Marc Gervais et moi.

With the 62nd annual Cannes Film Festival entering its final weekend, this seems like an appropriate time to pay tribute to Marc Gervais, the Canadian Jesuit film scholar who is said to have attended the festival "more often than any other priest" and probably more often than many other academics or journalists. A longtime professor of film studies at Concordia University and an acknowledged authority on the work of Ingmar Bergman, Gervais attended the Cannes Film Festival annually for nearly forty years. Retired from Concordia and with his days on the festival circuit behind him, Gervais now lives at a Jesuit infirmary in Ontario. Marc is surely missed by his colleagues, students and friends in Montreal, where he spent the greater part of his professional and religious life. I hope those of his friends who read this will join me in praying for a great Jesuit, a fine priest and an exceptional gentleman.

I've written before about the influence that Marc Gervais had on my own vocation, and I'm glad that I had the opportunity to get to know him somewhat over the course of several visits to Montreal. The above photos were taken during our first meeting, which came about quite unexpectedly. Passing through Montreal with another scholastic, I was staying in a community of francophone Jesuits on the other side of town (culturally as well as geographically) from the residence of English-speaking Jesuits where Gervais then lived. (I should probably point out that Canada has two Jesuit provinces - one French, the other English - and both have residences in Montreal.) A chance meeting with a Jesuit from the English province led to an invitation to dinner with his community, which is how I finally met Marc Gervais.

On the occasion of our first meeting as well as at other times, Marc Gervais proved an unfailingly gracious host. While he had stacks of papers to grade - he was still teaching, even though he had officially retired - Marc was happy to drop everything for a lengthy after-dinner chat with two visiting scholastics. Though we spoke a bit about our common interest in the films of Ingmar Bergman, our conversation touched on other topics as well. Marc spoke about his passion for Westerns (one of the pictures on his wall was a Monument Valley landscape, a still from a John Ford film) as well as the controversy that had erupted when a film festival jury that he led awarded a prize to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema (a decision which some Vatican officials criticized as much for Pasolini's atheism as for the film's racy content). We also spoke more generally about faith and culture and about the role that the Society of Jesus has played in trying to bring the two together. At the end of that first meeting, Marc gave me a copy of his book Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet, which you can see him signing in one of the above photos.

I hope that the above account proves an enjoyable one for the various friends and fans of Marc Gervais in the blogosphere. If any of said friends and fans come across this blog and would like to share their own memories and reflections, I would enjoy reading them. More importantly, I hope that you will join me in praying for Marc Gervais as he confronts the challenges of aging and diminishment. AMDG.

ADDENDUM (3/27/12): This post is getting some new hits following media reports of Marc Gervais' death, so visitors looking for more information on Marc's passing - or wanting to leave some memories or condolences, should read my most recent post.