Cinema's long association with the city, which involves not only the fact that film has long been a significant form of urban entertainment but also that the city and the forms of social life it engenders have been constant objects of cinematic interest, has produced a kind of dialectical movement between the two. As Clarke suggests,

...the spectacle of the cinema both drew upon and contributed to the increased pace of modern city life, whilst also helping to normalize and cathect the frantic, disadjusted rhythms of the city (...); reflected and helped to mould the novel forms of social relations that developed in the crowded yet anonymous city streets; and both documented and helped to transform the social and physical space that the modern city represented. (Clarke, 1997 : 3)

Central to this process is the creation of cinematic renderings of cities through the selection and combination of images taken of typically urban spaces and recognizable civic landmarks. The editing process simultaneously distorts actual spatial arrangements through selection and creates a coherent spatial map through their combination, producing, in the process, an imaginary representation of city space which can in turn inform and structure day to day spatial practices.

As Laspley has suggested that the idea that "the city is constructed as much by images and representations as by the built environment, demographic shifts, and patterns of capital investments" (Laspley, 1997 : 187) has become a cliché, however this does not mean that the relationship between the two has been fully conceptual elaborated. Comparatively little has been written about the image-city relationship with respect to actual cities. Extant writing on the subject (Clarke, 1997) tend to focus on the aesthetic properties of the cities themselves, giving cinematic representation the role of critical interpretation and ignoring the capacity of film to intersect with the forms of cultural identity and popular memory that are evoked by the cinematic representation of actual cities.

This approach is also warranted by the fact that a wide range of films, and filmic sub-genres, have undertaken the task of trying to capture the feel of the specificity of cities. To name but a few of them; Fellini's Roma (1971), Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), Mondo New York (1987), Altman's Short Cuts (1993), as well as early "city symphonies" and "boosterism" films all focus on cities in their specificity and attempt or purport to capture this specificity on film. Film however, also adds a sense of coherence to the spaces they record, as Braudy points out:

The real arrangement of streets in Hoboken, New Jersey, is less visually powerful than the concentrated focus on Hoboken in Elia Kazan's On the waterfront (1954). But in fact, far from accurately recording the spatial reality of Hoboken, Kazan has made his Hoboken by weaving three city parks into one and even including a chunk of far distant Brooklyn, to create a cinematically real neighborhood to which the actual Hoboken must forever subordinate itself imaginatively, in the same way that every decaying small town now exists primarily as a footnote to Peter Bogdanovitch's The Last Picture Show (Braudy, 1977 : 23).

The cinematic redenying of city space has a number of implications for the social use of those spaces. While the camera can certainly be used to transform the lived experience of cities into an unrecognizably distorted (from the perspective of the day to day spatial practices of their inhabitants) representation produced for the gaze of a mass market audience, the cinematic representations of cities can also be used to evoke shared memories and reinterpret common experiences of specific places, valorize local cultural practices, and link individuals to wider collectivities. They can, in short, be used to mediate between the spatial imaginary of a city's residents and the built environment within which they live out their day to day lives. The focus of the present work is the local use of cinematic cities to create spatialized forms of cultural identity and the use of film to as a means for the collective appropriation of the city in Quebec.

The Cultural value of the city in Quebec

Any examination of the city in Quebec raises a set of important considerations, foremost of which is the fact that prior to the middle of the 20th century the dominant discourses of cultural identity marginalized the experiences of urban Francophones and depicted city life as a source of moral, social and cultural impoverishment. According to what Rioux (1978) refers to as the ideology of conservation, which predominated in Quebec until well into the 20th century, the city was a site of identitary poverty for a number of reasons. Firstly, they tended to be dominated by the culturally foreign English-Canadian financial elites. This was as much the case in Quebec's metropole, Montreal, as in the new cities that resulted from the industrial development of rural Quebec. Montreal was marked, literally and figuratively, by the signs of the domination. Secondly, cultural domination was paralleled by the socio-economic subordination of the urban Francophones who made up the majority of Montreal's working class. For almost two centuries, the city was seen as a place of poverty, disease, and squalor, which the proponents of the ideology of conservation held up as a cautionary example to rural French-Canadians, whom, it was argued, were most at home in the countryside, where organic community would be preserved through a strong link between common language, faith and the agricultural vocation. The fact that as late as the 1950s traditional ideologues proposed a return to the land through the colonization of Quebec's north as a means of curbing the trend towards urbanization demonstrates the extent to which they saw the city as a source of cultural threat.

