23 Skidoo

I was listening to 23 Skidoo's fantastic 1983 album The Culling Is Coming earlier, and some casual googling yielded this little treat, which ties in quite nicely to yesterday's musings about abandoned city spaces... Made in 1965 for the National Film Board of Canada, 23 Skidoo is an 8min b/w film which finds Montréal mysteriously devoid of life. For admirers of the haunting coda of L'Eclisse this is required viewing and one can imagine a young David Cronenberg seeing this and being excited by the possibilities. Taking note of the director's name Julian Biggs, I experienced a frisson of deja-vu and realized that I had recently seen his name attached as producer to the excellent 1965 Canadian film The Railrodder in which Buster Keaton travels thru the great Canadian outdoors on a motorized rail-rider...