By Robert Greeley
For a quarter of a century, listeners to CBC Radio’s Ottawa drive-home show learned about movies from Robert Fontaine. Now, the uOttawa alumnus, who retired from the CBC in March, has returned to the University to continue teaching film — this time as a part-time professor.
Fontaine admits that it feels strange to be coming back after all these years to teach in the very place he took his first film courses. But he’s looking forward to the challenge and pokes fun at himself for being “an excited veteran rookie.”
With Fontaine’s trademark passion and wit, listeners were left wondering what would come next when Fontaine critiqued the latest movies. He was never boring or predictable, and the baseball fanatic in him never missed a chance to sneak clever references to the game into his reviews.
The All in a Day hosts who worked with Fontaine credit him with teaching them, along with their listeners, as he shared his encyclopedic knowledge of film.
“It was always an education, doing an interview with Robert Fontaine,” Adrian Harewood, the show’s host from 2005 to 2009, was quoted as saying in a CBC farewell piece. Current host Alan Neal said it was “always a joy to watch as Robert’s face lit up when he was talking about how a film was put together.”
Fontaine worked as a musician in the 1980s before completing a BA in communication at uOttawa. As a student, he volunteered with the campus radio station, at a time when it had just received its FM licence. He says uOttawa prepared him well for his future career, and he landed his first job in radio when one of his professors noticed his talent and helped him enter the field.
“We are thrilled and very honoured to have a movie critic of Robert’s calibre contribute to our undergraduate program,” said Jenepher Lennox Terrion, head of the Department of Communication. “He brings incredible insight into the films he discusses, but also situates them in their social, historic and cultural context, making the study of them even more relevant and important.”
Fontaine is teaching American cinema in the fall and the history of the science-fiction film from the post-war period to 1968 in the winter.