Andre Loiselle

St. Thomas University (Canada), Dean of Humanities, Faculty Member

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André Loiselle is Dean of Humanities and teaches film studies at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Loiselle holds a BA in Theatre from Université du Québec à Montréal, and an MA and a PhD from the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC. He joined St. Thomas in 2018 to become Dean after twenty years at Carleton University in Ottawa. His main areas of research are Canadian and Québécois cinema, theatricality in cinema, the horror film and screen adaptations of drama. He has published over forty refereed articles and chapters in scholarly anthologies, as well as a dozen books, including CINEMA OF PAIN: ON QUEBEC'S NOSTALGIC SCREEN (2020, with Liz Czach), THEATRICALITY IN THE HORROR FILM (2019) and THE CANADIAN HORROR FILM: TERROR OF THE SOUL (2015, with Gina Freitag). His current research explores the theatricality of horror spectatorship.

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Papers by Andre Loiselle

10. Look like a Worker and Act like a Worker: Stereotypical Representations of the Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films

5. From an Obsession with Death to an Oscar

1. The Production and Reception of Scabrous Conversations

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2008

The function of Andre Brassard's film "Il etait une fois dans l'Est" in the context of Michel Tremblay's "Cycle des Belles-soeurs

INTRQDUCTI ON On March 4, 1968, Jean-Claude Germain attended the first public reading of Michel T... more INTRQDUCTI ON On March 4, 1968, Jean-Claude Germain attended the first public reading of Michel Tremblay's play Les Be 11es-soeurs, held at the Apprentis-Sorciers theatre by the Centre d'Essai des Auteurs dramatiques. Struck by the power and originality of the dramatist's work, Germain wrote, in an article published a few days later, that Les Be 11es-soeurs marked the beginning of a new era in French-Canadian drama: "Lundi soir dernier, le nouveau theatre, quebecois est ne!"(1) (Last Monday evening, the new Quebecois theatre was born.-All translations are my own, unless explicitly noted otherwise.) Within the next few months, it became clear that Michel Tremblay, then rather unknown to the public, had, indeed, laid the grounds of a new theatre. The tremendous success of the first production of Les Be 11es-soeurs. which opened at the TheStre du Rideau Vert on Auguste 28th 1968, and the extraordinary polemic which arose from its use of joual(French-Canadian slang) and its forthright representation of Montreal working-class women, confirmed Germain's assertion that the creation of Les Be 11es-soeurs was n un evenement capital n (2) (a major event) in the history of French-Canadian theatre: "une etape aussi importante et aussi decisive que le furent a leur epoque Ti-coq(sic) de Gratien of short stories; La. Cite dans 1'oeuf(14). a novel; and two short plays: Les Paons. produced in 1971 but still unpublished, and Les Soc1es(15). published in 1979 in The Canad ian Theatre Rev i ew. Written in standard French and describing a world of mythology and fantasy, these four works create a universe of their own quite apart from that of Germaine Lauzon, her sisters and her neighbours from Les Be 11es-soeurs. Les Heros de mon enfance(16). an extravagant theatrical parody of children fairytales; L'Impromptu D'0utremont(17). a harsh criticism of the Quebecois petite bourgeoisie; Les Anclennes Odeurs(18) and Le. Coeur d£couvert(19). a play and a novel which take a touching look at the love relationships of Jean-Marc, a middle-aged French professor and Michel Tremblay's fictive alter ego, are some of the other works which are not directly related to the "Cycle des Be 11es-soeurs". All of these texts carry the distinctive Michel Tremblay stamp and are legitimate and coherent parts of the author's production. However, the homogeneity of the works which compose the "Cycle des Be 11es-soeurs" goes beyond a mere similarity of style, or the discernible presence, behind all characters, of a single subconscious. They are bound by a commonness of dialect, characters and milieu. The plays of the Cycle are Les Belles-soeurs(1968). En pieces Detachees(1969). La Duchesse de Langeai s(1969), Trois pet i ts tours(1969),Demain matin. Montrea1 m'attend(1970). A. to 1, pour tou 1 ours. ta Mar ie-Lou(1971). Hosanna(1973) , Bon.iour. la, bonjour ! (1974) , Surpr i se ! Surpr1se! (1975). Sainte Carmen de 1 a Main(1976). and Damn6e Manon. Church, my ass)-set the character in the same universe as Les Be 1 1es-soeurs. The diegesis of the novel, however, does not allow-6to establish a specific relationship with any of the plays of the Cycle. A fat raadame Lauzon is mentioned throughout the monologue, but nothing allows the reader to positively identify this character with the character of Germaine Lauzon in Les Be 11es-soeurs. Also, Laura's name is mentioned in a list of people having attented the birthday party of Yvette Longpre's sister-in-law, in Les Be 1 1es-soeurs. but still her connection with Germaine and the girls remains uncertain. The relationship between Laura Cadieux and Germaine Lauzon does become explicit, however, in Chroniques du P1ateau Mont-Roya1. As the reader discovers in the first volume of the series, published in 1978, Laura is the cousin of one of Germaine's neighbours, Albertine-also known as Robertine in En. p i eces detachees. (26) In the major literary work that Chroniques du P1ateau Mont-Roya1 constitute, Michel Tremblay manages to elaborate a complex network of relationships between dozens of characters from most of his major plays, and succeeds in transposing into novelistic form the universe which has grown out of more than a decade of stage production. At the centre of the universe depicted in the Chroniques-the east-end of Montreal in the 1940's and early 1950's-we find Albertine, her daughter Therese (Helene in En pieces detachees). her mother Victoire, her brother Gabriel, his wife (la grosse femme), their three sons(27), and Edouard, Albertine's second brother, better known to the theatre public as the Duchesse de Langeais. Around this nucleus gravitate most of the characters we have come to know through the author's plays: from Lucienne Boileau(28), introduced in Bonlour. 1 a. Bonjour. to Madeleine and Alex(29), presented on stage in Le. Vrai Monde?. In an interview given in 1981, Michel Tremblay clearly expressed the intentions behind this genesis of his theatre: J'ai ecrit un cycle entre 1965 et 1976, et j'ai eu besoin de decrire au monde comment les personnages en etaient arrives a #tre ce qu'ils etaient. Quand les quatre romans des Chron 1ques vont etre finis, l'oeuvre suivante sera Les Be 11es-soeurs. Je suis en train d'expliquer comment mes personnages sont devenus les be 11es-soeurs, comment ils sont devenus Marie-Lou, Carmen, etc.(30) (I wrote a cycle between 1965 and 1976, and I needed to describe to the people how the characters had managed to turn out the way they did. When the four(now five) volumes of the Chroniques are finished, the next work will be Les Be 11es-soeurs. I am explaining how my characters became the sisters in law (les be 1 1es-soeurs), how they became Marie-Lou, Carmen etc.) Now that the Chroniques du PIateau Mont-Roya1 have been written, they have to be considered in any serious analysis of the "Cycle des Be 11es-soeurs", for they provide the critic with enlightening and necessary Insights Into the narrative identity of the characters. But, the Chroniques were not Michel Tremblay's first attempt at organizing the universe of his plays into one work. In 1973, Michel Tremblay and Andre Brassard, who has directed most of the author's plays, temporarily left the theatre to prolong their exploration of the milieu of Les Be 1 Ies-soeurs In a film called l\_ eta i t une f o i s dans 1 ' est. Following Andre Brassard's original idea(31), they tried to create a fictional world inhabited by characters from half a dozen plays(32)

