Shadows of Spring
Emerging from the multiple perspective of this film, a memory of a neighbourhood is recreated which tells of the fragility of working class habitats. Residents and workers from southwest Montreal recount its tragic history: The immigration and settling of the Irish in the 19th century; the expropriation of Griffintown; the destruction of Goose Village; the industrial decline of Pointe-Saint Charles and surroundings.
| Director | Sylvain L'Espérance |
| Actor | Richard Brouillette |
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Sylvain L’Espérance’s second film–after the short Les écarts perdus–Shadow of Spring marks a transition in his creative process. Until then, his cinematic approach had been resolutely experimental, but life-changing encounters with the workers who would become his film’s protagonists tipped him right into a big cinematic stew. The documentary–a forerunner of the device that would sit at the heart of his next film–proceeds thus in hybrid form: impressionistic, interviews interlaced with abstract tableaus, poetic imprints.
A triptych portrait of a true demolition site that has been running its course over some thirty years in the working class neighbourhoods of southwest Montreal (where the population had been cut in half), the film also gives a glimpse of incipient gentrification. We follow along as if by anamnesis on a guided tour through these lost lands where destroyed houses, disappeared families, and sunken factories meet swallowed rage beneath a heavy and uncertain sky. The extent of the devastation crystallizes particularly poignantly in a series of photos taken by the municipal administration before the irrevocable destruction of Goose VIllage. With a falsely anodyne air, they shamelessly put on display all of the violence of capitalism (and the despotism of the mayor), immortalizing, with a quasi-colonial gaze, the soon-to-be bulldozed houses along with their impoverished and expropriated residents in intimate scenes from their day-to-day lives.
Richard Brouillette
Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant
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Les printemps incertains
Language: Français
- Année 1992
- Pays Quebec
- Durée 53
- Producteur Main Film
- Langue French, English
- Sous-titres French, English
- Résumé court In southwest Montreal, residents and workers tell the tragic story of their dispossession.
- Programmateur Richard Brouillette|Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant;
Sylvain L’Espérance’s second film–after the short Les écarts perdus–Shadow of Spring marks a transition in his creative process. Until then, his cinematic approach had been resolutely experimental, but life-changing encounters with the workers who would become his film’s protagonists tipped him right into a big cinematic stew. The documentary–a forerunner of the device that would sit at the heart of his next film–proceeds thus in hybrid form: impressionistic, interviews interlaced with abstract tableaus, poetic imprints.
A triptych portrait of a true demolition site that has been running its course over some thirty years in the working class neighbourhoods of southwest Montreal (where the population had been cut in half), the film also gives a glimpse of incipient gentrification. We follow along as if by anamnesis on a guided tour through these lost lands where destroyed houses, disappeared families, and sunken factories meet swallowed rage beneath a heavy and uncertain sky. The extent of the devastation crystallizes particularly poignantly in a series of photos taken by the municipal administration before the irrevocable destruction of Goose VIllage. With a falsely anodyne air, they shamelessly put on display all of the violence of capitalism (and the despotism of the mayor), immortalizing, with a quasi-colonial gaze, the soon-to-be bulldozed houses along with their impoverished and expropriated residents in intimate scenes from their day-to-day lives.
Richard Brouillette
Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant
-
Les printemps incertains
Language: Français
- Année 1992
- Pays Quebec
- Durée 53
- Producteur Main Film
- Langue French, English
- Sous-titres French, English
- Résumé court In southwest Montreal, residents and workers tell the tragic story of their dispossession.
- Programmateur Richard Brouillette|Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant;
