If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt. 1

Let's profane some rules as I invite you to visit the movies I've seen in the theater or movies and TV shows I have watched in the company of other people. Unless mentioned otherwise, keep in mind that in the province of Québec, it's very difficult to attend any projection without the movie being a french dubbed one. I have rewatched several during the recent pandemic and especially following the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (I pretty much shut down in disgust for a while). It's been the occasion to finally hear them in their original versions.

(The song's lyrics)

The music video above was directed by the photographer Anton Corbijn.

That said, here is some introductory terminology which will be useful for that trip we will start shortly after.

This first movie was part of a double feature program at the Ciné-Parc St-Hilaire (in operation since 1972, it's one of the first in the province). My parents probably brought me there in the summer of 1983 because I recall my younger brother was only a baby and we were just about to move to Saint-Hyacinthe. I was just 5 years old so I don't remember this movie in the slightest. It's probably the only Disney animated movie I've ever watched (besides the recent Soul from Pixar).

The second part of that double feature is another Disney project. As it was getting pretty late, with my mother sitting in the back of the car, holding my baby brother, we only watched the opening scene. I haven't watched it since, but with a plot involving a comic book creator made into becoming a CIA agent to help a KGB spy to defect, it's going to be relevant for the rest of this trip.

Nothing to do with the 1975 japanese TV series Seigi no Shinboru Kondoruman.

What is it about the Tokyo and Eiffel towers that attracts MI6 or CIA agents so much ? That is up until Team America blew one of them up. Instead, I was personally fascinated by A View to A Kill (and my brother and I watched the shit out of Octopussy).

Yes, Grace Jones had a lot to do with that fascination.

Speaking of egregious post-dubbing. I have here a little 1982 movie for kids written and directed by Fernando Arrabal. It was filmed in the province of Québec, featuring Monique Mercure (whom we know of from a previous publication on this blog) and the future Lieutenant-Governor for the province Jean-Louis Roux (Québec Liberal Party), following soon after the failed October 1995 referendum on Québec’s accession to sovereignty from Canada. For your information, that Québec Liberal Party had always been in opposition to the independence project, but we'll get back to that subject later. For now, let's discuss about the movie instead.

La Traversée de la Pacific (or The Emperor of Peru) bizarrely predates by a tiny margin a series of movies for kids called Les Contes pour tous. The first in the series was the grandiosely popular La guerre des tuques, directed by André Melançon. In Arrabal's movie, he plays a pirate attacking the cambodian refugees. The monk accompanying them is played by Jean-Pierre Ronfard, whom staged Claude Gauvreau's Les oranges sont vertes back in 1972 at TNM (the company was founded by Jean Gascon and that very same Jean-Louis Roux).

André Melançon is also the big-bearded dude helping Oliverio move that giant penis statue through the streets of Buenos Aires in this:

If you correctly hound after the trail, you can find it for free on youtube.

Without any further snooping around, here's this grand masterpiece from Señor Arrabal. Take it in, no vaseline. And don't ask me how former child actor Mickey Rooney got involved in this.

Autumn 1984. First year of primary school. A friend I've met there invites me to go to the movie theater to watch E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Apparently, I was talking about this movie quite a good deal, so we went there with his younger brother and his mother. This was another double feature and our movie of interest being the main course closed the evening.

Years later, Alain would be a member of our proto-surrealist trio Le Néo-Gravitique, alongside Belinda and myself. I haven't seen him since the summer of 2000 after he fell in love with one of his professor who pushed him towards becoming a folktales raconteur (it was all the craze at the time... cultural revivalism and whatnot... that sucker started working for the Festival interculturel du conte de Montréal thanks to a plug from that professor... very interested in Raôul Duguay, Alain ended up going to the Festival international du conte in Chiny, Belgium to meet his friend Julos Beaucarne... incidentally we saw them live at the Patro Le Prévost with that professor whom had also got us the discounts for the Les oranges sont vertes presentation in 1998, once again at TNM).