Rejecting the traditional image of society that the conservative political and social elites had promoted since the late 19th century, the intellectuals and artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s critically challenged French-Canadian ruralism and sought to develop a cultural identity rooted in the urban context in which the majority of Quebec's francophone population lived. Many of the first generation of Quebecois film-makers can certainly be counted among this group. Trough their films they sought to forge a link between cultural identity and the city (Veronneau, 1992). The problem was, however, that the recognition of the city was not simply a part of the process of modernization (even a late one as the discourse of the "quiet revolution" would suggest) as it had been in the rest of North America, but on the contrary, required a simultaneous contestation of traditional constructions of cultural and national identity and a challenge to the cultural domination of Montreal by Quebec's English speaking economic elites.

As the ideology of conservation fell under increasing criticism by proponents of social and cultural modernization during the 50s and 60s, a retreat to the countryside as a strategy for the preservation of cultural specificity ceased to be a realistic option. For one thing, most of Quebec's Francophone population lived in either older cities like Montreal or Quebec or in the industrial towns that had more recently been established between the metropole and the capital during the early part of the twentieth century. Moreover, due to a shortage of arable land, agriculture was not a viable option for the majority of the population, many of whom, in any event, saw the city as an escape from the insularity and restrictiveness of small-town life. The shift from the countryside to the city as an identitary place however was not unproblematic given the persistence of social disparities within the cities which perpetuated the general economic subordination of urban Francophones as well as the fact that, despite being a numerical minority, Quebec's Anglophone elites continued to dominate over urban culture 1. Montreal, and Quebec's cities more generally (although to a lesser extent) clearly embodied cultural disparities on the level of the built environment. If the city, that is to say its distinctive built environments, were to serve as a concrete basis for the articulation of a modern cultural identity it would have to be symbolically reclaimed through cultural practice, either through the re-appropriation of sites dominated by the symbolic weight of the other, the valorization of denigrated common places and cultural forms (i.e. the east end, joual), or the contestations of cultural narratives and popular memories rooted in spatial practices.

The cultural and linguistic appropriation of Montreal has never been accomplished to anyone's satisfaction, due in part to Montreal's pluri-lingual and culturally diverse population. Conflicts over competing strategies of cultural and linguistic appropriation are still at work, and as a result this, the incorporation of Montreal within a culturally coherent Québécois identity remains problematic. This has led to a proliferation of imaginary constructions of the city in a wide range of contexts, among them a nostalgic discourse of Montreal before the 1960s in films like Weintraub's The Rise and Fall English Montreal (1992) and television series like Montréal, ville ouverte (1992) 2, or Paul Tana's La Sarrasine (1992) and Café Italia (1985) about Montreal's Italian community. Built environments are open to multiple and competing appropriations, effected through the process of imagining them as part of a coherent and familiarized total city. Conceptualizing these spaces requires, as Bélanger points out, "a sensitivity to the multiple and plural nature of memory - of different histories and of incompleteness and ambivalence of everyday life and experiences of public space" (2000 : 416). The kinds of imaginary constructions of the city in popular memory, cultural narratives and representations are means of appropriating space in the sense defined above, in other words, of apprehending spaces as significant within socio-cultural and historical narratives of identity, and creating a coherent image of a total city that can be used to re-configure existing socio-cultural and spatial relations.

