The Cinema of the Quiet Revolution: Quebec’s Second Wave of Fiction Films and the National Film Board of Canada, 1963-1967

Film historians situate the birth of le cinéma québécois in the late 1950s with the emergence – within the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) – of an Équipe française whose Direct Cinema revolutionized documentary filmmaking. The grand narrative of Quebec national cinema emphasises the emancipating qualities of this cinematographic language and insists that it contributed to a collective prise de parole and Quebec’s ascension to modernity. Film historians mythologize the cinema of the Quiet Revolution (1958-1967) by inscribing the fiction films of the 1960s within the trajectory of Direct Cinema. Borrowing from Jocelyn Létourneau, the present thesis uses the concept of community of communication to investigate the documentary-to-fiction transition that accompanied the creation of the NFB’s Production française in the mid-1960s. The argument advanced here is that Quebec’s francophone filmmakers, between 1963 and 1967, distanced themselves from documentary filmmaking – including Direct Cinema – to explore the dramatic form and feature length format. They formed a tightly-knit community of communication whose actions, written works and films explained, legitimized and promoted the notion that Quebecers needed a commercial feature film industry of their own. The most prominent members of the Production française – Gilles Carle, Gilles Groulx and Arthur Lamothe to name but a few – played a preponderant role in this process. They articulated and disseminated an elaborate narrative which allowed them to consolidate their status as auteurs within a post-Duplessis Quebec. The present thesis reconstructs and analyzes the above filmmakers’ narrative to demythologize – and develop an alternative reading of – the cinema of the Quiet Revolution

Experiments in Cultural Diplomacy: Music as Mediation in Canadian-Brazilian Relations (1940s-1960s)

This thesis traces the origins of Canada’s cultural diplomacy by analyzing the role of music in Canadian-Brazilian relations from the early 1940s to the late 1960s. Brazil was the only country with which Canada had a cultural agreement at the time. Lacking experience in that realm, the Department of External Affairs let state and non-state actors on the ground lead the show. Those individuals (diplomats, artists, broadcasters, and Canadian capitalists, among others) had considerable leeway to put forward their own vision of Canada with the knowledge that national projection and national self-representation were part of the same feedback loop. Because they were conceived with both foreign and domestic audiences in mind, their experiments in musical diplomacy placed Canadians’ simultaneous search for a national and an international identity within a transnational context. Improvised as it was, this musical nation branding exercise was intertwined with a broad range of individual and collective agendas that cut across various combinations of political, business, religious, ethnic, linguistic, and even family ties. Latinity and Catholicism, but also métissage and family, were some of the dominant tropes that official and impromptu ambassadors employed to engage Brazilian publics. This process involved a reckoning with Brazil’s cultural and ‘racial’ difference that used musical genres (for example, ‘serious music’ as opposed to samba and jazz) to foreground ‘whiteness’ as the normative link between Canadians and Brazilians. As such, Canada’s plunge into the realm of musical diplomacy reflected and shaped where ‘white’ Canadians – whether francophones or anglophones – situated themselves vis-à-vis ‘others’ at home and abroad. ‘Race’ and empire, but also religion and gender, informed the musical nation branding efforts of this story’s protagonists. According to them, Brazil’s location on the periphery of the industrialized North made it an ideal place to experiment with the projection of Canada’s image abroad. It was the distant stage upon which internal (identity) politics and aspirations could be played out. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s work on nationalism and Georgina Born’s research on the mediating potential of music, this thesis is based on a broad range of sources (textual, audio, and visual) collected through multisite research: from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasília to Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City, and Halifax

Janus face aspect of all-cis 1,2,3,4,5,6-hexafluorocyclohexane dictates remarkable anion and cation interactions in the gas phase

