La Boîte Noire
With its bold white screened letters on a minimal, stark black marquee, La Boîte Noire’s sign remains a material manifestation of a by-gone era of media consumption. The MSP was lucky to add both the distinctive fascia and its large black lightbox to the collection. Originally hanging above the rental video’s entrance at 376, av du Mont-Royal Est (seen below in 2012), this sign represents a well-loved beacon of Montrealers’ thriving interest in local, international and rare cinema.
Located until recently in the heart of Montreal’s Plateau-Mont Royal neighbourhood, La Boîte Noire is remembered for fostering a carefully curated selection of local and international films. The store’s former proprietor, Francois Poitras, recounts how his enterprise began with the acquisition of 350 used cassettes in 1986. By the time he shut the business down in 2016, Poitras liquidated over 40,000 titles. During those 30 years, the store catered to expansive tastes in movie genres and styles from Fellini to Ford, Sokurov to Scorsese.
With the store’s final closure in 2016, and the loss of institutions such as Excentris, Poitras remarked that the city’s cinephiles had fewer and fewer ‘bricks and mortar’ resources available to them. All these closures, Poitras noted, were due in large part to the steady rise in movie-streaming services since the mid 2010s.
The addition of the Boîte Noire sign to the MSP collection serves as a poignant reminder of the by-gone video-rental era (remember Le SuperClub Vidéotron and Blockbuster?). The store’s original location is currently being renovated for a condo project.
Our thanks go out to the project’s developer Karl Patrontasch for donating the sign to the MSP, and to our old collaborator Lou Raskin who hooked us up through a truly absurd moment of absolute serendipity. While physical spaces and their forums for communities of rare films are on the decline, La Boîte Noire’s legacy reminds us that Montreal’s love of classic, foreign and rare films is not going anywhere.
For the typophiles among us, the font appears to be the digital font Square Slabserif 711 Pro Bold, derived from City, designed in 1930 by the German type designer Georg Trump (1896-1985). City is most famous for its extensive use in various iterations of the IBM logo.