A complicating factor for strategies of culturally appropriating the city as a physical space is the trend towards homogenization in urban planning strategies which has led to the growth of low density urban sprawl around older downtown city cores or the homogenization of inner city residential and shopping districts through redevelopment projects. In most older metropolitan cities their architectural and spatial distinctiveness is limited to the inner-city, while the expanding peripheries are almost indistinguishable from those of other cities. The result is that there is an increasing disjuncture between the imaginary specificity of cities and the morphological characteristics of their built environments. It is therefore necessary to conceptualize the relationship between these two elements as a preliminary step to examining Quebec's cinematic cities. To this end it is useful to turn to the work of Henri Lefebvre, and in particular his theorization of urban space as a form of spatial production.

Urban Space and the City

In La Revolution urbaine (1970), Lefebvre introduces the notion of social spatializations, which he defines as globalizing strategies for the material, symbolic and cultural production of space. Lefebvre distinguishes between three models of social space that he argues have predominated during different historical period; the rural-agrarian, the industrial and, most recently, the urban. Each has, he argues, superseded one another, and, as a result transformed both physical space and the ways in which it is understood, delimited, and represented. The city has existed in each of these forms of space, but its form and function within the overall system of social spatialization has changed according each form of spatial production. One of the implications of this argument is that, conceptually speaking, the city (or rather city space) is not reducible to urban space because the former, as an actuality, incorporates residual elements of prior spatialization which resist the modes of spatial production proper to the latter. The relationship between the two is fundamentally antagonistic since the production of urban space acts on the already existing heteromorphic space of a city in order to transform it according to its own strategic imperatives.

Through a set of complex technical, socio-political, and economic processes, urban strategies of spatial production transform extensive physical space into a series of discontinuous places linked together through quotidian routines and the various technologies that support urban lifestyles, rather than the forms of spatial continuity that traditionally sustained the coherence and cohesion of the space of the city. Recent developments like gated communities or spatially segregated suburban housing developments, the expansion of low-density urban sprawl around the decaying cores of older cities, and the conversion of inner-city cores into places for spectacular consumption (Bélanger, 2000), have all contributed to a kind of spatial fragmentation. It would be difficult to empirically substantiate the idea that it was once possible to experience the city as a coherent and continuous totality (a total city) by virtue of its spatial morphology. However it is also difficult to deny that developments in urban planning following the second-world war have transformed cities into vast agglomerations of differentiated locations, producing the phenomenon of low density urban sprawl around older city cores, which in turn have placed the imaginary city at a further remove from its spatial morphology.

The persistence of imaginary cities in the face of spatial fragmentation might appear perplexing, a kind of recalcitrant desire for spatial coherence and civic identity, but it can also be read as a kind of organic myth of locality: the city has a symbolic value, much as the country side did in the face of wide-scale industrialization. Where the spread of industrialization led to a concentration of production in the cities and the re-coding of agrarian space as resource for the system of industrial production (i.e. land, raw materials, or labour), the city, and specifically downtown, acquires symbolic value as inner city cores are transformed according to the imperatives of urban space. Civic monuments and up-scale neighborhoods are preserved as elements of civic heritage, while working class residential districts persist as slums, or are transformed into, commercial districts, gentrified neighborhoods, or transit systems and roadways that link the inner city with the peripheral residential suburbs. To offer a cinematic example, the closing sequence of Arcand's Réjeanne Padovanni (1973) depicts the violent conversion of Montreal's lower town residential districts into the autoroute that leads from the south shore suburbs to Montreal's downtown core. In terms of spatial representation, the destruction of residential districts in cites as part of the process of producing urban space is analogous to the destruction of rural communities through industrialization.

