Films “about” a specific city will always be faced with the problem of representing an urban space that is too dynamic and multifaceted to be captured in one cinematic installment. In this sense, “Montreal films” stand in much the same relationship to the city as canonical Canadian films do to national identity: the imagined communities both projects seek to depict don’t exist and never have. Christopher E. Gittings refers to this as “a regime of fictive ethnicity… Québec represented as a pur laine Québécois cultural formation” (4). “Montreal films,” then, are involved in a kind of cinematic myth-making that creates a coherent sense of the city, containing its complexity and pluri-ethnic make-up. Two films made in Montreal in the 1990s took a new approach to this dilemma. Rather than rely on one narrative to convey a sense of the city, Montréal vu par… (1991) and Cosmos (1996) use the short film form to help signify the fragmentation of postmodern Montreal. From this common starting point, the two films take different approaches to reconciling their disparate visions of Montreal. The earlier film presents more rigid and conventional portraits of the city while the later features an original approach to addressing tensions in Montreal’s civic identity. Focusing on Cosmos, I will explore how the film gives a sense of unity to its disjointed narrative and cinematic construction of Montreal, and to what extent the title character’s cab facilitates this unifying project.
The depiction of Montreal in both films can be explained, to some extent, by the economics of their productions. Montréal vu par… was financed in part by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), but also by Montreal’s municipal government for the city’s 350th anniversary (Marshall 212). Attracting six of Canada’s most famous directors – Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, Lea Pool and Denys Arcand among others – the project’s official sanctioning, mix of local and imported filmmakers and mainstream appeal curbed its potential for critical engagement with the Montreal cityscape. Cosmos, meanwhile, was “a showcase for young directors put together by Roger Frappier at Max Films” (214). Financed by a Montreal-based company, Québécois cultural institutions and an NFB fund for independent filmmaking, Cosmos was for several of its young directors a first commercial project after only making student films (Mandolini 46). The film, therefore, benefited from local perspectives informed by the dynamic student and immigrant culture of its filmmakers. Though many of the shorts in Montréal vu par… feature outmoded perspectives onto a city historically construed as white and francophone, Cosmos bares the traces of its production from within the multicultural city.
The films’ editing styles add to the sense of simultaneous unity and disjunction in Montréal vu par…, as opposed to the more unified visual code but disjointed narrative style of Cosmos. The former keeps its six segments completely apart, testifying to the auteur status of its feature filmmakers whose work remains clearly separated. This has the contradictory double effect of making the individual segments seem more cohesive, but creating a very disjointed feature-length film. In the latter, however, all the cinematography was handled by André Turpin, creating a cohesive visual style. The film-student directors of Cosmos are well-versed in short film, and thus more comfortable with the vignette format. Furthermore, their narratives present overlapping and interspersed events taking place over the course of the same day, thereby creating a sense of disjointed simultaneity. In an interview with Séquences magazine, the director of the Cosmos & Agriculture segment, Arto Paragamian, explains that their original project was to keep the vignettes separate. When it came time to edit the film, however, the group decided to intertwine their narratives. “That allowed us to freshen up the genre, renew the formula and to propose some unusual constructions” (Castiel 23). By subscribing to a more unified visual code, and placing its different storylines in an overlapping structure, the vision of Montreal communicated in Cosmos is more dynamic, complete and less alienating than that of Montréal vu par…. Put another way, Cosmos “carries the fragmentation of the previous film further, its portmanteau structure reinforcing the idea of the city as an assemblage of distinct and separate subjects” (Marshall 214).
In resolving this tension between the broad identity of the city and the specificity of its districts and subcultures, these two films mediate differently between the image of Montreal as a “walking city,” and one of simultaneous “automobility.” This contributes to the films’ sense of narrative unity or disunity, and to the sense of wholeness they are able to impose onto cinematic Montreal. Several shorts in Montréal vu par… – most notably Egoyan’s En Passant and Rozema’s Desperanto – reproduce the experience of discovering the city’s charms, alienations and exclusions from a pedestrian perspective. This denial of what urban theorists Mimi Sheller and John Urry term “automobilty,” confines Montréal vu par… to portraying only certain parts of the city and denying the fluidity between, and cultural specificity of, different districts. Elaborating on their approach to urban space, Urry and Sheller explain “that civil society should be reconceptualized as a ‘civil society of ‘automobilty’, a civil society of quasi-objects, or ‘car-drivers’ and ‘car-passengers’, along with disenfranchised ‘pedestrians’ and others not-in-cars, those that suffer a Lacanian ‘lack’” (Sheller 739). Through the device of the cab, Cosmos overcomes the barriers between “car-drivers,” “car-passengers” and “pedestrians,” connects disparate areas, and brings cohesion to an otherwise fragmented film. Providing a constant that figures in all the film’s narratives, Cosmos’s cab connects the cinematic city and its citizens.
