In April 1934, Associated Screen News (ASN) released the latest film in its ground-breaking two-year-old Canadian Cameos series: Rhapsody in Two Languages, a modernist ode to Montreal, “the metropolis of Canada.” Rhapsody was directed by Gordon Sparling, who had founded the Canadian Cameos in an attempt to combat Hollywood’s colonization of Canada’s screens through the production of short films. According to Sparling, these “featurettes” provided a safer way of establishing “a foot in the door of theatrical production for Canada,” while also offering a unique opportunity “for experimentation in technique [and] ingenuity in presentation.” Rhapsody was the first of the Canadian Cameos to realize this potential, depicting one hectic day in the life of Montreal, and employing a wide range of experimental special effects to do so, including canted angles, extreme high- and low-angle shots, multiple exposures, superimpositions, and rapid and rhythmic montage. The impression that was created was of a modern metropolis defined by its sharp contrasts, a fact that was emphasized by the train conductor who appeared early in the film, welcoming the audience to Montreal:
Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen! Step aboard for a day in Montreal… . Montreal, the metropolis of Canada, the city of contrasts… . It’s modern! It’ s old! It’s gay! It’s pensive! Feel the pulse of its million people! It’s French! It’s English! It’s Montreal!
What follows is a brisk treatment of this city of contrasts from dawn to dawn, one that pays special attention to old versus new, traditional versus modern, young versus old, religious versus secular, and French versus English, and that builds to a rhythmic and aesthetic crescendo during its lively nightlife sequences.
Rhapsody was immediately recognized as a new benchmark for ASN, and it received a surprising amount of press for a theatrical short. Thus, while the Montreal Gazette praised Rhapsody for being “thoroughly cinematic,” an experience that appealed “to the eye rather than the ear,” the Montreal Daily Star was impressed by the film’s complexity and its ambition, noting that Sparling “must have spent months” on the film, and that the film not only successfully captured “the cosmopolitan spirit of the metropolis,” it did so “neatly.” Later that same year, The Christian Science Monitor commented that Sparling’s film had a “modern” sensibility that was very much in step with “the cinematic times,” and that, consequently, Rhapsody should, “be ranked as an art picture and not as a mere travelogue.” In all of these cases, the important thing is that Sparling’s work on Rhapsody was being recognized as film art, not commercial filler, but its artistry also did not register as pretentious or off-putting.
The film appears to have been inspired by Bonney Powell’s Manhattan Medley, as there is a strong resemblance between a number of Sparling’s sequences (stray cats and milk deliveries, typists typing furiously, a bartender mixing a cocktail vigorously, et cetera) and some found in the earlier film, not to mention that Fox-Movietone had recently established a division in Canada and ranked among ASN’s top competitors. It also appears to have been inspired by Irving Browning’s City of Contrasts (as was Manhattan Medley), most obviously in its insistence on Montreal as a “city of contrasts,” as well as during its nighttime section, which uses many of the techniques Browning did to create a similarly dizzying sense of the city’s nightlife.
Anthony Kinik
further reading
Allan, Blaine, “ ‘Rhapsody in Two Languages’ and One Depression,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 27, 4 (1993): 153–68.
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