The model of urban space, however, differs from the older model of industrial space in a number of key respects. First of all, it does not operate according to the principles of uni-centric concentration in the city which was central to the strategic logic of industrial space, but rather creates multiple differential concentrations in various distinct places. Where the global strategy of concentration associated with industrial space leads to the creation of heterogeneous, continuous city space, the differential strategy proper to urban space produces self-contained nodal places that are linked together through systems of transportation and communications. Because this second strategy is polycentric, the strategic production of urban space is not limited to the confines of the city, but rather extends across the entirety of social space. As a result urban space constitutes a vast tissue, which differs in terms of density. While the territory geographically delimited by the spatial boundaries of a city may be more dense than peripheral zones, both embody the same spatial logic and thus spatial morphology no longer serves to differentiate between the two.

Urban space acquires a degree of imaginary cohesion through the effacement of the extensivity of the spaces that separate different places from one another; the various interstitial zones between a series of places that are linked together through day to day routines, lifestyle, memory, and a range of imaginary constructions that mediate between built environments and spatial practices. As one passes from one place to another in ones daily routine, for example, leaving home in the morning, going to work during the day, to dinner and the movies at night, and back home again at the end of the day, the spaces in between these various location are not experienced as places in their own right, but as distances between the points that make up the daily routine which gives consistency to spatial practice. Experientially, the places are collapsed together to form a spatial continuity.

If space has become fragmented fragmentary as urbanization strategies transform the city into a set of generic discrete places, how is it that we still have a sense of the distinctiveness of particular cities? Certainly the older downtown cores of metropolitan cities like Montreal and Quebec city are spatially distinct from one another in concrete and tangible ways. However it would be a mistake to assume that urbanism leaves this space intact. On the contrary, Lefebvre's argument suggests, the downtown core in integrated within the urban tissue as a discrete place, one that is governed as much, if not more, by the imperative of exchange, consumption and spectacle as it is by the interests of the individuals and communities who live there. As a result of the extension of the logic of urban space within the inner city, the downtown serves a symbolic function rather than embodying an alternate form of spatial practice. Just as the countryside is dominated by the urban imaginary and figures as a natural preserve in the cultural imaginary or as a resource by capital, the inner-city becomes increasingly spectacularized and figural in urban space. As Lefebvre would argue, in theory the city disappears, but the sign of the city and city life multiply, replacing and supplanting the "real" city. It becomes one of many discrete places, distinct from both work and home, which serves a symbolic and festive role in the day to day life of its inhabitants. The city core becomes, in effect, the metonymic signifier for the entire city, offering a coherent, if heterogeneous and multifaceted, image of the character of the city, much as Disneyland serves as a model of America.

The cinematic city

Although Lefebvre was primarily interested in a form of artistic re-appropriation of the city as a corrective to modern alienation, his conceptualization of the relationship between spatial production and the city can serve as a framework for theorizing the relationship between city space and its cinematic representation, as well as the relationship of both to cultural identity. Urban space affords a sense of spatial coherence to the city as a function of the operation of a spatial imaginary. Film, it can be argued works in an analogous manner; it uses a set of images of specific (discrete) places, objects or styles, which, when selected and combined through montage, produce a cinematic recreation of a distinctive space. There is, of course, no necessary relationship between the pro-filmic city and the filmic city it creates or recreates: footage taken of one city can be, and frequently is, used to cinematically represent another. The spatial morphology of specific cities does however place some limits of this practice. For example, while Montreal can, and has, been used as a background for films set in Europe or New York, it would not be a convincing exterior location for a film set in Venice or Bagdad. Various markers, including recognizable monuments, locations, architectural styles, or tourist attractions, can be used to establish that a film is set in a particular city. Even the use of this kind of footage does not imply that images used in the cinematic rendering of a cinematic city are actually images of those cities. Shots of monuments like the Eiffel tower or the World trade center can be edited together with footage of Old Montreal or its downtown without substantially undermining the effectiveness of the cinematic construction of Paris or New York. That said, the relatively arbitrary relationship between cinematic cities and their real life counterparts suggests that the sense of coherence offered by the former has more to do with the editing process and mise en scène than the spatial properties of the latter.

