ÉMERGENCE DE LA CRITIQUE DE CINÉMA DANS LA PRESSE POPULAIRE QUÉBÉCOISE

For the last 50 years, it has been common to write about how Quebec cinema was born around the 1960s with cinéma direct. To do so, however, is to neglect the 60 preceding years and the important pioneers, such as L.-E Ouimet, J.-A Hormier or Albert Tessier. Historians of Quebec cinema have thought and continue to think that a film criticism worthy of the name didn't appear until the end of the 1950s, via ciné-clubs and the magazines that they launched. However, as early as the 1920s popular Quebec publications had popular-culture critics who were interested in cinema and contributed to the development of a fully competent criticism along the lines of a model borrowed from their Parisian and American colleagues, whose judgements they knew very well. This all therefore occurred via a distinctive model, Quebec film criticism having emerged from and being consolidated in popular journals far before it the appearance of cinephile magazines. In France and elsewhere, for instance, criticism developed in specialised, cooperative or cinéphile magazines. The enlarged history of this emergent Quebec criticism constituted an interesting contribution not only to the history of Quebec cinema but also to a general history of film criticism, which is surprisingly understudied. This article seeks to begin such work by studying film criticism in a daily newspaper from Quebec in the 1920s.