2015 Essays

Emma Gendron

Lacasse, Germain

Emma Gendron was probably the main female figure in Quebec during the silent film era, but her importance appeared only recently along with new research about the early cinema and its centennial. Ongoing research about her career as a screenwriter will probably also reveal more about her motion picture film activity, but she is now recognized as the first important screenwriter in Quebec. She wrote at least two scripts that were brought to the screen by her probable lover, Joseph-Arthur Homier—Madeleine de Verchères (1922), a biopic about a New France heroine, and La drogue fatale (1924), a thriller in which the drug mafia kidnaps the police chief’s daughter. Gendron might have written other scripts and might also have been more involved in directing these films, but nothing is proven as the films, and along with most of the relevant paper archives, were destroyed.