Toward the Quebec Auteur: From Perrault to Arcand.

Quebec cinema burst forth with a new spirit in the early 1960s. It was following the lead of the new interventionist Liberal government of Quebec that wanted Quebeckers to become "maitres chez nous." Quebec filmmakers decided to become masters in their own house by ending the decade-long drought in feature film production. A number of young film directors came to be recognized in the 1960s. It is impossible to discuss all their work and its significance, but what is possible, is an informed discussion of one or two key films made by each director, the importance of these films to Quebec cultural life and the interconnections among the various directorial visions and how their visions have come to represent a unique society.

The careers of these half-dozen directors are only a sampling of the directorial talent that Quebec inaugurated in the 1960s and 1970s. There are others, a number of whom have significant reputations. Having to provide a narrow sample recognizes the incredible artistic bounty that the Quebec film industry developed after 1960. Many of these directors became auteurs--filmmakers who wrote, produced, directed and sometimes acted in their own films. The auteur spirit springs from an individual artist's roots in a society and its cultures. It acknowledges artistic control of a cinematic product the way an author might control a book. Auteur films are films with a special vision but that vision is more than just an individual expression. Auteur directors express varied aspects of a national identity and their works contribute significantly to a nationality's claim to having a genuine national cinema. Pierre Perrault (1927-99) was the documentarist that brought the meaning of the past into Quebec's current identity; Michel Brault (1928-) is the cinemtographer and director who created the visual moods that came to distinguish recent Quebec cinema; Jean-Pierre Lefebvre (1941-) is the film critic and poet turned revolutionary filmmaker; Gilles Carle (1929-) is the cultural animateur, whose humor, irony and social caricature created a cinematic sociology of popular sensibilities; Claude Jutra (1930-1987) was the shy genius who gave Canada the enduring classic Mon Oncle Antoine; while Denys Arcand (1941-) concluded the sixties' generation's best work with two award-winning and internationally-lauded films, Le Declin de l'empire american (1986) and Jesus de Montreal (1989). Together these directors created a major body of work that was the second wave of Quebec's feature film industry.'

In 1960 francophone Montreal had 64 cinemas, of which 54 showed only English language films. (2) That year there were 558 feature films screened in Canada, none of which were Canadian. (3) Canada's population at the time was 18 million, of which 5 million lived in Quebec. Anyone aspiring to create Quebec feature films had to face the daunting statistics of being part of a minority culture in a national entity that was not making any feature films and had not done so for some time. Not surprising, it was the young who took on the challenge. The Liberal government had launched a "Quiet Revolution" based on a call for an anti-conservative ideological and social change. For example, in 1961 a law was passed that allowed children under 10 to attend matinees, the first time since 1927. In ones and twos French-language features began to appear, both from the National Film Board (Office Nationale du Film-ONF) and from independent producers. By the end of the decade, almost 50 feature films in French had been released , more than double the number made during the first wave (1944-53). (4) There was a new spirit of self-affirmation that embraced young filmmakers, most of whom were then still in their late twenties and early thirties when their first major work appeared. Quebec film historians have called the cinema of the sixties, "le cinema de Ia revolution Tranquille.,, (5) It was a period when cultural creativity joined hands with social concerns in a veritable epiphany of renewal generated by the "cinema d,auteur." (6)

While the new political and social energy in Quebec created a national context in which Quebec film could come out of its shell, it was the "New Wave" cinema of France that was an inspiration for the province's Francophone filmmakers. "La Nouvelle Vague Francaise" as it was termed, provided a nonHollywood inspiration that led Quebec filmmakers in their own direction. The work of French directors, Truffault, Godard, Chabrol and Rohmer was inaugurated in 1959 with Truffault's Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows), which won the Critic's Prize at Cannes. Nouvelle Vague directors distinguished their approach by working improvisationally from an idea, casting friends and lovers in starring roles and using their own apartments as sets. They rejected typical melodramatic scenarios in favor of exploring the relationship of young heterosexual couples and they gave their work a certain "documentary" feel. (7) These influences surfaced in the work of young Quebeckers, who now had exciting, non-American role models.

Film may be categorized in numerous ways--by genre, by nationality, by gender, by region and by language. Canadian cinema has two branches--one English and the other French. This linguistic division means that the two cinemas live within the cultural orbits created by their respective languages and the countries that are dominant in that language. Since both languages were used by European imperialism from the 16th to the 20th centuries to create colonies around the world, these languages became the languages of various colonized nationalities, thereby creating an Anglophone and a Francophone universe. Since English was the leading imperial language via Britain and then the United States and France was a secondary imperial language, the Francophone linguistic universe was much smaller than the Anglophone. In the postcolonial period (after 1960) cross-national identification in the Francophone universe was weak and filtered through France. What did French-speaking Quebec have in common with French-speaking Ca meroon? In turn what did either country have in common with France? So Quebec turned inward in order to express its own stories and its own cultural individuality within this broad general linguistic framework and the cultural values that may come with it. Here it could explore its differences, not only with the rest of Canada, but with all of Francophonie. A renewal of national identity was on the historical agenda.

