Ville-Marie
1965 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Denys Arcand
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
Montreal began as Ville-Marie, a missionary settlement founded by French settlers intent on planting Christianity in North America; the film recalls those founders and traces what of that origin survives in the modern city.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Arcand's treating a founding myth with the same deadpan reverence most docs reserve for celebrity biopics—except he keeps letting the surreal seep in, which means the 'missionary settlement' conceit becomes almost deliriously unstable, and I respect that he won't let us settle into comfortable nostalgia.
A formally austere historical meditation that locates itself precisely in the essay-film tradition—Arcand's use of archival material, voice, and montage to excavate what remains of Ville-Marie's spiritual founding shows the kind of considered restraint and intellectual rigor that defines the best of NFB documentary practice.
The decision to overlay mythic and contemplative tones onto straightforward historical material creates this almost unsettling friction—Arcand picks the exact moments where the city's present-day architecture and street life register as phantom echoes of something sacred, and that editing choice turns a 27-minute film into something genuinely haunting.