Jason - Montreal Main (2010)

[Simon]

   

A Queer Film Classic: this brilliant 1974 Canadian cinema verité film, set in Montreal's bohemian neighborhood "The Main" and hailed at its Whitney Museum debut, is a fascinating take on social mores and relationships in the 1970s and a twentysomething photographer's attraction for the teenaged son of acquaintances.

“Waugh and Garrison treat Montreal Main with all the complexity that a vanguard film dealing with the relationships between men and boys deserve. They eloquently describe and analyze the film, placing it at the interstices of film aesthetics, sexual liberation history, and the larger history of representations of the desiring body. They ask how it was possible to frame the questions about men’s and boys’ eroticism and longing, and largely non-controversially, and they suggest why such open explorations would give way not many years later to banal and predictable plots on television police serials. At once a formal reconsideration of a lost film treasure and astute analysis of debates about intergenerational desire, Montreal Main is a ‘must read’ for film critics and historians of sexuality alike.”