At the same time--during the 1950s and 1960--socialistinfluenced national liberation movements in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were creating revolutions against colonialism and its heritage. Young Quebec filmmakers responded to these influences by associating their work with the concepts of national liberation and decolonialization. They sought to affirm a new Quebec national identity that went beyond the hyphenated concept of the French-Canadian that had been entrenched for so long. In 1971 L'Association professionelle des cineastes du Quebec issued a manifesto that stated:

Nous voulons que la collectivite Quebecoise retrouve au cinema un reflet d'elle-meme qul soit juste, dynamique et stimulant." (8)

This goal, which had been in the hearts of young Quebec filmmakers for over a decade, was a nationalist goal, while at the same time it was tied to the confrontational and critical spirit of the sixties and early seventies, when student radicalism had swept so much of North America and Europe. It was attuned to national liberation struggles, socialism and a general spirit of freedom from capitalism and consumerism. There was a desire to create a better, less hypocritical and more socially liberated and exciting world. National cinemas of the time united their local concerns with global sensibilities in the hope of creating a new world order that was postcolonial and radically self-conscious.

Besides New Wave French cinema, Quebec filmmakers were also attracted to cinema direct, a concept that was revolutionizing documentary filmmaking in Britain and the U.S. Michel Brault quipped that direct cinema was "une camera qui ecoute" (a cinema that eavesdrops). The National Film Board had begun a series titled "Candid Eye" that represented the work of documentarists who used hand-held cameras and portable synchronized sound recorders to reach into the very deepest recesses of human activities. The French version of Candid Eye was titled "Panoramique". Direct cinema techniques gave filmmakers a sense of vitality, of being involved in daily life. These documentaries projected an energized reality filled with real people dealing with real-life situations. They were in "direct" contact with them. They let the people in the films speak for themselves rather than construct a voice-over narrative with its dominating explanation of what was going on. The viewer was made to feel the presence of the camera and th e involvement of the cinematic eye. (9) Rather than use people's images to bolster a scripted narrative, direct cinema allowed people to script their own film.

When direct cinema ideas were transferred to feature films in the mid-sixties the results were startling. Like the New Wave directors in France, the Quebec directors preferred improvised dialogue over action. They emphasized the importance of what was being expressed by the actors in a scene over the requirements of a script. They used non-professional actors and the existence of a relationship between their actual lives and the story they were telling as the core of their inspiration and its novelty. (10) The new reality was being expressed through the projection of the filmmaker's subjective self in such a way as to convey a mood of a spontaneous contemporary actuality.

In the early 1950s the NFB was an assimilationist organization, which did not value Quebec culture. (11) After the NFB moved to Montreal in 1956 it became a target of nationalist accusations of discrimination. An article in Le Devoir stated that of the 1109 films the NFB made between 1952 and 1956 only 69 (6%) were in French. (12) A revolt was inevitable. The major breakthrough in the direct cinema documentary mode was the 1958 film Les raquetteurs /The Snowshoers by Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx. Why was their use of cinema direct techniques so appealing? Was it just a way of expressing the need of every generation to do things differently? Film scholar and critic, Bruno Cornellier, believes that Quebec literary fiction of the times was unable to capture the "gravity of the real" or provide a language of contemporary concerns. (13) To tell their stories the new generation had to turn to their own experiences rather than external sources. Up to this point Quebec literature was highly traditional and filled with "folkloric authenticity." (14) It was not until the 1940s that urban settings began to appear to fiction. So the young Quebec documentarists working at the NFB/ONF not only revolted against English domination, they also revolted against Quebec society's traditional French-Canadianism, with its emphasis on the four pieties of family, religion, language and land.

The person who best personifies the connection between the cinema direct documentary and the new feature film industry that was emerging is Pierre Perrault, who was born in Montreal in 1927. A lawyer by training, a published poet and a former broadcaster, Perrault represents the introspective, self-examining spirit of the Quebec intellectual. He coined the expression "le cinema vecu" (living cinema) as a description of what he was trying to achieve in film. He felt that the idea of a living cinema went further than the earlier cinema verite concept or even the NFB's direct cinema. Living cinema was meant "to present cultural nuances" in a very self-conscious way. (15) Perrault wanted to go "to the people" to capture the essence of their lives and through them the essential spirit of Quebec identity and to do so in a way in which it had never been done before.

"...Quebec artists have seen the vastness of la cote nord, the coldness of the winter," writes Peter Harcourt," and the centrality of the St. Lawrence River as the signposts of their civilization, as the formative symbols of their imagination." (16) It was here, on the St.Lawrence, that Perrault found what he was looking for. It was to the river that he went for inspiration. In 1963 he released the fruits of that journey, the ONF's Pour la suite du monde, the first Quebec film to be entered in competition at Cannes. It was named "Film of the Year" at the 1964 Canadian Film Awards and inaugurated a new age in Quebec filmmaking, when it joined Claude Jutra's A tout pendre, which was named Best Feature film.

Pour la suite du monde (literally 'so the world may continue' but titled Moontrap in the NFB's subtitled version) told the story of a community on Ile-aux-Courdres in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and its attempt to revive the tradition of hunting beluga whales. (17) Perrault knew Alexis Tremblay, the patriarch of the family, personally and selected the Tremblays to express his sense of who the Quebecois were and what they represented. Pour la suite du monde was the first of a trilogy of films about the Ile-aux-Courdres community with the second titled La Regne du jour (1967) and the third Les Voitures d'eau (1969). When the tiny film crew of Perrault, his co-director and cameraman, Michel Brault, and soundman Marcel Carriere went to this far-away region of Quebec, they let the people speak for themselves so that their worldview could express what it meant to be Quebecois. "Un cinema de la parole" captured the speech and personalities of rustic Quebec using nothing more than a hand-held camera, a microphone and cu ltural sensitivity and understanding. "Le cinema vecu representait pour moi la possibilite de pratique une sorte d'ecriture orale..." wrote Stephane-Albert Boulais, who worked with Perrault. (18) This folkloric, ethnographic interest in and focus on "ordinary" speech and the lives of marginalized but rooted people was a way for the urban intelligentsia to find its sense of a distinct national identity.

