To hear Girard tell it, the story took on a life of its own, guided only by the historical realities that had to be respected. It also served as a venue for field hockey, during the 1976 Summer Olympics. The doctoral candidate in question is Baptiste Asigny, a Mohawk from Kahnawake. Team Roster Standings Personnel History of the Alouettes Alouettes in the Hall of Fame rights reserved. “It’s about my roots, our roots. Other individual donors whose generosity built and renovated the stadium were William C. Macdonald and John W. McConnell. In 2004, The Alouettes installed a FieldTurf surface at Molson Stadium replacing the old-style Astroturf. Designed by Percy Erskine Nobbs,[4] the stadium was officially dedicated as McGill Graduates' Stadium at an intercollegiate track meet on October 22, 1915. Such a significant contribution to historic, archeological, anthropological, and Indigenous cultural communities does not warrant a proper round of academic scrutiny? Bruce W. Hodgins (1931- 2019) Historian and Master Canoeist, Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, History Department at the University of Saskatchewan. The film also fulfils a personal goal for Girard, who has followed a violin from 17th-century Europe to 1960s Communist China in The Red Violin; explored 19th-century Japan in Silk and chronicled the exacting standards of a boarding school for young singers in Boychoir, but has never had the chance to depict his hometown on the screen.
MONTREAL—Quebec director François Girard’s best-known film, The Red Violin, told the fictional tale of an instrument and its players by following it through centuries and across continents. When a revived Alouettes franchise was forced to move a playoff game out of Olympic Stadium due to a U2 concert scheduled for the day of the game, they moved the game to Molson Stadium. Congrats on your thesis and your new position at Queen’s. expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto The stadium is evacuated, and a few hours later, it becomes a protected archaeological site. In that same vein, his latest project, Hochelaga, Land of Souls, which was released in Quebec cinemas this week, might be alternatively titled Four Brief Movies About Montreal. However, in many instances, scholarly engagement stems largely from reinterpretation of a pre-existing or already known repertoire of primary sources – whether they be official government reports, journals, correspondence, account books, dispatches, censuses, surveys, maps, parish registers, notarial records, oral traditions, and indeed artefacts. Asigny unceremoniously dumps these other objects into a chapter titled “Incidental Discoveries,” yet he still discusses them at length in the short time allotted to him for the oral presentation. All of this on the spot of a massacre in 1267 between warring Indigenous tribes in which just one man survives, a descendant of Baptiste Asigny (played by Algonquin rapper Samian), the modern-day doctoral student who is leading the archeological excavation. The Examining Committee and other audience members seem generally pleased with Asigny’s oral presentation, and perplexingly that seems to be enough for the thesis defence! The stadium is also home to the McGill Team and McGill Martlets of the RSEQ, the Montreal Royal of the American Ultimate Disc League, and the Canadian Corporate Soccer League, the largest amateur corporate league in Canada. [8] The project to see the smallest CFL stadium increase to a seating capacity of 25,012 cost $29.4 million. Scott, you are right. Granted, it is not an accurate representation on how a thesis is defended. Any one of these “incidentally discovered” artefacts could have supported an entire thesis of its own. Asigny need not worry much about his defence, for he is presenting a doctoral project that could only be found in a movie – the irrefutable discovery of the site of the ancient St. Lawrence Iroquoian village of Hochelaga, the exact place Jacques Cartier visited on the Island of Montreal in 1535. Percival Molson Memorial Stadium (Montreal, Quebec): Address, … The film accurately depicts these events, combining Cartier’s journal (read against the grain) with St. Lawrence Iroquoian ethnohistory. “All the things that the film talks about are common to any Canadian.”, En Scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. One night on the campus of McGill University, a rainstorm opens a sinkhole in the field during a game at Percival Molson Memorial Stadium, killing one player. To order copies of This part is truly 80%-90% of the entire defence process. This is not a real thesis defence. Moreover, Asigny’s inclusion of all the objects discovered in the sinkhole in his dissertation is puzzling since he would have to engage with a vast scholarly literature to properly analyse each segment of the more-than-400-year history he analyzes in his doctoral project. It would have been nice to see the members of Asigny’s committee’s reaction to, interest in or questions about such a significant project. As we find out, for the last decade or so, Asigny has excavated the field of the Percival Molson Memorial Stadium at McGill University after a rainstorm opened a massive sinkhole during a football game, killing one McGill player. We’re the gardeners of that idea and what it becomes is not entirely our free will. One cheeky reviewer dubbed the 1998 production Five Short Films About a Fiddle. In a typical thesis defence, after the short oral presentation the committee is expected to ask relevant, clarifying, and analytical questions on the project. “This is how it became what it became with the multiple stories.”.
