Educational Media Reviews Online

The difference between The Memories of Angels / La mémoire des anges and so many “city symphonies” of the past, from Manhatta (1921) through Berlin – Symphony of a Great City (1927) onto My Winnipeg (2007), is that typical city symphony films represent the visual aesthetics and thematic preoccupations of one filmmaker. The Memories of Angels, in this case, is not in essence a symphony but more of feat of sampling: the director’s role is clearly that of an editor whose vision stems from assembling existing footage from a number of films to create a whole new vision and way of looking at a city. Rather than the homogeneous experimental or avant-garde approaches of his predecessors, Paul Strand, Walter Ruttman, and Guy Maddin, Luc Bourdon availed himself of excerpts from over 120 National Film Board of Canada productions from the late 1940s to the early 1970s to produce an inspired collage portrait of the city of Montreal.

There are no set chapters, no voice-over narration. The flow comes from seamless visual transitions allowing for the subject matter to follow. Occasionally we double back to take another look at something, from a slightly different perspective. The sound often overlaps the visual, creating another layer and an aural counterpoint to the collage. We cut from black and white footage to color and then back again, occasionally seeing the same places in both black and white and in color either at the same time or many years apart. Montreal could easily stand in for any number of North American cities whose post-WWII demographics began to change. Immigration created linguistic and religious diversity and not only socio-economic but also cultural ghettos of sorts. Consumerism climbed, politics shifted, mores evolved. Popular culture is shown in complete transformation through its music: from the reverential visit of Igor Stravinsky, to the piano boogie woogie performed by Oscar Peterson, the hit parade songs by Giselle Mackenzie, who was also extremely popular in the United States and often performed with Jack Benny on television, and finally to the music of heartthrob Paul Anka singing “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” to swooning and screaming teenaged girls in the 1962 film Lonely Boy.

The downtown area is shown at its most vibrant in several spectacular night shots of St. Catherine Street in the mid 1950s: in just a few blocks we can observe neon lights advertising a popular café, a famous delicatessen that still stands today as well as a couple of nightclubs and five huge movie palaces that have since been either demolished or re-appropriated. During daytime shots the street bustles with pedestrians. Almost 60 years later, the street is still bustling but at a different pace: the storefronts have changed and buildings have been demolished to make way for others. In one of the extras included on the DVD, the director talks about his view of the Montreal of the 50s and 60s not being an emotional one, but as someone who grew up in Montreal during the 50s and 60s I cannot help but feel a variety of levels of emotional attachment, dare I say, nostalgia for the city. Like the young girl forced away from the Christmas department store window, I most likely saw the same window she was pulled away from. The monorail footage of entering the American geodesic dome pavilion at Expo 67 still resonates with me: I rode that monorail into a Pavillion that marked me tremendously. I certainly walked in Park Lafontaine with my parents and on the Mont Royal, the mountain in the middle of the city whose landscape, like Central Park in New York, was designed by Frederic Law Olmsted. What we see of the mountain in La Mémoire des anges comes from the 1961 Le temps des Amours (Courtship) in which the 19-year old Genevieve Bujold stars as a young woman in love. This film is not even listed in her IMDB filmography as of the writing of this review and Bujold is incorrectly listed as playing herself in La Mémoire des anges.

What is most vital in this film is how it documents an era: the shifts in architecture: the interesting design of low-income housing built around communal courtyards used by the inhabitants to socialize. These structures have now all but disappeared or been completely transformed through gentrification. Other cultural shifts are more subtle such as the extensive footage of great numbers of children playing outside with each other in the streets. The children all went to the same schools in their communities and played with friends on their respective city blocks. Yet some changes, while minor in terms of technology, are huge in terms of their sociological impact on the entire landscape of inner-city life such as the gradual disappearance of laundry hanging on clotheslines. There are also changes that are more regionally specific: the change of a mostly francophone society under the strong rule of Roman Catholicism to the beginnings of a cultural revolution leading to the birth of separatism. Although not suitably explored, the subject matter could not be completely ignored in the presentation of late 1960s Montreal. It makes a brief appearance in the film but may not be fully understood by viewers who do not know this period of Quebec history.

The extras on the disc include two full-length shorts excerpted in the film, a photo gallery and interviews with the director Luc Bourdon. The best feature allows us to select an option of having most of the excerpts identified in terms of film titles and actors. I have often been enraged watching documentaries that do not identify their excerpts. This film will appease the historically obsessed and those who do not want to have the flow of the film ruptured by identifiers. I cannot say enough about the quality of the images. The archival color footage is pristine and immaculately vibrant, yet resonates with the appropriate tones and hues of color stock of the period. The black and white is crisp. This film serves to document urban change through media, it tracks sociological change and cultural change and yet there is an added bonus for people like me who grew up and/or live here, it is a love poem and an ode to a great city. Very highly recommended.