Expo 67 and Its World: Staging the Nation in the Crucible of Globalization 9780228013310

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Expo 67 and Its World

Expo 67 and Its World Staging the Nation in the Crucible of Globalization

Edited by Craig Moyes and Steven Palmer

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 ISBN 978-0-2280-1099-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1100-2 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-1331-0 (ePDF) Legal deposit second quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Expo 67 and its world : staging the nation in the crucible of globalization / edited by Craig Moyes and Steven Palmer. Names: Moyes, Craig, editor. | Palmer, Steven Paul, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210390549 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210390743 | ISBN 9780228010999 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228011002 (paper) | ISBN 9780228013310 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Expo (International Exhibitions Bureau) (1967 : Montréal, Québec) | LCSH: Exhibitions—Social aspects—Québec (Province)—Montréal. | LCSH: Globalization—Québec (Province)—Montréal. Classification: LCC T752 1967.B1 E97 2022 | DDC 907.4714/28—dc23 This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Minion 11/14.5

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Staging the Nation in the Crucible of Globalization 3 Craig Moyes and Steven Palmer 1 Expo 67 and Its (Laurentian) World 33

Craig Moyes 2 Two Universal Endings: Architecture and Cinema at the

New York and Montreal World’s Fairs 76 Heesok Chang 3 “For We Have Waited a Hundred Thousand Years”:

The Indians of Canada Pavilion and Indigenous Curatorial Practices 115 Linda Grussani and Ruth B. Phillips 4 Our Two Masks: Canadian Colonial Humanism and

Indigenous Representation at Montreal’s World Exhibition 150 Romney Copeman 5 The First Postcolonial World Exhibition: Revolutionary Cuba

and the Black Atlantic at Expo 67 178 Steven Palmer 6 Innovation and the Prospect of the Post-national in the

Architecture of Expo 67 213 Peter Scriver

7 Moving Image: Commissioned Quebec Cinema “à l’heure

de l’Expo” 237 Caroline Martel 8 Here, There, and Everywhere: Youth Revolt in Quebec

and around the World 270 Jean-Philippe Warren 9 Glass/Screen, or Dialectics at a (Momentary) Standstill:

Marcelle Ferron’s Windows at the International Trade Centre/Expo Club 298 Bruno Victor Andrus and Craig Moyes 10 Staging Modern Medicine in Montreal: Anatomy of an

Avant-Garde Pavilion 339 Steven Palmer 11 The New Brutalism and Design beyond Understanding

at Expo 67 368 Joy Knoblauch 12 Secret Agents at Expo: The Case of Kommissar X 383

Will Straw 13 Earth, River, (Is)Land: The Foundations and

Re-foundations of Expo 67 396 Bill Marshall Epilogue: “A Legend for Generations to Come”: Expo 67 in the Historical Memory of Contemporary Québécois 413 Jocelyn Létourneau Appendix: Notes on Expo 67 Visitor Data 425 Tables and Figures 429 Contributors 435 Index 437

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Acknowledgments

“The idea is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or more consciousnesses.”1 Although Mikhail Bakhtin is here speaking of the novel, the same of course holds true for the “live event” of Expo itself, and even more for the rich cinematic, artistic, architectural, literary, and historical legacy that has developed in its aftermath. Expo 67 and Its World is conceived in that spirit. If its ideas have life, it is chiefly because they are explored in dialogue with other ideas, articulated by different voices, and considered in the light of new or neglected evidence made available for scholarly engagement thanks both to the professional work of conservation and retrieval by its custodians, and to the many academic and non-academic institutions that continue to support and foster research – and dialogue! – within the humanities. The authors would thus like to thank for their financial and institutional support, in no particular order: the Office of Research and Innovation Services and the Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Windsor; the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London; the Institute of Modern Languages Research (imlr) at the University of London; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; l’Association internationale des études québécoises; la Délégation générale du Québec à Londres; and the Canada-UK Foundation. These institutions made possible our international and interdisciplinary conference of 2017 (“Staging Canada at Expo 67,” held over four days and multiple locations in London, England), where our dialogue on Expo 67 first began. Among the scholars who presented at that conference, we would like to acknowledge the generous contributions of Monika Kin Gagnon, Johanne Sloan, Kirsten Ostherr, Janine Marchessault, Michael Darroch, Yuval Sagiv, Denis Chouinard, Guillaume Lafleur, Scott Birdwise, and John Gold. Extraordinarily efficient administrative support was provided by Dot Pearce at King’s and by Cathy Collins at the imlr. We were also privileged in London to hear from key participants in the Montreal World Exhibition: Yves Laferrière and Monique Simard, whose work

at the Youth Pavilion began long and distinguished careers as producers of Quebec culture; Robert Cordier, who produced and directed Miracles in Modern Medicine at the Man and His Health Pavilion’s Meditheatre; and Jacques Godbout, who was part of the design team of the Man in the Community Pavilion (known in French as L’Homme et la cité) and who directed two feature films, yul 871 and Kid Sentiment, that are meditations on Montreal and being young in the mid-1960s, both of which touch on Expo in different ways. Our thinking about Expo 67 was further aided by a number of experimental restagings and special screenings of films related to the event by contemporary artists, musicians, and filmmakers: Ian Helliwell, Guylaine Maroist, Ron Leary, Jessica Pruneau and Martin Aubin, Gilda Stillbäck and Sandra Abouav, Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze. In a similar vein, we would like to thank the Cinémathèque québecoise, the British Film Institute (bfi South Bank), and the Anthology Film Archives in New York City for collaborating with us on the curation and sponsorship of two fiftieth-anniversary Expo 67 film festivals. We were inspired by the willingness of all the authors in this volume to go above and beyond reasonable expectations during the manuscript’s development. They were invariably happy to explore new evidence and themes, and to develop fresh lines of analysis that came to light, often very late in the game. The final work is much more dialogical, lively, and coherent because of their commitment. We are especially grateful to Heesok Chang for providing timely and insightful critical readings of different parts of the manuscript, especially those penned by the editors, and for reframing his own chapter to draw out and build on shared themes and complementary findings across the entire collection. Among the many expert keepers of the Expo 67 archives, we would like to thank Paul Gordon and Lynn Lafontaine at Library and Archives Canada for their assistance with photographic and film records, as well as Joséphine Ndour at the Archives de la Ville de Montréal, Shira Atkinson at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Edwin Bermudez at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Liliam Montero at Hydro-Québec, and the many, many people working behind the scenes at all those institutions. The King’s College Modern Languages Research Fund generously made available additional funds for the rights to photographs and colour reproductions. Thanks to Luc Desilets for the rights to the cover image and the two remarkable pictures that open our collection, three of the many his father, the talented La Presse photographer Antoine Desilets, took during the six months of Expo. Also, a special thank you to Ronald Labelle, who kindly gave us permission to reprint his original cover photo for Terre des bums.

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Acknowledgments

Shaymaa Zantout provided valuable research assistance in assembling and reassembling an evolving manuscript with great patience and precision. Nina Caplan brought to the task her eagle-eyed proofreading skills and elegant stylistic commentary. This volume would not be in the shape it is without the fine work of McGill-Queen’s University Press, from its anonymous readers to its production staff. Deep thanks are due to its editor in chief, Jonathan Crago, whose initial enthusiasm for the project never waned, and who pushed us at every stage to make it better. Finally, a heartfelt acknowledgment of the contribution made by our excellent friend Johnny Morris (1959–2020), who added to the London conference with stylish artwork that redeployed Expo images and motifs on our posters and notebooks in provocative ways. We are immensely saddened that neither he, nor Yves Laferrière (1943–2020), nor Robert Cordier (1933–2020) is with us to see the final volume. Very much at home with the spirit of the project – and indeed of Expo 67 itself – each was characterized by humane generosity, intellectual curiosity, and general joie de vivre. They will be sorely missed by everyone who knew them.

note 1 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 88.

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Expo 67 and Its World

I.1 Indians of Canada Pavilion behind flags of the participating nations at Expo 67.

Introduction: Staging the Nation in the Crucible of Globalization

craig moyes and steven palmer

The first “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” was held in London in 1851. It gave voice to a particularly Victorian faith in human progress based on the allied forces of national genius, technological advance, and world trade. Universal exhibitions over the following century continued in this vein, with an assumption that their basic task was to offer a forum for representing national cultures and the development of their material achievements. Expo 67 ostensibly fit squarely within this tradition. Celebrating one hundred years of Canada as an independent federal state,1 its initial designs attempted to mirror the Confederation myth of a new country born from “two founding nations,”2 eager to parade its natural riches and human potential before the world. As it transpired, a very different kind of event took shape in Montreal over the six middle months of 1967.3 Canada had lost its original bid to host a Category 1 world exhibition in Montreal to the Soviet Union, whose 1967 Moscow fair was meant to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, but the Soviets cancelled in 1962 and the Canadians successfully re-tendered to the Bureau of International Exhibitions (bie).4 The task of making the fair despite the late start fell to the Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition, formally answerable to Ottawa but also bound to respect provincial (Quebec) and municipal (Montreal) standards of legitimacy; the three jurisdictions had a budgetary stake of 50, 37.5, and 12.5 per cent respectively. Although the federal government

agreed to foot half the bill, its political support would be erratic and lukewarm. The real impetus for the project came from francophone, Quebec-based politicians, and especially from the irrepressible mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, whose early political allegiance to the ideological school of Lionel Groulx had evolved into a close involvement with moderate but trenchant Quebec nationalist politics. As cost estimates rose precipitously, the fair’s fortunes came to depend largely on Drapeau’s political energy and artistry. He overrode naysayers at every level while whipping up an unprecedented enthusiasm for the undertaking in a country – and still more a province – alien to the kind of cosmopolitan self-assuredness and grandstanding that a successful world’s fair demanded.5 To almost everyone’s astonishment Expo’s stock soon rose precipitously as well. Under the overarching theme “Man and His World/Terre des hommes,” its gates opened in late April 1967 to immediate popular and critical acclaim that had been unimaginable to all but a very few. By the time it closed in late October, Expo 67 was already being hailed as one of the most successful world exhibitions of all time (“that unsurpassed, quintessential, classic World’s Fair,” in the eyes of a young Umberto Eco).6 Its 52 million visitors set an attendance record, and its enthusiastic reception by the national and international media, buttressed by the appreciation of leading cultural critics, elevated it high above the earlier 1960s exhibitions in Seattle and New York, which had been excoriated as overly commercial and ultimately parochial. In Montreal, by contrast, a daily parade of monarchs, political leaders, renowned artists, eminent intellectuals, and famous personalities invested the affair with cultural majesty and global reach.7 Expo 67 was moreover embraced by critics and scholars of visual media and architecture, then and afterwards, as both excitingly modern and resolutely forward-thinking. Its singular achievement lay in making coherent a late humanist notion of world civilization through diverse experiences of immersive spectatorship in an environment that was both contemporary and futuristic, with film, architecture, electronic media, design, and on-site motility seeming continually to dissolve into one another. As such, it has been described as a “multi-sensory total-environment poem” in which communication was foregrounded to the point where it became the “message” of the entire event, and indeed prophesied our current globally connected world of screens and digital media.8 It could thus be considered a “transitional” world’s fair: as the event that saw out the old regime of nations, nationalisms, and internationalism and ushered in the new regime of offshore capitalism, multimedia networks, and the global commodification of culture.9 And yet at the same time, it managed to accommodate, negotiate, and even celebrate more classical images of the

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nation that might easily have proven explosive in the febrile climate of the 1960s: from the representational jousting of the former colonial Great Powers, France and Great Britain, quietly reiterating their historic claims on North America, to the US and the Soviet Union continuing, on “neutral” ground, their Cold War standoff; from the barely containable tensions in the Middle East (the Six-Day War broke out in June) to the global rise of “Third World” consciousness (the first meeting of the G77 would be held in Algiers in October); and finally, closer to home, from increasingly vocal Québécois nationalism to the burgeoning political activism of Canadian Indigenous peoples. The media-savvy (and sometimes media-saturated) one-world face of what some critics have dubbed the first “McLuhanesque” world’s fair has so far provided the focus for the majority of scholarship on Expo 67. The principal avenue of approach for the contributors to Expo 67 and Its World, however, is the self-conscious (and sometimes unconscious) staging of nations and the national within the fair’s explicitly “universal”10 and incipiently global context. For it is precisely at the intersection of these three vectors – the national, the global, and the spectacular – that the interest lies. By concentrating on the tensions between forms of collective imagining staged at Expo – whether linguistic, racial, civic, provincial, national, international, or tiersmondiste – this collection explores the exhibition’s role as the sometimes canny, sometimes unwitting aesthetic mediator between, on the one hand, the overlapping but far from congruent spaces of Montreal, Quebec, and Canada, and on the other, the larger world riven by the Cold War, recast by decolonization, progressively beholden to new forms of late capitalism, and yet nonetheless able to sustain and even promote a humanist ideal of global community: Terre des hommes. Some may be surprised to learn that the term globalization is only a few decades old. It acquired something approximating its current sense in rare, scattered articles around the middle of the century (1944, 1951, 1965, 1968), yet remained an unusual and occasional usage until the 1990s, when it suddenly became a central (and seemingly self-evident) concept across a range of disciplines from economics through political science to literary and cultural studies and beyond.11 Indeed, the very wealth and diversity of globalization studies today makes the concept itself a thorny one to define precisely or simply. But if it is true that the diffuse forces of globalization – with its “still ill-defined and ever emerging effects,” as Fredric Jameson put it12 – are not precisely posited in opposition to the apparent self-sufficiency of the nationstate, at least we can say that the conceptual illumination brought by the national paradigm begins to glow less brightly through the increasing haze of global interdependence. That this uncertain light should be refracted, over six months in 1967, onto a temporary stage erected in the middle of the Saint

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Lawrence River – the great channel that first opened the North American continent to global trade over four hundred years earlier13 – is what makes the shifting tensions between the national(izing) and the global(izing), between the affirmative and the performative, between the world’s fair in general and the 1967 Montreal International and Universal Exhibition in particular, ripe for exploration. Why is it, then, that as the fiftieth anniversary of Expo 67 came and went in 2017, practically the only attempts to explore that legacy came from Quebec? In English Canada, the federal government’s official 2017 Sesquicentennial celebrations of Confederation, “Canada 150,” paid no attention to an event which, after all, had been not only the centrepiece of the celebrations fifty years earlier, but remained by far the most ambitious, expensive, and successful cultural undertaking ever staged in the country. A surprise change of government in the election of late 2015 ended the Stephen Harper Conservative plans for a grim barrage of monuments and ceremonies built around the idea of Canada as a warrior nation, its key reference point not Confederation but the centenary of (a staunchly English) Canada’s mythical moment of national self-actualization at Vimy Ridge in 1917.14 The composition and agenda of Justin Trudeau’s incoming Liberal government bore more than a passing resemblance to Lester Pearson’s two minority governments (1963–68), where an internationalist suite of patriotic symbols and programmes included fitful support for Expo 67. If, however, there was any inclination to recapture the modern worldly magic of Liberal Canada’s 1960s heyday, the new government had no time to develop such an alternative and the year fizzled out with local patriotic projects that never achieved national coherence. Among English Canada’s “Centennial generation” there was a certain memory of Expo 67 as a lost utopia, a promise of Canadian cultural grandeur subsequently abandoned by the state in the long shadow of the October Crisis, the National Energy Policy, two Quebec referendums on separation, the bruising austerity measures of the neoliberal 1990s, formal acquiescence to US hegemony under nafta, and the failed efforts to gain consensus among the provinces (Quebec in particular) on the patriation of Canada’s constitution from Westminster.15 In 2017, an English-language media and public effectively cowed during Harper’s dour decade tended to remember the world exhibition in miniature (if they recalled it at all): a fun moment replete with twee souvenirs whose maximum expression was Bobby Gimby’s 1967 hit song celebrating a population of twenty million “little Canadians” living in ten “little provinces.”16 English Canadian historians, for their part, have largely avoided tackling the cultural mega-project head on.17 Among the few works to do so is an impressive study of Canada in the 1960s by the country’s doyen of social history,

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Bryan Palmer. While acknowledging Expo’s uniquely ambitious scale and success with intelligentsia and the public, he deploys classic anglophone Canadian tropes about Quebec in characterizing the fair as a fiscally irresponsible drain on federal coffers driven by Drapeau’s “insatiable need” to put Montreal on the global map and make Expo the main event of Canada’s Centennial. Palmer ultimately dismisses Expo 67 as a “socially constructed 1960s effort to cultivate Canadian national identity.”18 His reading of the world exhibition dovetails with a growing body of English Canadian scholarship on the Centennial Year that tends to find equally dubious any project involving official Canadian nationalism. For example, Misao Dean’s superb analysis of the Centennial Voyageur Canoe Pageant, a highly staged and scripted competition of provincial and territorial teams whose endpoint was Expo 67, reveals the attempt to erase Indigenous agency and even presence from the historical narrative of the Canadian nation encoded in this official Centennial event. The provincial paddling teams of 1967 (albeit with some resistance from the territorial teams, who were Indigenous) were to re-enact the masculine heroism of the early French-Canadian voyageurs who, now anglicized, could appropriate the vigour of the First Nations inhabitants and their command over the land, thus symbolically legitimizing its possession under Canadian state rule.19 It is nevertheless remarkable that Dean barely touches on the pageant’s place within Expo 67, assuming equivalency of the two events at the level of national representation rather than exploring their articulation. Indeed, English Canadian historical studies have understood Expo rather as English Canadians tended to in 1967: essentially as one more Centennial Year event, if a rather grand one. This was hardly surprising at the time, given that the exorbitant federal government funding was largely justified to English Canada in those terms, and the official Canadian presence at the fair designed with this in mind. That something rather more difficult to pin down was staged on the Expo islands over the summer of 1967 has been patched over in English Canadian historiography with suggestions, from a distance, that it was the ultimate display of Centennial Year Canadian nationalism. This may be related to a certain unfamiliarity and uneasiness with francophone Quebec in much of Canadian Studies, and also perhaps to an awareness that looking too closely at Expo 67 would complicate the emerging consensus that all expressions of postwar Canadian nationalism can be understood as a single discourse whose Rosetta Stone is settler colonialism.20 The most recent English-language scholarship focusing directly on Expo 67 has come almost exclusively from architecture, film and art history, and – in marked contrast to the tenor of Canadian Studies assessments of official Centennial Year events – is often couched in a distinctly celebratory tone. This,

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in some ways, is as it should be. From Habitat to Labyrinth, there is no denying that these fields produced some of the fair’s most dazzling and memorable experiments. Especially catalytic in this regard have been Janine Marchessault’s and Monika Kin Gagnon’s exquisite reconstructions of the multiscreen film projections of Expo 67 with their corresponding studies of its architectures of spectatorship21 and, as Marchessault has recently argued, the prescient “ecstatic” experiences of connectedness to self and world that these experiments conjured.22 Johanne Sloan and Rhona Richman Kenneally’s pioneering and wide-ranging collection of critical thinking about the Montreal World Exhibition, Expo 67: More than Just a Souvenir adopts an equally enthusiastic take on Expo 67 as “an important conjuncture in the histories of Canada, Quebec and Montreal.”23 Likewise, leading scholars of international exhibitions have underlined the world-historical significance of Expo, identifying Montreal as both a “high-water mark,” in the words of John and Margaret Gold, and as the “turning point,” according to Robert Rydell, between the modern world’s fair devoted to showcasing national industry and technological progress and the postmodern exhibitions characteristic of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have focused on sustainability and the environment.24 Perhaps this was why it was only in Quebec – and especially in Montreal, where a particularly strong understanding of the nation has traditionally collided with the modernizing and cosmopolitan demands of the “world” – that the fiftieth anniversary of Expo in 2017 found some public visibility. Headquartered since 1956 in Montreal and a significant contributor to the successful audiovisual innovations of Expo, the National Film Board – or, more precisely, its francophone alter ego, the Office national du film (onf) – was the only state actor (municipal, provincial, or federal) to stage a major anniversary event. This was Expo 67 Live, a monumental video-mapped show which, by projecting a comprehensive ensemble of footage onto multiple surfaces in the Place des Arts complex, attempted to give viewers a sense of what it was like to visit the world exhibition in 1967.25 Because the provincial government and the city had decided to invest their ceremonial dollar in the rather arbitrarily designated 375th anniversary of the founding of Ville-Marie, only begrudging room was made for a mostly civic memory of the fair. A limited number of books and museum exhibitions commemorated its role in consolidating modern life in the city and province.26 The most ambitious of these was held over three and half months at the Musée d’art contemporain, where Monica Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone curated a multimedia exhibition by nineteen artists (all too young to have experienced the fair themselves), In Search of Expo 67, which earned praise from the New York Times as “an incisive, sometimes wistful exploration of the fair and its afterlives.”27

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Most intriguing was the success of the “documentary thriller” Expo 67: Mission Impossible. With stunning use of archival footage, the film relives the race to build a Category 1 international exhibition to a deadline that almost everyone thought impossible given the late start and Drapeau’s decision, against most reasonable planning, to situate it in the very middle of the Saint Lawrence River, across from the then still active commercial port and the Old City of Montreal.28 This required reshaping the local geography and hydrography – partially with earth excavated from the tunnels of the new Montreal metro – in order to make two large islands.29 Hundreds of architects, engineers, designers, and builders were marshalled to assemble the infrastructure and superstructure of a venue that would have to accommodate millions of people, completing their work just hours before the gates opened on 28 April 1967. The Herculean labour involved in this unlikely feat is recounted through the eyes of the two charismatic Québécois on the executive team, known colloquially at the time as les durs (the tough guys): Philippe Gaspé de Beaubien, director of operations, and Yves Jasmin, director of public relations.30 As the surviving elder statesmen of a project that has been half mythologized and half forgotten, they succeeded in capturing the imagination of the Quebec media, and were the subject of a lively edition of Tout le monde en parle, the province’s most important television current affairs program, with Beaubien later receiving the key to the city from Montreal mayor Denis Coderre at the premiere of Expo 67 Live.31 Notably, however, the film deals only with the achievement of bringing the site and its installations to life, and with Quebeckers’ successful marketing of themselves to a North American public that had little previous sense of Quebec or even Canada beyond a few well-worn clichés. That Beaubien himself ends the film by suggesting that Expo was ultimately made possible by a meeting not so much of minds as of national stereotypes – Gallic panache tempered and organized by Anglo-Saxon practicality – is itself telling. The precise contribution of artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, designers, architects, urban planners, politicians, industrialists, bankers, prelates, physicians, scientists, cultural entrepreneurs, feminist leaders, and Indigenous activists to this extraordinary “national” spectacle is set aside. What exactly was created for Expo, what actually took place during its six-month run, which nation or nations were finally represented, and what it all ended up meaning in the context of Man and His World are issues left for academic study. And yet, despite a growing consensus within Quebec’s public sphere that the 1967 Montreal World Exhibition marked a celebration of the achievements of the Quiet Revolution, its francophone academy has been extraordinarily reticent about studying the fair itself.32 Such oversight remains a puzzle, given

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how easy it is to make the case that Expo 67 was one of the signal events in the modern history of the province – and indeed, of Quebec as a nation. A remarkable catalogue on the 1960s in Montreal, produced for an exhibition held in 2004 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, provides both the confirmation and the exception to this rule. A superb essay by the historian and sociologist Marcel Fournier on the Quiet Revolution mentions Expo only twice (and in passing), but is followed by three sections of information panels, architectural drawings, and photographs in which the actors and projects associated with Expo loom large, with the last section given over to Expo 67 entirely.33 Practically the only scholarly work of significance is Pauline Curien’s fine doctoral thesis on the making of the Quebec Pavilion, just a small part of which has ever been published.34 In common with much of the public discussion of Expo in Quebec, Curien’s meticulously researched work also sees the pavilion as a nationalist epiphenomenon, a representation of the Quiet Revolution in which Quebeckers could see themselves as modern within a new series of references that would replace the older, backwardslooking categories of faith and rural survival with new images of state action and popular culture.35 This is surely true. But it also seems evident that Expo 67, from the five-year period of its planning and construction through its six-month existence, must be considered as much an engine of the Quiet Revolution as one of its cultural products. The political and logistical requirements of building a world exhibition to an extremely tight schedule contributed to the redesign, modernization, and expansion of Montreal’s urban infrastructure across the decade, while the exposition itself was a giant pedagogical machine of secular humanism for the majority francophone Quebeckers who made up the lion’s share of its visitors (see appendix). In addition, its resources gave a generation of Québécois architects, intellectuals, filmmakers, designers, and artists the chance to experiment with new idioms while “internationalizing” their work in ways that otherwise would have been impossible; it provided the ideal platform for Quebec’s new, quasi-sovereign “national” foreign affairs policy, fortuitously amplified with considerable media éclat by General Charles de Gaulle’s famous “Vive le Québec libre!” during his Expo visit; and it showcased to a global audience the de facto capital of that new nation-within-a-nation, Montreal, which was being aggressively redesigned for the (post)modern world under the stewardship of Jean Drapeau. For, while Quebec City was positioning itself as the capital of a “sovereign” Quebec within the old order of nations and nationalisms (steered towards long-awaited international recognition by the French president’s carefully orchestrated journey along the

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Chemin du Roy), Montreal was working – in large measure through the massive experiment of Expo itself – to become the capital of a different sort of French Canada within a new globalized order.36 According to two leading theorists of that new order, “‘What is there is also here and what is here is also there’ is probably the most succinct and uncontroversial summary of globalization’s central dynamics of interconnectivity, reconfiguration of space and time, and enhanced mobility.”37 Yet already, fifty years earlier, Marshall McLuhan had proclaimed that “What is happening today around the world is what is happening at Expo.”38 Even though there was as yet no designated term for the process itself, the highly charged political environment of the 1960s made the Montreal World’s Fair a unique conduit for the accelerating epiphenomena of political, economic, and cultural affirmation and cross-fertilization that were remaking the world as a decidedly “smaller” place than it had been even a decade before. A few examples: between the exhibitions of Brussels (1958) and Montreal (1967), the world saw the decolonization of no fewer than thirty-four African countries, from Ghana (1957) to Lesotho (1966). Brussels was the last fair to feature a reconstructed “native” village for the delectation of its implicitly superior European spectators. At Expo 67, Africa Place (incorporating the pavilions of seventeen African nations), the Algerian Pavilion, the Cuban Pavilion, and the Indians of Canada Pavilion – not to mention the Quebec Pavilion itself – notably provided decolonizing narratives, in contrast to the Canadian Pavilion and certain industrial pavilions that bore witness to re-colonizing projects, albeit in more “palatable” economic and developmental terms. One month before the opening of Expo, Pope Paul VI promulgated the encyclical Populorum Progressio on the worldwide question of the poverty of peoples and unequal access to the benefits of civilization. In the wake of de Gaulle’s visit, the left-leaning Québécois journal Parti pris, which, despite its short lifespan, indelibly marked the intelligentsia of Quebec, proclaimed in its September 1967 issue: “Independence, yes, but independence, socialism and secularism – in a word, decolonization.”39 In the preceding special issue on the “Centenary of Alienation and Dispossession,” the same journal pointedly ignored the opening of Expo 67, except to deliver a glancing blow at its theme as nothing but “a vile mystification” (une immonde mystification) when compared to the real issues facing Quebec.40 “Sur la Terre des hommes,” writes the editorialist Luc Racine, “we are nothing or almost nothing, an insignificant quantum, sub-humans more or less well provided for at the margins of an empire whose full powers of destruction and massacre have doubtless yet to be revealed.”41 Compare that with

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what Guy Dozois, Expo’s theme director, called the fair’s “distinctively new” contribution to the relatively recent history of world exhibitions: its “development of a thematic core reflecting the principal scientific and cultural aspects of contemporary life, and serving as inspiration and guide to the seventy participating nations of the world.” Neocolonial mystification? Perhaps. But it is worth noting that even here, on the dustjacket of the official volume celebrating Man and His World, the French and the English do not coincide. The paternalistic accents suggested by the phrase “inspiration and guide” are absent from the original French, which reverses the agent and object to speak rather of a “gigantic operation supported by the participation of over seventy countries,” whose originality lies in the “generous expansion” of its dedicated thematic kernel, la Terre des hommes.42

Expo 67 had its own semiotic topography, superimposed upon the real geography of the site itself. First, there was the platform, infrastructure, and thematic superstructure, conceived and built by an exceptional ensemble of urban planners, engineers, architects, and exhibition designers under the auspices of the Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition (ccwe). Their site consisted of two islands in the Saint Lawrence River – one the result of joining two extant pieces of land, the other created almost entirely ex nihilo – connected by bridge to a strip that had been leased from the federal port authority and enlarged. Roadways and transit lines were built on, underneath, and above these invented lands; deliberately free-flowing pedestrian routes and gathering places laid out; plots measured off for pavilions and service buildings; electrical, water, and sewer lines laid in; and the whole ornamented with an elegant modern motif of custom-built streetlights, railings, telephone booths, and public furniture. Then there were the pavilions of the sixty-two participating nation-states (a small number of countries shared pavilions), as well as a sizeable group of intentionally understated corporate and international organization pavilions. While their design and content were entirely in the hands of their sponsors, all were asked by the ccwe to conceive them with the theme of Expo 67 in mind. Within the nation-state class of pavilions, Canada as host demanded special license, and the complex of Canadian pavilions on the Île Notre-Dame was extensive. The Canadian Pavilion itself was an ensemble of monumental structures and exhibition and theatre spaces; adjacent to it were the separate pavilions of Ontario, Quebec, Atlantic Canada, Western Canada, and the Indians of Canada.43 The results across the site were inevitably and appropriately heterogeneous, some engaging innovatively with the theme,

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others kitschy, traditionally ethno-national, or purely functional. Although it is Expo’s national pavilions that have largely remained etched in the collective memory, in fact conceptually the main edifices – which, along with the urban design scheme, gave the fair its identifiable, futuristic look – were the seventeen theme pavilions and special areas under the purview of the ccwe, each dedicated to a sub-theme (the city, health, life sciences, housing, food production, fabrication, exploration, creativity, myth, and so on) and intended to communicate its humanist, “one-world” theme.44 Nevertheless, this very range helped to generate the endless novelty, variety, and sheer fun that Expo became known for, and which the theme pavilions alone would not have been able to deliver due to the ccwe’s stated objective of using them to establish continuity, uniformity, intellectual depth, and comprehensiveness. All this formed a remarkable arena for the exchange of signs, symbols, and (sometimes) dialogue, analogous to what Juri Lotman would call, in a different context, the semiosphere: “Imagine a room in a museum,” he writes in a foundational article, “where exhibits from different eras are laid out in different windows, with texts in known and unknown languages, and instructions for deciphering them, together with explanatory texts for the exhibitions created by guides who map the necessary routes and rules of behaviour for visitors. If we place in that room still more visitors, with their own semiotic worlds, then we will begin to obtain something resembling a picture of the semiosphere.”45 On 28 April 1967 this artificial archipelago came suddenly to life as a radically new space for meaning generation.46 It was a utopian classroom, purpose-built to show the world how people live, or might live, today. But it was also an ark for artifacts, artworks, and multimedia presentations of the many contributions to civilization brought by the world’s peoples: curated, on the one hand, by the nation-state pavilions proudly displaying the particular achievements of a single country, and on the other, by the theme pavilions suggesting the trans-historical universality of the many varied and diverse works of humanity as a whole. A visitor to Expo 67 was to feel a citizen not simply of a country, but of a planet that could suddenly be explored at will, Expo passport in hand. If there were certain gaps, if the interconnectivity was more factitious than real, it nevertheless suggested a new experience of worldness, one that anticipated the abstraction, modularity, connected simultaneity, rapid transportation, mediated reality, and structured mass anonymity characteristic of contemporary globalization. Yet Expo 67 was also produced in and by Montreal, Quebec, Canada – something the makers of the fair sought to affirm and exploit in different ways even as they promoted the filtering of local cultures and politics through the thematic ideal of la Terre des hommes.

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The filtering may have been partial,47 and the thematic resolution often mitigated by confrontation with a less-than-ideal reality, but the islands on the Saint Lawrence nevertheless provided a genuine space for the exploration of tensions arising between local, national, and international “Man” and the (globalizing) “World” of 1967. These tensions themselves gave rise to some fascinating connections and the spontaneous creation of fortuitous networks. Here is but one example. On the opening night of Expo, François Dallegret, an up-and-coming Moroccanborn French designer of underground clubs who had worked on the fair’s amusement park, La Ronde, organized an unofficial “Expo Super-party” at the Place Bonaventure for the younger creative talent who had worked on the exhibition.48 Among the performers on the bill was Suzanne Verdal, a charismatic modern dancer from Montreal who had once had a place by the Saint Lawrence River, where she served tea and oranges (that came all the way from China) to a young poet and novelist named Leonard Cohen. Years later, in a bbc Radio 4 interview, Verdal recalled that in the early 1960s she had moved near the old port because “the Saint Lawrence held a particular beauty and poetry to me.”49 It was a beauty that clearly found expression in Cohen’s first major song, “Suzanne,” which he débuted in Canada over five nights at Expo’s Youth Pavilion from 22 to 27 July (by chance, coinciding with Charles de Gaulle’s visit) before returning to New York only a few weeks later to record it as a single, laying the cornerstone for what would become a long and celebrated (second) career as an internationally recognized singer-songwriter.50 If “Suzanne,” unexpectedly, returns us from global culture to the Saint Lawrence, the same could be said for Expo 67 itself. As Craig Moyes argues in the opening chapter of our collection, Mayor Jean Drapeau’s surprising decision to host a “universal” exhibition on newly created islands should not simply be seen as a grandiose political gesture, but as part of a long-standing French-Canadian symbolic investment in the river. Behind the humanist aspirations of “Man and His World” – too often understood as part of a general McLuhanesque focus on the incipient “global village” – lay a profound national consciousness, anchored in the Saint Lawrence River Valley, without which access to the universal would be compromised or impossible. If that investment, which predates Confederation, is associated with as conservative a figure as Lionel Groulx, it also, surprisingly, coincides with many of the forward-looking aspirations of the Quiet Revolution. Bookending the collection, Bill Marshall also traces the intersection of these two vectors in literary and historical explorations of the Laurentian siting of Expo 67. He considers the “Janus-faced” spectacle of Expo within the context of the Quiet Revolution by likewise focusing on the island setting and some of the literary, televisual,

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and cinematic texts that engage with it. Marshall borrows a number of theoretical models (de Certeau, Bakhtin, Deleuze) to explore the symbolic effectiveness of islands within the Expo imaginary, and to elucidate the centrifugal-centripetal, territorializing-deterritorializing tensions that informed this ambiguous national spectacle. A particularly eloquent example of that ambiguity, and of the “situated” conversation made possible by the topography of Expo, was to be found on Île Notre-Dame, where the original federal government plan for the Canadian Pavilion had included a small sample of traditional “Indian” handicrafts and symbolic artifacts. Pushback from Indigenous leaders led to the creation of a dedicated pavilion under their oversight, and a countrywide consultation with Indigenous communities on its form and content that made it the only democratically conceived pavilion at the fair. In revisiting this process, Linda Grussani and Ruth Phillips focus on the Indians of Canada Pavilion’s curatorial practices in order to pose questions about the way distinct, overlapping notions of Canadian national community were contested. Complementing their analysis, Romney Copeman offers a close reading of the starkly opposing manner in which the two pavilions represented Indigenous Canadians. At the core of the Canadian Pavilion, Copeman discerns a refined settler colonial narrative in guidebooks written by consultants among whom were some of the most distinguished Canadian intellectuals, English and French, of their day. They extolled a modernizing and developmentalist view of the country that relegated Indigenous people to the past, dooming them to assimilation into Canada’s multicultural national mosaic. A stone’s throw away, the Indians of Canada Pavilion responded with a bold narrative highlighting Indigenous resistance to the disastrous history of their colonization by the Canadian state. Guided by the recollections of Andrew Tanahokate Deslisle – a leader of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake who served as commissioner general of the Indians of Canada Pavilion – Copeman explores the symbolic and real encounters that ensued between what he calls “Canadian colonial humanism” and the reassertion of Indigenous autonomy and control over their own representation. Grussani and Phillips, in cataloguing the pavilion’s artworks and mapping their placement, see the beginning of a long process of thinking about Indigenous-led curatorial projects that has had a strong influence on “the stories that the nation-state tells about itself.” They also take on a littlestudied film from the Expo cinematic canon, Indian Memento/Mémoire indienne by the young nfb filmmaker Michel Régnier, finding in it both an invaluable resource for reconstructing the pavilion’s organization, exhibits, and unique colour scheme, as well as a record of how those who controlled

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the official Canadian documentary record hoped to re-contain the pavilion’s radicalism by showing an “ideal” experience of it. This was achieved through the film’s generic “biographical” study of one of the hostesses (who remains nameless), emphasizing her transition from an already acculturated life on the reserve to the (silent) mouthpiece of the pavilion’s message to nonIndigenous fairgoers. Indian Memento also shows the remarkable layering of interpretative “screens” that Expo gave rise to, as the hostess moves from one site to another, from her rural community in Western Canada to the urban East, from “nature” to the semiotically loaded environment of Expo, from the “real” environment of family to the “museological” frame of the Indians of Canada Pavilion, from the gaiety of the Expo crowds to the uncertainty of city life, as she gazes through shop windows at contemporary signs of commodification.51 Screens perform an analogous function of obscuring and revealing in Marcelle Ferron’s massive series of stained-glass windows for modernist architect Roger d’Astous’s International Trade Centre. In a piece of scholarly detective work, Bruno Victor Andrus and Craig Moyes recover this “lost” pavilion to show how the repurposing of a traditional religious iconographical practice on (and around) the Expo site functioned as a stepping-stone for a broader reinvestment in public art during the Quiet Revolution. Installed in the only “private” pavilion at Expo, one restricted to local and duly invited international businessmen who were given a dedicated space for what would come to be called networking that directly faced the old networks of global trade on the Saint Lawrence, Ferron’s work is another example of fortuitous interactions made possible by the topography of the semiosphere. Taking Walter Benjamin as a theoretical guide, the authors read her enormous array of windows along the corridor leading to the businessmen’s “Expo-Club,” between a suite of offices representing all the chartered banks of Canada on one side and the view over the river on the other, as a temporary (all-too-temporary) mediation between forms of national representation on the cusp of globalization. Ferron is just one of many prominent Quebec artists who used Expo commissions to further their creative agendas. Caroline Martel takes a localized and “materialized” road into the cinematic equivalent of this process, starting from the reality that most films at the fair (as indeed at twentieth-century world exhibitions in general) were commissioned or “useful” works. This sets up her exploration of two production stories of Quebec government film commissions associated with the fair, Gilles Groulx’s …québec? and Gilles Carle’s Québec à l’heure de l’Expo. Martel finds an overlooked chapter in the history of Quebec film production at the intersection of the auteur-driven and the governmental film, blending the old and new traditions and trends of the doc-

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umentary and the advertising industry. Her exploration of the conditions of production, and of the different styles and voices in films commissioned by the Office du film du Québec both before and after Expo 67, reveals new approaches to staging the nation during this period of significant change. While it is the event’s extended media innovations that are usually admired by commentators, this pivotal transformation in approach to film commissions may be, in fact, one of the Montreal exhibition’s most significant legacies. The English title of Carle’s film, Expo 67: Made in Quebec, captures one of the main thrusts of our volume: an interest in the terroir of this “universal” exhibition, the way its character was grounded in Montreal and in a Quebec society expressing itself nationally and globally in terms both old and new. Jean-Philippe Warren allows us to situate Expo 67 at the heart of a transformative francophone Quebec youth culture that was distinct in many ways from the student-driven radicalism that exploded around the world in the late 1960s. On the one hand, Quebec’s Boomers were privileged and enthusiastic participants in a radically new British-American fashion and music consumer culture, readily adopting an alternative, world-oriented humanism that frowned upon the proxy conflicts promoted by the Cold War (most notably, in Vietnam). On the other hand, they saw themselves as part of a burgeoning postcolonial nationalism that aligned Quebeckers with the victims of First World oppression elsewhere, with Pierre Vallière’s Nègres blancs d’Amérique (written in 1966 while the author was in prison in New York awaiting extradition to Canada) providing perhaps the most striking formulation of that notional alliance.52 The contradictions were hashed out over the Expo summer at the Youth Pavilion, a concession made by the ccwe in the face of pressure from Quebec youth groups that ended up being one of the most visited and lively places at the fair, site of talks by local and international intellectuals of every stripe (from conservative to separatist to anarchist), concerts by a litany of the era’s top performers, nightly dancing, and midnight screenings of new cinema from around the world. As it did for Ferron, Groulx, and Carle, an Expo commission offered architect Luc Durand an opportunity to make a creative statement about the new Quebec. His was undoubtedly the most symbolically central and high-profile of them all, and also one that explored post-colonial parallels. Peter Scriver’s chapter on Durand’s hand in the design of the Quebec Pavilion argues that what is often taken as the epitome of Quiet Revolution architecture was among a number of “ostensibly ‘national’ installations” that engaged “simultaneously with the more worldly theme and aspirations of the fair.”53 Scriver shows that celebrated aspects of the pavilion – its sobriety and elegant economy of form, its transparency suggestive of openness to communication with the visiting

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world, its delicate and reverent dialogue with the surrounding water – are better understood in the light of Durand’s formative prior experience as a young architect working in post-colonial New Delhi. In a striking cultural anticipation of the late-capitalist age of globalized commodity chains, what was most forthrightly “Made in Quebec” at Expo 67 may have essentially been “Made in India” as well. Using the same lens, Scriver expands the frame to situate Durand’s approach within a family of architectural innovation in the Australia Pavilion and Africa Place. Steven Palmer tests the degree to which Expo 67 was the first postcolonial world exhibition, surveying the participation of “Third World” and new nation-states. Everywhere he looks, from the elaborate pavilions of republican India and revolutionary Cuba to the more focused and modest stagings of the new African and Caribbean states, Palmer finds influential postcolonial artists, selected by their respective governments to stage complex representations of newly “national” cultures. He reveals Expo to have been not only an important site for a sustained exploration of postcolonial modernities, but one where radical and revolutionary iterations of political emancipation and Black Atlantic art and identity occupy multiple stages. “Third World” countries used the Montreal and Canadian siting to their political and diplomatic advantage in a number of ways. Their presence, meanwhile, left a lasting impression on the people of Montreal, especially a growing anglophone Black community of mostly West Indian descent that was emerging as a centre of Black Power thinking and activism. Opening just eighteen months after the end of the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, Montreal 1967 had from the beginning defined itself in opposition to its predecessor. Robert Moses’s extravaganza, which did not have bie sanction, was seen as destined to fail in paroxysms of hyper-commercialism and a lack of international buy-in well before it opened its gates, and most critics felt it more than lived down to the advance billing. Heesok Chang reconsiders Expo 67 in relation to this “outlaw” predecessor, and in contrast to the commonplace that Montreal triumphed where New York failed, finds “a shared modernist trajectory” and, in both, a “foiled utopian ambition.” Each was the creation of “an obdurate and powerful boss driven by an ulterior civic agenda” (Drapeau acting as Montreal’s Moses). Chang unpicks their “entangled techno-humanist legacies” in urban planning, architecture, and audiovisual environments. Expo 67’s Labyrinth and other immersive screen experiences were anticipated by two of the most popular attractions at the New York Fair, Think and To Be Alive. Chang views them as attempts to create the media Gesamtkunstwerk – or total experience – that, while ultimately unsuccessful, nevertheless signalled “the

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quandary of humanism in the coming era of ubiquitous computing”: an era in which sensorial space is conjured through invisible software networks rather than via the elaborate architectures (and collective spectatorship) of multiscreen projections, such as Labyrinth, which have remained a defining feature of Expo 67. Joy Knoblauch paints a dystopian portrait of the signature Brutalist architecture of Expo. She reads the fair as a platform for architectural experimentation based on the idea, promoted particularly by critic-theorist-practitioner Reyner Banham from the mid-1950s and through the 1960s, that architecture had to incorporate the lessons emerging from biology, medicine, and psychology, enabling it to “pass beneath the skin.”54 In a sense, Expo architects were answering a call that originated with military and state planners and was then echoed by US designers during the Cold War, one that sought to turn the public’s existential fear of nuclear annihilation into something controllable and productive. Knoblauch’s reading casts new light on the sensuous shock and disorientation that were so much part of the fun and excitement of Expo 67, particularly in the film-based show, Miracles in Modern Medicine, that caused thousands to faint at Expo’s wildly popular Meditheatre. The Man and His Health Pavilion and its Meditheatre show are at the heart of Steven Palmer’s second contribution to the collection, an anatomy of the pavilion as polysemic assemblage. While the intention was to represent “world medicine” – and a glittering international cast headquartered in Barcelona and New York City was responsible for the pavilion’s design and multimedia performance piece – Palmer finds the pavilion was rather an artfully disguised representation of Montreal medicine. This included anglophone and francophone physicians and surgeons playing important roles in international medical research, but who were also leaders in hospitals, medical schools, and associations whose growing secularization was at the core of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. The interaction of avant-garde Montreal medical professionals, health institutions, and even theatre companies with high-flying international creative talent forged the powerful and original staging that turned the pavilion into one of the surprise hits of the fair. Inverting the title of this collection, Palmer argues that the Man and His Health Pavilion was a striking example of the way that Expo 67 staged globalization in the crucible of the nation. Will Straw completes this tour of the artifacts of proto-globalization at Expo with a close second look at Kill, Panther, Kill: a low-budget, even “abject” film that shows itself to be a harbinger of much of today’s media production which casually (and interchangeably) exploits “the nation” as a disposable backdrop. A feature film in the “Eurospy” genre that was partially

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filmed on-site while the fair was in progress, the movie is an example of what he calls “media extension”: texts outside those sanctioned for the Montreal World’s Fair that might take the form of comics or commercial tv series as well as films. These texts generated “unofficial” images of the fair that took on strange, ultimately uncontrollable connotations as they circulated through the national backwaters of entertainment commerce in a way that anticipated the trade in half-stolen kitsch, experiential trash, and pornography that propels today’s global media capitalism. The distance between the nation and the crucible of globalization was not so great as we might think: notably, both Kill, Panther, Kill and Gilles Carle’s insouciant celebration of national modernity, Québec à l’heure de l’Expo, “used” Expo 67 as a backdrop to narratives inflected with sex, adventure, and postmodern irony, intended in each case for international showings and ultimately commercial ends. The volume closes with a retrospective epilogue, penned in the first person by a Quebec historian who grew up in the aura of Expo 67 and who supplements his recollections with empirical analysis of several generations of Quebeckers’ memories of the fair. Jocelyn Létourneau uses a series of studies designed to examine how non-specialists construct a narrative of Quebec’s history derived from lived experience, as well as various specialist, media, and official histories to establish, against expectations, that Expo 67 remains a strong and positive marker for many Quebeckers with regard to their understanding of the story of their own lives, as well as that of their national community. In the end, however, he suggests that this may not be the case for future generations unless a way is found to imprint Expo 67 more indelibly on Quebec’s collective historical imagination.

In two sections at the end of her long 1967 essay “unfolding” the theme of Expo – both partially redacted, to her chagrin, from the final published version55 – Gabrielle Roy moves from personal observations and reflections in the first person to a rhetorical address in the second person in which she asks the reader to think about the meaning of Terre des hommes itself, as she and fourteen other eminent Canadian thinkers had done four years earlier at the Montebello Conference.56 After enumerating many of the exciting and disturbing phenomena of the modern world – from the “mass of information” to “excessive specialization”; from the myriad examples of technological advance to the increase in selfishness and the “constant return to racial preference, so contrary to our (collective) progress”57 – she finds hope in the exhibition itself, comparing it to an immense classroom “where Man is taught to Man.”58 One at-

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tendee who clearly understood the lesson was the philosopher, semiotician, and budding literary and cultural theorist Umberto Eco, who noted that despite some obvious problems and failures, Expo was “an enormous experimental laboratory” and (at least potentially) “a perfect teaching device.”59 Our ambition in this volume is neither so optimistic nor so grand, and is borne along in any event by critical post-“Man” perspectives deployed in different ways by our contributors. But in the spirit of Roy and Eco, our aim is to do justice to the remarkable interconnectivity of that event by bringing together, over fifty years later, English-Canadian, Québécois, First Nations, and international scholars in an interdisciplinary conversation. History, sociology, cinema studies, literary and cultural studies, art history and architecture: these are all, as we know, discrete practices and disciplines, with their own standards, working concepts, and vocabularies. But as intellectuals writing on these cultural phenomena, we also participate in a situated encounter of ideas, where the writer’s greatest asset is not the elevated point of view offered by the disciplinary panopticon, but the possibility of dialogical engagement on the ground, as it were, using signs that have already been in some way mobilized for similar (although not necessarily identical) ends. The writers of Expo 67 and Its World, despite speaking in distinct voices and treating subjects proper to their diverse fields of expertise, are likewise engaged in a dynamic conversation with the event, with the existing scholarship, and with each other. And insofar as the chapters of this collection meet across a common (if roughly mapped) intellectual topography, our authors share, as the great Québécois critic André Belleau put it, “the good fortune of inhabiting the semiosphere.”60

notes 1 Created as a “Dominion” of four provinces by the British North America Act of 1867, Canada was only semi-independent from Britain until the Second World War, and arguably until the Constitution Act of 1982. Over the course of the 1950s and ’60s, spearheaded by Prime Minister Louis Saint-Laurent, the official term “Dominion” began to be quietly elided from official documents in favour simply of “Canada” (or replaced by “federal” when an adjective was necessary), culminating in Dominion Day being rebaptized Canada Day the same year that the bna Act was famously patriated by the Trudeau government without the agreement of Quebec. See Hansard, 8 November 1951 (21st Parliament, 5th Session, “Canada Lands Surveys Act”), https://www.lipad.ca/full/1951/11/08/14/. 2 It was the newly appointed commissioner of Expo, Pierre Dupuy, fresh from his ambassadorship in Paris (1958–63), who initially suggested that the Canadian

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Pavilion should be situated at the end of a broad avenue (“genre ChampsElysées”), flanked by the pavilions of Great Britain and France. Yves Jasmin, La Petite Histoire d’Expo 67 (Montreal: Éditions Québec-Amérique, 1997), 34. 3 A lively, if necessarily selective, daily chronicle of the 1967 Montreal International and Universal Exhibition, closely based on the daily bulletin distributed by the Public Relations department and nicely supplemented with photographs, is Yves Jasmin’s “Expo 67 au jour le jour,” Archives Montréal; seven posts corresponding to the months of Expo, April–October 1967; beginning with http://archivesdemontreal.com/2017/04/27/expo-67-au-jour-le-jour-avril/. An English version of the original is: “The Expo 67 Story,” vols. 1 and 2, mimeograph, Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition, Record Group 71, vol. 11, Library and Archives Canada. 4 A Universal and International Exhibition requires official sanction from the Paris-based Bureau of International Exhibitions (bie). According to a treaty which sets out classifications and rules, Category 1 is the highest form of world exhibition, having a “universal” theme, extending for up to six months, and with participant states building their own pavilions (Montreal 1967 is in the order of Paris 1937, Brussels 1958, Osaka 1970, Seville 1992, and Dubai 2020). bie-sanctioned world exhibitions in other categories focus on particular themes (for example, Vancouver’s 1986 Expo was devoted to Transport and Communication), and tend to have smaller budgets, less grandeur, and limited official participation by other nation-states. During the era under consideration, when Category 1 exhibitions had the public resources, diplomatic importance, commercial clout, and glamour now associated with the Olympic Games and the World Cup, the bie tightly restricted their number, and spread them around continents. The heft and unilateralism of the United States meant that they often held “world’s fairs” that did not conform to the bie rules and so enjoyed neither official sanction nor participation by other leading nation-states, with New York 1964–65 being the best-known example (see Heesok Chang’s chapter in this volume). Partly in order to avoid associations with the more commercial enterprise taking place south of the border, Jean Drapeau suggested the “Parisian” contraction Expo (from exposition universelle) for Montreal. The term initially met stiff resistance from English-Canadian politicians and pundits, who thought it absurd to give the event a name Americans would not understand (Jasmin, La Petite Histoire d’Expo 67, 23–4). Category 1 exhibitions have been known as “World Expos” ever since. 5 Though, as Ron Rudin has shown, in an earlier period Quebec political and religious leaders had been favourably disposed to a “commemorative mega-event … staged on the set of Quebec City.” Founding Fathers: The Celebration of Cham-

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6 7

8

9

10 11

plain and Laval in the Streets of Quebec, 1878–1908 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 8. Umberto Eco, “A Theory of Expositions” (1967), Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1987), 291. A comprehensive list would be long indeed. Those who created the most media impact at the time were, among royalty, Emperor Haile Selassie, Queen Elizabeth II, and Princess Grace of Monaco; among larger-than-life political leaders, Charles de Gaulle, Lyndon Johnson, and Bobby Kennedy; among transformative intellectuals, the Australian medical scientist and Nobel laureate Frank Macfarlane Burnet, the pioneering feminist economist Barbara Ward, and of course Marshall McLuhan; among artists with considerable aura, Marlene Dietrich (a cinema screen-sized blow-up of whose face, signifying “the movies,” also hung in the US Pavilion), Miriam Makeba, Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Laurence Olivier; and as for emblematic 1960s glamour, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Twiggy will suffice. The list of influential art and design talent would run to many pages, ranging from experimental jazz pianist Thelonious Monk to Andy Warhol and Niki de Saint Phalle, whose silkscreens and controversial Nanas sculptures graced the US and French pavilions respectively. There was also participation from a plethora of creative people from Quebec, Canada, and elsewhere who were not household names but made a significant impact on their fields (the contributions of many of them appear in this book). The phrase was from one of the first literary theorists to take Expo as a serious object of study: Donald Theall, “Expo 67 as Total Environment” (1976), reprinted in Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67, eds. Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 19. See also Jean Larose, “cadavre.exquis.com” (1999), Essais de littérature appliquée (Montreal: Boréal, 2015), 57: “C’est à Montréal que le multimédia serait né, pendant l’Expo 67” (multimedia was born in Montreal, during Expo 67). Appearing as it does on the margins and at the end of the “American century” (1945–73), what Fredric Jameson has called the “forcing ground … of the new system.” Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), xx. Where English tends to favour the shorthand expression “world’s fair,” it is still called exposition universelle in French. For an overview, see Paul James and Manfred B. Steger, “A Genealogy of Globalization: The Career of a Concept,” Globalizations 11, no. 4 (2014): 417–34. A fuller investigation of the term’s prehistory and crystallization within academic study is furnished in chapter 1 of Manfred B. Steger and Amentahru Wahlrab, What Is Global Studies? Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), 25–51.

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12 Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1998), 55. It is noteworthy that in his seminal 1991 work on the cultural and theoretical ramifications of late capitalism, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson still has no index entry for the term “globalization.” 13 As one of the first modern works on the urban geography of Montreal suggests, the city owes its very foundation to the precise topography of that liquid highway, which, in the hopes of finding a trade route to China, first opened up the Atlantic to the North American continent, and the continent to the Atlantic. “L’île de Montréal, située au confluent de l’Ottawa et du Saint-Laurent, se trouve donc en liaison avec un immense hinterland, tout en ayant accès direct à l’océan Atlantique. La valeur stratégique de cette situation s’accroît parce que des obstacles obstruent ces routes naturelles et rendent l’escale obligatoire.” (The island of Montreal, situated at the confluence of the Ottawa and Saint Lawrence Rivers, opens onto an immense hinterland whilst at the same time allowing direct access to the Atlantic. Its strategic value is that much greater because of the natural obstacles to navigation at that point in the river which force travelers to stop.) Raymond Tanghe, Montréal (Montreal: Éditions Albert Lévesque, 1936), 46. 14 On the rise of “Vimyism” as core symbol of a new English-Canadian nationalism, see Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, Warrior Nation: Re-branding Canada in an Age of Anxiety (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012); and Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, The Vimy Trap: or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016). Ironically, the idea that Canada came of age through independent participation in World War I points to the precise constitutional sense in which Canada was not an independent nation, automatically declaring war at the same time as Britain (Article 15 of the British North America Act states: “The Command-in-Chief of the Land and Naval Militia, and of all Naval and Military forces, of and in Canada, is hereby declared to continue and be vested in the Queen.”). Doubly blind to the ironies of history, Harper’s emphasis on 1917 also evoked the conscription crisis of that year, which precipitated the first major post-Confederation crystallization of French-Canadian nationalism, as well as a number of critical reflections on the confederative pact of fifty years earlier. The other event given great bicentenary weight by the Conservative government in 2012 was the War of 1812, a surrogate “war of independence” narrative as British as it was martial, and one entirely dismissive of the relevance to the polity’s existence of the prior 200 years of colonial French Canada. 15 The watershed moment is explicitly evoked in Pierre Berton’s elegiac popular history published for the thirtieth anniversary of the Centennial, 1967: The Last

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Good Year (Toronto: Doubleday, 1997); a 2017 look from the perspective of the Centennial generation is Tom Hawthorn, The Year Canadians Lost Their Minds and Found Their Country: The Centennial of 1967 (Vancouver: Douglas and MacIntyre, 2017). The subtitle of Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan’s edited collection, Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), attests to this cultural memory and pushes its limits. The only comprehensive account of Expo 67 is the highly readable and wellresearched popular history by writer and journalist John Lownsbrough, The Best Place to Be: Expo 67 and Its Time (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2012). Bryan D. Palmer, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 425. There is a cluster of studies on the historic role of the Indians of Canada Pavilion in the politics of Indigenous self-representation: Ruth B. Phillips with Sherry Brydon, “‘Arrow of Truth’: The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67,” in Ruth B. Phillips, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 27–46; Jane Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians: The Indians of Canada Pavilion and Public Pedagogy, Expo 1967,” Journal of Canadian Studies 49, no. 2 (2015): 171–204; Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ Participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17, no. 2 (2006): 148–73. On religion and Expo, see Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Remaking of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). The conference “Faces of Israel at Expo 67,” Concordia University, 23–24 May 2017, explored representations of Judaism at the fair; the conference presentations – all nine of which were in English – were the basis for a special issue of Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes 26 (2018). Misao Dean, Inheriting a Canoe Paddle: The Canoe in Discourses of English Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 82–101. Meagan Elizabeth Beaton, The Centennial Cure: Commemoration, Identity, and Cultural Capital in Nova Scotia during Canada’s 1967 Centennial Celebrations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017) implicitly departs from this consensus, in showing the degree to which the federal government used the 1967 Centennial to justify and focus an enormous investment in infrastructural renewal that would also stimulate local and regional rethinking of citizen engagement with federalism and modernity, in a way that recalls the use of Expo 67 by political leaders in Montreal, Quebec, and Canada. Gagnon and Marchessault, Reimagining Cinema; see also their website, Cinema expo67, http://cinemaexpo67.ca.

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22 Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies (Cambridge, ma:mit Press, 2017), 127–57. 23 Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan, “Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir,” in Richman Kenneally and Sloan, Expo 67, 4. 24 John Gold and Margaret Gold, Cities of Culture: Staging International Festivals and the Urban Agenda, 1851–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 106; Robert Rydell, “Preface,” Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader, eds. Laura Hollengreen, Celia Pearce, Rebecca Rouse, and Bobby Schweizer (Pittsburgh: etc Press, 2014), xxi. 25 Immersive projection, Karine Lanoie-Brien, Expo 67 Live, Office national du film, esplanade Place des Arts, 18–30 September 2017, https://www.nfb.ca/expo67live/. The show has been reformulated as 33 Short Stories about Montreal and Us by Karine Lanoie-Brien and Roger Laroche, a permanent “art-hotel” multimedia exhibition exploring the urban transformation of Montreal from the 1950s to the 1970s in Old Montreal’s Uville Hotel. Though it passed unnoticed at the time, Expo 67 Live marked an epochal transition: the onf – hitherto the nfb’s awkwardly Quebec-nationalist younger step-sibling – assumed loving stewardship over the legacy of its anglophone Canadian branch of the family, whose important role in the history of world cinema reached its zenith with the Labyrinth Pavilion and much of the Board-produced Expo cinematic corpus. 26 Of note were the exhibitions Expo 67 – A World of Dreams, Musée Stewart, Parc Jean Drapeau; Fashioning Expo 67, McCord Museum; Habitat 67: The Shape of Things to Come, Centre de Design de l’Université du Québec à Montréal; Expo 67: Place aux Arts!, l’Espace culturel Georges-Émile-Lapalme; Expo Extra! and Explosion 67: Terre des jeunes/Youth and Their World, both at the Centre d’histoire de Montréal. In the realm of print, notable were Luc Desilet’s beautifully illustrated Les 50 ans d’Expo 67 (Montreal: Guy Saint-Jean Éditeur, 2017), Tristan Demers’s Emmène-nous à La Ronde: 50 ans de plaisirs forains (Montreal: Éditions de l’Homme, 2017), and, surprisingly, a small spate of children’s books, including Johanne Mercier’s Raconte-moi l’Expo 67 (Montreal: Petit Homme, 2017), Maryse Rouy’s Sur une île inventée (Montreal: Hurtubise, 2018), and Michel Viau and Ghislain Dugay’s Mission Expo 67 (Montreal: Perro, 2018). 27 Jason Farago, “Expo 2017: Utopia, Rebooted,” New York Times, 22 June 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/arts/design/expo-2017-utopia-rebooted. html. The show is the reference point for Monika Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone, eds., In Search of Expo 67 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2020). 28 Guylaine Maroist, Eric Ruelle, and Michel Barbeau, Expo 67: Mission Impossible (Productions de la ruelle, 2017). “Pearson admitted in his memoirs that Drapeau’s

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plan to hold the exhibition in the middle of the river was, at first, ‘one of the silliest things I had ever heard.’ He assumed that ‘with four million square miles of land in Canada, we would be able to find a plot some place.’” Berton, 1967: The Last Good Year, 260. In 1976, Montreal’s commercial port was moved downstream to its present location on the riverfront below Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. The idea that the Expo islands were made with earth excavated from tunneling for the new metro system is a widely repeated Expo 67 legend (it is featured in the “Heritage Minute” devoted to the fair, analyzed in Bill Marshall’s chapter in this collection), and captures the symbiosis between the infrastructural transformation of Montreal in the 1960s and the building of the fair. In fact, the excavations accounted for only a small portion of the materials required to make the islands, most of which came from dredging the riverbed and other quarried materials. Realizing it would be impossible to create solid land masses of the size required in time, the Expo planning team designed a large lagoon for Île Notre-Dame and incorporated canals elsewhere, an expedient decision that ended up enhancing Expo’s charm and recalling historic cities like Venice and Tenochtitlán. The other members of this high-powered Canadian management group were Deputy Commissioner General Robert Shaw and Director of Installations Colonel Edward Churchill (both accomplished megaproject engineers who had built such things as the dew Line and the Saint Lawrence Seaway), Dale Rediker (finance), Andrew Kniewasser (general manager), Jean-Claude Delorme (legal), Pierre de Bellefeuille (director of exhibitors), and Édouard Fiset (chief architect). Tout le monde en parle (Radio Canada), 23 April 2017, https://ici.radio-canada. ca/tele/tout-le-monde-en-parle/2016-2017/segments/entrevue/21372/philippede-gaspe-beaubien-yves-jasmin. Standing out from the general amnesia is the important dossier of twelve articles – Expo 67: 40 ans plus tard – in the Bulletin d’histoire politique 17, no. 1 (2008), produced ten years earlier in the wake of the fortieth anniversary of the event. Marcel Fournier, “Une société en mouvement: La Révolution tranquille ou la montée des classes moyennes,” in Les Années 60: Montréal voit grand, ed. André Lortie (Montreal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture, 2004), 31–51. Pauline Curien, “L’Identité nationale exposée. Représentations du Québec à l’Exposition universelle de Montréal 1967 (Expo 67)” (PhD diss., Université Laval, 2003). Pauline Curien, “Une catharsis identitaire: l’avènement d’une nouvelle vision du Québec à Expo 67,” Anthropologie et Sociétés 30, no. 2 (2006): 129–51; “Matérialisation et incarnation du grand récit du Québec moderne à Expo 67,” Bulletin

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d’histoire politique 17, no. 1 (2008): 93–100; and “Une œuvre pour une vision du Québec: Le pavilion du Québec à l’Expo 67,” Luc Durand: Itinéraires d’un architecte, ed. Étienne Desrosiers (Montreal: Productions 7e vague, 2009), 33–9. The September issue of Jean Drapeau’s bilingual promotional magazine, Montréal ’67, gives pride of place to both the creation of Quebec’s international delegations and the general’s visit to Expo. Neither the French nor the English text mentions de Gaulle’s “Vive le Québec libre” or the diplomatic incident that followed, but the French account – roughly twice the length of the English – adds: “du balcon de l’Hôtel de Ville, il avait rendu à Montréal et au Québec un émouvant témoignage d’admiration” (from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, he gave a moving expression of his admiration for Montreal and Quebec). Montréal ’67 4, no. 9 (September 1967): 4. For the extraordinary symbolic investment of de Gaulle’s trip to Quebec, see Michel Hébert and Lyse Roy, “Amour scénarisé, amour vecu: l’entrée solennelle de Charles de Gaulle au Québec en juillet 1967,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 14, no. 1 (2005): 147–59. See Craig Moyes’s chapter in this volume for a reading of Drapeau’s response. Steger and Wahlrab, What Is Global Studies, 25–51. Quoted in Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds, 156. Ph. B. (Philippe Bernard), editorial, “Vive le Québec libre!,” Parti pris 5, no. 1 (September 1967): 5. Over the course of the 1960s, as the Quiet Revolution became increasingly noisy, the radicalization of Québécois nationalism was most clearly and vociferously expressed in the pages of Parti pris, whose fifty-three issues coincided almost exactly with the years during which Expo was programmed, built, staged and (partially) dismantled, from 1963 to 1968. L. R. (Luc Racine), Parti pris 4, nos. 9–12 (May–August 1967): 7. Ibid. “Sur la Terre des hommes nous ne sommes rien ou presque, quantité négligeable, sous-hommes plus ou moins bien nantis à la marge d’un empire dont tous les pouvoirs de destruction et de massacre ne se sont sans doute pas encore pleinement manifestés.” “Dans l’histoire encore jeune des grandes expositions internationales, l’Expo 67 de Montréal apporte, en plus d’un gigantesque déploiement appuyé par la participation de plus de soixante-dix pays, le développement généreux d’un noyau thématique illustrant les principaux aspects de la vie contemporaine, aussi bien scientifique que culturelle.” (To the history of great international exhibitions – still in its infancy – Montreal’s Expo 67, in addition to a gigantic operation supported by the participation of over seventy countries, brings the generous development of a thematic kernel illustrating the principal aspects of [man’s] contemporary scientific and cultural life.) Dozois, Terre des hommes/Man and his World (note on dust-jacket flap; emphasis added). The divergences between

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the French and English texts of Expo are explored in more detail below in the chapters by Craig Moyes and Bill Marshall. The most comprehensive catalogue of pavilions remains the lavish Expo 67: The Memorial Album of the First Category Universal and International Exhibition Held in Montreal from the Twenty-Seventh of April to the Twenty-Ninth of October Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Seven (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1968). Compare the proprietary exhibit on a similar theme created for the PepsiCola/unicef pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. Conceived by Disney, sponsored by Pepsico, and billed as the “happiest cruise that ever sailed round the world,” it was intended to promote “peace and unity” by showing “audio-animatronic” children from around the globe singing the national anthems of each country as fair-goers passed in flat-bottomed boats that were propelled through the building on a purpose-built water-filled channel. Walt Disney finally decided on a single song (“It’s a Small World”), written by Disney staff songwriters, which could then be translated into many languages – and of course copyrighted and resold. In 1966 the ride was moved to Disneyland where it has remained one of the most popular attractions. As Disney expanded to become a global corporation, It’s a Small World was recreated as a standard element at parks in Florida, Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong as part of its current mission to “execute the global strategy of Creativity, Innovation & International growth and seek to deliver the best entertainment to our fans and consumers where, when and how they want it with local relevance.” See “Our Mission,” The Walt Disney Company Europe, Middle East, and Africa (emea), accessed 6 May 2021, https://thewaltdisney company.eu/about/, and Heesok Chang’s chapter in this volume. Juri Lotman, “On the Semiosphere” (1984), trans. Wilma Clark, Sign Systems Studies 33, no. 1 (2005): 213–14. “Meaning generation” is another concept borrowed from semiotics: “[The semiosphere] was also the synthesis of the core principles of Lotman’s semiotics that can be formulated as the principle of cultural isomorphism – which postulates that all semiotic entities from individual consciousness to the totality of human culture are based on similar heterogeneous mechanisms of meaning-generation – and the principle of textuality of culture, the assumption that culture is an exceptionally complex text that in turn consists of texts within texts.” Aleksei Semenenko, “Homo polyglottus: Semiosphere as a Model of Human Cognition,” Sign Systems Studies 44, no. 4 (2016): 494. For pointed examples of partial erasure and the corollary “return of the (locally) repressed,” one need look no further than the Indians of Canada Pavilion or Charles de Gaulle’s visit. “François Dallegret on Expo 67, Le Drug, and the New Penelope Café,” Montreal

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Underground Origins Blog, 29 April 2017, www.montrealundergroundorigins. ca/francois-dallegret-expo-67-le-drug-new-penelope-café. Suzanne Verdal McAllister interviewed by Kate Saunders, You Probably Think This Song Is about You, bbc Radio 4, June 1998; transcript by Marie Mazur, www.leonardcohenfiles.com/verdal.html (accessed 20 December, 2020). Verdal’s unidiomatic “to me” is in the transcribed text. Judy Collins was the first to record the song in 1966; Cohen first performed it himself on 22 February 1967 – his first time on stage performing his own songs – at a benefit concert with Collins at the Village Theatre in New York. Sylvie Simmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 2012), 165. It is perhaps not by chance that one of the producers of Mémoire indienne was André Belleau, who, as co-founder of the Québécois literary review Liberté in 1958, was already thinking deeply about questions of representation, and especially national representation, in the quite specific polyvocal and heteroglossic context of Montreal. For some reflections on writing for a review that, since 1958, has attempted to steer a course between poetics and ideology, see Belleau, “Mon cœur est une ville” (1959) and “Liberté: la porte est ouverte” (1983), in Surprendre les voix (Montreal: Boréal, 1986), 11–20, 21–5. Pierre Vallières, Nègres blancs d’Amérique (Montreal: Éditions Parti pris, 1968). Although the flq and Parti pris were openly hostile to Expo, there is an unexplored link between the anti-colonial, militant nationalism of the former and the bourgeois, “universal” humanism of the latter. Michèle Lalonde, who in 1968 wrote what would become one of the famous literary statements of Québécois cultural resistance for the benefit of the still incarcerated Pierre Vallières, was commissioned in 1967 to write a poem “for two voices” and a symphony orchestra for the gala opening of Expo. Lalonde recently revealed that the central themes of “Speak White” (“the forces of destruction and the fate of minorities”) were first developed in “Terre des hommes” and recast the following year in the stark polemical terms of Nègres blancs d’Amérique. Mario Girard, “Petite histoire d’un grand poème,” La Presse, section Arts, 7 March 2016, https://www.lapresse. ca/debats/chroniques/mario-girard/201605/09/01-4979586-petite-histoiredun-grand-poeme.php. Except among the design cognoscenti, its architectural pride of place in the Quiet Revolution pantheon lasted only until the 1990s when, to Durand’s horror and against his vain plea with a Quebec society in the throes of neoliberal re-education, this nationalist temple was turned into the theatre of the Montreal Casino. Its once lake-blue windows – mirroring river and sky by day, translucent by night – were painted a flat ochre yellow that was explicitly designed to make it resemble a giant gold ingot. See Beth Kapusta, “Interior Architecture,” The Canadian Archi-

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tect 39, no. 4 (August 1994): 30–3. Even so, neoliberal profanity has not yet quite freed the building of its sacred origins: in the summer of 2017, the casino theatre presented a fiftieth anniversary cabaret of songs associated with Expo 67, named for Stéphane Venn’s official Expo song, “Un Jour, Un Jour: Expo 67 – 50 ans.” One of the city’s “what’s on” website descriptions was telling: “The show will be presented at the Casino’s Cabaret, which is in Expo 67’s Quebec pavilion next to the Pavillon de la France (Casino de Montréal).” The Montrealer, 10 July 2017 https://themontrealeronline.com/2017/07/un-jour-un-jour-until-august-24-2017cabaret-du-casino/. Banham’s 1965 article, “A Home Is Not a House,” Art in America 53, no. 2 (April 1965): 70–9, was illustrated by François Dallegret. And which Roy fought to keep: “En bref, longtemps après la signature du contrat, après même la traduction faite, après une dernière mise au point minutieuse, ils m’ont demandé d’accepter un condensé réduit à la moitié. J’ai finalement accepté – puisqu’ils ne voulaient pas rendre mon texte – à condition qu’ils le publient avec la mention abrégé. L’album vient de paraître. Extérieurement, il est assez beau, je pense. Mais comble de l’injustice, le nom de mes traducteurs n’est pas mentionné et, pis que tout, ils se sont permis de chipoter le texte anglais – ayant en main une belle traduction approuvée par moi – à leur façon, en style d’agence publicitaire.” (In short, long after I had signed the contract, and even after a final meticulous proofreading of the completed translation, they asked me to accept a version cut by half. I finally accepted – since they didn’t want to give me back my text – on the condition that they publish it with the note abridged. The album has just come out. It looks quite nice, I think. But, the height of injustice, the names of my translators are not mentioned and, worst of all, the English text has been rewritten in the style of an advertising agency when they had a lovely translation that I had already approved.) Roy to Cécile Chabot, 25 August 1967, in Femmes de lettres: Lettres de Gabrielle Roy à ses amies, 1945–1978 (Montreal: Boréal, 2005), 125. The famous Montebello Conference on Expo’s theme was held from 21 to 23 May at the Seigniory Club (now the Château Montebello Hotel), a private resort built in the 1930s on the former lands of the patriote Louis-Joseph Papineau, situated on the Ottawa river about 100 kilometres upstream from its confluence with the Saint Lawrence at Montreal. The list of fifteen members of the Advisory Committee on Theme is given in the First Annual Report of the Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition (1963), 278. Yves Jasmin gives a slightly shorter list (but with no reference to any primary source) in La Petite Histoire d’Expo 67, 453. Missing from the latter are John Deutsch, F.R. Scott, and André Laurendeau. “À côté de grandes espérances que font lever en nous tant de réalisations d’entreaide à l’échelle planétaire, il faut mettre dans la balance le danger de l’égoïsme sans cesse renaissant, notre cruelle indifférence encore à tant de malheurs, et la

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reprise constante de l’orgueil racial si contraire à notre avancement.” (Against the high hopes that such global achievements give rise to, we must weigh the ever-present danger of self-interest, our continuing cruel indifference to so much suffering, and the constant return to racial preference, so contrary to our [collective] progress.) Gabrielle Roy, “Terre des hommes,” in Fragiles lumières de la terre: Écrits divers, 1942–1970 (Montreal: Les Éditions Quinze, 1978), 227. 58 “Ce qui t’a été présenté ici pourrait se comparer à une immense classe où l’homme est enseigné à l’homme.” Ibid., 231. 59 But he questions whether the pedagogic payoff justifies the enormous outlay of resources for what remains a geographically and economically restricted clientele. “Even if an exposition could be a perfect teaching device, as we have suggested, is it worth the expense and effort?” Eco, “A Theory of Expositions,” 305–6. 60 “L’essayiste travaille dans le champ culturel avec les signes de la culture. Il a le bonheur d’habiter la sémiosphère.” (The essay writer works in the field of culture with the signs of that culture. He has the good fortune of inhabiting the semiosphere.) André Belleau, “Petite essayistique” (1983), Surprendre les voix, 88. Lotman first published “On the semiosphere” in Russian in 1984 (appearing in English for the first time in 2005), and the concept has gained currency over the last twenty years or so, especially in the contexts of multimedia, translation, and cultural studies. It is unclear how Belleau was able to pick it up in 1983. For an excellent overview of the concept and its current relevance, see Winfried Nöth, “The topography of Yuri Lotman’s semiosphere,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2015): 11–26.

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1 Expo 67 and Its (Laurentian) World

craig moyes Un hymne à la grandeur de l’homme. – Pierre Dupuy, “Preface,” Terre des hommes/Man and His World (final sentence)1 Et je situerai l’homme où naît mon harmonie – Gatien Lapointe, “Ode au Saint-Laurent” (first line)2

“At the centre of it all,” wrote Pierre Dupuy, “was the Saint Lawrence.” After finishing his term as commissioner general of the 1967 Montreal International and Universal Exhibition, held over six frenetic months on two man-made islands off the shore of the city proper, an exhausted Dupuy took a long holiday on another exotic island, Tahiti. It was supposed to be a well-earned rest ordered by his doctors, but his sleep was broken by nightmares of the organizational and political debacles that had swirled around what would nevertheless turn out to be the most successful world’s fair of the twentieth century. He tried to quell his anxious dreams by writing a memoir, published posthumously as Expo 67, ou la découverte de la fierté (Expo 67, or the Discovery of Pride). Unlike his envoi to the official exhibition album written the year previously, in which the pan-humanist ambitions of the Expo theme Terre des hommes/Man and His World are foregrounded, Dupuy locates the “grandeur” of the enterprise within neither the universalizing notion of “Man” nor the internationalist vectors implied by “World.” Instead, its source is to be found closer to home: “the River, as my French-speaking compatriots say, without mentioning its name, since in their eyes it is unique in majesty and liquid mass, and is the very flux of their history.”3 It is significant that Dupuy, a career federal diplomat before becoming de facto “ambassador” and “head of state” for an international exhibition that was meant to celebrate one hundred years of Canadian confederation, should invoke the symbolic matrix of an older, parallel nation. That nation, founded

in the seventeenth century through the alienation of Indigenous sovereignty over the shores of the Saint Lawrence and only ratified into legal existence a mari usque ad mare4 by the British North America Act in the nineteenth, was not the yet-to-be minted bilingual “Canada” (the Official Languages Act, mooted by the Laurendeau-Dunton commission from 1963, would not come into force until 1969). Rather, it was the longer-standing “imagined political community,” to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term,5 of what were once known as Canadiens, later as Canadiens français, and finally as Québécois. Despite the commemorative freight brought by the centennial year, this is not the place to rehearse the bicultural struggle for Canada or the rise of nationalism in Quebec.6 But the overlaying of contiguous yet nevertheless quite separate national moments leading up to 1967 – the maple leaf “rebranding” of Canada and active governmental intervention in the formation of Canadian identity under Lester Pearson;7 the de-provincialization and re-nationalization of francophone Quebeckers under Jean Lesage and Daniel Johnson;8 the sudden urgency of Indigenous representation borne on a global wave of 1960s radicalism9 – set the stage for that year’s world’s fair to become a national(ist) experiment like no other. Much has been made of the contemporary media zeitgeist that Expo seemed to embrace and shape, its “spectacular showcasing of audiovisual technologies distinguish[ing] it from all previous expositions.”10 Much too, at least in the popular imagination, of its (partially) federally funded place as the main event within the centenary celebrations of the young country of Canada.11 Very few scholars have, however, perceived that Expo was also a specifically Québécois attempt to participate in a Canadian and indeed global conversation about evolving national representation, a conversation made possible in the first instance by Expo’s symbolically and historically overdetermined setting on the Saint Lawrence in Montreal. On the face of it, Expo seemed no different from other world exhibitions in that the “nation” remained the ostensible backbone of the whole enterprise, an enterprise that Dupuy – “a man of international vision” – was recruited to lead precisely because of his long experience as ambassador to a number of European countries.12 Indeed, the concept of the nation seemed in many ways even more central to Expo 67, as Johanne Sloan and Rhona Richman Keneally observe, “precisely because the array of self-promoting national pavilions, exhibitions, and displays was situated against the backdrop of Canadian and Québécois nationalisms.”13 But if Expo was concerned with national representation, which “host” nation was meant to be showcased, and to what end? These were not just questions relating to jurisdiction or to financial stakes, but properly existential disputes which were becoming increasingly acute across the political and cultural spectrum in Quebec in the lead-up to the fair. The

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Official Guide, prefaced by the commissioner general, strikes a line that is either very coy, or very clear: it is neither Canada, nor Quebec; it is the Montreal International and Universal Exhibition. Six pages of the city’s history and current achievements precede the practical information, maps, and summaries of the pavilions that make up the bulk of the guidebook. Canada is mentioned just once (“Montreal is the banking and the financial centre of Canada”), as is Quebec (“Montreal represents 60% of the total economy of Quebec”). This is despite Quebec’s ongoing Quiet Revolution bringing active provincial intervention to areas that had formerly been the preserve of the Church, interventions that were moreover visibly reflected in the self-consciously “modern” urban fabric of Montreal touted by the guide. We should remember, too, that the city’s vaunted financial and commercial dominance within Canada – largely anglophone, and born of two centuries of Atlantic shipping trade on the river – was already losing ground to Toronto; and the joint CanadianAmerican Saint Lawrence Seaway (opened in 1959 by Queen Elizabeth II and Dwight Eisenhower) would ultimately deal a major blow to Montreal’s primacy by allowing much maritime traffic to bypass the port altogether.14 But in 1967, with a population of 2,600,000, Montreal was still Canada’s largest city.15 It was also Canada’s only truly bilingual city – in the sense that French and English could be heard in pretty much every walk of life, even if only a minority of citizens actually spoke both languages fluently – as well as being Quebec’s only real space of immigrant-led cosmopolitanism.16 The stated aim of Expo 67, however, was to provide more than a window on the material achievements or cultural sophistication of Montreal (or Quebec, or Canada), as the final sentence in this section of the guide underscores: “Montreal is not merely a cosmopolitan metropolis: It is a city with a particularly universal concept – heightened by the advent of Expo 67.”17 This chapter will argue that Montreal’s embrace of “the universal” should not be understood as mystifying or meaningless, or merely as a vestigial lexeme brought by the French translation of “World’s Fair” (Exposition universelle), but as a serious attempt to do justice to an older and specifically French-Canadian ideal within the partially urban and partially utopian space opened up by Expo’s felicitous river setting. It is certainly true, as the guide tells us, that “Montreal can ascribe its prodigious expansion to its geographical location. In the navigation sense it is a turntable, the farthest bound of ocean navigation which gives way to lake navigation, and terminus of the seaway to the great lakes. The second most important port of North America, it is 1,000 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, and one of the greatest of all the world’s inland ports.”18 But beyond the national and international connectivity that the river makes possible, beyond the obvious economic benefits for the port and for

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the city, Montreal’s universality was to be found, as Dupuy suggests, above all in the “flux of history” that the Saint Lawrence represents. That history is the national history of French Canada. To see how deeply it is embedded within the project of Expo, one need only start with the political alliance between the mayor of Montreal and the exhibition’s commissioner general. Each was a disciple of one of the luminaries of modern Québécois nationalism: in the case of Drapeau, Canon Lionel Groulx (1877–1967), the great historian and intellectual organizer of a public discourse aimed at reaffirming the national identity and spiritual mission of French Canada within North America;19 in the case of Dupuy, Édouard Montpetit (1881–1954), founder at the Université de Montréal of the first Quebec school of thought on political science, economics, and international relations.20 A third figure from the same generation of modern nationalist thinkers must be mentioned as well: Brother Marie-Victorin (1885–1944).21 A botanist who began his career in literature, Marie-Victorin’s literary and scientific attentiveness to the eco-social cradle of the French-Canadian nation found traction in the 1930s with a number of political writers who were arguing for an understanding of national identity based on the historical and geographical specificity of the Saint Lawrence River Valley. By 1957, Raymond Barbeau and the “Laurentian Alliance” were brandishing Groulx’s reading of history as the principal argument for an independent republic under the aegis of Marie-Victorin’s neologism Laurentie.22 The introduction to their first pamphlet is (almost) prophetic: “The creation of the Republic of Lawrencia is not only desirable but necessary, possible and relatively easy to achieve in the near future. Nothing can stop it coming into existence when the time is right, perhaps in 1967.”23 Neither Drapeau nor Dupuy was associated with Barbeau’s right-wing separatist movement; Dupuy was a staunch federalist and, as we shall see, Drapeau and Barbeau espoused positions on the national question that were in many ways antithetical. But the overlap between the historical nationalism of Lionel Groulx, the economic nationalism of Édouard Montpetit, and the physio-technocratic nationalism of Marie-Victorin was a key factor in Drapeau’s unlikely decision to situate the event in the middle of the river. With views onto the city’s active port and bustling urban centre beneath Mount Royal’s giant illuminated cross on one side, onto the new international seaway hugging the south shore on the other, onto the broad expanses of the Saint Lawrence pointing downstream to the Old World and upstream to the New, the island siting of Expo would be able to convoke the three national pillars of history, commerce, and geography as no other site could. It is striking how little commentary there has been on the fact that “Canada’s Fair” was built in the centre of that symbolically freighted channel, with its in-

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direct appeal to the history of French Canada moreover heightened by new or revised nationalist toponymy brought by Expo’s construction. Consider the three principal loci of the site: the massive expansion of the Île Sainte-Hélène, named for the saintly wife of Samuel de Champlain, first permanent settler of New France; the creation of an entirely new island, the Île Notre-Dame, a variant of the original name of the first French settlement on this spot in the upper Saint Lawrence in 1642, Fort Ville-Marie;24 and the extension of the nineteenthcentury dyke that protected the Old Port, Mackay Pier (known initially as Guard Pier),25 and renamed Cité du Havre in 1967 in a clear echo of the French harbour city that saw Champlain off on his first major voyage of colonization in 1604 and from which so many settlers would subsequently depart. These became spectacular new additions to a fluvial environment already thickly layered with historical reference. Expo was situated above the Jacques Cartier Bridge (renamed in 1934 from the original “Harbour Bridge”) and below the Victoria Jubilee Bridge (so between the “discoverer” of New France and the monarch who oversaw its entry into Confederation), with the newly built Concordia Bridge/Pont de la Concorde (after the motto of the city, concordia salus) joining the islands to the port. A little further downstream, another crossing (opened just a month before Expo) was named for Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, member of the nationalist Parti canadien (later the Parti patriote) who, in 1842, was the first politician in the newly united Province of Canada to address Parliament in the banned language of French. And on the south shore in Longueuil, erected to power Expo itself with electricity harnessed 500 miles away in the heartland of the province, was the new Marie-Victorin Hydro-Québec substation. Municipal documents prepared for the choice of site argue that because a universal exhibition should reflect “the vitality of human civilization in a grandiose setting,” the island siting speaks for itself: “the choice of the islands in the Saint Lawrence facing Montreal for the site of the Canadian International and Universal Exhibition represents the living symbol of a nation in full growth.”26 But again, which nation? Nominally, Canada: the federal government was, after all, paying half the bill for this jewel in the crown of the country’s Centennial celebrations, and reports such as this one were written to persuade both anglophone and francophone decision-makers. Nevertheless, it is no surprise that the “living symbolism” of the site would resonate above all with the francophone public (who would go on to make up the majority of Expo’s visitors; see appendix) while remaining more or less invisible to anglophones. This was effectively spelled out in La Presse the day after the mayor’s announcement.27 After enumerating the various practical and financial reasons for choosing the island location over other possible sites within greater

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Montreal, journalists Raymond Masse and Albert Tremblay suggested that the two most powerful justifications – les deux éléments de force – were the physical presence of the port and the river itself. “It is at the meeting place of these two elements [the one reflecting ‘material growth’ and the other ‘human civilization’], that the symbol of the ‘new’ nation of Canada will arise.”28 The quotation marks around “new” are telling. To be sure, Expo may be considered to represent Canada insofar as its host city, Montreal, could be seen to project a certain idealized image – modern, cosmopolitan, even (at times) bilingual – of a young country ready and able to welcome the world on the occasion of its 100th birthday. But the scare quotes imply more than this: Expo will also represent the older nation of Canada, precisely because it will be built on that river whose history flows from the national myth of foundation to the recent achievements of the Quiet Revolution, and that still bears the image of what Groulx called notre mystique nationale.29 It is instructive to compare Groulx’s reflections on the semicentennial of Confederation with those of his intellectual heirs fifty years later. Writing in 1917, Groulx notes the same tensions between the two “Canadas”30 as he wryly rehearses the debates on what the new country ought to be called: A haughty optimism shone through the very name given to the Confederation. From autumn 1864, the search was on for an appropriate name with which to baptise the newborn state. Scratching their heads, several bright sparks from the other province came up with such beauties as Cabotia, Borelia, Tupona, Norland, Canadia, Columbia, Nova Britannia, New Britain, and, the cherry on the cake, Aqua Terra. La Minerve quite rightly objected to a number of these barbarous appellations; it suggested, more tastefully, Laurentide or Canada. The second name, supported by a number of our statesmen, finally carried the day. And should we not applaud the choice? The word Canada had the virtue of evoking an entire history and recalling a great geographic unity forged by the immortal discoverers. The British North America Act conferred upon us the title of Dominion of Canada, and the French translation [of Dominion] underscores its power, since the term Puissance is a synonym for Sovereign State.31 Groulx clearly understands the symbolic weight of such nominative acts. Many names were suggested by English Canadians (“from the other province”), but it would be the one offered by the French-language Montreal newspaper La Minerve32 that would finally be adopted. “The word Canada had the advantage of evoking an entire history and recalling a great geographic unity, that made

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by the immortal discoverers” – a unity (does the demonstrative pronoun “that [celle]” in his text refer to geography or history or both?), not of a vast continent linked coast to coast by a yet-to-be completed railroad, but of a land defined by the river valley which, according to the French colonial myth, had been discovered, settled, and “storied” by a single people. It is scarcely surprising that among the many “barbarous appellations” proposed for the new country, the only other name worthy of consideration was an early variant of Marie-Victorin’s Laurentie. Against the ex post facto English-Canadian trope of the railway as national unifier, French Canada consistently returns to the Saint Lawrence River Valley and to the Canadiens who have inhabited it for generations. Indeed, to make a genuine nation of the Confederation, Groulx writes a little further on in the same text, “one would need to create between its provinces and races less artificial links than ribbons of steel.”33 Fortuitously (and “optimistically”) dilated by the British North America Act into the Dominion of Canada, the full name of that new sociogeographical unity even suggests – at least in the unofficial French translation that Groulx refers to here34 – synonymy with political sovereignty. Half a century later, the cultural and historical significance of the Saint Lawrence remained undiminished. Only now, instead of merely providing an “impregnable ground” for the French-Canadian race at home and succour for its diaspora abroad, as it did for Groulx in 1917,35 that geographical unity would also reveal itself to the generation of the 1960s as a privileged springboard for a (Catholic) humanism redefined for its newly secular age. In April 1963 (only a few weeks after the announcement that “L’Expo de 1967” would be held on the river) a long poem was published, striking an instant chord in Quebec: Gatien Lapointe’s “Ode au Saint-Laurent” (Ode to the Saint Lawrence). Its initial print run of 1,000 quickly sold out and it would go on to sell 12,000 copies through successive reprints and editions to the end of the decade – a remarkable figure for a book of verse, even considered within the minor Quebec poetry “boom” of the 1950s and 60s.36 Although the poem is signed “Paris, January 1961,” it gives voice to much more than a conventional expression of longing for home; it articulates – literally, in the sense of providing a dynamic link – the connection between the site of national origin and the wider world represented, in this poem, by the boundless ocean into which the river naturally flows. The poem’s genesis can be traced to the previous year, to the precise moment when the author first saw the Saint Lawrence coming into view from the deck of the liner bringing him back after five years abroad. As Lapointe explains in a letter to a friend: “[the poem] was born, born within me when I returned to Canada in 1960 after my first stay in Europe. I was at sea. Entering the Gulf, which is still the sea, I was suddenly awoken,

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surprised, moved and delighted by something. The wind was lashing my face; I breathed it in, and looked. Then, moving up the river, which is also still almost the sea, a thin line of land became visible, far away, on the horizon. Slowly, slowly its banks moved together; slowly, something rose within me that I wanted to express in this ode.”37 It is a little-known fact that the title, “Ode au Saint-Laurent,” was a lastminute change imposed by the publisher that the author later regretted as being “too folkloric” and “horrible.” Lapointe’s original title – much closer to the humanist spirit that would drive the conception of Expo 67 – was “L’homme en marche” (The March of Man/Humanity in Evolution).38 The Montebello Conference, convened shortly after Drapeau’s initial announcement but before federal approval for the site had been granted,39 uses almost exactly the same turn of phrase in its report, suggesting that the aim of a thematically driven universal exhibition should “lead us to the idea of humanity on the march, of a transcendance [sic] of the human mind.”40 Contrasting the disconnected displays of national technological achievement, or the “expressive vertical symbols” that were the hallmark of former world’s fairs, the novelist Gabrielle Roy, who was likely responsible for writing up the report, stresses that the Montreal exhibition “must not be presented as a ‘Terre des nations’ or a ‘Terre des machines,’” but something else entirely: nothing less than “a huge work of art.”41 Such universal aspirations were not simply abstractions launched on the back of the general “one-world” movement of the 1960s;42 they were also meant to resonate quietly through the more deeply anchored “local” and “national” landscape within which the exhibition would take place. Near the end of the report, at the point at which the author suggests that “Canadian unity should be presented not as a ‘fait accompli,’ but as a challenge and a search,” the conventional English designation for the fair – “World Exhibition,” used until that point throughout – becomes suddenly “Universal Exhibition.” Lapsus calami? Perhaps, but a significant one if so. For if it is undeniable that competing versions of the “national” were coming into increasing conflict over the course of the 1960s in Quebec, Expo provided a unique (albeit temporary) opportunity to resolve those tensions thanks to the social, aesthetic, and literary imaginary tied to its location: “if the ‘sense of place’ is to be realized to its full potential, exploitation of the River, one of the world’s great historical rivers, must be made by the arrangement of vistas looking outward from the Exhibition site itself.”43 A similar geographically anchored “universal humanism” is the central motif of Lapointe’s final published poem. Through the direct (re)encounter with the Saint Lawrence, the poet is not simply returned to “Quebec,” but to a fluvial matrix that permits the lyrical expansion of the poetic “I” from the

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river to the continent, from the continent to the ocean, and from the ocean to the world at large. Following the initial line, set off from the rest of the text by half a page of blank space (“And I shall place Man[kind] at the wellspring of my harmony,” quoted in the epigraph to this chapter), the poem suggests that both “Man” and the “World” are made possible by the poet’s emergence from the primal clay of the Saint Lawrence: Ma langue est d’Amérique Je suis né de ce paysage J’ai pris souffle dans le limon du fleuve Je suis la terre et je suis la parole Le soleil se lève à la plante de mes pieds Le soleil s’endort sous ma tête Mes bras sont deux océans le long de mon corps Le monde entier vient frapper à mes flancs J’entends le monde battre dans mon sang

My tongue is American I arose from this landscape I drew breath from the clay of the river I am the earth and I am the word The sun rises at the soles of my feet The sun goes to sleep beneath my head My arms are two oceans alongside my body The whole world comes to my shores I hear the world beat in my blood

For those with a long literary memory – of whom Gabrielle Roy was doubtless one, and Jean Drapeau likely another – there are echoes here of Pierre Dupuy’s only novel, written some thirty-five years previously.44 In the opening pages of this colonial “portrait of the artist as a young man,” a visiting French lecturer on literature fires up the narrator’s ambition to write a work that will at last resonate beyond the borders of his native province. The novel ends with the narrator’s departure for those international (read: French) horizons, as his ship leaves Montreal and “all the deformity of its modern ugliness and beauty”45 to navigate down the Saint Lawrence, in a mirror image of the movement of the poet returning to Quebec from France that underwrites Lapointe’s poem. It is not just the title and the name of the central character – André Laurence, Canadien français – that are clearly overdetermined here. Despite the stolid realist tradition within which Dupuy is writing, the mystical power of the Saint Lawrence imposes itself as source of poetic inspiration. At the midpoint of the novel, as the narrator gazes out over the river, he realizes his subject

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is before him: “The landscape filled him with a gracious serenity, with an almost religious admiration. And all of a sudden, it came to him in a flash: the River, what a unique subject for a poem! It was just what he needed.”46 If Expo could be read, as the Montebello report suggested it should be, as a “huge work of art,” then Terre des hommes was more than just its theme, in the conventional sense of a “subject” framed and developed by multiple means of aesthetic representation. As became increasingly clear even as the details of the project took shape,47 Drapeau would underscore Expo’s universal vocation in repeated pronouncements made over its conception, construction, and execution (continuing even through the early years of its afterlife as the slowly deteriorating municipal theme park, Terre des hommes, 1968–81). For Drapeau, that vocation was already implicit in the landscape, and it would be made explicit by turning the river, already invested with national symbolism, into nothing less than its “theatre.” It is in these terms that the mayor prefaces the second issue of the city’s new promotional magazine, Montréal ’64, with a lofty (bilingual) reflection on the imminent official handover of city lands to the Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition: The event is worth noting. It is the result of a daring idea: utilizing the river and the incomparable perspectives it offers from both banks as site of the exhibition. It is the realization of a great dream: utilizing geography to illustrate the very theme of the manifestation. “Man and his World.” From the start, we sought to identify this “World” with the site … It is a fascinating setting, expressing simultaneously a synthesis, a symbol and a lesson. The synthesis is of water and land, an expression of the fraternal and indissoluble alliance of seas and continents, rivers and plains, which condition all civilizations, yet marked in turn by man’s genius and action. Is that not the very image of Canada, a country of vast waterways sweeping into the great oceans of the world? Is that not the very symbol of our city which owes its fortune and prestige to its magnificent river? … It is in this way that in 1967, Montreal wished to offer the countries of the world a meeting-place worthy of the universe, the whole of humanity, its dreams and its efforts; a site which, from the beginning, will have given to the exhibition it embraces [l’exposition dont il sera le théâtre] the profound and stirring significance of “Man and his World” [Terre des hommes].48

Tasked with providing the text for the bilingual official Expo album, Gabrielle Roy arrived at the nearly completed Expo site a few months before the opening

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and again lingered by the river – notre grand fleuve, as the French text has it49 – lauding “the new and spectacular vantage points” opened up by the creation of the new islands. She takes note of the swirling waters struggling against the recently erected pillars of the Concordia bridge “in the channel parallel to the seaway,” not to suggest the bright technocratic future that such engineering represents, as might be expected according to the usual rhetoric of world’s fairs,50 but in order to evoke a colonial past inseparable from the flow of the water itself: “At this spot in the river, we are so well reminded of those first pages of Canada’s history that open with an interminable struggle for survival against nature. The Saint Lawrence, which holds within its banks such proud memories of the men [le Saint-Laurent, dont on imagine parfois que, tout en roulant ses eaux, il se souvient encore de la petite poignée d’hommes] who disembarked there long ago into the uncharted forests, exposed to every conceivable peril, was indeed the ideal setting for this immense and peaceful meeting of the nations of the earth.”51 The French text prefers “waters” to “banks,” the river to the shore. And Roy makes no mistake: in the case of the Expo site, it was its unique ex-centricity that saw it rise from these waters “like the Earth in the book of Genesis,” looking over a city whose appearance, at least, in words redacted from the final published version, “we should like to consider French.”52 The biblical reference is not incidental. Neither is her invocation of “Canada’s history.” It is almost as if her focus on the river attempts to turn the reader away from the first part of the psalm (72:8) that gave the Dominion of Canada its official motto, Et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare (“And he shall have dominion from sea to sea”), in order to revive the rest of the verse and imbue it with a newly relevant humanist mission appropriate to both the local and the global situation of Expo 67: a flumine usque ad terminus terrae, “from the river” – that is, notre grand fleuve – “unto the ends of the earth.” Sure enough, to the amazement of most Canadians, something truly extraordinary was created on that river around a contemporary theme, “Man and His World” (which had evolved, via “Man in his world,”53 from the original idea, “Man and the City”). Marshall McLuhan’s recently coined “global village” is often assumed to be the driving force behind the proto-globalist ambitions of the fair.54 But once again, the English overshadows its Laurentian origins. Terre des hommes was the phrase that had been chosen to express the theme in French. This was not just a way of rendering more elegant a possible but clunky formulation like L’Homme et son monde. Terre des hommes was the title of a 1939 philosophical memoir by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (published in English as Wind, Sand and Stars), whose observations and reflections from his elevated vantage as a pioneering aviator in the 1920s and ’30s were first suggested as the theme for Expo by Montreal’s bookish director of urban plan-

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ning, Claude Robillard. They were explicitly seized upon by Gabrielle Roy at the Montebello Conference as offering a succinct form of modern humanism for a new age of global commerce, of transnational migration, and indeed, as the American and Soviet pavilions trumpeted, of supra-global space travel. “Moved as he was by a heightened awareness of the solitude of all creation and by the human need for solidarity, Saint-Exupéry found a phrase to express his anguish and his hope that was as simple as it was rich in meaning; and because that phrase was chosen many years later to be the governing idea of Expo 67, a group of people from all walks of life was invited by the Corporation to reflect upon it and to see how it could be given tangible form.”55 If, as Roy suggests, much of the originality of the Montreal World’s Fair could be said to be the result of a number of very talented people meditating on a single phrase, we should also remember that it is not, really, a single phrase. In the final published literature, Terre des hommes and Man and His World are not congruent. The English translation of Roy’s introductory text in the official published album employs the French title in the first line, but thereafter it is translated as Man’s Earth (not, curiously, as Man and His World), the English possessive in both formulations losing the polysemic nuance of the genitive in the French (Land belonging to men/Planet composed of humans). Roy remarks later in the same text on the fact that Expo will be the first world’s fair to be held in Canada, suggesting that the very name of the country will resonate as it never has before, effectively extending the call of friendship and solidarity outwards beyond its borders: “Le beau mot à la fois doux et fort à notre oreille, ‘Canada,’ allait résonner dans le monde comme un vocable de ralliement et une invitation à l’amitié.”56 Why then is the first clause dropped from the English version (which begins: “The word ‘Canada’ would re-echo throughout the world like a rallying call and an invitation to friendship”)? Because the sweetness and power of the word Canada, heard here by the implicitly francophone ear (notre oreille), must in the first instance be understood as la terre de nos aïeux, not as “our home and native land.” We might say that Canada and “Canada” are as out of register in this (bilingual) text as they are in the national anthem and as they were for Lionel Groulx; they ought to be synonymous, but they do not refer to quite the same thing. In this battle for symbolic investment in both the nation and the world, Expo plays an ambiguous but fascinating role. Since it was both a federal and a provincial enterprise, neither government could properly claim full ownership. In that context, it is unsurprising that the increasingly nationalist Quebec government would be less interested in a “world’s fair” than in a project which would be 100 per cent Québécois and which would show the world a modern and confident nation – without “French-Canadian” folklore, with-

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out the Church, without federal tutelage, “without parentheses” (as Gilles Groulx would put it in the film commissioned for the Quebec Pavilion, but never shown).57 Luc Durand’s Quebec Pavilion offered a brave attempt at synthesis among the various architectural representations of nationhood across the Expo site. A translucent box on wooden pillars standing alone in the lagoon of Île Notre Dame (set off from the cluster of “Canadian” pavilions – Canada, the Atlantic Provinces, the Western Provinces, Ontario), it aimed simultaneously to represent the nation’s isolation, its inward/outward-looking prospect (visitors could see out by daylight, while at night the illuminated interior was visible from outside), and, as Durand affirmed in an interview many years later, its literal foundation in both the natural and human resources of la drave (logs floated from the interior of the province down waterways to mills on the Saint Lawrence).58 The New York Times called it “an exceptionally refined and sensitively detailed work of contemporary architecture with an exhibition design that is a three-dimensional sensory abstraction of sight and electronic sound that says, suddenly and stunningly, what a 1967 exhibit should be.”59 The pavilion stood out as projecting a resolutely modern image of Quebec, both inside and out, eschewing the past as much as possible in favour of the future. Less immediately seductive and imposing, but equally focused on the idea of national progress, was the Quebec Industries Pavilion in the Cité du Havre. The only separate industrial pavilion organized by a Canadian province (the other provincial pavilions incorporated their industries and economies as part of their displays), it had its own theme, the Saint Lawrence Industrial Valley; and it would be powered, literally and metaphorically, by the now fully nationalized Hydro-Québec which, at the instigation of the then provincial minister of Natural Resources, René Lévesque, had initially balked at sponsoring the Man the Producer theme pavilion, on essentially nationalist grounds.60 The pavilion also provided one of the most unusual and – at least for Québécois attendees – popular audio-visual installations at Expo: live closed-circuit footage showing the last stages in the construction of the signature mega-project of the “Quiet Revolutionary” Lesage government, the Manic-5 dam, on the Manicouagan river 800 kilometres north of Montreal. That such a spectacle was popular should come as no surprise.61 If Gabrielle Roy’s reflections on the near-completion of an officially “Canadian” event contained an implicit, almost coded reference to the historical foundations of French Canada, the highly visible nationalist investment in hydro-electric power on the Manicouagan river offered viewers an explicit appeal to the (imagined) nation as well as to that nation’s (real) geographical territory, which the dam’s advanced technology was shown to master in real time.

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1.1 Billboard advertising the closed-circuit transmission of works on the Manicouagan Dam. The sign reads: “at expo67 / MANIC 5 / televised live / in colour / on a giant screen / at the Quebec / Industries / Pavilion.”

Stéphane Savard has pointed out the vital role of Hydro-Québec in supporting the collective identity of the Québécois as part of a general substitution, over the course of the 1960s, of a new narrative of technological advancement for the traditional story of agricultural colonization and cultural survival that had been eloquently told by Lionel Groulx, amongst others. Manic-5 – still today the world’s largest arch-and-buttress dam – showed that the Québécois, for the first time in their history, could control and even invent the new technologies that would permit them to master nature, and own the economic benefits of both. The images sent directly from the north to the Quebec Industries Pavilion signalled not just the return of untapped wealth to its rightful owners,62 but a decisive victory that went beyond the traditional colonial investment of the land: a stirring narrative, as Daniel Johnson wrote in his speech for the dam’s official opening, that demonstrated that the nation was no longer

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subject to geography, but now held dominion over it. And dominion was, as Lionel Groulx suggested in a not-unrelated context, another word for power and sovereignty. It is noteworthy that Johnson’s speech in 1968 concludes with a comparison between Manic-5 and the universal exhibition that had closed its gates in Montreal less than a year before: “The dam we have before us is a remarkable illustration of the spirit that presided over Expo 67 and which continues to drive this monument to universal brotherhood.”63 Here too, the biblical cadences that will lead the premier to compare the dam to a “citadel,” to a “gigantic cathedral” and to a “pyramid for a new age,” are not incidental to its placement as the main event in the Quebec Industries Pavilion. Like the Israelites awaiting divine intervention by the Red Sea (“They are bewildered by the land; the wilderness has closed them in,” Exodus 14:3), Quebeckers were invited to witness their deliverance – live on screen – through a technological miracle suddenly able to “modify the course of the most mighty rivers, fill in valleys, move mountains and bring immense volumes of water to rise up behind walls like this one.”64 The contrast between this singular spectacle in the Quebec Industries Pavilion and the exhibition as a whole is instructive. The Expo 67 Official Guide opens with the “Miracle of Expo” on the flyleaf in two before-and-after photos of the Saint Lawrence site, showing quite clearly how “geography has been modified” through the application of technology. But for Dupuy, Drapeau, and Roy, as we have seen, it is not the technology per se that is meant to be foregrounded; it is the “living symbol” of the river itself. For Johnson, on the other hand, the dam symbolizes something quite specific: a new national mastery of technology, which will durably achieve what Expo only temporarily promised by at last turning the “hinterland which used to be known as a Terre de Caïn into a veritable Terre des hommes.”65 The allusion to what Jacques Cartier, when he first saw the inhospitable north shore of the Saint Lawrence in 1534, was supposed to have called the “land God gave to Cain” is a shorthand way of suggesting that this project is poised to take over the nationalist and indeed the Catholic-humanist ambitions of French Canada by first owning the land “God gave to Cartier,” as it were, in order to extend those ambitions beyond the “enclave encompassing the most populous part of Quebec,” as Marie-Victorin defined la Laurentie,66 to the full extent of the province. It will then fall to the state, as the legitimate representative of the people, to harness this (quiet) revolutionary “potential”67 and forge “new syntheses, new complementarities, new solidarities” within what is essentially, although Johnson does not use the word, a globalizing world: “Quebec will be part of a world

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1.2 Inside cover of the official Expo guide showing “The Miracle of Expo.”

