Ville décor, ville substitut, ville habitée : les représentations différenciées de Montréal dans les séries télévisées

Abstract

The city of Montreal is an important destination, behind Toronto and Vancouver, for filming in Canada, both nationally and internationally (especially for U.S. filmmakers). The article aims to compare filming locations, representations of the city on screen and geographical imaginaries linked to Montreal: to what extent does the choice of filming locations lead to a selective image of the city of Montreal according to the productions and the audiences? While the city of Montreal is often used as a generic or substitute city setting in American series, some Quebec productions choose, on the contrary, a strong territorial anchoring in more peripheral neighborhoods. The use of cross-methodologies allows us to question the notion of the imaginary applied to the city of Montreal, and the discrepancies observed between a city that is seen from the outside and a city that is seen by its inhabitants, an inhabited city. The article will focus on the mini-series “Je voudrais qu'on m'efface”, which takes place in the working-class and multicultural Saint-Michel district, in order to examine the inhabitation of the district as it is represented on screen, thereby overcoming certain representations of the city in other series and nourishing the Montreal imaginary.

Keywords

• TV series
• Representations
• Geographical imaginaries
• Filming
• Living
• Montréal