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3. The Death of Quebec History

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2008

Afferent drama / efferent cinema: the structure of modern Canadian and Québécois film-mediated drama from 1972 to 1992

496-522. "Never had so many Canadians come of age at a single time and never had they been so aff... more 496-522. "Never had so many Canadians come of age at a single time and never had they been so affluent. By the late 1960s, Canada was dominated, as never before, by its young" (p.503). "Federal-government income doubled between 1957 and 1967 ... the new money supported scores of programs [. . .] The millions of dollars poured into the coffers of arts organizations, universities, orchestras, publishers, and the CBC generated far more talent than Canadians had ever believed they possessed" (p.503, 508).

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Birth of a “Miserable Monster”

Entre théâtre et cinéma… Présentation

L'Annuaire théâtral, 2001

Tous droits réservés © Centre de recherche en civilisation canadienne-française (CRCCF) et Sociét... more Tous droits réservés © Centre de recherche en civilisation canadienne-française (CRCCF) et Société québécoise d'études théâtrales (SQET), 2001 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'

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C.R.A.Z.Y. By Robert Schwartzwald Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Oct 1, 2016

Stage-Bound

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Oct 16, 2003

Jerry Wasserman, ed. Modern Canadian Plays

Theatre Research in Canada-recherches Theatrales Au Canada, 1995

Cinema of Pain: On Quebec's Nostalgic Screen

C.R.A.Z.Y. by Robert Schwartzwald (review)