And we get to that evening's opener at the cinema, on that autumnal evening in 1984. I think it's hilarious considering how old we were (Alain and I were born 5 days apart in October 1977, our parents had met during prenatal classes). None of us had seen the first movie, Conan the Barbarian, or knew who that character was or what the heck we were watching. Our other friend James would later laugh so hard when he first saw Thoth-Amon walking out with the sword impaling him. Good stuff. Remember, this movie is dubbed in french, I never knew how much of a task it was sometimes to discern what Arnie is saying. Future Republican Governor of California, need I emphasize.

Now let me introduce you to another friend: Francis. He wasn't part of our little crew of Alain, James and myself (and whoever else happened to be with us at various points). Francis was more of a loner, introspective kid. He was interested in wars. Hanging out with him, it was the first time I seeked out any book, attempting to learn more about fascism and Nazis. In our small school library, the only book I found about WW2 was a novelization of events during the North-African campaign of the Afrika Korps (so, not a whole lot of informations about what such an idiotic ideology imagined itself accomplishing).

We also played and discussed a lot about G.I. Joe together. In case you are unaware about exactly what that stuff was all about:

Francis and I had a few G.I. Joe comic books, some Marvel or DC comics as well (and action figurines and vehicules). Francis also very much enjoyed Judge Dredd. All our comic books were translations published by Éditions Héritage (not very legally) and for a very long time I had no idea there was such a divide between Marvel or DC products since there were no distinctions as far as that publisher was concerned. All the packaging for the toys were bilingual (English-French).

At that time, karate or ninja fascination was all over comic books (or within movies) and very much so in Daredevil (with the arrival of a character like Elektra, for instance). In the recent 2024 season of Daredevil: Born Again, our Donald Trump-esque Wilson "Kingpin" Fisk becomes the mayor of New York City and starts imposing his rules too. And I've noticed some particular music being used.

Immediately after, Fisk ends up at the Latvian Cultural Center for some more.

Then there was this song in another Marvel project earlier this year. The song plays during the ending credits of the movie. In this one, our Tulsi Gabbard look-alike, former CIA director Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, unleashes massive scale depression unto New York City following an ill-advised plan to "keep the American people safe". Our ragtag team of hero fuck-ups (including three former KGB-adjacent operatives, more or less) have to step up to save the day by confronting that mental void (personified by run-of-the-mill Bob, ending up recruiting him into the team).

And it was also used in this scene of the comedy The Naked Blade... sorry, The Naked Gun (the new version). In this one, Frank Drebin, Jr. confronts an Elon Musk-esque character bent on resetting the World based on meritocracy where only the fittest shall join him and a select elite to repopulate the Earth once everybody else have killed each other. True to form, such a high level threat will not prevent another Drebin to go on a long random date with a love interest right in the middle of the story.

Shall we listen to the songs ? Pay attention to the lyrics and all that good stuff... Alright.

I'm far from being familiar with that era or to the preceding one when they were Jefferson Starship.

Everybody should at least know this era. September 29, 1968 on The Ed Sullivan Show.

(You can also consult the "official" channel for a more complete story.)

What else was Francis into ? For a bit, we even worked on a comic book of our own based on that TV series.

How about some more cosmic slop before we move on to another of my friends ?

You can find other better version of this on youtube but this one is the full VHS rip with relevant but also hilarious trailers.

How about that Space Traders story ? Let me tell you about James's parents. His father is a Black man from Haïti and he met my friend's mother while her White québécois family lived over there. It was the same for her sister, she also married a Black man and had kids. I never asked James why they decided to move back here, but perhaps with Baby Doc doing his thing... Who knows.

And so, this next friend is also mixed, First Nations descent, but I couldn't tell from which Nation and how many generations removed he would fall under. When Francis's family moved away, he had just introduced us. So, without any further ado, here's Michel Bachand, otherwise known as Kormort (Dead corpse/corps mort, but that's also a local slang for empty beer bottles).

I haven't seen either of them since 1996 and 1998 respectively. It's my first time listening to The Bastards of the North. Although having been surrounded my whole life by people listening exclusively to it, Heavy Metal is truly not my bag. I've heard every type and subgenre but I just can't. Same for that brand of local folklore music. I'll come back to that another time.