Experiencing Montreal in Cosmos, therefore, must be understood through the framing device of the cab. Drawing on Anne Friedberg’s analogy between driving a car and sitting in a cinema, we can understand Cosmos’s cab as a camera within the text, leading the narrative from one short film to the next, just as it leads the spectator from one area of the city to the next. As Friedberg explains, “[d]riving transforms the mobilized pedestrian gaze with new kinetics of motored speed and with the privatization of the automobile ‘capsule’ sealed off from the public and the street” (184). Crucially, however, the taxi differs from other cars in that it is a permeable “capsule:” not only does it allow passengers to move through urban space, it allows for movement through its doors and across its seats. The cab, to some extent, combines the private mobility of other cars with the open structure of public transportation.
Aside from the physical and narrative mobility afforded by Cosmos’s cab, it doubles as a meta-cinematic camera within the text, giving a sense of cohesion to Cosmos’s overlapping narratives and Montreal’s multi-nodal landscape. As Bill Marshall puts it, “Cosmos himself is a conduit in the literal and figurative senses, the prime connector of this rhizomatic network of relations” (215). Firstly, we move from one narrative to the next with Cosmos, as he drives and looks out through the windshield. When characters enter his cab we watch him drive from their perspective, but also look out onto the streets from their position in the back seat. The cab becomes a vehicle for narrative but also for camera movement. As Friedberg puts it, “the visuality of driving is the visuality of the windshield, operating as a framing device… one is also sometimes a passenger, and the side windows and vents of an automobile frame the view of the scenery, somewhat differently, en passant” (Friedberg 184). Moreover, it is through the cab that Cosmos makes transitions from one of its micro-narratives into the next. If we conceive of the film’s six shorts as six different districts that make up part of an urban space called Cosmos, the cab becomes our way of moving from one of these areas into the next, the windshield serves as the framing device for the successive districts. The cab, like the camera, is the viewer’s way of navigating through Montreal from one plot to the next, and back again.
The narrative structure of Cosmos creates a sense of temporal continuity that parallels the unity created by Cosmos’s movement between, and appearance in, each vignette. The containment of the vignettes within a twenty-four hour period, the circularity of seeing Cosmos sleeping in his car both at the beginning and near the end of the film, create a sense of coherence that is lacking in the completely free-standing vignettes of Montréal vu par…. As if thinking specifically of Cosmos, Sheller and Urry write that when “people dwell in and socially interact through their cars, they become hyphenated car-drivers: at home in movement, transcending distance to complete series of activities within fragmented moments of time” (Sheller 739). Cosmos’s mobility through city space, but also through the fragmented temporality of postmodern Montreal, allows his cab to move independently of linear story time. Thus, he appears in different narratives simultaneously, defying the spatial and temporal constraints imposed on the other characters. As a meta-cinematic device, Cosmos’s cab is akin to the camera, shaping the diegesis through its movements, manipulating rather than following time.
