Recovering Québec Culture: The Feature Films of Bernard Émond

Abstract

This article presents the feature films of Bernard Émond as being a sustained critique of Québec's Quiet Revolution. It posits that Émond displays strong nationalist tendencies as well as leftist political commitments, which might indicate that he is like many Québec filmmakers of his generation. But Émond is strongly influenced by a certain kind of conservatism, of the sort that has recently been enunciated by the controversial Québec historian Éric Bedard. In many ways Émond, like Bédard, is a “Red Tory,” being very close ideologically to the English-Canadian philosopher George Grant. Ideologically speaking, though, Émond is also very close to a number of important European filmmakers, such as Laurent Cantet, Ermanno Olmi or Kryzstof Kiselowski. Overall, his vision of Québec is of a place that is defined by an intense spiritual malaise, with a culture that is being made weaker by the forces of a capitalist-led globalization. The article focuses on all of the feature films that Émond has made up to 2012, and pays particular attention to his trilogy on the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity: La Neuvaine (The Novena, 2005), Contre toute espérance (Summit Circle, 2007) and La Donation (The Legacy, 2009). Because it was released so close to the press time of this article, Émond's most recent film, Tout ce que tu possédes (2012) is not considered here.

Notes

1. I refer here, and throughout this article, to the period also known as “La révolution tranquille,” which begins more or less when Jean Lesage's Liberals win the Québec election of 1960 (under the slogan “Maîtres chez nous” or “Masters in our own house”), ending the decades-long domination of the right-wing Union nationale (led by Maurice Duplessis) and ushering in a period of modernisation and secularisation, as well as a new form of Québec nationalism. Duplessis was premier of Québec from 1936–39 and from 1944 until his death in 1959; the Duplessis period is commonly known in Québec as “La grande noirceur” or the great darkness, and is popularly remembered as the time when Québec was an insular and rigidly conservative society, close to Franco's Spain or de Valera's Ireland. The importance of the Quiet Revolution has been the subject of vigorous debate among Québec historians, to say the least. For a forceful, concise indictment of the tendency to overstate the illiberal essence of pre-Quiet Revolution Québec, see Couture 1996, 1998. For an invaluable survey and critique of these historical debates, see Rudin 1997. Rudin is critical of positions like Couture's, which he dubs “Revisionist,” borrowing the term from a movement in Irish historical writing that sought to construct Ireland as a “normal” country rather than one with a highly distinctive, and often embarrassingly violent history. Many Québec historians, Rudin argues, are comparably embarrassed by Québec's distinctive and sometimes illiberal past, and are forever trying to construct its history as somehow “typical” or “normal.”

2. This is Charles Taylor the distinguished journalist with the Globe and Mail who died in 1997, not Charles Taylor the famous McGill philosopher and co-chair of the Québec's Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d'accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles, commonly known as the Bouchard–Taylor commission on “Reasonable Accommodation,” which I discuss below.

3. Émond recounts this history in Émond and Galiero 2009, 38. He gave the details of his time in the NWT/Nunavut to me in a phone conversation of 31 July 2012. Inuit television and video art have long had a strong Montreal contingent. Zach Kunuk's company Igloolik Isuma Productions had its southern office in Montreal, and the contributions of Montrealer Marie-Hélène Cousineau to Inuit filmmaking have been as important as those of Kunuk's longtime collaborator Norman Cohn.

4. Gravestock's Canadian Film Encyclopaedia entry on Émond is at http://goo.gl/Ci0U2.

5. For French original see Couture 1996, 138.

6. For French original see Maclure and Taylor 2010, 66.

7. Kieślowski's Dekalog was issued on DVD by Facets Video. A box set of his films, which includes 90-minute versions of two of the Dekalog films, is available from Kino Video. Kieślowski is, along with Kryzstof Zanussi, Poland's most celebrated filmmaker of the last 50 years, and is best-known for his Trois Couleurs series: Bleu (1993), Blanc (1994) and Rouge (1994).

8. L'emploi du temps was issued on DVD by Miramax Home Entertainment. Cantet won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'or for Entre les murs (2008).

9. L'enfant is available on DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. It won the Palme d'or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Their film Le Fils (available on DVD from New Yorker Films) won the Ecumenical Prize at the 2002 Cannes, and their most recent film, Le gamin au vélo (available on DVD from eOne Films), won the Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes.

10. These are all easily available on DVD; Il Posto and I Fidanzati (1962) are part of the Criterion Collection and L'Albero degli zoccoli has been put out on DVD by Koch Lorber.

11. See also Alain Tanner's film Docteur B. médecin de campagne, a film about a doctor in the Jura mountains of Switzerland that was made at about the same time as Berger's photo book, just as Berger and Tanner were starting to work together on film projects. That film is available for online viewing on Télévision Suisse Romande's website at http://goo.gl/m2mxA.

12. All of Émond's feature films are available on English-subtitled DVDs. La femme qui boit (2001) and 20h17 rue Darling are issued by Christal Films, La Neuvaine is issued by K Films, and Contre toute espérance and La Donation are issued by Séville.