Here are some of the movies I've watched with Michel. He recorded the following three movies on VHS tapes from the Grand Débrouillage de Super Écran (I have previously mentioned this event in another post).

Starting with our buddy John Carpenter:

Moving on to this right here:

But more importantly, this Paul Verhoeven classic. As a (although briefly) member of the Bureau de Recherche Surréaliste en Hollande, let's get the superb Maggie Mae Fish to talk about it.

Let's be metal. I don't remember why but it was my idea to go watch the next movie. James, Alain and his brother, myself and my brother, we walked to the movie theater (don't bother asking which one, in a smalltown like here, there's only one... that specific theater is closed now, a newer one having opened at the mall, the way every smalltown ought to be, I guess). A new member had joined our group at that point, plus we shared the same name: Dominic.

Same for Conan the Destroyer, none of us had seen the first one.

I, too, had a Public Enemy white t-shirt at that time but mine was solely the In the Crosshairs logo in yellow, and I always thought it was supposed to be a Black Panther-type revolutionary wearing a beret... Some people actually thought this was a police officer? What? Why? This would mean that some suckers out there are under the impression that the hip-hop group Public Enemy are about snipering out cops one at a time. Only the "other team" has ever had the time, money resource and manpower to sniper out who they have declared to be a public enemy and the full apparatus to justify it and openly putting it into action, bunch of idiots. The surrealist Jacques-Bernard Brunius tells it all in the Prévert brothers L'affaire est dans le sac.

This was our second year during high school, and the one we attended at that time was just a few street corners away from the movie theater. The school took us all to see Back to the Future III (I hadn't seen the second one). By the way, my first two years of high school were in two different locations. The last remaining three years were at the polyvalente. I began that final year but only for a few days, deciding to drop out due to lack of interest. I completed a high school equivalency once I got to Montréal and I have no further certification of any kind proving that I know or can do things for a living.

Yeah, we count the high school years in numbers, going from first to fifth. I still don't care learning what year being a freshman, a sophomore or whatever equates to whenever I hear that type of words in American movies or TV series. So, in "secondaire 3", they took us by bus to watch this movie. I haven't rewatched it thus far and since.

That first year of high school, my parents separated and my father started taking his two boys to the movies. What is it that Metallica sang, "We're off to Never-Neverland" ?

Speaking of the Big C, let's have some late-night talk show (that's where actors plug their movies, you know).

October-December 1963, in Montréal.

In the following movie, you will see future Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Liberal Party of Canada) debate with Pierre Bourgault, a staunch defender of the French language in the province of Québec and a great supporter of the province's independence from the canadian constitution. I met Justin Trudeau before he entered politics. He had become spokesperson for one of the projects at Moisson Montréal where I used to work. Just prior to leaving Montréal for Saint-Hyacinthe, I was living in Justin's electoral district (Papineau).

Another project I was involved in while working at MM was the Loi L-7. In May 2002, as previously mentioned on this blog, I took part in the Forum citoyen (where I met Françoise David, future founder of the political party Québec solidaire) in a roundtable/caucus for the Bill 112 Project (before it transitioned to L-7). The Québec Prime Minister at the time of the passing of that Bill was Bernard Landry (Parti Québécois). In the movie, you can see him in the company of Gilles Groulx (also previously mentioned on this blog) discussing how to use the dynamite.

Click on that link to watch the movie (there are hardcoded english subtitles).

Hook was not the movie we intended to watch that day. My brother and I wanted to see The Last Boy Scout, but the cashier at the movie theater went full on ahead and asked our dad if it was a good idea. I never saw that bloody movie.

It was one of those days, my parents are still together at that point (although arguing on a regular) and out of the blue my father decides to bring me and my brother to the cinema. I saw the promotion in newspapers and read some of the articles. Yes, I read newspaper articles as a kid. Don't get me started on how hard I went when Tim Burton's Batman popped up not too long after this one.

Let's take a short break and watch this cartoon. It was previously featured on this blog in a montage with Parliament's song Flash Light.

