Comédie

"This video in two parts is a newcomer's portrait of Montréal, and focuses on two of my architectural obsessions: the Hydro Québec building and the Métro. I spent my first winter in Montréal in a cold, dark, first-floor apartment. I sat in the kitchen beside the electric heater, drinking coffee and watching the disk on the electric meter spin faster and faster, all the while wondering how I would manage to pay the bills. At night, I lay in bed and looked at the enormous illuminated 'Q' on the Hydro Québec building and wondered how much it cost to keep it lit every night. A quote from a physics text brought this first section into focus. The second section is less autobiographically-based. In it, a man searches for the meaning of life in the tile patterns of Champ-de-Mars metro station. Though I did spend a great deal of time at that particular station asking some of the same questions he does; I took his search to an end much more absurd than anything I could hope to enact. The moral of these two tales is: 'Don't lose your sense of humour'. It's from this cliché that the piece derives its title."

—Nelson Henricks

This title is also available on Nelson Henricks Videoworks: Volume 1.