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| | | |  | | La maudite galette turns 50 | | | | |
September 7 is the 50th anniversary of the release of Denys Arcand's first dramatic feature, La maudite galette (Dirty Money). He had dabbled in drama with Seul ou avec d'autres, a student film he co-directed in 1962 with Denis Héroux and Stéphane Venne, but it was not until 1972 that Arcand really turned to fiction, after making documentaries at the NFB for eight years. At the time, he was finishing Québec : Duplessis et après… and his previous film, On est au coton, was still banned from distribution by NFB Chairman Sydney Newman.
In 1969, Denys Arcand had asked writer Jacques Benoit to write a screenplay based on the legend of the enchanted canoe (La chasse-galerie). Arcand was unimpressed by the script, which Benoit himself admitted was "rather poorly constructed," and turned down the project. Benoit then suggested a plot about cursed money instead. A working-class couple sets out to rob a rich old uncle. They don't realize their tenant is following them. The robbery goes wrong and the tenant makes off with the loot. He buys a big American car and a girl. But now he's the one being trailed and it will all end badly.
So Denys Arcand's first dramatic film was a shoot ‘em up about petty criminals set in working class Montréal. "Our goal was to make a film about a seemingly conventional story, one that apparently fit the mould of commercial cinema, and then subvert the conventions through the directorial style, cinematography, sound, acting, sets, etc. We wanted to make a film that was true and false, so to speak: true in every detail but false as a whole, because we would distance ourselves from established cinematic codes. We hoped the contradiction would create a sense of unease in the viewer....Our aim was to make an insidiously subversive film..."
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The film premiered in the Cannes Film Festival's Semaine de la Critique and opened at the Théâtre Saint-Denis on September 7, 1972 to rave reviews. Critics praised the distancing effect of the minimalist direction (all static shots) of this Québec-style film noir, the accurate depiction of society, the quality of the acting, the absence of any moral contrast between social classes, the cynical humor.
The review by Robert Lévesque, then arts and culture editor of Québec-Presse, is representative of the enthusiastic response to the film and the importance critics saw in it: "Just as Michel Tremblay and André Brassard shook up Québec theatre in 1969 when Les belles-sœurs was staged at the Rideau-Vert, Denys Arcand and screenwriter Jacques Benoit have shaken up Québec cinema with their Galette. These two events are of equal import, each in its own realm. They are successive milestones, four years apart, in the general development of Québec culture. There is much that is new in La maudite galette—most importantly the social milieu, one that Québec cinema is looking at for the first time, and the filmmaker's tone in talking about this milieu."
Why has the initial impact of La maudite galette faded and the view of the film as a milestone in the history of Québec cinema, exemplified by Lévesque, been forgotten? Perhaps the many great Arcand films that followed have eclipsed the memory of La maudite galette as a major work in our cinema. Or perhaps the aura and impact of direct cinema has so shaped our view of the first decades of Québec filmmaking that we are inclined to overlook the importance of a genre film at a time when our cinema was much more in tune with cinéma du réel.
In 2022, La maudite galette still packs a punch. To discover or rediscover the film today is a unique cinematic joy. It is also an opportunity to measure the richness and range of Denys Arcand's films, and to appreciate the incisive gaze he has cast on Québec society for 50 years.
La maudite galette was restored from the original 35mm negative and 35mm magnetic tape for the sound. The film will be screened at the Cinémathèque québécoise on September 5 at 6:30 p.m., with Denys Arcand and Marcel Sabourin in attendance.
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A nephew and his wife try to rob the family's wealthy uncle. The corpses soon start to pile up.
Starring Luce Guilbeault, Marcel Sabourin, René Caron, J.-Léo Gagnon, Maurice Gauvin, Gabriel Arcand, Jean-Pierre Saulnier, Julien Lippé, Hélène Loiselle.
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| | | | | | L'Infonie inachevée: back in glorious stereo sound
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L'Infonie, a collective of multidisciplinary artists led by composer/musician Walter Boudreau and singer/poet Raôul Duguay, was a cultural phenomenon in Québec in the early 1970s. The group's wild and iconoclastic performances touched the imagination during that effervescent era. Between March and July 1972, Roger Frappier recorded some of L'Infonie's performances and some key moments in the group's history. He also brought a group of poets, including Gaston Miron and Michèle Lalonde, together with Raôul Duguay to discuss poetry and the L'Infonie phenomenon.
The result was the film L'Infonie inachevée. Frappier's intention was to reproduce the spatialization of the long musical performances. He used six mics to record the sound at six points in order to create a stereophonic effect that let the viewer experience the sound at the precise points being shown on the screen. The finished film, in full stereo on a 35mm 4-track magnetic print, was produced at a laboratory in Los Angeles, since no Montréal lab could do it.
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According to Roger Frappier, the panoramic stereophonic version of the film was shown only once after his return from Los Angeles, in a screening at the Imperial Cinema for the crew. The Imperial was the only theatre in Montréal that could project the type of film to which the stereo sound had been applied. In the film's theatrical release in 1974 and every other time it was shown in the theatre or on television, the sound was truncated compared with the sound spatialization originally intended by Frappier.
The 35mm 4-track print, the only stereophonic copy in existence, was unearthed at the Cinémathèque québécoise. As no Canadian lab had the equipment to transfer the sound from the film, L'Infonie inachevée had to travel back to Los Angeles, to the Audiopoint laboratory, for the stereo sound to be salvaged. The restored version therefore recovers the stereophonic sound that had been lost for nearly 50 years and we can finally see and hear the film the way it was meant to be experienced.
The restored version of L'Infonie inachevée will be shown on September 1 at the Estival du nouveau cinéma, on the Esplanade Tranquille in the Quartier des spectacles. In addition to experiencing the stereo sound again, audiences will see some classic scenes from Québec cinema, such as the phone conversation between Boudreau (seen from the front) and Duguay (seen from the back), filmed simultaneously with two cameras, and the discussion of musical notation between Raôul Duguay and a half-amused, half-disconcerted Karlheinz Stockhausen.
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L'Infonie was a wild and zany poetic/musical group led by Walter Boudreau and Raôul Duguay. Their shows—half concert, half performance art—were major events on Québec's counter-cultural scene at the time. L'Infonie inachevée shows the two men searching for a broader understanding, beyond their art. The camera makes us part of each stage of their creative process. (ACPAV)
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| Screening | | | Le retour de l'Immaculée Conception | |
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