a Québecer in Paris, wondrous film-journals or satirical pamphlets made by a Canadian (in love with Québec) living in New York, a fragment of an 8mm amateur film showing Fernand Léger’s arrival at the Québec City train station in May 1945, the first student film made in Montreal by an Acadian filmmaker whose exceptional body of work will flourish in part in the US, an experimental sci-fi B-movie with surrealist accents, a collective found-footage film-poem, an intimate queer film mixing film and video… These films are the work of established filmmakers (Bourque, Wieland) or those who have made one or very few experimental films (Lafleur, Desrosiers, Parent, Lafontaine). They share in common the fact that they have been rediscovered or restored, in many cases, recently, thanks to the work of the Cinémathèque québécoise (which preserves the films of Joyce Wieland and O’Leary as well as several other films in the cycle) and many have never been screened publicly outside of Canada. They are part of recent historiographical and archival initiatives to map, write and restore the history of Canadian and Québec experimental cinema (see Zryd & Broomer or Lafleur & Elwani) to which this cycle also hopes to contribute. Isolated exercises, independent and fiercely artisanal, all these solitary films are paradoxica ly the expression of a collectivity – an “unavowable community”, “people who are missing” – and of a multitude. They bring to light, for our greatest happiness, the secret beauty of a hidden world, as well as the buried possibilities of cinema, and that is something that we are very fortunate to be able to unearth and rediscover. 

Glimpses of beauty: the films of Etienne O’Leary

 If Etienne O’Leary (born in Montreal in 1944) had composed an autopoietic essay, he could have entitled it Alchemy of Film, in a nod to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s The Alchemy of the Word, to whom he has sometimes been compared, as much for the poetic power of his work as for its fulgurating nature (three years of intense creative activity, followed by a long silence). In the three films that O’Leary made in and around Paris between 1966 and 1968, we find a gaze capable of hallucinating the everyday, of sublimating the ordinary into a syncopated sequence of kaleidoscopic visions. His work is part of the psychedelic vein of 1960s cinema (one thinks of the work of his friend Pierre Clémenti who appears in his films and to whom O’Leary would have taught the rudiments of cinema), where the filmed diary becomes a way of crossing the doors of perception against which often reality violently fragments itself. In Day Tripper, and even more so in Homeo and Chromo Sud, O’Leary uses virtuoso superimposition, frantic frame-by-frame editing and complex musical collages to compose a “crazy parade” to which he alone had the key. His palimpsests of images and sounds could well be best described by that other Rimbaudian word: illuminations. A few years after May ’68 (images of which events appear at the end of Chromo Sud), O’Leary returned to Québec. His work was only rediscovered in the early 2000s, thanks to the work of Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Christian Lebrat and Nicole Brenez, and then of the Centre Pompidou, who found the elements preserved at the Cinémathèque québécoise. These elements were screened in 2010 in Montréal, in the presence of the filmmaker who had not seen his films since the 1970s. He died the following year. The copies projected in Bologna, distributed by Light Cone, made from the original elements kept in Montréal, have never been shown in Italy.

André Habib