There are two level on which the cinematic city contributes to the construction of an urban imaginary: on a general level it defines the range of lifestyles and day to day practices made available within the city, thus mediating between spatial practice and the built environment, on a more specific level it contributes to the construction of popular memory and the identitary appropriation of spaces as familiar (the creation of espace propre, or "propriate space"). The specific level depends on the more general one, but by virtue of the specificity of the mediations made available by an identitary spatial imaginaire, any kind of general statement about the city and its relation to concrete forms of sociality must be qualified. Moreover, as noted above, the specificity of a city's forms of sociality, cultural context, and built environment set limits on the ways in which it can be imagined.

If the urban city has always been discontinuous, the use of film to provide an imaginary coherence to the experience of urban space rests on film's capacity to create continuity of fragments. No film can fully render a city - rather, as it has been argued, films create the impression of a total city through the selective use of cinematic images of specific locations within the city. The space of the cinematic city is elliptical, it joins locations together which are not actually coextensive but can be experienced as such. The urban experience of the city is also elliptical - and this is what makes it possible to talk about cities as total entities when they are in fact fragmentary complexes. Films create the impression that the cities they depict are coherent and cohesive through the selective use of images of city life and specific locations. The key difference between urban space and cinematic practice lies in the fact that the space of the city contains elements that urban space cannot directly incorporate within its system of social spatialization. These include residual elements of earlier forms of spatialization as well as alternative or emergent forms of spatial production. These elements can in turn be incorporated into a coherent imaginary city through cinematic editing. Although cinema constructs the city in similar manner, the creation of imaginary continuities between the residual elements influences spatial practice, and opens the possibility for alternative spatial practices and lived experiences of the city that do not conform to the globalizing model of urban space. The city, thus constructed, can act as a space for the articulation of collective values, expressions of common experience, and the development of cultural identities.

Quebec's cinematic cities

Two recent films, Charles Binamé's Eldorado (1994) and Robert Lepage's Le confessional (1995) both engage with the contemporary problematics raised by city life for cultural identity and social solidarity. Binamé's focus is downtown Montreal and the kinds of sociality urban life produces, while for Lepage, Quebec city is a locus for the development of popular memory situated in specific places and the ways in which space can be appropriated through film. While the focus of each film differs substantially from the other, they form a kind of complement in terms of their approach to the identitary value of the city. It therefore makes sense to consider the specific ways in which each of these films constructs its respective city in order to flesh out the arguments presented above.

Eldorado revolves around the interactions between six young Montreal francophones. The film plays around a number of central spatial dichotomies: inside-outside, public-private, spectacle-participation, consumption-engagement, all of which are combined in a more general distinction between home and the streets. Throughout the film nightlife offers a kind of false escape from the problems its characters have forming or maintaining authentic personal relationships. For Roxan, a rich girl turned street missionary, this takes the form of a manic zeal to help out the street people that populate downtown (street kids, the homeless and junkies), for Rita, a runaway, petty thief and junky, the pace of street life offers her a way to avoid her grief over the senseless death of her fellow runaway boyfriend, while for Lloyd, a radio DJ, downtown nightlife is a source of entertainment which does little to challenge his deep cynicism.

A notable element of the film is the way in which it blurs the spatial boundaries between the spectacle of downtown streets and the interior spaces of bars and nightclubs, thus evoking the characteristic elements of Montreal's nightlife. The space of nocturnal Montreal is open to competing appropriations; it is a zone of spectacular pleasure for fashionable club goers, it is a place where petty criminals ply their trade (contributing to the edginess of the scene), and a home to street-kids and the homeless. The many scene of street life the film uses to establish context are made up of a rapid, almost delirious inter-cutting of images of these kinds of spatial practices. The combination of these multiple uses produces a kind of phantasmagoric parade of differences, which combine to create a distinctive street scene. As Lloyd describe in one of his radio monologues:

Je vois passer une rousse, une blonde, un noir, un troué, un junky, un tatou, un percé, un manchot, un adolescent avec une jambe de métal, un normal, une lesbienne, - les specimens de 55 peuples de réfugiés venus dans notre ville ce soir pour célébrer avec les égarés qui prennent leur solitude pour la liberté. Baignons-nous dans l'euphorie provisoire du temps que l'on noie sans pitié dans l'alcool, les opiaciers.