1.3 Screening room at the Quebec Industries Pavilion.

where supersonic Airbuses, the multiplication of international exchanges and telecommunications via satellite will have made it even smaller and more interdependent than it is today … In the era of satellites just as in the era of great hydroelectric dams, Quebec must and will remain at the vanguard, open to the most fruitful influences, a laboratory for confrontation and synthesis, a source of creative emulation and fraternal solidarity.”68 Despite the soaring rhetoric, Johnson is essentially proposing a neoliberal model of internationalism more at home in the world’s fair of the nineteenth century than in the putatively “transhuman” spaces of la Terre des hommes. The picture of fairgoers in thrall to the “live” spectacle of the almost crenelated citadel under construction in northern Quebec is an image that suggests an analogy with precisely the sort of national exhibition, replete with superannuated “vertical symbols,” that had been decisively rejected by the Montebello Conference. The reader of Walter Benjamin cannot help but be reminded of

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the scene from the Crystal Palace evocatively described by Hugh Walpole and quoted in the Arcades Project – “There were in the machine-room the ‘self-acting mules,’ the Jacquard lace machines, the envelope machines, the power looms, the model locomotives, the centrifugal pumps, the vertical steam engines, all of these working like mad, while the thousands nearby, in their high hats and bonnets, sat patiently waiting, passive, unwitting that the Age of Man on this Planet was doomed.”69

With the waters of the Manicouagan River “imprisoned in this concrete fortress” and “no longer able to find their way to the sea”70 unless mediated by the turbines (and closed-circuit television) of the emergent nation of Quebec, it would be largely left to the city of Montreal, the third player in the game, to reclaim the Saint Lawrence’s historical connection to the world within the temporary context of Expo. It was a context that was quite literally inter-national, as the Montebello report’s “challenge and search” regarding Canadian unity suggested, between the two nations of Quebec and English Canada. It is a curious irony of history that it would once again be thanks to a French ship navigating up the Saint Lawrence from the ocean beyond that the centrality of “the River” to this redefined national but also civic project would be revealed in its most dramatic way. Charles de Gaulle’s visit in July was famously the most contentious of any foreign dignitary to Expo 67. The president of France was not just another head of state for Drapeau, who was very keen on letting the world know that Montreal was the second-largest French-speaking city after Paris. So keen, in fact, that despite Montebello’s injunction against “expressive vertical symbols,” the mayor had initially proposed dismantling the most enduring monument of the 1889 Paris Exhibition and very symbol of France, the Eiffel Tower, and reassembling it on the Île Sainte-Hélène for the duration of Expo.71 And for de Gaulle, Montreal was not simply another North American city. Having studied the Marquis de Montcalm in his youth, he was acutely aware of the vicissitudes of French Canada and wanted to offer support for Quebec’s current “resistance” to Anglo-American hegemony. He had no interest in attending une foire, as he called it, but he was seduced by the grander idea of somehow repaying the debt France had incurred when it abandoned its former colony to the British at the close of the Seven Years’ War.72 The journey was intended to be symbolically laden from the start. Crossing the Atlantic with 600 men aboard the 181-metre naval cruiser Colbert (named after the French minister who oversaw the intendancy of Jean Talon and the first major colonial expansion of New France under Louis XIV),73 stopping

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at the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, the last officially French colony in North America, he came ashore directly below the Plains of Abraham at l’Anse au Foulon, the precise spot where General Wolfe had landed on the night of 12 September 1759.74 Although protocol required the presence of Governor General Roland Michener on the quayside, it was clear to everyone, even as “God Save the Queen” was being booed, that it was Daniel Johnson’s reception, and that it was Quebec, not Canada, laying on full honours for a foreign head of state. The following day, having been welcomed by rapturous crowds on the streets of Quebec City and having been fêted at a sumptuous state banquet at the Château Frontenac, the president drove from the de jure capital of old French Canada to the de facto capital of the new along the eighteenth-century Chemin du Roy on the north shore of the river. Seven stops – and seven speeches – later, Johnson and de Gaulle were received by Jean Drapeau at City Hall in the early evening. The general’s choice of uniform and open-topped vehicle having already implicitly framed the afternoon’s journey as one of quasi-military liberation for the tens of thousands of flag-waving Quebeckers lining the route, and with over ten thousand more waiting for him in Montreal, the day’s final speech from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville would not disappoint. Despite a torrent of commentary at the time and a wealth of historical and political analysis since,75 this highly charged “nationalist” moment has rarely been analyzed in the context of the ostensible reason for his visit to Canada: Expo 67. On the morning of 25 July, the shock of those famous four words – Vive le Québec libre! – still reverberating across the country and around the world, the French president blithely began his official tour of the site. The day opened with an address at the Place des Nations (the only official Expo space to be given no English equivalent name). An enthusiastic crowd of over 7,000 people, many brandishing French-language papers showing the morning headlines, gathered to hear his speech, introduced by Pierre Dupuy. He then visited a number of national pavilions (the US and Soviet pavilions, those of Great Britain, Germany, and Italy, and those grouped in Africa Place), notably spending fifteen minutes at the French Pavilion, over forty-five minutes at the Quebec Pavilion, and – according to Lionel Chevrier, the federal delegate in charge of accompanying foreign heads of state at Expo – only two minutes at the Canadian Pavilion.76 After having his actions of the previous day finally branded “unacceptable” in a communiqué from a deeply offended Lester Pearson, he dined at the French Pavilion, where he toasted the contributions of France and of Quebec to the success of the world’s fair, but uttered not a word on those of the federal government whose anniversary it was meant to be celebrating. On 26 July, royal debt repaid and international incident concluded,

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he casually boarded the presidential plane (recalled to Montreal at the last minute from Ottawa where he was supposed to be meeting Pearson), having decided to cut short his stay and leave Canada – a country which, in a sense, he had never really visited. It was neither Canada, nor Quebec, nor even France that would have the final word, however; it was Montreal. Before boarding his plane, de Gaulle was taken by the mayor on a tour of a number of sites around the city: the new metro, the Place des Arts, the Université de Montréal, finishing on Mount Royal at the Chalet de la Montagne (a 1932 project of the city’s last great mayor, Camilien Houde). Inside the chalet, the president was able to admire painted scenes representing the seventeenth-century foundation of Montreal, while outside he was presented with a stunning panoramic view over the city – at the centre of which lay, of course, the liquid ribbon of the Saint Lawrence with the Expo site glittering between its banks. The morning ended with a return to the Hôtel de Ville for his last official reception in Quebec. There, in a twenty-minute speech over lunch, Drapeau took issue with de Gaulle’s claim, repeated throughout his visit, that French Canadians were essentially les Français du Canada,77 arguing instead for the primacy of a geographically situated historical experience that effectively trumped ethnicity. Remarking boldly that the president was the first French political figure to take a real interest in French Canada in over two hundred years, he said that, while Quebec might be grateful to de Gaulle personally, it owed no debt of thanks to France, having managed to survive, after the Conquest of 1760, with almost none of the linguistic or cultural resources that the mother country took for granted. Although Quebec’s heritage remained proudly French, its future was firmly tied to North America. English Canadians, furious at de Gaulle’s interference in domestic Canadian affairs, would applaud Drapeau, happy that someone in French Canada was willing to push back against the sudden gust of Gallic wind that had been filling Quebec’s nationalist sails.78 The francophone press would mostly dismiss the speech, concentrating on the predictability of the English-Canadian reaction, or on the “the tortuous phrases of a man who doesn’t dare to flatly declare what he thinks.”79 Drapeau’s conclusion – a striking quotation from the mentor he referred to as “the man who has forged the French-Canadian soul over three generations” – has mostly gone unremarked: “We belong to that select group of peoples – how many of them are there on Earth? four or five? – whose destiny is determined by their essentially tragic condition. Their worry is not whether tomorrow they will be rich or poor, great or insignificant; but whether they will or will not exist; whether they will rise to greet the day or disappear

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into oblivion.”80 “Why,” asks Christophe Tardieu in his recent history of the visit, “would Drapeau end his speech with a quotation from Lionel Groulx?” Returning to the source, Groulx’s 1937 collection of speeches and articles on the national question, Directives, Tardieu points to his celebrated phrase (not actually cited by Drapeau, but found within the same collection): “We will have our French State … We will also have a French homeland, a land whose soul will be visible for all to see.”81 Tardieu suggests that this implicit reference to what could be read as an apology for Quebec independence was “at the very least maladroit.”82 Maladroit? The link between political action and cultural action has rarely been so carefully – if here also fortuitously – articulated. During Drapeau’s brief interregnum between his two stints as mayor of Montreal (1954–57; 1960– 86) he flirted again with provincial politics83 in a pamphlet, Jean Drapeau vous parle, where he nailed his nationalist colours to the mast in an epigraph quoting exactly the same passage he would use in his speech to de Gaulle eight years later. And yet, despite the frequently dry economic and historical analyses that dominate his argument, Drapeau in 1959 remained fully cognizant of the central thesis he took up from Groulx in 1937: that the perpetuation of the FrenchCanadian nation is, perhaps even more so in the current era (i.e., on the very eve of the Quiet Revolution), a matter neither of insular conservatism nor of simple modernization. “We need to understand,” he writes, “that in this new era, the survival of French Canada is not a straightforward proposition, but something that must continually be secured, that must be strengthened and consolidated a little more each day. We must bear witness to our influential French and Christian presence in North America and make an original contribution to the common good of humanity. Without this, the justification for our collective existence vanishes and the sacrifices of previous generations will have been in vain.”84 The need to bear witness to – or, in words perhaps more appropriate to the new secular age, to represent (re-present) – French Canada on the North American and world stages is crucial to understanding Drapeau’s desire to bring the universal exhibition to Montreal. Expo was not simply an event with “measurable” economic and infrastructural benefits for the host city, as we might say today.85 It formed part of a much broader national project that would provide cultural responses to French Canada’s long-standing existential crisis. When Drapeau became mayor for the second time in 1960, his first megaproject was the Place des Arts (initiated in 1955, during his first term, and opened in 1963), designed to be an architecturally striking and internationally recognized performance centre for the dissemination of Quebec culture. His

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second was Expo 67. Both were part of an original vision for redesigning the city he would lead for the next twenty-six years86 that also included Henry Cobb and I.M. Pei’s Place Ville Marie (it was Drapeau who insisted that its name be changed from the “Royal Bank Tower” after having lost an earlier battle with the Canadian National Railway in 1958 to name the new Queen Elizabeth Hotel Le Château Maisonneuve) and, most notably, the Montreal metro. With Expo – and in many ways for Expo – was dug a new and specifically Parisian-style transport system that ran on rubber tires, reframing in potentially postmodern terms the rail and maritime axes that had so long defined Montreal as the modern hub of Quebec and Canada. Jean-Louis Cohen suggests that the choice to make the trains run on tires – a first for North America – could also be read as a type of Freudian displacement and condensation as part of the grander dream of making Montreal the capital of French North America: because it was impossible to appropriate Paris’s cultural preeminence,87 Drapeau borrowed the name and one aspect of the French metro – which used a core technology of the automobile, central to the American dream – and made it the key improvement to its new underground transportation system.88 Similarly, victory in the bid for the international exhibition in 1962 propelled certain logistical decisions that fit comfortably within a deeper symbolic framework: whereas the first two lines (projected in 1961) were to run east-west (Line 1, green) and north-south (Line 2, orange) beneath existing overground axes (Boulevard Sainte-Catherine, Rue Saint-Denis), the third line, which would have linked the northwest suburb of Cartierville to downtown by repurposing existing Canadian National tracks, was shelved in 1962 in favour of a new but much shorter line (Line 4, yellow) linking downtown Montreal to the South Shore.89 Despite inflating the budget (from $132 million to a final cost of $213.7 million), the new line would comprise only three stations (Berri-de-Montigny, Île Saint-Hélène, and Longueuil), but would allow passengers from both sides of the river to bypass viaducts and bridges to arrive at the world’s fair directly, as it were, from the river bed.90 All of these projects can be seen as ambitious attempts to redesign a major North American city for the challenges of the latter half of the twentieth century in more or less conventional ways,91 and at the same time to re-imagine a French-Canadian Montreal in terms that would move beyond the reactionary conservatism of the previous generation. Citing Groulx to de Gaulle (and at the same time, given the sudden media attention, to Quebec, to Canada, and to the world) cannot therefore be explained away as lazily pulling an old quotation out of a drawer. De Gaulle’s visit merely provided Drapeau the oppor-

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tunity to reaffirm, to ears sharpened by the momentary diplomatic furore, that French Canada had an important role to play on the world stage as a modern (even postmodern) actor, fully conscious of its history yet with no need to subscribe to a narrow idea of “liberation” as suggested by the neo-colonial intervention of a képi-wearing representative of the Old Powers. This vision is moreover entirely consonant with his remarks at the opening ceremony in April, where he situated Expo first as a civic and second as a universal event within a broad historical arc from the beginning of the seventeenth century to beyond the end of the twentieth. The first half of the speech was delivered in French, citing land “which less than three years ago had not yet come entirely out of the Saint Lawrence” and evoking Montreal’s heroic colonial foundation 325 years before (when “there were as many challenges as there were trees”),92 before switching suddenly to English, and to the present day: “And so, true to its great North-American destiny, the city of Montreal, second-largest French speaking city in the world and a warmly cosmopolitan metropolis … took up the challenge to build this gigantic meeting place of nations and peoples.”93 The provincial and federal governments are thanked perfunctorily. That Expo is meant to be celebrating Canada’s Centennial is mentioned but once in passing (at the seven-and-half-minute mark), before Drapeau makes the point he will develop over the rest of his speech: that the import of Expo 67 goes beyond spectacle, beyond a mere “Fair”: “a universal exhibition is not just a show … it is part of the universal civilization to which we are all invited.” He finishes with the sincere hope that, after Expo closes its gates to visitors, “these islands,” with their vast array of pavilions and structures, will “fulfil their destiny as an international city” and will continue to serve as a testament to “the reality of a universal civilisation” in Montreal. A year later, that universal mission was still carried high by Drapeau in his plans to turn Terre des hommes into a permanent exhibit. In the city’s official magazine, Montréal ’68, he writes: “The greatest danger facing a world exhibition [exposition universelle] evolving into a permanent undertaking is without a doubt the possible disappearance of spirituality, a resignation to a fair-like atmosphere and its rapid disintegration into a commercial bazaar. Such fears are unwarranted. Man and His World will be worthy of Expo 67 … Montreal has seen to it, is seeing to it, and will see to it that Man and His World never becomes a spectacle.”94 Almost as if he were channelling Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord (whose Société du spectacle appeared in Paris almost at the very moment that Expo’s gates were closing in Montreal),95 Drapeau holds fast to his refusal of the diverse forms of commodity fetishism that characterized both the world’s fairs of the nineteenth century and the ever-expanding reach of the entertainment/media industries

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in the twentieth. It matters little that, in short order, Drapeau would effectively preside over what he here claims to reject out of hand.96 In this respect, Drapeau’s vision for Quebec was clearly different from the backward-looking attitude of another group that brandished Lionel Groulx as its maître à penser, the Alliance laurentienne: “For a nation to thrive,” opens the editorial of its second newsletter (probably written by Marius Barbeau, and prefaced by none other than Groulx himself), “it must have a unifying principle. It must be able to identify itself. Recognize itself. Distinguish itself from others. Stand against others. Like all living realities, the FrenchCanadian nation is neither a concept, nor a fiction. Neither is it a humanist utopia, or a humanitarian dream, but a solid human reality.”97 Despite their shared admiration for Groulx’s version of French Canada’s history, we should note that Barbeau’s Laurentie is almost the very opposite of Drapeau’s. Indeed, if Drapeau cites Groulx to de Gaulle in order to evoke the “tragic” fate of the French-Canadian people, it is not to imply that their insularity, independence, or “liberation” will resolve it.98 On the contrary, Drapeau quotes Groulx here for the same reason that he quoted him in 1959: he wants to put an end to the existential anxiety99 that has afflicted French Canada since its inception by rising to the now global challenge of making “an original contribution to the common good of humanity.” By 1967, Groulx’s belief in the apostolic and civilizing vocation granted to the French-Canadian people by Providence may have been rendered obsolete,100 but his understanding of the nation nevertheless remained relevant within the broader humanist context of “Man and His World,” and, perhaps more surprisingly, within the context of the youth culture of the 1960s that would largely relay its message of solidarity and hope. Consider the rest of the passage – and its ringing conclusion – from Groulx’s speech of 1937 (reprinted at the end of Directives, not quoted by Tardieu): “The snobs, the conciliators, the defeatists can shout as loudly as they like: ‘You are the last generation of French-Canadians …’ Along with all the young people of this country, I answer: ‘Our generation is alive. Yours is the last of the dead!’”101 Given Groulx’s lifelong interest in the youth of the nation and his disappointment in that regard with the current age,102 it is surprising but nonetheless somehow appropriate that his last public appearance – two months after having been personally guided around the Expo site by Drapeau and two weeks before his death – should be at the Youth Pavilion at Expo, programmed between the traditional Québécois chansonnier Jean-Pierre Ferland and the experimental happening infra-galaxique, Le Zirmate.103

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One of the most promising among the young people Groulx was referring to was André Laurendeau. In 1967, Laurendeau would be putting the finishing touches to the Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism;104 in 1963, along with Gabrielle Roy, he was part of the committee appointed to shape the theme of Expo. But in the 1930s, during what Fernand Dumont called “the first Quiet Revolution,”105 he was a member (along with other young intellectuals like Jean Drapeau, Claude Robillard, and Marie-Victorin’s most famous student, the ecologist Pierre Dansereau) of Jeune Canada, anchoring his appeal to a new humanism within the unapologetic nationalism of Lionel Groulx.106 “Let us rediscover the true notion of Man,” a twenty-threeyear-old Laurendeau implored in 1935, going on to warn his readers not to forget where, culturally and geographically, that appeal comes from. “It is only possible to rise to the Universal in stages. Omitting a step, moving directly into abstraction, is to risk losing oneself and creating ideology upon ideology. Children only learn of the existence of the world by degrees; they become aware of it as they become aware of their own selves.”107 It should now come as no surprise that, throughout this tract, Laurendeau explicitly qualifies his own nationalism as laurentien. A generation later, twenty-nine-year-old Gatien Lapointe would write: “I arose from this landscape / I drew breath from the clay of the river … The whole world comes to my shores / I hear the world beat in my blood.” Reading these words written in 1961, it is impossible not to think of the universal exhibition that would emerge from those same waters barely six years later. Half a century on, we are still examining to what extent its humanist ambitions were achieved in the fraught, fractured, and increasingly globalized world of 1967. But if Expo did manage to “rise to the Universal” (Laurendeau) and prove to be a “hymn to the grandeur of Man” (Dupuy), we can conclude that it was at least partially thanks to its national “grounding” in and upon the Saint Lawrence.108

notes 1 The official English translation is slightly more verbose: “Here, with unparalleled grandeur, Man’s noblest endeavours speak for themselves.” Terre des hommes/ Man and His World (Ottawa: Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, 1967), 16. 2 “And I shall place man[kind] at the wellspring of my harmony.” Gatien Lapointe, Ode au Saint-Laurent, précédée de J’appartiens à la terre (1963; Montreal: Éditions du Jour, 1969), 65.

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3 “Au centre de tout, il y avait le Saint-Laurent – le fleuve, comme disent mes compatriotes de langue française sans mentionner son nom, puisqu’à leurs yeux il est unique en majesté, en masse liquide et qu’il est le flux même de leur histoire.” Pierre Dupuy, Expo 67, ou la découverte de la fierté (Ottawa: Les Éditions de la Presse, 1972), 11; unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. 4 Although officially the motto of Canada only from 1921, it became an aspirational ideal embedded within the project of Confederation itself with the creation of British Columbia as a Crown colony in 1858 and was realized with the incorporation of the westernmost province in 1871. See George Munro Grant, Ocean to Ocean: Sanford Fleming’s Expedition through Canada in 1872 (London: Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1877). 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, [1983] 2006). 6 It is nevertheless important to remember that French-Canadian dissatisfaction with the confederative pact of 1867 was profound and long-standing, and had been articulated well before the more vocal grumblings of the 1960s. See, for example, Lionel Groulx’s reflections on the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of 1917. “Ce Cinquantenaire (1867–1917),” Notre maître le passé (Montreal: Bibliothèque de l’Action française, 1924), 205–15. 7 See, for example, Mathew Hayday, “Fireworks, Folk-Dancing and Fostering a National Identity: The Politics of Canada Day,” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 2 (June 2010): 287–314; and Ted Cogan, “Alternative Identities: The 1967 Centennial and the Campaign for a Better Canada,” in Celebrating Canada: Vol. 2, Commemorations, Holidays and National Symbols, eds. Raymond Blake and Matthew Hayday (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 259–89. 8 See Jean Quirion, Guy Chiasson, and Marc Charron, “Des Canadiens français aux Québécois: se nommer à l’épreuve du territoire?,” Recherches sociographiques 58, no. 1 (2017): 143–57. The authors show how the adjective canadien-français became effectively “territorialized” as the province of Quebec increasingly came to represent the geographical (and ultimately political) homeland of all French Canadians. 9 See Bryan D. Palmer, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), especially the two final chapters, “Quebec: Revolution Now!” and “The ‘Discovery’ of the ‘Indian’”; in this volume, see the chapters by Jean-Philippe Warren, Romney Copeman, and Linda Grussani and Ruth Phillips. 10 Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopia, Ecologies (Cambridge, ma:mit Press, 2017), 130. 11 Although Expo was conceived and funded as a separate project from the myriad local initiatives sponsored by the federal Centennial Commission. See Helen

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12

13

14

15 16

Davies, “Canada’s Centennial Experience” and Robyn E. Schwarz, “A Continental Centennial: Situating Expo 67 within the Canadian-American Relationship,” in Celebrating Canada, 174–205, 313–37. “Un homme aux visions internationales,” according to the federal minister of industry, C.M. Drury. After having been Canadian ambassador to the Netherlands (1945–52), Italy (1952–58), and France (1958–63), Dupuy replaced the ill-equipped and provincial Paul Bienvenu as commissioner general of the Montreal exhibition in June 1964. See Yves Jasmin, La Petite Histoire d’Expo 67 (Montreal: Éditions Québec-Amérique, 1997), 28–31, and Roger La Roche, “Expo 67: le choix des commissaires, une pièce en deux actes,” Centre d’histoire de Montréal, 15 June 2007: https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/memoiresdesmontrealais/expo-67-lechoix-des-commissaires-une-piece-en-deux-actes. Rhona Richman Keneally and Johanne Sloan, “Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir,” Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Rhona Richman Keneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 7. In 1961 Montreal saw 40 per cent of Canada’s maritime traffic; by 1973 that figure had fallen to 15 per cent. Michèle Dagenais, Montréal et l’eau: Une histoire environnementale (Montreal: Boréal, 2011), 170. Expo 67 Guide officiel / Official Guide (Toronto: McLean-Hunter, 1967), 6. The “metropolis has representatives of more than 30 ethnic groups” (ibid.). Montreal is already described positively as a ville cosmopolite by Raymond Tanghe in 1936, noting that outside the 523,063 French and the 178,371 from the British Isles, the 1931 census counted another 112,290 immigrants from nineteen different nationalities (including 48,724 “Hébreux”), all grouped according to whether they are francisants or anglicisants, that is, whether they tend to assimilate into the French- or English-speaking communities already established on the island. Raymond Tanghe, Montréal (Montreal: Éditions Albert Lévesque, 1936), 39–40. The marginal placement (and numerical imprecision) of the author’s single footnote to this list of nations is telling: “La population autochtone a presque entièrement disparu. On compte à peine 150 Iroquois dans la ville de Montréal. La plupart sont catholiques. La réserve de Caughnawaga en contient à peu près 2,400” (The Indigenous population has almost entirely disappeared. There are scarcely 150 Iroquois in the city of Montreal. Most of them are Catholics. There are roughly 2,400 on the Kahnawake reserve), 40n1. In 1967, the Official Guide will suggest that the “4,400 Indians or Eskimos” are, with the 121,600 Italians, 86,800 Jews, and 4,800 Chinese, “as complete Montrealers as anyone else.” “Cosmopolitanism” should nevertheless be taken with a grain of salt in a city which, even in 1967, was principally defined by the cultural and linguistic divide between the “1,608,700 French and 445,000 of Anglo-Saxon stock.” Note that the French version of the text explicitly draws attention to the majority status of francophones and to the

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17 18 19

20

21

22

23

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minority status of the (still ethnic) English in Montreal: “La majorité francophone (1 608 700) et la forte minorité anglo-saxonne (445 000).” Expo 67 Official Guide, 7. Ibid., 5–6. Born scarcely ten years after Confederation itself and dying in May 1967, Groulx was “French Canada’s historian” for the better part of the century. For all his fervent nationalism – Notre État français, nous l’aurons! is the rallying cry of his most often quoted (see below, note 81) – he nevertheless remained for the most part a reluctant and disappointed “confederalist” throughout his life. Montpetit succinctly expressed the reasons for his life’s work, from his first lectures in 1910 to the eve of the Second World War, as “l’impérieuse nécessité de s’intéresser à l’aspect économique de la question nationale” (the urgent necessity of studying the economic aspects of the national question).” Édouard Montpetit, La Conquête économique, vol. 1, Les forces essentielles (Montreal: Bernard Valiquette Éditeur, 1939), 10. Two weeks after Expo closed at the end of October, a monument to Montpetit was unveiled at the Université de Montréal. Claude Ryan, then director of Le Devoir, noted at the time: “avec Groulx et Marie-Victorin, celui-ci fut l’une des trois grandes figures de sa génération” (with Groulx and Marie-Victorin, he was one of the three great figures of his generation). “Hommage mérité à Édouard Montpetit,” Le Devoir, 14 November 1967, 4. “Mot créé récemment pour désigner le pays habité par les Canadiens français et dont le fleuve Saint-Laurent est la note géographique principale.” (A word recently coined to mean the land/country inhabited by French Canadians and where the Saint Lawrence River is the principal geographical element.) MarieVictorin, “Glossaire,” La Flore laurentienne, 3rd edition (Montreal: Gaëtan Morin Éditeur, [1935] 2002), 989. For Marie-Victorin’s (self-proclaimed) role in the migration of the terms laurentien and Laurentie from geology, to botany, to literature, and thence to politics, see Marie-Victorin, “Pour un Institut de géologie” (1936), Science, Culture et Nation, ed. Yves Gingras (Montreal: Boréal, 1996), 130. “La création de la République de Laurentie est non seulement souhaitable, désirable, mais nécessaire, possible, et relativement facile dans un avenir assez rapproché. Rien ne l’empêchera de se manifester en temps et lieu, peut-être, en 1967.” Laurentie. La Souveraineté nationale, no. 101 (Montreal: Alliance Laurentienne, 1957), 1. It would be in 1968 that the Parti Québécois would unite the various secessionist movements of the 1960s in the first political party with a real chance of electoral success. For a recent discussion of the Alliance laurentienne in the context of the independentist movements of the 1960s, see Yvan Lamonde, La Modernité au Québec, vol. 2, La Victoire différée du présent sur le passé (1939–1965) (Montreal: Fides, 2016), 225–56.

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24 Thanks to archeological digs begun in the 1980s (and only completed in 2016), we now know that the exact site of the original settlement of Ville-Marie would have faced la Cité du Havre and Arthur Erikson’s Man in the Community Pavilion. See Louise Pothier, “Le fort de Ville-Marie point de rencontre entre Amérindiens et Français,” Cap-aux-Diamants, 130 (summer 2017): 27–9. 25 See Ernest Labelle, “Histoire du port de Montréal,” Montréal portuaire et ferroviaire: actes du 5e congrès de l’Association québécoise pour le patrimoine industriel, Montréal, 8 et 9 mai 1992 (Montreal: November 1993): 4–11. 26 “Le choix des îles du Saint-Laurent, en face de Montréal, comme emplacement de l’Exposition Canadienne internationale et universelle représente le symbole vivant d’une nation en pleine expansion.” Emplacement de l’Expo 67. À Montréal, sur le Saint-Laurent, n.d. (March 1963], 2. Quoted in Étude patrimoniale sur les témoins matériels de l’Exposition universelle et internationale de Montréal de 1967 sur l’Île Sainte-Hélène, Laboratoire de recherche sur l’architecture moderne et le design (Réjean Legault, dir.), École de design, uqam (25 February 2005), 9. 27 Full details, including discussion of the pros and cons of the alternative sites of Pointe Saint-Charles, LaSalle, or Parc Maisonneuve, were given in “Deux bonnes raisons: le fleuve et le port,” La Presse, 29 March 1963, 1, 26–7. 28 “Le port de Montréal et le fleuve Saint-Laurent: deux éléments de force qui ont fortement influencé les directeurs de la compagnie de l’Exposition … C’est au point de rencontre de ces deux éléments que s’élèvera le symbole de la ‘nouvelle’ nation canadienne.” Ibid., 26. 29 Roughly translated: “the mystic calling of our nation.” Lionel Groulx, “Notre mystique nationale” (1939), Constantes de vie (Montreal: Fides, 1967), 21–42. This was the last book of Groulx’s work to be overseen by him and published in his lifetime, launched in fact on the day he died (23 May 1967). 30 From 1841 until Confederation, the united Province of Canada was divided along “racial” lines into Canada West (Anglo-Protestant – coinciding with the region of southern Ontario bordering the Great Lakes) and Canada East (Franco-Catholic – coinciding with the Saint Lawrence Valley and part of Labrador). The idea of two distinct “Canadas” persisting within Confederation was given academic currency in the 1950s by the historian Michel Brunet. See especially, Canadians et Canadiens. Études sur l’histoire et la pensée des deux Canadas (Montreal: Fides, 1954) and La Présence anglaise et les Canadiens. Études sur l’histoire et la pensée des deux Canadas (Montreal: Beauchemin, 1958). It would be fifteen years before the first would be (partially) translated into English by Ramsay Cook in FrenchCanadian Nationalism: An Anthology (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969). Brunet, then head of the History Department at the Université de Montréal, would be one of the historians debating with Lionel Groulx at his last public appearance on 7 May 1967 at Expo (see below, note 103).

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31 “Un optimisme fier transparaissait dans le nom même qu’on venait d’attribuer à la Confédération. Dès l’automne de 1864 on se mettait en quête d’un nom approprié pour le baptême du nouveau-né. Quelques beaux esprits de l’autre province, s’étant frappé le front, s’arrêtèrent à des joliesses comme celles-ci: Cabotia, Borelia, Tupona, Norland, Canadia, Columbia, Nova Britannia, New Britain, et enfin, la fleur du bouquet Aqua terra. La Minerve protestait à bon droit contre quelques-unes de ces appellations barbares; elle proposait avec plus de goût Laurentide ou Canada. Ce dernier nom que patronnaient quelques-uns de nos hommes d’État finit par l’emporter. Et n’y avait-il pas lieu d’applaudir? Le mot Canada possédait cette vertu d’évoquer toute une histoire et de rappeler une grande unité géographique, celle qu’avaient faite les immortels découvreurs. L’Acte de l’Amérique du Nord nous a conféré le titre officiel de Dominion of Canada, et la traduction française a accentué la puissance de l’appellation, puisque le terme Puissance est synonyme d’État souverain.” Lionel Groulx, “La Puissance du Canada,” La Confédération canadienne. Ses origines (Montreal: Le Devoir, 1918), 218–19. 32 Founded in 1826 as a nationalist paper associated with the Parti canadien of Louis-Joseph Papineau and banned in the wake of the Durham report of 1837, reopened in 1842, La Minerve would move away from its radical beginnings, ultimately becoming the mouthpiece of the Conservative Party in the 1860s and openly campaigning for Confederation in 1864. 33 “Mais qu’était-ce que tout cela pour effectuer une solide unité nationale? Il fallait jeter entre les provinces et les races d’autres liens moins artificiels que des rubans d’acier.” Groulx, “La Puissance du Canada,” 236. Cf. Raymond Tanghe in 1928, who compares the organic role of the Saint Lawrence to that of the railroad in the creation of national identity: “La prodigieuse facilité de rapprochement que procure le chemin de fer relègue au second plan les voies fluviales, mais celles-ci ont précédé le rail dans l’œuvre d’unification; ce sont elles qui ont rassemblé les pierres de l’édifice national et le rail a cimenté un édifice déjà construit. (On remarquera d’ailleurs que les provinces étrangères au bassin du Saint-Laurent ont été les dernières et les plus réticentes à faire partie de la Confédération.)” (Rail’s prodigious ability to link destinations has made river traffic less important, but waterways were the first unifier: rivers brought together and assembled the building blocks of the nation and the railroad merely cemented an edifice which had already been built. [Notice moreover that those provinces situated outside the Saint Lawrence river basin were the last and most reticent to join Confederation.]) Géographie humaine de Montréal (Montreal: Librairie d’Action canadienne-française, 1928), 86. 34 The official document was in English only. For a discussion of the debates

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around this term in the French translation of the bna Act, see Jean Delisle, “Translating dominion as puissance: A Case of Absurd Self-flattery?” Language Update 8, no. 4 (2012): 18. 35 After evoking the dire predictions of historians as eminent as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Robert Seeley that the French-Canadian race was doomed in the long term to assimilation within Anglo-Saxon culture(s) of North America, Groulx concludes in terms that both Marie-Victorin and Drapeau would recognize: “Nous avons un imprenable pied-à-terre dans la province de Québec; nous occupons un territoire qui a l’unité géographique, nous avons toutes les richesses du sol, toutes les voies de communication, tous les débouchés vers la mer, toutes les ressources qui assurent la force et l’indépendance d’une nation. Si nous développons toutes les puissances de notre race et de notre sol, nous pouvons, si nous voulons, devenir assez forts pour prêter une assistance vigoureuse à tous nos frères dispersés.” (In the province of Quebec, we have an impregnable stronghold. We occupy a territory that is geographically unified. We have all the abundance of its soil, all of its rivers, routes, and thoroughfares, all of its openings to the sea, all of the resources that ensure the strength and independence of a nation. By cultivating the potential of our race and our soil, we can, if we want to, become strong enough to lend vigorous assistance to our diaspora.) Groulx, “La Puissance du Canada,” 243. Note that Groulx uses the French noun pied-à-terre in an unusual, even incorrect way here. It normally means a smaller secondary residence reserved for occasional use (as it does in English), but he seems to be using it in the sense of “ground” or even “stronghold.” Groulx is perhaps (unconsciously) suggesting both the original colonial gesture of arrival and settlement – the expression mettre pied à terre means to get down from a horse, to disembark from a boat, a train, etc. – and, through the tension between that literal image of placing one’s foot on the earth and the term’s current metaphorical sense of occasional dwelling, the fragility of French-Canadian survival going into the future. 36 Between 1952 and 1961, 7.65 per cent of the total book production in Quebec was poetry, against the surprisingly small figure of 5.53 per cent for the novel; Histoire de la littérature Québécoise, eds. Michel Biron, François Dumont, and Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge (Montreal: Boréal, 2007), 367. L’Ode au Saint-Laurent came out as the inaugural volume of what would become a new and major collection of Québécois poetry, Les Poètes du Jour (1963–75), notably publishing Michèle Lalonde’s specially commissioned long poem, “Terre des hommes,” which was performed at the gala opening of Expo 67 on 29 April at the new Place des Arts. That same evening opened with a bilingual poem written by the commissioner general himself, Pierre Dupuy, read by international stars Laurence Olivier (in French) and Jean-Louis Barrault (in English).

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37 “Cela est né, cela a pris naissance en moi lorsque je suis retourné au Canada en 60 après mon premier séjour en Europe. J’étais en mer. Rentrant dans le Golfe, qui est encore la mer, j’étais soudain alerté, surpris, ému, ravi, par quelque chose. J’avais le visage en plein vent, j’ai reniflé, j’ai regardé. Puis remontant le fleuve, qui est presque toujours la mer aussi, a commencé de surgir, au loin, à l’horizon, une mince ligne de terre; et les rives se sont rapprochées lentement, lentement; et c’est lentement que montait en moi ce quelque chose que j’ai voulu exprimer dans cette ode.” Letter to Pierre Caminade, 10 July 1962, Fonds Gatien Lapointe, Musée québécois de la culture populaire, Trois-Rivières. Quoted in Jacques Paquin, “L’Ode au Saint-Laurent, de Gatien Lapointe: un poème américain? Points de vue du poème et des archives du poète,” in Formes américaines de la poésie. Vingt essais, eds. Luc Bonenfant, Isabelle Miron, and Nathalie Watteyne (Lewiston, ny: Edwin Mellin Press, 2013), 68–9. 38 As Lapointe explains in “‘Le corps est aussi un absolu’: Une entrevue de Donald Smith avec Gatien Lapointe,” Lettres québécoises 24 (winter 1981–82): 52–63. 39 Drapeau’s decision regarding the site of the 1967 World Exhibition was announced to the press on 28 March 1963. Despite the terrifyingly short time frame for completion, federal authorization was not granted until over three months later, on 6 July; 12 August marked the official ground-breaking ceremony, although preparation and dredging had begun on the islands almost immediately after official approval. The master plan was submitted to the bie on 12 November, to the governments of Canada and Quebec on 20 December, and finally announced to the public on 23 December. First Annual Report of the Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition (1963), 279. 40 “The Theme ‘Terre des Hommes’ and its Development at the Canadian World Exhibition in Montreal, 1967,” Report of the Montebello Conference [May 1963], typescript (13 pp.). Box 39-1990-07-001, Fonds Gilles Gagnon, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 2. 41 Although it was the vice-rector of the Université de Montréal, Lucien Piché, who chaired the meetings, the style suggests that it is Gabrielle Roy who wrote the report: it is clearly written by someone with excellent English but a francophone, indicated by gallicized spellings like “transcendance” and “Magna Charta” (in French, Grande Charte); it ends, moreover, with a quote from one of her intellectual heroes, Teilhard de Chardin. Ibid., 8–9. On this last point, see Darlene Kelly, “‘Of All That Is and All That Might Be’: Gabrielle Roy’s Teilhardian Ideas,” Religion and Literature, 44, no. 3 (autumn 2012): 27–56. Emphasis is in the original. 42 Keneally and Sloan suggest that this type of “extra-planetary … cosmic humanism” was both widespread in popular culture during the 1960s at the same time as it became subject to new intellectual scrutiny through the work of posthumanist thinkers like Michel Foucault, “Introduction,” Expo 67: Not Just a

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43 44 45

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Souvenir, 5–6. The actual term, however, comes from a 1947 essay on SaintExupéry by the Belgian poet André Gascht, who uses cosmique (as well as the neologism cosmisme) in the specialized French philosophical sense of “relative to the material world or universe,” L’Humanisme cosmique d’Antoine de SaintExupéry (Bruges: Les Éditions A.G. Stainforth, 1947), 22. The opening sentence of Terre des hommes, despite the “stars” in the English title, suggests precisely this material, terrestrial focus of Saint Exupéry’s humanism: “La terre nous en apprend plus long sur nous que tous les livres [We learn more about ourselves from the earth than from any book].” Terre des hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 9. Report of the Montebello Conference, 12–13; note the uppercase “River.” The novel is mentioned in an article on Pierre Dupuy in one of the first issues of Drapeau’s promotional magazine: Montréal ’64, 1, no. 3 (July 1964): 12. “Le navire avait pris sa marche régulière dans le chenal, au milieu du Fleuve. De là, on voyait Montréal dans toute la difformité de sa laideur et de sa beauté modernes.” Pierre Dupuy, André Laurence, Canadien français (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1930), 244. “Ce paysage le remplissait de sérénité bienveillante, d’un recueillement presque religieux. Et tout à coup, comme un éclair dans sa tête, cette pensée: le Fleuve, quel unique sujet de poème! Voilà ce qu’il lui fallait” (ibid., 116). Compare Hugh MacLennan’s novelist hero of Two Solitudes, Paul Tallard, who is moved by a similar aesthetic ambition and struck with an analogous epiphany, that he must situate the action of his work locally. Paul’s subject, however, will not be the Saint Lawrence parish or French-Canadian nation of his birth, but rather the larger “bi-racial” drama of the young country of Canada, fulfilling the geographical prefiguration of confluence that opens the novel through the eventual marriage of the protagonists (followed by, one assumes, a fully “Canadian” bicultural progeny): “Northwest of Montreal, though a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian Shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec. It comes down broad and ale-coloured and joins the Saint Lawrence, the two streams embrace the pan of Montreal Island, the Ottawa merges and loses itself, and the mainstream moves notheastward a thousand miles to the sea … But down in the angle at Montreal, on the island about which the two rivers join, there is little of this sense of new and endless space. Two old races and religions meet here and live their separate legends, side by side.” Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1945), 1–2. Drawing on the actor-network theories of Bruno Latour and Howard Becker, Alain Marcoux persuasively suggests that the number and variety of actors involved in the construction of the Montreal exhibition meant that no single vision could be said to have programmed its development from the outset. “L’effet des

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mediations sur le choix du site et sur le dévéloppement du plan d’ensemble d’Expo 67,” Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, 29, nos. 1–2 (2004): 27–38. “Une œuvre de la nature et de l’homme/A dream fulfilled, a theme realized,” Montréal ’64, 1, no. 2 (June 1964): 3. “Le Thème raconté par Gabrielle Roy/The Theme unfolded by Gabrielle Roy,” Terre des hommes/Man and His World (Ottawa: Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, 1967). The texts (by Dupuy and Roy) are printed with French and English on facing pages. See many of the essays in Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader, eds. Laura Hollengreen, Celia Pearce, Rebecca Rouse, and Bobby Schweizer (Pittsburgh: etc Press, 2014), especially Lisa D. Schrenk, “Fordism, Corporate Display, and the American Expositions of the 1930s,” Celia Pearce, “Eames at the Fair: A Legacy of Communication Design,” and Stacey Warren, “To Work and Play and Live in the Year 2000: Creating the Future at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.” Roy, “Le Thème raconté par Gabrielle Roy/The Theme Unfolded by Gabrielle Roy,” 46–8. “Et sa physionomie que nous voudrions française.” Gabrielle Roy, “Terre des hommes – Le thème raconté,” Fragiles lumières de la terre. Écrits divers 1942–1970 (Montreal: Les Éditions Quinze, 1978), 215. Elsa Lam, “Man in/and His World,” Canadian Architect, 1 October 2020, https:// www.canadianarchitect.com/man-in-and-his-world/. At least since Donald Theall, who saw Expo as “the apotheosis of the theme of cosmic man, the inhabitant of a McLuhanized global village.” “Expo 67 as Total Environment” (1976), reprinted in Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67, eds. Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 19. Gabrielle Roy, “Le Thème raconté par Gabrielle Roy/The Theme Unfolded by Gabrielle Roy,” 22. Ibid., 34. See Caroline Martel’s chapter in this volume. “Luc Durand sur le Pavillon du Québec à Expo 67,” Mémoire des Montréalais, Centre d’histoire de Montréal, https://youtu.be/ErR_QGNXfi4 [accessed 21.02.2021]. For a rich discussion of the Quebec Pavilion, see Pauline Currien, “L’Identité nationale exposée. Représentations du Québec à l’Exposition universelle de Montréal 1967 (Expo 67)” (PhD diss., Université Laval, 2003). See also the chapters by Caroline Martel and Peter Scriver in this volume. Ada Louise Huxtable, “A Fair with Flair,” New York Times, 28 April 1967, 18. John Lownsborough, The Best Place to Be: Expo 67 and Its Time (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2012), 48–9.

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61 Drapeau’s magazine devotes several long articles to Hydro-Québec at Expo: Montréal ’65, 2, no. 8 (August 1965): 12–15; Montréal ’66, 3, no. 3 (March 1966): 17–20; Montréal ’67, 4, no. 7 (July 1967): 8–11. See also Marie-France Daigneault Bouchard’s meticulously documented thesis, “Manic 5 at Expo 67: Territorial Megastructure or the Connection of Three Spaces” (ma thesis, Concordia University, 2013), which explores the representational ramifications of this most unusual “show” in some detail. 62 The question of “legitimate ownership” would, of course, be increasingly contested in later years. It is not surprising that this and subsequent Hydro-Québec mega-projects such as Churchill Falls (joint project with Newfoundland, 1967– 74) and James Bay (1971–86) also managed to crystallize a fierce oppositional nationalism from First Nations peoples (notably the Innu in Labrador and the Inuit and Cree in northern Quebec) whose lands and villages were displaced by expropriation and/or flooding. See Thibault Martin and Steven M. Hoffman, eds., Power Struggles: Hydro Development and First Nations in Manitoba and Quebec (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2008). 63 “Le barrage que nous avons devant nous est une illustration éclatante de l’esprit qui régnait l’an dernier à l’Expo 67 et qui continue d’animer ce haut lieu de la fraternité universelle” (162). The speech was written but never delivered, as Johnson died suddenly on the morning he was due to open the dam. Daniel Johnson, Allocution de M. Daniel Johnson, Premier ministre du Québec. Cérémonie de la dernière coulée de bêton au barrage de Manicouagan 5, le jeudi 26 septembre 1968 [unpublished], Québec, Cabinet du Premier ministre: Service d’information, 1968, 9 pp. Quoted in Stéphane Savard, “La poésie ‘raisonnée’ du discours: Quelques réflexions sur Daniel Johnson, la question de l’électricité et l’influence de la ‘raison d’État,’” Bulletin d’histoire politique 20, no. 2 (2012): 155–70. 64 “Nous avons découvert par exemple qu’avec les moyens d’aujourd’hui, nous pouvions changer bien des choses, même la géographie, modifier le cours des rivières les plus impétueuses, combler des vallées, déplacer les montagnes et faire surgir derrière des murailles comme celle-ci d’immenses nappes d’azur.” Ibid., 161. 65 “Cet arrière-pays qu’on appelait jadis la Terre de Caïn est devenu véritablement une Terre des Hommes.” Ibid., 162. The bilingual Hydro-Québec report on the project produced the same year as Expo also refers to the territory it is building on as a Terre de Caïn, but notably only in the French version of the text. Paul Paradis, Manic-Outardes: Sept centrales sur deux rivières: L’aménagement hydroélectrique des rivières Manicouagan et Aux Outardes / Seven Powerhouses on Two Rivers: The Hydro-Electric Development of the Manicouagan and Aux Outardes Rivers (Montreal: Hydro-Québec, October 1967), f. 3, recto–f. 4 recto. Also left out of the English version is a curious statistic on the family names of those working on the project, providing once again, for the francophone reader, a shorthand

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way of underscoring the national investment in the project through a sort of patronymic synecdoche, beginning with the most common Québécois name, Tremblay, and then potentially extended to all of French Canada by a terminal etc.: “L’âge moyen est de 34.4 ans. En 1965, les Tremblay prédominaient avec une proportion de 4.83 p. 100, suivis des Gagnon avec 2.07 p. 100, puis des Bouchard, Lévesque, Côté, Lavoie, Gauthier, Ouellette, etc.” (The average age is 34.4. In 1965, there were more Tremblays than any other [4.83 per cent], followed by Gagnons [2.07 per cent], then Bouchards, Lévesques, Côtés, Lavoies, Gauthiers, Ouellettes, etc.) F. 5, recto. See also Stéphane Savard, “Quand l’histoire donne sens aux représentations symboliques: l’Hydro-Québec, Manic-5 et la société québécoise,” Recherches sociographiques 50, no. 1 (2009): 67–97. Une “enclave englobant la partie du Québec la plus peuplée.” Marie-Victorin, La Flore laurentienne, 3. Johnson seizes on the electrical sense of this term in order to speak of the Québécois as a “high-voltage” people by dint of their unique position in a NorthAmerican cultural circuit otherwise lacking resistance. See Stéphane Savard and Jean-Philippe Warren, “Un pays de haut voltage,” Liberté 51, no. 4 (June 2010): 51–8. “Ce Québec fera partie d’un monde que les aérobus supersoniques, la multiplication des rapports internationaux et les télécommunications par satellites auront rendu encore plus petit et plus interdépendant qu’il ne l’est aujourd’hui.” Johnson, Allocution de M. Daniel Johnson, in Savard, “La poésie ‘raisonnée’ du discours,” 162. Hugh Walpole, The Fortress (1933), quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 191. “Derrière cette forteresse de béton seront emprisonnés cinq billions de pieds cubes d’eau, qui ne pourront désormais retrouver leur chemin vers la mer qu’en s’engouffrant dans les turbines.” Johnson, Allocution de M. Daniel Johnson, in Savard, “La poésie ‘raisonnée’ du discours,” 160. With the opening of Drapeau’s personal archive in October 2019, we now know that the company responsible for running the Eiffel Tower at the time, la Régie publicitaire des Transports parisiens, did actually provide Drapeau an initial cost estimate for an operation they considered “difficult” but “not technically impossible”: 11,500,000 x 2 = 23,000,000 francs (equivalent at the time to over CA$5 million), “not including customs duty.” Letter to Jean Drapeau, dated 14 March 1963, Archives de la Ville de Montréal, accessed 8 May 2021, https://archives demontreal.ica-atom.org/uploads/r/ville-de-montreal-section-des-archives/7/ 2/7/72726d9994a27ec3335968a090efebb527edf3eebc6eb78d19848fde88042608/ P100-3-2-D010-DemenagementTourEiffel_op.pdf.

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72 See Christophe Tardieu, La Dette de Louis XV: le Québec, la France et de Gaulle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2017). 73 In order to justify his landing with full state honours in Quebec City rather than in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, he chose to arrive by sea rather than by air. The idea was initially suggested by, of all people, a federal navigation specialist during a chance encounter with the Quebec agent general for the French Radio and Television networks (ortf), Pierre-Louis Mallen, who encouraged de Gaulle to make the trip. See Mallen, Vive le Québec libre (Paris: Plon, 1978), 94. 74 L’Anse au Foulon was still officially called “Wolfe’s Cove” in 1967; it was returned to its original name in 1978. 75 Recently augmented by fiftieth-anniversary studies, notably: Tardieu, La Dette de Louis XV; André Duschesne, La Traversée du Colbert: De Gaulle au Québec en juillet 1967 (Montreal: Boréal, 2017); Roger Barette, De Gaulle et la Révolution tranquille: Vive le Québec libre! (Orléans: Regain de lecture, 2018); Jean-Paul Bled (ed.), Le général de Gaulle et le Québec (Paris: spm, 2018). See also the classic works: Jean Tainturier, ed., De Gaulle au Québec: le dossier des quatre journées (Montreal: Éditions du Jour, 1967), Mallen, Vive le Québec libre, and, in English, Dale Thompson’s excellent Vive le Québec libre (Toronto: Deneau, 1988). 76 This is likely an exaggeration, but it is recounted on an official telephone record from Chevrier, dated 25 July 1967, and addressed to the clerk of the Privy Council at the time, Gordon Robertson. Quoted in Jasmin, La Petite Histoire d’Expo 67, 114. 77 Only two hours earlier, in a speech at the Université de Montréal, de Gaulle referred to the people of Quebec as “the Canadian fraction of the French people,” Tainturier, De Gaulle au Québec, 83. 78 The Star: “All Canada applauding Drapeau”; The Gazette: “Mayor Drapeau Speaks for National Unity”; etc. Duschesne, La Traversée du Colbert, 224. For a fuller analysis of the reaction across the journalistic and political spectrum, see Marc-André Robert, “‘Vive le Québec libre!’: la moralité au coeur d’une polémique. Réactions publiques entourant la visite du général de Gaulle au Québec en juillet 1967,” Bulletin d’histoire politique, 21, no. 3 (2013): 134–49. 79 Montréal Matin, quoted in Brian McKenna and Susan Purcell, Drapeau (Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, and Company, 1980), 167. 80 “Nous appartenons à ce petit groupe de peuples sur la terre, – Combien sont-ils? Quatre ou cinq? – au destin d’une espèce particulière: l’espèce tragique. Pour eux, l’anxiété n’est pas de savoir si demain ils seront prospères ou malheureux, grands ou petits; mais s’ils seront ou ne seront pas; s’ils se lèveront pour saluer le jour ou rentrer dans le néant.” Quoted in Tainturier, De Gaulle au Québec, 90–1. Drapeau’s full speech is reprinted on pages 84–91. 81 “Notre État français, nous l’aurons … Nous aurons aussi un pays français, un

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83 84

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pays qui portera son âme dans son visage.” “L’Histoire, gardienne des traditions vivantes,” Directives (Montreal: Éditions du Zodiaque, 1937), 242. Failing to supply any bibliographic reference to Groulx, Tardieu suggests erroneously that this phrase “immediately” follows the passage quoted by Drapeau in his speech. La Dette de Louis XV, 107. Under the banner of the nationalist Bloc populaire canadien, Drapeau had run for office in 1942 (federal) and in 1944 (provincial); he lost both races. “Sachons bien que dans l’ère nouvelle, la survivance du Canada français n’est pas quelque chose qui va aller de soi, mais quelque chose que nous devrons assurer constamment, que nous devrons chaque jour affermir, consolider un peu plus. Nous devons avoir à cœur de témoigner en Amérique du Nord d’une présence française et chrétienne rayonnante, nous devons apporter une contribution originale au bien commun de l’humanité. C’est par là seulement que nous justifierons notre existence collective et que nous éviterons qu’aient été inutiles les sacrifices des générations qui nous ont précédés.” Jean Drapeau, Jean Drapeau vous parle (Ottawa: Éditions de la Cité, 1959), 79. The vigorous debates over the choice of site conducted behind closed doors at City Hall attest to Drapeau’s firm preference for the symbolic over the infrastructural. Montreal’s director of city planning, Claude Robillard – seconded to the world exhibition in April 1962 as its first director general – wrote an undated memorandum addressed to both the Expo commissioner (at that time, Paul Bienvenu) and the director of municipal administration (Lucien Hétu). He stated that since being appointed to study the project, there had been but one feasibility study conducted, favouring the Pointe Saint-Charles site and submitted for consideration by the Conseil d’administration on 19 March. According to the memorandum, Robillard was only summarily informed of the mayor’s preference for the Saint Lawrence on 21 March and given twenty-four hours to consider it. While conceding that the island site “presents certain advantages,” Robillard argues that its logistical and financial costs would be too high, the infrastructural benefits for Montreal too low, and strongly suggests that he is willing to carry on with the project only on the condition that the Pointe SainteCharles site is chosen (Archives de la Ville de Montréal, Fonds Claude Robillard, P137-3). It is likely the memorandum was written on the weekend or early in the week of 24 March; on Thursday 28 March, Drapeau announced that Expo would be built on the river. A detailed and costed fourteen-page “memorandum” from P.D. van Ginkel dated 17 June suggests that Robillard continued lobbying Drapeau to return to the Pointe Sainte-Charles plan (ibid.). Federal authorization to begin works on the islands was only granted on 6 July (almost five months after the choice of site was announced); Robillard resigned just over two months later. See

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87 88 89

90

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also Raymond Bédard, “L’histoire méconnue du site de l’Expo 67,” Revue de la Société des Professeurs de l’Histoire du Québec 55, no. 3 (2017): 39–44. See André Lortie, “Montréal 1960: les singularités d’un archetype métropolitain,” Les Années 60: Montréal voit grand, sous la direction d’André Lortie (Montreal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture, 2004), 75–115. Although Drapeau did try; see above, note 71. “La leçon de Montréal,” Rencontre entre Michael Sorkin, Jean-Louis Cohen et André Lortie, Les Années 60: Montréal voit grand, 152. Although stations were still being added, the metro was “inaugurated” on 14 October 1966, at a ceremony led by Jean Drapeau and blessed by the archbishop of Quebec, Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger. Line 4 was finished on 1 April 1967, and the official opening of the completed network was on 28 April, one day after the opening of Expo. To this day, there is still no line 3 in Montreal. See Benoît Clairoux, Le Métro de Montréal – 35 ans déja (Montreal: Éditions Hurtubise, 2001). Municipal documents also show that practical and symbolic considerations were further conjoined in the felicitous choice of pneumatic tires, as it would have been impossible for trains running on conventional rails to navigate the 6 per cent inclines that needed to be dug into the bedrock of the Saint Lawrence. “Desserte de l’Exposition universelle de 1967 par le métro,” 25 March 1963, Fonds Claude Robillard, P137-3, 3 pp. Michael Sorkin notes how pioneering Drapeau’s Montreal was in this respect, and yet, when measured against traditional economic indicators, how unsuccessful it was in the long term. “La leçon de Montréal,” Les Années 60: Montréal voit grand, 149. Doubtless an evocation of Maisonneuve’s famous statement of intent to found a colony in the heart of Iroquois country: “Il est de mon honneur d’accomplir ma mission; tous les arbres de cette île devraient-ils se changer en autant d’Iroquois” (My honour depends on completing my mission, even if all the trees on that island should turn into as many Iroquois). Although it is here perhaps cited unconsciously – the phrase is prominently inscribed on the pedestal of the 1895 monument to Maisonneuve on the Place d’Armes in Montreal – Drapeau’s tacit incorporation (and erasure) of Indigenous history is nevertheless a common trope of nationalist discourse that goes back at least to François-Xavier Garneau, who begins his foundational history of (French) Canada by dismissing the fantastic tales of “ces indigènes belliqueux et sauvages dont il reste à peine aujourd’hui quelques traces” (those bellicose and savage natives of whom today there remains scarcely a trace). Histoire du Canada (Québec: Imprimerie N. Aubin, 1845), vol. 1, “Discours préliminaire,” 9. C.f. Raymond Tanghe’s remarks above, note 16. See also Romney Copeman’s chapter in this volume.

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93 “Mayor Jean Drapeau’s Welcome at Expo 67” (27 April 1967), cbc Digital Archives, accessed 6 February 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/expo-67mayor-jean-drapeaus-welcome. 94 Montréal ’68, 5, no. 3 (1968): 3. Italics in the original. 95 Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967). Expo closed on 29 October; La Société du spectacle was published on 14 November. 96 Despite a short-lived attempt to make a permanent exhibition of Terre des hommes, most of the site was dismantled, repurposed, or fell into disuse from the early 1970s, as the city turned its attentions to the upcoming 1976 Olympic Games. In 1975 the former Ontario Pavilion caught fire. In 1976 the Buckminster Fuller dome of the US Pavilion, one of the most recognizable structures at Expo, met the same fate. Terre des hommes, which had essentially become a down-atthe-heel municipal theme park, finally closed for good in 1981. 97 “Pour qu’une nation vive, il lui faut un principe d’unité. Elle doit pouvoir s’identifier. Se reconnaître. Se distinguer. S’opposer. Comme toutes les réalités vivantes, la Nation Canadienne-française n’est ni un concept, ni une fiction. Elle n’est pas non plus une utopie humaniste, ni un rêve humanitaire, mais une solide réalité humaine.” Laurentie. La Souverainté nationale, no. 102 (November 1957): 87. 98 It was in this same preface to Directives – addressed “Only to those who know how to read” – that Groulx explicitly defended himself against the charge of separatism after his infamous speech to the Second Congress on the French Language in Quebec City (where he proclaimed, “notre État français, nous l’aurons”). “À mon discours au recent congrès de la langue française, l’on a fait les honneurs d’un large émoi. Honneurs gratuits. L’on y à vu l’exaltation de la thèse séparatiste. La lecture de Directives, de chapitre en chapitre, demontrera l’arbitraire fantaisie de pareille exégèse. D’un si etrange malentendu, irai-je jusqu’à m’émouvoir? De séparatisme il n’y avait point l’ombre en ce discours; et je défie bien que l’on y en trouve.” (Following my recent speech at the French Language Congress, I was honoured by an enthusiastic response. That honour was misplaced. People understood me to be extolling the separatist cause. Every chapter of Directives demonstrates the arbitrary fantasy of such a reading. Should I be worried by this strange misunderstanding? There was not a hint of separatism in that speech; and I challenge anybody to find one.) Lionel Groulx, “Pour ceux-là seulement qui savent lire,” Directives, 12. The second edition of Directives (Saint-Hyacinthe: Éditions Alerte, 1959), appearing the same year as Jean Drapeau vous parle, would be published with a new preface containing only snippets of Groulx’s original, none of which refers to his unambiguous rejection of separatism and his support for Confederation. Drapeau is clearly quoting from the first edition.

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99 It is important to underscore that this anxiety is far from being an obsession restricted to Lionel Groulx and his disciples; it is properly national. In 1917, at the height of the first conscription crisis, Édouard Montpetit opens his third published work on economic education in French Canada with the following paragraph: “Devant cette guerre, à laquelle nous assistons, à laquelle nous participons, chacun s’interroge avec angoisse. Que nous réserve demain? Pour nous, Canadiens français, l’anxiété est double. La guerre aura des réflexes: elle se prolongera peut-être, ici même, par une lutte pour notre survivance, pacifique espérons-le, à laquelle nous devons nous préparer.” (As we watch this war, as we participate in this war, each one of us asks the same anguished question: What will tomorrow bring? As French Canadians, we have more to fear. The war will have its repercussions at home: it will perhaps continue in the struggle for our survival, a struggle that we hope will be peaceful, but for which we had better prepare.) Édouard Montpetit, Notre avenir. L’Enseignement professionnel et la constitution d’une élite (Montreal: Extrait de la Revue trimestrielle Canadienne, 1917), 3. 100 As Michel Bock notes, “En 1937, comme déjà en 1917 et encore en 1967, Groulx croyait ferme en la vocation apostolique et civilisatrice de la nation Canadiennefrançaise. Sa présence en Amérique n’était pas un accident de parcours, elle avait été voulue par la Providence” (In 1937, Groulx firmly believed in the apostolic and civilizing vocation of the French-Canadian nation – a belief already articulated in 1917, and which he still held in 1967. Its presence in North America was not the result of historical accident; it was ordained by Providence). “Apogée et déclin du projet national groulxiste. Quelques réflexions autour de Directives (1937),” in 1937: un tournant culturel, eds. Yvan Lamonde and Denis Saint-Jacques (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2009), 32. 101 “Les snobs, les bonne-ententistes, les défaitistes, peuvent nous crier, tant qu’ils voudront: ‘Vous êtes la dernière génération des Canadiens français …’ Je leur réponds, avec toute la jeunesse: ‘Nous sommes la génération des vivants. Vous êtes la dernière génération des morts!’” Groulx, “L’Histoire, gardienne des traditions vivantes,” Directives, 242. 102 Groulx wrote Une croisade d’adolescents in 1912, which was popular enough to see a second edition (with a new preface) in 1938. Regarding his opinion of the generation of the Quiet Revolution, see Éric Bedard, “L’État français’ sans la jeunesse: Lionel Groulx et la Révolution tranquille,” Mens 16, no. 2 (2016): 37–63. 103 “À quoi servent les historiens sinon à se contredire?,” La Presse, 8 May 1967, 18. McKenna and Purcell recount the guided tour (Drapeau, 156–7); Ivan Carel mentions Groulx’s name in the context of the Youth Pavilion, but, to the best of our knowledge, no other historian has written about his final appearance at Expo.

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Ivan Carel, “L’Expo 67 et la jeunesse,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 17, no. 1 (2008): 101–11. For a recent overview of the commission, and Laurendeau’s role in it, see Valérie Lapointe-Gagnon, Panser le Canada: Une histoire intellectuelle de la commission Laurendeau-Dunton (Montreal: Boréal, 2018). It is noteworthy that the first epigraph to the volume (page 8) refers to Expo in a couplet from the 1970s Quebec rock group Beau Dommage (“En soixante-sept tout était beau, / C’était l’année de l’amour, c’était l’année de l’Expo” [In sixty-seven everything was great, / It was the year of love, it was the year of Expo]), but that the great bilingual experiment of that year is otherwise barely mentioned. Unremarked upon is that André Laurendeau, Davidson Dunton, and the bilingual poet and academic F.R. Scott were among the fifteen people “from all walks of life” invited to the Montebello Conference in May 1963; only two months later all three would be appointed to the Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, with Dunton and Laurendeau acting as co-chairs. The first volume of its report (“The Official Languages”) was published just three weeks before Expo closed in October 1967. Fernand Dumont, “Les années 1930. La première Révolution tranquille,” Idéologies au Canada français, 1930–1939, eds. Fernand Dumont et al. (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1978), 1–20. See Yvan Lamonde, “Les Jeune-Canada ou les ‘Jeune-Laurentie’? La recherche d’un nationalisme (1932–1938),” Les Cahiers des dix, no. 63 (2009): 175–215. “L’homme ne s’élève à l’universel que par étapes. Faire sauter un échelon, s’élancer droit dans l’abstrait, c’est risquer de s’y perdre et fabriquer des idéologies en série. L’enfant n’apprend que par degrés l’existence du monde; il en prend conscience à mesure qu’il prend conscience de soi.” André Laurendeau, Notre nationalisme (Montreal: Tract des Jeune-Canada, 5, 1935), 42. Cf. Gatien Lapointe, who is clearly writing from the same intellectual position as a nationalist humanist: ds: Vous associez l’universel et le particulier, le drame québécois et le drame de tout être humain aux prises avec les grandes questions de l’existence. C’est pour cela que vous écrivez, en exergue à votre ode, que “tous les hommes portent le même nom” [You link the Universal and the Particular, the drama of Quebec and the drama of every human being struggling with the great questions of existence. That is why you have placed in epigraph to your Ode, “All men bear the same name”]. gl: Je crois, oui, que c’est là le seul chemin pour accéder à l’universel. Le contraire nous jetterait vite dans l’abstraction, dans le général et sous les ordres même du “général.”

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[Yes, I think that is the only path to the Universal. Taking the contrary road quickly leads to abstraction, to the “general” and being subject, as it were, to the orders of the general.] “Une entrevue de Donald Smith avec Gatien Lapointe,” 59. 108 This chapter takes as its departure point unpublished historical work conducted by Steven Palmer on the place of the Saint Lawrence in the construction of Expo 67, first communicated in a lecture at Concordia University in 2015: “Making Expo 67: Avant-Garde Humanism and Canada’s Quiet Revolution” (Montreal, 20 November 2015). Thanks are due to him, as well as to Nina Caplan, Nick Harrison, and Jocelyn Létourneau for constructive comments over the writing of this chapter.

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2 Two Universal Endings: Architecture and Cinema at the New York and Montreal World’s Fairs

heesok chang

The first plan for the 1967 Universal and International Exhibition announced: new york ’64 will be the last of the old worlds fairs. montreal ’67 can be the first of a new era in international exhibitions. 1 It was a bold prophecy, composed in July 1962, two years before the “last of the old world’s fairs” was even scheduled to open. It staked its claim on the bad advance publicity coming out of New York and on the tantalizing potential for Montreal to be something altogether different. In contrast to the commercialism and disarray of the upcoming American spectacle, the Canadian exposition would be a utopian affair, marked by global association, urban renewal, and pathbreaking architectural novelty. The rallying cry of the vanguard architects and urban planners charged with envisioning Expo 67 was categorical: Montreal’s exhibition would be unifying and unique, not recycled and incoherent, universal and humanist in its aims, not ridden with commerce and nationalism. It would be nothing like New York’s. From early reviews of Expo 67’s stirring design and architecture to recent scholarly reconstructions of its cinematic experiments, a half-century of published opinion has tended to confirm their far-sighted claim. A critical overview of significant urban festivals from 1851 to 2000 singles it out as “the

highwater mark of the international exposition movement.”2 The 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, on the other hand, has never been able to shake its early abysmal notices. “I doubt whether any fair was ever so crassly, even brutally conceived as this one,” wrote architectural historian Vincent Scully in Life magazine.3 Rather than introduce new built forms, new modes of urban life, he noted, it offered a hodgepodge of self-promotional pavilions that served only to extol American consumerism. His scorn was not unlike Izvestia’s view of the American suburban house exhibit at the 1959 Kitchen Debate: “What is this, a national exhibit of a great country or a branch department store?”4 “The Fair is nothing but the concentrated essence of motel, gas station, shopping center and suburb,” Scully said.5 Novelist Robert Stone, who journeyed to the Flushing Meadows extravaganza with the Merry Pranksters, was also struck by all the ersatz futurism. It marked a disillusioning finale to a mind-bending, cross-country bus ride. “Curved, finned, corporate Tomorrowland, as presented at the 1964 world’s fair,” he recalled forty years later, “was over before it began.”6 That the fair was bound to be an aesthetic flop was a widespread notion among the cognoscenti. In her opening day review for the New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable remarked, “It is everything the critics predicted it would be – disconnected, grotesque, lacking any unity of concept or style.”7 By “the critics” Huxtable meant critics of architecture – experts like herself whose opinions shaped not only their field but, at a time when that field was still yoked to the aspirations of urbanism, the culture at large. Their authority helped fix the reputation of the New York festival as a shoddy spectacle and appoint the Montreal exposition a stunning and serious artistic event. Appearing just eighteen months after the close of Robert Moses’s fair, and only a halfday’s drive north on the expressways he built, Expo 67 served up a spectacular counterexample. Huxtable’s report from Montreal, also published on opening day, gushed with superlatives. It was “overwhelming in quality,” she wrote; “The sophisticated standard of excellence maintained in this enormous effort, a six-month miracle, almost defies description.”8 Dubbed the “Space Frame Fair,” Expo’s numerous, ethereal long-span structures – including Frei Otto’s mega-tent, Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat complex, to name the most iconic – broke dramatically with the forms and technics of mid-century modernism. The 1964–65 New York World’s Fair – a congregation of steel, glass, and concrete – did not. Although full of eccentrically shaped, attention-grabbing structures, their flourishes remained grounded (with some notable Pop Art exceptions) in the futurist vocabulary of yesteryear. The General Motors Pavilion was emblematic in this regard: a rectilinear edifice bookended on one side by a circular building displaying gm products and technologies, and on

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the other, by a ten-storey canopy, curved and angled to resemble a late model tailfin. The tailfin facade housed the most popular attraction at the fair, a ride through animated 3D models of twenty-first-century progress. Called Futurama II, it depicted various scenarios of technological conquest: space travel and lunar settlement, Antarctic research, aquatic farming and deep-sea tourism, high-tech highway paving through equatorial rainforests. The ride closed with a diorama of America itself: rugged (but technologically mastered) rural landscapes and cities of tomorrow linked by free-flowing, multilane expressways – in effect, a knockoff of Norman Bel Geddes’s dazzling Futurama exhibit for the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair. The gm Pavilion epitomized everything the critics found regressive about the fair. Futurama II advocated a vision of the built environment that was no longer utopian, but hegemonic. Its social fantasy was the abolition of congestion – not only traffic jams, but pedestrian crowds, mixed-use public squares, spontaneous pathways through space: in short, all the merits of urban density that Jane Jacobs and others had rallied behind two years earlier in their campaign to block Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway. At a moment of explosive civil unrest, charged in no small measure by the segregationist stratagems of rationalist urban planning, gm’s idyll of the republic as a car-centric sprawl leading in and out of orderly metropolises was not, to say the least, an exposition of the universal. For many native New Yorkers, indeed, this “urbanism of good intentions” (to borrow Rem Koolhaas’s phrase)9 had long ago revealed its bias. The fair itself was the site of racial dissent. Hundreds of civil rights activists disrupted President Lyndon Johnson’s opening day speech with shouts of “Jim Crow must go!” and “Freedom now!” The Congress of Racial Equality (core) staged multiple demonstrations to protest the fair’s racist hiring practices and the Louisiana Pavilion’s plan to stage a minstrel show. core’s larger purpose, according to national chair James Frazier, was to draw attention to “the melancholy contrast between the idealized, fantasy world of the Fair and the real world of brutality, prejudice, and violence in which the American Negro is forced to live.”10 As the gm Pavilion also illustrated, that fantasy world was forged in the crucible of the Cold War. By hitching the automotive industry to aerospace technology, it proselytized for the circulation of capital on the emerging terrains of superpower contestation – consumer goods (since the Kitchen Debate) and the space race (since Sputnik) – demonstrating, once again, that what was good for General Motors was good for America. Unlike the Kitchen Debate, however, this was a one-sided pile-on. A pile-on because of the likeminded messaging of the Ford and Chrysler, Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, Du Pont, Bell Telephone, and General Electric exhibits, not to mention the US

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national and state pavilions, and the Space Park co-sponsored by nasa and the Department of Defense. And one-sided because the Soviet Union and its satellite states declined to participate (negotiations for an exhibition exchange had broken down), as did Canada and Australia and most of Europe (the fair was banned by the Bureau of International Exhibitions [bie]), nations that might have offered alternative articulations of the fair’s themes: “Peace through Understanding” and “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe.” A more representative exhibition of these cosmopolitan aspirations – cast under the heading “Man and His World/Terre des hommes” – would take place at the bie-sanctioned, Category 1 world’s fair in Montreal. As if to redress the counterpoint missing from the festival in Flushing Meadows, at Expo 67 the US and Soviet pavilions faced each other across the narrow channel separating Île Sainte-Hélène and Île Notre-Dame. As specimens of progressive architecture, Fuller’s luminous, three-quarter sphere clearly eclipsed N.V. Posokhin’s glass-walled, convex roofed rectangle, a modernist concoction not unlike the gm Pavilion. Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet exhibition touted its advances in applied science and heavy industry, including peaceful uses of atomic energy. As if in anticipation of the postindustrial, creative economy, the US accentuated its culture industries, featuring giant images of Hollywood stars, props and clips from famous movies, instruments of rock musicians, and commissioned paintings from Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. In the duel of spacecrafts, prominently displayed in both pavilions, the Americans showcased the Lunar Lander, whose televisual image would be beamed to earth in two years’ time. Across Le Moyne canal, a replica of the Vostok, the rocket that carried Yuri Gargarin into outer space, reminded millions of visitors which nation had got there first. As far as Cold War standoffs go, this was not a very menacing one. In the introduction to their recent compilation of essays on Expo 67, Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan write, “Canadian soil provided a less-than-hysterical setting for the inevitable showdown between the American and Soviet pavilions, and their competing world views.”11 It did, however, provide a setting. Cold War chauvinism may have been restrained by Canada’s standing as a moderating “middle power,” as well as by the forceful framing of the fair as a shared planetary initiative, effectuated in large part by the seven theme pavilions representing the worlds of Man. But Expo 67 fell notably short of the radical aim of its original planners: to mount an aesthetically integrated exhibition – co-designed and installed by the participating countries – completely free of national and corporate pavilions. Although the Montreal fair featured only a scattering of commercially sponsored

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exhibits, the majority of its buildings represented nations and territories. The official guidebook’s claim that “every pavilion, in its fashion, relates its presentation to the overall concept of Man and his ideological, cultural and scientific relationship to his environment” was, Seth Feldman rightly notes, “perhaps wishful thinking.”12 “The assertion of nationhood,” Kenneally and Sloan point out, “would be continually juxtaposed to principles of inter-national commonality, universal human truths, and the transcendence of boundaries. Everywhere at Expo 67, the very concept of nation would be propped up, even while its ideological limits were being questioned.”13 But this formulation could just as well be reversed: everywhere at Expo 67, the very concept of a post-national, universal humanity – Man and His World/ Terre des hommes – would be propped up, even while its ideological limits were being questioned by various assertions of nationhood. Challenges to Expo’s soaring humanism would come not only from the playing out of Cold War, European, and Mideast rivalries, but also from the powerful emergence of neglected national sovereignties. These encompassed the expositions of recently decolonized peoples – most strikingly, perhaps, the consortium of fifteen subSaharan nations that exhibited at John Andrews’s elegantly designed Africa Place. And, as the essays in this collection underscore, they included the various – and incompatible – nationalist narratives of the host nation: the Canadian, on the Centenary of Confederation; the Québécois, in the throes of the Quiet Revolution; and Indigenous peoples, afforded the unprecedented opportunity to author their own exhibition. As Romney Copeman shows in this volume, the anti-colonial messaging at the Indians of Canada Pavilion was very much at odds with the depiction of the host nation – and its mythical appropriation of indigeneity – on display at the Canadian Pavilion. The Indians installation assailed not only Canada’s self-representation as an exceptionally peaceful and prosperous, interdependent and multiethnic nation, but also the grand narrative of universal human progress framing it and, indeed, the exposition as a whole.14 From diverse postcolonial points of view, the foundering of Expo’s original plan, not to mention the fuzziness of its successor theme, was fortuitous. Rather than be featured as exotic display (a mock Congolese village appeared just a decade earlier at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair), emerging nations were invited to erect pavilions of their own: to articulate their own conception – through architecture, design, and display – of inter-national co-belonging. At Moses’s spectacle, critics balked at its hackneyed utopianism. For much of the general public, on the other hand, the visible fractures in the fair’s lofty scaffolding, its “crassness,” made the whole affair more amusing, a giant Midway Plaisance. Architect James Sanders who went to the fair more than twenty times as a ten-year-old recalls, “the nature of it being these slightly showy,

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gaudy things wasn’t lost on me. It wasn’t serious architecture. But that didn’t make it any less fun.”15 Recent reappraisals of the 1964–65 World’s Fair dwell, indeed, on its popular and escapist appeal. In retrospect, its unifying style perhaps lay in its uneasy amalgam of, in Leo Marx’s metaphor, the machine and the garden, the gleaming space age and the pastoral frontier.16 This yesterdayand-tomorrow mishmash was evident in the fair’s best worst exhibits – Futurama II, Disney’s It’s a Small World ride at the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, Disney’s Carousel of Progress at ge, or “The Happy Plastic Family” musical number at the Du Pont Pavilion – exhibits that, in proto-postmodern fashion, blurred the line between utopia and nostalgia, humanism and kitsch. No such patina of retro futurity colours the modernity of Expo 67. In scholarly reconstructions its vanished pavilions and exhibits emerge freshly minted, its planners and designers forward-thinking auteurs collaborating in a rebuild of the affective environment. These studies rightly insist that Expo must be accounted for not only in the burgeoning study of world’s fairs but in the unfinished history of modern art (adding yet another turn to the academic discussion: what was modernism – and when?). In their collection Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67, editors Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault affiliate the fair’s zealous conceptual coordination to the “holistic thinking” of the Bauhaus.17 Expo’s material integration of building and spectacle, architecture and display, certainly met Gropius’s design brief to marry industry and art. By exalting the workshop and embracing design for mass production, the Bauhaus had distinguished its path forward from the surgical, anti-art polemics of leftist vanguards like Dada. By historical extension and analogy, so too did Expo 67: its high-tech, crowd-pleasing media innovations looked and felt nothing like the scratchy, flickering experiments of American and continental “underground” cinema of the 1950s and 60s, nor anything like the sundry anti-cinematic films of Guy Debord, whose seminal book La société du spectacle also appeared in 1967. As Gagnon and Marchessault underscore, the Bauhaus spirit informing Expo was rooted in the old Wagnerian dream of offering the audience a total aesthetic experience, a Gesamtkunstwerk. The “idea of an integrated environment” was, they write, “central to the humanism at the heart of Expo 67’s design aesthetic.”18 The present collection submits this mythic, techno-modernist conception of Expo to a polite détournement. Editors Steven Palmer and Craig Moyes contend that Expo 67 scholarship has focused on the fair’s “audio-visual and utopian aspects” while (for the most part) taking for granted the nationalist contexts in which those architectural and media innovations arose. The essays they have commissioned here seek to correct that oversight, to balance Expo’s claims for the universal with its grounding in the national and regional.

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Taking this analytic reframing a step further, one might argue that this collection aims to provincialize Expo 67. Provincialize in two related senses: to spotlight Expo – from its geo-political origins and intellectual-artistic labour to its restless sensibility and subaltern stance toward the global – as a decisively Québécois phenomenon; and, in the process of this reclamation, to culturally specify – provincialize in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s sense19 – the utopian allure of a post-national and universal modernity. To provincialize Expo 67 is to underscore how its homegrown exhibitions as well as its overarching conception and design did not simply subscribe to a global modernization already in progress (coming late to the party, as it were), but rather explored and articulated, from particular geographical, historical, and cultural viewpoints, what a yet-to-be-imagined terre des hommes might look like. The present essay seeks to provide a historical backdrop for the other essays in this collection by drawing out some unnoticed and unlikely correspondences it shares with “New York ’64” – a fair whose chauvinism and boosterism (provincial in the pejorative sense) it set out so unequivocally not to repeat. For better and for worse, in different but comparable ways, the universal expositions in New York and Montreal fell short of the universal. The polar contrast between their built worlds obscures a shared modernist trajectory and a comparably foiled utopian ambition. Their historical continuity is buried in the archive of their planning, in their architects’ earliest dreams for what a world’s fair could be. In both cases these plans were upended – not just by “reality,” but by a rival territorial audacity. Of course, there was utopian architecture – and some of it brilliant – at Expo 67. But here again, another limit was exposed. The bold modernists designing Expo were inspired by an exhibitionary enterprise that stretched from the great universal expositions of the nineteenth century to the immersive visual displays that came into vogue in the postwar. For these world-picturing projects, the pictures mattered less than their setting. The space of exhibition instilled in the viewers a disorienting and exhilarating sense of immersion, and a corresponding perceptual urgency: the need to apprehend multiple things all at once. But this architecture devoted to the solicitation of a new human sensorium was an architecture committed, in the long run, to its own disappearance – not only due to the ephemeral nature of building for exhibitions, but because of the sense-altering aspects of the world it was attempting to conjure and the virtual technologies it was deploying to conjure it. At Expo 67, mega-structural architecture encountered the limits of its capacity to picture and transform the world through the derealization of buildings and rooms.20 For the creation of truly immersive environments turned on a collaboration with cinema, another technology undergoing radical experiment.

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As various scholars have noted, the “McLuhan Fair” boasted numerous kinesthetic, multiscreen exhibitions, many of them housed in pavilions designed to augment and combine the affective structures of both architecture and cinema. This expanded cinema, like the architecture that housed it, was ephemeral – not only dismantled once the world’s fair left town, but also shortlived as a vital cultural experiment. The question of its legacy remains openended. Citing a glowing lecture on Expo 67 by media scholar Gerald O’Grady, Janine Marchessault writes, “It is an event that can be read as a harbinger of the digital era, a precursor to the multiplication and interconnectedness of screens that characterize twenty-first century media architectures.”21 This is a provocative claim, and not necessarily a welcome one. On their face, Expo’s cinematic display forms seem no more to have predicted the coming media ecology, certainly not the current one of miniaturized screens and imperceptible microprocessing, than its space-frame architecture blueprinted urban skylines. Expo’s participatory media buildings did not prophesize, say, the Internet of Things, its invisible network architecture, or the social reality that screens occlude (algorithms, data mining, surveillance). As environments transparently directed at human perception, they instead bear an untimely and critical relationship to our present; their out-modedness attests to their utopianism, to their collective wish (as Walter Benjamin liked to say) to make of new technology a second human nature. Utopian obsolescence, on the other hand, did not befall the wholesome architectural jumble of the 1964–65 World’s Fair. Like Disney’s “architecture of reassurance,” its legacy is evident in today’s ubiquitous theme park urbanism (pseudo-historical districts, gentrified recreation zones, destination marketplaces). Scattered amidst the fair’s glass-and-concrete miscellany, however, visitors could line up to view the kind of multi-mediated, immersive cinema that would take centre stage at Expo 67. They were amongst the most popular attractions in Flushing Meadows. Despite being hosted by commercial pavilions – most notably, Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid’s To Be Alive! at Johnson Wax and Ray and Charles Eames’s Think at ibm – the creators were free to experiment. Like Kaleidoscope at Expo, the psychedelic film sponsored by a consortium of Canadian chemical companies, To Be Alive! and Think did not plug any products (at least not overtly). Rather, akin to the great universal exhibitions of the previous century, they surrounded their audiences with architectures of instruction and delight, and bombarded their senses with elevated, humanist messaging. For some members of the audience this experience raised questions about the experimental form’s didactic advantage and ideological consequence: the disconnect between sensory intake and sensory recalibration, between ramified human agency and insidious social control,

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between enlightenment and myth. These are concerns critics have raised about the expanded cinema of Expo 67 as well – most notably, in regards to the remarkable Labyrinth, the fair’s most ambitious and bewildering media pavilion. It bears some telling correspondences with the ibm Pavilion at the 1964–65 World’s Fair. In comparable ways, both expose the limits of the media Gesamtkunstwerk – and by extension of world’s fairs – as a vehicle for mass edification, and both foretell, in different ways, the quandary of humanism in the coming era of ubiquitous computing.

Architecture Due in large measure to their monumental ephemerality, international exhibitions have long provided builders an opportunity to explore their wishful thinking. According to Vincent Scully, “World’s Fairs give architects a chance to do two things: to put up more advanced buildings than can be easily constructed elsewhere, and to suggest new solutions to the problems of city planning as a whole.”22 The 1964–65 exhibition fell short on both fronts. The team of distinguished architects appointed to blueprint the fair was disbanded soon after Moses, its president, dismissed their various proposals, including their favoured plan: an enormous elliptical complex centred around a landscaped lake. New York’s “Master Planner” decided instead to let the fair unfold without a novel unifying scheme. He sought to reduce outlay by planting the pavilions – whatever form they might take – on the grid of the magnificent 1939–40 fair. As parks commissioner, Moses had secured the earlier exhibition to finance the development of Flushing Meadows into a municipal park. This remained his priority a quarter century later. He was not going to repeat the mistake of his predecessor, fair president Grover Whalen, who had destroyed the profit margin by letting his architects pursue their extravagant ideas. Moses defended his bottom-line strategy with characteristic bravado, casting his detractors in the role of dogmatic elites, and framing his eschewal of an overarching design as an ecumenical aesthetic vision. “The Fair administration belongs to no architectural clique, subscribes to no aesthetic creed, favors no period or school, and worships at no artistic shrine,” he told an audience at Brandeis University in March 1961: “there will be no one predominating architectural concept … The styles of architecture [the exhibitors] adopt, like the exhibits within their structures, will be determined by them. This will produce endless variety, if not uniformity.”23 Conceived by Gordon Bunshaft, the “doughnut” or “Big Circle” (as they called it) was put forward precisely to avert the visual chaos of “endless variety.”

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National and commercial displays would have to conform to the same spatialaesthetic constraints, occupying wedges of a single building. 2,500 feet in outside diameter and a mile in circumference,24 Bunshaft’s “Big Circle” recalled the great exhibition halls of the nineteenth century, in particular Frédéric Le Play’s Colisée de fer, a massive ellipse built for the 1867 Exposition Universelle. Fixing on this perhaps inadvertent allusion, Moses relished the irony of “avantgarde” architects championing an anachronistic plan that would, he argued, stifle originality and experiment in exhibition design.25 He chose to ignore the boldness of Bunshaft’s plan itself, an astonishing departure from the recent practice of allowing exhibitors to erect their own pavilions. Moses was also disingenuous in casting the design committee, including Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, as radical artists. Led by architect Wallace K. Harrison, whose credits included Rockefeller Center, the United Nations complex, Lincoln Center, and the iconic Trylon and Perisphere (the Theme Center for the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair), the committee members were steeped in the triumphs – and orthodoxies – of the Modern Movement. Each of them more or less the age of the century, they were, by the early sixties, no longer the architectural vanguard. That mantle fell to a younger generation keen on renovating a modernism that had fallen in lockstep with big business and out of touch with its urban surroundings, with its mission to transform the built world. This restless cohort included Daniel van Ginkel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, husbandand-wife architects and planners invited in June 1962 by the Montreal Citizens Committee (mcc), a civic-minded group of business leaders, to develop a compelling proposal for a world exhibition bid. As Inderbir Singh Riar has shown in his corrective history of Expo 67, the van Ginkels were instrumental in ensuring the fair in Canada would become, in contradistinction always to the one in the US, an authentic platform for humanist aspirations and transformative architecture. But the stark disparity in the aesthetic-political daring of the two festivals obscures some interesting parallels in their design history. Like Harrison’s committee, the van Ginkels’ tenure as fair planners was shortlived. Little of their original vision for Expo was realized. The Montreal architects ran up against the same immovable obstacles as their New York counterparts. These included not only the exigencies of the exhibition format itself – an established theatre for nationalist rivalry and corporate boosterism – but also an obdurate and powerful boss driven by an ulterior civic agenda. What was the original plan for Expo 67? Under the heading “Man in the City,” the van Ginkels proposed a world’s fair distributed over six sites of terraced buildings, miniature cities in themselves, interlinked by a pedestrian rapid

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transit spine. Each of the architectural clusters would unify a specific exhibition function (international pavilions, Canadian pavilions, prototypes for housing, amusement, and so forth), and be built along the waterfront of downtown Montreal, featuring the Old City as its centrepiece.26 This inner city placement was crucial to their ambition of inaugurating “a new era in international exhibitions.” Indeed, their main opposition to the New York festival, then taking shape in Flushing Meadows, was precisely its conventional location – on a fairgrounds remote from the heart of the city. The van Ginkels saw Montreal and its exhibition as partners in reinvention: the urban milieu would revitalize a fair tradition grown stale; the build out from the fair would help modernize Montreal. The city was not physical backdrop – the stage on which architects could really show the world their stuff – but discursive foreground, a theme of urgent global concern. “The second half of the 20th century witnesses unprecedented urban growth throughout the world,” they wrote in their July 1962 memorandum. “The sheer volume of city building never has occurred before. This is so in highly industrialized countries such as the United States, as much as in those which are in transition from an agrarian economy. There exists a new technology which as yet has not been applied to the city.”27 This “new technology” was multifaceted, encompassing not only land-reclamation and slum-clearance redevelopment schemes, but strategies of conservation and restoration. It entailed a reordering of the city on a heroic scale, but keyed to the needs and whims of people gathering in and moving through urban space. According to Riar, “Man in the City” brought to bear the van Ginkels’ critique of modernist doctrine as epitomized, for example, by the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne’s (ciam) influential, prewar decrees on functionalist town planning.28 But, he underscores, their polemic was still resolutely modern (late modern not postmodern) – still firmly attached to the idea of architecture as a progressive art, capable of reordering the urban world through a combination of form and technics. This utopianism was reflected in their admiration for the great exhibitions of the nineteenth century. In invoking this precedent, the van Ginkels cited the work of Sigfried Giedion (a former ciam colleague), who discerned in the iron-and-glass exhibition halls of London and Paris a promise of mass society transformed through industrial processes. The 1867 exposition in particular illustrated how, for the van Ginkels, a century-old megastructure could inspire a new epoch in international exhibitions. In Space, Time and Architecture (a text from which their plans frequently crib), Giedion remarks: “The aim of the exhibition can be gathered from a quotation taken from an official publication of 1867. ‘To make the circuit of this palace, circular, like the equator, is literally to go around the world. All peoples are here, enemies live in peace side by side. As in the be-

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ginning of things on the globe of waters, the divine spirit now floats on this globe of iron.’”29 Le Play’s Colisée de fer figures in the van Ginkels’ planning as a spiritual, not a literal, manifestation. Like Harrison’s design committee, they were deeply opposed to a fragmented fair composed of competing pavilions. But unlike their peers in New York, they never entertained the idea of recycling the monumental forms of ferro-vitreous construction. For Bunshaft, the “Big Circle” was largely a solution to a design problem: how to create an impressive, unified event. For the van Ginkels, the Iron Colosseum, like the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower, were modernist touchstones, object lessons in how prefabricated, mass-produced building materials could produce collective enchantment. Arousing such universal wonder for a world’s fair in the 1960s required a comparably heroic architecture. But it could no longer be evoked by nineteenthcentury means and methods (“By the end of the 19th century, industry was no longer a source of wonder”).30 Answering the mid-twentieth-century challenge of reimagining the city-as-world called for new architectural theories and technologies, including a more plastic conception of megastructures. In a rare accord of art and commerce, Man in the City spoke directly to the concerns of local civic and business leaders who viewed the international exhibition as a unique opportunity to halt Montreal’s decades-long decline into “regional” city status. A bie-sanctioned world exposition could help reestablish its once proud standing as a commercial and cultural metropolis. Man in the City became the de facto plan for the city’s world’s fair by the fall of 1962.31 In November, it helped the Canadian delegation, led by a hard-charging Mayor Jean Drapeau, win the coveted Category 1 designation from the bie in Paris. The December 20th act of Parliament establishing the Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition (ccwe) and granting $40 million in funding stipulated that the fair take place in the city. Even as the van Ginkels and their architect allies broadened the theme of the exhibition from Man in the City to Man and His World, and eventually, to Terre des hommes, they never abandoned the cornerstone idea of an intraurban setting. But shortly after his triumphant return from Paris, Drapeau made clear that such a siting would not satisfy his demand for a grand spectacle. “A fair is for the masses and not for the thinkers,” he opined. “What the masses want are monuments.”32 He sought a location that could accommodate something like the Eiffel Tower, if not the Eiffel Tower itself. Against the steady opposition of the fair’s planning and design contingent, including its recently appointed director general (Claude Robillard) and master planner (Daniel van Ginkel), the mayor got the spectacular venue he wanted. Maneuvering around the commissioners of the ccwe (not to mention the planning team) and securing the backing of the prime

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minister, Drapeau announced through the press in March 1963, to the surprise of almost everyone, that Expo 67 would be built on two islands in the channel between the city and the South Shore. For all his Moses-like scorn for the “thinkers” and predilection for towering monuments, Drapeau did not necessarily put spectacle ahead of urban planning. Unlike Flushing Meadows, this extra muros location was city-adjacent, convenient to link to a modernized transit system, and offered panoramic views of the downtown skyline. It could certainly showcase the host town as a bonafide metropolis. Indeed, repairing Montreal’s slumping image may well have been at the heart of Drapeau’s audacious ploy – risky because Expo was already four years behind schedule and the site he called for was not actually there. It would have to be summoned by assimilating two smaller islands to enlarge Île Sainte-Hélène and reclaiming part of the peninsula (Mackay Pier), not to mention creating a whole new island from scratch (Île Notre-Dame). In addition to the diking, dredging, quarrying, excavating, filling, and carving required to build these showgrounds, they would have to be installed with water, sewage, and power systems and inter-connected by bridges and tunnels. It was a near biblical feat, as Drapeau made clear in his opening day remarks: “It is hardly likely that Montrealers could forget that less than three years ago the land on which we are gathered here today had not yet come entirely out of the waters of the St. Lawrence.”33 He framed the event as a collective enterprise connected to the founding – not of the nation (despite the Centenary occasion) – but of the city itself: “follow the trails which our pioneers cleared along the shores of this river in the past and meet the founders of Ville-Marie. Ville-Marie, which became Montreal, and which was established three hundred and twenty-five years ago.”34 It could not have escaped the attention of Montrealers that the making of the islands came on the heels of an even more massive construction project on the river: the Saint Lawrence Seaway completed in 1959. Spearheaded by proponents who sought to bolster the economies of the Great Lakes region, the Seaway was, according to Steven Palmer, a deeply ambivalent development for Montrealers, if anything “more bitter than sweet.”35 The Seaway’s great network of locks, canals, and dredged waterways relegated the gateway city to just another port on a streamlined thoroughfare between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes. It served to “deepen [Montrealers’] growing sense of decline in the face of a rising Toronto.”36 Palmer argues that the fair’s setting must be read in this fraught context, as a gesture of civic reoccupation: “In 1963 Drapeau planted ‘the flag’ of Expo right beside [the] St. Lambert locks, right beside the Seaway’s very gate, as a reclamation of La Laurentie and the primacy of Montreal on new urban terms.”37

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So too did Robert Moses view the world’s fair as a felicitous instrument of civic planning whose decisive feature was its location. According to biographer Robert Caro, Moses “simply was not especially interested in this mammoth enterprise he had undertaken to create and direct.”38 His enduring objective was to transform the vacated fairgrounds into a great municipal park, larger by half than Central Park, and occupying the true geographic middle of New York City. To make Flushing Meadows the centrepiece of a seven-mile corridor of parks traversing the borough of Queens had been his dream since the 1920s, when Tammany Hall crony Fishhooks McCarthy was using it to dump and burn all of Brooklyn’s garbage. This was the “valley of ashes” Fitzgerald memorably depicts in The Great Gatsby, the infernal landscape the young Long Island millionaires must cross in order to reach the glittering city. Where Fitzgerald saw an allegorical hell, Moses saw a green future and an expressway that runs through it. He hoped state funding for the road would finance the park as well, but the task of reclaiming the wasteland and the wetland – including removing the mountains of refuse, landscaping the meadow and the bay, installing drainage and sewage systems – was astronomical. He leaped at the opportunity to leverage a world’s fair to pay for the park scheme – not once, but twice. Moses got his funding, despite the fact that the 1939–40 and 1964–65 World’s Fairs closed with huge deficits: in the first case due to the high cost of constructing stunning pavilions and in the latter case because of profligate mismanagement (over a billion dollars spent, though barely any of it on architecture!) and disappointing gate receipts. Public monies used to develop Flushing Meadows as a site for the first fair totalled $59 million; public monies spent on permanent park improvements for the second fair came to $84 million. The two exhibitions thus generated about $143 million for Moses’s parks scheme.39 But even this colossal sum was insufficient to finance his green corridor. Nor was it enough to realize his dream of building a world-class urban park to rival, let alone surpass, Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted’s masterpiece in Manhattan. Moses admitted as much in a statement he delivered at the rededication ceremony for Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (“The Fair cannot entirely complete this great work so that nothing further will be required”), although, not surprisingly, he dwelt on his accomplishment: “We believe it is no exaggeration to say that two World’s Fairs have ushered in, at the very geographical and population center of New York, on the scene of a notorious ash dump, one of the very great municipal parks of our country.”40 In their final official act before being dissolved in August 1960, the design committee (minus Gordon Bunshaft, who had resigned in July) submitted a terse fair plan. In accordance with the president’s wishes, it adhered to the argument that making use of the 1939–40 fairground scheme – “with numerous

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improvements” – was the best of all available options, “as satisfactory a wedding of beauty and utility as can be produced.”41 The improvements pertained, by and large, to park infrastructure: landscaping, transportation, parking. Signed by all four members, it refuted the rumours circulating in the press (and repeated in contemporary accounts) that the committee had resigned in protest or been fired by Moses. But the report also records, perhaps in order to justify why their master plan lacked all mastery, the challenging conditions of their creative labour: “Our Committee has … agreed to certain compromises regarding the site which are not ideal but which we believe are fully justified under the circumstances. Had we been operating in open, completely undeveloped land, or if we had, to put it another way, an entirely clean slate we should no doubt have produced a more original and novel plan.”42 As the irony of their statement makes clear (what could be a cleaner slate than Flushing Meadows?), no site design they drew up stood a chance of being approved. In the event, the fair corporation built only three of its more than 200 exhibition pavilions. As the architects and the critics foretold, the net result was a visual cacophony of business and nation-state boosterism. Both Bunshaft’s circular megastructure and the van Ginkels’ Man in the City would have encountered formidable obstacles even with the backing of the men in charge. But, it is important to underscore that neither of their proposals was blocked by small-minded autocrats or by the pragmatic realities of staging an international exhibition. They were displaced by equally idealized visions of what a fair – or rather, what a fairgrounds – could be. In neither scheme was architecture constitutive, or at least not constitutive of anything other than itself. For Moses it literally stood in the way of his master plan to develop the park. And the park was part and parcel of his sculpting of New York City over three-and-a-half decades, a transformation on a scale that demanded aerial photographs as an instrument of planning. Architecture played a spectacular role at Expo 67. But for the ccwe, what mattered in the end was architecture as integrated spectacle, not architecture as a means of transforming the existing urban milieu. Against the strict rules of the bie, Drapeau sought to make Expo 67 a permanent installation, a perpetual celebration of the city’s reoccupation of the Seaway. At both exhibitions, modernist builders and designers encountered the limits of their capacity to reimagine the world by moulding powerfully novel urban landscapes. Indeed, one might say the 1964–65 World’s Fair and Expo 67 are two of the places where modernism ended, in New York with a whimper, and in Montreal with a bang. Much of the exhilarating architecture at Expo sought to create new, transitory structures of shared human experience, new ways of imagining our planetary being-in-

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common. This would require the assistance of cinema, another technology seeking to reinvent itself. But here too, the much-maligned New York World’s Fair offered some precedents and parallels.

Cinema Despite torpedoing Man in the City, Drapeau’s islands presented architects with a true tabula rasa, another opportunity to advance a cutting-edge site design.43 Developed over a series of informal discussions and official meetings in 1963 (including the Montebello Conference in May), consensus strongly backed the van Ginkels’ goal of eschewing competing pavilions in favour of a radically inclusive festival format. The Montebello proposal called for parsing the sweeping rubric of the exposition, Terre des hommes/Man and His World, into five precincts – Man the Producer, Man the Creator, Man the Explorer, Man the Provider, and Man in the Community – each of which would integrate international contributions to the topos in question. Rather than transform an existing city, it called for the creation of a global human community conceived as a city in itself. The master plan that Daniel van Ginkel eventually submitted (a day before resigning in December 1963) was not this: succumbing to external demands, the site was carved into plots to be occupied by autonomous exhibitors. No longer nodes in a megastructural network, the universal themes nevertheless appeared as benchmark pavilions scattered amongst the nearly one hundred national, corporate, and cultural attractions, helping Expo 67 retain some vestige of the original plan to stage a post-national festival. And even though it adhered to the usual fair format, “dominated by buildings whose main object is to attract more attention than the building next door” (as Architectural Review put it), the effect of the whole was remarkably coherent.44 Commentators credited the masterful landscaping, integrated design of the transport and support systems (including mini-rails and stations, kiosks and signs), and, most significantly, the avant-garde idiom of the pavilions themselves. The “Space Frame Fair” broke dramatically with the “packaging of … buildings in steel and glass boxes, the unrelieved … horizontality and verticality” of modernist skylines,45 as evident, for example, at the 1964–65 New York exhibition. In their place were buildings of various arresting shapes: Frei Otto’s mega-tent, Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat complex, Arcop’s tetrahedral Man the Producer pavilion, John Andrews’s cellular cluster for Africa Place, and many more. The modernity of these structures inhered not only in their futuristic forms and flexible modes

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of production (lightweight membranes or panels affixed to a geometric gestalt of modular components), but in their sublime capacity, their ability to encompass masses of fairgoers in an ethereal, sensorial space. Not unlike the dematerialized interior of the Crystal Palace, “perhaps the only building in the world in which the atmosphere is perceptible,”46 as Mary Merryfield put it in the 1851 Exhibition catalogue, architecture at Expo 67 was a transfiguring perceptual medium. As its other nickname, the “McLuhan Fair,” attests, audio-visual technologies themselves played a significant role in altering visitors’ senses at Expo 67. Janine Marchessault reports over 3,000 films were made for the festival and featured in almost two-thirds of its pavilions and complexes.47 More than just a ubiquitous attraction, moving and projected images, many which required faceted, multiple, or oversized screens, affected the design of the structures that housed them. Expanding the very possibilities of cinema, they were conceived and experienced as architectures in themselves, less images on a screen than environments. “Offering a sensory immersion that eclipsed even the most radical structures at the fair,” these experimental works, according to Riar, underscored the upstaging of architecture by cinema at Expo.48 For Marchessault, the synesthetic surrounds created by the integration of architectural and media technologies helped turn the exposition into an exhilarating ecosystem of utopian experiment, simultaneously a “media city” and an “ecstatic world” – for all intents and purposes, a realization of the original planners’ radical ambition to inaugurate a new era of world exhibitions, that is, a new way to exhibit or imagine the world.49 Marchessault grounds this lofty view of Expo 67, in part, on an appreciative excavation of Labyrinth, a multiscreen National Film Board of Canada production that occupied its own pavilion and was designated one of the seven sub-themes of the fair. Its formidable scale and multifaceted design have generated a rich body of commentary. Like Marchessault, critics past and present have treated Labyrinth’s intrepid mediascape as emblematic of Expo’s techno-humanist utopianism as a whole. Much of this commentary, however, accentuates the potential for heteronomy built into its all-encompassing, inter-medial experience. Using terms like phantasmagoria, encapsulation, and techno-atavism to frame their interpretations,50 these critics situate Labyrinth in compelling, if familiar, narratives of capitalist modernity, accounts that highlight consumerist enchantment, adaptive human sensoriums, and the mobilization of myth. As illuminating as this long historical view is, a more specific siting should focus on the technical and pedagogical challenges Labyrinth shared with contemporaneous, media-rich practices which also

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sought to edify their audience. Fred Turner’s recent study, subtitled Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, provides one such contextualization. Turner includes progressive multiscreen projects in a twenty-year vector of mass communications practice he calls the “democratic surround.” This postwar wave of Bauhaus-inspired experiment sought to dismantle the authoritarian, one-to-many broadcast structure of mass media by multiplying the sources of audio output and visual display. Surrounds were “immersive, multi-mediated environments designed to expand individual consciousness and a sense of membership in the human collective.”51 Heightening individual receptivity to social diversity and inclusion through media technics was, from the outset, a powerful weapon in America’s Cold War arsenal. Turner is careful neither to absolve these didactic environments of hegemonic sway, nor to dismiss them as mere propaganda. Ideological complexity was intrinsic to one of the earliest and certainly most influential of these surrounds: the massively popular (and critically polarizing) 1955 m o ma photography exhibition The Family of Man. Composed of 503 photographs of diverse human subjects selected by Edward Steichen and his assistant Wayne Miller and occupying the entire second floor of the museum, The Family of Man was viewed by a quarter million people (and many millions more in its touring and permanent versions). As Turner and other scholars have pointed out, German Bauhaus student and teacher Herbert Bayer’s “extended field of vision” – his scheme to defamiliarize and activate the viewer’s gaze by extending the exposition surface a full 360 degrees – was instrumental in its display design. Photographs were not uniformly sized, framed, or affixed to walls at eye level. They came in all sizes and hung frameless from the ceiling at different heights and angles and in different thematic and narrative clusters.52 With its myriad images from around the globe, select-your-own-path design, and all-oneworld conceit (“a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life … a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world”),53 The Family of Man was a catalyst not only for Expo 67’s expanded cinema, but for the humanist aspirations of its architecture as well.54 It was also formative for the various, immersive audio-visual exhibits featured at Flushing Meadows in 1964–65, including two works by pioneers in multiscreen cinema: Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid’s To Be Alive! and Ray and Charles Eames’s Think, neither of which would have been out of place at Expo 67.55 In terms of aesthetic-technical ambition, Thompson’s and Hamid’s earnest and disarming film bridged Steichen’s pathbreaking photographic event-space and the evolved media architectures of both Labyrinth

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and Think. To Be Alive! was an eighteen-minute, three-screen film produced for the Johnson Wax Pavilion. It played thirty times daily to enthusiastic audiences – including, for once, the critics. A characteristic notice in the Saturday Review reads: “Few films have ever conveyed more warmly what is implicit throughout the script – the basic oneness of people everywhere.”56 To convey this “everywhere,” Thompson and Hammid shot in three locations: Nigeria, Italy, and the US. In The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column, Thompson confessed they ran out of time to shoot in Asia, so the “Oriental” footage was faked: “The little Chinese boy wandering by the pool, for instance, was shot in a park in Fort Lee, New Jersey.”57 Far from undermining the film’s message (it was not, after all, a documentary), this easily available substitution confirmed it. That message lay in the parallels viewers were invited to draw between simultaneous moving images of children and teenagers from around the globe engaged in quotidian activities, often involving dynamic motion: in one early sequence, for example, an American boy rides a tricycle, an African child rides a donkey, another one sinks in a boat, another American boy falls off a bicycle. The task of suturing these briskly paced and trifurcated image sequences was aided by a zestful male voice-over. His commentary framed the action of daily life in existential terms – wishing, asking, knowing, wondering, voyaging, changing – tethering it to a universal coming-of-age story. The title exclaimed the enlightened resolution of this narrative, one that everyone the world over could, presumably, embrace. In Thompson’s words: “Its message is that while millions of people are frustrated and unhappy in this complex modern world of ours, there are millions of others who retain a sense of the underlying wonder of the world, who have a capacity for finding delight in normal, everyday experiences, and who realize – as the film attempts to make everyone realize – that there can be great joy in simply being alive.”58 Like The Family of Man, To Be Alive! was a site of competing ideological operations. A contemporary viewer will probably find its method familiar and its message hokey. But it must be remembered when and where it debuted. Johnson Wax had originally requested Thompson and Hammid feature some of their time-saving products in a film about the “new leisure in America.”59 That the film they insisted on making went in an entirely different direction speaks to the urgency of its appeal. Just as Ariella Azoulay has sought to redress The Family of Man’s bad reputation as a sentimental humanist vehicle by reading its images as “prescriptive statements claiming universal rights” instead of “descriptive statements with universal claims,”60 so too might To Be Alive! be historicized as staging a performative intervention. To Be Alive! made powerful claims about our shared humanity in the midst of a world’s fair driven by cor-

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porate interests, of a social world (systematically excluded from the fair itself) beset by racial and economic oppression, and of a planet on the constant brink of nuclear war. Yet its universal address may have missed the mark for roughly half the audience. Alternately hailed as “I” and “we,” the subjects on screen are primarily male. In a sequence depicting the onset of puberty, triplicated images of teenage boys high jumping, pole vaulting, and high diving are intercut with shots of an applauding female crowd, over which the narrator says, “When they cheered me, I could have hugged all the girls in the world at once.” The awkward gender bias of the film points more generally to the features of the faceless Man who is the presumptive universal subject of the world and its numerous expositions, including the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair and Expo 67. Man is a conspicuous anachronism, a problem of representation that can be fixed by changing nouns and pronouns. It can be remade to exclude less and include more. But Man is also a problem of representation in the sense of something intrinsic, perhaps even fatal, to the structure of representation itself. Heidegger famously discerned modernity as the age of the world picture, the age in which the world, and everything in it, is set over and against an aggressive human knower. Indeed, Man as such first emerges with this enframing of the world as something out there to be depicted and explored, and, soon enough, made to stand by, ready to be consumed. Although To Be Alive! did not feature any product placement, it nevertheless conjured a world – and a stance-in-being toward it – which the folks at Johnson Wax could live with. As spectators must have surmised, the joy of being alive was not incompatible with the joy of apprehending the world from a profusion of images. Turner notes that although multi-mediated, democratic environments like The Family of Man were enormously liberating, “the surround clearly represented the rise of a managerial mode of control: a mode in which people might be free to choose their experiences, but only from a menu written by experts.”61 When Thompson watched his multiscreen films and watched the people watching them, he did not detect the threat of social control, but the future of cinema. He was sanguine about the audience’s capacity to keep up with whatever he threw at them: “Audiences … have no trouble following action on three screens at once; most film-makers terrifically underestimate what the human eye and the human intelligence can take in. As a matter of fact, I have a plan right now for making a nine-screen film, and I expect to see the day when audiences will be surrounded by screen on all sides and above and below.”62 This expectation would be largely disappointed as the moviegoing public in the following decades would grow accustomed to bigger rather than multiple screens. Thompson and Hammid contributed to this cinematic

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evolution as well, producing one of the earliest films in the imax format, To Fly! (1976), a documentary about the history of flight from the gas balloon to the manned spacecraft, for the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. They were able to test the masses’ capacity to synchronize multiple moving image sequences one last time, however, at Expo 67. We Are Young! was another short montage, this one projected on six screens at the Canadian Pacific-Cominco Pavilion. In terms of topic and technique it could be seen as a sequel to To Be Alive! – the visuals and acoustics intensified, the anonymous subjects (still youth) matured. But the sweep of their democratic surround was more focused: whereas the kids in the earlier film personified hopeful humanity, the teens and young adults in their Expo film dramatized youth itself, youth today. In addition to its sensory barrage, reviewers were much taken with a sequence depicting a week in the life of two young women fresh off the bus in the big city.63 It added narrative mooring to the film’s acoustic-optical immersion of its viewers in the restless vitality and urban disquiet of sixties youth counterculture. According to Anthony Kinik these (mostly American) reviewers ignored the fact that the city in this arresting segment was Montreal. Indeed, “They failed to see that We Are Young! was actually a meditation on youth and Canada, and on Canada as a young, modern, forward-looking nation, an allegory of Canada produced by a corporation that had played a pivotal role in this young nation’s building.”64 The critics’ failure to see the specific nation and city depicted on the screens attests not only to their own national bias, but to their understandable expectation of what to find in an experimental film of this kind at a festival dedicated to Man and His World. If balancing the universal and the particular had, as Feldman notes, “long been a central concern of documentary [film],”65 that concern was especially acute for filmmakers who sought to give shape and pattern to increasingly experimental – that is, immersive and fragmentary – forms of expanded cinema. Their creative investment in pushing the envelope of affective technology was perhaps irreducibly at odds with giving breathing room for “meditation” and “allegory.” A self-reflective allegory nevertheless provided the narrative framework for Labyrinth, a cinematic and inter-medial exhibition that would properly “test what the human eye and the human intelligence can take in,” not only through the multiplication of screens, but, as Thompson (and Herbert Bayer before him) envisioned, by their placement “on all sides and above and below.”66 Thompson’s and Hammid’s three- and six-screen montages asked audiences to explore the world from the comfort of their seats. No matter how multiplied the wide-aspect screens and how fast and fractured the images moving across their surface, they did not disturb the vertical immobility of the viewing sub-

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ject. By contrast, film producers/directors Roman Kroitor, Colin Low, and Hugh O’Connor conceived Labyrinth as a peripatetic, perceptually disorienting experience. Like The Family of Man, it set its viewers in staggered motion, not just through the screen’s virtual architecture, but through the physical architecture specially designed to accommodate the audience’s cinematic trip. Based loosely on the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, this voyage was broken into three discrete media surrounds. In Chamber 1, visitors stood on four tiers of balconies stacked in an elliptical arrangement to watch an eighteenminute montage spliced together, like Thompson and Hammid’s films, from documentary footage shot around the world. A non-narrative allegory for human development from birth to maturity,67 the images were projected onto two giant, 70mm screens forming an L shape: a horizontal one sunk into the floor and a vertical one that extended to the top balcony. According to Low, the screen on the ground “was positioned such that the viewer had to look over the balcony railing at an angle that would change the level of fluid in the inner ear, causing sensations of vertigo.”68 In the next experience-scape, called the “Maze,” the audience moved through suspended, zigzagging walkways set between floor-to-ceiling prisms housing thousands of lights that blinked on and off and changed colour. These lights were synced to a soundtrack of soothing electronic music and “primitive” jungle noises (animal sounds, drums), piped through a six-channel audio system that created an acoustic surround. Their custom-designed glass allowed the prisms to act both as a mirror for the audience and a medium of transmission for the lights behind. The visual alternation between disjointed self-image and cosmic light show, like the interscreen cuts in the previous chamber, required individuals to suture the gap while trying not to lose their bearings. After navigating through this “Maze,” visitors took their seats in a theatre to watch a nineteen-minute 35mm film, titled In the Labyrinth, projected onto five screens arranged in the form of a cross. Even more eclectic than the montage projected in Chamber 1, In the Labyrinth was composed largely of fleeting sequences of sacred and quotidian human activity shot in various locations around the world: a ritual cleansing in the Ganges, a crocodile hunt in Ethiopia, a baptism in Greece, a ballet lesson in Russia, a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, a childbirth in Montreal, and so on. These documentary clips were intercut with footage of urban commotion (frequently traffic and transportation) and stately natural landscapes. Frequently a close-up of a human face (randomly selected from the “family of man,” as it were) would be isolated on one of the screens to anchor the gaze. Following his own abbreviated attempt to summarize the visual content of In the Labyrinth, Feldman notes, “More impressive than the images themselves was Tom Daly’s masterful multiscreen editing.”69 Without diminishing Daly’s

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mastery (on the contrary), one could also say his intricate cuts – driven by a musical or rhythmic visual grammar wed to the formal possibilities of a cruciform screen – made the images themselves difficult to retain. Giving individuals the autonomy to extract their own meanings from the Labyrinth was the democratic purpose of its makers. But how could viewers who were dazzled by the film’s technical artistry (as well as the mazelike experience of the pavilion a whole) make up their own minds what it was all about? The editor himself seems to have suspected the heavy hand his manipulation had played in directing audience response. The conflict between spectatorial freedom and authorial control is clearly evident in Daly’s reflections on his craft: “Whether it was by thought, by feeling or by action, we wanted to give a sense of choice, thus the multiscreen. We allowed time to look back and forth, but in terms of the progression from each group of shots to each next group of shots there was an attempt to make the observer wish to follow a certain line.”70 The need to integrate private quest and master plot spurred Labyrinth’s makers to meet early in their brainstorming with literary critic Northrop Frye.71 Frye was an obvious choice: The Anatomy of Criticism (1957) had established his magisterial gift for sorting Western narrative from antiquity to modernity into capacious but stratified mythic structures. It was also a discerning one: for Frye’s archetypal thinking was overtly utopian. In his reckoning, the individual work was not significant as an expression of personal genius, but as a “social fact and as a mode of communication.”72 The scholar helped steer the Labyrinth team toward a more flexible conception, one more in keeping with the brief of the fair: rather than asking visitors to follow in the path of Theseus, whose story most of them probably would not know, they would be invited to identify with a universal hero, “Man,” in search of self-discovery and transformation. Although some audience members (perhaps cued by the giant Styrofoam sculpture of a Minotaur’s head that greeted them on entry) expected to encounter some kind of theatrical beast on their journey, voice-overs in the transitions between the chambers clarified that this journey was a spiritual one: “The hardest place to look is inside yourself but that is where you will find the beast, blocking your path to other men, conquer it and you can truly join the world.”73 Contemporary reviewers balked at Labyrinth’s mythic scaffolding, finding its quasi-religious, cyclic progression from birth (in the first chamber) to regeneration (in the last) to be estranged not only from the psychic life of urban modernity, but from the exhibition’s own technical bravura. Unaccompanied by a compelling narrative thread, these dazzling effects could only be evaluated in terms of their affective impact, which “in that Summer of Love,” Feldman notes, “did nothing more than provide non-chemical highs for Expo’s non-

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hippie hordes.”74 What the critics missed is that the maze quest pertained to the encounter with sensation itself. The Labyrinth team carefully designed every moment of the spectatorial experience as a perceptual trial and an opportunity for creative reception. According to Gene Youngblood, influential theorist of expanded cinema, immersive, multiscreen films required viewers to tap into the deep reservoirs of their consciousness to make pattern-events out of a splintered syntax of images: “it’s the nature of synaesthetic cinema that one is made aware of the process of one’s own perceptions, thus one invests the experience with meaning by exerting conscious control over the conversion of sight impressions into thought images.”75 As Canada’s foremost media prophet put it in 1967, the medium was not simply the message – an intellectual valorizing of formal effects over semantic content – but, the massage – a physiological realignment of the perceptual apparatus. From a McLuhanite perspective, Expo’s immersive media spaces did not replicate psychedelic experiences for its “non-hippie hordes,” but plugged them in to the kind of apprehension such experiences afforded: “Youth instinctively understands the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.”76 Based on a report published in Foto Canada, Whitney notes, “The physiological impact of Labyrinth was so intense that some Expo officials requested that it be toned down to prevent disaster – they were seriously alarmed at the possibility of heart attacks, nervous breakdowns, and even suicides among the spectators.”77 They need not have worried. Journalists assured fairgoers that despite its experimental format Labyrinth was “executed with discipline and controlled imagination”; it was in no way “a chaotic ‘Happening’ or a contrived simulation of an lsd ‘trip.’”78 Nor did its “candid eye” documentary imagery (whose banality several reviewers noted) hold any shocks for the viewer. Its conventionally sanitized depiction of childbirth, for example, contrasted sharply with the graphic, full-frontal capture of an actual delivery being screened over at the Man and His Health Pavilion. An avant-garde documentary set in a surround shaped like an operating theatre, Miracles of Modern Medicine sent thousands of queasy and fainting spectators to medical aid stations set up inside the pavilion.79 Labyrinth’s sensorial barrage was calculated to rock viewers’ equilibrium, not raze it. Sound played a pivotal role both in rocking and steadying audience perception. Labyrinth’s designers sought through the multiscreen format to shake moviegoers free from the habitual passivity of their viewing without inducing what Colin Low called “optical indigestion.” “The judicious use of multi-channel sound,” he noted, “has the effect of preventing confusion between competing images.”80 In addition to five large speakers ensconced behind the screens, Chamber 1 was kitted with hundreds of tiny ones planted

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around the auditorium, creating effects of aural immersion, movement, and, importantly, orientation. Precise sonic manipulation was a powerful tool in the filmmakers’ arsenal for directing the bewildered spectator’s gaze. Directional sound helped resolve the tension between multiple choice and diegetic continuity, guiding “the observer to wish to follow a certain line” amidst diverse streams of images. Sound effects were an equally powerful device for disorienting visitors in the first place. This was particularly evident in Chamber 2, where the ambient soundtrack, synchronized with the blink of the lights, and thus with the phantasmagoric alternation between mirrored enclosure and starry space, could also dislocate participants by zigzagging up and down the walkways. Whitney notes that “Labyrinth visitors reported feelings of disembodiment, of ‘floating’ … particularly in Chamber I and the Maze.”81 This momentary release from the habitually grounded body epitomized just the kind of heightened subjectivity Labyrinth’s makers contrived to produce. At the same time, such a “floating” effect obscured, somewhat, the body itself as the malleable site of that contrivance. That Labyrinth brought into sharp relief – for its visitors, critics, and makers alike – the worrisomely thin line between interactive choice and psycho-sensorial manipulation endemic to all experimental media surrounds should count very much in its favour, as evidence of its ambition to expand the affective and perceptual skills crucial to democracy in the electrified global village, and perhaps in the coming electronic era as well. The spectre of social control also hovered over the Eames Office’s ibm exhibition at the 1964–65 World’s Fair. It was one in a series of remarkable multimedia works they did for the corporation under the creative directorship of industrial designer and architect Eliot F. Noyes. In collaboration with an inspired cohort of designers, architects, and critics, Noyes not only remade ibm’s corporate image, he also unified its raison d’être: “if you get to the very heart of the matter,” he said in an interview in 1966, “what ibm really does is to help man extend his control over his environment … . I think that’s the meaning of the company.”82 But recasting the company as an expansive managerial enterprise (“a business whose business was how other businesses do business”)83 entailed humanizing the machine (at least up to a point) at the heart of the matter. During campus antiwar protests in the late sixties, students had raged against “the Machine” by burning ibm punch cards carrying their registration information.84 In a September 1970 speech delivered at the annual convention of the Association of Computing Machinery, Ralph Nader, railing against the threats to privacy posed by a growing computer technology “exclusively in the domain of corporate and governmental control,” advocated the establishment of an “Information Bill of Rights.”85 To counter this public fear and animosity,

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ibm’s Design Program mounted a capital-intensive campaign of pleasurable instruction. They sought to demystify information technology on an array of smartly designed and personable media platforms, including books, charts, films, television programs, travelling exhibits, and large-scale multimedia exhibitions like the pavilion at the 1964–65 fair.86 Like In the Labyrinth, Think was conceived as a component in a larger, dynamic architecture – or as Charles Eames liked to call it, an “un-architecture” – an interactive, sensory environment that integrated space and spectacle.87 A joint design venture of the Eames Office and Eero Saarinen Associates, the ibm Pavilion was at ground level an open-aired space loosely modelled on a forest or a garden. Its main structural elements were 32-foot-high, tree-shaped steel columns. The trees fanned out at the top to create a canopy for the exhibition grove and a support for an ovoid-shaped theatre, said to resemble an ibm Selectric typing ball, but meant to evoke, according to lead architect Kevin Roche, “the form of the earth, even the universe.”88 The main event played inside this elevated ibm egg, but as John Harwood has shown, the downstairs exhibits were vital to the choreography of the whole. The Computer Court demonstrated a data processing system that could read and recall without punched cards, using optical recognition for near-instantaneous language translation and personal information retrieval. In the Pentagon Theater, the mission of naturalizing the computer took the old-timey form of “puppet shows.” The puppets were not toy figures animated by human voice and hand, however, but automatons remote-controlled by computer and synchronized to audio recordings. The ground floor groves also included bits and pieces of prior installations: the Typewriter Bar, from the ibm pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair, where visitors could use the Selectric to type ibm postcards; the Probability Machine, a visual aid to demonstrate the laws of probability; and elements of the History Wall, a timeline encapsulating the contributions of great mathematicians, both from the Eameses’ 1961 museum exhibition, Mathematica: A World of Numbers … and Beyond. The History Wall was one of many graphic, text-heavy panels to be found in the Scholar’s Walk, a contemplative passageway that engaged visitors in the old media activity of reading. If computers were to be wrested from the domain of technocracy into the orbit of daily life then the public would have to get into the act. Charles Eames’s teaching method eschewed lecture and favoured kinetic immersion, or as has often been said of his films, “information overload.”89 But, not unlike a three-ring circus, there was an underlying order and flow to the freewheeling assembly of exhibits. The circus was, indeed, a lifelong fascination for the Eameses – even, at one point, a career road not taken. Beatriz Colomina asserts that, “as an event that offers a multiplicity of simultaneous

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experiences that cannot be taken in entirely by the viewer,” the circus was the model for their “multimedia exhibitions and the fast-cutting technique of their films and slide shows, where the objective was always to communicate the maximum amount of information in a way that was both pleasurable and effective.”90 Harwood specifies how the analogy applied to the ibm pavilion. Orchestrating simultaneous attractions (the ringmaster function) in a space where spectators were free to wander entailed syncopating the flow of bodies and information. But also something more. Like Labyrinth, the ibm Pavilion was designed less as a sequence of representations than as an interactive, findyour-own-way journey. Yet no matter where visitors entered the open building, they were directed by visual and spatial cues to the entrance of the “ibm Information Machine,” written, as Harwood notes, “in twinkling lights.” He goes on to describe what followed: “At the entrance, the visitors found themselves standing on a pavement marked with a curious labyrinth … This labyrinth, which the Eameses had used prominently in Mathematica, while seemingly a trivial decorative detail, is in fact of the utmost importance to understanding the spectacular and architectural unity of the building as a whole.”91 Upon passing through the gate, spectators selected a path through a “bewildering set of winding staircases,”92 which they would mount, uncertain of what lay around the forking twists and turns. Minstrels and jugglers would stroll amongst the crowd, bearing witness to their climb up the maze. This disorienting, threshold-crossing experience led them to a five-tiered grandstand or “People Wall” mounted on a hydraulic lift. Before being elevated into the ovoid auditorium, the audience was greeted by a formally attired master of ceremonies dramatically dropped from the ceiling, “appearing before you high on a platform let down from the egg – like a jolly young god, triumphant over gravity … In this punctual deus ex-machina the designers have hit a Dionysian button, calling up emotions of awe, terror, recognition and joy.”93 Over and above introducing the show, he provided live commentary, appearing, intermittently spotlighted, on a balcony situated between the screens to the right of the audience. Critics thought the dress-coated showman with his carnivalesque banter a superfluous and vulgar addition to the sophisticated audio-visual apparatus. But this apparently incongruous figure – like the puppet shows on the ground floor and the peep shows at Mathematica – was one of the many fairground anachronisms Eames liked to employ in ibm’s campaign to naturalize the computer. The tuxedoed emcee presented the uncanny future in the dress and patter of a familiar, if vanished, Americana. He also evoked the kind of cinema that audiences would have encountered at turn-of-the-century theme parks and exhibitions. Tom Gunning

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has distinguished the experience of viewing this early cinema from the habitual way in which the public consumes narrative films. Rather than positing the audience as voyeurs before a self-enclosed fictional world, the “cinema of attractions” addressed them directly as spectators, breaking the fourth wall in order to heighten their curiosity about what they were seeing. A live showman exhibitor would often present these early films to the audience, drawing attention, as a magician might, to the optical wonders unfolding before their very eyes.94 The host of the Information Machine framed the “film” the audience was seeing as a kind of expanded cinema of attractions. Think was a fifteen-minute presentation composed of animated, still, and live-action images projected simultaneously onto fourteen large and eight small screens of various shapes and sizes, set into the curved theatre at different heights and angles. To explain what computers do, Eames put to work his favourite, universalizing trope: problem-solving. According to the film script, “computer problems, philosophical problems, homely ones – the steps for solving each are essentially the same, some methods being but formal elaborations of others.”95 This premise was illustrated by “a slew of examples ranging from planning a dinner party, a football play, designing a chemical compound, or determining a missile trajectory.”96 Although admired for its cerebral conception, critics questioned Think’s efficacy as a primer. In a review for Industrial Design, Mina Hamilton noted a conflict between Think’s message and its means, a tension she located in her frustrating inability to dwell on “the beauty and precision of each individual still or ‘take’” due to their “quick succession.”97 The celerity and multiplication of visual streams undermined for her the demonstration of problem-solving. “In a sense,” Hamilton says, “what Eames has done to the film in the ibm show is to present it as a symphony or ballet: a succession of images and sounds move so rapidly across time and space that they cannot be isolated, recognized, or remembered as individual events but they are interwoven to form a total impression. The kaleidoscope-like result is overwhelming and ‘spectacular’ but too fragmented to be entirely successful.”98 It would be hasty to consign this dismay to an old-fashioned sensibility, the sign of a sensorium in need of retraining. Hamilton’s critique is not aimed at the quicksilver and fractured presentation per se (she explicitly acknowledges its artistry), but at its failure to edify. In his brilliant overview of ibm’s design history, Harwood argues this failure was elemental to Eames’s representational strategy. ibm’s campaign to make their product a vital part of daily human life required convincing the public of two contradictory ideas: on the one hand, that the computer was just a tool

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for solving problems, an extension of (not a threat to) human agency; on the other hand, that the computer was the future, a technological power unlike any seen before, capable of transforming man and his world. Rather than attempt to patch over (let alone resolve) this contradiction, Eames sought to keep it in play. To convey simultaneously the déjà vu of the natural and the shock of the new was a high-wire design act of the first order – one that was mounted throughout the pavilion. “Despite their delirious diversity,” Harwood notes of the ground floor exhibits, “and especially in the puppet shows, we recognize the ubiquity of the … strategy of holding two opposed propositions in dynamic tension. In each, the computer and the human being are simultaneously posited as identical and, paradoxically, fundamentally different.”99 The labyrinthine journey through the Information Machine rendered this “dynamic tension” spatially, blurring the distinction between being outside and inside, between being on an adventure and being invisibly controlled, all the while transporting visitors into the enclosure of the main event. And there, as Hamilton’s uneasy and conflicted response attests, no effort was made to subordinate what people were seeing to what they were hearing. On the contrary, the rapid overflow of visual information provided a sensory analogy for the uncanniness of computational technology, and, to the extent the viewer couldn’t take it all in, a frustrating – and/or thrilling – experience of the limits of human processing power. If Think was an expanded cinematic mystification of how computers actually worked – and of what computers actually were (in relation to human beings) – then it was, so to speak, an honest one. It did not assuage people’s anxieties about this most uncanny of machines. When Walter Benjamin argued that cinema recalibrated human senses for industrial urban life, he assumed this would occur by human appropriation of the apparatus, a process of neurophysiological “innervation” in which the new technology would become a second nature. If Think calls for a retraining of the sensorium (which is debatable), it does not imagine an equipment-free future for human beings. Colomina points out that the Eameses’ multiscreen experiments, beginning with Glimpses of the usa (commissioned by the usia for the American exhibition in Moscow), not only shattered human perspective, but also created “a space that can only be apprehended with the high technology of telescopes, zoom lenses, airplanes, night vision cameras, and so on, and where there is no privileged point of view.”100 She suggests the War Situation Room as a plausible model for their multiscreen and multimedia presentations. To raise this ultimate spectre of social control is not to foreclose on the utopianism of cinematic-architectural environments, but, following the sobering critical legacy of Paul Virilio, to be mindful of the military provenance and vectors of our global media ecology.

