Pierre Perrault : l'action parlée

A rare document from the significant French series Cinéastes de notre temps, the episode Pierre Perrault : l’action parlée allows us to delve into the thoughts of Pierre Perrault, then in his early forties. It is fascinating to hear, for a rare occasion, the voice and words of Perrault, a filmmaker who dedicated his entire body of work to listening to others and conveying their words through cinema, this "technique that records things that disappear," as he asserts at the end of the interview.

The intelligence and vivacity of the man's speech, and the clarity of his approach are striking. At this time, the filmmaker was in the process of completing Les voitures d’eau (1968), his third feature film, and Alexis Tremblay, the central figure of the "Île-aux-Coudres Trilogy," had just passed away. Perrault was thus at a pivotal moment in his work. The Quebec of the time was also experiencing an important stage in its political and national assertion, fueled in part by General de Gaulle's famous 1967 declaration, still recent at the time of filming.

Perrault's words hold valuable lessons for any filmmaker interested in documentary ethics and the primacy of reality. In one of his typically simple yet highly skilled formulations, he suggests that "[these men] do not build a boat because we are making a film; we make a film because they are building a boat." The filmmaker rightly reminds us that "without cinema, we cannot come to know men as different as those [he has] known." This sentence could summarize the entire relevance and beauty of Perrault's work.

Jean-Philippe Desrochers
Critic