Printemps Now! (English Version)
2019 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Jean Jean
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
Montreal shifts from late winter into spring in a wordless visual poem modeled on classic city-symphony films, assembling everyday urban rhythms into music-like montage.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a city-symphony film—the most consensus move imaginable—but Jean Jean's refusal to add narration or score manipulation when every fiber of the form screams for it is genuinely perverse; that restraint reads as a quiet middle finger to the genre's own traditions.
Printemps Now! inherits the formal DNA of Ruttmann and Vertov but earns its place in that lineage through disciplined formal choices: the editing rhythms don't impose false musicality onto Montreal's actual pace, and the sensory montage respects both the essay-film tradition and the city's own indifference to our desire for meaning.
The singular move is the sound design—or rather, the decision to let ambient urban noise remain *ambient* rather than elevate it into scored accompaniment—which transforms what could've been precious into something genuinely alive and present.