Film plumbs 750 years of Montreal history
MONTREAL— Quebec director François Girard’s best-known film, The Red Violin, told the fictional tale of an instrument and its players by following it through centuries and across continents.
One cheeky reviewer dubbed the 1998 production Five Short Films About a Fiddle. It was a laudatory play on Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, an awardwinning 1993 biopic about the reclusive Canadian pianist.
In that same vein, his latest project, Hochelaga, Land of Souls, which was released in Quebec cinemas this week, might be alternatively titled Four Brief Movies About Montreal.
The film’s conceit is a sinkhole that opens up beneath McGill University’s football stadium, which ends the game and sparks an archeological dig that turns up 750 years of history. Girard tells this history through four short pieces, carefully weaved together with Indigenous — Iroquois and Algonquin — threads.
“It’s about my roots, our roots. I dug a hole and I found multiple inhabitants of the specific lot,” Girard said in an interview from New York. “This is how it became what it became with the multiple stories.”
Digging under the turf of the stadium at the foot of Mont-Royal, the mountain for which the city is named, reveals traces of Lower Canada rebels who fought against colonial British rule in 1837, and of a French trapper felled by an epidemic in 1687 and his Algonquin lover.
All of this on the spot of a massacre in 1267 between warring Indigenous tribes in which just one man survives, a descendant of Baptiste Asigny (played by Algonquin rapper Samian), the modern-day doctoral student who is leading the archeological excavation.
But the unearthing of a small metal cross that turns out to be the one brandished by French explorer Jacques Cartier on his arrival at the Iroquoian village of Hochelaga on Oct. 3, 1535, is the pivotal thread in the film.
This historic encounter, during which Cartier hastily debarks, reads to his awestruck Indigenous hosts from the Bible, then claims the entirety of the land as French territory before making a hasty getaway, is the one that gives the movie its name.
Girard also admits the $15-million film might not have been made if it weren’t for financing he received from the committee organizing the 375th anniversary of Montreal’s 1642 founding.
But he purposely doubled the time period covered in the movie as a not-so-subtle nod to the people who welcomed the Europeans when they got off their boats.
“It is a bit of a denial of anything that happens before,” he said of the city’s anniversary celebration. “My time span, 750 years . . . is a way of saying that there’s a whole half of history, if not more (that is left out).”
Girard collaborated with Quebec anthropologist Serge Bouchard to ensure his historic portrayals were accurate. Mohawk language activist and actor Wahiakeron Gilbert, Algonquin hereditary chief Dominique Rankin and former journalist Marie-Josée Tardif, who is also Algonquin, translated dialogue and ensured an accurate portrayal of Indigenous songs, rituals and dress that appear in the film.
The effort appears to have paid off. When Hochelaga premiered in Montreal last fall, Assembly of First Nations regional chief Ghislain Picard said: “Who would have believed 20 or 30 years ago that we would be able to see a film on the history of our people?”
“For you, it’s a moment of truth,” he told the audience. “But we have known the truth for a long time.”
The film also fulfils a personal goal for Girard, who has followed a violin from 17th-century Europe to 1960s Communist China in The Red Violin; explored 19th-century Japan in Silk and chronicled the exacting standards of a boarding school for young singers in Boychoir, but has never had the chance to depict his hometown on the screen.
He set out to correct that about eight years ago with the broad idea for an “immigration fresco” about Quebec. He whittled the scope down, setting it in Montreal, situating it at the foot of Mont-Royal and eventually digging into the tales behind the historical treasures uncovered by the fictional sink hole.
To hear Girard tell it, the story took on a life of its own, guided only by the historical realities that had to be respected.
“It’s a little bit like growing a plant. The DNA code is in it,” he said. “There’s a DNA code in any idea. We’re the gardeners of that idea and what it becomes is not entirely our free will. An idea, a story, a character has its own will and with that you make them grow.”
It is simply good timing, rather than any intentional act, that the film is being released at a time when political leaders at all levels of government are seeking to reconcile with First Nations for historical wrongs.
“It’s talking about the history of the country, the dispossession of the land by Europeans and the pushing out of First Nations from their land, from our past, from our history books,” Girard said. “All the things that the film talks about are common to any Canadian.” En Scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. Email: awoods@thestar.ca