Film and the City

George Melnyk

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781927356616
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to support what film scholar Jim Leach calls "the nationalist-realist project, " a documentary style that emphasizes the exoticism and mythos of the land. Over the past several decades, however, the hegemony of Anglo-centrism has been challenged by francophone and First Nations perspectives and the character of cities altered by a continued influx of immigrants and the development of cities as economic and technological centers. No longer primarily defined through the lens of rural nostalgia, Canadian urban identity is instead polyphonic, diverse, constructed through multiple discourses and mediums, an exchange rather than a strict orientation. Taking on the urban as setting and subject, filmmakers are ideally poised to create and reflect multiple versions of a single city.

Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from 1989 to 2007, including Denys Arcand's Jésus de Montréal (1989), Jean-Claude Lauzon's Léolo (1992), Mina Shum's Double Happiness (1994), Clément Virgo's Rude (1995), and Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2007), Film and the City is the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and "urbanity"—the totality of urban culture and life. Drawing on film and urban studies and building upon issues of identity formation in Canadian studies, Melnyk considers how filmmakers, films, and urban audiences experience, represent, and interpret urban spatiality, visuality, and orality. In this way, Film and the City argues that Canadian narrative film of the postmodern period has aided in articulating a new national identity.

1

THE CITY OF FAITH

Navigating Piety in Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989)

Integrative understanding, which seeks to pull together various elements or aspects, often from different disciplinary perspectives, works best when one is selective in the concepts applied to any particular film. In the case of Jésus de Montréal, my focus will be on the specificity of the film’s authorship and how that authorship gets translated into a film. With respect to Jésus, the primary distinguishing characteristics of both the film and its authorship are nationality, religion, and language. They create the film’s sense of the urban with a specific ethno-religious spatiality, visuality, and orality. Montréal becomes the site of a Catholic Christian drama whose narrative arrived with the settler society in the sixteenth century and continues to this day.

Bill Marshall, a leading authority on Québec cinema, argues that two streams exist within Québec film. The first is “unified, masculine, heterosexual,” while the second is “more heterogeneous, challenging that dominant masculine position, qualifying it by seeking to articulate with it other key terms such as class.”¹ Jésus de Montréal is a film that incorporates both positions. It is filled with heterosexual male perspectives, but it also challenges those perspectives. This conflict is rooted in Marshall’s description of Québec society—and, by extension, its cinema—as having a “minority, peripheral status” in relationship to English Canada, the United States, and France.² The codes of inferiority generated by this multiple-colonized consciousness become, for Marshall, the wellsprings of “innovation.” Marshall is referring to the emergence of a postcolonial cultural consciousness, one in which Québec’s previous position of inferiority (as a colony of France, of England, and of Canada) forms the basis of demands for a new status and identity. Jésus is a highly innovative film whose foundations lie in a distinct system of cultural meanings that link a new sense of de-colonized nationality with Catholicism, the French language, and Québec national identity.

Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s “Third World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986), Marshall points out how “any individual utterance” can become a statement of the whole collectivity.³ Arcand’s film is not simply a statement of personal creativity; it is a statement emanating from a collectivity with a distinct cultural history. Drawing on these wellsprings, Arcand has become a contemporary Québec filmmaker of world stature (his 2003 film, Les invasions barbares, won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film); he is viewed as representing his culture as it articulates a new, noncolonized identity on the world stage, while still remaining rooted in the historical traumas of second-class status and marginality. In Marshall’s view, the failure to achieve full nation-state status encourages cinematic innovation as a way of expressing this struggle for identity.

Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989), which appeared in the wake of Le déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire, 1986), winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, should be viewed as a highly innovative cinematic statement in terms of articulating the new Québec. His setting, the Christian Passion play in contemporary Montréal, was a major departure from the historical dramas and epics associated with biblical cinema.⁴ This novel approach in Christian-themed filmmaking resulted from the clash between his traditional Catholic upbringing (from his birth in 1940 to 1959) and his emergence as a filmmaker in the period of the Quiet Revolution (1960–75), during which Québec society became secularized, and the sovereigntist period of the Parti Québécois that followed.⁵ The film secularizes the Passion while retaining its Christian symbolism, a hybridity that represents the multiple worlds that Arcand had experienced.