Quebec critic, Michel Marie, describes Perrault's trilogy as "a kind of archaeology." (19) After Perrault's success with this story of the beluga whale hunt that ends in having the captured whale sent to a marine park in New York, he continued to dig into the importance of the past when he followed the Tremblay family, including Alex's wife, Marie (mother of 16) to France, where the Tremblays try to see if there is any resemblance between themselves and the people of their distant ancestral home. Le Regne du jour (The Realm of Time) was followed by the concluding film, Les Voitures d'eau (River Schooners), which had the island community build an old-fashioned wood fishing schooner of the kind that had once been the mainstay of the economy, but which is no longer used.

His approach won as much criticism as it did praise. Film historian, David Clandfield, considered it a form of "liberal paternalism"-this going out and filming ordinary people and making something special of them. (20) The idea that filmmakers were elitists when they engaged with simple people was also propounded by Yves Picard, a Quebec film writer, who considered the whole project of creating a distinct Quebec cinema to be the project of " une elite francophone." (21) This ideologically-motivated elite wanted to create a communal identity that would encompass Quebeckers and validate their project of independence. But there were other Quebec critics like Paul Warren, who were sympathetic to this work and believed that Perrault's films were "the fullest expression of Quebec cinema and the clearest line of demarcation from the cinema of English Canada." (22)

Perrault's rather somber style and his bringing forth of a hauntingly austere cinematography imbued with elegiac reverence (beauty mixed with sadness) was something that Quebec audiences and others found engaging, even entrancing. An American historian of Quebec film considered Pour la suite du monde to have "...some of the most beautiful photography [Michel Brault] in all cinema." (23) But the beauty had a purpose. It was an expression of an aesthetic that sought to create a beguiling artistry that would give ancestral heritage a mythological, and therefore, a political power. (24) Prominent Quebec film historian, Yves Lever, in an early book wrote a chapter on Perrault which he titled " Pierre Perrault et la construction du quebec libre." (25) He considered Perrault to be creating a new sense of Quebec identity that fit with the project of independence that was then gathering strength. When Perrault and Brault teamed up again to make a political documentary about a francophone student struggle in New Bruns wick, L'Acadie, l'Acadie (1971) the political dimension came to the forefront. Later Perrault also did a tetralogy of films on the Abitibi regime of Quebec, which were less enthusiastically received, an indication that cinematic and political taste had moved on.

Perrault's collaborator, Michel Brault (1928-) was the creator of the evocative cinematography of Pour la suite du monde and a practitioner of direct cinema, who brought the independence project to the forefront with his major film, Les Ordres (1974). Brault had been part of the scene since the 1950s when he worked with Gilles Groulx on the breakthrough direct cinema documentary, Les Raquetteurs (1958) and later with Claude Jutra on his award-winning feature, A tout pendre (1964). Brault represented the synthesis of aesthetic genius and political commitment that gave Quebec cinema its energy in this period.

Les Ordres is a film about the imposition of the War Measures Act in October 1970, when the British Trade Commissioner was kidnapped by the FLQ (Front de Liberation du Quebec) and Quebec's Labor Minister, Pierre LaPorte, was killed. Hundreds were rounded up and jailed without trail or warrant because the federal government claimed there was an apprehended insurrection. None of those arrested were ever charged. Simply being associated with the cause of Quebec independence was sufficient to be a target for the police and the military that occupied Montreal. Brault's film, using documentary techniques, brought the whole event to the screen. An important French film, Battle of Algiers (1966) served as an inspirational precursor. It had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The realistic treatment of the independence struggle of the Algerians against French colonial occupation in the 1950s made the documentary mode the technique of choice for fictionalizing political struggles that involved v iolence and terror. The Greek filmmaker, CostaGavras, used the same approach in dealing with South American revolutionary movements in State of Siege (1974).

Brault was the auteur director of Les Ordres, whose script presented his own interpretation of what was happening to Quebec society. The Canadian Film Awards chose it as Film of the Year and Best Feature Film and the film was honored at Cannes.

Brault's stark treatment of what happened to five characters in Montreal when the War Measures Act was proclaimed expressed his opposition to the federal government's actions." I wanted to give a voice to the people who had suffered the horror of this," he said in an interview many years after the event. (26) The political nature of the film came through when the NFB Commissioner, a political appointee of the Cabinet, vetoed the making of the film even though the French program committee had approved it. (27) A few years later Brault was able to get CFDC funding to make the film independently. While English Canadians found the film controversial, committed independantistes, like Pierre Vallieres considered it "untruthful" because it did not portray the resistance to Anglo occupation, instead focusing on the passivity of the victims. (28)

Brault has been called "the finest cinematographer Canada has produced" and while he did make other feature films in the 1990s (to little acclaim) his auteur reputation is based on Les Ordres. (29) When he was interviewed by The Globe and Mail in 1999 at the age of 72 he came across as a man from the past, a figure associated with the "cinema of contestation" that was no longer relevant to Quebec politics, as it had been thirty years earlier, or to cinema in general, which had by the 1980s lost its political edge. In a sense the documentary mode and direct cinema that fit so well with the spirit of national liberation that enflamed so much of the world at the time had become a victim of the times. A film like Les Ordres, which The Globe and Mail reporter, who interviewed Brault, ranked as "one of the two or three greatest movies made in Canada" was not available in any video rental store in Canada's largest city. And yet Perrault's nostalgic classic was about to be re-released by the NFB. (30) Ethnography ha d won Out over political criticism.