Construction was completed in 1914 on what was then known as McGill Graduates stadium, which was located on the slope of Mount Royal, at the corner of University and Pine (avenue Des Pins). ", The CFL Publishes The 2008 Schedule | Montreal Alouettes, "Visiting the Alouettes' new home | Montreal Alouettes", "Expansion of Montreal's Molson Stadium approved", "Molson Stadium to begin $29.4M expansion", Expansion Project Approved | Montreal Alouettes, Percival Molson Stadium under construction, McGill University webpage for Percival Molson Memorial Stadium, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Percival_Molson_Memorial_Stadium&oldid=954715682, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 3 May 2020, at 22:40. Le Stade Percival-Molson sert de domicile aux Alouettes de Montréal, équipe de la Ligue canadienne de football (LCF), depuis 1998. The effort appears to have paid off. Basically, just a recap or refresher, as the Examining Committee has already thoroughly read the dissertation. The film skips ahead to an outdoor scene on the steps of the building with Asigny and his supervisor Dr. Morin handing him a bottle of wine, congratulating him on a successful “defence,” and addressing him as “doctor.” However, the Examining Committee never actually did any “examining” in the movie! But the unearthing of a small metal cross that turns out to be the one brandished by French explorer Jacques Cartier on his arrival at the Iroquoian village of Hochelaga on Oct. 3, 1535, is the pivotal thread in the film.
Mohawk language activist and actor Wahiakeron Gilbert, Algonquin hereditary chief Dominique Rankin and former journalist Marie-Josée Tardif, who is also Algonquin, translated dialogue and ensured an accurate portrayal of Indigenous songs, rituals and dress that appear in the film.
It was a laudatory play on Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, an award-winning 1993 biopic about the reclusive Canadian pianist. The Ph.D. defence comes after the long and laborious work of researching and writing the dissertation and can be the source of much anxiety and trepidation for the doctoral candidate. He bases this claim on two pieces of key evidence found in the sinkhole – 1) Traces of a triple palisade Indigenous village like the one Jacques Cartier described in his 1535-1536 journal 2) A gold-plated crucifix whose provenance Asigny is able to link to a foundry in France that purportedly supplied Cartier’s second expedition. Frustratingly, the movie skips over the most substantive parts of a thesis “defence”! The Selwyn House Gryphons high-school football team also play their home games at the stadium. The film portrays Cartier’s arrival at Hochelaga, replete with a realistic palisade village, Iroquoian-longhouses, religiously zealous Frenchmen, and an encounter rife with cultural misunderstandings (for example, an Iroquois translator mistakes an image of Jesus Christ on an embossed ceramic for an “injured warrior”). However, the full width is available for more than half of each end zone, with the only missing pieces being the relatively small bits off the corners. A way more exciting way to present a lesson in history and the archeological process. The story of Hochelaga is told through a series of four vignettes structured around an Archaeology thesis defence at the Université de Montréal. Email: awoods@thestar.ca, Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. Percival Molson Memorial Stadium (also known in French as Stade Percival-Molson; commonly referred to as Molson Stadium in English or Stade Molson in French) is an outdoor football stadium located downtown on the slopes of Mount Royal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. “It’s talking about the history of the country, the dispossession of the land by Europeans and the pushing out of First Nations from their land, from our past, from our history books,” Girard said. Also, temporary bleachers in the east end-zone were replaced with 1,500 permanent seats, a new section was added to the northeast corner, and 19 new private suites were constructed. His will left $75,000 to the university to help pay most of the total costs for the completion of the stadium.