All that talking about femmes fatales makes one want to... observe one.

So, that was from the 1963 Strip-tease movie. In that scene, Serge Gainsbourg was at the piano.

Since we last left the Maison Gainsbourg in a previous publication on this blog, it's been going into ever deeper troubles. That said, remember Nico in Signor Fellini's masterpiece.

The black man besides Gainsbourg talking to Nico is Big Joe Turner. With my friend Dominic, we rented a VHS copy of Spike Lee's Malcolm X.

My brother and I have been great fans of his Do the Right Thing. I had recorded it on VHS from Télé-Québec (the only TV channel for serious cinema, where I saw my first Wim Wenders, Catherine Breillat, Jim Jarmusch, Wayne Wang, Bertrand Blier, and Luis Bunuel, among many others).

Finally got to see Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing in their original versions for the first time once the pandemic started. I used to own a cassette tape of this soundtrack (from our local Zellers at the mall). Mr. Big Joe Turner.

With Dominic again, I went to watch that movie when it came out at our local movie theater. Don't forget, this was once again a french dubbed version. Another one I got to see recently in its original version.

I'll jump ahead a few years to go to a movie I invited one of my Moisson Montréal co-worker to watch at the now defunct Cinéma Ex-Centris (it was quite the place). There or Cinéma du Parc were basically the only movie theaters to go watch movies in their original versions.

Ah, the early 2000s. Music was great too. This is from a CD I used to own. The video features Danielle Graham & Chang Chen and is directed by Wong Kar-Wai.

When Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out, a bunch of local contemporary music ensemble started including Tan Dun's music in their programs.

I guess it must have been the same with John Corigliano's music for The Red Violin. In 1998, I was just starting to attend contemporary music concerts, so if there ever was a wave, I missed it.

Such an enjoyable movie, though. If you're unaware, you might be on for quite a journey. It's an international movie directed by the Québécois François Girard. It features Samuel L. Jackson and he said it's his most cherished role he ever got to play.

Watch it for free right there on youtube, and please pay attention to wherever the moon ends up being throughout the course of the story.

Speaking of symbolism, here's the first movie I ever watched with Belinda (it was another VHS rental). Whenever I watch reaction videos on youtube, everytime actors like Alan Rickman or David Thewlis appear on screen, reactors always recognize them from some Harry Potter movie. Well, this was my first time seeing David Thewlis, and he's playing the role of the poet Paul Verlaine (not professor Remus). Also, if you feel like getting weird, you can see both his and Leonardo DiCaprio's penises in this movie. Happy now ? Good. Let's move on.

I've never watched any of the Harry Potter movies. Same for Twilight and so on.

Does he make a convincing Arthur Rimbaud ?

(With music by Karl Jenkins, a former Soft Machine. Alright, mate.)

It was also the first time I saw Romane Bohringer, playing the poetess Mathilde Mauté (Verlaine's wife). The next time I saw Romane was in L'appartement (Télé-Québec again, everybody). It's on this set that Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci met and became a couple.

Just before moving to Montréal in August 1997, this is the first movie Belinda and me watched at the cinema. The last one I ever saw inside that Saint-Hyacinthe movie theater. I've never set foot in the new one at the mall.

Keep in mind, this was also dubbed in french. Chris Tucker dubbed in french. Can you even fathom that with any modicum of honesty ?

I like how JoBlo just says Gaumont is some studio in France. It's where Musidora and Fantômas were born on screen, my dude. This studio predates Hollywood.

Let's talk about that chase scene. The actress here is Marie Guillard.

Marie Guillard was married to Nicola Sirkis, the singer of Indochine. If you want to recall the video about Who Framed Roger Rabbit and what was said about John Lennon, this song is about wanting to meet JD Salinger. I quite liked it at the time and think it still slaps.

Indochine was probably much bigger in Europe than over here. This was their first big hit, I believe. The music video is directed by Serge Gainsbourg. Ready to get weird again ?