Jean-Pierre Lefebvre was barely twenty years old when the sixties began. In 1965 he made three low-budget full-length films and twenty years later he had made 19 features. Lefebvre did not go through the documentary phase that the other Quebec directors did, though he did do the occasional NFB production after this reputation was established. Instead he was baptized directly into the mysteries of feature film, which allowed him to develop his own style of filmmaking. Le Revolutionnaire (1965) was his inaugural feature. It mocks a group of Quebeckers wanting to create a Cuban-style insurrection in Quebec. A later film, Les vieux pays on Rimbaud est mort (The Old Country Where Rimbaud Died), which he made in 1977, deals with a Quebecker, who goes to France (like Perrault's Tremblays) in search of his identity. In both cases Lefebvre's sense of politics is challenging and disquieting. Reflecting on his early films, Lefebvre stated in 2001: "Even 35 years ago I thought we had to be careful not to become our own colonizers." (31)

He was a social critic of his own society and his film style went against the grain of most filmmaking. He favored the long shot and dwelt for extended periods on a single situation with very little action in the frame. People found his films very slow. No wonder none of his films ever had a theatrical release in English Canada, though his ability to make films on next to nothing allowed him to make new ones in spite of their style. For example, Q-bec my Love (1970) cost a mere $25,000 to produce and grossed $140,000, of which Lefebvre was paid $7,000. (31)

Peter Harcourt, the English Canadian film scholar and critic, who has spent a great deal of time coming to understand Lefebvre's work, believes that his films are primarily about people's relationship to the environment they inhabit--be it a room, a city or a marriage. "The environment is as much a part of the content of the film as anything the characters do or say." he writes. (33) This is more than just the figure in the landscape concept. It refers to the way a person or a people inhabit their many spaces and the influences on that environment that mould them into what they have become. Harcourt believes that Lefebvre's films insist that the audience enter into the life of his characters no matter how simple, casual and uneventful it may be, because every moment is a human one and worthy of contemplation and compassion. (34) This aesthetic may appeal to cinephiles but it has great difficulty in pricking the Hollywood film and American television bubble that most Canadians inhabit. No wonder, Canadian fil m scholar, Seth Feldman, described Lefebvre as being "amongst the most foreign of foreign directors" for English Canadian audiences. (35)

When Lefebvre addressed the limitations of the nationalist project in his films he spoke directly to Quebec issues, but when he expressed the universal need to slow down and appreciate what really matters in a life, he was making a universal statement. If the end result was rather melancholic, this was simply the flip side of the fervent hopes for a new Quebec, which (people imagined it was realized after the 1976 election of the Parti Quebecois) turned out to be a chimera, a secular antithesis to the old age of incense, as Peter Harcourt, calls it. (36) The materialism and commercialism of the new Quebec was to trouble other filmmakers as well, but there were some who indulged it.

Gilles Carle was "the only Canadian director to consistently produce money-making commercial films." (37) He began in 1965 with La vie heureuse de Leopold Z (The Happy Life of Leopold Z) and went on to make another 15 features before 2000. In 1998 he directed and co-wrote an autobiographical documentary about his career titled Moi, j'me fais mon cinema (1998). Cane was 37 when he made Leopold Z, so he was not the child prodigy that was Lefebvre, but he was very aware of what made for a popular film. Leopold Z is the story of a hapless Montreal snowplow driver at Christmas, who struggle valiantly to fulfill all his pressing duties from clearing streets to shopping and going to church. Although influenced by a personal need for social caricature or satire, Cane was usually a tender humorist who loved irony. People generally went to his movies to laugh and enjoy themselves and Carle knew what kind of comedy worked for Quebec audiences. Films like Les Males (1971) were full of buffoonery and farce. Cane describe d his ability to reach Quebeckers with his films as coming from his "obedient compliance to the deeply rooted logic of our subculture", which meant he had to identify with John Wayne and the Pope simultaneously. (38) Because he was so attuned to popular culture he made a feature film that also ran on television about Quebec's most famous fictional family, the Plouffes, whose 1940s world was popular first as a radio serial and then as a television series, including an English version in the 1960s. If anyone could capture the absurdities of the traditional extended francophone family it was Carle.

