Film Magazines

  • Film Magazines

    The cover of issue no. 7 of the magazine Séquences (December 1956).

    Source : Université de Montréal

  • Film Magazines

    Nicole Germain on the cover of the magazine Le Film (December 1946)

    Source : Collection Pierre Pageau

A Promotional Tool
Several magazines for film fans were published in Quebec during the silent period, but only one, Le Film (1921-62), survived the transition to the talking film. In addition, between the arrival of the talking film and that of television in 1952, there appeared only one new popular film magazine of any importance, Le Courrier du cinéma (1935-54). American film magazines were widely distributed in Quebec at the time, it should be noted. Le Courrier du cinéma described itself as the “official monthly magazine of movie theatres and the principal producers and distributors of films in Canada and the United States”. In fact, the magazine was for the most part a publication for publicising France-Film.

Other magazines, however, promoted Quebec cinema, especially feature films made in Quebec after the mid-1940s. These publications expressed the dream of a Quebec Hollywood with their reports on film premieres and visits to the set and included Cinémonde (1942-47), a magazine “at the service of French-Canadian movie buffs”; Le magazine du cinéma et de la radio (1942-46); and Radio, the “Revue des Quat’z Arts” (1949-50).

Film Societies and Film BuffsBeginning in 1949, the Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique facilitated the birth of film societies. To sustain the movement, the JEC’s Commission étudiante du cinéma founded a “Film education booklet”, Découpages. Seventeen issues were published between 1950 and 1955, and its principal contributors were Michel Brault, Pierre Juneau, Marc Lalonde and Jacques Giraldeau. In 1955 the magazine Séquences, still published at the time of this writing in 2010, took over from Découpages and Liaison, the other magazine published by the JEC, between 1952 and 1953.

Parlons cinéma (1948-50), like Ciné-Revue (a single issue published in 1948), were film-buff magazines devoted to French auteur films. These magazines, along with Projections (1952-54), published by the “Société du Film” at the Université de Montréal, were the forerunners to secular film magazines such as Objectif (1960-67) which played a pivotal role in new currents in Quebec cinema in the early 1960s.