The polymorphous movements of the Greek-Canadian Cosmos through time and space provide an analogy to the flow of marginalized and immigrant groups throughout Montreal. The invisible movements of Cosmos correspond to the invisibility of marginalized groups in Montreal films. A recurring oversight in Quebec’s national cinema – and to a lesser extent English-Canadian cinema – is the productive engagement with diasporic, marginalized and immigrant communities. The 1996 census, for instance, found that visible minorities make up 12.2 per cent of Montreal’s population, which in turn accounts for 92 per cent of the province’s visible minority population (Marshall 211). However, there remains a remarkable dearth of representations of non-white populations in Quebec cinema. Writing on 1989’s Jésus de Montréal, for instance, one critic ponders whether or not “Arcand is suggesting that it is time Québécois let go of their myth of the unitary, historical subject that is at the basis of their nationalism and also of their xenophobia” (Alemany-Galway 131). Traditionally, Quebec cinema has sought to articulate a popular imaginary that revolved around the Anglophone-Francophone binary. As a result of perceived Anglophone oppression, “there is a much stronger commitment to the need for a national cinema to articulate the values of distinctive cultural traditions” (Leach 159). However, this model of rearticulating pur laine Québécois cultural traditions – what one critic calls “[t]he hegemonic cinema of whiteness that has marked production in Canada historically” (Gittings 233) – has become increasingly divorced from demographic reality.
Montreal is the playing field on which Quebec national identity meets the polymorphous and multicultural postmodern urban environment. The city, then, is the site of an ongoing negotiation between these two identities, it “is the most common setting for a Québec film and would seem, therefore, to play an authenticating role within this national cinema. And yet it is also the ‘weakest’ point for any kind of pure, homogenous vision of Québec culture to be formed since such a role is immediately contested and contradicted by its insertion within the international flows of both capital and labor” (Marshall 211). This tension is addressed summarily in Montréal vu par…, though none of the shorts actively engage multiculturalism. Cosmos, meanwhile, is more productive in its depiction of Quebec culture as it is destabilized by postmodern urban fragmentation and multiplicity.
The sense of a larger polymorphous city beyond the narrative, outside its frame, is a difficulty that most of the shorts in Montréal vu par… elide. Jacques Leduc’s La Toile du temps segment, for instance, takes a historical documentary approach, addressing Montreal’s history rather than its lived reality. The segment belies nostalgia for Quebec history, and looks back romantically from an unstable present in which traditional white patriarchal Québécois identity is threatened. Michel Brault’s La Dernière partie, meanwhile, takes a pillar of Montreal civic identity as its setting, but contains its scope to the middle-class white hockey fans who populate the Pepsi Forum. Denys Arcand’s short, Vue d’ailleurs, similarly confines itself to an upper-middle class white woman’s subjective experience. Set on a tropical estate, the short features a multicultural cast, but is completely removed from Montreal. Arcand only engages with Montreal’s multiculturalism in order to fetishize it, in the person of the nameless native character portrayed by Raoul Trujillo. It’s hard to tell whether the tone of Arcand’s short is sarcastic, or if it is very blatantly eroticizing the aboriginal other. The views on Montreal expressed at the dinner party do, however, testify to the popular mythologies surrounding the city, and its place in a network of global cities.
The three remaining shorts in Montréal vu par…, the ones not directed by white Québécois men over fifty, address the experience of Montreal’s urban geography as an alienating spectacle. Rispondetemi, Léa Pool’s segment, takes place at dawn and mostly consists of private flashbacks of a young woman’s childhood, and non-narrative shots of the morning sky from the streets. Rushing through the deserted city in an ambulance, Montreal becomes a sublime experience that washes over the body. The other segments, Rozema and Egoyan’s, address the immensity and elusiveness of Montreal from the perspective of a visitor. Both feature clever manipulations of language, through a voiceover audio guide in Egoyan’s En passant, and in the pulling of subtitles into the diegesis of Rozema’s Desperanto. Calling attention to language in these shorts, however, mainly serves to play up the English-French binary rather than address the pluri-lingualism of contemporary Montreal. As one critic puts it, “[a]ll six short films are in fact very oblique, either figuring the city as ‘elsewhere’ or, in their narratives of encounters and combinations, favouring the transversal over the panoptic” (Marshall 212). Indeed, Montréal vu par… trades on the existing popular imaginary of the city rather than contributing to or disrupting it.