It is important to note that for Arcand, Montréal is an adopted city. He was raised in the village of Deschambault on the St. Lawrence River, not far from Québec City. He also made the village his home when he was forging his career as a filmmaker from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. Yet he spent his high school and college years (1950s) in Montréal and, later on, worked there, first for the National Film Board and later as an independent filmmaker. He came to Montréal as a student migrant from rural Québec, whose own psychological and cultural space was formed by the religious and secular ideologies of a conservative Québec Catholicism. These ideologies emphasized the preservation of the French language as equally important to the core of the older French Canadianism as religious patrimony, the sanctity of the traditional heterosexual family, and a veneration of the land. This conservative, rural foundation clashed with the sophisticated and self-conscious urbaneness of Montréal and the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, which sought to inaugurate a modern, secular world view befitting a nation-state-in-waiting. Arcand knew both worlds, which he amalgamated into a new, critical, and personal consciousness—an awareness of the problems inherent in both his religious past and its secular replacement. This is what made Jésus de Montréal a site of contested values. Arcand described the personal context of the film:

Jesus of Montreal was born from juxtaposing the themes of the Passion according to Saint Mark, my memories of life as an altar boy in a remote village that had been Catholic for centuries, and my daily experience as a filmmaker in a big cosmopolitan city. I will always be nostalgic about that time of my life, when religion provided a soothing answer to the most insolvable problems, while remaining quite aware of how much obscurantism and demagogy these false solutions contained. . . . Through the thick fog of the past, I hear the echo of a profoundly disturbing voice. . . . All my films exude this loss of faith. It’s always with me.⁶

Le déclin de l’empire américain, which preceded Jésus de Montréal, received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film after its recognition at Cannes.⁷ The film is an exploration of the seemingly vain and hedonistic pursuits of urbane academics. Although set in Montréal, it maintains a powerful rural presence when the academics head to the countryside for a weekend getaway. This escape from the city acknowledges the power of the land in formulating consciousness and culture. While the city in the film is coded as signifying competition, hypocrisy, and what one might call “false consciousness,” the countryside, which is meant to be read by audiences as the authentic Québec, offers some degree of conviviality and community. Here is an urban story that carries an overpowering rural myth.

A few years later, Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal relegated the rural to a marginal role, dropping the symbolic dualism of city and country visible in Le déclin de l’empire américain in favour of an urbancentric story in which the land or issues of national identity were completely eclipsed. Arcand, as the film’s auteur writer and director, questions whether the historical flow from “obscurantism and demagogy” to cosmopolitanism is progressive in terms of the human condition. As a migrant to Montréal, Arcand would have experienced how strange this multicultural (anglophone and allophone) city was to other francophone Québécois, who then saw it transformed into a home for a secular sense of national identity.⁸

Arcand (in the quotation above) portrays Montréal as the city where he lost his original, natal faith. But the faith that he lost was a traditional one, associated with a repressed past that in adulthood he considers dysfunctional and empty. In Jésus de Montréal, he posits another faith—fresh, alive, and engaged, but still profoundly Christian. It is a “heretical” interpretation stripped of clerical encrustation and naked in its biblical purity. Arcand achieves this revitalized sense of Christian values and devotion by blending the past (the New Testament story of two thousand years ago) with the present (his contemporary Montréal), the religious (the Passion of Christ) with the secular (the theatre), rural park space (Mont Royal) with the deeply urban (soup kitchens and revolving restaurant towers). His own loss of faith liberated him to put his own stamp on his religious upbringing.

The great Québec filmmaker Michel Brault has described Arcand’s films as “a kind of history project on modern Quebec.”⁹ Of late, that history has been volatile, revolutionary, and modernizing. What is crucial to Jésus is the filmmaker’s religious background. In Jésus de Montréal, he confronts both the Catholicism of the past and the secularism of his adulthood in equally condemning tones. He connects these two worlds through the story of the Passion, recreating the world of New Testament Jerusalem in post–Quiet Revolution Québec. By situating the Passion story in the present and stripping away the past, Arcand eliminates the narrative distancing of history and so brings the Passion story to a mythological level.¹⁰ History and the passage of time are replaced with the eternal present. Dressing the film in the personalities, voices, and situations of contemporary Montréal, while costuming the actors in biblical garb, Arcand sets up an equation between Montréal and Jerusalem, thereby producing a sophisticated interpretive milieu that cannot be found in period-piece re-creations of the Passion. By erasing the historical and cultural differences between the two cities, he revitalizes the universal and mythic attributes of the Passion. It is no longer a story of then and them, but of now and us.

