Silver Screen Cities is delighted to publish this guest post by Pierre Pageau, author of Les Salles de Cinéma au Québec, 1896-2008 (Les Editions GID, ISBN 9782896340323).
I am a Montréaler (Québec, Canada). Always have been. As a teen I lived in the suburb city of Lachine and I saw movies in two movie theaters close to my home: the Empress (1912-1968; 900 seats) and the Royal Alexandra (1914-1967; 1050 seats). One week a theater did try something new: showing two movies (the standard at the time, 1950-1960) by the same director: Alfred Hitchcock. So, I went to see ‘Vertigo’ and ‘To Catch A Thief’. It’s obvious that ‘Vertigo’ impressed me the most. Also, in the same years, in Lachine, the Canadian Army had build the Eastern Manning Depot – 1956-1959, and there was a movie theater there. That theater was for the soldiers and their children. But I found a way to sneak in, always afraid that the soldiers at the entrance would find out that I was not supposed to be there. It was in that theater that I saw a great number of Singing Westerns featuring the likes of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.
After that I really had a tremendous experience of cinema in a beautiful palace, the Cinéma Impérial (1913; 1904 seats; on Bleury Street, near Mayor). The long story is that my father had a fur store and he would design and create furs after seeing movies. He would design, for instance, a ‘Bette Davis’ fur. My father had learned his craft in New York with members of the Jewish community, and had kept some friends that were working on Mayor Street. He would bring me with him. The Cinéma Impérial is just on the other side of that street. So, he would bring me with him to see his Jewish friends, but after that he would bring me to see the first Cinerama movies: ‘Cinerama’ (in 1954- I was 8 years old) and ‘This Is Cinerama’ (1955).
Seeing these movies, at that time, was great fun. Then, my parents decided to send me to a boarding school, where almost all my teachers were priests or Brothers; they had a great quality – they all loved movies. With them came my first Ciné-Club experiences. The first movie I saw was ‘The Little Fugitive’(made in 1953, New York); for me it was a great shock – in the movie the young boy found and sold old items to a scrap yard, and I did exactly the same at the same age. So, movies could also be a real reproduction of Life.
After that I wanted to see more of the auteur movies. And I found them in Montréal, when I could skip my boarding college. Many good theaters existed that would give me the chance to see the movies of Godard, Bergman, Buñuel, Truffaut, and so on. These important movie theaters for me were, first, the Empire on Ogilvy Street, in Park Extension. It opened in 1937. In August 1964 it became a ‘cinéma de répertoire’ and was programmed by Roland Smith for a few years. But the most important cinema for me was L’Élysée (the complete French name was Le Centre d’Art de l’Élysée Inc.). This ‘art theatre’ already had two screens in 1960-1961, which was very rare: Room 1 was called Salle Eisenstein (150 seats) and Room 2 was called Salle Renoir (600 seats).
Another very important repertory theater for me was the Cinéma Verdi on Boulevard Saint-Laurent. It opened in 1912 under the name Canada Moving Picture Theatre, devoted to Vaudeville and Motion Pictures. It changed name in 1957 to become the Cinéma Verdi, under the direction of Bernardo Celci. In December 1966 Roland Smith took over this theater and it became a repertory movie theater. There I would see movies of John Cassavetes, Keaton, Pasolini, and weeks dedicated to political movies. This movie adventure at the Verdi came to an end in April 1973. Already in 1971 Smith had concluded a contract with a very beautiful neighborhood palace, the 1442-seat Outremont, which opened in 1929. Here again we have a very important piece of movie theater history in Montréal, specially dedicated to auteur films. Smith would program this movie theater from 1971 to 1987.
There were many other art film theaters in Montréal and beyond, in Québec City, Sherbrooke, so on, but they generally had a short life span. In Québec, as elsewhere, the arrival of television (1952-1961) caused a great decline in cinema attendance. To maintain the old one-screen theaters the formula of ‘arthouse theaters’ (or Repertory theaters) and also the erotic formula were necessary. But by the end of the seventies they were all closed and then came the Multiplex era. That is another story.
Pierre Pageau