“We were shown, as in some strange phantasmagoria, scenes from different places in France. First there was the arrival of a train at the Lyon-Perrache station […] you could clearly see each individual. It was most lifelike: you really were at the station. The train left and everything disappeared […] And the sea? We saw it, not immobile, but rolling its waves. It was most striking. ‘How refreshing!’ cried a jocular fellow.”
So reads the only surviving document of North America’s very first film screening. On Boul. Saint Laurent, on June 27, 1896, a bewildered La Presse writer sat in an invite-only crowd of equally-bewildered French-Canadians, in one evening inaugurating the illustrious traditions of Montreal cinema, industry events, and film dorkery.
Montreal has long served as the capital of a national film industry working outside of the Hollywood monopoly. The Palace Theatre screening was merely the beginning of motion pictures’ complex history in Montreal.
Louis Minier, the Canadian franchise holder for the Lumière brothers’ newfangled “Cinematograph” machine, along with his assistant, Louis Pupier, held the premiere at 974 Boulevard St-Laurent. For fin de siècle Montrealers, the present-day Chinatown address was the site of the glamorous Palace Theatre, housed in the now burned-down Robillard Building.