Cosmos, however, repeatedly parodies the problem of a city that can never be captured on film, bringing new points to bear on Montreal’s polymorphous identity. Indeed, it is one of “[a] group of films in the 1990s [that] began to take on board and attempted to negotiate the new state of affairs of the Global City, which both unbalances that old tension between place and space, container and flow, and creates new possibilities as well as exclusions” (Marshall 211). A clear articulation of this, for instance, comes in Denis Villeneuve’s segment, Le Technétium. When the director-in-the-film Morille – portrayed by successful Québécois actor David La Haye – walks into a building in typical Plateau architectural style for an interview, he stumbles into a subcultural postmodern microcosm of global communication culture. Passing indoors, Morille emerges into a hyper-sensory internet television studio. Hiding amongst the picturesque rowhouses – the same ones that fuel the romantic imagination of Polly Vandersema (Sheila McCarthy) in Rozema’s short from Montréal vu par… – a jarring subcultural phenomenon is thriving in a timeless and technologically-shaped space. When Morille is forcibly given a haircut that complements his “director” function, the six mirrors that capture his face visit the same postmodern fragmentation on him that the film’s six narratives visit on the urban landscape of Montreal. The cultural underground that the Tekno Show represents is one that operates outside the material boundaries of national Quebec identity, instead engaging in the dematerialized media flow between global cities.
Two of the Cosmos segments take another approach to engaging the changing identity of Quebec and Montreal, using a white male figure to illustrate the pressures that have destabilized traditional categories of Quebec identity. In André Turpin’s Jules & Fanny, the ultra-modern space of the Place Ville Marie skyscraper provides the stage for an encounter between ex-lovers who are about to be rivals in court. Jules, portrayed by Alexis Martin, is isolated in a dreary work routine, debilitatingly immature and perpetuating antiquated gender and sexual norms. If taken as an allegorical figure for the state of white heterosexual Québécois masculinity in general, Jules embodies shock and angst at the fragmentation of the imagined patriarchal francophone community of Quebec. The architectural space of Place Ville Marie, at once a part of Montreal and of that international network that mediates the flow of global capital, helps to infantilize the diminutive Jules. The verticality of Montreal’s tallest office tower furthers the sexual emasculation that the powerful – perhaps phallic – Fanny uses to manipulate Jules. Turpin’s elegant segment, then, acknowledges the antiquated models of Quebec nationalism that revolve around heterosexual white patriarchal power. This articulation of the untenable norms of traditional Quebec culture in Jules & Fanny exemplifies postmodern reality, under which “the incorporation of Montreal within a culturally coherent Québécois identity remains problematic” (Lajoie 39).
Another problematic male figure in Cosmos testifies to a marginalized queer community that has only recently become visible in Montreal. In Manon Briand’s segment Boost two automobile flâneurs, Yannie (Marie-Hélène Montpetit) and Joël (Pascal Contamine), travel around Montreal as procrastination rather than going to get the latter’s HIV test results. Beginning in the Plateau, Boost is located in a section that is fluid in its demographic make-up, being both historically working-class and recently artistic and gentrifying. As opposed to the vertical city space of Jules & Fanny, Boost depicts “the alternative chronotype of the city’s multicultural Plateau district as a potential source of more mobile, less stable… definitions of the Québécois self” (Marshall 211). This segment again plays on lapses in maturity and characters who are adult children, refusing to accept responsibilities and consequences. Like Jules, Joël struggles to come to terms with a crisis in Quebec male identity, though he copes more successfully than the former. Boost not only stages the instability of Quebec masculine identity, but presents a narrative that attempts to acknowledge and work through that instability.
Finally, the narrative Cosmos weaves through Montreal’s landscape is driven by a working-class immigrant. Linking disparate people and places in the city together, Cosmos “is a Greek-Canadian cab driver, who sleeps in his cab and links the different stories in which all the main characters are white and francophone” (Leach 132). The scenes featuring Cosmos and the final segment, Cosmos & Agriculture, are all directed by a filmmaker of Armenian origin, Arto Paragamian. In an interview, Paragamian explains that “my Armenian origins are a determining factor in the construction of the sketch I directed” (Castiel 24). For the final sequence, which combines the chase and buddy-movie genres, Cosmos is joined by a Haitian-Canadian cab driver named Janvier, and the pair chase bank robbing car thieves into an abandoned open-air mine. Rather than being the result of narrative continuity, however, the passage of the cab from urban streets into the mine actualizes the postmodern dematerialization of the city. Montreal turns into a towering and amorphous disembodied space where there are no roads, exits, onramps, sidewalks or people, and where the vertical walls of buildings are grey, indistinguishable and polymorphous. This sequence, furthermore, features the “formal self-consciousness,” “self-ironic eclecticism and knowingness” that characterise postmodern aesthetics (Brooker 203). In this absurd space, logic is displaced by detached sarcasm and cynicism. Or, as Janvier responds to Cosmos’s pitiful “why me?”: “Yeah, it’s ironic. It’s as if everything was meaningless.”
