This program, produced as part of the Cadavre exquis project, features five films from the Université de Montréal's 16mm film collection, recently digitized by the Laboratoire CinéMédias. Also included is an experimental film, created from images and sounds taken from six films in the collection, directed by Michaela Grill and Roger Tellier-Craig.

The five films in this program, devoted to the art of scientific cinema, are diverse in nature: a computer-animated film by the team at the Centre de calcul de l'Université de Montréal (Jekyllum), an exploration of the chemical properties of cyclohexane (La stéréochimie dynamique), a microcinematographic study of the formation of the LE cell (Formation de la cellule LE), a subjective-view experiment on impulse phobia, a modality of obsessive-compulsive disorder (Phobie d’impulsion), or a 1953 color work by Père Venance, a pioneer of scientific cinema in Quebec, inviting us to discover “the sources of life” (Aux sources de la vie). What all these works have in common is that they were produced by a research department, a laboratory or a pharmaceutical company, in one case self-produced, with the goal of educating, disseminating scientific knowledge, or promoting new techniques, discoveries, or innovative technologies. These educational, “flatly” utilitarian works – seemingly outdated, outmoded, perhaps scientifically obsolete – tell another story of the moving image and visual culture, parallel, marginal, underestimated. Yet they represent millions of kilometers of film printed over time, neglected by most of the institutions responsible for preserving the “memory of cinema”, relegated to collectors' shelves, in the recesses of archives that have inherited them without always quite knowing what to do with them (not to mention everything that has been trimmed, destroyed, burned). This cinema, unclassifiable and astonishing, has nonetheless been the object of a particular devotion on the part of artists (think of the Surrealists' love of Painlevé's cinema, the fabulous found footage films of Bruce Conner, Abigail Child, Gustav Deutsch, Bill Morrison), passionate researchers-collectors (think of the work of Rick Prelinger, Skip Elsheimer, Dan Streible), and, for several years now, has given rise to a real craze and renewed attention on the part of academic researchers, historians of science and education, museum institutions and others.

These films share also the fact that they are part of the Université de Montréal's collection of over 1,200 16mm films, still accessible today at the Centre de conservation Lionel-Groulx des Bibliothèques de lettres et sciences humaines and at the Direction des archives et de la gestion des informations (DAGI). It was with the aim of enhancing the value of this collection, giving it greater visibility among the community of researchers, the curious and cinephiles, but also to see how it could be activated by filmmakers, musicians, writers, etc., that the electronic magazine Hors champ decided to launch the project Cadavre exquis : ouvroir de cinéma potentiel, in the summer of 2021.

In collaboration with the CinEXmédia partnership and the Laboratoire CinéMédias at the Université de Montr&e

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