With a title like this, you know I had to click on the video. Indochine's latest, from this May. According to Wikipedia, the song is about Nicola's past relationships (because I was just mentioning that). Shot in Mexico, the two dancers fell in love on the set. Wait until the end of the song and watch her lick the sweat off his neck. Amazing.

(You can activate the english subtitles for the song's lyrics)

Back to that car chase, JoBlo highlights a lot of the music but never says anything about raï music. Most likely, he doesn't know anything about it.‎

(notice how that Sting music excerpt had to be digitally modified, likely due to another youtube copyright claim)

Watching reaction videos of The Fifth Element, nobody has any clue about who is Mathieu Kassovitz. Especially American reactors. If they've ever seen a French movie prior to this one (and many express how bizarre they felt watching The Fifth Element, as if their brains can't process anything outside of familiar patterns of movie editing and so on), that movie was Jeunet's Amélie (2001) most of the time and few remember or notice that her love interest is played by Mathieu Kassovitz.

Not knowing who Mathieu Kassovitz is... hateful, perhaps ? Shit, for his movie classic, he gave himself the role of the skinhead (despite being Jewish).

That piano version at the end is quite haunting. Famously the song playing at the end of Fight Club. All my skater buddies during high school were into The Pixies. Yep, I've always swam through many crews at the same time.

At that point in time, Tricky was no longer a member of Massive Attack. This video was directed by Jonathan Glazer and the singer on that song was the great Terry Callier

So, here's a little movie Jonathan Glazer recently released.

Some of the movies I remember going to watch with Belinda were The Blair Witch Project, the second movie in the Lord of the Rings series (we hadn't even seen the first one but she heard it was good, so...), and the last movie we've ever been to together (in its original undubbed version at Cinéma du Parc with a bunch of the friends who were with us in Paris some months prior) was this one:

Just before that, we went to watch the 2006 sequel to Luis Bunuel's Belle de jour by Manoel de Oliveira. Belle toujours is set 38 years later. Catherine Deneuve was not interested in taking back her role as Séverine so it was given to Bulle Ogier. Michel Piccoli was once again Henri Husson. The characters meet again by chance and a reunion dinner date is organized.

To recap: Husson had caught Séverine while visiting the brothel where she was working, and after the tragic misfortune to Séverine's husband Pierre by the hands of a jealous client, as a friend of Pierre, did Husson explained to him the source of such a sudden attack ? What will this dinner reveal ? Then appears that mystery box again, that the Asian client showed to Séverine all those years ago. Enjoy it in its original french with english subtitles.

Now let's warp and distort time even more further. This is directed by the photographer Stéphane Sednaoui. They did a bunch of other videos together.

Björk got him to direct her first concert film (Vessel) after she saw his work for Give it Away.

And Sednaoui did this short film based on Lou Reed's song.

Photographers and their models...

Once I was at Michel's place and another friend of his was there with us. Very much into heavy metal as well, he was a gifted guitarist. While discussing, this guy mentioned having heard of a very peculiar and obscure band called The Velvet Underground. Michel and myself looked at each other and started to laugh. The music that was playing during our discussion was my cassette of Songs for Drella (from which the song Smalltown is the opening track... another Zellers retail bins find).

Poor guy, Michel even had this CD:

Of all the students at our school, I can tell you that plenty saw Oliver Stone's movie about The Doors, and the VU's song Heroin was also included on the original movie soundtrack (everybody had a copy of that, too). Right at the end of that clip, we have the actress Christina Fulton as Nico. Probably the only other movie I've ever watched with my mother (she had that classic The Doors first album on vinyl).

And didn't us perceptive teens also watched the shit out of his Natural Born Killers ? We would get high and spend hours analysing and discussing it.

I mean, come on...

After Belinda and I left this smalltown, we are now in June 1998 around the corner of Coloniale and Roy at the open air projection on a wall (named the Fellini Screen -- Écran Fellini) of the PBS American Masters documentary Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart. It was part of a documentary festival called Magnifico and that specific event was free.

Another fun cinematic music video, in the same so-called "trip-hop" genre as Tricky, sampling that same good old song.