Cosmos, then, completes the postmodern transformation of Montreal’s urban landscape into a place out of time and space. Through the cohesiveness of its visual aesthetic and the linking functions served by its immigrant cab driver, the film overcomes the disjointed assemblage of its narrative. In so doing it also acknowledges the complexities of Montreal’s urban network, and the pressures that are displacing the once hegemonic national Québécois myth of white patriarchal masculinity. Montréal vu par… employs a different strategy by isolating its auteur filmmakers, thereby producing a more uneven and dissatisfying film. By featuring a mix of outsiders (the Swiss immigrant Léa Pool, Egyptian-born Armenian immigrant Atom Egoyan and Ontarian Patricia Rozema) and established white heterosexual Québécois men (Denys Arcand, Jacques Leduc and Michel Brault), Montréal vu par… skirts the constructed nature of the imaginary stability of Quebec national identity. Each of these series of short films acknowledges the contradictions and inherent complexities of urban identity in “the age of globalization, the tension between specific local environments and generic locations, which has always been a part of Canadian cinema, [and] is increasingly becoming a worldwide phenomenon” (Leach 48). Unfortunately, Montréal vu par… shies away from a productive engagement with these themes. Cosmos, meanwhile, embraces the multiplicity of Montreal in a way that “reveals a set of meanings that is constantly in process but which usefully connects the specificity of the Québec situation with global evolutions and transitions” (Marshall 215).
Note: Written for course English 393: Canadian Cinema 1 taught by Mr. Ger Zielinski at McGill University in the Winter of 2007.
Works Cited
Alemany-Galway, Mary. “Jesus of Montreal.” A Postmodern Cinema: The Voice of the Other in Canadian Film. Lanham, MD, London: Scarecrow Press, 2002. 119-139.
Brooker, Peter. A Glossary of Cultural Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.
Castiel, Élie. “Cosmos: les risques du métier.” Séquences 188 (January/February 1997): 22-24.
Cosmos. Dir. Jennifer Alleyn (Aurore et Crépuscule), Manon Briand (Boost), Marie-Julie Dallaire (L’Individu), Arto Paragamian (Cosmos & Agriculture), André Turpin (Jules & Fanny), Denis Villeneuve (Le Technétium). Perf. Igor Ovadis, Stéphane Demers, Sarah-Jeanne Salvy, Gabriel Gascon, David La Haye, Marie-France Lambert, Alexis Martin, Marie-Hélène Monpetit. Max Films Productions Inc., 1996.
Friedberg, Anne. “Urban Mobility and Cinematic Visuality: the Screens of Los Angeles – Endless Cinema or Private Telematics.” Journal of Visual Studies 1.2 (2002): 183-204.
Gittings, Christopher E. Canadian National Cinema: ideology, difference and representation. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Lajoie, Mark. “Imagining the City in Québécois Cinema.” Cahiers du Gerse 3 (2001): 34-54.
Leach, Jim. Film in Canada. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2006.
Mandolini, Carlo. “Cosmos: Vingt-quatre heures sur la planète Solitude.” Séquences 187 (November/December 1996): 46-47.
Marshall, Bill. “Montréal Between Strangeness, Home and Flow.” In Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Eds. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice. Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 206-216.
Montréal vu par… . Dir. Denys Arcand (Vue d’ailleurs), Michel Brault (La Dernière partie), Atom Egoyan (En passant), Jacques Leduc (La Toile du temps), Léa Pool (Rispondetemi), Patricia Rozema (Desperanto). Perf. Rémy Girard, Arsinée Khanjian, Robert Lepage, Hélène Loiselle, Jean Mathieu, Anne Dorval. Atlantis Films Limited, Cinémaginaire Inc., National Film Board of Canada, 1991.
Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. “The City and the Car.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.4 (December 2000): 737-757).
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