Creation of a popular cinema for Quebeckers was not just the work of populists like Cane. It was also the work of pornographers. The Canadian Film Development Corporation funded a half-dozen of these marvels in its first few years. Termed "Maple Leaf Porno" by Variety magazine these films attracted Quebeckers in droves! (39) Denis Heroux and Claude Fournier were the main instigators. Heroux's first excursion into softcore porn was Valerie (1969), which was a black and white film made for under $100,000 that grossed $2 million after screenings in 40 countries. (40) The story of a 20-year old orphan raised in a convent who becomes a topless dancers and then a prostitute was the perfect vehicle for the audience's desire for nudity. It was the best-attended Quebec film since the shocking La Petite Aurore l'enfant martyre of the early 50s. Heroux then made L'initiation for $180,000, which grossed $2.5 million. (41) Fournier's Deux femmes en or was made for $218,000 and grossed $ 4 million. (42) These films displayed a European sense of sexual explicitness, which was now tolerated in Quebec's new uncensored environment. It was considered the age of sexual liberation, which, of course, was applauded by male audiences.

Out of this diverse and hurly-burly atmosphere, where political and art films competed with soft core porn, arose two directors whose work has come to signify Quebec cinema to the rest of Canada--Claude Jutra and Denys Arcand. When Claude Jutra's body was discovered on the shores of the St. Lawrence in 1987, it had been almost two decades since his masterpiece, Mon Oncle Antoine had been made. He had never again been able to create something as evocative and full of symbolic meaning as that NFB-sponsored feature film. He had been a feature filmmaker for five years when he began working on Mon Oncle Antoine. His first feature, an independent production titled A tout pendre (Take It All) had won the Grand Prize at the Montreal Film Festival in 1963 and the Feature Film of the Year Award at the 16th Annual Canadian Film Awards in 1964. A tout pendre was an autobiographical study in the spirit and style of direct cinema and French New Wave in which Jutra and his former girlfriend play themselves. Prior to this h e had been active in documentary film production at the NFB during the 1950s.

Film critic Martin Knelman described Jutra as a man of ambivalence, complex irony and a sly, understated humor. (43) It was this personality that Knelman felt allowed Jutra to tackle "the psychological claustrophobia of a rigid society that defeats people." (44) Jutra gained international experience between 1957 and 1961 when he went to France and associated with various French film personalities and worked on their projects. His aesthetic was formed first by the NFB and then the new cinema of France. In this he reflected an essential Quebec cultural position--a relationship with two dominating and opposing cultures with Quebec standing nervously in the middle. Out of this tension grew a distinct Quebec approach.

Jutra was acknowledged as part of the new wave of Quebec film making of the 1960s because of his contemporary topics, but when he moved away from that edginess he ran into criticism in Quebec. It began with Mon Oncle Antoine and reached a crescendo with his film of Anne Hebert's 1970 gothic novel, Kamouraska, set in 19th century rural Quebec. Cinematic examinations of the past were either considered nostalgic or a reactionary interest in an old-fashioned, long surpassed identity. What relevance could a film about an asbestos-mining community of the 1940s (when Quebec was living in the 'dark ages' of Duplessis's Union Nationale government) have to the new Quebec these critics asked? Since the Quiet Revolution was about modernization and rejection of old-style French Canadianism, a film that highlighted past failings was suspect. Besides a simple, old-fashioned narrative with no overt political content would not be well-received by intellectuals coming out of the trauma of the October Crisis.

In contrast Canadian critics were apoplectic with delight at this light comedy that seemed to reveal the soul of Quebec. Was this just a replay of the colonial mentality in which English Canada feasted on the antiquated French-Canadian image that pictured Quebeckers as constructs of family, farm, church and the French language? Or was it relief at finding a Quebec film that wasn't an in-your-face political statement of Canadian oppression? Was the new Quebec so hard to take that the old Quebec was comfortable and soothing? Bruce Elder, an insightful Canadian film commentator of deep aesthetic concerns, actually views Mon Oncle Antoine as a film of political significance. (45) Since the asbestos mining strikes of 1949 and 1952 were a reflection of the new post-war spirit that eventually became the Quiet Revolution, a film about that period, yet not overtly about the strikes, is a way of presenting the confused and uncertain birth of a new age.

Mon Oncle Antoine was based on a screenplay by Clement Perron, a Quebec playwright, filmmaker and screenwriter, who knew the asbestos region personally and who remembered the incidents depicted in the film. The film was shot by the cinematographic master Michel Brault. It is a coming-of-age story of a boy (Benoit), who works in his uncle Antoine's general store in a Quebec town in the asbestos region. It is winter and Christmas is at hand. Through the eyes of Benoit we see the life of his insular society unfold in a way that exposes both its personal hypocrisy and its exploitative social structure, including the English ruling class. Religion, sex and death are the main themes. The climax of the film comes when Benoit accompanies his inebriated uncle to pick up the corpse of another boy, who has died in the countryside. The film is rich in metaphor and symbol (coffins, barrels of nails, trampled wedding gowns, Nativity scenes, etc). In fact, a major study of the film and its director claims it is an excellen t example of the 'cinema of fable.' (46) In Mon Oncle Antoine there is not only a particular historical period in Quebec history that is described, but an exposition of the essential features of Quebec culture and its identity. Jutra understood this when he said the film was a statement of his own "sociological and cultural reality." (47) It was of a particular historical moment and how that moment reflected on Quebec's "eternal" soul.

The older generation is presented as one that is either trapped in its oppression (Jos Poulin, the asbestos worker finds no escape in winter logging work), or else one that simply feeds off its progeny (the father who has indentured his own daughter to work in Antoine's store). The film is saying that the old Quebec is only good for replicating an endless subordination to English Canada. But Benoit, who represents the new generation, offers hope that a new consciousness exists and that one day, when it matures, it will create the kind of Quebec that Jutra was experiencing in the sixties.