These elements are, however, in Lloyd description, elements of the scene, they are part of the spectacle downtown offers to consumer-subjects, thus subsuming alternate spatial practices like residence or the formation of community.

If the streets are depicted as having little to offer in the way of authentic personal relations, the anxious homes of Binamé's young urbanites do not offer a way out of this problem. Loulou and Marc, a young cohabiting couple, confront to a deep ennui that is results from a stability born out of diminished expectations. For Loulou this leads her to anonymous sex (with Lloyd) in the bathroom at the bar where she works as a waitress, an act that eventual leads to a breakup with Marc. The deeply neurotic and socially awkward Henriette tries to resolve her lifestyle problems therapy, but even then her neurotic need bars the possibility of any kind of real resolution as she constantly distorts the interactions she has with the other characters in the film in her conversations with her therapist. The only point in the film where the outside intrudes on the inside occurs when a group of thugs wreck Roxan's apartment because her temporary room-mate Rita has welshed on a debt. A particularly violent intrusion as it disrupts the demarcation line Roxan, has set up between life on the street and home, a line she herself crosses when she take in street-kid Rita. In terms of the thematic of the frustration authentic interpersonal relations that runs through the film, the relationship between Roxan and Rita contrasts two different modes of living city space, one sees home as an escape from the street, for the other this distinction is unavailable. When Rita pawns one of Roxan's prized possessions to pay off her debtors Roxan kicks her back out to the streets, a final rejection of the intrusion of the latter space and the reassertion of the boundary between it and her own personal space.

The recurring thematic that runs through the interactions between the films characters is the difficulties involved with forming authentic relations with others. On a surface level this theme has clear affinities with the analytics of the city that have circulated in Quebec for the better part of the 20th century, according to which the city inevitably breaks the close organic solidarity of the rural French-Canadian family and community. It is therefore tempting to see the lack of reference to the rural as a structuring absence, one that the modern Quebecois has been separated from to the extent that its loss does not even register consciously. This reading however, reproduces a set of identitary dichotomies that reifies Quebecois cultural identity, one that situates it in the primordial and idyllic past. If anything, the film's exclusive focus on the city suggests that it is an intrinsic part of the Quebecois cultural identitaire. If the film provokes an identitary relation to the city as space it is rooted in negativity: common alienation, the insufficiency of social and cultural mores to adequately respond the hindrances to full and authentic communication between individuals. The only instance where these difficulties with mutual recognition are overcome is the relationship between Rita and Lloyd, but it is a reconciliation on the level of the personal, not the public - a corrective to the social dangers inherent in the spectacular space of the city. References to the cultural specificity of Montreal are limited to images, and these are used to provoke recognition, not as markers of cultural identity. Binamé imaginary Montreal localizes the conflicts between urban city life and the vitality of its residents, which the former reduces to random acts of undirected emotion, pettiness, and misguided attempts to form relations with others. If cultural or national identity are not addressed in the film it is because the focus is exclusively on urban québécois, and in a sense the problems raised by urban life are fully a part of an implied cultural identitaire.

By contrast, Lepage's Le confessional draws attention to the historical and symbolic weight carried by identitary space. Set in Quebec city during two different time periods, 1952 (eight years prior to the election of Lesage's liberals which conventionally serves to mark the beginning of the Quiet revolution) and 1989 (nine years after the defeat of the pro-independence movement during Quebec's first referendum on sovereignty association), Robert Lepage's Le confessional sets the identitary and memorial significance of place in tension with the forces of modernization and globalization of culture in the context of the city. As the film begins with a slow pan across the St. Laurence river, a voice-over by Pierre, the film's protagonist states "dans la ville où je suis né, le présent porte le passé comme une enfant sur ses épaules", signaling from the outset the role of place in preserving the continuity between past and present.