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Marchessault postulates a more expansive evolutionary path: “While the synesthetic multiscreen cinema did not grow into the revolutionary medium many hoped for, one can see in the expanded-screen experiments at Expo 67 a foreshadowing of the intermedia networks, the mobility of images, and the cultures of the Internet, along with the concomitant multiplication of screens that now pervade everyday life in industrialized cities around the world.”101 Making its audiences wary of something like this outcome attests to the rigour of the “Information Machine.” Looking back from one of our possible futures, we could even argue that its foresight extended beyond our present life lived with ubiquitous screens. Eames never considered himself a filmmaker. The technical bravura of Think was not about expanding the radical possibilities of the medium. It was a screen allegory for strictly unscreenable modes of “thinking”: the speed of film cuts and the multiplication of screens a slow and finite stand-in for data processing. In some unpublished notes from 1969, Charles Eames wrote, “We do not seem to have yet the appropriate view of how the computer is changing the world. It is perhaps the great mass of the prosaic, day to day computer jobs that will have the most far-reaching effect on our society, and our new views of philosophy. The exciting and exotic computer applications are periferal [sic] manifestations. Each day one billion calculations per second for each man, woman and child.”102 The misspelled “peripheral” lends this astute reflection an inadvertent uncanniness. Like the breathtaking architecture at Expo 67 whose radicalism inhered in its obsolescence, the dissolving allegory of Think points to a world beyond screens and images. This is the coming age, so the story goes, of “calm technology,” a post-pc era in which computation is embedded throughout built space. Ubiquitous computing environments (ubicomp) do not address users frontally, through visuality, but peripherally, expanding cognitive agency at a microtemporal level.103 Jeremy Baker, a British architect living in Montreal, appears to have foreseen the coming autonomy of the peripheral after visiting not the ibm Pavilion at the 1964–65 fair, but Labyrinth at Expo 67: “Labyrinth … has created a new space without even the use of film. Connecting its two film display spaces (there isn’t an existing word to describe them) is a series of meditation galleries. They have none of the recognizable hardware of spaces; no walls, no ceilings, no views; this is true software space, in which, without any physical change, the whole atmosphere can be made terrifying, exciting or contemplative.”104 Feldman compellingly historicizes Labyrinth (and Expo) as self-reflexive illustrations of “1960s’ techno-atavism”: “a dialectic between the products of scientific reason and a reversion to states of fear and awe: Apollo and Dionysus together again.”105 “In the end,” he writes, the Labyrinth Pavilion “was a

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machine designed to demonstrate the means and uses of mystification.”106 But as Baker’s uncanny apprehension of the “Maze” as a “true software space” suggests, it also allegorized the mystification of hardware in the coming era of the “world wide web,” the “digital commons,” “social media,” and all the other humanizing tropes of a post-human media ecology. In other words, at its heart, Labyrinth was not far off from Think: a machine designed to mystify through visual demonstration the means and uses of computation. The labyrinth was a multiscreen sensory trial, lightly disorienting spatial experience, and peripheral media architecture central to both the Labyrinth and the ibm Pavilions. It stands as an emblem of the entangled techno-humanist legacies of New York 64–65 and Expo 67. And an appropriate mythical ending for modernist architecture and expanded cinema.107

notes 1 Van Ginkel Associates, “Montreal World’s Fair 1967” (27 July 1962): 2–3, series 27-A21-04, Fonds Van Ginkel, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. 2 John Gold and Margaret Gold, Cities of Culture: Staging International Festivals and the Urban Agenda, 1851–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 106. 3 Vincent J. Scully Jr, “If This Is Architecture, God Help Us,” Life, 31 July 1964, 9. 4 Izvestia quoted in “‘Ivan’ Takes a Look at American Life,” U.S. News and World Report, 10 August 1959, 42. 5 Scully, “Architecture,” 9. 6 Robert Stone, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 161. 7 Ada Louise Huxtable, “Architecture: Chaos of Good, Bad and Joyful,” New York Times, 22 April 1964, 25. 8 Ada Louise Huxtable, “A Fair with Flair: Expo 67 Shows How to Provide Variety within a Controlled Plan,” New York Times, 28 April 1967, 18. 9 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 78–9. 10 Quoted in Lawrence Samuel, The End of the Innocence: The 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 34. 11 Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan, “Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Kenneally and Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 6. 12 Cited in Seth Feldman, “Minotaur in a Box: The Labyrinth Pavilion at Expo 67,” in Reimagining Cinema at Expo 67, eds. Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 31. 13 Kenneally and Sloan, “Introduction,” 7.

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14 See also Romney Copeman, “Unsettling Expo 67: Developmentalism and Colonial Humanism at Montreal’s World Exhibition” (ma thesis, Université de Montréal, 2017). 15 Fred A. Bernstein, “Architects Remember the 1964–65 World’s Fair,” accessed 1 December 2020, www.fredbernstein.com/articles/display.asp?id=362. Originally published in Architectural Record, May 2014. For recent critical reevaluations of the fair that emphasize its popular success, see Samuel, The End of the Innocence; Joseph Tirella, Tomorrow-Land: The 1964–65 World’s Fair and the Transformation of America (Guilford: Lyons Press, 2014); David Thomas, “Fun at the Fair: The New York World’s Fair 1964/1965,” in Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader, eds. Laura Hollengren, Celia Pearce, Rebecca Rouse, and Bobby Schweizer, 423–33 (Pittsburgh: etc Press, 2014). 16 Michael Steiner explores how this characteristically American conflict between industrial progress and frontier nostalgia plays out in popular architecture in “Parables of Stone and Steel: Architectural Images of Progress and Nostalgia at the Columbian Exposition and Disneyland,” American Studies 42, no. 1 (spring 2001): 39–67. 17 Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault, “Introduction,” in Reimagining Cinema, 7. 18 Gagnon and Marchessault, “Introduction,” 7. 19 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, new ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 20 In his contribution to the present volume, Peter Scriver accentuates this tension between architecture and cinema. Elaborating on the influential journal Progressive Architecture’s description of the fair as a “middle-world of hesitation,” he writes, “a world that hovered between the monumental and the intimate, hightech wizardry and the (no-tech) certainties of traditional building forms and associations, and the increasing allure of artificially mediated perception that threatened to render the atavistic tangibility and surety of the physical mass, volume and space of architecture all but obsolete.” My reading of the scope – as well as the limits – of Expo 67’s architectural ambition draws on the work of Inderbir Singh Riar: “Expo 67, or Megastructure Redux,” in Meet Me at the Fair, 255–70; “Montreal and the Megastructure, ca 1967,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, 193–210; “Expo 67, or the Architecture of Late Modernity” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014). 21 Janine Marchessault, “Citérama: Expo as Media City,” in Reimagining Cinema, 80. “The American film and media scholar Gerald O’Grady has maintained that Expo 67 represents the most important artistic experiment of the twentieth century” (ibid.). 22 Scully, “Architecture,” 9.

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23 Robert Moses, “Robert Moses on Architectural Plans for the 1964 New York World’s Fair,” 23 March 1961, nypr Archives Collections, audio, 12:22, www. wnyc.org/story/robert-moses-on-architectual-plans-for-the-1964-new-yorkworlds-fair. 24 Emil Praeger, “Memorandum: World’s Fair Cost Estimates,” 17 June 1960: New York World’s Fair 1964–1965 Corporation Records, box 54, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 25 Moses noted, “The doughnut-shaped building idea was, in fact, borrowed, either consciously or unconsciously, from the Paris Fair of 1867 – that’s how new it was”; in Robert Moses, “Developing the Design,” in Public Works: A Dangerous Trade (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 549. 26 Van Ginkel Associates, “Montreal World’s Fair 1967,” 5–6. 27 Ibid., 3. 28 Riar, “Architecture of Late Modernity,” 35–53. 29 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th ed. (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1967), 261. 30 Van Ginkel Associates, “Montreal World’s Fair 1967,” 2. 31 Riar, “Architecture of Late Modernity,” 59. 32 Terrence McKenna and Susan Purcell, Drapeau (Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, and Company, 1980), 145. 33 Jean Drapeau, “Expo 67: Mayor Jean Drapeau’s Welcome,” 27 April 1967, cbc Digital Archives, audio, 2:22, www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/expo-67-mayor-jeandrapeaus-welcome. 34 Drapeau, “Welcome,” 4:17. For a fuller account of Drapeau’s motivation for Expo’s river siting, as well as “the cultural and historical resonance of the Saint Lawrence” for the Québécois generally, see Craig Moyes’s chapter in this volume. 35 Steven Palmer, “Making Expo 67: Avant-Garde Humanism and Canada’s Quiet Revolution,” (lecture, Concordia University, Montreal, 20 November 2015). 36 Palmer, “Making Expo 67.” 37 Ibid. 38 Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975), 1092. 39 Ibid., 1113–14. 40 Quoted in ibid., 1113. 41 Design Committee, “Basic Plan of the Fair” (August 1960): 1, New York World’s Fair 1964–1965 Corporation Records, box 54, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 42 Ibid., 1. 43 For a detailed history of the planning of Expo 67, from the van Ginkels’ early

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44

45 46

47 48 49 50

51

52

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54 55

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proposals through the Montebello Conference and beyond, see Riar, “Architecture of Late Modernity,” 1–190. “No international exhibition of this kind, dominated by buildings whose main object is to attract more attention than the building next door, can expect to be anything but incoherent; yet Expo has a surprising degree of unity, the result chiefly of skillful landscaping, of the use of water threading its way through every section of the site and of the overhead transport lines similarly providing every view with a common element” (“Expo 67 Landscape,” Architectural Review, August 1967, 102). Raymond F. Betts, “Structuring the Ephemeral: The Cultural Significance of World’s Fair Architecture,” The Kentucky Review 2, no. 1 (1980): 33. Quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 39. Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies (Cambridge and London: mit Press, 2017), 131. Riar, “Architecture of Late Modernity,” 412. Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds, 133. These terms appear respectively in Ben Highmore, “Into the Labyrinth: Phantasmagoria at Expo 67,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, 126–42; André Jansson, “Encapsulations: The Production of a Future Gaze at Montreal’s Expo 67,” Space and Culture 10, no. 4 (2007): 418–36; Feldman, “Minotaur in a Box: The Labyrinth Pavilion at Expo 67,” in Reimagining Cinema, 26–53. Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 8. Marchessault gives an excellent account of how Bayer’s theories shaped the layout of Steichen’s exhibition in “Anonymous Reality and Redemption in ‘The Family of Man,’” in Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds, 21–52. Edward Steichen and Museum of Modern Art, The Family of Man: The Greatest Photographic Exhibition of All Time – 503 Pictures from 68 Countries (New York: Museum of Modern Art and maco Magazine Corp, 1955), 4. See Riar, “Architecture of Late Modernity,” 6, 69–74. Indeed, To Be Alive! was screened at the United Nations Pavilion at Expo 67 (http://expolounge.blogspot.com/2006/10/united-nations-pavilion.html). Thompson and Hammid’s multiscreen short documentary We Are Young! also played at Expo, at the Canadian Pacific Railway-Cominco Pavilion (Cinema Expo 67 website, http://cinemaexpo67.ca/we-are-young). Arthur Knight, “Films at the Fair,” Saturday Review, 15 August 1964, 26.

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57 Louis P. Forster and Thomas Meehan, “Movie Man,” New Yorker, 10 October 1964, 52. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 51. 60 Ariella Azoulay, “‘The Family of Man’: A Visual Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” in The Human Snapshot, eds. Thomas Keenan and Tirdad Zolghadr (Annandale-on-Hudson: Sternberg Press, 2013), 20. 61 Turner, Democratic Surround, 6. Marchessault notes that the interactivity fostered by multiscreen technologies “was tied to the contradictory forces of capitalist media expansion in general, which simultaneously produced greater democracy in image production and consumption, and greater social and economic control of images themselves” (Ecstatic Worlds, 145). 62 Forster and Meehan, “Movie Man,” 51. 63 See Anthony Kinik, “Celluloid City: Montreal and Multiscreen at Expo 67,” in Reimagining Cinema, 122. 64 Ibid., 120. 65 Feldman, “Minotaur in a Box,” 28. 66 According to Allison Whitney, “internal nfb documents” reveal that Labyrinth’s designers consulted Thompson early on in their planning. Thompson regretted not incorporating more vertical movement in To Be Alive!, “placing screens above and below the triptych. This comment was a factor in the Labyrinth team’s decision to employ a five-screen system in Chamber III”; see Allison Whitney, “Labyrinth: Cinema, Myth, and Nation at Expo 67” (ma thesis, McGill University, 1999), 27. Like other scholars, I have relied on Whitney’s research to flesh out descriptive particulars about Labyrinth. A single-screen version of the film shown in Chamber 3, In the Labyrinth (1979), is available for viewing on the nfb website (www.nfb.ca/film/in_the_labyrinth). 67 According to Whitney, “The allegorical function of these images was expressed through the diegetic connections between the two screens. For example, in one sequence, a father looks down from the vertical screen to a baby projected on the horizontal screen; a boxer is knocked out in the vertical, then ‘falls’ onto the horizontal in defeat”; “Labyrinth: Cinema, Myth, and Nation,” 13. 68 Whitney, “Labyrinth: Cinema, Myth, and Nation,” 14. 69 Feldman, “Minotaur in a Box,” 41. 70 Cited in ibid., 42. 71 A fixture at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, Frye added another native voice to Labyrinth’s all-Canadian creative team. Kroitor, Low, O’Connor, and Daly were all experienced hands from the nfb, steeped in the experimental aesthetics of its internationally renowned Unit B. Daly would remark that “perhaps

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Labyrinth was the most complete embodiment of the Unit B philosophy” (ibid., 31). Low collaborated closely with Canadian architect Harry Vandelman from the Montreal firm of Bland, LeMoyne, and Shine (all graduates of McGill’s prestigious architectural program) in designing the pavilion. How might the national identity of the collaborators have informed their project? To my knowledge, Allison Whitney is the only critic to have explored this question. She notes that Labyrinth did not engage in the kind of “pro-Canada boosterism” (Whitney, “Labyrinth: Cinema, Myth, and Nation,” 69) evident in Polar Life and Canada ’67: Circle-Vision 360, popular expanded cinematic exhibitions that provided panoramic tours of the natural and built Canadian landscape. It did foreground, however, the framing of landscape (connecting it to practices of landscape painting in Canadian art), shooting a good deal of its international landscapes (some of them Canadian) through the windows of planes, trains, and automobiles (underscoring the Canadian heritage of rail travel as a means of territorial exploration and conquest). Whitney writes: “By making the viewer aware of spatial concerns, Labyrinth re-enacted the drama of the Canadian relationship with landscape and Canada’s extraordinary geographical characteristics. This was a particularly fitting project at the nation’s one hundredth birthday, when Canadians pause to ask ‘Who are we?,’ or as Northrop Frye put the question in the first edition of the ‘Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,’ ‘Where is here?’” (ibid., 66). In an excoriating critique of Frye’s majestic 1965 reflection on Canadian national identity, historian Ged Martin answers, “The slightest acquaintance with the writings of Quebec nationalists should have left Frye in no doubt that for a French Canadian, ‘here’ meant precisely what it said. As Louis-François Laflèche asserted in 1866, ‘French Canadians in this country are the real nation’ and ‘the vast expanse of the territory irrigated by the majestic St. Lawrence is their own legitimate homeland.’” (“Two Invocations of the Canadian Identity: Arthur Lower, Northrop Frye and the Invisible French,” accessed 1 December 2020, www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/308-two-invocations-of-the-cana dian-identity-arthur-lower-northrop-frye-and-the-invisible-french). For Frye the question “Where is here?” could function as an evocative substitute for “Who are we?” because – for English Canada – the here was perpetually unsettled and at the crux: “One wonders if any other national consciousness has had so large an amount of the unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested, so built into it … What is important here, for our purposes, is the position of the frontier in the Canadian imagination” (“Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, 2nd ed. [Concord: House of Anansi Press, 1995], 222). According to Frye, Canada’s expansive and unknowable,

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real and imagined, frontier gave raise in its writers to something of a “garrison mentality”: “closely knit and beleaguered” societies founded on a feeling of “great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting” (ibid., 227, 228). In several respects, Labyrinth can be read as allegory of this restless and unsettled Anglo-Canadian navel-gazing, beginning with the edifice, notably not a space frame structure, but a fortress-like, Brutalist building. It held up to a thousand visitors at a time, but they were split into groups of forty, creating a sense of collective purpose for the duration of the forty-five-minute escapade. Labyrinth captured rather well Frye’s topologization of the Anglo-Canadian’s identity quest, marrying an expansive spatial disorientation with a self-reflective journey. Whitney argues that Labyrinth incorporated its physical site as part of its expanded cinematic experience: “The location and design of the pavilion ensured that when visitors exited, their first view of the outside world was a ‘commanding vista of the river’ as opposed to a hot dog stand or some other unnatural phenomenon” (Whitney, “Labyrinth: Cinema, Myth, and Nation,” 67–8). One could just as well argue that “the majestic St. Lawrence” was only visible after exiting the Labyrinth. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 99. This voice-over was heard in the transition to the final chamber; Whitney notes that the English voice-over (written and performed by Donald Brittain) and the French one (written and performed by Claude Jutra) were distinctive texts. The French version of the Chamber 3 voice-over cited above reads: “Vous voilà face à face avec votre ennemi, le reconnaître c’est commencer à le vaincre” (You are face to face with your enemy; recognizing him is the first step in defeating him); Whitney, “Labyrinth: Cinema, Myth, and Nation,” 102–3). Feldman, “Minotaur in a Box,” 43. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1970), 111. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (New York: Touchstone, 1989), 9. Whitney, “Labyrinth: Cinema, Myth, and Nation,” 45. Ibid., 36. See Steven Palmer’s chapter “Staging Modern Medicine in Montreal” in this volume. Whitney, “Labyrinth: Cinema, Myth, and Nation,” 55–6. Ibid., 46. Quoted in John Harwood, The Interface: ibm and the Transformation of Corporate Design 1945–1976 (Minneanapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 5. Harwood, Interface, 7.

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84 Ibid., 163. 85 Lacey Fosburgh, “Nader Fears Computers Will Turn Us into Slaves,” New York Times, 2 September 1970, 18. 86 For a thorough and illuminating account of ibm’s design history see Harwood’s The Interface. 87 My descriptions and analyses of the ibm Pavilion and of Think draw from Harwood, Interface, 182–95; Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, ma:mit Press, 1995), 299–300, 325–8; Ralph Caplan, “Making Connections: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames,” in Charles Eames, Connections: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (Los Angeles: ucla Art Council, 1976), 43–8; Turner, Democratic Surround, 279–81; Beatriz Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room, no. 2 (winter 2001): 7–29. 88 Quoted in Harwood, Interface, 185. 89 A thesis given currency by Paul Schrader in his early overview of Charles Eames’s film aesthetic: “Poetry of Ideas: The Films of Charles Eames,” Film Quarterly 23, no. 3 (spring 1970): 7. 90 Colomina, “Enclosed by Images,” 15. 91 Harwood, Interface, 188–9. 92 Ibid., 189. 93 Quoted in Kirkham, Designers, 300. 94 See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 383; and Charles Musser, “American Vitagraph 1897–1901,” Cinema Journal 22, no. 3 (spring 1983): 10. 95 Quoted in Harwood, Interface, 194. 96 Harwood, Interface, 194. 97 Mina Hamilton, “Films at the Fair II,” Industrial Design 10, no. 3, May 1964, 37–8. 98 Ibid., 37. 99 Harwood, Interface, 188. 100 Colomina, “Enclosed by Images,” 11. 101 Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds, 158. 102 Quoted in Harwood, Interface, 195. 103 See, for example, the essays collected in Ulrik Ekman, ed., Throughout: Art and Culture with Ubiquitous Computing (Cambridge and London: mit Press, 2013), especially Mark B.N. Hansen’s “Ubiquitous Sensation: Toward an Atmospheric, Collective, and Microtemporal Model of Media,” 63–88. 104 Jeremy Baker, “Expo and the Future City,” Architectural Review, August 1967, 134. 105 Feldman, “Minotaur in a Box,” 44.

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106 Ibid., 45. 107 I wish to thank Mathieu Pomerleau at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and Cara Dellatte at the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books division of the New York Public Library for providing access to key historical documents. My gratitude to Steven Palmer, Inderbir Singh Riar, Emily Warner, Tom Hill, Nicholas Adams, Brian Lukacher, and Lisa Brawley for sharing their expertise. And thanks to my excellent research assistant Julia Metzger.

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3 “For We Have Waited a Hundred Thousand Years”: The Indians of Canada Pavilion and Indigenous Curatorial Practices

linda grussani and ruth b. phillips The Indian is in a turmoil, he is grasping the future with one hand, while, with the other, he is holding onto the values he wants to keep from his past. If he is going to adapt successfully to modern life, he will have to pull as hard with one hand as with the other. – Wallace Labillois, 19661

When we look back at the historical narratives and modern visual arts presented in the Expo 67 Indians of Canada Pavilion from the vantage points of the 2015 Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools (trc) and the 2017 Canadian Sesquicentennial year, we recognize both sameness and difference.2 We continue to grapple with the ongoing and deeply rooted legacies of Indigenous colonization and displacement, but we can also see significant differences in the terms upon which we today seek to negotiate decolonization in museums and other cultural institutions. Some of these changes are themselves legacies of the pavilion’s pioneering presentation of Indigenous-authored representations of Indigenous histories and relationships to settler colonialism. Many people who worked on the project have identified the experience as a formative moment in the development of an activist Indigenous cultural politics, and the importance of the pavilion for the history of modern and contemporary Indigenous art is even clearer. It forged a sense of common purpose among the participating artists, organizers, and activists from across Canada, and the experience of effective collaboration strengthened self-confidence and a sense of possibility. Yet in light of the pavilion’s positive reception and many innovations, it is surprising that change in the Canadian museum community was so slow and uneven in subsequent decades. It was not until the eruption of a national controversy two decades later, provoked by the 1988 exhibition The Spirit

3.1 Expo 67 Indians of Canada Pavilion, with mural by George Clutesi, West Coast (left), and Noel Wuttunee, The Garden of Indians (right).

Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples, that Indigenous and nonIndigenous museum professionals formed a Task Force on Museums and First Peoples to articulate the need for change and the mechanisms through which it could occur.3 Its 1992 report mandated new models of partnership with Indigenous collaborators in museological representations of their histories and cultures and protocols for repatriation and the management of sacred items, and it called for new resources for developing the cohort of Indigenous museum professionals.4 The year 1992 also saw compelling Indigenous-led curatorial projects that responded to the Columbus quincentennial.5 In accordance with the new task force guidelines, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History [cmh]) en-

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3.2 Maquette of George Clutesi, West Coast, 1967.

gaged an Indigenous advisory committee in creating its First Peoples Hall, which opened in 2003. Arguably, however, it was with the new Canadian History Hall, opened on the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, that the auguries of change embodied fifty years earlier in the Expo 67 Indians of Canada Pavilion were most fully realized. In this chapter, we revisit the pavilion in light of these dynamics of continuity and change in three different ways. First, we consider how the historicalethnographic installations in the interior and the art program mounted primarily on the exterior worked together. Secondly, we review both in light of the National Film Board’s documentary film Indian Memento. This short film, we argue, helps us to understand both how the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (diand) – the film’s governmental commissioner – expected visitors to receive its provocative installations and how the narrative arc of the film reflected its ambivalence about the pavilion’s revisionist historical narrative.6 Considering the pavilion, the film, and the Canadian Museum of History’s 2017 Canadian History Hall in tandem is revealing, we conclude, both of the distance travelled from the Centennial to the Sesquicentennial and the paths yet untravelled.

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From Incorporation to Autonomy: Creating an Indians of Canada Pavilion We begin with a brief account of the pavilion itself and its process of development – products of the “hard” politics of Indigenous political activism and mid-1960s liberalism filtered through the “soft” poetics of installations that sought to balance romanticized ideals of traditional Indigenous life with realistic accounts of the impacts of colonization.7 According to the initial plan, accounts of Indigenous history, culture, and art were to have been folded into a single Canada pavilion through content developed by diand. These early plans make clear that, in keeping with the evolving multicultural policies of the 1960s, “Indians” were to be considered as one among many “ethnic minorities,” all of which were to be treated in an even-handed manner. Internal memos stress that the “contributions” of all to the national story would be grouped within broad functional categories. “Indian handicraft, should be shown along with the handicraft of other elements of our population,” while “the contribution of the Indian, of maize, potatoes, and tobacco might be part of a general display of agricultural achievements, as his use and design of sleds, birch-bark canoes, toboggans and snowshoes might be part of a general story of the development of transportation.”8 Following the standard settler narrative, furthermore, such Indian “contributions” would be temporally confined within the pre-Confederation period. However, officials also recognized the need to involve Indian advisors and to avoid the appearance that the government was directing their work. “At no time,” one bureaucrat wrote, “should the impression be given that a government agency … has a directing or even subjective role to play in your relations with the Indian groups.”9 Cold Warera politics and Canada’s efforts to present a public image of respect for Indigenous peoples and other minorities in contrast to Soviet-era suppression may have contributed to diand’s concern for optics.10 The decision to create a separate Indians of Canada Pavilion represented a radical departure from these initial plans, and it was achieved through the activism of members of the Indian Advisory Council (iac) set up to develop the storyline for diand.11 Although participants have differed in their accounts, it seems clear that an effective putsch took place when members of the Indian Advisory Committee, angered by the efforts of the supervisory committee to determine their meeting agendas, threatened to walk out and take their complaints to the press. As summarized in a memo to the assistant deputy minister on the development and initiation of the pavilion: “as a result of representation from various Indian groups across Canada expressing a desire that the Indian people be afforded the opportunity of having their own participation at the

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Canadian Universal and International Exhibition 1967, the former Minister presented a program and budget to the Treasury Board. This proposal for a separate Indian participation at Expo ’67 was approved in August 1965.”12 After winning the showdown, a new process was set in motion which would allow Indigenous people to tell their own story as directly as possible. According to a press release issued the year before Expo opened, the storyline was developed as a two-stage process. The first iteration was created by members of the iac together with Robert Marjoribanks (1922–2009), a non-Indigenous professional writer contracted to work with them, but the final iteration incorporated the results of a national consultation process that was radically new. In March and April of 1966, iac members, Marjoribanks, and Kahnawake Mohawk chief Andrew Tanahokate Delisle, Sr (1933–2019), the thirty-threeyear-old commissioner general of the pavilion, took their initial draft on a national tour, meeting with “groups of Indian leaders, craftsmen, artists and others” in Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal, and Amherst, Nova Scotia.13 The question they wanted the pavilion’s installations to answer was put to Indigenous people across Canada: “What do you want to tell the people of Canada and the world when they come to Expo in 1967?” The hurried and informal tour established a process resembling the focus groups museums use today to develop new exhibitions. This exercise was one of the first attempts at a broadly conceived national sampling of Indigenous opinion and was proudly referenced as the source of the pavilion’s authority in the first paragraph of the visitor brochure. It began: “This storyline is written after meetings with groups of Indian leaders, craftsmen, artists and others in all areas of Canada.”14 A model of the proposed building, designed by diand’s in-house architect, Joseph W. Francis, was also displayed at these meetings.15 It consisted of a central tipi form buttressed by lower structures inspired by longhouses and other traditional Indigenous architectural forms.16 Viewed today, the Indians of Canada Pavilion (iocp), with its tipi form and adjacent totem pole, references the stereotypical iconography of tourist souvenirs (see figure 3.1 on page 116). Yet the translation of the tipi image into tempered steel and the program of contemporary Indian art commissioned for the exterior also expressed the coexistence of traditional values with technological modernity that had emerged as a principle theme from the consultation meetings.17 Both the architectural design and the storyline had met with general approval during the cross-country tour and were adopted with a few modifications; the commissioner general and the Advisory Council on Expo 67 approved them on 14 April 1966. Commissioner-General Delisle recalled years later that in contrast to the confrontational politics of the 1960s, consultants had been reluctant to criticize the government openly for fear of later repercussions.18 Yet when compared

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to the standard exhibitions of ethnology museums the pavilion’s installations were radically new. While the modern settler museum continued to locate the “pure” and “authentic” era of Indigenous culture in the remote past, assume both the inevitability and the benefits of assimilation, and omit or gloss over the evils of residential schooling, racism, and economic inequality, the pavilion addressed the negative aspects of contact, reminded settlers of their legally binding treaty obligations, and at the same time affirmed the currency and value of traditional practices and values. These exhibits were informed by the guiding principle that had emerged from the consultation process – “the Past should not dominate the Present and the Future; the Present is the crucial part which should be projected.”19 The shift in emphasis was evidenced first of all by the allocation of space within the pavilion.20 After entering a reception area in which stood a 9-foothigh welcome figure commissioned of carver Hwunumetse’, also known as Simon Charlie (Quw’utsun, 1919–2005), visitors were introduced to the standard culture area groupings according to which anthropologists have classified Canadian Indians. They then proceeded up a ramp into the two introductory rooms that presented Indian life in the pre-contact era, the period usually given centre stage in prior representations. The section called “The Land” conveyed a primordial and pervasive spiritual presence, the harmonious relationships between people and the other beings of the “natural world,” and the survival and continuing validity of this world view. “The Awakening of the People” featured functional ancestral and cultural belongings such as snowshoes, baskets, and paddles that demonstrated both adaptations to diverse local environments and underlying interconnections. From these areas, the visitor entered “The Drum,” the large central space of the tipi itself where the focus was squarely on the present and the recent past. In its six bays, a series of thematic displays addressed the impacts of European contact. These installations both rewrote standard historical narratives and provided an exposé of contemporary conditions. The installations were lit with spotlights, creating a dramatic chiaroscuro environment broken up by the outlines of the objects on display and the echoing shadows that fell on the floors and walls. The third bay of “The Drum” focused on the disruptive interventions of missionaries. Indigenous spirituality was represented by Haudenosaunee medicine masks (termed “False Faces” by ethnographers) and a 4-foot-high sculpture of a celestial bear incised with clan symbols, carved for the pavilion by Delaware artist Nathan Montour (1892?–1969). The carver explained that “the celestial bear acted as the mediator between the Great Spirit and the Indians as well as a protector of the Indians.”21 A photograph taken by diand to document the installation shows the shaft of light

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in the form of a Christian cross that was projected onto the bear, powerfully representing the imposition of foreign beliefs on Indigenous spiritual systems (fig. 3.3).22 An adjacent text panel read, “The early missionaries thought us pagans. They imposed upon us their own stories of god, of heaven and hell, of sin and salvation.” Following this display, the visitor came to a bay entitled “The Government and the Indians,” illustrated by a large geopolitical map of Canada showing the locations of reserves. Photo-murals depicting Indigenous people from different parts of the nation illustrated how various communities had fared within Canada. It stressed the importance of the reserve as “our last grip on

3.3 Indians of Canada Pavilion: “The Drum,” display on missionaries and Indigenous spirituality.

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the land” and the historic responsibilities of government to the First Nations. The next bay, representing “Work Life,” was constructed in the form of a barrel vault on which large photo panels portrayed First Nations people engaged in a wide range of occupations ranging from trapping to nursing and teaching (fig. 3.4). The brochure pointed out that even though Indigenous people engaged in the same range of activities as non-natives, there were an “abnormally high number living on government relief,” and it also raised the particular problems affecting non-status Indians. The last image the visitor saw on leaving this bay was a large photograph of an unsmiling and poorly dressed woman standing with her four small children at the door of their log cabin.

3.4 Indians of Canada Pavilion: “Work Life.”

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The final bay addressed the problem of education, focusing on the challenge facing the native child in “the white man’s school, an alien land for an Indian child.” This alienness was spelled out in one of the text panels: “Dick and Jane in the storybook are strangers to an Indian boy. An Indian child begins school by learning a foreign tongue. The sun and the moon mark passing time in the Indian home” (see figure 3.10 on page 135). Adjacent to these texts the public was confronted with “large blown-up photographs of tattered, unhappy-looking Indian children placed beside pictures of white Canadian children playing in the comfort of suburbia.”23 The impact of the harsh realities described in this section was only somewhat softened by the inclusion, requested by diand officials, of statistics showing progressive increases in student enrolments since World War II.24 Climbing up from “The Drum,” visitors arrived at “The Future,” with its symbolic central fire. As The Indian News reported, “Feelings of despair, hope, and confidence intermingle but the emphasis will be on the upbeat, the feeling that the Indian will succeed in grasping the future while preserving certain values with the other.”25 The contemporaneity of Indigenous life in Canada was also embodied by the First Nations women who served as hostesses. Hostesses were an integral component of the Expo pavilions, selected to provide an approachable frontline presence and human connection between the public and the interior displays. In the lead-up to Expo 67, First Nations women in all parts of the country were invited to apply for hostess positions with the iocp, and twelve were selected from among 280 applicants. They were chosen “on the basis of their appearance, intelligence, character and personality” by interview boards in major cities made up of Indigenous and non-Indigenous members.26 Arriving in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal) on 9 January 1967, the hostesses undertook a mandatory four-month training program organized by diand and overseen by Hostess Program co-ordinator Mona Jacob. The course included French language training and lectures on ethnology, natural history, and “other topics more closely related to the Indian tradition,” Canadian history, first aid, and “useful information about Montreal and Expo.”27 Each of the young women was issued with a uniform consisting of a fitted, sleeveless, A-line sheath of sandy beige-coloured wool whose square neckline was trimmed in an orange and brown geometric design, a coordinating loose jacket with bell-shaped sleeves, and a matching pillbox hat (see figure 3.10 on page 135). These fashionable outfits were meant to convey a contemporary image while also reflecting strong cultural connections to the past. Their resemblance to the uniforms worn by airline stewardesses in the still glamorous world of commercial air travel was not accidental – earlier that same year, the

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designer, Michel Robichaud, had created the flight attendant uniforms worn by Air Canada stewardesses.28 Robichaud intended to convey not only a contemporary image but also to reflect strong cultural connections to the past; his choice of colours may have reflected the associations, commonly made by non-Indigenous peoples during these years, between the earth tones of birchbark, wood, and ochres and Indigenous peoples’ “closeness to nature.”29 His original proposal had also incorporated embroidery by Indigenous artists into the design, but organizers felt that this element would be impractical and instead had him source trim from a manufacturer.30 Underscoring the importance of the role hostesses played in the pavilion, the Indian News reported that “the girls have undertaken a task of great importance to the Indian people. Through them, Indian culture and traditions will be exposed for the world to see and learn. Through the training sessions emphasis is being placed on the fact that the Pavilion is an Indian project, designed to serve as a reminder that the Indian people form a large part of Canada’s history and evaluation.”31 The pavilion’s combination of attraction and confrontation was well received by the public and the press. The Winnipeg Tribune’s reviewer wrote, for example, “those Indians of Canada have bowed … an arrow of truth at the Canadian government and white man – telling ‘le monde entier’ just what they think of us.”32 This “truth-telling” was, as even so brief a summary shows, the result of a complex process successfully pushed through in a remarkably short time by Indigenous people working within the Ottawa bureaucracy set up to create the fair.

On the Outside: Commissioning Contemporary Art The members of the iac also arranged to commission an ambitious art project for the exterior of the pavilion which brought together a multi-generational group that included some of the most renowned and respected First Nations artists of the time. The involvement of artists in the design of the iocp had taken root early on in the planning when, in December 1965, a group of nine First Nations artists gathered in Ottawa to “help design an Indian pavilion for Montreal World’s Fair.” Taking part in these discussions were artists Bill Reid (Haida), Jackson Beardy (Anishinaabe), George Clutesi (C’isaaʔath [Tseshaht]), Frank Kaquitts (Nakoda [Stoney]), Joe Land (Anishinaabe), Noel Wuttunee (Nehiyaw [Cree]), Gerald Tailfeathers (Kanai),33 John Dockstader (Seneca, Six Nations of the Grand River), and Phillip Young (Mi’kmaq). By July 1966, diand’s Cultural Affairs Section,34 headed by Yves Theriault, had been assigned to assist the Expo 67 task force by organizing a gathering of prominent Indigenous artists from across Canada with the intent of select-

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ing some of them to paint murals on the exterior of the Indians of Canada Pavilion. This led to the convening of eleven artists for a series of briefings and meetings that took place in Ottawa from 12 to 14 September 1966. The artists were received by Governor General Georges Vanier and Madame Pauline Vanier at their official residence, Government House, and were introduced to the pavilion models and plans.35 In a talk given in 2011, Tom Hill, the youngest of the invited artists, recalled these initial meetings as “chaos, absolutely sheer chaos,” during which disagreements were voiced by members of the group concerning the inclusion of contemporary and traditional artists, status and non-status Indians, and artists with different kinds of practices.36 “The cultural battles that raged during the creation of the pavilion,” Hill commented, “can best be characterized as growing pains. It was our first time at a national debate over what our social status was to be.” He also described an atmosphere in which artists were jockeying for the largest and most visible walls and desirable locations around the pavilion’s entrance. The situation was further aggravated by the challenge of staying within the limited budget established by the task force set up by the Cultural Affairs Branch and then strategically offloaded onto the artists. In a letter to Francis, Marjoribanks reported that “there are many difficult details to be resolved in the matter of commissioning the murals and, again, I believe our best approach is to share the problem with the Indians.” He further recommended that diand officials “present them with our limitations about money and invite them to propose some arrangement that would be satisfactory to all of them. This seems to me a traditional Indian approach to a problem and that they would arrive at a consensus among themselves more quickly than if we were invited to negotiate individually or were offered terms on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. In fact, we would be inviting them to share our problems, rather than imposing a solution on them.”37 He continued that, “in my judgment, within the ceiling of $26,000, the artists could work out an arrangement, without quarrelling, that would be fair and acceptable to everyone.”38 The budget included commissions for the artists, artist supplies, and materials, as well as the purchase, preparation, and installation of the panels upon which the murals were painted.39 The artists were invited to submit their design sketches for the pavilion murals by 15 October 1966, for review by a panel formed by the National Gallery of Canada.40 On 14 November 1966, this panel, made up of these gallery representatives as well as members from a commercial gallery, the pavilion, and the Cultural Affairs Section, was assembled to decide which artists would receive commissions.41 At the end of the process, nine artists were commissioned to create four circular murals, one circular ceramic mural, and three major

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murals, with work scheduled to take place in rented studio space in Montreal from 15 November to 15 December 1966,42 and on-site at the pavilion beginning in January 1967. Representing Northwest Coast artists was George Clutesi (1905–1988), a well-known artist and author. His mural, West Coast, depicted a Thunderbird with a killer whale in its talons, a lightning snake, and a wolf facing the entrance of the pavilion (see figures 3.1 and 3.2 on pages 116–17). Clutesi was wellrespected amongst the group of artists and it was his stature as an Elder artist that earned him the prominent wall in front of the pavilion. In 1949, Clutesi had confronted the Right Honorable Vincent Massey, chairman of the Royal Commission on the National Development of the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, to request permission to practise traditional ceremonies. His action highlighted the continuing criminalization of the potlatch, a wealth-distribution feast critical to traditional legal and political practices that mark and celebrate important milestones and occasions in West Coast cultures, which had been banned under the Indian Act from 1884 to 1951. Massey told Clutesi to “go home and dance,”43 and Clutesi began teaching the songs and dances of the Nuu chah nulth to the children at the Alberni Indian Residential School, which he had himself attended and where he was employed as a custodian. Clutesi’s presence within the group is credited with keeping the artistic project moving forward when many of the artists became frustrated with the bureaucracy and wanted to quit. Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau’s (1932–2007) mural design for Earth Mother with Her Children was selected for the south wall of the Land section of the pavilion (figs. 3.5 and 3.6). Morrisseau, today considered to be the grandfather of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada, had caused a national sensation four years earlier, in 1962, with his first sell-out show at a prominent Toronto gallery specializing in modern art. He would have been the best known of the commissioned artists. Morrisseau’s original design for the mural depicted a bear and a child, both nursing on Earth Mother’s breast. According to Hill, “the image was discouraged by the department and a new version was created.”44 Morrisseau reluctantly made minimal changes but, frustrated, lost interest in completing the project. He spent more and more time away and it was completed by the artist’s brother-in-law, Cree artist Carl Ray (1943–1978), who had originally been hired as his assistant. With its bold palette and Anishinaabe subject matter, the design is representative of Morrisseau’s work at the time, but Ray’s execution could not fully realize its characteristic power. Acknowledging his commitment to the preservation of the cultural legacy of the past through modern forms of art-making, Morrisseau inscribed the lower

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3.5 Indians of Canada Pavilion: painted mural by Norval Morrisseau and Carl Ray, Earth Mother with Her Children.

3.6 Below Maquette of Norval Morrisseau, Mother Earth, 1967.

right of the painted image: “in honor to my grandfather potan onanakonagas and to our ancestors.” The third of the larger murals, The Land, painted by Anishinaabe artist Francis Kagige (1929–2014), portrayed two flying geese over images derived from traditional pictographs. Kagige, a practitioner of the “Woodlands” or “Anishinaabe” style, had been encouraged to become an artist by observing the success of Norval Morrisseau. This mural expresses the artist’s ties to the land and nature; the geese indicate particular times of the year; the changing of seasons and the abundance of food; the sun’s twelve rays symbolize the artist’s guardian spirit; and the lower register features images derived from rock paintings the artist had not yet seen, but often dreamt of.45 The five circular mural commissions were awarded to Alex Janvier (b. 1935), Ross Wood (b. 1931), Gerald Tailfeathers (1925–1975), Noel Wuttunee (1926– 2011), and Tom Hill (b. 1943). Of these, Janvier’s was the most controversial (figs 3.7 and 3.8). An emerging Denesuline painter from Cold Lake, Alberta, he had begun working for diand in the mid-1960s as a cultural advisor. Motivated by his political engagement and awareness, he had undertaken the task of developing a cultural policy for First Nations artists and seized the opportunity to encourage the government to hire other Indigenous artists to paint the exterior murals for the pavilion.46 Originally, his circular mural, which celebrated the complex and thriving nature of Indigenous culture, was positioned over the entrance. However, its first title, The Unpredictable East, and Janvier’s practice of signing his work with his treaty number “287,” were seen as silent acts of defiance and protest. To stave off questions from visitors, the title of the mural was changed to Beaver Crossing Indian Colours, and it was moved to a less prominent location at the back of the pavilion. In its original place, a mural by Noel Wuttunee was installed. Entitled The Garden of Indians, its composition was inspired by floral beadwork patterns and Indigenous world views (see figure 3.1 on page 116). The artist’s statement for the work reads: The floral design with the Indian man and woman inside is symbolic of the Indian way of life. The floral designs represent nature and how the Indian was a part of it. The Indian lived in harmony with the Universe … his environment. The flower was always admired by the Indian people for its beauty and colour. The flower is blossoming out. In today’s society, the Indian people of Canada are having a rebirth. The Indian way of life is being understood, their expressions of their cultures are being recognized and appreciated, more Indian organizations, pow-wows, potlatches, ceremonies, revival of the arts.47

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3.7 Mural designed by Alex Janvier, Indians of Canada Pavilion, Beaver Crossing Indian Colours, 1967.

3.8 Maquette of Alex Janvier, Beaver Crossing Indian Colours, 1967.

The negotiation of the categorical Western distinction between “craft” and “art” implicit in Wuttunee’s work, as in that of several other artists, is also evident in his career before and after Expo. Before his Expo commission, Wuttunee had been appointed as a handicraft promotion officer by the province of Manitoba. In the years following, he launched a gallery in Winnipeg that promoted Indigenous art and artists.

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Similarly, the design for Fading Colours, by Ross Woods, a Dakota artist from Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, highlights Indigenous contributions to Canadian society amidst assimilationist policies: With the white man’s influence on the Canadian Indian, many of their expressions as Indian People are lost. However, the Indian has been able to retain parts of his culture and has made contributions to the Canadian society … over 80% of the food is Indian, inventions such as the canoe, toboggan, the tent, snowshoes, the loves of the outdoors … fishing, hunting, camping, the influence of the bright Indian colours etc. What of the future? The Indian can adapt to society, yet not be assimilated. The Indian is here to stay with his colours even though the buffalos are gone.48 The aesthetics of the mural are grounded in traditional embroidery motifs. The designs contributed by Tailfeathers and Hill both convey similar messages about Indigenous cultures that are firmly rooted in the past while remaining relevant in the present. Blackfoot Design by Gerald Tailfeathers, an artist from the Kainai Nation well known for his accomplished representational style, was based on traditional bead and quillwork and used stylized figurative imagery to tell the story of a war party in order to underscore that “the expressions of the traditional Indian cultures are still alive. Part of the Indian heritage today.”49 Seneca artist Tom Hill’s design for the Tree of Peace mural was rendered in ceramic by Huron-Wendat artist Jean-Marie Gros-Louis (b. 1932). In selecting the message he wanted to share, Hill turned to the central symbol of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for a visual statement to address an international audience: “The tree was a symbol that was used when the six different nations got together to form what we consider to be the first government in Canada, and I thought what an interesting way to be able to present this to the international audience that would be visiting Expo at that time.”50 The original murals commissioned for the outside of the Indians of Canada Pavilion were lost after Expo 67 when the pavilion was transferred to the city of Montreal. We can, however, reconstruct them from archival photographs, images from film and video, and a complete set of maquettes in the collection of the Canadian Museum of History.51 The murals articulated Indigenous world views that would have been largely unknown to the millions of nonIndigenous visitors received by the pavilion. Through these memorable and sometimes controversial works, the artists told a story that supported the narrative laid out in the pavilion’s interior but also went beyond it. Although rooted in customary practices, these contemporary artworks were executed through modern designs using modern materials. While the totem pole and

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stylized tipi architecture constituted a kind of immediately recognizable “signage” (not otherwise provided for at the pavilion) – the commissioned works of art provided a critically important affirmation of contemporaneity. They realized the goal laid out in the introduction to the theme and design concept for the pavilion: “There will be no need, we hope, for our Pavilion to bear a label or sign to identify itself, for its total impression, including the landscape on which it rests, will be unmistakably Indian, but in a curiously contemporary way.”52 The most striking and only surviving commissioned artwork for the exterior of the Indians of Canada Pavilion is a 65-foot-high totem pole designed and carved by Kwakwaka’wakw artists Henry and Tony Hunt (1923–1985 and 1942–2017), from Tsaxis (Fort Rupert, bc). The pole serves as a reminder of the ties between eastern and western Canada and symbolizes a link between the past and the future. Specially commissioned for the pavilion and intended to welcome the visitors from throughout the world, it brings together a series of images representative of the different Northwest Coast First Nations rather than, as is traditional, the crests belonging to an individual chiefly family and its community. At the top is the Raven or Thunderbird, and then, in descending order, the grizzly bear with a salmon in its mouth, the snake with two heads, the killer whale with a seal in its mouth, the beaver, and a man. The execution of the final pole is appreciably different from that represented in the scale model unveiled in 1966 because of the addition of a Thunderbird with outstretched wings, a feature favoured by Kwakwaka’wakw carvers. The pole depicted in the model had been designed by the architects with a thought to commissioning it of famed senior Haida artist Bill Reid. Reid, however, was irritated by his assumed participation and offended by the pavilion’s architectural appeal to popular stereotypes of “Indianness.” He wrote in no uncertain terms to Eric Mansfield, “First I want to make it quite clear that if your group is determined to impose Joe Francis’ California style roadside diner tipi on the landscape in any form, I have no interest in being involved in any way.”53 Reid was also frustrated by the exhibition designers’ perceptions of the totem pole and the price that he was being offered, following up sarcastically with “so if you build the tipi, I’ll pass up the pole, but would like to bid for the genuine beaded Magahide [naugahyde] moccasin concession.”54 Although he declined this invitation, Reid went on to create the first of his exquisite gold boxes as a commission for Expo 67’s Canada Pavilion. When the process of commissioning a totem pole was revised and opened up to tender, it was awarded to the father and son Henry and Tony Hunt, via the Provincial Museum of British Columbia. A giant red cedar log weighing eight tons was donated by the Vancouver forestry company MacMillan, Bloedell and was carved over three

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months in Thunderbird Park in Victoria. The Hunts were assisted by Quw’utsun artist Hwunumetse’, or Simon Charlie (1919– 2005), from Cowichan Tribes, who also carved the Welcome Figure installed inside the pavilion to “greet visitors in the pavilion’s reception area.”55 The pole remains the only witness to the Indians of Canada Pavilion and was restored by Henry Hunt’s grandson, Stan Hunt, in 2007 to mark Expo 67’s fortieth anniversary.56

Indian Memento As we have noted, diand commissioned the National Film Board (nfb) to make a documentary film about the Indians of Canada Pavilion. Indian Memento was directed by Michel Régnier (b. 1934), a documentary filmmaker who had been trained in France by Jean Rouch before moving to Canada in 1957; he would become one of the nfb’s most prolific directors. On one level, the film adds importantly to the archival documentation of the pavilion, making possible a more experiential understanding of its spaces and visitor paths. It also reveals the impact of colour on the visitor’s experience. The violent red and black contrasts of Nathan Montour’s Spirit Bear, for example, are startlingly revealed by the film and cannot be appreciated from the official diand black-and-white still photographs that are usually reproduced. On another level, Indian Memento can be taken to express the messages the government wanted to project about its modern relationships with Indians. Its narrative moves from the reserve to the city by following one of the twelve First Nations hostesses.57 Though never named in the film or the credits, nineteen-year-old Janice Lawrence is its star, and we journey with her from her Silyx/Okanagan Nation home territory in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley to Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal).58 Her home setting is represented as an idyllic western ranch with majestic, snow-topped mountains rising in the background (fig. 3.9). Fully a third of the film’s footage is devoted to the portrayal of family unity and rural productivity. She and her family members wear modern dress as they move from house to field, mother sewing, father smoothly shifting from logging work to herding horses, grandparents mending a fence, younger siblings playing. Their regulation reserve house is immaculate, the horses sleek, and the fields neatly tilled. The camera then cuts from a closeup of the young woman’s face to another in which she is standing in front of the Indians of Canada Pavilion in her elegant tour guide uniform. Indian Memento has no voice-over narrative, and only one subtitle – “The Pavilion was designed and created by the Indians of Canada” – which is superimposed on our first view of the exterior of the pavilion with its program of contemporary art, legible as an affirmation of the liberal message of

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3.9 Still from Indian Memento: hostess Janice Lawrence at home in Silyx.

minority empowerment. We then follow our guide – poised, cool, calm and collected – as she enters the building and leads visitors through its consecutive sections. We can see from her gestures that she is explaining the exhibits and pointing out details, but we cannot hear her speak. In the absence of a voiced narration, panning shots show the installations, while close-ups of selected text panels convey its messages. First comes the welcome, quaintly archaic in the romantic diction of Longfellow’s Hiawatha: “The Indians of Canada bid you welcome. / Walk in our moccasins the trail from our past, / Live with us in the here and now. / Talk with us by the fire of the days to come.” An introductory array of artifacts follows, ranging from a birch-bark container to a Haudenosaunee medicine mask to a Northwest Coast welcome figure.59 “When the White Man Came We Welcomed Him with Love,” we read as we enter “The Drum.” We see reproductions of the Royal Proclamation and early treaties signed with the animal dodems of its First Nations signatories. The camera rests on text panels reading “Wars and Peace Treaties Deprived Us of Our Land,” “Many Indians Feel Our Fathers Were Betrayed,” “The Early Missionaries Thought Us Pagans,” and then, “We Wanted to Live Our Own Life

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3.10 Still from Indian Memento: hostess Janice Lawrence guiding visitors in the section on schools.

on Our Own Land” and “The Reserve Is the Home of Our Spirits.” The camera keeps returning to Montour’s spirit bear; as noted, the colour film brings out the vivid red of its mouth and is suggestive of power and blood. The modules on work-life and schooling that were positioned at the heart of the pavilion are also central to its filmic representation (fig. 3.10). The camera cuts between texts and images representing poverty and economic inequality and the government’s aspirational program of prosperity through assimilation and modernization. We shift to a text panel that reads “The White Man’s School, an Alien Land for the Indian Child,” and see close-up photographs of very young children who appear sad, confused, and anxious. These are juxtaposed with images of the happy blonde children illustrated in the standard settler Dick, Jane, and Sally readers. In the background, the harmonica music plays on, discordant and mournful. This 1967 account of schooling only hints at the agony and trauma revealed almost a half-century later by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. For the modern viewer, the complete silence about residential schools is shocking, a sign of the inability of mid-1960s liberalism to acknowledge or redress the legacies of colonial oppression or the demands of Indigenous peoples that would become evident two years later with the Indigenous rejection of the government’s White Paper on Indian Policy.60 Surprisingly, too, the film’s tour of the pavilion ends here. Our guide does not lead us into its imagined representation of the future, but, rather, takes us with her into downtown

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Montreal. We see her on her day off, out of guide uniform but stylishly dressed as she strolls down a commercial city street to window shop and gaze at flagadorned department stores, pastry shops, and the city’s wax museum (fig. 3.11). We then return with her to Expo, as she rides the monorail back to the pavilion. The film ends with a panorama of Expo and a close-up of the Indians of Canada Pavilion nestled within it. These last scenes are, of course, the future being imagined for the First Nations by the Trudeau government and its minister of Indian Affairs, Jean Chrétien. Only two years later, its White Paper, or “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969,” would propose to abolish treaty rights and to recreate Indigenous people as Canadian citizens, forcing their final assimilation so that they could melt into the crowds of shoppers on the main streets of Canadian cities. It would be successfully opposed by an activist consortium of First Nations leaders, some of whom had played a role in the Indians of Canada Pavilion’s development.61 Assimilationism was still, however, the official policy of the Canadian government, and its messages are communicated by Indian Memento not only visually but also through the audio track. Scored by Hervé Brousseau (1937– 2017), a popular Québécois chansonnier active from the late 1950s to the 1970s, it incorporated several vocalizations performed by his sister, Odette Olivier, also a popular musician during the 1960s and a performer at a number of Expo venues. Brousseau combines a number of different elements. As Janice Lawrence leads us into the pavilion, we see her speaking with pavilion visitors, though we never hear her voice. Instead, we hear folksy melodies that appear to come from popular music traditional to Quebec played on the harmonica and accordion.62 At other moments whistling, drumming (played on a bongolike instrument rather than the drums used in Indigenous ceremony or dance), and more genuinely Indigenous flute music are introduced. We hear the sounds of different animals as our guide tours us through displays about the pre-contact past. As the colonial era begins and history becomes darker, a slower, more abstract soundtrack begins. A female voice, the harmonica, and the accordion alternate to evoke cultures and peoples in conflict. In the last segment, as Janice browses along one of Montreal’s most popular shopping streets, the carnivalesque Québécois music returns. Musicologist Paul Theberge comments that “the give-away comes [toward the end] when [Janice] is shown looking at a poster for ‘Le Patriote,’ a ‘Boite a Chansons,’ featuring popular Quebec chansonniers of the day (including Jean-Pierre Ferland, at the top of the programme). Like the rest of this sequence, the music seems to signal her integration into modern Quebec culture.”63 It is not surprising that Indian Memento mirrors some of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the pavilion itself. It was commissioned by the federal

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3.11 Still from Indian Memento: hostess Janice Lawrence in downtown Montreal.

agency responsible for implementing official assimilationist policy, made by a director trained in France by a renowned ethnographic filmmaker, and scored by a popular Québécois musician. Like the pavilion, it is confined within a settler framing and a positive message of future assimilation is proclaimed. Perhaps most strikingly, its central Indigenous character has been silenced. Without further research, it is hard to determine whether Régnier, who would go on to make some of the most radical documentaries about Third World struggles of his time, was motivated by a desire to avoid the usual

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authoritative male voice-over and allow the pavilion’s Indigenous-authored texts to speak for themselves. Only a year later the nfb would establish the Indian Film Crew, its first Indigenous filmmaking unit, as part of its Challenge for Change program.64 That other choices were beginning to be possible is also suggested by a film made the following year by another non-Indigenous director. David Millar’s 1968 film, Aki’name (On the Wall), tells the story of Kumukluk Saggiak and Elijah Pudlat, two Inuit carvers from Kinngait (Cape Dorset) who were invited to carve the plaster walls of the Katimavik (meeting place) in the Canadian Pavilion. In the film, spoken and written Inuktut and Inuit music are featured. Even more revealing is a contemporary video made by Algonquin Anishinaabe and French artist Caroline Monnet in 2015. Mobilize, which takes the viewer on an exhilarating journey from the Far North to the urban South, closes with archival footage of Janice Lawrence from the filming of Indian Memento. Monnet, however, has layered an Indigenous soundtrack featuring the powerful throat singing of Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq over the scene of her walk through downtown Montreal.65 Yet despite the actual and figurative dissonance of Indian Memento, the power of the visual narrative constructed by the pavilion’s Indigenous creators breaks through, just as the program of contemporary Indigenous art mounted on the exterior of the pavilion was able to overcome its stereotypical tipi-totem pole imagery.

From Centennial to Sesquicentennial The National Museum of Canada – known as the National Museum of Man in 1967 and the Canadian Museum of History today – played an important role in the development of the pavilion. One of its staff ethnologists, Tom McFeat, selected most of the historic ancestral and cultural belongings put on display and provided the interpretations that were used to write the labels and train the pavilion’s guides. As we have also seen, the standard anthropological culture areas were invoked in the introductory section. It is thus particularly interesting to contrast the way Indigenous history has been presented in the Canadian Museum of History’s new history hall, opened fifty years later to mark the Sesquicentennial of Confederation. Even a brief review of its development process suggests both significant movements toward decolonization and ongoing tensions and challenges. The new hall, like the Expo pavilion, follows a chronological path from the pre-contact period through to the present. But while it covers all of Canadian history rather than Indigenous history alone, the agency of Indigenous peoples and the impacts on major events in the nation’s history on them are promi-

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nently featured, threading through the successive modules. There are also parallels between the innovative Expo 67 consultations and the process by which the Indigenous component of the new hall was developed, for the 2017 Canada Hall’s narratives took shape in close consultation with an Indigenous advisory committee – the only one of a number of special topic advisory committees to remain active throughout the development of the hall. Working closely with Huron-Wendat historian Jonathan Lainey (the museum’s curator, First Peoples), its members vetted each successive iteration of the storyline, captions, and images. The hall also includes specific modules on Indigenous history, the difficult history of residential schools, and other aspects of colonization. Individual Indigenous Elders and experts appear throughout, directly addressing the public in videos. In this new hall, Expo 67 and the Centennial year celebrations have themselves become a part of the historical narrative: in the inaugural installations, a scale model of the pavilion and George Clutesi’s mural maquette were included in a section on the Centennial world’s fair. The activism that brought the Expo 67 pavilion into being was a product of the larger context of Indigenous political activism that had led to the repeal of some of the most oppressive articles of the Indian Act in 1951, and the granting of suffrage to status Indians in 1960.66 The 2017 Canadian History Hall is, similarly, a product of momentous developments that have occurred during the intervening fifty years. Indigenous sovereignty was entrenched in the 1982 Canadian constitution, a new treaty process was established to resolve land claims during the early 1990s, the new protocols and partnership models defined in the 1992 report of the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples have gradually been applied by museums across the country, a Royal Commission on Indigenous Peoples reported in 1996, Canada adopted the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (partially in 2010 and fully in 2016), and, as already mentioned, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc) issued its ninety-four calls to action in 2015. Although these blueprints for change have thus far been implemented in only partial and fragmentary ways, they chart new ways of going forward in the future. It is instructive to compare the historical revisionism of the Canadian Museum of History’s new hall with that of the pavilion – and to note what is not in the hall as well as what has been newly included. In contrast to the Expo 67 pavilion, there are no sacred items or medicine masks, and research on burials and other archaeological discoveries is presented in the pre-contact galleries only with the permission and interpretation of Indigenous collaborators. The male-centred pronouns dominant in the Indians of Canada Pavilion – as elsewhere in Expo 67/Man and His World – are absent, as is the Indian princess stereotype that was, arguably, referenced by the presence of the hostesses. Some

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of the debates over criteria of identity, which, in Tom Hill’s recollection, had threatened planning meetings with “chaos,” have been recodified by Supreme Court decisions and other actions that have stretched and broadened (though not resolved) the question of who has the right to determine Indigenous identity. Perhaps most notably, the cohort of contemporary Indigenous artists has grown exponentially, not only in numbers but also in its artistic range and national and international prestige. Indigenous curators, one of whom has coauthored this chapter, organized many of the Sesquicentennial exhibitions both inside and outside major mainstream arts institutions. As at the Indians of Canada Pavilion, they mobilized their artistic creativity to draw attention to ongoing deprivations, inequalities, and injustices as well as to histories of resilience and achievement. In 2017, however, it would have been impossible to imagine individual artworks being moved to less prominent locations or their titles forcibly changed by the bureaucrats. As we have argued, the contemporary strengths of the Indigenous arts community have grown organically from the decolonial energies that informed the 1967 pavilion and its artistic program. The project provided Indigenous artists in Canada with an unprecedented platform to share their art with the over 3 million people from Canada and the world who visited the pavilion. The project enabled regional artists from across the country to work together to present a cohesive vision and to influence the story the nation-state tells about itself to itself and others. Celebrating and affirming Indigenous cultures, artists employed customary aesthetics and imagery to honour their communities at the same time that they embraced contemporary art forms to express their full participation in the modern world. The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 was, then, pivotally important to the emergence of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada, giving birth, as many today accept, to contemporary Indigenous artistic and curatorial practices. Yet the fact that none of the art made for the pavilion has been preserved – or was ever intended by its government funders to survive – is also evidence of the ambivalence with which the pavilion’s governmental sponsors viewed the combination of historical critique and idealized futuristic vision it set out.67 The serious and at times visibly uncomfortable faces of the visitors whom Janice Lawrence guides through the pavilion in Indian Memento seem to express a combination of respectful attention, guilt, and a certain defensiveness. Perhaps most strikingly to contemporary viewers, the film and the pavilion tiptoe nervously around the subject of Indian education in white man’s schools, but refuse to articulate the horrific damage done by the residential school system itself or its underlying premise of forced assimilation.

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As Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller argue, many of the pavilion’s elements “blended both the Indian Affairs Branch’s desire to present the First Nations as accommodating themselves to the modern, technocratic world that Expo 67 celebrated, and the First Nations’ wish to use the pavilion as a platform on which to show the world their view of themselves and the history of their interactions with non-Native Canada.”68 These liberal politics and tensions continue to characterize governmentIndigenous relations. Yet the much more open and forceful critiques to which models of recognition, inclusion, and reconciliation are today being subjected should not prevent us from acknowledging the first steps that were taken toward opening up the public debate by the Indians of Canada Pavilion or its achievement in “indigenizing” Expo 67. It is difficult to imagine how present gains in the cultural and artistic spheres could have been achieved without the touchstone it offered to subsequent generations. On its own terms and in its own time, it fulfilled the hopes Anishinaabe poet Duke Redbird voiced in the poem “Indian Pavilion,” which he composed for the unveiling of the scale model in 1966 by the Indian Affairs Branch: May your form reflect The symmetry of our wigwams and our teepees. May your structure incorporate The strength of our long houses both East and West. And may your walls create The warmth of our fires That have burned a hundred thousand years. May your colors express The pageantry of our ceremonies. May your tapestries weave The story of our Great Men, both Then and Now. May your fabrics portray The contrasts of our culture That has lived a hundred thousand years. May your furnishings tell The simplicity of our wants and needs.

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May your accoutrements spell The multiplicity of our tongues both Old and New. May your designs whisper The tales of our legends That have been told a hundred thousand years. May your fixtures cast The light of our learning. May your shadows project The mystery and depth of our religions both Remembered and Forgotten. May your fountains recall The bubble of our laughter and the silence of our tears That echo across a hundred thousand years. May your floor combine The past and future of our people, May your carpets spin The mosaic of our complexities both common and unusual. May your foundation exhibit The strength of our wisdom and knowledge For we have waited a hundred thousand years.69

notes 1 Press release for the Indian Hall of Fame, Canadian National Exhibition (cne), 1966, where advance publicity was mounted for the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67. Wallace Labillois was the chairman of the Indian Advisory Committee for the Indians of Canada Pavilion. Press release for the Indian Hall of Fame at the Canadian National Exhibition, Indians of Canada Pavilion – Expo ’67 (E98.4), box 695, file 7, 4, Canadian Museum of History Archives (cited hereafter as Indian Hall of Fame press release). 2 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in 2008 as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement reached with the government of Canada. Its report, released in 2015, put forward ninety-four “calls to action,” all of which the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau promised to implement.

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Canada 150 was the year-long series of events that took place in 2017 to mark and celebrate the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation in 1857. Many new exhibitions and installations were organized by museums and artists, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to mark the year. On The Spirit Sings, see the special issue of Muse, on “Museums and the First Nations (autumn 1988); and “Moment of Truth: The Spirit Sings as Critical Event and the Exhibition Inside It,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, ed. Ruth B. Phillips, 48–70 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012). See Assembly of First Nations and Canadian Museums Association, Turning the Page: Forging New Partnerships between Museums and First Peoples (Ottawa: Canadian Museums Association, 1992). The most prominent Canadian projects were Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives in Canadian Art, at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, curated by Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree and member of the Siksika First Nation) and Lee-Anne Martin (Mohawk); and the National Gallery of Canada’s Land/Spirit/ Power: First Nations at the National Gallery, co-curated by Diana Nemiroff, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, and Robert Houle (Anishinaabe Saulteaux). Ruth B. Phillips with Sherry Brydon, “‘Arrow of Truth’: The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67,” in Museum Pieces, ed. Ruth B. Phillips, 27–47. Michel Régnier, Indian Memento, National Film Board of Canada, 1967, www.nfb.ca/ film/indian_memento. For a helpful discussion of the post–World War II federal political context, see Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ Participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17, no. 2 (2006): 148–73. Letter of June 1963 from H.M. Jones, Acting Deputy Minister, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (hereafter, diand), to J.A. Roberts, Deputy Minister, Department of Trade and Commerce, 1/43-3 V. 1, diand Archives. Letter of June 1964 from R.F. Battle, Director of the Indian Affairs Branch to R. Letendre, Administrator of Exhibits, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, 3, 1/43-3 V. 1, 19, diand Archives. On Canada’s international showcasing of Inuit art, see Norman Vorano, “Inuit Art in the Qallunaat World: Modernism, Museums and the Popular Imaginary, 1949–1962” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2007). This committee was mandated by the Centennial Indian Advisory Committee which included diand officials. See Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’”; and Phillips and Brydon, “‘Arrow of Truth.’” Carbon copy of letter from A.G. Leslie, A/Director of Development to Assistant

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Deputy Minister (Indian Affairs), 9 August 1967, file 17: Loose Correspondence re: Expo 67 Indians of Canada Pavilion, Library and Archives Canada. The branch contributed over $1.2 million for the design, construction, and operating costs of the iocp at Expo 67. Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Annual Report: Fiscal Year 1967–68, Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1967, Indian Affairs Annual Reports, Library and Archives Canada, www.bac-lac.gc.ca/ eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/first-nations/indian-affairs-annual-reports/ Pages/item.aspx?IdNumber=35794. Representatives from British Columbia met in Vancouver on 19, 20, and 21 March; from the Maritime provinces in Amherst, NS, on 23, 24, and 25 March; from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and the Northwest Territories in Edmonton on 3, 4, and 5 April; and from Ontario and Quebec in Montreal on 13, 14, and 15 April. The storyline also includes contributions made at meetings of the National Indian Advisory Council in Ottawa and Montreal, and in other informal interviews with Indians in many parts of the country. The storyline is intended to represent the Indians’ answers to the question: “What do you want to tell the people of Canada and the world when they come to Expo in 1967?” “Indians of Canada Pavilion / Expo ’67 (typescript) Storyline,” Indians of Canada Pavilion – Expo ’67 (E98.4), box 695, file 7, 2, Canadian Museum of History Archives. The 1966 press release for the Indian Hall of Fame made the same claim: “The design was evolved after a conference of the Indian artists from all parts of Canada held at Ottawa, during December 1965. The design was later modified to accommodate the story which the Indian people wish to tell.” Indians of Canada Pavilion – Expo ’67 (E98.4), box 695, file 7, 4, Canadian Museum of History Archives. For a short time, Francis also became the project coordinator for the pavilion. Open letter from the Commissioner General, 29 June 1966, Expo ’67 (E98.4), box 695, file 7, ii, 2, Indians of Canada Pavilion – Expo ’67, Canadian Museum of History Archives. The 1966 press release for the Indian Hall of Fame at the Canadian National Exhibition 1996 made these references clear: “The visitor will approach the tower through a series of smaller pavilions which represent stylized versions of other traditional Indian dwellings.” Indian Hall of Fame press release, 2. For a more detailed discussion of the pavilion’s architecture see Phillips and Brydon, “‘Arrow of Truth.’” Personal communication to Ruth Phillips, Kahnawake, Quebec, 8 May 1992. “Indians of Canada Pavilion / Expo ’67 (typescript) Storyline,” Indians of Canada Pavilion – Expo ’67 (E98.4), box 695, file 7, 2, Canadian Museum of History Archives.

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19 This was the first point noted during the discussion of the pavilion’s content that followed the presentation of the architectural plans to the iac. Its importance is reinforced by the sentence that follows: “The Past may appear more evident than the others in the present stage of design only because this is the section initiated in the design work … the theme on the Present actually has been assigned a greater physical area than the Past.” “Minutes of the Second Meeting of the Indian Advisory Council,” held at Montreal, 20–22 April 1966, 6. Files, Kanien’kehaka Raotitiohkwa Cultural Centre, Kahnawake, qc. 20 The following reconstruction of the pavilion’s interior installations draws on the ten-page visitor brochure, Indians of Canada Pavilion – Expo 67 (Canada: Controller of Stationery, 1967), which contained an expanded version of the text panels mounted in the installations as well as archival photographs commissioned by diand. Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, e001096685, Library and Archives Canada. 21 “Delaware Carves Celestial Bear,” The Indian News 10, no. 1 (April 1967): 5. 22 Display in interior of Canadian Indian Pavilion, Expo 67, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, pa-173205, e001096685, Library and Archives Canada. Reproduced in Phillips and Brydon “‘Arrow of Truth,’” figure 1.2; and in Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country,’” 161. 23 Rosemary Speirs, “Indian Pavilion Shocks Complacent Non-Indians” (source unidentified, but probably from the Montreal Star), vol. 447, rg71, Library and Archives Canada. 24 Tom Hill, personal communication to Ruth Phillips, 18 March 1991. 25 “Pavilion Tells Indians’ Story,” The Indian News 10, no. 1 (April 1967): 5. 26 Other Indigenous staff for the pavilion included deputy commissioners T. Reginald Kelly (Haida) and Russell Moses (1932–2013, Delaware Band, Six Nations of the Grand River), and the security guards, who were reserve constables, provided by the Caughnawaga (Kahnawake) Band Council and trained by the rcmp. Indians of Canada Pavilion (Compiled for the information of Mr. D.A. Webster), 13 October 1966, file 121-600/43-14.2, pt. 1, Library and Archives Canada. 27 The training was divided into four segments: (a) Indian Affairs Participation, (b) French language training, (c) Personality development, and (d) Indian Content. Indians of Canada Pavilion (Compiled for the information of Mr. D.A. Webster). 28 The pillbox hat was designed by a Mr Flemming in collaboration with Michel Robichaud. Exhibition label text, Fashioning Expo 67, McCord Museum, 17 March to 1 October 2017, visited 18 April 2017, www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/ expo-67-and-fashion-in-montreal-in-the-1960s. Michel Robichaud also designed the official hostess uniform for Expo 67 and five other pavilion hostess dresses: https://encyclomodeqc.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/entry/michel-robichaud.

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29 In the early 1960s, for example, Selwyn Dewdney, friend and mentor to pioneering modern Anishinaabe painter Norval Morrisseau, advised the artist to use earth tones rather than the bright colours he favoured. See Ruth B. Phillips, “Norval Morrisseau’s Entrance: Negotiating Primitivism, Modernism, and Anishinaabe Tradition,” in Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist, ed. Greg Hill (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2006), 43–77. 30 Exhibition label text. 31 “Hostesses Arrive for Expo,” The Indian News 9, no. 4 (February 1967): 3. 32 Michael McGarry, “Indians Speak with Straight Tongue,” The Winnipeg Tribune’s Weekend Showcase, 24 June 1967. 33 Gerald Tailfeathers is also known as Omuka-nista-payh’pee (Big Walking Away) and Eets-pahp-awag-uh’ka (Walking on Top). 34 The Cultural Affairs Section of diand was tasked with the objective to “preserve and stimulate the growth and expression of Canadian Indian culture through research, documentation, and the promotion of graphic and performing arts.” 35 The group included George Clutesi, Tseshaht, British Columbia; Gerald Tailfeathers, Kainai, Alberta; Alex Janvier, Denesuline, Alberta; Noel Wuttunee, Cree, Manitoba; Ross Woods, Dakota, Manitoba; Norval Morrisseau, Anishinaabe, Ontario; Francis Kagige, Anishinaabe (Odawa), Ontario; Tom Hill, Seneca, Ontario, Jean-Marie Gros-Louis, Huron-Wendat, Quebec; Joe Lands, Anishinaabe, Manitoba; and Duke Redbird, Anishinaabe, Ontario. 36 Revisioning the Indians of Canada Pavilion: Ahzhekewada (Let Us Look Back), keynote address, Aboriginal Curatorial Collective colloquium. The colloquium was organized to recognize the impact of the Indians of Canada Pavilion and took place at ocadu, Toronto, Ontario, 15 October 2011. 37 Letter from Robert Marjoribanks to J.W. Francis, 7 July 1966, file 121-600/43-14, pt. 1.2, Library and Archives Canada. 38 Letter from Robert Marjoribanks to J.W. Francis. This amount was to cover travel, lodging, art supplies, artist fees, and studio rental. Hill was paid $300 for his mural, a very modest sum at the time (Tom Hill, personal communication to Linda Grussani, 17 September 2017). 39 Carbon copy of letter authored by Tom Peltier, “Artist Participation, Indians of Canada Pavilion,” 14 February 1967, file 121-600/45-16, pt. 1, Library and Archives Canada. 40 “Murals by Indian Artists Eyed for Expo Pavilion,” Winnipeg Free Press, 27 September 1966. 41 The judges were Dr Dale, assistant director, National Art Gallery; Dr Schwartz, a Montreal art gallery proprietor; Yves Thériault, head, Cultural Affairs Section; Joe Francis, architect, Indians of Canada Pavilion; Alastair Ross, associate architect, Indians of Canada Pavilion; Lois Boisvenue, coordinator, Plastic and

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42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

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Graphic Arts, Cultural Affairs Section; Tom Peltier, organizational officer, Cultural Affairs. Indian Artists’ Programme (Nine Murals), 6 July 1966, file 121-600/43-14, pt. 1.2, Library and Archives Canada. Also recorded as “Go home and sing” in some accounts. Revisioning the Indians of Canada Pavilion: Ahzhekewada (Let Us Look Back). Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Indigenous Art Centre. Francis Kagige, artist’s file, photocopy from Mary E. (Beth) Southcott, The Sound of the Drum: The Sacred Art of the Anishnabec (Erin, on: Boston Mills Press, 1984). Tom Hill, “Canadian Indian Art: Its Death and Rebirth,” Art Magazine (1974): 11. “fph Text,” First Peoples Hall fonds, William Kingfisher, box 8, file 10, Canadian Museum of History Archives. “fph Text.” “fph Text.” Revisioning the Indians of Canada Pavilion: Ahzhekewada (Let Us Look Back). The maquettes were painted by the same artists who painted the larger murals for the pavilion and were collected by the Canadian Museum of History in 1991. “The Indians of Canada Pavilion – Expo ’67: Introduction to Theme and Design Concept,” file 121-600/43-16, pt. 2, Library and Archives Canada. Copy of letter from Bill Reid to Eric Mansfield, 12 April 1966, file 121-600/43-16, pt. 2, Library and Archives Canada. Copy of letter from Bill Reid to Eric Mansfield. Open letter from the General Commissioner, Chief Andrew T. Delisle, Expo ’67 (E98.4), box 695, file 7, 2, Canadian Museum of History Archives. René Bruemmer, “Chief Sees Ceremony as Totem-Pole Tokenism,” Montreal Gazette, 7 September 2007. The Indian Hall of Fame press release describes the selection and training process: “Twelve Indian girls from all parts of Canada have been selected for training as Pavilion hostesses, from among more than 280 applicants. The girls were judged by local interviewing boards in 10 cities on the basis of their appearance, intelligence, character and personality. Before taking on their duties, they will undergo a four-month training program in Montreal which will include refresher courses in Indian history and culture, personality development and grooming, and some knowledge of an extra language (French or English).” Indian Hall of Fame press release, 2. The press release “Hostesses Chosen for the Indians of Canada Pavilion, Expo 67” describes her as Janice Lawrence, an Okanagan Indian from Vernon, bc (file 121600/43-14.2, pt.1, Library and Archives Canada). These are visible in the photograph of the introductory section of the pavilion.

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“Indians of Canada Pavilion – Expo 67,” Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, e001096685, Library and Archives Canada. “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969.” See Alan Cairns, Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2001); Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1969); and George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Toronto: Collier-Macmillan Canada, 1974). George Manuel, for example, was a member of the pavilion’s National Indian Advisory Council. We are very grateful to Paul Theberge for explaining the composition of the soundtrack to Indian Memento. Email from Paul Theberge to Ruth Phillips, 20 October 2020. In 1967, Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin had begun consulting for the nfb, working on the film Standing Buffalo, directed by Joan Henson, produced by Joe Koenig and Robert Verral, and released in 1968. In 1968, the nfb began to work with and develop Indigenous filmmakers under the Indian Film Crew (ifc), which was created as part of the Challenge for Change program that was initiated in 1967 as a broader organizational initiative to use media to effect social change. Released in 1969, These Are My People… was the first nfb film made entirely by an Indigenous crew. It was co-directed by Roy Daniels, Willie Dunn, Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell, and Barbara Wilson. Monnet was one of four contemporary artists – along with Kent Monkman, Jeff Barnaby, and Michelle Latimer – selected to work with nfb archival footage and Indigenous musicians to create new short films for the exhibitions Gazing Back, Looking Forward, exhibited for the Aboriginal Pavilion at the Toronto Pan Am Games. See Philip Lewis, “Indigenous New Wave: nfb at the Pan Am Games,” nfb, 13 July 2015, https://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2015/07/10/indigenous-new-wavenfb-pan-games/. Technically, Inuit had had the right to vote since 1950 but were unable to exercise it in most places. The pavilion was never meant to last. According to the engineering study of the costs associated with taking it down that diand commissioned before it opened, “dismantling and site clean-up, transportation within a radius of 150 miles, and re-erection, including new foundations, new roofing, heating electrical, etc. would probably cost $300,000,” and more depending on how the building would need to be modified for use, given “the heating, ventilation and electrical systems were not designed for long-term use or winter conditions.” The study also indicated that it would be “economically impractical to dismantle, move, and re-erect the structure. If, however, there are Indian bands or groups interested in acquir-

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ing the Building and they can put forward a plan providing financially for its removal and maintenance, first consideration will be given to their proposals. Failing this we must consider alternative methods of disposal and may in the end have to simply demolish the Building and restore the site.” J.W. Churchman, Director of Indian Affairs, loose correspondence re Expo 67 Indians of Canada Pavilion, 17 April 1967, box 86, file 17, Library and Archives Canada. 68 Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country,’” 164. 69 Duke Redbird, “Indian Pavilion,” reprinted in The Indian News 10, no. 2 (August 1967): 8.

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4 Our Two Masks: Canadian Colonial Humanism and Indigenous Representation at Montreal’s World Exhibition

romney copeman You can’t reconcile anything when you don’t know what’s happening. – Andrew Tanahokate Deslisle1

On 4 August 1967, Andrew Tanahokate Delisle, the commissioner general of the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67, received numerous Indigenous chiefs and Expo and Canadian government officials at the Place des Nations to mark the day devoted to the Indians of Canada.2 Unbeknownst to Expo planners, Chief Delisle had requested the scheduling of the festivities on that particular day in order to coincide with the eve of the 270th anniversary of a Haudenosaunee raid on Lachine in response to continued French incursions into Mohawk (Kanien’kehá) territory.3 Likely oblivious to the symbolic weight of the calendar, Expo 67 commissioner general Pierre Dupuy, Canada’s governor general Roland Michener, and the federal minister for Indian Affairs and Northern Development Arthur Laing were in attendance. Despite the rain, a crowd of 5,000 spectators gathered at the Place des Nations – the official Expo site for national celebrations – and watched as each of nine Indigenous chiefs gave one of the dignitary invitees a headdress, conferred upon them Indigenous names, and adopted them into their nation in a ceremony that was itself a form of anti-colonial resistance.4 Just as the Canadian nation was reimagined for Expo 67, Indigenous leaders saw Expo as an opportunity to bestow the responsibilities that adoption and national membership entailed. This was especially true at the Indians of Canada Pavilion, where Indigenous peoples took advantage of an unprecedented opportunity to reshape their own role and identity within North America, resoundingly rejecting the premise

that the Canadian project of accelerating Indigenous development was wholly beneficial. The pavilion subverted traditional colonial imagery and developmentalist narratives by reclaiming Indigenous representation and charting a course for decolonial development on Indigenous terms. Jane Griffith notes that the Indians of Canada Pavilion was “a pedagogical act of resistance to the Centennial year’s colonial pedagogies,” and mentions the Canadian Pavilion at Expo as a prime example of these “thick layers of colonial education” before turning her attention to a number of other official Centennial events.5 Indeed, scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67, despite it being one of the most elaborate and symbolically central attempts to articulate the new official nationalism of the Pearson era. Reimagining and relocating the relationship of Indigenous people to the Canadian polity and Canadian peoples was central to that attempt. The Canadian Pavilion’s main exhibition area extended beneath a large, inverted pyramid-shaped structure called the Katimavik, an Inuktitut word for “meeting place.” In this sense, Canadian modernity at Expo 67 was both literally and figuratively structured by the appropriation of Inuit concepts. The Canadian Pavilion relied on the appropriation of northern indigeneity as a marker of difference for Canada relative to other states in the international community; Indigenous art and artifacts featured throughout, and replicas were given to visiting dignitaries who sought a uniquely “Canadian” experience. Two young Inuit carvers from Cape Dorset were brought to the Expo site to create murals depicting life in the North, and to carve figures while being observed by Expo audiences. A group of prominent English- and French-Canadian intellectuals authored a series of thematic guides to the Canadian Pavilion that had the difficult task of narrating the country’s history without engaging with the complex and contested aspects of its colonial past, concentrating instead on self-congratulatory moments of “interdependence” in the rise of a peaceful, multicultural nation. Within this narrative, Indigenous people played an important symbolic role as a point of comparison for white settler society. In Robin Bush’s contribution to My Home, My Native Land, for example, indigeneity was simultaneously celebrated and criticized. Indigenous peoples were narrated into Canadian history within a set of terms already rife with contradiction: they were part of “prehistory,” replete with “romance,” “mythology,” and “legends”; yet the prehistory was part of “our [Canadian] prehistory,” anachronistically making Indigenous people carriers of a colonial nation-state thousands of years before its formation.6 Though Indigenous narratives of their own history were discounted, Indigenous peoples were necessary within

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an imagined developmental timeline, and they were appropriated into a mythological construction of a Canada that stretched back well before the European invasions. In imposing this artificial timeline and setting points of reference for Indigenous development, the official Canadian narrative echoed a developmentalist ideology that found fertile soil in Expo 67 due to the world exhibition’s global focus, universalist pretentions, and idealistic vision of global brotherhood.7 The Noranda Lectures and the Maclean-Hunter International Forum, two exclusive speaker series held at Expo’s Du Pont Auditorium, welcomed internationally renowned speakers who espoused often condescending and racist views towards decolonized nations, seeing in the United States and Europe the development of an ideal model that could be easily exported to supposedly receptive “backwards” nations.8 The universalization of mankind’s accomplishments and challenges were encapsulated in the Expo theme, “Terre des hommes,” in reference to the “cosmic humanism” of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.9 Ascension to the peak of Expo’s internationalist developmental hierarchy required an erasure of national history and the history of colonization: Expo 67’s ideal world citizen would be free of any recognition of the profound damages and purposeful underdevelopment that colonial powers inflicted on colonized peoples through the destruction of political systems, entire economies, and human lives.10 This developmentalist utopia was conjoined in the messaging of the Canadian Pavilion with what Gary Wilder calls “colonial humanism,” which he traces to the French imperial nation-state, “an intrinsically contradictory form whose crises opened possibilities for systemic transformation, immanent critique – identifying within it alternatives that pointed beyond it.”11 Though Wilder’s concept extends from his analysis of colonial West Africa, the term is useful beyond the French colonial model and reveals much about colonial mentalities in general, and Canadian approaches to Indigenous people in particular. Canadian colonial humanism combined a set of principles including the espousal of universal values and the appropriation of Indigenous art and imagery in order to recast Canada as a model among nations through a variety of discourses that uphold and valorize whiteness. As Barnor Hesse points out, a central tenet of whiteness, the cultural construction underpinning white people’s understanding of themselves relative to “others,” is to replace white people’s own role in historical accounts with “whitewashed” histories coded as universal doctrines. Such historical accounts “are made through the selective construction and representation of ‘tradition’ in the public sphere.” The narrative structure of whiteness “forgets its contested antecedents, it forgets what

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‘others’ remember; in effect this ‘white amnesia’ represses the historical context of racism because the threat of the ‘racialised other’ absorbs all attention.”12 Such white amnesia was effected at the Canadian Pavilion in the deployment of a new multi-ethnic humanism. The pavilion promoted a set of multicultural symbols before the adoption of multiculturalism as an official government policy, something particularly evident in the images embedded in the leaves of the People Tree, a giant sculptural figure adjacent the Katimavik whose “leaves” were banners imprinted with photographs of Canadians of various ethnicities going about their daily lives. The humanistic, multicultural imagery and statements at the Canadian Pavilion coexisted alongside the paternalistic treatment of Indigenous people in the Canadian Pavilion guidebooks. As Eva Mackey explains, “officially endorsed versions of multiculturalism abduct the cultures of minority groups, pressing them into the service of nation building without promoting genuine respect and autonomy.”13 This process was also particularly evident at the Katimavik, which demonstrated the appropriation of Inuit culture, albeit reconfigured into a massive modernist structure, as a means to psychologically extend Canadian sovereignty into the northern reaches of North America. By seeking to appropriate Indigenous peoples into Canadian history without engaging with their narratives, Canadian nationalists relegated them to one of a number of roles: contributors to the Canadian nation, barriers to technological progress, or nearly forgotten relics of the past. Furthermore, early multiculturalism was developing alongside the aggressive assimilationist and genocidal policies of the Canadian state toward Indigenous people in the 1960s. Just as the new nationalism of the Canadian Pavilion tried to fully appropriate Indigenous peoples, Indigenous representatives adopted government and Expo officials into their nations and fought for a space to tell their own stories at the Indians of Canada Pavilion. The historic pavilion has been studied in some detail, and has been recognized as a key marker of First Nations coming together to take control over the way they would be represented. Here I revisit the Indians of Canada Pavilion as a key site in an intense dialogue at Expo 67 between Canadian colonial humanism and Indigenous peoples. I take my cue from the recollections of the pavilion’s Mohawk commissioner general, Chief Andrew Tanahokate Delisle, whom I interviewed in 2016 shortly before his passing into the spirit world. Delisle himself was a leader in strategizing, organizing, and prosecuting the way the Indians of Canada Pavilion message engaged and contested the official Canadian efforts to appropriate Indigenous peoples at the Montreal world exhibition, particularly at the Canadian Pavilion. His commentary also invites us to consider a range of responses

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among visitors to the Indians of Canada Pavilion, from Queen Elizabeth II, to prominent Indigenous activists, to reporters and citizens of Montreal. These responses suggest the success of the pavilion in disrupting the uncritical narrative of the rise of a “multicultural” Canada. This discursive and symbolic contest at Expo 67 did not occur in a vacuum. It took place during a period of accelerated kidnapping and confinement of Indigenous children in residential schools where many perished without their names being recorded, and during the “Sixties Scoop”: a drastic increase in the state-enforced removal and kidnapping of Indigenous children from their households for adoption into non-Indigenous families, in what the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 called “cultural genocide,” and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls would, four years later, term simply genocide without the qualifier.14 This made the incorporation of Indigenous cultures into the newly woven Canadian ethnic mosaic a challenging endeavour only achievable through the careful balance of humanism, racism, and colonialism that made up colonial humanism. The messaging of the Indians of Canada Pavilion unsettled that balance. Thus, Expo 67 was not free of Canadian and international colonial dynamics. Despite the intentions of the exhibition’s organizers to promote interdependence and humanism, and to integrate Indigenous peoples into a Canadian celebration of universality and humanism, the Indians of Canada Pavilion exposed the limitations of this endeavour by documenting and articulating the continued treatment of Indigenous peoples as colonial subjects.

The Inuit and the Canadian Pavilion’s Colonial Humanism The Canadian “Pavilion” was actually an ensemble of exhibition buildings and performance spaces, capped by two prominent structures. One of these, the Katimavik, was a large, inverted pyramid. Hollow on the inside with stairways on the vertices rising 200 feet to an observation platform, it gave visitors a panoramic view of Expo, one of whose backdrops was a Montreal cityscape showing off its newly built, modernist skyscrapers. The 66-foot-high People Tree, though dwarfed somewhat by the Katimavik, was to be the “centre of visual attention,” according to the guidebook written by Robin Bush, a leading Canadian designer who had worked on the pavilion.15 The “tree” was made up of 1,500 semi-transparent orange, red, and yellow “leaves” (actually vertical banners) which were meant to evoke Canada’s deciduous forests in autumn. Some 700 of them had printed onto the fabric photographic depictions of Canadians of different ethnicities in their everyday life; lit from within at night, the tree glowed with a wondrous aura, a visually

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4.1 Canada Pavilion at night, Montreal 1967.

emblematic representation of national subjectivity. Beneath the Katimavik and the People Tree was the main exhibition building. One of its central display areas featured murals by Inuit artists Elijah Pudlat and Kumukuluk Saggiak, whose carving inscribed an Indigenous presence onto what was effectively the marquee of Canada’s one hundredth birthday celebration. To the Inuit carvers, in a modest gesture akin to the more ambitious Indians of Canada Pavilion, the murals represented their people’s story. Their creative presence and voices, recorded in the documentary film Aki’name (1968), show just how complex and layered the different understandings were of their participation at Expo, beyond those of the people they refer to in the film as the “hudlanan” (white people).16 To the pavilion planners, however, the murals represented the extension of Canadian folkloric arts and culture to its northernmost reaches. Leanne Pupchek has shown how, as postwar Canadian nationalists sought to consolidate their control over Canada’s northern territorial claims, they turned their colonial gaze toward Inuit peoples as potential repositories for Canadian nationalist symbolism. Inuit imagery was used “as a resource for Canadian identity,” and the romanticizing of “Indian” and “Eskimo” by Canadian cultural

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producers “contributed to a program aimed at the gradual rhetorical extermination of the Aboriginal peoples that began in the 1800s.”17 Inuit art quickly became a tool for cultural diplomacy, conveniently providing a distinctive “Canadian” gift that could be offered to foreign dignitaries. By the mid-1960s official diplomatic visitors fully expected to receive Inuit artwork and even have visits with Inuit peoples, while the connection of Canada with the Inuit had also become a successful trope in tourist promotion.18 According to a 1967 Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (diand) brochure, the Inuit had gone from being “an amusing curiosity” to “a first-class and creative race” in only a short period of time. The official publication insisted they had been “saved from the fate of some little-known, recessive people who have been exhibited alive in the past, in such places as the Crystal Palace in London.”19 Having encouraged Inuit people to take up carving for export, officials at Indian Affairs and Northern Development not only congratulated themselves for benevolently saving Inuit people from being caged and displayed at international fairs, they built a psychological connection between Inuit carvings and national identity. The brochure’s remarks about Inuit artists reveal not only a paternalistic vision of “pre-modern” Inuit peoples, but the self-regard of the “first-class” race into which the anonymous author was, by his position in the Department of Indian Affairs, authorized to grant the Inuit admission. In perverse contrast to the department’s claim, however, at Canada’s own world exhibition Saggiak was required to carve for live audiences at the Canadian Pavilion, roped off from curious crowds, becoming a part of the display.20 Canadian Pavilion planners attempted to meld indigeneity and Canadiana, creating a new, hybrid cultural form promoted as distinctly Canadian; Inuit and northern imagery was crucially important to this messaging. Expo 67’s official mascot, Ookpik, was named after the Inuktitut word for “owl,” Canada’s main exhibition structure was given an Inuit name, and the pavilion restaurant was called La Toundra (French for tundra). Moreover, Expo theme pavilions including Man and the Polar Regions and Man the Explorer, and even the experimental housing complex Habitat 67, contained Inuit sculptures and prints.21 Appropriating Indigenous terminology into Canadian settler colonial identity allowed Canadians to observe Indigenous peoples through a lens created by and for Canadians, placing Indigenous cultural expressions within a narrative of Canadian global humanism. The Canadian Pavilion had three official guidebooks, averaging thirty pages in length and sold on-site for $1.00 each. They were meant to complement the four exhibition areas: The Land of Canada, The People of Canada, The Growth

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of Canada, and The Challenges to Canadians and Canada and the World. Written by prominent English- and French-Canadian intellectuals who had worked as consultants on the pavilion, the first guidebook described the Canadian Pavilion and the country, the second recounted the challenges faced by Canada, and the third considered Canada’s role in the international community.22 Together, the pavilion and its explanatory guidebooks encouraged individual transformation along nationalistic, humanistic, and universalistic lines in order to privilege global relationships with “our fellow-men.”23 The overall national vision of these books, including the way it located Indigenous Canadians, is perhaps best summarized in Norbert Lacoste’s essay on the People Tree in My Home, My Native Land. Lacoste, a priest-intellectual who had trained in Louvain and Chicago and founded the sociology department at the University of Montreal, asserted that Canadians have “overcome nature’s problems” and must turn to resolving their “human problems” by looking to the roots of the People Tree for inspiration: “Why not invoke the courage of those who preceded us on this inhospitable soil and who, despite technically poor methods and all other handicaps, managed to survive? Explorers, trappers, missionaries, navigators, settlers, how can we fully appreciate their lives of effort and hardship which today allow us to be masters of this vast land?”24 Lacoste offered the initial acts of colonization as a contemporary source of strength, reinforced by a mastery over Canada’s vast territorial claims, projecting settler power onto the landscape. The guidebook authors drew on developmentalist rhetoric to suggest that the technological changes that facilitated European settler expansion were part of a “civilizing” process. In Change Comes to Canada, for example, Lister Sinclair, one of English Canada’s most important playwrights and polymath intellectuals, explicitly devalued non-industrial culture when mentioning “Eskimos” who “went from the stone age to the air age without any intermediate steps.”25 “Stone age” in this context implied a primitive stage of development on a societal and technological level analogous to Europe’s prehistory on a developmental timeline. The temporal references of different technological “ages” throughout the course of Eurasian and Mediterranean history provided Euro-Canadians a ready framework for “understanding” the Inuit and Innu peoples by immediately relegating them to a certain static pastness. Crucially, Sinclair affirms that the Inuit were simply “modernizing,” rather than being narrated into a particular story of national expansion. Sinclair adopted Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1831 characterization of North America pioneering communities as “an Ark of Civilisation.” Adding to Tocqueville’s argument, he suggested that even the “humblest settler brought with

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him a book or two, often the Bible.”26 The “civilizing influence” of the Bible would certainly have major repercussions on Indigenous lives, from the evangelizing zeal of the early Jesuit missionaries right up until the scandal of residential schools, yet the image of a wave of civilization flooding the landscape through noble efforts of pioneering settlers was too tempting for Sinclair to consider the human cost of colonization. The first mention of Indigenous peoples comes when he informs the reader that it was the “Indian” who blazed the trails European settlers would subsequently follow. The density of the forest made waterways and areas previously stricken by forest fires the only plausible routes, a transportation network dictated by natural phenomena rather than human ingenuity (he mentions that fires were deliberately set by Indigenous peoples, without any explanation of Indigenous fire management practices).27 Thus, the reader is introduced to Indigenous peoples as mere guides for European colonial expansion rather than as shapers of their own civilization. Within the same white supremacist logic, technological transfer is represented as a one-way street, with Indigenous peoples as recipients of the superior goods Europeans had to offer rather than contributors to the technological development of the new arrivals as they began building their country. For example, early trading between colonists and native Americans involved Indigenous peoples being brought haphazardly into the “world” economy as unwitting providers of new objects of value to Europe such as furs, fish, and minerals (and of course the stories of discovery and colonization themselves), while in exchange Europeans provided “superior technology” to the locals. White European settlers are the only driving force in their national ascendancy. Sinclair described a masculine conquest of nature as “pioneers struggled through the northern forests,” becoming traders, settlers, and eventually connecting settlements to the Canadian state.28 “Interiors waiting to be opened up” and frontier expansion as “fertilizing penetration” were common, gendered settler colonial tropes in the guidebooks. The geographic challenges were overcome with advancing telecommunications and transportation technology, as early pioneering whites laid the groundwork for eventual national and technological development. Conquering the landscape by water, land, and air, Canadian capitalist power stretched across vast distances along railroads, Canada’s first “backbone of steel.”29 The nation’s anatomic configuration began to take shape, a body politic coming to life where settlers had imagined merely abstract space, inorganic emptiness. The railroad was characterized as having resolved “one of the greatest logistic problems in transportation that man has ever faced.”30 This reading of history reinforces national development as a climactic event to which all previous struggles led and from which future successes emanate, rather than an ongoing process subject to reinterpretation.

