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Abstract
Over the last decade, institutions such as the National Film Board—those that are, simultaneously, culturally conservative, productive, and mediatory—have seen their relationship to films of the past come to be marked by two potentially rival logics. One is a commercial logic, focused on the exploitation of footage accumulated over 50 years of existence; the other is a social logic, inscribed within approaches to creativity whose distinctive forms have been those of remakes of documentary films of the 1960s and 1970s. The key question to which this article will attempt to respond is that of the role of the digital turn in heightening the opposition between these two logics. The second question has to do more specifically with the social function of filiation, with the nature of the link that takes shape, through film, between inhabitants of the past and those of the present, across a period which, while rarely longer than two generations, has been marked nevertheless by an acceleration of history that renders acts of transmission problematic. We will see, behind these remakes and practices of reusing archival images, how the gestures of filiation seek to keep Québec's documentary films central to those dynamics through which the feeling of belonging to community is aroused.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Emma Roufs for her invaluable assistance.
2. Within one institution, those two logics are liable to be in confrontation when the NFB mission statement is defined, which has not been without budgetary consequences, as we will see.
3. The NFB produces a large number of teaching guides. See Kim Decarie, L’éducation cinématographique, une nouvelle approche pour les écoles secondaires québécoises, MA thesis, Université de Montréal, 2011.
4. The managers of the five major institutions vested with the conservation of audiovisual archives in France (INA, Cinémathèque française, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Archives du film), made the same comment with regard to the definition of their own institutions’ mandates, and the resources made available to fulfill that mandate, during a recent roundtable at the bi-annual conference of the Association française des enseignants et chercheurs en cinéma et audiovisuel,which was dedicated to archives: “Des sources aux réseaux, tout est archive ?” Université de Paris-Est, Marne-la-vallée, 9–10 juillet 2012.
5. The Campus subscription's costs for an institution such as the Université de Montréal are $8,000 per year. The price is based on the number of full-time enrolled students.
6. Based on the NFB's catalog Contenu en ligne 2011–2012. Available online.
7. Not without protest, especially in Montreal. See the action of Mouvement spontané pour la survie de l'ONF. http://www.facebook.com/MouvementSpontanePourLaSurvieDeLonf. We return to it later in this article.
8. An example of this is 100 mots pour la folie (http://malajube.onf.ca/#/malajube). This is a music video based on the principle of visual sampling, made to accompany a track by the group Malajube. Any action by the Internet user changes the sampling, and the user need only write, within a window, a word which evokes for him or her madness, fear or love. These words then insert themselves in series of archival images which are different each time the clip is viewed. Insofar as the random programming of these images offers no specific meaning, archival images serve as a visual background of variable relevance to a musical performance which doesn't really need it. One hopes that the chance encounters of words, music and images will produce meaning, but quickly learns that this is fruitless. This is not to say that the random programming of texts and images on the music is not interesting per se. It works very well in live performance, because it reinforces its event's quality. However, out of the space and time of the performance, presented for itself on a website, the interactive device leans towards a gadget.
9. The NFB has more than 6,000 DVD titles.
10. For example: Un soleil pas comme ailleurs (Forest 1972); Toutes les photos finissent pas se ressembler (Chiasson 1985); L'extrême frontière (Jean 2006).
12. Mouvement spontané pour la survie de l'ONF [Spontaneous Movement for Survival of the NFB]. See the website: http://coalitionculture.wordpress.com/
13. Working while following the footsteps of Pierre Perrault [La dame aux poupées (1996); Au pays des colons (2007)], Denys Desjardins has also produced documentaries on the history of cinema [Contre le temps, l'effacement, Boris Lehman (1997)] and on the history of Québec cinema in particular [Le direct avant la lettre (2006); De l'Office au box-office (2009), La vie privée d'Onyx-Film (2010), La vie privée du cinéma (2011)].
15. The new generation of cinéastes studied cinema in school or at university, where they learned how important these experiments were in the history of cinema (and not just of Québec cinema).
16. Inter alia: Cinéma vérité: le moment décisif (Peter Wintonick, 1999), L'art du réel (Pepita Ferrari, 2008), Le cinéma direct avant la lettre (Denys Desjardins, 2005), among other films on outstanding figures from cinéma direct of Québec.
17. Except the films by Stephane Thibault and Isabelle Lavigne, who made Junior (2007) at the NFB in the vein of the “cinéma direct.”
18. The image of this statue is in the film and is used as the film's emblem on the NFB's website.
19. See the thesis by Vincent Bouchard, “Étude du développement d'un cinéma léger et synchrone à l'Office national du film du Canada,” Université de Montréal, 2006.
20. On this issue, I would refer the reader to my study on this period published in Le cinéma à l’épreuve de la communauté. La production francophone de l'ONF. 1960–1985, Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2010.
