Synopsis
This short film is a series of vignettes of life in Saint-Henri, a Montreal working-class district, on the first day of school. From dawn to midnight, we take in the neighbourhood’s pulse: a mother fussing over children, a father’s enforced idleness, teenage boys clowning, young lovers dallying - the unposed quality of daily life.
A word from Tënk
From 30 pioneers of Quebec film (who would nearly all go on to form the NFB’s French Program, which was officially created two years later), directed by a mythic figure of Quebec’s literary scene, September Five at Saint-Henri captures a day in the life of this working-class Montréal neighbourhood in the early 1960s, during a period of vibrant self-discovery for a Quebec just barely emerging from its Grande Noirceur. This remarkable film is testament to the disjunctions of that era: that of the working-class voices, language and tone used by the neighbourhood residents against the plummy and decorous accent of narrator Jacques Godbout, or between a hands-off narration bordering on ethnology and the unpretentious welcome offered by the individuals featured in the film, or, further, between the film’s intellectual and condescending commentary and its filmmakers’ genuine interest in discovering and documenting this community, which generates a paradoxical mélange of fascination and discomfort in 21st-century viewers. Lastly, the disconnect between the beauty of this neighbourhood and its residents, and their actions, activities, and inevitable shortcomings (dirt, tight quarters, strict religious beliefs, etc.), all laid out and magnified by the choices and composition of each shot, in peerless black-and-white. All of these elements combined make September Five at Saint-Henri the jewel that it is.
Claire Valade
Critic and programmer