Due to what the lyrics of this song are about and the cross-gender of the characters happening throughout this music video, I invite you to do some research on what a glory box (or hope chest) is and ponder on the whole situation.

Is it necessary to introduce this man anymore ?

For many years, he was also Chef.

We are getting close to the end of this publication, but I want to include most of the movies I went to watch with Belinda when I joined her in Paris 20 years ago, from mid-October until mid-November 2005.

We also saw Le fils.

Many movie theaters in Paris launch their private film festivals around film directors during which they will project one movie each day until they projected their entire filmography. We saw a festival on Guy Debord (and I believe we watched Hurlements en faveur de Sade if my memory is correct), and there were others around Philippe Garrell and the Dardenne brothers.

Not part of any festival, Philippe Garrell had a brand new movie hitting the screens so we saw that one, too:

Let's take this occasion to watch this short one named after the parisian street where André Breton lived.

We saw J'entends plus la guitare (I no longer hear the guitar), a movie inspired by his relationship with Nico.

And of course, we saw the new Bertrand Blier on opening night. Notice that during the shooting for this movie, Monica was pregnant with Deva.

Currently, the big discussion is around Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie based on Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland.

I rarely do this but I dug up a CAMrip in order to be able to follow the conversation. The movie is playing right now at our movie theater inside Galeries Saint-Hyacinthe. I'm basically broke once again but even if I had the money for it, just like I've already told too many times dubbed movies are too disappointing. I don't know where that CAMrip originates from but it has arabic subtitles (they didn't stupidly dubbed it). In case you don't believe me, this is a screenshot I took right at the end of the film, and you can see a guy standing up to leave in the bottom left. Yes, CAMrip are people attending movie projections and recording them on their iPhone or whatever, later posting the result on the internet. The sound and images were not too bad but I can't wait to watch it from a proper webstream.

I'm turning 48 yo next week, and normally many things just happen in October all over the planet. Will I see my family this weekend, perhaps during the No Kings protest on saturday ? We saw in this publication a little bit of what happened in Montréal back in October 1963, but let's now take a look at what took place in Pasadena in October 1963.

In case you don't know, that conversation at the very end of the documentary between Duchamp and another old man, that other old man is Frank Zappa's hero.

The following film was made by Le Corbusier for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair set to Edgard Varèse's composition Poème électronique.

In January 2019, the author Lili Anolik published a book ("parts biography and detective story") about Eve Babitz, and I just want to show the cover for the U.K. edition first and lastly the cover for the American edition. These were published at the same time, if you didn't understood. Amazing. Just amazing...

We'll come back later for that One Battle After Another discussion. Let's just say I didn't saw the movie the way F.D Signifier did and let's leave it at that for now.

****

Let's end this on that new Stereolab album.

J'appartiens à la terre (I belong to Earth)

Je dis non à la guerre (I say no to war)

Subtle lenses

Supple senses

Soften, dissolve into longing

J'appartiens à la terre (I belong to Earth)

N'en suis propriétaire (I'm not its owner)

Permanent revolution of which implications

Are yet beyond our grasp, edge of the beginning

Untraveled universe, quantum untangling

Full of revelations supremely conceiving

In presence, embodied

Comprehend you are it

It is because I am you, it's because you are me

Eternally entwined, mirage of separateness

Meeting with a stranger, a lost part of myself

It's because I am you, it's because you are me

Two halves of one union compound

This is wild.

I just took a Google Maps view of the spot where that Lou Reed documentary open air projection took place, and it's fascinating to see the difference that occured in time by just moving ahead a few "steps".

This is the same street corner of Roy and Coloniale in each pictures. Here's what Google Maps revealed:

At one point, there was some urban renewal done by adding some green spots (I don't know how to call these things) and turning the street pedestrian. And look at that artwork on the buildings. Everything remains the same in Saint-Hyacinthe, unless buildings burn down. Which happens quite often if you ask, then ugly silver-shining "deluxe" new buildings are built in their places.

Just another one of those Marvel-ous project we'll talk about again some other time: Hey, Lou-ki !! We have to go now.

Addendum on October 24:

I watched The Fox and the Hound and guess what: