Pierre Véronneau (Montréal) &Louis Pelletier (Quebec)

Databases for Early Cinema Research

In the mid-1990’s, the Université de Montréal research group Grafics began to index some Québec newspapers between 1895 to 1915 to identify all the information related to cinema (advertisement and articles). The indexing was done in relation with further research (names, titles, subjects) to be made by the group. Rapidly another research project grew out of this one, since it was discovered that many films were shot in Québec during the silent era. This project built another in depth database with fields related specifically to film studies. This database was put on the web in fall 2006 (http://cri.histart.umontreal.ca/Grafics/fr/filmo/default.asp). Through a partnership between the Grafics and the Cinémathèque québécoise, some of the information of the filmographic database were put into the Répertoire des productions audiovisuelles, a database built by the later institution, that is a reference by itself and a point of access to the collections and the research tools of the Cinémathèque. Part of them is already on the Web (http://collections.cinematheque.qc.ca/).

The paper will expose the specificity of the two Grafics databases, pointing out how they were built by film scholars involved in many fields of research that brought their own concepts into the design of the databases, what information each database includes and how it is structured, and why they already helped deepening the research on the film activities during the silent era in Québec. The paper will also present the results of the cooperation between a university and a film archive. Finally, it will open on a new perspective of linkage between the Grafics, the Cinémathèque and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec around a research project on the early film activity in Quebec based on the way it was reflected in the newspapers. The result would be a global website with many internal links for research, reference, and documentation.