In this short film, a chair, animated by Evelyn Lambart, refuses to be sat upon, forcing a young man to perform a sort of dance with the chair. The musical accompaniment is by Ravi Shankar and Chatur Lal. This virtuoso film is the result of a collaboration between Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra.
This feature documentary about education explores the mid-century state of learning in the classrooms of North America. New approaches to learning and the emerging technologies that facilitate them are explored, including the new roles of the computer, tape recorder and television. Directed by Quebec cinema giant Claude Jutra (Mon Oncle Antoine), the film was produced with the collaboration of researchers studying all forms of education, from infancy to adulthood.
A candid-camera view of professional wrestling as seen in the Montréal Forum, where some of the biggest bouts are staged, and in back-street wrestling parlors where the warriors practice their art. Nothing escapes the probing camera as well-muscled tyros grapple, punch, squirm, roar and grimace, adding their own variations of showmanship to amuse and excite the crowd.
Claude Jutra's sweeping portrait of village life in 1940s Quebec has been called one of the greatest Canadian films of all time. Recalling a time when the local general store was the crossroads of life, the film illustrates the way a young boy sees the world and those closest to him – first through the eyes of a teenager, and later, as events change him, through the eyes of an adult. In French with English subtitles.
There was a time when the general store was the crossroads of life, a place where a boy could learn all he needed for the way ahead--especially when his uncle was the storekeeper, and also the undertaker, and the nephew often called upon to lend a hand. This film recalls such a store in a village in the asbestos mining area of Quebec in the early 1940s. The film presents a hundred-and-one vignettes of village life--all the bitter-sweet nostalgia with which a man might remember the events that thrust him into manhood. The action takes place on Christmas Eve--the one time of the year when the mine closed its doors, and the store bustled with humanity. For a few hours the villagers could forget their poverty and converge on the store for gossip and revelry. In the midst of it all was Uncle Antoine, customary ebullience and ribald humour whetted by occasional recourse to the gin bottle, and always somewhere in the background, his nephew Jacques taking it all in. But for Jacques this night was to bring sudden initiation into some of the harsher, cruder realities of life, even acquaintance with tragedy and death. Mon oncle Antoine is about a Quebec that makes no headlines but reflects the whole of life, the ebb and flow of hope and despair that might be in anyone's memory.
This short 1969 documentary dedicated "to all victims of intolerance” depicts the dawn of skateboarding in Montreal. A new activity frowned upon by police and adults, skateboarding gave youngsters a thrilling sensation of speed and freedom. This film - the first Canadian documentary ever made about the sport - captures the exuberance of boys and girls having the time of their lives in free-wheeling downhill locomotion.
Prompted by the filmmaker, nine teenagers individually act out their secret dreams and, between times, talk about their world as they see it. Babette conceives of herself as an abbess defending her fortress, a convent; Michelle is transported in a dream of love where all time ceases; Philippe is the revolutionary, defeating all the institutions that plague him, and so on, through all their fantasies. All the actual preoccupations of youth are raised: authority, drugs, social conflict, sex. With English subtitles.