Untraceable for a long time, the first images which were captured with sound in Quebec were finally able to be restored. This is a brief speech by Prime Minister Louis-Alexandre Taschereau delivered in the winter of 1929 on Parliament Hill. This valuable document can now be viewed free of charge on the Internet.
We can see the arrival by cart of the lieutenant-governor of the time, Narcisse Pérodeau, for the opening of the parliamentary session, on January 8, 1929. Then, Prime Minister Taschereau delivered a speech outside in English intended for Americans to ask them to treat French Canadians expatriates in the United States with respect.
This film, lasting just over two minutes, was produced by the Hollywood studios Fox Movietone, which presented to the American public during the beginnings of talking cinema various news capsules filmed around the world.
Now accessible in full on the Zoom Out platform, this archive piece has been digitized under the direction of film historian Louis Pelletier.
“Thanks to newspaper advertisements of the time, I determined a long time ago that it was the first talking film shot in Quebec. Excerpts from Taschereau’s speech had already been used in two documentaries, but without the sound. For several years, we did not know if there were still copies of these images with the original sound,” relates Mr. Pelletier, who teaches at the University of Montreal.
About fifteen years ago, a New York company claimed to have in its possession the famous images accompanied by sound. But given the enormous sum requested, $6,000, the University of Montreal preferred to pass. It was not until 2021 that Louis Pelletier heard again about the first talking film filmed in Quebec. One of his good acquaintances, the specialist in cinema projections Martin Châteauvert, discovered it by chance in a batch of 35 mm films which he had acquired.
“It’s always surprising to find a copy of a film that you’ve been looking for for a long time. There are so many films that we have lost track of, that we would like to see again, but that are lost forever, because there are no more archives,” explains Louis Pelletier.
A little history
The first film without sound shot in Quebec was returned in the 1990s. Directed in 1898 by Gabriel Veyre, operator-director of the Lumière brothers, the short film Indian dance was filmed in Kahnawake and shows Mohawks dancing around a teepee.
In the years that followed, silent cinema was very popular in Quebec, to the great despair of the clergy. The release in 1927 of The Jazz Singer, one of the first sound films, would precipitate its decline. From there, everything accelerated quickly. As early as 1928, the Montreal Palace offered exclusively sound programming. It was in this context that the following year, two Fox Movietone employees arrived in Quebec to film a speech by Louis-Alexandre Taschereau.
It is somewhat ironic that the former Liberal premier, who led the province from 1920 to 1936, is the subject of the first talking film filmed in Quebec. Indeed, his government was particularly restrictive with regard to the cinema industry.
“Under the influence of the clergy, Quebec was then one of the places in the world which exercised the most significant censorship on cinema. So much so that Hollywood was inspired by the code in force in Quebec when adopting its own internal censorship rules in the 1930s. The idea was that if it was broadcast in Quebec, it would be broadcast n “no matter where in the world,” Louis Pelletier recalls with humor.