21. In the chapter IV of Sociologie, Études sur les formes de socialisation (French edition, PUF, 2010; first German edition in 1917), relating to the role of conflicts in the socialization process, Simmel explains that the latter do not result from a pure and simple bringing together of juxtaposed elements which are indifferent to each other. The social unit is made by convergent movements wich inextricably mingled with divergent mouvements between its elements. By highlighting the role of conflicts in the socialization process, Simmel lays emphasis on the relational experience itself, on its issues, forms, affects, at the level of a couple, a family, a group or a society, and demonstrates that social ties are constructed on its chaotic history.
22. The credits mention that the young people themselves “conceived their dream scenarios.” “The most important events in people's lives are those which never happen.”
23. See the film description in the NFB's online catalog: http://www.onf-nfb.gc.ca/fra/collection/film/?id=217. While the direction of this film is credited to Hubert Aquin, a simple glance at the credits shows that this was a collective effort. Jacques Godbout confirms this in a letter to Shannon Walsh, published in Spirale no. 238 (2011).
24. These marks of enunciation (looks, shots of the camera, instructions to the team, references to the film being made, among others) allow us to follow the story of those making the film and let us see, as well, what happened between them and the people being filmed. These are less traces of the reality of filmmaking than they are acts of fictionalization. In fact, while these traces refer to the relationship of filmmakers to those being filmed, their selection and editing are mostly— and especially in the new Saint-Henri—in the interests of a desirable version of this relationship.
25. In the first Saint-Henri, what counted most was an image of the cohesion of the group of filmmakers, one of whose effects was the embarassing impression left by the film that it was made with little respect for the people being filmed. This was especially true of the often disparaging and tongue-in-cheek commentary on their abilities, attitudes and conditions, designed to elicit the viewer's complicity.
26. In the letter referred to earlier, Jacques Godbout makes reference to the negative response to the film by people in the neighborhood. Fernand Dansereau, the producer of the film, had already commented on this: “When the film went into distribution and was televised, it provoked an astonishingly violent negative reaction from the people who had been filmed. They felt debased by our outsiders’ observations of them. Worse yet, certain people who played a role in the film felt deeply and personally hurt. One of the families that had been filmed, for example, was overcome with a sort of shame so great they decided to remove their children from the local school. Because of the severity of these repercussions, a feeling of deep remorse has remained with me, in spite of our undeniable goodwill.” (Fernand Dansereau [1968] 2010, 34)
27. They are “dans le lien,” a very common expression used by French psychoanalysts to describe the psychic investment into the relationship with the other.
28. Laurent Jullier suggests that we distinguish between representational ambition in the following way: between prescriptive ambitions, on the one hand, and performative ambitions on the other. Within the latter, he suggests a further distinction between “preventative” films and “votive” fictions. Jullier calls “fictions votive” precisely these films which are getting their normative message across, on a moral or political level, by setting the example of a success, rather than by denouncing problematic situations or behaviors. (For more details, see Jullier 2012, 108).
29. This is also what the habitants of old, now-disappeared neighborhoods were made to say in the testimony collected for the exhibition “Quartiers disparus” at the Centre d'histoire de Montréal (June 15, 2011–March 25, 2012).
30. A recurrent political figure in the Abitibian cycle (1975–80) by Perrault, who fought to preserve a semblance of collective life in his region of the country.
31. We find this image in Le direct avant la lettre, Les dernières minutes du patrimoine, Histoire d’être humains (and probably in films shot outside the NFB, he suggests).
32. The films in the Abitibi cycle had, in fact, been rejected upon their release on the pretext that modern Québécois would no longer recognize themselves in a “colon” (peasant, in a pejorative sense) figure like Hauris Lalancette.
33. In the film Cinéma québécois: l'ivresse des débuts (Yvonne Dufour, George Privet, 2008), Jutra recounts an anecdote about Anglophone producers who thumbed their noses at the idea of Québécois feature films by pretending that the Québécois cinema did not exist. What followed is a triumphant montage of excerpts from Québécois films of all genres that were critically acclaimed, popular and prize-winning, proof, above all else, of the worth of the community that gave birth to this cinema.
34. His latest film, in production, is intended as a webfilm. It consists of interviews with craftspeople at the NFB and is entitled “Memories of the NFB” rather than “A History” of the NFB.
35. It is with this episode, in fact, that the film begins.
37. Note the reaction sparked by the “comité du visible,” a group of artisans, critics and professors which, in April 2010, attacked the directors of the NFB because of the main features of the NFB's mission. See http://www.revue24images.com/articles.php?article=1156.
38. More than 33,000 viewings for À Saint-Henri, le 5 septembre; 15,000+ for Wow (more than 3000 for Wow 2); 12,000+ for Éloge du chiac; 10,000+ for La mémoire des anges; around 7000 for Les vrais perdants and L’âge des passions. À Saint-Henri, le 26 août, Le plan, Trente tableaux, Éloge du Chiac—part 2 are not yet available online, but are on DVD.