Write now: Cruising down Montreal's Main
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema Professor and Concordia Research Chair in Documentary Film and in Sexual Representation Tom Waugh has written a book on the 1974 film Montreal Main, about a friendship between a 25 year-old bohemian photographer and a 12-year-old suburban boy. The book, co-authored with Jason Garrison, is part of a 15 volume series on queer film classics Waugh co-edited with MHSC colleague Matthew Hays, published by Arsenal Pulp Press (see Journal, March 18, 2010).
Below, an excerpt from the book quoting a review by La Presse’s then film critic Luc Perrault followed by Waugh’s reflections on the role of St. Laurent Blvd. in the film:
“The Main” is this street, St. Laurent Street [sic], which cuts Montreal in two, this street of a thousand contrasts, cosmopolitan, with its little shops, its “clochards [tramps],” its dubious cabarets, in short this street where everything plays out in a kind of chiaroscuro, where good and evil find themselves tightly bound and confused so well that it is impossible to trace a precise border on the level of people’s behavior between what is acceptable in the eyes of the upholders of traditional morality and what can seem to deviate from the habitual norms of a society like ours. ...It was time one stopped identifying Montreal with its skyscrapers and showed its alleys as they are, not as film sets but as lived spaces.
Perrault
The film is a celebration of the city that we know and love — with its diverse cultures, lifestyles, and sexual geographies of the early ‘70s. This is the Main before it became gentrified. In fact all of those places [depicted] on the lower Main are now being demolished. There was so much life on these streets, both the upper and lower Main, not to mention the Plateau and the “Mountain” — and even Alexis Nihon Plaza — and (director Frank) Vitale really captured that. People who lived here understood. American reviewers missed the point. They saw the locations as a decrepit slum, since their frame of reference was Expo 67 — glass towers and the underground city. Perrault has it right when he talks about lived spaces.
Waugh