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Oct 1, 2016

C.R.A.Z.Y. By Robert Schwartzwald Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015, 178 pp.REVIEWED BY ANDRE L... more C.R.A.Z.Y. By Robert Schwartzwald Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015, 178 pp.REVIEWED BY ANDRE LOISELLEJean-Marc Vallees C.R.A.Z.Y. is a bittersweet coming-of-age story about a gay character named Zac (Marc-Andre Grondin), who struggles throughout his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood to find his place among his eccentrically conventional family and earn the respect of his charming, but shamelessly homophobic father, Gervais (Michel Cote). The film was the biggest critical and commercial success of 2005 in Quebec and, over a decade after its release, it remains among the ten top-grossing movies ever made in the province. As such, C.R.A.Z.Y. is unquestionably deserving of a book-length study; and Robert Schwartzwalds contribution to the "Queer Film Classics" series, edited by Matt Hays and Tom Waugh for Arsenal Pulp Press, certainly delivers an eloquent, informative and insightful examination of the film. As would be expected of a single-film monograph like this one, Schwartzwald s short volume provides a detailed account of the films production history (26-39), a nuanced reading of its intricate narrative structure (44-50), sophisticated visual composition (50-62) and evocative musical score (77-93), as well as a discussion of the broader Quebecois (63-74) and gay (117-131) cultural contexts within which the film operates. Moreover, Schwartzwald does a good job of accounting for some of the linguistic subtleties that might be lost in translation for an Anglophone spectatorship. For instance, his accurate interpretation of the expression "tu men feras pas un fifi" (113) goes a long way to demonstrate the manner in which Vallee and his co-author, Francois Boulay, use every-day French Canadian idioms to construct a complex and multi-layered scriptBut what comes as a most pleasant surprise is Schwartzwald s unexpected critique of C.R.A.Z.Y.'s putative status as a "queer classic". C.R.A.Z.Y.s queemess is especially dubious in terms of its happy ending, which shows a saccharine reconciliation between Zac and Gervais who, even in his old age, still refuses to discuss his now middle-aged son's sexual orientation. As Schwartzwald pointedly asks:Is it problematic, then, to speak of C.R.A.Z.Y. as a queer film? Certainly, if by queer we mean a work that has at its core the refusal to stabilize categories of gender or sexuality. C.R.A.Z.Y. is quite orthodox throughout in its representation of sexual difference as a chance occurrence, but all the same innate and incontrovertible [...] Nor is C.R.A.Z.Y. queer, if by that we would mean that it critically explores the fluid ways in which sexual practices and identities are alternately included or excluded from what Gayle Rubin calls the "charmed circle" of social legitimacy [... ] In the narrator Zac, the film has arguably produced the sexually non-threatening and ultimately deferential gay citizen who has won his position inside the "charmed circle" of the early twenty-first century. (136-137,138-139).It is refreshing to read a book that does not simply assume the undisputable merit of its subject-matter only because it happens to have been deemed worthy of inclusion in a "classics" series.Highly manipulative in its calculated insertions of beloved "oldies" and classic rock favorites on the soundtrack, deliberate references to the quaintness of 1960s Quebec, and unapologetic reliance on melodramatic cliches, such as maternal sacrifice, unrequited love and violent sibling rivalry, C.R.A.Z.Y. comes across as a skillfully-crafted mainstream film that never aims to shock or disturb its audience. As Schwartzwald suggests, its gay content could easily be dismissed as just a trendy variation on the conventional sexual-awakening trope of the coming-of-age narrative. But ultimately, the author chooses to redeem C.R.A.Z.Y and claim that, in spite of its penchant for homonormativity, it remains a valid film from the perspective of queer spectatorship. …

2. The Decline of Patriarchy and the Death of the Feminine

4. Pure Laine Evil: The Horrifying Normality Of Quebec’S Ordinary Hell In The Film Adaptations Of Patrick Senécal’S “Romans D’Épouvante”

Tackling Wicked Monsters: The Horror Film as an Experiment in Leadership

Journal of Leadership Studies, May 9, 2018

Films have the ability to illustrate several concepts from management and organizational studies ... more Films have the ability to illustrate several concepts from management and organizational studies and, for that reason, are frequently used as teaching tools to examine different modes of leadership (Champoux, 2001). Rajendran and Andrew (2014), for instance, have demonstrated the value of relying on fi lms like Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998), and Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982) to enable students to critically assess the behavior of leaders. Long (2017) has drawn an extensive list of useful dramas and documentaries from what he calls the "Film & Leadership Case Study Club" (or "FLiCS" Film Club), which range from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow Part II (David Yates, 2011). However, Long and other scholars have generally ignored the horror fi lm as an eff ective genre to study leadership. As the current article contends, the very nature of the horror fi lm provides a perfect opportunity for the viewer

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Les Muses orphelines du théâtre au cinéma : en conversation avec Robert Favreau

L'Annuaire théâtral, 2001

Les Muses orphelines du théâtre au cinéma : en conversation avec Robert Favreau L 'adaptation cin... more Les Muses orphelines du théâtre au cinéma : en conversation avec Robert Favreau L 'adaptation cinématographique de pièces de théâtre, bien que très courante non seulement à Hollywood mais aussi en France, en ^ Angleterre et ailleurs, demeure un phénomène assez récent au Québec comme au Canada 1. Ce n'est que depuis une dizaine d'années qu'ont été présentées certaines adaptations comme Being at home with Claude

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A Small Life for the Small Screen : On the Cultural Phenomenon of the Sitcom La petite vie and the Critical Failure of the Feature Ding et Dong, le film

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Mar 1, 2006

L’émission ayant obtenu la plus haute cote d’écoute de l’histoire de la télévision québécoise fut... more L’émission ayant obtenu la plus haute cote d’écoute de l’histoire de la télévision québécoise fut un épisode de la série La petite vie (mars 1995), mettant en vedette Serge Thériault et Claude Meunier dans les rôles de « Moman » et « Popa » Paré. Dans les années 1980, Thériault et Meunier, sous le nom de scène « Ding et Dong », étaient devenus célèbres pour leurs spectacles de cabaret qui incluaient des sketchs avec les personnages de Popa et Moman. Passés à la télévision au cours des années 1990, Popa et Moman sont devenus de véritables phénomènes de société. Pourtant quand Meunier et Thériault tentèrent de transposer leur humour absurde au grand écran, dans Ding et Dong, le film (1990, Alain Chartrand), la critique fut méprisante. Par une analyse culturelle et formelle des spectacles, de la série télévisée et du long métrage, cet article tente d’expliquer le succès extraordinaire de Moman et Popan à la télé et l’échec de Ding et Dong au cinéma.

Cinema, Theatre and Red Gushing Blood in Jean Beaudin’s Being at Home with Claude

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Oct 1, 1996

L'adaptation cinématographique de la pièce de théâtre Being at Home with Claude, de René-Dani... more L'adaptation cinématographique de la pièce de théâtre Being at Home with Claude, de René-Daniel Dubois, débute avec un prologue en noir et blanc qui nous montre les antécédents du drame original. Ce prologue, créé de toutes pièces par le cinéaste Jean Beaudin, a plusieurs fonctions, dont celle de fournir certaines données sur le meurtre qui précède l'interrogatoire constituant l’ensemble du texte de dubois. Mais au delà de son rôle informationnel, cette préface illustre aussi de façon subtile, surtout par son utilisation très brève de la couleur pour représenter le sang qui gicle, le processus d'adaptation auquel la pièce a été soumise. En analysant les rapports qui existent entre le texte original, le film dans son ensemble et le prologue, en particulier au niveau des signifiants chromatiques et des modes de visualisation empruntés par beaudin pour cinématiser le propos de la pièce, cet article tente d'offrir une lecture de Being at Home with Claude qui situe l'oeuvre dans le contexte de certaines théories comparatives du cinéma et du théâtre.

3. Cinéma du Grand Guignol : Theatricality in the Horror Film

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2011

The historical link between horror fi lms and the gory, sensationalist popular theatre of the nin... more The historical link between horror fi lms and the gory, sensationalist popular theatre of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been noted. Dave Beech and John Roberts, for instance, suggest that 'the Hollywood horror movie is no doubt the true descendant of Grand Guignol.' 1 Similarly, Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson in their defi nitive study of the French theatre of horror assert 'that the Grand-Guignol greatly infl uenced subsequent horror fi lms.' 2 In the same vein, drama historian Michael R. Booth sees in the Gothic stage melodrama of the 1800s 'an early equivalent of the modern horror fi lm.' 3 Filmmakers have often evoked the theatrical genealogy of horror cinema. Although there have been few actual fi lm adaptations of Grand Guignol plays-Vernon Sewell's Latin Quarter (1946) based on Pierre Mille and C. de Vylars's L'Angoisse (1908; in English by José Levy as The Medium, 1912) 4 is a rare surviving example-many horror movies explicitly refer to the stage as the originator of screen terror and the privileged site of cinematic fear. These references to the theatre of horror do not merely pay lip service to a revered predecessor. Rather, the fi lms that acknowledge the theatre of gore do so to refl ect on the nature of horror on screen. Looking at a number of horror fi lms that identify explicitly the theatre as the locus horribilis par excellence, from the early Peter Lorre vehicle Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) to Douglas Hickox's cult classic Theatre of Blood (1973) and the straight-to-video thriller Acts of Death (Jeff Burton, 2007,), I will argue that such works use theatricality to foreground certain character types, expose structural paradoxes, and highlight modes of performance common to the cinematic tale of terror. The fi lms discussed here overtly conceive of the theatre as the antecedent of fi lmic horror, as the mayhem that affl icts the characters often

