Among the many awe-inspiring and attention-grabbing aspects of Expo 67 were its vast arrays of multimedia presentations. Screens were everywhere at Expo 67, and they were used in ways that were largely unprecedented. In fact, Expo 67 became a showcase for bold experiments in Expanded Cinema—new approaches to film that reimagined how the medium could communicate, as well as how it could be experienced. This presentation highlights some of the most adventurous cinematic experiments at Expo 67, but it pays particular attention to how representations of Montreal itself, the host city, appeared in some of these films. Montreal was going through a particularly dynamic, eventful, and tumultuous period in its history.  How did films produced for Expo 67 capture this moment? What did they express?

 

Anthony Kinik is the Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Brock University. He is a film studies scholar specializing in documentary film, popular music & film, and cinema & the city, and he has a particular interest in Canadian and Québécois cinema. He has taught in Canada and Europe, and he has presented research in North America, South America, and Europe.

Together with his colleagues Steven Jacobs and Eva Hielscher, he co-edited the book The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars (Routledge, 2019), which was launched at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy in combination with a program of rare examples of the city symphony genre, and which has inspired symposia, conference workshops, and an extensive film retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.  His contributions to this book include a chapter on the Canadian city symphonies of Gordon Sparling, the Toronto-born director and producer who was responsible for roughly 200 films at Associated Screen News of Montreal and the National Film Board of Canada. Earlier, he was part of the CinemaExpo67 research team, and his essay “Celluloid City: Montreal and Multiscreen at Expo 67” appeared in the collection Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (McGill-Queen’s, 2014). Recent articles include “The Beluga Triangle: Pour la suite du monde (1962), New Quebec Cinema, and the Urban/Rural Dialectic,” which was published in the journal Shima in 2024, and “‘Prospectors With Vision’: Montreal and Crawley Films’s Expo 67 (1965),” which is due to appear in the Canadian Journal of Film and Media Studies (CJFMS) later this year. Kinik is an active member of the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada, and he was the book reviews editor of CJFMS from 2020-2025. He is currently working on a book on Sixties Montreal as a cinematic city.