Early in the film, Pierre, again in voice over, notes the significance of 1952 on the level of global, provincial and civic events: the introduction of television, the re-election of Maurice Duplessis, and the filming of Hitchcock's I confess. Around these historical events, the drama of Pierre's parents' (Paul-Emile and Françoise) difficulties trying to conceive a child and the illegitimate pregnancy of his maternal aunt Rachel play out. The story that occurs during this temporality resonates with the literature of the period in which it is set: the moral authority of the church and conformity to community values conflict with personal desires, and social hypocrisy masks truth, eventually leading to Rachel's suicide. Yet even this period is marked by an interaction with the more general forces of modernization, epitomized through the intrusion of Hollywood film-making. The narrative of the second time period, begins with Pierre's return to Quebec city from his studies in China to attend his father's funeral. After seeking out his adopted brother Marc, Rachel's illegitimate son, he sets out to discover the identity of the latter's father.

The film establishes a continuity between the two time periods through dialogue, narrative and cinematography. This is most striking in a number of movements between the two temporalities that occur using a continuous tracking shot within a given location that move from actions in one time period to those in the other. Avoiding conventional montage to signal a change in time signals an effort to establish a continuity between Quebec's traditional past and it modern present (or more recent past, the film was released in 1995). References to the social transformations that occurred between these points in time are significantly absent from the film, a fact made more conspicuous by the smooth manner in which the film moves from one time period to another. At the beginning of the film, the camera pans from Pierre and his cousin André in front of the parish church to their parents in rear, counting off the years from 1989 to 1952 on numbered pews, effectively indicating the passage of time. A similar transition occurs in the Lamontagne family home, where the camera moves from the bathroom in which Francoise has had a bloody miscarriage in the bathtub, to Pierre repainting the livingroom a deep red. The net effect of these smooth temporal transitions is that they establish a narrative continuity on the level of the image track over a period that is generally recognized as signifying a social and historical rupture between the present and the past. Like the stains on the livingroom wall left by family photos that Pierre tires in vain to paint over, the unresolved yet repressed elements of Quebec's pre-Quiet revolution past return as insistent stains on the present.

The identitary complementarity of Pierre and Marc (the first embodying the modern cosmopolitanism, the latter a kind of marginalized localism), is manifest in their respective spatial practice. Pierre, the cosmopolitan, returns home from studies in China to take possession of the family home. Marc, on the other hand, is homeless and inhabits the city's queer marginal spaces (street cruising and the sauna) and moves between downtown Quebec and the peripheral town of Charney where his son and ex-girlfriend live. In effect, the city is marked by such marginal spaces, which are effected in identitary narratives, just as Marc is erased from his family history through his father's disavowal and mother's suicide. Pierre's efforts to uncover Marc's paternity lead him into his half-brother's marginal spaces.