The authors acknowledge support in the form of NSERC (Canada) Discovery Grants to EF, WSH, and TBM and an EPSRC (UK) responsive mode grant to DO’H and NSK is gratefully acknowledged.Experiments have been carried out in which electrospray ionization has been used to generate ionic complexes of all-cis 1,2,3,4,5,6 hexafluorocyclohexane. These complexes were subsequently mass isolated in a quadrupole ion trap mass spectrometer and then irradiated by the tunable infrared output of a free electron laser in the 800-1600 cm−1 range. From the frequency dependence of the fragmentation of the complexes, vibrational signatures of the complexes were obtained. Computational work carried out in parallel reveals that the complexes formed are very strongly bound and are among the most strongly bound complexes of Na+ and Cl− ever observed with molecular species. The dipole moment calculated for the heaxafluorocyclohexane is very large (~7 D) and it appears that the bonding in each of the complexes has a significant electrostatic contribution.PostprintPeer reviewe

The structures and properties of proton- and alkali-bound cysteine dimers

The proton-, lithium-, and sodium-bound cysteine dimers have been investigated in a joint computational and experimental infrared multiple photon dissociation (IRMPD) study. IRMPD spectra in the 1000–2000 cm−1 region show that protonation is localized on an amine group, and that intermolecular hydrogen bonding occurs between the protonated amine and the carbonyl oxygen of the neutral Cys moiety. Alkali-bound dimers adopt structures reminiscent of those observed for the monomeric Cys·Li+ and Cys·Na+ species. Calculations of the heavier Cys2·M+ (M = K, Rb or Cs) species suggest that these are significantly less strongly bound than the lighter (M = H, Li, or Na) dimers.We gratefully acknowledge high performance computing support from the SHARCNET consortium of Compute Canada. We are also grateful to the Centre Laser Infrarouge dOrsay (CLIO) team and technical support staff for the valuable assistance and hospitality. The authors would like to acknowledge financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada

Chapitre 1. Jazz libre et free jazz

Du 21 au 27 avril 1975, Montréal est le site d’importants débats publics sur les cultures marginales. Cette semaine de la contre-culture rassemble des intervenants venus de partout dans le monde pour participer à des ateliers et assister à des performances de poésie et de musique. Le Jazz libre, un groupe de free jazz qui connaît ses heures de gloire aux côtés de Robert Charlebois, prend part au concert de clôture qui a lieu au Palais du commerce. La revue Mainmise, organe principal des tenan..

Le sahabi de Sonde : évolution d’une source sonore

Né des ateliers de design musical offerts à l’Université McGill par Mario Bertoncini, Sonde s’impose rapidement au Canada et à l’étranger. Partant de jeux exploratoires et d’improvisations méditatives, le groupe utilise des techniques électroacoustiques afin d’explorer les potentialités acoustiques de matériaux divers. Il arrive parfois que ces musiciens s’arrêtent sur une source sonore dont les qualités musicales dépassent toute attente. C’est le cas du sahabi, instrument constitué d’un cadre de métal au travers duquel sont tendues des dizaines de cordes métalliques. Deux exemplaires de cette source sonore existent et les membres du groupe les utilisent fréquemment depuis 1976. Pour ces raisons, le sahabi mérite le statut d’instrument de musique. Mais quels sont les enjeux qui accompagnent ce glissement sémantique ? Le présent article répond à cette question en s’appuyant sur un entretien réalisé par l’auteur avec Charles de Mestral, créateur du sahabi et figure importante de la nouvelle musique au Québec.Evolving out of Mario Bertoncini’s Musical Design workshops at McGill University, Sonde quickly gained attention in Canada and around the world. Starting from exploratory games and meditative improvisations, the group uses electroacoustic techniques to explore the sonic possibilities of various materials. Often, the musicians happen upon a sonic source whose musical qualities surpass all expectations. Such is the case with the sahabi, a metal frame strung with dozens of metal strings. Two of these sound sources were built and have been frequently used by group members since 1976. The sahabi should therefore be recognized as a legitimate musical instrument. But what challenges come with this semantic shift? This article answers that question, drawing on the author’s interview with Charles de Mestral, inventor of the sahabi and an important figure on the Quebec new music scene