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Civilization was attained in Turtle Island only as a result of European colonization. Furthermore, as Sinclair explained in reference to one of the introductory displays in the Canadian Pavilion on the production of hydroelectric and nuclear energy, “energy is civilization.”31 In this view, however, civilization could not be attained without the requisite material progress of industrial society. This hierarchy of values at the pavilion was designed to bolster nationalist sentiment as Canadians could remark on their own contributions to civilization while relegating Indigenous peoples and their vital technological contributions to a lower order. The Widening Horizons guidebook connected Canadians to the wider human community through economic, political, and cultural links, dedicating major portions of the Canadian Pavilion “to that part of man which is universal.” In his essay on the Katimavik, François Hébert described it as a symbol for “humanity, its evolution, its achievements.” Canadian contributions to “mankind” were understood to be growing in importance, while the Katimavik represented “the constant expansion of Canada’s horizons” and its “devotion to the tenets of humanism.”32 By linking the Inuit symbolism of the Katimavik to Canada’s nation, culture, people, and universal values, Canadians could envision their “dominion” over lands and peoples stretching up into Inuit territories and over the massive expanse of the Arctic Circle. In his contribution to the same guidebook, the Montreal playwright and journalist Joseph RudelTessier promoted an “interdependence” model as a means of conceptualizing Canada’s national history, obscuring the unequal power relations that formed the basis of the Canadian state and its colonial confiscation of lands. Describing the Canadian Pavilion as the “symbol of a land shaped by many peoples who achieved a modus vivendi a century ago,” for Rudel-Tessier Confederation becomes the embodiment of interdependence, which “no longer appears as a utopian daydream.” Comparing Canadian Confederation to the innumerable failed political constitutions of other countries, he valorizes the successful compromises which have allowed Canada to remain a united country despite many unfulfilled hopes – compromises such as “the reconciliation of two adversaries, the sharing of political power among them, the minority speaking as an equal to the majority,” and, most significantly, “the surrender by peoples of a land as large as the whole of Europe to the doctrine of universal interdependence.”33 For Rudel-Tessier, “interdependence” results from globalized modernity. The Katimavik represented Canada’s tribute to interdependence at Expo 67, “a modest declaration of our fellowship with mankind.”34 He related the progression of civilization to the imperative of interdependence amongst nations, peoples, and individuals. “Is it not because of this very reason,” he

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asked, “that they also dreamed of subjugating other nations in order to share their artistic and scientific legacies?”35 The operative principle of this narrative of progress and conquest is “sharing” according to Rudel-Tessier, for whom the dreams of territorial conquest and control over wealth were based on the very same doctrine of interdependence that the Katimavik embodied, but without taking into account colonialism’s legacy of unequal power relations. Once interdependence and global conquest are intrinsically linked in this way, he is able to remark that we are “not born to destroy” and that we “cannot with a clear conscience continue to wage war, let alone do it with a lightness of heart.” While his post-1945 humanism may seem to counter older imperialistic attitudes glorifying war, global conquest is still being defended in the name of universal values and the supposed good intentions of its ultimately civilizing mission. Standing on l’Île Notre-Dame, an island specifically created for Expo in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River, the pavilion ensemble was imagined by Rudel-Tessier as an “unblemished metropolis” where “there are no spirits crying for revenge, no monuments to the dead, no triumphal arches.”36 The Canadian statist benevolence towards Indigenous peoples informed a peacemaker myth, a quintessential piece of “the settler problem.” This myth became an essential part of the way in which Canadians differentiated themselves from the violent, lawless conquest of American western expansion, sweeping under the rug the often brutal tactics of the North-West Mounted Police, the militarized precursor to the rcmp.37 The steady advancement of post-Confederation territorial acquisition with few military conflicts and occasional territorial disputes is here presented as a peaceful process of “abiding by the rules of interdependence from which [Canadians] derive hope and prosperity.” This harmonious national story is contrasted with violent conflicts that have erupted in other countries, cementing Canadian exceptionalism and indeed making Canada a model nation for the international community to emulate: “Mankind needs such examples if it is to be convinced that peace is attainable and that the forward step towards interdependence can be achieved through conciliation … When the seed of peace has been sown, nurtured and cherished, it flowers into universal brotherhood.” Canada, as a “ray of hope,” will ascend to its rightful place as a leader among nations, since “Canada needs the world, and the world needs Peace.”38 By proposing the universal applicability of interdependence and denying that any unequal relations of power undermine its egalitarian principles, the concept obscured the realities of colonialism in favour of a colonial humanism. Betraying an awareness of unequal power relations, Rudel-Tessier noted that the state “imposed” its laws. Still, he argued for faith in and “through renun-

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ciation of individual rights in favour of collective obedience to the laws of interdependence” to achieve the ultimate humanistic goal: the realization of “One World,” a perfect unity among man, nation, and planet.39 The correlation between Canadian history and a model for “perfect unity” could not have come into being without a determined effort to excise colonial history and enduring colonial practices. Bush proposed that as visitors reached the top of the People Tree, they would feel as though the wind had filled their sails, and be struck by an impression of “greatness and smallness”: great in the sense of the immense territory under Canada’s possession, and small in the sense of its population of 21 million. Canadians “dominate” nature at times with their “prodigious technical facilities,” yet nature “crushes” them with its size; Canada is “a great country and a small people” with a duty to “encourage its growth.” Bush turned to influential Canadian educator and broadcaster Donald Crowdis to romanticize the relationship between Canadian citizens, “held together by the tenuous bonds of nationhood and a common love of liberty.”40 The People Tree’s leaves represented a “type of Canadian” that could not be detached from the branches, as the trunk and roots carry “both our diversity and our unity” to nourish the people and make them part of the same organic whole. The association of tree-climbing with youthfulness added to the metaphoric process of national renewal as Canadians were encouraged to climb to the top. “The Canadian, even if the rigours of his climate force him to be a realist, is in the depths of his heart an idealist. So to the top we go!” The repetition of the “childhood experience” helped Canadians “uncover our young nation.”41 Such reflections were fraught with contradictions. The national project of settler expansion becomes a duty, the domination of nature and submission to the power of that expansion becomes the great national conquest, and Expo 67 is the time and place to reconfigure Canadian national priorities in line with the continuing process of colonial expansion, leaving time for national renewal and rediscovering Canada. The Canadian Pavilion thus reinforced developmentalist assertions by charting Canada’s history as a teleological process destined to culminate in the country becoming one of the great technological nations of the world, from an Edenic though technologically backward Indigenous continent to the potentially “universal” example of a successful nation-state.42 Through the prism of nationalism, the Canadian Pavilion represented Canada’s stepping stone to the wider, global humanistic notions of Expo 67. The pavilion visitors were invited to make a transformative identification with Canada; however, there remained firm barriers to Canadian humanistic principles, exemplified by the rhetorical extirpation and paternalistic treatment of Indigenous peoples in pavilion documents. As Wilder explains

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and the Indians of Canada Pavilion demonstrated, it is imperative that we “work through rather than act out the antinomy between universality and particularity” by “remaining attentive to multiple modes of universality … and the ways existent aspects of universality and particularity might be radically reconfigured in transformative ways by historical actors.”43

“Le choc de l’Expo”: Responding to Indigenous Truth-Telling and Self-Representation When he was asked by the federal government to be the head representative of the Indians of Canada Pavilion, Chief Delisle was not initially given the title of commissioner general on the grounds that it was reserved for heads of national pavilions. It was only after some protest by Delisle and others working on the pavilion that Pearson stepped in and approved his use of the title.44 During the pavilion planning stage, Chief Delisle recalled departmental resistance to the storyline that had been produced, “which was sort of telling the history as it is, not what we hoped it to be … the whole situation our people were in, we were going to tell that story, what’s wrong with residential schools … and economic development.” He approached his position with a degree of skepticism, as he focused on “questioning Canada, because I knew what they were doing to our people.”45 Delisle faced similar pressures to represent Indigenous peoples according to the instructions of Expo officials, yet he understood his position as occupying a liminal space, putting him in a diplomatic no man’s land where he could draw from either culture’s formal protocols. He recalls feeling pressure to wear traditional Mohawk regalia at such events, yet he preferred to project a different image and opted for formal suits to “show that we were that advanced and not what everyone was saying.”46 He also resisted requests to put greater emphasis on Indigenous dances and performances, as he disagreed that those ceremonies were more representative of Indigenous people’s lives than was “all the fighting.”47 When Canadian officials refused to pay for his tuxedo, “I sort of threatened them to pay for it. They bought the cheapest kind anyway.”48 Delisle’s determination to wear a tuxedo instead of Indigenous regalia disrupted Canadian colonial imagery, denying Expo officials the expected performance of a stereotypical “Indian” for the international community. Calculating in his decisions about when to push back against Indian Affairs officials, Chief Delisle rejected the initial plans to have the rcmp provide pavilion security, preferring to hire a Kahnawà:ke peacekeeping force instead. This was despite the fact that Canada and Quebec did not recognize the Kahnawà:ke peacekeepers as a police force. This decision was a point of pride for the com-

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missioner-general.49 Delisle’s early fights for increasing the Indigenous presence and decreasing the settler influence on the pavilion had international reverberations at the world’s fair, as Indigenous people were recognized by the international community in ways that made the Canadian federal and provincial officials uncomfortable. The paternalism that was a hallmark of Canadian colonial policy had been present since the pavilion’s planning stage. In August 1965, Indian Affairs Branch officials decided to take control of the Expo 67 Indians of Canada Pavilion project after the National Indian Council had expressed interest in managing it. As Richard Gordon Kicksee explains in his groundbreaking dissertation on the making of the Indians of Canada Pavilion, the planning process was fraught with contention, as the Indian Affairs Branch had hoped that “a frank explanation” would show Indigenous peoples “that we had no choice” but to take control of the Indians of Canada Pavilion project.50 Delisle, however, worked to leverage his relationship with both Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson and Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau in the face of opposition from different Indian Affairs officials, and tapped into the political network that had grown out of his time on the National Indian Council (nic).51 The tensions between public humanist statements and the realities of colonial policy were encapsulated in the shifting reactions of the minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Arthur Laing, to the Indians of Canada Pavilion. A month before it opened to the public, Laing, his staff, and journalists were given a private tour. In a panicked response to Indigenous anti-colonial messaging, Laing reportedly threatened to ‘“shut the place down.”’52 His angry response, as well as the more sympathetic ones of Michener and Dupuy, were typical of what Kicksee argues were present throughout Indigenous participation in Centennial celebrations: “moments of paternalism, liberal benevolence, and Native nationalism.”53 Indigenous officials fought against any alterations or delays in the pavilion.54 During a subsequent debate at the diand, an official suggested that any negative press the pavilion generated for the government would be met with “a kind of backlash of rationalization in the public’s mind. They will say, ‘Things aren’t that bad, they don’t appreciate what we (as taxpayers) are doing for them.’”55 Laing’s paternalistic, knee-jerk response was smoothed over by the liberal benevolent attitudes of public relations specialists in diand. Despite initial resistance from the minister of Indian Affairs, the Indians of Canada Pavilion was inaugurated on Expo 67’s opening day of 27 April 1967. From the beginning, the pavilion generated interest and controversy due to the Indigenous narratives. The displays resolutely refused to indulge in the fantastical notion of a North America devoid of history, reminding Euro-

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Canadian visitors in its first exhibit area: “You have stolen our native land, our culture, our soul … and yet, our traditions deserved to be appreciated, and those derived from an age-old harmony with nature even merited being adopted by you.”56 The display’s narrative arc of Indigenous history began with the pre-contact period, in which Indigenous people lived on their lands harmoniously. The story took the opportunity to rearticulate the “common sense” of Indigenous ecological spirituality in order to criticize settlers’ and settler society’s developmentalist programs, proclaiming that “Only a fool would … kill trees to make a way in the forest.” The pavilion also told the story of European arrival from Indigenous perspectives – those of “the so-called ‘savages’ whom the Europeans met when they ‘discovered’ North America” – chronicling the decline of Indigenous autonomy in conjunction with colonial expansion.57 In this story, Indigenous people proved resilient. As “the winds of change begin to produce their effects … old wisdom and modern science are two open doors to the future.”58 In a subsequent area, underneath cartoon drawings of Dick and Jane was the explanation that “an Indian child begins school by learning a foreign tongue.” Data was presented on Indigenous residential school enrolment in 1966, showing that it comprised nearly a third of the estimated total First Nations population of 200,000.59 The pavilion’s use of statistics was striking even to Delisle, who recalls: “Our people were aware of it … individual[ly], but they didn’t know that it was that broad [of a] problem.”60 Delisle understood the information to be groundbreaking, not just for white Canadians, who likely had little or no knowledge of the scope of the issue, but even for Indigenous peoples to recognize that their experiences at residential schools were not isolated. Throughout the pavilion, and especially in this last section, Indigenous people presented visitors with the project of genocide being performed in Canadians’ name. This was among the earliest Indigenous critiques of residential schools as a systemic issue affecting all First Nations, a process that would culminate in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s conclusion that the system “disrupted families and communities,” prevented “elders from teaching children long-valued cultural and spiritual traditions and practices,” and “helped kill languages.”61 The pavilions and hostesses confronted stereotypes and challenged assumptions held by Canadians about Indigenous and Canadian history. The ability to do so derived in no small part from the leadership shown by Chief Delisle. In his Place des Nations address on Indians of Canada Day, with Expo 67 at its halfway point, Governor General Michener spoke of “a developing social consciousness in our country towards Canada’s native people,” and insisted that “Canada cannot expect to achieve true greatness while any of its earliest

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people still live in the shadows.”62 As the Crown’s representative in Canada, Michener sought to change the paternalistic model of Canadian colonialism by shifting from a monologue to a “gentle dialogue.” Through increased white Canadian understanding of their social responsibilities towards Indigenous peoples, he hoped to rebuild the Crown-Indigenous relationship on principles of equality, and underlined the need for Canadians to pay attention to and support Indigenous peoples.63 His speech may well have been influenced by his own visit to the pavilion: a member of the governor general’s party mentioned to a Montreal reporter the impact of that visit earlier in the day.64 Michener reaffirmed some of the pavilion’s messages, attributing a lack of independence and serious health problems among Indigenous people to the arrival and presence of white people.65 Dupuy, for his part, remarked on the interruption of Indigenous civilization caused by “contact avec une race et une civilisation différentes” (“contact with a different race and civilization”). He grappled with settler guilt while praising Indigenous peoples, saying “Il est un peut [sic] tard pour s’excuser d’avoir changé le cours de votre évolution historique, mais nous reconnaissons plus que jamais, l’importance de votre contribution et vous remercions” (“It is a little late to apologize for having changed the course of your historical evolution, but we recognize the importance of your contribution more than ever and we thank you”). Dupuy dubbed Indigenous people “les vrais Canadiens d’origine ancienne, les Canadiens par excellence” (“the real Canadians of ancient origin, the ultimate Canadians”).66 The Indians of Canada Day did not represent official government policy so much as a well-orchestrated Canadian government public relations exercise. Michener and Dupuy could empower Indigenous people through their words, masking the realities of colonial policy with public statements of humanism. Chief Delisle recalled how people, including scholars, generally had a positive reaction to the pavilion while also being surprised at the history. Just about everybody enjoyed it, “except the original civil servants there that were in charge of the government, they didn’t want to see that,” he said with a chuckle.67 The multiple ways in which the pavilion’s messages were received and interpreted had as much to do with who was receiving them as it did with the messages themselves. But the majority of Montreal newspaper articles, and particularly those written in French, shed light on a vibrant discussion and awakening of settler society to the historical and contemporary challenges faced by Indigenous peoples. Like Laing, the Reverend Appolinaire Plamondon did not hide his initial distaste for the Indians of Canada Pavilion. The Catholic Oblate missionary left his home near Fort Alexander, Manitoba, to accompany four Indigenous

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4.2 Indians of Canada Day, 4 August 1967. From left to right: Pierre Dupuy, Robert Shaw, Russell Moses.

youth who were slated to perform at Expo in an eleven-person band. Plamondon had started the band “to give the Indian boys something to do to maintain their self-respect.”68 Plamondon outright denied the veracity of the pavilion’s message, claiming it “represents the views of the handful of people who designed it, but not those of the majority of Canadian Indians … Most Indians aren’t so bitter – they’re happy with what is being done for them by the Government and by missionaries.” He took further umbrage at pavilion claims that “war and treaties deprived us of our land,” which he believed “distort the real mood of the Indians … They never wanted the whole country. What would 200,000 Indians have done with all of Canada?” Plamondon’s position as a Catholic missionary with twenty-six years’ experience and a selfappointed speaker for Indigenous peoples nation-wide was as problematic as his assertions were inaccurate. In a letter to the editor of the Montreal Star, Frank Chevalier of Montreal wrote to his community to implore them to visit the “Red Indian Pavilion.” He cited useless expenditures on the war in Vietnam which could instead “be

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put aside to help the Indian regain his dignity and stand on his own feet,” favouring Canadian government divestment from military industries relating to the US imperial war effort. Chevalier advocated for schools to be established “by Indians for Indians.” He also criticized assimilationism, and invited Canadians to “make [a new start] in 1967.”69 Chevalier’s views were well enough received to prompt a response from Jeffrey Gabriel, a Haudenosaunee reader who thanked Chevalier for his uplifting words. He wrote in the Star that “it is not often that we have a White Man speaking up for the Indians, most of them are either unaware of the Indian situation in Canada today, or are too ashamed to admit knowledge of it.” Gabriel expressed hope for more encouragement “from our White Brothers … We are Indians, and cannot be changed to be something else.”70 Gabriel’s expressions were similar to the pavilion’s overall message of fighting for recognition and increased autonomy against colonial assimilationist policies. Chevalier and Gabriel demonstrated the alliances the pavilion made possible through fostering positive exchanges among a Haudenosaunee reader and a white settler. Journalist André Luchaire of La Presse was profoundly moved by the Indians of Canada Pavilion. Luchaire called the pavilion “le choc de l’Expo,” marking it as one that stood out among many fascinating sites at the world exhibition.71 Luchaire recognized the plight of Indigenous peoples who suffered under “un processus historique d’extinction plus ou moins délibéré d’une culture humaine, langue, traditions, philosophie de la vie, et même d’un groupement humain méritant mieux que le destin amer que les Blancs leur ont infligé” (“a historical process of more or less deliberate extinction of a human culture, language, traditions, philosophy of life, and even a human group deserving more than the bitter destiny that the whites inflicted on them”).72 Luchaire even went so far as to relate the federal government’s ongoing colonial practices to the history of colonization of Indigenous peoples as the government “semble avoir hérité [le paternalisme] comme partie intégrante de la succession française lors du Traité de Paris” (“seems to have inherited [paternalism] as part and parcel of the French legacy ceded by the Treaty of Paris”). His avid criticism of Canadians and the Canadian federal government regarding the Indians of Canada Pavilion differentiated him from his peers. Luchaire believed that Indigenous organization on a national scale would be the result of so many Indigenous participants and messages present at the Indians of Canada Pavilion. Yet most striking was his conclusion that “Les Blancs” had left it up to Indigenous people to resolve the ignorance that white people had of their history, and it would soon be time for white people to democratically solve the future problems of Indigenous peoples.73 Luchaire’s profound interest

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in the Indians of Canada Pavilion shaped his desire to contribute to solutions based on consultation with Indigenous peoples. He further credited Indigenous peoples for educating whites about their own historical roles in the history and legacy of colonization. Of all the foreign dignitaries to visit the Indians of Canada Pavilion, none stood out more than Queen Elizabeth II. Perhaps it was mere coincidence, but there were plumbing issues at the pavilion on 3 July, the day she arrived. Chief Delisle recalled that the queen began her visit in good spirits, but about halfway through, “as we went along, I could tell her face [was] frowning.” She eventually voiced her displeasure by exclaiming that Indigenous people were not the only people with problems. To this, the commissioner general recalled replying, “Your Majesty, we want to do something about it,” emphasizing the pavilion’s messages as one aspect of a larger anti-colonial strategy.74 Delisle did not feel as though he was the queen’s subject, nor did he believe that the queen was the one who would solve Indigenous problems. Indigenous people would have to rely on themselves. As he recalled, “I didn’t see it at that time, it was an awakening to the general public of … the Indian people, I think it was the first movement that Indigenous people started saying ‘hey it’s true, we’ve got to do something about these things.’” To Delisle, it was clear that the messages of the Indians of Canada Pavilion resonated enough to shake monarchs and activate Indigenous advocates. The pavilion was an ideal site for Indigenous representatives to show solidarity, or, in some cases, expose cleavages in Indigenous unity. On 18 May 1967, the Mohawk activist Kahn-Tineta Horn arrived nearly unannounced at the Indians of Canada Pavilion accompanied by John Belindo, the director of the largest North American Indigenous organization, the National Congress of American Indians. During the pavilion’s development phase, Delisle and Horn had been involved in a dispute related to the Expo project and other Mohawk political issues. He felt that Horn had invited Belindo up to Kahnawà:ke and Montreal to tour the pavilion with her to strengthen her position as a wellconnected Indigenous advocate, and their ongoing conflict clouded the visit. Belindo, however, remained blissfully unaware of the internal Kahnawà:ke power struggle as Delisle gave him a tour of the pavilion.75 Belindo was impressed, though he remarked that “Canadian Indians may be 50 to 75 years behind us in our relations with the Federal Government.”76 At the end of the tour, Delisle shook Belindo’s hand, but did not offer the same gesture to Horn. The event demonstrated the tension amongst the Mohawks even as they took pride in displaying Indigenous narratives. Belindo’s presence brought Indigenous advocates into contact with a wider continental network of Indigenous peoples resisting colonialism through national organizations.

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After performing at Place-des-Arts, the singer-songwriter Buffy SainteMarie, one of the most prolific and successful North American Indigenous artists and advocates, came to Expo 67 to visit and perform at the Indians of Canada Pavilion.77 She expressed joy that the pavilion was unsettling its visitors, calling it more of a school than a performance.78 In fact, Sainte-Marie wished the pavilion had gone further in expressing its anti-colonial message, and been “more forcible” and shocking to white visitors.79 Finding within the pavilion the opportunity for introspection, she further explained that she was part of the new generation of Indigenous peoples who were actually partial to shocking white people.80 Sainte-Marie recognized the pavilion’s importance not just as a tool of public education but as a discussion of Indigenous identity and worried that “too many of our people think we have to beg when all they have to do is demand what is rightfully theirs.”81 She advocated burning existing history books and replacing them with ones that included Indigenous perspectives.82

Our Two Masks: Colonial Humanism What sets Canada apart as a white settler colony is, according to Mackey, its “official national culture which is not ‘homogeneous in its whiteness’ but rather replete with images of Aboriginal people and people of colour,” resting on notions of cultural difference as inherent definitional aspects of the nation emanating from state policy as “a flexible strategy developed to manage diverse populations.”83 In essence, promoters of Canadian colonial humanism at Expo 67 articulated a Canadian whiteness that totalized the Canadian population into elites’ vision of the nation, projecting their hegemonic reach into the subjectivities of a multiethnic population. The ambitious cultural policy’s success depended heavily on turning a blind eye to much of Canada’s Indigenous policy. A simplified narrative of Indigenous peoples in Canada’s history coupled with the presence of Indigenous artifacts was all that remained available at the Canadian Pavilion, in contrast with the complex anti-colonial narrative at the Indians of Canada Pavilion. In 1969 Chief Andrew Tanahokate Delisle became the first Indigenous person to be awarded the Order of Canada. He noted that only a year later he was receiving mail from university students, professors, and other Canadians who “wanted to know how they could help the Indians’ cause.” Diversity and commonalities among Indigenous groups became more apparent due to the shared experience of colonialism at the hands of successive Euro-American governments. Yet Chief Delisle understood the limits to public pedagogy: “I know we got the ordinary public but I don’t think we made much of an impression on

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the politicians.”84 Indigenous people also began to understand themselves in relation to each other, as different Indigenous groups came together to work on the pavilion and learned about their common experience.85 The anti-colonial messaging of the Indians of Canada Pavilion both directly responded to and undermined the colonial developmentalist frameworks apparent in the Canadian Pavilion. Indigenous participation at Expo 67 challenged public and governmental perceptions of Indigenous peoples in Canada on a global stage. In doing so, Indigenous peoples resisted Canadian colonial compulsions and renegotiated the terms for which they would participate in the Centennial celebrations. The resulting Indigenous-led discussions elevated Indigenous issues to a prominent national spotlight in the Canadian media by undermining simplistic notions of Indigenous reliance on the Canadian state. Even under the enormous institutional weight of racist policies, residential schools, territorial dispossession, and the banning of spiritual practices, Indigenous peoples fought for a space to promote their resistance to the network of institutions that sought to repress their bodies, minds, and spirits. They reclaimed their representation and narratives in front of the widest public in Canadian history. The messages in the pavilion were more than just a testament to their anti-colonial resistance; they were a veritable sign of an impending cultural, social, political, and spiritual revitalization that by 1967 was showing clear signs of acceleration. While narratives of Indigenous peoples were also present at the Canadian Pavilion, it was at the Indians of Canada Pavilion that their messages were most clearly articulated to a total audience of 3 million visitors.86 Though the impact of the pavilion on Indigenous people was substantial, the Expo’s official memorial album described the pavilion as “akin to running the gauntlet” for the “paleface” visitors.87 The Expo album solidified the legacy of settler discomfort in the face of backlash from Canadian colonial policies. Few incidents exemplify settler discomfort more than the moment Barbara Wilson, an Indians of Canada Pavilion hostess, intervened when an “American man [began] hollering at this young [American First Nations] woman, he was just wailing at her verbally … people had so much anger.”88 The official Expo 67 guidebook emphasized “the problems with which [Indigenous people] are faced by involvement in a modern technological society,” as well as “their will to preserve the traditional moral and spiritual values of their forefathers.”89 The guidebook’s narrative described the pavilion’s message more in line with colonial notions of developmentalism, where access to technology was seen as a greater barrier to development than the violence of colonialism. The narrative of a Canada based on universal values did not match the realities of Canadian cultural policies. Visitors to the Canadian Pavilion were

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told that “we link our human communities, our regional groups, our industrial enterprises, our cultural and religious associations which help establish ties among us in endeavouring to respect our differences.”90 However, the same set of policies that integrated Indigenous artifacts at the Canadian Pavilion to celebrate Indigenous peoples in the abstract was used to integrate living Indigenous children through “aggressive assimilation” at state-created, churchrun residential schools, facts not lost on the Indigenous designers of the Indians of Canada Pavilion. At the same time that the Canadian state was promoting colonial humanism through the incorporation of Indigenous cultural artifacts and symbols at an international exhibition celebrating Canada’s Centennial, it was effectively pursuing a policy of genocide against Indigenous communities by kidnapping Indigenous children and channelling them into the residential school system or into adoptive white families. To exude characteristics of humanism within a colonial nation-state framework is not to erase the colonial ambitions of continued territorial consolidation, but to combine the two into a colonial humanism that, while certainly not unique to Canada, acquired a particular Canadian form at Expo 6791 – an unsettling overlap of the humanist and the colonial masks, to say the least.92 Today’s Canadian colonial humanist mask is deeply embedded in the mythologies surrounding multicultural policy. As Glen Coulthard points out, in Canada “colonial relations of power are no longer reproduced primarily through overtly coercive means, but rather through the asymmetrical exchange of mediated forms of state recognition and accommodation.”93 Our two masks are given new life when the sunny promises of reconciliation come without fundamental changes to Canada’s colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples. They are interchangeable when settler society continues its colonial advancement, as either one is donned in order to carve a path of least resistance towards colonial goals. The average visitor who remembers their visit to Expo 67 may not have any memory of witnessing its colonial overtones. This chapter cannot replace their memories, but it does recontextualize them within the history and ongoing realities of Canadian colonialism. The unity Canadians have imagined has always contained fractures, if not veritable fissures, and no amount of ignoring the fissures will negate their existence. If Canadians could take off their humanist mask and examine it more closely with the help of Indigenous peoples’ perspectives, histories, stories, and guidance, perhaps they would be just as shocked at the colonial impulsions behind the humanist mask as were many visitors to the Indians of Canada Pavilion in 1967. Patrick Wolfe characterizes settler colonization as “at base a winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement.” The implementation of this project, “a sustained institutional tendency to elim-

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inate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct – invasion is a structure not an event.”94 Thus, Expo 67 was a continuation of the structure of European settler colonial invasion. As expressions of humanism were being made in the Canadian Pavilion guidebooks, they were a result of a structured invasion that privileged white nationalism codified as universality as the apex of Canada’s evolution. My deconstruction of the identitarian, territorial, and developmentalist suppositions in the Canadian Pavilion guidebooks has tried to expose the overtones prevalent in white discourses of domination over the North American population and landscape, the hallmark of Canadian colonial humanism at Expo 67. “Do you think the Indians of Canada Pavilion was radical? Would you use that term?” I asked former commissioner general of the Indians of Canada Pavilion Andrew Tanahokate Delisle in a conversation in which he brought Expo to life through his memories. The late Kanien’kehá elder considered his response with nearly five decades of hindsight. “No, I don’t think so,” he replied. “Well, you gotta ask other people that. I thought it was something that was necessary and it was informative and it was something that needed to be said. If other people say it’s radical, that’s the problem that we have. People think that history is radical.”95

notes 1 Romney Copeman, “Interview with Andrew Tanahokate Delisle,” transcript of an oral history interview conducted on 8 December 2016, 1:27:00, https:// papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/20145. 2 The Place des Nations held national days to celebrate each participating country at Expo. There were also days dedicated to Canadian provincial and Expo thematic pavilions, including the Christian Unity and International Women’s Day events. 3 Copeman, “Interview,” 35:30. 4 John Gray, “Rain Was Bitter Blow,” The Montreal Star, 5 August 1967. Among the peoples represented were Mohawk, Blackfoot, Kwakwka’wakw, Micmac, Dene, Innu, Squamish, Ojibway, and Haida; “Nine Expo Bosses Honored with Titles, Headdresses,” Montreal Gazette, 5 August 1967. For more on adoption ceremonies as anti-colonial resistance, see Jonathan Clapperton, “Naturalizing Race Relations: Conservation, Colonialism, and Spectacle at the Banff Indian Days,” Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 3 (2013): 349–79. 5 Jane Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians: The Indians of Canada Pavilion and Public Pedagogy, Expo 67,” Journal of Canadian Studies 49, no. 2 (spring 2015): 187.

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6 Robin Bush, “My Home, My Native Land,” in My Home, My Native Land: A People and Their Growth, eds. Robin Bush and Norbert Lacoste (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1967), 7–9. 7 According to Michael Latham, developmentalists sought to “accelerate the passage of traditional societies through a necessary yet destabilizing process in which older values, ideas, and structures gave way to the liberal, capitalist, and democratic ways of life”; The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 3–4. 8 Speakers included Stormont Mancroft, Carl J. Friedrich, Raymond Aron, and Aurelio Peccei. The speakers series also welcomed a small number of radical critiques of developmentalism by theorists like Karl Gunnar Myrdal, Kushwant Singh, and Gabriel d’Arboussier. For a more in-depth analysis, see Romney Copeman, “Unsettling Expo 67: Developmentalism and Colonial Humanism at Montreal’s World Exhibition” (ma thesis, Université de Montréal, 2018), 86–114. 9 Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan, “Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir,” Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 5. For the origin of the term, see Craig Moyes’s chapter in this volume, 64n42. 10 On the subject of underdevelopment, see Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 50. 11 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Négritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 4, 8. 12 Barnor Hesse, “It’s Your World: Discrepant M/Multiculturalisms,” Social Identities 3, no. 3 (1997): 87. 13 Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (London: Routledge, 1999), i. 14 Truth and Reconcilation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, (Manitoba: trc, 2015), 1; National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, A Legal Analysis of Genocide (mmiwg, 2019). 15 Bush, My Home, My Native Land, 3. 16 David Millar, Aki’name: On the Wall (National Film Board, 1968). The term “hudlunan” is described by the narrator as the term for white people, yet it does not match the currently used term “qallunaat.” 17 See Leanne Pupchek, “True North: Inuit Art and Canadian Nationalist Imaginings,” American Review of Canadian Studies (spring/summer 2001): 193, 197, and 205.

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18 Pupchek, “True North,” 204. Germaine Bernier, “Rêverie polaire sur L’Expo montréalaise,” Le Devoir, 17 May 1965, reports on a Japanese cultural ambassador to Canada who explicitly requested from Lester Pearson a visit with Inuit people. For more on this topic, see Mandeep Roshi Chadha, “Inuit Art as Cultural Diplomacy between Canada and India” (ma thesis, Concordia University, 2014). 19 W.T. Larmour, The Art of the Canadian Eskimo (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer[?], 1967), 16. 20 Millar, Aki’name, 18:30. 21 Sherry Brydon, “The Representation of Inuit Art at Expo 67,” American Indian Art Magazine 37, no. 2 (2012): 36. 22 Bush, My Home, My Native Land; François Hébert, “Katimavik,” and Joseph Rudel-Tessier, “Interdependence,” in Widening Horizons: Katimavik and Interdependence, eds. François Hébert and Joseph Rudel-Tessier (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1967), 15–28; Lister Sinclair, Change Comes to Canada: A Personal Glance (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1967). 23 Bush, My Home, My Native Land, 26. 24 Norbert Lacoste, “The People Tree,” in Bush and Lacoste, My Home, My Native Land, 21. 25 Sinclair, Change Comes to Canada, 22. 26 Ibid., 26–7, 29. 27 Ibid., 13. 28 Ibid., 14. 29 Ibid., 15. 30 Ibid., 25. 31 Ibid., 20. 32 François Hébert, “Katimavik,” 3. 33 Rudel-Tessier, “Interdependence,” 15–17. 34 Ibid., 27–8. 35 Ibid., 15–16. 36 Ibid., 15. 37 See, for numerous examples, James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013). 38 Rudel-Tessier, “Interdependence,” 17–18. 39 Ibid., 21, 23. 40 Bush, My Home, My Native Land, 20, 5. 41 Ibid., 19–20. 42 Sinclair, Change Comes to Canada, 25. 43 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 20. 44 Copeman, “Interview,” 32:05.

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45 Ibid., 16:15, 25:00. 46 Ibid., 27:55. 47 Ibid., 19:15. The contemporary issues Chief Delisle worked on were related to hunting and fishing rights, as well as pay equity for Indigenous miners. 48 Ibid., 31:10. 49 Ibid., 54:50, 1:02:15. 50 “Memorandum to the Deputy Minister Re: Indian Affairs Branch Participation in Canadian World Exhibition of 1967,” Robert Battle, Assitant Deputy Minister, (Indian Affairs), to C.M. Isbister, Deputy Minister; August 16, 1965, DIA, 1211600/43-15; cited in Richard Gordon Kicksee, “Scaled Down to Size: Contested Liberal Commonsense and the Negotiation of Indian Participation in the Centennial Celebrations and Expo ’67” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1995), 161. 51 Copeman, “Interview,” 4:15, 16:25. See also: Assembly of First Nations, “A Discussion Paper: Leading to an Appropriate Structure for the Assembly of First Nations,” December 2002, revised March 2003, 12; http://www.afn.ca/uploads/ files/confederacy/2002_-_leading_to_an_approp_structure_for_afn.pdf. For a discussion about the degree of Indigenous control over the messaging, see George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Don Mills: Collier-Macmillan Canada, 1974), 171–4. 52 See Peter McFarlane, Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1993), 90; cited in Kicksee, “Scaled Down to Size,” 184. 53 Kicksee, “Scaled Down to Size,” 8. 54 Ibid., 184. 55 “Letter from D.A. William Fox to Wilfred Churchman,” April 13, 1967, cited in Kicksee, “Scaled Down to Size,” 185. 56 Expo Bureau of International Exhibits, 118. 57 The Indians of Canada Pavilion Expo 67 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1967[?]), 6. 58 Expo Bureau of International Exhibits, 121. 59 Régnier, Indian Memento (National Film Board, 1967), 13:55–14:00; H.B. Hawthorn, ed., A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada: Economic, Political, Educational Needs and Policies, vol. 2 (Ottawa: Queens Printer, 1967), 23. 60 Copeman, “Interview,” 1:19:40–1:20:00. Delisle himself was quite surprised by the figure when presented with it, remarking that “I wasn’t too familiar with that. It seems like a lot.” 61 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, They Came for the Children: Canada, Aboriginal Peoples, and Residential Schools (Manitoba: trc, 2012), 1. 62 Sandra Dolan, “Indians Make a Point on Their Day,” Montreal Gazette, 5 August 1967.

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63 “Le gouverneur général invite les Indiens à un ‘dialogue amical,’” La Presse, 5 August 1967; “Le chef Delisle: les Indiens entendent demeurer Canadiens,” Le Devoir, 6 August 1967. 64 According to the official, “I am not proud when I come in here,” a sentiment that a Montreal reporter said was “echoed time and time again by white Canadians visiting the beautifully designed pavilion.” Dolan, “Indians Make A Point on Their Day.” 65 “Le gouverneur général invite les Indiens.”’ 66 Ibid. 67 Copeman, “Interview,” 1:32:00; 1:10:00. 68 George Radwanski, “Pavilion Misrepresents Outlook of Most Indians Says Missionary,” Montreal Gazette, 11 July 1967. Frank Chevalier, “Letters to the Editor: Pavilion of North American Indians Proclaims True and Touching Message,” The Montreal Star, 20 May 1967. 70 Jeffrey Gabriel, “The Message of the Canadian Indian Pavilion,” Montreal Gazette, 5 June 1967. 71 André Luchaire, “Le Pavillon des Indiens, le choc de l’Expo,” La Presse, 26 June 1967. 72 André Luchaire, “Les Indiens du Canada: race qui cherche sa voix,” La Presse, 3 August 1967. 73 Luchaire, “Le Pavillon des Indiens, le choc de l’Expo.” 74 Copeman, “Interview,” 30:00, 42:30. 75 Wouter De Wet, “Chief versus Princess: Feud Erupts over Indian Pavilion,” Montreal Star, 19 May 1967. 76 “Pavilion Praised,” Montreal Star, 19 May 1967, 47; cited in Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations Participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17, no. 2 (2006): 166. 77 Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country,’” 166; and Expo Bureau of International Exhibits, 121. 78 Gilles Racine, “Le pavillon des Indiens est une école non un spectacle – (Buffy Sainte-Marie),” La Presse, 13 June 1967. 79 Helen Rochester, “‘Head Is White, Heart Is Cree’ Singer Seeks Sure Self,” Montreal Star, 13 June 1967, 9; cited in Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country,’”166. 80 Racine, “Le pavillon des Indiens.” 81 Rochester, 9, cited in Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country,’” 166. 82 Racine, “Le pavillon des Indiens.” 83 Mackey, The House of Difference, 3, 8, 13. 84 “Rush Is On to Open 15 Pavilions,” Montreal Gazette, 23 May 1968. 85 Copeman, “Interview,” 1:26:00. 86 Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country,’” 165.

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87 Expo Bureau of International Exhibits, 118. 88 Polly Leger and Gordon Katic, The Pavilion. Podcast audio, season 1, episode 3, April 2020, 39:45. 89 Charles C. Milne, ed., Expo 67 Guide officiel / Official Guide (Toronto: MacleanHunter, 1967), 183. 90 Bush, My Home, My Native Land, 21. 91 See Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State. 92 The formulation of “our two masks” draws from Carl Jung’s mask theory, which was later used by Frantz Fanon in his seminal work Black Skin, White Masks to examine colonialism’s effects on black and white psychology, while Glen Coulthard changes lenses to examine the colonial relation to Indigenous people. I draw from mask theory to focus on “national” and white subjectivities, and benefitting from the decolonial and anti-racist approaches of Coulthard and Fanon. 93 Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: The Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 15. 94 Patrick Wolfe, Settler-Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 163. Emphasis added. 95 Copeman, “Interview,” 1:20:25.

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5 The First Postcolonial World Exhibition: Revolutionary Cuba and the Black Atlantic at Expo 67

steven palmer Never before has Cuba participated in an exhibition of this kind. What was sought, nevertheless, was for the Cuban presence to get its message across, radiating its revolutionary power as the standardbearer of the Third World. – Bohemia, 3 November 19671

Until Expo 67, the world had never really been at a world’s fair. One way that prior fairs in Europe and the United States became “Universal Exhibitions” was by presenting colonized peoples to fairgoers in the flesh, in notorious “living exhibits” of “native life” – a format popular with the public that was still being used at the Brussels World Exhibition of 1958.2 Subordinated objects of exotic, ethnographic fascination, they were made to represent superseded human racial and social groups destined for elimination or assimilation according to an evolutionary narrative of universal civilization whose highest forms were the white race and Western states and lifeways.3 Expo 67 was the first world exhibition to take place after the dramatic wave of independence claimed by colonized peoples throughout Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean that began with India and Pakistan in 1947 and picked up pace through the 1950s and ’60s. As a result, Montreal 1967 marked a fundamental, postcolonial shift in the nature of world exhibitions, its organizers and participants for the first time seeking to realize the promise implicit in the official term, Exposition universelle et internationale: a forum in which all the peoples of the world could represent themselves, on their own terms as sovereign nation-states, to one another. It is in this sense that Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan describe the Montreal World Expo as “a promotional opportunity for an emergent postcolonial consciousness.”4 This chapter develops three propositions about the postcolonial character of Expo 67, and the way that opportunity was taken advantage of. One is that Expo 67 was indeed an important site of postcolonial engagement for new

states who represented not only their own nations but a new radical internationalism demanding a redistribution of global power in favour of what was known at the time as the Third World, or the developing world (and which still closely corresponds in make-up to what is currently called the Global South).5 They used the world exhibition stage to underline the modernity of their peoples and their intention to participate in the world on an equal standing. To do so involved broaching one of the core dilemmas of postcolonial artistic and intellectual life, itself key to state policy: how to present national cultures that could transcend the exoticism and folk nativism that were products of the colonial imaginary, and successfully engage a discourse of world civilization whose terms had been set in the West. Moreover, this would have to be done in a way that still met the expectations of a Western audience and sold products – key objectives in terms both of expanding trade and participating in an emerging mass tourism marketplace. From Senegalese leader Léopold Sédar Senghor’s brand of Négritude, magnificently present in the paintings and tapestries of Papa Ibra Tall, to the embodied Black politics of Rex Nettleford’s National Ballet Theatre of Jamaica, to the many interventions of luminaries from India’s vibrant cultural scene redeploying the fruits of their ancient civilizations, the chapter identifies key moments in the push toward a decolonized universal culture at Expo 67. My second proposition is that some states made their presence at Expo an argument for greater equity and justice for all races and peoples of the world. Unquestionably, the most sustained, sophisticated, and revolutionary of these was Cuba. The chapter offers a detailed exploration of the Castro regime’s remarkable participation at the Montreal World Exhibition by supplementing a variety of official Expo sources with reportage from the island’s two main sources of print journalism (the magazine Bohemia and the daily newspaper Granma). Cuba made its presence in Montreal a veritable socialist revolutionary beachhead on North American shores, and Expo 67 a battleground in the war against Western imperialist hegemony being fought under the banner of Tricontinentalism. The Cuban Pavilion and its delegation did not simply wage this battle with agitprop; they did so through a creative engagement in the conversations and experiments about architecture, popular housing, media representation, and immersive experience that were at the heart of Expo 67’s inquiry into the question of international and universal culture. I also show how the Cuban Revolution’s investment in Expo was an extension of an existing project to use Canada as a surrogate for the resources and representation they could no longer access in the US. This leads to the chapter’s final proposition, which is that the Caribbean participation at Expo 67 shows the importance of considering the agency of people and states from the Global South in shaping Canadian history, as well Revolutionary Cuba and the Black Atlantic at Expo 67

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as the particular ways they enlisted Canada and the unique spaces of operation that the country afforded them to advance their own postcolonial agendas. Sean Mills has called for historians to pay more attention to “Canada’s complex engagements with the Global South” and with Third World decolonization, especially in the Caribbean where Canada has long been influential.6 His review of recent work in the field – unusually strong in considering anglophone Canadian and Québécois research on the topic (which, he laments, are largely ignorant of one another) – shows that the focus has been almost exclusively on Canadian individuals, institutions, corporations, and state actors operating abroad in colonial and underdeveloped polities. Other than in an immigrant role, however, Canadian historians have been unable to imagine Caribbean actors operating in – and on – Canada as part of their own decolonizing and postcolonial projects. One exception is David Austin’s study of the 1968 Black Writers’ Conference in Montreal and the occupation of Sir George Williams University the following year by Caribbean students protesting against institutional racism. Austin points out that they “occurred in the aftermath of Expo 67 … [where] pavilions at the fair displayed Caribbean art and culture at a time when Canada’s Caribbean population was growing significantly,” and that this West Indian “support of the region’s participation in the fair … also played a part in the heightened sense of Caribbean and Black consciousness in the city.”7 Picking up on this, the chapter catalogues the way that a large number of Black artists from many parts of the decolonizing world, and especially the Caribbean, turned the world exhibition into a grand overture for the new Black activism that made Montreal a centre of radical thinking on race and postcolonialism in the late 1960s.8

A Postcolonial World’s Fair The postcolonial character of Expo 67 comes sharply into focus when compared to Brussels 58. The Belgian World Exhibition, considered a great success, was defined by the Cold War nuclear standoff between the US and the Soviet Union (its iconic feature was the Atomium, a monumental tower in the form of the atomic particle), and by the rebirth of Western European liberaldemocratic capitalism as a subordinate partner in US global hegemony (coming a year after the Treaty of Rome, pavilions of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation and the Council of Europe had great visibility).9 Half of participating nation-states (twenty-one of forty-three) were from Western and Eastern Europe, and the non-European ones included US client states like Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, or Iran whose postwar democratic flowering had been destroyed in 1953 by a joint British and US covert operation

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in favour of a Western-compliant military regime under the restored shah. The Philippines was the only new independent state present, but it was widely known to be still under the thumb of its former colonial ruler, the US.10 The only countries at Brussels offering anything resembling a promising future for autonomous postcolonial development were Brazil, experiencing a democratic period of rapid capitalist growth and modernist innovation under Juscelino Kubitschek (including the building of a new capital at Brasilia); Egypt, basking in the glow of Nasser’s defeat of British and French neocolonial intervention following the nationalization of the Suez Canal; and Tito’s Yugoslavia, which seemed to have consolidated a Communist course in Eastern Europe relatively free of Soviet domination. Brussels 58, then, was about the reformulation of Euro-US world domination in neocolonial guise under the tutelage of both superpowers, one still sanctioning the formal segregation of Afro-Americans.11 Japan had been tamed, and though China had become a problem, the lessons of Iran and Guatemala on the one hand and Hungary on the other seemed clear: the new covert operations and counterinsurgency technology of the Americans and the old tank and party discipline of the Soviets were invincible, and in any case irresistible due to the urgent logic of the Cold War. Over the next decade, the Algerian, Cuban, and Vietnamese revolutions, African independence, the anti-apartheid struggle, the Sino-Soviet split, and the emergence of the Non-Aligned group of countries (later, Non-Aligned Movement) and the Group of 77 (G77) would pose strong challenges to this rigidly binary Cold War and Euro-American neocolonial model, allowing Montreal 1967 the opportunity to become the first world exhibition of the postcolonial era. In basic geopolitical terms, quite a lot of the world was represented at Expo 67. All told, 60, or about half, of the United Nations’ then 123 member states participated; they had a combined population of 1.8 billion (just over half of the world’s 1967 population of 3.5 billion) and were from almost all continents and regions.12 Both Cold War superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were there in full regalia, as were all the former great powers who had once ruled over vast colonial possessions: Great Britain, France, Japan, and Germany (though only its West German rump). Yet less than a third of participating states were European (eighteen of sixty). The new postcolonial nationstates of South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean accounted for twenty-seven of the fifty-seven pavilions (48 per cent); if we add to this the representatives from Latin America and countries like Thailand, Ethiopia, and Tunisia whose experience of nation-statehood pre-dated the postcolonial wave but that were understood at the time as being part of the Third World or the developing world, they made up a clear majority of countries at Expo (thirty-seven of sixty-two, or 60 per cent).13

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This “Third World” had not only a numerical but also a collective political presence in that such countries were in the process of forging new multilateral power blocs in an attempt to escape Euro-US efforts to subsume their independence and weaken their trading options by forcing them into Cold War subordination to one camp or the other. India, a founding member of the NonAligned group, used Expo 67 to pronounce itself an emerging world power well on the road to achieving an alternative form of industrial modernity on its twentieth anniversary of independence. The country’s participation in the world exhibition included a visit by the Indian navy frigate the Brahmaputra showing off India’s emerging military ambition, and a pavilion exhibit on the Trombay reactor and Canada-India collaboration in atomic technology transfer to the soon-to-be-nuclear power.14 The influential Indian nationalist business tycoon Shantanu Kirloskar gave a talk on democracy and economic planning in the prestigious Maclean-Hunter lecture series, and on International Women’s Day, Vijaya Pandit, India’s first woman Cabinet minister, former president of the un General Assembly, and sister of the late prime minister Nehru, spoke to an assembly of national and international women’s groups at the Dupont-Noranda Auditorium.15 Participating for the first time in an international exhibition since achieving independence from France in 1962 following a brutal conflict, Algeria was not shy about announcing that the recently founded G77 would hold its first meeting in Algiers later that year.16 In his official remarks in the Place des Nations, Nourredine Delleci, long-standing member of the revolutionary high command and post-independence cabinets, reminded his audience that the “next conference of developing countries would take place in Algerian territory,” and that “Expo will have attained its real objectives if it incites a more just sharing of wealth among peoples.”17 In January 1966, Cuba had hosted the first Tricontinental Conference, an even more radical organization of eighty-three postcolonial states and national liberation movements from around the world, that inveighed against US and European imperialism and advocated for independence for African nations, the Civil Rights movement, the overthrow of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and Vietnam’s war of national liberation. As we will see, the country’s participation at Expo was framed very much in these terms.18 Important parts of the postcolonial world had no representation at Expo, of course, most significantly the People’s Republic of China (prc – Communist China).19 The other disappointment to organizers was the relative absence of Latin America, where many countries were in the throes of dismal rightwing military dictatorships disdainful of multilateralism and cosmopolitan humanism. Nevertheless, of the three Latin American participants, Mexico

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and Cuba were standard-bearers of twentieth-century social revolution and struggle against US imperialism, and foregrounded the Indigenous, mestizo, and Afro-descended peoples of the region in their Expo presentations.20 Cuba was withstanding the withering force of US counter-revolution and, despite clear dependence on Soviet economic and military assistance, had great credibility in the postcolonial world for deploying military and medical brigades to support independence struggles in Africa, assisting guerrilla insurgencies against US-backed governments, adopting a bold experimental program to industrialize and diversify an economy hitherto dependent on mono-crop sugar production, and making great strides in improving the education and welfare of its working people.21 As for Mexico, by the mid-1960s its political radicalism had been contained by capitalist forces highly dependent on the US, though it did try to act as a progressive counter-force to the US in continental diplomacy and emerging Non-Aligned/G77 multilateralism. The governing Party of the Institutionalized Revolution still associated itself with the great social upheaval of the Mexican Revolution and its radical nationalist 1917 constitution, something reflected in the work of the great Mexican muralists on display at its Expo pavilion, and Mexico City was on the verge of hosting the first Olympic Games ever held outside Europe, North America, or Japan.22 Twenty African states had pavilions in Montreal, seventeen that had won independence over the previous decade, including flagships of the continent’s anti-colonial struggles: along with Algeria, there was Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, and Kenya.23 Six African heads of state attended Expo 67, preeminent among them the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, who arrived within days of the exhibition’s inauguration and charmed the media with a serene regal eccentricity and a retinue that included two lion cubs, which he left as a gift to the City of Montreal. He was followed by Ahmadou Ahidjo of Cameroon, Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast, Joseph Arthur Ankrah of Ghana, Hamani Diori of Niger, and Grégoire Kayibanda of Rwanda. All had been central participants in their countries’ struggles for independence and were in the process of consolidating their power as formidable heads of state. Most were from former French colonies, and Quebec’s new foreign policy wing made a special effort to use the occasion to explain the Québécois national project, counter any notion that their Expo hosts were cut from the same cloth as the former colonial power, France, and establish a role for Quebec in the postcolonial global politics of la francophonie.24 As well as the official remarks by African statesmen at their respective national day ceremony in the Place des Nations, there were opportunities to conduct diplomatic business with the city of Montreal, as well as a separate state visit to Ottawa. Houphouët-Boigny gave one of the prestigious Noranda Lectures on the problems of African unity.25

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Were the participants from postcolonial states playing to a world public? The Expo PR machine hyped the idea that “the world” was coming to Montreal for Expo, but almost all its 52 million visitors were middle- or upper-middleclass white people from Quebec (and especially Montreal), Ontario, and the northeastern United States (see appendix). The half-million visitors to Expo 67 from outside North America, though a large figure in absolute terms, were largely from among the Western European upper-middle class and elites.26 Those who came from outside North America and Western Europe (and perhaps to some extent Japan and Mexico) would have been from a narrow elite indeed. Nevertheless, though few in number, this was a group who were playing a particularly influential role in establishing the infrastructure of globalization and what we might call an incipient “global public opinion” through travel, business, consumer taste, fashion, and adoption and commercial ownership of modern media – indeed, their 1967 sojourns to Montreal would have been privileged moments in that process. The same could be said for the pavilion architects, exhibition designers, staff, and exhibiting or performing artists from postcolonial countries, and the political delegations that visited. Moreover, everyone in the world could “visit” Expo 67 via the media – at least in theory – and for the first time in electronic visual form, with tv up and running around the world. On 25 June, the first live, closed-circuit program to be telecast simultaneously via satellite to the entire world included a segment from Expo 67, with commentary by Marshall McLuhan (the Beatles debuted “All You Need Is Love” on the same program).27 The international media carried news from the world exhibition on a regular basis, and there were feature stories in print and on film, radio, and television in almost every country that sponsored a pavilion, including the postcolonial ones – India, for example, had thirty-seven accredited media people, Trinidad and Tobago twenty-three, and Cuba seventy-eight.28 Among the things they reported on was their countries’ engagement with world culture from an explicitly postcolonial perspective. Most elaborate, eloquent, and political of the African pavilions at Expo was that of Senegal. Its exhibition text, quoting the country’s president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, promised the pavilion would give “expression to an enlightened and inspiring ambition … to become, like our ancestors, builders of civilization” and show aspects “of a culture that was already flourishing during the Middle Ages.”29 It had a special area where visitors could listen to recorded readings of poetry in the original French and in English translation, many by Senghor himself. The exhibition space was graced with a series of massive, vibrant tapestries (described as “masterpieces” in the official Expo memorial album) by Papa Ibra Tall, among the most important Senegalese artists of the post-independence

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period.30 He had been closely involved with the Négritude intellectual project during his studies in Paris in the 1950s, providing illustrations for the magazine Présence Africaine. At Senghor’s request he founded the Dakar School of fine arts, heading its Section de Recherches en Arts Plastiques Nègres that sought to lay the groundwork for the development of a uniquely Pan-African art. In 1965, again at the behest of Senghor, he established the Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Decoratifs, a tapestry school, to develop practices described by Elizabeth Harney as “situated within the authentic sphere of indigenous weaving practices, while simultaneously contributing a modern form to the genre.”31 Tall’s tapestries were among the “grandiose works” produced by the school that were “positioned as the ultimate embodiments of an esthétique négro-africaine.”32 In this respect, the Senegal Pavilion was a clear expression of the cultural nationalist politics of Négritude under Senghor, another step along a path consecrated at the First World Festival of Black Arts, held a year previously in Dakar, where Senghor had promoted a syncretic, cosmopolitan future for post-independence African art.33 At Expo, Tall not only exhibited at his national pavilion, but notably contributed four paintings to the Man in the Community theme building (part of an ensemble of pavilions and special areas designed to explore universal themes on the “Terre des hommes”), illustrating the epic story of people throwing off the yoke of colonialism.34 If the Dakar festival had been boycotted by such figures as Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba, and criticized for not including Cuban and other Caribbean artists, the same could not be said of Expo 67, which it is tempting to read as a more inclusive if perhaps also diluted follow-up to Dakar, gesturing to the possibilities of Black participation in a postcolonial humanism. Intellectuals and artists from India also used Expo to raise the profile of new forms of national culture. The country’s pavilion was designed by Mansingh Rana, described by Peter Scriver as “a rising star among the new nation’s first post-independence generation of modernist architects,” and it received close and rather withering critical attention from India’s postcolonial architecture and design cognoscenti.35 The World Congress of Poetry, held over four days as part of Expo’s vast, six-month-long World Festival of Culture program, welcomed the celebrated Indian poet Harindranath Chattopadhyay, who read two works in Hindi.36 Ali Akbar Khan, Ravi Shankar, Bismillah Khan, and two dance troupes drew large world festival crowds. The Indian writer, professor, and diplomat Khushwant Singh, author of Train to Pakistan (1956, a novel of the partition), who had been cultural attaché at the Indian Embassy in Canada early in his career, gave a Noranda Lecture exploring ways of thinking in the “Orient” (by which he meant India) and the “Occident” (by which he meant Canada).37 The pavilion festivities for the twentieth anniversary of

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India’s independence featured a show by Uma Sharma, one of a legion of young, high-caste women dancers who had trained in Delhi with teachers fashioning twentieth-century national dance forms from ancient sources. Accompanied by three musicians, she performed the “dance-drama of Kerala … in the classical kathak style,” something she would repeat every day until the end of the fair. Like many of the artists who performed or exhibited in the pavilions of the postcolonial countries, she was a player in the revival and modernization of Indigenous practices as national cultures that was central to the independence project, giving them international presence and legitimacy as high art forms (her performance at Columbia University following Expo was critically acclaimed by the New York Times dance critic).38 This hardly means that there was equality of representation among nationstates at Expo 67, or that the exhibition was free of vestigial colonial forms. Pavilion siting, size, and exhibits reproduced the world’s hierarchies and evident disparities in power and wealth. Pierre Dupuy, the aging diplomat who was Expo’s director general, betrayed his allegiance to the established hierarchy when he proposed early in the planning process that the “noble nations” be placed at the gates to the fair, and the siting of pavilions unfold according to diminishing rank from there.39 Expo’s formal “equality-among-nations” ceremonialism, with each country having its “day” in the Place des Nations, was as weakly egalitarian as the supposed world democracy of the un General Assembly where each nation had an equal vote in a chamber of little power. The Africa Place project, with the Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition designing and providing pavilion infrastructure for the new states of Africa in recognition that they might not otherwise have the resources to attend, had more than a whiff of the paternalism characteristic of much Western foreign aid.40 Despite its architectural elegance, the aggrupation came with a risk of ghettoization – both imagined and real. Indeed, at the fair’s midpoint in July there were strong protests from all the African states, and a one-week walkout by the French African countries housed there, to protest against prejudicial treatment and neglect from Expo services.41 Nevertheless, a single stark juxtaposition may serve to register the magnitude of change in world exhibition dynamics. In Brussels the “representation” of Africans was limited to the Belgian-overseen Congo and Ruanda-Urandi colonial pavilions with their infamous “human zoos” of Congolese people and the message that Belgian colonialism had civilized the “primitives” of their African territories; a mere nine years later at Expo 67, the Democratic Republic of Congo Pavilion, in Africa Place alongside those of sixteen other independent states, represented the movement and rhythm of national life in frescoes by leading Congolese artists Diouf Moussa and Charles Mwenze Mungolo.42

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The New Man and His World: The Cuban Revolution Comes to Canada What does the name Cuba suggest to you? Sunny beaches … Afro-Caribbean rhythm … the world’s best rum and tobacco? Or a revolutionary people who sacrifice and struggle for a better life? – “The Cuban Pavilion – Man and the Idea” advertisement, Expo 67 Official Guide 43

The Cuban pavilion left Havana on a ship, the Pino del Agua, in December 1966, accompanied by members of the architecture and design team, and the construction crew that would reassemble its various components on the Expo site (they also spent the winter renovating an office building on Metropolitan Boulevard that would house the staff and others associated with the pavilion during the fair). A second voyage in April carrying the delegation was given a big official and popular send-off in Havana harbour, presided over by Comandante Jesús Montané, one of the original revolutionaries of the 26th of July Movement. On board was a group of perhaps one hundred women and men who would be pavilion managers, hostesses, graphics specialists, bartenders, chefs, waiters, gift shop and ice-cream stand staff, and members of the distinguished and versatile pavilion band, Senén Suárez y su Conjunto (well known as the house band at the Tropicana in the 1950s).44 These “frontline” workers were supplemented by a support staff of chauffeurs, chefs, barbers, and a doctor, not to mention party political managers and security men. Joining them were ten print, television, and radio reporters, along with one of the most important and edgy Cuban caricaturists of the era, Arístide.45 If Quebec’s New Left, both francophone and anglophone, was disdainful of Expo, its communist Left was not – at least not about Cuba’s participation.46 A lively welcoming party of Canadians and Cubans met the vessel when it docked in Montreal with crew and passengers on deck singing the “Internationale.” Beneath the windows of the bridge, painted in large letters, was the revolutionary exhortation associated with Ché Guevara, “Hasta la Victoria Siempre.” They disembarked chanting “Viva Fidel y la Revolución!” and “Viva Cuba-Canadá!”47 Cuba’s pavilion was understood as an extension of the revolution, part of its internationalist mission to struggle for socialism throughout the world. The Pino del Agua’s journey was portrayed in the Cuban press as carrying forward the voyage of the Granma, the boat that had brought Castro’s original rebels from Mexico to Cuba’s Sierra Maestra in 1956. An April feature piece in

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the country’s most important magazine, Bohemia, titled “Cuba: Her Truth Will Triumph in Montreal,” described the participation in Expo 67 as an “important mission” and “like the beginning of another battle that the Revolution will win … showing the World the great advances achieved by the Revolution and further destroying the isolationist attempts of its imperialist enemies.”48 When, after a period of silence, Ché Guevara surfaced again in Bolivia in late April with a message of revolutionary solidarity to the world, Cuba’s Expo team was assembled in the delegation quarters to consider the message and its application to their own ideological battle in Montreal.49 A Canadian journalist, on a vip advance tour of the Expo pavilions the day before the exhibition opened, was surprised to find the Cuban pavilion closed, since he knew it had been finished early. Spotting one of the Cuban architects inspecting an outstanding matter on the pavilion’s exterior with a workman, he asked what was going on. The architect told him that the Cubans didn’t believe in vip s; instead, the delegation was hosting a party in honour of the Cuban workers who had built the pavilion.50 The pavilion design itself was the result of a competition among twentyfive proposals. These came from a sophisticated cohort of radical young architects who, in the early 1960s, focusing on the construction of social housing, educational facilities, and public works, “translated the Revolutionary mission into the built environment.”51 The winning plan was that of Hugo d’Acosta and two young Italian architects, Vittorio Garatti and Sergio Baroni, who had committed themselves to the revolution after apprenticing in Venezuela with the great Latin American modernist Carlos Raúl Villanueva.52 In 1963, Garatti had designed the “revolutionary modernist” Schools of Music and Ballet in Havana, a breathtakingly beautiful vaulted brick complex that was part of a more expansive National Schools of the Arts campus (unfortunately left unfinished at about the time the Expo pavilion design was chosen). Garatti’s art school project is known for, among other things, his ability to realize sophisticated form through an intensive use of labour to compensate for scarcity of materials and machinery – an “architecture of revolutionary ideals,” as he put it.53 The Cuban Pavilion at Expo 67 fit this mould. Described in the memorial album as “tumbled white wooded cubes bordered by marine-blue steel frames,” it reminded many people of Mondrian’s geometric canvases and was often identified as a work of “Cubism” (presumably with the pun intended). Baroni, however, who came to Montreal to reassemble the structure – literally, in that he joined in the manual labour that took place during the dead of a harsh winter – considered it “a series of containers, standardized units that are an offshoot of Cuban experiments in prefabricated housing.”54

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5.1 The Cuba Pavilion.

The pavilion’s modularity was intentional, allowing for its initial completion in Cuba and shipment to Montreal in sections. In this sense, it was a “Third World” complement to the more famous US and German pavilions that were considered major contributions to the space frame approach (one of the central architectural statements of Expo), while also an example of the “geometrical cellular variety” of design found in Habitat and the Israeli Pavilion.55 Cuba’s pavilion was at least the equal in modernity and sophistication to the celebrated architecture of the “First World” pavilions, and may even have surpassed them. It was at once an extension of the revolutionary nationalist architectural project initiated by Castro as a core objective of Cuban communism, and an exemplar of the new Latin American modernism that had captured the imagination of world architecture in the late 1950s in Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa’s Brasilia. At Expo, the closest thing in architectural terms to the Cuban Pavilion was Habitat, Moshe Safdie’s widely lauded modular residential complex that was billed as an experiment in popular housing.

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The difference was that the revolutionary architects who designed the Cuban Pavilion genuinely attempted to create innovative and inexpensive housing for the people, whereas Safdie’s complex – which cost a fortune to begin with and required elaborate and costly re-engineering to retain its structural integrity as it was built – was already being inhabited by the well-to-do during the Expo summer.56 “Inside, there is revolution,” according to the perceptive in-house review of the Cuban Pavilion for the Expo 67 memorial album: “The twentieth century is one of riot, war and revolution – yet, at Expo, Cuba alone faces the reality of violence in Man and His World.”57 The official Expo 67 guide seductively invited fairgoers to get to know “a small Caribbean island that for the past ten years has been the focal point of world-wide attention” as “the first socialist country of the Western Hemisphere.” According to the summary, the pavilion “represents the youthful spirit of the Cuban Revolution … showing Cuba as it was before the success of its Revolution on January 1, 1959, and as it is today.” The memorial album put it rather more starkly: “The vigour of this frankly propagandistic presentation creates for the pavilion an importance out of proportion to its size.”58 Canadian journalist Robert Fulford was taken aback by its “right-now hard-sell propaganda,” while a review of Expo in the New Yorker remarked that “the United States gets slapped around pretty hard in that pavilion.”59 And yet, far from mere pamphleteering radicalism, the Cuban Pavilion was very much in keeping with the immersive media experience of Expo 67 – but one of a decidedly non-bourgeois and explicitly political order. The repertoire may already have existed (the regime had been museographically re-enacting its revolution in a variety of formats for foreign visitors and Cuban nationals almost since Castro came to power),60 but Expo was an opportunity to speak directly to a North American public including millions of US citizens, and the Cuban Pavilion was a new, focused experiment in re-staging the revolution – but as actual revolutionary consciousness-raising, not simply display.61 Despite long line-ups, only small groups were allowed in at a time, so that they could properly absorb the pavilion. In the memorial album’s estimation, “Cuban designers have achieved maximum impact with great economy,” noting that interior display spaces were adequate but on the small side. “History, therefore, presses close around the visitor.” There was a photographic exhibit on the history of the country, and a silent retrospective of newsreel footage and old Cuban cinema. Buoyed by the “often poetic language of the captions,” the “walls shout”: for example, that enslaved people had been regarded “as a new mine, or a resource like raw sugar.” During the independence wars against Spain in the 1890s, “everywhere in the darkened land sprout the heroes”: the

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5.2 Cuba Pavilion exhibition.

Afro-Cuban leader Antonio Maceo; the Apostle, José Martí; and Máximo Gómez, who led the independence forces following the death of these two titans. In a “wordless film culled from newsreel footage, Cuba as the playground of the rich under Batista is contrasted with the post-revolutionary country in which women and Negroes, previously discriminated against, play an active role in building a socialist society.” Graphic collages jumbled headlines, and had Fulgencio Batista, the military dictator overthrown by the revolutionaries, strung up beside Hitler and Mussolini. An “ingenious” use of black-and-white photographs, “which spill off the walls to floors and ceilings,” marked the shift to the new narrative of the revolutionary era (the old regime was depicted in blown-up negative images, Cuba since 1959 in positives). The historical narrative culminated with the 1953 attack of the Castro-led rebels on the Moncada barracks, Fidel’s “History Will Absolve Me” speech from his trial, scenes of the revolutionary war, and the iconography of Fidel and Ché, joined by other New Men sacrificed in the cause of world revolution (including in Cuba’s international guerrilla operations).

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The contemporary scene was built around a playfully bilingual graphic design poster: “[la] liberté commence: man’s long journey through centuries of exploitation and murder comes to an end.” There were posters with pictures of Vietcong soldiers, and others denouncing the cia, the US use of napalm in Vietnam, and “atomic blackmail.”62 Late in the fair, the exhibition was revamped to become a shrine to “el Ché” after his capture and execution in Bolivia, with “a film and photographic exhibit devoted to this revolutionary figure” (described in the Expo chronicle as being “by way of mourning”).63 The apotheosis of Ché as icon of world revolution, and its

5.3 Cuba Pavilion interior art.

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use by the Cuban Revolution, had successfully begun: “The life-size photo of Guevara in an open-necked army shirt, with a beret over shoulder-length hair, is constantly surrounded by interested spectators.” As visitors took all this in, a recorded voice delivered a looped message over the speaker system: “For you who come to look at our life, however hasty this first sight, gather these images and bring them to mind. A friend quickly made but long to stay. Look here, look there, and see a change in the world, but long to stay. Working people struggling for reasons of their own, but long to stay. And one is all, but long to stay.”64 According to the memorial album review, “the psychedelic atmosphere is heightened by fishbowl windows in jewel-like tones of red, blue and yellow, which distort and colour the world outside.” Three screens on end walls showed films and documentaries without audio, some of them about “how Cubans live now”; translucent at night, passersby could “look up at the flickering scenes projected inside.” A North American middle-class public too alienated by the capitalist system to understand the message could receive instruction and guidance from a different, highly politicized kind of Expo hostess (though far from outdone on the style front, with chic two-piece white wool suits and matching Chanel boots), who interpreted and advocated for the revolution. As the reviewer put it, “because the designers have presented a powerful picture story often without captions … heavy demands are made on [the hostesses’] intelligence and diplomacy.” With passion and ideological clarity, these Cuban university students championed the revolution and Castro – calling him “Fidel, as though he were an older brother” – to visitors who were often shocked and turned off by the experience of the pavilion (while it was high on the priority list of the average Expo itinerary, it was the only pavilion to score a zero for “appeal” after visiting). American visitors in particular often got into intense ideological debates that on more than one occasion ended with their removal from the pavilion, and even from the Expo site itself.65 And yet the overall public sense of Cuba’s participation was very positive, even electric. Visitors could take the edge off the bitter immersion in revolutionary truths at the pavilion’s great bar (a favourite with journalists), with Cuban rum and a first-rate band whose music “set people dancing at Expo on many hot summer evenings.” The building had radical cachet and more than a hint of political danger, made all the more real by reportage on a number of actual bombing attempts, by the sunglasses-wearing Cuban security agents who could be seen around, and by the likelihood (later confirmed) that there were rcmp undercover men who carried out surveillance on the Cuban delegation even as they guarded against terrorist activity by anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Coinciding with revolutionary Cuba’s independence day, 26 July, which

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would also be its national day at Expo, a multi-group spectacular billed as “Fiesta Cubana” began a six-day run at the Théatre Maisonneuve as part of the World Festival of the Arts. Granma, Cuba’s official daily, reported that the “artists and auxiliary personnel” who boarded the plane in Havana for “Cuba Week” included Elena Burke, Bola de Nieve (the stage name of Ignacio Villa), la Orquesta de Enrique Jorrín, Los Modernistas, el Conjunto de Ojeda, Los Papines, Coralia Fernández, and Ramón y Ramoncito Veloz.66 Along with Senén Suárez’s pavilion house band, this may well have been the most significant combined show of twentieth-century Cuban music ever staged anywhere in the world. It would require a number of books to do justice to the pioneering role the respective artists played in the development of Cuban music – not to mention Latin American, US American, and world music. Each had established classic forms of rhythm-based music and dance genres like cha-chacha, son Cubano, Afro-Cuban jazz, guaguancó, danzón, Cuban rumba, trova, and salsa. Artists who spanned generations, all resolutely but not in any official or self-consciously way popular and progressive, they offered the Castro regime an extraordinary opportunity to show off the diversity, depth, and power of the folk and popular cultural authenticity that sustained the revolution – quite possibly the regime’s last great opportunity to do so.67 What Expo’s official chronicle called “the carnival of the Revolution” turned the exhibition into a spectacular Latin dance orgy on 26 July. To almost everyone’s disappointment, Castro cancelled his scheduled visit, apparently for security reasons and at the request of the Canadian government. In the Place des Nations, Cuba’s relatively low-level official representative declared that the Cuban Pavilion showed, “with pride, the contrast between colonial Cuba of yesterday and the revolutionary Cuba of today.” After the Cuban artists gave “Canadians and Americans” an informal training session on their songs and dances, “forty dancers, singers and musicians from the Fiesta Cubana gave a preview of the carnival atmosphere of the revolution, driven by frenzied [endiablés] Afro-Cuban rhythms.”68 An improvised conga line of Cuban performers “snaked out of the Place des Nations, drawing hundreds of visitors after it, and danced past several pavilions before returning to the plaza.”69 The Youth Pavilion showed a selection of Cuban films over the course of a week in its Midnight Cinema series.70 In September, the World Congress of Poetry welcomed the great Afro-Cuban poet, communist intellectual, and founding head of the revolutionary National Cuban Writers’ Union Nicolás Guillén, whose verse experiments with African dialects and rhythms dated back to his early 1930s collaboration with Langston Hughes. He had just published a new, combative series of poems, The Great Zoo, reflecting on the Vietnam War.

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But if this major Cuban presence was a rare opportunity for the revolutionary regime to argue its case before US American visitors and media while showing itself off to the world, the pavilion was equally staged for the people of Cuba, as propaganda, and as a way of generating pride by showing Cubans that the country could participate and compete with dignity in a developed world setting, but without compromising the revolution. It was also used to motivate the new Cuban Man (and Woman) in more concrete ways: those who made exceptional contributions in different areas of production would be given a trip to Montreal to see the Cuban Pavilion and the world’s fair.71 The strong news contingent, augmented further to cover the 26 July festivities, was able to offer a critique of the capitalist North from within. The headline of Bohemia’s first major report – “cuba at expo 67” – was bordered above and below with the banner: “from montreal – from montreal – from montreal – from montreal.”72 On equal footing with the great nations of the earth, in the heart of a major North American city, Cuban journalists fed a sometimes celebratory and wide-eyed, sometimes very critical series of reports on Montreal and Canadian life to the public back home.73 They remarked on the vulgar materialism and vapid celebrity-centred pop culture of many of the pavilions (in particular, that of the US), the marked social inequality visible in Montreal, and the rising tide of Quebec separatism.74 Canada was a “hinge” country for Cuba, one of its only significant entrées to the capitalist West, and Cuba’s use of Expo was in keeping with its use of Canada as a North American surrogate. In the early 1960s, Canada refused to abide by the US edict that countries in the Americas join its embargo of Cuba or cut off diplomatic relations. The reasons had to do with long-standing Canadian business and banking interests in Cuba, and also with an emerging willingness on the part of Canadian governments to resist US pressure on crucial issues of Cold War politics.75 It is well known that, after Pierre Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, Canada developed a foreign policy position in the Americas more explicitly independent of the US, symbolized by Trudeau’s state visit to Havana in 1972, his friendship with Castro, and government promotion of a series of development agency initiatives in Cuba. But well prior to this, Cuba had forged an autonomous bilateral engagement with Canada whose most important initiative was the transformation of the island’s animal genetics by using Canadian livestock to create breeds more suited to production goals in the area of popular protein (the shorthand slogan for the program would be “milk for the masses rather than meat for the few”). Within months of the consolidation of Castro’s regime, Cuban emissaries realized there would be no objection to them purchasing Canadian Holstein bulls to

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breed with Cuba’s “tropical” cattle variety, the Cebú, traditionally bred for meat rather than milk. They would also buy Canadian porcine and poultry stock.76 The scale of purchasing was such that in the early 1960s Cuba managed a year-round corral and veterinary facility in St John, New Brunswick, where a fleet of three Cuban ships, captained by some of Castro’s closest confidantes from the days of guerrilla struggle, collected Canadian stud bulls and semen, cows, pigs, and poultry for ferrying back to Cuba. Cuba’s pavilion staging in Montreal was, in a real sense, an extension of this program, not only in that Canada gave them access to a major Western capitalist resource that would further the goals of the revolution, but even in the use of the same shipping routes to deliver the pavilion and its delegation to Montreal, and in its perhaps surprising focus on ice cream. In 1966, as a high-profile emblem of the success of the revolutionary dairy project made possible by the Cuba-Canada Cattle Plan – an abundance of milk – the regime had triumphantly inaugurated the Coppelia ice cream parlour in the Rampa district of Havana (in a building designed by Baroni, one of the Expo pavilion architects). One might say that its first international franchise was opened on the Expo site in Montreal: an extremely popular Coppelia kiosk showcasing fifty-four flavours of ice cream.

The Black Atlantic at Expo 67 Every head of state from the newly independent Caribbean nations with pavilions at Expo came to Montreal for their respective national day. All had been major activist-intellectuals in Black Atlantic networks and figures of great weight in their country’s independence struggles: prime ministers Hugh Shearer of Jamaica, Forbes Burnham of Guyana, Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, Errol Barrow of Barbados, and Eric Gairy of Grenada (not yet a fully independent state, it shared a pavilion with Trinidad and Tobago). They brought with them the jewels of their new nationalist cultural projects, especially valuable ones in the cases of Jamaica and Trinidad.77 The Jamaican National Dance Theatre Company was featured in the World Festival of the Arts to coincide with the island’s national day, led by its founding choreographers and dancers, Rex Nettleford and Eddy Thomas. Nettleford was one of the towering polymath intellectuals and artists of the new Caribbean, not only a brilliant dancer and choreographer, but also a revered researcher, professor, and prolific essayist.78 Thomas, who had studied at the Martha Graham Company’s academy in New York, was an accomplished dancer and choreographer in his own right. Jamaican dance theatre emerged, according to historian Sabine Sörgel, as “a highly complex art form, which blends ritual-based African Caribbean folk dance movement with German expressionist and US modern

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dance techniques.” Since its founding in 1960, the company had fashioned a “uniquely Jamaican dance aesthetic” that rejected distinctions between popular and high art as themselves imperialist; the postcolonial dance of the ndtc was “embodied politics” – the Black body as locus of struggle.79 The Trinidadian and Tobagonian analogue to this was the National Steel Band, which joined Mighty Sparrow and the Esso Tripoli Steel Band for the islands’ national day in early August. Both steel bands were under the direction of Hugh Borde, an important figure in the development of the modern “national” genre. Borde had been named in 1966 by Eric Williams to a commission whose intention was to overcome the volatile culture of inter-band rivalry and put a disciplined steel band program at the centre of a more robust national culture derived from popular Afro-Trinidadian musical forms. Out of this came the National Steel Band, featuring the best musicians from various bands. One of them, the Esso Tripoli Steel Band, was attached to the pavilion for a longer run, beginning symbolically enough with a performance at Expo’s companion site of Montreal modernity, the plaza of the Place Ville Marie skyscraper.80 The musical visionary Van Dyke Parks first heard the band at Expo 67 and would produce their eponymous 1972 Grammy-nominated album that capitalized on the group’s years of touring with Liberace, who enlisted them into his act immediately after seeing them reprise their Montreal triumph on the Expo site in the summer of 1968.81 The Jamaican-American Harry Belafonte and South African exile Miriam Makeba also made well-publicized visits to the fair (Belafonte’s close friend Sidney Poitier, a Bahamian-American who in 1964 had become the first Afrodescended person to win a Best Actor Academy Award, also visited). During his tour of the Expo islands, Belafonte was photographed with his family at the Indians of Canada Pavilion, which was famously radical in its Indigenouscontrolled anti-colonialist messaging and in its curation of artworks.82 Belafonte and Makeba were both leading activists in the Civil Rights movement, and Makeba was the best-known anti-apartheid activist in the world. Starting in 1964, Makeba had incorporated Caribbean tunes into her repertoire, with support from Belafonte, and explicitly denounced apartheid in her lyrics, while also introducing audiences around the world to contemporary African music styles; the blend made her a pioneer in the development of world music. The two had won a Grammy Award for their 1965 album of African songs, An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. A Makeba-Belafonte concert was always a political event, and their performance in the context of a world exhibition was more than simply another stop on their 1967 tour. World music had come to the world’s fair in a powerful and popular anti-racist, postcolonial package. In August, Odetta, the voice of the Civil Rights movement, played the Café

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Dansons at the Expo 67 Youth Pavilion, followed in early October by Richie Havens.83 It should be recalled that these Expo performances were layered on top of one another over the course of a summer of explosive confrontations in almost twenty US cities between African-American communities and state authorities, culminating in an insurrection in a major centre of African-American civilization, Detroit, and a military occupation of the city by the Michigan National Guard and two divisions of the US Army. It is particularly surprising that the participation of the new Caribbean nation-states at Expo 67 (and that of the oldest, Haiti) has gone virtually unnoticed in Expo scholarship, or in the burgeoning studies of the Caribbeandescended communities of Montreal. Anglophone Black Caribbean Montreal was among the city’s oldest and most active visible minorities, with a considerable presence dating back to the late nineteenth century, and indeed was an important node of what Paul Gilroy has called “the Black Atlantic.”84 The city’s anglophone Black population, concentrated in an area variously known as St Antoine and Little Burgundy, was essentially West Indian in origin; it was rooted in a significant wave of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century migration to work in Nova Scotia mines and steel, in Canadian Pacific’s passenger railway system headquartered in Montreal, and in ships on the Saint Lawrence. Montreal was an important centre of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association almost from its founding in 1919 (there were forty unia divisions in Canada, from Glace Bay to Vancouver, by 1922), and it remained so as the population of West Indian origin grew over the 1920s with workers from Nova Scotia relocating to Montreal in the face of racist hostility and economic downturn. Until the 1960s, this was the core of a poor but cohesive Black Montreal, its dynamic evolving with the inclusion of African Americans who found their way to the city in the immediate postwar years. Starting in the mid-1950s, changes to Canadian immigration laws enabled a rapid growth in anglophone Caribbean and Haitian arrivals, and this accelerated even prior to the Immigration Act of 1967 which consolidated a pointsbased system that enabled more racially diverse immigration. There is no accurate figure for the Black population of Montreal in 1967, but it had risen quickly from about 7,000 in 1961 to the tens of thousands by the time Expo opened its gates.85 The same era saw an influx of immigration from the French Caribbean, including political exiles from the Duvalier regime. When Haiti abandoned its intention to have a pavilion in Montreal, citing financial restrictions, an anonymous Quebec-based benefactor agreed to foot the bill for a substantial pavilion, if one rather lacking in substance. Its theme, according to the Expo guide, focused on what was perhaps a depoliticized, generic idea of Haiti as

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“land of the sun.” The exhibition was sparse, its centrepiece a series of sculptures, paintings, and dolls hung from steel wires. However, it did have a small historical area extolling the Haitian revolution of the late eighteenth century, and featuring biographies of its Black Jacobins (as C.L.R. James had styled them in his classic history), heroic political leaders who had turned a rebellion of enslaved people into a successful war of independence from French colonialism: Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines were also at Expo.86 The pavilion was adjacent to those of France and Quebec in recognition of the important place that Haiti had long held in the “French America” imaginary of Quebec intellectuals, a connection nicely mapped in the work of Sean Mills. Surprisingly, there appears to have been no official effort, either by Expo or Haiti Pavilion organizers, to link Montreal 67 with the firstever bie-sanctioned world expo held in the Americas outside of the US: Haiti’s relatively small but intriguing Category 2 World Fair of 1949–50, to which Quebec had sent a special delegation.87 Black activism was revived in this buoyant Afro-Montreal scene between 1965 and 1968, largely through the efforts of Caribbean students at Montreal universities. Their radical rethinking of Black politics and race came out of discussions and conferences organized by the Caribbean Conference Committee, a student-led group that developed a close association with the great Trinidadian Marxist intellectual C.L.R. James, who was a visiting professor at Sir George Williams University between 1966 and 1968. David Austin’s pathbreaking research on the relaunch of Montreal as an important centre of radical Black politics in the late 1960s notes that the participation of Caribbean states and artists at Expo 67 motivated organization and radicalization, though how exactly remains for further study.88 The connections are probably complex. For one thing, all the Caribbean heads of state and some of the Caribbean artists and intellectuals who visited Expo 67 were opponents and critics of Black radicalism. Williams, for example, though once mentored by James and himself the author of classic Marxist reinterpretations of Caribbean history, had steered a reformist route into power during decolonization, and would soon run afoul of the Black Power Left by cooperating with Shearer in expelling Guyanese Marxist historian Walter Rodney from Jamaica. For his part, Shearer oversaw the state repression suffered by Rastafarians in the mid-1960s, while Nettleford, though certainly never on the side of reaction, increasingly aligned himself with a moderate, institutionalized politics within the University of the West Indies, and wrote widely read essays critical of the essentialism he saw as impoverishing the Black Power agenda. However, despite the political tensions that might have existed between official Caribbean delegations and Caribbean students in Montreal, it seems reasonable to suppose that the

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magnitude, cultural coherence, and sovereignty of the Black Atlantic showing at Expo augmented the legitimacy of Afro-descendants as players in Montreal’s symphony of modernist renewal.89 Some examples of the engagement of Black Montreal with Expo 67 suggest that the World Exhibition’s effects on the community were wide-ranging and mixed. As urban historians and community activists have pointed out, the infrastructural modernization of Montreal that dovetailed with Expo 67 involved the large-scale demolition of a number of older, impoverished working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods around the lower downtown, including parts of the St Antoine/Little Burgundy area where the Black population had historically been concentrated. The neighbourhood was already losing residents to the suburbs in a context of falling employment in traditionally Black occupations relating to passenger rail travel, and the decline of industrial work with the closing of the nearby Lachine Canal and the relocation of factories to ex-urban areas. After 1964, many of the remaining core businesses and residential areas were demolished to make room for a freeway.90 One painful memory for residents of these neighbourhoods – St Henri, Griffintown, and St Antoine – is the way that the City of Montreal hung screens on the raised highways and bridges to hide their communities from visitors to Expo. Nor, apparently, did Expo take the edge off the growing unemployment suffered by the Black community over these years. The New York Urban League, a Black advocacy group, accused Expo 67 of anti-Black discriminatory hiring policies for the coveted waged jobs related to the mega-fair, and petitioned President Lyndon Johnson to withdraw US participation.91 A number of intellectuals and artists from Montreal’s Black community were hired to provide creative content for Expo 67. Of course, the community’s international superstar, Oscar Peterson, from a family of West Indian origin, performed (though in the hyper-white packaging of a Perry Como tv special).92 The accomplished bassist, Charles “Charlie” Biddle, an AfricanAmerican who chose to move to Montreal in the 1950s for its less segregated music scene, played a number of different shows. Given the culture of informal after-hours collaborations among touring musicians, Biddle likely participated in some legendary jams involving the incredible jazz talent that passed through Montreal that summer (including musicians in the touring bands of Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Freddy Hubbard, Wynton Kelly, Benny Golson, and the Modern Jazz Quartet). Arleigh Peterson (no relation to Oscar) and Cynthia Hendrickson’s Afro-Jazz Dance Troupe performed at the Place des Nations during the official cultural program for International Women’s Day at Expo 67.93 Peterson and Hendrickson were dancers, chore-

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ographers, and actors who founded Montreal’s Revue Theatre in 1960 (though Peterson was originally from New York), and staged the first Montreal productions of a number of English-Canadian plays as well as producing the work of Black playwrights. They frequently employed Black actors, and among their early 1960s productions was a performance of Waiting for Godot with an allBlack cast.94 Probably the most high-profile contribution of Black Montreal to Expo 67 was that of Mairuth Sarsfield, a young journalist whose family had arrived in an earlier wave of migration from the Caribbean. Sarsfield was appointed exhibit co-ordinator for the People Tree, a tower whose aluminium “branches” were hung with 700 nylon banners printed with photographs of ordinary Canadians from many backgrounds at work and play that was one of the two defining structures of the Canadian Pavilion complex.95 One notable outcome of the relationship forged between Expo 67 and Black Caribbean Canada was the mobilization of the delegation and musicians of the Trinidad and Tobago Pavilion to bring to life the first Caribana festival in Toronto in August 1967. A project convened at a critical moment in the building of a West Indian community in Toronto and conceived as an official Centennial Year project, the first Caribana was able to tap into the modest subsidies the Canadian state made available for such local Centenary initiatives. The inaugural event was, overall, a great success and extremely well-attended despite dire weather and the usual scramble to get an ambitious festival off the ground. At its core were musicians, dancers, and organizers from Trinidad and Tobago’s Expo 67 contingent, who transposed their show, itself built on the theme of Carnival, to Toronto, providing musical fuel, star power, and organizing smarts to the nascent festival. Among those who participated were Mighty Bomber (Calypsonian Kenny Cooper), Young Killer, and Mighty Sparrow, as well as the Esso Tripoli Steel Band.96 In 1968, the National Steel Band would return to Montreal to play the Congress of Black Writers.97

Conclusion It may well have surprised visiting staff, artists, and political leaders from the postcolonial world to find that their host country, on the face of it celebrating a century of independence on a privileged European settler colonial model, was itself a mass of postcolonial aspirations, struggles, anxieties, and contradictions. For oddly, the Centennial and Expo 67 actually announced what they supposedly celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of: the birth of an independent Canada. Pearson’s mid-1960s civic reforms were much more than a new flag and a new official anthem. They added up to a comprehensive suite

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of major legislation in areas like health care and immigration, and royal commissions of inquiry into the status of women and bilingualism and biculturalism. With a dynamic industrial bourgeoisie taking full advantage of postwar North American-led world capitalist rebirth, a modern welfare state up and running, the infrastructure in place for a multicultural future grounded in large-scale and diverse immigration, the Canadian state – if not yet its white British-descended dominant groups – had mostly divested itself of the Union Jack and Mother England (instructive in this regard is the absence of the Commonwealth as an organizing principle at Expo 67). Instead, it was embracing a new, idealized identity as a modern middling power and force for good in the international state system, with a prime minister in receipt of a Nobel Prize for his role as the architect of un peacekeeping. And it was also cautiously staking out an ever more formal autonomy from Canada’s imperial big brother to the south. As José Igartua has made clear in his brilliant study, The Other Quiet Revolution, the increasingly sovereigntist nationalism of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution did not emerge against a century-old, consolidated nation-state called Canada – it did not come after Canada – but rather in conflictive tandem with Canada’s own emergence as a postcolonial nation-state. As for the participation in Expo 67 of Montreal and Quebec, there could be no mistake: the fair was a coming-out party for the new Quebec nation. Something similar could be said about the country’s First Nations, although for the moment the scale was small. It could be argued that Expo 67 was simply another Western world’s fair of great and middling powers, with the novel addition of many new, and for the most part comparatively small, postcolonial states. Alongside this, however, living in uneasy harmony and perhaps even inhabiting a parallel dimension, was the staging of a new world’s fair as a taxonomy of postcoloniality – the first ever Category 1 Postcolonial International and Universal Exhibition, as it were. In this sense as well, the Montreal World Exhibition was a crucible of globalization. It offered a dual stage for postcolonial nation-states participating in a world exhibition for the first time. One was built for a relatively uncomfortable performance of native self, not unrelated to a marketing of the traditional commodities to which the colonial world had consigned them, and which a future of mass tourism seemed to have locked them into performing forever. The other welcomed the enactment of postcolonial difference and hybrid subjectivities that commented critically, and from experience, on the shackling orthodoxies of neocolonial ways of thinking and doing politics and business, even as they played early scenes in an epic of radical emancipation.

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notes 1 “Expo 67,” Bohemia 59, no. 44 (3 November 1967): 60. 2 Matthew Stanard, “‘Bilan du monde pour un monde plus déshumanisé’: The 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and Belgian Perceptions of the Congo,” European History Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2005): 267–98. 3 See the essays in the section “Anthropology and Ethnology Pavilion,” in Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader, eds. Laura Hellengreen, Celia Pearce, Rebecca Rouse, and Bobby Schweizer (Creative Commons, 2014). 4 Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan, “Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 6. See also John Lownsbrough, The Best Place to Be: Expo 67 and Its Time (Toronto: Penguin, 2012), 77–93, 105–14. 5 Andrea Hollington, Oliver Tappe, Tijo Salverda, and Tobias Schwarz, eds., “Concepts of the Global South,” Voices from around the World, no. 1 (2015): https://web.archive.org/web/20160904205139/http://gssc.uni-koeln.de/node/451. 6 Sean Mills, “The End of Empire? Third World Decolonization and Canadian History,” Within and without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History, eds. Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 342. 7 David Austin, Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2013), 34. 8 The connections between foreign national pavilions and the host locale in general is a topic that is rarely broached in studies of world exhibitions. For example, two fine articles on the US Pavilion at Expo 67 – the breathtaking geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller – present it as though it had no intrinsic relation to the history of Montreal or Canada; see Jonathan Massey, “Buckminster Fuller’s Cybernetic Pastoral: the United States Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (2006): 463–83; and Daniela Sheinin, “Kookie Thoughts: Imagining the United States Pavilion at Expo 67 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bubble),” Journal of Transnational American Studies 5, no. 1 (2013): https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c81k3t1. Yet Fuller’s development of the geodesic dome had a long connection with Montreal alternative-futurist innovation, nicely explored in Carlo Carbone and Réjean Legault, curators, “Montreal’s Geodesic Dreams,” Gallery of the École de Design, Université du Québec à Montréal, 21 September – 10 December 2017. For innovative examples of work that does factor in the locale, see Peter Scriver’s chapter in this collection, and Eran Neuman, “The Israeli Pavilion for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes 26 (2018): 104–20.

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9 Lewis Siegelbaum, “Sputnik Goes to Brussels: The Exhibition of a Soviet Technological Wonder,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 (2012): 120–36. 10 While relinquishing formal colonial control after World War II, the US led a counterinsurgency campaign to destroy progressive nationalist forces and consolidate power in pro-US factions of the political elite. 11 György Péteri, “Transsystemic Fantasies: Counter-revolutionary Hungary at Brussels ’58,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 (2012): 137–60. 12 Asia – South, South-east, East, and Austral-; the Middle East, including Israel and Iran; Africa – North, West, and East; the Americas – North and South, as well as the French, English, and Spanish Caribbean; and Europe – Western, Eastern, and Scandinavia. Figures for the number of nation-states at Expo 67 vary between sixty-two and seventy (a range typical of publications at the time, and widely reproduced since), but the postmortem general report of the ccwe, which can be taken as definitive, lists sixty nation-states in fifty-seven pavilions (some countries shared pavilions); see ccwe, General Report on the 1967 World Exhibition (Montreal, 1969), 261–2. 13 This considers only the level of representation according to the new order of nation-states. Can we say that Pakistan was represented by virtue of the Pakistan Restaurant, sponsored by state-run Pakistan International Airlines, located in the United Nations Pavilion? Or that the population of those Central and South American nation-states that were not at Expo 67, and who were overwhelmingly Catholic, were represented there by the Christian Pavilion, which had the official sanction of the Vatican (by the same token, so was the ecclesiastical hierarchy of each country, which still held a significant measure of national political power at this time)? This religious dimension of postcolonial representation was underscored when Quebec’s Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, another leading liberal voice during Vatican II, welcomed twenty-two bishops from Asia and Africa (including Hélder Câmara, the archbishop of Recife already known as the great voice of liberation theology) for a tour of the Christian Pavilion on May Day. See Rhona Richman Kenneally, “Food, Nationalism and Authenticity at Expo 67,” in Richman Kenneally and Sloan, Expo 67, 38; and Yves Jasmin, “Expo 67 au jour le jour,” 1 and 24 May 1967; Archives Montréal; seven posts corresponding to the months of Expo, April–October 1967, beginning with: http://archivesdemontreal.com/2017/04/27/expo-67-au-jour-le-jour-mai/ (accessed 2 January 2021). 14 Although at this point it was still implausibly presented as limited to peaceful uses, India used the Canadian reactors to produce most of the fuel for its nuclear weapons, which it began to test in 1974; see Stutee Bannerjee, “India-Canada Relations: The Nuclear Energy Aspect,” India Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2017): 342–56. 15 Jasmin, “Expo 67 au jour le jour,” 15 August.

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16 On this question, and Algeria’s singular role in constituting the Third Worldist project, see Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 17 Jasmin, “Expo 67 au jour le jour,” 5 October; see also Magali Deleuze, “Le Maghreb a l’Expo 67: Tunisie, Maroc, Algérie,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 17, no. 1 (2008): 54. 18 On the central role of the Cuban Revolution in articulating Third World multilateralism with the international struggle for Black liberation, see Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism and Transnational Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 19 The politics of participation in organized international fora by the prc – which at this time had neither diplomatic relations with Canada, nor membership at the United Nations – were made more complex by the political volatility of the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, and there was no way to secure the country’s presence. A rather tepid “surrogate” Republic of China presence at Expo was provided by the Taiwanese. Surprisingly, the so-called Soviet bloc of Eastern Europe was not well represented – no East Germany, no Poland, no Hungary – with the notable exception of Czechoslovakia, which, already exhibiting tendencies that would lead to the reformist Prague Spring, staged one of the most culturally innovative pavilions, whose success with critics and public alike is nicely illustrated in Robert Fulford, This Was Expo (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1968), 135–46. Even so, with the exception of Maoism, the leading variants of world communism were represented at Expo 67: the orthodox version of the Soviet Union, the emerging liberal-reformist orientation of the Czechs, the Cubans’ Third World revolutionary variant, and the truly non-aligned version of the Yugoslavs. 20 In a distinct context, Mexico had pioneered the way for both revolutionary and developing nations in their participation in important international exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro, Seville, and Chicago between 1922 and 1933, where the new state’s then culturally radical embrace of Indigenous civilizations and popular nationalism was deployed, as Zara M. Moss summarizes it, “to encourage audiences to accept Mexico as a modern nation”; “¡Viva Mexico! World’s Fair Exhibits and Souvenirs: The Shaping of Collective Consciousness,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 28 (2010): 66. See also Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Cuba also had pre-revolutionary experience participating in international exhibitions; see Ricardo Quiza Moreno, “Pictures of an Exhibition: la participación cubana en la exposición de Buffalo (1901),” Tiempos de América, no. 7 (2000): 99–117. 21 For an overview, see Isaac Saney, “Homeland of Humanity: Internationalism

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22

23

24 25

26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33

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within the Cuban Revolution,” Latin American Perspectives 36, no. 1 (2009): 111–23; and John M. Kirk, “Cuba’s Medical Internationalism: Development and Rationale,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 28, no. 4 (2009–10): 497–511. The other was Venezuela, which would soon play a role in opec, but was an outlier at the time as a rare Global South case of successful capitalist modernization and functional liberal-democratic institutions. For a provocative text summary, photos, and link to a movie tour of the arresting Mexican pavilion, see “The Pavilion of Mexico,” Expo Lounge: http://expolounge.blogspot.com/2008/09/ (accessed 28 December 2020). A reading of the Mexican Pavilion’s expression of modernity, with an emphasis on the mural that was the pavilion’s focal point, Rufino Tamayo’s “El mexicano y su mundo” (The Mexican and His World), can be found in Johanne Sloan, “Humanists and Modernists at Expo 67,” Revista mexicana de estudios canadienses (nueva época), no. 13 (2007): 84–6. The core polities of Southern Africa were absent, as apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia were pariah states in the world exhibition context, and Angola and Mozambique were still under colonial occupation by Portugal. Aude Hendrick, “Les pays africains à l’Expo 67: symboles du changement,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 17, no. 1 (2008): 85. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, “Unité et développement,” Man and His World/Terre des hommes: The Noranda Lectures, Expo 67/Les conférences Noranda, l’Expo 67 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 95–107. ccwe, General Report, 2821–3, 2683–4. Yuval Sagiv, “Man and His tv World: Expo 67 as a Global tv Event,” paper given at the conference Staging Canada at Expo 67: Nationalism in the Crucible of Globalization, King’s College, London, 4 November 2017. ccwe, General Report, 622–4. Robert Fulford reproduces photos of feature stories in print media from places such as India, South Africa, and Japan in This Was Expo, 31–4. Expo 67 Official Guide, 153. Expo 67 Memorial Album, 233. Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 68; see also 56–63. Ibid., 52. On the politics of the Dakar festival, see Penny M. von Eschen, “Soul Call: The First World Festival of Negro Arts as a Pivot of Black Modernities,” Journal of Contemporary African Art 42–3 (2018): 124–35. Expo 67 Memorial Album, 233. These complex pieces can be viewed on the Library and Archives Canada website: Man in the Community – Papa Ibra, ccwe, Public Relations, Photography and Film Section, rg 71, box number: tcs

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35 36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43 44

00865, item 5065, photographs: https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/CollectionSearch/ Pages/record.aspx?app=FonAndCol&IdNumber=4943782. See Peter Scriver’s chapter in this collection. Jasmin, “Expo 67 au jour le jour,” 10 September. Romney Copeman has noted the overwhelming developmentalist consensus of modernization theory in the Noranda and McLean-Hunter talks. He also points out that some space was made for critical voices, like that of Gunnar Myrdal. See “Unsettling Expo 67: Developmentalism and Colonial Humanism at Montreal’s World Exhibition” (ma thesis, Université de Montréal, 2017), 83–109. Margaret Edith Walker, “Kathak Dance: A Critical History” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004), 212–13; Don MacDonagh, “India’s Uma Sharma Dances at Columbia,” New York Times, 11 November 1967, 25. Notably, Dupuy’s hierarchical plan was successfully sidelined by the design team in a way that speaks more to architecture and planning consciousness evolving in line with the globalization of consumption than to progressive ideological pushback. As Moshe Safdie recalls, placing the US and Soviet “main attractions” at the very furthest edges of the site was based on the same principles in use for shopping mall architecture – that is, maximizing commerce even at the smaller shops through strategic placement of the marquee grocery and department stores at “end-points.” See John Lownsbrough, The Best Place to Be: Expo 67 and Its Time (Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2012), 77. See Peter Scriver’s chapter in this collection. ccwe, General Report, 2879. Expo 67 Memorial Album, 101–5, 223. While representing his people at Expo 67, Moussa visited museums in Canada and New York, whereupon, “fuelled with new ideas, [he] enthusiastically returned to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasha later that year.” On Moussa as leader of the Kanyama School, embracing tourist art while simultaneously insisting on the importance of producing works for gallery and exhibition, see Bennetta Jules-Rosette, The Messages of Tourism Art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective (New York: Springer, 1984), 144–9. Romney Copeman points out in his chapter in this collection that the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67 was still “displaying” Inuit carvers as they worked on murals and sculptures for the entertainment of the public, though it is worth pointing out that in other areas in the Canadian Pavilion complex visitors also observed white artisans working on projects that expressed their regional ethnicities (Newfoundland boatbuilders, for example). Expo 67 Official Guide, 125. The eminent pianist Rubén González was a member of the group during their Tropicana days; see Chris Nixon, “Rubén González, 1919–2003,” Sing Out 48, no. 1 (2003): 220.

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45 On the critical edginess of Aristides Pumariega’s caricatures, see Rachel Hynson and Alice Bourgeois, “Cuba 1963 à travers quelques caricatures: politiques maternelles et pénurie,” Clio: Femmes, genres, histoire 43 (2015): 219–28; and Armando López, “Las dos caras de Aristides Pumariega, uno de los humoristas gráficas más populares de su generación,” Cubaencuentro, 10 January 2008: https://www.cubaencuentro.com/entrevistas/articulos/soy-un-bongoseroque-dibuja-caricaturas-62506. 46 For the key Left nationalist journal Parti pris’s skewering of Expo 67 as “vile mystification,” see the introduction to this volume. Judy Rebbick, then editor of the McGill Daily, recalls that “for radicals like me, Expo was just the extravagance of the corrupt Mayor Drapeau.” See “Témoignages: Expo 67. Judy Rebick, La contre-culture boude l’événement,” Mémoires des montreálais, 11 October 2017: https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/memoiresdesmontrealais/expo-67-judy-rebick-lacontreculture-boude-levenement-0. 47 “Cuba en la Expo 67,” Bohemia 59, no. 14 (14 April 1967): 5–6; “Expo 67,” Bohemia 59, no. 15 (21 April 1967): 52–3; “En Expo 67, una representación ejemplar,” Bohemia, 59, no. 35 (1 September 1967): 12–15, 69. 48 “Cuba: su verdad triunfa en Montreal,” Bohemia, 59, no. 16 (28 April 1967): 64–5, 68. 49 Ibid., 65. The Cuban exile community in the US saw it this way as well, making public threats that the pavilion would suffer counter-revolutionary attack and sabotage; bombs were later planted on and near the site, though none detonated, and police speculated that they were intended to dissuade fairgoers from visiting the pavilion; see Expo 67 Memorial album, 148. The Cubans working in the pavilion were, of course, aware of this; see “Cuba,” Bohemia, 28 April 1967, 65. 50 Charles Oberdorf, as cited in Lownsbrough, The Best Place to Be, 107. 51 Protected: Architecture and Revolution in Cuba, 1959–69, curated by Eduardo Luis Rodríguez, Storefront for Art and Architecture: http://storefrontnews.org/ archive/architecture-and-revolution-in-cuba-1959-1969/; Patrick Calmon de Carvalho Braga, “Arquitectura Cuba and the Early Revolutionary Project,” International Journal of Cuban Studies 9, no. 2 (2017): 235–59. 52 John A. Loomis, Revolution of Forms – Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999 and 2011). Villanueva designed Expo’s striking Venezuela Pavilion, a triptych of large brightly coloured cubes, which not coincidentally bore a resemblance to his former apprentices’ more complex, modular work based on interlocking cubes. 53 Vittorio Garatti and Therèse Kelly, “Choreographing Utopia: Vittorio Garatti’s Ballet School, Havana, Cuba,” Praxis: Journal of Writing and Building 1 (1999): 108 and 104–11; see also James Lynch, “Cuban Architecture since the Revolution,” Art Journal 39, no. 2 (1979–80): 101–3.

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54 Expo 67 Memorial Album, 148. 55 It also bore a striking resemblance to Expo 67’s Vienna Kindergarten, designed by Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer, who also built the Austrian Pavilion; see ibid., 98. 56 Though destined to be luxury rather than popular housing, Habitat did inspire d’Acosta and his partner, Mercedes Alvarez, to design a series of experimental prefabricated cement popular housing units in Havana; see Dania González Couret, “Medio siglo de vivienda social en Cuba,” Revista invi 24, no. 67 (2009): 75. 57 In this sense it was perhaps joined only by Charles Gagnon’s film, The Eighth Day, in the Christian Pavilion. See Bruno Victor Andrus and Craig Moyes’s chapter in this volume. 58 Expo 67 Memorial Album, 148; Expo 67 Official Guide, 125, 129. 59 Fulford, This Was Expo, 18; E.J. Kahn, Jr, “Our Far-Flung Correspondents: Expo,” The New Yorker, 10 June 1967, 132; as cited in Lownsbrough, The Best Place to Be, 107. 60 Some elements of its Expo pavilion exhibits may have come from the Primera Muestra de la Cultura Cubana, put on by the Casa de las Américas, en El Pabellón de Cuba on Havana’s Rampa the previous autumn. “Primera muestra de la cultura cubana,” Bohemia, 58, no. 48 (2 December 1966): 54–5. 61 Unless otherwise noted, the following tour of the pavilion comes from the review in the Expo 67 Memorial Album, 148–53. 62 Fulford, This Was Expo, 18. 63 Jasmin, “Expo 67 au jour le jour,” 25 October. 64 ccwe, General Report, 2899. 65 Domenic Dagenais, “Expo 67. Le pavillon de Cuba,” Mémoires des montréalais: https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/memoiresdesmontrealais/expo-67-le-pavillonde-cuba. 66 “Actuarán más artistas cubanos en la ‘Expo 67,’” Granma, 29 April 1967, 5; “Hacía la Expo 67,” Bohemia, 59, no. 29 (21 July 1967): 48. 67 Robin D. Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 106–13. Moore notes that, with the economic decline of the mid-1960s, and the end of private small business in 1968, most of Havana’s nightclub and dance venues closed, and established artists increasingly relocated abroad. See also Alexandra T. Vázquez, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–42. 68 Jasmin, “Expo 67 au jour le jour,” 26 July. 69 ccwe, General Report, 2878. 70 Jasmin, “Expo 67 au jour le jour,” 28 July. 71 “Expo ’67,” Bohemia, 59, no. 16 (21 April 1967): 53.

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72 “Cuba en la Expo 67,” Bohemia 59, no. 16 (28 April 1967): 64; also the cover picture of the Cuban Pavilion, and “La Exposición por dentro,” Bohemia 59, no. 18 (19 May 1967): 28–32. 73 “La Exposición por dentro,” 28–33; “Expo – 67: Un contraste disfrazado,” Granma, 29 April 1967. “Paseo por la Expo 67,” Bohemia 59, no. 22 (2 June 1967): 44–8. 74 The real and ideological connections of militant Quebec separatism with Cuba would take on increasing significance over the next few years, and on 4 December 1970, what had been the Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 would even be temporarily declared sovereign territory of the Republic of Cuba for the final negotiation of hostage transfer and safe passage to Havana between the Canadian state and members of the Front de libération du Québec who had kidnapped the British trade commissioner, James Cross. 75 See Dennis Molinaro, “‘Calculated Diplomacy’: John Diefenbaker and the Origins of Canada’s Cuba Policy,” in Our Place in the Sun: Canada and Cuba in the Castro Era, eds. Robert A. Wright and Lana Wylie (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 75–95. 76 Reinaldo Funes Monzote and Steven Palmer, “Challenging Climate and Geopolitics: Cuba, Canada and Intensive Livestock Exchange in a Cold War Context, from the 1960s to the 1980s,” in Itineraries of Exchange: Science, Technology and the Environment in Latin America, eds. Andra Chastain and Timothy Lorek (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 137–57; see also Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Nuestro viaje a la luna (Cuba: Fondo Casa de las Américas, 2019). 77 Barbados as well deserves mention. Jasmin, “Expo 67 un jour le jour,” 21 September: “Barbados, the Bajan Pepperpot, accompanied by the Barbados Mounted Police Band. Their traditional songs and dances brought an exotic flavour to the party that was much appreciated.” 78 His classic series of essays on the Jamaican national and racial problematic is Mirror, Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica (1970); see David Scott, “‘Seeing False Images of Ourselves’: Rex Nettleford’s Mirror, Mirror in the Wake of the 1960s,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 21, no. 3 (1 November 2017): 152–66. 79 Sabine Sörgel, Dancing Postcolonialism (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag), 12; see also 86–91: https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839406427-004 (accessed 6 January 2021). 80 Jasmin, “Expo 67 au jour le jour,” 7 July. 81 Dale Carter, “Beyond the Stars and Stripes: Charting Van Dyke Parks’ New World Musical Voyage,” Popular Music 28, no. 2 (2009): 201–4; on steel pan and the national question, Dudley Shannon, Music from behind the Bridge: Steelband Spirit and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 82 The photo of Belafonte at the Indians of Canada Pavilion is reproduced in Lownsbrough, The Best Place to Be, 214–15 (interleaf).

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83 Alex Giroux, “La musique populaire et la contre-culture au Québec (1967–1973)” (ma thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2015), 54. 84 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1993). 85 Carla Marano, “‘Rising Strongly and Rapidly: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in Canada, 1919–1940,” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 2 (2010): 233–59, esp. 252–4; James W. St G. Walker, West Indians in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1984); Leo W. Bertley, “The Universal Negro Improvement Association of Montreal” (PhD diss., Concordia University, 1983); and on Haitian immigration, Sean Mills, A Place in the Sun: Haiti, Haitians and the Remaking of Quebec (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 6–8. 86 Expo 67 Official Guide, 119; Expo 67 Memorial Album, 177. 87 Mills, A Place in the Sun, 43–4. Curiously, Mills does not seem aware that the Haitian exhibition was a bie-sanctioned world’s fair, nor does his history of Montreal’s Haitian community make any mention of Expo 67. The Haitian World’s Fair of 1949, “little” but audacious, was used to modernize the capital city, Port-au-Prince. It had participation from eighteen states (most from the Americas), including the US, Canada, France, and Italy. Officially marking the bicentenary of the founding of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s own exhibits celebrated its founding fathers and anti-colonial, anti-slavery revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Hadassah St Hubert, “The International Exposition of Port-au-Prince, 1949–50,” http://islandluminous.fiu.edu/part09slide18.html; and a reproduction of the commemorative album: Exposition Internationale, 1949–50: bicentenaire de Port-au-Prince, 1749–1949, https://ufdc.ufl.edu/ AA00010663/00001/4j (both accessed 5 January 2021). 88 Austin, Fear of a Black Nation, 34. 89 The Montreal visits of a number of important leaders of the Black Power movement were influential in the development of francophone Quebec’s increasingly radical nationalist youth and student movement, an issue documented in Jean-Philippe Warren’s extensive critical response to Austin (though Warren does not discuss the possible role of Expo 67 in this process); see “Le défi d’une histoire inclusive et objective. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal par David Austin,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 23, no. 1 (2014): 264–91. 90 Steven High, “Little Burgundy: The Interwoven Histories of Race, Residence and Work in Twentieth-Century Montreal,” Urban History Review 46, no. 1 (2017): 23–44. See also Catherine Charlebois and Paul-André Linteau, eds., Quartiers disparus: Red Light, Faubourg à M’lasse, Goose Village (Montréal: Les Editions Cardinal, 2014); and Kitty Scott, “Brian Jungen: Habitat 04,” in Richman Kenneally and Sloan, Expo 67, 211–19.

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91 Lownsbrough, The Best Place to Be, 78. 92 Jasmin, “Un jour le jour,” 22 May. 93 “International Women’s Day Program,” ccwe, rg 71, vol. 144, Library and Archives Canada. 94 Alan Hustak, “Arleigh Peterson Loved Risk,” Montreal Gazette, 16 August 2006, https://www.pressreader.com/canada/montreal-gazette/20060816/2824413 44561722. Performing Waiting for Godot in whiteface was in the repertoire of the Free Southern Theater, the cultural arm of the Civil Rights movement, that toured an integrated theatre company through the US South between 1963–65. 95 Elizabeth Renzetti, “Mairuth Sarsfield: From Little Burgundy to Expo 67,” Globe and Mail, 12 June 2013, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/ national/mairuth-sarsfield-from-little-burgundy-to-expo-67/article12507455/. 96 Jamie Bradburn, “Come Out to Caribana ’67,” Torontoist, 27 July 2011, https:// torontoist.com/2011/07/come_out_to_caribana_67/. According to Lyndon A. Philip, it was Trinidadian-Canadian lawyer Charles Roach who led the Centennial project, and also perhaps made the link with the Expo 67 delegation, having run a Toronto nightclub in the mid-1960s that regularly contracted calypsonian performers such as Mighty Sparrow; see “The Caribana Festival: Continuity, Change, Crisis and an Alternative Music” (PhD diss., York University, 1998), 27–8. 97 Austin recalls they “had played at Expo 67 the year before”; Fear of a Black Nation, 104.

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6 Innovation and the Prospect of the Post-national in the Architecture of Expo 67

peter scriver

From the standpoint of architecture and urban design, Montreal’s Universal Exposition of 1967 was a production of unprecedented scale, as well as both conceptual and technical ambition. Not only would it be the capstone to a decade of transformational urban growth and infrastructural development by the host city, in the context of Canada’s Centennial Year celebrations and the ongoing cultural and political renaissance of Quebec, Expo’s physical planners and architects openly aspired to design the greatest world’s fair ever.1 This was to be an optimistic spectacle of a rapidly changing present that would affirm a vision of an open, technophile world of late-modern humanism and cosmopolitanism, of which multicultural Montreal and the mediasavvy Canada of Marshall McLuhan and the nfb were apposite microcosms. Creative speculation and experimentation in design would push the boundaries of the conventional architectural project to encompass an expanded, interdisciplinary field of environmental design in which core assumptions about the spatial and political frameworks of modern society could also be challenged. Especially striking, however, on the very cusp of the critical turn away from the universalist certainties of the modern project in political and social thought, was the renewed conviction in the ideals of internationalism and the prospect of a post-national future that the fair’s overarching theme – Terre des hommes/Man and His World – would inspire, and that would be invested in some of the most innovative architecture at Expo 67.

Although few of the architectural ideas and technologies on show were actually new, lay observers were generally wowed by the built outcomes. For the first time, radical propositions that had been “in the air” for years were finally rendered full-scale in tangible and therefore testable form. Two of the most striking examples were Habitat, the hill-town-like complex of pre-fabricated housing units designed by the young Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, and the soaring tensile structures that the architectural-engineer Frei Otto had pitched to shelter the open-air exhibits of the West German Pavilion. Also unforgettable was the so-called biosphere in which the US exhibits were displayed: the largest geodesic dome that had yet been erected by its futurist inventor/engineer, Buckminster Fuller. Each of these extraordinary structures would become iconic exemplars for subsequent generations of architectural students of the benign prospect that many social theorists and urban planners still entertained for a mega-structural approach to designing the future city. Real progress in actual design-driven developments in the “real world” seemed to be imminent. From expert critics, praise was more cautious and discerning. The overall impression of the fair was of a “middle-world of hesitation,” as the editor of Progressive Architecture, an influential American professional journal, expressed it. It was a world that hovered between the monumental and the intimate, high-tech wizardry and the (no-tech) certainties of traditional building forms and associations, and the increasing allure of artificially mediated perception that threatened to render the atavistic tangibility and surety of the actual physical mass, volume, and space of architecture all but obsolete.2 On the spectrum of these wide-ranging tendencies, and considering the extremes to which some of its neighbouring provincial and national pavilions had expressed these, the Quebec Pavilion might have been regarded as a relatively unremarkable work of architecture at first glance. Upon closer scrutiny, however, it becomes apparent that its design innovations were not only radical but defied any charge of hesitancy or ambiguity. Whilst the cultural and political significance of this architectural avatar of the Quiet Revolution has been interpreted previously,3 the intention of this chapter is to re-examine how this celebrated icon might also be regarded as one of a number of contributions to Expo’s architecture that can also be interpreted – paradoxically perhaps – from the post-nationalist perspective of the fair’s broader theme. Beginning with the Quebec Pavilion, but focusing in particular on the transnational architectural career and perspectives of one of its principal designers, the chapter will proceed to articulate some of the formal and ethical quandaries that the inherent tensions in the Expo brief – between the parochial and the universal

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I.1 Indians of Canada Pavilion behind flags of the participating nations at Expo 67.

3.6 Maquette of Norval Morrisseau, Mother Earth, 1967. 3.8 Right Maquette of Alex Janvier, Beaver Crossing Indian Colours, 1967.

3.9 Still from Indian Memento: hostess Janice Lawrence at home in Silyx. 3.11 Below Still from Indian Memento: hostess Janice Lawrence in downtown Montreal.

4.1 Canada Pavilion at night, Montreal 1967.

6.2 Early sketch of the proposed Quebec Pavilion from the original competition-winning submission (Luc Durand, 1964).

7.1 Top Pavilion of the Province of Quebec. Postcard, artist unknown. BAnQ. 7.3 Bottom Representing Quebec’s international presence at Expo 67 via a multiscreen display of visiting world dignitaries (Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo).

8.1 Album cover, Terre des Bums, 1966. From left to right: Jean-Guy Moreau, Mouffe (Claudine Monfette), Robert Charlebois.

7.4 Opposite top and bottom Hostesses in uniforms created by the Quebec designer Michel Robichaud. (Québec à l’heure de l’Expo). 7.5 Opposite bottom Models outfitted in typically buoyant 1960s fashion (Québec à l’heure de l’Expo).

9.1 Schematic map, showing the location of the ITC on the Cité du Havre, International Trade Centre brochure.

9.4 Opposite top Marcelle Ferron window of the International Trade Centre. 9.5 Opposite bottom Courtyard/terrace of the International Trade Centre showing windows by Marcelle Ferron.

9.8 International Trade Centre, entrance, “Inauguration et vues de l’Expo 67, Montréal, Québec,” 1967.

9.11 Left Corridor of the International Trade Centre, looking towards the Expo Club, showing Marcelle Ferron windows. 9.13 Below “Verrière Marcelle Ferron au métro Champ-de-Mars,” La Presse, 14 January 1999.

10.7 The heart returns the medical gaze. Still from Miracles in Modern Medicine.

12.1 Lobby card for the Kommissar X film Kill, Panther, Kill, showing the West German Pavilion at Expo 67.

13.1 Hyperman, hero of Expo 67.

– posed for the pavilion’s designers and other architect peers. A comparative discussion of the pavilion designs for some of the many other exhibiting nations that were also emerging from colonial pasts into hopeful new states of political and social becoming – including India, Australia, and the collective of sub-Saharan countries that comprised Africa Place – reveals comparable design intentions and unexpectedly interconnected design histories.

