Last Dance on the Main

An animated documentary on the demolition of a row of historic buildings on Montreal’s St Laurent boulevard, also known as “The Main” by politicians and building developers. The film also portrays the resistance put up by a cabaret burlesque artists and the local community against their expropriation. The story of The Main is told through the voices of an architect, a cultural historian, a local activist, and the venue’s owner. The animation considers the unfolding of the events that led to the partial demolition of the area buildings and the challenges faced today by this fundamental part of the heritage and identity of the city.
The film, produced at Concordia University and with the collaboration of local music composer Tristan Capacchione, was made almost exclusively with paper-cut silhouettes, surfaces and other objects on a light table in the stop-motion technique. For the filmmaker, the artisanal way of making the film was a sensorial exploration of the historic neighbourhood in question, but also an expression of resistance to the dominant computer-generated depictions of new urban developments. Thus, craft and technique become a metaphor for all the human experience, which moulds the city and its buildings, often unruly yet deeply meaningful.

The material, when placed between light source and receiver, reveals fascinating possibilities yet it is the limitations of their physicalness that allows for imaginative thinking. I believe that the whole idea of animation is to animate the inanimate, and the coming alive and transformation of mere pieces of paper become a paradigm for how to see and what to expect from our material world, and, in my research, from our built world, our cities, and our architecture.
Animation is the most plastic of the arts in the sense that the animator can "mold" every frame of the animated film separately, controlling both time and content, and, in my case, literally mold/manipulate the depicted materials. Animation is explicitly illusionary, yet with the tacit consent of the viewer to suspend all disbelief, it liberates itself to reveal the most ungraspable and unspoken truths.