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. 

André Habib 

XPQ: Forking Paths

XPQ is the title that Ralph Elawani and I came up with when we decided  to name a collective book on the history of experimental cinema in Québec,   a  blend  of  interviews,  documents and essays. The team at the Cinémathèque québécoise, along with filmmakers and authors (including André Habib from the Université de Montréal) have made this book possible, which is dedicated to a largely unknown aspect of film production in Québec. Québec experimental cinema has long been associated with experimental animation produced by the National Film Board of Canada (McLaren, Lipsett, Hébert, Jodoin), but it is much more varied, rich and complex. An in-depth analysis of independent experimental production from the 1930s to the 1960s illustrates a synchronism with the advent of the avant-garde in Québec. In this programme, we therefore wanted to include two short films by the visual artist Omer Parent, demonstrating the link between the fledgling avant-garde movement and the European visual artists of the time, including Fernand Léger. The remainder of the programme explores the various approaches that characterised experimental cinema between the 1960s and 1980s, without any actual obstacles other than the extreme rarity of the films and their absence outside the city where they were created. Thus, after the laudatory words pronounced by Pauline Kael 50 years ago, during a visit to the Montreal Film Festival, we will be able to judge for ourselves an unconventional film by directors Lafleur and Desrosiers, Tant que s’illuminera l’animal stratifié. We shall discover films beyond the academic halls of the Université de Montréal and Concordia where they were produced (Desgagnés/Gélinas, Bourque) and also explore the advent of queer experimental cinema (Lafontaine). All these films have been digitised, restored and rediscovered in the last two years and, with a few exceptions, have never been shown outside of Canada.

Guillaume Lafleur