Silence, on Court!

» see silenceoncourt.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Silence, on Court! was what happens when a public broadcaster decides the short film deserves a website and then actually pays for it. Michel Coulombe started it at Radio-Canada in 2001. The National Film Board took it over and co-financed it with Radio-Canada, and for six years silenceoncourt.tv was the most important French-language home for short film on the Canadian web.

The site carried a good deal more than the films. There were forums and classified ads for the people who actually made shorts, plus webzines it wrote itself, so it worked as a trade publication with a video player bolted on. Over its life it counted more than a million viewings across upwards of two thousand films, most of them Quebecois, and it ran between 150 and 250 original pieces of its own writing and video about the form.

There was a television half as well. Silence, on Court! ran on ARTV from 2001 to 2005, with Coulombe hosting the first three seasons and Catherine Pogonat the fourth. Offline it organized 24 themed events across Canada and abroad, and three editions of La Longue Nuit du Court, the 2006 one playing in thirty Canadian cities at once.

~ the dossier ~

~ the contests ~

The competitions are the detail that lands oddest from here. Objectif Lait and Le Court en Web were two of them, themed short film contests for emerging directors run by a state-funded portal, with juries at the end and an audience waiting. The site took the Grand Prix Boomerang for a specialized portal in 2003 and was a finalist again in 2006.

~ the night it stopped changing ~

Nobody announced an ending. The archive is clear about what happened instead: a capture from 9 September 2007 still shows a working front page, promoting five animated shorts made at the Cégep du Vieux-Montréal, with a forum link and a reruns column beside them. Then that exact page is served again, unchanged, through November 2007 and on through the winter, a last time on 23 May 2008. By 16 September 2008 the address belongs to a domain reseller.

So the updating stopped during 2007 and the shell went on serving for another eight months, handing the same page to anyone who asked for it. Somebody kept settling the hosting invoice for eight months after the last edit.

~ the appointment in may ~

One thing survived the closure deliberately. Each year the site ran Silence, on Court! à Cannes, an open call for films in partnership with the Short Film Corner at the Festival de Cannes, and the National Film Board held on to that event when it shut the rest down. Of everything the Board had taken over from Radio-Canada, the week in May is the piece it chose to keep.

In 2001 my connection in Turkey turned a two minute video into something you committed to downloading, and French-language Quebecois short film was outside anything I had a route to. It is here for the arithmetic: two thousand short films pushed into public view on public money, and then an address that ended up worth more to a domain reseller than to the people who had built it.

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