Because the film is presented in an affectionate, delicate and old-fashioned way, it became the perfect interpretive vehicle for English Canadian audiences. (48) It provided them with the charming depiction of rural life that fit their stereotype of Quebec, but with enough symbolic resonance to see that the stereotype was completely irrelevant to today's Quebec. (49) What makes Mon Oncle Antoine so endearing is its universal aspect rather than its historical accuracy. The theme of growing up and realizing one's sexual nature, the revelation of adult hypocrisy and misdemeanors, and the constant struggle between life and death make sense to all people regardless of their culture.

Most Canadians who saw Mon Oncle Antoine viewed it when it was broadcast by CBC television. (50) That the film was considered suitable for a television audience was a sign of its universal appeal. Even though some might conclude that Jutra was not fully appreciated in Quebec (for a time he exiled himself to English Canada to make films), there was an undercurrent of understanding that only needed time to appear. In 1999 the Quebec movie industry broke with the Toronto-based Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, that operates the Genie Awards (successor to the Canadian Film Awards), to create its own Oscar-style awards show in which the awards are named in honor of Claude Jutra-the Jutra Awards.

Denys Arcand was to the 1980s what Jutra had been to the 1970s--an interpreter of Quebec that was embraced by all of Canada and beyond. He began his career at the NFB in the mid-sixties but ran into difficulty with his 1970 documentary on the textile industry in Quebec. On est au coton was to be released in 1970, but it was made available only in 1976 because of corporate objections. Meanwhile Arcand directed his first feature in 1972 (La Maudite Galette) which he co-wrote. His auteur debut came with Gina in 1974. He continued as an auteur with Le Crime d'Ovide Plouffe in 1984. It was however his next two films that created his reputation as Quebec's leading director of the 1980s. The 1986 Le Declin de l'empire americain (The Decline of the American Empire) was an international success, which was followed three years later by Jesus de Montreal. The Decline of the American Empire won the International Critics Prize at Cannes in 1987 and was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Film Category. The film garnered 9 Genies, including Best Director and Best Screenplay. It had a decent budget of $1.85 million with Canadian and Quebec government agencies putting up the bulk of the money. (51) Because of its profile (and provocative title) it received international distribution in three versions--original French, a version subtitled in English and a version dubbed into English.

The film is a simple story of a group of middle-class academics, intellectuals and their spouses who gather in the countryside one weekend. The setting is contemporary and the film is primarily a discussion of middle-aged issues of sexuality and fidelity. Arcand used his documentary experience to heighten the underlying tensions in the dialogue. Some have considered the film to be modeled after the 1983 American film, The Big Chill, in which a group of friends are re-united for a funeral of one of their own and the replay of their past relations. (52) Decline is a meditation on the direction of Quebec society after the successes of the Quiet Revolution, but it is not a positive interpretation of the new secularism. "I was taught at the university to take a very gloomy view of French-Canadian history" admits Arcand. (53) This sense of gloom pervades Decline and it provides what might be considered a very Catholic view of human affairs--that human nature is unchangeable and permanently flawed and that historica l progress is an allusion, especially in terms of spirituality.

Martin Knelman believes that Arcand has a highly developed sense of social justice and that while he may "express a revolutionary rage and sense of betrayal by the established order" he does not have the revolutionary's conviction that things can be changed." (54) This sensibility is best expressed in Jesus of Montreal. The film was written, directed and co-edited by Arcand and so is surely the deepest expression of his Catholic consciousness and its subconscious (he was raised in a strict Catholic home and educated by Jesuits). At Cannes Jesus won the Jury Prize and another Oscar nomination in the Best Foreign Film category. At the Genies it was awarded the Best Motion Picture award, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay plus acting and cinematography awards. The story was inspired by an actor who had auditioned for Decline and told Arcand of the degrading life he and his fellow actors had to lead in commercials and porno films, while at the same time performing in the Passion Play for tourists.

Because it spoke to his Catholic upbringing, Arcand took the story and created a masterpiece in which the slender body, piercing eyes and soft-spokenness of the actor (Lothaire Bluteau) who plays Jesus in the Easter pageant turns him into a Christ-figure in contemporary Montreal. The artificiality of the Passion Play is contrasted with the searing reality of the actor's contemporary life. Various events that engage the actor in the streets, homes and commercial towers of city are contemporary versions of events described in the Gospels, climaxing with an organ-transplant that is meant to mimic the Resurrection. The film is suffused with Christian imagery and metaphor so that the actor's life parallels that of the biblical Jesus. Only someone steeped in Christian mythology could produce such a critical yet sensitive portrayal. For some it was too radical a portrayal and a scandalous anti-clerical provocation. (55) Arcand responded by claiming his film was a critique of contemporary Quebec society and its relig ious institutions. (56) Informed critics like Pierre Veronneau consider it a triumph of postmodernism. (57)

Because of his new international fame Arcand was enticed to make English language films. The first of these was Love and Human Remains (1993) a dark portrayal of urban life based on a provocative and disturbing play by Brad Fraser, an Alberta playwright whose work was considered sexually explicit and full of tough language and attitudes. The film failed at the box office. Arcand then signed a deal with Canada's leading film production house, Alliance-Atlantis, where he wrote and directed his second English feature, Stardom (2000), a satire on the television and fashion industries. It also did poorly. It would seem that one can take the boy out of Quebec but one can't take Quebec out of the boy. Until Arcand finds a renewed voice for himself in francophone Quebec, his star will have shone brightest in the 1980s.