The inter-textual reference to Hitchcock's I confess serves to differentiate between the different cinematic images of Quebec city - Lepage's construction of Quebec city during the 1950s undermines the depiction of the city in I confess which emphasizes its traditionalism and the omnipresence of the catholic church. In Lepage's other films, Polygraphe (1996) and NÔ (1998), the fictionalization of reality is part of the narrative, in the former, like Le confessional, with film, and in the latter, theater. This conscious reference to the fictional recreation of the real draws acknowledges the distance between the two and draws attention to the manner of their construction. Footage from the opening sequence of I confess are inserted in various places in the film - including images of old Quebec and church interiors. Absent from the film are the growing social and political tensions that marked the Quebec of the period. Hitchcock however did not set out to make a social documentary about Quebec, but rather to use it as the backdrop for a morality tale that relies on its traditional catholic setting, evoked in the film by the omni-presence of the imposing churches of the old city and the European flavour of its architecture. Hitchcock's depiction of the city emphasizes its exoticness for a non-Quebecois audience rather than its familiarity for Quebecois film-goers. In terms of the cinematic construction of Quebec city, Hitchcock's serves as a backdrop for a moral suspense story set in a traditional catholic milieu, for Lepage, the Quebec of 1952 is the source of the contemporary problematics of cultural and national identity in the present. The first uses images of the city for the purposes of spectacle, the latter for embedding the present in the local social context of the past. At one point Lepage moves from black and white footage in the church from I confess to a (colour) recreation of the scene as it is being filmed. Lepage then cuts the infant Marc's christening elsewhere in the church, whose cries interrupt the shooting the film - effectively contrasting Lepage's lived Quebec city against Hitchcock's spectacular one. It is the intertextual reference to I confess that makes evident the process of identitary appropriation, because it is precisely those locations that figure most prominently in Hitchcock's film that are the focus of Lepage's narrative treatment: the church where Hitchcock shoots while Marc is baptized in an antechamber, the cobble-stone streets of the old town that an adult Marc cruises at night, and Château Frontenac where Pierre works. Undermining the exoticizing gaze of the other cinematically, Lepage reappropriates memorial city space by integrating them within a Québécois identitary narrative.

Lepage's Le confessional differs from Binamé's Eldorado in that it is not specifically about day to day life in Quebec city, but rather the film serves to invest the city within cultural and historical significance. While the cinematic city Binamé constructs elicits the recognition of downtown Montreal, it does not call for a reappropriation of space. The city is taken as a natural fact - it is an environment that is largely antagonistic to authentic intimate relations. Lepage's cinematic construction of Quebec city, on the other hand, invests space with historical depth. The space of the city is marked by the events which leave residual traces in the present. Le confessional both draws attention to the importance of the recognition of these element while simultaneously performing this operation by using the expressive potential of film to draw a connection between the past and the present.

In both films the cinematic city is constructed in terms of lived experience - in Binamé's case, to point to the difficulties that arise from the domination of the imperatives of spectacular pleasure in Montreal's downtown, and for Lepage, the historical depth of the city as a site for identitary construction. The thesis that has been put forward is that there is a growing disjuncture between the representation of the city as a coherent entity, or "total city", and the fragmentary nature of the urban space. While this is perhaps a purely theoretical claim about the nature of the spatial imaginary, as I have argued has important consequence in contexts like contemporary Quebec where the appropriation of the city has been central to cultural identity and political engagement. The cinematic construction of total cities therefore can contributes to the act of cultural appropriation of the city as a social space in Quebec. If, as Bélanger (2000) points out, spectacularized space increasingly contribute to the creation of forms of popular memory, thus incorporating the process of articulating cultural identity through space within the framework of consumer capitalism, the filmic reappropriation of urban space, if imaginary reconstruction of the city against the discontinuity inherent in the production of urban space, contribute to the development alternate forms of spatial practice and the identitary appropriations of space.

Notes

1 This cultural domination was evident in Montreal on a number of levels ranging from the street signs and public monuments that commemorated notable Anglophones, the predominance of English as the language of commerce and public life, and the ostentatious neighborhoods of the Anglophone elites. One of these neighborhoods, Westmount, remains a kind of bastion of pre-francicization Montreal. [retour au texte]

2 In his discussion of Montréal, ville ouverte, Straw draws attention to the imaginary construction of the Montreal of the 1950s. The series, he argues, provides "...a reconstruction of post-war Montreal which links political chaos to rampant criminality and both of these to ethnic diversity has been central to the cultural imaginaries of both Anglophone and Francophone Quebec for several decades. For the first of these, it has served within the elaboration of a lost Montreal as Runyonesque carnival, whose big-city colour and street-corner eccentricity are seen to have faded by the 1960s, victims of the city's francicization and Quebec's ascendant nationalism (Straw, 1992 : 61)". [retour au texte]

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