En passant par le Québec

"Cinema, after all, is about (…) prompting individual reflection; it’s not about teaching lessons or indoctrinating anyone. It’s like a trailer to remind you: don’t forget to question yourself, (…) it’s your life, it’s you." - Gilles Groulx

Through the iconic series Cinéastes de notre temps, Jean-Louis Comolli dedicated a little known but highly respectable episode to Quebec cinema of the 1960s. On the Jacques-Cartier Bridge and crossing the Richelieu, as if returning to historical roots, he showcased the charm and sharpness of this generation in search of cinema, featuring the gentle wisdom of Michel Brault, the adventurous impetuosity of Lamothe, the somewhat cunning ease of Jutra, and the tragic playfulness of Groulx, whose resonance is felt at the end of the film with the naive and lucid impudence of the youngest member of the group, Jean-Pierre Lefebvre.

They all directly address what seems to haunt them at the time: the influence of the Anglo-American empire and the adversities it creates, whether through the historical question of conquest (Brault), the exploitation of Indigenous territories by resource companies and private clubs (Lamothe), or the question of identity (Groulx): "If we want to live according to what we have learned, what we know of ourselves and others, it is very difficult. But if we want to transform ourselves, if we want to conform, if we want to consume American culture and speak English, it will work. So, we would have accumulated 300 years for nothing, we would have lost everything. It would be a shame. It would be diluted, it would be lost, it would be the melting pot, the ghetto," he declares. At the very end of the film, in front of an amused and credulous Comolli, on the back seat of a car cruising under the neon lights of Montreal's tourist district and its strip clubs, Lefebvre undresses a G.I. Joe toy while narrating an improbable film project: a "yéyé cantata" in which a Quebec general, a sort of Alexander Nevsky, "would declare war on the Americans with the tactic of fulfilling all their dreams and political, sexual, or social frustrations at the time [1967] when they reveal themselves to be the most frustrated people in the world with the Vietnam War."

However, with hindsight, another struggle becomes apparent in the film, an internal one, briefly touched upon by Groulx and Brault when the latter mentions the gentrification of the nascent modern Quebec (the one of the filmmakers), already consenting and at the height of the inevitability of its adherence to and subjugation by all liberal seductions, powerfully evidenced by Claude Jutra with the relaxed sophistication of his urban eloquence. In the midst of a large IBM computer room that he shows to Comolli, Jutra eagerly admires the immediacy and instantaneity of the new tools available to 16-17-year-olds with computers, as well as their "naturalness, without even being impressed" to "express themselves in a total and immediate way"... "Creation will quickly embrace all these new means because creation is curious, creation is eager," he says, likely unaware of the potentially ominous double meaning of the word. As a fervent salesman, he is already predicting the "very rapid end of cinema as we know it, destined to disappear" and describes the emerging consumerist attitude of the viewer: "What do I see, what is it worth, does it interest me, and what does it bring me?"

Starting from the political and historical consciousness of Brault, Lamothe, and Groulx, the film thus makes us aware of Jutra’s vision, tamed, malleable, and inevitable, which soon stands in mechanical contrast with the flamboyant and already lost identity that concludes the documentary with the young Lefebvre. While Lefebvre shares the observation of the former and anticipates the inevitable arrival professed by the latter, he subverts both the more or less mimetic attitudes of fixed and fluid identity. In present-day Quebec, he seems unwilling to provide any nostalgic or victimizing excuses for "this state of dreadful lethargy, this state of coldness in which we have been for so long," which he attributes to having left important questions in the hands of religious and political elites. But against Jutra’s zealous progressivism, he offers the flair of a much more radical, audacious, and transgressive alternative: "The most considerable battle we currently have to fight is against the viewer, especially when we try to laugh at them a little…"

The biting irony, all-encompassing and irreducible to a single thesis of the images from Le Révolutionnaire (1964) interspersing the interview, reflects this approach that embraces and surpasses all others, this fertile and invigorating necessity to confront all issues head-on despite the tragic impossibility of ever achieving it, as well as this existential and vital project summed up by the subject himself: "to bring a drowned person back to the surface."

Simon Galiero
Filmmaker, author and editor
of the documentary journal Communs.site