A Paragon of Modernist Sophistication Relative to the familiar nation-boosting cant and regionalist romanticism of pavilion design in the tradition of previous world fairs, the Quebec Pavilion attracted both popular and critical acclaim for its decidedly cool and unsentimental design qualities. Particularly striking, and still novel at the time, was the translucence of its reflective glass exterior. A winner of the prestigious Massey Medal in 1967, the top annual accolade of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, experts concurred that it was among the most technically sophisticated pavilions of the fair. Yet, its sober elegance contrasted markedly with the structural and sculptural exhibitionism of the large majority of Expo architecture. In contrast to its immediate neighbours, for example – the British Pavilion with its monumental flagstaff and scenographic faux-brutalist panoply of asbestos concrete, and what some critics would dismiss as the ludicrous non sequitur of the adjacent “Chinese-lantern” inspired French Pavilion – the sheer luminance of the Quebec Pavilion seemed closer than any, in terms of an architectonic analogue, to the nature of the projected media (film, 35mm transparencies) of which the exhibition content of this and so many other Expo pavilions was substantially comprised.4 Serenely chic, even conservative with its classical symmetry and overall formal composure, the pavilion epitomized for many Québécois the supreme confidence and quiet determination of the ongoing Révolution tranquille.5 The design had been procured through an open and widely subscribed architectural competition staged in 1964, and the fact that the unanimously selected winners that had emerged from that process – Louis Joseph Papineau, Michel Le Blanc, Guy Guérin-Lajoie, and Luc Durand – were a recently formed team of young and relatively unproven architects bespoke the progressive “can-do” spirit of that moment.6 As the official jury report described their scheme: “its qualities of originality, power, sobriety, harmony, and advanced technique will together forge the symbol of the Province of Quebec.” 7 Newspaper reports about the competition outcome highlighted the features that seemed most striking and innovative in the selected scheme. It was to be

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6.1 Quebec Pavilion (Papineau, Gerin-Lajoie, Le Blanc, architects; Luc Durand, associate architect, 1964–67).

built upon a stepped promontory surrounded by water and would have “the form of a truncated pyramid” suspended from four structural pillars. The gently inclined reflective glass screens that enclosed the multi-story interior – which was intended to be converted after the fair into a permanent gallery of contemporary art, a music conservatory, and a library – would modulate the solar loading and natural illumination of the building and vary its exterior appearance and internal colouration across the hours of the day and the seasons.8 As built three years later, the final realized scheme had been distilled and reduced to little more than half of its original height and volume. Nevertheless, it was to attract comparable interest and praise from international commentators. These included the influential architecture critic of the New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable, who crowned it as the “Barcelona Pavilion” of Montreal.9 This was a reference, for the architectural cognoscenti, to the paradigm-changing essay in modernist minimalism that had been designed almost half a century earlier by the widely revered German modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the Barcelona Exposition of 1929.10 Indeed, the Miesian pedigree was undeniable and couldn’t have failed to attract the attention of one of the prominent architect members of the competition jury that had selected the winning scheme, John C. Parkin. The principal of a leading

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Toronto architectural firm, Parkin was actually collaborating directly with Mies van der Rohe himself at the time on the project for the new Toronto Dominion Centre (1963–69).11 Mies was now established in the US as one of the architectural luminaries among the diaspora of avant-garde European artists who had been uprooted by World War II, and was simultaneously realizing several major projects in Montreal as well, namely Westmount Square and the sophisticated Isle des Soeurs/Nun’s Island new-town development just a few kilometres up-river from the Expo islands site. Mies had also recently completed the iconic Seagram building in New York as the flagship of the international commercial empire of Montreal’s powerful Bronfman family. Designed in 1958, the Seagram building in particular was a paragon of the socalled International Style of modern architecture in its mid-century reincarnation as the language of glass and steel. This style was serving to re-brand not only multinational corporate power and its expanding global reach, but international institutions as well, such as the United Nations, that were attempting to reframe the international order in the aftermath of the global conflicts of the first half of the century and the ensuing unravelling of the former colonial empires. Indeed, this style of mid-century modernist minimalism, of which prominent commercial firms such as Parkin’s were proficient and unapologetic acolytes, was becoming so ubiquitous by the mid-1960s that it was no longer avant-garde.12 Yet, there was something strange in the ostensible familiarity of the elegant dark glass box that Quebec had built; something that pricked one’s consciousness and made it somehow “other.” Architecture is an inherently applied art, and a multi-factorial discipline in which authorship can rarely be attributed to a single actor. The process of design development, and the ultimate realization of the actual building that arose from the original competition-winning scheme for the Quebec Pavilion, was no exception. The corporate-modern elegance of the final package was what might have been expected of the young partnership of Louis-Joseph Papineau, Guy Gérin-Lajoie, and Michel Le Blanc, later known as pgl. Established in 1958, the three principals had each been students of Professor John Bland at the McGill University School of Architecture. Under Bland, the postwar curriculum of the McGill school had been restructured closely on the model of the modernist Bauhaus course that Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, among others, had transplanted to various elite American architecture schools, such as Harvard’s Graduate School of Design on which Bland had benchmarked his program. In parallel with the pavilion project, pgl were also the architects responsible for designing the structurally and graphically sophisticated Peel Street Station for the new Montreal metro. Following Expo, they would revisit and develop

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some of the most innovative technical and planning principles of both the Quebec Pavilion and the metro scheme in their design for Montreal’s Mirabel International Airport, realized in the early 1970s.13 However, the competition-winning distinction of the original pavilion concept also reflected the seminal collaboration of the fourth member of the original design team, Luc Durand, who was an associate of the pgl partnership between 1962 and 1964.14 Durand (1929–2018) was another emerging architect of the same generation as his pgl colleagues. He had been born and schooled in Montreal, but the altogether different path he had followed to gain his professional training, including early career experience as far afield as India, had predisposed him to approach the question of an appropriate architecture for Quebec in its moment of new awakening from a substantially different perspective. This approach also reflected the engagement of this particular member of the design team with a set of larger design issues that concerned a number of other Expo architects. These issues revolved around the question of how new forms, materials, spatial structures, environmental systems, and ways of seeing could open the minds of a de-colonizing world to the prospects of a more universally equitable order and understanding of the relationships between society and space. With reference to the designs of some of the other Expo pavilions that sought to foreground this emerging global sensibility from other self-consciously post-colonial points of view, a close reading of Luc Durand’s direct and formative encounter with newly independent India informs a somewhat surprising, more plural understanding of possible formal sources for the Quebec Pavilion, and how it might be interpreted as the putative icon of the resurgent francophone nation within the Canadian dominion.

A Post-colonial Perspective When Luc Durand joined pgl, in 1962, he had only just returned to Quebec after over a decade of studies and professional work experience overseas. This had culminated in New Delhi, where he had arrived in 1959 and quickly developed a thriving architectural practice. In the context of rising political tensions in South Asia in the early 1960s, however, and the concurrent political and cultural renewal in Quebec, he had decided that it was time to bring his wife and growing young family back home.15 Durand’s distinctive hand and what appear to be India-inflected ideas about public space and architecture are discernible in the early free-hand design sketches that were drawn two years later for the Quebec Pavilion competition. While the river would be a ubiquitous feature of the exhibition site, with its matrix of shallow canals and the powerful flow of the Saint Lawrence coursing

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6.2 Early sketch of the proposed Quebec Pavilion from the original competition-winning submission (Luc Durand, 1964).

past the Expo islands, a more contemplative and elemental relationship to water seemed to inform the island-pavilion-like concept and design details of the initial scheme. The stepped, people-focused articulation of the water’s edge and the strange monumentality of the truncated pyramidal volume that floated above, and the vivid colour and graphic intensity that the felt-pen sketches evoked of the interior, were hardly clichés of Quebec. Arguably, however, these were strangely familiar elements from the perspective of everyday Indian experience, where the hulking profiles of monumental temples and

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tombs overshadow the vibrant urban fabric of contemporary commerce and craft, and the ubiquitous infrastructure of the step-like “ghats” that line the riverbanks and water-edges – mediating between dry and wet, culture and nature, polluted and pure – are archetypes of daily life.16 Durand had made his earlier passage to India indirectly, by way of Switzerland. Having rejected the conservativism of the initial course of studies he began at the École des Beaux Arts in Montreal in 1949, he had ultimately resumed and completed a diplôme in architecture at the Université de Genève in 1957. Seeking a more progressive training in architecture, Durand had also been attracted to the more cosmopolitan ethos of the program in Geneva, in which other francophone architectural students from emerging new nations around the world, primarily in post-colonial Africa and Asia, were strongly represented.17 After completing his studies and briefly returning to Canada where he had worked on the designs for the new cbc headquarters in Ottawa, it was an invitation from another young Geneva-based architect, Jack Vicajee Bertoli, who was connected to the powerful Tata family and business empire in India, that laid the path to New Delhi.18 Durand initially returned to Switzerland to assist Bertoli with the design of a small temporary pavilion to represent India at the 2nd International Atomic Energy Conference, which was convened in Geneva in 1958 at no less a venue than the Palais des Nations, the European headquarters of the United Nations. In that same year Durand is also thought to have worked on a submission for the international competition for the new Toronto City Hall.19 But it was a further commission of Bertoli’s to design a new jetage reservation office for Tata-owned Air India that subsequently took both men to New Delhi in 1959. While Bertoli was to depart again soon after, Durand completed the job and was attracted to stay on in India and pursue further commissions on his own. Among a plethora of residential and commercial projects undertaken, Durand was to design no less than eighteen exhibition pavilions over the next three years, including another commission from Air India for the airline’s installation at the Indian industrial fair of 1961.20 In the gaze of the international community the new-born India of the 1950s was the poster child of post-colonial nation-building and planned economic development. Industrialization was the priority of the Indian government’s second five-year plan (1957–61), and the fledgling democracy’s doors were still open to all who could invest in or guide its budding public and private enterprises technically to accelerate their progress.21 In the domain of architecture and urbanism, the Swiss-French modernist architects Charles Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier) and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret22 were the most celebrated of a number of influential

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international consultants who were engaged in major projects in India in this period, many of whom were working for agencies such as the Ford Foundation and the United Nations. Durand quickly became engaged himself with other Ford Foundation–commissioned consultants working on the 1960 master plan for Greater Delhi, and had soon attracted commercial and private residential design commissions as well. As one of few resident expatriates, however, Durand had also quickly become an insider, both professionally and socially, in the small circle of modernist architects, designers, and urbanists in New Delhi who were energetically exploring how progressive design and design-thinking could further open up India to the world. These included the senior government architect Habib Rahman, with whom Durand collaborated, as interior designer, on a private commission to design a large commercial cinema in Delhi. Another was John Bissell, an American entrepreneur and Ford Foundation consultant on crafts industries who was then establishing Fab-India, one of the country’s first and still today among its most successful chains of retail boutiques for craft-produced designer clothing and homeware. Commissions from Bissell further expanded the spectrum of Durand’s engagement in interior architecture to include the design of contemporary rugs and furniture. Through Bissell, most probably, Durand also met the maverick design critic and promoter Patwant Singh, editor and publisher of the influential interdisciplinary magazine Design. A measure of the significance of that relationship, and the evident respect Singh had for Durand’s design skills, was the fact that Singh presently commissioned Durand to design his own private residence. Completed in 1962, this was a capacious modernist penthouse overlooking Delhi’s salubrious Lodi Garden that was to become a legendary “salon” for meetings of Delhi’s art and design avant-garde in the 1960s and ’70s.23 Durand’s most conspicuous contribution to the local design scene during his three dynamic years in New Delhi, however, was the suite of temporary pavilions he designed at Pragati Maidan (“progress ground” in Hindi), the premier exhibition ground in the country for the staging of All-India and international trade fairs. These designs ranged widely, from a hand-built essay in the sculptural plasticity of ferro-cement for the State Trading Corporation of India erected at the 1959 Indian Agricultural Fair, to the striking delicacy and transparency of later structures in steel, fabric, and glass designed for the Indian industrial fair of 1961. Embracing the challenge of conceiving so many parallel and, in principle, competing designs, Durand exploited the opportunity to explore and develop a virtuosic repertory of progressive structural systems, materials, and space-making patterns. At the same time he had often been compelled to innovate frugal, ad hoc solutions in order to realize such

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6.3 Martin Burn Ltd Pavilion under construction. Indian Industries Fair, New Delhi (Durand and Malik, architects, 1961).

unprecedented designs with the limited material and technical means at hand. Such experience and hands-on know-how was to richly inform his later work, not least the work on the Expo project that was to come so unexpectedly soon after his return home in 1962.24 There is little doubt that Durand saw an opportunity to combine and refine some of the most successful of his innovative earlier exhibition design experiments in his seminal contribution to the original scheme for the Quebec Pavilion. Affinities of the latter with the diaphanous materiality and structural and compositional principles that Durand had explored in his pavilions for Thapar Industries, Martin Burn, and Hindustan Industries at the 1961 Indian industrial fair were particularly strong. Had his association with pgl continued into the subsequent design development phase of the project, however, it is open to question whether he would have encouraged the almost fetish-like focus on the formal and technical perfection of the final building, as it was ultimately realized by his erstwhile co-designers. Durand’s Indian experience had heightened his mindfulness of the ethics of scarcity, and the primacy, in his view, of the function rather than the form of constructed space. Indeed, whilst Durand’s patron, Patwant Singh, had praised the spatial and technical ingenuity of the young Canadian’s Delhi pavilions, many of which were documented in Design’s extensive coverage of these fairs, the critically outspoken publisher had railed at the indulgence of Durand’s industrialist clients, and their narcissistic infatuation with expensive new materials such as glass and steel that were incompatible with the needs or means of the hundreds of millions of India’s impoverished masses.25

Worldliness For many who experienced the Quebec Pavilion it was not the perfection of the designed object that was most striking so much as the openness to the inquiring gaze that its transparency invited; an architectural metaphor for the radical opening-up to new knowledge and communication that was transforming the cloistered and conservative Quebec of recent memory into the vibrant, socially and creatively progressive contemporary polity that the pavilion sought to showcase and to celebrate. Consciously challenging the tropes of Quebec’s own colonial past, the pavilion project also underscored for its designers – and perhaps for Durand in particular – their affinities with other Expo architects and designers charged with the representation of de-colonizing societies. But even as these affinities may have emboldened a more emancipated expression of Quebec’s contemporary

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identity, and quickened anticipation of its own independent statehood, a broader consciousness or critical counterpoint in the thinking of architects such as Luc Durand regarding the collective aspirations of those “other” so-called developing societies for a more equitable and globally minded international order was also bringing into question the value and the relevance of the “nation” as such. Beyond mere labels such as the “International Style” – which tended to diminish modern architecture in popular imagination to little more than a formalist tendency in mid-twentieth-century design – the modern movement in architecture had been deeply invested in the ideal of internationalism and associated broader movements in progressive social and political reform since its inception in the late nineteenth century.26 Indeed, the belief that architecture was not just a form or symbol of cultural capital but an instrumental spatial and material framework through which social structures and values could actually be transformed was still a powerful conviction of many architects of Durand’s generation. The potential was particularly apparent to some, therefore, that the architecture of such a significant global happening as the Expo could innovate novel social experiences and interactions that would have lasting impact on the many thousands of local and international fairgoers and participants who would encounter it. The idea that this “world’s fair” might even transcend the convention of separate national pavilions altogether had actually been considered in the early master-planning stages of Expo 67. Intent as the organizers were on hosting the greatest exhibition that the world had yet experienced, a faction within the initial design advisory panel had pushed earnestly to resume and finally realize a thread of radical aspirational thinking about “internationalism” that had long revolved around the conception of world’s fairs. At the close of the universal exhibition in Paris in 1900, for instance, the radical Scottish social geographer and urbanist Patrick Geddes had sought to repurpose many of the ostentatious national pavilions that were soon to be demolished as the permanent home for a form of alternative school of sociocultural evolution that Geddes had trialled over the course of the preceding summer using the exhibition itself as a laboratory. As Mark Crinson interprets the ulterior agenda of Geddes’s unrealized project, “the exhibition of the multiplied nation state would thus [have been] de-nationalised, dissolved into pan-national issues and institutions.”27 Key champions of such a post-national agenda in the initial vision-framing for Expo 67 were the cosmopolitan Canadian-Dutch architect couple of Blanche Lemco and H.P. Daniel (Sandy) van Ginkel. Both were closely associated with the international collective known as “Team Ten” that had been

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leading a critical turn within late-modern architecture and urban planning debate since the 1950s, drawing upon the socio-environmental holism of Geddes, among others.28 Van Ginkel had also been the supervisor at McGill University of the urban design and housing thesis project by Moshe Safdie that was to become Habitat 67 – a product of the radical turn in architectural education by the early 1960s that was transforming the curricula and social outreach of the established university programs on both sides of Quebec’s linguistic divide.29 In the end, however, whilst the big anthropocentric concept of the global commons – Man and His World/Terre des hommes – was to be explored in the content and architectural conception of the constellation of theme pavilions, it was perhaps unimaginable that the host country would surrender the opportunity to celebrate its own nationhood on the occasion of its hundredth birthday, and the same went for the passionately independent host province. Expo’s record-breaking recruitment of over sixty other participating countries would ultimately result in one of the largest and most architecturally eclectic displays yet of the conventional nationalism that had characterized all such exhibitions previously.30 Arguably, nevertheless, there were a number of such ostensibly “national” installations, including the Quebec Pavilion, that engaged simultaneously with the more worldly theme and aspirations of the fair. Two others that invite instructive comparison with Quebec’s in this regard were the distinctive complex referred to as Africa Place, and the official pavilion of one of Canada’s sister dominions, as former settler colonies of the British Empire: Australia. Africa Place was never conceived as a conventional pavilion, but rather as a shared facility that could enable an assortment of smaller and/or poorer African nations to pool resources and participate collectively in the fair. It was one of three such shared installations, including a joint Arab Pavilion and an ultimately unbuilt scheme for emerging nations of the British Commonwealth. Each of these had been directly commissioned by the Expo planning authority itself (the Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, or ccwe) when, late in the procurement process, it became apparent that many of the poorer developing nations in post-colonial Africa, the Middle East, and Asia could not afford to build full-fledged individual pavilions to the scale and standards that the ccwe had specified. There were notable exceptions, however, such as the kingdoms of Ethiopia, Iran, and Thailand, as well as the Republic of India to which we will return presently. Relative to the adjacent Thai Pavilion – a group of delicate and highly crafted pseudo-traditional structures first created for the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair that had simply been reassembled in Montreal – Africa Place was clearly a work of progressive con-

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6.4 Africa Place under construction (John Andrews architects, 1964–66); theme and US pavilions rising in background.

temporary architecture: a distinctive cluster of comparatively abstract shelllike forms crowning a porous base of three-quarter-height terracotta walls and pillars. Whilst some promoters of the fair would persist in describing it as a “village-like” pastiche on its African theme,31 echoing a seemingly obligatory trope of previous colonial and imperial exhibitions that sought to juxtapose picturesque backwardness against the progress of technologically advancing civilization,32 it was actually one of the more innovative and forward-looking pavilion designs of the whole fair. An official technical report on the building designs and systems employed at Expo described Africa Place as “one of the largest pavilions of the geometrical cellular variety,” of which the nearby Cuban Pavilion and the Israel Pavilion were two of the other most striking examples. “[The] design was based on a natural flow pattern which resulted in a series of interrelated and interdependent spaces arranged within a modular system. A natural ventilation sys-

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tem was devised based upon consistent prevailing winds on this section of the St. Lawrence River.”33 The novelty of the solution was spatial as well as technical, a response to what was necessarily a very loosely defined brief which, at the same time, was tightly constrained by a strictly limited delivery time and budget. The result was a formally robust but inherently flexible scheme, with a counterweaving open plan of loosely modularized exhibition space that would simultaneously accommodate no less than fifteen different exhibiting countries from both francophone and anglophone Africa, some of which were only to confirm their involvement a few months before the fair opened. At the same time, from the technical standpoint, the low-cost/low-tech constructability and energy-efficient design of the plywood and masonry structures was years ahead of its time in its focus on what would later be called “sustainability.”34 Quite apart from its presumed representational function, therefore, it was first and foremost a practical solution to the primary question of how to design inclusively and affordably for contingency with an open and indeterminate program. Africa Place, along with the unbuilt scheme for Commonwealth Place, was the work of another young cosmopolitan architectural team, led in this case by the Toronto-based Australian John Andrews. An emerging design maverick on the Canadian scene, Andrews’s recently completed Scarborough College for the University of Toronto was attracting significant critical praise for its radical reconfiguration of the social space of learning. With his focus on circulation and its dynamics in the social production of space as primary drivers of architectural design, Andrews would later be regarded as a key contributor to a broader tendency, “megastructuralism,” that was becoming particularly pronounced and productive in contemporary Canadian architecture and urbanism by the mid-1960s, and that would include his work in the discussion of other talented “locals” such as Raymond Affleck and Guy Desbarats of the Montreal partnership, arcop.35 In the judgement of the British architectural critic Reyner Banham, arcop’s innovative contribution to the thematic infrastructure of Expo had triumphed over the symbolic pomposities of the individual national pavilions and their more celebrated designers through the ludic situationism that the Expo public were enabled to experience spatially and semiotically in their unscripted ramblings within that matrix.36 Indeed, it seemed to be pointing beyond structure and technology to human agency itself as the central concern of architecture in the next era. At a smaller scale than the theme pavilions but reflecting much the same design ethos, Africa Place was a comparable proposition of an open and supportive architecture in which human connectivity was the aim.

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6.5 Australian Pavilion, interior view (John McCormick, architect, with Robin Boyd, John C. Parkin, associate architects, 1964–67).

Australia’s pavilion was most memorable to young fairgoers (as the present author recalls his own impressions as an eight-year-old) for the live kangaroos that visitors waiting in the cue could view grazing at the pavilion’s feet. On first glance, the rather generic, even drab, glass and metal box that the Australian government architect John McCormick had produced with the Parkin Office offered little joy.37 But, once inside, it was the colourful orange and green upholstered “talking chairs” that captured the imagination and mediated experience in an ambient, restful space where much of the content that might have potentially cluttered the interior with physical exhibits was instead translated into the (pre-recorded audio) “stories” that the chairs told through small speakers concealed in their upholstery. Upon closer observation, however, and especially after dark when the striking interior was revealed, the more worldly concept and outlook of the pavilion became apparent. In addition to obvious similarities with the Quebec Pavilion in its structural schema and planning, the use of reflective tinted glass on the

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6.6 Indian Pavilion (Mansingh Rana, architect, and Marshall, Merrett, Stahl, Elliott, and Mill, associate architects, 1964–67).

east and west facades was another intriguing parallel. But the outwardly inclining, shade-producing surface of the Australian Pavilion tended to sharpen rather than distort the reflected images of the neighbouring pavilions. As the cover photograph of a special Expo issue of a major British architectural journal appeared to imply, the irreverent Aussies seemed to be throwing back the imperious gaze of the nearby British Pavilion from behind their reflective “shades.” At the same time, a focal point of the interior exhibit was a large semi-spherical map of the Australian island-continent and its strategic place on the globe, as a self-consciously “Western” society at the threshold of the emerging societies and economies of post-colonial Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. The pavilion thus seemed to be framing a new, transnational gaze that was confidently directed away from the old country to its regional AsiaPacific sphere of influence, in which both the economic and the cultural engagement of Australians was slowly but surely growing, as they too were evolving as an increasingly multi-cultural society.

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Sitting proudly on an adjacent site, the pavilion of India – the “Jewel in the Crown” of the former British Empire – seemed sentimental and myopic compared to that of its colonial cousin, Australia. The designer, Mansingh Rana, was a rising star among the new nation’s first post-independence generation of modernist architects, who had even worked with the legendary pioneer of American architectural modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright, earlier in his career. But the backward historicist allusions that were only thinly disguised in the expressive geometric abstractions of his pavilion design were hardly the forward world-making vision of the post-colonial new world order that critics like Patwant Singh expected India’s emancipated design leaders to create.38 In the July 1967 issue of Design dedicated to the architecture of Expo, Singh pilloried Rana’s design with the damning brevity of his editorial comments on his own national pavilion: “Our architects show their genius by designing for international exhibitions pavilions which look like nineteenth century Indian Observatories … It is the stupor of a people whose vitality has been wasted by centuries of being sat and stood upon.”39

Mindfulness The architecture of Expo 67 was notable on multiple counts, not least the opportunity it gave to young and relatively untested designers like Luc Durand and John Andrews to explore new ideas, some of which would challenge core assumptions beyond the material substance and spatial framework of the built environment itself. Reflecting on the fair in a letter to Patwant Singh – evidently sent shortly after the April 1967 opening and subsequently published in July’s special Expo issue of Design – Durand acknowledged the audacious conception that had been realized. This was an affirmation for Durand that “anything can be done today within the power of thinking people.”40 The terraformed archipelago of man-made islands and lagoons with their spectacular panoply of pavilions and infrastructure was like “a dreamland where all is at its best in a better world. The amazement comes from the novelty of forms gathered like cars in a parking lot. At first glance it is amazing – but if you think a little it is a parking lot of very expensive cars, each one fancier than the other … What we have … is a land with fourteen theme pavilions scattered between [resource-intensive] multi-structural solutions where every country brings forward strange anecdotic forms of stylised architecture.” Conscious of his Indian readers, the McLuhan-esque slant of Durand’s observation on “the message” of the fair was decidedly downbeat: “There is a message – and it is the message of Man – Man and his world with a stronger meaning in French, Terre des hommes literally

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‘earth of men’ … If to educate man with audio-visual means it takes so much effort, I would be inclined to say that we won’t succeed in bringing it to all the world, and it may be that there are simpler means through a better grouping of energy and imagination.” In retrospect, Durand’s choice of words seemed to be prescient of the future revolution in digital media, still a couple of decades away, that would begin to bypass physical architecture altogether to make the virtual worlds of cinematic simulation and social media increasingly lived realities. Within the technical and critical scope of the late-modern moment, however, Durand evidently sustained faith that architecture could still be an instrumental medium for genuine and potentially radical social change. Among the many architectural icons of Expo 67 such faith had been expressed most astonishingly, perhaps, by Fuller’s geodesic “biosphere.” Beyond such mega-structural feats of construction, however, Durand imagined how such a capacity to contain and temper environments on an even greater scale might be applied. Given the chance to reconceive the whole fair, he mused hypothetically, he would have deployed such an environmental enclosure to moderate the climate of the entire site and thereby free the exhibitors, especially the poorer developing nations, of the energy waste and expense of erecting individual pavilion structures, permitting all to concentrate their resources on the message. In this alternative scheme, moreover, the common facilities would have been paid for equitably at a cost equivalent per square foot to the income per capita of each of the invited countries. Indeed, he quipped, there were even more radical purposes to which such a mega-structural strategy might have been applied: “On this side of the world the best experiment that could be made would be to surround a large area, invite people in, close the gates and starve them for ten days as a means of education.” In the end, as Durand concluded bitterly in his closing remarks to his Indian colleague, the fantastic Expo that had been created imparted little understanding of the actual realities of the large majority of the earth’s humanity, including India’s. It was a spectacle of and for the well-fed. “Man’s actions must be for improvement,” he declared, “or else it is suicide.” Durand was to persist and sustain his critical idealism over a long but enigmatic career that shuttled between architecture, urbanism, and other media. Notably, the other most iconic project in that wide-ranging body of work would be the design, in collaboration with Roger d’Astous, of the Athlete’s Village for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Meanwhile, the Quebec Pavilion was to survive as one of the few structures that were always fated to be spared demolition after the exhibition was finally decommissioned in the early 1970s. But the irony of how it was ultimately repurposed could not be escaped. Now used as a black-box theatre, as an annex to the Montreal Casino into which

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the adjacent French Pavilion was duly converted, the signature transparency of its glazed enclosure has been permanently occluded behind an opaque new veneer of reflective gold: a testament to the triumph of the neoliberal economic doctrine worldwide in the later decades of the last century, over belief in the power of democratic politics, institutions, and their architectures to innovate progressive and lasting social change. An echo of the seemingly more noble globalist themes and dreams of “Terre des Hommes” circa 1967 reverberated again, momentarily, early in the present century when a fleeting proposition was floated jointly by civic, provincial, and federal governments in 2007 to relocate the lacklustre United Nations from its increasingly cold-shouldered headquarters in New York City to a hypothetical new home on Montreal’s waterfront at the gateway to the former Expo site.41 But the gradual wilding of the artificially engineered Expo islands over the past half-century is perhaps the most telling and hopeful epitaph to the anthropo-technical aspirations of Expo’s idealistic planners and architects to imagine a better, more integrated world, and how it might be built. In the context of global climate change and its existential threats to the existing world order of the early twenty-first century, nature’s quiet re-conquest of the abandoned infrastructure of the former Expo site is tangible evidence of the power and resilience of natural systems. At the same time, it hopefully reminds us that, to continue improving the world through ever more innovative and integrative design, it would be suicide, to paraphrase Luc Durand, if we don’t integrate future plans for humankind at any scale – local, national, or transnational – with the far greater complexities and non-human priorities of the global environmental system in which we must coexist.

notes 1 André Lortie, ed., The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2004), 142–7; Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan, “Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 5–9. 2 Jan C. Rowan, “Editorial,” special issue on Expo 67, Progressive Architecture (June 1967). 3 Pauline Curien, “Une œuvre pour une vision du Québec: Le pavillon du Québec à l’Expo 67,” in Luc Durand: Itinéraires d’un Architecte, ed. Étienne Desrosiers (Montreal: Productions 7e Vague, 2009), 32–9. 4 For Peter Blake, editor of Architectural Forum, Quebec’s was “the most suave pavilion constructed at Montreal,” whose “mirror surfaces so distort the prepos-

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5 6

7

8

9

10 11

terous French pavilion next door as to make that absurdity look almost intriguing,” quoted in Lortie, The 60s, 54. In the critical estimation of the eminent contemporary French architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, the design of the French Pavilion was, and still is, “monstrous.” André Lortie, Jean-Louis Cohen, and Michael Sorkin, “Learning from Montreal,” in Lortie, The 60s, 150–1. For a more nuanced discussion of the critical reception of the British Pavilion, see Elizabeth Darling, “‘Britain Today’ at Expo 67,” in Richman Kenneally and Sloan, Expo 67, 47–80. Curien, “Une œuvre pour une vision du Québec,” 32–9. For the pgl firm and its seminal role in the modern architectural history of Quebec, the author is grateful to Réjean Legault who generously shared his scholarly insight and relevant material from the related exhibition that he and colleagues Louis Martin and Carlo Carbone curated at the École de Design, uqam, in 2015– 16. I am also indebted to the timely prior research of Mary N. Woods (Cornell University), Étienne Desrosiers, and other contributors to an exhibition and catalogue on the architecture of Luc Durand curated by Desrosiers in 2009. I have relied substantially on that source for biographical and visual material that underpins my discussion of the late Luc Durand, who died in early 2018, shortly before I had hoped to interview him myself. I am also grateful to architectural photographer Ram Rahman for sparking, many years ago, my original interest in Luc Durand’s early career in India, and his enduring connections with it. Responsibility for any errors of interpretation rests, of course, with the present author. “Pavillon du Québec Concours,” file no. 38-D26-29, Fonds André Blouin, Canadian Centre for Architecture (hereafter cca). Translation by the author from the original French: “Ses qualités d’originalité, de puissance, de sobriété, d’harmonie et de technique avancée concourront à en faire le symbole de la Province du Québec.” Rapport du Jury, 2 (unpublished typescript). Unidentified clipping of newspaper report (most likely in La Presse, or Le Devoir) upon the announcement of the competition outcome in early November 1964, with a reproduction of a rendered perspective view of the original competition scheme. “Pavillon du Québec Concours,” file no 38-D26-29, Fonds André Blouin, cca. Ada Louise Huxtable, “A Fair with Flair: Expo 67 Shows How to Provide Variety within a Controlled Plan,” New York Times, 28 April 1967, 18; cited in Curien, “Une œuvre pour une vision du Québec.” For the Barcelona pavilion, among other iconic works of Mies van der Rohe, see Detlef Mertins, Mies (London: Phaidon, 2014). “Pavillon du Québec Concours.” Parkin was one of four architects on the jury, and the only anglophone. The chairman of the jury, André Blouin, was another

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professionally prominent architect and urbanist, based in Montreal, who had been commissioned to write the original competition brief. The two other architect members were Édouard Fiset, the official chief architect for Expo, and Léopold Fontaine, chief architect in the Quebec government’s Ministry of Public Works. Jean Octeau, the pavilion commissioner, and Jean Vallerand, secretarygeneral of the Conservatoire de Musique et d’Art Dramatique de Montréal (the proposed future institutional occupant of the building after Expo), were the final two jury members. For Parkin, see Linda Fraser, Michael McMordie, and Geoffrey Simmins, John C. Parkin, Archives, and Photography: Reflections on the Practice and Presentation of Modern Architecture (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2013). The distinctive place of the firm’s work in the cultural history of modern Quebec has only relatively recently been re-examined comprehensively. A forthcoming critical monograph by Réjean Legault, Louis Martin, and Carlo Carbone reappraises the archive they assembled for the exhibition: Papineau, Gérin-Lajoie, Le Blanc: Une architecture du Québec moderne, 1958–1974, uqam Centre de Design, Montreal, 12 November 2015–17 January 2016. There is some uncertainty about the precise dates and contractual nature of Durand’s association with the firm due to differing accounts by Durand and his former associates. Communication with Réjean Legault, 15 September 2017. Étienne Desrosiers, “Chronologie,” in Desrosiers, Luc Durand, 11–18. Unless otherwise indicated, I have relied on this source for biographical data regarding the studies and early career of Luc Durand recounted below. Durand apparently offered quite a different explanation for some of the formative ideas of the original scheme, but one nonetheless inspired, it could be argued, by an appreciation for the poetic essence of water that had been heightened by his Indian experience. See Curien, “Une œuvre pour une vision du Québec,” 34. Mary N. Woods, “Un passage vers la modernité: Les photographies de Luc Durand en Inde,” in Desrosiers, Luc Durand, 21–31. Smita Dalvi, “Making Architecture in Interesting Times,” domus India 1, no. 9 (August 2012). See also Woods, “Un passage vers la modernité,” 23–4. Based on interviews conducted with Durand late in life by Woods and Dalvi, respectively, little seems to be known about Bertoli apart from his apparent Parsi family background. Desrosiers describes Bertoli as one of Durand’s former classmates: Desrosiers, “Chronologie,”12. Desrosiers, “Chronologie,” 12. However, it appears that this may never have been formally submitted. According to Professor George Kapelos, Ryerson University, who has conducted a thorough study of the surviving archives of that seminal earlier competition in the annals of modern Canadian architecture and urbanism, there was no record of any official submission received from Durand or

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Bertoli by the competition organizers. Email communication with George Kapelos, 12 January 2018. Woods, “Un Passage vers la modernité,” 24–6; Dalvi, “Making Architecture in Interesting Times.” For a more extensive discussion of architectural and national development in Nehru’s India, see Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava, India: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion, 2015), 127–221. Durand was directly introduced to Pierre Jeanneret by the illustrious Swiss architect’s niece, Jaqueline Jeanneret, a close friend among Durand’s Swiss colleagues. Desrosiers, “Chronologie,” 12. Singh later published plans and images of his Durand-designed residence in an issue of his magazine that included a review of a recent exhibition in Delhi of modern Swedish design: Patwant Singh, “A Residence in Delhi,” Design 7, no. 5 (May 1963): 18–24. For the significance of Design magazine in discourse and debate about modernity and development in India in the 1950s and 1960s, see Scriver and Srivastava, India: Modern Architectures in History, 217–19. Original drawings and related documentation for a number of these pavilion designs have been deposited and preserved in the Fonds Luc Durand, cca. See in particular: Luc Durand, “Proposed Design of Pavilion for Martin Burn Ltd.,” 1961, AP121.S2.SS1.D21; and Luc Durand, “Proposed Pavilion for Thapar Industries,” 1961, AP121.S2.SS1.D22. Patwant Singh, “Editorial: The Toll They Take,” Design 6, no. 1 (January 1962): 17. See also Bijit Ghosh, “Indian Industries Fair 1961,” Design 6, no. 1 (January 1962): 18–30. For a definitive critical reappraisal of this tenacious and influential ideal see Mark Crinson, Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017). Ibid., 74. For Team Ten and its role in instilling a radical cultural turn in the debates of the 1950s and 1960s about the ostensibly global universalism of modern architectural theory and doctrine, see Eric Mumford, The ciam Discourse on Urbanism, 1928– 1960 (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2000). Richman Kenneally and Sloan, “Introduction,” 8–9. See also “Territorial Expansion and Urban Laboratory,” in Lortie, The 60s, 142–5. For a general critique of the individualist grandstanding or “naïve belief in the charms of historical revivalism” that was still typical of many pavilions at Expo, see “The National Pavilions,” in Architecture at Expo 67: A Special Issue, Architectural Review CLXII (August 1967). Banque National de Paris, Montréal Expo 67 (Paris: la Photolith L. Delaporte, 1967), 50.

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32 Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris (Cambridge, ma:mit Press, 2000). 33 I. Kalin, Expo ‘67: Survey of Building Materials, Systems and Techniques Used at the Universal International Exhibition of 1967, Montreal, Canada (Ottawa: Materials Branch, Dept. of Industry, Trade and Commerce, Queen’s Printer, 1969), 131, 129. 34 For Andrews’s environmentalist design focus in contemporary and subsequent Australian schemes, see Paul Walker and Anthony Moulis, “Finding Brutalism in the Architecture of John Andrews,” Fabrications 25, 2 (May 2015): 214–33. 35 arcop: Architects in Co-Partnership was the award-winning partnership of Affleck, Desbarats, Dimakopoulos, Lebensold, and Sise. It had simultaneously realized a number of major urban design and redevelopment projects in Montreal prior to and during the Expo developments that would be examined in parallel with Andrews’s seminal Scarborough project in Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). 36 Reyner Banham, “Arts in Society: L’Homme à l’Expo,” New Society (June 1967), 811–13. See also Inderbir Singh Riar, “Montreal and the Megastructure, ca 1967,” in Expo 67, eds. Richman Kenneally and Sloan, 193–210. 37 Kalin, Expo ’67, 134. The interior was designed by Robin Boyd. 38 For the conundrums of representation when it came to designing an appropriate architecture for the modern postcolonial state, see Scriver and Srivastava, India, 166–9. 39 Patwant Singh, “Editorial: The Road Along Which Many Sensitive Men and Women Have Travelled,” Design 11, no. 7 (July 1967): 77–8. 40 Luc Durand, “A Letter from Luc Durand,” Design 11, no. 7 (July 1967): 92. All remaining quotations in this text are excerpted from this same letter from Expo 67 to Design editor Patwant Singh. 41 Christopher DeWolf, “Will the un Move to Montreal – and How Will It Affect the Waterfront?” Spacing Montreal, 25 October 2007, http://spacing.ca/ montreal/2007/10/25/will-the-un-move-to-montreal-and-how-will-it-affectthe-waterfront.

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7 Moving Image: Commissioned Quebec Cinema “à l’heure de l’Expo”

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Celebrated as an “optical amusement park,”1 the 1967 Montreal International and Universal Exhibition is equally considered to be Quebec’s spectacular entrance into modernity.2 Yet, historical narratives about Quebec cinema and Expo 67 are virtually non-existent, whether in visitors’ anecdotes, in filmmakers’ professional accounts, or in scholarly literature. Although a significant number of recognized local directors can be found in the credits of the multiscreen films, audiovisual content, and multimodal installations created for the event,3 how the Quebec production community appropriated the commissions was never integrated in the national cinema historiography. The standard Histoire du cinéma au Québec 4 allocates a mere twenty-four lines to the Montreal exhibition, and it is simply alluded to in Bill Marshall’s Québec National Cinema. Commissioned audiovisual works by francophones for Expo 67 remain unearthed, even by the formidable in-depth archival endeavour led over a decade by Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault’s CinemaExpo67 research group. Shedding light on multiple-screen and large-format works presented at the Montreal fair, including some of “the most important films to have disappeared from the Canadian film canon,”5 their seminal anthology Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 does not examine the encounter of the francophone filmmakers – an important emerging cultural formation6 at the time, on both artistic and political levels – with the Expo venture. While briefly acknowledging the tense dynamics of the Canadian and Quebec film

milieux in the mid-1960s as a great number of films were contracted for the event,7 the collection mostly approaches the exhibition’s cinematic production “as a harbinger of the digital era, a precursor to the multiplication of and interconnectedness of screens that characterize twenty-first-century media architectures.”8 The growing literature on film at the 1967 International and Universal Exhibition focuses on expanded cinema and “on art, interactivity, immersion, or the progressive ideals of connection.”9 However, these “filmevents,” as Gagnon and Marchessault term them, were actually commissioned works, and this very aspect of their condition of production has been generally less examined than their innovative technical and artistic dimensions. As demonstrated in the concept of useful cinema,10 the interplay of the institutional, industrial, economic, technological, spatial, and social situations within which films are inscribed is key to their full understanding11 – and that is particularly relevant for a body of productions conceived for varied agendas and displaying contexts in a grand popular mass such as a world’s fair. Film at Expo 67 was at the crossroads of a number of different audiovisual and production cultures. With filmmakers navigating between the National Film Board of Canada (nfb), Quebec governmental commissions, the growing “made in Quebec” advertising industry, and newly formed independent companies and cooperatives, this period is also one of a shift away from traditional promotional or informational documentary. In this chapter, I will attempt to localize and reify the analysis of this cultural moment through the production stories of two titles commissioned by the Office du film du Québec (ofq) to depict “Quebec” on the occasion of Expo 67: Québec sans parentheses / ...québec? (1967), abandoned in the end by filmmaker Gilles Groulx, and Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo (1968), shot during the event by Gilles Carle. Taking into account the social and material dynamics of a budding national cinema industry, and the emergence of new professional groups and practices in the second part of the 1960s, I will argue that this transition was influenced both by what came to be called the “Creative Revolution”12 in advertising, and by the very wind of change that Expo 67 cinematic experiments stimulated. This chapter will first reflect on the historical opportunity and the contested production territory that the Montreal world exhibition represented for the burgeoning local film milieu. It will then contrast Groulx’s commission experience with the ofq with the production of Carle’s “aggressively pop”13 documentary. The latter will be more closely examined as a media text playing on notions of documentary genres and on the national narrative. Historiographic consideration will then be given to the rise of the “soft sell” approach in advertising, in public relations, and in great exhibitions. Finally, I will put forth how such productions are instances of useful cinema worth integrating into

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7.1 “Our Pavilion” … “The Quebec Pavilion” … “was conceived to reflect the sky, the river” … “the minirail” … “and reality” (Québec à l’heure de l’Expo).

the history of Canadian/Quebec cinemas, revisited via the proto-globalist twine of Expo 67.

Before or After Expo 67 In the periodization of Quebec cinema, 1967 is a pivotal year. The cinema of the Quiet Revolution is often delimited from 1958 to 1967, with subsequent periods qualified by scholars as “From Expo 67 to the October Crisis,”14 as “A Cinema of Economic and Political Contestation (1968–1974),”15 or as “Maturity (1969–1994).”16 In other words, there is a before and an after 1967, but what about the works that were made for and at the Montreal exhibition that very same year? The 1960s represent a decisive period for the establishment of Quebec cinema. In 1956 the Canadian Film Board had moved from Ottawa to Montreal in order to escape the direct influence of the federal government and to increase the involvement of francophones.17 At the beginning of the following

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decade, these filmmakers were busy consolidating the French Unit at the nfb, at times trying to transform their projects into feature fictions within the institution. Quebec’s private film and television sectors were also starting to grow. A handful of companies, with filmmakers as part of their management, was structured and equipped to take on the complete production process. In the advertising industry, the wind was turning, too. Until then, campaigns were mostly created in the usa or in Toronto and translated or adapted for the French-Canadian market. Now, with luminaries such as Jacques Bouchard18 championing the production of native French-language advertising through the Publicité-club de Montréal, business was booming for pioneering firms such as bcp (Bouchard, Champagne, Pelletier) in Montreal and Cossette in Quebec City. With their proudly “made in Quebec” advertisements, such agencies would become cultural intermediaries both benefiting from and contributing to the Quiet Revolution’s nationalist affirmation, while providing work for a great number of actors, filmmakers, and musicians in the audiovisual sector. With the next universal exhibition coming to town, many directors, but also producers and government agents, took part in an endeavour that would turn out to be historic on several fronts. Suddenly, more filmmakers had an incentive to unite and establish companies and cooperatives to make the most of the business and creative opportunities brought forward by the event. It could help them generate revenue they could reinvest in their own films later, which would prove critical at a time when public financing was still at the advocacy stage. Seeking autonomy from the federal, majority anglophone production hub of the nfb,19 they would have the chance to represent Quebec on film before an international audience in the first (and to this day only) official Category 1 World Exposition to be held in North America. The event could also potentially offer these creators an opportunity to experiment with new projection spaces designed as part of exhibition visits in pavilion contexts. Federal agencies such as the cbc/Radio-Canada and the nfb would play a major role at Expo 67 – the first providing extensive coverage of the event, the latter serving to advise the Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition on audiovisual matters and, of course, producing many films. The groundbreaking Labyrinth multiscreen pavilion was designed by some of the nfb’s Unit B star filmmakers20 and the institution commissioned three films to document the “Canadian government participation” at the 1967 exhibition,21 as stated in their credits. The organization, moreover, sent some of its civil servants to the fair; younger ones such as Jacques Godbout, who worked on the Man and the Community Pavilion, and senior ones such as director and producer Roger Blais,22 who was loaned to the Expo 67 development department to ensure cinematic

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quality, respect for the overarching theme, and on-site coordination of the films. Raymond-Marie Léger, employed for over a decade in various capacities at the nfb, was another figure who would leave the institution for the Montreal exhibition. He was named audiovisual production executive assistant23 to the Quebec Pavilion general commissioner Jean Octeau in 1965. As such, he was ex-officio affiliated with the ofq, the provincial government’s photography and film arm,24 whose director was his ex-nfb colleague André Guérin.25 The government of Quebec, through different ministries and via the ofq, had $250,000 to commission works from the independent sector for Expo 67. Although a number of young companies shared the bonanza, two stood out.

Les Cinéastes associés vs Onyx Films Blais and Léger were sympathetic to filmmakers and committed to the evolution of a genuine Quebec film industry. In 1965, Léger arranged a secret meeting with nfb talents such as Denys Arcand, Michel Brault, Jean Dansereau, Bernard Gosselin, and Gilles Groulx.26 As Arcand recounted, Léger suggested they create a company from which the Quebec Pavilion could commission its productions. Almost overnight les Cinéastes associés was founded27 with Groulx as president. With a wealth of connections and experience, and businessmen on board, Onyx Films would become another key player in the production of audiovisual material for Expo 67. Established in 1962 by André and Pierre Lamy, Onyx merged with Les Films Claude Fournier in 1964. Fournier, who had left the nfb to work in New York with famed documentary filmmakers Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, and D.A. Pennebaker, had returned to Montreal in 1962 to set up his own production house. Onyx would grow into one of the first and most important film companies in the country, becoming even larger than the better-known Ottawa-based Crawley Films. At the time, Onyx was producing an average of 150 television ads a year, tv series for Radio-Canada (for example, Jeunesse oblige and Les insolences d’une caméra – a local version of the popular American show, Candid Camera), documentaries (Jeunesse année zéro and On sait où entrer, Tony, mais c’est les notes! to name just a couple), and feature fictions (shot on weekends with short ends) such as Pas de vacances pour les idoles. Over a decade, Onyx would bring together various business and creative partners, most notably the pairing of brothers Claude and Guy Fournier, Claude and Denis Héroux, and André and Pierre Lamy. Other filmmakers on the payroll included Arnold Gelbart and the young editor Jacques Gagné. Some became shareholders as well, such as cameraman Roger Moride, sound engineer Michel Belaieff, and the prolific Gilles Carle.

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Carle would be remarkably talented and versatile in the diverse milieus that he frequented. Trained in fine arts and commercial graphic arts at the École des Beaux-arts, he studied with Henry Eveleigh, himself a painter and a renowned pioneer of artistic ads and government propaganda. Before advertising became a recognized professional sector, Carle worked as what was referred to as a commercial artist. After a few years studying at the Université de Montréal in literature and social sciences at McGill, he was involved in launching the Hexagone publishing house. In 1955 he was employed as a graphic designer at Radio-Canada. He was hired by the nfb in 1960 as a researcher and scriptwriter before negotiating a move into directing documentary shorts. Among them was Percé on the Rocks (1964), an iconoclastic and poetic documentary on the Gaspésie region awarded a special mention at the Montreal International Film Festival. Carle would follow up with the “cinéma direct satire” Solange dans nos campagnes (1964, with Louise Marleau and Patricia Nolin) and the feature fiction La vie heureuse de Léopold Z (1965, with Guy L’Écuyer). Initially commissioned by the nfb as a documentary on snow clearing, this comic drama was decidedly political in outlook, with Léopold Z, as noted by Bill Marshall, cast as a “pre-revolutionary” figure, representing working-class francophones exploited by an English-speaking capitalist power structure. This “détournement” production story – that is, subverting the terms of its original commission – would soon become one of Quebec cinema’s foundational myths.28 Especially after the critical acclaim Léopold Z. received (Grand Prize at the Canadian Cinema Festival in 1965) and given its box office success – which contributed to the rise of a popular national cinema in Quebec29 – Carle grew impatient with the nfb’s unwillingness to allow francophone filmmakers the freedom to try their hand at the feature fiction adventure. In 1966, after the institution rejected several of his projects, he jumped ship to work independently. He joined Onyx as a director and artistic supervisor of the company and acquired shares. Carle would quickly become one of the directors most sought after by North American advertising agencies. He accepted a multitude of major contracts to finance his film projects, a situation much less ambiguous to him than submitting himself to what he referred to as “the nfb’s mysteries.” “I had only one idea: to be able to make the film that I hadn’t been able to make at the nfb,” he commented in an interview.30 “Everyone knew that I was working towards that goal. Cinema and advertising were linked in my head, one having to help the other. Denis Héroux did the same thing … and so did Claude Fournier.”31 Much like Claude Fournier, he would soon become recognized both as an advocate for a state-sponsored film system, and, in parallel, for a French-language advertising industry with locally produced original concepts.

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A Contested Production Territory Most contracts for the world exhibition were given between 1964 and 1966, and their allocation would make waves within the Association professionnelle des cinéastes (apc). Founded in 1962, the apc originally gathered some eightyfive directors, producers, and artisan technicians from both public and private sectors. Its goals were ambitious and broad. The members wanted, of course, to debate working conditions; most wanted not to remain “servile servants” of the nfb.32 They also sought to find ways to “assure cinema the place that it has in culturally developed nations.”33 Over a decade, the members of the apc produced an important body of essays and policy proposals, denouncing their inability to represent Quebec’s concerns within the nfb as well as the hegemony of American interests in theatrical exploitation. As historian Eric Fillion underlines, “the association stressed the fact that French Canadians desperately needed a national cinéma d’auteur of their own.”34 He quotes Groulx, who argued that “when we seek to establish an indigenous film industry, it is not only to be able to properly exercise our profession, but above all, because the Francophones need to recognize themselves in a diversity of images, and we are the

7.2 Gilles Groulx at an Association professionnelle des cinéastes press conference, May 1966.

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ones who can create these images for them.”35 By the time the Expo 67 commissions were being awarded, the apc was a force to be reckoned with. The apc would make the news with its denunciation of the disparities in the assignment of funds for Expo 67 productions. Between January and September 1964, now proudly representing, with 105 members, “the quasi totality of French language filmmakers in Canada,”36 Claude Jutra and Clément Perron corresponded with Expo 67 officials to offer the apc’s input for certain projects. They were sent to various service directors by Commissioner General Pierre Dupuy, but nothing came of it, as revealed in a dossier entitled “Commented summary of the correspondence between the Association professionnelle des Cinéastes and the Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition or Kafkaesque Episode Without Resolution.”37 In all likelihood, this preceded – or called for? – the nomination of Blais later in 1964, who, we can presume, would have indeed been a more apt interlocutor. The apc revealed the enormous discrepancy between commissions that Canadian companies and federal agencies assigned to Ontarians and Americans and those awarded to local francophone filmmakers, and they considered filing an investigative report. As Télé-Radiomonde put it in a headline: “Gilles Groulx, well-known filmmaker, does not mince words: ‘Expo 67 is a permanent scandal, an injustice.’” The caption under Groulx’s picture read: “To make films, one has to have food on the table.”38 As the apc dossier documented, out of a total of $12 million for the Expo 67 cinema budget, half went to finance the Labyrinth project, which was sponsored by the nfb, a Crown corporation, and overseen by three of its celebrated anglophone directors. Of the remaining $6 million, 90 per cent went to American companies, 9 per cent to the Toronto industry, and only 1 per cent to the Montreal and Quebec City production houses. “How can we make a living?” resumed the article on a quote from Groulx. Jacques Godbout, another active member of the apc, targeted his ire at the Canadian Pacific Railway, which, for the pavilion it co-hosted with mining corporation Cominco, offered a $1 million commission to two American cineasts, Alexander Hammid and Francis Thompson, famous for the Academy Award they had just won for their New York 1964–65 World’s Fair multiscreen short To Be Alive!39 Air Canada did not hire domestic filmmaking talent either, nor did the Telephone Association of Canada (tac), the organization in charge of promoting Canadian telephone companies supervising the making of the Telephone Pavilion. “These are either companies which provide a public service or Crown corporations. Is it fair that they use money collected from Quebeckers or Canadians to fatten the wallets of American producers?” Godbout was quoted in the Gazette.40 Canadian director-producer Chris Chapman had

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bid for the contract with the 70mm multi-frame technique that he would end up employing for the Ontario Pavilion to much success, but tac awarded the mandate to the Walt Disney Corporation. Blais, once on board as Expo 67 audiovisual director, lobbied Disney to engage local producers, and Torontobased Robert Lawrence Productions was hired to work with American director Robert Barclay “under the technology and signature brand of Disney Studios.”41 Godbout’s ultimate argument was that the Canadian and Quebec film industries would never grow without both the support of Canadian firms and provincial cultural legislation. In the leftist and sovereigntist cultural magazine Parti pris, Raoul Duguay went further, writing on how the “Expo Scandal,” by revealing the underrepresentation of francophone filmmakers in the fair’s commissions, raised deeper questions about the dispossession of the Quebec people. “Of course, the justification will be the fact that the Americans have better technology than the Québécois. It’s easy to find excuses when a people is alienated and crushed beneath the economic heel of the United States, when nobody realizes that its soul is up for sale to all comers, that it is deprived of the power to take control of its own economy and even of its own artistic production.”42 Meanwhile, francophones were no luckier in getting hired to direct any of the many promotional films shot during the event to document the pavilions and activities of private corporations such as Alcan, Air Canada, and Canadian Pacific Railway, and their contributions to the success of Expo 67. Despite its energetic appeals, the apc was not, unfortunately, able to advance the situation of francophone Quebec directors at Expo 67. The work of sustaining emerging local talents remained mainly, then, with the ofq. In 1965, in preparation for the Montreal exhibition, the head of the ofq needed to commission a film, financed by the Ministry of Trade and Industry, to champion a new “Québec économique.” Rather than selecting one of the usual more industrial filmmakers, forged in educational, didactic, promotional, or touristic approaches, Guérin would choose an auteur whose reputation was on the rise. Director and editor Gilles Groulx was about to achieve international recognition for his nfb short documentary on hockey, Un jeu si simple (1964– 65). His first feature Un chat dans le sac (1964, with Barbara Ulrich and Claude Godbout), depicting the relationship between a fledgling French-Canadian intellectual going through an existential crisis and a young anglophone actress from a Jewish background, had been hailed as a revelation. Today, this French New Wave–inspired œuvre, complemented by an original John Coltrane soundtrack, is deemed a classic, “the philosopher’s stone of the history of our national cinema.”43 It also happened to be a détournement film.

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Les Cinéastes Associés/Gilles Groulx: Le Québec sans parenthèses With a pitch entitled Québec à l’âge d’or, Groulx would be chosen to direct what was (surprisingly) the first ofq cinematographic portrait of the province – “an existential fact so difficult to grasp that it has a name: Québec,” as Guérin would later put it.44 Shot on 35mm, the twenty-eight-minute film project was optimistically aimed at a wide audience: both the local population and the filmgoers of Western Europe, since the initial goal was to distribute it through international networks to attract foreign investment. The plan was to create versions in French, English, and German. The ofq’s working title was Québec industriel – which Groulx quickly renamed Québec sans parenthèses.45 Groulx appeared to be confident that he could bring the commission around to his vision, with his directorial focus soon shifting toward Quebec’s historical and political affirmation instead of its economic growth. Signs like “Liberté” or “Vive le Québec libre!” pop up in a few sequences, and the otherwise rather serious voice-over frequently refers to Quebec as a country. Beautifully filmed by Michel Brault using natural light and colour as well as black and white, the shots, with their noticeable zooms and travellings, emphasize a sense of active and multi-perspective observation. In its final version, the film presents a series of scenes connected by the presence of a man who seems on a mission. However, the mysterious unnamed figure is played by none other than poet and journalist Gérald Godin. On a jazzy soundtrack, he is seen driving across the Jacques Cartier Bridge, following a high-heeled woman into the Université de Montréal’s computer room, and can be recognized in silhouette shivering in “Nouveau-Québec” (Nunavik). The opening segment essentially represents Montreal as a construction site, with visible pollution suggesting a critique of the metropole’s unbridled industrialization. The film then turns into a road trip of sorts inviting us to observe Quebec’s whole territory and its people. We are taken to Manicouagan, onto the Manic-5 dam building site with its 3,000 workers, and into a classroom in “Fort Chimo” (Kuujjuaq), with young Inuit travelling on dog sleds. The final sequence is in Quebec City, the capital of the “State of Quebec.” Given that this was an ofq commission, Groulx seems to have had a relatively free rein. However, the production process became quite intricate along the way. In early 1966, Groulx, who had by then accrued a great deal of experience defending his views before various officials, would have to do so on the RadioCanada television show Cinéma 66 during an interview about his new project.46 “Is it essentially a description of current Quebec, or historical Quebec

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… or the future [Quebec]?” the journalist Gilles Ste-Marie asked. Groulx explained, “I wanted to make a film on the intrinsic character, the existential character of Quebec. That is, a Quebec … assuming its own specificity, its own territory, belonging to its own citizens.” He would add that the film was not a description, but rather an interpretation, and that objectivity was a historically determined blur. Asked to comment on the state of cinema in Quebec, Groulx stated that the very fact that he had to do such commissioned (and, we can read between the lines, “complicated”) work was indicative of the bleakness of the situation. Expressing gratitude to the ofq for giving him a job, he nonetheless lamented the lack of public film funding, which meant that he had to “wade through the meanders of the documentary” instead of directing his next fiction film. He would conclude the interview by suggesting that a feature invited to festivals and events around the world often did better in promoting Quebec than dozens of short informational documentaries. Over the course of the two-year production process, Groulx would be asked to make many cuts and additions to meet the requirements of the Ministry of Trade and Industry – which at one point sent a list of new industrial developments involving million-dollar investments which “could serve as a target for the camera.” He would be expected to integrate numerous figures and official statistics into the voice-over written and read by Godin, whose style was also critiqued.47 This negotiation process can be followed in a fascinating production correspondence between Groulx and the head of the ofq, Guérin. It offers valuable insight into Groulx’s cinematographic posture and reveals the challenges faced by cultural intermediaries such as Guérin, who appeared caught between the demands of ministries and the desire to facilitate the work of a filmmaker hired precisely for his auteur sensibility (and whose sovereigntist inclinations he shared).48 Groulx wanted to reflect on, not just reflect, “le Québec économique.” He writes to Guérin: “The film will soon slide towards being either a souvenir album or an exercise in bombastic didacticism. The presence of too many different themes, the insistence on including uninteresting elements, the need to move too quickly from one thing to another, will only confuse the viewer who will see nothing but a mere ‘documentary.’”49 Interestingly, it was also the very notion of documentary that was being debated here: its function, according to employees of the ofq and the ministry, was to enable the audiovisual illustration of information, while Groulx wished to appropriate the medium in the service of a unique interpretation of reality. In the midst of the Quiet Revolution’s reform of institutions and cultural mores, the filmmaker was caught between his artistic and political commitments and the demands for multiple revisions from the ofq’s civil servants.50

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The making of the film would take twice as long as originally planned, and necessitate additional funding approved by the Quebec Treasury Board, before eventually going astray. The editing had been so compromised – and we can suspect this even while looking at the final version of the film – that Groulx declined to complete it. He distanced himself from the production and ended up removing his name; in the credits, the eighteen collaborators, including major names such as Serge Beauchemin, Michel Brault, Marcel Carrière, François Cousineau, Michel Garneau, and Gérald Godin are simply listed in alphabetical order, their individual contributions not made explicit. Director and editor Jean Dansereau, who acted as the Cinéastes associés producer, did not include himself in the credits either, even though he was the one to take over the film. Godin had written, as he put it, the “millionth and last (?) version of a commentary that I did not put my name to,”51 but he was removed by the ofq agents as the voice-over narrator and replaced by a professional (the poet and journalist Michel Garneau). The film’s original title was ultimately changed to …québec? – without even a capital Q.52 Some scholars such as Yves Lever have seen it as a good example of a commissioned production which managed to retain the imprint of its author:53 “The portrait of Quebec that emerges from the film is not as promotional as the bureaucrats of Industry and Commerce wanted it to be.”54 It was, however, not exactly a positive venture for the recently formed Cinéastes associés. In June 1966, Jean Lesage’s Liberal Party was defeated and Daniel Johnson’s Union Nationale came to power. The Ministry of Trade and Industry chose not to show …québec? either at Expo 67 or abroad, and instead commissioned a new documentary from Onyx – “from friends of the Party,” as Denys Arcand would put it.55 It is likely that the filmmakers had already met their new client, since Onyx filmed the advertising campaigns of all political parties at that time.

Onyx Films/Gilles Carle: Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo During the period of production for Expo 67, Onyx was at its peak, with 150 full-time employees and fourteen editing suites in its main office at 355 Place Royal in Old Montreal. In 1965, as part of the government’s clean-up campaign in preparation for the Montreal exhibition, Claude Fournier was commissioned to make a one-minute animated tv ad entitled “Astiquons le Québec” (“Let’s make Quebec shine”). In 1966 he created a series of four black-andwhite, forty-five-second television spots for the Quebec Pavilion, in French and in English, topped off with a voice-over in the declamatory style of the Golden Age of Radio: “Do not let anything stop you … Come and visit your

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Pavilion … You will be even more proud to be from Quebec!”56 The brothers Claude and Guy Fournier took contracts for the Venezuelan, Quebec, and Canadian pavilions. Louis Portugais and Arnie Gelbart, also Onyx affiliates, directed a film projected onto eight screens for the Agriculture Pavilion. Furthermore, Onyx produced a series of five half-hour films for the Canadian Centennial Commission.57 Meanwhile, Carle had been part of the team that came up with the concept for the thematic Man in the Community Pavilion’s Citérama, along with Jacques Godbout, Paul Buissonneau, and Jacques Languirand. He also created, along with editor Jacques Gagné, a five-screen mural on national natural resources for one of the six zones in the Quebec Pavilion, La conquête. Last but not least, he was busy shooting “made in Quebec” television spots for bcp. One, entitled “Labatt 50: Quebec Today” showed different regions and trades throughout the province, with slogans such as “Dans la Belle Province, y’a rien qui Labatt” (playing on the name of the brand in French – “In the Belle Province, there’s nothing that beats it [la batte]”).58 These could easily have doubled as government-sponsored promotion of tourism, echoing the rising nationalist “responsive chord” for the purposes of advertising. Following the shelving of the “film that could have been Groulx’s,”59 another was commissioned by the ofq about state-of-the-art Quebec industries, this time from Onyx. Carle was contracted to direct the documentary, which was financed by the Ministry of Trade and Industry as well as by the Quebec Information and Publicity Office. Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo was shot in 35mm by Bernard Chentrier in the fall of 1967. Aesthetically eclectic, it features Bombardier snowmobiles on the run, the construction of the isis-A satellite, “the cleanest pharmaceutical labs in the world,” “new” traditional pottery made from plastic, Charles de Gaulle’s much mediated visit, and stylish women – very much reflecting in fact what was displayed in the Quebec Pavilion. It includes multiscreen representations of news footage of dignitaries at the world’s fair, as well as Carle’s and Gagné’s own actual multiscreen installation in the Quebec Pavilion. All of this is interspersed with picturesque shots of Expo 67: the mini-rail, the Hovercraft, muscular dancers at the Place des Nations, and a messy and joyful happening by Fusion des arts at the Youth Pavilion. As suggested by the description of the film in the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec’s (banq) catalogue, “the shapes of Montreal’s Expo 67 – not lacking in boldness and beauty – are used as a pretext [for] a rapid insertion between sequences on plastics, electronics, miniaturization, aeronautics and on some mechanical fabrications exclusive to Quebec”60 (emphasis mine). While …québec? portrayed the whole province’s rural and urban

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territory and realities, seeming to contrast tradition and modernization, Carle’s film put technology at the forefront of a new national identity while using Expo 67’s colourful imagery and imaginary to symbolize its modernity. Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo would present an image of Quebec as “right on time” for Expo 67 via its half-flippant, half-postmodern hip aesthetics intended to appeal to Baby Boomer kids. The bold and catchy score by Pierre F. Brault goes from jazz to wah-wah guitars to trendy electronic sounds. The experimental sound design, much like the film overall, distorts “documentary reality,” sometimes transforming realistic sounds and effects into musique concrète. The montage, attributed to Guy-Jude Côté in some sources and to Carle himself in others,61 relies on playful visual associations and juxtapositions – for instance a shot of a woman’s red spiral earring fading into a reverse shot of La Ronde’s red Spirale sky tower, graphically erected against a blue sky. Like a number of Expo 67 industrial films shot on the spectacular premises of the man-made islands,62 Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo borrows the spatial and temporal treatment of the city symphony genre.63 Closely edited to an omnipresent musical track, it opens as the sun rises on the winding monorail with the Quebec Pavilion in the background and ends on the last day of the event. It focuses on the choreography of machines and silent workers in the manufacturing plants and features the fair’s architectural landmarks as recurring characters. To the strains of a marching band, visitors are portrayed literally parading on the Terre des hommes, always on the go, navigating Expo 67’s “megastructure.”64 They do not speak, but are repeatedly captured by multiple cameras, both amateur and professional. As if to add to the sense of the “speed of modernity,” frequent cutaway shots of a speedboat or water skiers on the Saint Lawrence River are inserted as motifs, as well as rhythmic images of traditional African dancers ironically contrasted with technology. We are left, though, wondering if this movement between the “primitive” and the “highly developed” is aimed to amplify or to critically pastiche the modernist narrative of progress. In many ways, Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo is at the locus of modernity, typified by the humanist mythology and the rhetoric of technical advancement to support a certain capitalist version of progress, and of a postmodern era or late (or “liquid”) modernity marked by a deconstructed, popular, and ironical approach to identity and history. It celebrates economic development in high-tech and heavy industry (metals, pharmaceuticals, plastics) without questioning their impact. Much as Pauline Curien has observed for the Quebec Pavilion, the film reflected the economic euphoria of the sixties but was less keen to portray the era’s political turmoil – as if anything could be hidden behind the blazing light of Expo 67. While Groulx tried to create a sociopo-

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7.3 Representing Quebec’s international presence at Expo 67 via a multiscreen display of visiting world dignitaries (Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo).

litical, historical, and even independentist analysis in his Ministry of Trade and Industry commission, Carle offered a treatment that was decidedly unthreatening to sponsors. It seems like Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo was intended to do a bit of everything to please all viewers – and it did. There were two different versions: a twenty-six-minute cut geared towards more educational markets, and one at eighteen minutes designed for the theatrical audience. After ofq affiliate producer Léger struck a deal with Famous Players, Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo ran at the Loew’s and Parisien theatres on Saint Catherine Street in downtown Montreal in early 1968. It would also eventually be included as part of the Quebec Pavilion film programme at Osaka 70. In both French and English versions (the latter, Expo 67: Made in Quebec, adapted by Gelbart), the voiceover was handled by the same narrators,65 speaking in English with their French-Canadian accents, rooting the film locally. Borrowing a French New Wave tone, a man and a woman recite a caustic commentary: – “Our Pavilion.” – “The Quebec Pavilion …” – “was conceived to reflect the sky, the river …” – “the minirail” – “… and reality.” Through the use of deadpan humour, literary narration, and graphic colourful shots, Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo is reminiscent of a famous film of the industrial genre: Alain Resnais’s Le chant du styrène (1958), which featured a poetico-mordant commentary written by Raymond Queneau and the grand musical score of Georges Delerue.

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Pointing to a transformation in the sort of films that the government was commissioning, Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo was also part of the shift in management of the Belle Province’s image.66 As we know, over the course of the 1960s the national self-image moved from the dominant representation of a Catholic French-Canadian people to the great collective narrative of modern Quebec. As Curien (2003) has argued, Expo 67 provided an original and unprecedented laboratory for both illustrating and speeding up this passage from one trope to another. “We don’t go to school in dog sleds anymore,” said Carle in an interview about his new film – pictured in shades in the Photo Journal.67 In it he explains that Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo was made in reaction to an Encyclopedia Britannica short film portraying French Canadians going to school in dog sleds – a cliché that would endure for decades. “I have recently seen one of their little documentaries that depict us like this, post-synchronized in France and full of ridiculous accents,” he commented. “Frankly, I am revolted by this folklore. Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo illustrates technological advances we have made, while certain ‘lunatics’ continue to promulgate to the world the image of a backward country.”68 Carle would have the chance to take his creative revenge by proudly featuring, instead, the modern “ski-dogs,” Bombardier’s Ski-Doos, backed by yéyé music.69 One postcolonial cliché would be updated into a national icon of innovation.70 Another postcolonial payback would be suggested in Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo by Carle, a longstanding sympathizer with the condition of Indigenous people. The film opens with narration lines that, borrowing an ironic tone, turn the traditional colonial narrative upside down: woman’s voice: “1534 …” – man’s voice: “Quebec welcomes its first tourist, Jacques Cartier.” – “He occupies the land in the name of the French King … as was fashionable at the time.” – “He gives useful objects to Natives, smokes the peace pipe and visits the deserted country.” – “1967” – “Quebec receives 50 million Jacques Cartiers. They discover a terra incognita: Man and His World!” The commentary implies the existence, and integrity, of a territory that predates the arrival of Europeans. As Erin Hurley points out, it offers an alternate origin narrative. “Carle’s invocation of the tropes of discovery and tourism is not particularly remarkable in the context of World’s Fairs and their publicity … Nor are these tropes uncommon in myths of national origin, particularly in the Americas … However, Carle has reversed the tropes’ usual order; Nouvelle France’s most renowned explorer is cast as a tourist and Expo 67’s crowds play discoverers.”71 The opening voice-over then quickly moves on to what will be the film’s main theme: “The Year 2000 is here, at the gates of Montreal, thanks to the marvels of Technology!” and the go-go music follows.

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Combining Advertising Strategies and Documentary Authority For all his director’s wit, Carle also had his advertising background going for him in his ofq commission. This showed in the editing, the snappy music, the seductive close-ups, and the display of sassy “strong women” (à la Carle, as some would argue)72 striking poses as if on a photo shoot. As these visually striking shots alternated with informative documentary scenes, Carle’s film could literally be read like a moving image version of a magazine, featuring articles interspersed with vivid, sexy ads. In a similar manner, when Carle was part of the development team behind Citérama, he referred to its multimedia installation as “a magazine”: “The articles express what we want to say; the pictures and illustrations are the ‘pop’ inspired settings and projections.” Contrasting with the documentary depictions of people in action working or visiting Expo, the only human figures that Carle expressly staged in Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo were models outfitted in typical 1960s buoyant fashion. This juxtaposition of the female body softening the portrayal of hard-edged, high-tech machinery, wild and raw Quebec’s natural resources (all ready to be exploited), and bold Expo 67 shapes was part of the construction and representation of “modern Quebec.” This type of recourse to Eros was obviously integral to the vocabulary (and very industry) of advertising and to the nation’s coming of age “à l’heure de l’Expo.”73 According to Hurley, the display of colourful female characters in Carle’s film could also be read as part of a gendered emotional labour contributing to the development of the new image of the nation.74 As she suggests, this form of productive femininity was in fact at the core of the work performed by hostesses in the Quebec Pavilion, where, highly visible in their Michel Robichaud futuristic outfits, they were reportedly the highlight of the show. Notwithstanding its brashness, Carle’s film needed to retain its documentary authority to remain legitimate in its commission context. In fact, the script submitted to the ofq boasts on its cover page that it is “A Documentary.” As Library and Archives Canada’s website mentions, somewhat laconically, “The film includes information on Quebec society.” Carle would manage to play the documentary card well and to make clever use of the commissioning bodies’ expectations by integrating, for instance, actual statistics into the narration. As is apparent in the production correspondence between the ofq and Groulx, figures were one of the elements over which the governmental agents tried to maintain control. Nonetheless, in Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo, Carle was able to balance this requirement by privileging statistics relating to ordinary daily life over industry-related numbers. He chose not to mention, for instance, the

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7.4 Top Hostesses in uniforms created by the Quebec designer Michel Robichaud (Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo). 7.5 Bottom Models outfitted in typically buoyant 1960s fashion (Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo).

national industry output in tons of asbestos or kilowatts of electricity, and instead insistently detailed Quebeckers’ access to modern (and not so modern) household “technologies”: – “We are six million Québécois. – “98.5% … have electricity, 96% tv … and 85% a bath!” He points to a “Québec économique” that is increasingly interested in consuming media and popular culture. Carle would, however, thumb his nose at the didactic type of documentary he always refused to direct for the nfb. His strategy: satire. On the making of the Bombardier aircraft, the voice-over goes, “Do we know that we’re building the most cutting-edge flight simulators in the world? … Hence we are helping Man to fly!” The commentary uses humour to elevate Quebec’s recent accomplishments, enabling them to transcend national boundaries and reach a global scale, highlighting how they contribute to mankind, to civilization – obviously with a nod to Expo 67’s overarching universalist theme, Man and His World. Wordplay punctuates the commentary: – “We have invented the mechanical lumberjack.” – “Our black spruce makes the best white paper!” Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo gives the impression that Carle had artistic carte blanche, especially in contrast to the not–Gilles Groulx documentary produced just the year before. With his experience at the nfb, Carle had after all become a master of détournement, but then again, hadn’t Groulx, as well? Where Carle may have had an advantage over Groulx was in his familiarity with the world of advertising; he was likely agile in dealing with sponsors, “doing his thing” while giving them what they wanted. Indeed, Carle represented the emerging figure of “the creative,” characterizing the copywriters and art directors of talent who gained increasing symbolic capital and power over the account executives of North American advertising throughout the 1960s.75 During that era, as Cynthia B. Meyers discusses, the advertising industry’s Creative Revolution would come to replace the rational, product-oriented “hard-sell” approach, filled with facts and numbers, voice-overs and specialists, with the more user-centred, artistic, emotional, and mischievous “soft sell.” Via conceptually and formally intriguing commercials, this communication strategy aimed to counteract consumers’ cynicism and revive their attention. These soft-sell experiments soon could be seen in works created for the major exhibitions of the Cold War period by artists, filmmakers, and designers such as Ray and Charles Eames, Shirley Clarke, and Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.). The Creative Revolution style infiltrated the public relations industry and trickled down into promotional productions, including corporate and government films. Those emerging international approaches came to impact the attitude that local ministries and agencies such as the ofq would adopt in their productions, inducing them to shift further away from informational films or “tourist propaganda.” Carle’s spirited documentary, not only

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7.6 End credits of Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo.

in the symbols it presented, but also in its humour and approach to history and “information,” points to this transformation in commissioned production emerging in Quebec at the time of Expo 67. During that period of soft power,76 the portrayal of industries in fairs and exhibitions was undergoing a change as well. As the universal exhibition historian Roger La Roche suggests, “Expo 67 must be regarded as part of a shift in world exhibitions: nations now displayed their cultural specificities and achievements, while industrial and commercial strength had been the driving force behind the previous ones.”77 Yet it is significant to note that the only pavilion at the Montreal exhibition more typical of the universal fairs’ old tradition of celebrating industrial success was the Quebec Industries Pavilion, sponsored by the Ministry of Trade and Industry, the same governmental body that attempted to transform Groulx’s project into a “souvenir album or bombastic didacticism” – and which shifted 180 degrees to hire Carle during Expo 67, rectifying its shot à la soft sell and soft power. On par with the commonly revered technological media innovations Expo 67 brought forth, this pivotal transformation in approach to film commissions may be, in fact, a substantial legacy of the Montreal exhibition. Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo’s shooting began close to the end of Expo 67, during which cutting-edge displays that embraced the most current marketing, pr, and artis-

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tic practices were celebrated both by international and local audiences. This may have inspired the sharp reversal whereby the ofq took the chance of allowing liberties to an auteur such as Carle, rather than risk being viewed as factual yet dull, if not plain old-fashioned. Some lessons were presumably also learned from the difficult experience of collaborating with Groulx, which, one would like to think, would have had a different outcome at a later time. Indeed, the documentaries produced by Onyx Films for the following universal exhibition in 1970 in Osaka reveal the extent to which the “Creative Revolution” had hit home. These productions, shown in the Quebec Pavilion in Japan, turned out to be strikingly experimental industrial films with soundtracks of avant-garde music and no voice-over. While the American and Pepsi pavilions were featuring innovative groups like E.A.T.,78 the Quebec Pavilion projected ofq and Hydro-Québec multiscreen works by filmmakers like Jacques Gagné and Aimée Danis, with music by Walter Boudreau’s Infonie.

Expo 67 and Quebec Cinema History On many levels, Expo 67 constituted a break between a Quebec film milieu that was, and the industry that it would become. It encouraged the creation of a few filmmaker-driven companies79 and represented for them a form of emancipation from the nfb (if only a temporary one). It gave momentum to the emergence of independent production practices and provided muchneeded money for the directors who had the ambition to produce their own work. For some, like the Fournier brothers, at a time when revenue only really came from advertising and television (which produced most of its shows internally), Expo contracts were critical to financial survival.80 The Montreal exhibition also called for filmmakers to appropriate new creative and technical methods, such as shooting and editing for multiscreen or for film loops made to be inserted as part of a pavilion’s exhibition scenario. Expo 67 represented a great opportunity for government agencies as well. The ofq had commissioned some twenty films or audiovisual elements from almost all the existing production companies, either to be featured as part of the Quebec Pavilion displays, or after the exhibition in theatres or in soft power operations abroad. The event could have been a springboard to develop and increase the ofq’s mandate and influence; however, as Marc-André Robert has suggested, somewhat curiously Expo did not fulfill this promise.81 In terms of film culture, the event offered spectators and filmmakers unique exposure to a huge quantity (5,000 films!) and variety of cinema, international and national, old and new, and exposed them to an explosion of cinematic forms. One of Expo’s indirect legacies was the removal of Church-led film censorship in Quebec. This was not

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only a long-time aspiration of Guérin’s (from his days at the Board of Film Censors), but also of the organizers of the Montreal International Film Festival, who had strategically staged their event on the “international” premises of the 1967 World’s Fair in the hope of opening up the context of film reception. Montreal’s 1967 International and Universal Exhibition remains renowned for its cinematic experiments and praised as a pivotal juncture in contemporary Quebec history, so how can we explain the absence of accounts of how the Quebec production ecology got mobilized to contribute to the “show”? After the event, somewhat like the attractive pavilion brochures handed out on-site or the exhibitions’ displays taken down for good, the commissioned films would become ephemeral. Unlike the titles studied here, most were designed for temporary, in situ, and multiple-media presentations, or seen as mere “audiovisual content.” Hence, they were not considered as standalone artworks with a worth of their own. “While parts of the Expo films were reproduced in conventional formats and early imax, the possibility of seeing the entire works in anything like their original context ended with the demolition of the Expo pavilions in which they were shown,” write Gagnon and Marchessault. “The consequence has been a decline in awareness of the important innovations and landmark experiments that characterized Expo 67, to the point that recent studies of Canadian cinema make little or no mention of them.”82 As their research has extensively revealed, the films’ preservation was not valued, which is one factor explaining their absence from the annals of national cinematography.83 Documentation about these productions has suffered the same fate. Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo, however, is kept both at lac and at the banq, with its script at the Médiathèque of the Cinémathèque québécoise. Contrary to most sponsored works, whose copyrights are unclear because of missing or non-explicit contracts, the longer version of the film can be found online in the Patrimoine québécois section of banq’s Digital Collection, with its English version, Expo 67: Made in Quebec, uploaded more recently in 2021. As for …québec?, after first being digitized by the nfb in the early 2000s for the complete Gilles Groulx dvd box set,84 it was posted in late 2020 on banq’s Digital Collection portal. As far as remembering the Expo 67 Quebec films goes, accounts from spectators have tended to focus on the fair’s most innovative and/or foreign audiovisual works. Visitors seem to have been more attracted, for instance, to the Czech Pavilion’s cinematic experiments than to silent documentary installations on familiar realities in the Quebec Pavilion.85 More significantly, these Expo 67 titles have tended not to be included in either the filmmakers’ narratives of their own œuvre or in their written filmographies, despite their being commissioned for such a prestigious and “historical” event. In their political

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and cultural quest for recognition as auteurs and their aspirations for featurelength fiction practice,86 they saw their Expo commissions essentially as breadand-butter work, not worthy of mention.87 So how did this invisible chapter of Quebec cinema end? Soon after its Expo 67 venture, Les Cinéastes associés wound down its activities, with most members returning to the nfb. Jean Dansereau would direct the “multiscreen spectacle” Comment vit le Québécois?, shot over four seasons, for the Quebec Pavilion at Osaka 70. Groulx went back to the nfb to make a lyrical and fragmented feature film on the political situation in Quebec, Où êtes-vous donc? (1970, with Mouffe and George Dor). Onyx would benefit from the creation of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (cfdc, becoming Telefilm Canada in 1984), which provided state funding for private film production. After incorporating various companies such as Omega Films, Niagara Films, Les Films Claude Fournier, and even Les Cinéastes associés, Onyx dominated the Canadian market until 1970. Following its acquisition in 1969 by the publicly traded computer firm Société de Mathématiques Appliquées, it was resold in 1971 to Entreprises Gelco Limited (formerly Gatineau Electric Light Company Limited). Onyx would be at the forefront of the push to “déshabiller la petite Québécoise” (“to undress the Quebec girl,” as Héroux put it) on the big screen,88 with a new wave of publicly funded erotic and light humorous box-office hits directed by Claude Fournier and Denys Héroux. Emulating an international trend of erotic films launched in Sweden, the body of about ten “Maple Syrup Porn” productions (as Variety would put it) have been of course criticized in feminist analysis.89 They have also been interpreted by others90 as an expression of the emancipation of French Canadians from the dictates of Catholicism. In 1972, paradoxically the same year that Claude Fournier’s Deux femmes en or was an unprecedented success at the box office, Onyx was shut down.91 Carle went on to make flamboyant fiction films that helped inspire the enthusiasm for Quebec cinema in France in the 1970s. He would continue to cast alluring strong women as lead characters, particularly his famous muses and partners Carole Laure and Chloé Ste-Marie. He became one of Quebec’s most influential filmmakers and artistic voices and was honoured with a state funeral when he died in 2009. During a worldwide moment of national (re)definition and a shift in the transnational and local advertising industries, Expo 67 provided an eclectic space for the diffraction of multiplied images and representations. Productions such as Groulx’s and Carle’s – respectively post–Quiet Revolution and on the cusp of postmodernity, talking about the nation with the world in mind, and equally commissioned and auteur in nature – complicate the narrative of Quebec cinema written until now. The examination of films such as … québec?

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and Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo invites us to reflect on the conditions for inclusion or exclusion of film titles in institutions, in the history of cinema, and in national heritage. After all, as the editors of the anthology Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen History in Canada92 have argued, the strengths of Canadian film production have traditionally been in educational documentaries, in small-gauge films, or in films that were neither classic, theatrical, nor conventional. If the works made for Expo 67 were to earn more than a few lines in the histories of Quebec and Canadian cinemas, it would require that the latter integrate multiple types of productions and exhibition venues on both historical and analytical planes. It would imply, among so many essential reconsiderations of what/who to include in the narratives, acknowledgment of the intertwining of cinema, the advertising and television sectors, commissioning opportunities, and the economy of independent cinema. At the cultural intersection of government productions, exhibitions, the commercial industry, and auteur cinema, these films challenge some implicit notions about the history of moving images, as well as expand the collective discourse on the construction of Quebec’s national cinema.93

notes 1 Judith Shatnoff, “Expo 67: A Multiple Vision.” Film Quarterly 11, no. 1 (October 1967): 2–12. 2 See Pauline Curien, “L’identité nationale exposée: représentations du Québec à l’Exposition universelle de Montréal 1967 (Expo 67)” (PhD diss., Université Laval, 2003); Marie-France Daigneault Bouchard, “Manic 5 at Expo 67: Territorial Megastructure or the Connection of Three Spaces” (ma thesis, Concordia University, 2013); Michel Hellman, “Art, identité et Expo 67: L’expression du nationalisme dans les œuvres des artistes québécois du Pavillon de la Jeunesse à l’Exposition universelle de Montréal” (ma thesis, McGill University, 2005); and the epilogue by Jocelyn Létourneau in this volume. 3 Among others: Denys Arcand, Hubert Aquin, Michel Brault, Gilles Carle, Jean Dansereau, Claude Fournier, Jacques Gagné, Arnold Gelbart, Jacques Godbout, Gilles Groulx, Denys Héroux, Richard Lavoie, Henri Michaud, Werner Nold, Clément Perron, Erica Pomerance, Louis Portugais, Marie-José Raymond, and André Rostworowski. 4 Yves Lever, Histoire générale du cinéma au Québec, new revised and updated edition (Montreal: Boréal, 1995). 5 Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault, eds., Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 3.

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6 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 7 Monika Kin Gagnon, “‘All-Embracing’ Circle-Vision 360: Canada 67 at Expo 67’s Telephone Pavilion,” in Gagnon and Marchessault, Reimagining Cinema, 231. 8 Janine Marchessault, “Citérama: Expo as Media City,” in Gagnon and Marchessault, Reimagining Cinema, 80. 9 Haidee Wasson, “Selling Machines: Film and Its Technologies at the New York World’s Fair,” in Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, eds. Bo Florin, Nico de Klerk, and Patrick Vondereau (London: British Film Institute, 2016), 55. 10 Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 11 Ibid. 12 Cynthia B. Meyers, “The Best Thing on tv: 1960s US Television Commercials,” in Florin, de Klerk, and Vondereau, Films That Sell, 173–93. 13 Anthony Kinik, “Celluloid City: Montreal and Multiscreen at Expo 67,” in Gagnon and Marchessault, Reimagining Cinema, 106–36, 269–70n68. 14 Bill Marshall, Québec National Cinema (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2001), 74. 15 Christian Poirier, Le cinéma québécois: À la recherche d’une identité ? vols. 1 and 2 (Montreal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2004). 16 Yves Lever, Histoire générale du cinéma au Québec. 17 Pierre Véronneau, Résistance et affirmation: la production francophone à l’onf – 1939–1964 (Histoire du cinéma au Québec III), Les dossiers de la Cinémathèque, no. 17, 1987. 18 Jacques Bouchard (1930–2006) was a pioneering Canadian advertising executive and author. He came up with campaigns that became legendary, and slogans that were adopted as popular expressions in Quebec. He was one of the founders of the advocacy group Publicité-club de Montréal as well as one of Quebec’s first French-language creative advertising agencies, bcp. He championed social and non-profit advertising and wrote Les 36 cordes sensibles des Québécois (1978 with an updated version in 2006), in which he identified thirty-six cultural traits of the Quebec people. The book was widely appreciated and is still in use in advertising today. It recently inspired the television series Code Québec on RadioQuébec that premiered in January 2021. 19 It is estimated that at the beginning of the 1960s, about 70 per cent of the nfb production funds went to the English studios, according to André Lamy, a former Onyx Films producer who was recruited as the assistant film commissioner for the nfb in 1970, before becoming the government film commissioner from 1975 to 1979. In Denys Desjardins’s film La vie privée d’Onyx Films (1962–72) (Les films du Centaure, 2010, 52min).

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20 The “total environment” experience of Labyrinth was created by Roman Kroitor and Colin Low, who conceived the three-chamber building and directed the two multiscreen films projected within. It was actually a thematic pavilion, Man the Hero, designed around the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. It is Expo 67’s film/apparatus that has probably received the most academic attention over the years, usually referred to, along with Polar Life (Graeme Ferguson) for the Man the Explorer pavilion, as the precursor of imax. See http://cinemaexpo67.ca/ labyrinth/ as well as Seth Feldman, “Minotaur in a Box: The Labyrinth Pavilion at Expo 67,” in Gagnon and Marchessault, Reimagining Cinema, 27–53; Janine Marchessault, “Multi-screens and Future Cinema: The Labyrinth Pavilion at Expo 67,” in Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, eds. J. Marchessault and Susan Lord (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 29–50; Allison Whitney, “Labyrinth, Cinema, Myth and Nation at Expo 67” (ma thesis, McGill University, 1999). 21 The Canadian Pavilion, Expo 67 (Marc Beaudet, 1967, 19 min), Impressions of Expo 67 (William Brind, 1967, 8 min), Indian Memento (Michel Régnier, 1967, 18 min). All currently available on the nfb website, these films shot during Expo 67, as well as their rushes, represent an invaluable record of Expo 67, and more specifically of the Indians of Canada and Canadian pavilions. The nfb also was commissioned by the Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition to produce the official synthesis film of Expo 67: Multiple Man (Georges Dufaux and Claude Godbout, 1969, 15 min). The film experimented with the multi-image techniques featured in Christopher Chapman’s Oscar-winning Ontario Pavilion film A Place to Stand. 22 Roger Blais (1917–2012) was a director (Fridolinons, Royal Journey, Grierson) and producer who spent most of his career at the nfb. After serving as a war artist in the Second World War, he was hired by John Grierson in 1945 and became instrumental in the development of French-language production within the institution. 23 In French: Responsable du programme cinématographique du pavillon du Québec. It is interesting to note how in some official documents “audiovisual” is privileged in English and “cinéma” in French. 24 A new incarnation of the Cine-Photography Service founded in 1940, the Office du film du Québec (ofq) or Quebec Film Board, was active from 1961 to 1976. It was the government agency responsible for the production, acquisition, and distribution of cinematographic documents for all departments and services of the Quebec administration. Its collection of short films, mostly documentary and educational, was used to communicate the activities and services of the state to citizens, and to preserve a visual trace of its ministries’ activities. See Marc-André Robert, “L’Office du film du Québec: vitrine de l’État dans la Cité. La communication des services de l’administration publique québécoise par le cinéma, 1961–1976” (PhD diss., Université Laval, 2020).

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25 André Guérin (1928–1989) was a civil servant who actively took part in the modernization of Quebec cinema legislation, institutions, industry, and culture over a period of twenty-five years. Trained in philosophy (Université de Montréal) and in public administration (Harvard), he worked in international sales at the nfb and in 1963 joined the Bureau de censure du cinéma (Board of Film Censors) before becoming director of the ofq. One of his major contributions is to have abolished film censorship and established the film classification system. Both a well-respected administrator and a cinephile, he took part in multiple reforms to help renew the relationships between producers, distributors, and exhibitors and facilitated the emergence of a national cinema. 26 Raymond-Marie Léger (1929–2003) was a civil servant who had an emancipatory vision of culture. He had himself been a film director and a poet (L’autre versant de l’aube, l’Hexagone, 2004), and he wrote the manifesto Le cinéma: autre visage du Québec colonisé (Champs libre 1, 1971: 77–87) as a president of the Association professionnelle des cinéastes du Québec. 27 Johanne Mercier, “L’Expo 67 de Denys Arcand,” Mémoires d’Expo 67, Centre d’histoire de Montréal (summer 2017): https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/memoiresdes montrealais/memoires-dexpo-67. 28 Among others such as Les Raquetteurs by Groulx and Michel Brault (1958), as well as Le chat dans le sac by Groulx (1964), all produced at the nfb. See Eric Fillion, “The Cinema of the Quiet Revolution: Québec’s Second Wave of Fiction Films and the National Film Board of Canada, 1963–1967” (ma thesis, Concordia University, 2012); Lever, Histoire générale du cinéma au Québec. 29 Marshall, Québec National Cinema, 69. 30 Excerpt from Michel Coulombe, Entretiens avec Gilles Carle: Le chemin secret du cinéma (Montreal: Éditions Liber, 1995), 58. 31 Entretiens avec Gilles Carle: Le chemin secret du cinéma, 58. 32 Fillion, Cinema of the Quiet Revolution, 39. 33 Pierre Véronneau, “L’Association professionnelle des cinéastes,” Les dossiers de la Cinémathèque québécoise, no. 12 (1984): 21. 34 Fillion, Cinema of the Quiet Revolution, 41. 35 “Il ne faut pas lâcher … quand nous voulons une industrie cinématographique indigène ce n’est pas seulement pour pouvoir exercer notre métier convenablement, mais surtout parce que le peuple a besoin de voir des images nombreuses qui soient les siennes et que nous sommes ceux qui les lui peuvent créer.” Fillion, Cinema of the Quiet Revolution, 38. 36 Letter addressed to Pierre Dupuy, Commissaire général de l’Exposition universelle, by Claude Jutra, Montreal, 21 January 1964. Press kit, Professional Association of Filmmakers, press conference, 3 May 1966, Hôtel Windsor, pn 1999 P75124, Médiathèque de la Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal.

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37 “Résumé commenté de la correspondance échangée entre l’Association professionnelle des Cinéastes et la Compagnie canadienne de l’Exposition universelle de 1967 ou Petite histoire Kafkaïenne et sans suite …” Press kit, Professional Association of Filmmakers, press conference, 3 May 1966, Hôtel Windsor, pn 1999 P75124, Médiathèque de la Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal. 38 Télé-Radiomonde, 7 May 1966, 9. 39 To Be Alive! was actually projected at Expo 67 as part of the daily film programme of the United Nations pavilion. Hammid and Thompson both had a rich artistic trajectory which led them to directing their six-screen film for Expo 67 We Are Young! Hammid (1907–2004) was an avant-garde filmmaker from Czechoslovakia, who had created several original advertising films; he was for a period a close collaborator with, and the husband of, Maya Deren (the couple co-directed the classic experimental film Meshes in the Afternoon, 1943). Thompson (1908– 2003) was a painter and a writer before he started a career of innovations in film which led him from “cubist documentary” to multiscreen to imax. See Anthony Kinik, “Celluloid City,” 106–36. 40 “Québec’s Film-Makers Angry at Contracts Given in US,” Montreal Gazette, 4 May 1966. 41 Gagnon, “‘All-Embracing’ Circle-Vision 360°,” 232. 42 Raoul Duguay and Andrée Paul, “Production, diffusion et enseignement des arts: pour une politique culturelle,” Parti-pris 4 (May–August 1964), 131. The dossier on cinema was actually entirely penned by Raoul Duguay (1939–), a cultural agitator who became a celebrated avant-garde poet and folk musician, artist, and political activist. “Bien sûr, on invoquera, en guise de justification, le fait que les Américains sont techniquement mieux équipés que les Québécois. Les prétextes sont faciles à trouver quand on est aliéné et sous la botte économique des ÉtatsUnis, quand on ne se rend pas compte que l’on vend l’âme d’un peuple à tout venant, quand on enlève à ce peuple le pouvoir de prendre en mains son économie et cela, même dans ses œuvres de création.” 43 André Gervais, “Correspondance de Gilles Groulx sur Québec …? (inédite),” Nouvelles vues sur le cinéma québécois 15 (winter 2013–14), 1. 44 “le premier que l’on tente de faire sur cette réalité tellement difficile à saisir qui a nom: le Québec.” Gervais, “Correspondance de Gilles Groulx,” 3. 45 Given that parentheses are used for provinces in postal addresses, the title suggested Quebec’s emancipation from Canada. Interpretation given by Barbara Ulrich in electronic correspondence, 22 May 2018. On 4 February 1966, in an interview for the Radio-Canada television show Cinéma 66 hosted by Diane Giguère and Michel Garneau (who, it turns out, would end up replacing Gérald Godin as narrator for the film), Groulx discusses the rationale behind this title

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46 47

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(available as part of a series of interviews with Groulx compiled by the nfb: https://www.onf.ca/film/entretien_en_six_temps_avec_gilles_groulx/ at 1:00). Cinéma 66, Radio-Canada, 4 February 1966, 6 min 50s. “M. Guérin a dit au scripteur que la formule du commentaire était acceptée mais qu’il devrait soigner davantage le style et revoir, avec M. Kaltenback, la partie statistique.” That quote is from an ofq report signed by Michel Vergnes; the “scripteur” is Godin and Kaltenback is an information officer from the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Gervais, “Correspondance de Gilles Groulx,” 6. This production correspondence was rediscovered by André Gervais as he was doing research for an anthology of Gérald Godin’s writing for Éditions de l’Hexagone. His analysis and excerpts of the correspondence dossier were published in Nouvelles vues sur le cinéma québécois 15 (winter 2013–14). In French: “Le film va bientôt verser dans l’album souvenir ou le didactisme vantard. La présence de trop de thèmes, l’insistance sur des aspects trop souvent inintéressants, la nécessité de devoir passer trop vite sur chaque chose, ne peuvent qu’étourdir le spectateur qui n’y verra qu’un “documentaire.” “Letter from Gilles Groulx to André Guérin,” 30 December 1965. Gervais, “Correspondance de Gilles Groulx.” This story of a commissioned film’s creative process short-circuited by government officials is reminiscent of Swiss cinéaste Henri Brandt’s experience during the editing of the film series commissioned for the 1964 Lausanne National Exhibition, La Suisse s’interroge. This particular case of negotiation of the transformation of the national image through the making of an auteur film for a great exhibition is analyzed by Alexandra Walther in La Suisse s’interroge. Ou l’exercice de l’audace (Lausanne: Éditions Antipodes, 2016). “Millionième et dernière (?) version d’un commentaire non signé,” Gervais, “Correspondance de Gilles Groulx,” 8. The Cinémathèque québécoise Médiathèque database lists that …québec! was an alternative name for the production. “Québec...? reste, pour sa presque totalité, un vrai film de Groulx, mais d’un Groulx qui aurait abandonné pour quelques heures son pessimisme naturel. Et pour moi, sous un autre aspect, c’est sûrement le meilleur exemple d’une œuvre de commande où un cinéaste québécois a réussi à inscrire son univers d’auteur.” Yves Lever, Le cinéma de la Révolution tranquille, de Panoramique à Valérie (Montreal: Yves Lever, 1991), 387. In French: “Le portrait du Québec qui ressort de ce film n’est pas aussi ‘publicitaire’ que le souhaitaient les fonctionnaires de l’Industrie et du Commerce.” Ibid., 387. Mercier, “L’Expo 67 de Denys Arcand.”

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56 “Ne laissez rien vous arrêter! Visitez votre pavillon! Vous serez encore plus fiers d’être du Québec!” – not yet daring to use the more explicitly nationalist phrase “proud to be Québécois.” 57 On the database of Library and Archives Canada, more than 150 items appear with “Onyx Films” as a research keyword; thirty-two productions in 1967, with about half of them related to Canada’s Centennial. 58 This ad campaign is reminiscent of the advertising series “Les régions du Québec,” where Carle made his directorial debut in 1958 in a commercial for the brewery Labatt, and where Jacques Bouchard had also worked prior to opening his own agency. Carle referred to it as “industrial commercials”: “completely free commercials, without script, nothing. These little films could have been made by the nfb, because I used direct cinema and spontaneous filming to the fullest” (des commerciaux complètement libres, sans scénario, rien. Ces petits films auraient pu être faits par l’onf, car j’utilisais à fond le direct, le tournage spontané). Marie-Claude Ducas, Jacques Bouchard: Le créateur de la publicité québécoise (Montreal: Québec Amérique, 2014), 62. Carle went on a shoot across the province with cameramen Guy Borremans and Jean-Claude Labrecque, and René Bail as sound engineer. None other than René Lévesque, the future premier of Quebec, would contribute to some of the texts. The campaign became so popular that it was emulated by other breweries. 59 “Sur un film qui aurait pu être de Gilles Groulx.” Gervais, “Correspondance de Gilles Groulx,” 8. 60 In French: “Les formes de l’Expo ’67 de Montréal, dont certaines ne manquent ni d’audace, ni de beauté, servent de prétexte à l’insertion de rapides séquences sur les plastiques, l’électronique, la miniaturisation, l’aéronautique et sur quelques fabrications mécaniques exclusives au Québec.” https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/ patrimoine/details/52327/2489333. 61 Diverging information about the credits of Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo appears in the Cinémathèque québécoise’s Médiathèque Guy-L.-Côté database and in the filmography published in the book of interviews Michel Coulombe conducted with Gilles Carle, Entretiens avec Gilles Carle: Le chemin secret du cinéma, 219. 62 To name a few: Air Canada at Expo, Expo 67 (Grattan Productions), Expo Explore (Crawley for Alcan), This Was Expo 67 (Canadian Pacific Railway/Arnott Rogers Batten), etc. Most of these industrials open with a sunset and close on fireworks shots at night. The nfb production Impressions of Expo 67 (William Brind, 1967, 8 min) followed a similar city symphony genre, as Kinik has closely analyzed in “Celluloid City.” 63 Of course, given that this was a commission to celebrate Quebec’s economic renewal through technological developments, some passages are reminiscent of the industrial symphony genre as well.

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64 Inderbir Singh Riar, “Montreal and the Megastructure, ca 1967,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 193–210. 65 Their names did not appear in the credits. 66 The catchy term “la Belle Province” comes from the title of the Office de tourisme et de la publicité de la province de Québec magazine edited throughout the 1940s by pioneer documentary filmmaker Herménégilde Lavoie. 67 The Photo Journal, weekend illustrated section of Le Petit Journal, 29 January–5 February 1968, 67. 68 “Le titre le suggère, observe l’auteur: Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo illustre les progrès technologiques accomplis chez nous quand certains rêveurs continuent de transmettre au monde l’image d’un pays arriéré. Pour dire le vrai, tout ce folklore me révolte. Savez-vous par exemple que l’Encyclopedia Britannica enseigne aux étrangers que nous allons encore à l’école en traîneau à chiens? Parfaitement, en traîneau à chiens! J’ai vu dernièrement un de leurs petits documentaires qui nous décrit ainsi, postsynchronisés en France et plein d’accents ridicules.” Le Petit Journal, 29 January–5 February 1968, 67. 69 Ski-Dog was the original name given to the first four Bombardier snowmobiles, before they became Ski-Doo. Rumour has it that a typographical error in printing the name in an official brochure, turning the g into an o, ended up setting the name to Ski-Doo (personal information from former Bombardier worker in the 1970s and Musée de l’ingéniosité J. Armand Bombardier’s Facebook page post on 26 August 2016). 70 See Canadian Icons – Stories and Treasures from Canada, https://www.canadian icons.ca/pages/the-snowmobile, accessed February 2020. 71 Erin Hurley, National Performance: Representing Québec from Expo 67 to Celine Dion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 31. 72 Carle was seen by some as exploiting women’s sexuality, yet, because of the type of unconventional female characters he often cast in leading roles, others view him as a “feminist.” Much has been said about this over the years, even recently in the 2018 conference Être femme dans les médias audiovisuels au Québec – Cinéma, télévision, jeux vidéo, web at the Cinémathèque québécoise, in which Thomas Carrier-Lafleur suggested that Carle was blurring the boundaries between cliché and myth in the representation of women as icons. 73 This very same visual leitmotif would not only be a staple of Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo, but of other commissions filmed by Chantrier and scripted and/or directed by Carle for Expo 67 and for the Quebec Pavilion at Osaka Expo 70. 74 Erin Hurley, National Performance. 75 Cynthia B. Meyers, “The Best Thing on tv: 1960s US Television Commercials,” in Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, 173–93.

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76 A term coined by Joseph Nye, soft power describes the influencing of opinions and preferences through attraction and co-optation instead of coercion. Soft power acts, suggests Nye, through culture (language, popular culture, mass media, cultural events), political ideals, and policies putting forth inspiring values such as “democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities” – instead of forcing other countries into compliance by the use of military force or economic sanctions (Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, New York: Public Affairs, 2004). Both state and non-state actors use soft power. As a strategy, it is considered to have originated in nineteenth-century England, which was also the place and time where the universal exhibition came into existence. 77 Electronic correspondence, 15 August 2018. 78 Fred Turner, “The Corporation and the Counterculture: Revisiting the Pepsi Pavilion and the Politics of Cold War Multimedia,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 78 (spring 2014): 66–78. 79 Mercier, “L’Expo 67 de Denys Arcand.” 80 La vie privée d’Onyx Films (1962–72) (Les films du Centaure, 2010). 81 Marc-André Robert, “L’Office du film du Québec: vitrine de l’État dans la Cité. La communication des services de l’administration publique québécoise par le cinéma, 1961–1976” (PhD diss., Université Laval, 2020). 82 Gagnon and Marchessault, Reimagining Cinema, 4. 83 Ibid. 84 However, ...québec?’s drab colours seem to reveal that it was not properly restored prior to its transfer. Especially with most of its scenes shot in the late fall months, it looks bleak; or would the film’s production story somehow have tainted it as such? 85 Indeed, one of the rare snippets of footage I have found from a multiscreen installation at the Québec pavilion was not from a local home movie filmmaker, but from a Super-8 reel shot by an American visitor that was screened during the Anthology Film Archives series Films for the Fair: The World’s Fair and the Cinema in New York City, May 2019. 86 Denys Desjardins, De l’Office au Box-Office (Les films du Centaure, 2009, 1h 35); Fillion, Cinema of the Quiet Revolution. 87 In an email exchange I had with Jacques Godbout, he expressed surprise that his contribution to Expo 67 would garner any contemporary interest and was actually being studied (electronic correspondence, 17 April 2020). It was only in retrospect, on receiving a copy of the book Reimagining Cinema, that Godbout awoke to the actual pride he could take in his accomplishment as a delegate, writer, and creative coordinator for the Man in the Community Pavilion. 88 The expression “déshabiller la petite québécoise” was used by Denis Héroux when he discussed his approach to nudity in his film Valérie (1969). It refers to

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the idea of “undressing the girl next door” in a national perspective, which implied at the time an emancipation from religious taboos. As Julie Ravary-Pilon put it, it speaks of a form of nationalistic revolution in the midst of a sexual revolution. See Sylvia Galipeau, “Revoir Valérie aujourd’hui,” La Presse Plus, 28 April 2019. See Louise Carrière, Femmes et cinéma québécois (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1983); Julie Ravary-Pilon, Femmes, nation et nature dans le cinéma québécois (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2018). “Films de fesses: Le cinéma érotique du Québec des années 1970,” interview with Michel Coulombe, Aujourd’hui l’histoire radio series, Radio-Canada, 14 February 2017, http://ici.radio-canada.ca/emissions/aujourd_hui_l_histoire/2016-2017/ chronique.asp?idchronique=429014. Onyx escaped bankruptcy thanks to political intervention. It would later amazingly resurface with completely new owners; branches in Toronto and New York opened in 1975. The confrontation between film-as-art and film-for-profit as it was actively experienced within the company is recounted with panache by the protagonists themselves in Denys Desjardins’s film La vie privée d’Onyx Films (1962–1972) (Les films du Centaure, 2010, 52 min). Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer, Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). The author would like to thank Denys Desjardins, Sébastien Desrosiers, Eric Fillion, Victor Simoneau-Helwani, Roger La Roche, Adam O’Callaghan, MarieJosé Raymond, Barbara Ulrich, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the archivists of the Guy-L.-Côté Médiathèque of the Cinémathèque québécoise, and the intrepid co-editors of this anthology Steven Palmer and Craig Moyes, as well as the anonymous readers.

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8 Here, There, and Everywhere: Youth Revolt in Quebec and around the World

jean-philippe warren

Expo 67 did not happen in a void, nor was its immense popularity among the young people of Quebec – and especially Montreal – simply a happy coincidence. The world’s fair came to life after a nearly decade-long Quiet Revolution in Quebec, which itself accompanied a global movement for change driven by youth that swept through most (so-called) developed nations. If Expo 67 came to be seen as a symbol of this new age, it is not because it was a particularly popular tourist attraction but because, on the one hand, it provided an opportunity to discover other cultures in a time of rising cosmopolitan and liberal ideologies; and, on the other hand, it crystallized a generalized intent to break free of outdated normative codes that was in many ways best expressed in the revolutionary coming of age of a new generation on a near-global scale. The present contribution aims to situate the Quebec youth revolt within this global upheaval, and to situate Expo 67 in relation to clear and dramatic demographic and political shifts that drove that culture of revolt among Quebec youth during the second half of the 1960s. The idea of comparing the youth revolts that shook countries in Europe, America, Africa, and Asia during what Bernard Lacroix called les années 1968 – roughly equivalent to the English expression “the late Sixties,” or perhaps a combination of the basic periodization 1967–70 with the rebellion-charged connotations of “1968” – is not new.1 Detailed work has now taught us more precisely the similarities between what took place in France or the United States and what happened in Poland, Italy, Brazil, Japan, Senegal, or Mexico.2 If, as the French saying goes, comparaison n’est pas raison (analogies should

always be scrutinized), putting into perspective these different historical experiences can nevertheless teach us something about the multiple factors that fuelled the passions of this tumultuous era.3 Breaking with a more conventional perspective that limits its assessment of Quebec youth-based movements to the direct influence of France, the US, or the UK, this chapter proposes that the youth revolt of the late 1960s in Quebec was grounded in a very specific sociohistorical context which, despite its obvious place within a more widespread countercultural transformation, explains the distinctly local manner in which it unfolded. And that same sociohistorical context goes a considerable distance to illuminate the specificity and the éclat of Expo 67 which, if far from an explicit or political manifestation of youth-led revolt (indeed, it was criticized by many on the Left on those very grounds), was nevertheless an event characterized by a parallel desire to imagine new, freer ways of living and to develop a more globally aware social consciousness around questions of equitability and social justice. The countercultural revolution of the 1960s affected all societies. Everywhere the younger generation was invited to participate in the construction of a different, better tomorrow. “The 1960s counterculture,” Johanne Sloan aptly writes, “asked individuals (whether situated in Montreal, in London, Ontario, or elsewhere) to join a global, dispersed network, through which ideas, values, lifestyles, music, fashion, images, etc., would be shared.”4 However, if Expo 67 represented such an iconic high point of the decade in French Quebec compared to other nations, it was because it opened at just the right time to appeal to this generalized sense of coming of age. Eager to attract a large number of visitors, especially among the local and regional population, Expo’s organizers offered season “passports” at a discount price for students and agreed to a push from student leaders to include a Youth Pavilion, in which youth culture could find a convivial space open to free expression. According to Ivan Carel, “in a Quebec society suddenly turned upside down by modernization in practically every arena, Expo appeared as the showcase of a young, dynamic country, proudly discovering its new identity and capabilities.” As the twenty-five-year-old Quebec songwriter Stéphane Venne put it in his competition-winning official theme song for the world’s fair, “Un Jour, un Jour” (“Hey Friend, Say Friend”), the Montreal World’s Fair was a “dream” on a “magic island” where, as Carel points out, “youth was a central element.”5 Expo 67 introduced visitors to a bright, colourful, technological, democratic, quasi-Edenic future. Who were these promises of an affluent, modern, improved society aimed at, if not the next generation? While some interesting work has been done to recapture the rich and complex relationship Quebec youth had with Expo 67, in particular the fascinating oral histories collected by Montreal’s Centre d’histoire, my intention is not Youth Revolt in Quebec and around the World

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to try to rehearse the experience of younger Quebeckers at Expo.6 Instead, this chapter provides a demographic and political blueprint, or infrastructure without which the character and popular success of Expo 67 is impossible to grasp, to show, without suggesting any necessary or clear causal relationship, that the six months of Expo coincided with a crucial turn of Quebec youth toward a more explicitly radical political agenda that was, nevertheless, largely in keeping with the evolution of Quebec politics and society more broadly. The chapter begins by looking at the demographic context that made Quebec an especially youth-centred society in the 1960s, one open to the progressive, globalist ethos of Expo and even to a youth-directed Pavillon de la Jeunesse that could articulate and celebrate Montreal and Quebec’s nascent counterculture. It then explores a more political register, focusing on the impact that world events had on the development of a genuine critical consciousness among Quebec youth. Clashes between young people and the police in other countries reverberated with young people in Quebec, bringing home the idea of participating in a global struggle against what was variously called “imperialism,” the “system,” or the “machine” – a struggle that was also expressed and reflected back to them at key moments and sites on the Expo islands over the summer of ’67. Finally, I compare the particular sociopolitical context of Quebec with that of France, the US, and the UK, with their socialist and nationalist movements experiencing contrasting fortunes. This allows for a reflection on the possible relationship between Expo’s curious officialist/ nationalist duality and the way that Quebec’s radical nationalist youth were also conceived as legitimate agents in the re-establishment of Quebec as a nation in the modern world. In shedding light on a period which, despite over fifty years of historical, sociological, and cultural analysis seems forever overshadowed by its own mythology, I hope to further a dialogue on the role of this world event in refracting the political energies of Quebec youth during what has become officially known as “the Summer of Love.”