Arcand’s view that the religiocentric world of his Duplessis-era childhood and its antithesis the secularized world of his Lévesque-era adulthood are equally problematic is rooted in a Catholic conviction that, despite transitory surface changes that might seem indicative of progress, history remains the expression of an unchanging, flawed, and fundamentally sinful human nature. When, in the film, a Catholic cleric turns to an actor to “update” the local church’s traditional Passion play so that it will be more appealing to contemporary viewers, his attempt to capture an audience becomes a statement of the inauthenticity of the Catholic Church’s response to political and social change. The revival of the play becomes more than the cleric had bargained for, just as the preaching of Christ became problematic for the religious establishment in Jerusalem. Only a filmmaker who knows Catholic orthodoxy but is removed from it spiritually could attempt such a bold project.

Arcand’s sensitivity to the inherent power of the biblical story infuses his film with an anti-establishment message that was part of the revolutionary nature of early Christianity. The sense of religious revolt and renewal that Christianity represented in its first centuries is translated to contemporary Montréal, where, ironically, it is the Catholic establishment rather than Judaic religious authority that represents the status quo. Situating Christ’s Passion in the contemporary world in the guise of its re-enactment raises issues of performativity, secularity, and social change. When Canadian director Norman Jewison tried to deal with the same subject (the Passion) in his film adaptation of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) sixteen years earlier, the result was not half as engaging as Arcand’s film. That wellspring of religiosity that defined Québec for so many centuries offered Arcand a rich pool of conscious and subconscious imagery that propels his film. It would seem that a devout Catholic upbringing like Arcand’s and his subsequent immersion in a dynamic, secular Montréal lifestyle were the two antithetical forces that generated both deep angst and profound insight, a combination that allowed Arcand’s own ethics to arise from a “lost” faith.

The inaugural spark for Arcand’s Montréal urbanity was his traditional Jesuit education. “I owe what I am to them,” he has remarked.¹¹ The Jesuits, as he relates, introduced him to the power of Italian neo-realist film in its heyday. For this rural migrant, the relatively educated and cosmopolitan interests of his Jesuit teachers caused a breakthrough to a new world, while the artistry of postwar Italian cinema with its intense Catholic context provided the bridge. It was the city that opened Arcand’s eyes to cinema. (Québec had a law against children attending movie theatres.) It was his status in the world of the intelligentsia that made European cinema, rather than Hollywood, so attractive. When Arcand joined the National Film Board at the age of twenty-one, he became a documentarist, because neither Québec nor Canada had a feature film industry at that time. It was the birth of the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s that pointed in the direction of self-expression and opened the possibility for creating something new.

The National Film Board, or Office national du film du Canada (ONF), which was making Montréal its new organizational home with a distinct French-language production unit, was the second factor in Arcand’s urbanity. The 1960s was a decade of cinematic renewal with new developments in the documentary mode, especially the approach referred to as cinéma direct, which emphasized populist subjects and narrative spontaneity. The renewal was fuelled by a new cadre of daring, young filmmakers who knew each other and worked together. The nationalist impulse was exploding in Québec in the radical sixties. This impulse to rid the province of its old identity as cleric-ridden, insular, and backward-looking and foster a new identity as an independent Québec, one that would be a master of its own destiny, appealed to the cultural and intellectual elite to which Arcand belonged.

A third factor was the rebirth of Québec feature films, incubated by the ONF, of which Claude Jutra’s masterful Mon oncle Antoine (1970) is the most famous example. Cultural self-assertion—no longer limited to French-language television, literature, or the stage and music—came to include narrative cinema. Arcand’s association with the ONF taught him his craft, but it also generated the desire to go beyond the documentary mode. The 1960s were about removing the old restrictions, and Arcand was swept up in that energizing process of cultural liberation. One of the old restrictions was the limitation of the documentary mode. The narratives of the new society, which emphasized the francophone fact and its new sense of self-achievement, found a high level of fulfillment in narrative cinema.

