Cinema Canada (Apr 1976)

BOOK REVIEWS A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING Catalogue des acquisitions de documents cinématographiques 1974 by Pierre Allard, published by Bibliotheque Nationale du Québec, 1976, 313 pages. Rare it is in this world of malcontents that we find someone who truly likes his job. Rarer still are people working in a large bureaucracy who do their job well. Such a man is Pierre Allard, curator of the collection of books and documents on cinema at the Quebec provincial library. Sandwiched between the censor board and the prisons department in a government building located near the docks in historic old Montreal, the département de documentation cinématographique houses a _ truly astonishing number of publications on: cinema. It is said to be among the most extensive collections of its kind in the world. At last count the library included 13,000 books, 36,000 periodicals and 200,000 press clippings directly related to film. I remember attending a large American university offering a program in cinema and being impressed with their library of three book shelves filled with books and periodicals about film. I figured that they must have scoured the ends of the earth to come up with those thousand or so volumes on this arcane subject. I almost fainted when I met Mr. Allard back in 1970, and his place continues to amaze me. The history of this unique collection is a fascinating combination of private and public enterprise. Many years ago, Guy Coté, a director at the National Film Board and a film scholar long before the field was even heard of, started collecting magazines and books about film. His house soon became like a movie itself (a Marx Brothers one at that), with books in the kitchen, books in the bathroom and books piled up under the bed. Because he had gone into this game so early, and since he was one of the few people even interested in the field of film literature, he managed to get hold of some very valuable material. Ron Blumer teaches, broadcasts and writes about film. He has just finished Beyond Shelter, a film about the aged. Pierre Allard, director of the library, looking at one of his 36,000 magazines (About thirty years ago Harvard University’s library threw all their film books into the garbage — an impressive testament to academia’s interest in the subject.) His documentation on the early history of Canadian cinema is only now proving its full worth, and without his efforts much material would surely have been lost or scattered. When it became clear that Mr. Coté was either going to have to move out of his house or be smothered in books, he decided to sell his collection. He was offered a considerable sum for his books by the federal government, an offer which spurred the ever vigilant provincial government into believing that they were about to lose a valuable cultural resource to the enemy. They grabbed the books from the cellar and the bathroom and the attic and in October of 1970 the ministéere des affaires culturelles declared this specialized library open to the public. Which is where Pierre Allard comes into the story. Putting M. Allard in charge of a collection of over one hundred thousand film publications was like giving a heroin addict the poppy fields of Turkey. He is a fanatic (in the best sense of the word) with a mania for film documentation. When he first started with the film library, he would spend ten hours a day cataloguing and cross referenc-' ing and then spend his evenings clipping film reviews out of newspapers as a hobby. Under his devoted management, the library has grown so rapidly in the past five years that Mr. Allard and his assistants are slowly being squeezed out of the back door. The library presently subscribes to over 500 film publications from around the world and receives pretty well every new book on the subject that comes out in both English and French. A recently issued catalogue of acquisitions for the year 1974 alone comprises 313 pages and is_ itself a valuable biographical tool. Included in the listing of new books and current periodicals are 26 pages of names and addresses of film book publishers and 45 pages of names and addresses of current film magazines. The catalogue is available free to any library or university in Canada. With a collection so complete, one is constantly stumbling across amazing material, private documents, letters, scripts and obscure publications. As a resource for research it is remarkable, simply because it is so easy to follow up on things. While reading a book on smellavision you might find a reference to Monster Film Review of April 17, 1935 and by jingo the library has it. With all these documents, Allard has several ongoing projects of his own. One is a listing of Canadian film periodicals, past and present, and he has come up with an astounding 125 different titles. He has amassed biographical material on 3000 Canadian films and is working on the 15,000 others. They have biographical filmographies on 750 Quebec filmmakers, and _ boxes of clippings on any film you are ever likely to have heard of. The library is open to anyone studying film. It is wisely not a lending library, although some of the material is available to cther libraries on inter-library loan. The bibliothéque can be contacted directly by mail, 360 McGill Street room 101, Montreal H2Y 2E9, or by telephone at (514) 873-5398. But it’s best to come and take a look for yourself; _ it’s an amusing but losing game to try and find something that they don’t have. Ronald H. Blumer April 1976/51