A Ripple Effect Quebec’s openness to change in the 1960s, characteristic of the spirit of Expo 67, was in large part made possible by the increasing importance of the youth demographic in the province. A specific ratio of older-to-younger might not be enough to trigger revolutionary change,7 but it is worth considering that in the mid-1960s Quebec was considerably younger than most Western societies. The median age in Quebec in 1965 was twenty-four years old, compared to 28.8 in the US, 32.8 in France, and 35.1 in the UK. In 1966, on the eve of the world’s fair, a million Quebeckers (roughly 18 per cent of the total provincial

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population) were aged between fifteen and twenty-five. Their demographic (and therefore political) clout, combined with their newly acquired purchasing power, explains why this generation was the object of so much attention from intellectuals, governments, and corporations. While Université de Montréal professor Marcel Rioux, following in the footsteps of Herbert Marcuse, was proposing to replace labour with youth as the new revolutionary class in postindustrial societies, advertising firms and the mass media (including a sophisticated Expo public relations department headed by Ford Canada’s former advertising director, Yves Jasmin) were designing ads and programs catering to this emerging demographic. Another important difference is that, contrary to the apparent stasis in France or the US, Quebec’s youth revolt took place within the tumultuous decade of the Quiet Revolution and therefore prolonged a period of profound social, cultural, and political upheaval. The Quiet Revolution was a moment when major reforms were adopted in favour of the province’s francophone group, including the creation of the Department of Education in 1964.8 If recent historiography has shown that progressive forces were at work in Quebec society well before 1960, the fact remains that, for many contemporaries, the world seemed to be opening up to all sorts of possibilities after a period that has been evocatively dubbed La Grande Noirceur (The Great Darkness).9 Just like in the US, the UK, and France, teenagers and young adults who participated in the events of the late 1960s in Quebec grew up in a prosperous world (personal income per capita in constant dollars made a prodigious jump of 69.2 per cent between 1963 and 1973 in the province) and an urban society, characterized by the rapid erosion of religious beliefs and the equally swift evolution of morals.10 Of course, student leaders talked about the generational wall standing between them and those they called “has beens” (vieux croulants); of course, they denounced a Quiet Revolution that was entangled in the red tape that had accompanied the dramatic rise of the welfare state;11 of course, they criticized the political elite for being insufficiently radical. But these vehement speeches also expressed a new context, characterized by freedom of expression (thanks to the end of clerical control over education, and the end of state censorship) and by a newly acquired level of material comfort (radios, televisions, telephones, automobiles), fuelled by the rapid economic growth during the years 1945 to 1975, a period known in French as Les trente glorieuses. Far from constituting an implacable reaction against conservative society, the words of the most radical leaders in many ways reflected the accelerated democratization and modernization of Quebec. In 1964, for example, the movie Troublefête, directed by Pierre Patry, was the first to describe the struggle of a Quebec

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student in his attempt to emancipate himself from the yoke of the Roman Catholic Church. The film’s slogan was blunt: “Make your choice, the die is cast, the Quiet Revolution is marching on.”12 As evidence that this message resonated in the province, the film was a resounding success, attracting no fewer than 300,000 people at the box office and helping the development of Quebec cinema. But in this changing context, old values were questioned without being immediately replaced. Quebec students were now spending longer in school. They felt the need for action, yet more and more of them ended up in anonymous educational establishments (the infamous polyvalentes, large and soulless schools rapidly erected to respond to the needs of a fast-growing population) where any attempt at self-expression was stymied. This cold and bureaucratic environment gave rise to an increasingly urgent desire for escape. It is perhaps no surprise that the students’ quest for identity found itself bound up with popular culture, itself a diffuse and multilayered phenomenon in the 1960s. As elsewhere, the coming of age of these ever larger generations in Quebec pitted old values and priorities against burgeoning new ones: conservatism versus liberalism, authority versus autonomy, tradition versus revolution, localism versus globalism, a quiet life versus disruption, incremental versus rapid change – all of which were also embraced by corporations in their attempt to boost the sales of consumer goods.13 It is not difficult to see that Expo 67 was characterized by its commitment to the dynamic, transformative side of such dichotomies. In 1964, as Expo planners were starting to figure out what the world exhibition might look and feel like, a survey of 200 students attending philosophy classes in the Collèges classiques throughout the province found a growing desire for critique and engagement. The survey indicated that “it is the young who are now responsible for the evolution of Quebec and the previous generation has a hard time keeping up.”14 The survey’s participants were eager to act, accusing their parents of having adopted a defensive stance instead of going on the offensive and demanding change. They showed a clear desire to put themselves forward and take centre stage. One of the respondents was particularly revealing: “Our parents’ generation went through the Depression, the War. We did not. Our parents’ generation was afraid. We are not.”15 Such youth determination could also be found in the US, France, or the UK, of course. Yet, only in Quebec did this revolutionary message resonate fully, since it was the only place where the new generation (aged thirty and younger) formed a majority. This bold youth optimism was the wind in the sails of Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau as he fought to overcome those skeptical of his soaring ambitions for the world’s fair.

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Quebec Youth Get Their Own Pavilion The influence of Quebec’s strongly skewed youth demographic was clearly visible in an ebullient 1960s popular music scene, one that had a distinct manifestation at Expo. Considered the “number one human fuel” and the “first universal language” by Le Devoir’s cultural critic, Jean Basile, music was unquestionably one of the most powerful channels of social and cultural awakening, as well as protest, becoming central to the identity of many young people. Expo 67’s Youth Pavilion became a focal point for these energies. In its planning stages the product of federal government consultation with recognized youth groups across Canada, including the Union générale des étudiants du Québec (ugeq, an association grouping at some point all Quebec universities, with the exception of Bishop’s), the pavilion came to life through the efforts and audacity of a small group of bohemian Québécois attracted to the new popular sounds and styles of the moment. They took to heart an official mandate to create a six-month “Republic of Youth,” one ultimately brought to life through the visits of roughly 11 million people to the pavilion. An “activity centre” included an amphitheatre for musical and theatrical performances and readings by artists like Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, and each night the adjacent plaza would be turned into a lively discotheque. Among those who gave conferences and debated, simultaneously translated into French and English, were Bobby Kennedy, Raymond Aron, René Lévesque, Marshall McLuhan, and the comic book artist Albert Uderzo, of Astérix fame.16 Just like Expo itself, the Youth Pavilion acquired cachet over the summer, in particular after its coup in arranging for what was effectively the North American premiere of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, played over the pavilion’s public address system before it was heard on the radio or available in stores. Yves Laferrière, a young musician who booked performers and organized events at the pavilion, recalls that “everyone was waiting for the new Beatles [album]. What would they do? We had learned that they were taking acid, we knew they were preparing something revolutionary. We were so impatient that we could not sit still.”17 The young pavilion directors arranged to have an Air Canada flight attendant purchase the record in London the morning it was released in Britain, bring it with her on that day’s flight, and rush the album to the Expo site after landing in Montreal.18 Thousands of people gathered on the grounds of the Youth Pavilion waiting for the music to pour out of the loudspeakers. “It was like a religious ceremony. Silence, wonder, delirium: the whole range of emotions thrilled this colourful crowd … After hearing it once, it obviously had to be played again. The record ran continuously until 2:00 a.m., when Expo closed for the night. The next day the record

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was playing on the radio.”19 During the rest of the summer, a part of Montreal vibrated to the sound of the new Fab Four record. The impact was tremendous and lasting: “we [the countercultural freaks] all came out of rock music since we all came out of Sgt Pepper. And Quebec as well, which began also to move to the unadorned rhythms of this chanson de geste of the psychedelic era.”20 As word spread of the Youth Pavilion and the Expo scene, the site attracted impromptu performances by leading countercultural rock bands of the era. Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane played an electrifying free concert outside the pavilion on 6 August – Expo’s designated “Youth Day,” chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, a symbol of the peace movement – followed later that night by the Grateful Dead, with 10,000 people attending. Not all the countercultural youth energies at Expo were channelled through the Youth Pavilion, of course. The young visionary artist François Dallegret, whose unusual underground club designs were sought after by impresarios in New York and Montreal during this period, worked on innovative designs for Expo 67’s amusement park, La Ronde. On the world exhibition’s opening night, he organized an underground, unofficial Expo “super-party” for the young creative set who had worked on bringing Expo to life, and managed to have his friends book counterculture icon Tiny Tim to perform along with other notable acts, including local francophone artists.21 Over the span of a few years, if not a few months, rock/pop turned a generation on to psychedelic style, long hair, mind-expanding drugs, “free love,” spiritualism, and the whole range of the countercultural experience; Montreal was now part of the imaginary of the Sixties. In 1969, the city famously played host to the Yoko Ono and John Lennon “bed-in,” one of the high points in the history of the countercultural movement, immortalized by the recording of the pacifist anthem “Give Peace a Chance” in their Montreal hotel room on 1 June. It must be emphasized that not much of that countercultural current was coming from France, except for the dim influence of situationism. Indeed, rock music and hippy culture never really became central components of the revolutionary underground in France. “The American case, in blunt contrast to the French revolt, showed that rock music and radicalism could intrinsically bind together … Whilst France’s New Left remained frighteningly highbrow, the American protest movement appeared to have thrown off all inhibitions and had fastened its standard firmly to the mast of personal liberation.”22 Quebec, in this regard, was much more British and American than French. Popular Québécois music legend Robert Charlebois, by one measure a chansonnier in the French mould (he opened for Félix Leclerc in the early 1960s), exploded onto the Quebec pop music scene in 1967 after a three-month trip to California where he discovered groups like the Byrds and Frank Zappa.

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A Coincidence of Contexts The postwar youth revolts shook many countries before culminating in the frequently violent demonstrations of the late 1960s. In the three years during which Expo 67 was conceived, built, and opened to the public, between January 1964 and December 1967, more than two thousand universities and colleges worldwide were disturbed by clashes between the student population and the authorities.23 More generally, whether inside or outside campuses, many young people felt alienated and uncomfortable in the society they were growing up in. To explain this clash between the older and the younger generations, the most common hypothesis supposed that Baby Boomers, as they came of age, were succumbing to a particularly spectacular form of mimicry.24 Similar events were taking place in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Berlin, and London. In Quebec, the metaphor of contagion was repeated by many observers of the time who thought they could see behind the actions of their compatriots the nefarious/malignant influence of foreign forces. This assumption was made all the more plausible by the calls of some young people to follow the actions of well-known American or European leaders. “What are we waiting for,” asked a Quebec student in January 1968, “to f—— up the rotten structures of our undemocratic universities? In other countries, even in the fascist usa, students are the ferment of the revolution: where are our true revolutionaries?”25 References to the actions and slogans of iconic foreign figures abound in Quebec newspapers of the period.26 Quebec activists not only articulated (more or less clearly) the same libertarian ideals, but also espoused the same strategies of direct action (sit-ins, teach-ins, marches, demonstrations, happenings), all amplified by turntables, radios, and televisions.27 Posters of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Lenin, and Mao adorned the walls of the premises of student associations in Quebec. Breaking from what might be called a traditional French-Canadian insularity,28 the Quebec youth of the 1960s increasingly saw itself within an international context, a task very much amplified by Expo 67. The Soviet Pavilion celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Lenin’s revolution, while the exciting Cuban Pavilion extolled the virtues of Castro’s still recent revolutionary victory over US imperialism (and was ultimately transformed, for the last few weeks of the world’s fair, into a shrine to Che Guevara following the latter’s death in Bolivia). “The students of Nanterre, Berlin, Turin, Madrid, like those of Columbia University (usa),” one could read in the pages of the bulletin of the Front de libération populaire in June 1968, “are leading our fight. Cuba, Vietnam, US Blacks, South American guerrillas are our allies.”29 International movements for decolonization inspired

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local nationalists who believed that Quebec was also exploited by imperial powers (UK, US, and/or English Canada).30 Events in the United States occupied the minds of Quebec youth. The actions of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Free Speech Movement brought forth the issue of participatory democracy, characterized by “suspicion of institutional structures and all complex forms of social organization; and belief in minority groups and the poor as central agents for social change.”31 As elsewhere, the American military intervention in Vietnam inflamed students’ passions. Internationally, the denunciation of the war in Southeast Asia had become, if not the only vector, at least one of the principal ones for “the relaying of protest movements and a point of contact of the new left.”32 Such an observation was even more true for Montreal, a city to which hundreds of Americans had recently moved to avoid the draft.33 Among them were organizers of notable protests that disrupted the sour, pointedly brief visit of Lyndon Johnson to Expo in late May for the fair’s designated United States Day and a visit to the US Pavilion. The antiwar protests would gain in strength through the rest of the year. In October 1967, as Expo drew to a close, ugeq invited a delegation of South Vietnamese students, who were members of the National Liberation Front (Việt Cộng), to publicize their cause throughout the province. When the South Vietnamese students’ tour was over, ugeq planned a demonstration in front of the American consulate to broadcast the ideological position of Quebec students. Shouting the slogan “Vietnam, it’s our business,” between 1,500 and 2,000 people clashed with the police: the word-slinging was followed by the hurling of paint pots, torches, bottles, brickbats, and wooden sticks. This demonstration, reflecting an increasingly violent political climate, resulted in the arrest of forty-six people. Nevertheless, without dismissing the impact of world events and international cultural trends, we should not exaggerate the influences coming from the US, France, and Britain: the Quebec revolt was not primarily an imported product. The Baby Boomers in Quebec were carried by local social movements that had not waited for the French, British, or American cultural or political scene to develop. Since the beginning of the 1960s, nationalism had channelled a large part of the aspirations of francophone youth in Quebec. As journalist Adèle Lauzon would observe in the more radical context of 1968, “It seems that the events of May 68 in France have had little impact on Quebec high school and cegep students. Only the most politicized were interested in these events and in a mainly ‘intellectual’ manner. But even they were more influenced by the rin and the msa [two sovereigntist parties] than by any foreign move-

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ment.”34 While Expo 67 was, officially, careful to downplay politically radical expressions of Quebec nationalism, and tended to be seen as a crass, even “mystifying”35 distraction by the nationalist intellectual, artistic, and political vanguards of the moment, it was popularly understood within Quebec as an expression of the nation’s coming of age, and there is strong anecdotal evidence that considerable pride was taken, among the “masses,” in the local, national, and international media’s portrayal of its resounding success. Unlike nationalist currents in France, the US, and the UK, the Quebec nationalist movement, having moved to the Left in the early 1960s, was an early ally of reformist and even radical social movements.36 From its inception, the Front de libération du Québec (flq, Quebec Liberation Front) recruited college and university students, Quebec youth being understood as the principal force capable of bringing about radical change. “A revolution without youth would be a series of reforms … For the flq, one objective: revolution; and one vehicle: youth.”37 Many young people imagined that the independence of Quebec was a necessary step toward the realization of a socialist revolution. It is therefore hardly surprising that General de Gaulle, despised by left-wing activists in France, was praised by the same groups in Quebec after having declared, from the top of the city hall’s balcony during his visit to Expo 67 in July 1967, his now famous “Vive le Québec libre!”38 Three years later, during a meeting with activists in Montreal in 1970, the French anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, for whom nationalism in Europe was anathema, himself recognized that “national liberation remains the necessary condition of the Quebec revolution.”39

The Student Movement and Political Radicalism after Expo Occurring when it did, Expo 67 played out alongside and expressed the great shift of the 1960s – a culmination of the optimistic convergence of the counterculture with the progressive mainstream that would be followed by the intense, student-led political protests and conflicts that rocked much of the world in 1968. To some degree, the same shift occurred in Quebec’s student movement. When May ’68 broke out in France, the events immediately became the benchmark for what could be accomplished in Quebec. The Comité Independence-Socialisme and ugeq issued a joint declaration on this occasion: “The undersigned, aware of the vital importance of the current events in France, salute the students in their struggle for a new university and the accessibility of it to all, congratulate the workers and the peasants in their fight for a new society, protesting against the police brutality of which they

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are the object, and express their solidarity with the students, the workers, and the French peasants, in the hope that they can continue the fight until the final victory.”40 Many activists were frustrated that Quebec did not seem ripe for a revolutionary change similar to the one that was rocking France. “Montreal has not yet experienced real, violent demonstrations,” cried nationalist leader Andrée Ferretti. “Moreover, the majority of students has not fully realized that a revolution like the one in France could take place here. It’s a shame, I must say, for I’m not opposed to that.”41 With the objective of promoting a transatlantic convergence, Quebec activists were active in increasing the number of exchanges. For example, Jacques Sauvageot, vice-president of unef, gave Socialisme (the “review of international and Québécois socialism”) an important interview on the aims and methods of the student movement in France.42 Two more obscure representatives of unef, as well as Pierre Dubé, a member of the Bureau des jeunesses communistes révolutionnaires, came to Quebec at the end of August 1968 to speak at student rallies and participate in workshops. In the other direction, many Quebeckers travelled to France or circulated French revolutionary literature in the province, thanks to their contacts abroad.43 The dissemination of certain methods (including that of provoking those in power and, once the mechanisms of repression had been set in motion, playing the victim according to a strategy that followed the provocationrepression-solidarity-mobilization cycle) owed much to these exchanges, which extended those taking place with American student leaders.44 In 1962, the Port Huron statement decried the loneliness and isolation of American students. In an interview, Tom Hayden stated that the impetus for the writing of the manifesto was “just sheer mad boredom at the bullshit Fifties.”45 The turned-off generation wanted to be turned on.46 In France, an article by Pierre Viansson-Ponté, which appeared in Le Monde in March 1968 under the title “La France s’ennuie” (France is bored), struck a chord with many people.47 Viansson-Ponté pointed to increasing discomfort among a student body that had reached adulthood but was still forbidden to take part in any decision-making, inside or outside the university (the voting age was reduced from twenty-one to eighteen years old in 1969 in the UK, 1970 in Canada, 1971 in the US, and 1974 in France). “We do not want,” cried the Belgian situationist Raoul Vaneigem, “a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom.”48 A similar observation can be made for Quebec. A survey conducted by the team of the Catholic Student Youth (jec) of the diocese of Montreal concluded, in October 1967, that “students are bored at school.”49 Two years later, the situation had hardly changed: “We shout that it’s boring at the cegep, that

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classes are boring, that teachers are boring, that life is boring.”50 If there was a common denominator for these youth revolts around the world, it would have to be the disgust of many young persons when confronted by a world perceived to be rife with apathy and compromise. The university was the target of many of their attacks. For example, L’Université ou Fabrique de ronds de cuir (The University, or Pencil-Pusher Factory), a manifesto published in January 1968 by students at the Université de Montréal, virulently criticized schools as places of alienation and repression. The ten signatories described their time in school as “incarceration,” criticized the triviality of class lectures, and spoke of the university as “a factory churning out members of the establishment.”51 These denunciations of the “boredom” of students being “detained” in classrooms regularly spilled out beyond the walls of colleges and universities.52 Student leaders set themselves the goal of “externalizing this general revulsion.” It was time to change, said many, a “disgusting” reality. “Activism must not be something quiet, which takes place only within the classroom,” wrote a student journalist from the Vieux-Montréal cegep; “it must help you to tell all the disgusting people of the world what you stand for and why they sicken you.”53 The result of this global discontent was often open rebellion and raw revolt that could neither be fully explained nor contained. Criticism directed at family, spiritual beliefs, sexual relations, and, of course, education suggested that they were all constrained by a lack of imagination and closedmindedness. Stronger than any desire to launch a specific reform of the “system” was what historians register as broad distrust for anything that looked “old,” and was therefore considered outdated. At the end of the experimental movie Cap d’espoir (1969), directed by Jacques Leduc, the student Denis Drapeau, wearing a red t-shirt on which is written the word écoeuré (sickened/fed up), turns to the camera and repeats the same sentence over and over again: “Mangez d’la marde … mangez tout’ d’la marde” (Go to hell … just all go to hell). While the influence of the 1960s cultural revolution was gradually felt by all young people everywhere, it was in fact a modest, though indisputably noisy, student minority who were fully politically committed. These more politicized young people, who suggested the idea of the student as an intellectual worker, came almost entirely from the human and social sciences. When pointing out the skyrocketing of college and university enrolments in the 1960s, we often forget that this massive growth was especially thanks to increased student numbers in departments and faculties of social sciences. At the Université de Montréal, between 1961 and 1968, the number of enrolments in this field of study quadrupled, an increase that can be contrasted with the relative stability that prevailed in medicine, engineering, or law. During these same years, the numbers of students studying political science increased from

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38 to 335. For the first time, at the end of the 1960s, university amphitheatres were largely populated by social scientists. This school migration had an impact on how students envisioned their careers. Those who attended university with the aim of preparing themselves for social engagement were found mainly in the social sciences. “Students in the Arts and Humanities and especially Social Science were not really ‘training’ for entry to specific professions, though many would expect to go into teaching, social work, various forms of administration, or work in the mass media. What they expected from their courses, and indeed were induced to expect, was some kind of nurturing of their ‘critical faculties’ and of their capacities for social, moral and political generalization … These students were most likely to be disappointed by the reality of university life, and – were radicalization to occur – the most likely to be responsive.”54 As in France, where the spark of May ’68 came from the University of Nanterre; the US, where Berkeley gave rise to the Free Speech Movement; or the UK, where the London School of Economics (lse) was a major site of contention and unrest, the most belligerent French-speaking students in Quebec came from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Université de Montréal, and more specifically from the departments of sociology and political science. This massive influx of politically engaged students caused a double rift. On the one hand, there was an increasing gap between students newly discovering activism and leftism and professors who belonged to a more conservative tradition. In Quebec, the humanities and social sciences were previously far less critical of the social order. In the 1950s, the teaching of literature excluded “modern” authors such as Balzac or Zola, philosophy relied on Thomism, and sociology was expected to limit itself to the collection of data (which explains the name Recherches sociographiques given to the first Quebec journal of sociology, founded in 1960) to extoll the wisdom of papal encyclicals. According to a survey conducted in April 1944 at Laval University, students in forestry and science (50.6 per cent), as well as those in commerce (47.6 per cent), were more inclined than those in social sciences (36.4 per cent) to answer in the affirmative to the question: “Are you for the radical transformation of our political institutions?”55 Obviously, this was no longer the case in 1968. From then on, social science students dreamed of revolution, like their “Comrades” in the Free Speech Movement in the US or the Mouvement du 22 mars in France.56 On the other hand, there was also a growing discrepancy between the mass of students who pursued academic success in order to acquire professional skills and a minority of students who were no longer satisfied with the prospect of integration into a society which they found increasingly problematic. This gap had direct consequences on student unionism. In France, traditional syn-

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dicalism went through a major crisis in the 1960s; as its base melted away, more radical groups took the opportunity to step into the vacuum.57 In the US, it is estimated that a mere 2 to 5 per cent of university and college students took part in student politics,58 the rest being not so much hostile as indifferent to student activism.59 The same thing happened in Quebec.60 Student union leaders were elected by nearly empty assemblies just as they were increasingly recognized by school and university boards and governments for their alleged representativeness. In Quebec, the educational system had become very centralized: the cegep network standardized the old hierarchical and fragmented network of colleges; the accelerated integration of Quebec universities into the public funding created by the new Ministry of Education also helped to bring students together by persuading them that they shared a common destiny. The founding of the Quebec student federation, the ugeq, in 1964 expressed the growing belief that students formed a single homogeneous class, beyond their different individual backgrounds and career aspirations. Having received the mandate to represent an extended student population that went about its business without much worrying about student leaders’ slogans, many thought that the only way to overcome general apathy was to mobilize people by escalating struggles. By the end of the 1960s, the gulf in Quebec between indifferent masses and hard-line student activists had never been so great. Student leaders aimed at connecting the more concrete and local issues concerning university organization with more noble and global causes. If, in the United States, there was commonality between the struggles of Black people, pacifists, and students, and in France the student and worker movements (which rested on the sharing of imaginary solidarities much more than real alliances61) were almost perfectly synchronized,62 in Quebec, there was a striking synchronicity in the simultaneous eruption of student and nationalist movements. In each case, the student movement drew its strength from other social movements more than the other way around. Certainly, in Quebec, as elsewhere, the student movement was powered by the desire to defend student interests: reducing tuition fees, increasing the value of loans and bursaries, making higher education more accessible, curriculum reforms, and so on. The cegep strike in the fall of 1968 notably led to the creation of the network of the Université du Québec, which was a priority for college students anxious to access institutions of higher learning the following year. However, the largest and most radical demonstrations always had a very strong nationalist dimension.63 For example, the colossal march in opposition to Bill 63 (1969), which left parents free to choose their children’s language of instruction, was far better

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attended than other student demonstrations of the era.64 According to a witness, in the days before the provincial government, led by Jean-Jacques Bertrand, voted on this law, “all the schools were closed and so were all the universities; everywhere, people were gathering; everyone was studying this infamous bill; every student had a copy; all Quebec’s intermediary organizations had united against the Bertrand-Lesage law. The life of the nation was turned upside down, especially among the young, which is to say among the most lucid; everywhere, disorder arose and everything seemed about to crumble.”65 Students succeeded in blockading some cegeps for a week, while organizing study days and symbolic walkouts across the province. Responding to a call from the Front du Québec français, 15,000 to 20,000 francophones marched in front of the National Assembly on 31 October 1969. Composed of three quarters of students, from all levels of schooling, the crowd’s age averaged twenty years old. Their very real concern was the ultimate fate of French speakers within the Canadian federation. In contrast, as noted by historian Jean Lamarre, the leaders of the ugeq never managed to galvanize the masses for international events, whether they were demonstrations against racial discrimination in the United States or the war in Vietnam.66 The need for a larger social or political cause to galvanize student activism is underscored by the counterexample of the UK. Foreign and distant causes, such as atrocities committed in Asia, were unlikely to directly trouble British university students, and the more immediate issues, such as the struggles in Ireland, threatened their preconceived opinions and privileges. Ultimately, in the UK, sit-ins, provocative acts, and strikes were largely isolated, and they did not disturb academic establishments, because the most militant students failed to connect the larger struggles to the students’ immediate concerns.67 The political agitation seen elsewhere during the years around 1968 was diluted in Britain into the larger pool of the “Swinging Sixties,” failing to find a resonance within the social or political spheres. Pop culture and permissive society gave birth to a “moderate version”68 of student protest: disturbances, incidents, and disruptions, as numerous as they may have been, did not spread beyond the university environment and, more specifically, beyond a few key campuses in and around London (notably lse, Essex, and Hornsey).69 At the same time, the young Quebeckers clamouring for change at the end of the 1960s felt that their actions were in harmony with the reforms of the Quiet Revolution. When they occupied schools in October 1968, they spontaneously adopted the slogan Maîtres chez nous (Masters of our own house), which had been that of the provincial Liberal Party in the elections of 1962. A large number of educators, even from apparently very conservative back-

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grounds, including religious figures, supported the students’ desire for change. For example, in June 1968, during a study session where directors of the Collèges classiques met, Jean-Guy Hamelin, an abbot, declared that wherever possible, self-management was to be promoted.70 Parents, civil servants, and members of the professional elite did not hesitate to express their sympathies for the actions of the strikers who, in October 1968, occupied most cegeps and some university faculties. The minister of education, leader of the nationalist and left wing of his party, was happy to see young people forcing his newly elected government to embrace the reforms fleshed out in the Parent Report.71 The emphasis on what distinguishes the contexts in France, the UK, and the US from that of Quebec shouldn’t hide certain important similarities. As is well known, students were the driving force behind youth mobilization wherever it occurred. Berkeley, Columbia, the Sorbonne, Nanterre, lse, or the Université de Montréal (to name but the most prominent) were hotbeds of youth activism in the late 1960s.72 However, in the US as in France, the establishment seemed unshakeable, and most activists were under the impression that things were moving too slowly if at all – but this was not the case in Quebec. A good example of this difference was expressed by a teacher from France who had accepted a job for a year at the Jacques-Cartier Normal School (in Quebec) in March 1968: In France, we were used to reforms – of the baccalaureate for example – but they did not shake the entire educational system, which was a pillar of the secular Republic … In Quebec, there was a more urgent need to adapt education to the requirements of the modern world and to a changed environment: much more than incremental changes and halfmeasures were required. So we had to demand explanations of what was being done, what had been done and what would be done in the future: in a word, we were obliged to follow the rhythm of the Quiet Revolution with its uncertainties, but also its speed and the exhilaration that comes from the feeling of making history.73 In France and the US, the youth movement clashed with the establishment and was thwarted in its desire to profoundly change the social order. Certainly, Nixon, de Gaulle, or Pompidou could hardly be said to represent the aspirations of the younger generation. In Quebec, the picture was entirely different. Far from retrenching, as elsewhere, Quebec’s political class gave the impression of opening up to these demands. In the summer of 1968, Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s campaign garnered passionate support across all the Canadian

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provinces. “Trudeaumania” – a term calqued on pop music’s “Beatlemania” – reflected the charisma of the young leader of the Liberal Party and his promises to establish a “just society” based on inalienable individual rights.74 Trudeau symbolized a regeneration of the country’s politics: he had become known, during his short passage at the Ministry of Justice in 1967, for passing an “omnibus bill” decriminalizing homosexuality and abortion, before being elected by a landslide in June 1968. On the provincial scene, the sovereigntist Parti Québécois (pq), led by René Lévesque, would be founded four months later. The hopes of building an alternative society did not seem illusory to many activists. (After a meeting with the prime minister, John Lennon boldly declared, “If all politicians were like Mr. Trudeau there would be world peace.”75) Even the Parti Québécois’s popular vote in the April 1970 election (23 per cent) did nothing to discourage activists who saw in these results the early signs of the ineluctable triumph of their aspirations, a sentiment succinctly expressed by René Lévesque on the night of the election: “It’s a defeat that looks like a victory!” The contrast between Quebec and Britain is striking. In Britain, there were no violent confrontations between the youth and the police or military forces until the 1970s. It seems as if the vast majority of British youth was not really interested in taking to the streets and organizing mass protests. Indeed, British counterculture, operating within a very different political and demographic context, was not fundamentally revolutionary: “The major figures in the British counter-culture were largely apathetic towards political revolt, with luminaries such as Lennon and Townshend only becoming interested at the fag-end of the decade.”76 Even popular songs bearing titles that sound radical and engaged turned their back on political protest. “Revolution” (1968) by the Beatles argues that it’s better to change one’s mind than to change the world. “Street Fighting Man” (1968) by the Rolling Stones concludes that there’s nothing to do in a sleepy London town but to “sing for a rock ’n’ roll band.” Historical studies have confirmed that youth protest in Britain remained marginal in comparison with events in other countries.77 According to Stuart P. Mitchell, the absence of a clear thread of discontent in British rock music reflects a less conflicted political context. “In America, the threat of the draft loomed over youth; in France the Fifth Republic had been deliberately constituted to avoid the systemic weakness that had destroyed its predecessor and consequently had failed to make adjustments to accommodate social reformist demands. For these reasons, radicalism found easy focus in these countries; nothing analogous can be shown in Britain. In short: no Vietnam, no de Gaulle.”78 In Britain, the Labour Party, in power from

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1964 to 1970, looked for ways to accommodate young people’s demands; important liberal reforms were enacted. There was not much for the young generation to rage against and, therefore, “in comparison to the movements in America and France, the student revolts that did take place in England were trifling affairs.”79 In Quebec, student revolts were also, in themselves, “trifling affairs” in comparison to the US (where they lasted a decade) or France (where they erupted with full force in May ’68). However, ironically, student revolts had a much greater impact in Quebec because they could immediately create a sense of solidarity among francophones, who were attempting to decolonize their own society. Thus, in Quebec, the issues of class and race combined in an original manner; one important sociologist even went so far as to argue that francophone Québécois were a “class-race.” In the US (i.e., the Civil Rights movement) and France (i.e., the Algerian war of independence and its aftermath), the issues of class and race were opposed, whereas in Britain the government adopted a “race relations” model that attempted to address racism head-on.80 The social and political contexts were consequently very different across these Western societies, and one needs to pay great attention to these multiple discrepancies when conducting a transnational analysis.

Conclusion Comparing Quebec’s experience of the late 1960s with that of other Western societies helps us clarify certain aspects of the period. The analysis of France, the UK, the US, and Quebec reveals that, while the internal development of their respective student movements was largely similar, the contexts in which that development occurred vary significantly. Counterculture was not by itself enough to “set society on fire.” England lived the cultural excitement of the 1960s more than France, and yet it was not enough to push British campuses to the brink of revolt. External events also had a rather mixed impact on student activism. While the Vietnam War offered Quebec’s student leaders the opportunity to associate their smaller struggles with an international fight around which the younger generation could rally, no more than a handful of university students ever actually mobilized in support of it. In October 1968, for example, fewer than 200 people came to Montreal to take part in a march against US military intervention, while the organizers were expecting 5,000 people after a comprehensive information and awareness campaign. Student participation was always more impressive when the student movement felt able to attach itself to a larger cause that was both collective and concrete. It

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is a sign of the malleability of the protests of this period that in France, that cause was the labour movement, while in Quebec, it was the nationalist movement. In contrast, the UK student movement remained fairly low-key because those students, believing that they enjoyed wealth, security, and freedom unavailable to their international peers, mostly concentrated on protests directed at distant struggles (e.g., Vietnam, South Africa). “American postgraduates who visited student protesters around Europe in 1968 echoed unsympathetic critics by dismissing British protest as mundanely moderate. They decried most British campuses as quiet, populated by a sober, serious majority, who were uninterested in political and social activism.”81 In Quebec, the post–Expo 67 reckoning resonates to this day. The creation of the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association, a separatist movement formed on 19 November 1967, replaced by the Parti Québécois a year later, filled Quebec youth with hopes that their demands for a rejuvenation of their society would soon be fulfilled. While not all student activists joined the ranks of the Parti Québécois – far from it – its platform announced the coming victory of a process launched in the late 1960s in and around (as well as for and against) the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal. To be sure, the countercultural revolution of the 1960s affected all Western societies. Everywhere, the younger generation was invited to participate in the construction of a different, better tomorrow. But Expo amplified the arrival of British and especially American counterculture, and these new forms of expression (however wrapped in consumerism) were perceived by many as powerful means to help reconnect Quebec youth with its traditional roots – even as they also assisted in contesting that culture in other arenas. In 1967, after returning from California just in time for Expo,82 a twentythree-year-old Robert Charlebois teamed up with two other rising young stars to create an alternative spectacle in a club in Old Montreal, just across the water from the enormous extravaganza taking place under the sign of Terre des hommes. The thrust of Terre des bums (fig. 8.1) – a series of musical sketches performed with the singer Mouffe and the comedian Jean-Guy Moreau – fell somewhere between a new energy of youthful irreverence and the older reference points of French-Canadian culture (socioeconomic marginality, the Church, linguistic identity). The popular television program for young people, Jeunesse Oblige, where Charlebois won his first public recognition as a folk singer/chansonnier in 1965, had been attempting to channel both currents in a “safe” way since its inception on Radio-Canada in 1963. But the pop, rock, and psychedelic influences absorbed during his trip to the West Coast, immediately followed by the many others staged back home at Expo (mostly at the Youth Pavilion), would soon acquire other dimensions.

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8.1 Album cover, Terre des bums, 1967. From left to right: Jean-Guy Moreau, Mouffe (Claudine Monfette), Robert Charlebois.

In 1968, the year Jeunesse Oblige stopped broadcasting, Charlebois launched his career-defining album Lindberg – featuring the international hit “California” in addition to the now classic title track – at the same time as on stage Terre des bums effectively metamorphosed into the openly countercultural and hugely popular L’Osstidcho (“The Fukinsho”). That same year the playwright Michel Tremblay premiered Les Belles-Sœurs, a pioneering work written in the rich but rough working-class dialect of the Plateau de Montréal. It was as if (global) psychedelia and (local) joual 83 suddenly came together to illuminate Quebec’s “true” culture, liberated at last from the dark provincialism and heavy-handed clericalism of the previous generation.84 In this

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sense, the period never posed a problem for the collective consciousness of the nation, in that it was easily accommodated within the mythology of the Quiet Revolution, to the point of constituting one of the main steps of Quebec’s march towards progress and modernity.85

notes 1 Bernard Lacroix, “Les jeunes et l’utopie: Transformations sociales et représentations collectives dans la France des années 68,” in Mélanges offerts au professeur Jacques Ellul (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 719–42. Chronological boundaries of “the 1968 years” are obviously contestable and contested. Jon Savage, for example, considers 1966 as the start date of the period; 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded (London: Faber and Faber, 2015). 2 See, among others, “Les Années 68: Une contestation mondialisée. Résonances et interactions internationales,” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 94 (2009); “Circulation de la contestation, des idées et des pratiques politiques,” in Les Années 68: Le temps de la contestation, eds. Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, Robert Frank, Marie-Françoise Lévyn, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (Bruxelles: Complexe, 2000), 25–115; Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 481–4; Christopher Leigh Connery, “The World Sixties,” in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, eds. Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books 2007), 77–108; Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Ronald Fraser, ed., A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988). 3 Emmanuelle Loyer and Jean-François Sirinelli, “Mai 68 dans le monde: Le jeu d’échelles,” Histoire@Politique: Politique, culture, société, no. 6 (2008); George Paloczi-Horvath, Le Soulèvement mondial de la jeunesse: 1955–1970 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1972); Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jean-Philippe Warren, Une douce anarchie: Les années 68 au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 2008). 4 Johanne Sloan, “Greg Curnoe’s Dorval Mural as a Critical Response to Expo 67,” in In Search of Expo 67, eds. Monika Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), 68. 5 “Dans une société québécoise qui se révolutionne sous la bannière de la modernisation tous azimuts, l’Expo apparaît comme la vitrine d’un pays jeune, dynamique, découvrant avec fierté sa nouvelle identité et son savoir-faire. Il s’agit d’une ‘fête sur une île inventée,’ pour paraphraser Stéphane Venne, et dont la

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6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14

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jeunesse est un élément central.” Ivan Carel, “L’Expo 67 et la jeunesse,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 17, no. 1 (2008): 103. Results were presented in the exhibition at the Centre d’histoire de Montréal, “Explosion 67: Terre des jeunes,” which ran from 16 June 2017 to 22 October 2020. David G. Munro and Claudia Zeisberger, “Demographics: The Ratio of Revolution,” insead Faculty and Research Working Paper 42 (March 2011). We can also cite the adoption of Medicare in 1961, the nationalization of electricity in 1962, as well as the creation of the Société générale de financement (sgf) in 1962 and the Caisse de dépôt et de placement in 1965. Jean-Philippe Warren and E.-Martin Meunier, Sortir de la Grande Noirceur (Sainte-Foy: Éditions du Septentrion, 2002). François Ricard, The Lyric Generation: The Life and Times of the Baby Boomers (Toronto: Stoddart, 1994). Jean-Jacques Simard, La Longue Marche des technocrates (Montreal: Les Éditions coopératives Albert Saint-Martin, 1979). The new role of the state was leading to the creation of many ministries and Crown corporations, which in turn significantly increased the size of the public service. The number of public servants in Quebec per thousand francophones aged fifteen and over increased from 8.8 in 1961 to 22.6 in 1971 (Gérald Bernier and Robert Boily, with the participation of Daniel Salée, Le Québec en chiffres de 1850 à nos jours [Montreal: acfas, 1986], 37). “Faites votre choix, les jeux sont faits, la Révolution tranquille est en marche.” Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). “L’évolution du Québec se fait avec les jeunes et les gens de la génération précédente ont de la difficulté à marcher au même rythme.” “La jeunesse étudiante du Québec en 1964,” Collège et Famille 21, no. 2–3 (April 1964): 61. “La génération de nos parents a connu la crise, la guerre. Nous ne les avons pas connues. La génération de nos parents a eu peur. Nous n’avons pas peur.” “La jeunesse étudiante du Québec,” 59. Carel, “L’Expo 67 et la jeunesse,” 107. Quoted by Sylvain Cormier, “Sgt Pepper a visité l’Expo avant le reste de l’Amérique,” Le Devoir, 2 June 2007. Yves Laferrièrre, personal communication, 4 November 2017. Gilles Gougeon, quoted by Sylvain Cormier, “Sgt Pepper a visité l’Expo.” Pénélope [Jean Basile], “ Et maintenant, Pénélope vous parle de Mainmise qui a 1 an,” Mainmise, no. 6 (1971): 6. Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison, eds., The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). According to the Woodstock census, 57 per cent of respondents believed in the 1960s that rock and roll was a revolutionary

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political force. Rex Weiner and Deanne Stillman, eds., Woodstock Census: The Nationwide Survey of the Sixties Generation (New York: Viking, 1979), 235. “François Dallegret on Expo 67, Le Drug, and the New Penelope Café,” Montreal Underground Origins Blog, 29 April 2017, www.montrealundergroundorigins.ca/ francois-dallegret-expo-67-le-drug-new-penelope-cafe. Stuart P. Mitchell, “You Say You Want a Revolution? Popular Music and Revolt in France, the United States, and Britain during the Late 1960s,” Historia Actual Online, no. 8 (2005): 14. George Paloczi-Horvath, Le Soulèvement mondial de la jeunesse: 1955–1970 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1972), 328. Marcel Fournier, “Mai 1968 et après. Mouvement étudiant et sciences sociales au Québec,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 3, no. 1 (1994): 79. In Britain, students were seen as simply aping radical international students. “The British Student: Democrat or Layabout?,” Guardian, 7 March 1968, 7, cited by Nick Thomas, “Protests against the Vietnam War in 1960s Britain: The Relationship between Protesters and the Press,” Contemporary British History 22, no. 3 (2008): 342. “Qu’est-ce qu’on attend pour f… en l’air les structures vermoulues de nos universités antidémocratiques? Dans les autres pays, même dans les usa fascistes, les étudiants sont le ferment de la révolution: où sont nos vrais révolutionnaires.” C. de L., “La révolution dans la réaction,” Le Carabin, 25 January 1968, 8. Le Carabin was the student paper at Laval University. See Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “Quand les phrases interdites descendaient dans la rue: Mouvements sociaux et internationalisation – l’exemple de Mai 68,” in Espace intellectuel en Europe: De la formation des États-nations à la mondialisation, XIXe–XXIe siècles, ed. Gisèle Sapiro (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), 183–97. Cf. Lionel Groulx’s preface to the second edition of Une croisade d’adolescents (Montreal: Librairie Granger Frères, [1912] 1938), 7: “Chez nous, m’assure-t-on, les jeunes apôtres d’aujourd’hui aiment retrouver, parmi leurs précurseurs, des adolescents de leur race. Cet exemple passe pour eux tout exemple venu de l’étranger.” (Here, I am told, young people prefer to take their religious lead from earlier examples of the youth of their own nation, which in their eyes is stronger than any foreign example.) “Les étudiants de Nanterre, de Berlin, de Turin, de Madrid, comme ceux de l’Université Columbia (U.S.A.) mènent notre combat. Cuba, le Vietnam, les Noirs U.S.A., les guérilleros sud-américains sont nos alliés.” Fernand Robidoux, “Cette civilisation malade,” La Masse, June 1968, 2. Léandre Bergeron, Petit manuel d’histoire du Québec (Montreal: Éditions Québécoises, 1970).

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31 James Laxer, “The Americanization of the Canadian Student Movement,” in Close the 49th Parallel etc.: The Americanization of Canada, ed. Ian Lumsden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1970), 279; Peggy Ann Sheppard, “The Relationship between Student Activism and Change in the University: With Particular Reference to McGill University in the 1960s” (ma thesis, McGill University, 1989). 32 Isabelle Sommier, “Les processus de diffusion des révoltes juvéniles de 1968,” Histoire@Politique: Politique, culture, société, no. 6 (2008). “De circulation de la contestation et de mise en contact de la ‘nouvelle gauche.’” Geneviève DreyfusArmand and Jacques Portes, “Les interactions internationales de la guerre du Viêt-nam et Mai 68,” in Les Années 68: Le temps de la contestation, eds. Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, Robert Frank, Marie-Françoise Lévyn, and Michelle ZancariniFournel (Bruxelles: Complexe, 2000), 49–68. 33 See John Hagan, Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001). It is estimated that until 1974 more than 30,000 draft dodgers moved to Canada, mostly to Ontario and British Columbia. 34 Adèle Lauzon, “Le refus global, 20 ans après,” Liberté 10, no. 5–6 (September– December 1968): 12. “Il semble, écrivait avec justesse une journaliste, que les événements de mai en France aient peu touché les collégiens québécois. Seuls les plus politisés s’y intéressèrent d’une façon surtout ‘intellectuelle.’ Mais ceux-là étaient plus influencés par le rin et le msa [deux partis souverainistes] que par n’importe quel mouvement étranger.” 35 Understood in the Marxist sense. “Aujourd’hui encore, l’immonde mystification que représente l’Expo 67 est là pour ramener à notre mémoire, si besoin en est, toute la déposession qui est notre lot le plus quotidien.” (Even today, the vile mystification represented by Expo 67 is there to remind us, as if we needed it, of the dispossession that is our daily lot.) Parti pris 4, no. 9–12 (May–August 1967): 7. 36 A house-survey revealed, for example, that, in the little town of Rouyn, the majority of students were already affirming sovereigntist views in 1968. (“La majorité des étudiants sont indépendantistes.” Le Tremplin 2, no. 3 (8 January 1968): 1. Le Tremplin is the student paper at the Rouyn-Noranda college.) 37 “Une révolution sans la jeunesse ne serait qu’une série de réformes … Pour le flq, un objectif: la révolution; et un moteur: la jeunesse.” La Cognée, 1 May 1965, quoted in Éric Bédard, Chronique d’une insurrection appréhendée: La crise d’octobre et le milieu universitaire (Sillery: Septentrion, 1998), 56–7. 38 Only weeks after the incident, Parti pris devoted a special issue to de Gaulle, prefaced by a dedication addressed to “[les] camarades français”; Parti pris 5, no.1 (September 1967): 2. On the links between de Gaulle and Quebec nationalism, see Frédéric Zoogones, “La France, le Canada et l’émergence du Québec sur la scène

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internationale: L’affaire de Libreville (1967–1968),” Histoire@Politique: Politique, culture, société, no. 4 (2008). Quoted in François Demers, “L’absence de formation théorique de la gauche québécoise rend son action stérile,” Le Soleil, 7 February 1970, 6. “Déclaration de l’ugq et des écrivains sur la situation en France,” Le Devoir, 29 May 1968, 3. “Les soussignés, conscients de l’importance capitale des événements actuels en France, saluent les étudiants dans leur lutte pour une université nouvelle et l’accessibilité de celle-ci à tous, saluent les ouvriers et les paysans dans leur combat pour une société nouvelle, protestant contre les brutalités policières dont ils sont l’objet, et se solidarisent avec les étudiants, les ouvriers et les paysans français souhaitant qu’ils continuent le combat jusqu’à la victoire finale.” Quoted in “Il y aura des émeutes s’il y a provocation…,” Le Petit Journal, 1 September 1968, 4. “Montréal n’a pas encore connu de vraies manifestations sanglantes, déclarait la leader nationaliste Andrée Ferretti. La masse des étudiants, d’ailleurs, n’est pas assez sensibilisée au fait qu’il puisse y avoir une révolution comme en France. C’est dommage d’ailleurs, car je ne suis pas contre.” Louis Maheu, “Entretien avec Jacques Sauvageot,” Socialisme 68: Revue du socialisme international et québécois, no. 15, October–December, 69–79. Sauvageot was invited by the Union générale des étudiants du Québec (ugeq) to visit Quebec in September 1968, but in the end was unable to come. For example, Georges Gustavi, a Québécois enrolled at Nanterre, published a paper on the events in France in “À propos des événements de Nanterre et de la Sorbonne,” Le Devoir, 10 May 1968, 4. See also J[ean] M[arc] L[éger], “La révolte des étudiants en France peut avoir des effets débordant largement ce pays,” Le Devoir, 16 May 1968, 6, 9. On the various connections of student leaders with France and the US, see Jean Lamarre, Le Mouvement étudiant québécois des années 1960 et ses relations avec le mouvement international (Quebec: Éditions du Septentrion, 2017). Tim Findley, “Tom Hayden: The Rolling Stone Interview, Part One,” Rolling Stone, 26 October 1972, 36–50. Colin Barker, “Some Reflections on Student Movements of the 1960s and Early 1970s,” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, no. 81 (2008): 43–91. Pierre Viansson-Ponté, “La France s’ennuie,” Le Monde, 15 March 1968; Youenn Michel, “Mai 68 et l’enseignement: Mise en place historique,” Les Sciences de l’éducation: Pour l’ère nouvelle 41, no. 3 (2008): 17. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (London: Rebel Press and Left Bank Books, 1994), 18. Micheline La Perrière, Janine Dallaire, Pierre Richard, and Gislaine Desmarais, “Les étudiants s’ennuient à l’école,” Maintenant, no. 70 (October 1967): 319–27;

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Lysiane Gagnon, “Les étudiants s’ennuient en classe,” La Presse, 11 November 1967, 6, 12. “On se crie que c’est ennuyant au cégep , que les cours sont ennuyants, que les professeurs sont ennuyants, que la vie est ennuyante …” Serge Riendeau, “Pourquoi se tuer?” La Griffe 2, no. 19 (28 April 1969): 4. Paul Villeneuve, Raymond Mailhot, Louise Harel, Pierre Pagé, Louise Fortin, André Saicans, Lorraine Rondeau, Louis Favreau, Roméo Bouchard, and Jean-Claude Dallaire, L’Université ou Fabrique de ronds de cuir (Montréal: n.p., 1968), 22. Michel Jarry, “De l’écœurement à une action concrète,” Le Carabin, 22 February 1968, 3. “L’opinion des autres,” Le Ressac, 12 September 1968, 2. Le Ressac is the student paper at the Vieux-Montréal college. “L’animation, ça ne doit pas être quelque chose de tranquille, qui se fasse dans des cours seulement, mais ça doit vous aider à dire à tous les écœurants du monde ce que vous êtes et pourquoi ils vous écœurent.” Barker, “Some Reflections on Student Movements,” 54. Jacques de la Chevrotière, Étude sur le milieu étudiant (Quebec: Université Laval, 1944), 40. “Mai 68 et les sciences sociales,” special issue edited by François Bédarida and Michael Pollak, Cahiers de l’ihtp, no. 11 (April 1989). Michel Dobry, Sociologie des crises politiques: La dynamique des mobilisations multisectorielles (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des sciences politiques, 1986), 52. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Students and Politics in Comparative Perspective,” in Students in Revolt, eds. Seymour Martin Lipset and Philip G. Altbach (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), xvii. Frederick D. Miller, “The End of sds and the Emergence of Weatherman: Demise through Success,” in Waves of Protest: Social Movements since the Sixties, eds. Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson (Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 303–24. Gilles Provost, “À l’Université de Montréal, le pouvoir étudiant n’a que 8% d’adeptes,” Le Devoir, 7 January 1970, 11. Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004). Boris Gobille, “Pour une sociohistoire du temps court,” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales, 70, no. 2 (March–April 2008): 321–49. Jean-Philippe Warren, “L’Opération McGill français: Une page méconnue de l’histoire de la gauche nationaliste,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 16, no. 2 (winter

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2008): 97–115; Jean-Philippe Warren, “Quelques facteurs sociologiques de la violence dans les années 1968: Le Mouvement de libération du taxi,” Violences politiques: Europe et Amérique, 1960–1979, eds. Ivan Carel, Robert Comeau, and Jean-Philippe Warren (Montreal: Lux, 2013), 117–37. Marc V. Levine, The Reconquest of Montreal: Language Policy and Social Change in a Bilingual City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). “Toutes les écoles étaient fermées et toutes les universités; on se réunissait partout; tous étudiaient ce fameux bill; chaque étudiant en possédait une copie; tous les corps intermédiaires du Québec s’étaient coalisés contre la loi BertrandLesage. La vie nationale, chez les jeunes surtout, donc chez les plus lucides, s’en trouvait bouleversée; le désordre surgissait de partout et tout allait s’écrouler.” Jérôme Proulx, Le Panier de crabes (Montreal: Éditions Parti pris, 1971), 181. Jean Lamarre, “‘Au service des étudiants et de la nation’: L’internationalisation de l’Union générale des étudiants du Québec (1964–1969),” Bulletin d’histoire politique 16, no. 2 (winter 2008): 53–73. Caroline M. Hoefferle, British Student Activism in the Long Sixties (New York: Routledge, 2013). A same argument can be made for English Canada. Roberta Lexier, “‘The Backdrop against Which Everything Happened’: English-Canadian Students Movements and Off-Campus Movements for Change,” History of Intellectual Culture 7, no. 1 (2007): 1–18; Roberta Lexier, “To Struggle Together or Fracture Apart: The Sixties Student Movements at English-Canadian Universities,” in Debating Dissent: Canada and the Sixties, eds. Lara Campbell, Dominique Clément, and Gregory S. Kealey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 81–94. Hans Righart, “Moderate Versions of the ‘Global Sixties’: A Comparison of Great Britain and the Netherlands,” Journal of Area Studies 6, no. 13 (1998): 82–96. Nick Thomas, “The British Student Movement from 1965 to 1972” (PhD diss., University of Warwick, 1997); Marie Scot, “Y eut-il un ‘Mai 68’ en Angleterre?,” Histoire@Politique: Politique, culture, société, no. 6, 2008. “Les directeurs d’étudiants des collèges classiques face à l’étudiant-citoyen dans le Québec 1966,” L’Action, 25 June 1966, 7. The report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education in Quebec, headed by the educator and priest Alphonse-Marie Parent and delivered with great fanfare in 1964. Nella van Dyke, “Hotbeds of Activism: Locations of Student Protest,” Social Problems 45, no. 2 (May 1998): 205–20. “En France, nous étions habitués à des réformes – du baccalauréat par exemple –, mais elles n’affectaient pas l’ensemble du système d’éducation, ce pilier de la République laïque … Au Québec, la nécessité apparaissait plus urgente d’adapter l’éducation aux exigences du monde moderne et d’un milieu original: elle impliquait plus que des retouches et des demi-mesures. Aussi nous fallait-il demander

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des explications sur ce qui se fait, se faisait et se fera: en un mot, nous étions amenés à suivre le rythme de la ‘Révolution tranquille’ avec ses incertitudes, mais aussi sa rapidité et l’exaltation que procure à l’homme le sentiment de faire l’histoire.” Jean Brulebois, “Un militaire coopérant: Bravo Québec!,” Éducation québécoise 1, no. 6 (March 1968): 2. Paul Litt, Trudeaumania (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016). Donald Newman, “Praise for Trudeau from the Lennons,” Globe and Mail, 24 December 1969. Mitchell, “You Say You Want a Revolution?,” 14. Nick Thomas, “Challenging Myths of the 1960s: The Case of Student Protest in Britain,” Twentieth Century British History 13, no. 3 (2002): 277–97; Esmée Sinéad Hanna, “Student Power: A Social Movement Analysis of the English Student Movement from 1965–1973” (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2012); Sarah Louise Webster, “Protest Activity in the British Student Movement, 1945 to 2011” (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2015). Mitchell, “You Say You Want a Revolution?,” 14. Ibid. Erik Bleich, Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking Since the 1960s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Webster, Protest Activity in the British Student Movement, 133; Marwick, The Sixties, 585; Esmée Sinéad Hanna, Student Power! The Radical Days of the English Universities (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013); Thomas, “Challenging Myths of the 1960s.” See Yves Laberge, “L’homme qui révolutionna la chanson québécoise. Entrevue avec Robert Charlebois,” Cap-aux-Diamants, no. 89 (spring 2007): 14–20. Joual is a sociolect of French bastardized by prolonged contact with English. The term, a reflection of local pronunciation of the standard French word cheval, was given legitimacy through the socio-linguistic debate launched by Jean-Paul Desbiens (a.k.a. Le frère Untel, or “Brother Anonymous”) in The Impertinences of Brother Anonymous (Montreal: Harvest House, 1962). Jean-Philippe Warren and Andrée Fortin, Pratiques et discours de la contreculture au Québec (Quebec: Éditions du Septentrion, 2015). Madeleine Gauthier, “Le mouvement étudiant des années 1960 comme aspect du mythe de la Révolution tranquille au Québec?,” in Jeunesses et politique, vol. 2, Mouvements et engagements depuis les années trente, eds. Raymond Hudon and Bernard Fournier (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1994), 233–55.

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9 Glass/Screen, or Dialectics at a (Momentary) Standstill: Marcelle Ferron’s Windows at the International Trade Centre/Expo Club

bruno victor andrus and craig moyes In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. – Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”1 Buildings have a large share in determining to what extent every one of us is an individual or a member of a group … Only because the building itself is experienced as a configuration of forces, namely as particular patterns of constraints, dimensions of freedom, attractions and repulsions, can the architectural setting serve as a part of the dynamic whole that constitutes our lives. – Rudolf Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form2 Tout chez moi est marqué au signe de ce que l’on appelle le hasard, même si pour moi le hasard n’est pas le hasard, mais la rencontre d’une idée de forces que l’on connaît mal. – Marcelle Ferron3

Expo 67 takes place at a privileged moment in the evolution of both religious and public art in Quebec, and in the spiritual evolution of Quebec society as a whole. Perhaps the single most enduring myth of the Quiet Revolution is that within the space of little more than six years, Quebec managed to transform itself from an inward-looking traditionalist society in which local Catholic clergy wielded undue political influence and controlled key public institutions to a modern and resolutely secular nation-state in waiting. If the truth is somewhat more complicated,4 it is nevertheless clear that Quebec society pushed back against the deep conservatism of the postwar period to engage openly, and in ways that seemed unlikely or impossible before, with both

local nationalism and the more obscure and diffuse forces of global modernity. And yet, as Fernand Dumont noted as early as 1958, the increasing obsolescence of the church in the context of a modernizing Quebec also left a “spiritual vacuum” which sooner or later would need to be filled.5 It was not enough that the state step forward to assure the ethical and political identity of French Canadians at the same time as it promoted the social and economic development of the province. By the summer of Expo, with the secular advances of the Quiet Revolution in full flow, Dumont was not alone in asking what would become of French Canada when the religious framework that had defined it for so long became but the “empty shell” of an outdated nationalism: “Many practicing Catholics, of whom I am one, rejoice: we believe that the attainment of pluralism is a welcome achievement. But where today shall we find that shared consensus without which no nation can exist? We have arrived at the point where we need a new collective project.”6 Expo both hid and revealed the critical nature of that historical juncture. In common with most left-leaning Québécois intellectuals of the period, Dumont does not consider the Montreal exhibition worthy of comment in his many reflections on the national question. As is often the case during moments of profound societal transformation, it was left to artists to gauge the impact of these changes and respond to them. Indeed, some of the most visible manifestations of Dumont’s “new collective project” came from the generation of artists and architects born in the 1920s who, coming of age in the years following the war, had found little nourishment in the stifling atmosphere of the Duplessis period. The Quiet Revolution was their opportunity to search for new forms – and forums – for artistic expression within a secular context. For many, Expo arrived at just the right moment to offer an opportune laboratory for their ideas, as well as unprecedented resources with which to bring those ideas to life. And yet, the necessarily time-limited nature of a Category 1 exhibition7 resulted in the loss of much of their on-site legacy. In some cases, works or evidence of works were buried in the archive; in others, they have all but vanished.8 This is true for a work that should have had an important afterlife: a major stained-glass installation by one of Quebec’s most notable painters and glass artists, Marcelle Ferron (1924–2001), which disappeared in its entirety at some point in the years following the fair, along with the building designed by the modernist architect Roger D’Astous (1926–1998) that housed it. D’Astous at that time was at the height of his career, having made his reputation both as an architect of elegant private dwellings in the tradition of his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright and, more importantly, as the pre-eminent contributor to the postwar renewal of religious architecture in Quebec. He

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designed two pavilions for Expo 67.9 One was the well-received, if controversial, Christian Pavilion on the Île Notre-Dame; the other was the much more discreet International Trade Centre/Expo Club, reserved for businessmen, located in the Cité du Havre. While seemingly worlds apart in function and intended audience (and built on opposite sides of the Expo site itself), these singular pavilions revealed, each in its own way, the influence of new forces on traditional practice. In contrast to the popular Christian Pavilion which would, against expectations, have no stained glass integrated into its architecture,10 the International Trade Centre (itc) would feature eighteen large stained-glass panels, measuring approximately 180 square metres in total, created expressly for the structure by Marcelle Ferron. Commissioned in 1965, created in 1966, and installed at the beginning of 1967,11 the itc windows directly prefigured what would become her magnum opus, the monumental architectural stained-glass installation for the Champ-de-Mars metro station, inaugurated in 1968. Ferron’s work for Expo 67 should thus occupy a major place in her oeuvre and be the subject of an abundant body of critical consideration. Instead, it is the least known and documented of her works.12 This is due not only to the particular nature of the pavilion, which was not accessible to the general public, but above all to the fact of its demolition some time during the 1970s, with the irretrievable loss of its array of windows. In seeking to refocus critical attention on this lost work, our chapter has three principle aims. First, by looking at the actors and networks that participated in the realization of Ferron’s windows at the heart of an unusual pavilion, we explore the relationship between avant-garde and religious art in the particular context of the Quiet Revolution, and their cross-fertilization in 1960s Quebec, shedding light on an ambiguous process in which, for a brief moment at least, seemingly opposing social and creative forces converged in a shared push towards modernization. For it was during this time that Ferron – a former student of Paul-Émile Borduas and signatory to his infamous 1948 manifesto, Refus global – became one of the leading Québécois artists to use abstract stained glass for both secular and religious ends. Despite her past association with anti-clerical protest, she was involved in creating stained-glass windows for religious institutions during the 1960s and 1970s; she and another student of Borduas, Jean-Paul Mousseau, also made significant contributions to the integration of abstract stained glass into Quebec’s new civic architecture as the rapid implementation of the secular state brought about a construction boom in the public sphere. But there is more to observe here than a simple translatio artis. By resituating Ferron’s windows within D’Astous’s forgotten commercial-national-architectural-artistic project, the itc, this chapter will, via our second avenue of inquiry, highlight Expo’s adventitious role as cultural

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nexus, connecting local networks with a number of international influences – artistic, religious, financial – in ways that have been hidden both by the single “quiet revolutionary” narrative within which many Quebec artists have been inscribed (and indeed have often inscribed themselves), and by the more spectacular, more obviously “McLuhanesque” proto-global elements of the world’s fair foregrounded by much recent scholarship.13 Our third aim in this chapter is more speculative. Alongside those two standard historical narratives, which, of course, continue well beyond the six short months of Expo, we want to suggest a new reading of Ferron’s stained-glass work. Although Ferron herself made very few theoretical pronouncements – she was a practitioner in the first instance, and a particularly intuitive one at that – the windows she produced for the itc at the multiple intersections of art and architecture, of Catholicism and commerce, of (brash) conformism and (quiet) revolution, echo, in unlikely ways, Walter Benjamin’s theories of the relationship of art to history, especially as articulated in his well-known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and in his unfinished Arcades Project – a project, moreover, within which universal exhibitions (the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851; the Paris Exhibitions of 1867 and 1889) hold emblematic status. What is at the core of Benjamin’s philosophy of history? That the historian should provide an understanding of the past in the manner of a work of art. Which does not mean to “paint a picture” of a bygone era, nor to show, chronologically, how what came before led to the here and now – unlike much standard historiography (of the Quiet Revolution, for example), Benjamin’s is not a narrative of progress – but rather to seize hold of fragments of the past as they appear, suddenly, as a living figure14 for the present in a manner akin to the apparently random collages of Max Ernst, the involuntary memory of Proust, or the associative logic of a Baudelaire poem. The arcades of Paris provided Benjamin with a real topography corresponding to his intuition that historical knowledge is not a recreation of the past “as it really was,” nor a linear narrative of causes and effects, but an “image” created by a meeting of heterogeneous temporalities that come together with the suddenness of cinematic montage, or the oneiric juxtapositions of the surrealist work of art. It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of the what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural. Only dialectical

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images are genuinely historical – that is, not archaic – images. The image that is read – which is to say the image in the now of its recognizability – is to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.15 We want to suggest that such a “figural” reading of Quebec’s (r)evolution from a religious to a secular “nation-state” is given fleeting visibility by the design and placement of Ferron’s windows in the itc. At just the moment (the “perilous critical moment”?) that the Québécois nation was foregrounding technocracy and technological modernization as the principal engines of its collective disengagement from clericalism and its agro-colonial foundational myth,16 Expo momentarily brought together, in the Cité du Havre, a number of ambitious architectural, plastic, and cinematic expressions of collective belonging (Labyrinth, Man in the Community, Man and His Health, Habitat) under the broad global/humanist umbrella of Terre des hommes. There, cheek by jowl on that narrow peninsula jutting out into the Saint Lawrence, situated right between a group of pavilions dedicated to “universal” culture (the Art Gallery, the Photography and Industrial Design Pavilion)17 and one dedicated to old-fashioned “national” industrial progress (the Quebec Industries Pavilion),18 a pavilion was built specifically for finance and business development that was the first of its kind at a universal exhibition.19 It is within this semiotically charged space of local and global “forces” that we propose to (re)locate Marcelle Ferron’s windows.

Borduas, Ferron, and the Collective Project of Quebec Born in the small textile town of Louiseville, Quebec, into an unusually literate family with a keen understanding of the local intricacies of politics, tradition, and culture, and fascinated with light and colour from an early age, Ferron toyed with the idea of becoming an architect before deciding to enrol at the École des beaux-arts in Quebec City.20 She soon rebelled against the school’s narrow classicism and left following an argument with one of her teachers. Her artistic vocation was reaffirmed, however, when she moved to Montreal two years later and discovered the painting of Paul-Émile Borduas. She recalled her first encounter with his work in 1945 as “a revelation” and soon afterwards joined a number of young artists in the dissident abstract movement known as automatisme, a painterly adaptation of the practice of automatic writing advocated by André Breton in the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924). What began as a belated and local form of an international artistic movement was suddenly inflated with “the scandal that is surrealism’s intention and its lifeblood”21

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9.1 Schematic map, showing the location of the ITC in the Cité du Havre, International Trade Centre brochure.

when Borduas, Ferron, and fourteen other artists signed the anti-clerical manifesto Refus global in August 1948. Three weeks later, Borduas was summarily relieved of his teaching duties at the École du meuble. The articles of provincial law invoked by the deputy minister in his letter of dismissal – for “conduct and writing incompatible with the function of a teacher in the Province of Quebec” – were telling even in their wrongheadedness.22 For, as Jean Éthier-Blais has perceptively suggested, the authoritarian and paternalistic relationship between the clergy and the French-Canadian people, against which Borduas and his disciples railed in Refus global, was at bottom “one between master and pupil.”23 In place of the obedience to doctrine – artistic and religious – operating at that time at practically every level of society, Borduas offered a lyrical expression of revolt, driven by the “irrational” instinct inherent in each of us, and anchored by a profound faith in humanity.24 It is here that the tiny collective aesthetic project of automatisme became part of a larger national project. Borduas’s discovery

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of surrealism at the end of the 1930s,25 his transposition of the surrealist literary practice of automatic writing to abstract painting in his first automatist experiments of the early 1940s, his sensational public break with the Church in 1948: these were not simply exercises in asserting individual liberty against the heavy-handed forces of local clerical and academic control (although they were that, too). Borduas’s deeply religious background and long apprenticeship to Ozias Leduc as a church decorator meant that his artistic practice, even in its radical rejection of religious and aesthetic orthodoxy, remained very much inscribed within the Catholic history of French Canada.26 In bringing surrealist ideas from Europe to Quebec, Borduas also brought a particular national dimension to an aesthetic problem which, from André Breton through Max Ernst and Roger Caillois to Salvador Dalí, primarily sought to give scope to a general “affective force” freed from the constraints of reason.27 In Quebec that force also helped lead to the reaffirmation of spiritual values which – suitably demystified, secularized, and, eventually, institutionalized – would also come to define many of the collective aims of the Quiet Revolution: “The great, the only duty,” Borduas writes in the work immediately following the scandal of Refus global, “is to spontaneously organize a new world where one’s noblest and most liberal passions are able to multiply collectively.”28 Shorn of its utopian and mystical overtones, transposed from the 1940s to the 1960s, that collective duty would be shouldered by a number of artists and architects who gravitated to Borduas’s orbit. The temporal interval was unavoidable but, ultimately, productive. In the aftermath of Refus global, Borduas and Ferron both decided to leave Quebec for cities where the relationship between art, religion, and politics was less oppressive. In April 1953, Borduas went to New York; in September Ferron moved to Paris, where she would remain until 1966.29 There, recognition of her work grew, both in France and internationally (she was awarded a silver medal at the 1961 Sao Paulo Biennale). Nevertheless, despite the freedom and success offered by her new country of residence, the limitations of the gallery system in which she had to move as a Parisian artist eventually began to chafe. She was increasingly sensitive to the fact that she was producing art for what was essentially a restricted circle of collectors. “In 1965, looking back on what I had being doing until that point, I felt the need to decide whether or not I should continue as a painter within the established art world, cultivating an international career. I quickly realized that that no longer interested me. I broke with everything and everyone around me. I left my house and Paris. Something new had begun.”30 As it turned out, that new beginning coincided with a change of aesthetic means. Ferron’s discovery of stained glass was made quite by accident, when in 1963 she passed by a little-known Paris gallery showing a large array of

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coloured glass slabs. As with Borduas, she recalled her chance encounter with the work of Michel Blum as “a revelation,” claiming that “in a flash I knew I had before me the means of expression I had sought for many years.”31 Despite her recollections of this as a eureka moment, and her affirmation elsewhere that Paris provided so much of the artistic inspiration that Quebec lacked in the 1940s and 1950s,32 her artistic trajectory would turn out to remain very much tied to the artists and artisans she had met as a young artist in Montreal, and to the collective project adumbrated by Borduas. “When I left, it was for good. It was only after having lived for years in France that I was able to think more clearly about the question of belonging. I realized then that my life was in Quebec. When I was younger, I wanted to be an architect … that was unthinkable for a woman. It was after years of painting that I returned to architecture. Whereas painting is a private medium, monumental art reconnects with society by speaking to a larger audience.”33 Her weariness was not so much with painting itself, but with the restricted system of exchange within which her painting was able to reach the public. Her serendipitous discovery of stained glass at once gave her the opportunity to integrate years of pictorial work on form, colour, and light within another of her long-standing interests, architecture, and to reflect on the different sort of viewer who moved in and out of architectural spaces that were necessarily situated in a particular here and now in a way that the international gallery could never be. That decision brought her back into contact with artists she had known in the 1940s who were now working at the intersection of the pictorial, the architectural, and the public: artists like Jean-Paul Mousseau (1927–1991, also a signatory to Refus global), the ceramicist Claude Vermette (1930–2006), and a young architect rapidly making a name for himself in the dynamic milieu of 1960s Montreal, Roger D’Astous.34 D’Astous was a graduate of the École des beaux-arts de Montréal and the only Québécois to intern with the great American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright – in fact, he was the only FrenchCanadian architect of his generation trained in the United States. Struck by Wright’s “almost religious belief in architecture,” D’Astous would adopt the same approach upon his return to Quebec, where he produced a number of private residences inspired by Wright’s modernist aesthetic.35 But churches remained D’Astous’s primary activity. He designed seventeen of them in total, mostly for Catholic parishes in Quebec and Ontario; twelve of these were completed. Almost all were designed and built between 1953 and 1965, a short period during which architects, decorators, and designers working within the religious sphere were encouraged to experiment.36 For D’Astous, influenced both by Wright and by the tradition of Les Ateliers d’art sacré (brought to Quebec by Father Marie-Alain Couturier, who had significantly marked

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Borduas’s aesthetic trajectory, and who was himself a designer of stained glass),37 architecture needed to reflect both “a profound sense of the inner life of its materials”38 and make reference to the sacred mysteries of the other world39 – the precise dosage of each depending, of course, on the nature of the commission. D’Astous had many artist friends – he collaborated with Vermette on his magnificent 1957 church, Notre-Dame-du-Bel-Amour in the Montreal suburb of Cartierville40 – but he was particularly close to Mousseau and Ferron. According to D’Astous: “In architecture, light is also a raw material, like stone, wood or concrete, but one that is intangible: there is something mysterious about it. It was Mousseau who taught me that, about light.”41 Ferron would adopt a very similar position, but from the starting point of paint on canvas. That lesson was reinforced by the stunning work Mousseau produced for Hydro-Québec’s head office in Montreal, inaugurated to much acclaim in 1962. This imposing interior mural, entitled Lumière et mouvement dans la couleur (Light and Movement in Colour), is made from sheets of coloured fibreglass soaked in resin, welded together then fixed to the wall inside the building, above the main entrance.42 Because it was illuminated not by natural light but by a system of different coloured neon tubes behind the screen, it did not, properly speaking, constitute a window. Indeed, it is closer to a dynamic painting: the neon colours fluctuate in intensity, creating a random succession of abstract forms. Mousseau’s work was one of the earliest and most striking examples of the transfer of Catholic cultural nationalism into a secular political domain whose major symbolic investments were in state-controlled technocratic operations like Hydro-Québec. Only six years later came Marcelle Ferron’s massive stained-glass installation for the Champ-de-Mars metro station.43 During that time – essentially, the core years of the Quiet Revolution – several longstanding Montreal neighbourhoods were razed to make way for modernist megaprojects such as La Place des Arts, Place Ville-Marie, Place Bonaventure, the Radio-Canada tower, and the project that had the most direct relation to Expo 67: the Montreal metro. As the direct link between the site of the world’s fair and downtown Montreal, the metro was instrumental in uniting the real city, for a time, with its “utopian” counterpart. Just as Hydro-Québec become the privileged symbol of modernity at the national level,44 the metro became an important symbol at the civic level, suggesting technical, architectural, and, of course, artistic advance. Different architects were engaged to design the different stations, but the functional and decorative brief remained essentially the same: public spaces and pedestrian tunnels that both enabled passengers to circulate easily and ensured that they could contemplate works of art while

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they did so. Like the metro and indeed Expo, this new scope and context for public art was itself indicative of a novel phase of Québécois modernity – as were, of course, the works of art themselves. And of all the artistic media that were drafted in to serve the aims of the Quiet Revolution in architectural projects across the province, perhaps none was quite as apposite as stained glass, an overtly religious medium with enormous secular potential. Ferron was doubtless already aware of Mousseau’s work in that area. She spent several years working with other materials, but her own early experiments were unsatisfactory. It was the encounter with Michel Blum’s verre-écran (glass-screen) in Paris that allowed her to explore more fully – and on a scale until then unimaginable – the interaction between light and colour that already formed the basis of her work on canvas. Blum’s technique involved taking delicate and irregular hues created by what was essentially a medieval process and sandwiching them between sheets of modern, industrial-strength glass without any need for traditional lead joints, at once increasing the window’s durability and vastly extending its potential size.45 Her collaboration with Blum was short-lived but fruitful; as early as 1965 she exhibited two stained-glass panels at Galerie Soixante in Montreal. The appeal of glass was not purely aesthetic, however; it was, literally and figuratively, much bigger than that – so big, in fact, that the gallery was no longer able to contain it. Ferron sought not only a medium more suited to the development of her artistic vision, but an alteration in the conditions of engagement with the collectivity that was both that vision’s seedbed and its ultimate addressee. “I was enchanted by the notion of making art accessible to the people. The poor don’t have the means to buy paintings and I wanted to be able to share my work with them. In the end, painting for the general public is good for the soul. Jean-Paul Mousseau had begun making public art in Quebec and he invited me to join him. In 1966, Quebec was buzzing. Montreal was getting ready to welcome the whole world to the 1967 Universal Exhibition and the metro was under construction. ‘Say no more, Jean-Paul: I’m coming back to Quebec!’”46 Her first work out of the gallery was for the chapel of the Prison of SteHyacinthe (1965–66).47 Although the work was sold at auction when the prison was demolished in 1999 and is now lost, from the photographic evidence we can see that there are very few of the freely drawn curves that would become a hallmark of her later stained-glass compositions.48 It is much easier to cut sheet glass in straight lines, so it is possible that her mastery of technique was limited at this stage. Indeed, she says as much in one of the rare interviews where she recalls the Expo commission: “My Parisian apprenticeship in glasswork with Michel Blum hadn’t resolved all my questions. The architect Roger D’Astous gave me the opportunity to put my capabilities to the test. I was

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nervous and I told him that my technique wasn’t yet up to the task. ‘It will be!’ He replied. He behaved like a mother bird pushing her fledgling out of the nest so it would learn to fly. I had a contract to create a glass wall for Expo. Even though this was my first work in glass, I rose to the challenge. After that, I wanted to work on an even bigger project.”49 That “bigger project” – Champ-de-Mars – soon overshadowed the itc windows, and Ferron almost never mentions the earlier work after that.50 But the relationship of all three projects to the audience she claimed to be seeking via her change of media is important. It was not just stained glass that Ferron adopted in her bid to bring art to the people; it was architectural stained glass. As was the case for the gallery, the nature and function of the building that housed her work necessarily determined the nature of the audience that viewed it. And yet she had not entirely turned her back on the gallery. From October 1966 to January 1967, she held an exhibition entitled Verrières of seventeen glass panels of “architectural dimensions,” first at the Musée du Québec in Quebec City (now the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec), then at the Musée d’art contemporain du Québec (now the mac) in Montreal. According to art historian Rose-Marie Arbour: “These works make clear the artist’s preoccupations with public art and with the integration of art into architecture. Marcelle Ferron’s ‘glass-screens’ were very positively received, both by the [province’s] most important museums, and by the critics, who were unanimous in underscoring their potential to be integrated into public architecture.”51 That potential would be realized very soon. Although Arbour does not make the connection, it seems more than likely that some of these stainedglass panels exhibited in the winter before the opening of Expo 67, including a number that were of the exact size (10 × 10 feet) of those featured in the extant photographs of the windows of the itc, were the same as (or models for) those destined for the Cité du Havre. In fact, two of the pictures taken at that exhibition show quite clearly panels that will subsequently feature in one of the few photos of the itc hallway. The Expo project thus constitutes a pivotal stage in a career that would see Ferron abandon painting entirely for roughly six years. A newspaper article from 1973 bears witness to that hiatus. “She created large windows for the metro and for Expo. After her Automatist period, her canvases sang with colour. Their sole mission was that given by the master, Borduas: to express Being. Today, after six years without opening a tube of oil paint, after six years devoted to stained glass and antique colours, she has come back to painting. But that return to what she was doing six years ago, is there not something anachronistic about it?”52

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9.2 and 9.3 Top and bottom Marcelle Ferron: verrières exhibition at the Musée d’Art contemporain, Montreal, 1966.

9.4 Marcelle Ferron window of the International Trade Centre.

The interpretation of Borduas is glib, and we shall come back to the final question (to which Ferron’s answer was: “Je m’en fous complètement” (I couldn’t care less). But the key point here has to do with location. Many studies look at her stained-glass works – with the signal exception of her Champde-Mars commission – as if each were a discrete object, like a picture in a gallery, or at best a sculpture on a plaza, able to be abstracted from its surroundings by the focus of the spectator. This is surely one reason why a number of critics and art historians will mention her Montreal show, yet almost none make the connection with the Expo installation only a few months later. But one of the considerations that pushed Ferron towards working with large panels of glass was the possibility, indeed the necessity, of its integration into

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its architectural context and the very different relationship between the work of art and the spectator that that implies. The 1973 interview makes this clear: “In this landscape with practically no greenery, [Ferron] understands architecture as being open to the outside world. She has always understood art as having a social conscience. Even the automatistes believed that. Borduas would tell her that ‘a painter is not only someone who makes pictures, but someone who writes their era’. ‘For me [she states] there is no distinction.’”53 If we accept Dumont’s diagnosis of that era as suffering from a “spiritual vacuum,” Ferron’s motivations for abandoning canvas (enclosed in the gallery) in favour of the glass-screen (opening out onto the world and society at large) clearly run more deeply than a general wish to join the “progressive” movement of the Quiet Revolution. If it is incontestable that the 1960s saw the rapid withering of the Church in Quebec, both from the point of view of institutional force and of personal observance, “Catholic sensibility,” often rechannelled into politics or renamed as different forms of social solidarity, remained strong.54 Likewise, in considering the art of the Quiet Revolution – despite that generation’s reclaiming Borduas as its precursor and prophet55 – it is perhaps best not to speak of a refus global of religion,

9.5 Courtyard/terrace of the International Trade Centre showing windows by Marcelle Ferron.

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but of a refus partiel of its association with the Church and, in the case of Ferron, with its secular substitute, the gallery or museum. As Benjamin suggested in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the sacralization of the original painting hung in the gallery represents a sort of negative theology that compensates for art’s displacement from its “auratic” origin in ritual. The reproducibility brought by modern technology potentially frees the work from its anchorage within the institution, while at the same time reinserting it within a new system (or systems) of commodification and political dependence. The problem – for art as for politics – is twofold: art has lost its aura by circulating as a commodity; those that used to participate in art as its celebrants are now its consumers. Benjamin’s argument is not as simple as a condemnation of commodification, however. He is a dialectical thinker, after all, and the reinsertion of art (as fetish) into new networks of valuation and exchange leads to the renewed urgency for an understanding of the relationship between the viewer and the work, and, just as importantly, of the society that determines that relationship. It is significant that Benjamin ends his essay on the historical desacralization of art with a reflection on the role of both architecture and the new technology of cinema in collective aesthetic response. “Painting [in 1936, when his essay was written] simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today.”56 The surprising association between cinema and architecture stems less from a theory of what art should be than from a theory of what the collective currently is, and the available forms of aesthetic attention. For Benjamin, there are only two: concentration (of the connoisseur) or distraction (of the flâneur – or indeed of the “mass” considered as a whole). Only the second has any revolutionary potential: “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it … In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”57 Film – “by the dynamite of the tenth of a second”58 – explodes the distance that separates the work from the world, shocks the viewer out of distraction, and reassembles the fragments of apperception in a way that painting never could. Rudolf Arnheim (whose 1932 book, Film als Kunst [Film as Art], was the inspiration for Benjamin’s reflections on film in “The Work of Art”) wrote that “buildings,” through their particular ability to situate and concentrate forces both cultural and spatial, “have a large share in determining to what extent every one of us is an individual or a member of a group.”59 D’Astous likewise understood this social potential of architecture, indeed perhaps all the more

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acutely as a modernist architect working for the Church in the context of a society suddenly casting off its long-held attachment to religion. His two pavilions at Expo – one explicitly devoted to Christian communion, the other implicitly facilitating economic individualism – explore the situated dynamic between the individual and the collective through spatial and visual design. Both, perhaps not surprisingly for the reader of Walter Benjamin, incorporate aspects of “the cinematic” in their design.

Two Pavilions: Dialectics at a Standstill Originally named the Pavilion of Unity, the Christian Pavilion at Expo 67 represented a historic step in favour of ecumenism. Rome, which had always remained jealous of its unique position as the legitimate heir of the sole “universal” church, officially changed its attitude at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), known as Vatican II: the church would now invite Catholics to engage with other denominations in the pursuit of Christian unity. At previous universal exhibitions, the Vatican, as Holy See in addition to being an independent city-state in its own right, had had its own pavilion.60 But the idea of a single Christian Pavilion was already in discussion among religious leaders in Montreal in 1958.61 Following Vatican II, the leaders of the eight principal denominations in Canada (which, according to the organizers, comprised 95 per cent of the country’s Christians)62 were able to agree to combine at Expo 67.63 The Official Expo Guide underlined that this was the “first time in the history of world exhibitions” that this had happened and boasted that that pavilion was “the first concrete example of ecumenical action in almost a thousand years since the final split between the Churches of East and West in 1054.”64 In many ways, as Nicola Pezolet has recently suggested, D’Astous was the logical choice for the project. His firm, Pothier-D’Astous, had already built “some of Canada’s most innovative and daring” church buildings. Moreover, given the ecumenical mandate of the Christian Pavilion, “the choice of a staunchly modernist firm also made sense: many post-war houses of worship, across denominational lines, were eschewing revivalist forms in favour of more abstract and streamlined designs that were not tied to a particular religious or ethnocultural group.”65 One of three privately sponsored religious pavilions built for Expo 67 (the other two were the Pavilion of Judaism and the evangelical Sermons from Science Pavilion), it was located at the heart of one of the busiest sectors on Île Notre-Dame, close to the complex of Canadian pavilions, which were themselves adjacent to those of Britain and France. Surrounded by a bold curvilinear concrete fence painted white, it was a building

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made mostly of wood and clear sheet glass, with massive beams supporting a strikingly asymmetrical curved roof. In the absence of any traditional Christian iconography or ornamentation, it was the structure of the pavilion itself that had to bear the weight of communicating its Christian message: “as with other church projects by D’Astous, the alternating shapes suggest the dynamic interaction between earth and sky, as well as between humanity and God.”66 The inside of the pavilion was intended to be just as semiotically load-bearing as its external structure, if not more so. Designed by artist Charles Gagnon, it eschewed traditional religious signifiers such as organ music, liturgical objects, religious sculptures, or didactic images inspired by the Bible or the life of Jesus, in favour of a modern multimedia display of secular images.67 Upon entering the building, the visitor was confronted with a series of cubes that featured over 300 photographs of everyday life in different locations around the world, complemented by a soundtrack of noises invoking crowds. According to D’Astous’s partner, Jean-Paul Pothier, this first level of the pavilion sought to show “reality.”68 A staircase then led visitors downstairs, past an increasingly random and disturbing montage of images, some with a distinctly surrealist flavour (including one showing “the larger-than-life upper torso of a woman, her head replaced by an upside-down padlock, an arm emerging from between her breasts”).69 Once underground, they were faced with a hightech media display of images, sound, lighting effects, and … a film. It was the film that provided the most controversial element of the display. Charles Gagnon’s The Eighth Day, a short compilation of newsreel footage featuring the carnage of war, was described as “thirteen minutes of unrelieved horror” by one reviewer.70 It ended with a sequence of three overlapping images: a bomb exploding; a flower budding; and a final bomb obliterating the just-opened blossom. From this “negative level,” stunned viewers would ascend back towards the light: a high-ceilinged hall and an exterior garden patio adorned with fountains, white concrete stools, and cedar trees. It was there that relief – salvation, of sorts – was to be found. But the important point is the way in which the pavilion purposefully sets out to reconfigure the relationship between its attendees. “The visitor to the Christian Pavilion at Expo 67 is in for many surprises,” writes the author of the pavilion’s initial press release. “He won’t find any of the expected Christian symbols – no stainedglass windows, no statues, no religious paintings, no pulpit and no attempt to sermonize. What’s more, he won’t merely be a visitor. He’ll be part of the Pavilion.”71 If the more outraged critics derided it as an “ecumenical shock pagoda,”72 épater les bourgeois was not its primary intention: indeed the explicit inscription of the viewer/visitor within the work itself was another way in which traditional religious values intersected with contemporary secular con-

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cerns, for such inscription not only harks back to the Christian communicant becoming one with Christ via the Eucharist, it also references the modern enthusiasm for participatory art as a means of turning the passive spectator/ consumer created by capitalist society into a genuine cultural collaborator.73 D’Astous’s other pavilion offered no such collaboration. Not only was its access restricted, it was in many ways designed for the same capitalist ideology that the Christian Pavilion was opposing with its shocking participatory displays. For those familiar with his work, the omission of stained glass in the Christian Pavilion was perhaps not so surprising. His churches of the 1950s and 1960s tended in general to privilege natural illumination – strategically placed clear glass that would favour divine mystery – over didactic illustration. In fact, there are stained-glass windows in only two of his twelve churches.74 And yet in the itc, D’Astous chose to incorporate vast stained-glass surfaces. These could, of course, be read as purely decorative. France Vanlaethem suggests that Ferron’s return to painting in the 1970s is partially a result of not being satisfactorily involved in the architectural decisions that ought to make the wall and its apertures a single statement; as Ferron herself stated in an interview, the glass artist, all too often brought in after the fact (après coup), becomes little more than a decorator.75 However, the sheer size of the commission, and the fact that the windows, or at least some of them, were exhibited in two major museum shows prior to installation, suggests otherwise, that they were an integral part of the project. D’Astous, moreover, had made his own Wright’s maxim that “ornament is to architecture what efflorescence of a tree or plant is to its structure. Of the thing, not on it.”76 And, while they were not figurative, nor explicitly controversial, their position, arrayed serially along a corridor and intended for passing foot traffic, offered a certain inadvertent echo of Gagnon’s film. If they were not properly cinematic, they were kinetic, the movement of the spectator now connecting the otherwise disconnected panels. “The film with its shock effect meets [the distracted viewer of modernity] halfway,” writes Benjamin. “The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”77 And thinking of both pavilions, we might remember that for Benjamin it was Dadaism (the precursor of surrealism, on which Ferron had cut her teeth) that first “attempted to create by pictorial … means the effect the public today seeks in film.”78 Under the aegis of the Business Development Bureau and sponsored by the Canadian Bankers Association, the itc was intended to serve as a hub where local, national, and international businesspeople could socialize, make deals and receive information on trade opportunities and industrial development

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prospects in Canada from bankers and federal and provincial government representatives. It housed the Business Development Bureau, a bank concourse, meeting rooms, a library, and the titular “Expo Club,” a bar and restaurant where businessmen could “meet and talk on a friendly, relaxed basis,” according to the official Expo guide. Unlike almost every other pavilion at Expo, access to the building and club membership were restricted to accredited businessmen and representatives of Canadian companies. Foreign businessmen, who had been duly introduced, were “granted honorary membership of Expo Club for the duration of their stay.”79 The “business case,” as we might say today, for such a pavilion is clear. But retaining our Benjaminian lens, we can also see it as a novel space created for a new type of international exhibition. Benjamin’s privileged nineteenthcentury models were the world’s fair, an event traditionally conceived around commodities and nations, and the commercial arcade, a sprawling and sometimes random network of interconnected passageways, located halfway between the city’s interior and its exterior, its shop windows displaying everything from art to umbrellas (along with – why not? – sewing machines and operating tables). While the latter continued to thrive (a modern, subterranean avatar of the arcade – la Place Ville-Marie, still the world’s biggest underground shopping complex – had only just been created in downtown Montreal by I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb, and immediately assimilated into the nationalist narrative of the Quiet Revolution),80 the old “world’s fair” had been transformed on islands in the Saint Lawrence into Terre des hommes, an event supposed to be dedicated not to commodities, but to universal “Man.”81 Is it by chance (or by an idea of forces that we barely understand) that the itc was located between the Art Gallery and the Quebec Industries Pavilion, between a pavilion dedicated (at one remove) to the collector of “universal” aesthetic value (“He makes his concern the idealization of objects. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them”)82 and one where the live closed-circuit transmission of technological achievement – the construction of the Manic-5 dam – was the main draw? Where the first replaces use value with connoisseur value in a gigantic once-in-a-lifetime collection (“A unique occasion is now offered. It is not for us to go towards the masterpieces, but for them to come to us”),83 the second makes use value itself – specifically the hydro-electric mastery of natural resources – into the singular and spectacular figure of the emergent nation of Quebec. At Expo there appears a third figure in this axiological opposition between commodity and connoisseurship. In the nineteenth century, the exhibition space was an iron and glass cathedral devoted to various displays of goods from around the world (“World exhibitions are places of

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pilgrimage to the commodity fetish”);84 at Expo – on the cusp of the age of “transnational business,” of a “vertiginous new dynamic in international banking,” of “new forms of media interrelationship”85 – this would be effectively reduced, refined, and relegated to a single private pavilion (even as the McLuhanesque benefits of “global culture” were being celebrated practically everywhere else on the Expo site). In such a context, it is unsurprising that a new space would be expressly created in order to welcome that semi-occult agent of late capitalism, the “businessman.” What is perhaps surprising is that Roger D’Astous and Marcelle Ferron should be behind its design. As he did for the Christian Pavilion, D’Astous made abundant use of local natural materials in his design. The building’s exterior walls, joists, ceilings, floors, paneling, and interior laminated columns were of Canadian wood. In contrast to the organic lines and asymmetrical curvilinear roof of the Christian Pavilion, the itc was composed solely of square and rectangular elements, a succession of straight lines and angles. The air-conditioned building

9.6 Passage de Choiseul, 2ème arrondissement, Paris, 1916.

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9.7 Place Ville-Marie, 1966.

was L-shaped, with the Expo Club situated atop the slightly shorter wing, overlooking a wide stretch of the river, directly facing the Île Sainte-Hélène and the Place des Nations at its point. This stunning vista provided a contrast to the rather dark and conventional spaces inside. From the rare photographs that remain, the interior décor of the various ground-floor meeting rooms appears to have been staid and functional, which seems rather out of step with the experimental modernism elsewhere on the site, and even with the clean lines of D’Astous’s building itself. A contemporary newspaper article provides a summary description of the eclectic and generally conservative nature of the meeting rooms: The Provincial Bank of Canada is furnished with old French-Canadian furniture. The Canadian National Bank has chosen an ambiance of warm upholstery, set off by a bas relief by Bourgault representing an auction on the old Place d’Armes. The Bank of Commerce wanted a very modern style and displays sculptures and paintings by contemporary artists. The Toronto Dominion Bank has created a “businessmen’s boudoir,”

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9.8 Top International Trade Centre, entrance, “Inauguration et vues de l’Expo 67, Montréal, Québec,” 1967. 9.9 Bottom Plans of the ITC (second floor), International Trade Centre brochure.

enhanced by the projection of enormous photographic slides of Eskimo sculpture. The Bank of Montreal has designed grand wooden fresco bearing a world map on which are placed clocks showing the time in all the major capitals.86 Perhaps this was to be expected, given that each of the chartered banks sponsoring the enterprise had a reception room, and banks in general, from their staff to their architecture, have traditionally been expected to exude solidity, sobriety, and discretion. But then there is the disconcerting vision of that very proper interior merging into a decidedly peculiar space, a sort of “arcade” of banking rooms, where French-Canadian folklore, contemporary sculpture, and the slightly surreal image of a “businessman’s boudoir, enhanced by … enormous photographic slides of Eskimo sculpture,” bring us back once again to Walter Benjamin: “Streets are the dwelling place of the collective,” he writes. “More than anywhere else, the street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses.”87 And that arcade led, around the corner, to the Expo Club: a new dedicated space for what would, in a few years, come to be called “networking.” In order to reach its unfettered view over the old networks of trade on the Saint Lawrence River, however, the businessmen had first to walk through Marcelle Ferron’s gallery of stained-glass windows, which served both to screen and to modify that view. Landscape, wrote Benjamin, “is what Paris becomes for the flâneur. Or, more precisely: the city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes about him as a room.”88 A similar dialectical division of labour seems to have been operating along the corridor of the itc. But the contrast would have been all the more striking: on the one side, the conventional signs of international trade with desks, armchairs, ledgers, prospectuses, maps, and clocks signifying the homogeneous “empty” time of the nation (or nations)89 and the flattened space of the world to be mastered through trade in a heterogeneous suite of semi-private, semi-public “interiors”; on the other, the ceaseless flow of the Saint Lawrence and, superimposed upon it, the temporary utopia of the Expo site with its fantastic structures, momentary concert of peoples, and the suggestion of a new zone of protoglobal exchange. In between: the strongly defined and brightly coloured forms of Ferron’s glass, a translucent medium that both obscures and facilitates the prospect from both sides of the partition, at once echoing the oblique lines of commerce taking shape within the building (perhaps another sense of Ferron’s idée de forces que l’on connaît mal) and the tones and outlines of the landscape without. Moreover, these windows were meant to be looked at and seen through in motion, the “businessmen” on their way to and from the Expo Club

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9.10 The Bank of Montreal Room at the ITC, with its wall of “empty time.”

passing by alternating panels of coloured and clear glass that could be said to resemble the cells of a filmstrip massively enlarged (which indeed one panel actually seems to represent – fig. 9.3). It was a prospect at once static and dynamic, pellucid and opalescent, to be taken in – distractedly – with one eye on the past and the other on the future.

Champ-de-Mars: Dialectics on the Move In his sociological study of “artistic generations,” Marcel Fournier notes that of all the artists who gravitated around Borduas in the 1940s, it would be Ferron and Mousseau who, during the 1960s, would translate the political engagement implicit in his aesthetic project into an integrated approach to

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9.11 Corridor of the International Trade Centre, looking towards the Expo Club, showing Marcelle Ferron windows.

the arts that went beyond painting.90 In the case of Ferron, her most wellknown expression of this engagement was without a doubt the Champ-deMars metro station, which was made possible by Expo. In her memoirs, Ferron recounts that she was summoned to meet Daniel Johnson, Quebec’s premier, who would surely have seen her work at the itc, situated as it was right next to the Quebec Industries Pavilion that was showing “live” the national project probably dearest to his heart. During their conversation (in which he made the surprising suggestion that it might be he, of all people, who would finally achieve independence for Quebec), she asked outright for the chance to help turn Montreal’s metro stations into works of art, “like the Russians.” He

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agreed. She was subsequently contacted by Lucien Saulnier, a close associate of Montreal’s mayor, Jean Drapeau, who promised her the opportunity to give “a soul” to the “ugly and gloomy” Champ-de-Mars station.91 Before beginning work she had first to agree on the details with Robert LaPalme, who was at that time artistic director of both Expo 67 and the Montreal metro. Perhaps inevitably given his background as one of the Duplessis era’s most outstanding political cartoonists, LaPalme greatly favoured representational art. Their initial meeting did not go well. He refused even to consider her abstract stained-glass project.92 Ferron, for her part, pushed back against his request for narrative illustration and historical didacticism: “He wanted me to incorporate a portrait of Papineau. It was out of the question! If people were to recognize him, I would have to write his name. Ridiculous! Where would that leave immigrants and anyone who didn’t know about Papineau? Would I have to write his history too? I was adamant. History is something you learn in school.” It was a response worthy of an artist. And her work for the itc is an eloquent reminder of what sort of artist she was. While the basrelief of representational history might have had its place on the wall of a banking room, hanging solemnly between two wingback chairs, just on the other side of the door lay a passageway of swirling medieval colours and clear glass windows looking (obliquely) onto the contemporary world. Had she been the kind of person inclined to quote philosophers to administrators, Ferron might well have added: “The true picture of the past flits by.”93 Her installation at Expo may not have had the afterlife it merited, but it would turn out to have a kind of half-life. Instead of being dismantled in 1968 like most of the structures on the Expo site, the itc became the home of the “Cercle universitaire,” the faculty-alumni club of the Université de Montréal,94 next to what became, for a time, Quebec’s National Museum of Contemporary Art (formerly the Expo Art Gallery). The art critic Jean Sarrazin, who visited it in this incarnation, was probably the last to write from personal knowledge about Ferron’s two great pieces of public stained glass from the late 1960s, before the earlier work vanished. In an article illustrated (sadly only in black and white) with photographs of the newly created Champ-de-Mars metro station and of both the itc (here referred to as the “Cercle universitaire”) and the gallery exhibition at the mac that immediately preceded it, he writes eloquently of a politico-aesthetic project that began in the gallery, was translated to the temporary “utopia” of Expo, and finished as an architectural commission for the city: a brightly coloured translucent membrane surrounding the entrance to a new network connecting ordinary Montrealers as they went about their daily tasks. By working through these iterations of light and

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9.12 “Le Centre du commerce international à la Banque Canadienne Nationale à Montréal,” 8 May 1967, showing historical bas-relief of the Place d’Armes by Jean-Julien Bourgault; the Île Sainte-Hélène and the dome of the US Pavilion are visible through the open door.

space, Ferron discovered that “the canvas on the wall has scarcely more meaning than it would have in those necropolises we call museums or mothballed in bourgeois salons; it certainly has none any longer in the heart of the modern city. The work of art today is only meaningful insofar as it is assimilated, absorbed by the living movement of its day-to-day landscape, where shapes and colours are breathed into the urban fabric, into the rhythms of its industry, into the ebb and flow of people as they move through its streets and transportation systems.”95 As Benjamin suggested, “Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception … Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building” – or indeed a visitor to a gallery contemplating a painting –

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9.13 “Verrière Marcelle Ferron au métro Champ-de-Mars,” La Presse, 14 January 1999.

it “occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion.”96 As such, her glasswork went some way towards fulfilling Borduas’s desire to extend aesthetic “national education” beyond the narrow doctrinal and institutional limits imposed by the Church, while retaining the spiritual foundations of its “universal” community. When Sarrazin considered those monumental glass-screens that both reveal and obscure the changing cityscape of Montreal – along with the changing cultural and political landscape of Quebec – he championed Ferron’s achievements with reference to the religious origins of her art: “For her, the glass mural must be within reach of everyone, and not simply in the service of churches as before!” Adding, with a lowercase touch of “quiet revolutionary” irony:97 “She has, thank god, secularized and democratized the art of stained glass.”98

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notes 1 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255. 2 Rudolf Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 269. 3 “All my work is marked by what people call ‘chance’, although, for me, chance is not chance, but the encounter with an idea of forces that we barely understand.” Quoted in Normand Thériault, “Marcelle Ferron: peindre sans peindre,” La Presse, 11 April 1970. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the authors. 4 Jocelyn Létourneau has recently described this period as a “reorientation” rather than a revolution. La Condition québécoise. Une histoire dépaysante (Quebec: Septentrion, 2020), 227–69. For a summary in English of the historiographical debate between “(quiet) revolutionaries” and “(noisy) revisionists,” see Donald Cuccioletta and Martin Lubin, “The Quebec Quiet Revolution: A Noisy Evolution,” in Contemporary Quebec: Selected Readings and Commentaries, eds. Michael D. Behiels and Matthew Hayday (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011): 182–95. For a plurivocal discussion of the Quiet Revolution and its legacy (“in the age of globalization,” according to the back cover), see La Révolution tranquille, 40 ans plus tard: un bilan, eds. Yves Bélanger, Robert Comeau, and Céline Métivier (Montreal: vlb Éditeur, 2000). 5 The observation provides the closing sentence to Yvan Lamonde’s recent intellectual history of twentieth-century Quebec to the Quiet Revolution. Yvan Lamonde, La Modernité au Québec, vol. 2, La victoire différée du présent sur le passé (1939–1965) (Montreal: Fides, 2016), 431. 6 “En un temps relativement court, le catholicisme a cessé d’être l’ossature de notre nationalité. Beaucoup de croyants, dont je suis, s’en réjouissent; nous pensons que le pluralisme est une heureuse conquête. Mais où trouverons-nous maintenant le lieu d’une certaine unanimité sans laquelle il n’est point de nation? Nous sommes à l’heure où il faut nous donner un autre projet collectif.” And he concludes: “De la coquille morte du nationalisme de naguère, les Canadiens français sont-ils capables de libérer leurs plus vieilles solidarités et d’en nourrir enfin un projet collectif qui puisse apporter sa petite contribution à l’édification de l’humanité? Alors seulement, nous aurons des raisons de perpétuer l’homme canadien français” (From the empty shell of an outdated nationalism, are we capable of extracting the venerable kernel of our solidarity in order to nourish a collective project that might finally allow French Canadians to make their small contribution to the development of humanity? It is only within that possibility that we have any arguments for preserving the French-Canadian species). Fernand Dumont, “Y a-t-il un avenir pour l’homme canadien-français ?” (1967), La Vigile du Québec (Montreal: Éditions Hurtubise, 1971), 62. See Craig Moyes’s

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7 8

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discussion of Lionel Groulx and Jean Drapeau, who invoke the same reasoning, in chapter 1 of this volume. The following year Dumont would head an elevenperson, three-year commission on the place of the church in Quebec society, whose report (commonly known as the Rapport Dumont) would be published in 1971: Dumont, L’Église du Québec: un heritage, un projet (report of the Commission d’étude sur les laïcs et l’Église) (Montreal: Éditions Fides, 1971). bie regulations require that all installations be dismantled six months after the closure of a Category 1 exhibition. The disappearance of most of the major audiovisual projects of Expo 67 has been brilliantly explored by Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault, eds., Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014), 25–53. For a fascinating recent attempt to do justice to the dialectical relation between imagining, forgetting, and reimagining of other works in the Expo archive, see Monika Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone, eds., In Search of Expo 67 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2020). In addition to the two Expo pavilions, he was concurrently responsible in 1966/67 for both a station in the new metro network (Beaubien) and the thirty-eightstorey Château Champlain hotel in downtown Montreal. See Claude Bergeron, Roger D’Astous, Architecte (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001). Which was remarked upon at the time: “Many come out [of the pavilion] complaining there are no stained-glass windows, no image of the church.” Pavilion hostess Esmerelda Thornhill, quoted in Monika Kin Gagnon, “The Christian Pavilion at Expo 67: Notes from Charles Gagnon’s Archive,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 150. Ferron’s sister Madeleine, in a letter dated January 1965, states that she had read a short notice in the newspaper that Marcelle had won a contract for the upcoming “Expo” in Montreal; in her response (dated 15 February), Ferron asks to be sent the clipping “about the pavilion for which I am supposed to be making the stained-glass windows.” Marcelle Ferron, Le Droit d’être rebelle: Correspondance de Marcelle Ferron avec Jacques, Madeleine, Paul et Thérèse Ferron, ed. Babalou Hamelin (Montreal: Boréal, 2016), 514, 516. The contract, dated 4 July 1966, was established directly between D’Astous and Ferron. France Vanlaethem, “Le peintre et l’architecte,” in Marcelle Ferron, ed. Réal Lussier (Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2000), 47n32. Gunda Lambton’s chapter on Marcelle Ferron in Stealing the Show: Seven Women Artists in Canadian Public Art (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994) mentions her Expo commission only in passing (on page 24) and does not specify its location at the International Trade Centre. Rose-Marie Arbour, in her fine

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essay on Ferron’s public art (“Arts visuels et espace public: l’apport de deux femmes artistes des années 60 au Québec, Micheline Beauchemin et Marcelle Ferron,” Recherches féministes 2, no. 1 (winter 1989): 33–50, while considering the Montreal exhibition that immediately preceded the itc installation, doesn’t mention it at all. And Véronique Millet’s extended reading of Ferron’s work in glass (“Vision chromatique et gestualité: le concept de transparence dans les œuvres de Marcelle Ferron,” ma thesis, uqàm, 2017) only references Expo when quoting a letter to her sister from 1965 (89n212). Likewise, the rich collection of essays and interviews produced for the major retrospective on her work at the Galerie Simon Blais in 2008, contains but a single mention of her work for Expo 67. Revealingly, Blais notes that the exhibition is to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Champ-de-Mars metro station, “la première réalisation d’envergure en art public de Marcelle Ferron, et la plus significative aujourd’hui encore” (Marcelle Ferron’s first major work of public art, and today still the most important). Marcelle Ferron: monographie (Montreal: Éditions Simon Blais, 2008), 4. The only study to mention Ferron’s Expo commission as an important step in her period of architectural collaboration in stained glass is France Vanlaethem, “Le peintre et l’architecte,” 35–43. With no visual evidence to work with, however, there is little that could be said about the glass itself. Claude Bergeron cites this article in his brief mention of the itc in Roger D’Astous, 47n6. A reading that was likewise partially assumed by the actors themselves: the artist and filmmaker responsible for the interior layout of the Christian Pavilion, for example, explicitly invokes McLuhan in an interview conducted at the time: “This pavilion is what Marshall McLuhan talks about – total communication.” Charles Gagnon, quoted in Gagnon and Marchessault, Reimagining Cinema, 192. In the religious sense of the term explored by Benjamin’s friend, Eric Auerbach, in “Figura” (1938), Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–76. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999), 463. See Jocelyn Létourneau, “Le ‘Québec moderne’, un chapitre du grand récit collectif des Québécois,” Revue française de science politique 42, no. 5 (1992): 765–85. “Here where life is exalted is indeed the privileged place for man in his world … Man is at the centre of a limitless universe whose perfect unity the artist reveals.” Robert Élie, “Terre des Hommes/Man and His World,” Man and His World International Fine Arts Exhibition Expo 67 Montreal Canada, exhibition catalogue (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1967), xvi. “The St. Lawrence Industrial Valley is the theme of the pavilion … The accent is on expansion and dynamic industrial activity, looking to the area’s future in Man’s new world … One of the most exciting prospects favoring progress in

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Quebec is the availability of immense fresh water resources, and an exciting feature will be daily color television reports from Hydro Quebec’s huge Manicouagan power project … transmitted direct from construction sites by private circuit.” Expo 67 Official Guide / Guide officiel (Toronto: MacLean-Hunter, 1967), 174. For a discussion of the live closed-circuit transmission of the construction of the Manic-5 dam in the qip, see chapter 1 of this volume. Un “club unique, premier au monde crée à l’occasion d’une exposition universelle.” Louis-Martin Tard, “Au rendez-vous des hommes d’affaires!” La Patrie, L’Hebdo des Canadiens-français 88, no. 15 (16 April 1967). Her father was a local notary, Liberal Party organizer, and “a sort of Montaigne” who respected local conventions while giving free reign to his own ideas in private. Her eldest brother, Jacques, though trained in medicine, received national recognition as writer of fiction in the 1950s, winning the Governor General’s Award for Contes du pays incertain in 1962 and going on to become one of Quebec’s greatest writers. In 1963, he founded the satirical Rhinoceros Party with her other brother Paul, while both were working as medical doctors. Her sister Madeleine became a well-known novelist over the course of the 1960s as well. For her (auto)biographical details, see Marcelle Ferron, L’Esquisse d’une mémoire, interview by Michel Brûlé (Montreal: Les Intouchables, 1996). Theodor Adorno, “Looking Back on Surrealism” (1956), Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 102. Adorno notes a little further on, “After the European catastrophe surrealist shocks lost their force,” 103. François Gagnon, “Situation de Projections libérantes,” Études françaises 8, no. 3 (August 1972): 231–42. The letter was signed by the deputy minister for social welfare and youth, Gustave Poisson (who was in charge of “technical” schools in the province), but according to André Gauvreau, the nephew of the École du meuble’s director, Jean-Marie Gauvreau, the order for Borduas’s dismissal came directly from “le Boss,” Premier Maurice Duplessis (conversation with André Gauvreau, 1 December 2020). Jean-Éthier Blais, Autour de Borduas (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1979), 132. “C’est dans la mesure où Borduas aura été formé – jusque dans son esthétique – par le catholicisme canadien-français qu’il réagira contre lui avec plus de violence … Il faut à Borduas, pour échapper, dans son art même, à l’étreinte de la religion, rechercher un nouvel état de grâce, qui sera l’amour du genre humain” (It is because Borduas was schooled by French-Canadian Catholicism, right down to his aesthetics, that he reacted against it with such violence … In order for his art to escape the constraints of religion, Borduas needed to seek a new state of grace, which he would find in love for the human race). Ibid., 134.