The fourth and integrating element in Arcand’s distinct urbanity was the political revolution centred in Montréal—the movement for Québec independence, which in the radical 1960s was decidedly leftist and national liberation–oriented. In his 1970 ONF documentary on the working class, On est au coton, Arcand acknowledged the importance of the factory worker, an emphasis that was part of the ideological milieu of the time. His hard-hitting portrayal of women workers in a cotton mill was so controversial that the ONF refused to release it. The original was finally shown in 1994 and only released in 2004, thirty-four years after it was made! While still living in his native village of Deschambault, he also wrote and directed Réjeanne Padovani (1973), a film about a Montréal mobster, which was followed a year later with Gina (1974), a docudrama about the censorship of On est au coton. Every one of these films is centred on Montréal. Arcand even did a short film on a hospital workers’ labour dispute in the Eastern Townships. But it was not until the electoral radicalism of the 1970s (the triumph of René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois as the province’s government) ended with the loss of the 1980 independence referendum that Arcand was able to express the contradictions in this new Québec. The palpable disappointment of the sovereignists over the public’s hesitancy toward independence was a catalyst for self-reflection and self-criticism. The promise that had motivated the intelligentsia had been overturned by corporate and populist reality. It was time to satirize that class and its ideology, which is what Arcand did in Le déclin de l’empire américain.

Arcand’s friend and biographer, Réal La Rochelle, believes that both Le déclin and Jésus are “intimately linked to Montreal.”¹² This was Arcand’s world as a filmmaker. He was intimate with it—close, understanding, and revelatory. Eventually, by returning to the Montréal characters from Le déclin, Arcand linked both of these earlier films, albeit in different ways, to his most successful and much later film, Les invasions barbares (2003), which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. La Rochelle points out in a chapter of his biography titled “Denys of Montreal” that “most of Arcand’s films take place in Montreal, which is certainly the case in his feature films.”¹³ That Arcand used a fictive Montréal as the site of his narratives suggests that he wanted to express his view of the city framed with his own cultural values.

Mont Royal, which overlooks the city, serves as a symbol of the rural in Jésus, while in both Le déclin and Les invasions barbares the same rural retreat serves to represent the “other,” more traditional Québec. This suggests that the signifiers associated with the urban and the rural are present in all three films.¹⁴ In the three films, the city is presented as a place of ideological fashionableness and spiritual emptiness, a place crying out for redemption in some fundamental way, while the countryside is presented as a place for introspection and conviviality, a place of human community, which the city lacks. This dichotomy reflects the dichotomy of the past and the present in Arcand’s own life. He works and struggles in the city, while in the countryside, he finds solace and space for contemplation. The city is the site of articulation; the countryside the site of reflection, the place of being rather than acting. In his adult life up to the mid-1980s, Arcand used a village retreat for creative endeavours, while the city was the locus of the turmoil and struggle associated with cinematic production.

Montréal, clearly central to Arcand’s cinema, is described metaphorically by La Rochelle as “the cocoon of his intellectual and artistic training . . . the flip side of Deschambault-de-Portneuf.”¹⁵ One may view Arcand’s urban experience as a kind of barbarian assault on his originating rural psyche. The urban world posited a new reality in opposition to his traditional upbringing, but it could not erase that upbringing. The past persisted, and when it came in contact with urban life, it turned it into a vital mythology or metaphor—the city of faith. The energizing and optimistic urban secularity that Arcand experienced in the 1960s and 1970s radically changed the identity he had brought with him to the city, but it also left him dissatisfied, questioning the substitutes for religion that modernization offered. Arcand highlighted the conflict when he said that “secularity is doubtless the most obvious acquisition of the Quiet Revolution.”¹⁶ Beginning with Le déclin, continuing with Jésus, and then reiterated in Les invasions, Arcand presents secularity as a spiritual poison equivalent to the poison of traditional Catholicism, a hypocrisy that d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema
• 1 The City of Faith: Navigating Piety in Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989)
• 2 The City of Dreams: The Sexual Self in Lauzon’s Léolo (1992)
• 3 The Gendered City: Feminism in Rozema’s Desperanto (1991), Pool’s Rispondetemi (1991), and Villeneuve’s Maelström (2000)
• 4 The City Made Flesh: The Embodied Other in Lepage’s Le Confessionnal (1995) and Egoyan’s Exotica (1994)
• 5 The Diasporic City: Postcolonialism, Hybridity, and Transnationality in Virgo’s Rude (1995) and Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood (2001)
• 6 The City of Transgressive Desires: Melodramatic Absurdity in Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World (2003) and My Winnipeg (2007)
• 7 The City of Eternal Youth: Capitalism, Consumerism, and Generation in Burns’s waydowntown (2000) and Radiant City (2006)
• 8 The City of Dysfunction: Race and Relations in Vancouver from Shum’s Double Happiness (1994) to Sweeney’s Last Wedding (2001) and McDonald’s The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess (2004)
• Conclusion: National Identity and the Urban Imagination
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index