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10. Look like a Worker and Act like a Worker: Stereotypical Representations of the Working Class in Quebec Fiction Feature Films

5. From an Obsession with Death to an Oscar

1. The Production and Reception of Scabrous Conversations

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2008

The function of Andre Brassard's film "Il etait une fois dans l'Est" in the context of Michel Tremblay's "Cycle des Belles-soeurs

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3. The Death of Quebec History

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2008

Afferent drama / efferent cinema: the structure of modern Canadian and Québécois film-mediated drama from 1972 to 1992

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Birth of a “Miserable Monster”

Entre théâtre et cinéma… Présentation

L'Annuaire théâtral, 2001

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C.R.A.Z.Y. By Robert Schwartzwald Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Oct 1, 2016

Stage-Bound

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Oct 16, 2003

Jerry Wasserman, ed. Modern Canadian Plays

Theatre Research in Canada-recherches Theatrales Au Canada, 1995

Cinema of Pain: On Quebec's Nostalgic Screen

C.R.A.Z.Y. by Robert Schwartzwald (review)

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Oct 1, 2016

2. The Decline of Patriarchy and the Death of the Feminine

4. Pure Laine Evil: The Horrifying Normality Of Quebec’S Ordinary Hell In The Film Adaptations Of Patrick Senécal’S “Romans D’Épouvante”

Tackling Wicked Monsters: The Horror Film as an Experiment in Leadership

Journal of Leadership Studies, May 9, 2018

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Les Muses orphelines du théâtre au cinéma : en conversation avec Robert Favreau

L'Annuaire théâtral, 2001

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A Small Life for the Small Screen : On the Cultural Phenomenon of the Sitcom La petite vie and the Critical Failure of the Feature Ding et Dong, le film

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Mar 1, 2006

Cinema, Theatre and Red Gushing Blood in Jean Beaudin’s Being at Home with Claude

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Oct 1, 1996

3. Cinéma du Grand Guignol : Theatricality in the Horror Film

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2011

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“The Québécois Nightmare: The Low-Brow, Schlocky, English-Language Horror Films of Maurice Devereaux,” Annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Montreal, March 2015.

In his 25-year career, Québécois filmmaker Maurice Devereaux has managed to complete only four fi... more In his 25-year career, Québécois filmmaker Maurice Devereaux has managed to complete only four fiction feature films (with a fifth apparently underway.) In and of itself, this modest output is not entirely atypical in Québec. For instance, over his more-than-50year career, renowned cineaste Michel Brault made only 6 fiction feature films. What is atypical, however, is the kind of films that Devereaux has made -gory horror movies --and the language this francophone Montrealer has chosen to use in his films -English. Perhaps most uncharacteristic of Quebec cinema, Devereaux's feature-film productions have never received substantial support from the Quebec government film funding agency, Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC) --save for minuscule script development subsidies and tax credits (Brendan). Whenever he has appealed to SODEC for sizeable funding, Devereaux has always received the same answer: "It is not in SODEC's mandate to encourage this kind of film projects" (Bérubé). While not stated officially, SODEC's de facto mandate is to support culturally significant motion pictures -especially earnest art films and endearing comedies … and en français si possible! As such, Devereaux's corpus represents everything that "official" Québec cinema isn't! This is not to say the Devereaux has been completely ignored; in fact he enjoys quite a cult following among horror movie buffs around the world. His End of the Line (2007), for instance, which received basically zero funding from either SODEC or Telefilm Canada,

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Zombie Leadership: Lessons in Governance from the Cinematic Undead

The Zombie narrative, at least in cinema, has always dealt in some way with the issue of leadersh... more The Zombie narrative, at least in cinema, has always dealt in some way with the issue of leadership: either as a metaphor for dictatorial leadership where the Zombie embodies an enslaved follower; or as a study in human inventiveness, where the Zombie menace compels the Living to come together and adopt various leadership styles to respond to attacks from the Undead. This talk briefly explores various modes of leadership as embodied in tales of the cinematic undead.

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