Magic moments preserved

Pierre Trudeau and former Quebec premiers René Lévesque and Maurice Duplessis have joined with rock group Rush in a walk into audiovisual posterity.

At a gala in Toronto Thursday night, the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust honours this year's selections for the trust's MasterWorks collection. Each year the trust's jury selects 12 significant works from the annals of Canadian film, television, sound recording and radio (the work must have been a critical or popular success, or influential in shaping its genre) to ensure the work's restoration or preservation.

Honoured this year are: The Champions, a 1986 CBC documentary chronicling the careers of Levésque and Trudeau as they battled for the fate of Canada; Duplessis, a seven-part miniseries also broadcast on the CBC; and The Pig & Whistle, which ran on CTV for a decade starting in 1967.

Sound recording was honoured with the preservation of opera and lieder recitals by soprano Pierrette Alarie and tenor Leopold Simoneau, 1940s opera stars, and the music of Paul Bley, the Canadian jazz musician who formed the Montreal Jazz Workshop and brought Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins to Montreal.

Other recordings include the music of Rush, the group which since 1974 has made a big noise in high-tech rock; Fidèle Aux Postes, a documentary about the golden age of French radio in Quebec; Michael Snow's art film Wavelength, and two Quebec cinema classics, Les bons débarras, and the thriller Isabel, voted one of 1968's 10 best films by some U.S. critics. The Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada is a national charitable organization.