THE JOURNEY OF A BISHOP BLOG REPORT:
On Friday I will attend the funeral in Montreal
of a dear Jesuit colleague:
Father Marc
Gervais, S.J.
December 3, 1929-March 25, 2012
December 3, 1929-March 25, 2012
 |
| Marc Gervais, a priest from Montreal, taught for decades at Loyola College and Concordia. |
Pierre Obendrauf, Postmedia News
Postmedia News • Mar. 28, 2012
Last Updated: Mar. 28, 2012 3:05 AM ET
A Montreal priest with a passion for world cinema,
Marc Gervais was an influential educator, film consultant and author of
scholarly works on Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
He died late Sunday afternoon, age 82, at a Jesuit
retreat in Pickering, Ont. His funeral is Friday at his parish church next to
Concordia University's Loyola campus, where he taught for decades.
Gervais had been suffering from dementia for
several years when he passed away. He is survived by his brother, André, a
prominent Montreal lawyer, and his sister, Connie.
Family, friends, colleagues and students remember
Gervais as a charismatic humanist who communicated his lifelong love of film to
generations of Loyola College and Concordia students.
Among them were Denys Arcand (a future Oscar
winner), John Kent Harrison (who went on to make TV movies such as The
Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler), and Kevin Tierney (producer of Bon Cop, Bad
Cop).
"I think in some ways the goal of my entire
professional career has been to get Marc's approval," Tierney wrote by email
from Mexico City, where he's promoting his latest film, French Immersion.
"Maybe I don't have to worry about that anymore or
maybe it's worse now knowing I can't."
Some of Gervais' students went on to become
journalists, such as the CBC's Hana Gartner and The Gazette's Paul Cherry, who
took two or three courses with him in the mid-1990s.
"He was humble about his credentials," said
Cherry, now The Gazette's crime reporter. "I remember one day he mentioned in a
very by-theway manner that he knew Jean-Luc Godard personally."
Born and raised in Sherbrooke, Que., Gervais was
the second child of Sylvia Mullins and Superior Court Justice Césaire Gervais.
He got the movie bug early: Though not yet the legal cinema-going age of 14, he
used to tag along with his grandmother, Lily Mullins, on her outings to the
theatre.
Gervais graduated from Loyola in 1950 with a
bachelor of arts degree. In 1960 he got a master's of fine arts in drama at the
Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He was ordained a Jesuit
priest in 1963 and began his academic career at Loyola in 1967. In 1979 he
received a doctorate in film esthetics from the Sorbonne.
Over the years - first at Loyola, then at
Concordia after its founding in 1974 - he gave courses on Hollywood silents and
musicals and Westerns, on German expressionist cinema and Italian neo-realism
and the French New Wave, and on directors as varied as John Ford, Alfred
Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino.
In a course called Film Ideas, Gervais screened
one film every week at the old Cinema V in Notre Dame de Grâce. He also opened
up screenings to the public at Concordia's F.C. Smith Auditorium.
"His passion was for teaching - he loved to
teach," said his long-time Concordia colleague Sheelah O'Neill, who runs the
communications studies department.
In emails to her, some of his former students
remembered their mentor as someone who, as Harrison put it, "ignited our passion
and in most cases, changed the direction of our lives."
"Who can forget," Harrison wrote, "those moments
when he would freeze a frame of Bergman or Rossellini on that rickety old
16-millimetre projector, hold his hands to heaven and without a word manage to
engage our limbic brains with paragraphs of profundity?"
Gervais attended the annual Cannes Film Festival
39 times; defended Pasolini as a jury member at the 1968 Venice Film Festival
and in his 1973 book about the controversial Italian filmmaker; became the go-to
international Bergman expert in 1999 with his book Ingmar Bergman: Magician and
Prophet; and worked as a consultant on such Catholic-themed films as Agnes of
God, Black Robe and The Mission.
Gervais was also the founding director of the
Loyola Institute for Studies in International Peace, a founding member of
Concordia's Lonergan University College and commissioner with the Canadian
Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
An award in his name - the $2,000 Marc Gervais
Prize in Communications Studies - is given each year to a BA student graduating
from Concordia.
In his spare time, Gervais was an avid tennis
player and a big baseball and hockey fan, favouring - to the dismay of his
Montreal acolytes - the Boston Bruins.
He struck an urbane figure in tweed jackets and
ascots, looked a bit like French director François Truffaut and did funny
impersonations of movie stars such as Cary Grant.
He lived most of his life on or just next to
Loyola campus.
* *
* * * * * *
AUTHOR : ARCHBISHOP PENDERGRAST
Comments