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25 A number of issues of the surrealist review Minotaure arrived at the École du meuble in 1938. Nicole Boily, “Borduas: l’homme et l’œuvre,” Études françaises 8, no. 3 (August 1972), 315. In an interview from 1987, Jean-Paul Mousseau recalled that, a few years later, the École du meuble would also bring in the experimental American surrealist review, vvv (edited by David Hare, in collaboration with Breton, Duchamp, and Ernst from 1942 to 1944). Mousseau also underlined the state of ecclesiastical control over reading material in Quebec at the time: in 1942 if one wanted to take The Three Musketeers out of the Bibliothèque nationale, written permission was needed from a “spiritual director” – “You could imagine that for Zola, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, it wasn’t even worth thinking about.” J.-P. Gilbert, “Jean-Paul Mousseau: l’heritage du refus.” etc 1, no. 2 (winter 1987–88): 38. In such a context, it is not difficult to imagine what the authorities would have made of the vagina dentata depicted on the cover of the fourth issue of vvv (1944), underscoring the review’s surprising presence within the École du meuble and at least one aspect of surrealism’s radical potentiality within traditional French-Canadian cultural education. 26 For Borduas’s debt to Leduc, see Éthier-Blais, Autour de Borduas, 45–74. 27 See Laurent Jenny and Thomas Tresize, “From Breton to Dali: The Adventures of Automatism,” October 51 (winter 1989): 105–14. 28 “Le grand devoir, l’unique, est d’ordonner spontanément un monde neuf où les passions les plus généreuses puissent se développer nombreuses, colllectives.” Paul-Émile Borduas, Projections libérantes (1949), Études françaises 8, no. 3 (August 1972): 302. For the influence of Borduas on another student of the École du meuble who made a significant contribution to Expo, see Martin Racine, “The Ambiguous Modernity of Designer Julien Hébert,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Kenneally and Sloan, 128–43. 29 In a 1977 interview she stated: “Si tu es peintre, tu veux vivre dans un lieu où tu peux plonger dans la culture. Pour moi, en tout cas de façon individuelle, je ne voyais rien à faire ici. Ce que je voulais, c’était de voir la peinture. En Europe, j’ai avalé tous les musées, les galeries. Je voulais aussi vivre dans un pays où l’artiste a un statut” (If you are a painter, you want to live somewhere where you can dive into culture. For me, at least personally, there was nothing I could see myself doing here. What I wanted to do was to see paintings. In Europe, I took in all the museums and galleries. I also wanted to live in a country where the artist has some standing). “Entretien: au temps de Refus global,” in Marcelle Ferron: monographie, 24–5. 30 “En 1965, regardant ce qui avait été jusque-là mon activité, j’ai senti pour moi l’obligation de décider si oui ou non je poursuivais, acceptant alors d’être un peintre qui vit dans le système de l’art tel qu’établi, visant alors la carrière internationale. J’ai vite découvert qu’une telle aventure ne m’intéressait plus. J’ai alors

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rompu avec tout ce qui m’entourait: j’ai quitté Paris, ma maison et les gens avec qui j’étais en relation. Quelque chose de neuf débutait.” Norman Thériault, “Marcelle Ferron: peindre sans peindre.” Lambton, Stealing the Show, 23–4; Ferron recounts the same moment in L’Esquisse d’une mémoire, 108–10. In her 1966 interview with France O’Leary, “Le travail du verre,” she claims that it was Jacques Michel who perfected the technique she calls “Verre-écran,” which sandwiches fragile hand-blown coloured glass between two much thicker industrial sheets of clear glass. In the handout that accompanied her exhibition at the Musée du Québec (now Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec), from 12 October to 7 November 1966, “La Société des Procédés Jacques Michel, de Paris” is given credit as the patent holder. “Exposition de verrière modern,” f. 3. See note 29 above. In her 1966 interview, “Le travail du verre,” she also mentions working with the Polish-French architect Piotr Kowalski as early as 1956 on transparent resins in architectural contexts. Marcelle Ferron, “Entretien: au temps de Refus global,” in Marcelle Ferron: Monographie, 25. For a summary of the artistic network that was crystallizing at the time, see Judith Bradette Brassard, “Jean-Paul Mousseau artiste public: étude de la station de métro Peel, de l’église Saint-Maurice-de-Duvernay et de la Mousse Spacethèque de Montréal” (ma thesis, uqàm, 2008), 185–9. For a tour of many of these houses, otherwise inaccessible to the public, see Étienne Desrosiers’s remarkable film Roger D’Astous (Québec: K-Films Amérique, 2016), 103 min. Bergeron writes in his biography that D’Astous “a construit presque toutes ses églises dans les années précédant immédiatement le concile Vatican II, qui s’est déroulé entre octobre 1962 et décembre 1965 … L’encyclique Mediator Dei, que le pape Pie XII publia en 1947, était déjà une première sanction de ce mouvement par autorité romaine … Aussi ne faut-il pas s’étonner que les églises de Roger D’Astous s’inspirent de ces directives et concrétisent le renouveau liturgique, avant que celle-ci ne furent promulguée par Vatican II en 1965” ([D’Astous] built almost all his churches during the years immediately preceding the Second Vatican Council, which took place between October 1962 and December 1965 … The encyclical Mediator Dei, promulgated by Pope Pius XII in 1947, constituted the first official steps toward modernization by Rome … We should not therefore be surprised that, even before Vatican II in 1965, the churches of Roger D’Astous take their inspiration and form from these [earlier] directives for liturgical renewal). Bergeron, Roger D’Astous, 128–9. See Éthier-Blais, Autour de Borduas, 77–108. Couturier spent five years in Quebec (from 1940–45), principally at the École du meuble in Montreal; the major part

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of his career was spent in France. See also Yvan Lamonde, “Un visa Chrétien pour l’art abstrait et pour un affranchissement,” Voix et images 37, no. 2 (winter 2012): 35–52; and Antoine Lion, “Art sacré et modernité en France: le rôle du P. MarieAlain Couturier,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 227, no. 1 (2010): 109–26. Un “sens interne profond des matériaux.” Bergeron, Roger D’Astous, 38. “L’art sacré implique une référence à un autre monde; il tient à un autre ordre de réalités que les réalités terrestres” (Sacred art implies a reference to another world; it depends on an order of reality other than that earthly reality). M.-A. Couturier, Art et liberté spirituelle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), 47. Rudolf Arnheim points out the affinities between Frank Lloyd Wright and the early modernist Austrian architect Adolf Loos from this point of view. Buildings should grow naturally out of the landscape “in the image of the tree,” in Wright’s words, or to look as if they had been created in nature “by the hand of God” in Loos’s. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form, 214. The official magazine of the province’s architectural association (aapq) devotes five pages to D’Astous’s church in 1957, describing it as a work whose central idea reinterprets “la fonction liturgique [de l’église], grâce aux possibilités nouvelles de la technique moderne. Conception qui conserve à cette enceinte sacrée son atmosphère exaltante et pieuse, le propre de la maison de Dieu” ([the church’s] religious purpose, thanks to the new possibilities offered by modern technology, retaining for this sacred space the exalted and pious atmosphere that befits the house of God”). Architecture-Bâtiment-Construction 30 (February 1957): 30–4. “En architecture, la lumière aussi est un matériau, comme la pierre, le bois ou le béton, mais c’est un matériau impalpable, il y a quelque chose de mystérieux làdedans. Mousseau m’a appris ça, la lumière.” Quoted in Sophie Gironnay, “Mousseau,” Le Devoir, 18 January 1997 (Bradette-Brassard, Jean-Paul Mousseau, 57). D’Astous collaborated with Mousseau on one of his last churches, the audacious Saint-Maurice-de-Duvernay in Laval (1961–62). The weight of this 4.57 m high by 22.86 m wide mural is approximately 1,360 kg. See Bruno Victor Andrus, “Vitrail et religion au Québec dans le contexte de la Révolution tranquille: De l’église au métro,” Ornamentum 38, nos. 1–2 (spring– summer 2020): 12–16. Indeed, as Stéphane Savard argues, the “symbolic position occupied by HydroQuébec within Quebec society is without common measure” when compared to other public utility companies elsewhere in Canada or the United States. “Quand l’histoire donne sens aux représentations symboliques: l’Hydro-Québec, Manic 5 et la société québécoise,” Recherches sociographiques 50, no. 1 (June 2009): 67–97. The technique is explained in detail in an article devoted to Ferron for an architectural trade magazine in 1974. Hélène Gosselin-Geoffrion, “Ferron 74: La

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Grande Équipe,” Architecture Concept 29, no. 325 (September–October 1974): 32–7. A good summary is given by Vanlaethem, “Le peintre et l’architecte,” 39–42. “La perspective de rendre l’art accessible au peuple m’enchantait. Les pauvres n’ont pas les moyens d’acheter des tableaux et je voulais leur faire partager mon art. Au fond, peindre pour le public, c’est se faire une belle âme. Jean-Paul Mousseau avait commencé à faire de l’art public au Québec et il m’invitait à me joindre à lui. En 1966, le Québec était en pleine effervescence. Montréal allait accueillir le monde entier durant l’Exposition universelle de 1967 et on commençait à construire le métro. ‘Jean-Paul, tu n’as plus à essayer de me convaincre de revenir au Québec. J’arrive !’” Ferron, L’Esquisse d’une mémoire, 209. The commission was announced in Le Soleil (Quebec City) on 25 June 1966 (p. 16) and likely executed at around the same time. It is reproduced in L’Esquisse d’une mémoire, 161; France Vanlaethem also provides a photo in “Le peintre et l’architecte,” 37. “Mon apprentissage des verrières à Paris avec Michel Blum n’avait pas répondu à toutes les questions. L’architecte Roger D’Astous m’avait donné l’occasion de mettre mes connaissances à l’épreuve. J’étais nerveuse et je lui avais dit que la technique n’était pas encore au point. ‘Tu la mettras au point!’ avait-il répondu. Il s’était comporté comme la mère qui pousse son oisillon hors du nid pour qu’il apprenne à voler. J’avais un contrat de faire un mur de verre pour un bâtiment de l’Expo. Bien que cette verrière ait été ma première, j’avais su relever le défi. Dès lors je voulais travailler sur un projet d’envergure.” Ferron, L’Esquisse d’une mémoire, 218. Although she did suggest, in an interview in 1967, that when the pavilion was dismantled after Expo, she would make a bid to buy back her windows. Donna Flint, “Artist’s Aim – Happiness through Color.” Montreal Gazette, 2 November 1967, 19. “Ces œuvres témoignaient des préoccupations de l’artiste pour l’intégration de l’art à l’architecture et pour un art public … La réception des verres-écrans de Marcelle Ferron fut très positive, à la fois par les institutions de diffusion les plus importantes … et par la critique qui fut unanime à en souligner le potentiel d’intégration à l’architecture publique.” Arbour, “Arts visuels et espace public,” 26. “De grandes verrières ont été conçues pour le métro, pour l’expo 67. Après la période automatiste, ses tableaux chantaient la couleur. Ils n’avaient que pour unique vocation celle que le maître, Borduas, leur avait donnée: exprimer l’être. Aujourd’hui, après six ans sans toucher à l’huile, après six années consacrées au vitrail et au verre antique, elle revient au tableau. Mais ce retour en soi, sur ce qu’elle était il y a six ans, n’a-t-il pas quelque chose d’anachronique?” Gilles Toupin, “Marcelle Ferron est-elle folle?,” La Presse, 21 April 1973, D14.

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53 “Maintenant, elle conçoit l’architecture, dans ce pays où on ne voit presque jamais de verdure, ouverte au paysage extérieur. Jamais son travail d’artiste ne se concevait en dehors d’une conscience sociale. Même avec les automatistes, il en était ainsi. Borduas lui disait qu’un peintre ce n’est pas seulement quelqu’un qui fait des tableaux mais quelqu’un qui écrit son époque. ‘Pour moi, il n’y a pas de frontière.’” Ibid. 54 This was especially true in Montreal, where the number of practising Catholics effectively halved, falling from 61 per cent in 1961 to 30 per cent in 1971. See Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 307. 55 “Dans une certaine mesure, Borduas, reconnu et aimé aujourd’hui plus encore qu’hier, dont l’influence, par cercles concentriques, s’étend des milieux intellectuels jusqu’à la jeunesse des écoles, a joué un rôle de prophète” (In a certain sense, Borduas – recognized and appreciated more today than ever, and whose influence extends in concentric circles from intellectuals to schoolchildren – played the role of a prophet). Éthier-Blais, Autour de Borduas, 15. 56 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 234–5. 57 Ibid., 239. 58 Ibid., 236. 59 Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form, 269. 60 The Vatican Pavilion was one of the most popular at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, exhibiting Michelangelo’s Pietà in North America for the first time, loaned by Pope John XXIII and shipped from Rome especially for the event. 61 Press release, Christian Pavilion, 14 April 1967. Archbishop Pocock Fonds, Archives of the Archdiocese of Toronto, po su 35.30, 6. 62 Ibid., 5. The Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church withdrew their support before the pavilion opened. 63 For extensive details of the origin and conception of the Christian Pavilion, see Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 161–99; for a reading of the pavilion within the context of multimedia at Expo, see Monika Kin Gagnon, “The Christian Pavilion at Expo 67,” 142–62. 64 Expo 67 Official Guide, 187. The only other Category 1 exhibition to have a joint Christian Pavilion was Osaka 70. After that, the Vatican/Holy See returned to having its own pavilions at world’s fairs. The statement from Expo 2017 Astana (Kazakhstan) reads: “The Vatican regards international events such as Universal Exhibitions and International Recognized Exhibitions as privileged moments for

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reflection, discovery and dialogue with visitors and with the other official participants about major world issues.” Expo 2017, International Recognized Exhibition of Astana, Holy See Theme Statement (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace), accessed 9 May 2021, https://www.humandevelopment.va/content/dam/svilup poumano/eventi/documenti/HS%20Theme%20statement_Expo2017_eng.pdf. Nicola Pezolet, “God and His World: The Architecture of the Christian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Research Notebooks/Laboratoire d’étude de l’architecture potentielle 3 (winter 2019): 105. Ibid., 105–6. One contemporary observer wrote: “no overt religious symbolism. No open Bibles, no displays of historic crosses, no ecclesiastical robes, no pictures of religious leaders. I saw more gothic art in the Czech Pavilion. The Christian one is a masterpiece of indirect communication.” Harvey Cox, “McLuhanite Christianity at Expo 67,” Commonweal 86, no. 10 (26 May 1967): 277–8. Interview at Expo 67 with Jean-Paul Pothier. Étienne Desrosiers, Roger D’Astous (Quebec: K-Films Amérique, 2016), 103 min. Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake, 163. Ibid., 165. Press release, Christian Pavilion, 14 April 1967, 1. Reverend Lindsay Howan, letter to the editor, Windsor Star, 17 May 1967. Quoted in Gagnon, “The Christian Pavilion at Expo 67,” 143. Although it tends to be overlooked now, a strong emphasis on Christian participation underwrote many contemporary French-Canadian reflections on the fair as whole. In the closing essay of a collection entitled The Christian and “Man and His World,” the journalist (and priest) Jean-Guy Dubuc writes: “La première attitude chrétienne, face à l’Expo ’67, en sera alors une de participation. Participation à l’événement, à ses manifestations, à ses spectacles, à tout son merveilleux. Mais surtout, participation à son thème, à son esprit, à sa vérité.” (The Christian’s first response to Expo 67 will be to be participate. To participate in the event, in its displays, in its shows, in all its wonder. But especially to participate in its theme, in its spirit, in its truth.) Jean-Guy Dubuc, “Pour une théologie de la Terre des hommes,” Le Chrétien et la Terre des hommes (Montreal and Paris: Fides, 1967), 185. See also the ambitious multi-volume series of guides produced by the Centre d’Animation Pastorale of Saint Paul University (Ottawa), Pour vivre l’Expo 67. Even at the other end of Quebec’s ideological spectrum, traces of participatory Catholic humanism could still be found. Playing on the etymology of “laïcité” (from the Greek laos, the people), Pierre Maheu, to take one particularly radical example, articulates his wish to elevate Quebec’s hesitant moves towards secularism into a true laos-ité: a neo-Edenic community based on the people rather than on God that would lie beyond current political and class division, and in which

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humanity might be reimagined and recast in opposition to the atomized world of modern economic rationality. It is significant that he ends with a reflection on the necessity of facilitating creative participation across society: “Une des taches révolutionnaires aujourd’hui, c’est de créer les moyens – maisons de la culture, émissions-dialogues à la radio T.V., happenings, etc. – les moyens et les instruments qui permettront aux hommes d’arriver à l’activité créatrice” (One of today’s revolutionary tasks is to create the means – cultural centres, tv and radio debates, happenings, etc. – the means and the instruments which will allow people to participate in creative activity). “La laïcité: inventer l’homme (notes),” Parti pris 4, nos. 9–10–11–12 (May–August 1967): 196–201. Compare the more pessimistic and now classic critique of alienated spectatorship which appeared in French only two weeks after Expo closed: Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967). Bergeron, Roger D’Astous, 149. “On ne peut donner sa mesure en plaquant sur un edifice un vitrail, après coup.” Quoted in Vanlaethem, “Le peintre et l’architecte,” 43. Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Language of Organic Architecture,” The Architectural Forum 98, no. 5 (May 1953): 106–7. D’Astous had copied this phrase out in the margin of his personal copy of Wright’s autobiography. Bergeron, Roger D’Astous, 39. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 240. Ibid., 237. Expo 67 Official Guide, 172. Don Nerbas has recently shown how much the national narrative of progress that immediately enveloped Place Ville-Marie has hidden the international financial forces working contemporaneously behind the scenes of its construction: “William Zeckendorf, Place Ville-Marie, and the Making of Modern Montreal,” Urban History Review 43, no. 2 (2015): 5–25. See Craig Moyes’s discussion of Expo’s humanist theme in chapter 1 and Heesok Chang’s comparison with New York’s “commercial” fair in chapter 2 of this volume. Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1939),” Arcades Project, 19. Pierre Dupuy, “Foreword,” Man and His World exhibition catalogue, v. Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 17. All characteristics which distinguish late capitalism from the older forms of “rivalry between the various colonial powers,” according to Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), xviii–xix. “La Banque Provinciale du Canada s’est meublée en vieux mobilier du Canada

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français. La Banque Canadienne Nationale a choisi une ambiance chaude à des tissus d’ameublement, rehaussée d’une grande sculpture de Bourgault en basrelief représentant un encan sur l’ancienne Place d’Armes. La Banque de Commerce a voulu un style très moderne et présente des tableaux et des sculptures d’artistes contemporains. La Banque Toronto-Dominion a créé un boudoir d’hommes d’affaires agrémenté d’immenses diapositives éclairées représentant des sculptures esquimaudes. La Banque de Montréal a inventé une grande fresque sur bois portant une mappemonde sur laquelle des horloges donnent l’heure de toutes les grandes capitales.” Tard, “Au rendez-vous des hommes d’affaires!” Benjamin, Arcades Project, 423. Ibid., 417. The idea of “homogeneous, empty time” as one of the necessary conditions for modern national consciousness is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), who in turn borrowed it from Walter Benjamin. Marcel Fournier, Les Generations d’artistes, suivi d’entretiens avec Robert Roussil et Roland Giguere (Quebec: Institut quebecois de recherche sur la culture, 1986), 40–1. Ferron, L’Esquisse d’une mémoire, 217. According to Ferron, he also asked her for a sweetener of $8,000 before signing the contract. She called Saulnier, who confirmed that (despite Jean Drapeau’s friendship with LaPalme and his own reservations regarding modern art) she did indeed have carte blanche to develop her project. Ibid., 218–19. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255. “Depuis le 1er novembre dernier, le Cercle universitaire de Montreal a repris ses activites en s’intallant dans ce qui fut l’Expo-Club lors d’Expo 67, a la Cite du Havre, a deux pas du Musee d’art contemporain du Québec.” (Since November last, le Cercle universitaire de Montreal … has moved into what was the Expo Club during Expo 67 … a stone’s throw away from the Musee d’art contemporain du Québec.) L’inter 10, no. 4 (November 1968): 13. “Elle découvrait, en même temps, que le toile sur le mur n’a plus guère de sens dans les musées nécropoles ou dans la naphthalene des salons bourgeois, mais elle n’a certainement plus aucun sens au cœur de la cité moderne. L’œuvre d’art, de nos jours, n’a de signification valable qu’assimilée, ingérée par les mouvements de la vie, le paysage quotidien où formes et couleurs doivent pénétrer comme une respiration le tissu urbain, le rythme industriel, le flux populaire des transports et des rues.” Jean Sarrazin, “Marcelle Ferron ou la quête joyeuse de la lumière,” Vie des Arts 61 (1970): 32. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 240.

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97 “Pour elle, la murale de verre doit être à la portée de tous, et pas seulement au service des églises comme jadis! Elle laïcise, dieu merci, l’art du verrier et le démocratise.” Sarrazin, “Marcelle Ferron,” 33. 98 The authors would like to thank Étienne Desrosiers, whose extensive research on the architect Roger D’Astous allowed us to recover a number of images of Ferron’s work as well as the plans of the International Trade Centre. Thanks are due also to France Vanlaethem for sharing with us, during a time of library closures, her excellent article on Ferron. The chapter also benefited from comments by Nina Caplan, Patrick ffrench, Steven Palmer, and Johanne Sloan.

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10 Staging Modern Medicine in Montreal: Anatomy of an Avant-Garde Pavilion

steven palmer Time magazine wrote an article, and they had a title saying, “Medicine Film Knocks Them Dead at Expo 67”… People were taken out on stretchers and some of them would get off the stretcher and say, “Can I go back and see the rest …?” – Robert Cordier, producer/director, Miracles in Modern Medicine/Miracles de la médecine moderne1

Man and His Health/L’homme et la santé was one of seventeen theme pavilions or special areas created for Expo 67 by the Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition.2 Threaded through the nation-state and corporate pavilions, these were designed to show off the state of world civilization and give the fair its cultural and universal backbone and legitimacy. On first glance, Man and His Health might be taken as an exquisite expression of the professional paternalism and scientific hubris characteristic of North American medicine in a postwar era of wonder drugs, life-saving surgical interventions, and rapidly rising life expectancies. The pavilion’s exhibition script, developed under the oversight of world-renowned radiologist Carleton Peirce, extolled the unbounded promise and centrality to world health of the teaching hospital, where medicine and surgery were driven by research and the development of increasingly complex machines. In doing so, it reproduced and extended one of the great Progress narratives of the twentieth century, based on a medical model originally developed in the metropolitan West. Man and His Health also enjoyed substantial corporate sponsorship from the Canadian Life Insurance Association and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Canada.3 Its interior designer, Peter Harnden, was a veteran leader of the elaborate cultural exhibitions that characterized the United States’ projection of soft power during the Cold War. At the core of the pavilion was the Meditheatre, whose combined documentary film and live performance, created

by New York–based producer Robert Cordier, boasted the title Miracles in Modern Medicine. Expected to “represent and mirror the achievements and aspirations of world medicine,” the pavilion was ostensibly a generic exhibition of Western medicine become globally triumphant.4 But like other Expo pavilions, Man and His Health was not a monolithic vehicle for delivering universal humanist bromides. It was a unique polysemic assemblage, a collision of local and international talents, materials, and cultural currents. The makers of the multimedia theatre piece at its core, Miracles in Modern Medicine, were intent on staging an avant-garde show for the masses that combined Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty with the experimental cinema of New York. The exhibition designer was a leading proponent of using open layouts and new forms of artistic expression to emancipate audiences and promote critical citizenship. The stars of Montreal’s glittering medical profession were more than happy to engage with these creative objectives, confidently performing world medicine for the cameras while mobilizing networks to make sure that the artifacts, equipment, and medical systems displayed in pavilion exhibits and on the Meditheatre stage were of the highest quality. This chapter recreates the extraordinary Man and His Health Pavilion as one of cool beauty and forward-looking design whose exhibits did indeed express confidence in world medical progress, but in ways that obliquely fractured Western professional medical certainties. In this sense it both expressed and contributed to the questioning of biomedical hegemony that began in the 1960s. This radical thread in the exhibition was an inexorable result of the pavilion’s exhilarating fusion of science and art, pedagogy and performance. Like numerous other pavilions, it used daring multimedia techniques to instruct and delight audiences. But in the case of Man and His Health, this use of spectacular devices and media representations of the medicalized body was also intrinsic to its theme, deeply embedded in the history of medicine itself. The Meditheatre was an unusually potent collaboration between North American medicine and the avant-garde art world of 1960s New York and Paris: Miracles in Modern Medicine was a carnivalesque, multimedia medicine show that threatened to capsize the towering vessel of biomedicine simulated and celebrated in the pavilion. Cordier’s sensational and rambunctious filmtheatre piece became the sleeper hit of the fair, seen by 2.5 million people over the course of the summer, about 20,000 of whom fainted or experienced some medical episode while watching it.5 In the process, the show became an early take on what we might call the miracles of postmodern medicine: it invited the masses to participate – as spectators whose gaze was as privileged as the medical experts themselves – in the weird and mysterious drama of their own

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bodies opened up, connected to unimaginably sophisticated and expensive machinery, and transformed into media images that were at once diagnostic tools, works of pop art, and artifacts of popular culture. If Warhol’s giant silkscreen self-portraits were widely admired at the United States pavilion across the way (including by Warhol himself), the Meditheatre work of two of his collaborators, Cordier and cinematographer John Palmer, proposed a much more vital and intimate engagement between public and pop art.6 Despite its scientific and creative pedigree, the popularity of the pavilion, and the media furore generated by the mass fainting phenomenon, Man and His Health and Miracles in Modern Medicine were ignored by elite commentators at the time, just as they have been overlooked by scholars of media and performance at world exhibitions since. The same could be said for health and medicine pavilions and exhibits in general, which have been staples of international exhibitions since London in 1851. The fairs were ideal for showing off new products and procedures in human and veterinary medicine and hygiene. With medical and health systems acting as handmaids in an aggressive phase of Western imperialism over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the world exhibitions mushrooming in France and the United States provided opportunities to promote the civilizing virtues of modern medicine and hygiene while marketing ever more specialized medical equipment, laboratory research, biologics, and pharmaceuticals.7 It would have been unusual if medicine and health had not been featured at Expo 67, especially given the extraordinary prestige and utopian energies enjoyed by Western medicine in the age of antibiotics, the teaching hospitals with their miraculous surgical, clinical, and birthing success rates, and a powerful medical profession. Indeed, one of Robert Moses’s regrets about the New York exhibition of 1964–65 was that the American Medical Association had not cooperated to create a proposed pavilion devoted to medicine and science, as they had for the Hall of Man at the 1939–40 World’s Fair.8 Even so, the fact that health and medicine acquired the heft they did within the Montreal theme complex – accounting for two pavilions, Man and His Health and Man and Life (which focused on the life sciences) – cannot be understood outside the Canadian, Quebec, and Montreal moment. Although it presented itself as universal, Man and His Health was in many ways profoundly local. Montreal had been the leading Canadian centre of medical education, research, and practice during the entire modern period. Its reputation as a vanguard place of medical research, underlined in the 1930s with the founding of Wilder Penfield’s Montreal Neurological Institute, had grown in the postwar period with advanced work in fields of increasing importance to academic

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medicine.9 The areas of medicine and surgery chosen for emphasis in the exhibition text – ostensibly typical of advanced practices – were, not coincidentally, ones in which Montreal research physicians were world leaders. The film segments in Miracles in Modern Medicine were shot in Montreal hospitals and depicted the city’s doctors performing said miracles on Quebec patients. If not exactly “nationalist,” these sources nevertheless evinced a local medical system that had been an important part of the Quebec national agenda since the Second World War. Pavilion scientific director Carleton Peirce and his assistant, Michel Jutras, who translated Montreal medicine into the Expo 67 discourse on universal health, were both axial figures in the city’s overlapping worlds of francophone and anglophone medicine. Given the local nature of much of the content and many of the actors dressed up to represent “world medicine,” we might say that the Man and His Health Pavilion was an example of the way that Expo 67 staged globalization in the crucible of the nation.

Designing Health: Pacific Fusion and Soft Power Man and His Health was part of a quartet of theme pavilions devoted to urban life, a vestige of the original Expo 67 concept, “Man and the City.” They were clustered toward the tip of Cité du Havre, an expanded apron of Montreal’s Old Port, gateway to Expo for visitors who arrived by car, and linked by bridge to the Expo islands. The other pavilions in this quartet were the National Film Board’s Labyrinth, an architecture of and for cinematic experience; the widely celebrated, high-density and modular experimental housing estate, Habitat; and the Man in the Community Pavilion about city life, a radiant conical yin to the understated, rose-like yang of its conjoined twin, Man and His Health. Architectural experiment was central to all these buildings.10 Health and Community were, like other iconic Expo pavilions, modular units, space frames that were cheap to produce and easy to assemble on site and to disassemble as necessary. This eco-globalist impulse was to be accentuated by lush garden surrounds (which were never actually realized as intended by the architects, Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey), and in Community by an elegant, translucent, and partially opened spire that allowed rain to fall into an interior pond.11 But what might have appeared a pastiche of an oriental pagoda was on closer inspection an intricate amalgam of Buddhist and West Coast First Nations architecture. Both Community and Health were bold modifications of Erickson’s signature post-and-beam structures inspired by Pacific Coastal edifices. They were all beam, no post – in this case bc spruce and fir laminate lengths that were at the time the largest plywood box beams ever built – stacked one atop the other in hexagonal patterns.12 This linked the complex

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to the wood characteristic of many other Canadian-associated structures at Expo, and distinguished it from the poured concrete of the adjacent Labyrinth and Habitat.13 So, while the exhibition inside the health pavilion made only occasional reference to Indigenous medicine, medical pluralism, or even Canada, modern medicine at Expo was exhibited in a matrix that was both late-modernist experiment with the space frame – something it shared with the US Pavilion (Buckminster Fuller’s celebrated geodesic dome) and Frei Otto’s West German Pavilion (which anticipated the 1972 Olympic Stadium in Munich) – and homage to Indigenous Canadian architecture. The interior design of the health pavilion was the work of Peter Harnden. A Yale-trained architect, Harden became one of the major figures of exhibition design in the postwar period. He was from 1949 the European point man for the US Office of International Trade Fairs, initially part of the Department of Commerce, responsible for what Greg Castillo calls a “trade fair diplomacy” that “redeployed the suburban model home as an emissary of the American Way of Life.”14 This was a prime node of US soft power during the Cold War, the ideology and culture wing of the state apparatus, its initial purpose to show the defeated people of Germany as well as the liberated people of Western Europe the appeal of US-style consumerism, keeping them from veering toward anti-capitalist parties and regimes. Harnden’s exhibition project peaked in the late 1950s, by which time he had relocated to Barcelona, where in conjunction with his partner Lanfranco Bombelli he designed innovative summer homes for an elite creative set in the small port of Cadaqués, while his firm, Exhibition Services International, worked on projects in different countries.15 He took the lead on the interior design of the US Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition – the first so-called Category 1 fair since 1937 and the first to take place during the Cold War. His vision has since received critical acclaim for its bold incorporation of the Saul Steinberg collage murals, The Americans, but Harnden’s main triumph in Brussels was a light and airy pop refinement that anticipated and inspired the US Pavilion at Expo 67. Fred Turner calls the US Pavilion at Brussels “a kaleidoscope of opportunities for visitors to step into America,” and one whose circular form and freedom of movement made it exemplary of what he calls “the democratic surround” that characterized the avant-garde art and design fostered by US state culture during the Cold War: “a new flexible environment in and through which individuals can freely enter, act spontaneously, and gain an education in diversity and tolerance.”16 Harnden also played a leading role in designing the model kitchen at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow that served as the site of Nixon and Kruschev’s famous debate – considered a major Cold War ideological triumph for the consumer capitalist lifestyle of the US.17

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Harnden’s interior design for the Man and His Health Pavilion transmuted Cold War home-appliance politics and national superpower culture: alluring kitchens and seductive appliances became irresistible research laboratories, hyperbaric chambers for futuristic surgery, and photo blow-ups of architect Louis Kahn’s sun-drenched Salk Institute, a symbol of scientific and medical modernism. As it was a theme pavilion and presumed universality, issues of Western capitalist competition with the Communist bloc in the area of health and medicine were not made explicit in the pavilion exhibits; things like the space race were in the US and ussr Pavilions.18 Nevertheless, the rise to global preeminence of hospital-based, physician-centred, and research-oriented medicine in the postwar world was fundamental to the consolidation of US and Western global hegemony. As Paul Starr puts it in his classic synthesis of the professionalization of medicine in the US, “medicine and science seemed to promise improved life without social reform; growth without conflict.”19 In this sense the design of Man and His Health can certainly be read as a refined incarnation of Harnden’s long-time project. It is hardly surprising given the era that the main exhibition text for Man and His Health exuded optimism about medical progress, and invited the public to witness the miracle of modern research medicine in the North American teaching hospital. Nevertheless, in its discursive staging the pavilion coalesced some of the emerging doubts and concerns about a system largely shaped by male physician-entrepreneurs, corporate hospital institutions, and multinational pharmaceutical companies. Also against the grain of the individualized, curative, and high-tech thrust of the dominant model, the exhibition embraced a collective notion of a global health citizenship defined largely in terms of preventive medicine and public health. Its picture gallery made ample room for the World Health Organization and its international campaigns, and depicted barefoot doctors and sufferers in many cultures, while other displays raised concerns about surfacing issues like environmental health, the toll of automobile accidents, and cigarette smoking.20 Harnden’s display cabinets, beautifully rendered by his exhibition co-ordinator, Deidi von Schaewen, a graduate of Berlin’s Hochschule for the Arts, offered a modern framing and illumination of humanity’s medical past, present, and future. The exhibits glowed with one of the first-ever uses of lightbox technology, while the pyramidal plexiglass casing produced a controlled mirroring and fracturing whose effect was quasi-holographic (see fig. 10.2).21 This was a representation of Enlightenment medicine at its zenith, a picture of medical progress that has become complex to the point of shattering. The familiar elements of a classic progress narrative were certainly present in the script: a

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10.1 Deidi von Schaewen, design coordinator, Man and His Health Pavilion.

“witch-doctor mask” and “pre-historic” medical instruments are artifacts of “primitive medicine”; more effective tools are gradually honed; knowledge of anatomy grows. We witness the rise to medical prominence of the laboratory, the development of vaccines and antibiotics, the breakthroughs in understanding human genes, the power of modern surgical spaces and techniques, and new, life-prolonging hospital systems like the Intensive Care Unit. Notably, however, in keeping with Erickson-Massey’s exterior and the circular (in this case hexagonal) form preferred by the architects and designers of the “democratic surround,” the exhibition’s sections were interchangeable. The pavilion visitor could choose his or her own route through, and was not channelled along the narrative in a linear manner. Harnden’s intent was clear from the very first proposal: “the plan of the exhibition ensemble accords a

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great freedom of action, giving the visitor the possibility of circulating and observing in their own way and at their own pace,” and “without being constrained to follow a prescribed itinerary.”22 Captivating display cabinets filled with artifacts borrowed from leading museums were equivocally ordered so as to flatten historical time and offer compelling microhistories that worked against the progress narrative. Primary care in Africa and Asia was as central to the lesson plan as the gallery of Western white male Nobel laureates in physiology and medicine compiled in consultation with Lloyd Stevenson, the eminent Yale historian who had been dean of medicine at McGill from 1960– 64.23 In fact, both found their significance through connection at such places as the Salk Institute for vaccine research. The modern hospital environment that was emerging as the central medical experience of the West was present in photographic wall panels, the large quarter-scale model of a hyperbaric operating room, and interactive installations like the computerized blood chemistry analyzer, and the icu nurses station. The clinical sterility of these settings was eluded, however, in the sleek mystery generated by the theatrical lighting and triangular cut glass, the museographical richness of the exhibits, the peep-show titillation of traditional anatomical models, and the interactive fun of such pieces as the polygraph station and the talking transparent male and female figurines who made ribald remarks intended to celebrate human sexuality. The pavilion’s scientific director, the eminent Montreal radiologist Carleton Peirce, had long championed a theatrical space at the core of the pavilion. He wanted to play with this classic form of medical pedagogy – the amphitheatre of anatomy class and surgical demonstration – and proposed a dramatic story featuring the “health team” in a modern teaching hospital. Starting from a central raised platform meant to be the attending staff lounge of a hospital, a senior attending physician would guide a group of students and the audience across moving stages to observe the health team of doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, and technicians dramatize cutting-edge procedures cribbed from actual Montreal programs. These demonstrations were to be explained further to the audience by an interlocutor, with the help of closed-circuit television and short films, mirroring how the two media were used in medical school instruction at this time. Harnden designed a theatre-in-the-round that would have both stages and screens, with a hexagonal, ramped viewing gallery.24 The pavilion was thus locked in to the Meditheatre concept and theatrical space as the central experience of Man and His Health, but with only a year to go before the opening of Expo 67, they had yet to determine what show might actually be put on there.

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10.2 Man and His Health display case.

Making Miracles In spring 1966, Peter Harnden sought out Robert Cordier in Manhattan. The Belgian-born, Paris-trained Cordier, resident in New York since the early 1950s, had been referred to him by friends in Harnden’s expansive Atlantic network. A versatile theatre artist, Cordier was also known for his association with Beat poetry, happenings, multimedia performance, and independent film – all styles of artistic expression that had been featured in US international exhibitions, especially in Brussels 58.25 In addition to his gifts as a theatre director, Cordier was a “fixer,” someone who could come into a stalled or conflictual project and bring disparate creative energies together into a workable and exciting show. He had played this role in 1963 for his friend, James Baldwin, mediating the creative tensions and racially related mistrust between the playwright and the Actors Studio that threatened to scuttle what would be a historic Broadway production of Baldwin’s Civil Rights drama, Blues for Mr.

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10.3 Carleton Peirce, director, Man and His Health.

Charlie. And in early 1965, he agreed to act as artistic director of John O’Neill and Gil Moses’s Free Southern Theater, an integrated troupe conceived as the cultural arm of the Civil Rights movement that toured the South at great risk putting on radical plays.26 Reluctant to accept Harnden’s overture, as he had no background of any kind in medicine, Cordier nevertheless put together a proposal and, after a trip to Montreal, a storyboard for a film and theatre show. His ideas were

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10.4 Robert Cordier (right), producer and director, Miracles in Modern Medicine, with Michael McClure, 1967.

enthusiastically received by Harnden, Peirce, and the supervisory committee. Accompanying him on the trip, and subsequently serving as cinematographer and associate producer, was John Palmer, a young experimental filmmaker and Andy Warhol Factory insider. One of Warhol and Gerard Malanga’s 13 Most Beautiful Boys and among the most popular subjects of Warhol’s Screentests, Palmer was part of the independent documentary movement emerging at the New York Filmmakers Cooperative. He had come up with the idea and means for the iconic 1964 work of experimental cinema Empire that he codirected with Warhol, an eight-hour, fixed-frame film of the Empire State Building (only recently illuminated for the New York World’s Fair) as afternoon turns to night. His restless, dynamic, and fresh camerawork on the Expo medicine film departs from the static approach he helped Warhol establish. Instead, it anticipates the innovative cinematography of his disturbing masterpiece, Ciao! Manhattan, a lightly fictionalized autobiographical study of Warhol’s tragic Superstar, Edie Sedgwick, which he started shooting in New York just after finishing Miracles in Modern Medicine. Aside from his artistic eye, Palmer’s command of the cumbersome film cameras of the time – some modern and technically sophisticated, others antiquated like the cheap, wind-up

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10.5 John Palmer (centre), cinematographer, Miracles in Modern Medicine, directing Edie Sedgwick in Ciao! Manhattan, 1970.

ones the National Film Board grudgingly provided them – would help overcome the challenges of shooting complex medical procedures, especially open heart and brain surgery.27 Over the summer and autumn of 1966 Cordier and Palmer filmed six scenarios in Montreal hospitals and health centres, as well as some segments at the homes of the featured patients, then finished post-production of the film with very little budget and considerable misadventure.28 Their nineteenminute film loosely recapitulates the life cycle, beginning with childbirth and the problem of Rh incompatibility. This was the first time that the North American mass public would see unshielded film of the delivery of a baby, and the graphic depiction of a caesarian section. Cordier and Palmer made a self-conscious decision to enlist the powerful medical allies on the Health Pavilion advisory board to get permission to shoot the birth of a child for the opening sequence. They knew it would mark a radical shift in viewing culture,

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turning what had been a tightly controlled, taboo image into mass spectacle.29 Acquainted with fellow Cooperative experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage and his work, Palmer says the move was inspired by Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving, a 1959 experimental film which documented Jane Brakhage giving birth. Palmer likened his and Cordier’s decision to “manning the barricades.” In effect, they self-consciously used their Expo opportunity as a way to bring an experimental film trope to a mass public.30 Of the following five episodes, one depicts a typical night for a male patient on a kidney dialysis ward; another, an experimental nuclear medicine machine for mapping lung function; and another, open heart surgery on a seven-year-old boy. The closing episode of the film is a neurosurgical procedure to address a classic disease of old age, Parkinson’s, which is followed by a final zoom out on a pair of disembodied human hands, illuminated as if by a spotlight on a pitch-black stage, coiling rope around fingers and running through a sequence of diagnostic tests of dexterity used to determine neurological function, before disappearing into black. Arguably the film’s most unsettling segment, both in terms of subject and editing strategy, portrays a five-year-old thalidomide victim, whom the film calls Bernadette, as she is acclimatized to a robotic vest assembly wired for her to be able to control prosthetic arms at Gustave Gingras’s Montreal Rehabilitation Institute. Montreal had been hard hit by the thalidomide tragedy of 1961–62, whereby aggressive pharmaceutical company marketing of a “wonder drug” for pregnant women experiencing morning sickness, combined with a failure of Canadian regulatory agencies to stop distribution despite growing evidence of its potential harm, led to hundreds of babies being born with a wide variety of severe malformations and cognitive impairments.31 Only the medical hubris of the 1960s – the profession’s belief that medicine could fix anything – can explain why, in a health pavilion sponsored in part by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, Montreal’s leading physicians would be so keen to draw attention to the worst medical tragedy in the city’s recent history, and moreover one that had underlined the over-medicalization of childbirth and the failure of government and medical profession to protect the public from unethical multinational pharmaceutical practices. Cordier initially resisted Gingras’s idea of featuring such seriously malformed children until he was presented with one whose charisma and abilities convinced him that it was legitimate to film a child thalidomide victim. He recalled being electrified by Bernadette’s force of character and beauty when he saw the girl tear through the Institute on a tricycle, likening her to “Marilyn Monroe with her arms cut.” The segment is a sensitive portrait of the intelligence and emotional depth of the child’s skepticism in the face of the monstrous appendage, and

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features her wondrous ability to play, swim, eat, and learn despite her severe disability. At the same time, the segment uses jump cuts, juxtaposition, unexpected editing tempos, extreme camera angles, and references to Hans Belmer’s dolls in order to create surrealist shock.32 Cordier and Palmer’s six film portraits were designed to thrill and destabilize viewers with a dizzying visual salad of surrealist, Nouvelle vague, direct cinema, and pop art representations of intimate, intrusive, grotesque, horrific, and inspiring moments in the modern repertoire of medicine. In much more accentuated form than in the exhibition display cases, modern medicine is shown to be mysterious, complex, and fragmented, a realm in which humans and machines have become conjoined at moments of acute intervention. The connection is emphasized through repeated motion pictures, beautifully shot in Eastmancolor, of blood circulating through bodies and hospital equipment. In one close-up of nuclear tracer being injected into the arm of a patient who is wired into an experimental chair apparatus for measuring lung function, lettering on the side of the syringe gradually comes into focus to reveal the word “interchangeable.”33

Staging Modern Medicine in Montreal Probably influenced by the “ibm Information Machine” at the New York fair, Peirce and Harnden originally imagined the Meditheatre show as a primarily theatrical piece. It would feature a bilingual master of ceremonies in a crow’s nest “addressing the visitors from on high” as different scenes from hospital surgeries played out on seven revolving platform-stages arranged at different heights. The suspended emcee and the moving stages were later scaled down to become a senior resident making his rounds with a group of junior physicians and students, introducing them and the audience to a variety of hospital medicine scenarios. In this initial formulation, films would have been used as supplements to the stage action – to, as one proposal put it, “present simulated or possibly actual closed-circuit television components of the story.” A short didactic film of a general nature might follow, serving as a segue between one demonstration and another.34 The idea was to use closed-circuit tv and film as they were then being employed in medical education, and to embroider a theatrical element akin to the medical documentaries that had been a staple of US television in the 1950s before giving way to “stethoscope soap operas” like Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare.35 Cordier had other ideas. Working with the residual notion of the medical amphitheatre, and inspired by the results of the unprecedented insider view afforded him in the filming, Cordier transformed Peirce’s conventional depar-

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10.6 Rehearsal for Miracles in Modern Medicine in the Meditheatre, April 1967

ture point into a novel spectacle. He reconceived the show as a primarily cinematic experience but with a live element, more akin to today’s “live documentary” – the introduction of live performance or address into screening of documentary films to achieve a sense of spontaneity and enhance audience engagement as a way of overcoming observational detachment. His practical knowledge of theatre had convinced him that surgical procedures on stage rarely created drama because it was obvious they were not real. His strategy for the Meditheatre was to invert German theatre director Erwin Piscator’s use of cinematic projection to expand horizons and place actor-characters in large tableaus and vistas in order to create what Piscator called total theatre, or sometimes epic theatre. Recalling his inversion of Piscator, Cordier explained that “the operation would be on screen and would be plunging into the people, and the people would be plunging into it. This time it wouldn’t be fiction, it was real … We took it one step further from actors to the real.”36 That is, his concept for the Meditheatre was to turn Piscator’s total theatre on its head, and create a kind of total cinema, or epic cinema (which turns out, nicely, to be theatre). There were three large screens above the actors, with the

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film projected simultaneously on each screen. Spectators in the gallery would be looking directly at one screen, with the same image reproduced on screens in either periphery of their vision. At the same time, though principally watching the film (and theme managers estimated that viewers spent 90 per cent of the time during the show looking at the screen), they would be aware of the intermittent stage business below, a lit performance that gave a “live” feel to the film, on sets dressed with real hospital equipment.37 The gentle jumbling of Western medicine’s progress narrative in the exhibition areas became a high-speed tumble in the Meditheatre. Although there is no complete record of the show, its core dynamic can be reconstructed from interviews with the creators and audience members, internal reports by pavilion and theme managers, raw documentary footage, and two different versions of the film found at Library and Archives Canada.38 In the original show staged by Cordier, which ran from the opening of Expo in late April to mid-July, the film had sparse narration and intermittent dialogue, all delivered in a declarative, aggressive, alienating, yet strangely poetic style by Cordier and two actresses. The film’s text required completion by the live actors on stage. The authoritative voicing in the film had a strident tone designed to call attention to itself and elicit a questioning reaction; the actors – both those in the film and those on stage – insistently told one another and the audience that the procedures would allow the patients to live “normal” and “useful” lives. This was Brechtian alienation and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty via Jean Luc Godard. Despite the evidence that it was working to dramatic effect on audiences, Cordier’s show left the pavilion and Expo theme managers cold. They reported that the stage performers, rather than acting among themselves in a realistic manner to recreate “the calm, professional aspect of an in-house hospital métier,” shouted their lines – likely echoing the tone of the film’s narration and dialogue – and spoke to the film, taking their cues from it, or directly to the audience.39 The film also featured a complex, bilingual (French-English) text, shifting constantly between screen subtitles that would have been delivered in the other language by the actors on stage. The fourth wall was broken, and so was the fifth: the actors’ performances, which addressed both audience and film, transformed a cinematic event back into a live show – it enlivened the film, making it more visceral and tangible.40 News of the extraordinary show spread by word of mouth, sporadic media reports, and ads paid for by the life insurance sponsors. Within a week, performances were perpetually full, and the fainting episodes frequent enough that the site manager demanded that two St John Ambulance posts be set up inside the pavilion to deal with them. Print, radio, and television media from across the US and Canada began reporting on the mass fainting phenomenon,

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including leading publications like Time magazine, the Boston Globe, and the Toronto Globe and Mail; Expo’s sophisticated pr unit also joined in the enthusiasm.41 Within a month people were waiting in line for hours (literally – the peak wait time during the summer months was seven hours) to see Miracles in Modern Medicine.42 The reasons why people fainted were complex and varied. Most had waited on empty or junk-food-filled stomachs in weather conditions ranging from the blistering sun of July and August to the cold spring and autumn on the windy Saint Lawrence; regardless, once they were inside, with ushers packing in as many bodies as possible, it was hot, dark, shoulder-to-shoulder crowded, and confusing.43 The viewing gallery was filled to capacity every half hour, and among the 700 spectators were many who had been primed for something risqué and shocking. As Peirce noticed disapprovingly, even the warning placed outside the theatre “pre-conditioned people to be disturbed”: “The realism of the medical films shown in this theatre might disturb some people, adults or children.” The audience waited with bated breath, not knowing whether they would endure the show without suffering a collapse.44 And collapse they did – 200 of the 250 daily faintings at Expo 67 happened at the Meditheatre – whereupon they were attended by medics from the pavilion’s first aid posts. Some likely fainted at the sight of blood or at the closeup of a surgeon’s finger poking an open heart; others may have flinched watching needles being inserted into a woman’s brain. One young man fainted away believing that the open heart surgery he was watching on the screen was actually taking place on the stage. Other informed observers cited the birth sequence as one that provoked fainting. In any case, the medicine show had itself become a medical event. Cordier succeeded in staging an avant-garde happening for the masses, a rendition of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty that regularly generated a violent, ambiguous catharsis in the audience. When he attended a performance on 26 May, a Montreal Gazette reporter described paramedics carrying out “men (including reporters), women and children” who had collapsed, until the pavilion “looked like a disaster area.”45 Despite its enormous popularity, Expo managers from Peirce on up were unhappy that the show was a cinematic experience rather than the theatrical one “the original design called for.” Their displeasure was manifest almost from the outset, but it was not until almost halfway through the run of the world exhibition, with Cordier long gone, that a decision was made to strip the stage characters of most of their lines and incorporate them into the film as a ponderous studio recording that would give the actors on stage an audio rather than a visual cue and allow them “to concentrate more on playing.” The net result was to recast the experimental multimedia screen and stage show as bad

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realism: a didactic documentary film that was doubled on stage by ritualized performances.46 The taming of the show was resisted by the visual qualities of the film, and by the basic dynamics of Cordier’s original vision; the fainting and other medical episodes continued and the queues remained long until the close of Expo 67 in late October.

Miracles of Montreal Medicine The “world medicine” on display at Expo 67 had a distinctly Montreal flavour, one that was imprinted in 1963 when senior federal planners convened a small group of luminaries – artists, scientists, and engineers – at a resort in Montebello, Quebec, to elaborate themes for Expo. Among the invited was Wilder Penfield, already a medical legend as one of the founders of neuroscience and director since the 1930s of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Montreal Neurological Institute. Penfield’s Montebello notes register that medicine was from the beginning slated to play a prominent role in the development of the Terre des hommes/Man and His World theme: “These (fr.?) of Exploration – research + development – toward future … Med. Phys. Anthropol. – Exhibits – .” This went with the humanist territory, of course, but the emphasis on medical research was also likely due to the recently retired Penfield’s presence at Montebello.47 Though he did not have any hands-on involvement with the Health Pavilion, Penfield became an Expo medicine theme in his own right across the summer of 1967: he introduced the Noranda Lecture by Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, and was presented with a $50,000 “Centennial Award” at Expo’s Pavilion of Honour in recognition of his lifetime research – a further indication of medical research’s prominence in this major attempt to frame Canadian modernity.48 Indeed, the Canadian Pavilion, which had its own exhibit on health, dedicated space to “Dr. Penfield’s brain surgery,” while the giant neurologically correct brain in the Man and Life Pavilion – designed, cast, and installed under the supervision of Hôpital Notre Dame neurosurgeon and former Penfield student Jules Hardy – was an unstated homage to Penfield and the Montreal Neurological Institute.49 The years between 1963 and 1967 were a transformative time in Canadian and Quebec health politics. Canada’s Medical Care Act of 1966, designed to introduce state medical care and eliminate private medical practice, was on a rocky road to implementation in Quebec, with professional groups offering spirited resistance. The abortion debate irrupted in the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, where in 1967 the Montreal physician Henry Morgentaler made his historic brief to a parliamentary committee on a woman’s right to a safe abortion. The Pill, on the cover of Time magazine that year, was a symbol

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of the dramatic drop in birthrates experienced in Western societies in the 1960s, none more spectacularly than in Quebec. This wider health context was absent from the official representation of health, medicine, and the life sciences at either of the two pavilions devoted to these questions. But it has to be remembered that the exhibits were experienced and read in relation to this turbulent medical and health context, which was addressed more explicitly in other Expo places – including, notably, at the entrance to the Man in the Community pavilion that was conjoined with Man and His Health, where Quebec writer and filmmaker Jacques Godbout’s poetic exhibition text broached the politics of the Pill. Québecois physicians, long involved in fighting to create French-language rights and to preserve a francophone scientific culture, were major players in the Quiet Revolution.50 But Montreal medical research hegemony belonged to McGill-affiliated physicians, and this was the group that was asked by the ccwe to establish the concept and set the tone for Man and His Health. All eleven members of the review panel for the pavilion were Montreal-based, and nine of them were physicians involved in research at hospitals associated with McGill University. Their specialties – neuroscience, kidney dialysis, transplant surgery, rehabilitation medicine, nuclear medicine, treatment for thalidomide victims, open heart surgery, psychotropic drugs (psychopharmacology), and telemedicine – were highlighted in the pavilion exhibits and in the Meditheatre, again giving a particular Montreal inflection to this portrait of the modern health sector.51 The central figure in this articulation of Montreal’s state-of-the-art medicine as world medicine was Carleton Peirce. The eminent radiologist took the position of senior theme consultant and pavilion director in 1964 at the time of his mandatory retirement from practising. This followed twenty-five years overseeing a near constant expansion of operations at the Royal Victoria and McGill departments of radiology. Peirce had been the Montreal host in 1962 to the World Radiology Congress where he was elected secretary general. He had a vast network of contacts going back to a stellar early career at the University of Michigan in his native Midwest. He had served in both world wars, including on the Manhattan Project. His scientific pedigree and managerial maturity were complemented by an accomplished amateur career as a cellist.52 Notably, during his time at Michigan, Peirce worked in the same department as Paul de Kruif, author of the 1926 bestseller Microbe Hunters – potboiling literary portraits of the great scientists of the bacteriological age. De Kruif had been scientific consultant to Sinclair Lewis, winner of America’s first Nobel Prize in literature, on the 1925 novel Arrowsmith, the story of a young doctor from the Midwest, perhaps not so unlike Peirce himself, who graduates

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from Michigan and toils in the trenches of rural public health before finding glory as a scientist at a lightly fictionalized Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (a “Dr Arrowsmith” would enjoy a brief mention in the Miracles in Modern Medicine film narration). That is to say, Peirce had been thinking about the arts and the artful popularization of medical science throughout his career, and of course as a radiologist he was always involved in developing complex new media representations of the normal and pathological body. Peirce hired Michel Jutras to be his project officer, or number two, overseeing scientific and technical questions in the exhibition script and assisting von Schaewen in assembling artifacts for the exhibits. A recent graduate of medicine from the Université de Montréal, Jutras was from an extraordinary family of Montreal artists and scientists.53 His father, Albert Jutras, was a distinguished Hotel Dieu and Université de Montréal radiologist, a graduate of the Radium Institute of Paris, and a champion of French-language scientific literature and culture who had fought to maintain Québécois medicine’s links to France in the postwar period when the rising power of US medical culture threatened to absorb all youthful professional energies. He had collaborated with his McGill colleague Peirce in teaching and in professional association work, and served with him as vice-president of the 1962 congress.54 The Expo Health Pavilion partnership of Peirce and Albert Jutras’s son, Michel Jutras, brought these two scientific and cultural networks together at Expo 67, and gave the Man and His Health Pavilion international, national, and pan-Montreal medical legitimacy.55 Jutras’s medical family credentials cemented the effect that Cordier’s bilingual charm and artistic glamour had on doctors, ensuring the collaboration of institutionally powerful physicians and enabling them to film some of the stars of Montreal surgery doing delicate and dramatic work: Claude Bertrand at the Hôpital Notre Dame performing brain surgery, and Anthony Dobell, a renowned cardiac surgeon who had been one of the team who invented the heart-lung machine, doing open heart surgery at the Montreal Children’s Hospital.56 In fact, both of these surgical stars, along with a diverse spectrum of nurses, technicians, physiotherapists, and patients, self-consciously and convincingly “performed” modern medicine for Cordier and Palmer. The performative quality is made explicit in one split-second shot, entirely rigged, in which the camera, looking straight up and rotating for effect, captures the heart’s-eye view of Dobell and his team performing the operation. Notably, despite the avant-garde qualities that would have been evident in the rough cuts, the filmmakers received unerring approval from the supervisory committee and Peirce, as well as from a great many physicians who saw the show. Evidently, there was something about the artistry of the film and its

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visual dynamic that captured not only the power but also the complexity and humanity of the way the specialists experienced their own medical performance. This raises another dimension of the film related to its commissioned nature, and the complexity of the task Cordier faced: the show had to entertain while also representing accurately the technical and scientific aspects of the medical procedures addressed, meeting the standards of a scientific committee who were committed to the integrity of their didactic mandate and anxious to win the approval of a world audience that would include medical scientists as well. That the film was universally approved of by its specialist audience,

10.7 The heart returns the medical gaze. Still from Miracles in Modern Medicine.

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and indeed is now considered a valuable record of how these procedures were done in the mid-1960s, is a testament to Cordier’s ability to fulfil the demands of his contract with acumen and artistry. We should also recall that the actors recruited for the Meditheatre performance were players in a Montreal theatre company of some distinction, Jeanine Beaubien’s “La Poudrière.” The company’s multilingual and international repertoire, which included works by Arthur Miller, Jean Genet, and Jean Cocteau, was suited to Cordier’s aesthetic. In her memoir, Beaubien recalls Cordier’s piece being “well thought out,” though she remained armslength from the details of the production (she herself was running a show under the company’s name at a different Expo site) and mostly remembers the struggles over actors’ contracts and the complaints from Expo managers about poor performances, or deliveries of lines in English “avec une langue pâteuse.” The latter underscores that the Montreal French accent would have inflected both French and English lines, rooting the characters in a local setting. Indeed, among the Meditheatre players was one of Quebec’s bestknown actors of the era, Jean-Pierre Masson (star of a hugely popular, longrunning television soap opera set during the late-nineteenth-century colonization of the Laurentian area that was part of Québécois mythology), and when his “shift” was on, the line-ups for the show were considerably longer.57 The Man and His Health Pavilion and its Meditheatre as tangled web of local and global forces is most clearly exemplified in the case of the child thalidomide victim featured in Cordier’s film – and indeed pictured on page 45 of the official Expo guide purchased by most visitors for a dollar.58 Man and His Health used Montreal physicians and patients as the raw material for telling a universal tale of medical progress that nevertheless – precisely because it represented a real medical history – might even double back on itself to revisit a terrible episode in Montreal medicine. Explicitly in this segment, and more obliquely in others, Cordier’s film called into doubt the universality and simplicity of the grand narrative of Western progress, and folded it into the complex, ineffable, and tragic miracle of historically rooted and contingent life itself. Man and His Health’s Meditheatre reproduced the theatrical and even the ambiguous charlatan/magician qualities associated with the classic medicine show at the heart of a didactic display of the wonders of modern medical science. The pavilion may serve as an apt figure for the symbolic potential of world exhibitions themselves: at once epic stagings of the global hegemony of Western civilization, and mega-carnivals designed to turn that same world upside down in transgressive revelry. Like any good carnival, the pavilion and its show were made, staged, and engaged in a particular place, and therefore bound to its history.59

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notes 1 Interview with Robert Cordier, 4 November 2015. Though I could not find that headline in Time, the magazine did report on the medical episodes in the Meditheatre, as did many North American print media publications, and the line remembered by Cordier is at the very least an accurate summary of the core tone and irony of that reportage. 2 The theme and sub-theme concept are developed and documented in Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition (hereafter ccwe), Terre des hommes/Man and His World (ccwe: Ottawa, 1967). 3 Globe and Mail, 27 April 1967, B5; the Canadian Life Insurance Association contributed $750,000 to the Meditheatre, and the Canadian Pharmaceutical Association $250,000 to the pavilion. A post-Expo report put the total from the clia at $900,000, $225,000 of which was spent on promotion. Globe and Mail, 9 November 1967, B12. 4 ccwe, Man and His Health/L’Homme et la santé (Montreal: n.p., n.d. [1966]), 2. This was a promotional brochure based on the projected rather than final design or Meditheatre show. 5 The figures on both varied. Peirce’s postmortem report to Exhibition Services International gave a final count, based on “sampling and extrapolation,” of 2.5 million spectators for Miracles in Modern Medicine and another half-million who visited the pavilion but did not see the show. The Canadian Life Insurance Association’s final figures on the Meditheatre audience was “about 2,136,000”; “about 14,800” were treated by St John Ambulance personnel at the two booths set up especially inside the pavilion. Globe and Mail, 9 November 1967, B12. The final official report on the world exhibition by the ccwe said that the two posts treated 22,273 “mostly fainting cases” (the other seven health posts on the Expo site treated only 16,107 people for all issues through the summer); General Report on the 1967 World Exhibition (Montreal, 1969), 1978. The higher figure accords with the report by the Department of Public Relations during the run of the fair that 200 of the 250 daily faintings at Expo occurred at the Meditheatre: “The Expo67 Story, vol. 2, August 1 to October 29,” mimeograph, p. 9; ccwe fonds, Record Group (hereafter rg) 71, vol. 11, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter lac). 6 On Warhol’s visit to see his work at the US Pavilion, see Jean-François Côté, “Andy Warhol at Expo 67: Pop In and Pop Out,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 163–74. 7 Julie K. Brown, Health and Medicine on Display: International Expositions in the United States, 1876–1904 (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2009); and on the PanamaPacific Exhibition of 1915, Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and

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Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 27–56. Robert Moses, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade (New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1970), 594. Annmarie Adams and Thomas Schlich, “Design for Control: Surgery, Science and Space at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, 1893–1956,” Medical History 50 (2006): 305. “Box-beamed Space: Man in the Community/Man and His Health,” Progressive Architecture, June 1967, 142; on the “total” or “environmental” experience of the Labyrinth Pavilion as “viewing machine,” see Seth Feldman, “Minotaur in a Box: The Labyrinth Pavilion at Expo 67,” in Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67, eds. Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 27–53; and Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies (Cambridge, ma:mit Press, 2017), 140–54; on Man in the Community as an example of “total architecture,” see Janine Marchessault, “Citérama: Expo as Media City,” in Reimagining Cinema, 81, 87; on Habitat, see Inderbir Singh Riar, “Expo 67, or the Architecture of Late Modernity” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 34. After Erickson’s June tour, his letter to the person at Theme Branch responsible for Man in the Community focused almost entirely on the failure to realize the “luxurious” plantings demanded in the plans in multiple key points of the pavilion. Erickson to Gerard Bertrand, 12 June 1967, Arthur Erickson fonds, 4A/76.13, Textual Material, Box #35, “Expo ’67 – Gerard Bertrand Correspondence,” Canadian Architectural Archives (University of Calgary). G. Bertrand to M. Dibbin, 21 April 1966; ccwe, rg 71, vol. 365, file 200-615, lac. These were also the only space frame pavilions whose modular struts were not steel. My thanks to Heesok Chang for this observation. Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Mid-Century Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 118. Julio Garnica, “Peter Harnden. Between the Cold War and the Mediterranean,” fam: Magazine del Festival dell’Architettura, https://www.famagazine.it/index. php/famagazine/article/view/233/1000 (accessed 13 January 2021). Exhibition Services International also had Expo 67 contracts for the pavilion of Venezuela, and that of the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development. Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 233–4, 63. Robin Cambelast, “America, the Great Colossal Collage: Saul Steinberg’s Forgotten Masterpiece,” Art News (7 March 2013): http://www.artnews.com/2013/03/07/saul-steinberg-worlds-fair-ludwig-museum/. New York Times, 24 October 1971, 83; and interview with Deidi von Schaewen.

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18 The Soviets were consulted on the storyline and invited to send materials; Peirce to B.A. Borisov, commissioner general for the participation of the ussr in Expo 67, 18 February 1966, ccwe, rg 71, vol. 366, Man and Health – General, Theme Branch – Dept of Installation, vol. 9, lac. 19 Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 359. 20 The exhibition text is reproduced in ccwe, Man and His Health. A short pictorial essay on the pavilion during Expo 67 can be found in Terre des hommes/Man and His World, 127–33; for raw footage for a never completed short documentary film journey through the pavilion, see Man and His Health (Chetwynd Films, 1967), lac. 21 On this being a very early use of lightbox technology: interview with Deidi von Schaewen. 22 “L’Homme et sa santé: esquisse préliminaire de l’exposition préparée pour la Compagnie Canadienne de l’Exposition universelle de 1967 par Exhibition Services International,” March 1965, ccwe, rg 71, vol. 365, Man and His Health – General (Theme Branch – Department of Installations), pp. 2, 7, lac. This idea was made explicit in the official Expo guide: “The entire exhibit, with its theater, is so arranged that visitors may move about the pavilion as they please, obtaining an impression of the storyline or examining the illustrative details.” Expo 67 Guide official / Official Guide (Toronto: McLean-Hunter, 1967), 45. 23 Jutras to Stevenson, 21 April 1966, ccwe, rg 71, vol. 365. 24 “Minutes of the Presentation of Visual Concepts of Exhibits on the Themes ‘Man in the Community’ – ‘Man and His Health,’” 15 March 1965, p. 5.; and “Man & Health” – ccwe, rg 71, vol. 365. 25 In 1965, he staged the “Grand Masturbateur” poetry readings at the St Regis Hotel with Dalí, Robert Rauschenberg, Mia Farrow, and Ava Gardner; and in September 1966 a reading of Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist play, Heart of Gas, with Turk Leclair, John Ashbery, Gerard Malanga, Ingrid Superstar, and Andy Warhol at Gallery Daché on 78th Street. Interview with Robert Cordier, 27 October 2015; “Robert Cordier,” Wikipédia, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cordier (accessed 14 June 2019); Robert Cordier papers. 26 James Baldwin, “Blues for Mr. Charlie,” Playbill: Blues for Mr. Charlie, 13 February 1964; Thomas C. Dent, Richard Schechner, and Gilbert Moses, The Free Southern Theater (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969); Free Southern Theater (company brochure, 1965), Robert Cordier papers. 27 Interview with John Palmer, 8 November 2015; interview with Robert Cordier, 4 November 2015; Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol – Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Abrams/Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), 153, 248.

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28 The holdings of Miracles in Modern Medicine at Library and Archives Canada contain two versions of the film, a print of the original film made by Cordier, considerably degraded from multiple screenings, and a restored version of the film, made from a scan of the negative, whose images are identical to the original, but with an audio track that had been redone by a consultant months into the exhibition to address what pavilion managers saw as shortcomings in the production. Where Cordier’s original film had very sparse dialogue, synchronized to the script of the stage show of his original production, the audio track of the restored film includes male and female documentary narration, studio-recorded delivery of much of what had been lines delivered onstage, as well as additional scripted material, with the overall effect of making it into a didactic, informational documentary. This second version of the film is available for streaming on the Library and Archives Canada website: https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/collec tionsearch/Pages/collectionsearch.aspx?q=miracles%20in%20modern%20medi cine&DataSource=Archives&. 29 Kirsten Ostherr, Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television, and Imagine Technologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 123–30, which discusses Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving in relation to avant-garde film’s engagement with this taboo; and David A. Kirby, “Regulating Cinematic Stories about Reproduction: Pregnancy, Childbirth, Abortion and Movie Censorship in the US, 1930–1958,” British Journal for the History of Science 50, no. 3 (2017): 451–72. 30 Interview with John Palmer. In 1957, the bbc newsmagazine show Panorama had televised a short black-and-white film clip of the expulsion of a baby from a natural childbirth during an interview with the obstetrician and filmmaker; see Salim Al-Gailani, “‘Drawing Aside the Curtain’: Natural Childbirth on Screen in 1950s Britain,” British Journal for the History of Science 50, no. 3 (2017): 475. Shortly after Cordier’s film was a sensation at Expo, the West German Department of Health released to mass public fascination Helga, which depicted the birth of a child with close-up shots of a parturient’s vulva, crowning, and expulsion. The film was distributed theatrically throughout Western Europe and North America, and became one of the most seen German films of all time. Uta Schwarz, “Helga (1967): West German Sex Education and the Cinema in the 1960s,” in Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Lutz D.H. Sauerteig and Roger Davidson (New York: Routledge, 2009), 198, 202. 31 B. Clow, “‘An Illness of Nine Months’ Duration’: Pregnancy and Thalidomide Use in Canada and the United States,” in Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945, eds. G. Feldberg, M. Ladd-Taylor, A. Li, and M. McPherson, 45–66 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 32 Interview with Robert Cordier; on the Russian-Canadian robotic prosthesis col-

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33 34 35

36 37 38

39

40

41 42

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laboration, see G. Gingras et al., “Bioelectric Upper Extremity Prosthesis Developed in Soviet Union: Preliminary Report,” Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (1966): 232–7. Miracles in Modern Medicine, 8:13. “Minutes of the Presentation of Visual Concepts,” p. 5. Ostherr, Medical Visions, 51–4, 68–9; David Serlin, “Performing Live Surgery on Network Television and the Internet since 1945,” in Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture, ed. David Serlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Interview with Robert Cordier. In this, Cordier was successful: Expo managers reported that the audience spent 90 per cent of their time looking at the screen, rather than at the stage action. Steven Palmer and Edward Riche, Ghost Artist (2019, 66 mins), a documentary on the artistic networks of Robert Cordier whose departure point is the Miracles in Modern Medicine show at Expo 67, tries to recreate a sense of the work as it was experienced by audiences. Peirce complained that “the doctors on both the ‘cardiac’ and the ‘Rh’ or premature nursery stage talk too directly to the screen or audience rather than to each other and in the latter stage virtually ignore the infants in their isolettes, which they are supposed to be discussing.” Peirce to Dozois, 12 May 1967, “Meditheatre,” ccwe, rg 71, vol. 10. Together with the performance artist, Gilda Stillback, Craig Moyes and I restaged a portion of Miracles in Modern Medicine in the Old Anatomy Theatre at King’s College, London with performers interacting with the screened film. This confirmed that, while the audience’s attention remained primarily on the film screening, the stage performance effectively enlivened the film. Moyes, Stillback, and Palmer, Meditheatre 1967/2017, King’s College, London, 4 September 2017. “The Expo67 Story – Volume 1, April 27–July 31,” mimeograph, p. 19, ccwe, rg 71, vol. 11, lac. Michel Jutras says that he sometimes sent out ushers with signs indicating the wait time at different points in the line-up, reaching at its maximum point seven hours, but still people generally waited. Interview with Michel Jutras. Film footage of the long lines can be found in Man and His Health (Chetwynd Films), lac. Interview with Michel Jutras; interview with Jill Whitaker, 12 July 2017. Peirce to Dozois, 10 May 1967, ccwe, rg 71, vol. 10. Bill Bantey, “Expo 67: Cinema verité,” Montreal Gazette, 26 May 1967. Cordier recalled his intentions to turn the show into an Artaudian theatre of cruelty, an objective tipped off in the film with what he calls a “wink” in a shot of the team of observing doctors, all of whom are wearing on their nametags the names of

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important artists (Kurosawa, Dovzhenko, Césaire, among others; the tag of the senior resident and leader of the group reads “Artaud”). Gilbert Bériault to Guy Dozois, 4 July 1967, “Theater Technology – Man and His Health Meditheatre,” ccwe, rg 71, vol. 366. Penfield Montebello notes, Wilder Penfield fonds, Osler Archive, McGill University, csd5-2; for Gabrielle Roy’s recollections of Penfield at Montebello, and of her own participation, Gabrielle Roy, “The Theme Unfolded,” Terre des hommes/ Man and His World, 24–32. Roy herself was married to the gynecologist Marcel Carbotte and moved in circles of Quebec physicians; see François Ricard, Gabrielle Roy: une vie (Montreal: Boréal, 1996). On the award, see Wilder Penfield Fonds, Osler Library Archive, w/u 326. Hardy to Bourgeois, 9 October 1967, and “Itemized list of work performed,” Januaury 1966 – June 1967; ccwe, rg 71, vol. 217, file 200-198-1. Denis Goulet and Robert Gagnon, Histoire de la médecine au Québec, 1800-2000: De l’art de soigner à la science de guérir (Quebec: Septentrion, 2014), 400–7. It should be noted that psychiatrists like Denis Lazure and Camille Laurin were more politically involved in these terms than francophone québécois medical researchers, and indeed the Lesage government was lukewarm about supporting medical research facilities, canceling plans for a teaching hospital and research complex on the University of Montreal campus in 1964. “Review Committee on ‘Man and His Health,’” ccwe, rg 71, vol. 365. Wilfrid B. Shaw, ed., The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, n.d.), 965, 999; “Carleton Barnhart Peirce: In Memoriam,” Radiology 133, no. 1 (October 1979): 270; McGill file staff record: www.archives.mcgill.ca/public/exhibits/mcgillremembers/results.asp?id=507; “Dr. C. B. Peirce, and Dr. F. E, McKenty to Head Departments,” Montreal Gazette, 20 September 1943, n.p.; in Series: File Folder (Recto), McGill University Archives, 0000-0481.01.2.e2194. Interview with Michel Jutras. His grandfather Joseph Gauvreau was a physician and early twentieth-century leader of the struggle for French language rights; his aunt was the botanist Marcelle Gauvreau, Quebec’s first notable woman scientist; his uncle, Jean-Marie Gauvreau, was the founder of the Quebec school of design, the École du meuble, whose staff were the main authors of the Refus global, the historic 1947 nationalist manifesto of Quebec artists. His older brother was one of Quebec’s leading filmmakers, Claude Jutra (who had also graduated as a medical doctor, though he never practised). Albert Jutras to Carleton Peirce, 2 February 1960; and “Research in Radiology: Dr. Albert Jutras,” Canadian X-Ray Newsletter (1960), Fonds Albert Jutras, Université de Montréal archives. Interview with Michel Jutras.

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56 On Bertrand, Gagnon and Goulet, Histoire de la médecine au Québec, 212, 232; “The History of Cardiac Surgery: An Interview with Anthony R. C. Dobell, M.D., May 1, 2000,” Vanderbilt University Medical School, https://www.library.vander bilt.edu/specialcollections/history-of-medicine/exhibits/cardiac_surgery/ dobell.php (accessed 3 May 2019). 57 Jeanine Charbonneau Beaubien, La Poudrière réincarné: 25 ans de théatre internationale à Montréal (Montreal: Méridien, 1997), 66–7. The information about Jean-Pierre Masson comes from an interview with Michel Jutras. Masson played Séraphin Poudrier in Les Belles Histoires des pays d’en haut, which ran on RadioCanada from 1954–70; prior to that he had played Léonidas Plouffe in another television series central to the national imaginary, La famille Plouffe. 58 Expo 67 Official Guide, 45. 59 I would like to acknowledge the generous collaboration of four of the creative talents at the heart of the Man and His Health Pavilion: Deidi von Schaewen, Michel Jutras, John Palmer (no relation), and the late Robert Cordier (1931– 2020). Esther Scriver provided valuable materials and thoughts about her father, the late Carleton Peirce (1899–1979), as did her husband, the eminent geneticist Charles Scriver, about his father-in-law. Jonathan Meakins, former head of medicine at McGill University, helped me to map the physicians and procedures in the film, Miracles in Modern Medicine/Miracles de la médecine moderne, which was beautifully restored under the direction of Paul Gordon, senior film conservator, and Steve Moore, senior audiovisual archivist, both at Library and Archives Canada. The chapter benefited from thoughtful readings by Heesok Chang, Craig Moyes, Caroline Martel, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Kirsten Ostherr, Peter Scriver, and María Carranza. Research was supported with funds from the Canada Research Chair in History of International Health, the Office of Research and Innovation Services, and the Office of the Dean – Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, all of the University of Windsor.

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11 The New Brutalism and Design beyond Understanding at Expo 67

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Expo 67 has been called the “victory of the risqué over the staid” because of the way that it replaced a more typically bourgeois, gendered, and consumerist approach with a highly designed vision of the total environment of the future.1 Organizers envisioned a fair where visitors would be participants; rather than receiving an education on the latest products of industry, they would inhabit a new urban reality rich with screens, responsive environments, and internationalism. Designers confronted the visitor with “the raw material of experience” and declared that “all that is demanded of him is participation. Not understanding. Not agreement. Participation.”2 The Montreal World Exhibition may also be seen as one of a number of elaborate explorations of a new humanism: a vision suited to the age of nuclear threat, with mankind united in the face of new technology. The anthropologist Joseph Masco has suggested that learning to live with the possibility of “nation-ending danger” was a challenge; the public struggled to adapt to something so far beyond individual experience.3 He identifies a new aesthetics developed during the classic era of the Cold War that would replace the fear of nuclear destruction with excitement, converting the existential terror generated by the prospect of nuclear holocaust into an affinity for the new. Masco argues that pervasive threats from military technology such as satellites and atomic bombs were difficult for the public to understand. In response, Cold War intellectuals and military personnel studied the psychology of mass emotion and proposed a structure of feeling similar to what Jacques Rancière has

called the “sensuous shock” of technological warfare that both limits thought and expands awareness.4 Cold War design in the United States, from the multimedia work of Charles and Ray Eames to the strategic corporate design program of ibm’s Eliot Noyes, sought to make peace between the excitement and the threat, between the global and the domestic. The curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection, Arthur Drexler cited airplane interiors and hotel chains as examples of a new strategy of design that responded to the complexity and interconnectedness of the postwar United States, and the triumphant novelty of these new architectural spaces and ergonomically designed commodities were increasingly mobilized as soft-power weapons in the United States’ ideological battle with international communism. Drexler was particularly intrigued by the ways designers might forge a connection between objects to create a mood that chimed with the era’s expanded media and mobility.5 Earlier world exhibitions had been opportunities for nations to compete over scientific progress, and Expo 67 did not eschew such nationalism, but the late 1960s saw a shift toward technology, fashion, and discussions of the “place of man” on a troubled planet.6 The world’s fairs that preceded Montreal in Seattle and New York had received poor reviews for being either consumerist, predictable, or both. Seattle was mocked as the first country fair of the space age by architect and critic Reyner Banham, and the New York World’s Fair immediately preceding Expo 67 was met with an underwhelming yawn by cultural critics. Canadians, Americans, and others wanted much more for Expo 67: the future would be presented as an experience through architecture, urban design, and film. Quebec writer Gabrielle Roy, one of the intellectual architects of the Expo theme Terre des hommes/Man and His World, explained her desire to choose a theme that would “emphasize human interdependence” and give the impression of participating nations working together, like an orchestra, to create a sensuous experience of humanity united.7 Bearing passports rather than admission tickets, visitors were to travel around the global city experiencing shock and excitement as they absorbed the pleasures of this new subjectivity in a world replete with the latest technological and scientific advances. Expo 67 was designed to be the broadest possible demonstration of the emotional and political potential of aesthetics to influence a population. Open heart surgery would be domesticated, becoming a startling subject for cinematic drama; Canadian landscapes would be displayed within avant-garde architecture; and new African nations would be clustered in a depiction of geopolitical tension made three-dimensional by urban planners. The advanced medical technologies on display and the avant-garde film and design strategies

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positioned Expo – and Canada as its sponsor – as distinct from the consumerist United States and the austere and realist Soviets. The architecture and cinema would demonstrate that, in the community of nations, Canada was keeping pace with the cultural changes of the new era, and more so, that it had a vision of the future to offer to others. In 1966, Edouard Fiset, chief architect of the Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition, declared architecture “the most fundamental expression of a People’s Genius,” and stated that the design of Expo 67 would demonstrate the cultural savvy of the Canadian people for a global audience.8 Inderbir Singh Riar notes a desire on the part of Expo architects and designers to take up ideas of group form and other quasi-biological inspirations as expounded by Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, and others who had been in conversation with Team X through the early 1960s. Architects such as Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Reyner Banham were intrigued by the lessons of science, anthropology, and medicine. Banham argued that what he called the New Brutalism would be informed by human biology, basically producing an architecture akin to what Marshall McLuhan called a “hot” medium (though Banham himself did not use the term). He situated the New Brutalism within a larger call for architecture to be inspired by science and particularly the human sciences: biology, medicine, and psychology. An architect and leading theorist of the style, Banham explained that Brutalism would eschew symbolism for material and form and achieve a direct, almost medical, physiological impact on its audience’s emotions rather than its reason. What follows is an analysis of architecture and film at Expo 67 as exemplars of a new aesthetic strategy intended to supersede ten years of Cold War propaganda about the unfailing and unstoppable (Western) progress of science. This strategy foregrounded the sometimes shocking experience of the new human sciences directly, and with greater impact than would have been provided by a didactic lecture about medical advances inside conventionally designed architecture. Formal experiments that sought to learn from biology were one thing, but what Banham called for and applauded at Expo was a deeper slice of humanity and its potential. In his admiration for its moments of spatial confusion, Banham touched on the shocking and intense aspects of Expo that exceeded earlier attempts to simply educate or improve audiences.9

The New Brutalism In 1955, the influential historian and critic Reyner Banham – somewhat tongue in cheek – labelled the work of the Smithsons, Louis Kahn, and others as the “New Brutalism.” These postwar architects were historically self-aware, grappling with the position of being part of the history of mod370

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ernism – a movement that was supposed to break from history yet ended up in history books just the same. The Smithsons and others reconnected with architectural history through references to earlier architectural examples. Rudolf Wittkower and Colin Rowe described a means of working from underlying formal structures such that a building would be enriched by the past and yet create a style that was new in its use of material and updated for contemporary technology. In projects like the Hunstanton School in Britain, the Smithsons responded to the need for reconstruction amidst postwar shortages with an embrace of raw materials and a minimalist sensibility. Banham argued that “what characterizes the New Brutalism in architecture as in painting is precisely its brutality, its je-m’en-foutisme, its bloody-mindedness.”10 Architects left the structure and mechanical and plumbing exposed, producing a frank environment that at Hunstanton would famously leave pipes visible beneath washroom sinks. The buildings created memorable images and a sense of being of their time, producing a new phase of postwar modernity that valued impact over comfort. The international conversation that had been developed through the meetings of the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (ciam) had, by the 1960s, shifted to a new generation’s search for a solution to what was felt to be a stalled modern project. The new generation, who called themselves Team X (or Team Ten), were a diverse group, but they shared a desire for a more contextual approach that would make use of new information about the populations being served. As Riar notes, Team X’s claims to novelty through large-scale assemblages for society were not unlike the ciam’s earlier claims for building a new society through like structures.11 And yet a shift in tone toward more environmental or ecological modes was emerging. Modern urban design and town planning emphasized attention to voids and axes, an urban element retained at Expo, which required national and corporate sponsors to leave forty per cent of their site for landscape.12 Architects such as Aldo Van Eyck, the Smithsons, Jacob B. Bakema, Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods, and Giancarlo De Carlo advocated for a more contextual architecture that would respond to differences in time and place to create a full habitat for human occupants.13 Many of these architects engaged with history, others with physics, cybernetics, biology, and anthropology. Architecture discourse engaged everyday life, primitivism, regionalism, play, and authenticity as a means of producing a more “humane” architecture. This new architectural fashion also left its mark on Expo 67, with the enthusiasms of key Expo architects Daniel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel who were part of Team X.14 Expo architect and planner Gilles Gagnon was aware of the international conversation about modern architecture, having attended two meetings of the main international group of architects, the ciam, at Hoddesdon and Aix.15 He The New Brutalism and Design beyond Understanding

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produced translations of Le Corbusier’s talks from French to English and advocated for the introduction of new architectural ideas at Expo 67. The architectural polarization between the International Style of the Marshall Plan nations and the socialist realism of the communist nations continued, but it was surrounded by new regional identities such as Africa Place and new concerns with materiality, complex geometry, and new fabrication techniques.16 Cold War polarization continued in the contrast between the Soviet Pavilion by M.V. Posokhin with A.A. Mdnoyants and A.N. Kondretlev located across a narrow channel from Buckminster Fuller’s US Pavilion.17 The US Pavilion participated in the new contextualism via the creation of a high-technology dome that produced a homeostatic environment for man. The complex dome was installed with triangular, motorized shades and an air conditioning system with a feedback loop to automatically create a comfortable environment for human occupants. Building and environment were in dialogue. Many of the Expo pavilions were built of simple elements rapidly assembled using new forms and new connections, as at Frei Otto’s German Pavilion. The Man in the Community Pavilion, designed by Arthur Erikson and Geoffrey Massey, used a spiralling series of polygons raising into a form that evoked primitive temples, ziggurats, and pyramids. The lattice was open – enclosing such complex forms is not a simple matter – and theorized as an opportunity for visitors to retain a direct connection to the environment even as they were inside. Annmarie Adams has described the architecture as creating a setting for a mediated experience so intense that further architecture was needed “to stabilize their bodies.” Architecture managed the shock of the new quite literally, as when handrails at the Bell Pavilion steadied visitors who were confronted with a continuous circular projection of the Canadian landscape.18 The new architecture incorporated media and cinema, but also sought an understanding of the psychology and physiology of visitors to create and manage the shock of the new.

Architecture and the New Biology In a series of articles that aimed to predict “Architecture after 1960,” Banham had argued that architecture would advance through attention to what was outside the discipline. Rather than look backward to the great modern architecture from before the war, the field should look to advances in technology, science, and art. In his view, architectural theory was merely an empty container, a void which is filled by vibrant ideas from outside architecture. He sought to predict the future by extrapolating from the trends of the past, presenting architectural history as the sequence of dynamic ideas from adjacent

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disciplines. As he wrote: “my contention is that trends in architecture follow the strongest available influence that can fill the vacuum of architectural theory. History filled that gap in the early 50s, imitating Corb [Le Corbusier] took over for some after that, others turned to Detroit styling and appliance affluence, others again have gone to science fiction, or to its historicist shadow, neoFuturism, and at all times, of course engineering has been a potent source of vacuum filler.”19 He worried about the periods in which the strongest adjacent discipline was architectural history, causing architects to gain inspiration from previous stages of development. For Banham, borrowing from earlier stages clearly constituted a step backward, not forward toward a more perfect implementation of technology, as well as an almost indecent inward focus. He was concerned that architecture after World War II was in such a situation, where architectural theory had become infused with architectural history. He worried that the result of such times was “architecture for architecture’s sake” or “the vacuity of architecture-as-such.”20 Banham claimed that not only does “the grave yawn for architect’s architecture” but “we all yawn at architect’s architecture the moment the novelty has worn off.”21 Describing his own period, he diagnosed just such a dearth of inspiration: “the present condition of architectural theory … has now become what some linguistic philosophers would call a vacuous category – that is, everyone agrees that it exists, but no one can show that it contains anything.”22 Fearing that architectural theory would again be filled with history, Banham proposed that architects turn to the human sciences for inspiration. He was excited by a transition he saw in architecture wherein the reasoning behind a design choice had less to do with the architect’s vision and more to do with the client’s perspective. In particular, he saw this new kind of architecture in the buildings being designed by the Nuffield Trust, which had been established in 1939 to provide medical care for World War II servicemen and women.23 Describing the work of the trust, he wrote: “The heart theme of the whole enterprise is a special care for the users of the buildings. That care may take a variety of forms – believing that exposed concrete is good for you spiritually, or that six air changes per hour are good for you physically, but these propositions are not made on the basis of ‘this is what the architect wants as a creative artist,’ or that ‘this is what the bye-laws require.’ In every case the architects have involved themselves imaginatively in the life and the outlook of the occupiers.”24 From the Brutalist sentiment of spiritual benefit through art brut aesthetics to more prosaic research on heating and ventilating, Banham saw an important new trend in deriving inspiration from “the occupiers” of the buildings and knowledge from the “human sciences.” He

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thought that according to “public opinion,” certain classes of persons – hospital patients and children – deserved more than the usual minimal attention to life safety issues.25 In his influential book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Banham argued that the future of architecture in the second machine age would come from attention to man’s biological needs.26 Grounding his prediction in a teleological view of architecture’s disciplinary past, Banhamas-historian pointed to the work of first-generation modernists like Lázló Moholy-Nagy who incorporated insights from the sciences into the curriculum for students at the Bauhaus. To continue this base in science and in the biological needs of man would free architecture from the entrapments of history and culture, allowing architects to jettison the cultural parachute and run with the scientists.27 Banham was excited about the possibility of following biology’s transition from larger to smaller scale studies, and explained that architecture’s interests mirrored the shift in the human sciences, from sociology and the study of institutions to smaller groups, families, and the individual. Following that approximating line, he “extrapolated” that the next step was for architecture to penetrate the skin: “With perception studies, we are down to the skin of the individual, as we are with studies of comfort levels and acoustics within rooms. The next move for architecture is to follow the human sciences inside the human being.”28 Banham encouraged architects to follow the progress of biology, focusing at ever smaller scales and passing beneath the skin of the individual. Was he proposing a faintly painful, quasi–science fiction world where the architect must take a blood sample to design for a client, or merely the architecture of the human sciences described previously, which would try to accommodate creature comforts using science? Banham walked the line between these two with success, evoking a tantalizing vision of a new world but at the same time creating the sense that he was only talking about introducing better heating. To legitimate his study, Banham claimed to be putting architecture back on its true path and following the legacy of Moholy-Nagy. He referred approvingly to two of Moholy-Nagy’s quasi-vitalist slogans from 1929 as important guides for architects in his own age, specifically quoting “the biological as the guide in everything” and “Man, not the product, is the end in view.”29 In this formulation, architecture was part of a method for improving humanity one individual at a time, through altering his or her environment. Indeed, Banham’s belief that architects should be acquainted with biology echoes MoholyNagy’s own scheme in the early 1940s to introduce general science studies to the foundation course at the Chicago School of Design.30 Both Banham and Moholy-Nagy left the exact nature of the alteration of the individual a bit

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vague; Moholy-Nagy mystically referred to helping man live up to his potential and Banham suggested an undefined new future for man. Whether coincidentally or intentionally, the particular biologists that Banham mentioned were researching the new medical practice of transplanting organs, potentially a direct means of improving the future of man. Banham called out two eminent scientists, the biologist Peter Medawar and the physician and virologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1960. The two men were artful popularizers as well as elite scientists, and Banham cited radio interviews by Burnet and Reith Lectures on “The Future of Man” by Medawar. He used these men’s words to express his excitement that the new ideas were accessible to many audiences, that they did not “require a Nobel class mind … even if you have to be called Macfarlane Burnet to think of it.”31 In addition to serving as indicators of the rapid growth of biology, the simplicity of the ideas and their mainstream appeal would be important in order for them to be fit for transplantation into architectural theory. Considering the slim chance that an architect would also be a Nobel-class biologist, it would be important for the ideas to be graspable by designers. Banham acknowledged that the successful adoption of the human sciences into architecture would require an aesthetic adaptation that was far from certain of success. He mentioned the light, prefabricated schemes of the clasp school designs as possible evidence that the aesthetic adaptation might happen “of its own accord.”32 He also cautioned that in most cases the “motive power will have to come from outside architecture, but the formal convictions and the creative force will have to come from inside.”33 He was unable to go any further toward explaining the connection between the aesthetic of the clasp schools and the human sciences, leading to the impression that the connection had more to do with a vague notion of user-oriented design than any grounding in science. If there had been a more specific connection, it seems that he would have celebrated it. Nevertheless, for Banham, clasp was a perfect example of the way that external forces would push architectural inventiveness towards new prefabricated horizons that would incorporate the lessons of the human sciences. Expo 67 would be another.

Banham at Expo In 1967, Banham visited the Montreal World Expo as a critic for New Society. Although his legacy is characterized by his support for engineers and his mockery of leading architects, in the case of Expo he repeatedly applauded the work of local Quebec architects, even as he chided established elites for once again

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demonstrating, as they inevitably did at world exhibitions, that “the official view of the world’s Establishment is about two jumps behind the human race.”34 Calling attention to the French version of the Expo theme, Terre des hommes, Banham noted that he sought as much innovation in terms of “hommes” as had been achieved with “terre” – a reference to the reclamation of land from the Saint Lawrence River. Interested as always in the way environments addressed the experience of the common man, down to the challenge of finding the right spot to urinate, he wrote about the graphic design component of Expo with as much seriousness as the built forms, objecting strenuously to the use of supposedly universal signs for toilets using a silhouette of a human male or female. “Only those who have been through the highly specialized education of using European airports in the last five years will know the secret code whereby the symbol of a man standing to attention means – of all things – pee here. With any luck, this first major international testbed of this supposedly universal sign language will be its deathbed.”35 We now know his hope was a vain one. Banham finds delight in the confusion of Expo, in keeping with his wish to see humans confronted with novel experience (he even argued that perhaps the expense of an Expo could be justified in this way, while tempering the claim by noting that there were more direct ways to use the money to alleviate human suffering). The experience even made him ponder whether or not a world expo could become a “human testbed situation,” without considering the ethical dimensions of the idea.36 He regretted that Buckminster Fuller’s initial proposal for the US Pavilion as a single large grid sheltering an embodied world scenario had not been pursued. And he admired the Czech film that enabled audience members to vote at certain decision points and guide the plot, making the visitors more than “a simple dazed receptacle of respectful impressions.”37 If Banham got the toilet signs wrong, he was prescient in terms of environmental data collection systems. Banham’s review of Expo, appropriately, comes to a focus on his appreciation of one of the central Brutalist designs of Expo 67, the Man the Producer Pavilion, one of Expo’s seven theme buildings. Designed by a Montreal architectural firm (a group of partners best known under their later acronym, Arcop), the Man the Producer building had a complex geometry composed of tetrahedra. The large space frames were combined to make many smaller cellular spaces, evoking movement and, as Banham noted, swallowing the movements of crowds. According to Riar, such architecture had socio-technical aspirations, hoping to offer new ways of congregating even as it innovated technologically, though he notes that the forms had trouble distinguishing themselves from previous modern movement ideals even as they claimed

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avant-garde status. As Riar notes, Banham must have had Cedric Price’s unbuilt Fun Palace or Potteries Thinkbelt in mind as he wandered the space.38 Banham clearly delighted in the confusion created by the experience, the network of circulation resulting in visitors repeatedly arriving on levels they were pretty sure they had not previously seen.

Meditheatre Film “Set to Stun” Though Banham did not take up the question of the application of the human sciences in the Brutalist architecture and design of Expo 67, he might well have. He brushed against it without taking it on explicitly in his less-thanenthusiastic report of passing through the cinematic architecture of the National Film Board’s Labyrinth Pavilion, the appreciation of his own sensuous shock relegated to the background by what he saw as the crass, Disneyesque, “humanist lite” imagery of the films themselves. He makes no mention of the other Brutalist theme pavilion complex produced by Arcop – Man the Explorer, a companion piece to Man the Producer, laid out as a triptych of megatetrahedrons that dominated the space near Expo’s main gate for those arriving by metro. The pavilion contained the Man and Life theme exhibit celebrating the life sciences. Its features included a sculpture of a three-story human cell that visitors walked in and out of as they absorbed the richly illustrated story of human biology, and a biologically detailed fourteen-foot-tall replica of the human brain, with internal lighting that accurately reproduced the firing of synapses. Nor, apparently, did Banham visit the Expo “experience” that arguably best exemplified the strategy of sensuous shock: the bare, immediate aesthetic offered in the Meditheatre, at the core of the Man and His Health Pavilion. This was a theatre-in-the round with three large cinematic screens custom-designed for a combined film-theatre show called Miracles in Modern Medicine. The pavilion itself was created by Peter Harnden, one of the leading designers of exhibitions for the United States during the era of Cold War, soft power exhibition diplomacy. He commissioned the Meditheatre show from the New York–based Belgian-American theatre director Robert Cordier, a collaborator with many of the avant-garde artistic talents that US exhibition designers favoured during this era. The film’s cinematography was by John Palmer, who collaborated with Andy Warhol on key cinematic experiments in the mid1960s. In the film that propelled the Meditheatre show, scenes of man and of his health were cut together to produce a slightly disorienting, emotional impact. Images of plastic tubing and pulsing machines are interspersed with nonmedical, everyday shots of the people who are confronted, inserted, connected

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with the tubes and the machines. And at times, objects and animals of a tertiary relationship to the medical procedure interrupt the back and forth of medicine and man. Beneath the projected film, actors on realistic medical sets performed scenes that complemented the film.39 The film itself produces a sensation similar to Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny or unheimlich through the rapid editing of sequences of the familiar and the strange. Using juxtaposition and repetition, the film generated uncertainty about what was being presented and why. Reason was challenged leaving emotion to take over. The result was stunning, quick, parsed emotionally rather than through the slow, rational understanding of what had been seen. For example, the film featured open heart surgery on a ten-year-old boy. Rather than explain the surgery, however, shots of a young boy with his sister alternate with scenes of his heart, beating, framed by the metal clamps that hold his chest open. From this disorienting view of a heart as an isolated yet animated object, very rarely seen by the public, the film shifts to another animated object that is not an object at all, but the animal that the boy perhaps keeps as a pet. The goldfish regards the viewer from an indistinct aquatic habitat prompting the question: what could the delicate fins have to do with open heart surgery? This was not a film to explain surgical procedure in reassuring terms, but to have an impact. In a sequence on kidney dialysis, a middle-aged man is shown walking out of his office, living a life “presque normale” (near normal), and is later shown smoking a cigarette and relaxing in bed on the dialysis ward. Such mundane images are interspersed with shots of his cherry-red blood flowing through tubes and valves for the treatment that wards off death. The depiction of medical technology for an international mass audience aimed to have a direct, emotional effect on its viewers. The confusion of human and object, of girl and doll, was most clear in the sequence of a young girl named Bernadette born a thalidomide victim, with hands on abbreviated arms. Scenes of her blond curls and smile are interspersed with a whirring set of arms – a prosthesis she initially rejects, then wears somewhat unhappily and fearfully at the sequence’s end. The narrator describes the possibility that she will have a “useful life” (refraining from using the word “happy”). Bernadette makes faces at a caregiver who somewhat playfully, somewhat cruelly pinches her cheeks. After this ambivalent demonstration of their bond, the film shows a doll dropped, the quick cuts linking the girl with the doll. And when a viewer might have begun to worry about the caregiver dropping the girl instead of the doll, the scene shifts to Bernadette about to swim with her short arms. A hand pushes the girl into the pool and the next shots show a blurry image of her head, made more ob-

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ject-like in a pink rubber cap with yellow and blue flowers sinking into the water. Again viewers were left with an uncertainty about what the film mixed together: subject and object, prosthetic and organic. The Meditheatre film contrasted the patient as a person with the new technologies that treated his or her living body as an object. The ontological confusion struck hard and fast, with sound, image, and structure producing a physiological effect. The film was itself a medical technology that was received biologically, immediately, and not entirely pleasantly. And it worked, as thousands of people fainted, vomited, or had other physical reactions. As with the architecture of the Expo, the film was set to stun; informed by cutting-edge media practice and theory, Expo 67 aimed to achieve a kind of aesthetic Brutalism, a desire to overcome the blasé reception that had plagued the New York World’s Fair and much of International Style modernism.

Conclusion At Expo 67, glimpses of a physiological and irrational attitude to design can be discerned amidst the hyper-rational technological innovations that abound. As Banham outlined, design could be used for more direct impact and toward less clarity. This happened amidst an increasingly postcolonial landscape wishing to reach subjects beyond the typical constraints of ideology and propaganda. As geopolitics brought more subjects into the parade of nations, global elites wondered how to address these subjects en masse. What new modes would be suitable in the atomic age (with its mind-bending fears)? Expo does seem to have operated as a “testbed situation” studying whether and how humans might be governable in part through the maintenance of a steady position of potential excitement and limited understanding. Through emotional and physiological appeals, the subject would remain ready to respond to an enduring state of crisis, though that crisis remained poorly defined. Film, graphic design, architecture, and urbanism would deploy design as a tool for producing this new excitable public who would “participate” rather than understand or seek to change the state of the world. These subjects appear less passive than the visitors lazily photographing the New York World’s Fair from predetermined spots, but it is hard to see how a vomiting or fainting subject is prepared to have agency over the forces in play in the geopolitics of 1967. As future generations look back at this and other expos, questions of agency, access, and affect may take their place with accounts of technological progress, nationalism, and experiment.

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notes 1 Daniela Sheinin, “Kookie Thoughts: Imagining the United States Pavilion at Expo 67 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bubble),” Journal of Transnational American Studies 5, no. 1 (January 2013): 6. 2 Ibid., 6. 3 Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.) 4 Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 1 (autumn 2009): 1–19. 5 Arthur Drexler, “The Disappearing Object,” Saturday Review, 23 May 1964, 15. 6 Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv. 7 Janine Marchessault, “Citérama: Expo as Media City,” in Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67, eds. Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 84. 8 Edouard Fiset, “Expo 67,” Architecture Canada, 43 (July 1966): 29. 9 Riar suggests a comparison with the sublime and a type of technological awe; Inderbir Singh Riar, “Expo 67, or Megastructure Redux,” in Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader, eds. Laura Hollengreen, Celia Pearce, Rebecca Rouse, and Bobby Schweizer (Pittsburgh: etc Press, 2014), 14. 10 “The definition of the new style being 1. Memorability as an image; 2. Clear exhibition of structure; and 3. Valuation of Materials as Found because these are the things that impact the emotions.” Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review 118 (December 1955): 357. 11 Riar, “Expo 67, or Megastructure Redux,” 3. 12 Marchessault, “Citérama,” 86. 13 See also: Arindam Dutta, ed., A Second Modernism: mit, Architecture, and the “Techno-Social” Moment (Cambridge, ma:mit Press, 2013); Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Rejean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2000); Hadas A. Steiner, “Life at the Threshold,” October, no. 136 (2011): 133–55; and Max Risselada, ed., Team 10: 1953–81: In Search of a Utopia of the Present (Rotterdam: nai, 2005). 14 Riar, “Expo 67, or Megastructure Redux,” 2. 15 Interview with Gilles Gagnon, Shaughnessy House, cca, Monday 5 October 1998; Gilles Gagnon fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, ms. See also John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold, Cities of Culture: Staging International Festivals and the Urban Agenda, 1851–2000 (London: Ashgate, 2005). 16 Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front, xiv.

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17 Jonathan Massey, “Buckminster Fuller’s Cybernetic Pastoral: The United States Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (2006): 463–83. 18 Annmarie Adams, “Learning from Expo: A New Generation of Architecture Students Explore the Legacy of Montreal’s Expo 67, Rediscovering Its Significance in Today’s World,” Canadian Architect 52, no. 8 (2007): 40–2. 19 Reyner Banham, “The History of the Immediate Future,” riba Journal (May 1961): 255. See also Paula Young Lee on Banham’s use of “influence” to construct his historiography. Lee argues that to say that one thing influences another is to simultaneously connect and separate the two, as influence is only notable when it comes from without. Thus, in a sense, to say that history, biology, or even social concerns “influence” architecture is to place those things outside of architecture while at the same time connecting them. Paula Young Lee, “Modern Architecture and the Ideology of Influence,” Assemblage 34 (1998): 6–29. 20 Banham, “The History of the Immediate Future,” 253. There were, of course, others who disagreed with Banham about the poverty of architecture and the importance of designs which are inspired by the trends in the world outside. One was Philip Johnson, who reviewed Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Johnson disliked the introduction and final section, which he claimed marked Banham as a “beyond architecture believer.” Philip Johnson, “Where Are We At?,” Architectural Review (September 1960): 173–5. 21 Banham, “The History of the Immediate Future,” 253. Banham borrowed the phrase “the grave yawns for architect’s architecture” from a note published in Architectural Review fifty-five years previously, in 1905. He quoted the note in full in Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, ma:mit Press, 1980), 47. 22 Banham, “The History of the Immediate Future,” 252. 23 See Gordon MacLachlan, A History of the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust 1940–1990 (London: Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, 1992). See also Sir David Lee, “The First Fifty Years (1939–1989),” available on the Nuffield Trust Website at http://www.nuffieldtrust.org/fifty.htm (accessed 18 July 2008). 24 Banham, “The History of the Immediate Future,” 255–6. 25 Ibid., 257. 26 Banham’s attempt to use history as a predictive social science has been discussed by Anthony Vidler in his historiography of modernism, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge, ma:mit Press, 2008). 27 Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. 28 Banham, “The History of the Immediate Future,” 256. 29 Lázló Moholy-Nagy, quoted in ibid., 257 30 Alain Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937–46),” Design Issues 7, no. 1 (autumn, 1990): 4–19.

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31 Banham, “The History of the Immediate Future,” 256. Somewhat surprisingly, he equates the research with Einstein’s theory of relativity (E=mc2) to illustrate that it is easy to understand. Admittedly the equation is simple, but how many architects understand relativity? 32 clasp was the abbreviation for Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme, formed in England in 1957 to promote shared use of prefabricated building designs for British schools. Ibid., 257. clasp had exhibited designs for schools at the Milan Triennale in 1960 to great acclaim. 33 Ibid. 34 Reyner Banham, “L’Homme à l’Expo,” New Society (5 January 1967): 811. 35 Ibid., 812. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 813. 38 Riar, “Expo 67, or Megastructure Redux,” 3. 39 See chapter 10 in this collection by Steven Palmer, and also Simon Lewson, “The Movie That Shocked Canada,” The Walrus (July/August 2017): https://thewalrus. ca/the-movie-that-shocked-canada/. Miracles in Modern Medicine (Robert Cordier, 1967, 19 mins) can be viewed on the Library and Archives Canada website: https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/collectionsearch/Pages/collectionsearch. aspx?q=miracles%20in%20modern%20medicine&DataSource=Archives&.

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12 Secret Agents at Expo: The Case of Kommissar X

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At some point in 1967, the Munich-based film production company Parnass came to Montreal to film on the site of Expo 67 and at other locations in the city. While in Montreal, a cast and crew shot roughly half of a fiction film featuring the character Joe Walker, an adventure hero and criminal investigator who was also known, in the seven films in which he appeared, as Kommissar X. The film shot in Montreal would be titled Drei blaue Panther in Germanspeaking markets and Gangsters per un massacro in Italy. For its Englishlanguage releases it was sometimes called Three Blue Panthers, but it circulated more widely as Kill, Panther, Kill, the title I shall use in discussing it here. Kill, Panther, Kill is a minor, even abject, film. It is the product of a national film industry in decline, made by a production company seeking to tie the regional fame of a pulp novel character to the global cycles of imitation that followed the success of the first James Bond film in 1962. The generic complex to which Kill, Panther, Kill belongs has come to be known as “Eurospy,” a term designating a loosely bounded (but large) corpus of European films of the 1960s which offered, as their heroes, versions of the secret agent or spy-adventurer.1 As we shall see, however, the Kommissar X films remained bound to pulpy plots about criminal gangs, rather than showcasing the espionage plots and battles for global political domination that marked more ambitious examples of the form. Kill, Panther, Kill is also an example of what I call the media extensions of Expo 67. By “media extension” I designate those media texts, like feature films,

comic books, and entertainment television series, which carried images of the fair outside the corpus of official documentaries that recorded and memorialized the event. The media extensions that concern me here are also distinct from the wide range of cinematic installations that formed part of the fair itself, such as the expanded and multiscreen experiments which have recently been the object of extensive scholarship.2 Those more minor media extensions might include the November 1967 issue of the Marvel comic book Daredevil, whose eponymous hero visits the fair, and a number of other films or television programs, to be discussed later, in which Expo 67 featured as setting or backdrop.3 Like most of these minor media extensions, Kill, Panther, Kill provides little sense of Expo 67 as a significant achievement in the life of its city, its nation, or the world itself. Rather, the film merely exploited some of the fair’s locations for their narrative possibilities, within a story that paused at Expo 67, then moved on. If some of the problem of representing Expo 67 had to do with the difficulty of visualizing it in its entirety, Kill, Panther, Kill is one of many texts which treated it in fragmentary or oblique fashion. In an era in which international adventure films (and, mostly notably, the James Bond series) deployed places of national spectacle as the setting for climactic set pieces, Kill, Panther, Kill used the site of Expo 67 as merely the backdrop for one of its secondary narrative events. A key effect of Kill, Panther, Kill, then, is to render Expo 67 minor. It does so, in part, because it is itself a minor film. The Kommissar X series in its entirety may be seen as an example of what Françoise Lionnet and Shue-mei Shih have called minor transnationalisms:4 it is a set of films circulating through markets knitted together in co-production agreements involving peripheral national film industries in the stages of their dissolution and decay. From a North American vantage point, the transnationalism of these films appears minor, as well, through the set of locations they employ: Singapore, Thailand, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and, here, Calgary and Montreal. In each of the Kommissar X films, sequences set amidst important ceremonial events or in architecturally distinguished locations are given short periods in which to unfold before the films themselves move to the peripheral locations in which much of their action transpires. Even as their internationalism is “minor,” however, the Kommissar X films exemplify a globalizing vision which resonates with that of Expo 67 itself. To be sure, the film series, across its various entries, reduces national particularities to a series of novel experiences to be consumed, and in doing so replicates the function (and appeal) of even the earliest world’s fairs. In their quick jumps between nations, however, from one elaborately staged spectacle to another far away, these films nevertheless suggest the possibility of an omniscient

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position from which the world as a whole might be observed in its simultaneity. If this globalizing view is imperfectly achieved in Kill, Panther, Kill, with its awkward transitions and messy interweaving of locations, the presumption that it was possible resonates with Expo 67’s own McLuhanite fantasies of an interconnected world.

From LA to Montmorency Like other secret agent films of the 1960s, Kill, Panther, Kill borrows the broad narrative structure of the adventure travelogue, despite its brief (seventy-nineminute) running time. The film moves from an opening scene in Los Angeles to a climax ostensibly set at the Montmorency Falls near Quebec City. In the opening sequence, set along the California coast, a group of criminals rescues a thief from the Los Angeles police. The thief is in possession of information about stolen jewels now being held in Montreal, but the criminal group heads first to Calgary, to hide out during the city’s “rodeo” (the Calgary Stampede). They are followed by the private investigator Joe Walker (aka Kommissar X). The film’s delayed credits unfold over documentary-like footage of the Calgary Stampede parade – footage from which the film’s central characters are absent. We are treated to displays characteristic of this period in the Stampede’s history: wagons carrying Indigenous peoples in traditional costume, and floats featuring the finalists and winners of women’s beauty contests, posing in seductive fashion. As the credits conclude, the narrative resumes, but Kill, Panther, Kill finds pretexts for showing us several of the Stampede’s other spectacles as its characters wind their way through them: cattle roping, a chuckwagon race, lassoing contests, jetpack daredevils, and so on. Indeed, the film’s footage of the Calgary Stampede is at least as revealing of the event’s various attractions as its treatment of Expo 67 is of the fair, though the latter is the site of its key narrative moments. As the Calgary Stampede sequence concludes, abruptly, the thieves decide to go to Montreal, with Walker in pursuit. The film then cuts sharply to the site of Expo 67. Over sequences lasting roughly twelve minutes, key action unfolds on the fair’s site. A chase across the grounds of the fair offers a view of several of Expo’s pavilions and other attractions. In a stylistic figure typical of the film’s period, there are zooms in and out from key buildings, like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome (the United States Pavilion). The centrepiece of the Expo sequences is a murder, in which the main thief kills his twin brother, in a cable car belonging to the Sky Ride transportation system. At this point in the story, Joe Walker has teamed up with Inspector Lefebvre of the “Canadian police” to pursue the perpetrators of the Los Angeles rescue,

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but things get more complicated still. It turns out that the “Blue Panthers” of the title are jewels of vaguely Indigenous provenance, now on display (for safekeeping) in Montreal’s Musée des beaux-arts, and it is to the Musée that all the key characters now rush. In an exterior shot, clearly filmed on location, we see Joe Walker and his female colleague leave the museum and, in an improbable navigation of local geography, turn their car onto Ontario Street and race through Montreal. Other scenes shot in Montreal include a romantic meeting, which becomes a confrontation, at the lookout on Mont-Royal. The film’s climax – a helicopter escape from a raging waterfall that is meant to be the Montmorency Falls in Quebec – was actually shot at the Monte Gelato falls in Italy.

Abjection and the Eurospy Film Cycle Like most so-called Eurospy films, Kill, Panther, Kill is relentlessly misogynist and colonial, even by the standards of its period and genre. In the case of the Kommissar X films, these qualities – a crudeness and insensitivity which were already, in 1967, beginning to seem retrograde – seem compounded by the films’ relatively low budgets and their orientation towards exhibition circuits designed for exploitation films of various kinds (like drive-in theatres, socalled grindhouse cinemas, and late-night television slots). Kill, Panther, Kill features long scenes of sexual banter and stereotypical characterizations of race and ethnicity, including one woman’s ongoing indulgence in an “Indian princess” persona. The abject status of the Kommissar X series is further betrayed in the markers of physical degradation to which copies of the films were subject in the years following their initial release. They inevitably circulated in crudely dubbed versions, with separate titles awkwardly inserted for different regions and with scenes cut or shortened to meet the demands of distinct markets (or, later, of television). As well, these films were made quickly. The first three of the Kommissar X films were released in 1966, with one each following in the next three years. A final entry in the series, known in English as FBI Operation Pakistan, was released in 1971. Kill, Panther, Kill, like other films of its cycle and industrial status, is both obscure and ubiquitous. It is one of the easiest to find of all films documenting Expo 67, but because it circulates in deteriorated form, on platforms that devour an abundance of media texts rather than consecrate them, it goes unmentioned in most discussions of the fair’s media extensions. The copyright status of the Kommissar X films has long been uncertain and has varied between territories, a state of affairs which has increased the ubiquity of these films just as it has underscored their abjection and obscurity. Films in the Kom-

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missar X series have circulated for years in different versions on a multiplicity of platforms, from vhs tapes to budget dvds, catering to viewers with a connoisseurist devotion to 1960s kitsch. In almost all cases, releases of the Kommissar X films on tape and disc were mastered from deteriorated film prints and from versions whose screen ratios had been already altered for television. The “Kommissar X Collection,” released by Retro Media in 2007, condensed three of the Kommissar X films on a single dvd, billed as “A Swinging 1960s Spy-O-Rama,” garnering reviews that complained about the collection’s poor visual quality and absence of special features. In 2012, the German company Koch Media released the entire series in a dvd set made from high-quality 35mm prints, with special features and widescreen presentation of the films, but this was not made available in the North American ntsc format. On YouTube, one may find faded copies of the Kommissar X films chopped into several chapters, dubbed in a variety of languages, or reduced to stills over which the film’s theme songs are played. Films from the series are regularly offered for streamed viewing on semi-illicit sites like Cat3Plus.com or Streamcloud.com, where they unfold surrounded by links to porn sites. As Matthieu Letourneux has observed, in an insightful reading of the Eurospy cycle to which Kill, Panther, Kill belongs, these films are emblematic less of any obvious ideological project than of the financial arrangements presiding over their production. “The conditions of production and circulation of these works,” he suggests, “reveal … the structuring of a European industry founded on co-production, on the circulation of actors between countries, on publishing agreements about translation [of the popular literature on which they were based], and so on. All of these took shape on the ruins of a system which had prevailed in the years between the world wars and which now found itself profoundly disorganized.”5 Letourneux notes how the mediatic roots of the Eurospy film cycle resided in cheaply priced forms of print media – paperback novels published in series, comic strips, and photo-romans. In addition to Kommissar X, these media featured characters like Diabolik, Fantomas, oss 117, fbi agent Jerry Cotton, and others who circulated widely across the boundaries of language and nation. The reach of these characters extended across Europe and into Latin America, but rarely into English-language markets, even when English-sounding names for authors and characters were used as marketing tools. These fictions, Letourneux argues, perpetuated the features of an earlier period of American pulp fiction, one which stretched back to the interwar period. Their heroes were rugged and usually unreflective, and the locations of these stories were exotic and often colonial. As movie adaptations of this print culture became

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popular in the 1960s, pulpy detective heroes were made, more and more, to resemble the secret agents made newly popular by the Bond novels and films. Technologies of investigation and destruction came to assume greater prominence in these fictions, and the exotic settings of the pulp detective story were reordered within the location-jumping which the viewers of Bond films had come to expect. Thus, while Joe Walker, the hero of the Kommissar X films, was in no sense a spy, and while the backdrop of the Cold War was scarcely to be glimpsed, the widely roaming narratives of these films, with their spectacular locations and elaborate setpieces centred on relatively expensive technologies (such as helicopters or cable cars), offered greater similarity to the secret agent cycle than to the private detective films of the immediate postwar period. Letourneux’s suggestion that the Kommissar X films were made within the ruins of postwar European cinema captures the sense of degradation that surrounds them. In his book International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s, Tim Bergfelder traces the way in which films like the Kommissar X series attempted to resuscitate West German cinema following a period of crisis in the early 1960s.6 By this historical point, a variety of popular, national genres that had flourished within the West German cinema in the 1950s – the Heimat film, the music-oriented Schlager film, the Sissi cycle – were losing popularity and ceasing to be profitable. In a pattern we may observe during the same period in Italy, Mexico, and, slightly later, the UK, West German commercial cinema of the mid-1960s turned, first, towards genres with demonstrable international appeal, like the adventurethriller, and then, by the end of the decade, towards more obvious exploitational films like the softcore sex film or the excessively violent crime or horror film. The Kommissar X films are a symptom of the early phases of this transition. (The beginnings, in the mid-1960s, of the government-subsidized, artistically ambitious, and avant-garde “New German Cinema” complicate this narrative somewhat, but do not alter its broad lines.)

Strategies of Deception By the time Kill, Panther, Kill was released in March of 1968, Expo 67 had ended, of course. It is perhaps for this reason that the film’s use of the fair as one of its locations went almost unmentioned in its advertising. One Germanlanguage poster for the film simply highlights the face of its central character, Joe Walker, suggesting a scene of violence in a sidebar and lacking any iconography that might suggest Expo 67. Another presents action whose effect is to make the film look like a Western or, perhaps, a war film. In the most blatantly

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12.1 Lobby card for the Kommissar X film Kill, Panther, Kill, showing the West German Pavilion at Expo 67.

deceptive of posters, for the film’s Italian release as Gangsters per un massacre, we are encouraged to believe Kill, Panther, Kill is a gangster film about the Roaring Twenties. Only in a lobby card for a German release do we see a site that we may recognize as Expo 67. In this image, the film’s hero poses in front of the West German Pavilion, a building presumably recognizable to large numbers of its intended viewers. In fact, one may enumerate, in relation to these films, the multiple levels of deception that marked their production and advertising. The director of most entries in the Kommissar X series, Gianfranco Parolini, had changed his name to Frank Kramer, presumably so that his films might appear less Italian and therefore less obviously foreign or “regional” as they moved into international markets. The star of the Kommissar X films, Luciano Stella, likewise, and for the same reasons, had early in his career changed his name to Tony Kendall. In the 1960s, he worked for the most part in those genres in which Italian cinema specialized, in an increasingly fragile international market: spy movie parodies, Spaghetti Westerns, and adventure films set in the Roman Empire.

