Founder blames youthful tastes, as well as technological change
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“It’s not the same kind of film consumption today,” said Poitras. “A good Boîte Noire customer would come in 30 weeks a year and rent between three and five films. That’s disappeared. Young people are less there. Look, we often talk about film festivals and how they’re festivals for the grey-hair set. It’s a different world. Look, I was in one little corner of the galaxy so it’s hard for me to talk about the entire galaxy. But I see less people interested in the masters, in filmmakers like Fellini and Bergman. For a long time we had a student special. You could rent two films for $5.50. That doesn’t destroy your budget. But it didn’t work. We’re in a society where we entertain ourselves to death. The leisure offering is so much bigger than it was 20 or 30 years ago.”
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It’s the end of an era.
La Boîte Noire is closing its doors. Montreal’s most famous indie video/DVD emporium will kick off a massive sale Friday morning, with 39,000 DVDs and videos set to be sold off in the next couple of months. Once that’s done, owner François Poitras will shut this extraordinary film shop on MontRoyal Avenue East once and for all.
La Boîte Noire is just not made for these times. Film-viewing habits have changed big-time in recent years with the introduction of Internet streaming networks like Netflix, video-on-demand services, and the ready availability of most any film in the history of the universe to anyone with a laptop and the ability to type a film title into Google.
Video stores have been disappearing for years now and most of the big chains have gone out of business ages ago. But La Boîte Noire managed to hang in there because it occupied a unique niche. Poitras always positioned his stores as unabashedly art-house places specifically tailored to Montreal’s once oh-so-discerning film crowd, an audience more attuned than most North Americans to foreign films, local productions and artier U.S. fare.
And for a long time it was a very good business. At its peak, in the early ’00s, Poitras had three stores in Montreal – the flagship on St. Denis St., another on Laurier Ave. in Outremont and a third in Old Montreal – and he was generating around $3 million in business annually.
Sitting on a bench just outside the current location on Mont-Royal Ave., which opened in 2007, Poitras talks of how this was once one of the best cities in North America for video stores. There appeared to be one on every street-corner and he says his main store on St-Denis St. was one of the most profitable video stores in North America at the beginning of this century.
And it was all about art films. He still remembers a headline from a Gazette story from the early days: “No Van Damme,” a reference to the fact you wouldn’t find any films starring the famed Belgian martialarts movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme. What you would find were films by auteurs like France’s JeanLuc Godard, Spain’s Pedro Almodovar and Hong Kong ’s Wong Karwai. He says that he at one time had 500 film noir titles.
Poitras believes it’s not just the technological changes that have killed off stores like Boîte Noire.
“It’s not the same kind of film consumption today,” said Poitras. “A good Boîte Noire customer would come in 30 weeks a year and rent between three and five films. That’s disappeared. Young people are less there. Look, we often talk about film festivals and how they’re festivals for the grey-hair set. It’s a different world. Look, I was in one little corner of the galaxy so it’s hard for me to talk about the entire galaxy. But I see less people interested in the masters, in filmmakers like Fellini and Bergman. For a long time we had a student special. You could rent two films for $5.50. That doesn’t destroy your budget. But it didn’t work. We’re in a society where we entertain ourselves to death. The leisure offering is so much bigger than it was 20 or 30 years ago.”
He tried to sell Boîte Noire last year but to no avail. The big corporations he was talking to weren’t impressed by his argument that his store was a real brand, that he had an incredible database of films, having published the Boîte noire film guide annually for 15 years.
It all started in November 1986 at the corner of Rivard and MarieAnne Sts., just a couple of blocks from the last standing Boîte Noire on Mont-Royal Ave. (The site of the original store is now occupied by the specialty record store L’Oblique). Poitras was a 27-yearold literature student at UQAM at the time, a hardcore film buff, the type of guy who used to circle the movies in the TV listings so he could plan his week around them.
Then the video revolution arrived.
“It was like the invention of the printing press,” he said.
So he opened the original store, with just 350 videocassettes that he bought used, displayed on shelves that he picked up from a shoe store. And it just kept growing.
A key part of the Boîte Noire success story was local audiences’ appetite for foreign films. He recalls how American distributors told him they couldn’t believe foreign films were dubbed for Quebec. In the U.S., foreign films were always subtitled because they were only watched by a cultural elite that didn’t like dubs. But ici, loads of ordinary folks watched films from other countries.
“There won’t be many Italian, German, French or Quebec films left once our sale is finished,” said Poitras. “But I’ll still have the American comedies.”