Three directors: Claude Jutra.

Director. Born, Montreal, 1930. Died, 1986. Trained as a doctor, Jutra emerged as a prominent filmmaker during the early stages of the 1960s counter-culture movement. In Montreal, this meant a network of hangouts ranging from poets' coffee houses to nightclubs where black R&B bands jived for wannabe hipsters and their soulful chicks. This milieu is the world of Jutra's autobiographical debut feature A tout prendre, made in 1963. In it, he plays himself as a discontented rambler, who, while in the process of terminating an interracial affair with Johanne, a lanky Haitian model, reveals that he's gay.

Shot in an improvised style, reminiscent of the French New Wave, A tout prendre displayed Jutra's fascination with free-spirited, poetry-over-narrative moviemaking. However, at the height of his career his work became more traditional in both form and content. Mon oncle Antoine (71), still regarded by many critics as the best Canadian film ever made, is an archetypical, serio-comic initiation story set in a small town during the 1940s. His next feature, the lavish period-piece Kamouraska, based on a novel by Anne Hebert, is constructed around its 19th century heroine's memories of a tempestuous love affair.

After a difficult shoot, Kamouraska was radically cut for its initial release, and then lambasted as a disappointing followup to Mon oncle Antoine. Following another debacle, Pour le meilleur et pour le pire, Jutra fell out of favour in Quebec and accepted TV and theatrical film assignments in English-Speaking Canada.

Like many of his Quebec pictures, Jutra's English-language films are concerned with turbulent emotions and even breakdowns, especially in the young. In Ada and Dreamspeaker, both made in 1977, he successfully conveys his mistrust of healing institutions. Moving back to a bigger budget production, Jutra and producer Beryl Fox attempted to film the probably unfilmable Margaret Atwood novel, Surfacing; this failure hurt both of their careers. Jutra returned to form with By Design, a screwball comedy about a lesbian couple determined to become parents. This film won over many fans, including New York critic Pauline Kael, who called it a "Lubitsch sex comedy stripped of the glamor but not the fun."

During the early 1980s, Jutra discovered he had Alzheimer's disease, and as a former doctor, his awareness of its effects was acute. He directed his last film Les dames en couleurs--one that is both admired and dismissed for its nightmarish storyline--while contending with symptoms of the disease. In 1986, Jutra drowned himself in the St. Lawrence, a suicide anticipated in A tout prendre's final shot of him stepping off a pier into the glistening river.

Since Jutra's death, no one has questioned his successes, and his failures have been reconsidered. In 1995, a restored director's cut of Kamouraska has led some critics to compare it to pictures such as Dr. Zhivago and Gone with the Wind. Since 1993, the Director's Guild of Canada has awarded the Claude Jutra Award at the Genies to the best director of a first feature. Jutra lives on as a benevolent and influential guiding spirit of quality Canadian feature filmmaking. Whether or not Mon oncle Antoine is the best Canadian movie ever made, Jutra worked with absolute sincerity and a passion for cinema.