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However, while the Kommissar X films were mostly the work of Italian talent, their real sources, as noted, were German. The character of Kommissar X had been the hero of more than 600 pulp novels popular in Germany, most of them of anonymous or pseudonymous authorship. None of them had been filmed until the prominent German producer Theo Maria Werner decided to adapt them for his Munich-based production company Parnass. In the muddled production and distribution agreements that presided over their commercial life, the Kommissar X films were genuinely international. All of them involved West German and Italian money, and then, typically, funding from at least one other country – in the case of Kill, Panther, Kill, this was Yugoslavia. This core set of transnational arrangements was then supplemented, Bergfelder suggests, by financial or logistical support from tourism promotion agencies in the countries where they were shot.7 In their choice of exotic locations for each film of the series, we begin to see the logic that led the producers of Kill, Panther, Kill to shoot in Montreal. Kommissar X: The Golden Dragon, released in 1966, took place for the most part in Singapore. It opens with brief scenes of the Singapore Grand Prix – an event which, like the Calgary Stampede, was filmed on location, and contributed significantly to the film’s offering of travelogue-like added value. Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick, in the same year, unfolded in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and contains extended footage of a local festive elephant parade. Other films in the series were set in Pakistan and Thailand, and briefly highlighted local sites of festivity or spectacle. While the James Bond films bounced around globally dispersed locations, each of the Kommissar X films was restricted to one or two. In this respect, the status of Montreal and of Expo 67 in relation to Kill, Panther, Kill is curious. I have, as yet, found no evidence that governments in Canada contributed in any financial sense to the making of the film. The Canadian Film Development Corporation had been set up in 1967 to support the growth of a Canadian feature film industry, but there are no Canadian production entities or funding sources listed even deep in the credits of Kill, Panther, Kill. Nor are there the typical signs of local involvement in international productions shot in Canada, such as francophone names down far in the list of credits, at the level of extras, bit players, and below-the-line crews. Even Erwin Strahl, the actor who plays Inspector Lefebvre, the most markedly “French Canadian” of the film’s characters, was born and died in Vienna. There is no sense, in Kill, Panther, Kill, of the Montreal scenes having been the work of a second unit producing footage for process shots which would have artificially located the film’s key performers in Montreal. In fact, even as one goes quite far down the list of performers, it appears that most of the

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principal and secondary actors appear in exterior locations clearly shot in Montreal: at the Expo site, parked along Dorchester (now René Lévesque) Boulevard, driving past the Jacques Cartier Bridge or Mont-Royal, and so on. For a film that has left so few traces in histories of filmmaking in Montreal, Kill, Panther, Kill at the very least brought to the city a relatively large, apparently self-sufficient team.

World’s Fairs in the Cinema The body of fictional films whose plots cross actual world’s fairs is extensive. The vast majority of these films, however, have been period films for which earlier fairs have been reconstructed, within studios or on backlots.8 Only in a few cases have filmmakers set performers within the actual spaces of contemporary world’s fairs. In 1915, a comedy short produced by Mack Sennett and starring Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand, Mable and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco, was shot in part at the titular exposition and used real attendees as extras in the film’s narrative. In 1930 and 1940, two Hollywood films featured real footage of the New York World’s Fair and made it the location of key narrative turning points. In both Tay Garnett’s Eternally Yours and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a visit to the fair becomes an activity of marital rejuvenation for drifting or disenchanted lovers. In each case, however, the intercutting of documentary footage and dramatic action filmed in studios (as well as using back projection or other processes) is quite obvious. In Norman Taurog’s It Happened at the World’s Fair, a character played by Elvis Presley hitchhikes to the Seattle Exhibition in 1962 to make money performing, and we see a great deal of on-location footage, intended, apparently, to help sell the fair to potential visitors. The use of the Expo 67 site in cinematic and audiovisual fictions was usually belated, coming after the fair had closed. In an episode of the American network television series It Takes a Thief, broadcast in January 1968 (and therefore, presumably, shot while the fair was still running), Expo 67 is made to stand in for an event called “Sports Expo ’68.” Already, then, the fair’s site had fallen to the condition of other Canadian film locations, disguised as somewhere else. Quickly, the Expo grounds would assume the character that has marked their appearance in so many films – as empty, even ruinous. In Claude Jutra’s Wow (1970), young characters ride jubilantly on the attractions of La Ronde, until one of them speaks of her fantasy of time stopping and the film shows us the fair’s structures as silent, unpopulated, and somewhat ghost-like. In René Clément’s 1972 film La course du lièvre à travers le temps, criminals scramble into the Expo site for a shootout in Buckminster Fuller’s now-empty geodesic

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dome. More famously, in Robert Altman’s 1979 science-fiction film, Quintet, the Expo 67 site served to house the earth’s last inhabitants, as a doomed city facing the final devastation of an ice age.9 In another apocalyptic vision of the fair’s ruins, Nathaniel Hebert, the creator of a 2004 album of electronic music, Bonjour Expo, wrote in the liner notes of growing up against the backdrop of others’ golden memories of the fair and his own experience of its dilapidation: “tales of this event formed a murky fantasy-land in my mind and as a child, in the early 1980s, I was privileged to visit the empty skeleton of man and his world, the man-made world drenched in nostalgia.”10 Kill, Panther, Kill is the only commercial fiction film I am familiar with in which dramatic action takes place on the Expo 67 site during the year of its operation. Still, as the film’s characters make their way to Expo, from Los Angeles through Calgary, there is no anticipation, no sense of narrative lines converging on the space of a spectacular climax, as one might expect in narratives of pursuit whose destination, known in advance, is mythical. The key characters arrive at Expo as part of a continental meandering, and while the Expo sequences show us a series of buildings and attractions, the film does not linger to explore these locations independent of their narrative function. Nor do its characters pause to reflect upon or marvel at the context in which they find themselves. Expo 67 happens to be what you will find if you come to Montreal, and, indeed, the film soon leaves the Expo site for such Montreal locations (most likely shot in Italy) as a sporting club and a judo school. At Expo 67, the Sky Ride cable car transportation system becomes the site of a set-piece murder, joining a long lineage of cinematic fairground killings, but the film seems uninterested in the technological marvel that makes this possible. Only a brief sequence of choreographed waterskiing on the Expo site is left to unfold as an autonomous source of visual pleasure. Indeed, the film devotes much more uninterrupted visual attention to the annual spectacle of the Calgary Stampede than to Montreal’s momentous world’s fair.

Spaces of Documentary I will close by commenting on what, for me, are two of the most curious aspects of Kill, Panther, Kill. As noted, it is one of the few fictional feature films to be shot on the Expo site while the fair was still in operation. It is unclear to me whether the filmmakers secured space at the fair in which to shoot, bringing extras and setting up barriers to interruption – or whether they simply filmed as best they could amidst the crowds. Much about the Expo sequences suggests the latter. In most of the Expo scenes, we see people who look like tourists staring at the actors and the action as if trying to figure out what was

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going on. The attention of bystanders to the fight scenes, for example, is more the attention of confused and curious onlookers than of professional extras. In any event, in the context of a world’s fair full of media professionals engaged in a wide range of activities, it would be difficult for the average bystander to know whether the events they were witnessing were scripted, part of someone else’s use of the fair as backdrop for dramatic fiction, or simply elements within the fair’s own spectacular offerings. To extrapolate further, we might set Kill, Panther, Kill within that little group of films, made or released in 1968, in which fictional characters thread their way through real-life crowds participating in a major world spectacle. Two films belonging to this corpus are Robin Spry’s fiction film Prologue, made at the National Film Board of Canada, and Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. In both of these, actors playing fictional characters move and act amidst the crowds assembled to protest the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As with Kill, Panther, Kill, the obvious attention paid by onlookers to these instances of performance seem less a failure of fictionality than a successful capturing of the broader performativity which marked both these occasions. Three years after Expo had closed, Marshall McLuhan would offer a revision of his doctrine of the “Global Village” – a doctrine which, as the editors note in their introduction to this volume, is commonly assumed to be one of the key influences on the fair’s own sense of its internationalist ambitions. In his 1970 book From Cliché to Archetype, McLuhan saw the expansion of satellite perspectives on the earth as enacting the planet’s transformation from “global village” to “global theatre,”11 from a space of transnational consciousness and interconnection to one of incessant performativity. In its multiple forms of deception (involving its creators’ names, its variable title, the national origin of its main character, the shifting authenticity of its sets, and the multiple languages with which versions of the film circulated in the world), Kill, Panther, Kill functions as a film that performs a fluid, transnational interconnectedness while eschewing any of the noble values (of mutual recognition or planetary understanding) on which both Expo 67 and McLuhan’s global village based their claims to virtue. The other curious aspect of Kill, Panther, Kill is one I have already noted: that its use of Expo as backdrop seemed to have little significance in the promotion for the film. This is perhaps because the film was released in 1968, when the fair was over, when memories were dimming and the promotional value of Expo 67 was diminished. It is also, I suggest, because Expo 67 (like the elephant parade and other local attractions highlighted in the various Kommissar X films) is treated by the film’s producers as simply a spectacular backdrop to be exploited rather than a momentous event of global significance to be cel-

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ebrated. The probable audiences for this film, in markets throughout Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and elsewhere, may well have consisted of people for whom Expo 67 was less a great achievement of modern invention hailed by a cosmopolitan intellectual class than a far-off spectacle to which they had little or no access. In either case, this film is one of the vehicles in which images of Expo 67 continue to circulate, at a great distance from official archives or national practices of commemoration and preservation.

notes 1 Among many online lists of “Eurospy” films, the one provided on the website Letterboxd contains over 300 titles. “The Ultimate Eurospy Movies List,” accessed 15 October 2018, https://letterboxd.com/thedude1973/list/the-ultimate-eurospymovies-list. 2 See, in particular, Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault, eds., Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). 3 For an overview of comic book and other media appearances of Expo 67, see “Le Québécois dans la bd internationale 8,” Comicorama en français, 9 September 2016, https://comictrip.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/le-quebecois-dans-la-bdinternationale-8. 4 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 5 Matthieu Letourneux, “Eurospy: Une culture pop européenne au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” Études littéraires 46, no. 3 (2015): 48. 6 Tim Bergfelder, International Adventures: Popular Cinema and European CoProductions in the 1960s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 208–16. 7 Ibid., 215. 8 A list of films assigned the keywords “World’s Fair” on the Internet Movie Database includes 391 titles (accessed 1 November 2018, www.imdb.com/search/key word?keywords=world%27s-fair). The majority of these are US films, and almost all are period films – many of them musicals – which revisit the well-known world’s fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 9 Among various aspects of Altman’s treatment of the Expo 67 site in Quintet, see Steve Lyons, “Memory of a Post-Apocalyptic Future: Whitening Skeletons and Frozen Time in Robert Altman’s Quintet and Expo 67’s Man the Explorer Pavilion,” in Montreal as Palimpsest II: Hauntings, Occupations, Theatres of Memory, eds. Cynthia Hammond and Danielle Lewis (Montreal: Department of Art History, Concordia University, 1999), https://cityaspalimpsest.concordia.ca/

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palimpsest_II_en/papers/Steve_Lyons.pdf; and the online project by Paul Landon, “Mapping a Modern Diegesis: Terre des hommes and Robert Altman’s Quintet,” Journal for Artistic Research, no. 4 (2013), www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/ show-exposition?exposition=17834. 10 Quebec Connection (Nathanial Hebert), Bonjour Expo, ProtoMusik Records, Montreal, 2004, liner notes. 11 For an extensive discussion of this shift in McLuhan’s thought and work, see Abigail De Kosnik, “What Is Global Theater? or, What Does New Media Studies Have to Do with Performance Studies?,” in Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 18, special issue on “Performance and Performativity in Fandom,” eds. Lucy Bennett and Paul J. Booth, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0644.

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13 Earth, River, (Is)Land: The Foundations and Re-foundations of Expo 67

bill marshall

Time and memory invariably dominate much contemporary discussion of Expo 67. As a ten-year-old growing up in a working-class community in the north of England, I was not alone there in coming to awareness of Frenchspeaking Canada via the events of 1967: Expo (the bbc science and technology primetime documentary series Tomorrow’s World devoted a whole edition to it on 26 April), and General de Gaulle’s “Vive le Québec libre” on 24 July. Figure 13.1 is what remains of that personal 1967 archive. The 200th issue of Superman in October that year was devoted to an “imaginary story,” a counter-“factual” speculation on the Superman myth, in which North America ends up with two versions of the superhero. The final page condenses several contradictions of or tensions within the Expo event, of course: a Canadian rather than a Quebec celebration, a Canada and Montreal now seen as utterly equivalent in modernity (and globality, the transnational heterogeneity of the Expo pavilions paralleled by the Daily Planet sphere atop its skyscraper) to that of “Metropolis” in the US, as the verticals and symmetry of the last two panels indicate; but with “Charles Leblanc” as a presumably francophone equivalent of Clark Kent, writing in an anglophone newspaper, the Montreal Star. While the final panel represents a slightly lower-angle shot of “Hyperman,” in order to render some detail, if schematic, of Expo pavilions, a further aspect I wish to retain here is – with reference to Superman’s most famous superpower – the aerial representation. Aerial views of the site pitch us onto a welltrodden path of analysis based on Michel de Certeau’s distinctions between

13.1 Hyperman, hero of Expo 67.

strategy and tactics, carte and parcours. The whole Quiet Revolution project (and narrative) of Quebec modernization and “opening to the world,” of federal and city agendas and their consequences for space and spatial relations, would fall into de Certeau’s description: “I call a ‘strategy’ the calculus of forcerelationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution [a university]) can be isolated from an environment. A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper [propre] and thus serves as the basis for generating relationships distinct from it … Political, economic and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model.”1

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Against this, de Certeau posits a world of “tactics,” of creativity and plurality, “micro-resistances” which sidestep or adapt the grand strategy in favour of, for example, strolling, and play. This tension is played out in the panoptic vision of surveillance famously evoked in his pages on the view from the World Trade Center in New York, which “transforms the city’s complexity into readability and that freezes its opaque mobility into a crystal-clear text.”2 Jocelyn Létourneau describes in similarly vertical terms the iconography of power in relation to the euphoric Quiet Revolution narrative: “a society that is taking off, for which the sky is the limit [in English in the text], a society fully aware of its strength, dynamic, modern and competent. A society resolutely turned towards the future, wishing to leave behind ‘small’ daily life in order to explore the universal, to live at the level of great ideas and big projects, tuned into the world (Expo 67). A society that imposes its will on the environment, conquers the forces of nature and refashions its world in its unique way and according to its desires.”3 To the objection that there is something distinct about the artificial and temporary space of Expo, the further well-trodden path of Foucault’s heterotopia is available to deal with its specificity. In the highly influential 1967 (is the date more than a coincidence?) essay “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault wrote of those spaces that do not quite fit into the contemporary regime of classifying and establishing relations between sites. These other spaces are “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.”4 The preoccupations shared by de Certeau and Foucault with regard to administration, power, and space – its reproduction and contestation – take us so far. What if, however, we turned our attention from air and the aerial to ground level? Representations of the Expo site across decades have also, suggestively, been expressive of the materiality – and have en-visioned that materiality – of the process of its construction, in ways which are relevant for an understanding of the elaboration of Quebec national identities before, during, and after Expo, and also within its commemorations. Historica Canada’s “Heritage Minute” series of reenacted vignettes, inaugurated in the late 1980s and by 2020 running to ninety episodes in English and French versions, shown on cbc/Radio Canada, in cinemas, and online, is part of an ongoing elaboration of Canadian identity narratives and nation-building. This promotion of a duty of memory is open, needless to say, to contestation because of unresolved national issues pertaining to Quebec and First Nations peoples in

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particular. (At the time of writing, the latest episodes are on Oscar Peterson and insulin.) The Expo 67 Heritage Minute was made for the thirtieth anniversary in 1997. Structured in three parts, the first half-minute is devoted to a dialogue between two city planners on the shoreline facing the Île Sainte-Hélène in 1963, with one trying to convince the other of the feasibility of the site. The editing of their dialogue includes a point-of-view and a background shot of the (is)land and river, with the Pont Jacques-Cartier visible in the background of another. There is then an editing – and temporal – cut to a digger and shots of the construction, with aerial shots but also much emphasis on rubble being emptied, of holes dug, and of earthworks, layers of soil photographed with the city skyline in the background. Finally, and in colour, aerial shots of the fair itself in 1967 are accompanied by a voice-over emphasizing its success. This is part of the dialogue of the English version, just preceding the first temporal cut: “We will build islands.” “How, dig up Mont-Royal?” “They’re digging a subway, remember? Take it from there, you put it here.” And in (the very marked Quebec) French: – Je te parle de construire des îles. – Pis la terre? On va péter le mont-royal je suppose? – On creuse présentement pour le métro, là? La voilà notre terre. The polysemy of the French terre allows meanings that go well beyond any English equivalent: Earth, earth, soil, land, ground, (terr)itory. “Man and His World” and “Terre des hommes” carry different connotations. While the latter title is that of the 1939 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry text (at the time rather freely translated as Wind, Sand and Stars, which at least is elemental in its conjuring of the sky of the author’s aviation and the land of the Sahara he flew above) that inspired the name of the exhibition and Gabrielle Roy’s introduction to it, it is clear that a discrepancy opens up across and between the languages as to the readings, and positionings within a narrative (of Quebec, of Montreal, of Canada), that are made possible. “La voilà notre terre”: “there we have our soil,” “that’s where we get our soil/earth,” “there we have our land” – worlds away from the English version. “Our/notre”: given the sequence’s mode of address, the temptation to read a Quebec national story by an implied Quebec

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audience is strong. Not only is Expo regularly placed in such a Quiet Revolution hegemonic narrative,5 the word “terre” speaks to a Duplessiste valorization of rural life associated with the soil, in literature to the pre–World War II roman de la terre/du terroir, and in the 1960s to a territorialization of FrenchCanadianness associated with Quebec rather than an ungrounded population: already, therefore, a Janus-faced nationalism looking back and forward, both reactionary and progressive.6 The visible presence of the Saint Lawrence in the background of the dialogue also speaks to this dimension of belonging, of “home.”7 In Jacques Godbout’s yul 871 (1966), an aerial view of the Expo construction site is also accompanied by an emphasis on “terre,” on the earth that has been moved to build the artificial island. The unnamed Frenchman visiting Montreal (Charles Denner) is taken on a helicopter ride by his potential business associate Jean-Paul Nadeau (Jean Duceppe): – [mcu on Nadeau in helicopter]: C’est une île artificielle créée en un an. Dix millions de dollars de terre camionnés au milieu du fleuve, et pourtant [cut to Frenchman, then aerial view of reflecting water of the Saint Lawrence and the Pont Jacques-Cartier] une exposition ça passe vite. Mais vous savez, ici [camera pans right to body of water on island] on passe notre temps à creuser, à élargir [overview of bridge and island showing vegetation and bare earth, fig. 13.2], à démolir, à construire. On vit dans, dans une sorte de provisoire qui dure. [Cut to mcu on Frenchman looking to left outside window] Ça vous intéresserait de vivre ici? Vous êtes souffrant, la fatigue du voyage? – Non, non, ça va. [Then his pov shot on ship in Saint Lawrence Seaway and adjacent reclaimed land and mud flats] – [Nadeau voice off]: vous aimez voler? – Non. Mais j’aimerais savoir piloter, j’aime bien la voile aussi. [Aerial shot continues without dialogue, then shot of airfield at an angle as helicopter returns] Compare the (dubbed) English dialogue: “There, that’s the artificial island we made. Ten million dollars’ worth of earth, and we pile it up in the middle of the river. Our world’s fair, Expo 67, will last six months, but that’s what we’re like, we tear things down, we build things up, life is exciting, a little frantic perhaps. Have you ever thought of settling down here? Are you feeling all right?” “No, no, I feel fine.”

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13.2 Still from Jacques Godbout’s YUL 871 showing the Jacques Cartier Bridge and the Île Sainte-Hélène.

“Are you free tonight?” “Well, I have plans.” “Ah, I understand.” As with the “Heritage Minute” films, the mode of address and the implied audience differ between the languages: who do the “notre” and “on” imply, rather than the “we”? yul 871 is an early fictional feature film made by the National Film Board, and Godbout’s first attempt at one following the short fiction Fabienne et son Jules (1964). Like the latter film, yul 871 is in large part an extended tribute to the French New Wave and even Italian Neo-Realism, with a French star and, for example, extensive use of a jazz score developed by François Dompierre and Stéphane Venne in the manner of Martial Solal’s music for A bout de souffle (dir. Godard, 1959). The visiting Frenchman is very much living in-between (flights – hence the title: airline code for Dorval airport – and identifications), and the film has him experience a provisoire qui dure, connecting, provisionally, with an attractive young woman, Madeleine

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(Andrée Lachapelle), wandering the streets of Montreal with an eleven-yearold girl, and almost but not reuniting with his (it is implied, Jewish) parents who had left him in Europe as they fled the Nazis during World War II. In Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books, the upheavals of that conflict had been seen as the catalyst for new forms of cinema, in which what he terms the “movementimage” and particularly its quest-narrative form, the “action-image,” entered into a crisis of disconnection and displacement that enables new ways of looking. yul 871 corresponds to much of what Deleuze sees in the “time-image,” including the “balade” or urban, non-teleological wandering, and the special role of the child. The crisis of the action-image contained, for Deleuze, these characteristics: “the form of the trip/ballad, the multiplication of clichés, the events that hardly concern those they happen to, in short the slackening of the sensory-motor connections. All these characteristics were important but only in the sense of preliminary conditions. They made possible, but did not yet constitute, the new image. What constitutes this is the purely optical and sound situation which takes the place of the faltering sensory-motor situations. The role of the child in neo-realism has been pointed out, notably in De Sica (and later in France with Truffaut); this is because, in the adult world, the child is affected by a certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him [or her, as in yul 871] all the more capable of seeing and hearing.”8 yul 871 is thus a film about not connecting durably, about wandering in no man’s lands like the Expo construction site (or “any-space-whatevers” in Deleuze’s terms) in which action is suspended in favour of an attentive looking which also renders porous the division between past and present. The irruption of images of World War II and of refugees that punctuate the “action” of the film might be seen as an example of that “irrational cut” which short-circuits time periods unmotivated by a character simply reminiscing or recalling events. The Frenchman’s reluctance to connect with his parents, as he narrates his experiences to the little girl and his (fleeting) lover, seems partly connected to that of refusing, in his words, “la terre promise” (the promised land), in favour of wandering. As we saw, he does not respond to Nadeau’s question about “settling here.” Certainly, in a roughly contemporary critique from 1971, Yvan Patry saw the film as at odds with its epoch and therefore the Quiet Revolution: “Godbout testifies to the contradictions of our intellectuals in relation to the space-time of Quebec: how to insert oneself dialectically into a historical duration and how to root oneself in a space, a place, in order to participate in its transformation? What is more, we find in the pirouettes of both Godbout and Jutra (À tout prendre, Wow) the same premise, one of propriety [pudeur] that signals the unease of the creative-static self confronted with the socialdynamic self.”9 Indeed, in a 1974 interview, Godbout regretted making what

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was in effect a European film in Quebec, and lamented its lack of “enracinement” (rootedness).10 And yet, the film tugs the spectator in other directions, principally through its documentary-realist cinematography, to produce what an otherwise generally critical Yves Lever describes as “images of Montreal” that are “amongst the most beautiful and varied that Quebec cinema has offered us.”11 And as Andrée Fortin has pointed out, the city tours offered by a film such as yul871 may happen for a foreigner’s benefit, but the film’s (Québécois) spectator is “ainsi convié à s’approprier le territoire” (thus invited to take up ownership of the territory).12 Director of photography Georges Dufaux and cameraman Gilles Gascon had extensive experience of black-and-white cinematography in nfb documentary, for example the former on A Saint-Henri le 5 septembre (Aquin et al., 1962), the latter on Arthur Lamothe’s La Neige a fondu sur la Manicouagan (1965). Despite the post-synchronized sound, the result is a film in which the influence of direct cinema is also keenly felt, with location shooting and a rich palette of black, white, and grey shades producing an immediacy of vision that captures the Montréalais at work, in the street, in the Ville-Marie shopping centre. The effect is one of recognition, of reproducing visually and aurally the norm of national belonging, connections and identifications, and of interpellating the Québécois spectator as such, despite or perhaps even because of (through contrast) the mediation of an outsider. Another look at figure 13.2 might confirm its polysemy as any-space-whatever and a land- and riverscape of recognition, which the detailed, tangible cinematographic rendition of “earth” intensifies. For we must recall that Patry’s complaints above correspond to a reality. The 1960s cinema of Quebec modernization was not a direct expression of a particular triumphant social class, the hegemonizing technocracy; rather, it partakes of a complex flux of meaning that is dominant or contested and that is profoundly marked by the links between past, present, and future. In this national cinema that explores and questions a “national” that is still in the process of elaboration, protagonists of key films (for example, À tout prendre [Jutra, 1963]; Le Chat dans le sac [Groulx, 1964]) are uncertain as to the nature of the society that surrounds them and the future that faces them. They are in interregnum, in Gramsci’s sense of unstable equilibria between old and new social and political orders, or, to borrow Nadeau’s words in yul 871, a “provisoire qui dure.” The 1960s, far from being a decade of seamless unanimity in Quebec, contained its own contradictions, was a contested time and space, with the transmission belt of history bringing problems from the past as well as recasting future dilemmas. Such films were valuable for their skepticism with regard to the triumphalism of the Quiet Revolution technocracy and its

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belief in linear progress, to the inequalities the new society brought in its wake, and to the euphoria in North American and especially Canadian media “analysis” (McLuhan) concerning the new communicative sphere of the global village. Thus a film from 1967 itself, but which ends in the triumphant modernity of the Place des Arts rather than Expo, Entre la mer et l’eau douce by Michel Brault, expresses in spatial terms the contradictions of the Quebec national project, torn and potentially dispersed “in between” a native past and a multiracial present and future, rural “authenticity” and mass media. The materiality of earth and water at the Expo site, and the consequences of their connotations for Quebec identifications, are also explored in Monique Larue’s 1995 novel La Démarche du crabe. In what is basically a philosophical tale, a married, middle-aged Mont-Royal dentist, Luc-Azade Santerre, is propelled into an investigation of his ancestry and that of a long-lost childhood friend whose mysterious daughter, as is later revealed, appears for treatment at his surgery. Settings and indeed chronotopes (in the sense of a repertoire of spatial-temporal representations) from Quebec cultural history – iconic as in the forest, lake, cabin, and Amerindian reservation, the road trip, following and crossing the Saint Lawrence – but more specific as with Expo 67, are harnessed to a conceptual vocabulary of atoms and fractals of meaning and memory that precede, inhabit, and succeed the individual (and indeed the novel ends with Santerre’s death). These fragments of meaning and memory are where individual and collective – and very provisional – “identities” intermingle, so that the novel’s protagonists become vehicles for the interaction of wider historical assemblages concerning class, gender, nationality, and indigeneity: “[des] atomes dotés de mémoire” (atoms endowed with memory).13 Expo 67 is the site and time when and where the main protagonists, as young people working there, consummate or fail to consummate their relations, and lay the basis for future lives and separations. If the narrative first-person voice of Luc twenty years later colours his description with the euphoria and hopes of youth commonly associated with Expo (“Une illusion, une flambée. La jeunesse!”/“An illusion, the flame of youth!”),14 that enthusiasm is modulated by the vocabularies of earth, water, and construction we have remarked on in earlier texts. In the extraordinary opening paragraphs of this chapter (111–12), which for the rest is dominated by narrative and the resolution of enigmas posed earlier (it takes the form of a letter to the daughter unaware of her father’s identity), streets in the run-up to Expo have become “des chemins rocailleux” (rocky paths), but here they are linked to a series of bodily metaphors as the “gaping sewers” lay bare the city’s “entrails” and “flatulences,” “excrescences” marking its surfaces as the “face” of the city is given a “makeover.” The creation of the islands means that the river is sectioned, lined up, narrowed,

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interfered with, so that its flow, colour, and currents, “witnesses” to the past, would never be the same as “when there was no city there”: “The riverbed was to be drained, filled in with rocks, earth [de la terre], cement debris poured day after day by trucks which formed foul-smelling processions.” Several levels of meaning are articulated here. One is an emanation of the first-person narrative voice, now disenchanted, and this connects with the metaphors of the body both opened up as if in dissection or surgery, but also made up anew with a bright façade, “as if the city was our age, and was going to grow old and disappear with us.” The individual body and life of the narrator/protagonist on which this novel centres flow into wider and older identifications with the site of the city and the natural scene which preceded (and will follow?) it. The passage also contains its fair share of Quebec national connotations, with its more dysphoric than euphoric view of the construction sites of the Quiet Revolution, and its realization that a longue durée approach to the reality of the site and space includes the coming and going of regimes and beliefs: “Tons of plaster angels, of statues of the Virgin and of the Sacred Heart, rendered useless by the mass desertion from churchgoing, were used as landfill” (a notion taken up in Denys Arcand’s Barbarian Invasions, 2003). When we get in the next paragraph to Expo itself, the emphasis is on geometry, on surface (an “audiovisual chaos [chambardement]”) rather than depth, and on a clarity now lost: “pavilions – each clearly identified, decorated with the distinctive signs of each country, for these notions were still very clear to us at the time.” In her insightful chapter on Expo in National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion, Erin Hurley argues convincingly that the “Quebecness” of the event is to be understood in hegemonic Quiet Revolution terms of modernity, nationality, and urbanity being made to supersede the “old order” of tradition, regionalism, and ruralism. Montreal and by extension Quebec were “reconstructed” in this artificial space, so that “Terre des hommes literally forged a new national origin out of,” among other factors, “dredged earth.”15 It is revealing to juxtapose Hurley’s unitary analysis of Expo’s hegemonic move with the relativism and dispersal of meanings found in Larue’s novel. What I argued in relation to the “Heritage Minute” versions and to yul 871 was that of a potential pulling in different directions of the meanings associated with these films, including those, in visual and verbal terms, of “earth” for (national) collective significations. This can be seen in terms of a tension between forces, what I have called a “national-allegorical” tension16 between homogeneity and heterogeneity, between forces that would gather up and unify identities and identifications, and those that would pluralize or scatter them. The term draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the forces

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in language between an inert unitary form and the plurality and movement of “heteroglossia”: “Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear.”17 But we might equally draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary in which territorialization (the code of grounding, and of checking the flows of meaning) and deterritorialization (the process of decoding and unfixing) are constantly interacting and the operation ceaselessly relaunched: “Signs are not signs of a thing; they are signs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a certain threshold in the course of these movements.”18 These categories are illustrated in concrete form, when, for example, Jocelyn Létourneau sees analogous tensions playing themselves out through the history of Quebec: “New France is not a place where univocal notions of action and strategy take root. The … society which emerges finds itself in a line of flight in relation to itself, suitably expressed in pairs of concepts which fundamentally define it: sedentarism/nomadism, Frenchness/Americanness, tradition/opening to otherness.”19 Hurley argues that the symbolic effectiveness of Expo within the context of the Quiet Revolution has much to do with its island setting: “the constructed island site gave geographical expression to an already circulating metaphor used to represent Quebec’s nation-ness: the constructed islands of Expo 67 would stand in for the island of a French Quebec floating in the sea of English-speaking North America. This metaphor was extended in the Quebec Pavilion as well, whose guide explains, ‘The Pavilion presents itself first as an immense glass house completely surrounded by water. It is an islet in an island.’”20 For the rest of this chapter, I wish to explore further the way in which this category of the island, its identitarian properties glimpsed so far in its metonymic relationship to the earth and to the “home” river of Quebec, and here discussed by Hurley via the pavilion guide as allegory, can be analyzed as one of the most significant examples of the centrifugal-centripetal, territorializing-deterritorializing tensions with which this national identification is riven. The island is in this sense a synthesis of earth and water. On the conceptual level of what we might call “island theory,” unstable, non-totalizable categories emerge that are particularly magnified when we consider islands as infinitely singular and infinitely connected: they are a point on a map, an interior that is enclosed and bounded, an in-tension, as it were, but they are also networked, traversed by multiple lines, ex-tensive.21 We have seen the in-tension/ex-tension relationship at work already in the iconography of earth and depth in the Heritage Minute and the aerial sequence in yul 871 which, in the latter case especially, highlighted the ex-tension represented by the bridge connections and the Saint Lawrence Seaway.

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In fact, the island has functioned as a privileged vector for some of the central tensions within Quebec culture which extend both before and after Expo 67. That identitarian investment dates from before 1945. As Lucie K. Morisset points out, the restoration and indeed re-creation in the 1960s of the Place Royale in Quebec City, on the initiative at first of the province’s metropolitan Chambers of Commerce, corresponded to a Quiet Revolution demand for an urban rather than rural cradle of New France, a role previously filled by the Île d’Orléans in the epoch of clerical nationalist hegemony.22 A ten-minute film made in 1941 for the government of Quebec by Associated Screen News Limited (the main Canadian producer of newsreels and short documentaries in that era), Les Îles du Saint-Laurent, is eloquent in this regard. In a journey downstream, footage of life and historical landmarks on the Île Perrot, the island of Montreal, the Île d’Orléans, the Isle-aux-Coudres, and the Île Bonaventure off the Gaspé peninsula is accompanied by voice-over narration – and constant string music on nostalgic and folk themes – which emphasizes pastness, filiation, and ancestry, a burrowing-in of space and time which, according to the voice-over, “tells the story of the French-Canadian people.” At the Île d’Orléans, over shots of horse-drawn threshers and oxen-drawn ploughs, the narration explains that “the good people of the island have conserved their customs, the customs of their Norman ancestors,” “very attached to the soil [sol] that saw them born.” References to Jacques Cartier à l’appui, we learn, against shots of schoolchildren, a church, and manor houses, of the “memories that persist of the lords [seigneurs] who colonized this land [terre].” (It is striking how much of the voice-over takes up the language of myth-making nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts on the island, analyzed by Luc Noppen,23 and which continues to this day.24) At the Isle-aux-Coudres, emphasis is also put on the (non-)fact (viz., the Spanish presence further south) that the first mass on the North American continent was celebrated here by Jacques Cartier in 1535. Here, the centripetal pull of identity is seemingly so strong that (against shots of fields, and a house in the interior, the water merely glimpsed with a mill in the foreground and a church in the middle ground) “the passage of ships on the river does not affect the inhabitants, whose existence flows serenely on.” Indeed, over footage of manual labour in field and workshop, we learn that because of this “plenitude,” “passing ships arouse in them no desire to change their way of life [existence].” And yet, even this supremely ideological text contains elements that pull in an opposite, centrifugal dimension befitting the national-allegorical tension. For in the context of the downstream journey, what to do about Montreal? The tactic of placing its portrayal between that of the Îles Perrot and d’Orléans partly addresses this, as the former is depicted with heavy emphasis on religion

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and on filiation, belief passed down “from father to son.” However, there is no escaping, firstly, Montreal’s anglophone dimension, so that the footage of preBill 101 street signs in English has to be countered with the narration’s assertion of the city as the “Paris of the New World” and as the second-largest Frenchspeaking metropolis “in the universe.” A shot of the entrance to the McGill University campus is followed by that of a cricket match, over which we nonetheless learn about “the French character of the city” and a cut to an image of the Château Ramezay, residence of the eighteenth-century French governors. Similarly, there is an attempt to balance the importance of the port with an emphasis on the Catholic religion via the Notre-Dame de Bonsecours chapel, where sailors give thanks for safe voyages “on all the world’s seas.” With a cut to the cathedral, we thus immediately learn that this is a “city of churches, where faith remains truly alive and spiritual life retains all its importance.” This life is well adapted to “modern gaiety,” as a montage of shots by night hint at a different world of jazz (on the soundtrack) and more terrestrial pleasures. Indeed, the film ends on a line of flight, as, accompanied by shots of seabirds, the ship that has made this downstream voyage does not stop or reverse but in fact is said to “sail towards another continent,” indeed is “carried [emporté]” towards “all the ports of the universe” as “the land [terre] disappears from view.” It is striking how many key cultural texts in Quebec from the 1960s onwards evoke a notion of the island, notably as a vehicle for dramatizing that relationship of in-tension and ex-tension, contraction and dilation of worlds that characterizes the national-allegorical tension. One of the significant achievements of Pierre Perrault’s Ile-aux-Coudres trilogy is to rewrite the island’s place in pre-Quiet Revolution identity narratives in favour of a much more subtle examination of tradition and connection, of past- and future-directed fabulation, with regard, for example, to indigeneity and to the relationship between the islanders and the outsider filmmakers.25 Réjean Ducharme’s novel L’Avalée des avalés (1966) depends for much of its effect on the relationship between the dysfunctional family origin on the Ile des Soeurs/Nuns’ Island and the wider world of New York and Israel. Much of the theatrical and cinematic work of Robert Lepage depends upon that minimal contraction between the walled old Quebec City, seen as but one membrane in a perhaps endless series of interconnecting cells, and a world of difference: the Chinatown of The Dragon’s Trilogy (1985), or the incestuous family kitchen in Le Confessionnal (1995) juxtaposed with China, Japan, Hollywood. As if to illustrate the persistence of the island in the repertoire of a Quebec imaginary, a later example is to be found in Xavier Dolan’s 2012 film Laurence Anyways, where the eponymous would-be transexual protagonist (Melvil

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Poupaud) heads off in the depths of winter with his on-off lover Fred (Suzanne Clément) for the “Île au noir,” variously interpreted as l’Île aux noix on the river Richelieu, but, given that these sequences were shot in Charlevoix, resembling more the Isle-aux-Coudres. Rather than an actually existing place, Dolan here sets up a space that is not utopian (Fred is mortified by its faux bohemian nature and returns to her husband and son) but which constitutes a narrative pause where Laurence’s quest for recognition and for a nondifferentiation in difference – in other words, a difference of transgender which makes no difference in the world – is momentarily satisfied. Foucault described a heterotopia as “a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory”:26 the Île au noir imperfectly fulfils this role in Laurence Anyways. As we have seen, this analysis takes us so far, but there is more mileage for our argument here if we also invoke the other pole of Foucault’s reflections in this section of his essay: the heterotopia of compensation which he associates with the colony. Foucault cites the Puritans in New England and the Jesuits in Paraguay, to which we might add Jeanne Mance founding Montreal on its island, and life on the Île d’Orléans and Isle-aux-Coudres in the 1941 film regulated by cross and church bells for a gaze both nation-building and touristic. These evocations conjoin to add greater suggestiveness, given Dolan’s predilection for polyvalent images, to the Île au noir (both the Isle aux noix with its fortress and the Ile-auxCoudres described by Jacques Cartier) and to the enigmatic photographic image which introduces the first references to it in the film, framed behind a sugar jar. We recall how fundamental the island has been both to the imaginary of colonialism and its potential or real(ized) contestations and counterdiscourses.27 Indeed, islands may be seen as “both archetypal and prototypical sites of the colonial experience,”28 and to “have supported much of the imaginative burden of Europeans’ shift from passive contemplation to active possession of the marvellous.”29 Co-existing with this, however, there is the dissident edifice of post-colonial “archipelagian” thought associated with Édouard Glissant, the Caribbean, and the authors of the 1989 Éloge de la créolité. Envisioned through that optic, the preoccupation with real and imagined islands in Quebec culture might be seen as an opportunity to re-think a centred, grounded, continental, territorialized idea of the nation in favour of something more creatively dispersed and mobile. However, the island is most often bearer of the national-allegorical tension. And if the tension between colonizer and colonized is at the heart of the Quebec/French-Canadian experience, then Expo represented at one and the same time a recolonization and re-foundation on a new but also pre-existing island using the “earth” of the island of Montreal, devoid of spatial or any other kind

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of confrontation with Indigenous peoples, and a result of technical prowess. In addition, we have the contraction (the “islet within an island” of the Quebec Pavilion, in Hurley’s terms) and dilation represented by the “universality” of the Exposition universelle; both were built into its concept, and fulfilled in its boundary-crossing audiences, patterns of consumption, and publicity. Supremely, then, in its navigation of the national-allegorical tension, and the attempt to square the circle of past origins and contemporary re-invention, Expo offered (and its memory continues to offer) to its Québécois visitors/ readers/spectators a re-writing, “in such a way that the [text] may itself be seen as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext.”30 This re-writing speaks to the fundamental lesson that Fredric Jameson draws from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myth: “the individual narrative, or the individual formal structure, is to be grasped as the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction.”31 At Expo, “people,” “roots,” and “world” were reconciled via technocracy/technology and the promise of a seemingly apolitical, or postpolitical, future.

notes 1 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: 2 3 4 5 6 7

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University of California Press, 1984), xix. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92. Jocelyn Létourneau, “La Saga du Québec moderne en images,” Genèses no. 4 (May 1991): 66, 69. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (spring 1986): 24. See for example, Létourneau, “La Saga”; and Expo’s presence in C.R.A.Z.Y., directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (tva Films, 2005). Tom Nairn, “The Modern Janus,” New Left Review, no. 94 (November–December 1975): 3–29. Examples abound of the Saint Lawrence’s association with Québécois dwelling, with the idea of “chez nous.” To give two examples: the mid-twentieth-century nationalist appellation of Laurentie for Quebec (given political resonance at the end of the 1950s by the Alliance laurentienne and its short-lived journal, Laurentie); and Robert Charlebois’s 1992 lyric, “Saint-Laurent”: “J’habite un fleuve en Haute-Amérique / Presque océan, presque Atlantique / Un fleuve bleu vert et Saint Laurent / J’habite un grand boulevard mouvant / Une mer du nord en cristaux de sel / Agile, fragile, belle et rebelle / Presque océan, presque Atlantique.” Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 3.

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9 Yvan Patry, Jacques Godbout (Montreal: Conseil québécois pour la diffusion 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

du cinéma, 1971), 9. Léo Bonneville, “Entretien avec Jacques Godbout,” Séquences, no. 78 (October 1974): 9. Yves Lever, Le Cinéma de la révolution tranquille, de Panoramique à Valérie (Montreal: Yves Lever, 1991), 490. Andrée Fortin, “Mémoire des années 1960 dans le cinéma québécois,” Les Cahiers des dix, no. 69 (2015): 23. Monique Larue, La Démarche du crabe (Montreal: Boréal, 1995), 217. Ibid., 212. Erin Hurley, National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 34. Bill Marshall, Quebec National Cinema (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 270–2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 67. Jocelyn Létourneau, Que veulent vraiment les Québécois? Regard sur l’intention nationale au Québec (français) d’hier à aujourd’hui (Montreal: Boréal, 2006), 24. Hurley, National Performance, 35. I am drawing here partly on Deleuzian vocabulary from The Fold (1988; trans. Tom Conley [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992]) which would take us into metaphysical as well as art history territory, but which enriches the relation between “microcosm” and “macrocosm.” See Hurley, National Performance, 37; Luc Noppen, “L’île d’Orléans: Mythe ou monument?,” Capaux-Diamants 5, no. 1 (spring 1989): 25; and widespread other references for use of these terms in relation to Quebec, as well as of course to Expo’s planetary ambitions. Normand Cazelais, Roger Nadeau, and Gérard Beaudet, eds., L’Espace touristique (Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2000), 235. Noppen, “L’île d’Orléans: Mythe ou monument?,” 23–6. Michel Lessard, L’île d’Orléans: Aux sources du peuple québécois et de l’Amérique française (Montreal: Editions de l’homme, 1998). Marshall, Quebec National Cinema, 25–31. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 27. For example, Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Michel Tournier’s 1967 variation, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique/Friday, or, The Other Island; Stevenson’s Treasure Island; Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau; Verne’s The Mysterious Island; and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie.

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28 Maeve McCusker and Antonio Soares, eds., Islanded Identities: Constructions of Postcolonial Cultural Insularity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), xi. 29 Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 94. 30 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981); author’s emphasis. 31 Ibid., 77.

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Epilogue “A Legend for Generations to Come”: Expo 67 in the Historical Memory of Contemporary Québécois

jocelyn létourneau

It is common to say that Expo 67 was the making of an epoch for the generations born before 1960 – the Baby Boomers in particular, who like to make themselves central to the evolution of history. The Montreal World’s Fair certainly made an enormous impact on me personally. When Expo was inaugurated, I was ten years old, living in Lauzon, pq, 250 kilometres east of Montreal, which meant that my visits to Expo were necessarily infrequent. Yet, I can remember the excitement I felt when travelling to the fair, a sixhour drive back and forth. I made that journey three times, once with my schoolmates, once with my family, and once with my godmother. I prepared for my trips by devouring everything that I could find in newspapers and official brochures – and there was a lot to read. My father (born in 1918), a man with no degree but one who was nonetheless capable of appreciating the uniqueness of the moment, kept me busy with his constant questions about the different pavilions, making my youthful curiosity all the more effervescent. Obviously, at ten years old, I was not in a position to grasp the importance of the event. But I was pretty sure something extraordinary was going on and I wanted to be part of it.

A fair amount of research has been conducted on the perceptions and memories of people who attended Expo 67.1 With few exceptions, those who express their feelings about the exhibition are very positive about it.2 For many,

Expo 67, a major event to be sure, has been transformed by the hazy process of recollection into a legend. Interestingly, Pierre Dupuy, Expo 67 commissioner general, foretold that transmutation in his 1968 preface to the official souvenir album of the fair: “When the lights go out for the last time, when the crowds have left the pavilions and the avenues, a World Exhibition begins a new life. Less glittering but more profound, this new life is nourished in the souls of those who visited the Exhibition, and it will blossom into a legend for generations to come.”3 In a way, Expo 67 was an event that belonged to everyone who participated in it – at least, once that fair was over and when it was clear that it had been a success in every respect. That success was, as we know, quickly appreciated by different parties in different manners for different purposes.4 When I say that the exhibition is recalled as something truly positive, what do I mean? No matter whether Expo 67 is remembered in its entire scope as an official, state-sponsored event, or through episodic reminiscences that refer to specific moments experienced by the individual fairgoer, it is invariably associated with having fun, pleasant encounters, unforgettable discoveries, new adventures, and so on.5 Very often, the fair is identified as the key context within which an erstwhile visitor situates his or her experience at the time the exhibition was running: an extraordinary backdrop, as it were, to the events of their life at that time. When Canadians – and especially Quebeckers and Montrealers – consider the late 1960s, Expo 67 tends to function as a gilt frame or brightly painted canvas, one that illuminated life with something extraordinary and meaningful. Most people who walked its grounds during those magical few months in 1967 consider the Montreal International and Universal Exhibition a landmark moment in their life. Even more than this, they felt that they were participating in something that was historically significant, both as individuals and as part of society more generally. It contributed – and still contributes, as becomes clear when that generation is invited to talk about Expo – to the construction of the individual Self within the larger theatre of public History. In research on private and public memories of Expo 67, carried out forty years after the event,6 David Anderson and Viviane Gosselin conducted fifty extensive interviews with people who visited the fair in 1967. They were able to show that respondents connect the exhibition to happy feelings, nice meetings, and enchanting discoveries, in particular with respect to a fascination with technological and other innovations. When asked what they remembered about Expo, their memories were still vivid, even though four decades had passed. People would tell interviewers, for instance, about the astonishing in-

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teractive multimedia productions, such as the multiscreen experiments of the Labyrinth or the kinoautomat at the Czech Pavilion.7 They would remember the excitement of seeing up close the nasa display in the US Pavilion, the feeling of nausea in the Man and His Health Pavilion, the dizziness experienced while watching the panoramic film Canada 67 at the Telephone Pavilion. They would describe the fair from different sensory perspectives: hearing traditional music performed by various cultures, touching exotic animals or objects for the first time, the smell and taste of food that was entirely new to them. Of course, Expo 67 is not recalled only in a personal manner and from an individual viewpoint. It is also recollected as a moment of collective pride, even progress, which is also a positive legacy. For many, visiting Expo was felt and understood as being part of a collectivity that had something important to show to the world. That collectivity – nation if you like – was either Quebec, Canada, or both, with its epicentre Montreal, where all problems and possibilities of the country (e)merge. While universalistic in aims and claims, world’s fairs are usually understood as catalysts for nationalistic sentiments.8 Expo 67 is certainly no exception to this rule. For the Canadians quoted by Anderson and Gosselin living outside Quebec, “Expo 67 was the centennial party of the nation.” It was “a rendez-vous for all Canadians and the World.” Peter C. Newman – a high-profile essayist and commentator as well as an unofficial nation builder, for English Canadians at least, in his capacity as editorin-chief of Maclean’s magazine – went so far as to say that “Expo 67 was the greatest thing we’ve done as a nation.”9 At last Canada was on the map, its visibility suddenly increased not only for Canadians, of course, but for the rest of the world as well. Quebeckers expressed the same feeling in a different way. For many, Expo 67 was the incarnation of the popular advertising slogan, “Le Québec sait faire,” crafted in an attempt to entice people to buy Quebec products by emphasizing the province’s native know-how.10 It is a phrase that literally means “Quebec knows how to do it.” But it also means “Quebec can do it” – and even, with a little imaginative twist projecting the slogan onto a political future, “Quebec knows what to do.”11 Nationalism was never far from the surface in Quebec in the 1960s. While Expo 67 was in principle conceived as a celebration of Canada’s Centennial, it was in practice, at least for francophone Quebeckers, an acknowledgement of the province’s success. It was also a provincial – or more properly national – jubilee to which the world was invited. And the host nation was not necessarily Canada. As a matter of fact, in Anderson and Gosselin’s corpus, none of the francophone Quebeckers associated Expo 67 with Canada’s one hundredth anniversary. On the other hand, no anglophone

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participants in the survey alluded to Expo 67’s importance to Quebec. Two solitudes, even in their way of looking at a shared event of the recent past.12 It has been suggested earlier that, for many fairgoers, Expo willy-nilly became one of the collective building blocks for the construction of identity.13 I would add that the exhibition has served the same function in terms of its significance in collective history and for collective memory, whether that be the history and memory of Canada or of Quebec. For Canadians, Expo predates the tension and/or animosity between French and English Canada that exploded in the 1970s – a mythistory14 to be sure, since the two communities have been uneasy with each other for a very long time. For the Québécois, “before Expo we Quebeckers were backward, secluded, parochial” – also a mythistory, since modernity did not suddenly spring forth in Quebec in 1960 with the Quiet Revolution. For both communities, however, the fair was a moment of happiness – before things got worse according to Canadians (“After Expo, we Canadians never knew as clearly who we were”); the first moment of a belated and necessary aggiornamento according to the Québécois (“Expo contributed to a collective awareness in Quebec; it is linked with the Refus global manifesto and with the Quiet Revolution”).15 The two following excerpts offer a good illustration of the different if not divergent meanings ascribed to the exhibition by the francophones or anglophones who responded to Anderson and Gosselin’s survey. The first is a woman who was twenty years old in 1967, living in British Columbia and celebrating her honeymoon by driving from the West Coast to Montreal; the second is a man based in Montreal who was forty years old at the time of the fair and who visited Expo five times: It was tied up with Canada’s coming of age. It seemed like there were convoys of Canadians on the road going to Expo. The highways had just been re-worked. We had the feeling of sharing an experience with other travellers on the road. The baby boomers were becoming adults. It was before Trudeau’s repatriation of the Constitution. Canada was still very tied to the UK. It was an assertive step to host an event of this magnitude. It was part of the Centennial anniversary. It promoted Canadian nationalism. It was a euphoric, high-energy time. It was the Canadian experience. And it continued through the 1970’s until the movement [Canada’s momentum, one may think] crumbled.16 Expo was undoubtedly important … It opened the mind of Canadians and Québécois. The Quiet Revolution in Quebec had already started. It was very beneficial. We really had to get out of the woods.17

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For some time, I have been conducting surveys on how “ordinary people” (non-specialists) recall the history of Quebec in their own terms. Instead of questioning respondents on arcane topics of Quebec’s history (for example, who was the first premier of Quebec? – a piece of trivia that very few would be able to answer),18 I simply asked them to summarize, in their own words, the history of Quebec to the present day.19 With a smaller number of people, I conducted additional research on their historical memory. In one of the studies, carried out at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec City in 2004, I called on people to list ten events that, according to them, were significant in the history of Quebec up to and including the present.20 In a second study, conducted in 2012, I provided visitors with a series of sixty pictures depicting aspects or moments of Quebec’s past, from which they had to select a group of ten pictures that, according to them, were representative of Quebec’s history; and a group of five pictures that, in their view, were not representative of Quebec’s history.21 In my research, Expo 67 was not an event that I was specifically interested in. Put a different way, I did not care whether people selected Expo 67 as an event of historical significance. Yet, despite the fact that respondents were not pushed in any way to consider the world’s fair as an important, relevant, or otherwise significant event in the history of Quebec, they actually did. Ordinary Quebeckers believe, without any encouragement, that Expo 67 is (or was) a milestone in the history of Quebec. Now, this quite general statement needs to be refined. That Expo represents a milestone in Quebec’s history is an attitude mostly held by the Baby Boomer generation. This is not to say that younger generations – the Xs, the Millennials, and the Zs – are necessarily ignorant of the fair. Nevertheless, with rare exceptions, the younger a person is, the less likely he or she is to mention Expo, let alone to offer any specifics or to highlight its significance. Let me elaborate a little on this. When asked to list what they thought were the ten most significant events in the history of Quebec, the 484 participants in the 2004 survey, all of them aged eighteen or more at the time, named Expo eighty-six times, placing the event seventh overall in the list: after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the Quiet Revolution, the 1980 referendum, the foundation of Quebec, the Rebellions of the Patriots and the October Crisis in 1970, but before Jacques Cartier’s exploration of the Saint Lawrence, the 1995 referendum, Confederation in 1867, the 1976 Olympic Games, and so on (see table E.1). Similarly, when asked to pick ten images from a group of sixty pictures that were, according to them, the most representative of Quebec history, almost a third of the 427 participants in the research conducted in 2012 selected Expo

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Table E.1 Ten most representative events in the history of Quebec according to respondents, 2004 (n = 484) Event

Number of times selected (total)

Battle of the Plains of Abraham Quiet Revolution 1980 referendum Foundation of Quebec City Rebellions of the Patriots October Crisis Expo 67 Jacques Cartier’s explorations 1995 referendum Confederation (1867) Montreal Olympic Games

179 149 118 115 106 105 86 73 67 63 54

Source: Jocelyn Létourneau, Je me souviens?, 184.

67. Overall, in this study, the fair ranked ninth among the pictures most representative of Quebec history, after René Lévesque, the 1980 referendum, Maurice (the Rocket) Richard, the conquest of Quebec by the British on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, a First Nations settlement, a “French First” poster, a sugar cabin party, and the Manic-5 dam (see table E.2). When we look at data on the age of respondents (see table E.3), we see that those who included Expo 67 in their list were more likely to be people older than forty-five – that is, people who were alive at the time of the fair. Again, this is not to say that generations born later are not aware of Expo 67 or that they underestimate its significance. That more than a quarter of those aged twenty-five to forty-four picked up Expo 67 as a representative event in Quebec’s history is indeed telling. While not born at the time of the fair, they might have been told about it, read about it, or learned about it in school.22 Particularly illuminating is the testimony of a woman aged between twenty-five and thirty-four who justified her selection by saying, “It seems to have been a grandiose event I would have loved to have been able to attend. Unfortunately I wasn’t born.”23 Overall, there is a statistically significant gap between those who were born before 1967 and those who were born after that date. Data show that only

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Table E.2 Ten images most representative of Quebec history among sixty pictures according to respondents, 2012 (n = 427) Image

Per cent of respondents having selected

René Lévesque 1980 referendum Maurice Richard Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759) First Nations settlement “French First” poster Sugar shack Manic-5 Dam Expo 67 Jacques Cartier and Indigenous people

55 47 45 43 36 35 33 32 31 31

Source: Jocelyn Létourneau et al., “Le Mur des représentations,” table 2, 506.

Table E.3 Selecting Expo 67 as one of the most representative images of Quebec history among sixty pictures according to respondents, 2012 (distribution by age; n = 427) Age

18–24

25–34

35–44

45–54

55–64

65+

Born between 1988– 2003

1978–87

1968–77

1958–77

1948–57

Per cent of respondents selecting

26

28

44

39

1947 and earlier 44

20

Source: Jocelyn Létourneau et al., “Le Mur des représentations,” table 3, 510.

20 per cent of those separated from the event by twenty to twenty-five years consider Expo 67 as representative of – or significant to – Quebec’s history. The trend is clear: as generations succeed one another, the memory of the fair fades away. This is an interesting finding. Such a trend should not be considered an automatic process. After all, the conquest of New France by the British happened over 250 years ago; nevertheless, it remains central to the historical consciousness of francophone Quebeckers.24 Why is Expo 67 vanishing from young Quebeckers’ minds? It may be that Expo 67 sits uneasily with the victimhood narrative associated with Quebec’s quest for affirmation, long the driving force behind a certain type of nationalism that caught the imagination of a large swathe of the population – including the younger generation, who were taught that narrative – from the 1970s at least until the end of the century. Indeed, when we look at the way in which young people (that is, those born after 1985) attempt to synthetize the different and sometimes conflicting elements of Quebec history in their own terms, Expo 67 is not part of their narrative. Their story revolves mostly around the tension or conflict between the French and the English, the essential matrix within which the whole story of Quebec and les Québécois can be understood.25 Even when thinking about contemporary Quebec, the young tend to neglect Expo 67 in favour of other events, in particular the Quiet Revolution leading the province out of the “Great Darkness” of the Duplessis years, the October Crisis, two independence referendums, or the rise of the Parti Québécois. Events that have to do with (or are at least interpreted as having to do with) national survival, such as showing weakness or heroic resistance in the face of the aggressor, are given greater weight, and therefore identified as significant, while other events are neglected or downgraded.26

The year 2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Expo 67 and the 375th anniversary of the foundation of Montreal. No fewer than fourteen events were programmed to celebrate the fair as a landmark event in the history of the city and to revive the happy memories among those who were there – and there were a lot of them, still alive and willing to talk about their experiences, the good old days of the 1960s, when everything was possible while now, supposedly, everything is harder. These discussions and revivals of Expo probably had two goals: to make younger generations aware of the forgotten spirit of “Man and His World” and to sensitize them to the significance of the event in Quebec’s history. Perhaps because I’m a Baby Boomer, I was myself supportive of such commemoration. As I said, Expo 67 was certainly important for me personally. As a historian, I also know that it was and remains, objec-

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tively, an important event that goes beyond its brief six-month life on those islands in the Saint Lawrence. Anyone writing a book or a textbook on Quebec society cannot now neglect the impact of Expo 67, at least as a signal moment in the history of that society’s self-representation as an imagined political community.27 It seems that this interpretation of Expo 67 is not easy to transmit to generations born after 1965. I’m pretty sure that in the classroom today’s young people are told about Expo 67, especially if someone over fifty-five teaches them. And if that someone actually visited the fair, there will be some emotion, even personal testimony, which might well make the topic an interesting one for students. However, data indicate that information about Expo 67 does not much stick in their minds. For instance, the young seem more attracted by the October Crisis than by Expo 67. In a way, this is unsurprising: October 1970 was a spectacular event, involving kidnapping, assassination, political turmoil, a popular and overbearing prime minister, the army, police, government, and coast-to-coast news coverage – the very stuff of high drama! These properly narrative elements make for an ideal fit with the dramatic nature of Quebec history – at least as it is usually told. Expo 67, as a success story, is a mismatch with the traditional Quebec narrative of survivance, résistance, and impuissance.28 It neither serves young people today as a reference point to help them make sense of their lives, nor helps any of them to situate their individual identity within a political community they probably have difficulty imagining as their predecessors did – that is to say, as a nation unaccomplished or a latecomer in terms of technology, modernity, openness, and otherness. Because Expo 67 does not serve any practical purpose for Quebec’s youth, it shrinks as a historical marker for them and is at risk of falling into the rubbish heap of the past if not commemorated. Pierre Dupuy was certainly right in saying that “when the lights go out for the last time, Expo 67 will nourish the souls of those who visited the Exhibition.” But he might have been mistaken in stating that the fair will blossom into a legend for generations to come.29

notes 1 The most interesting studies are David Anderson and Viviane Gosselin, “Private and Public Memories of Expo 67: A Case Study of Recollections of Montreal’s World’s Fair, 40 Years after the Event,” Museum and Society 6, no. 1 (March 2008): 1–21; Pauline Curien, “L’identité nationale exposée: représentations du Québec à l’exposition universelle de Montréal 1967 (Expo 67)” (PhD diss., Université Laval, 2003).

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2 Curien reports that, in the two focus groups she held with thirteen participants

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6

7

8

9 10 11

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in total, only one person was critical of Expo 67, emphasizing the fragmented image disseminated about Canada at the fair, with four provincial pavilions (Quebec, Ontario, Western provinces, and Atlantic provinces) in addition to the Canadian Pavilion. Pierre Dupuy, “Preface,” Expo 67: Memorial Album (Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1968), 7. Curien, “L’identité nationale exposée.” Yves Jasmin, La petite histoire d’Expo 67 (Montreal: Québec-Amérique, 1997); Bryan MacDonald, “La conception de l’Expo 67: le projet de la Compagnie canadienne de l’Exposition universelle de Montréal” (ma thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2005). Most research conducted on the perceptions and reminiscences of Expo 67 has focused on the event itself, with little place for broader context. In addition, it has stressed the impact of the fair on those who actually visited the site. This is only half of the story. In the middle of the 1960s Montreal was hardly a paradise. The city was turned upside down by major public works, in particular the construction of the metro. Large numbers of people, from both French and English backgrounds, were trapped in poverty. See, for example, Tanya Ballantyne’s The Things I Cannot Change (nfb, 1967), a fifty-five-minute documentary on an anglophone family’s struggle to survive in Little Burgundy. Not everyone experienced the era of Expo as a shining moment or as a beacon of hope. Anderson and Gosselin, “Private and Public Memories of Expo 67.” Curien conducted her focus groups thirty years after the event happened. In terms of their findings regarding people’s memories of Expo 67, the research projects reinforce each other. The Czechoslovakian pavilion was one of the most popular at Expo 67, because of the multimedia presentation Diapolyecran, a three-dimensional animated mosaic featuring one hundred display cubes projecting images of various subjects, such as the creation of the world, and industrial progress; see Expo 67, 256. John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle, Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions (Jefferson: McFarland, 2008); Paul Greenhalgh, Fair World: A History of World’s Fairs and Expositions from London to Shanghai, 1851–2010 (London: Papadakis, 2011); Curien, “L’identité nationale exposée,” chap. 4 and 6; see also: “Expo 67: 40 ans plus tard,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 17, no. 1 (fall 2008), special issue. Quoted in Robert Fulford, Remember Expo (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 25–7. Jean-Marie Allard, La Pub: 30 ans de publicité au Québec (Montreal: Libre Expression/Publicité Club de Montréal, 1989), 107. This viewpoint is confirmed by Jean Cournoyer, in charge of labour relations

Jocelyn Létourneau

12

13

14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22

during the construction of the site of Expo 67, in answer to Pauline Curien’s question (“According to you, what did Quebeckers discover at Expo 67?” [“D’après vous, qu’est-ce que les Québécois ont découvert à Expo 67?”]: “I’m not telling you that Quebeckers found out who they were thanks to Expo. They rather come to the conclusion that they were able to do anything.” [“Moi, je vous dis qu’ils n’ont pas découvert qui ils étaient, ils ont découvert qu’ils étaient capables”]). Quoted in Pauline Curien, “Une catharsis identitaire. L’avènement d’une nouvelle vision du Québec à Expo 67,” Anthropologie et sociétés 30, no. 2 (2006): 129–51. See also Curien, “L’identité nationale exposée,” 311ss., and Pierre Dupuy, Expo 67 ou la découverte de la fierté (Montreal: Éditions de l’Homme, 1972). For a more in-depth discussion, see John Meisel, Guy Rocher, and Arthur Silver, eds., As I Recall/Si je me souviens bien. Historical Perspectives (Montreal: Institute for the Research on Public Policy, 1999); and Jocelyn Létourneau and David Northrup, “Québécois et Canadiens face au passé: similitudes et dissemblances,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 1 (March 2011): 163–96. Similar connections between personal and collective history were made by some respondents in the “Canadians and Their Pasts” survey. See Margaret Conrad, Kadriya Ercikan, Gerald Friesen, Jocelyn Létourneau, Del Muise, David Northrup, and Peter Seixas, Canadians and Their Pasts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). A mythistory can be defined as the amalgamation of narratives and references in the form of a metahistorical vision of what has been. See Jocelyn Létourneau, “Mythistory,” in Oxford Companion to Canadian History, ed. Gerald Hallowell (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004), 423. All quotes are from Anderson and Gosselin, “Private and Public Memories of Expo 67,” 13. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. The answer is Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau. Jocelyn Létourneau, Je me souviens? Le passé du Québec dans la mémoire de sa jeunesse (Montreal: Fides, 2014). Details on the survey are available at www.ton histoireduquebec.ulaval.ca. Highlights of this research are reported in Létourneau, Je me souviens?, 180–7. Jocelyn Létourneau, Claire Cousson, Lucie Daignault, and Johanne Daigle, “Le Mur des représentations. Images emblématiques et inconfortables du passé québécois,” Histoire sociale/Social History 47, no. 97 (November 2015): 497–548. Expo 67 is included in the list of events that are specifically taught to students who follow the mandatory history program in grade 10. See Ministry of Education, Quebec, Québec Education Program. History of Quebec and Canada, Secondary III and IV (Quebec: Ministry of Education, 2017), 52–4.

Epilogue: “A Legend for Generations to Come”

423

23 Quoted in Létourneau et al., “Le Mur des représentations,” 527. 24 Jocelyn Létourneau, Raphaël Gani, and Stéphane Lévesque, “Tout a commencé

25

26

27

28

29

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par la défaite. La guerre de Sept Ans dans la mémoire et la conscience historiques des Québécois,” in La Nouvelle-France en héritage, eds. Bertrand Fonck and Laurent Veyssière, 311–27 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013); and Jocelyn Létourneau, “What Is to Be Done with 1759?” in 1759 Remembered: Interpreting the Conquest, ed. Phillip Buckner and John Reid, 279–302 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). Jocelyn Létourneau, “We’ve Been Screwed: French Québecers and Their Past,” in Teaching and Learning the Difficult Past: Equity and Trusts, eds. Magdalena Gross and Luke Terra, 229–43 (London: Routledge, 2019). Perhaps a simpler explanation along similar lines is that narratives with drama, with real winners and losers, are naturally more captivating than happy stories of peace and reconciliation. That is why “Paradise Lost” is a better story than “Paradise Regained,” and perhaps why the most significant Expo moment for Quebec history was given to us not by Johnson or Drapeau, but by Charles de Gaulle, to the point where in most accounts of “Vive le Québec libre” the reason for his visit is barely mentioned at all. Thanks to Craig Moyes for these comments. The phrase is from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, [1983] 2006). See Curien, “L’identité nationale exposée,” chap. 7. The reason that the victimhood narrative persists among young people may be because they have been offered (so far) no alternative historical script that is as strong and straightforward. If another story were presented, they could possibly shift to (or at least be attracted by) that different narrative. See Létourneau, Je me souviens?, conclusion. See also Létourneau, La Condition québécoise. Une histoire dépaysante (Quebec: Septentrion, 2020). Curien, “Une catharsis identitaire,” expresses the idea that Expo might have given rise to an “Expo generation,” hence confirming a hypothesis put forward by Robert W. Rydell in his book World of Fairs: The Century of Progress (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Jocelyn Létourneau

Appendix: Notes on Expo 67 Visitor Data

As much as the public relations department and the media hyped the idea that “the world” was coming to Montreal for Expo, in fact 96 per cent of its visitors were from Canada and the United States, and the great majority of those from areas in the watershed of the Saint Lawrence River. 27 per cent were from Montreal, and another 5 per cent were from elsewhere in Quebec; the rest of Canada accounted for only 20 per cent (and most of this from Ontario), while visitors from the usa made up 45 per cent, though almost all came from the heavily populated states of the northeast, with New Yorkers predominant among them.1 In fact, on any given day except the peak tourist months of July and August, the vast majority of the Expo crowd was made up of locals, as was its workforce. Expo 67 was considered – and indeed was – an immense success in terms of attendance, but the standard figure of 52 million who passed through the turnstiles obscures the fact that four out of five were return visitors with an Expo season passport – in other words, essentially inhabitants of the Greater Montreal region.2 Given the city’s demographic, these would have been mostly francophone (according to figures given in the Expo official guide itself, they accounted for 62 per cent of the city’s 2.6 million people).3 That is to say, the lived experience of Expo 67 was overwhelmingly that of francophone residents of Montreal, who returned on multiple occasions over an extended period of time and grew familiar with the world exhibition in ways that outof-town visitors could not.

The composition of the Expo public was skewed toward the middle and upper-middle class. This was to be expected. While some effort was made to ensure that visiting was affordable, unless you lived in and around Montreal a trip to the world’s fair was a relatively expensive proposition, and high demand for hospitality combined with entrepreneurial opportunism acted to raise prices. Survey data accumulated by the Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition (ccwe) showed the following composition: “upper blue collar” (6 per cent), white collar (22 per cent), professional (14 per cent), prosperous self-employed (2 per cent), and managerial executives (1 per cent), for a total of 44 per cent, while the 19 per cent who were students and the 17 per cent who were “housewives” likely brought the middle-to-upper-class proportion closer to 75 or 80 per cent. This is corroborated by the fact that over half of heads of household who gave their information earned more than $10,000 per year, and another third earned $7,000 to $10,000; thus a good 80 per cent of heads of household surveyed at Expo made salaries corresponding to the upper 50 per cent of household incomes in the United States in 1967.4 Among Greater Montrealers who could visit while living at home and purchase a season passport that gave them unlimited entry, a trip to Expo need not have been so expensive, and so the class, ethnic, and race profile almost certainly broadened to some degree, and both anglophones and francophones came out in force (51 per cent of them on the metro). It was, overall, a young crowd: 40 per cent were between fifteen and thirtyfour years of age, and 65 per cent between fifteen and forty-four.5 No data on race, ethnicity, language, or gender (with the exception of the housewife category) were collected. It is not unusual to see people from visible minorities visiting Expo 67 in the visual record of the exhibition. Nevertheless, one can conclude from that same record and the socioeconomic and demographic profiles of the parts of Canada and the US accounting for most visitors that the Expo public was overwhelmingly white. One issue of accessibility was addressed at Expo in a pioneering way, as the entire site was built and its signage made to the highest “Building Standards for the Handicapped” (as the accessibility code for persons with disabilities was then known), in particular for those in wheelchairs and the vision-impaired, and a trained staff was made available to assist and guide them. A total of just under 55,000 people with disabilities and their companions availed themselves of these special services and, based on feedback received on site and afterwards, the ccwe felt that this aspect of the exhibition had been very successful.6

426

Appendix

notes 1 Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition (hereafter ccwe), General Report on the 1967 World Exhibition (Montreal, 1969), 2821–3.

2 ccwe, General Report, 2683–4. Thirteen million individual tickets were sold for

3

4

5 6

Expo, and although only 1.15 million of these were season passports, almost exclusively purchased by those in the Montreal area, they accounted for about 40 million of the 52 million visits to Expo. ccwe, Expo 67 Guide officiel / Official Guide (Toronto: McLean-Hunter, 1967), 6–7. First-language anglophones of “Anglo-Saxon stock” accounted for only 17 per cent, however, meaning that many of the remaining 20 per cent were allophones whose strongest second language was French (by far the largest of such groups were of Italian descent). The overwhelming preponderance of francophones in the Expo public is confirmed by the fact that the coverage of Expo 67 in the French edition of the major Canadian women’s magazine Châtelaine was much denser than that of the English edition, and reportage carried on throughout the six months of the fair and even into 1968 with postmortem and legacy commentary, whereas the English coverage died out by about June 1967, after the promotional/novelty phase was over. Eva-Marie Kröller, “Une terre humaine: Expo 67, Canadian Women, and Chatelaine/Châtelaine,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, eds. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 63–9. US Department of Commerce, “Household Income in 1967 and Selected Social and Economic Characteristics of Households,” Consumer Income Series P-60, no. 2 (July 1969): 1. The Canadian dollar was worth about US$0.93 during the middle months of 1967, making the respondents’ stated incomes roughly commensurate. ccwe, General Report, 2846–7. Ibid., 2067–81.

Notes on Expo 67 Visitor Data

427

Tables and Figures

Tables E.1 Ten most representative events in the history of Quebec according to respondents, 2004. 418 E.2 Ten images most representative of Quebec history among sixty pictures according to respondents, 2012. 419 E.3 Selecting Expo 67 as one of the most representative images of Quebec history among sixty pictures according to respondents, 2012. 419

Figures Frontispiece Expo attendees on “Cosmos Walk” looking towards the US Pavilion on Île Sainte-Hélène. Photographer Antoine Desilets. Courtesy of Luc Desilets. ii–iii I.1 Indians of Canada Pavilion behind the flags of the participating nations of Expo 67. Photographer Antoine Desilets. Courtesy of Luc Desilets. 2 1.1 Billboard advertising the live closed-circuit transmission of works on the Manic-5 Dam. Photo courtesy of Hydro-Québec. 46 1.2 Inside cover of the official Expo guide, entitled “Nouveaux Travaux d’Hercule / The Miracle of Expo,” showing before and after pictures of Ile Notre-Dame and Ile Sainte-Hélène. 48 1.3 Screening room at the Quebec Industries Pavilion. Photo courtesy of Hydro-Québec. 49 3.1 Expo 67 Indians of Canada Pavilion, with mural by George Clutesi, West Coast (left) and Noel Wuttunee, The Garden of Indians (right). Library and Archives Canada, copy negative [1970-019 npc] pa173167. 116 3.2 Maquette of George Clutesi, West Coast, 1967. Canadian Museum of History, VII-F-938, S92-6001. 117

3.3 Indians of Canada Pavilion: “The Drum,” display on missionaries and Indigenous spirituality. Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e011193837. 121 3.4 Indians of Canada Pavilion: “Work Life.” Photographer unknown. Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition/e011193890. 122 3.5 Mural designed by Norval Morrisseau and painted by Norval Morrisseau and Carl Ray, Earth Mother with Her Children, 1967. Photograph by the Public Relations Department, 1969 or 1970. City of Montreal Archives, vm94-ex273-0921. 127 3.6 Maquette of Norval Morrisseau, Mother Earth, 1967. Canadian Museum of History, III-G-1538, S92-5810. 127 3.7 Mural designed by Alex Janvier, Indians of Canada Pavilion, Beaver Crossing Indian Colours, 1967. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, vm94-Exd007-015. 129 3.8 Maquette of Alex Janvier, Beaver Crossing Indian Colours, 1967. Canadian Museum of History, VI-D-269, S92-59275927. 130 3.9 Still from Indian Memento: hostess Janice Lawrence at home in Silyx. Michel Régnier, National Film Board, 1967. 134 3.10 Still from Indian Memento: hostess Janice Lawrence guiding visitors in the section on schools. Michel Régnier, National Film Board, 1967. 135 3.11 Still from Indian Memento: hostess Janice Lawrence in downtown Montreal. Michel Régnier, National Film Board, 1967. 137 4.1 Canada Pavilion at night, Montreal, 1967. Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e011179994. 155 4.2 Indians of Canada Day, 4 August 1967. From left to right: Pierre Dupuy, Robert Shaw, Russell Moses. Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e011 179800. 166 5.1 The Cuba Pavilion. Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e011193779. 189 5.2 Cuba Pavilion exhibition. Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e011180347. 191 5.3 Cuba Pavilion interior art. Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e01118032. 192 6.1 Quebec Pavilion / Le pavillon du Québec de l’Expo 67, 1967, Bibliotheque et Archives national du Quebec, Vieux-Montréal, Fonds Euclide Sicotte (06M_P927S2D011_004.jpg), Cicot. 216 6.2 Proposed Quebec Pavilion. From the original competition-winning

430

Tables and Figures

6.3

6.4

6.5

6.6

7.1 7.2 7.3

7.4

7.5 7.6 8.1 9.1

submission (Papineau, Gerin-Lajoie, Le Blanc, architects; Luc Durand, associate architect, November 1964). The Gazette, 7 November 1964, 41. Detail: “View from landing.” Ernest Cormier fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture. 219 Martin Burn Ltd. Pavilion under construction, Indian Industries Fair, New Delhi, 1961 (Durand and Malik, architects, 1961). Image from slide arch252536, Luc Durand fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gift of Luc Durand. © Sharat Shapma, photographer. 222 Africa Place under construction, with theme and US pavilions rising in background. and 65101, John Andrews fonds, by permission of John Andrews. Courtesy of Canadian Architectural Archives, Archives and Special Collections, University of Calgary. Unknown photographer, 1966. 226 Australian Pavilion, interior view (John McCormick, architect, with Robin Boyd and John C. Parkin, associate architects, 1964–67). Office du film du Québec, unknown photographer, 1967. Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm. arch256262, Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gift of May Cutler. 228 Indian Pavilion (Mansinh M. Rana, architect, and Marshall, Merrett, Stahl, Elliott, and Mill, associate architects, 1964–67). Office du film du Québec, unknown photographer, 1967. Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm. arch256299, Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gift of May Cutler. 229 Quebec Pavilion. Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo, Gilles Carle, Office du film du Québec, 1968. 239 Gilles Groulx at a press conference of the Association professionnelle des cinéastes, May 1966. Télé-Radiomonde, 7 May 1966, 9. 243 Representing Quebec’s international presence at Expo 67 via a multiscreen display of visiting world dignitaries. Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo. Gilles Carle, Office du film du Québec, 1968. 251 Hostesses in uniforms created by the Quebec designer Michel Robichaud. Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo, Gilles Carle, Office du film du Québec, 1968. 254 Models in Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo. Gilles Carle, Office du film du Québec, 1968. 254 End credits of Le Québec à l’heure de l’Expo. Gilles Carle, Office du film du Québec, 1968. 256 Album cover, Terre des bums, 1967. Photo © Ronald Labelle. 289 Schematic map, showing the location of the itc on the Cité du Havre, International Trade Centre Brochure. Business Development

Tables and Figures

431

9.2

9.3

9.4

9.5

9.6

9.7 9.8

9.9

9.10

9.11

9.12

432

Bureau, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, 8–9. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Roger D’Astous fonds, coll photo / Bte. 60-1998-005. Gift of Micheline D’Astous. 303 Marcelle Ferron: verrières exhibition at the Musée d’Art contemporain, Montreal, 1966. Photographer Gabor Szilasi. banq Vieux Montréal, E6,S7,SS1P662456_007. 309 Marcelle Ferron: verrières exhibition at the Musée d’Art contemporain, Montreal, 1966. Photographer Gabor Szilasi. banq Vieux Montréal, E6,S7,SS1P662456_004. 309 Marcelle Ferron window of the International Trade Centre (photo taken, probably by Roger D’Astous, during installation in early 1967). Courtesy of Étienne Desrosiers. 310 Courtyard/terrace of the International Trade Centre showing windows by Marcelle Ferron. Photographer Meredith Dixon. Expo ‘67 Slide Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library. 311 Passage de Choiseul, 2ème arrondissement, Paris, 1916. Photographer Charles Joseph Antoine Lansiaux. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, PH10084. 317 Place Ville-Marie, 1966. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, vm94A0651-043. 318 International Trade Centre, entrance, “Inauguration et vues de l’Expo 67, Montréal, Québec,” 1967. Photographer Germain Beauchamp. banq, Fonds Germain Beauchamp, P809,S1,DA, P062. 319 Plans of the itc (second floor). International Trade Centre brochure, Business Development Bureau, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, 13. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Roger D’Astous fonds, coll photo / Bte. 60-1998-005. Gift of Micheline D’Astous. 319 The Bank of Montreal Room at the itc, with its wall of “empty time.” “Visite du Centre de Commerce International à l’Expo 67,” 2 June 1967. Photographer Paul-Henri Talbot. banq, Fonds La Presse, P833,S5,D1967, 0230_001f. 321 Corridor of the International Trade Centre, looking towards the Expo Club, showing Marcelle Ferron windows (photo taken, probably by Roger D’Astous, during installation in early 1967). Photo courtesy of Étienne Desrosiers. 322 “Le Centre du commerce international à la Banque Canadienne Nationale à Montréal,” 8 May 1967, showing historical bas-relief of

Tables and Figures

9.13

10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5

10.6 10.7 12.1

13.1 13.2

the Place d’Armes by Jean-Julien Bourgault. Photographer Armour Landry. banq, Fonds Armour Landry, P97,S1,D14048. 324 “Verrière Marcelle Ferron au métro Champ-de-Mars,” 14 January 1999. Photographer Robert Mailloux. banq, Fonds La Presse, P833,S5,D1999, 0003_001. 325 Deidi von Schaewen, design coordinator, Man and His Health Pavilion. Photo courtesy of Deidi von Schaewen. 345 Man and His Health display case. Photo courtesy of Deidi von Schaewen. 347 Carleton Peirce, director, Man and His Health. Photograph (possibly by Yousuf Karsh) courtesy of Esther Scriver. 348 Robert Cordier, producer and director, Miracles in Modern Medicine, with Michael McClure, 1967. Photo courtesy of Robert Cordier. 349 John Palmer, cinematographer, Miracles in Modern Medicine, directing Edie Sedgwick in Ciao! Manhattan, 1970. Photo courtesy of John Palmer. 350 Rehearsal for Miracles in Modern Medicine in the Meditheatre, April 1967. Photo courtesy of Deidi von Schaewen. 353 The heart returns the medical gaze. Still from Miracles in Modern Medicine. Courtesy of Robert Cordier. 359 Lobby card for the Kommissar X film Kill, Panther, Kill, showing the West German Pavilion at Expo 67. Scan courtesy of Holger Haase, http://krimifilm.blogspot.com/2010/10/kommissar-x-drei-blauepantherthree.html. 389 Hyperman, hero of Expo 67. Superman 1, no. 200, October 1967. 397 Still from Jacques Godbout’s yul 871 showing the Jacques Cartier Bridge and the Île Sainte-Hélène. Jacques Godbout, National Film Board, 1966. 401

Tables and Figures

433

Contributors

bruno victor andrus is a Montreal-based art historian and glassblower. He has published on the history of glassblowing in Quebec as well as international glass art, and has taught glassblowing for over twenty years. His work has been exhibited worldwide. heesok chang teaches English literature at Vassar College. He is the author of articles on modernism and philosophy and the forthcoming Modernism (Blackwell Guides to Literature). He is currently working on a book about media technologies. romney copeman works for the Quebec Ministry of Education and the federal Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. His research interests revolve around racism, whiteness, colonialism, and multiculturalism. linda grussani (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg/Italian) is a curator, art historian, and arts administrator born and raised on unceded Anishinàbe Akì (Ottawa, Canada). She is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at Queen’s University researching Indigenous representation in museums. joy knoblauch is assistant professor of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College. She is the author of The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America (2020) and co-chair of the Society of Architecture Historians Affiliate Group on Climate Change. jocelyn létourneau is professor of history at Laval University. From 2001 to 2015 he was Canada Research Chair in Quebec’s Contemporary History. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, in 2018 he was awarded the AndréLaurendeau Prize in the Humanities. His most recent book is La Condition québécoise. Une histoire dépaysante (2020).

bill marshall is emeritus professor of comparative literary and cultural studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland. His book publications include Quebec National Cinema (2001) and The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History (2009). caroline martel is a documentary filmmaker, artist, and researcher currently completing a PhD at Concordia University on Quebec’s audiovisual contribution to Expo 67. Her critically acclaimed films and installations include The Phantom of the Operator (2004), Wavemakers (2012), Industry/Cinema (2012), and Spectacles du monde (2017). craig moyes is a senior lecturer in the French Department at King’s College London and director of the Quebec and French Canada Research Network (qafcarn). He is co-editor (with Yves Gingras) of Marcelle Gauvreau, Lettres au frère Marie-Victorin (2019). steven palmer is professor of history at the University of Windsor. He is the author of Launching Global Health (2010), co-author of Medicine and Public Health in Latin America: A History (2015), and co-director of the documentary film Ghost Artist (2019). ruth phillips is Canada Research Professor and professor of art history emerita at Carleton University. She writes and publishes on Indigenous North American arts and critical museology. Among her recent books is Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011). peter scriver, a native Montrealer, is an associate professor and director of the Centre for Asian and Middle-Eastern Architecture at the University of Adelaide, Australia. His books include Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (2007) and India: Modern Architectures in History (2015). will straw is James McGill Professor of urban media studies in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America (2009) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (2019) and Night Studies: Regards croisés sur les nouveaux visages de la nuit (2020). jean-philippe warren holds the chair for the study of Quebec at Concordia University. His work has received numerous prizes, including the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. 436

Contributors

Index

abortion, 286, 356 activism, 34, 270–2, 277, 285; of 1968, 279– 82; antiwar protests, 100, 192, 194, 278, 284, 287; of Black community, 18, 78, 199– 200, 211n89, 283; of Indigenous Canadians, 5, 9, 34, 67n62, 115, 118; peace movement, 276; of Quebec students, 277, 280, 282–4. See also youth advertising industry, 238–42, 248–9, 253, 257, 259, 261n18, 273, 388–9, 415 African states, 11, 183. See also pavilions: Africa Place Algeria, 182, 287 Alliance laurentienne, 36, 56, 60n23 Anderson, Benedict, 34, 421 Anderson, David, 414–16 Andrews, John, 80, 91, 226–7, 230 Arcand, Denys, 241, 248 architecture, 9, 18–19, 21, 86, 105; Indigenous architectural forms, 119; megastructures, 81, 87, 214, 231, 250; space frame, 77, 83, 91 Arnheim, Rudolf, 298, 312 Artaud, Antonin, 340, 354–5 assimilation, 15, 140, 178; assimilationist policy of Canadian state, 130, 135–7, 153, 167; of French Canadians, 63n35; of Indigenous Canadians, 120. See also Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools; residential schools Austin, David, 180, 199 Automatisme. See Borduas, Paul-Émile automobiles, 54, 273; General Motors Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 77–8 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 405–6 Baldwin, James, 347–8

Banham, (Peter) Rayner, 19, 369–79 banks and banking, 9, 16, 35, 302, 314–24 Barbeau, Raymond, 36, 56 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 23n7, 63n36 Bauhaus (architectural style), 81, 93, 217 Beatles, the, 184, 275–6; Beatlemania, 286 Beaubien, Jeanine, 360 Belafonte, Harry, 23n7, 185, 197 Belleau, André, 21, 30n51, 32n60 Benjamin, Walter, 16, 49, 55, 83, 104, 298, 301–2, 312–13, 315–21, 323–5 Bergfelder, Tim, 388–90 Bible, the, 43, 47 Black community of Montreal, 18, 198–9 Black politics, 179, 196–7, 205n18; Black Power, 18, 199, 211n89; Congress of Black Writers, 201; négritude, 185; World Festival of Black Arts, 181. See also Civil Rights movement Blais, Jean-Éthier, 303–4 Borduas, Paul-Émile, 300, 302–6, 308–12, 325, 366n53, 416 Brakhage, Stan, 351 Brault, Michel, 246, 248, 404 British North America Act, 21, 24n14, 34, 38, 62–3n34 Brutalism/New Brutalism (architectural style), 19, 370, 376–9 Bureau of International Exhibitions (bie), 3, 22n4, 64n39, 79, 87; rules for Category 1 world exhibitions, 90 Burnet, Sir Frank Macfarlane, 356, 375 Bush, Robin, 151, 154, 161 Canada, 79; Dominion of, 38; English Canada, 51, 110–12n71; and First Nations, 122; government of, 3, 40, 55, 64n39; as modern nation, 96; naming of, 38–9, 44;

unity of, 40; identity and nation building, 398, 415. See also Indigenous peoples of Canada; pavilions: Canada Canadian Corporation for the World Exhibition (ccwe), 3, 12, 17, 27n29, 87, 90, 186, 225, 240, 262n21 Canadian Museum of History, 116–17 capitalism, 4–5, 20, 23n9, 92, 110n61, 180, 317; neoliberalism, 30, 31n53, 49, 232 Caribana, 201, 212n96 Carle, Gilles, 16–17, 20, 45, 238, 242–52 Cartier, Jacques, 47, 407, 409, 417–18 Castro, Fidel, 187, 195, 277 Catholic Church, 35, 39, 47, 274, 298–300; and censorship, 257–8; and education, 273, 280 censorship, 263n25, 273 Centennial (of Canadian Confederation, 1967), 6–7, 25n20, 34, 55, 80, 88, 201, 213; Centennial Commission, 58n11; fiftieth anniversary of Expo 67, 8; semi-centennial, 38, 58n6; Sesquicentennial (“Canada 150”), 6, 117 Champlain, Samuel de, 37 Charlebois, Robert, 276, 288–9 childbirth, 97–9, 341, 350–1, 355, 364n30 cinema. See film Cité du Havre (Expo site), 37, 45, 88, 302, 342 Civil Rights movement, 78, 182, 197–8, 212n94, 287, 348 Clutesi, George, 116–17, 124, 126 Cohen, Leonard, 14, 30n50, 275 Cold War, 5, 17, 19, 78–9, 93, 182, 195, 255, 343, 368–9; and Indigenous Canadians, 118 colonialism, 15; neocolonialism, 54; postcolonialism, 17–18, 80, 218–20, 252; settler colonialism, 7, 15, 63n35, 115, 225. See also colonization; decolonization colonization: and Christianity, 121; of Indigenous peoples of Canada, 115, 118, 120, 409–10; of Quebec, 37, 407 commodification and commodity fetishism, 4, 16, 18, 55, 312, 316–17 computers, 19, 100–3; ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), 84, 105 Confederation, 37, 58n4, 58n6, 61n30, 62n33; myth of two founding nations (“two

438

Index

Canadas,” “two solitudes”), 3, 38, 50, 61n30, 65n46. See also Centennial Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (ciam), 86, 371–3 consumerism, 17, 77–8, 92, 95, 274 Crystal Palace, 50, 87, 92 Cuba, 182; Cuban Revolution, 187; musical performers from, 194. See also pavilions: Cuba Curien, Pauline, 10, 66n58, 250, 252 Dada, 81, 315. See also surrealism Dallegret, François, 13, 31n54, 276 D’Astous, Roger, 16, 231, 299–300, 305–10, 313–19 Dean, Misao, 7 Debord, Guy, 55, 72n95, 81, 336n73 de Certeau, Michel, 396–7 decolonization, 5, 11, 80, 115, 218, 277, 287 de Gaulle, Charles, 10, 14, 22n2, 28n36, 50–5, 69n73, 69n77, 279, 286, 396 Deleuze, Gilles, 402, 407 Delisle, Andrew Tanahokate, 15, 119, 150, 153, 162–5, 168–70, 175n47, 175n60 Démarche du crabe, La. See Larue, Monique democracy, 98, 100; democratic surround, 93, 343, 345; democratization of Quebec, 273 Department of Indian and Northern Development (diand), 117–20, 123–5, 128 design and designers, 9–10, 12–13, 19, 21–4, 10, 30–1n53, 154, 221, 276, 339, 343–6 Dobell, Anthony, 358 Dolan, Xavier, 408–9 Dozois, Guy, 12 Drapeau, Jean, 4, 7, 18, 22n4, 42, 53, 68n71, 70n82–3, 71n91–2, 87, 90, 274; decision on site of Expo, 9, 14, 26–7n28, 36, 40, 42, 47, 64n39, 70n85, 87–8; relation to Lionel Groulx, 36, 63n35, 72n98; vision for Quebec, 56; and visit of Charles de Gaulle, 10, 28n36, 50–5 Dumont, Fernand, 57, 299, 311 Dunton, Davidson, 34, 74n104 Duplessis, Maurice, 273, 420 Dupuy, Pierre, 21n2, 33, 34, 36, 47, 51, 57, 58n12, 207n39, 244, 414; as novelist and poet, 41, 63n36 Durand, Luc, 17, 45, 214–28, 230

Eames, Charles and Ray, 83, 93–6, 101–5, 255, 369 Eco, Umberto, 4, 21 education, 20–1, 84, 101, 279–84, 303–4, 325 Eiffel Tower, 87 Elizabeth II (queen), 23n7, 35 Erickson, Arthur, 342, 345, 372 Expo 67: attendance and visitor demographics, 4, 10, 13, 49, 184, 195, 250, 252, 425–6; budget and cost, 3, 4, 244; cinematic experiments of, 76; critical reception of, 76–8, 279; divergence between French and English texts of, 12, 26n36, 28–9n42, 31n55, 43–4, 112n73; guidebooks, 15, 34–5, 47–8, 80; historiography of, 6–7, 20; jurisdiction of different levels of government over, 3–4, 44; legacy, 17–18, 42, 72n96, 106, 232, 257; media zeitgeist, 34; nations and nationalism, 34, 45, 53, 80, 279; and pedagogy, 10, 20–1, 92; planning of, 10, 12, 27n29, 64n39, 76, 85; and protoglobalist ambitions, 43; and Quebec creative and intellectual culture, 11, 17, 23n7; and religion, 25n18, 313–14; scholarship on, 7, 9–10, 76, 81; site of, 12–13, 26–7n28, 34, 37, 39–40, 47–8, 55, 57, 61n27; and transformation of Montreal, 10, 27n29, 54. See also Terre des hommes/Man and His World) fashion, 17, 123. See also hostesses; Robichaud, Michel federalism, 25n20, 36 Ferron, Marcelle, 16, 298–9; Champ-deMars commission, 308, 321–5; International Trade Centre commission, 307–8, 315–21; signatory of Refus global, 300, 303–5, 311–12; Sainte Hyacinthe Prison commission, 307 film, 17, 19, 82, 92, 215; commissioned, 16– 17, 45, 248–9; documentary, 9, 97, 247, 250, 255, 260, 349; Eurospy (film genre), 383–8; expanded cinema, 83–4, 99, 103, 106; experimental, 81, 96, 250, 257–8; historiography of Quebec cinema, 238–9; immersive, 83, 96, 231; multiscreen, 8, 19, 83, 93, 95–9, 105–6, 110n61, 237, 249, 251, 257–9, 264n39; relation to architecture, 82, 104, 107n20, 312–13, 321

First Nations. See Indigenous peoples of Canada Fiset, Édouard, 233n11, 370 Foucault, Michel, 398, 409 Fournier, Marcel, 10, 321–2 France, 5, 50. See also de Gaulle, Charles; pavilions: France French Canada, 11, 24n14, 34–7, 39, 45, 51–6, 58n6, 58n8, 69n77, 299, 319–20. See also Quebec Front de Libération du Québec (flq), 30n52, 279 Frye, Northrop, 98, 110n71 Fuller, Buckminster, 77, 79, 91, 203n8, 214, 231, 343, 372, 376. See also geodesic dome; pavilions: usa Gagnon, Charles, 314–15 Gagnon, Gilles, 371–2 Gagnon, Monika Kin, 8, 81, 237–8, 257 Gauvreau, Jean-Marie, 366n53 gender, 95, 253, 259 geodesic dome, 77, 79, 91, 203n8, 214, 231 Glissant, Édouard, 409 globalization, 4–5, 11, 13, 16, 19, 23n9, 43, 47– 9, 57, 300–1, 316–17; of media, 20, 184; history of concept, 5, 23n10, 24n12; and Walt Disney Company, 29n44. See also transnationalism/internationalism global trade, 6, 16, 18, 44, 316–20 Godard, Jean-Luc, 354, 401 Godbout, Jacques, 240, 245, 249, 268n87, 357, 400–3 Gosselin, Viviane, 414–16 Great Britain, 5, 202. See also pavilions: Great Britain Groulx, Gilles, 16–17, 45, 56, 238, 246–8 Groulx, Lionel, 4, 14, 36, 38, 44, 46–7, 52–4, 56–7, 58n6, 60n19, 60n21, 61n30, 63n35, 70n82, 72n98, 73nn99–100, 73nn102–3 Group of 77 (G77), 5, 181 Guevara, Ernesto (Ché), 187–8, 192–3, 277 Guillén, Nicolás, 194 Haile Selassie, 23n7, 183 Hammid, Alexander, 83, 93–6, 109n55, 110n66, 244, 264n39 Harnden, Peter, 339, 343–6 Harper, Stephen, 6

Index

439

Heritage Minute (historical film series), 398–401, 405–6 Hill, Tom, 125, 128 homosexuality, decriminalization of, 286 hostesses, 16, 123–4, 187, 193, 253–4 humanism, 4–5, 10, 13–15, 17–19, 30n52, 56– 7, 74n107, 83–4, 213, 340; Catholic, 39, 47; cosmic, 64n42, 152; and Expo theme, 33, 40, 44; and Expo design aesthetic, 81; postcolonial, 185; techno-humanism, 91, 106 Hurley, Erin, 253, 405–6 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 77, 216 Hydro-Québec, 37, 67n65, 257, 306, 316, 322; Manic-5 (Manicouagan hydro-electric dam), 45–50, 67n61, 67–8n63, 246 ibm Pavilion (New York World’s Fair, 1964– 65), 83–4, 100–1, 105–6, 352 Île Notre-Dame (Expo site), 37, 45, 79, 88 Île Sainte-Hélène (Expo site), 37, 54, 79, 88 imax, 96, 258, 264n39 immersive environments, 82, 93–102, 190 immigration, 35, 59–60n16, 199–201, 323 India, 18, 178–86, 204n14, 206n28, 215, 218– 25, 229–31, 233n6, 234n16. See also pavilions: India Indian Act, 126 Indian Advisory Council (iac), 118–19, 124 Indian Memento/Mémoire indienne, 117, 133–8. See also Régnier, Michel Indigenous peoples of Canada, 7, 15, 34, 71n92, 246; contested history, 398–9; spirituality, 120. See also activism; assimilation; colonialism International and Universal Exhibitions. See world exhibitions International Style (of architecture), 217 Iroquois. See Mohawks islands, 399–400, 406–10 It’s a Small World (Disney fairground attraction), 29n44, 81 Jacques Cartier Bridge, 37, 246, 252, 399–401 James, C.L.R., 199 Jameson, Frederic, 5, 23n9, 410 Janvier, Alex, 128–30 Jasmin, Yves, 9, 22n4, 273 Johnson, Daniel, 34, 46–9, 51, 67n63, 68n67, 248, 322

440

Index

Johnson, Lyndon B., 22n7, 78, 200, 278 Jutra, Claude, 112n73, 244, 402 Jutras, Michel, 342, 358 Kahn, Louis, 344 Kahnawake (Caughnawaga). See Mohawks Kenneally, Rhona Richman, 8, 34, 79–80 Kill, Panther, Kill, 19, 383–94 Kitchen Debate, 77, 78, 343 Lacoste, Norbert, 157 Laferrière, Yves, 275–6 Lalonde, Michèle, 30n52, 63n36 landscape, 15, 24n13, 43, 53, 311, 320, 324 landscaping, 109n44 LaPalme, Robert, 323 Lapointe, Gatien, 33, 39–41, 57, 63n36, 74n107 La Ronde (Expo amusement park), 13, 250, 276 Larue, Monique, 404 Laurendeau, André, 34, 57, 74n104, 74n107 Laurentie, 36, 39, 47, 56–7, 60n22–3, 88. See also Alliance laurentienne Le Corbusier, 220–1, 372–3 Léger, Paul-Émile (cardinal), 71n89, 204n13 Lesage, Jean, 34; Liberal government of, 45, 248, 284 Létourneau, Jocelyn, 398, 406 Letourneux, Matthieu, 387–8 Lévesque, René, 45, 275, 286 Longueuil, 37, 54 L’Osstidcho. See Charlebois, Robert Lotman, Juri, 13, 29n46, 32n60 Low, Colin, 97–9, 110n66, 110–12n71 MacLennan, Hugh, 65n46 Makeba, Miriam, 22n2, 197–8 Man and His World/Terre des hommes. See Terre des hommes/Man and His World (Expo 67 theme) Marchessault, Jeanine, 8, 81, 92, 105, 110n61, 237–8, 257 Marie-Victorin, Brother, 36–7, 39, 47, 60n21–2, 63n35 Massey, Geoffrey, 372, 342, 345 Masson, Jean-Pierre, 360 McCormick, John, 228–9 McGill University, 110–12n71, 217, 225, 242, 346

McLuhan, Marshall, 5, 11, 14, 22n2, 43, 66n54, 83, 92, 99, 184, 213, 230, 275, 370, 385, 393 Medawar, Peter, 375 media: audiovisual, 4, 18, 34, 45, 83, 92, 342; digital, 4; electronic, 4; entertainment industry, 55, 79, 110n61; experimental media surrounds, 100, 231; multimedia, 13, 19, 23n8, 93, 253, 340; post-human media ecology, 106; print, radio, and television reportage, 4, 52, 99, 118, 195, 273, 275, 277 media extensions, 20, 383–6 Mexico, 182–3. See also pavilions: Mexico Middle East, 5, 225, 394 modernism, 18, 77, 81, 85, 90, 189, 230, 318, 344, 379 modernity, 25n20, 81–2, 95, 98, 315, 371; architectural, 91; capitalist, 92; global, 299; and Indigenous peoples of Canada, 119, 151, 159; medical, 356; of Montreal, 34–5, 197, 306, 396; postcolonial, 179, 182, 189; of Quebec, 20, 45, 273, 250, 290, 306–7, 371, 404–5, 416, 421 Mohawks (Iroquois, Kanien’kehá), 15, 59– 60n16, 119, 143n5, 150, 153, 162, 168, 172 Moholy-Nagy, László, 374–5 Montebello Conference, 20, 31n56, 40, 42, 44, 49–50, 57, 64n41, 74n104, 91, 356 Montour, Nathan, 120 Montpetit, Édouard, 36, 60n20–1, 73n99 Montreal: ethnic and racial composition, 59n16; founding of, 37, 55, 61n24; as political jurisdiction, 3, 8, 50; as symbolic capital of new Quebec nation, 10, 51; relationship to universality, 35–6, 42, 55; stature as city, 35, 54, 87 Montreal Casino, 30–1n53, 231–2. See also pavilions: Quebec Montreal International and Universal Exhibition, 1967. See Expo 67 Montreal metro, 9, 27n29, 54, 71n89, 71n90, 88, 217, 306–7, 321–5 Montréal ’64–’68 (magazine), 28n36, 42, 67n61 Morrisseau, Norval, 126–8 Moses, Robert, 18, 77, 80, 84–5, 88–90, 108n25, 341 Mousseau, Jean-Paul, 305–7 multiculturalism, 15, 118 multimedia. See media

murals, 121, 125–7, 129 National Film Board (nfb), 8, 15, 26n26, 92, 110n66, 117, 213, 238–45, 257, 259, 261n19, 262n24, 263n25, 350. See also Office national du film (onf) nations and nationalism, 5, 34; Canadian, 6–7, 15, 34, 38; English-Canadian, 24n14; French-Canadian, 24n14, 34, 36, 38, 57; Indigenous, 67n62; postcolonial, 17, 80; Quebec, 4–5, 11, 17, 28n39, 34, 36, 45, 51–3, 71n92, 74n107, 110–12n71; of Quebec government, 44; of Quebec youth, 272, 278, 283 Nègres blancs d’Amérique. See Pierre Vallières Nettleford, Rex, 196, 199 1960s. See sixties, the Non-Aligned group of countries (from 1976, Non-Aligned Movement, nam), 182 Noranda Lectures, 152, 183, 185 nuclear war, 19, 95, 276 October Crisis, 210n74, 239, 421 “Ode au Saint-Laurent.” See Lapointe, Gatien Office du film du Québec (ofq), 16, 238, 241, 245–6, 248, 251, 253, 257, 262n24 Office national du film (onf), 8, 26n26, 403. See also National Film Board (nfb) Olivier, Laurence, 23n7, 63n36 Otto, Frei, 91, 214, 343, 372 Palmer, Bryan, 7 Palmer, John, 341, 377 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 31n56, 62n32 Paris, 39, 54–5 Parti pris, 11, 28n39, 30n52, 245 Parti Québécois, 60n23, 288 Paul VI (pope), 11 pavilions (Expo 67), 11–13, 86, 79, 91; Africa Place (national), 18, 51, 80, 91, 186, 215, 225–6; Air Canada (corporate), 244; Art Gallery (theme), 316, 323; Australia (national), 18, 215, 228–9; Canada (national), 12, 14, 21–2n2, 51, 80, 201, 262n21; Christian (corporate), 204n13, 300, 313–15, 317; Cuba (national), 11, 187–95, 226; Czechoslovakia (national), 258, 376, 415; Expo-Théâtre (theme), 302; France

Index

441

(national), 22n2, 23n7, 30–1n53, 51, 215, 232, 313; Great Britain (national), 22n2, 51, 215, 229, 313; Habitat 67 (theme), 8, 77, 91, 189–90, 214, 225, 302, 342; Haiti (national), 198–9; India (national), 185–6, 215, 229; Indians of Canada (national), 11–12, 15–16, 25n18, 80, 115–49, 197, 262n21; Israel (national), 189, 226; Jamaica (national), 196; Labyrinth (theme), 8, 18–19, 26n26, 84, 92–3, 96–100, 105, 110n66, 110– 12n71, 112n73, 240, 244, 262n20, 302, 342, 377, 415; Photography and Industrial Design Pavilion (theme), 302; International Trade Centre (corporate), 16, 300–3, 308– 11, 315–24; Man the Explorer (theme), 377; Man and His Health (theme), 19, 302, 339–67, 377–9, 415; Man in the Community (theme), 61n24, 240–1, 268n87, 302, 342, 372; Man the Producer (theme), 45, 376; Mexico (national), 205n20, 206n22; Quebec (national), 10–11, 17–18, 45, 51, 66n58, 214–28, 232n4, 248–54, 257– 8, 406, 410; Quebec Industries (corporate), 45–50, 256, 302, 316, 322, 328–9n18; Telephone (corporate), 244, 372, 415; Thailand (national), 225; Trinidad and Tobago (national), 197, 201; usa (national), 23n7, 44, 51, 77, 79, 203n8, 214, 278, 343–4, 372, 385, 415; ussr (national), 44, 51, 79, 277, 344, 372; West Germany (national), 51, 77, 214, 372, 343, 389; Youth (theme), 13, 17, 56, 73n103, 194, 197–8, 249, 271–2, 275–6, 288 Pearson, Lester B., 6, 34, 51–2, 201–2 Peirce, Carleton, 339, 342, 346, 348–9, 352, 355–8 Penfield, Wilder, 341, 356 performance, 5, 339–40, 342, 346–56, 360. See also spectators and spectatorship Piscator, Erwin, 353 Place des Arts, 52, 53–4, 63n36, 404 Place des Nations (Expo ceremonial site), 51, 151, 164, 172n2, 182–3, 186, 194, 200, 249, 318 Place Ville-Marie, 54, 316 poetry, 14, 30n52, 40, 246, 263n26, 264n42; Quebec poetry boom, 39, 63n36; World Congress of Poetry, 185, 194 pop art, 77, 341

442

Index

popular culture, 10, 14, 274, 284 postmodernism, 20, 259, 340–1 progress (narratives of), 80, 250, 301, 339– 40, 344–6, 354, 360, 370. See also Quiet Revolution psychedelic, 83, 93, 99, 193, 288–9; drugs, 275–6 public relations, 9. See also Jasmin, Yves Quebec: culture, 53; demographics, 274–5, 356–7; film production, 10, 16–17, 274; foreign policy of, 183; historical narratives of, 20, 45; independence, 11, 56, 322; industry, 45; as a nation, 10, 50; national consciousness, 14, 20, 45; popular music, 276; separatism, 6, 17, 30n52, 36, 72n98, 195, 210n74; sovereignty, 47, 60n23, 247. See also nationalism; pavilions: International Trade Centre, Quebec, Quebec Industries Quebec, government of, 3, 8, 16, 44, 55, 64n39, 241, 291n11; relationship to Catholic Church, 44–5; and censorship, 257–8, 263n25, 273; Department of Education, 273, 283, 285; relationship with federal government, 45 …québec? See Groulx, Gilles Québec à l’heure de l’Expo. See Carle, Gilles Quebec City, 10, 51, 240, 244, 246, 302, 308, 385, 407–8, 417–18 Quiet Revolution, 19, 28n39, 38, 53, 80, 214– 24, 240, 259, 274, 357, 397–404, 407–8, 416; and architecture, 214, relationship to Catholicism, 10, 16, 34, 53, 56, 73n100, 73n102, 257, 259, 273, 298–304, 313–15, 325, 326–7n6; cinema of, 239–40, 247; cultural survival, 10, 45, 53, 63n35, 73n99; Expo 67 and, 9–10, 14; “first Quiet Revolution” of 1930s, 57; historiography of, 273, 301; and public art, 16, 30–1n53; and Quebec youth, 270–3, 284; state intervention, 34, 45, 47. See also modernity; progress (narratives of) racism, 78, 95, 120, 186, 200 Rana, Mansingh, 229–30 Rancière, Jacques, 368–9, 377 Ray, Carl, 126–7 Refus global. See Borduas, Paul-Émile

Régnier, Michel, 15, 30n51 Reid, Bill, 124 religious art and iconography, 16, 299–300, 303–6, 311–12, 313–15, 325, 405 Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (LaurendeauDunton Commission), 34, 57, 74n104 Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools (trc), 115, 135, 139, 142n2, 154, 164 residential schools, 115, 120, 123, 135, 139, 142n2, 154, 158, 162, 164, 170–1 Riar, Inderbir Singh, 85–6, 92, 370, 376–7 Robichaud, Michel, 124, 253–4 Robillard, Claude, 44, 57, 70n85, 87 Roy, Gabrielle, 20–1, 31n55, 31–2n57, 40–5, 47, 57, 64n41, 369, 399 Safdie, Moshe, 77, 91, 189–90, 207n39, 214, 225 Saint Lawrence River: as Expo site, 5–6, 9, 47–8, 51, 55, 219–20, 250; in Quebec imaginary, 14, 33, 36, 39–43, 57, 62n33, 110– 12n71, 407–6; relation to site of Montreal, 24n13, 31n56, 35, 43, 50, 88; and Seaway, 35, 88, 400, 406; as trade route, 16, 24n13, 316, 320 Sarrazin, Jean, 323–5 Sarsfield, Mairuth, 201 satellites, 49, 78 Savard, Stéphane, 46 science, 9, 13, 19 screens, 16, 320–1, 325 semiosphere, 13, 16, 21, 29n46, 32n60 Senegal, 184–5 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 184–5 sex, 20; and Summer of Love, 98, 272, 276, 284 sixties, the, 93; and political radicalism, 34; and youth culture, 56, 270–2, 284 Sloan, Johanne, 8, 34, 79–80, 271 Smithson, Alison and Peter, 370–1 socialism, 11, 272, 279 Société du spectacle. See Debord, Guy soft power, 256–7, 268n76, 343, 369. See also Cold War software, 18; software space, 105–6 Soviet Union, 3, 5, 79. See also pavilions: ussr

space travel, 44, 78, 97 “Speak White.” See Lalonde, Michèle spectacle, 55. See also performance spectators and spectatorship, 8, 11, 19, 49, 258; alienated and participatory, 335– 6n73, 368; immersive, 4, 18, 82 students, 274–5; radicalism of, 17, 277 Superman (comic book character), 396–7 surrealism, 301–4, 314–15, 320, 330n25, 352 Tall, Papa Ibra, 184–5 Team X (architectural group), 369–71 technology, 8, 47, 54, 78, 91; calm technology, 105 telecommunications, 49 Terre des bums. See Charlebois, Robert Terre des hommes (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry book), 43–4, 64–5n42, 399 Terre des hommes (1968–81, post-Expo municipal theme park), 42, 72n96, 90 Terre des hommes/Man and His World (Expo 67 theme), 4–5, 12–13, 20, 33, 42–4, 79, 87, 91, 213, 227, 230, 232, 241, 288, 316 Theall, Donald, 23n8, 66n54 Think. See Eames, Charles and Ray Third World, 5, 18, 182 Thompson, Francis, 83, 93–6, 109n55, 110n66, 244 To Be Alive! See Hammid, Alexander; Thompson, Francis transnationalism/internationalism, 44, 384, 393. See also globalization Trinidad and Tobago, 184, 196–7, 199, 201, 212n96. See also pavilions: Trinidad and Tobago Trudeau, Pierre Elliot, 195, 285–6; Liberal government of, 21n1, 136, 416 Turner, Fred, 93, 95, 343 Two Solitudes. See Confederation; MacLennan, Hugh United States, 5, 243; Anglo-American hegemony, 50; imperialism, 11, 182–3, 272, 277. See also pavilions: usa Université de Montréal, 36, 52, 61, 64n41, 69n77, 242, 246, 273, 281–2, 285, 323 urban planning, 9–10, 18, 76, 78; and transformation of Montreal, 86 utopia, 409; utopian ambitions of Expo 67

Index

443

and New York 1964–65, 76–83, 86; cinematic environments as, 92, 104; Expo 67 as, 6, 13, 18–19, 35, 306, 320, 323, 398; French Canadian nation as, 56 utopianism: of Northrop Frye, 98; of Canadian Pavilion, 152; of Confederation, 159; of Refus global, 304; of Western medicine, 341 Vallières, Pierre, 17, 30n52 van der Rohe, Ludwig Mies, 216–17 van Ginkel, Blanche Lemco and Daniel, 85, 87, 90–1, 224–5, 371 Vatican II (Second Vatican Council), 331n36 Venne, Stéphane, 30–1n53, 271, 401 Verdal, Suzanne, 14, 30n49 Vermette, Claude, 305–6 Vietnam War, 17, 100, 286–8. See also activism “Vive le Québec libre!” See de Gaulle, Charles von Schaewen, Deidi, 344–5 Walt Disney Company, 29n44, 83, 245 Warhol, Andy, 23n7, 79, 341, 377 We Are Young! See Hammid, Alexander; Thompson, Francis Whitney, Allison, 97–101, 110n66 Williams, Eric, 196–7, 199. See also Trinidad and Tobago

444

Index

women, 96, 123, 182, 259, 267n72; feminism, 9; and Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 356–7 world exhibitions, 8, 23n10, 35, 40, 301; Brussels 1958, 11, 180–1, 186, 343; categories of, 3, 9, 22n4, 79, 87; Haiti 1949 (Port-au-Prince), 199, 211n87; London 1851 (Great Exhibition), 3, 92; New York 1939–40, 84, 89, 341; New York 1964–65, 4, 18, 22n4, 29n44, 76–9, 81, 83–4, 89, 91, 225, 341, 349, 369, 379, 391, 244; of the nineteenth century, 49, 55, 82–3; Osaka 1970, 251, 257, 259; Paris 1867, 85–6, 108n25; Paris 1889, 50; Paris 1900, 224; San Francisco 1939–40, 391; Seattle 1962, 4, 369, 391. See also Bureau of International Exhibitions World Festival of Culture, 185, 194 World Health Organization, 344 world’s fairs. See world exhibitions Wright, Frank Lloyd, 230, 299, 305, 315, 332n39 Wutunee, Noel, 116, 124, 128, 130 youth, 17; of Canada, 96; counterculture, 96, 270–2, 276, 279, 287–8; demographics, 272–5; of Quebec, 5, 72n98, 73n102, 74n107, 211n89. See also sixties, the