The rise of the Quebec auteur and the birth of a viable feature film industry in Quebec are rooted in the successes of the independence movement. Films that explored Quebec's identity paralleled what was happening in literature, music and drama. The joual-loaded urban plays of Michel Tremblay, the folksy novels of Roch Carrier or the deep dark visions of Anne Hebert (Kamouraska) or Maire Claire Blais(Une sasion dans la vie d'Emmanuel) and the popularity of chansonniers like Gilles Vignault and the Quebec pop star Charlebois were the new content for Quebec culture and the context for its cinema. The ruling Parti Quebecois's emphasis on the French language as the language of life and work in the province legitimized francophone cinema; the CFDC and its successor Telefilm Canada provided financial support; and the desire to foster a sense of distinct identity made artists of all kinds respected and admired. Besides, Hollywood was not threatened by Quebec cinema. After 1974 Canada provided about 10 percent of th e world market for Hollywood products and Quebec represented 20 percent of 10 percent or 2%. (58) Of course, Quebec cinema's share of the Quebec market was much less than Hollywood's and its films hardly ever made it to English Canada. (59)

Because of television and home video viewing, movie theatre capacity fell dramatically from 1970 to 1992. (60) Yet the Quebec industry's products were reaching a wide enough audience to be felt as a cultural influence of some importance. What kind of influence was this? Film historian Yves Lever believes that Quebec cinema of this period was overly preoccupied with a kind of cultural solipsism that sought to dig into Quebec's collective psyche with a merciless judgmental honesty. (61) The result was the birth of a national cinema. Although Quebec audiences had been subjected to "une colonisation systematique de son imaginaire" they still hungered to see expressions of their life on the screen. (62) That fact that the industry produced everything from avant-garde art house films to mainstream comedies indicated how broad the audience was.

Nevertheless, one can argue that what had been born in Quebec in the 1960s was a quasi-national cinema because the independence project had not been realized in spite of two referenda-1980 and 1996. Until sovereignty is achieved, Quebec's claim to a distinct national cinema on par with that of France, Germany or Italy remains compromised. Operating in a North American context and influenced by French, American, and in a certain way, Canadian cinema, the cinema of Quebec is characterized by a certain ambivalence about itself. (63) What is its place in an international context? The recognition that Denys Arcand received in the late 1980s was a sign that Quebec had something distinctive to say to those outside the province. One may conclude that Quebec cinema in the 1960-1990 period, while initially influenced by France's New Wave and direct cinema, developed sufficient critical mass to go in its own direction. French or American or even Canadian feature films of the same period are dissimilar from the Quebec p roduct. So the ambivalence about its status is more of an internal questioning and uncertainty than it is an objective one. It may be that the question about Quebec's political future, either inside or outside Canada, remains disquietingly imbedded in the cinema of the Quebec auteur.

The cultural offensive that post-Duplessis Quebec launched in 1960 did succeed in creating a powerful cinematic entity, but the failure of the Parti Quebecois to create a sovereign Quebec left that entity questioning its own identity. Even so, considering that Canadian film at the same time was much more defensive and scattered, the achievement of Quebec in creating a cadre of auteur directors who received Canada-wide and even international recognition, moved Canada's film identity to a whole new level of now being a global player, albeit a small one.

(1.) The first wave of Quebec feature films from 1944-1953 did not create any auteur directors other than Gratien Gelinas.

(2.) Pierre Pageau et Yves Lever, Cinemos canadien et quebecois: notes histariques (Montreal: College Ahuntsic, 1993) p.44

(3.) Ibid.

(4.) New Canadian Film 3, 13 (April 1971) as reproduced in Manjuth Pendakur, Canadian Dreams and American Control: The Political Economy of the Canadian Film Industry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990) p.154

(5.) Yves Lever, Histoire generate du cinema au quebec second edition (Montreal: Boreal, 1995) pp.143-238

(6.) Ibid. p.148.

(7.) Jill Forbes, "The French Nouvelle Vague" in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson eds. The Oxford Guide of Film Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1998) p.464

(8.) Lever, Histoire generale du cinema au quebec p.345

(9.) David Clandfield, "From the Picturesque to the Familiar: Films of the French Unit at the NFB (1958-1964) in Seth Feldman, ed. Toke Two (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984) p.113

(10.) Ibid, pp. 181-185

(11.) Marcel Jean, Le cinema quebecois (Montreal: Boreal. 1991) p.31

(12.) Ibid.

(13.) Bruno Cornellier, "Hollywood et le cinema quebecois (II)" in Cadrage: Revue de Cinema www.cadrage.net p.1

(14.) Hubert Aquin, "The Cultural Fatique of French Canada" in Larry Shouldice, ed. Contemporary Quebec Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979) p.74

(15.) Peter Harcourt, "Pierre Perrault and Le cinema vecu" in Feldman ed. Take Two, p.125

(16.) Ibid. p.130

(17.) The film with English subtitles was re-released by the NFB in 2001 under the English title "Of Whales, the Moon and Men." Originally it was titled The Moontrap.

(18.) Stephane -Albert Boulais, "Le cinema vecu de l'interieur: man experience avec Pierre Perrault" in P Veronneau, Michel Dorland and Seth Feldman, eds. Dialogue: Cinema canadien et quebecois (Montreal: Madiatexte, 1987) p.171.

(19.) Michel Marie, "Singularite de l'ouevre de Perrault" in Veronneau et al. Dialogue, p.157

(20.) David clandfield, "Ritual and Recital: The Perrault Project" in Feldman ad. Take Two, p.146.

(21.) Yves Picard,: "Les success du cinema quebecois" in Veronneau at al. Dialogue, p.104

(22.) English synopsis of Paul Warren, " Las Quebecois at le cinema" in Varonneau at al. Dialogue, p.110.

(23.) Janis L Pallistar, The Cinema of Quebec: Masters in Their Own House (Madison: Assoc. University Presses, 1995) p.43.

(24.) Michal Larouche, "Pierre Parrault at la "parlura" du Quebec" in Michel Laroucha, L'aventure du cinema quebecois en france p.147.

(25.) Yvas Lever, Cinema et societe quebecois (Montreal: Editions du Jour, 1972) pp.21-55.

(26.) Ray conlogue, " For Michel Brault, the era is over" The Globe and Mail Nov. 19, 1990, p.R3

(27.) Martin Knelman, This is Where We came In; The Career and character of Canadian film. (Toronto: Mcclelland & Stewart, 1977) p.31

(28.) Pierre Vallieres, "An Account by a Privileged Hostage of Les Ordres: Brault Has Missed His Shot" in 5. Feldman and J. Nelson ed. Canadian film Reader (Toronto: PMA Associates, 1977) p.266.

(29.) Marshall Delaney, "Artists in the Shadows: Same Notable Canadian Movies" in Feldman, Take Two, p.4.

(30.) Conlogue, "For Michel Brault, the era is over" The Globe and Mail, p.R3

(31.) Ray Conlogue, "Tilting at the U.S. film windmill" The Globe and Mail, Sept. 21, 2001 p.R3.

(32.) Lever, Histoire generale du cinema au quebec p.287

(33.) Peter Harcourt, "Jean-Pierre Lefebvre: Videaste" Monograph. (Toronto International Film Festival Group, 2001) p. 21

(34.) Ibid. p.27

(35.) Intro to Peter Harcourt, "The Old and the New" in Feldman, Take Two, p.169

(36.) Ibid. p.48

(37.) James Leach, "The Sins of Gilles Carle" in Feldman, Take Two, p.160

(38.) Martin Knelman, This is Where We Come In p.70

(39.) Ted Madger, Canada's Hollywood: The Canadian State and Feature Films (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) p.136

(40.) Jean, Le cinema Quebecois, p.69

(41.) Lever, Histoire generale du cinema au quebec p.305

(42.) Ibid, p.306

(43.) Martin Knelman, Claude Jutra in Exile" in D. Fetherling, ed. Documents in Canadian Film (Peterbarough: Broadview Press, 1988) p.216

(44.) Ibid.

(45.) Bruce Elder, "Claude Jutra's 'Mon Oncle Antoine" in Feldman and Nelson, Canadian Film Reader, pp. 194-199. Originally published in Descant, Spring, 1973.

(46.) jim Leach, Cloude Jutra: Filmmaker (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999) p.124/

(47.) Ibid, p.136

(48.) These adjectives are used by Martin Knelman, Where We come In, p.48

(49.) Elder, "Claude jutra's 'Mon Oncle Antoine" in Feldman and Nelseon, canadian Film Reader, p.199.

(50.) Knelman's "claude Jutra in Exile" in Fetherling, Documents in Candian Film, p.224 mentions a figure of 3 million.

(51.) Lever, Histoire generale du cinema au quebec, p. 323

(52.) Adrian Van Den Haven, "The Decline at the American Empire in a North-American Perspective" in Joseph Donohoe ed. Essays an Quebec Cinema (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991) p.145.

(53.) Judy Wright and Debbie Magidsan, " Making Films for Your Own People: An Interview with Denys Arcand" in Feldman and Nelson eds. Canadian Film Reader p.219.

(54.) Knelman, This is Where We Came In p. 80.

(55.) Michele Garneau et Pierre Veronneau, "Un cinema <de genre> revelateur d'une inquietante americanite quebecoise" in Larouche, L'aventure du cinema quebecois en france, p.201

(56.) Interview with Denys Arcand, www.sundancechannel.com/focus/arcand/5.html.

(57.) Garneau et Veronneau, "Un cinema <de genre> ..." in Larouche, L'aventure du cinema quebecoise en france, p.202

(58.) Lever, Histoire generale du cinema Cu quebec, p.393

(59.) Ibid. Lever claims that in the 1980s, 80% of screen time in Quebec belonged to Hollywood, 10% to French films and the Quebec portion varied from 4% to 10%. When it was at a high of 10%, 1.5 million tickets were said in the province to view Quebec films. P.416

(60.) Ibid. From 189,553 seats in 326 theatres in 1970 to 81,765 seats in 250 theatres in 1992. R417

(61.) Ibid.p. 373

(62.) Ibid. p.475

(63.) Bruno Cornellier, "Hollywood et le cinema quebecois (1)" Cadrage: Le magazine du cinema international, www.cadrage.net.

George Melnyk teaches Canadian Studies at the University of Calgary. He is currently completing a history of Canadian and Quebec cinema.